They Left Their Nets

“And immediately they left their nets and followed him”.

This is a very familiar story, and a very familiar image, too.

We still talk of following Jesus today, 

although most of us are called to do so within the context
of our families and our jobs.

I rather think that by the time the Gospels were written down, 

most people who were called to follow Jesus 

were doing so within the context of their own lives, too.

All the Gospel writers tell us this story, though, 

so it must have been an important one.

St Luke goes into a bit more detail than either Matthew or Mark, 

whose account is more-or-less identical to Matthew’s.

In Luke’s version of events, Peter –

only he was still Simon, in those days –

had been out in the boat fishing all night, with no sign of a fish anywhere. 

One of those days when you reckon there simply aren't any fish in the lake,
even though you know quite well there must be. 

But the fish were hiding. 

And so Simon and his colleagues decide to call it a night, 

and they pull up their boats on the beach and start to wash the nets.

And along comes Jesus, with a whole crowd of people following him. 

"Can I borrow your boat a minute, mate?" he asks. 

And Simon rows him out just a tiny way offshore, 

so that he can speak to the crowds from there. 

We aren't told what he told them, but we know that Jesus' message tended to be
that the Kingdom of God was now here, and was well worth seeking for.
And I expect he told them, too,
a bit about the sort of people God wanted in the Kingdom –

people who go out of their way to help others,
even people they've nothing in common with,
even people who they can't stand;

people who don't bear grudges,
who don't use other people in any way,
or get angry with them in a destructive way;

people who, basically, treat other people with the greatest possible
respect for who they are,
and who go out of their way for them.
For anybody, just as God himself does.

Anyway, when Jesus had finished his teaching, he grins at Simon and goes,
"Ta very much, Mate.
Tell you what, why don't you take that boat out into deep water,
just over there [points] and see what you don't catch?" 

Simon's sceptical, but –

well, why not. So they row out and throw their nets over one last time....
and the amount of fish in there, the nets couldn't cope and, eventually,
nor could the boats.

And Simon's reaction is to throw himself at Jesus' feet –

I assume Jesus was still in the boat with them –

and say "Depart from me, for I am a sinful man!"

And Jesus reassures him:

“From now on, you will be catching people.”

And not only Simon Peter,
but Andrew, James and John all leave their nets to follow Jesus.

John’s gospel is different again, as it so often is.

In his version of events, Andrew, Simon’s brother, is a disciple of John the Baptist,
and after he hears Jesus speak,
he goes and spends the day with him at his home.

And then comes to find Simon Peter,
and tells him that they have found the Messiah –

and Simon believes them and leaves everything to follow Jesus.

Incidentally, I hadn’t quite noticed, had you,
the first part of our Gospel reading today,
where Matthew explains that Jesus left Nazareth
after John the Baptist had been put in prison, and settled in Capernaum?

One doesn’t really think of his having a home of his own –

we’re so used to the “Foxes have nests” image.

Not quite that, it’s
“Foxes have dens and birds have nests,
but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.”

But at this very early stage, this isn’t quite true.

Jesus has taken a house –

or at least rooms –

in Capernaum.

And people could go and visit him there, and eat with him.

The wandering came later on in Jesus’ ministry. 

All the gospels agree that this is a very early stage in Jesus’ ministry.

They place it almost immediately after he returns from being tempted in the desert, where he’s wrestled with the temptations to misuse his divine powers, and has become a lot clearer about who he is,
and what he’s been called to do.

I’m not sure how much he actually knows, at this stage, of what lies ahead,
but he does know that he is to preach that the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand
and, like all the preachers and teachers of his day,
he is gathering disciples to help him with this task,
perhaps helping with their physical needs –

Judas, you may remember, kept the communal purse –

and learning from him all that they needed to know in order to spread his message.

Although, as we know, it wasn’t until after the Holy Spirit came, at Pentecost,
that they were truly able to understand
and to spread the good news of the Kingdom.

But that came later.

For now, they left their nets and followed Jesus.

And that’s the important thing.

They followed Jesus.

Sadly, it wasn’t very long before that stopped being the case.

Factionalism arose in the early church.

St Paul picks up on this in his letter to the Corinthians.

He has heard, from people who lived in Chloe’s household,
that there are an awful lot of squabbles and factions in the local church,
with some people saying they follow Apollos, 

some saying they follow Peter
and some saying they follow Paul...
I wonder whether some also said they followed Jesus,
or whether that was Paul being sarky, we don’t know.

I also don’t know who Chloe was;

we don’t hear of her again,
so we have to assume that she was basically one of the believers in Corinth,
and perhaps gave house-room to one of the churches there.

Peter, of course, is Simon Peter, and Apollos, too, is well-known.

He was a Jew from Alexandria who met up with Paul
and his friends Prisca and Aquila in Ephesus, and was converted there –

he was already a believer in Jesus, but hadn’t got further than John’s baptism.

Prisca and Aquila bring him up-to-date,
and then he goes off to Achaia to preach the gospel there,
and is, apparently, a very effective evangelist.

Certainly Paul often refers to him,
and sends affectionate messages to him in his letters.

Achaia, by the way, is a prefecture –

the local equivalent of a county or other administrative area –

in Greece, bang next door to the prefecture of Corinthia,
whose capital is, of course, Corinth.

So it’s not too surprising that the Corinthians knew Apollos,
and some of them were claiming to follow him.

But, of course, it is Jesus that they needed to follow,
as St Paul makes quite clear, spelling it out to them in words of one syllable.

It’s nothing to do, he says, with who baptised you.

He, Paul, hardly ever baptises anybody, leaving that to the local church.

It’s the message that matters, not the person who preaches it.

“Christ did not send me to baptise,” one modern translation puts it.

“He sent me to tell the good news
without using big words that would make the cross of Christ lose its power.”

The “not using big words” was particularly difficult for Greek people,
as their tradition was very much one of philosophy and of debate.

They had trouble visualising a God who was actually involved with human life,
a God who cared,
a God who cared to the point of becoming a messy, emotional human being.

A God who cared to the point of dying on a cross.

So for them, all too often, Christianity was a matter of intellectual assent,
of rules and regulations,
of doing things in a certain way.

And the person who taught you about this
became almost as important as the message itself.

I think we’re awfully prone to doing that today.

It’s a lot easier to give intellectual assent to one’s faith than to live it.

It’s a lot easier to live by rules and regulations than to live by faith in Jesus.

It’s a lot easier to belong to a denomination than it is to be a Christian!

Don’t get me wrong –

there’s nothing the matter with denominations as such!

It’s denominationalism that is the problem –

where we think that because we are Methodists, 

we are in some way better than Anglicans or Baptists or Free Church people.

We aren’t.

We may have some quite profound theological differences –

especially with the Baptists and others who believe in a limited atonement –

but we are all following Jesus as best we know how,
and we are all sinners in need of redemption.

And that, for St Paul, was what mattered.

The message of the Cross.

The message that we can all be saved.

Simon, Andrew, James and John left their nets to follow Jesus.

We aren’t all called to leave where we are and what we are doing –

in fact, few of us are. But we are all called to follow Jesus!

Not all of us are called to be evangelists, but we are all witnesses to Jesus.

That, by the way, is a function of being Jesus’ person;

he told us that when the Spirit came we would be his witnesses –

not that we would have to be, or that we ought to be,
but that it would happen as part of receiving the Spirit.

If we are truly following Jesus, if we are truly his person,
then we are witnesses to him, even if we never mention our faith out loud.

His Spirit shines through us.

Of course, none of us is perfect.

The Bible is full of examples of when Simon Peter got it wrong –

most notably when he panicked when Jesus was arrested and tried,
and pretended he’d never met him.

But he was forgiven, and restored,
and he went on to become one of the greatest leaders the Church has ever had.

Sure, he wasn’t perfect, even then –

he had his quarrels with St Paul
about how far people who weren’t Jewish should be allowed into the Church,
and under what conditions –

but “the big fisherman” was definitely a great leader.

He became the person God had created him to be,
and fulfilled the role God called him to fill, even though he was far from perfect.

We are not all called to be leaders,
but we can still become all that we were created to be,
because we can all be forgiven and restored and enabled.

They left their nets to follow Jesus.

It’s not what we leave, if we leave anything, that’s important –

it’s that we follow Jesus.

Amen.

Echoes

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




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

It’s certainly not found elsewhere;

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

Here we are, in Matthew,

finding the Holy Family living in Bethlehem,

fleeing to Egypt,

and then settling in Nazareth,

well out of reach of Herod’s descendants.

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

went to Bethlehem for the census,

and, far from avoiding Jerusalem,

called in there on their way back to Nazareth!

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

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

and whether Jesus and John played together as children?

Not that it matters.

We all rationalise the two stories into one,

and add our own extraneous bits –

the ox and the ass, for instance,

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

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

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

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

And do you really think people kept bursting into song,

like they do in Luke’s gospel?

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

But both Gospels –

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

but at the start of his ministry –

both Gospels agree that Jesus was born to a virgin,

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

And they both agree that he was born in Bethlehem,

to a mother named Mary and a father named Joseph.

Both gospels also provide a genealogy for him,

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

and forward from Abraham in St Matthew’s case!

And occasionally tracing by different routes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

blessed art thou among women!”

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

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

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

But he didn’t.

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

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

As if that made it better…..

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

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

and to change his mind.

He comes across as someone who listens to God,

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

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

Imagine, Joseph, of all people,

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

Joseph, willing to raise another man’s child!

Joseph…. Just fancy that!

In our reading today, again, Joseph listens.

He acts on what he hears –

he takes his family and flees to Egypt,

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

only to Nazareth, not Bethlehem.

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

And it echoes down the years.....

There is Israel going down into Egypt

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

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

which led to Moses being hidden the bulrushes.

Jewish legends about this event also have dream warnings

just as we have here

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

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

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

The provide a setting for Jesus, if you like.

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

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

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

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

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

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

but that doesn’t matter.

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

that was how you proved things:

was there a relevant quotation in the Scriptures?

He wants to set the Messiah in context.

And showing that history is repeating itself:

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

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

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

it never ends.

The magi –

wise men, astrologers, it’s thought –

came to Bethlehem to worship the new-born infant,

and we are invited to do the same.

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

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

and having cuddles,

like we do when we admire babies.

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

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

We kneel at the cradle in Bethlehem, yes –

but we worship the Risen Lord.

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

although that, too,

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

he could not come again.

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

We worship at the cradle in Bethlehem,

but we also worship Jesus all year round,

remembering not only his birth,

but his teachings,

his ministry,

the Passion,

the Resurrection,

the Ascension and the coming of the Holy Spirit.

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

what was that song:

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

it’s not just about worshipping a distant divinity,

but about God with us:

Emmanuel.

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

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

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

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

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

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

A “technion” would not only work in wood,

but he’d build houses –

and design them, too.

He was a really skilled worker,

not your average builder with his trousers falling off.

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

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

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

God with us:

a God who chose to live an ordinary life,

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

who knows what it is to work for his living.

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

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

This, then, is the God we adore.

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

for the Gospel message is a joyful one.

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

It is the story of the God who is there.

God with us.

Emmanuel.

Amen.

8-second

Wot’s going on ’ere?

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

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

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

In Matthew,

we find the Holy Family living in Bethlehem,

fleeing to Egypt,

and then settling in Nazareth,

well out of reach of Herod’s descendants.

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

went to Bethlehem for the census,

and, far from avoiding Jerusalem,

called in there on their way back to Nazareth!

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

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

and whether Jesus and John played together as children?

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

Not that it matters.

We all rationalise the two stories into one,

and add our own extraneous bits –

the ox and the ass, for instance,

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

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

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

But that doesn’t matter now.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Facing the Future

This time of year, it starts feeling that it’s all downhill until Christmas. We’ve had half-term, we’ve had Halloween, we’ve had Bonfire Night, we’ve had Remembrance Day. Next stop, Christmas!

Of course, for us Christians that isn’t strictly true, as we have Advent first, and the church is already in the countdown to Advent, which is why our readings today are about the future.

Isaiah is optimistic. He is looking far, far ahead to a time when people will routinely live to be well over a hundred, when there will be no more famine, no more war, no more weeping and wailing. People will not have to slave for others, but will work for themselves and live happy and contented lives, with no illness or misfortune.

Well, I don’t know what Isaiah was on when he wrote that, but his vision is still very far from being fulfilled, in these days when so many people are reliant on food banks, trafficking and slavery are a thing, racism is prevalent, the future is so wildly uncertain. It would be lovely if we were anywhere remotely close to what Isaiah saw, but, sadly we aren’t.

We’re much closer to what Jesus said about the future. He was with his friends in the Temple, which was still a fairly new building then, and they were marvelling at the beauty of it, rather as we might go into a cathedral and marvel at its beauty, too. And, let’s face it, our cathedrals and churches are, in many cases, very beautiful.

But Jesus said that the Temple would be pulled down, and not one stone left standing – and, indeed, by the time Luke was writing all this down, this had actually happened. Jerusalem had been overthrown and destroyed in AD 70 by the Romans, who were clamping down on the rebels who had tried to establish a provisional government there. I am reminded of Hungary in 1956 or Czechoslovakia, as it then was, in 1968, when the Soviet Union allowed rebellion for a short time but then clamped down. The Romans came with their equivalent of tanks, and overthrew the city, and destroyed it.

The Temple has never been rebuilt. For us Christians, it didn’t need to be, because Jesus had been the one, sufficient sacrifice, so Temple sacrifices were now obsolete. But for the Jews, of course, it was and has been a cause of immense sadness, especially as the site is now a famous Mosque.

But Jesus makes it clear that anything built by humans is only temporary in the grand scheme of things. And that life is going to be anything but peaceful, most of the time. There will be wars and earthquakes and famines and plagues – are we reading the Bible, or the newspaper? Even then, says Jesus, it’s not going to be the end.

It is futile to speculate, to try to decipher a timeline of events. Every generation, I think, has looked at these words of Jesus and reckoned it applied to them. And it probably has! It applies to us, of course – but it also applied to our parents and grandparents who lived through the cataclysms of the last century. It applied to those who lived through the Great Plague of the 17^th century and the Great Fire of London in 1666. It applied to those who lived through the various religious persecution of Tudor times – perhaps especially to them. Jesus said “They will seize you and persecute you. They will hand you over to synagogues and put you in prison, and you will be brought before kings and governors, and all on account of my name. And so you will bear testimony to me.” I am sure that both the Protestant martyrs in Queen Mary’s day and the Catholic ones murdered by the other Tudor monarchs – well, not actually by them, but you know what I mean – I’m sure they reckoned that these words were addressed to them.

And there was the Black Death, the Hundred Years’ War, and, of course, the various major earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, hurricanes and other natural disasters that have happened over the years.

We’ve just been to Pompeii, last month, and visited the town that was destroyed by an eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD. It was fascinating to see how they lived – you had the big houses, but most of them had let out their front rooms to shops. You could tell which were the shops, because they had had sliding doors, and you could see where they had been. And some of the shops had sold hot food – the local equivalent of McDonald’s or Burger King. There was a bakery, and we have seen a loaf of bread – burnt to carbon, of course – in an exhibition in Oxford about the food in Pompeii and contemporary Roman Britain. The exhibition is fascinating – do go, if you’re ever near Oxford, it’s on until 20 January. Anyway, the point is, they had things just like us, even muffin tins! They were people just like us, living lives similar to ours, enjoying the same kind of things we do – and their world came very abruptly to a very decisive end.

I think this is partly what Jesus was talking about. The end can come incredibly quickly and unexpectedly. Of course, many people get “notice to quit”, and know full well that they are going to die very soon. Others, however – well, it’s the road accident, the stroke, the heart attack, and “this night your soul will be required of you”, as Jesus said in the story he told about the rich farmer, who concentrated so much on gaining great harvests and making loads of money that he forgot about the things that really do last.

That, after all, is what is important. Jesus said that we will face persecution – well, we in the West don’t, just now, but that’s not true of all the world. Although some churches in the USA say they’re being persecuted, when they really aren’t…. they aren’t likely to get put in prison, or worse, for meeting to worship, or for telling other people about their faith and about Jesus. That, sadly, is not true in some parts of the world today. And who knows what it will be like here, in the future? We don’t know. We don’t know the future, we don’t even know our personal futures. Yes, we expect we’ll be leaving here and enjoying a good Sunday lunch, or perhaps we’re planning on going out to brunch, as lots of people do on a Sunday. We expect that tomorrow morning we’ll be heading off to work or college or school, or whatever we usually do on a Monday morning.

But things can change so quickly. A month’s worth of rain has recently fallen in the Midlands, causing rivers to burst their banks and homes to be flooded. In Australia, people’s homes, and, indeed, their lives are being menaced by bush fires – I have a friend who has spent the past few days on high alert, expecting that she and her family may have to evacuate their home any minute. Thus far, fortunately, that hasn’t happened, but….

The people in Pompeii and the neighbouring town of Herculaneum were enjoying their lives right up until the last few minutes, when the volcanic ash started to fall on them.

It is possible – not very probable, but possible – that we are in “the end times” and Jesus will return in glory, as we say we believe he will, to judge the living and the dead. But it’s far more probable that some natural or human-made disaster will intervene first. But whichever it is, we are expected to carry on with our lives as if they were going to go on forever. I didn’t choose to have the reading from the Epistle today, but it’s the one where Paul reminds the people of Thessalonia that they do have to work, even if they are expecting Jesus to come back at any minute. They still need to eat, and nobody is going to feed them! They must go and earn their livings, and expect Jesus to find them getting on with things.

Jesus is pessimistic about the future, and with hindsight we can see that he was right to be. Life is pretty good most of the time, except when it isn’t. And we don’t know when it will suddenly switch from being great to being ghastly. All we can do is trust Jesus, and trust that we will be shown what to say and what to do in the face of catastrophe.

And we mustn’t lose sight of Isaiah’s vision, either. One of thing things I specially noticed was that God is going to be there and speaking with us - “Before they call, I will answer, and while they are yet speaking, I will hear.” That contrasts with the dire warnings in the Old Testament about how the heavens will be shut up, and people will long and long to hear from God but it simply won’t happen.

I don’t know whether Isaiah’s vision can come true this side of heaven. It probably can’t. Jesus’ vision of the future seems really rather more probable. But does it have to be inevitable? I don’t know whether we can do very much to change things, to bring about the peaceable Kingdom that Isaiah foresaw, rather than the disastrous world that Jesus did. But shouldn’t we be trying? Shouldn’t we be doing what we can in the cause of peace and justice? In the cause of trying not to destroy our planet? In the cause of balancing humanity’s needs with those of the natural world? Maybe, just maybe, if enough of us did, it would tip the balance. Amen.

... And with all the company of Heaven

Today, 29 September, is the feast of St Michael and All Angels. Michaelmas, they used to call it, a term which still survives in Michaelmas daisies, which are in bloom at this time of year. It is a Quarter Day, when, back in the day, rents had to be paid, and rural employment contracts ran from one Michaelmas to the next, so you would have Michaelmas fairs in various towns which were hiring fairs – people whose jobs hadn’t been renewed, for whatever reason, would stand in lines with some token showing what their trade was – a dairyman, for instance, would probably have a piece of straw – so farmers in need of labourers could come and hire them.

You haven’t to pick blackberries after today, either – the old superstition is that the devil comes and pees on them or spits on them or something, and they are no longer worth eating. Basically, it is the end of summer and the start of autumn.

But who were St Michael and all the angels? Do angels even matter? If so, why do they matter to us? And what, if anything, does this festival mean to us today?

What are angels, anyway? They appear to be a different kind of creation, not human at all. I know we talk casually about someone “growing their wings” when they die, particularly of children, but in fact that’s probably not what happens. Our children will, I’m sure, be with God in heaven in some way, but probably not as angels!

There seem to be several different kinds of angels – Michael is described as an archangel, but he is the only one. Although tradition says Raphael, Gabriel and Uriel are also archangels, the Bible doesn’t describe them as such. But there are also seraphim – they are the ones with six wings that Isaiah saw, you may remember: two wings to cover their heads, two to cover their feet, or more probably their private parts, since “feet” is often a euphemism for that in the Bible, and two to fly with. And there are cherubim – not the chubby little baby angels of popular culture, which are more properly called putti, but very grand beings indeed. Two of them were stationed outside the Garden of Eden, with a flaming sword, to stop Adam and Eve going back in there after the Fall. And there were golden cherubim represented on the Ark of the Covenant, and images of them woven into the curtains of the Ark of the Covenant. And God, apparently, spoke to Moses from between the cherubim. And when the Temple was built, the Ark was placed between two great statues of cherubim, wooden statues overlaid with gold.

It’s amazing how often angels of various kinds do appear in the Bible. I did an on-line search, and they seem to be mentioned in practically every book! There are only two mentions of an Archangel, in one instance explicitly Michael, but pages and pages of angels, cherubim and seraphim. So they obviously do matter.

But what do they do? What’s the point of them? Certainly Michael is depicted as a warrior prince, fighting and defeating the evil one. And there is a book in the Apocrypha called the book of Tobit – if you have access to an Apocrypha, either a dead-tree version or on-line, have a read of it sometime. It’s actually a good story that hangs together. Tobit is a pious old man who goes blind when a bird poos on his eyes when he is asleep in the sun; his wife Anna is a bit of a nag; Sarah is possessed by a demon who kills any man she marries before he’s crossed the bedroom door – and she’s been married seven times so far, but is still a virgin. Tobit sends his son Tobias to collect some money he left with a relative some years earlier, and God sends the angel Raphael to accompany Tobias, posing as his cousin Azariah. Raphael helps Tobias defeat the demon and marry Sarah, and then goes and gets the money for him while Tobias and Sarah are on their honeymoon, and then when they get back he heals Tobit’s sight. And then he reveals who he is and departs, reminding them always to praise God.

Mostly, though, angels seem to be God’s messengers. In the Old Testament they tell Abram and Sarai that they are to have a child, much to their amusement; an angel fights with Jacob at Bethel; angels go before the Children of Israel to defeat their enemies and so on and so forth. Apparently there are 290 references to angels in the Bible, not counting cherubim and seraphim. Of these, 108 references are in the Old Testament and/or the Apocrypha, and 182 in the New Testament. Obviously we know about the role of the angels in the Nativity story – how the angel appears first to Zechariah in the Temple to announce John’s birth, then to Mary to tell her she will bear the Messiah, if she is willing, then to Joseph to tell him to marry Mary anyway, and the various disclosures to the magi and the shepherds and so on. And, of course, angels minister to Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, and in some versions of the Resurrection it is an angel who tells the women that Jesus has risen.

And there is that wonderful story in Acts where Peter is in prison and an angel comes and sets him free, and he thinks he’s dreaming, and when he realises he isn’t, he goes to the safe house where they are all praying for him, and the maid who answers the door is so startled that she leaves him standing there, and they have trouble believing that it’s really him! An angel appears to Cornelius in a vision, and to Philip to take him to the Ethiopian treasury official who wanted to know about Jesus.

Angels also seem to have guard duty – we are told that when the Lord returns, he will come “with his angels”, like an escort, or guard of honour. And they also fight – Jesus comments on the Cross that he could ask the Father who would send twelve legions of angels to rescue him, if necessary, but he knows that’s not part of the plan.

And so it goes on. I honestly thought, when I started to think about this sermon, that there weren’t many references to angels in the Bible, and it was mostly extra-biblical tradition, but I was wrong! Of course, there is a lot of tradition around angels. One comes, I think, from the passage where Jesus says about children: “‘See that you do not despise one of these little ones. For I tell you that their angels in heaven always see the face of my Father in heaven.” I think it’s that passage that has given rise to the idea of guardian angels, one per person, but I’m not sure whether that is actually what happens.

But why does it matter? Are angels important to us? Why should we bother with St Michael and his angels?

I think, by and large, angels are one of the things we don’t necessarily think about most of the time. They are not, for most of us, something that impinges on our daily walk with God, on our daily journey with Christ. But they are, nevertheless, there in the background. We are told that they rejoice when a sinner repents, when someone says “Yes” to Jesus, perhaps for the first time, perhaps for the hundredth. The angels rejoice. They rejoice when you, or when I, consciously decide, yet again, to be God’s person, to walk in God’s way. They rejoice even more when someone who had never made that decision makes it for the first time.

The writer of the letter to the Hebrews reminds us not to “forget to show hospitality to strangers, for by so doing some people have shown hospitality to angels without knowing it.” Although angels, apparently, don’t actually eat or drink, but they can make it look as though they are doing so.

Angels lead us in our struggle against the powers of darkness. You remember how St Paul tells us to put on the whole armour of God? “Our struggle,” he reminds us, “is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.” Angels are the ones in the front line of the battle, and bear the brunt of the struggle.

We are not to worship angels. It’s made pretty clear that they, too, are created beings who worship their Creator. In fact, we sometimes invoke their aid in our hymns, as in some of the ones I’ve chosen for today. Angels can, perhaps, help us in our worship. And, if you remember, in the great prayer of thanksgiving, in our Communion service, we say “Therefore, with angels and archangels, and all the company of heaven, we proclaim your great and glorious name, forever praising you, and saying,” and go on into “Holy, holy, holy.”

And on that note, let’s do just that, and sing together….

Pride and Prejudice

Our Old Testament reading this morning came from a book you may never have heard of – the book of Sirach, also known as Ecclesiasticus, the book of the Church. It didn’t make the cut into the Protestant Old Testament, although Catholics see it as canonical, but for us it is part of that collection of books we call the Apocrypha, which we are told to study “for example of life and instruction of manners; but yet not apply them to establish any doctrine.” But once in awhile the Lectionary throws up a reading from the Apocrypha as an alternative, and I think, particularly where it resonates with the Gospel reading, it’s no bad thing to have a look at it.

Anyway, this book was written, or possibly compiled, by someone known as Joshua Ben Sirach, who was a Jewish scribe who had lived in Jerusalem, and who may have been living in Alexandria when he compiled the work between about 180-175 BCE. We know who wrote it because, uniquely among the Old Testament and Apocryphal writers, he signs his work. And there is a prologue to the Greek version, written by his grandson in 130 BCE who translated it from the original Hebrew! There are far more Greek manuscripts of it available than there are Hebrew ones, although a large portion of the Hebrew version was found among the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Anyway, that’s all very interesting, but what was he about? Basically, it was a collection of ethical teachings, rather like the book of Proverbs. I must admit I’ve not read all the book, although I have skimmed the first few chapters, and he writes a great deal about Wisdom, pretty much equating her with God Himself, as the apocryphal writers are apt to do. And a great deal of it, as in the passage we just heard read, is to do with pride.

Pride, we are told, begins when a person abandons the Lord. Pride begins when a person abandons the Lord. Pride, says ben Sirach, is like a fountain pouring out sin, and whoever persists in it will be full of wickedness. A fountain pouring out sin. Strong stuff, no?

The thing is, though, he’s right. Pride is the worst of sins – if sin can be said to have any “worst”, because it is the one that totally turns us away from God. C S Lewis had a lot to say about it in his book, Mere Christianity, and I propose to quote from it, because he says it better than I could: “According to Christian teachers, the essential vice, the utmost evil, is Pride.  Unchastity, anger, greed, drunkenness, and all that, are mere fleabites in comparison: it was through Pride that the devil became the devil: Pride leads to every other vice: it is the complete anti-God state of mind.”

Lewis goes on in this vein for some time, saying that Pride is essentially competitive – I’m not too sure he’s right there – and then we come to the heart of it:

“But pride always means enmity – it is enmity. And not only enmity between human beings, but enmity to God.

“In God”, says Lewis, “you come up against something which is in every respect immeasurably superior to yourself. Unless you know God as that – and, therefore, know yourself as nothing in comparison – you do not know God at all. As long as you are proud you cannot know God. A proud man is always looking down on things and people: and, of course, as long as you are looking down, you cannot see something that is above you.”

Of course, Lewis points out, it’s not pride to be pleased when someone pays you a sincere compliment – as long, that is, as the compliment doesn’t lead you to believe you’re cleverer or prettier or a finer person! As long as you delight in the praise, and don’t start thinking you must be a grand person to have merited it. And he also points out that it’s fine to be proud of your school or your father or your children as long as you don’t start thinking you must be a grand person to have been to such a school, or had such parents or children. The “Aren’t I clever, knowing a famous person” syndrome is alive and well today!

And obviously Pride, as in the carnival of that name, is fine, too – again, as long as you don’t think yourself rather superior for being part of it, or, indeed, rather broad-minded for enjoying it even if you aren’t gay!

Jesus, of course, knows all about it. In our Gospel reading, we saw him and his disciples – dare I say being amused by the people who obviously thought they deserved the best place at table, and being asked to move down…. As Jesus said, it makes far more sense to go down to the bottom, less honoured, places at the table and be asked to move up than to try to grab a place at the high table and be told in no uncertain terms you don’t belong there! Although I can see, as I’m sure you can, a danger lurking there whereby you rather ostentatiously go to the lowest place and look, expectantly, for the host coming to move you up a bit! And, indeed, it’s all too easy to see how, if you were to give a dinner for those who couldn’t return it, you could feel rather good about yourself in the wrong way: “What a good person I am to help out at Robes”…..

As I said, Jesus knew all about it. Look at the story he told of the Pharisee and the tax-collector who went to pray at the same time, and the Pharisee was all, “Oh God, I thank you I am not like this tax collector; I tithe and I fast and I’m generally a Most Superior Person, thank you very much.” But Jesus said it was the tax collector, who knew himself to be a sinner, who went away right with God on that occasion.

I heard a story once of a Sunday school teacher who was discussing this parable with her class, and at the end, she said “Now, let us thank God that we are not like this Pharisee”. Hmm – all well and good, until the moment I found myself thanking God that I was not like that Sunday School teacher!

No, pride and God are basically incompatible. Or rather the wrong sort of pride is. It can be very insidious – we go, imperceptibly, from being delighted that we have become God’s person, that we have been cleansed, forgiven and made whole, we go from that into thinking that we must be a pretty good person, really, to have allowed God into our lives.

Or, worse, we take this sort of thing to heart and, knowing that we are apt to be a bit proud on occasions, we think we must be truly terrible people, and quite beyond redemption. Which is another sort of pride, isn’t it – pride in one’s own sinfulness!

You know, this sermon feels very thou-shalt-nottish, which is not at all where I want to leave it. Pride is a very great sin, it is the sin that brings us into total opposition to God. Ben Sirach warns us, that whoever persists in pride will be full of wickedness. That is why, he tells us, the Lord brought terrible punishments on some people and completely destroyed them. And not only people, he says, but nations and empires, too. And if I were to leave it there, we would all be in a very sad case.

But there is hope. After all, we aren’t supposed to try to pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps. We aren’t supposed to strain and strive and continually fail and hate ourselves for so doing. No, my friends, not that. Never that.

If we try to overcome our faults in our own strength, we will fail. And we will become proud of ourselves for trying – I try far harder than he does, of course. I’m sure God will reward me better than him.

No, that’s not the answer. And continuing in our pride isn’t the answer, either. Let’s face it, we’re all guilty of feeling proud, some of the time. But if we continue, we will cut ourselves off from God, and perhaps end up worshipping what we think is God, but is in fact a god, made in our own image, who thinks we’re really rather brilliant!

God knows what we’re like. God knows our struggles, our failures, our weaknesses, our tendency to think we’re rather good for allowing Him to heal us…. And God goes on loving us and forgiving us and healing us. No matter how often we take our eyes off him to look at ourselves, or to look down on our neighbours, as soon as ever we realise what we’re doing, as soon as ever we turn back to God with an, “Oh, sorry!” or “Oops!” then God is there, forgiving us, healing us, helping us to grow into the person we were designed to be. “The Creator,” says ben Sirach, “never intended for human beings to be arrogant and violent.” And that being so, the Creator will help us become humble and peacable folk, the peacemakers who Jesus told us were to be given the kingdom of Heaven. Amen.