When Forgiveness Comes First

 

Texts: Exodus 17:1-7; Romans 5:1-11; John 4:5-42

 

Do you remember the good old days when parents brought up their children according to traditional values?  I do.  I had one of those upbringings myself.  And one part of that was about the importance of owning up when I did something wrong.  You probably had that lesson drummed into you, too.  If you've done something wrong, the thing to do is to own up, tell the truth, say sorry, and move on.  That's the message that my parents gave me, and it was reinforced at school.

 

Or was it?  Were we praised for our honesty when we confessed our wrongdoing – held up as a good example to others?  No, we were not.  We were punished for the wrongdoing.  And what did that teach us?  That honesty doesn't pay.  Say nothing – and if that doesn't work, try lying your way out of it.  That was the lesson that we soon learned from those who believed that the proper response to a confession was punishment for the crime confessed.

 

The turning-point for me came in Mr Chapman's class, form 4 in the Crantock Street Primary School.  Mr Chapman was a huge man – at least, he looked huge to a small 10-year-old.  And Duggie Dishman was certainly one of those.  One day Mr Chapman came back into the classroom and was about to sit down behind hid desk when he noticed something unpleasant on the seat – something brown, smelly and produced by a dog.  Having a naturally suspicious mind, Mr Chapman did not jump to the obvious conclusion that a dog had somehow managed to get into the classroom, climbed up on the chair, and let nature take its course.  Mr Chapman strongly suspected that one of us was responsible for putting the stuff there.

 

He demanded to know who was responsible for this outrage.  And to the astonishment of us all Duggie Dishman put up his hand and confessed.  Judging from his expression, for a split second  Mr Chapman was as surprised as the rest of us that anyone would own up and tell the truth, but he recovered quickly.  My guess is that Duggie Dishman took a week or two longer to recover.  But the lesson was very clear.  If you follow the teaching of your parents and teachers, don't expect to be praised for your honesty: rather, expect to be very uncomfortable for the next few days.

 

Something rather similar turned up in our news media this week.  Look at the response to the report on mishaps in our hospitals.  The medical professionals owned up collectively to a number of serious mistakes made in our hospitals, some of which resulted in death, some in serious injury.  Why did they do that?  So that they can learn from these instances, and make our hospitals even safer than they are now.  And they are very safe.  As horrible as the cases were, they represented 2 in every 10,000 hospital admissions.  I like those odds; I'll gladly take them if I need surgery at some stage.  And I applaud the decision to make this information available.

 

But what thanks did they get?  Headlines in our media about "killer hospitals".  Demands for further inquiry, disciplinary action, and naming and shaming.  Would it be too surprising if the Duggie Dishman principle came into play here?  Isn't the lesson for our health professionals, don't own up to anything, don't acknowledge your mistakes; if you do you will be slammed in the media, and quite possibly sued in the courts?  We say we want the truth – we say we want to learn from our mistakes – but all too often, what we really want is to punish those who have done wrong, or to sue them for every penny we can get out of them – or their employer, or their insurer or anyone else.  We might call it justice.  What we can't call it is godly.  What we can't call it is merciful.  What we can't call it is truth-promoting.  What we can't call it is forgiveness.

 

And so to the reading from the Book of Exodus this morning (not Genesis, as it says in the notes!).  Here we have a very vivid demonstration of the difference between the human and the divine approach to wrongdoing.  As human beings we can sympathise with Moses' feelings here.  It's not easy leading these people.  They are born grumblers – with, it must be said, something to grumble about.  They, too, are all too human.  When they were slaves in Egypt, they had a terrible life.  Then God, working through Moses, rescued them, led them out of Egypt and called upon them to follow his and he would give them a land of their own.

 

But they had to get there first, and that involved the difficult matter of getting through the wilderness.  And so the grumbling started.  And very soon they were convincing themselves that they were better off in Egypt.  Far from being rescued they had been dragged away against their better judgment by this madcap Moses, and brought out to die in the desert.  What are we going to eat?  What are we going to drink?  At the very least, they have lost their trust in God.  When they were escaping, when they saw the waters part for them, and then close back and drown their Egyptian enemies, it had been easy to believe in God.  It always is when things are going well for us.  But now the difficulties have come, and their faith is gone.

 

Now they turn on Moses.  This wasn't God's idea, this was his.  He has conned them.  They were quarrelling among themselves and asking, "Is the Lord among us or not?"  And notice that the author describes this as 'testing the Lord'.  That expression ought to ring loud bells for us, because not so long ago we had the Temptation of Christ; and one of the Scriptures Jesus quoted to Satan was, "You shall not put the Lord your God to the test."

 

So the case against the Israelites at this point is pretty strong.  What they should do is own up, confess their wrongdoing, be honest, and apologise.  That's probably what Moses – the Mr Chapman figure in all this – wants them to do; and when there's no sign of that happening, he turns in despair to God.  What am I to do with these people?  They are almost ready to stone me?

 

And the God in whom they have lost faith, the God against whom they have offended, does what?  Demands confession, demands an apology?  No – he doesn't.  He meets their need, as he has been doing all along the way.  He demonstrates yet again that he is their, God, that he is among them, and that Moses is his instrument.  In other words, he reminds them that they are his people, that he loves and accepts them, despite their failures and their sins.

 

St Paul famously puts the same thought this way in his Letter to the Romans: You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly.  Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous person, though for a good person someone might possibly dare to die.  But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

 

God forgiveness, embodied in Jesus Christ, came to us while were still offending against God.  We didn't have to clean up our act, confess our sins, or anything else first – God's forgives precedes our confession.

 

St John illustrates this same principle in his lovely story of the encounter between Jesus and the woman at the well.  Culturally, humanly, this woman is a nobody, the lowest of the low.  She is a woman, not a man; she is a Samaritan, not a Jew.  Worst of all, she is a Samaritan woman of low reputation.  She has, shall we say, an interesting marital and domestic history.  She doesn't even begin to admit any of that stuff until after Jesus has demonstrated his complete acceptance of her.  And, anyway, Jesus already knew all that stuff.  It makes no difference to him: he accepts her as and who she is.

 

All of this doesn't, of course, mean that we should not confess our sins.  What it does mean is that confession is for us, not for God.  To confess our sins is to off-load those things that make us feel separated from God: it is not a way of seeking to win back God's love, which we have lost through sinning.

 

And all this means that we can confess our sins – we can be honest and tell the truth – in the certain assurance that we are not going to be beaten up as Duggie Dishman was, or vilified in the press as out hospital staff have been, or sued or whatever.  We are going to be assured that God is and always has been among us.  That we have already been forgiven, cleansed, and reconciled to God through the cross of Christ.  That God already knows of our sins before we confess them, and that nothing we can do will ever make any difference to his love for us.

 

That's not justice.  That's forgiveness.  That's mercy.  That's God's way, whatever we put on his seat, and however many mistakes we make.

Repentance is for Radicals

 

Texts: Genesis 12:1-4a; Romans 4:1-5, 13-17; Romans 3:1-17

 

If ever we wanted an illustration of the power of repentance we surely saw it in the remarkable events in Canberra this week, and, in fact, throughout Australia.  No doubt, there are a few cynics around who will dismiss that "saying-sorry" ceremony as pure political theatre, but that's not how those huge crowds we saw on the TV News felt about it.  Something historic, something of fundamental importance to all the people of that country, was taking place, and hardly a man, woman or child was unaffected by it.

 

It was as if the whole dominant class in Australia was collectively repenting – not just acknowledging the specific wrongs of the past, - but changing their mindset.  They were turning away from their past attitude to adopt a new one.  They were rejecting the idea of one type of humanity – their own – being superior to another, the Aborigine peoples.  Perhaps they are not yet ready to go a step further to acknowledge that there is, in fact, only one type of human being, but it was certainly a huge step that they took this week.  No doubt difficult times lie ahead as they work through the implications of this dramatic act of national repentance, but at least now they are facing in the right direction.

 

And that's really what repentance is – a turning to face in the right direction.  It's not only Dick Whittington – and the Australian people! – who need to turn again and again – it is all of us.  All of us can become distracted – all of us can find new things to look at in place of God – all of us are capable of building our own golden calves and worshipping them instead of God.  Where do we look to for our fundamental sense of security, and for our hope for a better future?  To our families, to our careers, to our own hard work, to our country?  All of those are good in themselves, but all of them can become alternatives to God.  When they do it is time for repentance – for turning back to God.

 

We saw another example of turning back a little closer to home this week, when one of our local M.P.'s announced she was quitting Parliament at the next election.  It was time for her, she had decided, to turn back to her family and leave behind, at least for now, her all-consuming political career.  That sort of radical re-prioritising is a form of non-religious repentance; it is not a confession of past wrongdoing but a radical break from the past and present to open up a new future.  Perhaps one day we will hear of an M.P. who is quitting Parliament to spend more time with God.  Wouldn't that be something!  Wouldn't that cause a sensation!

 

I imagine that Abram's radical decision caused something similar among his people.  He was well on in years – perhaps even a bit older than me.  He had a large extended family.  His father had died and he was now the patriarch of the clan.  They were well off, with many livestock, living a comfortable existence, not in Ur as we're often told, but in a place called Haran, to which Abram's father had brought the family some years earlier.  [Genesis 11:31]

 

That probable doesn't matter too much either way.  The point is that there is nothing in the text so far to tell us whether or not Abram or the family were religious – or were even aware of God before his call.    There is no suggestion in the text, for example, that God had called Abram's father, Terah, to leave Ur – the decision seems to have been his own.

 

But nor is there any suggestion that Abram had previously been a wicked man, leading an irreligious life.  Rather, we may assume that he was a fine, upright, middle-class family man, well-off and comfortable – inwardly sad that he had no son of his own – but otherwise untroubled.

 

Then God spoke to him.  God told him to give up all sense of security based on familiarity – leave his own country, his home, the land of his fathers – and journey to a new land.  If he will do that, God promises to make him into a great nation.  I wander if we can grasp how crazy it must have seemed to everyone else besides Abram – or perhaps even to Abram himself when he first heard it.  Who is this God he claims to have heard?  It's not uncommon for older people to hear voices.  Perhaps he's beginning to lose the plot?  Why risk it?  What if it is all a silly delusion?  Where is this new land – what's it like?  Does it even exist?

 

And yet, says, our text, "Abram left, as the Lord had told him".  At one level, of course, this is all about obedience.  But when we look at St Paul's reflections on this episode in his Letter to the Romans, we can see that it is something much more than that.  St Paul makes much of the fact that all this took place before the Law was given.  He says that where there is no law there is no transgression.  In other words, there is no issue of disobedience.

 

And this is surely right.  Look again at this short passage from Genesis and we see that there is no threat of consequence if Abram declines to go.  God does not threaten to strike him down, or take away his livestock, or hurl a few plagues in his direction.  If he declines to leave, then he stays and his life goes on as before.  There is no stick, but there is a great carrot!  Go, and you will be made into a great nation.  Go, and you will be richly blessed.  Go, and your name will be great.  Go, and all peoples on the earth will be blessed through you.

 

That's some remuneration package he's been offered there!   But you know what they say, if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is.  What trust could be put in such huge promises?  What trust could be put in the One who was making them?  That was the question for Abram to consider.  He was not being told what to do and threatened with harm if he disobeyed.  He was being told what to do and assured of great blessing if he did.  His response, his decision to leave as the Lord had told him, was one of trust in God, much more than it was a simple act of obedience. 

 

He turned from his past to face a brand new future.  He turned from all worldly considerations and opened himself to God.  That's repentance – real, radical, life-changing repentance.

 

Something similar is put before Nicodemus in his encounter with Jesus in our gospel passage.  Again, we are dealing here with a fundamentally good man.  A faithful Jewish leader, a teacher of the faith.  He must have heard of Jesus, or even heard Jesus himself, somewhere and formed a respectful opinion of him.  He seeks him out, and he addresses him with the courtesy title of Rabbi, even though he must have known that under Jewish law and custom Jesus was not qualified as a rabbi.  Probably he is genuinely interested in finding out more about Jesus.  He knows of Jesus' reputation for extraordinary miracles, and perhaps he is intrigued by this.  How does Jesus do them?  Or, perhaps, he really does accept them as evidence that Jesus must have a special relationship with God.

 

But before he can ask his first question, Jesus takes over the conversation.  He turns the focus away from him and back to Nicodemus.  No one can understand the ways of God unless they are first born again.  He catches Nicodemus completely off-guard, causes him to make a bit of a fool of himself.  Of course, Jesus is not talking about a second biological birth.

 

Then what is he talking about?   He is talking about that radical re-orientation of life that we have been calling repentance.  That turning to God in openness, that turning away from false certainty, even false certainty based on the painstaking study of the Scriptures that Nicodemus would have been doing for years, and simply trusting God to lead us in his ways. That is not something we can achieve by our own efforts.  That requires the gift of grace, that requires the gift of the Spirit.  Flesh gives birth to flesh, Jesus says, but the Spirit gives birth to Spirit.

 

That whole encounter must have shaken Nicodemus to the roots of his being.  In his own way he was being challenged as Abram was: could he leave all that he was familiar with in his learning, could he risk his position in the community, and walk a new path, following this mysterious man who seems in some new way to have come from God?  In the end, he seems to have made that leap of faith, for it was he who helped Joseph of Arimethea to bury Jesus.  (John 19:39)

 

Radical repentance – a radical change of direction – for Australia, for Katherine Rich, for Abram, for Nicodemus.  May it be for us also as we continue our journey through Lent.  Amen.

 

 

 

 

The Wall that Divides

 

Texts: Isaiah 60:1-6; Ephesians 3:1-12; Matthew 2:1-12

 

As so often is the case, there was good news and bad news from the Holy Land over the Christmas period.  And for obvious reasons, let's start in Bethlehem.  The good news was that Bethlehem was relatively peaceful this year, so that a large number of pilgrims were able to join with local Palestinian Christians in worshipping in the Church of the Nativity, the church that, according to local legend, was built over the site of the stable in which Jesus was born.

 

So that was good news.  And at the political level there was also some good news.  The leaders of Israel and the Palestinians have agreed to talk, and accepted the aim to achieve a peaceful settlement by the end of this year.  But, sadly, that's where the good news ends; because already those talks have stalled.  They've stalled because of Israel's concern about security from terrorist attack, and, because of that concern, Israel's determination to separate its people from the Palestinians.

 

Hence the huge wall that Israel is building.  Such a wall is not an Israeli invention, of course.  We human beings have often put our faith in walls to keep us safe from our perceived enemies.  It says something about our human nature that the only man-made object visible from the moon is the Great Wall of China, now over 2,300 years old!  Those of us of British stock can look back to Hadrian's Wall, only 300-400 years younger.  Thr first was built to separate the Chinese from the Mongols, the second to keep those terrible Celts in their place in what we today call Scotland.  Walls are designed to separate, to keep 'us' safe from 'them'.

 

So we must be a bit careful in our condemnation of Israel – they got the idea from our ancestors, among others.  But their wall is particularly tragic in terms of our faith, and theirs, because it is contrary to our Scriptures and theirs.  It is designed to separate Jews and Gentiles, to preserve Israel for the Jews.  And despite what the religious right in the USA and elsewhere want to believe, that contradicts the teaching of the Hebrew and the Christian Scriptures.

 

And today is a very good day to remind ourselves of just that.  As I've said in other sermons recently, the great end-time hope we find in the Hebrew Scriptures is of a renewed and restored Israel, cleansed, purified, obedient and made holy, becoming a sort of irresistible magnet to all the other peoples of the world.  The great prophets looked forward to a day when all the peoples of the earth would worship the one true God, the God of Israel, and would come to Jerusalem to learn the ways of this God and to bring him tribute.

 

Our first lesson this morning is an example of this vision.  Addressing Jerusalem, Isaiah says: Nations will come to your light, and kings to the brightest of your dawn.  And he goes on to talk of people  from Midian, Ephah and Sheba flocking to Jerusalem bringing their treasure with them.  No hint of a wall here – open borders on all sides.  That's not a Christian vision, that's the vision of one of the greatest of all the Hebrew prophets.  That is part of the teaching of Judaism – part of the hope that faithful Jews still nurture and are nurtured by.

 

And that's the sort of hope that St Paul was brought up on.  That is surely part of what he had in mind when he wrote this Letter to the Ephesians.  In fact, it is the heart of what he is writing in this letter.  He calls it the mystery of Christ now revealed.  He has pondered what Christ's coming is all about – what is its essential meaning – and he says this: The mystery is that through the gospel the Gentiles are heirs together with Israel, members together of one body, and sharers together in the promise in Christ Jesus.

 

And even more to the point, in the preceding chapter, he says this: For he himself is our peace, who has made the two one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility, by abolishing in his flesh the law with its commandments and regulations.  His purpose was to create in himself one new humanity out of the two, thus making peace, and in this one body to reconcile both of them to God through the cross, by which he put to death their hostility.  This passage, if no other, should be plastered over the wall that Israel is presently erecting – if only to remind Christian sympathisers that such a wall is contrary to the teaching of St Paul.

 

Bethlehem is on the other side of the wall, and that alone should give us pause on this day of the Epiphany, for our story today is based in Bethlehem, and its about Jews and Gentiles.  As I have said in the pewsheet notes, this story is found only in St Matthew's gospel, and it is told in his characteristic way.  But before we get to that, just for the record, and not expecting it to do any good at all, I want to make three quick observations.  First of all, the Magi do not find Jesus in the stable, but in a house.  Secondly, this may well be due to the fact that they did not arrive on Christmas night, but about two years later.  And thirdly, and most intriguingly, Joseph was not there, it seems, when they arrived.

 

Presumably, St Matthew feels that he has solved the 'Joseph problem' in chapter one.  If you have been here over the last week or two you will have noticed that Mary hardly gets a mention in chapter one; the whole drama focuses on Joseph, because St Matthew is concerned about the legitimacy of Jesus, not his virgin birth.  Jesus had to be a descendant of David if he were to be recognised as the Messiah, and he could only claim such descent through the paternal line.

 

Now St Matthew has a different problem.  If Jesus was born in Bethlehem, and it seems to have been accepted that he was, how come he was known as Jesus of Nazareth?  Hence this rather strange and drawn out story of the visit of the Magi and its aftermath, which, whatever else its does, is designed to explain why Jesus was born in Bethlehem but raised largely in Nazareth.  (We might notice how careful St Matthew is not to mention where Mary was living before Jesus' birth.  St Luke's story of the census is another approach to the same sort of problems.)

 

But St Matthew has much more in mind than this problem of geography.  He has in mind that great Jewish hope.  In the coming of Jesus, the Messiah, the end of the age is coming, and with it that great influx of Gentiles promised by the prophets.  The Magi, whoever and whatever they were, and wherever they hailed from, were Gentiles, and they came to Jerusalem bringing their treasures, before being directed on to Bethlehem.  In his typical way, St Matthew is showing us how the prophecies of the past and the promises of the future come together in Jesus the Christ.

 

And, of course, he is pointing us forward to Christ's passion and death.  When the Magi ask for directions from the King, whom does he consult?  The chief priests and the teachers of the law – that is, the Jewish elite.  They know their Scriptures, they know that the promised Messiah is to be born in Bethlehem, but do they show any interest or excitement?  No, they do not.  It is the Gentiles who go looking for the Christ child, not the religious leaders of Jerusalem.  Far from being excited, we are told that Herod "was disturbed, and all Jerusalem with him."

 

St Matthew surely has in mind the eventual arrest of Jesus before Pilate, and the conspiracy of members of the Sanhedrin, the Ruling Council, to have him condemned.  Once again, St Matthew reminds us that we can't have Christmas without Good Friday.

 

We don't know what became of the Magi, except that they returned home to their country by a different route.  They were fortunate: they had unimpeded access to Jerusalem and Bethlehem, and safe passage.  Those rights are promised by the Scriptures, Jewish and Christian, to all gentiles, including you and me.

 

To build a wall between people is to divide the Body of Christ.  In our lifetime, the Berlin Wall has come down, and so has the wall of apartheid.  Let us pray that Israel's wall will go the same way, and soon.  Amen.

The Nanny God?

 

Texts: Genesis 2:15-17, 3:1-7; Romans 5:12-19; Matthew 4:1-11

 

I don't know who first coined the expression 'the Nanny State', but whoever did, I wish he or she hadn't.  Along with 'P.C. nonsense', it is surely becoming the most over-used, and therefore virtually meaningless saying of our time.  Why can't people just indicate that they disagree with a particular policy or decision, and argue against it?  Why this character-assassination of all those responsible for the new policy?  Whatever happened to Big Brother State, by the way?  How come Big Brother became a Nanny?  Am I being too cynical in suspecting that this change, at least in our country, has something to do with the rise of women into leadership positions?

 

We had a classic case of this last year with the so-called anti-smacking Bill.  Of course, there was room on that issue for a genuine difference of opinion.  I found myself in the curious position of being opposed to a piece of legislation that I personally agreed with.  I know a bit about the law, in this country as well as a number of other countries.  I know that there are many modern and reasonable countries that never had in their law the sort of provision we had in the Crimes Act; and if we had never had it, very few if any would have argued today that we should have it.

 

The problem was, we did, and its repeal therefore would have changed the law, has changed the law.  But to abuse those who were in favour of its repeal as servants of the Nanny State interfering with the rights of parents I found highly offensive.  And hypocritical.  What is the cry as soon as a child has been abused by its carers?  Where was CYFS when that was going on?  Where were the Police or the school or the health authority?  What is the Government doing about it?  No mention now of the Nanny State – that child should have been removed from those monsters and…and…looked after properly by…?

 

The point of this rave is not to re-open last year's debates but to draw attention to the fact that in our human nature we have a very ambiguous attitude to the law.  If Parliament passes a law that we agree with, all well and good, but if we don't agree with it then the fun starts.  And the word games.  Despite the fact that only Parliament can pass laws, and despite the fact that most of the laws that we get most agitated about are passed on a so-called free vote, we blast the Government of the day, or the Nanny State.

 

Well, maybe I was part of the system for too long, but I remain of the view that virtually all the laws that are passed in this country are passed with good intent.  The proponents honestly believe that the laws they are proposing are in the best interests of the country – which, of course, means, in the best interests of you and me and everyone else who lives here.  Of course, that doesn't mean that I agree in every case – but I do contend that the vast majority of them are passed with good intentions.

 

Perhaps the greatest areas of contention – apart from spectacular one-offs like the anti-smacking stuff – comes in the field of health and safety.  We have amazing battles over alternative therapeutic products.  We are adults, what we put in our bodies is our own business and the Nanny State has no business trying to regulate them or limit our choice in some way.  And, of course, any attempt to tax food products according to their potential to injure our health – don't even go there.  Look at the tuck-shop wars in the U.K., with parents infuriated at the suggestion that school tuckshops should only stock healthy food for their children.  So what if there's an obesity problem among children, or a looming diabetes epidemic, or rotten teeth in our five-year-olds?  The Nanny State should not dictate to us what we can and can't eat, or feed to our children.

 

All of which gets us, of course, to Adam and Eve.  For today's story centres around food – it's about appetite – and about wisdom and, yes, obedience.  The whole of this chapter 3 in the Book of Genesis is worth studying in detail; and I find that the longer I spend with this ancient story, the more modern it seems to be.  It's a classic human dilemma – precisely because it plays to that element of our human nature that I mentioned earlier – that ambiguity towards any form of authority, however benign.  As the story goes on it comments on other things as well, but it starts with this simple issue.  As a human being, as an autonomous self as we post-moderns like to think of ourselves, should I be free to eat whatever I damn well please?

 

One of the great subtle elements in this story is found in the description of the fruit.  (Please note, incidentally, that we are NOT told it's an apple!)  The author of the story is very clear that there is nothing inherently wrong with the fruit.  On the contrary, "the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom".  That's quite a fruit we've got here!  Who wouldn't want to sink their teeth into it?  And why shouldn't we?  Is this bureaucracy gone mad?  Is this yet more P.C. nonsense from tree-hugging greenies who think the Garden of Eden should be left in it's pristine state and human beings should take their carbon footprints elsewhere?  Is this the Nanny State telling us what we can and can't eat?

 

Well, of course, it's none of the above.  If we have to have a bogey target, it can only be the Nanny God we claim to worship.  Only we don't usually address him in that way.  But perhaps we should.  Our Jewish cousins in the faith tell us that the Torah, the Law of God, which fills much of the first five books of the Hebrew Scriptures, our Old Testament, is a gift of love from God to his people to tell us how to lead long and healthy lives.  This Nanny God claims to know better than ourselves what is in our own best interests.  And at the heart of that Law are all sorts of highly detailed rules and regulations about food.  It sometimes appears that God is most actively concerned with us human beings at mealtimes.

 

And not only in a negative sense.  Think how much good stuff happens around meals in the gospel narrative.  And think about the meal we will share together here shortly.  Why bead and wine, and not locusts and honey?  Because God in Christ decreed that this is what we are to share together as his followers. Why?  That is the question we are not permitted to ask: even to ask it is to give ourselves the right to stand in Eve's place – to question God's decrees, to decide for ourselves whether or not we will accept the intervention of this Nanny God.

 

Look at how the tempter proceeds with Eve.  First he tries to sow doubt in her mind as to what God has actually said.  That fails.  Eve is clear about the prohibition – in fact, she even extends it.  She says they are not aloud even to touch the fruit, much less eat it.  So far so good.  Eve knows the word of God.

So the tempter moves to the second stage.  He persuades Eve that disobedience will not bring the consequences she fears.  This time he succeeds.  Eve decides to eat some of the fruit.  In other words, once she loses her fear of disobedience, she is free to disobey.

 

What is missing here is love.  If she truly loved God she would have obeyed willingly, as a consequence of that love.  Her obedience would have been an act of love – a denial of self and an offering to the Other.  That's what Christian obedience is all about – not slavish adherence to a set of rules out of fear of hell and damnation for disobedience.  That gives us a terrible image of God.  If we believe that God is love, if we believe that everything he asks of us is for the best, then disobedience is the ultimate foolishness.

 

Contrast this with the encounter between the tempter and Jesus in the desert.  Here we never get to the second stage.  The debate is entirely about the word and will of God.  There is no consideration of possible consequences because there is no possibility of Jesus choosing to disobey the Nanny God whom he preferred to call Abba.

 

As we enter Lent, let us see it as an opportunity to love God more fully, not to fear him more greatly.  It is a time of self-denial – a time to remind ourselves that our Nanny God knows best.  Amen.

Consecrated to God

 

Texts: Malachi 3:1-4; Hebrews 2:14-18; Luke 2:22-40

 

As I have mentioned in this morning's notes in the pewsheet, the first thing that might strike us about this story is that it has wandered into the wrong gospel.  It has all the hallmark of St Matthew's scholarly and very Jewish approach.  We would not have expected the more inclusive St Luke to be too fussed about this peculiarly Jewish ritual.  Needless to say, Bible commentators have felled many trees and used up gallons of ink on this very question.

 

They've even come up with a sort of conspiracy theory.  It goes like this.  Look at the accounts in St Luke's gospel of the conception and birth of John the Baptist, and put them alongside St Luke's account of the conception and birth of Jesus, and what do we find?  Remarkable parallels and one major omission, is the answer they're looking for.

 

There is, of course, no suggestion that John was conceived through the Holy Spirit in the same direct way as Jesus was; but his was also a miracle conception announced by a visiting angel.  The angel chose the name to be given to the baby; and the whole event was celebrated in song and joyous wonder.  On the eighth day the baby was named and circumcised, as was Jesus.  At the end of St Luke's account, we read this: And the child grew and became strong in spirit, which, it is claimed, is simply a shortened version of what St Luke says about Jesus at the end of today's passage: And the child grew and became strong; he was filled with wisdom, and the grace of God was upon him.

 

So half the case is made out.  There are clear parallels between the account of John's conception and birth, and Jesus' conception and birth.  Now to the omission.  Today we have this detailed account of Mary and Joseph taking the infant Jesus to the Temple on the fortieth day, as required by Jewish law.  There were two elements to this ritual.  First, the mother of a new baby needed to be rendered ritually clean after child-birth.  Secondly, the first-born male child was to be consecrated to God.  So clearly St Luke is showing that Mary and Joseph complied with the law in this regard.

 

But where is the parallel account of Zechariah and Elizabeth taking the infant John to the Temple on the fortieth day?  Aha, say the conspiracy theorists, there is no such account; therefore this is a put-down of John and his parents.  They did not follow the requirements of the Law – black mark for them.

 

All of which seems to me to be reading far too much into this omission.  We have only to turn back to St Luke's account of the visit of the angel to Zechariah to have serious doubts about the plausibility of that theory.  This is what the angel said of the baby to be born to Zechariah and Elizabeth: He will be a joy and delight to you, and many will rejoice because of his birth, for he will be great in the sight of the Lord.  He is never to take wine or other fermented drink, and he will be filled with the Holy Spirit even from birth.  Many of the people of Israel will he bring back to the Lord their God.  And he will go before the Lord in the spirit and power of Elijah, to turn the hearts of the parents to their children and the disobedient to the wisdom of the righteous – to make ready a people prepared for the Lord.

If St Luke had wanted to put down John he would surely have been a little less fulsome in this part of the story.  And throw in the fact that Zechariah is a priest in the Temple, the idea that he did not follow the law with his first-born child is most unlikely.  More likely is that St Luke didn't include it because his story is about Jesus, not John.

 

So why did St Luke include this story, when none of the other gospel writers did?  Perhaps because he wants to stress the humanity – and the normality - of Jesus.  We know that the early Church had great difficulty in holding Jesus' humanity and his divinity in balance.  Some tended to stress his humanity and play down his divinity.  That approach is widespread today, of course.  Others went the other way and stressed his divinity, sometimes to the point of dismissing his humanity as a façade, a sort of fleshy shell that the Son of God inhabited briefly while he was on earth.

 

In the birth narratives, the emphasis had been on the divine.  God takes the initiative: God chooses Mary; God sends the angel; Mary becomes pregnant by the Holy Spirit, and so on.  But in today's story St Luke changes the emphasis: he makes it clear in verse 22 that "Joseph and Mary" take Jesus to the Temple as required by the Law.  (And notice that Joseph is named before Mary – he is acting as the human father, the head of the family, here.)  They are not prompted to do so by an angel of the Lord, or by the Holy Spirit.  Throughout the account St Luke repeats that what is going on here is the normal custom as required by the Law.

 

When the Holy Spirit gets a mention, it is in relation to the old prophetic figure, Simeon, not Joseph and Mary, and not, more surprisingly, Jesus.  At no stage in this story does St Luke suggest that Jesus is filled with the Holy Spirit.  For St Luke, the Spirit comes to Jesus at baptism, not birth.  (Which may be another nail in the coffin of the conspiracy theorists, as John was filled with the Holy Spirit from birth!)

 

Perhaps this is why it does not seem to have occurred to St Luke that there is a bit of a theological problem at the heart of this story.  It would certainly have occurred to St Matthew.  We remember how, in St Matthew's account of Jesus' baptism, John initially balked at the idea of baptising Jesus.  Why did Jesus need baptising for the forgiveness of sins when he himself was sinless?  Today we might be tempted to ask, why does Jesus need to be consecrated to God when he himself is God?  Perhaps, like St Luke, we should never let theology get in the way of a good story!

 

And this is a good story.  It is beautifully constructed.  All the key elements of the Jewish faith are here.  The scene is the Temple, the House of God, the central place of the Jewish faith.  The faithful Jewish couple are obeying the Torah, the Law handed down by God to Moses on Mount Sinai.  Two prophetic figures, one expressly guided by the Holy Spirit, are in the Temple to greet them.  Simeon speaks, recognising Jesus as the promised Messiah, and looking ahead to the consequences of his coming.  Anna, a woman dedicated to a life of prayer, adds her own words, again seeing Jesus as the promised redeemer.  It may well be significant that one is a man, the other a woman.  Jesus is recognised by all humanity represented in this way.

 

What lessons are there in all this for us?  First of all, of course, there are obvious links with our practice of infant baptism or our service of thanksgiving for the gift of a child.  Without wanting to get into an argument about the practice of infant baptism, those who oppose the practice might want to ponder why it is okay to dedicate a new-born child to God but not okay to baptise it, which surely has much the same effect.

 

Beyond that it seems to me that in this story we are shown the importance of custom, practice, or tradition, however we might want to term it.  Today we are inclined to give priority to anything new, and pooh-pooh the old established ways of doing something.  We like to think of ourselves as free spirits, writing our own scripts as we go along.  Perhaps we need to ponder why it was that when God did this amazing new thing that we call the incarnation, the Holy Family nevertheless were careful to observe the law and customs of the faith that had been worked out over many centuries.

 

I want to end this morning with a quick look at our second reading from the Letter to the Hebrews.  Writing of the reasons for Jesus' coming in our flesh, the author says it was to "free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death".  It seems to me that that is a profound thought that we might wish to take with us into Lent this year.  If Jesus really has conquered death, if we now have no reason to fear death, then cannot we not take more risks in our dealings with other people than we customarily do?  Are we not set free to love as he loves us?

 

To consecrate our lives more fully to God?

 

 

 

 

A Voice Calling

 

 

Texts: Isaiah 35:1-10; James 5:7-10; Matthew 11:2-11

 

There is no doubt that in the early church there was considerable tension between the followers of John the Baptist and the followers of Jesus.   All four gospels show a real concern to spell out that relationship: they are not to be understood as rivals, but as two characters in God's great drama playing different roles.   John is the one who was sent on ahead – to prepare the way – to proclaim, to warn, to get ready.  In some ways he is like the supporting act in a modern pop show – he comes on in the first half to warm up the crowd for the Big Act to follow.

 

So we first hear from him as he emerges from the wilderness.  He draws the crowd, he preaches repentance, he tells them of the coming Messiah, while being careful to make it clear that he is not himself the Messiah.   At least, that's where we first hear from him in three of the four gospels.  But St Luke takes the question of John's relationship with Jesus back even further.   He tells us that John's mother, Elizabeth, and Jesus' mother, Mary, were cousins, so Jesus and John were second cousins, members of the same extended family.   And according to St Luke, they first knew each other pre-birth – which may be something about eternity, pre-history etc.

 

That's as maybe.  What is certain is that John was a prophet, whose specific calling was to help to establish Jesus' identity.   And that's what he does when he first emerges as an adult from the wilderness.  Crowds flock to him as he warns them that the Kingdom of Heaven is near, and the time for repentance is NOW.   And St John's gospel has John pointing Jesus out as the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world, and directing his disciples to follow Jesus.

 

At this stage in the drama there is no hint of uncertainty: he speaks with the conviction we associate with the other Biblical prophets.   But by the time we get to today's passage, things have taken a turn for the worst.  John has upset King Herod, and is languishing in the royal dungeons.   His fate is not yet certain, but his future is under severe threat, to put it mildly.  Not uncommon among the prophets of old, most of him suffered terribly for the privilege of speaking for God.

 

And in some respect his reaction is rather like theirs.  Elijah comes to mind, sulking in a cave, wallowing in self-pity, and muttering his complaints against God.   Jeremiah also complained about the hand he had been dealt.  Now we find John in the dungeon beset by doubts: if Jesus really is the Messiah, how come the Romans are still in charge – how come John himself is facing the death penalty – how come the glory of God is not filling the earth as the waters cover the sea?

 

In other words, John is no longer convinced that he heard what God had told him, he is no longer convinced that Jesus is indeed the Messiah, the one promised hundreds of years ago by Isaiah and many of the other prophets.   The trouble is, there was no precedent for this – he had nothing to compare it with.  God was doing a new thing, and John was not sure that he had called it right.   God was moving from the aural to the visual, and that was something God had not done before.  In the past God had been heard, but not seen.   Now, in Jesus, God was to be seen as well as heard.

 

We can easily overlook how different the God of the Jewish Scriptures is from the divinities of other cultures and holy books.   The Greeks believed that divinity was seen in beauty – in shapes and forms.  If God created all things then he must have acted like an artist, a sculptor, taking primordial goo and shaping it into various forms.   The Hebrew Scriptures take an entirely different starting-point.  God created all things, not as an artist, but as a Caller.   God created by calling things into existence.  Let there be…and there was.  In our faith history everything occurs through call and response.

 

When the human drama with God really began, God did not show himself to Abraham, he called him.  Leave the land of your fathers…   The Hebrew God is a Voice calling out to us.  When we are asked how we know there is a God, it is because we have heard him, not because we have seen him.   We experience ourselves being addressed, being called, being spoken to – and that Voice we call God.

 

Moses is one of the pivotal figures in this disclosure, because in him we see most clearly the next stage of the self-revelation of this God who calls.   In Moses we see the concept of "call forwarding", so to speak.  God calls to him, as God called to Abraham, but now the call is not only for the recipient, it is for others to whom the recipient must forward it.   Go to Pharaoh and say to him…

 

There, perhaps, is the birth of the prophetic ministry.  God has a message for Pharaoh, but the message is not sent directly to him.   It is given to Moses to forward to Pharaoh.  At that time Moses is both leader and prophet, but as time goes on we see a split take place in those two ministries.   Samuel and some of the other judges seem to combine both, but by the time we come to the heyday of the monarchy we find the political power in the hands of King David and the prophetic ministry in the mouth of Nathan the prophet.   You are that man…

 

In many ways that great story of Nathan's prophetic challenge to the King is the biblical equivalent of the Magna Carta, establishing for all time that even the King is under God's law.   And from that time on, the role of the great succession of prophets was to call the nation and its rulers back to faithfulness to God.  They were not powerful people in the ordinary sense.   They could not force people to do anything – they were in fact, very often, the powerless victims of the powerful elite.  They were mere voices…calling in the political wilderness.

 

Instruments to sing the song of God, to proclaim words they themselves first had to hear.  And it is in that tradition that John the Baptist stands as he emerges from the wilderness.   He has heard the words of God, he has been called to forward the message to the people of his day, and he has obeyed.  He has spoken out the message that the waiting is over, the Messiah is coming, and he has correctly identified Jesus of Nazareth as the Messiah.

 

His task is done; but the results he had anticipated had not occurred.  Or had they?   He sends emissaries to Jesus to ask him a simple question: are you the Messiah or aren't you?  No doubt he had hoped for a simple answer, yes or no.   But Jesus told him to look around him, to see the effects of Jesus' ministry.   The blind receive sight, the lame walk, those who have leprosy are cured, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the good news is preached to the poor.   That's what the prophets of old said would happen when the Messiah came.  Now you do the maths!

 

But here was something completely different.  Jesus appeared to be, not another messenger, but the message itself.   Jesus spoke, said the crowds, with his own authority.  Jesus did not point out the error of their ways, he simply called them to follow his way.   He called people to himself.  He called attention to himself.  He didn't ask God to do something, he did it himself, things that only God could do.

 

We will never know if John understood Jesus' reply when he received it from his emissaries.  Did he understand that his distant relative was not ,like himself, a mouthpiece, an instrument for the God who calls.   Did he understand that Jesus was himself the God who calls to us?  Come to me…Come, follow me…

 

Did he understand that for the first time in history God had become incarnate, ("incarnate of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary", as we say in our Creed)?   Can we understand it, even two thousand years later?  Or do we take the easy modern way out and dismiss it as pre-scientific twaddle?

 

This Advent and Christmas Season we have the same questions addressed to us by the Voice crying in our wildernesses.   Will we, can we, give the same answer that Mary gave?  It's to her that we turn next week

Approaching the End

 

 

Texts: Malachi 4:1-2a; 2 Thessalonians 3:6-13; Luke 21:5-19

 

Next week we will celebrate the Feast of Christ the King, the last Sunday of the Liturgical Year, when we sum up all that we have heard during the last year, and every other year before this one.   It is the climax of the Christian story, our story that is also, first and foremost, God's story.  We should not be surprised to hear that it all ends in Christ.

 

Over the last few weeks we have been working towards this conclusion as we have gradually turned our gaze from what happened, to what it means for us, and then to what is still to come.   We might say that each year we look first to the past as we are reminded of the great events of the whole Christ event, from his incarnation at Christmas to the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost.   Then we look to the present as we ponder what it all means for us in the here and now, as we try to live our lives of faith in this country, in this place, in this time.   Then we look to the future, the future towards which we are constantly journeying as God works his purposes out.

 

In doing all this each and every year we are guided by the great framework of our faith, summed up in various "slogans" that occur from time to time in the Scriptures and in our liturgies.   God is the God of the past, the present and the future.  Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today and tomorrow.   He is the One who was, who is and who is to come.  He is the alpha and the omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end.

 

So now we are approaching the end; and the first thing to notice is that word "end".  In English it has two interesting but different meanings, and both of them are important for the understanding of our faith.   The obvious meaning is "finish" or "conclusion".  Films always used to have the words "The End' on them, in case we didn't realise the thing had finished.   Novels, too, often had the same words printed at the bottom of the last page – (but not, for some reason, books of non-fiction, short stories or poetry).   But that meaning of "end" is clear.  There is no more –it's finished.

 

The second meaning of "end" is not quite so obvious; it is something like "aim" or "purpose": the end we have in mind when we set out to do something.   That which we aim to achieve.  And, of course, the two meanings coincide when we achieve our end – our task is finished, it is ended.   And here we have the heart of the Christian teaching about the end times, or the end things, or simply the end of the story.  The end comes when God has achieved the end he had in mind in creation.

 

We had that end spelt out for us two weeks ago (All Saints Sunday) with that glorious reading from the first chapter of the Letter to the Ephesians.   The end or vision that God had in mind in creating the universe and everything in it was to have a Significant Other to love and to be loved by.  All through time God has been wooing his creation, and in particular humanity, to receive his love and to give him our own.  He seeks a free and loving relationship with his creation.

 

But loving relationships don't happen overnight, as the saying goes.  They take time.    Along the way difficulties arise.  Patience and endurance are called for, as well as understanding and forgiveness.  In one sense the whole of Scripture is an account of that love story, of God's wooing of humanity, and of our failures in response.   It is a story that is still unfolding, we live our lives in its pages; and yet we know how it ends.  It is a love story with a happy ending.   In the end, God wins our love – achieves his end – finishes creation.  The End.

 

Except that the end lasts for all eternity.  There is now forever more.   Time ends but life doesn't.  Life continues outside time.  That's what we mean by "eternal life" – not life going on much as it is now for ever, but life as we know it transformed into eternal life, of which at the moment we have only brief glimpses, if that.   Not only is eternal life beyond time, it is beyond our words, beyond our imaginings.  Having got to this part of our story it is time to fall silent.

 

Today's readings point to this difficulty.  The old Testament, like the New Testament, points forward towards the end without telling us much about what the end will be like.   For some reason we are given only a brief extract today from the last chapter of the last book in the Old Testament, the Book of Malachi.  The chapter is only 6 verses long, so we could have had the lot, but we have been left to read the rest of it for ourselves.   In my Bible the chapter is headed, "The Day of the Lord"; and the first thing that Malachi says about the day is that it is coming.  And the second definite thing is that the Day will be bad news for the wicked, but good news for the people of faith.

 

Beyond that it has to be said, Malachi seems a bit hazy about the details.  For you who revere my name, he says, the sun of righteousness will rise with healing in its wings.  And you will go out and leap like calves released from the stall.  All of which may or may not strike you as something to really look forward to.  But the key is right there: as people of faith we look forward.

 

The Thessalonians were looking forward with gusto!  But some of them were so busy looking forward that they were no longer looking out: they were so focussed on the future, they were no longer concerned with the present.   As the old saying has it, they were so heavenly-minded, they were no earthly use.  St Paul did not mince his words.   Those who have stopped work while they wait for Christ's return shall not eat.  St Paul says they are to "settle down and earn their bread".  We live in expectation, we live in hope, we look for the coming of the Lord, but we live in the present.  And in the present, in the meantime, we must "never tire of doing right".

 

Once again, our chosen reading has missed out an important point of St Paul's teaching.  At the beginning of this last chapter of his letter, he asks for prayer that "the message of the Lord may spread rapidly and be honoured".   As that happens, of course, so God's end is fulfilled and the end comes ever nearer.

 

In today's gospel reading, Jesus and his disciples are in Jerusalem, seemingly for the first time; for the Twelve Disciples are doing the tourist-thing at the Temple.   They are struck, not by the holiness of the place, but by its enormity and beauty.  As faithful Jews we might have expected them to be moved by its sacredness, but the fact that they, a bunch of fishermen and the like from far distant and despised Galilee, are now standing near the House of the Lord.   But they notice in particular how the great building is "adorned with beautiful stones and with gifts dedicated to God".

We can imagine the shock they must have felt when Jesus assured them that the time was coming when the Temple would be destroyed.   When would this happen, they wanted to know.  And so, once again, our readings turn our attention to the future.

 

And once again the details are fuzzy.  The world will get worse, before it gets better, for them personally and for the rest of humanity.   They will be persecuted for their faith.  Jesus himself will give them the words to say in their own defence; and yet some of them will be put to death.

 

Is that the end in store for them?  No, it isn't, for Jesus gives them this assurance: But not a hair on your head will perish.   By standing firm you will gain life."  Even those who are put to death for their faith will gain life.  Why?  Because the end God has in mind is to share his eternal life with all those who love him.

 

The End.