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.

“The vilest 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.

The Presentation of Christ in the Temple.

Last Wednesday was when the Church traditionally celebrates the Presentation of Christ in the Temple, which is the story we heard in our Gospel reading today. Many churches actually celebrated this last Sunday, but I only discovered that too late, too late....

Until recently, Christian women in many denominations would be “churched” about six weeks after giving birth –
either at a special service, or as a special prayer said in the main service, to give thanks for a safe delivery and so on.
It seems to have died out now, largely, I think, because the service was not transferred to the modern prayer books,
and arguably because childbirth is so very much safer than it used to be.
Shame, really –
it would be a lovely thing to happen whenever someone appeared in church with a new baby!
Imagine bringing your newborn baby to the front to be introduced to the church, and a prayer said over you – perhaps over both parents, if both are to be involved in the child’s upbringing – in thanksgiving for a safe delivery.
I think it would be lovely, and it would in no way detract from the importance of the child’s baptism a few weeks or months later.

For Jewish women, though, the ritual was also about purification.
They would, traditionally, go to be purified forty days after giving birth.
I am not totally sure what the process involved,
but fairly certainly Mary would have had a ritual bath before going to the Temple to make her thanksgiving,
and to present the baby.

The text says Mary and Joseph took a pair of pigeons to sacrifice –
interesting note that, because that's what you took if you were poor;
richer people sacrificed a sheep.
And if you were really, really poor and couldn't even afford a pair of pigeons, I believe you were allowed to take some flour.
But for Mary and Joseph, it was a pair of pigeons.

And they present the baby –
they would, I think, have done this for any child,
not just because Jesus was special.
And then it all gets a bit surreal, with the old man and the old woman coming up and making prophecies over the child, and so on.

Actually, the whole story is a bit surreal, really.
After all, St Matthew tells us that the Holy Family fled Bethlehem and went to Egypt to avoid Herod's minions,
but according to Luke, they're just going home to Nazareth –
a little delayed, after the census, to allow Mary and the baby time to become strong enough to travel,
but six weeks old is six weeks old,
and it makes the perfect time for a visit to the Temple.
The accounts are definitely contradictory just here,
but I don't think that really matters too much –
after all, truth isn't necessarily a matter of historical accuracy.

Come to that, I don't suppose Simeon really burst into song,
any more than Mary or Zechariah.
Luke has put words into their mouths,
rather like Shakespeare does to the kings and queens of British history.
Henry the Fifth is unlikely to have said “This day is called the Feast of Crispian” and so on,
or “Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more”,
but he probably rallied the troops with a sentiment of some kind,
and it is the same here.
Zechariah, Mary and Simeon probably didn't say those actual words that Luke gives them, but they probably did express that sort of sentiment.

Although I often wonder why it is that when Jesus reappears as a young man, nobody recognises him.
We don't hear of an elderly shepherd hobbling up to him and saying “Ah, I remember how the angels sang when you were born!”
But perhaps it is as well –
it means he had a loving, private, sensible childhood.
Which, I think, is partly why we see so very little of him as a child,
just that glimpse of him as a rather precocious adolescent in the Temple.
He needed to grow up in peace and security and love, without the dreadfulness of who he was and why he had come hanging over him.

But on this very first visit to the Temple,
he can't do more than smile and maybe vocalise a bit.
It is Simeon we are really more concerned with.
His song, which the Church calls the Nunc Dimittis,
after the first two words of it in Latin, is really the centre of today's reading.
He is saying that now, at last, he has seen God's salvation, and is happy to die.
The baby will be “a light to lighten the Gentiles, and the glory of God's people Israel.”

“A light to lighten the Gentiles”.
This is why another name for this festival is Candlemas.
Candlemas.
In some churches, candles are blessed for use throughout the year,
but as we are no longer dependent on candles as a light source, it might be more to the point to bless our stock of light bulbs!
Because what it's about is Jesus as the Light of the World.
A light to lighten the Gentiles, certainly,
but look how John's Gospel picks up and runs with that.
“The Word was the source of life,and this life brought light to people.
The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has never put it out.”
And John's Gospel reports Jesus as having said:
“I am the light of the world.
Whoever follows me will have the light of life and will never walk in darkness.”

Jesus is the Light of the World,
and that's part of what we are celebrating today.
We rather take light for granted, here in the West, don't we?
We are so used to being able to flick on a switch and it's light
that we forget how dark it can be.
On the rare occasions we have a power-cut, it feels really, really dark.
Even though we have an good emergency lantern and, of course, torches on our phones.
And candles, come to that –
I make sure we have a supply of emergency candles, just in case.

Not that a candle provides very much light, of course –
you can't see to read by it very well, or sew,
or any of the things people did before television and social media,
or, come to that, before houses were lit by electricity.
But even a candle can dispel the darkness.
Even the faintest, most flickering light means it isn't completely dark –
you can see, even if only a little.
And sometimes for us the Light of the World is like that –
a candle in the distance, a faint, flickering light that we hardly dare believe isn't our eyes just wanting to see.
But sometimes, of course, wonderfully, as I'm sure you've experienced, it's like flicking on a light switch to illuminate the whole room.
Sometimes God's presence is overwhelmingly bright and light.

And other times not.

This time of year is half way between the winter solstice and the spring equinox.
It's not spring yet, but the days are noticeably longer than they were at the start of the year.
There are daffodils and early rhubarb in the shops,
and the bulbs are beginning to pierce through the ground.
The first snowdrops will be out any day now.
In the country, the hazel trees are showing their catkins,
and if you look closely at the trees,
you can see where the leaves are going to be in just a few weeks.
We hope.

Candlemas is one of those days we say predict the weather –
like St Swithun's Day in July, when if it rains, it's going to go on raining for the next six weeks.
Only at Candlemas it's the opposite –
if it's a lovely day, then winter isn't over yet,
but if it's horrible, Spring is definitely on the way.
The Americans call it “Groundhog Day”, same principle –
if the groundhog sees his shadow, meaning if the sun is out, winter hasn't finished by any manner of means,
but if he can't, if the sun isn't shining, then maybe it is.

So it's a funny time of year, still winter, but with a promise of spring.
And isn't that a good picture of our Christian lives?
We still see the atrocities, the horror of terrorist attacks,
the pandemic that doesn’t go away,
the government that breaks its own rules
the worry about the tension between Russia and Ukraine.
We still see that we, too, can be pretty awful when we set our minds to it, simply because we are human.
We know that there are places inside us we'd really rather not look at.
We know, too, that when God’s light shines into those dark places, we have to look at them, like it or not!
And yet that light cleans and heals and forgives, as well as exposes.
It is definitely winter, and yet, and yet, there is the promise of spring.

There is still light.
It might be only the flickering light of a candle in another room, or it might be the full-on fluorescent light of an overwhelming experience of God's presence, but there is still light.

The infant Jesus was brought to the Temple, and was proclaimed the Light to Lighten the Gentiles.
But, of course, that's not all –
we too have that light inside us;
you remember Jesus reminded us not to keep it under a basket, but to allow it to be seen.
And again, the strength and quality of our light will vary, due to time and circumstances, and possibly even whether we slept well last night or what we had for breakfast.
Sometimes it will be dim and flickering, and other times we will be alight with the flame of God's presence within us.
It's largely outwith our control, although of course, by the means of grace and so on we can help ourselves come nearer to God.
But it isn't something we can force or struggle with –
we just need to relax and allow God to shine through us.
Jesus is the Light of the World, and if we follow Him, we will have the light of life and will never walk in darkness.
We will, not we should, or we must, or we ought to.
We will. Be it never so faint and flickering, we will have the light of life.

Amen.

Reassurance

Today's first reading in the New International Version reads, in part:

“He will stand and shepherd his flock
    in the strength of the Lord,
    in the majesty of the name of the Lord his God.
And they will live securely, for then his greatness
    will reach to the ends of the earth.
And he will be our peace
    when the Assyrians invade our land”

The Good News version phrases it slightly differently,
and the various translations seem almost equally divided as to whether there is a full stop after “He will be our peace,”
and the next sentence starting “When the Assyrians invade our land”,
or the phrasing that says that when the Assyrians invade our land,
He will be our peace.
Which is more true to the original Hebrew I don’t know;
I do know that I prefer the second version!

And I find that prophecy strangely comforting in these dark days!

“He will stand and shepherd his flock in the strength of the Lord,
in the majesty of the name of the Lord his God.”
“And he will be our peace when the Assyrians invade our land.”

However, as we all know, a text without a context is a pretext, so rather than just taking the words as a lovely Christmas prophecy –
which of course, on one level, they are –
let's look a bit deeper and find out a bit more about Micah,
and what he was talking about.

Micah was a prophet in 8th-century Judah,
more or less a contemporary with Isaiah, Amos and Hosea.
As with so many of the prophets, the book starts off with great doom and gloom.
He prophesied the destruction of Jerusalem,
particularly because they were simply dishonest and then expected God to cover for them:
“Her leaders judge for a bribe, her priests teach for a price, and her prophets tell fortunes for money.
Yet they lean upon the LORD and say, Is not the LORD among us?
No disaster will come upon us.”
But Micah said, “Well, actually....”
As one modern paraphrase puts it:
“The fact is, that because of you lot, Jerusalem will be reduced to rubble and cleared like a field;
and the Temple hill will be nothing but a tangled mass of weeds"

An archaeologist called Roland de Vaux has excavated village sites only a few miles from where Micah is thought to have lived, and he found something very interesting:
“The houses of the tenth century B.C. are all of the same size and arrangement.
Each represents the dwelling of a family which lived in the same way as its neighbours.
The contrast is striking,” says de Vaux, “when we pass to the eighth century houses on the same site:
the rich houses are bigger and better built and in a different quarter from that where the poor houses are huddled together.”

During those 200 years, Israel and Judah had moved from a largely agricultural society to one governed by a monarchy and with a Temple in Jerusalem.
The distinction between the “Haves” and the “Have nots” had grown, as it does still today.
In the tenth century, the “haves” may well have been richer than the “have nots”, and have had more luxuries, but their homes were basically the same, their lifestyles similar.
And then it changed.
But Micah tells the powerful ones –
the judges, the priests, the rulers –
that God doesn't prop up any so-called progress that is built on the backs of other people.
For God, justice and equality matter far more than progress or growth.
But God's people disagree, and they try to stop Micah, and other prophets, telling them God's truth;
they only want to hear comforting, agreeable prophecies about how their crops will flourish and there will be plenty of wine!

But when Jerusalem has been destroyed,
when her people have been carried off into exile,
then a day will come when a new leader will be born to them,
a leader who will “stand and shepherd his flock in the days of the Lord”,
and “who will be our peace when the Assyrians invade our land.”

I expect you realise that these prophecies were often dual-purpose;
they did and do refer to the coming of Christ, of course,
but they also often referred to a local event, a local birth.
We don't know who Micah was originally referring to,
who would be born in Bethlehem,
but we do know that, for us, these prophecies refer to Jesus.

“He will be our peace when the Assyrians invade our land.”
These days we worry rather more about Syrians than about Assyrians –
whether we are concerned about the number of refugees seeking asylum here, or whether we are more concerned, as we should be, about how relatively few our government is allowing in.
Some people, I know, worry that we shouldn't allow them in in case they turn out to be terrorists,
but those are the tiniest of tiny minorities among those fleeing Syria and Afghanistan,
and, indeed, most are fleeing just such terrorists at home.
I mean, how desperate do you have to be to try to cross the Channel in a leaky rubber dinghy, and then not be allowed to land?
Which is actually illegal on the part of our government –
if people genuinely want to seek asylum,
they should be allowed to land and apply through the appropriate channels.

We call them “migrants”, lumping them all under one umbrella.
The term is supposed to be neutral, less laden with emotional baggage than “refugee” or “asylum seeker”.
It isn't, of course, because people then talk about “illegal immigrants” or “economic migrants”.
And it's noticeable that if we Brits go to live abroad we aren't called migrants –
I did the whole economic migrant thing back in the 1970s,
when I went to work in Paris for some years after leaving school,
but nobody called me a “migrant”, economic or otherwise –
I was an expatriate!
And people talked about cultural exchange, and our young people learning about different lifestyles, and so on, and it was all considered a Good Thing.

And, of course, many of your families,
and perhaps some of you are the first generation who did so,
many of you came over here to work and contribute to our society and learn about our way of life –
and have enriched this country beyond all measure!
Maybe you can remember the bewilderment of arriving here,
not too sure of your welcome,
not too sure what life in this cold and rainy land was going to be like.

Even if someone does make it across the Channel,
their problems aren't yet over.
They aren't allowed to work while their claim for asylum is being processed, and although they do get an allowance, it really isn't very much.
Not really enough to live on, and certainly not enough for a comfortable lifestyle.
And if they are found not to be in imminent danger of death back home, they are thrown out again, and if that's on their records they can't really go and try their luck somewhere else in Europe.

I don't know what the answer long-term is.
The politicians will have to work that one out between them.
But we need to pray for all migrants, and do what we can to help.
That may be only donating a few pounds to the Unicef appeals that we see daily on our televisions,
or we may be called to do something more “hands-on”.
Whatever, though, we mustn't think of it as someone else's problem!

Because Jesus will be our peace, so Micah tells us.
If we believe Matthew's account, he was himself a refugee for awhile,
when they fled to Egypt to avoid Herod's troops.
As I understand it, God won't necessarily keep the bad times from us,
or protect us from what lies ahead,
but Jesus will be there with us in the midst of it all.
And I, personally, find that reassuring.

And there is, of course, the other “Assyrian” that invaded our world some twenty months ago now and turned all of our lives upside-down.
I’m speaking, of course, of the Covid-19 virus.
All of us have been affected; all of our lives have been touched in one way or another.
Even if we didn’t get ill, we have had to adapt to wearing masks
and using hand sanitiser frequently,
to getting vaccinated and boostered,
to testing regularly,
and, until July, we had to get used to unwarrantable intrusions into our personal freedoms.
I mean, did you ever think it would one day be illegal to sleep or eat anywhere other than in your own home?
I never did!

But it came, and it happened.
And we learnt that God was, and is, still with us in the pandemic.
When we couldn’t attend public worship, we discovered new and creative ways of being church together.
And that legacy lives on as many churches livestream at least some of their services –
Brixton Hill does every week,
and my daughter’s church is to livestream their carol service this evening;
I hope to watch at least part of it as my grandson is reading one of the lessons.
God has been with us in this pandemic,
no matter what it has felt like at times,
and God will still be with us for the rest of it, and when it is over.
All may not be totally well, but God will be with us.

Our Gospel reading, too, told of someone who badly needed reassurance.
Mary has just met the angel and been told that, if she will, she is the one who will bear God's son, and she has said “Yes”.
But it's early days yet –
there aren't any physical signs that she is pregnant,
she has never slept with a man, what is it all about?
But one thing the angel had told her, that she hadn't already known, was that her cousin Elisabeth, surely far too old to be having babies, was six months gone.
So Mary goes off to see Elisabeth –
incidentally this, for me, is one of the pointers that she was living in the Jerusalem area at the time,
whether at Bethlehem or Jerusalem itself –
tradition has it that she was ­one of the temple servants –
because she would never have been able to travel all that way between Nazareth and Jerusalem on her own.

Anyway, she arrives at Elisabeth's front door,
and there is Elisabeth with a large bump,
and Elisabeth, filled with the Holy Spirit, confirms all that the angel had said.
And Mary bubbles over into love and joy and praise,
and even if the words of the Magnificat are what St Luke thought she ought to have said –
rather like Henry the Fifth's speech at Agincourt being what Shakespeare thought he ought to have said, rather than what he actually did say –
even if they are not authentic, they are probably very close to reality!
We sung a metrical version of her song just a few minutes ago.
And it reminds us that God is turning accepted values upside-down by having His Son born to a virgin mother in a small town in an occupied land.

“Tell out, my soul, the greatness of his might!
Powers and dominions lay their glory by.
Proud hearts and stubborn wills are put to flight,
the hungry fed, the humble lifted high.”

In the culture of the day –
as in ours –
it was thought that prosperity was a sign of God's blessing, and poverty rather the reverse.
But no, that was not what Jesus was, or is, all about.
Instead, he himself was born to an ordinary family that, within a couple of years, was fleeing for its life into exile,
and when they did dare go home, they didn't dare go back so near Jerusalem, but moved up to the provinces.

Mary was so brave, saying “Yes” to God.
I don't know how much she understood, but of course Joseph could –
and seriously considered doing so –
have refused to marry her, and then where would she have been?
But the angel reassured Joseph, and Elisabeth reassured Mary.
All was not totally well, but God was with them.

And that's the message to take into this Christmas, isn't it?
With all the uncertainty about Covid, and the Omicron variant,
all the shenanigans in Downing Street leaving you wondering what the politicians really think,
all the worries about our loved ones,
especially those who haven’t had their booster yet.
All may not be totally well, but God is with us.
And God's son, Jesus, will be our peace when the Assyrians invade our land.
Amen.

Rejoice, but....

I forgot to start recording until after I'd read the verses from Zephaniah!  Podcast Garden has become so unreliable I am experimenting with uploading the audio from Google Drive.  Bear with me if it doesn't work!

"Rejoice in the Lord always;" says St Paul, "Again I will say, Rejoice."

And Zephaniah knew something about rejoicing, too.
It was our first reading:

"Sing aloud, O daughter Zion;
shout, O Israel!
Rejoice and exult with all your heart,
O daughter Jerusalem!"

I don't think I know very much about Zephaniah, do you?
He's not one of the prophets we usually read.
Apparently, though, nobody knows anything more about him than what he writes about himself.
He was a great-great-grandson of a king called Hezekiah –
and Hezekiah was the last so-called “good” king of Judah for several generations.
But when Zephaniah was prophesying and preaching,
his cousin Josiah was on the throne, and Josiah was another good king.

This is one of my favourite stories in the Bible, actually!
You see, Josiah's father Amon and his grandfather Manasseh had preferred to worship Baal, rather than God.
This is not too surprising, actually, because the next-door kingdom, Israel, had been taken over by Assyria,
and although Judah was nominally free,
in practice it was a vassal of the Assyrians,
so it made sense to worship the same gods that the Assyrians did.

What's more, those gods were a lot easier to worship than the Jewish God was.
They didn't ask you to behave in special ways.
You could influence them.
If you said the right words and did the right actions at the right time, they would make the harvest happen, that sort of thing.

And they didn't really mind who else you worshipped, or how you behaved, or what your thought.
It was much easier to worship them.

Josiah, however, probably prompted by his cousin Zephaniah,
decided that he was going to worship the Jewish God.
And in 621 BC, when Josiah was about 26, the King of Assyria died, and was succeeded by a much weaker person who didn't mind much about what the people of Judah did.
Josiah had already cleared out altars to other gods from the Temple, but apart from that, he hadn't dared do much more.
Now, however, he reckoned he could risk cleaning it up a bit.

So he sent his secretary, a man called Shaphan ben-Azalia, to go and ask the High Priest how much money they'd had in the collection lately, and to tell him to give it to the builders to repair the place and make it look smart again.

You are going through a lot more than just renovations, at Lambeth Mission, but I am sure you can empathise a bit with the High Priest here!

The High Priest was a man called Hilkiah.
While he was looking in the storeroom for the money,
he found a book about God's law.
And he decided to show it to the king.
We don't know whether Hilkiah had known the book was there and decided that now would be a good moment to show it to Josiah,
or whether it was a shock to him, too.

Scholars think that this book was at least part, if not all, of what we now know as the book of Deuteronomy.
They reckon it was written down during the reign of Josiah's grandfather and hidden away safely.
Up until then the priests had basically kept their knowledge of God's law in their heads, and it hadn't really been written down,
but this was a time of both persecution and indifference, and they were afraid that the time might come when there was no priest in the Temple,
and the people's knowledge of God might be lost.

As it was, a great deal had been lost, and the result of the discovery of the book was a great religious reform.

And it's in this context, scholars think, that Zephaniah was preaching.
It's actually thought that his book may not have been written down until a couple of hundred years later, because of the style of the writing and so on, but it seems to be based on contemporary happenings.
So it was probably written before about 622 BC,
and is definitely set in Jerusalem.

Most of the book is rather doom and gloomy.
Again, remember that this is being written in a time when most people aren't bothering to worship God,
and even those who want to aren't really sure how God is different from the neighbouring gods.
So there's a lot of prophecy about gloom and destruction and the usual sort of stuff you expect to read in the minor prophets, but after two and a half chapters of that, we suddenly get this glorious piece that formed our reading today.

The LORD, your God, is in your midst,
a warrior who gives victory;
he will rejoice over you with gladness,
he will renew you in his love;
he will exult over you with loud singing
as on a day of festival.

So, you see, it's not just we who rejoice, but God rejoices, too.
That's a great comfort, I think.
We are called to rejoice in God –
there are, apparently, over 800 verses telling us to rejoice and be glad,
so I rather think God means it.
And with God, if he wants us to do something, he enables us to do it.
We sometimes find it very difficult to rejoice, to be joyful.
But joy is a fruit of the Holy Spirit –
it's not something we have to manufacture for ourselves.
Joy is a fruit of the Holy Spirit.
And this means that it isn't something we have to find within ourselves.
It is something that grows within us as we go on with God and as we allow God the Holy Spirit to fill us more and more.
Joy grows, just as love, peace, patience, gentleness, goodness, kindness and self-control do.
We become more and more the people we were created to be, more and more the people God knows we can be.

That doesn't mean we'll never be unhappy, far from it.
It doesn’t mean we will never grieve.
It doesn’t mean we’ll never suffer from depression or other mental illnesses.
It doesn’t mean we’ll always be in perfect mental or physical health.
But we know, as St Paul also tells us, that God works all things together for good for those that love him.
Even the bad things, even the dreadful things that break God's heart even more than they break ours.
Even those.

We may be unhappy, we may be grieving, we may be poorly, we may be depressed.
But we can still be joyful, we can still rejoice,
because God is still God, and God still loves us.
Okay, sometimes it doesn't feel like that, but that's only what it feels like,
not what has really happened.
God will never abandon us, God will always love us.
God will weep with us when we weep.
And underneath there always is that joy, the joy of our salvation.

Christmas can be a very difficult time of year for many of us.
People who are alone, people who are ill, people who have been bereaved. Many rocky marriages finally come adrift at Christmas.
Last year was particularly difficult, when plans, however tentative, had to be cancelled at the last moment,
and I expect many people are jittery in case the same thing happens this year, although it seems less likely.
But we are still commanded to rejoice!
Not because of the tragedies, no way.
But in spite of them.

"Do not worry about anything,
but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving
let your requests be made known to God.
And the peace of God,
which surpasses all understanding,
will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus."

For John the Baptist, preparing for the coming of the Messiah meant, among other things, turning away from the old, wasteful ways and starting again. Sharing our surplus with those who haven't enough.
Tax-gatherers and soldiers are told to be satisfied with their wages, and not to extort extra from people who can ill-afford it.

John got very frustrated when people just wanted to hear him preach and laugh at him, rather than allowing their lives to be turned around.
There hadn't been a proper Old Testament-type prophet for a very long time, and naturally people flocked to hear him,
but they didn't want to deal with what he was actually saying.
But enough people did hear him to begin to make a difference in the world.
And they were ready when Jesus came.

We are going to be celebrating the coming of Jesus, of course we are.
If we are allowed, we may attend parties or family celebrations.
We're probably also going to eat and drink more than usual,
and give one another presents, and watch appallingly ghastly television,
and that can be quite fun, too, for a couple of days.

So we will rejoice, but we will be sensitive to those for whom it's almost impossible to rejoice at this time of year.
We will remember that the Israelites had to go through terrible times,
and their nation was all but destroyed. Paul himself suffered dreadful things – scourgings, imprisonment, shipwrecks, beatings....

But we can still remember, as we await the coming of the King, that:
"he will rejoice over you with gladness,
he will renew you in his love;
he will exult over you with loud singing."

"And the peace of God,
which surpasses all understanding,
will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus."

Amen.

Facing the Future

This time of year, it starts feeling that it’s all downhill until Christmas. We’ve had half-term, we’ve had Halloween, we’ve had Bonfire Night, we’ve had Remembrance Day. Next stop, Christmas!

Of course, for us Christians that isn’t strictly true, as we have Advent first, and the church is already in the countdown to Advent, which is why our readings today are about the future.

Isaiah is optimistic. He is looking far, far ahead to a time when people will routinely live to be well over a hundred, when there will be no more famine, no more war, no more weeping and wailing. People will not have to slave for others, but will work for themselves and live happy and contented lives, with no illness or misfortune.

Well, I don’t know what Isaiah was on when he wrote that, but his vision is still very far from being fulfilled, in these days when so many people are reliant on food banks, trafficking and slavery are a thing, racism is prevalent, the future is so wildly uncertain. It would be lovely if we were anywhere remotely close to what Isaiah saw, but, sadly we aren’t.

We’re much closer to what Jesus said about the future. He was with his friends in the Temple, which was still a fairly new building then, and they were marvelling at the beauty of it, rather as we might go into a cathedral and marvel at its beauty, too. And, let’s face it, our cathedrals and churches are, in many cases, very beautiful.

But Jesus said that the Temple would be pulled down, and not one stone left standing – and, indeed, by the time Luke was writing all this down, this had actually happened. Jerusalem had been overthrown and destroyed in AD 70 by the Romans, who were clamping down on the rebels who had tried to establish a provisional government there. I am reminded of Hungary in 1956 or Czechoslovakia, as it then was, in 1968, when the Soviet Union allowed rebellion for a short time but then clamped down. The Romans came with their equivalent of tanks, and overthrew the city, and destroyed it.

The Temple has never been rebuilt. For us Christians, it didn’t need to be, because Jesus had been the one, sufficient sacrifice, so Temple sacrifices were now obsolete. But for the Jews, of course, it was and has been a cause of immense sadness, especially as the site is now a famous Mosque.

But Jesus makes it clear that anything built by humans is only temporary in the grand scheme of things. And that life is going to be anything but peaceful, most of the time. There will be wars and earthquakes and famines and plagues – are we reading the Bible, or the newspaper? Even then, says Jesus, it’s not going to be the end.

It is futile to speculate, to try to decipher a timeline of events. Every generation, I think, has looked at these words of Jesus and reckoned it applied to them. And it probably has! It applies to us, of course – but it also applied to our parents and grandparents who lived through the cataclysms of the last century. It applied to those who lived through the Great Plague of the 17^th century and the Great Fire of London in 1666. It applied to those who lived through the various religious persecution of Tudor times – perhaps especially to them. Jesus said “They will seize you and persecute you. They will hand you over to synagogues and put you in prison, and you will be brought before kings and governors, and all on account of my name. And so you will bear testimony to me.” I am sure that both the Protestant martyrs in Queen Mary’s day and the Catholic ones murdered by the other Tudor monarchs – well, not actually by them, but you know what I mean – I’m sure they reckoned that these words were addressed to them.

And there was the Black Death, the Hundred Years’ War, and, of course, the various major earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, hurricanes and other natural disasters that have happened over the years.

We’ve just been to Pompeii, last month, and visited the town that was destroyed by an eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD. It was fascinating to see how they lived – you had the big houses, but most of them had let out their front rooms to shops. You could tell which were the shops, because they had had sliding doors, and you could see where they had been. And some of the shops had sold hot food – the local equivalent of McDonald’s or Burger King. There was a bakery, and we have seen a loaf of bread – burnt to carbon, of course – in an exhibition in Oxford about the food in Pompeii and contemporary Roman Britain. The exhibition is fascinating – do go, if you’re ever near Oxford, it’s on until 20 January. Anyway, the point is, they had things just like us, even muffin tins! They were people just like us, living lives similar to ours, enjoying the same kind of things we do – and their world came very abruptly to a very decisive end.

I think this is partly what Jesus was talking about. The end can come incredibly quickly and unexpectedly. Of course, many people get “notice to quit”, and know full well that they are going to die very soon. Others, however – well, it’s the road accident, the stroke, the heart attack, and “this night your soul will be required of you”, as Jesus said in the story he told about the rich farmer, who concentrated so much on gaining great harvests and making loads of money that he forgot about the things that really do last.

That, after all, is what is important. Jesus said that we will face persecution – well, we in the West don’t, just now, but that’s not true of all the world. Although some churches in the USA say they’re being persecuted, when they really aren’t…. they aren’t likely to get put in prison, or worse, for meeting to worship, or for telling other people about their faith and about Jesus. That, sadly, is not true in some parts of the world today. And who knows what it will be like here, in the future? We don’t know. We don’t know the future, we don’t even know our personal futures. Yes, we expect we’ll be leaving here and enjoying a good Sunday lunch, or perhaps we’re planning on going out to brunch, as lots of people do on a Sunday. We expect that tomorrow morning we’ll be heading off to work or college or school, or whatever we usually do on a Monday morning.

But things can change so quickly. A month’s worth of rain has recently fallen in the Midlands, causing rivers to burst their banks and homes to be flooded. In Australia, people’s homes, and, indeed, their lives are being menaced by bush fires – I have a friend who has spent the past few days on high alert, expecting that she and her family may have to evacuate their home any minute. Thus far, fortunately, that hasn’t happened, but….

The people in Pompeii and the neighbouring town of Herculaneum were enjoying their lives right up until the last few minutes, when the volcanic ash started to fall on them.

It is possible – not very probable, but possible – that we are in “the end times” and Jesus will return in glory, as we say we believe he will, to judge the living and the dead. But it’s far more probable that some natural or human-made disaster will intervene first. But whichever it is, we are expected to carry on with our lives as if they were going to go on forever. I didn’t choose to have the reading from the Epistle today, but it’s the one where Paul reminds the people of Thessalonia that they do have to work, even if they are expecting Jesus to come back at any minute. They still need to eat, and nobody is going to feed them! They must go and earn their livings, and expect Jesus to find them getting on with things.

Jesus is pessimistic about the future, and with hindsight we can see that he was right to be. Life is pretty good most of the time, except when it isn’t. And we don’t know when it will suddenly switch from being great to being ghastly. All we can do is trust Jesus, and trust that we will be shown what to say and what to do in the face of catastrophe.

And we mustn’t lose sight of Isaiah’s vision, either. One of thing things I specially noticed was that God is going to be there and speaking with us - “Before they call, I will answer, and while they are yet speaking, I will hear.” That contrasts with the dire warnings in the Old Testament about how the heavens will be shut up, and people will long and long to hear from God but it simply won’t happen.

I don’t know whether Isaiah’s vision can come true this side of heaven. It probably can’t. Jesus’ vision of the future seems really rather more probable. But does it have to be inevitable? I don’t know whether we can do very much to change things, to bring about the peaceable Kingdom that Isaiah foresaw, rather than the disastrous world that Jesus did. But shouldn’t we be trying? Shouldn’t we be doing what we can in the cause of peace and justice? In the cause of trying not to destroy our planet? In the cause of balancing humanity’s needs with those of the natural world? Maybe, just maybe, if enough of us did, it would tip the balance. Amen.

... And with all the company of Heaven

Today, 29 September, is the feast of St Michael and All Angels. Michaelmas, they used to call it, a term which still survives in Michaelmas daisies, which are in bloom at this time of year. It is a Quarter Day, when, back in the day, rents had to be paid, and rural employment contracts ran from one Michaelmas to the next, so you would have Michaelmas fairs in various towns which were hiring fairs – people whose jobs hadn’t been renewed, for whatever reason, would stand in lines with some token showing what their trade was – a dairyman, for instance, would probably have a piece of straw – so farmers in need of labourers could come and hire them.

You haven’t to pick blackberries after today, either – the old superstition is that the devil comes and pees on them or spits on them or something, and they are no longer worth eating. Basically, it is the end of summer and the start of autumn.

But who were St Michael and all the angels? Do angels even matter? If so, why do they matter to us? And what, if anything, does this festival mean to us today?

What are angels, anyway? They appear to be a different kind of creation, not human at all. I know we talk casually about someone “growing their wings” when they die, particularly of children, but in fact that’s probably not what happens. Our children will, I’m sure, be with God in heaven in some way, but probably not as angels!

There seem to be several different kinds of angels – Michael is described as an archangel, but he is the only one. Although tradition says Raphael, Gabriel and Uriel are also archangels, the Bible doesn’t describe them as such. But there are also seraphim – they are the ones with six wings that Isaiah saw, you may remember: two wings to cover their heads, two to cover their feet, or more probably their private parts, since “feet” is often a euphemism for that in the Bible, and two to fly with. And there are cherubim – not the chubby little baby angels of popular culture, which are more properly called putti, but very grand beings indeed. Two of them were stationed outside the Garden of Eden, with a flaming sword, to stop Adam and Eve going back in there after the Fall. And there were golden cherubim represented on the Ark of the Covenant, and images of them woven into the curtains of the Ark of the Covenant. And God, apparently, spoke to Moses from between the cherubim. And when the Temple was built, the Ark was placed between two great statues of cherubim, wooden statues overlaid with gold.

It’s amazing how often angels of various kinds do appear in the Bible. I did an on-line search, and they seem to be mentioned in practically every book! There are only two mentions of an Archangel, in one instance explicitly Michael, but pages and pages of angels, cherubim and seraphim. So they obviously do matter.

But what do they do? What’s the point of them? Certainly Michael is depicted as a warrior prince, fighting and defeating the evil one. And there is a book in the Apocrypha called the book of Tobit – if you have access to an Apocrypha, either a dead-tree version or on-line, have a read of it sometime. It’s actually a good story that hangs together. Tobit is a pious old man who goes blind when a bird poos on his eyes when he is asleep in the sun; his wife Anna is a bit of a nag; Sarah is possessed by a demon who kills any man she marries before he’s crossed the bedroom door – and she’s been married seven times so far, but is still a virgin. Tobit sends his son Tobias to collect some money he left with a relative some years earlier, and God sends the angel Raphael to accompany Tobias, posing as his cousin Azariah. Raphael helps Tobias defeat the demon and marry Sarah, and then goes and gets the money for him while Tobias and Sarah are on their honeymoon, and then when they get back he heals Tobit’s sight. And then he reveals who he is and departs, reminding them always to praise God.

Mostly, though, angels seem to be God’s messengers. In the Old Testament they tell Abram and Sarai that they are to have a child, much to their amusement; an angel fights with Jacob at Bethel; angels go before the Children of Israel to defeat their enemies and so on and so forth. Apparently there are 290 references to angels in the Bible, not counting cherubim and seraphim. Of these, 108 references are in the Old Testament and/or the Apocrypha, and 182 in the New Testament. Obviously we know about the role of the angels in the Nativity story – how the angel appears first to Zechariah in the Temple to announce John’s birth, then to Mary to tell her she will bear the Messiah, if she is willing, then to Joseph to tell him to marry Mary anyway, and the various disclosures to the magi and the shepherds and so on. And, of course, angels minister to Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, and in some versions of the Resurrection it is an angel who tells the women that Jesus has risen.

And there is that wonderful story in Acts where Peter is in prison and an angel comes and sets him free, and he thinks he’s dreaming, and when he realises he isn’t, he goes to the safe house where they are all praying for him, and the maid who answers the door is so startled that she leaves him standing there, and they have trouble believing that it’s really him! An angel appears to Cornelius in a vision, and to Philip to take him to the Ethiopian treasury official who wanted to know about Jesus.

Angels also seem to have guard duty – we are told that when the Lord returns, he will come “with his angels”, like an escort, or guard of honour. And they also fight – Jesus comments on the Cross that he could ask the Father who would send twelve legions of angels to rescue him, if necessary, but he knows that’s not part of the plan.

And so it goes on. I honestly thought, when I started to think about this sermon, that there weren’t many references to angels in the Bible, and it was mostly extra-biblical tradition, but I was wrong! Of course, there is a lot of tradition around angels. One comes, I think, from the passage where Jesus says about children: “‘See that you do not despise one of these little ones. For I tell you that their angels in heaven always see the face of my Father in heaven.” I think it’s that passage that has given rise to the idea of guardian angels, one per person, but I’m not sure whether that is actually what happens.

But why does it matter? Are angels important to us? Why should we bother with St Michael and his angels?

I think, by and large, angels are one of the things we don’t necessarily think about most of the time. They are not, for most of us, something that impinges on our daily walk with God, on our daily journey with Christ. But they are, nevertheless, there in the background. We are told that they rejoice when a sinner repents, when someone says “Yes” to Jesus, perhaps for the first time, perhaps for the hundredth. The angels rejoice. They rejoice when you, or when I, consciously decide, yet again, to be God’s person, to walk in God’s way. They rejoice even more when someone who had never made that decision makes it for the first time.

The writer of the letter to the Hebrews reminds us not to “forget to show hospitality to strangers, for by so doing some people have shown hospitality to angels without knowing it.” Although angels, apparently, don’t actually eat or drink, but they can make it look as though they are doing so.

Angels lead us in our struggle against the powers of darkness. You remember how St Paul tells us to put on the whole armour of God? “Our struggle,” he reminds us, “is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.” Angels are the ones in the front line of the battle, and bear the brunt of the struggle.

We are not to worship angels. It’s made pretty clear that they, too, are created beings who worship their Creator. In fact, we sometimes invoke their aid in our hymns, as in some of the ones I’ve chosen for today. Angels can, perhaps, help us in our worship. And, if you remember, in the great prayer of thanksgiving, in our Communion service, we say “Therefore, with angels and archangels, and all the company of heaven, we proclaim your great and glorious name, forever praising you, and saying,” and go on into “Holy, holy, holy.”

And on that note, let’s do just that, and sing together….

Pride and Prejudice

Our Old Testament reading this morning came from a book you may never have heard of – the book of Sirach, also known as Ecclesiasticus, the book of the Church. It didn’t make the cut into the Protestant Old Testament, although Catholics see it as canonical, but for us it is part of that collection of books we call the Apocrypha, which we are told to study “for example of life and instruction of manners; but yet not apply them to establish any doctrine.” But once in awhile the Lectionary throws up a reading from the Apocrypha as an alternative, and I think, particularly where it resonates with the Gospel reading, it’s no bad thing to have a look at it.

Anyway, this book was written, or possibly compiled, by someone known as Joshua Ben Sirach, who was a Jewish scribe who had lived in Jerusalem, and who may have been living in Alexandria when he compiled the work between about 180-175 BCE. We know who wrote it because, uniquely among the Old Testament and Apocryphal writers, he signs his work. And there is a prologue to the Greek version, written by his grandson in 130 BCE who translated it from the original Hebrew! There are far more Greek manuscripts of it available than there are Hebrew ones, although a large portion of the Hebrew version was found among the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Anyway, that’s all very interesting, but what was he about? Basically, it was a collection of ethical teachings, rather like the book of Proverbs. I must admit I’ve not read all the book, although I have skimmed the first few chapters, and he writes a great deal about Wisdom, pretty much equating her with God Himself, as the apocryphal writers are apt to do. And a great deal of it, as in the passage we just heard read, is to do with pride.

Pride, we are told, begins when a person abandons the Lord. Pride begins when a person abandons the Lord. Pride, says ben Sirach, is like a fountain pouring out sin, and whoever persists in it will be full of wickedness. A fountain pouring out sin. Strong stuff, no?

The thing is, though, he’s right. Pride is the worst of sins – if sin can be said to have any “worst”, because it is the one that totally turns us away from God. C S Lewis had a lot to say about it in his book, Mere Christianity, and I propose to quote from it, because he says it better than I could: “According to Christian teachers, the essential vice, the utmost evil, is Pride.  Unchastity, anger, greed, drunkenness, and all that, are mere fleabites in comparison: it was through Pride that the devil became the devil: Pride leads to every other vice: it is the complete anti-God state of mind.”

Lewis goes on in this vein for some time, saying that Pride is essentially competitive – I’m not too sure he’s right there – and then we come to the heart of it:

“But pride always means enmity – it is enmity. And not only enmity between human beings, but enmity to God.

“In God”, says Lewis, “you come up against something which is in every respect immeasurably superior to yourself. Unless you know God as that – and, therefore, know yourself as nothing in comparison – you do not know God at all. 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.”

Of course, Lewis points out, it’s not pride to be pleased when someone pays you a sincere compliment – as long, that is, as the compliment doesn’t lead you to believe you’re cleverer or prettier or a finer person! As long as you delight in the praise, and don’t start thinking you must be a grand person to have merited it. And he also points out that it’s fine to be proud of your school or your father or your children as long as you don’t start thinking you must be a grand person to have been to such a school, or had such parents or children. The “Aren’t I clever, knowing a famous person” syndrome is alive and well today!

And obviously Pride, as in the carnival of that name, is fine, too – again, as long as you don’t think yourself rather superior for being part of it, or, indeed, rather broad-minded for enjoying it even if you aren’t gay!

Jesus, of course, knows all about it. In our Gospel reading, we saw him and his disciples – dare I say being amused by the people who obviously thought they deserved the best place at table, and being asked to move down…. As Jesus said, it makes far more sense to go down to the bottom, less honoured, places at the table and be asked to move up than to try to grab a place at the high table and be told in no uncertain terms you don’t belong there! Although I can see, as I’m sure you can, a danger lurking there whereby you rather ostentatiously go to the lowest place and look, expectantly, for the host coming to move you up a bit! And, indeed, it’s all too easy to see how, if you were to give a dinner for those who couldn’t return it, you could feel rather good about yourself in the wrong way: “What a good person I am to help out at Robes”…..

As I said, Jesus knew all about it. Look at the story he told of the Pharisee and the tax-collector who went to pray at the same time, and the Pharisee was all, “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!

No, pride and God are basically incompatible. Or rather the wrong sort of pride is. It can be very insidious – we go, imperceptibly, from being delighted that we have become God’s person, that we have been cleansed, forgiven and made whole, we go from that into thinking that we must be a pretty good person, really, to have allowed God into our lives.

Or, worse, we take this sort of thing to heart and, knowing that we are apt to be a bit proud on occasions, we think we must be truly terrible people, and quite beyond redemption. Which is another sort of pride, isn’t it – pride in one’s own sinfulness!

You know, this sermon feels very thou-shalt-nottish, which is not at all where I want to leave it. Pride is a very great sin, it is the sin that brings us into total opposition to God. Ben Sirach warns us, that whoever persists in pride will be full of wickedness. That is why, he tells us, the Lord brought terrible punishments on some people and completely destroyed them. And not only people, he says, but nations and empires, too. And if I were to leave it there, we would all be in a very sad case.

But there is hope. After all, we aren’t supposed to try to pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps. We aren’t supposed to strain and strive and continually fail and hate ourselves for so doing. No, my friends, not that. Never that.

If we try to overcome our faults in our own strength, we will fail. And we will become proud of ourselves for trying – I try far harder than he does, of course. I’m sure God will reward me better than him.

No, that’s not the answer. And continuing in our pride isn’t the answer, either. Let’s face it, we’re all guilty of feeling proud, some of the time. But if we continue, we will cut ourselves off from God, and perhaps end up worshipping what we think is God, but is in fact a god, made in our own image, who thinks we’re really rather brilliant!

God knows what we’re like. God knows our struggles, our failures, our weaknesses, our tendency to think we’re rather good for allowing Him to heal us…. And God goes on loving us and forgiving us and healing us. No matter how often we take our eyes off him to look at ourselves, or to look down on our neighbours, as soon as ever we realise what we’re doing, as soon as ever we turn back to God with an, “Oh, sorry!” or “Oops!” then God is there, forgiving us, healing us, helping us to grow into the person we were designed to be. “The Creator,” says ben Sirach, “never intended for human beings to be arrogant and violent.” And that being so, the Creator will help us become humble and peacable folk, the peacemakers who Jesus told us were to be given the kingdom of Heaven. Amen.

Great Expectations

Once upon a time, there was a young man called Jeremiah.

He was from quite a good family –

his father was a priest, although not a high priest,

and owned a fair bit of land not far from Jerusalem.

So Jeremiah grew up in a fair amount of comfort,

loved and nurtured by his family.

Perhaps he had planned to be a priest himself when he grew up.

But then one day, in about 626 BC, God came to him, and said:

"Jeremiah, I am your Creator, and before you were born, I chose you to speak for me to the nations."

Jeremiah is shattered!

“Lord God, you’re making a big mistake!

I am a lousy public speaker and I’m too young for anybody to take me seriously.”

But God insists:

“Don’t put yourself down because of your age.

Just go to whoever I send you to, and say whatever I tell you to say.

Don’t let yourself feel intimidated by anyone, because I’ll be there as back up for you.

You’ll be okay;

take my word for it.”

And Jeremiah is touched by God, and enabled to speak God’s word.

Some six hundred years later, Jesus is teaching in the synagogue one Sabbath day, as he often did.

There was a woman in the congregation who was twisted and deformed –

perhaps she had scoliosis or perhaps it was an arthritic condition.

Certainly it was long-standing.

We are told she had been like this for eighteen years.

And Jesus suddenly notices her, and heals her.

She is able to stand fully upright again, and starts praising God.

Well, that didn’t please the leader of the synagogue.

Healing people like that on the Sabbath –

wasn’t that dangerously close to work?

“Oi,” he goes, “Stop healing people on the Sabbath!

Now then you lot, if any of you want healed,

you come on any of the other six days of the week;

I don’t want any Sabbath-breaking going on here!”

“Oh come on, mate,” says Jesus.

“I saw you taking your donkey down to the drinking-trough earlier this morning, Sabbath day or no Sabbath day.

If it’s all right for you to take your donkey to have a drink on the Sabbath,

it’s all right for me to heal this good lady,

whom Satan had bound for eighteen whole years!”

The leader of the synagogue had nothing to say to this, but the crowd really cheered.

---oo0oo---

I think it’s about expectations, isn’t it?

God expected Jeremiah to proclaim His word to the nations.

Jesus expected that the woman would be healed,

Sabbath day or no Sabbath day.

The ruler of the synagogue expected Jesus to keep the Sabbath.

And Jeremiah and the woman?

I don’t think they expected anything at all!

What does God expect from us?

What do we expect from God’s people?

And what do we expect from God?

Firstly, then, what does God expect from us?

Jeremiah was expected to go and proclaim God’s word.

He had been specifically called for this purpose,

and although he was horrified when the call came, and tried to get out of it,

he ultimately accepted it, and trusted in God’s promise that

“Attack you they will, overcome you they can’t”;

a promise that was fulfilled many times over in the Biblical narrative.

I wonder what God is expecting of you?

I know I am expected to preach the Gospel.

Like Jeremiah, I was very young when I was called –

about fifteen.

Unlike him, I wasn’t able to answer that call for many years for reasons that I won’t go into now,

but suffice it to say that for about the past thirty years I have known that this is what God has wanted me to do.

This is what God expects of me.

I am so grateful, every time I preach,

that all I am expected to do is to provide the words;

God does the rest!

So what does he expect of you?

Some of you will know, definitely, what God expects;

you are a steward,

or a local preacher,

or a musician.

Or, like my daughter, you’re called to children’s ministry.

For others, it’s less clear cut.

You have a job, perhaps, or are bringing up a family.

Or perhaps that is all behind you now, and you are retired.

But whatever it is you do, you are expected to be Christ’s ambassador.

You are a witness to him in everything you say and do.

Now, before you start squirming uncomfortably,

and thinking “Oh dear, I’m not a very good one, am I?”,

don’t forget that Jesus said that when the Holy Spirit came,

we would be his witnesses throughout the known world.

Not that we should be,

or ought to be,

but that we would be.

We are.

You are an ambassador for Christ,

and whether you like it or not,

whether you know it or not,

this is what you are, through the power of the Holy Spirit who dwells within you.

When God calls you to do something,

whether it is some well-defined job like cleaning the church,

or running a prayer group,

or speaking forth his word,

or simply praying quietly at home,

or whether you’re called to be God’s person where you work, or where you live, God will enable you to do it, just as he enabled Jeremiah.

---oo0oo---

And so to my second question for this morning:

What do you expect of God’s people?

When someone says he or she is a Christian,

what do you reckon they’re going to be like?

The leader of the synagogue was confounded when Jesus didn’t conform to his expectation of what a good Jewish man did or didn’t do on the Sabbath.

Healing people?

Seriously?

No, no, that counted as work!

And sometimes we are confounded when we come across Christians whose standards of acceptable behaviour might differ from ours.

Could they possibly be Christians at all?

Do real Christians behave like that?

Some churches have felt so strongly about some of these issues that they have even split up,

causing enormous hurt and upset in their various denominations.

Yet who are we to judge another’s behaviour?

In fact, you might remember that St Paul suggests

that if your brother is offended by something you do or don’t do,

you should do it, or not do it, as the case may be,

so as not to upset them, or, worse,

to let them think it’s all right for them to do it,

when it might not be at all all right,

and might lead them away from God.

We need to be sensitive to one another,

and to refrain from judging one another.

We probably have our rules that we live by,

but we don’t have the right to force those rules on to other people,

not even on to other Christians.

I suppose the thing is, we shouldn’t really expect other Christians to be like us!

Many, of course, will be –

that’s why you go to this church, here,

because you find people you are comfortable with,

people whose vision of what God’s people are like resonates with yours.

But there will be others whose views you are less comfortable with;

who perhaps strike you as rather puritanical, or rather lax.

Of course, when we know someone, we know what they are like,

whether they are reliable,

whether you can trust them.

And we accept them, normally, for who they are.

Just as God does with us.

But we mustn’t be judgemental.

Maybe they hold views that we find strange, or even unpleasant.

Maybe they feel free to behave in ways we’ve been taught that Christians don’t do,

or ways that we feel would be sinful for us.

But it is not for us to judge.

Our Lord points out, in that collection of His teachings known as the Sermon on the Mount,

that we very often have socking great logs in our own eyes,

so how can we see clearly to remove the speck in someone else’s?

In other words, keep your eyes on what’s wrong with you,

not on what’s wrong with other people!

See to it that you obey your rules, and leave other people to obey theirs.

That’s something, I think, that the leader of the synagogue would have been wise to keep in mind,

rather than criticising Jesus for healing someone on the Sabbath,

to say nothing of criticising the congregation for coming to be healed that day.

He had rules he needed to keep,

and he needed other people to keep them, too.

But Jesus had other ideas.

For him, healing someone on the Sabbath was as normal and as natural as making sure your livestock were fed, or your cow was milked.

---oo0oo---

So, then, God is free to expect anything from us;

we should not, though, expect other Christians to be just like us.

But what do we expect from God?

Jeremiah didn’t expect anything from God.

When told that he was to proclaim God’s word, his first reaction was to panic:

“I can’t possibly! I’m a lousy public speaker and much too young!”

But God gave him the gifts he needed to fulfil his task,

and sometimes Jeremiah had to actively act out God’s word, not just speak it!

The woman who was all twisted and bent over didn’t expect anything from God, either.

She presumably went to the synagogue each week to worship,

not really expecting anything to happen.

But that particular Sabbath day, Jesus was there –

and that made all the difference.

After eighteen years she was finally free of her illness,

able to stand up straight,

able to walk normally and talk to people face to face once more.

What did you expect from God this morning?

Let’s be honest, we come to church week after week,

and on most Sundays nothing much happens!

We worship God, we spend some time with our friends,

and then we go home again.

And that’s okay.

But some weeks are different, aren’t they?

Not often, but just sometimes we come away from Church

knowing that God was there, and present, and real.

I wonder why these occasions are so rare?

Partly, of course, because mountain-top experiences like that are rare,

that’s why we remember them.

There’s an old story of two men coming out of Church one Sunday morning when the preacher had been rather more boring even than usual.

The first man said, “Honestly, what’s the point?

I’ve been going to Church more or less every Sunday for the past 30 years,

and I must have heard hundreds of sermons,

yet I hardly remember any of them!”

To which the second man replied, “Hmm, well;

I’ve been married for 30 years and my wife has cooked me a meal more or less every night,

and I don’t really remember many of them, either.

But where would I be without them?”

Church, mostly, is about providing daily bread for daily needs.

We don’t expect to see miracles each Sunday,

or healings such as took place in the synagogue that day.

But what do we expect when we come to Church?

Do we expect to meet God in some way?

What do we expect from God?

We know that our sins have been forgiven, right?

And that God is gradually making us into the people he designed us to be.

But do we expect more?

Should we expect more?

Neither Jeremiah nor the woman in the synagogue expected anything from God –

yet God gave, bountifully, to both of them in very different ways.

---oo0oo---

Who was it who said “Expect great things from God.

Attempt great things for God”?

I can’t remember right now,

but it’s really what I want to leave with you this morning.

What does God expect from you?

Are you trying not to hear something you think God might be trying to say?

What do you expect from other Christians?

Are you requiring a higher standard from them than from yourself?

And what are you expecting God to do for you today?

Amen.