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God’s everlasting faithfulness

3rd Sunday of Lent, Year A.

One of the aims of the Lectionary, alongside making sure that we cover as much of the bible as possible rather than just always listening to our favourite bits, is to show the links between the Old and New Testaments, to show that Jesus, while being the ultimate divine revelation, is a revelation in the context of the Old Testament history of Israel and God.

Jesus’ incarnation is not something that just happens out of nowhere.  It is something that God has been preparing humanity for, through successive covenants with Noah, Abraham and Moses.

Our Old Testament reading takes place at a liminal point in the story of one of these covenants.  Moses, through the power of God, has freed the Hebrews (and many other foreigners) from a lifetime of slavery in Egypt and led them out into the wilderness of Sinai.  Soon they will reach the holy mountain, and God will unfold to them the details of the covenant that he has already made with them, although they are as yet unaware of it.  He will unfold to them the Torah, the Law of Moses, the commandments that they should keep in faithfulness to the covenant that God has made with them.  But already they are showing that they lack the faith that is necessary for them to live out this covenant.  They are thirsty, and they doubt that God will provide for them.  Moses strikes the rock with his staff, and living water – clean fresh water pours forth from the rock, to quench their thirst.

In our Gospel reading, Jesus is similarly thirsty.  He is in Samaria, and it is midday, the hottest part of the day, when sensible folk find shade and cover from the harsh sun.  Whereas at Sinai, the people of God’s covenant doubted that God would save them from thirst, here Jesus, God incarnate, places his faith in a lone woman at the well to provide him with water to slake his thirst.

The interaction is unusual in several ways. 

Firstly, and most obviously, Jews in those days shunned Samaritans and were shunned in return.  The Samaritans practiced a form of Judaism, but rather than worshipping at the temple in Jerusalem, they had their own temple on Mount Gerizim.  As so often the case, the two peoples, rather than being brough together by the similarity of their religions, were actually driven apart by it.  She is regarded by the Jews as being part of a people that are outside the covenant that God gave to Moses at Sinai.

Secondly, it is not just that she is a Samaritan, but also that she is a woman, and he is a man.  For a man, especially one on his own, to address an unrelated woman, especially one on her own, is crossing a number of deep social taboos.  It is a degree of forwardness and familiarity that would have probably have been quite scandalous.

Thirdly, she is obviously someone of low status, otherwise she wouldn’t be going to fetch water from the well at midday, the hottest part of the day.  If she was able, she would have fetched it early in the morning when it was cooler.  If she had a family, she would probably have sent a child to fetch the water.  But here she is, on her own, unprotected and unaccompanied, having to fetch her own water at the hottest part of the day.

Despite all of this, she responds to Jesus, and he obviously discerns something in her which leads him to reverse the entire interaction.  Rather than asking her for water from the well, he now offers her living water, water of eternal life.

In a parallel with the passage in a few chapters time, where he declares himself the bread of life, which he contrasts with the manna in the desert which sustained, but did not give eternal life, he contrasts the water of the well which is drunk but only quenches thirst for a while, like the water that Moses brought forth from the rock at Sinai, with the water of eternal life that only He can give.

In both cases Jesus makes the explicit contrast.  The old covenants satisfied for a while.  They were gifts of God, but they were never intended to be the final gift of God’s grace.  They were always limited in their scope and effect.  Not that God was punishing or withholding from the people that he gave these covenants to.  The covenants served a purpose.  They are part of the God’s invitation to work with him in the restoration of the fallen world.  This is not an easy task.  It is a task which God needed to prepare people for, to open their hearts.  It is a task which God invited and continues to invite us into, but which ultimately required God himself, in the person of Jesus, to adopt human form, and to suffer and die alongside us, to become like us, so that we might in turn become like Him.

Because what actually links these three passages together isn’t water, living or otherwise. 

What actually links these passages together is grace and faith. 

God’s grace in giving the covenant to the Israelites in the wilderness, and the new covenant of Christ’s blood when he died for us.  Not covenants that we earned or deserved – as Paul says, while we were still weak, ungodly sinners, Christ died for us.  The Israelites were similarly undeserving of God’s grace, as they grumbled their way through the wilderness to Sinai, and even more so when the worshipped the Golden Calf even as Moses received the Law from God.  No, none of us earn or receive God’s salvation by our own efforts, we are all given it through God’s unconditional love and grace. 

Despite the phrasing that so many translations of Paul use, it is not even our faith that achieves our salvation.  Our passages show this – the Israelites have little faith in God or Moses, and yet God has already included them in his Covenant because it is his gracious gift to forgive and redeem us, not something we have to earn.  The Samaritan woman believes in Jesus, even though it seems like she doesn’t really know what she is believing in.

We have been reconciled with God by faith, not our own faith, but through the faithfulness of God in the person of Jesus Christ.  God is eternally faithful to his covenants.

Which is not to say our faith is not important.  Our faith is the proper response to God’s grace, but it is a response, not a condition.  God’s gracious gift is not conditional on our faith.  The bible is full of examples of faith.  Faith found in the strangest places, like the Samaritan woman at the well – part of a long line of women in the bible like Rahab or Ruth who show that faith is found in unexpected places.  Faith that is a response to God’s unconditional gift.

We live in troubled times, and it sometimes feels that despite all our prayers things are getting more and more unsettled.  We see more and more innocent people suffering daily, because of the vanity, greed or fanaticism of their leaders.  We hear the world groaning in pain as climate patterns shift and sea levels rise because of our selfishness and carelessness.

In these circumstances it can be hard to maintain our faith.  These are testing times, the time of trial, the sort of times that we pray in the Lord’s prayer not to be led into.  But as the Israelites discovered in Sinai, being faithful to God requires us to remain faithful during the time of trial, knowing that even if we fail, God’s faithfulness to his promises of salvation always endures.

Amen

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The faithful servant

Second Sunday of Christmas, 2025. Year A. Evensong – second service readings.

Isaiah 41:21-42:4

The second half of our reading this evening from Isaiah is the first of four ‘suffering servant’ passages that are found in the second half of Isaiah.

From the very earliest of Christian writers, these passages, culminating in Isaiah 52-53, have been seen as a messianic prophecy that was fulfilled by Jesus, and in his own words in the Gospels, Jesus spoke of himself in a way that made it clear to people that he was the fulfilment of these prophecies, and that he was the sort of messiah that these prophecies spoke of.

This because these visions speak of a very different sort of Messiah.  The imagery develops over the four songs, and the element of suffering for which they are most notable doesn’t enter until later, but even here we are presented with a striking image of the servant.

This is not the normal covenantal restoration of Isreal that we expect.  There is no overthrowing of oppressors and elevation of Zion above other nations.  God will not come to crush the kings of the earth.

Instead, the servant will bring forth justice to the nations – all the nations.  And how will he do it?

Not by crying out, or lifting up his voice in the street.

There will be no violence to others, even an already damaged reed will not be broken by his coming.

Instead he will faithfully bring forth justice.  Faithfully, slowly, gradually, inexorably, indefatigably and continuously.

He will not be fatigued, or turn aside from his goal.

Not even, we now know, when violent hands are laid upon him.  Instead, he will go faithfully to his death, but even death will have no hold over him.  He will shrug off the bonds of death with his faithful obedience.

What does this mean for us?

Firstly, that we have a unique model of power and majesty set before us.  God is glorified not by his dominance, or his ability to violently compel others to his will, but by his patience and faithfulness.  God has established covenants and made promises, and he will always abide by those covenants.

When we set out to live our lives in the way of God as revealed in Jesus Christ, we commit ourselves to be righteous in the same way.  We commit ourselves to bring justice to the nations – to each other, and to every human that we meet, not just to our own family, or community or nation, but all the nations of the earth.

We do not need to cry out or raise our voices in the street.  We do not need to fight for justice.  We are not called to impose justice on others.  We are called to peaceful witness.  The results of this will not come soon.

This is the second thing that this means for us.

We are in this for the long haul.  The problems of creation are not something that we can solve by our own efforts, and they will not be solved in our lifetimes necessarily.  We shouldn’t be looking for short term solutions, but rather we should be showing consistent faithfulness to God’s promises in Jesus Christ.  God isn’t promising to fix creation right away – the problems run too deep for that, and we shouldn’t trust those who promise easy answers or quick fixes for anything.  God will be faithful to his covenants for ever, and we need to be equally persistent in our quiet faithfulness.

Amen

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The violence of the Incarnation

Christmas Day, 2025. BCP Communion.

Happy Christmas everyone.

You may not have noticed it in the hurley burly of all the other news that has been happening recently, but this year was the seventeen hundredth anniversary of the council of Nicea.  

This was the first great council of the church, and gave us the first draft of the Nicene creed, which was devised to try and bring some sort of unity back to a divided and fractured church – plus ca change…

And the question that was most vexing the church in 325AD is the question that is first posed on Christmas Day, and to which John, Matthew and Luke all dear witness to in different ways.  Mark, of course, just completely dodges the issue.  The question of course is who is Jesus?

Everyone could agree, like Peter, that he was the Christ, the Messiah, the anointed one of God.  Both Luke and Matthew make it clear that he was more than just human; conceived by the Holy Spirit of the Virgin Mary.  

But only John explicitly claims that ‘the Word was God’.  That this person of Jesus, seemingly fully human, was in actuality fully divine.

For several centuries much ink, and sometimes blood was spilt over this claim that Jesus was truly God.  

And after the Council of Nicea, even more would be spilt over the question of whether he was also truly human as well, and if so, how his human and divine natures were reconciled in one person.  It needed the Council of Chalcedon to sort that one out.

Does any of this matter to us today?

It is very easy to just take for granted that Jesus was truly God, and that he was also completely human at the same time.  

We are so used to affirming it that for much of the time, our minds don’t rebel against this in the same way that the theologians of the early church did, for very sensible reasons.  They sought to protect Christianity from pagan polytheism.  They didn’t want to water down the otherness of God and distinction between creator and created.  

They wanted to maintain the neat categories of their philosophical constructs.

God becoming man doesn’t make any sense…

But Jesus doesn’t fit into neat categories.  

He doesn’t come to confirm the status quo.  

He is not here to make us feel good about ourselves, but instead to make us feel bad about ourselves, so that we can start to feel better about ourselves.

This is the violence that Jesus promises that he brings in the Gospels.

Not violence of the world; the physical violence of war and oppression – we can do that quite well by ourselves.

Rather violence of thought and spirit.  Violence that breaks our complacency, our willingness to go with the flow, to not make waves, to not stand up for righteousness and justice for all.

Violence that starts with his very existence.  God from God.  Word made Flesh.

A God who so loves all of His creation that he partakes fully of himself in every aspect of that creation.  From destitute birth to violent death.  Not just a cute baby in an idyllic pastoral scene, but rather a total reordering of creation as God’s infinite love breaks in.  

After Christmas, nothing is ever the same again…

Amen.

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Role models

4th Sunday of Advent, 2025. Year A.

The fourth Sunday of Advent is upon us already.  Christmas is only 4 days away.  Hopefully all of you have bought all your Christmas presents for those you love, and also for those you don’t.  

The waiting is almost over, and at the same time, the waiting continues.  

Advent is a time of expectation and preparation for the coming of Jesus.  Not just looking back to his incarnation 2000 years ago, but also to his eschatalogical coming – the final arrival of the kingdom of God for which we are all waiting.

And there have been times over the last year where it has felt like the kingdom of God really can’t come soon enough.

The four Sundays of Lent are traditionally themed – last Sunday we considered John the Baptist, and this Sunday we consider the Virgin Mary.  

But interestingly our lectionary reading for this week focuses as much on Joseph as it does on Mary.  Indeed this is the passage in the bible where we learn the most about Joseph’s character and role.  And it’s really not much to go on.  

What do we learn about Joseph?  He is righteous, at least by the standards of his time.  When he discovers that Mary is already pregnant, and presumably draws the obvious conclusion, he resolves to quietly break their engagement.  

And he is obedient, at least to the angel, when he is told not to take this course of action.

Obedience to God’s will is of course what we most often think of when we think of Mary as well.

Obedience to God’s will is of course something that is admirable, but that obedience shouldn’t necessarily be completely unquestioning, especially if the mediator of God’s will is something less credible than an angel.  

And indeed even angels can be deceivers as well, we should remember.

I would suggest that when we usually read this passage we project a lot of our own cultural preconceptions into this passage when we think about the parallel roles of Mary and Joseph in the incarnation.

For Mary we have a habit, if we are not careful, of overemphasising her meek obedience to the will of God, and transforming that into a normative role for women of being meek and obedient in all that they do – a role that is not conditioned by the Gospel, but by our own cultural prejudices.  

I was reminded of that this week reading the Church Times, and a review of the Channel 4 documentary about the John Smyth abuse.

Part of it was dwelling on the role of his wife, Anne, as both victim and unwilling participant.  

A quote about her described her as “‘the perfect Christian wife’, because she never stood up to him”.  

How do we end up here?

Overemphasising Mary’s obedience, and underemphasising to whom that obedience is directly given runs the risk of us falling into this cultural trap.  

It has to be the foundation of us being a safe church and a Gospel-values-living-out community that obedience should never be given blindly, and trust should always be conditional and accountable.

At the same time as we are taking Mary as an ideal of submissive female obedience, we do not seem to be doing the same for Joseph.  

You will, unfortunately, I think, find few authors holding up Joseph as a model for male qualities because of his submissive obedience to God’s wishes.  

Despite, of course, that in this he is just foreshadowing Jesus’ own submissive obedience and faithfulness to God’s covenant when he meekly goes to his death on the cross 33 years later.

This seems a far cry from the muscular and aggressive Christianity that large parts of the church have spent the last two millenia endorsing, and which once again seems to be raising its ugly head in current events.

We carry a long burden of sin as a church.

But the response to sin is to repent, and change.

If the bishops of the Church of England are being described as ‘weak, woke, weirdos’, then surely the response from anyone who believes in the Gospel is that that is what we should all be boasting in, if we are to model Jesus.

It’s not just about putting Christ back into Christmas; it is about putting Christ back into all of our life.  

Christianity is not about tradition or security or making us feel comfortable and reinforcing our current attitudes.  

Christianity is first and last and everything else in between about Christ as revealed to us in the Gospels.

And everything in the Gospel is about God’s glory that is shown not through strength, but through weakness; not through exclusivity but through inclusivity; not through continuity but through radical change.

Joseph’s role in the Gospel is underappreciated because he is just one of many men in the Gospel, whereas Mary is one of the few women that play a prominent role.  

This is an unfortunate imbalance, and reflects on the cultural traditions of the time that the writers of the new testament were unable to fully break away from, rather than on any eternal principle of how the kingdom of God will be ordered and organised.  

If we complain that the church today is straying from traditional ways, then we need to recognise how culturally dependent that tradition is, and how much Jesus was breaking from the traditions of the 1st century when he preached and enacted the Gospel.

Joseph’s role is also underappreciated because he is not an obvious leader, in the same way that the new testament focuses so heavily on certain key apostles and allows the others to fade into the background.  

It is again cultural conditioning that we focus on people that we perceive as successful, despite the Gospel making it clear that there is no favouritism in the Kingdom to come.  

It is a lesson the modern church often fails to heed, elevating the flashily and outwardly successful over those who offer constant and tireless comfort and ministry, and ignoring that exceptional success is all too often built on shallow, human, foundations, rather than the sure foundation of the Gospel.

It is hard to escape from our cultural conditioning.  

Considering Joseph as Jesus’ father sets us thinking about the language we use of God the Father.  

For many people this can carry a lot of personal or sociological baggage, as our view of God is conditioned by our experience of family relations or patriarchal models of society, especially negatively.  

The problem is that all too often, we are projecting our concept of what a father is onto God, rather than taking the divine model of fatherhood: an all loving, self-effacing, completely sacrificial model of fatherhood, and using that as an expectation that we should aspire our human instances of fatherhood to reach for, even if we can never match.

So this Christmas, as we contemplate the holy family, let us think deeply about how we can model the meekness and obedience of Joseph, the courage and righteousness of Mary, and the self-sacrifice of Jesus, divine majesty humbled into mortal human incarnation.

Amen

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God’s work in the world

13th Sunday after Trinity, 2025. Year C.

1 Timothy 1:12-17 and Luke 15:1-10

Our two readings this morning are linked by common themes of sin, redemption and forgiveness.
From Luke we get the first two of three well known parables that Jesus tells in quick succession to the same audience.
The missing one is of course the parable of the prodigal son.
In all of these Jesus is looking at the relationship of the sinner and the righteous.
In yet another, earlier, parable, that of the workers in the vineyard, he introduces us to the uncomfortable idea that those who have come late to faith in God are loved just as much by God as those who were faithful from the start and remained faithful throughout.
In these two parables we have just heard, and the prodigal son, he steps this up a level.
Not only, he tells us, does God love us all equally, but in fact he rejoices more in a sinner who repents and mends his ways than he does in someone who remained faithful from the beginning.
Paul picks up on this theme at the start of his letter to Timothy.
Superficially it can feel at first read like he is boasting of how great a sinner he is, but actually as we read it closely we realise that he is really boasting in the grace of Christ, which he recognises is great enough to be able to overlook the violence and persecution that Paul wrought against the faithful before he became one of the faithful.
But Paul recognised the trap that cheap grace could create – in Romans 6 he poses a rhetorical question as to whether it is a good thing to continue in sin so that Christ’s grace may be shown even more, and vehemently comes out against that argument.
Because of course, God’s forgiveness is only part of the response to our sin.
Even if we are forgiven by God, we have to live with the consequences of our sinful actions, which often include a lack of forgiveness from others, and often from ourselves as well.
Actions always have consequences.
Forgiveness is not unwinding the past. It does not change what has happened.
Indeed even with God’s forgiveness, we can often find ourselves trapped in a cycle of escalation, as our actions beget counter-actions, and all too often we then fall into the trap of feeling required to respond in like manner to these reactions.
This way we end up in a vortex of sin.
This is why John called up those baptised to repent – literally to turn away; to reorient themselves and their lives, away from sin, and towards God.
Forgiveness that is not accompanied by a change in life will not actually change us or benefit us.
We must use the opportunity that God’s unconditional forgiveness gives us to make changes in our lives while we can.
It is easy to feel affronted by these parables – the favouritism that seems to be shown to those who sin and repent offends our natural sense of justice.
And that is to our credit, that we have a natural sense of justice and fairness – that is a God-given gift that we should treasure.
But of course, there is a trap that Jesus sets for us in these parables.
There is no point in us getting excited about those sinning being preferred over us who are righteous, because none of us are righteous.
There are no 99 sheep who never strayed, because we have all sinned and strayed. There are no 9 coins that were never lost.
God rejoices to his maximum over each one of us and our salvation.
There is no hierarchy or grades in God’s love; none of us are closer to or further away from his love; we are all lost sheep, and Jesus has found all of us.

[ 8am only –

Amen

– ]
[ 10 am only –

This is the mistake that the Essenes and the Pharisees could be accused of, to think that there is a route to righteousness through human action, whereas Jesus shows us that, all along, the only route to salvation that we can actually use is through Jesus himself.
For Adam, salvation was possible through right-living, but the expulsion from Eden was the loss of that easy route.
Now the only route left is the hard route – hard for us, even harder for God.
We live in a broken and fallen world, and everything we do is set in that context.

In my training, especially when part time students are gathered together, a common question is ‘what do you do for a living when you are not doing this’.
When I tell people I work for a company that produces software for online gambling, there can often be an eyebrow raised, or sometimes worse.
And I completely understand that.

I sometimes raise an eyebrow at my colleagues myself.
There are times when I doubt what I do.

One of the reasons why I was rejected by the first ordination selection panel that I attended was that I started to doubt my own calling when surrounded by other potential ordinands who seemed to be youth workers and pastoral assistants and or worked in church charities.
I sabotaged myself because I doubted myself and my calling.
And recovering from that experience was one of those times when I have felt God, at length, speaking to me clearly.
Because I believe that part of my calling is to be out there in the world, not just visiting but being in a secular workplace.
I just needed to be more confident in that calling.
I do not in any way doubt the wonderful work that all those other ordinands do in any way.
They were all wonderfully spirit-filled people who seemed passionate about wanting to follow God’s calling.
I sincerely hope that all of them were selected, and go on to serve God in a myriad of wonderful ways.
But if the only thing we do to serve God is to work within the church, or in church outreach to the disadvantaged, then who is going to bring the kingdom of God into our work places and into all those other places where people who don’t come to us,
people who don’t know about us,
people who may not even realise the need for God that they have; who is going to go and meet those people?
Who is going to model the kingdom of God for them, not just in what they say, but in what they do, how they act, who they are?
Who will show them what the kingdom can be in practice?
None of us here cease to be a Christian when we walk out of that door at the end of the service.
And I believe that while as Holy Trinity, we do already do a lot to remind ourselves of our witness in the world;
we need to do even more to constantly celebrate all of us who may not necessarily even realise what evangelists we are in everything we do beyond these four walls, everywhere that we are.

Jesus in his parable doesn’t say ‘who on losing one sheep doesn’t wait for it to return’.
He says’ who, on losing one sheep, does not go after it until he finds it’.
We are both shepherds and lost sheep, and in both cases, we are found out in the wilderness, not in the fold.

Amen.

– ]

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Freedom and family

12th Sunday after Trinity, 2025. Year C.

Philemon 10,12-17; Luke 14:25-33

Abandon your family and give up all that you have. This is what Jesus tells us we must do in order to follow him.

The NSRV uses even stronger language – you must hate your family and give up all your possessions.
Strong words for us in Northwood today – many of us have many possessions that we would need to give up.
Strong words for the crowds that Jesus is talking to on the road to Jerusalem. They had fewer possessions that we do now, but for them family was the anchor of their entire existence.
Your family was your social circle. Your family was your financial security if things went wrong. They would stand up for you and testify on your behalf if you were accused in court. Land, the primary source of wealth for most people wasn’t held individually, but but families and clans.
In our atomised and individualistic secular western world of here and now, it is probably hard for most of us to imagine how strong those familial ties were.
Yet Jesus seems to be asking those who would follow him to give up all of this – all ties to the world, in order to follow him.
Those of you who were here last week and heard me preach then might be thinking that in my analysis of John the Baptist’s way of withdrawing from the world, and Jesus’ way of engaging with the world, I got it wrong – that even Jesus is now advocating withdrawing from the world.
Our epistle reading, from the very unusual letter of Paul to Philemon, seems to show that even his early followers didn’t necessarily read it this way.
The letter to Philemon can be very challenging to our modern sensibilities, and shows how much progress we have made in two thousand years, on the subject of slavery at least.
Paul disappoints many of us I think in this letter in the way that he accepts that Onesimus is a slave, and returns him to his master. This is the same Paul who in Galatians says that in Christ there is neither slave or free, and we might feel that this logic would extend to wanting to abolish the status of slavery entirely.
Instead we get a practical outworking of his message in Galatians.
He invites Philemon to receive Onesimus back, not as a runaway slave, but as a brother in Christ. He asks Philemon to see that in Christ neither of them is a slave, but also, of course, neither of them are free in the traditional sense either, because both of them belong to Christ.
To misquote Orwell, enslaving oneself to God is true freedom.

And this is what Jesus is demanding of those who follow him. They must break out of their existing social network, which both sustains and constrains them. That network brings them a measure of freedom, but it also enslaves them to its needs.
What it does not do is provide them with the support and resources that they will need if they are to truly follow Jesus.
The two parables he tells in quick succession illustrate this.
Both of them illustrate situations where people embark on a project with insufficient resources to complete, and in both cases the end result, easily predicted at the outset, are disastrous.
Jesus is warning us that following him is not something to be undertaken lightly or trivially. We must have sufficient resources to complete the undertaking that we are embarking upon.
Jesus, I think, is not asking us to start this by making ourselves less prepared though.
What he is highlighting is that we need to cast off things that might hold us back, or prevent us from properly following him.
Family in Jesus’ time was a support network, but it was also a place of hierarchy, control and authority. We may or may not have a different experience of family today, but in his time, the family controlled your life. To truly follow God, you needed to free yourself from that control.
Possessions are another thing that can keep us from God. In the case of Philemon, his possession of Onesimus is certainly something that is preventing him from properly following Jesus. But, like the One Ring, he must give up that possession voluntarily in order to truly benefit.
But this does not mean that we are separating ourselves from the world. Jesus’ language may be stronger than we expect, but that is because in those days the ties that bound people were stronger. You couldn’t be ambivalent about your family, or be semi-detached from it – you were either part of it, and submitted to the authority of the family patriarch, or you were not part of it.
Jesus is on the road to Jerusalem, and his death on the cross. People who wanted to follow him on that road, would need to give up everything, including their own lives.
Jesus is talking about his here and now in what he says here.
In the description of the early church that we get in Acts, we see how his followers fulfilled that vision in the light of not just the crucifixion, but also the resurrection.
They may have left their families, but they had formed a new family, the church. A much more equal family. Again, we may look at it and see the leaders and followers, the hierarchy, and the divisions between Jews and Greeks. But for its time, it was a place of radical equality and inclusion and freedom. We still have the church today, as a family that everyone here, and many many others all belong to. A family that supports, cares and loves all its members. A family that we seek to make a safe place for everyone, which is why we have safeguarding policies and procedures and training. That is not bureaucracy – it is living out God’s vision for the church.
The early church members sold everything, and held all their possessions in common. We no longer hold all our possessions in common, but we do hold this church building in common, between all of us in this community, as a place where we can meet with each other and with God.
That is why we ask the members of the congregation to contribute according to their talents, in both money and time and skills, to help maintain and improve this place, that it might be a beacon of God’s presence in the world – a physical sign of the kingdom that is to come. That is why we contribute as a parish to the work of the diocese according to our talents, so that other places may also be beacons of God’s kingdom in the world.
If we seek to follow Jesus, and I hope all of us here present seek to follow him in some way, then we need to be prepared for the journey ahead, because it will not be a straightforward road, and it will take us to places that we never expected to go, and lead us to experiences that we never expected to encounter.
Our existing resources will never be adequate for this, and it is not a journey that we can undertake on our own.
Instead, we must learn not to rely on our own strength, our own resources, our own networks.
We must place our trust in the Spirit, in God’s love for us, and in each other.
Amen.

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A feast where all are welcome

Eleventh Sunday after Trinity, 2025. Year C.

Readings: Hebrews 13:1-8,15-16; Luke 14.1,7-14

Jesus does seem to have liked a good meal.  It is commentated upon in the Gospels as something that sets John the Baptist apart from him.  John spends most if not all of his ministry in the Jordanian desert, surviving we are told on a diet of locusts and honey.  Jesus, apart from his 40 days in the wilderness at the start of his mission, remains amongst the people, where he is most needed.  John makes the people come to him for baptism; Jesus comes to them, bringing them healing where they already are.

And this split illustrates two different forms of ministry that persist down to this day.  John, we can assume, doesn’t spend his life in the desert because he enjoys privation.  I assume that he does it because he feels that it is necessary for him to do this in order to prepare himself to better know God.  He needs to shut out and remove from himself the distractions and temptations of our everyday lives.  And when he calls out to people to repent of their ways and change their lives, the implication is there that in order to do so, people should follow that pattern of life, and retreat from the world into a place that is less cluttered, less distraction, less tempting.  Some do follow him into the desert, while others just come for the baptism and return to everyday life.  In this call for people to remove themselves from an unholy world, he is working in the tradition of the Essenes, who he seems to have belonged to.  They looked to bring the age of the messiah by creating a new Israel, more exclusive and purified of the outside influences that they thought had corrupted the old Israel.  There are the seeds of the monastic movement here, and also of many Christian sects throughout the centuries that have followed a narrow definition of a chosen people of God, and have minimised contact between the chosen and the ordinary world.

Jesus though, walks a different path.  Obviously for him, there is no need to prepare or purify himself in order to know God, because he is God.  But he does establish patterns for us to follow in how he conducted himself.  He does withdraw into the wilderness to prepare himself for his mission.  He also withdraws for short periods throughout his ministry into the wilderness in order to pray and be nearer the Father, which indicates that even for him, the busyness of the world was a distraction.  This is a pattern that we are all encouraged to follow – to find times of quiet and contemplation, whether an hour snatched here and there, or the luxury of a formal retreat – such opportunities are a time for spiritual growth and renewal.

But Jesus mixes this in with a life led fully in the world, and he joyfully celebrates the mutuality of human existence, especially in eating together.  Many of his parables about the coming kingdom of God liken it to a great feast, where all are gathered together, irrespective of rank or position.  

I myself have just come back from Greenbelt, and that is a wonderful example of the Church embracing the world in all its diversity and confusion.  As always I come back having been thoroughly entertained, stimulated and challenged by what I have encountered.  In many respects it feels like a retreat in reverse – rather than clearing myself of distraction, I am subjecting every sense to the totality of God’s infinite creative expression in the world; letting God’s bounty pour over and through me.

Jesus, interestingly, initially goes low in this passage, where he is appealing to our natural sense of shame and embarrassment in order to persuade us to act in ways that are appropriate for the coming Kingdom.  Do not assume that you are an honoured guest when you are invited to a formal feast, and take a seat at the top table, because there might be so many that are more honoured than you that you are kicked off the top table in full view of everyone else, and by then the only place left might be at the bottom table.  Rather sit at the bottom table, and wait for the host to puff up your ego by insisting that you come join him.  The ancient world was incredibly obsessed with status and position in society, and trying to step outside one’s position was highly disapproved of.  In some respects, we haven’t changed as much as we would hope. 

If anyone else were offering this advice we would decry it as deeply cynical and self-serving.  And yet, of course, this is what Jesus himself does in his incarnation – he joins us at the bottom table, and no-one ever invites him to the top table where he should by right sit.

Even his second argument, that we should be welcoming those who cannot return our hospitality, feels like he is suggesting that this is a transactional arrangement, rather than being something we should be doing because it is how we, as humans, can reflect God’s unconditional love for us.  God certainly doesn’t love us because he needs anything from us – he does so because his very essence is love that cannot help but overflow and fill all of creation.

Jesus is right that eating together is one of the great human bonding experiences.  It is unfortunate that so often throughout history we have corrupted it in pursuit of our own selfish interests.  We are using this incredible gift that God has given us – the enjoyment of flavours and textures and smells and tastes, the enjoyment of company and conversation, of mental stimulation and relaxation, and we use it as a tool to indicate who is included and who is excluded; who is within our social circle and who is beyond it; who is powerful and influential, and who is powerless and ignorable.

Jesus knows exactly what he is doing when he uses the example of a feast as a metaphor for the kingdom of heaven.  He is taking what should be an expression of God’s love and bounty, and showing us how we have corrupted and misused it, and how God will restore it in the new creation.  He is showing us how easily we create boundaries and exclusions; groups of us and them.  It is what John and the Essenes were doing, maybe with good intentions, but any attempt to divide the world into us and them will always run counter to God’s kingdom.  Salvation is not for the elect, but for all of creation.

We may think we are beyond such things – but actually the politics of us and them are still all around us.  

We see with the current debates around immigration, how easily people fall back into the politics of inclusion and exclusion – drawing arbitrary boundaries around groups of people. We are too easily drawn into rational arguments about whether there are economic benefits from immigrants, or whether they pay more tax or commit fewer crimes, statistically, than the average of the population.  But as Christians, surely we should be helping those in need because they are, above all, human beings.  We do not help the poor and suffering because we might get something in return, we help them because they are poor and suffering.  

People say that if we don’t do something about immigration, then in 30 years time, this will no longer be a Christian country.  But what is Christianity if it is not compassion for the desperate and love for all that God loves?

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The many voices of the Bible

9th Sunday after Trinity, 2025. Year C.

Preached at St Barnabas, Pitshanger Lane.

Readings – Jeremiah23:23-29; Hebrews 11:29-12:2 & Luke 12:49-56.

Our reading from Luke might strike us as being unusual language from Jesus, and yet this episode appears in all of the synoptic gospels.  Jesus is making an emphatic point about the necessity of remaining alert and expectant for events that are to come. 

In doing so he uses the apocalyptic language that we also find in the Old Testament used by the prophets, especially when they are warning of the fate that will befall Israel as a result of its unfaithfulness towards God – a fate realised in the Babylonian sack of Jerusalem and destruction of the temple.

It can at first feel jarring when we encounter passages like this, which seem at odds with Jesus’ normally more measured way of speaking, and with his emphasis on love and peace as the key to the Kingdom, rather than violence and division. 

But he is speaking here with a purpose, because he is trying to shock his audience out of their assumptions about what they think is God’s eschatological plan.  He knows that their wish for a military messiah who will confront the hated Romans is a route that will lead to death and the destruction of Israel.

When he talks about the division of families against themselves, he is quoting from the prophet Micah, who is speaking about this previous destruction of Israel.

He is speaking prophetically – he knows that his message is not one that will be received openly by many, but rather only by a few.  It will set people against each other.  It will cause division, because it is a message that is hard, while appearing simple.  There will be many who prefer what they think of as the easy route.  But this is a necessary message that he is bringing.  He is impatient to deliver this message, to have it taken up by humanity.

The language of division that he uses is a familiar one to us today, as we live in a world which seems to be more and more reverting to nationalism and tribalism.  And yet Jesus is not seeking to use the language of division and othering to further his aims, instead he is being honest when he admits that the truth will cause division – that there will be those who refuse to accept the truth because they are unable to adjust or change, or admit that they were wrong.

A superficial reading of Luke 12 can allow us to portray Jesus as an apocalyptic judgemental figure, dividing us into the saved and the damned.  Other extracts of the Gospels can help support this view.  Many Christian leaders throughout history have leant into this idea of the final judgement where the righteous will be saved (normally themselves) and the others will be damned.  They will say that there is a single route to righteousness, and we must all follow it to be saved.  All too often though, they want us to listen to what they are saying, and not what God is saying.

But we have to read the Gospel, and indeed the whole of scripture, in its totality, not picking on the bits that we want to listen to.

The Bible is not a self-help manual, with a simple remedy for the human condition or a ten-step programme, logically arranged to take you in a straightforward and logical progression from discontent to contentment.  

Instead the Bible is the product of that innumerable cloud of witnesses that the writer of Hebrews invokes.  It is a myriad of stories about people and their relationship to God, each told in a different voice, and each testifying to a different experience of God. 

Few of these stories have happy endings.  There is no simple remedy for the broken-ness of the world.  These people may have had faith in God, and God certainly had faith in them and in his covenants with them, but ultimately they are still trapped in sinfulness. 

They cannot lift their heads up high enough to see that it is not their own salvation that is the end-goal, or the salvation of Israel, or the salvation of humanity, but the salvation of all of creation that is the goal and that God is asking up to partake in. 

But God never gives up, and ultimately, in the faithfulness of his Son, who is faithful to death, in that faith, all of creation is reconciled to God.

Because Jesus isn’t just some wise-man dispensing philosophical one-liners about being nice to each other.  Jesus is King and Prophet, the Messiah, the Son of God.

Jesus is very aware that he is part of God’s overarching salvation work that permeates the whole story of creation.  The secret to life isn’t just being nice to each other.  The secret to life, true life, is God, because life isn’t just a transient existence between what we perceive as our birth and our death.  Life is us being invited by God to partake in God’s salvation story.  And that salvation story is not just us ensuring that we, individually, will be saved.  Yes, God loves and cherishes each of us individually, but he also loves and cherishes all aspects of his own creation, and we are called into his work of salvation for all of creation, not just for ourselves.

And as Jesus warns us here, aligning ourselves with God’s plans for creation runs the risk of causing friction, dissent and disagreement.  Not because God is looking to create disorder or disharmony – exactly the opposite.  God is looking to bring everything into harmony with Him.  No, it is because we seem to be so often naturally disinclined to act in a way that brings us into harmony with God.  It is in our God-given nature to be rebellious, because God created us free-willed, not as slaves or servants.

God did not choose to populate his creation with puppets, but with free creatures.  It is more pleasing to God that we should choose to be good and faithful, than that we should be compelled to be.

What does this mean for us as God’s creations.  It certainly does not mean that there is one ‘right’ way to live – a single formula which if only we all followed, we would all be righteous.  Scripture shows us a wonderful set of stories about people and their relationships, good and bad, with God.  It shows us that God values our diversity and our differences.  The Bible is not simple.  In some respects, it is not helpful.  The Bible, like Jesus, rarely, if ever, provides straightforward answers.  What it does is affirm that the questions that we ask are questions which we should be asking of God and of ourselves, because we can see that faithful people have been asking these questions of God for all of history. 

Each of these people is faithful in their own way, because God has created us all wonderfully diverse, and that creation is fundamentally and essentially good in every way.  Like all of creation, we will be perfected when creation is returned to the state that God created it in, but that perfection will be a perfection in diversity and community, not a perfection in unity and uniformity.  Just as the Father is not the Son, and the Son is not the Holy Spirit, and the Holy Spirit is not the Father, so too we are not each other, but each are uniquely ourselves, fearfully and wonderfully made by God, individually loved and cherished by him.

Jesus’ warning is valid though, even for us today.  As a church, as Jesus predicted, we are divided by many things.  We seek out prophetic voices, but we must take care, as God warns Jeremiah, to discern between the prophet who just has a dream, and the one who has God’s word faithfully.

Jesus says that he has not come to bring peace to the earth, but rather it is the case that the earth is not fully prepared to hear of the peace that he brings because it is too radical a type of peace, that we are unable to comprehend the full strain that such a peace will put upon us.  We are not able to change ourselves enough to embrace the peace that he brings, and instead we demand peace on our own terms, which is just division against someone else, further off.

But Jesus has come to us, and has given us a taste of that peace.  Only in Jesus can we see the peace that he brings; the peace that is harmony and rightness, not just with each other, but with God and all of his creation. And in us, in his church, we are the harbingers of the Kingdom that will come.  We are the clouds in the west, that foretell the rain tomorrow, or the wind from the south that foretells the heat to come.  We are called to be faithful to God, as he is faithful to us, so that all may see the signs of the Kingdom to come.

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Faith and certainty

2nd Sunday of Easter, 2025. Year C.

Readings: Acts 5:27-32 & John 20:19-31.

I don’t know how many of you here today are amongst those who have driven the almost 300% reported increase in viewing of the film Conclave over the last week.  If you haven’t you may yet come to it in the next couple of weeks – it is, as far as I can tell with just one irritating and probably irrelevant factual error, as good a documentary on the process of selection of a new Pope as you can get.  And beautifully shot as well.

It is interesting to contrast the speed with which the Roman Catholic church moves to select a new supreme pontiff with the long deliberations that the Church of England is undertaking to select a new Archbishop of Canterbury, especially if you consider that Archbishops of Canterbury normally have a scheduled retirement date, and popes tend not to.  Is speed of selection an advantage in this process, or a problem?  It certainly emphasises the difference between the role of the Pope and the Archbishop of Canterbury that the Church of England and Anglican Communion seem to think that they can happily function without Canterbury for 6 to 9 months, whereas the Roman Catholic Church, at least in modern times, keeps its periods of sede vacantia to a few weeks.

In both cases of course, the intention is that the Holy Spirit should point the way towards someone who is most suitable to lead this part of the church at this time.  This is not a naïve expectation.  Of course this is a group of human beings, with a greater or lesser degree of representation of the whole of body of Christ.  These are people with agenda and politics.  We no longer just chose at random who is going to lead the church, as the apostles did when they looked to fill Judas’ place on the twelve, although even they narrowed it down to two, presumably equally qualified, candidates.  These are people who are of their time and place.  But that is the whole point.  The church exists in time, not in eternity, and the electors of the church are people of their time.  Their role, at its best, is to discern the person whom the Holy Spirit is calling at this time and in this place to be the person who can best lead the church as they see it.  Obviously they are not perfect – that would be two great a burden to place on anyone.  Bad choices are made.  But sometimes it is easier to see issues in hindsight and from outside than it is in the moment of history.  

It is a process built on trust – our trust in our representatives that they will listen to the voice of the Holy Spirit, and their trust in the person who they chose, that they will chose someone who will lead in humility and wisdom.  Pope Francis, it seems to be generally agreed, was a good choice by this standard.  He rewarded the trust placed in him, not by being perfect, but by being humble.  Trust is a word we will come back to later.

One of my favourite scenes in Conclave is the sermon that Ralph Fiennes’ character delivers as Dean of the College of Cardinals before the conclave starts, where he says ‘Certainty is the great enemy of unity. Certainty is the deadly enemy of tolerance.’  This is something that I have observed for myself in the debates that are currently raging in the Church of England.  There are a great many people who are absolutely certain that they know what God’s will is, and that therefore there can be no compromise or accomodation.  

He then goes on to say that ‘Even Christ was not certain at the end.’, which is something that I am not sure I do agree with, both trivially because to see crucifixion as Christ’s end is to completely ignore the resurrection and ascension and eternal existence, but also more fundamentally because while a superficial reading of the passion narrative might indicate doubt on Jesus’ part, a deeper reading of it shows that he is completely certain in his faith in God the father, and in God’s promises to him.  He does not necessarily understand how those promises will be fulfilled but he is certain in his faith in God, and we ourselves are saved by that faith that Jesus has in the father.  We are saved not by our own works or deeds or actions but by the faith of Jesus Christ.

How does this sit with our gospel account of Thomas that we just heard.  It is common to have poor old doubting Thomas held up to us as an example of lack of faith.  Is that what John is telling us here?  He ends the chapter after all, saying that this whole account is so that we may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God.  Thomas himself, when confronted by the risen Jesus, acclaims him as ‘my messiah and my God’ – he becomes the first person to hail Jesus unambiguously as divine.  And Jesus says that those, like us, who do not get to stick our fingers in his wounds, but still believe, as to be praised even more.  Is certainty to be exalted over doubt?

Peter is similarly uncompromising when he declares in our Acts reading that “We must obey God rather than any human authority.”  that might seem to be an uncontroversial position, that we have a duty as Christians to do what God commands us to do, rather than submit to human authority.  

Indeed, a couple of weeks ago you would have heard me preach exactly that point, that we should be recognising Jesus Christ as our ultimate authority in all things.  A single sermon though, like a single verse of scripture, is not something that necessarily allows for examination of a nuanced point of view.  I agree with Peter that we must obey God rather than human authority, but we have to ask ourselves what does obeying God look like?  Are God’s wishes always clear and unambiguous.  Always certain?  Should we allow ourselves room to doubt ourselves in how we hear God’s command?

I ask myself, does God order us to force our beliefs on others?  Does God order us to loudly and ostentatiously demand the right to wear a crucifix at work?  Does God order us to picket abortion clinics and demand an absolute right to harass vulnerable women making one of the most difficult decisions of their lives?  Some would say that we should, that this is what Christian witness is all about.

On the other hand, did Jesus go to the cross raging and cursing?  Did he stand before Pilate demanding his rights?  Did he condemn those who condemned him?

Or did he go to his death humbly, but with certainty?  Not certainty that he would not suffer.  Not certainty that God would raise him.  Not certainty that he understood God’s plans and mind.  But certainty that God had called him to be faithful even if that meant that he had to suffer and to die, and certainty that he would be faithful to God’s covenant with him that by going to this death, God’s will would be done.

In Francis, the Holy Spirit gave us a pope who showed what humility can look like, even in the powerful, in life as well as in death.  

Let us obey God, but let us do so in humble faith, always doubting in our own strength and certainty.

Amen

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All Jerusalem was afraid

1st Sunday of Advent 2024. Year C.

For the first Sunday of Advent, we are treated to Matthew’s account of Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem for the passover festival.   It might seem strange to be reading about this as are minds are anticipating his birth, but, while I don’t subscribe to a theology that says that Jesus was only born in order to die, it is helpful to remind ourselves of the circularity of time, and how so much that Jesus does is leaning back into the established covenants and prophecies.  We often forget how much of what he does has these echoes back into Jewish messianic expectation, and also how much expectation there was in Jewish society at the time of the imminent arrival of the Messiah, and therefore how attuned many people were to the key prophecies that would announce the arrival of the Messiah.

What Jesus is doing is choosing which of the prophecies he is going to fulfil.  And they way he enters Jerusalem is very intentionally positioning himself in a particular messianic tradition, that of Isaiah’s suffering servant.  His entry into Jerusalem matches his entry into the world, humble and meek.

Not that you might think it from Matthew’s account of the crowd singing hosannas as they accompany him into Jerusalem.  Matthew’s account of this differs in minor details from those of Luke and Mark, but one of them is quite telling.  He seems to make it explicit that the crowd that are accompanying Jesus are his followers from Galilee, rather than locals.  The locals obviously don’t even know who Jesus is, because they have to ask the crowd, who tell them that this is Jesus the Prophet  of Nazareth of Galilee – conspicuously identifying him as a foreigner, from the strange and untrusted land of Galilee.  Matthew also describes the city as moved or troubled by his arrival – no doubt with the city crowded with pilgrims, the nervous Romans in control, and the Passover about to start, the last thing they want is a disturbance that might threaten their peace and prosperity.  But it is interesting that in the same way that his birth caused Herod and all Jerusalem to be frightened, his arrival now occasions the same fear in the city.

Establishing that the fervent welcome is by his long term followers from Galilee, and that his welcome from the locals is ambivalent at best, if not positively unwelcoming, gives us a different insight into the events of the next week.  We do not see a crowd of fervent admirers fade away when the going gets rough.  Instead we maybe see dedicated followers just swallowed up in a sea of indifference – people who haven’t seen at first hand the miracles he has been working and heard the words he has been preaching, and therefore can’t understand why there is such a fuss about this pseudo-Messiah who doesn’t even have a warband, let alone an army to take on the Romans.  It feels like the perfidy and inconstancy of the Jerusalem mob is so ingrained into our narrative of the Passion that it seems strange to think that actually, many or most of his supporters stayed loyal and true to him throughout this week to come, stayed loyal to him, like John at the foot of the cross, even to the point of death.  It feels though, living as we now do in a secular world that is mainly indifferent to the teaching and presence of Jesus, that we have more in common with those loyal followers.

So, in the same way that Jesus’ arrival in Jerusalem has echoes of his birth in Bethlehem, and of the prophecies in Zechariah, what echoes does it have for us in this Advent season as we await again for Jesus’ birth, and for his coming again in glory in the full realisation of his kingdom.  This year, more than most, it has felt like it can’t come too soon.