God's Country

Imagine, if you will, that there is a place you’ve always wanted to visit.
It sounds as though it’s really wonderful –
permanently great weather, fantastic scenery,
lots of great places to visit,
lots of walking, or swimming,
great bars and restaurants,
you name it, this place has it!
And you long and long to go there,
but you don’t know how to get there,
and what’s more, you don’t know anybody else who has been there.
All the things you’ve heard about it are rumour or hearsay.

And then one day someone comes along who very obviously has been there, and he starts to tell you all about it.
But –
oh dear –
it’s not at all what you thought!
Weeds everywhere, attracting masses of birds which could and did eat all the crops!
And the food, far from gourmet, is rotten bread made by women!
And then, he goes on to tell his special friends in private –
but you hear about it later –
the place is so infinitely desirable that people sell all they have to get tickets there!

Well, the place is, of course, the Kingdom of Heaven,
or God’s country,
which Jesus is telling people about.
Unfortunately it seems to be the kind of place that doesn’t go into words very well,
and the parables that Jesus uses to talk about it are,
although we don’t hear it much as we are so familiar with them,
really not what his listeners would have been expecting.

To start with, the mustard seeds –
well, you know mustard seeds.
I expect you use them in your cooking, as I sometimes do.
You can buy the seeds, or you can buy the ground seeds as a powder to make your own mustard –
lovely in salad dressings and cheese sauces –
or you can buy ready-made mustard with or without various flavourings.
I’m sure they used mustard as a seasoning back in Bible times, too –
but it was, and is, a terrific weed.
They do grow it, of course – very pretty flowers, a pale yellow, much nicer than the brash yellow of oilseed rape.
But in Bible times they tended to use the wild plant, because if you cultivated it –
well, it was like kudzu or rhododendrons, or even mint –
you’d never get rid of it!
Nobody would actually go and plant it,
any more than you or I would plant stinging-nettles in the fields.
And, of course, it doesn’t grow into a terrific tree,
never has and never will.
But it does attract birds –
and you don’t want birds eating all your other crops, either!
Yet in God’s country it seems as if you plant mustard and it does grow into a tree, and you actively want to encourage birds, rather than discourage them.

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

And yet, in the stories Jesus told his disciples privately, a little later, it’s like treasure hidden in a field, and it’s worth selling everything you own just to get hold of that field, and its hidden treasure.
Or the one perfect pearl that the collector has been searching for, and he finds it worth selling the rest of his collection to buy it.
God’s country is worth all we have, and all we are.

It’s all very contradictory.
God’s country is totally not what we might expect.
It’s not a comfortable place –
when Jesus told the story of the lost son, he explained that the son was reduced to looking after pigs, a job which the Jews, then and now –
and Muslims, too, incidentally –
thought was really disgusting.
Perhaps we could think of him as working in a rat farm, or a sewage works.... not a pleasant job, anyway.
And yet the father went running to welcome him home –
and men in that day and age never ran.
The story is taking place in God’s country!

And if we want to be part of it, part of God’s country –
as, indeed, we probably do or we’d not be here this morning –
if we want to be part of the Kingdom of God,
then we need to expect the unexpected.
Someone once said that God comes to comfort the afflicted,
and to afflict the comfortable, and I think that’s very true.
Often we are called to do things we never expected.

What would you think if a group of refugees turned up here one Sunday morning, and asked if you could find a time for them to worship –
but they were Muslim, and had no idea of converting to Christianity.
They just wanted to find a sacred space in which they could pray.
Perhaps they couldn’t find a mosque where they would be welcome, for whatever reason –
maybe there wasn’t one where their own particular style of worship was practised,
or maybe they simply weren’t welcome there for one reason or another.
What if they wanted to join you on a Sunday morning because it was where the worship of God was taking place,
even if it wasn’t in a form they were used to?
Would you welcome them, or would you find their presence intolerably disruptive.

I understand that this very thing happened in a church in the Midlands a few years ago;
the refugees just wanted a place where they could pray, no matter what their faith was.
The minister of the church was all in favour –
of course, come in, be welcome!
But, sadly, the congregation was horrified, and many of them moved elsewhere.
They thought the minister should be there for them, not for these incomers who weren’t even Christians!
But surely the church should be the institution that cares more about those who are not yet its members, or even who never will be its members?
I’m sure that in God’s country we will find that to be the case.

Sadly, though, it’s not surprising that the congregation reacted like that.
Look what happened when the Empire Windrush came over
and the people on it turned up in Church their first Sunday,
only to be turned away.
Not everywhere, of course –
many churches made a point of welcoming immigrants;
Railton Road church, in this very circuit, had a big poster outside welcoming people, and I believe many others did, too.
But in some churches people were turned away, simply because they weren’t “like us”,
God used this for good, of course, and we saw the rise of the Black-led churches which did, and still do, so much good in our inner cities.
But all the same….
I feel ashamed on behalf of those who were turned away!

In God’s country, values are turned upside down.
It’s not the wealthy, the educated, the important who matter.
It’s the poor, the downtrodden, the refugee, the single mum on benefits.
It’s the people who come to the food bank for help,
not those who give out the bags and the coffee!
Remember how Jesus said that at the last day,
he will say to those who did nothing to help “You didn’t help me!”
and will commend those who did help for helping him.

Talking of single parents, do remember, won’t you,
that this can be a very hard time of year for many families –
they might just be able to cope in term time when the children get a meal at school,
but in the holidays they struggle and have need of our food banks,
so do give extra when you can.
As I’m sure you know by now, Brixton Hill now runs a food bank and advice hub every Wednesday,
and it’s also a bit of a social centre where people can sit down for a coffee and a chat.
And donations, in cash or in kind, are always very, very welcome.

I don’t know about you,
but I am not very good at recognising Jesus in the beggar outside Tesco,
or even the checkout operator inside the store.
And yet we know that in God’s country, we are all loved and valued, whoever we are and whatever our story is.
And, as we heard from St Paul earlier:
“Nothing can separate us from his love:
neither death nor life, neither angels nor other heavenly rulers or powers, neither the present nor the future,
neither the world above nor the world below –
there is nothing in all creation that will ever be able to separate us from the love of God which is ours through Christ Jesus our Lord.”

And however disconcerting we may find God’s country, we know that because of that love, it is worth all we have, and it is worth all we are.

Amen. 

Flowers, weeds, ladders and seeds

I have to admit that I do find today’s readings really rather difficult.

They are both familiar stories, and that almost makes it worse –
it’s not easy to see how they should influence our lives today.

Let’s look first at the story of Jacob’s ladder.
The joy of these very earliest stories in the Old Testament is that they do present their people warts and all.
They don’t sanitise them into saints!
And Jacob, it has to be said, was not a nice person.
In fact, he was one of the nastiest people in the Bible.
He is, of course, the younger of the twin sons of Isaac,
and a grandson of Abraham.
He is his mother’s favourite,
and spends his time indoors,
doing the cooking and generally keeping the encampment going,
while Esau does the outside work and looks after the flocks and herds.
You remember, of course, the infamous story of how Esau sold his birthright to Jacob for a bowl of lentil stew one cold day when he was hungry.
Lentil stew is good, but not that good!
Esau also married a couple of foreign wives,
and, according to Genesis 26:35,
“they made life bitter for Isaac and Rebecca”.

And it was partly because of that, I think, that Rebecca helped Jacob trick Esau out of his father’s blessing.
If you had the Old Testament reading here last week, you will have heard that story,
how Rebecca helps Jacob tie goatskin over his hands,
so that his father thinks it’s Esau.
Although I’m not sure quite how much Isaac was fooled:
“The voice is the voice of Jacob, but the hands are the hands of Esau”.
Anyway, Isaac goes along with it, and gives Jacob his blessing.
But, of course, Esau is furious, and plans to kill Jacob,
so Jacob has to flee.
And it’s while he’s on the run that our reading starts.

Jacob falls asleep,
just on the ground with nothing more than a stone for his pillow,
and dreams of the ladder, or staircase, between earth and heaven,
with the angels going up and down it.
And God, speaking directly to Jacob,
assuring him of his love and blessing,
reaffirming that God will be with him on his travels, and will bring him safely home.
And when Jacob wakes, he knows he’s been with God:
“Surely the Lord is in this place –
and I did not know it!
How awesome is this place!
This is none other than the house of God,
and this is the gate of heaven.”

I wish I could say that from that time on Jacob was a changed person.
But he wasn’t, of course.
For him, God was associated with places, not people.
Bethel, where he had his dream,
was a place where God lived,
and despite God’s promise of being with him all the time,
Jacob didn’t seem to want to know.
He goes on lying and cheating, as do the rest of his family;
his sons even plotted to murder their brother Joseph,
and were only just stopped from doing so.
Even though later on God encounters Jacob again,
and this time Jacob does seem to realise that God is more than just a local god, one would scarcely describe them as God-fearing people.
Yet God used them as an integral part of his plans for the nation of Israel.

And so we turn to our Gospel reading, which carries on from last week’s reading about the parable of the sower.

In this story, someone has been and gone and mixed weed seeds in with the wheat that they have kept so carefully since last year.
Now, a weed is basically a plant in the wrong place.
Many wild flowers are simply lovely –
I am never very good at knowing which is which, except for obvious ones like bluebells or primroses.
Robert and I were in the Hungarian countryside a few weeks ago, the puszta, they call it, and, as the land there isn’t very suitable for vast monocultures, there were acres and acres of beautiful wild flowers.
Poppies, vetches, ladies’ bedstraw, lavender, all sorts of other flowers.
Also things like burdock and wild barley –
barleygrass, we used to call it in my childhood –
that I hadn’t thought of for years!
It was wonderful.
But, although we deplore the monocultures that here in the UK can make vast tracts of our countryside look very dull indeed,
we do prefer to keep the wildflowers to the headlands and verges!
You do need the wildflowers there, to attract insects and butterflies, but you don’t want them messing up your crops.
It would be very difficult for even a modern weedkiller to target the right thing, especially if the weeds were things like barley-grass or wild oats –
you couldn’t destroy them without destroying the entire crop.
Imagine what that would do to a subsistence farmer in our day, for instance, perhaps in Africa!

But, apparently, back in Bible times, Jewish law didn’t allow you to grow two kinds of crop in the same field.
So the servants were really anxious to go and pull up the weeds,
it was all wrong to let them grow.
But the farmer knew that it would really damage the wheat, and jeopardize the harvest, if they were to do that,
so he tells his men not even to try.
Time enough, he says, to destroy the weeds when the crop is harvested ­
by then, they won’t damage the crop itself.
This must have been rather a shock to Jesus’ hearers, of course.
But then, I expect they were used to Jesus saying things that might appear shocking!

In this country today, of course, the barren weeds would be harvested along with the corn, and go through the combine harvester,
but back then, harvesting was done by hand with a scythe or sickle, and it was easier to separate them out before they were turned into sheaves.
I expect the same would apply in those areas where modern harvesting methods aren’t appropriate, in the developing world, too.

But what does it all mean?
Do these stories, familiar though they are,
have any real relevance to our lives today?

I think, perhaps, they do.
You see, the whole point about Jacob is that God didn’t give up on him!

Jacob was a thoroughly bad lot, he didn’t even try to live a godly and moral life, he was out for what he could get.
But God had serious plans for him, and for his descendants, and even though he couldn’t really get through to Jacob on the first time of asking, at Bethel, he tried again and again, until finally he was sort of successful.

So the first point is that God never gives up on us.
No matter how awful we are, no matter how far we walk away from God, the Good Shepherd still grabs his coat and wellies and goes to look for us.
Time and again God went to Jacob and his family, spoke to them in dreams and visions, tried to show them something of who He is.
Time and again he met with failure,
they said “Oh yes, there’s a god here, is there?”
and carried on with their lives.

Then the second point is that God has confidence in us.
When Jesus tells the parable of the weeds,
you see how confident the farmer is that the crop won’t be damaged by having the weeds grow among it.
There’s no way he’s going to risk damaging the crop by doing anything prematurely.
The weeds may take up space, but the quality of the seed will win through to a good harvest.
Doesn’t the same God who sows the seed in us have the same confidence?
That’s something to celebrate, I reckon.
Each of us, those of us who have said “Yes” to Jesus
and who are touched by His Spirit,
each of us has the most incredible God-given potential to grow and develop into the person God created us to be.
God has confidence that we will be part of building the Kingdom of Heaven.

And the third point is that we need to have confidence in God.
Sometimes we feel afraid when we look round and see that we’re surrounded by weeds.
It feels as though we must be overwhelmed,
that we must go under.
But God knows that we won’t.
God has confidence that we won’t.
It may be more than we can handle right now, but God will be with us every step of the way, even if it doesn’t always feel like that.
We don’t have to handle those weeds on our own!

We also need to trust God when he tells us to wait until the harvest.
Sometimes we want to rush in, like the servants in Jesus’ story, to Do Something About It.
Like them, it feels all wrong to us when wheat and weeds grow in the same field.
The mediaeval church reckoned the “weeds” were heresies;
we don’t fuss quite so much about heresies,
but sometimes we fuss more than we need to about other people’s spiritual status before God.
We fuss, too, when problems loom large in our lives, whether personal or as a church.
We fuss when things have gone wrong and God seems to be absolutely ignoring both us and the problem!
We reckon that if we did this or that, then things would become quite all right again.
Sadly, of course, it doesn’t work that way.
If we rushed in and did what we thought,
it probably would hurt only ourselves, and not have any effect on the problems we face.
Unlike God, we can’t see round corners.
We need to trust God that, in the words of Mother Julian,
“All will be well, and all manner of thing will be well.”

Sowing the Seed

 

The story that Jesus told of the sowing of the seeds, and what became of them, is one of the first we ever learn, isn’t it?
We drew pictures, in Sunday School, or in our primary school Scripture lessons,
of the sower, with his trayful of seeds,
and squiggly seagulls swooping down to grab them before they could take root,
hot sun shining on others,
and lovely scribbly weeds choking still others....
and a few, just a very few, ears of wheat standing up in a field.

And then, perhaps, as we grew older and began to stay in Church rather than go to Sunday School, we would hear sermons on this parable,
and if you are anything like me, what you heard –
not, I should emphasize, necessarily what had been said, but what you heard –
was that Proper People, or perhaps I should say Proper Christians,
were the ones who were the fertile soil,
where the Word could take root, grow and flourish.

But, of course, if you were anything like me, that just made you feel guilty and miserable –
what if you weren’t the good soil?
What if you were the stony places, or the weedy patches?
And I’m sure that there are times when we do allow other things to take priority, perhaps when we ought not.
And there are times when we do rather wither up,
in times of spiritual drought.
All of us go through them, of course.
But it doesn’t help when the preacher starts banging on about how dreadful we are if we are not 100% fully fertile soil, and bearing fruit 100%.
We just end up feeling guilty and thinking that we must be terrible people.

But I don’t think Jesus meant us to think that!
After all, we are told over and over again how much we are loved,
and St Paul reminds us, in the reading we heard from his letter to the Romans, that if we live according to the Spirit,
we won’t be the barren ground Jesus talks about!

Of course, again, if you are like me, you’re apt to think that you can’t possibly be living according to the Spirit, because, pride....
but that’s stupid!
Why would we not be, if we are committed to being Jesus’ person?
You might remember last week’s reading,
where St Paul was being upset about the fact that he found it nearly impossible not to do wrong things, but now he is triumphant –
God’s Spirit enables him to live as he should.
And us, too.

Going back to the story of the sower for a moment, I think that it’s not so much that any given one of us is barren ground,
or weedy, or stony, or fertile –
but that each of us has all of those characteristics within us.
Think, for a moment.
Sometimes it’s really easy to be God’s person,
we can’t think of anything else we’d rather be.
Other times, not so much!
Times when we are tempted to sin,
or times when we want to do something that isn’t necessarily sinful, but isn’t going to help our spiritual lives.
Times when we know God is asking us to do something that we would really rather not....
you know the kind of thing.

But the thing is, if –
or rather because –
we are living according to the Spirit,
we are able to allow God to help us grow and change.
We don’t have to struggle to be good,
we don’t have to struggle to turn ourselves into fertile ground!
That part of it is God’s job.
All we have to do is to be willing to let that happen.

And, meanwhile, sometimes we are the sowers ourselves –
often, maybe, we don’t even know it.
Again, it’s probably as well when we don’t –
nothing worse than a rather forced presentation of the Gospel as someone tries to explain, embarrassed, why they follow Christ.
But sometimes, who knows, just a “Good morning”, or a smile in the right place can tip the balance for someone who may have been despairing;
a box of pasta or tampons in the food bank box might make all the difference to someone’s summer holidays.

Which reminds me – as you know, I’m sure, many families who can just about cope in term time when their children get a meal at school find it a lot more difficult during the holidays.
You will remember Marcus Rashford’s campaign during the pandemic to get children the food they so desperately needed while the schools were closed.
So do consider giving a little more to the various food banks than you usually do – most supermarkets have a box where you can put donations, or you can give money.
Or, of course, bring stuff to Brixton Hill, which hosts a food bank on a Wednesday.
And not only a food bank – there is an advice centre where people can get helped to get the benefits they need, or with housing, or whatever.
Wednesdays, 11 until 1.
It’s also a social session; people are free to stop and chat and have a coffee – it’s basically a descendant of the “warm space” we had last winter.

That’s a bit of a digression.
But the point is – well, the other week we heard Jesus reminding us that whatever we did for anybody else, we did it to him.
So we don’t judge, we don’t look down on people who need food, we don’t try to preach to them.
But who knows?
Maybe one day they will come to know and love God, just because we were kind to them and smiled at them and helped them in their need.

Some years ago now, I read about a church in Colorado whose congregation was mostly elderly, with no young families, but who wanted, and prayed for, a youth group.
One day, their minister was sitting in a coffee shop when he was approached by a group of young people who asked whether his church was a place where people could say goodbye to friends who had died.
He explained that it was, and they explained that one of their friends had just died of an overdose, but his parents had taken his body home before there could be any funeral.
The young people were allowed to use the church to hold their own funeral –
no hymns or prayers, but they spent time telling stories about their friend, and then ate a meal that church members had prepared for them.
One of them said “Oh, I wish we could eat like this every week –
it reminds me of my grandma’s cooking!”
And the church members said “Well, of course you can –
we’re here every Sunday;
you come and bring your friends!”
Those young people may never attend worship at that Church, but the congregation still loves them and cares for them and feeds them every Sunday.

Nearer home, a friend of a friend had four tiny children, including twins, when her husband was diagnosed with terminal cancer.
She was left widowed, but her local church stepped up to the mark and started to care for her, bringing her meals, babysitting, finding clothes for the children that, perhaps, their own children had outgrown but which were still good, and generally caring for her.
I believe that she is now a pillar of that church, although before her husband died she had no idea of faith.

What I’m trying to say is that often it’s not what we say that is the seed we are sowing, it’s what we do.
And not putting pressure on people –
the church in Colorado knew that they would lose the young people if they started insisting they came to church,
or even conformed to any kind of dress code when they entered the building.
My friend’s church knew that someone with four small children would find coming to church very difficult, even if they had wanted to come.

We may never be in exactly that sort of situation, but there will always be times when we are called to love people into the Kingdom of God.
Our duty is to do the loving we’re called to do –
and it’s God’s job to worry about the results!
Whether the seed falls on the path, or on stony ground, weedy ground, or a fertile field isn’t our business –
our job is to sow the seeds.
And our job is also to allow God the Holy Spirit to live in us and transform more and more of us into fertile ground in which God’s Word can bear fruit.

God is good, and, going back to our theme, if we say “Yes” to God, God will help us become more and more fertile ground for growing seed and producing fruit;
God will help us live by the Spirit, the life that leads to life.
And God will help us sow seeds that may or may not fall in fertile ground.
Amen.

God gets involved

 

A new introduction to an old friend!

At this time of year, our Old Testament readings are all about Abraham. Over the last month, if the Old Testament lesson was read, we learnt how God called Abraham to leave his home in Ur
how he and Sarah were childless, but God promised them a child;
how Abraham pre-empted this by conceiving a child, Ishmael, on his servant;
how that all went rather pear-shaped when Ishmael started playing too roughly with Isaac, when he was finally born, and making him cry;
last week, we had that extraordinary episode when God appeared to be asking Abraham to sacrifice Isaac;
and now, this week, we come to a nearly-grown-up Isaac, and his search for a wife.

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 5^th and 6^th 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 2^nd millennium BC.
Apparently the earliest he could have been born was 1976 BC and the latest he could have died was 1637 BC.
This was in the Bronze age –
he would have had bronze tools, not iron, and possibly still a flint knife.

Many years ago now, Robert and I visited 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 shot by person or persons unknown.
His body had 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.
Just the sort of food I like!

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 they had all sorts of adventures, and sometimes things went very wrong, but mostly they went all right.

And now Isaac has grown up and Sarah has died,
and it is time for Isaac to marry.
Abraham is urgent that he marry a woman from his own tribe,
not a local Canaanite woman, who wouldn't have known about God,
so he sends his servant back to Ur, to find a suitable relation for Isaac to marry.

The servant explains, rather earnestly, how he asked God to show him which the right woman was –
would she offer to draw water for his camels, or not?
That wasn't an easy task –
camels, which can go four or five days without water, like to drink A LOT at one time, so she'd have needed a fair few bucketsful!

Rebecca's family would have liked a few days to get used to the idea,
but the servant says he needs to get back as soon as possible,
and Rebecca agrees to leave next day.
So she and her various maidservants –
one of them may have been her old nurse –
got packed up and ready, and set off.
And eventually they get home safely,
and there is Isaac coming to meet them.
And they get married, and live more-or-less happily ever after!

We sometimes get alarmed about arranged marriages these days;

we know that in those communities where they're still more-or-less the norm, things can go horribly wrong –
think of those so-called “honour killings” we hear so much about!
Even in this day and age, it isn't always easy for someone to escape an abusive situation if they don't know where to go.
But as I understand it, an arranged marriage can be every bit as happy and as successful as one where the bride and groom have chosen one another;

we all know that you have to work at being married,
whether you knew your husband for years beforehand or whether you met him a few days or weeks before the wedding –
or even at the wedding!

I think Rebecca was very brave going off with Abraham's servant like that;

she had no way of knowing who or what was awaiting her at the far end of the journey.
The servant had bigged up Abraham's –
and thus Isaac's –
wealth, and had given her lots of gold jewellery, but was he telling the truth?

But one thing stands out about this story and that is that God was involved from beginning to end!
And God led them all to a happy ending.

I wonder how much we actually believe that God is really involved in our lives?
I know we say we do, but these Sundays in Ordinary Time are very much places where what we think we believe tends to come up against what we really do believe!
After all, not all of our stories have happy endings, do they?
Some do, many do, and for these we give thanks,
but what happens when they don't?
Does God get involved in our lives?
And if so, how does this work, and how can we work with God to ensure a happy ending?

Well, the Bible definitely tells us that God is involved in our lives,
and I am sure most of us could tell of moments when we were perfectly and utterly sure of this.
But equally, most of us could tell of moments when we really struggled with it!
Where was God when this or that bad thing happened?
Does God really care?
In the story from two weeks ago, Ishmael and Hagar in the desert,
we found that God was there with them, even though it hadn't felt like it.

Many of us have lived through enough bleak times to know that one comes out the other side.
We know that, when we look back, we will see God's hand upon it all.
God may not have led us to a happy ending, exactly,
but we can see how God has worked all things together for good for us.

It's not a matter of God waving a magic wand and producing the happy ending we want;

we all know God doesn't work like that.
And it's not a matter, either, of God having set the future in stone so that nothing we can do can change things.
Nor is it a matter of God simply sitting back and letting us struggle as best we can, although everybody feels at times that this is what is happening.

It's more as if God is working with us, moment by moment.
Sometimes we –
or other people –
do things that mean the situation can't come out as God would have wished.
God has a detailed plan for creation, but his plan for our individual lives isn't –
can't be –
mapped out in moment-by-moment detail
since we are free to make our own choices.
But God truly wants the best possible life for each one of us.
The idea, I think, is to stay as close to God as possible,
trying to be aware of each moment of decision and what God would like for us to do.

But, of course, as St Paul points out in the letter to the Romans, that isn't actually possible!
We're a bit crap at actually doing the right thing, no matter how much we know we want to!
It was impossible for Paul to keep the Jewish law in its entirety,
no matter how much he wanted to.
And although we know we are, and I quote, under grace not under the law,
we do tend to find it easier to try to follow a set of rules and regulations than to follow Jesus!
And, of course, we don't follow those rules and regulations perfectly –
how could we?

But Jesus points out that his burden is light!
Sometimes we don't feel as though it is.
“Come unto me all you who are burdened, and I will give you rest!”

I am sure Abraham's servant must have felt incredibly burdened when he went back to Ur to find Rebecca.
But the servant, at least, spent his time moment-by-moment in God's presence.
He trusted that God would lead him, step by step, to the right woman and that God would bring the whole journey to a happy conclusion.
“Come unto Me all you who are burdened, and I will give you rest!”
Abraham's servant trusted God.
I wonder how much we trust God?
It isn't always easy, is it.
Last week's story, how God asked Abraham to kill Isaac,
was very much about trust.
Abraham didn't even argue with God –
he just went ahead and did as he was told, leaving it very much up to God to do the right thing!
Even Isaac didn't struggle –
he was a young man at that stage, not a small boy,
and he could easily have overpowered his elderly father.
But no –
he allowed himself to be bound and laid upon the altar.
And God did do the right thing, as it were, and produced the ram.

And now God did show the servant his choice of wife for Isaac.
And so was born the Kingdom of Israel.
We never know the consequences of our choices –
they may be far more far-reaching than we expect.
But we do need to practice involving God in our everyday lives,
otherwise, when the crunch comes, we'll find it much harder than it need be to rely on him.
“I will give you rest,” says Jesus, but if we don't know how to come to him for that rest, how can he give it to us?
Amen.

Trinity Sunday 2023 Evening service

 This is similar, but not identical, to what I preached this morning.  This was a Zoom service; please excuse the washing-machine noises at the beginning!

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

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

The thing is, the first half of the Christian year,
which begins way back before Christmas,
is the time when we think about Jesus.
We prepare for the coming of the King, in Advent,
and then we remember his birth,
his being shown to the Gentiles,
his presentation in the Temple as a baby.
Then we skip a few years and remember his ministry,
his arrest, death and resurrection, and his ascension into heaven.
Then we remember the coming of the promised Holy Spirit,
and today we celebrate God in all his Godness, as someone once put it.

The second half of the year, all those Sundays after Trinity,
tend to focus on different aspects of our Christian life.
And today is the one day in the year when we are expected to stop and think about God as Three and God as One.
And it is difficult.
It’s a concept that doesn’t really go into words,
and so whatever we say about it is going to be in some way flawed.
It took the early Church a good 400 years to work out what it wanted to say about it, and even that is very obscure:
“That we worship one God in Trinity, and Trinity in Unity:
Neither confounding the persons nor dividing the substance.
For there is one person of the Father,
another of the Son,
and another of the Holy Spirit.
But the Godhead of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit is all one,
the glory equal, the majesty coeternal.
Such as the Father is, such is the Son, and such is the Holy Spirit.
The Father uncreated, the Son uncreated, and the Holy Spirit uncreated.
The Father incomprehensible, the Son incomprehensible, and the Holy Spirit incomprehensible.”
The whole thing incomprehensible, if you ask me!

There are all sort of illustrations you can use to try to get a mental image of what it’s all about.
Look, for instance, at what happens when you join two hydrogen atoms to one oxygen one –
you get H₂O.
Di-hydrogen monoxide!
Which, I am sure you realise, can be ice –
a solid, good for cooling drinks or injuries, for preserving food, or for skating on.
Or it can be water –
a liquid, making up most of our bodies, good for drinking, sustaining all life.
Or it can be steam –
a gas, good for removing creases from our clothes or for cooking vegetables. Ice, water, steam, all very different from each other, but all, still, H₂O.

It’s an illustration.
It happens to be my favourite one, but there are plenty of others.
Another local preacher, on the same subject, brought in three tins of soup –
lentil, mushroom and tomato –
well, it might not have been exactly those, but something like that –
all tasting very different but all soup.
Some people like thinking of an egg,
which has the shell, the white, and the yolk....
They are all sort-of pictures, but only sort-of.
Nobody really understands it.
And, of course, that is as it should be.
If we could understand it,
if we knew all the ins and outs and ramifications of it,
then we would be equal to God.
And it’s very good for us to know that there are things about God we don’t really understand!
It’s called, in the jargon, a “mystery”.
That means something that we are never going to understand,
even after a lifetime of study.
Lots of things to do with God are mysteries, in that sense.
Holy Communion, for one –
we know what we mean when we take Communion,
but we also know that it may very well mean something quite different, but equally valid, to the person standing next to us.
Or even the Atonement –
none of us really understands exactly what happened when Jesus died on the Cross, only that some sort of change took place in the moral nature of the Universe.

Nevertheless, for all practical purposes,
we live very happily with not understanding.
We synthesise some form of understanding that suits us,
and, provided we know it is not the whole story, that’s fine.
And the same applies to the Trinity.
It doesn’t matter if we don’t really understand how God can be Three and One at the same time:
what matters is that we love and trust him, whatever!

And in our Gospel reading, Jesus talks of Himself, the Father and the Spirit as equal:
“All that belongs to the Father is mine.
That is why I said the Spirit will take from what is mine and make it known to you.”
Like St Paul, He doesn’t have the word “Trinity”, but it is the kind of thing He means.

And in the reading from Proverbs, which is sometimes used today, we are reminded of Wisdom.

“The LORD brought me forth as the first of his works,
before his deeds of old:
I was appointed from eternity,
from the beginning, before the world began.
When there were no oceans, I was given birth,
when there were no springs abounding with water;”

and so on and so forth.
Wisdom, here, is personified as female.
The Greek word for Wisdom is Sophia.
And some commentators equate Sophia, here, and in other passages, with the Holy Spirit.

Incidentally, some people find the image of God as Sophia, Wisdom, helpful and different.
It’s one of the many images of God we have, up there alongside the Shepherd, the Rock, the Strong Tower and so on.
If you don’t find it helpful, then don’t use it, but if it is something that appeals, then do.

But that is beside the point.
Seeing God as Wisdom is a very old tradition,
but the real point is that even in the Old Testament we get glimpses of God as having more than One Person.
The Trinity might not be a Bible expression, but it is a Bible concept.

But really, the thing about today is that, no matter how much we don’t understand God as Three but still One,
today is a day for praising God in all his Godness.
It is not really a day for deep theological reflection, nor for self-examination, but a day for praise and wonder and love and adoration. Amen

Trinity Sunday 2023 Morning Service

 

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

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

The thing is, the first half of the Christian year, which begins way back before Christmas, is the time when we think about Jesus.
We prepare for the coming of the King, in Advent,
and then we remember his birth,
his being shown to the Gentiles,
his presentation in the Temple as a baby.
Then we skip a few years and remember his ministry,
his arrest,
death and resurrection,
and his ascension into heaven.
Then we remember the coming of the promised Holy Spirit,
and today we celebrate the whole Godness of God, as someone once put it.

The second half of the year, all those Sundays in Ordinary Time, tend to focus on different aspects of our Christian life, and how what we think we believe informs, or should inform, the way we live.
And today is the fulcrum, the changeover day
the one day in the year when we are expected to stop and think about God as Three and God as One.

The concept of the Trinity isn't really found in the Bible.
The bit about doing things in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit is as near as it gets.
It's really the early church's efforts to put things into words that don't really go.
They knew, as we know,
that the Father is not the Son or the Spirit,
the Son is not the Father or the Spirit,
and the Spirit is not the Father or the Son.
But the Father is God,
the Son is God
and the Holy Spirit is God.
And yet we don't have three Gods, we only have one God.

That's basically what it's about, but it's very confusing.
And the trouble is, most illustrations simply don't give you more than a tiny glimpse of it, if that.
You can, for instance, think of three tins of soup –
maybe you have lentil soup, mushroom soup and chicken soup, which are all different but all soup.
But that doesn't really help, as soup is soup, whatever flavour you drink.
Some people like to think of an egg –
the yolk, the white and the shell.
Or an apple –
the core, the flesh and the skin.

My own preferred illustration is of water, ice and steam –
all H₂O, but very different from each other and used for different purposes.
Water is not ice, and water is not steam;
ice is not water, and ice is not steam;
steam is not water and steam is not ice.
But water is H₂O, ice is H₂O and steam is H₂O.
Water is about drinking and washing;
ice is about skating and cooling injuries.
Oh, and cooling drinks, too, of course.
And steam is about clearing your head when you have a cold,
and showing you that the kettle is boiling....
So it is quite a good illustration.

But even that is merely a tiny glimpse of what the Trinity is all about.
Maybe we shouldn't even try to explain the Trinity –
it's what's called a mystery, meaning that while we can get a good working image of what it's all about,
we know that it isn't more than an image
and our conception may well change over time.
We'll never know exactly what it's all about, because we are not God!

But, as St Paul points out, we can think of the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit!
That makes it easier, I think.
We might not understand how we can have three Persons, as the technical term has it, in one God,
but we can understand a little about the Grace.
We will close this service, as we close so many services, by wishing one another God's grace in these very words.

I wonder, then, what we are actually wishing each other.
Again, when you start to unpack it, it isn't as easy as it looks.
After all, what, exactly, does “Grace” mean?
We think we know –
we have a working model of it –
but again, it's one of those concepts that really doesn't go into words,
as so many of the things of God don't.
Oh, we say glibly that it's “God's riches at Christ's expense”,
and of course that is very much part of it, but it's only part of it.
Grace is about all that Christ gives to us in the package we call “salvation”.
We can't earn grace, we can only accept it as a freebie.
It is everything that Christ poured out for us on the Cross.
And it is that that we pray for one another!

And then Love.
Again, how can we put this into words?
We know what love means –
we think.
But then, we love strawberries and we love our children and we love our spouses or partners, and it's not the same sort of love, is it?

If you want a general definition of love, one can say it is the condition whereby the happiness and safety of the beloved is of greater concern than your own.
The happiness and safety of the beloved is of greater concern than your own.
That, of course, can't apply to strawberries!
And I would have difficulty in applying it to our love for God, I think, wouldn't you?

But I have no difficulty whatsoever in applying it to God's love for us.
God's love for us is quite beyond our imagination.
It is constant, unremitting.
God loves each and every one of us as though we were unique.
It doesn't matter who we are, or what we have done, or whether we serve Him or not –
God loves us.
In a way, our prayer ought to start with the love of God,
for it is from that love that the rest stems.
If God didn't love us, he would not have sent Jesus, nor the Holy Spirit.

Some of us here this morning have children, maybe grandchildren.
Anybody have great-grandchildren?
Well, I don't know about you, but I do remember that when my daughter was born,
I began to have a glimpse, just a tiny glimpse of what God's love for us is like.
That was over 40 years ago, and I am a grandmother now,
but I still remember it.
That realisation that this, this is something a tiny bit like how God cares for me!
Amazing!

So, the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ,
and the love of God,
and then, of course, the Fellowship of the Holy Spirit.
The Fellowship of the Holy Spirit.
Some translations say the Communion of the Holy Spirit.
You notice it's “of” the Holy Spirit, just as it is the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God.
The Holy Spirit sends, among other amazing things, fellowship, communion.
Both with God and with one another.

Yes, of course, we are friends.
And there are always going to be people in the church we are more friendly with and less friendly with, if that makes sense.
But by our very human nature, we're going to like some people more than we like others.
That's okay.
But we are given the gift of having fellowship with everybody in the Church, whether we like them or whether we don't.
We can sit beside them in worship,
we can study the Scriptures with them,
we can pray for them and their concerns,
we can lift them to the Throne of Grace.
And that is the gift of the Holy Spirit here.

And we can also have fellowship with God.
That sounds even more amazing, doesn't it?
Fellowship with God himself, the Creator.
The Father –
Jesus said to call God “Father”,
but I know that isn't helpful to everybody, if they have had a poor relationship with their own father, for instance.
You may prefer a totally different name for God, and that's okay, too –
and often, your preferred name for God changes as you travel along your Christian journey.

We know the Old Testament was full of different names,
from the plain basic “El” that meant “The Lord” –
you still get this in names like “Michael” or “Rachel” or “Gabriel”, or any of those Bible names that end in “El”.
They all mean something about God –
Michael, for instance, means “Who is like God?”,
which is a rhetorical question, of course, because nobody is!
Gabriel means “Strong man of God”, and so on.....
Anyway, names for God –
the plain basic “El” that I mentioned, and then a lot of other ones –
shepherd, judge, redeemer, king, rock.
Or there is “El Shaddai”, which has several different possible meanings, including God the Destroyer, or even God with breasts –
but is mostly used to mean God Almighty.

And talking of God with breasts, there are a few feminine names for God, which you may or may not find helpful,
including Lady Love, and Lady Wisdom.
Some people refer to the Holy Spirit as “She”,
on the grounds that the Hebrew word, Ruach, is feminine.
There’s that lovely hymn you may have sung last week – we did at Stockwell – with the image of a female dove brooding on the water.
Do so if you find it helpful, but if it irritates you or feels gimmicky, then don't.

I seem to have wandered rather far from “The fellowship of the Holy Spirit”.
But today isn't really a day for understanding, you see.
It's much more of a day for rejoicing.
I said at the beginning that it was a day to celebrate the whole Godness of God, and I rather like that definition.
We will never even begin to understand who God is, and that's okay.
We know that we have a loving Father in God –
or whatever other title we wish to use.
We we know that we have a Redeemer and a Brother in our Lord Jesus.
And we know that we are filled with the Holy Spirit, who enables us to grow into the person God created us to be, and who gives us all we need, and more beside, to become that person.

And then, there is the fact that it is a mystery.
That we can't understand or explain it.
And that's great, too!
So let us rejoice, and give thanks to God.
Amen.

Pentecost 2023

 

I wonder what it must have been like.
It almost beggars imagination, doesn't it.
There they were, in that upper room.
One hundred and twenty of them, they say,
including Mary the mother of Jesus
and several other women.
Waiting.
Waiting for what must have felt like simply forever.

They'd been told, in Luke's version of the story, to wait in Jerusalem and they would receive power when the Spirit came upon them.
So they waited, and waited.
At least ten days,
we don't, I think, know exactly how long,
until the Day of Pentecost dawned.
I wonder how many of them had felt like giving up and going home,
and celebrating Pentecost,
which back then was a sort of Harvest Festival,
celebrating the first fruits of the harvest,
celebrating Pentecost with their neighbours?

But they didn't go home.
They stayed.
And when the day of Pentecost was fully come,
the Spirit came on them.

It must have been a pretty dramatic visitation.
The tongues of flame,
the rushing mighty wind.
And the immediate explosion of praise,
and when they ran out of words those other words,
words of praise that, in this instance,
turned out to be words "in our own native language?

Parthians,
Medes,
Elamites,
and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia,
Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia,
Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene,
and visitors from Rome,
both Jews and proselytes,
Cretans and Arabs –
in our own languages we hear them speaking about God's deeds of power."

Thus the bystanders.
They might not have seen the tongues of flame,
or heard the rushing mighty wind,
but they certainly saw the results.

But some people were more cynical
And they said,
oh, these people have been on the booze;
they're bladdered;
they're lathered.....
And I can think of several rather ruder things they might have said,
and so, I expect, can you.

So Peter, glorious, wonderful Peter,
who never used to be able to open his mouth without putting his foot in it –they used to say he only opened his mouth to change feet –
Peter jumps up and lets out this terrific bellow which shuts everybody up, sharpish.
"No, no, no, no, no, no, no," he goes,
"we're not on the sauce –
come off it, it's only nine am, what do you take us for?
We're not football fans!"
And he goes on to explain that this is what Joel was talking about,
this is what they'd all been expecting.
And, as you know, he preached so powerfully,
and God's presence was so overwhelming,
that three thousand people got converted that day alone!

Thus the story.
We know it so well, don’t we?
Every year, this passage from the book of Acts is read.
We could probably quote a great deal of it off by heart, and the bits we can’t quote –
all those nationalities, I can never remember them without looking –
we know what they say, even if we don’t know the words!

Obviously, then, it is an important story –
as important as those other stories we hear every year,
the stories of Jesus’ birth,
the coming of the magi,
the presentation in the Temple,
the visit to the Temple the year Jesus was 12,
and then the gap to the adult Jesus,
his arrest,
death,
resurrection,
and ascension into Heaven.
And then the coming of the Spirit.

One way of seeing it is that it’s the Church’s birthday.
The day we celebrate the anniversary of the explosive growth from a tiny handful of believers –
barely more than a hundred –
to several thousand,
and on down the millennia to the worldwide organisations and denominations that is the Church today.
But there again, that’s just history, rather like we celebrate our own birthdays.
Pentecost is more than that.
I think that much of it is one of those things that doesn’t go into words very well –
what is officially called a “mystery” -
the Church’s word for something that words can never fully explain.

After all –
a mighty wind, and what looked like tongues of fire?
We know the damage that both wind and fire can do –
hurricanes seem to be increasing in both frequency and strength, and have caused terrific damage over the years.
And we all know what terrible damage fire can do.

But the wind and flame from God were not sent to destroy,
but to cleanse, to heal, and to empower.
Some of the empowerment was pretty spectacular –
the speaking in other languages,
the healings,
the preaching that brought thousands to Christ in one go....
some of it, of course, would have been less so.

And then there were the other side-effects –
the changes in people’s character to become more the people God meant them to be.
The fruit of the Spirit –
Paul, in his various letters, reminds us both of the various gifts he saw in use (the tongues, the prophecies, the healings and so on) and the fruits he saw develop in people’s characters:
"love,
joy,
peace,
patience,
kindness,
generosity,
faithfulness,
gentleness,
and self-control" .

The thing is, of course, that it wasn’t and isn’t just those few people in the Upper Room in Jerusalem who received the Holy Spirit.
Nor was it just the three thousand people who were added to the church that day!
Right down throughout history, and right down to today,
God has sent his Holy Spirit on to believers.
And that includes you and it includes me.

But some of us will say, oh, help, no, not me,
I'm not worthy.
I'm not clean.
Well, you're no more and no less worthy than anybody else.
But there are things that can stop you being filled with the Holy Spirit.
The first is if you are not walking God's way.
You do need to be God's person
and that is not something that happens automatically.
You have to consciously commit yourself to God.
We Methodists do this formally each year in the Covenant Service,
but you don't have to wait until then!

And you may say, well, yes, years ago –
but these days?
I’m all dried up and God doesn’t use me any more.

Well, look at my cup.
I get very thirsty when I preach, and like to have my water-bottle with me – we do try not to use single-use plastic bottles unless we know we have another use for them afterwards.

But supposing I wanted to put some coffee in a cup like this?
(waves reusable coffee cup with lid)
I can’t, can I, as it has the lid on!

Okay, let’s take the lid off.
Hmmm.... still can’t put any coffee in here, just look at it.
All sorts of bits and pieces in here......

think this mug must be rather elastic!

(removes bits and pieces from mug)

The point is, it doesn’t really matter what’s in there,
but they shouldn’t be there.
Perfectly good, valid and worthwhile things in themselves,
but they don’t live in a coffee cup.

And thank you, but I don’t fancy drinking my coffee out of a mug that has been filled with all these things.

So we need to wash the mug, and rinse it, and dry it....

and now, at last, we can put coffee in it!

(Mimes these actions).

That’s a very old illustration;
I first heard it about fifty years ago.
But it’s still valid today.
You see, we can thwart God completely by refusing, if you like,
to “take the lid off” yourself and allow God in there to work.
And yes, it’s scary doing that.
Horribly so.
We really do have to trust God and trust that He loves us.
And once we have “taken the lid off”,
we have to allow God to search for those things that are filling us up wrongly –
perfectly valuable, valid things in their own right,
but things that aren’t right for us.
John Wesley, for example, said that while there was absolutely nothing intrinsically wrong with a career in mathematics, it wouldn’t have been right for him.


That, too, is hard.
We are so afraid that God will take all the things we love from us, and leave us with boring Church things....
I doubt it.
Most of us love what we do, or we wouldn’t do it!
God doesn’t call us to be bored and miserable, but to be fulfilled and happy.

And then finally we need to be washed –
cleansed, forgiven, made whole.
Again, sometimes it’s difficult to allow that to happen, which is largely because we often find it very hard to forgive ourselves when things go wrong.
And that makes it hard for us to believe that God has forgiven us.

But when all that has happened, then we become fit for purpose.
We can be filled with God’s Spirit....
not only filled up, as we would fill a coffee cup, but filled to overflowing,
pouring out everywhere, a sort of coffee-fountain, if you like....

And once we are filled, what then?
That, of course, is up to God, who knows us far better than we know ourselves.
He knows our characters, our desires, our needs, our failings....
It’s not our job to worry about the “what then”.
If there’s something specific God wants us to do,
you can be sure we will know it, one way or the other.
Otherwise, we go on with our lives, just being!
God does the rest –
we very often don’t know

So –
how?
That one’s easy –
just be willing!
That’s all we have to do –
be willing.
God does all the rest.

To help us find the words to be willing, let’s stand and sing hymn 385: “Holy Spirit, we welcome you”