Temptation!

Um, yes; this actually is very like the sermon I preached on this Sunday in 2010, which was in turn very like the one I preached in 2007.... I do recycle my sermons, with tweaks, unless it appears not to be what's wanted!

It's difficult, isn't it?

On Thursday I spent the day, as I usually do on Thursdays, looking after my grandson.

He and his family have just moved house, and there is a Homebase quite literally three minutes' walk from where they live,

and I wanted to go there as I wanted to buy some anti-mould stuff my daughter had been recommending.

The trouble is, they also had a lovely display of Malteaster Bunnies...

so of course I had to buy a pack of mini-Bunnies to share with the family, didn't I?

And how often do we get tempted to buy stuff like that – it might not be sweets, but very often, the kind of food the supermarket has on special offer, or on BOGOF, is the kind of food that is very tempting, but not very good for you.

Okay, so eating the wrong sort of food can scarcely be called a sin!

It might not be very kind to horses, we've been learning this week, and it might not be very good for us, but that's all.

But sometimes we find it easy to be tempted to do wrong.

Perhaps we're tempted to use our bodies in the wrong way,

or worse, to misuse other people's bodies.

Or to misuse other people full stop –

Jesus reminded us that if we were angry with someone,

we needed to express our anger in such a way that it didn't destroy the other person, or put them down.

Jesus tells us that we are to treat other people with the greatest possible respect for who they are –

physically, emotionally and spiritually.

And the rest of the New Testament makes it clear that we aren't even supposed to think unkind things about other people,

which it's very hard to do at times!

We don't yet know the truth about what happened between Oscar Pistorious and his girlfriend in South Africa, but it does seem as though someone lost their temper and things went tragically wrong.

We can be tempted, too, not to get involved when a friend needs help or a listening ear;

we can be tempted to ignore it when someone in the church is in difficulties.

We can be tempted to steal –

even a few minutes' of our employers' time to make a personal phone call or answer a personal e-mail.

Although, of course, most employers do allow a reasonable amount of that, but not all.

Some people like to make a quick profit at the expense of their ethics – again, that has come very clear from the horsemeat scandal.

And some poor folk are addicted to things, drink or drugs or gambling or cigarettes or something –

and it's terribly hard for them to resist the temptation to indulge their habit.

I know –

I'm addicted to cigarettes.

Oh, I've not smoked for about 20 years –

19, I think, to be accurate –

but I'm still addicted,

and one puff and I'd be back to 40 a day in no time at all.

On the other hand, I can claim no virtue for not being addicted to gambling –

it simply doesn't interest me and I've never seen the point!

Different people are tempted to different things.

I know that when I read today's Gospel,

I often wonder what the problem was –

what are these so-called temptations?

But to Jesus, they were very real, and very urgent.

He was being tempted to misuse his divine powers,

to go for cheap glory rather than the way of the cross.

Do people still enjoy the Harry Potter books and films?

I love the books, although I’ve only seen a few of the films;

I do prefer reading to watching when it comes to fiction.

But sometimes, when I read about the way they use their wands, I wonder why they bother –

I mean, whatever is the point of using magic to draw the curtains, for instance;

can't they just pull them by hand or with a cord, like everybody else?

Jesus did miracles, sure, but they weren't like that.

They weren't just to avoid bother, or to get something more easily.

That's why it was wrong for him to turn the stones into bread –

it would have been a cheap magic trick and would have done nothing to enhance God's glory.

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.

We read Luke's account, and it just sounds as though Jesus shook his head and said, "No, it's written: you shall not live by bread alone!"

But it can't have been that easy, can it?

If it were, it wouldn't have been worth worrying about.

It's like I have no interest in going to a casino,

or in playing games of chance online or with others –

it just isn't my scene, so I'm totally not virtuous if I don't do it!

But for someone who finds that sort of thing the most enormous fun, it must be enormously tempting:

"Oh, go on then;

you never know, you might win!

They're offering £20 free if you sign up!"

And so on.

I do think, by the way, that the constant ads for on-line betting sites must be really, really difficult if you are addicted to gambling –

and make no mistake, it can be a very real addiction,

one that can and has destroyed families.

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.

And then the third temptation.

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!"

It's the Harry Potter temptation again, I think –

the temptation 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.

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.

In the world of Harry Potter, magic is sometimes used for personal comfort and to save time –

look at Mrs Weasley cooking by magic,

or Fred and George teasing Ron and Harry because they have to prepare the Christmas Brussels sprouts the way we do, using a knife,

instead of just being able to wave their wands at them.

And Harry, on his 17^th birthday, using magic to fetch his spectacles from the bedside table just because he could!

Jesus wasn't like that.

His powers weren't to be used to save him discomfort, or even death.

They were only to be used at God's command,

to heal the sick,

raise the dead,

and cast out demons.

There were no short cuts.

He had to go to the Cross,

to walk the way of Calvary,

to be put to death.

Mind you, in the very end, so did Harry, of course.

You remember how he has to die,

and then has the choice whether or not to go back and save his world.

He had to die first, though.

He is a picture of Christ, dying for his world to be saved.

Rather like Aslan in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

But in our world, unlike in Harry’s,

there simply aren't any short-cuts.

Jesus couldn't use his powers for his own glory, his own comfort,

and certainly not to save his own life.

And we can't, either.

And I don't know about you, but sometimes I find the traditional things preachers tend to say about this story rather irritating.

They point out that temptation does go away if you don't give into it,

and that help is available to help us resist.

Well, yes –

if it's something like an addiction –

been there, done that, when I was giving up smoking,

and I know I couldn't possibly have done that without God's help.

And if there is time, we can often decide that we won't do whatever it is we are being tempted to do, whatever it is.

But far too often, the temptation to do or say the wrong thing happens so quickly,

there simply isn't time!

before you know it, you've snapped at someone,

or you've got engrossed in something at work and missed the train you'd earlier promised to catch.

Or whatever.

I'm not quite sure what you're supposed to do then....

except know that God does change us, slowly,

as we walk more and more in His way,

as we get more and more used to being His person all the time,

not just on Sundays or whenever we happen to think about.

I have often said that it doesn't matter much what Lenten discipline you chose as long as it is something to help you come nearer to Jesus,

to become more Jesus' person.

Perhaps you will be coming to the Lent study groups tonight, and other Sunday evenings in Lent.

One friend has been challenged to spend ten minutes a day, just ten minutes, in God's presence –

not praying, not confessing her sins or thanking God for anything, just sitting quietly in God's presence.

I read an article which suggested that perhaps someone suffering from anorexia should be challenged to eat chocolate every day.

This season of Lent is about becoming more and more Jesus' person.

We aren't required to be perfect –

although when we do mess up, we're required to try to put things right as far as possible.

But we are expected to be open to being made more and more perfect!

Jesus was tempted in ways that we may not be.

He was enabled to resist, not because he was divine, but because he trusted God.

We are all tempted, we all have our own weak spots.

Mine are different to yours, but I have them, and so do you.

But with God's help we can fight them,

we can gradually gain ground over them.

And as we learn to trust God more an more, so we can gradually gain more and more ground over them.

And Lent is a terrific time to increase our spiritual discipline to help us do just that.

Amen.

Ash Wednesday Reflections

Introduction

Good evening, and welcome to this Ash Wednesday service. Tonight, we are going on a journey. We are going to start when it all went horribly wrong, right back at the very beginning. Then we will travel via God's plan for putting it all right again, and how that worked out, to get to the place where we put ourselves right with one another in a celebration of the Peace, and there will be an opportunity to receive the Ashes as a sign that we wish to be right with God, and then finally we will celebrate the ultimate closeness to God in the reception of Holy Communion.

Let us pray:

Father God, be with us and bless us on our journey together this evening. Help us to be aware of your love for us, and your presence with us, and lead us to a new level of closeness to you. In Jesus' name. Amen.

So we begin with our first reading, that tells us how it all went wrong.

Reflection 1 (Genesis 3:1-13)

And that's the story we tell to explain why our relationship with God went all pear-shaped.

The man and the woman did the one thing they were specifically asked not to do, eating the fruit from the one tree they were told not to touch. “If we eat it, we'll die,” the woman explained to the serpent. And indeed, in the end, death came into the world because they ate it. It was not immediately poisonous, but it poisoned their relationship with God. They hid from him, and couldn't face up to him.

Well, okay, Adam and Eve in the garden is only a story, but on another level it is profoundly true. We still question “Did God really say?” We still think we know better than God. We still find our relationship with God is sometimes poisoned. We hide from God, because we know we've done something that we ought not to have done, or because we have let ourselves down in some way or another. We have not lived up to our own standards, whether or not these are God's standards, or self-imposed.

And no matter where we are in our journey towards God today – whether we are far away or really close – we are probably not yet perfect.

So as we take our first steps on this journey, let us sing together “Dear Lord and Father of Mankind”.

Reflection 2: Galatians 4:1-7

Although the Man and the Woman had to leave the Garden of Eden, God didn't abandon them. Really quite the reverse. Genesis tells us that God showed them how to make clothes from skins, so much warmer than the fig-leaves they had managed with until then.

The rest of the Old Testament tells us of God's dealings with His people, specifically with the Israelites, who we are told are His chosen race. But over and over and over again they fail at being God's people. They find it so much easier to worship other gods, gods who don't demand more than ritual in worship, gods who don't expect you to follow them when you're not actually engaged in worship. They don't want to follow a God who is actually interested in who they are and what they do – that is too difficult, too intrusive. And eventually the inevitable happens, and most of the Kingdom of Israel is conquered by other peoples, never to be seen again. Even the Kingdom of Judah, the remnant, is taken into exile for a time, but eventually returns to Israel.

And by New Testament times, they were the People of the Law. They knew that God had set out written rules and regulations about how you were to live your life, and over the centuries their scholars and teachers had endeavoured to explain what the various laws meant, and how you should keep them. They had really become burdensome and, worse still, they were beginning to replace the ideal of a two-way relationship with God that had been God's plan from the foundation of the world.

And so God sent his Son, born of a woman, to free us from the law and from sin. And we will be enabled to become children of God.

Our next song is “Oh Lord, the clouds are gathering.”

Reflection 3: Romans 5:6-11

St Paul, I always feel, has a knack of putting things into words. “While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” The point is, we don't have to get perfect before Christ accepts us and loves us. We are already forgiven; all we have to do is to accept that forgiveness. We are not responsible for our own salvation. I'll repeat that: we are not responsible for our own salvation. All too often, we talk of “being saved by faith”, as though it was something we do. No, our faith doesn't save us – Jesus saves us! Yes, we need to acknowledge this, to own it for ourselves, of course we do. But while we were still sinners, Jesus died for us. It was all God's idea, not ours!

The worship group will sing “I am the God that healeth thee”; do join in if you know it, or sit quietly and listen if you don't.

Introduction to the Peace

So, on our journey, we have come to the place where we need to make God's love and forgiveness a reality in our own lives. And, as much as anything, this involves getting right with other people. Jesus told us, you remember, that if we knew someone was at outs with us, we should make things right before even worshipping God. So we are going to take a few moments to wish one another God's peace, and then the worship group will sing again as we prepare for the liturgy of the Ashes.

Final Reflection: Hebrews 10:19-23

Confidence! We may enter God's presence with confidence, since we know that we are right with God. It is not because we are perfect, but because we are forgiven. It's not because we love God, but because God loves us. So, dear brothers and sisters, Nadine is now going to lead us in prayer as we celebrate the Lord's Supper together.

God's extravagance

Today's sermon was basically a re-run of this one, so I am not reprinting it; Lynda-Anne led the service and I preached, and I think it was appreciated, despite the small congregation due to snow.

Rejoice, but...

I did, of course, discuss the atrocity in Connecticut that had taken place two days earlier when I came to the part about "dreadful things".

Zephaniah 3:14-20; Philippians 4:4-7; Luke 3:7-18

"Rejoice in the Lord always;" says St Paul, "Again I will say, Rejoice."

We had a good old cheer just there now, with the children, didn't we?* We were shouting for joy because Christmas is coming, because Jesus is coming, because we are celebrating the return of the Light, at this darkest time of year.

Old Zephaniah knew something about rejoicing, too. It was our first reading:

"Sing aloud, O daughter Zion; shout, O Israel!
Rejoice and exult with all your heart,
O daughter Jerusalem!"

I don't think I know very much about Zephaniah, do you? He's not one of the prophets we usually read. Apparently, though, nobody knows anything more about him than what he writes about himself. He was a great-great-grandson of a king called Hezekiah – and Hezekiah was the last so-called “good” king of Judah for several generations. But when Zephaniah was prophesying and preaching, his cousin Josiah was on the throne, and Josiah was another good king.

This is one of my favourite stories in the Bible, actually! You see, Josiah's father Amon and his grandfather Manasseh had preferred to worship Baal, rather than God. This is not too surprising, actually, because the next-door kingdom, Israel, had been taken over by Assyria, and although Judah was nominally free, in practice it was a vassal of the Assyrians, so it made sense to worship the same gods that the Assyrians did.

What's more, those gods were a lot easier to worship than the Jewish God was. They didn't ask you to behave in special ways. You could influence htem. If you said the right words and did the right actions at the right time, they would make the harvest happen, that sort of thing.

And they didn't really mind who else you worshipped, or how you behaved, or what your thought. It was much easier to worship them.

Josiah, however, probably prompted by his cousin Zephaniah, decided that he was going to worship the Jewish God. And in 621 BC, when Josiah was about 26, the King of Assyria died, and was succeeded by a much weaker person who didn't mind much about what the people of Judah did. Josiah had already cleared out altars to other gods from the Temple, but apart from that, he hadn't dared do much more. Now, however, he reckoned he could risk cleaning it up a bit.
 
So he sent his secretary, a man called Shaphan ben-Azalia, to go and ask the High Priest how much money they'd had in the collection lately, and to tell him to give it to the builders to repair the place and make it look smart again.

The High Priest was a man called Hilkiah., While he was looking in the storeroom for the money, he found a book about God's law. And he decided to show it to the king. We don't know whether Hilkiah had known the book was there and decided that now would be a good moment to show it to Josiah, or whether it was a shock to him, too.

Scholars think that this book was at least part, if not all, of what we now know as the book of Deuteronomy. They reckon it was written down during the reign of Josiah's grandfather and hidden away safely. Up until then the priests had basically kept their knowledge of God's law in their heads, and it hadn't really been written down, but this was a time of both persecution and indifference, and they were afraid that the time might come when there was no priest in the Temple, and the people's knowledge of God might be lost.

As it was, a great deal had been lost, and the result of the discovery of the book was a great religious reform.

And it's in this context, scholars think, that Zephaniah was preaching. It's actually thought that the book may not have been written down until a couple of hundred years later, because of the style of the writing and so on, but it seems to be based on contemporary happenings. So it was probably written before about 622 BC, and is definitely set in Jerusalem.

Most of the book is rather doom and gloomy. Again, remember that this is being written in a time when most people aren't bothering to worship God, and even those who want to aren't really sure how God is different from the neighbouring gods. So there's a lot of prophecy about gloom and destruction and the usual sort of stuff you expect to read in the minor prophets, but after two and a half chapters of that, we suddenly get this glorious piece that formed our reading today.

The LORD, your God, is in your midst,
a warrior who gives victory;
he will rejoice over you with gladness,
he will renew you in his love;
he will exult over you with loud singing
as on a day of festival.

So, you see, it's not just we who rejoice, but God rejoices, too. That's a great comfort, I think. We are called to rejoice in God – there are, apparently, over 800 verses telling us to rejoice and be glad, so I rather think God means it. And with God, if he wants us to do something, he enables us to do it. We sometimes find it very difficult to rejoice, to be joyful.

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

That doesn't mean we'll never be unhappy, far from it. But we know, as St Paul also tells us, that God works all things together for good for those that love him. Even the bad things, even the dreadful things that break God's heart even more than they break ours. Even those. 

We may be unhappy, we may be grieving, we may be depressed. But we can still be joyful, we can still rejoice, because God is still God, and God still loves us. Okay, sometimes it doesn't feel like that, but that's only what it feels like, not what has really happened. God will never abandon us, God will always love us. God will weep with us when we weep. And underneath there always is that joy, the joy of our salvation.

Christmas can be a very difficult time of year for many of us. People who are alone, people who are ill, people who have been bereaved. Many rocky marriages finally come adrift at Christmas. But we are still commanded to rejoice! Not because of the tragedies, no way. But in spite of them.

"Do not worry about anything,
but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving
let your requests be made known to God.
And the peace of God,
which surpasses all understanding,
will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus."

For John the Baptist, preparing for the coming of the Messiah meant, among other things, turning away from the old, wasteful ways and starting again. Sharing our surplus with those who haven't enough. Tax-gatherers and soldiers are told to be satisfied with their wages, and not to extort extra from people who can ill-afford it.

John got very frustrated when people just wanted to hear him preach and laugh at him, rather than allowing their lives to be turned around. There hadn't been a proper Old Testament-type prophet for a very long time, and naturally people flocked to hear him, but they didn't want to deal with what he was actually saying. But enough people did hear him to begin to make a difference in the world. And they were ready when Jesus came.

It's not just about cheering with the kids, but it's about that, too! We are going to be celebrating the coming of Jesus, of course we are. We're probably also going to eat and drink more than usual, and give one another presents, and watch appallingly ghastly television, and that can be quite fun, too, for a couple of days.

So we will rejoice, but we will be sensitive to those for whom it's almost impossible to rejoice at this time of year. We will remember that the Israelites had to go through terrible times, and their nation was all but destroyed. Paul himself suffered dreadful things - scourgings, imprisonment, shipwrecks, beatings....

But we can still remember, as we await the coming of the King, that:

"The peace of God,
which surpasses all understanding,
will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus."

Amen.

* I am not publishing the children's talk as it was not original, and I have lost the source, so can't give an attribution, but mainly, we shouted for joy because Jesus is coming. 

Preparing for Christmas?

So today is Advent Sunday. It's the first Sunday in the Church's Year, and, of course, the first in the four-week cycle that brings us up to Christmas. Christmas is definitely coming – if you go by what the supermarkets do, it's been going on since September!

It seems strange then, doesn't it, that the readings for this Sunday are about as un-Christmassy as you can get! This from the Gospel we've just heard:

“There will be strange things happening to the sun, the moon, and the stars. On earth whole countries will be in despair, afraid of the roar of the sea and the raging tides. People will faint from fear as they wait for what is coming over the whole earth, for the powers in space will be driven from their courses. Then the Son of Man will appear, coming in a cloud with great power and glory. When these things begin to happen, stand up and raise your heads, because your salvation is near.”

It's all about the end of the world! The time when Jesus will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, as we say in the Creed. Now, there are frequently scares that the end of the world is about to happen – some cult or other claims to have deciphered an ancient text that tells us that it might occur on any given date – I believe some people think that an ancient Mayan calendar proves it's going to end on 21 December this year. I do hope not – what a waste of all the Christmas presents we've been buying and making! However, it is only one of a very long line of end-of-the-world stories which people have believed. Sometimes they have even gone as far as to sell up all their possessions and to gather on a mountain-top, and at least two groups committed mass suicide to make it easier for them to be found, or something. I don't know exactly what.... And because some Christians believe that when it happens, they will be snatched away with no notice whatsoever, leaving their supper to burn in the oven, or their car to crash in the middle of the motorway, a group of non-believers even set up an organisation called After the Rapture which you can sign up to, and if and when it happens, they will look after your pets for you! They assume that, as they are not believers, they will be left behind.

But the point is, Jesus said we don't know when it's going to happen. Nobody knows. He didn't know. He assumed, I think, that it would be fairly soon after his death – did anybody expect the Church to go on for another two thousand years after that? Certainly his first followers expected His return any minute now.

What is clear from the Bible – and from our own knowledge, too – is that this world isn't designed to last forever; it's not meant to be permanent. Just ask the dinosaurs! We don't know how it will end. When I was a girl it was assumed it would end in the flames of a nuclear holocaust; that particular fear has lessened since 1989, although I don't think it's gone away completely. These days we think more in terms of runaway global warming, or global pandemics of some disease they can't find a cure for, or something, or a major asteroid strike. But what is clear is that one day humanity will cease to exist on this planet. We don't know how or when, but we do know that God is in charge and will cope when it happens.

Christmas is coming. Jesus said, of his coming again, “Look at the fig tree and all the trees. When they sprout leaves, you can see for yourselves and know that summer is near. Even so, when you see these things happening, you know that the kingdom of God is near. Truly I tell you, this generation will certainly not pass away until all these things have happened.  Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will never pass away.”

No, we are still reading Jesus' words today. And just as we know summer is coming when the days get longer and the leaves start to shoot, so we know that Christmas is near when the shops start selling Christmas stuff! But Jesus goes on to give a warning:  “Be careful, or your hearts will be weighed down with carousing, drunkenness and the anxieties of life, and that day will close on you suddenly like a trap.  For it will come on all those who live on the face of the whole earth.  Be always on the watch, and pray that you may be able to escape all that is about to happen, and that you may be able to stand before the Son of Man.”

Certainly we appear to celebrate Christmas with carousing and drunkenness, more often than not. And who isn't weighed down with thoughts of all the preparation for the big day that is going to be necessary? Whatever am I going to give this person, or that person? So-and-so wants to know what I should like – what should I like? Have I got all the turkey-pudding-mince pies-Christmas Cake-Brussels Sprouts and so on organised? Who have I not sent a card to, and won't they be offended? You know the scenario. 

But what is Christmas really about? In much of the country it's been reduced to an extravaganza of turkey and booze and presents. And the Christians, like us, chunter and mutter about “Putting Christ back in Christmas!”, as if He was not there anyway. But even we tend to reduce Christmas to a baby in a manger. We render it all pretty-pretty, with cattle and donkeys surrounding the Holy Family, shepherds and kings, and so on. Which is fine when you're two years old, like my grandson, but for us adults? We forget the less-convenient bits of it – the fact that Mary could so easily have been left to make her living as best she could on the streets, the birth that came far from home – at least, in Luke's version of the story. Matthew's version says that they lived in Bethlehem anyway. We forget about the flight to Egypt that Matthew tells us about so dramatically, and the children whom Herod is alleged to have had killed in Bethlehem to try to avoid any rivalry by another King of the Jews. We forget that it was the outsiders, the outcasts – the shepherds, outcast in their own society, or the wise men from the East, not Jewish, not from around here – it was they who were the first to worship the new-born King.

But the point is, it's not just about that, is it? We'll teach the babies to sing “Away in a Manger”, and it's right and proper that we should. We kneel at the cradle in Bethlehem, yes – but we worship the Risen Lord.

We worship at the cradle in Bethlehem, but we also worship Jesus all year round, remembering not only his birth, but his teachings, his ministry, the Passion, the Resurrection, the Ascension and the coming of the Holy Spirit.  And we worship, not only as an abstract “Thing” – what was that song:

“I will celebrate Nativity, for it has a place in history....” – it’s not just about worshipping a distant divinity, but about God with us. Emmanuel.

And that brings us full circle, for whether we are celebrating once again the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem, or whether we are looking towards the end times, as we traditionally do today, what matters is God with us. Emmanuel. Jesus said “When these things begin to happen, stand up and raise your heads, because your salvation is near.” We know that we will be saved, we have been saved, we are being saved – it's not a concept I can actually put into words, as it's not just about eternal life but about so much more than that. But “our salvation is near”. Dreadful things may or may not be going to happen – and they probably are going to happen, because Life is Like That – but God is still with us.

Talking about the end of the world like that is called “apocalyptic speech”, and very often, when people talked apocalyptically, they were addressing a local situation just as much as the end times. The prophets certainly were; they had no idea we would still be reading their words today. When Jeremiah said, as in our first reading, “The people of Judah and of Jerusalem will be rescued and will live in safety,” he was thinking of a fairly immediate happening – and, indeed, we know that the tribes of Judah did return after exile and live in Jerusalem again. But his words apply to the end times, too.

And the same with Jesus, I think. Much of the disasters he spoke of will have happened within a few years of his death – the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, for one thing. Don't forget that he was in an occupied country at the time. And all down the centuries there have been plagues and wars and floods and famines and earthquakes and tsunamis and comets and things; every age, I think, has applied Jesus' words to itself.

So we are living in the end times no more and no less than any other age has been. And in our troubled world, we hold on to the one certainty we have: God with us. Emmanuel. Amen.

Becoming Ourselves

“So, friends, we can now—without hesitation—walk right up to God, into “the Holy Place.” Jesus has cleared the way by the blood of his sacrifice, acting as our priest before God. The “curtain” into God’s presence is his body. So let’s do it—full of belief, confident that we’re presentable inside and out. Let’s keep a firm grip on the promises that keep us going. He always keeps his word.”

That's a modern translation of part of our first reading today, from the letter to the Hebrews. I don't know how much you know about this letter; it's thought to date from around the year 63 or 64 AD, before the Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed and before the Eucharist became a widespread form of Christian worship. Nobody knows who wrote it, either; arguments about its authorship go back to at least the 4^th century AD! Probably one of Paul's pupils, but nobody actually knows who.

The Temple in Jerusalem is still standing when this letter is written. The author uses it to contrast what used to be – in the olden days only the High Priest could go into God's presence, and he had to take blood with him to atone for the people's sins and his own. Nowadays, only Christ, the great High Priest, can go into God's presence – but he can and does take us with him. We can go with Jesus into the very presence of God himself, confidently, just like you'd walk into your own front room.

The thing is, of course, that it's all because of what Jesus has done for us. We can't go into God's presence, as the prayer says, “trusting in our own righteousness”. If we are to go in with any degree of confidence, it is because of what Jesus has done for us, arguably whether or not we recognise this.

The author of the Letter to the Hebrews tells us that Christ takes us in there in his own body. I don't know about you, but for me that rather helps clarify what St Paul said about our being part of the Body of Christ – and in that Body, we can go into God's presence.

There is nothing we can do to make it any easier or any more difficult; it is all down to Jesus. We are made right with God by what Jesus has done, end of. It isn't about whether we have confessed our sins – although I hope we have faced up to where we have gone wrong. It isn't about whether we have accepted Jesus as our Saviour and our Lord – although I very much hope we have done so. Neither of those things will save us. Only God will save us – and as soon as we reach out a tentative finger to him, and sometimes even before, he is there, reassuring us that we are loved, we are saved, we are forgiven.

The trouble is, all too often we focus on sin as though that were what Christianity were all about. We even tend to think the Good News goes “You are a sinner and God will condemn you to hell unless you believe the right things about him.”

Erm, no. Just no. We do things like that. We are quick to condemn, especially people in public life. Just read any newspaper, any day. We are slow to forgive – we don't believe people can change, we keep on bringing up episodes in the lives of our nearest and dearest that might have happened a quarter of a century ago!

But God is not like that. God is love. God is salvation. We don't have to do anything, only God can save us. Yes, following Jesus is not an easy option, we know that. If we are Jesus' person, we are Jesus' person in every part of our lives – it isn't just something we do here in Church on Sundays. It affects who we are when we are at work, or at home with our families, or going to the supermarket. It affects what we choose to do with our free time, who we choose to spend it with – not, I hope, exclusively people who think the same way as we do.

You see, the thing is, you never know exactly what God's going to do. An acquaintance of mine is a fairly well-known author whose books have been published both here and in the USA. She is my age – a little older than me, in fact, as she was 60 on Friday and I won't be 60 for another 6 months and 25 days!

And two months ago, quite unexpectedly, she met Jesus. As she describes it on her blog*, “'you know Who I am, don’t you?  It’s time.  It’s over time.  Stop dithering and follow Me.’ And she adds that everything changes. Everything.

It was, I think, incredibly brave of her to “come out” like that on her blog. What if half her fan base would disappear, snorting that she'd totally lost it and would no longer be worth reading? She is a solitary introvert, and now has to find a church family! She writes: “A friend pointed out that there’s a perfectly good tradition of solitary whatever in Christianity, and there is, but that’s not where I’m being led/dragged/shoved like a balky kid going to her first day of kindergarten.”

Yes, everything changes. Another fairly well-known author – well, well-known to me, anyway, but if you don't read science fiction or fantasy you'll not have heard of either of these lovely women – confirmed in the comments on this blog that she, too, is a believer, although you couldn't have actually read some of her books and not realised that. Anyway, I loved her particular comment on Wednesday, which read, in part: “I'm still who I was, probably more so. . . . I was scared of the other – of becoming the cookie fresh from the cutter, just like every other cookie. But individuality and diversity appears to be built in to the design concept.”

Individuality and diversity appear to be built into the design concept. Yes. God has created and designed each one of us to be uniquely ourselves. When we are told that we will become more Christ-like as we go on with Jesus, it doesn't mean we'll all grow to resemble a first-century Jewish carpenter! We will, in fact, become more and more ourselves, more and more who we were intended to be.

So where does this leave our reading? Jesus, in our gospel reading, reminded us that we mustn't go running this way and that way, convinced of doomsday scenarios every time we hear a news bulletin. Yes, the world as we know it is going to end some day – it wasn't built to be permanent, just ask the dinosaurs! We don't know how and why it will end; in my youth, I would have assumed it would end in a nuclear war that would destroy all living things. These days that is less probable, but what about runaway global warming or an asteroid strike? Or just simply running out of fossil fuels and unable to replace them? The answer is that we simply don't know. Unlike the first Christians, we don't really expect Jesus to return any minute now – although I suppose that is possible. We do, however, accept and appreciate that this world is finite and that one day humanity will no longer exist here.

But we are also taught that we will be raised from death and go on Somewhere Else. We don't know what that Somewhere Else will be like, nor who we'll be when we get there – although I imagine we'll still be recognisably ourselves. But we do know that Jesus will be there with us, and that we will see Him face to face.

But eternal life isn't just pie in the sky when you die, as it is so often caricatured. If we are Christians, we have eternal life here and now; so often, it's living it that's the problem. So I'm going to conclude with part of the quote from Hebrews with which I began: “Jesus has cleared the way by the blood of his sacrifice, acting as our priest before God. The “curtain” into God’s presence is his body. So let’s do it—full of belief, confident that we’re presentable inside and out.”

Let's do it! Amen.

* http://robinmckinleysblog.com/2012/11/13/the-road-to-damascus/

Becoming Human

Genesis 2:18-25

The Old Testament reading today was about God, and a Man, and, ultimately, a Woman.

It starts when God had nearly finished His creation. In this version, he hasn't made humankind as male and female, but he has made all the animals birds and the first Man. And the Man is in the Garden, but he is alone. God shows him all the animals and all the birds, and gets him to give them names. There are horses to ride, to help with hunting. There are cattle to milk, and to pull the plough, and to give meat and leather. There are sheep to provide wool, milk and meat. Goats, too, provide milk. Then there are chickens and ducks of various kinds for eggs. There are deer for hunting, and other game, too – even wild boar, although perhaps not domesticated pigs. There are cats to catch mice. But there are no companions. Even the dogs, faithful and friendly as they are, helpful in the hunt as they are, aren't real companions. They don't think the same way as Man does.

“Well,” says God, “If none of these will do – and I quite see that they won't – there is only one thing for it!”

And he causes Man to sleep and from his body creates Woman. The perfect companion to Man, who will work alongside him. Together they will create and raise children. Together they will run their home, perhaps doing different things, but alongside one another, equal with one another. In each generation, the man will leave his parents' home and make a new home with his wife.

Or that was the general idea! Of course, we know that on one level these are only stories, what we call creation myths to explain the origin of humans, and of our relationship with God. We know that humankind originated in Africa's Rift Valley, not in the Middle East. We know that farming, which did originate in the Middle East, came only after who knows how many generations of hunter-gatherers. We know that animals have different names in different languages, and the universal Latin names were only given in the last century or so. We even know that these stories were not written down until comparatively late.

But on another level, of course, they are profoundly true. They are about us, and about our relationship with our creator. In the next chapter, we learn about how it all went horribly wrong, how humanity disobeyed the creator and has never been really comfortable with him, or with itself, ever since. Again, stories that explain this that are, on one level, only stories and on another level profoundly true.

And it did go horribly wrong, didn't it? Because the Woman was created last, after all the animals and birds, and after the Man, she has been seen down the centuries as somehow inferior; her role, instead of being different-but-equal, was seen as very much there to serve. Not helped, of course, by the misapprehension that she was just the soil in which a man planted his seed, rather than contributing equally to the genetic material of the next generation.

And the picture of marriage that was painted in these stories hasn't quite worked out, either, has it? Jesus said, in our gospel reading, that Moses had had to allow a law permitting divorce because there were times when it simply didn't work out. But how many women have been able to leave a husband who abused them, physically or mentally? In how many cultures has the man been able to get a divorce on a whim, but a woman must stick to her marriage no matter how ghastly it is. Quite apart from anything else, throughout much of history the only alternative has been a life on the streets.

Even today in the United States there is a worrying trend to try to take control of a woman's fertility away from her, and place it in the hands of men, as though it wasn't her own body. In some states they are trying to make it illegal for a doctor to say if there's something wrong with the baby she's carrying, in case she should decide to have an abortion – but of course, they aren't, as far as I know, making appropriate provision for care and support of badly disabled children. You remember the row the other week when a senator blithely repeated that old, and untrue, chestnut that you can't get pregnant from being raped. Sigh....

It all sounds frightfully doom-and-gloom, doesn't it? I don't mean to sound that way, because, of course, there are so many cases when things have gone right, when people have been happily married for years, supporting one another and alongside one another, just as seems to be the Biblical ideal. I only have to look at my own parents, who, three weeks ago, celebrated 60 years of married life together, and got a card from the Queen. Which is pretty amazing really – not the card from the Queen bit, of course, but the rest of it.

But I'm also sure that, if you asked them, they would say – reluctantly, as that generation doesn't really care to speak of its faith – that part of it has been their kneeling together side-by-side in worship several times a month in Church. Part of it. And I'm not saying you can't have a successful marriage without being a Christian, which would be an extremely stupid thing to say and easily disprovable; I am, however, saying that I am sure this is part of it.

But it's the same for all of life, really. We make a pretty good job of being human without God, but we seem to make a much better job of it with God.

On the other hand, we have done some dreadful things in God's name – crusades and jihads being the least of them. Those abuses of women I just talked about? Done in God's name. Slavery – done in God's name. Even apartheid was originally set up in God's name; people genuinely believed that God wanted people of different skin colour to live separately. 

And from that, a small step to thinking that they are somehow different or inferior.

Ridiculous to our modern way of thinking, of course, but I'm sure you will tell me that the effects of such thinking linger on to this day. And think of the cultural damage that missionaries, no matter how well-meaning, have done – it's only really in the last twenty or thirty years that we have begun to hear hymns that have their origins in other cultures.

I could go on and on. And that's just humanity in general. Shall we come to us in particular? Hmmm, let's not, and say we did! I don't know about you, but I don't like facing up to the fact that I'm not perfect, and that I have to admit that to myself in God's presence. But why would I be special? Humankind, down the years, has done some appalling things. We read of appalling atrocities in our newspapers every morning – some of them, alas, done in God's name, even today. I am not different or special. It's only through God's grace that I haven't done dreadful things, and at that, maybe I have. Not newspaper-headline dreadful, but hurting people, putting myself first all the time, that sort of thing.

Because that's what it's all about, isn't it? About putting ourselves first, which all of us do, all the time. It's only natural. Look at a baby asleep in its pram – it doesn't have the first idea that the world doesn't revolve around it, with people running to do its bidding whenever it expresses displeasure at its current state! My little grandson is just over two, and is only now beginning to learn this. He has to learn to share his toys and to take turns; he is learning, slowly, that when Mummy or Daddy are working at home and the door is shut, they can't give him their attention – but that doesn't stop him asking, sometimes.

As we grow up, we are supposed to learn that the world doesn't revolve around us. But our natural inclination is always to put ourselves first. And yet we know, from the Bible and other sources, that this isn't really the way to true humanity, true happiness. We just think it is.

One of the quarrels I have with evangelical Christianity is that it does make the good news start “You are a sinner!” And my sermon today has done that, rather, hasn't it?

But, of course, that's not where I want to leave it. We all know we are sinners, we know that we're always going to put ourselves first if we get half a chance, and sometimes we do dreadful things, even if we say it's in God's name. We know that.

But we also know that we are saved. That God loved his creation so much that he came down to live as one of us. He knows what it's like to be human. And his death in some way assures us that we are loved and forgiven. And the Holy Spirit indwells us, if we allow him to, and enables us to live far more in the way that God intended – in harmony with ourselves, with each other, with our world, and with God. Amen.