Butterflies

Today is all about butterflies! First of all, F is going to read us a story. It's a story you know very well – you probably remember it being read to you, or perhaps you read it to younger brothers and sisters, or to your own children. (F reads “The Very Hungry Caterpillar”).

So the caterpillar became a beautiful butterfly. But before he became a butterfly, there was an intermediate stage. He built a cocoon around himself. He became a pupa.

That isn’t just a matter of hibernating, like a dormouse or bear; to become a butterfly, caterpillars have to be completely remade.  While they are in the pupa, all their bits dissolve away, and are made from scratch, from the material that is there.  It’s not just a matter of rearranging what is there, it’s a matter of total breakdown and starting again. The caterpillar more-or-less has to die before it can become a butterfly.

That's really scary. But it's also very appropriate as we enter the season called Passiontide. Jesus said, “Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.”

Jesus knows that he is going to die. He is dreading it. He was, after all, human. We wouldn’t like it if we knew we were to be put to death tomorrow. I once dreamed that I was going to be executed, and I can’t tell you how frightened I was! I was so relieved to wake up and find that it was all a dream.

The farmers were sowing their fields. Jesus knew, perhaps, that he would not live to see the crops grow. But he knew that they would grow. And, more importantly, he knew that they would not grow if they were not sown. If they remained in their basket, they might germinate, but they would rot away almost at once. Or, if they were kept in very dry conditions, they might remain viable for years, but nothing would happen.

The seeds had to die.

The birds, at that time and in that place, were building their nests and laying their eggs. But the eggs couldn’t remain as eggs – they would addle and be no good to anybody. The young birds had to grow inside the eggs, and then they must force their way out or they would die.

Jesus could see the caterpillars that were hatching from the eggs laid last year. He knew, I expect, that they had to become pupae before they could be butterflies.

Someone he knew had had a baby lately; Jesus remembered this: “When a woman is in labour, she has pain, because her hour has come.

But when her child is born, she no longer remembers the anguish because of the joy of having brought a human being into the world. “

Jesus saw all this and knew that from seeming dissolution, God brought new life. He knew that he would have to die, so that new life could come.

Perhaps at that stage he didn’t really know how this would happen. He knew that it must happen, but not how it would.

We know that God raised Jesus from death, and because of that, we have eternal life. But that didn't stop it being really scary.

But this verse has become very important to me over the last ten days: “Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies,
it remains just a single grain;
but if it dies, it bears much fruit.”

What is going to happen to our Circuit with two of our Churches closing? What is going to happen to me? Where will I be worshipping this autumn? It's very scary, especially for the people of King's Acre and Railton Road – and, of course, it's dreadfully sad. I've been worshipping at King's Acre for well over thirty years now. But – what if, what if God is going to bring resurrection out of all of this? What if this Circuit needs to die in order to be raised to something better?

“Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies,
it remains just a single grain;
but if it dies, it bears much fruit.”

This is what I am taking with me into this Eastertide. When a caterpillar becomes a pupa, it seems as though it dies. But it is raised to new life as a butterfly. This Circuit is dying – my church is dying – but what is God going to raise it as? I am sad beyond words, but I'm also looking forward to finding out!

Ash Wednesday 2012

This year, New Years' Day fell on a Sunday, and so we went to Church. We were staying with my parents, and went to their village church; some of King's Acre have seen it. And I was very interested in what the vicar had to say in his sermon, because he said that New Year's Resolutions could be selfish. They could be all about you. I am going to give up smoking. I am going to lose weight. I am going to take exercise three times a week.... you know the scenario. How much better, he said, to resolve to be God's person, to resolve to put God at the centre of your life, to resolve to let God love you.

And isn't it the same about Lent? Perhaps you are planning to give something up for Lent – it might be chocolate, as a friend of mine does every year; it might be alcohol; it might be meat; it might even be social networking. But why? Why are you giving these things up, if you are?

When I was little, we were only allowed to give things up for Lent if we put the money we would otherwise have spent on them to a good cause. Which, since I found – and still find – it impossible to determine how much I might have spent on, say, chocolate, which I only buy irregularly anyway, since I found it impossible, I never gave anything up! And I am quite sure that, were I to give up social networking, I'd not spend the time in prayer or devotional reading, but faffing about playing computer games!

But self-discipline is a good thing. So we are told, and so it is, of course. But if it is all about you, all about me, that's not much good, is it? And, of course, as we heard in our reading, it's all too easy to do things for all the wrong reasons. If we start complaining about how much we're missing chocolate, or booze, or whatever it might be, that's not the idea at all. The idea is to keep it totally to yourself, don't let anybody know unless you have to. Keep it between you and God.

I personally prefer to do something positive for Lent, like reading a devotional book, or finding something to be thankful for each day, or something. But whatever you do or don't do, the idea needs to be that it brings you closer to God. And if it doesn't do that, if it doesn't work if you keep it secret, then leave it.

And so we turn to our liturgy for tonight. The beginning of Lent always feels so solemn and penitential and miserable. But it shouldn't be like that, not really. The idea is to get right with God, not to wallow in our own sinfulness! And what could be nicer than being forgiven and cleansed, and at peace?

Confession isn't really about telling God the nasty things you've done, said or thought. It can involve that, of course, but I think it's deeper than that – it's about facing up to the fact that you are the sort of person who can say, do our think such things: I have to face up to the fact that I am the sort of person who will snap at her family, given the slightest excuse to do so, or that I tend to be very greedy and lazy, as you can doubtless tell just by looking! But without God's help I shall always be these things. God knows what I'm like – it's no surprise to Him. But I need to face up to the fact that I'm like that, and ask God to help me change.

And, of course, we need to let go of anything someone else has done that has hurt us, to forgive them. And that can be horrendously difficult, too, especially if you're still angry at them. Again, it's not really something you can do by yourself – you need God's help to do it. God can take the anger and the hurt and even the hatred, and transform it – but you have to be willing to give it to him, and sometimes you have to start by asking for help to make you willing to let go of it! That's all part of confession.

And sometimes, it's God himself who we need to forgive. Which sounds awful, but what about those times when something awful happens and we don't know why? I know there have been times in my life when bad things have happened, and I've been very angry with God. Who, thankfully, doesn't mind – admitting our anger is, as always, part of confession.

And sometimes, of course, it's ourselves we need to forgive. We find it very hard to accept we are the kind of person who can snap at others, or who can waste a lot of money in the shops, or on on-line gambling sites, and when we catch ourselves doing something like that, we feel we've let ourselves down, and we find it very hard to put it behind us and allow God to help us carry on. Again, admitting that is part of confession.

The second part, the repentance, isn't just about saying “Sorry” to God, although that's where it starts. It's about turning right round, and going God's way rather than our own way. This may well involve changes in our behaviour, but mostly it involves changes in our deepest being, in who we are, in what's important to us. And that doesn't happen overnight, of course, and won't happen at all without God's help.

We're not just telling God how ghastly we are and promising to change in our own strength. We're asking God to help us grow and change. If we try to change in our own strength, we shall surely fail. Sometimes we get it twisted, and think we have to make ourselves perfect before we can come to God – er no. We must come to God exactly as we are, and allow Him to come into our deepest levels and help us to grow perfect. It won't happen overnight, but as long as we are open to God, it will happen.

It occurred to me that sometimes we feel really weighed down with things that come between us and God – the old classic “Pilgrim's Progress” depicted the Christian as having to carry a huge burden which rolled away when he came to the Cross of Christ.

So what I've done is collected some stones – just ordinary stones from the beach – and I hope you took one when you came in. If not, get one now. The stones are to represent all that weighs down your relationship with God, whether it's a bad habit, an addiction you can't overcome, a personality trait you really dislike in yourself, or whatever. It doesn't matter what – you know, and God will know. So I want you to sit and hold your stone, we'll have a little time of silence and then the worship group will sing.

And when you know what your stone represents, you're going to give it to God! We'll collect the stones, and as you put them in the bowl, give God all the bad habits and the things that are worrying you and weighing down your relationship with him. And then we will gather round the table and receive the ashes on our foreheads if we wish, as a sign of repentance – and then receive Holy Communion as a sign that we are forgiven. And then, my friends, we can go into Lent rejoicing! Amen!

What do you want with us, Jesus of Nazareth?

We don't always remember this in our day and age, but Jesus was a Jew. This seems obvious when I say it, but we don't often think through the implications of it. And one of the implications is that every Sabbath day, he went to worship at the local synagogue, wherever he found himself. Normally at home in Nazareth, but when he was on the road, he went local.

And here, in Mark's Gospel, Jesus is at the very beginning of his ministry. Mark tells us that he has been baptised, and then gone into the desert to think through the implications of this, to work out what it means to be “God's beloved Son, in whom he is well pleased.” He was tempted, and learnt what was and was not the right thing to do with his divine power.

And then John, his cousin, was put in prison and Jesus knew the time had come to start his own ministry in good earnest. He came out of the desert, and picked up Andrew and Peter and one or two others – we know from John's gospel that Andrew and Peter had been followers of John before this – and then, on the Sabbath, he finds himself in Capernaum, about 20 miles as the crow flies from his home town of Nazareth. So they all go to the synagogue there.

Now, one of the things about synagogue worship was that – is that, I should say, as I understand it is much the same today – is that you don't have to have a trained preacher up there, but almost any adult – adult males, in many synagogues, but some welcome women, too – can get up on his hind legs and expound the Scriptures. And visitors were very often asked to read the Scripture passage for the day as a way of honouring them, and it was quite “done” to comment on it. You might remember Jesus goes home to Nazareth at one stage and is asked to read the Scriptures there, with rather disastrous results. But not on this occasion.

What happens here, though is equally unexpected. Someone with an evil spirit is there, and the evil spirit recognises Jesus, and causes its host to cry out, interrupting whatever Jesus was saying or reading, to cry out: “What do you want with us, Jesus of Nazareth?”

“What do you want with us, Jesus of Nazareth?”

It's a good question, isn't it? What does Jesus want with us? Why does he come, interrupting our nice, peaceful church services? Why does he come, interrupting our nice, peaceful lives? What do you want with us, Jesus of Nazareth?

Of course, the answer is going to be different for each and every one of us. And yet there are some universal truths.

Firstly, I think, he answers “I want you to let me love you.”

To let him love us. That sounds as though it ought to be a no-brainer, but in fact, it can be very difficult to allow ourselves to be loved. And we tend not to look at it that way round, anyway. We think it's our business to love God – I am not quite sure what we think God's business is, but we don't always expect him to love us. And yet, how can we love unless he loved us first?

There's a story you may have heard before, told by the theologian and writer Gerard Hughes, in which he describes an image of God that many of us may have grown up with; a God who demanded our love and attention, and threatened us with eternal damnation if he didn't get it. And we ended up telling God how much we loved him, while secretly hating him and all he stood for, but terrified of not appearing to love him, because of the eternal damnation. We weren't told, or if we were told, we didn't hear, the first bit, which is that God loves us! God loves us so much that he knows quite well we can't possibly love him first. “We love, because He first loved us,” we are told. His love comes first. We need to let him love us. That's the first answer to the question, “What do you want of us, Jesus of Nazareth?”

“I want you to let me love you.”

And the second answer is “I want you to let me heal you.”

Healing. It's a bit of a vexed question, isn't it? We know that healings happened in the Scriptures, and we know that they can and do happen today, but we rarely seem to see any. We do see miraculous physical healings now and again, and we thank God for them as, indeed, we thank God when people are healed through modern medicine. But our bodies are going to wear out or rust out one day, whatever we do. We aren't designed to live forever on this earth, in these bodies, and they will eventually come to the end of their usefulness to us. But Scripture teaches that we will be raised from death in a new body, so it makes sense to me that the parts of us that make us “us”, if you like, are the parts that need healed. Our emotions, our personality, our memories. Things that have screwed us up in our pasts, that we find hard to get beyond. I believe Jesus always heals us when we ask, but we usually get the healing we really need, not necessarily the one we thought we wanted!

Also, while our language differentiates between healing and forgiveness, Jesus doesn't seem to so much. Remember the paralysed bloke whose friends let him down through the roof? Jesus' first words to him were “Your sins are forgiven!” which was what healed him. We need to be forgiven our sins, we need to be healed of being a sinner, if you like. We need to be changed into someone who can love God, and who can step away from sin – and we'll never do that without Jesus, let me tell you. We need to be healed so that we can become the person God created us to be. “I want you to let me heal you.”

“What do you want with us, Jesus of Nazareth?”

“I want you to let me love you.

I want you to let me heal you.

And I want you to let me fill you with the Holy Spirit!”

To be filled with God's Holy Spirit. According to the Bible, this isn't an optional extra, it's an absolutely central part of being a Christian. Remember the believers at Antioch, who were asked whether they'd received the Holy Spirit when they were baptised, and they were like, “You what? What's the Holy Spirit?” and Paul had to re-explain the Gospel to them. It turned out they'd only got as far as John's baptism of repentance, not the baptism into a new life with Christ. So far as Paul is concerned, receiving the Holy Spirit is an absolutely central part of being a Christian.

Makes sense, really, when you think about it. Because if we are filled with the Holy Spirit, we are filled with God Himself, and can be loved and healed and made whole, and God Himself can direct our lives, never forcing, never compelling, but always asking and reminding us, and enabling us. We need to be filled with God's Holy Spirit if we are to grow and change into the people God designed us to be.

“What do you want with us, Jesus of Nazareth?”

Of course, at that time the question was inappropriate, as was the follow-on of: “I know who you are, the holy one of God!” because Jesus was only just at the start of his ministry. He wasn't ready to become universally known, and anyway, he could sense that that which asked the questions had no interest in wishing him well. So he did the only possible thing, which was to command the evil spirit to come out of its host, which it did, and when the host recovered, all was well. But, of course, stories like this spread around, and Mark tells us that Jesus' fame in the area began to grow.

“What do you want of us, Jesus of Nazareth?” The question still resonates down the years, and I think the answers are still the same as ever: “I want you to let me love you. I want you to let me heal you. I want you to let me fill you with the Holy Spirit.” What is your answer? What is mine?

Will you let Jesus love you? Will you let Jesus heal you? Will you let Jesus fill you with his Holy Spirit? Amen.

God's Extravagance

Some years ago now, when my daughter got married, my husband and I went to France to buy the sparkling wine they'd chosen for toasts and so on, and they ordered the rest of the wine on sale or return from Majestic or one of those. Of course, frantic panic and calculations about how much to get – but we all got it right, and there was plenty but not enough, as my daughter said, to be worth sending back! So we shared out what was left among the various families, and very nice it was, too! But wouldn't it have been awful if we'd got it wrong?

And, in our Gospel reading for today, that is exactly what happened The wine ran out. I gather that wedding parties in those days tended to go on for about three days, and it isn't clear at what stage the wine ran out; probably towards the end of the festivities. We aren't told why, either. Perhaps the wine merchant let them down, or perhaps her relations drank more than the bridegroom's family had expected, or perhaps they just didn't calculate properly. Who knows? Anyway,they ran out of wine. Total embarrassment and despair, and probably a great deal of fury going on behind the scenes.

But among the wedding guests were a very special family. Mary, the carpenter's widow from Nazareth, and her sons. Cana isn't very far from Nazareth, only about twelve miles, but that's quite a good day's journey when you have to rely on your own two feet to get you there. So it's probable that either the bride or the groom were related to Mary in some way, especially as she seems to have been told about the disaster with the wine.

And then comes one of those turning-point moments in the Gospels. Mary tells her eldest son, Jesus, that the wine has run out.

Now, as far as we can tell, Jesus is only just beginning to realise who he is. John's gospel says that he has already been baptised by John the Baptist, which implies that he has been out into the desert to wrestle with the implications of being the Messiah – and the temptations which came with it, and John also tells us that Simon Peter, Andrew and some of the others have started to be Jesus' disciples and had come with him to the wedding. But, in this version of the story, Jesus hasn't yet started to use his divine power to heal people and to perform miracles, and he isn't quite sure that the time is right to do so. So when his mother comes up and says “They have no wine,” his immediate reaction is to say, more or less, “Well, nothing I can do about it! It isn't time yet!”

His mother, however, seems to have been ahead of Jesus for once, on this, and says to the servants, “Do whatever he tells you!” And Jesus, who was always very close to God, and who had learnt to listen to his Father all the time, realises that, after all, his mother is right and the time has come to start using the power God has given him. So he tells the servants to fill those big jars with water – an they pour out as the best wine anybody there has ever tasted. As someone remarked, right at the fag-end of the wedding, when people are beginning to go home and everybody has had more than enough to drink, anyway.

I don't suppose the bridegroom's family were sorry, though. Those jars were huge – they held about a hundred litres each, and there were six of them. Do you realise just how much wine that was? Six hundred litres – about eight hundred standard bottles of wine! Eight hundred.... you don't even see that many on the supermarket shelves, do you? Eight hundred.... I should think Mary was a bit flabber-gasted. And it was such good quality too.

Okay, so people drank rather more wine then than we do today, since there was no tea or coffee, poor them, and the water was a bit iffy, but even still, I should think eight hudnred bottles would last them quite a while. And at that stage of the wedding party, there's simply no way they could have needed that much.

But isn't that exactly like Jesus? Isn't that typical of God? We see it over and over and over again in the Scriptures. The story of feeding the five thousand, for instance – and one of the Gospel-writers points out that it was five thousand men, not counting the women and children – well, in that story, Jesus didn't provide just barely enough lunch for everybody, quite the reverse – there were twelve whole basketsful left over! Far more than enough food -all the disciples could have a basketful to take home to Mum.

Or what about when the disciples were fishing and he told them to cast their nets that-away? The nets didn't just get a sensible catch of fish – they were full and over-full, so that they almost ripped.

It's not just in the Bible either – look at God's creation. You've all seen pictures of the way the desert blooms when it rains – look at those millions of flowers that nobody, for a very long time, ever knew were there except God. Or look at how many millions and millions of sperm male animals produce to fertilise only a few embryos in the course of a lifetime. Or where lots of embryos are produced, like fish, for instance, millions of them are eaten or otherwise perish long before adulthood. And millions and millions of different plant and animal species, some of which are only now being discovered.

Or look at the stars – have you, perhaps, been watching this Stargazing Live programme this week with Brian Cox and Dara Ó Briain? All those millions upon millions of stars, many with planets, some with planets like our own that may even hold intelligent life..... God is amazing, isn't He? And just suppose we really are the only intelligent life in the Universe? That says something else about God's extravagance in creating such an enormous Universe with only us in it! Our God is truly amazing! And who knows, somewhere, in a galaxy far away, God might be being worshipped by beings who are far different from us – perhaps they are five feet square, one inch thick, and ripple! Or perhaps they are more like plants than like people.... who knows? Apart from God, nobody knows! But it's fun to speculate.

But there's a more serious side to this than just science fiction, much though I love it. The point is, doesn't an extravagant God demand an extravagant response from us? His most extravagant act, so far as we know, was to come down to earth as a human being, a tiny baby, born in an obscure village in a dusty corner of the world, totally helpless, totally vulnerable.... our own celebrations of Christmas, no matter how over-the-top, don't even begin to come close!

And yet our response is, so very often, "meh!"; lukewarm! We tend to give God the minimum, rather than the maximum – that's much too scary! And yet we're told that the measure we give will be given back to us, pressed down, shaken together and running over! As the response to our Psalm reads, “How abundant is your goodness, O Lord.”

We hold back. We follow God only a little bit. We don't dare give the full tithe, the full ten percent, because we think that in times of recession we can't afford to. Or we think it doesn't apply to us. Well, I'm not one to preach prosperity theology, but God does promise all sorts of blessings on us, material or otherwise, if we bring in the full tithe.

Or, perhaps we do follow God whole-heartedly – but we see Christianity as a matter of judgementalism, of a God who seeks excuses to condemn people, rather than excuses to forgive them. We see people proclaiming in the media, or on Facebook, or elsewhere that God hates a given group of people – usually gay people, or women who have abortions. Such nonsense – how can he hate those he came to die for? He may or may not approve of their actions, but – well, he doesn't approve of everything we do, either. We too are sinners, and know that we are!

Would our extravagant God, the one who produced eight hundred bottles of top-quality wine at the tail end of a party, would that God really be mean-minded? Yes, we have seen from Scripture that God can be extravagant in his judgements as well as in his gifts, but not, normally, against people who are trying to follow him as best they know how. It is those who turn against God, who follow false gods, and who, worse still, encourage other people to do the same, they are the ones who come under judgement.

Sometimes, though, we can't respond extravagantly to God's extravagance because we are afraid to allow God to be extravagant with us! Maybe we'd be asked to do something we really don't want to do.... or live somewhere we don't want to live, or.... you know the scenario. But, my friends, if an extravagant God calls you to do something extravagant for him, won't he give you extravagantly, abundantly, the strength and, yes, the desire, to do it?

Jesus came, he told us, so that we can have life, and have it abundantly! Abundantly. Are we allowing God to be extravagant in our lives? Am I? Are you? Amen.

Echoes - Matthew chapter 2

This is an edited version of a sermon first preached some years ago. It doesn't feel right to just preach on the Epiphany without mentioning its aftermath.

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

It’s certainly not found elsewhere;

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

Here we are, in Matthew,

finding the Holy Family living in Bethlehem,

fleeing to Egypt,

and then settling in Nazareth,

well out of reach of Herod’s descendants.

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

went to Bethlehem for the census,

and, far from avoiding Jerusalem,

called in there on their way back to Nazareth!

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

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

and whether Jesus and John played together as children?

Not that it matters.

We all rationalise the two stories into one,

and add our own extraneous bits –

the ox and the ass, for instance,

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

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

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

And they were probably astrologers, not kings,

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

He doesn't even specify that they were male, although they probably were. The word “Magi” just means “wise ones”.

And do you really think people kept bursting into song,

like they do in Luke’s gospel?

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

But both Gospels –

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

but at the start of his ministry –

both Gospels agree that Jesus was born to a virgin,

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

And they both agree that he was born in Bethlehem,

to a mother named Mary and a father named Joseph.

Both gospels also provide a genealogy for him,

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

and only as far back as Abraham in St Matthew’s case!

And occasionally tracing by different routes.

And both agree that the baby Jesus was visited by outsiders, by people who were not from the religious establishment of the day.

The shepherds were apparently outsiders, not accepted in Jewish society.

And the Magi, of course, were foreigners, outsiders, not even Jewish.

Similarities, differences – it doesn't really matter, as I said.

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

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

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

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

blessed art thou among women!”

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

he could have discarded her publicly and left her with no other resource than to go on the streets.

But he didn’t.

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

And then he listened to the angel who said that he should marry her anyway.

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

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

and to change his mind.

He comes across as someone who listens to God,

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

In our reading today, again, Joseph listens.

He acts on what he hears –

he takes his family and flees to Egypt,

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

only to Nazareth, not Bethlehem.

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

And it echoes down the years.....

There is Israel going down into Egypt

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

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

which led to Moses being hidden the bulrushes.

Jewish legends about this event also have dream warnings

just as we have here

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

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

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

The provide a setting for Jesus, if you like.

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

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

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

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

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

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

but that doesn’t matter.

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

that was how you proved things:

was there a relevant quotation in the Scriptures?

He wants to set the Messiah in context.

And showing that history is repeating itself:

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

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

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

it never ends.

The magi –

wise men, astrologers, it’s thought –

came to Bethlehem to worship the new-born infant,

and we are invited to do the same.

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

it’s not just about watching a child grow and develop, and applauding when he does something really clever, like I do with young James.

Actually, he has learnt to applaud himself when he's done something he considers clever, but never mind that now.

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

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

We kneel at the cradle in Bethlehem, yes –

but we worship the Risen Lord.

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

although that, too,

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

he could not come again.

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

We worship at the cradle in Bethlehem,

but we also worship Jesus all year round,

remembering not only his birth,

but his teachings,

his ministry,

the Passion,

the Resurrection,

the Ascension and the coming of the Holy Spirit.

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

what was that song:

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

it’s not just about worshipping a distant divinity,

but about God with us:

Emmanuel.

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

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

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

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

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

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

A “technion” would not only work in wood,

but he’d build houses –

and design them, too.

He was a really skilled worker,

not your average builder with his trousers falling off.

Jesus would have been educated, as every Jewish boy was,

and probably taught to follow his father’s trade.

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

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

God with us:

a God who chose to live an ordinary life,

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

who knows what it is to work for his living.

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

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

This, then, is the God we adore.

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

for the Gospel message is a joyful one.

But it is so much more than just a happy-clappy story of the birth of a baby.

It is the story of the God who is there.

God with us.

Emmanuel. Amen.

Be Joyful Always

From St Paul's instructions to the Thessalonians, which formed part of our first reading:
“Be joyful always;
pray continually;
give thanks in all circumstances, for this is God's will for you in Christ Jesus.”

“Be joyful always;
pray continually;
give thanks in all circumstances, for this is God's will for you in Christ Jesus.”

Hmmm. It rather jumped out and hit me in the face when I was reading the passages set for this Sunday, and I can't help but wonder what on earth St Paul was talking about. How on earth are we supposed to be joyful always? Does he mean we always have to be happy, and it's wrong if we are miserable? Surely not! How can we pray continually? We do have lives, after all – we need to concentrate on other things like cooking the dinner or the work we're being paid to do! And how about giving thanks in all circumstances? Even in the middle of a disaster?

The Bible tells us, over and over again, that we should rejoice and be glad – I believe there are over 800 verses telling us to. So it must be something we are meant to do. But how?

We aren't always happy and rejoicing – and indeed, it would be quite wrong if we were. If someone is hurting very badly, it doesn't help to go and be happy all over them! There are times when we are all very unhappy – personal tragedies, dreadful things that happen to loved ones, national tragedies.... how can we “be joyful always” when people have lost their homes in a hurricane or an earthquake?

Indeed, in the letter to the Romans St Paul tells us to “Weep with those who weep” as well as “Rejoice with those who rejoice”. And even our dear Lord wept when he arrived at Bethany and found his friend Lazarus dead and buried.

So it's obviously not wrong to be unhappy, to be sad. And yet we are told to be joyful.

Well, for one thing, St Paul also reminds us, in the letter to the Galatians, that joy is a fruit of the Holy Spirit.

Joy is a fruit of the Holy Spirit. And this means that it isn't something we have to find within ourselves. It is something that grows within us as we go on with God and as we allow God the Holy Spirit to fill us more and more. Joy grows, just as love, peace, patience, gentleness, goodness, kindness and self-control do. We become more and more the people we were created to be, more and more the people God knows we can be.

That doesn't mean we'll never be unhappy, far from it. But we know, as St Paul also tells us, that God works all things together for good for those that love him. Even the bad things, even the dreadful things that break God's heart even more than they break ours. Even those.

We may be unhappy, we may be grieving, we may be depressed. But we can still be joyful, we can still rejoice, because God is still God, and God still loves us. Okay, sometimes it doesn't feel like that, but that's only what it feels like, not what has really happened. God will never abandon us, God will always love us. God will weep with us when we weep. And underneath there always is that joy, the joy of our salvation.

Okay, maybe that is understandable. We can be joyful always if joy is a fruit of the Holy Spirit. But what about praying continually? We have lives, don't we? We have to do such basic things as eating and sleeping and going to the loo, never mind earning our living. How can we pray continually?

I suppose it depends on what prayer is. If it's all about a conversation with God, or even worse, a monologue from us telling God about our world and our lives, then it probably isn't possible.

But what if, what if it were more about an attitude of mind? A way of living where we are continually conscious of God's presence with us, of God's love for us? There is a plaque some people like to have in their homes that says “Christ is the head of this house; the unseen guest at every table, the silent listener to every conversation.” That can sound as though he's some kind of creepy stalker, but it's also a reality, if you are God's person. And one can practice being aware of this, of God's constant presence with us.

It does take practice, of course; you can't just go from only thinking of God when you're in Church on Sunday or when you're praying or reading your Bible at home, and forgetting about Him when you're watching East Enders or getting the supper. Some people find it helpful to build reminders into their lives, so that every time they put the kettle on, say, or get up from their chair, or whatever, they remember to – I was going to say grin at God, but you know what I mean. After all, you can be sitting very happily in the same room as someone else, both of you utterly absorbed in whatever it is you're doing – even, it has to be said, watching different television programmes over the Internet – but you're still aware that the other person is there. I think it must be a bit like that with God. You can be getting on with your life but aware, in the background, that God is there with you. I wonder if it's that that St Paul meant by “Pray continually.” I think it must be something like.

By the way, don't think I'm some sort of super-spiritual genius – I can't do this, a lot of the time. Sometimes I can, but more often than not it doesn't happen!
I'd like to be able to – but then again, like all of us, there are times when I'd really rather forget.....

And, you know, I bet that, like the underlying joy that the Holy Spirit gives, being able to be aware of God's presence, so that you can take up and put down conversations with Him, must also be a gift of the Holy Spirit.

So, be joyful always, pray continually, and the third one was “Give thanks in all circumstances.”

Give thanks in all circumstances.

Now, I know there are some writers who have interpreted this to mean that we have to give thanks for everything. I don't see how we can do that – I mean, we know that God's heart breaks when a child is killed on the roads, or when an earthquake devastates a country. How are we supposed to give thanks for things that make God Himself weep?

I don't think it means that. I think it's more about having a thankful heart. About acknowledging God's good gifts to us. About – okay, if you like, about counting our blessings. We can't, and I don't think we should, thank God for the dreadful things – but we can be aware that God is there, in the midst of the dreadful things, and we can certainly thank him for that. We can be aware that in all things God does work for good for those who love him.
“Be joyful always;
pray continually;
give thanks in all circumstances, for this is God's will for you in Christ Jesus.”

“For this is God's will for you in Christ Jesus.” That's important, too. I don't think we can just do all this in a vacuum. It is because God wants this for us, it is His best for us.

Yes, it will take some work on our part – we know that God the Holy Spirit will most certainly do his part by enabling us to develop a sense of joy in Christ that can and will be there even through the most heartbreaking of outward circumstance, but of course we have to do our part by allowing Him to, by practising, with His help, being aware of his presence at all times and developing, again with His help, a thankful heart that sees and acknowledges what God is doing in our world. And no, it won't be easy, and no, we can't do it by ourselves but only with Christ's help.

We are in the season called Advent, and Christmas is rapidly approaching. We've already started singing carols – King's Acre's carol service is this afternoon, if you fancy coming along – four o'clock, I think. And over the Christmas season, we will be singing words like, “Yet what I can, I give him, give my heart” and “Cast out our sin and enter in, be born in us today!” The thing is, do we really mean it? Are we just singing lyrics we've known for years and never really taken much notice of? Even the ghastly “Away in a Manger” – “No crying he makes?” I don't think so! Not if he was a real baby, not a wax doll! Anyway, sorry, even when we sing “Away in a Manger” we are asking God to “fit us for heaven, to live with thee there!”

And that's what it's all about, isn't it? St Paul's instructions are things we simply can't do on our own, no matter how hard we try. But if we do ask God to help us fulfil them, if we do learn to “Be joyful always, pray continually and give thanks in all circumstances”, then when we do get to heaven, we'll fit right in! Amen.

Micah, Matthew and Me

I must admit I rather despaired when I looked at this week’s readings. What on earth am I going to say about them? But then I had a second look, and decided that the Micah and Matthew readings were saying much the same thing, but to different people in different ways. I wonder, though, what they have to say to us today. And then I listened to the news.....

Micah was a prophet in 8th-century Judah, more or less a contemporary with Isaiah, Amos and Hosea. He prophesied the destruction of Jerusalem, particularly, as in our reading, because they were simply dishonest and then expected God to cover for them: “Her leaders judge for a bribe, her priests teach for a price, and her prophets tell fortunes for money. Yet they lean upon the LORD and say, Is not the LORD among us? No disaster will come upon us.” But Micah said, “Ain’t gonna happen!” As one modern paraphrase puts it: “The fact is, that because of you lot, Jerusalem will be reduced to rubble and cleared like a field; and the Temple hill will be nothing but a tangled mass of weeds"

An archaeologist called Roland de Vaux has excavated village sites only a few miles from where Micah is thought to have lived, and he has something very interesting to say: “The houses of the tenth century B.C. are all of the same size and arrangement. Each represents the dwelling of a family which lived in the same way as its neighbors. The contrast is striking when we pass to the eighth century houses on the same site: the rich houses are bigger and better built and in a different quarter from that where the poor houses are huddled together.”

During those 200 years, Israel and Judah had moved from a largely agricultural society to one governed by a monarchy and with a Temple in Jerusalem. The distinction between the “Haves” and the “Have nots” had grown, as it does still today. But Micah tells the powerful ones – the judges, the priests, the rulers – that God will have no interest in propping up any so-called progress that is built on the backs of other people. For God, justice and equality matter far more than progress or growth.

Thus Micah. So what of Matthew?

Here we have Jesus lambasting the religious leaders of the day. Or not. He says to listen to their teachings and follow them, but not to imitate them. They put on a huge display of being holy, when they really aren’t. They lay huge burdens on people. As I’ve said many times before, the trouble with the Pharisees was that they really did want to follow God, but they had misunderstood what was wanted, and thought that in order to be God's person, you simply had to follow the law absolutely exactly. To help them do that, they had added some incredibly detailed “what ifs” and “in this case yous” to the Law. The Law, as interpreted by the Pharisees, provided for every single detail of life, and if you failed to keep it absolutely perfectly, then, they thought, God wouldn’t want to know you.

Well, that was all very well. The Pharisees meant well, of course, but they were imposing impossible burdens on people. It was quite impossible to keep the Law in their way. And the Pharisees themselves made one very big mistake: they rated keeping the Law more highly than human relationships. They were more concerned about the way people obeyed, or did not obey, the Law than they were about who people were, and how they were hurting, and why. And, of course, somewhat inevitably, they tended to be rather proud if they managed to live as they thought right, and then they looked down on those who didn't live as they did, believing God would exclude them. Jesus takes this further, and says that not only do they place impossible burdens on people, but they also then don’t follow the law themselves – they are too proud of being holy, too proud of their position. They compete to wear the biggest phylacteries – a phylactery, incidentally, was a small leather box which you put a verse or two of Scripture in – often, I believe, the verse that goes “Hear, O Israel, the Lord is God, the Lord is One” – and then wore bound round your forehead and on your arm during prayers. Only the Pharisees tended to wear theirs all the time, which wasn’t the idea at all. Remember how Jesus, elsewhere, told his followers not to show off when they prayed, or to make a big fuss when giving to charity?

Jesus also rebukes the Pharisees for enjoying their status, revelling in being looked up to, getting the best seats and so on. It’s not about that, he says. It’s not about status or standing – it’s about following God.

I am not sure quite why vast swathes of the Church have disregarded the instruction not to call any man “Father”, and address their ministers or priests as such, but there you go. But the point is, Jesus says, that the greatest among you must be your servant, just as he was to wash his disciples’ feet before the Last Supper. “All who exalt themselves will be humbled, and all who humble themselves will be exalted.” Jesus has said that elsewhere, too. A great deal of Matthew’s gospel is devoted to this concept – those three great chapters 5, 6 and 7 which contain the distillation of Jesus’ teachings we call the Sermon on the Mount, for instance, and then these later chapters. For Matthew and his congregation, the emphasis was very much on serving others, on putting yourself last, on being there for other people.

So, then, for Micah it’s all about being honest, not taking bribes, not giving dishonest weight, not expecting God to be on your side no matter how you behave. God is more interested in justice than in growth. For Matthew it’s about not putting on side, not being puffed up because of your position. And what, then, is it for me? For us, really, but that doesn’t start with “M”!

Well, one very important thing happened this week – Canon Chancellor Giles Fraser resigned his post at St Paul's Cathedral because he could not countenance the Cathedral's decision to have the protesters forcibly removed from outside it. He believes that the Church should have no part in violence, and has paid for his principles with his job. The Revd Fraser Dyer, a vicar who was a part-time chaplain there, also resigned for similar reasons.

All the comments I've seen on Facebook and elsewhere make it clear how much Canon Fraser and Mr Dyer is being admired for their stands. They are people who know what they believe is right, and not only say so, but Caonon Fraser, at least, has put his money, quite literally, where his mouth is. He is the antithesis of the religious leaders that Micah and Matthew condemn.

And those people who have been protesting outside the Cathedral are also standing up for what they believe in. Canon Fraser apparently commented, back in August at the time of the riots, that people in the City were no better, really, only out for what they could get. And the protesters would like to see that changed. We may or may not agree with their methods, but can we disagree with their viewpoint?

Our passages today condemn greed, they condemn self-seeking and they condemn vanity. We will, I'm sure, say if we're asked that we know all that, that we wouldn't dream of behaving in the way Matthew and Micah describe. No, I don't suppose we would – but would we go as far as Canon Fraser did? I wonder! Still, we aren't, right now, called to do so – although you never know what lies around the bend in the road.

But it really isn't easy not to be complacent! We so often fall into the trap of considering ourselves – not exactly better, but perhaps wiser or something – than our neighbour.  Do you remember the story Jesus told about the Pharisee and the tax collector, where the Pharisee thanked God that he was so much better than the tax collector, and his whole prayer was thanking God, not for what God had done, but for what he had?  I heard a story of a Sunday-school teacher –  not, I hasten to add, one of ours – who told her class this story and then said, “Now children, let us thank God we are not like that Pharisee!”  

Well yes, we might laugh – but I didn’t laugh when, meditating upon that story, I found myself thanking God that I was not like that Sunday-school teacher!  Oops!

See what I mean?

It isn’t easy, but it’s not meant to be an impossible burden, either.  It is, after all, for freedom Christ has set us free, so the Apostle Paul tells us.  We shouldn’t be burdened by guilt, or by anything else that our leaders choose to put on us.  Sometimes we preachers – oh yes, I’m quite sure I do it, too – sometimes we accidentally make it very difficult for people to follow Jesus.  

We assume, often quite without realising it, that our way of following Jesus, of being Christ’s person, is the only valid way, and then when other people have a different experience, we try to tell them there’s something wrong with them!  

One of the things that really impressed me in the interview the BBC had with Canon Fraser was his insistence that the Chapter of St Paul's wasn't split over the issue – they disagreed, yes, and he felt that his principles meant he had to resign, but he respected that other people had different views to his. How refreshing to hear someone say, almost in so many words, that different doesn't necessarily mean wrong!

This, I think, is why Jesus tells us in Matthew not to put our teachers and preachers and ministers on a pedestal.  That only ends up showing up their feet of clay!  Only God is the perfect Teacher, and what filters through us is, at best, flawed and at worst can be pernicious – look at some of the things that Christians do and say in the name of Christ.  Things like “God hates Gays”, or that “Unborn children are so precious that the mother’s life and health don’t matter.”  Or, the hardy perennial: “Give lots of money to God – or rather, to the preacher – and you will be rich and healthy!” Getting back, yet again, to Me First!

Listen, we're not supposed to be discouraged by all this! Jesus makes it quite clear that religious leaders can lay impossible burdens on their followers, and that's not just the Pharisees! We look at people who do great things for God and despair because we're not like them. We would be reluctant to resign our job on a principle. We don't want to let go of our complacency. We would like lots of money and frankly, our own wants do tend to come first with us! And we find preachers who tell us Not To Be Like That very difficult to cope with.

The thing is, as so often, it's about allowing God to work in our hearts, to change us into the people we were designed to be. And then when the time comes that we might be called on to give up something precious for the sake of the Gospel, like Canon Fraser, when we might be called to live with less money for awhile, or to yield to someone else's agenda, and we never do know what's just round the bend in the road – if and when that time ever comes, if we are really serious about God, and about allowing Him to work within us, then we will be able to cope. Without him, no. But with him – well, it might not be easy, it might well be very difficult indeed, but we will cope. Amen.