Be joyful always

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That doesn't mean we'll never be unhappy, far from it.
But we know, as St Paul also tells us,
that God works all things together for good for those that love him.
Even the bad things,
even the dreadful things that break God's heart
even more than they break ours.
Even those.
We may be unhappy, we may be grieving, we may be depressed.
But we can still be joyful, we can still rejoice,
because God is still God, and God still loves us.
Okay, sometimes it doesn't feel like that,
but that's only what it feels like, not what has really happened.
God will never abandon us,
God will always love us.
God will weep with us when we weep.
And underneath there always is that joy,
the joy of our salvation.

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

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

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

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

By the way, don't think I'm some sort of super-spiritual genius –
I can't do this, a lot of the time.
Sometimes I can, but more often than not it doesn't happen!

I'd like to be able to –
but then again, like all of us, there are times when I'd really rather forget.....

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

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

Give thanks in all circumstances.

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

I don't think it means that.
I think it's more about having a thankful heart.
About acknowledging God's good gifts to us.
About –
okay, if you like, about counting our blessings.
We can't, and I don't think we should, thank God for the dreadful things –
but we can be aware that God is there,
in the midst of the dreadful things,
and we can certainly thank him for that.
We can be aware that in all things God does work for good for those who love him.

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

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

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

We are in the season called Advent, and Christmas is rapidly approaching.
We've already started singing carols –
Tulse Hill is having their carol service this morning, and Clapham has theirs this evening.
And over the Christmas season, we will be singing words like,
“Yet what I can, I give him, give my heart” and
“Cast out our sin and enter in, be born in us today!”
The thing is, do we really mean it?
Are we just singing lyrics we've known for years and never really taken much notice of?
Even the ghastly “Away in a Manger” –
“No crying he makes?”
I don't think so!
Not if he was a real baby, not a wax doll!
Anyway, sorry, even when we sing “Away in a Manger”
we are asking God to “fit us for heaven, to live with thee there!”
At Tulse Hill they used to pray this prayer every week, when the children left for Sunday school. There's a brief introductory prayer, and then everybody says together:
“Be near me, Lord Jesus, I ask Thee to stay
Close by me forever, and love me I pray.
Bless all the dear children in Thy tender care,
And fit us for heaven, to live with Thee there.”

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

The Coming King

 

So, Advent.
It’s almost an anomaly nowadays, isn’t it?
Out in the world, people are starting to celebrate Christmas already –
the shops have had their decorations up since the beginning of last month, or even earlier,
and the round of office parties, works celebrations, school festivities will be starting any day now.
And the endless tapes of carols and Christmas songs that are played in the shops, I should think they’d drive the shop assistants mad!

But here in Church, Christmas hasn’t started yet, and won’t for another four weeks.
We are celebrating Advent,
and it seems to be another penitential time, like Lent.
Those churches that have different colours for the seasons have brought out the purple hangings,
and many will have no flowers except for an Advent wreath.

But Advent is really a season of hope.
We look forward to “the last day when Christ shall come again”
to establish the Kingdom on earth.
We also look back to those who’ve been part of God’s story, including John the Baptist and Jesus’ Mother, Mary.

Today, though, our readings are about the coming King.
Our first reading, from the prophet Isaiah, tells how the prophet,
and perhaps the people for whom he was speaking,
longed and longed to see God in action.
“Oh, that you would rend the heavens and come down,
that the mountains would tremble before you!
As when fire sets twigs ablaze and causes water to boil,
come down to make your name known to your enemies
and cause the nations to quake before you!”

Scholars think that this part of Isaiah was written very late,
after the people of Judah had returned from exile.
They would have remembered the stories of the wonderful things God had done in the olden days,
in the days of Abraham and Sarah,
of Isaac and Jacob,
of Moses,
and of David the King –
and then, they would have looked round and said
“But hey, why isn’t any of this happening today?”

They reckoned the answer must be because they were so sinful.
“You come to the help of those who gladly do right,
who remember your ways.
But when we continued to sin against them,
you were angry.
How then can we be saved?
All of us have become like one who is unclean,
and all our righteous acts are like filthy rags;
we all shrivel up like a leaf,
and like the wind our sins sweep us away.
No-one calls on your name
or strives to lay hold of you;
for you have hidden your face from us
and made us waste away because of our sins.”

It does sound very much as though the prophet were longing for God,
but somehow couldn’t find him, in the mists of human sinfulness and this world’s total abandonment of God.
You know, there’s nothing new –
we complain that people don’t want to seek God today,
and our churches stand empty,
but there was the prophet saying that thousands of years ago!

And, of course, as it turned out,
God hadn’t abandoned his people at all!
Jesus came to this earth, lived among us, and died for us,
and Isaiah’s people now knew the remedy for their sin.

But Jesus himself tells us, in our second reading,
that his coming to live in Palestine as a human being isn’t the end of the story, either.
Somehow, someday, he will come back again.
He obviously doesn’t know all that much about it while he is on earth,
and rather discourages us from speculation as to when or how.
But he draws pictures for us:
“The sun will be darkened,
and the moon will not give its light;
the stars will fall from the sky,
and the heavenly bodies will be shaken.
“At that time men will see the Son of Man coming in clouds with great power and glory. And he will send his angels and gather his elect from the four winds, from the ends of the earth to the ends of the heavens.”

It is a scary thought, isn't it, with the world as unstable now as at any time in the past century.
What’s more today, as at no other time in history,
communications are such that if Jesus were to come back,
we’d know about it almost as soon as it happened –
look how quickly news spreads around the world these days.
Half the time you hear about it on Facebook or Twitter before the BBC has even picked up on it.
And Jesus' return would be something totally unmistakable.
But lots of generations before ours have thought that Jesus might come back any minute now,
and Christians throughout history have lived their lives expecting him to come home.
We have remembered Jesus’ warnings about being prepared for him to come, but He hasn’t come.
And we get to the stage where we, too, cry with Isaiah:
“Oh, that you would rend the heavens and come down,
that the mountains would tremble before you!”

Like Isaiah, we long and long to see God come and intervene in this world, and wish that He would hurry up. And that’s perfectly natural, of course.
Some folk have even got to the stage of believing it won’t happen, and have given up on God completely.
But Jesus said it will happen,
and one has to assume He knew what he was talking about.

But that doesn’t mean that we can blame God –
if You had come back before now, this wouldn’t have happened.
Every generation has been able to say that to God,
and it’s not made a blind bit of difference.
So maybe there’s something else.

You see, in one way, Jesus has come back.
Do you remember what happened on the Day of Pentecost,
in that upper room?
God’s Holy Spirit descended on those gathered there,
looking like tongues of fire,
and with a noise like a rushing mighty wind,
and the disciples were empowered to talk about Jesus.
And we know from history,
and from our own experience,
that God the Holy Spirit still comes to us,
still fills us,
still empowers us.

One of the purposes of these so-called penitential seasons is to give us space to examine ourselves
and see if we have drifted away from God,
to come back
and to ask to be filled anew with the Holy Spirit.
Then we are empowered to live our lives
as Jesus would wish.
We don't have to struggle and strain and strive to “get it right” by our own efforts.
God himself is within us, enabling us from the inside.
Jesus doesn’t just provide us with an example to follow, but actually enables us to do it, by the indwelling of the Holy Spirit.

I do two tai chi classes a week, these days, but it’s really difficult to get it all the way it should be.
Back in my ice dancing days, we only had to memorise a routine that lasted two minutes, with musical cues to tell us what move to do when.
In tai chi, it’s a 25 minute routine with no musical cues!
I get very muddled at times.
But supposing somehow the spirit of a tai chi master could get inside me,
and actually make my body move in the right way,
and show me how it's done from the inside.
That would be so much better than anything my coach could say, or anything I can learn from watching videos.
I really would be able to do the routine, even at home!

And that’s what God does –
by indwelling us with his Holy Spirit,
He not only shows us what to do, but enables us to do it.

All of us will face the end of the world one day.
It might be the global end of the world, that Jesus talks about, or it might just be the end of our personal world.
We expect, here in the West, to live out our life span to the end, and many of us, I am sure, will do just that.
But we can’t rely on that.
You never know when terrorists will attack –
or even muggers, or just a plain accident.
We can’t see round corners;
we don’t know what will happen tomorrow.

But whether it is tomorrow,
or twenty, thirty, forty or fifty years from now,
one day we will die, and then, at last, we will meet Jesus face to face.
And we need to be ready.
We need to know that we have lived as God wants us to live –
and when we’ve screwed up,
as we always do and always will,
we’ve come back to God and asked forgiveness, and asked God to renew us and refill us with his Holy Spirit.

We can only live one day at a time, but each day should, I hope, be bringing us nearer to the coming of the King.
Amen.

It's what you do with it that counts.

 The recordings are from two services; firstly an abridged version for Night Prayer on 15 November, and then the longer version for 19 November.

I often quail when I’m faced with a very familiar Gospel story to preach on,
as I never know whether I shall be able to say anything that you haven’t heard a million times before.

This story is a very old friend –
most of us, I expect, have known it since our nursery days.
Indeed, it is –
or used to be –
often employed by teachers and so on to push children on to practice and work hard.
If God has given you talents, they say,
then you must work to make the absolute very best of them.

But, of course, it isn’t so much about talents in that sense –
although it can be taken that way.
It’s about money.
Or at least, in Jesus’ story it’s about money.
I think it’s also about other things, too,
but we’ll come to that in a minute.

A talent was serious money back then.
Maybe about twenty years’ wages for your average labourer;
maybe more.
Serious money.
So the master was not messing about when he asked his slaves to look after it for him.
One slave was given five talents, another two and the third just one.
I suppose in these days they would be share portfolios,
and the slaves would be young investment bankers or stockbrokers or something like that.

In many ways, I prefer Luke’s version of this story,
where each of the slaves are given the same amount of money,
and come back with different amounts.
But today we have Matthew’s version set in the lectionary, so let’s go with that.
The master goes away, for whatever reason, and shares out the money.
And then he goes away, and doesn’t come back and doesn’t come back.
Maybe he is away for months, maybe years, maybe even a decade or more:
the text just says “A long time”.
And while he is away, things happen.
The first and second servants both go into business for themselves using their unexpected capital.
Perhaps they deal on the stock exchange.
Perhaps they open up a business of some kind –
a restaurant, say, or buying and selling houses.
We’re just told they traded with their money.

I expect they made themselves seriously rich, too.
They would have felt able to pay themselves a good salary,
while all the time preserving and adding to their Master’s capital.

But what of Number 3?
He’s quite comfortable already, thank you.
He has a good, secure job;
he would really rather be employed by someone than go into business for himself.
It doesn’t occur to him that, of all the slaves,
he was the one chosen to see what he would do,
whether he would have the courage to invest that capital.
And in any event, he doesn’t have that sort of courage.
Supposing something went wrong and he lost it all?
The consequences don’t bear thinking about!
Better play safe.
Very safe.
Not the bank –
not with the current banking crisis, just look at Northern Rock!
Okay, maybe his money would be safe,
but he wouldn’t be comfortable thinking about it, just in case it wasn’t.
Better just dig a hole in the ground and pretend you’re planting carrots or potatoes.
So that’s what he does;
the sort of moral equivalent of putting it into
old sock under his mattress, or in his underwear drawer.
And he gets on with his life.

And then, one day, the Master comes back.
I wonder whether they had ever really expected that he would,
or if they had almost forgotten they weren’t in it for themselves.

And the first and the second servant come swanning up with all the trappings of wealth –
chauffeur-driven Rollers,
Philippe Patek watches,
Louis Vuitton briefcases,
noses down in the latest top-of-the-range smartphones,
and, finally, able to present the Master with
share certificates
and bank statements
and other records of profit and loss to show him that they had each doubled their investments.

The Master is delighted.
“Well done, you good and faithful servant.” he says to each of them.

“You’ve been faithful in little things” –
not that little;
a “talent” was, as I said, serious money –
“now you’ll be put in charge of great things.
Enter in to the joy of your Master!”

And then along comes the third servant.
On a pushbike.
And he presents his master with a filthy dirty and rather crumpled envelope containing the original bankers’ order.
“I couldn’t face it, Master!” he explains.
“supposing it had all gone wrong
What would you have said to me?
You’re very harsh, and you do like your people to make you lots of money,
and I was too scared to try.
So I have kept it safe, and here you are!”

And the Master is seriously annoyed!
“Oh, look here!” he said.
“So you didn’t want to play the stock market or start a business, okay,
but couldn’t you at least have put it on deposit somewhere for me,
so I could have had the interest?
Just not good enough, I’m afraid.
Take him away!”

This story takes place in God's country, the Kingdom of Heaven.  I often think that Jesus struggles slightly when talking about the Kingdom,
trying to find an illustration that would make sense to his hearers,
talking of the tiny grain of mustard seed that grew to become
a huge shrub,
or the tiny bit of yeast that was needed to make the dough rise.
And as I'm sure you know, these stories didn’t say to us quite what they said to Jesus’ first hearers,
as mustard was a terrific weed, like stinging-nettles,
and nobody in their right mind would plant it deliberately.
And yeast –
or sourdough, more probably –
was not really associated with people of God,
since what you had at the holy feasts was unleavened bread,
which was then, by association, considered slightly more “proper” than ordinary bread.
And the thought of a woman baking it may well have turned people up a bit –
women tended to be rather “non-persons” in those days.

And, actually, it’s the same here.
Particularly for the third slave –
you what?
He should have put his money in the bank​?
To earn interest?
I don’t think so!
Jewish people in that time and place took very seriously the commandment that “thou shalt not lend out thy money upon usury”.
So here is the master telling the slave that he should have done just that?
Yikes!

So what does it all mean?
This whole story comes in a section of teaching about the End Times,
something we don’t really like to think about these days.
Jesus has been saying that nobody, not even he, knows the day and hour –
there will be all sorts of signs and symbols and symbolism, but they don’t necessarily mean anything.
And people will say “Oh, Jesus is coming on this date,” or “the end of the world is coming on that date”, but not to believe them.

He says nobody knows when it will happen –
and these days, increasingly, it’s or even if it will happen –
but the idea is to be prepared.
“Who,” Jesus asks,
“are faithful and wise servants?
Who are the ones the master will put in charge of giving the other servants their food supplies at the proper time?
Servants are fortunate if their master comes and finds them doing their job.
You may be sure that a servant who is always faithful will be put in charge of everything the master owns.”

And the Gospel for last week –
although you may not have thought about it as it was Remembrance Day –
was the story of the wise and foolish virgins,
and whether you would rather be with the wise virgins in the light,
or the foolish virgins in the dark....
well, not quite that, but you know what I mean.
Again, the sensible girls were prepared and ready –
the silly ones hadn’t even thought they might need to light lamps if it got late.

So again, Jesus is trying to draw pictures of things that don’t go into words very well;
he’s trying to make his hearers understand what it’s going to be like,
when he himself doesn’t have a very clear picture of it.
But one thing he does know –
we need to live as if he were never coming back,
but be prepared for him to return any second now!
It’s one of those Christian paradoxes that our faith is so full of.

It’s not just about what we do with our money, or with our time –
although obviously we need to make sure we are good stewards of both.
It’s maybe more, I think, about what we do with our relationship with God.

We are all, I expect, Christians here;
all people who enjoy a reciprocal relationship with their Creator.
And some people make the most of it!
Most of us do, I am quite sure.
We make a point of learning who we are, so we can be honest with God,
we make a point of learning from the Bible who God is,
and making a point of developing the relationship by spending time with God each day.
We don’t find it easy –
nothing worthwhile ever is easy –
and, of course, the ones who are really expert at it tend to make it look easy, which tends to make us feel inadequate.
But, of course, most of what we do to grow as a Christian is actually done by God;
our job is to be open to being grown –
and to use the “means of grace” that we have been given to do that.

But there are others around –
not here, I don’t suppose, not for one moment –
but I’m sure we know people who joyously responded to God’s call upon their life –
and then got stuck.
Didn’t grow, didn’t, maybe, even want to grow and change.
Stayed as baby Christians, still drinking milk when they should have been weaned on to meat, as St Paul puts it.
And maybe, one day, they will have to explain themselves, too.
“You had all these opportunities to become the person you were meant to be, but you wasted them.
Why?”

The good slaves, in this story, took what they were given and doubled it.
The bad one didn’t want to know, and buried his money.
It’s a picture –
and only a picture –
and must be taken alongside the other pictures we have of the end times.
But nevertheless, it is a picture we probably need to take seriously.
We need to allow God to work in us, to make us the people we have the potential to be, and maybe even to make us more than that.
We need to become what we can become, in God.
Much has been given to us already;
now we need to be open to God working in us.
Amen.

Lazarus and the Saints

 You will find the text of this sermon, which I have only slightly adapted, here  Tonight's service was on Zoom, so no location details!

Bible Sunday and Black History Month

 

This was shorter than usual because we were celebrating the end of Black History Month, so needed to make sure we didn't overrun too badly.  Which we didn't!

Today, we are celebrating the end of Black History month, 2023.
I hope that most of our liturgy is reflecting that, and we will have some more contributions to our celebration later on in the service.

It’s also Bible Sunday;
when I was a girl, this was celebrated during Advent, but they changed the calendar around some years ago now, so now it’s celebrated on this Sunday.
I had to learn the collect, the special prayer for the day, off by heart when I was a schoolgirl!
I used to love “help us so to hear them, to read, mark, learn and inwardly digest them….”

And it’s that which we have to do with the Scriptures, isn’t it?
Read, mark, learn and inwardly digest them,
until they become part of us, part of who we are, part of our lives.
We are told to let the Word of Christ dwell in us richly!

But, having said that, we do have to be aware that our reading of the Bible is always going to be flawed,
we’re always going to read it through the lens of our own prejudice,
our own experience, our own political viewpoint.
Or, if we read with the help of a daily commentary, of that commentator’s prejudice, experience, political viewpoint, and so on.

But, by and large, we want to internalise Scripture;
to let it dwell in us richly.
And I rather think the passage that [the reader] read to us earlier is one that we really need to internalise: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbour as yourself.”

Love.
Of course, there are all sorts of different kinds of love, and our English language, unusually, doesn’t have different words for the sort of love we give to our parents, our partners, our children, our friends, even strawberries or our teddy bear!
Greek does, which is helpful, and the word it uses for loving God is “agape”;
it’s not used anywhere else.
St Paul gives that wonderful definition of agape love in his letter to the Corinthians, you may remember:

“Love is patient;
love is kind;
love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude.
It does not insist on its own way;
it is not irritable or resentful;
it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth.
It bears all things,
believes all things,
hopes all things,
endures all things.
Love never ends.”

Pretty amazing, really.
This is the sort of love that Jesus was talking about, when he told us to love God with all of our being, and to love our neighbours as ourselves.

We need to be centred on God, not on ourselves.

But how do we do that?

After all, most people manage pretty well without God, and even those of us who try to be God’s people spend vast swathes of time doing other things,
sleeping, for one, or cooking, or working….

We are, of course, still God’s people while doing all those things,
but it’s not often at the forefront of our minds!

In John’s first letter, he equates loving God with loving our neighbour,
saying, basically, you can’t have one without the other.

“Those who say, `I love God', and hate their brothers or sisters, are liars
for those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen,
cannot love God whom they have not seen.
The commandment we have from him is this:
those who love God must love their brothers and sisters also.”

But then, just to get us even more confused, he says
“Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ has been born of God,
and everyone who loves the parent loves the child.
By this we know that we love the children of God,
when we love God and obey his commandments.”

So for John, loving God and loving our neighbour,
our brothers and sisters,
are one and the same thing.
And, indeed, that God's love for us is first and foremost –
our love for God is just a response to that.

And I think he's probably right.

We love, we are told, because God first loved us!
The love of God has been poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit.

And without God, our human loves can be desperately flawed.
Parents can be overly possessive of their children, not allowing them to grow and develop in their own way;
I don’t need to tell you how often romantic love can go wrong;
and even friendship can be more about excluding another person or group of people than anything else.

But if Love is the most important commandment in the Bible, then we mustn’t exclude anybody, for whatever reason.
Not even if they hold views we find abhorrent.
It’s not always easy, of course –
how do we pray for politicians whose views we loathe?
And how easy is it to forgive, and to love, those who have rejected us for whatever reason?
I know my experience is peanuts compared to what many of you have gone through, but I was rejected by my peers at boarding-school a lot of the time, and those were not always happy years.
And even though we are all friends now, over 50 years later, I still have to bite my tongue on occasion!
Loving and forgiving those who have hurt us, or those whose views we find abhorrent, or those who have inflicted gross damage on the world –
it really isn’t easy.
And I really think it’s only through God’s help that we can.

We are, we are told, to love our neighbours as ourselves;
and sometimes that is a case of “pity the poor neighbour”.
We are often either totally self-absorbed, or we fail to value ourselves as we should.
And, there again, it’s only through God’s help we can .


Just as we can’t love God without God’s having first loved us, so we can’t love our neighbours, or ourselves, without God’s help.
It’s all one, really.
We need to allow the word of God to dwell in us richly, to allow God the Holy Spirit to indwell us;
we need to allow the Spirit to grow us and change us and teach us to love.
Amen.

Terrorism, or what?

 

I ad-libbed the children's talk which makes up the first part of the recording.

What an incredibly nasty Gospel passage was set for today! I don’t like it one little tiny bit. But it’s there, it’s in Matthew’s Gospel, and it’s our Gospel reading for today, so we had better look at it, I think.

A king is holding a wedding-feast for his son. And, one presumes, his daughter-in-law, but she isn’t mentioned! I believe even in Orthodox Jewish weddings to this day the bride and groom celebrate separately, so perhaps that’s not as surprising as it sounds.

What is surprising, though, is that people didn’t want to come. The King sent out his servants to call them in, and they refused. And then when they were asked a second time, they even beat up the servants and killed them. So the King, in retaliation, sent his soldiers to burn down the city, and gets the servants to invite a whole different set of people, “good and bad alike”, who all jump at the chance to visit the royal palace. Or who are too scared not to, by that stage. But then, there is one bloke who isn’t properly dressed, and doesn’t justify himself, and isn’t just asked to leave, as you might expect, but bound hand and foot and cast into outer darkness.

Well, what’s it all about? The thing is, people tend to see the King who throws the party as God inviting everybody in in place of the Jews who refused Jesus’ invitation, and then the ones who are invited later are the ones who, like us, have said “Yes” to Jesus. But all that violence in the middle? Doesn’t sound like the Jesus I know, does it you? And what of the guy who was thrown out for not wearing the right clothes? Maybe he’s the one who tried to get in on his own merits, without putting on “the garment of salvation”.

But this story, with blood and gore everywhere, with the King seeming to be happy to kill everybody and burn their towns, even while letting the feast get cold – what is that saying about God, if we look on the King as representing God? What does it say about the Kingdom of Heaven?

St Luke, and some of the non-canonical Gospels, the ones that didn’t make the cut, tell the story in a very different way, where the party-giver is definitely God, there are no reprisals for those who chose not to come, but then the gaps are filled with anybody and everybody, no matter who they are, no matter what their physical condition. All are welcome. Now, that version of the story is giving a very different picture of God. So what’s Matthew trying to say. Why is his version the kind of image of God that can really damage our mental health, leaving us worried and fearful of “doing it wrong” and being thrown out. Or which can make us justify hating groups of people who are not like us. Or can make us justify using violence in God’s name.

Ah, but think a minute. Matthew is Jewish, writing for Jewish believers. And what was their experience of kings? Not the King of Heaven that we associate with kings – but the puppet kings installed by the brutal Roman regime. Maybe this story can be read another way. The king is brutal, so violence and killing become the norm in that society. Maybe the one who refused to wear a wedding garment, and who refused to justify himself, and who was bound and violently cast out – could that, could that, do you think, be Jesus? That is, after all, what we are told happened to him. He was the one who stood silently in front of his accusers, refusing to justify himself, and who was bound and taken to the shameful death of the cross.

If you have ears to hear, said Jesus, then hear. Maybe many of his followers were unwilling to see such a story as anything other than a picture of God at his most vengeful; maybe they liked seeing God like that. Maybe you do, too? One trouble with seeing God like that is that it makes salvation be down to us, not down to God. If we get it wrong, we’ll be chucked out.

Although one way of seeing the wedding garment, is the salvation that comes from God. We need to acknowledge that we can do nothing of ourselves to save ourselves, and we need to put on the “wedding garment” that Christ provides for us. We can’t be, and won’t be, accepted on our own merits. Acceptance is through Christ, and is unlimited. We will, of course, receive due recognition, I am sure: “Well done, thou good and faithful servant” – but it is through Christ we gain admittance to God’s country.

You can look at the story either way, of course. But all that violence – isn’t there enough violence in the world these days without having to see the rather cartoonish violence in the story Jesus told. As so often, it’s over the top – Jesus spoke Aramaic, which is a very over-the-top language. The king wasn’t very likely to abandon his feast, go and kill those who had killed his messengers and burn their towns to the ground, and then come back and expect to find his feast just as he had left it, after all!

St Paul, in the part of the letter to the Philippians that we also read earlier, reminds us that we should be filling our minds with “those things that are good and that deserve praise: things that are true, noble, right, pure, lovely, and honourable.” This doesn’t mean, of course, that we must close our eyes to the horrors that go on in this world – God forbid!

Even Paul is at his most practical at the start of the chapter, urging two of the stalwart women who run the church to get over themselves and sort out their differences, and he asks the bearer of the letter, and some of the other elders of the church, to help them do that. We’re not told what they were disagreeing about – whether it was an important point of doctrine, or just whose turn it was to arrange the flowers that week, or what was to be on the menu for the communal meal at Pentecost. Even the little things can assume undue importance at times!

But then he reminds us that we need to be joyful always in our union with Christ, and not to worry about anything. Well, that’s easier said than done, for a start! But the point is, Paul says, pray about it. Pray about the issues, bring them to God, being thankful that God is there to listen and to help. And you listen too, in case God wants you to be part of the answer to your prayer, as does often happen. And the more we can leave the issues with God, and focus on the good things, the more we will experience God’s peace.

Now, the word usually translated “peace” comes from the Hebrew word Shalom. And Shalom means far more than peace as in an absence of worry, although that too. It’s more than just an absence of war and quarrels, although them, too. It’s about wholeness. About things being the way they ought to be, but so seldom are.

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. That is the sort of peace that Paul says will “keep our hearts and minds in Christ Jesus”.

Now, you know as well as I do that we live in a broken world. The horrendous conflict that has suddenly sprung up, yet again, between Hamas and Israel over the past few days is just one of the many conflicts going on around the world. The war between Russia and Ukraine is still ongoing, even though the latest conflict has knocked it off the front pages. Afghanistan is still refusing women basic rights over their own bodies, as are parts of the USA, but Afghanistan goes further and refuses them most of their rights as human beings.
There is still trouble in Syria… and so it goes on.

And then there is the brokenness of God’s creation: climate change, pollution, extinctions and so on.

Nevertheless, St Paul says to pray, to thank God, and then to fill our minds with “those things that are good and that deserve praise: things that are true, noble, right, pure, lovely, and honourable.”

I’m not entirely sure that Jesus’ story in our Gospel reading comes under that heading! But if the person thrown out in chains for not wearing a wedding garment is Jesus, as there is a strong argument that he is, then that is something we can focus on.

The thing is, I think, that we need to be aware of the evil, bring it to God in prayer, and then put it aside for now. We need to listen to or read the news, of course we do, and pray as we read or listen, but we shouldn’t wallow in it! When our friends on social media post something that means they need our prayers, we should pray at once, so we don’t forget, and then move on. We need to be disciplined about the rabbit-holes we fall down on-line – some, of course, are wonderful, but others, not so much! And so it goes. Common-sense, really, but how many of us have any common sense? And we need to focus on peace, pray for peace, yet still aware that there will probably be no peace in our lifetimes.

And as for the story Jesus told – let’s not wallow in the bloodthirstiness and the nastiness, but let’s focus on the solitary figure, silent, bound, and cast out – for it is through him that we can know God as our heavenly Father, and experience his peace and wholeness. Amen.

With thanks to Nathan Nettleton of the South Yarra Community Baptist church in Melbourne, Australia, whose sermons, as published on Laughingbird.net, helped me enormously with this sermon.

Together in His name

“Where two or three are gathered together in My name,” said Jesus, “there am I with them.”

I expect you know that the Gospels were only written down about 50 or 60 years after Jesus’ death.
A lot of things happened during those years, of course,
and although we know how accurate oral transmission can be,
there are a few places where it looks as though an extraneous passage got inserted.
I don’t quite mean extraneous, I don’t think –
but a passage attributed to Jesus that perhaps wasn’t what he actually said,
but what the early Church thought he ought to have said.
And part of the passage we heard just now is, I think, one of those passages, mostly because it talks about the Church, a gathering of Christians –
and such a thing didn’t exist in Jesus’ day.
But whatever, it got into our Bibles, so we need to read it and learn from it.
And although my text is, as I said at the beginning, “Where two or three are gathered together in My name, there am I with them,” we do need to look at the whole passage, as “a text without a context is a pretext!”

The first part does seem, at first reading, extraordinary, though.
We know from elsewhere that Jesus tells us never to put limits on our forgiveness.
We know we must forgive, or it’s impossible for us to receive God’s forgiveness, we block ourselves off from it.

And we are told never to judge.
We’re told to sort out what’s wrong with ourselves first –
you remember how Jesus graphically told us to remove the very large log from our own eyes before we could possibly deal with the tiny speck that bothered us in someone else’s.

But we are human.
No matter how much we want to love our neighbours as ourselves, it’s difficult.
It’s easy enough to love suffering humanity en masse, to send a text to a certain number to give three pounds towards relieving some kind of community suffering somewhere else.
It’s easy enough to throw an extra box of tea-bags into the food bank box at the supermarket, or to donate to homeless charities.
It’s even relatively easy to do small things to lower your carbon footprint –
to take reusable produce bags to the supermarket, to be scrupulous about recycling, and so on.

Now, don’t get me wrong, all these are good and right and proper things to be doing, and we should probably all do them more than we actually do.
But they are all relatively easy –
the difficult bit comes when we have to start interacting with other people, and loving them.
“To love the world to me’s no chore.
My problem is that lot next door!”
That’s when we’re apt to forget to be loving, when we are apt to go our own way, when we’re apt to hurt people, most probably totally unintentionally.
The careless word, the accidental insult –
or even, sadly, the intentional one.

Now, obviously, if we realise we’ve hurt someone,
the thing to do is to apologise at once.
Sometimes there are times when we don’t really want to apologise –
they started it, it was their fault.
Well, even if it is, we are the ones who need to apologise, if only because it makes us bigger than them….
Well, perhaps not for that reason, but you know what I mean.

But what if it is they who hurt you?
The human thing to do is to hit out and hurt them back, but we’re not supposed to do that, and with God’s help we won’t.
This passage tells us what to do –
first, go and explain what has gone wrong,
and if they agree and apologise, all is well and no harm done.
Then you take a couple of friends along to witness that you had a problem and to try and help you be reconciled,
and then, finally, take it to the church.
The church, note –
not the world!
And then, the passage says, if they still won’t listen,
let them be to you as a tax gatherer or a gentile.
Which, on first reading, sounds as if you should shun them completely,
which was how Jewish people of the time behaved towards them.

But that’s not what Jesus did!
Remember the story of Levi, who was a tax collector, and Jesus called him to become one of the disciples.
Remember Zaccheus, who resolved to pay back anybody he had cheated after Jesus loved and forgave him and went to eat with him.
Remember how many times he talked with, and healed, Gentiles, non-Jews, people who observant Jews would have nothing to do with.

So what is the church to do with those who won’t see that they’ve hurt someone, or if they do see it, don’t care?
From Jesus’ example, it looks as though we have to go on loving them, trusting them, and caring for them.
Heaven, as one paraphrase puts it, will back us up.
Obviously, there are very rare occasions when steps have to be taken,
if a child or a vulnerable adult is at risk, for example,
but mostly things can be put right without that.
And even when steps do have to be taken –
and the Methodist church has systems in place to organise such steps,
so our safeguarding people know what to do –
we still have a duty to love and care for the perpetrator.

Now, the next part of the passage is really not easy to understand.
If, says Jesus, or the Church speaking in Jesus’ name, two or three agree on anything in prayer, it will be granted.
But we know that, with the best will in the world, this doesn’t always happen.
We have all seen times when our prayers, far from being answered,
appear to have gone no further than the ceiling.
But then again, were we only looking for one answer to our prayer?
Were we telling God what to do, as, I don’t know about you, but I find I’m rather apt to.
Were we just talking at God, and not trying to listen,
trying to be part of what God is doing in the world?
All too easily done, I’m afraid.

But the final sentence –
ah, now that brings hope.
“For where two or three gather in my name, there am I with them.”

You see, in the Jewish faith, you need what’s called a minyan, a minimum of ten people –
in many traditions, ten men, not people.
If there are only nine of you, you can’t go ahead with the service.
But not for we Christians.
We know that even if there are only a couple of us,
Jesus will be there with us and enabling our worship.
I think I told you that last time I was with you, when the congregation was rather smaller than usual because of the Cup Final!
But Jesus was definitely with us.


“Where two or three are gathered together in My name,” said Jesus, “there am I with them.”

I don’t know about you, but I found that to be very true during the pandemic, during those long, weary months when we weren’t allowed to meet together, and when we could, there were huge restrictions.
Last time I preached on these passages, it was, I think, the first Sunday we had been allowed back to church in five long months.
We had to sign in, and in some churches we even had to book a seat!
We had to sit miles apart from anybody except our own families, we had to wear masks, we weren’t allowed to sing, or to take an offering (there was usually a box by the door for those who had brought one), or even share the Peace or make our Communions as we were accustomed to do.
But it was a lot better than not meeting at all, which had been the case for so many months, and was to be again the following winter.

Many of us lost loved ones during that hard time, either to Covid-19 or to other illnesses.
Many of us had Covid ourselves, and although some recovered quickly,
others, myself included, were still feeling the after-effects a good two years later.
Many of us had mental health issues during that time.
Many, if not most, of us wondered where on earth God was in all this.

But God was there.
There in the many different ways we struggled to be church together –
the recorded services, the Zoom services, eventually, the livestreams.
Some of those continue to this day –
we now have two Zoom services weekly in the Circuit, the Wednesday evening Compline and the Sunday evening service which, although it is Clapham who run it, welcomes any of us who care to log in.

But most of this is, we hope, ancient history.
There may or may not be another pandemic in our lifetimes –
I hope and pray there won’t be.
Eventually, there will be one, of course;
but I hope not for a long while yet!
But what is total, current, today’s news, is that Jesus is here with us, right now this minute.
We are gathered together in his name, and he has promised that where two or three –
or a dozen or so, in this case –
are gathered together, he is there with us.

We have been told what to do if we have a problem with someone else who refuses to acknowledge it, or to clear the air.
Although I’ll just remind you here that Jesus said that if you know someone has a problem with you, or you with them,
you really ought to make it right before you come to the Lord’s table together.
But that, as this passage points out, isn’t always practical.
All we can really do is pray for God’s grace.
It’s not as if church quarrels were anything new –
even St Paul has to tell two of the women in the church at Philippi to get over themselves and get their acts together!
They happen.
They have always happened.
And they probably always will happen.

But Jesus is there with us, no matter how many people’s backs we’ve put up.
Jesus is there with us because we are gathered in his name.
And this, of course, means we can’t actually exclude anyone!
How can we be gathered in Jesus’ name and exclude anybody from that gathering?
We can’t, of course.
Not even people like tax-gatherers or pagans!
Jesus would never have turned his back on such people unless they had made it very, very, very clear that they wanted nothing at all to do with him, and how can we do differently?

“Where two or three are gathered together in My name,” said Jesus, “there am I with them.”
And it doesn’t matter what we are doing in His name,
whether we’re attending public worship,
or visiting someone who is ill,
or helping at the food bank,
or any other form of community service.
Or even being at work or school, or at home.
If we do it in Jesus’ name, and if there are other people involved, he is there in the midst of it all!

Amen.