Great Expectations

This is similar, but not identical, to a sermon I have preached several times before.  But there is new material in there!

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-five 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 worship leader,
or you work with the projection.
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.

Having said that, of course, I find it really hard to accept some of what is going on in the USA, largely initiated by people who call themselves Christian. Do Jesus’ people really think it is right to control women’s fertility, and cut her off from essential medical care?
Do Jesus’ people really think it is right to deny aid to the poorest?
Or medical care to those who cannot afford it?
Do Jesus’ people really think it is okay to discriminate against people because of their ethnicity, sexuality or even gender?
Personally, I don’t think so.
Jesus said, after all, that if you helped – or denied help – to anybody, no matter how insignificant, you were helping, or failing to help him.

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 said, of course, we do need to protest manifest injustice, and to speak truth to power when we get an opportunity!

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 –
I may have told you this before –
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 50 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 over forty 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.

Most of the modern Bible paraphrases quoted  are ©Nathan Nettleton 2002

Mary the Mother of God

 

Last Friday was a very important day!
Yes, I should have had my operation, but that’s not why it was important. In some parts of the Christian Church, the fifteenth of August is a major festival in the Church’s calendar.
It’s what’s called the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary,
and celebrates the belief that her body, as well as her soul,
was taken to heaven after she’d died.
Or possibly even before, it’s not clear.
Either way, it’s a very old tradition,
going right back to the early years of Christianity,
even though there’s nothing about it in Scripture.
And even those Christians, like us,
who don’t necessarily subscribe to that doctrine,
do still consider 15 August one of the Festivals of Saint Mary.

And even though we Protestants don’t really think about Mary much,
the fact that she’s such an important figure in so much of Christianity means she’s probably worth thinking about from time to time.

So what do we actually know about her from the Bible, as opposed to tradition?
She first appears in our Bibles when Gabriel comes to her to ask her if she will bear Jesus,
and, of course, as we all know, she said she would,
and Joseph agreed to marry her despite her being pregnant with a baby he knew he wasn’t responsible for.
I do rather love Luke’s stories about Mary –
how one of the things the angel had said to her was that her relation, Elisabeth, was pregnant after all those years.
And Mary rushes off to visit her.
Was this to reassure herself that the angel was telling the truth?
Or to congratulate Elisabeth?
Or just to get away for a bit of space, do you suppose?
We aren’t told.
But Elisabeth recognises Mary as the mother-to-be of the promised Saviour, and Mary’s response is that great song that we now call the “Magnificat”, which we heard in our Gospel reading.
Or if it wasn’t exactly that –
that may well be Luke putting down what she ought to have said, like Shakespeare giving Henry V that great speech before Agincourt –
it was probably words to that effect!
I think she was very, very relieved to find the angel had been speaking the truth, and probably did explode in an outpouring of praise and joy!

And later, in Bethlehem, when the shepherds come to visit her, we are told that she “kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart.”

The next time we see Mary is when Jesus is twelve and gets separated from them in the Temple.
I spent a lot of time with that story when my daughter was a teenager –
how Mary and Joseph say to Jesus, “But why did you stay behind?
Didn’t you realise we’d be worried about you?”
and Jesus goes, “Oh, you don’t understand!” –
typical teenager!

We don’t see Joseph again after this –
tradition has it that he was a lot older than Mary, and, of course, he had a very physical job.
It wasn’t just a carpenter as we know it –
the Greek word is “technion”, which is the same root as our “technician”;
if it had to do with houses, Joseph did it,
from designing them,
to building them,
to making the furniture that went in them!
And tradition has it that sometime between Jesus’ 12th birthday, and when we next see him, Joseph has died.

But we see a lot more of Mary.
She is there at the wedding at Cana, and indeed,
it’s she who goes to Jesus when they’ve run out of wine.
And Jesus says, at first, “Um, no –
my time has not yet come!” but Mary knew.
And she told the servants to “Do whatever he tells you”, and, sure enough, the water is turned into wine.

There’s a glimpse of her at one point when Jesus is teaching, and he’s told his mother and brother are outside waiting for him, but he refuses to be diverted from what he’s doing.
And, of course, it could have been that it was just random people who said they were his relations to try to get closer to him.

We see Mary, of course, weeping at the Cross –
something no mother should ever have to do.
And Jesus commending her into the care of the “beloved disciple” John.
And, finally, we see her in the Upper Room in Jerusalem when the Holy Spirit came.

That’s really all we know about her from the Bible, but other early traditions and writings, including some of what’s called the apocryphal gospels –
they’re the ones that didn’t make the cut into the New Testament as we know it –
tell us a bit more.
They tell us that her mother was called Anne and her father was called Joachim, and that she was only about 16 when Gabriel came to her.
One source has it that Anne couldn’t have babies, and when Mary finally arrived, she was given to be reared in the Temple, like Samuel.
And traditional sources also tell us that, after the Crucifixion, she went to live in Ephesus, probably with John, and died somewhere between 3 and 15 years later, surrounded by all the apostles.
And that her body was taken up to heaven, which is where we came in!

Well, so far, so good, but how did they get from there to the veneration of her, not to say worship in some cases, that we see today?
This may be something you find difficult to understand –
I certainly do –
and that’s okay.
We aren’t required to do more than honour her as the Mother of our dear Lord;
we mention her when we say the Creed, of course, and there are lots of churches dedicated to her.
My family’s church in Clapham is dedicated to St Mary the Virgin, as are loads of other churches around the world.

But we do not think of her as quasi-divine in some way.
We do believe that Jesus was conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit, not by ordinary human means,
but that this was something that happened in time, not in eternity!
She became the Mother of God –
she was not the Mother of God before Jesus was born.

It’s fascinating, reading up on all the various Marian theologies.
I don’t propose to go into them now –
I don’t understand some of them at all, and anyway, it would take too long.
It would appear, though, that while veneration of Mary is very ancient indeed, independent theological study of her is comparatively recent.
Actually, theology isn’t quite the right word, given that that is the study of God - I think the technical term is “Mariology”.
And when it spins over into giving Mary that worship that properly belongs to God alone, it becomes “Mariolatry”.

I wonder, though, just how it happened that veneration of Mary became such a thing among Roman Catholic Christians.
Orthodox Christianity also venerates her, but make it quite clear that she is not divine –
the distinction, sometimes, among Catholics gets a bit blurred.
One theory I have heard put forward is that she gives a female aspect to Christianity, which may or may not be lacking from the Trinity.
In Italy, apparently, the day is called “Ferragosto”, and is far older than Christianity –
it was originally a festival of the goddess Diana, and became a public holiday during the reign of the Emperor Augustus!
You remember “Great is Diana of the Ephesians” when Paul had a row with a silversmith making copies of her shrine in the book of Acts – it’s that Diana, also known as Artemis, who was associated with the moon, the hunt, and virginity.

Her festival is now the Assumption!
We Christians do like to take a pagan festival and turn it into something else, don’t we?!

But listen, back in the day when the head of your household, or family, or tribe, decided to be baptised and to follow Jesus, everybody else had to, too, no matter what they felt about it.
And although many traditions worshipped a God who,
if gendered, was thought of as male, a very great many worshipped some kind of mother goddess –
and, suddenly confronted with a God who presented very much as male –
although of course there are female aspects of, and names for God, but we don’t use them much!
One can quite validly pray to Lady Love, or Lady Wisdom, and the Holy Spirit is often thought of as female, since the Hebrew word for Spirit is feminine.
Anway, where was I –
oh yes, when told they would now worship God, and Jesus –
well, there was his Mother, all ready to be the Mother you used to worship…..

We Protestants, of course, do have a choice –
there is a tradition of venerating Mary in some parts of the Protestant Church, but it is far from compulsory.
We honour her as the Mother of our dear Lord –
and we honour her, too, for her bravery in saying “Yes” to God like that.
After all, had Joseph repudiated her for carrying someone else’s child, she could have ended up on the streets!

As for the Assumption –
well, who knows?
Some Catholics think she was still alive when that happened, but the official position is unclear.
The Orthodox call it the Dormition, or falling-asleep, and celebrate her death, but they, too, believe her body was carried up to heaven.

But what, then, can we learn from Mary?
We don’t tend to think of her very much, at least, I don’t.
But there is that incredible bravery that said “Yes” to God –
and remember, she didn’t know the end of the story, not at that stage!
There are times I wonder what she must think of it all!
But she was totally submitted to God in a way that very few people can claim to be.

And, of course, there is what she said to the servants at that wedding in Cana - “Do whatever He tells you”.
And that’s not a bad motto to live by, either:
Do whatever Jesus tells you.
Amen.