Monday 25 December 2023

Christmas story: No word of a lie

 

No word of a lie – a story for Christmas Day 2023

 

There was once a man who farmed the steep slopes of the hillsides near the town of Bethlehem, growing wheat to make its people’s bread. His name was Samuel, but the local people had long ago given him a nickname – “no word of a lie” – because Samuel always told the truth, even when a little white lie might have been kinder or wiser. If his wife, Hannah, had spent days and weeks and lots of money making a new dress and asked him “does this make me look fat, Samuel?” He would look carefully, his head on one side and then say “well, no word of a lie, yes, it does, just a bit?” Oh dear - bad decision, Samuel! If a new parent showed him their beloved baby and asked him, “have you ever seen a more beautiful child?”, he would say, “well, quite a few actually. In fact, no word of a lie, I think he looks plug ugly at the moment.” The parents were usually up in arms, but others would tell them, “What did you expect from “No word of a lie Samuel”? If you don’t want to know what he thinks, don’t ask him!

 

One day it so happened that Samuel was out sowing wheat seed. Up and down the fields he went, scattering the seed around him, until, by the end of the day, every seed was sown. Samuel looked at his work “A little rain, a little sun and in three or four months time, this field will be full of wheat, ready to harvest” He thought about the little seeds, tucked up in the good earth. He thought about the little roots that would grow down into the soil, slowly, slowly, and the green shoots that would grow up towards the sun. He thought about the ears of wheat swelling up and the green gradually turning to gold as the wheat ripened. Samuel gathered up his tools, and sighed with pleasure, as he turned to walk home. But as he did so he noticed something. Two weary looking travellers walking along the road, a man and a woman, and – what was that the woman was holding – it was a tiny baby, wrapped in rough cloth. They looked worried. They were going as fast as they could, but with a child, and a mother who had recently given birth, they were struggling, and they looked so tired. Samuel thought of his own children, grown up now, and his little grandchildren – he wouldn’t like to imagine them looking like the bedraggled family he saw before him.

 

Samuel hailed them “Where are you going so late in the day, and why the rush?”

We’re heading for Egypt with our child, said the man. He is in danger, and we must hurry.

Well you won’t get to Egypt tonight, said Samuel – no word of a lie – it’s hundreds of miles away, and you look so tired. Why don’t you stop the night with me and my wife. We’d be happy to feed you and give you a bed, and you’ll go along much faster tomorrow with a good night’s sleep and some food inside you.”

 

The man and the woman looked at each other, and whispered together something that Samuel couldn’t quite hear.

“It’s kind of  you,” they said, but we’re afraid we’d put you in danger,” they said. King Herod is after us. He wants to kill our child, and anyone sheltering us might be at risk if he found them.

 

Well, that settles it, said Samuel – you must definitely come back with me. I’ve no time for Herod. He’s a cruel man – no word of a lie. I’m happy to take the risk to help someone who’s on the wrong side of him, and so will my wife be. There’s no need to go a step further. You’re coming home with me, and you can get on your way in the morning bright and early. It can’t make that much difference, if we are careful. Our little house is out in the middle of nowhere, so no one will know you are there.”

 

So the man and the woman – whose names, they said, were Mary and Joseph, - came home with Samuel. When they got there, Samuel took Hannah aside, and told her what Joseph and Mary had said. “Are we putting ourselves in danger by sheltering them, “ asked Hannah”. Yes we are, said Samuel, no word of a lie, we are, but we can’t let them go on. They need us. “ and Hannah agreed, as he knew she would. And she  welcomed them with open arms, made them sit down, made a fuss of the baby – Jesus, he was called – and bustled about sorting out some good food for them all to share together. Darkness fell as they sat and ate and talked in the one roomed house. And Mary and Joseph told them a strange story about how they’d come from Nazareth, about angels, and shepherds, and travellers from distant lands, and a star in the sky, and the news they’d been given that their child was sent from God to show the love of God. And Samuel and Hannah thought it just possibly be true, because, in the darkness of the room, they could swear that there was a light coming from the

, a light that shone in the darkness and chased it away.

 

In the morning, Hannah and Samuel got up early, but they found that Mary and Joseph were already packing their bags, ready to go. “Must you go so soon,” said Samuel. Yes, said Joseph. I keep having these awful dreams about Herod, and the danger our child is in. “Well, at least take some food for the journey, said Hannah – some of our good, fresh bread, made from our own wheat, and cheese, and vegetables – you’ve got to keep your strength up!”

Take one of our donkeys too, said Samuel. You’ll get along much faster with it. If you ever come back this way, you can bring her back, and if not, you can pass her on to someone else who might need her.”

 

So Joseph and Mary loaded their belongings onto the donkey, and Mary climbed up on its back, holding her child close to her, and as quickly as they could, they said their goodbyes and their thank yous and went on their way, just as the sun rose.

 

An hour or so later, Samuel was getting ready to go out into the fields again. There were some stone walls that needed mending – best to do it before the wheat grew, to protect the young plants from animals. He was lost in thought, pondering that little family, and hoping they would be all right when he got to his fields. Then he lifted up his eyes, and saw something that astonished him…

But before he could even take in what he’d seen, he  heard a sound which drove away all other thought, which struck fear into his heart – the sound of galloping horses and clanking weapons…

He turned around to see a band of soldiers heading his way.

 

“You, peasant! Stop and answer us in the name of King Herod!” the leader of the group said.

 

“What is it?” said Samuel, quaking in his boots a little.

 

“King Herod has sent us out to question everyone on the roads leading out of Bethlehem. You must answer our questions honestly.”

 

“Oh, he’ll certainly do that, said one of the soldiers. I come from hereabouts, and I know this man. We call him “no word of a lie Samuel” . He couldn’t tell a lie to save his life.”

 

“Good”, said the leader, “in that case, I ask you, have you seen a man and a woman with a small baby, coming along this road?”

 

Samuel looked up at him.

 

“No word of a lie – yes I have. It was on the day that I sowed the wheat seeds in this field here.” And he pointed to the field behind him.

 

And the soldier turned to his men and said “Well, there’s obviously no point in us going on, lads. They must be long gone by now… Look at that field… “

 

And they looked, and they saw what Samuel had seen, the thing that had astonished him so much. That field where he had only the day before sown those tiny seeds, was filled with fully grown wheat, ripe and golden and ready for harvest.

 

And without another word to Samuel, the soldiers turned their horses around and galloped back the way they had come. And Samuel was left shaking his head, wondering what on earth had just happened.

 

He couldn’t make any sense of it, but he could see that there was work to do, so he went back to the house, and told Hannah what had happened. And they fetched their scythes and started to reap their unexpected crop, grateful for the extra harvest, but even more grateful that the little family were safe.

 

They never heard what happened to Mary, Joseph and their baby,  but many years later they did hear about a preacher from Nazareth – and hadn’t that been Mary and Joseph’s hometown? He was called Jesus too, and people said he’d lived out a message of God’s love and welcome for all, and been killed for that message, but some said he’d risen from death. And when  Hannah and Samuel heard those stories, they remembered that tiny child, and the light that seemed to chase away the darkness, not just in their room, but in their hearts too, they wondered…no word of a lie … they just wondered, whether their courage and hospitality might have been more important than they thought on that night so long ago. And maybe we should wonder the same about whether our small acts of courage and hospitality might make more of a difference than we think.

Amen

 

 

Midnight Mass 2023

  

Heb 1.1-4, Luke 2.1-14, John 1.1-14

 

It came upon the midnight clear/ that glorious song of old/ from angels bending near the earth to touch their harps of gold; “Peace on the earth, good will to men, From heaven’s all gracious king/ the world in solemn stillness lay/ to hear the angels sing.

 

Every Christmas night service I have taken since I arrived in this parish 18 years ago has begun with that carol. I inherited the tradition from my predecessor here, and I have no idea how far back it goes. But, working on the principle of “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”, I have never felt the urge to do something different. It’s a good place to begin, a profound prayer for peace, calling us all to “hush the noise, ye men – and women - of strife” so we can hear God’s message.

 

It was written by a Unitarian minister, Edmund Hamilton Sears, in Wayland, Massachusetts.  Sears imagines angels singing not just to the shepherds, but to the whole world, announcing a new way of peace to any who will listen, but it’s a carol tinged with sadness, because men – and women  - “hear not the love-song which they bring”.. Sears wrote it in 1851, a decade before the American Civil war, at a time when tensions were already mounting as states took different positions on the abolition of slavery: it didn’t take a genius to see that trouble was brewing.

 

This year, once again, we are confronted daily with scenes of warfare, nearly 175 years after Sears wrote his carol; nothing much seems to have changed. It’s as easy for us to despair, in our “weary world” as it was for people in his times.  

 

The fact that one of today’s wars is being fought out in the lands where Jesus was born seems to have added an extra edge for some people.  Some churches have decided to mute their Christmas celebrations this year, in solidarity with the Christians of the Holy Land, most of whom are ethnically Arab. Bethlehem’s own world famous public services in Manger Square have been abandoned this year – no one had the stomach for them -  and one Lutheran church in Bethlehem, instead of their conventional crib scene, has created one out of rubble, like the rubble in which so many children – Palestinian and Jewish – have died this year. The Christ child lies in the midst of the ruins, as vulnerable as them.

 

Some churches across the world, too, have decided to leave one of the candles in the Advent wreath, the second one, which traditionally symbolises Peace, unlit this year. How can we light it, they said, when there is no peace in the land where Jesus was born?

 

At Seal, though, that wasn’t the decision I made. In fact, if anything, it seemed even more important to light that candle of peace this year. Firstly because the candle is a prayer for peace, not a self-satisfied statement that we already have it, but also because if we didn’t light it this year, when could we light it? There has never been a Christmas when men, and women, haven’t been at war with each other. Should it have stayed unlit last year, because of the outbreak of war between Russia and Ukraine? What about Yemen, where the fighting has lasted 9 years, and shows no sign of abating, or any of the other places in the world where people are maiming and terrorising and killing each other, and have been, in some cases for decades.

 

And, of course, the world into which Jesus was born was no less war-torn. He was born in an occupied country. According to Luke’s story, it was an arbitrary ruling by the Roman Emperor which sent Mary and Joseph on the trek from Nazareth to an overcrowded Bethlehem to be counted. And Quirinius, the Roman Governor who implemented the census locally, was a brutal military leader, not a pen-pushing civil servant.

The Romans promised peace to the nations they conquered, the Pax Romana, but all it really consisted of was a clamping down on internal divisions or skirmishes between neighbouring countries under their rule. That might have been welcomed by some, especially those whose economic interests it served, but peace which is enforced at the point of a sword, peace which is maintained by keeping people in fear through public demonstrations of cruelty like the gladiatorial games, isn’t really a peace worth having

 

The peace which the angels proclaim is very different, and the fact that it is proclaimed first to a bunch of shepherds out in the middle of nowhere tells us that. They are ordinary people, nameless people, people with no influence in the world, no seat at the table of power, no voice in international diplomacy. All they can do, when they hear the song of the angels, is to let it change their own lives, which it seems to do. And yet that is enough. In Luke’s Gospel they stand for and point towards those whose lives will be changed by the adult Jesus. He will continue to spend his time disproportionately with those who have no worldly influence; a rather random bunch of fishermen, tax collectors and prostitutes will form the core of his followers. He will welcome children; telling people that they have vital things to teach us about the Kingdom of God. He will choose women to be the first to bear witness to his Resurrection, despite the fact that women weren’t trusted as witnesses in a court of law.

 

It seems like a ridiculous strategy for changing the world, and yet, here we are 2000 years later, and far away from Jesus’ homeland, still telling their stories, still finding inspiration in them, still being changed by them. People are still challenged by the Jesus they meet in the pages of the Bible, the Jesus they meet in worship, the Jesus they meet in one another, challenged to love their neighbours as themselves, to love their enemies and pray for those who persecute them, to see themselves, and all people as beloved by God, to feed the hungry and work for a world in which no one is hungry. We don’t always manage to live up to that challenge, which is why the global peace and justice we long for is so elusive, but it’s Jesus’ words we keep returning to, Jesus’ words which so stubbornly challenge us, not the decrees of the Emperor Augustus or Quirinius the Roman Big Shot about whom most people, let’s face it, now know nothing at all.

 

Confronted with the pervasiveness of the human suffering and sin we see around us, we feel despair. What can we do about it? We feel swallowed up by the darkness. Yet, as the anthropologist Margaret Mead once said, Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has. The Christmas story is a powerful reminder of that truth.

 

Anonymous shepherds, foreign Magi from distant lands, a peasant couple, only just married – too recently to be respectable – and at the centre of it all, an infant – infans literally means unable to speak. What hope is there that their stories can make a difference? None, humanly speaking, and yet, with the help of God, by the grace of God, they have made a difference, and will continue to do so. The light of Christ isn’t one big, blazing fireball, it is billions of tiny, flickering flames – held in your hands, held in mine - kindled whenever and wherever we show the love of God. And in the end, the darkness can never overcome that kind of light.

Amen

 

 

 

 

Sunday 10 December 2023

Advent 2 2023

Isaiah 40.1-11, Mark 1.1-8

 

“Comfort, O comfort my people.” Those words, from the book of the Old Testament prophet Isaiah are probably familiar. Those who know Handel’s Messiah may have the music running through their heads already, because they are the first words in his oratorio which will go on to tell of Jesus’ birth, death and resurrection. For Handel at least, this is where the great story of Jesus begins - with God’s declaration that his people need to be “comforted”.

 

But if this is what it’s all about, then that little word “comfort” is obviously an important one, and it matters that we understand it.

 

What does comfort mean to you? Snuggling into an armchair under a blanket, in front of a log fire, with a mug of cocoa? The Scandinavian concept of ‘hygge’ has been all the rage in recent years; it’s a good way of selling  fairy lights, thick socks, scented candles, and all the other things that get people through long hard winters.

 

But that’s not really what Isaiah had in mind. You can’t buy the kind of comfort he was talking about. Even in English, that wasn’t originally what comfort meant. The “fort” in comfort gives that away. It’s linked to fortifications and fortitude. Soldiers live in forts. To be comforted was originally to be strengthened, not wrapped in a fluffy blanket.

 

But the Hebrew word Isaiah used carries an even richer set of meanings. It’s the word ‘nacham’, and it’s very hard to translate. It’s to do with changing someones mind or heart. Sometimes in the Bible “nacham” is translated as “repent” – not a very cosy word at all – or relent, or regret, or pity or have compassion on. In the book of Genesis, God decides to destroy the world he has made by flooding it, but he sees that there is one good man in it, Noah, and so, the story says, God “repents” – nacham - of his decision, and saves Noah, his family and a  pair of every living animal so that they can begin again. Nacham is a word that describes the things that transform you, the things that reach and change the places in you nothing else can, setting you on a different track.  That’s not something that a mug of cocoa and a log fire can do – at least not by themselves.

 

One of the great privileges of my job is that, as a priest, I get to listen to a lot of people’s stories. Clergy soon discover that people – sometimes completely random people – tell us stuff about themselves, about their hopes and fears, their regrets and sorrows, stuff they may never have told anyone else. There’s not usually anything we can do about what they tell us, but I sometimes wonder whether that’s precisely the point. All we can do is listen. We can’t write prescriptions or fix what is broken in their lives. We aren’t gatekeepers to the benefits system, but often simply to be heard and seen is the most powerful help of all, and something that is surprisingly rare in many lives. Whether we are priests or not, just being present to people as they are can be completely transformative. When people are listened to in love, not judgement, often they heal and blossom of their own accord. It seems to me that’s a good example of the power of “nacham”, that transformational comfort God calls Isaiah to proclaim. 

 

But there’s an added dimension to the “nacham” Isaiah is talking about. He was prophesying to people who had been in exile in Babylon for several generations, far away from home, and – they thought - far away from God. They thought God had abandoned them, and some thought they’d deserved that abandonment.

 

What is the comfort Isaiah is told to bring them? Isaiah isn’t sure at first. What shall I cry? he asks God.  The passage gradually works up to the big reveal. “Get you up to a high mountain, , O Zion, herald of good tidings; lift up your voice with strength , O Jerusalem, herald of good tidings, lift it up, do not fear,; say to the cities of Judah – what are they going to say? – “here is your God!”  That’s it. “Here is your God,” God is present with you, on the journey with you as you return home, feeding the flock, carrying the lambs who can’t yet manage the journey by themselves, but most of all just being there. “His reward is with him” Isaiah says - or to put it another way, his presence is the reward. That presence tells them that the love they thought they had destroyed is indestructible. The God they thought had forgotten them is right there with them. That’s the comfort, the nacham, that they need to know, the knowledge that will transform them.

 

In the Gospel reading John the Baptist restates that message as he points people to Jesus. “The one who is more powerful than I is coming”, says John “the one who will baptise you with the Holy Spirit”.  “Here is your God” in this man.

 

Christianity can be made to sound very complicated, full of long theological words like atonement and sanctification and the imputation of the righteousness of Christ. We can get ourselves lost in debates about the Trinity or the Eucharist, transubstantiation and consubstantiation and all the rest. But actually it’s very simple and it is all summed up in those four words. “Here is your God”. Four words, and none of them longer than one syllable. “Here is your God”, in the child in the manger, born to a poor family, in the friend of sinners, who sits with those others avoid, in the man on the cross, humiliated and beaten. “Here is your God,” the one who walks beside you, who is found not only where you expect him to be, but also where you don’t, not only in the love and goodness of our lives, but also in the grubby broken places we’d rather keep hidden. He is the one who sees us and hears us, knows us and loves us, whether we think we are lovable or not. A mug of cocoa by a warm fire is great, but this is the comfort we really need, the good news that can change us completely.

Amen

Advent 1 2023

 Isaiah 64.1-9, Mark 13.24-end

 

A few weeks ago, when the Prime Minister reshuffled his cabinet, there was quite a bit of hoo-ha about his new “minister without portfolio”– Esther McVey. In a supposedly “off the record” briefing to the Sun newspaper a nameless “Whitehall insider” described her as the “minister for common sense” and said she had been brought in to advance the government’s “anti-woke” agenda. They plainly assumed that being “anti-woke” would be a vote winner, at least with the Sun’s readership.

 

“Woke” is a word that has become very loaded in recent years, often used as an insult, said with a sneer. For Christians, though, wherever we stand politically, this negativity about “wokeness” poses a bit of a problem because in today’s Gospel reading Jesus tells us very clearly and urgently that we should “stay awake”, and it’s probably this passage which gave rise to the slogan “stay woke” in the first place.

 

It's a slogan that’s been in use in the Black American community as far back as the 1920s, a community that was historically steeped in the scriptures, and it has a double meaning. It was partly a warning to be aware of the danger you might be in if a white person thought you’d stepped out of line. You had to “stay woke”, be vigilant to what they might be thinking. But “staying woke” was also about being aware that to be treated like this was not ok. If discrimination is embedded in society, people often don’t see it or name it, just as a fish isn’t aware of the water it swims in. If you are on the receiving end of prejudice constantly it’s really easy to internalise it, to start thinking it’s your fault or that “it’s just the way things are”. That’s true not just of racism, but of any kind of injustice. 

 

History is littered with things we now look back on with horror.

How can people have thought that slavery was a good thing? And yet they did.

How can people have thought that women weren’t capable of voting? And yet they did.

How can people have thought it was ok to send children up chimneys to clean them, or  down mines to haul coal trucks? And yet they did. And of course, in many parts of the world these things are still happening.

Here in 21st century Western Europe, though, we look back at these things and, “How could people have thought this was ok?”, but how will history judge us. What are we closing our eyes to that future generations will be staggered at? Over consumption? It’s good to have our bring and swap table here today to highlight that. Environmental degradation? Global inequality? Who knows? It’s the stuff we aren’t seeing that is the problem…

 

“ Staying woke” - “waking up” – means opening our eyes to whatever damages God’s creation, which includes ourselves, and taking it seriously, but on its own that’s not enough. In fact, on its own it can be profoundly dangerous. If we only wake up to the problems, we end up chronically anxious, depressed, swamped by hopelessness. One reason why we can’t bear to look at what’s in front of our eyes is that we don’t think we can do anything about it; it’s too big, too complicated, too overwhelming for finite, frail, flawed human beings like us. And we’re right to think that. It is. And that’s why Jesus tells us in this Gospel passage that we also need to keep our eyes open, to stay awake, for the coming of God to us, for that moment when God shows up in our midst, maybe in small ways – as small as the budding of leaves on a fig tree – but which make all the difference. Jesus’ words here are meant to be words of encouragement  Yes, stay awake to the needs of the world, he says, because it is there, in the need  that you will find God. Stay awake to the sorrow, because it is there you will find his joy. Stay awake to the brokenness because it is there you’ll find his healing.

 

The prophet Isaiah calls on God “O that you would tear open the heavens and come down” – Pull your finger out, God. Where are you? He cries.  But by the end of the passage he has come to realise that God was there all the time. What felt like his absence was really the effect of his people turning away, forgetting to look for him, closing their eyes and falling asleep to him. “There is no one who calls on your name, or attempts to take hold of you…” he says. No wonder they weren’t finding him; they weren’t looking for him. But despite that, as he says in the end, “we are all your people”. That was always true; they just needed to realise it. For Christians, of course, the ultimate way in which God shows up in our midst, the ultimate way in which we can know him is in Christ. Where are you, God? We cry. Here I am, says Jesus…

 

So how do we “wake up” to Jesus, Emmanuel, the God who is with us? Isaiah says that “you meet those who gladly do right”. We can find God as we work for justice and put things right. Habits of prayer matter too – calling on his name. And in the Gospel reading we are reminded that we don’t have to look for God on our own. The doorkeeper in Jesus’ parable is part of a household, a community. He has his role to play, his job to do – literally sitting at the door and keeping watch – but others have different roles to play in making sure the household is ready to welcome their master when he returns. We look out for God best when we look out for him in the company of others.  

 

“Stay woke”. That’s what Advent calls us to do. Not to close our eyes to the issues we need to address because we despair of them, but to open our eyes to the presence of God, to his love, which heals and transforms and empowers us.

 

In Advent – the word means “coming” – we think about the coming of  God in the past, in the baby in the manger. And we think about the coming of God in the future, looking forward  to a time when God will make “a new heaven and a new earth”. But also, and most importantly, we think about the God who comes to us now, in the present, the God who shows up, if we have eyes to see him, every day, planting his seeds of love and courage in the hearts of anyone willing to receive them.  

 

Am I woke? I sincerely hope so, but if not, my prayer is that God will wake me – and all of us – up this Advent, that he will wake us up to his glory, that he will wake us up to his glory, that he will wake us up to his peace and his joy.

Amen

Second Sunday before Advent

 

Zephaniah1.7,12-end. 1 Thessalonians 5.1-11, Matthew 25.14-30

 

I love to watch the Antiques Roadshow at the end of a busy Sunday. Perhaps you do too. There are always interesting historical titbits and moving personal stories attached to objects people bring along. But I’m less keen on that moment at the end of each little encounter when the expert says “So, what might this be worth?” Sometimes it’s rather awkward – the Ming vase is actually a cheap, mass-produced 20th century knock-off. The brooch bought for a fiver at a car boot sale, which they hoped would provide for them in retirement, turns out only to be worth a f£.2.50. The owners try to put a brave face on it, but their disappointment is obvious. Sometimes there’s a good surprise though. Great-Granny’s little trinket turns out to be worth tens of thousands. Everyone gasps and applauds. But where does that leave its owners? Nine times out of ten, they say “well, that’s nice to know, but, of course, it will never leave the family, because it was Great-Granny’s”. I’m sure that for many of them that’s genuine, but I wonder whether it’s sometimes said through gritted teeth, whether they’d rather have sold it and got the money, but just feel it isn’t theirs to sell – and now they have the worry of looking after it and insuring it too.  

 

Treasure, and what we do with it – especially when it isn’t entirely our own – is at the heart of today’s Gospel readings.

 

The treasure in the parable comes in the form of what are called “talents”, and it’s important not to be distracted by that word. Talents to us are special abilities – singing or dancing or playing a sport. It’s easy to read this parable as if it is telling us that we shouldn’t hide them. And that’s a perfectly good message. But it’s not the message of this story. A talent, in Jesus’ time, was simply a standard unit of measurement for precious metals, often silver. One talent of silver weighed around 4 stone, 28 kilos, and that represented a huge amount of money then, as it would today.

 

One talent of silver represented about 15 years’ wages for an ordinary working man, so 2 talents were 30 years’ worth and 5 talents, 75 years’ worth of wages… Just imagine the impact of being given such vast sums to handle, especially for enslaved people, whose lives were entirely in the hands of their master.

 

No wonder the third slave is so terrified. He may have been given the least but it’s still far more than he would ever have a hope of repaying if it were lost. We’re meant to sympathise with him, and I am sure most of Jesus’ hearers would have done. Investments can go down as well as up. Trade is risky. What if he loses it all? He believes, rightly or wrongly, that his master is a harsh man; he doesn’t want to risk a penny of what he’s been given.  So he digs a hole and buries it, and maybe heaves a sigh of relief. At least it’s safe. But when his master comes home he is furious. Surely this slave could have invested it with a banker, he says, where at least it might have made some interest! And the slave is thrown out.  

 

If you think this sounds monumentally unfair, then you aren’t alone, and I think Jesus means us to feel that way. Parables are meant to help us get in touch with our own experience, our assumptions, our attitudes. Jesus means to stir up our empathy for this third slave, whose fear of his master, his fear of getting it wrong, has completely paralysed him, preventing him from taking any risk at all, but as a result, he loses even what he had – not the talent of silver, that was never his anyway – but his place in the household, his protection and support, on which his life depended.

 

Please note: Jesus isn’t saying that God is like this master. But he is asking us whether we think and act as if he is. That’s the point. Because if this is our image of God, then it will profoundly affect the way we live out our lives and express our faith. In our Old Testament reading, from the book of Zephaniah, and in today’s Psalm we meet a God who might feel to us to be like this, but Zephaniah and the Psalmist are writing from a particular context, at a particular moment, for a particular purpose, and their words have to be held in tension with other strands of Biblical writing which emphasize the endless love and forgiveness of God, despite all the times his people let him down.

 

The disciples who first heard Jesus’ parable – Jewish people like Jesus - had grown up knowing that God had given them great treasures as a people, for which they gave thanks. They gave thanks for their law, the law God had given them to help them live together well. They gave thanks for the covenant relationship he’d called them into – they would be his people and he would be their God. They gave thanks for the Temple in which they encountered him.

 

These were precious things – not burdens but treasures - entrusted to them, just as their master’s treasure was entrusted to the slaves in the story, but what should they do with these treasures? There are tensions throughout the Hebrew Scriptures about this. Should they make their treasured inheritance available to anyone who wanted it, take it out into the world and share it? Or should they guard it carefully, acting as gate-keepers, in case people from different backgrounds polluted or changed the faith they had received.

 

The early Christians, many of whom were Jewish by birth, were often accused of misusing the inheritance of faith they had been given, putting it at risk as they preached a Gospel of radical inclusion. Was God’s love really for everyone? Shouldn’t Gentiles be expected to observe all the Jewish laws in order to be accepted? Could women and men, slave and free really be part of this new movement on an equal basis? It was a source of huge anxiety and conflict, between Christians and Jews, and within the Christian church too. It was a long time before it was settled.

 

And we are still grappling with the same problem, albeit over different issues. We value the faith we have inherited, and those we have inherited it from, but our understanding and interpretation of our faith has never been static; it changes and develops over the years. If it didn’t, it would have died long ago. But every change brings anxiety and often conflict. The Church of England has been caught up in this again this week at General Synod, over the question of allowing services of blessing for same-sex couples in church. Synod voted to approve this for a trial period, and though we still have to wait for the detail of what’s going to be permitted, I rejoice at what is, in my opinion, a step forward, albeit a tiny one. I have always taken the view that God is far more interested in the quality of our relationships than the gender of the people in them, and rejoices at the loving, faithful commitment of marriage. But I also understand the anxiety of those who worry about this, for whom it feels too great a change, even if I don’t agree with them, because I know I might feel fearful over other things.

 

Whatever the specific issues we are arguing about - and each generation will produce new ones - Jesus’ parable asks us what it really means to us to “treasure” our faith, what we should do with the precious inheritance that has been entrusted to us. It asks us not so much where we draw the line on any particular issue – that may be different in different situations - but why we draw it. Do we believe, like the slave in the story, that God is a “harsh” master, who will punish us severely for things beyond our control, or do we dare to believe, with St Paul,  that God has “destined us not for wrath but for obtaining salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ”, that in Christ he puts himself into our hands, that he himself is our treasure, and that he longs for us to take the risk of sharing his love with all who need it? 

Amen

 

Remembrance Sunday 2023


For my birthday this year, Philip gave me a year’s membership of the Westminster Abbey association for us both, which has meant we can potter in and out of the Abbey as often as we like, shortcircuiting the often enormous queues, and not having to pay the pretty steep entrance fees each time either. That’s been great, because there’s a lot to see in the Abbey, and in particular, a huge number of memorials . Westminster Abbey is, if I’m honest, a bit of mausoleum, so full of tombs that they threaten to crowd out the living. There are kings and queens aplenty, but there are also poets and musicians and scientists too – Handel and Tennyson and Stephen Hawking.  There are generals and admirals, earls and dukes, all of them trying to outdo one another in death with their spectacular monuments, just as they probably did in life.

 

But amidst them all is one tombstone – a simple one in design – which draws more attention than all those ornate memorials. It’s near the entrance to the Abbey, right in the middle of the aisle – a thoroughly inconvenient place – but that’s intentional. It’s meant to stop people in their tracks, force them to alter their path – it’s the only grave that’s never walked over, even by Royal wedding or funeral processions.

 

If you haven’t guessed – and the photo on the service sheet is a bit of a giveaway -  it is the tomb of the Unknown Warrior, a plain black marble slab, surrounded by flowers –remembrance poppies at this time of year -  inscribed with the words

 

Beneath this stone rests the body
Of a British warrior
Unknown by name or rank
Brought from France to lie among
The most illustrious of the land

The inscription finishes with some words from the Old Testament

They buried him among the kings because he had done good toward God and toward
His house.

 

The stone is surrounded by other Biblical quotations.

 

The Lord knoweth them that are his (2 Timothy 2:19)

Unknown and yet well known, dying and behold we live (2 Corinthians 6:9)

In Christ shall all be made alive (1 Corinthians 15:22), and, from the Gospel reading we’ve just heard, “Greater love hath no man than this” (John 15:13) which, as we know continues, “than to lay down his life for his friends.”

 

It’s an extraordinary memorial, not in its design or its wording, but in the fact that it’s there at all, and it’s that which I think makes the huge crowds of sightseers pause and be silent at it. There is something special, something holy about this memorial, and people sense that.

 

We owe its existence to one man, an army chaplain called David Railton. In 1916, while serving on the front line in France, he had noticed one evening, a rough wooden cross, marking one of the many graves dug in haste to inter those who had fallen. On it was written in pencil “An unknown British Soldier of the Black Watch”. It was common for bodies to be buried hastily like this as the battle swept on. There was no time to do anything more.

 

Railton, who was Scottish, said that as he looked at this simple grave of this unknown member of a Scottish regiment, and wondered who he was; a city boy from Edinburgh, or a shepherd from some Highland glen? A young lad newly enlisted, or an old soldier who’d seen many battles before? There was no way of knowing, but the seed of an idea lodged in Railton’s mind, that somehow an anonymous soldier, like this one, could stand in for all the others who’d never be identified and named, so that families who didn’t know where their loved one was buried, could still have somewhere to mourn.

 

Railton couldn’t do anything about it at the time. In 1916 the fighting was still too fierce, and the outcome of the war too uncertain to make plans. But when the war ended, and plans for commemoration were underway across the nation, he remembered his idea, and decided to write to the Dean of Westminster Abbey. He had very little hope that anything would come of his idea. It was the summer of 1920: on Armistice Day that year the Cenotaph in Whitehall would be unveiled, so there was very little time to act.   And anyway, who was he? Just an ordinary chaplain, who had become an equally ordinary parish priest – he was vicar of a church in Margate.

 

To his surprise, though, the Dean whole-heartedly took up his cause, and wrote to the  Prime Minister, David Lloyd-George, who was equally supportive. The King was initially reluctant, but swiftly came round, and after that everything moved very fast. Four unidentified bodies were exhumed at random from various battlefields in Northern France – no one knew where each had come from. They were laid in plain coffins and brought into a chapel nearby, where an army officer with eyes closed laid his hand on one of them. The other three were taken away again and reverently buried – where was deliberately shrouded in mystery, so that no one would know that these were the bodies that hadn’t been chosen. Then the body was brought back to England by train, and, after a full state funeral – the kind of funeral that was normally reserved for royalty – he was laid to rest. And there he remains. Of course, these days, a quick DNA test could probably reveal who he was, but no one has ever suggested that this should happen, and I am sure it won’t.  

 

The whole point is, of course, that this warrior is unknown, and remains so. He has to be unknown so that any grieving mother, child, wife or friend, who came to his grave could feel he might be the person they had lost, the person they had known, a unique and irreplaceable individual to them.

 

“No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends”, said Jesus to his disciples on the night before he died. He wasn’t, of course, talking about those who die in battle, but about his own crucifixion, which was motivated by his love for the people he came to help and to serve, individual people, people like you and me, not by some grand theological idea. His words are often quoted in the context of war, though, because they remind us that in war too, it is individuals who matter, individuals who pay the price, individuals who bring home to us the truth of its terrible cost, and that if we lose sight of individuals, we have lost sight all humanity.

 

One unnamed serviceman buried in Westminster Abbey represents that to us, but I think today we can also see it in the faces of those we see on the news, the ones we want to turn away from, but mustn’t – the father or mother grieving for a child killed by a bomb in Gaza, the children grieving for a mother killed by Hamas, the family who don’t know whether their loved one in Ukraine is alive or dead, the ones who, like all of us, just want to live in peace, everyone beneath their vine and fig tree, with no one to make them afraid, as the prophet Micah said. Whichever side they are on, if they are on any side at all, they are individuals to those who love them and to God, people made in his image who were meant to live and to thrive and to be a blessing to the world.

 

Today, as on every Remembrance Sunday, we are called to remember not just the grand and terrible events of history, but the individuals whom war destroys in body, mind and soul, and to remember too that we, as individuals, have the power to choose whether we will act in ways that lead to war, or to the peace God wants for all his children.

Amen

Sunday 29 October 2023

All Saints: Oct 29

Rev 7.9-end, 1 John 3.1-3, Mt 5.1-12


I hope you said hello to St Edith on the way into church today, my offering for the Halloween scarecrow trail around the village. I thought I would put the Hallow into Halloween, and honour our local saint – hallow is just another word for holy, or saintly.


In fact, she is really one of two local saints, because her mother Wulfthryth, was also regarded as a saint, and for very good reason, it seems to me. I wondered about making a scarecrow of her as well, but time ran away with me, and I wasn’t sure so many people would know her. 


In some ways, though, Wulfthryth showed the greater courage and determination, and deserves to be honoured.


I am sure many of you will be familiar with the story, but in outline, here it is. Around 960 AD England was ruled by the 18 year old King Edgar, known as the Peaceable, but only because there were no major wars in his time. He was a bit of a lad, a womaniser, who had at least four children by three different women in the space of five years, and one of those women was Wulfthryth. She was either a nun or, more likely, a nobleman’s daughter entrusted to the keeping of Wilton Abbey near Salisbury, where she could be educated and kept safe from unsuitable men. The defences of a convent couldn’t keep a king out, though, and legend has it that he was entranced by the sound of her voice reading aloud during a meal in the convent. He either abducted her or eloped with her, depending on who you believe, but either way, she probably didn’t have much choice. She was a woman; he was a man, and a king to boot. Soon she was pregnant, so he installed her in what was either a royal house or a convent in Kemsing. He doesn’t seem to have married her, though marriage was a fairly flexible concept at the time, and in any case, very soon after Edith’s birth his roving eye had roved on to another woman, Elfrida, who he definitely did marry and who eventually became his queen.


Edgar always acknowledged Edith and supported her, and seems to have been on good terms with Wulfthryth too, but, discarded by a king, the best she could have hoped for was to be married off quietly to someone who would turn a blind eye to her past, and Wulfthryth wasn’t going to put up with that. She insisted on going back to Wilton, where she became a nun, and eventually Abbess. She brought Edith up in the convent, where she became a nun herself.  


Edith died in her early twenties, but Wulfthryth lived on many years afterwards, dying around 1000 AD, with a reputation for holiness and loving care, having built up Wilton Abbey and influenced generations of nuns. One of her more tangible achievements was to build a stone wall around the Abbey, perhaps in the hopes of giving the nuns in her care more protection against rapacious kings than she had.


It would have been easy for Wulfthryth and Edith to have been consumed with bitterness, but they weren’t. They decided not to let their past dictate their future – our history doesn’t have to fix our destiny. Instead they found within the difficulties of their lives real and living faith in God which enabled them to serve others and make a difference to the world around them.  They chose to make their own lives, and what lives they made!


The truth is that those who we call saints are often people who at the time would have seemed to those around them unlucky, awkward, cursed rather than blessed, people with no obvious success or attractiveness to recommend them. Jesus’ words to his disciples in today’s Gospel reading sum that up. The disciples had seen the crowds flock to Jesus, needy people, battered people, “harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd” as the Gospel puts it elsewhere. I can just imagine the disciples rolling their eyes and tutting as yet another leper, yet another woman hysterical with grief because her child was ill, yet another man whose life had gone off the rails, yet another prostitute stretched forward their grubby hands to try to touch him. What was the point of helping these people? What use would they be to God’s mission? Surely the chaos of their lives was proof that God wanted nothing to do with them? Surely they should be written off, as people might have been inclined to write off Wulfthryth and Edith.


But Jesus takes his disciples aside and calmly, cooly overturns all those unspoken thoughts in the words we now call the beatitudes.  Blessed are the poor in spirit, he says, the meek, the mournful, those who hunger and thirst for righteousness. Blessed are those who don’t play the power games of the world – the merciful, the pure in heart, the peacemakers, those persecuted for righteousness’ sake. In them God is doing a holy thing, he says. In them, the kingdom is coming into being.  The rewards he talks about aren’t some arbitrary prize they are given after death. They grow out of the situations they face. When we are poor in spirit we don’t have the security that comes from wealth and status, but that means we value much more the loving support of others and the loving support of God. It is impossible to be comforted unless we truly mourn. Being hungry and thirsty for righteousness, knowing we need it, is the first step on the road to justice and peace. Jesus knew the truth of this because this was his experience.


In John’s Gospel Jesus says “I am the Way – no one comes to the Father but by me”. Being a Christian isn’t a matter simply of praying the right prayers or believing the right things; it is about following a way, the way that Jesus walked before us, which led through the squalor, hardship and shame of the cross. Yet in that suffering, not despite it, hope was born. 


Our first reading, from the book of Revelation echoes that truth. It starts out sounding like a fairly standard image of an earthly court, with rank on rank of loyal subjects, waving palms and cheering, a glorious throne surrounded by triumphal music. But who is on the throne? The sacrificial Lamb,  that symbol of the crucified, humiliated, powerless Christ.


Our natural sense is that when things are falling to pieces around us we must be doing something wrong – we feel ashamed - but God doesn’t see it that way. That is the message of Jesus’ beatitudes, and the message of his life too. When Wulfthryth found herself pregnant, unmarried, and discarded, I doubt whether she felt blessed. When Edith was growing up, illegitimate, dependant on the whim of a father who might or might not support her, I doubt whether she felt blessed either. And yet they discovered the blessing of God in their vulnerability. And that meant they could become blessings to others. 


“Beloved” says the letter of John, “We are God’s children now”. Now when we are in a mess. Now when our lives have gone awry. Now when our plans seem to be backfiring.  “We are God’s children now” he says, but then he goes on, “what we will be has not yet been revealed.” The past doesn’t have to define the future. The things that have happened to us, the things we have done, are not the last word. God has that word, and whatever it is, it will be a word of love. 


So, let’s thank God for our local saints, for Wulfthryth as well as Edith. Their lives remind us that the things that seem like the end of the world can, in fact be a new beginning. Others may think we will never amount to anything. We might think that others will never amount to anything. But God sees us all as his beloved children, heirs of his kingdom, and if we can see that too we are truly blessed.

Amen


Sunday worship podcast and other news from Seal Church: Oct 29

 

Dear Friends

As usual, the link to our podcast is above - click on the picture to access it.
with best wishes


Anne Le Bas

Online
Worship podcast - Click on picture above
Order of service

You can also access this podcast by phoning 01732 928061


In the church building today
10 am Holy Communion
6.30pm All Souls' Service

Next Sunday Nov 5
10 am Holy Communion
6.30pm Evensong

This week: 
Mon     1.30pm Funeral: Sir Jonathan Benn Bt  
Wed    10 am Good Book Club in the vicarage. Revelation 21
            4.30 children's choir
            7.15 pm Adult choir 
Fri        9 am Morning Prayer in Church
            10.30 - 12.30 Friday Group in the church hall

All Saints & All Souls

Today we celebrate the feast of All Saints in our podcast and at church in the morning, giving thanks for all who have shown the light of Christ in the world, and thinking about our own calling to share God's love too. This evening we will mark All Souls' day, (see details below) with a special service in which we will remember those we love who have died, and lighting candles in their memory. (All Saints is actually on Nov 1, and All Souls on Nov 2)

It's no accident that these festivals take place as the nights are closing in - the clocks went back in the middle of last night, in case you missed it!  Our ancient ancestors knew that darkness could be dangerous - who knew what lurked within it? - so it was natural, and sensible, to fear it. The obsession with "things that go bump in the night" is a way of acknowledging and confronting those fears, as people do at Hallowe'en. But it's important that we remember that Hallowe'en is, literally, the eve of All Hallows - All Saints; we may acknowledge the darkness, but we are also bearing witness that, within that darkness we can find the light of Christ, which no darkness can overcome. 

In today's sermon, I explore the story of two of our local saints, St Edith and her mother, St Wulfthryth, women whose courage and tenacity in the face of their societies expectations and attitudes enabled them to shine a light which illuminated the lives of many others. You can find out more about them here, in the blog I wrote following my sabbatical a few years ago. My scarecrow offering for this year also introduces us to Edith, so say hello to her if you are passing the churchyard in the next few days (she will be there until next weekend).

 
All Age Ideas
Today at church we are celebrating All Saints and All Souls, two special services in which we remember the people who have shone like lights in our lives and in the wider world, who have helped others or given us good examples to follow. 

You could:
  • Cut out some paper people, and draw on them to represent people who you think are inspiring, or who have helped you. I'm sure you know how to do this already, but in case not, there are instructions here 
  • Make some pictures on thin paper or greaseproof paper and stick them to your window, or shine a light behind them. The light makes the colours glow. 
  • If you are carving a pumpkin or making other decorations for Hallowe'en, why not include something that represents love, joy and peace for you, and pray for people who are going through dark and scary times at the moment?
CHURCH AND COMMUNITY NEWS

SEAL OVER 60's SOUTHERN STRUMMERS UKULELE GROUP SAT NOV 11th 2.30 SEAL VILLAGE HALL
Following last year's resounding success, the Southern Strummers Ukulele Group are returning to Seal Over 60's and all are welcome to come along. The cost is £6 to non-members and includes the usual Over 60's delicious afternoon tea. 
To book, please call Chris on 07759 808814.  

SEAL VILLAGE HALL FREE SOCIAL INFORMATION SESSION SAT 11th NOVEMBER 5pm-7pm 
Come and join the Village Hall Trustees and volunteers, for a free glass of wine, or a soft drink, and nibbles, and find out what is going on in your Village Hall. All are welcome.

SEAL TIDDLERS FUND RAISING PAMPER EVENING - ENTRY BY PRE-BOOKED TICKET ONLY
Pamper evening Thursday 23rd November
Seal church hall (TN15 0AR) 7.30 to 9.30pm (Parking is limited so please walk or car share if possible).
£5 a ticket with a glass of prosecco or orange plus a goody bag in aid of funds for Seal Tiddlers. 
Tickets and bookable appointments from Stephanie_barnes1990@outlook.com (Please bring cash on the night).
Hair and make-up demonstrations.
Hair, nails, Neal's Yard hand massage, wax melts, Indian Head Massage and stalls include jewellery, cupcakes, fashion, Body Shop and a raffle.
Appointments for nails and hair/hand massage
Lots of stalls to start your Christmas shopping!


CHRISTMAS WREATH MAKING 
Friday December 1st in Seal Church Hall £30 per head

There will be 2 sessions - 3pm and 7.30pm , providing all you need to make a beautiful Christmas wreath, a glass of wine and mince pie.Please bring your own secateurs!
To book, please contact Chris on 07759 808814 or 01732 763585.

SEAL VILLAGE ALLOTMENTS
Seal Village Allotments are now renewing rentals for the 2024 season, and have some plots available. If you would like to join us and grow your own produce, then please contact: sealvillageallotments@gmail.com

VILLAGE CHRISTMAS LIGHTS

We have had an amazing offer from a new resident to Seal, Marcus, who is willing to take on the lead role for the Christmas lights this year, taking over from Marion Gilchrist. We are very grateful for this offer, and would welcome at least a few people to put their names forward now, to help Marcus with this task. As usual, they will probably go up on the last weekend of November or first weekend in December. If you can register your interest now, by contacting marionjgilchrist@gmail.com, she will give Marcus your names, and maybe have a little get together before that time.
 

Tuesday 24 October 2023

Trinity 20

 

Isaiah 45:1-7,  1 Thessalonians 1:1-10 & Matthew 22:15-22

Did you have any coins about your person today? A simple question to which the answer is yes or no.I expect that many people don’t use cash much anymore, preferring to tap or use their mobile devices to make payments.

Much of our Gospel reading is centred around coins and questions today.When you take time to think about it there really are ‘questions’ and then there are ‘questions’.

Simple ones like is there a train service from Sevenoaks to London Bridge? Yes.

There’s questions like, how does the person that drives the snow plough get to the depot in the morning?

Then there’s those annoying sarcastic type questions like ‘Did you mean to cut your hedge all wonky like that’?

I heard of a child who had to move out of their house because it was to be rented to someone else who asked one of those questions that makes adults hearts sink ‘why don’t we all just share’?

But, while we eat our breakfast or drink our morning tea, radio and TV presenters ask all sorts of difficult questions to people in the public glare, sometimes smugly, sometimes because they think they already know the answer or that there simply is no acceptable answer. These are not straightforward questions.

In such situations with whom do you think the balance of power rests? Occasionally it’s surprising to the interviewer when the person being interviewed produces unexpected evidence or a strong argument. And so we edge closer to Jesus’ situation.

Enter the Pharisees and Herodians, opposing groups, but united in their desire to destroy Jesus, give them some credit, they have really thought about the question and feel confident that whichever way Jesus answers he’s going to cause problems for himself.

They start with a bit of empty flattery. Beware of flattery, even though it works a treat on egotistical people.

There are wise words about it throughout the bible but several in the book of Proverbs. Here’s two examples…

‘Whoever flatters a neighbour is spreading a net for the neighbour’s feet’ and ‘Whoever rebukes a person will afterwards find more favour than one who flatters with the tongue.’

So Jesus ain’t falling for that one!

The Pharisees believe that they have put Jesus in a ‘no win’ situation. If he answers that people should pay taxes to the hated Roman occupiers to fund their brutal regime, he will lose all credibility with those who hope he is the true Messiah, radical and liberationist.

If he says that the people should withhold their taxes then he’s going to be in immediate trouble with the Roman authorities and liable to be arrested.

His first response is ‘show me the coin used for the tax’, he probably doesn’t carry them routinely unlike the pharisee who immediately has one to hand.

Next he asks, and here we see the art of the balance of power being turned upside down in the questioning process, ‘Whose head is this, and whose title’? ‘The emperor’s’ they reply.

Those who study Roman coinage will know that all sorts of abbreviations were used to minimise the labour required to communicate the title of the emperor as they needed to fit this on a small coin and the work was done by hand.

Coinage was a way of projecting power. With an Emperors head on coins throughout the region he was hard to avoid and a constant reminder of who was in charge whether the people liked it or not.

Forced into a situation where they must study the coin the Pharisees would have been observing an image likely to be that of Ceasar Augustus Tiberius, a man whose followers regarded him to be a living god, the inscriptions are likely to have referred to him as son of the divine Augustus, reinforcing his ‘godliness’.  Jewish law prohibited any form of idolatry and it must have suddenly dawned upon the Pharisees that they continuously carried a symbol of their complicity with Rome and of blasphemy to their God. Just having this coin in the temple was against their own law, oh dear, they really were finding themselves in a muddle.

By saying ‘Give therefore to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s and to God the things that are God’s’ Jesus makes it clear that earthly and divine rulers are entirely separate and these coins have no value to God.

Despite the fact that Jesus’ message has political implications he has rejected the political ambitions of those who would make him a king in earthly spheres. The changes he wants to see will come from peoples’ hearts and not the change of regime which they think they need.

it can be hard for us to look at the subject of taxes dispassionately. It was Benjamin Franklin who wrote in 1789 ‘in this world nothing is certain but death and taxes’. Whilst taxation in its various forms is currently at an historic high, thankfully, we at least are paying it to our own Government rather than a foreign occupier.

We may not always approve of how our taxes are spent but at least we have hospitals, emergency services, a military, schools, refuse collectors and other valuable public services which are funded by them.

Although there were significant resistance movements against paying tax to Rome even in Jesus time there will have been those who appreciated some of the benefits the occupying Romans brought with them. What have the Romans ever done for us? You probably know that this was a question posed by the fictional Peoples Front of Judea. Apart from medicine, irrigation, education, public health, baths and some other things, absolutely nothing!

Back in the temple those asking Jesus won’t be pleased with the answer they have received but they also know in their hearts that it wasn’t a real question and they only wanted an answer which would cause trouble for Jesus, so their hatred and resentment  of him continues to grow and just few days later Jesus would be arrested and crucified.

The Pharisees make Ceasar the subject of the question whilst Jesus wants to bring these so called religious and pious people back to the subject of God and our duty to him. No wonder he calls them hypocrites as they conveniently fail to acknowledge that God reigns over all in their frenzied enthusiasm to entrap him.

Of course, they should use all their study, their alleged wisdom and their learning from Jesus to recognize him and help others to know him as the Son of God, but this is the one thing they are absolutely determined not to do.

Was it that the Pharisees were scared that God has come this close to them, and they don’t like what they are hearing? Was it that despite all the wacky religious preachers in Jerusalem at the time this one stood out as different and couldn’t just be dismissed.

Contrast what Jesus tells to the Pharisees and Herodians with Paul’s letter to the Thessalonians . When he had visited Thessalonica previously the people he is writing to would have worshipped many cults including the ideals of the Roman empire. The coverts to Paul’s message would have faced persecution and rejection as they made a clear choice to follow Christ and it this message, rooted in God, that he praises and encourages so enthusiastically.

Perhaps the Pharisees thought If only God were like Ceasar they could just pay their taxes and be done with it, but a relationship founded in generous love is so very different.

By Jesus pointing to the emperor’s head, we are encouraged to reflect of the earthly things that distract us from God and all that competes for our obedience and loyalty.

But it’s important that we remind ourselves the image we bear is not that of Ceasar, any political party, nor the ruling monarch but that of God. We are created in his image and called to be his children.

So whilst we may accept that death and taxes are certainties of our lives, as children of God we also have the opportunity to show that the third certainty in life is the love of God for each and every one of us.

Amen

Kevin Bright                                                                                                                   22nd October 2023

Sunday 1 October 2023

Trinity 17 2023

Trinity 17 2023


Philippians 2.1-13, Matt 21.23-32


It's hard to get far these days without some sort of formal identification. Passports, driving licences, photo cards and so on. And then there are the biometric checks - phones with facial recognition software and fingerprint detection. It's a sign of the times. Technology develops, but so do the ways criminals use it to defraud us. So ever more complex and inconvenient checks are needed.    


But if the technology is new, the problem is an ancient one. How do we know whether we can trust someone or not? How do we know whether they are who they say they are? That's the core question and it's there at the centre of today's gospel reading. By what authority are you doing these things? The chief priests ask Jesus as he preaches in the temple. Who do you think you are? in other words. It's not just his preaching that's rattled them, though. It's what came before it. 


Just the day before, Jesus had ridden into Jerusalem on a donkey, and then he'd gone straight to the temple and turned over the tables of the traders there. The temple authorities know that his actions weren't just a spur of the moment outburst. They were a deliberate message to anyone with ears to hear it. That triumphal entry on a donkey and the cleansing of the temple echoed well known prophecies in the Hebrew scriptures about the coming of God's Messiah. Jesus knew exactly what he was doing and how it would be understood by people who knew those scriptures. 


We might think that the temple leaders would welcome the Messiah, the chosen one of the God they worshipped, the one who would deliver Israel from oppression. But the problem was that Jesus wasn't the kind of Messiah they were hoping for. They assumed that the Messiah would be one of them, or at least sympathetic to them, not a carpenter from Nazareth who'd consistently challenged the status quo, of which they were definitely a part. It's classic institutional behaviour. Those with power tend to assume they have a right to hang on to it. They tend to assume they have a right to be at the front of the queue, at the centre of whatever's happening, and it didn't look as if that was Jesus’ plan at all. 


But if they wanted to get rid of him, they'd need solid evidence to take to the Romans about the claims he was making. They needed to hear him say that he was the Messiah out loud, clearly, with witnesses. The Romans weren't going to be interested in reenacted Hebrew prophecies. That's why they try to force him into this no-win situation. If he says he's the Messiah, they think the Romans will clamp down on him as a potential troublemaker. But if he says he isn't, the crowds will turn against him because he will have exposed himself as a fraud. 


But Jesus uses their own tactic against them, and in the end it's his accusers who are faced with the no-win dilemma. What about John the Baptist? Asks Jesus. Was he working in line with God's will and God's way? John had been executed by King Herod, but he still had a huge popular following. If they say they think John was sent by God, Jesus will ask them why they didn't follow him. He'd been calling people to live in obedience to the law after all. If they say he wasn't sent by God, though, the crowd, who loved him, will turn against them. 


The temple authorities want Jesus to reveal himself, to declare who he really is. But in the end, he reveals them and their true motivation, which is to preserve their own position and power and the stability of the institution that gives it to them. As I said, it’s classic institutional behaviour. The temple officials aren't bad people. They're just caught up in groupthink, and we are all capable of doing what they did. We're all tempted to defend the groups we belong to, the groups which give us identity and security, to refuse to see anything wrong in them and to refuse to listen to those who've been hurt by them. That's why victims and survivors of abuse so often find themselves ignored or silenced or vilified if they speak out about what's happened to them in churches or in schools, care homes, the police, the military, the NHS, sports organisations or businesses.


The little parable Jesus goes on to tell about two sons and their father hits home because it set in one of the most powerful and complicated institutions that human beings know - the family. A man has two sons. One initially refuses to help out in the vineyard - we aren't told why -  but eventually he goes and does so anyway. The other son says he will help, but doesn't. Which son does the father's will? asks Jesus. The answer is obvious. The first son, who actually does the job, even if he'd said he wouldn't. We might think it would be even better if he’d said ‘yes’ from the beginning, but I think there's a reason why Jesus doesn't set the story up like that - I'll come to it in a minute. His brother’s behaviour is far more frustrating though. If someone says they will do something and then doesn't, when do you give up waiting and do it yourself? Do you wait till the grapes are rotting on the vine? The second son, a dig at those temple authorities, may have looked good in his father's eyes at first, just as all their prayers and sacrifices made them look holy, but what's the point of that if it doesn't make any difference, if the harvest isn't gathered in or people's lives aren't changed? 


The proof of the pudding is in the eating, we might say, or as Jesus puts it elsewhere in the Gospels, by their fruits shall you know them. However unlikely-looking the pudding, or the tree, or the person,  if they produce something which is nourishing and life giving, then obviously something good must be happening in them. That's the message of this parable. And that's why that first son needs to say ‘no’ for the parable to work. He's like the tax collectors and prostitutes  They were all people whose lives seemed to the religious elites to be saying a big ‘no’ to God. And maybe Jesus is also pointing the finger at himself - he was seen as a troublemaker and a rebel after all.  .But the tax collectors and prostitutes had listened to John and to Jesus, and were changing their lives, and Jesus himself brought new life wherever he went. Their lives were bearing fruit.


Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, writes Saint Paul to the church in Philippi. Have the same attitude Jesus did, he means. Not clinging to his power, but acting like a slave and dying. The kind of death by crucifixion reserved for slaves and other disgraced people. For Paul, it wasn't just Jesus’ death that was cross shaped, it was his whole life, focused on service rather than status, seeing and lifting up those who are at the bottom of the heap, helping them to find the God who was at work in them, as Paul puts it, enabling them to be and to do what God had intended so they could find their identity as his beloved children. 


And that brings me back to where I started. With those questions about identity. Passports and ID cards can only go so far in telling us - and those who meet us - who we are. To know that truly, we also need to know whose we are - children of a loving, serving, self-giving God who was prepared even to die for us, and who calls us to show the family likeness to him in the way we live our lives. Our hearts are restless till they find their rest in you says today's collect. It's in God that we find our true identity. It's in God that we find our true calling and the strength to live out that calling for the good of others.


Amen