Without Honour

I don't actually like the title for this sermon, but it was the working title and I didn't change it.

Once upon a time there was a big flood, and people had to climb up on to the roofs of their houses to escape. One guy thought this was a remarkable opportunity to demonstrate, so he thought, God’s power, so he prayed “Dear Lord, please come and save me.”

Just then, someone came past in a rowing-boat and said “Climb in, we’ll take you to safety!”

“Oh, no thank you,” said our friend, “I’ve prayed for God to save me, so I’ll just wait for Him to do so.”

And he carried on praying, “Dear Lord, please save me!”

Then along came the police in a motor-launch, and called for him to jump in, but he sent them away, too, and continued to pray “Dear Lord, please save me!”

Finally, a Coastguard helicopter came and sent down someone on a rope to him, but he still refused, claiming that he was relying on God to save him.

And half an hour later, he was swept away and drowned.

So, because he was a Christian, as you can imagine, he ended up in Heaven, and the first thing he did when he got there was go to to the Throne of Grace, and say to God, “What do you mean by letting me down like this? I prayed and prayed for you to rescue me, and you didn’t!”

“My dear child,” said God, “I sent you two boats and a helicopter – what more did you want?”

In a way, that’s rather what happened to Jesus in our Gospel reading this morning. What a difference from last week’s reading! You remember, we looked at the story of Jesus healing the little girl and the old woman. Jesus was mighty popular then, all right.

But then what happens? He goes home for the weekend. Big mistake! Because on the Sabbath Day, he goes to the synagogue with his family, and because he’s home visiting for the weekend, they ask him to choose the reading from the Prophets. Luke’s version of this story tells us that he read from the prophet Isaiah, the bit where it says: “The Spirit of the Sovereign LORD is on me, because the LORD has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to bind up the broken-hearted, to proclaim freedom for the captives and release from darkness for the prisoners, to proclaim the year of the LORD's favour and the day of vengeance of our God, to comfort all who mourn.”

Mark doesn’t go into such detail, but he does tell us that Jesus’ friends and family were amazed. “Where did this man get these things?” they asked. “What's this wisdom that has been given him, that he even does miracles!” And we’re told they were rather offended. “He’s only the Carpenter’s son, Mary’s lad. These are his brothers and sisters. He can’t be special.” And they were offended, so we are told. Luke says they even picked up stones to throw at him to make him go away. But Mark says that he could do no miracles there, just one or two healings.

And he was amazed at their lack of faith.

After all, they thought, what did he know? He’s just a local lad, a builder. Ought to be home working with his brothers, not gadding about the country claiming to be a prophet. They couldn’t hear God’s voice speaking through him. They didn’t expect to, and they didn’t want to. Like the man in my story, they had very definite ideas about how God worked, and working through a local boy they’d known since childhood wasn’t one of them!

You know, I really love King’s Acre. I’ve been worshipping here regularly for more than half my life – I first came over thirty years ago, a young bride of 25 years old. You people have known me for years, you’ve stood by me in my struggles with the faith, you’ve prayed for me, you’ve loved me. When I decided, tentatively, that it was just possible that God was calling me to be a preacher, you didn’t laugh at me. You encouraged me, you prayed for me, you supported me. You rejoiced with me when I was commissioned – seventeen years ago this month, it doesn’t seem possible, does it? In short, you’ve known me for the best part of my life, you’ve watched me grow up, you’ve helped me grow up, and you accept me for who I am. And my goodness, I thank God for you!

But it could have been different. You could have turned round and said, what her? Who does she think she is, thinking God has called her to preach? You could have refused to listen to me.

Now, obviously I’m not Jesus, but I hope that sometimes God does use me to bring His word to you – that part of it isn’t my problem, of course! I have no way of knowing what God wants to say to you this morning, I just preach what I think I’m given to say, and trust God for the rest. But the point is, if you refused to listen to me, simply because I’m Annabel and you’ve known me since I was little more than a girl, that would be treating me rather like the people of Nazareth treated Jesus.

Do we have definite ideas about how God works, I wonder? Do we expect to see God working in the ordinary, the every day? Or do we expect him always to come down with power and fire from Heaven? Do we expect Him to speak to us through other people, perhaps even through me, or do we expect Him to illuminate a verse of the Bible specially, or write His message in fiery letters in the sky?

We do sometimes, because we are human, long and long to see God at work in the spectacular, the kind of thing that Jesus used to do when he healed the sick and even raised the dead. And very occasionally God is gracious enough to give us such signs. But mostly, He heals through modern medicine, guiding scientists to develop medicine and surgical techniques that can do things our ancestors only dreamed about. And through complementary medical techniques which address the whole person, not just the illness. And through love and hugs and sympathy and support.

We do need to learn to recognise God at work. All too often, we walk blindly through our week, not noticing God – and yet God is there. God is there and going on micro-managing His creation, no matter how unaware of it we are. And God is there to speak to us through the words of a friend, or an acquaintance. If we need rescuing, God is a lot more likely to send a friend to do it than to come in person!

And conversely, we need to be open to God at work in us, so that we can be the friend who does the speaking, or the rescuing. Not that God can’t use people who don’t know him – of course He both can and does – but the more open we are to being His person, the more we allow Him to work in us, to help us grow into the sort of person He created us to be, then the more He can use us, with or without our knowledge, in His world. Who knows, maybe the supermarket cashier you smiled at yesterday really needed that smile to affirm her faith in people, after a bad day. Or the friend you telephoned just to have a catch-up with was badly needing to chat to someone – not necessarily a serious conversation, just a chat. You will never know – but God knows.

We are, of course, never told “what would have happened”, but I wonder what would have happened if the people of Nazareth had been open to Jesus. He could have certainly done more miracles there. Maybe he wouldn’t have had to have become an itinerant preacher, going round all the villages. Maybe he could have had a home. I think God may well have used the rejection to open up new areas of ministry for Jesus – after all, we do know that God works all things for good.

And, finally, what happened to the people of Nazareth? The answer is, nothing. Nothing happened. God could do no work there through Jesus. Okay, a few sick people were healed, but that was all. The good news of the Kingdom of God was not proclaimed. Miracles didn’t happen. Just. . . nothing.

We do know, of course, that in the end his family, at least, were able to get their heads round the idea of their lad being The One. His Mother was in the Upper Room on the Day of Pentecost. James, one of his brothers, was a leader in the early church. But were they the only ones? Did anybody else from Nazareth believe in Him, or were they all left, sadly, alone?

I think that’s an Awful Warning, isn’t it? If we decide we need to know best who God chooses to speak through, how God is to act, then God can do nothing. And God will do nothing. If he sends two boats and a helicopter and we reject them because we don’t see God’s hand at work in them, then we will be left to our own devices. As the people of Nazareth were.

Twelve Years

Twelve years. The story in today’s gospel reading is about two people who, for twelve years, have led very different lives.

Twelve years is a very long time. Twelve years ago, it was 1997. Most of us, at least those of us who were alive twelve years ago, were worshipping here then, but things were very different.

We were still a local Ecumenical project. Sheila was our minister. The Conservative Government finally came to an end, and Tony Blair was elected Prime Minister in May. Emily was in the Lower Sixth at School, and went into the Upper Sixth in September. And in that September, Diana Princess of Wales and Dodi Fayed were killed in a car-crash in Paris. It feels like a long time ago.

But Chelsea won the FA cup – some things don’t change! I think they were just as international then as they are now. Michelle Kwan took Silver in the Figure Skating World Championships, and is still talking of making a come-back next year. I wonder whether she will. And in other sporting news, Jan Ullrich won the Tour de France for the first time. Pete Sampras and Martina Hingis won Wimbledon.

Ummm, what else happened in 1997? It was just before the infamous Dot-com bubble that was to build up over the next couple of years, so e-mail and Internet access, although growing, wasn’t nearly as ubiquitous as it is today. Most people still had dial-up connections, so you couldn’t be on-line and talk on the phone at the same time, and you couldn’t download television programmes or anything like that – if you knew you were going to miss a television programme, you set your video to record it on to tape. People did have mobile phones, but children didn’t, by and large. Your home or business telephone number was still the first thing you thought of when people wanted to contact you – and you mostly had a telephone-answering machine at home if you needed one, since the useful 1571 service wasn’t launched until 2001. Our telephone numbers, by the way, began 0171 or possibly 0181, depending on the exchange.

Such is the pace of change, that twelve years is a different world for us now.

And for the little girl in today’s story, it was a whole lifetime. She was twelve years old, so Luke’s version of the story tells us – beginning to grow up. She would, perhaps, be expecting her parents to start thinking of a husband for her within the next couple of years – her culture, you were more or less grown-up at 13. We don't know her name; women in the Bible don't tend to have names very often. We do know that her father was called Jairus, and he was a leader of the synagogue in Capernaum. I don't know if that means he was a rabbi, or whether he was the local equivalent of a church steward or something. Not that it matters. What does matter is that he loved his daughter, and now she was ill. Seriously ill. Her short life was ending almost before it had properly begun.

And there was the other woman, the one for whom twelve years was not so much a lifetime as a life sentence. The one with the haemorrhage. Twelve years of constant nagging, dragging pain. Twelve years of constant blood loss, of constantly feeling unwell, of constantly being tired and anaemic.

And, worst of all, twelve years of total social isolation. You see, back then, if you were a woman and you were bleeding, you were considered unclean. Nobody could touch you, or they risked becoming unclean, too. Your husband certainly couldn’t touch you – not even a cuddle. She couldn't go to the Temple, or to her synagogue, to worship. If she sat in a chair, that chair would be unclean for the rest of the day. And so on. She was basically cut off from normal social contact. We aren’t told whether this woman was married, although it was very unusual not to be in her society. But if she was, it’s quite probable that her husband had consoled himself elsewhere.

And nothing was helping. She’d spent all her money on seeing doctors, but they hadn’t been able to help, and the problem was, if anything, growing worse. She was becoming weaker, and knew that soon she would be too weak to carry on. Her life, too, was drawing to a close – and it may well be that she was profoundly grateful that it was happening.

But then, a rumour swept through the crowds. Jesus of Nazareth was visiting Capernaum today! Everybody had heard of Jesus of Nazareth. He had done some spectacular healings. Maybe, just maybe....

Jairus, it seems, had no doubts. The doctors hadn't helped his girl, and she was dying. Maybe this Jesus could help. Nothing to lose, anyway. At worst, he could do nothing for her. And at best.... well, perhaps Jairus didn't really allow himself to hope what that best would be.

The woman with the haemorrhage may or may not have doubted. Probably she was in despair, too. And anyway, Jesus wouldn’t look at the likes of her. She didn’t have any money. She didn’t have clout, like a synagogue leader. She was just a lonely old woman.

But the crowd was so huge that Jesus could barely walk up the street. The disciples were going, “Excuse me, excuse me, make way there now, oh would you please shift your – er – yourselves”, but progress was very slow. And the woman, caught up in the crowd, suddenly plucked up the courage and just, with one finger, touched his cloak.

And Jesus felt it. In all the crowd, with people everywhere, jostling and rubbing up against him, he felt that one deliberate touch. "Who touched me?" he asked. We aren't told the tone of voice he said it in. Sometimes, preachers seem to reckon he was irritated, angry even. I don't think so. I think he was full of compassion and love. He knew. He may not have known who she was, but he knew why she was hiding.

For Jesus, being ritually unclean didn’t matter. Sure, he was a devout Jew, worshipping in the synagogue every week, going to Jerusalem as often as possible, but for him, people mattered a lot more than ritual. You’ll remember he makes rude remarks to the Pharisees about their habit of tithing every herb in the garden, but refusing to take care of elderly parents. People, to Jesus, mattered far more than ritual. He was quite prepared to visit the centurion's house to heal his servant, even though that would have made him unclean.

Not that he could have been made unclean by her touch – it is, after all, He who confers cleanliness upon us, not us who make him unclean. But would Jesus, walking about on earth, have known that? Arguably not. I think, for him, it was more a matter of minding about people more than about rituals, without really realising why. So he doesn't care that the woman may or may not have rendered him unclean. What he does care about is that everybody should know that she is now well, and thus no longer a social outcast. So he says to her "Go in peace; your faith has made you well!"

And then to the little girl, who, if she wasn't already dead, was very close to death. But Jesus never let a little thing like being dead stop a healing, and he reached out to her and held her hand. "Get up, little one!" he said. And she did. She woke up, yawned, and stretched, for all the world as if she had just been enjoying a lovely, refreshing nap. "Get her something to eat," Jesus said, what could be more practical? And he didn't want her surrounded by the media of the day all yelling at her and stressing her out, either, so he suggests the parents don't tell anybody.

---oo0oo---

So far so good. But what is this telling us today, on this summer morning?

It’s about the obvious things, of course – about faith, about trusting Jesus, about having the faith to reach out and ask when things go pear-shaped. I suppose it’s about healing, and patience, and all that sort of thing. And it’s about the fact that everybody, but everybody, is welcome to Jesus.

You have the little girl, loved, accepted, coming from a relatively well-off family, who are in despair at her illness. And you have the old woman, poor, outcast, alone, friendless, who has nobody now to care whether she lives or dies. Yet Jesus heals them both.

I don’t know whether these two healings actually happened in the way that those who retold the stories say – it seems remarkably pat, to me. The rather obvious parallels and contrasts between the two healings – the repetition of twelve years, the risk of uncleanness in both cases, the woman, reaching out secretly, privately, yet healed in public. The little girl, whose father comes to Jesus in public, yet the healing is private and supposed to have been kept that way. It might be that the two stories were linked together very early on, even if they didn't happen quite like that. Not that it matters, of course, and all the three Gospels who tell it do link them together.

Another thing to notice is that both of them were women. Neither has a name, which is typical, but in that time and place, even for women to be noticed is pretty incredible. Certainly religious Jews didn't go round allowing themselves to be touched by strange women!

So, I think for today, the story is about inclusiveness. God's love is for everybody, no matter who you are. Rich or poor, old or young, male or female, religious or otherwise, whatever your race or ethnic origin. Even the worst type of sex-offender or paedophile. Even terrorists. God's love is for everybody.

I think we sometimes like to be a bit exclusive about who we worship with – I don’t know whether the Methodist church in this country has a less shameful history in this respect than the Anglican church, but I doubt it, somehow. We like to be with “people like us”, and in some ways, that’s all right. What isn’t all right, though, of course, is when “people like us” becomes “the only people worth knowing”, or “the only proper people”. That way leads to tribalism, and we know how many and dreadful conflicts tribalism has led to throughout the years. Including, it has to be said, Northern Ireland.

But, of course, the joy of it is that the Lord Jesus who brought healing to the little girl and the old woman, the Lord Jesus who was not afraid to get his hands dirty, not afraid to be considered ritually unclean, who put people before religious ritual, that same Lord Jesus is still with us today, still loving us, still healing us, still reaching out to us as we reach, however tentatively, out to him.

Praise God!

Waiting for God

This is an edited version of a sermon I first preached back on the Sunday after the Ascension in 1996. I retyped it for another community, and thought I would also publish it on here.

Acts 1 - Jesus Taken Up Into Heaven

In my former book, Theophilus, I wrote about all that Jesus began to do and to teach until the day he was taken up to heaven, after giving instructions through the Holy Spirit to the apostles he had chosen. After his suffering, he showed himself to these men and gave many convincing proofs that he was alive. He appeared to them over a period of forty days and spoke about the kingdom of God. On one occasion, while he was eating with them, he gave them this command: "Do not leave Jerusalem, but wait for the gift my Father promised, which you have heard me speak about. For John baptised with water, but in a few days you will be baptised with the Holy Spirit."

So when they met together, they asked him, "Lord, are you at this time going to restore the kingdom to Israel?"

He said to them: "It is not for you to know the times or dates the Father has set by his own authority. But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth."

After he said this, he was taken up before their very eyes, and a cloud hid him from their sight.

They were looking intently up into the sky as he was going, when suddenly two men dressed in white stood beside them. "Men of Galilee," they said, "why do you stand here looking into the sky? This same Jesus, who has been taken from you into heaven, will come back in the same way you have seen him go into heaven."

When I was a little girl, which was quite a long time ago now, I used to really look forward to my birthday. And the night before, it would be very difficult to go to sleep, just like it was difficult to go to sleep the night before Christmas. My mother used to say, "The sooner you go to sleep, the sooner it will be morning." But that didn't make it any easier to go to sleep!

I wasn't very good at waiting for it to be Christmas, or waiting for it to be my birthday. I always used to peek at presents, to try to guess what they were. Of course, people who are good at waiting never peek, do they? That only spoils the surprise! But I'm impatient. I don't like waiting for things.

I wonder how I would have got on, then, if I'd been one of Jesus' disciples all those years ago. We heard in our first reading, from Acts, that Jesus was taken from the disciples. We don't know exactly how - Luke's account isn't very clear. It just says he was taken from them, and a cloud hid him from their sight, so we don't know if he just faded into the mist, or if he zoomed off up into the air like an aeroplane taking off, or what. And really, it isn't exactly important. What does matter is that it was made very clear to the disciples that This was It. Jesus wasn't going to be with them in quite the same way any more. And their job now was to go back to Jerusalem and wait.

The question is, what were they waiting for? It wasn't going to be their birthday. It wasn't going to be Christmas. Well, of course, they didn't celebrate Christmas then! It was going to be the Feast of Pentecost, but in those days that was a sort of Harvest Festival. But that wasn't what they were waiting for.

I don't think they knew exactly what they were waiting for. They knew, in theory, that they were waiting for the Holy Spirit, but they didn't know, in practice, what that meant. Jesus had told them lots of things about the Holy Spirit. But that didn't tell them exactly what was going to happen. Jesus had told them that the Holy Spirit would remind them of all the things he had said and done, and they would understand the things he'd taught them. He said that the Holy Spirit would give them power to witness to Jesus in all sorts of far-flung places like Judea and Samaria and all the ends of the earth. He had told them that the Holy Spirit couldn't possibly come unless he, Jesus, went away.

But he hadn't told them what it was going to be like. They had o way o knowing exactly what they were waiting for.

And I think it must have been very difficult to wait. We don't know, of course, exactly how long they did have to wait. It might not have been for very long. In the Church, we celebrated Ascension Day on Thursday, and we celebrate the coming of the Holy Spirit next Sunday. We know the date for the coming of the Holy Spirit, because it was Pentecost, and we know that the Crucifixion and Resurrection happened around the time of the Jewish feast of Passover, and that these two feasts were about six weeks apart. But we don't know when the Ascension happened. It could have been a week after Easter; it could have been the day before Pentecost. So we don't know exactly how long the disciples had to wait. But no matter how long or how short a time it was, I bet that it felt like a very long time indeed! It must have been very, very difficult to wait patiently for Jesus to send the Holy Spirit. I shouldn't be surprised if some of the people nearly got fed up with waiting, and felt like going home to get on with their lives again. I think I might have felt like that, don't you? Perhaps some people did go home; Luke doesn't tell us. But we do know that 120 people didn't go home, including Jesus' mother, and Peter, James and John, and they were there in the Upper Room that morning when the Holy Spirit came down in tongues of fire and a noise like a rushing mighty wind. But if they had gone home, of course, they might have missed the whole thing.

It really isn't always easy to wait for God, is it? I'm sure you've had the experience of praying for something, and it not happening and not happening and not happening, and then all of a sudden it does happen. And you can't help wondering whether you had started to do something differently, or what, that made it happen, when, of course, it was just that not everything was ready for God to answer your prayer.

Waiting for God isn't a bit easy. Who was it prayed, "Give me patience, Lord, and I want it now!"? We always have to think we know better than God does - we want whatever it is now, and we don't see why God is delaying letting us have it. So then we whinge and moan at God, and some people even want to give up being God's person altogether.

Trouble is, of course, if you do that, if you try to know best, what you are saying, even if you don't realise it, is "Do it my way, God! Don't do it your way, do it my way!" And that is not a very sensible thing to say, because God can see round corners and we can't!

Sometimes we have to wait until we can say to God, "Okay God, do it your way! Don't do it my way!" Jesus had to say that to God in the Garden of Gethsemane, do you remember? He really, really didn't want to have to go through with it, and he had to absolutely fight with himself until he got to the point where he could say "Do it your way!" to God.

The other thing that sometimes happens is when something horrible has happened. When someone has died, for instance, especially if they are young, or if it was a terrible accident, or if they were killed. We get very cross with God, and say things like, "Well, what did you want to go and do that for? Why didn't you stop it?"

We forget that we can't see round corners the way God can. We aren't told what would have happened, but God knows And sometimes God doesn't stop dreadful things happening because it would mean interfering with someone else's freedom. And God doesn't interfere with our freedom. And sometimes God doesn't answer our prayers at once because to do so would mean forcing someone else to say "yes" to God when they aren't quite ready to. And again, God doesn't do that, either. But we do know that God always has a Plan B And that God works all things together for good to those that love him and are called according to His purpose. We might be going through a rough patch just now, but we know that, if we trust God, God will work it for good, and in six months' time we can probably look back and see the good God has worked from it.

I seem to have wandered rather a long way from the disciples, waiting patiently in the Upper Room for the Holy Spirit to come. But waiting is one of the skills we all have to learn to do. It's no good jumping up and down and being impatient, because it won't make God's time happen any faster. In act, I have a feeling that sometimes it delays things.

We have to learn to say to God, "Do it Your way!" And it's not an easy thing to learn. i find it incredibly difficult at times, and am terribly prone to go saying "No, no, you've got to do it my way!" But i we are to grow as God's people, then we have to say "Do it Your way."

And, of course, when we do learn to say that, then God the Holy Spirit is free to work in us. We mightn't necessarily see the tongues of fire or hear the rushing mighty wind that the disciples saw and heard, but we can know the power of God at work within us. We can be given gifts with which to do God's work; we can grow into the kind of people we were always meant to be. We will be the sort of people who have rivers of living water flowing from them - not that we can see it, or touch it, but that people will know that we are in touch with the source of all healing, and come to us for comfort. And we, we hope, will be able to point them to the right place where they can find healing for themselves - we will be able to point them to Jesus.

So learning to wait for God isn't just about learning patience; it isn't just about learning to say "do it your way" to God. It's about waiting for the right time, for when God is able to give you the gifts you need, the power you need, the love and joy and peace you need. To wait, as the first disciples waited, for the Holy Spirit to come. Amen.

Hmm. I'm not sure whether I would preach this like this today. Possibly. I can see several things I'd change - I don't think I would say that God has a Plan B, for instance; I think I'd say that God is never surprised! And maybe I'd talk about our need for control, and how hard it is to surrender control of our lives to God. But by and large I'd probably say the same kind of thing.

Remain in my love

“As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Now remain in my love. If you keep my commands, you will remain in my love, just as I have kept my Father's commands and remain in his love. I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete. My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you.”

Thus Jesus in the first part of our Gospel reading today. To set it in a little context, which I probably don’t need to do, but still, this is, of course, part of Jesus’ farewell to his disciples. They have met together for the Passover meal, and Jesus has washed their feet. And the other Gospels tell us that he took bread and wine, blessed them, and gave them to the disciples – the ordinary actions that the host would have done at any special meal together, particularly a Sabbath or Passover meal. But Jesus, we are told, took this and lifted it into something different: This is My Body; This is My Blood. And now he is speaking to them, telling them things that perhaps they won’t take in all at once, but that the Holy Spirit, so Jesus reassures them, will remind them of in the days, weeks, months and years to come.

Above all, he is reassuring them. Basically, he is telling them that he must leave them, but that they will not be left alone. The Holy Spirit will come to them – something that couldn’t happen if Jesus didn’t leave. And the Holy Spirit will lead them into all truth.

The bit about loving one another, though – that’s so important that he says it twice. First, right at the very beginning: “A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.” And now in the passage we have just read: “My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you.”

Well, yes, all right, we know that. We have heard it before. It is familiar. But, hang on a minute – how are we supposed to do this? And what does Jesus mean, anyway?

Part of the problem, of course, it does depend on your definition of “love”. Our English language lets us down here, unusually, as we only have the one word that has to cover an awful lot of meanings, from loving God down to loving cheese on toast, including loving our families, our friends, our pets, our old teddy-bear, our hobbies and the person we're in love with! In Greece they managed better, and had several different words!

There is “storge”, or affection, the kind of love you feel for your child or your parents; then there is “eros”, which is romantic love; “philia”, which is friendship,and “agape”, which is divine love, and this is the word that is used in this passage. It is also, as you may or may not know, the word that St Paul used in that lovely chapter in 1 Corinthians, when he talks of the nature of that sort of love:

“Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends.”

One of the interesting things is that when Jesus reinstates St Peter after he has denied him, you remember, by the lakeside, when he says to him “Simon, son of John, do you love me?” he uses the word “agape”. Peter can’t quite manage that, so he, when he replies “Lord, you know that I love you”, he uses the word “philia”; in other words, “Lord, you know I’m your friend”. Then when Jesus again asks him, “Simon, son of John, do you love me?”, he again uses the word “agape”, and Peter again replies using the word “Philia”. And then the third time, Jesus himself uses the word “philia” – which is why Simon Peter was so hurt. He’s already said twice that he is Jesus’ friend, why does he have to say it a third time?

Simon Peter found that committing himself to agape love, to God’s love, was pretty much impossible. I’m not surprised, are you? Let’s look at it again:

“Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.”

This is the sort of love that Jesus was talking about, when he told us to love one another in the same way that He loved us.

But how? Heaven knows, I don't always succeed in this, I'm sure my centre is far more often on myself than it is on God, and I expect many of you feel the same way.

Even Simon Peter couldn't do it, as we have seen: “Lord, you know I'm your friend!” It wasn't until after Pentecost, after the Holy Spirit came down, that he became the great apostle and evangelist. His love for God, and for his neighbours, was never in doubt after Pentecost, however much it was before!

So it seems as though we can't love God or one another without God's love first in us, in the Person of the Holy Spirit. And in our Gospel reading, Jesus says that we need to remain in His love. God loves us. We need to remain in that love, “abide” in it, the older translations say. A modern paraphrase, “The Message”, says “Make yourself at home in my love”. So if God’s love is in us, and we remain in that love, we make ourselves at home in it, what does that mean? Jesus says that if we obey his commands, we will abide in his love, end of. And his command is to love one another.

But it's not always easy, is it? The trouble is, quite apart from anything else, our human loves can be so desperately flawed. You might think that there is nothing more wonderful than the love between parents and children but how easily that love can turn into wanting to dominate the child, to dictate how it should live, what it should do, who it should be. And you have all heard the old joke, “She’s the kind of woman who lives for others – you can always tell the others by their hunted expressions!” The kind of person who, out of love, misguidedly tries to run people’s lives for them.

And I don’t need to spell out just how easily romantic love can go wrong, and become something of a battle for possession. Or in this day and age, more likely, a refusal to commit oneself to the beloved.

As for friendship, you would have thought it would be difficult for that to go wrong. People tend to be friends because of shared interests; Robert and I have a great many very dear friends whom we would not otherwise have anything in common with apart from our love of skating. That is the thing that we are friends about.

But sometimes friendship can be more about excluding the other person, not including them. Particularly among children, of course, but it can happen among adults. Sadly, we see it a lot in the churches – we exclude those who, perhaps, are not of the same denomination as we are, or don’t worship God in quite the same way. Or perhaps we are Evangelical and they are not, or vice versa, so we tend to be sniffy about their way of being a Christian, and exclude them.

But God’s love is the kind of love that lays down its life for its friends. Jesus says that if we obey his commands, we will remain in his love. We need to love one another with God’s love, and that’s not something we can do alone. God’s love, we are told, is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Spirit – we can love neither God nor one another without God’s having first loved us.

It all comes back to that, doesn’t it. God loves us and one of the implications of that love is that we are enabled to love one another.

But it’s not just about gooey feelings. Jesus pointed out that the greatest test of love is if you are willing to lay down your life for the other person. And St Paul’s description of love is eminently practical, too. Love, it seems, is something you do.

Love is something you do. Love is about putting the other person first. It’s about taking that extra step – giving someone a lift, even though it’s out of your way; making that telephone call, or sending that e-mail, to check that someone is all right. It can even be about commenting on someone’s Facebook status! It’s about remembering people’s birthdays and other special days. All that sort of thing – you know as well as I do; I scarcely need to spell it out.

In another place, Jesus tells us that we must love our neighbours as we love ourselves. Now loving ourselves is, very often, the difficult bit. It's all too easy to have the wrong kind of self-love, the kind that says “Me, me, me” all the time and demands its own way – the absolute opposite, in fact, of the love that St Paul speaks about in 1 Corinthians. You can't love your neighbour – or God, either, for that matter – if you are full of that sort of self-love.

But then there is the equal and opposite problem – we don't value ourselves enough. We don't really like ourselves, we have a big problem with self-image, we are not what the French call “comfortable in our own skins”. And often it is the people who appear most self-absorbed, most unable to love others, who are the most wounded inside, and who are totally not comfortable with themselves. And again, it is only through the love of God, and by the power of the Holy Spirit, that we can be made whole, and thus enabled to love ourselves and other people, as we should.

So really, it's all one – we love, because God first loved us; we can't love God without also loving one another; we can't love one another unless we love ourselves – or, at the very least, have a healthy self-image, which amounts to the same thing; and we can't love ourselves unless we are aware that God loves us!
So the important thing, as it always is, is to be open to God's love more and more - which is basically what I think "remain in my love" means; to continue to be God's person; and to continue to be open to be being made more and more the person God designed us to be. To be fully human is to be fully God's person. Amen.

Children of God

I thought that today, for once, we wouldn’t look too closely at the Gospel reading, as Luke’s account of Jesus’ appearance to the disciples after the Resurrection is very similar to the account in John’s gospel, which I expect you looked at last week. We certainly did at King’s Acre! The only thing I will point out is that Luke says Jesus actually ate with them – ghosts, after all, don’t eat! So that particular detail is, for the gospel writer, just another proof that Jesus really was raised. He wasn’t just a ghost; he wasn’t just a figment of their imagination. He ate some fish – and there’s the dirty plate!

We read the first chapter of this letter from John last week, too. I want to focus on the passage we read today, in a minute. It isn’t quite a letter, is it – it’s more of a sermon. He doesn’t put in the chatty details that Paul puts into his letters, nor the personal messages. Nobody seems to know whether it was really the disciple that Jesus loved that wrote the Gospel and this letter, or whether it was someone writing as from them, which was apparently a recognised literary convention of the day. But I noticed last week that right at the very beginning of the letter, or sermon – hey, let’s just call it an Epistle and have done – right at the very beginning, he says: “That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched – this we proclaim concerning the Word of life. The life appeared; we have seen it and testify to it, and we proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and has appeared to us.” In other words, the writer, too, claims to have seen, known and touched Jesus!

But to today’s passage. “How great is the love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are!” “How great is the love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are!”

We are God’s children! You know, when you come to think of it, that’s a pretty terrifying concept. People tend to think of themselves as serving God, or as worshipping God. But to be a child of God? That’s a whole different ball-game. After all, if we worship God or serve God, that doesn’t necessarily imply that God does anything for us in return. But if we are God’s children? That’s different! That implies that God is active in caring for us, in being involved in our lives, in minding.

Many of us here this morning have had children of our own. And all of us have been children! Perhaps some of us didn’t have very satisfactory childhoods, or our parents weren’t all they should have been. The model of God as Father isn’t helpful to everybody, I know.

But I still want to unpack it a bit, if I can, as I do think it’s important. We are all children of God, so we are told. We are not servants. We are not just worshippers. “Children” implies a two-way relationship.

Actually, it almost implies more than that. It implies that God does the doing; we don’t have to. No, seriously, think about it a minute. I have a daughter – she’s grown up and married now, of course, but for eighteen years she lived at home, and for many of those years she was totally dependant on Robert and me for everything – for her food, for her clothing, for her education, you name it! When she was a tiny baby, she needed us even more, as babies do. They can’t even keep themselves clean without a parent or other carer to see to that for them.

Parents look after their children. Quite apart from the seeing to food, clothing, education and so on, it’s about the daily care – seeing to it they get up and so on. There’s a video doing the rounds on YouTube at the moment, called “The Mom Song”, where a woman sings all the things she’s apt to say to her children over the course of a day to the tune of the William Tell Overture. It’s extremely funny; do look it up sometime. And okay, so we do say the same things over and over again: Have you cleaned your teeth? Have you done your homework? Have you fed your hamster? Don’t talk with your mouth full. And so on and so forth. But it is, of course, because we care for and about our children, and want them to grow up to be the best possible person they can be.

And parents do this because they love their children. Ask any new parent – all those sleepless nights, the pacing up and down, the nappies, the lack of sleep – and yet, they are delighting in that precious baby, and will show you photographs on the slightest provocation. And that is just how God feels about us! Pretty mind-blowing, isn’t it?

And yes, God does want us to grow up to be the person he designed us to be. And sometimes that will involve saying “No” to us, as we have to say it to our children. “No, you mustn’t do that; no, you can’t have that!” Not to be mean, not because we are horrid – although it can feel like that sometimes when you’re on the receiving end – but because it is for their best. You can’t let a child do something dangerous; you can’t allow them to be rude; they can’t eat unlimited sweets or ices.... and so on. And the same sort of thing with us.

God loves us enormously and just wants what is best for us. And because we are, mostly, not small children, we tend to be aware of this, and allow Him to work in us through the power of the Holy Spirit.

John goes on to comment about sin and sinfulness. It is rather an odd passage, this; we know that we do sin, sometimes, because we are human. And yet we know, too, that we are God’s children and we abide in Him. Yet John here says nobody who sins abides in God. If he were right, that would mean none of us would, since we are all sinners.

But then, are we? I mean, yes, we are, but the point is, we are sinners saved by grace, as they say. God has redeemed us through his Son. We don’t “abide in sin” any more.

St Paul tells us that when we become Christians, we are “made right” with God through faith in his promises. I believe the technical term is “justified”, and you remember the meaning because it’s “just as if I’d” never sinned. However, we also have to grow up to make this a reality in our lives. That’s called becoming sanctified, made saint-like.

One author described it like this. Suppose there was a law against jumping in mud puddles. And you broke that law, and jumped. You would not only be guilty of breaking the law, you would also be covered in mud. So when you are justified, you are declared not guilty of breaking that law – and being sanctified means that you wash off the mud! Or, to be more accurate, God helps us (through the power of the Holy Spirit) to get rid of the mud, just as we would help a muddy child to have a shower and get some clean, dry clothes.

So we no longer abide in sin, but are we washing off the mud? Are we allowing God to help us wash off the mud? That’s not always easy to do – the temptation to conform to the world’s standards can be overwhelming at times. We all have different temptations, of course; I can’t claim to be virtuous because I don’t gamble, since gambling simply doesn’t appeal to me! But I am apt to procrastinate, and can be grouchy at times! And so it goes.

And, of course, there are those who have not said “Yes” to God, who perhaps have no idea of doing so. In this model, they are not God’s children – but that doesn’t mean they are not loved! Indeed, God so loved the world that he sent his Son while we were still sinners, so we are told. God loves the worst and most horrible person you could imagine, just as much as he loves you or he loves me. Even terrorists. Even paedophiles. Jesus died for them, too. Just as he died for you, and just as he died for me.

And we, we are Children of God. We are God’s precious Children. We are not just servants of God. We are not just worshippers. We are children. And the Risen Christ calls us his friends. Amen.

Monday in Holy Week - The Entry into Jerusalem

This isn't being preached, at least, not this year! I wrote it in 1996 for our Monday in Holy Week service, and was asked to produce something for an on-line group, so looked for it and copied it. So I thought I would also post it here.

So, Jesus comes to Jerusalem in triumph.

He, and the disciples,
Have spent the night with Mary, Martha and Lazarus,
at that home in Bethany.
He loves them, so much.
Dear Martha,
never happy unless she is bustling bout doing for him,
getting irritated at Mary’s doglike devotion.
Mary, extravagant almost to the point of madness,
with the nard she was supposed to be saving for her marriage,
poured out over his head like that last night.
And her almost unfeminine interest in his teaching,
her ability to sit and listen and learn by the hour.
And Lazarus, totally unable to do enough for Jesus since he was raised from the dead.

And now it is time to move on.
Into Jerusalem.
It isn't the first time Jesus has been there.
On the contrary,
he has been there many times,
the first time being when he was a baby.
But this will be the last visit.
This time,
there won't be the teachers in the Temple falling all over themselves to enlighten him.
This time,
there won't be the vast crowds waiting to listen to him -
or if there are, the priests will soon move them on.
This visit promises nothing but pin and death.
Yet it must be done.

Long ago words echo from Zechariah:
"Behold your King comes to you;
triumphant and victorious is he,
humble and riding on a donkey."

It never made any sense before.
Kings don't ride on donkeys!
Kings ride on war-horses, richly caparisoned.
Kings ride in carriages, pulled by six milk-white Arab stallions.
Kings are carried in litters on the shoulders of Nubian bearers.
A King on a donkey -
the picture is ridiculous.
Donkeys are for the elderly, for the infirm.
Donkeys are for carrying wood or peat in creels on their backs.
Donkeys are for children, for pregnant women.

And yet, and yet.
Today, Jesus will ride on a donkey.
He even knows which donkey.
It is in the next hamlet down the road.
A mare, with a young colt.
They sw it on their way to Bethany,
and stopped and said "Hello" to it.
The owner's a friend of theirs -
he'll lend it willingly enough.

So the disciples are sent off to borrow the donkey,
and, back they come with it, colt duly at foot.
And anxious owner, too, who doesn't mind lending it,
but wants to go with it.

Jesus climbs on.
Hmmm -
his feet nearly touch the ground.
Just as well, perhaps -
it doesn't feel very steady.
The mare shifts, uneasily.
This isn't her usual rider.
But she trusts Jesus, instinctively,
and lets him feel comfortable with her.

And so they set off.
A strange procession.
Jesus, on the donkey
and the disciples and followers on foot beside him.
Almost a young procession, really.
There's James and John,
Peter and Andrew,
all of the Twelve -
even Judas, looking sulky.
He still hasn't forgiven Jesus for snubbing him like that last night
when he pointed out - mildly -
that Mary shouldn't have wasted the nard like that.
Mary and Martha and Lazarus are there, too,
and the donkey's owner and his daughter.
Quite a procession.

And there are other groups of pilgrims going to Jerusalem for the festival.
Others on the road.
And somehow, nobody quite knows how,
they join up with Jesus' group.
Many of them have heard of him -
some have even heard him speak.

A group of boys rushes on ahead,
down into Jerusalem,
to announce that Jesus is coming!
The people, mostly holidaymakers,
come out to have a look.
Yes, that's him, over there, look -
yes, the one on a donkey!
Some say he's the Messiah, or a prophet.
Maybe he is.
Why not?
It is Passover, after all.

Who started the cheering?
Nobody knows.
Maybe it was one of the Twelve,
maybe even Peter.
Or maybe a child in the crowd.
But the cheers increase in volume.
"Hosanna!
Hosanna to the Son of David!"
"Blessed is he who comes in the Name of the Lord."
"Hosanna in the Highest."
And they throw their cloaks into the road for the donkey to walk on.
And they tear branches off the trees to help line the route.

Now they are approaching Jerusalem.
The pilgrims and holidaymakers are still cheering.
It's a day for rejoicing, after all.
The end of the journey is in sight.
The pilgrims have been travelling for days, some of them,
ad are looking forward to getting to the inns and relaxing.
Some of them will be meeting family they haven't seen for some years.
So it's easy to cheer.
Its easy to throw your cloak in the road for the donkey to tread on.
It's easy to be carried along with the crowd.

But Jesus knows that this visit to Jerusalem will be his last.
He will not leave the city.
This crowd, which is cheering him today,
will be baying for his blood at the end of the week.
Without noticing the contradiction.

The disciples are relaxed, enjoying the attention.
But underneath there are shadows.
They know they are in danger.
They know that Jesus is convinced he will be killed,
yet has insisted on going to Jerusalem anyway.

But for now, as they enter the city, they are relaxed and amused.
Let us leave them like that,
for the storm clouds are gathering,
and they will not disperse until the day of Resurrection.

Getting back to basics

There are times when I look at the lectionary readings and my reaction is almost one of panic – whatever am I supposed to say about this? And the Ten Commandments is definitely one of those readings. Especially when linked to the clearing out of the Temple!

The trouble with the Ten Commandments is that people think they know them, but they don’t, not really. Every so often you see on television them asking random people to say what they are – everybody knows the ones addressed to human behaviour, about honouring your parents,not murdering, not committing adultery, not stealing, and, usually, not bearing false witness and not coveting, but they don’t place them in the context of the first four commandments, which are the ones about our relationship with God. The ones about worshipping God alone, not making graven images, not taking God’s name in vain, and keeping the Sabbath day holy.

And I think, if you take the last six commandments out of context, as we are all apt to do, you get the wrong impression. You get the impression that it’s all about the “Thou shalt nots”. Christianity – well, Judaeo-Christianity, I suppose – comes across as very negative and joyless. But I don’t think it was meant to be like that.

There are plenty of very detailed commandments in the Old Testament about how God’s people were meant to live, especially while they were a travelling, nomadic race. Many of them were about the health and sanitation of the community – what could be safely eaten, for instance, or how to isolate infection, or even the basic hygiene of going outside the perimeter of the camp and taking a shovel with you when you needed a “natural break” as the sports commentators call it. Others were about criminal law, and still others about how you treated outsiders in your midst, and who you should be looking after. They go into huge detail, have a read of Leviticus or Deuteronomy sometime, ideally in a modern paraphrase.

But the basic Ten Commandments, as given in Exodus, are different. They are a summary of the Law – if you like, they are the Constitution for God’s people. In our modern world, except perhaps for prohibitions on murder and stealing, they are seen as anachronistic, not relevant to most people. Our very economy is based on the fact that people covet things they do not yet own, and advertising hopes to make you want something you didn’t know you wanted. And most people don’t even bother to think about God at all, never mind putting Him first.

But we, us, we who are here this morning, we are God’s people. What if we did live like this? We would like to think we did, of course, but you know as well as I do that we don’t! We fall far short of God’s ideal for us.

As, of course, everybody has since the Law was first given. We know that it’s not possible to keep the Law perfectly, we know we are going to fall short. Sometimes deliberately, sometimes carelessly, sometimes even just going rather over the top. That’s what was happening in our Gospel reading – I don’t necessarily mean that Jesus was going over the top, although possibly he was; that’s an interesting thought, which I’ll come back to in a minute. But right now, let’s look at what prompted his outburst.

I don’t really know what the Temple was like, and find it rather hard to imagine. I believe the actual central bit was quite small, but it was surrounded by a series of courtyards. Anybody could go into the outermost courtyard, which was called the courtyard of the Gentiles. Next in was the courtyard of the Women – any Jewish person could go in there, but no Gentile could. Then came the courtyard of the Israelites, where only Jewish men could go. Then you had the court of the priests, which is where the sacrifices were performed, by the priests, and finally the Temple itself, with the altar where incense was burnt, and inside that was the Most Holy Place where the High Priest alone could go, once a year, with blood.

So you approached God – at least, if you were a Jewish man you did – via a series of courtyards, getting closer and closer. In an ideal world, you arrived in Jerusalem, went to the ritual baths and cleansed yourself, and then took yourself and whichever animal you had brought to sacrifice into the Temple.

But.

And there is always a “but”, isn’t there. In this case, two “buts”. Firstly, it wasn’t always practical to bring a sacrificial animal with you, and sometimes, if you did, the priests would tell you that it was flawed and Would Not Do. So it was a lot easier to buy your animal when you arrived, and if you bought it in the Temple, the priests couldn’t tell you it wouldn’t do. But then there was a problem with money, or rather, with the coinage. You see, for everyday use you used Roman coins, but they, unfortunately, had a picture of the Emperor on them, which was thought to be just possibly a graven image, so you couldn’t use them in the Temple, but had to change them into Temple money, which had no such problems. And, of course, the rate of exchange often wasn’t what it might have been, and the commission may have been just slightly higher than strictly necessary, and then the animals might be just that much more expensive than you would have paid in the street (“After all, this sheep is guaranteed free from any flaws. Gotta pay a premium for that!”).

And even if it wasn’t, the whole atmosphere was more like a market-place than anything conducive to worship. And Jesus snapped.

Now, we don’t know what caused him to snap. He’d been to the Temple umpteen times before – St Luke tells us his parents took him every year for the major festivals. Perhaps he saw someone having to settle for a lesser animal than they’d planned. Or perhaps he had just prepared himself for the Temple and was feeling quiet and worshipful – and the atmosphere in the Court of the Gentiles simply wasn’t conducive to that. Whatever. He snapped, and we know the rest.

St John links the episode with Jesus’ saying “Destroy this temple, and I will rebuild it in three days”, which was looking forward to the Resurrection, as the disciples realised once this had happened. At the time, it did nothing but infuriate the religious authorities, and arguably signed Jesus’ death-warrant.

The money-changers and traders and souvenir-stalls and so on may not have been wrong in themselves, but they were in the wrong place. They were cluttering up the Temple and making it difficult to get an unbroken progression from the ritual bath up to the sacrifice. They were turning the house of God into a market-place, and this Would Not Do. They needed to get back to basics.

Jesus was clearing out the Temple, taking it back to basics. Was he over the top? Probably, yes. But then, Jesus always was over the top, wasn’t he? When he changed the water into wine, he didn’t really need to produce over 700 bottles of the finest quality wine at the tag-end of a party. When he fed the five thousand out of a small boy’s packed lunch he didn’t really need to provide twelve basketsful of leftovers. It is well within Jesus’ character to be over the top, in this case, wanting to take the Temple back to basics.

Jesus was forever trying to take people back to basics. The trouble was, because they thought you pleased God by keeping the Law absolutely perfectly, they kept having to provide “What if....” scenarios. What, exactly, was work – how did you keep the Sabbath Day holy? And it sometimes got a bit ridiculous; Jesus points that out on a number of occasions. When it got so that you fussed about tithing the contents of your herb garden at the expense of your elderly relatives, who should have had first call on you. When it got so that you fussed about how thoroughly you washed yourself before eating, but forgot to worry about how clean your heart was before God. When it go so that you worried about whether healing somebody on the Sabbath was work, or whether you ought to be allowed to pick a head of wheat and eat the berries if it was the Sabbath – wasn’t that reaping? Jesus picks up on all these things, and others besides.

For Jesus, what mattered was your relationship with God, pure and simple. In the end, as we know, it was his body that would become the Temple, that would be raised in three days, and that would be given us to eat, in symbolic form, at his table. And it was his Spirit that was sent to indwell us and help us to become the people we were created to be.

We know that if we try in our own strength, we shall fail. We cannot even keep the Ten Commandments, let alone any of the rest of the law. But we don’t have to do it in our own strength; if we try, we will inevitably fail. Thank God for Jesus! He cleaned out the Temple of the extraneous stalls and merchants that had crept in – although I doubt they stayed away for very long – to remind us that what matters is our relationship with God. We don’t have to go through intermediaries. We don’t have to struggle to keep the Law. We just need to rest in Him. Amen.