It's you, dear

Sadly I was unable to preach this, as we were detained in France due to a family emergency. I sent the text to the Worship Leader at Springfield, and I expect he read it. Obviously no recording today! 

I want to talk about our Gospel reading in a minute,
but first of all, we need to look at the Old Testament reading,
the story of David and Bathsheba.
This is, in fact, the second week of this story –
you may or may not have heard the first part last week,
but just in case you didn't, I'll recapitulate.

David is now King of Israel and Judah, a united kingdom.
He has built a very splendid palace in Jerusalem,
and is one of the richest and most powerful men in the region.
And, like many rich and powerful men, he has a high sex drive, and, of course, many women find riches and power very aphrodisiac.

So David can more-or-less have any woman he wants,
and, quite probably, the reverse is also true –
any woman who wants the King can have him!
And there is Bathsheba, Uriah's wife,
who allows herself to be seen while having her ritual bath –
and responds to the King's summons.

Unfortunately, what neither Bathsheba nor David had any way of knowing, given the state of medical knowledge back then,
was that when you have just finished your monthly purification rituals is when you are likely to be at your most fertile.
And so it comes about that Bathsheba finds herself pregnant,
and there's no way it can be anybody other than David's.

And they panic.
David could arguably have got away with it,
but he wasn't going to abandon Bathsheba like that, and, it's probable that it was she who panicked.
Uriah, from what we read about him, strikes me as very much the kind of person who always does the right thing,
no matter what the personal cost to himself,
and in this case, the right thing to have done was to have had Bathsheba,
who had obviously committed adultery,
stoned to death.
Yes, killed.
Even if he hadn't wanted to do that.
He was far too prim and proper to sleep with his wife while on active service, no matter how hard David tried to make him do that –
if he had, he would have accepted the coming child as his own, and their problems would have been solved.
But he refused, because his country was at war and he was a soldier on active service,
and wouldn't even go and see Bathsheba, even when David got him drunk, but just slept on his blanket in the guard room.

So David feels he has no option but to get rid of Uriah,
which he does by causing him to be sent into the front line of battle,
and get killed.
And as soon as it is decently possible, he marries Bathsheba.

End of story?
No, not quite.
You see, it might seem to have all been tidied up and nobody any the wiser, but they had forgotten God.
And God was not one bit pleased with what David had done.

So he sends Nathan the Prophet –
brave man, Nathan, wasn't he? –
to say to David that there is a man who only had one sheep, just one, and a rich bully had taken that sheep away from him.
So David said, well, who is this bully, I'll deal with him –
he can't get away with that sort of thing in my kingdom, so he can't!
And Nathan looks him in the eye and says, “It's you, dear!”

And, then David sees exactly what he has done.
The lust, the adultery, the deception, the murder.
He looks at himself and does not like what he sees, not one tiny little bit.
He doesn't know what God must think of him,
but he knows what he thinks of himself –
and he knows, too, that he needs to repent.
Which he does, and some of the words he is said to have used have come down to us:
Have mercy on me, O God, in your great goodness; 
   according to the abundance of your compassion
      blot out my offences.
  Wash me thoroughly from my wickedness
   and cleanse me from my sin.
  For I acknowledge my faults
   and my sin is ever before me.
 Behold, you desire truth deep within me
   and shall make me understand wisdom
      in the depths of my heart.

Turn your face from my sins
   and blot out all my misdeeds.
  Make me a clean heart, O God,
   and renew a right spirit within me.
  Cast me not away from your presence
   and take not your holy spirit from me.
  Give me again the joy of your salvation
   and sustain me with your gracious spirit;

Deliver me from my guilt, O God,
      the God of my salvation,
   and my tongue shall sing of your righteousness.
  O Lord, open my lips
   and my mouth shall proclaim your praise.
  For you desire no sacrifice, else I would give it;
   you take no delight in burnt offerings.
  The sacrifice of God is a broken spirit;
   a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.

And so on.
There's a bit more, but I've not quoted it all –
it's Psalm 51, if you want to have a read of it.

Anyway, the point is, his repentance is genuine, and he will be reinstated.
The child will not live, though.
And there is that lovely scene where the child is born,
and David is told that it cannot live –
it hasn't “come to stay”, as they used to say –
and he prostrates himself before the Lord in prayer.
And the baby duly dies,
and the servants are at a loss to know how to tell him,
thinking that if he's in that sort of mood, he might well shoot the messenger, but when they have stood outside the door for ten minutes going “You tell him,”
“No, you tell him!” he realises what's going on –
and when he finds out that the baby has died,
he astonishes them all by going and washing his face and going to comfort Bathsheba,
and when asked, he points out that while the baby was still alive, there was hope that God might yet be persuaded to let it live,
but now that it's dead, there's no hope;
and yes of course he minds,
but it won't help anybody to lie on the floor rolling about in grief.

And as we know, just to round off the story, Bathsheba and David do eventually have another child, who becomes King Solomon, arguably the greatest King of the combined kingdoms.

David's main fault, I think, that started the whole sorry saga, was greed.
He was greedy for life, and for women, and for pleasure.
He wanted to have it all, and had to learn the hard way that it wasn't all his.

Jesus says much the same to the followers in the Gospel reading, doesn't he?
It takes place almost immediately after Jesus has fed five thousand or more people with a small boy’s packed lunch.

He then sends the disciples on ahead of him, so he can spend some time in prayer and being quiet for a bit –
in some of the gospels, we’re told that he’s just heard about his cousin John’s execution and needs a bit of space to grieve.
Anyway, he then walks across the lake to join the disciples,
and next day the crowd finds him on the other side of the lake than they’d expected.

But Jesus reckons they’re not following him because of his teachings,
but because they want another free lunch.
“Very truly, I tell you, you are looking for me, not because you saw signs,
but because you ate your fill of the loaves."
And this is not what he plans for them.
“Do not work for the food that perishes,
but for the food that endures for eternal life,
which the Son of Man will give you.”

Jesus points out that in the wilderness, it wasn’t Moses who provided manna for the children of Israel to eat, but God.
And it is God who gives the true Bread from Heaven.
“I,” said Jesus, “am the Bread of Life”.

You know what I’m reminded of here?
The story of woman at the well, a little earlier on in John’s Gospel.
She asks Jesus to work the pump for her, which he duly does, but he tells her that he is the Living Water, and any who drink of that water will never be thirsty again.
Same sort of principle.

Many –
not all, but many –
of those who followed Jesus did so because they wanted the spectacular.
They wanted a free lunch from a small boy's packed lunch.
They wanted to see the healings, the deliverances, the people collapsing on the floor as evil spirits left them, and so on.
They weren't interested in the teachings,
in the way your faith has to manifest itself in actions or it isn't really part of you,
in loving their neighbour, in feeding the hungry....
they were wanting to believe in Jesus without having to become Jesus' person.
I don't want to pre-empt what you'll doubtless hear about next week,
but many of them walked away when the teachings got too hard for them to cope with.

And what about us?
What about you and me?
Are we just interested in the next thrill,
the next sensation,
the next fashion?
Are we willing to be Jesus' disciples,
and pay the price that the Bread of Life requires –
all of us.
Even the dreadful bits, even the bits that we'd rather keep hidden.
David had to surrender all of himself before he could receive God's forgiveness.
Can we do that?
It's very far from easy,
and I don't pretend to be able to, at least, not all the time.
It has to be a daily, hourly, moment-by-moment surrender.
And when you find you've taken yourself back again, as it were,
then it's all to be done again.
What it needs, of course, is the will on our part to be Jesus' person,
even if we don't succeed all the time.

King David was not a wicked man.
He did a very evil thing when he allowed his lust for Bathsheba to overtake his common sense, but normally he was God's person –
and when it was pointed out to him where he'd gone wrong, he came back.

My friends, let's be like David.
When we go wrong,
when we take ourselves back and live our own lives again,
and when we realise we're doing that,
then let's recommit ourselves into God's hands.
He will be there to welcome us back with loving arms.
“There you are, there you are at last!
Welcome home!”
Amen.

 

Mary Magdalene

Today, July the twenty-first, is the eve of the feast of St Mary Magdalene,
if you are the sort of church that celebrates that sort of thing.
Methodists don’t tend to, of course, but nevertheless I can't resist having a look at Mary Magdalene today, because she is such an intriguing person.
We know very little about her for definite:

Firstly, that Jesus cast out seven demons from her, according to Luke chapter 8 verse 2, and Mark chapter 16 verse 9.

From then on, she appears in the lists of people who followed Jesus, and is one of the very few women mentioned by name all the time.

She was at the Cross, helping the Apostle John to support Jesus' mother Mary.

And, of course, she was the first witness to the Resurrection, and according to John's Gospel, she was actually the first person to see and to speak to the Risen Lord.

And that is basically all that we reliably know about her –
all that the Bible tells us, at any rate.

But, of course, that's not the end of the story.
Even the Bible isn't quite as clear as it might be,
and some Christians believe that she is the woman described as a “sinner” who disrupts the banquet given by Simon the Leper, or Simon the Pharisee or whoever he was by emptying a vial of ointment over his feet –
Jesus' feet, I mean, not Simon's –
and wiping it away with her hair.
Simon, you may recall, was furious, and Jesus said that the woman had done a lot more for him than he had –
he hadn't offered him any water to wash his feet, or made him feel at all welcome.

Anyway, that woman is often identified with Mary Magdalene,
although some say it is Mary of Bethany, sister to Martha and Lazarus.
Some even say they are all three one and the same woman!

So if even the Bible isn't clear whether there are one, two or three women involved, you can imagine what the extra-Biblical traditions are like!

Nobody seems to know where she was born, or when.
Arguably in Magdala, but there seem to have been a couple of places called that in Biblical times.
However, one of them, Magdala Nunayya, was on the shores of Lake Galilee, so it might well have been there.
But nobody knows for certain.

She wasn't called Mary, of course;
that is an Anglicisation of her name.
The name was Maryam or Miriam, which was very popular around then as it had royal family connections,
rather like people in my generation calling their daughters Anne,
or all the Dianas born in the 1980s or,
perhaps, today, the Catherines or Charlottes.
So she was really Maryam, not Mary –
as, indeed, were all the biblical Marys.

They don't know where she died, either.
One rather splendid legend has her, and the other two women called Mary, being shipwrecked in the Carmargue at the town now called Saintes-Maries-de-la-mer, and she is thought to have died in that area.
But then again, another legend has her accompanying Mary the mother of Jesus and the disciple John to Ephesus and dying there.
Nobody knows.

And there are so many other legends and rumours and stories about her –
even one that she was married to Jesus,
or that she was “the beloved disciple”, and those parts of John's gospel where she and the beloved disciple appear in the same scene were hastily edited later when it became clear that a woman disciple being called “Beloved” Simply Would Not Do.

But whoever she was, and whatever she did or did not do,
whether she was a former prostitute or a perfectly respectable woman who had become ill and Jesus had healed,
it is clear that she did have some kind of special place in the group of people surrounding Jesus.
And because she was the first witness to the Resurrection, and went to tell the other disciples about it, she has been called “The Apostle to the Apostles”.
So what can we learn from her?

Well, the first thing we really know about her is that Jesus had healed her.
She had allowed Jesus to heal her.
Now, healing, of course, is as much about forgiveness and making whole as it is about curing physical symptoms, if not more so.
One may be healed without necessarily being cured!
And Mary allowed Jesus to make her whole.

This isn't something we find easy to do, is it?
We are often quite comfortable in our discomfort, if that makes sense.
If we allowed Jesus to heal us, to make us whole, whether in body, mind or spirit, we might have to do something in return.
We might have to give up our comfortable lifestyles and actually go and do something!

What Mary did, of course, was to give up her lifestyle,
whatever it might have been, and follow Jesus.
We don't know whether she was a prostitute,
as many have thought down the years,
or whether she was a respectable woman,
but whichever she was, she gave it all up to follow Jesus.
She was the leader of the group of women who went around with Jesus and the disciples,
and who made sure that everybody had something to eat,
and everybody had a blanket to sleep under,
or shelter if it was a rough night, or whatever.
Mary gave up everything to follow Jesus.

Again, we quail at the thought of that, even though following Jesus may well mean staying exactly where we are, with our present job and our family. Almost definitely will, for the older ones among us!

But Mary didn't quail.
She even accompanied Jesus to the foot of the Cross,
and stood by him in his final hours.
And then, early in the morning of the third day after he was killed,
she goes to the tomb to finish off the embalming she hadn't been able to do during the Sabbath Day.

And we know what happened –
how she found the tomb empty, and raced back to tell Peter and John about it, and how they came and looked and saw and realised something had happened and dashed off, leaving her weeping in the garden –
and then the beloved voice saying “Mary!” and with a cry of joy, she flings herself into his arms.

We’re not told how long they spent hugging, talking, explaining and weeping in each other’s arms,
but eventually Jesus gently explains that,
although he’s perfectly alive, and that this is a really real body one can hug,
he won’t be around on earth forever, but will ascend to the Father.
He can’t stop with Mary for now,
but she should go back and tell the others all about it.
And so, we are told, she does.

She tells the rest of the disciples how she has seen Jesus.
She is the first witness to the Resurrection, although you will note that St Paul leaves her out of his list of people who saw the Risen Lord.
That was mostly because the word of a woman,
in that day and age, was considered unreliable;
women were not considered capable of rational judgement.
At least Jesus was different!

So Mary allowed Jesus to heal her, she gave up everything and followed him, she went with him even to the foot of the Cross,
even when most of the male disciples, except John, had run away,
and she bore witness to the risen Christ.

The question is, of course, do we do any of these things?
We don't find them comfortable things to do, do we?
It was all very well for Mary, we say, she knew Jesus,
she knew what he looked like, what he liked to eat, what made him laugh, and so on.
We don’t.
We often find it very difficult to even envisage him as a human being, someone just like us who we would probably have liked enormously had we known him on earth, even if we had been a little scared of him!

But we don't have to do these things in our own strength.
The Jesus who loved Mary Magdalene, in whatever way,
he will come to us and fill us with His Holy Spirit and enable us, too,
to be healed,
to follow Him, even to the foot of the Cross,
and to bear witness to His resurrection.
The question is, are we going to let him?
Amen.

Is God in this?

 

You probably know the story of the time there was a big flood,
and people had to climb up on to the roofs of their houses to escape.
One guy thought this was a remarkable opportunity to demonstrate, so he thought, God’s power,
so he prayed “Dear Lord, please come and save me.”

Just then, someone came past in a rowing-boat and said
“Climb in, we’ll take you to safety!”

“Oh, no thank you,” said our friend,
“I’ve prayed for God to save me, so I’ll just wait for Him to do so.”

And he carried on praying, “Dear Lord, please save me!”

Then along came the police in a motor-launch, and called for him to jump in,
but he sent them away, too,
and continued to pray “Dear Lord, please save me!”

Finally, a Coastguard helicopter came and sent down someone on a rope to him, but he still refused, claiming that he was relying on God to save him.

And half an hour later, he was swept away and drowned.

So, because he was a Christian, as you can imagine, he ended up in Heaven,
and the first thing he did when he got there was go to to the Throne of Grace, and say to God,
“What do you mean by letting me down like this?
I prayed and prayed for you to rescue me, and you didn’t!”

“My dear child,” said God, “I sent you two boats and a helicopter –
what more did you want?”

In a way, that’s rather what happened to Jesus in our Gospel reading this morning.
He has gone home for the weekend.
Big mistake!
Because on the Sabbath Day, he goes to the synagogue with his family,
and because he’s home visiting for the weekend,
they ask him to choose the reading from the Prophets.
Luke’s version of this story tells us that he read from the prophet Isaiah,
the bit where it says:
“The Spirit of the Sovereign LORD is on me,
because the LORD has anointed me to preach good news to the poor.
He has sent me to bind up the broken-hearted,
to proclaim freedom for the captives
and release from darkness for the prisoners,
to proclaim the year of the LORD's favour
and the day of vengeance of our God,
to comfort all who mourn.”

Mark doesn’t go into such detail,
but he does tell us that Jesus’ friends and family were amazed.
“Where did this man get these things?” they asked.
“What's this wisdom that has been given him, that he even does miracles!”
And we’re told they were rather offended.
“He’s only the Carpenter’s son, Mary’s lad.
These are his brothers and sisters.
He can’t be special.”
And they were offended, so we are told.
Luke says they even picked up stones to throw at him to make him go away.
But Mark says that he could do no miracles there, just one or two healings.

And he was amazed at their lack of faith.

After all, they thought, what did he know?
He’s just a local lad, a builder.
Ought to be home working with his brothers,
not gadding about the country claiming to be a prophet.
They couldn’t hear God’s voice speaking through him.
They didn’t expect to, and they didn’t want to.
Like the man in my story, they had very definite ideas about how God worked,
and working through a local boy they’d known since childhood wasn’t one of them!

So Jesus leaves them alone,
and goes off on a tour of the local country, teaching and healing as he went.
And then he starts to send out his disciples, two by two, giving them authority over “impure spirits”.
They are sent out with literally only their walking-staffs,
rather like modern-day trekking poles.
No food, he tells them, no money, no bag –
you can wear sandals, if you wish, but don’t take an extra shirt.
The disciples are to rely on God’s provisions for them,
staying wherever they are first welcomed –
and not moving next door if next door’s cooking is better!
And if they are not welcomed, they are to leave at once, without comment, but shaking the dust off their feet.

And, we are told, that’s just what the disciples did.
They drove out evil spirits, they anointed people with oil,
and healed people,
bringing the good news of God’s Kingdom far and wide.

We aren’t told how long they were on the road,
but I imagine not more than a couple of months.
We are told that when they came back,
Jesus tried to take them to a quiet place to debrief them,
but so many people were following them all by this time that it became impossible,
so he went on teaching the crowds,
and eventually fed them with the contents of a small boy’s lunchbox!

For the disciples, this must have been an exciting interlude in their lives.
But in the other gospels we are told that when they were able to tell Jesus that even evil spirits responded to them,
Jesus said that really, what mattered was that their names were written in the Kingdom of Heaven.

A modern paraphrase puts it:
"All the same, the great triumph is not in your authority over evil, but in God's authority over you and presence with you.
Not what you do for God but what God does for you –
that's the agenda for rejoicing."

Do we have definite ideas about how God works, I wonder?
Do we expect to see God working in the ordinary, the every day?
Or do we expect him always to come down with power and fire from Heaven?
Do we expect Him to speak to us through other people,
perhaps even through me,
or do we expect Him to illuminate a verse of the Bible specially,
or write His message in fiery letters in the sky?

Because we are human, we do sometimes
long and long to see God at work in the spectacular,
the kind of thing that Jesus used to do when he healed the sick
and even raised the dead.
“Oh, that you would rend the heavens and come down!” as the prophet says.
And very occasionally God is gracious enough to give us such signs.
But mostly, these days, He heals through modern medicine,
guiding scientists to develop medicines,
and vaccines,
and surgical techniques that can do things our ancestors only dreamed about.
And through complementary medical techniques
which address the whole person, not just the illness.
And through love and hugs and sympathy and support.

We do need to learn to recognise God at work.
All too often, we walk blindly through our week, not noticing God –
and yet God is there.
God is there and going on micro-managing His creation,
no matter how unaware of it we are.
And God is there to speak to us through the words of a friend, or an acquaintance.
If we need rescuing, God is a lot more likely to send a friend to do it than to come in person!

Another story concerns two men who were talking in their club.
“Haven’t seen you around lately,” said the first man. “Have you been away?”
“Yes, I went on a trip to North Africa. It was very hairy! I got lost in the desert – my own silly fault, of course – and ended up calling on God to save me!”
“Oh really. How did God do that? I mean, obviously you were saved, as you’re here now.”
“Oh no, God didn’t need to do anything, because just at that moment a caravan appeared on the horizon, and they saw me and came to the rescue!”
We do need to be open to how God is working!

And conversely, we need to be open to God at work in us, so that we can be the friend who does the speaking, or the rescuing.
Not that God can’t use people who don’t know him –
of course He both can and does –
but the more open we are to being His person,
the more we allow Him to work in us,
to help us grow into the sort of person He created us to be,
then the more He can use us, with or without our knowledge, in His world.
Who knows, maybe the supermarket cashier you smiled at yesterday really needed that smile to affirm her faith in people, after a bad day.
Or the friend you telephoned just to have a catch-up with was badly needing to chat to someone –
not necessarily a serious conversation, just a chat.
As a friend of my daughter’s who was going through a tough time once said, “So nice to talk about general shit, not just the shit shit!”
You will never know –
but God knows.

We are, of course, never told “what would have happened”,
but I wonder what would have happened if the people of Nazareth had been open to Jesus.
He could have certainly done more miracles there.
Maybe he wouldn’t have had to have become an itinerant preacher, going round all the villages.
Maybe he could have had a home.
I think God may well have used the rejection to open up new areas of ministry for Jesus –
after all, we do know that God works all things for good.

And, finally, what happened to the people of Nazareth?
The answer is, nothing.
Nothing happened.
God could do no work there through Jesus.
Okay, a few sick people were healed, but that was all.
The good news of the Kingdom of God was not proclaimed.
Miracles didn’t happen.
Just. . . nothing.

We do know, of course, that in the end his family, at least, were able to get their heads round the idea of their lad being The One.
His Mother was in the Upper Room on the Day of Pentecost.
James, one of his brothers, was a leader in the early church.
But were they the only ones?
Did anybody else from Nazareth believe in Him,
or were they all left, sadly, alone?

I think that’s an Awful Warning, isn’t it?
If we decide we need to know best who God chooses to speak through,
how God is to act,
then God can do nothing.
And God will do nothing.
If he sends two boats and a helicopter
and we reject them because we don’t see God’s hand at work in them,
then we will be left to our own devices.
As the people of Nazareth were.

“Not what you do for God but what God does for you –
that's the agenda for rejoicing.”
And if you don’t allow God to do anything for you,
in whatever way,
what then?

Goliath and the Storm

Completely forgot to record this, sorry!

Well, these are two very familiar stories that we have just heard read, aren't they?

David killing Goliath, and Jesus calming the storm.
I'm sure I've known them since I was in Kindergarten,
and I expect you have, too.
Let's look at them more closely,
and then see what, if anything, ties them together
and what, if anything, they have to say to us as God's people gathered here this morning.

---oo0oo---

So then, firstly David and Goliath.

Just to remind you, in the part of the chapter that we didn't read, as it would have made the reading far too long,
we learn that the Israelites under King Saul are at war with the Philistines,
and things aren't going well.
The Philistines' champion, Goliath, is challenging someone to single combat, which was a recognised way of finishing a war –
you often find this happening in novels,
especially if you read the sort of historical fantasy novels I do!
Anyway, Goliath was rather terrifying and none of the Israelites felt able to stand up to him.

Now three of Jesse's sons are fighting with the army,
and David, the youngest, is mostly responsible for looking after the sheep.
One day his father tells him to leave all that, and to take some food to his brothers and their commanding officer in the camp,
and to come back with news of what's going on
and whether his brothers are all right.
So David goes off.

And, of course, when he gets there, he hears all about Goliath's challenge, and the reward the king has put up for defeating him –
a big financial reward, plus his daughter's hand in marriage and tax relief for his family,
the usual sort of thing that heroes always are promised!
David keeps asking about this,
and his eldest brother tells him to shut up and go home:
“You've only come to watch the fighting.
Now go away and look after your sheep and stop being such a smartarse!”

But David, quite rightly, takes that as merely elder-brother-itis,
and goes on asking until he understands what is happening,
and what is at stake.
Then he has a bit of a think.
He can kill lions and bears and wolves when they threaten his flock,
he's been doing so for years.
How is Goliath going to be any different?
So he goes to the King and says he's up for it.
The king says “Don't talk nonsense, you're just a boy, how could you possibly fight a professional soldier?”

David explains about the wild animals and points out that if God has kept him safe from those, he'll surely keep him safe from Goliath.
The King is rather desperate by now, so he says, okay, have a go.

They load up David with armour until he can scarcely walk –
do you get the impression they are laughing at him?
But David, as we heard in our reading, said he couldn't manage with that.
And with a stone and his slingshot,
he hits Goliath square in the forehead, breaking his skull and killing him.
And, just to finish off the story, David grabs Goliath's sword and cuts his head off with it, and the Philistines all run away, so the Israelites are victorious.

There are some rather odd bits of this story, of course –
apparently, in the earliest versions nothing is said about David taking food to his brothers,
but he's just there with the army all along,
and they omit those verses where Saul appears not to know who David is, despite the fact that earlier in the book he has appointed him as shield-bearer and court musician.
And Goliath's height is rather more realistic –
instead of being over nine feet tall, he is described as over six feet tall,
which is still enormous by the standards of the day!
So some of the ambiguous bits are probably from a folk tradition of the story that got mixed in.
There are also questions as to whether that sort of armour was worn at that sort of date, and whether the tradition of challenging someone to single combat existed in that culture, and so on and so forth.
But I don't think they matter, because it doesn't make the story any less true, even if some of the factual details are arguable.
As they say, all the Bible is true, and some of it even happened!

---oo0oo---

So let's fast-forward nine hundred years or so and go a little further north along the Mediterranean until we reach Jesus and the disciples on the Sea of Galilee.
We don't know exactly where they were, it doesn't say.
What it does say is that Jesus has been teaching all day,
and vast crowds came to hear him,
so he stood in a boat so that everybody could see and, we hope, hear.
And at the end of the day, he suggests that they cross to the other side of the lake,
and he collapses, exhausted, on to a cushion in the stern and falls asleep while the disciples row across.

I don't know if you've ever been to Galilee?
I haven't, although my parents went with their church.
But some years ago now, one of the ministers in the then Brixton circuit went, and when he came back,
he told us that he had actually been on a boat on the lake when one of the sudden storms blew up,
and that it really had been quite scary.
And I’ve seen videos on YouTube, and it really does look scary.
I believe these easterly winds can blow up very suddenly, too,
and it might have been fine when they set out.

So there are the disciples,
many of them experienced fishermen who know about the sea of Galilee,
struggling to control the boat in the storm,
and there is Jesus, sound asleep.
So they wake him up and yell at him:
“All hands on deck, there!
Don't you go sleeping as if you don't care whether we drown or not!”

And Jesus, instead of helping to pull on the oars,
which is probably what they expected,
addresses the storm and it calms down as quickly as it came up.
And he asks why they were still so afraid?
Where, he wonders, was their faith.
And then, I expect, he helped them bail out the water that was swamping the boat.

But of course, this demonstration of his power over nature made them even more afraid than ever.
“Even the wind and the sea obey him!”

---oo0oo---

So, then, what is the link between these two stories, and what do they have to say to us today?

I suppose the obvious link is that, in each story,
people were out of their depth.
They couldn't control the situation.
The Israelites had no way of coping with the Philistine army,
and especially not with Goliath and his challenges.
The disciples couldn't cope with the storm.
They were out of their depths, and everybody was afraid.

David, when he went up against Goliath, or so we are told, said firmly that he was going in the Lord's strength, not in his own.
He refused to put his trust in bronze armour, but in the weapons he knew, backed up by the Lord's righteousness.

The disciples were unable to trust in their usual methods of getting home safely when the wind started to blow.
The oars simply would not co-operate, as the winds were too strong,
and those who didn't know how to row were wanted to bail,
but they couldn't keep up, either.
It wasn't until Jesus intervened that they were safe.

So it's a bit about trusting God when things go pear-shaped,
but, as we all know, that is easier said than done!
So maybe it's a bit about not panicking when things get out of control.
If we can't trust God –
and you know as well as I do that we can’t, not always –
if we can't trust God, then let's look round for someone who can.
In the Israelite's case, this was David.
He trusted God,
he didn't panic when he faced Goliath,
and he trusted that God would use his skills to defeat the enemy.
And that is exactly what happened.
The Israelites relied on David's faith, and God saved them.

And for the disciples, their faith was fast asleep in the back of the boat.
They, at that moment, couldn't trust God to save them,
but Jesus could, and did.
He didn't panic when he saw the boat was swamped,
he trusted that God would use his power to still the storm.
And that is exactly what happened.
The disciples relied on Jesus' faith, and God saved them.

Now, all too often, we are the ones who panic,
who can't cope,
when the situation has got out of our control.
I know I am.
But wouldn't it be lovely if we were the ones who people could rely on to have faith?
To not panic when we saw what the situation was,
to trust God to use our skills –
or to intervene directly in some way –
to save the situation.

Mind you, if we were like that –
and I'm sure some of us are, although not me –
then it is just as well we don't know it,
or we'd start to rely on our faith and not on God.
It's one of those paradoxes, like it always irritates me –
does it you? –
when people talk about the power of prayer, as it isn't the prayer, it is the God who answers prayer.

But I think we should all aspire to be that kind of person.
And you can't be one just by wishing.
It is really only by God's grace,
by God's power at work within us,
that we can become the people God created us to be,
people who don't panic when life gets out of control
but who trust God,
either directly or through the use of their skills,
to sort things out again.
There are times, of course, when all we can do is pray about a situation.
We can’t, after all, save migrants trying desperately to reach safety in small boats, for instance.
There are, however, small things that we can all do to help –
it does, of course, depend on the kind of person you are, but those of us who are registered to vote can,
should,
and dare I say must vote on 4 July.
I don’t presume to tell you how to vote, of course, that’s up to you.
Most of us can probably give a little to the local food banks,
even if it’s only a tin of cheap baked beans.
Many of us can be involved in Lambeth Citizens,
and some of us could even stand for the council.

But above all, sometimes we need to be the person who is trusting God when our friends or family can’t.
“I will hold the Christ-light for you in the night-time of your fear”, as the hymn says.
When we deploy the shield of faith, it’s not just for us, but for our friends and family, too.

We can grow into that kind of person by using the means of grace available to us –
prayer, fellowship, the Scriptures, Holy Communion.
But being aware, as Wesley was aware and reminds us in his sermon on the means of grace,
that they are only a means, not an end in themselves.
They need to be used to bring us closer to God,
so that God can, by the power of the Holy Spirit,
make us more the people we were created to be.
To become more like David, and less like Saul.
Amen.

Be careful what you wish for

 

This photo has nothing to do with the sermon - I just like it!

Our Old Testament reading seems to me to be a prime example of the Law of Unintended Consequences!
Or, indeed, the necessity to be careful what you wish for!

Up until now, Israel has been a theocracy;
in other words, it has been governed by God, as ministered by the various judges and prophets, most recently Samuel.
It hasn’t always gone well –
there have been wars;
the Ark of the Covenant had been captured and taken away by the Philistines, but then it was returned with all honour.
At the time of which we speak, there was peace in the land –
for one of the only times in history, it would seem.

But this peace was precarious.
Samuel was getting old now, and his sons, who were his obvious successors, weren’t doing a good job.
Unlike their father, who was as upright as –
well, as an upright thing,
they were susceptible to taking bribes, and justice was not always served as it might have been.

Also, the people of Israel had been looking round at how things were done in other countries.
They didn’t have dreary prophets interpreting God’s will at them all the time.
They weren’t led into battle by priests guiding an ox-cart with the Ark on it.
They had a King!
They were led into battle by a King on a beautiful horse, wearing armour glittering in the sun.
They didn’t have to spend hours in prayer before they could get on with it…..
Anyway, everybody had kings.
Why couldn’t they have a king?

So, as we heard in our first reading, they went to Samuel and said, “look here, you’re getting old, and your sons aren’t anything like you –
we want a King, please, now.”

Samuel is very hurt by this, and does what he always does when he has a problem –
he goes and prays about it.
And God says to him, more or less, “Well, now you know what I feel all the time, the way people reject Me.
And really, it’s not you they are rejecting, it’s Me.”
And, at God’s instruction, Samuel goes and asks the people if they are sure they want a king.
Sure, there is the grandeur and the pomp and circumstance –
but there is also the tithes;
the conscription;
the droit de seigneur where the king thinks he can, and will, have any pretty girl he chooses…..
there are a lot of bad things that might and will happen along with the good.

But the people are convinced.
Prophets and judges are old-fashioned;
they want a King.
Monarchy is definitely the way to go.

And, as we know, they got permission to have a King,
and Saul was appointed –
and anointed –
King.
But as we know, he wasn’t altogether satisfactory, and there was war again, and, eventually, David became king,
and then his son Solomon,
but after that it all went rather pear-shaped,
and the Kingdom was divided into two.
And after a series of rather ineffectual, weak kings, the majority –
the Ten Tribes –
were taken into captivity and absorbed;
the two tribes of Judah were also captured,
but managed to retain a distinct identity.
Mind you, we are not told what would have happened had they remained a theocracy….

So what is this all about, and what does it say to us today?
I’m certainly not advocating a return to theocracy –
one only has to look at so-called Islamic State or Boko Harum, or even what some American Republicans would like, to see that it can and does stifle people’s freedom of choice.
And monarchy itself is nearly obsolete.
Our own King reigns, but he does not rule.

The King may well have done all the dreadful things Samuel warned against:
“He will make soldiers of your sons;
some of them will serve in his war chariots, others in his cavalry, and others will run before his chariots.
He will make some of them officers in charge of a thousand men, and others in charge of fifty men.
Your sons will have to plough his fields, harvest his crops, and make his weapons and the equipment for his chariots.
Your daughters will have to make perfumes for him and work as his cooks and his bakers.
He will take your best fields, vineyards, and olive groves, and give them to his officials.
He will take a tenth of your grain and of your grapes for his court officers and other officials.”

But a good King –
and there have been many throughout history –
a good King protects his people, as well as exploits them.
And a good King leads by example.
C S Lewis, in his novel “The Horse and his Boy”, expressed it thus:
“For this is what it means to be a king:
to be first in every desperate attack and last in every desperate retreat, and when there's hunger in the land (as must be now and then in bad years)
to wear finer clothes and laugh louder over a scantier meal than any man in your land.”

Being a King is not just about privilege and luxury –
but for a bad King –
and probably for every good King there has been a bad one –
for a bad King, it is all about privilege and luxury.
The people needed to be careful what they wished for.

But one of the main problems of a Kingdom, mostly,
is that it is up against others.
Kings have to fight because other people want their Kingdoms.
Sometimes these are kings from other sovereign states, and other times they are internal contenders for the throne;
people who think that the king really isn’t doing as good a job as he might and they would do a better one.
Civil War.
Satan’s Kingdom divided against itself –
as Jesus points out in our Gospel reading –
is always going to fail and spiral down into chaos and darkness.

So let’s contrast this with God’s kingdom, that Jesus tells us so much about.

He told us lots of stories to illustrate what the kingdom was going to be like, how it starts off very small, like a mustard seed, but grows to be a huge tree.
How it is worth giving up everything for.
How “the blind receive their sight,
the lame walk,
the lepers are cleansed,
the deaf hear,
the dead are raised,
and the poor have good news brought to them.”

And some of the stories were very unsettling to his hearers.

The mustard seed that Jesus spoke of –
well, mustard was a terrific weed, back in the day –
grows like the clappers, and still does –
and nobody in their right mind would have planted it.
Besides which, it would have attracted birds,
which would then have eaten the other the crops.

And the yeast that leavens the whole of the dough?
Well, for Jews, what was really holy and proper to eat was unleavened bread, which you had at Passover.
You threw out all your old leaven –
we’d call it a sourdough starter, today, which is basically what it is –
and started again.
I remember being told in primary school that this was a Good Idea because you need fresh starter occasionally.
But the thing is, leavened bread was considered slightly inferior –
and the leaven itself, the starter –
yuck!
It isn’t even the bread that is likened to God’s country, it is the leaven itself!
And did you notice –
it was a woman who took that leaven.
A woman!
That won’t do at all!
Again, for male Jews, women were slightly improper –
and who knew that she wouldn’t be on her period and therefore unclean?
And she hid the starter in enough flour to make bread for 100 people!
She hid it.
It was concealed, hidden.

Not what people would expect from the Kingdom of God, is it?

Be careful what you wish for!
You wanted a King, instead of God;
a King who would introduce conscription, would confiscate your bit of land and give it to one of his favourites.
A King whose country would be manifestly unfair and unequal.
But that was what you thought you wanted.

And then you got God’s Kingdom.
A place that was totally not what you expected.
A place of justice and mercy and love and forgiveness;
but also a place where your most entrenched ideas are turned upside-down;
where what you thought you knew about God turned out to be all wrong…. And yet, a place so worthwhile, so wonderful, that you would sell all your possessions to get there.

Perhaps, just perhaps, it was worth wishing for a King so that we could know Christ as King of the Kingdom of Heaven.
Amen.

Trinity Sunday 2024

 

Today is Trinity Sunday, the day on which we celebrate all the different aspects of God.
It’s actually a very difficult day to preach on, since it’s very easy to get bogged down in the sort of theology which none of us understands, and which we can very easily get wrong.

The trouble is, of course, that the concept of the Trinity is trying to explain something that simply won’t go into words.
We are accustomed to thinking of God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and most of the time we don’t really stop and think about it.
Trinity Sunday is the day we are expected to stop and think!

The thing is, the first half of the Christian year, which begins way back before Christmas, is the time when we think about Jesus.
We prepare for the coming of the King, in Advent,
and then we remember his birth,
his being shown to the Gentiles,
his presentation in the Temple as a baby
and, some years, the time when he was a teenager and stayed behind in the Temple rather than going home with his family.
Then we skip a few years and remember his ministry,
his arrest, death and resurrection,
and his ascension into heaven.
Then, as last week, we remember the coming of the promised Holy Spirit,
and today we celebrate God in all his Godness, as someone once put it.
The second half of the year, all those Sundays after Trinity,
tend to focus on different aspects of our Christian life,
and how what we think we believe informs, or should inform, the way we live.
And today is the fulcrum, the changeover day;
the one day in the year when we are expected to stop and think about God as Three and God as One.

And it is difficult.
It’s a concept that doesn’t really go into words, and so whatever we say about it is going to be in some way flawed.
It took the early Church a good 400 years to work out what it wanted to say about it, and even that is very obscure:
“That we worship one God in Trinity, and Trinity in Unity;
Neither confounding the persons nor dividing the substance.
For there is one person of the Father, another of the Son, and another of the Holy Spirit.
But the Godhead of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit is all one, the glory equal, the majesty coeternal.
Such as the Father is, such is the Son, and such is the Holy Spirit.
The Father uncreated, the Son uncreated, and the Holy Spirit uncreated.
The Father incomprehensible, the Son incomprehensible, and the Holy Spirit incomprehensible.”
The whole thing incomprehensible, if you ask me!

One picture I rather like is of H₂O –
dihydrogen monoxide.
Which, as you probably realise, can be a solid – ice,
a liquid – water,
or a gas – steam.
All of which look and behave totally differently,
and are used for totally different things, but they are all H₂O –
and life as we know it would be impossible without it!

There are many other pictures, of course.
I have heard people talk of an apple –
skin, flesh and core.
Or an egg –
shell, white and yolk.
Or perhaps three tins of soup –
lentil, tomato and mulligatawny –
all different, but all soup.
But none of these images, helpful as they might be,
is more than just the tiniest corner of a picture of what the Trinity is like.

Nobody really understands it.
And, of course, that is as it should be.
If we could understand it, if we knew all the ins and outs and ramifications of it, then we would be equal to God.
And it’s very good for us to know that there are things about God we don’t really understand!

It’s called, in the jargon, a “mystery”.
That means something that we are never going to understand, even after a lifetime of study.
Lots of things to do with God are mysteries, in that sense.
Holy Communion, for one –
we know what we mean when we take Communion,
but we also know that it may very well mean something quite different,
but equally valid, to the person standing next to us.
Or even the Atonement –
none of us really understands exactly what happened when Jesus died on the Cross, only that some sort of change took place in the moral nature of the Universe.
Nevertheless, for all practical purposes, we live very happily with not understanding.
We synthesise some form of understanding that suits us,
and, provided we know it is not the whole story, that’s fine.
And the same applies to the Trinity.
It doesn’t matter if we don’t really understand how God can be Three and One at the same time;
what matters is that we love and trust him, whatever!

Of course, the terms “Father, Son and Holy Spirit” aren’t the only ones people use to refer to the Trinity.
I’ve heard people say “Creator, Redeemer, Sanctifier”, or “God the Unknown, God the Known, God the Worker of Miracles”.
And there are plenty of other names for God used in the Bible:
the Good Shepherd,
the Rock,
Strength and Refuge,
Provider,
Emmanuel, which means “God with us”,
even Wisdom, a female personification.
And, of course, all those names do show us aspects, glimpses of Who God is –
we can never grasp all of God, and it wouldn’t be right to try.
Even Moses, you remember, was only allowed to see the merest glimpse of the shadow of God’s back,
and that was nearly too much for him.
But finding a name, an aspect of God, that you need right now,
can help enormously in one’s prayers, I find.
And that changes as we grow and change, and as our perception of God grows and changes, and as life happens.
This week, we might find it helpful to pray to the Good Shepherd;
perhaps yesterday we needed to pray to Lady Wisdom, or Lady Love;
maybe tomorrow we will need to meditate on the Rock, or the Shadow of a great Rock in a weary land.
The Bible never actually uses the word “Trinity” –
it’s a term that came later when they tried to put it into words.
Strikes me, it’s one of the things that we human beings like to do,
to try to put things into words that won’t actually go!
Understandable, really, but it doesn’t always help.
But the Bible does have the concept of the Trinity –
it speaks of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit,
all as God, yet makes it very clear that God is One!
That lovely reading from Isaiah, that was our first reading this morning, about our Creator:

“Have you not known?
Have you not heard?
The LORD is the everlasting God,
the Creator of the ends of the earth.
He does not faint or grow weary;
his understanding is unsearchable.
He gives power to the faint,
and strengthens the powerless.
Even youths will faint and be weary, and the young will fall exhausted;
but those who wait for the LORD shall renew their strength,
they shall mount up with wings like eagles,
they shall run and not be weary,
they shall walk and not faint.”

Says it all, doesn’t it!
And today is not really a day for deep theological reflection, nor a day for self-examination to see where our lives don’t measure up to God’s standards.
It’s a day for enjoying God and praising him!

“Have you not known?
Have you not heard?
The LORD is the everlasting God,
the Creator of the ends of the earth.
Amen!”

The Treasurer

“Here is some water.
What is to keep me from being baptised?”

This is an odd little story, the one we heard from Acts, isn't it?
I wonder who these people were,
what they were doing,
and, above all, why it matters to us this morning.

Well, finding out who these people are is probably the least difficult part of it.
The man was, we are told, a eunuch who held a high post in the government of the Queen of Ethiopia.
Now, we do know a little about her
her official title was Candace, or Kandake, or even Kentake
nobody is really sure,
but if you know somebody called Candace,
that's where the name comes from.
Anyway, this one was called Amanitore, apparently,
and her royal palace of Jebel Barkal in the Sudan
is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Her tomb is also in the Sudan, in a place called Meroë.
Confusingly, the area that our Bibles call “Ethiopia” or “Kush” is actually in what is now Sudan,
and present-day Ethiopia was then the Kingdom of the Axumites!
Anyway, the Queen isn't important, except that you should understand that she was a ruler in her own right, not just a regent
Amanitore, for instance, was co-ruler with Natakamani,
who may have been her husband, but was more probably her son.
The Candaces were very powerful, and could order their sons to end their rule by committing suicide if necessary.
So a senior treasury official in her government would be a pretty high mucky-muck back then.

We know rather more about his employer, though, than we do about the treasury official himself.
He might not even have been a Kushite, which is the more proper term for Ethiopians back then –
the word “Ethiop” in Greek basically just means someone from sub-Saharan Africa.
He probably was a eunuch, though;
many people in positions of authority were, in those days, rather like in the Middle Ages in this country they were usually in holy orders of some kind.
Basically they were people who were celibate, for whatever reason, so as not to have divided loyalties between their job and their families –
with all the stuff one hears about work-life balance,
and the sort of hours people who work for American companies are expected to put in, maybe they had a point!
Although, of course, the people in the Middle Ages were voluntarily celibate, which our friend could not have been.
He was probably a slave, or at least born into slavery,
and brought up to eventually get this high and trustworthy position.
There is, of course, plenty of form for this –
look at Joseph, who was sold into slavery in Egypt but ended up as a hugely influential administrator in Pharoah's court.

And the same was true for this man.
We don't know his name, which is unfortunate as I don't like to keep referring to him as “The Eunuch” as though it were the most important thing about him, so let's call him “The Treasurer”.
He was probably born into slavery, maybe into a family who belonged to the Ethiopian court, and raised from an early age to serve the Royal Family.
I have no idea what sort of education he would have had,
but he obviously was an educated man;
he could read, which was not very usual in that day and age,
and what is more, he could read Greek or Hebrew, I am not sure which,
but neither could have been his first language.

And when we meet him, he has just been to Jerusalem to worship God.
Again, I have no idea how he became what's called a God-fearer, a non-Jew who worships God without converting to Judaism,
but he could not have been a convert, or proselyte as they were known, because he was a eunuch,
and the Old Testament forbids anybody mutilated in that way to enter the Temple.
And now he is on his way home –
he must have been a pretty high-up official to have been allowed to go on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, don't you think?

I wonder whether he bought his copy of the Book of Isaiah during his visit?
I don't know whether it was in the Greek translation known as the Septuagint, or whether he had been able to read Hebrew and buy one of the Hebrew versions.
Jewish men could all read, because they were expected to read the Scriptures in their services,
but elsewhere the skill was not that common long before printing was even thought of,
when all manuscripts had to be copied by hand.
So a copy of the book of Isaiah would have been very valuable.
And he had one, and was reading it during his journey, but not really understanding what he read, and doubtless wishing for someone to come and explain it to him.

That someone turned out to be Philip the Evangelist.
Now, this isn't the Apostle Philip, the one who tends to be partnered with Bartholomew in the lists of apostles;
he's a different Philip.
We first meet this one early in the Book of Acts,
when the gathering of believers is getting a bit large, and the Jewish and Greek believers are squabbling over the distribution of food.
Philip and seven other people were appointed deacons to sort it out for them.
Philip would have been Greek –
it's a Greek name –
but he might also have been Jewish,
since he was fairly obviously resident in Jerusalem around then.

He, incidentally, is the chap who ends up with four daughters who prophesy who entertains St Paul on his way back to Jerusalem later on in Acts.

But for now, he is wanted on the old road between Jerusalem and Gaza and, prompted by the Holy Spirit, he goes there and walks alongside the Treasurer in his carriage –
I expect the horse was only going at walking pace.
Back then, the concept of reading to yourself was, I believe, unknown, and everybody always read aloud, even if only under their breath,
so he would soon have known what the Treasurer was reading, and was intrigued:

“Do you understand what you're reading?”
This man, an obvious foreigner, someone who obviously wasn't Jewish, probably didn't know the traditions at all
what on earth was he finding in the book?

And the Treasurer admits that yes, actually, he is a bit lost.... and Philip explains it all, and explains about how the prophet was referring to Jesus, which of course meant explaining all about Jesus.
And so the Ethiopian challenges him:
“Okay, there's some water.
Any reason I shouldn't be baptised?”

He couldn't be accepted in the Temple as a Jew –
would these followers of the Way –
they were barely called “Christians” yet –
would they accept the likes of him, or was this going to be another disappointment?
I can hear a challenge in his voice, can't you?
The Authorised version, which some of you may still like to read, claims he made a profession of faith,
but apparently that's not in the earliest manuscripts available and has been left out of more recent translations.

“Why can't I be baptised?”
Well, there was no good reason.
Jesus loved him and died for him, and Philip knew that, so he baptised him.
And then left the new young Christian to cope as best he could, while the Holy Spirit took Philip off to the next thing.

It is a strange story, and I know I've spent rather a long time on it, but it intrigues me.
You can't help comparing it with the story of Cornelius,
a couple of chapters later.
Cornelius, too, is an outsider, a member of the Army of Occupation, a Gentile
but he, too, loves God and wants to know more.
And Peter is sent to help him, although Jewish Peter needed a lot more persuading than Greek Philip to go and help.
And again, it is clear that God approves, and Cornelius and his household are baptised.

The thing is, this was an age when the Church was gaining new converts every day –
three thousand in one day, we're told, after Pentecost.
How come these two are picked out as special?

I think it's because they are special.
These are the outsiders, the misfits.
They aren't your average Jewish person in the Holy Land of those days.
Cornelius is a member of the hated Roman army;
but at least he lives in Caesarea and might have been expected to pick up one or two ideas about local culture and so on.
But the Treasurer?
He is not only a Gentile, but of a completely different race, and a different sexuality.
A total and utter outsider, in fact.

But he is accepted!
That's the whole point, isn't it?
There was nothing to stop him being baptised.
The Holy Spirit made it quite clear to Philip that this man was loved, accepted and forgiven and could be baptised with the contents of his water-flask!

How difficult we make it, sometimes.
We agonise over who is a Christian and who isn't.
We wonder what behaviour might put people right away from God.
And sometimes we cut ourselves off from God by persisting in behaviour, or patterns of thought, that we know God doesn't like, and we aren't comfortable in God's company.
And yet God makes it so simple:
“Here is some water.
What is to keep me from being baptised?”
And the answer, so far as God is concerned, is “Nothing”.
Anybody, anybody at all, who stretches out a tentative hand, even a tentative finger, to God is gathered up and welcomed into his Kingdom.
I don't know what happens when it's people like Professor Alice Roberts or David Attenborough who really don't want God to exist –
I suppose that when people say “No, thank you!” to God,
God respects their wishes, even if that means He is deprived of their company, which He so wanted and longed for.

The Treasurer, the Ethiopian Eunuch, was the most complete outsider, from the point of view of the first Christians, that it was possible to imagine.
And yet God accepted him and welcomed him, and he went on his way rejoicing.
We aren't told what happened to him.
Was he able to meet up with other Christians?
Was he able to keep in touch with the early Christian communities and learn more about early Christian thinking?
We don't know.
We aren't told anything more about him –
but then, I don't suppose Philip ever heard any more.
Our Gospel reading minded us that unless you abide in Jesus you wither away
or perhaps more properly that your faith does –
and perhaps that happened to him.
We will never know.
But perhaps he did abide in Jesus.
Perhaps, even without fellowship and teaching and the Sacrament and the other Means of Grace we find so important,
perhaps he still went on following Jesus as best he knew how.
I hope he did.
Maybe his relationship with God would have been purer and stronger than ours is, because there wouldn't have been anybody to tell him that he was doing it all wrong.

“Here is some water.
What is to keep me from being baptised?”
We have, I think, all been baptised;
possibly as babies or perhaps when we were older –
but what keeps us from entering into the full relationship with God that this implies?
My friends, if there is something between you and God, put it down now,
come back to God and rest and rejoice in Him.
There are no outsiders in God's kingdom –
everybody is welcome, and that includes you, and that includes me!
Amen.

And as soon as we started the next hymn I realised what I should have said, so said it before the notices - because God loves and accepts absolutely anybody, we need to love and accept them, too. I didn't have time to unpack this, but if I preach this sermon again, I'll be sure to work it in!