Bones and Bandages

 

“Son of man, can these bones live?”

Today’s readings are, of course, about resurrection.
About returning to life.
Ezekiel in the valley of the bones,
and Jesus with his friends in their distress.

Can you imagine a field of bones?
We’ve all seen skeletons on television, of course,
and some of us may have visited ossuaries on the continent,
which are usually memorials to soldiers who fell in the first world war,
and they put the bones of soldiers who have got separated from their identity into the ossuaries to honour them.
Robert and I went to one near Verdun, once; it's very impressive.

And the older ones among us may remember seeing pictures of a huge pile of bones in Cambodia after the Pol Pot atrocities of the 1970s.

I think Ezekiel, in his vision, must have seen something like that.
A huge pile of skulls and bones….
“Son of man, can these bones live?”

And, at God’s command, Ezekiel prophesied to the bones,
and then he saw the skeletons fitting themselves together like a jigsaw puzzle,
and then internal organs and tendons and muscle and fat and skin growing on the bare skeletons.
I’m sure I’ve seen some kind of computer animation like that on television, haven’t you?
But for Ezekiel, it must have been totally weird,
unless he was in one of those dream-states where it’s all rational.

But once the skeletons had come together and grown bodies, things were still not right.

Do you ever watch those television programmes where they try to build up an image of the person from his or her skull? They do it extremely well, although the one I saw of Richard III made him look just like the famous portrait of him!

The trouble is, of course, that they never look much like a real live person, but more like those photo-fit reconstructions that the police build up from people’s descriptions of villains.

And think how those dinosaurs that they reconstruct as computer animations, imagining what they may have looked and sounded like when all they really have is a fragment of bone! David Attenborough has done some programmes on them, and sometimes it’s difficult to remember that these are not real animals, only animations. They are much better than they used to be, but even still, the difference, in both the head reconstructions and the dinosaur programmes is that there is no life.
No spirit, no personality looking out through the eyes.

And that’s what Ezekiel saw in his vision –
there were just so many plastic models lying there, no life, no spirit.
Ezekiel had to preach to them again, and they eventually came to life as a vast army.

And then Ezekiel was told the interpretation of his vision –
it was a prophecy of what God was going to do for Israel, which at the time seemed dead and buried.
God was going to bring Israel back to life, to breathe new life into the nation, and put His Spirit into them.

---oo0oo---

I’ll come back to Ezekiel in a minute, but for now, let’s go on to the wonderful story of Lazarus.

The family at Bethany has many links in the Bible.
Some people have identified Mary as the woman who poured ointment all over Jesus’ feet in the house of Simon the Leper –
and because he lived in Bethany,
some people have also said that he was married to Martha.
We don’t know.
The Bible isn't very clear about which Mary was which,
apart from Mary the Mother of God,
and it certainly doesn't say that Martha and Simon were married to each other, although both of them probably were married.
We do know that Martha and Mary were sisters,
and that they had a beloved brother, called Lazarus.
We do know that on one occasion Mary poured her expensive perfume all over the feet of the Lord –
whether this was the same Mary as in the other accounts or a different one isn't clear
But whatever, they seem to have been a family that Jesus knew well,
a home where he knew he was welcome,
and dear friends whose grief he shared when Lazarus died.

In some ways the story “works” better if the woman who poured ointment on Jesus’ feet in the house of Simon the Leper and this Mary are one and the same person,
as we know that the woman in Simon’s house was, or had been,
some kind of loose woman that a pious Jew wouldn’t normally associate with.
Now she has repented and been forgiven,
and simply adores Jesus,
who made that possible for her.
And she seems to have been taken back into her sister’s household,
possibly rather on sufferance.

But then she does nothing but sit at Jesus’ feet, listening to him.
Back then, this simply was Not Done.
Only men were thought to be able to learn,
women were supposed not to be capable.
Actually, I have a feeling that the Jews thought that only Jewish free men were able to learn.
They would thank God each morning that they had not been made a woman, a slave or a Gentile.
And even though St Paul had sufficient insight to be able to write that “In Christ, there is neither male nor female, slave nor free, Jew nor Gentile”, thus at a stroke disposing of the prayer he’d been taught to make daily, it’s taken us all a very long time to work that out,
and some would say we haven’t succeeded, even now.

Anyway, the point is that Mary, by sitting at Jesus’ feet like that,
was behaving in rather an outrageous fashion.
Totally blatant, like throwing herself at him.
He might have felt extremely uncomfortable,
and it’s quite possible that his disciples did.
Martha certainly did, which was one of the reasons why she asked Jesus to send Mary through to help in the kitchen.
But Jesus replied:
“Mary has chosen what is better, and it will not be taken away from her.”

Mary, with all her history, was now thirsty for the Word of God.
Jesus was happy enough with bread and cheese, or the equivalent;
he didn’t want a huge and complicated meal.
He wanted to be able to give Mary what she needed,
the teaching that only he could provide.
He would have liked to have given it to Martha, too,
but Martha wasn’t ready.
Not then.

But now….. now it’s all different.
Lazarus, the beloved brother, has been taken ill and died.
It’s awful, isn’t it, when people die very suddenly?
I know we’d all rather go quickly rather than linger for years getting more and more helpless and senile,
but it’s a horrible shock for those left behind.
And, so it seems, Lazarus wasn’t ill for very long, only a couple of days.
And he dies.

It must have been awful for them.
Where was Jesus?
They had sent for him, begged him to come, but he wasn’t there.
He didn’t even come for the funeral –
which, in that culture and climate, had to happen at once,
ideally the same day.
The two women, and their families if they had them, were observing the Jewish custom of “sitting Shiva”,
sitting on low stools indoors while their friends and neighbours came to condole with them
and, I believe, bring them food and stuff so that the bereaved didn’t have to bother.

But Martha, hearing that Jesus is on his way, runs out to meet him.
This time it is she who abandons custom and propriety to get closer to Jesus.
And it is she who declares her faith in Him:
“Yes, Lord, I believe that you are the Christ,
the Son of God, who is come into this world!”

And Mary, too, asserts that if Jesus had been there,
Lazarus would not have died.
But it is Martha, practical Martha, who overcomes her doubts about removing the gravestone –
four days dead, that was going to smell rather, wasn’t it?
But she orders it removed, and Jesus calls Lazarus forth.

And he comes, still wrapped in the bandages they used for preparing a body for burial.
When Jesus is raised, some weeks or months later, the grave-clothes are left behind, but we are told that this didn’t happen to Lazarus.
The people watching had to help him out of the grave-clothes.

---oo0oo---

Of course, I think the point of these two stories –
and the point of linking them together in the lectionary –
is fairly obvious.
Life comes from God.
In Ezekiel’s vision, God had to breathe life into the fitted-together skeletons,
or they were no more than computer animations,
or dressmakers’ dummies.
And it was God who, through Jesus, raised Lazarus from the dead.
Without God, Ezekiel’s skeletons would have remained just random collections of bones.
I think that this may have been a dream or a vision, rather than something that actually happened, but it makes an important point, even still.
God said to Ezekiel that just as, in the dream, he had breathed life into the skeletons, so he would breathe new life into the people of Israel.

And the story of Lazarus, of course, foreshadows the even greater resurrection of Jesus himself,
a resurrection that left even the grave-clothes behind.
Lazarus, of course, will have eventually died permanently, as it were, when his time had come;
Jesus, as we know, remains alive today and lives within us through the power of the Holy Spirit.

So what have these stories to say to us, here in the 21st century?
We don’t find the idea of a fieldful of bones coming together and growing flesh particularly special –
computer animations have seen to that.
And we don’t expect to see the dead raised –
more’s the pity, in some ways;
maybe if we did, we would.
Then again, that doesn’t seem to be something God does very often in our world.

But I do think that there are two very important things we can take away with us this morning.

The first thing is that God can make dry bones live again.
Sometimes we despair, I know, when we look round and see the state of the church today –
tiny, elderly congregations that aren’t really viable, churches having to close or only have one or two services a month, and so on.
Or we might see services where people’s emotions are manipulated by big-name preachers and vast stage shows.
Or we see churches where whole groups of people are demonised and condemned.
And we wonder, “Can these bones live?”
Is God really still here?
But, you know, there are signs of spring –
the other week, there was what they are calling a “revival” in a small town in the USA called Asbury.
It is, of course, far too early to tell whether this will bear fruit in the form of genuine repentance and changed lives,
or whether people were simply caught up in some kind of mass emotionalism, all too easy to do.
But if it is real, if it is resulting in changed lives….
Well…. Can these bones live?

The second thing that is that it’s all God’s idea.
Our relationship with God is all his idea –
we are free to say “No, thank you”, of course,
but in the final analysis, our relationship with God depends on God,
not on us.
I don’t know about you, but I find that really liberating –
I don’t have to struggle and strain and strive to stay “on track”.
When I fall into sin, I am not left all by myself,
but God comes after me and gently draws me back to himself.
I can just relax and be myself!

Our relationship with God is God’s idea.
It is God who breathes life into us.
It is God who brings us back when we go astray.
It is God who helps us to change and grow and become the people we were created to be, designed to be.
It is God who breathes life into the dry bones of our spirituality, who calls us out of the grave, who enables us to grow and change.
Amen, and thanks be to God!

Can you see?

 

I actually got the two recordings together this time (3rd time of asking!); there will be a gap after the main sermon, and then the secondary sermon will begin.

This is a very splendid story in John's Gospel, although it's rather long, which is why I divided the reading into two bits.

It's not just about a healing, it's about what happened afterwards.

We start with the man born blind,
and first of all the disciples want to know why this had happened.
We all want to know why, don't we,
when dreadful things happen.
Why was this child born disabled?
Why did that earthquake devastate towns on the Turkey/Syria border?
Why did so and so get cancer?
Why did so and so get cancer and then get better,
when someone else couldn't get better, and died?
And so on and so forth.
It's human nature.
Even though we sometimes know the answers, or at least part of them –
the buildings in those cities didn’t conform to earthquake-proofing regulations
which is why the earthquake caused so much devastation;
that person shortened their lifespan by smoking.
And so on.
But other times there seems to be no reason for it.

And so the disciples ask Jesus whether the man's blindness was some kind of punishment for him, or for his parents.
I wonder if the parents were asking, too:
“Why us?
What did we do wrong?”

But Jesus said no, it wasn't anything like that, but to show how he, Jesus, is the Light of the World.
And he proceeds to heal the man.

Now, all the Gospels tell of Jesus healing a blind man, sometimes called Bartimaeus, but this is the only one that takes it further, and looks at the consequences.
You see, after all, if your life is touched by Christ there are, or should be, consequences.
If nothing changes, was it a real touch?

For the blind man –
and let's call him Bartimaeus for now,
as it makes life easier with pronouns and such –
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 that gift, as well.

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 happened?” asks 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.

Then Jesus, the Light of the World,
says that he has come so that the blind may see,
and those who see will become blind –
looking hard at the Pharisees as he said it.
The Pharisees are horrified:
“What, are we blind, then?”

And Jesus says, “If you acknowledged that you were blind, you, too, could be healed.
But but now that you claim you can see, your guilt remains!”

That's the thing, isn't it –
the Pharisees wouldn't admit they needed Jesus.
They wouldn't admit there was anything wrong.
Jesus has picked up on this before –
you remember the story he told about the Pharisee and the tax-collector,
and the Pharisee was too pleased with himself to be able to receive God's grace.
The tax-collector knew he was a rat-bag, and thus God could do something.

We know that bit.
We know that we need to acknowledge our need of God before God can act –
we must make room for God in our lives.
But when we have done that,
and God has touched us, in whatever way,
things change.
For Bartimaeus, it was about learning to live with his sight,
and about dealing with the issues that it raised.

I wonder what it is for us.
For make no mistake, my friends, when God touches our lives, things change.
Sometimes it is our behaviour which changes –
perhaps we used to get drunk,
but now we find ourselves switching to soft drinks after a couple of glasses.
Perhaps we used to gamble,
but suddenly realise we haven't so much as bought a Lottery ticket for weeks, never mind visiting a bookie!
Perhaps we used to be less than scrupulous about what belongs to us, and what belongs to our employer,
but now we find ourselves asking permission to use an office envelope.

Very often these sorts of changes happen without our even noticing them.
Others take more struggle –
sometimes it is many years before we can finally let go of an addiction, or a bad habit.
But as I've said before, the more open we are to God,
the more we can allow God to change us.
Sometimes, of course, we cling on to the familiar bad habits,
as we don't know how to replace them with healthier ways of acting and thinking, and find it too scary to trust God to show us the way.

But perhaps it isn’t just our personal behaviour that changes.
Maybe we find ourselves getting involved in our community in a way we hadn’t been before.
It will be different for all of us, but we will probably find ourselves, in some way, walking alongside the poor and marginalised in our society.   

The point is, when God touches our lives, things change.
They changed for Bartimaeus, I know they changed for me,
and they will have changed for many of you, if not all of you, too.

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!
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.
Bartimaeus was scared, and with some reason
as his healing ended up with his being chucked out of the synagogue.
That was relatively mild compared with what has happened to some of Jesus' followers down the years, though.
But then, we always seem to be given the strength and the ability to cope with whatever comes.
It’s not necessarily true that God never gives us more than we can handle, but what is true is that 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,
showing people that Jesus is the Light of the World.
As happened when Bartimaeus was healed;
as may well happen if and when God touches our lives.
Amen.

---oo0oo---

What day is it today?
Mothers’ Day –
is the wrong answer!
At least, it might be Mothers’ Day out in the world,
but here in Church it’s Mothering Sunday,
and that, in fact, is only tangentially about human mothers!

Today is the fourth Sunday in Lent, and it’s long been known as Laetare Sunday, or Refreshment Sunday –
it’s half-way through Lent, and in days when people kept it rather more strictly than they do now,
it was a day when you could relax the rules a little.
And the tradition grew up that on that day,
you went to the mother church in your area –
often the cathedral, but it might have just been the largest church in your area.
Or sometimes, it might have been the church where you were nurtured and taught as a child, before you left home.
I have had the honour and privilege of preaching at my own “mother church” in a Sussex village, and I love to visit there when I can.

Families went together to the local cathedral, if they lived near enough;
sometimes even whole congregations went together,
and it became traditional for servants to have time off to go home and see their families on that day and go to church with them,
if they lived near enough.
In the Middle Ages, servants may only have got one day off a year,
and it was, traditionally, the 4^th Sunday in Lent.
Many servants had to leave home when they were very young –
only about 11 or 12 –
because their parents simply couldn't afford to feed them any longer.
And, indeed, many of these children hadn't known what a full tummy felt like until they started work.
But even so, they must have missed their families,
and been glad to see them every year.

And today is also a day for remembering God’s love for us.
We’re having the readings for the Fourth Sunday in Lent today,
but if we’d had the traditional Mothering Sunday readings,
we would have heard Jesus weeping over Jerusalem:

“Jerusalem, Jerusalem!
Your people have killed the prophets and have stoned the messengers who were sent to you.
I have often wanted to gather your people, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings.
But you wouldn't let me.”

The image of Jesus as a mother hen!
What we remember on Mothering Sunday isn’t just our mothers,
although that, too,
but above all, the wonderful love of God, our Father and our Mother.

Choose Life

 Of course, idiot me carefully worked out how to pause the recording during the playing of the song, and then went and pressed the wrong button, so it is in two parts again!  Scroll down for the recording of the second part after the first part.

Once upon a time, long, long ago, in a kingdom far away,
there was trouble in the land.

The King, whose name was Manasseh,
had decided to forsake worshipping the God of his ancestors,
and to worship other, more exciting gods instead.
Not only that, but he put up altars to them in the holy Temple at Jerusalem, and despite all the priests could do,
and despite dire warnings from the prophets,
he carried on like this, even sacrificing one of his children and practising black magic.

The priests in the Temple were scared.
They didn't know how much longer they would be allowed to stay,
or even whether the King would have them killed.
What if no new priests could come?
How would future generations know how to worship God?
Their country had enemies, and it was quite possible that it would be over-run, and God's name might disappear altogether.

So the priests did the only thing they could think of.
They wrote a book to tell future generations all about God,
and how to worship,
and, especially, how to live as God's people.
And then they hid it away in the depths of the Temple,
and carried on as best they could.

Roughly fifty years later, there was a new king on the throne,
the grandson of King Manasseh, and his name was King Josiah.
King Josiah did worship God, and one day he decided that it was high time the Temple in Jerusalem was refurbished:
painted, cleaned, the stonework repointed, all that sort of thing.
And while that was happening, the priests found this book that had been hidden away for so long –
either that, or they decided that now was a good moment to produce it –
and they brought it to the King.

And that book was at least part of, and perhaps all of, the book of Deuteronomy which our reading came from.
I'll be talking about what it actually said in a bit,
but when Josiah read it, he was horrified and realised that he and his people had been doing things all wrong,
and he made them all listen to it and do what it said.
And God was pleased.
The doom that had been prophesied did come on the land,
but not in Josiah's lifetime.
You can read all the story in 2 Kings chapters 21 to 23, if you've got a good modern English translation.
But don’t do it now!
Now we are going to listen to a YouTube video where some of our reading from Deuteronomy has been set to music.

(The video was this one: https://youtu.be/L2kKAd6EXPY)

Choose Life

The book of Deuteronomy turned out to be like nothing Josiah had ever heard before.
The central theme of the book,
how God wants his people to be,
is of course that famous passage that begins
"Hear, O Israel, The Lord is God, the Lord is One".
We are to love God with all of our being,
and to keep all the commandments, decrees and ordinances,
says the book of Deuteronomy.
And, as the passage we heard read says, we are to choose Life.
To choose to follow God is to choose Life.

The rest of the book is an expansion of that theme.
You look after your neighbour, especially if your neighbour is an Israelite.
Refugees or "sojourners" who have settled among you are also to be treated with kindness and compassion,
since you were once sojourners in Egypt.
If you have slaves or servants,
you must give them the opportunity to go free at the end of six years,
and give them some capital to help them make a new start.
You mustn't give it grudgingly, either,
since you've had work from the slave for six years,
and no way could you have got a hired servant so cheap.
If your slave runs away,
people are to assume that you were a cruel owner,
and the slave won't be returned to you.
If your paid servants need it, you must pay them daily,
and don't you dare cheat them!

You don't fancy military service?
Well, you don't have to go if you are about to get married,
or have just got married,
or if you've just built yourself a house or planted a vineyard,
or even if you are afraid.
Fighting is the Lord's work, and we don't want anyone who isn't whole-hearted about it.
If you do go to war, the camp must be kept clean and hygienic at all times - please go right outside the perimeter when you need to "go",
and use your trowel afterwards.
And when you fight, give your enemy every chance to surrender first.

Above all else, the book of Deuteronomy is concerned with rooting out idolatry,
forcefully if necessary.
Because of this the whole system of worship is being changed.
From now on, you can't sacrifice to God where you please,
but only in the Temple in Jerusalem.
No more popping into the local shrine;
it's too difficult to police it and to make sure it is only God that sacrifices have been made to.
Now, obviously, this is going to cause some upheavals,
and the authors have made provision for this.

Firstly, you ask, what about your dinner?
If you've been in the habit of eating your share of the sacrifice, what do you do if you can't sacrifice any more?
Have you really got to go hunting every time you fancy some meat?
No.
From now on you may butcher your own meat, or have it butchered for you, so long as it is done in a certain way.
It doesn't have to have been sacrificed first.
Secular meat is quite OK.

Bur what about me?
I'm a Levite, a descendent of Levi.
I've been used to working in the shrines and keeping myself on part of the meat brought as sacrifice.
What am I going to do now?
Well, you get given charitable status, along with widows, orphans and sojourners.
Henceforth it is the duty of all religious Jews to support you.

Well, OK, that's fine, you say.
But how am I going to worship God?
It's three days' journey to Jerusalem;
I can't go gallivanting up and down each week.
What am I to do?

The answer to that one has repercussions to this day!
What they did was, they set up a system of praying with psalms and readings that gradually developed into the synagogue worship that persists even today.
What's more, we Christians adapted it,
and in various forms it became the Benedictine Daily Office, the Anglican Matins and Evensong,
and even has echoes in a Methodist preaching service such as this one!
All because those who wrote Deuteronomy felt it would be better,
or that God was saying, if you prefer it said that way
to have sacrifices made only in the Temple in Jerusalem so that an eye could be kept on what happened.
There was too much worshipping of other gods going on.

The other thing that shows God's hand in all this, of course, is that the Temple was destroyed in 70 AD.
Suppose the Jews hadn't had an alternative form of worship to fall back on?
And what would we have done without it?
Jesus rendered Temple worship obsolete, because he was, as the old Prayer Book has it, "a full, perfect and sufficient sacrifice, oblation and satisfaction for the sins of the whole world."
God is clever sometimes!

But that is all detail –
I find it fascinating, and suggest you sit down and have a good read of the book of Deuteronomy in a modern paraphrase sometime.
All sorts of fascinating rules and regulations....

But that's the point.
They could so easily become just dry rules and regulations.
The priests were aware of this, I think, which is why they were so emphatic about the need to choose, to choose life:
“Now choose life, so that you and your children may live and that you may love the LORD your God, listen to his voice, and hold fast to him.
For the LORD is your life, and he will give you many years in the land he swore to give to your fathers, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.”

But it got too easy to follow God just by keeping the rules, and by the time Jesus came along, that, all too often, is what was happening.
And all the rules were getting hedged around with “Well, what if....” and “In this case, you should...” until they had become a real burden.

Jesus cuts through this, as we heard in our second reading.
Just keeping the rules isn't enough.
It's not enough to not murder someone –
you haven't to be angry with them in a way that would destroy their self-esteem,
and when things go wrong, it's down to you to be the first to go and put them right.
It's not enough to not have sex with someone if the only reason you fancied them in the first place was because they had a great body.
You don't get divorced for trivial reasons,
no matter how scrupulous you are about doing it legally.
You don't need to swear by anybody or anything, as you should be so trustworthy that just a “Yes” or “No” is enough.

Jesus is giving this picture of what his followers would be like,
and it's really hard to live up to.
I'm pretty sure I don't, and I'm pretty sure you don't, either.

But then, of course, we don't have to.
I mean, not like that.
It's not about our trying and struggling and failing to make ourselves into better people.
It never has been.
In our own strength, we are always going to fail.
It's about a reciprocal relationship with God.
It's about allowing ourselves to be transformed.
About saying to the Holy Spirit, okay, here I am, You do it.
He will!
Probably not in ways you'd expect,
and quite possibly not in ways you'd like, given a choice,
but you will be transformed, more and more,
into the kind of person God created you to be.

Josiah could have just listened to the book of the Law, and nodded, and said "Oh yes, how very interesting", and let it flow over him.
But he didn't.
Josiah really wanted to worship God properly –
his cousin Zephaniah was a prophet, and quite possibly influenced him to follow God –
so he rooted out all the shrines to God that were sometimes used to worship other gods,
and he required his subjects to worship God alone,
and to celebrate the Passover.
The Bible tells us that that first Passover, in the eighteenth year of Josiah's reign, so in about 621 BC by our reckoning, was unique:
"No such Passover," it says, "had been kept since the days of the judges who judged Israel, or during all the days of the kings of Israel or of the kings of Judah."

The point is that Josiah really meant it about worshipping God, and when he was confronted with the Scriptures, the book of the Law, he chose life.
And we are asked to make that choice, too.

Is our religion something formal, a matter of coming to Church on Sundays, of obeying certain rules, going through the motions?

It would be much easier if it was just a matter of obeying rules, wouldn't it? We would just have to do this, do that,
not do this, not do that,
and God would accept us.
But it doesn't work like that.
Nor does the more subtle temptation:
“I believe that Jesus died for me, so I am saved.”
And that's true, of course –
but it's the wrong way round.
Once again, it's making our relationship with God dependent on something we do –
but, my friends, nothing we can do can save us!
If we think it is our faith that saves us, we need to think again.
It is Jesus who saves us!
We can and should believe in Him,
but that belief shouldn't be a matter of static facts,
a matter of just the Creeds and no more.
It should be a belief that leads to a living, two-way relationship with him.
He has saved us; we can do nothing to help or hinder him.
What we can and should do is be willing to enter into that relationship with him,
so that we can know He has saved us,
so that we can be saved to the uttermost, as our doctrines have it.
“I set before you life and death;” says the Lord. “Choose life.”

Salt and Light

Children's talk:

Please scroll down for the recording of the main sermon.

When it's really dark outside, what do we do?
We turn on the lights, and we draw the curtains,
and we are all snug and cosy indoors.
Here in London, we don't often see it being really dark, unless there's a power-cut, because of the street lights and all the lighting up.

When I was a girl, the street lights in the town where I went to school were switched off around 11:00 pm or so,
and sometimes now they do that in parts of France and Germany to save energy.

And it does get really, really dark.
What if you were out then?
You'd be glad of a torch or a lantern so you could see where you were going, wouldn't you?
And you'd be glad if someone in the house you were going to would pull back the curtains so you could see the lights.

In our Bible reading today, Jesus says that we, his people, are the light of the world.
He didn't have electric lights back then, it was all candles and lanterns.
But even they are enough to dispel the darkness a bit.
And when lots of them get together, the light is multiplied and magnified and gets very bright,
so people who are lost in the dark can see it and come for help.
Which is why, Jesus says, we mustn't hide our light.
We don't have to do anything specific to be light, but we do have to be careful not to hide our light by doing things we know God's people don't do, or by not saying “Sorry” to God when we've been and gone and done them anyway!

---oo0oo---

Main Sermon:

“You are the salt of the earth;” says Jesus,
“but if salt has lost its taste, how can its saltiness be restored?
It is no longer good for anything, but is thrown out and trampled under foot.”

“You are the salt of the earth;
but if salt has lost its taste, how can its saltiness be restored?
It is no longer good for anything, but is thrown out and trampled under foot.”

Salt.
These days it's often considered a bad thing,
as too much is thought to be implicated in raised blood-pressure, and so on.
But back in the days before refrigeration and so on,
salt was vital to help preserve our foods.
Even today, bacon and ham are preserved with salt, and some other foods are, too.

Salt is also useful in other ways.
It's a disinfectant;
if you rinse a small cut in salty water –
stings like crazy, so don't unless you haven't anything better –
it will stop it going nasty.
And if you have
something that has gone nasty, like a boil or an infected cut,
soaking it in very hot, very salty water will draw out the infection and help it heal.

Salt makes a good emergency toothpaste, and if you have a sore mouth for any reason, you should rinse it out with hot salty water and it will help.

But above all, salt brings out the flavour of our food.
Processed foods often contain far too much salt,
but when we're cooking, we add a pinch or so to whatever it is to bring out the flavour.
Even if you're making a cake, a pinch of salt, no more, can help bring out the flavour.
And if you make your own bread, it is horrible if you don't add enough salt!

Imagine, then, if salt weren't salty.
If it were just a white powder that sat there and did nothing.
I don't know whether modern salt can lose its saltiness, but if it did, we'd throw it away and go and buy fresh, wouldn't we?

And Jesus tells us we are the salt of the world.
Salt, and light.

But how does this work out in practice?
I think, don't you, that we need to look at our Old Testament reading for today, from Isaiah.

In this passage, Isaiah was speaking God's word to people who were wondering why God was taking no notice of their fasting and other religious exercises.
And he was pretty scathing:
it's no good dressing in sackcloth and ashes, and fasting until you faint, if you then spend the day snapping at your servants and quarrelling with your family.
That's not being God's person, and that sort of fast isn't going to do anybody any good.

Jesus said something similar, you may recall, a little later on in this collection of his sayings that we call the Sermon on the Mount:
“When you go without food, wash your face and comb your hair, so that others cannot know that you are fasting—only your Father, who is unseen, will know.
And your Father, who sees what you do in private, will reward you.”

It's what your heart is doing, not what you look as though you are doing that matters!
Isaiah tells us what sort of fasting God wants:
“Remove the chains of oppression and the yoke of injustice, and let the oppressed go free.
Share your food with the hungry and open your homes to the homeless poor.
Give clothes to those who have nothing to wear, and do not refuse to help your own relatives.”

This is what God wants.
It's not just the big picture, you see.
Yes, maybe we are called to be working for the rights of Palestinians in Israel, or whichever tribe is oppressing whoever – Ukrainians just now, I suppose.
Sadly, it seems inevitable throughout history that whenever two tribes try to share a territory, there will always be friction, whether it is the Muslims and Hindus in India and Pakistan, or Greeks and Turks, Tutsi and Hutu, Loyalists and Nationalists in Northern Ireland, or Palestinians and Israelis.
Throughout history it has been the same –
and that it has not been very much worse has been down to the efforts of God's people,
often unsung,
often not thanked,
often, even, persecuted and tormented for their efforts.
But they have been there, and they have helped.
And God knows their names and has rewarded them.

But it's not just about the big picture, is it?
It's about the little things we do here at home, every day.
We can't always take homeless people into our homes, although some do –
but we can give to the food bank, either in cash or in kind.
Brixton Hill has been asked to be a food bank hub, a place where people can go to pick up necessary supplies each week, and maybe find out what benefits they are entitled to and how to claim them.
Incidentally, if that goes ahead – and please pray that our church council makes the right decision – if that goes ahead, we will be needing volunteers, so if you can spare a few hours, you would be very welcome!
But maybe we should also be asking our MP awkward questions about exactly why, in 2023, our food bank is so necessary!
Why must we host a warm space each week – not that we grudge doing that, you understand, but why is it necessary?
Why are people so poor that they need to choose between heating their homes and feeding their children?
This has been going on for far too long now, and the people who need to make use of the food bank, or of Brixton’s soup kitchen, have increased in number year by year.
Something is very, very wrong.
I would blame Brexit, but the soup kitchen had to be set up in 2014, long before then!

It’s part of what our being salt and light to our community is all about.
Not just doing the giving, not just helping out where necessary –
that too, of course, and it’s very necessary.
But asking the awkward questions,
not settling for the status quo,
making a nuisance of ourselves, if necessary,
until we get some of the answers.

It's not always easy to see how one person can make a difference.
Sometimes, I don't know about you, but when I watch those nature documentaries on TV
and they go on about how a given species is on the brink of extinction and it's All Our Fault,
I wonder what they expect me to do about it, and ditto when we get programmes about climate change and all the other frighteners the BBC likes to put on us.
But it's like I said to the children –
maybe one little candle doesn't make too much difference in the dark, except for being there and enabling us to see a little way ahead.
But when lots of us get together, it blazes out and nothing can dim it.
One person alone can't do very much –
but if all of us recycled,
and used our own shopping bags,
and public transport when feasible,
drank water our of the tap, rather than out of a bottle,
tried to avoid single-use plastic as much as possible,
and limited our family sizes;
if everybody did that, there would soon be a difference.

Obviously you don't have to be God's person to do such things.
The food banks are secular, as, indeed is the warm space, even though ours happens in Brixton Hill.
The one on Wednesdays happens in the Windmill Community Centre on Brixton Hill, and there are others, in churches or ot of them.

But we, God's people, should be in the forefront of doing such things,
leading by example,
showing others how to help this world.
Historically, we always have been.
But sometimes the temptation is to hide in our little ghettoes and shut ourselves away from the world.
It's all too easy to say “Oh dear, this sinful world!”
and to refuse to have anything to do with it –
but if God had done that, if Jesus had done that, then where would we be?

We don't bring people to faith through our words, but through what we do.
As St James says in his letter, it's all very well to say “Go in peace;
keep warm and eat your fill,” to someone who hasn't enough clothes or food, but what good does that do?
That person won't think much of Christianity, will they?

It’s about walking the walk, far more than talking the talk.
I heard of a woman who was unexpectedly widowed, and left with something like four children under four.
Her local church rallied round and supported her, not with Bible quotes or prayers – although I’m sure they did pray for her – but with practical help, getting her shopping for her, babysitting when she needed a break, that sort of thing.
And that woman came to faith, not because of what that church said, but because of what it did.

Another example is a church in America somewhere – I don’t remember where – that wanted a youth group and started to pray for one.
And one day, a group of rather rough young people came to the pastor and asked whether they could hold some kind of memorial for one of their number who had died of a drugs overdose, and whose parents had instantly taken his body home for burial.
The pastor agreed, and the young people sat in the church talking about their friend, sharing memories and generally beginning to come to terms with his loss.
And then that church’s hospitality committee gave them lunch.
One of the young people, saying thank you, added wistfully, “I do wish we could eat like this more often; it reminds me of my grandmother’s cooking!”
“Well, of course you can,” said the hospitality leader.
“We’re here every Sunday, so come and join us!”
There was no pressure on those young people to tidy up and look respectable, no pressure to attend services or “turn to Christ”.
Only steady love and hospitality, and accepting them for who they were.
I don’t know whether any of them did find faith, but I’d be very surprised if at least one or two didn’t.

Ordinary Time,
and we are in a brief bit of Ordinary Time before the countdown to Lent starts,
is the time when what we say we believe comes up against what we really believe,
and how we allow our faith to work out in practice.
It's all too easy to listen to this sort of sermon and feel all hot and wriggly because you're aware that you don't do all you could to be salt and light in the community –
and then to forget about it by the time you've had a cup of coffee.

It's also all too easy to think it doesn't apply to you –
but, my friends, the Bible says we are all salt and light, doesn't it?
It doesn't say we must be, but that we are.
It's what we do with it that matters!
We don't want to be putting our light under a basket so it can't be seen.
And if, as salt, we lose our saltiness –
well, let's not go there, shall we?

Many of us, of course, are already very engaged in God's work in our community, in whatever way –
I’ve already talked about the food banks and the warm spaces, and there’s our youth work, and so on.

The question is, what more, as a Church, as a Circuit, could we or should we be doing?
What should I, as an individual, be doing?

And that's where we have the huge advantage over people who do such work who are not yet consciously God's people –
we pray.
We can bring ourselves to God and ask whether there are places that need our gifts, whether there is something we could be doing to help, or what.
Don't forget, too, that there are those whose main work is praying for those out there on the front line, as it were.
And even if all we can do is put 50p a week aside for the food bank,
and write to our MP every few months and ask why we still need food banks in this day and age and what they, and the rest of Parliament, are doing about it –
well, it all adds up.

Because I don't know about you, but I would rather not risk what might happen if we were to lose our saltiness.
Amen.

Come and See

You know, I don't know about you,
but usually when I think about the calling of the disciples,
I think about the scene by the See of Galilee,
with James, John, Simon Peter and Andrew all mending their nets after a hard days' fishing –
or, perhaps, them out in the lake still and Jesus pointing out to them a shoal of fish that he could see and they couldn't.
And Simon Peter falling on his knees before Jesus,
and Jesus telling them that if they followed him,
he would teach them to fish for people.
That's what I think of, anyway.

So this story in St John's gospel comes a little strange.
In this passage, Andrew is already one of John the Baptist's disciples, and, at John's suggestion, goes after Jesus,
and then comes and gets his brother, Simon Peter, and introduces him.
Not a fish or fish-net in sight!
You wonder, sometimes, when the stories were being collected,
who told what to whom,
and who was trying to make who look good!

Not that it matters, of course;
truth and historical accuracy weren't the same thing in Bible days,
and don't need to be today.
So for now we'll stick with John's story, since it was our reading for today.

And today's story introduces us to a very important person –
Andrew.
At least, Andrew is very important in John's gospel.
We don't often think of Andrew, do we?
He's Peter's younger brother,
but it's Peter, James and John who go with Jesus when he is transfigured;
it's Peter, James and John who accompany Jesus to the Garden of Gethsemane.
Andrew gets left out.
Andrew stays back with the other disciples.

But here, according to John's version of events,
Andrew was with John the Baptist, and when they encountered Jesus,
he and his friend went off after him.
“What do you want?” asked Jesus.

“Where do you live?” asks Andrew, in return.
And Jesus says, “Come and see!”

We're all so used to the idea that “Foxes have dens and birds have their nests but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head”
that it might strike us a bit odd –
but, of course, when Jesus hadn't yet started his ministry,
he was not yet itinerant,
and presumably still lived with his mother and brothers in Nazareth,
or perhaps at his lodgings in Capernaum.
Although, in fact, the story says that they were in Bethany,
on the other side of the Jordan, where John was baptising,
and later on they leave to go home to Galilee,
so presumably he was staying with friends somewhere.
This wasn't the same Bethany where Martha, Mary and Lazarus lived, though, so he wouldn't have been staying with them.
This Bethany is sometimes called Betharaba, to distinguish it.

I did read that the questions have a deeper meaning –
I don't know enough Greek to be sure,
but apparently they can be interpreted as Jesus asking Andrew what he is really looking for,
Andrew asking Jesus who he is at the deepest level,
and Jesus inviting Andrew to come and find out.
But whatever happens, Andrew and his companion spend some time with Jesus, and the first thing that Andrew does afterwards is go and find his brother Simon Peter, and introduce him to Jesus.

Andrew does this a lot in John's Gospel.
He introduces people to Jesus.
First of all he introduces Simon Peter –
to become Peter, that great Rock on whom Jesus was to build his church.
And Simon Peter becomes one of Jesus' closest friends and supporters,
far closer than Andrew himself did.

Then a bit later on, Andrew introduces some Greek travellers to Jesus;
the travellers speak to Philip, and he goes to Andrew,
and then both of them take the travellers to see Jesus.
We aren't told what happened next;
John goes off into one of Jesus' discourses.
But it was Andrew who introduced them.

And in John's version of the story of the feeding of the Five Thousand,
it is Andrew who brings the boy to Jesus,
that nameless youth who had five barley loaves and two fishes, and who was prepared to share them with Jesus.
Andrew brought the boy to Jesus.

Yes, well.
I've heard, and I'm sure you have too, lots of sermons on St Andrew where they tell you that you ought to be like him and introduce people to Jesus.
Which is all very well, and all very true,
but it's not quite as simple as that, is it?

First off, when preachers say things like that, the congregation –
well, if I'm any representative of it –
go all hot and wriggly and feel they must be terrible Christians because it's so long since they last introduced anybody to Jesus.
And the ones who are apt to feel the hottest and wriggliest are those who really do more than anybody else to introduce people to Jesus.

But you see, Andrew only introduces people to Jesus when they want to be introduced.
Simon Peter, his brother, was probably already following John the Baptist, and was anxious to meet the Messiah.
He may, of course, have thought that the Messiah, the Anointed One, would rebel against the occupying power, an earthly leader,
but, of course, he soon learnt differently.
The Greeks in chapter 12 of John's Gospel had asked for an introduction.
The boy with five loaves and two fish was anxious to share his lunch with Jesus, but couldn't get past the security cordon of the disciples.

And when our friends want to be introduced to Jesus,
that's when we need to imitate Andrew.
If they don't want to know him yet, and we keep trying, we'll just end up being utterly boring and probably lose their friendship!
It's probably better to just pray for our friends, and hold them up to Jesus that way –
if and when they are ready for more, they will let you know.
There is, as the Preacher tells us, a time for everything!

Brixton Hill, as a church, does have activities which =make Jesus known in the community,
what with the various youth activities,
the Warm Space on a Thursday
and Pop-In.
We are giving people the opportunity –
they know what a church stands for, and if they don't, they can always ask.
We may never know how much we've done for people,
how much our example has led them to want to find Jesus for themselves,
to question the easy, unthinking atheism popularised by Richard Dawkins and his ilk.
That's as it should be –
our job is to be ourselves, to be Jesus' people, as we have committed ourselves to being.

So what sort of people are we going to be being?
I think Jesus gives a very good picture of what his people are like in that collection of his teachings we call the Sermon on the Mount:
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. 
They love everyone, even those who hate them;
they refrain from condemning anyone,
or even from being angry with them in a destructive way;
they don’t hold grudges or take revenge,
value or use people just for their bodies,
or end their marriages lightly.
Their very words are trustworthy.
In short, they treat everyone with the greatest respect
no matter what that person’s race, creed, sex or social class.
They also treat themselves with similar respect, looking after themselves properly and not abusing themselves any more than they abuse others.

We don't, of course, have to force ourselves to become like that in our own strength –
we'd make a pretty rotten job of it!
We do have to give God permission to change us, though,
to “let go and let God”.
We have to be willing to allow God to work in us,
gradually transforming us into the people we were created to be.
It isn’t easy –
I do so know!
But we do need to be willing,
or at the very least, willing to be made willing!

And as we do so, we will be able to have a response when our friends ask what Church is all about, or who Jesus is.

And people are asking, aren't they?
Like Andrew, they want to know where Jesus is.
Where is Jesus in this dreadful war in Ukraine?
Where is Jesus in the energy crisis, the rising cost of living?
Where is Jesus in the strikes that beset us?
Where is Jesus in Brazil, in the USA, in Iran?

Jesus answers us, as he answered Andrew:
“Come, and see”.
And the answer, of course, is that he is there in the middle of it all, as he always is.
“Behold the Lamb of God,” said John, “Who takes away the sins of the world.”

There are always dreadful things happening in our world.
There always have been –
even back in Jesus' day, you remember, the disciples asked what had gone wrong when a tower collapsed, killing rather a lot of people.
Look at the book of Job, or at some of the Psalms,
trying to come to terms with why bad things happen,
and so often to people who really didn't deserve it.
And there are no easy answers;
all we can do is to trust and to believe that God is there in the middle of it.
“Come and see,” said Jesus, and they went and saw.
And we are invited to stay with him exactly where he is:
in the middle of it all.
Amen.

The Baptism of Christ

My apologies for the coughing - it developed during the service!

This Sunday, the Church celebrates the baptism of Christ.
St Matthew tells us how Jesus came to John to ask for baptism.
John, we are told, demurs, saying that it is Jesus who should be baptizing him, but Jesus says he wants everything done properly in good order. And then the voice comes from heaven, saying “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased”

For Jews, baptism was really a matter of washing.
They had –
and still, as far as I know, have –
a way of washing in their ritual baths,
which made them no longer unclean.
But it was not, I believe, until the time of John the Baptist
that baptism was linked with repentance.
John had one or two things to say to people who wanted baptism without repenting,
baptism without tears, if you like,
calling them “a brood of vipers”,
and reminding them that just because they were children of Abraham didn’t mean they were excused from bearing “fruits worthy of repentance.”
In other words, they had to show their repentance by the change in their lives, and their baptism was to mark this fresh start.

Now for me, at least, this raises at least two questions.
Why, then, was it necessary for Jesus to be baptised, and, secondly, what about our own baptism?

Why did Jesus have to be baptised?
He, after all, was without sin, or so we are told,
so he, alone of all humanity, did not need,
and never has needed, to repent.
But when John queried him
he said “Let it be so now;
for it is proper for us in this way to fulfil all righteousness.”
In other words, let’s observe all the formalities,
don’t let anybody be able to say I wasn’t part of the religious establishment of the day.

And, of course, one other very good reason is that it was an opportunity for the Father to proclaim Jesus to the crowds thronging the Jordan.
John probably baptised hundreds of others that day, I shouldn’t wonder, with Jesus waiting his turn very patiently.
But it was only when Jesus rose up from the waters of baptism
that God sent the Holy Spirit upon him in the form of a dove, and said, out loud,
“You are my Son, whom I love;
with you I am well pleased.”

God proclaimed Jesus as his beloved Son.

And then what?
There was no triumphant upsurging against the occupying power,
no human rebellion.
Not even a triumphal entry into Jerusalem.
No, what awaited Jesus after his baptism was forty days in the desert,
and an almost unbearable temptation to discover the depths of his powers as God’s Son, whom God loves,
and to misuse them.
And it was only then, after Jesus had wrestled with, and conquered, the temptation to misuse his divine power,
that he could come back and begin to heal the sick,
raise the dead,
restore sight to the blind
and preach good news to the poor.
And gather round him a band of devoted followers, of course, and eventually, the Cross and the triumphant resurrection from death.

Well, so much for Jesus’ baptism;
what about ours?

For many Christians, baptism does seem to be very similar to John’s baptism, a baptism of repentance, of changed lives,
a signal to the world that now you are a Christian, and plan to live that way.
But for a great many more Christians, baptism is something that happens when you are a tiny baby, too small to remember it.
That’s usually the case for Methodists and Anglicans, so it applies to us.
I was baptised as a baby and so, very probably, were you.

Now, some folk say that being baptised as a baby is a nonsense,
how can you possibly repent when you are an infant in arms,
and how can other people make those promises for you?
I think it depends very much on whether you see baptism as primarily something you do, or primarily something God does.
The Anglican and Methodist churches call baptism a Sacrament,
and you may remember the definition of a Sacrament which is
that a Sacrament is the outward and visible sign
of an inward and spiritual grace.

The other Sacrament that Methodist churches recognise is, of course, Holy Communion.
The Catholic church recognises at least five more,
but as I can never remember all of them off-hand, I won’t start listing them now!
The point is, that a Sacrament is a place where we humans do something and trust that God also does something.
When we make our Communion, we believe that we are meeting with Jesus,
communicating, if you like, in a very special way
during the taking, breaking, blessing and sharing of the bread and wine.
And in baptism, we believe that God comes and meets with us in a very special way, filling us with the Holy Spirit.
Yes, even babies –
do you really have to be old enough to be aware that you are doing so in order to love God?
I don’t think so!
You certainly don’t have to be aware to be loved by God,
and that’s really what it’s all about.

You see, baptism, like Communion, is one of those Christian mysteries, where the more deeply you penetrate into what it means,
the more you become aware that there’s more to know.
You never really get to the bottom of it.
St Paul goes off in one direction, talking about baptism being identifying with Christ in his death.
I’m never quite sure what he is getting at, when he says in the letter to the Romans,
“Do you not know that all of us who have been baptised into Christ Jesus were baptised into his death?
Therefore we have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life.
For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we will certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his.”

I may not have totally understood Paul there –
who does? –
but it’s nevertheless part of what baptism is all about.

Another part of it is, indeed, about repentance and turning to Christ.
For those of us who were baptised as infants,
someone else made promises on our behalf about being Jesus’ person, and we didn’t take responsibility for them until we were old enough to know what we were doing,
when we were, I hope, confirmed.
We confirmed that we were taking responsibility for those promises for ourselves,
we became full members of the Church and, above all,
we received, once again, the Holy Spirit through the laying-on of hands.

And so it goes on.
But it’s all very well me droning on about baptism and what it really means, but what is it saying to us this morning?
For some of us, our baptism was more than six decades ago, after all!
For some of us, it may have been a lot more recent, but you may well not remember it, even so!

Well, first and most importantly is that baptism is important for Christians,
as important as the Sacrament of Holy Communion.
So if for any reason you never have been baptised,
and you know that you want to be Jesus’ person,
do go and talk to Lena or someone.
The same applies if you haven't yet been confirmed, but feel you are ready to become a full member of the Church and ready to take responsibility for those promises they made on your behalf.

But for the rest of us, for whom our confirmation is nothing more than a memory, and baptism not even that, so what?
What does it mean for us today?

I think that, like so much that is to do with God,
baptism is an ongoing thing, not just a once-for-all thing.
Yes, we are baptised once;
St Paul reminds us that there is one baptism,
just as there is one faith, and one Lord.
But when Martin Luther was quite an old man,
and the devil started whispering in his ear that he was a rotten human being and God would cast him out, et cetera, et cetera, you know how he does,
Luther threw his inkpot at the spot where he felt the voice was coming from, and said: “Nonsense!
I have been baptised, and I stand on that baptism!”
Even though that baptism had been when Luther was a newborn baby,
he still knew that its effects would protect him from the assaults of the evil one.
As, indeed, it does for us.
There are times when life seems to go very pear-shaped, aren’t there?
The 2020s, so far, haven’t exactly been a wonderful decade.
It sometimes feels that God has forgotten us, that we are stumbling on alone, in the dark,
totally unable to see where we are going.
Whether that is true for us as individuals, or as a church, or even as a nation,
these times are very hard to deal with and to understand.
All we know is, they happen to all of us from time to time, and we simply can’t see the reason from this end.

Of course, we know intellectually
that God hasn’t in the least bit forgotten us.
Some folk say these times of darkness are when God is testing us,
but I’m not sure it’s even that.
It’s some part of the pattern that we don’t understand,
can’t see what is happening,
and tend to try to rationalise.
I do believe that one day we’ll know what it was all about,
and see how it fitted in.

But our first reading reminds us, when we are going through these dark patches, that the “Servant”, who we identify with Jesus these days, even if there was a local application back at the time when Isaiah was writing, is gentl and loving: “a bruised reed he will not break, and a dimly burning wick he will not quench;” In other words, it doesn’t matter how weak and feeble your faith – our faith – may be; God will not snuff it out, but instead encourage it, help it to grow. And help justice be established in our world once again.

In some way we know that our baptism is part of that.
As I said earlier, it’s what they call a mystery;
we’ll never know the whole truth of how it works, only that it does!
Jesus came for baptism to John, and from his baptism he was sent into the wilderness to wrestle with one of his bad times –
another, as we know, was in the Garden of Gethsemane the night before he was crucified.
And if Jesus can have bad times, then it’s all right for us to, I reckon!
The bad times will happen, they happen to everybody.
But we will not be broken or extinguished; God will be with us.
Life doesn’t have to be perfect, and nor do we, before we can remind ourselves that God loves us.

Of course, that love isn’t just warm fuzzies;
it’s about going out there and doing something.
Christian love is something you do,
not something you feel.
But in the dark watches of the night, we need our warm fuzzies.
And I think God knows that,
which is why there are those lovely passages in Scripture about how much he loves us, about how he protects us and cares for us.

Carol Service reflection

 A very brief reflection in the middle of our carol service

So.

It is Christmas again.

We are in the middle of hearing the Christmas story, of how the world went wrong, and what God did to put it right again.
All our readings so far have been optimistic promises –
that Abraham’s descendant will bring blessings to all the nations of the earth;
that the king is coming and will usher in a reign of justice for the poor and peace for all of God’s creation;
that a king will be born to a people in darkness.
And that God is rejoicing over us with singing.

So what, I wonder, has gone wrong?

These last few years have been pretty awful. I believe there is an ancient Chinese curse that reads “May you live in interesting times!”
Seems that someone has invoked that curse,
what with first of all the pandemic,
and then this year, just as things got a bit easier,
the war in Ukraine and its impact on the rest of Europe,
the Queen’s death,
galloping inflation, the energy crisis, strikes….
What has happened, and will there ever be an end?
And where, we wonder, is God in all this?
What of those magnificent promises we have just heard?

You know, desperate as it feels right now, we’ve been here before.
Some of you may remember, as I do, the 1970s,
when it was very similar to now –
an energy crisis, galloping inflation, strikes, a government which appeared not to care…
I missed the worst of it as I was living and working in Paris at the time,
but it was difficult not to know about it from letters and phone calls from family and friends.

And, of course, there have been wars, plagues, storms, all sorts of disasters, both man-made and natural, all down the centuries.
And people have looked around and wondered “Where is God in this?”

One of the earliest efforts to come to terms with it all is the Book of Job.
You remember how Job’s life went totally pear-shaped –
God knew all about it and had given permission for this to happen –
and his friends tried to make it be all his fault.
Which it totally wasn’t, and Job knew this,
so he demanded answers from God.
God eventually answered Job, reminding him of the glories of creation that were all around him, that Job could have done nothing about:

‘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’s wonderful stuff, and goes on for several chapters.
And at the end, Job has to acknowledge God’s greatness,
and “repents in dust and ashes”, we are told.
It’s one of the earliest attempts to come to terms with the fact that awful things do happen, and we can often do nothing about them.

But then, Jesus himself said they would.
He said there would be wars,
and plague,
and famine,
and all sorts of disasters.
He told his disciples that they would be killed by those who thought they were doing God’s work.
But he also reminded them –
and us –
that the Holy Spirit would come.
And, he said, he has told us this so that we may have peace.
In this world we will have trouble.
“But take courage!
I have overcome the world!”

So as we move into the second half of this service,
and hear once again the ancient story of how God became a human baby in a remote corner of an Empire,
let’s remember that, despite appearances,
God is in charge, and we can know his peace –
shalom, which means so much more than peace.
In the Bible, according to one scholar,

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.

The way things ought to be.
We know full well that right now, things are not right,
and they very seldom are.
But we can know God’s peace, God’s shalom, in our hearts, no matter what.
Emmanuel.
God with us.
Amen.