Guests and hosts: Trinity 11

Ecclesiasticus (Sirach) 10.12-18, Hebrews 13.1-8,15-16, Luke 14. 1, 7-14

I don’t suppose Jesus was really looking forward to the dinner we’ve just heard about in the Gospel. I’m a bit of a party pooper myself – I would usually just as soon stay at home and have a mug of cocoa and an early night - but even the most sociable person might have hoped to avoid this particular occasion.

He’s been invited to a Sabbath meal by a “leader of the Pharisees” a group that was often in conflict with Jesus. Luke tells us that the Pharisees “were watching Jesus closely” – they are just waiting for him to get it wrong. It’s not a recipe for a happy evening.

But Jesus is also watching them, and what he sees says it all.

“He noticed,” says Luke, “how the guests chose the places of honour”. He saw who sat where, and he understood what that said about them. It sounds as if they were subtly jostling for the best seats, making sure they’d be nearest the host, in a privileged position. But there’s something odd about this statement, and that’s simply the fact that the guests, apparently, were choosing their own seats. If you go to someone’s house for dinner that’s not what you do even now – and it certainly wasn’t then. It’s the host who decides the seating plan. And that’s even more true if the meal is a formal one, with specially invited guests, as this Sabbath meal was. You don’t just head for the top table at a posh dinner or wedding reception because you fancy sitting there. 

In response, Jesus tells a parable which probably still has the power to make us cringe. Just imagine the walk of shame for the guest in it, who is publicly sent to sit at a lower table. He would probably never live down the humiliation. 

We might feel a bit sorry for him, but I don’t think Jesus’ first hearers wouldn’t have seen it that way. In their eyes it would have been clear that it was the guest who was in the wrong, breaking one of the first and deepest rules of hospitality by forgetting that he is a guest. He’s not the host. This is not his house. This is not his party.

That’s what I think Jesus is drawing attention to. This isn’t a story about social etiquette. It’s what the guests’ behaviour says about their deeper attitudes which bothers Jesus; the way they think about the world they live in and the people they share it with. Those who assume they have a right to the prime positions at the dinner table probably do the same in the rest of their lives. The Pharisees are criticised elsewhere in the Gospels for acting as if they are gatekeepers for God, as if heaven and earth is theirs to command, and they alone have the right to decide who is in God’s favour and who isn’t. In another place, Jesus criticises them for laying heavy burdens on people and not lifting a finger to help them when they struggle. It wasn’t true of all Pharisees, but it certainly seems to have been true of some. And we can often behave like this too. 

Human beings are naturally egocentric. When we are born we assume we are the centre of the universe. It’s a survival mechanism; babies have to make sure they are noticed, usually by screaming, because they are totally dependent on their parents. As we grow up, though, if all is well, we learn that life isn’t just about us, that we share the world, that other people have their own needs.  We learn that not everything can be bent to our will, no matter how much noise we make. We discover that the world is bigger than we are, and that we don’t rule it. 

Some people deal with that dethronement better than others, but most of us probably have at least the odd moment when we struggle with it, especially if we are feeling insecure or threatened. The guests at this Sabbath meal in the Gospel had very little power outside their own orbit. They lived in an occupied land, under the thumb of the Romans. But in their own small pond, they could be big fish, asserting their status by putting down those who had even less than they did. It was those people – the ones who were at the bottom of the heap – who Jesus was particularly concerned about, the poor and vulnerable and outcast, who didn’t have a place at the table at all. 

Power is a sort of comfort blanket; it gives us a sense of safety in an uncertain world, but ultimately, it’s a delusion. Neither this world nor the world to come are ours to own. We aren’t the hosts: we are the guests. We receive the gift of life, but we can’t ultimately control it. You don’t have to believe in God to know this – you just have to look around you at the immensity of the universe, the mighty forces it displays. The idea that we can lord it over creation, use it as we wish, is a fallacy that, in the end, brings down disaster on our heads. We are already seeing that as the impacts of climate change start to bite.

It's especially ironic that it was a Sabbath meal which provoked this power struggle.  That’s not an accidental detail. As I said last week, when we heard another story set on the Sabbath, this was meant to be a weekly celebration of the story of God resting after his labour of creation. It was meant to remind people that the world was God’s gift to them, not something they had made or could control. When we forget that and play God ourselves we do so at our peril, because none of us is big enough or clever enough to know what we are doing. As our Old Testament reading reminded us “The beginning of human pride is to forsake the Lord; the heart has withdrawn from its Maker.” 

This little tale of a supper party gone wrong, raises huge questions.

It raises ecological questions. Whose party is the banquet of life? How can we live as guests in the world, rather than assuming we have ultimate power over it?

It raises social questions. Who gets to decide in our society who is in and who is out, who gets the place of honour and who is shamed?

Then there are personal questions. When might I have acted like a big fish in a small pond, crushing the life out of others? Or maybe it’s the other way round. Have I let others squeeze me out of the picture and not had the courage to be the person I was created to be? 

But behind all these questions, I’d like to suggest, is an even bigger, spiritual question. If I’m not God, the centre of the universe, with the right to command and control, do I have the faith to let God be God instead? Can I trust that I am safe in his hands. That doesn’t mean nothing bad will ever happen to me but that, if it does, he will still be with me,  “never leaving me or forsaking me”, as the Bible promises.  Can I believe that? 

In the end that’s what delivers us from the need to grasp at a power which can never truly be ours, because it tells us that however insignificant we feel, in God’s eyes we are precious. Whether we are on the top table at the world’s feast or haven’t even made it past the bouncers at the door, each one of us is his honoured guest.  

Amen  

Sabbath Rest?: Trinity 10

Isaiah 58.9-14, Luke 13.10-17

 

I wonder how you feel about Sundays, the Christian Sabbath? It might depend on your age, of course. In my childhood in the 1960s, most shops were closed on Sundays, and there weren’t the Sunday sports activities there are now, but the really strict Sabbath observance had mostly disappeared – no playing, no hanging out washing.  I remember it as a quieter day than normal, a different day, including church in my case, but not a solemn or boring day. That may be partly because I was quite happy with my own company, with my nose in a book, but even so, looking back, I wonder whether it might have been a high point in Sabbath observance, preserving the sense of rest, but not in a repressive way, at least not in my family. Some of you may recall a much stricter Sabbath observance, or, if you are younger than me, you may never have known a time when this day was much different from the rest.   

 

At the time of Jesus, the Sabbath was a major preoccupation of the religious experts. The rules surrounding the Sabbath were a distinguishing feature of Jewish society, setting it apart from the nations around it. But the trouble with rules is that as soon as you make them, people will start arguing about them, finding complications, asking for exemptions. Take the hosepipe ban. Hosepipe use is banned at the moment here – unless you can’t run your business without using one, or have animals to care for, or, in some cases, if you are disabled. But who draws the lines between those who can and can’t – does washing the mud off your dog count, or is it only hosing down an elephant which exempts you? Who polices this? Would you report your neighbour for using a hosepipe on their runner beans? And how should it be enforced? Fines from the police or naming and shaming on facebook? Rules soon turn into minefields.  That was just as true of the religious experts of Jesus time. Carrying things was classed as work, for example, but did carrying a chair across a room count? They couldn’t agree. You couldn’t travel, but how far couldn’t you travel? You needed to get to the synagogue after all…

 

In the story we heard in the Gospel, Jesus runs up against one of those religious experts, the leader of the synagogue who had invited him to speak one Sabbath day, curious about this travelling preacher everyone was talking about. But whatever he expected, he got more than he bargained for. A woman turned up, who’d been ill for 18 years, bent double by some disease. Her disability must have made normal life very hard. She couldn’t even look people in the eyes when they spoke to her. And it’s quite possible that they shunned her anyway. Disease and disability were often regarded as punishments from God, so her neighbours may have thought she’d done something to deserve this.

It’s clear that she wasn’t going to push herself forward. She was used to being on the sidelines. It was Jesus who called her to him, laid his hands on her and lifted her up to standing again. The crowd were amazed and delighted, whatever they’d privately felt about this woman before. But the synagogue leader couldn’t see the wood for the trees. It was the Sabbath. Healing was work. Work was forbidden on the Sabbath. Jesus had broken the law. The fact that a desperate woman’s life had been transformed meant nothing to him. We’re told that he “kept saying” to the crowd that they should all have come on another day if they wanted healing… He kept saying it. You can almost hear the panic in his voice…

 

But Jesus stuck by what he had done, stuck by this woman. The law permitted people to take their livestock to food and water on the Sabbath, he said, so why should it forbid the healing of a human being in need? In fact, Jesus went further than that. He didn’t just believe he was allowed to heal on the Sabbath; he believed this was what he ought to be doing, what the Sabbath was for. “Ought not this woman, a daughter of Abraham whom Satan bound for eighteen long years be set free from bondage on the Sabbath.”

 

His opponents were put to shame by his answer, we are told, perhaps because at some level they recognised that his answer was firmly rooted in the Hebrew Scriptures.

 

The Bible said that the Sabbath had been given by God to the people of Israel as they trekked through the wilderness with Moses, after their deliverance from slavery in Egypt, where they’d probably have never known rest at all. But the gift of the Sabbath not only gave them a precious break from work, it also reminded them that they shouldn’t use their new-found freedom to exploit others, as they had been exploited. It was profoundly counter-cultural. The aim of most nations at the time was to expand, but how could you build a vast empire if you kept stopping to do nothing every seventh day? You couldn’t even properly defend your borders. The Sabbath set a limit to Israel’s power, and that was quite deliberate. It was a weekly reminder that their true worth didn’t depend on their productivity or their achievements; it came from God, who loved people as they were, productive or not.

 

Even God’s own value wasn’t located in what he did, according to the book of Genesis. God had created the world in six days, but on the seventh day he “ceased from his work”. I’m sure he hadn’t run out of ideas, but when he looked at what he’d made he knew that it was enough - good enough, rich enough, diverse enough. He didn’t feel the need to labour on and on, heaping up creation, striving after more. What he wanted was for it to be enjoyed, treasured and shared, as the blessing he meant it to be.

 

The Sabbath was meant to be a reminder of that first perfection, and a foretaste of how God meant his world to be in the future. The Sabbath wasn’t just a time to give tired bodies and minds a rest – valuable though that is. It was meant to be a glimpse of a world made right, the goal of our work on all the other days.

 

That’s why the prophet Isaiah, in our first reading, linked the Sabbath to justice and righteousness. You can’t expect to have a good Sabbath if you ignore those who are hungry and afflicted, if you speak evil of others, if you just pursue your own aims. That’s why Jesus could so confidently say that healing this woman on the Sabbath wasn’t just permitted; it was compulsory, exactly what the Sabbath was meant for.

 

This little story, then, packs a big punch. It asks us what we think we are here for, what our labours are for, what our lives are for. It challenges our priorities, and casts a light not only on what we do today, but what we do in the rest of the week too. God calls us to catch a glimpse of heaven on the Sabbath, the heaven we have been working with him to build in all the other days. Where will we spot God at work, and how will we join in with him?

Amen

Trinity 9: The signs of the times

 When Philip and I were on holiday in the Loire a couple of weeks ago, we visited some Roman ruins near the little village of Gennes. We hadn’t planned to visit them, but it was very hot, and they were in the midst of some woodland and we were at the point where we would have gone anywhere if it promised some shade. The ruins turned out to be the remains of a second-century amphitheatre, built by the Romans who had conquered and occupied Gaul. Every self-respecting Roman town expected to have an amphitheatre, but this one had been big, seating 5000 people. All that is left now, though, is the oval shaped arena, and some of the tiered seating on the sloping banks, which have been excavated and preserved. We had it to ourselves. It was peaceful and quiet. But as we walked around, we couldn’t help remembering what had once gone on there. The most popular attraction at these sort of arenas were gladiatorial games in which people fought to the death against each other or against wild animals. Many of them had no choice; they were enslaved, or had fallen foul of the Roman authorities in some way. Some may have been Christians, executed for their faith in these gruesome spectacles.

 

We might wonder why anyone would want to watch people dying like this, but they did, in large numbers. And before we get too sniffy about it, we might remember that public hangings took place in England right up to the 1860’s, and were regarded by many as a good day out, so long as it wasn’t you, or someone you loved, who was suffering.

 

The Roman writer Juvenal once made a barbed comment about the formula the rulers of Rome used to stay in power. “Bread and circuses” he called it. They’d realised that if you keep people fed – there was a free dole of bread for Roman citizens – and if you keep them entertained people will ignore almost any amount of injustice and corruption, and in case they were inclined not to ignore it, the savagery of the gladiatorial games reminded them of what would happen if they spoke out.  

 

Rome claimed to bring peace to the nations it conquered, the “Pax Romana”, but it was really no peace at all; it was more like an imperial protection racket. ‘Toe the line and all will be well’, they said. ‘We’ll build you roads and public bathhouses. But dare to question or rebel, and it won’t end well for you.’

 

“Why do you not know how to interpret the present time?” says Jesus to his hearers in today’s Gospel reading. “Why can’t you see the injustice and the need that’s in front of you? Why isn’t this burning at your soul, making you act?” The answer was simple. We don’t see what we don’t want to see. We don’t read the signs of the time because it would cost us too much, and what is one person against such forces of evil? We feel powerless, overwhelmed.  We don’t face death in the arena. Our challenges are different. But the problem is the same. We know that this heatwave we’re in the middle of is wrong, a sign of human-made climate change, but that doesn’t necessarily mean we act any differently. We know there is a cost of living crisis which will make the lives of those who are already struggling impossible this winter as they find they can’t afford to eat or to heat. The latest idea to tackle this seems to be “warm banks” – places for people to spend their days if they can’t afford to heat their homes. But these aren’t the answer, any more than “food banks” are an answer to food poverty. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have food banks or warm banks – please do continue to put your contributions in the collection box at the back of church - but there something wrong if we aren’t asking why we need to do this. They are an indictment of a nation in which so many don’t have enough to provide even the basics of life, a sign that radical change is needed.

 

Jesus repeatedly asked awkward questions like these of those in power in his own day, and it’s clear from today’s Gospel reading, that he knows what that will cost him. The “baptism which which I am to be baptised,” which he talks about is his crucifixion. He knows a confrontation is coming, not because he has some supernatural power to forecast the future, but because it is obvious. He’s spoken out for the powerless and preached justice for the oppressed, and he has made powerful enemies as a result. And he knows that anyone who follows him in doing that is likely to find the same thing happens to them.  

 

Faith can bring us comfort in times of trouble, and there’s nothing wrong with that, but sometimes it should be the thing that brings the trouble, that disturbs our complacency, that pushes us out beyond our comfort zone. If we’ve never found it hard to live as Jesus calls us to, then perhaps we haven’t really been listening.

 

Jesus isn’t saying that conflict is good in itself, or that falling out with our families or friends is something we should rejoice in. He’s certainly not saying that if the rest of the world is against you, you must be in the right. That sort of thinking can be very dangerous, drawing us down dark and isolating pathways. But sometimes conflict is the inevitable price of working for justice.

 

‘Interpreting the present times’ – seeing what needs doing and doing it can be tough though. Very few people really enjoy conflict, and those that do probably have something wrong with them. We can feel isolated and alone when we speak out, but today’s Psalm reminds us that we aren’t.

 

It paints a picture of God in the midst of a heavenly assembly, surrounded by what the Psalmist describes as gods, but which are often interpreted as personifications of the forces that influence human affairs, the impulses that push and pull us around, the things that feel bigger than we are, beyond our control. St Paul later called them the “principalities and powers” of the world. Today’s equivalent might be the global economic and political systems we are all part of, which seem to have a life of their own, or the ever-increasing digital networks we are entangled in, things too complex for most of us even to begin to understand. In this Psalm God challenges them ‘How long will you judge unjustly, and show favour to the wicked’ and tells them to “save the weak and the orphan, defend the humble and the needy”. That’s what power is supposed to be for, to bless and to benefit others, but so often it is used simply to make the rich richer and the powerful more so.

 

It's a strange psalm. We often think of heaven as a place where  all is calm and perfect, but I’m glad we have it in our Bibles, because it shows us a God who isn’t holding himself at a distance from all the confusions and turmoil of the world, but takes his place in the midst of it, sharing the pain of it, challenging abuse and oppression.

 

And that’s what Jesus does on the cross, which is a living enactment of this psalm. God came among us in Christ, rebuking the “principalities and powers” of his age - the might of Rome, the self-protectiveness of the Jewish authorities - and is killed for doing so. And although all seems to be lost when he dies, his resurrection shows us that there is no power that can destroy God, no hatred which is stronger than his love.

 

As we try to ‘interpret the present time”, to see and respond to the challenges that seem overwhelming to us, may we remember that we never do so alone. God stands with us as we challenge the ‘principalities and powers’ our own times, the things which distort and maim his creation, whether they are outside us or within us in the depths of our own hearts, and he will not be defeated.

Amen

Trinity 8 2022 : Do not be afraid

 

Genesis 15.1-6, Luke 12.32-40

 

 

Do not be afraid, little flock, says Jesus to his anxious disciples, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom.

 

When Jesus talks about the kingdom, he doesn’t just, or even mainly, mean life after death. It is far broader and better than that. Elsewhere in the Gospels, Jesus talks about it as “life in all its fullness”, life in the here and now that is rich and deep, life that is beyond our expectations, beyond anything we could kid ourselves we had earned or deserved. It may not always be easy – neither Jesus’ life nor the lives of his first followers were easy – but it will be full of meaning, full of treasure, because it will be lived in the company of God. And this kingdom, this new place to live, is given to us, by God’s good pleasure.  All we need to do is to learn open our eyes to see it.

 

Jesus tells a parable about slaves waiting for their master to return from a wedding banquet. Of course, they would need to be awake to look after him when he arrived  – they would expect to get into trouble if they weren’t. But Jesus turns that expectation on its head here.  He goes on to say , “He – that is the master -  will fasten his belt and  have them – that is the slaves - sit down to eat , and he will come and serve them.”  The slaves don’t need to be awake so they can work; they need to be awake so that they can share in the joy of that wedding he had been to, hear the stories, feel the excitement. They are going to be part of the celebration. Who, in their right minds, would want to miss it? Everyone hearing this parable would have known what the life of a slave was normally like, a life of drudgery, hardship and often fear. But in the kingdom of God, the ordinary things of life, even its darkest, middle-of-the-night moments, can be transformed into places of delight, when we learn to see God at work in them, God who wants nothing more than our company.  

 

It’s not always easy to trust that and to learn to look for that, of course. Anxiety , fear comes far more easily and far more naturally to most of us than trust. In our Old Testament Reading we discover that Abram longs for a child. God has promised that he will be the father of a multitude, but right now he’s not even father of one, and according to the Bible he’s almost a hundred years old, and married to a woman who is well beyond child-bearing age herself. He’s set out into the wilderness, enticed by God’s promise, to a new land that God has said his descendants will fill, but there are no descendants, and Abram is starting to despair, quite understandably. It looks as if all he has will eventually go to a distant relative Eliezer, and what of God’s promise then?  Abram is no hero. In the middle of this existential dread, as he fears being forgotten – children were all that preserved your memory in his time – trust doesn’t come easily to him. He tries all sorts of tricks of his own to achieve his aim in life. Twice he gives his wife away to others, to save his own skin. He fathers a child with Sarah’s slave girl, Hagar, at Sarah’s suggestion – perhaps that’s the way to create descendants they think – but that ends in disaster. Poor Hagar and her son, who have done nothing to deserve it, are cast out in the wilderness, where they have to be rescued by God. As I said, Abram is no hero. Like most of us, it’s a huge struggle for him to trust in the generosity and faithfulness of God, to see life as a gift, rather than as something he must negotiate through by his own anxious striving.

 

But the message to him, and to us, is that God does stick with us. He reassures him again and again when he struggles. Look towards the heavens says God on this occasion, taking him outside his tent. Count the stars if you can!  Of course, he can’t – it would be hard enough in our light–polluted skies, but impossible in the star-filled darkness of the desert. So shall your descendants be! And so it turns out. Eventually his son Isaac is born, and he goes on to have children of his own and soon it is as God has promised.  Abraham is the father of a multitude, despite this inauspicious beginning.

 

What we see, as we follow his story, is someone who is slowly, painfully, through many ups and downs, learning to trust God’s generous heart, rather than his own abilities and strengths. His story is an encouragement to us to keep going when times are tough, to keep daring to trust that we are in God’s hands, even if we have no idea what he is up to or where he is leading us.

 

Do not be afraid, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom.

 

To be honest, if we know that, we know everything we need to know. This is one of the most comforting and encouraging verses in scripture, and one which we should all have graven on our hearts, so we can find it easily in dark or desperate moments. There are many things to be afraid of in life. We live in a scary world, at a scary time. But so did Abraham, and so did Jesus’ audience. Fear is real, and ever present, but so is the generous presence of God.

 

It’s not just that God grudgingly thinks he ought to look after us, now we are here, says Jesus. There’s nothing conditional about it, no qualifications; we don’t have to know anything, do anything, figure anything out. He doesn’t say that he’ll give us the kingdom if we are good, or say the right prayers or live the right way. Giving us the kingdom, life in all its fullness, is something which is in his nature to do, his good pleasure, his delight, and we can find it all around us – in the love of others or the wonder of the world – if we learn to look for it.

 

I pray today that we will all come to know the generosity of God, that we will know that we are gifts of God, that life is a gift of God, that everything is a gift of God, and that we will show that in the way we relate to ourselves, to others, and to the world we have been given. Like those slaves in Jesus’ parable, we are invited to sit down and eat with God, in the company of all the rest of the world. The bread and wine we share in this service is a demonstration of that. The word “Eucharist” means to give thanks. It reminds to look for God within the whole of life, in scary times as much as in good times.

If we can learn to do that, we will find that we have what we most deeply need. No one is immune to fear, but if we know that God is with us in the midst of it, we’ll have found a purse that never wears out, a treasure that never fails, which is  greater than all our fears and can take us through them to the peace which is his will for us and for all his creation.

Amen