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

 

 

 

 

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 21^st 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 20^th 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