Trinity 3: A faith that transforms

 

Trinity 3 2023

 

 

In the mid-1970s, a group of women gathered together in Argentina, just a few to start with, and quite ordinary women. The only thing they had in common was that each of them had a son or a daughter who had been abducted by the ruling military dictatorship who'd been “disappeared,” as they put it. Grieving and angry, they couldn't rest without knowing what had become of their children. They couldn't rest without calling to account those who had tortured and probably killed them.

 

So, they gathered each Thursday afternoon in the Plaza de Mayo outside Government House in the capital. Eventually they took to wearing white headscarves with the names of their children written on them, and carrying nails to remind them of that other mother, whose son had been nailed to a cross. The mothers of the disappeared, as they became known, were part of the process which led to the collapse of military rule in Argentina. Their courage and persistence were quite awesome. Despite the cost to themselves, they wouldn't give up. As one of them said, “when the foreign journalists began to ask about us, the military used to say don't take any notice of those old women. They're all mad. Of course, they called us mad. How could the armed forces admit they were worried by a group of middle-aged women? And anyway, we were mad when everyone was terrorised. We didn't stay at home crying. We went to the streets to confront them directly. We were mad, but it was the only way to stay sane”.

 

Those mothers weren't natural campaigners. Most had spent their lives caring for their families, focused on their own homes. But their passionate love for their children meant they couldn't just shrug their shoulders and leave it to someone else to challenge the injustices of their society. I thought of those brave women as I read today's passage from the Old Testament. Poor Jeremiah. He was regarded by his contemporaries as mad and troublesome like those mad old women in the Plaza de Mayo, and he was treated with contempt and brutality too. He'd never wanted to be a prophet, but he couldn't escape his calling any more than they could escape the pain that led to their protest.

 

The time of Jeremiah was a bad time to be a prophet, if there's ever a good time. The Babylonian army was advancing inexorably on Israel, conquering and destroying. But the people of Israel refused to acknowledge that they were at risk. The priests had told them that God wouldn't let anything bad happen to them, and they chose to believe it. Who wouldn't? They were convinced that it didn't matter what they did or how they lived. It would all turn out for the best. God was on their side.

 

Protected by this fantasy, corruption thrived. The wealthy oppressed the poor and the cohesion of the nation was undermined. They only paid lip service, if that, to God, so they weren't developing the kind of deep, trusting relationship with him that they would need to carry them through the terrible times that were coming. So, God called Jeremiah to speak out. Wake up! Open your eyes! It matters what you do and how you live.

 

His message went down like a lead balloon. He was ridiculed, arrested, maltreated. No one wanted to know. Jeremiah was having a particularly bad day when he spoke the words we heard today. He'd been prophesying in the temple the day before, and the priest, Pashur, wanted to shut him up, so he'd put him in the stocks overnight. It was a humiliating and painful punishment, and when Jeremiah was released in the morning, he was furious: furious with the priest, but most of all furious with God for calling him to this thankless task. You have enticed me, he complained to God, and I was enticed. The word enticed is a very strong one. In some versions it's translated as seduced or even deceived. That's how Jeremiah feels about God at this minute, as if God's pulled a fast one on him, got him into this without really telling him what he was letting himself in for. And yet there's a tension in Jeremiah's lament. However furious he is with God, he knows people need to hear this message, and in the end, he cares more about that than his own safety. The words burn within him and insist on being spoken. He's come to realise that God isn't motivated by vindictiveness or cold judgement, but by love. This is a God who is passionate about his people, desperate to help them through the days that are coming.

 

It's this passion that's overpowered Jeremiah, seduced him, enticed him. But it's a true passion. It's not a false trick. He's seen the depths of God's love, this God who delivers the life of the needy from the hands of evildoer.

 

Jesus’ words to his disciples in the gospel reading today are an attempt to prepare them for an equally dangerous and unpopular ministry. And Matthew's account is written, of course, for early Christians who also faced the daily reality of persecution and the danger of death. Don't be afraid, says Jesus. What you're doing is worth doing. It may sometimes feel like failure. Death and defeat may seem to stare you in the face. But in the end, those who lose their lives for my sake will find the true life that can't be destroyed.

 

The Bible passages we've heard today, like the witness of all those who stood up for justice over the ages, invite us to ask ourselves two questions. The first question is this. What difference does my faith make to the way I lead my life? What impact has it had on me and through me on others? What do I do because I'm a Christian? What do I not do because I'm a Christian? When I come to a tricky situation, how does my faith influence the way I deal with it? If we can't think of a way that our faith changes us, well, that's something we should surely ponder, because when push comes to shove, what's the point of it?

 

The second question follows on. Faith should change the way we live, but that's not enough on its own. The terrorists who destroyed the Twin Towers on September 11 2001, had a faith, and it made a difference to their lives. But it was entirely destructive. Destructive faith doesn’t have to look as dramatic as theirs, though. Plenty of people have destroyed themselves and others through joyless faith, narrow faith, faith that is driven by fear or the desire to dominate. Faith can be deep and powerful and sincere, but not healthy at all. But that's not the faith that Jeremiah and Jesus call us to. Their witness was rooted in the knowledge that God cared passionately for them, as for all people, and so they should care passionately too.  

 

The mothers of the Plaza de Mayo couldn't stop protesting because they couldn't stop loving their children. God can't stop loving us, even if he wanted to. If we know that, if we really know it, we’ll not only have a faith that’s strong and deep, but a faith that's loving, sustaining and enriching too. And though it may bring challenges, that kind of faith will keep us going long after a faith rooted in fear or self-righteousness has faded away. So, this week we're invited to ask, How does my faith change me?, but also Why does it change me? Is it rooted in fear? The desire for approval? Just plain habit? Or is it rooted in the knowledge of God's passionate, personal, endless love? God calls us all to serve, to witness, to work with him in great ways or in small. If that feels daunting, as perhaps it should, we need to open our ears to his words of reassurance that whatever happens, his passionate love for us means that like those brave, Argentinian mothers, he'll never give up on his children.

Amen

 

 

 

 

Trinity 2 : the map of the journey

 

Trinity 2 2023

Exodus 19.2-8a, Matthew 9.35-10.8

 

As you may know. Philip and I are very keen walkers and cyclists. Not that we necessarily walk or cycle far, and the bikes do have electric motors, but we enjoy exploring. And that means maps are very important to us, not just to help us find our way, but also to point out what might be worth seeing – an intriguing place name, some historic ruins, an ancient trackway, a bit of industrial heritage.

 

Human beings have always been map readers and map makers. Aboriginal Australians made maps called Songlines by telling stories and singing songs that traced the way through their landscapes. They weren’t alone in that. Many cultures tell stories to account for local features – narrative maps if you like -  like the biblical story of Lot’s wife, turned into a pillar of salt, a landmark people would have known, because she looked back at Sodom and Gomorrah as she left it (Gen 19.26).

 

Medieval people drew what they called “itinerary maps” as guides for traders and pilgrims,

which just showed the route, rather than all the land around it – an early form of the sat nav. They also drew maps of the world as they knew it – Mappa Mundi, as they are known – there’s a famous one in in Hereford Cathedral. They had  Jerusalem at the centre, because in their world view that was the focal point of the world, the place of Jesus death and resurrection. Some, like the Ebstorf map from Hanover drew the map as if it was Jesus body. His head pokes out at the top and his feet dangle beneath it, to emphasize the fact that the world and all it contains is made and redeemed and exists in him.

 

As all those examples suggest, maps have always been about more than simply recording a landscape or helping people to find their way. They reflect the things that are important to us, religious ideas, military concerns – the Ordnance in Ordnance Survey maps refers to the fact that they were originally commissioned as maps to help with the logistics of defending the nation, moving ordnance, weaponry, around. Maps are drawn for a purpose, helping us to reflect on where we are, record where we have been, navigate to where we are going, and, whether we know it or not, we are all map makers.

 

We naturally talk about our lives as a journey, and as the long history of pilgrimage shows, we often take real journeys in the hope that they will enrich us spiritually.

 

The journey we hear about in our Old Testament reading today from the book of Exodus certainly did that for the ancient Israelites. “The Israelites had journeyed…” it begins, and they certainly had. They had escaped from Egypt, with the Pharaoh’s armies in hot pursuit, but then found themselves in a trackless wilderness, with only the clothes they stood up in and the possessions they could grab at the last minute. They had no idea where they were going, or how they would sustain themselves along the way. But according to the Biblical account they were guided by a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night, God gave them manna to eat and water that gushed out of solid rock. As they travelled, they faced all sorts of challenges together, sometimes meeting them, sometimes failing, and gradually started to learn what it meant to be God’s people. They were given the ten commandments that were meant to shape their life together, so that they could be the “priestly kingdom and holy nation” God wanted them to be once they got to the Promised Land, the land “flowing with milk and honey”. They travelled together for forty years around this wilderness, on a journey which, technically speaking, should only have taken a few weeks, even going at the pace of the slowest. But the speed our bodies can travel at isn’t necessarily the same as that of our souls. They might have been able to walk to the Promised Land in days, but it would take forty years for them to be formed as a community, ready to enter it, and the “map” they drew through the stories of this time was one they returned to often.

 

In the passage we heard today, God tells them to remember the journey they have taken, and in particular to notice and remember how he has been present with them. “You have seen what I did to the Egyptians, and how I bore you on eagle’ wings and brought you to myself”.

 

In today’s Gospel reading there’s another journey about to take place. Jesus sends his disciples out to preach, teach and heal, travelling from village to village, just as he has done. But this time they will go without him. It’s very clearly meant to be an apprenticeship for them, a practice run for the time when he will no longer be physically present in the world .

Their experiences will, in a sense, create a map for them, enabling them to discover the lie of the land, and how they fit into this landscape. Where will they struggle? Where will they find joy? How will they keep going? 

 

Why does Matthew think it’s important to tell this story? Probably because the early Christian community he writes his Gospel for is journeying through similar territory.  They were trying to spread the message of Jesus too, sometimes finding a welcome, sometimes finding apathy or even persecution. The “map” Matthew draws as he talks about the journeys of the first disciples, will help them, reminding them that others have been where they are, that there will be unexpected joy to be found, and that when bad things happen and they find they have stumbled into “here be dragons” territory, God will still be with them, giving them the words they need.

 

Map makers aren’t just people with skills in geography, people who can measure the height of hills or trace where the rivers run to: they are people who help us to navigate the emotional and spiritual journeys of our lives.  One of the gifts we give one another as a community of faith is that we can each share our maps with one another. No one can make our journey for us. Often they can’t make it with us either, but there are often people who know the lie of the land we are going through, because they’ve been there themselves, and that can help us find a safe route through.

 

So today, I wonder what your journey through life has taught you, what’s on your map that you might be able to share with others, the places you’ve found refreshment and help, guidance and shelter. “You have seen…how I brought you to myself”, says God to the wandering Israelites in the wilderness. That’s the ultimate aim of all our journeys, to find God with us as we travel, and there at our journey’s end. How has God brought you to himself, I wonder, so that you can “enter his gates with thanksgiving” as the Psalm puts it? Whose maps have helped you find him? And how might you share your map with others, as they have shared theirs with you?

Amen

 

 

 

Trinity 1: A day in the life of...

 Psalm 50 , Matthew 9.9-26

 

There’s a cartoon I saw recently. It goes the rounds on the internet quite regularly in one form or another, but the slogan is always the same. “I’m staying inside today; it’s way too peopley out there!”

As an introvert, I know the feeling. I love people, but lots of big gatherings and chit-chat can leave me feeling very exhausted. 

 

In today’s Gospel reading, Jesus has what seems to me to be an extremely “peopley” day, full of interruptions and crowds. I feel tired just reading about it.

 

First he meets Matthew, the tax collector, as he strolls through Capernaum where he lives, and calls him to leave his tax booth and follow him. By lunchtime he’s been joined by all Matthew’s tax collector friends along with a random assortment of others, who’ve invited themselves along to see what’s changed their old friend’s life so radically. Then the Pharisees turn up, aghast that someone who claims to be doing God’s work, as Jesus does, would choose to eat with to such a disreputable bunch of people. And hot on their heels are some disciples of John the Baptist who are equally aghast for a quite different reason. They don’t mind who Jesus eats with; they are just offended that he is eating at all, rather than fasting as their teacher would have done. And then, after all that hullabaloo, just when we might have excused Jesus if he had wanted to slope off and have a siesta, into the melee comes the leader of the local synagogue, whose daughter has died and who is evidently so desperate that he is prepared to beg for the help of this unconventional new preacher.

 

Jesus goes off with him, straightaway, but on the way, yet another need is presented to him, as a woman with some sort of gynaecological condition quietly touches his cloak. She hopes he won’t notice, because she knows that contact with a woman who is bleeding will render him ritually unclean and complicate his life.  But Jesus does notice, and far from being angry, he stops and takes the time to heal her before going on to raise the little girl from death, having dealt with the crowd of flute players - professional mourners who are there to prepare for her funeral.

 

Like I said, an incredibly peopley day, and everyone who is part of it has a different agenda and different needs. The tax collectors need to know they are loved and accepted. The Pharisees need to know there is a clear line between good and bad, and that they are on the right side of it. The disciples of John, who are never happy unless they are miserable, need to make sure everyone else is miserable too. The woman with the haemorrhage needs to be healed and restored to her community. The leader of the synagogue needs his daughter back. And the flute players, while they might not have been so heartless as to have wanted her to die, needed the lucrative job of playing at her funeral.

 

Jesus couldn’t please them all, but what he could do, and did do, was give them all time and space, opening up new possibilities for them. “God desires mercy and not sacrifice” he says to the Pharisees, quoting the Old Testament prophet Hosea, and in a way this is what this whole peopley day is about. Jesus demonstrates what this means as he makes his way through it.

 

Mercy can sound like a rather condescending word to us. It perhaps conjures up visions of a judge letting someone off with a lesser punishment, or someone being given a second chance because we feel sorry for them or they beg hard enough, but the Hebrew word Hosea uses - “hesed’  - is much bigger than that. It’s often translated “loving kindness” or “steadfast love”; it seems to me to be a love that is characterised by spaciousness. It is a love which gives people room to be themselves, accepts them as they are, and, paradoxically, because of that, it also gives them room to change and grow; they don’t need to dig their heels in or be defensive, because they aren’t being attacked. Jesus gives that spacious love to everyone he meets on this peopley day, meeting them where they are, and offering them room and time to see new possibilities if they want to.

 

It’s easy to see where that happens in his dealings with Matthew and his tax collector friends, with the synagogue leader and his daughter, and with the woman with the haemorrhage. He welcomes, calls and heals them, restoring them to life physically in the case of the little girl, but spiritually and socially for the others. Matthew would have been despised by his community, because the taxes he collected on behalf of his Roman overlords mainly went to support their military occupation of Galilee. Tax collectors were collaborators, traitors. We don’t know how he came to take on this role, but once he’d started, it would have been hard to get out of, but Jesus sees possibilities for Matthew, and his friends, which no one else, including themselves, could. The woman’s bleeding would have rendered her, and anyone she came into contact with, ritually unclean. So for twelve years, she’d have had to isolate herself from family and friends, cut off by her illness. By the time she meets Jesus, she’s come to the point where she doesn’t even seem to be able to make room for herself – she literally wants to be invisible – but Jesus sees her and gives her the dignity of time and space. That is “hesed”, spacious love in action.

 

But Jesus also shows that spacious love to the other groups in the story, the ones who don’t agree with him, who challenge him, who ask him questions, in that he takes them seriously, he listens to them and answers them; he doesn’t just write them off, ignore them or attack them. Even those flute players and mourning crowd weren’t just sent packing, as if they were a nuisance; they were given an explanation which opened up the possibility that this might be a story which would end in life, not death. “she is not dead, but sleeping” says Jesus. Whether they could stop laughing long enough to take that in was up to them, but the space was there, the invitation to see a different future.

 

It’s challenging to live a life of spacious love, to be open to others, instead of endlessly defensive. Jesus can do it because he is rooted in the spacious love of his Father for him. If we find ourselves unable to listen to others, wanting to demonise them before we’ve even met them, perhaps it is because we don’t have that sense of security ourselves. As the Bible says, “We love because he first loved us.” If we think God’s love has limits, then we will inevitably worry that if others get more, there will be less for us, so we’ll try to ration it out to those we think deserve it. The message of the Bible, though, is that there is plenty for everyone, that it is inexhaustible.

 

As we follow Jesus through his “peopley” day, perhaps it might lead us to think of the people we meet in our days. Who do we welcome, and who do we avoid or resent? Who do we not even notice, and why might that be? And are we secure in the knowledge of God’s spacious love for us, so that we can let it overflow to those around us too?

Amen

Trinity Sunday: God with us

 2 Corinthians 13.11-13, Matthew 28.16-20.

Today is Trinity Sunday, the day when I am supposed to explain to you the mystery of how God can be three and one at the same time, probably using dodgy analogies of ice, water and steam or images of shamrocks or long theological words like perichoresis.  You’ll probably be quite glad to hear that I’m not going to do any of that. 

But that doesn’t mean that I think the idea of the Trinity doesn’t matter. It’s just that it seems to me it is something to explore, not explain, to wonder at, not to dissect. The idea of the Trinity started with the experience of the early Christians, and it’s when we let it speak to our experience that it really starts to make a difference to us. 

In particular, it grew out of their experience of the truth of the words Jesus spoke to them at the end of his ministry, the words we heard in our Gospel reading just now. “Remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age” says Jesus. Matthew’s gospel doesn’t include the story of Jesus ascending into heaven. It’s only Luke who tells that tale.

Why is this? It could be that Matthew doesn’t know the story Luke tells – their Gospels were written around the same time. But I think it’s more likely that Matthew is simply making a different point. Luke emphasizes that Jesus is going away at this point. The disciples stand gawping up into space until angels appear to tell them go back to Jerusalem and wait for the Holy Spirit.  But Matthew wants to emphasize the fact that though they may no longer see Jesus, he has not, in a sense, gone anywhere at all. “Remember, I am with you always”. Matthew’s story isn’t about absence; it is about presence. 

And it has been so right from the beginning of his Gospel. He is the one who describes an angel appearing to Joseph telling him that Mary will bear a child who will be called Emmanuel – he is quoting from the prophet Isaiah. Emmanuel means “God is with us”. Matthew is the one, also, who tells us that when we do anything to help the least and last in the world, we do it for Christ; he is present in the hungry and thirsty and homeless. If we ignore them, we miss seeing him too. He compares the Kingdom of Heaven to yeast, hidden in the dough, indistinguishable from it, and yet transforming it from a solid lump to good bread. 

“The kingdom of Heaven has come near” says Matthew again and again. (Mt. 3.2, 4.17, 10.7)

 

And that brings me back to the Trinity. I haven’t forgotten about the Trinity! 

The early Christians were convinced that God was Father, Son and Holy Spirit because that was their experience. It wasn’t a dry and complicated doctrine, but a living reality for them.  They knew of God as creator and loving parent from their Scriptures. That was foundational to Jewish belief. When they met Jesus, they had the sense that they were meeting someone who showed them what God was like, who bore God’s likeness, the family likeness. And when Jesus was no longer physically present, they sensed him through the Holy Spirit, who came to them in prayer, and in the new communities they formed, and in the people they reached out to, people who they might once have shunned as unclean outsiders, different from themselves.

“Nothing can separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus” said Paul to the Romans (Romans 8.39). They realised that God wasn’t – and had never been – hiding in a distant heaven in untouchable perfection. He was all around them and within them. 

That doesn’t meant that they thought there was no heavenly realm beyond their earthly experience. They knew that they hadn’t seen heaven in all its fullness yet, but they discovered that it all started here and now. There was no separation between humanity and God. In Christ, and in the Holy Spirit, God was where they were, going through what they went through. And that changed them utterly. 

Just imagine what a difference it would make if we fully understood this ourselves, if we truly realised that God was present in us, and in each other. How would that change the way we treated each other, and ourselves?

Just imagine what a difference it would make if we fully understood that God was present in our homes and workplaces. If we were to save him a seat at the dinner table or a desk at the office, if we were to see him in the people we pass in the street, or those who work to provide the essentials of our lives, those who grow our food, make our clothes, collect our rubbish, how might that affect the decisions we make. 

Just imagine what a difference it would make if we truly believed that God was present in every part of his creation. Wouldn’t we care for the world rather better than we do now?

It was the sense of God’s presence with them, first in Jesus, then in his Holy Spirit, known in prayer, known in the communities they formed, known in the people they reached out to, which transformed those early Christians and made them so excited that their message spread to the ends of the earth.

But it took practice to learn this – it didn’t happen by magic, and that’s something we need to take note of if we want to know the presence of God. It’s obvious from our second reading, in which Paul tells the Corinthians to “put things in order” and “live in peace with one another”  that they weren’t doing that. It is only as they do that they will become aware of the “God of love and peace” being with them, says Paul. 

Perhaps that’s why Jesus doesn’t just say “I am with you always”. He says “remember, I am with you always” or, to translate it more accurately, “behold, I am with you always”. The Greek word is “idou” and it means “look”. If we want to see God’s presence, we have to look for it, and doing that will shape the way we live.  

Until I was in my twenties I knew nothing about gardening, and I wasn’t very interested. Gardens were full of green things, indistinguishable to me from any other green things. A leaf was a leaf was a leaf. It was only when I started gardening myself, that I started really to look. I needed to differentiate the seedling I wanted to nurture from the weed I needed to pull out. It’s the same with God. He doesn’t usually shout at us. He doesn’t write in golden letters in the sky. He doesn’t force himself on us if we don’t want him, but if we open our eyes to him, we learn to find him. As we pray, we discover the one to whom we pray. As we come together, we discover God in our sisters and brothers. As we reach out beyond ourselves, we discover God already there, waiting for us, at work in all people and places, in all times and seasons, in sorrow as well as in joy. And that discovery changes us, as it changed those first disciples, like the yeast that leavens the dough.

“Remember – behold – look - I am with you always,” says Jesus. The good news that Matthew proclaims from beginning to end in his Gospel is that God has never abandoned us and will never abandon us. Jesus is Emmanuel, God with us. Father, Son and Holy Spirit, are a Trinity of love, woven inextricably through the life of the world. God calls us to see him and know him, to trust him and work with him. Let’s pray for the grace to do just that.

Amen