Tag: Relevance

Lent 2 – Year B ‘The meek shall inherit the Earth – Yeah Right!’

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Sermon for Lent 2 – Year B
Sunday March 1st 2015

Mark 8:31-38

The meek shall inherit the Earth
Yeah, Right!

Fundamentals

A couple of years ago I had a dream. It was so striking that I wrote it down in my journal. In it I was in a canoe paddling up a stream. The stream, as streams do, became narrower and the water shallower, therefore the effort of paddling became greater until I grounded. Of course the obvious thing was to turn the canoe round, but the stream was too narrow

It must be said, when I ponder that dream and its meaning for me, the contemporary church also hoves into view. The stream getting narrower and shallower, perhaps a metaphor for falling numbers? And trying harder and harder . . . perhaps we need to get our bearings. To remind ourselves of one or two fundamentals . . .

1. God is not relevant to our lives

I have pondered often and long about why so many of us are at the very least hesitant about ‘sharing our faith with others’ – and the answer that came to me in the early hours of one morning this week was that we imagine the conversation in our head – a little like this.

I’m a Christian
I’m not
My faith makes a real positive difference to my life
Really? What? We have been friends for a long time. Your life and my life – they are pretty similar – indeed in many respects you might say I have a better life than you, no?
Well, yes, errm – I see what you are saying, err but I have a profound peace in my heart
Yes. Good. I’m happy for you. I find a walk on the beach does that for me. Isn’t it lovely 🙂

So how are the grandchildren doing then . . .

When I say ‘God is not relevant to our lives’ I mean it. But what do I mean by ‘our lives’. I mean the lives we determine for ourselves. The life which is all about our life story – the story which people may tell of us after we die, of career and home and children and hobbies etc. etc. The lives into which we try to fit God rather like a new kitchen accessory – a Unique selling point in a house, or in this case a life

We have grown up in a culture which springs from Christendom – a world where ‘everyone was a Christian’ – God was in his heaven ‘watching over it all’, and all was well with the world. ‘God’ in this scheme was there to sort out the difficulties of our lives. Like a kindly chaplain, or a Spiritual plumber, or indeed a kindly parking attendant who found us that parking space we really needed or otherwise we’d be so stressed at that important meeting with the bank to discuss our mortgage . . . God is ‘there to look after us’. But of course, for our friend with whom we are in conversation, they pretty much manage to get along very well thank you very much without any of that, and also they have spare time on a Sunday to use as they wish . . . and of course should life’s circumstances become difficult then perhaps we don’t really need this church stuff anyway because God is there looking after us, or perhaps he isn’t and actually it doesn’t seem to really make any difference . . . after all there are lots of helpful guides to having a better life – some are religious, some aren’t . . .

2. Our lives are not relevant to God

Sorry if we find this thought troubling, but they’re really not. God does not spend every moment of his waking hours figuring out how to get our lives sorted out so that we can have the life we always dreamed of . . . indeed we may have noticed that 🙂 And vice versa, there is nothing we can do to ‘help God’. On the one hand the dominant expression of faith is that ‘god is up there somewhere looking over us’, and on the other, the Church seems obsessed in what Margaret of Sienna calls ‘solicitudo religioso pro Deo’ To translate roughly, ‘a blasphemous anxiety to be doing God’s work for him’. Whatever, ‘God’ is largely absent from the proceedings
Like in the canoe dream – people paddling harder and harder as the stream narrows and the water shallows. The church is busier than ever, getting the message out, endless committees, initiatives etc.etc.etc. ‘God’ becomes an ever vague shadow, out there, somewhere, perhaps??

Last week I concluded that we would do well from time to time, not to put ourselves in the disciples’ position, as they observe Jesus healing people, but rather to place ourselves in the position of those who are healed, in other words, In Jesus direct line of sight.
Well, let’s do that this week and where is Jesus looking, oh yes he’s looking at his disciples. He is telling them, quite openly that he ‘must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again.’

And we all know Peter’s response – And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him.

Now let’s just pause at this moment. Immediately before our gospel reading, Peter has declared that which God has revealed to him, not what he has figured out for himself, what God has revealed to him, That Jesus is the Messiah, the Christ, the Anointed one, The King of Israel . . .

And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him?????!!!!!!

3. The problem is ‘Our Lives’ . . .

Jesus words seem like madness to Peter – but it is Peter who has the problem . . . turning and looking at his disciples, Jesus rebuked Peter and said, “Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.” Jesus tells Peter ‘You don’t get it! You don’t have a clue! You are the One trying to destroy my work . . . and we, like Peter have So much confidence that we do get it . . . but as I said, we cannot give a coherent account of what IT is to those amongst whom we live

The problem is ‘Our Lives’. When we listen to what Jesus says, it seems utter madness, we are there with Peter. Jesus says ‘The meek shall inherit the earth’ – and we rebuke him saying, that’s a nice sentiment Jesus, but actually its the hard work and fine accounting skills, its our genius that will get us what we want . . . and the moth and rust will corrupt and if we store it all in vaults after our deaths, the thieves will break in and steal.

I was in a church meeting a long way from here earlier this week, where the wheels of power were turning. We were planning and proposing. And someone gave a very lengthy account of a significant event in the life of the church and credited one person with all the credit and said how much we owed them by way of thanks, and no one batted an eyelid . . .
No one – myself included – said, ‘Let us pause and offer profound thanks to God without whom Nothing is possible. It was as if God didn’t even exist.’ We’d pulled it all together.

We modern westerners are So in control of Our Lives – and thus the way we run them is in direct opposition to the way of Jesus – Jesus who says ‘The meek shall inherit the Earth’; ‘do not store up for yourselves treasure on earth’, ‘unless you become like a little child’ How could a child even begin to run the church as we do??? Jesus who says 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. For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life? Indeed, what can they give in return for their life?

4. Jesus response to the problem of ‘Our Lives’

He called the crowd with his disciples, and said to them, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.”

As I was painfully reminded this last week by a friend, we miss the horror of what Jesus is saying here. The Cross has become a pretty item of jewelry – or we talk about it is terms of the sufferings that are common to all human kind, broken relationships, illness – ‘We all have our cross to bear’ we sigh. Jesus speaks to the whole people of God, who symbolised by Peter have their minds set on human things and faces them with something horrific. No one there, none of the readers of Mark’s gospel in the first 300 years will have not seen, in all likelihood Many Crosses, not hanging round people’s necks, but with people hanging on them. ‘You really don’t want to go there’, but Jesus says this is the Way.

Pontius Pilate wanting to let people know where the real power lay, didn’t always bother with wood, bit of a waste, he would nail people to the walls of Jerusalem. Everyone knew the horror of it and had seen how literally excruciating was the death of the Crucified, over hours in unendurable agony. The utter destruction of a Life – indeed bodies were left there to be devoured by wild animals and birds.  So horrifying that people could not bear to speak of it or write about it. Truly A Satanic tool.

Jesus takes Our Lives to the Cross, and we are called to follow him. Indeed this is the meaning of our Baptism – not some folk rite, so that we are in on this Chaplain God and can expect his services. Christendom neatly sidestepped the Cross and delivered up a faith of the irrelevant God, placing the human and our lives back in the centre of things. But our Lives are only the centre of things if w are In Christ, the Crucified One. We are baptised into his death so that He might be Our Life, Our All in All. As St Paul puts it in Colossians, ‘For you died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God’  Our baptism is the End of Our Life. The end of Our agendas, the end of Our plans. The life we now live we live by faith in the Son of God. For truly Christian life to begin, Our Lives must end. He must become Our Life. The Risen one

And So we come here, we confess our Sins, that once more we have lived for ourselves and not for Him who loves us, We feed on his word which is Life giving Like honey on our lips, we respond in words irrelevant to the World, the Creed, and in his infinite Grace and Mercy, he feeds us with His Very Life.
Glory to Jesus Christ
Glory for Ever

Sermon for ALL SAINTS – 2014 Year A

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Sermon for ALL SAINTS 2014 – Year A
Revelation 7:9-17
Psalm 34
1 John 3:1-3
Matthew 5:1-12

Uncomfortable clothes . . .

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.
1 John 3:1

For those of you who are following its progress, the beard has got to the itchy stage. 🙂

I’m informed that this is the stage at which a lot of men give up – we don’t like discomfort!! But discomfort is at once a non-negotiable aspect of the Christian life, and one which is intensified in this present age.

We will all have seen comedy films where a boat is sat by a deck and someone tries to get into the boat, but as they do, they have a foot on the deck and a foot in the boat – I will allow your imagination to fill in the details 🙂

But in this age, that is also a profound illustration of how we experience our lives a Christians. For large parts of the lives of most of us, we have lived in the long shadow of Christendom. There was a sense that most people amongst whom we lived had some inkling of the Christian story, and after all didn’t we share the same set of moral values?? And after all, wasn’t that what it was all about???

Wasn’t it? Yet there is a sense of drifting apart – The church often tries to fix this – to ‘try to be relevant’ as if the answer was to be found in chasing after the world – we don’t like the discomfort.

I wonder how many of us have known a profound discomfort upon plucking up the courage to try and give witness to our faith. Our children I suspect know this far better than most of us as adults. We tell someone ‘I am a Christian’ – ad quick as a flash the rejoinder comes back ‘I live a good life’, or ‘I don’t need such things, my life is very fulfilling’ And we are uncomfortable . . . where do we go from here? Is that all there is? A vacuous sameness? A comfortable nothingness?

Come back to that boat – let’s call it our Waka. For many years, to our eyes it has sat by the dock, but now it seems to be drifting off, or is it? Is it not that the dock is drifting away? We thought our ‘values’ were somehow universal. If we could at least live in a world where we shared values, then we could be comfortable. But who said that the Christian Life was about values??

This is not what Jesus tells us ‘you must be born again – unless you are born again you cannot see the Kingdom of God’. St Paul when berating the Galatians tells them with regard to their conflicts on circumcision –  ‘What counts, is a new Creation!’ We might say ‘Values?? What counts is a New Creation!’ And our own St John speaks these words to us – to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, 13who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God. – And again in the epistle this morning ‘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.’ These words are to say the least ‘uncomfortable’ especially when we have grown up in a culture where we have been told over and over : ‘we are all God’s children! That is why we have these universal shared values, that is why it isn’t essential to be Christian, that is why we shouldn’t try and share our faith – because let’s face it we have nothing particularly distinct to share, and after all, trying to share our faith does makes us very uncomfortable’ We find great comfort in the crowd, however illusory it is . . .  yet, as the world abandons its pretense of Christian faith, One calls us to be with Him . . .

When Jesus saw the crowds, he went up the mountain; (Jesus walks away from the crowds – indeed he is often doing this) and after he sat down, his disciples came to him . . . Jesus is in the Waka – the disciples step off the dock. They are called apart . . . and that ‘called apartness’ is Essential to what it means to be Christian – those who are called Apart – this is the root of the word Saint!!

Next time you pluck up the courage to have that conversation about our faith, try and use a better word than Christian – a more helpful word – a word that won’t have folks telling you what good people they are – a word that has less unhelpful cultural baggage – a word that won’t have people thinking ‘well so am I’  – a word which might find you mocked and ridiculed . . . try telling them the Truth – ‘I am a Saint’

Of course, immediately we are confronted with seems to be a similar problem . . . but perhaps a more truthful one . . . that while we are comfortable calling ourselves Christian, after all for much of our lives that was not a contentious thing to do, referring to ourselves as Saints feels very uncomfortable to us . . .

It is not only our illusions about the world which are called into question – our Christian imagination is also in need of serious remedial attention. Following the death and resurrection of Jesus, nowhere are his brothers and sisters called sinners . . . something we would be comfortable with, indeed we are. If I were to say ‘you are a Saint!’ you might blush and demur – or you might say, no I’m just a common or garden sinner . . . but to be called apart – called to be with Jesus is to find ourselves in the company of those who are either called Saints, or ‘those called to be Saints’ . . . But how might we understand this? So infected is our imagination by images of ‘Christian heroes’ whose lives seem to glow with the Life of Jesus in a way we cannot see in ourselves. Well firstly of course we have to say that our vision is defective, in that we are Always looking at ourselves!

During the early part of the middle ages there was the great controversy over Ikons – they were being smashed left right and centre – Iconoclasm . . . and we have replaced them with mirrors . . . but a child, that constant ideal Jesus holds up to us his disciples, a child is absorbed in this powerfully sensate world . . . like a Saint – paying attention to what is Real

To understand what a Saint is, come back with me to last week and this photo I shared with you. I invited you to put yourself in the place of the child – whose whole imagination is taken up with God. Our Psalm today expressed it thus The angel of the Lord encamps around those who fear him, and delivers them. O taste and see that the Lord is good; happy are those who take refuge in him. O fear the Lord, you his holy ones, for those who fear him have no want.

those who fear him have no want – to fear the Lord is to have ones life set on a completely different course – as Moses is described in the letter to the Hebrews who ‘persevered as if he saw him who is invisible’. Jesus calls us to himself, like Martha’s sister Mary to be utterly attentive to him – and this means we are called out and this feels uncomfortable.

One of the reasons my school days weren’t the happiest of my life was because my parents elected to send me not to the local Grammar school, but to one ten miles away. Everyone in my village went to either the local Grammar, or the local Secondary Modern as it was called, based on the results of the 11+ exam. So I was the only child in my village to wear the Blue blazer of Heversham Grammar, rather than the Green of Queen Elizabeth’s or the Black of Milnthorpe. Many was the time I could have happily disappeared, but my blazer marked me out as different. And of course dressing differently continues to this day 🙂 But as we have been at pains to remind ourselves these past weeks, my priesthood is merely a visual reminder of the priesthood of us all – those called out – to be bearers of the Glory of God in the World which God loves. Called to be Saints

That as Jesus tells his disciples is a blessing – in these words addressed to those who have stepped out from the crowd – who have stepped off the dock and into the Waka. Blessed are the poor in Spirit, those who mourn, the meek, those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, the merciful, the peacemakers, those persecuted for the sake of Righteousness . . . A strange blessing – a powerful symbol of being set apart – not a blessing which finds much resonance in the world . . . surely these blessings of Jesus explode any illusion we might have about ‘a shared set of values’. Who is blessed in the world? Who is blessed in the Waka of the Kingdom of God?

And if this feels uncomfortable? Well I ask you to cast your mind back to The First Story – The Creation – How does God bring Life into the world? By setting apart. Day from night, Water above the earth from water upon the Earth, . . . Darkness from Light – First there is the formless and void primeval chaos, so like the modern world in which we live – incoherent, directionless, shapeless – but then God says ‘let there be light’ – and there was light.

St Paul – ‘What counts is a New Creation’

Jesus calls his disciples out from the crowd, to know their life in him. Now they see the crowd, the crowd see them – they are set apart – and, thus set apart Jesus says the most extraordinary thing to them: he blesses them with these strange blessings, so unlike the deceitful blessings of the world – the Poor, Mourning, Meek, Hungry and Thirsty, The Merciful, Peacemaking, Persecuted and Crucified One breathes his Creative Word, his very being upon this group of his disciples – making them his sisters and brothers – making them children of God and announcing this new creation of those called to be with Him in these words “You are the light of the world.”  “You are the light of the world.” Saints.
To the Glory of God the Father

Let us pray
We bow our knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth takes its name. We pray that, according to the riches of his glory, he may grant that we may be strengthened in our inner being with power through his Spirit, and that Christ may dwell in our hearts through faith, as we are being rooted and grounded in love. We pray that we may have the power to comprehend, together with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that we may be filled with all the fullness of God.

Now to him who by the power at work within us is able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations, forever and ever. Amen.

Ephesians 3:14-end