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”

Coronations and Vocations

 

Jesus said to his disciples: “Do not let your hearts be troubled. You believe in God; believe also in me. My Father’s house has many rooms; if that were not so, would I have told you that I am going there to prepare a place for you?”

“My Father’s house has many rooms; if that were not so, would I have told that I am going there to prepare a place for you?”

This Eastertide, I have been thinking a lot about how Jesus deals with people as individuals. You can see it during his ministry, of course – far too many instances to go into here. But what I have been thinking of specially was how he came to people after his resurrection. I mean, you have Mary Magdalene crying in the garden, and how lovely he is with her; then there was the walk and chat with Cleopas and his wife on their way to Emmmaus, when he went through the Scriptures with them to show them how the Resurrection was foretold – and agreed to stay the night, but then vanished after he’d broken bread at the supper-table. Then he comes specially to Thomas when he had missed the original appearance to all the disciples, and had trouble believing it had really happened. And, perhaps finally, he speaks to Peter on the shore of Lake Galilee, forgiving him for denying he knew him, and reinstating him.

All these people needed a different touch from Jesus, and they all got it. And that holds true for us, too. Jesus comes to us through the Holy Spirit, but our experiences of this will all be different. “In my Father’s house are many rooms.” Many rooms. They will all be of different shapes and sizes, according to our individual needs.

I wish, in a way, that the Epistle set for today was that lovely passage from 1 Corinthians about how we are all part of one body, but all different parts.

Today, you see, is Vocations Sunday, when I think I’m supposed to urge you all to offer for ordination, or something like that. Don’t worry, I’m not going to! Although I will just say that if you do think you are experiencing a call to offer for ordination, or indeed to become a local preacher, worship leader, or another role in the church, do go and talk to Rev R about it! She will be able to tell you what your first steps should be. And, by the way, if you think you might be feeling such a call, you haven’t gone mad! It’s always worth exploring, even if the call turns out to be for something quite else. I mean, look at me – I’ve been a local preacher for over 30 years now, if you count time spent on note and on trial. They still haven’t discovered they made a terrible mistake….

Seriously, though, our vocation need not necessarily be for a role within the church. Some people are called to be teachers, or medical professionals – and, goodness knows, given the way the Government sees fit to pay public sector workers, it would have need to be a vocation, as you certainly wouldn’t be in it for the money! And in other roles, that aren’t necessarily anything to do with the church, or a profession, for that matter. God needs Christians in any and every role, from doctor to decorator, judge to janitor, lawyer to labourer, professor to plumber, rat-catcher to retired, and so on. We need people to stand as local councillors, or maybe even get more involved in politics, if that is something that interests you. And our schoolchildren and students need to be focussing on their studies and their play, and on finding out who they are as beloved children of God.

From youngest to oldest, we all have our role to play in God’s plan for this world. We all fit in the community in our various roles. We all have different needs, different gifts, different preferences, different dreams.

It can be instructive, sometimes, to read how God dealt with his prophets and leaders who really didn’t want to answer God’s call. Moses said he was crap at public speaking, so God gave him Aaron to be his mouthpiece. Jeremiah also said he was hopeless at it, and anyway, he was far too young for anybody to take him seriously. He needed God’s reassurance that “I am with you, and I will protect you,” plus a special touch from God, a special gift of the Holy Spirit, if you like, for him to be able to speak.

Isaiah, too, was horrified when he saw God’s glory in the Temple and realised that God was calling him to be a prophet. “Oh, no! I will be destroyed. I am not pure enough to speak to God, and I live among people who are not pure enough to speak to him. But I have seen the King, the Lord All-Powerful.” And he needed a cleansing touch from an angel before he could say “Here I am, send me!” to God.

Three different men, with very similar concerns – they simply weren’t good enough for God to use them. And God basically said “Rubbish!” and gave them the reassurance they needed that they could, indeed, do the work to which they were being called.

And it’s the same for us. No matter what we are being called to do – and don’t forget that most of us, probably, indeed, all of us, are doing exactly what we are meant to be doing – no matter what it is, God will enable us.

Whether we are called to actively preach the Good News, or whether we are being asked to pray quietly at home, we will be given the gifts we need to do so. All our gifts are given to us as individuals, and, of course, God isn’t stingy! In fact, given half a chance, God would give us far more than we are able to cope with.

We are, after all, God’s children, not his servants! Jesus reminds us, also in our Gospel passage, that nobody can come to the Father except through him. There may be – there are – other paths to God, but only Christians can know God as Father. And Jesus reminds us that earthly fathers don’t – or most don’t, we see exceptions in our newspapers all the time – give bad things to their children; they don’t give a stone instead of bread, or scorpions instead of fish.  “If you, then,” Jesus concludes, “though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him!”

How much more! More than we can ask, or even imagine.

God deals with us, then, as individuals – but, of course, we are part of a community, of a family, and our gifts and calling will reflect that. We are all one body, with many parts. We are, as our first reading reminded us, “a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s special possession, that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light.”

Yesterday, of course, was a very special day in the life of our nation, as our King was anointed and crowned to his office. I know our late Queen felt that God had anointed her as Queen, and this meant being Queen was who she was, not what she did. I rather suspect our new King feels the same way. Certainly he, like his mother before him, believes that he has been appointed to serve the various countries of which he is King, and has sworn an oath to that effect. The crowning and anointing, so we were told in the service yesterday, set him apart and consecrated him for the service of his people.

There is, of course, only one King. But we are all consecrated by God for his service, as our reading from Peter’s letter reminded us: “But you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s special possession, that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light.” God does not call without enabling. Of course, that doesn’t mean our service – whatever it may be – will always be easy and trouble-free; you know as well as I do that it won’t be! There are always rocks along the way – as Jesus said, “In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world.”

And, finally, many years ago now I knew someone who had served as a medical missionary in Burundi. She told me once that, when she had been getting ready to leave, she got worried, as she was so looking forward to going she started to wonder whether it was really God calling her to go there, or whether it was just what she herself wanted. And when she took this worry to her advisor, she was told, “Why on earth would God call you to do something you would hate? You wouldn’t do a great job if you were unhappy all the time, quite apart from anything else. And the God who loves you gives good gifts to all His children!”

It won’t always be easy. Often we will wonder whether we’re on the right track or not. Often we will wonder why so-and-so is called to be a worship leader and we aren’t, or vice versa. But “In my Father’s house are many rooms,” and each and every one of those rooms has been specially designed. There is one for you, and there is one for me! Amen.

Going to Emmaus

 

The text of this sermon is substantially the same as the one preached here.

Jesus and Thomas

 

So it is the evening of what we now call Easter Sunday.
Jerusalem is quiet, shocked still by the happenings at the end of the previous week.
Not so much by the executions –
they seem to be two a penny these days –
but by the fact that that rabbi, the one they called Jesus, the one who had come into the city on a donkey with a huge crowd shouting and cheering him on –
they had killed him!

And his disciples –
most of them, anyway, had locked themselves in the upper room of a house, as they were afraid, with good reason, that the authorities who had taken Jesus to his death would be after them, too.

There were odd rumours going round.
A couple of the women said they had gone to the place where he was buried, and found he wasn’t there.
An angel had apparently told them that he had been raised from death.
Mary Magdalene even said she’d seen him and talked to him.
Well, you can’t trust what women say, can you?
But then Cleopas and his wife come rushing in, breathless and exhausted, saying that they had seen Jesus on the road and walked with him, and he’d come in to supper with them.

And then, suddenly, Jesus himself is there, standing in the middle of the room.
He hadn’t opened the door –
they had been careful to lock it again once Cleopas had arrived.
But he was there.
Alive.
Real.
You could touch him,
see where those terrible nails had been hammered through his hands and feet,
see where the soldiers had stuck a spear into his side to make quite sure he was dead.

But he wasn’t dead.
“Peace be with you!” he said.
And they were no longer afraid.

He said he was hungry, and shared their supper with them, just like in the olden days.
But it wasn’t quite like that, he was different.
His body was just as solid as ever, but somehow, not quite the same.
And in his manner, he seemed far more sure of himself, far more certain.

“Receive the Holy Spirit” –
what did he mean by that, they wondered?
“If you forgive people’s sins, they are forgiven;
if you don’t forgive them, they aren’t.”

Again, what did he mean? The disciples, at that stage, had no real idea.
And then Jesus wasn’t there any more, although nobody saw him go.

And then Thomas arrived.
“Sorry I’m late,” he said.
“Got held up.”
And, all talking at once, they try to tell him what has happened.

But Thomas is sceptical.
Can’t really be true, he says.
You must have been dreaming, or a mass hallucination or something.
And even though they tell him over and over again, he still has trouble believing.
“I’d need to touch those wounds you say you saw, need to put my hand on his side where the spear was.
Then I might believe, but really, no –
people don’t come back from the dead!”

Poor Thomas.
It seems less than ten days ago that he was the one who said to Jesus, “Well, if you insist on going to Jerusalem, let’s all go with you and die with you!”
and now he seems to have missed out on all the excitement.
People don’t come back from being dead,
no matter how much you would like them to.

But then, on the other hand, there had been those miracles, people healed –
the time Jesus’s friend Lazarus had died,
and Jesus had called him to come out of the tomb, and he had come.
Or when that little girl had died, only Jesus had said she was only sleeping.
Or that time when….
Thomas remembers all the times Jesus had healed the sick or done other miracles.
But then, he couldn’t be alive, could he?
And so on, round and round, on the treadmill of his thoughts.

This goes on for a whole week.
It must have seemed an eternity to poor Thomas,
with the others, although still cautious and hiding from the authorities –
indeed, some of the fishermen were talking of going back to Galilee and getting the boats out;
safer that way, and Jesus had apparently told the women to tell them to go back to Galilee –
the others, still cautious, yet fizzing and bubbling that the Teacher was alive!

A whole week.

But at the end of the week, they are still in the locked room.
They have been gathering there every day to pray and be together,
and trying not to come to the attention of the authorities.
Thomas is beginning to seriously wonder whether they’ve gone mad, or whether he has.
Maybe he should just leave them, and go on home to Galilee.
But maybe, one last time, he’ll join them.

And he’s so glad he did, because Jesus comes again, specially to talk to him,
to show him his hands and his side, and say
“Go on, you can touch them if that’s what you need to do to believe in me!”
Thomas doesn’t seem to need to, he believes anyway and worships his risen Lord.

And then later on, tradition tells us,
he goes to India and founds the church there,
and many denominations there say they trace their origins back to his ministry!
So what do we learn from this story.
We sometimes call Thomas “Doubting Thomas”,
as though that was the only significant thing about him.
It wasn’t, of course.
He was a brave and bold disciple, and he went to the furthest reaches of the known world, and beyond, to tell people about Jesus.

What’s more he was brave enough to say that he didn’t believe it.
That took a great deal of courage, if you think about it.
All the others seemed to be totally convinced that Jesus was alive, even if they did privately wonder if they had dreamed the whole thing.
But Thomas was the only one brave enough to say he thought it was all rubbish.

But in a way, the story isn’t really about Thomas, is it?
It’s far more about Jesus, and the way Jesus deals with Thomas’s doubts and fears.

I wonder why Jesus felt it necessary to wait a whole week before coming to reassure Thomas?
It does seem odd, when you think that Thomas had been one of his most loyal followers.
Some people might think that he was punishing him for doubting, but that doesn’t seem very probable.
Not when you look at the way he treated him when he finally did turn up.

Jesus has form for delaying, if you remember.
When Lazarus was so ill, and then died?
And we know that Jesus loved Lazarus, and was badly upset when he saw his tomb.
And Mary and Martha were upset, too:
“Lord, if you had been here, our brother wouldn’t have died!”
But Jesus delayed, so he said, that God’s glory might be revealed –
and he raised Lazarus from death.

I’m not just so sure why he had to delay in this case, though.
But perhaps it was to show us that it’s okay to have to wait.
So often we want to see God at work now.
We want to be healed now.
We want answers now.
But God doesn’t seem to work like that.
Sometimes we need time to work through our feelings about something.
Sometimes we need to be certain that we really do want God to work –
do you remember how Jesus would always ask people what they wanted, did they really want him to heal them?
Were they sure?

After all, when God acts, life changes.
Thomas’ life was irretrievably changed.
Well, obviously, so were all the other disciples’ lives changed.
Jesus said “Receive the Holy Spirit”, and although nothing much seemed to change at that moment –
they were still hiding away in the upper room the following week –
later they were able to receive the Holy Spirit in a more dramatic way, and were changed forever more.

But for Thomas, the change was immediate and dramatic.
He went from unbelief to faith in the course of a single moment.
And his life was changed.

I do like the fact, too, that Thomas was still hanging with the others.
He could have walked away, gone back to Galilee, or wherever it was he came from.
But no, he stayed with the others, and they all saw Jesus come to him specially, they all saw Jesus inviting him to touch his hands and his side.
They all heard Thomas exclaim “My Lord and my God!”

Jesus came to Thomas and gave him a special touch, a special visit.
Later, he came to Peter on the shores of Lake Galilee, and spoke to him, specially, making sure Peter knew he had been forgiven for denying Jesus on that dreadful night when the authorities had arrested him.

The author of John’s Gospel reminds us, too, that Jesus did many more things than that, and that his book is a carefully curated selection
“in order that you may believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through your faith in him you may have life.”
Jesus said to Thomas that people would be able to believe in him without necessarily having seen him.
“How happy they will be!”

And down the years, Jesus has come to us in many different ways.
Some of us may have experienced his presence unmistakeably, no matter how short a time.
Others may never have experienced him directly, but have met him through the words of a friend, the actions of a stranger, a random sermon.
We are all different, and Jesus treats us differently –
he meets us in the way best suited to our nature, the way we would be most inclined to trust.

Thomas needed a special visit from Jesus.
And Jesus paid him that special visit.

We all need a special visit from time to time;
maybe we will have to wait, as Thomas had to wait, as Lazarus had to wait.
But Jesus will come to us in the end.
He will come, he will forgive us, heal us, reassure us, and enable us to use our lives to his glory!
Amen.

Palm Sunday 2023

 A series of meditations interspersed with readings, hymns and prayers.

All 4 meditations are on the same recording.

Meditation 1: The Procession
Each year there are a few days’ holidays around Passover,
when as many people as possible go to Jerusalem for the biggest festival of the Jewish year.

This year,
you're going, too.
Perhaps you go every year,
or perhaps you can only go once every few years,
if you don't have much money.
Whatever,
this year, you are going to Jerusalem.
Perhaps you are travelling with a large party,
perhaps there are only two of you.
But today is the day you arrive at Jerusalem.
It's hot.
You're walking along,
a bit hot and rather thirsty,
and somewhat tired of walking.
It will be good to get into Jerusalem,
and to your room at the inn.

Suddenly, though,
there is a noise in the crowd.
What is happening?
Everyone has stopped moving.
But there are cheers and shouts going on.
What are people shouting?
Listen, a minute:
"Hosanna to the Son of David!
Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.
Hosanna in the highest!"
What on earth are they on about?
What's going on?
People are pulling branches off the trees.
They're throwing down their cloaks.
Who is this person coming along, anyway?

It's someone riding a donkey.
How extraordinary.
Why a donkey, please?
How very undignified.
And yet everyone else is cheering him.
Oh well, why not.
"Hosanna", you shout,
joining your voice to everyone else's.
"Hosanna" .
And carried away by the emotion of the moment,
you throw your cloak into the road for the donkey to walk on.

Later, when the moment has passed,
you wonder what on earth it was all about.
Your cloak was torn by the donkey's feet.
It's dusty and spoilt from lying in the road.
Your new cloak,
that you had bought specially for the festival.
It's ruined.
And you were shouting and cheering like a mad thing.
How very odd.

Meditation 2: Peter
Simon Peter.
You're at the Palace,
in the servant's courtyard.
Jesus is in there somewhere.
You'ld like to rush in and rescue him,
but you don't know whereabouts they are keeping him.
Meanwhile you're cold,
tired,
scared
and feeling sick.
You were up all night, praying with Jesus in the garden.
Well, you might have nodded off a time or two,
but basically you haven't had any sleep.
And he was upset, you heard him;
crying, he was.
Crying out to God to spare him,
not to make him have to go through with this.
But they have taken him anyway.
You followed, at a distance.
You would love to rescue him, but....
There's a fire in the courtyard,
and you creep up to it,
staying in the shadows
and listening to the maids flirting with the soldiers,
and being flirted with in their turn.
And they are talking about the arrest,
and the newest prisoner.
You prick up your ears.
A teacher, they say.
A religious nut, more like.

The servants are sneering at your master.
You'ld love to tell them about him,
about the fun you've had,
the travels,
the wonders.
But your voice won't work.
Suddenly one of the maids turns to you:
"Hey, big boy!
You were with him, weren't you? Tell us about him!"
But your voice doesn't do what you want it to.
"No way, no, not me, you've got the wrong chap!"
you hear yourself babbling.

"No, I'm sure I saw you with him," says one of the other maids.
Again, you find you saying it wasn't you.
You begin to sweat.
Why are you telling all these lies?
Can't they just shut up and leave you alone?
What's going to happen, anyway.

"Oh, come on," says another voice.
"You're from Galilee, same as him.
Your accent proves it.
You must have known him, at the very least."

And your temper explodes, and you round on the man,
cursing and swearing.
You fling out of the courtyard.
And the cock crows.
Just as He had said.
"Before the cock crows,
you will deny me three times."
Just what he had said.
Dear God,
what have I done?

Meditation 3: In the Crowd
Now it is two or three days later,
early in the morning.
You look out of your bedroom window,
and see that a massive crowd has gathered outside the governor's palace.
You step over, to see what all the fuss is about.
"What's happening?", you ask.

"Pilate's going to release a prisoner",
explains the knowledgeable one.
"Like every year.
This year it's going to be a chap called Barabbas,
you know, the terrorist."

"No it isn't," interrupts another person.
"There was a new prisoner bought in last night.
That teacher, the Galilean one.
You know.
They arrested him,
but I gather Pilate wants to release him."

"No way," says a third voice.
"The chief priests won't wear that.
They want him dead."

And then a hush.
Pilate appears on the balcony. A few quiet "boos",
but the crowd is fairly patient.
"Who shall I release to you?" he asks.
"Barabbas!" yell the crowd.
"We want Barabbas.
At first it is only a few voices,
but gradually more and more people start to shout for Barabbas.
"We want Barabbas, we want Barabbas!"
"Well," goes Pilate,
"Are you sure you don't want Jesus who is called the Christ?"
One or two people start to shout "Yes",
but you are aware that there are some heavies in the crowd and they soon shut up, and start the chant again:
"We want Barabbas, we want Barabbas!"

"Then what shall I do with this Jesus?" asks Pilate.
And the voices start, slowly at first,
but more and more people join in:
"Crucify him, Crucify him!"
And you find yourself shouting, too.
"Crucify him, crucify him!"

But why?
Normally you hate the thought of crucifixion.
The Romans consider it too barbarous for their own citizens.
Only people who aren't Roman citizens,
local people,
slaves.
Only they get crucified.
So why are you shouting for this man to be crucified?

Meditation 4: On the Cross
So they did crucify him.

There were rumours going round all night.
You didn't get any sleep; you kept hearing things
He was with Pilate.
With Herod.
They were going to let him go.
They weren't.
And now he is up there, being put to death.
Maybe he was no better than those thieves beside him.
Who knows?
You certainly don't.
Yes, he's suffering.
God, that must hurt.
Hope it never happens to me.
Shouldn't happen to a dog, crucifixion.

All the same, what does this mean?
Didn't he say he was going to destroy the Temple, rebuild it in three days?
Now he's dying; now he's up there, can't do anything about it...
Maybe he was all a big fake, not the great Teacher.
Such a pity. He could have been the Messiah, but......
that death?
Would the Messiah really die?

Oh yes, he's dying.
Forsaken!
Forsaken by God.
Left alone, alone on the Cross to die.
And yet, and yet.
He feels alone, abandoned, forsaken.
And yet, and yet.
He suffers, suffers dreadfully.
And yet, and yet.
That cry, that cry when he died:
“It is finished! I've done it!”
A cry of triumph, of triumph over death.
Forsaken, yet triumphant.
“Surely this man was a Son of God”.

Bones and Bandages

 

“Son of man, can these bones live?”

Today’s readings are, of course, about resurrection.
About returning to life.
Ezekiel in the valley of the bones,
and Jesus with his friends in their distress.

Can you imagine a field of bones?
We’ve all seen skeletons on television, of course,
and some of us may have visited ossuaries on the continent,
which are usually memorials to soldiers who fell in the first world war,
and they put the bones of soldiers who have got separated from their identity into the ossuaries to honour them.
Robert and I went to one near Verdun, once; it's very impressive.

And the older ones among us may remember seeing pictures of a huge pile of bones in Cambodia after the Pol Pot atrocities of the 1970s.

I think Ezekiel, in his vision, must have seen something like that.
A huge pile of skulls and bones….
“Son of man, can these bones live?”

And, at God’s command, Ezekiel prophesied to the bones,
and then he saw the skeletons fitting themselves together like a jigsaw puzzle,
and then internal organs and tendons and muscle and fat and skin growing on the bare skeletons.
I’m sure I’ve seen some kind of computer animation like that on television, haven’t you?
But for Ezekiel, it must have been totally weird,
unless he was in one of those dream-states where it’s all rational.

But once the skeletons had come together and grown bodies, things were still not right.

Do you ever watch those television programmes where they try to build up an image of the person from his or her skull? They do it extremely well, although the one I saw of Richard III made him look just like the famous portrait of him!

The trouble is, of course, that they never look much like a real live person, but more like those photo-fit reconstructions that the police build up from people’s descriptions of villains.

And think how those dinosaurs that they reconstruct as computer animations, imagining what they may have looked and sounded like when all they really have is a fragment of bone! David Attenborough has done some programmes on them, and sometimes it’s difficult to remember that these are not real animals, only animations. They are much better than they used to be, but even still, the difference, in both the head reconstructions and the dinosaur programmes is that there is no life.
No spirit, no personality looking out through the eyes.

And that’s what Ezekiel saw in his vision –
there were just so many plastic models lying there, no life, no spirit.
Ezekiel had to preach to them again, and they eventually came to life as a vast army.

And then Ezekiel was told the interpretation of his vision –
it was a prophecy of what God was going to do for Israel, which at the time seemed dead and buried.
God was going to bring Israel back to life, to breathe new life into the nation, and put His Spirit into them.

---oo0oo---

I’ll come back to Ezekiel in a minute, but for now, let’s go on to the wonderful story of Lazarus.

The family at Bethany has many links in the Bible.
Some people have identified Mary as the woman who poured ointment all over Jesus’ feet in the house of Simon the Leper –
and because he lived in Bethany,
some people have also said that he was married to Martha.
We don’t know.
The Bible isn't very clear about which Mary was which,
apart from Mary the Mother of God,
and it certainly doesn't say that Martha and Simon were married to each other, although both of them probably were married.
We do know that Martha and Mary were sisters,
and that they had a beloved brother, called Lazarus.
We do know that on one occasion Mary poured her expensive perfume all over the feet of the Lord –
whether this was the same Mary as in the other accounts or a different one isn't clear
But whatever, they seem to have been a family that Jesus knew well,
a home where he knew he was welcome,
and dear friends whose grief he shared when Lazarus died.

In some ways the story “works” better if the woman who poured ointment on Jesus’ feet in the house of Simon the Leper and this Mary are one and the same person,
as we know that the woman in Simon’s house was, or had been,
some kind of loose woman that a pious Jew wouldn’t normally associate with.
Now she has repented and been forgiven,
and simply adores Jesus,
who made that possible for her.
And she seems to have been taken back into her sister’s household,
possibly rather on sufferance.

But then she does nothing but sit at Jesus’ feet, listening to him.
Back then, this simply was Not Done.
Only men were thought to be able to learn,
women were supposed not to be capable.
Actually, I have a feeling that the Jews thought that only Jewish free men were able to learn.
They would thank God each morning that they had not been made a woman, a slave or a Gentile.
And even though St Paul had sufficient insight to be able to write that “In Christ, there is neither male nor female, slave nor free, Jew nor Gentile”, thus at a stroke disposing of the prayer he’d been taught to make daily, it’s taken us all a very long time to work that out,
and some would say we haven’t succeeded, even now.

Anyway, the point is that Mary, by sitting at Jesus’ feet like that,
was behaving in rather an outrageous fashion.
Totally blatant, like throwing herself at him.
He might have felt extremely uncomfortable,
and it’s quite possible that his disciples did.
Martha certainly did, which was one of the reasons why she asked Jesus to send Mary through to help in the kitchen.
But Jesus replied:
“Mary has chosen what is better, and it will not be taken away from her.”

Mary, with all her history, was now thirsty for the Word of God.
Jesus was happy enough with bread and cheese, or the equivalent;
he didn’t want a huge and complicated meal.
He wanted to be able to give Mary what she needed,
the teaching that only he could provide.
He would have liked to have given it to Martha, too,
but Martha wasn’t ready.
Not then.

But now….. now it’s all different.
Lazarus, the beloved brother, has been taken ill and died.
It’s awful, isn’t it, when people die very suddenly?
I know we’d all rather go quickly rather than linger for years getting more and more helpless and senile,
but it’s a horrible shock for those left behind.
And, so it seems, Lazarus wasn’t ill for very long, only a couple of days.
And he dies.

It must have been awful for them.
Where was Jesus?
They had sent for him, begged him to come, but he wasn’t there.
He didn’t even come for the funeral –
which, in that culture and climate, had to happen at once,
ideally the same day.
The two women, and their families if they had them, were observing the Jewish custom of “sitting Shiva”,
sitting on low stools indoors while their friends and neighbours came to condole with them
and, I believe, bring them food and stuff so that the bereaved didn’t have to bother.

But Martha, hearing that Jesus is on his way, runs out to meet him.
This time it is she who abandons custom and propriety to get closer to Jesus.
And it is she who declares her faith in Him:
“Yes, Lord, I believe that you are the Christ,
the Son of God, who is come into this world!”

And Mary, too, asserts that if Jesus had been there,
Lazarus would not have died.
But it is Martha, practical Martha, who overcomes her doubts about removing the gravestone –
four days dead, that was going to smell rather, wasn’t it?
But she orders it removed, and Jesus calls Lazarus forth.

And he comes, still wrapped in the bandages they used for preparing a body for burial.
When Jesus is raised, some weeks or months later, the grave-clothes are left behind, but we are told that this didn’t happen to Lazarus.
The people watching had to help him out of the grave-clothes.

---oo0oo---

Of course, I think the point of these two stories –
and the point of linking them together in the lectionary –
is fairly obvious.
Life comes from God.
In Ezekiel’s vision, God had to breathe life into the fitted-together skeletons,
or they were no more than computer animations,
or dressmakers’ dummies.
And it was God who, through Jesus, raised Lazarus from the dead.
Without God, Ezekiel’s skeletons would have remained just random collections of bones.
I think that this may have been a dream or a vision, rather than something that actually happened, but it makes an important point, even still.
God said to Ezekiel that just as, in the dream, he had breathed life into the skeletons, so he would breathe new life into the people of Israel.

And the story of Lazarus, of course, foreshadows the even greater resurrection of Jesus himself,
a resurrection that left even the grave-clothes behind.
Lazarus, of course, will have eventually died permanently, as it were, when his time had come;
Jesus, as we know, remains alive today and lives within us through the power of the Holy Spirit.

So what have these stories to say to us, here in the 21st century?
We don’t find the idea of a fieldful of bones coming together and growing flesh particularly special –
computer animations have seen to that.
And we don’t expect to see the dead raised –
more’s the pity, in some ways;
maybe if we did, we would.
Then again, that doesn’t seem to be something God does very often in our world.

But I do think that there are two very important things we can take away with us this morning.

The first thing is that God can make dry bones live again.
Sometimes we despair, I know, when we look round and see the state of the church today –
tiny, elderly congregations that aren’t really viable, churches having to close or only have one or two services a month, and so on.
Or we might see services where people’s emotions are manipulated by big-name preachers and vast stage shows.
Or we see churches where whole groups of people are demonised and condemned.
And we wonder, “Can these bones live?”
Is God really still here?
But, you know, there are signs of spring –
the other week, there was what they are calling a “revival” in a small town in the USA called Asbury.
It is, of course, far too early to tell whether this will bear fruit in the form of genuine repentance and changed lives,
or whether people were simply caught up in some kind of mass emotionalism, all too easy to do.
But if it is real, if it is resulting in changed lives….
Well…. Can these bones live?

The second thing that is that it’s all God’s idea.
Our relationship with God is all his idea –
we are free to say “No, thank you”, of course,
but in the final analysis, our relationship with God depends on God,
not on us.
I don’t know about you, but I find that really liberating –
I don’t have to struggle and strain and strive to stay “on track”.
When I fall into sin, I am not left all by myself,
but God comes after me and gently draws me back to himself.
I can just relax and be myself!

Our relationship with God is God’s idea.
It is God who breathes life into us.
It is God who brings us back when we go astray.
It is God who helps us to change and grow and become the people we were created to be, designed to be.
It is God who breathes life into the dry bones of our spirituality, who calls us out of the grave, who enables us to grow and change.
Amen, and thanks be to God!

Can you see?

 

I actually got the two recordings together this time (3rd time of asking!); there will be a gap after the main sermon, and then the secondary sermon will begin.

This is a very splendid story in John's Gospel, although it's rather long, which is why I divided the reading into two bits.

It's not just about a healing, it's about what happened afterwards.

We start with the man born blind,
and first of all the disciples want to know why this had happened.
We all want to know why, don't we,
when dreadful things happen.
Why was this child born disabled?
Why did that earthquake devastate towns on the Turkey/Syria border?
Why did so and so get cancer?
Why did so and so get cancer and then get better,
when someone else couldn't get better, and died?
And so on and so forth.
It's human nature.
Even though we sometimes know the answers, or at least part of them –
the buildings in those cities didn’t conform to earthquake-proofing regulations
which is why the earthquake caused so much devastation;
that person shortened their lifespan by smoking.
And so on.
But other times there seems to be no reason for it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“So what happened?” asks the neighbours.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But perhaps it isn’t just our personal behaviour that changes.
Maybe we find ourselves getting involved in our community in a way we hadn’t been before.
It will be different for all of us, but we will probably find ourselves, in some way, walking alongside the poor and marginalised in our society.   

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

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

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

It can be scary.
Bartimaeus was scared, and with some reason
as his healing ended up with his being chucked out of the synagogue.
That was relatively mild compared with what has happened to some of Jesus' followers down the years, though.
But then, we always seem to be given the strength and the ability to cope with whatever comes.
It’s not necessarily true that God never gives us more than we can handle, but what is true is that we don't have to cope alone.
God is there, not only changing us,
but enabling us to cope with that change.

And we are changed and grown, and God gets the glory!
Because it's not just about what happens to us –
although, human as we are, that's the bit we think about most.
It's also about showing God's glory to the world,
showing people that Jesus is the Light of the World.
As happened when Bartimaeus was healed;
as may well happen if and when God touches our lives.
Amen.

---oo0oo---

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

Today is the fourth Sunday in Lent, and it’s long been known as Laetare Sunday, or Refreshment Sunday –
it’s half-way through Lent, and in days when people kept it rather more strictly than they do now,
it was a day when you could relax the rules a little.
And the tradition grew up that on that day,
you went to the mother church in your area –
often the cathedral, but it might have just been the largest church in your area.
Or sometimes, it might have been the church where you were nurtured and taught as a child, before you left home.
I have had the honour and privilege of preaching at my own “mother church” in a Sussex village, and I love to visit there when I can.

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

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

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

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