Of God and Money

I don’t know –
today’s Gospel reading!
What are we to make of such a story, do you suppose?
The steward has been doing a rotten job,
so he gets told to put his books in order and pack his bags.
And he decides to make a few friends for himself en route,
to build up a few favours he can call in when he is homeless and hungry.
So he starts adjusting the debts of those who owe his master some money –
you owe my master a hundred jugs of oil?
Okay, let’s call it fifty.
A hundred bushels of wheat?
Hey, eighty’s just fine!

So what do you think his master would say to that if he found out?
Call the police, shouldn’t wonder.
Have him done for fraud.
But no –
the master was pleased!
One modern paraphrase puts it like this:
“Now here's a surprise:
The master praised the crooked manager!
And why?
Because he knew how to look after himself.
Streetwise people are smarter in this regard than law-abiding citizens.
They are on constant alert, looking for angles, surviving by their wits.
I want you to be smart in the same way –
but for what is right –
using every adversity to stimulate you to creative survival,
to concentrate your attention on the bare essentials,
so you'll live, really live,
and not complacently just get by on good behaviour.”

Another paraphrase goes: “You see, that’s how it is.
The people who belong to this present world are far better equipped to dodge and weave their way through their dealings with one another than you lot are, and you belong to the light.
So take it from me, if you’ve got a fistful of filthy lucre, use it to help other people out. That way, when it runs out, you’ll have friends for eternity.”

John Wesley, who preached his famous “Use of Money” sermon
on this very passage, sees it slightly differently.
He reckons that Jesus is saying that those who seek no other portion than this world, and I quote: "are wiser" –
not absolutely;
for they are one and all the veriest fools,
the most egregious madmen under heaven;
but, "in their generation," in their own way;
they are more consistent with themselves;
they are truer to their acknowledged principles;
they more steadily pursue their end.”

We, Christians –
and I think this is as true today as it was in Wesley’s time –
aren’t very good at talking and thinking about money.
We remember that “the love of money is the root of all evil”
and shy away from the subject.
We might or might not talk about holding lightly to our material possessions and living simply and all that, but by and large, we don’t talk about it.
It was the same in Wesley’s day.
But we all need money, we all use money.
Wesley concluded that Scripture shows that we should earn all we can,
save all we can
and then give all we can.

He then went on to explain further.
I rather love this paragraph, as isn’t it true in today’s world where people spend so long at the office:
“We ought to gain all we can gain, without buying gold too dear, without paying more for it than it is worth.
But this it is certain we ought not to do;
we ought not to gain money at the expense of life, nor (which is in effect the same thing) at the expense of our health.
Therefore, no gain whatsoever should induce us to enter into, or to continue in, any employ, which is of such a kind, or is attended with so hard or so long labour, as to impair our constitution.
Neither should we begin or continue in any business which necessarily deprives us of proper seasons for food and sleep,
in such a proportion as our nature requires.
Indeed, there is a great difference here.
Some employments are absolutely and totally unhealthy;
as those which imply the dealing much with arsenic, or other equally hurtful minerals, or the breathing an air tainted with steams of melting lead, which must at length destroy the firmest constitution.
Others may not be absolutely unhealthy, but only to persons of a weak constitution.
Such are those which require many hours to be spent in writing;” –
or, perhaps, these days, at a computer screen –
“especially if a person write sitting, and lean upon his stomach, or remain long in an uneasy posture.
But whatever it is which reason or experience shows to be destructive of health or strength, that we may not submit to;
seeing "the life is more" valuable "than meat, and the body than raiment."
And if we are already engaged in such an employ, we should exchange it as soon as possible for some which, if it lessen our gain, will, however not lessen our health.”

He goes on to add that:
“We are, Secondly, to gain all we can without hurting our mind any more than our body.
For neither may we hurt this.
We must preserve, at all events, the spirit of an healthful mind.
Therefore we may not engage or continue in any sinful trade, any that is contrary to the law of God, or of our country.
Such are all that necessarily imply our robbing or defrauding the king of his lawful customs.”
These days, of course, it’s her Majesty’s Government, rather than her person, which is robbed by tax evasion and smuggling –
as prevalent now as in Wesley’s day, if not more so.
All the same, could it harm our souls to engage in it?
I suspect so.

“For it is at least as sinful,” said Wesley, obviously forgetting for the moment what story he had taken to base his sermon on,
“For it is at least as sinful to defraud the king of his right, as to rob our fellow subjects.
And the king has full as much right, to his customs as we have to our houses and apparel.
Other businesses there are, which however innocent in themselves,
cannot be followed with innocence now at least, not in England;
such, for instance, as will not afford a competent maintenance without cheating or lying, or conformity to some custom which not consistent with a good conscience:
These, likewise, are sacredly to be avoided, whatever gain they may be attended with provided we follow the custom of the trade;
for to gain money we must not lose our souls.”
Slave trading springs to mind, of course, or trafficking as we call it today;
or again, drug-dealing.
“There are yet others which many pursue with perfect innocence, without hurting either their body or mind;
And yet perhaps you cannot:
Either they may entangle you in that company which would destroy your soul;
and by repeated experiments it may appear that you cannot separate the one from the other;
or there may be an idiosyncrasy,
a peculiarity in your constitution of soul, (as there is in the bodily constitution of many,) by reason whereof that employment is deadly to you, which another may safely follow.
So I am convinced, from many experiments, I could not study, to any degree of perfection, either mathematics, arithmetic, or algebra, without being a Deist, if not an Atheist:
And yet others may study them all their lives without sustaining any inconvenience.
None therefore can here determine for another;
but every man must judge for himself, and abstain from whatever he in particular finds to be hurtful to his soul.”

Wesley then goes on to explain that, just as you shouldn’t earn money doing things that might hurt you physically or spiritually,
similarly you mustn’t do anything that might hurt other people, either physically or spiritually.
Within those limits, you should work hard, concentrating on what you’re being paid to do and not wasting time on Facebook or Twitter.
Well, Wesley didn’t exactly say that, but that’s more or less what he meant!
And Wesley reminds us to use our God-given intelligence to do our jobs as well as we can.

He then goes on to discuss his thesis that one ought to save all one can.
He reckons you shouldn’t fritter money.
Buy your necessities, by all means, but don’t go mad for luxuries you don’t really need.
Don’t try to keep up with the Joneses.
And don’t spoil your kids.
“Why should you purchase for them more pride or lust, more vanity, or foolish and hurtful desires?”
And, foreseeing today’s massive inheritance tax, “Do not leave it to them to throw away.”
He was actually talking about kids wasting their inheritance, like the Prodigal Son, but it’s nevertheless a good point.

Finally, he discusses the third, and arguably most important clause:
“Give all you can”.
For him, it wasn’t about tithing, or giving away a certain proportion of your income.
He reckons you should start from the premise that everything you are and have is God’s, and take it from there.
Your property, he thinks, isn’t your own, it is God’s.
You’re just the steward.
And if, says Wesley, “you desire to be a faithful and a wise steward, out of that portion of your Lord's goods which he has for the present lodged in your hands, but with the right of resuming whenever it pleases him,
First, provide things needful for yourself;
food to eat, raiment to put on, whatever nature moderately requires for preserving the body in health and strength.
Secondly, provide these for your wife, your children, your servants, or any others who pertain to your household.
If when this is done there be an overplus left, then ‘do good to them that are of the household of faith.’
If there be an overplus still, ‘as you have opportunity, do good unto all men.’
In so doing, you give all you can;
nay, in a sound sense, all you have:
For all that is laid out in this manner is really given to God.
You ‘render unto God the things that are God's,’ not only by what you give to the poor, but also by that which you expend in providing things needful for yourself and your household.”

Almost everything I’ve said this morning has been Wesley, not me.
But talk about why keep a dog and bark yourself –
what Wesley had to say all those centuries ago is still true for us today, I think.
We should still be careful how we earn our livings,
not harming ourselves or our neighbours in so doing.
We should still work hard while we are at work,
not distracting ourselves or faffing about.
We should still live sensibly and frugally, especially in the light of climate change and reducing our carbon footprints and all that –
we are, after all, stewards of the planet God has given us.
And we should still regard ourselves as God’s stewards in our attitude to what we do own –
fine to spend money on ourselves where we need to, and God is totally not mean!
There’s no need to be a miser, but just to be aware that maybe one day God will ask you to do something for, or give something to, someone else.

And do pray.
I haven’t mentioned our first reading so far, from Paul’s letter to Timothy, but it seems that prayer was, and should remain, a priority.
When did you last pray for David Cameron or Nick Clegg?
And I mean really pray, not just “Oh God, David Cameron!!!”
Maybe if we all prayed for him, not just “God bless,” or “Oh God”, but really holding him and Obama, and other world leaders up to the Throne of Grace,
well, maybe things would be different.

I forget, at this instant, who it was who said that the world has not yet seen what one person truly dedicated to God can do.
I actually disagree with whoever it was –
Dwight L Moody, I think –
we’ve seen loads of people who have dedicated their life to God and made a huge difference, from Wesley himself, Mother Teresa, all sorts.
But the point is, if we are truly dedicated to God, if our whole lives are about being God’s person, then how we live may or may not make a difference to the whole world, but it probably will to our own immediate community.
Let’s be good stewards, but let’s also be streetwise and know how to use what God has given us! Amen.

Great Expectations

Once upon a time, there was a young man called Jeremiah. He was from quite a good family – his father was a priest, although not a high priest, and owned a fair bit of land not far from Jerusalem. So Jeremiah grew up in a fair amount of comfort, loved and nurtured by his family. Perhaps he had planned to be a priest himself when he grew up.

But then one day, in about 626 BC, God came to him, and said: "Jeremiah, I am your Creator, and before you were born, I chose you to speak for me to the nations."

Jeremiah is shattered! “Lord God, you’re making a big mistake! I am a lousy public speaker and I’m too young for anybody to take me seriously.”

But God insists: .“Don’t put yourself down because of your age. Just go to whoever I send you to, and say whatever I tell you to say. Don’t let yourself feel intimidated by anyone, because I’ll be there as back up for you. You’ll be okay; take my word for it.” And Jeremiah is touched by God, and enabled to speak God’s word.

Some six hundred years later, Jesus is teaching in the synagogue one Sabbath day, as he often did. There was a woman in the congregation who was twisted and deformed – perhaps she had scoliosis or perhaps it was an arthritic condition. Certainly it was long-standing. We are told she had been like this for eighteen years. And Jesus suddenly notices her, and heals her. She is able to stand fully upright again, and starts praising God.

Well, that didn’t please the leader of the synagogue. Healing people like that on the Sabbath – wasn’t that dangerously close to work? “Oi,” he goes, “Stop healing people on the Sabbath! Now then, if you want healed, you come on any of the other six days of the week; I don’t want any Sabbath-breaking going on here!”

“Oh come on, mate,” says Jesus. “I saw you taking your donkey down to the drinking-trough earlier this morning, Sabbath day or no Sabbath day. If it’s all right for you to take your donkey to have a drink on the Sabbath, it’s all right for me to heal this good lady, whom Satan had bound for eighteen whole years!”

The leader of the synagogue had nothing to say to this, but the crowd really cheered.

I think it’s about expectations, isn’t it? God expected Jeremiah to proclaim His word to the nations. Jesus expected that the woman would be healed, Sabbath day or no Sabbath day. The ruler of the synagogue expected Jesus to keep the Sabbath. And Jeremiah and the woman? I don’t think they expected anything at all!

What does God expect from us? What do we expect from God’s people? And what do we expect from God?

Firstly, then, what does God expect from us?

Jeremiah was expected to go and proclaim God’s word. He had been specifically called for this purpose, and although he was horrified when the call came, and tried to get out of it, he ultimately accepted it, and trusted in God’s promise that “Attack you they will, overcome you they can’t”; a promise that was fulfilled many times over in the Biblical narrative.

I wonder what God is expecting of you? I know I am expected to preach the Gospel. Like Jeremiah, I was very young when I was called – about 15. Unlike him, I wasn’t able to answer that call for many years for reasons that I won’t go into now, but suffice it to say that for about the past 20 years I have known that this is what God has wanted me to do. This is what God expects of me. I am so grateful, every time I preach, that all I am expected to do is to provide the words; God does the rest!

So what does he expect of you? Some of you will know, definitely, what God expects; you are a steward, or a local preacher, or a musician. For others, it’s less clear cut. You have a job, perhaps, or are bringing up a family. Or perhaps that is all behind you now, and you are retired.

But whatever it is you do, you are expected to be Christ’s ambassador. You are a witness to him in everything you say and do. Now, before you start squirming uncomfortably, and thinking “Oh dear, I’m not a very good one, am I?”, don’t forget that Jesus said that when the Holy Spirit came, we would be his witnesses throughout the known world. Not that we should be, or ought to be, but that we would be. We are. You are an ambassador for Christ, and whether you like it or not, whether you know it or not, this is what you are, through the power of the Holy Spirit who dwells within you.

When God calls you to do something, whether it is some well-defined job like cleaning the church, or running a prayer group, or speaking forth his word, or simply praying quietly at home, or whether you’re called to be God’s person where you work, or where you live, God will enable you to do it, just as he enabled Jeremiah.

And so to my second question for this morning: What do you expect of God’s people? When someone says he or she is a Christian, what do you reckon they’re going to be like?

The leader of the synagogue was confounded when Jesus didn’t conform to his expectation of what a good Jewish man did or didn’t do on the Sabbath. Healing people? Seriously? No, no, that counted as work!

And sometimes we are confounded when we come across Christians whose standards of acceptable behaviour might differ from ours. Could they possibly be Christians at all? Do real Christians behave like that? Some churches have felt so strongly about some of these issues that they have even split up, causing enormous hurt and upset in their various denominations. Yet who are we to judge another’s behaviour? In fact, you might remember that St Paul suggests that if your brother is offended by something you do or don’t do, you should do it, or not do it, as the case may be, so as not to upset them, or, worse, to let them think it’s all right for them to do it, when it might not be at all all right, and might lead them away from God. We need to be sensitive to one another, and to refrain from judging one another. We probably have our rules that we live by, but we don’t have the right to force those rules on to other people, not even on to other Christians.

I suppose the thing is, we shouldn’t really expect other Christians to be like us! Many, of course, will be – that’s why you go to this church, here, because you find people you are comfortable with, people whose vision of what God’s people are like resonates with yours. But there will be others whose views you are less comfortable with; who perhaps strike you as rather puritanical, or rather lax.

Of course, when we know someone, we know what they are like, whether they are reliable, whether you can trust them. And we accept them, normally, for who they are. Just as God does with us. But we mustn’t be judgemental. Maybe they hold views that we find strange, or even unpleasant. Maybe they feel free to behave in ways we’ve been taught that Christians don’t do, or ways that we feel would be sinful for us. But it is not for us to judge. Our Lord points out, in that collection of His teachings known as the Sermon on the Mount, that we very often have socking great logs in our own eyes, so how can we see clearly to remove the speck in someone else’s? In other words, keep your eyes on what’s wrong with you, not on what’s wrong with other people! See to it that you obey your rules, and leave other people to obey theirs.

That’s something, I think, that the leader of the synagogue would have been wise to keep in mind, rather than criticising Jesus for healing someone on the Sabbath, to say nothing of criticising the congregation for coming to be healed that day. He had rules he needed to keep, and he needed other people to keep them, too. But Jesus had other ideas. For him, healing someone on the Sabbath was as normal and as natural as making sure your livestock were fed, or your cow was milked.

So, then, God is free to expect anything from us; we should not, though, expect other Christians to be just like us. But what do we expect from God?

Jeremiah didn’t expect anything from God. When told that he was to proclaim God’s word, his first reaction was to panic: “I can’t possibly! I’m a lousy public speaker and much too young!” But God gave him the gifts he needed to fulfil his task, and sometimes Jeremiah had to actively act out God’s word, not just speak it!

The woman who was all twisted and bent over didn’t expect anything from God, either. She presumably went to the synagogue each week to worship, not really expecting anything to happen. But that particular Sabbath day, Jesus was there – and that made all the difference. After eighteen years she was finally free of her illness, able to stand up straight, able to walk normally and talk to people face to face once more.

What did you expect from God this morning? Let’s be honest, we come to church week after week, and on most Sundays nothing much happens! We worship God, we spend some time with our friends, and then we go home again. And that’s okay. But some weeks are different, aren’t they? Not often, but just sometimes we come away from Church knowing that God was there, and present, and real. I wonder why these occasions are so rare? Partly, of course, because mountain-top experiences like that are rare, that’s why we remember them. There’s an old story of two men coming out of Church one Sunday morning when the preacher had been rather more boring even than usual. The first man said, “Honestly, what’s the point? I’ve been going to Church more or less every Sunday for the past 30 years, and I must have heard hundreds of sermons, yet I hardly remember any of them!”

To which the second man replied, “Hmm, well; I’ve been married for 30 years and my wife has cooked me a meal more or less every night, and I don’t really remember many of them, either. But where would I be without them?”

Church, mostly, is about providing daily bread for daily needs. We don’t expect to see miracles each Sunday, or healings such as took place in the synagogue that day. But what do we expect when we come to Church? Do we expect to meet God in some way?

What do we expect from God? We know that our sins have been forgiven, right? And that God is gradually making us into the people he designed us to be. But do we expect more? Should we expect more? Neither Jeremiah nor the woman in the synagogue expected anything from God – yet God gave, bountifully, to both of them in very different ways.

Who was it who said “Expect great things from God. Attempt great things for God”? I can’t remember right now, but it’s really what I want to leave with you this morning. What does God expect from you? Are you trying not to hear something you think God might be trying to say? What do you expect from other Christians? Are you requiring a higher standard from them than from yourself? And what are you expecting God to do for you today? Amen.

Mary the Mother of God

Today is the Feast of the Blessed Virgin Mary. At least, in some parts of the Church it is. If you’re Catholic, it is the Feast of the Assumption, and a public holiday in many countries. If you’re Orthodox, it is the Dormition, only many branches of the Orthodox Church observe their Festivals according to the old calendar, so that won’t be until the 28th of this month. But for us Protestants, it is simply a day to celebrate Mary the Mother of God.

We tend not to think very much about her, do we? Possibly in a reaction to what we see as Catholic worship of her, we tend to ignore her most of the year, except possibly for a mention on the Annunciation, on the 25th March, and then this festival, deep in August when many people are away.

As so often happens, the festival long pre-dates Christianity. It has taken over what used to be a day celebrated to the goddess Diana, who, if you remember your Roman mythology, was the goddess of the hunt, and of the Moon, and, incidentally, was celebrated as a virgin goddess.

Hmmm, that’s interesting. We celebrate the Virgin Mary on a feast-day originally dedicated to a pagan virgin goddess. It makes sense, really, when you come to think about it, given that Christianity took over many other pagan festivals. But perhaps it helps to explain why some versions of Christianity do venerate Mary so much. If you were Jewish, you were quite used to thinking of God as Father and Creator, but if you came from a background which worshipped a virgin goddess, Mary obviously provided what you found you were missing. And again, if you were used to worshipping a mother figure, as so many people were, you found something in Mary that perhaps you missed in the Christian depiction of God. Don’t forget, in the olden days you had to convert to Christianity when your ruler did, or the head of your tribe, or whatever, and if the worship you were used to was suddenly no longer provided, you had to make what you could of what you did have!

And then, of course, the Catholic Church being nothing if not practical, formalised a great deal of what was happening, and thought, about Mary into doctrine.... and so it went on. Chicken and egg type of situation, drawing on tradition and practice more than on Scripture. And so, of course, when the Protestants went back to the Bible, discarding most, although not all, traditional theology, Mary rather fell back into the background.

The thing about Mary, though, is that she provides a model for us to copy. In our Bibles, we first meet her as a young girl in Nazareth who says “Yes” to the enormous, impossible task God set for her, to be the mother of the Messiah. Tradition tells us that she was the daughter of Joachim and Anne, and quite possibly had been reared in the Temple, like Samuel, only if she was living in Nazareth when she was 16, I’m not quite sure how that could have been. Unless, of course, as Matthew implies, she was living in Bethlehem, which isn’t that far from Jerusalem. In either event, she was not dedicated to the Temple as a permanent virgin or anything; she was betrothed to Joseph, a local craftsman, who we are told was much older.

I do rather love Luke’s stories about Mary – how one of the things the angel had said to her was that her relation, Elisabeth, was pregnant after all those years. And, as we heard in our reading, Mary rushes off to visit her. Was this to reassure herself that the angel was telling the truth? Or to congratulate Elisabeth? Or just to get away for a bit of space, do you suppose? We aren’t told. But Elisabeth recognises Mary as the mother-to-be of the promised Saviour, and Mary’s response is that great song that we now call the “Magnificat”. Or if it wasn’t exactly that – that may well be Luke putting down what she ought to have said, like Shakespeare giving Henry V that great speech before Agincourt – it was probably words to that effect! I think she was very, very relieved to find the angel had been speaking the truth, and probably did explode in an outpouring of praise and joy!

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tradition then has it that she moved to Ephesus with John, where she died sometime between three and fifteen years later, and that her body was taken into heaven – or perhaps she didn’t die, but was taken bodily into Heaven first, which is what Catholics believe. In either event, this is what the Catholic Church celebrates today; the Orthodox believe she died, and her body was taken into heaven, which they celebrate as the Dormition.

Well, we Protestants don’t necessarily see her as the Queen of Heaven, or anything like that, but she does make a terrific role model, doesn’t she? She says “Yes” to God; she tells the servants at the wedding to “Do whatever Jesus tells you”. She does what no mother should ever have to do, and watches her Son die one of the most cruel deaths imaginable. And she stays with the disciples afterwards, and is in the Upper Room when the Holy Spirit comes. She stayed with Jesus, all the time. She believed in him, apparently not just because he was the son of her body, although that too, but because He was raised from death, and she remained, one imagines, a faithful disciple until she died.

I’ve been thinking about that a bit this week, as it is the start of Ramadan when, as you know, observant Muslims don’t eat or drink anything during daylight hours. That must be incredibly difficult – I should hate to have to do it. Yet they do it every year, for four whole weeks, as a discipline to help them stay close to God. I find it always says things to me about my own self-discipline and how I need to help myself stay close to God. Nadine was reminding us just last week how easy it is to slip away from one’s first love for God.

But Mary stayed close to her Son, and through Him to His heavenly Father. Mary’s “Yes” to God enabled God to be incarnate, to come to earth as God the Son. Our own “Yes” to God is unlikely to do anything quite so earth-shattering, but on the other hand, who knows where it will lead? We don’t observe Ramadan, and when we do observe a season of fasting, such as in Lent or Advent, we tend not to allow it to impinge on us very much. But we do need to do whatever it takes to stay, like Mary, close to God, and to say “Yes” to whatever we are asked to do. Amen.

Allowing God

Jesus said to his disciples:
"A large crop is in the fields, but there are only a few workers.
Ask the Lord in charge of the harvest to send out workers to bring it in."

St Paul wrote to the Christians in Galatia:
"Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up."

You can see the theme the lectionary compilers were thinking about –
harvests!
But there are other themes, too, that unite the two readings.

In many ways our two readings are completely different, of course.
Nobody seems to know who the 72 people that Jesus sent out were –
nor, actually, how many there were,
as some translations say seventy, others say seventy-two.
But who were they?
Where did they come from?
Why do we never hear of them before or since?
All very peculiar.

But Jesus sends them out, telling them they were not to take anything with them –
no luggage, not even hand baggage.
One paraphrase has it:
"comb and toothbrush only!"
but I'm not entirely sure they were meant to take even that much.
They were to be totally dependent on other people's generosity in order to live.
If one household wouldn't take them in, another probably would,
but you weren't to move from house to house to find who was the better cook.

Apparently the instruction not to stop and greet people en route was because doing the polite, in those days, could take a mighty long time,
it wasn't just a matter of saying "Hi!" and moving on, you had to stop and ask about all the family members right down to your sixth cousin twice removed, who was probably their uncle anyway.
So it all took time, so you hadn't to stop.

And when they come back –
we are not told how long they were on the road –
they were full of their experiences:
"Lord, even the demons submit to us in your name!"

But Jesus said that was almost by the way.
It didn't matter.
What did matter was "that your names are written in heaven."

A modern paraphrase puts it this way:
"All the same, the great triumph is not in your authority over evil, but in God's authority over you and presence with you.
Not what you do for God but what God does for you –
that's the agenda for rejoicing."

---oo0oo---

Some years before this story was written down, but a few years later, chronologically, St Paul was coming to the end of his letter to the Christians in Galatia.
This is, you may or may not know, one of the earliest letters –
they think it might have been written as early as 54 AD, so within twenty-five years or so of the Crucifixion.
People who had actually heard Jesus speak would still be alive;
people who had seen the Crucifixion;
maybe even people who had seen the risen Jesus.

And St Paul was already travelling around and making converts.
And this is where the problem arose, because originally, people who were converted were Jewish, and tended to follow the Jewish law and so on.
At that, St Paul himself was.
But then you started getting this new lot of Christians,
who had never been Jewish
and didn't see that it was necessary to keep the Jewish law in order to be a Christian.
This, as we know, is also what St Paul thought,
but there were others who disagreed,
and said that if you were to be a proper Christian, you had to be circumcised
(if you were male –
they didn't practice female circumcision)
and keep the Jewish Law, with all the observances about what you did and didn't eat,
what did or did not make you unclean,
what you could and couldn't do on the Sabbath Day and so on.
For St Paul, this had all been rendered totally obsolete by the Cross of Christ –
you were saved by faith, not by keeping the Law.
And thus his letter to the good Christians of Galatia.

The end of the letter, he says, is written in his own handwriting –
some scholars think he had something the matter with his eyes, which is why he tended to use a scribe or secretary to write his letters for him.
And when he uses his own handwriting, it tends to be rather large and scrawly.
But it enables him to stress what he wants to leave them with which in our pew Bibles reads:

"Neither circumcision nor uncircumcision means anything;
what counts is a new creation."

Another modern translation puts it:
"It doesn't matter if you are circumcised or not.
All that matters is that you are a new person."

And in a modern paraphrase, they put it like this:
"Can't you see the central issue in all this?
It is not what you and I do—
submit to circumcision, reject circumcision.
It is what God is doing, and he is creating something totally new, a free life!"

That is really the point:
a new creation.

St Paul is very big on that, it's one of the things he stresses.
This from his letter to the Corinthians:
"Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation;
the old has gone, the new has come!
All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation:
that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting people's sins against them.
And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation."

---oo0oo---

Obviously, being "a new creation" is something God does.
It's not something we can do.
And having our names "written in heaven",
that's not something we can do, either.
It is something God does.

Now, over the centuries, some branches of Christianity have interpreted this to mean that you don't get a choice about it,
and that it's not until you get to heaven that you find out whether your name was or was not written down there.
They call it "Limited Atonement" –
as if!

But we Methodists don't believe that.
We believe that everybody needs to be saved –
to become a new creation, if you like –
and that everybody can be saved.
We also believe that we can know that we are saved, and that we can be "saved to the uttermost", as they say –
for Wesley, this meant that one could grow so close to Jesus that for all intents and purposes one would be practically perfect.
He didn't, you will note, claim to be like that himself,
although he did reckon he knew one or two folk who were.

We know all this, of course.
Most of us have been Christians for more years than we care to remember!
But it's always good to remind ourselves of the basics from time to time;
and the thing that really leapt off the screen for me from the various translations and paraphrases that I read
was that both having our names written in heaven and being a new creation is something that God does, not something we do.

"Not what you do for God but what God does for you –
that's the agenda for rejoicing," as the modern paraphrase put it.

And we who have been Christians for many decades sometimes forget that.
We get so involved in Church administration, or worse, in Church politics, that we forget what we're here for –
and the main thing we're here for is to allow God to do something for us!

So the question I want to leave with you today is:
When did you last allow God to do something for you?

The Fruit of the Spirit

Think of a bowl of fruit. I wonder what fruit you think of. Apples, oranges and bananas, perhaps; or at this time of year peaches and nectarines and strawberries? Or perhaps the tropical fruits, like pineapples and mangoes and papayas. It doesn’t really matter what they are – they are all fruit. So are things like tomatoes and cucumbers and squash and marrow; basically if it is a mechanism for carrying seed, it’s a fruit. If not, not, which means that disgusting rhubarb is actually a vegetable!

Fruit, of course, is Nature’s way of ensuring that seeds are widely distributed – the fruit is eaten, and the seeds deposited somewhere else to grow away from the parent plant. Obviously centuries of cultivation have meant that some fruit has grown a very long way from its origins, and of course, for farmers nowadays it is a cash crop; I’ve driven past cherry orchards in the South of France, and plum orchards in the Vale of Evesham, and we have all heard of the fruit fields in California.

St Paul talks about a crop of fruit, too, in our reading from the letter to the Galatians. He isn’t talking about apples and oranges, though; his fruit is qualities: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control And he calls this the fruit of the spirit.

The fruit of the Spirit. Now, you may have heard plenty of sermons on the fruit of the spirit – I know I have! And do you know, almost every time I’ve heard one I’ve ended up feeling horrible and guilty – I always start to think that I don’t show the fruit of the spirit in my life, and that means I must be a terrible, rotten person, or I’m doing the whole Christian thing all wrong, or something like that!

But I don’t think St Paul really meant what he was saying to make us feel all guilty and horrible. I’m sure he meant something rather different.

You see, he didn’t just write this list of good qualities out of the blue! He wrote it as part of a letter to the Christian Church in Galatia, which was either the Roman province of Galatia, or a much smaller area that was called Galatia long before the Romans came. Doesn’t matter which it was, not at this stage. What does matter is that the Galatians had a problem. They wanted to follow Jesus, but some of their teachers thought that in order to do that, they must also keep the Jewish law. They were teaching that they must become Jews first and Christians afterwards.

Well, St Paul was Jewish himself, and he knew that this was not so. He knew that you could be a good Christian without necessarily being a good Jew. He himself was both, of course, but he was beginning to abandon the Jewish rituals when they became a barrier to evangelism. He said that the Jewish law was fine as long as it lasted, but now that Jesus has come, it’s all changed. You don’t need to keep the Jewish law any more. “For freedom, Christ has set us free.”

But then he realised that people might just misunderstand him, so he goes on to say BUT. And his BUT is that you do have to let god the Holy Spirit fill you, and live in accordance with God’s will. You see, Paul says, if you just live for yourself – what he calls “the sinful nature” – if you don’t either follow the Jewish law or allow God the Holy Spirit to lead you, you might well end up with some or all of the nasty qualities he listed: idolatry and witchcraft, hatred, discord, jealousy, fits of rage, selfish ambition, dissensions, factions and envy; drunkenness, orgies and the like. And, he says, people like that don’t fit into God’s kingdom.

And then he says, but if you allow yourself to be filled with the Holy Spirit, you’ll produce love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. And he says that if you belong to Jesus, the old selfish you has been crucified. Put to death. He doesn’t you notice, say it should be put to death, or it must be put to death. He says it has been put to death. By virtue of the fact that you belong to Jesus.

The trouble is, of course, that when you hear that, if you’re anything like me you go “I wish! In your dreams!” and similar sort of remarks. Because we know all too well that we are prone to some of the things in the list of nasties – we might get jealous, or bite someone’s head off because we’re stressed out... and so on. There are times when a life showing nothing but Paul’s fruit of the Spirit seems like an impossible dream.

Perhaps Paul is being idealistic? Perhaps we should all be trying to be loving and so on? Perhaps that’s the ideal, and if we mess up it doesn’t matter all that much?

Well, that's not what it says. Yes, of course we should, ideally, be trying to be loving and all that, but by ourselves we simply aren’t going to succeed. It isn’t that we should try and develop these qualities – it is that, if we are God’s person, we gradually will develop these qualities.

I’ve said before and I’ll probably say it again that these Sundays in Ordinary Time are the ones when the readings put what we say we believe smack up against what we really do believe, and how that belief translates into practice. If we are God’s person, we are told, we gradually will develop these qualities. We’re told that we’re being made more and more like Jesus as we carry on our walk with God, and these qualities, above all, are ones that shone out of Jesus.

Now, we’re probably not going to notice them very much; it’s far more obvious that we’ve had a meltdown than that we haven’t had one when we might have done! Reminds me of the silly story of the man with the string round his wrist, and when asked why he wore it, he said, “It’s to keep the elephants away!”
“But there are no elephants!”
“Yes, you see, it works!”
It’s really hard to prove a negative! And in some cases it’s hard to prove a positive – we know when we have been unloving or unkind, but do we know when we have been loving or kind? And ought we to know? Wouldn’t we end up being proud of ourselves, as though it were all down to us, when it isn’t really.

Because, you see, these qualities are fruit. And you can’t make fruit, can you – well, there is doubtless an Apple factory somewhere, but that’s something different. You can’t go and watch a banana being made, or the peel being put on an orange. Fruit grows. It’s the farmers and the growers who produce fruit, not factories or mills. The farmer, or the market gardener, does a great deal to protect the fruit trees, and see that they aren’t eaten by pests, or get too dry, and that the trees have been pollinated so that the fruit can grow, but basically they have to be patient, and wait for the fruit to grow and ripen.

And so do we. We can’t manufacture love, or joy, or gentleness, or the other qualities Paul mentions. But we can help them grow.

How? Well, obviously first of all by really being God’s person, not just in Church on Sundays, but allowing what we do on Sundays to affect the rest of our week. Ideally we should try to take time to be with God, even if only for a few minutes, every day. John Wesley reminds us of the “means of grace” of prayer, both private and corporate, the Holy Scriptures and Holy Communion. He points out, in his famous sermon on “The means of grace” that these things aren’t powerful in and of themselves, but only insofar as they bring us towards God. We can pray until we’re blue in the face, Wesley says – well, words to that effect, anyway – but it’s not our prayer that changes things, it’s God working in and through our prayers. And, of course, Wesley reminds us, it’s not praying or whatever that makes us a Christian – it is God’s grace alone that can do that.

Nevertheless, the “means of grace” are very helpful to keep us aligned with God, and the closer we can stay to God, the more fruit will grow in us. Remember what Jesus told us, in John 15: “I am the vine, you are the branches. Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit, because apart from me you can do nothing.”

And in another of Paul’s letters, he reminds us to go on being filled with the Holy Spirit, too; it’s not a once-for-all thing, but a daily need, a continuous process.

But let’s be realistic, too – we are going to fail! We often show more nasty qualities than good ones. It happens. It’s no good saying “It oughtn’t to happen,” or “It doesn’t happen” when we know full well that it does. That’s because we’re here on this earth and we are not yet made perfect. And when it happens – not if, when – then we need to admit to ourselves, and to God, that it has happened. That we aren’t perfect. We need to apologise to the person we were unkind to, or who bore the brunt of our latest meltdown, or whatever, and then pick ourselves up and go on being God’s person.

Because the more we go on with God, the more we will grow these fruit-qualities of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. It’s the only way. We can’t make them; we can’t even fake them. We can only grow them. Let’s be committed to doing just that. Amen.

In Remembrance of Me

I was preaching at our Church's monthly Communion service; our minister had asked me to share the service with her.

“If anyone loves me,” said Jesus, “he will obey my teaching. My Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him. He who does not love me will not obey my teaching. These words you hear are not my own; they belong to the Father who sent me.”

You remember that this passage comes from John’s Gospel, at the Last Supper; it’s where Jesus is summing it all up for the disciples before the crucifixion. “In my Father’s house are many mansions” and so on. If you had the lectionary reading last week, as we did in Shropshire, it was the passage about the commandment to love one another, from the same section. This bit sort-of carries on from there. “If anyone loves me, they will obey my teaching.”

In our Gospel reading, Jesus makes it pretty clear that being a Christian isn’t just about believing, it’s also about obeying. We need to take Jesus’ teaching on board, and allow our faith to make a difference in our lives. It’s not just a mental assent to a set of propositions, it’s about a whole new way of living. We know that, of course, but half the time we forget it and, if you’re anything like me, when you remember, you instantly start thinking you must be a terrible Christian!

But look at it again, for a minute: “If anyone loves me, they will obey my teaching!” Not “They ought to”, or “They must”, but “They will!” It will happen more or less automatically as long as we love Jesus. It’s not about a legalistic list of dos and don’ts; it’s about a relationship with the living God. “They will obey my commands.” Not because we have to, not even because we love Jesus, but because it’s a cause and effect type of relationship. We don’t need to feel guilty, we just need to let go and let God. As Jesus goes on to say:

“My Father will love him – or her – and we will come to them and make our home with them.”

That’s a pretty extraordinary statement, when you come to think of it. To make their home with us? Really? Actually, it’s a bit terrifying – are we, am I, are you living as though this is true? Is it true for us? Yikes....

And then Jesus goes on to say not to worry if his disciples don’t remember all this, as when the Holy Spirit comes, He will teach it all to us, and remind us of all of Jesus’ teachings.

And then he concludes “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not be afraid.”

I have been thinking about this passage in the context of Holy Communion, which we are celebrating today. In the other Gospels, Jesus takes the normal Jewish Friday-evening ritual of taking, blessing, breaking and sharing the bread and the wine, that every Jewish family did, and still does, on a Friday evening, and made it into something different, something special. The bread becomes, in some way, his body, the wine becomes his blood. And we are told to “Do this in remembrance of me”.

Now, as I’m sure you realise, there are as many different ways of looking at Holy Communion as there are Christians! What happens when we take, bless, break and share the bread and the wine, as we are about to do, is what they call a mystery. That’s a jargon-word of course, it doesn’t mean anything to do with Midsomer Murders or Lewis; what it means is that no matter how deeply you go into it, no matter how deeply you understand it, because it is of God, there will always, always be more that you don’t understand. And that’s as it should be! We won’t understand the things of God until we are in Heaven with God, and quite probably not even then.

I was taught, as a very small girl, that Holy Communion is a sacrament. And that a sacrament is “an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace”. In other words, we do something – in this case taking, blessing, breaking and sharing the bread and wine – and God does something, too.

For some people, it is a time quite simply of remembrance. We use the Lord’s Supper to remember what Jesus did for us on the Cross. For others, it’s the great Thanksgiving, the Eucharist, where we not only remember what Jesus did, but give thanks for it. Or again, it might be, quite simply, a time of special communion with Jesus – whether that is through the actual bread and wine in some way, or because the service is very focussed. And then there are people for whom it is a re-enactment of Christ’s sacrifice on the Cross – not repeating it, but re-enacting it.

And, of course, because it is a mystery, everybody is probably right, and nobody probably has the whole truth about it. And that’s okay. And our views will, quite probably, change as we continue on our Christian journey, with one aspect taking priority and then another, and that’s quite normal, too.

But whatever the Eucharist means to us, one very good reason to make our Communions is because Jesus said to: “Do this in remembrance of me.” Christians have differed widely about what Jesus actually meant when he said “This is my body, this is my blood”, but we are all united that he said to do it anyway!

“If anyone loves me, they will obey my teaching!”

And this is one of the ways in which we do obey Jesus’ teaching, by making our Communions. Whether we do this daily, weekly, monthly, or even less often, almost all Christians, except Quakers, make their Communions regularly. It is one of the great uniting things – Catholics, Protestants and Orthodox Christians have very different views of the sacrament, but we all celebrate it regularly, one way or another.

And of course, in our Gospel reading, Jesus reminded us that “the Counsellor, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you all things and will remind you of everything I have said to you.” And in the great prayer of Thanksgiving, the Eucharistic prayer, one of the things is praying for the Holy Spirit to come. “Pour out your Holy Spirit, that these gifts of bread and wine may be for us the body and blood of Christ,” or words to that effect. There’s a technical term for that part of the prayer, by the way; it’s called the epiclesis. Just fancy that!

But the point is, it echoes back. The Holy Spirit, Jesus said, will teach us all things and remind us of everything that Jesus said; we pray, in our Communion prayer, for the coming of the Holy Spirit.

For me, right now, as you may have gathered, the service is all about a special moment of communion with Jesus. A time of forgiveness, a time of healing, a time of empowerment, of refilling with the Holy Spirit, of – well, of Jesus, if you like. But, of course, there are times when it feels as though one is just going through the motions. Perhaps you didn’t come to church in a great mood, or the service has been uninspiring, or you’re uncomfortable or in pain or something, or just one of those days when you simply can’t concentrate. We all have them. You know what it’s like as well as I do.

The thing is, I think this passage helps to show us that it doesn’t really matter. We come to Communion, if all else fails, because Jesus told us to do so. He never actually promised we’d get anything out of it, even though quite often we do. He just said, “Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me.” For his first followers, this was a normal and natural part of their Friday night rituals; whatever Jesus may or may not have meant by “This is my body, this is my blood,” passing the cup and the plate around was what they did.

For us, it is a Sunday morning ritual. But still, we do this in remembrance of him. We do it because he told us to.

Of course, there are plenty of other things that Jesus told us to do; in the context, he may well have been referring to the so-called “new commandment”, to love one another. And we know from elsewhere, from Matthew’s and Luke’s gospels, exactly what sort of people we are going to be, which can be summarised as people who treat other people with the greatest possible respect for who they are. No matter who they are. But nevertheless, by making our Communion we are doing as he commanded us.

But what does it do? Does it actually change anything? I said earlier that it was a Sacrament, and that implies that God does do something. Yes, we make our Communions frequently, although perhaps now that we’re wholly Methodist not quite as often as we’d like. And I don’t suppose, most of the time, that we feel any different.

I suspect, though, that we’d soon notice if we didn’t take Communion as regularly as possible. It is one of what Wesley calls the “Means of Grace”, which include prayer and reading the Scriptures and fellowship, as well as Communion. It is a place where we come into contact with God, and those places are vitally necessary to us. Without them, we are apart from Jesus, and you remember that he said “Without me, you can do nothing!”

And, as we come to make our Communion, let’s remember, too, the last thing Jesus said in this particular passage: “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not be afraid.”

“Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not be afraid.” Amen.

Silly Sheep

“My sheep know my voice,” says Jesus. “My sheep know my voice”.

My brother is a shepherd, so I always love preaching on the shepherd texts in John’s Gospel. His sheep are fairly brainless, as sheep go, but they do eventually learn to recognise his car, and that of the other shepherds, and their response to those cars is quite different from their response to, say, my father’s car. They know when they see those particular cars, they’ll get fed, or looked at, or moved to a new pasture, or something nice.

However, some years ago now there was a foot-and-mouth epidemic, and you weren’t allowed to move your stock at all without permission. So the sheep were stuck in one field, from which they had eaten all the grass, and were bored and restless. Sometime around then, we drove past in my father’s car, and their reaction was as if we had been my brother – they came rushing up, bleating, hoping for something nice to happen.

This Gospel reading always reminds me of that incident. Jesus says "My sheep know my voice". My brother's sheep obviously did not know who was their shepherd, and were quick to run after any passing car or person who might have been able to move them to another field. Normally they knew, but because they were stuck and hungry and bored, they wanted anybody or anything to be their shepherd.

So I wonder, how is it that we know the Shepherd's voice, and what does it mean in practice?

How is it, then, that we know the Shepherd's voice. I think there are two reasons. The first is that He speaks to us; the second is that we listen to Him.

He speaks to us. Well, in one sense that's somewhat of a no-brainer, as the Americans so graphically put it. We are told, from our earliest days as Christians, that God speaks to us through the Bible, and through other people, and even, although we must be careful, through our own imaginations. But being told it and knowing it seem to be two different things! Of course, there are times when we hear the Shepherd's voice so clearly, times when we know we are His, held in His arms - or round his neck, the way shepherd today will still carry a young sheep. It is, my brother tells me, far and away the easiest way to carry a sheep, but it does make nasty stains down the front of your jacket!

Sorry, that was a diversion, where was I? Oh yes, we have all known times when we hear the Shepherd's voice so clearly, but, of course, we have all known those other times, too; times when God seems far away, when our prayers go no further than the ceiling, when, so far from hearing God's voice, we wonder whether, in fact, our whole faith has been based on a delusion! I'm sure we've all been there and done that, too!

Now, it's traditional to be told that when those times happen, it is our fault. We have stopped listening, we are told, we have gone our own way, we have sinned. And, of course, some of the time that is exactly what has happened, even if some preachers do make it sound like God isn't talking to us any more because we've offended him! I think, rather, it is we who cannot hear the voice of God when we are uncomfortable in God's presence. But usually when that has happened we know that is what the matter is, and sooner or later we admit this to ourselves, and to God, and things come all right again.

But some of the time, with the best will in the world, we know we have not sinned, and it really doesn't seem to be our fault. Times when everything goes pear-shaped, and you wonder where on earth God is in the middle of it all? And part of you knows that this is exactly where God is - in the middle of it all - but that part is operating on sheer faith. You can't sense God's presence, or hear the Shepherd's voice at all, no matter how hard you listen.

It happens to all of us, probably more often than we care to admit. Again, preachers have various explanations for it, and you've probably heard them as often as I have. That God is testing our faith, as though God didn't know how strong our faith actually is. Actually, of course, God does know, but we don't necessarily, and it can be a salutary shock to us!

The thing is, of course, that we don't understand, can't understand, why these things happen. God is God, not just another person like us, and it's not possible to understand. We don't know why we suddenly seem to lose the ability to hear God's voice, and why, even worse, we suddenly seem to lose all sense of God, and seem to simply be going through the motions.

The fact that it's almost universal, that almost every Christian goes through it from time to time must mean that it is normal. But I don't know why it happens, and I don't altogether accept the explanations as to why. I think it's just "part of the human condition", or, if you prefer, "part of the mystery of faith", and we must accept it as such.

There are times when we just don't understand what God is doing, and that's okay, too. My brother had a very good reason that year for not moving his sheep to a new field, no matter how much he wanted to move them, and how much they wanted to be moved. He wasn't allowed to by the Government, because of foot-and-mouth precautions. And you try explaining that to sheep! And since God is even further beyond us than we are from real sheep, how could we be expected to understand what constraints He has?

Sometimes, of course, the matter seems urgent, when we want to know what God wants us to do, and yet God simply doesn't seem to answer. The more we pray, the less we know what to do, and the quieter God seems to get. It's so frustrating! And we rage and rampage and know no peace.

Or those times when something simply dreadful has happened - when someone has died prematurely, or killed in an accident, or beaten up by thugs, or any or all of the dreadful things that can and do happen nowadays. We wonder where on earth God is, we ask how a loving God can allow such dreadful things to happen, we cannot hear God's voice.

In our reading from Acts, the believers in Joppa were despairing – Tabitha was dead. Tabitha, who had been the first to lead her community in good works – how were they going to manage without her? Where was God in this? The voice of the Shepherd seemed to have disappeared from their universe.

But they sent for Peter, who brought them God’s voice, and who brought healing to Tabitha, enabling her to carry on with God’s work.

This is rare, of course. Mostly, when people die, they stay dead! We grieve, and we know that God grieves with us, even though sometimes it feels as though all trace of Him has vanished from our universe.

Jesus says "My sheep hear My voice". It is a given. There are no ifs, buts and ands. He says "My sheep hear My voice". We do hear His voice. Even when we think we don't. Often, when seeking guidance, we know in our hearts that a given path might probably be wrong. Or wrong for us, if not intrinsically wrong. And when something dreadful happens, it is God's heart, I think, which is often the first to break.

We, of course, behave like sheep from time to time. We think we do not hear the voice of the Shepherd, so we rush after any and every passing thing that looks as though it might be the Shepherd. Just as my brother's sheep ran after my father’s car, hoping that we were coming to move them to a better field. Is this the right Shepherd, we ask ourselves, rushing to find out. And sometimes, in the process, we get ourselves badly lost. We find that the better field was no such thing.

But remember our Lord's story about the lost sheep? When we do get lost, we can trust the Good Shepherd to pull on Barbour and Wellies forthwith, and head out to find us. "No one will snatch them out of my hand," Jesus said. And earlier in the chapter, in the part we didn't read, he reminds us that not only do we know him, and hear his voice, but he knows us: "I am the good shepherd. I know my own and my own know me, just as the Father knows me and I know the Father."
So even if we, or someone we care about, has gone off down the wrong track and got lost, we can trust the Good Shepherd to come and find us again.
Because the Good Shepherd, Jesus tells us, is come "that they may have life and have it abundantly". Abundantly.

So when we get to a time where we seem not to hear His voice, a time when we look round and He seems to have vanished, let's not panic. Let's not assume it was all our fault - it might have been, but not necessarily. Let's not abandon all idea of Christianity, of churchgoing, of being God's person. Instead, let's sit and wait, calling out to God in prayer, but accepting the silence, trusting that one day the Good Shepherd will come and find us, and say "There you are! Come on, I'll take you back to the rest!" Amen.