Be careful what you wish for

Our Old Testament reading seems to me to be a prime example of the Law of Unintended Consequences! Or, indeed, the necessity to be careful what you wish for!

Up until now, Israel has been a theocracy; in other words, it has been governed by God, as ministered by the various judges and prophets, most recently Samuel. It hasn’t always gone well – there have been wars; the Ark of the Covenant had been captured and taken away by the Philistines, but then it was returned with all honour. At the time of which we speak, there was peace in the land – for one of the only times in history, it would seem.

But this peace was precarious. Samuel was getting old now, and his sons, who were his obvious successors, weren’t doing a good job. Unlike their father, who was as upright as – well, as an upright thing, they were susceptible to taking bribes, and justice was not always served as it might have been.

Also, the people of Israel had been looking round at how things were done in other countries. They didn’t have dreary prophets interpreting God’s will at them all the time. They weren’t led into battle by priests guiding an ox-cart with the Ark on it. They had a King! They were led into battle by a King on a beautiful horse, wearing armour glittering in the sun. They didn’t have to spend hours in prayer before they could get on with it….. Anyway, everybody had kings. Why couldn’t they have a king?

So, as we heard in our first reading, they went to Samuel and said, “look here, you’re getting old, and your sons aren’t anything like you – we want a King, please, now.”

Samuel is very hurt by this, and does what he always does in time of trial – he goes and prays about it. And God says to him, more or less, “Well, now you know what I feel all the time, the way people reject Me. And really, it’s not you they are rejecting, it’s Me.” And, at God’s instruction, Samuel goes and asks the people if they are sure they want a king. Sure, there is the grandeur and the pomp and circumstance – but there is also the tithes; the conscription; the droit de seigneur where the king thinks he can, and will, have any pretty girl he chooses….. there are a lot of bad things that might and will happen along with the good.

But the people are convinced. Prophets and judges are old-fashioned; they want a King. Monarchy is definitely the way to go.

And, as we know, they got permission to have a King, and Saul was appointed – and anointed – King. But as we know, he wasn’t altogether satisfactory, and there was war again, and, eventually, David became king, and then his son Solomon, but after that it all went rather pear-shaped, and the Kingdom was divided into two. And after a series of rather ineffectual, weak kings, the majority – the Ten Tribes – were taken into captivity and absorbed; the two tribes of Judah were also captured, but managed to retain a distinct identity. Mind you, we are not told what would have happened had they remained a theocracy….

So what is this all about, and what does it say to us today? I’m certainly not advocating a return to theocracy – one only has to look at so-called Islamic State or Boko Harum to see that it can and does stifle people’s freedom of choice. And monarchy itself is nearly obsolete. Our own Queen reigns, but she does not rule.

The King may well have done all the dreadful things Samuel warned against: “He will make soldiers of your sons; some of them will serve in his war chariots, others in his cavalry, and others will run before his chariots. He will make some of them officers in charge of a thousand men, and others in charge of fifty men. Your sons will have to plough his fields, harvest his crops, and make his weapons and the equipment for his chariots. Your daughters will have to make perfumes for him and work as his cooks and his bakers. He will take your best fields, vineyards, and olive groves, and give them to his officials. He will take a tenth of your grain and of your grapes for his court officers and other officials.”

But a good King – and there have been many throughout history – a good King protects his people, as well as exploits them. And a good King leads by example. C S Lewis, in his novel “The Horse and his Boy”, expressed it thus:

“For this is what it means to be a king:

to be first in every desperate attack and last in every desperate retreat, and when there's hunger in the land (as must be now and then in bad years)

to wear finer clothes and laugh louder over a scantier meal than any man in your land.”

Being a King is not just about privilege and luxury – but for a bad King – and probably for every good King there has been a bad one – for a bad King, it is all about privilege and luxury. The people needed to be careful what they wished for.

But one of the main problems of a Kingdom, mostly, is that it is up against others. Kings have to fight because other people want their Kingdoms. Sometimes these are kings from other sovereign states, and other times they are internal contenders for the throne; people who think that the king really isn’t doing as good a job as he might and they would do a better one. Civil War. Satan’s Kingdom divided against itself – as Jesus points out in our Gospel reading – is always going to fail and spiral down into chaos and darkness.

So let’s contrast this with God’s kingdom, that Jesus tells us so much about.

He told us lots of stories to illustrate what the kingdom was going to be like, how it starts off very small, like a mustard seed, but grows to be a huge tree.

How it is worth giving up everything for.

How “the blind receive their sight,

the lame walk,

the lepers are cleansed,

the deaf hear,

the dead are raised,

and the poor have good news brought to them.”

And some of the stories were very unsettling to his hearers. Imagine, if you will, that there is a place you’ve always wanted to visit.

It sounds as though it’s really wonderful –

permanently great weather, fantastic scenery,

lots of great places to visit,

lots of walking, or swimming,

great bars and restaurants,

you name it, this place has it!

And you long and long to go there,

but you don’t know how to get there,

and what’s more, you don’t know anybody else who has been there.

All the things you’ve heard about it are rumour or hearsay.

And then one day someone comes along who very obviously has been there, and he starts to tell you all about it.

But –

oh dear –

it’s not at all what you thought!

Weeds everywhere, attracting masses of birds which could and did eat all the crops!

And the food, far from gourmet, is rotten bread made by women!

And then, he goes on to tell his special friends in private –

but you hear about it later –

the place is so infinitely desirable that people sell all they have to get tickets there!

That’s the Kingdom of God for you. The mustard seed that Jesus spoke of – well, mustard was a terrific weed, back in the day – grows like the clappers, and still does – and nobody in their right mind would have planted it. Besides which, it would have attracted birds, which would then have eaten the other the crops. And the yeast that leavens the whole of the dough? Well, for Jews, what was really holy and proper to eat was unleavened bread, which you had at Passover.

You threw out all your old leaven –

we’d call it a sourdough starter, today, which is basically what it is –

and started again.

I remember being told in primary school that this was a Good Idea because you need fresh starter occasionally.

But the thing is, leavened bread was considered slightly inferior –

and the leaven itself, the starter –

yuck!

It isn’t even the bread that is likened to God’s country, it is the leaven itself!

And did you notice –

it was a woman who took that leaven.

A woman!

That won’t do at all!

Again, for male Jews, women were slightly improper –

and who knew that she wouldn’t be on her period and therefore unclean?

And she hid the starter in enough flour to make bread for 100 people!

She hid it.

It was concealed, hidden.

Not what people would expect from the Kingdom of God, is it?

Be careful what you wish for! You wanted a King, instead of God; a King who would introduce conscription, would confiscate your bit of land and give it to one of his favourites. A King whose country would be manifestly unfair and unequal. But that was what you thought you wanted.

And then you got God’s Kingdom. A place that was totally not what you expected. A place of justice and mercy and love and forgiveness; but also a place where your most entrenched ideas are turned upside-down; where what you thought you knew about God turned out to be all wrong…. And yet, a place so worthwhile, so wonderful, that you would sell all your possessions to get there.

Perhaps, just perhaps, it was worth wishing for a King so that we could know Christ as King of the Kingdom of Heaven. Amen.

Look and live

I really, really don’t understand what is going on in our first reading, do you? I mean, one minute you have God being absolutely livid with the Israelites for building a golden calf to worship, and threatening to destroy the lot of them, and the next minute you have God telling Moses to build a bronze serpent for people to look at to be healed of snakebite. And the snakes themselves were, we are told, sent by God because the people were grumbling! I mean, hello? If God punished us for grumbling like that, not a one of us that wouldn’t be reaching for the snake-bite serum at some time during the week! I rather suspect that this is a story that sort of crept in by mistake. Or, perhaps, they found a statue of a bronze snake in the Temple and made up this story to explain how it came to be there. And, of course, the fact that it is there means that God meant it to be there, no matter what its provenance!

Of course, the people who wrote down what’s called the Deuteronomic histories, which basically means the Pentateuch and some other bits of our Bible, do like to make a perceived punishment fit an alleged crime. Moses doesn’t quite make it to the Promised Land, so God must be punishing him for something. The people of Israel take 40 years to get there, there must be a good reason for it. And so on and so forth. And in this instance there was a plague of snakes. So the people must have been grumbling.

I suppose grumbling is a sin, really, when you come to think about it. After all, it is either futile or hurtful and can often be both. The Israelites were mooing on about how much better off they’d been in Egypt, totally forgetting that there they had not been free, and moaning on about the strict rations that they were getting in the desert. Talk about hurtful to Moses, and utterly futile, too, as nothing was going to change. They weren’t going back!

We grumble, too, most of the time. It wouldn’t be us if we weren’t chuntering on about the weather, or the trains, or the health service! Just look at your Facebook page, especially when we had that snow a couple of weeks ago! All things we can do absolutely nothing about! I dare say that’s pretty harmless.

But then, there are the times when people could do something about it, but, instead, they grumble. It is easier to expect the other person to do something than it is to get up and do it yourself. Although, quite often, if you want something done properly, it is a lot easier to do it yourself!

And sometimes we grumble about each other, which is all very well, but the things we say have a nasty habit of being relayed to the person we said them about, hurting them, and causing us all a great deal of bother. It’s best to try – heaven knows, I know how difficult it is – to try not to say anything behind people’s backs that you wouldn’t say to their faces. Which is all very well when it’s one’s spouse, because one does, as often as not, grumble at them, but one doesn’t tend to grumble at other people.

So yes, by and large, maybe grumbling is a sin. But to be bitten by snakes for it? It doesn’t sound so much like God to me. But there you are, the story got put in the Bible, and physicians liked it so much that they adopted the snake on a pole as their emblem. And, of course, one of the reasons it is important is that Jesus refers to it when he is talking to Nicodemus, as we heard in our Gospel reading: 

"And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life. For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life."

That, of course, is why the story still resonates with us today, as it is a type, or picture, of the crucifixion. I remember one sermon I heard on this passage where the preacher pointed out, quite forcefully, that the Israelites didn’t have to do anything with the snake – they didn’t have to go up to it, or touch it, or lick its tail, or anything like that. All they had to do was look at it, and instantly they were healed of their snake-bite. And similarly, we too, the preacher said, just have to look to Jesus, and instantly we are saved.

And so Jesus himself tells us. All we have to do is to believe. To look to the Cross.

It is, of course, God who saves us. We can do nothing to save ourselves. Nothing. The Israelites in the desert could do nothing to save themselves from the snakes. They didn’t know about anti-snakebite venom back in the day. If they were bitten, the probability was that they would die – unless, of course, they could just look at the bronze serpent.

There would, of course, be those who refused to look. They had been bitten by a snake, very well, they were going to die. Or perhaps they thought they knew better: looking at an image wasn’t going to help, was it? Maybe if they did this or that instead, that would help. You’ve got to DO something, after all.

But no, if they wanted to live, all they had to do was to look. They could do nothing to save themselves, all they could do was look at the serpent. And, similarly, we can do nothing to save ourselves – whatever we may mean by that, and I’m not always quite sure – all we can do is look at the Cross. And God does the rest.

It’s about love, isn’t it?   What we remember on Mothering Sunday isn’t just our mothers, although that, too, but above all, the wonderful love of God, our Father and our Mother. After all, there are people whose mothers have died; people who didn’t or don’t have a good relationship with their mothers; and above all, people who would have loved to have been mothers, but it didn’t happen, for whatever reason. Many of those will not be in church this morning. The Church isn't always very tactful about Mothers Day, I'm afraid – I used to find it very patronising, especially considering that for the rest of the year I was rather left to get on with it, and was told that the loneliness and isolation and lack of fellowship was “the price you pay for the wonderful privilege of being a Christian Mother!” As if....

The worst Mothers Day sermon I ever heard was from a young curate who had just discovered his wife was expecting their first child – sadly, he moved away during the course of the year,

as several of us were longing to hear what he would have had to say after several months of the reality of parenthood!

But one of the things that those of us who are parents will know about is unconditional love. We know that, no matter what our children may do, we will go on loving them. When they are young, we may have to punish them if they behave badly; when they are older, how much we see of them very much depends on them, not on us. But we never stop loving them, no matter how infuriating they are.

I am vividly reminded of Jesus saying: 

“Is there anyone among you who, if your child asks for bread, will give a stone? Or if the child asks for a fish, will give a snake? If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good things to those who ask him!”

“How much more”! We find it very difficult to comprehend God’s love, the love that says you only have to look to live. The love that reaches out to us infinitely more strongly than we are able to reach out to God. Jesus said that

“Those who believe in him are not condemned; but those who do not believe are condemned already, because they have not believed in the name of the only Son of God. And this is the judgement, that the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil.”

But the thing is – light! After all, if you think about it, when you are in a dark room, you switch on the light, and the darkness has gone. People might have preferred darkness, but it is easier to make it light than to make it dark. And in the light, all you have to do is look, look at the Cross – and you will live! Amen.