Doing it God's Way

 

Children's Talk: Two brothers I totally forgot to record this, sorry! Scroll down to listen to (or read) the main sermon, although you can watch it on the video - service starts about 20 minutes in, following the worship group.

Once upon a time, long, long ago in a galaxy –
well, a country, anyway –
far away, there lived a man with two sons.
Not unusual, of course –
there are lots of people who have two sons, my daughter does.
But these two boys, and their dad, feature in several of Jesus' stories.

Daddy was a wine-grower, we are told, and one morning at breakfast-time, he said to the boys, “Right, lads;
busy day today, grape harvest starting.
Either of you free to come and help?”

The younger boy shakes his head.
“Sorry, Dad;
I'm booked, I'm afraid.
Told Sammy I'd go round to his today.”

“Not a problem,” said his father.
“What about you, Joe?” to the older boy.

“Yes, I can come!” says Joe.
“What time do you want me?”

“Oh, make it about 09:30, we'll be able to use you then.
Great.
See you later!”

All very well and normal, you might think.
But then what happens?
Joe, in the hour or so between the end of breakfast and 09:30, when he said he'd be at the field, begins to have second thoughts.
It's a horribly hot day, he could go swimming with his friends;
Dad wouldn't really mind, there were plenty of other helpers.... and eventually, his brother sees him heading off with his trunks and a towel under one arm, obviously not heading for the harvest-fields.

So the brother does a bit of thinking himself.
Yes, Sammy was half-expecting him, but harvest was harvest, and it was pretty sure he'd be wanted to help his Dad, too.
So he grabs a passing servant and sends him round to Sammy's with a message that he couldn't come, after all, and heads off down to the field.

Well, that's the story Jesus told.
And one of the reasons he told it was to tell us that it's never, ever too late to change your mind, not in this life.
If you've not been quite sure about God, about being Jesus' person, you can still change your mind.... it isn't too late!

Main Sermon: Doing it God's Way

You know, I feel very sorry for Moses.
There he is, doing his best to lead his people to the Promised Land,
and what happens?
They do nothing but grumble!
They keep telling him they'd rather be back in slavery in Egypt, thank you very much,
quite ignoring the fact that when they were in slavery, they hated it!
But first of all they didn't have anything to eat,
and then, when God provided manna for them –
and nobody knows what manna was, exactly, only that it was edible and tasted good –
they got bored of it, and wanted meat, so God sent quails for them.
And now here they are grumbling because tonight's camping place doesn't have any fresh water for them.
Moses is very fed up, and also slightly afraid of a riot and stoning,
so God intervenes and tells Moses to hit a certain rock with his staff
and water gushes out.
And the people of Israel stopped grumbling, until the next time!

They were never contented.
And nor, in many ways, were the Pharisees from our Gospel reading.
They were not bad people, of course;
they really did want to follow God,
but they had misunderstood what was wanted, and thought that in order to be God's person, you simply had to follow the law absolutely exactly.
To help them do that, they had added some incredibly detailed “what ifs” and “in this case yous” to the Law.
The Law, as interpreted by the Pharisees, provided for every single detail of life,
and if you failed to keep it absolutely perfectly, then, they thought, God wouldn’t want to know you.

Well, that was all very well.
The Pharisees meant well, of course, but they were, quite without realising it, imposing impossible burdens on people.
It was quite impossible to keep the Law in their way.
And the Pharisees themselves made one very big mistake
they rated keeping the Law more highly than human relationships.
They were more concerned about the way people obeyed, or did not obey, the Law
than they were about who people were, and how they were hurting, and why.
And, of course, somewhat inevitably, they tended to be rather proud if they managed to live as they thought right,
and then they looked down on those who didn't live as they did, believing God would exclude them.

And they find Jesus' teachings very unsettling,
especially when he starts telling them they're being totally hypocritical, fussing about how many mint leaves to tithe but ignoring people who are in need.
Unsettling and disturbing.
So they ask Jesus by whose authority he is speaking.

Now this was a trick question, of course.
If he claimed a human source for his authority, they could and would discredit it.
If he said it was just his own thoughts, or, worse, if he claimed it came from God, they could, and almost definitely would, stone him for a heretic.
It could be that some of them genuinely wanted to know, but many would have hoped he'd blunder.
But he didn't.
He turned it back on them –
okay, who gave John the authority to baptise?
And that, too, was a trick question.
If they said John's authority was from God,
Jesus could legitimately ask why they hadn't believed him,
and if they said it was merely human, well, what would the people think –
they believed John was a prophet sent from God,
and weren't going to stand for the Pharisees telling them different!

And then Jesus tells them the lovely little story to show how it's not always the obvious people who are first in line for the kingdom of God.
The two sons, one seemingly more than willing to help his father in the vineyard, the other with some excuse or other not to.
And then the role reversal, the first son failing to go, despite having said he would;
the second son finding he was free after all and going to help.
And he was the one who found favour with his father that day.
“For John came to you to show you the way of righteousness, and you did not believe him, but the tax collectors and the prostitutes did. And even after you saw this, you did not repent and believe him.”

And if you didn't believe John, Jesus implied, you aren’t going to believe me, either!

So what do these readings have to say to us this morning?

I think it's very much about our expectations.
What do we expect from God?
The people of Israel expected God, through Moses, to provide for their every want.
Not just their every need –
which he manifestly did –
but their every whim.
They wanted leeks and onions and all the delicious food they'd left behind in Egypt.
They wanted to be free, but they didn't want to pay the price of that freedom!
They wanted to be in the Promised Land already, without having to travel there, if that makes sense.
And whenever things got slightly uncomfortable for them,
they grumbled and moaned and whined –
on one occasion, you may remember, they even went so far as to worship another god in the shape of a golden calf.
They wanted God to do things their way.

And the Pharisees also wanted God to do it their way.
They wanted God to say they were doing it right, their tithes and their keeping the law in infinite detail would make things all right.
God would, they hoped, accept them because they kept the Law.
Which was all very well, but not when it turned into that they hoped God would reject those who didn't keep the Law!
They definitely wanted God to do it their way!

I have a horrid nasty feeling that we are all too apt to do this, too.
I know I do.
It would be nice to be able to manipulate God, to make God do things our way.
In many ways, it would be nice to be able to take responsibility for our own salvation.
We can't, of course, any more than the Pharisees could.
They tried to be saved by keeping God's law exactly perfectly,
just as we try to assume we are saved because we have committed ourselves to be Jesus' person.
But they weren't, and we aren't.
We are saved by God's grace alone, and we can do nothing to change that.

That sounds as though I'm preaching about predestination and stuff like that.
I'm not.
As Methodists, we believe that everybody needs to be saved,
and that everybody can be saved,
can know they are saved,
and can be saved to the uttermost.
But the point is, while I know that God has saved me, whatever I might mean by that –
and I don't always know, so don't go asking me –
I know that God has saved me,
but I have no way of knowing about you.
You know, yes.
You know, and you will doubtless tell me, that God has indeed saved you,
but I have no way of knowing unless you tell me.
And you have no way of knowing about anybody else, and nor do I.

We can't make God do things our way.
We'd like it if people were only saved if they prayed the sinners' prayer, or whatever, and then expressed their faith exactly like we do.
Human nature, that is.
The Israelites wanted God to do things their way,
to provide all sorts of delicious food for them whenever they wanted it, not just camp rations.
They wanted to have arrived in the Promised Land without having to journey there.

We have to remember that it was the son who worked in the vineyard who did what his father wanted.
The father still loved the son who changed his mind and didn't go –
that was never the issue.
He still loved him, but he wasn't best pleased about it, all the same.


So what is it God wants us to do?
Obviously to believe, to have faith.
And to stop trying to manipulate him!
It really isn't easy.
When they first told us King's Acre might close, all those years ago,
I remember that I found myself praying, “Lord, if you do that, I'll never speak to you again!”
What I should have been praying,
and what God gave me the grace, eventually, to be able to pray, was
“Lord, if you want to do that, you're going to have to change me to enable me to accept it, because I certainly can't right now!”
I dare say God could manage very happily if I never spoke to him again –
but I'm not sure I could!

Seriously, though, it can get like that, can't it?
Another rather silly example –
someone on Facebook, some years ago now, posted a comment that I considered judgemental,
and I was going to post “Judge not, that ye be not judged” on his status, when I realised –
or God pointed out to me, whichever –
that if I did that, I'd be being just as judgemental as I was planning to accuse him of being!
Oops!

It isn't easy to do things God's way,
rather than to try to make God do things our way.
That is always the temptation –
I know it's one of my persistent temptations,
and I shouldn't wonder if some of you share it.
We want our own way;
we think we know how the world should be run,
and we think God is very silly not to see it the same way as we do.
Okay, when I put it like that, it sounds ridiculous –
but isn't that exactly what the Israelites were doing?
What did God think he was doing, they wondered,
making them camp here where there wasn't any fresh water?
Isn't it exactly what the Pharisees were doing?
What did God think he was doing, they wondered,
sending this laughing young man to tell them they'd got totally the wrong idea about God?

And we wonder what God thinks he is doing allowing a small boy to wander off and drown, as sadly happened last week;
we wonder what God thinks he is doing allowing such dreadful floods in Nepal, or earthquakes in South America, or whatever.
We think – at least I do – that if we were God, we’d do things very differently!
And we’d like God to do things our way.

The good news is, of course, that we can catch ourselves doing it, and repent.
I don't mean having to grovel and tell God how awful we are –
often, it is enough just to laugh at ourselves.
“Oops, I did it again!” as the song says...
And if we can and do commit ourselves to doing things God's way,
then next time we try and do it the other way round,
we might catch ourselves just that wee bit earlier.

And yes, sometimes it isn't at all easy.
If things look as though they might be going in a direction we would hate –
illness, a threatened job loss, whatever it might be –
it's not at all easy to say to God, “do it your way.
Thy will be done!”
Often we know God's going to have to change us before we can accept it.

But we do, in the end, have to say “Thy will be done!” to God.
If we keep on and on saying “Do it my way!” eventually God might just take us at our word –
and leave us to get on with it.
And, as I said, I don't know about you, but I don't think I could cope with a universe without God, could you?
Amen.

God provides

 

Today’s readings are about how God provides for his people, and how ungracious our response usually is!

Our Old Testament reading is set shortly after the Israelites have been set free from Egypt.
You remember how God sent various plagues on the Egyptians,
and then parted the waters of the Red Sea,
or more probably one of the lakes that’s now part of the Suez Canal,
to allow the Israelites to escape from Pharoah’s armies, which drowned if they didn’t get out of the way in time.
So now they are wandering about in the desert,
waiting to be shown the way to the Promised Land.
And they are fed up and hungry.
Wouldn’t they have done better to have stayed in Egypt,
where at least they had delicious food to eat?
Forgetting, of course, all the nasty things about having been in Egypt.

But God provides for them –
quails in the evening, so they can have a hot meal, and manna for the rest of the day.
Nobody seems to know quite what manna was –
the Bible tells us that it looked a bit like white coriander seeds,
and tasted a bit like a wafer with honey, but that doesn’t really help.
Nor, of course, does it matter; it’s not about what manna was, after all!
I’m sure that those of you who are interested can research further into the whys and wherefores of it;
scholars have argued about it over the years, and they have some very weird and wonderful ideas!
But for now, suffice it to say that God provided enough food for his people while they were wandering in the desert.

I am always interested when I read the rather longer version of this story, since it’s made quite clear that every family was only able to collect enough manna for its own needs.
You couldn’t store it.
You couldn’t hoard it.
If you gathered too much,
and didn’t give it to someone who wasn’t as able to gather it as you were,
then it went rotten on you and had to be thrown away.
The only exception to this was on a Friday –
you were allowed to gather enough to last you for the whole Sabbath day,
so that you didn’t have to gather it on the Sabbath,
but that was the only time you could gather more than needed for immediate use.
Strictly enforced socialism!

All the same, the people were still not satisfied, so we are told,
and went on and on grumbling and muttering and being generally miserable.
As you probably remember, it came to a head on several occasions –
for instance, when they thought Moses and Aaron, their leaders, had been gone up Mount Sinai for too long,
so they decided God must have abandoned them, and built a golden calf to worship, instead.
And so it went on, grumble, grumble, moan, moan, never satisfied.....

Actually, are the Israelis ever satisfied?
Seems like it’s going on still – there are, of course faults on both sides in this conflict between Israel and Gaza, and I don’t want to get into it now, but strikes me that Israel would like to increase its borders, largely at the expense of the Palestinians.

Anyway, never mind that now. Let’s turn to our Gospel reading. Jesus is telling a story of what the Kingdom of Heaven – God’s country, if you like. We, like Jesus’ first hearers, want to think of God’s country as the most wonderful place there is, and, indeed, Jesus does tell us that it’s worth giving up everything else for. But –
oh dear –
it’s not at all what we thought!
Weeds everywhere, attracting masses of birds which could and did eat all the crops!
And the food, far from gourmet, is rotten bread made by women!

And then there’s this story. It’s harvest time, and so many labourers are needed. These days, of course, the harvest is usually done by machines as it is, sadly, more economical. A winemaker of my acquaintance told me that, although he would have preferred to continue using seasonal labour, his mechanical harvester paid for itself in under two years!

But back in the day, machines weren’t available, so you used seasonal workers or nobody. So the winemaker goes to the market, where the unskilled workers were waiting to be hired, and negotiates with them for a fair day’s pay. But he found he hadn’t taken on enough people, so he goes back mid-morning, at lunchtime, and then again mid-afternoon, and finally just an hour before knocking-off time. And then he gives everybody the same wage that he’d negotiated with those who worked a full day. And they, of course, were livid. Wouldn’t you be? These layabouts only worked for an hour, and we’ve done the whole shift! How come they get the same money as us. It’s Not Fair!

But the winemaker says, “No, listen, I paid you exactly what we agreed I would, and if I choose to pay those who came later the same, how is that your business? You be thankful for what you have and don’t tell me what to do!”

I think most of us would sympathise with those workers! It really does seem unfair, and probably most of them would have hired on with someone else next day. But let’s twist it round a second, and look at those who came late. Perhaps some had family responsibilities to deal with and couldn’t get there for a six am start. Some might have hired on elsewhere, but been let go early, as their employer had overestimated the amount of work there was.
Some might have worked almost a full shift but taken on an extra hour’s work because they needed the extra pay for – oh, I don’t know, shoes for their children, or something. Some might have been different, not “people like us”, perhaps they had some kind of disability and employers were reluctant to take them on in case they didn’t give value for money.

But this is God’s country, and God knew everybody’s needs, and provided for them. The employer – God if you like – was not being unfair to the ones who worked all day; they got what was agreed. It was God’s immense generosity which gave more to those who had worked less, and who, arguably, needed the full amount. God’s country is very much not what we think it’s going to be. After all, if we are honest, we probably all secretly think we deserve more!

I expect the Israelites would have liked an occasional change from manna and quail! But they had what they needed. They couldn’t take more than they needed, unless they were gathering it for someone who wasn’t able to get their own for whatever reason. But they had sufficient. The workers who worked a full day’s shift were paid the agreed amount – a very fair day’s wage, back in the day. And those who came later were paid the same amount, which in God’s eyes is very fair, even if it isn’t in ours!

We are taught to believe, and these stories show us, God’s provision for us as His people. But what of those he doesn’t appear to provide for? What of those who desperately need to use the food banks or they’d not be able to feed themselves or, worse, their children, by the end of the week? What of those in Nepal, trying to recover from those terrible mudslides? What of those in Gaza or Yemen that we know are starving? And there is so often famine in Africa, too? Has God forgotten these people? Why do they not have enough?

You hear of people who say these people brought it on themselves. They don’t work hard enough. They spend what they have on luxuries. And so on, you’ve heard it all before.

But you know what? It almost never is their fault! In this country, our systems are cursed by those years of austerity – still going on – which makes it incredibly difficult to climb out of poverty, especially if you don’t have the qualifications for a well-paid job, or you are trying to bring up young children single-handed, or you are disabled and can’t work. The powers that be have been known to refuse – refuse, I tell you – to give these people the benefits to which they are entitled. Not all of them, and not all of the time, but enough so that people still rely on the food banks and soup kitchens. And the food banks and soup kitchens rely on our generosity – yours and mine – to keep going and provide the service they do.

And abroad – well, they say the Nepal mudslides were caused, primarily, by climate change. And again, that is very largely down to us. We have turned a blind eye to the reality of global warming, until it hits us in the face as it has this summer. As individuals, we can’t stop global warming single-handed, but we can do our own bit – using refillable water-bottles, reusing supermarket carrier bags, being scrupulous about recycling properly, minimising food waste, and, while we are at it, minimising food miles. That sort of thing. If we all did it, it might make a difference, and we mustn’t think that just because not everybody does it, we needn’t bother either! We should, and we should encourage our friends to do so, too.

And so many of the famines we see are caused by war. Certainly in Gaza and Yemen, in Sudan, in so many countries whose wars we don’t really hear about. I think there are people going hungry in Ukraine now, too.

The thing is, God can, and God will, provide for all these people – but almost always that provision will be through us. It’s so easy to get what they call “compassion fatigue”, fed up with the nightly sight of suffering on our television screens. You know and I know that if we gave three pounds a month to all who beg us to, we’d soon go broke! But we can and should sit down with God and work out where our own personal giving should go – to the church, of course, but what other cause yells at you? Don’t forget, that if you’ve committed to being God’s person, as I’m sure most of us here has, that should be all of us, including our personal finances!

Now you might, of course, be thinking “But I can’t afford to give anything – I can barely feed my children as it is!”, and if that’s you, then rest assured, I’m totally not getting at you! All I can say is that I’m sorry the Social Security are such arses on occasion! And there are the food banks and there are the soup kitchens!

Meanwhile for the rest of us, there are ways to make our giving relatively painless. Perhaps you buy a coffee on the way to work – could you bear to take one with you, just one day a week? That would be around a fiver you could give to your chosen charity. Or perhaps you buy your lunchtime sandwich? Could you bear to take one from home, not necessarily every day, but perhaps once a week? Again, that bit of lunch money could go towards your charity.

You’ll have your own ideas, I’m sure. But I want to close by reminding you that you can’t outgive God! Jesus is recorded as saying, in several places, that God rewards us: “Give, and it will be given to you. A good measure, pressed down, shaken together and running over, will be poured into your lap. For with the measure you use, it will be measured to you.” This doesn’t necessarily mean material blessings, of course – in fact, it very probably doesn’t. The Israelites were given plenty of manna, but not too much. But it does mean enormous spiritual blessings, and love, and awareness of God’s love for us, both as individuals and as churches. Amen.

To eat or not to eat

 

As I’m sure you know, Jesus’ first followers were Jewish, and accepting Gentiles – non-Jews – into the early church was somewhat fraught. Ought those early disciples to follow the Jewish law in its entirety; must they be circumcised; how should they proceed? St Luke tells us, in the book of Acts that there was such a kerfuffle that they had to hold a special Council about it, in Jerusalem. After a great deal of debate, and speeches from people like Peter, who reminded the assembly that God had shown him that Gentiles, too, were welcome, and from Paul and Barnabas, telling about the people they had met on their travels, James, the Lord’s brother, who was at the time de facto head of the Church in Jerusalem, said: “Therefore I have reached the decision that we should not trouble those Gentiles who are turning to God, but we should write to them to abstain only from things polluted by idols and from fornication and from whatever has been strangled, and from blood.” It is, of course, debatable whether Paul would really have agreed to that, given the sort of views he is propounding in our reading today, but hey.

The Letter to the Romans is thought to have been written around 57-58 AD, or CE if you prefer that terminology, and the book of Acts not until, probably, the 80s or even 90s, so who knows how accurately his views have been represented? It doesn’t really matter, of course, but what does matter are his views in the passage we’ve just heard read.

The issues are not about the ethical or health considerations of vegetarianism, but it’s all about relations between the Jewish and Gentile Christians. You see, about ten years earlier, Emperor Claudius had expelled the Jews from Rome, and of course many who left would also have been Christians. The Church in Rome was then, for some years, exclusively a Gentile church. But in 54 CE, Claudius died and Nero took over as Emperor, and the Jews came back. And, of course, during the time they were away, the church had grown and evolved, and the Jewish Christians didn’t like the changes at all! First of all, there was the vexed question of eating meat. In Rome, as in other cities at the time, meat was normally sacrificed in the temples and then sold to the butchers to resell to the public.

As you know, the Jews need their meat to be kosher, killed properly according to Jewish dietary laws, and, above all, not to have been offered as a sacrifice in a temple to pagan gods. In a community where there was a large Jewish population, that was not a problem, since there would be a kosher butcher, from whom they could buy their meat. But there hadn’t been any Jews in Rome for several years, and so there was nowhere to buy meat that they could trust – there was no way of knowing how and where it had been killed when you bought from a street stall. Gentile Christians weren’t particularly bothered by this; they didn’t keep kosher and anyway, those pagan gods weren’t real, so what did it matter? But for the Jews, this was dreadful – they couldn’t possibly eat meat when they didn’t know where it had come from, so they would stay vegetarian, and everybody else should, too!

Similarly, the Jewish Christians were shocked to find that the Gentiles didn’t observe the Sabbath as they thought it should be observed. For them, the Gentile Christians simply weren’t honouring God as they should. They must have thought they were adhering to What The Bible Teaches

But, how does this affect us? We may or may not choose to eat meat, and some people do make a moral issue out of it, but it’s not a sticking point. And I do know, from personal experience, there can be a dichotomy between those who observe Lent and, to a lesser extent, Advent very strictly and those who don’t really observe those seasons but who are fairly strictly Sabbatarian. But really, they aren’t particularly major issues today.

But we do have our major issues, don’t we? From whether or not you should shop on a Sunday, have sex before marriage, get divorced, drink alcohol, be gay…. When I was a young Christian, I wondered what on earth Paul was talking about when he said “It is for freedom Christ has set us free” when Christianity seemed to be hedged about with all these rules and regulations, and people said you were being a “bad witness” if you didn’t keep them as strictly as the Pharisees kept their petty rules. Christianity, it seemed to me, may have freed us from the Jewish law, but it imposed extraordinarily heavy burdens on one, just the same.

Of course, leaving the rules behind is extremely scary. Paul refers to those who want to stick to the rules as “weak in the faith”, which I imagine came as a big surprise to the Jewish Christians who heard his letter being read. Surely, they were the strong ones? They were the ones who were doing it right. I don’t think the meme “God said it; I believe it; that settles it!” had been coined back in the day, but that is certainly what they were thinking! And yet, to Paul, they were the weak ones, clinging to a framework of legalism and not allowing themselves to be truly free in Christ.

And I remember being utterly terrified when I first began to let go of all the evangelical rules and regulations, and to try to trust Jesus alone. What if I got it wrong? Wouldn’t I be condemned as a dreadful sinner?

It is really, really hard to accept that we have been saved by Jesus and don’t need to cling to the Bible as a rule book, but to read it more as a love letter from God. Mind you, I’ve noticed that people tend to find whatever they look for in the Bible – if they want a God who condemns those who aren’t exactly like them, or who do things they’ve been taught are wrong, then they are going to find that condemnation; if, on the other hand, they go looking for a God who loves each and every one of his children more than words can tell – then that’s who they will find!

But the thing is, whether we are weak like the Jewish Christians were, or like I was, or whether we are what Paul would call “strong”, we haven’t to despise one another. Paul writes, in a modern paraphrase:

“Don’t put anyone down for being timid in their faith. Welcome them into the congregation, and don’t give them a hard time for being hung up about things that cause you no concern. You who are strong must not make fun of those who play it safe; for the fact is that God has extended a welcome to them too, and the Lord is quite capable of getting them to stand where they should without your help.”©2002 Nathan Nettleton LaughingBird.net

We are all God’s children. We may choose to express our faith in different ways. I may reckon that a certain behaviour is acceptable, and you may disagree. Or vice versa. But we haven’t to fight over it. In fact, more than that, we haven’t to let our behaviour put someone else off. If someone believed, for instance, that it was really wrong to paint a room on a Sunday, but you were perfectly happy to do just that once you’d been to church, Paul says elsewhere that you mustn’t let your freedom lead your friend into doing something they believe is sinful. If they can’t help you with your home decorating on Sunday, don’t try to make them. Arrange another time that suits both of you! And maybe, if the thought of your decorating really upsets them, don’t do it!

Paul points out that those who eat meat are doing it for God’s glory, to prove that the pagan gods have no power, and those who don’t, in that context, are also doing it for God’s glory, as they are refusing to allow themselves to be contaminated by possible contact with paganism. Both sides have valid points, and if your neighbour at church lunch refuses the meat course, don’t try to persuade them otherwise, and perhaps don’t eat meat yourself that day.

C.S.Lewis said, in The Screwtape Letters, that if we took Paul seriously, you would expect to see your low church neighbour genuflecting and using incense and so on so as not to lead their high church friend into irreverence, and the high church one would refrain from such things so as not to lead the other into idolatry! But we are not all so tolerant!

We will not, I think, talk about those so-called Christian Nationalists who appear to believe that only white people can be true Christians – but, while we believe they are misguided, to say the least, we would want to welcome anybody who turned up at our church holding such views, and accept them and love them and hope to change them through love, not through argument.

Similarly, I know some churches – not, thankfully this one – seem to think gay marriage is wrong. “God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve” they chunter. All the same, I bet that if Adam and Steve – or Eve and Donna, for that matter – were to rock up to that church next Sunday, they would be warmly welcomed and find themselves on the coffee rota before they had time to blink! And we know that the whole issue has caused major heartache and even split some churches, so we will be sensitive and not flaunt our own views in front of those who don’t share them. The whole tenor of Jesus’ teaching, after all, is about treating other people – whoever they are, whatever their views – with the greatest possible respect and love.

The point is, that whatever we do or don’t do, whatever we think or don’t think; whether we treat the Bible as a rule book, or as a love letter; whether we believe we have been set free in Christ, or that Christianity is a life full of constraints; whatever we believe, how can it possibly matter against what Christ has done for us? God’s love for us in sending Jesus is so immense, so totally beyond our understanding in its immensity, that our own beliefs are insignificant. We are not saved by our faith, but by what God has done! Yes, we need to express our willingness to be Jesus’ person – but the Good News isn’t, although I was taught to believe it was – it isn’t “You are a dreadful sinner”. The Good News is “You are loved”. Amen.

Moses in the bulrushes

 

The text of this sermon can be found here.

Mary the Mother of God

Yesterday, the fifteenth of August, was a major festival in some parts of the Christian Church.
It was what’s called the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary,
which celebrates the belief that her body, as well as her soul,
was taken to heaven after she’d died.
Or possibly even before, it’s not clear.
Either way, it’s a very old tradition,
going right back to the early years of Christianity,
even though there’s nothing about it in Scripture.
And even those Christians, like us,
who don’t necessarily subscribe to that doctrine,
do still consider 15 August one of the Festivals of Saint Mary. And even though we Protestants don’t really think about Mary much, the fact that she’s such an important figure in so much of Christianity means she’s probably worth thinking about from time to time.

So what do we actually know about her from the Bible, as opposed to tradition? She first appears in our Bibles when Gabriel comes to her to ask her if she will bear Jesus, and, of course, as we all know, she said she would, and Joseph agreed to marry her despite her being pregnant with a baby he knew he wasn’t responsible for.

I do rather love Luke’s stories about Mary – how one of the things the angel had said to her was that her relation, Elisabeth, was pregnant after all those years. And Mary rushes off to visit her.

Was this to reassure herself that the angel was telling the truth?
Or to congratulate Elisabeth?
Or just to get away for a bit of space, do you suppose?
We aren’t told.

But Elisabeth recognises Mary as the mother-to-be of the promised Saviour, and Mary’s response is that great song that we now call the “Magnificat”, which we heard in our Gospel reading.
Or if it wasn’t exactly that –
that may well be Luke putting down what she ought to have said, like Shakespeare giving Henry V that great speech before Agincourt –
it was probably words to that effect!
I think she was very, very relieved to find the angel had been speaking the truth, and probably did explode in an outpouring of praise and joy, and of wonder that God would come down to a relatively poor young woman in a dusty backwater of the Empire!
I’ll come back to that in a minute, but for now let’s go on looking at what we know about Mary.

After Jesus’ birth, the next time we see Mary is when Jesus is twelve and gets separated from them in the Temple.
I spent a lot of time with that story when my daughter was a teenager –
how Mary and Joseph say to Jesus, “But why did you stay behind?
Didn’t you realise we’d be worried about you?”
and Jesus goes, “Oh, you don’t understand!” –
typical teenager!

We don’t see Joseph again after this – tradition has it that he was a lot older than Mary, and, of course, he had a very physical job. It wasn’t just a carpenter as we know it – the Greek word is “technion”, which is the same root as our “technician”; if it had to do with houses, Joseph did it, from designing them, to building them, to making the furniture that went in them! And tradition has it that sometime between Jesus’ 12th birthday, and when we next see him, Joseph has died.

But we do see a lot more of Mary.
She is there at the wedding at Cana, and indeed,
it’s she who goes to Jesus when they’ve run out of wine.
And Jesus says, at first, “Um, no –
my time has not yet come!” but Mary knew. And she told the servants to “Do whatever he tells you”, and, sure enough, the water is turned into wine.

There’s a glimpse of her at one point when Jesus is teaching, and he’s told his mother and brothers are outside waiting for him, but he refuses to be diverted from what he’s doing. And, of course, it could have been that it was just random people who said they were his relations to try to get closer to him.

We see Mary, of course, weeping at the Cross –
something no mother should ever have to do.
And Jesus commending her into the care of the “beloved disciple” John.
And, finally, we see her in the Upper Room in Jerusalem when the Holy Spirit came.
That’s really all we know about her from the Bible, but other early traditions and writings, including some of what’s called the apocryphal gospels –
they’re the ones that didn’t make the cut into the New Testament as we know it –
tell us a bit more.

They tell us that her mother was called Anne and her father was called Joachim, and that she was only about 16 when Gabriel came to her.
One source has it that Anne couldn’t have babies, and when Mary finally arrived, she was given to be reared in the Temple, like Samuel.
And traditional sources also tell us that, after Pentecost, she went to live in Ephesus, probably with John, and died somewhere between 3 and 15 years later, surrounded by all the apostles.
And that her body was taken up to heaven, which is where we came in!

Well, that’s all very well, but how did they get from there to the veneration of her, not to say worship in some cases, that we see today?

This may be something you find difficult to understand – I certainly do – and that’s okay. We aren’t required to do more than honour her as the Mother of our dear Lord; we mention her when we say the Creed, of course, and there are lots of churches dedicated to her. My family church in Clapham – the Clapham in Sussex, that is, not the one in London – is dedicated to St Mary the Virgin, as are loads of other churches around the world.

But we do not think of her as quasi-divine in some way.
We do believe that Jesus was conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit, not by ordinary human means,
but that this was something that happened in time, not in eternity!
She became the Mother of God –
she was not the Mother of God before Jesus was born.

I think it’s probably largely to do with the fact that, back in the day, when the head of your family, or tribe, or whatever, converted to Christianity, you had to, too. And if you were used to worshipping a mother goddess of some kind, maybe you found in Mary something of what you were used to, and what felt natural to you. After all, although we do sometimes use female names for God – Love, for instance, or Sophia, Wisdom – they don’t always come naturally. It is, perhaps, significant that in Italy, 15 August is known as Ferraugusto, and was originally a festival of the goddess Diana – you know, “Great is Diana of the Ephesians”, that one – and has been a public holiday since the days of Caesar Augustus! Diana, whose Greek name is Artemis, is associated with the moon, the hunt, and virginity! So a festival dedicated to a virgin goddess is now dedicated to the Virgin Mary!

Anyway, the point is, what does this have to do with us? The various Mariologies, or Marian theologies, are fascinating, although I don’t pretend to understand most of them, but what can we learn from it all?

From Mary herself, of course, I think we can learn obedience to God. We know how very brave she was saying “Yes” to God’s request that she bear Jesus; I also like to remember that, at the wedding in Cana, she says to the servants, “Do whatever he tells you!” – and that’s not a bad motto to live by! Do whatever Jesus tells us.

But there’s more to it, isn’t there?

“He has brought down the powerful from their thrones,
   and lifted up the lowly;
 he has filled the hungry with good things,
   and sent the rich away empty.”

Mary may well have thought, if, indeed, she had ever even thought about it, that when the Messiah came, he would come in spectacular fashion, a king above all kings, acknowledged by all, revered by all, worshipped by all. But that’s not what happened! Instead, God came as a human baby, born in a house so crowded that the only available cradle was an animal feeding-trough, born in an occupied country whose rulers were ruthless in putting down resistance and dissent.

We see how Mary’s words were later echoed by Jesus – in his teachings, it is quite clear that those who are rich in material things will find it very difficult to be God’s person; those who are self-satisfied won’t be able to find God. Those who think they are righteous probably aren’t. Remember Jesus’ stories of the Pharisee who thought he was righteous and the tax collector who knew he wasn’t – and it was the tax collector who went home right with God. Similarly, it was the poor widow who gave what was probably her food money for the day who was blessed, where the rich man who gave what looked like a lot, but was really only peanuts to him was not.

It is those who are poor, weak, hungry who can find God, who can trust God to fill them with good things. I imagine – well, I hope – that most of us here this morning have decent housing, enough to eat, enough to wear, access to the Internet and so on. But all too many don’t. Our soup kitchens, our food banks, our warm spaces in the winter, and so on, are still desperately needed, and I’m sure we all give what we can, although probably not enough.

But it’s not just about physical hunger – it’s about spiritual hunger, too. We need God. All of us need God, whether we acknowledge that need or whether we don’t. All of us here this morning probably do acknowledge that need, and have committed ourselves to being Jesus’ person.

But it’s all too easy to become complacent, to forget that we need God. There’s a song we sometimes sing at Brixton Hill that begins “May your struggles keep you near the cross and may your troubles show that you need God.” We don’t like struggle and trouble and ghastliness – but what if it is bringing us closer to God? Not just as individuals, but as churches! You here at Lambeth Walk know what it is like to struggle as a church, both when you were trying to build this lovely building, but also before then when you had to split up from St Mary’s. King’s Acre Church united with Brixton Hill many years ago now, but before then we, too, had to leave our Local Ecumenical Project and become purely Methodist. It was not an easy few years, and quite heartbreaking when we had to cease being a separate church, although it was the right decision. But God has blessed us, and I’m sure you will tell me that God has blessed you, too. We knew we needed God.

And more recently, too, during the pandemic when we were not allowed to worship together for so many months. Yet God was there, as we learnt how to be Church on Zoom, and how to livestream our services, which, like many churches, still do at Brixton Hill,

Yet, are we still aware that we need God? Mary, I think, knew that she needed God her whole life long.

“He has filled the hungry with good things!” Are we hungry for God? Am I? Are you?

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!