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.

Lazarus and the Saints

>

Our Gospel reading today concerns the raising of Lazarus.

You know the story, of course –
Lazarus was the brother of Martha and Mary,
and Jesus seems to have been a frequent, and beloved, visitor to their home in Bethany, just outside Jerusalem.
It’s possible, if not probable, that he stayed there most years when he came up to Jerusalem for the Passover,
and they certainly seem to have been among his closest friends.

Anyway, Lazarus falls ill, and they send to Jesus to come and heal him.
But Jesus, unaccountably, delays for another two days.
And when he does set out to go there, the disciples are rather worried, as they fear for his safety.
But he explains that Lazarus has died, and God wants him raised from the dead.

And when he gets to Bethany, both Martha and Mary disobey tradition, and come out to meet him.
Normally, relatives of the deceased were expected to stay seated on low stools while the visitors came to them to offer their condolences –
it’s called sitting shiva, and I understand it’s done in Jewish families to this day.
Anyway, Martha and Mary run out to meet him, Martha first.
Jesus has this wonderful conversation with her which culminates in him saying to her, “I am the resurrection and the life.
Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die.
Do you believe this?” and Martha replying with that wonderful declaration of faith:
“I believe that you are the Christ, the Son of God, who was to come into the world.”
Martha said this.
Martha.
A woman –
and not only a woman, but a traditional woman,
usually more concerned with getting a meal for Jesus and the disciples than in learning what he had to say!
It’s amazing.

Anyway, then we come to the bit we just read,
where Mary comes out to Jesus in her turn,
and Jesus weeps at his friend’s grave.
And then he calls for the stone to be rolled away and Martha, wonderful, practical Martha, complains that it’s going to stink quite dreadfully after four days....
but the stone gets rolled away, and Lazarus comes forth, still wrapped in his graveclothes.

Now, it’s a wonderful story, and I expect you, like me, have heard many great sermons and much wonderful teaching on it.
But the reason why we had it this morning is because tomorrow is All Saints’ Day, when the church is asked to celebrate those who have gone before into glory.
What is sometimes known as the Church Triumphant;
we here on earth being the Church Militant.

Today, of course, is Halloween.
Actually, it’s the Eve of All Saints, or All Hallows, so All Hallows Eve, Halloween.
When you look round the shops, you see, above all, orange pumpkins which are in season at this time of year – the small ones, of course, are delicious to eat, and the larger ones make delightful jack-o-lanterns.
It’s only really in this century that the pumpkin has become the vegetable of choice for jack-o-lanterns; in my youth, they were neither imported nor grown here, and if you wanted a jack-o-lantern, you had to carve it from a swede!
Which was not easy.
Also, in my childhood, although Halloween parties were a thing,
it was greatly overshadowed by Guy Fawkes’ Night, on 5 November.
Children didn’t go trick-or-treating, back then; instead, they would make a guy, and take it through the streets on an old pushchair or go-kart, and ask passers-by for “a penny for the guy”, which money was probably spent on fireworks.
I have to admit that I’d really rather we still did that!
I don’t at all care for the spooky aspects of Halloween, and the hints of evil that run through it,
although people do say that it is to celebrate Jesus’ victory over such things.
Nevertheless, I prefer to think of it as the Eve of All Saints.

In France, All Saints’ Day is a Bank Holiday,
and although Halloween is increasingly a thing there, as here,
the tradition there is to take flowers –
usually chrysanthemums –
to put on your loved ones’ graves.

But All Saints itself is about life, not death.
No spiders or ghosts or witches or other nasties.
It’s a triumph of life.
Jesus said “I am the Resurrection and the Life.
Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die.”

So, granted that what we are celebrating is All Saints, what is a saint?
Strikes me there seem to be two kinds of saints.
The first is a Saint with a capital S.
These are often Bible people, like St Paul, of course, but there are also lots of Saints who were, in life, totally dedicated to being God’s person.
To the point where, very often, they got into serious trouble, or even killed for it.
There was St Polycarp, who was put to death,
and when he was given a chance to recant, to say he wasn’t a Christian after all, he said very firmly that he’d served God, man and boy,
for something like eighty years now, and God had never let him down,
so if they thought he was going to let God down at the last minute, they’d another think coming.
Or words to that effect.

There were Saints Perpetua and Felicity, her servant.
Saint Perpetua was a young mother, whose husband and father both roundly disapproved of her being a Christian,
and Felicity, also a Christian, was expecting a baby when they were taken and put on trial.
They were left until Felicity had had her baby –
a little girl, who was brought up by her sister –
and then they had to face wild beasts in the arena.
And so went to glory.

There are lots of other saints, too, whose story has come down to us.
Although sometimes their stories are rather less exotic than we once thought.
St George, for instance, the patron saint of England:
he was born in Cappadocia of noble, Christian parents and on the death of his father, accompanied his mother to Palestine, her country of origin, where she had land and George was to run the estate.
He rose to high rank in the Roman army, and was martyred for complaining to the then Emperor about his persecuting the Christians –
he ended up being one of the first to be put to death.

And his dragon?
Oh, that was a bit of a misunderstanding.
The Greek church venerated George as a soldier-saint,
and told many stories of his bravery and protection in battle.
The western Christians, joining with the Byzantine Christians in the Crusades, elaborated and misinterpreted the Greek traditions and devised their own version.
The story we know today of Saint George and the dragon dates from the troubadours of the 14th century.
Of course, you can look at it, as they did, in symbolic terms:
the Princess is the church, which George rescued from the clutches of Satan.
I imagine football fans often see places like Brazil or Argentina as the dragon, especially during the World Cup!

But not all Saints belong to the dawn of Christianity.
There is Thomas More, for instance, who was put to death by Henry the Eighth as he wouldn’t admit that the King’s marriage to Katharine of Aragon was valid, or that the King was Head of the Church.
And in our own day, Mother Theresa, Archbishop Romero, Pope John the Twenty-third – he was the one who called for Vatican 2, you may remember, which produced so many changes in the Roman church, and a great many others.

So, anyway, those are just a very few of the many “Saints” with a capital S.
No bad thing to read some of the stories of their lives, and learn who they were, and why the Church continues to remember them.

And then, of course, there is the other sort of saint, the saint with a small “s”.
St Paul often addresses his letters to “The Saints” in such-and-such a town.
He basically means the Christians.
Us, in other words.
We are God’s saints.
We are the sanctified people –
sanctified means “being made holy”, or being made more like Jesus.

And you notice that it is “being made holy”, not “making ourselves holy”.
We can do nothing to become a saint by ourselves!
We can’t even say that God has saved me because I believe in him –
our salvation, our sainthood, is a free gift from God and we can do nothing to earn it, not even believe in God!
We aren’t saved as a reward for believing –
we are saved because God loves us!

We believe that, like Lazarus, we shall be raised from dead.
But unlike him, we shall probably be raised to eternal life with Jesus,
and God will wipe away every tear from our eyes.
And we are also told that Jesus came so that we might have life, and have it abundantly.
That applies to the here and now, too, not just pie in the sky when we die!
Our whole lives now have that eternal dimension.
That doesn’t mean, of course, that we won’t experience great sorrow here –
sadly, that is part of human existence.
And I don’t think it means that we can live just as we like, doing whatever we like, because God has saved us.
Rather to the contrary, I think personal holiness is very important.
We need to do all we can to avoid sin.
Jesus shows us in some of his teachings what his people are going to be like:
poor in spirit –
not thinking more of themselves than they ought;
mourning, perhaps for the ungodly world in which we live;
meek, which means slow to anger and gentle with others;
hungry and thirsty for righteousness;
merciful;
pure in heart;
peacemakers and so on.

St Paul gives other lists of characteristics that Christians will display;
you probably remember from his letter to the Galatians:
Love, joy, peace, patience and so on.
And he gives lots of lists of the sort of behaviour that Christians don’t do, ranging from gluttony to fornication.
Basically the sort of things that put “Me” first, and make “me” the centre of my life.

But the wonderful thing is that we don’t have to strive and struggle and do violence to our own natures.
Yes, of course, we are inherently selfish and it’s nearly impossible to put God first in our own strength.
But the whole point is, we don’t have to do it in our own strength.
That is why God sent the Holy Spirit, to come into us, fill us, and transform us.
We wouldn’t be very happy in heaven if we were stuck in our old nature, after all!

But if we let God transform us, we can have abundant life here on this earth, and then we leave our bodies behind and go on to be with Jesus.
And that, we are told, is even better!

Jesus asks us, “I am the resurrection and the life.
Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die.
Do you believe this?”

Can we reply, with Martha, “I believe that you are the Christ, the Son of God, who was to come into the world.”?