Soul Repair: Nourished by Unconditional Love and Forgiveness

 

The service starts about 18 minutes in.  

Today, our soul food is God’s unconditional love and forgiveness, as shown in our Gospel reading. Also because it’s Mothering Sunday, which I’ll talk more about in a bit. But first, let’s have a look at our familiar, and, I suspect much-loved, Gospel story.

We don't know why the younger son got fed up with his comfortable life on the farm;
Jesus didn't go into details about his family background, or, if he did, Luke didn't record them!
Perhaps he was being asked to marry a girl he really disliked –
or perhaps he'd fallen in love with the wrong girl.
Or perhaps he just found farm work boring,
and the lights of the big city more attractive.
Whatever, he goes to his father and asks for his share of his inheritance, and takes off.

Now, it was really awful of him to ask that –
he was more or less saying “I can't wait until you're dead!”.
And, of course, it wasn't a matter of going to the bank and writing a cheque –
it was a matter of ­dividing up the farm,
letting the younger son have a certain number of fields and buildings,
and a certain amount of stock.
But this story is taking place in God's country,
where the rules are not the same as ours,
so the farmer does just that,
and a few days later, when the son has sold all this –
I wonder if he sold it back to his father, I wouldn't put it past him –
he lets his son go with his blessing.

And the son goes off to seek his fortune in the big city.

But, like so many of us, he doesn't make a fortune.
Instead, he wastes what he has on what the Bible calls “Dissolute living”.
You know the kind of thing –
fashionable clothes,
champagne,
caviar,
top-of-the-range smartphones,
expensive callgirls,
fast cars,
cocaine,
and so on and so forth.

They perhaps didn't have quite those things in his day, but very similar!
And he almost definitely gambled,
and may even have taken drugs as well.

And, inevitably, it all goes horribly wrong and he wakes up one morning with no money and with his creditors ringing the doorbell.
And he is forced to earn his living as best he can.

I don't think we Christians can ever quite realise the absolute horror of what happened next.
We don't have the utter horror of pigs that the Jews had and have.
We think of pigs, we think of bacon and sausages and roast pork with crispy crackling;
for the Jews –
and, I gather, for Muslims, too –
it was more like taking a job on a rat farm.
In terms of actual work,
it probably wasn't much different from the work he'd been used to,
but he would be an outcast among his own kind,
and we gather from the story that he wasn't paid very well, either.
He was hungry, to the point where even the pigs' food looked good.
I wonder if he was working for one of his creditors?

Anyway, one morning he wakes up and thinks to himself, “What on earth am I doing?
Even my father treats his people better than this –
maybe he'd take me on as a farm worker.”

You notice, perhaps, that he doesn't actually say he's sorry.
He doesn't appear to regret having left home,
only finding himself in this fix.
And yes, he would be better off working for his father than he is here.
He does say he’ll admit he has sinned, and is not worthy to be his father’s son any more, but there doesn’t seem to be any regret….
I wonder if those few years of squandering it all still felt worth it?

Well, we all know what happened next.
Father rushes out to greet him –
and men simply never ran in that place and time,
but remember that this story takes place in God's country,
and anything can happen there.
The celebrations go on and on.

Elder brother is most put out.
He has been working hard all the time,
and nobody ever gave him a party, did they?
And this wastrel, who has caused so much grief, is being treated like a prince.
What's all that about?

Well, the elder brother could have had a party any day in the week, if he'd wanted one.
He'd never said, had he?
He'd seemed quite content with his lifestyle.
Perhaps underneath, though, he was seriously jealous of his brother.
No, not jealous, that's the wrong word.
Envious.
Perhaps he wish he had had the guts to cut loose and make a life of
his own.
We don't know.

But whatever, Father's reaction seemed to him to be well out of order.
He wished his Father had said, “Get out –
how dare you show your face around here!”

Or that Father had said “Well, I suppose you can be a servant,
but no way are you coming back into this family.”

Or, perhaps, “Well, if you work really hard and prove to me you're really sorry, I might be prepared to forgive you –
in about ten years' time and providing you are absolutely perfect during that time!”

But for Father to rush up and hug Little Brother, and to be calling for champagne and throwing a party –
well, that was definitely out of order, as far as Big Brother was concerned.
His only hope was that Little Brother would insist on being treated as a servant:
“No, no, you can't give me a party!
I don't deserve it.
I'm going to live above the stables with the other workers,
and behave like a worker, not your son!”

You know, that's what I think I would have done.
I don't know about you, but I find being forgiven the hardest thing there is.
Responding to God's love is really hard.
I want to earn my forgiveness, earn God's love, God's approval.

But it doesn't work like that, does it?
The bit of Luke Chapter 15 that we didn't read was the other two “lost” stories –
the lost sheep and the lost coin.
We don't blame the coin for getting lost;
we know how easy it is to drop something, or to put it down in a safe place, and we can't find it.
If you knew how many time Robert mislays the keys to one church building or another….
And when we find whatever it was we have mislaid – usually when we’re looking for something else, we do rejoice!
We don't really blame the sheep for wandering off, either.
Sheep are dumb animals –
well, noisy ones, really, but stupid ones, whatever –
and if they can get into trouble, they will.
But the Good Shepherd isn't going to lose one if he can help it;
he'll be pulling on his coat and wellies as soon as he realises one has gone missing, and set off with his dogs to find it.

You might say that is over the top –
but again,
this is God's country, the Kingdom of Heaven,
and anything can happen there.
In God's country there is more joy over one lost sheep being found than over the 99 that stayed in their field.

But we can and we do blame the young man for running off.
Perhaps we would like to run off, who knows?
In any case, we can identify with him.
We know we can –
and maybe we have –
done dreadful things like that.
And we don't like it, like the big brother didn't like it,
when the Father forgives him so generously and open-heartedly,
even without his repenting properly.
He came home, he is here again, this calls for a drink!
No, we think, this won't do.
I can't be forgiven that easily.
It can't be that simple.
I need to earn it.

But we can't earn it.
We can't earn forgiveness.
We can't earn salvation.
Sometimes we speak as if, and maybe we even think,
that salvation is down to us,
that we need to say the special prayer so that God will save us.
No.
Salvation is all God's idea,
and God has a great deal more invested in the relationship than we do.
God pours out his love on us unconditionally, and all we need do is accept it.
God’s love and forgiveness are unconditional

This reading does fit in rather well with the fact that it’s Mothering Sunday. It’s also Mother’s Day, but they are two rather different things.

Mothering Sunday has roots way, way back in history, at a time when this mid-Lent Sunday was the time when servants would go home to visit their families
and, if possible, they would all visit the “mother church” of their area together.
One of the traditional readings for today is the one where Jesus is weeping over Jerusalem: “
“Jerusalem, Jerusalem!
Your people have killed the prophets and have stoned the messengers who were sent to you.
I have often wanted to gather your people, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings.
But you wouldn't let me.”

The image of Jesus as a mother hen!
What we remember on Mothering Sunday isn’t just our mothers, although them, too, but above all,
the wonderful love of God, our Father and our Mother.

We do give thanks for our mothers, of course we do.
But we have to remember, too, people whose Mums are no longer with us, and to remember that some people didn't have satisfactory relationships with their own Mums,
and some people have never known the joy of motherhood.
The Church used to be very tactless about this, and only give flowers to those women in the congregation who actually were mothers – quite ignoring those who would have loved to have had children.
And blithely glossing over the fact that for the rest of the year we were rather left to get on with it, and were told that the loneliness and isolation and lack of fellowship was “the price you pay for the wonderful privilege of being a Christian Mother!”
As if....
At least these days we give flowers to everybody in church!

But what I really want to leave with you this morning is God’s wonderful and unconditional love and forgiveness.
So much love, so much forgiveness – it could almost overwhelm us, which is probably why we hold back.
And we feel, rightly, that we don’t deserve it.
Well, of course we don’t – but who does?
I don’t know about you, but the first time I really realised the tiniest fraction of what God’s love is like was when they laid my newborn daughter in my arms.
Was this feeling, this love, this protectiveness, this –
this total overwhelmingness, was it really a picture of what God feels for me?
And for you?
And for each and every one of us?
I think it is.

But the awful thing we also have to remember is that this love is for everybody!
It’s not just for those who have “accepted Christ as their personal Saviour”;
it’s not just for those who conform to what we believe a Christian must be.
It’s everybody.
It’s the muggers, the phone snatchers, the bank robbers, the traffikers, the slavers, the rapists –
and yes, even the politicians!
God might –
and probably does –
hate the things they do, hate the things they say –
but God doesn’t hate them!
On the contrary, God loves each and every one of them as much as he loves you and me.
And each and every one of us is loved with all of God’s love, because God is love, and “when we are still far off” God comes running to rejoice with us that we are home at last! Amen!

Glimpses of Glory

 

Do you ever watch sport on television?
It doesn’t really matter which sport –
football, rugby, athletics, gymnastics, cycling, ice-skating –
whatever it is you enjoy,
the point I’m about to make is the same.

What we see on television is just the tip of the iceberg, the pinnacle of the sport.
They show you the very best athletes at the peak of their game.
What they don’t show you is the endless hours of practice every single one of those athletes puts in,
often training at unearthly hours of the morning to fit in with the day’s work, grinding along,
day after day after day,
getting injured,
recovering,
plodding on.
And then, every once in awhile, realising how much they’ve improved,
how much they are “getting it”.
Suddenly, all the hard work has paid off –
they’ve been selected for their team, or their club, or even their country!
Or perhaps they’re finding a certain aspect of the skill easy that six months before they could barely do.
A glimpse of the glory of what they’ve been working so hard for.

Perhaps you’ve taken a sport fairly seriously in your time, so you know what I’m talking about.
But even if you haven’t, isn’t it the same with our Christian lives, too?
We plod on, dutifully using what John Wesley called “The means of grace”,
that is, the Sacrament,
public worship,
the Scriptures,
prayer and so on,
and yet nothing seems to happen. 
Sometimes it feels as though our relationship with God is all down to us, not to God,
and doubts set in. 
But then, just sometimes, God breaks in and we get a glimpse of his glory. 
I know that has happened to me, and I hope it has happened to you.
 
In our readings today, various people get glimpses of God’s glory.
 
Firstly, Moses and the Israelites. 
Moses is spending time in the mountains with God. 
This passage is set shortly after that infamous episode with the golden calf,
and I think the authors are trying to emphasize that it is God, Yahweh, who is in charge,
not Moses, not a golden calf, nor anybody else. 
So Moses’ face shines when he has been in God’s presence,
as he is speaking with God’s authority. 
The Israelites caught a glimpse of God’s glory. 
And we are told that Moses did, too;
he was allowed to see just the tiniest shadow of the back of God –
as though God had a human form, but then, he was told,
he couldn’t see the face of God as he wouldn’t live through the experience. 
Nobody can, nobody except Jesus. 
We can only come to God through Jesus;
more of that in a minute. 
The Israelites could only see God’s glory reflected in Moses’ face, and it scared them. 
Moses, who hadn’t at all realised anything was different,
had to put a veil over his face while he was among them, so as not to scare them.
 
The New Testament reading set for today, which we didn’t read,
points out that Moses was able to take the veil off, eventually, because the glory faded. 
Moses was back among the people, involved in the every-day tasks of running the Exodus,
and gradually the glimpse of glory that he had had,
and that he had passed on to the Israelites,
faded.
 
Okay, fast-forward several hundred years to the time of Christ.
This time, it is Jesus who is going up the mountain and he asks his friends James, Peter and John to go with him.
I don't know whether Jesus knew what was going to happen,
only that it was going to be something rather different and special,
and he wanted some moral support!
And so the four friends go up the mountain –
and suddenly things get rather confused for a time,
and when it stops being confused,
there is Jesus in shining white robes talking to Moses and Elijah.
 
Peter, of course, babbles on about building shelters,
but more to reassure himself that he exists, I think, than for any other reason.
And then the voice from heaven saying "This is my Son, listen to Him".
In other words, Jesus is more important than either Moses or Elijah, who were the two main people, apart from God, in the Jewish faith.
To good Jews, as James, Peter and John were, this must have almost felt like blasphemy.
No wonder Jesus told them to keep their big mouths shut until the time was right,
or he'd have been stoned for a blasphemer forthwith.

Peter, for one, remembered this momentous day until the end of his life.
Years and years later, he –
or someone writing in his name –
was to write:
"For we did not follow cleverly devised myths when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ,
but we had been eyewitnesses of his majesty.
For he received honour and glory from God the Father
when that voice was conveyed to him by the Majestic Glory, saying, `This is my Son, my Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.'
We ourselves heard this voice come from heaven,
while we were with him on the holy mountain."
 
For Peter, James and John, it was to be proof that Jesus is the Messiah, and through all the turbulent times that followed they must have held on to the memory of that tremendous day, when they saw a glimpse of God’s glory in Jesus.
 
But they, too, had to come down from the mountainside and carry on,
and immediately they are confronted with a crisis:
a child who has been brought to the disciples for healing, but nothing has happened. 
In this version of the story, Jesus sounds almost cross –
well, you can’t blame him, can you? 
He was probably tired after being on the mountain,
and rather wanting a quiet supper and his bed,
and now the disciples were all talking at once, explaining how they’d tried to cast out this demon,
and the boy’s father is adding to the confusion, and yadda, yadda, yadda….. 
Basically, back to normal! 
We know from other accounts of this story that afterwards Jesus tells the disciples that they can only cast out that sort of demon with prayer and possibly fasting. 
 
So it seems that glimpses of God’s glory are very rare, and the normal gritty, hum-drum, everyday life is the norm. 
And that’s as it should be. 
You can’t live on a mountain-top all the time, you’d get altitude sickness! 
If you were on holiday all the time, you wouldn’t appreciate the rest and relaxation that being on holiday brings. 
It’s not much fun waking up and knowing you have no work to go to and, when you get up, the big excitement of the day will be deciding what to have for supper! 
We are never quite sure where God is in all of this. 
 
But God is there. 
Those very special glimpses of his glory, such as Moses saw,
such as Peter, James and John saw, are just that:
special. 
They happen maybe once or twice in a lifetime, if that. 
But God is there, acting, working in our lives, even if we don’t always recognise Him.

There are a couple of stories about this, which you may or may not have heard. In the first, two men are talking in the pub, and the first is telling of an adventure he’s recently had in North Africa. He got lost in the desert, and ran out of water, and quite thought his last hour had come, so he prayed out loud to God to come and save him.
“And what did God do?” asked his friend, realising that something must have happened as there he was, large as life and twice as natural, in the pub enjoying his pint.
“Oh,” said the first man, “God didn’t need to do anything, as just then a caravan came along, and I was able to go on with them to safety.”
 
The second story tells of the time there was a big flood, and people had to climb up on to the roofs of their houses to escape.
One person – let’s make it a woman this time, as we had a man in the last story, but it doesn’t really matter – one woman thought this was a remarkable opportunity to demonstrate, so she thought, God’s power, so she 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 she carried on praying, “Dear Lord, please save me!”

Then along came the police in a motor-launch, and called for her to jump in, but she 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 she still refused,
claiming that she was relying on God to save her.

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

So, because she was a Christian, as you can imagine, she ended up in Heaven,
and the first thing she 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?”
 
When we pray for someone to be healed, quite often we want to see God intervening spectacularly, like the disciples expected to see with the boy with a demon from today’s reading. 
After all, if you think of it, there’s a limit to what medicine can do. 

When you have an operation, the surgeons can cut you open and do what needs to be done inside you, and then they can stitch you up again – but they can’t make that cut heal up!

They can, of course, do all sorts of things to encourage it to heal –
they can’t actually make the flesh grow back together again.
That has to be left to natural processes –
or is it God? 
 
I believe God is involved in healing, whether it is by direct, supernatural intervention,
or, more usually, through the normal processes of one’s immune system,
aided by medical or surgical intervention when necessary. 
But those glimpses of glory that I started with –
when you realise that you are making progress in your chosen sport or hobby, or perhaps when you are out there competing –
I believe those times, too, are from God.
 
I think, then, that what I want to leave with you today is this:
as we go into Lent,
which is a time when we are apt to think about God, and our relationship with Him,
perhaps a little more deeply than at other times of the year,
let’s be on the lookout for touches of God in our everyday lives. 
They don’t have to be spectacular, they probably won’t be. 
But each of them is a little glimpse of glory.  Amen.

Doormat or Dynamite?

 

Two familiar passages today; in the first, we see Joseph confronting his brothers many years after they sold him into slavery and told his father he was dead.
And in the second, Jesus is preaching to the crowds in what is often called the “Sermon on the Plain”;
Luke’s version of the Sermon on the Mount that we are so familiar with from Matthew’s gospel.

Let’s look at the Old Testament story first.
You know Joseph’s story, of course;
born into the most dysfunctional of dysfunctional families, his father and grandfather both liars and cheats.
And Joseph himself was the spoilt favourite –
his father had two wives, you may remember, Rachel, whom he loved, and Leah, whom he didn't but was tricked into marrying anyway.
He also had a couple of kids by Leah's and Rachel's maids, Bilhah and Zilpah, but Rachel, the beloved wife, had had trouble conceiving,
so Joseph and his full brother Benjamin were very precious,
especially as Rachel had died having Benjamin.
He, it seems, was still too young to take much part in the story at this stage, but Joseph was well old enough to help his brothers –
and, we are told, to spy on them and sneak on them to his father.
And stupid enough to boast of self-important dreams.

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

Joseph has a lot of growing up to do,
and it takes a false accusation and many years in prison to help him grow up.
But eventually he is freed
and given an important post in the Egyptian administration,
preparing for the forthcoming famine and then administering food relief when it comes.

And so his brothers come to beg for food relief.
And at first Joseph is angry enough with them to first of all insist they bring the youngest, Benjamin, with them next time they come –
he had stayed at home to look after their father –
and then to plant false evidence that he had stolen a gold cup.
He says he will let the others go but keep Benjamin as his slave,
but the other brothers explain that it will kill their father if he does so.

And at that something breaks inside Joseph, and he makes himself known to his brothers, forgiving them completely for all they had done to him –
pointing out, even, that God had used this for good,
as he had been able to organise the food relief,
knowing there would be five more years of drought and famine to come.
And he sends for his father to come and bring all the households and settle in Egypt.
The family is reunited and –
for some generations, at least –
they all live happily ever after.

Five hundred years or so later, the son of another Joseph is preaching to the people.
And what he says is completely revolutionary.
Here is a modern paraphrase:

“If you are ready to hear the truth then I have this to say:
Love! Love even your enemies.
Treat even those who hate you with love.
If anyone mouths off at you or treats you like dirt, wish them all the best and pray for them.
If someone gives you a smack around the ear to humiliate you, stand tall and stick your chin out, and invite them to have another crack.
Absorb the hostility –
don’t escalate it.
If someone nicks your coat, just say, ‘Hey, if you’re needing that, you’ll be needing these,’ and hand over your hat and scarf as well.
Give to everyone who asks something of you, and don’t go hassling people to give back what they’ve got from you.
Live generously, and don’t go keeping score and looking to balance the ledger.”
©2001 Nathan Nettleton LaughingBird.net

It’s all pretty familiar, isn’t it?
We are perhaps more familiar with the version given in St Matthew, but it’s pretty much the same sentiment.
Jesus goes on:
“If you want to know how to treat someone, just ask yourself what you’d be hoping for if you were in their shoes.
Treat others the way you’d like to be treated, not just the way you are treated.
It’s not as though you’d deserve a medal for loving someone who loves you.
Anyone can do that!
You won’t find your name in the honours lists for a good turn done to those who are always going out of their way to help you.
Any crook can do that!
And if you only ever give when it looks like there’ll be something in it for you, what’s the big deal?
Every business shark knows how to make an investment, but it’s not exactly evidence of a generous spirit.”
©2001 Nathan Nettleton LaughingBird.net

The thing is, of course, that we don’t do it!
None of it.
We know it in our heads, but we haven’t made it part of us.
We’re taught to stand up for ourselves, we’re taught to look out for number one.
Even though we’re taught to share, we understand that we may have our turn on the swings in the playground, or whatever.
Maybe as adults, we reckon we’ve a right to our turn at the remote control….

But from what Jesus is saying, we don’t.
We need to put other people first.
We need to allow other people to walk all over us, to hit us, to steal our possessions.
It does sound as though we’re supposed to be doormats, doesn’t it?
As though we need to just stand there, being totally passive, allowing other people to run our lives for us.
No wonder we don’t do it!

But are we supposed to be doormats?
I don’t think so!
Jesus wasn’t, after all.
Yes, he allowed himself to be arrested and crucified, he refused to defend himself at his trial.
But before that we see him arguing with the Pharisees and teachers of the law.
He doesn’t say “Oh well, I expect you’re right,” but tries to show them what he is all about, what the Kingdom of Heaven is like.
He took up a whip and drove out the traders in the Temple –
was that being a doormat?

You see, it’s not just about standing there and taking it.
It’s about being positive, as well.
“Be different!” says Jesus.
“Love your enemies and do good to them.
Lend freely, and don’t go looking for returns.
God will see that it’s worth it for you.
You will be God’s very own children.
God is generous to those who don’t deserve it,
even if they’re totally ungrateful.
God forgives whatever anyone owes.
Do likewise:
treat people the way God treats people.”
©2001 Nathan Nettleton LaughingBird.net

“Treat people the way God treats people.”
Of course, there are those who go around saying that God hates this group of people, or that group.
There are those who would like to exclude all sorts of people from God’s love.
But that’s not what the Bible says.
Our Methodist doctrines teach that everybody, no matter who, can be saved.
“And every offender who truly believes,
that moment from Jesus a pardon receives!”

God doesn’t hold things against us.
It worries me, you know, that people’s whole careers can be ruined because of a thoughtless tweet they may have published ten years ago.
People move on.
I don’t know about you, but there are things I’ve thought or said in my past that make me cringe to think about them now –
had there been social media when I was young,
I’d probably be utterly disgraced now!
And you can probably think of occasions in your own lives, too.

But the thing is, God doesn’t think of them.
“So far as the East is from the West,
so far has God put our transgressions from us,” says the Psalmist.
And Jesus reminds us, here as elsewhere,
that because that is so, we need to forgive, too.
Think of the story we call the Prodigal Son.

The son who asked for his share of inheritance and went into the world to have some fun,
and when he was in the gutter decided to go home again.
And the father ran to meet him, and put on a massive celebration for him,
and had obviously been longing and longing and longing for his son to come home again.

But the father couldn't make the son come home.
He had to wait until the son chose to come home of his own free will.
What's more, the son had to accept that his father wanted him home again.
He could have said "Well, no, I don't deserve all this,"
and rushed off to live in the stables, behaving like a servant,
although his father wanted to treat him as the son he was.
The son had to receive his father's forgiveness, just as we do.

And don't forget, either, the elder brother,
who simply couldn't join in the celebrations because he couldn't forgive his brother.
How dare they celebrate for that lousy rotter!
I don't know whether he was crosser with his father for having a party, or with his brother for daring to come home.
I feel sorry for him, because he allowed his bitterness to spoil what could have been a good time.

And that is exactly what happens to us when we do not forgive one another.
We allow our bitterness to spoil what could have been a good time with God.

I often think forgiveness is the Christian’s secret weapon.
All of Jesus’ teachings in the passage we have been looking at this morning seem to be about forgiveness.
If someone hits us, we forgive them, rather than hitting back.
If someone steals our coat, we forgive them, and perhaps even offer them more of our clothes.
And so on.
After all, that’s how we’d like them to treat us, isn’t it?

But as you know, and as I know, the world isn’t like that.
And we tend to conform to the world’s standards,
rather than God’s standards.

But what if we didn’t?
What if we really did do as Jesus tells us?
What if we really treated people the way God treats them,
the way we would like them to treat us?

The first Christians were known as the people who turned the world upside-down.
But that was two thousand years ago, and over the centuries we have watered down Jesus’ teaching.
We have got used to it, and we don’t see how revolutionary his teaching actually was.

Joseph, as we have seen, was able to forgive his brothers –
it took him awhile, but when he got there, he really forgave them.
He saw how God had worked everything together for good, and not only forgave them, but invited them to come and settle locally.
He really is the poster child for forgiveness.

Jesus promises us that if we give generously –
and I don’t think he means just material giving, but giving of ourselves, of our time, of our love, of our forgiveness –
then God’s generosity to us will know no limits, either.

What do you think, I wonder?
If you did as Jesus says in the gospel reading –
would you turn into a doormat?
Or could it be, possibly, just might, it prove to be dynamite,
something to turn the world upside-down?
Amen.

A tree planted by the water

 

From our first reading this morning, the passage from Jeremiah chapter 17:
“I will bless the person
    who puts his trust in me.
He is like a tree growing near a stream
    and sending out roots to the water.
It is not afraid when hot weather comes,
    because its leaves stay green;
it has no worries when there is no rain;
    it keeps on bearing fruit.”

And in the Psalm we read together, we are told that those who delight in the law of the Lord “are like trees planted by streams of water, which yield their fruit in due season.
Their leaves do not wither.
In all that they do, they prosper.”

Some time ago I saw a documentary about the Kalahari desert in Africa, which is one of the driest places on earth.
But water still flows under, and very occasionally on top of, the dried river beds, and you could see, from drone footage, exactly where the rivers run, because they are lined with green trees,
and it was those trees that enabled giraffes to live there,
as they could feed on the leaves.

Israel is pretty dry, too, I understand –
the Negev, do they call the desert there?
Anyway, the whole thing of irrigation, and planting trees by the river, has a great many echoes in the Bible,
so I imagine it must have been very much a thing,
especially back in the days before modern irrigation techniques were able to make the desert, quite literally, blossom like a rose.

One of my favourite passages is in Ezekiel,
where that prophet has a vision of a stream of water beginning in the Temple in Jerusalem and flowing down to the Dead Sea,
becoming wider and deeper as it flows, full of fish, fertile, bringing fertility to the whole area, including the Dead Sea.
And we are told that “On each bank of the stream all kinds of trees will grow to provide food.
Their leaves will never wither, and they will never stop bearing fruit.
They will have fresh fruit every month, because they are watered by the stream that flows from the Temple.
The trees will provide food, and their leaves will be used for healing people.”

Zechariah also mentions this river, but says half of it will flow to the Mediterranean and half to the Red Sea.
He doesn’t put trees alongside it explicitly, though.

This river appears, according to the book of Revelation, to be in the heavenly Jerusalem rather than the earthly one we know.
The writer has a vision of the new Jerusalem, and in part,
“The angel also showed me the river of the water of life, sparkling like crystal, and coming from the throne of God and of the Lamb and flowing down the middle of the city's street.
On each side of the river was the tree of life, which bears fruit twelve times a year, once each month;
and its leaves are for the healing of the nations.”

But the point of the passages in both Jeremiah and the Psalm is that it is we who are –
or who can be –
like the tree planted by the water.
It is we who can bear fruit all year round, who can stay green and fresh even in times of drought.
And at this point we all start to wriggle and feel uncomfortable and think, “Oh God, I’m not like that at all!”

And, of course, we aren’t like that.
At least, most of us aren’t.
Some of us are, and you will know who those people are in your life.
But they won’t know it –
partly because if they did know it, they might start thinking what great people they are, and then, of course, they wouldn’t be.
Because the whole point is, those of us who do bear fruit, or green leaves, or whatever, are the ones through whom God’s Spirit flows.

Jesus said that if we abide in him, we will bear much fruit, and apart from him, we can do nothing.

We know, too, what the fruit is that we are going to bear –
those lovely, life-enhancing qualities that St Paul lists in his letter to the Galatians:
love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.
And I am sure there are others –
Paul’s lists are apt to be descriptive, not prescriptive!

But to get back to our passage, Jeremiah also points out that people who do not trust in God are like desert shrubs –
small, stunted, good for nothing much at all.
A far cry from the lush trees growing by the river.
And we may well know people like that, too;
people who do make a fair fist at being human,
but oh, how much more they could be if only they trusted Jesus!

And, you know, it’s not just us as individuals, but us as a church.
As a church, we can be lush trees growing by the river;
at that, we can guide people to the source of living water, Jesus himself.
We can cry out against injustice where we perceive it;
we can stand by our American friends who are really worried by this new regime; by our Ukrainian,
Russian,
Palestinian,
Israeli,
Sudanese,
Somali
or Syrian friends whose lives have been devastated by war;
we can cry out against the conditions that mean people need to use the food banks –
and, indeed, donate to them;
and so on –
you can watch the news as much as I can!
Or, alas, we can be small and stunted and good for nothing much –
but I’m sure this church isn’t like that!

And Jesus himself had some pretty harsh things to say to people –
and, presumably, churches –
who only trusted themselves, as we heard in our Gospel reading.
We are more used to the version of this teaching given in Matthew, I think, probably because Matthew’s version is so much easier.
We can think of ourselves as poor in spirit, as hungry and thirsty after righteousness –
but we are manifestly rich and well fed,
just like those whom Jesus condemns here.

I imagine Jesus does not condemn us just for being rich and well fed and content –
after all, that is largely an accident of birth.
Had we been born in another country, at another time, things might have gone very differently for us.
But it’s the “I’m all right, Jack” mentality that so often goes with being rich and well fed that is to be shunned at all costs.
We may be all right –
but there are plenty of people who aren’t.
We may be going home to a big Sunday lunch,
or we might be planning to go out for brunch,
as there are so many good restaurants in this area that serve it on a Sunday.
We’re on our way to the country for a week!
But what of those whose cupboards are bare, who depend on the food banks for today’s meals?
What of those who are homeless and begging in the streets?
These appear to be the ones who, in this passage, Jesus is praising and blessing.

I’m not saying, of course, that we should be giving to every beggar on the streets –
there are better ways of
helping to relieve homelessness and hunger.
I know some of you have donated to the Brixton Food Bank recently –
Robert took a car-load from here over to the hub at Brixton Hill just the other day.
Please go on doing this as and when you can afford to –
it is more necessary than ever, alas.

But it isn’t so much what you do, as your attitude.
Remember Jesus’ story of the rich man ostentatiously giving huge amounts to the Temple, and then the poor old beggar woman giving a tiny coin?
It was, said Jesus, the woman who had given the most;
the rich man wasn’t going to miss what he’d given, but that coin might have meant the woman going without her supper that day.

But how do we become that sort of person?
I know I’m not!
The sort of person who resembles a tree planted by the water,
bearing fruit and leaves all year round –
well, that’s not me!
I’m far too selfish and lazy and greedy and so on….
But then, we all have our faults.
And if I were to try to conquer mine in my own strength, I’d just be setting myself up for failure.

The thing is –
and this isn’t easy, either –
it’s about letting God grow us.
We are to produce fruit, and fruit isn’t manufactured, it’s grown.
Leaves aren’t stuck on the tree with Blu-tak, they are grown, too.

Some years ago now, a friend gave me a small flower-pot containing an aloe vera shoot. These days, it’s huge – at least three large plants, and I ought to repot it. But I’ve done nothing to make this happen – given it a few drops of water from time to time; plucked a leaf when I’ve needed some aloe vera for something, and that’s it. It has grown.

Plants grow.
Flowers grow.
Fruit grows.
Leaves grow.
We can’t make them grow, and we can’t make ourselves produce the good qualities that are required of God’s people.
But we can allow God the Holy Spirit to flow through us,
to fill us,
to indwell us,
to enable us to become the people God designed us to be.
And if we do that –
and, let’s face it, we’re not going to be able to do that every moment,
but the more we try to allow God to work in and through us, the more successful we will be –
if we do allow God the Holy Spirit to flow through us, we will gradually become a tree planted by the water side.

Amen.

Extravagance

 

 

I suggest you listen to the beginning of the recording, at least, as I included what would have been the children's talk had there actually been any children in church!

I wonder how many of you went to a Christmas party? We invited someone to lunch on Christmas Day, but the only other party we went to was Brixton Hill’s big annual Christmas dinner. For reasons I won’t go into now, that was a bit of a disaster, with food having to be cooked on one site and brought round to the other. Mostly by R! But there was plenty of food; most people were able to take a “goody bag” home with them.

That’s one of the things about parties, or weddings,
or any other big event that you’re hosting, or your church is,
have you got enough food and drink for everybody –
to the point that, very often, there is far too much, as there was at Brixton Hill this year!
And I do know we got it right when it came to buying the sparkling wine for our daughter’s wedding, many years ago now,
but I also remember worrying lest we should, perhaps, have got another case….
As it turned out, there was plenty –
we were even able to take a couple of bottles home with us!

But it seems to have been very far from the case for that poor host of the wedding at Cana we have just read about.
As I understand it, back in the day wedding feasts lasted two or three days, and a host would expect to have enough food and drink to cater for the entire time.
But something had gone badly wrong here.
We don’t know what had happened, or why –
only that it had.
Such embarrassment –
the party will be going on for awhile yet, but there is no wine.

But among the wedding guests were a very special family.
Mary, the carpenter's widow from Nazareth, and her sons.
Cana isn't very far from Nazareth, only about twelve miles,
but that's quite a good day's journey when you have to rely on your own two feet to get you there.
So it's probable that either the bride or the groom were related to Mary in some way,
especially as she seems to have been told about the disaster with the wine.

And then comes one of those turning-point moments in the Gospels.
Mary tells her eldest son, Jesus, that the wine has run out.

Now, as far as we can tell, Jesus is only just beginning to realise who he is.
John's gospel says that he has already been baptised by John the Baptist,
which implies that he has been out into the desert to wrestle with the implications of being the Messiah –
and the temptations which came with it,
and John also tells us that Simon Peter, Andrew and some of the others have started to be Jesus' disciples
and had come with him to the wedding.
But, in this version of the story, Jesus hasn't yet started to use his divine power to heal people and to perform miracles,
and he isn't quite sure that the time is right to do so.
So when his mother comes up and says “They have no wine,”
his immediate reaction is to say, more or less,
“Well, nothing I can do about it!
It isn't time yet!”

His mother, however, seems to have been ahead of Jesus for once, on this,
and says to the servants, “Do whatever he tells you!”
And Jesus, who was always very close to God,
and who had learnt to listen to his Father all the time,
realises that, after all, his mother is right
and the time has come to start using the power God has given him.
So he tells the servants to fill those big jars with water –
and they pour out the best wine anybody there has ever tasted.
As someone remarked, right at the fag-end of the wedding,
when people are beginning to go home and everybody has had more than enough to drink, anyway.

I don't suppose the bridegroom's family were sorry, though.
Those jars were huge –
they held about a hundred litres each, and there were six of them.
Do you realise just how much wine that was?
Six hundred litres –
about eight hundred standard bottles of wine!
Eight hundred....
you don't even see that many on the supermarket shelves, do you?
Eight hundred....
I should think Mary was a bit flabber-gasted.
And it was such good quality too.

Okay, so people drank rather more wine then than we do today,
since there was no tea or coffee, poor them,
and the water could be a bit iffy,
but even still, I should think eight hundred bottles would last them quite a while.
And at that stage of the wedding party, there's simply no way they could have needed that much.

But isn't that exactly like Jesus?
Isn't that typical of God?
We see it over and over and over again in the Scriptures.
The story of feeding the five thousand, for instance –
and one of the Gospel-writers points out that it was five thousand men, not counting the women and children –
well, in that story, Jesus didn't provide just barely enough lunch for everybody, quite the reverse –
there were twelve whole basketsful left over!
Far more than enough food –
all the disciples could have a basketful to take home to Mum.

Or what about when the disciples were fishing and he told them to cast their nets that-away?
The nets didn't just get a sensible catch of fish –
they were full and over-full, so that they almost ripped.

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

Or look at the stars!
All those millions upon millions of stars, many with planets, some with planets like our own that may even hold intelligent life.....
God is amazing, isn't He?
And just suppose we really are the only intelligent life in the Universe?
That says something else about God's extravagance in creating such an enormous Universe with only us in it!
Our God is truly amazing!

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

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

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

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

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

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

And yet we still hold back from God, both as individuals and as communities.
I don’t mean just money –
although we do that, too, despite the promise that if we:
“Bring the full tithe into the storehouse, so that there may be food in my house, and thus put me to the test, says the Lord of hosts;
see if I will not open the windows of heaven for you and pour down for you an overflowing blessing.”

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

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

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

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

It takes a Village

 

Some years ago now, Robert and I went to Avignon for a holiday during the first week of January.
As holidays go, it was a dismal failure, because I had flu, the hotel was horrible, and it snowed!
But one thing was very good, and that was that in the Town Hall, they had a Christmas crib.

Now, when we think of a Christmas crib, we usually think of a stable, with Mary and Joseph, the Christ Child, the shepherds, an ox and an ass, and perhaps the wise men if it’s nearly Epiphany.

But in France, and particularly in the South of France, they do things a bit differently, and their Christmas cribs show the whole village of Bethlehem, as they imagine it.

The one in the Town Hall was huge!
They do have the Holy Family, but they also have all the villagers going around their daily visitors;
you might have a milkmaid flirting with the baker’s boy;
someone fishing from a bridge;
someone else with a cart full of wood,]the old men sitting on a bench watching the world go by,
a couple of women gossiping outside a shop, and so on.
The more you look, the more you see.

I wish I could show you some of the pictures I took of it,
and of one I saw in an exhibition of cribs in a church in Alsace last year!
I love this Provençal tradition.
You see, unlike many crib traditions, it reminds us that Bethlehem was, and is, a village, and Mary and Joseph were not isolated.
We tend to think of them as travelling alone –
just Mary, Joseph and the donkey –
but of course they would have gone to Bethlehem with a group of other travellers;
it wasn’t safe, else.

And realistically, the manger would have been on the step separating the animal part of the house from the human part,
and there would probably have been a great many women,
mostly relations, helping Mary with the birth and afterwards.

We don’t think of animals as sharing living-space with humans, as we only do that with our pets,
but of course the cattle and horses or donkeys would have helped keep the house warm in the winter, and was the norm back in the day.

Yes, there were signs that this wasn’t just another human baby being born at a most inconvenient time.
Yes, the shepherds came to visit –
but they might well have been family, don’t you think?
And yes, Anna and Simeon did respond to the promptings of God’s Spirit,
and knew that they had seen their salvation.
But from the human point of view, Mary and Joseph were just doing what all Jewish families did –
they had their son circumcised at eight days old, and then, at forty days old, they took him to the Temple to redeem him from God –
the first and the best of everything belongs to God, so that parents would redeem him by paying a small sum and having ritual prayers said over him, these always invoking Elijah.
Everybody did that, if they could.

And then they went back to Nazareth –
again, travelling in a party for safety –
and Jesus would have grown up in an extended family, lots of aunts and uncles and cousins around, and, in due course, brothers and sisters.
He would have learnt to roll over, and to sit up,
and in due course to stand and walk, and talk, and be potty-trained;
he’d have had to learn when not to talk,
and when he needed to sit still and listen.
He’d have gone to school with the other kids his age,
and learnt to read and write, especially the Scriptures.
He’d probably have hung round Joseph, and learnt basic carpentry, even before his formal apprenticeship when he was 13 –
and, at that, he probably learnt some interesting words to say when he hit his thumb with a hammer!

And each year they would go to Jerusalem, to the Temple.
Again, they would travel in groups and caravans.
At first Jesus would be carried on his father’s back,
and then kept close to his parents,
but as he grew older, he’d be off with his friends,
running ahead and being told not to go out of sight,
or lagging behind and being told to keep up.

They’d gather round the camp fire in the evening and sing the traditional songs.

And then the kids were coming twelve years old.
Now, in Jewish circles, you were considered a man at the age of 13,
and from then on could be asked to read, and comment on, the Scriptures at any time.

These days they have a ceremony called a “Bar Mitzvah”, or a “Bat Mitzvah” for girls,
where the child in question reads a passage from Scriptures, translates it, and then preaches on it –
my daughter went to a friend’s daughter’s Bat Mitzvah last term, and was very impressed by her performance.
They also have a party, either immediately afterwards or later the same day.

In Jesus’ day, they didn’t have the ceremony, but every boy –
not girls, back in the day, alas –
every boy approaching his 13^th birthday knew he could be called on at any time after his birthday.
Their teachers would have been focussing on this during the school year,
and probably some of the boys were getting nervous.
It was probably their last school year –
they would be leaving soon to work with their fathers, and learn their father’s trade.
They weren’t children any more –
at thirteen, they would be considered men.

That year, they all went up to Jerusalem as usual, and attended the Passover festivities, and then gathered together to go home again.
And it wasn’t until next day they discovered that there Jesus wasn’t!
His parents had assumed he was off with his friends as usual,
but suddenly, horrifyingly, nobody had seen him.
His parents rushed back to Jerusalem –
they didn’t like to go on their own, but this was an emergency –
and found him still in the Temple, deep in discussion with the scribes.

You see, as Jesus had studied the Scriptures, he became engrossed in them.
God helped them become real to him.
And, of course, Jesus had endless questions.
I'm sure his parents did their best to answer him, but perhaps they didn't know all that much themselves.
And his teachers, perhaps, didn’t have the time they would have liked to answer his questions –
or perhaps he wanted to go more deeply into these things than they cared to do in an academic environment.
And when he reached Jerusalem that year, he found all that, for then, he was seeking with the scribes in the Temple.
They knew.
They could answer his questions, in the way that the folks back home in Nazareth could not.
They could deal with his objections, listen to him, wonder at his perspicacity at such a young age.

I hope the scribes didn’t laugh at him;
it's not clear from the text, but they might have.
But probably not, if his questions were sensible and to the point.

And Jesus, typically adolescent, totally forgets about going home,
forgets that his parents will have kittens when they find he's not with them, forgets to wonder how he's going to get home,
or even where he's going to sleep –
or, perhaps, thinks a vague mention of his plans was enough.
Anyway, Aunt Elizabeth and Uncle Zach will put him up, he’s quite sure.

And when his parents finally find him,
like any adolescent, he says “You don’t understand!”
And, rather rudely, “I have to be about my Father’s business!”

Poor Joseph –
not very kind, was it?
We aren’t told what happened next,
whether they hurried to catch up with their original caravan,
or had to wait until the next one was going in that direction.
We aren’t told whether Jesus was grounded for a few days when they did get home, or what.

Come to that, we aren’t told whether he actually knew anything about who he was.
He’d probably grown up in the normal rough-and-tumble of village life,
but then, when they started studying the Scriptures in good earnest,
something came alight in him.
He began to catch glimpses of God,
of That Which Is,
of the Thought that Thought the World…
and he longed and longed to know more.

Later on, of course, he would realise that
searching the Scriptures was not enough.
Remember what he said to the Pharisees:
“You search the scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life;
and it is they that testify on my behalf.
Yet you refuse to come to me to have life."

He knew that you needed more than just the words on the page –
but at twelve years old, this was what had intrigued him, fascinated him, to the point of ignoring anything else.

But why does this matter?
For me, it’s about Jesus being human as well as divine.
He didn’t come fully formed from his father’s head,
like some of the Greek or Roman gods are alleged to have done.
He didn’t grow up in splendid isolation, just with his parents,
and later, with his mother alone.

Even if, as it appears from Matthew’s gospel,
the family had lived in Bethlehem until they had had to flee into exile,
they would probably have resettled in Nazareth because they had family there, rather than just choosing it at random.

The thing is, he grew up in the midst of other people.
They say it takes a village to raise a child,
and Jesus grew up in that sort of village!
He had lots of examples to follow,
both of how to behave and of how not to.

I hope he didn’t know how special he was, not until much later.
But he did grow up loving God.

It’s not always easy, at this distance, to see the human Jesus, is it?
We see him as divine –
and so he is,
but he is also human.
His experiences may not have been exactly the same as ours,
as he grew up in a very different culture.

All the same, if he was 13 years old today, he’d be glued to his phone,
getting WhatsApp messages from his friends every few minutes,
gradually being allowed more freedom to go out with his friends, and so on, like my grandsons, who are 11 and 14, so just that sort of age!

And when my daughter was adolescent, I spent a LOT of time with this story!

(You may want to listen to the audio at this point, as I spent a few minutes talking about the fact that Jesus comes to us as communities as much as, if not more so, than as individuals)

And I do think it’s important to see Jesus as human as well as divine, because it makes him –
at least, I find it does –
much more approachable, much more real,
much more able to empathise with me, and plead my cause with God.
On Christmas Day, K reminded us, at Brixton Hill, that God came down into the mess and muddle of this world.
He’s been here; he knows what it’s like.
He’s not just the baby in the manger;
he’s not just the adolescent boy following his obsessions to the exclusion of all else;
at that, he’s not even the still figure on the Cross.
He is any and all of those things, he is Jesus Christ,
and he is our Lord and Saviour.
Amen.

Carol Service 2024

 

“So hush the noise, ye men of strife, and hear the angels sing!”

That is the theme the Methodist church has suggested we consider during the festive season this year, and really, what with one war and another going on around the world, it really couldn’t be more appropriate. The words come, as you know, from the carol “It came upon the midnight clear”, which we’re going to sing in a minute or so.

There is just too much war going on in the world this year – Ukraine, Israel, Syria, Sudan…. So it goes. We know that, even while we are celebrating, people all over the world are suffering. And, closer to home, we know that there are many people who will be struggling to put a festive meal on the table on Wednesday, never mind find presents for their family. Just ask those who help out at the foodbank each week! Father Christmas won’t be calling at those homes.

And for the rest of us, Christmas can be a bit manic – all that last-minute shopping, and you know as well as I do that the supermarkets will have run out of the one thing you really went in for…. And the stress of whether you have forgotten something vital!

There’s a poem that went round social media the other day – you may have seen it. But it resonated with me on this year’s theme of “hush the noise”. It’s by someone called Meredith Anne Miller, and goes like this:

Christmas is not here to offer
a four-week escape
from the pain of the world
with a paper-thin layer of twinkle lights.

It is not here to anaesthetise us
with bows and eggnog lattes.

Christmas is not offering us the chance
to escape the ache of life
through piles of presents.

Christmas is God saying,
“Yes, this pain is too much. Yes, it is too sad.
Yes, the ache is too great. Hang on.
I’ll come carry it with you.”
© Meredithannemiller

“I’ll come carry it with you.”
“Hush the noise.”

Let’s try to spend a few minutes each day hushing the noise, relaxing, and becoming aware that God has come to carry it all with us. Amen.

Preparing for Christmas

 

So today is Advent Sunday.
It's the first Sunday in the Church's Year, and, of course, the first in the four-week cycle that brings us up to Christmas.
Christmas is definitely coming –
if you go by what the supermarkets do, it's been going on since September!

It seems strange then, doesn't it, that the readings for this Sunday are about as un-Christmassy as you can get!
This from the Gospel we've just heard:

“There will be strange things happening to the sun, the moon, and the stars. On earth whole countries will be in despair,
afraid of the roar of the sea and the raging tides.
People will faint from fear as they wait for what is coming over the whole earth, for the powers in space will be driven from their courses.
Then the Son of Man will appear, coming in a cloud with great power and glory.
When these things begin to happen, stand up and raise your heads, because your salvation is near.”

It's all about the end of the world!
The time when Jesus will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, as we say in the Creed.
Now, there are frequently scares that the end of the world is about to happen –
some cult or other claims to have deciphered an ancient text that tells us that it might occur on any given date –
Some years ago, people thought a Mayan calendar was predicting the end of the world, which would have been a serious waste of all the Christmas presents we had been buying and making that year!
Of course, it didn’t happen!
And it was only one of a very long line of end-of-the-world stories which people have believed.
Sometimes they have even gone as far as to sell up all their possessions and to gather on a mountain-top,
and at least two groups committed mass suicide to make it easier for them to be found, or something.
I don't know exactly what....
And because some Christians believe that when it happens,
they will be snatched away with no notice whatsoever, leaving their supper to burn in the oven, or their car to crash in the middle of the motorway, some people set up, half as a joke but also have serious, a register of pets, so that if it happened, non-believers, who would be, they thought, left behind, will look after your pets for you! I don’t think the site is still active, but it was for a couple of years, back in the day.

But the point is, Jesus said we don't know when it's going to happen.
Nobody knows.
He didn't know.
He assumed, I think, that it would be fairly soon after his death –
did anybody expect the Church to go on for another two thousand years after that?
Certainly his first followers expected His return any minute now.

What is clear from the Bible –
and from our own knowledge, too –
is that this world isn't designed to last forever;
it's not meant to be permanent.
Just ask the dinosaurs!
We don't know how it will end.
When I was a girl it was assumed it would end in the flames of a nuclear holocaust;
that particular fear has lessened in 1989,
but has returned a bit with Russia making ominous noises.
These days we also think in terms of runaway global warming,
or perhaps a global pandemic far worse than what we endured a couple of years ago,
or a major asteroid strike.
But what is clear is that one day humanity will cease to exist on this planet.
We don't know how or when,
but we do know that God is in charge and will cope when it happens.

Christmas is coming.
Jesus said, of his coming again,
“Look at the fig tree and all the trees.
When they sprout leaves, you can see for yourselves and know that summer is near.
Even so, when you see these things happening,
you know that the kingdom of God is near.
Truly I tell you, this generation will certainly not pass away until all these things have happened.  
Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will never pass away.”

No, we are still reading Jesus' words today.
And just as we know summer is coming when the days get longer and the leaves start to shoot, so we know that Christmas is near when the shops start selling Christmas stuff!
But Jesus goes on to give a warning:
“Be careful, or your hearts will be weighed down with carousing, drunkenness and the anxieties of life, and that day will close on you suddenly like a trap.  For it will come on all those who live on the face of the whole earth.  
Be always on the watch, and pray that you may be able to escape all that is about to happen,
and that you may be able to stand before the Son of Man.”

Certainly we appear to celebrate Christmas with carousing and drunkenness, more often than not.
And who isn't weighed down with thoughts of all the preparation for the big day that is going to be necessary?
Whatever am I going to give this person, or that person?
So-and-so wants to know what I should like –
what should I like?
Have I got all the turkey-pudding-mince pies-Christmas Cake-Brussels Sprouts and so on organised?
Who have I not sent a card to, and won't they be offended?
You know the scenario.

But what is Christmas really about?
In much of the country it's been reduced to an extravaganza of food and booze and presents.
And the Christians, like us, chunter and mutter about
“Putting Christ back in Christmas!”, as if He was not there anyway.
But even we tend to reduce Christmas to a baby in a manger.
We render it all pretty-pretty,
with cattle and donkeys surrounding the Holy Family,
shepherds and kings, and so on.
Which is fine when you're two years old, but for us adults?
We forget the less-convenient bits of it –
the fact that Mary could so easily have been left to make her living as best she could on the streets,
the birth that came far from home –
at least, in Luke's version of the story.
Matthew's version says that they lived in Bethlehem anyway.
We forget about the flight to Egypt that Matthew tells us about so dramatically,
and the children whom Herod is alleged to have had killed in Bethlehem to try to avoid any rivalry by another King of the Jews.
We forget that it was the outsiders, the outcasts –
the shepherds, outcast in their own society, or the wise men from the East, not Jewish, not from around here –
it was they who were the first to worship the new-born King.

But the point is, it's not just about that, is it?
We'll teach the babies to sing “Away in a Manger”,
and it's right and proper that we should.
We kneel at the cradle in Bethlehem, yes –
but we worship the Risen Lord.

We worship at the cradle in Bethlehem,
but we also worship Jesus all year round,
remembering not only his birth,
but his teachings,
his ministry,
the Passion,
the Resurrection,
the Ascension
and the coming of the Holy Spirit.
And we worship, not only as an abstract “Thing” –
what was that song:
“I will celebrate Nativity, for it has a place in history....” –
it’s not just about worshipping a distant divinity,
but about God with us. Emmanuel.

And that brings us full circle, for whether we are celebrating once again the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem,
or whether we are looking towards the end times,
as we traditionally do today,
what matters is God with us. Emmanuel.

Jesus said “When these things begin to happen, stand up and raise your heads, because your salvation is near.”
We know that we will be saved,
we have been saved,
we are being saved –
it's not a concept I can actually put into words,
as it's not just about eternal life but about so much more than that.
But “our salvation is near”.
Dreadful things may or may not be going to happen –
and they probably are going to happen, because Life is Like That –
but God is still with us.

Talking about the end of the world like that is called “apocalyptic speech”,
and very often, when people talked apocalyptically,
they were addressing a local situation just as much as the end times.
The prophets certainly were;
they had no idea we would still be reading their words today.
When Jeremiah said, as in our first reading,
“The people of Judah and of Jerusalem will be rescued and will live in safety,” he was thinking of a fairly immediate happening –
and, indeed, we know that the tribes of Judah did return after exile
and live in Jerusalem again.
But his words apply to the end times, too.

And the same with Jesus, I think.
Much of the disasters he spoke of will have happened within a few years of his death –
the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, for one thing.
Don't forget that he was in an occupied country at the time.
And all down the centuries there have been plagues
and wars
and floods
and famines
and earthquakes
and tsunamis
and comets and things;
every age, I think, has applied Jesus' words to itself.

So we are living in the end times no more and no less than any other age has been.
And in our troubled world, we hold on to the one certainty we have:
God with us.
Emmanuel.
Amen.

Bones and Bandages

 

“Son of man, can these bones live?”

Today’s readings are, of course, about resurrection.
About returning to life.
Ezekiel in the valley of the bones,
and Jesus with his friends in their distress.

Can you imagine a field of bones?
We’ve all seen skeletons on television, of course,
and some of us may have visited ossuaries on the continent,
which are usually memorials to soldiers who fell in the first world war,
and they put the bones of soldiers who have got separated from their identity into the ossuaries to honour them.
Robert and I went to one near Verdun, once; it's very impressive.

And the older ones among us may remember seeing pictures of a huge pile of bones in Cambodia after the Pol Pot atrocities of the 1970s.

I think Ezekiel, in his vision, must have seen something like that.
A huge pile of skulls and bones….
“Son of man, can these bones live?”

And, at God’s command, Ezekiel prophesied to the bones,
and then he saw the skeletons fitting themselves together like a jigsaw puzzle,
and then internal organs and tendons and muscle and fat and skin growing on the bare skeletons.
I’m sure I’ve seen some kind of computer animation like that on television, haven’t you?
But for Ezekiel, it must have been totally weird,
unless he was in one of those dream-states where it’s all rational.

But once the skeletons had come together and grown bodies, things were still not right.

Do you ever watch those television programmes where they try to build up an image of the person from his or her skull? They do it extremely well, although the one I saw of Richard III made him look just like the famous portrait of him!

The trouble is, of course, that they never look much like a real live person, but more like those photo-fit reconstructions that the police build up from people’s descriptions of villains.

And think how those dinosaurs that they reconstruct as computer animations, imagining what they may have looked and sounded like when all they really have is a fragment of bone! David Attenborough has done some programmes on them, and sometimes it’s difficult to remember that these are not real animals, only animations. They are much better than they used to be, but even still, the difference, in both the head reconstructions and the dinosaur programmes is that there is no life.
No spirit, no personality looking out through the eyes.

And that’s what Ezekiel saw in his vision –
there were just so many plastic models lying there, no life, no spirit.
Ezekiel had to preach to them again, and they eventually came to life as a vast army.

And then Ezekiel was told the interpretation of his vision –
it was a prophecy of what God was going to do for Israel, which at the time seemed dead and buried.
God was going to bring Israel back to life, to breathe new life into the nation, and put His Spirit into them.

---oo0oo---

I’ll come back to Ezekiel in a minute, but for now, let’s go on to the wonderful story of Lazarus.

The family at Bethany has many links in the Bible.
Some people have identified Mary as the woman who poured ointment all over Jesus’ feet in the house of Simon the Leper –
and because he lived in Bethany,
some people have also said that he was married to Martha.
We don’t know.
The Bible isn't very clear about which Mary was which,
apart from Mary the Mother of God,
and it certainly doesn't say that Martha and Simon were married to each other, although both of them probably were married.
We do know that Martha and Mary were sisters,
and that they had a beloved brother, called Lazarus.
We do know that on one occasion Mary poured her expensive perfume all over the feet of the Lord –
whether this was the same Mary as in the other accounts or a different one isn't clear
But whatever, they seem to have been a family that Jesus knew well,
a home where he knew he was welcome,
and dear friends whose grief he shared when Lazarus died.

In some ways the story “works” better if the woman who poured ointment on Jesus’ feet in the house of Simon the Leper and this Mary are one and the same person,
as we know that the woman in Simon’s house was, or had been,
some kind of loose woman that a pious Jew wouldn’t normally associate with.
Now she has repented and been forgiven,
and simply adores Jesus,
who made that possible for her.
And she seems to have been taken back into her sister’s household,
possibly rather on sufferance.

But then she does nothing but sit at Jesus’ feet, listening to him.
Back then, this simply was Not Done.
Only men were thought to be able to learn,
women were supposed not to be capable.
Actually, I have a feeling that the Jews thought that only Jewish free men were able to learn.
They would thank God each morning that they had not been made a woman, a slave or a Gentile.
And even though St Paul had sufficient insight to be able to write that “In Christ, there is neither male nor female, slave nor free, Jew nor Gentile”, thus at a stroke disposing of the prayer he’d been taught to make daily, it’s taken us all a very long time to work that out,
and some would say we haven’t succeeded, even now.

Anyway, the point is that Mary, by sitting at Jesus’ feet like that,
was behaving in rather an outrageous fashion.
Totally blatant, like throwing herself at him.
He might have felt extremely uncomfortable,
and it’s quite possible that his disciples did.
Martha certainly did, which was one of the reasons why she asked Jesus to send Mary through to help in the kitchen.
But Jesus replied:
“Mary has chosen what is better, and it will not be taken away from her.”

Mary, with all her history, was now thirsty for the Word of God.
Jesus was happy enough with bread and cheese, or the equivalent;
he didn’t want a huge and complicated meal.
He wanted to be able to give Mary what she needed,
the teaching that only he could provide.
He would have liked to have given it to Martha, too,
but Martha wasn’t ready.
Not then.

But now….. now it’s all different.
Lazarus, the beloved brother, has been taken ill and died.
It’s awful, isn’t it, when people die very suddenly?
I know we’d all rather go quickly rather than linger for years getting more and more helpless and senile,
but it’s a horrible shock for those left behind.
And, so it seems, Lazarus wasn’t ill for very long, only a couple of days.
And he dies.

It must have been awful for them.
Where was Jesus?
They had sent for him, begged him to come, but he wasn’t there.
He didn’t even come for the funeral –
which, in that culture and climate, had to happen at once,
ideally the same day.
The two women, and their families if they had them, were observing the Jewish custom of “sitting Shiva”,
sitting on low stools indoors while their friends and neighbours came to condole with them
and, I believe, bring them food and stuff so that the bereaved didn’t have to bother.

But Martha, hearing that Jesus is on his way, runs out to meet him.
This time it is she who abandons custom and propriety to get closer to Jesus.
And it is she who declares her faith in Him:
“Yes, Lord, I believe that you are the Christ,
the Son of God, who is come into this world!”

And Mary, too, asserts that if Jesus had been there,
Lazarus would not have died.
But it is Martha, practical Martha, who overcomes her doubts about removing the gravestone –
four days dead, that was going to smell rather, wasn’t it?
But she orders it removed, and Jesus calls Lazarus forth.

And he comes, still wrapped in the bandages they used for preparing a body for burial.
When Jesus is raised, some weeks or months later, the grave-clothes are left behind, but we are told that this didn’t happen to Lazarus.
The people watching had to help him out of the grave-clothes.

---oo0oo---

Of course, I think the point of these two stories –
and the point of linking them together in the lectionary –
is fairly obvious.
Life comes from God.
In Ezekiel’s vision, God had to breathe life into the fitted-together skeletons,
or they were no more than computer animations,
or dressmakers’ dummies.
And it was God who, through Jesus, raised Lazarus from the dead.
Without God, Ezekiel’s skeletons would have remained just random collections of bones.
I think that this may have been a dream or a vision, rather than something that actually happened, but it makes an important point, even still.
God said to Ezekiel that just as, in the dream, he had breathed life into the skeletons, so he would breathe new life into the people of Israel.

And the story of Lazarus, of course, foreshadows the even greater resurrection of Jesus himself,
a resurrection that left even the grave-clothes behind.
Lazarus, of course, will have eventually died permanently, as it were, when his time had come;
Jesus, as we know, remains alive today and lives within us through the power of the Holy Spirit.

So what have these stories to say to us, here in the 21st century?
We don’t find the idea of a fieldful of bones coming together and growing flesh particularly special –
computer animations have seen to that.
And we don’t expect to see the dead raised –
more’s the pity, in some ways;
maybe if we did, we would.
Then again, that doesn’t seem to be something God does very often in our world.

But I do think that there are two very important things we can take away with us this morning.

The first thing is that God can make dry bones live again.
Sometimes we despair, I know, when we look round and see the state of the church today –
tiny, elderly congregations that aren’t really viable, churches having to close or only have one or two services a month, and so on.
Or we might see services where people’s emotions are manipulated by big-name preachers and vast stage shows.
Or we see churches where whole groups of people are demonised and condemned.
And we wonder, “Can these bones live?”
Is God really still here?
But, you know, there are signs of spring –
the other week, there was what they are calling a “revival” in a small town in the USA called Asbury.
It is, of course, far too early to tell whether this will bear fruit in the form of genuine repentance and changed lives,
or whether people were simply caught up in some kind of mass emotionalism, all too easy to do.
But if it is real, if it is resulting in changed lives….
Well…. Can these bones live?

The second thing that is that it’s all God’s idea.
Our relationship with God is all his idea –
we are free to say “No, thank you”, of course,
but in the final analysis, our relationship with God depends on God,
not on us.
I don’t know about you, but I find that really liberating –
I don’t have to struggle and strain and strive to stay “on track”.
When I fall into sin, I am not left all by myself,
but God comes after me and gently draws me back to himself.
I can just relax and be myself!

Our relationship with God is God’s idea.
It is God who breathes life into us.
It is God who brings us back when we go astray.
It is God who helps us to change and grow and become the people we were created to be, designed to be.
It is God who breathes life into the dry bones of our spirituality, who calls us out of the grave, who enables us to grow and change.
Amen, and thanks be to God!