Mr Moneybags and the Big Issue Seller

 

An old friend, revisited.

Once upon a time, there was a really big city gent, known as Mr Moneybags.
You might have seen him, dressed in an Armani suit,
with a Philippe Patek watch on his wrist,
being driven through Brixton in a really smart car to his offices in the City, or perhaps in Canary Wharf.
Mr Moneybags did a great deal for charity;
he always gave a handsome cheque to Children in Need and Comic Relief, and quite often got himself on the telly giving the cheque to the prettiest presenter.

But in private he thought that the people who needed help from organisations like Comic Relief were losers.
Actually, anybody who earned less than a six-figure salary was a loser, he thought.
He despised his five brothers,
three ex-wives,
ten children,
twenty-five grandchildren
and the hordes of mistresses,
secretaries,
assistants
gofers
and general flunkies
who surrounded him –
and they knew it, too.
Especially, though, he despised homeless people and beggars,
who he thought really only needed to pull themselves together,
to snap out of it,
to get a life.

Particularly, he despised the Big Issue seller
who he used occasionally to come across in the car-park.
He would usually buy a copy, because, after all, one has to do one’s bit, but once in the car would ring Security and get the chap removed.

Laz, they called him, this particular Big Issue seller.
Not that Mr Moneybags knew or cared what he was called.
I’m not quite sure how Laz had ended up on the streets,
selling the Big Issue
or even outright begging.
It might have been drugs, or drink,
or perhaps he was just one of those unfortunate people who simply can’t cope with jobs and mortgages and families
and the other details of everyday life that most of us manage to take in our stride.
But there you are, whatever the reason,
Laz was one of those people.
He was rather a nice person, when you got to know him;
always had a friendly word for everybody,
could make you laugh when you were down,
knew the way to places someone might want to go, that sort of thing.

But what he wasn’t good at was looking after himself,
keeping hospital appointments,
taking medication,
that sort of thing.
And so, one morning, he just didn’t wake up,
and his body was found huddled in his bed at the hostel.
They couldn’t find any relations to take charge of it,
so he was buried at the council’s expense, very quietly, with only the hostel warden there.
But the warden always said, then and ever afterwards,
that he had seen angels come to take Laz to heaven.

At about the same time, Mr Moneybags became ill.
Cancer, they said.
Smoking, they muttered.
Drinking too much….
Rich food….
So sorry, there was very little they could do.
Now, of course, Mr Moneybags wasn’t about to accept this,
and saw specialist after specialist,
and, as he became iller and more desperate, quack after quack.
He tried special diets,
herbal remedies;
he tried coffee enemas,
injections of monkey glands,
you name it, he tried it.
But nothing worked and, as happens to all of us in the end, he died.

His funeral wasn’t very well-attended, either.
Funny, that –
you’d have thought that more of his
five brothers,
three ex-wives,
ten children,
twenty-five grandchildren
and the hordes of mistresses,
secretaries,
assistants
gofers
and general flunkies
might have wanted to be there.
But no.
In the end, only the ones to whom he had left most of his money were there,
and a slew of reporters,
hoping to hear that the company was in trouble.
Which, incidentally, it wasn’t –
whatever else Mr Moneybags may have been,
he was a superb businessman, and the company he founded continues to grow and flourish to this very day.

Anyway, there they were,
Mr Moneybags and Laz the Big Issue seller, both dead.
But, as is the way of things,
it was only their bodies which had died.
Mr Moneybags found himself unceremoniously told to sit on a hot bench in the sun, and wait there.
And he waited, and waited, and waited, and waited,
getting hotter and hotter,
thirstier and thirstier.
And he could see the Big Issue seller, whom he recognised,
being welcomed and fed and made comfortable by someone who could only be Abraham, the Patriarch.
After a bit, he’d had enough.
“Abraham,” he called out, “Couldn’t you send that Big Issue seller to bring me a glass of water, I’m horrendously thirsty?”

And you know the rest of the story.
Abraham said, not ungently,
‘‘Remember, my son, that in your lifetime you were given all the good things, while Lazarus got all the bad things.
But now he is enjoying himself here, while you are in pain.
Besides all that, there is a deep pit lying between us,
so that those who want to cross over from here to you cannot do so,
nor can anyone cross over to us from where you are.’’
And he pointed out that Mr Moneybags’ five brothers,
three ex-wives,
ten children,
twenty-five grandchildren
and the hordes of mistresses,
secretaries,
assistants
gofers
and general flunkies
wouldn’t listen to Laz if he were to go back and tell them –
they really knew it already, thanks to Moses and the Prophets.
You note, incidentally, that Mr Moneybags didn’t ask if he could go back!

---oo0oo---

Jesus had a lot to say about money, and our relationship with it
didn’t he?
And about our relationship with other people, too, for that matter.
Do you remember the story he told about the sheep and the goats?
This was when he reckoned that at the Last Judgement it would be those who had cared for Jesus in the persons of the sick, the prisoners, the hungry and, yes, the Big Issue sellers who would be welcomed into heaven, and those who had ignored him, in those guises, would not.
“For whoever does it unto the least of one of these, does it unto Me”, he said.

It must have come as a shock to Jesus’ hearers.
They had been taught that if you were rich and successful, it meant that God favoured you, and if not, not.
I am always rather amused when I read Matthew’s version of the Beatitudes and compare them with Luke’s –
Luke says, frankly, “Blessed are you when you are hungry, or thirsty, or poor”, but then, he was a Gentile and didn’t have the background that Matthew, a Jew, had.
Matthew can only bring himself to write “Blessed are you when you are poor in spirit, or when you hunger and thirst after righteousness.”
For him, still, poverty is not a sign of God’s favour, but rather the reverse.

Even today, you know, there are those who preach prosperity, they preach that if you are God’s person you will be rich and healthy.
But that isn’t necessarily the case.
Jesus never said that!
Okay, so he healed the sick, but he had a great deal to say about the right attitude to possessions and to other people.

It’s in this sort of area, isn’t it, where what we say we believe comes up smack bang against what we really believe.
We discover, as we study what Jesus really had to say, that being His person isn’t just a matter of believing certain things, it’s about being in a relationship with Him, and about letting him transform us into being a certain kind of person.
It’s no good believing, says St James, if that faith doesn’t transmute itself into actions.
And this seems to be what Jesus says, too.

It’s no good saying you believe in Jesus, and ignoring the very people Jesus wants you to look after –
the dispossessed, the refugees, the downtrodden, the marginalized, the exploited.
It’s not easy, I know.
We do hesitate to give money because of the very real possibility it might be spent on drugs or drink.
The other day I bought a sandwich for the beggar sitting outside Lidl on Acre Lane, and when I came out with it, she had gone!
But there are other ways of giving.
There are various charities we can give to,
or even lend a helping had at.
Brixton Hill’s foodbank on Wednesdays always needs donations, and volunteers, too, for that matter – contact Rev Kristen or my Robert to find out more.
Of course, one can even buy the Big Issue!

Seriously, though, we need to take this sort of thing seriously.
Quite apart from anything else, our very salvation may depend on it.
We say that salvation is by faith, and so it is –
but what is faith if it doesn’t actually cost us anything?
What is faith if it is mere lip-service?

And anyway, what sort of picture are we giving to the world if we just talk the talk, and don’t walk the walk?
Do you remember Eliza Doolittle, in My Fair Lady, exclaiming “Don’t talk of love, show me!”
I reckon the world is saying that to the Church right now.
Don’t let’s just talk about Jesus, let’s show people that he is risen and alive and dwelling within us by the power of his Holy Spirit.
The best way to cultivate a right attitude to money, people and spiritual things is to see the “beggar outside our gate” –
quite literally the Big Issue seller, if you like, but basically anybody who is not like ourselves.
Although, mind you, the other day I bought a sandwich for the beggar sitting outside Lidl and when I cam out she’d gone, so I was left with a sandwich I didn’t want!
You can’t win, sometimes.
But mostly they are thankful for the odd sandwich or pasty or similar.
And we must remember that it could have been us….

The miracle is that the more loosely we hold our possessions, the more we enjoy them,
the more we serve the needs of others, the more we value them, and the more we listen to God’s words, the more we value ourselves.
And, of course, the more we are able to show people Who Jesus Is, and that he is alive today.
Amen.

Lazarus and the Saints

 You will find the text of this sermon, which I have only slightly adapted, here  Tonight's service was on Zoom, so no location details!

Trinity Sunday 2023 Evening service

 This is similar, but not identical, to what I preached this morning.  This was a Zoom service; please excuse the washing-machine noises at the beginning!

Today is Trinity Sunday,
the day on which we celebrate all the different aspects of God.
It’s actually a very difficult day to preach on,
since it’s very easy to get bogged down in the sort of theology which none of us understands,
and which we can very easily get wrong.

The trouble is, of course, that the concept of the Trinity is trying to explain something that simply won’t go into words.
We are accustomed to thinking of God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit,
and most of the time we don’t really stop and think about it.
Trinity Sunday is the day we are expected to stop and think!

The thing is, the first half of the Christian year,
which begins way back before Christmas,
is the time when we think about Jesus.
We prepare for the coming of the King, in Advent,
and then we remember his birth,
his being shown to the Gentiles,
his presentation in the Temple as a baby.
Then we skip a few years and remember his ministry,
his arrest, death and resurrection, and his ascension into heaven.
Then we remember the coming of the promised Holy Spirit,
and today we celebrate God in all his Godness, as someone once put it.

The second half of the year, all those Sundays after Trinity,
tend to focus on different aspects of our Christian life.
And today is the one day in the year when we are expected to stop and think about God as Three and God as One.
And it is difficult.
It’s a concept that doesn’t really go into words,
and so whatever we say about it is going to be in some way flawed.
It took the early Church a good 400 years to work out what it wanted to say about it, and even that is very obscure:
“That we worship one God in Trinity, and Trinity in Unity:
Neither confounding the persons nor dividing the substance.
For there is one person of the Father,
another of the Son,
and another of the Holy Spirit.
But the Godhead of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit is all one,
the glory equal, the majesty coeternal.
Such as the Father is, such is the Son, and such is the Holy Spirit.
The Father uncreated, the Son uncreated, and the Holy Spirit uncreated.
The Father incomprehensible, the Son incomprehensible, and the Holy Spirit incomprehensible.”
The whole thing incomprehensible, if you ask me!

There are all sort of illustrations you can use to try to get a mental image of what it’s all about.
Look, for instance, at what happens when you join two hydrogen atoms to one oxygen one –
you get H₂O.
Di-hydrogen monoxide!
Which, I am sure you realise, can be ice –
a solid, good for cooling drinks or injuries, for preserving food, or for skating on.
Or it can be water –
a liquid, making up most of our bodies, good for drinking, sustaining all life.
Or it can be steam –
a gas, good for removing creases from our clothes or for cooking vegetables. Ice, water, steam, all very different from each other, but all, still, H₂O.

It’s an illustration.
It happens to be my favourite one, but there are plenty of others.
Another local preacher, on the same subject, brought in three tins of soup –
lentil, mushroom and tomato –
well, it might not have been exactly those, but something like that –
all tasting very different but all soup.
Some people like thinking of an egg,
which has the shell, the white, and the yolk....
They are all sort-of pictures, but only sort-of.
Nobody really understands it.
And, of course, that is as it should be.
If we could understand it,
if we knew all the ins and outs and ramifications of it,
then we would be equal to God.
And it’s very good for us to know that there are things about God we don’t really understand!
It’s called, in the jargon, a “mystery”.
That means something that we are never going to understand,
even after a lifetime of study.
Lots of things to do with God are mysteries, in that sense.
Holy Communion, for one –
we know what we mean when we take Communion,
but we also know that it may very well mean something quite different, but equally valid, to the person standing next to us.
Or even the Atonement –
none of us really understands exactly what happened when Jesus died on the Cross, only that some sort of change took place in the moral nature of the Universe.

Nevertheless, for all practical purposes,
we live very happily with not understanding.
We synthesise some form of understanding that suits us,
and, provided we know it is not the whole story, that’s fine.
And the same applies to the Trinity.
It doesn’t matter if we don’t really understand how God can be Three and One at the same time:
what matters is that we love and trust him, whatever!

And in our Gospel reading, Jesus talks of Himself, the Father and the Spirit as equal:
“All that belongs to the Father is mine.
That is why I said the Spirit will take from what is mine and make it known to you.”
Like St Paul, He doesn’t have the word “Trinity”, but it is the kind of thing He means.

And in the reading from Proverbs, which is sometimes used today, we are reminded of Wisdom.

“The LORD brought me forth as the first of his works,
before his deeds of old:
I was appointed from eternity,
from the beginning, before the world began.
When there were no oceans, I was given birth,
when there were no springs abounding with water;”

and so on and so forth.
Wisdom, here, is personified as female.
The Greek word for Wisdom is Sophia.
And some commentators equate Sophia, here, and in other passages, with the Holy Spirit.

Incidentally, some people find the image of God as Sophia, Wisdom, helpful and different.
It’s one of the many images of God we have, up there alongside the Shepherd, the Rock, the Strong Tower and so on.
If you don’t find it helpful, then don’t use it, but if it is something that appeals, then do.

But that is beside the point.
Seeing God as Wisdom is a very old tradition,
but the real point is that even in the Old Testament we get glimpses of God as having more than One Person.
The Trinity might not be a Bible expression, but it is a Bible concept.

But really, the thing about today is that, no matter how much we don’t understand God as Three but still One,
today is a day for praising God in all his Godness.
It is not really a day for deep theological reflection, nor for self-examination, but a day for praise and wonder and love and adoration. Amen

What Belongs to God

Sadly, I messed up the recording for this service!

I don’t know about you, but since the pandemic began I’ve hardly ever paid cash for anything.
I tend to use contactless payment via my phone, and even in places like France or Germany, which were far slower off the mark to adopt contactless payments, most places now accept cards.
But cash is still there, and for some things you have to use it.

And we’re used to our coins, aren’t we –
we barely even notice that they have a picture of the Queen on one side, and a few odd remarks in Latin printed round the picture.  The first coins featuring King Charles are to be issued next month, I understand, starting with a 50p piece.  

Our coins basically say Elizabeth, and will say Charles.
and then DG, which means by God’s grace;
Reg, short for Regina, means Queen or Rex, which means King,
and FD means Defender of the Faith –
a title, ironically, given to Henry the Eighth when he wrote a book supporting the Pope against the Protestant Reformation,

long before he wanted to divorce Katherine of Aragon and had to leave the Catholic church.

When I was a little girl, though, before decimalisation, coins were even more interesting, as they didn’t all have pictures of the Queen on –
the old shillings, sixpences, florins and half-crowns had often been issued during the reign of George the Sixth and pennies were often even older –

it was not unusual to find a penny that had been issued during the reign of Queen Victoria, even!
We didn’t have pound coins back then;

they were always banknotes
and there was also a banknote for what we now know as 50p, but was then called ten shillings.
It was quite a lot of money back in the day
a useful amount for visiting godfathers to tip one!

My father used to make us guess the date on a coin,
based on which reign it was, and if we were right we got to keep it

Not that we ever were right, so it was a fairly safe game for him,

but it made sure we knew the dates of 20th-century monarchs!

Different countries have different things on their coins, of course;

if you look at Euro coins, they have a different design on one side depending on which country issued them:

the German ones have a picture of the Brandenburg gate, or a stylised eagle;

the Irish ones have a harp.

Those Euro countries which are monarchies have a picture of their monarch on them,

and the Vatican City ones have a picture of the Pope!

This convention, of showing the monarch on your coins, dates back thousands of years, and was well-known in Jesus’ day.

But unfortunately, this raised a problem for Jesus and his contemporaries,

as the Roman coins in current use all showed a picture of the Emperor,

and the wording round the side said something like “Son of a god”, meaning that the Emperor was thought to be divine.

You might remember how the earliest Christians were persecuted for refusing to say that the Emperor was Lord, as to them, only Jesus was Lord? Well, similarly, the Jews couldn’t say that the Emperor was God, and, rather like Muslims, they were forbidden to have images of people, either.

So the Roman coins carried a double whammy for them.

They got round it by having their own coins to be used in the Temple –

hence the moneychangers that Jesus threw out, because they were giving such a rotten rate of exchange.

But for everyday use, of course, they were stuck with the Roman coins.

And taxes, like the poll tax, had to be paid in Roman coinage.

You might remember the episode where Jesus tells Peter to catch a fish,

and it has swallowed a coin that will do for both of their taxes.

But that was then, and this is now.

Now, Jesus is in the Temple when they come to him –

in the holy place, where you must use the Jewish coins or not spend money. “They”, in this case, are not only the Pharisees,

who were out to trap Jesus by any means possible,

but also the Herodians, who actually supported the puppet-king, Herod.

The question is a total trick question, of course.

They come up to Jesus, smarming him and pointing out that they know he doesn’t take sides –

so should they pay their poll tax, or not?

If he says, yes you must, then he’ll be accused of saying it’s okay for people to have coins with forbidden images;

it’s okay to be Romanised;

it’s okay to collaborate with the occupying power.

And if he says, no don’t, then he’ll be accused of trying to incite rebellion or terrorism.

So Jesus asks for a coin.

I expect it was the Herodians who produced one –

the Pharisees would probably not have admitted to having one in their pockets, even if they did.

And he asks whose image –

eikon, the word is –

whose image is on the coin?

And they said, puzzled, the Emperor’s of course, whose else would it be?

And we all know what he said next:

Give to the Emperor what belongs to the Emperor;

give to God what belongs to God.

It’s kind of difficult, at this distance, to know what he meant.

Was he saying we need to keep our Christian life separate from the rest of life?

God forbid, and I mean that!

If our commitment to God means anything at all,

it should be informing all we do, whether we are at worship on Sunday

or at work on Monday

or out at the pub on a Friday!

There is a crying need for Christians in all walks of life;

whether we are called to be plumbers or politicians,

bankers or builders,

retired or redundant!

Wherever we find ourselves, we are God’s people,

and our lives and values and morals and behaviour need to reflect that.

So what is Jesus saying?

It’s about more than paying taxes or not paying them.

It’s not about whether we support our government or whether we don’t.

We know from Paul’s letters that in the best of all worlds,

Christians should pay their taxes and live quietly under the radar,

exercising their democratic right to vote and not taking part in violent overthrow of a legitimate government.

Doesn’t always work like that, of course, but by and large.

Maybe the clue is in that word image - eikon.

For are we not told that we are made in the image of God?

If our picture were on a coin,

it would say round the side “A child of God”–

not, as for the emperors, meaning that we are gods ourselves,

but meaning, quite literally, that we are God’s beloved children.

Sure, sometimes God’s image gets marred and spoilt, when we go astray. I’ve seen coins that have been buried in the earth for years,

and they go all tarnished,

and sometimes, if they’ve been there for centuries, they build up an accretion of gunk round them to the point that you can’t possibly tell what they are.

But even that gunk can be cleaned off, with care –

do you remember those ads where the man dipped a penny into some cleaner or other, and it came up bright and sparkling?

Maybe Jesus is saying that this is not an issue to divide people –

Caesar gets what belongs to him, which is the coin,

and God gets what belongs to him, which is us!

No need to choose –

you don’t have to be either a quisling or a resistance worker.

We don’t separate what belongs to Caesar from what belongs to God –

we give ourselves to God, and the rest follows!

Is it, then, about possibly owing a small amount of money in tax,

but owing God a far greater amount –

our very being?

Yes, that is definitely part of it.

It was, I think, fifty-one years ago last month that I first consciously said “Yes” to God;

and yes, that does make me feel old!

But the more I go on with God, the more it seems not only possible, but also sensible.

You see, God created us in His image and likeness,

and not only that, but God redeemed us through Jesus,

and empowers us, by the Holy Spirit.

So yes, we do owe God our very being –

we are created by him, and without him we wouldn't exist.

It's not so much that we owe him the duty of giving ourselves back to him –

we do, of course, but we know that!

It's more about not being able to fulfil our potential on our own.

We are made in God's image, but unless we allow God to indwell that image,

to empower it,

we will never really fulfil our potential as human beings.

So we owe it to ourselves, almost as much as we owe it to God,

to say “Yes” to him, to open ourselves to Him.

So we are made in God's image, and as such we owe it to both God and to ourselves to give ourselves back to God.

But we also owe it to God and to ourselves to make sure that our image reflects God.

We owe it to God and to ourselves to make sure our image reflects God.

There's a wonderful book by an author called Georgette Heyer,

I don't know if people read her much these days,

but this book is called “These Old Shades”, and in it, one of the characters –

a child –

is taken to Versailles and sees the king, and her rather sleepy reaction at the end of the evening is, “He is just like on the coins!”

I wonder whether anybody would recognise God after having seen us.

Would they say, “He's just like on the coins”?

The thing is, we do mar God's image in us –

I mentioned earlier how coins can be so covered in the gunk of ages as to be unrecognisable.

But coins can be cleaned, renewed, restored....

Our prayer of confession today was one of the alternate Anglican ones, which I have always loved for the words “We have wounded your love and marred your image in us.”

“We have wounded your love and marred your image in us.”

This, for me, reflects the fact that we are made in God's image, and that sometimes that image gets distorted.

I am well aware that this sort of thing is apt to make us all feel guilty, apt to make us feel we must be terrible Christians, and so on.

But that's so not what I want to do here.

After all, there are plenty of other ways of distorting God's image –

look at the Pharisees, for instance, who tried to turn God into a set of rules and regulations.

Or in our own day, look at some of the more extreme Christian sects in the USA.....

Yet all of those are following God to the best of their ability.

Yes, they have got things tragically wrong.

Yes, they are distorting, marring, God's image in them.

But they are not, I think, any more evil than you or I are.

And God will, I pray, help them find their way back.

Because that, in the end, is what God is all about.

God minds far more about our relationship with him than we do!

We wander off, we get lost, marring God's image in us,

distorting Christianity into something very much less than it is –

oh yes, I've been there and done that –

and yet, every time, the Good Shepherd pulls on his coat and wellies, grabs his crook, and goes looking for us to bring us back into the fold.

We don't have to do it ourselves.

Indeed, it's when we try that the distortions are apt to happen.

We just need to be open to allowing God to keep us clean and polished and ready for action!

The coins that bear the emperor's image on them need to be given to the emperor.

But the coins that bear God's image –

we ourselves, each and every one of us who names the name of Christ as Saviour and as Lord –

those coins need to be given to God, reflecting His glory, and allowing Him to work in our lives to make us more and more like Him, and more and more the people He designed us to be.

Amen.

The Spirit is Upon Me

.

When our children grow up and first leave home, perhaps to go to university, or to go to work, it’s lovely when they come home for the weekend, or for the holidays, isn’t it? And often they will come to church with us, and see all their old friends, and talk about how they are getting on. And it has been known for the minister or preacher to ask them to come up and talk about what they’ve been doing, especially if they’ve been away on some kind of mission work.

Our reading is set very near the beginning of Jesus’ ministry. He has been baptised by John, and then led into the desert to be tempted, and basically to come to terms with who he is and what his mission is. He has been wandering around Galilee, collecting disciples, healing the sick, and proclaiming the Kingdom of God. And now he has come home to Nazareth and, of course, goes to his home synagogue on the Sabbath. And he is asked to read a passage of scripture, which was the norm – Jewish men were, and I believe still are – and, of course, women in some Jewish traditions, but not all – apt to be dropped on to read at a moment’s notice.

And what Jesus reads is the very passage we had for our first reading this evening, from Isaiah:
“The Sovereign Lord has filled me with his Spirit.
He has chosen me and sent me
To bring good news to the poor,
To heal the broken-hearted,
To announce release to captives
And freedom to those in prison.
He has sent me to proclaim
That the time has come
When the Lord will save his people
And defeat their enemies.”

So far, so very good. It’s lovely, isn’t it, to think that we have just read a passage of Scripture that we know that Jesus himself read, allowing for differences in translation!

The tradition was that if you read the Scripture, you could comment on it, but having stood to read – much as in some churches we stand to read the Gospel – you then sat down. And Jesus sat down, and they all looked at him attentively, wondering what he was going to say.

After all, they’d known him since he was a very small boy, when the family had moved to Nazareth after King Herod died. And he’d grown up with them, gone to school with them, worked with his father – until suddenly he’d gone off, some months ago now, with barely a word of farewell. You can hear the aunties in the gallery, can’t you: “Hmph, don’t know what he thought he was doing, leaving his Mum in the lurch like that. I did hear he’s been doing miracles and healings and so on, out in the back country, but I don’t believe a word of it, do you? Well, he’s home now. Let’s see what he’s got to say for himself!”

What he said was the last thing anybody expected:
“This passage of scripture has come true today, as you heard it being read.”

“This passage of scripture has come true today, as you heard it being read.”

I can’t help wondering whether he knew he was going to say that, or whether it just came out. It’s so unclear how much Jesus knew about Who he was, and what he had been sent to do. He had been coming to terms with it a bit in the desert, of course, but it’s clear from Scripture that he gradually appreciates things more and more as time goes on. I do hope he was able to grow up as an ordinary boy, learning and playing with his friends, without any special knowledge hanging over hime. Anyway, at this stage, he does know that he has been sent to heal people, to minister to the sick, to proclaim the Kingdom of God, and, above all, to follow the promptings of God’s spirit. And maybe, when he read the bit from Isaiah, it suddenly spoke to him, and showed him that it was he to whom it applied.

We didn’t go on to read the rest of the story, but it’s rather sad. They were impressed by his authority – but – but – this was Joseph’s son, surely? How could the Isaiah passage apply to him?

And Jesus says, probably slightly annoyed, “Well, they do say a prophet is without honour in his own country!” which, of course, infuriates them, and they drag him up to the cliff edge with some thought of throwing him over, but he escapes and goes away.

You see, it’s very difficult when God doesn’t do what you expect. And nobody in Nazareth expected God to come in the person of the carpenter’s son! Not Mary’s eldest, who’d gone off so suddenly like that!

Sometimes, when we call upon God for help, we expect him to come in some kind of miraculous way. My father used to tell of a man whose house was menaced by floods, and who was on the roof, praying for God to save him. He really expected God to sweep him away in a whirlwind or something, so when the fire services came along in a rowing-boat, he refused to get in, saying “God will save me!” A little later, another boat came along, but again he refused. The waters continued to rise, and a coast guard helicopter came to try to persuade him to come to safety but no, “God will save me.” And, inevitably, he was swept away and drowned.

So, in Heaven, he seeks the throne of grace, and demands, “How could you let me down like that? I prayed for you to save me, and you didn’t!”
But God answered, “My dear son, I sent you two boats and a helicopter – what more could you want?”

The man didn’t recognise God’s hand in the boats and the helicopter, and the people of Nazareth didn’t recognise it in Jesus.

But for Jesus, this passage, and similar ones from Isaiah, were the touchstone of his ministry. You remember, some time later, how his cousin John was imprisoned and suddenly had a crisis of faith. He sent his disciples to Jesus to ask “Are you the one John said was going to come, or should we expect someone else?” and Jesus replied, “Go back and tell John what you are hearing and seeing: the blind can see, the lame can walk, those who suffer from dreaded skin diseases are made clean, the deaf hear, the dead are brought back to life, and the Good News is preached to the poor.”

Jesus became more and more certain that he was the Messiah, the chosen one. Even if his childhood friends didn’t recognise this. His disciples did, most of the time, but even they had moments….

But why does this matter? What does this passage have to say to us tonight?

Well, on Thursday it was Ascension Day, the day when we remember Jesus’ final parting from his disciples. The Book of Acts tells us that he was “taken from their sight”, and it is certainly clear to them, in some way, that he will not now return as the Jesus they knew and loved. But they have been told to wait in Jerusalem until the Spirit comes. Which, as we know, happened on the Day of Pentecost, which we will be celebrating next Sunday.

And when the Spirit came, of course, what had happened was instantly recognisable. It wasn’t just the tongues of fire, or the rushing mighty wind. It wasn’t just the way the disciples were enabled to speak in tongues, and the listeners to understand what was being said. It wasn’t just the way that Peter was able to preach so powerfully that three thousand people were added to the church that day.

It was all that, and then it was the fact that they were able, in Jesus’ name, to heal the sick, to perform miracles, and, perhaps especially, to
“bring good news to the poor,
To heal the broken-hearted,
To announce release to captives
And freedom to those in prison.
. . . . to proclaim
That the time has come
When the Lord will save his people
And defeat their enemies.”

And again, that is not just something that happened long ago in history; it is something that can, and should, happen to all believers today. To you, and to me.

We can be, and should be, filled with the Holy Spirit; I’m sure we can all remember times when we know this is what has happened. Some believers talk of being “baptized with the Holy Spirit”, from John the Baptist’s pointing out that he, John, can only baptize with water, but Jesus can and will baptize with the Holy Spirit. And maybe you have experienced something you can describe as such.

But the problem with being filled with the Holy Spirit is that we tend to leak! It’s not, I find, a once-and-for-all experience; it’s something that we need to ask God to do daily, sometimes even hourly! The Spirit comes to burn out that which is not of God in us – what St Paul would probably call “the flesh”; to enable us to speak God’s word, whether we know we’ve done so or not, and above all, to help us become the people God created us to be, the ones we have been designed to be.

My friends, right now this minute we may be full of the Holy Spirit, or we may feel empty and forlorn. Or somewhere in between. So let’s ask God to fill us anew, using the lovely song “Spirit of the Living God, fall afresh on me.” Let’s sing it through twice.

Tempted and Fallen

The first reading today was about a man, and a woman and God.
The man and the woman don't have names –
later on, they are called Adam and Eve,
but at this stage they don't need names.
They are just Man and Woman.
They are the only Man and Woman that exist –
God hasn't made any more, yet –
so they don't need names.
Man can just go, “Oi, you!”
and Woman will know he's talking to her.

God has made the Man and the Woman, and put them in a garden,
where there is plenty of food to eat for the picking of it.
It's lovely and warm, so they don't need clothes,
and in fact they are so comfortable with themselves and with God that they don't want clothes.
There are animals to be cared for, and crops to be tended,
but the work is easy and pleasurable.
And all the fruit in the garden is theirs, except for one tree,
which God has told them is poisonous.
If they eat the fruit of this tree, God said, they'll die.

Well, so far, so good.
But at this point, enter another player.
The serpent.
Now, the Serpent is God's enemy,
but the Man and the Woman don't know that.
They think the Serpent is just another animal.
Now Serpent comes and chats to Woman.

“Nice pomegranate you've got there!”

“Mmm, yes,” says Woman.

“Look at that fruit on that tree over there, though,” says Serpent.
“That looks well tasty!”

“Yes, but it's poisonous!” explains Woman.
“God said that if we ate it, we'd die, so we're keeping well clear of it!”

“Oh rubbish!” says Serpent.
“God's stringing you a line!
It's not poisonous at all.
Thing is, if you eat it, you'll be just like God,
and know good and evil.
God doesn't want you to eat it,
because God doesn't want any rivals!
Go on, have a bite!
You won't regret it!”

So Woman has another look at the tree,
and sees that the fruit is red and ripe and smells tempting,
so she cautiously stretches out her hand and grabs the fruit,
and, ever so tentatively, takes a tiny bite.
Mmm, it is good!

So she calls to Man, “Oi, you!”

“Mm-hmmm,” calls Man, looking up from the game he was playing with his dogs.
“What is it?”

“Come and try this fruit,” says Woman,
and explains how the Serpent had said that God had been stringing them a line,
and how good the fruit tasted.
So Man decides to have a piece himself.

But it's coming on to evening,
and at evening, God usually comes and walks in the garden,
and Man and Woman usually come and share their day.
But tonight, somehow, they don't feel like chatting to God.
And those bodies, the bodies they'd enjoyed so much, suddenly feel like they want to be kept private.
They look at one another, and both retreat, silently, into the far depths of the garden, grabbing some fig leaves to make coverings for themselves.

Presently, God comes looking for them.
“What's up?
Why are you hiding?”

“Well,” goes Man, “I didn't want to face you, 'cos I was naked.”

“Naked?” says God.
“Naked?
Who told you you were naked?
You've been eating that fruit I told you was poisonous, haven't you?”

“Well, er, um.”
Man wriggles.
“It wasn't my fault.
That one, the Woman you gave me.
She said to eat it, so I did.
Wasn't my fault at all.
You can't blame me!”

So God looks at Woman, and says, “Is this true?
Did you give him the fruit?”

Woman goes scarlet.
“Well, it was Serpent.
He said you, well, that the fruit wasn't poisonous.”

But, of course, the fruit had been poisonous
It wasn't that it gave Man and Woman a tummyache or the runs;
it poisoned their whole relationship with God.
They couldn't stay in God's garden any more.
Serpent was going to have to crawl on his belly from now on,
and everyone, almost, would be afraid of him.
Woman was going to have awful trouble having babies,
and Man was going to find making a living difficult.

But God did show them how to make warm clothes for themselves, and didn't abandon them forever,
even though, from that time forth, they weren't really comfortable with God.

Well, that's the story, then, that the Israelites used to explain why human beings find it so very difficult to be God's people and to do God's will.
And it shows how first the Woman and then the Man were tempted, and fell.

They fell.
But Jesus resisted temptation.
You may remember that he was baptised,
and there was the voice from heaven that said
“This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.”
And then Jesus went off into the desert for six weeks or so,
to come to terms with exactly Who he was,
and to discover the exact nature of his divine powers.

It must have been so insidious, mustn't it?
"Are you really the Son of God?
Why don't you prove it by making these stones bread?
You're very hungry, aren't you?
If you're the Son of God, you can do anything you like, can't you?
Surely you can make these stones into bread?
But perhaps you aren't the Son of God, after all...."
And so it would have gone on and on and on.

But Jesus resisted.
The way the gospel-writers tell it,
you would think he just waved his hand and shook his head and said,
“No, man shall not live by bread alone!”
But that wouldn't have been temptation.
You know what it's like
when you're tempted to do something you ought not –
the longing can become more and more intense.
There are times when you think,
Hmm, that'd be nice, but then you think,
naaa, not right, and put it behind you;
but other times when you have to really, really struggle to put it behind you.
“If you are the Son of God....”

The view from the pinnacle of the Temple.
So high up.... by their standards,
like the top of the Canary Wharf tower would be to us.
"Go on then –
you're the Son of God, aren't you?
Throw yourself down –
your God will protect you!"
The temptation is to show off, to use his powers like magic.
Yes, God would have rescued him, but:
“Do not put the Lord your God to the test.”
That's not what it's about.
That would have been showing off.
That would have been misusing his divine powers for something rather spectacular.

Jesus was also tempted with riches and power beyond his wildest dreams –
at that, beyond our wildest dreams,
if only he would worship the enemy.
We can sympathise with this particular temptation;
I'm sure we all would love to be rich and powerful!
But for Jesus, it must have been particularly subtle –
it would help him do the work he'd been sent to do!
Could he fulfil his mission without riches and power?
What was being God's beloved son all about, anyway?
Would it be possible to spread the message that he was beginning to realise he had to spread
if he was going to spend his life in an obscure and dusty part of the Roman empire?
And again, after prayer and wrestling with it, he finds the answer:
“Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him.”
Let the riches and power look after themselves;
the important thing was to serve God.
If that is right, the rest would follow.

You may remember that Jesus was similarly tempted on the Cross, he could have called down the legions from heaven to rescue him.
But he chose not to.
It wasn't about spectacular powers –
often, when Jesus did miracles,
he asked people not to tell anybody.
He didn't want to be spectacular.
He'd learnt that his mission was to the people of Israel,
probably even just the people of Galilee –
and the occasional outsider who needed him, like the Syro-Phoenician woman, or the Roman centurion –
and anything more than that was up to his heavenly Father.

And, obviously, if the "anything more" hadn't happened,
we wouldn't be here this evening!
But, at the time, that wasn't Jesus' business.
His business, as he told us, was to do the work of his Father in Heaven –
and that work, for now, was to be an itinerant preacher and healer,
but not trying deliberately to call attention to himself.

And a few years later, Jesus was crucified. It is, I think, far too complicated for us to ever know exactly what happened then, but it is safe to say that a change took place in the moral nature of the universe. St Paul expands on this idea in our second reading tonight.

Paul compares and contrasts what happened to the first Man, Adam, with what happened to Jesus, pointing out that sin came into the world through Adam, which poisoned humanity’s relationship with God, but through Jesus, we can receive the free gift of eternal life, and thus restore our relationship.

Of course, it’s never as easy as that in practice. You know that and I know that. Can we really live in a restored relationship with God? All the time? Twenty-four seven? Well, maybe you can, but I find it very difficult indeed!
We know we’re apt to screw things up in our relationship with God. Usually because we screw things up in our relationship with other people, but not always. Sometimes we just screw ourselves up! We don’t take the exercise we promised ourselves. We lounge around all day and don’t get on – so easy to do, I find, in lockdown, don’t you?

But the point is, Paul seems to think that we can live in a restored relationship with God. And so does John, when he reminds us that “Those who are children of God do not continue to sin, for God's very nature is in them; and because God is their Father, they cannot continue to sin.” He also, of course, reminds us that if and when we do sin, we need to confess our sins and we will be forgiven. We need to look at ourselves honestly, and admit not only what we did, said or thought, but that we are the kind of person who can do, say or think such things. And allow God not only to forgive us, but to help us grow so that we will stop being such people.

John Wesley very much believed Christian perfection was a thing.
He didn’t think he’d attained it, but he reckoned it was possible in this life.
He preached on it and it’s one of the sermons we local preachers are supposed to have read –
you can find it on-line easily enough.
Anyway, what he said about perfection was that it wasn’t about being ignorant, or mistaken, or ill or disabled, or not being tempted –
you could be any or all of those things and still be perfect.
Wesley reckons –
and by and large he reckons that the closer we continue with Jesus,
the less likely we are to sin.
I believe he didn’t consider that he’d got there himself, but he did know people who had.
He said even a baby Christian has been cleansed from sin,
and mature Christians who walk with Jesus will be freed from it, both outwardly and inwardly.
I hope he’s right....

But the point is, it’s not something we can do in our own strength; we have to allow God to do it for us and in us. The first Man and Woman listened to the serpent, and destroyed their – and our – relationship with God. Jesus was able to restore that relationship through the atonement. And because that relationship is restored, we can be indwelt by the Holy Spirit, and made whole again. Let’s do it! Amen.