Category: St Mary’s, Northolt

7th Sunday after Trinity, Year A. Holy Communion with Baptism. St Mary’s Northolt.

May I speak in the name of Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

Amen

Matthew’s gospel continues with another parable by Jesus themed around wheat and farming.  Again, he is using a common problem that farmers of the time had, to paint a picture of the difference between the world as it is now, and the world to come.

Last week he spoke of how in some cases the devil comes and snatches away the word of God in our heart before it is understood and can bear any fruit – the seed that falls upon rocky ground.

This week he paints a picture of a farmer who does successfully sow an entire field of wheat – who ensures that all the seed falls upon fertile ground and is well nourished and fertilised, so that it will grow well.  This is indeed a good and fruitful church.

But despite this, under the cover of night, the devil comes and sows weeds amongst the wheat, so that even amongst this plentiful and fruitful harvest, there are also people who are unfruitful, who create discord and disharmony, or who work evil.

And the farmer is unable to pull out these evil weeds, for fear of harming and destroying the good wheat.

There are many lessons we can take from this parable.

One is that God accepts the world for what it is.  God so loves us that he is not prepared to destroy the good in order to root out the evil.  The worth of the good is so great that God will not sacrifice them for some putative greater good.  The ends do not justify the means for God.  God’s love for us is so great that he will never abandon us.

I am reminded of two contrasting episodes in the Old Testament that reflect these two ways.  With Noah, God does seem to try to eliminate the evil in the world by allowing the flood waters – the destructiveness of primitive creation that he holds back from us, allowing the flood waters to overwhelm all of the world except for that which is safe in the ark.  But this does not solve the issue, at least not in the long term.

The other is the story of Abraham and Sodom, where Abraham tries to spare Sodom even if only a few good people can be found there – although it turns out in the end that there are no good people there at all.

We discover from these ancient stories a Jewish understanding of the mercifulness of God which Jesus’ parable stands in the tradition of.

God accepts that evil is unfortunately an inevitable part of the world, and that the cost of defeating it head on is too great if it means the destruction of all that is good in creation.  Instead, of course, he takes that cost upon himself, offering himself up to die so that evil may be conquered by his own death and resurrection.

We need to continue to live in this world that evil can thrive in though, and this parable can speak to us today.  If we think of the field as the church, it can show us how we need to conduct ourselves in the world.  Jesus is warning us that no matter how fruitful and good the field may look, evil can and will thrive in there as well.  The safeguarding scandals that the church is coming to terms with are evidence of this – indeed it feels like it is when the field seems especially fruitful that it is easy to let down our guard and not see the weeds that are growing and thriving amongst the wheat. 

Good farming keeps an eye out for weeds hidden deep amongst the wheat, and good safeguarding practice needs to similarly always be looking and examining for signs of bad practice, of abuse of authority and power and position, of the devil at work amongst us.  It seems to be the case that this often is found where things seem at first glance to be most fruitful, that the devil can find these the easiest places to hide.

There is yet another level that this parable can be read at though.  The field is not necessarily the world, or the church, the field can also be us within ourselves.

We are a field that contains both good fruitful wheat, but which also contains many weeds that are sown by the devil.  There is no one who is either perfectly good or perfectly evil – for all of us, the two are blended together in our souls.

And yet despite this, God still loves us for the good, and the potential for good, that is within us.  We are made in the image of God, and we are loved by God for that reason.  God knows that we are fallen and sinful, but he also knows that we are created by Him. And he choses to redeem us for that reason.

We are baptized into God’s family in order to show our loyalty to the covenant that God has made with us – to show our trust in his eternal redeeming love that can and will overcome any evil in our hearts.

This is especially important to those of you who will be standing here today later in this service as godparents to Jasmine.

As part of the declarations you will make, you will renounce the devil and his works, both for yourselves and on behalf of Jasmine.

This is not just an old and outdated form of words.  This is a very real recognition by the church the evil still exists in the world, and within each one of us, and we need to constantly fight against the seductions and temptations of the devil. 

We might not use the simple categories and rules that we once did – we are wiser and humbler now, and we understand better that God’s love is not reducible to simple rules, but God still gives us the knowledge of what is the difference between right and wrong.  God gives us this gift, but it needs nurturing and developing and encouraging, and your job as godparents especially is to help Jasmine develop wisdom to know what God’s path is.

We too as a congregation have a role to play in that – Jasmine is being adopted today into the family of God, and we as this church are the representatives of that great family.  We have a responsibility too towards our newest sister in Christ.  We have a responsibility to walk alongside her, accompany her, guide her and above all to love her as our own sister in Christ.

This is not an easy or light burden that we are given.  The seductions and temptations of the world are many and varied.  None of us are perfect.  Some of us struggle to be good even half the time.  But as the baptised children of God, we are all the adopted children of God, and therefore we all know that we have God as a parent. 

We know that like a good parent, God is merciful and loving, and does not abandon us when we need him most.  God never abandons us, no matter how far we may stray.  God’s love for us is the one eternal truth.  God will never abandon us, any of us.

Jesus gives us a vision here of how, when the time of judgement comes, it is not that there is a clear distinction between good and bad people, who will be saved or damned as appropriate.  Instead this parable tells us that we are all a blend of both good and bad, and he will at that time separate out the weeds of our evil desires from the good and fruitful wheat that also exists within us, and he will burn away the evil that is within us, and only the good will remain.

This is what a merciful God does – he does not discard that which has good in it just because there is also evil, because doing so would also destroy what is good.  Instead, when the harvest time is come and the two can be finally separated, then he will purge the evil from us so that only the good remains.  Then we can enter the Kingdom of God as the people that God always intended us to be.

This is what a merciful and loving God does.  We baptise Jasmine today into that God’s church as a mark of God’s love for her, a love that means that God will never abandon her, but will always walk alongside her and watch over her.

Amen

6th Sunday after Trinity, Year A. St Mary’s, Northolt.

The observant amongst you will have noticed that in my sermons so far I haven’t really touched on our New Testament readings, which are from Paul’s Letter to the Romans.

This isn’t because I think Paul’s letter to the Romans isn’t important, although it is true that I do not think it has the priority that some people think it should have in the New Testament canon.

It isn’t that I don’t want to talk about the messages that Paul has in Romans.  I think Paul has some very important messages in Romans.  But they are also very complicated messages that he is sending, not because this is a theological textbook but because he is writing a letter to a church that is in very particular circumstances, a church he did not found or have any relationship with before this letter, and a church that had probably been warned that many of his views were regarded as wrong by the church in Jerusalem.  This is why he is at pains to construct a very complex and subtle argument to defend his views but also to demonstrate his orthodoxy.

For these reasons, I believe that Romans isn’t an epistle that you can just jump into the middle of, or sample verses from out of context.  It needs to be read very carefully in its context, and given the lectionary is almost halfway through it at this point, I feel it is too late to try and contextualise the readings that we are currently getting.  Plus I don’t pretend I understand Romans myself, yet.

The early church context that Paul is part of would have been very in tune with Jesus’ parable of the sower, which Paul and they would have known from oral tradition and stories that were being told and retold about Jesus life and death in their church meetings even though the Gospels as we know them hadn’t been written by this stage.

The early church knew all about different reactions to Jesus’ message of the kingdom.  Jesus himself encountered them even during his ministry.

It seems incredible that people could not want to listen to the message of the kingdom, especially when combined with the miracles and healing that Jesus brought with it.  How could anyone not be uplifted by a vision where everyone is raised up and brought into the presence of God.  Where all are included in the God’s kingdom, rich and poor, inside and outsider, male and female.  Where God’s covenant with Abraham is finally fulfilled – when all the people of the earth are blessed and restored to their rightful place with God.  Where Israel can rest from their labours as God’s priestly race, knowing that in bringing God’s blessing to all the earth, they have achieved the task that God has given them.

And yet…

And yet it is sadly a part of our fallen, sinful, human condition that all too often such a message isn’t one we find uplifting.  Satan all too easily works in our hearts to make us envious and jealous.  We don’t look to our own happiness or wealth as something to be enjoyed as an absolute, but only as something to be compared with that of others.

We are happy because we have more than others, and we are downcast because others have more than we do.  Satan works in our hearts so that we are rocky ground for the seeds of God’s message to fall on. 

We live in a time of extraordinary plenty.  We take for granted so many essential things that generations before us did not know.  We turn on taps and clean, healthy, clear water comes out, rather than having to trek to a deep well to pull up water by hand.  We expect our children to survive childhood – indeed when a child is lost to us it is a matter of devastating anguish, rather than being an expected outcome as it would have been only a hundred and fifty years ago.

And yet, people are more unhappy, more anxious, less satisfied.  Modern communication enables us to see others who we think have more than we do, and modern communication enslaves us into algorithms that prey on our insecurities and our envy and our jealousies, so that that can make more money off us.

The gospel gives us an antidote to this modern culture of materialism, envy and comparison.  The Gospel gives us that absolute truth that is God, and empowers us to see that it is only our relationship with God that has value in this world.  It is only by comparison with that relationship that anything else has any value at all, and the value that it has is in proportion to how it lives out the truth of that relationship.  Our relationships with each other are only valuable in how much they embody our relationship with God.  Our love for each other can only ever be a reflection of our love for God, and that is only ever a place reflection of God’s love for us.

Sometimes this gospel message falls upon stony ground and gains no purchase.  There are now, as there have always been, those who wilfully close their hearts to Christ’s message.  What can we do in such circumstances?  Well, we can pray and we can look to God’s generous mercy.  God is always ready and reaching out to us whenever we are ready to receive him.

Sometimes this gospel message may fall upon shallow earth.  We all know people who have heard Christ’s message and embraced it enthusiastically, but then it lacks nourishment and withers away, and they move on, looking for something else to sustain them.  It is our duty as the church to help nourish these early seedlings; to reach out and welcome those whose faith needs nourishing and help provide that nourishment – help it grow those deep roots.

Sometimes the gospel message does take root, but then the busyness and confusion of modern life can overcome it.  People fall away from the faith because they go to university, or because their job gets to busy, or because looking after a family takes too much energy.  It is hard to find time in the busy schedule of modern life, and while I would never equate attendance at church with faith, being part of a worshipping community does help sustain faith, does keep habits of prayer alive, does give us the spiritual food of the communion table.  We need to help those whose lives are crowded to find what space they can in those lives for God – we need to go and meet them where and when they have that space.

And sometimes the gospel message bears fruit.  We see that in JP who we are sending out today as a gift to the wider church.  We can see fruitfulness in JP here, and I am sure we will see even more fruitfulness in the future.  Jesus talks about thirty-fold, or sixty-fold or even a hundred-fold, but fruitfulness is not a numbers game.  It is about quality, not quantity.  If our fruitfulness is that we have a deeper relationship with God, then we are blessed.  If our fruitfulness is to help just one other person have a deeper and more beautiful relationship with God, then we are doubly blessed. God does not call each one of us to fill stadiums or revival tents – some of us one day might, but he lovingly only calls us to be faithful to Him, to grow deep in our faith with Him, and to heed His call, whatever that might be.

Amen.

5th Sunday after Trinity, 2026. Year A.

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable in your sight O Lord, our rock and our redeemer.

Amen.

The gospel reading we have just had ends with a saying that I used to find one of Jesus’ most confusing.  I could never understand how a yoke could be easy.  For me, far from the manual agricultural culture that Jesus lived in, a yoke was something you used to impose burdens on people or animals, not something that liberates.  But I realised that actually a yoke is a machine, albeit a basic one.  A yoke allows you to distribute weight more equally, and also to take that weight through your most powerful muscles and joints rather than your weakest.

Jesus isn’t saying that there are no burdens in life.  He isn’t saying that he will remove all of the pain and struggle of life.  Life will always have its pains and struggles.  But Jesus will help us bear those pains and struggles.  He will help strengthen us to bear them with our strengths rather than our weaknesses, and he will help us by bearing our pains alongside us.

In the kingdom, of course, there will be no more pain, but the kingdom is not yet here, even if we have seen its coming in Jesus.  This is part of the Christian paradox – the kingdom has come, but is not yet here.  This might not feel like much of a comfort.  But we know that in Christ we have God who knows our pain and suffers alongside us.  God may be all-powerful, but is also painfully human.

The reading we had from Zechariah is familiar to us of course, even if we have never read it, because it is to fulfil this prophecy that Jesus rides into Jerusalem on a colt on Palm Sunday.  This gives us one of our great visions of the paradoxical contradiction that Jesus is – he enters Jerusalem to a triumphant welcome, and yet riding, not in a chariot or on a proud stallion, but instead on the humblest and poorest of animals – the humble ass – a beast of burden rather than of war.  He enters to a king’s welcome, but not as a king.

We can see this contradiction in the rest of the Gospel passage as well, where he complains about the expectations of his generation, and how fickle the people are.  Fickleness is not just a modern problem…

John and his disciples live a life of ascetic self-denial in the desert – famously dressed in camel hair and living on locusts and honey, and people complain that he is possessed because of it.

John’s role is to prepare people for the coming of the kingdom, and he models this by discarding the distractions and temptations of everyday life, so that he can focus on the signs of the kingdom to come.  He withdraws into the desert, and his followers withdraw with him.  His message rings forth across all of Judea even to Jerusalem, and the people flock to him to repent and be baptized, but he demands that they come to him. 

Jesus, by contrast, although he is no stranger to personal time spent alone or with a few companions, makes no such demand.  Jesus does not need to withdraw from everyday life in order to find the divine – Jesus is the divine come into everyday life.  Jesus goes out amongst the people in order to encounter them where they already are.  Jesus joins them in everyday life – by the well, in the street, and most often by dining with them.  Jesus’ willingness to eat with absolutely everyone was one of the most scandalous things about him in a culture that was obsessed both by status, which was most pointedly expressed in who you ate with and how people were arranged for dinner, and also by purity and cleanliness codes that you needed to stick to in order to be able to come near to God.  Codes that served as a boundary marker, to show clearly who were God’s chosen people, and who were definitely not.  Jesus smashes through these codes, welcoming everyone whether pure or impure, whether poor or rich, whether powerful or marginalised.

Jesus knew how to bring people of all kinds together through communal meals; a tried and tested technique that lives on down to the present day.  For this, he complains, people say he is a glutton and a drunkard.

What people want, of course is a middle way, but this is not what John or Jesus offer.  Both of them demand something from us.  Even though Jesus comes to meet us where we are and as who we are, he still demands something from us – he demands that we recognise that he is also coming to everyone else where they are and as who they are.  Jesus doesn’t just have a personal relationship with us, Jesus has a personal relationship with everyone, even the people we don’t like, the people we despise or hate.

This is the contradiction of Jesus’ love for us – Jesus loves us for who we really are, despite all our failings and sinfulness, but he also loves everyone else, despite their failings and sinfulness, and he calls upon all of us to love each other – not just the each other that are in our community or in this building here today with us, but all the other each others that are out there.  Every person is loved by Jesus, and valued by him as a unique human being.  Every single one.  We may want to group people together into races or faiths or nationalities, but Jesus demands that we recognise that even if we do, everyone in those groups is still a unique individual, each totally and fully loved by God as much as we are, and we must relate to them in this Christlike way.

This is the burden of love that Christ places upon us.

But as Jesus says at the end of our Gospel passage, if we come to Jesus he will teach us how to be gentle and humble in heart.  The burden that Christ places upon us, the burden of love, is a light one once we have come to accept it for what it is.  The yoke is easy, and the burden is light.  Jesus is here to be our guide, and a light before our path.

Amen

4th Sunday after Trinity 2026, Year A

Well, after that Gospel reading what is there actually to say in a sermon?

Whoever welcomes you welcomes me, says Jesus to the twelve apostles, and while I am not equating myself with any of the apostles, the warm welcome which I, and Petra and Larissa, have received here is indicative of a genuinely Christian community here that does open its arms to welcome everybody, understanding that it is in welcoming everyone that we truly welcome Christ into our lives.

Two weeks ago I was preaching my farewell sermon at Holy Trinity, and the passage was the beginning of this section of Matthew’s Gospel, where Jesus was sending out the apostles having given them authority to act in his name.

Now, having been sent out by Holy Trinity, I am being welcomed here by you.

In between, Jesus has warned his apostles that the road ahead will not be an easy one.

There is a hint of this in our passage.  Jesus says whoever welcomes a prophet will receive a prophet’s reward, and whoever welcomes the righteous will receive the reward of the righteous.

I think Jesus makes it quite clear elsewhere that the rewards of the prophet and the righteous are not in this world, but in the coming kingdom.

The Christian journey is not necessarily an easy one.  Having spent six years of discernment and training, including failing a selection panel and having to reapply a year later, I can say that even the journey that I have taken in order to be here as your curate today has not been an easy one, although I wouldn’t dare to compare it to the struggles that other people have faced.

And the setbacks that I have faced in this journey have been, in retrospect, good setbacks – they have forced me to examine myself, and come to terms with issues that I was ignoring or burying.  It has been a painful but cathartic process.

For those of you who I haven’t talked to about it before, I was brought up in a largely non-religious household, and only really started going to church properly around 20 years ago, prompted by my wife Petra.  In the end I was confirmed twelve years ago, and the confirmation preparation process opened up for me a love of discussing and debating about Christianity that led me to offer myself for discernment as a licenced lay minister.  I trained to be a lay minister from 2016 to 2019, and so was licenced just before Covid hit – I may have had plans for what I was going to do as a lay minister, but that was an early lesson in how as a Christian minister you need to be flexible and adaptive to the needs of the people, rather than needing them to adapt to you.

My experience of training for licenced lay ministry opened me up to the possibility that I might be being called further, into ordained ministry, and I spent several years examining and exploring that vocational calling before offering myself for formal discernment.

And so, after some false starts, I have spent the last two years in further training, and then yesterday, as some of you witnessed, I was ordained as a deacon.

What is a deacon then?  Of the three ranks of ordained ministry, it has the earliest roots, dating back to almost the start of the book of Acts, when the apostles appoint seven people, including Stephen, the first martyr, to wait at the tables in the communal meals of the early Christian community.

And the word in Greek literally means ‘servant’ – and can be used in both meanings – as a servant, or as a title of someone in a leadership position in the church, through the rest of the New Testament.  It is a disappointing reflection of the failings of the Church that there are still Bible translations out there that will translate the male version of the word into English as Deacon, and yet the female version of it as servant, even when it is obvious that the meaning is as a Deacon, i.e. a church leader, for both men and women.  In the final chapter of Romans, when Paul refers to Phoebe as a diaconon, he is saying that she is a Deacon, the leader of the church of Chenchrae, and a benefactor of Paul, not a servant.  Female leadership in the church goes back to the time of St Paul.

So I am now come to you as a servant – I am here amongst you to serve and to learn, from Reverend Julia obviously, but also from all the rest of you here.  Bishop Lusa sent me here to St Mary’s because he felt that it would be a place where I could learn much, and which would help me to be better Christian.  So I stand here in humility before you, and thank you for your welcome, and hope that over the next three years I will be able to serve you well, and that I will learn much from each of you and from this community.

Amen.