Epiphany 3 2024

 Rev 19.6-10, John 2.1-11

There’s sometimes a danger in our worship for us to get a bit above ourselves, I think. Already today, for example, we’ve heard about great heavenly visions of ranks of angels. Our hymns and songs and prayers are full of grand language, the transformation of the world and so on. It’s stirring stuff but what is it all about in practical terms?

I don’t know what was on your mind as you came to church today, but my guess is that it wasn’t the redemption of the cosmos. It was more likely to be the Sunday lunch, or the deadline at work, or the children’s homework, or that tetchy conversation you had yesterday with a friend that you really ought to sort out.

Daily life for most of us, most of the time is small scale. For me it’s “have we got the right service sheets? Have the Messy Church glue sticks dried out?” Even if you do a genuine life-or-death job – like nurses or doctors – you probably find you spend a lot of time on things that seem trivial; box ticking and form-filling and having meetings that don’t really go anywhere. 

That’s why our Gospel reading today is such an important one. It’s a miracle, of course, so not exactly mundane, but it is a miracle which happens in very ordinary circumstances, to very ordinary people, at an ordinary wedding in an out of the way village in Galilee. In fact, most of those present don’t even know it has happened. “The steward tasted the water that had become wine and did not know where it came from” says John. Neither the newly-weds, nor their families, nor the vast majority of the guests have a clue that a miracle has taken place in their midst. If they were aware that there was a problem with the wine, they probably just assume someone has found an extra barrel hidden somewhere.

Apart from Jesus and his immediate circle it’s only the servants who know what is going on. “The servants who had drawn the water knew” John tells us. He puts it in brackets. It sounds like an aside, but actually it’s not. It’s one of the most important points in the story because it sets the tone not only for what Jesus does here, but for his whole ministry, which is primarily going to be focussed on people like these servants, the poor and overlooked. God almighty, the creator of heaven and earth, the Lord of time and eternity, the giver of all good things is at work in this wedding, but most people don’t spot it.

And what is this miracle for, anyway? What does it achieve? World peace? The overthrow of Roman rule? No, it just saves a family from the shame of having their wedding go down in village memory as the one where the wine ran out. In the grand scheme of things, it doesn’t seem to matter at all. But to that family at that moment, it mattered completely. Their happiness, their ability to hold up their heads in front of their neighbours – not just on that day but for ever afterwards - hinged on it.

This miracle is absolutely characteristic of the miracles of the New Testament. In the Old Testament, miracles are usually done on a grand scale and a very public stage, in the interests of national survival; the parting of the Red Sea, the Manna in the Wilderness, the fall of Jericho. That’s because the Old Testament was written by and for a nation trying to establish its identity. Its stories are mostly about kings and prophets, wars and alliances, national victories and defeats. There are domestic and small-scale stories too, like those of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, but these are people who will become founders of the nation, highly significant.

The focus In the New Testament is completely different. It was written by and for a persecuted minority – the early Christians – a tiny group of people, mostly poor, powerless and insignificant, like the servants at the at this wedding feast. People who would never be remembered by history, and who didn’t expect to be. But Jesus’ message, in words and actions, was that whoever you were, you mattered to God and your concerns were his concerns too. Jesus’ miracles are almost all done for people who are anonymous. Unnamed deaf people hear and blind people see, a woman with a haemorrhage which has kept her from being part of her society is healed, another who is bent double is enabled to stand upright and talk to her neighbours face to face again.  They have no obvious influence on the sweep of history. Jesus doesn’t provide miraculous wine for emperors and kings. He doesn’t meet King Herod and the Roman Governor until the last week of his life, and only then because they have dragged him before them to accuse him.  He heals and helps people because they need it, not because he hopes the to win them over to his cause. He doesn’t seem to worry about whether they will follow him afterwards or help to further his wider mission. He welcomes them if that happens, but it is their need, and his ability to meet it that really matters to him.

There are grand themes in his preaching, of course; the kingdom of God and the healing of humanity, but these things grow, says Jesus, from small and humble beginnings in the ordinary lives of ordinary people, people like us. A tiny speck of yeast, a mustard seed, a grain of wheat, says Jesus; this is where God’s work has to begin. The small things are, in the end, the big things. 

In my experience, too, the holiest places in our lives are often those that others might see as rather trivial – those pesky issues at work, the ups and downs of family life, whether we’ve got enough wine for the wedding – because these are the things that make a real difference to us, and through us to the lives of others too. These are the places where we can hurt, or heal, each other, where we can wrong others, or set those wrongs right, where we can lay good – or bad - foundations for the future.

I’d like to finish with a favourite poem by David Scott. It’s called “Letters from Baron Von Hugel to a Niece”. To understand it you need to know that Baron Von Hugel was a very much respected late 19th Century spiritual writer and guide. He is probably best known, though, for a series of letters he wrote to his beloved niece, a young woman who struggled with her health and eventually died young. 

His day was not really complete until

he sealed with a gentle middle finger

a letter to his niece, heralding the arrival

of books. It smelt of camphor. The advice 

was a comfort to her: “Give up Evensong,

and even if dying never strain.”

It was surprising counsel from one so scrupulous;

whose sharp pencil noted on both margins of a page,

and hovered, like a teacher’s, over spelling. 

Walking into Kensington with the letter,

his muffler tight against the frost,

he reassures himself that directing a soul

is not only a matter of angel’s talk, it is 

also the knack of catching the evening post.

“Catching the evening post” – a small thing but one which mattered. The small things are the big things, because in them we find God at work. Whatever concerns you brought to church with you today, if they matter to you they matter to God. And if you pay attention to them, who knows, you might find that they are the places where God is turning water into wine in your life, making it rich in love which can overflow to others.

Amen

Epiphany 2 2024

 

1 Samuel 3.1-20, John 1.43-end

 

In today’s readings we have two stories about people who took a bit of getting through to, who just didn’t seem to be able to hear or see something which they needed to. Nathanael can’t believe that Jesus might be the Messiah; Samuel takes all night to realise that God is speaking to him and the old priest Eli has been unable or unwilling to hear the voice of God for many years. I expect we can all sympathise with them. I’m sure we’ve all been confronted with a truth about someone or something which, looking back, we feel we should have known all along. Worse still, perhaps we realise that we did know it, but couldn’t acknowledge it.

 

Why didn’t governments see Covid coming and make better preparation for it?

Why couldn’t the Post Office have seen that the financial losses they had spotted were a glitch in the computer system, not a sudden outbreak of widespread criminality among their subpostmasters and mistresses.

On a personal level we might ask ourselves why we didn’t we take notice of the niggling symptoms that later turned out to be a serious illness?

Or Why we didn’t spot the warning signs of a relationship that was getting into difficulties?

Or Why it took us so long to realise that were called into, or out of, a particular role or career?

In hindsight it all seems so obvious, but so often our vision is clouded and our ears stopped.

 

In Nathanael’s case it seems to be prejudice which gets in the way of him seeing the truth about Jesus. “A Messiah from Nazareth! You’ve got to be joking” he says to his friends. We’re not sure why Nazareth seemed such a dodgy place to hail from, but presumably people at the time would have understood. It might have been because the northern territory of Galilee was more mixed ethnically and religiously than the southern lands of Judea around Jerusalem. It was also where the majority of the occupying Roman soldiers were stationed, forcing the people into greater collaboration with them. Or perhaps Nazareth just had a bad reputation – a backwater, hicksville place people wanted to avoid. Whatever it was though, Nathanael seems convinced that Nazarenes are not Messiah material, and he can’t get past that.   

 

It‘s only when he meets Jesus that he realises his mistake. This man knows him, somehow, even better than Nathanael knows himself, because he sees Nathanael’s potential as a disciple, something which was also way off Nathanael’s radar. Seeing a new truth about Jesus enables him to see a new truth about himself.

 

The Old Testament story of Eli and Samuel is a more complex tale, and a sadder one. Eli was the old priest at the shrine of Shiloh where the Ark of the Covenant – the symbol of God’s presence in Israel - was kept. He had two adult sons who should have followed him as priests in this important position. But they had gone off the rails and are abusing their positions. They are stealing the offerings that people are bringing to Shiloh. Eli knows this at some level, but he’s never quite found the courage or energy to confront them. In the end, of course, they are responsible for themselves, but at least Eli could have tried to influence them, and it seems he hasn’t.

 

And that’s where Samuel comes in, a young boy whose mother, Hannah, had brought him to the sanctuary for Eli to bring up as his own. It might seem like an odd thing for a loving mother to do, but there is, of course, a back story. Hannah is one of two wives of her husband, Elkanah . The other wife has borne him lots of children, but Hannah hasn’t been able to conceive, and her co-wife and step-children never let her forget it, making her life a misery. In desperation, Hannah comes to the shrine at Shiloh and prays for a child. Her prayers are so passionate that Eli thinks she must be drunk, but when she explains the situation, he assures her that God had heard her prayer, and that she will have a son. It all happens as he said it would and once the child is weaned, Hannah decides that, in thanksgiving, she will entrust the child to Eli to help at the shrine as soon as he is old enough to leave her. As I said, it seems like an odd decision, but maybe he will be safer there than at home with step-brothers and sisters who treated his mother so badly, and will probably do the same to him. Whatever Hannah’s motivation, it is clear that Hannah has realised that her child matters, not only to her, but to the people of Israel and that God is calling him to do something important.

 

But, as the story says “the word of the Lord was rare in those days; visions were not widespread”, so when God literally calls to him, one dark night as he lies asleep in the sanctuary at Shiloh, it takes a while for both Samuel and Eli to work out what is going on. And when Samuel finally does say, “speak Lord for your servant is listening”, the message he is asked to give Eli is grim.

 

It is the end of the road for Eli’s household. His sons will eventually be killed in battle, and Eli himself will die of sorrow. No wonder Samuel seems reluctant to pass this message on. But Eli finds the courage to urge Samuel to tell the truth, no matter what it is, and by doing that he teaches Samuel a vital lesson which he will need to draw on often in the future – that the truth, however painful, can’t be avoided forever.

 

Samuel goes on to be one of Israel’s most important prophets, instrumental in the lives of King Saul and King David. He is often called by God to challenge them – and those who challenge kings need all the courage they can muster. I like to hope that Eli would have been glad, for all his own failures, to know that he had been able to play at least a little part in God’s work.

 

And that is what it is about – God’s work. Because it is most often where the pain and the mess are that God is. We see this in Jesus, born in a dung-strewn stable, growing up in that dodgy town of Nazareth, dying on a cross, alone and reviled, looking to all the world as if he had failed. Who would have thought that God could be in these squalid places, in these squalid things? Not the Magi who headed first for Herod’s palace. Not Nathanael with his blinkered views. Not the horrified disciples who ran away from the crucifixion. But that is where God was, at work in the world through Christ. And that is where he still is. In the places, the people, the situations we would rather not see at all – the things within ourselves we’d rather bury or ignore. It is there that God waits patiently with his healing and his love because it’s there that we need him most. Turn away from that place and we turn away from God too.

 

I wonder what would happen today if we were to say, as Samuel does, “Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening?” I don’t know, and that’s why it frightens me, as perhaps it does you, but if we are serious in our search for God’s presence in our lives and in our world then the places where we least want to be may turn out to be the very places where we will find him. Amen

Mysteries: Epiphany Sunday 2024

  

Ephesians 3.1-12, Matthew 2.1-12

 

Back in December, quite a few of you followed the Advent reflection series I produced, looking at a picture from the National Gallery which depicted – sort of – the story we have heard today, Jan Brueghel’s “Adoration of the Kings”. The reflections are still available on the church blog, if you missed them first time round.

 

It's a wonderful picture, but packed with detail. Brueghel sets the story in a typical late Medieval Flemish landscape– the landscape he knew - rather than in 1^st century Judea. In the background there is a town, with narrow streets and imposing churches, but it seems eerily still, dark and deserted, because all the action is happening in the foreground, across the river from the town, in a muddy field, around an extremely dilapidated stable.  

 

What’s drawn everyone to this out of the way spot? A small baby, enthroned on his mother’s lap, reaching out his pudgy hands to bless some fine visitors who are kneeling in the mud in front of him.

The picture is packed with detail. There are all sorts of people in it. Some are concentrating on the child, some seem to have other agendas – looking to make a profit from these fine visitors and their retinue or just having a day out - but they are all there, in some sense, because of him. And it’s not just the human population that has noticed that something important is happening. There are ducks and chickens, dogs and wild birds, and a cat, surveying the scene from a high spot in the stable, a bit aloof, as all proper cats are, but watchful nonetheless.

 

Brueghel takes all sorts of liberties with the Biblical story, of course. He crams the shepherds into his scene, though they aren’t found in Matthew’s account. And Matthew never calls his protagonists kings – they are Magi, astrologer priests. But in a way, this doesn’t matter.  The point is clear – Jesus’ birth has turned normal expectations upside down. Important, finely dressed, mature men shouldn’t be kneeling before peasant women and their babies. Significant events shouldn’t happen in tumbledown buildings on the wrong side of the tracks – or the river in this case. Foreigners from a different culture, with what would have seemed like dodgy religious beliefs to good Jewish people, shouldn’t be the ones taking the lead in recognising and worshipping a Jewish Messiah.

 

The biblical nativity stories and Brueghel in his depiction of them are all designed to tell us that in Jesus, God is doing something new, something unexpected, unforeseen, which overturns the patterns we expect, our lazy assumptions about how the world works.

 

It’s impossible to know how much, if any historical reality there is in the biblical accounts of Jesus’ birth, but Matthew and Luke tell us truths about Jesus– a story doesn’t have to have to be real in order to be true. They may not have actually known much about Jesus’ birth – how much do we know about anyone elses, or even our own, often – but they do know things about the adult Jesus. Well-attested stories circulated freely in the Christian community in the decades after Jesus’ crucifixion, told by people who were his closest friends. Matthew and Luke are pointing us towards those real-life memories, signalling in the stories of Jesus’ birth what to expect from this baby when he grows up, a man in whom God was at work, a man who welcomed all and loved all, a man to whom worldly power and glory were irrelevant; a beggar or a small child were just as important to him as any of the King Herods of this world. The nativity stories tell us to expect the unexpected if we follow Jesus, to expect things to change, and know that we are safe in God’s hands when they do.

 

That was the experience of Jesus’ first disciples, and it was the experience of St Paul, too, although he hadn’t known or followed Jesus during his earthly life. In his letter to the Ephesians, Paul talks repeatedly about the mystery of God’s kingdom, the mystery of the way God works in the world. The Greek word he uses, musterion, doesn’t mean what we often mean by “mystery” though; it’s not like a murder mystery, where we can work out whodunnit if we are clever enough and pay close enough attention. The mysteries Paul talks about are things which are beyond our understanding. We can only know them if they are revealed to us.

 

Paul is playing with his readers a bit in using this word “mystery”. In his time many people followed what were called “mystery” religions, cults to which you only gained admission to through taking part in secret rituals. They attracted people with the promise of hidden knowledge, but they were only for the initiated, those who had committed themselves, and once you were in, there were dire penalties if you told anyone else the secrets you’d been made privy to. But the point Paul is making is that the “mystery” that has been revealed to him is quite different, because there is nothing secret about it.

 

There is plenty that’s surprising, astonishing even, about the message of God’s love in Jesus, but it’s open to everyone, wherever they come from, whatever their background.

 

That was the revelation that came to Paul on the road to Damascus, and it changed his life completely. He thought he knew all about God – a God who was accessible only to those who kept the Jewish law, like him, and most certainly not to  those who followed Jesus, who he thought was a disgraced, dead heretic. But on that Damascus road, he heard Jesus’ voice calling to him from heaven, from the right hand of God, the last place Paul expected Jesus to be, and that broke his vision of the world to pieces and threw him into total confusion. Blinded, he was led into Damascus, where he was healed physically through the prayers of a Christian called Ananias, but more importantly healed spiritually by the courageous welcome Ananias gave him. No ifs, no buts, no maybes – Paul was loved and forgiven and made part of the Christian family. Through Ananias’s love Paul discovered, as one hymn puts it, that “the love of God is broader than the scope of human mind”.

 

It has sometimes been said that there are only two things we need to know to have a healthy Christian faith; first, that there is a God, and, second, that it isn’t us. That’s really hard for most of us to get our heads around, though. We like to be in control, to feel we have worked things out for ourselves. But often it isn’t like that, and actually, Paul has discovered, it is far better that way, because, knowing we don’t have it all sorted out, we are set free to receive the “wisdom of God in its rich variety” as Paul puts it, wisdom which may come to us in unexpected people, people who aren’t like us, wisdom which may come to us in unexpected situations and places – places we might have thought were god-forsaken.

 

Every Epiphany Sunday here at Seal, I give out little pieces of blessed chalk, and we mark the doors of our church and our homes with the number of the year, and the initials C, M and B – Caspar, Melchior and Balthazar, the traditional names of the magi. It’s a reminder to us to keep our doors are open to any wandering wise men who might pass by, to the “wisdom of God in its rich variety”. Life is full of mysteries, but the greatest and most marvellous mystery, a mystery we can treasure but never understand,is that we are loved unshakeably by the God who keeps turning up and making his home with us where we are, even if we have nothing to offer him but a stable.

Amen