Bible Sunday and Black History Month

 

This was shorter than usual because we were celebrating the end of Black History Month, so needed to make sure we didn't overrun too badly.  Which we didn't!

Today, we are celebrating the end of Black History month, 2023.
I hope that most of our liturgy is reflecting that, and we will have some more contributions to our celebration later on in the service.

It’s also Bible Sunday;
when I was a girl, this was celebrated during Advent, but they changed the calendar around some years ago now, so now it’s celebrated on this Sunday.
I had to learn the collect, the special prayer for the day, off by heart when I was a schoolgirl!
I used to love “help us so to hear them, to read, mark, learn and inwardly digest them….”

And it’s that which we have to do with the Scriptures, isn’t it?
Read, mark, learn and inwardly digest them,
until they become part of us, part of who we are, part of our lives.
We are told to let the Word of Christ dwell in us richly!

But, having said that, we do have to be aware that our reading of the Bible is always going to be flawed,
we’re always going to read it through the lens of our own prejudice,
our own experience, our own political viewpoint.
Or, if we read with the help of a daily commentary, of that commentator’s prejudice, experience, political viewpoint, and so on.

But, by and large, we want to internalise Scripture;
to let it dwell in us richly.
And I rather think the passage that [the reader] read to us earlier is one that we really need to internalise: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbour as yourself.”

Love.
Of course, there are all sorts of different kinds of love, and our English language, unusually, doesn’t have different words for the sort of love we give to our parents, our partners, our children, our friends, even strawberries or our teddy bear!
Greek does, which is helpful, and the word it uses for loving God is “agape”;
it’s not used anywhere else.
St Paul gives that wonderful definition of agape love in his letter to the Corinthians, you may remember:

“Love is patient;
love is kind;
love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude.
It does not insist on its own way;
it is not irritable or resentful;
it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth.
It bears all things,
believes all things,
hopes all things,
endures all things.
Love never ends.”

Pretty amazing, really.
This is the sort of love that Jesus was talking about, when he told us to love God with all of our being, and to love our neighbours as ourselves.

We need to be centred on God, not on ourselves.

But how do we do that?

After all, most people manage pretty well without God, and even those of us who try to be God’s people spend vast swathes of time doing other things,
sleeping, for one, or cooking, or working….

We are, of course, still God’s people while doing all those things,
but it’s not often at the forefront of our minds!

In John’s first letter, he equates loving God with loving our neighbour,
saying, basically, you can’t have one without the other.

“Those who say, `I love God', and hate their brothers or sisters, are liars
for those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen,
cannot love God whom they have not seen.
The commandment we have from him is this:
those who love God must love their brothers and sisters also.”

But then, just to get us even more confused, he says
“Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ has been born of God,
and everyone who loves the parent loves the child.
By this we know that we love the children of God,
when we love God and obey his commandments.”

So for John, loving God and loving our neighbour,
our brothers and sisters,
are one and the same thing.
And, indeed, that God's love for us is first and foremost –
our love for God is just a response to that.

And I think he's probably right.

We love, we are told, because God first loved us!
The love of God has been poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit.

And without God, our human loves can be desperately flawed.
Parents can be overly possessive of their children, not allowing them to grow and develop in their own way;
I don’t need to tell you how often romantic love can go wrong;
and even friendship can be more about excluding another person or group of people than anything else.

But if Love is the most important commandment in the Bible, then we mustn’t exclude anybody, for whatever reason.
Not even if they hold views we find abhorrent.
It’s not always easy, of course –
how do we pray for politicians whose views we loathe?
And how easy is it to forgive, and to love, those who have rejected us for whatever reason?
I know my experience is peanuts compared to what many of you have gone through, but I was rejected by my peers at boarding-school a lot of the time, and those were not always happy years.
And even though we are all friends now, over 50 years later, I still have to bite my tongue on occasion!
Loving and forgiving those who have hurt us, or those whose views we find abhorrent, or those who have inflicted gross damage on the world –
it really isn’t easy.
And I really think it’s only through God’s help that we can.

We are, we are told, to love our neighbours as ourselves;
and sometimes that is a case of “pity the poor neighbour”.
We are often either totally self-absorbed, or we fail to value ourselves as we should.
And, there again, it’s only through God’s help we can .


Just as we can’t love God without God’s having first loved us, so we can’t love our neighbours, or ourselves, without God’s help.
It’s all one, really.
We need to allow the word of God to dwell in us richly, to allow God the Holy Spirit to indwell us;
we need to allow the Spirit to grow us and change us and teach us to love.
Amen.

Terrorism, or what?

 

I ad-libbed the children's talk which makes up the first part of the recording.

What an incredibly nasty Gospel passage was set for today! I don’t like it one little tiny bit. But it’s there, it’s in Matthew’s Gospel, and it’s our Gospel reading for today, so we had better look at it, I think.

A king is holding a wedding-feast for his son. And, one presumes, his daughter-in-law, but she isn’t mentioned! I believe even in Orthodox Jewish weddings to this day the bride and groom celebrate separately, so perhaps that’s not as surprising as it sounds.

What is surprising, though, is that people didn’t want to come. The King sent out his servants to call them in, and they refused. And then when they were asked a second time, they even beat up the servants and killed them. So the King, in retaliation, sent his soldiers to burn down the city, and gets the servants to invite a whole different set of people, “good and bad alike”, who all jump at the chance to visit the royal palace. Or who are too scared not to, by that stage. But then, there is one bloke who isn’t properly dressed, and doesn’t justify himself, and isn’t just asked to leave, as you might expect, but bound hand and foot and cast into outer darkness.

Well, what’s it all about? The thing is, people tend to see the King who throws the party as God inviting everybody in in place of the Jews who refused Jesus’ invitation, and then the ones who are invited later are the ones who, like us, have said “Yes” to Jesus. But all that violence in the middle? Doesn’t sound like the Jesus I know, does it you? And what of the guy who was thrown out for not wearing the right clothes? Maybe he’s the one who tried to get in on his own merits, without putting on “the garment of salvation”.

But this story, with blood and gore everywhere, with the King seeming to be happy to kill everybody and burn their towns, even while letting the feast get cold – what is that saying about God, if we look on the King as representing God? What does it say about the Kingdom of Heaven?

St Luke, and some of the non-canonical Gospels, the ones that didn’t make the cut, tell the story in a very different way, where the party-giver is definitely God, there are no reprisals for those who chose not to come, but then the gaps are filled with anybody and everybody, no matter who they are, no matter what their physical condition. All are welcome. Now, that version of the story is giving a very different picture of God. So what’s Matthew trying to say. Why is his version the kind of image of God that can really damage our mental health, leaving us worried and fearful of “doing it wrong” and being thrown out. Or which can make us justify hating groups of people who are not like us. Or can make us justify using violence in God’s name.

Ah, but think a minute. Matthew is Jewish, writing for Jewish believers. And what was their experience of kings? Not the King of Heaven that we associate with kings – but the puppet kings installed by the brutal Roman regime. Maybe this story can be read another way. The king is brutal, so violence and killing become the norm in that society. Maybe the one who refused to wear a wedding garment, and who refused to justify himself, and who was bound and violently cast out – could that, could that, do you think, be Jesus? That is, after all, what we are told happened to him. He was the one who stood silently in front of his accusers, refusing to justify himself, and who was bound and taken to the shameful death of the cross.

If you have ears to hear, said Jesus, then hear. Maybe many of his followers were unwilling to see such a story as anything other than a picture of God at his most vengeful; maybe they liked seeing God like that. Maybe you do, too? One trouble with seeing God like that is that it makes salvation be down to us, not down to God. If we get it wrong, we’ll be chucked out.

Although one way of seeing the wedding garment, is the salvation that comes from God. We need to acknowledge that we can do nothing of ourselves to save ourselves, and we need to put on the “wedding garment” that Christ provides for us. We can’t be, and won’t be, accepted on our own merits. Acceptance is through Christ, and is unlimited. We will, of course, receive due recognition, I am sure: “Well done, thou good and faithful servant” – but it is through Christ we gain admittance to God’s country.

You can look at the story either way, of course. But all that violence – isn’t there enough violence in the world these days without having to see the rather cartoonish violence in the story Jesus told. As so often, it’s over the top – Jesus spoke Aramaic, which is a very over-the-top language. The king wasn’t very likely to abandon his feast, go and kill those who had killed his messengers and burn their towns to the ground, and then come back and expect to find his feast just as he had left it, after all!

St Paul, in the part of the letter to the Philippians that we also read earlier, reminds us that we should be filling our minds with “those things that are good and that deserve praise: things that are true, noble, right, pure, lovely, and honourable.” This doesn’t mean, of course, that we must close our eyes to the horrors that go on in this world – God forbid!

Even Paul is at his most practical at the start of the chapter, urging two of the stalwart women who run the church to get over themselves and sort out their differences, and he asks the bearer of the letter, and some of the other elders of the church, to help them do that. We’re not told what they were disagreeing about – whether it was an important point of doctrine, or just whose turn it was to arrange the flowers that week, or what was to be on the menu for the communal meal at Pentecost. Even the little things can assume undue importance at times!

But then he reminds us that we need to be joyful always in our union with Christ, and not to worry about anything. Well, that’s easier said than done, for a start! But the point is, Paul says, pray about it. Pray about the issues, bring them to God, being thankful that God is there to listen and to help. And you listen too, in case God wants you to be part of the answer to your prayer, as does often happen. And the more we can leave the issues with God, and focus on the good things, the more we will experience God’s peace.

Now, the word usually translated “peace” comes from the Hebrew word Shalom. And Shalom means far more than peace as in an absence of worry, although that too. It’s more than just an absence of war and quarrels, although them, too. It’s about wholeness. About things being the way they ought to be, but so seldom are.

The way things ought to be. Wholeness. Reconciliation, not just within families, within the church, between denominations, between nations, but reconciliation between people, God and nature. Wholeness. And it’s the wholeness of creation, the wholeness of ourselves within it. That is the sort of peace that Paul says will “keep our hearts and minds in Christ Jesus”.

Now, you know as well as I do that we live in a broken world. The horrendous conflict that has suddenly sprung up, yet again, between Hamas and Israel over the past few days is just one of the many conflicts going on around the world. The war between Russia and Ukraine is still ongoing, even though the latest conflict has knocked it off the front pages. Afghanistan is still refusing women basic rights over their own bodies, as are parts of the USA, but Afghanistan goes further and refuses them most of their rights as human beings.
There is still trouble in Syria… and so it goes on.

And then there is the brokenness of God’s creation: climate change, pollution, extinctions and so on.

Nevertheless, St Paul says to pray, to thank God, and then to fill our minds with “those things that are good and that deserve praise: things that are true, noble, right, pure, lovely, and honourable.”

I’m not entirely sure that Jesus’ story in our Gospel reading comes under that heading! But if the person thrown out in chains for not wearing a wedding garment is Jesus, as there is a strong argument that he is, then that is something we can focus on.

The thing is, I think, that we need to be aware of the evil, bring it to God in prayer, and then put it aside for now. We need to listen to or read the news, of course we do, and pray as we read or listen, but we shouldn’t wallow in it! When our friends on social media post something that means they need our prayers, we should pray at once, so we don’t forget, and then move on. We need to be disciplined about the rabbit-holes we fall down on-line – some, of course, are wonderful, but others, not so much! And so it goes. Common-sense, really, but how many of us have any common sense? And we need to focus on peace, pray for peace, yet still aware that there will probably be no peace in our lifetimes.

And as for the story Jesus told – let’s not wallow in the bloodthirstiness and the nastiness, but let’s focus on the solitary figure, silent, bound, and cast out – for it is through him that we can know God as our heavenly Father, and experience his peace and wholeness. Amen.

With thanks to Nathan Nettleton of the South Yarra Community Baptist church in Melbourne, Australia, whose sermons, as published on Laughingbird.net, helped me enormously with this sermon.