The Weaver of Bethlehem : A story for Christmas Day

There was once a woman, called Sarah, who lived in small house just beyond the edge of the town of Bethlehem.

Her husband kept a flock of sheep on the hills around the town. Often, he would be gone for weeks at a time, and as their children were long ago grown up and gone, when he was away she was alone, but she kept busy, looking after the house, growing vegetables, and most of all, spinning and weaving with the wool from her husband’s sheep. 

Sarah was a very good weaver, known throughout the town for the beauty of her cloth. She could weave strong, thick fabric, to keep the fiercest wind out, but she could also weave the finest cloth, gossamer thin, like silk. But although both she and her husband worked hard, they still only just about made ends meet.

One day, when Sarah’s husband was away searching for pasture with the sheep, there was a knock on the door. There on the doorstep was an official looking man, dressed in fine clothes. 

“Are you the weaver, Sarah?” 

“I am,” Sarah said, nervously, wondering what all this meant. 

“I have a message for you – You are to present yourself at the court of King Herod in Jerusalem tomorrow, with a piece of your finest cloth.”

This didn’t sound like good news at all to Sarah. It was usually far safer to go unnoticed, especially by someone like King Herod, who had a reputation for being cruel and angry. But an order from a king can’t be ignored, so early the next morning, Sarah set off to walk the five miles or so to Jerusalem, with a piece of her very best weaving folded carefully in her pack.  

She presented herself at the palace gates, and was taken in through room after room, corridor after corridor, each one bigger and grander than the last until she was ushered into the most splendid room of all. She’d never seen anything like it; fine carved wood, and silk cushions on the chairs and a great throne upon which sat a bored looking man, holding a cup full of wine in his jewelled hands. 

“Who’s this?” he said to the attendant who had brought her in. 

“Sarah the weaver, sir”.

“Ah yes, the weaver. I hear that you are the best weaver in the area – is that true?”

“I, I don’t know, sir – I try my hardest to do a good job.”

Sarah handed over the cloth she had brought with her. Herod rubbed it between his fingers. “Yes, if it is as good as this, it will do.”

“Do for what, sir?”

“I want a toga – you know, one of those long things people wrap round and round themselves. They’re all the rage in Rome. All the best people wear them, including the Emperor. So, obviously, I should have one too. But it’s got to be made of your very best, finest wool. It must be the best weaving you have ever done. Do you understand?”

“Yes, sir. How long should it be, sir?”

“Twelve cubits exactly – no longer, no shorter. – A cubit was about the length from your elbow to the tip of your fingers – “ That’s what I’m told is the perfect  length, so that’s how it should be.”

Twelve cubits, thought Sarah – that will take months to weave in between all the other things I have to do! 

“And I shall want it to be ready by the time of my birthday feast, which is…hmm…three weeks away.”

Three weeks! Thought Sarah. How can I possibly get it finished in time?

Herod waved Sarah away impatiently. As far as he was concerned it was all settled. 

But Sarah knew there was one other question she really had to ask, so, summoning all her courage, she coughed gently. 

“Excuse me, your majesty, but might I ask how much you will pay me for the cloth I weave for you?”

Herod turned back towards her, and looked at her, astonished. “Pay you! What do you mean, ‘pay you!’ It will be an honour for you to do this work for me, a token of your admiration and loyalty. And just think of the important people who will see it – it will be free advertising for you. It might even bring you more work. Why ever should I pay you for it? But mark my words; if you don’t finish in time, or it isn’t just as I have ordered, then you can be sure there will be trouble. 

“The impertinence” – he said to the attendants. “how much will you pay me? – whatever next! Take her out!  “ 

So Sarah was taken out and sent home, knowing that there was nothing for it but to do as Herod demanded. 

There was no time to lose. And before she could even start on the weaving, she had to have yarn to weave with.  

She set to work. She sorted through the fleeces in the storeroom, choosing the finest she could find. She washed them and carded them and set to work with her spindle spinning the yarn. Every spare moment she had she spun and spun and spun, as finely as she could until there were reels and reels of yarn ready for weaving and her hands ached. Days passed, a week passed, before she was even ready to set up her loom and begin to weave. There was only a fortnight left. She wove and wove, sending the shuttle backwards and forwards as fast as she could, but it was slow, slow progress. The yarn was so fine. Sometimes the cloth hardly seemed to grow at all. Now there was only a week left. Faster and faster she wove. Now there were only two days left, now one, but it still wasn’t finished. On the night before Herod’s birthday, she still had two cubits to go. “If I stay up all night, perhaps I might just finish it,” she thought.  

She wove on by the light of a single candle as the darkness fell and the stars came out. Sarah was exhausted. Her eyes kept closing, no matter how hard she tried to stay awake. Maybe just a five-minute nap would refresh her, she thought, as she leant back in her seat at the loom and rested her back against the wall, just for a moment. In an instant she was fast asleep, but as she slept she dreamt she felt  the touch of soft feathery wings and heard sweet singing – a song of a world where people loved each other, and no one was oppressed.  

But then, suddenly, interrupting that glorious music came the loud crowing of a cockerel. Sarah sat bolt upright. The first light of dawn was streaming in through the window. She’d slept all night. Oh no! there was no chance she’d finish the weaving now, was there. She reached for the shuttle, but what was this? 

She looked at the loom. She knew where she had stopped weaving the night before, but somehow the loom was full. The weaving was finished. Had she been weaving in her sleep? No, she was sure she hadn’t. As she wondered what could have happened, she noticed one stray white feather lying on the floor beside the loom which was far too big to have come from any bird she’d ever seen.  

Shaking her head, she cut the cloth off the loom, and measured it. One cubit, two cubits, five cubits, ten cubits, eleven cubits, twelve cubits – the length she’d promised – but there was more - thirteen cubits, fourteen. Two cubits too many. What should she do? Herod had been clear. It had to be twelve cubits long – that was the perfect length, he said. Would it matter if it was longer? With someone like Herod you could never be sure. So, Sarah cut off the extra bit and hemmed both pieces with tiny stitches to stop them unravelling. She set the smaller piece to one side, wondering what to do with it. As she looked at it again, it seemed even better than her own weaving. 

But there was no time to think of that now. She folded Herod’s toga and put it in her bag and hurried off towards Jerusalem. When she got there, a servant at the gate took it from her with a grunt and shut the door in her face – no thanks, no acknowledgement, and certainly no pay. All she could do was turn around and head back the way she’d come, hoping that the toga was good enough not to bring Herod’s wrath down on her head, hoping that was the last she would ever have to do with him.  

But as she put Jerusalem safely behind her, she started thinking about that spare piece of cloth she’d set aside. What should she do with it? It would raise very good money if she sold it; it was so fine! She started daydreaming about what she would spend the money on; something useful for the house? Or just something beautiful – there was never any money for luxuries, and it would feel lovely to have a treat… By the time she got home, she had a whole shopping list in her mind. At least something good had come from this.  She was very excited. She folded the cloth into her bag and decided to set off for the market to see if she could sell it straight away. 

But as she headed for the door, it opened, and there was her husband, home at last! He seemed to be just as excited as she was.“You’ll never guess what happened” they both said at the same time. 

“You go first,” he said. “No, no – you tell me your news” she answered – so he did.

“Well!” he said, “What a night! We were out on the hillside, just like always. It was pitch black, no moon, and cold, cold. But then, all of a sudden there was light everywhere and great flying things with snowy white, feathery wings, singing at the tops of their voices. It was amazing. Then one of them says to us ‘Don’t be afraid’ – which we were – ‘the Messiah has been born, the one God said he would send to save you. He’s in Bethlehem, and he’s lying in a manger, and you can go and see him.” Well. We were gobsmacked. We just stood there with our mouths open until he said again – ‘Go on then…’  So we did. Turns out he’s right here in Bethlehem staying in old Eli’s place – the father is some sort of relative of Eli. But Eli’s guest room was full, so there was nowhere for them to stay except down the end of the house where the animals were. They’d had to put the baby in the animal’s feeding trough. The poor little scrap was just lying on the scratchy straw. The angel said he was “wrapped in swaddling clothes”, but it looked like they were cut from one of Eli’s old hessian feed sacks to me. We’d never have let our babies sleep like that. The mother and father – Mary and Joseph were their names - must be really hard up, and old Eli doesn’t have a clue about babies.

Anyway, sorry to be rattling on. What was your news?”

“Oh… never mind,” said Sarah. “It can wait. This baby… do you think I could go and see it too.”

“I don’t see why not” said her husband, “I expect Mary would be glad to see another woman – she looked worn out and terrified.”

Sarah didn’t wait a moment. She set off on the short journey to Eli’s house. She called out quietly as she pushed open the door, but she needn’t have worried. The young mother, trying to hold the wriggling baby in her arms, looked up at her with tears of relief in her eyes. “I’m so glad to see you. This is my first and I don’t know what I’m doing. All I know is that this isn’t how it’s meant to be, a baby having to lie in the straw among the animals.” 

“I’m sure you’ll do just fine” said Sarah “It takes a while to get used to babies. But I have something for you that might just help.”

Sarah took the cloth out of her bag. It was funny; it looked even more beautiful than it had done when she’d first seen it. She could swear it shone with its own light. It must be her eyes – she was very tired! 

“Here,” she said. “I don’t really know where this cloth came from, but I know where it should be going.”

And she wrapped the child around with the cloth, just as she had her own children so long ago, and gave him back to his mother, and he lay in her arms, comforted, and quieted by his fine new shawl. 

And as he slept, Sarah told Mary what had happened, about Herod – ‘steer clear of him if you can’ – and about the weaving, and about her dream, and about the single white feather she’d found. “What can it all mean?” she asked. 

“I don’t know” said Mary, “but I do know this. There will always be Herods in the world – people who have to throw their weight around to feel they matter at all - but there will also always be love, and this shawl will remind me of that, whatever happens in the future. If what I’ve heard is right my son who is wrapped in it, has come to bring us love enough to wrap the whole world if we will let him.” 

And the child fell asleep, and so, not long afterwards, did his mother. And Sarah tiptoed out and left them to rest, and so shall we. Amen 

Mary's Song: Advent 4

 

Micah 5.2-5a, Luke 1.39-45, Canticle Luke 1 46b-55

 

When Philip and I went to Israel a couple of years ago, one of the most atmospheric places we visited was the ancient town of Sepphoris, about 4 miles from Nazareth. It’s not mentioned by name in the New Testament, but some ancient traditions say that it was the birthplace of Mary – and who knows, maybe it was.

 

Sepphoris was inhabited until the Arab/Israeli conflicts of 1948, when it was a focus of bitter fighting, and its predominantly Arab population was evicted, after which it was excavated – it is now just an archaeological site. But that was just the latest in a long line of troubles. And one of the worst time had been under the Roman occupation of Israel, around the time of Jesus’ birth.

 

Shortly after King Herod died in 4 BC, a Jewish rebel leader called Judas, the son of a local bandit, had seized Sepphoris and incited its people to revolt. The Romans came down hard on Sepphoris, and, of course, the rebel forces were no match for theirs. According to ancient historians they burned the city to the ground, and killed many of its inhabitants.

 

Rather than leaving the town a ruin, though, Herod’s son, the new ruler of the area, decided to rebuild Sepphoris, to be what he called “the ornament of Galilee”, a fine Roman-style town, which would remind anyone who saw it who was in charge. Sepphoris became famous for its loyalty to Rome – they never rebelled again. They had learned their lesson the hard way.

 

But rebuilding the town was no mean feat. It took a lot of builders, and where were they to come from, when so many in Sepphoris itself had been killed? They were brought in from neighbouring villages, places like Nazareth, which is just on the next hill. It’s entirely possible that one of those builders was Joseph. We usually think of him as a carpenter, but the Greek word that describes him is teknon, and it just means a builder – the kind of person who could turn their hand to anything. He would almost certainly have taken along any of his sons who were old enough to be any use too, so today, when you place your hands on the ruined walls of Sepphoris today, you just might be touching the work of Joseph, or Jesus himself, a thought which I found rather spine-tingling when I was there.

 

Whether “Joseph and sons” rebuilt Sepphoris, though, they would have known what had happened there, just as we would if a great disaster had fallen on Wrotham, which is about the same distance away from us in Seal. They would have known people directly affected by the rebellion and its aftermath. Perhaps friends or relatives would have been among those killed or made homeless. The slaughter and sacking of Sepphoris would have overshadowed local memory, and the message of power that was being sent out by its rebuilding would have been clear to everyone. Don’t mess with Rome. It won’t end well.

 

It’s against this backdrop that we need to read Luke’s Gospel, and especially the song of Mary, which we heard today. Jesus was born into a world where ordinary people had no security at all, where their voices didn’t count, where their homes and lives could be taken away on a whim, and where they might even be expected to build monuments to their own oppression, which is what this “ornament of Galilee” really was.

 

Mary knew what power looked like in her world, and what happened to those who challenged it. And yet she rejoiced that through her child, God would pull down the powerful from their thrones, lift up the lowly, fill the hungry with good things and send the rich away empty.  She knew the risks. She knew the cost. She knew the price that people paid when they stood up to oppression. And yet she rejoiced, because she also knew God, and she knew that he cared and that he would act, just as he had so many times before – through Moses, through Miriam, through Joshua, through Deborah, through David, through Ruth, through Daniel, through prophets and leaders, brave men and women who had trusted God and had stood up for what was right, even when everything looked as if it was against them. And now he was acting through her, and through the child she carried.

I’ve had two children myself, and remember the joy of knowing that I was carrying a new life, but if I’m honest, it was really just about me and them. It’s very hard, when you are expecting, or are a new parent, to see beyond the tiny baby to the grown adult they will become, to rejoice not just for the immediate joy they bring to what they might one day do for others. But Mary does in her song. In fact, this child will grow up to die on a cross. He won’t be there to support her in her old age. He won’t give her any grandchildren. But she takes joy in what he will do for the rest of the world, the gift he will be for everyone else, as he gives a voice to the voiceless, and stands with those who are marginalised and ill-treated.

 

I’ve noticed that whenever church leaders make any statement about any sort of current affairs, people leap on them and tell them to stay out of  politics and stick to spiritual matters. As the 20^th century Brazilian Bishop, Helder Camara, said, “When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint; when I ask why they are poor, they call me a communist.” It is often far more comfortable to spiritualise and privatise faith, to make it all about individual salvation or personal happiness, but that’s not a faith which Mary would have recognised.

 

That tendency to look inwards often seems especially strong around Christmas. The images we see often focusses on the home, on the nuclear family gathered around a groaning table. It’s about Christmas jumpers and chestnuts roasting on an open fire, about time off and relaxation in the private sanctuary of your own home.

 

There’s nothing wrong with any of those things in themselves, but it’s important to recognise that for Mary, the birth of her son is about on those who have no home, no family, no food, never mind a groaning table. It’s about those who long for rest, but find none, who daily face the grind of oppression. These are the ones who she longs to see lifted up, and knows that to do so will mean that others must be pulled down. The birth of her son is for those forced by the vagaries of politics to make long journeys, as she was, to places where there is no room for them. It is about danger and fear. It’s hard for us to see any cause for rejoicing in that, but Mary realises that into all this mess, the son of God is about to be born, through her. It may seem like a small thing – a tiny baby born to a poor family – but this is the one whose life will change the world, by changing the lives and hearts of those who follow him.

 

And that is why she rejoices.

 

Her words, which are said or sung at every service of Evening Prayer, are explosive in their implications. This is what Christian faith is meant to look like. This is how the followers of Jesus are meant to live, she reminds us.

 

This year, above all years, none of us knows quite what Christmas will look like. We take our lateral flow tests and hope that we won’t see that second red line, with all that might mean for us. We worry about Christmas being spoiled, our best laid plans coming to nothing.

 

But Mary’s song reminds us that it is precisely for times like these that Christ was born, when the love and courage we show one another really matters, when we are called to put others needs before our own. He is the promise of God’s love in the darkness as much as the light. He is the promise of God’s love when things go wrong just as much as when they go right.  And neither invading armies nor invading viruses can take that love away from us, this Christmas or ever.

Amen

 

Rejoice! Advent 3

 Audio version here 

Philippians 4.4-7, Luke3.7-18

 

Today, the third Sunday in Advent is sometimes called Gaudete Sunday. Gaudete means “rejoice” in Latin, and it’s the opening word of the first reading we heard, which has been been read on this day right back into the Middle Ages.. “Rejoice!” says Paul to the Philippians. In fact, he says it twice – “and again I say rejoice”. We light the pink candle on our Advent wreath in church because today was traditionally a day when the Advent fast was relaxed. “Are we nearly there yet?” Yes, we are. We’ve nearly made it to Christmas

 

The reading is a wonderfully joyful one...unless, of course, your life has just gone pear-shaped, you’ve got a chronic illness, you’ve lost a job, you’ve been bereaved, you’ve fallen out with a friend or family member, or encountered any one of the many disasters that life can throw at us. It that’s the case, then Paul’s cheery words can just  feel like a kick in the teeth. It’s like when someone says “cheer up, it may never happen” - but it already has. “Turn that frown upside down” people say – well, no, sometimes we can’t, and we shouldn’t.  It’s all very well for Paul, we might think. Life was obviously going swimmingly for him. If he was in our shoes, he wouldn’t be so irritatingly jolly.

 

Except that if we read the whole of his letter to the Philippians, we find that isn’t so at all. In fact, when he writes these words, Paul is under arrest. We know that because he tells us so at the beginning of the letter. He’s been imprisoned by the Romans, and is being guarded by Roman soldiers, and that’s never good news. Paul knew that sooner or later his message would probably get him into trouble, and it did. You don’t tangle with the might of Rome and get away with it. Eventually he was executed for his faith, and it’s not hard to see why. He was preaching about another kingdom, the kingdom of God, and that sounded like rebellion to the Romans. He followed another ruler, and to add insult to injury, it was Jesus, who they thought they’d got rid of on the cross, but who Paul insisted had been raised from death. They couldn’t be doing with people who made trouble like that.

 

Even as Paul writes to the Philippians, he knows that the writing is on the wall for him.  

And yet, still he says “rejoice”.

 

But of course, he doesn’t just say “rejoice” and that’s the key to understanding this passage. He actually says “rejoice in the Lord”. When it’s all going wrong, when the sky feels as if it’s falling on our heads, simply being told to rejoice is an insult. We have to have something to rejoice about, some reason for rejoicing, something to find joy in, and for Paul, the cause of his rejoicing is Jesus. His resurrection was the proof for Paul that nothing, nothing could defeat God’s love. No army in the world, no disaster, not even death on the cross had the last word; the last word belonged to God.

 

The resurrection wasn’t just an amazing miracle to Paul; it was the proof that in the end, love wins, that it is stronger than hatred. He didn’t think that God would prevent bad things happening – after all, God hadn’t swooped down and saved Jesus from dying – but his resurrection showed that even though sometimes love seems wasted, goodness seems pointless, they never are. Their effects are eternal, and spring up in the most unexpected times and places. At the beginning of his letter to the Philippians, he says that what has happened to him – this cruel imprisonment - has actually helped to spread the Gospel, because his message has now come to the imperial guard, the soldiers who are guarding him, and that it is changing lives even among them. When he calls the Philippians to rejoice, he isn’t calling them to forced cheerfulness, he is calling them to see that in all times and all places, God is at work, that, as he puts it here, the Lord is near.

 

In the Gospel reading today, John the Baptist also preached about God’s nearness,  but in a much starker and less comfortable way. He doesn’t mince his words with those who come to him. I’ve never called people a “brood of vipers” from the pulpit, and I don’t plan to start doing so - I think you’d probably be complaining to the Bishop if I did, and with some justification. But we do all need shaking out of our complacency sometimes. There are times when we need to change. We know there’s no quick fix to problems like the climate emergency. There’s no superficial answer. We can’t just hope that clever scientists or politicians will come up with a magic wand which enables us to go on living as we do; we know that all of us will have to learn to live differently if there’s any hope of the human race living at all.

 

Whether it is big things like that, or the many smaller, but just as devastating problems we face individually, it is easy to wallow in blame and guilt, or just to try to close our eyes to them. One of the reasons we do that is because, deep down we don’t really believe that anything can change. But John’s words, stark as they seem actually lead us out of that despair. He preaches about the possibility of change, calling people to share what they have, treat others fairly, do their jobs with integrity, whatever they are. He preaches about a God who loves his people enough to want them to be transformed, washed clean in the waters of baptism, able to start again. He doesn’t abandon us or give up on us. In a lovely poem about John the Baptist, Charles Causley describes him as someone who’d “hold your hand/ and bring you to land/ and wash your fears away.” John preaches about a God to whom each one of us matters, and who sends his Son knowing that he will face the worst human beings can do to him, to show us just how much each one of us matters.

 

That kind of love and commitment is what, in the end, changes people towards the good. Fear can’t do it. Force can’t do it. Only love can really transform us. Once we know that we are loved by God, that we matter to him, we can never entirely unknow that. It will glow in a corner of our hearts to be discovered on even the darkest day. And if we believe it for ourselves, we have to believe it for others too, so it will change the way we treat them too.

 

And that is our cause for rejoicing. As Paul sits in his prison cell, he knows that he is not alone, that God is right there with him in the darkness and the fear, and right there, too, in the hearts of the Roman soldiers who are guarding him, leading them to wonder how this prisoner manages to find joy even in the midst of terror and maybe, for some of them, enabling them to find that joy for themselves. And it can do the same for us.

 

Rejoice in the Lord always, and again I say rejoice. Amen

Names... Advent 2 (with baptism)

 

Philippians 1.3-11, Benedictus and Luke 3.1-6

 

Tiberius, Pontius Pilate, Herod, Philip, Lysanias, Annas and Caiphas. Judea, Galilee, Ituraea and Trachonitis, Abilene…

Today’s Gospel reading was full of names of people and places – a bit of a challenge to read. But my guess is that most of them meant nothing at all to you. Anyone want to tell me who Lysanius was? Anyone able to point to Trachonitis on a map? (Without googling them, which is what I had to do). Pontius Pilate and Herod might have stirred a memory, and maybe you recognised Galilee, but my guess is that there were quite a few names there that were a complete blank. It’s really tempting to skip over the opening lines of this reading. After all, what have these obscure people and places got to do with anything?

 

But of course, the point is that although these names and places are obscure to us, they wouldn’t have been to the people who first heard Luke’s Gospel. These were people who had been big in the first century world in which Jesus ministered, the ones who had power. Luke wrote his Gospel forty or fifty years after Jesus’ crucifixion, but these would still have been names and places that were remembered, that came freighted with memories and emotions. It would be a bit like me saying  “in the time of Margaret Thatcher” or “when Tony Blair was Prime minister ”. That would trigger a whole raft of associations for us, either from our own memories if we’re old enough to remember those time or from the stories of others. It’s the same with places too. If something happens in a place we know, where we used to live or still do, we sit up and take notice. We might feel a sense of pride. “It’s put Seal on the map” we say,. Or we might feel a sense of shame and surprise. “You don’t expect things like that to happen in your own backyard,”

 

Lysanius, Trachonitis and all the rest were as familiar and as emotive to the people Luke wrote his Gospel for as our own politicians, celebrities, or familiar place names are for us. They locate the story he writes in a particular time and place. It isn’t “long ago and far away”. He’s not writing about some abstract idea. He’s writing about something that happened to people and in places that his hearers might have known or known of. They were famous.

 

And yet it isn’t them who this story is really about. Listen to that first sentence again. “In the fifteenth year of the reign of the Emperor Tiberius, when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, and Herod was ruler of Galilee and his brother Philip ruler of the region of Ituraea and Trachonitis , and Lysanias ruler of Abilene, during the high-priesthood of Annas and Caiphas, the word  came to John son of Zechariah, in the wilderness.” John who? It was a very common name in first century Israel. John, the son of Zechariah. Zechariah who? Oh, just some old priest who worked in the Temple now and then, no one anyone would ever have heard of. And what territory does this John rule over? None at all – he lives out in the wilderness.

 

All that build up, through all those names, but it turns out that a scruffy unknown preacher is the central character in Luke’s story. And the reason for that, of course, is that he is the one who announces that God is on the move, that the Messiah, the leader God had promised is coming, who points the way to Jesus, another apparently obscure person, just a carpenter from Nazareth, with no army to command, and yet between them – John the Baptist, as we know this John, and Jesus – they would change the world. It’s their names which ring out through history, their impact which has lasted, when poor old Lysanias is long forgotten.

 

Names matter. Today in church we’re baptising Harry Benjamin Fuller. He’s not quite five months old yet. I have absolutely no idea what he’ll do when he is grown up. Even his parents are only really starting to get to know him, discovering his personality, his likes and dislikes. So much about little Harry is, as yet, unknown and unknowable, like the many thousands of children who have been baptised here before him. But what we do know is that he is unique, that he comes into the world with gifts to give, blessings to share. He may never be world-famous. He may not find a cure for cancer, or fly to Mars, or play football for England, but he will have an impact on those around him, just as we all do. When we baptise him I will ask for his name, just as I always do, and use it, not because I need to tell God who he is – God already knows– but to remind us that here is someone who the world has never seen before and will never see again, a life that is unique, just as all our lives are.

 

It doesn’t matter whether we are kings or emperors – Tiberius, Pilate, Herod, or Lysanias, whoever he was.  God can, and does, work through anyone, including unconventional desert preachers like John the Baptist, and carpenters from backwater towns, like Jesus, and a whole range of others; ordinary people, odd people, broken people, people whose lives have gone off the rails or hit the buffers or who seem to have nothing much to offer, fishermen and tax collectors and women who are looked down on and despised, All of these, and many more, will turn out to be vital to the story Luke will tell in his Gospel, a story of God’s love for us all, just as all of our lives, whoever we are, whatever we achieve, or don’t,  in the world’s eyes, are vital to God’s work now .

 

So today, whoever we are, whatever our name, whether we are famous or not, the Gospel tells us that we matter. The word of God came to John. The word of God comes to each of us, calling us to prepare the way of the Lord, to sow seeds of love and hope and joy and peace, to play our part in creating communities where people are welcomed and can thrive, filled with the life of God.

Amen.

Be alert at all times: Advent 1 2021

 

1 Thess 3.9-13, Luke 21.25-36

 

“Be alert at all times!” says Jesus in the Gospel reading.

Oh Lord! Do we have to…?

I don’t know about you, but at this time of year I just want to go into hibernation, to curl up like the bears and the hedgehogs and sleep till the spring!

I don’t suppose I’m the only one who feels like that.

Can’t we just be left to slumber?

 

That isn’t an unreasonable question. Many people these days get far too little rest, working all hours to make ends meet, juggling to meet their commitments, under pressure to do more with less, or struggling with chronic illness or disability. There’s often no simple way to ease up, but it’s important to recognise when “enough is enough”, and allow ourselves to stop. The Bible doesn’t advocate burn-out. Quite the reverse: rest is sacred. We’re told to keep a Sabbath, a regular time for doing nothing. And in case we’re tempted to think that might have been easier back in Biblical times, let’s remember that God gave that commandment to keep the Sabbath holy as his people were trekking across the desert towards the Promised Land, when their lives must have been almost impossibly harsh and demanding. Even then - especially then – in the fact of all that it was vital that they learned to rely on God, not on their own anxious efforts, which were never going to be enough in any case. We can’t do it all, no matter how hard we try.

 

If the Advent call to wake up, feels like just another demand sent to hound us, another burden to bear, more stuff we ought to do, then there’s something wrong with the way we are understanding it. Jesus doesn’t call his followers here to be busy, but to be alert, and that’s very different. In fact, busyness can make us less alert. If our minds are literally pre-occupied – already full - with our to-do lists and our worries, it’s much harder to pay real attention to the things that really matter.

 

And that’s what the Advent call is; a call to pay attention to what really matters, and most of all to pay attention to God, to look for his presence, to notice him at work in ourselves, in others, in the world around us. The promise of the Bible is that if we can do that properly it will bring us the true rest we really need.

 

Jesus expresses this call to pay attention in very dramatic language – signs in the sun and moon and stars. He reminds his hearers that it may not come in comfortable ways – it may feel like the heavens are shaking.  All this apocalyptic imagery can sound very alien to us. Did Jesus really believe that that this was literally what was going to happen? The answer is probably yes. He was a man of his time, just as we are of ours. His followers certainly believed that the end of the world as they knew it was just around the corner.

 

Two thousand years of history have shown that they were mistaken, but the underlying message Jesus gave them is still worth hearing, because it wasn’t, first and foremost about when and how the world would end, but about how to live in a world that felt constantly as if it might tumble around their ears at any moment, as our world so often does to us. The people of the first century lived under the shadow of persecution, disease, war and famine; they knew they might be swept away at a moment’s notice. For many people today that is still true. The migrants who lost their lives in the channel this week, and the many thousands desperate enough to take similar risks around the world, bear witness to that. But we have all been reminded of the fragility of human life over the last year or so. The end of the age, in some cosmic, universal sense, might not be around the corner, but the end of the age for each of us personally can still come on us completely unawares.

 

How do we cope with that? We could try to build defences against every possible threat, but no amount of money, power or influence can protect us completely.

 

We can’t stop bad things happening, but Jesus words remind us that we have a choice about how we respond to them. And the key to responding well, he says, is to be alert, to pay attention, not just to the problems, but to the ways in which God is present in the midst of them. “When these things take place” says Jesus, “stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.” Look at the fig tree, he goes on, whose unfurling leaves tell you summer is on the way. In the same way God’s kingdom is growing among you. Pay attention to its small beginnings and nurture them, he says.

 

What might that look like in practice? It might mean paying attention to the word of God, reading the Bible, spending time in prayer and reflection, so that we can learn to see ourselves as God sees us - eternally loved and of infinite value.

It might mean learning to see him at work in others too, though. 

 

In our first reading, Paul gave thanks for the Christians he was writing to in Thessalonika, for their love, which gave him strength and courage. The love of the Christian community mattered greatly to Paul. This was the man who’d once hated and persecuted Christians, until, on the road to Damascus, he’d had a dazzling vision of Jesus. But it wasn’t just the vision which changed his mind and heart, it was the fact that when he got to Damascus, blind and confused, one of the very people he’d been persecuting, a Christian called Ananias, had come to him – the enemy – prayed for his healing, taken him in and welcomed him into this very community he had been hell-bent on destroying. No wonder he later wrote so glowingly about the love which “bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.” He knew it for himself, and he wanted others to know it too, to pay attention to it, to draw on the strength that a community of loving people can provide. I see,  day to day, the quiet, often unsung care that people give each other in this church, and which spreads out to those around us too. It’s easy to take all that care for granted – but the love which notices people and helps them in the small things of life is something which many today are desperately hungry for, we should never underestimate how important and precious it is.

 

No one has a magic wand to wave away the sorrows of the world – the heavens do shake, there is distress among nations – it is part of life. But within all that trouble there are also the seeds of love and hope and joy, growing stubbornly amidst the wreckage of the world. Our job this Advent, and all year round, is to pay attention to those fragile seedlings wherever we find them so that they will grow into the kingdom God wants us all to enjoy.

Amen

 

My kingdom is not from this world

John 18.33-37 & Daniel 7.9-10,13,14

Power crazy people in themselves can be difficult enough but when they come face to face with their opposite number and neither will back down, then it’s often a recipe for disaster. People and physical resources become mere pawns in their games as they seek to destabilise and weaken each other. I’m sure that you can easily call to mind examples currently in the news, Belarus, Afghanistan and the troop build up near Ukraine come to mind.

So today we meet the familiar figure of Pontius Pilate, a powerful man indeed, the Roman Prefect (or Governor) of Judea with great military resources at his disposal. He really is not interested in the people’s squabbles as he sees the concerns of the Jewish leaders, there is a sense that he can’t be bothered to intervene in their dramas unless his rule is threatened. So he wastes no energy investigating what he assumes are false accusations against the man brought before him, this Jesus of Nazareth, and instead comes straight out with ‘ Are you the King of the Jews’?

If you asked a Judean local who was powerful they would tell you of the Roman and Jewish leaders but the way in which Jesus answers Pilate’s question has a sense of power that comes from a deeper authority which isn’t granted through rank or your place in the system.

Jesus’ reply is a challenge that I’ve seen described as ‘slow’, the slow food movement I’m familiar with but slow Kingship is a new way of for seeing things. I guess it’s the sort of challenge to Pilate and many like him which is subtle, rooted in truth and which just won’t go away. It requires a shift in the way we see things, it’s certainly not a Kingship for the war mongers or the vengeful.

Pilate correctly interprets Jesus’ replies to his question as a ‘yes’, a direct threat to his authority, in fact, to all authority. He’s not interested to hear what this type of kingship is all about, how it might differ from people’s expectations, how it’s very strength comes from turning away from the exploitation and violence that temporarily props up earthly rulers nor how it finds enduring power among the weak, the servants and those who seek justice.

Our lectionary labels this Sunday as ‘Christ the King’, the hinge between Ordinary Time and Advent which starts next week. When we think of Jesus’ kingship in the bible we may recall the time the Magi got King Herod worried when they asked ‘where is the child who has been born king of the Jews, or when Jesus was in the wilderness and refused an offer to have all worldly kingdoms if he would worship the devil. Perhaps the easiest image to conjure up is that of Christ riding into Jerusalem on a donkey as the crowds laid cloaks and branches in his path ‘Look, your king is coming to you, humble, and mounted on a donkey…’ 

These earlier events have already taught Jesus’ followers that this is no normal king but someone who has come to show them what real kingship is about, how things could be so much better for us and all in the world if only we would listen. But even to them it must have been a challenge to recognise Christ’s kingship as he is pushed around and sent before Pilate as a child might be sent to the Headmaster.

In our reading from the book of Daniel we hear an Old Testament description more in line with what we might recognise as earthly power. A great throne to be occupied by ‘an ancient one’, old and wise we assume, in white robes as fire spues out around him and thousands of servants attend him.

It plays into the stereotype that God is an old bloke with white hair, just like in many films and cartoons.

‘An ancient one’ can be an image used both positively and negatively dependant upon one’s agenda.

Age should not be a determining factor in anything much, ageism is often rife along with many other prejudices, and because our world is so technology driven some younger people associate a lack of familiarity with tech as a lack of familiarity with the world when the fact is that each can benefit from the others knowledge.

Admittedly it can sometimes seem that different generations have their own language. I heard of one mum, confused by all the abbreviations used in texting who sent a message her son to asking what does IDK, LY, & TTYL mean? He texted back, I Don't Know, Love You, & Talk To You Later. So she replied, don't worry about it. I'll ask your sister, love you too.

Let’s be honest, we’ve all done it, or at least had to fight hard not to do it. You are sat down in a warm conference room, however important the subject, the presenter may not be the most scintillating, maybe you’ve had lunch and the lights are dimmed. Add in some jetlag and a busy schedule and perhaps you don’t actually have to be that ancient to fall asleep, though if you hold a position of global responsibility you can be sure that your opponents will seize the opportunity to say this proves that you are ‘past it’.

Until very recently a Reader (Lay Minister) upon reaching the age of 70 would automatically trigger the need for Permission To Officiate (PTO) from the Bishop. It’s an interesting thought now that I have several people over 70 working full time in our business, a Building Surveyor of 78 was still happily inspecting lofts and climbing scaffolding when he retired.

It's quite thought provoking this age and power thing, especially when you consider that the boss of the Church of England, Her Majesty the Queen is 95. I doubt that she had any direct influence but now those youngsters in their 70’s can simply seek endorsement from the Vicar for a license extension.

Particularly in the Old Testament the various Kings were always up to something so Daniel’s vision would have caused the ears of those hearing this to prick up.

At this particular time, around 167 BC, the Syrian Emperor Antiochus IV was persecuting the Jews but Daniel speaks of a divine courtroom where God has pure white robes and sits in judgment unaffected by transitory rogue leaders offering a vision of hope.

Our focus should be on helping each other thrive through recognition of our common humanity drawing upon the example of the one who came before the throne to inherit an ‘everlasting dominion’…’that shall never be destroyed.’ Jesus humanity is found here.

As we begin to understand the type of kingship we see in Jesus it helps us recognise a clear mis-match with much of what we passively accept as normal. We need to think afresh about why we are doing certain things and if they seem right to pursue them with a degree of humility.

There is a great deal of difference between those that accept positions of responsibility and service aware of their weaknesses and reliance upon the support of others and those that seek self-importance and power. The real question is whether leaders want to rule over or to live in community with others.

We know that there is a great deal wrong with our world but we ( us here, you and me) also need to be people who can recognise God’s kingdom when we see it in each other. As Christians we remain people of hope, seeking peaceful resolution of our differences and not giving up in our efforts to collaborate with people of all faiths and none where this benefits others. We get a glimpse of Christ’s kingship each time we see kindness and forgiveness in action that seeks no reward, even more so when it is for those we don’t know, find hard to help or even like. In doing these things we are not keeping God’s kingdom to ourselves but allowing others to experience it and share in it. There’s always a possibility that it might catch on and spread further.

We are citizens of God’s kingdom every time we refuse to turn our back on people in need, every time we have the courage to stand up against what we know to be wrong and every time we try to put God’s desires above our own.

So, as we celebrate Jesus as king today, let’s try to take all we have been told out into our world and play our part in building that kingdom which he desires for our entire humanity.

Amen

Kevin Bright                                                                        20th November 2021

Third Sunday before Advent: Second chances

Jonah 3:11-5, 10, Psalm 62:5-14, Mark 1:14-20

 

I really enjoy watching tv programmes like The Great British Bake Off. I love watching others bake incredible cakes and biscuits each week, or sew beautiful garments. There are several programs that follow this format. My favourite one is still the Pottery Throw Down - for me, it even beats Strictly. It amazes me how creative people can be as they make something wonderful to behold - or maybe not - out of a lump of clay. The bit I don’t enjoy, though, is when someone has to leave the group at the end of the programme. There’s often tears and sadness as someone is eliminated.

 

Don’t get me wrong - I don’t have a problem with people winning. But I have realised that what I don’t like about these programmes is that people don’t get a second chance at things. Wow - second chances are great, aren’t they? There is such relief and joy whenever there is one of those weeks where they don’t send anyone home but give everyone a second chance. You can see a sort of hopefulness in the group in the way their hearts are lighter within them, at this unexpected second chance.

 

The verses from today’s Old Testament reading tell us something about second chances - I wonder what that felt like for both Jonah and the Ninevites. We join Jonah halfway through his story. This is actually the second time that God has spoken to Jonah about Nineveh. When God first speaks to him, he tells Jonah to go immediately to Nineveh and cry out against their wickedness. This is the last thing Jonah wants to do - Nineveh had a fearsome reputation for being cruel and violent. ‘No thanks' - thinks Jonah - ‘that’s not for me! I’ll sail as far away from Nineveh as I can.’

 

Perhaps wickedness isn’t the only way to turn our back on God and go in the opposite direction to what he wants for our lives. Instead of going overland to the East, Jonah sails West. But God brings such a terrible storm on the boat, that Jonah asks to be thrown into the sea. And here’s the bit of the story that you might be familiar with - the whale. God sends a very large fish to swallow Jonah and get him to dry land.

 

Now, whatever we think about how possible it might be for someone to be swallowed by a very large fish and survive, Jonah writes a prayer about the experience. In it, he tells us about God. “Deliverance belongs to the Lord!” says Jonah. He says that when he called out to God in his distress, God answered him and delivered him. God hears Jonah’s anxiety and dispair and God responds with mercy, rescuing Jonah and saving him from death. Jonah doesn’t drown is given a second chance.

 

I wonder what Jonah felt about this second chance. Nineveh was the huge city of the Assyrians and was the largest in the world for a number of years. It was also a place of terrible cruelty. Two of the Old Testament books have stories of the violence that Israel experienced at the hands of the Assyrians. The Assyrians slaughtered and enslaved countless people, using exploitation and abuse to get what they wanted. Archeology shows stone carvings depicting the hideous acts they committed.

 

So it’s easy to see why Jonah didn’t want to go there. God was calling Jonah to have compassion on a city that was a threat to his own people, maybe even a threat to those he loved. God calls Jonah to trust God in a situation that was way out of his comfort zone.

 

And Jonah, this second time around, does what God asks. He walks for 3 days across this vast city, preaching God’s message for the Ninevites. He perseveres in warning the Ninevites about God’s judgement on their wickedness. My goodness, those Ninevites benefitted from Jonah’s second chance, didn’t they - because they get to hear about God, in time to have the opportunity to escape God’s judgement. They get to hear about the deliverance of the Lord by someone who knows what that feels like.

 

At this point in the story, everyone has been offered a chance to act on what they hear, either from God or about God. The effect on the Ninevites is quite unexpected, given their reputation for evil wickedness. There’s a radical change in the Ninevites.

They proclaim a fast, and everyone, whoever they are, takes off their nice clothes and dresses themselves in plain garments made out of sacking material. Rather like wearing hessian - very scratchy I would imagine!

 

And just as Jonah learns that deliverance belongs to the Lord, the Ninevites also discover this. God sees how they turn from their wicked and evil ways, and he changes his mind about  the calamity that he said he would bring upon them. Just as God heard Jonah’s anxiety and distress when Jonah was drowning, so God also hears the anxiety and distress of the Ninevites - and at this particular point he delivers them. 

 

We might find it quite hard to read about how God gives these wicked people the chance to turn to him and escape his judgment. It can be painful to think of wickedness going unpunished. I think that it’s very natural to feel confused and maybe even angry with God at times. But it’s what we do with that confusion that matters, and where we go with our anger. In the following chapter of Jonah, we read that God is big enough for us to take our questions to him. He will listen.

 

In fact in the Psalm we read today, we are encouraged to pour out our hearts before God. The Psalmist says that he has found God to be a refuge when he pours his heart out to him. The Psalm says that there is a robustness and firmness about God that we can trust - always. This is where we find hope. Even in the quiet waiting, as we put our trust in God, we can know that we are held safely and securely in the steadfast love of his power.

 

And just as God didn’t let go of Jonah, so he won’t let go of us. God’s grace and persistence with Jonah gives us such hope - I know how much I don’t want God to give up on me. I’m sure that I’m like most people in being grateful for second chances. I’m so glad that God doesn’t use the same format as all those tv programmes like Bake Off, and eliminate us one by one. Instead, he offers a welcome to everyone and anyone who wants to join in. Anyone who turns to him will find him. It’s the beautiful good news that Jesus brings, isn’t it. For he himself journeys out of his comfort zone to visit a vast place, full of wicked people. He also brings the same message - the need to repent - but he also brings good news with him. The good news is that in Jesus, God will deal with evil and wickedness. The good news, that in Jesus there is forgiveness for all the ways we turn away from God. The good news, that believing in Jesus is about having a relationship with God. It’s a relationship where we can pour out our hearts to him, and find God to be a strong, sure place of safety and refuge.

Amen

Bible Sunday

 

Bible Sunday 2021

 

Isaiah 55.1-11, John 5.36b-47

 

When my children were at primary school, there was one part of the curriculum which always struck me as particularly humane. “What did you do at school today?” I would ask. Often the answer was “nothing”, of course, but sometimes they would say “oh, we had ERIC today”.

ERIC – who was Eric? Some new teacher? It took me ages to discover that it stood for “Everyone Reading In Class”. It was basically a session where each child got out a book and read silently to themselves. Frankly it would have been my idea of heaven, and I think my children felt the same way.

 

Today is Bible Sunday, and there’s a bit of me that wonders whether, rather than me blathering on, I shouldn’t just declare this to be an ERIC day – Everyone Reading In Church (whether you are in the Church building or sharing in Church online through the podcast). I wonder whether I should tell you to open a Bible and just sit and read it for 10 minutes or so. It would be a lot less work than writing a sermon.

 

But the problem with ERIC is that though it might be my idea of heaven, it’s might be your idea of hell. I know it was for some children, especially those who struggled with reading, or just didn’t like sitting still. And if reading a story book is a challenge, then reading the Bible can feel like a much greater one. It’s not the same as getting lost in a page-turning whodunnit or a romance. It isn’t one book, for a start. It’s a whole library of different sorts of books, written over many hundreds of years by many different people, covering many different genres – history, poetry, prophecy, myth, proverbs, letters. Some of them are far more difficult to get our heads around than others. It was produced in cultures very different from our own by people with different assumptions and agendas. Sometimes it is quite baffling, and brutal. And it doesn’t help that often we just hear little snippets of it in church, without any context. How can we even begin to make sense of it?

 

Another barrier to reading the Bible can be the worry that we might not understand it correctly. After all, it’s holy writ, the word of God, somehow different and sacred, we think. What if we get it wrong? Perhaps we’d better leave it to the experts, just in case.

 

We might worry too, that people will think we’ve turned into religious extremists – Bible bashers – that we’ve surrendered our critical faculties to some Bronze Age mumbo jumbo.

 

As someone who’s had a lifelong love of the Bible, I’m passionate about helping people to get beyond those worries, though. I’m no fundamentalist or Biblical literalist, but I’ve found time and time again that God speaks to me through these ancient words, not necessarily because those who wrote them had a hotline to God, but because they were willing to struggle honestly with their experiences, with themselves, and with God too sometimes. I may not always come to the same conclusions they did, but their stories help me to see my own story more clearly, and so be aware of God’s Holy Spirit at work here and now. Of course, the Bible can be misused, and misunderstood, but the answer to that isn’t to keep it firmly closed and locked away, but to open it up and dive in, letting it become our book, our territory, our pathway into the heart of God.

 

Here at Seal, as well as in Sunday worship and in the private, individual Bible reading we do, we chew over the Bible together in our monthly Good Book Club - a Bible discussion group I run on the first Wednesday morning of each month, and in our Zoom Church sessions, and in home groups - let me know if you’d like to be part of one, or start a new one with some friends. In these groups we aren’t looking to find the “right” answers from an expert. Everyone brings their own insights, and they’re all valuable. Often it’s the questions we ask rather than the answers we give that open up the Bible most effectively, the doubts rather than the faith. It genuinely doesn’t matter whether you are an old hand or coming to it brand new. Some of the most profound insights I’ve had into the Bible have come to me from children; their reactions make me see stories that I am over-familiar with in a completely new way.

It’s when God’s story and our stories intertwine that we really start to hear what we need to hear, as God’s word becomes flesh in us, together.

 

In today’s Gospel reading, Jesus makes that point to the religious experts who come to him. It’s all very well reading the ancient words of Moses in their sacred scrolls, but if they can’t recognise the Word of God in flesh and blood, standing in front of them, living out the love that the ancient scriptures call them to, then they haven’t understood what they’re reading, he tells them. If what we read doesn’t lead us to become more loving, more whole, and bring wholeness to others too, then we’re missing the point.

 

So how do we get started, and how do we make sure that we’re reading the Bible in a way that is life-giving, for us and for others?

 

I read a very helpful book earlier this week – I’ll put it at the back of church after this morning’s service. It’s called “How to eat bread”, but don’t worry; I’m not about to give up the day job and go into catering. The bread it refers to is the spiritual food we get from the scriptures. The subtitle is  “21 nourishing ways to read the Bible”. For the author, Miranda Threlfall-Holmes, the Bible is like bread, something essential, a staple food, but it’s endlessly versatile too. Bread comes in many forms; brown , white , wholemeal, granary, French, flatbread, naan, rye… the list goes on and on. And there’s so much you can do with it. You can mop up your gravy with it, toast it, make sandwiches with it… You can even spread Marmite on it, though I can’t imagine why you’d want to… And if it goes stale, well, there’s bread and butter pudding. You get the point.

 

Reading the Bible can be done in just as many ways. Some of those ways are academic, and maybe a bit specialised; reading it in the original languages, investigating its historical and geographical context, pulling it apart and analysing it. Those things are important. We need that sort of scholarship and attention to detail.  But we can also use our imagination to read the Bible, whoever we are. We can imagine we are part of the stories it tells. We can play with it, act it out, mull over individual words and phrases that strike us in it, draw it, paint it, embroider it. We can notice who speaks and who is silent, who’s included and who’s left out of the stories we read. We can look at it from the perspective of people very different from us, too, and be enlightened by that.

 

Miranda Threlfall-Holmes tells the story of a Biblical scholar, Mark Allen Powell, who read Jesus’ well-known parable of the Prodigal Son to three different groups, one in America, one in Russia and one in Tanzania. He asked them all the same question. Why did the prodigal son end up so poor and so desperate, longing to eat the food he was feeding to the pigs? The Americans said that it was because he’d wasted his money; it was his fault. The Russians said that it was because there was a famine in the land; he couldn’t have done anything about it. The Tanzanians said that it was because no one in his new land, where he was a stranger, offered him hospitality or help. The same story; three radically different interpretations, reflecting the backgrounds, the experiences and the unconscious biases of the hearers. Each view was valid, but very revealing, and brought the story to life in a new way.

 

So, on this Bible Sunday, as on every other day of the year, even though I haven’t declared this to be an ERIC day, I hope we’ll find time to open the book, so that we do have “Everyone Reading in Church,” or at home, or on the train, or anywhere else you happen to be, and that we’ll have the confidence to bring ourselves to it, just as we are. If you’d like help in getting started, there’s plenty of it around. The leaflet I’ve given you today has ideas and resources in it. There are more at the back of church and in this week’s newsletter. And there are the home groups and other activities I mentioned earlier too. However we do it, I hope that we’ll continue to open the book, open our minds, open our ears, and open our hearts to the God who still longs to speak to us.  Amen  

...and again...Trinity 20

 

Trinity 20 2021

 

Two of Jesus’ closest disciples, James and John, come to him asking to sit on thrones on his right and his left when he comes into his kingdom, to be his right- and left-hand men. Jesus tells them that it’s not about thrones; it’s about serving others…

 

If you’ve been following the Gospel readings over recent weeks, all taken from chapters 9 and 10 of Mark’s Gospel, you may have noticed a certain sameness about the messages they’ve contained. They’ve all been stories about greatness and littleness, pride and humility, as Jesus has told his followers time and time again that it’s the “little ones” who are first in the queue in God’s eyes, whether those “little ones” are children or anyone else who is vulnerable and looked down on by the world; but time after time it goes in one ear and out of the other for the disciples.

 

If it all starts to feel a bit repetitive, I think that’s the point. Mark means us to notice the repetition. When will the disciples get it? When will they finally understand? They seem completely unable to imagine a world other than the one they live in, where might is right, and the strong always end up on top.

 

To make it worse, in these chapters Jesus tells them no fewer than three times that he is heading for arrest and crucifixion. He makes it very clear that their fantasies of power and glory are not going to materialise. But the more often he tells them, the more elaborate and entrenched those fantasies become. That’s probably no coincidence. Arguing about who gets the best seats is a great way of taking their mind off the thought of crosses and suffering.  

 

It would be quite understandable if Jesus had washed his hands of them completely at this point, but he doesn’t, and he won’t. Patiently, he explains it all over again. God isn’t playing power games, like the Roman Empire or King Herod. He isn’t planning to replace one set of tyrannical rulers with another. They won’t start really to understand how different God’s view of the world is until after the crucifixion and the resurrection, though, as they try to work out what those events meant.

 

Jesus’ execution should have been the final blow to any idea they might have had that he could be God’s chosen one. It very nearly was. The disciples were terrified and downcast when it happened. They just wanted to slink back to their old lives and forget about it all. But then Jesus rose again, and they started to see that the upside down world he’d been preaching about really was of God. On the cross, Jesus had become one of those humiliated “little ones” himself, helpless and vulnerable, and yet, through his resurrection, God declared that he’d been at work in this brokenness and disgrace. Those who’d condemned him to death, who abused him or colluded with his abuse, treated Jesus as less than nothing, rubbish to be discarded, but in God’s eyes he was everything, the one who opened the gateway to new life for us all.

 

These repeated stories of the disciples’ bumpy road to understanding were vital to Mark’s telling of the story because he knew the people he was writing for needed to hear them. Mark’s Gospel was written a few decades after the events they describe, for an early Christian community which was struggling to live out Jesus’ message in a world full of challenges. Sometimes they got it right; sometimes they got it wrong. It was important for them to know that those first disciples had been just as flawed, but that Jesus had stuck with them anyway.

 

We’re no different. We hurt one another, throw our weight around, collude with the power-hungry world around us. But God sticks with us and still wants to work through us anyway, calling us patiently, repeatedly, to learn and change, to find that resurrection life which transforms us and spills over to those around us. And just as he did with those first disciples, he sticks with us until we get it – probably not perfectly this side of heaven, but at least in part. And as he walks beside us on that bumpy road to growth, Jesus himself shows us how those changes can start to happen.

 

Today’s reading from the letter to the Hebrews isn’t easy to understand,. There are a lot of rabbit holes we could disappear down – who is Melchizedek? What are these Temple rituals the author writes about? But there isn’t really time for that, and I’m not sure you’d thank me for wandering down those byways either. 

 

There’s one verse which it is worth us spending some time on today, though, in the light of today’s Gospel passage. “Although Jesus was a Son,” says the writer of the letter, “he learned obedience through what he suffered; and having been made perfect he became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him.”

 

Please note, before I go any further with this, that it doesn’t say “God sent Jesus suffering to teach him a lesson…” God does not send us suffering to teach us things. If he did, he would be a monster. But that doesn’t mean that we can’t learn things from the troubles that come our way, just as we can learn from the good things. It doesn’t mean we can’t find gifts within them which we might not have found any other way. We can learn from anything – good or bad – and that is what we are called to do.

 

How do we do that? Hebrews tells us that obedience is the key. “Jesus learned obedience through what he suffered.” That might sound a bit grim. Obedience, to us, often implies mindlessly following orders, doing what you’re told without asking why or answering back. Obedience is what you teach dogs, so they will come when you whistle. We are rightly wary of expecting it from humans, though. But this isn’t really what the Greek word translated obedience here means.  

 

The word is “hupakuo” . “Akuo” means to listen or to hear – we get the word acoustic from it. The “hup” at the beginning of the word means under or beneath. It intensifies the idea. It’s about really listening or hearing. We know what it feels like when someone’s really listening to us. When someone really listens, they take time to receive and ponder what we’re saying, getting under the skin of our words to find out what’s beneath the surface. We probably also know what it feels like when we’re not being listened to, when the listener is full of their own agenda, just using the time to think up their own clever response. They are never going to be affected or changed by what they hear – and maybe they prefer it that way. The good listener, though, knows that what they hear might knock them off course completely, that they might learn something they don’t know.

 

Listening well isn’t just something we need to do to other people, though. We also need to listen to ourselves well, and to the situations around us, not instantly labelling feelings or circumstances good or bad, but looking out for the gifts in them, believing that we might find God at work in them, however unlikely that might look.

 

What happens to that verse from Hebrews, if we substitute “listen well” for the word “obedience”. Let’s try it. “Although Jesus was a Son, he learned to listen well through what he suffered and became the source of eternal salvation for all who listen well to him.” It feels quite different, doesn’t it?

 

In our Gospel reading, and all the others we’ve heard in recent weeks, we meet disciples who were struggling to learn to listen well. They had to learn to listen well to Jesus, to listen well to the things that happened to him, to listen well to themselves and to their own reactions. They had to learn to listen well to the painful things as well as the joyful ones, to listen well for the still, small voice of God in littleness and brokenness and failure, rather than just paying attention to the trumpet calls of worldly power and success. Mark tells us how they got it wrong again and again, until we are fed up with it, because he knew that his community, and those who would come after them – that’s us – would get it wrong just as often. But the good news is that Jesus doesn’t give up on us, any more than he did on them.

 

May we listen well today, to our own hearts, to one another, to all that happens to us and around us, and to God, who faithfully sticks with us, listening well to us, throughout it all.

Amen

Relationships

 

Mark 10.2-16, Genesis 2.18-24

They are great these sort of questions aren’t they, the type that you might expect to hear in parliament or the courtroom. The person asking already knows what reply they are hoping for and in this case it was intended to trap Jesus and catch him out.

‘Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?’

The question about marriage has been carefully composed, if he gives the answer that the Pharisees are hoping for he’ll be in serious trouble with the religious institutions.

As a preacher it would be nice to ignore awkward subjects like divorce and just focus on Jesus telling the disciples off for keeping little children from him.

Yet it’s a subject that has grown in prominence since the Pandemic with divorce rates soaring as couples were confined to each other’s company for unnaturally long periods of time in lockdown and in many cases prevented from returning to their places of work even when they wanted to, due to concerns around spreading the virus.

We probably all know people who are going through divorce, have been divorced or are contemplating divorce and know that it can range from a bitter and painful process to an inevitable failure where surprisingly often the couple get along much better just being friends once they get out from being under each others feet on a daily basis.

Our personal experience of divorce will inevitably affect how we hear and react to this reading and what we may think of the preacher’s comments. Human love for others remains a mysterious concept that can’t be pinned down, sometimes it will last a lifetime and sometimes it struggles to endure.

It’s really not something I feel comfortable or particularly qualified to talk publicly about but then Jesus is good at putting us in the position where we have to wrestle with something to which there are no neat answers, and where there may even be the potential to upset people . As we consider his own comments we might feel that this is something he could also be accused of.

In this case the pharisees are trying to get Jesus into the sort of trouble that John the Baptist had with king Herod who needed his wife to divorce before he could marry her. They weren’t really interested in his wisdom and guidance on the subject at all they just wanted to see whether he would also lose his head over this, in every sense of the phrase.

Out in the open with the crowd Jesus refers the pharisees back to Moses to answer their question, it seems that Moses allows for divorce if necessary. Then he quotes Genesis and explains how the wonderful possibility that two people can come together as one, is a gift from God. He’s clearly careful about what he says in public. He shifts the focus from legalities to encouraging thought about what marriage is supposed to be according to God.

Back in the relative safety of the house he seems harsher, perhaps he feels safe aiming his comments at Herod among those he trusts. No doubt his words about divorce and adultery have been quoted and misused over time to control a partner seeking divorce or to humiliate them when they do so, surely this can never have been Jesus’ intention. We are certain that he could never wish people loved by God to be trapped in abusive, dangerous or unhealthy relationships. Perhaps there is a sad acknowledgement that the Israelites in Moses day struggled to achieve their potential in Gods eyes just as generations have done ever since.

There’s certainly no place for those with long marriages to be smug. Every marriage is imperfect and many seriously malfunction and fail to live up to God’s ideal even when they endure. At their worst some are a microcosm for much that is wrong in our world. We also recognise that many who never formally marry can also have loving, stable and valuable relationships.

It’s really not straightforward at all is it. I heard of one couple which argued so much that they made each other’s life a misery, finally the man told his wife to pack her bags and go. As she was leaving he shouted down the driveway ‘I hope that you suffer for the rest of your life’. The woman turned around confused and said ‘ so you want me to stay now’?

Joking aside we can be confident that Jesus wants us all to look beyond an arrangement that simply complies with the law to something much deeper.  Perhaps he speaks in a harsher tone to his disciples as they know that his is a message of love and forgiveness despite our shortcomings, that he understands mankind’s many weaknesses and that perfection is not achievable this side of God’s kingdom.

Jesus would have been acutely aware of the imbalance of power in first century marriage and we need to guard against seeing what he said through 21^st century eyes.

In more recent times many view marriage in terms of legal rights that are created and financial entitlements. One accountant of a certain age even used to encourage his clients to get married at the start of a new financial year in order to maximise the tax benefits of doing so, an incentive long since dispensed with by HMRC ! Then there’s a whole industry in prenuptial agreements, ‘just in case’ you understand darling!

To hear Jesus’ words in context we need to remind ourselves that women were powerless in a marriage, sometimes caught in a legally binding contract with no rights whatsoever and facing absolute destitution should a man choose to divorce her. Unquestionably an incredibly unjust balance of power.

So the fact that Jesus talks of divorce for men and women in an equal way would have been shocking to many hearing his words. What on earth could he be advocating, surely not equality and protection for the vulnerable and powerless when relationships break down?

There’s another point in today’s readings which is really all about thriving alongside others.

Many will know from personal experience that when we lose someone we love we often appreciate more than ever what we have lost and it becomes apparent how much more complete we were with them around. When relationships do work out it’s clear how we often flourish and achieve much more than we can alone.

Genesis reminds us that God wants us to be in relationship with at least one other person we can rely upon and share with to the extent that we are not lonely. Not everyone will want another go at marriage or any form of partnership after a divorce or loss, not everyone will meet a life partner at all, but with real friends, family, people that care about them there’s still the opportunity for us to thrive as God intends.

In our Genesis reading God observes, “It’s not good that the man should be alone”.

So for this single human God creates “a helper as his partner.” Now a lot of men might automatically think well that’s really handy, someone to find his fig leaf when he can’t remember where he’s left it, pick fruit and light a fire maybe. Who knows, one day such a person might even evolve to load dishwashers and use vacuum cleaners!

But again equality is at the heart of God’s actions. In the Old Testament ‘a helper’ could be equal or even superior to the person they are helping. Numerous times God himself is described as a helper, particularly in the Psalms.

Psalm 54.4…But surely, God is my helper; the Lord is the upholder of my life.

I subscribe to the view that the fundamental question that needs to be considered today is, what does God think makes any relationship valuable?

It may be true that you don’t have to go to church to be a Christian but there is certainly a lot to be gained by being part of a church community whether in person or even online. There is more to be learned and achieved together when we are part of a community founded upon the love of God, also it’s a lot easier and more fun to move massive pews around the church together than to leave an individual to struggle alone.

There’s also an increased possibility that the couple, the friends, the group or community start looking beyond themselves. Together they are stronger as they support and care for each other, more interested in and able to look out for those who are not so fortunate. Surely these are exactly the relationships that have real value in God’s eyes and this where our focus should rest.

Amen

Kevin Bright

3^rd October 2021