Patrick and Butterflies

 A talk in two parts at All Age Worship.  Not that anybody there was under 50, but they seem to have enjoyed it and got something from it.

I do apologise for the appalling coughing fit I was struck with at the end of the first part of the sermon!  No idea what got to me, but something did.  I should fast forward past that point, were I you!

Once upon a time, long, long ago, a boy was born in a small town in Scotland. His name was Maewyn Succat. For the first sixteen years of his life he grew up in a happy and stable family, but when he was sixteen, something dreadful happened! Pirates raided his village, and carried Maewin, and probably other boys, too, off into slavery in Ireland.

And for six whole years, Maewin had to belong to someone else, not free to be his own person. He was very lonely, so he turned to God for help, and learnt to love God and to pray pretty much constantly, listening to God and chatting to him.

After six years, though, Maewin was able to escape to France, where he spent many years studying and learning what the great Christian fathers had thought and taught about Jesus. Sometime during those years he was baptised, and took the name we know him by best: Patrick. He was ordained a priest, and then made a Bishop, and then God called him to go back to Ireland – the place where he had been a slave, remember? And he went, and spent the next 30 years or so telling the people of Ireland about God, and about Jesus. He died on 17 March in the year 462, and is buried in the grounds of Down Cathedral. And every year, we celebrate him on 17 March. In America they even dye their rivers green, and their beer! And some of us – me included – like to wear something green, just because.

But there’s more to celebrating St Patrick than that! Patrick trusted God, and wrote a lovely prayer, now turned into a rather long hymn. I quoted four lines right at the start of the service, and here is another verse.

I bind unto myself today
The power of God to hold and lead,
His eye to watch, his might to stay,
His ear to hearken to my need.
The wisdom of my God to teach,
His hand to guide, his shield to ward,
The word of God to give me speech,
His heavenly host to be my guard.

Patrick trusted God, and looked after God’s people in Ireland. We are going to sing a hymn reminding us to look after God’s people wherever we find them. “Brother, sister, let me serve you”. It’s number 611 if you want to use the hymn book.

---oo0oo---

Apart from St Patrick, today is all about butterflies!
First of all, we are going to watch a video,
telling us a story you know very well –
you probably remember it being read to you, or perhaps you read it to younger brothers and sisters, or to your own children.



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

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

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

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

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

The seeds had to die.

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

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

Someone he knew had had a baby lately;
Jesus remembered this:
“When a woman is in labour, she has pain, because her hour has come.
But when her child is born, she no longer remembers the anguish because of the joy of having brought a human being into the world.”

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

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

We know that God raised Jesus from death, and because of that, we have eternal life.
But that didn't stop it being really scary for Jesus.
You remember how he spent all night in the park, praying that God would make him not have to go through with it.
But he had to, and he knew he had to.
Because if he hadn’t died, he could not have been raised from the dead, and could not have made us right with God.
I expect St Patrick was very scared when he was sold into slavery.
We know that he was very lonely, so he learnt to pray, and turned to God for comfort.
And then, when he was able to leave Ireland and go to France,
that must have been scary, too.
However much he hated Ireland, change is always scary,
and he didn’t know what France was going to be like.
And I should think he was even more apprehensive when God asked him to go back to Ireland and bring the Good News of Jesus to the people there.

But Patrick did what God asked him to do.
He said “Goodbye” to his old life;
he died to it, if you like, and went bravely ahead into the new life God was calling him to.

Jesus did what God asked him to do.
We are just beginning the season called Passiontide, when we think about how Jesus went forward to his death, and through death to the glorious resurrection we will be celebrating on Easter Day.

But what does it mean for us?
Are we facing any changes in our lives?
Life is full of change, isn’t it?
Some changes are gradual, others sudden.
Some –
many, perhaps, are expected;
others come out of the blue.
But even the expected changes can be frightening –
it’s scary to move out of your parents’ home and live on your own for the first time, for instance.
And growing old is most definitely not for wimps!
But we know we have to grow and change;
we can’t stagnate, any more than an egg can stay and egg,
or a caterpillar not transform into a butterfly.
But the joy of it is, Jesus was there first!

Here, again, is St Patrick:
Christ be with me, Christ within me,
Christ behind me, Christ before me,
Christ beside me, Christ to win me,
Christ to comfort and restore me,
Christ beneath me, Christ above me,
Christ in quiet, Christ in danger,
Christ in hearts of all that love me,
Christ in mouth of friend and stranger.

As we face changes and new growth in our lives, let’s pray that we learn to recognise Christ in all around us, as Patrick tried to do. Amen.

What do you want with us, Jesus of Nazareth?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I want you to let me love you.”

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

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

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

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

“I want you to let me love you.

I want you to let me heal you.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Samuel

 

The story of Samuel in the Temple is an old friend, isn’t it?
I was amazed, when I came to have another look at it,
that it was actually a much darker story than I remembered.
We all know the bit about Samuel waking up in the night and thinking Eli has called him,
and Eli eventually clicking that God was trying to speak to Samuel....
but what is the context?
And what, actually, did God want to say?

It all started, of course, with Samuel’s mother, whose name was Hannah.
She was married to a man called Elkanah, and, in fact, she was his senior wife.
But her great sadness was that she had no children,
and her co-wife, called Penninah, did.
Elkanah actually loved Hannah more than he loved Penninah,
and although I don’t suppose he minded for his own sake that she had no children, he minded for her sake.

And, we are told, whenever Elkanah went to the Temple to make sacrifices, he gave Hannah a double portion.
And one day, Hannah, in the Temple, is just overcome by the misery of it all,
and pours out her heart to God –
I’m sure you’ve been there and done that;
I know I have.
And Eli, the priest, thought she was drunk, seeing her mumbling away like that.

It was rather a bad time in Israel’s history.
I don’t know if it ever occurred to you –
it hadn’t to me until quite recently –
but this is not the Temple in Jerusalem that Jesus would have known;
the first Temple in Jerusalem wouldn’t be built until the reign of King Solomon, about seventy or eighty years in the future.
This Temple was in Shiloh, and really, it was the place where the Ark of the Covenant resided.
And Eli is the priest in the Temple.
Now, back then, being a priest was something that only certain families could do;
and if your father was a priest, you usually were, too.
It’s actually only within quite recent history that what you do with your life isn’t determined by what your father did –
and isn't it the case that people are finding it increasingly hard to get a better education than their parents, and perhaps do different things?
Anyway, back then, you followed in your father’s profession,
and if your father was a priest, as Eli was, then you would expect to be one, too.

Unfortunately, Eli’s sons were not really priestly material.
They abused the office dreadfully –
taking parts of the sacrifices that were meant to be burnt for God alone,
sleeping with the women who served at the entrance to the temple.
I don’t think these women were prostitutes –
temple prostitution was definitely a part of some religions in the area,
but I don’t think it ever was part of Judaism.
These women would have been servants to Eli and his family, I expect,
and considered that service as part of their devotion to God.
And perhaps, too, they helped people who had come to make sacrifices and so on.
Whatever, Hophni and Phineas, Eli’s sons, shouldn’t have been sleeping with them,
and they shouldn’t have been disrespecting the sacrifices, either.

There had been a prophecy that the Lord would not honour Eli’s family any more, and that Hophni and Phineas would both die on the same day,
and a different family would take over the priesthood.
Eli had tried to tell his sons that their behaviour was unacceptable, but they hadn’t listened, and one rather gets the impression that he had given up on them.
He was not a young man, by any manner of means.

And now he had this child to bring up, Samuel, first-born of the Hannah whom he had accused of being drunk.
Hannah had lent her first-born child to the Lord “as long as he lives”,
since God had finally granted her request and sent her children –
unlike some of the other childless women in the Bible,
people like Sarah or Elisabeth,
God gave her more than one child in the end.
So Samuel, her first-born, was lent to God, and grew up in the Temple.

I had always somehow imagined the Temple as being very like
the Temple in Jerusalem, but, of course, it can’t have been.
It was probably just an ordinary house, but with the main room reserved for the altar of the Lord and the Ark of the Covenant.
Samuel sleeps in there, you notice, and Eli has his own room at the back somewhere.
And I imagine Hophni and Phineas have rooms of their own, too.

I do think that the first verse of our reading is one of the saddest there is;
“The word of the Lord was rare in those days;
visions were not widespread.”
“The word of the Lord was rare in those days;
visions were not widespread.”
It sounds like a very bleak time, doesn’t it?

Samuel, we are told, did not know the Lord.
He didn’t know the Lord.
This in spite of ministering in the Temple daily.
He wasn’t able to offer sacrifices, of course –
he was not, and couldn’t ever be, a priest, as he came from the wrong tribe.
But he would have helped Eli get things ready,
he would perhaps have made the responses.
He would certainly have known what it was all about.
But he did not know the Lord, in those days.
The word of the Lord had not yet been revealed to him.

So when God calls him in the night, he has no idea what is happening,
and thinks that Eli is in need of help.
And it isn’t until the second or third time that Eli realises what is happening, either.
But once he does, Eli explains that it might be that God is wanting to speak to Samuel, and he should say “Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening!”

And then what?
No message of hope or encouragement such as anybody would want to hear.
In fact, quite the reverse:

“See, I am about to do something in Israel that will make both ears of anyone who hears of it tingle.
On that day I will fulfil against Eli all that I have spoken concerning his house, from beginning to end.
For I have told him that I am about to punish his house forever,
for the iniquity that he knew, because his sons were blaspheming God,
and he did not restrain them.
Therefore I swear to the house of Eli that the iniquity of Eli’s house shall not be expiated by sacrifice or offering forever.”

There will be no escape for Eli;
he could, and should, have stopped his sons from being blasphemous,
from disrespecting the offerings of God’s people,
from sleeping with the temple servants.
I get the feeling Eli has rather given up, don’t you?
When Samuel tells him what the Lord has said, his reaction is simply,
“It is the Lord;
let him do what seems good to him.”
And in the end, just to round off the story, both sons were killed in a battle against the Philistines,
and Eli died of a heart attack or something very similar that same day.
And the Philistines captured the Ark of the Covenant.

All very nasty –
not one of the nicer stories in the Bible, I don’t think.
But what does it say to us?
What do we have in common with these people at the end of the Bronze Age, or early Iron Age, I’m not quite sure which they are?

The thing is, of course, we do have rather too much in common with them.
This is a time when the Word of God is not heard too much in our land.
It is a time when churches, and, indeed, synagogues and mosques, too, are disrespected;
synagogues and mosques even have to have security at the entrance, just for when people are coming to worship.
Thank goodness that isn’t yet the case with our churches, and pray God it will never be.
But even ministers and priests have been known to abuse their position – I have not heard of any rabbis or imams doing so, but I shouldn't be in the least surprised.

I suppose that there is nothing new;
every age has probably said the same of itself.
We know that we are, naturally, sinners, and unless God help us we shall continue to sin.

Samuel served in the Temple but he didn’t, then, know God.
Eli had given up;
Hophni and Phineas set him a poor example.
It must have been confusing for Samuel –
what was it all about?
And then when God did finally speak to him,
it wasn’t a comforting message of cheer and strength,
but a reminder that God’s judgement on the whole shrine and the priestly family who ran it was going to happen.

But good things came from it, too.
Samuel became known and respected as a prophet and as a judge in Israel.
He couldn’t be a priest, as he was from the wrong tribe,
but he could be, and was, a prophet who was widely respected and loved.
It was he who anointed Saul as king, and then David.

So there is hope, even in the cloudiest, stormiest days.
The temple of Shiloh was abandoned, and the Ark never returned there.
But the Ark did return, and eventually the Temple was built in Jerusalem.
Samuel became one of the most famous prophets of them all.

Samuel said “Yes” to God.
He was willing to hear God’s message,
no matter how unpleasant it had to be,
no matter how traumatic.
He was willing to hear, and he was willing to speak it out.
And so God used him to establish the Kings of Israel and then of Judah –
perhaps not the most successful monarchy ever,
but from King David’s line came, of course, Jesus.

It is never totally dark.
God ended Eli’s family’s service to him, yes;
but the Temple endured, and was eventually rebuilt in Jerusalem,
bigger and better than before.
The Ark of the Covenant was taken into captivity –
but it came back, and remained in the Temple until it was no longer needed, as God made a new covenant with us.

When we go through difficult times,
and I think we all do, whether as individuals,
as churches,
or as a society,
it’s good to think back on this story.
God may be bringing one thing to an end;
but a new thing will, invariably, follow, just as spring follows winter.

The difficult thing, of course, is going on trusting Him when all does seem dark, when we can’t see how things are going to work out.
It's been terribly dark just lately, hasn't it, with the wars in Ukraine and Israel threatening our own world.
But remember Paul’s letter to the Romans, chapter 8;
“And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.”
I do think that we can ask to see how God is going to work a bad situation for good;
it’s amazing how that can and does happen.
Perhaps one day we will see the good that God has worked out of the war between Russia and Ukraine.
Perhaps one day we will see the good that God has worked out of the conflict between Israel and Hamas.

And we need, like Samuel, to listen to God, and to do what He asks of us, no matter how difficult.
Are you willing to do this for God?
Am I willing?
It isn’t easy, is it?

Thanks be to God that we need do none of this in our own strength, but in the power of the Holy Spirit, who strengthens us.
Amen!

Gold, Frankincense and Myrrh

 

What a very odd story this is, about the wise men coming to Jesus.
For a start, you only find it in Matthew's gospel, and not in Luke's.
To carry on with, it's quite difficult to reconcile the course of events in Matthew with those in Luke –
for instance, Luke seems to think that the family go straight back to Nazareth, stopping off at Jerusalem on the way to present Jesus in the temple,
whereas Matthew seems to think they lived in Bethlehem all the time,
fled to Egypt to escape Herod's vengeance after the wise men's visit,
and only then settled in Nazareth.

I don't suppose it matters much, really, though, because we have also got an incredible amount of tradition mixed up with the stories –
the ox and the ass in the stable, for instance;
you don't find those in either gospel account.
Nor, in the one we have just heard read, were there three wise men!
It doesn't say how many there were.
Tradition, of course, has made of them kings;
Caspar, Melchior and Balthazar.
But that's not what the Bible says.

And it is only tradition that identifies gold with kingship,
frankincense with divinity, or godhead,
and myrrh with death.
But seeing as we all have our own mental image of the Nativity stories,
it doesn't matter very much.
It wouldn't really be a Christmas crib without donkeys and oxen, would it?
And it's a lot easier to depict Eastern potentates than Zoroastrian astrologers, or whatever they really were.
And if we see gold, frankincense and myrrh as equivalent to kingship, godhead and death –
well, why not?
It helps us remember a bit Who Jesus is,
and anything that does that is always helpful.

I have heard people comment that the wise men might have given more useful gifts, but, in fact, back in the day what they gave would have been very useful.
After all, gold is always useful, and when the Holy Family had to flee into Egypt, as Matthew tells us they did,
they would have needed gold to help cover their expenses.
And although you can get both frankincense and myrrh very cheaply in Brixton these days –
Brixton Wholefoods usually has them in their spice jars –
back in the day they were very rich and rare.
And useful.
Frankincense isn't just about saying that Jesus is divine,
it's also very calming and soothing,
and it helps to heal chest infections and coughs.
You can either burn it as incense –
and it is an essential component of the incense that some Christians like to burn in worship –
or you can buy the essential oil and dilute it to massage yourself with.
It's also used in face creams for its anti-ageing properties.

Myrrh, too –
rarer than rare, back then –
is very healing.
When I was growing up, there was always a little bottle of tincture of myrrh in the medicine cabinet in case anybody had toothache –
tasted vile, but did the trick.
It's still a component part of some toothpastes, even today.
And I believe it can be used to heal skin irritations, things like that –
not the toothpaste, of course, but the essential oil, or a cream containing it!
And, as we know, it was used in embalming the dead, and it's seen as symbolic of death.

So you see they would have been useful gifts, as well as symbolic.

But why does it matter?
What is it all about?

Partly, of course, it is about giving to Jesus.
The kings, or wise men, or whatever they were, brought gold, frankincense and myrrh to the one "Born to be King of the Jews",
even though they were not themselves Jewish.
Three of the most valuable commodities in the ancient world,
and not only valuable, but very useful, too.
I don't know what we would think of as the three most valuable commodities of today - probably something like platinum and uranium and petrol, which, except for the last, wouldn't be quite so useful!
Nor quite so symbolic, either –
the tradition of kingship, divinity and death may be only a tradition, not biblical, but it is very powerful.

But then, that's not really what's wanted today, is it?
What God wants of us today is –
well, basically, nothing less than all of us.
Not just our money, not just our time, but our whole selves.
And that's scary!
Next week, Rev’d Rita will be leading you in the Covenant service, when we recommit ourselves to being God's person in the year to come.
Again, scary!

Very scary.
But the thing is, that's actually only part of the Epiphany.
The posh name for it is “The manifestation of Christ to the Gentiles”.
The Gentiles.
And, when you come to think about it, the Magi couldn't really have been more outsiders if they'd tried with both hands!
They were, it is thought, some kind of astrologers, diviners,
just exactly the sort of person Jews were forbidden to be.
They came from the East, probably from present-day Iraq or Iran,
not countries with whom Israel has ever had a peaceful and friendly relationship!

The people to whom God chose to make himself known in the person of the infant Jesus were outsiders.
Rank outsiders.
Apparently not just the Magi,
but also the shepherds whom Luke tells us about were total outsiders,
far from the comfortable religious establishment of the day.

And again and again we see this in the New Testament, don't we?
It's the outsiders who get special mention,
the tax-gatherers,
the prostitutes,
the quislings,
the terrorists,
the members of the occupying power.

Even after the Ascension, it is still the outsiders who get special mention –
Cornelius, for instance, or the Ethiopian treasury official.

And us.

What the story of the Epiphany tells us is that we are loved.
Loved to the uttermost.
No matter who we are, what background we come from,
and whether we love God or whether we don't.
We are still loved.
Don't ever believe the fundamentalist groups who want to tell you that God hates Muslims, or gay people, or whoever –
it's simply not true.
Even if you were to say “Oh, bother this for a game of soldiers,
I'm never going near a church again!”
God would still love you.
Even if you were to go out and murder someone in cold blood,
or order your army to attack innocent people.

God might hate it that you did that, but God would still love you.
God might, or might not, have approved of the way the Magi worshipped him, but
he still loved them, and caused their journey and their gifts to be recorded in history.

I don't know if that makes it any easier to give ourselves to God or not.
It's difficult, isn't it?
And I think sometimes we stress about it unnecessarily.
We are always going to get it wrong.
That stands to reason.
We are, after all, only human, and the whole point of the Incarnation, of Jesus becoming a human being, was so that we could make mistakes and get it wrong and it wouldn't matter too much.
After all, salvation was God's idea, not ours.

We sometimes forget that, don't we?
We tend to live as though we have to get it right, or we won't be Jesus' people any longer.
But that's not so.
After all, what are we saved by?
What Jesus did for us on the Cross, or by our own faith?
I rather think it is what Jesus did for us that saves us!

But then, if we are saved by what Jesus did for us, why bother?
Why give expensive and valuable gifts,
like gold, and frankincense and myrrh,
or even our own selves?
Isn't the answer because Jesus is worth it?
Those of us who are parents know something of what it must have cost God to send his only son to earth as a helpless human baby.
We may even glimpse, sometimes, something of what Jesus must have lost, limiting himself to a human body.
Jesus is definitely worth all we can give to him, and then some!
And, more than that, Jesus makes it worth our while giving to him!
Because we are loved, because Jesus loved us enough to give up his whole life for us, then anything we can give is accepted with love, with joy, and is transformed into something greater.
Amen.

It takes a village

Some years ago now, R and I went to Avignon for a holiday during the first week of January. As holidays go, it was a dismal failure, because I had flu, the hotel was horrible, and it snowed! But one thing was very good, and that was that in the Town Hall, they had a Christmas crib.

On Monday, you may remember, K showed us some pictures of various Christmas cribs, and there was an exhibition of them at Clapham church a few weeks ago. But in Provence they do things a bit differently, as this picture shows: It’s a whole village. It’s not a very high-resolution picture, but there are lots of little figures, not just the Holy Family, although they are there, too, but all the villagers going around their daily business. I took this picture, which is a much better resolution, at an exhibition of cribs in a church in Alsace a couple of weeks ago.

It doesn’t show the village in quite the same detail, but just look at all the people! You’ve got the Holy Family, of course, and then there is another stable with what looks like pigs in it – improbable, really, as Jewish people don’t eat pork or pig products. But you have all the villagers going on with their lives. I couldn’t spend as long as I wanted looking at it, as time was getting on and we needed to catch a bus back to our campsite, but it’s one of those things that the more you look, the more you see. There’s someone with his cart, and someone setting out to go fishing or sailing in a dinghy, and lots of people just standing around and chatting; a water-carrier is going over the bridge, and so on.

I love this Provençal tradition. You see, unlike many crib traditions, it reminds us that Bethlehem was, and is, a village, and Mary and Joseph were not isolated. We tend to think of them as travelling alone – just Mary, Joseph and the donkey – but of course they would have gone to Bethlehem with a group of other travellers; it wasn’t safe, else. And realistically, the manger would have been on the step separating the animal part of the house from the human part, and there would probably have been a great many women, mostly relations, helping Mary with the birth and afterwards. We don’t think of animals as sharing living-space with humans, as we only do that with our pets, but of course the cattle and horses or donkeys would have helped keep the house warm in the winter, and was the norm back in the day.

Yes, there were signs that this wasn’t just another human baby being born at a most inconvenient time. Yes, the shepherds came to visit – but they might well have been family, don’t you think? And yes, Anna and Simeon did respond to the promptings of God’s Spirit, and knew that they had seen their salvation. But from the human point of view, Mary and Joseph were just doing what all Jewish families did – they had their son circumcised at eight days old, and then, at forty days old, they took him to the Temple to redeem him from God – the first and the best of everything belongs to God, so that parents would redeem him by paying a small sum and having ritual prayers said over him, these always invoking Elijah. Everybody did that, if they could.

And then they went back to Nazareth – again, travelling in a party for safety – and Jesus would have grown up in an extended family, lots of aunts and uncles and cousins around, and, in due course, brothers and sisters. He would have learnt to roll over, and to sit up, and in due course to stand and walk, and talk, and be potty-trained; he’d have had to learn when not to talk, and when he needed to sit still and listen. He’d have gone to school with the other kids his age, and learnt to read and write, especially the Scriptures. He’d probably have hung round Joseph, and learnt basic carpentry – and probably some interesting words to say when he hit is thumb with a hammer!

And each year they would go to Jerusalem, to the Temple. Again, they would travel in groups and caravans. At first Jesus would be carried on his father’s back, and then kept close to his parents, but as he grew older, he’d be off with his friends, running ahead and being told not to go out of sight, or lagging behind and being told to keep up. They’d gather round the camp fire in the evening and sing the traditional songs.

And then the kids were coming twelve years old. Now, in Jewish circles, you were considered a man at the age of 13, and from then on could be asked to read, and comment on, the Scriptures at any time. These days they have a ceremony called a “Bar Mitzvah”, or a “Bat Mitzvah” for girls, where the child in question reads a passage from Scriptures, translates it, and then preaches on it – my daughter went to a friend’s daughter’s Bat Mitzvah last term, and was very impressed by her performance. They also have a party, either immediately afterwards or later the same day.

In Jesus’ day, they didn’t have the ceremony, but every boy – not girls, back in the day, alas – every boy approaching his 13^th birthday knew he could be called on at any time after his birthday. Their teachers would have been focussing on this during the school year, and probably some of the boys were getting nervous.

That year, they all went up to Jerusalem as usual, and attended the Passover festivities, and then gathered together to go home again. And it wasn’t until next day they discovered that there Jesus wasn’t! His parents had assumed he was off with his friends as usual, but suddenly, horrifyingly, nobody had seen him. His parents rushed back to Jerusalem – they didn’t like to go on their own, but this was an emergency – and found him still in the Temple, deep in discussion with the scribes.

You see, as Jesus had studied the Scriptures, he became engrossed in them. God helped them become real to him. And, of course, Jesus had endless questions. I'm sure his parents did their best to answer him, but perhaps they didn't know all that much themselves. And his teachers, perhaps, didn’t have the time they would have liked to answer his questions – or perhaps he wanted to go more deeply into these things than they cared to do in an academic environment. And when he reached Jerusalem that year, he found all that, for then, he was seeking with the scribes in the Temple. They knew. They could answer his questions, in the way that the folks back home in Nazareth could not. They could deal with his objections, listen to him, wonder at his perspicacity at such a young age.

I hope the scribes didn’t laugh at him; it's not clear from the text, but they might have. But probably not, if his questions were sensible and to the point.

And Jesus, typically adolescent, totally forgets about going home, forgets that his parents will have kittens when they find he's not with them, forgets to wonder how he's going to get home, or even where he's going to sleep – or, perhaps, thinks a vague mention of his plans was enough. Anyway, Aunt Elizabeth and Uncle Zach will put him up, he’s quite sure.

And when his parents finally find him, like any adolescent, he says “You don’t understand!” And, rather rudely, “I have to be about my Father’s business!” Poor Joseph – not very kind, was it?

We aren’t told what happened next, whether they hurried to catch up with their original caravan, or had to wait until the next one was going in that direction. We aren’t told whether Jesus was grounded for a few days when they did get home, or what.

Come to that, we aren’t told whether he actually knew anything about who he was. He’d probably grown up in the normal rough-and-tumble of village life, but then, when they started studying the Scriptures in good earnest, something came alight in him. He began to catch glimpses of God, of That Which Is, of the Thought that Thought the World… and he longed and longed to know more. Later on, of course, he would realise that searching the Scriptures was not enough. Remember what he said to the Pharisees: “You search the scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that testify on my behalf. Yet you refuse to come to me to have life."  He knew that you needed more than just the words on the page – but at twelve years old, this was what had intrigued him, fascinated him, to the point of ignoring anything else.

But why does this matter? For me, it’s about Jesus being human as well as divine. He didn’t come fully formed from his father’s head, like some of the Greek or Roman gods are alleged to have done. He didn’t grow up in splendid isolation, just with his parents, and later, with his mother alone. Even if, as it appears from Matthew’s gospel, the family had lived in Bethlehem until they had had to flee into exile, they would probably have resettled in Nazareth because they had family there, rather than just choosing it at random. The thing is, he grew up in the midst of other people. They say it takes a village to raise a child, and Jesus grew up in that sort of village! He had lots of examples to follow, both of how to behave and of how not to. I hope he didn’t know how special he was, not until much later. But he did grow up loving God.

It’s not always easy, at this distance, to see the human Jesus, is it? We see him as divine – and so he is, but he is also human. His experiences may not have been exactly the same as ours, as he grew up in a very different culture. All the same, if he was 13 years old today, he’d be glued to his phone, getting WhatsApp messages from his friends every few minutes, spending hours making a 12-days-of-Christmas chocolate calendar for his parents, grumbling that he and his friends aren’t allowed to go to Camden Town without a grownup – oh no, wait, that’s my 13-year-old grandson, but you get the picture! And I do think it’s important to see Jesus as human as well as divine, because it makes him – at least, I find it does – much more approachable, much more real, much more able to empathise with me, and plead my cause with God. He’s not just the baby in the manger; he’s not just the adolescent boy following his obsessions to the exclusion of all else; at that, he’s not even the still figure on the Cross. He is any and all of those things, and he is our Lord and Saviour. Amen.

Advent 4

 

So, what day is it today? Christmas Eve. And tomorrow it’s Christmas Day. I bet you’re all getting excited, aren’t you?

What are you going to do tonight? Hang up your stockings. Santa’s on his way – my Santa tracker says he’s (wherever he is).

Well, in church we normally think about Jesus’ being born in Bethlehem, and today’s reading told us how the angel came to Mary and asked her if she would give birth to Jesus, and how Mary very bravely said yes she would, trusting that God would look after her, and how Jesus would turn the world upside-down. But you know that story – you’ve heard it lots of times before, so I’m not going to retell it today. I’ve got a quite different story to tell you, so settle down and listen.

Once upon a time, long, long ago, in a land far away, a little boy was born. Not Jesus – this was a couple of hundred years later, in a land called Patra, one of the places St Paul visited on his missionary journeys. So it’s not too surprising that this little boy’s parents were followers of Jesus, and the little boy grew up to be a follower, too.

His parents were rich, by the standards of their day, and when they died when the boy was quite young, he inherited all their money. But because he loved Jesus, he didn’t think it right to keep the money for himself, and began to give it away to the poor and needy in the area.

He dedicated his whole life to God, and was made Bishop of Myra while still a young man. One famous story about him tells of a poor man with three daughters, whom he could not hope to marry off as he had nothing to give for their dowries, something that was considered vital back in the day. And the future for unmarried women back then was bleak – slavery was probably the best option. So this young Bishop, anonymously, threw three purses of gold, one for each daughter, through the window of their house, and the purses landed in the shoes the girls had put to dry by the fire.

There are lots of other stories about him – some of them probably legendary rather than absolutely true. One story, which may or may not be true, tells how during a famine in Myra, the bishop worked desperately hard to find grain to feed the people. He learned that ships bound for Alexandria with cargos of wheat had anchored in Andriaki, the harbour for Myra. The bishop asked the captain of the fleet to sell some grain from each ship to relieve the people's suffering. The captain said he couldn’t because the cargo was "meted and measured." He must deliver every bit as he would be responsible for any shortage. The Bishop assured the captain there would be no problems when the grain was delivered. Finally, reluctantly, the captain agreed to take one hundred bushels of grain from each ship. The grain was unloaded and the ships continued on their way.

When they arrived in Alexandria and the grain was unloaded, it weighed exactly the same as when it was put on board! No shortages at all! We are told that all the emperor's ministers worshipped and praised God with thanksgiving for God's faithful servant!

Back in Myra, the Bishop distributed grain to everyone in Lycia and no one was hungry. The grain lasted for two years, until the famine ended. There was even enough grain to provide seed for a good harvest.

The Bishop, of course, was made a saint when he died. And the stories of his miracles didn’t stop coming. One rather splendid story concerns a small boy snatched away by pirates while the townsfolk were celebrating the Bishop’s feast-day. The boy, called Basilios, was made a cup-bearer to the ruler, as he couldn’t understand the language so couldn’t gossip. And he waited on the ruler with a lovely golden cup containing the finest wines, and so on. This went on for a year, while his poor parents grieved for him, thinking they would never see him again. But then, on the Saint’s feast-day, they were praying at home when quite suddenly Basilios reappeared, still clasping the king’s golden cup. He had been really scared, of course, but the saint had appeared to him and reassured him that he was quite safe and was going home.

The Bishop became the patron saint of children, and the patron saint of sailors, too. And as the years and centuries passed, he was revered in Christian countries all over the world, both Orthodox and Catholic. In the 11th century his remains were moved from Myra, now called Demre, which was under Moslem rule, to a town in Italy called Bari, where he is venerated to this day. Nuns started to give poor children little gifts of food – oranges and nuts, mostly – on his feast day. And his cult spread right across Christendom.

This saint was Saint Nicholas, Bishop of Myra. And these days, we know him as Santa Claus! In many countries, of course, he is still Saint Nicholas, and on his feast day, which is 6 December, children put their shoes by the fire and in the morning, they find the Saint has put some sweets and perhaps an orange or a tiny present into their shoes. But here in the UK, and perhaps especially in the USA, he is known as Santa Claus!

You see, Protestants like us don’t revere saints the way Catholics do, so you couldn’t have St Nicholas giving out sweets and so on to the children. And very strict Protestants didn’t even like celebrating Christmas, seeing it as inconsistent with the Gospel. Here, in England, with our gift for religious compromise, our folk traditions changed to include Father Christmas and yule logs and things, but in many Protestant countries, particularly the USA, it was considered “just another day”. But it seems that German colonists brought the St Nicholas tradition to the USA, and gradually he became the “jolly elf” of the famous poem. And, of course, the illustrations for the Coca-Cola advertisements began to settle his image as the fat old man we know today. A far cry, really, from a young Bishop in ancient Turkey!

But why does it matter? What, you may ask, has this got to do with us? How does it affect us this Christmas Eve? Many of us, perhaps most of us, are looking forward to tomorrow, to our presents, perhaps to seeing family, to eating Christmas dinner. We’ll probably go to church, but once we’ve done that, the rest of the day is very much a day of self-indulgence. And that’s okay, too, as long as we don’t forget that some people won’t have a great day, if they can’t afford to buy presents, or a lovely meal, or if they don’t have anybody to celebrate with, and spend the day by themselves, watching television. It’s a bit late for this year, but perhaps next year you could do something to help – giving some really nice things to the food bank, or the box for presents they put in Lidl, that sort of thing. Or, if you know someone is going to be on their own over Christmas, perhaps you could invite them to spend the day with you and your family.

But the point is, sometimes it feels as though Santa and Jesus are miles apart – but now that we know that Santa, too, was Jesus’ person, and, one assumes, still is, doesn’t that make a difference? I think it does. It means Christmas isn’t divided into two halves; it means it’s all one. Santa’s sleigh, the reindeer, Rudolph, all that sort of thing is actually to honour Jesus, the One who gave us the greatest gift of all! Amen.

Be joyful always

 

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

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

Hmmm.
It rather 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.