Waving or Drowning

There is a video, but for some reason it won't link!  

These are two very familiar stories we've heard read this morning, aren't they?
The story of Joseph and his –
I was going to say his technicolour dreamcoat, but that's Andrew Lloyd Webber, not the Bible!
And the story of Jesus walking on the water,
which is the one episode that people who know nothing of Jesus seem to know about.

So anyway, Joseph.
Talk about dysfunctional families –
his was the very worst.
His father, Jacob, had been a liar and a cheat,
as had his maternal grandfather.
And Joseph himself was the spoilt favourite –
his father had two wives, you may remember, Rachel, whom he loved, and Leah, whom he didn't but was tricked into marrying anyway.
He also had a couple of kids by Leah's and Rachel's maids, Bilhah and Zilpah, but Rachel, the beloved wife, had had trouble conceiving,
so Joseph and his full brother Benjamin were very precious,
especially as Rachel had died having Benjamin.
He, it seems, was still too young to take much part in the story at this stage, but Joseph was well old enough to help his brothers –
and, we are told, to spy on them and sneak on them to his father.
And stupid enough to boast of self-important dreams.

It's not too surprising that his brothers hated him, is it?
Obviously, he didn't deserve to be killed, but human nature is what it is,
and the brothers were a long way from home
and saw an opportunity to be rid of him.
At least Reuben didn't go along with having him killed, and had hoped to return him to his father,
although he did appear to go along with selling him to the Ishmaelites who were coming along.

Joseph has a lot of growing up to do,
and we all know the story of what happened and how, in the end, he was able to forgive his brothers and help save them from famine.

Let's leave him for the minute, though, and go on to this story of Jesus walking on the water.

This is the thing that everybody knows about Jesus,
that he walked on water,
and even those who don't realise that the Jesus who walked on water is the same Jesus whose birth is celebrated at Christmas know “walking on water” as some kind of metaphor for the divine.

But there's more to the story than that,
just as there is more to Jesus than someone walking on water!
Jesus didn't go much for spectacular displays of his divine power –
that wasn't what he was about at all.
In fact, you may remember that he refused to be tempted in that way when he was being tempted in the wilderness.
He mostly kept who he was to himself, until the right time came.

And now it was the right time to join the disciples.
He had told them to go on ahead while he stayed behind to pray,
and at some time in the wee small hours he was ready to join them.
He had had a horrible day – first of all, he’d heard 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. But the crowds had followed him, and he had had to spend time first healing them and then, as we heard about last week, to provide a meal for them. And finally, finally, he had been able to spend time on his own with his heavenly Father, and is ready to rejoin his disciples.

They should have been at the far side of the lake by now,
but they were up against a contrary wind.
I've never been to the Sea of Galilee, but I'm told by those who have that the storms can blow up very suddenly,
and the disciples, although experienced fishermen, were struggling slightly.

And then, here is Jesus, walking towards them on the water.
Most of them are terrified, except for Peter, who says,
“Lord, if that's really you, order me to come out on the water to you!”

And Jesus tells him to come, and he comes,
and then he finds he really is walking on the water, and panics.
Peter is a strong swimmer, we know that from John’s gospel; he didn't really need to panic, but in the dark and the cold and the confusion....
well, Jesus grabs him and they get into the boat –
and then suddenly it's calm and quiet.

Now, I don't know any more than you do whether this is a true story or not.
It almost sounds as though it was a dream;
or perhaps it was a legend that got into the story of Jesus at an early stage.
Or perhaps it really did happen.
At this distance, it doesn't matter;
what does matter is that the story got into our Bibles,
and so God means us to learn from it!

But what?
What can we learn from either this story or the story of Joseph?
In a way, the Joseph story is easier.

I am very blessed;
I belong to a wonderful and close family, as does Robert.
But I know how lucky and blessed we are.
It's very unusual –
all too many families these days aren't close,
don't enjoy spending time with each other,
and are what might be classed as dysfunctional.
Sadly, even within our church family.
We do like to put on a happy face when we come to church,
pretend everything is lovely, even when it isn't.
But God sees behind the happy faces to the heartbreak behind.
God knows that not all families are happy ones;
not all parents can be kind and loving,
no matter how much they might want to be.
Not all husbands and wives can get along together.
And so it goes on.

But when we look at the story of Joseph and his family, we can see that this doesn't actually matter to God.
These people became God's chosen people,
the twelve tribes of Israel.
God used them in spite of how dysfunctional,
how disorganised,
how downright cruel
they were.

The story of Jesus walking on the water is, I think, more about Peter than it is about Jesus.
If Jesus is who he says he is, then suspending the laws of nature is reasonable.
But for Peter, fallible Peter –
the one who, if he could get it wrong, did get it wrong –
for Peter to walk on water is not reasonable.
And Peter panicked and nearly drowned, and Jesus had to rescue him.

I was going to say that Peter is the most human of the disciples;
I think, perhaps, it is that he is the one we read most about.
We know when he puts his foot in it and says the wrong thing.
We know when his faith fails him.
We know when he panics and nearly drowns –
or, indeed, when he panics and denies Jesus.

And yet:
“You are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church.”

God chose Peter long before Peter chose God!
Jesus knew that Peter was the one chosen to carry on the work after he, Jesus, had been raised to glory,
even perhaps at at time when Jesus had only the faintest inkling of what lay before him.

God used Peter, even though Peter was so human and fallible.
And God used Joseph and his family, even though they were so awful.
And God can use you, and God can use me.

But.

And there always is a “But”, isn't there?

God couldn't use either Joseph or Peter as they were.
Joseph had to grow up and stop being an immature brat.
As you probably remember,
we're told that he was accused of rape and left to languish in prison for several years,
during which time he did grow up, and became an invaluable administrator and was thus able to help organise famine relief when it became clear that there was to be a massive famine.
He matured enough to forgive his family, and to help them all settle in Egypt where, for several generations, they were happy and comfortable.

And God couldn't really use Peter the way he was, either.
Peter was transformed, of course by the Holy Spirit at Pentecost.
Not that he would claim to be perfect, even then,
but he became someone God could use.

And you and I, we need to be transformed before God can use us.
We need to allow God to work in us, to renew us, to make us into the person he intended us to be.

But the good news is, of course, that we don't have to be perfect!
It doesn't matter what our family background is.
It doesn't matter how chaotic our lives are just now.
What does matter is our openness to God, and our willingness to be transformed.

I'm not sure how much, if anything, Joseph knew of God,
other than as the sender of dreams.
His transformation was a slow and painful process.
Ours may be, too –
but I'm sure of one thing, and that is that the more we are open to God,
the more we commit ourselves to being God's person,
the more honest we can be with ourselves and with God about how chaotic our lives are and how badly we get things wrong,
then the easier it is for God to transform us.

And, of course, we don't have to wait for that transformation to have fully happened before God can use us!
We can still be used, ready or not.
And God does use us, sometimes, often even, without our knowledge.
But never, I think, without our consent.

Amen. 

Five Thousand Men

 

Totally forgot to record this.  Probably just as well!

Well, we watched the video (before the Gospel was read), and we heard the original from Matthew’s gospel.
And I expect we’ve known the story from our earliest childhoods –
we older ones probably don’t remember a time when we didn’t know it!

But in many ways it raises more questions than it answers;
Were there literally five thousand men there, not counting their families?

At this distance, we can’t really know whether there were really five thousand men,
or whether this was the way of describing a large number that historians of the day like Josephus or Herodotus were apt to use, and in reality there were only a few hundred.
And the nearby villages had no more than three thousand people in each,
so if there were really about fifteen thousand people, the whole countryside would have been depopulated!

On the other hand, the other two gospels that tell this story say that the disciples divided the crowds into groups of fifty or a hundred people, making it easier to tally them up;
and it was Passover, when literally thousands of people would leave their home villages and descend upon Jerusalem for the festival, so might have been distracted by the knowledge that Jesus of Nazareth was teaching nearby.
After all, Jesus had pretty much gone viral by this stage –
he did tell many people not to say anything about his having healed them, but they did, of course, and his fame had spread all over the area.

So it could be either.
And what about the food?
Had all those people really come out with no food or drink that day?
It seems improbable, especially if people were on their way to Jerusalem!
Far more likely that most people had some kind of snack with them, but didn’t care to be the first to bring it out and start eating
until the small boy, who, John’s account of the story tells us, came up to Andrew and whispered “Jesus can have my lunch, if he’d like!”
One minister of my acquaintance, who used to be a teacher, said that for him the real miracle was that the boy hadn’t already eaten his lunch,
given the tendency of boys on school trips to have finished their lunch before the coach has left the school car-park!


Seriously, though, it doesn’t really matter!
The story was considered important enough to be retold in all four gospels –
the only one that is –
so, even if it isn’t absolutely literally true, we mustn’t confuse truth with historical accuracy.
The story is true, in its essentials, and God the Holy Spirit caused the Gospel writers to record it, so we need to learn from it!

Well, what do we learn?
I think, for me, there are three things to think about.

Firstly, about Jesus.
This sort of food-stretching isn’t unique to him;
there are parallels in the Old Testament.
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.
Which she does,
and it doesn't.

Elisha, Elijah's successor,
performs a miracle very like Jesus',
making 20 barley loaves stretch to feed 100 people, with some left over.
Which mightn't sound too bad to us, but those loaves were only about the size of a hamburger bun –
and if you were only given 1/5 of a bun,
you might well want to complain that it wasn't quite enough!

So this kind of miracle was something that prophets did.
You might have noticed that John doesn't tend to record Jesus' miracles unless they teach us something about who Jesus is.
So on one level, in John’s gospel, the story shows that Jesus was not only a prophet like Elisha, but something greater.

And did you notice something else?
Jesus took the food,
gave thanks,
broke it
and shared it.
Doesn't that sound awfully familiar?
Doesn't that sound like something we do some Sundays,
those Sundays we have a Communion service?
So the story is saying something about who Jesus is;
it is showing us that Jesus is not only a prophet,
he is more than a prophet.

Then the next thing I think we can learn from this story is about God the Father.
You see, when Jesus provided lunch for everybody, it wasn’t just a meagre amount.
It wasn’t just enough food to keep everyone going until they got home.
It wasn’t just enough for everyone to have a decent meal.
There was enough for everyone to have a decent meal and still have masses left over!

That seems to be so typical of Jesus, though.
When he turned the water into wine at the wedding at Cana,
he made enough wine to stock a young off-licence,
never mind be enough for a few guests at the tag-end of a party.
And when people were healed,
they were healed!
He made a proper job of it,
even if it took him two goes.

It's typical of Jesus, and it's typical of God.
I mean, look at the sort of extravagance we see in the natural world –
all those desert flowers, for instance,
and nobody knew they were there.
All those stars,
all those universes.....

This story, with the twelve basketsful left over,
reminds us that God is generous to the point of extravagance.
And also, it was Jesus who broke the bread and shared it out.
He did the serving.
It was Jesus,
elsewhere in John's gospel,
who kneels with towel and basin,
washing the disciples' feet.
It was Jesus who said of himself,
"The Son of Man came not to be served, but to serve."

So this story helps to remind us that God longs
and longs
and longs
to give us, his children,
more good things than we can possibly handle.
God wants to serve us,
to heal us,
to make us whole,
to give us what we need –
not just grudgingly,
barely enough,
but pressed down, shaken together and running over!

It's not just in the Bible either –
look at God's creation.
You've all seen pictures of the way the desert blooms when it rains –
look at those millions of flowers that nobody, for a very long time, ever knew were there except God.
Or look at how many millions and millions of sperm male animals produce to fertilise only relatively few embryos in the course of a lifetime.
Or where lots of embryos are produced, like fish, for instance, millions of them are eaten or otherwise perish long before adulthood.
And millions and millions of different plant and animal species, some of which are only now being discovered.

Or look at the stars!
All those millions upon millions of stars, many with planets, some with planets like our own that may even hold intelligent life..…

God is amazing, isn't He?
And just suppose we really are the only intelligent life in the Universe?
That says something else about God's extravagance in creating such an enormous Universe with only us in it!
Our God is truly amazing!

Scientists think that some of the so-called exoplanets they have been discovering lately might contain life, although whether or not that would be intelligent life is not clear, and probably never will be.

So how did God redeem such beings, assuming they needed redemption?
We know that here, his most extravagant act of all was to come down and be born as a human baby –
God, helpless, lying in a makeshift cradle fashioned from an animal feeding-trough.
Having to learn all the things that human babies and children have to learn.
Becoming just like us, one of us, knowing what it’s like to work for his living, what it’s like to be a condemned criminal and to die a shameful death!

But God, God who could only allow Moses the teeniest glimpse of his glory, or he would not have been able to survive it, and even then his face shone for hours afterwards, this God became a human being who could be captured and put to death.

You know, sometimes I think the main function of the church is to help us cope with God.
Perhaps the church, quite unwittingly, limits God, or, like Moses, we’d not be able to handle it.
St Paul prays that we might know “what is the immeasurable greatness of his power for us who believe, according to the working of his great power.
God put this power to work in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places, far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named, not only in this age but also in the age to come.
And he has put all things under his feet and has made him the head over all things for the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all.”

The Church, which is His body.
And yet we –
we the Church –
are so bad at being His body.
We limit God.
We limit God as individuals, saying “Thus far shall you come, and no further!”
We don’t allow God access to all of us, to every particle of our being.

And we limit God as communities, as churches;
We tell God what to do.
We tell God who God may love, and who is to be considered beyond the pale.
We judge, we fail to forgive, we withhold, despite the fact that Jesus said
“Do not judge, and you will not be judged;
do not condemn, and you will not be condemned.
Forgive, and you will be forgiven;
give, and it will be given to you.
A good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over,
will be put into your lap;
for the measure you give will be the measure you get back.”

And yet we still hold back from God, both as individuals and as communities.
I don’t mean just money –
although we do that, too, despite the promise that if we:

“Bring the full tithe into the storehouse, so that there may be food in my house, and thus put me to the test, says the Lord of hosts;
see if I will not open the windows of heaven for you and pour down for you an overflowing blessing.”

But we hold back ourselves from God.
We aren’t –
well, I know I’m not, and I dare say I speak for you too –
we aren’t really prepared to give ourselves whole-heartedly to God.
After all, who knows what God won’t ask of us if we do?
We might even have to give up our lives, as Jesus did!
Or worse, perhaps God would say “No thank you!”
Perhaps we would be asked to go on doing just exactly as we are doing –
how disappointing!

But I wonder if it’s really about doing.
Isn’t it more about being?
Isn’t it more about being made into the person God created us to be?
Isn’t it more about allowing God into us extravagantly, wholeheartedly…. I would say “completely”, but I don’t think that’s quite possible.
God is simply too big, and we would be overwhelmed.

Nevertheless, Jesus came, he told us, so that we can have life, and have it abundantly!
Abundantly.
Can we let more of God into our lives, to be able to live more abundantly?

Do you dare?
Do I dare?
Do we dare?
Amen!

God gets involved

Children's Talk

We have just read about Isaac, the son of Abraham. He was born, apparently in about 1896 BC, or BCE if you prefer that version.
This was in the Bronze age –
he would have had bronze tools, not iron, and possibly still a flint knife. It makes it all sound like a very long time ago, doesn’t it?

Many years ago now, Robert and I visited the town of Bolzano, in Italy. `
where they have the museum where the body of Oetzi, the ice-man, is stored.
You may remember that he was found in the Alps almost 25 years ago,
having been shot by person or persons unknown.
His body had been preserved in a glacier for over 5,000 years.
The point is, this was even longer ago than Isaac –
he only had a copper axe, as they hadn't discovered about bronze yet.
But the things that were found with him – his axe, his coat, his trousers, his bow and arrows, his knife and so on,
you could see just how they were used, and he was really a person just like you or me!
That makes Isaac feel less remote, as he, too, would have worn clothes we recognise, and carried tools we'd know and so on.

Many years earlier, Isaac’s father, Abraham, had felt called by God to leave his home-town of Ur in the Chaldees, which in his day was allegedly highly civilised.
They had, apparently, nineteen different kinds of beer and a great many fried-fish shops, if you call that being civilised!
However, they did enjoy other kinds of food, such as onions, leeks, cucumbers, beans, garlic, lentils, milk, butter, cheese, dates, and the occasional meal of beef or lamb.
You know what, that sounds almost exactly like my shopping list from earlier in the week!

There was wine available, to make a change from beer,
but it was expensive, and drunk only by the rich.
They played board-games,
enjoyed poetry and music, which they played on the lyre, harp and drum,
and were generally rather well-found, from all one gathers.

The only thing was that without many trees in their part of the world,
they had to do without much furniture,
and tended to sleep on mats on the floor, for instance, instead of beds.
But definitely a sensible and civilised place in which to live.
When you hear it described, it doesn't sound all that remote, does it?
They were people like us, and had similar tastes to us.

That’s one of the reasons why we read these stories about long-ago people like Abraham and Isaac –
like us, they wanted to be God’s people,
and, also like us, they didn’t do it perfectly!
I’m going to be talking more about Isaac and his family in a while,
but for now, would you go back to your table,
and we’ll listen to our Gospel reading.

---oo0---

Main Sermon

 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
how he and Sarah were childless, but God promised them a child;
how Abraham pre-empted this by conceiving a child, Ishmael, on his servant;
how that all went rather pear-shaped when Ishmael started playing too roughly with Isaac, when he was finally born, and making him cry;
last week, we had that extraordinary episode when God appeared to be asking Abraham to sacrifice Isaac;
and now, this week, we come to a nearly-grown-up Isaac, and his search for a wife.

Scholars seem to think that these stories of Abraham,
which had been an integral part of the Jewish tradition,
were collected together and written down during the 5^th and 6^th centuries BC –
this, you remember, was when the Israelites were in exile,
the Temple had been destroyed,
and they had no king of their own.
Only a very few Israelites were left in Jerusalem,
and they had rather lapsed from their traditions and practice.
So the various stories were collected and written down,
possibly somewhat haphazardly, in case it should all be lost.

Abraham himself is thought to have lived in the early part of the 2^nd millennium BC.
Apparently the earliest he could have been born was 1976 BC and the latest he could have died was 1637 BC.
This was in the Bronze age –
he would have had bronze tools, not iron, and possibly still a flint knife, as I was saying earlier.

Abraham had felt called to leave Ur, where, as you just heard, he had a very comfortable life,
and to take his family and household and to live in the desert.
And they had all sorts of adventures, and sometimes things went very wrong, but mostly they went all right.

And now Isaac has grown up and Sarah has died,
and it is time for Isaac to marry.
Abraham is urgent that he marry a woman from his own tribe,
not a local Canaanite woman, who wouldn't have known about God,
so he sends his servant back to Ur, to find a suitable relation for Isaac to marry.

The servant explains, rather earnestly, how he asked God to show him which the right woman was –
would she offer to draw water for his camels, or not?
That wasn't an easy task –
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!

Rebecca's family would have liked a few days to get used to the idea,
but the servant says he needs to get back as soon as possible,
and Rebecca agrees to leave next day.
So she and her various maidservants –
one of them may have been her old nurse –
got packed up and ready, and set off.
And eventually they get home safely,
and there is Isaac coming to meet them.
And they get married, and live more-or-less happily ever after!

We sometimes get alarmed about arranged marriages these days;

we know that in those communities where they're still more-or-less the norm, things can go horribly wrong –
think of those so-called “honour killings” we hear so much about!
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.
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;
we all know that you have to work at being married,
whether you knew your husband for years beforehand or whether you met him a few days or weeks before the wedding –
or even at the wedding!
Friend of mine more-or-less had an arranged marriage – her parents paraded a line of potential husbands in front of her and said “Pick one!” – I think she was given a chance to get to know them a bit first – and she did, and has been very happy for the past 50 years or so! But I’m sure she had to work at it.

I think Rebecca was very brave going off with Abraham's servant like that;
she had no way of knowing who or what was awaiting her at the far end of the journey.
The servant had bigged up Abraham's –
and thus Isaac's –
wealth, and had given her lots of gold jewellery, but was he telling the truth?
It could so easily have been a scam, and she might have found herself being traffiked into slavery or prostitution.

But one thing stands out about this story and that is that God was involved from beginning to end!
And God led them all to a happy ending.

I wonder how much we actually believe that God is really involved in our lives?
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!
After all, not all of our stories have happy endings, do they?
Some do, many do, and for these we give thanks,
but what happens when they don't?
Does God get involved in our lives?
And if so, how does this work, and how can we work with God to ensure a happy ending?

Well, the Bible definitely tells us that God is involved in our lives,
and I am sure most of us could tell of moments when we were perfectly and utterly sure of this.
But equally, most of us could tell of moments when we really struggled with it!
Where was God when this or that bad thing happened?
Does God really care?
In the story from two weeks ago, Ishmael and Hagar in the desert,
we found that God was there with them, even though it hadn't felt like it.

Many of us have lived through enough bleak times to know that one comes out the other side.
We know that, when we look back, we will see God's hand upon it all.
God may not have led us to a happy ending, exactly,
but we can see how God has worked all things together for good for us.

It's not a matter of God waving a magic wand and producing the happy ending we want;
we all know God doesn't work like that.
And it's not a matter, either, of God having set the future in stone so that nothing we can do can change things.
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.
It’s not just individuals, of course!
I’m sure the people of those countries where there is war and aggression feel that God has abandoned them, but again, the leaders of those countries have free choice –
they can choose to live as God’s people, acting for peace, truth and justice, or they can choose not to.
And in many cases, they choose not to!
God cannot act when people refuse to listen!

It's more as if God is working with us, moment by moment.
Sometimes we –
or other people –
do things that mean the situation can't come out as God would have wished.
God has a detailed plan for creation, but his plan for our individual lives isn't –
can't be –
mapped out in moment-by-moment detail
since we are free to make our own choices.
But God truly wants the best possible life for each one of us.
The idea, I think, is to stay as close to God as possible,
trying to be aware of each moment of decision and what God would like for us to do.

Jesus points out that his burden is light!
Sometimes we don't feel as though it is.
“Come unto me all you who are burdened, and I will give you rest!”

I am sure Abraham's servant must have felt incredibly burdened when he went back to Ur to find Rebecca.
But the servant, at least, spent his time moment-by-moment in God's presence.
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.
“Come unto Me all you who are burdened, and I will give you rest!”
Abraham's servant trusted God.
I wonder how much we trust God?
It isn't always easy, is it.
Last week's story, how God asked Abraham to kill Isaac,
was very much about trust.
Abraham didn't even argue with God –
he just went ahead and did as he was told, leaving it very much up to God to do the right thing!
Even Isaac didn't struggle –
he was a young man at that stage, not a small boy,
and he could easily have overpowered his elderly father.
But no –
he allowed himself to be bound and laid upon the altar.
And God did do the right thing, as it were, and produced the ram.

And now God did show the servant his choice of wife for Isaac.
And so was born the Kingdom of Israel.
We never know the consequences of our choices –
they may be far more far-reaching than we expect.
But we do need to practice involving God in our everyday lives,
otherwise, when the crunch comes, we'll find it much harder than it need be to rely on him.
“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?
Amen.

Isaac and Ishmael

I wonder how old you were when you first heard the story of Isaac and Ishmael.
I can't have been more than 6 or 7 when it was part of my primary school Scripture curriculum.
Of course, as a child you only notice the superficial parts of the story,
and I didn’t really look at it in any great depth until I had to preach about it.
But it's an important story, because it echoes down to this day.

So, then, Ishmael.
The older child.
The one Abraham conceived on his slave girl, Hagar, because he didn't see how else he was going to have a child –
Sarah, he thought, was long past child-bearing.
Hagar and Sarah didn't really get on –
Sarah had been very jealous of Hagar when Hagar was carrying Ishmael,
and Hagar, one gathers, hadn't exactly helped by showing she rather despised Sarah.
Hagar had had to run away from Sarah when she was pregnant, but the Lord had come to her and told her to go back,
and that he would make a huge nation from Ishmael, whose name, incidentally, means “God will hear”.
Any name that ends in “-el” usually means something about God, as “El” was the Hebrew word for The Lord.
Actually, make that male names that end in “-el”; women’s names, like Rachel or Jael, didn’t!
“Rachel” means a sheep, and Jael means an ibex!
But men’s names, by and large, with “El” in them, mean something about God –
Michael, Gabriel, Elijah, Elisha, and so on.
And Ishmael means “God will hear”.

And the years went by,
and they all had loads of adventures which you can read about in Genesis, including fleeing from the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah,
and finally Sarah becomes pregnant and Isaac is born.
And now Sarah sees Ishmael playing with Isaac –
some translations say he was playing, others that he was teasing or tormenting or mocking him,
and we have no way of knowing what he actually was doing.
He may even have been doing both –
started off by playing,
but unable to read Isaac's body language to know when he'd had enough,
and ended up with Isaac crying, and Ishmael laughing at him,
the way young people do with very small children.

And Sarah is absolutely furious.
This had been a special party, to celebrate Isaac's weaning –
he would have been somewhere between 2 and 4, I think, rather like Samuel was when he was taken to the Temple.
Anyway, this special party, and now Ishmael has upset the boy and made him cry.
Is it always going to be like this?
And what if Ishmael really meant to harm Isaac?

You can understand Sarah's anger and concern, of course.
She is well old to have a small child to look after,
and this older half-brother is always going to be perceived as a menace.
So for the second time she demands that Abraham send her away, and, heavy-hearted, he does so.

God tells him not to be too upset –
his promise is to go through Isaac, but Ishmael is also Abraham's son,
and so he, too, will father a vast nation.
Ishmael is about 16 at the time.
We know, because we are told he was 13 when they were all circumcised, and that was about a year before Isaac was born,
so if Isaac is around three, Ishmael has to be 16.
But the story makes him sound as though he was younger,
and still very dependent on his mother.

Anyway, Abraham loads up a backpack for Hagar, and sends them both off.
And they appear to have no idea what to do next,
so wander rather aimlessly around until the water runs out.
And then when Hagar is despairing, Ishmael resting under the one and only bush, God intervenes, and miraculously provides a well, or a spring, so they are saved.

According to some Muslim traditions, Paran, where they settled, is identified as Mecca, which is one of the reasons why it is a holy place for Muslims today.
Because, of course, Ishmael is the father of the Arab nations.

I am not going to go into details about which tribes he fathered and which he didn't –
the sources are unclear and nobody seems to really know.
However, tradition has it that he had twelve sons, all of whom became tribes, and their descendants are, of course, the modern-day Arab nations.

Actually, you know, that's really depressing!
Because if there has not been peace between them ever since, how many millennia is that, and what hope is there for peace today?
People don't change!
The tribes of Ishmael and the tribes of Isaac have never been able to live in peace.
Just look at the headlines.
Israel and Gaza at war with one another;
Israel and the USA making war on Iran;
Hezbollah getting involved….
“Israel”, incidentally, means “One who struggles with God”, after Jacob wrestled with the angel at Bethel –
but the name seems rather painfully apt today!

And elsewhere, as the news bulletins make horribly, painfully clear,
they are divided among themselves.
Look at the situation in Sudan, or Yemen;
desperate civil wars there causing enormous deprivation and suffering.

So it's all very depressing, and it's a depressing story for a summer morning, isn't it?
I wonder what, if anything, we can learn from it.

One of the things I do like about the story is that it shows the people concerned to be real human beings, with human faults and failings.
Many ancient myths and stories depict the people involved as in some way super-human, all too perfect,
or with amazing super-powers that they can call on in time of need.
Genesis doesn't.
The people here are human, they have human problems and human failings.

We can empathise with Sarah, I think.
At least, I can.
We can't, and shouldn't, excuse her behaviour –
she was wrong to cast them out like that, and I expect she knew it.
But we can understand why she felt the way she did,
and why she reacted the way she did.
She obviously had a huge problem with jealousy,
and if Hagar was youngish and pretty and, above all, fertile, while she, Sarah, wasn't.... well....
And then with Ishmael playing with, or teasing, or mocking –
according to your translation –
the 3-year-old, who may have been over-tired after the party....
you can see where she was coming from.
And she wasn't having “that bastard” inherit any of Abraham's wealth, thank you very much.

And Abraham, too.
He has proved himself far from perfect –
read some of the stories about him in Genesis when you have a moment.
He twice introduces Sarah as his sister –
she was, in fact, his half-sister –
instead of clarifying that she was his wife,
and nearly led important people into sin.
And he didn't believe God that Sarah could have a child,
which is how come Ishmael was conceived in the first place.
But at least here he shows himself unwilling to let the family go.
And he gives Hagar a backpack of food and water, and relies on God's promise to look after them.

And God does look after them, we are told.
They were thrown out for no fault of their own,
they were facing almost certain death in the wilderness,
and then God was there,
in the middle of the mess,
providing water for them and ensuring their survival.

And because God intervened, Ishmael went on to become the father of many nations, just like his brother.
Yet Ishmael wasn't the child God had originally planned for Abraham and Sarah, and his sons were not to be “the chosen people”,
although I daresay our Muslim friends would disagree with us on that one!
But God still looks after him.
God is there, in the middle of the desert.
God is there, in the middle of the injustice and unfairness that caused Ishmael and his mother to be cast out.
God is there in the thirst and the heat and the despair.

And that is true for us, just as it was true for Ishmael.
Ishmael was not a child of the covenant, but God still cared for him.
We ask where God is in the middle of the brutal wars currently raging in the region;
where God is in the war between Russia and Ukraine;
where God is in the middle of our own personal tragedies.

And the answer is the same as it always was.
God is there, redeeming us,
in the middle of unfairness and injustice and tragedy.

Perhaps you are suffering that way today –
in a desert place where it feels as though God has abandoned you,
and certainly everybody else has,
and that you are going to die of thirst any minute.
I don't mean literally, obviously,
but there are times when it does feel like that, doesn't it?
And yet God is always there.
Sometimes God does intervene to improve matters.
Other times, perhaps more often, things don't actually improve, but God gifts us with the skills and grace we need to cope with them.
Hagar and Ishmael went on living in the desert,
but they learnt how to do this on their own.

God never abandons us.
When we call on him, he is there.
Sometimes it doesn't feel like that –
sometimes we really do feel abandoned,
and that our calls are just echoing back from an empty sky.
But that is only what it feels like, not what has happened.
I don't know why it sometimes seems to take God forever to answer our calls –
I'm sure there are plenty of good reasons we'll learn about in Heaven –
but I do know he does answer.
Sometimes “Be patient, be strong!” is the only answer –
but the strength and the patience grows.

The story of Hagar and Ishmael is not a happy story.
But it does have one happy and shining outcome –
God was there with them in the desert.
And God is with us in our personal deserts,
and in the global crises and tragedies of today.
God is with us.
Emmanuel.
Amen.

Put right with God

 The service starts about 15 minutes into the video, although I'm not quite sure when the IT team realised they weren't focussing on me!  

I wonder whether you can remember when you first made a conscious decision to be Jesus’ person?

I know some people can’t remember, they have been Jesus’ person all their lives and it would never have occurred to them to do otherwise.
And some people know that once upon a time they were not Christians,
but their journey to God was such a slow, gradual and yet purposeful one
that they can’t point to a given day when they were a Christian,
yet were not the day before.

And others have a definite date that they can point to and say “Then.
That was the day I became a Christian.”
I sort-of have that.
In many ways the second Sunday in October, well over fifty years ago, was the day for me,
but in fact, there was a lot of stuff that went before it,
and a great deal more that came after it.
It didn’t happen in a vacuum, although it felt a bit like that at the time.

I was just a child then, eighteen years old and on my own in Paris.
I was rather lonely and having trouble making friends,
and my grandmother suggested I went along to the English church
to see whether they had any activities for young people.
They most certainly did, and it didn’t take long for me to hear a sermon on “Behold, I stand at the door and knock.....”.
And this was obviously the thing you did if you wanted to be accepted by this group of people..... so.....
I’m so glad God is gracious and loved me anyway!

But the reason I’m raking up ancient history like this is that when you had become a Christian, as it was called,
you were expected to attend the weekly Bible Study
as well as the more formal teaching sessions which took place on a Wednesday.
The Bible Studies were small discussion groups, people roughly the same age, peer-led.
The minister stayed away, on the grounds that people needed to learn to read the Scriptures for themselves, not just be taught what to think.
And it was noticeable that, very often, if we had got stuck with something,
he would talk about the very thing we’d got stuck on in the Wednesday teaching sessions.

This form of studying the Bible was new to me –
attending Bible Study and prayer meetings –
the two tended to merge, rather –

was not something that was done at the school I attended,
or at my parents’ church.
So I can still remember the very first passage I ever studied with my contemporaries, and do you know,
it was that very passage from Romans that we’ve just heard read.
We used the Good News Bible, only back then it was only the Good News New Testament, which is why I asked Robert to read from this version today.

“Now that we have been put right with God through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.
He has brought us by faith into this experience of God's grace,
in which we now live.
And so we boast of the hope we have of sharing God's glory!”

“Now that we have been put right with God through faith”
What does that even mean?
Most translations say “Now that we have been justified by faith”. “Justified” is a technical term, meaning – well, basically meaning “put right with God”!
All the nasty squirmy bits of ourselves that we really don’t want God to look at too closely –
and that, come to that, we don’t actually want to look at too closely ourselves –
they are –
not swept away, sadly, much though we might like that to happen.
Quite the reverse;

they are brought out into the light so that we can look at them and God can look at them and say –
okay, that needs to change.
And then, if we are sensible, we allow God to change us.

That, of course, is a very long process, and will probably never be completely finished this side of heaven.
That’s what we call “sanctification”, being made holy, being made whole, being made more like God, being made more into the person we were created to be.
But the point is, God doesn’t make us wait until we are perfect before he will put up with us.
All the nasty squirmy bits, what the jargon calls “Sin”,
God decrees they no longer exist.
They do, of course, and we deal with them in due course,
but the point is, they no longer come between us and God.

We have, so St Paul tells us, peace with God.
But I really do think the most important thing that I’ve learnt in all the years since that first Bible study, so long ago,
is that I don’t have to do the putting right!
It took me a really long time to learn that particular lesson!
I thought I had to grow my own faith, as though my salvation were down to me.
It’s not.

Our salvation doesn’t depend on what we do.
We all need to be saved, and we all can be saved –
these days, I’m not entirely sure what I mean by “saved”,
and it’s one of those words that I suspect we all interpret slightly differently, but that doesn’t matter.
The point is, we don’t have to –
and, indeed, we can’t –
save ourselves.
God does that.
All we have to do is to reach out, to say “Yes please!”
and accept what is on offer.
“Listen,” says Jesus, according to the book of Revelation,
“Listen! I stand at the door and knock;
if any hear my voice and open the door, I will come into their house and eat with them, and they will eat with me.”

Of course, one shouldn’t really take a verse out of context like that,
but it is a helpful illustration.
All we need do is open the door to Jesus –
and then let go.
Then we are put right with God by faith,
we do have peace with God,
and we can relax and allow God to re-create us into the person we were designed to be.
That bit isn’t always easy –
far from it –
but it’s worth it.

But it’s not just about us, is it?
Of course, our individual relationship with God is essential
it is something that needs to permeate all our lives.
It’s not just about what we do in Church on Sundays, although that too –
it’s about how we live the rest of our lives.
I have often said that these Sundays in Ordinary Time are where what we think we believe comes up against what we really do believe!
And sometimes, I think, we forget that we aren’t in it just as individuals, but as a community.
Paul says “We” all the time in this passage, not just “I”.
We, as a church, have been put right with God;
we, as a church, are being made more Christ-like, more the community that God created us to be.

We don’t have to wait to come to God;
Paul tells us that Jesus died for us end of story.
We could be the foulest person who ever trod this earth, but Jesus died for us.
We could be almost perfect –
and Jesus still died for us!
And that includes everybody –
even those we want to hate.
Even those who want nothing to do with God and treat religion with contempt.
Even those who set themselves up in place of God….
Jesus still died for them, and longs and longs for them to turn to him.

And Paul also points out that when trouble comes –
as it always does, always has, and always will,
God can use it to help us grow and become more what we can be.
Both us as individuals, and us as a community.

God will continue to work on us, if we let him, right up until the day we die, and probably afterwards, too!
Like butterflies, we are in our caterpillar stage right now, and our journey through the valley of the shadow of death is the equivalent of the pupa, and then, we believe, we will be transformed –
perhaps not into a butterfly, but certainly into something wonderful.
To a certain extent, of course, that happens, and is happening right now, here on earth,
which is why God has already started to work in us and to make us into the person we were created to be.
But how much more work will need to be done on us before we are perfect!
I know John Wesley believed that Christians could be perfect,
but I also know I’m very far from!
And God still needs to do a great deal of work on me before I fulfil my potential.

But the thing is, we don’t have to do it.
And we don’t have to wait until it’s done before we can get on with our lives as Christians, as God’s people.
We have been put right with God through faith, and now have peace with him through our Lord Jesus Christ.
So we can get on with our lives.
Amen.

Mercy, not sacrifice

 

“Go and learn what this means, ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’” Jesus is referring his hearers to the passage in Hosea that we heard in our first reading. So firstly, why; secondly, what was Hosea even talking about, and thirdly, is it relevant to us in any way?

Well, the first question is easy enough to answer. Why did Jesus refer his hearers to that passage?

He had just called Matthew from the tax office. Now, as I am sure you know, back in the day, tax collectors were quislings, collaborators with the occupying power. They were expected to hand over so much to the Roman authorities every – I don’t know whether it was every month, or every quarter, but certainly every so often – and also to pay themselves a decent salary out of what they had collected. And human nature being what it is, many, if not most tax collectors were apt to feather their own nests at the expense of the public! They would demand far more than they were owed, and enforce payment. We don’t know that Matthew did that – we do know that Zaccheus did.

So, anyway, Jesus has called Matthew, and then he has dinner with Matthew and, presumably, some of his tax-collector friends. And the virtue-signallers, the Pharisees, start chuntering about this and asking why on earth he would want to eat with such dreadful people. To which Jesus replies that these are the very people who need him, the ones he was sent to help! The ones who think they’re doing fine don’t need him, or don’t admit to needing him. So he sends them away to look up Hosea….. and I don’t suppose they were best pleased, because of course they knew the Scriptures, didn’t they? Didn’t they?

And what, then, of Hosea? Hosea is the prophet who was asked to marry a prostitute who he couldn’t trust to be faithful to him, as a picture of the way the tribes of Israel and Judah couldn’t be trusted to stay faithful to God, but were apt to go off after the local gods of the area who were so much easier to cope with, as they only wanted you to do the various rituals. They didn’t want a relationship with God; that might interfere with their own lives, and make them live in ways they didn’t want to live!

Every so often they would make attempts to come back to God, but what usually ended up happening was that, as we heard in our reading, “their love is like a morning cloud,
    like the dew that goes away early.”

In other words, they start off well, but then get distracted. Like the seed in Jesus’ story that landed in the rocky ground or in the thistles, and didn’t grow much after the first sprout. And God says, through Hosea, that sacrifices and temple rituals are all very well but what is wanted is mercy – steadfast love, says the NRSV – not sacrifice!

I don’t know whether you’ve ever read John Wesley’s sermon on the means of grace? We local preachers have to read certain selected sermons as part of our training, and this is one of them. Wesley tries to navigate between two equal and opposite errors, the first being formalism – ritual without substance, just what Hosea is talking about here, and the second being what was called quietism, where you did nothing but wait for God to give you faith.

Wesley reckoned – and so do we, to this day – that God has ordained three specific means of grace that we all need to use. They are:

Prayer; both private and corporate. After all we all have times when, try as we might, we simply can’t pray, and that’s when we have to rely on corporate prayer, and perhaps prayers that other people have written. It doesn’t matter how you pray, of course – verbal prayer is only one way of praying – it is the contact with God that matters.

Then there is searching the Scripture, by reading, hearing and meditating on it. You probably have your own method of doing this, whether you like to meditate on the week’s readings, or whether you use a daily Bible reading guide, or whatever, but there again, Scripture is there to help us know God.

And finally there is the Sacrament of Holy Communion, which, whatever we may mean when we make our Communion – and of course, our views on it will change as we go on in our journey of faith – is important to our spiritual growth.

So far, so good. But: “I desire mercy, rather than sacrifice”. Wesley goes on to point out that these things, important though they are, have no intrinsic power: Separate from the Spirit of God, a ritual is just what Wesley calls "a dry leaf, a shadow." Spoken words, printed text, or bread and wine aren’t magic!

They possess no merit: Performing these duties does not buy God's favour or atone for sins. Only the blood of Christ saves. And this, of course, is part of what Hosea was talking about. Mercy rather than sacrifice. Steadfast love rather than keeping the rules.

And Wesley also reminds us that God is greater than the means of grace! We should use them, because he told us to, but God is perfectly capable of acting outside them! Again, they are not a magic formula!

But there is more to it than just our personal relationship with God. Of course, that is important, vital, even. But I don’t suppose for one moment that there were no followers of God at the time Hosea was writing. There were probably a minority of people who did want to be God’s people, who did do their best to give mercy, steadfast love, rather than mere form. But the people as a whole were not God’s people. The community was not a God-fearing one. As, of course, ours isn’t.

And you will note what was happening when Jesus told the Pharisees to go away and read Hosea – he was eating with a group of people who were widely hated. Hated. Outcast. Other. And we know all about that in our society, don’t we? Yes, I’m white and privileged, I know that, but I also know that many people are pretty much outcast and hated in much of our society, due to skin colour, sexuality or religion. Or are hated because they are so-called “migrants”, many of whom are so desperate to get here that they take their lives in their hands to do so, only to find they are not only officially unwelcome but are widely mistrusted and hated.

And yes, we know we must and will stand by such people, love them, defend them, help them as best we can. As Jesus did with the tax-collectors. As he did with other outcasts of the day – Samaritans, lepers, and so on.

But then, and this is where it gets really difficult, and why I’ll probably start speaking far too fast – do attract my attention if I do! But then, there are the haters. The Christian nationalists, Reform, Nigel Farage, the MAGA republicans, Donald Trump. What should our attitude to them be? What would Jesus say to them?

It’s so easy, isn’t it, to hate them in our turn. Certainly I hate some of the things that seem to be happening in the US, although I do wonder sometimes if there isn’t a bit of exaggeration. And it makes it very difficult not to hate the perpetrators – but we mustn’t. Jesus doesn’t. He argues with the pharisees, sure. He refers them to Scripture. He tells them frankly that their self-satisfaction means they can’t get close to God. But he doesn’t hate them.

Look at the healings in the second half of the Gospel. Matthew’s account is very bald compared to those in Mark and Luke, but he still tells the story. How the leader of the synagogue comes to Jesus in despair as his daughter is deathly ill – in this account, he says she has already died. But Jairus, as the other accounts tell us he is called, is probably a Pharisee. He may have been one of the haters; he may have thought that Jesus was blaspheming when he suggested that they should come to him to know righteousness with God. But he was desperate, and he came to Jesus in his despair – and Jesus raised his daughter. He didn’t hate Jairus, any more than he hated any other Pharisee.

And we haven’t to hate, either. Not even Trump. Not even Farage. Not even Boris Johnson for what he did to our country…. We mustn’t hate. But how not to? This is what I find hard – I want to hate them! Yet Jesus says, very firmly, to love our enemies, and he sets us an example of how it is done. He didn’t let them get away with anything – he was, after all, the one who drove the traders out of the Temple – but he didn’t hate them, and when they were in need, he responded to that need.

So how not to hate? I think there’s only one way, and that is to ask God to love them through us. We are given the potential through the Holy Spirit indwelling us; we can, I think, be guided as to whether we should speak out, or not. Probably we should – we need to call out wrongdoing and hatred when we find it. Not always easy to do – much easier to leave it to other people! But we are promised that we’ll be given the words when we need them.

But I don’t want to end on a negative note – let’s think about love, not hatred! Matthew doesn’t really show it, but look how lovely Jesus is with the woman who couldn’t stop bleeding, and, indeed, with Jairus’ daughter. And, indeed, with the tax-gatherers, with whom he enjoyed a convivial lunch! Which reminds me of the passage in Revelation that so many of us have used, over the years, to commit and to recommit ourselves to being Jesus’ person: “Listen! I am standing at the door, knocking; if you hear my voice and open the door, I will come in to you and eat with you, and you with me.”
“I will come in to you and eat with you, and you with me.” Amen.

The Gate

 

I don’t know about you, but I sometimes find the cultural assumptions in the Bible very difficult.

We don’t really know about sheep here in London, other than as curry mutton or a half-leg of lamb such as we enjoyed on Easter Sunday.

But for sheep farmers, they are an essential part of the economy, as, indeed, they have been for millennia.
As they were in first-century Palestine.
Jesus’ first hearers would have known exactly what he was talking about, exactly what image he wanted to conjure up in their minds.

As it happens, I do know a little about sheep and sheep-rearing, as my brother was a sheep farmer until he retired last year.
Obviously, many of the methods he used were very different from those used in the Bible – but sheep don’t really change.
Shepherds still use dogs to round up the sheep and move them to a different field.
Electric fences and quad-bikes have replaced sheep-folds and people on foot, in the South of England;
but in other areas, like the Yorkshire moors or the Scottish Highlands, sheep are still at liberty to roam pretty much where they will.
In fact, they are what’s called “hefted” to their local area;
it is imprinted on them, so they don’t go far away.
In some areas, they are brought back to the farmyard at lambing time, or at shearing time, but otherwise they live freely on the hill.

Back in the day, in Southern England, sheep would also roam fairly freely on the South Downs.The shepherd would be with them, and often had a little caravan-type hut, on wheels, where he could keep his stuff, and, if necessary, sleep at night.

At night, the shepherds would make a large pen for the sheep, often using hazel hurdles, and close them in, to keep them from straying in the dark, and to keep them safe from predators.
There haven’t been wolves in the UK for many centuries now, but the sheep are kept from getting lost, and it gives the shepherd a chance to check them over for parasites, sore feet and so on.

Anyway, the point is, that’s the sort of sheep pen that I think Jesus was talking about.
We know that in Palestine there were plenty of predators that the shepherds had to be alert.
Do you remember how David, when he heard about Goliath’s challenge, volunteered to go, and when Saul asked him how on earth he thought he could beat a professional solder, said that he was accustomed to fighting off lions and bears when he was looking after his sheep.

So the shepherds had to be alert for lions and bears, and, Jesus said, for robbers, too.
Sheep were, and are, a pretty valuable commodity, and need to be kept safe.
So they were enclosed at night, and apparently the shepherd would often lie down in the gateway, so that any predator or robber would have to get past him, and, conversely, any sheep who felt minded to stray would have to do so, too!
And sheep do stray!
The grass, as they say, is always greener on the other side of the fence.
Hence Jesus’ story of the lost sheep, with the shepherd grabbing his coat and staff and going off to look for it.

And it’s also true that the sheep know their shepherd.
These days, they are more likely to recognise the shepherd’s quad bike or car than the actual person.
When my brother farmed sheep, if he, or a shepherd in his employ, drove into their field, they would cluster round the vehicle, expecting that there would be supplementary feed coming.
But if an unfamiliar car, or even an unfamiliar person, were to go into that field – perhaps we would be driving around to look at the woods – they would run away, bleating loudly.

But what on earth does this have to do with us?
The nearest most of us are likely to get to a sheep is the meat aisle in the supermarket!
Or a woollen jumper, of course – sheep give wool as well as meat, although that is far less profitable these days.
Not like a few centuries ago, when England’s fortunes were derived from wool, and everybody knew how to spin, and carried a spindle around most of the time.
But not today, except for hobbyists.

It’s about being kept safe, I think.
About being able to trust God to keep us safe.
About trusting that it will be as Isaiah says:
“The Lord will make you go through hard times, but he himself will be there to teach you, and you will not have to search for him any more. If you wander off the road to the right or the left, you will hear his voice behind you saying, ‘Here is the road. Follow it.’”
Which makes it sound as though God is our satnav!
Hmmm, that might be an interesting theme to follow up.
“The Lord is my Satnav, therefore shall I never get lost.
He leads me beside still waters….” and so on.
It works!
After all, we don’t know much about shepherds, but we do know about satnavs! Although the analogy only holds so far, because you always have to check your satnav to make sure it isn’t taking you on some most peculiar route, whereas you can always trust God to lead you in the right way.

But then, how do we know the Shepherd's voice?
Well, he speaks to us;
and we listen to him.

He speaks to us.
Well, in one sense that's somewhat of a no-brainer, as the Americans so graphically put it.
We are told, from our earliest days as Christians,
that God speaks to us through the Bible,
and through other people,
and even, although we must be careful, through our own imaginations.
But being told it and knowing it seem to be two different things!
Of course, there are times when we hear the Shepherd's voice so clearly, times when we know we are his, held in his arms –
or, indeed, round his neck, the way shepherd today will still carry a young sheep.

Just look at our first reading, from Acts.

The believers were going through one of those times when God was so close to them, when new believers were coming in all the time, when life was simply ideal.
They ate together, they shared everything in common.
It was idyllic, and, of course, it couldn't last.
Ethnic tensions crept in between the Jews and the Greeks;
there was that dreadful time when Ananias and his wife pretended they'd given their all to the church, when they hadn't at all.
It wouldn't have mattered –
nobody was making them give anything at all, never mind all they had –
but to lie about it?
They paid a fearful penalty.
The community was wonderful while it lasted, but it didn't, couldn't, last.
I wonder whether they felt they were failures when it all broke up, when they started to be persecuted, when things basically went wrong –
or did they accept that things happen, and that God still loved them?

We have all known times when we hear the Shepherd's voice so clearly,
but, of course, we have all known those other times, too;
times when God seems far away, when our prayers go no further than the ceiling, when, so far from hearing God's voice, we wonder whether, in fact, our whole faith has been based on a delusion!
I'm sure we've all been there and done that, too!

Now, it's traditional to be told that when those times happen, it is our fault.
We have stopped listening, we are told, we have gone our own way,
we have sinned.
And, of course, some of the time that is exactly what has happened,
even if some preachers do make it sound like God isn't talking to us any more because we've offended him!
I think, rather, it is we who cannot hear the voice of God when we are uncomfortable in God's presence.
But usually when that has happened we know that is what the matter is,
and sooner or later we admit this to ourselves, and to God,
and things come all right again.

But some of the time, with the best will in the world,
we know we have not sinned,
and it really doesn't seem to be our fault.
Times when everything goes pear-shaped,
and you wonder where on earth God is in the middle of it all?
And part of you knows that this is exactly where God is –
in the middle of it all –
but that part is operating on sheer faith.
You can't sense God's presence, or hear the Shepherd's voice at all,
no matter how hard you listen.
It happens to all of us, probably more often than we care to admit.
Again, preachers have various explanations for it,
and you've probably heard them as often as I have.
That God is testing our faith, as though God didn't know how strong our faith actually is.
Actually, of course, God does know, but we don't necessarily,
and it can be a salutary shock to us!

The thing is, of course, that we don't understand, can't understand, why these things happen.
God is God, not just another person like us, and it's not possible to understand.
We don't know why we suddenly seem to lose the ability to hear God's voice, and why, even worse, we suddenly seem to lose all sense of God, and seem to simply be going through the motions.

Years ago now, there was an epidemic of foot-and-mouth disease, and the government issued movement restriction orders.
The sheep had to stay in the same field for weeks on end, and they hated it!
They had eaten all the grass, and were reliant on supplementary feeding, and they longed and longed to be moved elsewhere, as normally they would have been.
So they would run after any car that went into that field, on the off-chance it had come to move them. But you try explaining that to sheep!

And since God is even further beyond us than we are from real sheep, how could we be expected to understand what constraints He has?

The fact that it's almost universal, that almost every Christian goes through it from time to time must mean that it is normal.
But I don't know why it happens,
and I don't altogether accept the explanations as to why.
I think it's just "part of the human condition", or, if you prefer, "part of the mystery of faith", and we must accept it as such.

We, of course, behave like sheep from time to time.
We think we do not hear the voice of the Shepherd, so we rush after any and every passing thing that looks as though it might be the Shepherd.

The most recent seems to be this vile, racist so-called Christian Nationalist movement, which is basically White Supremacy under another name.
Just as my brother's sheep ran after another car,
hoping that we were coming to move them to a better field.
Is this the right Shepherd, we ask ourselves, rushing to find out.
And sometimes, in the process, we get ourselves badly lost.
We find that the better field was no such thing.

But remember our Lord's story about the lost sheep?
When we do get lost, we can trust the Good Shepherd to pull on coat and boots, forthwith, grab a crook, and head out to find us.
"No one will snatch them out of my hand," Jesus said.
So even if we, or someone we care about, has gone off down the wrong track and got lost, we can trust the Good Shepherd to come and find us again.

Because the Good Shepherd, Jesus tells us, is come "that they may have life and have it abundantly".
Abundantly.

So when we get to a time where we seem not to hear His voice,
a time when we look round and He seems to have vanished, let's not panic.
Let's not assume it was all our fault –
it might have been, but not necessarily.
Let's not abandon all idea of Christianity, of churchgoing, of being God's person.
Instead, let's sit and wait, calling out to God in prayer, but accepting the silence, trusting that one day the Good Shepherd will come and find us, and say
"There you are!
Come on, I'll take you back to the rest!" Amen.