Sermons
21st Sunday after Trinity - 20th October 2024
JOB 38 1-7.
I first visited the United States of America in June 1995, almost 30 years ago. For part of the time, I stayed with a cousin who lived in Fairport, in Upper New York State. The family were very hospitable. My cousin’s wife, Marge, embroidered a picture with the words of Footprints on it, and gave it to me as a leaving present. I still have it hanging on the bedroom wall.
The words are probably familiar to many of you. For those who don’t know them, here is a summary. A man had a dream, he recalled the saddest times of his life. He imagined he was walking on a beach, he expected God to be walking with him, but he saw only 1 set of footprints. He was dismayed and said “Lord, why, at the most difficult times in my life did you desert me?” The Lord replied, “When you saw only 1 set of footprints, it was then that I carried you”.
We often claim to know what God is doing or not doing in our lives, we expect to understand God’s ways when we can see or understand so little.
In today’s Old Testament reading we heard part of the story of Job. Job was a wealthy man with many sons and daughters, many sheep, camels, oxen, donkeys and slaves. He was a good man so when all his children died and his possessions were destroyed he sat in sackcloth and ashes and tried to understand why these tragedies had happened to him.
This story is a piece of wisdom literature, we can describe it as a discussion about why bad things happen to good people. He has several so- called friends who visit him and offer
advice. His wife tells him to curse God and then he will surely die and be out of his misery.
His friends offer various opinions about how he should face his sufferings. One said, be patient, if God is rebuking him for his behaviour, accept God’s discipline for he must have offended God. If he repents he will surely enjoy better times once more. Another friend said that his sons must have sinned, God is just, so Job must have deserved the disaster he was experiencing. The third friend told Job that he was claiming he had done no wrong, but he should turn to God in prayer.
There are many more arguments but none of them makes sense to Job who knows he doesn’t deserve to be punished in this way.
So, Job rejects their advice and continues to insist that he had done nothing to deserve such suffering. “I swear by the living God who has filled me with bitterness, that so long as there is any life left in me, no untrue word will pass my lips”. He appeals to God to explain why he has experienced such a tragedy. He says” I call out to you, God, but you do not answer, I stand up to plead, but you keep aloof.”
Job is convinced that if only the Lord would answer his cries, he could plead his case before God “I know that my vindicator (or Redeemer) lives, and at last he will stand upon the earth, then I shall see God”. (Job19. 25-6). So, he believed God would declare him innocent and remove all his sufferings.
Christians have used these words and applied them to the resurrection of Jesus as Redeemer, words made famous by Handel in his work “The Messiah”. “I know that my Redeemer liveth”
God does come to Job, and the passage we heard this morning as our Old Testament reading is part of that reply to Job. Job is reminded of the greatness of God as Creator of the universe, and of all living creatures. Job, says God, is without knowledge, he doesn’t understand how the earth was made. God goes on to say “Shall a faultfinder contend with the Almighty?”
When God has finished speaking Job’s only response is to say, “I have uttered what I did not understand, things too wonderful for me, which I did not know”. God does not explain to Job why he has suffered so much, but when Job experiences the presence of God and acknowledges his own ignorance and smallness in the presence of God, he is humble and he questions no more.
Other parts of the Old Testament also speak to us of our inability to understand why good people suffer. In the book of Isaiah, the writer of Chapter 55 says “My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, says the Lord, for as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts”. (Isaiah 55. 8-9.) Parts of this chapter are normally read each year early in Lent.
So, what are we to say when bad things happen to good people?
Does it mean we should not ask questions?
We have been given free will, we can choose to do what is right or what is wrong. We can choose to love our neighbour or to ignore our neighbour. God doesn’t stop wars, terrible things are happening to our neighbours in many parts of our world today. God doesn’t stop a drunk driver killing others.
As Christians we are called to confront evil wherever we meet it, by doing good. In the midst of the fighting in the Middle East there are many stories of people who are working to help those who are suffering, One remarkable story that you also may have heard was about a young Israeli man. On October 7th last year several people were hiding in a shelter. Hamas was trying to blow up the shelter with hand grenades. They found a way to get them in, this one young man picked up grenades one after another and threw them out, each time risking his own life, but saving the lives of others in the shelter. Finally, a grenade cost him his own life.
God doesn’t stop people hurting or harming others, but God does give us the Holy Spirit, grace, to do what is good, to have courage to support and help others who suffer.
We should never accuse God of doing something we regard as inhuman, neither should we claim to know why some things happen to us. When a child dies, we should not say “It was God’s will” God does not desire the death of children. Remember the words of Job who refused to admit that something was true when he knew it was not. God, he said, had filled him with bitterness but no untrue word would pass his lips.
Does the Christian faith have a particular understanding of human suffering, of why good people suffer bad things?
We have Jesus Christ who is the supreme example of the innocent sufferer, whose sufferings and death brought, and still brings life to others. Jesus saves us as our suffering Lord and inspires his followers to be willing to suffer for others also. Through the centuries there have been numerous examples of people with such love and courage, that continue to inspire us today.
Finally, let us be humble and admit that there are many questions we cannot answer, “Here we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part, then I shall understand fully, even as I have been fully understood,”
The words of St Paul from the First Letter to the Corinthians Chapter 13.
Janet Fulljames
Harvest Thanksgiving - 13th October 2024
‘In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.’
‘God saw all that he had made, and it was very good.’
‘The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it.’
Our readings, this Harvest Festival remind us of God’s generosity to us. The earth provides us with all we need and more. God’s message to Joel told of times of hardship, but they will pass: ‘You will have plenty to eat until you are full, and you will praise the name of the Lord your God’.
Our response is that we too should be generous. In the words of the general thanksgiving, ‘We should show forth our thanks not only with our lips but in our lives.’
Paul, in our second reading, tells us to be generous and willing to share.
How should this generosity be expressed? Throughout the Bible, God’s people are taught to be generous to the poor amongst them, and to the stranger.
And then, what of the future? What about posterity? We could just brush it off, by saying, ‘Well, what did posterity ever do for me?’
That, surely, would be taking us down the wrong track.
Another response is to recognise that this earth and its bounty belong to those who will come after us, just as much as they do to us. We should not steal from them. Our love for our neighbour should extend to those who are not yet born.
We have been told, over many years, about the damage that our modern lifestyles are doing to the planet. This is fundamentally a moral issue. The Australian scientist, Tony McMichael, wrote about ‘the general moral problem … of bequeathing to future generations a negative legacy, an ecologically damaged world’. That was thirty years ago. It’s time we recognised this moral challenge and decided to change direction.
Christians, surely, should be leading the way, showing how we could leave a legacy that we could be proud of, a legacy for which future generations could be thankful.
In our epistle today, Paul encourages us to be content if we’re well-fed and well-clothed. Elsewhere in the Bible the people are reproved for their extravagant living.
Today we hear a lot about economic growth – or the lack of it. They didn’t have growth in biblical times. Growth, as we understand it, didn’t start till about 200 years ago. It began to be given importance in the 1950s, and it wasn’t long before some people began to question the way things were going. In 1975, to take one example, the bishop of Winchester, John Taylor, wrote about the theology of enough.
From the point of view of the environment, not all activity is equally harmful. Manufacturing, construction, travel and transport do tend to cause significant damage. We can try to cut back on these.
Many services and on-line activities, on the other hand, do very little harm. Think of carers and comedians, medics and musicians, teachers and sports coaches. These and many others add to the quality of our lives, with very little impact on the environment. That is where we can put more of our energies and our spending.
What can we do, as individuals and families? There are lots of little changes we can make to our way of living that would make a difference.
You should have with you three items, handed out to you with your hymn books.
This little leaflet, which has been promoted before by our very active Eco-Church group, lists lots of things we can think about. Some of the suggestions may not be possible for us. There may be others where we could make a start. Life is often a matter of compromise. We can all make our own decisions to suit our personal circumstances. We can’t expect to do everything at once: we can start small. One thing I like about this leaflet is that it points out that many of the changes we might make don’t cost us – in fact, they would save money.
This is a flier for Take the Jump, a website that is bright and cheerful. The same message, but another way of expressing it.
This is a questionnaire produced by our Eco-Church group. If you would like to fill it in, please, you can leave it in the box in the narthex.
There is a huge amount that we, as ordinary citizens, can do. There is also much that only government can do. We have to accept, though, that some of the government initiatives have to be paid for through higher prices and higher taxes.
Some people may fear that these changes to the way we live would take away everything that makes life worth living. But we all know, don’t we, that the best things in life aren’t things. They are people: they are family, friends, community.
There was a book published a few years ago with the title ‘Happier People, Healthier Planet’. The author sent a questionnaire to people who had chosen to live a life of modest material consumption and who said that they were happy with it. Hence the title of the book: ‘Happier People, Healthier Planet’.
Our Eco-Church group at St Andrew’s has changed the way that we, as a church, do things. As a church, we have a rather small environmental footprint. Collectively, though, as a congregation, we have a more substantial impact.
May we all take seriously our responsibility for looking after God’s world, living with the future in mind.
Henry Haslam
The Nineteenth Sunday after Trinity - 6th October 2024
“I do not believe one can settle how much we ought to give. I am afraid the only safe rule is to give more than we can spare.”
Wow! That’s a challenge!
That was a quotation by C.S.Lewis, the well known Christian writer and author of the Narnia chronicles, still beloved of children today, even after all these years.
Here’s another one…
“When the whole world is running towards a cliff, he who is running in the opposite direction appears to have lost his mind.”
On the face of it, unrelated, but we’ll come back to that one.
In the meantime, let’s look at the first one again…
“I do not believe one can settle how much we ought to give. I am afraid the only safe rule is to give more than we can spare.”
I guess, I’m glad it was him saying that and not me! It’s hard to preach about stewardship. It’s hard because asking for money, time or talents is not always easy. And of the three, money must be the worst. In our culture we tend to be very private about money. It’s a sensitive subject. I probably won’t tell you how much I earn, and you probably won’t tell me. Though in my case, if you really want to know, you can look it up!
So I can’t tell you what to give. I don’t know your circumstances. What I do know is that St Andrew’s folk are very generous and I’m thankful for that.
What I can do is to address the challenge to myself. Am I giving more than I can spare? Probably not, but perhaps I ought to think about it. And that’s hard because I’m as reluctant to take that sort of risk in an unforgiving world as you might be.
What I can also do as a Christian preacher is to reflect upon what the Bible says about how we should regard our possessions, and how that translates into Christian living.
As I do so, I can see a number of important principles.
First, from that passage in Deuteronomy, we hear God addressing his People and saying. “Take care that you do not forget the Lord your God.”
At that stage in Israel’s history, God had taken a motley bunch of slaves out of a harsh and powerless life in Egypt. He had brought them through the Red Sea and caused the pursuing armies behind them to literally flounder as the parted waters closed in behind Moses and his crew as they stepped out on the other side. God had then gone on to drive out the inhabitants of the Promised Land he was giving them; a good land, flowing with milk and honey, so that they could settle there in safety and security.
God is saying that, when they sit safely in their grand houses with plenty to eat and drink, do not forget that it was God who made it all happen. In short, it was his gift.
Second, as Paul is explaining to the Church in Corinth, that enjoying God’s plenty involved a responsibility to be generous to those in need. As we heard a few minutes ago, he’s saying to the Corinthians, “Look, the Macedonians have done it. Now please can you?”
“It,” by the way, was to help out the Church in Jerusalem, which, at the time, was experiencing a time of famine. As brothers and sisters in Christ, out of recognition of God’s goodness towards them, felt a duty to help them out. And they did so with a joyful heart – a point too that Paul does not want them to miss.
Third, God is in control. He is engaged with us. He cares for us. And he will not abandon us. We can depend upon him. Matthew records Jesus inviting us to trust in him.
“Do not worry about your life,” he says.
Would that it was that simple, we cry! We know how the world is an uncertain place. Prices rise. Economic circumstances change. Hardship for some is only a blink away. For others it is inescapable.
Well, yes, being a Christian does not insulate us from hardship. It never did. But it does bring with it the ability to share. And it does remind us that relying upon God is better than relying on ourselves.
But why is that so?
One answer lies in a very different Gospel reading we could have used today, which includes the verse (John 3,16)…
“For God so loved the world that he gave his only son, that whoever believed in him would not perish, but have everlasting life.”
So far, we’ve reflected on a generous God, the source of all that we have and all that we own, in fact, all that we are. But we don’t always remember just how generous.
For God has not just given us generously of the world’s resources, he has given us generously of himself.
There he is; he has created a wonderful world, blessed it, and in Jesus Christ he has redeemed it and restored it in spite of our sin. And although God shared our life in Christ bringing so much love and so much blessing, we still nailed him to a cross. And still, he turns around and offers us eternal life that is absolutely free.
Now, that is not only generous, but recklessly generous. For how many times since then has God’s recklessly generous love been simply snubbed. Maybe even by our very selves.
And that’s where I come back to that second quotation by C.S.Lewis… “When the whole world is running towards a cliff, he who is running in the opposite direction appears to have lost his mind.”
Even though it often seems like the whole world is bent on its own destruction; by the way we live and the way things are done. But since everyone else is doing it, it is easy for us to do it do.
Reckless generosity is bound to blow up in your face. It appears to do so for God, and it will do for us, we say. Nevertheless, that is the way that God is wired up. That is the way he loves. And when we dare to run in the opposite direction to the world, he has that funny knack of making it right. In short, it’s worth taking the risk.
Like I said, I cannot tell you what you should give of your time, talents and hard earned cash. But whatever we give, and however we work it out, let us make sure that it is a response, from the bottom of our hearts, to the sheer reckless love that God has shown to us.
Because stewardship is exactly that. Nothing more and nothing less.
Amen.
Rev'd Preb. Robin Lodge
The Seventeenth Sunday after Trinity - 22nd September 2024
The appeal of Christ
Why go to church? I chatted with someone recently who said they were a cradle Christian. So was I. I caught my Christianity from my mother who taught me to pray and her family who included two clergy. My mother was the equivalent of the good wife in Proverbs 31 though not so hands on. She had strength and dignity.
I went to our parish church in Crawley and sang in the choir. At secondary school we had daily chapel and I was confirmed there and encouraged to read the bible daily. So my faith was caught through home, and partly inherited; and I’ve never looked back.
Christianity, our Anglican sort, is so right for me though I like silence and Quaker ways and find contemplative prayer a good basis for each day.
One memory of those Sussex childhood days is of my sister Jane aged three. We had sat down one Sunday morning in church and the organ began to be played. Jane popped her head up and asked, ‘Mummy is that Jesus practising?’ I loved that.
Jane’s question spoke of her early awareness of Jesus. What was he like? Why worship him? He was the son of God, born of Mary, and I will focus mainly on his teaching. As they passed through Galilee Jesus wanted some private time for teaching his disciples. He was preparing them for what was going to happen to him. The Son of man is going to be betrayed into the hands of men. They will kill him, and after three days he will rise. But they did not understand what he meant and were afraid to ask him about it. (Mark 9.31-32).
Would we have understood, had we been them? I doubt that I would. Here he is coaching his close friends and having to be patient. As a teacher he was able to teach both the one and the many equally effectively. That is a skill teachers have to have: one to one work is sometimes easier and more conversational but we have to be able to work with others: twenty or thirty in a classroom; larger numbers in talks, lectures and assemblies. Jesus managed both sorts with assurance and appropriately. He could speak to the one and the many, the whole group, with equal facility. He listened to Nicodemus, a night visitor, and then challenged him. He could tell the woman at the well in Sychar about her past and offer her forgiveness and a new way forward. He could hold the attention of several thousand people and also address their hunger and feed them.
He told stories, offered parables (and explained them to his close followers) and taught about the kingdom of God and how to love God and one’s neighbour as oneself.
What attracted me to Jesus from the start was his gift to us of both the Beatitudes and parables such as the Sower and the Prodigal Son (or Sons, to one commentator). He spoke with authority, he held people’s attention, and he left you challenged, wiser and with work to do. He was a wonderful and unique educator.
In Luke 15 the young son in the story, takes his money and squanders it to the extent that he longs for any - food - even the pods that pigs ate - but no one gave him anything. He is at his lowest. He resolves to go home and ask forgiveness: Father I have sinned against heaven and against you. But before he gets there his father has already set out to meet him, and forgives him with the biggest of hugs. It is an astonishing act of love and forgiveness by the father. That is how God forgives each of us, Jesus is saying: we who are made in God’s image.
God’s love for us is integral to everything Jesus says and does for others. And talk about Jesus leads one quickly to love, God’s love. For like it or not we are caught up in and bounded by Love. Jesus’ teaching about forgiveness is at the heart of his message. We are to forgive each other. It’s in the Lord’s prayer; it is spoken of often in Matthew: and when Peter asks, How many times should I forgive someone, Jesus says Not seven times but 77 times 7.
The Franciscan Richard Rohr, a modern prophet, wrote online recently that forgiveness reveals three goodnesses simultaneously. When we forgive, we choose the goodness of others over their faults, we experience God’s goodness flowing through ourselves, and we also experience our own goodness in a way that surprises us.
He set up the New Jerusalem Community in Cincinnati. Over the front door of the main house he had painted the numbers 77 x 7. Unfortunately the local postmen misunderstood this witty in-house message, and wodered if it was another form of zip code.
A friend, a churchgoer and spiritual person, told my wife and me how she can wake up in the night and feel very guilty about something she had said or done in the past; and worry about it. I asked if she had sought God’s forgiveness for whatever pained her, and I don’t think she had. I suggested, to ease her pain and get back to sleep, that the next time this happened, she said Lord have mercy, Christ have mercy, Lord have mercy.
The best way to forgive is as soon as possible after I’ve hurt someone. Do it now and not wait until later. And if we rankle about something, Richard Rohr advises: Let’s ask for the grace to let go of those grudges and hurts to which we cling.
Jeremy Harvey
The Sixteenth Sunday after Trinity - 15th September 2024
As you may have picked up over time, each Gospel writer has his own take on the story of Jesus. Matthew sets out to prove to a Jewish audience that Jesus is the Messiah. Luke just wants to get the historical account set down. He’s a good storyteller. Oh, and, being a doctor, takes a particular interest in the healing stories. John focusses on the cosmic Christ – Jesus as the Incarnation of the Word of God, that deep reality behind the whole of Creation itself.
And, Mark? Well, Mark is an interesting one. His is the shortest Gospel. Fast moving, with frequent use of phrases such as, “And then,” “And next,” “Suddenly,” and so on. I always say it would make brilliant telly. But his message is really a question. He gives us the Jesus story, and all the time asks us to consider… “Who is this guy?”
Today, we hear from the mid-point of Mark’s Gospel: chapter 8 of 16. It is a pivotal moment in the story. The moment when Peter reveals to us all his answer to the question…
“You are the Messiah.”
Short and to the point, that. No messing. Peter says it like it is. Jesus is the Messiah, the long awaited one from God. Matthew’s account, pushes the message home…
“You are the Messiah, the Son of the Living God.”
It all began as Jesus and the Twelve were walking and talking together on their way towards the villages of Caesarea Phillipi. We don’t know what they were talking about. Maybe they were reflecting together on all they had been through so far. Because, guess what story comes immediately before this in Mark 8.
The feeding of the 4000… There’s that bread again!
And when I say 4000, I mean 4000. Not the 5000 of Chapter 6. For this is a different feast. And if you compare the two stories there are some important differences. The crowd has been there for 3 days, not one. And this time there are no villages nearby, whether the shops would be open or not. The situation is far more urgent.
So is Jesus’ mission. Time is beginning to run out.
There are some other details that have more symbolic significance too, but we needn’t worry ourselves with them now.
The point is that, Peter apart, no one seems to be getting it.
As they travelled away by boat, Jesus makes a remark about the leaven of the Pharisees and of Herod. Yet the disciples think he’s having a go at them for not having enough bread. It’s like they’re on a different planet. The penny has simply failed to drop.
9000 people miraculously fed on two occasions and they still don’t get it. And remember how, after the first time, the crowd had wanted to take him and make him king. Jesus is one big meal ticket and he has to get away before the Romans don’t get it either but with consequences that were far worse. Maybe the disciples didn’t get that either.
So it is highly likely that this conversation is still going on when they reach the far shore of the lake and continue their journey on foot.
Sensing their confusion, Jesus tries a different tack.
“So, who do people say that I am?”
They reply that some say Elijah, for there was a tradition that the great Old Testament prophet would put in an appearance just before the Messiah came. Others say, John the Baptist come back from the dead. This was the man that Herod had executed, of whom Jesus remarked that, in effect, he was Elijah come again but they hadn’t recognised it.
And it is at that point that Peter has a bright idea. If Elijah has already come and gone, then there you can only conclude one thing…
That Jesus is indeed the Messiah.
And, of course, Peter is quite right. Big tick and a gold star. Peter has done well … only then, being Peter, he puts his foot in it.
When Jesus starts talking about his forthcoming Passion and Death, Peter thinks, “Come off it. That’s not what happens to the Messiah.” Moreover, he says so.
“Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.”
The rebuke must have stung. But Jesus had to do it. For in the Lord’s mind he was taken right back to the beginning of his ministry to his time in the Wilderness following his baptism.
It was a time when Jesus had to work out what kind of Messiah that his Father expected him to be. And being as human as he was divine, he was subject to all the temptations that we might have had. Satan lays before him a range of possibilities to demonstrate his power and authority.
Or, perhaps, less demonstrate and more flaunt.
For none of those scenarios spoke into the kind of God revealed throughout the Scripture, often implicitly; on occasions explicitly, such as in the Suffering Servant passages of Isaiah 53 that we hear each Good Friday as we reflect on the meaning of the cross.
As Cleopas and his fellow traveller on the Road to Emmaus had to learn, it was all there in the Scriptures from the beginning. It just needed to be pieced together.
In that passage from Proverbs that he heard first off this morning, Wisdom cries out…
“How long, O simple ones, will you love what is simple?”
It is the sentiment born out of frustration that even Jesus expresses from time to time.
Earlier in Mark 8, Jesus says to his disciples as they reflect on the meal for 4000…
“Do you still not understand? Are your minds closed? You have eyes: can you not see? You have ears: can you not hear?”
But they look at him blankly.
Of course, it’s easy for us. We have 2000 years of theological reflection upon the story of Jesus. Yet, they did have the Scriptures, and may well have been better versed in them than we are, but still they didn’t get it.
Not so much because their minds were closed but because their assumptions were all wrong. Dangerous things assumptions. They are a kind of prejudice – literally a pre-judgement – a framework on which to hang all their thinking. But if that framework is wrong… Effectively, they were badly taught.
Peter’s mistake was his assumption was that the Messiah would be this great death-or-glory warrior-prince, who would take back Israel from the oppressor – in his case the Romans – and replace them with a kind of Divine Rule in which Israel would be top nation and history would come to a full stop.
By contrast, the kind of kingdom that God would set up would only come by travelling the road to Calvary and the cross. There would have to be death before there could be a resurrection.
It is the same for us. When we are moved to apply our faith to our own lives and the world around us, what assumptions – what faulty thinking – do we have to put to death before we get it; before we truly understand what God is about?
Peter may have had an inkling in Chapter 8, but still Mark goes on asking his question…“Who is this guy.”
It is a question that Jesus’ followers were still grappling with as Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James and Salome headed to the tomb on that first Easter morning, wondering who would roll away the stone.
Even then they did not expect to see what they found. Even after the angel tells them to get Peter and go on to Galilee to meet the Risen Christ, they still didn’t get it. And so the original version of Mark’s Gospel ends like this…
“Then they went out and ran away from the tomb, trembling with amazement. They said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.”
It’s hardly encouraging, and the Church later seems to have added a bit to make a better ending. Look for yourself when you get home.
Mark asks us of Jesus, “Who is this guy?”
Peter sort of knew, but it was a hazy picture, for all the clues laid down in the Scriptures. Even on the road to Emmaus puzzlement was the order of the day – until the couple meet the Risen Jesus for themselves.
Because that’s what it takes.
For Mark’s question goes even deeper. Not just, “Who is Jesus?” but this…
“Who is Jesus – for you?” Amen.
Rev'd Preb. Robin Lodge
The Fifteenth Sunday after Trinity - 8th September 2024
One of the things that I found most repellent about the violence in Southport and other cities at the beginning of August after the murder of three little girls by a young black man, riots encouraged by the likes of nasty individuals like Tommy Robinson and Elon Musk, ……..what particularly annoyed me was that the far-right rioters laughably claim that they were upholding Christian values and culture against an evil invasion of Muslim ideas and practices designed to turn our country into an Islamic state governed by Sharia laws.
Really? Setting fire to hotels temporarily housing asylum seekers, looting local shops, burning Police vans, attacking Police officers and innocent passers-by while screaming slogans demanding the expulsion of all recent migrants of colour: how does this behaviour uphold the glorious Christian traditions of our country?
What would Jesus have thought about law-breaking, bigotry and violence on such a depressing scale? Would he have regarded such behaviour as an appropriate way of protecting and upholding the fine moral and spiritual traditions of the Christian faith?
It is all too easy for us Christians to forget that Jesus was no Christian, but an ordinary Jew, steeped in the complexities of the Old Testament legal code with its 619 distinct injunctions, supplemented by a vast prophetic and literary library far greater in size than what we have in the New Testament.
Judaism is much more legalistic than Christianity, so that strict adherence to Rules of ancient origin is seen as the true hallmark of a righteous Orthodox Jew, whereas for Christians there is as great an emphasis on faith and on one’s beliefs as on the expression of that faith and those beliefs in daily living.
In the NT we often find Jesus locked in fierce debate with religious leaders and experts in Jewish Law and observance, whom he criticized for missing the real point of their religious laws while obsessing about their superficial details.
Scribes, Pharisees and Sadducees were offended by Jesus’ accusation of hypocrisy against them, but they moved carefully against him because of his popularity with the general public and because he showed such skill and learning in argument.
In James 2 the writer reminds us that the entire corpus of Jewish Law can be summarized in the precept that James calls the Royal Law, but you might know better as the Golden Rule: “Love your neighbour as yourself”, which is as simple a rule as it is profound.
To treat other people as you would like them to treat you is at the heart of the gospel message which Jesus was so persistently proclaiming, since that practice is the best possible proof of one’s love for God.
All the other wordy arguments of Christian theologians down the last twenty centuries are really only a gloss on those two critical commandments: love God and love your neighbour. That is the heart of the gospel, and so it is also the heart of the Christian faith.
Like all profound statements the Royal Law, or Golden Rule, gives rise to a number of questions. What is the nature of the Love referred to here? Who exactly is my neighbour? Such questions received a definitive answer of course when Jesus told the parable of the Good Samaritan.
Love is that selfless, generous, unprejudiced, unjudgmental compassion that the despised Gentile, the Samaritan, displays in rescuing a badly injured Jew, who might well have shunned him in different circumstances. Loving one’s neighbour cannot ever involve prejudice, or discrimination on the basis of colour, culture, creed, or handicap.
So what on earth is Jesus doing in our gospel reading insulting a foreign woman, a Gentile, who in all humility has come to plead with him to heal her desperately ill daughter? “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs,” Jesus barks at her.
How does such naked racism and rudeness square with his own illustration of the Golden Rule in the parable of the Good Samaritan? Is not Jesus here being guilty of the same sin of hypocrisy for which he lambasts the Pharisees and other self-righteous religious leaders?
This is undoubtedly a tricky passage for scholars to interpret. Some try to sanitize Jesus’ words by suggesting that the reference to dogs is to cherished pets, so is meant affectionately. I think that this is rubbish, but you can believe it, if you want. The reality is that Jesus heals the Gentile woman’s child, because the mother has shown such trust in the Lord’s capacity to do her good.
Mark does not disguise the robustness of Jesus’ initial response with its racist overtones, because his characterization of Jesus is naturalistic and far removed from that awful presentation of him as “gentle Jesus meek and mild” to which we as children were all too often subject in Sunday School.
We need Mark to remind us that Jesus was fully human like us. He could be righteously indignant, or tetchy, or irritable, or plain rude at times just as we can be in moments of stress. We need to be less hung up with notions of Jesus’ moral perfection and sinlessness and focus instead on his overall character and ministry.
He forgave, healed and loved with unique readiness and generosity. In that there is evidence that he considered his own calling to be primarily to his own Jewish community, though not exclusively so, we should judge the moment of unkindness in Mark 7 to a persistent Gentile woman as a regrettable lapse, to be set in the context of the conciliatory words that he later speaks to her before he heals her daughter.
The Old Testament condemns prejudice and partiality as strongly as the New. We read in Proverbs 22, “Whoever sows injustice will reap calamity”. In the Letter of James, Cp.2, the writer says, “If you show partiality, you commit sin and are convicted by the law as transgressors.”
To claim that there is anything Christian about claiming that there is something intrinsically inferior about people coming here from another country with a different culture than our own and speaking a different language from ours, perhaps with a different skin colour and different tastes in food is to ignore the command to love our neighbour.
Because we like the Jesus of Mark’s gospel are human, we will sometimes fail to live up to our calling as disciples and imitators of Christ. There will occasionally be inter-community conflict, accusations will be thrown around denigrating those with whom we disagree and there may even be confrontation which community leaders will have to restrain.
When such sins are committed, we must be penitent and recall our true Christian ideals, which include the acceptance of difference, the constant search for dialogue and reconciliation and the promotion of social harmony in the quest for peace, for peace is the quality which defines the Kingdom of God.
It is that Kingdom for which Jesus taught us to pray. It is that peace in the world which we should be making every effort to create. As Jesus compassionately unblocked the ears of the deaf man and loosened his tongue so he could speak, we need to open the ears of the rioters and of the creators of chaos in society, so they listen to the wisdom of reconcilers and peacemakers and learn to speak words of love rather than of divisive hate. Amen.
Munna Mitra
The Thirteenth Sunday after Trinity - 25th August 2024
Recently, a visitor to Taunton asked me what I knew about the Christadelphians. He had noticed the meeting house near the town centre. Now, I know nothing about the congregation in Taunton but I could tell him that the Christadelphians had been founded in the USA in the 19th century. They are not part of the mainstream Christian Church as they don’t believe in the Holy Trinity, do not believe that Jesus Christ is God. They believe he was a holy man, a good man, but do not believe in the Incarnation, that “ The Word became flesh and dwelt among us”, or as we heard in our gospel reading today “ This is the bread which came down from heaven, who ever eats this bread will live forever” (v58).
Some disciples could not stomach this teaching. “This is a hard saying, who can listen to it?”, and many of his disciples drew back and no longer went about with him” (v60) It is easy to think this was because of the teaching about Jesus as the Bread of Life that we have been hearing in detail during the last 3 Sundays, but Jesus also says ”What if you were to see the Son of Man ascending where he was before?” Where he was before – heaven- the Word made flesh who came down from heaven, and returns to the Father’s presence.
As our Offertory hymn this morning we will sing that great Christmas hymn, a favourite of Alan Cook’s, a great hymn of praise that rejoices in the Incarnation. “Of the Father’s Love Begotten” a hymn dating back to the 4th century. (Sorry, it means you have 2 hymn books this morning!).
This morning I want to think with you about the Incarnation and Redemption, about Jesus as a human being and as God, and why it is necessary for our salvation that Jesus was both human and divine.
There have often been people who want to follow Jesus and his teaching but cannot accept that Jesus is God who enters our world as a human being, so is both God and human .You will have heard of Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Unitarians, these faiths do not believe in the Incarnation, do not believe in the Christian creeds we say every week. Is it because it’s easier to think of Jesus as a human being? If we say Jesus was a holy man full of the Spirit of God, what does this then say about our salvation and eternal life?
The hymn we will sing at the Offertory “Of the Father’s love Begotten” speaks of Jesus as our Saviour and Redeemer, and this is the problem if we deny the Incarnation. How can a man be our Saviour and Redeemer? Prophets and holy men before the time of Christ had tried to bring the people back to God, again and again they failed. Only God can save, only God can redeem us.
We believe that Jesus Christ has come to our help, has become our Saviour and Redeemer. He was able to do so because he is both human and divine. Through his life, death and resurrection Jesus has enabled us to live in a new relationship with God, enjoying new life which is eternal.
There are many ways that Christians have tried to describe how the death and resurrection of Christ could save us, it is sometimes described as a release from the slavery of sin, or the payment of the price for sin that separates us from God, or the payment of a ransom when we have been captured by sin.
I have an image; I don’t know when I first became aware of this image, but it still speaks to me. Between God and his creation there was a great chasm or gorge, impossible to get from one side to the other. The cross of Christ is placed in that chasm, the arms reaching from one side to the other, creating a bridge so that now we can cross that bridge via the cross and come near to God.
Some followers of Jesus have had difficulty believing he was God, others have had difficulty believing he really was a human being like you and me.
Some followers of Jesus during the last 2,000 years have believed Jesus only appeared to be a human being. They believe that for God to take human flesh would be to dishonour God, to insult God. God is holy so cannot be part of the material world. We believe that all that God has created, the universe, this world and human beings all are good and not evil. Throughout the ages there have been people who see the physical, our human flesh, as evil. They think the body distracts from the spiritual, from God, and cannot please God. Some Christians have struggled with human sexuality, regarding celibacy as a higher state than marriage. Those struggling to understand human sexuality today may be adopting this same position, struggling to see the human body as the dwelling place of God.
Our gospel says many left Jesus they could not accept his teaching. What prevents people today from believing the Gospel?
I read most of my news online now, and when I switch on the computer, I am presented with lots of pictures, some are news items, some adverts, and some are organizations promoting their views paid for by adverts. Recently I noticed one called “The Sense Hub” one item was “21 reasons people do not believe in Christianity”. There were lots of obvious reasons, what was missing interested me. Nowhere was worship mentioned yet we are often told that young people are put off by boring worship. Not that I would suggest that our worship is boring, those who may be unfamiliar need to learn what we are doing, and to understand why we do certain things.
What surprised me most was that there was no mention of Jesus Christ! Jesus, - at the heart of the Christian faith, yet Jesus is apparently not thought about much by those who know little about Christianity. Perhaps this is the greatest challenge we face as Christians, to help non-believers read about Jesus, help them to think who Jesus was, did he really live, did he really die and was he seen alive afterwards? Was he a human being like you and me? Was he more than this, did he have a unique relationship with God the Father? Was his death not some terrible mistake but a means of new life for us? Was he the Living Bread that came down from heaven and gave life to the world?
For me one of the most amazing statements in the gospels are the words of Jesus at the Last Supper. “This is my blood of the New Covenant which is poured out for many”, and the earliest written record, from Paul writing to the Corinthians “This is my body which is broken for you” What human being would speak about making a new covenant between God and human beings? Who would say that their death would be for the good of many?
Finally, the Incarnation shows us what God is like. The world often sees God - if they can believe in a God – as we experience suffering, cruelty, violence and injustice, as some kind of uncaring autocrat. We have only to look at the face of Jesus Christ to see the love and compassion of God for us and for all creation.
We have heard a part of John Chapter 6 during the last 5 weeks, the teaching is not always easy to understand, but the message is a simple one. John tells us that we need intimacy with Christ, we need to dwell in Him, we need to allow His life to become one with our lives. This we do at the Eucharist every Sunday as we receive Holy Communion. We open our hearts to the presence of Christ, receiving his life, which is ours for eternity.
I will finish with the words of a well-known Communion hymn, reading the first verse. It is a 19th century hymn written by Josiah Condor, a Congregationalist, known for his work to abolish slavery.
Bread of heaven, on thee we feed,
For thy flesh is meat indeed;
Ever may our souls be fed
With this true and living bread;
Day by day with strength supplied
Through the life of Him who died.
“This is the bread which came down from heaven, it is not like the bread which our fathers ate; they are dead, but whoever eats this bread will live forever”. v 58.
Janet Fulljames
The Eleventh Sunday after Trinity - 11th August 2024
The Bread of Life: Reflection for St. Andrew’s
In a week where our news has been of Far Right street rioting and Olympic athletes achieving great things, our subject here today has to be bread. Bread has featured in three successive Sunday readings, all from John 6.
Robin pointed out there were two sorts of bread in John’s account of the feeding of thousands: bread made from barley - a boy had five barley loaves – and bread made from wheat. The latter was what the rich ate. Today’s reading mentions bread six times. And when we pray the prayer Jesus taught, we ask, ‘Give us today our daily bread.’
Let’s start then with daily bread. Bread today. Bread is still our staple diet provided we can afford it. At home we eat some three to four slices a day. We make sandwiches if we to take some lunch with us. Some of you may even make your own bread and very tasty it can be.
One messy church leader Aike undertook with her London children the growing of wheat and then the making of bread. She found it very hard to obtain any wheat seeds. Once she had some she planted them in a small raised bed. She had only a small space to run this trial, a pinched site close to the O2 Arena and a motorway. The children watered the seeds and learnt how long it took for them to grow. At first Aike thought she had sown grass, not wheat. Once the wheat was ready to be ‘harvested’ they cut it by hand. Hard work for young hands. Then they threshed and winnowed it. Again not easy and slow work. By now they had the necessary ingredients to make bread. But then they found how little bread they had from that crop.
Altogether it was a hands on learning lesson about how much land you needed to grow enough wheat to make even a few loaves. Wheat growing was best left to farmers if the nation was to be fed.
Which brings us to what a vital role farmers have across the world in giving people their daily bread. We have among us farmer’s wives and people who have grown up on farms even if they did not become farmers. Our thanks to those who provide our bread and the other crops we eat.
Also mentioned in John 6 has been ‘manna’ the bread from heaven (Exodus 16) that God provided the Israelites with each morning as they journeyed in the wilderness after their escape from Pharoah and the Egyptians. Each household was to eat as much as they needed and not to hoard or waste any. Manna, their daily ration, was basic to their existence and survival.
For Jesus bread was staple, it seems, to life and also one of the ways in which he defined his role. John puts this in a repetitive but slightly abstract way. But Jesus’ message is clear.
‘I Am the bread of Life.’ That is because he gives, teaches, passes on, what his father gives him and wants us to have. ‘I and the father are one.’ I have to pass on what the father teaches me. If we listen to Jesus, obey him, he will ‘feed’ us with eternal life, all we need in the way of food for both our bodies and our souls, both now and in our eternal future. (I can’t say what that future consists of but I believe Jesus offers us now eternal ‘food’.) By coming to him, following him, we will never be spiritually hungry or thirsty. Jesus will feed us abundantly. Unpicking meaning in John’s gospel is not easy!
And we are aware, that some Christian traditions believe that at this service of Eucharist (Thanksgiving) for Jesus death and resurrection, the wafer/bread we eat is transformed and becomes his body, the wine we sip a taste of his blood.
We should be aware that Jesus – in John’s gospel – makes other claims: such as I Am the Light and I Am the Way, the Truth, and the Life. Each of these I Ams is important and emphasizes an aspect of the astonishing abundance that Jesus gives us.
Do you read Clinton Rogers’ column in the Somerset Gazette? He is a well known local reporter, now retired, with a poor memory. Where possible he writes something down. One day he decided to ride his motorbike. As he put his helmet on, he put his smart phone on the pillion seat. ‘I’ll remember to pick it up’, he thought. He sets off, comes home and realises his mobile is lost. He retraces his journey in busy traffic and with relief sees a blue object on the road, stops and retrieves it. It is the case. A motorist stops to help, rings Clinton’s mobile number, and they both walk in the grass verge and find the phone nearby. Clinton thanks the man warmly, asks his name and the man drives off. Clinton returns home. But by then he has forgotten the man’s name. But he tells the story and thanks him at the end of this column, hopefully.
How good is your memory? John the gospel writer knows that our memories can be poor. He wants us to remember that Jesus said ‘I Am the bread of life’ and so he repeats that saying and the word bread far more than we might like. Perhaps he was right.
I found this verse helpful from a hymn I sang at the Minster:
‘When we meet around your table,
Lord, be here in bread and wine
real to us who find your presence
In the world as in this sign.’
Jeremy Harvey
The Ninth Sunday after Trinity - 28th July 2024
When we think of food shortages, we probably used to think of newsreel footage of empty shelves in the supermarkets of communist countries, or the starvation conditions in Ethiopia, and other faraway places.
In our own country, we might have imagined higher prices but little more. So those of us who have been used to the plenty of the Western world all our lives, were shocked at the beginning of the Covid crisis by empty shelves in our supermarkets too. Remember, right at the very beginning, the mad rush on toilet rolls, for example. And it's a phenomenon that hasn’t quite gone away since.
But unless you visit a bakery late in the day, it is not a problem that we usually encounter with bread. If it did, we would soon take fright.
We think of bread as a symbol of basic food. In many places it really is basic food.
It was so in the world of the New Testament, where the phrase, “To eat bread,” in Hebrew, literally meant, “To have a meal.”
So the poor ate barley bread, and the rich eat bread made with wheat, but everyone treated it with respect. There was a rule that any crumb larger than an olive was not to be thrown away. The line between plenty and starvation was easily crossed, and crossed you never knew when, so it literally paid not to be wasteful.
The scene set up for us by John is Jesus, teaching and working miracles in the hills on the far side of the Sea of Galilee. Now Jesus had already made a bit of a reputation for these things and had built up quite a following. If you really want a thing, you are invariably prepared to travel to get it. They’ve been at it a while, and everyone is getting tired and hungry. Jesus picks this up and realises he needs to do something about it.
Never one to shrink from a challenge, and always alert for a teaching point, Jesus turns to Philip. Now Philip was local to these parts and could reasonably have known where food might be obtained. Looking around them, of course, it was clear that there wasn’t so much as a farm, let alone a handy Tesco Express, even if they’d been invented yet.
And Andrew comes up with the other issue raised whenever we want to do something really radical... The cost. Six month’s wages would barely make a dent in the bill.
Then he says something else; something we all know from this story, but something perhaps more striking than we think…
“There is a boy here who has five barley loaves and two fish.”
He might as well have said he’d got a couple of quid in his back pocket.
So why did he say it? He knew that wouldn’t feed five never mind five thousand.
Was he just being a bit ironic, saying the obvious.
Perhaps he was saying what we all say to God when we’re in a tight spot, “Excuse me … could we have a bit of a miracle… like, now… please?”
Or maybe, “It’s your idea, Lord. You’re the boss. Do something!” which is much the same thing, only less polite.
All of which gave Jesus the “in” he needed, and the rest is, as they say, history.
This story is important. It must be, because you’ll find different versions of it in all four Gospels. So we’d better listen up to the conclusions it offers us…
Number One…
We all have gifts we can offer to God, and no talent, or skill, or moment of time that is too insignificant to be placed into his hands. However meagre our resources, when they are given generously and with an open heart it will be accepted and multiplied beyond our wildest dreams.
Time, talents and treasure. All are to be offered to God, not as spare, but in thanksgiving for God’s generosity towards us. But like all spiritual disciplines, it’s a risk. The Widow’s Mite comes to mind; the poor woman who gave all she had. But take that risk in God’s service and you will find God faithful.
Number Two…
From that we can conclude that with Jesus as our Resource, even the bread of the poor can satisfy the hunger of so many. When God is at work, shortage becomes abundance, deficiency becomes plenty, and like the crumbs the size of an olive, nothing given sincerely to God is ever lost.
And then, there is Number Three…
A warning. There are some appetites that Jesus will not fill. One is the hunger for power. The people could see that in Jesus they were on to a good thing, so they wanted to take him and make him king, whether he liked it or not. But domination is a destructive power. Jesus could see it all around him, and we can see it all around us today. It is the very desire for domination that keeps the bread from the hungry, the power that steals the community’s own resources to secure its position. And that is not the way of the Kingdom of God.
Because that’s why Jesus performs this miracle. He could have spent all his time overriding the laws of nature to keep the people fed and healed of all their diseases, but that way they would never learn.
They would never learn that real power lies in the freedom to give with a generous heart, rather than to grab out of greed. Because when we share the little we appear to have we will discover how much we have left over.
And, as with all the challenges that Jesus gives us, we will only discover the truth when we act it out in the everyday places of our lives.
Amen.
Rev'd Preb. Robin Lodge
Feast of Dedication - 21st July 2024
Well, Happy Birthday, once again, folks, now we are 143! I hope you’re enjoying the party so far, for the word Eucharist literally translates as “Feast of Great Joy.”
Now, I know that having party sometimes means doing crazy things, but as we’re the CofE we do crazy very gently. So in a moment of sheer exuberance I prepared for this sermon by Googling the number 143. It was one of those, let’s see what happens moments, not knowing what it would come up with.
One answer was that 143 is the name of the next album to be launched by the singer Katy Perry in September.
Another was that it was the Oxford Bus Company route from Reading to Goring in the Thames Valley.
And the other meaning was really quite striking, but I’ll leave you in suspense with that one … unless, of course, you have already guessed.
But let us now turn to the Scriptures…
Three very different readings, all quite unrelated, stitched together by the Church for occasions such as this.
The first, the story of Jacob’s Ladder, joining Earth and Heaven, with that constant procession of angels ascending and descending. All this happens as a vision while Jacob is sleeping, a stone beneath his head for a pillow out there in the wild country.
Imagine that! If you thought your average hotel pillow can be a bit firm, that must be nothing to the accommodation Jacob lined up for himself that night!
Next up, Peter is writing to the young and scattered churches in what is now modern day Turkey, probably north of the Taurus Mountains.
After the first flush of faith, Peter is encouraging the new Christians to settle down into growing in their discipleship. It was about setting a path towards a deeper understanding of the things of God. They were to be like living stones, a church built on holy lives that would be a witness to all.
Finally, Jesus’ warning to those who thought they were on the right path that belonging meant being atuned to God and not just the system, and, indeed, on the Temple as a place of prayer and mission and not just an end in itself. Those who lay hold of that truth will be ever under God’s protection… a movement unstoppable whatever the world might throw in its path.
From these readings, I sense there a number of conclusions that we can draw about the nature and purpose of this, and indeed any other, church building.
First, a church is a place where heaven and earth touch.
Perhaps for the first time, reflecting on Jacob’s Ladder, I noticed that it was busy. There is a constant flow of angels up and down, messengers, God’s servants doing his will.
Now, the work of angels is a whole sermon in itself, and there are probably others better qualified to do that. But it does make me realise, not only that there is a connection between the faithful on Earth and the faithful in Heaven, but that God is engaged with the Church on earth, protecting and sustaining it constantly. That’s important, especially when being the Church can be hard work. We belong to God, and, as Jesus promises, nothing can snatch us from his hand.
Second, a church should be a place of rest.
I’m always grateful for those few hours each week that the church can be open for passers by to come in, sit awhile and ponder, or light a candle or leave a prayer request in the prayer net. But, beyond that, there is our public worship, when all who would like to can turn aside from busy or difficult lives and receive sustenance from God through prayer and through the sacraments, particularly Holy Communion. But lest the pillow get too comfortable, this happens so we can move on to another day, assisted by the angels doing who knows what in proclaiming God’s love to the world.
Third, a church is where you will find people living differently. Or should do. The world rejects the things of God, but it these things for which we stand, a beacon of life and hope in a dark old world.
And fourth: a church is not an end in itself. The Jerusalem Temple in the time of Christ was at the heart of a religious system in which, by and large, God had been quietly forgotten. So next time you wonder why it is that we fund raise for this building, why we staff rotas and sit on committees; why it is that we turn up week by week when some of time we might feel we could equally well pray at home, know this…
It is so that we can be that beacon of love, light and prayer in this community. This building is a resource for us as we live out that calling, not as perfect saints by any means, but forgiven sinners who have found in Jesus blessing and peace, and, when life gets tough, a reason to go on.
Back to the number 143…
Before I tell you the answer I promised, one more thing.
In our normal red hymn book, hymn no.143 happens to be, “Jesus shall reign where’er the sun…” It’s a classic CofE hymn, written by Isaac Watts, who lived from 1674 and 1748. And it is based on Psalm 72. I was quite struck by some of the lines in relation to our Feast of Dedication today…
Take for example the second verse, referring possibly to the worship we offer here…
People and realms of every tongue
Dwell on his love with sweetest song,
And infant voices shall proclaim
Their early blessings on his name.
And verse three, about our mission to the weary amongst us and around us...
Blessings abound where’er he reigns
The prisoner leaps to lose his chains;
The weary find eternal rest,
And all the sons of want are blest.
And in the final verse, echoes of Jacob’s Ladder and the thin join between the Church on Earth and the Church in Heaven…
Let every creature rise and bring
Peculiar honours to our King;
Angels descend with songs again,
And earth repeats the loud Amen.
And now, the moment you’ve all been waiting for: the other meaning of the number 143.
May be you knew this, but I did not: it is text language… 143 is simply code for, “I love you,” – three words, 1 letter, 4 letters, 3 letters. Apparently, you also use 831: 8 letters, 3 words, 1 meaning.
So we’ll bury this sermon in a time capsule, and whoever is Vicar here in the year 2855 can use it again, because none of us will be here to notice, so it will be fresh – just like the Gospel in every age!
That’s quite a meaning isn’t it. I love you…
So here it is, St Andrew’s, the old pile of stones, beloved by its people, perchance beloved by its community, but standing, sure and steadfast as an expression of God’s love for us – and for whoever is pleased to come under its shade.
Amen.
Rev'd Preb. Robin Lodge
*******************