‘For “In Him we live and move and have our being”’
Acts 17:28
A man was walking his dog alongside a lake and idly picked up a stick and threw it into the lake for his dog to fetch. To his utter astonishment, the dog walked across the water, picked up the stick and walked back across the water, dropping the stick, but not dripping with water at his master’s feet. The man, in a daze thinking he was hallucinating twice threw the stick back into the water, only to watch bewildered as each time the dog walked on the water to retrieve the stick. Worried about his own mental health he called a friend to urgently come down to the lake – and when he arrived threw the stick into the lake and once more the dog walked out and returned to shore completely dry. ‘Did you see that?’ he almost screamed at his friend. ‘Wow!’ his friend replied – ‘your dog . . . it can’t swim!!’
[With hearty thanks to John Pritchard, former Bishop of Oxford]
We can know about many things, but to really know them we have to dive in, to be immersed in them. We can’t really know what a lake or indeed an ocean is, unless we go swimming into the depths, and the height, and the width and the breadth. The week before last at General Synod, we heard more from Archbishop Winston regarding ‘Moana Theology’ – Ocean Theology. As I might have said, his talk on this at the Synod in Waitangi in 2014 left a deep impression on me, for here was theology done deep in the reality of existence. Of Wind and Wave, of the complex web of interdependence between those who dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea and those who live on those fragile scraps of land with all its storm born chaos in the immensity of Moana, the Ocean.
And there is no better stopping off point for us moderns than this perspective, especially on this Trinity Sunday – for we have bought an illusion about our existence, in the World and indeed in God – an illusion that says, ‘there is some Olympian height – some place where we can stand back and consider the reality of our lives, or indeed the Reality of God himself. And so we draw diagrams, or word pictures to ‘illustrate the Trinity’ as if we might reduce God to a set of ideas to ponder and either accept or reject. Liberalism and Fundamentalism being in essence to sides of the same coin . . . for how unthinkingly do we speak about God . . . as if He were not ‘everywhere present and filling all things’ . . . this is why the true language of faith is not language about God, but language directed to God – Worship – Praise – Thanksgiving – Lament – Confession. God is our Life – apart from Him we are no thing.
Where will we stand to consider God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit . . .
And our readings today will not give us nice theoretical answers – let us consider for example our Psalm.
O Lord, our Sovereign, how majestic is your name in all the earth!
You have set your glory above the heavens. Out of the mouths of babes and infants you have founded a bulwark because of your foes, to silence the enemy and the avenger. When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you have established; what are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them? Yet you have made them a little lower than God, and crowned them with glory and honour. You have given them dominion over the works of your hands; you have put all things under their feet, all sheep and oxen, and also the beasts of the field, the birds of the air, and the fish of the sea, whatever passes along the paths of the seas.
O Lord, our Sovereign, how majestic is your name in all the earth!
Do you hear the heart of worship? The Psalmist immersed in the Creation, Immersed in the Worship of the living God. The Psalms, the basic language of our faith – teaching us faith, not as ideas but by a lived human response to the God who was and is and is to come, even in his apparent absence. For the Psalmist, God IS existence.
So too the apostle Paul. In the fifth chapter of the epistle to the Romans he begins making what might sound to us to be ‘objective – dry – theological statements – not getting his feet wet, not swimming we might say
Therefore, since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ,
But not so, our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand;
for this grace has gathered us up, taken us into itself and like the ocean current brought us into a new place – access – we have been brought into this grace – the Life of God and that Life has so taken root in us and brought for the fruit of hope!! And what a Hope! and we boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God. Anyone who knows true hope knows it goes much deeper than a vague wish – we boast – we confidently proclaim our hope of sharing the glory of God.
Having been granted access to the Ocean we now feel the water bouying us up! And we begin to Rejoice to Enjoy our life in Him. Yet this is not for a moment otherworldly it is Real. It is rooted in the true circumstances of our lives. As our Polynesian brothers and sisters were full of life and hope, even though the waters surge and the waves and the winds blow with unimaginable force, so our immersion into God teaches us through many strange means – but knowing that Grace and Peace, ‘we also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, Why? because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us. Because we know God present within us, as Brett taught us last week – we Know the Love of God in our hearts, we are set free to love others – we sense the powerful River of Life beginning to surge through us as the Holy Spirit is poured into us.
Jesus said, The Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Truth ‘will glorify me, because he will take what is mine and declare it to you.’ The Holy Spirit points us to Jesus – we come to Know and Love Jesus because of the action of the Holy Spirit, who always and everywhere works to direct us to Jesus – and pointing us to Jesus he draws us into Jesus relationship with the Father – for whoever has seen Jesus has seen the Father All that the Father has is mine. For this reason I said that [The Holy Spirit] will take what is mine and declare it to you.
This is why we speak of God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit – for by Grace through faith the Holy Spirit has made Jesus known to us, we have come to love him, and by that same Spirit we have been drawn into Jesus’ perfect relationship of Love with the Father – as St Paul tells us For all who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God. For you did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received a spirit of adoption. When we cry, ‘Abba! Father!’ it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ—if, in fact, we suffer with Christ [There it is again, that note of real world faith] . . . so that we may also be glorified with Christ.
Trinity Sunday is not a Sunday for sitting on the shore looking out at the water and trying to figure it out – it is not even a Sunday for walking on the water – it is Sunday for swimming in the depths of the profound Love of God and Knowing Him in Truth as Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
“When Jesus saw the crowds, he went up the mountain; and after he sat down,
his disciples came to him.
Then he began to speak, and taught them”
Many years ago now, Sarah and I hosted a home group for our small church in Bradford. It was a very down to earth group with good honest down to earth members. There was Elsie – a former mill worker and clippie on the trams. She’d been ‘Born again’ in her late seventies, and glowed with the presence of Jesus – there was Sue and her husband John, who devoted their life to fostering children, and becoming so attached to them that they ended up adopting them. Sue always listened to the story of the Rich young man and said, ‘Jesus can have what he asks for, but I dread him asking me to give up my dishwasher . . .’ 🙂 John and his wife shirley. John had gone to Nicaragua on a mission trip and been so broken by what he’d seen that he never recovered. Then there was Cath. Cath who could recite the names of all the books of the bible without batting an eyelid, whose knowledge of scripture was unmatched, and had a deep gentleness of Spirit.
One year, the Vicar asked me to write some study material on Discipleship. I remember clearly the first night when I introduced the topic to the group, and Cath saying. ‘Ooohh. I’m not at All Sure . . . We’re not all called to be disciples you know . . .’ 🙂
I didn’t see the parallel at the time, but I was teaching at a Roman Catholic high school where, despite the best efforts of the RE teachers, there was a similar attitude towards ‘The Saints’ amongst the working class Irish Catholic population from whose numbers most of our students were drawn. The idea which despite all endeavours it was hard to eradicate, the idea that there was some kind of ‘spiritual elite’. That there were ‘ordinary Christians’, and then there were disciples, that there were ordinary Catholics, and then there were ‘Saints’.
For Cath, ‘Disciples’ were ‘up there’ – on a pedestal – although, looking back I wonder if she, or indeed any of us could have identified one we actually Knew . . . rather like the Saints, these were people of history and myth, many of whom in the school where I taught were literally on a pedestal, or a picture on the wall with a candle beneath.
And of course, given the prevailing understanding of heaven, the Saints were quite literally ‘up there’ . . . The Elite . . . but more than that, the myth of The Elite, produced an understanding of the Christian Life which was as it were two tier. Not only was there Heaven up there, there was Earth down here . . . of course we didn’t like to think about down there . . . and this sort of spiritual cosmology was replicated in a sort of Spiritual Geography, a hierarchy. Ordinary Christians, and the Elite Christians, the Saints, or for my sister Cath, a lady of Strongly Protestant inclinations, ‘Disciples’ . . .
And Jesus – demolishes this idea . . he doesn’t so much not turn on its head any ideas we have of an Elite. He calls his people to something far more challenging, something as it were out of this World. Which brings us to The Beatitudes . . .’ So wired together into our human psyche ares the idea of an Elite and Progress – as those who have Grown Upwards ‘Onwards and Upwards’ we say [Evolutionary thinking is the way our culture names this myth]. So hard wired is it that the Beatitudes come as a terrible shock.
Blessed are the Who??? The words of Jesus are SO hard to swallow, that I know of at least one American writer who twisted himself in knots to say that Jesus – despite the text being clear, wasn’t teaching his disciples at all. How hard is it for one soaked in say American culture, which is of course the one we’re all trained to buy into, how hard is it for one so trained – to hear the Gospel announcement of the Blessed?? The poor, the mourners, the meek, the hungry, the persecuted . . . This writer choked on this passage declared that Jesus MUST have been looking beyond the disciples, and declaring, ‘Hey! The Kingdom is for the losers as well . . .’ . . . which is a problem as not all of Jesus words about the blessed can easily be translated as blessed are the losers . . . Blessed are the Pure in heart . . . Blessed are the peacemakers . . . BUT given that Growth MUST be upwards!!!! Then somehow we have to find a way to deny the words of Jesus . . . Certainly Jesus’ words addressed to his disciples, demolish all our ideas of Elite.
Certainly as far as the world understands it, the poor, the mourners, the meek, the persecuted are not those ‘who have made it’, but Jesus says, those who have made it are the poor, meek, mourners – those persecuted for righteousness sake . . . but surely we might argue, isn’t Jesus setting up a different idea of Elite??? Isn’t he purely reversing the direction and those who ‘make it’ make the best fist of ‘downward mobility’?? after all, didn’t he say ‘The first shall be last and the last first – whoever would be chief amongst you must become the servant of all – whoever loses his life for my sake and that of the gospel shall find it . . . Isn’t it still all about some form of achievement by downwards progress??? After all, aren’t the Saints pictures to us of deepest humility, as opposed to Pride, or Poverty as opposed to Riches?? As if these things were to be understood on a continuum and all we have to do to understand Jesus is to tip things upside down??
Our difficulty I think comes from a misunderstanding of ‘Saint’. It’s a misunderstanding that we’ve been happy to live with – pertly because it fits our understanding of the world as we know it – a simple parallel between Worldly success, and Spiritual success, even if in opposite directions. But we may also be happy to accept this simple story of reversal, because the actual meaning of Saint is far more shocking than any simple reversal of values which we might try to live out.
Christians, are not people with as it were a set of values which are simply ‘downward’ instead of ‘upward’ mobility – rather they are a people with a completely different form of existence, a New Life. Not an improvement on the old – not the old life with the bad bits taken out – not the old life tipped on its head, but a New Life.
‘Saint’ comes from the word for ‘Holy’ . . . well so far, so not useful – there we go again, another elite word. Holy we generally take to mean in terms of ‘at the top of the virtue scale’ As it were the opposite end of the spectrum from ‘Evil’. As if everything were some from of sophisticated moral gradation. Not just Good people and Bad people, we know that that is too simplistic . . . but Evil people through bad, through naughty, through rough diamonds, through good, right up . . . (there we go again with the up down language) Right up to Saints, the ‘holy’. But That is the meaning that we have given to ‘Holy’ – it is not the meaning that the Scriptures give.
‘Holy’ means ‘Set apart’. The things associated with the worship of God were Holy, but that was as it were a signifier, that The people of God were as set apart as the Holy Things. The people of God from the call of Abraham, a landless wanderer, through the calling of Israel, a people called to a land, to the disciples – were to be a people – are to be a people – set apart for the Glory of God. So set apart that they were not to be like the surrounding nations with their Kings – for God was to be their Shepherd King. A people with a land, but not like any other, that God might be glorified in and through them. And so The King comes and calls his people to separate themselves and gather round Him.
When Jesus saw the crowds, he went up the mountain;
and after he sat down,
his disciples came to him.
Then he began to speak, and taught them
Jesus sees the crowd, he sees Everyone, but those whom he has called to be with Him, his disciples, come out of the crowd – they come to Him, stood before Him and separated from the Crowd – they are set apart – and he teaches Them. He teaches them about the nature of their existence, their New life in and with Him. A life which in its Otherness, would be Light to the World, which is dark. Jesus tells them, your life as the poor in spirit, mourning, meek, persecuted, pure in heart, peacemaking, your Life Is Salt of the Earth, Light to the World. A Life which is radically for the World, but not of the World. A life in which their identity is completely bound up with Him. Set Apart – Holy – Saints.
To be Baptised is to become part of a people, the body of Christ set apart entirely for the purposes of God and the Glory of God. To be a disciple, to be a Saint. Not Better than the World, not to be a brighter light in the world, but to be different, to be The Light of the World. Not each in his various callings, you in your small corner, and I in mine, but Together as the community of the Saints, those called apart for the Glory of God and for the sake of the World.
Christendom, as we have been recalling, subverted that. There were those whom everyone said were ‘called into the Church’ – I must admit that I choked upon my ordination at a card from a colleague of a Catholic persuasion ‘upon the occasion of your ordination into the Church of Christ’. Denying that we are a Kingdom of Priests, together. Then there were for my sister Cath, those special ones, the ‘disciples’, denying that there is only one form of Christian existence, which is to be with Jesus and taught by Jesus, to be a disciple, and of course The Saints . . .
And so St Paul as he writes to the churches of Asia minor and further afield writes ‘To the Saints who are in Ephesus’ or ‘To those called to be Saints . . .’ Those called to be with Jesus, Together . . .
The call into Christian existence is not a call to huge moral effort – it is far far more challenging than that – to hear the call of Jesus is to belong to a people set apart for the Glory of God in the world. There is an old name for that people, an old name but a truthful one, The Communion of Saints. We are all called to be Saints
Just this week I was at a presentation at a local school where the guest speaker told us ‘I am living proof that it is possible to have a career in the Arts . . .’ I really didn’t know exactly what to make of this. For underlying the proposition was an imperative ‘You must have a career . . . we all have to have a career’ Or put another way – one cannot just be an artist, one has to earn a living . . . To say that earning a living is antithetical to the Good News of Jesus Christ is a truism, but to our modern ears perhaps it is an absurdity . . .
We live in what the German philosopher Josef Pieper called a culture of total work. He was writing 70 years ago – in many respects his work was as prophetic as it was contemporary. What with the advent of phones which carry your emails, not a few of us know an existence where work fills every waking hour . . . and work defines us, it gives us our ‘significant identity’, our value in the world. If you doubt this, look at the reaction on people’s faces when Sarah tells them her work is to tend to house and home and garden and bring up our children . . . or note how many folk turn up at funerals to discover the truth of the person behind their work . . . even our latter days should we live that long are ‘Retirement’ – in other words defined by our work, and the idea that one must earn a living is of course a subtle if unconscious driver in terms of how we treat those who do not . . . for example children
When people ask our children ‘What are you going to be when you grow up?’ They will often be met by cheerful laughter. Laughter is the only way to deal with Totalitarian narratives about our existence. And of course it is a Totalitarian Narrative – be it Covertly in Capitalist systems, or overtly and more truthfully therefore in Communist systems ‘Work is good for you’, Work gives your life a sense of meaning, ‘Work makes you free . . .’
Contrary to this totalising narrative of Work and Identity, the Jewish people were given the Sabbath. This practise marked them out, and we might perhaps be tempted to say that therefore it is the most important practise for the people of God in this day of ‘total work’. Sabbath set limits to our work. As the LORD set limits to the sea saying to its proud waves ‘Thus far and no further’ [Job 38:11] so Work was held back so that it did not flood their existence. And indeed the children of Israel had every reason to practise Sabbath given their history. As the footnote to the fourth commandment said ‘Remember that you were a slave in Egypt, and the LORD your GOd brought you out from there with a mighty arm . . . It was the occassion of the Egyptians groaning under the slavery of Pharaoh the Egyptian culture of ‘Total Work’ which had occasioned the LORD to reveal himself to Moses and set them free – to bring them out and form them into His people. To forget the Sabbath was for your self awareness to be drowned under the sea of Work, it was to forget who you were as a Jew, that is One who had been saved from ‘total work’ by God, and FOR God. It was to forget God, and all cultures of ‘total work’ are fundamentally atheist, however religiously observant they are.
The Sabbath was a multi dimensional claim on Existence itself. It was about who you were – your identity – NOT what you did. Sabbath told you that your Life was only with others. “YOU shall not do any work—you, or your son or your daughter, or your male or female slave, or your ox or your donkey, or any of your livestock, or the resident alien in your towns, so that your male and female slave may rest as well as you.”
When the powerful do not rest, neither does anyone else. People who work all the time require others to do the same. When those with money will not rest from shopping, others must be dragged from rest to serve them. When the CEO is sending emails seven days a week, every minion must pay constantly pay attention to their inbox . . . Pharaohs throughout the ages are tormented by dreams, and the whole empire must rush to serve them and calm the fears of the self made life.
And therein was the key to Sabbath, for Total work is the fruit of Anxiety, the refusal to accept life as a Gift, the deep rooted belief that life had to be earned. It is the failure to know yourself as the child of the ‘Father in heaven who knows you need all these things’, and who sets you free to seek the Kingdom of God. It is total amnesia.
Sabbath told you were a Child of the Father, Loving God with heart souls mind and strength (as a child loves) identifying with the One who rested. ‘For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but rested the seventh day’.
You rest because God your Father rests. Nowhere in scripture is human work related to God’s work except in Jesus. Identifying human work with God’s work was but a covert attempt to secure our existence for ourselves, rather than accept the Gift of Sabbath. The Scribal tradition used one verb for God’s work, and another for human work, there is no 6-day a week correspondence. But there is one verb for Rest. It was in Sabbath that Israel’s identity as the child of God was known . . . The Sabbath had nothing to do with Work, except as restraint from the primal sin of forgetting the Father who knows your needs and instead making a Life for yourself.
And thus the Sabbath day alone was Holy. As God alone is Holy, to be invited to Sabbath is to be invited to Participate in the Life of God – to be His child.
For many many years the people of God had suffered under totalitarian regimes from North and East and South, the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Egyptians, the Greeks and now finally the Romans, the Jewish people had desperately clung onto their sense of who they were through Sabbath observance.
And the Pharisees understood that it was Their role, their Sacred duty to act as the guardians of Jewish identity, and thus to secure the existence of the Jewish people, and thus they were Anxious about the ‘correct understanding of the Sabbath’, not least because that interpretation was one which ruling powers had accommodated themselves to and allowed to continue . . .
So Jesus words ‘Come to me all you who are weary and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest . . .’ come, not like a comfort blanket, like a bumper sticker slogan for hard times, but high explosive claim for all of Identity and existence, in a situation which reeked of fear. Fear of losing their national identity, and fear of what the Romans might do to them if things were pushed too far . . . For of course it was eminently suitable to any occupying power that there was an agreement with the power brokers that after a day off, everyone would be back at their desks . . . (Middle management has always been a position of Curse . . . ) and here comes Jesus, talking of giving Rest, and No words about six days shalt thou labour . . . Jesus, as he had done with the law on Murder and Adultery, had revealed the Fourth commandment, the Sabbath also to be a limit on human evil, and consequently a limit on their participation in the Life of God, a limitation upon the Reign and Rule of God to just one day in Seven.
The fullness of Life which Jesus came to proclaim and to enact was prefigured in the Sabbath Command, like all the law, a school teacher to point us to the Good, but its total fulfilment was revealed in Jesus. ‘Come to me all you who are weary and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.’ I will. Jesus as he speaks with his disciples is pointing to himself as the one who truly reveals the identity of God’s people . . . In the Life, Death and Resurrection of Jesus we are invited to the participate in Holy Time – not one day in seven, but ‘Eternal Life’ – to a Life defined not by our work, but by our, parentage as children of our Father in heaven . . .
Jesus words were and are a total claim on the people of God and their true identity . . .and this is why the Pharisees ‘went out and conspired against him, how to destroy him’.
For surely They were the true guardians of the identity of Israel, and if they along with the Herodians and Scribes could deliver a pacified workforce, taught ‘six days shalt thou labour’, they could keep their position, and keep the Powers that be happy. God may have commanded rest, ‘but the world cannot work unless we work like crazy on the other six . . .’ and everything before the ‘but’ is always negated . . .
Matthew gives us the fullest account of how Total is Jesus‘ claim regarding himself and thus the Identity of all of the children of God. Jesus’ conflict about Sabbath isn’t finally about Work and Rest, it’s about Everything to do with the Identity of God’s people, those who bear the name of Jesus Christ – those who Participate in God’s Holiness, in his very Life. It is the breaking of Sabbath Consciousness into all of existence, in and through Jesus Christ
At that time Jesus went through the cornfields on the sabbath; his disciples were hungry, and they began to pluck heads of grain and to eat.When the Pharisees saw it, they said to him, ‘Look, your disciples are doing what is not lawful to do on the sabbath.’ The Pharisees defined Sabbath and thus all of Israel’s existence. But Jesus completely reinterprets the fourth commandment, and makes himself the centre of it, this command that links the existence of God to the existence of the people of God. Jesus said to them, ‘Have you not read what David did when he and his companions were hungry? He entered the house of God and ate the bread of the Presence, which it was not lawful for him or his companions to eat, but only for the priests. David and his companions. Jesus and his disciples . . .
When Jesus enters Jerusalem, the Pharisees rebuke him for allowing children and disciples to cry out ‘Hosanna to the Son of David, Hosanna to the King’. The crowd tell Bartimaeus to shut up when he cries out ‘Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me’ Any word of a new King will bring it all crashing down and reminding the people that the king had eaten the Holy Bread when they were hungry. The people as we know from the feeding of the 5000 are hungry – Life under Roman rule is harsh for all the accommodation of the Jewish rulers with the Powers that be . . . As to this day, there is always a good market for ‘spiritual messages’ which make one feel nice when life is harsh, but do not threaten the status quo . . . But Jesus is demolishing the status quo. Or have you not read in the law that on the sabbath the priests in the temple break the sabbath and yet are guiltless? For indeed are not all God’s people priests?? A royal priesthood? A holy Nation they were called, ever before the Sabbath commandment was given . . . Jesus again calling his fellow Jews to their true identity I tell you, something greater than the temple is here. Sabbath – Kingship – Priesthood – Temple. Who truly is the King of the Jews? To whom do they belong? What defines them? Take my yoke upon you and learn from me . . . the yoke the symbol of the King . . . The Pharisees considered themselves to be the guardians of the identity of God’s people, and in so doing left them enslaved – denying that they were a people radically set free by God. Jesus takes all their precious signs of identity and says, these are mine, and My people are Free.
Finally this Sabbath Life, this Eternal Life is revealed in power, as Jesus heals, ‘to show that the Son of Man has authority on earth . . .’. This is a total claim for Authority – a total claim on Identity. These, Jesus is saying are my people. , and ‘the Pharisees went out and conspired against him, how to destroy him.’
And so the True existence of the people of God is revealed in the Resurrection, the eighth day, the day outside of the workaday existence, the New Time, the time that is Eternal – and for almost all the church’s existence, the body of Christ has not mentioned Sabbath. Augustine gives it the briefest of mentions, Aquinas too . . . but to this day Catholic and Orthodox theologians don’t mention it . . . Life was marked by Human work, growing food, tending for the sick, bringing up children, study and scholarship, art, the hungry fed, the elderly revered and listened to for their wisdom – and in and through all of it, Celebration and Worship – every day prayer and worship.
But following the Reformation ‘Sabbath’ begins to make a comeback . . . as do such phrases as ‘Hard work is good for you’, ‘Work makes you free’. The ladies of C17 Holland were much taken with that new blue and white fashion, Delft China. This it is fairly clear was the root of Consumerism – and following hot on its heels ‘The Protestant Work Ethic’, after all, if one wanted all these new consumer goodies that the Industrial revolution was pouring out, one needed to earn more money, one needed to work for more than the basic essentials of life, and one needed to justify this new found zeal for work, for new forms of work and money making. The Scriptures called this Greed, but . . . if one needed to do that , then there were and indeed are more than enough apologists to work out neat sophisticated arguments for more work, for denying that God’s work and human work are not the same . . . where of course people weren’t enslaved . . . so we were brought Consumerism, The Work Ethic, and now a plethora of books on the Sabbath . . . for after all, in this brave New World we have Created for ourselves, everyone needs a rest from their work . . . as if that were the meaning of Sabbath . . . and everyone of those books as far as my researches suggest written by a Protestant writer . . .
As I have suggested over the past weeks, Jesus does not come to us as a ‘spiritual salve’ for when life is hard. ‘Come to me all you who are weary and are heavy laden and I will give you rest’ is the gentle demand on the whole of our existence, that we do not live to work, rather the goal of our existence is Love of God and Neighbour.
Yes. There is work to be done, the hungry must be fed, the sick healed, the elderly and frail cared for, children brought up to know who they are . . . did you know that the word ‘School’ literally means ‘leisure’ I’ve been telling one or two of my young friends this . . .The land must be cared for and tended, its wounds cleansed and repaired . . . food must be grown – but the goal of the whole creation of all existence is Life with God. Thy will done on Earth as in Heaven. As St Paul puts it – everyone should do some work with their hands, so that they have something to share with the poor.That is Human work
The Sabbath commandment which is a restraining ordinance, points to the deeper truth of the Life which is known in Jesus Christ. Knowing our existence is secure in Him. To refuse this gift is to refuse life itself. Our insistence upon Total Work – our refusal of Life not as something to be toiled for but as a Gift of our Father, leads us to a deep and destructive amnesia . . . forgetting that we belong to the one who ‘gives us Rest’ – and it is destroying us, and it is destroying God’s Good Creation
Work has overstepped its bounds and the whole creation is now led back into utter slavery and despoilation. As Isaiah prophesied, ‘The earth dries up and withers, the world languishes and withers; the heavens languish together with the earth. The earth lies polluted under its inhabitants;
for they have transgressed laws, violated the statutes, broken the everlasting covenant.’ [Isaiah 24]
Our reading from Joshua concluded – The Land had rest from war . . . our wretched Greed has meant that it is many years since the Land knew such rest . .. Sabbath Rest included the land. Every seventh year the Land was to lie fallow. This was a sustaining ordinance. As Sabbath restrained our evil desires to make lives for ourselves, so for the Land to bring forth her increase, required us to be restrained in our work, restraining our evil. The Land had to have rest. And as the Gospel is good news for the poor, those enslaved, the Lord will see that the Land, HIS good Earth has Rest.
As the Sabbath Command was given to restrain evil, so too the Command of the Lord restrained the proud waves, and set their limits. We have thrown off the gentle yoke in our quest to earn a living – creating a world of ‘total work’ – and the waves are rapidly encroaching their bounds.
Dear Lord and Father of Mankind, forgive our foolish ways, reclothe us in our rightful minds . . .
Sermon for Sunday 13th September 2015
‘Stewardship’
James 3:1-12
Mark 8:27-38
‘ . . .as those who will give an account’
Dangerous Faith
Anglicanism has more than its fair share of peculiarities, hardly surprising for a church which had its genesis in the determination of a King to marry whomsoever he wanted at a time of religious upheaval in the 16th Century.
But for the purposes of today, when we are considering Stewardship, I want to think about our Anglican posture of prayer. Not because I want everyone to pray that more money will come in – but because our posture in prayer says something about how we relate to God, and not only in theory. We are embodied, and what we do with our bodies affects our faith as much as our faith affects what we do with our bodies. You may like to spend time praying adopting different positions – pay attention to how it changes the disposition of your heart and mind . . .
So how does being Anglican affect our posture in prayer? Well, the fact is that by and large our way of praying is rather odd – for historically and indeed until recently, pretty uniformly, Anglicans kneel to pray. OK so some more modern types sit – itself unusual historically, after all, only the relatively wealthy could afford to put seats into their churches – or adopt the shampoo position, which is sort of half way between sitting and kneeling whilst massaging your follicles, but as the prayer book repeatedly says – ‘the people all kneeling . . .’.
Whereas the way to pray most commonly observed and practised, and that of our Jewish forebears also, is that we pray Standing up! I’ll come to standing up in a minute, but why are Anglicans different? Well as far as we can tell it was because in the feudal times out of which the Church of England grew – one knelt before one’s lord and master, and so transferring that practise it seemed right and proper to kneel before God – but I suggest that that is not helpful. Not least because it leaves us entirely with a sense that we are supplicants in prayer, which is only a very small part of the story.
Our primary relationship to God is not one of begging. And certainly if we consider what it is to be a Steward, then begging isn’t primarily what we are about. For God in Christ has so dignified his people that he calls them to be Stewards of all that He has created, and in that dignity to Stand before him.
In the book of Job – after Job has poured out all his complaints, the LORD confronts Job with the words – ‘gird up your loins like a man and I will question you, and you shall declare to me.’ For 35 chapters Job has sat in the dust and pondered his plight, and now the LORD appears with the command – get up from the dust – face me like a man! Gird up your loins is a way of saying – get ready for hard labour – get ready for battle! ‘I will question you, and you shall declare to me.’ God invites Job to debate face to face. Astonishingly, God treats the human as in a sense an equal – and expects us not to cower but to Stand before Him. So we learn to speak with God as it were ‘Face to Face’ Standing. If you wish to enter into a deeper apprehension of your life before God, Standing to pray makes a huge difference – After all – is not God Present??!
Now at this point you may be asking – WHAT has this got to do with Stewardship??? Surely you need to be talking about how we need to be giving more etc. etc. etc. Or give us guidelines – or something.
Well I’m not . . . The Christian Life is not one in which we are spoon fed. God in Christ has forgiven us our sins and set us free from Sin. We don’t have to sin. God in Christ through the gift of the Spirit has taken us up from the dust and set us on our feet – he offers his Life to us that we might obey his commandments and do them – to love our neighbour as ourself, to love God with all we have and all we are. God treats us like responsible adults. ‘This is the way, walk in it . . .’
For example, as we have thought about over the last few weeks – when the wealthy young man comes to Jesus, Jesus tells him it like it is – he treats him as a responsible human being. This is the deal – sell your possessions give the money to the poor, then come follow me . . . over and over again Jesus says things that treat us not like infants, but adults. And sadly and too often, we seek to evade Jesus Word to us – the Word that gives Life . . .
So the parable to the talents, the man going on a journey puts all his wealth in the hands of his servants . . . As the Psalmist says ‘The Earth is the LORD’s and everything in it’ Everything belongs to God – he puts it into the hands of the human. Let us make man in our own image, ‘according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.’Each of the stewards is held responsible – it is the one who tries to squirm away, who seeks to evade his responsibilities who finds himself in the mire. As Jesus said – when the invitation to the Kingdom came, ‘one after another began to make his excuses . . .’ The call into the Kingdom is a fearful call for it is at once a call to our true dignity and therefore Responsibility as human beings – not by the deceitful standards of the World, but by the Command of the One who created the heavens and the Earth . . . our stewardship is not calculated to win us the admiration of society, but God’s Well Done, Good and faithful steward
When we are baptised into the Life of the Church – the time for excuses is over. Yes we may sin, and for that we confess our sins one to another that we might be healed – but no excuses now. God in Raising Christ from the dead has set us up on our feet – our Life, our very Existence is now Face to Face with the Living God, and thus as the Scriptures continually tell us – we must give an account . . . Baptism is not into some life where we are as it were held in cossetted existence, no it is a passage into Life before God, It is an awakening to the true reality of our lives and our Life Together – in all its Glory and all its Fear of the LORD.
Those who are called by the church to teach should know this accountability well, for we are called on me to preach the gospel of Jesus Christ, and no other gospel. Not to as it were to try and find easy ways around the words of Jesus, but to face up to them for ourselves and to declare them to God’s people. As St Paul says ‘Woe to me if I do not preach the gospel!’ It’s of course tempting to say – God help me if I don’t, but it is to God that the preacher is responsible!!! There is no other defence!!! As James puts it in his epistle we who teach will be judged with greater strictness. Yet it is not only the ordained who are given the capacity for speech. Perhaps in no greater way does God give over Stewardship to man than in conferring upon him the terrifying power of speech?? As Paul says, Let no evil talk come out of your mouths, but only what is useful for building up, as there is need, so that your words may give grace to those who hear. And what terrifying responsibility – for as James tells us, the ongue is like the rudder of a ship – small but guiding and directing its course – our Speech creates worlds for Good or Ill – and it forms us also. As Jesus puts it I tell you, on the day of judgement you will have to give an account for every careless word you utter; for by your words you will be justified, and by your words you will be condemned.’
It is no wonder that James exhorts us – ‘be slow to speak’ – for we will have to give an account of our stewardship of the Divine Gift of speech. And Peter is reminded of that in the most forceful of terms. Responding to the words of Jesus hastily he says the first thing that comes out of his mouth. And Jesus treats his words with full seriousness – ‘Get behind me Satan!!’ As I have said before, our Life in Christ is a matter of LIfe and Death, to dare to call oneself Christian is to take the responsibility for our Life that he places into our hands
Jesus summons to Life could not be more serious “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. 35For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.” To follow Christ – to die to oneself is to be set free in Radical Responsibility. It is to live with the Command of God as our only guide. No rules no regulations, certainly no careful calculations. One of the insights I had about myself on Sabbatical was a tendency to try and be calculating in my Life before God. The only response to the Life of God is Yes, or No. There are no %ages. It is all or nothing. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.” Simply all we have comes from God – and we are to use it for HIs Glory – the Glory of the One we Love – according to our unique abilities – to Love God with all we have and all we are, and to love our neighbours as ourselves.
That is our Life – it is the meaning of our Existence. To be a steward of that which God has given us is to live with this Life giving Command before our eyes, day in and day out. It is to live knowing that we shall all have to give an account – it is to understand that nothing we have is ours, even our very lives, but everything belongs to our Father, as we ourselves are his Precious possession.
We are HIs precious possession – it is because we belong to Him in Jesus, that we have life; because we belong to Him in Jesus that we are set free to live in true Responsibility for our LIves. It is our sense of the reality or otherwise of our relationship before God in Jesus Christ which marks out how we respond to that. Whether, knowing Him and Loving Him we dare stand before Him, Rejoicing in Him and boldly stepping out in Life in His Name. Or, not knowing him, hearing words about giving an account with terror and fear
It’s not my place to tell anyone how much to give – or to what – but an obligation is placed on me to remind us that God in Jesus Christ has radically saved us and brought us into the kingdom of his Son, He has given us his life, breathing the Holy Spirit into each one of us, lifting us from the dust of death and setting us on our feet – facing Him moment by moment and day by day. Our Life is before God, and we will have to give an account to God of how we have used all he has put into our hands – so let us respond not with fear and excuses, with self serving calculation, but – with cheerfulness – indeed as St Paul puts it in the Greek with Hilaritos – as Children of our Father bestowing gifts upon the righteous and the unrighteous – with Joy and Gladness in all of our Stewarding of the Good Gifts he has bestowed upon us.
For in truth all of us are accountable before God for what we have done with that which is his . . . Not taking responsibility before God for all he has placed into our hands is to deny the very Life he has given us – but let us not hide in the shadows of excuses and fear, but walk fully in the Light of the Life of Christ, so that on the last day when he shall come to judge the Earth, we may rejoice at his coming and Stand before Him, as we have learned to do. Rejoicing Always, Praying without Ceasing, and giving thanks in all circumstances – for this is God’s will for us in Christ Jesus.
‘Make every effort to enter in at the narrow gate,
for many I tell you will try to enter and will not be able to’
A couple of weeks ago I mentioned at the end of the sermon the Church in Syria – which is undergoing the most horrendous persecution imaginable. To many of us no doubt, inculcated as we are in a secularised understanding of our faith, this may well seem to us to be little more than just another example of what is called ‘Religion’ gone bad – but is it? Or is there something far more consequential happening? For as I briefly set out last time, the Church in Syria is no ordinary Church – it’s not just another church.
The Scriptures tell us that St Paul, following his conversion set out to preach the gospel in Damascus which of course is in modern day Syria, and the Church which sprang from that teaching remains there to this day. Some of the oldest Christian writings, the New Testament aside come from that Church, most notably the letters of St Ignatius, the second bishop of Antioch, whom the Tradition teaches was himself a disciple of our own St John the Evangelist. These letters were written around the turn of the first century. Liturgically it has hardly changed for nearly two thousand years, and its language ‘Syriac Aramaic’ is thought to be the language which Jesus himself spoke.
The idea that there is nothing more troubling in the mass martyrdom which is being inflicted on this church than the World describes as Religion gone bad is, I suggest a failure to grasp the significance of the attempted anihilation of the One Church which can truly trace its ancestry directly back to the Traditions of the Apostles. Because they have barely changed
Compare and contrast the church in much of the West – by the Way there are Syrian Orthodox in Dunedin – here Churches left right and centre are driven along by the waves of history – changing form and shape to match the current culture. Seeking to be ‘Relevant’. Over just the last 20 years or so we have seen a whole raft of ‘new forms of church’ or new movements of church – one after the other after the other – seeker sensitive church, messy church, emergent church, liquid church, purpose driven church – and I’m sure folk could come up with other multiple variants – all established on an erroneous proposition, that is we come up with a ‘culturally relevant’ form of worship – people will flock in and become disciples of Jesus . . . but actually they don’t.
Which when you think about it isn’t all that surprising, firstly because it starts from a false premise, that Worship is all about the worshipper and not The One whom we Worship. Worship which is moulded to the worshipper cannot fail to be idolatrous – what is revealed is not the Living God, but the reflection of the worshipper.
I remember in one of my churches a middle aged lady used to go on at length about needing worship music which would ‘get the young people in, the sort of music which young people enjoy today’. Well that is problematic 🙂 For ‘Young people’ are not a coherent group – I know some young people who enjoy Bach, others who like Garage music – a growing number it seems, although I may be wrong who have little or no interest in music at all. Whilst it is not difficult to stereotype the attitude of consumer churches in terms of the French Revolutionary who saw the mob pass the sidewalk table at which he was drinking his coffee and said ‘They are my people! I must follow them!’ in reality the situation is even more absurd than suggested by that example. One who seeks to follow culture, be it musical or otherwise, is going to find not one, but a plethora of mobs going in 101 different directions – and consequentially following the one that most mirrors their own prejudices. Church in our own image.
I remember another young man in the village where I was Priest telling me not long after I’d arrived – ‘The Church needs to get with it’ To which the only logical response is ‘With which ‘It’ should the Church get?’
The Antiochene Orthodox Church should give we Western Consumer Christians pause for thought. They have lasted 2000 years without seeking to ‘get with it’ – in modern terms wwe might call them anachronistic, for they are utterly irrelevant – yet it is they who are the focus of yet another wave of terrible persecution, one which unlike any previous may possibly lead to their extinction. Apparently the only way their light could be extinguished through murder, sometimes crucifixion – bearing eloquent witness to their Lord, for whose sake they have lost all things.
Which brings us to our Lord Jesus HImself – who shows what is to our eyes a remarkable disinterest about accommodating himself to his hearers, rather unflinchingly calling his hearers to shape their lives to his.
Over and over and over again in the gospels, we hear Jesus speaking words which seem almost to be designed to drive people away. He says that he speaks in parables so that people ‘may not understand’!! He goes on ‘none of you can become my disciple if you do not give up all you have’ – the sort of saying which left St Ignatius, even as he made his away across the East towards his martyrdom in Rome questioning whether even he, who had sat at the feet of St John was truly a disciple of Jesus. How nonchalantly the modern Christian assumes that he or she is a follower of Jesus . . .
Or again the encounter of Jesus and that young enthusiastic man – ‘What must I do to inherit eternal life?’ He says he has kept all the commandments – he’s kept his nose clean and led what to his surrounding society looks like a ‘good life’ – but Jesus tells him, if you truly want to be healed, sell your possessions and give to the poor, then you will have treasure in heaven, and then follow me . . . and he went away sorrowful for he had many possessions. And Jesus turning to those who were following him told them ‘truly I tell you – it is harder for a Rich man to enter the Kingdom of heaven, than it is for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle’. The one thing Jesus didn’t do was run after him and try and change his teaching to adapt itself to the young man. Actually his teaching was perfectly adapted to him – he gave him the Truth – for He is the Truth.
Or Jesus response to the question ‘Lord will only a few be saved’ responds saying – ‘Make every effort to enter in at the narrow door, for many will try to enter and will not be able’ – how alien these words sound to our understanding of Jesus – it perhaps is not going to far to say that we imagine saying, ‘broad and easy is the way that leads to life and many their are that find it – for after all, all that is required is that we are true to our own version of the truth – but hard and narrow is the way that leads to destruction, because after all, most people are good . . .’ We find the words of Jesus an embarrassment and give people almost the directly opposite message. We think the words of Paul about fighting against powers and principalities odd – hey Paul! Dont be ridiculous mate – what’s all this about the quenching the flaming arrows of the evil one?? That’s SO medieval . . . and in smug contentment at our modern way of looking at things we stroll away, and from somewhere we hear muffled laughter . . .
We remember that this gospel reading comes at the end of a long sequence leading on from the feeding of the 5000. In the wilderness . . . Jesus begins by challenging those who have flocked after him ‘you’re only here because I filled your bellies . . .’ Someone, laughing sidles up to him and whispers in his ear . . . “Hey – just keep giving them bread – look at the crowd you’ve got – don’t get all spiritual on them. 5000 – a church of 5000!!! think of that!!! Go on – turn these stones into bread . . .” Who we might well ask is this peddler of Relevance??? “Do something to draw the crowds!! Bring them in Then you can stick them with the hard sell, when you’ve got them gathered – put on some spectacular show – jump off the Temple even!!! Or . . . look Jesus – you really need to get with it – and I’ll see they turn up for you Sunday after Sunday . . . just follow the techniques, get yourself a decent strategic plan, it will all come right, just do what I tell you, here by my book, here’s the strategy!!” – Or to translate and unmask the god of this age, “just bow down and worship me . . .”
But Jesus is not listening to Satan, Jesus caps of his unpalatable [sic] teaching with these words – Just as the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so whoever eats me will live because of me. Jesus seems curiously unconcerned with trying to put the message in terms that are easy to take on board – Rather he confronts us with the Truth and once more we see Jesus as the Church Growth Failure he is, with his stubborn refusal to ‘get with it’, to be ‘Relevant’ When many of his disciples heard it, they said, “This teaching is difficult; who can accept it?” And Jesus’ pastoral response?? You think This is difficult to accept??? This is just the beginning!! Jesus, being aware that his disciples were complaining about it, said to them, “Does this offend you? Then what if you were to see the Son of Man ascending to where he was before? It is the spirit that gives life; the flesh is useless. The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life. This message you reject – my words are Spirit and Life . . . But among you there are some who do not believe.” For Jesus knew from the first who were the ones that did not believe, and who was the one that would betray him. 65And he said, “For this reason I have told you that no one can come to me unless it is granted by the Father.” 66Because of this many of his disciples turned back and no longer went about with him.
From 5000 to . . . 12 . . . nice work Jesus . . . but he hasn’t finished. “Do you also wish to go away?” For he knows that amongst the few who are left is one who will betray him, one who will deny him. Peter at least speaks the Truth we all need to hear and know deep within our hearts – “Lord, to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life. None will be saved without at first recognising this Truth, That Jesus body is Real Food, That Jesus Words are Words of LIfe – however much they seem pointing in exactly the opposite direction – for the way to Life is through our dying to ourselves, The way to life is through the Cross of Jesus and our taking our own up in self denial – try and sell that as an idea for a new church . . . So much if not all of this contemporary frenzy with ‘new forms of church’ has one root and it is a Rotten root. The root of ‘we must do something to survive . . .’ But the way to Life is only found in and through the Cross of Jesus – through our dying to ideas about relevance or 101 other deceitful messages whispered in our panicking ears . . .
Through the Cross comes Life. As Jesus looks at the 12 he knows that one will betray him, one will deny him, and nine who will forsake him. At the Cross, the only disciple is John . . . At the Cross Jesus says to Mary his Mother about John, behold your son – and to John, behold your mother. It is the disciples who goes to the Cross, who becomes the seed and pillar of the Church, the body of Jesus Christ.
The Way of Jesus has nothing to tantalise our consumer sated appetites. It has no USP – like its Saviour there is nothing in her that we should desire her – the Church that bears his name has no business chasing after the herd of cats that are our modern consumer preferences.
The Syrian Orthodox Church does nothing to draw the crowds, it never has – yes it does send out missionaries – and today there are from that first church 4 million believers world wide, even here in Dunedin!, but it has done nothing to adapt itself to the world around – rather by patiently and at times such as this, under fierce persecution, worshipped God in Jesus Christ through the Word and the Sacrament, Words of Life and the Bread of eternal Life. It has not turned to left or right, but rather enduring, to the end, faithful perhaps to The Very End.
May God in his infinite love and mercy grant that we too may be drawn in truth to Jesus Christ – and may we not be found wanting when he comes
A couple of weeks ago we thought about the proposition ‘God loves us too much to give us what we want. . .’ and I ended with the reason that God desires to give us his very self, but we desire far lesser ends. We seek a comfortable life, or one thing or another. Things that in themselves are not bad, for all God creates is good, but things which fade into the background when we See who God is, in and through Jesus Christ. To rework something CS Lewis wrote – we choose to be content playing with mud pies in a slum, when a life at the Seaside is offered us.
God in Jesus Christ has given us his very self – we might well say, there is nothing else God can give us, for he has given us all he has in Christ Jesus. He has given us his Son, he has given us his LIFE.
Last week we pondered how God in Christ has descended to the very depths of all that is, and then ascended to far above the heavens – that he might fill all things and in that filling all things he might sanctify them, so that with the eye of faith, the eye that has seen the self emptying love of God in Jesus Christ -‘whoever has seen me has seen the Father’ – sees everything in the Light of Christ. This is one way of expressing what it means to walk in the Light. It is as if we look out at creation and everywhere we look and everyone we see has a large flag stuck out of their head saying ‘belonging to God the Father in and through Jesus Christ’. To see with the eye of faith is to see the world as it is – to see that Christ fills all things.
In the words of the beautiful ancient hymn, St Patrick’s breastplate
Christ behind me, Christ before me,
Christ beside me, Christ to win me,
Christ to comfort and restore me.
Christ beneath me, Christ above me,
Christ in quiet, Christ in danger,
Christ in hearts of all that love me,
Christ in mouth of friend and stranger.
So with the eye awakened by faith we See Christ in and through all that is good. We see The Good, in and through the good. Our failure of faith is to confuse the good, with the Good, the Creator with the Creation, that sets off the insatiable fires of hellish longing, ‘if only I had. . .’ when God has given us all he has, himself.
As most folk know, there are a couple of ‘significant’ wedding anniversaries amongst us this weekend – and marriage provides us with a model for this seeing. For in the Self giving of husband and wife – we See through that to The Self Giving of Christ to the Church as St Paul so fully sets it out in Ephesians. Marriage is like everything good a Sacrament of God’s self – giving. And this passage is worth quoting at length in order to make her holy by cleansing her with the washing of water by the word, so as to present the church to himself in splendour, without a spot or wrinkle or anything of the kind—yes, so that she may be holy and without blemish. In the same way, husbands should love their wives as they do their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. For no one ever hates his own body, but he nourishes and tenderly cares for it, just as Christ does for the church, because we are members of his body. ‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.’ This is a great mystery, and I am applying it to Christ and the church. Each of you, however, should love his wife as himself, and a wife should respect her husband.
Note what St Paul says, This is a great mystery and I am applying it to Christ and the Church – each of you however should love his wife as himself. In other words the good of Christian marriage, points beyond itself to The Good – which is Christ and his selfemptying love for the Church.
Now lets follow this a little further . . . lets imagine that in a marriage, a husband only loved a wife because of what she did for him, or gave to him. Put another way, if it wasn’t for those things there would be no love. We would say and rightly, that in a true marriage, it is the Self giving of the person which is the foundation, apart from which there is no marriage. The husband gives himself totally in love to his Wife, and the wife gives herself totally in love to her husband. Now of course the things the husband does for the wife and vv may be expressions of that self giving, but at the heart is the desire to give yourself totally to your spouse, to become one flesh. In other words, no other person will do. Someone else could well serve you in the same way, but it is the person who is fundamental and in a real sense – someone else could not serve you in the same way.
So it is with God and the things of God. It is in Loving God in and for himself, that the good things he give come into proper perspective. But if we do not love God, then the Things the good things assume a false significance. They loom in our imagination – our imagination is filled with things, not full of the vision of Christ himself, a vision which gives the things a radically different dimension. The things become idols, and lead us not to Life in its fulness but to death – we chase after the things for love of them, not love of God. We desire marriage, not for the sake of Christ, but for itself – and thus marriage loses its meaning, for it as with All things, are given precisely that we might know Christ – for to know him Is eternal life.
Put another way, because Christ Fills all things, we can only know the Truth about anything in so far as we Know Jesus Christ . . . Apart from the Intimate Knowledge of Jesus Christ – Knowing Him and seeking to Love him – the idea of Christian Values is meaningless.
When you read the accounts of the Early Church, you realise that they seemed as it were to be straining at gnats from our perspective. Why, WE might ask does it matter at all what we think about God?? Heresies and conflicts over heresies were always about what seem to us to be very minor and obscure matters, but as I suggested last week, perhaps, if we are not as a starting point seeing the world around us in and through Jesus Christ, perhaps it is our perspective that is skewed??
Which is what is most unhelpful about all this talk of Christian values and why talking about ‘values’ can rapidly lead us away from Christ. Let’s take for example what many would take to be the core Christian value – so much so that it is not at all uncommon to say ‘It’s all about Love isn’t it . . .’ . . . But the problem is this. Apart from Jesus we do not know what Love is. So we put up this ‘value’ – by the way, actually it is a Virtue and not a value and that downgrading in itself is not unimportant – and we say ‘It is all about Love’ and if we are at all alert we will say, hang on where is Jesus in this? And we might say – well Jesus shows us what love is, true, but Love has no existence apart from Him and in saying Jesus shows us what love is it is as if Jesus reveals something other than himself – but as John says ‘God is Love’
As I said last week – He fills All things – so to speak or think of anything apart from him is not to know it at all. One cannot Know anything about the Christian Virtues apart from Him – for He HImself is the centre of all things and in him all things hold together. Apart from Him they fall apart.
To say we are only interested in Christianity for the sake of its values, is like saying ‘I’m only interested in marriage for the sake of having someone make my breakfast . . .’
Here I think we suffer from the modern account of ‘Religions’ in which Christian existence is but one of many – but what is utterly unique about Jesus is this – he is the only one who says All that I say and do has but one purpose – to point to me, so that you might Know God and thus Know the Life He desires to give, his very self. And this teaching of Jesus comes to a single focus here in John’s gospel ‘I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live for ever; and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.’ I am the Living Bread that came down from heaven – I am the Life and Light of the World – I am the Good shepherd. Over and over and over again the teaching of Jesus turns out to be teaching about Jesus, and through Him that we might Know God.
In fact Jesus sharpens the focus even further in the Gospel for next week – ‘Very truly, I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. 54Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life, and I will raise them up on the last day; 55for my flesh is true food and my blood is true drink. 56Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them. 57Just as the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so whoever eats me will live because of me. . . .
And it is not long before what Jesus is saying finds disciples leaving him, left right and centre – whoever eats me, will live because of me . . . I am Offering you Life in all its fullness, and it is to be found Here, In me . . . and some want a code for good living – others want, well a million and one things – but all God has to give is His very self
Why do they leave? In a sense because it is utterly outrageous – offensive even to our modern sensibilities – that Anyone might claim to be the Bread of heaven – that anyone might say ‘whoever eats me will live because of me’ – and of course it is utterly outrageous. If we are searching for values, for ‘a better way to live our lives, then the bookstalls, the internet, the world is full of people offering advice – and you can patch together a pretty reasonable existence out of it . . . but to find our life in Jesus Christ is . . . well it can only be known in Knowing Him.
We live in a time of seemingly unending persecution of the Church – it is very much as if we are at the end of days. More Christians died because they were Christian in the C20 – already the C21 looks as if the bride of Christ is being butchered once more and now right down to the root, as our brothers and sisters in Iraq and Syria are beheaded and crucified in their hundreds if not their thousands. There in the world’s oldest churches, places where unbeknownst to us the church has worshipped for almost two thousand years without a break . . . there above all, there is no talk of Christian values – only Christ.
On their doors, the IS militias paint this symbol – that of the Nazarene – the title of those Christians – a title of scorn – the very name they gave Christ in Matthews Gospel – ‘and he will be called a Nazorene’. In Life and in death bearing the name of the one who died for them, and is their life. No talk of values, just Christ. In Life and in death – for He has given His all for them, and He is their Life.
Sermon for Easter 3 – Year B – 2015
Sunday April 19th
Acts 3:12-19
1 John 3:1-7
Luke 24:36b-48
‘You are witnesses of these things . . .’
In my family there is a certain question which we have learned not to ask, because to ask it would to be met with a chorus of correction. The question is one often asked of children – ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’
And the correction is simply this – ‘it’s not what you want to be, it’s what do you want to do!’ However much work is tied up with identity in the World, and how often in casual conversation with a stranger we ask – what do you do for a living – a subtle way in which we value some people higher than others, I still remember the pain of a wonderful man I knew who kept it hidden from most people he knew that his work was as a bus cleaner . . . indeed we may well ask how many of us know people engaged in the menial work without which our comfortable lives would quickly fall to pieces, I still also remember the horror of a very well qualified friend when they learned that one of my highly educated daughters was training to be a nurse . . . So perhaps it is not surprising that we confuse that which we do for a living with who we are, whereas more subtly it is Lives Lived that reveal the truth about us. And, as with aspiring to highly paid careers, it is that upon which we fix our eyes and our hopes that in the end reveals our essence.
Over the last couple of weeks we have reflected on the terrifying fact of the resurrection of Jesus. I must admit that last Sunday as we celebrated communion, I was almost overcome by it. For ‘if Christ be raised from the dead’ then the World is not as we think, and as Christians we have the most significant of Vocations in bearing witness to that fact, that the death AND resurrection of Jesus changes everything.
As I have said before, all too often we are left saying, Good Friday changes everything – but without Easter Day, there is no Good to that Friday, it is just another Friday like thousands of others. Nothing is changed and those Christian narratives which place the emphasis upon the cross for the here and now, as the thing to which we must respond, leave the story dangerously half told, and the people of God half baptised. Placed down into the waters of Baptism, but with no one to draw them up out – death of the Old self, but no sign of the new, until after we die. But the Resurrection of Jesus comes crashing in to our present existence. The Resurrected Jesus terrifies his disciples and then eats grilled fish – he invites Thomas to put his fingers and hands in his open wounds. He does these things not purely to persuade the disciples that he is risen – his emphasis on the Physical proclaims them that New Life has come into being, that the worlds narratives of Sin and Death have been triumphantly renounced. The Life to which John the Evangelist bears witness takes on flesh and blood, it cannot be known apart from it.
The Gospel is no disembodied message of hope for life after we die – it is the total metamorphosis of life before the end of our physical bodies. It is at once utterly challenging, but also utterly compelling. It is at once both terrifying, and yet the source of exultant Joy.
It is New Life in Jesus Christ – and for us as Christians, that gives each one of us, and the Church together a Vocation unlike any other. A doing and a call to a new being.
The doing of Christian life is very very simple, yet utterly challenging. ‘You’ says the Risen Jesus, ‘are witnesses of these things’ Witnesses.
It is a word which loses some of its resonance for us – it is a largely passive word in our language – we see something happen. It only becomes active IF we are called to give an account of what we have witnessed.
But the word ‘Witness’ of course in the Christian tradition has a far deeper more engaged meaning – it is Active – it is Participatory. Something to which the realisation that ‘witness’ and ‘martyr’ are one and the same word in the language of the scriptures, bears eloquent witness. To witness is to give your life for . . . we note such language in Paul when he calls the Roman church to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. Our Being – our Existence is given over to God in response to, as witnessing to what God has done for us in and through Jesus Christ. The meaning of each and every moment of our Life has been named – it is Witness – Martyr
For too long in the church, witness has been reduced to ‘speaking about Jesus’ as and when the opportunity arises – and given our shyness in this regard, witness has all but disappeared – yet the biblical vision of witness as giving our lives for the truth of the Gospel – takes us way way beyond all of this. To be a witness is to lay down our lives in testimony to the one who laid down his life for us. It is our whole existence, we receive the New Life of the Risen Christ and so become witnesses. In living through and out of the glorious reality of the Resurrection, our Radically New Lives become vessels of witness.
See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God; and that is what we are. The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know him.
We Are children of God – that is through the Sacrament of Baptism – we have been included in the death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ and now become participants in the very Life of God in and through His Son. In other words, our Lives, our Baptismal identity is a New Life , which sets us apart – Insofar as our lives as Christians do not make sense to those amongst whom we live – we reveal the World’s hostility to the God who so loved the World that he gave his only Son – ‘The Reason the world does not know us, is that it did not know Him’
The Church in her anxiety about what seems to be happening rushes after the false God of relevance, seeking at every opportunity to become more and more like the World – but that is to abandon our baptismal vocation – to bear the same reviling that Christ suffers from the World for the Love of the World – we do not hear the Words of Jesus – Woe to you when all men speak well of you. ‘Ah how relevant and rational – how up to date your church seems . . .’ In seeking to make sense to the world in which we live, we abandon our discipleship – our commitment to Jesus and deny our true parenthood.
But for those who do not do so, God has something truly breathtaking in store. It is the very vision of God which is the source of our Life. Beloved, we are God’s children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed. What we do know is this: when he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is.The old St Iranaeus said – The Glory of God is a Man fully alive – may people have taken hold of this and thought that it therefore justifies our lives as they are, but no, for he goes on ‘and the glory of man is the vision of God . . .’ What is it to be fully alive – but to have our vision consumed by the Living God – we will see him as he is . . . where is our vision? Where are we looking?? Perhaps that old childhood question is appropriate . . . ‘what Will you be when you grow up??
Perhaps it is time, perhaps it is Always time for the church to remember its identity – its God given Vocation of being those living witnesses to the Life of Jesus Christ – radically free in the world – for the sake of the world and to the everlasting glory of God the Father. Time to grow up
I have a very vivid recollection of Holy Week in 2001. Unknown to me at that time it was the last Easter I celebrated as a curate, as Sarah and I moved to Gisburn in the December of that year, moving into a community which like many others that year was suffering from a trauma the like of which few if any of us here may have known, the effects of which continue to this day.
Gisburn and Hellifield were of course rural parishes, in the midst of many farms. Gisburn a village of 400 people, was home to one of the largest stock auction markets in the North of England. And it was 2001 – the year of the Foot and Mouth epidemic. Of course my curacy was in a Northern town far from any farm apart from rather unusually, an Ostrich farm 🙂 But for all that no one could be unaware of Foot and Mouth. At the start of the year TV news bulletins carried film of burning mountains of cattle carcasses, a view so distressing that the government ordered in the army to excavate an entire disused airfield so that the tens of thousands of culled beasts could be buried rather than burnt. Access to all open countryside was closed to try and prevent the spread of the disease, so I couldn’t walk my beloved hills
But I was closer to the epidemic than that. We watched with horror as the disease seemingly unstoppable overwhelmed the village in which I‘d grown up in and the surrounding areas, a cousin was involved with the ‘veterinary’ squads who were charged with shooting all the cattle, and somehow dealing with the trauma of that. And of course my own family were farmers.
Tucked away in a very remote valley in the South West Lake District we hoped and prayed that the plague would stay away, but inexorably it inched closer. It was on the Monday of Holy Week that we had the news we’d dreaded. Foot and Mouth had been diagnosed on a farm adjacent to my uncle’s farm. Which meant that all his stock would be culled as well.
Most farming operations involving stock were not huge, industrial scale farming is still pretty much unknown in the English stock sector. And my Uncles farm was no exception. He had about 150 rough fell cattle. Semi Wild – they were hardy and gave birth unassisted.
When he had first moved to the farm in 1970 the first calf was born – they found the mother, obviously having given birth yet they couldn’t find the calf – until late into night, walking the rough moraine landscape, my uncle saw the shape of a calf in the moonlight reflected of a small tarn. They named the cow Moonlight and they named the tarn ‘moonlight tarn’, a name which you now find on OS maps of the area.
We learned that the dreaded cull of the stock would take place on Maundy Thursday, and so it was I went to our Diocesan Chrism Eucharist with the heaviest of hearts and barely able to speak with anyone, rushing out at the end without even acknowledging the bishop. I returned home, to hear things were worse than I thought if that were possible. The stock wagons carrying the armed vets had been unable to get up my uncle’s farm track quickly enough and would be unable to carry out the cull in the space of a day as required. they were to return the next day.
Usually the vets and soldiers with them would round up the stock, but these were wild fell cattle, On Good Friday, early in the morning, my Uncle walked his land alone, to call his stock to their deaths. The oldest cow among them, 31 years old, Moonlight herself.
Good Friday – and on Easter Sunday I had been rostered to preach . . . to a church full of people most of whom had come with Easter joy and cheer . . . I think that this was the first Easter when I had come anywhere close to understanding the terrifying nature of Easter Day.
For the response of the disciples that first Easter morning was not an easy joy – rather they were troubled, they were afraid, they were amazed and terrified . . . For they had seen all their hopes, their lives destroyed. They had given up everything to follow Jesus. They had thrown in their livelihoods, they had walked away from home and family because they believed he was the one who was going to rescue God’s people. They had pinned their lives on him, and he had apparently recklessly taken that all to the Cross, where he had been brutally murdered not only before their eyes, but the eyes of everyone.
My Good Friday Story in a very real sense is nothing out of the ordinary – we live in a world where we live in fear of such things because they can and do happen, and represented amongst us and all those we know are 1001 such Good Fridays. Good Friday is nothing out of the ordinary. It was just the brutal confirmation of the way the world is – all heading inexorably one way or another towards death. Indeed the death of Jesus upon the cross is not in itself at all exceptional. The death of the innocent is a universal human theme, highlighted in brutal fashion this past few weeks in the deaths on Vanuatu and of course the crash of the German Wings plane in Southern France.
Traumatic as these events are, they do nothing to challenge our view of the world. Good Fridays are endless. But not Easter Day. Good Friday we assume to be troubling and Easter Comforting, but in a sense it is entirely the other way round. For all the horror of what my family suffered that Good Friday in 2001, life went on. They still farm there. A small fountain in the farmyard the only visible testimonial to that terrible day, although the pain of it carries on, but in many ways, in most ways, life carries on as normal. It didn’t change anything, it didn’t change the world. Similarly the disciples had seen in the death of Jesus the death of all their hopes. There was no way forward. He was their life. Without Him they were nothing and he was dead. So in a sense were they. It is perhaps not surprising that they too are found in the resurrection stories going back to life as it was, fishing by the shore of Galilee. Back to normality . . . So it is perhaps little or no wonder that they are terrified when early that Easter morning they find the tomb empty and rumours of angels telling them he is Alive.
Good Friday seemingly confirms for us ‘the way of the world’ – Easter Day demolishes it, trashes it, and says not ‘there is another way’, but That way is no way at all. We are confronted in the Risen Jesus with the terrifying realisation that Life is not what we have been told. The Resurrection of Jesus unmasks what we call ‘our everyday existence’ as a tragic illusion, and Satan as the Father of Lies.
And I have to ask has the Resurrection of Jesus had that impact amongst us? Has it so disturbed us, because if it be true as the Church asserts that God the Father Raised Jesus from the dead, not as some ghostly spirit, but as a living breathing man who prepares breakfasts and eats bread and fish . . . then the stories the world tells us about our existence, and most if not all the stories we have built the frail fabric of our tenuous existence upon are untrue.
A couple of weeks ago, Mother Keleni visited us and warned us about our ‘familiarity’ with God . . .I think the danger of comfortable familiarity with the Easter story is just as perilous. We learn it young and for most if not all of us if that familiarity doesn’t breed contempt, as it does without doubt in some, it breeds a sort of spiritual narcolepsy – its like a dream – we have not discovered its truth in our everyday existence, we have not woken up to its Reality – because if it is indeed true then nothing can ever be the same again. No wonder they fled from the tomb . . . because they were afraid. Like a child being born into the world, that which we had taken to be life, the darkness of our existence up to that point, turned out not to be life at all . . .
And we must ask ourselves and especially as the Body of Christ the Church, Have we allowed this new Reality to shake and disturb us as it so terrified the disciples??
Often if not always this is not the case – as with the Living God and Father of our Lord Jesus, we ask questions of the Resurrection without stopping to allow it to ask questions of us . . . Like Peter at the Last Supper, we don’t want Jesus getting to close, we don’t want him overturning our world, the world which in our anxiety and imprisonment we have done our best with and tried to call ‘life’
If Christ be not raised from the dead then we are playing religious games here week by week, games which the wider world has tired of – but if he be raised from the dead, then we have no business playing any religious games. His Resurrection so changes our perception of reality that we are faced with a terrifying choice, go on as we are, or start to live in the light of this New Creation that has come into being.
Indeed it is no choice at all – if Christ be raised from the dead, there is only one existence and that is Life in obedient following of Him, the Risen one who is Alive for ever more. The Resurrection of Jesus is the judgement of the whole world – how then shall we live?
Christ is risen from the dead,
Trampling down death by death,
And upon those in the tombs
Bestowing life!
Our three portions of Scripture point us in a common direction, towards the human predicament and God’s answer to it.
When we consider our own lives, let alone the whole world, we may have many views on the nature of the human predicament, but whatever we see out there has a common source, one with which we are all familiar – our failure to Love God with all we have and all we are and our neighbours as ourselves. This failure is in the end a failure of belief. To believe in Jesus is to accept his diagnosis of our condition and to come to him for our healing.
Part of our particular difficulty in this regard is because we live in an age which, even within the church, divides out the Spiritual and the Material or Physical. So our faith only applies to certain areas of life. We see this in the Church – here in our Diocese the Church is on its knees, at least metaphorically, and we wonder what is to be done. But rather than Believe in Jesus, turn to Him in repentance and Faith and Prayer, we try to fix structures, or find money, or have initiatives, none of which address the Source of our problems, that of unbelief.
For most of us most of the time, our hearts and minds are far from God. We in our pride, buttressed by confidence in our modern technological triumph over God’s Creation, which has brought it to its knees, think we can pretty much fix things ourselves. But the problem is this. We are like blind Guides. We do not see the Spiritual depth of our predicament, many for example barely think Church in any sense necessary. We think despite all the evidence to the contrary that the world is full of people of good will and we can fix it all ourselves thank you very much. We think we can get on without God, even in the Church.
The children of Israel had been rescued from Slavery in Egypt by a God who was pretty much unknown to them. They’d been there 400 years and the old stories of the patriarchs, of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob were but dim memories, so that as Exodus records, when they cry out under their suffering, they do not even cry out to God, they just Cry out. (Would many in the Church today know with Confidence to whom it was they cried out?)
The God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob is all but unknown to them. And so as God in his love and mercy leads them out of slavery, he takes them into the wilderness there to learn that their lives are Gift and come from Him, that He is their life, that apart from Him they have no good thing, just slavery and death.
Certainly it would benefit us much in the Diocese were we just to spend the next year meditating upon that truth, God, made known to us in Jesus Christ, is our Life – apart from him we are nothing, apart from Him we have nothing, apart from Him, all our deeds are as nothing worth.
Here we are in Lent, which takes us back to the context of the wilderness that they and we must learn, and as we hear today, they like us prefer life on their own terms, so they turn against God, they turn against Life – and so snakes are sent amongst them, because turning from Life, all is death. Which explains why Moses is instructed to make a dead snake, a copper snake, a snake with no life and hold it before them. They need to see and believe that God has the power to conquer death. They see there death defeated, and believing, they are healed.
They have passed from death to Life – and so have we. As St Paul puts it – ‘You were dead through 9those deadly snakes of ) the trespasses and sins in which you once lived, following the course of the world’ – living pretty much as everyone else around you lived – and thus ‘following the ruler of the power of the air, the Spirit which is at work amongst those who are disobedient.’ He goes on to tell of our deadly predicament ‘in the passions of our flesh, following the desires of our senses, by nature children of wrath’ Why did we then not share all we had with all who are in need? Because we were held captive by fear which fed our our own desires for safety, for comfort, for life that was no life at all – what we might call ‘ordinary life’ which is under the judgement of God in Jesus Christ.
Of course, even though we have set out on the path of following Jesus, which we call being Christian, we too fall prey to those desires once more. It is all too easy to sit back and say, ‘well, the world’s not all that bad a place. People are pretty good really . . .’ and to find ourselves also back in slavery to fear and our own desires
Last week one of the youngsters on our confirmation course suddenly piped up ‘I’ve just had a thought! If everyone loved one another, there would be no need for money’. Just let that thought sink in for a moment. If everyone loved everyone, there would be no need for money – everything would like the Life of God which would be revealed, everything would be Gift. Think how different that world would look. Then think again about our evaluation of the world . . .
Paul having painted the picture of our predicament then goes on with two of his favourite words . . .‘But God . . .’ Israel was in slavery in Egypt, facing death daily, ‘But God . . .’ You were dead in sin and trespass ‘But God . . .’ God’s alternative reality is so Different, that in the midst of our stories of sin and suffering and death, His Word is like the most dramatic full Stop. All of a sudden in utter darkness there is a blinding light, Israel is rescued from out of the hand of Pharaoh, and we too experience God’s refusal to allow darkness to triumph in the life of his children . . ‘But God, who is rich in mercy,out of his great love with which he loved us even when were were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ’.
Jesus is the one who by death tramples down death. When we look to the Son of Man lifted up from the earth in Faith we see our truest healing. He is the One who takes upon himself all that keeps us from God, all our disobedience, all our contentment with that which does not give life, all our lack of Love for God and one another and takes it to the grave where it belongs, so that we who in truth do not belong there might be set free to Love God with all we have and all we are, and to Love our neighbours as ourselves, and, who knows, perhaps to live such a life together as the people of God that we begin to do away with our slavery to money . . .
For God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world, through HIm might be Saved
Sermon for Lent 3 – Year B – 2015
Sunday March 8th
Exodus 20:1-17
Psalm 19
1 Corinthians 1:18-25
John 2:13-22
‘THIS is the Temple of the Lord’
One of my churches in England was a little older than the other, 800 years older – roughly. Actually we have no idea how old Gisburn Church was, we only had the date of the first recorded Vicar in 1124. When we were considering some building alterations to the other church in my care including the possible removal of some pews, someone remarked – ‘why can’t we keep it the same, just like Gisburn has been over the years’ I wanted to laugh, but instead tried gently to point out that the original form of the building was unknown, buried under many many changes over the years. Not least the arrival of pews in the 17th Century – following the reformation.
Over the years it had seen many things, many changes. It’s tower was castellated as it was built in an era when the Scots were wont to roam that far South and so it provided a place of refuge and defence. Oliver Cromwell had stabled his horses in it prior to the battle of Foulridge in the English Civil War, and as most medieval churches it had served as a place for storing what passed for the local fire engine, and of course hosting the market. An imaginative Vicar would have had little difficulty summoning up the scene which confronts us in our gospel, as Jesus went into the Jerusalem temple, confronted by sheep, cows, doves and all the mechanisms of financial exchange . . . the Temple was the commercial hub of Jerusalem – although it hadn’t been around nearly so long as Gisburn Parish Church 🙂 The Jerusalem temple that is, this great Edifice of Herod the Great, under construction these mere forty six years – it hadn’t even been around as long as this church 🙂 500 years previously, the Jewish people had returned from exile and set about the task of rebuilding on the site of Solomon’s Temple, but Herod decided on a huge rebuild programme. It was Vast and said to be coated in Gold Leaf – such that it was almost impossible to look at as the suns light reflected from it.
It was visible from Joppa on the sea coast and it was from there that all the many many goods associated with the life of the Temple made their way to Jerusalem. Its expense and upkeep led to what we may remember was called the Temple Tax. And we read in Matthew’s gospel how the tax collectors came to Peter to ask if Jesus did or didn’t pay the temple tax – and how Jesus instructed Peter to go and fish and find the two drachma coin in the fish’s mouth 🙂
Keeping up the Temple was literally life draining from the people of God – indeed it was said that slaves were also bought and sold there. The Temple was in many respects a vast idol – which enslaved the people. As the Church in Gisburn was seen as in many ways central to the village, even by those who only darkened its doors for funerals, and many people helped pay for a new roof – so far far more so Jewish identity was inextricably linked to the Temple – this was why they had gone to So much trouble after the exile to rebuild it, and why those in authority thought nothing of the tax, or the other burdens of upkeep to the vitality of the people.
Jesus in his appearing is like a laser guided missile, aimed right at the very heart of this Identity. In every gospel THE confrontation with the Pharisees and the rest which provokes calls for his death is the Identity forming Day, the Sabbath. And second, the identity forming place the Temple. We might say that the Jewish sense of who they were rested on these two pillars one in time and one in Space, Sabbath and Temple.
The Temple’s significance of course was clear – it was the place where the God of Israel dwelt with his people. And it was understood literally as the Centre of the World – the Creation narrative from Genesis echoing in its six days the arrangement of the various courts of Solomons Temple. The Sea being figured by the great basin for the purification rites, the Lights in the Sky – the great Menorah, the great Lampstand in the Temple and in its heart, the Seventh Day, the Sabbath, the One who dwelt in the Holy of holies – the one in whom we are to find our hearts Rest (as St Augustine puts it)
From the beginning of the story of the forming of Israel, by God’s majestic act of rescue from Slavery in Egypt – He had dwelt in their midst. In the wilderness – which we travel through in Lent. No trappings of luxury. The Ark of the Covenant, containing the Ten Words on the two tablets of stone – overshadowed by a pillar of cloud by day and fire by night – there in the Tabernacle in their midst. But Israel did not listen to the Word, that the God who had brought them out of the land of Egypt and thus entreated them – you shall have no gods before me, was not a God who dwelt in houses built by human hands. The God who frees from slavery is a God who is radically Free, and commands the true freedom which is found in obedience to His Life Giving Word made flesh. Each of those Ten commandments was about Freedom. Do not be enslaved to other Gods, do not be enslaved to Idols, Do not try to enslave me by using my name to back up your plans, do not be enslaved to work, know who you are honour your father and mother, do not be enslaved to other identities, do not be enslaved by the passions and deisres that are murder, adultery, theft, stealing, false witness – and do not be enslaved by things in covetousness. God is Freedom and His people should be, but in beuilding a house of stone, they themselves have once more become enslaved to the project of its upkeep . . .
St Stephen in his eloquent witness which will lead to His martyrdom again points to the Temple “Our ancestors in turn brought [the tabernacle containing the ark] in with Joshua when they dispossessed the nations that God drove out before our ancestors. And it was [in Jerusalem] until the time of David, who found favour with God and asked that he might find a dwelling-place for the house of Jacob. But it was Solomon who built a house for him. Yet the Most High does not dwell in houses made by human hands; as the prophet says, “Heaven is my throne, and the earth is my footstool. What kind of house will you build for me, says the Lord, or what is the place of my rest? Did not my hand make all these things?”
And the significance of the Temple conflict is brought into sharpest focus in John’s gospel. John moves the clearance of the Temple from Jesus last week, to the beginning of His ministry, his first truly public appearance – the first place where he makes himself known amongst the crowds. After a quiet appearance at the Wedding in Cana, he Erupts onto the public stage, In the Temple. Consumed by zeal as Psalm 69 recounted ‘it is zeal for your house has consumed me’ – the prayer of a righteous man suffering untold persecution, the prayer of one who loves God with heart and soul and mind and strength and thus cannot bear to see what has become of the dwelling place of his Father. John is saying – THIS is what he has come for – the Sign? Destroy this Temple and I will rebuild it in three days . . .
You, in the slavery of your minds can only envisage death and destruction, but I am the Light and the Life of the World. Standing up in the midst of the Temple, upon the feast of tabernacles, when the poeple are celebrating their time in the wilderness – Jesus stands up in their midst and ‘cried out with a loud voice – bawling from the centre of his gut – Whoever is thirsty, let him come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as the Scriptures say – out of his heart shall flow life giving waters
Ho, everyone who thirsts,
come to the waters;
and you that have no money,
come, buy and eat!
Come, buy wine and milk
without money and without price.
Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread,
and your labour for that which does not satisfy?
Listen carefully to me, and eat what is good,
and delight yourselves in rich food.
Incline your ear, and come to me;
listen, so that you may live.
And again from the end of the Book of Revelation – that great picture of the presence of God where there is no Temple – Only the throne of God and the Lamb – ‘It is I, Jesus, who sent my angel to you with this testimony for the churches. I am the root and the descendant of David, the bright morning star.’
The Spirit and the bride say, ‘Come.’
And let everyone who hears say, ‘Come.’
And let everyone who is thirsty come.
Let anyone who wishes take the water of life as a gift.
Destroy this temple, and I will rebuild it again in three days – Jesus Christ. The place where we meet God. The word became flesh and Tabernacled amongst us. For all the brilliance of Herod’s Temple, it is as nothing to the brilliance of God made known to us in Jesus Christ and we have seen his glory . . . say John. Whoever has seen me, has seen the Father says Jesus as he tells of a house with many mansions . . . many many mansions – we dwell in Him and he in us.
And he comes with a refining fire. He Cleanses the Temple – drives from it all that keeps us from him. Through Lent we participate in that refining, that cleansing as we consent to have all that hinders us, we lay aside all that keeps us from Him and his nearer presence, we consent to have it stripped away, in our individual lives and our Life together. No longer slaves but finding our true freedom in obedience to the Word that frees, the Word that Lives for Ever, the Word made flesh – that we might be a fit place for the dwelling place of God, as the Body of Christ in This place.
the elves are heading west 