Facing the Future

 

The  text of this sermon is pretty much the same as this one, only with the contemporary references updated.  

We Feebly Struggle

 

Yesterday, as I’ve already mentioned, was All Saints’ Day.
Perhaps you went to the Circuit Service at Clapham to commemorate loved ones, or members of the congregation, or both, who died during the past year.
In many parts of the Church, that actually happens today, which is known as All Souls’ Day; All Saints is specifically for rejoicing with those who are in heaven with God.

In some countries, All Saints’ Day is a public holiday, and people buy flowers, especially chrysanthemums to put on a loved one’s grave.
In some countries, it’s those electronic candles that get put, and cemeteries at this time of year, after dark, are full of twinkling lights; rather lovely.
Some years ago now, Robert and I went on a guided tour of Nunhead Cemetery at about this time of year, and many of the graves had lights or flowers on them.
But by and large, All Saints isn’t celebrated much outside of the Church; in the world, it’s all about Halloween – All Hallows Eve, or All Saints Eve!

What, I wonder, springs to mind when you think of the word “Saint”?
We Protestants don't tend to think of them all that much, really.
I suppose we think of New Testament people, like St Paul,
and people who like the Reform party tend to stick a St George flag on lampposts, as though nobody else cared about this country,
but by and large, saints don't really impinge on our consciousness.
We don't have a formal category of “Saint” in which to put people,

as we believe that all who trusted in Jesus during their lifetime have eternal life.
We don't have the concept of Purgatory, of a time of working off our sins,

as we believe that we have already passed from death into life.
We are all saints!

Then why celebrate All Saints?
What's the point?
Well, in a way that is just the point –
all Christians are saints!

But today is about those who are living, those who are part of the great Church Triumphant, as we call it.
We, here on earth, are the Church Militant, still fighting the world, the flesh and the devil, as the old prayer-book has it.
“We feebly struggle, they in glory shine” says the hymn we'll be singing in a bit.

We don't tend to think too much about what happens after we die.
But if our faith is real, if what we believe is true,
then what happens next is something even greater than we can imagine.
It is our great Christian hope, as St Paul reminded us in our first reading, from his Letter to the Ephesians:

“I pray also that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened in order that you may know
the hope to which he has called you,
the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints,
and his incomparably great power for us who believe.
That power is like the working of his mighty strength, which he exerted in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly realms,
far above all rule and authority,
power and dominion,
and every title that can be given,
not only in the present age but also in the one to come.”

We have that glorious inheritance.

But it doesn't always seem like it!
As C S Lewis once put it:
“The Cross comes before the Crown, and tomorrow is a Monday morning!”
We feebly struggle, they in glory shine!

But Jesus reminds us that it's okay, a lot of the time, to feebly struggle.
Our second reading was taken from Luke's version of the collection of Jesus' teachings known as the Sermon on the Mount –
actually, I think Luke's version is commonly called the “Sermon on the Plain”, but never mind that now.
The point is that both Matthew and Luke start off their collections with a proclamation of people who are blessed.
Luke says it is the poor, the hungry, and people who are hated,
which he contrasts explicitly with those who are rich, well-fed and of who people speak well of!

Last week’s Gospel reading was the story of the tax-collector and the Pharisee, and I once heard a sermon on this story which reminded us that our values and opinions are not necessarily God's.
And that is certainly the case here –
in the Jewish world, prosperity was seen as a sign of God's blessing,
and poverty was thought rather disgraceful.
Jesus is turning the accepted wisdom upside-down.
No, he says, you are blessed if you're poor, if you're hungry, if you're hurting…
Never believe preachers who tell you that if you’re not rich or successful, you must be a sinner….

Matthew, who was Jewish, couldn't quite bring himself to write that down, and has people being blessed if they hunger and thirst after righteousness,
or if they are poor in spirit, but in many ways the principle is the same, I think.

Of course, we in the First World aren't really poor, only by comparison;
we have food, shelter and clothing,
we have health care and education,
and a general standard of living that our ancestors could only dream of.
So is it woe unto us?

I think it's the same issue that the Pharisee had, who, you may remember,
was so pleased that he fulfilled the criteria for an upright, religious member of the community that he forgot his need of God,
and it was the tax-collector, the hated quisling, who remembered that he was a sinner, and that he had need of God's mercy.
Again, Jesus is turning this world's values upside-down;
it is the despised outcast who went home justified,
and the professionally religious man who, that day at least, did not.

Jesus' teachings, as collected by Matthew and Luke, give a terrific picture of what God's people, the saints, are going to be like.
They'll be people who don't judge others, who don't get angry with others in a destructive way, who don't use other people simply as bodies.
Basically, they treat other people with the greatest possible respect for who they are.
And they trust God.
They don't get stressed out making a living –
they do their absolute best at whatever their job is, of course,
but they don't scrabble round getting involved in office politics in order to get a promotion.
They trust God to provide the basic necessities of life,
but they don't make a parade of being ever so holy, they just get on with it quietly.

Jesus' values turned the world upside-down.
We are almost –
dare I say used to them.
They don't shock us, or strike us as strange –
until, that is, we try to live them!
Then we discover just how far off they are from the values that most people live by.
And what we say we believe comes smack up against what we really believe –
and what we really believe usually wins!
Truly, we feebly struggle!

But the saints in glory shine!
They found the secret of living the way Jesus suggested.
And it wasn't striving and struggling and trying to do it all by themselves.
Remember what St Paul wrote, again.
He prays that we might be given the Spirit of wisdom and revelation, so that we may know God better.
And he prays “that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened in order that you may know the hope to which he has called you,
the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints,
and his incomparably great power for us who believe.”

We don’t have to strive to know this in our own strength;
we can allow God to put this knowledge in us and make it part of us.
The saints in glory have done this.
We feebly struggle, but we don't have to,
we can relax and allow God to do it for us.

As we are, we would never inherit the Kingdom of God,
whether on this earth or in the world to come.
But transformed by God’s Spirit, then, in the words of St John,
“We shall be like him”.
And yet, paradoxically, we shall still be ourselves.

St Paul addresses some of his letters to “The saints in such-and-such a town”.
He knew, and they knew, that it was possible to be a saint in this life.
The letter to the Corinthians, for example, begins:
“To the church of God that is in Corinth, to those who are sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be saints, together with all those who in every place call on the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.”

The word “sanctified” means “Being made saint-like”, and it’s one of the things that happens to Christians who are truly intent on being God’s person.
You can’t help it;
the Holy Spirit who dwells in you does sanctify you,
makes you more the person that God created you to be.
We feebly struggle, but the Holy Spirit always wins!

Jesus taught that the values and opinions of God's kingdom are radically different to those of this world.
The saints, those who trust in Christ, all have one thing in common,
and I hope and pray that it's a feature that I share, that you share:
They all knew, and know, that of themselves they are doomed to feebly struggle.
It is only through recognising our own weakness,
our own utter inability to live anything like the sort of life Jesus expects of his followers, that we can be enabled to live that life.
We can do nothing of ourselves to help ourselves, as the collect says.
Jesus has done it all for us; he has bought our entry tickets into glory through his death on the Cross.
And the Holy Spirit will transform us so that one day, one day, we will be among the number of those who “in glory shine”.
Amen.

Nevertheless, she persisted

I totally and utterly forgot to record either the children's talk or the main service. Apologies. 

Children's Talk

I wonder if you’ve ever noticed how many names end in “el” – I’m thinking of names like Daniel or Joel or Michael or Gabriel. These names usually have meanings, and the meaning is often something about God. Michael, for instance, means “Who is like God?”, and Daniel means “God is my judge”.

The thing is, the word “El” in ancient Hebrew, was used for God. El was actually one of the gods in Canaan, but the Israelites used it to mean just God. So names ending in “El” all have something to do with God. In our reading, we have Jacob fighting the angel, and the angel gives him the name “Israel”, which means “One who struggles with God,” And when Jacob realises that it is God with whom he has been fighting, he calls the place where it took place “Peniel”. This, apparently, means “The Face of God”.

One thing to notice about the story, apart from the names, is that Jacob refuses to let the angel go until he blesses him. Jacob is wounded and in pain from his hip, but he will not give in. He persisted. And we’re going to hear a story that Jesus told, in a minute, about someone who persisted. And we’re told that we, too, should persist in prayer.

Prayer is a funny thing, isn’t it? We know that God knows what we need even before we ask. And often, we aren’t even really asking anything specific, especially when it’s intercessory prayer – prayer for other people. We’ll say “God here’s this person with this need, could you do something?” And sometimes God says, yes, here’s this person with this need, what are you going to do about it?

We can’t, of course, make someone feel better if they’re not well, but we can text them and say we’re thinking of them;
if new children come to your school who don’t yet speak much English, you can befriend them, show them what they need to know –
where the toilets are, for instance, or where to go when it’s lunchtime.
If someone’s being bullied, you can help them report it, or just stay with them so the bullies can’t get at them.
That sort of thing.
And the grown-ups will have their equivalents, too.

It’s important to be open to what God might be asking you to do. You don’t have to be BFF with the new kid in your class – but you do have to be helpful and friendly! And you might get a new friend out of it, who knows? But even if you don’t, what you will get is help from God to be nice! So don’t stop asking!

---oo0oo---

Nevertheless, she persisted

 You know, I think Jesus must have a terrific sense of humour. It’s not always easy to find his parables funny, as we are so used to hearing them read in a solemn “I’m-reading-the-Bible” voice that we don’t hear the light and shade in them. But I wouldn’t be in the least surprised if he meant his story of the unjust judge to be funny.

I mean, there is this judge, who seems to like nobody but himself – he doesn’t serve God, and rather despises his fellow-humans. And the widow, who has a cast-iron claim against someone else, who is demanding justice. And not getting it. And the judge keeps on telling her to push off, probably putting it rather more strongly, and yet she keeps on coming back, and keeps on coming back, and finally he gives in and does what she asks.

I am reminded, reading the story again, of the phrase “Nevertheless, she persisted”, which became fashionable a few years ago when they tried to shut up a woman senator in the USA who was saying things thought to be inappropriate – unparliamentary, we would call them in this country. The then Senate majority leader explained, “Senator Warren was giving a lengthy speech. She had appeared to violate the rule. She was warned. She was given an explanation. Nevertheless, she persisted.”

And “Nevertheless, she persisted” became a rallying cry among women of all ages, nationalities and classes. Particularly, I think, in the USA, where women’s freedom is under threat in many ways, although not, of course, as badly as in Afghanistan. And this woman, this widow, is the absolute archetype of someone who persisted, even though she was told to go away and stop being a nuisance. And in the end, she got her way, purely because of her persistence.

We call the story “the unjust judge”, but really, it’s about the widow, isn’t it? Widows, back in the day, had very little status. They may well have been living in absolute poverty, totally dependent on charity. Mind you, it was part of God’s law that widows, orphans and “aliens” or immigrants be looked after by those who had it to spare. In the book of Deuteronomy, indeed, chapter 27 and verse 19, you are cursed if you do not look after the alien, the widow or the orphan. These people have no male protector to look after them, so it’s your job!

You can’t really equate the judge with God, nor the widow with us, although it does feel like that sometime. One source I read when researching this sermon pointed out that it’s really about a flea biting a dog.

It’s amazing how disturbing a small irritant can be. Think of what it’s like when you get a mosquito in your room, and you can hear it whining and whining, but you can’t see it – nor, indeed, feel it until next day when you have one or several itchy bites on your person! As the song says “A flea can bite the bottom of the Pope in Rome!”

Women persist. Women always have persisted. As American writer Valerie Schultz put it: “We women persist. Isn’t that our job? Throughout history, we have persisted in our quest for respect, for justice, for equal rights, for suffrage, for education, for enfranchisement, for recognition, for making our voices heard. In the face of violence, of opposition, of ridicule, of belittlement, even of jail time, nevertheless, we have persisted.”

And because of our persistence, things have happened. Women, in most countries, can now vote – in the UK, universal suffrage only became a thing in 1928, less than a century ago, and in many countries it didn’t happen until more recently. It’s only since 1975 that women can open a bank account or take out a mortgage or even a credit card without a male guarantor – 1975. That’s only 50 years ago! Well within many of our lifetimes.

But in theory, at any rate, women have equal rights with men in this country, although there are still visible pay gaps in certain industries, and for many, other factors such as race come into play. I’m well aware that I’m speaking from a position of White privilege – and a privileged background, at that! I went to an all-girls’ school, and there was no nonsense about girls not being good at STEM subjects, or anything like that.

Sadly, though, in many countries women do not have equal rights, particularly in Afghanistan, and many of my American women friends are afraid that their rights are being eroded.

But back to our parable. It’s not an allegory, you can’t just equate the judge with God and the woman with us, but it is about prayer. God is not an unjust judge – God’s greatest delight, after all, is to give us more and more; remember when Nathan confronted David after he’d had an affair with Bathsheba and got her husband killed? God said to David, through Nathan, that had what he already had not been enough, God would have delighted in giving him twice as much!

Prayer is an odd sort of activity, isn’t it? Especially what’s called intercessory prayer, which is when we ask God for other people, and for ourselves. You would think God would know people’s needs before they ask – and of course, God does! But we are told to pray; it seems in the Bible that it’s absolutely indispensable. Jesus assumed that people prayed; you might remember that he said “When you pray....” rather than “if”. Yet God already knows people’s needs. Like when you see on social media that a friend is poorly or something, and you stop what you’re doing and say a little prayer for them, even something like, “Dear God, please look after them and help them feel better.” God already knew they didn’t feel great....

I don’t know why we are told to pray, but we are. It seems as if prayer creates a condition, an energy if you like, that enables God to work. I do know that when we pray, things change. We change. The more we pray, I think, the closer we come to God, and the more we are enabled to see things from God’s point of view. We aren’t telling God what to do, although it might start off feeling like that; we are barely even asking, other than to say here’s this person with this need, can you do something about it? And, as I said to the children, sometimes God says, yes, here’s this person with this need, what are you going to do about it?

That’s the thing, isn’t it? We are very often called to be the answer to our own prayers. We can’t make someone feel better if they are ill – but we can make them feel loved and appreciated by visiting them, or sending flowers or a card or a tiny present of some kind. We can, and indeed should, welcome new people into our churches and communities, telling them about local activities and community groups or sports clubs they might like; as I said to the children, at school they can help newcomers, especially those who don’t speak much English.

It’s more difficult when it comes to bigger issues, though. We can often help our family and friends, and I do think that it’s always right to name their names before God and to ask God’s blessing on them. I think, too, we need to do the same for our leaders. I know it feels counter-intuitive to pray for someone whose views are not our own, and which, indeed, we may find abhorrent, but we are told to pray for our leaders – and, indeed, for our enemies.

Having said that, of course, we must never sit down under injustice, and must protest it wherever we find it, whether it’s someone at work or college being bullied or treated unfairly by a superior, or whether the government is about to propose something we find unjust or hateful.

Don’t forget, of course, that we don’t have to do any of this in our own strength. The one who calls us will enable us! God delights, as I said above, in giving us what we need and more than that! One of the best things we can pray for is for more of God’s good gifts, which he gives us for his delight, but which do, incidentally, enable us to serve him better.

We seem to have got away from the persistent widow. But she is our example. God is not an unjust judge, but we still need to persist in prayer, and in doing what we can to bring about the answers to our prayer, if it’s something obvious we can do. Because, you see:

God is not an unjust judge.
God is never going to tell us to go away and stop being a nuisance!
God is always going to listen to us when we pray, although sometimes the answer will not be what we expect.
God loves us and delights in being generous to us!
Amen!

Great Expectations

This is similar, but not identical, to a sermon I have preached several times before.  But there is new material in there!

Once upon a time, there was a young man called Jeremiah.
He was from quite a good family –
his father was a priest, although not a high priest,
and owned a fair bit of land not far from Jerusalem.
So Jeremiah grew up in a fair amount of comfort,
loved and nurtured by his family.
Perhaps he had planned to be a priest himself when he grew up.

But then one day, in about 626 BC, God came to him, and said:
"Jeremiah, I am your Creator, and before you were born, I chose you to speak for me to the nations."

Jeremiah is shattered!
“Lord God, you’re making a big mistake!
I am a lousy public speaker and I’m too young for anybody to take me seriously.”

But God insists:
“Don’t put yourself down because of your age.
Just go to whoever I send you to, and say whatever I tell you to say.
Don’t let yourself feel intimidated by anyone, because I’ll be there as back up for you.
You’ll be okay;
take my word for it.”
And Jeremiah is touched by God, and enabled to speak God’s word.

Some six hundred years later, Jesus is teaching in the synagogue one Sabbath day, as he often did.
There was a woman in the congregation who was twisted and deformed –
perhaps she had scoliosis or perhaps it was an arthritic condition.
Certainly it was long-standing.
We are told she had been like this for eighteen years.
And Jesus suddenly notices her, and heals her.
She is able to stand fully upright again, and starts praising God.

Well, that didn’t please the leader of the synagogue.
Healing people like that on the Sabbath –
wasn’t that dangerously close to work?
“Oi,” he goes, “Stop healing people on the Sabbath!
Now then you lot, if any of you want healed,
you come on any of the other six days of the week;
I don’t want any Sabbath-breaking going on here!”

“Oh come on, mate,” says Jesus.
“I saw you taking your donkey down to the drinking-trough earlier this morning, Sabbath day or no Sabbath day.
If it’s all right for you to take your donkey to have a drink on the Sabbath,
it’s all right for me to heal this good lady,
whom Satan had bound for eighteen whole years!”

The leader of the synagogue had nothing to say to this, but the crowd really cheered.

---oo0oo---

I think it’s about expectations, isn’t it?
God expected Jeremiah to proclaim His word to the nations.
Jesus expected that the woman would be healed,
Sabbath day or no Sabbath day.
The ruler of the synagogue expected Jesus to keep the Sabbath.
And Jeremiah and the woman?
I don’t think they expected anything at all!

What does God expect from us?
What do we expect from God’s people?
And what do we expect from God?

Firstly, then, what does God expect from us?

Jeremiah was expected to go and proclaim God’s word.
He had been specifically called for this purpose,
and although he was horrified when the call came, and tried to get out of it,
he ultimately accepted it, and trusted in God’s promise that
“Attack you they will, overcome you they can’t”;
a promise that was fulfilled many times over in the Biblical narrative.

I wonder what God is expecting of you?
I know I am expected to preach the Gospel.
Like Jeremiah, I was very young when I was called –
about fifteen.
Unlike him, I wasn’t able to answer that call for many years for reasons that I won’t go into now,
but suffice it to say that for about the past thirty-five years I have known that this is what God has wanted me to do.
This is what God expects of me.
I am so grateful, every time I preach,
that all I am expected to do is to provide the words;
God does the rest!

So what does he expect of you?
Some of you will know, definitely, what God expects;
you are a steward,
or a worship leader,
or you work with the projection.
For others, it’s less clear cut.
You have a job, perhaps, or are bringing up a family.
Or perhaps that is all behind you now, and you are retired.

But whatever it is you do, you are expected to be Christ’s ambassador.
You are a witness to him in everything you say and do.
Now, before you start squirming uncomfortably,
and thinking “Oh dear, I’m not a very good one, am I?”,
don’t forget that Jesus said that when the Holy Spirit came,
we would be his witnesses throughout the known world.
Not that we should be,
or ought to be,
but that we would be.
We are.
You are an ambassador for Christ,
and whether you like it or not,
whether you know it or not,
this is what you are, through the power of the Holy Spirit who dwells within you.

When God calls you to do something,
whether it is some well-defined job like cleaning the church,
or running a prayer group,
or speaking forth his word,
or simply praying quietly at home,
or whether you’re called to be God’s person where you work, or where you live, God will enable you to do it, just as he enabled Jeremiah.

---oo0oo---

And so to my second question for this morning:
What do you expect of God’s people?
When someone says he or she is a Christian,
what do you reckon they’re going to be like?

The leader of the synagogue was confounded when Jesus didn’t conform to his expectation of what a good Jewish man did or didn’t do on the Sabbath.

Healing people?
Seriously?
No, no, that counted as work!

And sometimes we are confounded when we come across Christians whose standards of acceptable behaviour might differ from ours.
Could they possibly be Christians at all?
Do real Christians behave like that?
Some churches have felt so strongly about some of these issues that they have even split up,
causing enormous hurt and upset in their various denominations.
Yet who are we to judge another’s behaviour?
In fact, you might remember that St Paul suggests
that if your brother is offended by something you do or don’t do,
you should do it, or not do it, as the case may be,
so as not to upset them, or, worse,
to let them think it’s all right for them to do it,
when it might not be at all all right,
and might lead them away from God.
We need to be sensitive to one another,
and to refrain from judging one another.
We probably have our rules that we live by,
but we don’t have the right to force those rules on to other people,
not even on to other Christians.

I suppose the thing is, we shouldn’t really expect other Christians to be like us!
Many, of course, will be –
that’s why you go to this church, here,
because you find people you are comfortable with,
people whose vision of what God’s people are like resonates with yours.
But there will be others whose views you are less comfortable with;
who perhaps strike you as rather puritanical, or rather lax.

Having said that, of course, I find it really hard to accept some of what is going on in the USA, largely initiated by people who call themselves Christian. Do Jesus’ people really think it is right to control women’s fertility, and cut her off from essential medical care?
Do Jesus’ people really think it is right to deny aid to the poorest?
Or medical care to those who cannot afford it?
Do Jesus’ people really think it is okay to discriminate against people because of their ethnicity, sexuality or even gender?
Personally, I don’t think so.
Jesus said, after all, that if you helped – or denied help – to anybody, no matter how insignificant, you were helping, or failing to help him.

Of course, when we know someone, we know what they are like,
whether they are reliable,
whether you can trust them.
And we accept them, normally, for who they are.
Just as God does with us.
But we mustn’t be judgemental.
Maybe they hold views that we find strange, or even unpleasant.
Maybe they feel free to behave in ways we’ve been taught that Christians don’t do,
or ways that we feel would be sinful for us.
But it is not for us to judge.
Our Lord points out, in that collection of His teachings known as the Sermon on the Mount,
that we very often have socking great logs in our own eyes,
so how can we see clearly to remove the speck in someone else’s?
In other words, keep your eyes on what’s wrong with you,
not on what’s wrong with other people!
See to it that you obey your rules, and leave other people to obey theirs.
That said, of course, we do need to protest manifest injustice, and to speak truth to power when we get an opportunity!

That’s something, I think, that the leader of the synagogue would have been wise to keep in mind,
rather than criticising Jesus for healing someone on the Sabbath,
to say nothing of criticising the congregation for coming to be healed that day.
He had rules he needed to keep,
and he needed other people to keep them, too.
But Jesus had other ideas.
For him, healing someone on the Sabbath was as normal and as natural as making sure your livestock were fed, or your cow was milked.

---oo0oo---

So, then, God is free to expect anything from us;
we should not, though, expect other Christians to be just like us.
But what do we expect from God?

Jeremiah didn’t expect anything from God.
When told that he was to proclaim God’s word, his first reaction was to panic:
“I can’t possibly! I’m a lousy public speaker and much too young!”
But God gave him the gifts he needed to fulfil his task,
and sometimes Jeremiah had to actively act out God’s word, not just speak it!

The woman who was all twisted and bent over didn’t expect anything from God, either.
She presumably went to the synagogue each week to worship,
not really expecting anything to happen.
But that particular Sabbath day, Jesus was there –
and that made all the difference.
After eighteen years she was finally free of her illness,
able to stand up straight,
able to walk normally and talk to people face to face once more.

What did you expect from God this morning?
Let’s be honest, we come to church week after week,
and on most Sundays nothing much happens!
We worship God, we spend some time with our friends,
and then we go home again.
And that’s okay.
But some weeks are different, aren’t they?
Not often, but just sometimes we come away from Church
knowing that God was there, and present, and real.
I wonder why these occasions are so rare?
Partly, of course, because mountain-top experiences like that are rare,
that’s why we remember them.

There’s an old story –
I may have told you this before –
of two men coming out of Church one Sunday morning when the preacher had been rather more boring even than usual.
The first man said, “Honestly, what’s the point?
I’ve been going to Church more or less every Sunday for the past 50 years,
and I must have heard hundreds of sermons,
yet I hardly remember any of them!”

To which the second man replied, “Hmm, well;
I’ve been married for over forty years and my wife has cooked me a meal more or less every night,
and I don’t really remember many of them, either.
But where would I be without them?”

Church, mostly, is about providing daily bread for daily needs.
We don’t expect to see miracles each Sunday,
or healings such as took place in the synagogue that day.
But what do we expect when we come to Church?
Do we expect to meet God in some way?

What do we expect from God?
We know that our sins have been forgiven, right?
And that God is gradually making us into the people he designed us to be.
But do we expect more?
Should we expect more?
Neither Jeremiah nor the woman in the synagogue expected anything from God –
yet God gave, bountifully, to both of them in very different ways.

---oo0oo---

Who was it who said “Expect great things from God.
Attempt great things for God”?
I can’t remember right now
but it’s really what I want to leave with you this morning.
What does God expect from you?
Are you trying not to hear something you think God might be trying to say?
What do you expect from other Christians?
Are you requiring a higher standard from them than from yourself?
And what are you expecting God to do for you today?
Amen.

Most of the modern Bible paraphrases quoted  are ©Nathan Nettleton 2002

Mary the Mother of God

 

Last Friday was a very important day!
Yes, I should have had my operation, but that’s not why it was important. In some parts of the Christian Church, the fifteenth of August is a major festival in the Church’s calendar.
It’s what’s called the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary,
and celebrates the belief that her body, as well as her soul,
was taken to heaven after she’d died.
Or possibly even before, it’s not clear.
Either way, it’s a very old tradition,
going right back to the early years of Christianity,
even though there’s nothing about it in Scripture.
And even those Christians, like us,
who don’t necessarily subscribe to that doctrine,
do still consider 15 August one of the Festivals of Saint Mary.

And even though we Protestants don’t really think about Mary much,
the fact that she’s such an important figure in so much of Christianity means she’s probably worth thinking about from time to time.

So what do we actually know about her from the Bible, as opposed to tradition?
She first appears in our Bibles when Gabriel comes to her to ask her if she will bear Jesus,
and, of course, as we all know, she said she would,
and Joseph agreed to marry her despite her being pregnant with a baby he knew he wasn’t responsible for.
I do rather love Luke’s stories about Mary –
how one of the things the angel had said to her was that her relation, Elisabeth, was pregnant after all those years.
And Mary rushes off to visit her.
Was this to reassure herself that the angel was telling the truth?
Or to congratulate Elisabeth?
Or just to get away for a bit of space, do you suppose?
We aren’t told.
But Elisabeth recognises Mary as the mother-to-be of the promised Saviour, and Mary’s response is that great song that we now call the “Magnificat”, which we heard in our Gospel reading.
Or if it wasn’t exactly that –
that may well be Luke putting down what she ought to have said, like Shakespeare giving Henry V that great speech before Agincourt –
it was probably words to that effect!
I think she was very, very relieved to find the angel had been speaking the truth, and probably did explode in an outpouring of praise and joy!

And later, in Bethlehem, when the shepherds come to visit her, we are told that she “kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart.”

The next time we see Mary is when Jesus is twelve and gets separated from them in the Temple.
I spent a lot of time with that story when my daughter was a teenager –
how Mary and Joseph say to Jesus, “But why did you stay behind?
Didn’t you realise we’d be worried about you?”
and Jesus goes, “Oh, you don’t understand!” –
typical teenager!

We don’t see Joseph again after this –
tradition has it that he was a lot older than Mary, and, of course, he had a very physical job.
It wasn’t just a carpenter as we know it –
the Greek word is “technion”, which is the same root as our “technician”;
if it had to do with houses, Joseph did it,
from designing them,
to building them,
to making the furniture that went in them!
And tradition has it that sometime between Jesus’ 12th birthday, and when we next see him, Joseph has died.

But we see a lot more of Mary.
She is there at the wedding at Cana, and indeed,
it’s she who goes to Jesus when they’ve run out of wine.
And Jesus says, at first, “Um, no –
my time has not yet come!” but Mary knew.
And she told the servants to “Do whatever he tells you”, and, sure enough, the water is turned into wine.

There’s a glimpse of her at one point when Jesus is teaching, and he’s told his mother and brother are outside waiting for him, but he refuses to be diverted from what he’s doing.
And, of course, it could have been that it was just random people who said they were his relations to try to get closer to him.

We see Mary, of course, weeping at the Cross –
something no mother should ever have to do.
And Jesus commending her into the care of the “beloved disciple” John.
And, finally, we see her in the Upper Room in Jerusalem when the Holy Spirit came.

That’s really all we know about her from the Bible, but other early traditions and writings, including some of what’s called the apocryphal gospels –
they’re the ones that didn’t make the cut into the New Testament as we know it –
tell us a bit more.
They tell us that her mother was called Anne and her father was called Joachim, and that she was only about 16 when Gabriel came to her.
One source has it that Anne couldn’t have babies, and when Mary finally arrived, she was given to be reared in the Temple, like Samuel.
And traditional sources also tell us that, after the Crucifixion, she went to live in Ephesus, probably with John, and died somewhere between 3 and 15 years later, surrounded by all the apostles.
And that her body was taken up to heaven, which is where we came in!

Well, so far, so good, but how did they get from there to the veneration of her, not to say worship in some cases, that we see today?
This may be something you find difficult to understand –
I certainly do –
and that’s okay.
We aren’t required to do more than honour her as the Mother of our dear Lord;
we mention her when we say the Creed, of course, and there are lots of churches dedicated to her.
My family’s church in Clapham is dedicated to St Mary the Virgin, as are loads of other churches around the world.

But we do not think of her as quasi-divine in some way.
We do believe that Jesus was conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit, not by ordinary human means,
but that this was something that happened in time, not in eternity!
She became the Mother of God –
she was not the Mother of God before Jesus was born.

It’s fascinating, reading up on all the various Marian theologies.
I don’t propose to go into them now –
I don’t understand some of them at all, and anyway, it would take too long.
It would appear, though, that while veneration of Mary is very ancient indeed, independent theological study of her is comparatively recent.
Actually, theology isn’t quite the right word, given that that is the study of God - I think the technical term is “Mariology”.
And when it spins over into giving Mary that worship that properly belongs to God alone, it becomes “Mariolatry”.

I wonder, though, just how it happened that veneration of Mary became such a thing among Roman Catholic Christians.
Orthodox Christianity also venerates her, but make it quite clear that she is not divine –
the distinction, sometimes, among Catholics gets a bit blurred.
One theory I have heard put forward is that she gives a female aspect to Christianity, which may or may not be lacking from the Trinity.
In Italy, apparently, the day is called “Ferragosto”, and is far older than Christianity –
it was originally a festival of the goddess Diana, and became a public holiday during the reign of the Emperor Augustus!
You remember “Great is Diana of the Ephesians” when Paul had a row with a silversmith making copies of her shrine in the book of Acts – it’s that Diana, also known as Artemis, who was associated with the moon, the hunt, and virginity.

Her festival is now the Assumption!
We Christians do like to take a pagan festival and turn it into something else, don’t we?!

But listen, back in the day when the head of your household, or family, or tribe, decided to be baptised and to follow Jesus, everybody else had to, too, no matter what they felt about it.
And although many traditions worshipped a God who,
if gendered, was thought of as male, a very great many worshipped some kind of mother goddess –
and, suddenly confronted with a God who presented very much as male –
although of course there are female aspects of, and names for God, but we don’t use them much!
One can quite validly pray to Lady Love, or Lady Wisdom, and the Holy Spirit is often thought of as female, since the Hebrew word for Spirit is feminine.
Anway, where was I –
oh yes, when told they would now worship God, and Jesus –
well, there was his Mother, all ready to be the Mother you used to worship…..

We Protestants, of course, do have a choice –
there is a tradition of venerating Mary in some parts of the Protestant Church, but it is far from compulsory.
We honour her as the Mother of our dear Lord –
and we honour her, too, for her bravery in saying “Yes” to God like that.
After all, had Joseph repudiated her for carrying someone else’s child, she could have ended up on the streets!

As for the Assumption –
well, who knows?
Some Catholics think she was still alive when that happened, but the official position is unclear.
The Orthodox call it the Dormition, or falling-asleep, and celebrate her death, but they, too, believe her body was carried up to heaven.

But what, then, can we learn from Mary?
We don’t tend to think of her very much, at least, I don’t.
But there is that incredible bravery that said “Yes” to God –
and remember, she didn’t know the end of the story, not at that stage!
There are times I wonder what she must think of it all!
But she was totally submitted to God in a way that very few people can claim to be.

And, of course, there is what she said to the servants at that wedding in Cana - “Do whatever He tells you”.
And that’s not a bad motto to live by, either:
Do whatever Jesus tells you.
Amen.

A long, hard slog

I ad-libbed a children's talk, and there is a bit of a break where they went back to their own activities, but keep listening....

If I were to ask you how many years you’ve been consciously Jesus’ person, I wonder what you would answer!
For me, it’s –
well, it’s really rather a long time, let’s put it that way!

And during that time, I hope, you have grown and changed,
and allowed God to grow and change you and help you become more and more the person you were created to be.
I don’t suppose for one moment you’ve got there –
I know I haven’t:
God still has a lot of work to do in me!

I expect your views on what God’s people should be like have grown and changed over time, too.
Mine have;
but then, they’d have had need to!
I ended up in a weirdly toxic form of evangelicalism that demanded that if you wanted to be a Christian you had to do it in a particular way, and no other way was valid.
And God was incredibly picky, and out to catch you out whenever possible.
Which was, of course, ridiculous, but you don’t realise it at the time.

But over the years I’ve learnt, and I expect you have too, slowly and often painfully, that “in my Father’s house are many mansions”,
and there is room for us all, no matter how differently we may express our faith, and our commitment to being Jesus’ person.
And, indeed, that God is looking for every excuse to pardon and forgive us, not condemn us.

But, of course, there are caveats.
Look at our first reading, from Isaiah:
“Do you think I want all these sacrifices you keep offering to me?” asks God.
“I have had more than enough of the sheep you burn as sacrifices and of the fat of your fine animals.
I am tired of the blood of bulls and sheep and goats.”

And then;
“When you lift your hands in prayer, I will not look at you.
No matter how much you pray, I will not listen, for your hands are covered with blood.”


God wants his people to:
“Wash yourselves clean.
Stop all this evil that I see you doing.
Yes, stop doing evil and learn to do right.
See that justice is done;
help those who are oppressed, give orphans their rights, and defend widows.”

I wonder, sometimes, what God thinks of what’s going on in America right now, with people there calling on His name to justify cutting aid to the poorest of the poor, and so on.
Well, I am sure justice will be done in the end.
Remember Jesus’ warning:
“Not everyone who calls me ‘Lord, Lord’ will enter the Kingdom of heaven, but only those who do what my Father in heaven wants them to do.”

But meanwhile, we do need to be stepping up to the plate to help those less fortunate than ourselves.
The need for the Food Bank, for instance, hasn’t stopped just because it is August;
rather the reverse, as people who can just about cope in term time when their children get their main meal at school can find it very much more difficult in the school holidays.
You will, perhaps, remember footballer Marcus Rashford’s campaign to have meals provided for children in poorer families during, and I think after, the pandemic.

Just about a year ago there were riots against asylum seekers, prompted by the rumour –
untrue, of course –
that the person who murdered some little girls at a dance class was an illegal immigrant.
He wasn’t, but it served as an excuse for the most appalling displays of racist behaviour that you can possibly imagine.
They even set fire to hotels where they thought asylum seekers were being housed!
And I believe there have been similar gatherings this past week, on the anniversary.
It is this old chestnut that “they” are getting more support than people in this country are.
Which is also not true.
They get less than £50 a week to live on, and they are certainly not housed in 5-star hotels!

But what are we, as God’s people, to do about this?
Yes, we can and do express our disgust at such behaviour, but is that all?
What, I wonder, would Jesus do?
If we look at how he treated people whom his culture thought despicable, maybe we will get an idea:
he loved them and forgave them!
He made it quite clear that their behaviour was, or had been, wrong, but then he loved them and forgave them, just as he does us.
Just as, I hate to say it, he does some of those “pseudo-Christians” in the USA.

But enough of that particular rabbit-hole!
Today I am trying to talk about faith!
Faith that manifests itself in action!

Faith that probably has to be grown over many years.

“To have faith” says the letter to the Hebrews, “is to be sure of the things we hope for, to be certain of the things we cannot see.”
And the letter goes on to give us an example in Abraham, who, we are told, was promised a wonderful inheritance.
God promised to make his descendants, quite literally, more numerous than the grains of sand on the seashore.
He was going to be given a wonderful land for them to live in.

Now, at this stage, Abraham was living very comfortably thank you, in a very civilised city called Ur,
and although he didn't have any children, he was happy and settled.
But God told Abraham that if he wanted to see this promise fulfilled he had to get up,
to leave his comfortable life,
and to move on out into the unknown,
just trusting God.
And Abraham did just exactly that.
And, eventually, Isaac was born to carry on the family.
And then Isaac’s son, Jacob.
And we are told that, although none of them actually saw the Promised Land, and although the promise was not fulfilled in their lifetimes,
they never stopped believing that one day, one day, it would be.
Their whole lives were informed by their belief that God was in control.

This sort of faith is the kind we'd all like to have, wouldn't we?
Wouldn't we?
Hmmm, I wonder.
In our Gospel reading, Jesus says, “Do not be afraid, little flock, for your Father is pleased to give you the Kingdom.”
That's great, isn't it?
“Your Father is pleased to give you the Kingdom.”

Well, it would be great, but then he says, “Sell all your belongings and give the money to the poor.
Provide for yourselves purses that don't wear out, and save your riches in heaven, where they will never decrease, because no thief can get to them, and no moth can destroy them.  For your heart will always be where your riches are.”

That's the bit we don't like so well, do we?
Like Abraham, we are very-nicely-thank-you in Ur,
comfortably settled in this world,
and we don't want to give it all up to go chasing after something which might or might not be real.
This is the difficult bit, the bit where what we say we believe comes up against what we really do believe.

We would like to be there –
to be that sort of faith-filled person –
without the hard slog of actually getting there!
We want to have all the privileges and joys of being Christians without actually having to do anything.

Of course, in one of the many great paradoxes of Christianity,
we don't have to do anything!
We can do nothing to save ourselves!
It is God who does all that is necessary for our salvation.

But if we are to be people of faith, if we are to be of any use to God,
our faith does, or should, prompt us to action.

First of all, then, our faith should prompt us to repent.
To turn away from sin and turn to God with all our hearts.
It's not just a once-and-for-all thing;

it's a matter of daily repentance, daily choosing to be God's person.

And as we do that, our faith grows and develops and strengthens to the point where, if we are called to do so,
we can leave our comfort zone and try great things for God.
As Abraham did, and as Jesus calls us to do.

We aren't all called to sell our possessions and give what we have to the poor –
although a little more equity in the way this world's goods are handed out wouldn't be a bad thing.
We are all called to work for justice in our communities,
whether that is a matter of writing to our MPs if something is clearly wrong,
or getting involved in a more hands-on way.
We are called to pray for those places where things are clearly wrong,
whether that’s what’s happening in the USA right now
or for people in those countries whose leaders are at war andw ho are suffering immeasurably because of it.

Some people –
maybe some of you, even –
are or have been called to leave your home countries and work in a foreign land to be God's person there,
whether as a professional missionary, as it were,
or just where you are working.
Others are asked to stay put, but to be God's person exactly where they are –
at school,
college,
work,
home,
at the shops,
on the bus,
in a traffic jam,
on social media...
everywhere!
Being God's person isn't something that happens in church on Sundays and is put aside the rest of the week.

It isn't easy. It's the every day, every moment hard slog.
The times when we wish we could skip over all this,
and be the wonderful faith-filled Christian we hope to be one day without the hard work of getting there!

Sadly, it doesn't work like that.
We don't have to do all the hard work in our own strength, of course;

God the Holy Spirit is there to help us, and remind us, and change us, and grow us as we gradually become more and more the people God designed us to be.
But God doesn't push in where He's not wanted.
If we are truly serious about being God's person,
then we need to be being that every day.
Each day we need to commit to God, whether explicitly or implicitly.

Jesus reminds us that this world isn't designed to be permanent.
One day it will come to an end, either for each of us individually,
or perhaps in some great second coming.
Scientists tell us it will be very soon now, as climate change runs out of control.
But whichever way, it will end for us one day,
and not all of us get notice to quit.
We need to be ready and alert, busy with what we have been given to do, but ready to let go and turn to Jesus whenever he calls us.

None of this is easy.
Being a Christian isn't easy.
Becoming a Christian is easy,
because God longs and longs for us to turn to Him.
But being one isn't.
Allowing God to change us,
to pull us out of our comfort zone,
to travel with Him along that narrow way –
it's not easy.
But it is oh, so very worthwhile!
Amen.

Martha and Mary

 This was a short reflection for an informal act of worship when on holiday with book group friends.  I am not recording it.  

I chose to only have the Gospel reading today, because this is, after all, meant to be a short act of worship! But, had I chosen to have the Epistle read, too, we would have heard that: “in Jesus all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell.”

And in our Gospel reading, we basically find all the fullness of God sitting in someone’s front room eating crisps! Well, perhaps not crisps, but probably bread and olives, and maybe cheese as well.

We know the story of Martha and Mary so well; we probably learnt it in Sunday School. Jesus and his disciples visiting their good friends in Bethany, and Jesus teaching, as he so often did. Martha, bustling about in the kitchen, getting a meal ready for everybody, and Mary sitting at Jesus’ feet and listening!

I think we probably see Mary’s behaviour as perfectly normal, but back in the day, it was incredibly shocking. Women weren’t supposed to be able to learn, and if they were, they should learn in private, ideally from other women, not in mixed company! The disciples may well have been embarrassed by her behaviour, and Martha certainly was. I rather suspect she didn’t ask Jesus to send Mary out to the kitchen because she wanted help, but because she thought Mary might be embarrassing Jesus by her behaviour. After all, this was Mary who poured a vial of ointment all over Jesus’ feet, and who may have had some kind of Past! Some scholars think this Mary was the same person as Mary Magdalene, but the Bible isn’t very clear how many people poured vials of ointment all over Jesus. But anyway.

It’s not that Martha didn’t want to know about Jesus, other than as a friend, perhaps a friend of her brother’s; it was, if you remember, Martha who declared, after her brother had died,
“Yes, Lord, I believe that you are the Messiah,
the Son of God,
the one coming into the world.”
Martha, perhaps, was beginning to get a glimpse of who Jesus was. She knew he would have healed her brother had he arrived before he died; she was to see him raised from the dead – and, perhaps, later she was to meet the risen Jesus, as Mary did, as the other disciples did.

But not that day. That day she was fussed with preparing a meal, and by her sister’s embarrassing behaviour. Jesus and the disciples would probably have been happy enough with bread and cheese, and maybe some olive oil or even some olives, but Martha couldn’t, at the time, feel she was honouring him with a simple meal.

And yet – “Mary has chosen the better part!” Jesus never cared whether he was speaking to men or to women; he never cared whether or not he was made ritually unclean; he only cared that people listen to his message of the good news of the Kingdom of God.

“In Jesus all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell.”

I wonder how we would react if Jesus, in person, was sitting in our front room nibbling on crisps and olives. Would we, like Mary, long to sit at his feet and listen? Or would we, like Martha, prefer to prepare a feast for him? I don’t think either is wrong – we need both Martha and Mary in our churches. And I think most of us lean to one or the other, although I hope we carry both of them with us. I know I’m more like Mary…. What about you?