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November 9th 2008     Remembrance Sunday

Psalm 42.1-8, Ephesians 6.10-17

It’s Remembrance Sunday – a day, as its title says, for remembering. But I wonder what it is we are remembering today? Perhaps that sounds like a strange question, but it seems to me that there are many different types of remembrance happening on a day like today. I’d like to touch on three of them this morning and I think each has its place as we reflect on war and try to find a path to peace.

The first sort of remembering I want to talk about might be called historical remembering. If you look at the television schedules or the newspapers around this time you’ll find they are filled with documentaries and articles about the wars that have been turning points in our history. We hear the stories of great leaders – good and bad – both the Churchills and the Hitlers of our world. Historians talk about military strategies and the politics of war. That is historical remembering and it can be fascinating stuff, though perhaps it’s not everyone’s cup of tea. But even if you’re not a history buff, this historical remembering matters. There’s an old saying that goes along the lines of “History repeats itself. It has to. No one listens.” If we don’t pay attention to the lessons of past conflicts we may have to learn those lessons all over again, the hard way. That’s historical remembering

My next sort of remembering is at the other extreme from that, and we could call it personal remembering, recalling not the grand stories and the politics but the memories that are unique to each one of us. I’m sure there are a lot of those sort of memories around.
There are many here who have had direct experience of conflict. Some of you have served in the armed forces, some may be serving currently. You will have memories of the people you’ve served with, the places you’ve been, the things that have happened to you and that you have done. Some of those memories may be painful, of things you’d rather forget, but you might also be remembering times of great camaraderie and sense of purpose. Whether they are good or bad memories they are your memories, your stories to tell of how things were for you – no one else’s will be quite the same.
Others here I know will be thinking of family members who are in war zones right now, or have been recently. Others may be recalling a war-time childhood amidst the bombs and the air raid sirens.
Even those of us who have no direct experience of war will probably have personal memories of the effects of war on our family lives; stories of a father or grandfather who was never quite the same when he came home, of wounds, physical or mental, that never really healed, of family life blighted by wartime separation or bereavement. War doesn’t always make people better or braver. It can also leave a painful legacy which stretches across the generations.

Recalling those personal memories may be difficult, but it is important that we do so. Remembering can be the first step to healing, and for those of us who haven’t known war directly it is the personal stories that make real its cost to us, that underline the importance of the work of organisations like the British Legion or Combat Stress, who work with those who bear the scars of war.

So – historical remembering helps us see the big picture; personal remembering helps us to see the individual story – both are important. But the third type of remembering I want to think about today is important too because it helps us to understand not only what happens in war – politically or personally – but why it happens. For want of a better term I’m going to call it spiritual remembering. On this day, if at no other point in the year, we are called to remember our values, the things that matter to us, that can make us the people we want to be.

Both our Bible readings today were about spiritual remembering in different ways. The first one, from Psalm 42, is the song of a person who is in exile, a captive in a foreign land. The plaintive verses from Psalm 137 which the choir sang to us came from this period too. They were written at a time when the people of Judah had been conquered by the Babylonians and taken away across the desert to Babylon – modern day Baghdad. Jerusalem had been smashed to pieces, the temple ruined. Everything they had was gone. As they sat in Babylon, the Bible tells us, they remembered the life they had lost. They remembered the land they loved, which they thought they would never see again. They remembered, too, their beginnings in that land – the ancient story of God setting their ancestors free from another exile in Egypt. They remembered the tale of him bringing them across the wilderness to a Promised Land of plenty and they remembered the laws they had been given by Moses, laws which were meant to form them into a nation that would be based on justice and respect.

As they sat in Babylon, remembering mournfully what they had once had, who they had once been, the dreams they had once dreamed, they started to think about how they had come to abandon that vision and ignore those laws. The rich had heaped up wealth for themselves; the poor had been disregarded, trodden down. And they had taken God’s love for granted, too, assuming that he would make them invincible. They hadn’t seen their own responsibility for shaping their society. It was only when they thought they had lost everything, as they sat in that distant exile, that they began to remember what they were meant to be about. It was there in Babylon that they started to collect together the stories of their origins into what we call now call the Old Testament. It’s a book of spiritual remembrance.

Remembering the things that matter is a theme picked up in a different way in the New Testament reading. “Put on the whole armour of God” says St Paul to the church in Ephesus. These early Christians were going through tough times. Being a Christian was dangerous. Many of them were imprisoned, tortured, killed by the Romans. How should they act in the face of this persecution? Paul reminds them that this struggle isn’t one they can fight with weapons and armour made of metal. What they really need in these dangerous times is to remember and to hold close to them the lessons they have been learning as they follow the way of Christ.

Paul talks about truth. He talks about righteousness, faith, peace, the sense of being secure in God’s love – that’s what salvation is about. He talks about being open to God’s word, the challenging voice that cuts across our prejudices and assumptions. It’s not meant to be an exhaustive list and I expect we could come up with other things to add to it, but the point he is making is that in times of trouble it is these things, things that are to do with our basic attitudes to life, which will make the difference. If we forget them we will soon be in trouble. It is sad but true that wars can bring out the worst in people as well as the best. There’s never been a war that was without its atrocities – massacres, rapes, casual cruelty. Those scenes of the brutal treatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison are probably not that exceptional – it’s just that someone took photos so the whole world saw them. In times of trouble people who would normally be law-abiding can find themselves forgetting who they are, forgetting what they always thought was most precious to them.

I watched a TV programme last week about the last day of the World War 1 – perhaps you saw it too. It told the disturbing story of the soldiers who fell in the hours before the Armistice came into force at 11 o’clock. Despite the fact that it was widely known that the fighting would end then, something like 11,000 soldiers were killed on that day, more than the total killed in the D-Day landings. Some of those deaths may have been inevitable, even justifiable, but sadly there were cases where it seems there was no better reason for them than that a commanding officer wanted to have one last stab at glory, to be able to say he had won some town or village, which he could have walked into a few hours later. If ever there was a story that told of the need for spiritual remembrance – remembering what really matters - it is this one.

It isn’t only in the heat of battle that these things happen, of course. When any of us are struggling with some great difficulty at work or at home, when any of us feel threatened, with our backs to the wall, we can just as easily find ourselves using weapons that we know are wrong to win ourselves an advantage – lying to cover up our failures, cutting others down with a ruthlessness we would usually be ashamed of. But the victories we win using such weapons usually turn out to be hollow ones, and the long-term cost can be far greater than we anticipated. We find, in that Old Testament phrase, that we have sown the wind, and reaped the whirlwind.

Today then there are many memories, many types of remembering happening here and all of them matter. It matters that we remember our history so that we can learn from it. It matters that we remember those personal stories too. But spiritual remembrance matters as well; remembering who we are, and who we want to be. It matters not only on the battlefield but also in the board room, on the shop floor, at home. It matters because if we forget these vital things we may find that we have fought the wrong battles with the wrong weapons, and that the world we have created for ourselves is a place of suspicion, hatred and vengeance where no one can live well.
Amen.

2nd Nov 08    All Souls' Evening service

Rev 21. 1-6, Romans 8.31-35, 37-39

In the seventeenth century an eminent Quaker wrote a prayer which is still beloved by many today. His name was William Penn and he was the founder of what is now the state of Pennsylvania. I am sure you will have heard it – it’s often read at funerals.

We give them back to you, dear Lord, who gave them to us. Yet you did not lose them in giving, so we have not lost them by their return. What you gave you take not away, O Lover of souls; for what is yours is ours also if we are yours. And life is eternal and love is immortal, and death is only an horizon, and an horizon is nothing save the limit of our sight. Lift us up, strong Son of God, that we may see further; cleanse our eyes that we may see more clearly; and draw us closer to yourself that we may know ourselves to be nearer to our loved ones who are with you. And while you prepare a place for us, prepare us also for that happy place, that where they are and you are, we too may be for evermore.
William Penn (1644-1718)

It’s a prayer all about giving, taking, losing and finding again. Penn knew about loss. Several of his children had died in infancy, as they so often did in those days, and his first wife died quite young. He’d had to leave behind his life in England, too, when he travelled to America to escape the religious turmoil of the times. He’d lost all that was familiar to him. His prayer comes out of personal experience – and it is one that clearly still speaks to many today.

I think there are two reasons for that. The first is that we recognise the sense of separation and absence he talks about. It is a universal human experience. Especially in the early days of bereavement these are usually the most powerful and painful feeling we have. It’s telling that we often say of someone who has died that we have “lost” them. Suddenly there is a gap in the world where they used to be. There is an empty chair. There is silence where we are used to hearing a familiar voice. It can seem quite baffling – absurd even. How can someone be there one minute and the next be utterly gone from us? It’s very common, in fact, for us to find this literally unthinkable – our brains “fill in” the gap. We think we’ve caught a glimpse of the one we have lost in a crowd, or heard the sound of their key in the door. It’s a common phenomenon, nothing to do with ghosts or spirits, just that we tend to see and hear what we expect to see and hear, even if it isn’t there.

But I think there is a second reason why this prayer is so treasured, because it doesn’t stop at that feeling of loss. It doesn’t let loss have the last word. Instead Penn reminds us that there is a sense in which ultimately we can’t be parted from those we have loved. We are still bound to one another, says Penn, because God holds us all in one embrace – living and departed. We are bound together in his love. Penn said in another place that “Whoever loves beyond the world cannot be separated by it.” He calls death an horizon - and this is a man who knew about horizons; he’d sailed over them as he crossed the Atlantic several times during his life. Horizons look all too real from the shoreline, like the end of the world, yet when you sail towards one it vanishes. Just because we can’t see the world that is beyond the horizon doesn’t mean it isn’t there and just as real as the place where we are.

St Paul said the same thing in a different way in our reading tonight. “Nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus”. He was speaking to the church in Rome – not some mighty institution meeting in a grand building but just a small group of Christians gathered together, often in secret, in the face of persecution. These people had seen friends and family dragged away, arrested, imprisoned, executed in the arena for their beliefs; they knew that one day it might be them who faced this fate. Their whole lives were permeated by loss and the fear of loss. But Paul, who was eventually executed himself by the Romans, reassures them. He has discovered – he is convinced – that whatever their persecutors manage to destroy, they can’t destroy the love of God, the love which truly bound them together.

It may be tonight that you are in those first raw stages of grief, aware only of what you have lost. You may feel that this can never change – and of course there is a sense in which that gap is never filled, not in the way we would like it to be, this side of death – nor can bereavement be hurried through or short circuited. It takes as long as it takes. But as we bring our grief and loss to God, Penn’s prayer for us, and my prayer for you, is that you will find yourself held in the embrace of God, an embrace that holds us all, living and departed, an embrace that reaches across the horizons of our loss.
Amen

26th October 2008 Bible Sunday sermon by Kevin Bright
Col 3.12-17, Luke 17.11-19

Today is designated ‘Bible Sunday’.

Here’s a question for you, have you read your bible every day this week? Me neither.

Do most of us read words from the bible at least once a week? There’s a good chance that we do with the lectionary readings on our pew sheets.

It’s worth asking ourselves if there are events that make us read the bible more often, more urgently or which make us look for help in understanding it better. Preaching the next day usually works for me!

We’re often urgently grappling with God’s word during our preparation for confirmation or if we are studying for an authorised ministry. People who read publicly often like to have some understanding of the context in which their reading sits or at least run through it to ensure there are none of those difficult to pronounce words.

Then there’s life’s challenges, times of fear, danger and suffering which understandably prompt us to seek hope in the words of the bible.

But what about what we might call normal daily life when none of the above may apply?

According the last UK census in 2001 72% of respondents took the trouble to state their religion as Christianity, 77% in Sevenoaks district, and Christians read their bibles don’t they.

Well from those of that 77% that actually attend church the Bible Reading Fellowship tells us that 16% read the bible on a daily basis.

If you feel a structured approach to daily bible reading would help you they are offering a two week free trial of their notes and reflections, which can be downloaded from their website, the two weeks starts today so you’ll have to online later to get the maximum advantage. Alternatively, Bobby Rayner is our Bible Reading Fellowship representative and can tell you more.

We heard the words of Jesus in Matthew’s gospel ‘Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away’. The words of Christ, of God, remain with us for all time and remain eternally significant. Have these words been left with us in order that successive generations of Christians can be made to feel guilty about not habitually reading them? I’m certain that this is not what God had in mind.

My view is that reading the bible, thinking about what it means to us and acting upon it are an integral part of our relationship with God. He’s not interested in making us feel bad about how much time we put in but as our Christianity matures we are likely to feel that the bible will help us go deeper with God and it will therefore grow in importance to us.

We need to be honest with God and ourselves and lay open the reasons we find bible study difficult sometimes. There’s no shame in saying it and it’s a ridiculous pretence among people who are in a community of mutual support to assume everyone else has their head in the bible for hours every day.

The bible is a fantastic collection of books. 39 in the Old Testament and 27 in the new, easy to remember as 3x9=27. These books really are worth reading. There’s poetry, songs, wisdom, law, violence, kindness, protest, complaint, letters, prophesying, great surprises, joy and much, much more. The bible is a collection of 40+ authors covering around 1600 years.

We don’t need to fear the books of the bible too much as we are probably more familiar with much of it than we realise.

We know many great characters from the bible, Adam and eve, Noah (and his Ark), Joseph (and his amazing Technicolor dream coat), Moses (and his parting of the sea), Samson (the strong man), David and Goliath. We can probably recall the accounts surrounding Jesus birth with Inns and wise men, we know John the Baptist, that 5000 were fed, the Good Samaritan and the prodigal son. We smile at the little tax collector Zacheus who had to climb a sycamore tree to see Jesus. Palm Sunday with the donkey, the last supper, Christ’s crucifixion, resurrection, Pentecost and all those letters to the early church at least ‘ring some bells’ among us.

We all know at least parts of this and don’t need to fear picking up our bibles it’s just that it can offer so much more when we understand the people, their customs, and the events of the times. When we start to imagine ourselves in their shoes the bible can come alive as the penny drops and we see they were often going through similar stresses, strains, sadness and joys that we are today.

Don’t have time, don’t understand it, get bored reading it, fall asleep when reading, find it hard work, don’t have the self discipline are all common and natural excuses for letting our good intentions come to nothing.

We can all spare a few minutes each day and there will be others here who would love someone to discuss the bible with. There’s an enormous amount of help available in books and online. Even if you don’t have a bible with you it can be read in over 100 versions on bible gateway .com so we can read it in before or after we start our busy day or in our lunch break, technologically savvy people can even read it on their PDA as they sit on the bus or train or wait between meetings or lectures.

The early Christian church, such as that in Colosse which Paul’s letter was addressed to, didn’t have all the formality that we have in our patterns of worship. Their church would most likely have been small groups of people meeting wherever they could to worship pray and study the bible. Much of the time they would be debating and getting to grips with the events they read about without any expert help, discovering and learning for themselves.

As a lay person I’m with you on this. I need to learn more, dig into the bible more regularly and be open to being challenged and changed as a result.

My experience to date has been that time spent with the bible can offer consolation, comfort, deepened spirituality, hope, courage and more.

There is so much potential that we as a church community can release for the power of good if we get reading and sharing the bible together.

If we’re honest it’s easier to get motivated when we do things with others. Anne is proposing to publish study notes on a monthly basis relevant to our reading in church. Its then up to us to decide what we do with these. My suggestion is that we each look for opportunities to sit with a few others for an hour or so once a month. I’m happy to make my house available but equally happy to meet at others where mobility and child care make it difficult to get out.

Whether alone or with others let’s start reading the bible more from today.

There’s a new opportunity here to increase what we can take from the bible so let’s respond as people sharing a common journey and not let our good intentions pass us by.

Amen

October 19 2008     Trinity 22 Breathing Space Holy Communion

1 Thess 1.1-10, Mt 22.15-22

Jesus is in a tight spot, as he so often is in the Gospels. You could say he has put himself there. He has been telling parables, parables that are none too subtle in their message. We’ve heard a series of them over the past few weeks. Stories of wedding banquets where the wedding guests refuse the invitation, where sons who ought to help don’t. The Chief priests and Pharisees aren’t stupid. They can see who the target of these stories is – them. And they don’t like it. So they plan their fight back.

They send some of their stooges along to Jesus with an apparently serious question. “Teacher, we know that you are sincere…(a bit of flannel follows to soften Jesus up)…Tell us what you think. Is it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor or not?”

The problem they are tapping into here was not only that the taxes were being paid to the Romans, the hated occupying forces, but that the coins with which they had to be paid bore an image of the head of the emperor, the emperor who was regarded as divine. This broke the commandment not to make graven images. It was absolutely fundamental to Jewish law. Good Jews were left in a huge dilemma. Break the Jewish law and keep the Romans on your side, or break the Roman law, but keep in the good books of your Jewish friends (and, they thought, of God too.)

It’s a dilemma to which there was no easy answer, So they know when they ask Jesus this question that there is no reply he can give which will keep everyone happy – that’s why they ask it. Whatever he says they will have grounds to accuse him to someone – either to the Jewish leaders as a collaborator, or to the Romans as a revolutionary.

But unfortunately they aren’t as clever as they think. When Jesus asks them to show him a coin, they are caught off guard and instantly reach into their pockets for one, and they are hoist on their own petard. They might disapprove of these coins, but at least one of them has one on him, and what is more, when we look at this passage in its context we discover that they are standing in the Temple at the time. They have brought a graven image of the Roman emperor into the most sacred place in the Jewish world. Jesus could have just shrugged and walked away. He has punctured their self-righteousness – they are no better than anyone else, caught up in the inevitable contradictions and complexities of human life. If we think we are going to be able to get through life floating in a bubble above the mess of the world we can think again. But that is not the end of the story. There is something else they need to learn, something which, had they known it might have prevented them trying to play a trick like this in the first place.

“Give to Caesar what belongs to him” says Jesus. But then he goes on “and give to God the things that are God’s”. And that is the sting in the tail. The coin is the emperor’s – it bears his image to make that point. But it is not just the emperor’s image Jesus sees before him as he stands there on that day. He also sees something that bears the image of God – not a coin but people, the people who are asking the question, the other people there who are perhaps more genuinely struggling towards the truth. The Bible teaches, right from the beginning that each of us is made in the image of God. It’s there in the Book of Genesis – “God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them. Male and female he created them.” Whoever we are, whatever we have done, we reflect God in some way. We bear his image, just as much as the coin bore the image of Caesar. Give to the emperor what bears his image, says Jesus, but give to God what is his, which is nothing less than the whole of ourselves.

Jesus doesn’t just tell us to do this thing or that thing. He calls us to look at our basic orientation towards God and one another. He calls us to know that we are God’s children, with all the joy and demand that involves, and that those around us are God’s children also.

In the silence tonight let’s reflect on what it might mean for our lives if we took that call seriously – giving to God what is God’s, nothing less than our whole selves, and seeing what is God’s in others too.

Amen

12th Oct 08    Trinity 21

Isaiah 25.1-9, Ps 23, Phil 4.1-9, Mt 22.1-14

We’re in the middle of a crisis – you don’t need me to tell you that. It’s all over the news, banks collapsing, financial systems grinding to a halt. People are worried about the security of their jobs, savings and pensions. Individuals, local councils, charities, even the police force are worried that they will lose money, vital money that funds vital work. I don’t pretend to understand all the ins and outs of what has caused this crisis, but it’s clear that we are facing major changes and challenges. I don’t know about you, but I find a lot of what I hear unsettling, frightening even. For those of us in the prosperous West, who have been winners in the global lottery in recent generations of growth and prosperity, all this is coming as a nasty shock. That’s why I’ve put together some resources which you may have noticed in the porch on the way in – prayers for the financial situation and leaflets which might help if you or someone you know is worried. They are on the church website too.

It may not be obvious but the readings we heard today are very relevant to this time of crisis – this turning point that we have reached.

The first reading comes from the book of the prophet Isaiah. These words were written in the eighth Century BC at a time when Isaiah’s society, the little nation of Judah, was also going through a crisis. The Assyrians were advancing on them, conquering the nations round about, and soon they knew the axe would fall on them. It hadn’t happened yet, but it would, and there seemed to be nothing they could do but watch, just as perhaps we have watched what is happening in our day, transfixed with a sort of horrified fascination.

Isaiah, though, calls his people to look beyond the terrifying vision they are facing, and to consider what will come next. There is an old myth that the Chinese character for crisis is made up of two others, one which represents danger and the other opportunity. I’m afraid it isn’t true, but I can see why we would want it to be, because there is a sense that every disaster, however ghastly it is, also opens up new possibilities. When something is swept away, eventually something else will come along to fill the gap, and however small and insignificant we might feel we can all affect what that new world looks like. Change brings with it choices that must be made, choices which will shape the future.

God’s desire, says the prophet, is that that new world will be one that is very different from the one these people know now. Instead of corruption and injustice – the city that is destined to become a ruin - he longs for a world where everyone can share in the feast of creation, where everyone has enough and “the song of the ruthless is stilled.”

How does that sound to you? Pie in the sky? Unrealistic? Dangerously subversive? Too good to be true? Possibly all of those things, but it is what the Bible says, again and again, that God wants – there is nothing really new in this vision. It is the same vision God gave to Moses as he led the people towards a land “flowing with milk and honey”. Jesus preaches of a world in which there is justice and love too and when we pray that Biblical prayer “thy kingdom come”, this is what we are praying for as well.

But however much we say we want a world like this, bringing it about always seems to elude us. The problem is that it takes more than a vague longing to build this sort of world. It takes real change in the way we live, the way we relate to one another, our priorities. Especially for those of us living in relative comfort and prosperity a fairer world is likely to mean we have less rather than more, where we have to give up some of the advantages we have enjoyed for so long, and that’s not an easy thing to do. If it was we would have done it long ago. Being content with less means confronting whatever it is that drives our need to grab and to grasp; the fear of losing face, the fear of being vulnerable perhaps. Like most people throughout human history, we’d like everything to be different, but we don’t really want anything to change.

The Gospel reading is about change, and our resistance to it, as well. A king holds a banquet to celebrate the marriage of his son. We’re used to thinking of weddings as being about love - about two people wanting to be together – but for most of human history that wasn’t the case at all. Marriage was about the future – inheritance, property, the forging of alliances. And that was especially true of royal marriages like this one. A royal marriage is about the future of a whole kingdom, the first step towards birth of an heir, another generation of kings.

So, the king in this story isn’t just having a party. He is celebrating a new stage in his kingdom’s life. The ways the various characters in the story respond to his invitation tell us how they feel about being part of his plans.
They fall into three groups, three different responses. Some people won’t come to the banquet at all, even though they’ve been specifically invited. Some respond with enthusiasm – the crowds in the streets – both good and bad – who never imagined they could be guests at such a feast. And then there is that poor chap at the end who is thrown out because he isn’t dressed properly – I’ll come back to him in a minute.

Those who first heard this story would have had no trouble identifying who the first group represented – those invited guests who won’t come. Ah, they’d have said, these are the Jewish leaders, religious and secular, who didn’t recognise Jesus as the Messiah. They couldn’t believe that God really wanted the kind of future he talked about – his version of the kingdom of God – so they first ignored him and then had him killed. There would have been no mystery there for them at all. This was a group that it was easy to point the finger at and to disapprove of from their perspective.

The second group – the great crowd of ordinary people who find themselves unexpectedly welcomed to the banquet – would have been pretty obvious too. Jesus’ message was that everyone – good and bad, rich and poor, whatever their life story – was welcomed by God.

But the really puzzling figure is the man at the end, the one who is thrown out for not having the right clothing. What’s all that about, we wonder? What’s he done wrong? Surely it doesn’t matter to God what we wear? And we’d be right to think that - it doesn’t matter. God loves us whatever we look like, whether we are in jeans or an Armani suit. To understand this bit of the story we need to know a bit about its cultural background. In the Middle East it was common practice for the host at a wedding to provide clothes for his guests, just as people sometimes give out wedding favours to guests today. This man isn’t too poor to afford a wedding garment. He has been given the clothes he needs already; he just can’t be bothered to change into them, or doesn’t want to for some reason. He’s turned up to the feast – who wouldn’t with free food and drink on offer? But he doesn’t really want to get involved in this king’s plans for the future.

It is easy, as I said, to tell the goodies from the baddies in the first part of the story, easy to see who they represent, but this man is perhaps more difficult and more uncomfortable for us to identify, because there’s probably a bit of him in all of us. He’s the bit of us that stands on the sidelines, comes along to church, voices concern for the poor, means well, but hopes that everything will basically stay the same in his life. The man in the story literally doesn’t want to get changed, and he stands for that part of us that doesn’t want to get changed either, to have God transform us, pull us apart and put us together differently. But just like him, if we won’t get changed then our involvement in building the kingdom is never going to come to much.

“Whatever is true, whatever is honourable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable…think about these things…and the God of peace will be with you” says St Paul to the Philippians. The kind of transformation we should aim for is clear, but how do we get changed? What can we do about it?
Sometimes the change we need might come through spending regular time in prayer and reflection, reading the Bible – letting ourselves hear what God is saying to us. I’m planning from next month to produce a monthly Bible study outline, something you can use on your own, or get together with a couple of friends to talk through. I hope that might help us hear God’s voice and respond to it.
Sometimes we may need to seek out some help to change, talking through a problem with someone else – I’m always happy to listen.
Sometimes change comes as we get involved in serving others. We meet Christ in them, and discover parts of ourselves, good and bad, that we were unaware of.
It doesn’t matter how we get changed, so long as we do, committing ourselves by that change to being part of the kingdom God is building in our age.

Somewhere in all of the mess of this moment, in the crises that are besetting the world, God is at work. He is always at work if we have eyes to see him. As Psalm 23 put it, he is setting a table in the face of all that troubles us, a table at which the poor are just as welcome as the rich, the bad as welcome as the good. We’re invited to share in that feast, to get changed ourselves so that we can be part of the transformation he wants for all. That is the challenge we face, a challenge to which each one of us has to make our own response.
Amen

5th Oct 08    Harvest Evensong

Job 38.1-18, Romans 8.18-25

We’re living in difficult times. The financial crisis that’s filling the news at the moment is one which will have directly touched many in our own community who work in the City. It’s not just affecting them, of course– less money around means fewer goods being manufactured and sold, not just here but around the world, which means fewer jobs for those who work to produce and sell them. People unable to get mortgages means less money for house buying, house-building and all the allied trades that go with that. In the end everyone suffers, not just in this country but around the world, and as ever it is likely to be the poorest that suffers most. We’re all in these difficult times together.

And it’s not just the economy that might make us fear for the future. There’s the threat of terrorism, and the continuing struggle in Afghanistan and Iraq, and tension growing with other countries like Iran as well. And there’s climate change, which will exacerbate any other problems, potentially causing massive ecological disruption, pain, poverty and conflict.

We’re living in difficult times – our celebration of the harvest is inevitably tinged with that knowledge. But we are not the first to live through times like these. Communities, nations and individuals have struggled with disasters of one sort or another for the whole of human history. Indeed we could say we’ve been lucky to live when and where we have. Most of us have enjoyed a long period of relative prosperity, comfort and safety. For many around the world now, and many in this country in the not too distant past it would have seemed a complete pipe dream to have, for example, health care free at the point of need, universal education, a welfare safety net. We may grumble about the inadequacies of the systems we’ve got, but at least we have them to grumble about.

So difficult times are nothing new, and both our readings tonight are about people who are living in such times.

The first reading was from the book of Job, a story which leads us on an extended journey through one man’s misery. It’s not meant to be a historical account of a real person – it may well be based on a folk-tale that would have been familiar to its hearers already. But it takes that story and expands it to form a meditation on the problem of suffering – what causes it, whose fault it is, and how we can respond to it.
Paul’s letter to the Romans is written to a community living through persecution, by a man who endured repeated threats to his life, arrest and in the end almost certainly was martyred. So these ancient writings should have something relevant for our times too.

Job was a prosperous man at the start of his story. In fact he was ridiculously prosperous. As well as his ten children, he had, says the Bible, seven thousand sheep, three thousand camels, five hundred yoke of oxen, five hundred donkeys and very many servants. He was the Warren Buffett or the Bill Gates of his day; “the greatest of all the people of the east” it says. And to add to all that he was a good man, upright and blameless. This is not a story of a fat cat reaping the just reward for greed.

But all this is taken from him, supposedly at the behest of Satan who wants to prove that people only serve God because of what he gives them. We need to be careful not to place too much emphasis on the figure of Satan in this story – it is a story not a work of academic theology. The word “Satan” literally means “the accuser” – the one who tests people – rather than the horned devil of later mythology. In this folk-tale picture of the courts of heaven he is just the antagonist that gets the story going, but he’s not a central player. He doesn’t appear after this point at all.

Anyway – Satan gets his way and disaster after disaster falls on Job. Enemy tribes and natural disasters deprive him of his livestock. His children are killed when a strong wind from the desert destroys their house. Job himself is afflicted with a terrible disease – some dreadful skin condition that leaves him sitting in the ashes scraping at his sores with a potsherd. Job refuses to turn away from God though. “Shall we receive the good at the hand of God and not receive the bad?“ he asks his wife.

Frankly he seems a bit too good to be true at this point, but as the writer develops his story we begin to seem more clearly Job’s struggle to hold onto his faith. We are introduced to a group of Job’s friends – Job’s comforters - who turn out not to be a lot of comfort at all, and it is in conversation with them that we start to see into Job’s mind, and into theirs too. They fall into the classic mistake of trying to “fix it” for Job, or at least find him a neat explanation for his suffering. The trouble is that their tidy solution actually ends up making him feel worse.

For Job’s friends it all seems clear. In their spiritual economy, you get what you deserve. If Job suffers, it must be because he has done something wrong. Despite his denials, denials which fit in with what God has said about him, that he really is blameless, they go on at him about justice and repentance, urging him to turn to God, although in fact he has never turned away from him.

Job rejects their neat but wrong solution. But that doesn’t mean he lets God off the hook. If you’ve ever held yourself back from being angry with God, thinking perhaps that it isn’t really allowed, the book of Job should give you all the permission you need. Job tells it like it is. He is bitter, desperate, furious and he’s not going to hide any of that from God. And it’s clear that that is fine with God. He can cope with our anger – it is when we refuse to speak to him at all that he can do nothing for us. Job demands that God gives an account of himself. If the trite answers of his friends are wrong, if he really is innocent, why is this happening? I guess it is a question many of us have asked at some time.

And God eventually does respond - but not in the way Job expects, with a reasoned account of what has been happening. He responds with the words we have heard tonight. From the depths of a great whirlwind his voice thunders out. “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Who shut in the sea with doors? Have you commanded the morning?” Job wants an explanation he can understand, but God tells him that he’ll never find one. Our horizons are limited – all we can really see is our own narrow viewpoint. That’s part of being human. Any explanation we can get our heads around is always going to be inadequate. Job’s friends think they understand how the world works – suffering is a punishment for sin – but in their desire to find a neat answer they increase Job’s suffering rather than decreasing it. The truth, as God says to Job, is that the universe is bigger than us, bigger than we can ever comprehend, and it always will be. God himself is bigger than us and bigger than we can ever comprehend too. In fact, if God isn’t bigger than we can comprehend, then he isn’t God at all, no more than an idol, the work of our own imagination. It may not strike you as much of an answer, but it is the only answer you’ll get from this particular book of the Bible. But for Job it was enough, and for what it’s worth, I think it is one of the most valuable insights we can have as we try to deal with the reality of life with all its sufferings. Job reminds us that we need to learn to see our limitations, to be aware that what we know isn’t all there is to know, because then, paradoxically we may find that we can open our minds and hearts to all sorts of new possibilities.

Paul’s letter to the Romans is also written, as I’ve said, in a time of trouble. Many of those who heard it knew people who had already died for their faith, and many of them would die for it too. It hardly looks like triumph. But then, neither did the death of Christ, yet out of that death came resurrection. Again we hear that things are not always what they seem. Death is not the end; failure is not the last word; when things are against us it doesn’t mean that God has stopped loving us. Paul calls his hearers to look at the world with new eyes, eyes which are ready to recognise the dawn of a new day not just focus on the darkening of the old one. He calls them to hear the groaning of the world as labour pains rather than death throes. God’s at work in you, says Paul to these troubled Roman Christians. There’s a new harvest growing. Look at yourselves and see the changes he has wrought in you.

So, tonight as we think of the current crises the world faces, we hear of two sets of people living in difficult times of their own, trying to respond to them with hope not despair, with faith not trust. There are no magic answers. I don’t know what the future holds for us, or how much difficulty there will be yet to come. But God promises that he won’t forsake us. If we live with integrity and love, if we hold onto the values and the principles that lead to life rather than retreating into a self-protective huddle, then the God who is unimaginably greater than we can imagine can still bring forth a new harvest of righteousness in our lives that we can share with a world that desperately needs it.
Amen

5th Oct 08    Harvest - The Pumpkin Competition

There was once a village where lots of people liked growing things. In the centre of the village were some fine allotments on a sunny slope. At the top of the allotments were three plots next to each other owned by three sisters. Now I’d like to tell you that they all got along well, and most of the time they did, except when it came to growing pumpkins. Beans and potatoes and cabbages and lettuces and asparagus – they could grow these and share them without any argument at all, helping each other out, but when it came to growing pumpkins that was another matter.
Pumpkins just seemed to bring out their competitive streak. Every year there would be arguments about whose was the biggest and best pumpkin. Sometimes it got quite nasty and they didn’t talk to one another for weeks!

Eventually the head of the allotment society – a wise man - decided that this wouldn’t do at all. “I’ve decided,” he said to the three sisters, “that this year we will have a pumpkin growing competition. We will see who is best at growing pumpkins. I will be the judge, and I will give the prizes when I have decided who the best pumpkin grower is.

The three sisters got to work. They sowed the seeds. The pumpkin plants started to grow. They watered them. They fed them. The plants put out leaves and flowers. The tiny pumpkins started to form. They watered and fed some more. They watched anxiously as their pumpkins started to swell. As the summer wore on the competition hotted up. Which one would win the competition?

Harvest time came. The pumpkins were ripe. And it was clear to the sisters which one of them would win. The first sister’s pumpkin was huge – far bigger than the other two. The middle sister had grown a big pumpkin, a fine pumpkin, but it was nothing like as big. And the third sister's pumpkin, though still very impressive, was quite a bit smaller. The three sisters harvested their pumpkins and brought them to the head of the allotment society. “Here we are” they said. Ready for you to judge who has won. “Well” he said,” they are very fine pumpkins.” He measured them and weighed them and took some photographs. “Very fine pumpkins indeed, but actually I’m not quite ready to decide which of you is the best pumpkin grower yet. Take them away and do what you want with them – I have all the measurements, I’ve taken some photographs - , and I will think about it and let you know.” The three sisters were very puzzled. It was obvious to them who had one. But they took the pumpkins away and waited. But what were they going to do with the pumpkins now, while they waited for the official announcement?

The first sister took her huge pumpkin home in her wheelbarrow. She could hardly carry it. She knew she was going to win. It was obvious. She started to dream about what it would be like when she won. Everyone in the village would want to come and see her prize-winning pumpkin. She imagined himself showing it to them. But where would she put it? How would she display it? Surely such a marvellous pumpkin deserved a really special showcase. So she built a fine wooden case, and made a wonderful velvet pillow for the pumpkin to sit on and everyday she polished the pumpkin so that when the day came she would be ready to show it off. What she didn’t know – and you may not either – is that sometimes although a pumpkin can look fine on the outside, in the middle it can be rotting away, fermenting and producing gas, just like a fizzy drink… Inside the pumpkin the pressure had been building up for weeks. One morning she reached out to polish the pumpkin and as soon as she touched it – boom – the whole thing exploded. Slimy rotten pumpkin everywhere.

The second sister, when she heard this had happened, felt a bit smug I’m afraid. What a waste of a pumpkin, she thought. It serves her right. Pumpkins aren’t for exhibiting, they are for eating, so that’s what I’m going to do. I love pumpkin, and now I’ve got this huge one, all for me! So that evening, she cut a big slice of pumpkin and roasted it in chunks, with her dinner. Delicious. But it was a big pumpkin – there was an awful lot left. What was she going to do? She could share it – but why should she – it was her pumpkin; if other people wanted a pumpkin they could grow their own. No, she would eat it all herself. She had baked pumpkin, boiled pumpkin, fried pumpkin, pumpkin pie, pumpkin cake, curried pumpkin, stewed pumpkin, pumpkin fricassee, pumpkin pizza, pumpkin on toast, pumpkin for breakfast, for lunch, for tea. She ate pumpkin in every way you could think of, and perhaps some you’d rather not. She ate it faster and faster, ever more desperately. She didn’t want her pumpkin going rotten before she’d finished it. But let’s face it, there’s only so much pumpkin one person can eat. Soon, although she hated to admit it, she was absolutely fed up with pumpkin. She was seeing pumpkins in her dreams, chasing her along the road…
Finally there came the day when she took one look at the pumpkin flakes she was eating for breakfast – that’s like cornflakes only made out of pumpkin - and her stomach just turned over at the thought. I won’t tell you what happened next, but suffice it to say that she was very, very ill…

Meanwhile the third sister had taken her pumpkin home with her, just like the other two, and just like them, she wondered what to do with it. She knew it wasn’t the biggest, but it was still a fine pumpkin, a tasty looking pumpkin. It was far too big for her. She thought and she thought, and then she came up with an idea. The next morning the village woke up to find posters all over the place. Come to my pumpkin party! Today! All Welcome! No one was quite sure what a pumpkin party was, but it sounded interesting. So at the appointed time, they all turned up. “What’s a pumpkin party?” They all asked. “This is!” said the third sister,” and she showed them into the dining room – “help yourself!” and there was the table groaning under the weight of a big pot of pumpkin soup and a splendid pumpkin pie. “There’s plenty for everyone, “she said – you can take some home to share if you can’t eat it all. And that’s how it was. Everyone ate and drank and laughed and strangers who’d never spoken a word to one another became the best of friends.

And just at that moment the head of the allotment society came around. “Now I’m ready to give my prize “, he said, “for the very best pumpkin grower…”
And who do you think won it?

It’s a daft story- of course it is. But it’s not so daft that we can’t see ourselves in it. Often we use our possessions as ways of impressing others, like the first sister, or we hoard them all for ourselves, like the second. In the end, the Bible says, neither is the way to real happiness. The good things God has given us are ours to share – that way they aren’t just possessions – gadgets, houses, toys, pumpkins – but ways of creating love, bringing us together.

Perhaps this year, as we contemplate this fine big pumpkin at the front, which Patrick and Hilary Coffey grew for us on our very own allotments here at Seal – where I’m sure they have no arguments at all - we might like to think about what the pumpkins in our lives are. What are the things we have which we could share, but sometimes find it hard to? The things we use to impress others, the things we hoard for ourselves because we feel we are entitled to them. Patrick said to me yesterday, (and he didn’t know what this story was going to be about,) that this pumpkin, though huge, is perfectly edible. “If someone brought a big breadknife, people could take a slice home….” He said. So that’s what we’ll do after the service – slice it up so we can have our very own pumpkin party.
Amen

21st Sept 2008     St Matthew    Breathing Space Communion

Matthew 9.9-13

“Go and learn what this means,” says Jesus, “’I desire mercy, not sacrifice’”. The people he was talking to would have been very familiar with those words. They are from the book of the prophet Hosea, and they are echoed in other places in the Scriptures too. In the book of the prophet Isaiah God tells his people “I have had enough of burnt offerings …. Cease to do evil, learn to do good, seek justice rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow.”
The Pharisees would have known the words. There was nothing new here at all. But Jesus isn’t telling them to learn the words; he’s telling them to learn what the words mean, and that is a very different thing.

Jesus’ words are his response to the Pharisees reaction when he calls Matthew to be his follower. Matthew is a tax-collector, a collaborator with the Romans, forcing the Jewish people to pay taxes which mostly went to fund the Roman army. In other words he was part of the machinery which made an oppressed people pay their oppressors for oppressing them. And, since tax-collecting was essentially a franchised industry, tax-collectors like Matthew would have made money from it by adding on a top-up fee for themselves. It’s a way of life that was probably very difficult to escape from once you were in it. You’d have to convince those around you that you really had changed, your whole social network would change too. Many people would think “once a traitor, always a traitor. Once a cheat, always a cheat.”

That certainly seems to be how the Pharisees felt about it, but I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the disciples were just as shocked. What was Jesus thinking of? To be sure they were nothing special themselves – just ordinary fishermen – but at least they were loyal fishermen. Matthew was just the kind of person who would call this new movement into disrepute.

I desire mercy, not sacrifice, says God. When Jesus quotes those words here he is reminding his hearers of our human tendency to want to look down on others, to turn them into the sacrifices that bear the badness of the world for us. Even in prison there are hierarchies of wickedness, it seems. Heaven help you if it becomes known that you are in for harming a child in some way – the punishment meted out by fellow prisoners is, I’m told, far worse than that handed down by the courts. You become the sacrifice – everyone else feels better because they can project onto you all the monstrous things in the world. We scapegoat and sacrifice other groups in this way too – illegal immigrants, those struggling with mental illness or addiction, those who can’t look after their families in the ways we think they ought to – fat cat business people have come in for a lot of criticism this week, as if the global economic crisis were solely down to them. It’s easier to blame them than to look at the whole financial system and our part in it too. We turn them into sacrifices to bear the guilt we all have a part in.

But Jesus calls us to mercy, not sacrifice. That doesn’t mean pretending that sin isn’t sin or that there aren’t things that need healing in our world, but it does mean recognising that those around us are human, as we all are, that they can fail, but that they can also change – as Matthew does. It means giving them the freedom to make that change rather than weighing them down with our negative opinions of them so that they are sunk before they start. And the only way to develop that sense of mercy – to learn what the words mean – is to start with ourselves, to see the way we too need to change and heal.

In the silence today let’s think of those who are sacrificed by our society, those who bear the burden of disapproval, those who struggle to find a better way to live. Let’s ask God to help us learn what it means to be merciful, to ourselves and to one another.
Amen.

14 Sept 2008    Holy Cross Day

Most people like a good story, one that has a beginning, a middle and an end, with all three bits joined up logically. We like to hear stories, and we like to tell them as well. They help us to make some sort of pattern out of the things that happen to us. Counsellors help us to tell the story of our lives; news reporters try to make the things they report into a story so we can get our heads round them more easily. Spinning a yarn, telling a story is a fundamental part of human nature.

Today is Holy Cross Day, and it’s a day around which many stories have been spun. It’s a feast that goes back to the fourth Century when St Helena, the mother of the Emperor Constantine, allegedly “discovered” the True Cross, buried near the supposed site of Jesus’ tomb. Of course there’s no proof that either the cross or the tomb site were genuine, but people were quite content to believe in them at the time. Soon little splinters of the wood she’d found were dispersed all over the Christian world to be venerated as relics, enshrined in golden cases, and, inevitably, people began to create stories around them – because that’s what human beings like to do.

So, I’m going to tell you one of those stories. It was written down by Jacobus de Voragine in the 13th Century, and I’m pretty sure there’s not a shred of fact in it, but I’m going to tell it anyway, because, like all good tales, a story can be true even if it isn’t real. It can tell us important things, even if it didn’t happen like this at all.

This is a story that starts where every story should; at the beginning – in this case at the very beginning, in the Garden of Eden. In this garden were a man and a woman, and a tree that they were forbidden to eat from, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. We all know what happened next. They couldn’t resist the temptation and they ate, and as a result they were driven out of that paradise into a world where they had to labour and struggle.

That much is in the Bible, of course, but at this point, like all good storytellers, our medieval forebears began to improvise.

Adam, they said, eventually grew old and as he lay dying, he thought with longing of that garden he had been exiled from. So he sent his son Seth back to the gates to beg the Archangel Michael for a little bit of Eden –something to remember it by. But all Michael would give him was one seed from that tree that he’d had eaten from - probably the only thing in the garden Adam didn’t want to remember. Seth brought the seed back, and, as Adam sank into death he put the seed into his mouth. Adam died and was buried, but the seed germinated and began to grow strong and tall.

Many centuries passed as the tree grew and no one remembered any more where it had come from. Eventually the great king Solomon came to the throne. He decided to build a magnificent Temple in Jerusalem. He needed timber and his eye fell on the tree, which was just right for the purpose. So he had it felled and cut up and built a bridge with it that led into the Temple.
One day who should come to the bridge, but the Queen of Sheba, come to marvel at Solomon’s wealth and wisdom? But as she went to cross the bridge she had an awful premonition. She went straight to Solomon and told him that this timber would one day lead to the destruction of his Temple, and to something new that would stand in its place.

Solomon was horrified by this, the story says – he’d only just finished the Temple. It was his pride and joy, his monument - so he ordered that the timber be torn out and the wood buried. The timber was put deep in the ground and once again it was completely forgotten.

Time passed and it happened that people dug a pool for watering their animals just where the buried timber lay. Soon they discovered that the water in the pool had strange healing properties. The sick would crowd around the pool, waiting for their chance to get into it and be cured. For many years it was a place of healing until the day when Jesus of Nazareth came to it, and finding a man there who had no one to help him get into the water, he healed him anyway. That story’s in the Gospel but the legend adds that as soon as he had done this, the wood buried at the bottom rose to the surface – if Jesus could heal people what need was there for this pool anymore?

The wood was fished out and left to dry. And that’s how it came to be conveniently lying around when a local carpenter, who’d been ordered to make crosses for the Romans, found himself looking for a strong piece of timber for an upright. They were crucifying this Jesus of Nazareth, a troublemaker who’d claimed to be king of the Jews, or Son of God, or some such – the carpenter didn’t know what it was all about, and he didn’t care either. He was just doing his job, and this timber would do just fine. So the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, the tree that had borne the fruit that began all the trouble, in the end bore Christ, the fruit of God’s love, the fruit which healed the world.

Of course all that is complete invention – absolute taradiddle. But it’s taradiddle with a profound and important point to make. As I said at the beginning, just because a story isn’t real doesn’t mean it isn’t true, that it can’t tell us things we need to know.

What this story reminds us is that, in Christ, God comes to us in the very place where we need him most, the place where it has all gone wrong in our lives and in our world, in order to set us right. He doesn’t sit high up in his heaven looking disapprovingly on us from a distance, exhorting us to try harder, to struggle to make our own way out of the mess we’ve made. As St Paul says in our second reading, “he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross…” He comes to us at the point of our need.

That’s why those medieval storytellers wanted to link the tree of Eden and the tree of Calvary – to sort out the mess you have to go to the place where it all began, to its very heart.

It’s on the cross that Jesus shows the transforming power of God’s love, because it is only here that he can face the destructive force of evil, the evil of an oppressive Roman state, the evil which treats people as rubbish, outcasts. And he shows that no amount of evil can destroy the love of God as he comes through into the new life of the resurrection. Out of the mess comes the salvation. Out of the disease comes the remedy. It is only by dying, only on the cross, that we can see this.

In our Gospel reading, John uses the same sort of parallelism. He recalls the story of the people of Israel in the wilderness that we heard in our first reading today. They had been bitten by poisonous snakes, and Moses was told that the only way to cure them was to make an image of a snake and put it on a pole – those who looked at the snake, the source of the trouble, would be healed. As we look at the cross, and Jesus lifted up on it, we see both the problem of evil – the horror of what human beings are capable of doing to one another - and its remedy too - the love which faces that evil for the sake of others.

But what’s all that got to do with us? What difference does it make to the way we live our lives? One of the things I have learned in my ministry is that human life is full of mess. Not all the time; there’s plenty that’s good too. But whether we look outside at our society, or inside at ourselves we find that there are many dark corners, places where we’d rather not go, painful memories, failures, things we are ashamed of or regret – our own crosses, places where everything seems to be are dead or dying. And many people spend huge amounts of energy trying to avoid those places. Often they will try to use faith as a cover-up, a bolt-on, a distraction from the problems. They try to build a fence between faith and life, as if they could hide these things from God – surely he wouldn’t want to go there either. And as a result nothing ever really changes for them. The shocking message of the cross, though, is that God not only can go into those dark places and live to tell the tale, but that these are the very places where he needs to be and wants to be, the places where we need him to be too.

Our medieval forebears probably seem very strange to us, going to all that trouble to venerate what were probably completely ordinary little bits of wood, but perhaps they have something to teach us. As they contemplated those precious splinters they were reminded that the real “true crosses” were the ones in their own lives - the places of pain and failure in themselves and their world. They were reminded too that these were the places to which Christ longed to come, just as he had to the Cross of Calvary, to restore and heal. I have no relics to offer you today – just the strange story they told – but I hope it will help us to see where the true cross is for us, the place where we most need God’s presence, and that we will let God come to us there, so that his love can transform us too.
Amen

7 September 2008    Trinity 16 Sermon by Kevin Bright
Ezekiel 33.7-11, Romans 13.8-14 & Matthew 18.15-20

All three of our readings today talk of problems with our behaviour; something most adults largely consider doesn’t apply to them but to younger members of our communities. I suspect that it is very rare for any of us to be challenged about our behaviour in this very liberal society we live in, unless it borders on the criminal.

However this doesn’t mean that we aren’t aware that we are doing things wrong, things we wouldn’t choose to share with our children for example. Paul, in his letter to the Romans is effectively saying, look you know how to behave, you know what is wrong adultery, murder, stealing and all the other things so now is the time to get on with living your lives in a way which is an example to others.

He tells us to not get distracted from the important work of Christ by over indulging or falling into bad ways, don’t waste time being jealous of your neighbours house extension, new kitchen or convertible car, don’t waste time quarrelling, trying to discredit others or put them in a bad light but focus on getting to know your neighbour as a person.

If we are to love our neighbour it will involve getting to know something about them whether they are a group of disadvantaged people who live on the other side of the planet that we want to help or whether they literally live next door. Clearly this is something that people in this church have acted upon long before this sermon, the outcome of which is a coming together for the village fete. We have to ask ourselves would we like to be loved abstractly as if we had no personal qualities, weaknesses or flaws.

Paul doesn’t suggest this is something to get around to one day but a matter of extreme urgency. Could all this imply that there never has been a perfect Christian community and that this stuff has to be addressed by every generation of Christians? Now there’s food for thought.

One of the pleasures of children growing up is that they can offer you advice; it’s no longer a one way street. Advice might include ‘I thought drinking too much wine wasn’t good for you or that sign said 40 mph and you’re doing nearly 50!’ It’s uncomfortable isn’t it. Who likes being told off and knowing they are in the wrong?

Another pleasure can be to have advice reinforced in writing, so that you can study it over and over. In my case when I got one of these I also asked for a photograph of my offence and the Metropolitan Police seemed only too pleased to oblige!

I though I’d shown great restraint by driving along a near empty dual carriageway at only 36 miles per hour. I wasn’t happy to have it pointed out to me that I had done wrong and my reaction was to become defensive. Why don’t the police spend their time focussing on the catalogue of crime in Woolwich, near to where I committed my speeding offence? If it had been a traffic cop he would have seen that I was driving safely and never given me a ticket. I was only 6 mph over the speed limit this was pathetic.

The journalist Piers Morgan also had the same experience of being prosecuted for doing 36 mph in a 30 limit and was offered the opportunity of attending a 3 hour lecture on rehabilitation instead of 3 points on his licence. He found this a very painful 3 hours enduring comments from his fellow offenders such as ‘Britain’s got no driving talent’. He ridiculed the man offering the corrective lecture saying he was like the Ricky Jervais character ‘David Brent’ and fumed at the multiple choice questions he had to complete such as ‘ keeping to the speed limit in the next year would be wise, a) I strongly agree, b) I strongly disagree or c) I don’t know.’ After writing an article ridiculing the system and the man pointing out the truth to him he concludes that next time he going to take the points on his license.

And there you have it, two grown up self righteous men who don’t like having the fact that they have done wrong pointed out to them. Two men who rather than accept they are in the wrong look for excuses and try to deflect away from the fact that they knew the rules and got caught breaking them. I was wrong and so is Piers Morgan.

The prophet Ezekiel is inspired by God to tell us we must warn the wicked and Jesus tells us to point out the fault when a member of the church sins against us.

Taking into account what we have heard so far it seems we would need to do so after careful thought and prayer as what we point out will almost certainly not be welcomed. We also need to think about how we each react to being told uncomfortable truths be they about our lifestyle, our affect on the planet or our need of Christ.

At its most extreme the backlash of criticism and warning can lead to violence, terror and oppression. But I would have thought the most common reaction is a fudging of the issues a failure to really face up and deal with what is put to us. We avoid the people, we pretend it doesn’t exist or we think we can forget about our problems by moving on to a new job, a new home, a new church or splinter group within a church where we can avoid the issues by sitting with likeminded people. Many dream of a life in a new country only to find the same problems rise to the surface after they have lived there for a period of time.

I can really relate to Christ’s advice to discuss a problem initially ‘just between the two of you.’ Shouting across an office at someone in front of their colleagues is humiliating to the recipient and often also confrontational. On an international scale open criticism of other countries or their leaders has the same effect. Whilst it may be necessary to immediately confront in case of an emergency the chances of a successful resolution to a problem are greatly increased where this doesn’t involve humiliation. If we don’t feel this is true we have to question our motives for acting. Are we on an ego trip, do we want to demonstrate how powerful and important we are, is it really all about crushing someone or getting our own back rather than achieving what is best for our community?

Jesus tells us that if we are not listened to when we point out a fault we should go back with one or two others, but there is also a duty on us to listen and reflect as well. In doing this we would be made to explain to the others why we felt the person was at fault. Don’t you sometimes find that when you discuss someone else’s faults with another they often force you to consider the facts again or introduce new thoughts on the subject which you may not have considered? They may even remind us that you have done something similar in the past, resulting in a more humble approach to the criticism we offer.

I can’t believe that Jesus meant us to intimidate or bully a person we are trying to correct by turning up with others rather that the evidence is checked and considered by others before confronting the person again. Quite possibly the outcome is a compromise resulting from both sides further reflection on the matter.

Sadly we all know that attempts at conflict resolution can sometimes inflame the problem. Jesus tells us that the next stage should be to consider the problem within the wider church and if the person still cannot see reason we are free to treat them as a tax collector or pagan, perhaps a modern equivalent might be, (well still a tax collector, only joking) more likely an extortionist and a Muslim fundamentalist.

We’ve reached the point where we’ve given our offender every opportunity to be reconciled; we’ve been very fair and now is the time for casting them out with righteous indignation isn’t it? Is this what the bible tells us?

Those tempted to follow this route would find they had gone full circle and should themselves face correction from their fellow Christians who know how Christ treats outcasts in society.

The very author of today’s gospel is Levi, better known as Matthew, formerly a tax collector who Christ called to change his ways and follow him. Then there’s the little man who collected big taxes Zacheus who Christ eats with, outraging the Pharisees.
One of the clearest features of the life and teachings of Jesus is the way that he included people that everybody else left out. Jesus included criminals (the thief on the cross), and people who were outcast (Samaritans, Gentiles, the poor, the sick, lepers, women, and the list goes on).
It seems that when we feel we have exhausted routes to reconciliation Christ encourages us to never give up hope, to leave the door open to those shunned by society. This is certainly not easy. If we look at reconciliation in South Africa or Northern Ireland peace has come at great cost to many and this can also be true in our communities and families.
To me the messages from today are about Christianity making a real difference by having the courage to act when we know something is wrong but also using our faith to persevere in trying to achieve the reconciliation that God wants between us, something he knows first hand can come at a great cost.
Amen

August 31st 2008    Trinity 15

Jeremiah 15.15-21, Matt 16.21-28

A year or so back the TV presenter Tony Robinson did a series on the worst jobs in history, trying to get a flavour of what it might have been like to do some of the jobs our ancestors did. How about being a leech collector, for example, stamping about in swamps until the leeches attached themselves to your legs? All you’ve got to do then is pull them off and put them in a jar ready for the doctors to use…wonderful!
Or perhaps you’d rather be a medieval royal falconer? That sounds fine, very grand, very fascinating, looking after magnificent birds of prey belonging to the king - until you discover that if you happen to lose one of them, the penalty is to have an equivalent weight of flesh to the bird you’ve lost cut off your body. It would concentrate your mind on your job!

I can sense that I’m probably not being very successful in selling you these new career ideas, am I?

There was one job, though, which Tony Robinson didn’t try, but which I think he would have found equally unpleasant, if our first reading is anything to go by, and that is the job of an Old Testament prophet. Jeremiah certainly doesn’t seem to be enjoying it. He feels as if the whole world is against him. He’s getting it in the neck from all and sundry. He’s even starting to wonder whether God is against him too, despite the fact that he is only doing what God himself has asked him to. “Why is my pain unceasing, my wound incurable, refusing to be healed? Truly you are to me like a deceitful brook, like waters that fail.” He’s not having fun.

It’s tempting to write off Jeremiah as one of those people who are never happy unless they are miserable, but I don’t think that’s fair to him. He’d never wanted to be a prophet in the first place and when we discover what he was up against we can see why.
The message God gave him to proclaim was a message no one would have wanted to hear. It was a challenging message, warning his nation that it was about to be overthrown and destroyed, telling people that they needed to turn to God for help, now, before it was too late. It was the 6th Century BC, and at that time the Babylonian Empire ruled across much of the Middle East. The tiny nation of Judah, the area around Jerusalem where Jeremiah lived, hadn’t been conquered – yet – but anyone with any sense could see that Babylon had it in its sights.

So what were the people of Judah doing about this threat? Not a lot. They were sleepwalking towards destruction, convinced that because they were God’s chosen people, because he’d rescued them from Egypt, they’d be fine. They were invincible in their own eyes. No matter what they did God would protect them. Nothing bad could happen to them. It didn’t matter if they ignored God, if they worshipped idols, if they disregarded the laws he’d given them, if they oppressed the poor, neglected the vulnerable. Good old God – he’d come through for them in the end and everything would be fine and dandy.

So when Jeremiah starts telling them to wake up, to sort themselves out, well, you can just imagine the response. They ignore him. And when they can’t ignore him any more they arrest him, they persecute him, they even throw him into a dry well to die – anything to shut him up. Who can blame him for complaining so bitterly?

The problem was that Jeremiah’s vision of the future was spot on. Not much later Jerusalem was destroyed, the Temple flattened and the cream of the people carried off into captivity in Babylon. Jeremiah couldn’t even comfort himself with the smug satisfaction of having been proved right because this was his own nation, his own people, and he suffered just as much as they did when it fell. It wasn’t until Jerusalem lay in ruins, when the people were far away in Babylon, that they started to reflect on Jeremiah’s prophecies, and to hear not only that unwelcome challenge he had set before them, but also the message of hope within the challenge. It was because God loved them that he had been so desperate that they should change. God would stick with them, but if they treated him simply as a sort of lucky mascot – paying lip service to him, but not actually living as he told them – then his vision for them of a society of compassion and justice could never come to fruition because they wouldn’t let him help them bring it about.
Their illusion of invincibility had blinded them to the reality not only of the threat against them, but also of the blessings God wanted to give them. They preferred to believe that “it can’t happen to us”; it was only when it did happen to them that they saw how they had lied to themselves, and by that time, tragically, it was too late.

In today’s Gospel reading we meet someone who is also having a problem facing reality. This time it is Peter who is saying “It can’t happen, it mustn’t happen...” Jesus has been explaining that he must go to Jerusalem where he will be arrested, tried and executed. It’s not that he has some spooky ability to tell the future, just that it is obvious that if you tangle with the authorities, as he is doing, you are heading for trouble and a sticky end.

But Peter won’t have it. Somehow he has convinced himself that Jesus can’t die. He’s the Messiah. What’s the point of that if God won’t protect you from trouble? God can’t let this happen. It was the same thinking that had bedevilled the ancient Judeans of Jeremiah’s time. If God is with you, surely that means you must be immune from suffering and failure, no matter how you act yourself?

Peter hadn’t realised that it was precisely because Jesus was God’s Messiah that trouble and death were always going to be part of the package. Jesus’ calling was to stand up against the forces of oppression, and the forces of oppression were hardly going to take kindly to that. The only way he could have avoided suffering was to walk away from the job. You can’t have your cake and eat it – either he had to take what came with the task or not do it at all. Just like the ancient Judeans, Peter had to learn to face the reality of what was going to happen to his friend, to give up his illusions, his wishful thinking, and accept the world as it really was.

Most of us, thank God, don’t face the sort of cataclysms and challenges we’ve heard about in our readings today, but that doesn’t mean we are any better at facing reality when life does get tough. I suspect we are equally prone to living in a fantasy world in which everything is as we wish it to be, or at least it could be if only everyone else would fall in with our plans.

It’s often the small things that catch us out, it seems to me. Like thinking that we all ought to be able to drive where we want when we want, and find somewhere to park at the end of the journey. The reality is that there is a limited amount of space for driving and parking, but that doesn’t stop people acting as if they are entitled to absolute freedom of movement. Or we ignore some health problem or disability that is beginning to trouble us – it can’t happen to us, it mustn’t happen to us, so it isn’t happening to us. We miss out on the help we need, and we often make our lives and the lives of those who care for us more painful and difficult as a result. We just can’t bear to admit that we have a problem. We pretend the resources of our planet are unlimited, or that we can buy cheap goods without someone somewhere paying the price for that. We feel we ought to have dream holidays, dream marriages, dream jobs, dream homes – but such things are exactly that, a dream. Nothing is perfect, nor can it be. Even if we work as hard as we can, try as hard as we can, there are always things that will be beyond our control. Compromise is inevitable. In the end we can’t have all we want, do all we want. We have to make choices, and those choices will not always be easy ones.

Jesus warns his disciples that if they want to follow him they will find themselves having to deny themselves and take up their cross. I don’t think he means we should all wear hair shirts or seek out hardships deliberately. In the context of this passage I think what he is saying is that we need to drop our illusions, stop living in our own little dream worlds, and accept that living as children of God, sharing in that work of healing and restoration, is bound to involve cost and sacrifice in a world which is not perfect. Peter’s refusal even to consider that Jesus might die shows how ego-centric his thinking is. He doesn’t want it to happen so he doesn’t see why it should happen, so it can’t happen. But the truth is that it will happen and, as Jesus says, there is some sense in which it must happen if he is to do what he came to do.

So there’s a challenge for us in today’s readings. What are the illusions we cling to? How prepared are we to see the world as it really is, ourselves as we really are, others as they really are rather than as we would wish them to be. Reality is sometimes unattractive, but it is what is real, what is there. Our refusal to acknowledge it won’t drive it away. Whether it is the urgent shared reality of the struggle to live together on a crowded planet, or the more personal realities of relationships that need attention, work that needs doing, troubles that must be faced, we need to accept that what is, is. Unless we do that we can’t hope to deal with the issues that confront us, and more than that we will miss the blessings that are hidden within the pain, the hope, healing and new life God wants to bring us as we do what needs to be done, and the knowledge that whatever we face, God faces it with us.
Amen

August 24 2008     Trinity 14

Romans 12.1-8, Matthew 16.13-20
“You are Peter and on this rock I will build my church”.

A few years ago I went to Rome for a holiday with Philip. We saw all sorts of fascinating places – Philip had lived there for some years, so he knew the nooks and crannies the guide books don’t tell you about. But you can’t go to Rome without visiting the Vatican, so that had to be on the itinerary too. It’s been a focal point for western Christianity for almost two millennia. Whether you’re Catholic or Protestant, love it or loathe it, you can’t ignore it. And if the Vatican is at the heart of the western Church, then at the heart of the Vatican is the great basilica of St Peter’s. And at the heart of the basilica, under the high altar, is, so they say, St Peter himself, or his bones at any rate. Tradition has it that he was martyred in Rome and buried in this spot. Eventually a church was built over the burial site, which grew into the vast basilica we see today. So there’s a sense in which quite literally, the church has been built on Peter. He’s right there in the foundations, with all that heavy marble weighing down on him. As you can tell, it’s not my cup of tea architecturally, but there can be no doubt of the message it proclaims. St Peter matters. Of course its not really meant as a literal picture of Jesus’ words, but it does reinforce the lesson that in some sense, we all rest on Peter, the rock.
But why? What is there about this man which is so rocklike?

It’s not obvious. When we meet him in the Gospels as often as not he is getting it wrong – sometimes spectacularly so. It’s Peter who jumps out of the boat and attempts to walk on the water, with predictably soggy results. Next week we’ll hear the story of Peter trying to stop Jesus heading for Jerusalem because he can’t bear to think of him dying. It is Peter who louses things up at the Transfiguration. There he is with James and John, given the privilege of witnessing a vision of Jesus shining with glory, with Moses on one side and Elijah on the other. But he can’t just stand there and watch – he has to put his big foot in it, offering to put together a couple of sheds so they have somewhere to stay the night. In the midst of this transcendent, beautiful, mysterious moment all he can think of is getting down to Homebase before it closes …
And then, of course, Peter denies even knowing Jesus when Jesus is arrested. Some rock he turns out to be!

If what you mean by a rock is a safe pair of hands to entrust a body of theological doctrine to, someone who’ll bring a sharp and intelligent mind to bear on matters of faith, who’ll lead others with tact and diplomacy then Peter is not the person you want for the job.   He is a great character, but there are many other disciples who seem much better qualified. I am reminded of that old military report on a trainee officer. “His men would follow him anywhere, but only out of curiosity.”

So why is Peter chosen? What is it which Jesus and the early church saw in him that made them call him the rock and want to build on him? What are the qualities that he brings to the leadership of this new movement which Jesus so much wants to point us to?

The clues, I think, are right there in Peter’s own reaction to Christ in today’s Gospel reading. It is a pivotal point in Jesus’ ministry. His fame has grown, but so has the opposition against him, and Jesus wants to know what his closest followers think.

“Who do people say the Son of Man is?” he asks. It’s a very vague question. Which people does he mean? His friends? His enemies? The crowd? And what does he mean by the “Son of Man”? It’s a title that was sometimes used for the longed-for Messiah, but more often it was simply a roundabout way of referring to yourself – this mere mortal, muggins, I. So, did Jesus want to know what they thought about the Messiah or about him, or did he think that the two were the same? He didn’t say, and they didn’t know, so they gave him an answer as vague as the question. “Some say John the Baptist, or Elijah, Jeremiah, one of those old prophets…”
“Ok,” Says Jesus, “enough beating about the bush – let’s be straight about this now – that’s what “people” say, but what about you, and what about me - who do YOU say that I am?”

And, quick as a flash, back comes Peter with his answer. “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God…” There’s no vagueness in his answer, and it tells me two very important things about Peter, two things which shed light on why this unlikely person became so important to the church.

The first thing is that Peter has his eyes on the here and now. He doesn’t talk about John the Baptist, Elijah, Jeremiah. He’s not looking for the return of some dead prophet from the past or the restoration of a bygone golden age. What he can see is that right here in front of him, in the form of this carpenter from Nazareth – not an obvious choice either - God is present and bringing to birth something astonishing and new. Everyone else – those unspecified “people” - might expect God to appear and to act in some familiar way, but Peter doesn’t. He affirms Jesus as the Son of the LIVING God, a God who is newly present in every generation not frozen in time or form in a past age.

That mattered for the early Christians, because whether they liked it or not, their lives were full of change. Their understanding of their religion, of their God, of themselves, of each other, was completely turned upside down in the early years of the church. They had to cope with being expelled from the synagogues and persecuted by Jewish and Roman leaders. They lost friends, families, livelihoods, security, and in their place all they had was an extraordinary rag-bag of fellow travellers in faith to support them. Paul talks about the body of Christ in our first reading today and how its different parts must learn to work together. It was a hard lesson though, because that body was made up of such a strange assortment of limbs. Slave and free, men and women, all races and backgrounds. This was a body with Jewish arms and Gentile legs, so to speak, and who knows where the torso had come from? No wonder they struggled. No wonder we still do sometimes. A leader whose ideas were set in stone, who could only imagine God acting in ways he had acted before, who was hamstrung by the past, would be no good at all. Instead the church needed someone like Peter, who had his eyes open for God at work in new ways, making a new creation.

And that brings me to the second important thing I think this story reveals about Peter. To be able to acclaim Jesus as Messiah was a huge and courageous leap of faith. How was Peter able to take that leap? It wasn’t, with all due respect to him, because he had studied the Scriptures in detail and proved to his intellectual satisfaction that the prophecies all pointed to Jesus – in fact I doubt whether he could explain a tenth of what was going on if his life depended on it. It was because he knew and trusted this man. He had lived with him, travelled with him, gone through thick and thin, success and failure with him, known him in his public and private moments. He knew that Jesus’ love wasn’t just put on when he went out to meet the crowds, but was something which pervaded all his words and actions, that his closeness to his Father wasn’t a fleeting thing, but a daily reality. Peter knew Jesus. He might not have always understood what he said and did, but he knew the person who was saying it, and that was enough. In John’s Gospel, when the crowd starts drifting away from Jesus, scared off by the sheer strangeness of what he seems to be saying, it is Peter who announces that he is staying. “Who else can I go to, Lord? You have the words of eternal life.”

Peter sticks around. He sticks around when he gets it right and he sticks around when he gets it wrong. He sticks around when he understands and when he doesn’t. The message to us is that if we want a faith that is resilient enough to withstand the changes and chances of life we need to stick around too, to give time to things like reading the Bible, meeting with others, praying, looking for Christ in our daily lives, serving him in others. There is no short cut, no magic pill, no way of developing that deep sense of trust without putting in the legwork, or perhaps it’s the soul-work, of living day by day in the light of Christ. Putting in that soul work won’t make the questions go away, of course – there is always more to learn and understand – but what I have observed in those who live like this is that eventually the questions don’t disturb them so much. Like Peter, they don’t need to know everything to know the really vital thing, the life-giving, life-transforming love of God at work in them.

So Simon the fisherman is declared by Jesus to be Peter, the rock. But I am sure that Jesus was aware of the paradox – perhaps the irony – in this nickname he gives him. Calling him a rock makes it sound as if he ought to be inflexible, unchanging, solid, but actually he is the opposite, open to all sorts of new possibilities. It’s a different sort of rocklikeness altogether. But this, in the end is what makes him the perfect foundation, just what the church needs as it grows through the changes and chances of life. And it’s just what we need too as we try to open our eyes to see the living God in our midst today.

Amen

August 17 2008     Trinity 13 Breathing Space Communion

Matt. 15.21-28

“Jesus went away to the district of Tyre and Sidon”

The Gospels are full of Jesus coming and going; he always seems to be on the move. So perhaps we don’t think twice about this statement at the beginning of our Gospel reading. But we ought to think twice about it, because it is highly significant, and quite surprising, because Tyre and Sidon are not Israelite towns. They were originally in the land of the Philistines, arch-enemies of Israel. In Jesus’ day they were in Roman Syria. Now they are Lebanese. In other words these were foreign towns, full of foreigners – and a particularly rum lot of foreigners at that. Tyre and Sidon were sea ports, with the kind reputation for drunkenness and debauchery that sea ports often seem to have. Earlier in Matthew’s Gospel Jesus denounces those who don’t listen to him by saying that even Tyre and Sidon will come off better on Judgement Day than they will – EVEN Tyre and Sidon - the implication is that Tyre and Sidon are just about as bad as you can get.

So, the question is obvious – what is Jesus doing there? It’s not the kind of place you’d go for an “away from it all” break – especially if you are a good Jew. This is a place which is guaranteed to confront you with all sorts of challenges – people worshipping other gods, people living and behaving in ways that would have seemed shocking to Jew, and to a lot of other people too.

This trip of Jesus’ seems to be a deliberate attempt to put himself in a situation in which he and the disciples will feel uncomfortable, out of their element, challenged in ways they couldn’t have been at home. And that, of course, is exactly what happens. A pagan Canaanite woman comes to them, having heard that Jesus is a healer. Her daughter is ill and she is desperate. She probably hasn’t got a clue about the Jewish religion, maybe doesn’t know much about who Jesus is or how he fits into the religious landscape. She just believes he can help, and that’s all that matters. Although it seems clear to her, though, it obviously isn’t to Jesus and the disciples. As far as they are concerned she is nothing to do with them. “Wrong religion, wrong nationality – go and find someone more like you to help you…” She just seems too foreign for them, as if somehow healing won’t work if it’s done in a foreign language or offered to someone with a different understanding of the world. It is only her persistence which convinces them otherwise.
Some people will try to say that Jesus was just testing her faith when he refused to help, but I think that makes him a monster. It seems to me far more likely that Matthew intends us to read this story just as it appears, as an account of Jesus learning and growing. It shows Jesus’ understanding of himself, his mission and his Father’s will developing – he’s human, like us, and doesn’t know everything.

What is significant though is that he seems deliberately to have put himself in a situation where he knew he would not feel at ease, where he knew he would not be on home ground. He didn’t know what would happen or how he would react there, but he knew that it would be challenging that there was a possibility that he would get it wrong, as he seems to do here, before he got it right. He might not know what he needs to learn, but he knows that he needs to learn, and that you can’t do that by sticking with what you know.

The story deserves its place in the Gospels because he calls us to have the same kind of courage and willingness to go beyond our comfort zone as he goes beyond his. The lesson he learns in Tyre and Sidon is vital to him, and it’s vital to us too. God really is at work in all people, that he speaks every language as his native language, every nook and cranny of the world is home to him. It is the Canaanite woman who has the real faith in this story, the faith to look for God’s help from someone who must have seemed as alien to her as she did to him and who seems decidedly unhelpful at first. She can see that God is at work through Jesus; he and the disciples take a lot longer to recognise that God is also at work through her, to call them to the changes they need to make.

The earth is the Lord’s and everything in it. We say it, but do we believe it, or do we think that really God is really most at home in our own familiar corner of the world, working in the ways we have always expected him to? Where are our Tyres and Sidons today – the strange places where we feel like a fish out of water? Who is our “Canaanite woman”, the person who calls us out of the comfortable familiar territory to discover the unimaginable wideness of God’s love.

Amen

August 10th 2008     Trinity 12

1 Kings 19.9-18, Romans10.5-15, Matthew 14.22-33

“Immediately after feeding the crowd with the five loaves and two fish, Jesus made the disciples get into the boat and go on ahead to the other side…”

I’ve been reading the Bible for many years now – as you might expect - and I like to think it is familiar territory, but I still often find things in it that surprise me, things I’ve never noticed before. There’s a word in the opening verse of today’s Gospel reading which had that effect on me this week.

Jesus MADE the disciples get into the boat…It’s that word “made” that caused me to sit up and take notice. Jesus MADE the disciples get into the boat.

It jars somehow, to think of Jesus compelling people to do something which they evidently don’t want to do. And it is puzzling as well. What is going on here?

The story doesn’t tell us why the disciples are so reluctant to set out. Perhaps they can see that a storm is brewing. Perhaps they just don’t want to end up on the other side of the lake without Jesus – if they’ve got the boat how will he get there? Perhaps they think he is trying to send them away for their own protection, away from some trouble he faces, as if they are children.
We don’t know what the problem is, but what is clear is that this is a journey they don’t want to make. They think it’s a bad idea, and when the wind and waves get up I’ve no doubt they feel they have been proved right. But by then it is too late. They are far from shore and they can’t turn back.

I guess that many of us will be able to identify with that feeling. Most of us at some time or other will find ourselves having to take journeys we’d rather avoid, or face challenges we’d rather duck. We may have misgivings, suspecting that we’re biting off more than we can chew, but still, somehow we find we have to go ahead. There are some things you just have to do. But when the task we have taken on turns out to be far harder than we thought, as is often the case, we feel, like the disciples, all at sea, out of our depth, “much further out than we thought, and not waving but drowning” as Stevie Smith’s poem puts it. I can well imagine that there are times when Archbishop Rowan Williams has felt like this recently – who’d want his job? But there are many also who don’t make the headlines who face daily struggles to provide for their families, to honour their commitments to others and to live with integrity, honesty and love.

In our Old Testament reading today Elijah is going through the same sort of experience. He’s just had a showdown with the prophets of the god Baal, the god of the evil queen Jezebel. Elijah has won the contest – or rather his God has won it – but he soon realises that he is actually in more trouble now than he was before he started. Jezebel isn’t one to take defeat lying down. She lets it be known that she wants Elijah dead and he has to run for his life. We find him out in the wilderness, cowering in a cave on Mount Horeb.
“What’s the point?” he says to God. “I tried to follow you. I did everything I should, and look what has happened! I am all alone and everything I’ve tried to do has come to nothing!”

Two stories, then, which although they come from long ago and far away speak of experiences we can all recognise.

But there is hope in these stories as well as familiarity, and some advice for coping with times like these. In particular there are two messages which seem to me to be worth hanging onto when the storms hit.

The first is that running into stormy water isn’t necessarily a sign that something has gone wrong – that we have failed, that others have failed, that God has failed. Why did the disciples have to cross the lake? It’s the same as that old question about the chicken crossing the road. To get to the other side. If we read on in the Gospel we find that when they do get to land there is a crowd of hurting, lost, helpless people, waiting for someone to come to their aid, waiting for Jesus and for the disciples. Of course this journey is hard, but it is a journey that each of those needy people will consider was worth making.

As Paul says, quoting the Prophet Isaiah in our second reading, “how beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news”, or, in this case the hands that are blistered and bleeding from pulling on the oars to bring the message of hope they so desperately need to them through the storm.

This journey wasn’t a pleasure trip. It certainly wasn’t just a test, set by Jesus to see how much faith the disciples could muster. I don’t believe in a God who imposes pointless ordeals on us to try to catch us out – if God is like that then he’s a monster. I added those extra verses to our Gospel reading this morning because it seemed to me that we need to hear them for this story to make sense.
Jesus didn’t send the disciples out into a storm out of some perverse sense that it would do them good to suffer. He did it because this was a journey that needed to be made.

The people for whom Matthew wrote this Gospel – the early church – knew all about challenges like that. They were persecuted by the Romans for following Jesus. Many of them would die for their faith in painful and humiliating ways. It’s no accident that when Matthew describes this little boat as being “battered” by the storm, he uses a word which literally means “tortured”, because that was what was happening to his readers and those around them.

Sticking to the pathway of love they had chosen was tough, and it must have often felt like a completely stupid thing to do – why not just give in and go back to the old ways and an easy life? But they couldn’t shake the conviction that this actually was the right way, this way that Jesus had set them on. In a sense this story, of Jesus walking on the water, is not so much an account of a miracle from the time of Christ’s earthly ministry as it is an account of what seems to me to be an even more miraculous discovery made by those early Christians as they faced torture and death. Whether Jesus had ever really walked on the surface of the Sea of Galilee we’ll never know, but they certainly believed that he walked beside them on the chaotic waters of the storms they faced. It was that experience which Matthew was really reminding them of in this extraordinary tale.

And that brings me onto the second message which this story, and that of Elijah, proclaims. No matter how far out at sea you are, the Bible says, and how close to drowning, no matter how far away God feels, you cannot fall out of his sight, out of his mind, out of his hands. Jesus’ words to the disciples as he walks towards them over the water are simply “Take heart, it is I; do not be afraid”. He is here, even in this place which was surely the last place they would expect him. If he can come to them here, he can come to them anywhere.

And his presence is enough for them, though the waves are still as mountainous, the wind is still as fierce. The storm doesn’t die away until he and Peter are in the boat, and it’s not clear whether that was Jesus’ work in any case, or whether the storm had simply blown its course. It almost seems like an afterthought - and I think that is deliberate. It’s not the storm on the lake that matters; it’s the storms in the disciples’ hearts that really need stilling. As Peter leaps out of the boat to walk on the water too, it takes him quite a while even to notice those mountainous seas, despite the fact that he has been hauling the boat through them, exhausted and desperate for hours and hours.

For Elijah too, it isn’t in some great demonstration of power – an earthquake, wind or fire, that God speaks most clearly. It is somehow, mysteriously, in the depths of a sheer silence - something which can’t outwardly change anything at all - that Elijah becomes aware of God’s presence, aware that God is God, in charge no matter what is happening on the surface.

Life is full of storms. There’s no avoiding them, especially if you want to live with integrity, to bring hope and healing to others, to challenge injustice. Jesus couldn’t avoid trouble; he was overwhelmed on the cross by the waters of death. We can expect trouble too if we follow him and seek his kingdom of justice and peace in our own lives. But just as those waters of death weren’t the end of the story for Jesus, they aren’t the end of the story for us either. Beneath the surface of the events that so trouble us is a love that is deeper and stronger still, which no storm can destroy, and no wind sweep away. Look again and listen again, say these tales; beyond the earthquake, beyond the fire, beyond the wind, beyond the waves there is one who is always beside you on the waters of chaos to lead you into his peace.
Amen

July 13th 2008    Trinity 8

“A sower went out to sow” said Jesus. “Ah, good,” said the crowd. “Now this is going to be a story we understand – nothing too mystical or high-fallutin’. We all know about sowing seeds.”
And of course they did; there can hardly have been anyone there who wouldn’t have experience of growing things.
In Jesus’ day, growing your own wasn’t a hobby, a lifestyle choice. It would have been essential for all but the most wealthy to grow at least some food to provide for their families.

So when Jesus launched into a story about a sower he was talking to people who were all likely to be knowledgeable about this sort of thing. He was speaking their language…

“A sower went out to sow…” he said, and they wondered what would come next. Perhaps there would be some horticultural wisdom here? “Well” says Jesus, “some of the seed fell on the path.” “Yes,” thinks the crowd, “it always does that – it’s irritating, but you’re bound to waste some that way. Obviously it won’t grow, but that’s life – one for the rook, one for the crow, one to rot and one to grow – that’s the rule for seeds. Still the path is narrow, so not too much is lost!”

“And then,” continued Jesus, “some seed fell on rocky ground where it started well, but when the sun came out it just didn’t have enough soil, and it shrivelled up and died.” The crowd started to look doubtful about this sower. “Didn’t he know his fields? Hadn’t he worked this ground enough to realise where the bedrock was close to the surface? You can’t help throwing some seed on the path, but it seems a bit wasteful to chuck it about on the rocks – he can’t have been very good at this farming lark…”

“And some seed, “Jesus went on “fell among thorns…”
“Oh, come on!” said the crowd, “that’s ridiculous. Who’d sow seed in amongst the weeds?”
Now you might say, “perhaps the sower didn’t realise that the soil was weedy, and the thorns only appeared after he had sowed the seed,” except that the word Jesus uses for the thorns makes it clear this couldn’t have been so. These thorns, according to the text, are acanthus. You might have acanthus in your garden – its common name is Bear’s Britches and it’s sold as an architectural plant. In other words it is huge. In the Middle East it would have been evergreen too, there all year – you couldn’t have missed it. Even if the seed made it to the ground through these great leathery leaves, they’d have no chance of growing down there in the dark.

Of course some seed does end up falling on good ground in the story, but by this stage the crowd probably feels it is more by luck than judgement. This sower is not “Gardener of the year”. There’ll be no RHS gold medal for him. The only redeeming factor is that the seed that falls on the good ground thrives, and despite the apparent ineptitude of the farmer, there is, in fact, a good harvest, indeed a bumper harvest – some of these plants yield a hundred seeds for the one that was sown.

But that doesn’t change the fact that the crowd would probably not have thought very highly of this sower. He really doesn’t seem to know what he is doing, casting seed indiscriminately all over the place like this – what a waste!

What kind of sower throws three quarters of the seed into places where it almost certainly won’t grow?

There are two possible answers to that question.
The first is - a very, very foolish sower indeed.
The second is - a sower who has an unlimited supply of seed and an unlimited amount of time and patience to sow it in.

A sower of the second variety can chuck the seed around as freely as he likes, even into the most unlikely soil. He’s got nothing to lose and everything to gain by it. It might look as if he is sowing in improbable places, but who knows? Perhaps one or two odd seeds might find a way to grow along the broken edges of the path, or in some little pocket of deeper soil among the rocks, or in a clear patch among the acanthus. The good soil might not all be in one neat, fenced off block - the story doesn't say it is, and we’re not dealing with modern factory farming methods here. In fact the only real way to discover where all the good soil in your field, all the soil that might support a growing plant is, is to cover the whole area with seed and see what comes up. And my experience is that nature often has more surprises up its sleeve than we expect.

I have a particularly fine hollyhock growing in a gap just a couple of inches wide by the garage. It’s a great big plant and it would never have occurred to me to plant it there. But there it is – it arrived without my help, dropped there by the wind, or a bird perhaps, and it’s doing fine. I might not be able to see much good soil there, but the seed knows what it's do