Abraham and Isaac

Our Old Testament story is a very strange one, isn't it? The editors of Genesis explain it away as “God testing Abraham”, but although they might think God is Like That, I'm not at all sure I do!

Still, it is very much a part of the story of Abraham, so we must look at it. Scholars seem to think that these stories of Abraham, which had been an integral part of the Jewish tradition, were collected together and written down during the 5th and 6th centuries BC – this, you remember, was when the Israelites were in exile, the Temple had been destroyed, and they had no king of their own. Only a very few Israelites were left in Jerusalem, and they had rather lapsed from their traditions and practice. So the various stories were collected and written down, possibly somewhat haphazardly, in case it should all be lost.

Abraham himself is thought to have lived in the early part of the 2nd millennium BC, somewhere between 1976 BC and 1637 BC. This was in the Bronze age – he would have had bronze tools, not iron, and possibly still a flint knife.

Robert and I went to Italy over Easter this year, and on Easter Monday we went to the town of Bolzano, where they have the museum where the body of Oetzi, the ice-man, is stored. You may remember that he was found in the Alps about 20 years ago, having been preserved in a glacier for over 5,000 years. The point is, this was even longer ago than Abraham – he only had a copper axe, as they hadn't discovered about bronze yet. But the things that were found with him – his axe, his coat, his trousers, his bow and arrows, his knife and so on, you could see just how they were used, and he was really a person just like you or me! That makes Abraham feel less remote, as he, too, would have worn clothes we recognise, and carried tools we'd know and so on.

Abraham had felt called by God to leave his home-town of Ur in the Chaldees, which in his day was allegedly highly civilised. They had, apparently, nineteen different kinds of beer and a great many fried-fish shops, if you call that being civilized!

However, they did enjoy other kinds of food, such as onions, leeks, cucumbers, beans, garlic, lentils, milk, butter, cheese, dates, and the occasional meal of beef or lamb. Foods that you and I enjoy to this day! There was wine available, to make a change from beer, but it was expensive, and drunk only by the rich. They played board-games, enjoyed poetry and music, which they played on the lyre, harp and drum, and were generally rather well-found, from all one gathers.

The only thing was that without many trees in their part of the world, they had to do without much furniture, and tended to sleep on mats on the floor, for instance, instead of beds. But definitely a sensible and civilised place in which to live. When you hear it described, it doesn't sound all that remote, does it? They were people like us, and had similar tastes to us.

But Abraham had felt called to leave there, and to take his family and household and to live in the desert. And there, eventually, long after Sarah had given up all hope of having a child, Isaac was born.

And now this. Now the demand to give up Isaac, to sacrifice him to God. What should Abraham do? What could Abraham do, being the kind of person he was? He wasn't perfect – he had been known to tell lies when things got awkward; he had tried to bring God's plan for him into being himself by conceiving a child on his servant Hagar. No, he wasn't perfect, but what he was, was someone who really wanted to follow God, and to do what God wanted. And now, it seemed, God wanted him to sacrifice his only child. What of the promise to make his descendants a great nation? But if God said to do it, Abraham did it, to the best of his ability.

Child sacrifice was, of course, not unknown in that era and that region, and some scholars even think that it was not unknown among worshippers of God, although it's explicitly and emphatically forbidden in the various books of the Law. The Israelites were not to copy their neighbours' bad example! Deuteronomy 12, verses 30-31 says: “After the Lord destroys those nations, make sure that you don't follow their religious practices, because that would be fatal. Don't try to find out how they worship their gods, so that you can worship in the same way. Do not worship the Lord your God in the way they worship their gods, for in the worship of their gods they do all the disgusting things that the Lord hates. They even sacrifice their children in the fires on their altars.”

Anyway, Abraham and Isaac – who, by the way, wasn't a small boy by then, but probably a young man – go off with the servants up to the mountain to sacrifice. Traditionally, they went to where the Temple would later be built in Jerusalem, where the Dome of the Rock is now. At least, that's what Jewish scholars say – Christian commentators have thought it was more probably Golgotha, where Jesus was crucified. The Bible isn't exactly clear, but it's in that sort of area, anyway. And Abraham causes the servants and the animals to wait behind, while he and his son go and worship, “and then we will come back to you.” Note that “We”; we'll come back to that!

And Isaac asks where is the animal for the sacrifice, and Abraham says that God will send one – but he binds Isaac and puts him on the altar. You notice, Isaac doesn't struggle – or we are not told if he does – but accepts his fate as from God. And then, just in time, the angel intervenes and the ram is sacrificed instead of Isaac.

Well, it's a very extraordinary story! What was Abraham thinking? What was Abraham thinking God was thinking? God had promised him that he would be the father of many nations – but Isaac had not yet married or had a child, so if he was killed, that would be the end of the line!

Of course, the traditional Christian interpretation of this story is stated in the letter to the Hebrews, chapter 11, verses 17-19: “It was faith that made Abraham offer his son Isaac as a sacrifice when God put Abraham to the test. Abraham was the one to whom God had made the promise, yet he was ready to offer his only son as a sacrifice. God had said to him, 'It is through Isaac that you will have the descendants I promised.' Abraham reckoned that God was able to raise Isaac from death – and, so to speak, Abraham did receive Isaac back from death.”

Abraham may well have thought that God might provide a last-minute substitute for Isaac, or, failing that, would return Isaac from the dead. Remember that he said to his servants that “We will come back”, not “I will come back.” He trusted God.

The story is, of course, considered to be a picture of the Atonement, too – God sacrificing his own son, Jesus, in place of humanity. And Isaac, like Jesus, went more-or-less willingly to his death. And where Jesus was raised, Isaac was given the ram as a substitute.

Of course, there are many other ways of looking at the Atonement, and frankly, this one is one that I don't find says anything to me at this stage in my Christian journey. It is part of the truth, of course, but not all of it. I prefer those parts of the truth that focus on God's love, rather than on God's judgement. But it's there, nevertheless, and it is part of it.

I said at the beginning that the stories had probably been written down during the Exile, and it's also interesting to read what some of the Jewish fathers have made of it. One writer reckons that actually, Abraham was testing God, not vice versa! This, after all, is the Abraham who had pleaded with God to save Sodom and Gomorrah – it's like he went off and did what God was asking without arguing in order to put pressure on God to do the right thing, as it were, and send the ram! After all, he doesn't even say “You what? But you told me Isaac was to be the father of many nations!” He just went off and obeyed what he believed God was asking him to do.

And that, of course, is the important thing that I wish to leave with you this morning. We have just begun the very long haul of Ordinary Time that goes on until the end of November. And while, during the first half of the Church's year, we look at the life of Jesus, his birth, his teachings, his death, resurrection and ascension, and the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, during this second half of the year, what we are basically looking at is our faith, and what happens when what we believe comes up against what we think we believe!

And that's what happened to Abraham. He was asked to trust God even for the life of his only Son, the Son that God had promised would father many nations.

Of course, that test, if that's what it was, didn't come out of the blue. Abraham had had long practice in believing God, in trusting him, from moving out of Ur of the Chaldees, through the promise of a son – and the failure to trust that led him to conceive Ishmael – and the birth of Isaac, and so on. He was used to trusting God, and so when the crunch came, he was able to.

Are you used to trusting God? If and when the crunch comes in your own life, will you still be able to trust him? Job, you may remember, said he would go on trusting God even if it killed him. And trusting God has killed many, many people down the centuries, the martyrs who preferred to die than to renounce their faith. Could you trust God when the crunch comes? Can I?

I tell you one thing; we may or may not be able to, but we certainly won't be able to if we don't practice trusting Him in our everyday life! Amen.

The Sheep

Here in London, we probably don't think much about sheep, do we?
Okay, we might wear wool clothes, or eat curry mutton or roast lamb,
and we might use a lanolin hand-cream when our hands are dry and chapped, but by and large, we don't think much about where these things come from.
About sheep.

It's very different when I go and visit my family in Sussex,
because my brother is a shepherd,
and so sheep loom pretty large in our lives down there.
They are silly creatures, really –
very few brains!
Usually they follow a leader, and the trick is to become their leader.
An Australian sheep-farming friend of mine likes to enter her sheepdogs in trials, and she comments that
“Sheepdog trialling is a tricky sport.
Sheep have this amazing ability to bring Humans and Dogs completely undone.
Experienced triallers know that no matter how good the dog and how good the handler it only takes ONE sheep to bring the whole show down.”
Yes, that makes enormous sense to me.
One sheep finds a hole in the fence, and they are all through it,
and have all wandered off where they ought not to be....

These days, shepherds don't stay with their flocks 24/7 the way they used to;
time was, they would often live in caravans on the Downs with their sheep, who could wander almost at will during the day, and then be fenced in, or “folded” into a corral with hazel hurdles, at night.
The shepherd lived there with them, and knew the sheep intimately.

That's less easy to do these days, with bigger flocks;
and the development of electric fences means that there is no need for the shepherd to be there 24/7,
although during the lambing season, my brother will get up several times in the night to check the ewes,
and has been known to sleep on a camp-bed in the shed with them!

In Bible times, it was more traditional;
the sheep would be folded at night, gathered into fenced-off areas,
and the shepherd would lie down at the entrance to guard the sheep.
And in our reading, Jesus likens himself to that shepherd:
“I am the gate for the sheep!”
He contrasts himself with those who climb over the hurdles,
or who get into the fold some other way –
the thieves, those who would steal the sheep.
Or perhaps in our day we might think of people's dogs left to run loose –
you wouldn't believe, or perhaps you would, the amount of damage a couple of dogs can do.
Not good.

Sheep do tend to know their shepherd.
My brother's sheep are fairly brainless, as sheep go,
but they do eventually learn to recognise his car,
and that of the other shepherds, and their response to those cars is quite different from their response to, say, my father’s car.
They know when they see those particular cars, they’ll get fed, or looked at, or
moved to a new pasture, or something nice.

And Jesus tells us, in our reading, that the sheep follow him because they know his voice.

So I wonder, how is it that we know the Shepherd's voice,
and what does it mean in practice?

How is it, then, that we know the Shepherd's voice.
I think there are two reasons.
The first is that He speaks to us;
the second is that we listen to Him.

He speaks to us.
Well, in one sense that's somewhat of a no-brainer, as the Americans so graphically put it.
We are told, from our earliest days as Christians,
that God speaks to us through the Bible,
and through other people,
and even, although we must be careful, through our own imaginations.
But being told it and knowing it seem to be two different things!
Of course, there are times when we hear the Shepherd's voice so clearly, times when we know we are His, held in His arms –

or round his neck, the way shepherd today will still carry a young sheep.

We have all known times when we hear the Shepherd's voice so clearly,
but, of course, we have all known those other times, too;
times when God seems far away, when our prayers go no further than the ceiling, when, so far from hearing God's voice, we wonder whether, in fact, our whole faith has been based on a delusion!
I'm sure we've all been there and done that, too!

Now, it's traditional to be told that when those times happen, it is our fault.
We have stopped listening, we are told, we have gone our own way,
we have sinned.
And, of course, some of the time that is exactly what has happened,
even if some preachers do make it sound like God isn't talking to us any more because we've offended him!
I think, rather, it is we who cannot hear the voice of God when we are uncomfortable in God's presence.
But usually when that has happened we know that is what the matter is,
and sooner or later we admit this to ourselves, and to God,
and things come all right again.

But some of the time, with the best will in the world,
we know we have not sinned,
and it really doesn't seem to be our fault.
Times when everything goes pear-shaped,
and you wonder where on earth God is in the middle of it all?
And part of you knows that this is exactly where God is –
in the middle of it all –
but that part is operating on sheer faith.
You can't sense God's presence, or hear the Shepherd's voice at all,
no matter how hard you listen.
It happens to all of us, probably more often than we care to admit.
Again, preachers have various explanations for it,
and you've probably heard them as often as I have.
That God is testing our faith, as though God didn't know how strong our faith actually is.
Actually, of course, God does know, but we don't necessarily,
and it can be a salutary shock to us!

The thing is, of course, that we don't understand, can't understand, why these things happen.
God is God, not just another person like us, and it's not possible to understand.
We don't know why we suddenly seem to lose the ability to hear God's voice, and why, even worse, we suddenly seem to lose all sense of God, and seem to simply be going through the motions.

The fact that it's almost universal, that almost every Christian goes through it from time to time must mean that it is normal.
But I don't know why it happens,
and I don't altogether accept the explanations as to why.
I think it's just "part of the human condition", or, if you prefer, "part of the mystery of faith", and we must accept it as such.

There are times when we just don't understand what God is doing, and that's okay, too.
Some years ago now, there was an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease,
and as part of the effort to control this,
you were only allowed to move your livestock to another field with government permission.
My brother's sheep became stuck in their field,
long after they had exhausted all the grass,
long after they should have been moved.
And they wanted out, and couldn't understand why they were not moved, to the point that they would run up to any and every car going past, asking to be moved, even cars they would normally ignore like my father's.
My brother had a very good reason that year for not moving his sheep to a new field, no matter how much he wanted to move them, and no matter how much they wanted to be moved.
He wasn't allowed to by the Government, because of foot-and-mouth precautions.
And you try explaining that to sheep!
And since God is even further beyond us than we are from real sheep, how could we be expected to understand what constraints He has?

Sometimes, of course, the matter seems urgent, when we want to know what God wants us to do, and yet God simply doesn't seem to answer.
The more we pray, the less we know what to do, and the quieter God seems to get.
It's so frustrating!
And we rage and rampage and know no peace.

In our reading from Acts, the believers were going through one of those times when God was so close to them, when new believers were coming in all the time, when life was simply ideal.
They lived together, they shared everything in common.
It was idyllic, and, of course, it couldn't last.
Ethnic tensions crept in between the Jews and the Greeks;
there was that dreadful time when Ananias and his wife pretended they'd given their all to the church, when they hadn't at all.
It wouldn't have mattered –
nobody was making them give anything at all, never mind all they had –
but to lie about it?
They paid a fearful penalty.
The community was wonderful while it lasted, but it didn't, couldn't, last.
I wonder whether they felt they were failures when it all broke up, when they started to be persecuted, when things basically went wrong –
or did they accept that things happen, and that God still loved them?

Jesus says "My sheep know My voice".
It is a given.
There are no ifs, buts and ands.
He says "My sheep know My voice".
We do hear His voice, and know it.
Even when we think we don't.
Often, when seeking guidance, we know in our hearts that a given path might probably be wrong.
Or wrong for us, if not intrinsically wrong.

We, of course, behave like sheep from time to time.
We think we do not hear the voice of the Shepherd, so we rush after any and every passing thing that looks as though it might be the Shepherd.
Just as my brother's sheep ran after my father’s car,
hoping that we were coming to move them to a better field.
Is this the right Shepherd, we ask ourselves, rushing to find out.
And sometimes, in the process, we get ourselves badly lost.
We find that the better field was no such thing.

But remember our Lord's story about the lost sheep?
When we do get lost, we can trust the Good Shepherd to pull on Barbour and Wellies forthwith, and head out to find us.
"No one will snatch them out of my hand," Jesus said.
So even if we, or someone we care about, has gone off down the wrong track and got lost, we can trust the Good Shepherd to come and find us again.

Because the Good Shepherd, Jesus tells us, is come "that they may have life and have it abundantly".
Abundantly.

So when we get to a time where we seem not to hear His voice,
a time when we look round and He seems to have vanished, let's not panic.
Let's not assume it was all our fault –
it might have been, but not necessarily.
Let's not abandon all idea of Christianity, of churchgoing, of being God's person.
Instead, let's sit and wait, calling out to God in prayer, but accepting the silence, trusting that one day the Good Shepherd will come and find us, and say
"There you are!
Come on, I'll take you back to the rest!" Amen.

Mothering Sunday (Second sermon for 4 April)

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

Today is the fourth Sunday in Lent, and it’s long been known as Laetare Sunday, or Refreshment Sunday – it’s half-way through Lent, and in days when people kept it rather more strictly than they do now, it was a day when you could relax the rules a little. And the tradition grew up that on that day, you went to the mother church in your area – often the cathedral, but it might have just been the largest church in your area.

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

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

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

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

We do give thanks for our mothers - this year it's all a bit special because it's my first as a grandmother, and Emily's first as a mother - and I texted my own mother this morning, remembering that it was her first as a great-grandmother. But we have to remember, too, people whose Mums are no longer with us, and to remember that some people didn't have satisfactory relationships with their own Mums, and some people have never known the joy of motherhood.

But we can all celebrate God's wonderful love for each and every one of us.

Can you see?

This is a very splendid story in John's Gospel, although it's rather long, which is why I divided the reading into two bits. It's not just about a healing, it's about what happened afterwards.

We start with the man born blind, and first of all the disciples want to know why this had happened. We all want to know why, don't we, when dreadful things happen. Why was this child born disabled? Why did that earthquake and tsunami devastate part of Japan? Or part of New Zealand, for that matter? Why did so and so get cancer? Why did so and so get cancer and then get better, when someone else couldn't get better, and died? And so on and so forth. It's human nature. Even though we sometimes know the answers, or at least part of them – that city was built on a fault line, which is why the earthquake happened just there; that person shortened their lifespan by smoking. And so on. But other times there seems to be no reason for it.

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

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

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

For the blind man – and let's call him Bartimaeus for now, as it makes life easier with pronouns and such – life changed immediately. My sister-in-law, who is blind, says that not only would he have been given his sight, but he would have been given the gift of being able to see, otherwise how would he have known what he was looking at? He wouldn't have known whether what he was looking at was a person or a camel or a tree, would he? But he was given the gift, so he knew.

And he could stop begging for his living, he realised, and he went and did whatever the local equivalent of signing-on was. And, of course there were lots of mutterings and whisperings – Is it him? Can't be! Must be someone new in town, who just looks like him!

“Yes, it's me,” explains Bartimaeus, anxious to tell his story. “Yes, I was blind, and yes, I can see now!”

“So what happens?” asks the neighbours.

“Well, this bloke put some mud on my eyes and told me to go and wash, and when I did, then I could see. No, I don't know where he is – I never saw him; Yes, I'd probably know his voice, but I didn't actually see him!”

And the neighbours, thinking all this a bit odd, drag him before the Pharisees, the religious authorities of the day. And they don't believe him. Not possible. Nobody born blind gets to see, it just doesn't happen. And if it did, it couldn't happen on the Sabbath. Not unless the person who did it was a sinner, because only a sinner would do that on the Sabbath – it's work, isn't it? And if the person who did it was a sinner, it can't have happened!

They got themselves in a right old muddle. Now we, of course, know what Jesus' thoughts about healing on the Sabbath day were – he is on record elsewhere as pointing out that you'd rescue a distressed donkey, or, indeed, lead it to the horse-trough to get a drink, whatever day of the week it was, so surely healing a human being was a right and proper activity for the Sabbath. But the Pharisees didn't believe this. They thought healing was work, and thus not a proper activity for the Sabbath at all.

So they decided it couldn't possibly have happened, and sent for Bartimaeus's parents to say “Now come on, your son wasn't really blind, was he? What has happened?” And his parents, equally bewildered, say “Well yes, he is our son; yes, he was born blind; yes, it does appear that he can now see; no, we don't know what happened; why don't you ask him?” And the Bible tells us they were also scared of being expelled from the synagogue, which is why they didn't say anything more.

Actually, they must have had a fearful mixture of emotions, don't you think – thrilled that their son could suddenly see, scared of the authorities, wondering what exactly Jesus had done, and was it something they ought to have done themselves, and so on. And, of course, wondering how life was going to be from now on. Very soon now, their son probably wouldn't need them any more; now he was like other people, he could, perhaps, earn a proper living and even marry and have a family.

So the authorities go back to Bartimaeus, and he says, “Well, how would I know if the person who healed me is a sinner or not? All I know is that I was blind, and now I can see!” And then they asked him again, well, how did it happen, and he gets fed up with them going on and says “But I told you! Didn't you listen? Or maybe you want to be his disciples, too?” which was, of course, rather cheeky and he deserved being told off for it, but then again, I expect he was still rather hyper about having been healed. And he does go on rather and tells them that the man who opened his eyes must be from God, can't possibly not be, and they get even more fed up with him, and sling him out.

And then Jesus meets him again – of course Bartimaeus, not having seen him before, doesn't actually recognise him – and reveals himself to him. And Bartimaeus worships him.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But it's easy to fall out of the habit of allowing God to touch you and change you. I know I have, many times. The joy of it is, though, that we can always come back. We aren't left alone to fend for ourselves – we would always fail if we were. We just need to acknowledge to ourselves – and to God, of course, but God knew, anyway – that we've wandered away again.

That's a bit simplistic, of course – there are times when we are quite sure we haven't wandered away, and yet God seems far off. But I'm not going into that one right now; nobody really knows why that happens, except God! But for most of us, most of the time, if we fall out of the habit of allowing God to touch us and heal us and change us, we simply have to acknowledge that this is what has happened, and we are back with him again.

It can be scary. Bartimaeus was scared, and with some reason as his healing ended up with his being chucked out of the synagogue. That was relatively mild compared with what has happened to some of Jesus' followers down the years, though. But then, we are always given the strength and the ability to cope with whatever comes. We don't have to cope alone. God is there, not only changing us, but enabling us to cope with that change. And we are changed and grown, and God gets the glory! Because it's not just about what happens to us – although, human as we are, that's the bit we think about most. It's also about showing God's glory to the world, showing people that Jesus is the Light of the World. As happened when Bartimaeus was healed; as may well happen if and when God touches our lives. Amen.

Tempted and Fallen

This was prepared before the dreadful earthquake in Japan. I did sort-of mention it: "What if the temptation had been for the earthquake not to happen.....?"

The first reading today was about a man, and a woman and God. The man and the woman don't have names – later on, they are called Adam and Eve, but at this stage they don't need names. They are just Man and Woman. They are the only Man and Woman that exist – God hasn't made any more, yet – so they don't need names. Man can just go, “Oi, you!” and Woman will know he's talking to her.

God has made the Man and the Woman, and put them in a garden, where there is plenty of food to eat for the picking of it. It's lovely and warm, so they don't need clothes, and in fact they are so comfortable with themselves and with God that they don't want clothes. There are animals to be cared for,and crops to be tended, but the work is easy and pleasurable. And all the fruit in the garden is theirs, except for one tree,which God has told them is poisonous. If they eat the fruit of this tree, God said, they'll die.

Well, so far, so good. But at this point, enter another player. The serpent. Now, the Serpent is God's enemy, but the Man and the Woman don't know that. They think the Serpent is just another animal. Now Serpent comes and chats to Woman.

“Nice pomegranate you've got there!”

“Mmm, yes,” says Woman.

“Look at that fruit on that tree over there, though,” says Serpent. “That looks well tasty!”

“Yes, but it's poisonous!” explains Woman. “God said that if we ate it, we'd die, so we're keeping well clear of it!”

“Oh rubbish!” says Serpent. “God's stringing you a line! It's not poisonous at all. Thing is, if you eat it, you'll be just like God, and know good and evil. God doesn't want you to eat it, because God doesn't want any rivals! Go on, have a bite! You won't regret it!”

So Woman has another look at the tree, and sees that the fruit is red and ripe and smells tempting, so she cautiously stretches out her hand and grabs the fruit, and, ever so tentatively, takes a tiny bite. Mmm, it is good!

So she calls to Man, “Oi, you!”

“Mm-hmmm,” calls Man, looking up from the game he was playing with his dogs. “What is it?”

“Come and try this fruit,” says Woman, and explains how the Serpent had said that God had been stringing them a line, and how good the fruit tasted. So Man decides to have a piece himself.

But it's coming on to evening, and at evening, God usually comes and walks in the garden, and Man and Woman usually come and share their day. But tonight, somehow, they don't feel like chatting to God. And those bodies, the bodies they'd enjoyed so much, suddenly feel like they want to be kept private. They look at one another, and both retreat, silently, into the far depths of the garden, grabbing some fig leaves to make coverings for themselves.

Presently, God comes looking for them. “What's up? Why are you hiding?”

“Well,” goes Man, “I didn't want to face you, 'cos I was naked.”

“Naked?” says God. “Naked? Who told you you were naked? You've been eating that fruit I told you was poisonous, haven't you?”

“Well, er, um.” Man wriggles. “It wasn't my fault. That one, the Woman you gave me. She said to eat it, so I did. Wasn't my fault at all. You can't blame me!”

So God looks at Woman, and says, “Is this true? Did you give him the fruit?”

Woman goes scarlet. “Well, it was Serpent. He said you, well, that the fruit wasn't poisonous.”

But, of course, the fruit had been poisonous It wasn't that it gave Man and Woman a tummyache or the runs; it poisoned their whole relationship with God. They couldn't stay in God's garden any more. Serpent was going to have to crawl on his belly from now on, and everyone, almost, would be afraid of him. Woman was going to have awful trouble having babies, and Man was going to find making a living difficult.

But God did show them how to make warm clothes for themselves, and didn't abandon them forever, even though, from that time forth, they weren't really comfortable with God.

Well, that's the story, then, that the Israelites used to explain why human beings find it so very difficult to be God's people and to do God's will. And it shows how first the Woman and then the Man were tempted, and fell.

They fell. But Jesus resisted temptation. You may remember that he was baptised, and there was the voice from heaven that said “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.” And then Jesus went off into the desert for six weeks or so, to come to terms with exactly Who he was, and to discover the exact nature of his divine powers.

I often think that what Jesus was tempted to do was to behave as though he were Harry Potter – to misuse his divine powers for his own comfort and safety.

It must have been so insidious, mustn't it? "Are you really the Son of God? Why don't you prove it by making these stones bread? You're very hungry, aren't you? If you're the Son of God, you can do anything you like, can't you? Surely you can make these stones into bread? But perhaps you aren't the Son of God, after all...." And so it would have gone on and on and on.

But Jesus resisted. The way the gospel-writers tell it, you would think he just waved his hand and shook his head and said, “No, man shall not live by bread alone!” But that wouldn't have been temptation. You know what it's like when you're tempted to do something you ought not – the longing can become more and more intense. There are times when you think, Hmm, that'd be nice, but then you think, naaa, not right, and put it behind you; but other times when you have to really, really struggle to put it behind you. “If you are the Son of God....”

The view from the pinnacle of the Temple. So high up.... by their standards,
like the top of the Canary Wharf tower would be to us. "Go on then – you're the Son of God, aren't you? Throw yourself down – your God will protect you!" The temptation is to show off, to use his powers like magic. Yes, God would have rescued him, but: “Do not put the Lord your God to the test.” That's not what it's about. That would have been showing off. That would have been misusing his divine powers for something rather spectacular.

Jesus was also tempted with riches and power beyond his wildest dreams – at that, beyond our wildest dreams, if only he would worship the enemy. We can sympathise with this particular temptation; I'm sure we all would love to be rich and powerful! But for Jesus, it must have been particularly subtle – it would help him do the work he'd been sent to do! Could he fulfil his mission without riches and power? What was being God's beloved son all about, anyway? Would it be possible to spread the message that he was beginning to realise he had to spread if he was going to spend his life in an obscure and dusty part of the Roman empire? And again, after prayer and wrestling with it, he finds the answer: “Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him.” Let the riches and power look after themselves; the important thing was to serve God. If that is right, the rest would follow.

You may remember that Jesus was similarly tempted on the Cross, he could have called down the legions from heaven to rescue him. But he chose not to. It wasn't about spectacular powers – often, when Jesus did miracles, he asked people not to tell anybody. He didn't want to be spectacular. He'd learnt that his mission was to the people of Israel, probably even just the people of Galilee – and the occasional outsider who needed him, like the Syro-Phoenician woman, or the Roman centurion – and anything more than that was up to his heavenly Father.

And, obviously, if the "anything more" hadn't happened, we wouldn't be here this morning! But, at the time, that wasn't Jesus' business. His business, as he told us, was to do the work of his Father in Heaven – and that work, for now, was to be an itinerant preacher and healer, but not trying deliberately to call attention to himself.

St Paul deliberately contrasts Jesus with the first Man, Adam: “As in Adam all die, even so in Christ all are made alive.” Jesus, by resisting temptation, balanced out the first Man and Woman's failure to resist. Jesus, we believe, paid the penalty on the Cross for humanity's failure to resist the lures of the evil one; for our failure to live as God's people should; for our failure to live as God's people. And because of that, we shall all live.

Because, in the end, that's what it's about. Not what we do or don't do – that's just petty details. But are we going to be God's person, or are we not?

Ash Wednesday 2011

So here we are at the beginning of another Lent. We are having a rather traditional penitential liturgy, closing with the Imposition of Ashes, for those who want. A sign of penitence, of repentance.

So what is it all about? Is it all solemn and penitential? Should Lent be a joyless, miserable few weeks? It certainly has form for being just that. I can't find my copy to quote exactly, but back at the turn of the last century, children in a vicarage family dreaded Lent: it was assumed that nobody would want to eat cakes, sweets or jam, so these were not served, and for small children it seemed a dreadfully long time! And on the one, memorable, occasion they were allowed to accept an invitation to a party in Lent, they were reminded that they should only eat bread and butter – and were somewhat at a loss as to what to do when they found it was sprinkled with hundreds-and-thousands, as was often the custom at parties in those days! The sausage rolls and mini-pizzas that would have saved them at a party today were unknown then!

More recently, I had a cousin whose birthday normally falls in Lent, and I gather her father didn't really like her to have a party until Easter was safely over. And when Robert and I were married, also in Lent, my mother was not at all sure whether we should have flowers or not!

You'll see no flowers here today, nor will you until Easter Day. That's a legacy of our Anglican roots – no Anglican church will have flowers now, or at least not on Sundays, until Easter. It is, apparently, fine for weddings and funerals, but you don't keep them the way you normally would.

And in those churches where they change colours according to the seasons, the cloths and the clergy's stoles will be changed from the green of Ordinary Time to the purple of Lent and Advent.

Even today people still give things up for Lent; a friend of mine, who is not a Christian, nevertheless doesn't eat chocolate during Lent as a minor act of self-discipline. Actually, given that we are competing in France in a couple of weeks and both of us find chocolate one of the best ways to avoid a serious adrenaline crash, it will be a rather more serious deprivation this year, I suspect! Other people give up other things – booze, for instance, and some friends are giving up their social networking for Lent – Twitter, for instance, or Facebook.

But just giving things up is often not enough. When we were children, we were never allowed to give up anything for Lent unless we saved the money we would otherwise have spent and gave it to charity. And if you give up going on a social network, what do you do with the time? Do you really spend it practising the presence of God, or does it get frittered away playing Solitaire or something similar? I know which it would be if I tried doing that!

But should Lent be a dreary, solemn time, with an emphasis on the negative? I think not. Sometimes people take on something extra during Lent. The classic, of course, is the Lent Study Group, but there are other things. Some people make a point of reading a book about God, or about people's experiences and history with God, during Lent. Others might make a point of doing something for other people – going round and visiting people from church that perhaps they haven't visited for ages. If you are on bad terms with someone, Lent is a terrific time to put things right. Or you might make a point, as I do some years, of finding something to be thankful for each day.

But what, then, about all this solemn penitential stuff we're going to do in a minute? It's easy enough to think of it as miserable; as meaning we ought to be unhappy about being such dreadful people, and so on. But I don't think it's meant to mean that.

It is, I think, about making a fresh start, about preparing for Lent. Back in the day, people used to go to confession on Shrove Tuesday, to be shriven of their sins, so that they could start Lent right with God. What, after all, could be nicer, after all, than being right with God, than knowing you are right with God, that you are forgiven, that you are loved?

Confession isn't really about telling God the nasty things you've done, said or thought. It can involve that, of course, but I think it's deeper than that – it's about facing up to the fact that you are the sort of person who can say, do our think such things: I have to face up to the fact that I am the sort of person who will snap at her family, given the slightest excuse to do so, or that I tend to be very greedy and lazy, as you can doubtless tell just by looking! But without God's help I shall always be these things. God knows what I'm like – it's no surprise to Him. But I need to face up to the fact that I'm like that, and ask God to help me change.

And, of course, we need to let go of anything someone else has done that has hurt us, to forgive them. And that can be horrendously difficult, too, especially if you're still angry at them. Again, it's not really something you can do by yourself – you need God's help to do it. God can take the anger and the hurt and even the hatred, and transform it – but you have to be willing to give it to him, and sometimes you have to start by asking for help to make you willing to let go of it! That's all part of confession.

And sometimes, it's God himself who we need to forgive. Which sounds awful, but what about those times when something awful happens and we don't know why? Think of the people of Christchurch, New Zealand this Lent – I wonder how many are angry with God because of the earthquake that has destroyed their Cathedral and may well have destroyed their homes, or their loved ones. I know there have been times in my life when bad things have happened, and I've been very angry with God. Who, thankfully, doesn't mind – admitting our anger is, as always, part of confession.

And sometimes, of course, it's ourselves we need to forgive. We find it very hard to accept we are the kind of person who can snap at others, or who can waste a lot of money in the shops, or on on-line gambling sites, and when we catch ourselves doing something like that, we feel we've let ourselves down, and we find it very hard to put it behind us and allow God to help us carry on. Again, admitting that is part of confession.

The second part, the repentance, isn't just about saying “Sorry” to God, although that's where it starts. It's about turning right round, and going God's way rather than our own way. This may well involve changes in our behaviour, but mostly it involves changes in our deepest being, in who we are, in what's important to us. And that doesn't happen overnight, of course, and won't happen at all without God's help.

We're not just telling God how ghastly we are and promising to change in our own strength. We're asking God to help us grow and change. If we try to change in our own strength, we shall surely fail. Sometimes we get it twisted, and think we have to make ourselves perfect before we can come to God – er no. We must come to God exactly as we are, and allow Him to come into our deepest levels and help us to grow perfect. It won't happen overnight, but as long as we are open to God, it will happen.

And so we come to our penitential rite.

This isn't something we do publicly very often. In our Gospel reading, Jesus reminds his followers that mostly, you keep your religious practices to yourself. You don't make a parade of being holy, because that's not what being holy is about. You don't let everybody know when you're fasting – and I assume that, in this day and age, it means you don't moan on Facebook about missing chocolate or booze if you happen to have decided to give them up for Lent! You certainly don't make a parade about what you are giving, or giving up! What you give to the church or to charity is between you and the Treasurer of that organisation – oh, and the Inland Revenue if you are a tax-payer and gift aid it. Nobody else needs to know. If you are helping out someone who is in financial difficulty, nobody needs to know except you and that person.

You don't have to let people know how much – or how little – you pray, although it's only polite to say you've prayed for someone if they've asked you to. But if you found you lay awake in the night praying for them – and it can happen, if God really needs you to pray for that person – then you don't go saying so, and certainly not to anybody else!

Instead, says Jesus, you do all that privately, keeping it between you and God and anybody else who really needs to know, and you carry on as though nothing has happened.

And that's what we're going to do now. We're going to use the words on the sheet to help us get ourselves right with God, and if we wish, we're going to have the sign of the cross marked on our foreheads with ash as a sign of that happening. But we will wipe it off before we leave here – there are plenty of tissues if you haven't one – and we will go on our way rejoicing.

And I hope we will continue to rejoice throughout Lent; rejoice that we are loved; rejoice that we are saved; rejoice that we are, however slowly, becoming the people we were created to be. It's not our idea, it's not our doing. It's God's idea.

And then, come Easter Sunday, we will be able to realise all this for ourselves, to make the Resurrection real, to know the Risen Lord in our own hearts and lives, and for the joy and love to spill over on to those around us. Amen!

Choose Life

The Children's talk is an integral part of this sermon, albeit separated by the music group and the Gospel reading!

Children's Talk

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 the music group is going to sing for us.

Choose Life

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The point is that Josiah really meant it about worshipping God, and when he was confronted with the Scriptures, the book of the Law, he chose life.
And we are asked to make that choice, too. Is our religion something formal, a matter of coming to Church on Sundays, of obeying certain rules, going through the motions?

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

“I set before you life and death;” says the Lord. “Choose life.”