Easter Sermon
St Stephen’s Stanley, April 8th 2012

Easter Day – the day of resurrection – the day of rising again!
The Lord is risen: he is risen indeed!

St Mark tells that the women came to the tomb in the early morning to anoint Jesus’ dead body with spices. And they found the stone rolled away and the tomb empty and a young man who said ‘He has been raised; he is not here!’ And so today our hymns of praise sound the triumphant note of joy: Alleluia! Praise God!

The Easter story is the story of the victory of hope over despair, the victory of light over darkness, the victory of life over death.

And yet that is not how the women saw it, according to Mark. The women were alarmed, amazed, afraid, seized with terror. They were disoriented, frightened, uncomprehending of this terrifying and totally unexpected event. And the young man said, ‘Do not be alarmed.’

Do not be alarmed; do not be afraid; fear not. The words of the angel to Mary, telling her the strange news that she will bear the Son of the Most High God; the words of the angel to the shepherds, telling them the wonderful and strange news that a new baby is born who will be the Saviour, the Messiah, the Lord; and now the words of the young man – or was it an angel – to the women at the tomb, telling them the newest, strangest, most joyful tidings of all, that death does not have the final say. At the beginning of life, and at the end, with God: do not be afraid.

Do not be alarmed, do not be afraid, fear not. Fear – the most paralyzing, crippling, disabling emotion. Fear of loss; fear of failure; fear of meaninglessness; fear of annihilation, which is nothingness, non-existence. We all know of fear and its quietly devastating consequences.

And God acts to take away our fear. Jesus brought healing to the paralyzed, the crippled and the disabled. He brought his redeeming power to dispel what is wrong and false and fearful, and to bring righteousness, truth, and faith. Perfect love casts out fear, and in Jesus we see God’s love made perfect in human love. St Paul wrote, ‘He is the image of the invisible God.’ Because he did these things, we know that this is the nature of God: to heal, to redeem, to bring new life. The opposite of fear is hope; the opposite of fear is love; the opposite of fear is trust. The Lord is risen: he is risen indeed!

What really happened on that first Easter Day? The answer is – we don’t know. We don’t know the full story with all the details. The women arrived after the event. The stone was rolled back, the body was not there. It had happened. But we do know that what happened was a transforming event not only in the lives of Jesus’ friends and followers but in the history of the world. The Christian story of the God-Man who died and rose again is our story, and the foundation of our society, our laws, our morality, and our freedom. It is the great story of the triumph of love, hope and trust over the powers of fear and darkness and despair. It is the great story of the victory of resurrection, rising again, over all that would drag us down to destruction. It is the incredible hope of the triumph of life even in the face of death.

Jesus Christ is alive today! He lives in bread and wine; he lives in the Gospel stories of lives renewed and hope restored and trust rekindled; he lives in the Church, which is the meeting of those who would be his followers; he lives in you and he lives in me, if we will allow him room in our hearts.

And if we will allow him room in our hearts, then the resurrection becomes not just an event in history but a living reality that raises us up, and through us, has the transforming power and potential to raise up others around us. The Lord is risen: he is risen indeed. Alleluia!

‘Those who love their life lose it’
Sermon at St Stephen’s Stanley, March 25th 2012
5th Sunday of Lent

John 12.20-33

Sometimes you come across something in the bible that sounds so strange that it demands explanation, or at least exploration. I think we just heard one of those verses.

From St John’s Gospel, chapter 12, verse 25: ‘Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life.’

What does this mean? ‘Those who love their life lose it’. Is this some kind of puritanical life-denying idea? And what can we make of the teaching that we should hate our life if we want to win eternal life? Doesn’t it just sound bizarre, as if it’s encouraging us to hate our own existence on earth? It’s not just strange, it’s almost chilling. And it seems completely against Jesus saying, also in John’s gospel, ‘I have come that they may have life, and have it in abundance.’

To go deeper into the meaning of this verse we need to go back to the original Greek, and we find that the English translation here serves us poorly. A more helpful translation might be something like this:

‘Those who love themselves lose themselves, but those who are willing to give up their life in this world will inherit eternal life.’

I think this helps us to see more clearly the meaning of the verse, especially when we understand it in the context of Jesus talking about his own life and death, as he is in this passage.

So instead of ‘Those who love their life lose it’, we have ‘Those who love themselves lose themselves.’ The late Whitney Houston sang ‘Learning to love yourself is the greatest love of all’. And in a way she’s right. There are people who for various sad reasons come to hate and despise themselves, and such people are desperately in need of learning to love themselves. But loving yourself is very dangerous if it leads to self-obsession and selfishness, where other people are excluded from your love. Loving yourself can lead to destruction. Can lead to losing yourself.

We are all self-centred. Inevitably we see the world through our own eyes almost all the time. Our default mode is to put ourselves ahead of other people, and our interests above their interests. But a self-centred life is the opposite of what we are meant for. One of the central messages of Christianity is against selfishness. We are meant to live in relationship with others. Jesus taught his followers to love God, and to love others as we love ourselves. Not put ourselves first. St Benedict, the 6th century founder of Western monasticism, wrote this:

‘Try to give up selfish desires, and believe others to be better than yourself. Do not pursue what you think is advantageous to you, but what seems best for another.’

So yes, we can learn to love ourselves – but not more than we love others, or else we risk losing ourselves in a meaningless, selfish life which is no real life at all.

Let’s come back to the second part of the verse. I have retranslated ‘Those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life,’ and instead, we have ‘Those who are willing to give up their life in this world will inherit eternal life.’

It sounds better than ‘those who hate their life’, doesn’t it! And I think it’s also closer to the real meaning. The word ‘hate’ here is hyperbole, exaggeration used for effect. And as I mentioned, Jesus is speaking here in the context of giving up his own life. Nobody would suggest that Jesus hated his life; that would make complete nonsense of his life and teaching. No, Jesus is saying that one who is willing to give up his or her life will inherit eternal life. We can understand this much more readily, as a matter of faith.

Where does this lead us? We have learnt two things: don’t take bible verses out of context, and don’t trust English translations too easily, go back to the original if you need to, to understand more clearly. But we have learnt something much more important than this. We have learnt something about ourselves, about our human nature, about the self-love that leads to self-destruction, and about the willingness to give, that is life-giving. This is not just about Jesus, it is about you and me in our everyday lives. And as so often, we have a choice. Which way will we follow? Self-loving, or self-giving?

Jesus said, ‘The hour has come’. This is a recurrent theme in John’s gospel. At the wedding in Cana when Jesus is persuaded to turn the water into wine, he says ‘My hour has not yet come’. Twice more in following chapters he repeats, ‘My hour has not yet come.’ But in today’s reading, for the first time, we hear ‘The hour has come’. And Jesus says, ‘Now is the judgement of this world.’ The Greek word for judgement is ‘krisis’, which gives us our English word ‘crisis’. Now is the crisis point. Now is the time for each one of us to make a judgement. Now is decision time. Which way will you follow? Self-loving to the point of self-obsession? Or self-giving?

Amen.

Sermon for Ash Wednesday 2012, St John’s Cathedral

Isaiah 58.1-12
2 Cor. 5.20b-6.10
Matthew 6.1-6, 16-21

Today, Ash Wednesday, the start of Lent, the season of penitence and fasting, the Church calls us to come and receive ashes, a sign of our penitence and a symbol of our mortality. And later in this service all who wish will be marked with ashes on our forehead, in the shape of a cross.

Using ashes in this way has a good biblical pedigree. Job repents in dust and ashes when he finds that he has challenged God way beyond his limited understanding. Which of us has not at some time done that? Jeremiah tells the people to put on sackcloth and roll in ashes, in mourning for the destruction that is to come. In the Book of Jonah when Jonah’s message gets through, the king of Nineveh puts on sackcloth and sits in ashes. It’s obviously the right thing to do to express sorrow, mourning and repentance.

So why, with all these biblical examples of using ashes in the way we will soon be doing ourselves, does the Church offer us two bible readings today which seem to call this practice into question?

In our first reading this evening the prophet Isaiah asks the rhetorical question,

Is such the fast that I choose, a day to humble yourself?
Is it to bow down the head like a bulrush, and to lie in sackcloth and ashes?
Will you call this day a fast, a day acceptable to the Lord?

Isaiah’s answer is very clearly ‘No!’. This is not what God requires of us.

Why? How does Isaiah explain his rejection of the normal custom?

Isaiah sees that putting on sackcloth and ashes has become for the people merely an outward form with no inward meaning. The people claim to worship God, they delight to know his ways, they want to come close to God, and they conform to the proper rituals. But in their heart is something else. Bewildered, they ask God ‘Why do we fast but you do not see? Why humble ourselves, but you do not notice?’ And God replies, ‘You serve your own interest on the fast day, and oppress your workers. You fast only to quarrel and fight, and strike with a wicked fist. Such fasting as you do today will not make your voice heard on high.’

Isaiah’s warning comes straight to us as it did to his contemporaries. What is the use of our outward forms of religion if they only cloak the reality of the selfishness and violence that we are trying to hide? Who are we fooling?

Jesus had a warning too. Unusually for Jesus, he said it in a milder way, but the message is still clear. This is from today’s gospel reading:

Whenever you fast, do not look dismal, like the hypocrites, for they disfigure their faces so as to show others that they are fasting… But when you fast, put oil on your head and wash your face, so that your fasting may be seen not by others but by your Father.

Don’t look dismal and disfigure your face, says Jesus. But isn’t that precisely what we’re going to do? Put ash on our forehead? But Jesus says, put oil on your head, not ash – a sign of gladness, not a sign of mourning. Like Isaiah, Jesus seems to be rejecting the tradition. Why?

Jesus here is talking in the context of hypocrisy. People often think that Jesus reserved his bitterest criticism for the Scribes and Pharisees and suchlike. In fact, Jesus was most bitter against religious hypocrisy. And isn’t that exactly the same as this evening’s reading from Isaiah: both of them warning against hypocrisy.

But they don’t just warn and criticize and condemn. Isaiah’s warning here leads straight into one of the most beautiful passages in scripture:

Is not this the fast that I choose:
To loose the bonds of injustice,
To undo the thongs of the yoke,
To let the oppressed go free,
And to break every yoke?
Is it not to share your bread with the hungry,
And bring the homeless poor into your house;
When you see the naked, to cover them,
And not to hide yourself from your own kin?
Then your light shall break forth like the dawn,
And your healing shall spring up quickly…
You shall be like a watered garden,
Like a spring of water whose waters never fail.

And there we have it. Jesus said something similar: ‘Come, you that are beloved of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you! For I was hungry and you fed me, I was thirsty and you gave me drink. I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me.’

This is what God requires of us. The Ashing on Ash Wednesday is not just another arcane church ritual. Yes, come forward and receive your ash. But don’t think it has any meaning unless you are prepared to go from here and do whatever is in your power to feed the hungry and thirsty, to welcome the stranger, shelter the homeless, clothe the naked, and care for the sick. And go home and wash off the ash and put on a sign of gladness. Because salvation has come to this house.

Amen.

‘Those who love their life lose it’
Sermon at St Stephen’s Stanley, March 25th 2012
5th Sunday of Lent

John 12.20-33

Sometimes you come across something in the bible that sounds so strange that it demands explanation, or at least exploration. I think we just heard one of those verses.

From St John’s Gospel, chapter 12, verse 25: ‘Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life.’

What does this mean? ‘Those who love their life lose it’. Is this some kind of puritanical life-denying idea? And what can we make of the teaching that we should hate our life if we want to win eternal life? Doesn’t it just sound bizarre, as if it’s encouraging us to hate our own existence on earth? It’s not just strange, it’s almost chilling. And it seems completely against Jesus saying, also in John’s gospel, ‘I have come that they may have life, and have it in abundance.’

To go deeper into the meaning of this verse we need to go back to the original Greek, and we find that the English translation here serves us poorly. A more helpful translation might be something like this:

‘Those who love themselves lose themselves, but those who are willing to give up their life in this world will inherit eternal life.’

I think this helps us to see more clearly the meaning of the verse, especially when we understand it in the context of Jesus talking about his own life and death, as he is in this passage.

So instead of ‘Those who love their life lose it’, we have ‘Those who love themselves lose themselves.’ The late Whitney Houston sang ‘Learning to love yourself is the greatest love of all’. And in a way she’s right. There are people who for various sad reasons come to hate and despise themselves, and such people are desperately in need of learning to love themselves. But loving yourself is very dangerous if it leads to self-obsession and selfishness, where other people are excluded from your love. Loving yourself can lead to destruction. Can lead to losing yourself.

We are all self-centred. Inevitably we see the world through our own eyes almost all the time. Our default mode is to put ourselves ahead of other people, and our interests above their interests. But a self-centred life is the opposite of what we are meant for. One of the central messages of Christianity is against selfishness. We are meant to live in relationship with others. Jesus taught his followers to love God, and to love others as we love ourselves. Not put ourselves first. St Benedict, the 6th century founder of Western monasticism, wrote this:

‘Try to give up selfish desires, and believe others to be better than yourself. Do not pursue what you think is advantageous to you, but what seems best for another.’

So yes, we can learn to love ourselves – but not more than we love others, or else we risk losing ourselves in a meaningless, selfish life which is no real life at all.

Let’s come back to the second part of the verse. I have retranslated ‘Those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life,’ and instead, we have ‘Those who are willing to give up their life in this world will inherit eternal life.’

It sounds better than ‘those who hate their life’, doesn’t it! And I think it’s also closer to the real meaning. The word ‘hate’ here is hyperbole, exaggeration used for effect. And as I mentioned, Jesus is speaking here in the context of giving up his own life. Nobody would suggest that Jesus hated his life; that would make complete nonsense of his life and teaching. No, Jesus is saying that one who is willing to give up his or her life will inherit eternal life. We can understand this much more readily, as a matter of faith.

Where does this lead us? We have learnt two things: don’t take bible verses out of context, and don’t trust English translations too easily, go back to the original if you need to, to understand more clearly. But we have learnt something much more important than this. We have learnt something about ourselves, about our human nature, about the self-love that leads to self-destruction, and about the willingness to give, that is life-giving. This is not just about Jesus, it is about you and me in our everyday lives. And as so often, we have a choice. Which way will we follow? Self-loving, or self-giving?

Jesus said, ‘The hour has come’. This is a recurrent theme in John’s gospel. At the wedding in Cana when Jesus is persuaded to turn the water into wine, he says ‘My hour has not yet come’. Twice more in following chapters he repeats, ‘My hour has not yet come.’ But in today’s reading, for the first time, we hear ‘The hour has come’. And Jesus says, ‘Now is the judgement of this world.’ The Greek word for judgement is ‘krisis’, which gives us our English word ‘crisis’. Now is the crisis point. Now is the time for each one of us to make a judgement. Now is decision time. Which way will you follow? Self-loving to the point of self-obsession? Or self-giving?

Amen.

Where does God live?

Sermon for Advent 4, 2011 - 2 Samuel 7.1-11,16; Luke 1.26-38
St Stephen’s Stanley

King David thought that God should live in a house. David himself lived in a house of cedarwood, but the ark of the covenant, where God’s presence was stronger than anywhere else, was housed in a tent. That seemed wrong to the King. God should not live in a lesser place than a king; God should not be forever camped out in a tent like a wandering desert chief. Now that the kingdom was settled and secure David wanted to honour God by building a house for him to live in, a permanent structure worthy for God.

We may smile at David’s primitive idea that God needs a house like people need houses. But are we so different? People often talk about a church as ‘the house of God’, and we may come to church expecting or at least hoping to meet with God in some way. At the same time, we know perfectly well that God is not confined to this church, or to any church building. Anyone who comes to church one morning a week and then goes out and lives their own life without reference to God for the next six and a half days has not got the point.

At first Nathan the prophet gives King David the green light to go ahead with his building project; but then God speaks to Nathan. ‘Go and tell my servant David this: Are you the one to build me a house? I have never lived in a house, I have always moved about with my people’, says God. ‘Remember how I took you from being a shepherd boy to a king. I will appoint a place for my people Israel to live. And I will make a house for you; your house and your kingdom will last forever.’
David has got it wrong. It’s not his task to build a house for God. It’s the other way around. God builds a house for David. And in any case God has no desire to live in a house. God is not going to be a stay-at-home God. He’s out there. His home is with his people, wherever they are.

In the end, as the Old Testament tells us, and history and archaeology confirms, the temple was built, but not by King David. It was David’s successor King Solomon who built the first temple where the ark of the covenant was lodged. That temple was destroyed by the Babylonians in 586BC. After the exile in Babylon and the return of the exiles to Jerusalem, the temple was rebuilt. This was the second temple, the temple Jesus and his parents knew and visited.

I wonder why Solomon built the temple, and why the Israelites later rebuilt it, when in the time of Nathan the prophet the message had been so clearly delivered to King David that God did not want to live in a temple. Perhaps it was because the Israelites, like all the other kingdoms around them, wanted to show in visible, tangible form how much they honoured their God who was so important to them as a nation. And yet there’s still a lingering feeling that it was the will of man to build the temple as a house for God to live in, rather than the will of God. Because the cult of the temple became exclusive. Access to God was controlled by the religious hierarchy. God was shut away in the Holy of Holies at the back of the temple, a place so awesome that only the High Priest, on one day of the year, could enter there.

But then when we come to the story of Mary and the archangel Gabriel, we find out God’s own choice of a home. Where does God really want to live? God chooses for his home not a royal throne, but a young woman’s womb. God chooses not a royal palace, but a stable. God chooses not the immortal body of a God, but human flesh and blood. God chooses not lofty Olympian clouds, but our messy, compromised, bruised – and yet wonderful – world. And it seems as if God has never been really happy living in the temple after all.

Yes, we come here on Sunday morning to meet God. But don’t think that he lives here. He may come to meet us here, but his home is the world and the universe. He may be found here, but he is also to be found in the sick and the suffering and the tearful – and the joyful – all around the world. God is the same today as in the days of King David and Nathan the prophet, 2,800 years ago. God still moves about among his people. The wind of the Holy Spirit blows where it chooses. It may blow your way today, or tomorrow, or at any time in your life, or at many times in your life. Be ready. That’s the message of Advent, isn’t it. Don’t try to shut God away in a house, to be visited from time to time when you feel like it. God is not to be confined. Expect to be confronte by God anywhere, any time. And be ready to respond.

Amen.

Ready or Not
Family Sermon at St Stephen’s Stanley
6th November 2011

Ready or not, here I come!

Who likes playing hide and seek? Put up your hands.
Adults, put up your hands if you liked playing hide and seek when you were a child.

In hide and seek, one person is the seeker, and the others hide. The seeker puts their hands over their eyes so they can’t see, and counts up to 100. And then what does the seeker say?

Ready or not, here I come!

What happens if the seeker finishes counting and says ‘Ready or not, here I come!’ and you’re not ready, you haven’t yet found a hiding place? Then the seeker will easily catch you. But if you’re ready and you have a good hiding place then the seeker may take a long time to find you.

Robin, who is playing the organ today, used to be very good at hide and seek about 9 or 10 years ago. He used to think of places that nobody else would think of, and squeeze himself into places you didn’t even know existed.

Jesus’ story about the 10 bridesmaids is a little bit like hide and seek. In this story the bridegroom is Jesus, and Jesus is the seeker. And at midnight there’s a shout, ‘Look! Here is the bridegroom!’ That’s like ‘Ready or not, here I come!’

But in this version, being ready doesn’t mean hiding, being ready means coming to meet the seeker. The bridesmaids who are ready are the ones who have their oil lamps burning, and they go to meet the bridegroom and go with him into the wedding banquet. The bridesmaids who are not ready have no oil for their lamps. They have to go and get some, and while they are away the bridegroom comes and they are not there to welcome him. And so they can’t join the wedding feast.

The bridesmaids didn’t know when the bridegroom would come. But some of them were ready when he did come, and some of them were not. Why were some of the bridesmaids not ready? Because they were not wise, they were foolish. They didn’t think ahead and bring extra supplies of oil with them.

The bible tells us that Jesus will come again into our world, and we should be ready when he does. But when will Jesus come?

Some people think they know. There’s an old man in America called Harold Camping who said earlier this year that Jesus would come on 21st May, and on that day the world would end. Some people believed him. They sold their homes and had parties and got ready to go with Jesus. When 21 May turned out to be an ordinary day, Harold Camping said that he had not understood the bible properly. God was giving the world another 5 months. 21 October would be the day instead. Well, here we are, 6 November, and the world hasn’t ended yet. Never believe anyone who says they know when Jesus will come and the world will end. They are lying. Jesus himself said that nobody knows when these things will happen.

I’m not waiting for that day myself. I’m not saving myself up for Jesus to come on that one day. Because if you want to know when Jesus will come, the answer is, Jesus comes every day.

Every day Jesus comes into our world. But often we don’t recognize him because he’s in disguise. He’s not dressed in a white robe, with sandals on his feet, and long hair and a beard. We can’t recognize him by what he looks like. And as often as not, he is a she. He or she might be right here, now.

He’s the one who’s lost or lonely, who needs our help or friendship.

She’s the friend who’s downhearted and needs our love and encouragement.

He’s the colleague I got angry with, and now I need to put things right.

She’s the person I neglected, because I was too busy, who needs some of my time.

He’s the person I don’t like, because he’s different from me, but I need to learn
that he’s valuable too, and I may learn things from him that I don’t know.

She’s the one who is in trouble and can’t see which way to go, and she needs hope and maybe some guidance.

Every day Jesus comes up to us and taps us on the shoulder and says ‘Ready or not, here I come!’ Are you ready?

Amen.

The Lord’s Prayer
25th September 2011
A sermon at St Stephen’s Chapel Stanley

Today for a change I’m not going to preach about the bible readings. Two or three years ago I preached two sermons about the Creed, and what does it mean. After that I was asked to do the same with the Lord’s Prayer. So here it is – the Lord’s Prayer.

Our Father in heaven
Our, not only my. There are some brands of Christianity that emphasise the individual’s relationship with God. So long as my personal relationship with Jesus and God is OK, that’s all that matters. It’s all about me and God. The very first word of the Lord’s Prayer says something different. This is not just my personal relationship. God is not mine but ours. Christianity is a community religion, not a private personal religion. This links in with Jesus’ teaching that love God & love your neighbour go together. Nobody can love God without also loving others.

Our Father – the father gives life, and provides for the children. Brings them up, guides them, feeds and clothes them. The children depend on the father (this is a patriarchal view of society). Of course children also depend on their mother. Mothers also give life and provide for their children. On Mothering Sunday each year we pray ‘Our Father and Mother’. What’s important is not whether God is male or female – God is neither male nor female, God is a spirit. What’s important is that we think of God being like a parent who cares and provides for us.

In heaven – God is in a different dimension. There is an ultimate reality beyond this world, although that ultimate reality, the kingdom of heaven, can sometimes break in upon our world.

Hallowed be your name
Your kingdom come
Your will be done

Yours, not mine. We give up our claims to power and glory. This is so important. For an atheist there is no higher power than Man. In the last century the terrible totalitarian states where Man was elevated as the supreme being caused the deaths of so many millions. When Man is raised to godlike power – Hitler, Stalin, Mao and others on a smaller scale – then there is no restraint on the evil that Man may do. But for those who believe in God there is a higher power. Those who truly believe in God will not seek power and glory for themselves. If we give up our own self-seeking ends and willingly put ourselves under the power of God, we commit ourselves to living God’s way. As Christians we know that God calls us not to hate but to love, not to destroy but to create, not to kill but to give life.

On earth as in heaven
And if we will give the power and glory to God rather than seeking them for ourselves, then the kingdom of heaven can come among us here on earth. 

Give us today our daily bread
I find this the most difficult line of the Lord’s Prayer. We live in a place and time where we take food completely for granted. We don’t really believe that our daily bread comes from God. We know perfectly well that it comes from the supermarket, and before that the supplier, the factory, the lorry or ship or aircraft, and ultimately from the farm. None of us lives in hunger, not knowing where the next meal will come from. None of us has to resort to praying for food, we all have money to buy it. Even with food prices rising, none of us is likely to suffer from lack of food.

Perhaps to make sense of this line we need to think ourselves back into biblical times, when people really did live with the risk of hunger, when famine was a killer, and when people were far more aware than we are of their dependence on good weather for the harvest. Or we need to think ourselves into the life right now of an adult or child in the Horn of Africa, where people are literally dying of starvation. Last week I met a friend who has been teaching in Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia. He said that you see corpses in the street – people dead from starvation. I bet they are praying for food in Somalia and Ethiopia. Maybe we should give thanks for our daily bread after all.

Forgive us our sins
As we forgive those who sin against us
We’ve talked a lot about forgiveness in the last two weeks here at St Stephen’s. Jesus told Peter to forgive 77 times, forgive without limit. Then we had Jesus’ story of the slave who is forgiven a huge debt by his master, but who then refuses to forgive a small debt that was owed to him. The message here is, ‘Do as you would be done by’. If you want to be forgiven, you must also forgive others. This requires the humility to recognize that although others may have wronged us, we too have done wrong and are in need of forgiveness. So often it’s easier to see the fault of others, rather than acknowledge our own failings.

Lead us not into temptation
Here’s another puzzling line – as if God would lead us into temptation! - maybe to test us? But I don’t think it means that. I think this is simply praying or wishing that we may not meet temptation. Was it Marilyn Monroe who said ‘I can resist everything except temptation’! We ask to be spared temptation because we know how powerful a lure to do wrong temptation can be.

But deliver us from evil
When I was a child I thought this was praying that bad things would never happen, but it’s not. We may meet evil, and when we do, we ask that evil may not have power over us. If you have read the Harry Potter stories, or seen the films, you know that there are some characters there who have encountered evil and been corrupted by evil, becoming evil themselves. We pray that if we meet evil, we may not surrender to its power.

For the kingdom, the power and the glory are yours
This is not in the original Lord’s Prayer, which you can find in slightly different versions in Matthew chapter 6 and Luke chapter 11. It simply repeats the opening lines of the prayer. ‘Hallowed be your name, your kingdom come, your will be done’, is the same as your glory, your kingdom, your power.

Now and forever.
This is not a temporary state of affairs. God’s power is everlasting, whatever may happen here on earth.

This daily prayer for the Christian family

• reminds us of our loving relationship with God and each other
• reminds us not to seek our own power but to submit to God’s way
• reminds us of our dependence on God, which we can easily forget
• commits us to forgive
• and seeks God’s help to resist temptation and the power of evil

When you say the Lord’s Prayer, don’t just repeat the familiar words without thinking, but reflect on what they mean.

Amen.

The Real Story of Jonah, or, God doesn’t keep count
18th September 2011
A sermon at St Stephen’s Chapel Stanley, Matthew 20.1-16, Jonah 3.10-4.11

Will the real Jonah please stand up?

Everyone knows the story of Jonah, more or less. At least, everyone knows about the whale. Just to remind ourselves, God calls Jonah to go to the great city of Nineveh and tell the people that their city will be destroyed because of their wickedness. Jonah tries to escape from God’s command by boarding a ship, but when a storm arises Jonah is blamed and the sailors throw him overboard. The whale comes and swallows him, and Jonah spends three days in the belly of the whale, praying to God, until it spits him out onto the shore. Then finally Jonah obeys God and goes to Nineveh and walks through the city saying that it will be destroyed. The people of the city believe Jonah, and they all repent, and turn from their violence and evil ways, hoping that God may not destroy their city after all. And so we come to today’s reading:

‘When God saw what they did, how they turned from their evil ways, God changed his mind about the calamity that he had said he would bring up on them; and he did not do it.’

So far so good – that’s all reasonably familiar to us as the story of Jonah. But what happens next is often left out in telling the story. Jonah’s reaction to God’s change of heart is to be angry with God. God’s unreasonable forgiveness makes Jonah feel that he’s been made to look a fool. He proclaimed destruction, and now it’s not going to happen. What is Jonah really concerned about? He’s not concerned with the people of Nineveh, 120,000 people, who are now going to live rather than die. He doesn’t see the point of God’s forgiveness and mercy. He doesn’t see that through God working in him, these people have been saved from self-destruction. He only sees himself, after he’s risked his life for God, looking stupid.

I love the story of the bush in Jonah. It’s very hot out there while Jonah is waiting to see what will happen to the city. Then a bush grows up and gives him shelter. But the next day the bush is attacked by a worm, and dies. Jonah is so mad that this makes him still more angry. He’s so angry about the bush that he’s angry enough to die. And God says, ‘You’re so concerned about this bush. Shouldn’t I be concerned about the people of Nineveh, and their animals? Come on Jonah, get your priorities right!’

The 18th century French philosopher Voltaire said that we are more concerned about a pain in our little finger than about the death of 10,000 people we don’t know in a country far away. And 99 times out of 100 he’s right. Jonah is more concerned about the dead bush and having no shelter, than he is about the life or death of the people of Nineveh. But the point is not only that Jonah is self-centred, but also that he resents God’s forgiveness. He wants God to punish the wicked. That, in Jonah’s view, would be fair. But God refuses to see things Jonah’s way.

The labourers in the vineyard who worked all day long, in the parable we heard from Matthew’s gospel, are a bit like Jonah. They want the landowner to be strictly fair. If those who worked only an hour get a full day’s wage, then they think they should get much more – even though they are also getting the fair wage that was agreed. Like Jonah, they are angry about God’s unreasonable generosity. Like Jonah, they are thinking about all the hard work they put in, and now they feel like fools. They could have come at the last hour and been paid just as much. They are thinking about themselves, not the other labourers. The labourers who were hired later and worked for a shorter time also needed a day’s wage. If they were only paid for an hour’s work, their families would go hungry. They also need to live.

People often feel that this parable of Jesus is ridiculous. You couldn’t run a business like this. But it’s not about running a business. It’s about God’s business, the kingdom of heaven. If we run a business, we have to keep accounts. But God doesn’t keep accounts. It doesn’t matter to God how many hours you worked in the day. What matters is that you worked. You were there, and willing.

This idea that God doesn’t keep accounts may be very different from other teaching we have heard. It’s a common idea that God does keep count of things. He’s watching and he notices all our faults and mistakes and sins, and they’re all going to be held against us on judgement day. But the teaching of this parable, and a lot of Jesus’ teaching, tells us that God is ridiculously generous, giving life to all, instead of giving only according to the work we have done, or how good we are.
Just last week we had Peter asking Jesus ‘How many times should I forgive? As many as seven times?’ and Jesus replies ‘No, seventy-seven times.’ Jesus didn’t mean count up to seventy-seven and then on the seventy-eighth time you don’t need to forgive. He meant, don’t keep count. Just keep on doing what is right.

Elisha foils the Arameans
Sermon at Choral Evensong, Saint John’s Cathedral, August 21st 2011

2 Kings 6.8-23
Acts 17.15-34

What do you make of the strange story in our Old Testament reading this evening? Let me summarise it.

The king of Aram is at war with Israel, but he is thwarted because his plans are known to the prophet Elisha, and Israel is forewarned. The king sends an army to seize Elisha, and when Elisha’s servant sees them he is terrified; but Elisha says ‘Do not be afraid, for there are more with us than with them.’ And God opens the servant’s eyes to see a great array of horses and chariots of fire protecting Elisha. But when the Arameans come to capture Elisha, God blinds them so that they allow Elisha to lead them into a trap. Now they are at the mercy of the king of Israel, who wants to kill them all. But Elisha says no. Give them food and drink, and send them back to their master. And after that, the Arameans no longer came raiding into the land of Israel.

On one level we could take this as a simple story of God acting to defend his people, save the life of his prophet, and defeat the enemy. But I think if we look a little more closely, we may see more. And we quickly find that this story is partly about seeing and not seeing.

At the beginning of the story the king of Aram’s plans are revealed to Elisha. We could say that Elisha sees them, even though they have only been discussed by the king and his army officers. And then when the Arameans come to the city where Elisha is, Elisha sees the powerful forces defending him, the horses and chariots of fire that are invisible to others. Elisha’s servant is overcome with fear, but God opens his eyes so that he too sees the power of God. So the man of God sees what others do not. Things are revealed to him that are hidden from other people. And through the power of prayer he can help others to see the power and glory of God as he sees. As for the Arameans, they don’t see. They don’t see the power of God protecting Elisha, and they don’t see Elisha, they don’t recognize him when they come to capture him. It is only when God opens their eyes that they find themselves in Samaria, Israel’s capital city, surrounded by the men of Israel and in deadly danger.

This theme of seeing and not seeing is one we’re familiar with in the New Testament. Many times in the gospels Jesus heals the blind, giving back their sight. And when he does so, it’s not just the physical sight they receive, it’s not just like a cataract operation, it’s also a glimpse of the kingdom of heaven. They see the truth of Jesus. The thing they were blind to, the truth they could not see, is now revealed. Again, the apostle Paul, then known as Saul, a persecutor of the Christians, was famously blinded by a bright light on the road to Jerusalem, and unable to see for three days. At the end of that time he accepted the spirit of God, and the scales fell from his eyes. I wonder if that was a physical blindness, or a blinding flash that suddenly revealed to Paul that he had been on completely the wrong track. He thought he had been doing God’s will in trying to stamp out the followers of Jesus. He was blind to the wrong he was doing until by God’s grace he was given the gift of seeing clearly.

Seeing and not seeing. The man of God sees clearly. Those opposed to God are blind. And so to continue our story, the unsuspecting Arameans are led into the enemy city by Elisha. And then something very unexpected happens. If you read through the Books of Kings you will find a story largely made up of warfare, rebellion, violence and killing. Not completely, there are intervals of peace and general welfare, but not very often. And so with the Aramean army helpless, trapped in the Israelite capital, you would expect them to be cut down and massacred. That’s what the king of Israel wants. He says to the prophet Elisha, ‘Shall I kill them?’ And Elisha says – No. Very strange. Elisha says, ‘Did you capture them?’ He seems to imply that because the king of Israel did not capture them, he should not kill them. It is not by the king’s power that they have fallen into his hands. Whatever the reason Elisha gives, the fact remains that Elisha tells the king to provide food and drink to his prisoners, and a feast takes place instead of a massacre. And so the Aramean army, expecting death, are given life, set free, and returned to their master and to their families.

I find it impossible to read this story and not connect it with the teaching of Jesus to love your enemy. Repay no-one evil for evil. Israel’s failure to kill their enemies when they were at their mercy is against all common sense. It was what everyone did in those days. What’s to stop the Aramean army from attacking again? What Israel has done here is like turning the other cheek. The king of Aram could easily send his troops to attack Israel again. Slap the other cheek, with deadly effect. But no – the end of the story is that the Arameans no longer came raiding into the land of Israel. At least for a while.

What if the Israelites had massacred the Arameans? Surely the king of Aram would have raised another army and invaded Israel again. And so violence breeds violence. And sadly we see it again in the land of Israel, with the events of the past two days. Violence breeds violence. We see it right now with Israel and the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. I’m not saying that Israel should turn the other cheek. I’m not saying that they should not defend themselves. I’m pleading for a recognition that violence breeds violence, and that the only way forward is a change of heart, a different way of seeing that goes beyond the terrible, destructive cycle of violence, retaliation, and revenge. By breaking that vicious circle the Israelites in the time of Elisha secured at least a measure of peace. Is that because they saw clearly through the eyes of the man of God?

Amen.

Wheat and Weeds
Sermon at St Stephen’s Stanley, July 17th 2011
Matthew 13.24-30, 36-43

Last week we heard the parable of the Sower: the seed that fell on poor soil and the seed that fell on good soil. This week we have Jesus’ own variation on that parable. The focus today is not on the soil, but on the seed. What kind of seed – wheat or weeds? And the problem faced by any farmer or gardener – how to deal with the weeds? The slaves or reapers, who Jesus tells us are the angels, want to tear up the weeds right away, separate out the bad from the good, and get rid of the bad.

The question of how to deal with evil and evil-doers is repeatedly addressed in the parts of the Old Testament known as ‘Wisdom Literature’ – in particular the Psalms, Proverbs, and the Book of Job. Surely a Just God should punish wickedness and reward virtue. Does this happen? And if not, why not? Some of the Psalms and some Proverbs, together with Job’s comforters, claim that the righteous always flourish, and the wicked are always punished and frustrated in their evil ways. This is a view of the world as it should be. But the people who wrote these books and songs also knew that the world is often not like that. And so we also find lamentation and bewilderment in parts of the Wisdom Literature: why do the wicked flourish? Why does God allow such a thing? And in some of the psalms we find demands that God root out and punish the wicked; which is the same desire shared by the angels in Jesus’ parable who want to uproot the weeds. And often it’s our desire too: we think that weeds should be pulled up and evil rooted out.

But Jesus’ teaching takes us down a different path. Let the weeds grow together with the wheat, otherwise in uprooting the weeds you might destroy the wheat. This teaching is not new. We can trace its roots in Jewish thinking back as far as the Book of Genesis and the story of Sodom and Gomorrah. In chapter 18 of Genesis there’s a remarkable conversation between God and Abraham. God tells Abraham that he’s planning to destroy Sodom because it’s such a wicked city. But Abraham challenges God: ‘Will you sweep away the righteous with the wicked? Suppose there are 50 righteous people in Sodom, will you then sweep away the city, and not forgive it for the sake of those 50? Far be it from you to slay the righteous with the wicked!’ And God says ‘If I find 50 righteous people in the city then I will not destroy it.’ But Abraham goes on. He bargains God down 50 – 40 – 30 – 20 – If there are 10 righteous people in Sodom will you still destroy it?’ And God finally says ‘If I find 10 righteous people in the city I will not destroy it.’

I tell you, Abraham would be a great guy to have with you in Stanley Market. If he could bargain God down from 50 to 10, just think how he could bargain the stallholders down!

But the point is not about the numbers, it is simply that God will not sweep the righteous away with the wicked.

Jesus’ teaching about the weeds and the wheat is also reflected in St Luke’s Gospel chapter 6, when Jesus gives the strange and difficult teaching that we should love our enemies: if you love your enemies he says ‘Your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High; for he is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked.’

So while our human instinct - and even the angels’ instinct – says that the wicked should be uprooted and punished here and now, God’s answer is more merciful. God is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked, and so should we be, even to the point of loving our enemies.

What about heaven and hell? A more evangelical preacher than myself would likely focus the sermon much more on reward and punishment. And I have to admit that Jesus’ words pose quite a challenge to someone from the tradition of liberal Christianity. Jesus doesn’t mince his words about the hellfire that ultimately awaits evildoers, despite the landowner who tolerated their presence in his field. (And incidentally, Christianity is not the only religion that has works of art depicting the pains and tortures of hell – Buddhism has such pictures too). I find the emphasis on judgement and punishment extremely unhelpful. Are we frightening people into being Christians? What kind of good news is that supposed to be? So many people have been scarred and damaged by believing in a God whose chief attributes are that he judges and punishes. No, I will not preach that God. And I don’t believe it’s what Jesus preached either. Christ came not to condemn, but to save. If God is a judge, then his chief characteristic is mercy. Why else are we taught to love our enemy, and to allow the weeds to grow alongside the wheat?

There is one more side to this story that needs a little exploration. Jesus’ parable divides the world neatly into wheat and weeds, good and bad, black and white. In this parable Jesus doesn’t address the issue of shades of grey, or the possibility that what appears to be weed may later turn into wheat – and vice-versa. But think of a time when Jesus does address those issues. The Parable of the Prodigal Son. The younger son who demands his share of the inheritance and then goes and wastes it all in riotous living is clearly one of the weeds, destined for the eternal fire. Shouldn’t he be condemned and uprooted, if not during his lifetime then at least on the day of judgement? The elder son who stays dutifully with his father, working in the fields, is clearly the wheat, destined for glory. And yet the younger son comes to his senses and sees what he’s done wrong, and goes back to his father expecting condemnation – and receiving instead a loving embrace. Then the elder brother becomes jealous, and bitterly refuses to join the celebration. This should make us beware of thinking that we know who is wheat and who is weed.

I think it was Alexander Solzhenitsyn who said that the dividing line between good and evil runs not between people but right through every human heart. When we are honest with ourselves we know that is true. And that more than anything else should hold us back from any temptation to judge and condemn others. And ultimately I think that’s what this parable is about. It is not for us to decide who is wheat and who is weed, and to start uprooting the weeds. The judgement is God’s, in the fullness of time. Our task is not to condemn others, but to get on with growing into the wheat that we are called to be. In the words of the harvest hymn:

All the world is God’s own field
Fruit unto his praise to yield
Wheat and weeds together sown
Unto joy or sorrow grown
First the blade and then the ear
Then the full corn shall appear
Grant O Harvest Lord that we
Wholesome grain and pure may be.

Amen.

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Jesus teaching by the sea – The Parable of the Sower
Sermon at St Stephen’s Stanley, July 10th 2011

The Parable of the Sower is so well-known that it’s easy to skate over it without thinking much about it. We know it all, there’s nothing new to learn, we may think. But let’s look again.

The story told by Matthew starts when Jesus went out of the house and sat beside the sea. The sea is the Sea of Galilee – which is not a sea at all, but a lake. You can easily see from one side of the lake to the hills on the other side, I think it’s about 5 miles across. Those hills are the Golan Heights that we sometimes hear about in the news, on the disputed frontier between Israel and Syria. But what house did Jesus walk out of that day? And where was it?

Earlier in Matthew’s gospel he tells us that Jesus left his parent’s home in Nazareth, up in the hills, and made his home in the small town or village of Capernaum, by the lake. You can still visit the ancient site of Capernaum, and walk down its streets. I was there 4 years ago. The modern town has moved away, and you are surrounded by ancient ruined buildings, some of them dating back to the first century. There’s a church in Capernaum, a rather ugly modern building. It’s built on a site where churches have been built before, all of them built over one particular first century house. It’s a tradition in the Holy Land to build a church over a holy site, and the house beneath this church has a special claim because it’s the house where Peter the fisherman lived. How do we know? Because his Hebrew name is carved on the wall in ancient graffiti – Shimon, Simon – Simon Peter. And why else would they build a church there? Matthew tells us that Jesus went into Peter’s house where Peter’s mother in law had a fever, and Jesus healed her. So very likely that’s the house that Jesus left, to go and sit beside the lake.

And a crowd came to listen to his words, so he got into a boat and spoke to them across the water. The former Bishop of Durham, Tom Wright, tells the story that when he visited the lakeside, their guide got into a boat, rowed a little way out, and read this story to the group standing on the shore, without raising his voice, and the words came clearly across the water. We may even know the boat that Jesus sat in. About 10 years ago one summer the water level in the lake went down more than usual, and in the mud archaeologists discovered the largely intact timbers of a first century fishing boat. It’s now housed in a museum by the lake, and we went and saw it. People call it ‘The Jesus Boat’.

So we know the sea, we know the town, we know the house, we know the boat, and we know that the acoustics work. This is not just a fairy story, or something that’s been made-up. It really happened, in that place, one afternoon nearly 2000 years ago. And Jesus told the parable of the sower to that crowd, but he tells it also now to us.

In our gospel reading just now we heard both the parable and the explanation. But Matthew says that Jesus only told the explanation to the disciples, not to the crowd. All the crowd got was the parable itself, without any explanation. They heard Jesus’ story about the farmer and the seed and the poor soil and the good soil. And then Jesus said, ‘If you have ears, then listen’!

I wonder how many of the crowd understood him. Would they know who the farmer was, and what was the seed? Would they understand that they themselves were the soil, for better or worse? We who have the explanation have no excuse for not understanding. We need to look at ourselves and ask what kind of soil are we?

There are so many reasons why the seed might not take root in us. Jesus tells them all.

Maybe we just don’t understand about the kingdom of God. Like the ground that is actually path, not field, and the minute the seed falls it’s snatched up by the birds and devoured. It can’t grow because the path is trodden hard. The seed comes to our ears but it can’t reach our hearts because our hearts are too hard. And what causes hardness of heart? Selfishness. Self-righteousness.

I’d like to read you a short poem written by an Israeli poet, Yehuda Amichai. It’s called ‘The place where we are right.’

From the place where we are right
Flowers will never grow in Spring.
The place where we are right is hard
And trampled like a yard.

But doubts and loves
Dig up the world like a mole, a plough;
And a whisper will be heard
Where the ruined house once stood.

If we are convinced of our own self-righteousness then the flowers will never grow in us, there will be no place for doubts and loves, and the ruined house we have created will remain silent.

The rocks that Jesus spoke of next on that afternoon by the lake are like the pathway, too hard and unyielding to receive the seed. The prophets spoke out against people who had hearts of stone. One of our modern hymns, ‘I the Lord of Sea and Sky’ uses this phrase: I will take their hearts of stone, give them hearts for love alone. Take away our hardness of heart, Lord, give us hearts that are open to receive and to give out, not barren, unproductive hearts, but fruitful hearts.

How can we escape from this hardness of heart? The service of Morning Prayer in the centuries-old Book of Common Prayer includes a canticle, a chant called the Venite, the Latin for ‘O come’, the opening words of the chant; and in the Venite are these words: Today if you will hear his voice, harden not your hearts. And sometimes all I need when my heart is hard is to hear that still small voice. Today if you will hear his voice, harden not your hearts. Perhaps it may help you too.

But even if we can escape from hardness of heart, Jesus warns that we may be the soil where thorns grow and choke the seed. These thorns are the cares of the world and the lure of wealth. What do you do with thorns? Some of you know that in my student days I used to work on a farm in Wales, and one of the jobs I sometimes had was to go out on a tractor with a machine called a thistle-cutter attached behind, and drive round the fields cutting down thistles. The problem with thistles is that they spread very fast. If you allow them to flower and then the seeds blow away you’ll soon have a field of thistles instead of a field of grass, and that’s no use for the cattle and sheep. So you have to cut down the thistles before they flower. And that’s what we have to do too with those thorns that lure us away from God. Keep cutting them down. They’ll come back again, they always do. Go round again and cut them down before they flower, or they will choke you and take control of your life.

And the good soil? The soil that is fruitful and yields a harvest? That brings us round to St Paul, talking of the fruits of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. Try to practice these things and allow them to flourish in your heart and in your life.

Amen.