Trinity 12

Isaiah 51.1-6, Matthew 16.13-20

 

My late father-in-law was a geology lecturer. I think it would be fair to say that his life revolved around rocks. Clearing his house after his death last Christmas has shown us that, if we didn’t know it already. We’ve come across box after box of carefully labelled rock samples, gathered on working trips, but also on family holidays. Coming back from the seaside with rock is nothing unusual, but it’s usually the sort that’s made of peppermint candy, with the resort name running through the middle of it. Not for the Le Bas family – they came back with the real thing, packed in the car around the luggage. To us, as we wondered what to do with all those rock samples, one looked much like another, but to Philip’s father each one was unique, coming from somewhere specific, with its own story to tell.

 

“Look to the rock from which you were hewn, and to the quarry from which you were dug”, says Isaiah to the people of Israel. They’d been in exile in Babylon for generations at this point, and their big fear was that they would lose their identity, their heritage, their sense of who they were as children of God, that they would just be absorbed into the empire that had conquered them and sink without trace. Isaiah’s answer to that fear was to point them back to the stories of their faith, stories like that of Abraham and Sarah, called by God to journey into the unknown, getting it wrong as often as they got it right, but learning bit by bit to trust God.

 

Isaiah is reminding his hearers of God’s steadfast love for them. This is the bedrock of their faith, the faith which inspired Abraham and Sarah. This is the “rock from which they were hewn”.

 

The Gospel reading is also a rocky one. In one sense that’s obvious – Jesus calls Peter the “rock”, which is what the Greek word Petros means, on which his church will be built. But those who originally heard this story would probably have other rocks in mind too.  

 

It’s all to do with where it takes place. Jesus is in the district of Caesarea Philippi, a town in the far north of Israel, near what is now the border with Lebanon, in the foothills of the range of mountains that included Mount Hermon. As that might suggest, it was a rocky landscape, peppered with limestone caves and outcrops, and the site of ancient shrines carved out of the rock, including a very popular shrine to the Greek god Pan.

 

If we imagine this scene, then, as its first hearers would have done, we need to see Jesus and his disciples standing amongst the rocks; rock beneath their feet, rock in front of them, rock around them, rock everywhere, rock carved into altars and statues, monumental reminders of the powers that ruled those lands.

 

The name of the town itself, Caesarea Phillipi, was a reminder of what were seen as the non-negotiable realities the people of this area had to deal with. It was named for Caesar Augustus, the Roman Emperor at the time it was founded, and for Philip the Tetrarch, the Jewish king, part of the family of King Herod, who was the puppet ruler put in by the Romans, who had founded this town as a stronghold on an important trade and military route. Power and authority were enshrined right there in its name. If anyone was in doubt about who was in charge, who ruled the roost, who decided what was what and who mattered, the two words “Caesarea Phillipi” were designed to give them rock-hard certainty about it.

 

That makes it all the more extraordinary that when Jesus asks his disciples, “who do you say that I am?” , Peter answers with no hesitation, “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.” In this place, where the source of power, the bedrock of people’s lives was supposed to be so clear, Peter makes a bold and counter-intuitive claim. He wasn’t looking to Rome, or to the Herodian kings for guidance and authority. He was looking to a Galilean carpenter who had called him, loved him, chosen him, who had transformed his life and shown him a new way, a way of love and inclusion. Jesus couldn’t offer him glory, or financial reward or security. In fact, he was clear that following him was likely to lead to confrontation with the authorities, challenge and trouble. But despite all of that, Peter knew that this was the person, this was the way he wanted to shape his life.

 

It wasn’t always plain sailing for him, of course. Not long after this, he would deny even knowing Jesus, when Jesus was arrested and crucified, but Peter soon realised that he might have preserved his life by doing so, something within him had died when he turned his back on Jesus. He couldn’t just walk away from Jesus, and as history bears witness, he did indeed become that rock on which the church was built.  

 

These readings challenge us to ask ourselves what our bedrock is, what are the things that really matter to us, and why It’s often said that we live in a very commitment phobic age. Maybe that’s because many people have more choices than they might once have done – choices in relationship, choices about whether to have children or not, choices about jobs, volunteering, hobbies, what to spend their time and energy on, choices about faith, political opinions and lifestyles. That’s not true for everyone, of course, but the more choices we have, the more we are aware that choosing one thing – one partner, one job, one way of life – means rejecting other options, and that can feel very difficult. It’s all too easy to end up like the donkey that starves to death between two bales of hay, because it can’t decide which one to eat first. The result can be that we drift through life, rootless and restless, never making a conscious choice at all, but discovering that our reluctance to commit ourselves has shaped our lives just as much, and often not for the better.

 

There’s no magic formula for making those tough decisions in life, and  and often, in retrospect, it’s impossible to tell whether we got it right or wrong – whether there even was a right or wrong - but what really does matter  is that, in all our decisions, we remember “the rock from which we were hewn”, the bedrock of our lives, the values that matter to us, the things that are foundational for us, and the one who gave them to us.

 

God’s love for us is as steadfast as it has always been, and he calls us to rest on that love, to trust it and build on it because when the empires of the world crumble away, as they all will, when the things we thought we were certain of are stripped away, his love will still be solid and enduring.

Amen

Trinity 11

 Isaiah 56.1, 6-8, Matthew 15. 21-28

 

“Far and few, far and few,

Are the lands where the Jumblies live

Their heads are green, and their hands are blue,

 And they went to sea in a Sieve.”

 

If you are a fan of Edward Lear’s nonsense poetry those words will be familiar. The Jumblies, who “went to sea in a Sieve”, despite being told that they would drown if they did so, were just one of a long list of unlikely invented creatures and situations he thought up. He’s responsible for the Owl and the Pussycat too – an unlikely pairing in real life, but one we are glad to see get together in a poem.

 

Edward Lear’s creatures are often in some way outsiders, odd and isolated, just as Lear seems to have been. He was probably gay, long before that was considered acceptable, and he certainly had epilepsy, in an age when there was a huge stigma about this. He kept it secret as far as he could, but doing so meant that he was often quite lonely, like the Quangle Wangle, another of his inventions, who sits alone at the top of the Crumpetty tree, shielded from view by his gigantic hat , “102 feet wide with ribbons and bibbons  on every side, and bells and buttons and loops and lace, so nobody ever could see the face of the Quangle Wangle Quee”. Eventually, to his delight the Quangle Wangle is joined by a bizarre array of animals who make their home on his hat and dance in the moonlight, reflecting Lear’s own lively sense of fun, and genuine love for and interest in others, but his wasn’t an easy life.

 

His wonderful, surreal writing has endured, I think, because most of us can identify with his characters, and their writer. We all feel like outsiders sometimes, like those Jumblies, as if our head were green and our hands were blue, way out of our depth, at sea in a vessel that seems bound to sink. The poems comfort us because they tell we’re not alone, and they proclaim that even the oddest of creatures can love and be loved, and the strangest of situations can have a happy ending.

 

In our Gospel reading we meet two other outsiders, who have a decidedly awkward encounter with each other. The first outsider is Jesus himself. He’s gone to the coastal district of Tyre and Sidon. It’s outside the land of Israel. Why he is there we aren’t told and it’s a strange place to choose if he wants simply to get away for a bit. Tyre and Sidon were notorious seaports in the land of Israel’s old enemy the Canaanites. It was full of dubious characters coming and going, of every race and background and it was a byword for sin and loose living. He must have known it would feel strange there, but it turned out to be even stranger than he’d bargained for. The woman who comes to him is a Canaanite, so she is automatically strange to him, but she is probably viewed with suspicion in her own community too. She’s a woman on her own, apparently a single mother in a society where women were expected to stay in the background. Why isn’t there a man to speak for her – her daughter’s father perhaps? We don’t know. She might be a widow, or perhaps he was a sailor, with a girl in every port, and he has gone and left her. Anyway, she is all her sick daughter has, and she’s determined to do what she can to help.

 

When the disciples beg Jesus to send her away, we probably expect him to rebuke them, but even he seems to have reached his limit of tolerance. He tries to say that she’s not his concern. Israel’s bread mustn’t be thrown to the dogs – it’s a shocking response. But she persists, and he suddenly seems to see beneath the label, and acclaims her faith. Her vision of God seems wider and deeper than his own at this point. I’ll come back to the complexities of that in a minute.

 

In our Old Testament reading, Isaiah is grappling with the same idea. The Temple, and the relationship with God it symbolised, weren’t just for the people of Israel, but for anyone who wanted to draw near to it, he says. It’s a strand of thought that runs through the Bible – the book of Jonah tells a story of the unexpected, and in some ways inconvenient, repentance of the people of Nineveh, whom Jonah has been sent, very reluctantly, to preach to. He would rather see these Assyrians, historic oppressors of Israel, blasted from the face of the Earth, but God has different ideas. But this expansive vision was always a hard one for people to get their heads around, and it competes in the Bible with sometimes brutal desires for conquest and domination, like the destruction of the city of Jericho, whose “walls come tumbling down” simply because the Israelites want, and believe God has promised them, exclusive possession of the land.

 

Creating “in” and “out” groups seems to be hard-wired into us, a protective, deeply dyed instinct that probably goes way back in our evolutionary history, when working out who was like or unlike us may have been vital to keep us alive. It can be counter-productive, though, cutting us off from those who might bring us blessings from their strangeness, new ideas and perspectives, precious gifts. “Who matters to us? Who counts? Who deserves a place at the table?”, these readings ask us, pulling us out of our comfort zones just like those Jumblies who “went to sea in a Sieve”.

 

That brings me back to the challenge of the story of the Canaanite woman. The mere fact that it’s in the Gospels at all is odd. It seems to show Jesus in a very bad light, but Matthew knew it mattered that it was told because the people he was writing for, an early Christian community, was living constantly at the boundaries of their tolerance too. They were Jews and Gentiles, men and women, rich and poor, slave and free, and they regularly floundered as they tried to work out how to get along together. To add to that, following Jesus had often alienated them from their communities of origin.

 

Knowing that that Jesus himself had worked through similar feelings was a huge encouragement. It told them that it was normal and human to notice difference and sometimes struggle with it. We need to acknowledge what feels strange and difficult, if we want our faith and love to grow, not simply try to ignore it which usually results in it seeping like silent poison into our relationships and attitudes anyway. Only when we’re honest about that sense of strangeness, as Jesus is here, can we be open to the discovery of God at work in unexpected places.  

 

That’s the message of Edward Lear’s Jumblies, too, who I started out with. Did they sink, on their perilous voyage? No, says Lear, they didn’t, and in the end, they were blessed by it.

 

“in twenty years they all came back,

   In twenty years or more,

And every one said, “How tall they’ve grown!

For they’ve been to the Lakes, and the Torrible Zone,

   And the hills of the Chankly Bore”;

And they drank their health, and gave them a feast

Of dumplings made of beautiful yeast;

And every one said, “If we only live,

We too will go to sea in a Sieve,--

   To the hills of the Chankly Bore!”

      Far and few, far and few,

         Are the lands where the Jumblies live;

      Their heads are green, and their hands are blue,

         And they went to sea in a Sieve.

 

Amen

 

Trinity 10: Walking on water

 1 Kings 19.9, Psalm 85. 8-13, Matthew 14.22-23

I discovered this week that the BBC have a wonderful treasure trove of sound effects and background noise on their website, all downloadable. With a little bit of electronic wizardry, [ This can be heard on the podcast], I could perhaps convince you that this podcast was coming to you from a steam train…or the African bush in the night time…or even a camel market, rather than my study in the vicarage.

The background noises we hear are often far more important than we think, giving us subliminal aural clues about where we are. Apparently scammers often play backing tracks of office noise when they phone people, to try to convince their victims that they are phoning from somewhere official.

I wonder whether you have ever thought about the soundscapes of the stories we read in the Bible. We’re are used to seeing Bible stories; illustrations in Bibles, images in stained glass abound. But what would it have sounded like to have been there? What background noises would we have heard? And how might it change or enrich our understanding of them if we could hear them in our mind’s ear, as well as seeing them in our mind’s eye.

This all came into my mind because the two stories we’ve heard today are particularly noisy ones.

In the first, we meet Elijah, who’s run away into a hostile desert to escape from the even more hostile Queen Jezebel, who is looking to have him killed. He feels utterly defeated, powerless, hopeless, ready to give up, but eventually, with a bit of help from an angel he staggers to the slopes of Mount Horeb, where he knows he will meet God. It’s almost certainly the same mountain as Mount Sinai, where Moses received the Ten Commandments, so it was a place associated with divine encounters. And that’s where the noisy bit begins. I’m not going to play you sound effects for this, because the ones in your imagination are likely to be much better, but think about what it might have sounded like.

First there is a wind, a mighty roaring wind strong enough to crack open the rocks. Then there is an earthquake, tearing the mountain apart and sending those rocks crashing down the mountainside. Finally, there is a raging fire, crackling and howling around Elijah.

He must have been deafened and terrified, but possibly not surprised. “The voice of the Lord breaks the cedars” says Psalm 29 “the voice of the Lord shakes the wilderness”… And yet he discovers that God isn’t in these noisy demonstrations of power, as he might have assumed he would be. We thought last week about how we often tend to think of God as big and majestic, and miss him in the small things. The same thing applies to the auditory assumptions we make. Elijah discovers that on this occasion at least , God isn’t in all that wilderness-shaking drama. Instead, he finds him in what’s called here the “sound of sheer silence”, sometimes translated as a “still, small voice”.

What is this sound? The writer, and translators through the ages, have obviously struggled to find a way of expressing it,  but my experience is that people know it when they hear it, and a surprising number of people have told me that they have, at least once in their lives. It’s that moment of deep certainty about something, that moment when we hear something, from without or within, that cuts through all the other noise and distraction, the moment when we say “yes…this! This is true! This is how it is!” Some people describe an actual voice, actual words, others just a profound sense of peace, an assurance that whatever is going on in their lives, they are loved and, ultimately, held in safe hands.

Elijah has been feeling overwhelmed with feelings of failure. He feels as if he will never defeat the power of the evil King Ahab and Queen Jezebel. “I alone am left!” he wails to God, but God begs to differ, and by the end of the encounter Elijah has realised that, not only does God have his back, there are also many others who are with him. There’s no magic wand, no promise that it will all be easy, but Elijah has found the peace and the certainty he needs.

St Peter hears this “still small voice” in a different way in the equally noisy Gospel story we heard today. The disciples have set off in their boat across the Sea of Galilee. They’ve left Jesus behind to pray at the end of a long and exhausting day, but as the evening wears on a storm blows up. The wind and waves batter the boat – imagine the din; sails and ropes flap, wood creaks as if the boat might break in two, the disciples shout, desperately trying to make themselves heard over the howling wind. And then suddenly, there is someone, walking on the water… and a voice, cutting through the storm saying “it is I; do not be afraid.” And suddenly, for Peter at least, it’s as if that’s all there is to hear. He seems to be oblivious to the wind and waves, at least for a while, as he climbs out of the boat and begins to walk on the water to Jesus. It doesn’t last. The noise of the storm, and of his fear of the storm, breaks in again, reminding him that, actually, people can’t walk on water. But even though he starts to sink, he seems to be aware that the help he needs is right there at hand. “Lord, save me,” he calls, daring to trust that Jesus can and will.

It's a puzzling story to our modern minds, but as with so many of the miracles, we can get distracted by the miraculousness of them, and miss the message their writers meant us to hear. The early Christians who told and heard this story told it because day by day they found themselves out of their depth, all at sea, having to do what seems impossible – walking on water in one way or another - just as we so often do today. The only way they would get through, and the only way we will, is to listen for the voice of the one who still comes to us saying “it is I: do not be afraid”, the one who “speaks peace to his faithful people” as Psalm 85 puts it.

The voice that “speaks peace” which Peter and Elijah hear doesn’t deny the raging of the storm, the problems that they face, but it reminds them that they are in the hands of one who created wind and water, rock and flame, the one who is not overwhelmed by them, and will not let them overwhelm us either.

 We live in a noisy world. There is outer noise; traffic, machinery, all those screens and devices that demand our attention, as well as the noises of clashing opinions and arguments that surround us. But the noise within us is often just as distracting and exhausting, the noise of our anxieties and regrets, our anger and frustration, the inner voices pulling us this way and that. We are faced by huge, noisy challenges – personal, national, global. But that means that it has never been more important to stop, and listen for that still, small voice which speaks peace, which points us in the right direction so we don’t drown in our own panic, but instead reach out our hand to the one who can bring us safely through the storm.

Amen

Transfiguration

 Transfiguration Aug 6 2023

Daniel 7.9-10,13-14, Luke 9.28-36

What do you imagine when you imagine heaven? And what is the God at its centre like?

The writer of our Old Testament reading from the book of Daniel had no doubt. God was like earthly kings, only better, and his heaven was just an incredibly spectacular version of the kind of throne rooms the writer might have known. 

The book of Daniel is a strange one, a compilation of writings composed over several hundred years. There are stories, probably originally passed on orally, which date back to the time when the Israelites were in exile in Babylon, like the famous story of Daniel in the Lions’ Den, in which kings get their comeuppance. But there are also complex mystical visions, like the one we heard today, which probably date to a later time, when Israel was under the thumb of new empires, and wondered whether they would ever be free. The visions, like those we heard today, were meant to reassure them that the earthly realities they saw around them weren’t the whole, or the end, of the story. God was still in charge. In this passage, the writer envisions him as an almighty ruler. He sits, enthroned in glory, wreathed in fire, completely in control. 

Imagination is a powerful thing, but we need to be careful not to let our images mislead us into thinking they say all there is to be said about God. In the case of a majestic image like Daniel’s, it’s important that we don’t end up idolising the power and bling it portrays – the sheer bigness of God - as if that’s that only truth that matters. It’s all too easy, if we do that, to assume that wealth, strength and power are signs of God’s blessing, and weakness and smallness are signs of failure. That’s a temptation to which individuals, churches and nations have fallen prey again and again in Christian history.  It has led us to feel entitled to exploit others and the natural world in our quest to have more and be more. “Wider still and wider, shall thy bounds be set, God who made thee mighty, make thee mightier yet.” If God is big, then it’s a short step to believing that “big” is God and making that the goal that trumps every other goal in life.

The people of the Bible knew, at some level at least, that God was beyond human imagining – not a supersized “king in the sky” - but it was a hard truth to hold onto. The second of the Ten Commandments told them that they shouldn’t make any “graven image” of God, for that reason; the minute we create an image of God, we somehow fix God in that image. But even if they didn’t carve or paint God, the mental image of that heavenly throne room became firmly entrenched, dominant, swamping any other images.

That’s why the story in our Gospel reading, which we call the Transfiguration, is so important. 

It’s a strange story, of course. Seeing someone shining with glory, flanked by the Old Testament figures of Moses and Elijah would blow anyone’s mind. But I think the strangeness of this story, and its significance, may go even deeper than that, and I wonder whether the most important point of this episode wasn’t so much the transfiguration of Jesus as the transfiguration of the disciples, the change – eventually – it wrought in them and their understanding of God.

We are used to thinking of Jesus as the Son of God. We are used to seeing him portrayed with a shiny halo. Even the paintings of his nativity often show him as a sort of “glow in the dark” baby, as if it was obvious from the beginning that he was different. But the reality wasn’t like that. He was a carpenter, the son of a carpenter, from an ordinary family. He had no credentials, no formal religious training, nothing to single him out. He wasn’t even from Jerusalem, but from a backwater town in Galilee. When Nathanael, who eventually became a disciple of Jesus, first heard of him, his reaction was , “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” (John 1.44). It seemed unthinkable to him that God would work through someone like this. 

And if a Galilean carpenter seemed an unlikely Messiah, a crucified Galilean carpenter was even more unlikely. The story of the Transfiguration comes just at the point in when Jesus is starting to head for Jerusalem, where he will be killed. That’s the “departure” he is talking with Moses and Elijah about, his death. He has tried to warn his disciples that this will happen, but they don’t want to hear it. They don’t get it, and they won’t get it until after his resurrection, when it will start to dawn on them that the crucifixion wasn’t a disaster, but the heart of God’s message to them - in fact, in some sense, it is the message. The crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus show them that God can be found in weakness, humiliation, and in a squalid death just as much as in the big, shiny, successes of life. The Transfiguration is a moment when the glory of God becomes visible in Jesus, but it is only a moment, and Jesus doesn’t seem to want to prolong it – Peter’s offer to build shelters, to cling to this moment, isn’t taken up. 

It matters that the disciples come to understand all this partly because many of them will face the same fate as Jesus, their lives looking as if they are ending in failure, but also because it will help them make sense of Jesus’ mission, and profoundly shape their own. Jesus spent much of his time with people whose whole lives looked liked failures, people who were marginalised and oppressed, people who were often written off, people the blingy powers-that-were of his day thought were of no consequence at all. Jesus’ affirmed, though, in his words and his deeds, that they were people in whom God’s presence could be found, lights of the world in whom God’s glory could shine. 

So the astonishment of the disciples at the transfiguration isn’t just that they see the glory of God breaking through, heaven on earth, in their midst, but that they see this happening in their mate, the man they have gone down the pub with, laughed and joked with, maybe even employed to fix their boats… and the man they will soon see crucified. 

The transfiguration is, of course, a spectacular moment, but it reminds us that God’s glory is not just found in the obvious places, the places of success and acclaim. God is big, unimaginably, infinitely so, but that doesn’t mean that “big” is necessarily God. Our God is also the God of the mustard seed, the tiny speck of yeast that leavens the dough, the grain of wheat that falls into the ground and dies, and the people that don’t look important at all, but are vital to God. 

Maybe if we really understood this, we might be able to let go of some of that perpetual striving for greatness which so easily poisons our lives, our nations, our churches, and the natural environment we depend on. And maybe, if we really understood this, we and the world around us would be transfigured too. 

Amen