Feb 26: Knowing our Weakness

 Gen 2. 15-17, 3.1-7 Matthew 4.1-11

We never quite know what is around the next corner.

These last few years have taught us that, even if we didn’t know it before.

A year ago, Russia invaded Ukraine. On one level, people saw it coming for weeks beforehand as the tension built, but I recall the news reports from Ukraine at the time showing people apparently just going about their normal business right up to the last moment. Maybe it was defiance, but I suspect that there was an element of simply not being able to get their heads around what was happening. Surely it wouldn’t come to actual war, or if it did, it wouldn’t last long. The alternative – the reality, as it turned out – was too awful to contemplate. And if we had been in their shoes, I am sure we would have behaved in just the same way.  

Coincidentally, three years ago, it was also at this time, that Covid was starting to loom on the horizon. There had been a handful of cases in the UK, a few deaths. We saw the hospitals in Italy filling up and being overwhelmed. But I don’t think, even a month before the first lockdown it felt very real to most of us, and even if it had, we couldn’t imagine what we could do about it anyway, other than panic-buying toilet roll. We knew there was trouble ahead, but we had no way of knowing what it would mean for our individual lives. And when the government ordered us all to stay at home, we were thrown into confusion. I’d like to pretend that I’d carefully prepared for all the complexities lockdown brought to church life, but in reality I was making it up as I went along, as I think we all were. I realised in that first week of lockdown that we would have to find different ways of connecting with one another and with God. I rapidly taught myself to make podcasts, and use zoom, as well as trying to find ways of keeping in contact with those who weren’t online. I rejoiced at the way people in the congregation and community sprang into action to take care of one another – we discovered that the most effective, perhaps the only effective, preparation we’d made was to build up the love we had for one another over the years – but, looking back, I know that there was so much we weren’t ready for, and maybe couldn’t have been ready for. 

I suspect the same was true for Jesus at the beginning of his ministry. In the Gospel passage we heard today, he heads out into the desert. He has just been baptised by John in the Jordan, and a voice from heaven has announced “This is my Son, the Beloved, listen to him”. He was probably around 30 years old at this point, and we know almost nothing of his life in those first three decades, other than that he seems to have been learning Joseph’s trade as a carpenter and builder. But at some point, he realised that he had a job to do, a calling to fulfil, a calling that would empower the powerless, but as a result bring him into conflict with those in authority, and it would have been obvious to anyone that a calling like this would lead to pain and suffering. Rome didn’t get where it was, to the top of the tree of power in the ancient world, by being soft on its opponents, and the Jewish authorities, who were trying to keep Rome happy, weren’t likely to welcome challenge either.  There’s no reason to think that Jesus knew that in any detail what was going to happen – he wouldn’t have been human if he did – but whatever the future held, he has to have known that it was going to be tough and lead to his death. 

That was what he was doing  in the wilderness, pondering that future. And  “wild” in “wilderness” is significant. The Judean desert where he spent 40 days and nights was a hard place to be, barren, waterless, exposed, baking during the day, freezing at night, inhospitable. It was a place of wild animals - scorpions, snakes, bears, wolves – and of wild people too, bandits, outlaws, people driven away from settled society. In the thinking of the time, it was also the home of demons, a place of conflict and danger. Jesus wasn’t withdrawing for some peace and quiet, he was heading straight for the spiritual frontline.

Jesus’ earthly ministry, then, begins as it will end. In the wilderness, as on the cross, he is alone, afraid, vulnerable, hungry and thirsty, at the mercy of the uncaring forces around him. And he’s tempted to find an easy way out, to use the tactics of the worldly leaders he sees around him to avoid the suffering he sees coming. The emperors and kings of his world – and ours too – puff themselves up to try to look big in the face of danger. They heap up wealth – turning stones to bread. They make alliances with other powerful people – bowing down to the devil. They boast that they are untouchable, invincible, immortal, that nothing can touch them, that they could take any risk and get away with it, in the hopes of convincing people not to even think of defying them. But ultimately those tactics are illusions, even if they work for a while, and they come at a high cost, corrupting and destroying.  

This isn’t the pattern God calls his Son to follow, and his time in the desert confirms that. Jesus isn’t called to protect himself, to look strong, to dazzle by displays of power. He isn’t called to manoeuvre and manipulate. He is called to trust his Father’s love, to trust that when he is weak, God is with him, when he is struggling, God is with him, when he is suffering and dying, God is with him, so that all of us who are weak, struggling, suffering and dying know that the same is true of us. He answers the temptations that Satan puts before him, not by pointing to his own strength, wisdom or resourcefulness, but by pointing to the love and faithfulness of his Father. 

In a sense, this passage is a direct counterpart – the anti-story if you like - to our first reading. There Adam and Eve are tempted to believe that they can go it alone, that they can be “like God, knowing good and evil”. They are tempted to believe that God doesn’t really love them, that he was lying when he forbade them to eat from that particular tree, just trying to keep them subservient to him. Jesus chooses to believe the opposite, that he is loved, whatever happens, that he doesn’t have to do it all or have it all, and that is what carries him through all that he faces.

I began by saying that we never know what is around the corner. It’s tempting to see Lent as a time to build up our spiritual strength, so that we can cope with anything life throws at us, like the spiritual superheroes we would like to be. But actually, I wonder whether Lent might be the opposite. Our collect for today asked God that, “as you know our weakness, so may we know your power to save.” I wonder whether Lent is really , a time to get used to the idea that, ultimately, we can’t cope, and that we don’t need to, that we will all fail and fall and die,  but that when that happens, we will still be safe, because we will know we are held by the grace of the God whose faithfulness is eternal. 

Amen

Second before Lent: Stories of creation

 

Genesis 1.1-2.4, Matthew 6.25-end

 

I’d like to take you on a little imaginative journey today, back in time to the sixth century before Christ, and across the world to the city of Babylon. It is one of the greatest cities on earth, a cradle of civilisation and science, inhabited by people from across the known world, from every background and nation, each with their own cultures and stories. Some have chosen to live there but others have been taken there by force, exiled and sometimes enslaved people from the nations the Babylonians have conquered.

 

Imagine we are members of one of those groups forced to make a new home here. We are from Jerusalem, which now lies in ruins, destroyed by our captors. Years have passed, and those among us who remember Jerusalem are getting old and dying, leaving a new generation which doesn’t know the faith, the customs, the stories that had shaped our lives back there.   

 

Something needs to be done. The stories must be gathered together and written down, so that they can’t be lost. So that’s what we do. Scribes began to set to work, shaping the stories so they will be memorable, telling them, so they won’t be forgotten.

 

Let’s imagine ourselves, sitting around a fire in some rough shelter in Babylon, after another day’s hard graft, listening to our storytellers. Like all good storytellers, they start with something familiar, or something that sounds as if it will be, and the most familiar story in Babylon is the Enuma Elish, the Babylonian Creation story, known and told across the whole of the ancient Near East. It is named for its opening words “When on high” – that’s what Enuma Elish means. As the Jewish storytellers begin their story, they start with almost identical words,  “When God created” –  we think we know what’s coming because the phrase is almost identical in the original languages. But as we listen we’re in for a surprise.

 

The Enuma Elish, the creation story we take for granted, that we hear around us all the time, goes on to describe how Apsu the god of freshwater, and Tiamat, the sea goddess – who are symbols of primeval chaos - create a whole race of gods who fight with one another, kill each other and dismember each other’s bodies in an orgy of violence, creating the world as pretty much as a by-product. Eventually they make humanity to be their slaves, to do the work they don’t want to do themselves.

 

That’s the kind of story we’re expecting to hear. And at first, it sounds as if the story might turn out to be the same. There are chaotic waters, like Apsu and Tiamat, after all. But then it takes a very different turn. Instead of a host of divine beings at war with one another, there is one God who brings calm and peace and beauty and fruitfulness. And instead of humanity being created as an afterthought, as slaves at the bidding of these cruel gods, they are the crown of creation, the delight of the God who made them, entrusted with the care of the rest of the creation. Again and again, this God looks at what he has made and declares “it is good, it is good, it is very good…”

 

The story we are hearing, as we sit in exile, takes us off guard. It is wonderful, but, can it be true…? What would it mean if it was true…? Not true in the sense of being a literal historical account, but true in its message, that God loves what God has made, that it didn’t come about as the by-product of divine warfare, but was dreamed up in love, in all its rich diversity. What would it mean if life was not seen as a burden, one day’s hard graft after another, but a delight to the one who made it, designed to be enjoyed, even having a day a week set aside simply to do that? What would it mean if the world and everything in it, including us, was good and beloved in the eyes of God?

 

Now, I can just imagine someone among us sitting in that ancient Babylonian audience piping up at this point, “but it doesn’t feel good, this world that we’re living in. It feels brutal, and oppressive, and insecure, and we are treated as less than nothing. It feels much more like we were created by malicious gods who didn’t care about us.” And that’s often how it has felt, of course.  Whether its enslavement in Babylon or earthquakes in Turkey or war in Ukraine, or something more personal and closer to home, the world can feel far from blessed.

But maybe the storytellers might answer, keep listening, and let the tale unfold, and see what happens next. You’re right. The world often feels like a terrible mess, but see what that God does about it. So we keep listening and we hear that we’re not the first people to feel far from home, expelled from Eden, out in the wilderness, but we also hear about the God who goes out into that wilderness with his people, who speaks to them from burning bushes, and rescues them from an earlier enslavement Egypt, and travels with them through the desert. He promises them that he won’t forsake them, and he doesn’t. Suffering is real and baffling, and the Bible never soft pedals that, but God’s love is real too, and unstoppable.  

 

If we had been there in that Babylonian captivity, hearing that story, daring to trust its truth as it spoke of our belovedness and the belovedness of the world, what would it have done to us?  Instead of swallowing the lie that we were worthless, made only to work for cruel and capricious warring forces – human or divine – that ruled our world, it would have given us the strength to endure and to live and love again, eventually returning to our country and rebuild it. And that’s exactly what it did, and what it has continued to do for Jewish people ever since. As Christians we believe  it was and still is, wonderfully confirmed by the life and death and resurrection of Jesus, the one who shows us that “God with us” in flesh and blood. As Jesus reminds us in the Gospel story today,  and as this week’s earthquake has reminded us, controlling the world around us is often completely beyond our power,  but knowing we aren’t alone, that life isn’t pointless, that every person matters to God is a vital antidote to the anxious, and usually pointless, striving Jesus talks about.

 

And it all starts with that foundational Creation story. It's hard for us to understand how revolutionary this version was, how subversive, how life-changing, because we’ve lived with it for so long. We are more likely to fuss about whether it is literally true, and how it relates to scientific understandings – a great amount of energy is wasted on that sort of debate - but it’s not a story about faith versus science; it’s a story which asks us to consider what kind of God we believe in, and what our belief says to us and about us, and about all the rest of his creation, discerning his hand in all his works, and his likeness in all his children, as today’s special prayer put it. Do we look around us and hear God say “it is good”, and therefore treasure God’s world? Do we look at one another and hear God say “it is good” and treasure one another? Do we look in the mirror and hear God say “it is good” and treasure ourselves? What difference might it make to the world if we did?

 

Amen

3 before Lent

 Isaiah 58.1-12, Matthew 5.13-20

“Why do we fast, but you do not see? Why humble ourselves, but you do not notice?”

The people Isaiah was writing about weren’t happy – that much is obvious. Things weren’t as they ought to be, and God didn’t seem to be listening. Many of them had been in exile for generations in Babylon, following the conquest of their nation, and those that weren’t were scratching out an existence among the ruins of Jerusalem and the surrounding areas. Their society had collapsed. Everyone was scrambling for their own security. The weak were being left to fend for themselves. It’s an ancient story, but also a very modern one. Times of crisis can bring out the best in people, but they can bring out the worst too, especially if they drag on for a long time.

They hadn’t forgotten their ancient religious practices though. In fact,  seemed to have doubled down on them, fasting, and praying, “[bowing] down their heads like bulrushes and [lying] in sackcloth and ashes”, but although they had remembered what to do, they seemed to have forgotten why they did it. They were treating God like a sort of “coin-in-a-slot” machine, behaving as if performing the rituals and keeping the rules were simply a way of trying to manipulate God into giving them what they wanted. The words of their complaint give the game away. “Why do we fast but YOU do not see? What’s the point of being good if the boss doesn’t notice? 

God’s response, essentially, is “don’t focus on me, and don’t focus on yourselves. Focus on those who are in need, focus on justice, focus on doing what’s right because it’s right, not because you think it will get you into my good books.” “Is not this the fast I choose; to loose the bonds of injustice, to share your bread with the hungry, to house the homeless, to clothe the naked.” 

That might make us wonder whether prayer and worship really matter at all. People sometimes ask me “why does God need us to worship him anyway?” The simple answer is “he doesn’t.” God doesn’t need anything from us. He’s not like the paranoid dictators of our world –Vladimir Putin or Hitler or Kim Jong-Un. He doesn’t need people to fawn on him to build up his fragile ego. God is complete as God is. 

So what is our worship for? Perhaps we could think of it like this. If you’ve got children, of any age, you’ve probably got, somewhere in your house a wonky clay pot or unidentifiable painting that they proudly came home from school with and presented to you, and which you can’t bear to throw away. Why do we treasure these things and keep them? It’s not because we need them, it’s because they remind us of the love we have for our children and they for us. I suspect that the same is true for God, as he listens to our stumbling prayers, and receives our inadequate offerings of thanks and praise. They just delight him. He likes to be with us; he likes having us around, he likes hearing from us, and being invited into that divine joy heals and strengthens us too.

Prayer and worship matter, but they aren’t payments to God for services rendered, still less bribes to make him do what we want.  Instead they are things which reshape us, and send us out into the world to love others and to bring them joy in our turn. 

It reminds me of the story Jesus tells in Luke’s Gospel of two men who go up to the Temple to pray. The first is a Pharisee who stands where everyone can see him and thanks God that he is such a good man, who fasts and makes charitable donations. He doesn’t commit any big sins, like adultery or murder, and in particular, he boasts to God, he isn’t like the other man in the story, a collaborating tax-collector. The tax-collector, meanwhile, kneels in a corner and prays quietly, desperately, to God to forgive him. Which one goes home set right with God, having done the business they need to do? asks Jesus. The answer is obvious. It’s not the Pharisee, who thinks he has earned God’s love through his own brilliance, who thinks God jolly well ought to love him and approve of him, that God owes him one. It’s the one who knows he can’t earn God’s love, but that God loves him anyway. He’s the one who has found true security – salvation might be another name for that –  because he has discovered that God’s love is a gift of grace, not dependent on what he does, not a contract either he or God is obliged to fulfil.   

In the Gospel reading we heard today, Jesus says to his disciples “unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.” It might sound as if he is setting an impossibly high bar, but I think it is really our attitude to faith that Jesus is questioning, challenging us not just to do right, but to do right for the right reasons, simply because it is right and will make God’s world, his beloved creation, a better place.  Jesus calls us to be salt and light in the world, not so that God will notice our saltiness and brilliance, but simply because the world needs salt and light. Virtue is its own reward, as the saying goes, or, as Isaiah puts it, it's water in parched places, building up what is ruined, repairing breaches, restoring streets to live in – something that is good for us all, right here and right now. It’s what the kingdom of heaven looks like, a place where there is healing happening, where the seeds of joy are growing.

It reminds me of the story of Nicholas Winton. He was a respectable, middle class finance director from Surrey, but his family discovered, late in his life, that just before WW2 broke out he’d gone to Czechoslovakia and, alongside others, had organised the rescue of hundreds of Jewish refugees on the Kindertransports. He’d never really talked about it, but they discovered his scrapbooks in the attic, with the names and photos of those he’d rescued, none of whom he’d heard from or seen since, and many of whom had no idea who’d saved them. You may have seen the programmes made by Esther Rantzen in the late 1980s in which she told his story. At the end of the second of those programmes, she asked the studio audience whether there were any of those children present, and one by one, dozens of people sitting around him stood up and applauded him, middle aged by then, with children and grandchildren of their own, who’d had the chance to live, to achieve, to give their gifts to the world, among other things as writers, scientists, doctors, and politicians – Alf Dubs was one of his evacuees – and all because of his courage and tenacity. In the midst of it all, Winton sat, overcome with emotion, seeing for the first time, what he’d accomplished. He'd never expected any reward or recognition. As far as he was concerned, he’d just done what was right, because it was right. Winton had no particular religious faith as an adult, but if ever there was a man who was salt and light to the world it was surely him, and I am quite sure that God would say of him, “here is someone who offered the fast that I choose, the worship that truly honours me, the righteousness that exceeds that of the scribe and Pharisees. Here is someone who entered and inhabited the kingdom of heaven in his lifetime by his actions, and opened it up to many others too as he gave them the gift of life.” 

Amen