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Incarnation and temptation

First Sunday of Lent, 2022. Year C.

Readings: Romans 10:8b-13 & Luke 4:1-13.

May these words of my mouth and the meditation of our hearts be pleasing in your sight, O Lord, my Rock and my Redeemer.

The incarnation is a uniquely Christian religious concept.  Plenty of other religions have or had stories of men becoming gods, or gods assuming the shape of men, but I know of no others that have, as one of their central stories, God becoming man.  Jesus was the word made flesh.  Not pretending to be a man, or seeming to be a man, but actually a man.  And a man who allowed himself to be beaten and whipped and put to death.  In Jesus, God experiences humanity as we experience it.

Despite this, scripture and tradition are clear on one thing though – Jesus was without sin.  Jesus is man as God originally intended man to be; the second Adam.  The book of Genesis shows us the solution to the inconsistent triad – an all-loving God was all-powerful in creating a world without suffering, but we chose to use our divine gift of free-will to create pain and suffering in the world.  God’s solution to this is not to remove free-will.  It is to give us the law, the prophets, and finally his own Son to lead us on the path of redemption and salvation.  He first attempted to make us sinless by making us innocent of sin, but once we had fallen, the only way back is for us to confront our sinfulness.

Jesus may be without sin, but that does not mean that he is without temptation.  Adam was tempted, and temptation is part of our pre-Fall humanity, so Jesus shares that temptation with us in his full and complete humanity.  In Matthew’s gospel, we read of the sort of temptations that Jesus was prey to.  The bible personifies this temptation both here and in Genesis as the work of the devil, elsewhere called the Satan – the adversary or the accuser.  But this is not some external agency working on us – our temptations come from within us.

Jesus feels three temptations. 

The first is hunger and thirst, understandable having spend forty days and nights fasting.  His temptation is to use his power to turn the stones into bread to satisfy his own needs.  His response is that physical nourishment is worthless without spiritual nourishment as well.  Fasting can be a good discipline for our minds and bodies, although we should also reflect on the luxury that we have to chose to fast, compared to those who have no food.  Today we are thinking of those in the Ukraine denied access to food and water; but for tomorrow we will need to think about the dire impact this war will have on food supplies for the whole world.

The second is to tempt God – to push him and see how he will react.  Surely God will save us, we might cry ourselves.  God will save us, but our ways are not his ways.  Jesus tells his adversary  not to put God to the test – a double edged message.  In our inhumanity to each other, we are constantly putting God to the test, defiling that which He made in His own image.  God forgives us in his infinite mercy and grace, but actions have consequences, even if their sinfulness is forgiven.

Thirdly he is tempted by worldly power.  We can see what the results of that temptation are, right now, in the destruction of the Ukraine and the impoverishment of Russia.  One man, surrendering to a temptation like that, is leading millions of people into starvation, ruin and death.  The ancient world had no shortage of similar tyrants.  Jesus refuses take on such worldly power at the price of becoming a slave to such worldly power.

In each case, Jesus is offered an easy solution to the world’s problems.  He can solve world hunger with the wave of his hand.  He can rule the world as a benevolent tyrant.  But complex problems are not solved by easy solutions, and human sinfulness and the consequent fallenness of creation is a complex problem. 

We are faced with an escalating war where we have no idea what the outcome or consequences will be.  There are plenty of people offering solutions, or telling us what should have been done different to have stopped it happening, but the reality is that this is a complex problem, created at its heart by human greed, pride and ambition.  In this Lenten season let us examine ourselves, and try to hold ourselves to account and resist such urges in ourselves, trusting not in ourselves, but in God.

Amen

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Russian invasion of Ukraine

This sermon was delivered the Sunday after the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The Gospel appointed in the lectionary was the transfiguration, which was what the sermon was therefore originally going to reference.

Readings: 2 Corinthians 3:12-4:2; Luke 9:28-36

This week has been a week where writing a sermon in advance has felt like a futile activity, events have been changing so fast.
A week ago, I was reading the passage in the lectionary for this Sunday, and thinking about the transfiguration, and what I could say about it.
The week before that, I was talking to someone over dinner, an ex-politician, and he was advancing the view that the church (and I think he meant specifically the Church of England) shouldn’t get involved in politics.
I guess he would prefer if I did just give a sermon about the transfiguration, why Moses and Elijah were there, what Peter was thinking of when he offered to build huts for them, and all those sorts of things.
But the Church can’t not talk about politics, for several reasons.
The first is that the Church has been a political captive ever since the 4th century AD, when it became the state religion of the Roman Empire. As a result of that bargain, it became a part of the apparatus of government, and has been ever since. Sometimes the church becomes fatally compromised; or, as in the case of the Russian Orthodox Church, the state church becomes a direct tool of state power and oppression. In England, fortunately, these days are behind us; but it still feels two-faced when governments demand the church not get involved with politics whenever it dares to voice an independent point of view. Governments – and leaders – are not always right
The second is that politics – which means the affairs of the village, the poleis in Greek – has always been something that the Church has cared about. Christianity is not a metaphysical religion – it is not about personal enlightenment and one’s own journey. Christianity is about a people who have been chosen by God to make God’s world right again, not by individual effort, but by being a community of God, attempting to live in harmony with God and in the way that God always intended us to live. Politics is the management of the affairs of a community, and the Church is a community, within a community. We are not called to personal salvation, we are called to be a light to the world, so that all the world may be saved. That is a political matter.
The third is that Jesus was political, and if we are called to live our lives like Jesus, that means we must be political too. If Jesus were not political, the Romans would never have bothered to execute him. They didn’t care about Jewish accusations of blasphemy – they cared because he was a threat to their power.
But if we are called to be political, we need to be very careful how we are political. As Christians, we should not articulate a Christian political message because we are socialists or Marxists or communists or capitalists or any other -ists. We need to articulate a definitively Christian political view – one that is rooted in the scripture and in Christ as revealed in the scriptures and in the Holy Spirit.
To come back to my original sermon, what can the transfiguration tell us about the events in Ukraine? What might one, and just one, distinctively Christian political take on the week’s events look like?
A common first question might be – where is God in all of this?
And the answer, as always, is everywhere.
God is in the suffering and the pain, the dying and the mourning, just as God is in the joy and the happiness when things are going well.
We cannot blame God for the sufferings of Ukraine. He is responsible, in the sense that he is responsible for all of creation, but the suffering of Ukraine is inflicted by people on other people.
We cannot blame God for our faulty exercise of our own free will, for our arrogance and pride. It is God who will hold us responsible for those sins.
When we seek a theological response to a war, we should look at Jesus’ actions and words in the Gospels.
Jesus is unconcerned about the word of the law. Putin’s attempts to hide behind hollow legalism or interpretations would be met with the same scorn that Jesus addresses to the pharisees and scribes.
For Jesus, it is about intent – it is what is on the inside that matters, not what is on the outside.
We are all created in the image of God, and therefore when we oppress another person, or ourselves, we are oppressing God as well.
And God affirmed the closeness of this relationship when he chose to become man, and live amongst us.
Indeed, for much of his earthly ministry and life, Jesus appeared almost entirely human. Were it not for his actions it would be hard to see him as God. But he was God, and because of that, wherever he went the sick were healed, the excluded were welcomed back by him, the unclean were made clean.
But occasionally, he allowed his full glory to show though, and this account of the transfiguration is one of those times. Here, on the mountaintop, he allows Peter, James and John to behold his glory. This surely is what John is remembering when he writes in his gospel ‘he dwelt amongst us and we beheld his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son’.
But this vision of glory is brief. For most of his ministry, both leading up to this point, and then from here on, as he turns his face to Jerusalem, and his degradation and slaughter at the hands of the authorities, he lives as one of us.
He suffers alongside us, and takes on our pain and sorrow. Everyone in Ukraine who suffers in agony or mourns or trembles in fear at what the future holds has Jesus alongside them, also suffering in agony, or mourning, or trembling in fear and begging God to save him from death.
The transfiguration sits at the centre of Jesus’ earthly ministry – a brief glimpse of the true glory of God, in the same way that Jesus’ earthly ministry sits at the centre of history – a brief glimpse of the coming kingdom of God.
We are shown the vision, and then, all too soon it is taken away from us. Why?
The kingdom of heaven is not within our power to bring in.
Why did not Jesus appear in glory to the powers of the world of that time – to Pilate, and Herod and Caesar himself?
Because those people, who thought they had power, and abused the power that they had, did not truly have power to change the world. The only power that they had was the power to abuse and denigrate and destroy. The same power that Putin now flaunts and abuses.
True power belongs to God, and we cannot exercise that power.
God calls us not to power, but to powerlessness. He calls us not to exercise power over others, but to refuse to do so. He calls us to live as examples, as lights to the world, but not in pride, but in humility.
All we can do as Christians is to say that the exercise of power to compel others is wrong, and to model an alternative way of living – a way of love and rightness in relation to each other and God. A way that we will fail in, because we are human, but will keep on trying in despite our failure, because we have the example of Jesus in front of us.
Jesus came to those who were open to hearing the voice of God. Not the powerful, or the self-righteous, but the weak and the humble. Not the clever, but the naïve.
The kingdom is not about us changing the world, but about God changing us. As Paul says, we are transformed from one degree of glory to another.
There is a temptation to want to solve something like the war in Ukraine, but we cannot solve the problems of the world by force, only by example. Example is slow – it won’t stop suffering and pain and death right now.
You could say that his is a totally naïve view, and it is, but that doesn’t necessarily make it wrong. Situations like Ireland and South Africa show us that the best path to peace and righteousness is dialogue and forgiveness.
Not that I am saying that inaction is the only theological or Christian response. Jesus wasn’t a knee-jerk pacifist – he knew how broken the world was. But we need to realise that when we take action, we exert power over others, and when we exert power over others, we often hurt them, and we hurt God. Death and destruction are never the will of God. We may feel that we have to act, in order to prevent what are atrocious crimes against humanity, but we have to understand that there is peril in exercising power, and we have to prayerfully weigh up and accept our responsibility for that exercise of power in the eyes of God.
Amen.

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Anticipation and expectation

Third Sunday of Advent, 2021. Year B.

Readings: Isaiah 12:2-6; Philippians 4:4-7; Luke 3:7-18

This week, we have reached the third Sunday of Advent. Traditionally, having considered the patriarchs and the prophets on the previous two Sundays, we now focus in on John the Baptist, as the herald of Jesus’ earthly ministry.
Advent shares a liturgical colour with Lent, and is also intended as a time of reflection. Historically it was, like Lent, a time for fasting, as an aid to that reflection, which would have made the festival of Christmas that follows it all the more exciting. The twelve days of feasting and revelry that followed Christmas itself was the high-point of the medieval year – the necessary counterpoint to the cold, wet, dark days around it. The focus of Advent though is very different from Lent. Advent is a time of expectation. And that expectation is threefold.
We are joining with those who historically were living in expectation of the coming of their Messiah, an expectation that was met on that first Christmas millenia ago.
We are living in the anticipation of the final arrival of the Kingdom, when Jesus will come in the glory of the Father to renew all of creation. We don’t know when that day will be, but we do know that it will come and that on that day we will be renewed as well.
And finally we are looking forward to our Christmas present, and probably Christmas presents, building up to our festival of Christmas which binds those two appearances together, the past and the future.
There is a temptation to only look backwards at Christmas. The accoutrements of the season tend to reinforce that temptation. We surround ourselves with nativity scenes and familiar rituals. We exchange presents, hopefully in memory of St Nicholas, that belligerent champion of orthodoxy at the council of Nicea, rather than Santa Claus the chubby moral judge or Father Christmas, the pagan avatar of fertility and rebirth. Christmas is a time when we indulge in recreating the rituals and mystery of our childhood.
In itself, that is no bad thing. But if that is all we are doing, then we are missing half the message. John the Baptist is quite clear when he talks to his listeners about this. They cannot retreat into the past, and rely on their history. If they think that they are privileged because they are the heirs of God’s covenant then they may be sorely disappointed. God can raise up new children for Abraham out of the stones on the ground. God’s covenant is a two way street – both sides must be faithful to the promises that they have made.
Thus far, John has not said anything that many of his listeners would have found out of the ordinary. First century Judea was a hotbed of eschatological expectation. Since the return from exile in Babylon, the Jews had waited expectantly for the return from spiritual as well as physical exile – to feel once again the presence of God amongst them in the temple. The temple was rebuilt, more glorious than ever, but they still suffered under the rule of the gentile – first the Greeks, and now the Romans. Their own leaders had been corrupt and self-serving. The Pharisees preached that the way to return to God’s grace was to purify the whole nation, for everyone to follow the priestly codes so that everyone would be pure and clean in God’s eyes. They sought by this to prove to God that they were following their side of the covenants that God had made with their ancestors.
The Essenes on the other hand had retreated into the desert. They saw no hope in trying to purify the whole nation – instead they would become an Israel within Israel – a core of true believers that would be worthy of a renewed relationship with God. Fixing all of Israel, let alone all of creation was too tall an order.
John the Baptist probably came from this Essene tradition – we have very little description of their beliefs and customers – only a description by the historian Josephus and what we can glean from the Dead Sea Scrolls. But if he did, he certainly seems to be much more outwardly focussed than the mainstream Essenes. He goes among the people, calling them to repentance and baptising them with water, in preparation for one who will come to baptise them with fire and the Holy Spirit.
And he is practical as well. When he baptises tax collectors, he merely admonishes them not to over-collect their taxes to line their pockets. When soldiers ask him what they should do, he tells them not to extort money from people and falsely accuse them – soldiers of the time obviously often abused the power and authority they had over people.
He anticipates Jesus in this practically. He is not calling on these people – despised collaborators who the Pharisees and Essenes regarded as unworthy of God’s love and forgiveness to give up their professions, but he is asking them to do their work fairly, and to treat other people honourably. In a foretaste of the marvellous event the we will celebrate in two weeks, God does not distain the messy realties of creation, but seeks to engage with them, and work through them. Even tax collectors can do God’s work, he says, if they repent and amend their ways.
John’s message is that coming into God’s grace is not something that will happen just by looking backwards. The past is important. Being the children of Abraham is important, because God is faithful to his covenants. But the covenant wasn’t just there for Israel. God made that covenant so that they could be an example to the world. And they are not all being fruitful in that covenant, and those that are not fruitful and not fulfilling that covenant. They are falling back on the comfort of the past.
Fruitfulness in the present is important as well. God wants to work through us who are his creation, in his creation, for the purpose to finally fulfilling his creation. He does not need us, but he wants us, to be fruitful in the here and now. Not in an unreasonable manner. He is calling us to be fruitful in what we do in our everyday lives. Fruitful in our honesty, in our graciousness, in our compassion for others, in our love for others which is the reflection of God’s love for us.
But most importantly, John the Baptist also looks to the future. He is lucky in this, in a way. His eschaton, the fulfilment of the divine plan for creation, is close at hand. The coming of Jesus that he announces is soon fulfilled, although he himself does not live to see that Pentecost baptism with fire and the Holy Spirit that he describes.
We have a harder time in some ways. We also look forward to an eschaton, a revelation of God’s outworking in creation. We work towards that fulfilment of God’s promise, that creation will be remade anew and in the perfection that God always intended. We do not know when this will come. Like John, we will probably not live to see it in this life. But in looking forward to Christmas – in keeping this season of Advent as a season of expectation and preparation, we remind ourselves that God so loved his creation that he became part of it, and that he continues to be part of it with us, working alongside us, in everything we do, so that in everything we do, no matter how humble, or mundane, we are bearing witness to the glory of God through his creation.

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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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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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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.