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!

Job and Remembrance

 

“I know,” said Job, “that my Redeemer lives, and that in the end he will stand upon the earth.

And after my skin has been destroyed, yet in my flesh I will see God.”

We are all very familiar with those words,

whether we know them from Handel’s Messiah

or from Martha’s reprise of them in John’s Gospel,

or even from this bit of the book of Job, which is where it came from originally.

It's a funny old story, isn't it, this story of Job.

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 type –

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.

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.”

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. Indeed, my father asked me to read Job 39 at his funeral, which I duly did, with a brief explanation. And we read it to him a couple of times as he lay dying. He especially loved the bit about the warhorse that I quoted above.

And at the end, 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 even still, Job makes one of the central declarations of our faith:

“I know, that my Redeemer lives, and that in the end he will stand upon the earth.

And after my skin has been destroyed, yet in my flesh I will see God.”

“In my flesh, I will see God.” I wonder how much comfort that verse really is, when your cities are being bombed and your energy supplies disrupted, your children’s education interrupted and maybe you are even forced to flee your country and depend on the kindness of strangers for a roof over your head.

As has been happening, as I’m sure you know, in Ukraine over the past few months and, although things seem to be going badly for Russia just now, there is no sign of an end, or even a ceasefire. Many of you may know, or know of, Ukrainian refugees who are in this country temporarily until things improve. My sister-in-law is giving house space to one family, and I believe they are great friends, but naturally the family wants to go home. The son has already gone – he wanted to go and fight, but I think he has been persuaded to finish his university course first. But there are plenty of others – I know a girl who needs a room to rent; she has a good job that she can do remotely, but can’t afford a flat at London prices on Ukrainian wages!

You know, in many ways we have been very lucky here in the UK. Yes, this war is bringing increased energy prices – and increased profiteering by the energy companies – but we don’t, yet, have to suffer bombs and foreign soldiers stamping around killing the men and raping the women on the slightest provocation. Not yet, and I pray God we never will.

We were blitzed once, still just about within living memory – you can still see the scars in many local roads, with 1950s housing next to the 19th-century stock that remains. I pray it will be the last time, and I pray our armed forces will never be required to go and bomb foreign cities, too.

Today is the day we remember those servicemen and women who have given their lives in the service of their country. I don’t know about you, but I do know that I lost at least three relatives in the First War, two of whom have no known grave but are commemorated on the various memorials in and around Arras. The third one has a grave – my brother has just visited it and sent me photographs – in a tiny cemetery literally in the middle of nowhere, about two kilometres from the main road! And my father, and one of my grandfathers, saw service in the Second World War, too. I’m sure your families may have similar stories to tell, of people who served their country in this way. And, of course, not just those in the armed forces, but those who risked their lives bringing desperately-needed provisions across seas studded with enemy submarines, or who were dropped “behind the lines” to help the Resistance movements. And the countless millions whose lives were simply interrupted by the way – evacuated to safe areas, or directed to jobs that helped the “war effort”, such as making munitions or working on the land. All these we remember, too.

There are those who say that Remembrance services glorify war.
I think not.
They are not easy, of course.
For those who have been involved in war,
whether actively or by default because their whole country was,
they bring back all sorts of memories.
For those who have not been involved, they can seem irrelevant.

Many Christians, too, think that all fighting and killing is wrong,
and refuse to join the armed forces, even in a time of conscription.
I’m inclined to agree, I have to admit, but for one thing –
do we really want our armed forces to be places where God is not honoured?
That’s the big problem with Christian pacifism –
it leaves the armed forces very vulnerable.

We must, of course, do all we can to bring peace.
But almost more important is to bring hope.
To bring the good news that
Job, and then Jesus proclaimed.
“I KNOW that my Redeemer lives.”
“God IS the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob.”

We all find the concept of eternal life enormously comforting, of course.
You may well have known people who have died very suddenly; I know I have.
We may have known people who have been the victims of terrorist attacks, or just the random shootings and stabbings that seem to have happened far too often recently.
And we wonder, as Job must have done, where God is in all this.
Job, we are told, never lost faith –
but many people did when they saw the horrors of war.

But if God grants people eternal life,
if this life is not all there is,
if the best bit is still to come,
then death isn’t a total, unmitigated disaster.
Of course it is a disaster.
Of course we hurt, and ache, and grieve, and miss the person who has gone.
But we can know they haven’t gone forever, and it does help!

“In my flesh I shall see God.” It may not be much comfort when God seems far away and the enemy near, but it is something to hold on to in times of trial.

I certainly believe in eternal life!
Some preachers will say that God limits those who can get into heaven to those who have professed faith in Jesus,
but I think it is rather we who exclude ourselves than God who excludes us.
People who are seriously anti-God,
seriously anti-faith,
wouldn’t be comfortable in eternal life, would they?

God is a God of love, a God who delights in us,

who loves each and every one of us so much that Jesus came to die so that we can have eternal life.
“I KNOW that my Redeemer lives and that in the end he will stand upon the earth.
And after my skin has been destroyed, yet in my flesh I will see God.”

What Belongs to God

Sadly, I messed up the recording for this service!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

the Irish ones have a harp.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So the Roman coins carried a double whammy for them.

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

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

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

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

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

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

But that was then, and this is now.

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

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

who were out to trap Jesus by any means possible,

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

The question is a total trick question, of course.

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

so should they pay their poll tax, or not?

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

it’s okay to be Romanised;

it’s okay to collaborate with the occupying power.

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

So Jesus asks for a coin.

I expect it was the Herodians who produced one –

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

And he asks whose image –

eikon, the word is –

whose image is on the coin?

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

And we all know what he said next:

Give to the Emperor what belongs to the Emperor;

give to God what belongs to God.

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

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

God forbid, and I mean that!

If our commitment to God means anything at all,

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

or at work on Monday

or out at the pub on a Friday!

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

whether we are called to be plumbers or politicians,

bankers or builders,

retired or redundant!

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

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

So what is Jesus saying?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maybe the clue is in that word image - eikon.

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

If our picture were on a coin,

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

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

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

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

and they go all tarnished,

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

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

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

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

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

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

No need to choose –

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

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

we give ourselves to God, and the rest follows!

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

but owing God a far greater amount –

our very being?

Yes, that is definitely part of it.

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

and yes, that does make me feel old!

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

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

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

and empowers us, by the Holy Spirit.

So yes, we do owe God our very being –

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

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

we do, of course, but we know that!

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

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

to empower it,

we will never really fulfil our potential as human beings.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

a child –

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yes, they have got things tragically wrong.

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

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

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

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

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

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

distorting Christianity into something very much less than it is –

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

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

We don't have to do it ourselves.

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

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

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

But the coins that bear God's image –

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

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

Amen.

Mr Moneybags and the Big Issue seller

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And you know the rest of the story.
Abraham said, not ungently,
‘Son, remember that in your lifetime you received your good things,
while Lazarus received bad things,
but now he is comforted here and you are in agony.
And besides all this, between us and you a great chasm has been fixed,
so that those who want to go from here to you cannot,
nor can anyone cross over from there to us.’
And he pointed out that Mr Moneybags’ five brothers,
three ex-wives,
ten children,
twenty-five grandchildren
and the hordes of mistresses,
secretaries,
assistants
gofers
and general flunkies
wouldn’t listen to Laz if he were to go back and tell them –
they really knew it already, thanks to Moses and the Prophets.
You note, incidentally, that Mr Moneybags didn’t ask if he could go back!

I think this story must have come as a huge shock to Jesus’ hearers. You see, back in the day, wealth was seen as a sign of God’s blessing – look how Abraham and Isaac became rich, or look at Job! Job quite believed God had abandoned him when his riches were taken away from him, but at the end, they were restored tenfold.

But by and large, if you were rich, God had blessed you; if you weren’t, then not. However, and this is a huge however, if you were rich, you were obligated to look after the poor. You weren’t to use your position to make matters worse for the poor; quite the reverse, you were expected to do what you could to alleviate their poverty. The prophet Amos, in our first reading, is warning his readers, painting a picture of rich people who were supposed to be using their wealth to tend to the welfare of God’s people, they were using it for their own comfort; sleeping on raised beds of wood inlaid with ivory at a time when most people slept on mats on the floor; eating veal and lamb at a time when most people at little to no meat; basically not giving a stuff about what happened to the poor as long as they had their own comforts!

Just like the rich man in our story. Basically, what he, and the people against whom Amos fulminates, were not doing was allowing God to transform them. They were proud. C S Lewis pointed out that pride is a terrible sin because “As long as you are proud you cannot know God. A proud man is always looking down on things and people: and, of course, as long as you are looking down, you cannot see something that is above you.”

The rich man was proud. He thought himself better than Lazarus, and spent his time – well, not all of his time, but you know what I mean – looking down on him. So he couldn’t be looking up at God and allowing God to change him. He couldn’t be looking up at God and knowing that God was immeasurably greater than he was. He may or may not have paid lip-service to God – he probably did. But it was only lip-service as, indeed, his ordering the kitchen to give the scraps to Lazarus was.

It’s easy to pay lip-service, isn’t it? And much harder to be really involved. We can’t do it of ourselves, of course; we have to allow God into our lives to change us and grow us and transform us into the people he created us to be. And we can’t do that if we are busy looking down on other people – not necessarily the beggar outside the supermarket or the homeless man outside the Tube station, but, for instance, if we see somebody making a mess of a job, whether as a volunteer or in paid work, and we think how much better we could do it. Or if we see someone doing or thinking something we wouldn’t do or think, and again, we think how much better we are for not doing that.

Do you remember the Pharisee, in another story Jesus told, who thanked God that he wasn’t like the tax-collector in the next pew? “Oh God, I thank you I am not like this tax collector; I tithe and I fast and I’m generally a Most Superior Person, thank you very much.” But Jesus said it was the tax collector, who knew himself to be a sinner, who went away right with God on that occasion.

I heard a story once of a Sunday school teacher who was discussing this parable with her class, and at the end, she said “Now, let us thank God that we are not like this Pharisee”. Hmm – all well and good, until the moment I found myself thanking God that I was not like that Sunday School teacher! For me, it’s one of the most difficult things, not being pleased with myself for not being like someone I may or may not privately think isn’t doing a great job.

But that makes me like the Pharisee in Jesus’ story, like the rich man in today’s story. And while I am looking down on the tax collector or the beggar, I’m not looking up to God. And it’s only by looking up to God that I can stop looking down on the tax collector or beggar.

It’s one of those circular things, isn’t it? The more we can look up to God, the less we are able to look down on other people. And the less we look down on them, the more we are able to see them as people like us. Had the rich man really seen the beggar, he might not have treated him as a brother, but he might have told his people to see to it that he had warm clothes and a place to sleep, and a good meal each day – and maybe, as his self-esteem increased, even a job of some kind, assuming the beggar could hold down a job in the first place. But no, he just allowed him to be fed on scraps and otherwise ignored him.

We need to give thanks, not that we are better than this rich man, because we aren’t. St Paul says, “What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body that is subject to death? Thanks be to God, who delivers me through Jesus Christ our Lord!”

It is only through Jesus that we can be delivered from sin, and death, and only through him that we can become truly the people we were meant to be! Which you know, of course – I know you do – but it bears repeating every so often! Amen.

Lost and Found

 

Sheep are extremely silly animals.
They are always looking for innovative ways to get dead!

Whether it is becoming stuck on cliffs,

or in snowdrifts,

or brambles

or barbed wire,

or even hanging themselves on the fence,

or eating the wrong thing,

whatever,

a sheep will do its utmost to frustrate the shepherd’s attempts at keeping it alive!

And in the story that Jesus told in our Gospel reading,

the sheep has wandered off somewhere and got lost.

This is a very familiar story;
the Good Shepherd abandons all the rest of the sheep to go and find the lost one.
Because, we are told, there is more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents, than over the ninety-nine who never went astray.

And the woman who drops her valuable coin somewhere and who turns the house upside-down looking for it –
been there, done that, haven’t you?
The most recent thing we lost was a dozen eggs,

which sounds odd but I had bought two dozen in Belgium last week because they were on a BOGOF, or Buy One Get One Free offer,

but when we had unpacked and I came to look in the fridge, there was only one dozen there.
We had to go down to Sussex again that day, so we went to the motor home and turned it upside-down, looking in every cupboard, just in case they had been left there, but no joy,

and it wasn’t until we got back to London that I saw them sitting innocently on the corner of a chest where they had no business to be!
So we were delighted.
Sometimes I really think there is a black hole in the flat that swallows things and then spits them out again randomly,

usually when you are looking for something else!
Anyway, the woman in Jesus’ story did eventually find her coin,

perhaps when she was looking for something else, and called her neighbours –

who had, perhaps, been helping her look for it –

to share her joy.

These are the first two of the three stories Jesus told about finding things –

the third, of course, is the story that we know as the Prodigal Son, about the young man who insists on having his legacy now, without waiting for his father’s death, and heads off to make his fortune,

only to come crawling back when it all goes horribly wrong.
But we’ll leave that one for now, as it wasn’t part of today’s reading.

There is a subtle difference between the lost coin and the lost sheep.
You see, the coin couldn’t help getting lost.
It was probably attached to a headband that the woman normally wore, which was the custom in that time and place, apparently.
It probably formed part of her dowry –

a tenth of it, in fact, we are told, as she had ten coins.
And one having fallen off would be incredibly obvious, a great gap in the middle of her headband.
But it was nothing to do with the coin.
A coin is an inanimate object.
It couldn’t choose to twist off the headband and go exploring.
And when it had fallen off, it couldn’t attract attention to itself.

But the sheep wandered off of its own volition.
I don’t suppose it meant to go so far from the flock;
sheep do like being together, they are herd animals.
Which makes sense, since they are prey animals, and there is safety in numbers.

So a sheep that has got lost will bleat very loudly to try to attract attention.

But sometimes it’s difficult to come back.
Like the coin, we are dumb, we are stuck.
We have wandered away from God, and perhaps we don’t even want to come back.
Perhaps we don’t even realise we need to!


“Do these evildoers know nothing?” asks God in our first reading.
“They devour my people as though eating bread!”

“Fools,” we are told, “have said in their heart there is no God.”
They may or may not pay lip-service to Christianity, or other religions,

but they certainly don’t behave that way.
People who want to deny women the right to their own bodies.
People who want to deny women even the right to an education.

People who want to send refugees back where they came from,

or on to other countries who don’t want them, either.

People who want to give tax breaks to the rich,

while increasing the burden on the poor.

People who are quite happy to see others having to use food banks,

or not knowing how to feed or clothe their children.

People who are quite happy to allow energy prices to increase by far more than in other European countries,

even though we actually imported far less gas from Russia than many.

And so it goes on.
“They devour my people as though eating bread!”

But we know, too, that we’re not blameless.

We can’t sit here thinking “Thank God I’m not like that!”

because that would put us in the same pew as that Pharisee who thanked God because he felt he was righteous.

We do like to think of ourselves as better than others.
We know God doesn’t hate gays, or immigrants, or Muslims, or whoever the current hate group is right now.
Does that make us any better than those who think God does hate certain groups of people?
I don’t think so!
I’d like to think so, but, alas, I can’t.

You see, I’m human, too.
Just as you are.
Just as those who would deny others basic human rights are.
Just as those who deny God are.
We are all human, and we all need God.

Of course, there are many millions of people who don’t believe in God,

but who nevertheless lead honest, decent, upright lives, giving to charity,

being active against the worst excesses of our society, and so on –

please, don’t think there aren’t.

And God loves them every bit as much as God loves you and me,

and, of course, longs and longs for them to turn to him.

Because, like you and like me, they are human, and humans screw things up!

No matter how good and upright a person is,

whether or not they are God-fearing, they –

we –

screw things up.

Big-time.

The Bible calls it sin, and one of the definitions is missing the target.

Missing the good things that God has for us because,

like the lost sheep, we wander off after something that looks better.

So where am I going with this?
The thing is, we don’t like admitting we’ve made a nonsense.
We don’t like saying we’re up the creek without a paddle.
Or maybe we aren’t even aware that we’re lost!

Like the coin, we have no idea that we aren’t where we’re meant to be,

but are perfectly happy in the dust and dirt of a dark corner, or the cracks between the floorboards.

But then, coming back is not, according to these stories, our idea.
It is God who does the seeking.
Like the woman in the story turning her house upside-down to find the coin, God searches and searches and calls to us to come back to him.
The Good Shepherd pulls on his coat and wellies, grabs his staff, and goes out into the wind and rain to rescue the lost sheep.

We may feel that we ought not to expect God to come and rescue us if we’ve got into a mess through our own silly fault.
But then, how else would we get into a mess?
Yes, there are times when it feels as though God has abandoned us and, as far as we are aware, we have done nothing to deserve it.
We all go through those times of darkness, they appear to be a necessary part of the Christian journey.
And, like the coin, all we can do is wait quietly until we are found.
If you were at the circuit service last Sunday, you will have heard K read a story about a man who planted trees and then deliberately neglected them, requiring them to grow their own roots to get water, and in the end his trees were a lot stronger, and grew better, than those which were looked after more conventionally.
Maybe these times of darkness, where we feel God is neglecting us, are necessary to help us grow into the person we are meant to be.

But a great deal of the time we have got ourselves into a mess.

We may not have meant to –

or we may have done it deliberately.

And there we are, totally lost.
Caught in the brambles, unable or unwilling to move from our position.
All we can do is call out to God, just as the sheep will bleat when it hears someone coming.

Or maybe, even, we don’t really want to be found.
Maybe we are quite comfortable as we are, or maybe we aren’t, but can’t quite see how God could possibly forgive us and welcome us back.
But that’s the whole point, in a way.
If we have our act together, if we know we are “doing it right”, then we aren’t, just as the Pharisee in that other story Jesus told wasn’t.
He was convinced he was better than most people, and especially better than that tax-collector over there.
But he wasn’t.
And we aren’t.
You know what?
We’re no better and no worse than anybody else, and like anybody else, like everybody else, we need to allow the Good Shepherd to rescue us.

There will be no condemnation.
No blame.
No telling-off.
Not from the Good Shepherd.
We might have to put things right with other people –

that’s normal.
But as far as the Good Shepherd is concerned, there is just an enormous smile and, “There you are at last!
Come on, let’s go back to the others!”
Amen.