Doormat or Dynamite?

 

Two familiar passages today; in the first, we see Joseph confronting his brothers many years after they sold him into slavery and told his father he was dead.
And in the second, Jesus is preaching to the crowds in what is often called the “Sermon on the Plain”;
Luke’s version of the Sermon on the Mount that we are so familiar with from Matthew’s gospel.

Let’s look at the Old Testament story first.
You know Joseph’s story, of course;
born into the most dysfunctional of dysfunctional families, his father and grandfather both liars and cheats.
And Joseph himself was the spoilt favourite –
his father had two wives, you may remember, Rachel, whom he loved, and Leah, whom he didn't but was tricked into marrying anyway.
He also had a couple of kids by Leah's and Rachel's maids, Bilhah and Zilpah, but Rachel, the beloved wife, had had trouble conceiving,
so Joseph and his full brother Benjamin were very precious,
especially as Rachel had died having Benjamin.
He, it seems, was still too young to take much part in the story at this stage, but Joseph was well old enough to help his brothers –
and, we are told, to spy on them and sneak on them to his father.
And stupid enough to boast of self-important dreams.

It's not too surprising that his brothers hated him, is it?
Obviously, he didn't deserve to be killed, but human nature is what it is,
and the brothers were a long way from home
and saw an opportunity to be rid of him.
At least Reuben, and later Judah, didn't go along with having him killed,
although they did sell him to the Ishmaelites who were coming along.

Joseph has a lot of growing up to do,
and it takes a false accusation and many years in prison to help him grow up.
But eventually he is freed
and given an important post in the Egyptian administration,
preparing for the forthcoming famine and then administering food relief when it comes.

And so his brothers come to beg for food relief.
And at first Joseph is angry enough with them to first of all insist they bring the youngest, Benjamin, with them next time they come –
he had stayed at home to look after their father –
and then to plant false evidence that he had stolen a gold cup.
He says he will let the others go but keep Benjamin as his slave,
but the other brothers explain that it will kill their father if he does so.

And at that something breaks inside Joseph, and he makes himself known to his brothers, forgiving them completely for all they had done to him –
pointing out, even, that God had used this for good,
as he had been able to organise the food relief,
knowing there would be five more years of drought and famine to come.
And he sends for his father to come and bring all the households and settle in Egypt.
The family is reunited and –
for some generations, at least –
they all live happily ever after.

Five hundred years or so later, the son of another Joseph is preaching to the people.
And what he says is completely revolutionary.
Here is a modern paraphrase:

“If you are ready to hear the truth then I have this to say:
Love! Love even your enemies.
Treat even those who hate you with love.
If anyone mouths off at you or treats you like dirt, wish them all the best and pray for them.
If someone gives you a smack around the ear to humiliate you, stand tall and stick your chin out, and invite them to have another crack.
Absorb the hostility –
don’t escalate it.
If someone nicks your coat, just say, ‘Hey, if you’re needing that, you’ll be needing these,’ and hand over your hat and scarf as well.
Give to everyone who asks something of you, and don’t go hassling people to give back what they’ve got from you.
Live generously, and don’t go keeping score and looking to balance the ledger.”
©2001 Nathan Nettleton LaughingBird.net

It’s all pretty familiar, isn’t it?
We are perhaps more familiar with the version given in St Matthew, but it’s pretty much the same sentiment.
Jesus goes on:
“If you want to know how to treat someone, just ask yourself what you’d be hoping for if you were in their shoes.
Treat others the way you’d like to be treated, not just the way you are treated.
It’s not as though you’d deserve a medal for loving someone who loves you.
Anyone can do that!
You won’t find your name in the honours lists for a good turn done to those who are always going out of their way to help you.
Any crook can do that!
And if you only ever give when it looks like there’ll be something in it for you, what’s the big deal?
Every business shark knows how to make an investment, but it’s not exactly evidence of a generous spirit.”
©2001 Nathan Nettleton LaughingBird.net

The thing is, of course, that we don’t do it!
None of it.
We know it in our heads, but we haven’t made it part of us.
We’re taught to stand up for ourselves, we’re taught to look out for number one.
Even though we’re taught to share, we understand that we may have our turn on the swings in the playground, or whatever.
Maybe as adults, we reckon we’ve a right to our turn at the remote control….

But from what Jesus is saying, we don’t.
We need to put other people first.
We need to allow other people to walk all over us, to hit us, to steal our possessions.
It does sound as though we’re supposed to be doormats, doesn’t it?
As though we need to just stand there, being totally passive, allowing other people to run our lives for us.
No wonder we don’t do it!

But are we supposed to be doormats?
I don’t think so!
Jesus wasn’t, after all.
Yes, he allowed himself to be arrested and crucified, he refused to defend himself at his trial.
But before that we see him arguing with the Pharisees and teachers of the law.
He doesn’t say “Oh well, I expect you’re right,” but tries to show them what he is all about, what the Kingdom of Heaven is like.
He took up a whip and drove out the traders in the Temple –
was that being a doormat?

You see, it’s not just about standing there and taking it.
It’s about being positive, as well.
“Be different!” says Jesus.
“Love your enemies and do good to them.
Lend freely, and don’t go looking for returns.
God will see that it’s worth it for you.
You will be God’s very own children.
God is generous to those who don’t deserve it,
even if they’re totally ungrateful.
God forgives whatever anyone owes.
Do likewise:
treat people the way God treats people.”
©2001 Nathan Nettleton LaughingBird.net

“Treat people the way God treats people.”
Of course, there are those who go around saying that God hates this group of people, or that group.
There are those who would like to exclude all sorts of people from God’s love.
But that’s not what the Bible says.
Our Methodist doctrines teach that everybody, no matter who, can be saved.
“And every offender who truly believes,
that moment from Jesus a pardon receives!”

God doesn’t hold things against us.
It worries me, you know, that people’s whole careers can be ruined because of a thoughtless tweet they may have published ten years ago.
People move on.
I don’t know about you, but there are things I’ve thought or said in my past that make me cringe to think about them now –
had there been social media when I was young,
I’d probably be utterly disgraced now!
And you can probably think of occasions in your own lives, too.

But the thing is, God doesn’t think of them.
“So far as the East is from the West,
so far has God put our transgressions from us,” says the Psalmist.
And Jesus reminds us, here as elsewhere,
that because that is so, we need to forgive, too.
Think of the story we call the Prodigal Son.

The son who asked for his share of inheritance and went into the world to have some fun,
and when he was in the gutter decided to go home again.
And the father ran to meet him, and put on a massive celebration for him,
and had obviously been longing and longing and longing for his son to come home again.

But the father couldn't make the son come home.
He had to wait until the son chose to come home of his own free will.
What's more, the son had to accept that his father wanted him home again.
He could have said "Well, no, I don't deserve all this,"
and rushed off to live in the stables, behaving like a servant,
although his father wanted to treat him as the son he was.
The son had to receive his father's forgiveness, just as we do.

And don't forget, either, the elder brother,
who simply couldn't join in the celebrations because he couldn't forgive his brother.
How dare they celebrate for that lousy rotter!
I don't know whether he was crosser with his father for having a party, or with his brother for daring to come home.
I feel sorry for him, because he allowed his bitterness to spoil what could have been a good time.

And that is exactly what happens to us when we do not forgive one another.
We allow our bitterness to spoil what could have been a good time with God.

I often think forgiveness is the Christian’s secret weapon.
All of Jesus’ teachings in the passage we have been looking at this morning seem to be about forgiveness.
If someone hits us, we forgive them, rather than hitting back.
If someone steals our coat, we forgive them, and perhaps even offer them more of our clothes.
And so on.
After all, that’s how we’d like them to treat us, isn’t it?

But as you know, and as I know, the world isn’t like that.
And we tend to conform to the world’s standards,
rather than God’s standards.

But what if we didn’t?
What if we really did do as Jesus tells us?
What if we really treated people the way God treats them,
the way we would like them to treat us?

The first Christians were known as the people who turned the world upside-down.
But that was two thousand years ago, and over the centuries we have watered down Jesus’ teaching.
We have got used to it, and we don’t see how revolutionary his teaching actually was.

Joseph, as we have seen, was able to forgive his brothers –
it took him awhile, but when he got there, he really forgave them.
He saw how God had worked everything together for good, and not only forgave them, but invited them to come and settle locally.
He really is the poster child for forgiveness.

Jesus promises us that if we give generously –
and I don’t think he means just material giving, but giving of ourselves, of our time, of our love, of our forgiveness –
then God’s generosity to us will know no limits, either.

What do you think, I wonder?
If you did as Jesus says in the gospel reading –
would you turn into a doormat?
Or could it be, possibly, just might, it prove to be dynamite,
something to turn the world upside-down?
Amen.

A tree planted by the water

 

From our first reading this morning, the passage from Jeremiah chapter 17:
“I will bless the person
    who puts his trust in me.
He is like a tree growing near a stream
    and sending out roots to the water.
It is not afraid when hot weather comes,
    because its leaves stay green;
it has no worries when there is no rain;
    it keeps on bearing fruit.”

And in the Psalm we read together, we are told that those who delight in the law of the Lord “are like trees planted by streams of water, which yield their fruit in due season.
Their leaves do not wither.
In all that they do, they prosper.”

Some time ago I saw a documentary about the Kalahari desert in Africa, which is one of the driest places on earth.
But water still flows under, and very occasionally on top of, the dried river beds, and you could see, from drone footage, exactly where the rivers run, because they are lined with green trees,
and it was those trees that enabled giraffes to live there,
as they could feed on the leaves.

Israel is pretty dry, too, I understand –
the Negev, do they call the desert there?
Anyway, the whole thing of irrigation, and planting trees by the river, has a great many echoes in the Bible,
so I imagine it must have been very much a thing,
especially back in the days before modern irrigation techniques were able to make the desert, quite literally, blossom like a rose.

One of my favourite passages is in Ezekiel,
where that prophet has a vision of a stream of water beginning in the Temple in Jerusalem and flowing down to the Dead Sea,
becoming wider and deeper as it flows, full of fish, fertile, bringing fertility to the whole area, including the Dead Sea.
And we are told that “On each bank of the stream all kinds of trees will grow to provide food.
Their leaves will never wither, and they will never stop bearing fruit.
They will have fresh fruit every month, because they are watered by the stream that flows from the Temple.
The trees will provide food, and their leaves will be used for healing people.”

Zechariah also mentions this river, but says half of it will flow to the Mediterranean and half to the Red Sea.
He doesn’t put trees alongside it explicitly, though.

This river appears, according to the book of Revelation, to be in the heavenly Jerusalem rather than the earthly one we know.
The writer has a vision of the new Jerusalem, and in part,
“The angel also showed me the river of the water of life, sparkling like crystal, and coming from the throne of God and of the Lamb and flowing down the middle of the city's street.
On each side of the river was the tree of life, which bears fruit twelve times a year, once each month;
and its leaves are for the healing of the nations.”

But the point of the passages in both Jeremiah and the Psalm is that it is we who are –
or who can be –
like the tree planted by the water.
It is we who can bear fruit all year round, who can stay green and fresh even in times of drought.
And at this point we all start to wriggle and feel uncomfortable and think, “Oh God, I’m not like that at all!”

And, of course, we aren’t like that.
At least, most of us aren’t.
Some of us are, and you will know who those people are in your life.
But they won’t know it –
partly because if they did know it, they might start thinking what great people they are, and then, of course, they wouldn’t be.
Because the whole point is, those of us who do bear fruit, or green leaves, or whatever, are the ones through whom God’s Spirit flows.

Jesus said that if we abide in him, we will bear much fruit, and apart from him, we can do nothing.

We know, too, what the fruit is that we are going to bear –
those lovely, life-enhancing qualities that St Paul lists in his letter to the Galatians:
love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.
And I am sure there are others –
Paul’s lists are apt to be descriptive, not prescriptive!

But to get back to our passage, Jeremiah also points out that people who do not trust in God are like desert shrubs –
small, stunted, good for nothing much at all.
A far cry from the lush trees growing by the river.
And we may well know people like that, too;
people who do make a fair fist at being human,
but oh, how much more they could be if only they trusted Jesus!

And, you know, it’s not just us as individuals, but us as a church.
As a church, we can be lush trees growing by the river;
at that, we can guide people to the source of living water, Jesus himself.
We can cry out against injustice where we perceive it;
we can stand by our American friends who are really worried by this new regime; by our Ukrainian,
Russian,
Palestinian,
Israeli,
Sudanese,
Somali
or Syrian friends whose lives have been devastated by war;
we can cry out against the conditions that mean people need to use the food banks –
and, indeed, donate to them;
and so on –
you can watch the news as much as I can!
Or, alas, we can be small and stunted and good for nothing much –
but I’m sure this church isn’t like that!

And Jesus himself had some pretty harsh things to say to people –
and, presumably, churches –
who only trusted themselves, as we heard in our Gospel reading.
We are more used to the version of this teaching given in Matthew, I think, probably because Matthew’s version is so much easier.
We can think of ourselves as poor in spirit, as hungry and thirsty after righteousness –
but we are manifestly rich and well fed,
just like those whom Jesus condemns here.

I imagine Jesus does not condemn us just for being rich and well fed and content –
after all, that is largely an accident of birth.
Had we been born in another country, at another time, things might have gone very differently for us.
But it’s the “I’m all right, Jack” mentality that so often goes with being rich and well fed that is to be shunned at all costs.
We may be all right –
but there are plenty of people who aren’t.
We may be going home to a big Sunday lunch,
or we might be planning to go out for brunch,
as there are so many good restaurants in this area that serve it on a Sunday.
We’re on our way to the country for a week!
But what of those whose cupboards are bare, who depend on the food banks for today’s meals?
What of those who are homeless and begging in the streets?
These appear to be the ones who, in this passage, Jesus is praising and blessing.

I’m not saying, of course, that we should be giving to every beggar on the streets –
there are better ways of
helping to relieve homelessness and hunger.
I know some of you have donated to the Brixton Food Bank recently –
Robert took a car-load from here over to the hub at Brixton Hill just the other day.
Please go on doing this as and when you can afford to –
it is more necessary than ever, alas.

But it isn’t so much what you do, as your attitude.
Remember Jesus’ story of the rich man ostentatiously giving huge amounts to the Temple, and then the poor old beggar woman giving a tiny coin?
It was, said Jesus, the woman who had given the most;
the rich man wasn’t going to miss what he’d given, but that coin might have meant the woman going without her supper that day.

But how do we become that sort of person?
I know I’m not!
The sort of person who resembles a tree planted by the water,
bearing fruit and leaves all year round –
well, that’s not me!
I’m far too selfish and lazy and greedy and so on….
But then, we all have our faults.
And if I were to try to conquer mine in my own strength, I’d just be setting myself up for failure.

The thing is –
and this isn’t easy, either –
it’s about letting God grow us.
We are to produce fruit, and fruit isn’t manufactured, it’s grown.
Leaves aren’t stuck on the tree with Blu-tak, they are grown, too.

Some years ago now, a friend gave me a small flower-pot containing an aloe vera shoot. These days, it’s huge – at least three large plants, and I ought to repot it. But I’ve done nothing to make this happen – given it a few drops of water from time to time; plucked a leaf when I’ve needed some aloe vera for something, and that’s it. It has grown.

Plants grow.
Flowers grow.
Fruit grows.
Leaves grow.
We can’t make them grow, and we can’t make ourselves produce the good qualities that are required of God’s people.
But we can allow God the Holy Spirit to flow through us,
to fill us,
to indwell us,
to enable us to become the people God designed us to be.
And if we do that –
and, let’s face it, we’re not going to be able to do that every moment,
but the more we try to allow God to work in and through us, the more successful we will be –
if we do allow God the Holy Spirit to flow through us, we will gradually become a tree planted by the water side.

Amen.

Extravagance

 

 

I suggest you listen to the beginning of the recording, at least, as I included what would have been the children's talk had there actually been any children in church!

I wonder how many of you went to a Christmas party? We invited someone to lunch on Christmas Day, but the only other party we went to was Brixton Hill’s big annual Christmas dinner. For reasons I won’t go into now, that was a bit of a disaster, with food having to be cooked on one site and brought round to the other. Mostly by R! But there was plenty of food; most people were able to take a “goody bag” home with them.

That’s one of the things about parties, or weddings,
or any other big event that you’re hosting, or your church is,
have you got enough food and drink for everybody –
to the point that, very often, there is far too much, as there was at Brixton Hill this year!
And I do know we got it right when it came to buying the sparkling wine for our daughter’s wedding, many years ago now,
but I also remember worrying lest we should, perhaps, have got another case….
As it turned out, there was plenty –
we were even able to take a couple of bottles home with us!

But it seems to have been very far from the case for that poor host of the wedding at Cana we have just read about.
As I understand it, back in the day wedding feasts lasted two or three days, and a host would expect to have enough food and drink to cater for the entire time.
But something had gone badly wrong here.
We don’t know what had happened, or why –
only that it had.
Such embarrassment –
the party will be going on for awhile yet, but there is no wine.

But among the wedding guests were a very special family.
Mary, the carpenter's widow from Nazareth, and her sons.
Cana isn't very far from Nazareth, only about twelve miles,
but that's quite a good day's journey when you have to rely on your own two feet to get you there.
So it's probable that either the bride or the groom were related to Mary in some way,
especially as she seems to have been told about the disaster with the wine.

And then comes one of those turning-point moments in the Gospels.
Mary tells her eldest son, Jesus, that the wine has run out.

Now, as far as we can tell, Jesus is only just beginning to realise who he is.
John's gospel says that he has already been baptised by John the Baptist,
which implies that he has been out into the desert to wrestle with the implications of being the Messiah –
and the temptations which came with it,
and John also tells us that Simon Peter, Andrew and some of the others have started to be Jesus' disciples
and had come with him to the wedding.
But, in this version of the story, Jesus hasn't yet started to use his divine power to heal people and to perform miracles,
and he isn't quite sure that the time is right to do so.
So when his mother comes up and says “They have no wine,”
his immediate reaction is to say, more or less,
“Well, nothing I can do about it!
It isn't time yet!”

His mother, however, seems to have been ahead of Jesus for once, on this,
and says to the servants, “Do whatever he tells you!”
And Jesus, who was always very close to God,
and who had learnt to listen to his Father all the time,
realises that, after all, his mother is right
and the time has come to start using the power God has given him.
So he tells the servants to fill those big jars with water –
and they pour out the best wine anybody there has ever tasted.
As someone remarked, right at the fag-end of the wedding,
when people are beginning to go home and everybody has had more than enough to drink, anyway.

I don't suppose the bridegroom's family were sorry, though.
Those jars were huge –
they held about a hundred litres each, and there were six of them.
Do you realise just how much wine that was?
Six hundred litres –
about eight hundred standard bottles of wine!
Eight hundred....
you don't even see that many on the supermarket shelves, do you?
Eight hundred....
I should think Mary was a bit flabber-gasted.
And it was such good quality too.

Okay, so people drank rather more wine then than we do today,
since there was no tea or coffee, poor them,
and the water could be a bit iffy,
but even still, I should think eight hundred bottles would last them quite a while.
And at that stage of the wedding party, there's simply no way they could have needed that much.

But isn't that exactly like Jesus?
Isn't that typical of God?
We see it over and over and over again in the Scriptures.
The story of feeding the five thousand, for instance –
and one of the Gospel-writers points out that it was five thousand men, not counting the women and children –
well, in that story, Jesus didn't provide just barely enough lunch for everybody, quite the reverse –
there were twelve whole basketsful left over!
Far more than enough food –
all the disciples could have a basketful to take home to Mum.

Or what about when the disciples were fishing and he told them to cast their nets that-away?
The nets didn't just get a sensible catch of fish –
they were full and over-full, so that they almost ripped.

It's not just in the Bible either –
look at God's creation.
You've all seen pictures of the way the desert blooms when it rains –
look at those millions of flowers that nobody, for a very long time, ever knew were there except God.
Or look at how many millions and millions of sperm male animals produce to fertilise only a few embryos in the course of a lifetime.
Or where lots of embryos are produced, like fish, for instance, millions of them are eaten or otherwise perish long before adulthood.
And millions and millions of different plant and animal species, some of which are only now being discovered.

Or look at the stars!
All those millions upon millions of stars, many with planets, some with planets like our own that may even hold intelligent life.....
God is amazing, isn't He?
And just suppose we really are the only intelligent life in the Universe?
That says something else about God's extravagance in creating such an enormous Universe with only us in it!
Our God is truly amazing!

Scientists think that some of the so-called exoplanets they have been discovering lately might contain life, although whether or not that would be intelligent life is not clear, and probably never will be.

So how did God redeem such beings, assuming they needed redemption?
We know that here, his most extravagant act of all was to come down and be born as a human baby –
God, helpless, lying in a makeshift cradle fashioned from an animal feeding-trough.
Having to learn all the things that human babies and children have to learn.
Becoming just like us, one of us, knowing what it’s like to work for his living, what it’s like to be a condemned criminal and to die a shameful death!

But God, God who could only allow Moses the teeniest glimpse of his glory, or he would not have been able to survive it, and even then his face shone for hours afterwards, this God became a human being who could be captured and put to death.

You know, sometimes I think the main function of the church is to help us cope with God.
Perhaps the church, quite unwittingly, limits God, or, like Moses, we’d not be able to handle it.
St Paul prays that we might know “what is the immeasurable greatness of his power for us who believe, according to the working of his great power.
God put this power to work in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places, far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named, not only in this age but also in the age to come.
And he has put all things under his feet and has made him the head over all things for the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all.”

The Church, which is His body.
And yet we –
we the Church –
are so bad at being His body.
We limit God.
We limit God as individuals, saying “Thus far shall you come, and no further!” We don’t allow God access to all of us, to every particle of our being.

And we limit God as communities, as churches;
We tell God what to do.
We tell God who God may love, and who is to be considered beyond the pale.
We judge, we fail to forgive, we withhold, despite the fact that Jesus said
“Do not judge, and you will not be judged;
do not condemn, and you will not be condemned.
Forgive, and you will be forgiven;
give, and it will be given to you.
A good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over,
will be put into your lap;
for the measure you give will be the measure you get back.”

And yet we still hold back from God, both as individuals and as communities.
I don’t mean just money –
although we do that, too, despite the promise that if we:
“Bring the full tithe into the storehouse, so that there may be food in my house, and thus put me to the test, says the Lord of hosts;
see if I will not open the windows of heaven for you and pour down for you an overflowing blessing.”

But we hold back ourselves from God.
We aren’t –
well, I know I’m not, and I dare say I speak for you too –
we aren’t really prepared to give ourselves whole-heartedly to God.
After all, who knows what God won’t ask of us if we do?
We might even have to give up our lives, as Jesus did!
Or worse, perhaps God would say “No thank you!”
Perhaps we would be asked to go on doing just exactly as we are doing –
how disappointing!

But I wonder if it’s really about doing.
Isn’t it more about being?
Isn’t it more about being made into the person God created us to be?
Isn’t it more about allowing God into us extravagantly, wholeheartedly…. I would say “completely”, but I don’t think that’s quite possible.
God is simply too big, and we would be overwhelmed.

Nevertheless, Jesus came, he told us, so that we can have life, and have it abundantly!
Abundantly.
Can we let more of God into our lives, to be able to live more abundantly?

Do you dare?
Do I dare?
Do we dare?
Amen!

It takes a Village

 

Some years ago now, Robert and I went to Avignon for a holiday during the first week of January.
As holidays go, it was a dismal failure, because I had flu, the hotel was horrible, and it snowed!
But one thing was very good, and that was that in the Town Hall, they had a Christmas crib.

Now, when we think of a Christmas crib, we usually think of a stable, with Mary and Joseph, the Christ Child, the shepherds, an ox and an ass, and perhaps the wise men if it’s nearly Epiphany.

But in France, and particularly in the South of France, they do things a bit differently, and their Christmas cribs show the whole village of Bethlehem, as they imagine it.

The one in the Town Hall was huge!
They do have the Holy Family, but they also have all the villagers going around their daily visitors;
you might have a milkmaid flirting with the baker’s boy;
someone fishing from a bridge;
someone else with a cart full of wood,]the old men sitting on a bench watching the world go by,
a couple of women gossiping outside a shop, and so on.
The more you look, the more you see.

I wish I could show you some of the pictures I took of it,
and of one I saw in an exhibition of cribs in a church in Alsace last year!
I love this Provençal tradition.
You see, unlike many crib traditions, it reminds us that Bethlehem was, and is, a village, and Mary and Joseph were not isolated.
We tend to think of them as travelling alone –
just Mary, Joseph and the donkey –
but of course they would have gone to Bethlehem with a group of other travellers;
it wasn’t safe, else.

And realistically, the manger would have been on the step separating the animal part of the house from the human part,
and there would probably have been a great many women,
mostly relations, helping Mary with the birth and afterwards.

We don’t think of animals as sharing living-space with humans, as we only do that with our pets,
but of course the cattle and horses or donkeys would have helped keep the house warm in the winter, and was the norm back in the day.

Yes, there were signs that this wasn’t just another human baby being born at a most inconvenient time.
Yes, the shepherds came to visit –
but they might well have been family, don’t you think?
And yes, Anna and Simeon did respond to the promptings of God’s Spirit,
and knew that they had seen their salvation.
But from the human point of view, Mary and Joseph were just doing what all Jewish families did –
they had their son circumcised at eight days old, and then, at forty days old, they took him to the Temple to redeem him from God –
the first and the best of everything belongs to God, so that parents would redeem him by paying a small sum and having ritual prayers said over him, these always invoking Elijah.
Everybody did that, if they could.

And then they went back to Nazareth –
again, travelling in a party for safety –
and Jesus would have grown up in an extended family, lots of aunts and uncles and cousins around, and, in due course, brothers and sisters.
He would have learnt to roll over, and to sit up,
and in due course to stand and walk, and talk, and be potty-trained;
he’d have had to learn when not to talk,
and when he needed to sit still and listen.
He’d have gone to school with the other kids his age,
and learnt to read and write, especially the Scriptures.
He’d probably have hung round Joseph, and learnt basic carpentry, even before his formal apprenticeship when he was 13 –
and, at that, he probably learnt some interesting words to say when he hit his thumb with a hammer!

And each year they would go to Jerusalem, to the Temple.
Again, they would travel in groups and caravans.
At first Jesus would be carried on his father’s back,
and then kept close to his parents,
but as he grew older, he’d be off with his friends,
running ahead and being told not to go out of sight,
or lagging behind and being told to keep up.

They’d gather round the camp fire in the evening and sing the traditional songs.

And then the kids were coming twelve years old.
Now, in Jewish circles, you were considered a man at the age of 13,
and from then on could be asked to read, and comment on, the Scriptures at any time.

These days they have a ceremony called a “Bar Mitzvah”, or a “Bat Mitzvah” for girls,
where the child in question reads a passage from Scriptures, translates it, and then preaches on it –
my daughter went to a friend’s daughter’s Bat Mitzvah last term, and was very impressed by her performance.
They also have a party, either immediately afterwards or later the same day.

In Jesus’ day, they didn’t have the ceremony, but every boy –
not girls, back in the day, alas –
every boy approaching his 13^th birthday knew he could be called on at any time after his birthday.
Their teachers would have been focussing on this during the school year,
and probably some of the boys were getting nervous.
It was probably their last school year –
they would be leaving soon to work with their fathers, and learn their father’s trade.
They weren’t children any more –
at thirteen, they would be considered men.

That year, they all went up to Jerusalem as usual, and attended the Passover festivities, and then gathered together to go home again.
And it wasn’t until next day they discovered that there Jesus wasn’t!
His parents had assumed he was off with his friends as usual,
but suddenly, horrifyingly, nobody had seen him.
His parents rushed back to Jerusalem –
they didn’t like to go on their own, but this was an emergency –
and found him still in the Temple, deep in discussion with the scribes.

You see, as Jesus had studied the Scriptures, he became engrossed in them.
God helped them become real to him.
And, of course, Jesus had endless questions.
I'm sure his parents did their best to answer him, but perhaps they didn't know all that much themselves.
And his teachers, perhaps, didn’t have the time they would have liked to answer his questions –
or perhaps he wanted to go more deeply into these things than they cared to do in an academic environment.
And when he reached Jerusalem that year, he found all that, for then, he was seeking with the scribes in the Temple.
They knew.
They could answer his questions, in the way that the folks back home in Nazareth could not.
They could deal with his objections, listen to him, wonder at his perspicacity at such a young age.

I hope the scribes didn’t laugh at him;
it's not clear from the text, but they might have.
But probably not, if his questions were sensible and to the point.

And Jesus, typically adolescent, totally forgets about going home,
forgets that his parents will have kittens when they find he's not with them, forgets to wonder how he's going to get home,
or even where he's going to sleep –
or, perhaps, thinks a vague mention of his plans was enough.
Anyway, Aunt Elizabeth and Uncle Zach will put him up, he’s quite sure.

And when his parents finally find him,
like any adolescent, he says “You don’t understand!”
And, rather rudely, “I have to be about my Father’s business!”

Poor Joseph –
not very kind, was it?
We aren’t told what happened next,
whether they hurried to catch up with their original caravan,
or had to wait until the next one was going in that direction.
We aren’t told whether Jesus was grounded for a few days when they did get home, or what.

Come to that, we aren’t told whether he actually knew anything about who he was.
He’d probably grown up in the normal rough-and-tumble of village life,
but then, when they started studying the Scriptures in good earnest,
something came alight in him.
He began to catch glimpses of God,
of That Which Is,
of the Thought that Thought the World…
and he longed and longed to know more.

Later on, of course, he would realise that
searching the Scriptures was not enough.
Remember what he said to the Pharisees:
“You search the scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life;
and it is they that testify on my behalf.
Yet you refuse to come to me to have life."

He knew that you needed more than just the words on the page –
but at twelve years old, this was what had intrigued him, fascinated him, to the point of ignoring anything else.

But why does this matter?
For me, it’s about Jesus being human as well as divine.
He didn’t come fully formed from his father’s head,
like some of the Greek or Roman gods are alleged to have done.
He didn’t grow up in splendid isolation, just with his parents,
and later, with his mother alone.

Even if, as it appears from Matthew’s gospel,
the family had lived in Bethlehem until they had had to flee into exile,
they would probably have resettled in Nazareth because they had family there, rather than just choosing it at random.

The thing is, he grew up in the midst of other people.
They say it takes a village to raise a child,
and Jesus grew up in that sort of village!
He had lots of examples to follow,
both of how to behave and of how not to.

I hope he didn’t know how special he was, not until much later.
But he did grow up loving God.

It’s not always easy, at this distance, to see the human Jesus, is it?
We see him as divine –
and so he is,
but he is also human.
His experiences may not have been exactly the same as ours,
as he grew up in a very different culture.

All the same, if he was 13 years old today, he’d be glued to his phone,
getting WhatsApp messages from his friends every few minutes,
gradually being allowed more freedom to go out with his friends, and so on, like my grandsons, who are 11 and 14, so just that sort of age!

And when my daughter was adolescent, I spent a LOT of time with this story!

(You may want to listen to the audio at this point, as I spent a few minutes talking about the fact that Jesus comes to us as communities as much as, if not more so, than as individuals)

And I do think it’s important to see Jesus as human as well as divine, because it makes him –
at least, I find it does –
much more approachable, much more real,
much more able to empathise with me, and plead my cause with God.
On Christmas Day, K reminded us, at Brixton Hill, that God came down into the mess and muddle of this world.
He’s been here; he knows what it’s like.
He’s not just the baby in the manger;
he’s not just the adolescent boy following his obsessions to the exclusion of all else;
at that, he’s not even the still figure on the Cross.
He is any and all of those things, he is Jesus Christ,
and he is our Lord and Saviour.
Amen.

Carol Service 2024

 

“So hush the noise, ye men of strife, and hear the angels sing!”

That is the theme the Methodist church has suggested we consider during the festive season this year, and really, what with one war and another going on around the world, it really couldn’t be more appropriate. The words come, as you know, from the carol “It came upon the midnight clear”, which we’re going to sing in a minute or so.

There is just too much war going on in the world this year – Ukraine, Israel, Syria, Sudan…. So it goes. We know that, even while we are celebrating, people all over the world are suffering. And, closer to home, we know that there are many people who will be struggling to put a festive meal on the table on Wednesday, never mind find presents for their family. Just ask those who help out at the foodbank each week! Father Christmas won’t be calling at those homes.

And for the rest of us, Christmas can be a bit manic – all that last-minute shopping, and you know as well as I do that the supermarkets will have run out of the one thing you really went in for…. And the stress of whether you have forgotten something vital!

There’s a poem that went round social media the other day – you may have seen it. But it resonated with me on this year’s theme of “hush the noise”. It’s by someone called Meredith Anne Miller, and goes like this:

Christmas is not here to offer
a four-week escape
from the pain of the world
with a paper-thin layer of twinkle lights.

It is not here to anaesthetise us
with bows and eggnog lattes.

Christmas is not offering us the chance
to escape the ache of life
through piles of presents.

Christmas is God saying,
“Yes, this pain is too much. Yes, it is too sad.
Yes, the ache is too great. Hang on.
I’ll come carry it with you.”
© Meredithannemiller

“I’ll come carry it with you.”
“Hush the noise.”

Let’s try to spend a few minutes each day hushing the noise, relaxing, and becoming aware that God has come to carry it all with us. Amen.

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 –
Some years ago, people thought a Mayan calendar was predicting the end of the world, which would have been a serious waste of all the Christmas presents we had been buying and making that year!
Of course, it didn’t happen!
And it was 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, some people set up, half as a joke but also have serious, a register of pets, so that if it happened, non-believers, who would be, they thought, left behind, will look after your pets for you! I don’t think the site is still active, but it was for a couple of years, back in the day.

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 in 1989,
but has returned a bit with Russia making ominous noises.
These days we also think in terms of runaway global warming,
or perhaps a global pandemic far worse than what we endured a couple of years ago,
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 food 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, 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.”

©2000 Nathan Nettleton LaughingBird.net

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, it is only Christ, the great High Priest, who 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 asked Jesus to be 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.
Look how people’s careers can be destroyed by the revelation of an injudicious tweet they sent when they were a teenager!
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 a few months older than I am, and some years ago she announced on
her blog that she had met Jesus and was now a Christian.
You don't really expect people to become Christians just before their 60^th birthday, but it happened to her.
God reached out to her and, as she put it, everything changed.

Yet she was still herself.

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.
And one of her comments 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.

Salvation comes from God, through nothing you or I can do, although we are, of course, at liberty to say “No thank you!”
But if we say “Yes please”, as I suspect most of us here have said, at one time or another, then everything changes.
I've spoken before, although not, I think here, about the consequences of healing.
For make no mistake, my friends, when God touches our lives, things change.
Sometimes it is our behaviour which changes –
perhaps we used to get drunk, but now we find ourselves switching to soft drinks after a couple of glasses.
Perhaps we used to gamble,
but suddenly realise we haven't so much as bought a Lottery ticket for weeks, never mind visiting a bookie!
Perhaps we used to be less than scrupulous about what belongs to us, and what belongs to our employer,
but now we find ourselves asking permission to use an office envelope.

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

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

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, perhaps, 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?
And who knows what a second Trump presidency will do to the United States, never mind to the rest of the world?
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.

And we mustn't be scared all the time, either.
Yes, our news headlines can be very scary –
but isn't God greater than terrorists?
Isn't God greater than Russia, or Hamas, or Israel, or even the USA?

And we musn't get bogged down in details, either.
A few years ago there was such a silly row in the USA this week because Starbucks hadn't put Christmas symbols –
not Christian ones, but snowflakes and so on –
on their red cups that year.
Too silly – the God we worship is so very much bigger than whether or not a corporation has decorations on its cups.
There are many good reasons not to go to Starbucks, but that really isn't one of them!
And at the moment there are huge rows going on in the Church of England about reaction to historical abuse scandals, and failures in safeguarding. People are calling for the Archbishop of Canterbury to resign, as indeed he apparently considered doing, but another cleric has pointed out that it’s not a scalp that is needed, but a complete change in safeguarding culture.
Methodists have been working very hard on safeguarding –
just last week I did a course, as all local preachers and others in positions of responsibility must do, about safeguarding and how to ensure vulnerable people are not abused or exploited.
And that is a very important thing, and to know who to contact if you become aware of such things going on, and see what systems and so on need to be implemented to make it more difficult for people to abuse or exploit others.

It is, of course, vital to our life on earth to be aware of such things. But when we are also taught that we will be raised from death and go on Somewhere Else, it almost pales into insignificance.
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, as I expect some of the examples I’ve given have shown.
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.