What do you want with us, Jesus of Nazareth?

We don't always remember this in our day and age, but Jesus was a Jew. This seems obvious when I say it, but we don't often think through the implications of it. And one of the implications is that every Sabbath day, he went to worship at the local synagogue, wherever he found himself. Normally at home in Nazareth, but when he was on the road, he went local.  The picture above is of a synagogue in Capernaum which is thought to be slightly later than the one in Jesus' day, but still on the same site.

And here, in Mark's Gospel, Jesus is at the very beginning of his ministry. Mark tells us that he has been baptised, and then gone into the desert to think through the implications of this, to work out what it means to be “God's beloved Son, in whom he is well pleased.” He was tempted, and learnt what was and was not the right thing to do with his divine power.

And then John, his cousin, was put in prison and Jesus knew the time had come to start his own ministry in good earnest. He came out of the desert, and picked up Andrew and Peter and one or two others – we know from John's gospel that Andrew and Peter had been followers of John before this – and then, on the Sabbath, he finds himself in Capernaum, about 20 miles as the crow flies from his home town of Nazareth. So they all go to the synagogue there.

Now, one of the things about synagogue worship was that – is that, I should say, as I understand it is much the same today – is that you don't have to have a trained preacher up there, but almost any adult – adult males, in many synagogues, but some welcome women, too – can get up on his hind legs and expound the Scriptures. And visitors were very often asked to read the Scripture passage for the day as a way of honouring them, and it was quite “done” to comment on it. You might remember Jesus goes home to Nazareth at one stage and is asked to read the Scriptures there, with rather disastrous results. But not on this occasion.

What happens here, though is equally unexpected. Someone with an evil spirit is there, and the evil spirit recognises Jesus, and causes its host to cry out, interrupting whatever Jesus was saying or reading, to cry out: “What do you want with us, Jesus of Nazareth?”

“What do you want with us, Jesus of Nazareth?”

It's a good question, isn't it? What does Jesus want with us? Why does he come, interrupting our nice, peaceful church services? Why does he come, interrupting our nice, peaceful lives? What do you want with us, Jesus of Nazareth?

Of course, the answer is going to be different for each and every one of us. And yet there are some universal truths.

Firstly, I think, he answers “I want you to let me love you.”

To let him love us. That sounds as though it ought to be a no-brainer, but in fact, it can be very difficult to allow ourselves to be loved. And we tend not to look at it that way round, anyway. We think it's our business to love God – I am not quite sure what we think God's business is, but we don't always expect him to love us. And yet, how can we love unless he loved us first?

There's a story you may have heard before, told by the theologian and writer Gerard Hughes, in which he describes an image of God that many of us may have grown up with; a God who demanded our love and attention, and threatened us with eternal damnation if he didn't get it. And we ended up telling God how much we loved him, while secretly hating him and all he stood for, but terrified of not appearing to love him, because of the eternal damnation. We weren't told, or if we were told, we didn't hear, the first bit, which is that God loves us! God loves us so much that he knows quite well we can't possibly love him first. “We love, because He first loved us,” we are told. His love comes first. We need to let him love us. That's the first answer to the question, “What do you want of us, Jesus of Nazareth?”

“I want you to let me love you.”

And the second answer is “I want you to let me heal you.”

Healing. It's a bit of a vexed question, isn't it? We know that healings happened in the Scriptures, and we know that they can and do happen today, but we rarely seem to see any. We do see miraculous physical healings now and again, and we thank God for them as, indeed, we thank God when people are healed through modern medicine. But our bodies are going to wear out or rust out one day, whatever we do. We aren't designed to live forever on this earth, in these bodies, and they will eventually come to the end of their usefulness to us. But Scripture teaches that we will be raised from death in a new body, so it makes sense to me that the parts of us that make us “us”, if you like, are the parts that need healed. Our emotions, our personality, our memories. Things that have screwed us up in our pasts, that we find hard to get beyond. I believe Jesus always heals us when we ask, but we usually get the healing we really need, not necessarily the one we thought we wanted!

Also, while our language differentiates between healing and forgiveness, Jesus doesn't seem to so much. Remember the paralysed bloke whose friends let him down through the roof? Jesus' first words to him were “Your sins are forgiven!” which was what healed him. We need to be forgiven our sins, we need to be healed of being a sinner, if you like. We need to be changed into someone who can love God, and who can step away from sin – and we'll never do that without Jesus, let me tell you. We need to be healed so that we can become the person God created us to be. “I want you to let me heal you.”

“What do you want with us, Jesus of Nazareth?”

“I want you to let me love you.

I want you to let me heal you.

And I want you to let me fill you with the Holy Spirit!”

To be filled with God's Holy Spirit. According to the Bible, this isn't an optional extra, it's an absolutely central part of being a Christian. Remember the believers at Antioch, who were asked whether they'd received the Holy Spirit when they were baptised, and they were like, “You what? What's the Holy Spirit?” and Paul had to re-explain the Gospel to them. It turned out they'd only got as far as John's baptism of repentance, not the baptism into a new life with Christ. So far as Paul is concerned, receiving the Holy Spirit is an absolutely central part of being a Christian.

Makes sense, really, when you think about it. Because if we are filled with the Holy Spirit, we are filled with God Himself, and can be loved and healed and made whole, and God Himself can direct our lives, never forcing, never compelling, but always asking and reminding us, and enabling us. We need to be filled with God's Holy Spirit if we are to grow and change into the people God designed us to be.

“What do you want with us, Jesus of Nazareth?”

Of course, at that time the question was inappropriate, as was the follow-on of: “I know who you are, the holy one of God!” because Jesus was only just at the start of his ministry. He wasn't ready to become universally known, and anyway, he could sense that that which asked the questions had no interest in wishing him well. So he did the only possible thing, which was to command the evil spirit to come out of its host, which it did, and when the host recovered, all was well. But, of course, stories like this spread around, and Mark tells us that Jesus' fame in the area began to grow.

“What do you want of us, Jesus of Nazareth?” The question still resonates down the years, and I think the answers are still the same as ever: “I want you to let me love you. I want you to let me heal you. I want you to let me fill you with the Holy Spirit.” What is your answer? What is mine?

Will you let Jesus love you? Will you let Jesus heal you? Will you let Jesus fill you with his Holy Spirit? Amen.

Samuel

 

The story of Samuel in the Temple is an old friend, isn’t it?
I was amazed, when I came to have another look at it,
that it was actually a much darker story than I remembered.
We all know the bit about Samuel waking up in the night and thinking Eli has called him,
and Eli eventually clicking that God was trying to speak to Samuel....
but what is the context?
And what, actually, did God want to say?

It all started, of course, with Samuel’s mother, whose name was Hannah.
She was married to a man called Elkanah, and, in fact, she was his senior wife.
But her great sadness was that she had no children,
and her co-wife, called Penninah, did.
Elkanah actually loved Hannah more than he loved Penninah,
and although I don’t suppose he minded for his own sake that she had no children, he minded for her sake.

And, we are told, whenever Elkanah went to the Temple to make sacrifices, he gave Hannah a double portion.
And one day, Hannah, in the Temple, is just overcome by the misery of it all,
and pours out her heart to God –
I’m sure you’ve been there and done that;
I know I have.
And Eli, the priest, thought she was drunk, seeing her mumbling away like that.

It was rather a bad time in Israel’s history.
I don’t know if it ever occurred to you –
it hadn’t to me until quite recently –
but this is not the Temple in Jerusalem that Jesus would have known;
the first Temple in Jerusalem wouldn’t be built until the reign of King Solomon, about seventy or eighty years in the future.
This Temple was in Shiloh, and really, it was the place where the Ark of the Covenant resided.
And Eli is the priest in the Temple.
Now, back then, being a priest was something that only certain families could do;
and if your father was a priest, you usually were, too.
It’s actually only within quite recent history that what you do with your life isn’t determined by what your father did –
and isn't it the case that people are finding it increasingly hard to get a better education than their parents, and perhaps do different things?
Anyway, back then, you followed in your father’s profession,
and if your father was a priest, as Eli was, then you would expect to be one, too.

Unfortunately, Eli’s sons were not really priestly material.
They abused the office dreadfully –
taking parts of the sacrifices that were meant to be burnt for God alone,
sleeping with the women who served at the entrance to the temple.
I don’t think these women were prostitutes –
temple prostitution was definitely a part of some religions in the area,
but I don’t think it ever was part of Judaism.
These women would have been servants to Eli and his family, I expect,
and considered that service as part of their devotion to God.
And perhaps, too, they helped people who had come to make sacrifices and so on.
Whatever, Hophni and Phineas, Eli’s sons, shouldn’t have been sleeping with them,
and they shouldn’t have been disrespecting the sacrifices, either.

There had been a prophecy that the Lord would not honour Eli’s family any more, and that Hophni and Phineas would both die on the same day,
and a different family would take over the priesthood.
Eli had tried to tell his sons that their behaviour was unacceptable, but they hadn’t listened, and one rather gets the impression that he had given up on them.
He was not a young man, by any manner of means.

And now he had this child to bring up, Samuel, first-born of the Hannah whom he had accused of being drunk.
Hannah had lent her first-born child to the Lord “as long as he lives”,
since God had finally granted her request and sent her children –
unlike some of the other childless women in the Bible,
people like Sarah or Elisabeth,
God gave her more than one child in the end.
So Samuel, her first-born, was lent to God, and grew up in the Temple.

I had always somehow imagined the Temple as being very like
the Temple in Jerusalem, but, of course, it can’t have been.
It was probably just an ordinary house, but with the main room reserved for the altar of the Lord and the Ark of the Covenant.
Samuel sleeps in there, you notice, and Eli has his own room at the back somewhere.
And I imagine Hophni and Phineas have rooms of their own, too.

I do think that the first verse of our reading is one of the saddest there is;
“The word of the Lord was rare in those days;
visions were not widespread.”
“The word of the Lord was rare in those days;
visions were not widespread.”
It sounds like a very bleak time, doesn’t it?

Samuel, we are told, did not know the Lord.
He didn’t know the Lord.
This in spite of ministering in the Temple daily.
He wasn’t able to offer sacrifices, of course –
he was not, and couldn’t ever be, a priest, as he came from the wrong tribe.
But he would have helped Eli get things ready,
he would perhaps have made the responses.
He would certainly have known what it was all about.
But he did not know the Lord, in those days.
The word of the Lord had not yet been revealed to him.

So when God calls him in the night, he has no idea what is happening,
and thinks that Eli is in need of help.
And it isn’t until the second or third time that Eli realises what is happening, either.
But once he does, Eli explains that it might be that God is wanting to speak to Samuel, and he should say “Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening!”

And then what?
No message of hope or encouragement such as anybody would want to hear.
In fact, quite the reverse:

“See, I am about to do something in Israel that will make both ears of anyone who hears of it tingle.
On that day I will fulfil against Eli all that I have spoken concerning his house, from beginning to end.
For I have told him that I am about to punish his house forever,
for the iniquity that he knew, because his sons were blaspheming God,
and he did not restrain them.
Therefore I swear to the house of Eli that the iniquity of Eli’s house shall not be expiated by sacrifice or offering forever.”

There will be no escape for Eli;
he could, and should, have stopped his sons from being blasphemous,
from disrespecting the offerings of God’s people,
from sleeping with the temple servants.
I get the feeling Eli has rather given up, don’t you?
When Samuel tells him what the Lord has said, his reaction is simply,
“It is the Lord;
let him do what seems good to him.”
And in the end, just to round off the story, both sons were killed in a battle against the Philistines,
and Eli died of a heart attack or something very similar that same day.
And the Philistines captured the Ark of the Covenant.

All very nasty –
not one of the nicer stories in the Bible, I don’t think.
But what does it say to us?
What do we have in common with these people at the end of the Bronze Age, or early Iron Age, I’m not quite sure which they are?

The thing is, of course, we do have rather too much in common with them.
This is a time when the Word of God is not heard too much in our land.
It is a time when churches, and, indeed, synagogues and mosques, too, are disrespected;
synagogues and mosques even have to have security at the entrance, just for when people are coming to worship.
Thank goodness that isn’t yet the case with our churches, and pray God it will never be.
But even ministers and priests have been known to abuse their position – I have not heard of any rabbis or imams doing so, but I shouldn't be in the least surprised.

I suppose that there is nothing new;
every age has probably said the same of itself.
We know that we are, naturally, sinners, and unless God help us we shall continue to sin.

Samuel served in the Temple but he didn’t, then, know God.
Eli had given up;
Hophni and Phineas set him a poor example.
It must have been confusing for Samuel –
what was it all about?
And then when God did finally speak to him,
it wasn’t a comforting message of cheer and strength,
but a reminder that God’s judgement on the whole shrine and the priestly family who ran it was going to happen.

But good things came from it, too.
Samuel became known and respected as a prophet and as a judge in Israel.
He couldn’t be a priest, as he was from the wrong tribe,
but he could be, and was, a prophet who was widely respected and loved.
It was he who anointed Saul as king, and then David.

So there is hope, even in the cloudiest, stormiest days.
The temple of Shiloh was abandoned, and the Ark never returned there.
But the Ark did return, and eventually the Temple was built in Jerusalem.
Samuel became one of the most famous prophets of them all.

Samuel said “Yes” to God.
He was willing to hear God’s message,
no matter how unpleasant it had to be,
no matter how traumatic.
He was willing to hear, and he was willing to speak it out.
And so God used him to establish the Kings of Israel and then of Judah –
perhaps not the most successful monarchy ever,
but from King David’s line came, of course, Jesus.

It is never totally dark.
God ended Eli’s family’s service to him, yes;
but the Temple endured, and was eventually rebuilt in Jerusalem,
bigger and better than before.
The Ark of the Covenant was taken into captivity –
but it came back, and remained in the Temple until it was no longer needed, as God made a new covenant with us.

When we go through difficult times,
and I think we all do, whether as individuals,
as churches,
or as a society,
it’s good to think back on this story.
God may be bringing one thing to an end;
but a new thing will, invariably, follow, just as spring follows winter.

The difficult thing, of course, is going on trusting Him when all does seem dark, when we can’t see how things are going to work out.
It's been terribly dark just lately, hasn't it, with the wars in Ukraine and Israel threatening our own world.
But remember Paul’s letter to the Romans, chapter 8;
“And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.”
I do think that we can ask to see how God is going to work a bad situation for good;
it’s amazing how that can and does happen.
Perhaps one day we will see the good that God has worked out of the war between Russia and Ukraine.
Perhaps one day we will see the good that God has worked out of the conflict between Israel and Hamas.

And we need, like Samuel, to listen to God, and to do what He asks of us, no matter how difficult.
Are you willing to do this for God?
Am I willing?
It isn’t easy, is it?

Thanks be to God that we need do none of this in our own strength, but in the power of the Holy Spirit, who strengthens us.
Amen!

Gold, Frankincense and Myrrh

 

What a very odd story this is, about the wise men coming to Jesus.
For a start, you only find it in Matthew's gospel, and not in Luke's.
To carry on with, it's quite difficult to reconcile the course of events in Matthew with those in Luke –
for instance, Luke seems to think that the family go straight back to Nazareth, stopping off at Jerusalem on the way to present Jesus in the temple,
whereas Matthew seems to think they lived in Bethlehem all the time,
fled to Egypt to escape Herod's vengeance after the wise men's visit,
and only then settled in Nazareth.

I don't suppose it matters much, really, though, because we have also got an incredible amount of tradition mixed up with the stories –
the ox and the ass in the stable, for instance;
you don't find those in either gospel account.
Nor, in the one we have just heard read, were there three wise men!
It doesn't say how many there were.
Tradition, of course, has made of them kings;
Caspar, Melchior and Balthazar.
But that's not what the Bible says.

And it is only tradition that identifies gold with kingship,
frankincense with divinity, or godhead,
and myrrh with death.
But seeing as we all have our own mental image of the Nativity stories,
it doesn't matter very much.
It wouldn't really be a Christmas crib without donkeys and oxen, would it?
And it's a lot easier to depict Eastern potentates than Zoroastrian astrologers, or whatever they really were.
And if we see gold, frankincense and myrrh as equivalent to kingship, godhead and death –
well, why not?
It helps us remember a bit Who Jesus is,
and anything that does that is always helpful.

I have heard people comment that the wise men might have given more useful gifts, but, in fact, back in the day what they gave would have been very useful.
After all, gold is always useful, and when the Holy Family had to flee into Egypt, as Matthew tells us they did,
they would have needed gold to help cover their expenses.
And although you can get both frankincense and myrrh very cheaply in Brixton these days –
Brixton Wholefoods usually has them in their spice jars –
back in the day they were very rich and rare.
And useful.
Frankincense isn't just about saying that Jesus is divine,
it's also very calming and soothing,
and it helps to heal chest infections and coughs.
You can either burn it as incense –
and it is an essential component of the incense that some Christians like to burn in worship –
or you can buy the essential oil and dilute it to massage yourself with.
It's also used in face creams for its anti-ageing properties.

Myrrh, too –
rarer than rare, back then –
is very healing.
When I was growing up, there was always a little bottle of tincture of myrrh in the medicine cabinet in case anybody had toothache –
tasted vile, but did the trick.
It's still a component part of some toothpastes, even today.
And I believe it can be used to heal skin irritations, things like that –
not the toothpaste, of course, but the essential oil, or a cream containing it!
And, as we know, it was used in embalming the dead, and it's seen as symbolic of death.

So you see they would have been useful gifts, as well as symbolic.

But why does it matter?
What is it all about?

Partly, of course, it is about giving to Jesus.
The kings, or wise men, or whatever they were, brought gold, frankincense and myrrh to the one "Born to be King of the Jews",
even though they were not themselves Jewish.
Three of the most valuable commodities in the ancient world,
and not only valuable, but very useful, too.
I don't know what we would think of as the three most valuable commodities of today - probably something like platinum and uranium and petrol, which, except for the last, wouldn't be quite so useful!
Nor quite so symbolic, either –
the tradition of kingship, divinity and death may be only a tradition, not biblical, but it is very powerful.

But then, that's not really what's wanted today, is it?
What God wants of us today is –
well, basically, nothing less than all of us.
Not just our money, not just our time, but our whole selves.
And that's scary!
Next week, Rev’d Rita will be leading you in the Covenant service, when we recommit ourselves to being God's person in the year to come.
Again, scary!

Very scary.
But the thing is, that's actually only part of the Epiphany.
The posh name for it is “The manifestation of Christ to the Gentiles”.
The Gentiles.
And, when you come to think about it, the Magi couldn't really have been more outsiders if they'd tried with both hands!
They were, it is thought, some kind of astrologers, diviners,
just exactly the sort of person Jews were forbidden to be.
They came from the East, probably from present-day Iraq or Iran,
not countries with whom Israel has ever had a peaceful and friendly relationship!

The people to whom God chose to make himself known in the person of the infant Jesus were outsiders.
Rank outsiders.
Apparently not just the Magi,
but also the shepherds whom Luke tells us about were total outsiders,
far from the comfortable religious establishment of the day.

And again and again we see this in the New Testament, don't we?
It's the outsiders who get special mention,
the tax-gatherers,
the prostitutes,
the quislings,
the terrorists,
the members of the occupying power.

Even after the Ascension, it is still the outsiders who get special mention –
Cornelius, for instance, or the Ethiopian treasury official.

And us.

What the story of the Epiphany tells us is that we are loved.
Loved to the uttermost.
No matter who we are, what background we come from,
and whether we love God or whether we don't.
We are still loved.
Don't ever believe the fundamentalist groups who want to tell you that God hates Muslims, or gay people, or whoever –
it's simply not true.
Even if you were to say “Oh, bother this for a game of soldiers,
I'm never going near a church again!”
God would still love you.
Even if you were to go out and murder someone in cold blood,
or order your army to attack innocent people.

God might hate it that you did that, but God would still love you.
God might, or might not, have approved of the way the Magi worshipped him, but
he still loved them, and caused their journey and their gifts to be recorded in history.

I don't know if that makes it any easier to give ourselves to God or not.
It's difficult, isn't it?
And I think sometimes we stress about it unnecessarily.
We are always going to get it wrong.
That stands to reason.
We are, after all, only human, and the whole point of the Incarnation, of Jesus becoming a human being, was so that we could make mistakes and get it wrong and it wouldn't matter too much.
After all, salvation was God's idea, not ours.

We sometimes forget that, don't we?
We tend to live as though we have to get it right, or we won't be Jesus' people any longer.
But that's not so.
After all, what are we saved by?
What Jesus did for us on the Cross, or by our own faith?
I rather think it is what Jesus did for us that saves us!

But then, if we are saved by what Jesus did for us, why bother?
Why give expensive and valuable gifts,
like gold, and frankincense and myrrh,
or even our own selves?
Isn't the answer because Jesus is worth it?
Those of us who are parents know something of what it must have cost God to send his only son to earth as a helpless human baby.
We may even glimpse, sometimes, something of what Jesus must have lost, limiting himself to a human body.
Jesus is definitely worth all we can give to him, and then some!
And, more than that, Jesus makes it worth our while giving to him!
Because we are loved, because Jesus loved us enough to give up his whole life for us, then anything we can give is accepted with love, with joy, and is transformed into something greater.
Amen.

It takes a village

Some years ago now, R 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.

On Monday, you may remember, K showed us some pictures of various Christmas cribs, and there was an exhibition of them at Clapham church a few weeks ago. But in Provence they do things a bit differently, as this picture shows: It’s a whole village. It’s not a very high-resolution picture, but there are lots of little figures, not just the Holy Family, although they are there, too, but all the villagers going around their daily business. I took this picture, which is a much better resolution, at an exhibition of cribs in a church in Alsace a couple of weeks ago.

It doesn’t show the village in quite the same detail, but just look at all the people! You’ve got the Holy Family, of course, and then there is another stable with what looks like pigs in it – improbable, really, as Jewish people don’t eat pork or pig products. But you have all the villagers going on with their lives. I couldn’t spend as long as I wanted looking at it, as time was getting on and we needed to catch a bus back to our campsite, but it’s one of those things that the more you look, the more you see. There’s someone with his cart, and someone setting out to go fishing or sailing in a dinghy, and lots of people just standing around and chatting; a water-carrier is going over the bridge, and so on.

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 – and probably some interesting words to say when he hit is 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.

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, spending hours making a 12-days-of-Christmas chocolate calendar for his parents, grumbling that he and his friends aren’t allowed to go to Camden Town without a grownup – oh no, wait, that’s my 13-year-old grandson, but you get the picture! 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. 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, and he is our Lord and Saviour. Amen.

Advent 4

 

So, what day is it today? Christmas Eve. And tomorrow it’s Christmas Day. I bet you’re all getting excited, aren’t you?

What are you going to do tonight? Hang up your stockings. Santa’s on his way – my Santa tracker says he’s (wherever he is).

Well, in church we normally think about Jesus’ being born in Bethlehem, and today’s reading told us how the angel came to Mary and asked her if she would give birth to Jesus, and how Mary very bravely said yes she would, trusting that God would look after her, and how Jesus would turn the world upside-down. But you know that story – you’ve heard it lots of times before, so I’m not going to retell it today. I’ve got a quite different story to tell you, so settle down and listen.

Once upon a time, long, long ago, in a land far away, a little boy was born. Not Jesus – this was a couple of hundred years later, in a land called Patra, one of the places St Paul visited on his missionary journeys. So it’s not too surprising that this little boy’s parents were followers of Jesus, and the little boy grew up to be a follower, too.

His parents were rich, by the standards of their day, and when they died when the boy was quite young, he inherited all their money. But because he loved Jesus, he didn’t think it right to keep the money for himself, and began to give it away to the poor and needy in the area.

He dedicated his whole life to God, and was made Bishop of Myra while still a young man. One famous story about him tells of a poor man with three daughters, whom he could not hope to marry off as he had nothing to give for their dowries, something that was considered vital back in the day. And the future for unmarried women back then was bleak – slavery was probably the best option. So this young Bishop, anonymously, threw three purses of gold, one for each daughter, through the window of their house, and the purses landed in the shoes the girls had put to dry by the fire.

There are lots of other stories about him – some of them probably legendary rather than absolutely true. One story, which may or may not be true, tells how during a famine in Myra, the bishop worked desperately hard to find grain to feed the people. He learned that ships bound for Alexandria with cargos of wheat had anchored in Andriaki, the harbour for Myra. The bishop asked the captain of the fleet to sell some grain from each ship to relieve the people's suffering. The captain said he couldn’t because the cargo was "meted and measured." He must deliver every bit as he would be responsible for any shortage. The Bishop assured the captain there would be no problems when the grain was delivered. Finally, reluctantly, the captain agreed to take one hundred bushels of grain from each ship. The grain was unloaded and the ships continued on their way.

When they arrived in Alexandria and the grain was unloaded, it weighed exactly the same as when it was put on board! No shortages at all! We are told that all the emperor's ministers worshipped and praised God with thanksgiving for God's faithful servant!

Back in Myra, the Bishop distributed grain to everyone in Lycia and no one was hungry. The grain lasted for two years, until the famine ended. There was even enough grain to provide seed for a good harvest.

The Bishop, of course, was made a saint when he died. And the stories of his miracles didn’t stop coming. One rather splendid story concerns a small boy snatched away by pirates while the townsfolk were celebrating the Bishop’s feast-day. The boy, called Basilios, was made a cup-bearer to the ruler, as he couldn’t understand the language so couldn’t gossip. And he waited on the ruler with a lovely golden cup containing the finest wines, and so on. This went on for a year, while his poor parents grieved for him, thinking they would never see him again. But then, on the Saint’s feast-day, they were praying at home when quite suddenly Basilios reappeared, still clasping the king’s golden cup. He had been really scared, of course, but the saint had appeared to him and reassured him that he was quite safe and was going home.

The Bishop became the patron saint of children, and the patron saint of sailors, too. And as the years and centuries passed, he was revered in Christian countries all over the world, both Orthodox and Catholic. In the 11th century his remains were moved from Myra, now called Demre, which was under Moslem rule, to a town in Italy called Bari, where he is venerated to this day. Nuns started to give poor children little gifts of food – oranges and nuts, mostly – on his feast day. And his cult spread right across Christendom.

This saint was Saint Nicholas, Bishop of Myra. And these days, we know him as Santa Claus! In many countries, of course, he is still Saint Nicholas, and on his feast day, which is 6 December, children put their shoes by the fire and in the morning, they find the Saint has put some sweets and perhaps an orange or a tiny present into their shoes. But here in the UK, and perhaps especially in the USA, he is known as Santa Claus!

You see, Protestants like us don’t revere saints the way Catholics do, so you couldn’t have St Nicholas giving out sweets and so on to the children. And very strict Protestants didn’t even like celebrating Christmas, seeing it as inconsistent with the Gospel. Here, in England, with our gift for religious compromise, our folk traditions changed to include Father Christmas and yule logs and things, but in many Protestant countries, particularly the USA, it was considered “just another day”. But it seems that German colonists brought the St Nicholas tradition to the USA, and gradually he became the “jolly elf” of the famous poem. And, of course, the illustrations for the Coca-Cola advertisements began to settle his image as the fat old man we know today. A far cry, really, from a young Bishop in ancient Turkey!

But why does it matter? What, you may ask, has this got to do with us? How does it affect us this Christmas Eve? Many of us, perhaps most of us, are looking forward to tomorrow, to our presents, perhaps to seeing family, to eating Christmas dinner. We’ll probably go to church, but once we’ve done that, the rest of the day is very much a day of self-indulgence. And that’s okay, too, as long as we don’t forget that some people won’t have a great day, if they can’t afford to buy presents, or a lovely meal, or if they don’t have anybody to celebrate with, and spend the day by themselves, watching television. It’s a bit late for this year, but perhaps next year you could do something to help – giving some really nice things to the food bank, or the box for presents they put in Lidl, that sort of thing. Or, if you know someone is going to be on their own over Christmas, perhaps you could invite them to spend the day with you and your family.

But the point is, sometimes it feels as though Santa and Jesus are miles apart – but now that we know that Santa, too, was Jesus’ person, and, one assumes, still is, doesn’t that make a difference? I think it does. It means Christmas isn’t divided into two halves; it means it’s all one. Santa’s sleigh, the reindeer, Rudolph, all that sort of thing is actually to honour Jesus, the One who gave us the greatest gift of all! Amen.

Be joyful always

 

From St Paul's instructions to the Thessalonians, which formed part of our first reading:
“Be joyful always;
pray continually;
give thanks in all circumstances,
for this is God's will for you in Christ Jesus.”

“Be joyful always;
pray continually;
give thanks in all circumstances,
for this is God's will for you in Christ Jesus.”

Hmmm.
It rather jumps out and hits you in the face when you are reading the passages set for this Sunday, don't you think?
And I can't help but wonder what on earth St Paul was talking about.
How on earth are we supposed to be joyful always?
Does he mean we always have to be happy,
and it's wrong if we are miserable?
Surely not!
How can we pray continually?
We do have lives, after all –
we need to concentrate on other things
like cooking the dinner
or the work we're being paid to do!
And how about giving thanks in all circumstances?
Even in the middle of a disaster?

The Bible tells us, over and over again,
that we should rejoice and be glad –
I believe there are over 800 verses telling us to.
So it must be something we are meant to do.
But how?

We aren't always happy and rejoicing –
and indeed, it would be quite wrong if we were.
If someone is hurting very badly,
it doesn't help to go and be happy all over them!
There are times when we are all very unhappy –
personal tragedies,
dreadful things that happen to loved ones,
national tragedies....
how can we “be joyful always” when people have lost their homes in a hurricane or an earthquake?

Indeed, in the letter to the Romans St Paul tells us to “Weep with those who weep” as well as to “Rejoice with those who rejoice”.
And even our dear Lord wept when he arrived at Bethany and found his friend Lazarus dead and buried.

So it's obviously not wrong to be unhappy, to be sad.
And yet we are told to be joyful.

Well, for one thing, St Paul also reminds us, in the letter to the Galatians, that joy is a fruit of the Holy Spirit.

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

That doesn't mean we'll never be unhappy, far from it.
But we know, as St Paul also tells us,
that God works all things together for good for those that love him.
Even the bad things,
even the dreadful things that break God's heart
even more than they break ours.
Even those.
We may be unhappy, we may be grieving, we may be depressed.
But we can still be joyful, we can still rejoice,
because God is still God, and God still loves us.
Okay, sometimes it doesn't feel like that,
but that's only what it feels like, not what has really happened.
God will never abandon us,
God will always love us.
God will weep with us when we weep.
And underneath there always is that joy,
the joy of our salvation.

Okay, maybe that is understandable.
We can be joyful always if joy is a fruit of the Holy Spirit.
But what about praying continually?
We have lives, don't we?
We have to do such basic things as eating and sleeping and going to the loo, never mind earning our living.
How can we pray continually?

I suppose it depends on what prayer is.
If it's all about a conversation with God,
or even worse, a monologue from us telling God about our world and our lives,
then it probably isn't possible.

But what if, what if it were more about an attitude of mind?
A way of living where we are continually conscious of God's presence with us, of God's love for us?
There is a plaque some people like to have in their homes that says
“Christ is the head of this house;
the unseen guest at every table,
the silent listener to every conversation.”
That can sound as though he's some kind of creepy stalker,
but it's also a reality, if you are God's person.
And one can practice being aware of this, of God's constant presence with us.

It does take practice, of course;
you can't just go from only thinking of God when you're in Church on Sunday or when you're praying or reading your Bible at home,
and forgetting about Him when you're watching East Enders or getting the supper.
Some people find it helpful to build reminders into their lives,
so that every time they put the kettle on, say,
or get up from their chair, or whatever, they remember to –
I was going to say grin at God,
but you know what I mean.
After all, you can be sitting very happily in the same room as someone else, both of you utterly absorbed in whatever it is you're doing –
even, it has to be said, watching different things on the Internet –
but you're still aware that the other person is there.
I think it must be a bit like that with God.
You can be getting on with your life
but aware, in the background, that God is there with you.
I wonder if it's that that St Paul meant by “Pray continually.”
I think it must be something like.

By the way, don't think I'm some sort of super-spiritual genius –
I can't do this, a lot of the time.
Sometimes I can, but more often than not it doesn't happen!

I'd like to be able to –
but then again, like all of us, there are times when I'd really rather forget.....

And, you know, I bet that, like the underlying joy that the Holy Spirit gives, being able to be aware of God's presence,
so that you can take up and put down conversations with Him,
must also be a gift of the Holy Spirit.

So, be joyful always, pray continually, and the third one was “Give thanks in all circumstances.”

Give thanks in all circumstances.

Now, I know there are some writers who have interpreted this to mean that we have to give thanks for everything.
I don't see how we can do that –
I mean, we know that God's heart breaks when a child is killed on the roads, or when an earthquake devastates a country,
or when one nation attacks another with incredible loss of life.
How are we supposed to give thanks for things that make God Himself weep?

I don't think it means that.
I think it's more about having a thankful heart.
About acknowledging God's good gifts to us.
About –
okay, if you like, about counting our blessings.
We can't, and I don't think we should, thank God for the dreadful things –
but we can be aware that God is there,
in the midst of the dreadful things,
and we can certainly thank him for that.
We can be aware that in all things God does work for good for those who love him.

“Be joyful always;
pray continually;
give thanks in all circumstances,
for this is God's will for you in Christ Jesus.”

“For this is God's will for you in Christ Jesus.”
That's important, too.
I don't think we can just do all this in a vacuum.
It is because God wants this for us, it is His best for us.

Yes, it will take some work on our part –
we know that God the Holy Spirit will most certainly do his part
by enabling us to develop a sense of joy in Christ that can and will be there even through the most heartbreaking of outward circumstance,
but of course we have to do our part by allowing Him to,
by practising, with His help,
being aware of his presence at all times
and developing, again with His help,
a thankful heart that sees and acknowledges what God is doing in our world.
And no, it won't be easy,
and no, we can't do it by ourselves but only with Christ's help.

We are in the season called Advent, and Christmas is rapidly approaching.
We've already started singing carols –
Tulse Hill is having their carol service this morning, and Clapham has theirs this evening.
And over the Christmas season, we will be singing words like,
“Yet what I can, I give him, give my heart” and
“Cast out our sin and enter in, be born in us today!”
The thing is, do we really mean it?
Are we just singing lyrics we've known for years and never really taken much notice of?
Even the ghastly “Away in a Manger” –
“No crying he makes?”
I don't think so!
Not if he was a real baby, not a wax doll!
Anyway, sorry, even when we sing “Away in a Manger”
we are asking God to “fit us for heaven, to live with thee there!”
At Tulse Hill they used to pray this prayer every week, when the children left for Sunday school. There's a brief introductory prayer, and then everybody says together:
“Be near me, Lord Jesus, I ask Thee to stay
Close by me forever, and love me I pray.
Bless all the dear children in Thy tender care,
And fit us for heaven, to live with Thee there.”

And that's what it's all about, isn't it?
St Paul's instructions are things we simply can't do on our own,
no matter how hard we try.
But if we do ask God to help us fulfil them,
if we do learn to
“Be joyful always,
pray continually
and give thanks in all circumstances”,
then when we do get to heaven, we'll fit right in!
Amen.

The Coming King

 

So, Advent.
It’s almost an anomaly nowadays, isn’t it?
Out in the world, people are starting to celebrate Christmas already –
the shops have had their decorations up since the beginning of last month, or even earlier,
and the round of office parties, works celebrations, school festivities will be starting any day now.
And the endless tapes of carols and Christmas songs that are played in the shops, I should think they’d drive the shop assistants mad!

But here in Church, Christmas hasn’t started yet, and won’t for another four weeks.
We are celebrating Advent,
and it seems to be another penitential time, like Lent.
Those churches that have different colours for the seasons have brought out the purple hangings,
and many will have no flowers except for an Advent wreath.

But Advent is really a season of hope.
We look forward to “the last day when Christ shall come again”
to establish the Kingdom on earth.
We also look back to those who’ve been part of God’s story, including John the Baptist and Jesus’ Mother, Mary.

Today, though, our readings are about the coming King.
Our first reading, from the prophet Isaiah, tells how the prophet,
and perhaps the people for whom he was speaking,
longed and longed to see God in action.
“Oh, that you would rend the heavens and come down,
that the mountains would tremble before you!
As when fire sets twigs ablaze and causes water to boil,
come down to make your name known to your enemies
and cause the nations to quake before you!”

Scholars think that this part of Isaiah was written very late,
after the people of Judah had returned from exile.
They would have remembered the stories of the wonderful things God had done in the olden days,
in the days of Abraham and Sarah,
of Isaac and Jacob,
of Moses,
and of David the King –
and then, they would have looked round and said
“But hey, why isn’t any of this happening today?”

They reckoned the answer must be because they were so sinful.
“You come to the help of those who gladly do right,
who remember your ways.
But when we continued to sin against them,
you were angry.
How then can we be saved?
All of us have become like one who is unclean,
and all our righteous acts are like filthy rags;
we all shrivel up like a leaf,
and like the wind our sins sweep us away.
No-one calls on your name
or strives to lay hold of you;
for you have hidden your face from us
and made us waste away because of our sins.”

It does sound very much as though the prophet were longing for God,
but somehow couldn’t find him, in the mists of human sinfulness and this world’s total abandonment of God.
You know, there’s nothing new –
we complain that people don’t want to seek God today,
and our churches stand empty,
but there was the prophet saying that thousands of years ago!

And, of course, as it turned out,
God hadn’t abandoned his people at all!
Jesus came to this earth, lived among us, and died for us,
and Isaiah’s people now knew the remedy for their sin.

But Jesus himself tells us, in our second reading,
that his coming to live in Palestine as a human being isn’t the end of the story, either.
Somehow, someday, he will come back again.
He obviously doesn’t know all that much about it while he is on earth,
and rather discourages us from speculation as to when or how.
But he draws pictures for us:
“The sun will be darkened,
and the moon will not give its light;
the stars will fall from the sky,
and the heavenly bodies will be shaken.
“At that time men will see the Son of Man coming in clouds with great power and glory. And he will send his angels and gather his elect from the four winds, from the ends of the earth to the ends of the heavens.”

It is a scary thought, isn't it, with the world as unstable now as at any time in the past century.
What’s more today, as at no other time in history,
communications are such that if Jesus were to come back,
we’d know about it almost as soon as it happened –
look how quickly news spreads around the world these days.
Half the time you hear about it on Facebook or Twitter before the BBC has even picked up on it.
And Jesus' return would be something totally unmistakable.
But lots of generations before ours have thought that Jesus might come back any minute now,
and Christians throughout history have lived their lives expecting him to come home.
We have remembered Jesus’ warnings about being prepared for him to come, but He hasn’t come.
And we get to the stage where we, too, cry with Isaiah:
“Oh, that you would rend the heavens and come down,
that the mountains would tremble before you!”

Like Isaiah, we long and long to see God come and intervene in this world, and wish that He would hurry up. And that’s perfectly natural, of course.
Some folk have even got to the stage of believing it won’t happen, and have given up on God completely.
But Jesus said it will happen,
and one has to assume He knew what he was talking about.

But that doesn’t mean that we can blame God –
if You had come back before now, this wouldn’t have happened.
Every generation has been able to say that to God,
and it’s not made a blind bit of difference.
So maybe there’s something else.

You see, in one way, Jesus has come back.
Do you remember what happened on the Day of Pentecost,
in that upper room?
God’s Holy Spirit descended on those gathered there,
looking like tongues of fire,
and with a noise like a rushing mighty wind,
and the disciples were empowered to talk about Jesus.
And we know from history,
and from our own experience,
that God the Holy Spirit still comes to us,
still fills us,
still empowers us.

One of the purposes of these so-called penitential seasons is to give us space to examine ourselves
and see if we have drifted away from God,
to come back
and to ask to be filled anew with the Holy Spirit.
Then we are empowered to live our lives
as Jesus would wish.
We don't have to struggle and strain and strive to “get it right” by our own efforts.
God himself is within us, enabling us from the inside.
Jesus doesn’t just provide us with an example to follow, but actually enables us to do it, by the indwelling of the Holy Spirit.

I do two tai chi classes a week, these days, but it’s really difficult to get it all the way it should be.
Back in my ice dancing days, we only had to memorise a routine that lasted two minutes, with musical cues to tell us what move to do when.
In tai chi, it’s a 25 minute routine with no musical cues!
I get very muddled at times.
But supposing somehow the spirit of a tai chi master could get inside me,
and actually make my body move in the right way,
and show me how it's done from the inside.
That would be so much better than anything my coach could say, or anything I can learn from watching videos.
I really would be able to do the routine, even at home!

And that’s what God does –
by indwelling us with his Holy Spirit,
He not only shows us what to do, but enables us to do it.

All of us will face the end of the world one day.
It might be the global end of the world, that Jesus talks about, or it might just be the end of our personal world.
We expect, here in the West, to live out our life span to the end, and many of us, I am sure, will do just that.
But we can’t rely on that.
You never know when terrorists will attack –
or even muggers, or just a plain accident.
We can’t see round corners;
we don’t know what will happen tomorrow.

But whether it is tomorrow,
or twenty, thirty, forty or fifty years from now,
one day we will die, and then, at last, we will meet Jesus face to face.
And we need to be ready.
We need to know that we have lived as God wants us to live –
and when we’ve screwed up,
as we always do and always will,
we’ve come back to God and asked forgiveness, and asked God to renew us and refill us with his Holy Spirit.

We can only live one day at a time, but each day should, I hope, be bringing us nearer to the coming of the King.
Amen.