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Pastoral ethics in the Gospel

22nd Sunday of Trinity, 2021. Year B.

Readings: Hebrews 7:23-38; Mark 10:46-52

When I was studying to become a Licenced Lay Minister, one of the more interesting topics that we covered was Christian Ethics. Ethical dilemmas are always thought provoking, and ethics as a subject is always walking a fine line. As an academic subject, it is trying to generalise, and find principles; but the nature of ethical issues is almost always that they are intensely personal. Many ethicists might say that that is the whole point of ethics – to remove the emotion from emotional decisions, and provide a rational basis for making these decisions. But we were not supposed to be studying ethics, we were supposed to be studying Christian ethics.
So where do we start with Christian ethics? Normally, for any Christian subject, I would hope most people would say that we should start with the words and actions of Jesus, as recounted to us in the Gospels, and possibly also in the various epistles of the new testament. And yet, it seems to me, that we have a problem here, because Jesus was not an ethicist, at least not in academic terms.
That could be quite a provocative statement, but I think passages like the one today from Mark, show that, to me, Jesus was not approaching people and problems with a set of rigid rules. In Torah, the Jews had a complex set of legal rules that rabbis interpreted and made judgements according to. Jesus’ relationship with Torah seems to be have been ambiguous, like that of so many of the prophets who acted as his precursors. For them, and for Jesus, it was important not to forget the guiding principles behind Torah. God is a righteous and loving God, who created us as part of a good creation with agency that we could use for good or for evil. When Jesus asks Bartimaeus ‘What do you want me to do for you?’, he is affirming that original God given agency. Bartimaeus has a choice in what he can ask Jesus for. Bartimaeus asks to see again. For him it is physical sight that he is asking for – and he regains his sight. Jesus doesn’t claim credit – it is Bartimaeus’ faith which has made him well. Obviously, even if he is physically blind, spiritually he can see better than many of those around him.
The interchange could be seen as unnecessary. It must have been obvious what Bartimaeus’ main problem was, so why bother with talking to him.
I think for Jesus it is part of healing Bartimaeus to talk to him. Being blind, especially in those days, but even now, is a very disempowering experience. Talking to Bartimaeus, and giving him responsibility, is re-empowering him, even before he regains his sight. Sometimes Jesus tells people that their sins are forgiven. In Jewish theodicy, sin was often a reason for physical punishment. Many people then would have thought that their sinfulness was the root of their physical or mental problems. For them, telling them that their sins were forgiven might have been a powerful part of making them feel healed again. For Bartimaeus he doesn’t say this. A feeling of sinfulness might not have been at the root of Bartimaeus’ problems.
It seems to me that Jesus doesn’t have a fixed response or set of rules for situations like these. Instead he only seems to have one over-riding principle – what is best for this person, at this time, to make well their relationship with God and creation? Within that principle, the exact response to each person is tailored to their situation.
This goes beyond informing how we should approach ethical issues in a Christian manner. It ought to lie at the heart of our approach to justice as well. Politicians talk about making the punishment fit the crime, but for Jesus, it would be about making it fit the criminal instead. What will bring this person back into a right relationship with God. And in our increasingly pluralistic society, we need it to inform all of our relationships. It is too easy to label people, or lump them into groups. We need, like God, to love all of them as unique individuals.
Amen.

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Main Service Sermons

Locked meta-narratives

Seventeenth Sunday of Trinity, 2021. Year B.

Readings: James 3:13 – 4:3, 7-8a; Mark 9:30-37

One of Mark’s themes this morning is once again the incomprehension, even stupidity, of the disciples. Hope for us all here.
Why is this such a constant theme of the gospels?
Once again, God’s plan for creation’s salvation in the Messiah, conflicts sharply with what the disciples are expecting.
This is despite the words of so many of the prophets, that show the real concerns of God for Israel and the world.
This is not a conflict between faith and works, which so many protestant theologians have interpreted Paul and highlighting, and which our passage from James shows is not part of the New Testament, and recent scholarship shows was not part of the Jewish theology of the times.
Instead there always seems to me to be a surface conflict at the heart of the Old Testament, between the vision of Israel in the books of history, and the vision in the books of prophecy.
Both start in the covenant given by Moses at Sinai.
But the narrative of the histories concentrates on the promised land, to the exclusion, it can sometimes seem of all else. The vision of Israel as a light to the nations is lost. As part of that vision, God wanted Israel to live to certain standards. There are admonishments not to take up the customs of other peoples. These become seen as mandates for ethnic cleaning and exclusivity. And it doesn’t work, because keeping oneself holy for God isn’t about having neighbours who are exactly the same as you, or not eating with people who are other. Israel does become as other nations are – they ask God for a king like other nations do, they build a temple, like other nations do, they start worshipping idols of wood and stone, like other nations do.
The notion of Israel was never as narrowly ethnic as it is sometimes popularly portrayed. Rehab the prostitute and the book of Ruth show us that anyone who is willing to enter into God’s covenant is part of Israel, and numerous other examples show us that those who despise God’s covenant are not part of Israel.
It is unfortunate that it is stories from these historical books of the bible that we most often seem to teach young children at Sunday school. It is because they seem simple narratives I think, but the message of these books is actually deeply hidden and quite complex, and at odds with the surface narrative.
This is the narrative that the disciples are locked into. Their narrative of universal salvation requires that Israel should be re-established as a sovereign power, ruled by the Messiah. Once that is done, then the God will use that power to impose the Kingdom of God onto the world. The end goal is correct – the role of humanity, Israel and the Messiah, is to bring creation back into the right path. But they have misunderstood the means, and their faith in their version of the narrative is so strong that even Jesus cannot change their minds.
We should be able to understand this, I think, in these days of fake news, and reinforcing echo-chambers.
To counterbalance this natural human tendency, God sent us people like Ruth, and Isaiah, and Amos, and Hosea, and all the rest of the prophets.
These stories and prophets can be harder to read. The language of prophecy can be obscure and feel over complex. We get confused even by the meaning of the word prophecy in English. People get hung up on whether these people are genuinely predicting the future, or whether it is all written after the event. This doesn’t actually matter. What prophecy is doing is interpreting the past, the present and the future.
Their message is one where Israel should be an example to humanity, but using what we would now call soft-power, rather than hard-power. They are reminding Israel that it needs to be true to the essence of the law. Righteousness, justice, compassion and charity are at the heart of God’s plan for the world, and at the heart of the law he gives Israel. Their role is to model this behaviour for the world.
The kingdom of God will not come from compulsion, but from persuasion. In the narrative of the disciples, the Messiah will redeem Israel, and Israel will redeem humanity. Jesus’ narrative is the same. What changes are the means, which will be self-sacrifice and humility.

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Evil in the world

Thirteenth Sunday of Trinity, 2021. Year B.

Lectionary – Ephesians 6:10-20 & John 6:56-69.

For the last eighteen months people have been wishing that we could get back to normal. The news this week, no longer dominated by Covid, helps me remember that normal wasn’t really all that great, especially on a global scale.
The swift and total collapse of the Afghan government, admittedly no saints, to the Taliban the moment the US withdrew was, I think unexpected only in its rapidity. Many will observe that it is always the fate of foreign intervention in Afghanistan to fail, but that should not allow us to shut our eyes and ears to the humanitarian catastrophe that is almost certainly brewing in that impoverished country.
On the other side of the world, the earthquake in Haiti was a terrible disaster, but what is even more terrible is how the disaster is then amplified by the total collapse of the Haitian state.
The problem of suffering and evil in a world governed by an all-loving and all-powerful God is something men and women have struggled to answer for millennia. I doubt I will find an answer in the next ten minutes. But its insolubility does not mean it should be unexamined.
The extract we have heard from Paul’s letter to the Ephesians articulates one opinion on the problem.
“For our struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of the present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.”
For Paul, the rulers and the authorities are not enemies of blood and flesh, but are part of these cosmic powers of evil that he knows he is battling against.
The counter to this though is to ask why God created evil in the first place. Why did a benevolent God create an imperfect world. Doesn’t Genesis tell us that God looked upon his creation, and it was good?
The Boethian view of evil, after the writings of Boethius in the sixth century, views evil as internal rather than external. Evil comes from us, from our willingness to do wrong and sin. If God has given us free will, then he must necessarily give us the capacity to sin and do wrong. If we could not, then we would not truly have free will.
Paul, indeed, goes further than saying that we have the capacity to sin – for Paul, sin is inevitable. There is no way that we can ever live up to the perfection of God, and our only hope is in Christ’s faith, rather than our own efforts. Maybe this is veering too far in the other direction – do we truly have free will if there is no possibility of us making the right choices either? Or is that we are doomed to sin because of Adam’s sin? Have we all inherited a sinfulness from that first sin, as Augustine would argue?
For Paul, evil appears to be both internal and external – it is a result both of our own inability to resist, but is also urged upon us by external powers that seek to destroy us.
What do our present disasters show us on this?
Are they caused by the spiritual powers in the heavenly places?
Earthquakes and similar disasters are often referred to as acts of God. It is a lazy shorthand to say that we can’t blame any particular person for the disaster, but creates the implication that somehow God must be responsible. Why do we have earthquakes? They are a consequence of living on a tectonically active world, with a molten core of iron that generates the magnetic field that protects us from the ionising radiation of the life-giving sun. Earthquakes are, in a way, a requirement for life to exist on this planet at all. The ecological lesson of the last century is that we live in an ecosystem whose complexity we are only starting to understand – changing any part of it has unexpected consequences on the rest of the system.
No, in both cases, it seems to me, the true magnitude of the problem lies with us.
Not necessarily directly us, in this church here in Northwood today, but us in the sense of humanity in general. And therefore, yes, us in this church today, because we are all part of this humanity.
We were all created alike in God’s image. To all of us was given the stewardship of God’s creation. In the faithfulness of God through Christ we are all adopted into one family.
And, as this week’s news makes it abundantly clear, we are all fallen from the hope that God had in us.
Paul talks of the struggle being against the rulers and authorities, who are not of flesh and blood.
For us, this may seem strange or hyperbolic. We may dislike Tony Blair or Boris Johnson, but few would say that they were not flesh and blood, or seriously describe them as part of the cosmic powers of evil in the world.
But Paul was dealing with the Romans. The supposedly divine Emperor did view himself as a cosmic power, and for Paul, he was one of the spiritual forces of evil. Not to say that Paul accepted that the emperor was divine, but he saw him as a puppet or a manifestation of those eternal forces of evil. The emperor was a force of evil both by word, in his false claim to be ruler of the world, rather than Christ, and by deed, in the atrocities that the Romans perpetuated in the name of peace. Brutality, violence, corruption were the hallmarks of the Roman empire. This behaviour was ingrained – even a emperor who tried to do good was entrapped in a system that compelled evil. It was beyond mere individual conscience.
For those that are suffering most in the world, their rulers and authorities must seem similar to the Romans.
The Afghan state might not have crumbled quite so rapidly if it were not so corrupt, and riven by factionalism. Which is in no way to excuse the Taliban, who have deployed terror and violence to intimidate any who would dare to even try and stand against them.
Haiti as well, is suffering from not just an earthquake, but an earthquake exacerbated by the indifference, violence and corruption of those who have held power over the decades.
These are not acts of God, but acts of man. We cannot blame God for the horrors that we inflict upon each other. We chose to behave like this, and to try and blame God for it is just to continue to shirk our responsibility.
But God does not abandon us, even in the worst depths of our sin.
As Jesus says in our passage from John ‘Just as the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father’ God, in his love, sent us his son, for us to beat and kill, and in his death to take upon himself the deserved punishment for the sins of all of us. This was an act of God.
Places like Afghanistan and Haiti show us why sin has consequences. God loves all and can forgive all, but to forgive sin without consequence is to perpetuate it. How can God look into the eyes of those who are dying in Haiti because of lack of food or water, because those in authority have stolen the aid given for them, and tell them that those in authority are forgiven and bear no consequence for their actions, when the consequence of their actions is plain to see?
To do would be to deny the pain of suffering of the victims, and God’s love for the victims is just as great as it is for the perpetrators – no more and no less. Sin requires judgement and punishment not because God is vindictive, but because God is loving.
And because God is loving, he takes this judgement and punishment upon himself, to stop our endless cycles of violence and retribution. On the cross, God is saying ‘if you must curse and hate and demand justice’ then do it to me. God is asking us to blame him, to stop us blaming each other.
This is how Jesus has conquered, and will continue to conquer death and sin. In his death, he can give us life – renewed life, free from the burdens of sin and punishment.
Paul knows this – that the battle has been won and that Christ has prevailed. Tom Wright imagines it brilliantly when he compares Paul to a junior officer on a foggy battlefield. He knows that the battle is won overall, but he can’t see the bigger picture and from where he is, it still seems to be going on. The enemy are still fighting and so he needs to keep fighting back.
It is the same for us. We are saved, and yet the fight goes on. There is still evil and suffering in the world. Despite Paul’s image of armour and weapons though, this is not a physical fight. As Paul says, we are proclaiming a Gospel of peace.
That is scant consolation for those being oppressed, tortured or murdered by the Taliban, I suspect. Or those dying of hunger or disease in Haiti watching aid being embezzled by the powerful.
But we are not called to compel others into the way of peace and justice. We are not commanded to convert the world at the point of a sword. We cannot force others into our faith in God.
Paul knows this. He talks of armour and weapons to strengthen ourselves, not to defeat others. Indeed, we cannot ultimately defeat the powers of evil, because they are already defeated. Paul, in Ephesus, as elsewhere, is building a community of the righteous. Not the self-righteous, not the holier than though. But a community of those who are dedicating themselves to a Gospel of peace. Those who, in the Spirit are attempting to make the right choices. To be a beacon and to show people that there is a better way to live. Not perfect, by any means. But people who are trying to live in a better way. A Christian community is not a matter of quantity, but quality. We hear a lot about numerical growth of the church, or lack of it these days, but in our Gospel reading we see Jesus unconcerned about his disciples leaving him. It almost feels like he is encouraging it. It is about having the right people around him, not as many people as possible.
We cannot solve problems like Haiti or Afghanistan. Not directly. To even try is to enmesh ourselves in that cycle of power and abuse. What we can do best is to show the world that there is a better way of living – a way not of mastery, but of servanthood, not of taking but of giving, not of hating, but of loving.
Amen.

The metaphor is apt for this passage in Ephesians, but we should not be distracted by the military metaphor. Paul himself says that we are to proclaim the gospel of peace, despite our warlike apparel.
The gospel of peace is not an easy idea, especially for those who are suffering.
Jesus’s disciples did not find his teachings easy. They were looking for physical freedom now, a kingdom of their own, the oppressors to be overthrown and brought low. That is not what Jesus was offering them, not because the Romans could not be overthrown, but because that wouldn’t solve the problem of sin. Israel had been free before. It had been a nation under God’s rule, but had rebelled against that freedom – using it to indulge in idolatry. Freedom had bred pride and rebellion, rather than justice and peace. The prophets had warned them, but they had rushed headlong into destruction and exile. The freedom of choice given to Adam and to Israel had had the same consequences.

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There will be no more sea

Third Sunday after Trinity, 2021. Year B.

Readings: 2 Corinthians 6:1-13 & Mark 4:35-41.

This is one of those short vignettes from the life of Jesus that Mark specialises in, told at Mark’s normal breakneck pace, but also with the eye for the little, eyewitness, details and colour that Mark is so good at. 

One of the most notable things about Mark’s Gospel is how short it is, and it is passages like this that show us the incredible economy of Mark in creating a scene for us, with as few words as possible.  

You end up wondering whether the cost of ink and parchment was just too much for the persecuted Roman church he was writing as part of to afford.

Jesus has had a full day, down at the lake, preaching to the crowd in parables, and then, as the preceding verse to our passage notes, having to explain each of his parables to the disciples afterwards.

All day he has been talking about the coming kingdom, but Mark is careful to emphasise, only in parables.

The crowd has been so large that they have pushed him back into the water, and he has had to preach to them from a boat.

Now as evening comes he tells his disciples that they should cross the lake to the other side.  Already in the boat, and being fishermen, they set out just as they are, in the boat.  

Jesus travels light – there is no need to go back to where they might have stayed the night before – everything they need is everything the have, and everything they have they carry with them.  Mark can tell us this in just four words – ‘just as he was’.

We can try and imagine what the day has been like.  Maybe it was spring, with the hills above the Sea of Galilee ablaze with flowers, and their perfume thick on the air.  Maybe it is later in the year, and the sea is like a glass radiating back the dead heat of the day towards the same hills, now dried and brown.  Maybe that is why they are down by the lake, to capture what little cooling breeze there is blowing off the water?  

It is in that sort of heat that the life-giving properties of water become most apparent.  The divine bounty of a spring of crystal clear, living water, bursting forth from the earth, cold and fresh.  The great lake, sitting in its bowl of haze shrouded mountains, provides a livelihood for the fishermen from whom so many of Jesus’ disciples were called, and the fish that they catch are a staple part of the diet of everyone living around the lake.  Fish often appear in Jesus’ stories as a symbol of the bounteous plenitude of God, and of his infinite love for us.  For people back then, with only the haziest grasp of the ecology of fish population dynamics, they must have seemed an inexhaustible resource.  Indeed, even today, when we do fully understand the science behind fish stocks, we are all too guilty of making exactly the same mistake and assuming that fish are an inexhaustible resource that we can plunder at our whim.

As the little armada of fishing boats sets out across the Lake, Jesus settles down to get some sleep in the stern, sleeping on a cushion.  Why a cushion?  Maybe when Mark was first telling the story, his listeners had some experience of small fishing boats and were wondering how on earth someone could actually get comfortable enough in one to sleep.  The answer – there was already a cushion in the boat.  Maybe its just one of those little details that Peter noticed.

Anyway, as Jesus is sleeping, suddenly a dangerous squall hits the boat.  The Sea of Galilee is noted for the suddenness and ferocity of its storms, because the mountains around it channel the winds in unpredictable ways.

Suddenly, the sea is changed from being a convenient preaching place, or a source of life-giving fresh water and fish, into a terrifying force of nature.  This is the primordial chaos that Genesis refers to in its second verse – “darkness covered the face of the deep, while wind from God swept over the face of the waters”.  This is the sea that John refers to at the end of his apocalypse when he is given the vision of the fulfillment of God’s promises – “Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth ; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more.”

The sea is a metaphor for the destructive power of untamed nature throughout the scriptures.  Indeed it is a common metaphor throughout the ancient Near East.

In the creed, we describe God as ‘creator of all that is, both seen and unseen’, but when we look at the Genesis account of creation, it certainly looks like the waters are there before God first speaks.  God fashions everything else, but the waters are already there.  What is possibly more important though is not that they are already there, and therefore exist prior to or even apart from God’s creation, but that they, even if not created by God, obey him completely.  Most of the other mythic creation accounts of the Near East are told around a struggle or war between competing elemental deities.  In Genesis 1, we have an account of a creation that is wholly and completely subordinate to the word and will of God, who is able to order it as He wishes, without compromise or dissent.

But this primordial disorder is still present in the world.

While Jesus sleeps, this force of chaos can creep back into the world, and the disciples despair.  They are like the seeds that Jesus has described earlier that day, that fall upon the stony ground.  They blossom initially, but then when the hard times come, they despair and wither away.  Maybe this time he is only sleeping for three hours; later he will be gone for three days. 

When Jesus awakes, he is able to still the storm with a word.  The chaos is still obedient to the word of God.  The disciples ask themselves who Jesus is, but the scriptures already give them the answer.  Only God has the power that even the wind and the waves obey instantly.  This is not just a miracle, or a show of magical power.  This is a direct affirmation of divinity – Jesus showing that he is indeed God, for only God has that total power over all of creation.

So what can this story say to us, who are not there in the boat, with Jesus sleeping on the cushion?

We too are beset with the forces of disorder and chaos in this world that God created to be ordered and peaceful.

Sometimes, for us too, it feels like the waves are breaking over our boat and that we are rapidly shipping water.

We feel like we are at the mercy of events that we have no control over.

Sometimes the storm calms; sometimes we feel like we are bailing for ever; sometimes it feels like the boat sinks.

We have to remember that God’s love for us is infinite, even greater than the number of fish in the sea.  We may exhaust the fish of the sea, which would be a terrible sin, but even then, we would not exhaust God’s love for us and for all of his creation.

The early church often used the image of a boat to symbolise the church.  They too felt that they were beset by storms.  They prayed to God to be saved from the torments of the world.

A boat is a very apt metaphor, because everyone in it is in it together.  They are, as the saying goes, ‘all in the same boat’.

Genesis 2, in its story of creation, emphasises the role that God has given us as stewards of creation.  Salvation may be personal, through faith, but it is also corporate as well.  If the boat sinks, we will all drown.

Salvation is not an individual act.  We are not saved and go to heaven.  Salvation is communal – there will be a new earth as well as a new heaven – there needs to be an earth to be reborn.  And in that new earth, there will be no temple, for God will dwell amongst us.  And there will be no more sea.

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Community and forgiveness

Thirteenth Sunday after Trinity, 2020. Year A.

An online sermon during lockdown.

Readings: Romans 13:8-14 & Matthew 18:15-20.

For where two or three of you are come together in my name, I am there among them.

This saying of Jesus’ has I think been a great comfort to many of us in lockdown over the last few months, unable to worship together as a broader church.  

In its context here, however, it is saying other things as well.

It could be that Jesus is making a distinction between rabbinical Judaism, which held that ten males was the minimum required to have a worshipping community – a synagogue needed that many men to be established.

Jesus is lowering the bar considerably, down to just two worshippers.  And he doesn’t even say that they have to be men – any two worshippers are enough for him to be among them.

But that there needs to be at least two tells us something important about our faith – it is a communal faith. 

Which isn’t to say that God isn’t always present with us, even when we are alone.  I think that we have all experienced times of total loneliness in our lives; times when we thought we were completely on our own.  For some of us, the last 6 months may have felt like that.  Throughout history Christians have been imprisoned and persecuted, or have chosen to isolate themselves because the demands of the world have become too loud.  

In all of these cases, I think we are all aware that God is still with us, listening to us, protecting us, and enveloping us in his patient love.

For many of us, the abiding presence of God is what has got us through the last few months, and there is I think a feeling that, bereft of traditional church, people are finding God more and more in the other places of life – in nature, in domestic settings, in the quiet of the morning and the evening, even in work.  

This may turn out to be a blessing from this period, that more people may come to find God in new places, and hopefully will continue to walk with God even when things return to normal.

But Jesus here is still stressing that the church is communal, rather than individual.

It might only be a small community that is required – just two people, but a community is still required.  

And I think we have to go to the first half of the passage to see a reason for this.

The first half can, on the surface, be seen as a very reasonable and very practical suggestion for conflict resolution.  

First you should talk things over with the person concerned, privately.  Don’t make a big fuss of things.  Intervene early, before problems fester.  Because this isn’t about conflict resolution – this is about seeing sin in those around you.

Being judgemental isn’t very fashionable nowadays.  We are asked to be inclusive and accepting of other people, and their preferences and ways and habits.  

And this is a laudable aim.  Jesus shows us this himself.  He makes it clear, as his ministry develops, and sometimes with some outside prompting, that he is come for the salvation of all the world, and all the people in it.  He is ultimately inclusive of everyone.

But this doesn’t mean that he is relaxed about everything that people do.  There is still sin in the world, and still suffering and pain, and evil.

Salvation comes from God’s unconditional love and grace, and is not earned by our own deeds, but that doesn’t mean that our actions are immaterial.  

Our response to God’s love and grace should be to try and reflect some of that love and grace back, not only on God, but also on our fellow beings.  

We all fall short on this, but the important thing is to keep trying.  

As he says, that which ties on earth, is tied in heaven, and that which is loosed on earth is loosed in heaven.  

Our actions have consequences, not just now, but in eternity.  

Consequences for us, for those we affect, and for God.

But, as Jesus well knew, trying to do good and avoid sin on your own is difficult.  

Not just because it is always helpful to have someone else beside you, sharing the burden, as Christ does, but also because we can become acclimatised to our own sin.  

Both as individuals and indeed, as we are learning more and more, as societies.  

We come to accept things as normal and OK that are not.  

We abuse our power, hurt others, hurt God, act sinfully.

For this reason, we need the other to question us, to make us examine ourselves, to shock us out of our complacency and acceptance that things should be as they are.

This is what Jesus is talking about at the start of our passage.  

It is sometimes easier to observe sin in others than in oneself.  

This could of course turn one into an insufferable busybody – always telling other people how they are falling short.  

This is a trap the church has fallen into repeatedly throughout history.   

We judge others on their superficial behaviour, on the things that really don’t matter to God, rather than on the things that do matter.  

It is easier to follow narrow rules, than to follow Jesus in showing love and acceptance of all.

We have to avoid that by knowing, in humility, that we are also riddled with sin as well.  We can see sin easily in others, because it is in ourselves as well.

The purpose of the intervention that Jesus is suggesting is not to build ourselves up, by showing how much more virtuous we are, but to build others up.  We must be willing to listen, as well as talk.

If we are confronting someone else about their behaviour, we must be willing to examine our own as well, and listen to some hard truths about ourselves.

But ultimately, the community is only as healthy as the individuals who comprise it.  

We are not called to be perfect, but we are called to be saints, as well as sinners.  It is our faith in Christ, and his faith in us, that makes us saints, those who strive to do what Jesus has asked us to do.  

But in this, we need help.  We need others to guide, correct, confirm, uphold and enable us, in the love of God.  

We will not always succeed in this.  Jesus makes that clear in his escalating intervention.  

First talk one on one, then get two or three together, and then finally the whole church.  And if that doesn’t work, treat them as pagans and tax collectors.  That sounds harsh, but you have to remember this is a gospel written by a tax collector.  This is not a permanent expulsion.  

Jesus is saying that you need to go back to the beginning in this case.  

Effectively they need to be reconverted – there may be something wrong with the foundations, so start again by examining the foundation.

This passage really needs to be read in the context of the passages immediately before and after.  We come into this passage from the parable of the lost sheep, and immediately after we have Peter’s question about how many times we should forgive others in the church.

The context for this passage is entirely love and forgiveness.  What we do to help others should always and entirely be motivated by love – love of others and love of God.

Christianity is not a simple religion of clear legal rules that can be easily followed – it is a set of case law – stories that Jesus tells us that reveal how we should behave in certain circumstances, wrapped up in human interpretation.  

And that interpretation is difficult.  

Which is not to say that it should be left to others to decide for us.  

We must decide ourselves what our behaviour should be, but we should also allow ourselves to be guided and informed by others, both the living and the dead, the long tradition of the church, guided by our own faith to discern what is from God, and what is not.

Amen

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A messianic feast

Eighth Sunday after Trinity, 2020. Year A.

Readings: Matthew 14:13-21

The feeding of the five thousand feels like quite a simple story.  It’s one of the first bible stories that we learn about as children if we are learning about stories of Jesus.

And there is a reason for this.

It’s a pretty easy story to understand.  A lot of people come to listen to Jesus, and most of them forget to bring a packed lunch.  He talks to them, and heals people and then, when it is getting late, he miraculously feeds them.  Although of course, he has been doing miracles all day, healing them, as well.

Communal eating has always been a key part of our social lives as humans.  We eat together to reinforce our sense of community, of being together. As families, as groups of friends, and as church.

But what Jesus is doing here is more than just bringing all these people together.

He is showing, in action, what being the Messiah is all about.

And he is showing us that in him, all of time is gathered.  He is the centre-point of history.  In his now, is all of the past, and from it, all the future flows.  All in the simple action of feeding 5000 people, with just 5 loaves and 2 fishes.

In the present moment, he is showing us what the good news is.  

He has spent the day healing the sick, now he feeds the hungry.  He is showing these people, and us, what the Kingdom of God that he preaches about is really like.  The sick are healed.  The hungry are fed.

He is also showing them what it is not.

It is notable that this miracles occurs in the wilderness, where Jesus has retired following the news of the death of John the Baptist.  That death would have been big news at the time, because John the Baptist was big news at the time.  Maybe many of these people were following Jesus into the wilderness because they thought he would now take on the mantle of John the Baptist, and become a voice, crying in the wilderness?  Maybe they thought that his death might provoke Jesus to raise the standard of rebellion in the wilderness, like the Maccabees had two centuries earlier, overthrowing the hated Seleucids.

Jesus is coming into the wilderness to prophesy about the Kingdom of God, and he is declaring himself the Messiah, but not in an expected way.  He is forgiving sins and healing people, which until now has only been permitted through the sacrifice system in the Temple.  

He is feeding thousands of people with bread, which is what Caesar did in Rome to demonstrate his power and majesty.  In its own, non-aggressive way, feeding the five thousand is just as much of a thread to the rulers of the world as raising any standard of rebellion.  Jesus is showing that anything Caesar can do, he can do as well, but he doesn’t need to ship his bread from Egypt.  His bread comes from heaven.

And this is where he ties himself back into the past; the history of Israel.  Like this crowd, the Isrealites who left Egypt with Moses found themselves in the wilderness with nothing to eat.  And for them God provided manna from heaven, for 40 years.  Even down to Jesus’s day, a jar of manna was kept in the inner sanctum of the temple, to remind Israel of the time when their entire survival has been completely dependent on God’s gifts.

So by feeding the five thousand (and later the four thousand, so we must assume this wasn’t a one-off; this probably happened several times); by feeding them, Jesus is showing them that he is the Messiah; that he can fulfil the role that God has filled in the past for Israel.  In him, all the history of Israel comes to its triumphant conclusion.

And at the same time this is a feast.  He is not just feeding them with bread, but with fish as well.  In Greek and Hellenistic culture, food was generally divided into two types.  There was the bulk food – the stuff you ate to survive, like bread and beans, and pulses and even meat.  You normally only ate meat because it had been sacrificed in a temple, and then the priests tended to take the best bits, so you were left with the less appetising cuts.  The other sort of food was the appetisers – the bits you ate to make the meal exciting.  For the Greeks (and probably for other biblical period peoples, fish was really important – fish were never used as sacrifices, so you go do what you wanted with them; and they had a lot of flavour.  So in serving both bread and fishes to the crowd, Jesus isn’t just filling them up so that they can survive.  He is giving them a proper feast.

Feasts play a big part in the Gospels.  Jesus was obviously fond of socialising and meeting people, especially over meals.  And he often uses parables about feasts to describe the Kingdom of God.  It will be like a great feast to which all will be invited.   Feasts in Roman times, like formal banquets now, were opportunities to display the social pecking order.  Those of high status got to recline nearest the host.  Those of lower status would stand or sit further away and only get what the top table didn’t finish.  But Jesus always makes it clear that his Kingdom will be a feast where everyone is welcome and treated equally.  This is one of the reasons that Paul gets so irked by the Corinthians in his first epistle – they are not sharing properly between rich and poor at their weekly eucharistic meal, but the eucharistic supper is not just a communal meal following the normal social rules of the time  – it is a model of the world to come.

So in giving this feast to all these people, Jesus is showing them his vision of what the future will one day be.  This is a little bit of the kingdom to come, in the kingdom of the present.  We live in this time as well – the time when the kingdom is here, and is also yet to come. It is hard to be in this ‘not quite’ state, but fortunately Jesus has left us with these models of how we can enact the kingdom that will one day come.

It has been harder still in these times of lockdown, where even the symbol of a meal eaten with friends and relatives and neighbours has been taken from us.  For some of us there is a relaxation, an ability to gather once again; for others there is still the need to shield and protect themselves.  And yet we have come through this period in fellowship and caring for one another.  It was a mark of the early Christians, noted by pagan writers, that during the cycle of plague outbreaks in the 3rd century, when others would flee the victims of plague, Christians would continue to care for them, at personal risk.  It was such counter-intuitive behaviour, it left a great impression.  We, fortunately, have not been confronted with something as terrible as plague, but the way we have cared for each other is, for our generation, an enactment of the kingdom to come.

And yet we are faced by this pandemic with challenges that are new to our generation.  We are able to meet, not sitting on the ground in the wilderness, but in this church building, sanctified by generations of worship from this community.  

We are now part of the establishment, rather than being rebels and outsiders, even if we are still called to be a challenge to the world.  

It can be easy to fall into a comfortable familiarity, even to see the church as more of a social club than God’s people on earth.

The pandemic has put strain on people, on communities, on finances and on priorities.  It calls us to evaluate what is central to God’s mission with which we are entrusted.

Things that we have taken for granted, we can no longer take for granted; and that should be a good and fruitful thing, if we approach it rightly, and prayerfully.

So let us use this opportunity that we are given to reflect on our faith, our mission and our church.  Let us evaluate what is the bread from heaven, and what is the earthly bread; what is the basic stuff of life, and what is the appetizer that God has given to us on top of that.

Amen.

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Main Service Sermons

Testing times

First Sunday of Lent, 2020. Year A.

Readings: Matthew 4:1-11

Its been quite a couple of weeks.
Floods, war, pestilence – there is starting to be a bit of an end of the world feeling in the air.
Which in the first week of Lent, when our minds are supposed to be turning towards eschatological themes, is appropriate.
Lent is a time of self-inspection, and reflection because we should be thinking about how we will ultimately stand before our maker, when the Kingdom of God is made complete.
The Spirit sends Jesus into the wilderness for 40 days in order to be tested.
The analogy is the 40 years that the Israelites spend in the wilderness of Sinai, being tested by God before they can enter the promised land.
God signs a covenant with the Israelites, and then tests them to see if they are worthy.
Similarly, God has recognised Jesus as his Son, and is now testing him to see if he is worthy.
Why does Jesus need to be tested though? He is as much God as God. And yet at the same time he is also fully human, like the Israelites, and all of us.
The Israelites had a pretty mixed record when it came to passing God’s tests.
Jesus passes them all with flying colours.
Extending the parallel, all the scripture he quotes here is from Deuteronomy. The fifth book of the Pentateuch, and the repository of many of the laws and advice given out during those 40 years in the wilderness.
But why does Jesus need to be tested?
Why indeed do any of us need to be tested by God?
Surely God, our maker, who knows every hair on our head, has no need for this? He can see our past and our future; he plumbs the very depths of our souls, and rises with the heights of our passions.
An ordinary maker does need to put his creations to the test, in order to see how well he has made them; how well they perform.
A gunmaker must proof his guns, least they explode dangerously when used.
But God is no ordinary maker.
Why then the need for testing?
This is one of those big questions. There is, for us, with our imperfect senses and reason, no definitive answer to it, beyond the starting position of ‘God wills it’.
And yet it is one of the blessings of having been given both reason and Spirit, that we can at least ask these questions and talk about answers to it.
The answer from the new atheists would just be – ‘That’s the way the world is. You can’t argue with an uncaring, impersonal universe – you just have to accept it and put up with it.’
In many ways, that is pretty much the same answer as ‘God wills it.’
But we can go beyond this.
Scripture, tradition and reason all encourage us to ask the question ‘Why?’
We are not going to find the definitive answer, at least not here and now. But in asking, and answering these questions, in affirming what we believe about God; because the ways we answer these questions will teach us a huge amount about how we understand God, we will also understand a huge amount about ourselves.
Maybe God tests us, not so that He can find out about us, but so that we can come to know ourselves better? And also so that we can come to understand Him better.
As Jesus says, quoting Deuteronomy chapter 6 verse 16, ‘you shall not put God to the test’. We should not be putting God to the test, but by being put to the test ourselves, we develop our own understanding of God.
What we will see will only ever be a reflection of ourselves, rather than God in his infinitely, but that will show us what about ourselves we value most.
Even the devil, in the gospel passage, shows us more of himself than God in his tests for Jesus. Instant gratification of hunger and thirst; a desire for self-glory, and temporal rulership. This is what the devil thinks is power, not what God knows is power.
God, of course, sees and values all of us, in our entireties.
So is that the reason why there is pain, and suffering and sin in the world?
Jesus could have ended it all with a word or a wave of his hand.
The devil offers him all the kingdoms of the world, if he will fall down and worship him. Jesus rejects him, because only God is worthy of worship; but he doesn’t really need the devil to offer him the kingdoms of the world.
They already belong to him, and he could reorder them with a word.
But that is not God’s plan.
Again, during the passion, he will be tempted to deviate from God’s plan, and then, as now, he will resist the temptation.
But why is God doing this the hard way?
Both for His Son, and for us.
Again, one of the big questions.
And not one that we have been able to answer definitively, even after two thousand years of Christian theology. And thousands more of Jewish theology before and in parallel.
The answer is that we can’t yet know, but we should continue to ask, and debate and question.
The study of salvation, Soteriology, is another area where what we think God has and is doing says more about ourselves than about God.
Why do we need to be saved; why did Jesus die; how is Jesus related to our salvation; why can’t God just save us anyway?
It really forces us to think what we mean when we say God is just, or loving, or righteous.
When these human words and concepts are applied to the divine infinity, it has a way of showing us how limited our understanding really is.
We can quickly get into all sorts of topics here – election, grace, pre-destination, justification, atonement, deification, free will.
I’m not going to, especially from a pulpit, because these are not topics that should be taught, but topics that should be explored.
Christianity is not a set of answers, or a destination – it is a journey, with God as the destination.
We never stop learning, and reasoning and changing our minds.
All the way from being children learning our bible stories, through confirmation, and onwards. I was talking to a fellow ex-student at St Mellitus during the week, and while I don’t miss the essay deadlines, I do miss the stimulation of debate and being forced to read and expand my frontiers.
Nowadays, I have to create the time for that myself, and that’s always much harder.
The wonderful thing about writing sermons – one of the wonderful things, that is – is that again, I have to engage with God, and really think deeply and pray over a passage of scripture that I may have just skated over before.
I’ll start on Monday with one idea. By Friday, I will have written something completely unexpected.
This evening we have two groups starting their first session preparing for confirmation.
The word confirmation has something of a finality to it, but actually its just another step on a journey of exploration and inquiry.
Its not a ‘ticking the box’ exercise, but a chance for people to ask questions and think deeper about their faith, together.
And everyone will gain something from it. There are no leaders, or attendees – just a group of Christians, gathered together, exploring what Christ means to them and the world. Very like the groups that Paul describes in his letters.

So, Lord, we ask your blessing on all those who gather this evening in confirmation groups.
May you grant them the courage of your Son
And the joy of your Spirit
That we may come together in your name
In order to deepen and widen our love through you and our faith in you.
Amen.

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Main Service Sermons

Beginnings

The Baptism of the Lord. Year A.

Readings: Acts 10:34-43 & Matthew 3:13-17.

Both of our readings this morning are stories of beginnings.

Matthew describes Jesus’ baptism by John.  

In the previous chapter he was describing Jesus’ childhood sojourn in Egypt, hiding from Herod.  

Only a couple of years in this case, rather than the centuries that Israel spent in Egypt between Joseph and Moses, but highly symbolic none the less.  

Then, immediately afterwards in the gospel, we have him coming down to the Jordan to be immersed in its waters by John the Baptist.  

From the early church onwards, theologians have puzzled over this, as their understanding of Jesus’ nature developed.  

Once the doctrine had been established of Jesus’ simultaneously divine and human nature, and more importantly of the sinlessness of this combination, _and_ once baptism has been established as being for the forgiveness of sins,  why did Jesus need to be baptised?  Obviously it can’t have been to forgive the sins of one who was sinless.

And John is quick to point out that the whole ceremony is the wrong way round.

It is Jesus who should be baptising John, not John baptising Jesus.

But again, this is a symbolic action.

By being baptised, Jesus is affirming John’s message of the coming of the kingdom of heaven.

And the place is also symbolic – this is where the Israelites entered the old promised land, 

and here is where John is helping them enter the new promised land.

We often focus on Jesus’ words when thinking about his teaching in the Gospel, but it is often just as important to look at his actions.

Like prophets throughout Jewish history, he often uses symbolic actions as much as 

or even more than words in order to deliver a message to people.

Both Jesus and John are notable in how they use actions and place symbolically.

So having returned from Egypt to Nazareth, Jesus now comes south to Judea

To enter the waters of the Jordan, the boundary of the promised land.

But while Matthew has jumped straight from one to the other, for Jesus, 30 or more years may have passed.  

Only in Luke do we hear anything of Jesus between his miraculous birth and this moment of revelation; 

this Epiphany, 

where the Holy Spirit descends again, and God acknowledges him as his Son.  

We are not actually told whether everyone hears the voice of God, or just Jesus.

Is this a public declaration of God’s purpose and blessing?

Or a private affirmation for Jesus that he is ready for the task he is to undertake?

So what has brought Jesus to this place and this time?   

The place is symbolic, but why has he waited until now?

Surely with a message like the coming of the kingdom, 

It must have been incredibly tempting to proclaim it as soon as possible.

Unlike Jesus, who is presented to us as an adult fully formed,so to say, 

for Peter, we get to see his complete journey from first calling to venerated apostle, 

in every painful and tortuous step and mis-step.  

Throughout the Gospels we see his enthusiasm, 

but also his ability to misunderstand almost everything that Jesus is showing and telling his disciples.  

And yet in our first reading, we now see Peter full of the confidence of the spirit.  

To put this reading into its context, this is at Caesarea, 

Just after the vision of the sheet on the rooftop in Joppa 

and just prior to the conversion of Cornelius and his household.

Cornelius has sent messengers to summon Peter, in response to an angelic vision of his own, 

And now asks Peter what God has commanded him to say.

Then Peter responds with this speech.

It’s a wonderful passage.  

If you re-read it, it is in many ways the first creed.  

If you look at it as we say the Nicene creed later in the service, 

you can see how much of our basic statement of belief it already covers.  

This event is probably within a year of the crucifiction, 

and yet already there had been a transformative shift in how Peter sees Jesus.  

No longer the traditional messiah that Peter thought he was following throughout the Gospels. 

Death on the cross would have been failure for that Messiah.

But that was not the kingdom he was proclaiming.

Already Peter can understand that ‘everyone who believes in him receives forgiveness of sins through his name’.  

And the important word is ‘everyone’. 

At the beginning of this creed, we see that Peter has already absorbed the vision at Joppa. 

This is not just a faith for the lost sheep of Israel.  

‘God shows no partiality, but in every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him.’

When Peter speaks earlier, at Pentecost,

It is a speech that is full of scriptural quotations,

But here, in front of Gentiles, he doesn’t rely on showing how Jesus fulfills the scriptural prophecies.

Cornelius is referred to as God-fearing, but he is presumably no expert in the Jewish scriptures.

So Peter, in the Holy Spirit, has to explain Jesus in language that everyone can understand.

Pentecost is often referred to as the birth of the church, 

and it is certainly the event that makes the church holy, 

but this declaration by Peter, following his vision, 

and the Holy Spirit descending on those gentiles who hear it,

leading to their baptism by Peter,

marks the beginning of a church which is truly both holy and catholic, a universal church.

And yet, it is always Paul who is thought of as the apostle to the Gentiles, 

Despite this promising start by Peter.

As always, Peter finds it hard to stick to his convictions, 

Especially when opposed by James.

Indeed, if we are to trust Luke and Paul’s accounts, it gets pretty fractious, and Peter engages in some serious wavering and fence sitting.

He’s a bit like a modern Archbishop, trying to keep all parts of the church happy,

No matter how difficult or impossible that may seem.

Peter and Jesus have very different beginnings, and follow very different paths.

And that is the thing with vocation.

They are always different, and unique.

Sometimes we have to wait until the right time in our life, or in other people’s lives,

Like Jesus, who waits until he is in middle age to start his ministry.

Despite his vocation being his entire purpose and nature.

Maybe he was waiting for other people to be in the right place for his message?

Sometimes, it can take a long time to discern a vocation, no matter how obvious it might seem.

Like Peter’s, we can be slow and hesitant, taking wrong turns, or even sliding backwards at times.

Full of good intentions, but sometimes poor decisions.

But coming, like Peter, to amazing revelations.

All our journeys with God have a beginning somewhere, and they are all steps into the dark.

When we start, we never know where we will end up.

But God is always here to guide us, especially when we listen to him.

Amen.

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Main Service Sermons

Healing and wholeness

Eighteenth Sunday of Trinity, 2019. Year C.

Readings: 2 Timothy 2:8-15 & Luke 17:11-19.

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable in thy sight, O Lord. 

Amen. 

I was reading an article the other day, written by someone who was disabled, she didn’t say in what way, although it was obviously something that was apparent, as her experienced showed. 

She was talking about the experience that she had had, of Christians coming up to her out of the blue and wanting to heal her.  Not her asking to be healed or anything like that, but Christians so infused with the Holy Spirit and so keen to pour out that gift on the world, they would come up and ask to lay hands on her and pray for her.  I think the politer ones at least asked beforehand. 

Now from inside a charismatic church this would make perfect sense in many respects.  People are given gifts from the Holy Spirit and there are biblical injunctions that tell them that these gifts should be used to bear witness to the truth of Jesus Christ in the world.  And what is more potent than a spiritual healing?  And as our Gospel reading this morning reminds us, healing people was one of Jesus’ most powerful signs to show that he was the Messiah.  It is symbolic of the coming of the Kingdom of God that Jesus proclaimed that around him there was no more sickness and death. 

And yet, the person who had written this article was profoundly offended by this action.  For her, her disability was part of what made her, her.  Removing it would be to fundamentally alter her – it would compromise her personal identity.  I’m sure her disability was inconvenient to her a lot of the time, but it also helped define her, I am sure both physically in how she looked, but also in her personality.   

Now we can enter a minefield here about personal consent and mental capacity, and I’m not going to do that, you will be relieved, because I in no way feel myself qualified to talk on that subject.   

I think we can probably all agree that there are probably some people who want to be healed of various things, and other people who don’t.  It is a matter of personal choice, and no matter how empowered we might feel, we shouldn’t impose on others if they don’t want to be imposed on. 

Or should we? 

I am reminded at this point by a scene in Monty Python’s Life of Brian, where Brian encounters an ex-leper, played by Michael Palin, who spends five minutes complaining about how Jesus came up to him and healed him, “without so much as a by your leave.  One minute, I’m a leper with a living,” he says, “the next I’m out of work.” 

Like many scenes in the Life of Brian, you could see this as pretty blasphemous, but there is also a few quite pertinent questions in there, and I think faith is something that always benefits from being questioned. 

How should we be bearing witness to our faith?  Are we losing something of our biblical vitality if we start asking people’s permission to pray for them or tell them the good  news?  Are we diluting out faith, conforming to a secular, liberal world?   

Certainly, as the letter to Timothy says, we should not be ashamed of our faith.  If asked we should be ready to proclaim our faith, debate, argue, affirm.  But should we be imposing salvation on others?  Even if we know it is for their ultimate benefit? 

Does Jesus ever heal anyone without their wanting to be healed? 

I think it is pertinent in this situation to look at what healing meant in first century Palestine, or rather what being sick meant.  Many of the people that Jesus heals are people who are afflicted with diseases that make them unclean.  Judaism, like many cultures of the time, had a particular horror of anything that involved blood or skin diseases, possibly because they provided the easiest ways for diseases to spread. 

So these people are not just ill, they are unclean and they are outcasts.  No one will care for them; because to do so would be to make oneself unclean as well.  And this ritual impurity will separate you from God.  So what Jesus is doing when he heals is threefold.   

Firstly he is removing the disease, and the pain and threat of death that that carries with it.  That alone is an amazing gift. 

But secondly he is also restoring them to society, bringing them back into their families and clans.  Now that they are no longer unclean they can re-join society.  That is why Jesus sends the cured lepers in our reading to the priests; so that they can be certified as being clean again. 

And thirdly, he is showing that actually God can approach us, and we can approach God, when we are unclean.  Whereas in the ‘old world’ uncleanliness is contagious – the clean is contaminated by contact with the unclean; in the kingdom of God, cleanliness is contagious – the unclean is purified by contact with the clean. 

But I think it is also important that in many cases, Jesus makes it clear that he is just the enabling force for this process of cleansing and purification.  How often does he say to people – your faith has healed you? 

The act of healing in these cases is an act of free will on the part of those healed.  Once again, God in his omnipotence, who can command anything of his creation, is commanding us to chose.  To chose to be healed.  To chose to give our lives to God. 

And what else can we do if we chose to live our lives as if we are in the Kingdom of God? 

Let us return to the second thing that Jesus does when he heals.  He returns people to society.  He reincludes them. 

We can do this too.  

Under the prescriptions of his day, Jesus had to physically heal people in order for other people to accept them. 

We live under the Law as embodied in Jesus Christ, so we don’t need to regard people who are ill as spiritually unclean.   

We don’t need to say that those who are physically imperfect are therefore unholy.  Instead we can see beyond that to the original truth from the bible, that we are all created in God’s image and are all equally loved and valued by God. 

We are all given the gift of the Holy Spirit as well, and that gift manifests itself in many different ways.  You don’t need to be able to heal or speak in tongues to be a true Christian.  Being able to endure or to listen well is just as great a gift of the Holy Spirit as well. 

And a gift we can all exercise is to heal people, not by relieving their physical or mental symptoms, but by emulating Jesus, by including them back into society.  Making them feel welcome and part of a community. 

Coming back to our original story, our way to heal those who are disabled or infirm or mentally ill needs to be a gospel message of inclusion into our community.  I’m not saying that physical healing isn’t important, but bringing people back into society is a form of spiritual healing and that is just as important, and something that we all can have a gift for.   

That is how we can model the Kingdom of God here in Northwood.   

That is how we can be like Christ. 

Amen. 

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Main Service Sermons

Faith and works

Eight Sunday of Trinity, 2019. Year C.

Reading: Luke 12:13-21

On the face of it, this is a pretty straightforward exchange between Jesus and someone in the crowd.  The unnamed person in the crowd appeals to Jesus as a rabbi – the law is pretty straightforward and all he wants is a ruling in accordance with the law.

Jesus’ response is interesting on several levels though.

First is his response question – yet another example of Jesus answering a question with another question.

‘Who set me to be a judge or arbitrator over you?’

This seems like a strange response.

The answer, we know in the light of John’s later revelation, is God.  Jesus has indeed been appointed to be our judge. 

It is interesting that here he seems to be refusing that role.

Unlike some of his other interactions though, where people do recognise Jesus as the messiah, this questioner doesn’t respond in that manner, or possibly isn’t even given the chance to.

Unlike some of his questioners, who are at least heading in the right direction – like the rich young man who wants to know how to get into the kingdom of heaven, and is unable to because there are earthly things that he holds too dear – Jesus discerns that this person isn’t even interested in living his life in the right way.  ‘Beware! Don’t be greedy…’ He says.

For ancient societies like Israel, especially predominantly agrarian ones, and that was most of them, wealth was land, and land was wealth.  And in order to use the land efficiently, it would stay in the common ownership of the family unit.  So, not a ‘nuclear’ family like we are used to, but an extended family, 4 or even 5 generations living under the same roof.  And this was a very sensible idea.  Because this would give you the capacity to cope with the vicissitudes of fortune – one working adult hurting themselves wouldn’t mean starvation for their dependents.  This was your safety net; your social security.

The Pentateuch is full of laws designed to uphold this extended family unit, reaching up to the law of Jubilee – the sabbath year of sabbath years, when every 50 years, debts were forgiven, slaves were released and land was returned to its original owners.  Every generation, there was a chance to begin afresh, no matter how things had gone for the previous generations.

And yet this questioner is seeking to break up this system.  He is asking Jesus to rule on splitting his inheritance with his brother.  He no longer wants to be part of this extended family unit – Like the Prodigal Son, he wants to strike out on his own.

Now it’s possible that he had had a major falling out with his brother – brothers can be pretty insufferable at times, certainly in my experience.  And I’m hopeful that when the Kingdom of Heaven fully arrives, then they won’t be insufferable, or at least not nearly so much.

But in the meantime, this is what we have to put up with in God’s world.  God made us to live in community, not alone.  In community with God certainly, but also in community with each other, and often we see God most clearly when we see him in each other.

This is why Jesus responds with the parable of the rich man who pulls down his barns in order to build larger ones to store all his abundance.

On one level, Jesus’ audience may have thought that the rich man deserved it – Proverbs tells them that the good will prosper, and the wicked will suffer.  So those that prosper are obviously blessed.

But Jesus tells them this is not so.  God calls this man a fool, because he is storing up earthly goods against a future that doesn’t exist for him.  People prosper who are not good – Israel’s theology and understanding of God have moved on and become deeper, and they understand now that it is not just about rewards in this life, but also rendering an account of oneself to God after that as well.

So this man isn’t thinking about his eternal soul – he is only thinking about this life and a future that doesn’t exist for him.  Specifically for him.

And this is the critical thing about this I think – the rich man is storing up goods for himself – not for his community.  Like the man who is asking the question, he is thinking only of himself – not of God, and certainly not of others, the community around him, the members of his family and his tribe.

And this is a surprisingly easy trap to fall into.  Obviously it is easy on a superficial level, with worldly goods.  I’m sure many of us have an abundance of ‘stuff’, material goods that we may or may not need for the future – stuff that will be worthless to us if an account were to be demanded of us this very day. 

But at the same time, we know this.  At the level of material possessions, we know that our wealth will be of little account when we stand before God.  What we have done with our wealth will be what counts.

Many people here are very generous with their money and time towards the church, and towards each other.  

We hear and understand the first level of Jesus’ parable.

But should we be looking deeper than that?

And yet at the same time, how many of us are procrastinating spiritually?  How many of us are echoing Saint Augustine of Hippo’s famous adolescent appeal – ‘God make me good, but not just yet’. 

I’m not suggesting anyone here is quite living the life of the young St Augustine, but often God is looking for more from us that we are necessarily giving. 

God is always asking for a deeper commitment, the sort of commitment that you think is heading in one direction, but can actually lead you somewhere completely different.

Might we be like the rich man? Storing up our gifts for ourselves? 

When in the 16th Century, Martin Luther read his Bible with fresh eyes, what stood out for him was Paul’s emphasis on salvation through faith.  Luther was quite an unusual character and very much a product of his time, and his theology was very much driven by his personality and how he saw those times.

There is no doubt that the abuses and excesses that he saw in the Roman church at the time were in need of correction.  And he draws our attention to some very challenging passages in Paul’s letter to the Romans, that chimed with his own feelings of complete failure in any attempt to follow the rules.  Like Paul in Romans, he found the Law to be a death trap.

And the product of this, his insistence on salvation by faith in Jesus, is undoubtedly theologically and spiritually liberating.

And yet, but turning so decisively against works as a means of salvation, there has been a risk that we have jettisoned too much in the other direction, thrown out the baby with the bathwater.

It is all too easy, and it is a trap that many protestant churches have fallen into, to see salvation not only as the be-all and end-all, but also as a purely personal thing – a matter between us as individuals, and God.  We are saved individually by our own faith, and by our faith alone. 

Like the rich man, our souls can produce abundant salvation, so much so that we have no place to store it all.  We are right with God; we are saved by our own faith in Jesus.  Surely this is what is critical – our justification before God.

And yet like the rich man, maybe we too are fools if we think like this; as individuals concerned only about our own salvation.

For what Jesus demands of us is faith, that is true, but the word that the New Testament writers use has many more meanings than the simple English word faith has.  The word that is used, pistis, is more normally used of the relationship between ruler and ruled.

It occurs in the Book of Maccabees in the Apocrypha in this sense, where the Jewish rulers are required to have pistis in their Greek overlords.  Pistis here is faith, allegiance, trust.  But importantly, it is something that is not just a way of thinking – it is something that you live out in your life – you are required to demonstrate your pistis, your faith and allegiance in your actions as well.  If your overlord was attacked, it wasn’t enough to believe in him in your heart – you had to raise your troops and march out in support of him.

So maybe when Jesus says to people that their faith has saved them, it is not just their belief, but also their action that has been motivated by that faith that has saved them.  They have believed and acted. 

This is not salvation by works – it is not calculating how many years in purgatory each prayer will save us, but it is seeing that belief and action cannot be divided when we truly have allegiance to Christ.  We too must gather our forces and march out in support of our Lord.

Dietrich Bonhoffer, the German Lutheran theologian murdered by the Nazis in 1945, talked in one of his most famous books of ‘cheap grace’.  ‘infinite and boundless grace without price; grace without cost!’  He felt that people were asserting their faith privately, assured of their own salvation, while not challenging the spirit of the times they were living in.  He was convinced that religion could not be a purely personal thing – to be a Christian, you had to take a position on the social and political questions of the day.  For him, your faith, your allegiance to Christ compelled it. 

It is one of the key tenets of the modern world that religion is a private and personal affair, that should not interfere with public affairs, but Bonhoffer saw clearly that it is not possible to truly have faith in Christ and ignore the world around us.

Jesus’ questioner is trying to live for his own satisfaction and on his own terms, rather than as part of a family or community.  He is not confronting the issues and dealing with them, but trying to solve them by dividing the family – not building relationships, but breaking them.  And when we break our relationships with other people, we are breaking our relationships with God as well.

Unlike Jesus’ questioner, and unlike the rich man, true faith in Christ means acknowledging him as King and showing our allegiance to him in our actions, playing our part in his Kingdom – a kingdom of all the world, not just one small corner of it. Amen