God's Country

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!

Well, the place is, of course, the Kingdom of Heaven,
or God’s country,
which Jesus is telling people about.
Unfortunately it seems to be the kind of place that doesn’t go into words very well,
and the parables that Jesus uses to talk about it are,
although we don’t hear it much as we are so familiar with them,
really not what his listeners would have been expecting.

To start with, the mustard seeds –
well, you know mustard seeds.
I expect you use them in your cooking, as I sometimes do.
You can buy the seeds, or you can buy the ground seeds as a powder to make your own mustard –
lovely in salad dressings and cheese sauces –
or you can buy ready-made mustard with or without various flavourings.
I’m sure they used mustard as a seasoning back in Bible times, too –
but it was, and is, a terrific weed.
They do grow it, of course – very pretty flowers, a pale yellow, much nicer than the brash yellow of oilseed rape.
But in Bible times they tended to use the wild plant, because if you cultivated it –
well, it was like kudzu or rhododendrons, or even mint –
you’d never get rid of it!
Nobody would actually go and plant it,
any more than you or I would plant stinging-nettles in the fields.
And, of course, it doesn’t grow into a terrific tree,
never has and never will.
But it does attract birds –
and you don’t want birds eating all your other crops, either!
Yet in God’s country it seems as if you plant mustard and it does grow into a tree, and you actively want to encourage birds, rather than discourage them.

And then the second story is almost worse.
You see, for Jews, what was really holy and proper to eat was unleavened bread, which is what 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 bleeding 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 God’s country, is it?

And yet, in the stories Jesus told his disciples privately, a little later, it’s like treasure hidden in a field, and it’s worth selling everything you own just to get hold of that field, and its hidden treasure.
Or the one perfect pearl that the collector has been searching for, and he finds it worth selling the rest of his collection to buy it.
God’s country is worth all we have, and all we are.

It’s all very contradictory.
God’s country is totally not what we might expect.
It’s not a comfortable place –
when Jesus told the story of the lost son, he explained that the son was reduced to looking after pigs, a job which the Jews, then and now –
and Muslims, too, incidentally –
thought was really disgusting.
Perhaps we could think of him as working in a rat farm, or a sewage works.... not a pleasant job, anyway.
And yet the father went running to welcome him home –
and men in that day and age never ran.
The story is taking place in God’s country!

And if we want to be part of it, part of God’s country –
as, indeed, we probably do or we’d not be here this morning –
if we want to be part of the Kingdom of God,
then we need to expect the unexpected.
Someone once said that God comes to comfort the afflicted,
and to afflict the comfortable, and I think that’s very true.
Often we are called to do things we never expected.

What would you think if a group of refugees turned up here one Sunday morning, and asked if you could find a time for them to worship –
but they were Muslim, and had no idea of converting to Christianity.
They just wanted to find a sacred space in which they could pray.
Perhaps they couldn’t find a mosque where they would be welcome, for whatever reason –
maybe there wasn’t one where their own particular style of worship was practised,
or maybe they simply weren’t welcome there for one reason or another.
What if they wanted to join you on a Sunday morning because it was where the worship of God was taking place,
even if it wasn’t in a form they were used to?
Would you welcome them, or would you find their presence intolerably disruptive.

I understand that this very thing happened in a church in the Midlands a few years ago;
the refugees just wanted a place where they could pray, no matter what their faith was.
The minister of the church was all in favour –
of course, come in, be welcome!
But, sadly, the congregation was horrified, and many of them moved elsewhere.
They thought the minister should be there for them, not for these incomers who weren’t even Christians!
But surely the church should be the institution that cares more about those who are not yet its members, or even who never will be its members?
I’m sure that in God’s country we will find that to be the case.

Sadly, though, it’s not surprising that the congregation reacted like that.
Look what happened when the Empire Windrush came over
and the people on it turned up in Church their first Sunday,
only to be turned away.
Not everywhere, of course –
many churches made a point of welcoming immigrants;
Railton Road church, in this very circuit, had a big poster outside welcoming people, and I believe many others did, too.
But in some churches people were turned away, simply because they weren’t “like us”,
God used this for good, of course, and we saw the rise of the Black-led churches which did, and still do, so much good in our inner cities.
But all the same….
I feel ashamed on behalf of those who were turned away!

In God’s country, values are turned upside down.
It’s not the wealthy, the educated, the important who matter.
It’s the poor, the downtrodden, the refugee, the single mum on benefits.
It’s the people who come to the food bank for help,
not those who give out the bags and the coffee!
Remember how Jesus said that at the last day,
he will say to those who did nothing to help “You didn’t help me!”
and will commend those who did help for helping him.

Talking of single parents, do remember, won’t you,
that this can be a very hard time of year for many families –
they might just be able to cope in term time when the children get a meal at school,
but in the holidays they struggle and have need of our food banks,
so do give extra when you can.
As I’m sure you know by now, Brixton Hill now runs a food bank and advice hub every Wednesday,
and it’s also a bit of a social centre where people can sit down for a coffee and a chat.
And donations, in cash or in kind, are always very, very welcome.

I don’t know about you,
but I am not very good at recognising Jesus in the beggar outside Tesco,
or even the checkout operator inside the store.
And yet we know that in God’s country, we are all loved and valued, whoever we are and whatever our story is.
And, as we heard from St Paul earlier:
“Nothing can separate us from his love:
neither death nor life, neither angels nor other heavenly rulers or powers, neither the present nor the future,
neither the world above nor the world below –
there is nothing in all creation that will ever be able to separate us from the love of God which is ours through Christ Jesus our Lord.”

And however disconcerting we may find God’s country, we know that because of that love, it is worth all we have, and it is worth all we are.

Amen. 

Flowers, weeds, ladders and seeds

I have to admit that I do find today’s readings really rather difficult.

They are both familiar stories, and that almost makes it worse –
it’s not easy to see how they should influence our lives today.

Let’s look first at the story of Jacob’s ladder.
The joy of these very earliest stories in the Old Testament is that they do present their people warts and all.
They don’t sanitise them into saints!
And Jacob, it has to be said, was not a nice person.
In fact, he was one of the nastiest people in the Bible.
He is, of course, the younger of the twin sons of Isaac,
and a grandson of Abraham.
He is his mother’s favourite,
and spends his time indoors,
doing the cooking and generally keeping the encampment going,
while Esau does the outside work and looks after the flocks and herds.
You remember, of course, the infamous story of how Esau sold his birthright to Jacob for a bowl of lentil stew one cold day when he was hungry.
Lentil stew is good, but not that good!
Esau also married a couple of foreign wives,
and, according to Genesis 26:35,
“they made life bitter for Isaac and Rebecca”.

And it was partly because of that, I think, that Rebecca helped Jacob trick Esau out of his father’s blessing.
If you had the Old Testament reading here last week, you will have heard that story,
how Rebecca helps Jacob tie goatskin over his hands,
so that his father thinks it’s Esau.
Although I’m not sure quite how much Isaac was fooled:
“The voice is the voice of Jacob, but the hands are the hands of Esau”.
Anyway, Isaac goes along with it, and gives Jacob his blessing.
But, of course, Esau is furious, and plans to kill Jacob,
so Jacob has to flee.
And it’s while he’s on the run that our reading starts.

Jacob falls asleep,
just on the ground with nothing more than a stone for his pillow,
and dreams of the ladder, or staircase, between earth and heaven,
with the angels going up and down it.
And God, speaking directly to Jacob,
assuring him of his love and blessing,
reaffirming that God will be with him on his travels, and will bring him safely home.
And when Jacob wakes, he knows he’s been with God:
“Surely the Lord is in this place –
and I did not know it!
How awesome is this place!
This is none other than the house of God,
and this is the gate of heaven.”

I wish I could say that from that time on Jacob was a changed person.
But he wasn’t, of course.
For him, God was associated with places, not people.
Bethel, where he had his dream,
was a place where God lived,
and despite God’s promise of being with him all the time,
Jacob didn’t seem to want to know.
He goes on lying and cheating, as do the rest of his family;
his sons even plotted to murder their brother Joseph,
and were only just stopped from doing so.
Even though later on God encounters Jacob again,
and this time Jacob does seem to realise that God is more than just a local god, one would scarcely describe them as God-fearing people.
Yet God used them as an integral part of his plans for the nation of Israel.

And so we turn to our Gospel reading, which carries on from last week’s reading about the parable of the sower.

In this story, someone has been and gone and mixed weed seeds in with the wheat that they have kept so carefully since last year.
Now, a weed is basically a plant in the wrong place.
Many wild flowers are simply lovely –
I am never very good at knowing which is which, except for obvious ones like bluebells or primroses.
Robert and I were in the Hungarian countryside a few weeks ago, the puszta, they call it, and, as the land there isn’t very suitable for vast monocultures, there were acres and acres of beautiful wild flowers.
Poppies, vetches, ladies’ bedstraw, lavender, all sorts of other flowers.
Also things like burdock and wild barley –
barleygrass, we used to call it in my childhood –
that I hadn’t thought of for years!
It was wonderful.
But, although we deplore the monocultures that here in the UK can make vast tracts of our countryside look very dull indeed,
we do prefer to keep the wildflowers to the headlands and verges!
You do need the wildflowers there, to attract insects and butterflies, but you don’t want them messing up your crops.
It would be very difficult for even a modern weedkiller to target the right thing, especially if the weeds were things like barley-grass or wild oats –
you couldn’t destroy them without destroying the entire crop.
Imagine what that would do to a subsistence farmer in our day, for instance, perhaps in Africa!

But, apparently, back in Bible times, Jewish law didn’t allow you to grow two kinds of crop in the same field.
So the servants were really anxious to go and pull up the weeds,
it was all wrong to let them grow.
But the farmer knew that it would really damage the wheat, and jeopardize the harvest, if they were to do that,
so he tells his men not even to try.
Time enough, he says, to destroy the weeds when the crop is harvested ­
by then, they won’t damage the crop itself.
This must have been rather a shock to Jesus’ hearers, of course.
But then, I expect they were used to Jesus saying things that might appear shocking!

In this country today, of course, the barren weeds would be harvested along with the corn, and go through the combine harvester,
but back then, harvesting was done by hand with a scythe or sickle, and it was easier to separate them out before they were turned into sheaves.
I expect the same would apply in those areas where modern harvesting methods aren’t appropriate, in the developing world, too.

But what does it all mean?
Do these stories, familiar though they are,
have any real relevance to our lives today?

I think, perhaps, they do.
You see, the whole point about Jacob is that God didn’t give up on him!

Jacob was a thoroughly bad lot, he didn’t even try to live a godly and moral life, he was out for what he could get.
But God had serious plans for him, and for his descendants, and even though he couldn’t really get through to Jacob on the first time of asking, at Bethel, he tried again and again, until finally he was sort of successful.

So the first point is that God never gives up on us.
No matter how awful we are, no matter how far we walk away from God, the Good Shepherd still grabs his coat and wellies and goes to look for us.
Time and again God went to Jacob and his family, spoke to them in dreams and visions, tried to show them something of who He is.
Time and again he met with failure,
they said “Oh yes, there’s a god here, is there?”
and carried on with their lives.

Then the second point is that God has confidence in us.
When Jesus tells the parable of the weeds,
you see how confident the farmer is that the crop won’t be damaged by having the weeds grow among it.
There’s no way he’s going to risk damaging the crop by doing anything prematurely.
The weeds may take up space, but the quality of the seed will win through to a good harvest.
Doesn’t the same God who sows the seed in us have the same confidence?
That’s something to celebrate, I reckon.
Each of us, those of us who have said “Yes” to Jesus
and who are touched by His Spirit,
each of us has the most incredible God-given potential to grow and develop into the person God created us to be.
God has confidence that we will be part of building the Kingdom of Heaven.

And the third point is that we need to have confidence in God.
Sometimes we feel afraid when we look round and see that we’re surrounded by weeds.
It feels as though we must be overwhelmed,
that we must go under.
But God knows that we won’t.
God has confidence that we won’t.
It may be more than we can handle right now, but God will be with us every step of the way, even if it doesn’t always feel like that.
We don’t have to handle those weeds on our own!

We also need to trust God when he tells us to wait until the harvest.
Sometimes we want to rush in, like the servants in Jesus’ story, to Do Something About It.
Like them, it feels all wrong to us when wheat and weeds grow in the same field.
The mediaeval church reckoned the “weeds” were heresies;
we don’t fuss quite so much about heresies,
but sometimes we fuss more than we need to about other people’s spiritual status before God.
We fuss, too, when problems loom large in our lives, whether personal or as a church.
We fuss when things have gone wrong and God seems to be absolutely ignoring both us and the problem!
We reckon that if we did this or that, then things would become quite all right again.
Sadly, of course, it doesn’t work that way.
If we rushed in and did what we thought,
it probably would hurt only ourselves, and not have any effect on the problems we face.
Unlike God, we can’t see round corners.
We need to trust God that, in the words of Mother Julian,
“All will be well, and all manner of thing will be well.”