Reassurance

Today's first reading in the New International Version reads, in part:

“He will stand and shepherd his flock
    in the strength of the Lord,
    in the majesty of the name of the Lord his God.
And they will live securely, for then his greatness
    will reach to the ends of the earth.
And he will be our peace
    when the Assyrians invade our land”

The Good News version phrases it slightly differently,
and the various translations seem almost equally divided as to whether there is a full stop after “He will be our peace,”
and the next sentence starting “When the Assyrians invade our land”,
or the phrasing that says that when the Assyrians invade our land,
He will be our peace.
Which is more true to the original Hebrew I don’t know;
I do know that I prefer the second version!

And I find that prophecy strangely comforting in these dark days!

“He will stand and shepherd his flock in the strength of the Lord,
in the majesty of the name of the Lord his God.”
“And he will be our peace when the Assyrians invade our land.”

However, as we all know, a text without a context is a pretext, so rather than just taking the words as a lovely Christmas prophecy –
which of course, on one level, they are –
let's look a bit deeper and find out a bit more about Micah,
and what he was talking about.

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

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

During those 200 years, Israel and Judah had moved from a largely agricultural society to one governed by a monarchy and with a Temple in Jerusalem.
The distinction between the “Haves” and the “Have nots” had grown, as it does still today.
In the tenth century, the “haves” may well have been richer than the “have nots”, and have had more luxuries, but their homes were basically the same, their lifestyles similar.
And then it changed.
But Micah tells the powerful ones –
the judges, the priests, the rulers –
that God doesn't prop up any so-called progress that is built on the backs of other people.
For God, justice and equality matter far more than progress or growth.
But God's people disagree, and they try to stop Micah, and other prophets, telling them God's truth;
they only want to hear comforting, agreeable prophecies about how their crops will flourish and there will be plenty of wine!

But when Jerusalem has been destroyed,
when her people have been carried off into exile,
then a day will come when a new leader will be born to them,
a leader who will “stand and shepherd his flock in the days of the Lord”,
and “who will be our peace when the Assyrians invade our land.”

I expect you realise that these prophecies were often dual-purpose;
they did and do refer to the coming of Christ, of course,
but they also often referred to a local event, a local birth.
We don't know who Micah was originally referring to,
who would be born in Bethlehem,
but we do know that, for us, these prophecies refer to Jesus.

“He will be our peace when the Assyrians invade our land.”
These days we worry rather more about Syrians than about Assyrians –
whether we are concerned about the number of refugees seeking asylum here, or whether we are more concerned, as we should be, about how relatively few our government is allowing in.
Some people, I know, worry that we shouldn't allow them in in case they turn out to be terrorists,
but those are the tiniest of tiny minorities among those fleeing Syria and Afghanistan,
and, indeed, most are fleeing just such terrorists at home.
I mean, how desperate do you have to be to try to cross the Channel in a leaky rubber dinghy, and then not be allowed to land?
Which is actually illegal on the part of our government –
if people genuinely want to seek asylum,
they should be allowed to land and apply through the appropriate channels.

We call them “migrants”, lumping them all under one umbrella.
The term is supposed to be neutral, less laden with emotional baggage than “refugee” or “asylum seeker”.
It isn't, of course, because people then talk about “illegal immigrants” or “economic migrants”.
And it's noticeable that if we Brits go to live abroad we aren't called migrants –
I did the whole economic migrant thing back in the 1970s,
when I went to work in Paris for some years after leaving school,
but nobody called me a “migrant”, economic or otherwise –
I was an expatriate!
And people talked about cultural exchange, and our young people learning about different lifestyles, and so on, and it was all considered a Good Thing.

And, of course, many of your families,
and perhaps some of you are the first generation who did so,
many of you came over here to work and contribute to our society and learn about our way of life –
and have enriched this country beyond all measure!
Maybe you can remember the bewilderment of arriving here,
not too sure of your welcome,
not too sure what life in this cold and rainy land was going to be like.

Even if someone does make it across the Channel,
their problems aren't yet over.
They aren't allowed to work while their claim for asylum is being processed, and although they do get an allowance, it really isn't very much.
Not really enough to live on, and certainly not enough for a comfortable lifestyle.
And if they are found not to be in imminent danger of death back home, they are thrown out again, and if that's on their records they can't really go and try their luck somewhere else in Europe.

I don't know what the answer long-term is.
The politicians will have to work that one out between them.
But we need to pray for all migrants, and do what we can to help.
That may be only donating a few pounds to the Unicef appeals that we see daily on our televisions,
or we may be called to do something more “hands-on”.
Whatever, though, we mustn't think of it as someone else's problem!

Because Jesus will be our peace, so Micah tells us.
If we believe Matthew's account, he was himself a refugee for awhile,
when they fled to Egypt to avoid Herod's troops.
As I understand it, God won't necessarily keep the bad times from us,
or protect us from what lies ahead,
but Jesus will be there with us in the midst of it all.
And I, personally, find that reassuring.

And there is, of course, the other “Assyrian” that invaded our world some twenty months ago now and turned all of our lives upside-down.
I’m speaking, of course, of the Covid-19 virus.
All of us have been affected; all of our lives have been touched in one way or another.
Even if we didn’t get ill, we have had to adapt to wearing masks
and using hand sanitiser frequently,
to getting vaccinated and boostered,
to testing regularly,
and, until July, we had to get used to unwarrantable intrusions into our personal freedoms.
I mean, did you ever think it would one day be illegal to sleep or eat anywhere other than in your own home?
I never did!

But it came, and it happened.
And we learnt that God was, and is, still with us in the pandemic.
When we couldn’t attend public worship, we discovered new and creative ways of being church together.
And that legacy lives on as many churches livestream at least some of their services –
Brixton Hill does every week,
and my daughter’s church is to livestream their carol service this evening;
I hope to watch at least part of it as my grandson is reading one of the lessons.
God has been with us in this pandemic,
no matter what it has felt like at times,
and God will still be with us for the rest of it, and when it is over.
All may not be totally well, but God will be with us.

Our Gospel reading, too, told of someone who badly needed reassurance.
Mary has just met the angel and been told that, if she will, she is the one who will bear God's son, and she has said “Yes”.
But it's early days yet –
there aren't any physical signs that she is pregnant,
she has never slept with a man, what is it all about?
But one thing the angel had told her, that she hadn't already known, was that her cousin Elisabeth, surely far too old to be having babies, was six months gone.
So Mary goes off to see Elisabeth –
incidentally this, for me, is one of the pointers that she was living in the Jerusalem area at the time,
whether at Bethlehem or Jerusalem itself –
tradition has it that she was ­one of the temple servants –
because she would never have been able to travel all that way between Nazareth and Jerusalem on her own.

Anyway, she arrives at Elisabeth's front door,
and there is Elisabeth with a large bump,
and Elisabeth, filled with the Holy Spirit, confirms all that the angel had said.
And Mary bubbles over into love and joy and praise,
and even if the words of the Magnificat are what St Luke thought she ought to have said –
rather like Henry the Fifth's speech at Agincourt being what Shakespeare thought he ought to have said, rather than what he actually did say –
even if they are not authentic, they are probably very close to reality!
We sung a metrical version of her song just a few minutes ago.
And it reminds us that God is turning accepted values upside-down by having His Son born to a virgin mother in a small town in an occupied land.

“Tell out, my soul, the greatness of his might!
Powers and dominions lay their glory by.
Proud hearts and stubborn wills are put to flight,
the hungry fed, the humble lifted high.”

In the culture of the day –
as in ours –
it was thought that prosperity was a sign of God's blessing, and poverty rather the reverse.
But no, that was not what Jesus was, or is, all about.
Instead, he himself was born to an ordinary family that, within a couple of years, was fleeing for its life into exile,
and when they did dare go home, they didn't dare go back so near Jerusalem, but moved up to the provinces.

Mary was so brave, saying “Yes” to God.
I don't know how much she understood, but of course Joseph could –
and seriously considered doing so –
have refused to marry her, and then where would she have been?
But the angel reassured Joseph, and Elisabeth reassured Mary.
All was not totally well, but God was with them.

And that's the message to take into this Christmas, isn't it?
With all the uncertainty about Covid, and the Omicron variant,
all the shenanigans in Downing Street leaving you wondering what the politicians really think,
all the worries about our loved ones,
especially those who haven’t had their booster yet.
All may not be totally well, but God is with us.
And God's son, Jesus, will be our peace when the Assyrians invade our land.
Amen.

Rejoice, but....

I forgot to start recording until after I'd read the verses from Zephaniah!  Podcast Garden has become so unreliable I am experimenting with uploading the audio from Google Drive.  Bear with me if it doesn't work!

"Rejoice in the Lord always;" says St Paul, "Again I will say, Rejoice."

And Zephaniah knew something about rejoicing, too.
It was our first reading:

"Sing aloud, O daughter Zion;
shout, O Israel!
Rejoice and exult with all your heart,
O daughter Jerusalem!"

I don't think I know very much about Zephaniah, do you?
He's not one of the prophets we usually read.
Apparently, though, nobody knows anything more about him than what he writes about himself.
He was a great-great-grandson of a king called Hezekiah –
and Hezekiah was the last so-called “good” king of Judah for several generations.
But when Zephaniah was prophesying and preaching,
his cousin Josiah was on the throne, and Josiah was another good king.

This is one of my favourite stories in the Bible, actually!
You see, Josiah's father Amon and his grandfather Manasseh had preferred to worship Baal, rather than God.
This is not too surprising, actually, because the next-door kingdom, Israel, had been taken over by Assyria,
and although Judah was nominally free,
in practice it was a vassal of the Assyrians,
so it made sense to worship the same gods that the Assyrians did.

What's more, those gods were a lot easier to worship than the Jewish God was.
They didn't ask you to behave in special ways.
You could influence them.
If you said the right words and did the right actions at the right time, they would make the harvest happen, that sort of thing.

And they didn't really mind who else you worshipped, or how you behaved, or what your thought.
It was much easier to worship them.

Josiah, however, probably prompted by his cousin Zephaniah,
decided that he was going to worship the Jewish God.
And in 621 BC, when Josiah was about 26, the King of Assyria died, and was succeeded by a much weaker person who didn't mind much about what the people of Judah did.
Josiah had already cleared out altars to other gods from the Temple, but apart from that, he hadn't dared do much more.
Now, however, he reckoned he could risk cleaning it up a bit.

So he sent his secretary, a man called Shaphan ben-Azalia, to go and ask the High Priest how much money they'd had in the collection lately, and to tell him to give it to the builders to repair the place and make it look smart again.

You are going through a lot more than just renovations, at Lambeth Mission, but I am sure you can empathise a bit with the High Priest here!

The High Priest was a man called Hilkiah.
While he was looking in the storeroom for the money,
he found a book about God's law.
And he decided to show it to the king.
We don't know whether Hilkiah had known the book was there and decided that now would be a good moment to show it to Josiah,
or whether it was a shock to him, too.

Scholars think that this book was at least part, if not all, of what we now know as the book of Deuteronomy.
They reckon it was written down during the reign of Josiah's grandfather and hidden away safely.
Up until then the priests had basically kept their knowledge of God's law in their heads, and it hadn't really been written down,
but this was a time of both persecution and indifference, and they were afraid that the time might come when there was no priest in the Temple,
and the people's knowledge of God might be lost.

As it was, a great deal had been lost, and the result of the discovery of the book was a great religious reform.

And it's in this context, scholars think, that Zephaniah was preaching.
It's actually thought that his book may not have been written down until a couple of hundred years later, because of the style of the writing and so on, but it seems to be based on contemporary happenings.
So it was probably written before about 622 BC,
and is definitely set in Jerusalem.

Most of the book is rather doom and gloomy.
Again, remember that this is being written in a time when most people aren't bothering to worship God,
and even those who want to aren't really sure how God is different from the neighbouring gods.
So there's a lot of prophecy about gloom and destruction and the usual sort of stuff you expect to read in the minor prophets, but after two and a half chapters of that, we suddenly get this glorious piece that formed our reading today.

The LORD, your God, is in your midst,
a warrior who gives victory;
he will rejoice over you with gladness,
he will renew you in his love;
he will exult over you with loud singing
as on a day of festival.

So, you see, it's not just we who rejoice, but God rejoices, too.
That's a great comfort, I think.
We are called to rejoice in God –
there are, apparently, over 800 verses telling us to rejoice and be glad,
so I rather think God means it.
And with God, if he wants us to do something, he enables us to do it.
We sometimes find it very difficult to rejoice, to be joyful.
But joy is a fruit of the Holy Spirit –
it's not something we have to manufacture for ourselves.
Joy is a fruit of the Holy Spirit.
And this means that it isn't something we have to find within ourselves.
It is something that grows within us as we go on with God and as we allow God the Holy Spirit to fill us more and more.
Joy grows, just as love, peace, patience, gentleness, goodness, kindness and self-control do.
We become more and more the people we were created to be, more and more the people God knows we can be.

That doesn't mean we'll never be unhappy, far from it.
It doesn’t mean we will never grieve.
It doesn’t mean we’ll never suffer from depression or other mental illnesses.
It doesn’t mean we’ll always be in perfect mental or physical health.
But we know, as St Paul also tells us, that God works all things together for good for those that love him.
Even the bad things, even the dreadful things that break God's heart even more than they break ours.
Even those.

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

Christmas can be a very difficult time of year for many of us.
People who are alone, people who are ill, people who have been bereaved. Many rocky marriages finally come adrift at Christmas.
Last year was particularly difficult, when plans, however tentative, had to be cancelled at the last moment,
and I expect many people are jittery in case the same thing happens this year, although it seems less likely.
But we are still commanded to rejoice!
Not because of the tragedies, no way.
But in spite of them.

"Do not worry about anything,
but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving
let your requests be made known to God.
And the peace of God,
which surpasses all understanding,
will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus."

For John the Baptist, preparing for the coming of the Messiah meant, among other things, turning away from the old, wasteful ways and starting again. Sharing our surplus with those who haven't enough.
Tax-gatherers and soldiers are told to be satisfied with their wages, and not to extort extra from people who can ill-afford it.

John got very frustrated when people just wanted to hear him preach and laugh at him, rather than allowing their lives to be turned around.
There hadn't been a proper Old Testament-type prophet for a very long time, and naturally people flocked to hear him,
but they didn't want to deal with what he was actually saying.
But enough people did hear him to begin to make a difference in the world.
And they were ready when Jesus came.

We are going to be celebrating the coming of Jesus, of course we are.
If we are allowed, we may attend parties or family celebrations.
We're probably also going to eat and drink more than usual,
and give one another presents, and watch appallingly ghastly television,
and that can be quite fun, too, for a couple of days.

So we will rejoice, but we will be sensitive to those for whom it's almost impossible to rejoice at this time of year.
We will remember that the Israelites had to go through terrible times,
and their nation was all but destroyed. Paul himself suffered dreadful things – scourgings, imprisonment, shipwrecks, beatings....

But we can still remember, as we await the coming of the King, that:
"he will rejoice over you with gladness,
he will renew you in his love;
he will exult over you with loud singing."

"And the peace of God,
which surpasses all understanding,
will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus."

Amen.

Lazarus and the Saints

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Our Gospel reading today concerns the raising of Lazarus.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Change Happens

 An updated version of this sermon, preached in 2015.


Today's readings are all about change.
Things changed for Job, and things changed for Bartimaeus.

So, then Job.
It's a funny old story, isn't it?
Do you know, nobody knows anything about it –
what you see is totally what you get!
Nobody knows who it was written, or when, or why, or whether it is true history or a fictional story –
most probably the latter!
Apparently, The Book of Job is incredibly ancient, or parts of it are.
And so it makes it very difficult for us to understand.
We do realise, of course, that it was one of the earliest attempts someone made to rationalise why bad things happen to good people,
but it still seems odd to us.

Just to remind you, the story first of all establishes Job as really rich, and then as a really holy person –
whenever his children have parties, which they seem to have done pretty frequently, he offers sacrifices to God just in case the parties were orgies!
And so on.
Then God says to Satan, hey, look at old Job, isn't he a super servant of mine, and Satan says, rather crossly, yeah, well, it's all right for him –
just look how you've blessed him.
Anybody would be a super servant like that.
You take all those blessings away from him, and see if he still serves you!
And that, of course, is just exactly what happens.
The children are all killed,
the crops are all destroyed,
the flocks and herds perish.
And Job still remains faithful to God:
“Naked I came from my mother's womb, and naked shall I return there;
the Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away;
blessed be the name of the Lord.”

So then Satan says, well, all right, Job is still worshipping you,
but he still has his health, doesn't he?
I bet he would sing a very different tune if you let me take his health away!
So God says, well, okay, only you mustn't kill him.
And Job gets a plague of boils, which must have been really nasty –
painful, uncomfortable, itchy and making him feel rotten in himself as well.
Poor sod.
No wonder he ends up sitting on a dung-heap, scratching himself with a piece of broken china!

And his wife, who must have suffered just as much as Job, only of course women weren't really people in those days, she says “Curse God, and die!”
In other words, what do you have left to live for?
But Job refuses, although he does, with some justification, curse the day on which he was born.

Then you know the rest of the story, of course.
How the three "friends" come and try to persuade him to admit that he deserves all that had come upon him –
we've all had friends like that who try to make our various sufferings be our fault, and who try to poultice them with pious platitudes.
Gaslighting, don’t they call it?
And Job insists that he is not at fault, and demands some answers from God!
Which, in the end, he gets.
But not totally satisfactory to our ears, although they really are the most glorious poetry.
Here's just a tiny bit:

“Do you give the horse its might?
Do you clothe its neck with mane?
Do you make it leap like the locust?
Its majestic snorting is terrible.
It paws violently, exults mightily;
it goes out to meet the weapons.
It laughs at fear, and is not dismayed;
it does not turn back from the sword.
Upon it rattle the quiver, the flashing spear, and the javelin.
With fierceness and rage it swallows the ground;
it cannot stand still at the sound of the trumpet.
When the trumpet sounds, it says "Aha!"
From a distance it smells the battle, the thunder of the captains, and the shouting.
Is it by your wisdom that the hawk soars,
and spreads its wings towards the south?
Is it at your command that the eagle mounts up and makes its nest on high?
It lives on the rock and makes its home in the fastness of the rocky crag.
From there it spies the prey;
its eyes see it from far away.
Its young ones suck up blood;
and where the slain are, there it is.”
Wonderful stuff, and it goes on for about three chapters, talking of the natural world and its wonders, and how God is the author of them all.

If you ever want to rejoice in creation, read Job chapters 38, 39 and 40.
My father asked me to read chapter 39 at his funeral, which I did, in the Authorised Version that he preferred – I was comforted, then, by the unicorns: “Will the unicorn be willing to serve thee,
or abide by thy crib?
Canst thou bind the unicorn with his band in the furrow?
or will he harrow the valleys after thee?
Wilt thou trust him, because his strength is great?”
I was very disappointed when I discovered that in more modern versions, they replace “unicorn” with “wild ox” – not the same thing at all!
Anyway at the end, as we heard in our first reading, Job repents "in dust and ashes", we are told, and then his riches are restored to him.
But would even more children and riches really make up for those seven children who were killed?
I doubt it, which is one of the reasons it’s probably a story, rather than actual history.
But the point I want to make this morning is that God intervened in Job's life, and things changed.
At first they changed for the worse, but then they changed for the better.

And the same thing happened to Bartimaeus, as we heard in our Gospel reading.
Jesus touched him, and his life was changed beyond all recognition.
In John's version of the story, we're told a little bit about the consequences of the healing.

For Bartimaeus life changed immediately.
My sister-in-law, who is blind, says that not only would he have been given his sight, but he would have been given the gift of being able to see, otherwise how would he have known what he was looking at?
He wouldn't have known whether what he was looking at was a person or a camel or a tree, would he?
But he was given the gift, so he knew.
And he could stop begging for his living, he realised, and he went and did whatever the local equivalent of signing-on was.
And, of course there were lots of mutterings and whisperings –
Is it him?
Can't be!
Must be someone new in town, who just looks like him!
“Yes, it's me,” explains Bartimaeus, anxious to tell his story.
“Yes, I was blind, and yes, I can see now!”
“So what happens?” ask the neighbours.
“Well, this bloke put some mud on my eyes and told me to go and wash, and when I did, then I could see.
No, I don't know where he is –
I never saw him;
Yes, I'd probably know his voice, but I didn't actually see him!”

And the neighbours, thinking all this a bit odd, drag him before the Pharisees, the religious authorities of the day.
And they don't believe him.
Not possible.
Nobody born blind gets to see, it just doesn't happen.
And if it did, it couldn't happen on the Sabbath.
Not unless the person who did it was a sinner,
because only a sinner would do that on the Sabbath –
it's work, isn't it?
And if the person who did it was a sinner, it can't have happened!
They got themselves in a right old muddle.

Now we, of course, know what Jesus' thoughts about healing on the Sabbath day were –
he is on record elsewhere as pointing out that you'd rescue a distressed donkey, or, indeed, lead it to the horse-trough to get a drink, whatever day of the week it was, so surely healing a human being was a right and proper activity for the Sabbath.

But the Pharisees didn't believe this.
They thought healing was work, and thus not a proper activity for the Sabbath at all.
So they decided it couldn't possibly have happened, and sent for Bartimaeus's parents to say “Now come on, your son wasn't really blind, was he?
What has happened?”

And his parents, equally bewildered, say
“Well yes, he is our son;
yes, he was born blind;
yes, it does appear that he can now see;
no, we don't know what happened;
why don't you ask him?”

And the Bible tells us they were also scared of being expelled from the synagogue, which is why they didn't say anything more.
Actually, they must have had a fearful mixture of emotions, don't you think –
thrilled that their son could suddenly see,
scared of the authorities,
wondering what exactly Jesus had done,
and was it something they ought to have done themselves, and so on.
And, of course, wondering how life was going to be from now on.

Very soon now, their son probably wouldn't need them any more;
now he was like other people, he could, perhaps, earn a proper living and even marry and have a family.
So the authorities go back to Bartimaeus, and he says,
“Well, how would I know if the person who healed me is a sinner or not?
All I know is that I was blind, and now I can see!”
And then they asked him again, well, how did it happen, and he gets fed up with them going on and says
“But I told you!
Didn't you listen?
Or maybe you want to be his disciples, too?”
which was, of course, rather cheeky and he deserved being told off for it, but then again, I expect he was still rather hyper about having been healed.

And he does go on rather and tells them that the man who opened his eyes must be from God, can't possibly not be, and they get even more fed up with him, and sling him out.
And then Jesus meets him again –
of course Bartimaeus, not having seen him before, doesn't actually recognise him –
and reveals himself to him.
And Bartimaeus worships him.

 
Make no mistake, my friends, when God touches our lives, things change.
Sometimes it is our behaviour which changes;
sometimes our attitudes;
sometimes, even, our very faith.
But it's easy to fall out of the habit of allowing God to touch you and change you.
I know I have, many times.
The joy of it is, though, that we can always come back.
We aren't left alone to fend for ourselves –
we would always fail if we were.
We just need to acknowledge to ourselves –
and to God, of course, but God knew, anyway –
that we've wandered away again.

That's a bit simplistic, of course –
there are times when we are quite sure we haven't wandered away, and yet God seems far off.
But I'm not going into that one right now;
nobody really knows why that happens, except God!
After all, Job didn’t know why his life had gone so totally and completely pear-shaped – but God knew!
But for most of us, most of the time,
if we fall out of the habit of allowing God to touch us and heal us and change us,
we simply have to acknowledge that this is what has happened,
and we are back with him again.
It can be scary.
But then, we are always given the strength and the ability to cope with whatever comes.
We don't have to cope alone.
God is there, not only changing us,
but enabling us to cope with that change.
And we are changed and grown, and God gets the glory!
Because it's not just about what happens to us –
although, human as we are, that's the bit we think about most.
It's also about showing God's glory to the world,
as God showed Job, and this has come down to us;
As happened when Bartimaeus was healed;
as may well happen if and when God touches our lives.
Amen.

Shalom!

As I explained in my introduction, today is Peaver, if you have a copy of the Plan, you will have seen that this month is also designated the Season of Creation. The two are very far from mutually exclusive, of course. The word “Shalom” does mean peace, but it’s not just peace in the sense of the absence of war. The easiest way to describe it is to quote an American theologian called Cornelius Plantinga, who writes: “The webbing together of God, humans, and all creation in justice, fulfilment, and delight is what the Hebrew prophets call shalom. We call it peace but it means far more than mere peace of mind or a cease-fire between enemies. In the Bible, shalom means universal flourishing, wholeness and delight – a rich state of affairs in which natural needs are satisfied and natural gifts fruitfully employed, a state of affairs that inspires joyful wonder as its Creator and Saviour opens doors and welcomes the creatures in whom he delights. Shalom, in other words, is the way things ought to be.”

“Shalom, in other words, is the way things ought to be.”

The way things ought to be. Wholeness. Reconciliation, not just within families, within the church, between denominations, between nations, but reconciliation between people, God and nature. Wholeness. And it’s the wholeness of creation, the wholeness of ourselves within it. You know what, when we wish each other God’s peace on Communion Sundays, that’s what we wish each other. We say, rather muttering it, “Peace be with you”, but we are really wishing each other all of God’s wholeness and reconciliation. Even though “Shalom” is a common greeting in Hebrew, it is still what people are, consciously or not, wishing one another.

But we know our world is not whole, however much we wish it were. There is always war somewhere; the whole situation in Afghanistan just now is very unclear, but will probably lead to yet more war there. The war in Syria has been going on for several years now, and hasn’t stopped just because the pandemic and Afghanistan have moved it off the front pages. You know what? I looked up a “list of ongoing conflicts” on Wikipedia when preparing for this sermon, and honestly, it’s frightening just how little peace there is in the world.

And of course, our planet is broken. We are in a period of rapid climate change, arguably exacerbated by human activity. We have seen all sorts of extreme weather conditions this summer, from monsoon rains to extreme heat waves. And very strong hurricanes causing damage that takes weeks, if not months, to repair.

The powers that be tell us that it is All Our Fault, although natural climate change is also a thing. Nevertheless, two hundred years of industry really haven’t helped!

You can’t watch a nature documentary these days without being told that it is All Your Fault that certain species are declining due to habitat loss, or a documentary about the planets without being told that climate change is All Your Fault. It gets old, very fast, I find.

Of course, we can all do our very small bit towards lowering our carbon footprint, and arguably we should – trying not to use single-use plastic bottles, for instance, reusing things like ice-cream boxes or take-away containers. Reusing shopping bags, rather than buying a new one every time you go to the supermarket, and using public transport where possible – and perhaps taking the train instead of flying when you are going somewhere, if that is at all feasible.

But really, it is the big corporations that will make the most difference to carbon dioxide emissions, and to be fair, some of them are already trying to. Not all, but some! If only because government legislation – often rather aspirational rather than practicable, I think – if they are going to be fined for not trying to lower their carbon emissions, then they will try harder!

In many ways, the idealised wife that we read about in Proverbs, summarises “Shalom”. She isn’t a real person, of course – if we had read the whole chapter, we would have seen that this is the mother of King Lemuel talking to her son. Lemuel may or may not be code for Solomon, but the point is, it is Mum giving good advice to one who is, or who will be, King. You don’t go spending good money on loose women, nor do you get drunk – you don’t need wines and spirits, so give them to the hospitals and hospices for those who do need them. And look for a wife like this…. And then the description of the ideal woman, who is more valuable than rubies. Not surprising – she is probably rarer than rubies, too!

So she is a model rather than a template. We don’t have to imitate her – we couldn’t, anyway – we who live in Lambeth don’t exactly have access to fields and vineyards to buy and rent out for profit, nor do we have access to flax for spinning, although you can buy unspun wool from some wool shops. But the thing about the idealised woman is that she is whole. All parts of her life are in balance. She isn’t trying to juggle work and childcare. She isn’t fretting because she has no paid work but must stay home with her children. She makes the best of what she has, and, I imagine, when she focuses on one thing, she isn’t constantly looking round to wonder what else she ought to be doing, but that child, or her husband, or the piece of work she is focussing on, take her full attention. Being mindful, I think is what they call it.

Mindfulness is no bad thing. It is the beginning of shalom. When we are fully in the moment, we can’t be worrying ourselves ragged about everything else. I used to ice skate, and I always found that skating was far and away the best thing to do when you were worrying about something, as you simply had to concentrate so much that you couldn’t fret.

Our New Testament reading takes up this theme. St James reminds us that “the wisdom that comes from heaven is first of all pure; then peace-loving, considerate, submissive, full of mercy and good fruit, impartial and sincere.” That sounds like shalom to me, doesn’t it to you? Wisdom that comes from heaven, pure, peace-loving, considerate, submissive and so on.

And do note that it comes from heaven! It is not something we can manufacture within ourselves, any more than we can manufacture any of the other fruits of the spirit that St Paul describes. Jesus reminded us that he is the vine, and we are the branches, and if we abide in him, we will bear much fruit. And definitely shalom will be one of those fruits.

St James goes on to point out that our fractiousness comes from not being whole, from wanting this and that and seeing no way to get it, so quarreling and being generally unpleasant. And, as he says, we need to ask God for what we want, but to be quite clear, God isn’t Santa Claus – we aren’t necessarily going to be given loads of toys to maintain an unsustainable lifestyle.

Having said that, of course, God is nothing if not generous. Do you remember how, when the prophet Nathan confronted David after he had committed adultery with Bathsheba, God said through him, more or less, “Look at all I have given you. And if you’d wanted more, I’d gladly have given you twice as much! But no, you had to have that which belonged to someone else!” The bit where he says “If you’d wanted more, I’d gladly have given you twice as much” always jumps out at me whenever I read this passage, as I am apt to forget just how loving and generous God is. All that wine at Cana? All those basketsful of leftovers after he’d fed the five thousand? Is God ever anything but generous?

But, of course, we want to be part of what God is doing, not outside it, so we don’t – or shouldn’t – ask for our own selfish ends. At least we do, and often God will give us some of what we ask for, if it will not harm us and our loved ones, because God is love. But in an ideal world, we will be so reconciled with God, attuned to God, aligned with God, that our prayers will reflect that.

In our Gospel reading, Jesus reminds us, again, that if you want to be great, you must first become the servant of all, and that when you welcome children, you are welcoming God. And think how many children are still anxious and miserable, having missed so much school these past two years, and worried about Covid-19 and people dying from it. And many have picked up a bit about climate change, and are worried. And the far too many children who are refugees, terrified and confused by a situation not of their making.

How can we welcome the Father by helping these children, by listening to their concerns, and maybe changing things? How can we be peacemakers in this noisy world?

As we allow God more and more into our lives, as we become more and more attuned to God, more and more aligned with God, more and more the person God designed us to be, so we will experience more and more shalom, peace, wholeness, in our lives, and be more and more able to spread it round our communities, and perhaps further. Shalom: the way things ought to be.

After all, you don’t have to be very big or very important to make a difference – think of Greta Thunberg or Malala Yousafzai, both of whom were only children when they started to remind us, respectively, of our need to live more sustainably and of women’s and girls’ right to an education. They had no idea, when they started, that what they said and did would make such a difference. But they followed the promptings of their consciences, and look what happened!

Now, that probably won’t happen if you or I start to follow the promptings of what we believe God may be asking us to say or do, whether that is to live a more sustainable lifestyle, or to be arbitrators for peace in our families, our churches, our circuits. We may only make a very minor difference – but sometimes, that, too, can set the world alight. For now, though, we need to seek God’s peace, God’s wholeness, God’s shalom. Remember that Jesus is our peace, and it’s not something we can manufacture for ourselves. Mindfulness helps, but it’s only part of it. For the rest, we need to receive God’s good gifts, and then maybe we will see things beginning to be the way they ought to be. Maybe we will experience the wonder and delight that is shalom. Amen.

Creation and Education

I apologise for the child coughing towards the end of the sermon!  I am not quite sure what the Powers that Be were thinking of when they asked us to combine the Season of Creation, Education Sunday and the readings for today – the 24th Sunday in Ordinary Time. It does make it very difficult for us poor preachers. So you will forgive me if I inadvertently use a “proof text” or two – something I hate doing as a text without a context is, as we all know, a pretext!

The thing about observing the season of creation is that we are all, as you know, in a period of rapid climate change, arguably exacerbated, if not caused by, human activity. You can’t watch a nature documentary these days without being told that it is All Your Fault that certain species are declining due to habitat loss, or a documentary about the planets without being told that climate change is All Your Fault. It gets old, very fast, I find.

As for education – well, after the past two school years, when everybody’s education has been disrupted, I know we are all hoping and praying that this year will be back to relatively normal. Even though kids are still catching Covid and missing a week or so of school every time. At least their friends only have to stay off if they, too, test positive. Both my grandsons have been isolating this week, as they tested positive; in one way, it is a relief as it means they are unlikely to catch it again, but a week off at the start of the school year is not ideal. Still, it can’t be helped, and it’s a great relief to other parents, I’m sure, that the whole of the class doesn’t have to be off, too. And, incidentally, thus far the vaccines seem to be doing their job, and neither parent has tested positive all week!

So what do our Bible passages today have to say to us about all this? Well, the reading from Proverbs seems almost aimed at those who are destroying our planet, doesn’t it?

"I will mock when calamity overtakes you –
when calamity overtakes you like a storm,
    when disaster sweeps over you like a whirlwind,
    when distress and trouble overwhelm you."

Wisdom, here, incidentally, is one of the few female names of God that we have; there is a long-standing tradition of praying to God as “Lady Wisdom”, and some of you might find that helpful – not all of you, I know, but it is one of the names of God, and as valid as praying to the Rock or the Judge or the Shepherd.

Anyway, where was I? Oh yes, Wisdom, reminding us that we need to heed God’s word, and failing that, disaster will probably overtake us, and God can do nothing! We are required, right back in the book of Genesis, to look after our planet and the life on it, and we probably never have. I am interested that the writer picks out storms and whirlwinds as examples of the distress and calamity that might befall us – we are seeing an increase in the number of bad storms, and look at the torrential downpours we had early last summer. I remember saying at the time that if the choice, in the summer months, was between monsoon-style rains and heatwaves, I’d really rather have the heatwaves, thank you very much.

However, we do not get a choice. The weather happens, and if much of the recent increase in extreme weather is being driven by climate change, then so be it.

Where we do have a choice, however, is in our response to it. We can shrug, and say there is nothing we can do; or we can do our own little bit to help – not using single-use plastic bottles, for instance; taking our own carrier bags to the supermarket; arguably eating less meat – although in many ways a wholly vegan diet is almost as bad for the planet. We can refuse to buy food that has been airlifted in from across the globe. That sort of thing. We can even look carefully at our use of transport, and decide whether we really need a car – many people do, of course. And what is the balance between buying a new, electric car, and running our current petrol or diesel one into the ground? Some of us won’t get a choice, of course, as from 25 October we can’t take vehicles with certain emission limits inside the South Circular. And if we do have a car, do we really need to use it as much, or is it just a convenience and public transport would do as well?

That sort of thing. But, of course, all we can do is really so much spitting in the wind; if we all did what we could, it might make a difference, but for so many people that’s impossible. It’s really down to the big corporations to do what they can to minimise carbon emissions, to use sustainable energy, and so on. And, to be fair, I think they are beginning to realise that, but it might take longer than we actually have for it to make a difference.

But then again, God is in charge! It is God’s creation, after all, and God does not abandon it. Individuals may or may not be abandoned, but only if they choose to be. God will not abandon the whole of creation. And one of the things we can do is to pray to be shown how we, you and me, can help overcome this destruction of our planet.

One of the ways, of course, is education. In our Proverbs reading, the Lady Wisdom mocks those who hate knowledge and are complacent in their ignorance. And our second reading, from James’ letter, reminds us that teachers have a terrific responsibility to get things right! We probably all know people who would like to deny that Covid-19 exists, and that vaccines, if they are not part of a huge global plot to have us all microchipped like dogs or cats, are terribly dangerous because they are untested. Which isn’t actually true, by the way, as more people have been vaccinated more quickly than ever before, so actually, the vaccine has been tested in the field more widely than any other in history!

You can’t fix stupid, and you can’t teach those who refuse to listen. And St James points out that you can’t tame the human tongue, either. Teachers have a huge responsibility – not just teachers in school, but preachers like me and others, and those responsible for lifelong learning – a huge responsibility to get it right. Those who listen are going to pick up what we said and, if they believe it, may well tell other people, and before you know it, misinformation and fake news has swept round the community, and, in these days of social media, has swept around the planet.

This, of course, means that we all, whether we teach, or learn, or do both, have a responsibility to discern what is true and right from what we read or see on social media, or what our friends tell us, or what our teachers and preachers tell us. And that isn’t easy, although discernment is, or can be, one of God’s many gifts to us.

And it is our responsibility to change our minds as new knowledge comes along. We have seen, over the past eighteen months, the way science works – you try one way of doing things, and that isn’t what was wanted, so you try something else. It’s been really interesting, I think – normally, scientists have long since discovered, for instance, how to treat many different illnesses, and know exactly what to recommend people do if there is an outbreak. But this time, we were dealing with something completely new, and they had to try a great many different approaches before they found ways to help people recover from Covid-19. But it has worked – the death rate, which was so very alarmingly high last winter, has dropped now to about what you would expect in a bad flu year – incidentally, it will be important to get a flu vaccine as soon as we’re offered it, even more so this year than before. There wasn’t much flu last year, because people were mostly at home, but scientists are afraid that this may be very different this coming winter.

I don’t know why I’m going on about the virus. We’ve all had to live with it for the past eighteen months, and will have to go on living with it, in different ways, for the foreseeable future. But one of the main things that happened was that our children’s education was badly disrupted. Twice, schools were closed for extended periods of time. It was all very well for those who could afford computers and tablets at home, and had high-quality broadband, as they could join in such lessons as their schools were able to offer – not much at first, but a full timetable, from some schools, in the second. But trying to share out one smartphone with a cracked screen among four or five schoolchildren? At that, trying to feed said children when they weren’t getting their main meal at school? Not so much. And our children suffered, badly, from being stuck indoors and missing their friends.

But that is, we hope, over now, although individual children still have to isolate for ten days if they test positive. And this year, our teachers will have to deal with the fallout from those missed terms. For many children the problem won’t be academic so much as social; for others, it will be both.

You know what? This sermon appears to be full of doom and gloom about the future of our planet, and our children. But there is hope, you know. God does not, has not, and will not abandon creation, as I said earlier. God is still in charge. It may be difficult to see, sometimes – but I don’t know about you, but I did see God’s hand at work during the pandemic, as we learnt different ways of being church together. And God has promised to work all things together for good for those who love him. All things – that includes the good, but it also includes the bad things.

I don’t know how God is going to work the current climate disasters and the pandemic and its consequences for good – but I do know that this is what the promise says, so this is what will happen! Let’s hold fast to that. Amen.

It's you, dear!

The text of this sermon is substantially the same as this one, preached three years ago.