Deuteronomy

 

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

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

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

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

And that book was at least part of, and perhaps all of, the book of Deuteronomy which our reading came from.
I'll tell you more about what it said in a bit,
but when Josiah read it, he was horrified and realised that he and his people had been doing things all wrong,
and he made them all listen to it and do what it said.
And God was pleased.
The doom that had been prophesied did come on the land,
but not in Josiah's lifetime.
You can read all the story in 2 Kings chapters 21 to 23, if you've got a good modern English translation.
Not now, though.
(Now you younger ones are going to go to your own classes, while the rest of us sing….)

---oo0oo---

The book of Deuteronomy turned out to be like nothing Josiah had ever heard before.
The central theme of the book,
how God wants his people to be,
is of course that famous passage that begins
"Hear, O Israel, The Lord is God, the Lord is One".
We are to love God with all of our being,
and to keep all the commandments, decrees and ordinances,
says the book of Deuteronomy.
And, as Moses is alleged to have said in the passage we heard read, you must remember them, and observe them, and show all the nations round about that God is God!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But that's the point.
They could so easily become just dry rules and regulations.

But it got too easy to follow God just by keeping the rules, and by the time Jesus came along, that, all too often, is what was happening.
And all the rules were getting hedged around with “Well, what if....” and “In this case, you should...” until they had become a real burden.
It is clearly said that you mustn’t add or subtract to any of the commandments, and I don’t think they meant to. It was just clarifying, but they went too far.

Jesus cuts through this, as we heard in our second reading.
“Look,” he says to the Pharisees, “Outward observance really doesn’t mean anything if you’re just going through the motions! It’s not what goes into a person that matters; after all, eventually that just goes down the drain. It’s what is in your heart that matters!” He pointed out that they have abandoned God’s commandments in favour of human rules.

And he told the crowd that they can’t be defiled by anything external, but it is from the heart that come things like sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance and folly.

In the collections of Jesus’ teachings that we call the Sermon on the Mount, he gives a description of what God’s people will be like – they won’t be angry with anybody in a destructive way, far less murder them;
they will always be the first to try to put things right if they have had an upset with someone;
they won’t use or abuse people sexually;
they won’t get divorced for trivial reasons;
they will be honest to a fault;
in short, they will treat other people with the greatest possible respect for who they are.

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

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

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

The point is that Josiah really meant it about worshipping God, and when he was confronted with the Scriptures, the book of the Law, he chose to obey that law, and by doing so, he met with God.

The Scriptures don’t tell us, but I imagine Josiah also instituted laws to look after refugees, widows, and orphans, and those whose income had been upset by the new worship systems.

The passage from Deuteronomy that we heard read asks: “What other nation is so great as to have their gods near them the way the Lord our God is near us whenever we pray to him?”

We don’t think of God as the God of a particular nation,
but perhaps we should wonder whether those of other belief systems know that God is near us whenever they pray to him!
We know.
Jesus said that nobody can know God as Father except through him –
we discussed this last week, you will remember.

So we, too, need to learn to listen to God’s commandments and obey them.
And sometimes that will be hard.
Being God’s person isn’t always easy, as those priests so long ago found, and as Josiah found a couple of generations later.
But it is oh, so very worth while! Amen.

You have the words of eternal life.

 

The recording may be a little odd, as I had visual aids - laminated sheets with the "I am" sayings and an image, and got some volunteers to hold them up and read them out to the rest of the congregation.  So I am interacting with them during the course of the sermon.

“Lord, to whom can we go?
You have the words of eternal life.”

“To whom can we go?
You have the words of eternal life.”

It was Peter who said it.
A great many people who might have liked to have been followers of Jesus have given up –
they found what Jesus was saying just simply too much to swallow.
Literally!
And then, when Jesus asks Peter and the others if they are going to disappear, too, Peter says “Lord, to whom can we go?
You have the words of eternal life!”

Peter is a pretty terrific person all round.
He does have his moments, and he gets it wrong a lot of the time, but he goes on because, whatever else happens, he knows that Jesus is the Holy One of God.

I don't know whether Jesus really knows that he is, or if he's just beginning to think so, or what.
But in John's Gospel we have those seven great sayings beginning “I am”,
that we've just sung about.
And I want us to think about these a bit this morning,
because I think some of these “I Am” sayings are, to us,
the words of eternal life.

You see, even though Jesus might not have been totally aware of it when he was saying it,
what he was doing, on one level, was declaring himself to be divine.
I expect you know the story of Moses and the burning bush,
where a voice speaks to Moses out of the bush,
which was burning up but didn't burn away.
And it told him to get Pharoah to let the Israelite slaves go.
And Moses said, “Well, who shall I say sent me?”
and the voice said “I Am has sent you”.
And Jesus, apparently used exactly the same wording.
Now I don't know how fully he was aware of this,
but certainly on one level this is what he was saying.

In John’s Gospel, Jesus says “I am” seven times, and I thought that we would look at those sayings this morning. Because there really is nowhere else to go, is there. So to whom are we going?

I am the Bread of Life
Let's start with the one this chapter of John's Gospel has been expounding for the last month.
I expect you have heard several sermons on it over the past few weeks, so I won't add much, except to remind you that his first hearers reacted very differently to the way we do when we hear those words.
At first they said, “Oh rubbish, we know this man, he's Joseph the Carpenter's son, we know his Mum, too –
how can he say he is the bread that comes down from heaven?
Don't be silly!”

And then Jesus expounds a bit on it:
“Very truly, I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.
Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life, and I will raise them up on the last day.”
And he goes on like that,
and this is when most people decide he's either being totally gross,
or else he's talking nonsense, and go away.
Peter and the other disciples may not have understood what Jesus was talking about –
after all, it doesn't go into words very well, does it?
All the same, they knew that the needed to go on following Jesus:
“Lord, to whom else should we go?
For you have the words of eternal life.”



I am the Light of the World
“I am the Light of the World.”
And in fact Jesus added that and said:
“I am the light of the world.
Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness
but will have the light of life.”

“Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness
but will have the light of life.”

Here in London it doesn't really ever get totally dark, does it?
There are so many streetlights and so on that it is even quite difficult to see the stars, always assuming it doesn't rain.
But when we're in the country, it can be quite different.
I remember one Christmas when we were going to midnight service at my sister's church in Norfolk,
and we had to park the car in a field next to the church.
So there were no streetlights or anything, and we had to turn the torches on on our phones so that we could see what we were treading in!

That's the thing, isn't it.
Light, however feeble, is always stronger than darkness.
Think of the rare occasions when we have power cuts –
if you go and find a tea-light or similar candle, it doesn't produce much light, but you can still see enough not to bump into the furniture.
And the same here –
if you follow Jesus, there will always be light enough to see your way ahead in life, even if it's only one tiny step.
“Lord, to whom else should we go?
For you have the words of eternal life.”


I am the Gate for the Sheep
“I am the Gate for the sheep”.
This one's a bit weird, isn't it?
Whatever can he mean?

I don't think it's quite within living memory these days, but time was, on the Sussex Downs and elsewhere, the shepherd lived with his sheep for weeks on end.
He had a little hut that was like a tiny caravan where he could sleep and store food and so on.
During the day, the sheep roamed fairly freely on the Downs, but at night, the shepherd would build an enclosure from hurdles, and “fold” as it was called, the sheep in there.
They would move the fold each night,
so that the sheep weren't subjected to mounds of manure.
These folds were closed in with a final hurdle, but in the middle east, the shepherd himself would lie down in the gap so that wolves and stray dogs and thieves and so on couldn't get in.
And the wolves and stray dogs and thieves and so on knew that,
and would sometimes jump over the walls of the fold.
Jesus riffs on this:
“Very truly, I tell you, I am the gate for the sheep.
All who came before me are thieves and bandits;
but the sheep did not listen to them. I am the gate.
Whoever enters by me will be saved,
and will come in and go out and find pasture.
The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy.
I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.”

“Lord, to whom else should we go?
For you have the words of eternal life.”


I am the good shepherd
This is the more familiar of the two “sheep” sayings, isn't it?
Actually, it happens in the next paragraph in John 10.

“I am the good shepherd. I know my own and my own know me, just as the Father knows me and I know the Father. And I lay down my life for the sheep.”

“I know my own, and my own know me.”
I think I may have told you before that my brother and his wife were shepherds, and when they went into the field where the sheep were, the sheep knew who they were and would either carry on with their own lives, or else, if they were hungry, start demanding food NOW!
But if Robert or I, or anybody else they didn’t know, went into that field, they would run away, bleating ferociously.
Jesus also points out that a hired shepherd might run away if a wolf comes, because they aren't his sheep,
so naturally he'd rather save his own skin than that of the sheep,
but Jesus, the Good Shepherd, will lay down his life for the sheep, if necessary.

“Lord, to whom else should we go?
For you have the words of eternal life.”



I am the Resurrection and the Life
“I am the Resurrection and the Life”.
This, of course, comes in that lovely story where Jesus' friend Lazarus has died, and his sisters Martha and Mary are grieving for him.
Jesus, weeping himself, says that Lazarus will rise again.
And Martha says:
“‘I know that he will rise again in the resurrection on the last day.’
Jesus said to her, ‘I am the resurrection and the life.
Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die.
Do you believe this?’
She said to him, ‘Yes, Lord, I believe that you are the Messiah,
the Son of God, the one coming into the world.’”

“Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live,
and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die.”

Do you believe this?

“Lord, to whom else should we go?
For you have the words of eternal life.”



I am the way, and the truth, and the life
“I am the way, and the truth, and the life”.
Here, Jesus is talking to his disciples only, not to the crowds.
He has reminded them that he is going to prepare a place for them in his Father's house.
But Thomas says, “Well, how are we going to know the way?”
and that is when Jesus says, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life.
No one comes to the Father except through me.
If you know me, you will know my Father also.
From now on you do know him and have seen him.”

So it is through Jesus, and Jesus alone, that we can know God as Father, that we can know ourselves beloved children of God.

“Lord, to whom else should we go?
For you have the words of eternal life.”



I am the true vine.
“I am the true vine”.
Jesus is speaking to his disciples again, here.
And this time, it's a two-way thing.
First of all, he says he is the vine, and his Father is the vine-grower.
“He removes every branch in me that bears no fruit.
Every branch that bears fruit he prunes to make it bear more fruit.”

And then Jesus goes on to explain:
“You have already been cleansed by the word that I have spoken to you.
Abide in me as I abide in you.
Just as the branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in me.
I am the vine, you are the branches.”

So this “I am” is a two way one, pointing up to the Father and down to us.
We can do nothing unless we “abide” in Jesus.
I don't know about you, but that always makes me feel that we have to strive and struggle to stay in Jesus,
but if you think of branches on a fruit tree, they don't do any such thing!
They just stay where they are put, perhaps swaying a bit if it's windy, but otherwise just relaxing, knowing that the trunk of the tree is holding them tight so that they will bear fruit in due season.
As, I expect, will we.

“Lord, to whom else should we go?
For you have the words of eternal life.”

And that's it.
The seven great sayings of Jesus.

Get the congregation to read them aloud, one at a time.

“Lord, to whom else should we go?
For you have the words of eternal life.”
Amen.

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.