The Coming King

 

So, Advent.
It’s almost an anomaly nowadays, isn’t it?
Out in the world, people are starting to celebrate Christmas already –
the shops have had their decorations up since the beginning of last month, or even earlier,
and the round of office parties, works celebrations, school festivities will be starting any day now.
And the endless tapes of carols and Christmas songs that are played in the shops, I should think they’d drive the shop assistants mad!

But here in Church, Christmas hasn’t started yet, and won’t for another four weeks.
We are celebrating Advent,
and it seems to be another penitential time, like Lent.
Those churches that have different colours for the seasons have brought out the purple hangings,
and many will have no flowers except for an Advent wreath.

But Advent is really a season of hope.
We look forward to “the last day when Christ shall come again”
to establish the Kingdom on earth.
We also look back to those who’ve been part of God’s story, including John the Baptist and Jesus’ Mother, Mary.

Today, though, our readings are about the coming King.
Our first reading, from the prophet Isaiah, tells how the prophet,
and perhaps the people for whom he was speaking,
longed and longed to see God in action.
“Oh, that you would rend the heavens and come down,
that the mountains would tremble before you!
As when fire sets twigs ablaze and causes water to boil,
come down to make your name known to your enemies
and cause the nations to quake before you!”

Scholars think that this part of Isaiah was written very late,
after the people of Judah had returned from exile.
They would have remembered the stories of the wonderful things God had done in the olden days,
in the days of Abraham and Sarah,
of Isaac and Jacob,
of Moses,
and of David the King –
and then, they would have looked round and said
“But hey, why isn’t any of this happening today?”

They reckoned the answer must be because they were so sinful.
“You come to the help of those who gladly do right,
who remember your ways.
But when we continued to sin against them,
you were angry.
How then can we be saved?
All of us have become like one who is unclean,
and all our righteous acts are like filthy rags;
we all shrivel up like a leaf,
and like the wind our sins sweep us away.
No-one calls on your name
or strives to lay hold of you;
for you have hidden your face from us
and made us waste away because of our sins.”

It does sound very much as though the prophet were longing for God,
but somehow couldn’t find him, in the mists of human sinfulness and this world’s total abandonment of God.
You know, there’s nothing new –
we complain that people don’t want to seek God today,
and our churches stand empty,
but there was the prophet saying that thousands of years ago!

And, of course, as it turned out,
God hadn’t abandoned his people at all!
Jesus came to this earth, lived among us, and died for us,
and Isaiah’s people now knew the remedy for their sin.

But Jesus himself tells us, in our second reading,
that his coming to live in Palestine as a human being isn’t the end of the story, either.
Somehow, someday, he will come back again.
He obviously doesn’t know all that much about it while he is on earth,
and rather discourages us from speculation as to when or how.
But he draws pictures for us:
“The sun will be darkened,
and the moon will not give its light;
the stars will fall from the sky,
and the heavenly bodies will be shaken.
“At that time men will see the Son of Man coming in clouds with great power and glory. And he will send his angels and gather his elect from the four winds, from the ends of the earth to the ends of the heavens.”

It is a scary thought, isn't it, with the world as unstable now as at any time in the past century.
What’s more today, as at no other time in history,
communications are such that if Jesus were to come back,
we’d know about it almost as soon as it happened –
look how quickly news spreads around the world these days.
Half the time you hear about it on Facebook or Twitter before the BBC has even picked up on it.
And Jesus' return would be something totally unmistakable.
But lots of generations before ours have thought that Jesus might come back any minute now,
and Christians throughout history have lived their lives expecting him to come home.
We have remembered Jesus’ warnings about being prepared for him to come, but He hasn’t come.
And we get to the stage where we, too, cry with Isaiah:
“Oh, that you would rend the heavens and come down,
that the mountains would tremble before you!”

Like Isaiah, we long and long to see God come and intervene in this world, and wish that He would hurry up. And that’s perfectly natural, of course.
Some folk have even got to the stage of believing it won’t happen, and have given up on God completely.
But Jesus said it will happen,
and one has to assume He knew what he was talking about.

But that doesn’t mean that we can blame God –
if You had come back before now, this wouldn’t have happened.
Every generation has been able to say that to God,
and it’s not made a blind bit of difference.
So maybe there’s something else.

You see, in one way, Jesus has come back.
Do you remember what happened on the Day of Pentecost,
in that upper room?
God’s Holy Spirit descended on those gathered there,
looking like tongues of fire,
and with a noise like a rushing mighty wind,
and the disciples were empowered to talk about Jesus.
And we know from history,
and from our own experience,
that God the Holy Spirit still comes to us,
still fills us,
still empowers us.

One of the purposes of these so-called penitential seasons is to give us space to examine ourselves
and see if we have drifted away from God,
to come back
and to ask to be filled anew with the Holy Spirit.
Then we are empowered to live our lives
as Jesus would wish.
We don't have to struggle and strain and strive to “get it right” by our own efforts.
God himself is within us, enabling us from the inside.
Jesus doesn’t just provide us with an example to follow, but actually enables us to do it, by the indwelling of the Holy Spirit.

I do two tai chi classes a week, these days, but it’s really difficult to get it all the way it should be.
Back in my ice dancing days, we only had to memorise a routine that lasted two minutes, with musical cues to tell us what move to do when.
In tai chi, it’s a 25 minute routine with no musical cues!
I get very muddled at times.
But supposing somehow the spirit of a tai chi master could get inside me,
and actually make my body move in the right way,
and show me how it's done from the inside.
That would be so much better than anything my coach could say, or anything I can learn from watching videos.
I really would be able to do the routine, even at home!

And that’s what God does –
by indwelling us with his Holy Spirit,
He not only shows us what to do, but enables us to do it.

All of us will face the end of the world one day.
It might be the global end of the world, that Jesus talks about, or it might just be the end of our personal world.
We expect, here in the West, to live out our life span to the end, and many of us, I am sure, will do just that.
But we can’t rely on that.
You never know when terrorists will attack –
or even muggers, or just a plain accident.
We can’t see round corners;
we don’t know what will happen tomorrow.

But whether it is tomorrow,
or twenty, thirty, forty or fifty years from now,
one day we will die, and then, at last, we will meet Jesus face to face.
And we need to be ready.
We need to know that we have lived as God wants us to live –
and when we’ve screwed up,
as we always do and always will,
we’ve come back to God and asked forgiveness, and asked God to renew us and refill us with his Holy Spirit.

We can only live one day at a time, but each day should, I hope, be bringing us nearer to the coming of the King.
Amen.

Lazarus and the Saints

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Our Gospel reading today concerns the raising of Lazarus.

You know the story, of course –
Lazarus was the brother of Martha and Mary,
and Jesus seems to have been a frequent, and beloved, visitor to their home in Bethany, just outside Jerusalem.
It’s possible, if not probable, that he stayed there most years when he came up to Jerusalem for the Passover,
and they certainly seem to have been among his closest friends.

Anyway, Lazarus falls ill, and they send to Jesus to come and heal him.
But Jesus, unaccountably, delays for another two days.
And when he does set out to go there, the disciples are rather worried, as they fear for his safety.
But he explains that Lazarus has died, and God wants him raised from the dead.

And when he gets to Bethany, both Martha and Mary disobey tradition, and come out to meet him.
Normally, relatives of the deceased were expected to stay seated on low stools while the visitors came to them to offer their condolences –
it’s called sitting shiva, and I understand it’s done in Jewish families to this day.
Anyway, Martha and Mary run out to meet him, Martha first.
Jesus has this wonderful conversation with her which culminates in him saying to her, “I am the resurrection and the life.
Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die.
Do you believe this?” and Martha replying with that wonderful declaration of faith:
“I believe that you are the Christ, the Son of God, who was to come into the world.”
Martha said this.
Martha.
A woman –
and not only a woman, but a traditional woman,
usually more concerned with getting a meal for Jesus and the disciples than in learning what he had to say!
It’s amazing.

Anyway, then we come to the bit we just read,
where Mary comes out to Jesus in her turn,
and Jesus weeps at his friend’s grave.
And then he calls for the stone to be rolled away and Martha, wonderful, practical Martha, complains that it’s going to stink quite dreadfully after four days....
but the stone gets rolled away, and Lazarus comes forth, still wrapped in his graveclothes.

Now, it’s a wonderful story, and I expect you, like me, have heard many great sermons and much wonderful teaching on it.
But the reason why we had it this morning is because tomorrow is All Saints’ Day, when the church is asked to celebrate those who have gone before into glory.
What is sometimes known as the Church Triumphant;
we here on earth being the Church Militant.

Today, of course, is Halloween.
Actually, it’s the Eve of All Saints, or All Hallows, so All Hallows Eve, Halloween.
When you look round the shops, you see, above all, orange pumpkins which are in season at this time of year – the small ones, of course, are delicious to eat, and the larger ones make delightful jack-o-lanterns.
It’s only really in this century that the pumpkin has become the vegetable of choice for jack-o-lanterns; in my youth, they were neither imported nor grown here, and if you wanted a jack-o-lantern, you had to carve it from a swede!
Which was not easy.
Also, in my childhood, although Halloween parties were a thing,
it was greatly overshadowed by Guy Fawkes’ Night, on 5 November.
Children didn’t go trick-or-treating, back then; instead, they would make a guy, and take it through the streets on an old pushchair or go-kart, and ask passers-by for “a penny for the guy”, which money was probably spent on fireworks.
I have to admit that I’d really rather we still did that!
I don’t at all care for the spooky aspects of Halloween, and the hints of evil that run through it,
although people do say that it is to celebrate Jesus’ victory over such things.
Nevertheless, I prefer to think of it as the Eve of All Saints.

In France, All Saints’ Day is a Bank Holiday,
and although Halloween is increasingly a thing there, as here,
the tradition there is to take flowers –
usually chrysanthemums –
to put on your loved ones’ graves.

But All Saints itself is about life, not death.
No spiders or ghosts or witches or other nasties.
It’s a triumph of life.
Jesus said “I am the Resurrection and the Life.
Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die.”

So, granted that what we are celebrating is All Saints, what is a saint?
Strikes me there seem to be two kinds of saints.
The first is a Saint with a capital S.
These are often Bible people, like St Paul, of course, but there are also lots of Saints who were, in life, totally dedicated to being God’s person.
To the point where, very often, they got into serious trouble, or even killed for it.
There was St Polycarp, who was put to death,
and when he was given a chance to recant, to say he wasn’t a Christian after all, he said very firmly that he’d served God, man and boy,
for something like eighty years now, and God had never let him down,
so if they thought he was going to let God down at the last minute, they’d another think coming.
Or words to that effect.

There were Saints Perpetua and Felicity, her servant.
Saint Perpetua was a young mother, whose husband and father both roundly disapproved of her being a Christian,
and Felicity, also a Christian, was expecting a baby when they were taken and put on trial.
They were left until Felicity had had her baby –
a little girl, who was brought up by her sister –
and then they had to face wild beasts in the arena.
And so went to glory.

There are lots of other saints, too, whose story has come down to us.
Although sometimes their stories are rather less exotic than we once thought.
St George, for instance, the patron saint of England:
he was born in Cappadocia of noble, Christian parents and on the death of his father, accompanied his mother to Palestine, her country of origin, where she had land and George was to run the estate.
He rose to high rank in the Roman army, and was martyred for complaining to the then Emperor about his persecuting the Christians –
he ended up being one of the first to be put to death.

And his dragon?
Oh, that was a bit of a misunderstanding.
The Greek church venerated George as a soldier-saint,
and told many stories of his bravery and protection in battle.
The western Christians, joining with the Byzantine Christians in the Crusades, elaborated and misinterpreted the Greek traditions and devised their own version.
The story we know today of Saint George and the dragon dates from the troubadours of the 14th century.
Of course, you can look at it, as they did, in symbolic terms:
the Princess is the church, which George rescued from the clutches of Satan.
I imagine football fans often see places like Brazil or Argentina as the dragon, especially during the World Cup!

But not all Saints belong to the dawn of Christianity.
There is Thomas More, for instance, who was put to death by Henry the Eighth as he wouldn’t admit that the King’s marriage to Katharine of Aragon was valid, or that the King was Head of the Church.
And in our own day, Mother Theresa, Archbishop Romero, Pope John the Twenty-third – he was the one who called for Vatican 2, you may remember, which produced so many changes in the Roman church, and a great many others.

So, anyway, those are just a very few of the many “Saints” with a capital S.
No bad thing to read some of the stories of their lives, and learn who they were, and why the Church continues to remember them.

And then, of course, there is the other sort of saint, the saint with a small “s”.
St Paul often addresses his letters to “The Saints” in such-and-such a town.
He basically means the Christians.
Us, in other words.
We are God’s saints.
We are the sanctified people –
sanctified means “being made holy”, or being made more like Jesus.

And you notice that it is “being made holy”, not “making ourselves holy”.
We can do nothing to become a saint by ourselves!
We can’t even say that God has saved me because I believe in him –
our salvation, our sainthood, is a free gift from God and we can do nothing to earn it, not even believe in God!
We aren’t saved as a reward for believing –
we are saved because God loves us!

We believe that, like Lazarus, we shall be raised from dead.
But unlike him, we shall probably be raised to eternal life with Jesus,
and God will wipe away every tear from our eyes.
And we are also told that Jesus came so that we might have life, and have it abundantly.
That applies to the here and now, too, not just pie in the sky when we die!
Our whole lives now have that eternal dimension.
That doesn’t mean, of course, that we won’t experience great sorrow here –
sadly, that is part of human existence.
And I don’t think it means that we can live just as we like, doing whatever we like, because God has saved us.
Rather to the contrary, I think personal holiness is very important.
We need to do all we can to avoid sin.
Jesus shows us in some of his teachings what his people are going to be like:
poor in spirit –
not thinking more of themselves than they ought;
mourning, perhaps for the ungodly world in which we live;
meek, which means slow to anger and gentle with others;
hungry and thirsty for righteousness;
merciful;
pure in heart;
peacemakers and so on.

St Paul gives other lists of characteristics that Christians will display;
you probably remember from his letter to the Galatians:
Love, joy, peace, patience and so on.
And he gives lots of lists of the sort of behaviour that Christians don’t do, ranging from gluttony to fornication.
Basically the sort of things that put “Me” first, and make “me” the centre of my life.

But the wonderful thing is that we don’t have to strive and struggle and do violence to our own natures.
Yes, of course, we are inherently selfish and it’s nearly impossible to put God first in our own strength.
But the whole point is, we don’t have to do it in our own strength.
That is why God sent the Holy Spirit, to come into us, fill us, and transform us.
We wouldn’t be very happy in heaven if we were stuck in our old nature, after all!

But if we let God transform us, we can have abundant life here on this earth, and then we leave our bodies behind and go on to be with Jesus.
And that, we are told, is even better!

Jesus asks us, “I am the resurrection and the life.
Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die.
Do you believe this?”

Can we reply, with Martha, “I believe that you are the Christ, the Son of God, who was to come into the world.”?

Change Happens

 An updated version of this sermon, preached in 2015.


Today's readings are all about change.
Things changed for Job, and things changed for Bartimaeus.

So, then Job.
It's a funny old story, isn't it?
Do you know, nobody knows anything about it –
what you see is totally what you get!
Nobody knows who it was written, or when, or why, or whether it is true history or a fictional story –
most probably the latter!
Apparently, The Book of Job is incredibly ancient, or parts of it are.
And so it makes it very difficult for us to understand.
We do realise, of course, that it was one of the earliest attempts someone made to rationalise why bad things happen to good people,
but it still seems odd to us.

Just to remind you, the story first of all establishes Job as really rich, and then as a really holy person –
whenever his children have parties, which they seem to have done pretty frequently, he offers sacrifices to God just in case the parties were orgies!
And so on.
Then God says to Satan, hey, look at old Job, isn't he a super servant of mine, and Satan says, rather crossly, yeah, well, it's all right for him –
just look how you've blessed him.
Anybody would be a super servant like that.
You take all those blessings away from him, and see if he still serves you!
And that, of course, is just exactly what happens.
The children are all killed,
the crops are all destroyed,
the flocks and herds perish.
And Job still remains faithful to God:
“Naked I came from my mother's womb, and naked shall I return there;
the Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away;
blessed be the name of the Lord.”

So then Satan says, well, all right, Job is still worshipping you,
but he still has his health, doesn't he?
I bet he would sing a very different tune if you let me take his health away!
So God says, well, okay, only you mustn't kill him.
And Job gets a plague of boils, which must have been really nasty –
painful, uncomfortable, itchy and making him feel rotten in himself as well.
Poor sod.
No wonder he ends up sitting on a dung-heap, scratching himself with a piece of broken china!

And his wife, who must have suffered just as much as Job, only of course women weren't really people in those days, she says “Curse God, and die!”
In other words, what do you have left to live for?
But Job refuses, although he does, with some justification, curse the day on which he was born.

Then you know the rest of the story, of course.
How the three "friends" come and try to persuade him to admit that he deserves all that had come upon him –
we've all had friends like that who try to make our various sufferings be our fault, and who try to poultice them with pious platitudes.
Gaslighting, don’t they call it?
And Job insists that he is not at fault, and demands some answers from God!
Which, in the end, he gets.
But not totally satisfactory to our ears, although they really are the most glorious poetry.
Here's just a tiny bit:

“Do you give the horse its might?
Do you clothe its neck with mane?
Do you make it leap like the locust?
Its majestic snorting is terrible.
It paws violently, exults mightily;
it goes out to meet the weapons.
It laughs at fear, and is not dismayed;
it does not turn back from the sword.
Upon it rattle the quiver, the flashing spear, and the javelin.
With fierceness and rage it swallows the ground;
it cannot stand still at the sound of the trumpet.
When the trumpet sounds, it says "Aha!"
From a distance it smells the battle, the thunder of the captains, and the shouting.
Is it by your wisdom that the hawk soars,
and spreads its wings towards the south?
Is it at your command that the eagle mounts up and makes its nest on high?
It lives on the rock and makes its home in the fastness of the rocky crag.
From there it spies the prey;
its eyes see it from far away.
Its young ones suck up blood;
and where the slain are, there it is.”
Wonderful stuff, and it goes on for about three chapters, talking of the natural world and its wonders, and how God is the author of them all.

If you ever want to rejoice in creation, read Job chapters 38, 39 and 40.
My father asked me to read chapter 39 at his funeral, which I did, in the Authorised Version that he preferred – I was comforted, then, by the unicorns: “Will the unicorn be willing to serve thee,
or abide by thy crib?
Canst thou bind the unicorn with his band in the furrow?
or will he harrow the valleys after thee?
Wilt thou trust him, because his strength is great?”
I was very disappointed when I discovered that in more modern versions, they replace “unicorn” with “wild ox” – not the same thing at all!
Anyway at the end, as we heard in our first reading, Job repents "in dust and ashes", we are told, and then his riches are restored to him.
But would even more children and riches really make up for those seven children who were killed?
I doubt it, which is one of the reasons it’s probably a story, rather than actual history.
But the point I want to make this morning is that God intervened in Job's life, and things changed.
At first they changed for the worse, but then they changed for the better.

And the same thing happened to Bartimaeus, as we heard in our Gospel reading.
Jesus touched him, and his life was changed beyond all recognition.
In John's version of the story, we're told a little bit about the consequences of the healing.

For Bartimaeus life changed immediately.
My sister-in-law, who is blind, says that not only would he have been given his sight, but he would have been given the gift of being able to see, otherwise how would he have known what he was looking at?
He wouldn't have known whether what he was looking at was a person or a camel or a tree, would he?
But he was given the gift, so he knew.
And he could stop begging for his living, he realised, and he went and did whatever the local equivalent of signing-on was.
And, of course there were lots of mutterings and whisperings –
Is it him?
Can't be!
Must be someone new in town, who just looks like him!
“Yes, it's me,” explains Bartimaeus, anxious to tell his story.
“Yes, I was blind, and yes, I can see now!”
“So what happens?” ask the neighbours.
“Well, this bloke put some mud on my eyes and told me to go and wash, and when I did, then I could see.
No, I don't know where he is –
I never saw him;
Yes, I'd probably know his voice, but I didn't actually see him!”

And the neighbours, thinking all this a bit odd, drag him before the Pharisees, the religious authorities of the day.
And they don't believe him.
Not possible.
Nobody born blind gets to see, it just doesn't happen.
And if it did, it couldn't happen on the Sabbath.
Not unless the person who did it was a sinner,
because only a sinner would do that on the Sabbath –
it's work, isn't it?
And if the person who did it was a sinner, it can't have happened!
They got themselves in a right old muddle.

Now we, of course, know what Jesus' thoughts about healing on the Sabbath day were –
he is on record elsewhere as pointing out that you'd rescue a distressed donkey, or, indeed, lead it to the horse-trough to get a drink, whatever day of the week it was, so surely healing a human being was a right and proper activity for the Sabbath.

But the Pharisees didn't believe this.
They thought healing was work, and thus not a proper activity for the Sabbath at all.
So they decided it couldn't possibly have happened, and sent for Bartimaeus's parents to say “Now come on, your son wasn't really blind, was he?
What has happened?”

And his parents, equally bewildered, say
“Well yes, he is our son;
yes, he was born blind;
yes, it does appear that he can now see;
no, we don't know what happened;
why don't you ask him?”

And the Bible tells us they were also scared of being expelled from the synagogue, which is why they didn't say anything more.
Actually, they must have had a fearful mixture of emotions, don't you think –
thrilled that their son could suddenly see,
scared of the authorities,
wondering what exactly Jesus had done,
and was it something they ought to have done themselves, and so on.
And, of course, wondering how life was going to be from now on.

Very soon now, their son probably wouldn't need them any more;
now he was like other people, he could, perhaps, earn a proper living and even marry and have a family.
So the authorities go back to Bartimaeus, and he says,
“Well, how would I know if the person who healed me is a sinner or not?
All I know is that I was blind, and now I can see!”
And then they asked him again, well, how did it happen, and he gets fed up with them going on and says
“But I told you!
Didn't you listen?
Or maybe you want to be his disciples, too?”
which was, of course, rather cheeky and he deserved being told off for it, but then again, I expect he was still rather hyper about having been healed.

And he does go on rather and tells them that the man who opened his eyes must be from God, can't possibly not be, and they get even more fed up with him, and sling him out.
And then Jesus meets him again –
of course Bartimaeus, not having seen him before, doesn't actually recognise him –
and reveals himself to him.
And Bartimaeus worships him.

 
Make no mistake, my friends, when God touches our lives, things change.
Sometimes it is our behaviour which changes;
sometimes our attitudes;
sometimes, even, our very faith.
But it's easy to fall out of the habit of allowing God to touch you and change you.
I know I have, many times.
The joy of it is, though, that we can always come back.
We aren't left alone to fend for ourselves –
we would always fail if we were.
We just need to acknowledge to ourselves –
and to God, of course, but God knew, anyway –
that we've wandered away again.

That's a bit simplistic, of course –
there are times when we are quite sure we haven't wandered away, and yet God seems far off.
But I'm not going into that one right now;
nobody really knows why that happens, except God!
After all, Job didn’t know why his life had gone so totally and completely pear-shaped – but God knew!
But for most of us, most of the time,
if we fall out of the habit of allowing God to touch us and heal us and change us,
we simply have to acknowledge that this is what has happened,
and we are back with him again.
It can be scary.
But then, we are always given the strength and the ability to cope with whatever comes.
We don't have to cope alone.
God is there, not only changing us,
but enabling us to cope with that change.
And we are changed and grown, and God gets the glory!
Because it's not just about what happens to us –
although, human as we are, that's the bit we think about most.
It's also about showing God's glory to the world,
as God showed Job, and this has come down to us;
As happened when Bartimaeus was healed;
as may well happen if and when God touches our lives.
Amen.

Shalom!

As I explained in my introduction, today is Peaver, if you have a copy of the Plan, you will have seen that this month is also designated the Season of Creation. The two are very far from mutually exclusive, of course. The word “Shalom” does mean peace, but it’s not just peace in the sense of the absence of war. The easiest way to describe it is to quote an American theologian called Cornelius Plantinga, who writes: “The webbing together of God, humans, and all creation in justice, fulfilment, and delight is what the Hebrew prophets call shalom. We call it peace but it means far more than mere peace of mind or a cease-fire between enemies. In the Bible, shalom means universal flourishing, wholeness and delight – a rich state of affairs in which natural needs are satisfied and natural gifts fruitfully employed, a state of affairs that inspires joyful wonder as its Creator and Saviour opens doors and welcomes the creatures in whom he delights. Shalom, in other words, is the way things ought to be.”

“Shalom, in other words, is the way things ought to be.”

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. You know what, when we wish each other God’s peace on Communion Sundays, that’s what we wish each other. We say, rather muttering it, “Peace be with you”, but we are really wishing each other all of God’s wholeness and reconciliation. Even though “Shalom” is a common greeting in Hebrew, it is still what people are, consciously or not, wishing one another.

But we know our world is not whole, however much we wish it were. There is always war somewhere; the whole situation in Afghanistan just now is very unclear, but will probably lead to yet more war there. The war in Syria has been going on for several years now, and hasn’t stopped just because the pandemic and Afghanistan have moved it off the front pages. You know what? I looked up a “list of ongoing conflicts” on Wikipedia when preparing for this sermon, and honestly, it’s frightening just how little peace there is in the world.

And of course, our planet is broken. We are in a period of rapid climate change, arguably exacerbated by human activity. We have seen all sorts of extreme weather conditions this summer, from monsoon rains to extreme heat waves. And very strong hurricanes causing damage that takes weeks, if not months, to repair.

The powers that be tell us that it is All Our Fault, although natural climate change is also a thing. Nevertheless, two hundred years of industry really haven’t helped!

You can’t watch a nature documentary these days without being told that it is All Your Fault that certain species are declining due to habitat loss, or a documentary about the planets without being told that climate change is All Your Fault. It gets old, very fast, I find.

Of course, we can all do our very small bit towards lowering our carbon footprint, and arguably we should – trying not to use single-use plastic bottles, for instance, reusing things like ice-cream boxes or take-away containers. Reusing shopping bags, rather than buying a new one every time you go to the supermarket, and using public transport where possible – and perhaps taking the train instead of flying when you are going somewhere, if that is at all feasible.

But really, it is the big corporations that will make the most difference to carbon dioxide emissions, and to be fair, some of them are already trying to. Not all, but some! If only because government legislation – often rather aspirational rather than practicable, I think – if they are going to be fined for not trying to lower their carbon emissions, then they will try harder!

In many ways, the idealised wife that we read about in Proverbs, summarises “Shalom”. She isn’t a real person, of course – if we had read the whole chapter, we would have seen that this is the mother of King Lemuel talking to her son. Lemuel may or may not be code for Solomon, but the point is, it is Mum giving good advice to one who is, or who will be, King. You don’t go spending good money on loose women, nor do you get drunk – you don’t need wines and spirits, so give them to the hospitals and hospices for those who do need them. And look for a wife like this…. And then the description of the ideal woman, who is more valuable than rubies. Not surprising – she is probably rarer than rubies, too!

So she is a model rather than a template. We don’t have to imitate her – we couldn’t, anyway – we who live in Lambeth don’t exactly have access to fields and vineyards to buy and rent out for profit, nor do we have access to flax for spinning, although you can buy unspun wool from some wool shops. But the thing about the idealised woman is that she is whole. All parts of her life are in balance. She isn’t trying to juggle work and childcare. She isn’t fretting because she has no paid work but must stay home with her children. She makes the best of what she has, and, I imagine, when she focuses on one thing, she isn’t constantly looking round to wonder what else she ought to be doing, but that child, or her husband, or the piece of work she is focussing on, take her full attention. Being mindful, I think is what they call it.

Mindfulness is no bad thing. It is the beginning of shalom. When we are fully in the moment, we can’t be worrying ourselves ragged about everything else. I used to ice skate, and I always found that skating was far and away the best thing to do when you were worrying about something, as you simply had to concentrate so much that you couldn’t fret.

Our New Testament reading takes up this theme. St James reminds us that “the wisdom that comes from heaven is first of all pure; then peace-loving, considerate, submissive, full of mercy and good fruit, impartial and sincere.” That sounds like shalom to me, doesn’t it to you? Wisdom that comes from heaven, pure, peace-loving, considerate, submissive and so on.

And do note that it comes from heaven! It is not something we can manufacture within ourselves, any more than we can manufacture any of the other fruits of the spirit that St Paul describes. Jesus reminded us that he is the vine, and we are the branches, and if we abide in him, we will bear much fruit. And definitely shalom will be one of those fruits.

St James goes on to point out that our fractiousness comes from not being whole, from wanting this and that and seeing no way to get it, so quarreling and being generally unpleasant. And, as he says, we need to ask God for what we want, but to be quite clear, God isn’t Santa Claus – we aren’t necessarily going to be given loads of toys to maintain an unsustainable lifestyle.

Having said that, of course, God is nothing if not generous. Do you remember how, when the prophet Nathan confronted David after he had committed adultery with Bathsheba, God said through him, more or less, “Look at all I have given you. And if you’d wanted more, I’d gladly have given you twice as much! But no, you had to have that which belonged to someone else!” The bit where he says “If you’d wanted more, I’d gladly have given you twice as much” always jumps out at me whenever I read this passage, as I am apt to forget just how loving and generous God is. All that wine at Cana? All those basketsful of leftovers after he’d fed the five thousand? Is God ever anything but generous?

But, of course, we want to be part of what God is doing, not outside it, so we don’t – or shouldn’t – ask for our own selfish ends. At least we do, and often God will give us some of what we ask for, if it will not harm us and our loved ones, because God is love. But in an ideal world, we will be so reconciled with God, attuned to God, aligned with God, that our prayers will reflect that.

In our Gospel reading, Jesus reminds us, again, that if you want to be great, you must first become the servant of all, and that when you welcome children, you are welcoming God. And think how many children are still anxious and miserable, having missed so much school these past two years, and worried about Covid-19 and people dying from it. And many have picked up a bit about climate change, and are worried. And the far too many children who are refugees, terrified and confused by a situation not of their making.

How can we welcome the Father by helping these children, by listening to their concerns, and maybe changing things? How can we be peacemakers in this noisy world?

As we allow God more and more into our lives, as we become more and more attuned to God, more and more aligned with God, more and more the person God designed us to be, so we will experience more and more shalom, peace, wholeness, in our lives, and be more and more able to spread it round our communities, and perhaps further. Shalom: the way things ought to be.

After all, you don’t have to be very big or very important to make a difference – think of Greta Thunberg or Malala Yousafzai, both of whom were only children when they started to remind us, respectively, of our need to live more sustainably and of women’s and girls’ right to an education. They had no idea, when they started, that what they said and did would make such a difference. But they followed the promptings of their consciences, and look what happened!

Now, that probably won’t happen if you or I start to follow the promptings of what we believe God may be asking us to say or do, whether that is to live a more sustainable lifestyle, or to be arbitrators for peace in our families, our churches, our circuits. We may only make a very minor difference – but sometimes, that, too, can set the world alight. For now, though, we need to seek God’s peace, God’s wholeness, God’s shalom. Remember that Jesus is our peace, and it’s not something we can manufacture for ourselves. Mindfulness helps, but it’s only part of it. For the rest, we need to receive God’s good gifts, and then maybe we will see things beginning to be the way they ought to be. Maybe we will experience the wonder and delight that is shalom. Amen.

Creation and Education

I apologise for the child coughing towards the end of the sermon!  I am not quite sure what the Powers that Be were thinking of when they asked us to combine the Season of Creation, Education Sunday and the readings for today – the 24th Sunday in Ordinary Time. It does make it very difficult for us poor preachers. So you will forgive me if I inadvertently use a “proof text” or two – something I hate doing as a text without a context is, as we all know, a pretext!

The thing about observing the season of creation is that we are all, as you know, in a period of rapid climate change, arguably exacerbated, if not caused by, human activity. You can’t watch a nature documentary these days without being told that it is All Your Fault that certain species are declining due to habitat loss, or a documentary about the planets without being told that climate change is All Your Fault. It gets old, very fast, I find.

As for education – well, after the past two school years, when everybody’s education has been disrupted, I know we are all hoping and praying that this year will be back to relatively normal. Even though kids are still catching Covid and missing a week or so of school every time. At least their friends only have to stay off if they, too, test positive. Both my grandsons have been isolating this week, as they tested positive; in one way, it is a relief as it means they are unlikely to catch it again, but a week off at the start of the school year is not ideal. Still, it can’t be helped, and it’s a great relief to other parents, I’m sure, that the whole of the class doesn’t have to be off, too. And, incidentally, thus far the vaccines seem to be doing their job, and neither parent has tested positive all week!

So what do our Bible passages today have to say to us about all this? Well, the reading from Proverbs seems almost aimed at those who are destroying our planet, doesn’t it?

"I will mock when calamity overtakes you –
when calamity overtakes you like a storm,
    when disaster sweeps over you like a whirlwind,
    when distress and trouble overwhelm you."

Wisdom, here, incidentally, is one of the few female names of God that we have; there is a long-standing tradition of praying to God as “Lady Wisdom”, and some of you might find that helpful – not all of you, I know, but it is one of the names of God, and as valid as praying to the Rock or the Judge or the Shepherd.

Anyway, where was I? Oh yes, Wisdom, reminding us that we need to heed God’s word, and failing that, disaster will probably overtake us, and God can do nothing! We are required, right back in the book of Genesis, to look after our planet and the life on it, and we probably never have. I am interested that the writer picks out storms and whirlwinds as examples of the distress and calamity that might befall us – we are seeing an increase in the number of bad storms, and look at the torrential downpours we had early last summer. I remember saying at the time that if the choice, in the summer months, was between monsoon-style rains and heatwaves, I’d really rather have the heatwaves, thank you very much.

However, we do not get a choice. The weather happens, and if much of the recent increase in extreme weather is being driven by climate change, then so be it.

Where we do have a choice, however, is in our response to it. We can shrug, and say there is nothing we can do; or we can do our own little bit to help – not using single-use plastic bottles, for instance; taking our own carrier bags to the supermarket; arguably eating less meat – although in many ways a wholly vegan diet is almost as bad for the planet. We can refuse to buy food that has been airlifted in from across the globe. That sort of thing. We can even look carefully at our use of transport, and decide whether we really need a car – many people do, of course. And what is the balance between buying a new, electric car, and running our current petrol or diesel one into the ground? Some of us won’t get a choice, of course, as from 25 October we can’t take vehicles with certain emission limits inside the South Circular. And if we do have a car, do we really need to use it as much, or is it just a convenience and public transport would do as well?

That sort of thing. But, of course, all we can do is really so much spitting in the wind; if we all did what we could, it might make a difference, but for so many people that’s impossible. It’s really down to the big corporations to do what they can to minimise carbon emissions, to use sustainable energy, and so on. And, to be fair, I think they are beginning to realise that, but it might take longer than we actually have for it to make a difference.

But then again, God is in charge! It is God’s creation, after all, and God does not abandon it. Individuals may or may not be abandoned, but only if they choose to be. God will not abandon the whole of creation. And one of the things we can do is to pray to be shown how we, you and me, can help overcome this destruction of our planet.

One of the ways, of course, is education. In our Proverbs reading, the Lady Wisdom mocks those who hate knowledge and are complacent in their ignorance. And our second reading, from James’ letter, reminds us that teachers have a terrific responsibility to get things right! We probably all know people who would like to deny that Covid-19 exists, and that vaccines, if they are not part of a huge global plot to have us all microchipped like dogs or cats, are terribly dangerous because they are untested. Which isn’t actually true, by the way, as more people have been vaccinated more quickly than ever before, so actually, the vaccine has been tested in the field more widely than any other in history!

You can’t fix stupid, and you can’t teach those who refuse to listen. And St James points out that you can’t tame the human tongue, either. Teachers have a huge responsibility – not just teachers in school, but preachers like me and others, and those responsible for lifelong learning – a huge responsibility to get it right. Those who listen are going to pick up what we said and, if they believe it, may well tell other people, and before you know it, misinformation and fake news has swept round the community, and, in these days of social media, has swept around the planet.

This, of course, means that we all, whether we teach, or learn, or do both, have a responsibility to discern what is true and right from what we read or see on social media, or what our friends tell us, or what our teachers and preachers tell us. And that isn’t easy, although discernment is, or can be, one of God’s many gifts to us.

And it is our responsibility to change our minds as new knowledge comes along. We have seen, over the past eighteen months, the way science works – you try one way of doing things, and that isn’t what was wanted, so you try something else. It’s been really interesting, I think – normally, scientists have long since discovered, for instance, how to treat many different illnesses, and know exactly what to recommend people do if there is an outbreak. But this time, we were dealing with something completely new, and they had to try a great many different approaches before they found ways to help people recover from Covid-19. But it has worked – the death rate, which was so very alarmingly high last winter, has dropped now to about what you would expect in a bad flu year – incidentally, it will be important to get a flu vaccine as soon as we’re offered it, even more so this year than before. There wasn’t much flu last year, because people were mostly at home, but scientists are afraid that this may be very different this coming winter.

I don’t know why I’m going on about the virus. We’ve all had to live with it for the past eighteen months, and will have to go on living with it, in different ways, for the foreseeable future. But one of the main things that happened was that our children’s education was badly disrupted. Twice, schools were closed for extended periods of time. It was all very well for those who could afford computers and tablets at home, and had high-quality broadband, as they could join in such lessons as their schools were able to offer – not much at first, but a full timetable, from some schools, in the second. But trying to share out one smartphone with a cracked screen among four or five schoolchildren? At that, trying to feed said children when they weren’t getting their main meal at school? Not so much. And our children suffered, badly, from being stuck indoors and missing their friends.

But that is, we hope, over now, although individual children still have to isolate for ten days if they test positive. And this year, our teachers will have to deal with the fallout from those missed terms. For many children the problem won’t be academic so much as social; for others, it will be both.

You know what? This sermon appears to be full of doom and gloom about the future of our planet, and our children. But there is hope, you know. God does not, has not, and will not abandon creation, as I said earlier. God is still in charge. It may be difficult to see, sometimes – but I don’t know about you, but I did see God’s hand at work during the pandemic, as we learnt different ways of being church together. And God has promised to work all things together for good for those who love him. All things – that includes the good, but it also includes the bad things.

I don’t know how God is going to work the current climate disasters and the pandemic and its consequences for good – but I do know that this is what the promise says, so this is what will happen! Let’s hold fast to that. Amen.

It's you, dear!

The text of this sermon is substantially the same as this one, preached three years ago.

Mary Magdalene

The text of this sermon was substantially the same as this one.  

No Boundaries

 

They had been building a new palace in Jerusalem. It was a beautiful house, a gift from the king of Tyre to King David, made of cedar, and built by Tyrian carpenters and stone-masons. Then, in the course of a war against the Philistines, David had been able to bring the Ark of the Covenant back to Jerusalem. The Ark lived in a highly-decorated tent, and you couldn’t actually look at it, it was the holiest thing of all and considered to be the place where God lived.

So, anyway, David had a sudden thought – here he was, living in this glorious and comfortable palace, but there was the Ark of God just in a tent. Admittedly a very nice tent, but still a tent. So maybe the time had come to build God a lovely house, too. Nathan, the prophet, originally said “Go for it”, but then God said that no, for now at any rate, a tent was where the Ark needed to be.

We know, of course, that Solomon later built a temple, and that temple, or its successors, remained until 70 AD, when it was destroyed forever. It was a very nice temple, but the trouble was, it excluded people. You had the court of the Gentiles, where anybody could go – that was where the traders sold so-called “flawless” doves and sheep and so on to sacrifice, or to have sacrificed, and where you could change your money for the coins that didn’t have pictures on them – at a premium, of course. That is where Jesus had a hissy-fit and drove them all out. I think there may have been a separate court for women, too. And a court where Jewish men could go, but nobody else. Only the priests could go inside the Temple proper, and as for the Holy of Holies, where the Ark resided (still covered in its ceremonial blankets so nobody could actually see it), only the High Priest could go in there, once a year, with blood.  So fewer and fewer people could actually get near to God, and, of course, the Ark was now static, it couldn’t be carried about – or not without great difficulty, anyway – to where God’s people needed it.

So the Jewish people grew up with the rules and regulations that hedged in their worship, and their lives in general. But after Jesus had been raised from death and the Holy Spirit came, it became increasingly clear that this new way was not just for Jewish people, but for everybody. And this led to trouble, because the Jewish converts, naturally, felt themselves still to be bound by the Jewish law, the law of Moses, but the Gentile ones, who had never known the Jewish law, didn’t see why they should have to learn it now and especially they didn’t see why they should have to be circumcised as their Jewish brothers were. The New Testament, and especially the Epistles, are full of little glimpses about that particular quarrel. In Acts we see how the Council of Jerusalem agreed, eventually, that believers need not be circumcised nor keep the Law of Moses, but merely “abstain from what has been sacrificed to idols and from blood and from what is strangled and from fornication.”

St Paul, you may remember, took this even further and said that you could eat meat that had been sacrificed to idols if, and only if, your conscience was quite clear about it – after all, if idols had no power, nor did meat that had been sacrificed to them – and, more importantly, you weren’t going to upset your friends and fellow-believers by doing so. And there are hints in the letter to the Galatian believers that he had a row with Peter about it when Peter suddenly developed scruples about eating with Gentiles. Peter did know, really, that his faith was for everybody, not just the Jews, but you know what it’s like – the things we learnt as children do die very hard!

And, in the letter to the Ephesians, Paul wrote:
“[Jesus] is our peace;  in his flesh he has made both groups into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us.”

Jesus has broken down the wall. Both Jews and Gentiles are reconciled to God through the Cross. Both are being built into a temple, into the Body of Christ. They are set free to be who they are. Jesus is their peace, breaking down the walls of hostility.

And, dare I say it, breaking down the walls of hostility that kept God confined in the Temple for so long. You may remember that when Jesus was crucified, St Matthew tells us that the heavy curtain that screened off the Holy of Holies was torn in two. And the writer of the letter to the Hebrews tells us that “we have confidence to enter the sanctuary by the blood of Jesus, by the new and living way that he opened for us through the curtain (that is, through his flesh).” We can enter into God’s presence. God is not bound by the curtain – it works both ways.

Well, yes, but these stories and letters were written long, long ago. Do they still have relevance for us today? We no longer have divisions between Jewish and Gentile Christians, and we no longer think God sits on a throne above a hugely-decorated box.

No, but we do have our divisions, and they have been thrown into stark relief again recently, with the decision by the Methodist conference to allow gay marriages on Methodist premises and by Methodist ministers. The statute on marriage now reads as follows: “The Methodist Church believes that marriage is given by God to be a particular channel of God’s grace, and that it is in accord with God’s purposes when a marriage is a life-long union in body, mind and spirit of two people who freely enter it. Within the Methodist Church this is understood in two ways: that marriage can only be between a man and a woman; that marriage can be between any two people. The Methodist Church affirms both understandings and makes provision in its Standing Orders for them.”

My daughter, who watched the conference debate, says that it was very moving and emotional. I expect it was, and I expect there was, and will be, a great deal of hurt and confusion.

But then, don’t you think there might have been a great deal of hurt and confusion among the Jewish believers when they were told that there was no longer any need to be circumcised, or to keep the law of Moses, and you could be a perfectly good Christian without? I bet there was! There will have been those who accepted the new provisions joyfully and wholeheartedly, and welcomed the Gentile believers fully into the lives of their congregations. Others, on the other hand, will have been very upset and perhaps unable to believe that God could possibly accept those who didn’t conform to the Jewish law. And there would have been those like Peter, who thought they had accepted the new provisions, but when push came to shove, had real trouble overcoming their old prejudices and actually sitting down to a meal with Gentile believers.

It is always difficult when we move into a new way of being God’s people. Some will say we are following the spirit of the age; others that it is a genuine leading of God’s Spirit. Others won’t know what to think, and will be very confused.

Some authorities believe that the letter to the Ephesians was all or part of the now-vanished letter to the Laodiceans – why not send a copy to each? – and that it was taken for distribution, along with the letter to the Colossians, by Tychichus and Onesimus. Now, Onesimus, you may remember was, or had been, a slave belonging to a man called Philemon, although Paul hoped very much that Philemon would free him as they were both now Christians. Now, my point is this – we believe slavery is absolutely and utterly wrong, the worst thing people can do to each other. But in the Old Testament, slavery was the norm, although hedged around with all sorts of precautions to make sure the slaves were fairly treated, and given a chance to leave every seven years, and if a slave ran away it was to be assumed that their master had treated them badly and they were not to be returned. Sadly, in the Roman empire, there were no such precautions and slaves were just simply property, as they have been down the generations ever since. And this, too, was for many centuries considered quite normal, and we all know about the dreadful traffic from Africa over to the Caribbean and the United States.

And when that was finally abolished, there must still have been people who thought it was just the spirit of the age, the zeitgeist, and God’s Spirit would never lead people in such a terrible direction, and so on.

We have all, always, put boundaries on God. From the courtyards of the Temple saying who could, and who couldn’t go and see him, right down to the worries that we are following the zeitgeist and not God. We are all prejudiced and inclined to think that God would never do thus and so, whatever thus and so may be.

But – “he is our peace, in his flesh he has made both groups into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us.”

Can we make room in our hearts for God to do a new thing? Can we believe God might be leading us in a new direction? We don’t have pillars of fire or cloud as the Israelites have; we no longer believe that God lives in a Temple. If God is leading us, dare we follow? Amen.

Is God in this?

 

You probably know the story of the time there was a big flood, and people had to climb up on to the roofs of their houses to escape. One guy thought this was a remarkable opportunity to demonstrate, so he thought, God’s power, so he prayed “Dear Lord, please come and save me.”

Just then, someone came past in a rowing-boat and said “Climb in, we’ll take you to safety!”

“Oh, no thank you,” said our friend, “I’ve prayed for God to save me, so I’ll just wait for Him to do so.”

And he carried on praying, “Dear Lord, please save me!”

Then along came the police in a motor-launch, and called for him to jump in, but he sent them away, too, and continued to pray “Dear Lord, please save me!”

Finally, a Coastguard helicopter came and sent down someone on a rope to him, but he still refused, claiming that he was relying on God to save him.

And half an hour later, he was swept away and drowned.

So, because he was a Christian, as you can imagine, he ended up in Heaven, and the first thing he did when he got there was go to to the Throne of Grace, and say to God, “What do you mean by letting me down like this? I prayed and prayed for you to rescue me, and you didn’t!”

“My dear child,” said God, “I sent you two boats and a helicopter – what more did you want?”

In a way, that’s rather what happened to Jesus in our Gospel reading this morning. He has gone home for the weekend. Big mistake! Because on the Sabbath Day, he goes to the synagogue with his family, and because he’s home visiting for the weekend, they ask him to choose the reading from the Prophets. Luke’s version of this story tells us that he read from the prophet Isaiah, the bit where it says: “The Spirit of the Sovereign LORD is on me, because the LORD has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to bind up the broken-hearted, to proclaim freedom for the captives and release from darkness for the prisoners, to proclaim the year of the LORD's favour and the day of vengeance of our God, to comfort all who mourn.”

Mark doesn’t go into such detail, but he does tell us that Jesus’ friends and family were amazed. “Where did this man get these things?” they asked. “What's this wisdom that has been given him, that he even does miracles!” And we’re told they were rather offended. “He’s only the Carpenter’s son, Mary’s lad. These are his brothers and sisters. He can’t be special.” And they were offended, so we are told. Luke says they even picked up stones to throw at him to make him go away. But Mark says that he could do no miracles there, just one or two healings.

And he was amazed at their lack of faith.

After all, they thought, what did he know? He’s just a local lad, a builder. Ought to be home working with his brothers, not gadding about the country claiming to be a prophet. They couldn’t hear God’s voice speaking through him. They didn’t expect to, and they didn’t want to. Like the man in my story, they had very definite ideas about how God worked, and working through a local boy they’d known since childhood wasn’t one of them!

So Jesus leaves them alone, and goes off on a tour of the local country, teaching and healing as he went. And then he starts to send out his disciples, two by two, giving them authority over “impure spirits”. They are sent out with literally only their walking-staffs, rather like modern-day trekking poles. No food, he tells them, no money, no bag – you can wear sandals, if you wish, but don’t take an extra shirt. The disciples are to rely on God’s provisions for them, staying wherever they are first welcomed – and not moving next door if next door’s cooking is better! And if they are not welcomed, they are to leave at once, without comment, but shaking the dust off their feet.

And, we are told, that’s just what the disciples did. They drove out evil spirits, they anointed people with oil, and healed people, bringing the good news of God’s Kingdom far and wide.

We aren’t told how long they were on the road, but I imagine not more than a couple of months. We are told that when they came back, Jesus tried to take them to a quiet place to debrief them, but so many people were following them all by this time that it became impossible, so he went on teaching the crowds, and eventually fed them with the contents of a small boy’s lunchbox! For the disciples, this must have been an exciting interlude in their lives. But in the other gospels we are told that when they were able to tell Jesus that even evil spirits responded to them, Jesus said that really, what mattered was that their names were written in the Kingdom of Heaven. A modern paraphrase puts it:

"All the same, the great triumph is not in your authority over evil, but in God's authority over you and presence with you.
Not what you do for God but what God does for you –
that's the agenda for rejoicing."

Do we have definite ideas about how God works, I wonder? Do we expect to see God working in the ordinary, the every day? Or do we expect him always to come down with power and fire from Heaven? Do we expect Him to speak to us through other people, perhaps even through me, or do we expect Him to illuminate a verse of the Bible specially, or write His message in fiery letters in the sky?

We do sometimes, because we are human, long and long to see God at work in the spectacular, the kind of thing that Jesus used to do when he healed the sick and even raised the dead. And very occasionally God is gracious enough to give us such signs. But mostly, these days, He heals through modern medicine, guiding scientists to develop medicine and surgical techniques that can do things our ancestors only dreamed about. And through complementary medical techniques which address the whole person, not just the illness. And through love and hugs and sympathy and support.

We do need to learn to recognise God at work. All too often, we walk blindly through our week, not noticing God – and yet God is there. God is there and going on micro-managing His creation, no matter how unaware of it we are. And God is there to speak to us through the words of a friend, or an acquaintance. If we need rescuing, God is a lot more likely to send a friend to do it than to come in person!

And conversely, we need to be open to God at work in us, so that we can be the friend who does the speaking, or the rescuing. Not that God can’t use people who don’t know him – of course He both can and does – but the more open we are to being His person, the more we allow Him to work in us, to help us grow into the sort of person He created us to be, then the more He can use us, with or without our knowledge, in His world. Who knows, maybe the supermarket cashier you smiled at yesterday really needed that smile to affirm her faith in people, after a bad day. Or the friend you telephoned just to have a catch-up with was badly needing to chat to someone – not necessarily a serious conversation, just a chat. You will never know – but God knows.

We are, of course, never told “what would have happened”, but I wonder what would have happened if the people of Nazareth had been open to Jesus. He could have certainly done more miracles there. Maybe he wouldn’t have had to have become an itinerant preacher, going round all the villages. Maybe he could have had a home. I think God may well have used the rejection to open up new areas of ministry for Jesus – after all, we do know that God works all things for good.

And, finally, what happened to the people of Nazareth? The answer is, nothing. Nothing happened. God could do no work there through Jesus. Okay, a few sick people were healed, but that was all. The good news of the Kingdom of God was not proclaimed. Miracles didn’t happen. Just. . . nothing.

We do know, of course, that in the end his family, at least, were able to get their heads round the idea of their lad being The One. His Mother was in the Upper Room on the Day of Pentecost. James, one of his brothers, was a leader in the early church. But were they the only ones? Did anybody else from Nazareth believe in Him, or were they all left, sadly, alone?

I think that’s an Awful Warning, isn’t it? If we decide we need to know best who God chooses to speak through, how God is to act, then God can do nothing. And God will do nothing. If he sends two boats and a helicopter and we reject them because we don’t see God’s hand at work in them, then we will be left to our own devices. As the people of Nazareth were.

“Not what you do for God but what God does for you – that's the agenda for rejoicing.” And if you don’t allow God to do anything for you, in whatever way, what then?

God's Country

Please forgive the traffic noise in the recording - we were out-of-doors and the A23 runs past the end of the garden!  No sirens, as far as I'm aware.  Also, the tree pollen got to me a bit, so there are a couple of coughs.  But it was glorious to be out of doors and able to sing again!

 

I am often quite glad that I don’t have a garden! There is a communal garden for our block of flats, and it’s lovely to be able to go and sit out and read in the shade on a summer’s day, but I don’t have to do anything else! Whereas people who have gardens do seem to have to spend all their time watering, or weeding, or mowing the lawn, or planting out seeds that they started in the greenhouse…. And seldom seem to have time to just sit and enjoy it.

But, of course, in the end all that hard work is worth while. Your vegetables come up and you have masses of tomatoes, or lettuces, or beans, or courgettes, or whatever it is you like to grow – often too much, more than will even fit in your freezer. If you grow flowers, they produce a beautiful display, and perhaps even smell nice. I walked past a garden in Brixton the other day where the owner of the house had obviously chosen roses for their smell, and it was really lovely!

I do have an orchid, that was given to me over 14 years ago now by my daughter and her husband as a “thank you” for their wedding. Amazingly, it has lasted and lasted, and even survived and flowered again after I repotted it earlier this year. Slightly to my surprise, I have to say!

But you know what? None of us, whether we have big gardens or just have a few plants on the windowsill, none of us can actually make our plants grow! We can sow the seeds, we can tend the plants by watering them regularly and feeding them, and perhaps pruning as necessary – but we can’t make them grow. They grow all by themselves, pretty much independent of what we do. I repotted my orchid very carefully, but it was not down to me whether I killed it in the process – as it was, thankfully, I didn’t. But I had no say in the matter.

The person in Jesus’ story today knew that. He planted some seeds in his garden, and then, as if by magic, the seeds sprouted and grew, and eventually he was able to harvest a great crop. He didn’t need to know how it happened; from the story, it appears that he’d rather forgotten all about it, anyway. And then suddenly, there is a lovely crop. God had grown the seeds for him, and enabled them to produce the crop they were designed to produce.

Well, so far, so good. But you know what? I’m reminded of another story Jesus told, a story of someone who sowed his seeds and they went everywhere, and some fell on the path, and others on rocky or weedy soil, and it seems that only a minority fell on the fertile soil that enabled it to grow and reproduce up to a hundred-fold.

We all know that story, we’ve known it since our earliest days at Sunday School, and have heard many sermons on it. If you are anything like me, what you heard – not, I should emphasize, necessarily what had been said, but what you heard – was that Proper People, or perhaps I should say Proper Christians, were the ones who were the fertile soil, where the Word could take root, grow and flourish.

But, of course, if you were anything like me, that just made you feel guilty and miserable – what if you weren’t the good soil? What if you were the stony places, or the weedy patches? We may well end up feeling guilty and thinking that we must be terrible people.

But I don’t think Jesus meant us to think that! From the story we have just read in Mark’s gospel, it is God that does the growing and takes care of the result! We don’t. We don’t really have to worry about whether we are fertile soil or not; if we are living in God’s country, as God’s people, it’s God’s job to worry about the fertility or otherwise of the soil!

Well, so far so good. That’s a fairly straightforward story of what God’s country is like. But then Jesus goes on to talk about the mustard seed. Well, you know mustard seeds. I expect you use them in your cooking, as I sometimes do. You can buy the seeds, or you can buy the ground seeds as a powder to make your own mustard – lovely in salad dressings and cheese sauces – or you can buy ready-made mustard with or without various flavourings. I’m sure they used mustard as a seasoning back in Bible times, too – but it was, and is, a terrific weed. They tended to use the wild plant, because if you cultivated it – well, it was like kudzu or rhododendrons, or even mint – you’d never get rid of it! Nobody would actually go and plant it, any more than you or I would plant stinging-nettles in the fields. And, Mark tells us, it grows into a shrub which can accommodate birds in its branches.

The thing is, that we don’t really realise, is that Jesus was taking the passage that we heard in our first reading, from Ezekiel, and twisting it. Ezekiel tells us that God will take a shoot from the cedar tree and grow it into the biggest tree there ever was, so that birds could shelter in it, and everybody would know that God was the Lord.

And Jesus takes this and twists it. The other gospel-writers who retell this story say that the mustard-seed grows into a tree – but, of course, it doesn’t; it is at best a waist-high shrub. If you travel through a mustard-growing area, you will see what the plants are like, with pale yellow flowers. Not as harsh as rapeseed oil flowers, much paler yellow, rather pretty. It grows – or modern cultivars do – about waist height for easy harvesting. But in Israel it was a weed and grew anywhere and everywhere. Even here you often get wild mustard, known as charlock, growing among other crops, or on field edges.

No, a mustard plant was not comparable to a huge cedar tree. Yet Jesus says this is what the Kingdom of Heaven, God’s Country, is like. And elsewhere he says that it’s like yeast that makes dough bubble up and become bread. We might think this is a Good Thing, but for Jews, the most proper bread of all was the matzo, or unleavened bread, that they ate each year at Passover. I still remember being told, when I was in about Year 2 at school, that this was actually a good idea because a sourdough starter could get old and too sour over the course of a year, so it was better to start again at least once a year.

However that may be, most of the stories Jesus tells about God’s Country are like that. It’s not at all a comfortable place – and yet people are willing to sell all they have to get tickets there!

In a way, Jesus’ stories today show the two sides of the Kingdom. The first is that we can’t do anything to hurry things up. Seeds grow in their own good time. We may long and long to see revival, although whether we’d actually like it if we saw it is another matter, but we can do nothing to hurry it up. God has it all in hand, and you can be quite sure that if and when there is something for us to do to bring about God’s Kingdom, we’ll know!

Then we find it’s not what we expected. It’s not tall, beautiful trees with wood-pigeons cooing and blackbirds shouting; instead, it’s a shrubby weed, with much smaller birds – sparrows, perhaps, or even starlings – jostling for space and chuntering about it.

But then, if you think about it, weeds are very persistent. Trees take years to grow. Five or six years ago there was an initiative in Brockwell Park to plant some trees, and we took our elder grandson, then aged about five, to help plant some. Many of the trees planted that day have survived, although not all, but they are really not much bigger than they were, and are certainly not the big, shady trees they might be when my grandson takes his grandsons to look at the trees he helped plant.

But weeds, now. Weeds grow quickly, and they are persistent creatures. They rapidly take over any fallow land, and can push up even through concrete. The Kingdom of God is like a weed that can grow anywhere, in surprising places.

We didn’t read the Epistle today because we aren’t supposed to go on too long, but it was that passage where St Paul reminds us that if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation. Old things are done away, and all has become new. Whether this newness has come through the unseen working of the Spirit in our hearts, or through the way God’s kingdom is simply not what we had been led to expect, it is nevertheless a new creation.

God, we are often told, comforts the afflicted and afflicts the comfortable. We have all been shaken up by this pandemic – how can we be God’s people in the world when we aren’t allowed to go into the world? How can we worship God when we can’t meet together, or sing when we do meet? We have found answers to those questions, not always satisfactorily, but we have. God has been working, and it has showed.

So what I am going to leave with you today is this: are you allowing God to work in you, like the man in his garden, or are you going to have to wait until the weeds push up through the paving stones and concrete around your heart? Amen.

The Spirit is Upon Me

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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.