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?