Echoes

I do apologise for the cough at the beginning of the podcast, and the slight delay before the sermon starts; I have just moved to a Chromebook computer and have yet to make audio editing work on it!  Next time, perhaps....




The story of the flight into Egypt, from Matthew’s Gospel, is really rather strange.

It’s certainly not found elsewhere;

in fact, Luke’s version of events is so different you sometimes wonder whether they are talking about the same thing.

Here we are, in Matthew,

finding the Holy Family living in Bethlehem,

fleeing to Egypt,

and then settling in Nazareth,

well out of reach of Herod’s descendants.

But Luke tells us that the family lived in Nazareth in the first place,

went to Bethlehem for the census,

and, far from avoiding Jerusalem,

called in there on their way back to Nazareth!

And, indeed, went there each year for the festivals –

I wonder, don’t you, whether they stayed with Mary’s cousin Elisabeth

and whether Jesus and John played together as children?

Not that it matters.

We all rationalise the two stories into one,

and add our own extraneous bits –

the ox and the ass, for instance,

are figments of people’s imaginations, not part of the Luke’s account.

And from Matthew’s telling of it, the Holy Family lived in Bethlehem anyway and didn’t need to use a stable!

And, as we shall hear next week that they were astrologers, not kings,

and Matthew doesn’t actually say how many there were!

And do you really think people kept bursting into song,

like they do in Luke’s gospel?

I rather think that Luke, like Shakespeare, was writing what he thought they ought to have said, rather than what they actually did say!

But both Gospels –

for both Mark and John choose not to start with Jesus’ birth,

but at the start of his ministry –

both Gospels agree that Jesus was born to a virgin,

was conceived in her by the Holy Spirit in some way we simply don’t understand.

And they both agree that he was born in Bethlehem,

to a mother named Mary and a father named Joseph.

Both gospels also provide a genealogy for him,

tracing him right back to Adam in St Luke’s case,

and forward from Abraham in St Matthew’s case!

And occasionally tracing by different routes.

But it doesn’t really matter, as I said.

The Bible people were not writing to modern standards of historical accuracy, but they are still telling us true stories, however they might vary in detail.

It’s what they are telling us that matters, not the historical details!

Have you ever noticed, too, that Luke’s version of events is from Mary’s point of view, but Matthew is telling us it from Joseph’s?

I hadn’t before this year, but you’re all probably going, “Well, duh!”

But if you hadn’t thought of it, it’s absolutely true.

Luke shows us Gabriel going to Mary and saying “Hail, thou that art highly favoured;

blessed art thou among women!”

But Matthew shows us Joseph’s reaction to the news that Mary was expecting a baby and it wasn’t his.

Quite why Mary chose not to discuss the angel’s proposition with Joseph before she agreed escapes me.

He could, and arguably should, have discarded her publicly and ordered her stoned to death.

But he didn’t.

He decided he’d end the betrothal quietly, with no public scandal.

And then he listened to the angel who said that he should marry her anyway, because her child was conceived by God.

As if that made it better…..

I think I rather like Joseph, don’t you?

He comes across as someone who’s willing to listen,

and to change his mind.

He comes across as someone who listens to God,

and is prepared to accept that God speaks to him in dreams.

He is forced to choose between being seen as righteous, and doing what he believes is God’s will, which may well make him a laughing-stock.

Imagine, Joseph, of all people,

can’t you hear them mutter in the market-place?

Joseph, willing to raise another man’s child!

Joseph…. Just fancy that!

In our reading today, again, Joseph listens.

He acts on what he hears –

he takes his family and flees to Egypt,

and when he is told it is safe, he brings them home again,

only to Nazareth, not Bethlehem.

But this whole story that we heard read to day has echoes in the Old Testament, doesn’t it?

And it echoes down the years.....

There is Israel going down into Egypt

and being called up out of Egypt in the Exodus as God's son (hence the quotation from Hosea in verse 15),

but we also have echoes of when Pharaoh tried to kill Hebrew infants

which led to Moses being hidden the bulrushes.

Jewish legends about this event also have dream warnings

just as we have here

and I expect Matthew knew about them when he was writing the story.

At that, wasn’t there another Joseph who knew all about hearing God’s voice in dreams?

What these echoes do is to root the story in history.

The provide a setting for Jesus, if you like.

Sending Jesus wasn’t just something God decided to do totally randomly –

he was firmly rooted in the history of the Jews, who were expecting a Messiah.

Matthew, who is thought to have been Jewish, is trying to show how the Scriptures led down to this moment.

Rather like, if you will, when Jesus explained the Scriptures to Cleopas and his wife on the road to Emmaus, so they were able to see that they pointed to Jesus, and to the Resurrection.

For Matthew, all the Scripture quotations act as proof that Jesus is who He claimed to be.

It’s not the sort of thing scholars nowadays consider proof,

but that doesn’t matter.

For Matthew, as for all Jewish scholars of the time,

that was how you proved things:

was there a relevant quotation in the Scriptures?

He wants to set the Messiah in context.

And showing that history is repeating itself:

a new Pharaoh killing the babies, a new Joseph listening to dreams, a new journey into Egypt, and a new Exodus out of it.

And it echoes down to our own day, doesn’t it –

refugees, people fleeing in terror of their lives, genocide....

it never ends.

The magi –

wise men, astrologers, it’s thought –

came to Bethlehem to worship the new-born infant,

and we are invited to do the same.

But we don’t just worship him as a baby –

it’s not about going “Ah, cootchy-cootchy-coo, isn’t he sweet!”,

and having cuddles,

like we do when we admire babies.

No, worshipping the Baby at Bethlehem involves a whole lot more than that.

It’s about worshipping Jesus for Who He became, and what he did.

We kneel at the cradle in Bethlehem, yes –

but we worship the Risen Lord.

We celebrate Christmas, not just because it’s Jesus’ birthday,

although that, too,

but because we are remembering that if Jesus had not come,

he could not come again.

And he could not be “born in our hearts”, as we sing in the old carol.

We worship at the cradle in Bethlehem,

but we also worship Jesus all year round,

remembering not only his birth,

but his teachings,

his ministry,

the Passion,

the Resurrection,

the Ascension and the coming of the Holy Spirit.

And we worship, not only as an abstract “Thing” –

what was that song:

“I will celebrate Nativity, for it has a place in history....” –

it’s not just about worshipping a distant divinity,

but about God with us:

Emmanuel.

Jesus, as a human being, can identify with us.

He knows from the inside what it is like to be vulnerable, ill, in pain, tempted.....

From the story of the flight into Egypt, we see him as a refugee, an asylum-seeker, although he was just a baby, or perhaps a small boy at the time.

From the story that Joseph chose deliberately to settle his family in the sticks, far away from civilisation, we see Jesus as living an ordinary, obscure life.

His father, Joseph, was, we are told, a carpenter, although in fact that’s not such a great translation –

the word is “Technion”, which is basically the word we get our word “technician” from.

A “technion” would not only work in wood,

but he’d build houses –

and design them, too.

He was a really skilled worker,

not your average builder with his trousers falling off.

Jesus would have been educated, as every Jewish boy was, and probably taught to follow his father’s trade.

After all, we think he was about 30 when he started his ministry,

and he must have done something in the eighteen years since we last saw him, as a boy in the Temple.

God with us:

a God who chose to live an ordinary life,

who knows what it is to be homeless, a refugee;

who knows what it is to work for his living.

Who knows what it is to be rejected, to be spat upon, to be despised.

Who knows what it’s like to live in a land that was occupied by a foreign power.

This, then, is the God we adore.

We sing “Joy to the World” at this time of year, and rightly so,

for the Gospel message is a joyful one.

But the story of the flight into Egypt reminds us that it is so much more than just a happy-clappy story of the birth of a baby.

It is the story of the God who is there.

God with us.

Emmanuel.

Amen.

8-second

Wot’s going on ’ere?

Okay, we have all heard this Gospel story many, many, many times. Probably several times every year, depending on how many carol services we’ve been to, or listened to on the radio, or watched on television! It’s part of the great cycle of nine lessons and carols without which no Christmas is complete.

So we let it wash over us. “The birth of Jesus was in this wise….” yadda, yadda, yadda. We knew it all before.

But, you know, it really is a most extraordinary story. We know that Matthew tells his version of the nativity from Joseph’s point of view, while Luke tells his from Mary’s, and that there are several very significant differences between the two versions. In fact, Luke’s version of events is so different you sometimes wonder whether they are talking about the same thing.

In Matthew,

we find the Holy Family living in Bethlehem,

fleeing to Egypt,

and then settling in Nazareth,

well out of reach of Herod’s descendants.

But Luke tells us that the family lived in Nazareth in the first place,

went to Bethlehem for the census,

and, far from avoiding Jerusalem,

called in there on their way back to Nazareth!

And, indeed, went there each year for the festivals –

I wonder, don’t you, whether they stayed with Mary’s cousin Elisabeth

and whether Jesus and John played together as children?

And while Luke has the shepherds visiting the manger, Matthew has eastern astrologers calling in at the house to worship the child.

Not that it matters.

We all rationalise the two stories into one,

and add our own extraneous bits –

the ox and the ass, for instance,

are figments of people’s imaginations, not part of the Luke’s account.

Even the stable – the manger may well have been separating the dwelling-house from the animal-house, rather than in a separate stable as we envisage it.

But from Matthew’s telling of it, the Holy Family lived in Bethlehem anyway and didn’t need to use a stable!

But that doesn’t matter now.

What does matter, is that Joseph was a righteous man. A righteous man, in the Bible, is one who always tries his hardest to do what he believed God wanted. Job is another “righteous man”, and I’m sure there were others in the Bible, but I can’t think of them off-hand right now. Anyway, Joseph always wanted to do what was right in God’s eyes. And now, suddenly, his world is torn apart. Mary, to whom he was betrothed – and a betrothal back then is far more binding than an engagement today – Mary is expecting a child, and it isn’t his.

I do wonder, don’t you, why Mary didn’t go and discuss the angel’s visit to her with Joseph before saying “Yes”. Although, come to think of it, Luke doesn’t mention Joseph at that stage, but has Mary saying that she can’t possibly get pregnant because she doesn’t have a lover. Joseph only appears in the next chapter as her husband.

Anyway, she didn’t. She accepted God’s request that she bear “a son, who will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. The Lord God will give him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over Jacob’s descendants forever; his kingdom will never end.”

And there she is, and what is Joseph to do? A righteous man, in those days, would probably go to the rabbis and seek guidance from Scripture, and ask what they thought. Back then, they didn’t have the written guidance that Jews have today, known as the Talmud, because it hadn’t been written down, but the rabbis knew, and remembered, what earlier generations had said about the Law. And in this case it was very clear: if your wife, whether married or betrothed, betrayed you, she was to be stoned to death. The man wasn’t, of course – that sort of law didn’t apply to him! He might have to pay a fine to the husband, and he might be required to marry the girl (assuming she hadn’t been stoned first), but he certainly didn’t face death. That, I’m afraid was and remains the reality for all too many women.

Anyway, Joseph is kind-hearted. He knows he can’t marry Mary, but he really can’t bring himself to agree that she be stoned to death. So he decides – and I expect he sought the rabbis’ approval – to quietly end the betrothal and send her back to her parents. She would just have to cope as best she could. If they threw her out – as well they might – she would have to go on the streets or starve.

But then God intervenes, and tells Joseph to marry Mary anyway, because it was he, God himself, who was the father of the coming child. Did that really make it better? It was God who had betrayed him with his future wife? Seriously? And that was supposed to make it all right? Hmph. Joseph wasn’t impressed. I should think he was very angry with God, and probably said so in no uncertain terms. Fortunately, it’s okay to be angry with God – I’m sure we have all been, at one time or another. And that’s fine. God understands. God knows that we need to express our anger in order to get rid of it, and not let it fester and turn to depression.

Poor Joseph. He is a righteous man, but he has to choose between obeying God’s call and going on being seen as righteous. We may or may not have trouble believing that Mary’s baby was conceived by the Holy Spirit – after all, we say we believe it whenever we say the Creed – but I’m quite sure that nobody in first-century Bethlehem would have believed it. And if Joseph had tried to tell people, it might have been his turn to have been stoned, this time for blasphemy!

God does confound our expectations in this story. You might expect the Messiah to be born to a righteous man – but would you expect him to have to choose between doing God’s will and being righteous? God is continually turning our world upside down like that – or should be!

When I was young, there was a book by a man called J B Phillips, entitled “Your God is too small”. I don’t know whether it’s still in print, but it was excellent, I seem to remember. Phillips showed how most of us tried to keep God small enough that our minds could encompass what it was all about. But, of course, you can’t do that. I mean, you can do that, of course, and we all tend to, but if we do, what we are worshipping isn’t God. Similarly, we tend to put God in boxes, telling each other that God always does thus and so – but that’s not true, either, as this story shows.

God required a righteous man to marry a woman who was pregnant, not by another man, which would have been bad enough, but by God himself! We think that God has laid down rules for sexual morality – but is God bound by those rules? Doesn’t look like it, does it? What if God’s rules are actually less rigid than we think? Of course, Jesus told us that we mustn’t use people just for their bodies, but then, that isn’t applying here. Mary has said “Yes” to God, and trusts God enough to believe he’ll do the right thing by her and she won’t end up on the streets. And Joseph trusted God enough to believe he would enable him to live down the scandal of marrying a woman carrying, so it was thought, another man’s child.

I don’t know if you’ve ever read the genealogies that comprise the first half of this first chapter of Matthew? If you have, you’ll notice that while mostly it was so-and-so was the father of someone else, on a very few occasions the name of the mother is given. And every time, every single time, there is some scandal attached to that woman. Tamar was a daughter-in-law of Judah, who was a childless widow and who should then have married Judah’s youngest son, but Judah refused to arrange this. So Tamar, who was furious, pretended to be a prostitute and made a bargain with Judah for a goat, and his seal and stick as a deposit on the goat. Then she stopped pretending, and nobody could find her to give her the goat. But when Judah heard that Tamar was pregnant, he ordered her to be burnt – but changed his mind sharpish when she sent him back his seal and stick and said that he was the father!

Rahab, the mother of Boaz, really was a prostitute. And Ruth, of course, is a Gentile, an outsider, a Muggle, if you like, who seduces Boaz to get him to marry her. And then there was Bathsheba, who committed adultery with David while she was still married to Uriah, and later marries David and is the mother of Solomon. Nevertheless, she was probably not as virtuous a woman as all that…. David could have had any woman he wanted, so I expect he probably accepted “No” for an answer. But we’ll never know.

The point is, none of these women were the virtuous women whose price, the book of Proverbs tells us, is above rubies. And yet they played a vital part in the genealogy of Jesus. God has confounded our expectations yet again! The virtuous, righteous women are just in the nameless ruck – it is the outsiders who are named and cherished.

Outsiders. I know that the church has an incredibly bad reputation when it comes to welcoming outsiders – you only have to consider what happened when those who had come over on the Empire Windrush appeared in church their first Sunday in London. But that was not of God. God is the one who welcomes the outsider, the outcast. Jesus spoke to the woman at the well when nobody else would – and his disciples were shocked and horrified.

I wonder how good we are today at welcoming outsiders. What if a gay or lesbian couple turned up at church on Christmas Day? What if a Muslim family, seeking somewhere to worship, turned up? What if…. I know I’m not good at coping if someone drunk wanders in, seeking money – and yet God might have sent that person just to confound our expectations.

God confounded our expectations by having the Messiah born of an unmarried woman – well, carried by an unmarried woman, I should say, as she and Joseph appear to have been married before Jesus was actually born. He then proceeded to confound them still further by having outsiders be the first to be told the news, and to come and worship him. The shepherds, in their own way, were as much outsiders as the magi.

And God continues to confound our expectations today. Are you ready for that to happen? When we sing “O holy child of Bethlehem, be born in us today?” are you ready for that to happen. Or when we sing “Fit us for heaven, to live with thee there”, are you ready for God to fit you, indeed for heaven. Because it won’t be in the way you expect! 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.