The following sermon was preached at the Yilki Uniting Church on January 5th, 2025. Spaces appear where two photographs coulod not b transferred to this website item. I hope you find he reading worthwhile.
Tony
S2025YLK0101
5-1-25 Yilki Uniting Church 1030
RCL Jer.31:7-14 Ps.147:12-15(16-18)19,20 Eph. 1:3-14 John 1(1-9)10-18
GOD DWELLING WITH US
Christmas was the time we thought especially, in almost every church, about God with us. The language used in the various churches might have differed, but God with us – Emmanuel – formed the focus of our Christmas thinking.
It is one of the most precious realities of our Christian faith, so important that the lectionary keeps us focused upon it by setting as the Gospel reading for today the prologue to John’s Gospel and the subject of the Word made flesh among us. Surely one of the most astonishing statements ever made! That God is with us in the world is a compelling reality that should surely be uplifting for us every day. So that will be the focus of our thinking today – God dwells with us.
We are going to focus our thinking upon two verses from the prologue of John’s Gospel. For those who like to read them in their own Bibles, they are verses 14 and 18 of chapter one. Putting them together, they read, in the RSV,
‘And the word became flesh, and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth; we have beheld his glory, glory of the only Son from the Father…No one has ever seen God; the only Son who is in the bosom of the Father, he has made him known.’
That speaks to me of a small group of subjects that make up the unity of these two verses and I invite you to think about them with me. They are, the ENFLESHING,the REVELATION andthe REVELATION’S CONTENT.
We move straight into those subjects, beginning with
I
The ENFLESHING.
‘And the word became flesh and dwelt among us…’
The word became flesh. Isn’t that a remarkable thought? God dwells in his own creation!
I hope you’ll excuse some Greek. It should be useful in helping us to understand what the Gospel is saying to us. The Greek from which scholars have translated word[1]is rich in meaning in classical Greek and the writer of John’s Gospel, writing in the everyday Greek of his day knew that classical background very well and chose the expression carefully. It carries the meanings ofreason, especially in a wisdom sense,rational argument and word.
So what or who is the person in whom the word becomes flesh? Verse 18 describes him as
the only Son who is in the bosom of the Father.
Again, I’m going to the Greek that lies behind the expression the only Son. Translated literally, it means the only begotten. But it’s very clear that the writer means more than that. In fact, the term was understood in his day to mean the-one-of-a-kind.[2] ;That is, his essence, the Word’s essence, was of the Father. One-of-a-kind is one of kindred. So one of the meanings of the only Son who is in the bosom of the Father, is the beloved who is in the heart of the Father.
When we think this morning of the Word becoming flesh, we are thinking of Jesus as the beloved of God, the one who is one-of-a-kind, the essence of God, marking him off from any other.
A word of caution is needed here. The writer of John was clearly a mystic, a deeply contemplative man, and the truths he teaches us – truths they certainly are – can easily leave us with a picture of Jesus who is unlike us in the sense that he is unearthed, ungrounded, – not really a human being as we are human.
How sad that would be if we were to understand Jesus in that way. As I mentioned last week here at Yilki, he was as human as we are, and John, even in his very high and lofty view of Jesus, makes sure that we don’t lose sight of his humanity when he states very clearly,‘And the word became flesh and dwelt among us…’ The Word became flesh, human as we are, God dwelling among us in our earthly habitation, his creation.
So that is the major lesson of the ENFLESHMENT of the Word. Jesus, the one-of-a-kind beloved of God, is he in whom God is not visiting us, but dwelling with us in the life of the everyday world, his creation, God yes, man yes. As you and I worship now in this church building, God is with us. As we leave to go our separate ways, God goes with us. What a beautiful reality that is…
II
Bring your thoughts with me now to the REVELATION.
I want to introduce this part of our thinking by providing the information that the Gospel of John was almost certainly written in Ephesus, now part of Turkey. Well, you might be asking yourself, what’s the relevance of that?
This is the relevance. There was a Jewish population in that very sophisticated city. Moreover, a careful reading of the gospel indicates that the writer knew his readership in the churches included people very familiar with the religious practices of Judaism, the religion of the Jews – the religion of Jesus. So the Jewish Christians, who are likely to have been among the first who read these words would have been taken aback by the statement that dwelling among us, was the Word, the revealer of the Father whom, the Gospel freely notes, no one has ever seen. But, the gospel sense insists, we CAN see in the person of Jesus, God whom no one, prior to his advent, had ever seen!
You might remember that the strong Jewish conviction that no man has seen God – in fact no man is able to see God – is found in words to Moses in the book of Exodus, ‘…man shall not see me and live.’[3] It was a tenet of Jewish faith, but ‘No’, says John. That is no more the case. With the coming into the world of the Word, God can be seen and is seen in Jesus of Nazareth, the revealer of Divinity because he is one-of-a-kind with God, Beloved of God, one who dwells with us, walks with us, accompanies us in every circumstance.
This morning we shall be involved in a practice where faith engages in revelation. It is called Holy Communion. It is holy because it pertains to God and is therefore unlike any other experience.
Holy means “different”. When we celebrate Holy Communion, we use very ordinary, everyday items, bread and grape juice. That’s one of the reasons for the richness of the experience. Everyday food – bread, and everyday drink– grape juice, are consecrated for a sacred purpose.
Let Buzz Aldrin, who travelled to the moon in 1969 in Apollo 11, add to that. Prior to his departure from Cape Kennedy, Buzz Aldrin talked wth his pastor, a man called Dean Woodruff about what might be suitable to take to tbe moon. Dean’s answer was, “One of the principal symbols is that God revels himself in the common elements of everyday life.” Aldrin wrote, adding to his pastor’s words, “Traditionally, these elements are bread and wine – common foods in Bible days and products of man’s labour.” There was discussion with other members of the crew of Apollo 11 and with the mission control and permission was received to take the elements with them and to celebrate communion on July 20th when Buz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong were scheduled to walk on the surface of the moon.
The service was held in the moon lander. The verse they used as the key theme was John 15:5:
I am the vine, you are the branches. He who abides in me, and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me, you can do nothing.
When the time came for Aldrin and Armstrong to step onto the moon’s surface, mission control allowed them radio silence for the time needed for the communion celebration, before re-establishing communication for the first steps onto the moon’s surface.
As I think about that, I love to note that Christ, who is revealed in the bread and wine in churches all over the world, was revealed through bread and wine on our satellite moon, far from any church building. He is revealed in bread and wine literally anywhere. I like to remember also that the first liquid poured on the moon was revelatory communion wine.
God in Christ, revealed in bread and wine! Yet the symbolism, too, is that God is revealed in Christ, no matter where we are,
In our communion celebration this morning, enter into it prayerfully and allow the bread and the wine to be revelations to you of God in Christ.
III
Let’s now think about the CONTENT OF THE REVELATION.
‘…we have beheld his glory, glory of the only Son from the Father…’
Before moving any further into the matter, let’s note that too often we receive revelations that our own human cleverness is far from being without its undesirable side. Our human cleverness, unmatched by possessed wisdom, has led to the existence and use of atomic bombs, to far more powerful nuclear weapons now than those bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Too often, our human inventiveness has brought us evils which match the goods. There are some who argue that a present, very pressing example of our cleverness outstripping our wisdom is the matter of artificial intelligence. We don’t really know what the outcome is likely to be, but in our cleverness we go ahead anyway. Will it turn out to be another area where our lack of wisdom will bring a terrible cost? I don’t know. Not a prophet I, nor the son of a prophet, but I recognise that it is a matter which concerns a great many people.
Oh, for wisdom to match our cleverness!
There is a story in Tales of Ancient India which focuses upon that revelation. This is how the story goes:
‘Four royal sons were questioning what speciality that should master. They said to one another, “Let ussearch the earth and learn a special science.” So they decided and after they had agreed on a place where they would meet again, the four brothers started off, each in a different direction. Time went by and the brothers met again at the appointed meeting place, and they asked one another, what they had learned. “I have mastered a science,” said the first, “that makes it possible for me, if I have nothing but a piece of bone of some creature, to create straightaway the flesh that goes with it.” “I”, said the second, “know how to grow that creature’s skin and hair if there is flesh on its bones.” The third said, “I am able to create its limbs if I have the flesh, the skin and the hair.” “And I”, concluded the fourth, “know how to give life to that creature if its form is complete with limbs.” Thereupon the four brothers went into the jungle to find a piece of bone so that they could demonstrate their specialities. As fate would have it, the bone they found was a lion’s, but they did not know that and picked up the bone. One added flesh to the bone, the second grew hide and hair, the third completed it with matching limbs, and the fourth gave the lion life. Shaking its heavy mane, the ferocious beast arose with its menacing mouth, sharp teeth, and merciless claws and jumped on his creators, He killed them all and vanished contentedly into the jungle.”[4]
May God, dwelling with us, give us wisdom yet.
It’s a fine story of how our foolishness is revealed to us after the event. We are, it seems, not as wise as we are clever. The darker revelation comes after we have shown how clever we are. How important, then, how wonderful to receive a wholly positive in-content revelation in God in Christ, the Word is made flesh, and is glory, grace and truth.
His glory is surely in servanthood, in compassion, in living and dying the kingdom of God, the elevation of the person to the level of the sacred and ultimate purpose in the will of God, in the wisdom of God.
His grace is in the entry of the Divine into human experience, a blessing we can never earn;
His truth is the revelation of what really matters, what has genuine value and the reality of a Divine love that knows no bounds.
In that revelation of the Word become flesh there is the message of the wisdom of God among us.
The prayerful man, the prayerful woman, can be blessed by that Divine wisdom in knowing God.That is a revelation surely one of the great truths in our Christian faith!
Come with me, if you will, to a town called Sansepolcro. Sansepolcro is in northern Tuscany and it’s something of a Christian Mecca for me.
In the town of Sansepolcro, in the Museo Civico – the civic art gallery, there hangs a very special painting. Aldous Huxley described it as “the greatest painting in the world.” I add my comment to that by saying that it is, for me, the greatest painting I have gazed upon, and while I am no art expert, I have seen the Mona Lisa, the Last Supper, and a great many other of the world’s acclaimed paintings.
The paining in Sansepolcro’s Museo Civico is Resurrection. It was painted by Piero Della Francesca, for me the most sensitive painter of the Renaissance. Piero had the ability to make his paintings revelatory. He was able to show something in all his paintings I am familiar with, a revelation of something words struggle to express.
In Resurrection, he has dramatically revealed triumph in the Risen Christ. He stands with one foot on the grave. Is that the mark of triumph? Well, yes, to some extent. Guards are asleep at the scene. Is that the mark of triumph? Again, to some extent.
But the real triumph is seen in the eyes if Jesus. How Piero managed to depict triumph in the eyes of Christ, I cannot begin to imagine. But he has achieved it. Triumph shines in his gaze and as you see the picture, you feel it. So much so, that I have visited Sansepolcro twice in order to stand in front of that deeply moving picture. You have to stand before it to gain the real effect of those eyes.
But here is the wonder of the revelation in the Word become flesh; it is in the Christian story of God’s love in the world, of God’s involvement in the world, of God’s ultimate triumph in the world, of God’s deep compassion for men and women, for you and for me, in both good times and bad.
‘And the word became flesh, and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth; we have beheld his glory, glory of the only Son from the Father…No one has ever seen God; the only Son who is in the bosom of the Father, he has made him known.’
I leave you with words from her majesty, the queen, in her 2020 Christmas address, spoken during the worst of the early years of the COVID outbreak:
"…even on the darkest nights there is hope in the new dawn".
The revelation in the Word made Flesh is of a NEW DAWN.
Amen
This sermon was preached at the Delamere Uniting Church on July 7th, 2024
S2024DEL0701
7/7/24 Delamere Uniting Church 0915
RCL readings: 2Sam 5:1-5,9-10 / Ps.48 or Ezek.2:1-5 / Ps.123 2Cor.12:2-10 Mk. 6:1-13
The sufficiency of the grace of god
Most of us are likely to be familiar with the words I shall be focusing on for these few minutes as we give our attention to the Scriptures. They were written by Paulto the troublesome church at Corinth, but he was convinced that it was what God was saying to him.
How he was convinced, we can’t know because he does not tell us, but it’s clear that Paul had no doubt that God was telling him something and that it was supremely important.
“My grace is sufficient for you,
For my power is made perfect in weakness.”[1]
They are some of the best-known words in the Bible.
For Paul, they changed his thinking radically.
God sometimes makes known his will for a person in unmistakable but unexplainable ways. The young Samuel, a kind of apprentice with Eli, heard God calling him. Moses was convinced God was calling him in the burning bush incident. Abraham in some way was convinced God was calling him to leave the security of his home in Ur to go out to a place yet to be revealed to him. Sometimes we, too, can be convinced that there is some kind of urging to us to take a certain course or to take heart in a difficult circumstance or even to leave the comfortable to perform a certain task.
Well, here was a word to Paul the apostle:
“My grace is sufficient for you,
For my power is made perfect in weakness.”
I
Why did Paul write that? Because he was aware of weakness. We know from his own writing that he endured what he describes as “a thorn in the flesh”[2]. We don’t know what that thorn in the flesh was, but we do know from his own words that it was a weakness of some kind. What did he do about it? His process is interesting. First, he reacted mistakenly to it. Second, he listened to Godabout it. Third, he put it to usefor the kingdom of God.
That’s an interesting pattern of behaviour that might or might not remind us of some of our own reactions to frustration or weakness or difficult situations. You see, Paul didn’t like whatever the affliction was, whatever the weakness was that went with it, and why would he like it? When I was younger, I played football and loved it. Youth is far behind me today and it seems sometimes that I get tired now watching it on television! Do I like that? There is no reason why I should, but the sensible thing is to accept that it’s part of getting older.
Well, initially Paul did not accept that condition that he did not like one bit. It limited him and he did not like being limited. In what he writes to the Christians of Corinth, he admits that:
“Three times I besought the Lord about this, that it should leave me.”[3]
Have you ever felt inadequate? Asked yourself how, with your limited abilities, you can have any significant part in the work of the kingdom of God? Wondered how one so poorly equipped could have any part at all in proclaiming the faith that transforms lives and brings the reality of God into human experience I certainly have. Many times. And from time to time I find myself questioning how I can possibly make a contribution to the faith of others and be part of the proclamation of the Christian Gospel.
I was at our weekly musical hour on Thursday at the Newland-Port Elliot church. It’s called Reflections. For an hour we listen at Reflections to fine music played, for the first part, on the grand piano, and, for the second part, on the pipe organ.
I began thinking at Reflections on Thursday of how sometimes we can wilfully take ourselves to a place where we think we are not fit for service in the kingdom. And I thought to myself, God has designed us to live in a way that we might think of as a life of beautiful music. But sometimes I have played the wrong notes. Sometimes I have even ignored the conductor and played my own tune. Am I fit to be part of the grand concert of the kingdom of God? Perhaps we have all felt that we are not fit for the calling. But that, Christian friends, makes us just like the apostle Paul. He and we have that in common. We can be as mistaken as he was. We remind ourselves that he believed that what he called a thorn in the flesh, stood in the way of his ever being effective as a servant of Jesus Christ. And he confesses his mistake.
“Three times I besought the Lord about this, that it should leave me.”
He believed that the way he was got in the way of being an effective servant of Jesus Christ, and he wanted it changed.
Big mistake!
God wanted Paul just as he was.God wants you just as you are, with whatever weaknesses you have.God wants me, to my amazement, just as I am, with whatever weaknesses I have - just as Paul discovered that God wanted him, weaknesses as well.
II
You see, the second stage was that he listened to God.
I don’t know how he listened.Did he go out to a lonely hillside somewhere and contemplate what he knew about the Jewish scriptures? I don’t know.Did he spend long evenings in prayer? I don’t know.Did a realisation come in a kind of flash of his mind from God? I don’t know.What we can and do know is that in some way known only to him, he listened to God and realised, deep in his heart, the truth that he needed to know. And it came to him in the words,
“My grace is sufficient for you,
For my power is made perfect in weakness.”
Note that the Divine message came in two parts. The first? The grace of God is all-sufficient. It is all that you need. It is all that I need. Without the grace of God, it would be impertinent for me see any part for me to play. I took a while to realise that. No matter how ill-equipped I was to be a faithful servant of God as I knew him in Christ, the grace of God covered it all.
I certainly wanted to be the best I could be, but the failings I was aware of, the weaknesses I knew well enough, were not barriers to service, because the message Paul received applied to me no less than it did to the apostle and applies no less to you than it did to the apostle: “My grace is sufficient for you.” That’s all you need, and it’s unfailing. That’s all I need, and it’s unfailing.
Isn’t that a liberatingtruth to know? Isn’t that freeing to a troubled disciple’s mind? Isn’t that an opening of the gates of effective discipleship? You can dance down the street with that truth in your heart!
But note that there is a second part of the message that Paul received and applies today to us. Your weakness counts and is essential for God’s will to work through and in you. My weakness counts and is essential for God’s will to work through and in me.You might already have noted from the text the truth of that. The assurance that came from God to Paul included these extraordinary words: “…my power is made perfect in weakness.”
Why should that be?
Imagine that you are conducting a job interview. The candidate before you could not be weaker in qualifications or abilities. Would you say to him or her,
“You are just the person we want. You are no good at the tasks we’ll entrust you with and you don’t have one relevant qualification. We need your weaknesses in this job.”
No. You would not give the job to that person. But at the Divine interview for discipleship and service in the kingdom of God, he says to you, and to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” “My grace is all you need. Your weakness enables my power, my potency, my mission in my world, to be evident and effective. But Imust work through your weakness. Don’t speak to me about qualifications. It will help if you love me with your whole heart, but you might even be a little weak in that too, but don’t worry, my Spirit prays for you, even though you might not know how to pray for yourself. It would help if you were to love your neighbour as yourself, but you might be a little weak in that department too. But in that weakness my power is made perfect. I will love through you, despite any lack you have. So don’t give even a thought to your weaknesses. If to be a disciple were to depend upon strengths, you might become overly proud, even a little arrogant. But it’s humility that counts. Just be available. My grace will see to the rest.”
But here is the most potent reason of all that our weaknesses come with us into the service of God. They mean that we shall rely on the grace of God, not on ourselves.
III
Does that, then, complete our learning from the experience of Paul? We’ve noted that, first, he reacted mistakenly to his thorn in the flesh, his weakness that he prayed to be freed from. We’ve seen, second, that at last he listened in some way to God and received the assurance, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” God’s grace was all that he needed and indeed God could and would show his power in Paul’s weakness.
Well, there is a third step. Paul received a powerful assurance and an unforgettable lesson, so, third, he put it to usefor the kingdom of God, or, rather, he put both the weakness and the learning to use for the kingdom of God.
And so can we.
The New Testament book, The Acts of the Apostles and Paul’s letters show that he was used in an extraordinary way in the spreading flame of the message to the non-Jewish world (our world) of Jesus Christ, the one who continues to be Emmanuel, God with us in the struggles and the joys of life, the deep moments and the shallow, the reaching out moments and the personal, spiritual building moments. He put the lesson to work because he took seriously that assurance, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.”
A few years ago, I mentioned to the Yilki congregation a person who made a very great contribution to helping me with my faith. I was a serving soldier in the British army at the time, stationed in south-west Wales, still a young man. The man I am thinking of and am mentioning to you now, was one who was never going to be famous. His name was the Rev. Archibald Penrose. He had been an architect through most of his professional life. He entered the Baptist ministry late. He was the minister of a Baptist chapel I attended with my first wife and, at that time, our only young child. Archibald Penrose did not look impressive. He was, in some ways, a version of Paul, because
his weaknesses were evident.
He did not have eloquence, as the world understands eloquence. He would never get praise for his sermons in a preaching class. But I will tell you this about the Rev. Archibald Penrose. From this man of manifold weaknesses, Jesus Christ shone. That’s how the Rev. Archibald Penrose contributed to the building of my faith. Through all his weakness, as weakness is most generally understood, Jesus Christ reached out. God’s power was in his weakness. Jesus Christ was within. How much of Jesus I saw in the Rev. Archibald Penrose!
IV
So we have some things of immeasurable value to take with us into the world
- our weaknesses, that we can so mistakenly want God to eradicate, but through which his power can be evident and at work, and,
- THE GRACE OF GOD, the sufficiency of which encourages us to be humble, to be confident, and
- THE CALL TO DISCIPLESHIP and service in the kingdom of God in the grace that enables us.
Let’s each of us allow that message to find a place in our hearts.
then we can be used by our Saviour God.
amen
S2023YLK1202
10.12.23 Yilki Uniting Church 1030
RCL readings: Is.40:1-11 Ps.85:1-2,8-13 2Pet.3:8-15a Mk.1:1-8
SECOND SUNDAY IN ADVENT
PREPARING THE WAY
I’m not very good at keeping a clear desk.
Usually, when I go to it to work on my computer, I have to clear away assorted papers and various bits and pieces before I can even have a clear mouse pad. Once I have cleared the accumulated this and that, I am freed to work well and to achieve. Ideas can be executed. I can do what I need to do.
It might seem a strange thing to suggest, but I am going to ask you to think of my desk as an illustration of an Advent action.
We need to do some clearing away.
And it can be immensely beneficial.
I
What has this to do with Advent?This morning’s scripture readings were from Isaiah and Mark’s gospel.The Isaiah reading celebrates the return to Jerusalem of the Jewish captives from their years of deportation in Babylon. And even though their release from captivity has been decreed by Cyrus the Mede, after defeating the Babylonians, the writer ascribes their release to the hand of God.The return to Jerusalem, brought about by Cyrus or not, is preparing the way of the Lord!The way from alien Babylon to beloved Jerusalem is the way of the Lord.
Now that’s a remarkable thing for the author to write. Most would have seen simple good fortune in Cyrus and his armies defeating their captors, the Babylonians, and now, as a consequence, they are on their way home, something simply brought about by circumstances. But there is here a mind and spirit who can see behind the raw event, and recognise the hand of God, a not easy recognition to make. The way home, the prophet declares, is the way of the Lord! That means that God is with them and, if they can just begin to understand, God has been with them through the whole time, including their captivity.
The wording in Isaiah is,
‘A voice cries:
“In the wilderness prepare the way of the LORD,
Make straight in the desert a highway for our God.
Every valley shall be lifted up,
and every mountain and hill be made low;
the uneven ground shall be made level,
and the rough places a plain.
And the glory of the LORD shall be revealed,
and all flesh shall see it together,
for the mouth of the LORD has spoken.[1]
What a magnificent vision!
It’s a far greater vision than the top of my undity desk, or even my tidied desk, can tell of!
A magnificent vision!
The road is to be made straight and level, not unlike that perfectly straight road across the Nullabor plain, but on this road the glory of the LORD is to be revealed.
Marks’s Gospel takes the words from the Jewish world into the Christian. Right at the very beginning of his gospel. Mark repeats the words,
‘ the voice of one crying in the wilderness;
Prepare the way of the Lord,
He follows it with John the Baptist, who preaches the need for repentance and forgiveness.
II
What, then, has this to say to us?
We don’t live in the sixth century BC when the Jews returned to Jerusalem from their Babylonian captivity, nor do we live in the first century AD when Mark’s Gospel was written and John the Baptist preached.
What, are we being told today? The first readers of the book of Isaiah were being told that God is in events, though we do not easily recognise that. And there was preparation to do. The first readers of Mark’s Gospel also were being told that God was in the preaching of John the Baptist, and in that circumstance too, there was work to do in preparing the way of the Lord. Today, too, God is both with us and calling us and there is preparation to be done, a spiritual preparation that is able, because God is in it with us, to reveal the glory of the Lord to us.
Advent has more than one meaning for us, but one very precious meaning is an opportunity to anticipate a new dawning or a new birth of Christ in our hearts, or it might be better to express it as the opportunity to experience God in Christ in a new way and thus add to our adventure of living – our adventure of Christian living.
It is very easy for us to experience Christmas in the same way every year. Dare I say that there seems to be a sameness to it all? The scripture readings tell the same story; the Advent hymns are the ones we sing every Advent season; we sing the same carols at Christmas; the Christmas tree is decorated; the message can seem the same. Yet Advent also has the element of anticipating a new birth in our hearts, a new experience of his presence. That will make a difference to our every day as we are drawn closer to God.
II a
So how do we prepare the way to that new entry of Christ into our lives?
If we heed John the Baptist, the first step is clear. We have some clearing away to do. This is one of the great opportunities of Advent for us. We can, in the grace of God and the leading of his Spirit, take an inventory. We can think over the events of the year just passing, the end of it very close, and list them least in our minds, but if it helps on paper. How did we behave in those events? What was positive in the way we lived them; what was negative? Was there anything, as we consider them, that was, if we are honest, clearly less than the will of God in our reactions? What of our relationships?
Were there highlights where we know we made positive contributions to others? Were there occasions in our relationships where we let ourselves down and we related in ways that were far from the teaching of the Sermon on the Mount? Of course, there will have been both. We are human, with our limitations. But God has been with us, though we might not have realised it in those times and his steadfast love never wavers from accepting us in the Divine presence and the Divine family.
What problems have we faced over the year? How did we handle them? Were our means always as pure as our ends, or did we occasionally cut moral corners?
How constant have we been in our Christian discipleship?
None of this calls for breastbeating. In fact, it is all positive as we prepare the way of the Lord in our hearts and anticipate a new experience of him as his Advent and Christmas gift to us.We do it prayerfully, positively and in prayer ask God to help us clear away all that gets in the way, and knowing that God creates a new and right spirit in the penitent heart.
II b
There is a further consideration in clearing the way for the Lord. It is this: It has an immediate benefit. I didn’t tell you at the beginning of this sermon that in addition to the top of my desk being untidy, the top right hand drawer, quite a large drawer, was stuffed full of everything you could imagine might fit into a desk drawer. I cleared that drawer out a few days ago. I made a lot of discoveries. There were items there I had forgotten I had, and I was glad to find them. There is much less in the drawer now and the contents are set out very neatly. Everything in the drawer is now accessible and I’m very glad that I cleared it out because, strange as it might seem, given that I have had to clear the top of my desk and clear out that top drawer, I like order. It enables me to work well. It enables me to be productive. It enables me to use my time well and to achieve.
Just so, our internal clearing the way, preparing the way of the Lord.
When the spiritual mountain obstacles are made low, the dark spiritual valleys are raised and the rough spiritual places made into a plain, our relationship with God is enriched and the glory of the Lord is revealed more and more to us because our relationship with God of grace, God of glory, is the more intimate. God, in his grace, invites us to prepare the way and receive his Advent and Christmas gift of deepening faith, of durable trust.
III
But here is another important element of God’s presence in our lives, as we prepare the spiritual way.
WE DO NOT ALWAYS RECOGNISE IT.
Not at the time, that is, but afterwards we recognise that our lives have been blessed by the presence of God in Christ, and we are enriched.
As we sometimes wake in the morning and look out of the window and discover that there has been rain in the night with all the benefits of rain and realise only in that retrospect of morning that we have been blessed, so it can be with God’s presence among us.
You know well enough, of course, that deeply spiritual story of the couple on the Emmaus Road. They thought a stranger had drawn alongside them as, in their depressed state, they walked to the village. It was only after he broke bread with them and left that they realised that the Risen Christ had been with them as they walked, with them in their downhearted state. And you’ll remember that, in the most positive way, their hearts burned within them.
God so often comes in quiet, unexpected ways.
You remember also the event of Elijah’s experience at the cave. There were the dramatic experiences when he sheltered there – a great windswept through the mountains, so strong a wind that it broke pieces from the rock. Then there was an earthquake – a truly alarming experience. But that was not all. Elijah was confronted by a great fire. I know what a fire is like, having experienced at close hand the 1983 Ash Wednesday bushfire.They might all be described, at least poetically, as demonstrations of the power of God. But the book of Kings tells us that God was not in any of them. Instead, God came to Elijah in ‘a still, small voice.’[3]
Mostly, that is more God’s way with us than the dramatic.
Some years ago, I had a good friend in the Flinders Street Baptist Church. She was older than I and is no longer with us. I was in Westminster Abbey one day, gazing upon the tomb of the Unknown Warrior. As I gazed at the tomb, I felt the gentlest tug on the left sleave of my jacket. I wasn’t immediately aware of it, so gentle was the tug. Then it registered, so I turned to my left, and there, by my side, was my friend Marjorie from the Flinders Street Church in Adelaide. And we were in Westminster Abbey in London.
As I think of that gentle tug on the sleave in that place where I would least have expected it, I realise that God’s touch of our lives can be as gentle and unexpected as that tug, but the touch is to our hearts and it can be in the least expected place or circumstance. Moreover, we might not recognise it immediately.
Some might be aware of the writings of the Trappist monk Thomas Merton, a man whose writings of contemplation have encouraged many of us. His writing has been prolific. He said once that writing was not prayer for him, but it helped him to pray because it made the mirror inside him very clear. Concerning that interior mirror, he wrote, ‘God shines there, and is immediately found, without hunting, as if he had come close to me while I was writing, and I had not observed his coming.’[4]
That is so often how God enters into our days.
If we do our spiritual preparation of the way,
we may discover that God in Christ is new-born into us,
in ways we least expect.
Quietly, unobtrusively,
the miracle happens again.
Amen
The following sermon was preached at Port Elliot on June 11th, 2023.
S2023PTE0602
11.6.23 Port Elliot Uniting Congregation 1000
RCL Readings: Gen.12:1-9 & Ps.33:1-12 Hos.5:15-6:6 & Ps.50:7-15 Romans 4:13-25
Matt.9:9-13, 18-26
Newland-Port Elliot Uniting Church
Port Elliot
Congregation
WAKING FROM SLEEP
I am hoping that these next minutes as we think about the restoration of the daughter of a ruler will take us from darkness to light, and from sleep to wakefulness.
Darkness to Light.
Sleep to wakefulness.
One of my favourite poets is the Dorsetshire wordsmith and master of imagination, Thomas Hardy. His words commence this morning’s sermon with darkness:
They hail me as one living,
But don’t they know
That I have died of late years,
Untombed although?
I am but a shape that stands here,
A Pulseless mould,
A pale past picture, screening
A man whose body lives as a spiritually empty shell, a condition that sends a chill up my spine when I think of it.
The poem is used this morning because it gives us an entry into today’s scripture readings from the great 8th century BC prophet Hosea, from the Psalms and from Matthew’s Gospel, the most Jewish of the synoptics, Matthew, Mark and Luke, all of which, of course, came from the Jewish faith of Jesus and of the Gospel writers. We are led into them by the dark words,
They hail me as one living,
But don’t they know
That I have died of late years,
Untombed although?
The poem is called The Dead Man Walking.
I
That leads us not to a dead man walking, but to an apparently dead girl on her bed.
This morning’s Gospel reading takes us to the house where the flute players were already making the sounds of mourning. This was a requirement in Judaea. The law of the time said, that for a funeral, ‘even the poorest in Israel should hire not less than two flutes and one wailing woman’.[2] We are left in no doubt that the funeral arrangements were being put into effect.
The girl lies on her bed, apparently lifeless. Jesus takes her by the hand, and she rises, alive.
But that is preceded by the intriguing words which provide our theme for this morning. Before she rose from her bed, Jesus had said to the crowd,
“She is not dead, but sleeping.”
Is it possible that we could be physically alive, but spiritually sleeping, as though lifeless? Should it be so, Jesus the healer can restore us to spiritual life. The words are for any of us who feel,
I have died of late years,
Untombed although.
I don’t suggest we feel as bleak as the poem indicates, neither should we because the Judaeo - Christian scriptures are documents filled with hope and reasons for rejoicing.
Maybe at times we have known faith and the reality of God just seeming to fade away. Perhaps we have needed to wake up from a spiritual sleep. Perhaps we are in such a spiritual condition now. How, then, do we progress?
II
First, let’s recognise that periods of spiritual emptiness are as old as the existence of humanity. We see ancient evidence of it via the 8th century BC prophet Hosea, who paints a picture of God saying to his people,
“What shall I do with you, O Ephraim?
What shall I do with you, O Judah?
Your love is like a morning cloud,
Like the dew that goes early away”[3]
Isn’t that metaphor powerfully descriptive? Love so fickle that it is like a morning cloud that dissipates. Love like the dew, not surviving the heat of the sun.
Have the reality of God and the buoyancy of faith, sometimes been as the morning cloud that dissipates, or the morning dew that does not survive the heat of the sun?
What can we do about it? What can we do to be awakened from the spiritual sleep we can experience from time to time?
I want to suggest to you THREE TRUTHS that can help us back into the wakefulness of a beating spiritual pulse.
The first two depend upon the third, if we are truly to move from darkness to light, from sleep to spiritual wakefulness.
III
The first is an historical matter.
Come with me into ancient Greece. As we observe the life of the people around us, we can easily say to those ancient Greeks, as Paul said to them,
“Men of Athens, I perceive that in every way you are very religious.”[4]
And very religious they are, overflowing with gods, Zeus the senior, and numerous others that share the pantheon with him. There is a god for just about everything. Yes, we perceive that in every way these Greeks are very religious.
If we leave ancient Greece now, and go to modern Greece, we ask, where are all those gods of the pantheon? They exist only as sculptures in museums or paintings in galleries. Why?
They had no historical existence.
They had no historical existence.
It is good for us to note that in moments when God might seem far away, and we feel a kind of spiritual emptiness, we can begin our awakening – but only begin it - by reminding ourselves that our faith is founded in an historical person and an historical event. Jesus of Nazareth was an historical person, no mythical being in a pantheon of unreality.Born in the Roman province of Judaea, brought up in a working family, he was flesh and blood. He proclaimed a message of the kingdom of God and New Life – the awakened life – that seemed to have been forgotten since the days of the great 8th century BC prophets.
Then there is the major event of our faith– the historical event of his crucifixion on a Roman Cross, sanctioned by the historical Roman procurator, Pontius Pilate, during the emperorship of the historical Tiberius.
There is our starting point. Our faith has not come from a philosophy current at the time of its beginning, but is founded on an historical figure, one Jesus of Nazareth, who was recognised by the writer of Matthew’s Gospel as so important in the faith, that he records his advent with the word, Emmanuel,[5] With us, God.
There, then, is the first distinction of our faith, a distinction to remind ourselves of when we might feel spiritually in a kind of vacuum. Our faith is founded in and on an historical figure, one whose influence far outlasts the influences of Pilate and his emperor Tiberius, and whose influence has resulted from an event which is certainly one which calls from us a response of faith, but is supported by the evidence of many at the time – the event of Resurrection, that fired up the disciples as nothing else could have done.
But a note of caution. This is not yet the full story.
IV
So now we move to a second matter for us to consider in times of spiritual flatness, and we must do so because, important though it is to recognise that our faith is historically based, that of itself is insufficient for our awakening from spiritual sleep.
The historical Jesus has left us with ethics that are world-changing, and we should never underestimate the importance in our Christian faith of ethics.
It is easy to say that Jesus was a great teacher, and great teacher he certainly was, speaking to large crowds as well as to small disciple groups in the language of their day. But to acknowledge that is of little use if the teaching is not listened to, absorbed and acted out.
This is the point:
The teaching is revolutionary
The teaching is revolutionary
But how strongly does it impact upon us? I can’t help remembering at this point a question that was asked to Mahatma Ghandi. He was asked if he believed Christianity to be effective and powerful. He replied, “Yes. It’s a pity it hasn’t been tried.” Ghandi was guilty of exaggeration, but there is some value in his reply and the value is that the teaching is of no gain to us if it is no more than words on the pages of our Bibles. Here is the thing for us to recognise – The teaching of Jesus is not only revolutionary; it has never been more necessary to live it than it is today, and in living it we can not only contribute to the wellness of our world, but we can contrinute to our own wellness.
Do you find it depressing to listen to the news on radio or television or read it in the newspapers? I do.My first news bulletin of the day is at 6 in the morning on ABC Classic radio. If I allowed it to, it would ruin my day. But I can do something else about the news in the morning. I can recognise, when I hear it, how crucial the Christian Way is for both the world and for individual persons. The Christian faith, in its hope and its vision stands out in sharp relief against the daily news of what is happening in the world. It is light in the darkness.
So does the teaching of Jesus have anything to say about the dark news of the world? You bet it does! Does the Roman soldier require you to carry his pack for a mile? Carry it for two! Translated into today’s circumstances, does someone mistreat you? Respond with care for that person’s welfare with the offer of friendship!
In a world where revenge is sought in response to offences, and hatred is in every day’s news, Jesus has this revolutionary teaching: Love God with every ounce of whom you are, Love your neighbour no less than yourself. And Love your enemies and pray for those who have ill-will toward you. We accept readily enough the call to love God with all that we are and we can come at loving our neighbour as we love ourselves, but the last is the sticking point, yet the most important of all. Love your enemies and pray for those who have ill-will toward you. Perhaps that’s an area where Ghandi was making a point – not very much loving of enemies has been tried.
In a world of war and more than enough mass slaughter, Jesus says, “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons (and daughters) of God.”[6]
In the world of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, Jesus says, “Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.”[7]
With those examples, we have only started on the revolutionary teaching of Jesus on the way to BE. There is a cornucopia of riches in his teaching on renewing the world of relationships. Here is something from Ghandi I accept wholeheartedly and accept without reservation: We need to BE the change we wish to see in the world. The revolutionary teaching of Jesus is waiting for us to live it. That vision can inspire us when we feel spiritually empty, when we need to wake up from spiritual sleep,
But this is still not the full story.
V
We can find great strength for our faith in the knowledge that it is founded upon an historical person and upon historical events. We can draw great inspiration from the vision in the revolutionary ethical teachings of Jesus on the way to BE, BUT MORE IS NEEDED TO RENEW ADEQUATELY OUR SPIRITUAL CAPITAL WHEN WE ARE FEELING SPIRITUALLY BANKRUPT.
So as we move into the third truth to help us in times of spiritual sleep, or spiritual flatness, let’s remind ourselves of the name given to the historical figure, Jesus of Nazareth, near the beginning of Matthew’s Gospel: Emmanuel – With us, God. This is the dimension which, in the ultimate, counts. It is where the historical Jesus, teacher of revolutionary ethics, takes us that counts.
Let’s go for a short excursion at this point to Florence, to help make the point. My friend Lewis Kelsall reminded me last Sunday of the wonderful sculptured doors of the Baptistery, near the west portal of Florence’s magnificent cathedral.The doors of the baptistery are of bronze, superbly depicting the life of Christ, and a number of Church fathers, among other subjects. The sculptor, Lorenzo Ghiberti, left so wonderful a treasure in those doors, that Michelangelo called them The Gates of Paradise.
You open doors, to see what is inside. What you see inside the baptistery in Florence is not seen by the eye, but is visible to the spirit. Inside the baptistery is the floodlight of faith.
That takes us straight to the point. Jesus bids us open our hearts and our days to his revelation. Because while he is an historical figure, he is more than that; while he is a revolutionary teacher, he is more than that. He is Revealer.
You will recall that in John’s Gospel, Jesus appears as the door, or gate, of the sheep. He is the sheep’s protector, but let’s take that metaphor and understand Jesus as the gate, or door, who opens us to truth, to allow us to see, because the more you read the New Testament with care and an open heart, the more you understand that God himself is revealed in this man Jesus.
Read his words carefully and pray about them.
Study the things he did and pray about them.
Discern in your reading his deep love of people and of his world, and pray about it.
This is Emmanuel. Our healing in those flat times is to look carefully at Jesus, to allow ourselves to have our attention to be drawn to him, then to open the door he invites us to open and see in him all that we need to see of God,
In him we find the Saviour God, the Creator God, the Life-renewing God, the always with us Spirit God, the ONE GOD of steadfast love, in whom we are born into newness of spiritual life.
Open the door and find that, as the baptistery at Florence is filled with the floodlight of faith, so are we filled with the floodlight of Christ, who is ‘the Light of the World.’[8]
We have moved from the dark night of Hardy to the broad sunlight of Jesus Christ, the world’s Light.
Open the door and see that ‘in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.’[9]
And, wonder of wonders,
‘THE WORD BECOMES FLESH
AND DWELLS WITH US.
Amen
The sermon on these pages was preached yesterday, Pentecost Sunday, to a predominantly elderly congregation. The format has been chan ged to enable it to be read rather than to be preached. I hope you find the reading helpful.
Shalom
Tony Gates
PENTECOST
Today is a special moment in the life of the Christian Church. We call it Pentecost.
The noun Pentecost comes from a Greek word Πεντηκοστή,[1] which means fiftieth.
Before proceeding further, I invite you to look at your service order, where you will see a painting. It is a picture that gives us in the painter’s vision what the Pentecost moment and all moments since mean for our Christian faith. The painting is by one of the masters of the Renaissance, Masaccio, and it is in the church of Santa Maria Novella in Florence
Because we are human, Masaccio knows that we need human forms to understand the spiritual, so God is represented in human form.
The painting is called Trinitá,[2] in English, Trinity. You will see that Jesus is upon his cross, and God stands behind him. But where is the third person of the Trinity? Look at where you expect the Father’s collar to be. What do you see? A dove! Masaccio is saying to us, the Spirit proceeds to us from the Father, via the Crucified Christ, and comes to us in the fullness of Trinity, God as Father, God as Son, in the oneness of Spirit.
Please keep that in mind as we proceed with our thoughts of the Holy Spirit this morning.
The Spirit is not a person detached from God, but God coming to us in Trinitarian fullness.
I
Having set that foundation, I want to take us straight to the roots of Pentecost and to what those visitors were doing in Jerusalem, and for that matter what the disciples were doing in Jerusalem on the day of Pentecost. It’s a reminder that we cannot know as much as it is possible to know about the New Testament if we ignore the Old Testament world out of which it grew. Therefore, on this very special day in the Christian year, we are going to start our thinking in the life of the Jewish people for whom Pentecost was a religious, annual feast.
Many Jewish visitors, including the disciples of Jesus, were gathered in Jerusalem to celebrate the Jewish festival of Pentecost or, to give it its Jewish name, Shavuot. The rabbis also called it the Feast of Weeksor the Feast of 50 days. What, then, did the feast mean to those first century Jewish people, and therefore to the disciples gathered in Jerusalem? Shavuot, or Pentecost, was and is for Jewish people, the Harvest Festival, celebrated seven weeks and a day after the first day of Passover, which is itself the Feast of Unleavened Bread. In the book of Exodus, Shavuot’s purpose is set out in the words which come to us as from God,
“None shall appear before me empty-handed. You shall keep the feast of harvest, of the first fruits of your labour, of what you sow in the field.”[3]
Why is this important on the day of Pentecost in a Christian Church? It is important because it is the purpose of the disciples’ gathering in Jerusalem and it is the nature of their thinking - it is what they are thinking about. It is certainly the case that they had been told by the risen Christ to remain in Jerusalem until they were “clothed with power from on high”.[4] The conclusion of Luke’s Gospel tells us that. Luke and Acts are two volumes of the same book by the same author.But at Pentecost, though they had remained in Jerusalem on the command of Jesus, they were focused upon the festival of the harvest. And if we are to interpret the impact of the Holy Spirit of God on that occasion, we have to take account of the Harvest Feast.
II
So now we are going to turn to the New Testament.
The passage from the Acts of the Apostles, one of the best-known in the Bible, depicts a very special experience of Jesus’ followers during the feast of Pentecost, the harvest thanksgiving. They were in a spirit of gratitude for all God’s provision for them, and in that spirit of gratitude they receive a greater yet provision, and empowerment for a spiritual harvest yet to be rept.
It appears to be beyond adequate description because Luke, in describing it, using the symbolic language of tongues as of fire resting upon them, and he tells us that they were ‘filled with the Holy Spirit’.[5]
We can’t be certain of exactly what happened, because Luke tells us that they were sitting together in a house[6], yet a great many Jewish pilgrims to Jerusalem for the Pentecost feast were in Jerusalem – over 15 countries are mentioned[7] – and they all heard the Galileans speaking in their languages. That takes more than a little working out. How come, if the disciples were sitting in a house?
But here is what matters. At the Harvest Festival of Pentecost the disciples receive a great harvest of their faith, devotion, discipleship and openness to God. The rich harvest, or provision received is the gift of God himself, in the personal Holy Spirit. And they were able to communicate in a way that was given power by the blessing and potency of God. That is the significance of the symbol of tongues of fire – the spreading flame of the message will follow!
The great spiritual harvest would be gathered in and their tongues would be the tongues of the Gospel message, the promised power from on high.
Yet some thought they were drunk. That was a natural supposition because Pentecost was a feast of great celebration. Wine supply would not have been stinted.
So it seems that there were two groups of responders to the phenomenon of the disciples’ empowerment by and in the Holy Spirit. On the one hand, there were those who recognised the work of God in them in a great spiritual provision so much greater than the harvest provision they were in Jerusalem to celebrate. And on the other, there were the sceptical who looked for more mundane explanations.
What has changed? There are two camps today – those who perceive the work of God in the world, and those who look for any explanation which will deny that.
That should cause us to rejoice! Yes, there is a positive. We have a mission! The Holy Spirit of God is as much at work today, empowering Christians as was ever the case in New Testament times. If there is a difference it is in the outcomes. In New Testament days there was such a love and service of one another in the Church that the advances in Christianity’s march in the world were rapid and made huge numbers of new disciples, as God’s Spirit empowered them. Luke, who is telling the story, is a Gentile. He has been converted by the Spirit and message himself! He knows what he us talking about.
For us, the circumstances are not the same. We live in a country where Christian faith is under siege on a stage of the cynical who believe they have more to lose than to gain in a Christian faith.
We have the privilege of being the faithful in an hour of challenge and we have the empowerment of the Holy Spirit of God in this hour. That means we have no cause for being downhearted. The cynic is not our enemy. He or she might well be searching, and very probably is. God’s kingdom is not on the battlefield for being defeated.
Think of this for a moment. During the struggle in the Southern States of America for Civil Rights for coloured people, when those coloured people were under the control and derision of the whites, the Reverend Martin Luther King, a coloured man in whom both deep Christian faith and powerful leadership resided, said this to his followers and fellow strugglers as a key to success in their struggle: “Love the white man”.
Of course, the cynic would have laughed at him and probably did, but the Spirit-empowered movement won the spiritual fight and the day was theirs and especially God’s.
The advice of the Spirit to us today might well be,
“Love the cynic, love the opponent of the kingdom of God.
I, the Spirit, empower you, and as you live by the command of Christ in loving one another in the Christian movement, to love those who are not among you is also your charge. This is a crop for you to sow and a harvest for you to reap.’
The Spirit is our empowerment and calls us to a harvest of our faith, devotion, discipleship and openness to God, and to a harvest still waiting.
III
Now we are to turn to this morning’s Gospel reading. The passage from John’s Gospel begins with the words,
‘On the last day of the feast, the great day, Jesus stood up and proclaimed, “If anyone thirst, let him come to me and drink. He who believes in me, as the scripture has said, ‘Out of his heart shall flow rivers of living water.’”’[8]
Remember here, two things. The first is that Jesus lived and taught in a society where males were the heads of the household in matters of faith and spirituality. Today Jesus would say, if he were teaching now,
“If anyone thirst, let him or her come to me and drink. He or she who believes in me, as the scripture has said, ‘Out of his or her heart shall flow rivers of living water.’”
He would be speaking today, as he does speak today, to both sexes.
The second thing to remember is that John’s Gospel is par excellence the Gospel of symbols. The Gospel reading for today continues,
‘Now this he said about the Spirit, which those who believed in him were to receive.’[9]
It was the last day of another feast, the feast of Tabernacles, or Sukkot, to give it its Jewish name, another major element of the faith of the Jewish people. Sukkot, or Tabernacles is the feast which commemorates the days following the rescue of the Israelites from Egypt, their desert wanderings when they lived in tents (or tabernacles), and God’s care for them in those years. The feast is therefore a celebration of freedom and care in the desert wanderings. And in this setting of the feast of desert wanderings and tent-living, Jesus stands up and proclaims (and there is very little water in a desert),
“If anyone thirst, let him come to me and drink. He who believes in me, as the scripture has said, ‘Out of his heart shall flow rivers of living water.’”
As the writer of John’s Gospel points out, he was speaking of the Spirit.
Jesus’ words refer to the 44th chapter of the book of Isaiah[10] where the author shows us God saying to his people:
“…I will pour water on the thirsty land,
And streams on the dry ground;
I will pour my Spirit upon your descendants
And my blessing on your offspring.”[11]
In John’s Gospel, water is a very strong metaphor for the Spirit of God. For example, when, in John’s Gospel, he meets a Samaritan woman at Jacob’s well, who labours in the heat of the middle of the day to draw water from the well’s depths, Jesus tells her that that he is able to give her water that will mean she will never thirst again. She misunderstands him, so he states it more clearly:
“Everyone who drinks of this water will thirst again, but whoever drinks of the water that I shall give him will never thirst; the water that I shall give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”[12]
Thus, the Spirit frees her from the captivity of the humdrum and lifts her life to eternal quality, a quality of spiritual freedom, not unlike, in a spiritual sense, the freedom from Egyptian captivity the feast of Tabernacles celebrates in its focus on the wilderness wanderings.
To make sure the point is clear, we should note that the words from Isaiah 44 that Jesus used are from a part of the book which refers to the Jews’ release from their later captivity in Babylon, a release brought about by Cyrus, king of Medo-Persia, after his defeat of the Babylonians. They are words of celebration of freedom. And so they are for us. The water that Jesus gives, the Spirit of God, lifts us to life of eternal quality– that is – Divine quality and freedom, so long as we are open to him and to the Eternal Spirit of God, from life without purpose and hope.
Water is, of course, the first essential of life. Who could not be aware that the major search on the surface of Mars is for evidence of water, because only with water can life exist.
Last Sunday, as Ruth and I drove to Delamere where I was due to preach, we had a fine moment. It was a morning of pouring rain. The most magnificent rainbow appeared in front of and above us. My imagination saw an assurance from God, a kind of covenant in which, provided we care properly for the world, his gift of life will not fail.
So is the Holy Spirit. The Spirit of God is God animating our spirits, freeing us from the worst in us and giving us the harvest of blessing and a harvest to come.
IV
However, I can almost hear the thoughts that we are a small, elderly congregation. Where is the energy for us to reach out to the cynic in love and be active for and in the kingdom of God? We can love one another, and where energy permits serve one another and celebrate our oneness in Christ. But reaching out?
We are old.
Let’s remind ourselves of another reference to the Spirit in John’s Gospel. Passover time is at hand, and Jesus is with his disciples. He says many things to them, including,
“If you love me, you will keep my commandments.
And I will pray the Father and he will give you another Comforter, to be with you forever, even the Spirit of truth…”[13]
Remember the painting by Masaccio in the church of Santa Maria Novella. The Spirit proceeds from the Father to us via the Crucified Son. That is, God is with us in all his wholeness in the Spirit, and is our comforter who strengthens and encourages us.
The commandments we have to keep?
The commandments to love. Yes, we might say that we can only love and serve ne another within the limits of age, but in our circumstances that is perhaps just the requirement for us to meet. Remember that men and women said of those early Christians, “See, how they love one another!”[14]That suggests that there were some who were won to the kingdom of God by the love they saw in Christians.
Jesus spelled that love out as the greatest commandment and one like it – love God and love others as we love ourselves.
What better commandments could there be?
We don’t have to be great energy-expending evangelists.
We have to love.
Love God.
Love others as ourselves, including the cynics.
Then leave the rest to God, Holy Spirit, Pentecost presence for always.
Let’s reflect the Samaritan woman’s cry – Lord, give me this Spirit!
And be thankful.
Amen.
[7]As I read the account, I am convinced that the 15 countries mentioned are there to show the reader the harvest that is waiting for the reapers.
[10]Many Bible scholars believe that Isaiah 1-39 was written by the great 8th century BC prophet Isaiah himself, chapters 40 to 55 to have been written for the return to Jerusalem from Babylonian captivity and chapters 56-66 at a later date. They refer to the three sections as Isaiah, deuteron-Isaiah and trito-Isaiah.
Readings: Ps.103:1-8 Is.58:9b-14 Lk13:10-17
Our Healing God
Every time we turn to the story of the ministry of Jesus, we learn something of how to live. And we learn that because Jesus had a strong priority of showing us how to be.
We join Luke’s account of the ministry of Jesus when he is teaching in a synagogue, something he did often, probably on most sabbaths. The Sabbath was then and is now from 6pm Friday to 6pm Saturday, though they did not use our names for the days of the week.
It is the Sabbath in this case, a very important point to note. Because theSabbath, in Jesus’ day, had become a focus for the most legalistic religious leaders in Judaea and Galilee.
Legalism is the death of healthy religious life, legalism being more concerned with the law than with kindness, compassion and helpfulness.
Jesus had taught that the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath[1], yet there were those – far too many of them – who reversed that and insisted upon so many rules for conduct on the Sabbath that there was no room for compassion at all.
Jesus has something to say about that. He called those legalistic people hypocrites. They were kinder to their animals on the Sabbath than they were to people.
I
Nothing so clearly defines the ministry of Jesus than those memorable words,
“The sabbath was made for man,
So much of his teaching was advocating compassion over legalism, which boils down to the difference between love and hardness of heart.
He comes to us in the tradition of the great 8th century BC prophets who called continuously for justice, for equity, for love, for mercy, for compassion
and who declared hardness of heart as a great enemy of God.
In the case of Jesus, the message is the more powerful because he comes to us from his special relationship with God his heavenly Father and as one who lived the life of compassion he advocates.
Has that message ever been more needed than it is today? I think not. Compassion is always one of the great the leavens of life.
I was at a meeting last week at which the condition of the Church was discussed, and one member of the group made the comment that is very often made today that the Church across Australia has lost relevance to the community. Perhaps it has, but if so, it can certainly in part be that it has lost its compassionate ministry, the ministry of bringing back broken people to wholeness in a broken world, itself needing mending.
There is no need to recite a litany of the examples of brokenness in people, in society and in the world. You and I have only to read the newspapers or listen to or watch news bulletins to be reminded of it every day.
It’s more important, surely, to ask ourselves whether we are convinced that compassion is a healing force that works to bring people to wholeness, to treat the brokenness in the world successfully.
Is compassion a healing force?
I heard recently of a tribal custom in Africa for dealing with people who transgress tribal law. I don’t know which people they are. I know only that it is a tribal story.
You and I might ask, what kind of punishment does the tribe prescribe? Well, I was amazed to discover this – that there is no provision for any action that we would call punishment.
Prominent people in the tribe are called together to deal with the person who has broken tribal law. They sit around him in a semi-circle, and this is what they do. They take it in turns for each person in the semi-circle to tell the lawbreaker what they really like about him and what they admire in him. That’s it.
Yes, compassion is a healing force.
Now, I’m not advocating anything here; I am simply illustrating thecompassion that wants to see the lawbreaker brought back to successful, fulfilling life in the community. And it seems to work. So I remind myself that God is like that. He reaches out to us in compassion, and it is one of the great blessings of our living. God is the healing God who reaches out to us in compassion with a will for mending our brokenness, rehabilitation to life in fellowship and of communion with him, our heavenly Father.
How do we know that? We know it because Jesus so often demonstrated it. One illustration will suffice. You remember that the Scriptures speak of Jesus being present at a moment when the legalists wanted to stone a woman for her act of immorality. Unfortunately for her, she had been caught by the legalists (those for whom the Jewish religious law was more important than anything else) in the act of adultery.[3] It seems that the legalistic accusers were no more innocent that the accused as it turns out in the Gospel account.
Jesus invited the one without sin to throw the first stone. AS YOU KNOW, NO-ONE DID. Such a man – one without sin- was not there. So Jesus said these unforgettable words to the woman: “Has no one condemned you?” “No one”, she replied. “Neither do I condemn you,” he said.
Did he therefore condone the immorality? Certainly not, as the following words confirm: “Go your way. And from now on do not sin again.”[4] Was she likely to sin again? Almost certainly she would not, because she had been treated with compassion and restored.
The legalists wanted to punish. The man of compassion wanted to rehabilitate.
Yes, compassion is a healing force.
Another example from Africa helps to make the point. A white woman suffered the death of her daughter, a daughter whom she dearly loved. Well, you might say, a number of women, and men for that matter, have suffered the death of a daughter. And that, without the shadow of a doubt, is a deeply distressing bereavement. Even so, this woman’s bereavement was especially awful, because her daughter had been murdered by a coloured group. The woman knew who had given the order to kill her daughter.
Put yourself in her position. What would you do?
I read in the papers from time to time and I hear on television news bulletins, people who have had a son or daughter deliberately killed. So often I have heard a member of the family say, “Lock him up and throw away the key!” or “I hope he rots in hell!” - sometimes worse. And I understand that. The words come from deep pain. Yet they eat away from the inside the spirit of the person bereaved. But I repeat, I understand the pain from which those words come.
This woman was different. She tried to imagine what was happening in the heart of the man who had ordered her daughter’s killing. And she felt that his heart was almost certainly troubled. She would have been wholly entitled to have felt hatred for him and to have called for the full weight of the law to fall upon him. But there was no trace of legalism in her reaction. Only compassion. So strong a compassion that she sought him out.
She had a very specific purpose. She wanted him to know that she forgave him. She gained access to the man’s group. She went to see them, to talk with them. She apologised for the way their people had been treated. She found the man who had ordered the murder of her daughter. She forgave him. She shook hands with him.
He experienced healing and so did she.Compassion overcame legalism.
Yes, compassion is a healing force.
It was a Christlike act. It brings to my mind so easily the prayer of Jesus for those who nailed him to the cross, a prayer uttered as he hung dying, “Father, forgive them. They know not what they do.”[5] In those moments when any other would have cursed the Romans and Jews who put him on that cross of excruciating pain, Jesus prayed to his heavenly Father for their forgiveness. Even there, even then, he looked upon them with compassion.
Compassion was his way. And we have the opportunity for it to be ours, the way of his disciples. What a difference we can make in the world as people of compassion.
II
But now it’s time to return to that synagogue where Jesus was teaching. To refresh our memories, remember that during the synagogue service a woman entered who had what the RSV calls ‘a spirit of infirmity’.[6] Almost immediately, we read that Jesus did something which is absolutely a work of God who heals. He called out to her, “Woman, you are freed from your infirmity.”[7]
What wonderful words to hear! What a moment for rejoicing! This woman had been bent over, unable to straighten her back for 18 years, and now she is able to live with freedom of movement she had not known for nearly two decades. Time to celebrate! Time to get out whatever the Galilean equivalent of champagne was! Time to dance around the synagogue! Time to praise and thank God for the woman’s new freedom and wellbeing! Time for hugs and all the expressions of joy known to man and woman!
But what happened? The joyless legalistic ruler of the synagogue said, “There are six days on which work ought to be done; come on those days and be healed, and not on the sabbath day.”[8]Expect no rejoicing from him. He won’t be popping the cork. Anticipate no prayer of thanksgiving for the woman’s healing from him.
Legalism and compassion don’t breathe the same air.
Luke, in his Gospel account, wants us to recognise in this event our healing God, our God of compassion, who rejoices over a life set free and sets the stage for us to rejoice over any and every life set free.
One of the most interesting characters in Anthony Trollope’s Barchester novels is the greatest lawyer in London, Sir Abraham Haphazard. Sir Abraham lived for the law, and for his magnificent performances before this jury and that. The courts were spellbound by what Trollope calls his glittering coruscations pouring from his mouth. Did Sir Abraham lack anything? Yes, he lacked compassion. In Sir Abraham Haphazard there was not a trace of compassion. Trollope relates that not a tear would be shed when Sir Abraham left this life to return to his fathers.
I think the ruler of the synagogue might be called Sir Abraham Haphazard. It was the law – the religious law- which mattered to him. It was compassion and healing that mattered to Jesus.
III
So what is the thought, even the touch of the Spirit, to take away with us this morning? It is that the event in that first century AD synagogue is as relevant today as it was then. In our world where, to use Luke’s vocabulary, there are many spirits of infirmity, we worship our Healing God. That is confirmed by the writer of the First Letter of John, who affirms that God is Love.[9] Hatred, the need of revenge, the hard heart, the merciless mind, the greed which lusts for yet more, indifference to suffering, the lies that spoil another’s life, and so much more that destroy our souls – are spirits of infirmity. The woman’s spirit of infirmity, to use Luke’s description, was, it seems, a spinal, physical complaint. But spirits of infirmity are not only physical. More often than not, they are spiritual and life-destroying. And I venture to say that we have all experienced a few in our time. Ours might not be the woman’s spirit of infirmity, but we have our own different sorts of spirits of infirmity, and our God is on the side of healing of those.
God’s healing calls us to openness to his compassion and grace, and our desire, penitentially, to have our brokenness mended. God, our healing God, reaches out to us in compassion and love, ready to heal our worst traits and be at work in our hearts as we are open prayerfully to him.
Freedom in the New Testament includes healing of the spirits of infirmity that can so easily eat away at us from within. So let’s take with us thehealing thoughts of faith, of the compassion and grace of God, and know the renewing, freeing words. “Woman ( or Man), you are freed from your infirmity.” And let’s walk in freedom from spirits of infirmity. And be thankful to our God of healing and Love.
S2022YLK0705
31.7.22 Yilki Uniting Church 1030
Readings: Hos.11:1-11 Ps.107:1-9,43 Eccl.1:2,12-14,2:18-23 Ps.49:1-12 Col.3:1-11 Luke 12:13-21
THE WISE AND THE FOOLISH
This morning’s Gospel reading is particularly interesting and instructive,.
Jesus’ told the parable of the man who devoted his life exclusively to wealth, then died prematurely. His foolishness is exposed.
The story ends with the words,
“So is he who lays up treasure for himself, and is not rich toward God.”[1]
Now, before telling the parable, Jesus said to a listening crowd,
“Take heed, and beware of all covetousness; for a man’s life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions.”[2]
Thus, we have a parable sandwiched between two important declarations – a parable sandwich, in fact. And it’s not an easy one to digest.
I wonder what Jesus’ inspiration for the parable was?
One of the religious books he would have known well enough (because it was part of the religious life of the Jews) was written about 200 years before the time of his ministry, and there are some words in it that must have ignited his imagination every time he thought of them.
The book is called Ecclesiasticus, or The Wisdom of Yeshua the Son of Sirach. It was written by a Jewish scribe called Ben Sira of Jerusalem. Are these the words, I wonder, which were the inspiration for Jesus’ parable?
‘There is a man who is rich through his diligence and self-denial’
and this is the reward allotted to him:
when he says, “I have found rest, and now I shall enjoy my goods!”
he does not know how much time will pass
until he leaves them to others and dies.’[3]
Sound familiar?
You can almost hear the bell tolling, can’t you.
What is the value now of all those goods?
Whether it was the inspiration for Jesus’ parable or not, it certainly supplements its force.
The power of the last line of the parable he told is undeniable:
“Fool! This night your soul is required of you;
and the things you have prepared, whose will they be?”[4]
And we can almost hear the refrain,
“Where is his coveted wealth now?”
“Where is the wisdom he ought to have exercised?”
For make no mistake about it, the parable is about wisdom – and about the lack of it.
We are going to think of the subject in this way.
The man in the parable made three mistakes, and we can learn from them all. These are the three mistakes he made:
1 He mistook the material for the spiritual as quality of life.
2 He mistook foolishness for wisdom.
3 He mistook accumulation of assets for real wealth
1
First, then, the parable shows the man had mistaken the material for the spiritual as quality of life.
This would have struck home very strongly with the man in the crowd who had asked Jesus to press his, the petitioner’s, brother to divide his inheritance, that is, to share it with him. And it would surprise more than a few people today in our excessively materialistic society. You remember that the parable is Jesus’ answer to that man who had asked him to make available a share of his brother’s material wealth.
Before telling the parable, Jesus said so clearly to the petitioner:
“Take heed, and beware of all covetousness;
For a man’s life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions.”[5]
Neither a man’s life, nor a woman’s life, consists in the abundance of his or her possessions.
The trouble is, that for many, life consists in exactly that – the abundance of possessions.
In their experience, little outside of the accumulation of possessions has any appeal.
Let me take you to Pompei, on the shores of the Bay of Naples.
In the ruins of Pompei, there is a main shopping street, probably the most frequented street in the city. Its name suits our purpose very well this morning. It is called Via Abbondanza – the street of abundance, the street of plenty.
Now, it’s very easy for us, perhaps a little self-righteously, to condemn those who give themselves to accumulating as many possessions as they can, to accumulate as much wealth as they can. Yet we should not condemn anyone for covetousness because the function of condemning is God’s, not ouirs. Rather, we should regard them compassionately, for they have mistaken material wealth for quality of life. Perhaps they are still searching for meaning and so far not finding it – searching, perhaps for what life is about. So in that sense we are with them. We all search for meaning in life.
But let’s listen for a warning to ourselves.
Are we sure that we do not sometimes wander down the via Abbondanza, the road of abundance? And wander it covetously.
I shall be going to the Adelaide Theological Library this week for a very specific reason. The college has a sale of books. As I look at my library at home, packed with volumes on theology, on history, on art, on English and American literature, on Biblical scholarship, on preaching, on travel, on railways and on so much more, can I honestly say I have not from time to time wandered down the via Abbondanza, the road of abundance? Perhaps at least a little covetously?
I don’t limit that to my library. I have to ask, have there been other areas of possessing where I might have strayed onto that road of abundance with doubtful motives. You see, it is very easy for us to slip, even unintentionally, into the materialistic trap.
Perhaps we all, Christian as we are, need to ask the question from time to time,
‘Am I certain that I am not being covetous?’
‘Am I sure that I am not mistaking the material for the spiritual as quality of life?’
God, Jesus told the Samaritan woman by the well, is Spirit.
That tells us immediately that it is spiritual life that matters.
Wealth itself does not have to get in the way of that – but coveting wealth does.
Life reaches its greatest depths when we reach into ourselves and find that our core is spiritual and
it is there at the core that we meet God and live with God.
It is there in the realisation that we have spirit to nurture that life becomes a new and rich with meaning way of being.
It is there, when we are committed to God in Jesus Christ that we know what Paul the apostle meant when he wrote of a new creation.
The mind at prayer and the will at one with God are our best helps in not mistaking the material for the spiritual as quality of life.
2
So, we have noted that the first mistake the man in the parable made was to mistake the material for the spiritual as quality of life.
Now we move to the second mistake that he made.
He mistook foolishness for wisdom.
The parable, almost at its end, has God saying to the covetous man,
“Fool! This night your soul is required of you; and the things you have prepared, whose will they be?”[6]
Fool indeed!
And you notice the basis of his foolishness…
He has placed all his value on the temporal, that is, on the things he can have in the world of time, and the temporal is totally outside the possibility of calculating.
That was the basis of his foolishness. We cannot know how much time we have in this world, so if all our eggs are in the temporal basket, we might or might not live to see them hatching. This much we can be certain of – the material can be enjoyed for only the limited time we have here on earth.
The foolishness of building our life on coveting wealth becomes self-evident.
The brevity of life,
the unpredictable longevity of life,
is beyond denying.
My first wife Ann and I had planned our retirement. We were going to live so many experiences that working life had denied us. Cancer had other ideas.
We just cannot know when the time will come.
As the man in the parable discovered, and his temporal focus was called foolishness.
So where is wisdom?
First, we should admit that if you are a person who believes that there is this life only,
and we have not eternal quality or destiny,
then while coveting the material might not be the best way to live, or the most productive, at least the coveting is understandable. “Live, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die!” is a view of things that has some understandable reason – if you believe that this life is all. And that material wealth is all.
It is not difficult to understand that he or she who believes this life is all there is could see wisdom in focusing upon the value of material wealth.
But we have reason to believe otherwise.
Jesus told a parable about the wise and foolish builder, in the Sermon on the Mount.[7]
The parable sums up the teaching of the Sermon on the Mount, our greatest scriptural resource for practical spiritual living and it begins in this way:
“Every one then who hears these words of mine, and does them will be like a wise man…
…will be like a wise man who built his house upon the rock;”[8]
And we know how the story runs.
Imagine the rocky country on both sides of the River Jordan.
There are wadis, dry creek beds of sand that rarely see water, but when it does come, it is a raging torrent, sweeping away all in its path, as in Australia the torrent does in a river’s flood plain. And so the foolish man loses the house he built upon the sandy wadi floor, but the wise man whose house is founded upon the rock above the wadi bed, thanks his lucky stares that he still has his home, though he ought to thank his wisdom.The sandy wadi bed has the house of the foolish man, the man or woman who is content to hear the teaching of Jesus, but not ready to do, to live it.
The rock above the wadi bed has the house of the wise man or woman,
he or she who not only hears the teaching, but lives it.
Jesus tells us that
there is wisdom,
there lies the best life.
It is a life borne up by the love and service focused in the cross of Jesus, a life which finds its fulfilment in spiritual focus.
Not everyone sees such a life as wise.
The apostle Paul wrote to the Corinthian church,
‘…we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to the Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.’[9]
But it is in the cross, its servanthood, its love and its spiritual truth, that we find wisdom, the wisdom of God.
3
So we have now covered two of the three mistakes.
1 He mistook the material for the spiritual as quality of life.
2 He mistook foolishness for wisdom.
We come now to his third mistake.
He mistook accumulation of assets for real wealth.
It remains only for us to think about real wealth.
I wonder if you know the story of the Vietnamese mandarin of great integrity?
There was once a mandarin who was so honourable that all the other mandarins in the land looked up to him and admired him for his incorruptible integrity. He was admired by all. There had never been so honest and upright a mandarin.
However, the time came for him to retire. His fellow mandarins were devasted that he would no longer be part of their fellowship, and they felt they must give so honest and upright a mandarin the best possible send-off. They decided that they would do it in the best way they could think of.
They would give him a life-sized animal sculpted in gold. Something he could be proud of. Something he would value. An animal that fitted the year of his birth in the Chinese calendar. Viet Nam uses the Chinese calendar.
So they visited his wife when the mandarin of great integrity was out. They asked her what month and year he was born in. She told them. He was born in the year of the rat. They told her that it was to be a surprise for him. She should keep the secret until the day of presenting the golden rat came along.
The day came when the golden rat was ready. His fellow mandarins delivered it to the mandarin of great integrity’s wife. She waited excitedly for him to come home.
When he arrived, she picked up the golden rat and gave it to him, telling him the story of his fellow mandarins wanting to give him a creature of his birth year in solid gold, and how they had called round to ask her the month and year of his birth.
He looked furiously at her, and shouted,
“You stupid woman. You should have told them I was born in the year of the Ox!”
Coveting wealth is one thing; doing something with it to benefit others who need help is a beautiful way to use it.
Ruth has been reading a book about Roger Federer, a person I seem instinctively to feel is a good man who is not grasping after anything.
This simple statement is made in the book:
“Throughout his life he has sought out people who could serve as mentors, even role models for his next phase: from Sampras… to, more recently, Bill Gates, whose philanthropic approach Federer hopes to emulate in his later years.”[10]
He wants his money to bring relief where there is serious need.
What a man or woman does with wealth, says a great deal about the values he or she lives by.
Well, as Jesus said, accumulation of assets or material wealth is not the best way to life;
He teaches that real wealth is described as being “rich toward God”.
That might seem a little difficult to comprehend, but it really means something very simple:
It means making our life choices “with God in view”.[11]
It means living our days “with God in view”.
It is to build up “treasure in heaven”. To let God be our guide is to live a Spirit-touched life that is above all the wealth of this world. It is literally to live with God.
We won’t make any of the mistakes of the man in the parable if we can avoid them. Rather, we shall live and choose and pursue “with God in view”.
Therein lies real wealth.
Therein lies real wisdom.
This sermon was preached at the Aldinga Uniting Church on June 26th, 2022. It looks at the wholeness of the Christian disciple.
S2022ALD0604
26.6.22 Aldinga Uniting Church 1000
Readings: Psalms 16,; 1Ki.19:15f,19-21; Gal.5:1,13-25; Luke9:51-62
Wholeness in Discipleship
Jesus said,
“No one who puts his hand to the plough and looks back, is fit for the kingdom of God.”[1]
I know nothing of any significance about farming, so I don’t have anything of value to say at all about ploughing. But the context of the saying in Luke’s gospel makes it clear that Jesus is talking about discipleship. Context is always the key for understanding any statement in any literature.
When we take note of the context, we see the clear meaning of the saying about the plough and the man who looks back as this:
Discipleship, if it is to have value, has to be committed discipleship. (RPT)
Why?
Because it fits us for the kingdom of God, which consists in living the will of God insofar as we are able.
“Thy kingdom come”, we pray,
“Thy will be done,
on earth as it is in heaven.”[2]
We are thinking this morning, therefore, of the fulfilling life that we call Christian discipleship, the wholeness of living that is discipleship.
A couple of weeks ago, I was sitting on the verandah of a hotel room in Bunbury, south of Perth, looking out over the Indian Ocean. At various points, a mile or so offshore, half a dozen cargo vessels were riding at anchor, waiting for a berth in the port. They reminded me of a decision I had to make many years ago. I was a young merchant seaman in love with the sea. I was also in love with a young woman. We hoped to marry as soon as we were able. I was therefore faced with a problem. What kind of husband would I be if I were home only once or twice a year between voyages?
The sea?
Or Ann, who became my now late wife?
It became clear that the only husband it was satisfactory to be was a committed husband whose wife was his first consideration. I left the sea.
The statement of Jesus, “No one who puts his hand to the plough and looks back, is fit for the kingdom of God”, is like that. Be a committed disciple, or don’t be a disciple at all, because the way to fulfillment, to wholeness in living, is commitment.
I’m going to discuss three elements of that this morning. They are:
1 Wholeness in discipleship
2 Fruits of discipleship
3 Grace in discipleship.
I
First, then, WHOLENESS in discipleship.
Wholeness, as many will know, is the deepest meaning of salvation. There is a beautiful greeting in Italy. I first heard it many years ago in Corneglia, a tiny village high above the ocean in Le Cinque Terre. I was walking through the village one early evening when a man sitting on a bench called out to me, “Salve!” His greeting meant, “Wholeness, health, salvation!” “Salve” is a lovely greeting, and we are thinking about wholeness – salve - in discipleship.
How is that wholeness achieved? In asking the question I am not suggesting that we achieve it through our own efforts – I am suggesting that wholeness is coincident with a certain action, and that action is
Following Jesus to the Cross.
Because the historical event of the cross is the most potent symbol and reality of Love.
Because Love is the core of discipleship.
Because in following Jesus to the Cross is following to where Love is seen in its unquestionable reality and its most potent expression.
The Love we are thinking about now is not sentimental, feel-good love (though I am not criticising that), but the special Love that the Greek word ἀγάπη[3] describes. It is Love which always looks for the wellbeing of others, even if it means some self-sacrifice. The cross certainly shows the reality of self-sacrifice.
Jesus himself showed the centrality of love in his reminder that the chief requirements of the Jewish law and therefore the chief requirements of following him are that we should love the LORD our God with all our heart and with all our soul and with all our might and our neighbour as yourself.[4]And then there is the disturbing requirement he spelled out in the Sermon on the Mount,
“Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons (and daughters) of your Father in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust”,[5]
but not sons only of the Father, but daughters too.
That is, God loves your enemies, and you also are to do so. We have so much to learn about love in a Christian context!
(a)Loving God, in the teaching of Jesus, has the same insistence upon
Commitment as the saying on ploughing has. We are to love the LORD our God with our whole, committed being.
Does that sound like a big demand? It isn’t really. It’s more an invitation to know God in the everyday. If, for example, we write to someone important to us, we can choose to sign off with the words, “All my love”.We can write to more than one person in that way. “All my love” means that we love each person without reserve. We love with our whole being. And so it is in loving God. We love God in loving our neighbour as ourself, in loving others, caring for their wellbeing. And paradoxically, it brings wellbeing and wholeness to us.
(b)To love our neighbour as ourselves is to be liberated from life-spoiling selfishness. And sometimes there is self-sacrifice.
A few decades ago, while spending time in Wales, I drove through the village of Aberfan.
Some here might remember that many years ago, something terrible happened in Aberfan. A great slag heap from the nearby coal mine towered above the village. After a period of heavy and constant rain, the slag heap began to move. It slid down the hillside and engulfed the Pantglas[6] Primary School during school hours. It was to be a half-day holiday, but the slag heap buried the school in the morning. Many teachers and children in the school died that day. The newspapers, of course, were full of the tragedy. That’s what you would expect.
But what they did not report was the action of a teacher called Hettie Taylor in the Pantglas school that day.
Her classroom was filled with children at every desk. When the slag came down on the school, fear in Hettie’s classroom was as strong as in any other part of the school. Hettie, was a Christian. She saw that as the slag engulfed the school, there was one as yet unsealed exit that was narrowing and would soon be closed, so entombing them all.
When she first heard the rumbling from the ceiling, she thought the roof was collapsing. She told the children to get under their desks, but now she told them to get out from under them and to stand. Then she told them to walk calmly from the classroom to make their way out through the narrowing escape gap in the slag. When every child had left and escaped safely to the open air, Hettie followed them. She stayed there until the last child was safe. She placed the lives of her young students before her own. That is ἀγάπη, Christian Love, the Love of the committed disciple. There are Welsh men and women today who owe their lives to Hettie Taylor.
I do not know if Hettie Taylor is still alive or not, but I sometimes think of her, a Christian disciple whom I never met, and see her as a special example of ἀγάπη, of Christian Love.
My conviction is that committed discipleship, the core of which is Love, enriches our lives with the wholeness of a daily walk with God.
II
Second, we think of the FRUITS of discipleship.
We are, of course, familiar with those fruits of the Spirit in Paul’s letter to the Galatians, those evidences of life-transformation –
Love, joy,
Peace, patience,
Kindness, goodness,
Faithfulness, gentleness,
And self-control.
Those evidences of a transformed life can take time to pervade our being, and a wise man or woman would not claim that his or her life displayed them all.
But here, we have different fruits, to think about, and they are fruits of discipleship. And again, we have Paul to thank for helping us in this.
In the letter to the Galatians,after introducing his subject in this way,
“For freedom, Christ has set us free; stand fast, therefore, [7]and donot submit again to a yoke of slavery”,
he explains to his readers that the freedom is part of the call to discipleship with the words,
“For you were called to freedom …; only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love be servants of one another.”[8]
So the essence of the freedom Paul declares we know in discipleship is service.
and you notice, too, that love as the core of discipleship is followed through because it is through lovethat we are to be servants of one another.
A woman I know had a severe back operation some years ago. It meant that she had to spend an extended time lying flat on her back. Ladies from her church came regularly to her house to do cleaning. She said to one of them one day, “I don’t feel comfortable having you cleaning my toilet.” The lady replied, “Allow me the grace to serve you”.
That is at the core of discipleship, a beautiful fruit of following Jesus to the cross, where others become the objects of our love, and servanthood the fruit and privilege of being his followers.
RPT
Now here is a fascinating thing about this interlude with Paul. He tells us that we have freedom, and must not fall back into slavery, then he tells us that we are to be servants of one another.
What we miss in English is an interesting point in the Greek of the original. That is that our English ‘slave’ and our English ‘servant’ are the same word in Greek.[9]
Slavery was an everyday part of life in Paul’s day, so he quite naturally uses slavery as a metaphor for his teaching. Speaking of slavery to personal desires, selfishness which enslaves us, he tells his readers,
“You were once slaves to the worst in you. Don’t fall back into that kind of slavery again, because you now have the freedom and privilege to be slaves of a different kind – that is, servants of one another. And this is through love.”
And so love as the core of discipleship follows through into the freedom to serve one another in the Christian fellowship through love.
A good question for all of us is, “Whom do I know whose life can be helped through my servanthood?”
III
Third, we turn to GRACE in discipleship.
Sometimes, we grow so used to words that we don’t take much notice of them any more. It’s one of the problems of over-familiarity. For example, when we hear the benediction words, from the Second letter of Paul to Corinth, does the power of them make its way into our consciousness?
“The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all.”[10]
Have we become too used to those words?
Andso we move into the third section of our discussion with Love still there in the theme of discipleship.
The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, which is, as we know, the grace of God, comes with us on the road of discipleship, removing altogether any thoughts of the need for striving to be the disciples we are called to be. The grace of God and the Love of God achieve that in us. Commitment is the key.
How do we know that his grace and his Love are with us in every step of discipleship? Because the fellowship of God is with us in his Spirit because, as John’s Gospel tells us, “God is Spirit”.[11] Because God is Spirit, he is with us wherever and however we are.
IV
So what do we take away with us this morning?
We take with us three elements of Christian discipleship and the wholeness of person that forms within us.
The first is that the man or woman who puts his or her hand to the plough has to be the committed disciple who chooses exclusively and steadfastly the road of following Jesus to the cross of Love.
That love seeks the wellbeing of others.
That love is the core of discipleship.
The second is that the fruit of committed discipleship ripens as the grace of serving one another in and through Love
The third is that Love as the core of discipleship is reciprocated by God whose Love and grace are with us always on the road in the reality of his Spirit. Yet the reciprocating of love by God is how it seems in our experience. In fact, we reciprocate the love God already has for us.
Such discipleship fits us for the kingdom of God, that is, for living out his will as we are able.
We are privileged to be called to follow Jesus.
Amen.
A few years ago,my wife Ruth and I had the pleasant experience of walking through the ruins of the great ancient city of Ephesus.
It is among the most preserved of all acient centres of population. My own interest lay in its Christian associations, a twofold association because both the apostle Paul and the Johannine faith are focussed there.
Paul spent three years in the city. It was my pleasure to sit at the top layer of terraces of the great Greek theatre and look down the straight road that leads to the ancient port. It was not difficult to imagine Paul walking from the ship that brought him to the port along that road to the city. I felt some excitement at that. A few minutes later, I set foot on that roa which Paul had walked.
This article, however, is about Johannine Christianity.
What is meant by the term? When we speak of Johannine Christianity we mean the faith which is the content of John's Gospet and the first three letters of John. We do not include the Apocalypse (or Revelation) of John. Its content is vastly different from that of te Gospel and the letters. It has a very different purpose.
Who wrote the Johannine documents? The answer is, simply, that we do not know. Some scholars believe that all the four documents were written by the same person. I believe, based on internal evidence, that that is unlikely. My own view is that two or three authors were involved, but all were steeped in Johannine belief and teaching.
When were the documents written? The Gospel was probably produced somewhere near the turn of the first and second centuries AD, with the First Letter written sometime after that. The other two letters are more difficult to date, but it can be said that they, too, are clearly part of the Johannine literature.
There is a legend that the disciple John, at some time after the crucifixion of Jesus, went to Ephesus. It is not, of course, a traceable piece of history, but the legend is interesting because it encourages us to associate the Johannine religious tradition with him. Whether that is so or not, the Johannine form of the faith is strongly focused in Ephesus.
Anything more than cursory readings of the Gospel and the letters of the Johannine tradition reveals that they represent the most developed faith in the New Testament. Given that they post-date the synoptic Gospels (Mark, Matthew and Luke), that should not be surprising. 'John' is the result of the contemplation and reflections on the person and teaching of Jesus, and should be read as such. Only then, do the riches of John's Gospel reveal themselves and bless the reader. Chronological outlines of the life and ministry of Jesus are to be found in the synoptic Gospels; deep insights into the meaning of his life and ministry are found in John's Gospel.
What, then, is the relationship between John's Gospel and the First Letter of John, the most important of the three epistles?
John is a kind of resource book of faith for disciples, whereas the First Letter deals with a particular problem at a particular time and applies Johannine faith in addressing it.
There are probably as many opinions of the content of Johannine Christianity as there are readers of the documents. My own is that there are three great themes of how God relates to us, God as Spirit, God as Light and God as Love. These themes are expressed against the background of that which is called realised eschatology, that is, the view that we are living in the last days; they have already arrived.
In the Gospel, Jesus is addressed by a Samaritan woman who mentions that Samaritans and Jews worship in two defferent central locations. Jesus responds, "God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth." (John 4:24)
The meaning is clear: It matters less where we worshi God than how, and given that God is spirit, we can worship him anywhere because worship is a matter of human spirit. God who is spirit touches my spirit. The Greek word for spirit is pneuma. It means spirit, wind or breath. And so I can think of God breathing upon me, or even with me. God who is spirit is a precious truth.
The First Letter of John (not really a letter, but a kind of pastoral occasional tract to address a problem dividing the local churches) speaks of God as light. Very early in the documant the writer declares, "This is the message we have heard from him and proclaim to you, that God is light and in him there is no darkness at all." (1 John 1:5) This also is an immensely encouraging statement. Light, in this context, has an obviously moral quality. I find immensely helpfl to pray that God who is pure light will remove all traces of darkness within me. This is a truth for contemplation.
1 John declares God to be love twice in the very heart of the document. At chapter 4, verse 8, the author writes, "He who does not love does not know God; for God is love." A little later in the same chapter he writes, "God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him."(1 John 4:16). Could there be any greater encouragement for us to love. We are told that we live in the very milieu of love. That is the implicationof God being love. It can be argued, when reading the document, tht the whole emphasis, even allowing for its specific purpose, is to assure the readers that the sure ground for their feet is the truth that God is love.
There is of course a good deal more than this to the Ephesus tradition of Christiantiy that we generally call Johannine. This is a good starting point for studying the Gospel and the letters.
Christ is Risen!
He is Risen Indeed!
Today, in these times of coronavirus, we cannot make that joyous acclamation together. Closed churches make it impossible. But we can make our own acclamation.
Here, in our home, Ruth and I, and probably Richard too, will make that acclaimation at lunchtime (Ruth and I made it this morning as well), and also make a toast "Lo Chaim!", the Jewish toast, "To Life!" That, when it boils down, is what the Resurrection speaks to me about - Life with an upper case L. Death, in the most profound sense, was defeated that first Easter morning. Life was triumphant - is triumphant.
Let's, then, make this Easter Day one of rejoicing in the triumph of Life. None of us will know precisely what the
Resurrection of Christ was on that first morning, but we do know that the post-crucifixion life of Christ was in undefinable ways different than was the case pre-crucifixion. On at least two occasions, Christ was not immediately recognised. It appears that closed doors and windows were of no consequence to him. Most important of all, the post-crucifixion Christ inspired his followers as they had never been inspired before. The resurrection must really have been something.
How are we going to celebrate it?
(1) I have for many years been intrigued and spiritually stimulated by the story of the two on the Emmaus road. They walked part of the way to their village in the company of the Risen Christ, unaware of the identity of him who walked with them. Yet, the narrative tells us, their hearts were warmed within them by their walking companion. Unaware of who he was, they invited him into their home at the end of the journey. Then the truth was revealed. He became known to them in "the breaking of bread."
That says to me that one of the greatest experiences of the Risen Christ can be, for me, the act of Eucharist, the "breaking of bread". I have used the words, 'can be'. That leads me to say that the Eucharist celebration has to be entered into as a truly holy act in a holy moment, as unliturgical as possible, so that we can, deep in our spiritual selves, meet with the Christ of the Emmaus Road and the Emmaus breaking of bread. The symbols of bread and wine (wine rather than grape juice facilitates, for me, deeper understanding of the act as holy) speak of the one who is with us in the staple (bread) and in the celebration (wine), the everyday and the special. Open hearts reaching out to God who is Spirit, can meet with "open arms" of God reaching out to us in moments of spirit meeting Spirit. The Risen Christ speaks his message of hope to me in those communion moments if I approach the Eucharist in the right frame of mind as a meeting rather than exclusively an ecclesiastical ritual.
(2) Can we celebrate the Resurrection in the light of its possibilities for us? Who is not at times frustrated by whatever limitations, whatever flaws, get in the way of our becoming all that we would like to be? I am the first to admit that I'm disappointed with myself when I let my own person down by unworthy reactions.
One of our Christian hymns has the line, "You raise me up to more than I could be." The line is one that speaks of a powerful aspect of the Resurrection. The Risen Christ raises me up to more than I could be without his powerful renewing influence. The Risen Christ expands my limits. That's precious. Yes, I can celebrate that! My hope is that those expanded limits enable me to be in some way a conduit of God's blessing to others.
This is the most important Sunday of the year, the most important any day of the year. This is the Day we celebrate resurrection and our own opportunities of renewal, of being raised to more than otherwise we could be.
That's surely worth a toast. Get out the champagne, raise the glass, and with celebration in your voice, proclaim,
"Lo chaim (pronounced Lo Ha-eem, with a slight catch in the back of the mouth with the "h") -
Lo Chaim, To Life!
Christ is Risen!
He is Risen Indeed!"
________________________________________________________________________________________
Tony Gates antoniocancelli@bigpond.com
A CONTEMPLATIVE PIECE April 7th, 2019 Jindabyne
MARK 14:32 'And they went to a place which was called Gethsemane; and he said to his disciples, "Sit here while I pray."'
We are in a sacred place of natural eucalypt forest. We have had our first night here; this is our first morning. The glistening sun, the enticing shadows, the miscellany of eucalypts in this place take me to that which at the very least seems to be my natural place of habitation where everything around me encourages my spirit to grow. The trees, though not only the trees, are an ecclesia of God. This is Eden's garden. I am with God who walks here. The eucalypt forest cannot be without the realised presence of God. It is a spiritual place, a fecund place, a place of ruach, of pneuma (spirit), at once of stillness and movement. God manisfests divine presence in all I see and feel.
Am I saying that here in this spiritual place I find the deepest meaning of home? It is certainly a place where there is a deep, interior intimation of home. It is a place where I am acutely aware of me as well as of God, and home includes being at home with myself. The deep within is a social relationship with me, yet is me. In the beginning was the deep within, and the deep within was with me, and the deep within was me. The deep within is me.
At this point I have to be careful of the identification because the deep within is God within me, but God is not me. Yet there is a tangible connection. I am, as all men and women are, the fruit of God. We are not God, but are not entirely separable from God, as no child is entirely separate from his or her parents.
This is the discernible voice of the eucalypt forest to me, the voice of a sacred place.
That should be no surprise to me. Jesus spent a deal of time in quiet places removed from the business of life. He found places of nature in which to pray, nurturing his relationship with God, his Father. A garden, an olive grove, a mountain, a desert place. All offer the place of solitude. All nourish the spirit in communion with God. I think Jesus would have made his communion with God in solitude in this eucalypt forest, had he been here now in this sacred place.
S2022YLK0102
9.1.22 Yilki Uniting Church 1030
Readings: Is.43:1-7 Ps.29 Acts 8:14-17 Luke 3:15-17, 21-22
Preached at the Yilki church, 9th January, 2022
Jesus, a Baptised Man of Prayer
I
One of the unresolved puzzles of the New Testament is the baptism of Jesus at the hands of John the Baptist.
It might not have been a difficulty for us if the baptism had been at the hands of someone other than John, because, as we know, John was administering a baptism of repentance. Jesus? Repent?
Of course, we are puzzled by that, and scholars have been discussing it for generations, without any agreement or conclusions.
So how shall we think of it this morning?
I suggest that the positive, undeniable truth that we can take from the baptism of Jesus is that it marks the beginning of the ministry of a man of deep prayer
whose special relationship,
his filial relationship,
with God is confirmed by the Spirit of God himself.
The Revised Standard Version tells us,
‘…when all the people were baptised, and when Jesus also had been baptised and was praying, the heaven opened, and the Holy Spirit descended upon him in bodily form, as a dove, and a voice came from heaven, “Thou art my beloved son; with thee I am well pleased.”’[1]
Confirmation of the Son / Father relationship.
This is a real gem of a passage because it takes us more deeply into the event of the baptism than any of the other Gospel accounts do.
You will already have noticed that the voice from heaven did not, in Luke’s account, come at the moment of baptism. Luke tells us that it was ‘…when Jesus…had been baptised.’
Not at the moment of his baptism.
In Luke’s account, the voice from heaven comes when Jesus ‘was praying’.
When else would a voice from heaven be more likely to be heard?
P
The voice from heaven came when Jesus was praying.
That is the major focus for this morning.
II
When I was very, very much younger than I am now, I was living in one of the world’s loveliest places, a village called Manorbier in South-West Wales. The country church in Manorbier was the place where I preached what memory suggests was my second sermon as a lay preacher and as a serving soldier.
I mention the Manorbier church because there was a scroll on the wall above the pulpit that read,
‘My House Shall Be Called A House of Prayer’.
I think Jesus would have been happy to preach beneath that scroll.
He was so conscious that the temple in Jerusalem had always been intended to be a house of prayer.
Isaiah, those many centuries before, had declared, with the voice of God speaking,
‘I will bring them to my holy mountain and make them joyful in my house of prayer.’[2]
The preciousness of the temple as the house of prayer was evident enough when Jesus drove out the traders with the words,
‘…It is written, ”My house shall be called a house of prayer.” But you are making it a den of robbers!’[3]
Ruth and I went to Manorbier a few years ago and looked into the church. It was so good to see that the scroll is still there over the pulpit.
What better, for a local church, than to be thought of and experienced as ‘a house of prayer’! – a place of rendez-vous with God!
This diversion, if it is a diversion, is made to show how important prayer was to Jesus, and to drive home the point that the voice from heaven was heard when he was praying,
when he was engaged in his habitual communion with his heavenly Father.
I have no doubt that he would say to us today,
“If you want that kind of close relationship with God, then be men and women of prayer. You can’t predict what road of service and what life of walking with God you will be led into.”
So we are going to move now into thoughts about the prayer life of Jesus, and that is holy ground. We must walk carefully and reverently.
IIIA
Our first thought, most appropriately, is that for Jesus, prayer was companionship, but so much more than companionship.
It was closeness of communion with God who was able to reach into the very essence of his being, spirit with spirit.
You see, the habit of prayer with Jesus was not customarily to get something from his heavenly Father, but rather, to allow him to be present in the deepest reaches of his soul.[4] He was not trying to persuade his Father into a transaction, but to deepen a relationship.
I like to think of prayer which seeks to deepen our relationship with God as a tree and its roots.
The roots, sunk deep into the soil of life, allow the life of the soil, the sustenance of the soil, to reach right into the heart of the tree and allow it to flourish.
I see Jesus in prayer, allowing his heavenly Father to nourish his deepest self in sacred moments of closeness.
Why should that be important for us?
Do you ever feel empty, frustrated, downhearted, low in faith?
Jesus’ way of prayer is important for us because God’s presence in our deepest selves is a renewing experience. In the case of Jesus, The Holy Spirit, or, to put it another way, God who is Spirit, touched his life, confirming his relationship with God. Luke tells us that it was a voice from heaven.
Surely it was, because it is in prayer that a voice from heaven is to be experienced, not necessarily an audible one, but perhaps more akin to the ‘still, small voice’ heard by Elijah in the Old Testament story.[5]
Or the voice might be an unarticulated assurance of God that we are, as the First Letter of John puts it, ‘children of God.’[6]
I remember years ago, reading about the mother of the Rev. Lesley Weatherhead, of London’s City Temple. His mother was suffering from a terminal illness. Not surprisingly, she was not handling it very well. Who would? Premature ending of life is not a good thought, and much pain to be endured can make the best of us quail.
She constantly complained when Lesley visited her. I can’t recall how she learned to pray to know God’s presence rather than to ask for things. But she did, and one day when her son Lesley went to visit her, he was taken aback to see that she was radiant. She told him,
“I have learned in prayer, Lesley, that I am to take this illness as a trust. God did not give me the illness, but now that I have it, I am entrusted with it. And God has never been as much my life as he is today. I know his love is part of my life.”
To pray in such a way as to know God rather than to ask for things is to learn a new way of being. God waits for us to pray in that way.
It might seem strange to speak of answer to prayer when we are not seeking things but answer there is. It is expressed from an unexpected direction. Henry Morton Stanley, who met with Dr Livingstone in Africa, wrote in his journal,
“You may know when prayer is answered, by that glow of content which fills one who has flung his cause before God, as he rises to his feet.”[7]
To “fling our cause before God” can be, and at best is, seeking him rather than things from him. …thar glow of content…
Look at Jesus’ life in the Gospels and you can’t help noticing that whenever the opportunity arose, he retired to some private place to be with his heavenly Father.
So, then, the first thing to note about Jesus the man of prayer is that he sought closeness of communion with God who was able to reach into the very essence of his being, spirit with spirit.
IIIB
The second thing we can note is that in prayer he sought to know as clearly as he could how God would lead him.
We note with reverence that the best example of that was the experience in the wilderness which followed immediately upon his baptism, the wilderness of temptation.
Various possibilities were before him. Should he be committed to meeting people’s material needs, expressed in the supply of bread from stones? Should he commit to the dramatic and test God out to see if divine miracle could save him from a deliberate risking of his life, i.e., commitment to being a kind of miracle working public Houdini? There would be excitement in that and immediate public recognition and praise! Or should he pursue political power by giving himself to exploitation of evil and becoming a self-seeking, power-lusting achiever?[8]
In that time he was fasting and in prayer,
What roads should his life take?
How would God lead him?
His answer to every temptation was reference to Scripture because he saw there God’s will expressed and therefore how he should respond as he saw the ways of God opening up before him, so clearly opposed to the ways of the world’s more pagan minds.
And so he shows us that the voice of God, still, small though it might be, comes to us in prayer, and often in Scriptural terms to guide us on our way. We too can find that angels come and minister to us.[9]
IIIC
I think we can add a third purpose in Jesus’ praying, as long as we are careful not to draw the wrong conclusions.
In prayer, Jesus received power. But it was not the power to dominate.
He rejected that kind of power when it was offered in temptation in the wilderness. Rather, this was the power to serve.
What an example that is for us! Just imagine what the world would be like if we were all committed to serve one another. If only we could substitute ‘serve’ or ‘dominate’. All that you read of Jesus tells us that he was constantly serving. His washing of the feet of his disciples was just one, particularly well-known example.[10]
Yet it was even more than that. It was an inner fortitude that enabled him to face the world.
Wherever he went, he seemed to radiate power and inner strength.
He was equal to any occasion, even scourging and crucifixion. Gethsemane looked like defeat.
The cross looked like defeat.
To all around, including his disciples, it was seen only as defeat.
Jesus’ prayer enhanced his power to serve.
Yet there was an internal fortitude that in my mind I see in him as I read his life in the Gospels. I find myself seeing him, in all the situations of his ministry and in all the moments of tribulation, with the strong, victorious look given him by Piero della Francesca’s painting, “Resurrection.”
And yes, there is surely no doubt that his power to serve, his power to inspire, his power to endure, his power to be a faithful, unswerving in purpose Son of his heavenly Father, is inseparable from his prayer of intimate communion.
IV
There is, to my knowledge of the Scriptures, no evidence that Jesus used prayer as though God were a dispenser, a kind of Santa Claus who gives what is asked for by seekers of presents.
Prayer for him was all about intimate communion with God; prayer for Jesus was, if we can summarise it this way (and I have already mentioned these),
· Communion with God who alone could reach the utmost reaches of his soul and commune with him there.
· Illumination – seeing more clearly how and where the ways of God would lead.
· The blessing of power to serve, to meet with courage any circumstances, and to find victory in much that others would see as defeat.
That might inspire us at least to aim to pray more nearly as Jesus prayed, and so to know our heavenly Father more closely – prayer focused upon communion, guidance and service.
As the Biblical scholar S. McLean Gilmour once put it,
‘ …the gift of the Holy … Spirit does not automatically follow upon baptism, but is associated with the act of prayer’[11]
Prayer is the arena of the voice of God.
Prayer is the arena of the gift of God himself to us.
Prayer is healing in our world of suffering and pain.
Prayer is for those who wish to be whole
- the prayer of intimate communion with God.
What better way to live 2022 than as those who pray, as those who seek a deeper relationship daily with God, whose Spirit confirms within us that we are children of God and who walks every road with us?
Sermon preached 27.8.17 at Newland Memorial Uniting Church
New Testament Reading:Matthew 16:13-20
PETERFIED OR PETRIFIED?
I
I wonder how many people here have been to Venice? I hope those who have love that city as much as I do. For me it is a glittering miracle in the Adriatic.
I wonder too, how many visitors to Venice know what they are walking on when they are in the city? And I ask that rather rhetorical question because when I talk with people who have been to Venice, I find that many believe it to be a normal city like any other except that it has canals running through it.
Not so.Not so.
Venice is built upon approximately 130 low-lying mud islands. The canals are the water between the islands.
How did that happen?
It happened because the Veneti people, those people who lived on the mainland by the lagoon where Venice now exists, fled to those islands to escape the tribal people we know as the Huns, when those Huns invaded the lands of north-eastern Italy. In time, the Veneti built their great city on the mud islands and connected them with those many, many hump-backed bridges that every visitor to Venice knows.
So what are visitors to Venice walking on when they stroll through the city?
Remember that it is built on mud islands, and on those mud islands every edifice in Venice is constructed. So how were they built,
the wonderful baroque church of Santa Maria delle Salute, constructed in thanksgiving for deliverance from a terrible outbreak of the plague,
the lovely church of Santa Maria del’ Orto, the home church of the painter Tintoretto,
the great Basilica of Saint Mark,
the glittering palaces of the Grand Canal,
the elegance of St Mark’s Square,
and for that matter every other building in Venice?
How did they do that?
The answer is -
by floating thousands upon thousands of larch poles out to the islands and driving them down through the mud until they penetrated firmer ground beneath. And upon those thousands upon thousands upon thousands of larch poles, everything in Venice is built.
Every one of those magnificent structures in Venice is built upon a foundation of wood. And every walkway is built upon a foundation of wood. So every visitor to the city, whether he or she knows it or not, is walking upon wood, driven through mud, and into firmer ground beneath.
So why hasn’t the city fallen down into ruin?=P=
Because the timber poles have petrified over the years. They have become stone, or rock.
II
What has that to do with this morning’s reading from Matthew’s Gospel?
Quite a lot because the Church is, Matthew’s Gospel tells us, built on rock, or stone. Matthew tells us that this is what Jesus said to Peter:
“I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church.” RPT
So Matthew is telling us in his Gospel that Jesus has in some way built his church, and perhaps we can say is still building his church, on rock, or stone.
Now to make sure that we get the point, Matthew has used a rather clever Greek pun. This is what he has done – and you remember, of course, that the New Testament is written in the Greek of the day. He has used two Greek words which sound very similar. The Greek for Peter is Pétros, and the Greek for rock or stone is pétra. So Matthew relates that Jesus tells Peter,
You are Pétros, and on this pétra I will build my church.RPT
That makes sure that it will be remembered, doesn’t it?
It has been my privilege to visit Rome on a number of occasions, and it is rare for me not to visit St Peter’s in the Vatican while I’m there. It always interests me to look up into the dome of that great basilica, and see those words (in Latin), on the inside of the structure:
You are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church.”
Not being a Roman Catholic I cannot be certain of how the Catholic Church sees these words, but I have always been persuaded that it is Peter himself that the Vatican sees as the foundation of the Church. It is claimed that he was the first Pope, and I have no doubt that Peter went to Rome and was crucified there.
I went down into the necropolis – the underground burial plot - beneath St Peter’s many years ago, and stood next to the grave there which is claimed to be that of Peter, and I am inclined to believe that it’s authentic. It lies beneath the High Altar, which is the very spot where, as early as the second century AD, there was a shrine to Peter at the edge of a Roman circus – a roman circus of course being a chariot racetrack.
So Peter the person is very important in Rome.
III
But was Jesus saying that his Church would be built on the person of Peter? As always, the context is important. Peter has just declared,
You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.
You see, at the moment when Matthew tells us Jesus declared to Peter that he would build his Church on the rock, Peter the rock was expressing the most extraordinary faith,
and it was in response to that faith that Jesus spoke of building his Church upon the rock. Faith, we might note here, was one of the very central things that Jesus was concerned with in all his ministry.
Peter had just said,
“You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.’
It was an extraordinary statement of faith.
‘You are the Messiah, the Son of the God who lives.’ It was extraordinary under any circumstances, but especially so since Jesus was about as far from the kind of person expected as the Messiah than anyone could be.
It would have been incomprehensible to most Jews of Jesus’ day that a carpenter from Galilee who preached love and peace could be the Messiah. The Messiah was expected to be a great deliverer of the people from subjection to Rome – he was expected to restore the Jewish people to the great days of the kingdom of David.
A peace-preaching carpenter from Galilee?
He couldn’t be further from the Messiah popularly expected.
Yet Peter proclaims Jesus to be so in an amazing statement of faith. He had the perception to see in this man something that was so far above the normal that he could see only Divinity
in his teaching,
in his healing,
in his compassion and
in his person.=P=
And he expresses it by calling him Son of the God who lives, in contradistinction from dead idols, and by calling him the long-awaited one, the Messiah.
Oh, yes, in his later behaviour he resiled from that, or so it seemed, when, in fear, he deserted Jesus when he was taken captive to the palace of Caïaphas and then to the Praetorium for Pilate’s judgment.
But here, in this moment away from the crowds, he is THE MAN OF FAITH.
So is it the man Peter upon whom the Church is to be built,
or
is it the man of faith upon whom the Church is to be built?
Remember, this is the man expressing faith who listens to the words
You are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church,
And who would surely not miss the point that it was in that moment of faith, and never before it, that the building of the Church was mentioned.
I think we can safely conclude that the building of the Church was to be on THE CONFESSING FAITH MAN. As long as Peter was a man of faith, he was key to the Church.
IV
That applies to us.=P=
The Church is built upon the confessing and practising faith of you and me and every other Christian who is a confessing and practising faith person.
Just over a week ago, Ruth and I were visitors to the old Moonta Mines Wesleyan Methodist Church. It is a magnificent building with a fine sanctuary, a working pipe organ, wonderful decoration and an internal balcony running around three sides of the building. And it’s large.
We spoke with a volunteer on duty in the church that day, and he told us that the church in its heyday was packed tightly with no space anywhere. The Cornish miners and their families did not miss a service. Today the average congregation in that enormous church is 16.
Were they people of faith in those mining days when the church was packed to capacity? I think it has to be noted that the mine captain kept a careful eye on who was in church on Sunday, and noted especially who was not there. And if you were a miner and you were not there you had to explain yourself to him on Monday morning.
We could conclude from that that they were there only because they had to be.
Yet the Cornish of those mining days were people of faith – devout Methodists for whom their faith was important.
I might illustrate that by mentioning a visit we made to another location, some years ago, this time in Cornwall. We went to Gwennup pit, a large excavation not far from a town called Altarnum.
John Wesley preached in the centre of that pit to a crowd of many thousands. And they were not compelled to be there. They were there because their faith was important. The Cornish miners and their families were people of strong faith.
Well, up at Moonta the miners are no longer there, and there are few to attend the church. And here at Newland there are far fewer of us than once there were. But lest you think I am about to sound a “Woe is us” note, be assured that that is not going to happen. There are more positive things for Christian preachers to say.
And I’m going to say it by contrasting the commendation Jesus said to Peter with the timber-turned-to-stone foundations of Venice.
It was FAITH that was commended by Jesus. That moment of almost explosive faith from Peter when he said,
“You are the Christ, the Son of the living God”,
was a faith Jesus could do something with. In fact, he could found his whole religious movement on such a faith. Because such a faith – in fact, faith per se, is ADVENTUROUS!
Faith reaches out for new experiences.
What might Peter have been thinking, when he said’
“You are the Christ, the Son of the living God”?
He has just declared that this man Jesus is the Messiah, the long-awaited one who was to usher in a new age.
What might that mean for him?
It would mean, and Peter would have been very conscious of this in his exclamation of faith, that he would have to be as new in his being as the age would be new! RPT
=P=
And if this man Jesus was Son of the Living God, note the important word, LIVING, then he would have to accept that the Living God calls for LIVING FAITH. As you and I have to accept that. That means venturing faith. It means a faith which constantly asks,
“Where is God leading me to now?
What new experience is God leading me into now?
What new avenue of service is he leading me to now?
What new understanding of him is he coaxing me into now?
What new depths of faith is he encouraging me into now?
What new kind of person is he calling me to be?”
There is the meaning of Peter’s exclamation of faith –
it is living,
it is vibrant,
it is growing,
it is developing,
it is ALIVE!
Now contrast Venice, that wonderful city that I love deeply. It is, you remember, built on thousands upon thousands of larch poles. They have, as all Venetians are thankful for, remained stationary. And it is in their remaining stationary that they have turned to stone.
It is in their remaining stationary that they have become PETRIFIED.
The word ‘petrified’ means, ‘have become stone.’
Yes, it means to be frightened, but its root meaning, its major meaning is to become stone.
Think about that for a moment. We have a choice, as always we have in life.
We can choose living faith, or we can choose to stay the persons we are.
We can be as Peter in his commitment to living faith in the living God, or we can become as the petrified supports of Venice because we are content to remain as we are.
We can be, if you will excuse the word, PETERFIED – people of living faith in the living God,
or we can be PETRIFIED – people happy to stay where we are in our churchmanship, in our religious life, and perhaps even be self-satisfied. Perhaps afraid of a living faith?
That is the choice, and should you and I choose to take the adventurous way of Peter, the way of adventurous, living faith in the living God, we could take an important practical step of asking ourselves those questions I raised a few moments ago, and perhaps even writing down the answers.
They will be tempered by the fact that we are an elderly congregation. We know the effects of the years. So, within the limitations of our senior years, why not ask the questions as a serious contribution to our living out of our Christian discipleship?
“Where is God leading me to now?
What new experience is God leading me into now?
What new avenue of service is he leading me to now?
What new understanding of him is he coaxing me into now?
What new depths of faith is he encouraging me into now?
What new kind of person is he calling me to be?”
Peterfied or petrified?
The model is the way of Peter, who is recorded as saying,
“You are the Christ, the Son of the living God”
As always in Christian living, the way forward is the way of faith.
S2024N-PEUC0403a
21.4.21 Newland-Port Elliot Uniting Church 1000
RCL Acts 4:5-12 Ps.23 1 John 3:16-24 John 10:11-18
BEYOND THE LEADLINE
I
It might seem strange to begin a sermon by highlighting a piece of seamanship.
However, we are going to start our thinking about Jesus the Good Shepherd by focusing on one tool that can be used by a seaman.
One of the more interesting activities I learned while undergoing sea training, was the use of the lead line.
What is the lead line? It is a rope, over 150 feet in length, which has a large lead weight attached to one end of it. The other end is usually around a drum.
There are pieces of fabric of different kinds and different colours attached at selected fathoms (a fathom is 6 feet) - pieces of fabric of different kinds and different colours attached at selected fathoms marks and the budding seaman has to learn those colours and fabrics –
For example,
2 fathoms, 2 strips of leather
3 fathoms three strips of leather
5 fathoms a piece of white cloth
7 fathoms a piece of red cloth etcetera.
It is used to measure the depth of water beneath your ship.
As the vessel moves forward, the lead caster casts the lead line forward so that the lead weight reaches the seabed ahead of the man casting it. He draws the line in as the ship continues to move forward, not hard enough to move the lead weight on the seabed, but enough to keep the line taught.
When the line is vertical below him, the markers will indicate the depth and he calls it out so the master of the ship knows enough to make safe decisions. He knows the depth of water beneath his ship.
The lead line has two important assets: it needs no electronics to operate it, and it never has to be recalibrated. It is reliable.
A famous American writer made good use of the lead line in giving himself a pen name – in the call of the lead caster for 2 fathoms: “By the mark, twain!”
But you can only use the lead line when you are in comparatively shallow waters – no deeper than 25 fathoms – in fact, that’s the only time that you need it. Very deep water is beyond the lead line.
And that takes me straight to the Gospel of John, the Gospel which takes us into depths well beyond the lead line. In John’s Gospel we are in very deep waters.
Does that mean that it is too deep for us to understand? Well, No.
It was once said of another document that it was at the same time shallow enough for a toddler to paddle in and deep enough for an elephant to swim in. John’s Gospel is at one and the same time a Gospel we are able to engage with the lead line, but also that we can absorb at depths beyond the lead line.
John is the New Testament master of symbolism, mysticism and parable and every incident takes us beyond its surface meaning.
We have, for example, this morning’s Gospel reading which takes us straight into a simple concept of the shepherd and his sheep. Jesus says, in this narrative, “I am the good shepherd”[1] A simple picture, but it contains, at the same time, depths which take us below and beyond the lead line shallows.
At its simplest we see a shepherd carrying out his tasks of caring for the sheep, walking the hillsides of Galilee with them, protecting them,spending the nights on the hills conscious of predators that were always a mortal danger to the sheep. A simple picture of care for the sheep in their environment.
But here is where we go deeper than the lead line can take us.John’s Gospel’s author gives us seven statements from Jesus which begin with the words, “I am”, and each of them indicates that God comes to us very personally in Jesus in those statements.
This morning’s is “I am the good shepherd.”To understand that statement, we need to remind ourselves that Jesus was born a Jew, lived as a faithful Jew and died a Jew committed to his Jewish religious heritage, so that when we are given the words,“I am the good shepherd”,we can anticipate that there is more than only the simple picture of the shepherd on the hillsides with the sheep to bring to mind.
There is that simple picture, and it has some teaching for us. But we can go more deeply into its meaning. When Jesus speaks of being the Good Shepherd, his meaning is rooted in the Old Testament which, by the way, is much better understood as the Hebrew Bible.
For us, it will take us straight to the 23rd Psalm, which means we move to depths beyond the lead line’s reach. Jesus, you see, whatever else we may know about him, was a Jewish thinker, that is, a Jew who thought very deeply about God and all his teaching is filled with Jewish theology.
When Jesus calls himself the Good Shepherd, then, we go straight to Psalm 23, which is only one of the many shepherd references in the Hebrew Bible, and therefore in Jesus’ understanding. Where, then, will that take us?
II
Psalm 23 is headed, “A Psalm of David”. How would Jesus, the faithful Jew, have read that?
Let me introduce you to Rabbi Shlomo Yitzhaki, usually known by the acronym, Rashi. He was born in the 11th century AD in northern France. He is accepted in Judaism as the leading authority on the traditional understanding of the Psalms, that is, the understanding Jesus and his contemporaries would have had.
One of the most precious to me of the books in my library is Rashi’s commentary on the Psalms. It’s a spiritual gold mine. This is what Rashi has to say about the title, “A Psalm of David.”. Rashi shares with us the traditional Jewish understanding of that title when he tells us,“Wherever it is stated …a Psalm of David (it means) he (David) plays the harp and thereafter Shekinah rests upon him.”[2] “(The purpose of the) music was to bring divine inspiration to David…Shekinah rested upon him, and afterwards he composed a song.”[3]
Now one meaning of the Hebrew word Shekinah is glory, but if we want to know what a Psalm of David meant to Jesus, we have to see what it meant traditionally to Jewish people, and it was held to be another name for God. So Jesus, as well as others of his nation, read the words ‘of David’ in the Psalms to mean the presence of God upon David. The Psalm is a celebration of the presence of God upon David – the presence of the glory of God and of God himself.
So when we read that Jesus speaks the words, “I am the good shepherd”, we can understand that he is making a statement about divinity. “I am divine presence with you and upon you.”
With that statement he is taking us well beyond the limits of the lead line. We are in wonderfully deep waters.
As you sit in the pews now, God, the divine presence, is with you and upon you. And when you leave here, no matter what awaits you, divine presence is with you and upon you, because the Good Shepherd is your everyday companion, as he is mine.
That does not stop some days being what others might call mundane, but however the day comes, mundane or otherwise, the Good Shepherd, God’s presence, is with us and upon us, transforming every day into a walk with God, be it in a spiritual botanical garden, or a red earth wilderness.
III
The sense of the Psalm as it commences is that because the Lord is
my Shepherd I shall not lack anything! It is not a guarantee that I shall
win a two million dollars lottery – that’s unlikely in any case because
I’ve never bought a ticket. It is not a promise that I shall receive
whatever I want.
It is an assurance that as certain as the tide comes in and ebbs, as certain as the sun rises and sets, I shall not lack one iota of the qualities and realities that make for a life of substance, a life of meaning, a live of service and significance, a life of direction and purpose, a life within the embrace and grace of God, for the Shepherd is always with me if I am open to his leading, the presence of the Eternal God is with me and upon me, as his presence is with you and upon you.
“I am the Good Shepherd”,Jesus said.He guarantees the qualities and realities that make for a life of substance, because he brings the divine presence with us and upon us.That sense is confirmed as the Psalm continues in noting that the shepherd leads the Psalm writer to green pastures and to what my Bible tells me in English are the still waters.
The leading is not into a world of luxury, but into a place of necessary sustenance – a place of spiritual feeding.
Most of our English bibles read “He makes me liedown in green pastures.”The Hebrew, the original language of the Psalms, has the sense, “He makes me lie down in abodes of grasses,”– the places of grasses. The suggestion is that the sheep have been in places of little or no food, but the Shepherd, the presence of God with them, leads them to the places of secure feeding.
It is clearly to be taken spiritually, especially when the next statement is that he leads me besides still waters, because again, we are helped if we note that the Hebrew from which we translate is “the waters of rest”. The rest is the deep peace of Shalom, the wholeness and renewing rest of Shalom.
Rishi relates the traditional understanding of the Psalm as being written by David either during or after his fleeing from Saul and he was, as the first book of Samuel tells us, taking refuge in the forest of Hereth in Judah, at a time when the forest was as dry as shards of pottery. The traditional Jewish view is that In that circumstance, David wrote of the abodes of grasses and the waters of rest to which God, the good shepherd, was leading him. So Jesus would have read that Psalm as an affirmation of faith from the soul of David.
“I am the good shepherd” means, as well as other shades of meaning, follow me and the presence of God, with you and upon you, will guide you to the place of spiritual refreshment and the deep peace of Shalom.
IV
We don’t have the time to consider every verse of the Psalm
but it will profit us to look at a couple more.
“Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil, for thou art with me; they rod and thy staff, they comfort me.”
The first part of the verse can be translated “the valley of the shadow of death” or “the valley of deep darkness”. In the context of the whole Psalm, “the valley of deep darkness”is the better translation.
The presence of God with us and upon us, accompanies us even into a faith-assured valley of deep darkness, into experiences that could be among the worst darknesses in our lives. The shepherd’s crook gently keeps us from the dangerous places, and his rod beats off those creatures which would savage the sheep.
We can’t pretend to enjoy the times of deep darkness.
Sometimes only knowing that there is One with us in the experiences sees us through. The promise of the Psalm is that he who brings the presence of God with us and upon us through them all, as surely as spring follows winter, never leaves us. The presence of the Good Shepherd with us makes all the difference, no matter what the outcomes of the valley of deep darkness experiences are.
V
One final aspect the Psalm
“Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life; and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord for ever.”
What a remarkable promise that is for me to digest! Goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life. Goodness and mercy shall follow you all the days of your life. Put concisely that means, the grace of God, the Love of God, the Compassion of God, the Light of God, the Spirit of God, will always be with you, always with me.
I cannot think of anything greater than that to send me rejoicing into the good times, and with enduring hope into the dark times.
And the enduring point of it all? I shall be in the presence of God always.
VI
There, then, are some of the contents of the words of Jesus, “I am the Good Shepherd.”The presence of God is with us and upon us in a transforming companionship in all our daysin a divine family relationship. It has no terminus.
Thanks be to God.
Amen.
S1004YLK2018sSermon edited for reading on website
28.10.18Yilki Uniting Church1030
Readings: Job 42:1-6, 10-17,Ps.34:1-8,Heb.7:23-28Mark 10:46-52
The Light and Shadows of the Morning
I
One of the loveliest parts of my day is the very beginning.
I start writing when it is still dark, at around quarter to five. The world in a sense is my own. The houses in our street are all in darkness. There is no noise of vehicles passing. No dogs are barking. I am in virtual silence until just before dawn when the magpies begin calling out on our deck. It is a magical hour.
As I sit working, I occasionally look out through the window and enjoy the blackness, the blackness which hides my small world from everything else. I am in my own world of the written word and of thought. And I rejoice in every second of it.
Something happens when the sky receives its first, very feint, glimmer of light. At that point I can just make out blurry outlines a shade darker in their blackness than the dark matrix of the hour.
I think of a blind man whose sight was restored in the eighth chapter of Mark’s Gospel, not the one in the reading which sets the subject for this study – this was a healing which took place before that of the man whose sight was restored in this gospel reading. After using a traditional ancient procedure in dealing with optical problems, Jesus laid his hands on the blind man and asked him, “Do you see anything?” The man’s answer is fascinating: “I see men; but they look like trees walking.”
He could see just a little, but his vision was blurred.
The man who had not been able to see anything, could now see blurred outlines, vague undefined shapes.
In my morning hour I am in a sense blind to all outside my writing space, and when that first feint glow appears – the feintest of glows, I see blurred outlines, each in its blackness darker than the matrix of darkness. A glimmer of sight, but not yet real sight, not yet clear sight.
The man in Mark’s eighth chapter receives a second touch on his eyes from Jesus, and he sees clearly. The restoration is now complete.
My sight of the world outside is gradual. The predawn grows lighter, the sun as a pinprick of light appears where the sea meets the sky, it grows in size, becomes a huge fiery ball, then I see bright morning.
The early morning light comes in low rays, casting long shadows from the trees, which are now at their clearest, in all their colours in what are, at this time of year, still green fields. Now it is all revealed. I can see the whole panorama from my window. The movement from darkness to light, from the blindness of the dark to seeing, has been gradual.
This study is about the light and the shadows, because it is about a man who received his sight.
So let’s go to this morning’s story of the blind man who became sighted.
II
The Gospel writers never tell us of a healing without there being a meaning to the event – a meaning which arches over it. It is critical to remember that. The Gospel healings are always teaching us something beyond the healing act.
This reading of a man who receives his sight is no exception. It has an overarching meaning, and the meaning is there in the text.
So let’s remind ourselves of the story. Jesus and his disciples are on their way from Galilee to Jerusalem in company with a great crowd, a crowd weary and yet excited, as we’d expect because every Jew who could was travelling to the great city on the hill for Passover. They have skirted Samaria, as Jews making the journey always did, by taking the road on the eastern side of the Jordan for their walk southwards. They have recrossed the Jordan at the busy ford near Jericho to enter Judea, and now they are to proceed on the uphill climb to Jerusalem.
As they approach Jericho, a blind man called Bartimaeus calls out to Jesus (and the words he uses are very important), “Jesus, son of David, have mercy upon me!”
Now, I repeat, no healing takes place in the Gospels without there being a much deeper meaning to it. It’s looking for and perceiving that deeper meaning that contributes to making the Gospels such exciting reading!
In cases of healing the blind in the New Testament, the major meaning is always to do with enlightenment, that is, “seeing” a truth as it has not been seen before, and for us, the readers, “seeing” a truth as we might not have seen it before.
In the case of Bartimaeus, he partially saw a truth when he called out, “Jesus, son of David!”
His vision of the truth was blurred. He could see partially. He was in that moment before the dawn when sight is partial.
Now I know that Son of David is an important concept in Matthew’s Gospel, and in some of our hymn-singing. And certainly the expected, liberating - from - political oppression, restoring - Israel’s - sovereignty, Messiah was Jewish belief concerning the line of David. And Jesus belonged to that line. The book of Revelation, for example, portrays Jesus saying, “I am the root and the offspring of David, the morning star.” But “Son of David” was a very particular and precise form of words in Jewish society of New Testament days. To be called “Son of David” was to be hailed as the conquering Messiah whose anointing was to deliver the Jewish nation from the shackles of Rome.
That is how Bartimaeus saw Jesus as he passed him on the road, and cried out, “Jesus, son of David!” But you see, just a little later in Mark’s Gospel, in Jerusalem, Jesus rejects that title. Teaching in the temple in Jerusalem, he said to his listeners, “How can the scribes say that the Christ is the son of David? David himself, inspired by the Holy Spirit, declared, ‘The Lord said to my Lord, sit at my right hand, till I put (thine) enemies under thy feet.’ David himself calls him Lord; so how is he to be his son?”, Jesus asks. And we read that “the great throng heard him gladly.”
Blind Bartimaeus was blind not only as one lacking physical sight, he was partially blind in his understanding of Jesus. He had yet to learn that Jesus, whom he called Son of David, was anointed with a quite different purpose – yes, he was son of David, but he was to be a suffering servant Messiah.
Mark’s Gospel consistently paints that picture of the servant leadership of Jesus, the suffering servant Messiah.
Bartimaeus had yet no concept of a Messiah who served his people and whose suffering would be consummated on a Roman cross. Far from throwing off the yoke of Rome, he would suffer a Roman execution.
For the moment Bartimaeus’ picture of the Messiah was blurred. His understanding of Jesus was blurred. But the dawn would come and the ministry of Messiah Jesus would become clear.
It’s not that the title, “Son of David” was wrong. Rather, it was that there was an even more important truth about Jesus that was at that point not seen by Bartimaeus. The title, “Son of David”, had a nationalistic note to it, but Jesus, Bartimaeus had not yet realised, was coming not as a military general of an army of his people, but as a SERVANT to them.
III
Let’s return, now, to thinking about light and shade, thinking of light and shadow, light and shade, as illumination of our minds and our faith.
It would be helpful for us to commence with some words of Jesus that John records, and you know them very well:“I am the light of the world; he who follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.” Jesus is, John tells his readers, The Light of the World. So I like to think of Jesus as I think of that early morning sun.
(a)He shows us in the Gospels, as clearly as the morning sun shows the trees, their colours, the grass, the fences, that he is one who is a servant. He does not come to us with political power, or any kind of force. He comes as one who serves, and in serving he shows us a quality of our God.
Think for a moment of that occasion when Jesus was assembled with his disciples in a room, just before Passover, as John’s Gospel tells it. He is there with his followers, He is their leader, and as we see in reading the account, those followers, his disciples, have called him ‘Lord.” So what does he do, this man whose followers call him Lord? He ‘girds himself with a towel. Then he pours water into a basin, and begins to wash the disciples’ feet…’
It was customary in Palestine for a servant to wash the feet of a person who enters a house. It was done because the dust of the road made sandal-shod feet uncomfortable, and the foot-washing was relaxing as well as cleansing. It was a servant’s job. And Jesus does it. He becomes a servant to his followers. He carries out the most menial tasks for them and to them.
Think of Jesus as the morning sunlight. He shows us, as clearly as the morning light shows the trees, the flowers, the grass, that LEADERSHIP IS SERVANTHOOD. The light of Jesus shows leadership to be the joy of serving.
The notion that leadership is control, seeking position, is thrown into shadow. It belongs in the shadow.
Leadership is SERVANTHOOD. It is TO SERVE, which means that it is open to all of us. Bartimaeus had to learn that. He called out to the Son of David. Son of David he might well be, but Servant is more important by far in the person of Jesus. He is the Messiah who might well be Son of David, but not the conquering, political Messiah; he is the ‘Servant Messiah.’‘…he calls us now to follow him, to bring our lives as a daily offering of worship to the Servant King.’
(b)Bartimaeus had something else to be enlightened about – there was something else he was blind to. He believed, you see, as almost everyone in his day did, that blindness, was caused by sin. What a cruel notion that was.
Bartimaeus might not have been able to remember any particular sin, but he had no doubt that sin somewhere had caused his loss of sight – even if it were sin by his parents. He had no doubt that he was a sinner, either directly or by proxy. His blindness was proof of it. And so he calls out to Jesus, “Jesus, Son of David, HAVE MERCY ON ME!” Bartimaeus could see only that God was a punishing God who brought the most terrible retribution for misdemeanours. If you were sick, your sickness was Divine punishment for wrongdoing. So Bartimaeus cries out, “HAVE MERCY ON ME!” Because if sin is forgiven, disease is healed. In Bartimaeus’ mind, the sin must be dealt with if there were to be healing. Hence his plea, “Have mercy on me!”
Now you won’t have missed something important there. If Bartimaeus believed that God inflicted sickness as punishment for sin, as just about everyone in his day did, he must also have believed that only God could cure him because only God could forgive sin. So in crying out to Jesus, ‘HAVE MERCY ON ME’, he is recognising that in some way God is working through this man Jesus. You can’t have one without the other. If you believe that God inflicts the punishment, then you must also believe that only God can remove the punishment. If you believe that your sickness is God’s punishment for sin, you must also believe that only God can forgive sin.
However, among Bartimaeus’ errors, there is one clear element of faith, and it is that in a way he did not need to understand, God was working through this man Jesus.
Jesus responds to that not with a correction of his mistakes, but with the words, ‘Go your way; your faith has made you well.’ Jesus, the Light of the World, shows Bartimaeus that God is Love, as he shows us that God is Love. That does not mean that when we do wrong it does not matter. It does. The repentant heart is the heart at peace with God. It is also the heart that is at peace with the shadows of life. Never overlook the truth that God is Love, as the First Letter of John so carefully points out The light shows the Love of God. The shadow, the darkness, contains the superstition, the cruel notion, that sickness and misfortune are inflicted by God because of sin. That superstition, that belief, belongs in the shadow. It has no place in the enlightenment of Christ, the light of knowledge that shines in the hearts and minds of his followers.
IV
The eyes of the blind are still opened. The enlightenment of Christ shows us that God who is Love calls us to follow and serve, to be servant leaders in our Church and our Community. That, by the way, is what Bartimaeus did. Jesus said to him, ‘Go your way; your faith has made you well’. Did he go his way? No, he did not. He responded rather disobediently. Mark tells us this about Bartimaeus’ response: ‘…he received his sight and followed him on the way.’ He followed Jesus on the way to Jerusalem, yes, but we can also be sure that he followed him on the way of discipleship.
Jesus, the Light of the World, tells all who are his disciples, and you can read it in the Sermon on the Mount, “You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hid.’ A disciple is the light of the world, Like a city set on a hill that cannot be hid. It is a reflected light of Jesus, the Light of the world, And the reflective element is our faithfulness in discipleship.
You and I are called to continue that ministry of the Light of the World. The city that cannot be hid is, of course, Jerusalem, set on its hill in the high country of Judaea, now Israel. But we, the disciples of Jesus are called now to be the city set on a hill, lights in the world, showing in our relationships, telling by the quality of the values we proclaim, sharing in the faith we live by, God who is Love, God who is Servant, in Jesus who calls us to be Love and Servants in the world.
Do we call him “Lord”? Yes, of course we do, and willingly. But we are declaring allegiance of a Lord who serves, and calls us to serve.
SERMON
Preached at Yilki Uniting Church, 13th August, 2017
Readings:Gen.37:1-4, 12-28Ps.105:1-6, 16-22, 45bRo.10:5-15Matt.14:22-33
FAITH, DIVINITY AND FOCUS
I
I know a little about storms. In my early working years as a merchant seaman I recall a particularly bad one. I was serving on a cargo vessel. The wind was immensely powerful, and the waves were enormous. Moreover, they were coming at the ship on her port beam, which means that they were directly side on, coming from the left as you face forward.
It was a wild ride, and my memory of one moment remains vivid. A particularly large wave caused the ship to roll so far to starboard that my overwhelming thought was, Is she going to come back? Is she going to roll right over?
She seemed to hang over on her beam for far longer than she really did. I looked at the other hands on the deck, men gripping the life lines, that is, the ropes that are slung fore and aft from the bridge during a storm to give hands something to grip and remain safe. Their faces were filled with the anxiety that I felt.
She came back after that roll that had made us all wonder whether our early demise had come. And I thought, The Old Man (that’s what we always called the Master of the ship, but never to his face) – The Old Man, I thought, must surely heave to now, take us off this beam sea course. But he didn’t. He made no course change at all. He kept the vessel going with the beam sea.
Was it foolish?
Then I reminded myself that the Master had many decades of experience. He was a very senior man. With all that sea experience, we could trust him to know what he was doing. And he did know. We continued with a very uncomfortable day, but the anxiety inside me had evaporated. He could be trusted. We could have faith in him.
Today’s Gospel reading is about a storm.
And it’s about fear.
And it’s about faith.RPT a storm, fear, and faith.
The core of the story that Matthew tells is of disciples in a boat on the sea or lake of Galilee in the midst of a serious storm. They are fearful, as they might be expected to be.
Jesus appears in the midst of the storm. Peter leaves the boat and walks over the water towards him. He believes he can do it because Jesus has bidden him to do it. That’s the point of the story.
But then fear of the storm takes over, and he begins to sink.Fear.
So there are the major elements of the incident as Matthew tells it; Jesus, Peter, the storm, fear and faith.
Peter, in his fear, forgets that Jesus can be trusted.
II
So what can we draw from this that applies to us, today, in our various experiences of life?
There is an American proverb that runs thus:
Courage is fear that has said its prayers.
It’s telling us that courage and faith are very closely related, and they are an antidote to fear.
I don’t read Latin, but I’m giving what time I can spare to learning it, and I find that the English word ‘courage’ has its root in the Latin cor, which in my still very early days of learning Latin I discover means heart. So, to have courage is to hearten, and to ENcourage is to ENhearten. That appeals to me because Jesus gave so much of his ministry time to enheartening people, to giving them heart. He was, to a very beautiful degree, an encourager.
John’s Gospel tells us of an event by the pool of Bethzatha, where a man who had been lame for 38 years lay. Do you remember what Jesus said to him? It’s very important.
Do you want to be healed?
Jesus wanted to get to the man’s heart. Was there a deep yearning there to be healed? We can’t really know.
We can read the words that followed as just a flat sentence, but if we let it speak to us, we’ll realise that there is a great deal more to it than just a command. He said to the 38-years lame man,
Rise, take up your pallet, and walk,
Just a command? No! It’s a “You can do this” encouragement to the man.
And there’s the link between faith and encouragement!
“I believe you can do it, so you can believe you can do it.”
In the midst of the storm on the lake, Peter (and probably the others in the boat, too) needed some assurance that they would survive. Perhaps Matthew is telling us that Peter saw his security in going to Jesus. So what point is made by Matthew when he tells us that Jesus said to Peter, “Come”?
As always when we read words from the Bible, or from any document, for that matter, we must first take note of their context. And the context here is clear. The storm has filled the disciples with fear, as well it might. I know the feeling. Matthew tells us, “they were terrified” and “they cried out for fear”, but Jesus said to them, and take careful note of the words,
“Take heart, it is I; have no fear.”
You have, you see, all the elements there.
•Taking heart or being encouraged, that is, you can have faith that all will be well.
•The reason for being enheartened, for embracing faith is because Jesus, the Encourager, is with them in the storm.
•The enemy that is defeated by faith is fear.
Faith,Jesus the EncouragerFear.All there in the story.
I was encouraged during my moment of fear at sea. I was enheartened and exercised faith in Captain Thompson, the Master. Fear evaporated.
We have a great deal to gain in the worst moments of life, but also in the everyday moments when we realise that courage and faith work together. They are at their most effective when we allow ourselves to be encouraged by the great Encourager.
Think for a moment of another incident in the New Testament involving encouragement and fear. Some manuscripts put the event in John’s Gospel, some in Luke’s. It concerns a woman caught in the act of adultery.
Now New Testament times were times in Judea and Galilee when strict legalists held great power over people, and there were those who wanted to apply the legally prescribed punishment of stoning to the woman. The law said stoning was the punishment for adultery. The woman was in great fear. Who wouldn’t be with stoning imminent?
Jesus said to her accusers, “Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at her,” The would-be stone throwers melted away, of course. But it’s the words of Jesus to the woman that matter. He said,
“Has no one condemned you?...Neither do I condemn you; go, and do not sin again.”
They were not words which minimised the wrong she had done, but they were encouragement. They amounted to, “I believe in you. You can believe in yourself. You can do better. You can succeed. Take heart.” I can well imagine the new confidence, the sense of release, the dispelling of fear that she had experienced.
It reminds me of a moment during my schooldays. I had been scrumping. Scrumping was the word we used for stealing apples from orchards and it was a well-known hobby among schoolboys. On this day the front of my shirt was bulging with apples.
To my great dismay, as I walked out onto the road, who should come along but the local policeman on the beat, PC Ross. He knew what I had under my bulging shirt, but he asked me to show him. Fearing the worst, I showed him the apples. Was he going to take me to the local police station? Was he going to march me home? To my great surprise, he did something better for me than that. He put his hand on my shoulder and said, “You can do better than that.” He warned me against doing it again of course, and he told me to take the apples back to the owner. But what I remember most strongly are his words, “You can do better than that.” PC Ross was an encourager to me that day. And I have never forgotten it.
The words, I believe in you. You can believe in yourself, in a sense encapsulate what we mean by faith. When we look at the story of Peter walking in the storm on the lake towards Jesus, we can read into those words,
Take heart, it is I; have no fear
and,
Come,
the two strong assurances of faith,
I believe in you. You can believe in yourself, and
I believe in you. You can believe in me.RPT
The story of Jesus and Peter on the lake, you see, is skilfully written. In faith, Peter walks, water or no water, towards his Lord who has expressed confidence in him. Peter in return is expressing confidence in Jesus. It is only when Peter turns his attention to his fears that he begins to sink. Does he falter in faith? We are left to think that one through for ourselves. And that’s as it should be.
But here is an important point. Peter is not punished for his apparent lack of faith when the storm regains his attention. He is rescued from the consequences. And this is what Jesus said to the newly-rescued Peter:
O man of little faith, why did you doubt?
“You can do better, Peter. You had a little faith. You started out on the journey. You doubted, but you can recover from that, and live your life in greater faith. You can and you will do better.”
And of course Peter went on to become the leader of the Church in Jerusalem, the very centre of Jewish Christianity.
I found myself thinking, when I set my mind to consider this passage about the storm on the lake, what the first readers would have drawn from it.
Those first readers were Jewish Christians of the latter half of the first century AD. The crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus had happened a long time ago. In the meantime those Jewish Christians had suffered considerable persecution from the Jews of the synagogues and in Rome terrible persecution from the Emperor Nero, a persecution that had taken very many Christian lives.
Perhaps there are some who don’t realise that the first Christians, most of whom were Jewish, suffered their earliest persecution from the Jews of the synagogues.
Their faith had been severely tested in the storms of persecution.
I think those first readers of Matthew’s Gospel would have taken great heart from this story of Peter, Jesus, and the storm on the lake. They would have been encouraged in their faltering faith and helped back to confidence in Christ.
And in reading the whole Gospel they would have noted that Jesus encouraged faith wherever he went, but not as one who insisted upon faith, not as one who demanded faith, so much as one who encouraged faith through showing that God could be trusted in every phase and aspect of life.
He showed the reason for faith – and the reason was the goodness and steadfast love of God. That, Jesus showed, was a reality that could be trusted, no matter what the storms that threatened were. God is Love , and remains faithful to us. We find that love expressed most vividly in Jesus of Nazareth.
And on the lake Peter let his attention stray from that.
There is a song that used to be sung in churches a generation or two ago. Do you remember it?
Turn your eyes upon Jesus.
Look full in his wonderful face.
And the things of earth will grow strangely dim,
In the light of his glory and grace.
Perhaps we find notions of looking into a wonderful face just a bit too sentimental for today’s thinking, but its truth is important to note.
Substituting fears for things in the story, there is truth in the conviction that the fears of earth do grow strangely dim when our eyes are on the one who calls us to faith, who tells us in all that he did in his earthly ministry,
I believe in you. You can believe in yourself.
I believe in you. You can believe in me.
So you can believe in God whose love never deserts you.
God who is Spirit is with us always.
5.3.17Yilki Uniting Church1030
Readings:Gen.2:15-17, 3:1-7Ps.32Ro.5:12-19Matt.4:1-11
NOT BY BREAD ALONE
I
I keep on my desk a small stone. It has quite a polished surface to it. It’s only. say, an average of 1” diameter. It’s mostly black.
If you didn’t know it were there, you’d probably not notice it. But it has an important place for me. It represents all that is not bread. Yes, it’s a symbol of the non-material realities that make life the best that life can be. As Jesus said, we can’t live by bread alone,
‘but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.’
We have to come back to that, because the idea of words proceeding from the mouth of God is not an idea we can easily mentally digest.
But before we do, there is something more to say about bread, and it’s especially important on a communion Sunday. What I have to say is that bread at least appears to get a mixed press in the Gospel. Here, in the experience of temptation, bread can get in the way of the things that really matter, but later on in the Gospel we find, at the Last Supper, that bread represents the things that really matter.
We are going to look at both of those pictures of bread, but in the context of stone:
-That it, bread, can get in the way of the things that really matter and
-That it can represent the things that really matter.
II
So first in our thinking is bread that gets in the way of the things that really matter. Or to broaden the concept, material things that get in the way of the really important things.
This morning’s gospel reading focuses upon being tempted. And in no part of the reading is there a focus upon trivial temptations. I say that because the season of Lent, which has just commenced, is often trivialised when some people talk of giving up for Lent some things they won’t really miss, and are in any case on the perimeter of what life is about. The gospel reading is concerned with temptation at the level where life – your life, my life – is affected at fundamentally.
So our concern this morning is the temptation to turn stones into bread, that is, into consumables.
And we are going to note that Jesus had a word to say about that, and it was and is,
‘Man shall not live by bread alone,
but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.’
And we may take ‘Man’ to mean ‘Mankind’ there – that is,
‘Man or woman shall not live by bread alone, not by material, consumable things alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.’
A few years ago, Ruth and I found ourselves in Venice at Carnivale time. I say, ‘found ourselves in’ because, although we had planned to be there, and booked our accommodation, we had not realised that we were so close to Lent, and Venice would be in Carnival mood. We first realised that something more than the everyday was happening in Venice when, while we were travelling on a vaporetto (a water bus), we were joined on board, at one of the stops, by Napoleon. We knew it was not the end of the 18th century nor the beginning of the19th, so what was going on? It was even stranger when, at the next stop, a plague doctor came on board. We knew very well that Venice’s last plague was during the 17th century.
Then the penny dropped. Carnivale was on!
I mention it because that word, Carnivale, or Carnival, describes at least one aspect of what Lent is about. The word ‘Carnival’ means, ‘Farewell to meat, - Carne, meat, and Vale, farewell. The carnival, which ends on Shrove Tuesday, is about farewell to meat – or, to use the Scriptural picture, farewell to bread, as the season of stones begins.
Farewell to the focus upon material appetites.
So let me come back to my stone.
It speaks to me of the non-material things that are implied in Jesus’ statement,
Man shall not live by bread alone,
But by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.
Now I said a little while ago that the idea of words proceeding from the mouth of God is a bit difficult for us to get our minds around.
We don’t need even to try.
Because we have a clever contrast here. We spend so much of our time consuming, either by mouth or by buying consumable items that if we want to discover the spiritual blessings of life we have to pause from all of that taking in, and listen to what God gives out.
You see, forget about words proceeding from the mouth of God – God is Spirit. The contrast is our taking in compared with God’s giving out. That is the basic point we need to appreciate. And that if we pause a little in our taking in, we can be in touch with what God gives out.
That is one of the basic points and blessings of Lent. We pause from our consumerist life and concentrate upon the spiritual blessings from God who is Spirit. And my stone says to me, “You, Tony Gates, cannot live by bread alone, by consuming alone, but by every blessing that God gives out and enriches your life with.”
And that is a very great blessing indeed. Because though we need to keep ourselves physically well, and we are foolish if we do not, our inner person, our spiritual self, is no less important. Time spent with the stone is time spent at the heart of God – a pause from the material, from the consuming focus.
It is time spent in building inner strength that sees us through the hard times.
A.J. Gossip, a preacher of long ago, once preached s sermon to which he gave the title, ‘When Life Tumbles In, What Then?’That’s a good question to ask. ‘If, and when life tumbles in, what then? What could I find in my spiritual barn to sustain me? What is there in my spiritual storehouse?’ The answer to that question lies in what I put into the barn now. Have I given all my time to bread? Or have I spent time with the stone? Time with God in quiet contemplation?
Jesus told a story about a man who built his house upon rock – that is, on stone, and a man who built his house upon sand. Only the house built upon rock survived the storm. It is a story about investment for the future, and especially for a future where life might collapse in upon us. And I might say here that few if any move through their time on earth without, at some time, the experience of life tumbling in. When it happens, what have we got stored in the spiritual barn? Is it that all we have is a barn stuffed full of bread?
Two or three or four years ago, Ruth and I went to Dachau, close to Munich. Dachau, as most will know, was a concentration camp during the era of National Socialism. It was a sobering visit. The dark cloud of death still hangs over Dachau. It is not possible to forget what happened there to Jews and to Christian priests. The darkest experience now is to look at the ovens, those means of cremation which had so sordid and evil a purpose. There is a convent now within the Dachau enclosure, I think of Carmelites. The convent is a ray of light in the darkness of Dachau.
There is also a chapel Ruth and I went into, and as I sat in the chapel I wondered what it was like, for the Jewish people especially, in their terrible hour when, for them, life tumbled in.
We know that some met their deaths singing psalms. But not all. When life tumbled in for them, what then?
We prayed in that chapel, and remembered that when life tumbled in for Jesus, and he was executed by the Romans on a cross, he prayed, not only,
My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?
but also,
Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.
And yet this is the terrible thing: neither Ruth nor I could pray that prayer, because, we reasoned, they, the representatives of the NAZI regime, DID know what they were doing. Were we right?
We can look at it objectively now and say, The NAZI regime collapsed, so there is at least some outcome of justice.
But that isn’t a wholly satisfying answer.
We can say, Hitler failed to obliterate the Jews.
But that isn’t a wholly satisfying answer.
We can say, we have learnt to be vigilant, and the continued existence of the Dachau site reminds us of our responsibility to make sure it doesn’t happen again..
But that isn’t a wholly satisfying answer.
You see, we have to admit that for ethics and reason, there is NO wholly satisfying answer, and perhaps never can be.
But we can say, if our spiritual barn is full, We know from our daily experience of God that there is an eternal dimension which takes care of it, and at least for now, that is hidden from us. But more importantly, reflection tells us that, horrifying as the crime was, our knowledge of God, formed from our daily spiritual walk with him, tells us that Jesus certainly would have prayed, on that day in the chapel at Dachau,
Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.
Because in the mystery of the eternal, they DID NOT know what they were doing.
And that makes it possible for us, in reflecting upon it, to pray the most difficult prayer of all for the perpetrators:
Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.
There is a word from the mouth of God;
there is God giving out.There is the non-material, but deeply spiritual, sustenance that the stone reminds us of, and if we want life to make any sense at all, we must not live by bread alone.
II
But don’t miss the positive side of bread in the New Testament!
One of the hymns we have yet to sing in this morning’s service has, as its last verse,
As grain, once scattered on the hillsides,
was in the broken bread made one,
so may your world-wide church be gathered
into your kingdom by your Son.
It comes from a 2nd century AD Christian document called the Didache. It describes Church order, not much more than a century after Jesus lived, and this is what it says about how thanks are to be given for the wine and the bread:
Concerning the Eucharist (that is, the communion service), give thanks in this way. First, for the cup; ‘We give thanks to thee, our Father, for the holy vine of David thy servant, which thou hast made known to us through thy servant Jesus. To thee be the glory for ever.’ And for the broken bread; ‘We give thanks to thee, our Father, for the life and knowledge which thou madest known to us through thy servant Jesus. To thee be the glory for ever. As this broken bread was scattered on the hills, and was gathered together and made one, so let thy Church be gathered together into thy kingdom from the ends of the earth; for thine is the glory and the power through Christ Jesus for ever.
This takes us straight into the service of communion, or to give it its historical title, the Eucharist.
In a little while we shall take the bread, and when we do it will not be getting in the way of the things which really matter; it will be representing he things that reallymatter. It will be representing the spiritual wholeness of communion with God through Christ..
It represents in one shade of meaning, the deepest relationship with the Christ whose love knew no bounds, and whose last words included,
Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.
In the moments of communion, that meaning invades our spirits in the reality of faith. It is our relationship with him who is the Bread of Life, the man of Bethlehem, Hebrew word which means House of Bread.
That truth of faith is in the communion service when we take bread.
But this truth of faith is also present:
That we are part of the great Church of Christ that spans the world, and looks to the day of its full uniting in the Christ whom it serves, as the grain is harvested from the hillsides and the grains are made one in the loaf we break.
III
Such is the message of stones and bread this morning, and in their different ways they tell the same truth – that life is abundant, that life is fulfilled, that life has firm foundations, when we give time and commitment to a daily walk with God who is Spirit.
The days are transformed into spiritual health and nourishment.
May that be the daily experience of all of us.
A MEDITATIVE PIECE
This afternoon I lay on a grassy bank by the Thredbo River near the Gaden Hatchery. Jindabyne was not far away.
I have a love of rivers singing over stony beds, a love born of being fly-fishermen. Beautiful rivers are part of the pastime. I had long wanted to see the Gaden Hatchery, a kind of Mecca for all fly-fishermen. It the Government of New South Wales hatchery from which many of the trout streams of the Monaro are stocked with trout fingerlings. I have long wanted to see it.
Today, on a sunny afternoon Ruth and I diverted from the main road into Jindabyne to see the hatchery. It is a very sophisticated set-up They are there to keep avian preditors from the trout.
We walked just a few yards upstream from the river and watched large numbers of big brown trout, easily seen in the clear waters, waiting for rain to signal them to swim upstream on their spawning run to the redds in the shallow headwaters for the annual breeding. The trout presented a magnificent sight.
After that, we drove away from the hatchery and took a turn down a dirt road to a place on the river known as Paddy's Corner, and there we found a stretch of the river I have made a mental note of. The next time we are in Jindabyne I shall fish that part of the river. The water chuckles its way over its stony bed, mostly just a few inches deep except for areas of deep pools on the outside stretches of bends.
It was idyllic. I lay on the grass, closed my eyes and listened to the music of the river, knowing I wanted to be nowhere else. It was at time of deep contentment. I lay there on my back for half an hour of more rejoicing that, many years ago, I had discovered the delight of fly-fishing. It is the art that takes me to lovely rivers in lovely places.
As I lay there my mind inevitably found its way to Psalm 1 which speaks of the man 'whose delight is in the law of the Lord, saying of him,
'He is like a tree
planted by streams of water,'
Well, it wasn't difficult to translate my lying on my back to the tree by streams of water. The sense of being in the presence of the Divine was all about, around and within. Drawing sustenance from God is well described as a tree drawing its moisture from streams of water. Water is, after all, a fundamental need of life. The search on Mars is a case in point. One of the prime objectives of the Mars project was to see if water or signs of water could be found on the planet. Without water there cannot be life.
And so the man (or woman) who seeks communion with the Divine is likened to a tree by streams of water. Jesus is depicted in John's Gospel as promising to give a Samaritan woman by Jacob's Well Living Water so that she would not thirst again. Her spiritual need would be met by spiritual nourishment symbolised as Living Water.
So as I lay on my back by the Thredbo River, its symphony ringing in my ears I thought on these things and was grateful for the beauty of the day, the sweetness of the river's joyful sound, and spiritual nourishment by streams of water.
Streams of water are deeply satisfying natural phenomena for spiritual contemplation. You might find it worthwhile to focus on memories of bubbling rivers for contemplation.
Somewhere around the year 50AD, something apparently insignificant in historical terms but in reality very significant happened, and the man who set it in motion had no idea of the literary importance of what he was doing, though he was well aware of its spiritual value.
It was a time of significant developments. Claudius, one of the more interesting of the the Roman emperors, had occupied the imperial throne for the best part of a decade. Britain, or at least the part of it which excluded modern Scotland, had very recently been incorporated into the empire as a Roman province and the city of Londinium founded by one Aulus Plautius. Jews had recently been expelled from Rome (though before long some were to return).The everyday language was Greek, a form known as koine which had subtle differences from that which we now call classical Greek - and very different from modern Greek. The Romans, of course, spoke Latin. The language of Judaea and its religious centre, Jerusalem, was Aramaic (the language Jesus spoke; his name in Aramaic was Yeshua).
In this time when the armies of Rome still controlled the mediterranean world and much of Europe, a man temporarily residing in the city of Corinth,and known in Christian circles but largely unknown elsewhere, began to dictate a letter to his amanuensis. Some time before, he had founded a local church in Thessalonica (the modern Salonika) the capital of Macedonia, named after a lady called Thessalonica, half-sister of Alexander the Great. It seems that now there was a problem concerning what was expected by some in the local church to be an imminent return of Jesus (Yesous in the Greek of the day). Something of the problem lay in whether those expecting that imminent return should be getting on with life as usual or turning their backs on the world and concentrating on the anticipated great event. Another problem in that church was the relationship between Jews and Gentiles. In Thessalonica as elsewhere, the apostle Paul, the man who was dictating the letter, on his earlier second missionary journey, had concentrated on the synagogue as a fertile field for winning converts to the Messiah (Christ) Jesus. Not surprisingly, this was not agreeable to every Jew in the Thessalonica synagogue and tensions grew. Those not pleased with the conversionof Jews and Gentile adherents of the synagogue to the new Christian faith worked to undermine the Christian loyalty of the converts and some attempted to blacken Paul's character. The issues had to be addressed, and the most important of them was the Jews - Gentiles problem.
So Paul, dictating to his amanuensis, spoke the first words of his first letter to Thessalonica:
"Paul and Silvanus and Timotheus to the community of the Thessalonians in God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ:
grace to you and peace."
What Paul was totally unaware of was that he was dictating the first words of that collection of documents we know today as the New Testament.
The order of the books as they appear in our New Testaments has the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John at the beginning. That is perhaps an order which has as its justification the fact that the Gospels contain the foundational material of our faith - the material of the life, teaching, death and resurrection of Jesus. But the earliest Gospel (Mark) was not written until at least 20 years after Paul's first letter to Thessalonica, which itself was written around 20 years after the crucifixion.
And so the first words of the New Testament written are very beautiful:
"Paul and Silvanus and Timotheus to the community of the Thessalnians in God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ:
grace to you and peace."
To be wished the unmerited favour of God and peace is a beautiful blessing with which to open a letter and I can imagine that when it was read out to the congregation in Thessalonica those who had not met hom would have warmed to this man Paul and those who had not would have liked what they were hearing. We can assume that those who were trying to undermine him would have been cooler. Even so, it could have been the opening blessing that gave him a hearing for what he had to say as the letter progressed. His companions Silvanus and Timotheus would surely have been pleased to see their names included in sending such a blessing.
22.11.15Yilki Uniting Church1030
Readings: 2Sam 23:1-7, Ps 132:1-12(13-18), John 18:33-37 (Rev 1:4b-8)
Christ the King
“Hail, King of the Jews!” the Roman soldiers called out to the man being scourged and wearing a crown of thorns. The cry was so obviously a mocking reference to the greeting, “Hail, Caesar!” Caesar, of course, namely Tiberius, residing at this time at Villa Jovis on the island of Capri, was the temporal king of the Jews, ruling through his procurator Pontius Pilatus, better known to us as Pilate.
It’s interesting to note that in Luke’s narrative Mary, before her pregnancy, is greeted by the divine messenger with the words, “Hail, O favoured one, the Lord is with you!” “Hail...”
The word Hail is a difficult one. And it’s important to note why, because it has a significant effect upon how we understand the soldiers’ mocking acclamation. The Greek word used in the New Testament here has both the sense of greeting and the sense of rejoicing and gladness. I don’t know of an English word that has both senses.
You see, in their mocking tones, the soldiers are greeting Jesus just as they would greet Caesar – they are greeting him in their mocking way as their ruler and wishing him joy and gladness. That’s the joke the soldiers are enjoying while the man they greet is being scourged in preparation for execution. In their sick joke they wish the suffering man with a crown of thorns on his head joy and gladness.
They had missed the point as badly as Pilatus had missed the point, when Jesus said to the procurator, “My kingship is not of this world.”
And in that interchange with Pilatus, he went on to say some words which
we can very easily dismiss:
“...if my kingship were of this world, my servants would fight, that I might not be handed over to the Jews.”
Listen to the words again.“...if my kingship were of this world, my
servants would fight, that I might not be
handed over to the Jews.”
Jesus is saying here to Pilate,
“Listen. There are two kinds of kingdom at least. There is the one you know, the kingdom of Caesar who maintains his control with soldiers. But there is another kind. And that other kind is not a kingdom that the world knows, not like the kingdom of Caesar with armies to impose its will. It is not temporal. It does not claim lands for empires. It is a kingdom not of this world at all. It exists in the hearts of those who seek God and who accept the kingdom willingly because it renews their lives. It is known by my followers as the kingdom of God. The king is accepted voluntarily. The kingdom is not imposed, as the kingdom of your Caesar is imposed.”
And the crown of thorns?
It is massively symbolic for us. Massively.
Hymns like, “The head that once was crowned with thorns
is crowned with glory now”
are fine enough, but they miss an important point about that crown of thorns. It is not an item to be discarded when our thoughts turn to the Resurrection and Ascension. It is a permanent part, or should be a permanent part, of our thinking about Jesus. That crown of thorns speaks of the kind of king he is.
He is the king who suffers with his people.
One of the most enduring pictures I have in my mind of the Second World War is of a devasted area of London where everything is rubble after a German bombing raid. Rescuers are trying to find possible survivors. Some who have survived are sitting on whatever they could find to sit on. They have rugs around them and mugs of hot tea in their hands. In their midst are two figures. King George VI and Queen Elizabeth. And the expression on the king’s face leaves no doubt that he is suffering the sufferings of his people.
I know of no better earthly example of a king who, in modern times, metaphorically wore the crown of thorns. He was suffering the sufferings of his people. Londoners loved him. By the way, he refused to leave London during the blitz, though the Prime Minister urged him to do so.
Jesus the king wears the crown of thorns as the one who suffers the sufferings of his people, the burdens of his followers
who take on the mantel he offers,
who walk in his way,
who place their trust in him,
who seek to live as those who are citizens of the kingdom of God, no matter what earthly kingdom or republic or commonwealth they belong to.
And as all that he is suffuses their spirits, they too learn what it is to suffer the sufferings of others with love, with compassion, with empathy, with faithfulness.
There is, in St Peter’s cathedral in Adelaide, a depiction of Jesus the king. You’ll see it in the transept on the Adelaide Oval side of the church. It’s a fine depiction, and when I first saw it, many years ago, I was disappointed with the sad face. Now I am not. The sad face speaks to me of one who suffers not the suffering of “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me” , but suffering with and for those who suffer and are in need. It is the face of empathy – not the face of sympathy, because sympathy is feeling sorry for but not getting involved. It is the face of empathy.
There is another picture of our monarch that I want to mention at this point. It is to do with the parliament at Westminster. Many will already know that when the Queen makes her speech to Parliament, she does so in the House of Lords. It is because she is not allowed to enter the House of Commons. And so the members of The House of Commons all walk to the House of Lords to hear the speech. It is, for those moments, a separation of the monarch from the chamber of her common people. And there are historical reasons for it. It symbolises the will of the people not to be dominated by their monarch, and to be free to make their own laws without royal interference.
How different is the king shown in that depiction of Christ the king in the cathedral. The sadness of expression is that of one who is in every way identified with his people, with his followers, with those willingly within the kingdom of God. The depiction in the cathedral is called Christus Rex, by the way, Christ the King.
The kind of king we celebrate when we meet in Church on this Sunday of Christ the King is one whose spirit is found in the book of Isaiah, beginning at chapter 52, written about five centuries before Jesus was born. They are chapters which see Israel as God’s servant, suffering vicariously for others, leading through serving. They are chapters about servanthood, and the servant is one who suffers; it is a servanthood of empathy – of suffering with. Israel the servant-nation is personalised. Who does not know so well, passages like,
“He was despised and rejected by men;
a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief.”
Or,
“Surely he has borne our griefs
and carried our sorrows;
yet we esteemed him stricken,
smitten by God and afflicted.”
The Church quickly saw that this was a passage from Scripture that expressed who Jesus was better than any words they could find of their own. This was the spirit of Jesus. The servant. The King who suffers for and with his people.
We follow and serve a Servant King
We follow and serve THE Servant King.
William Penn, founder of Pennsylvania, wrote in a pamphlet in 1669,
“No pain, no palm; no thorns, no throne; no gall, no glory; no cross, no crown.”
Could we possibly have a better description of the crown of thorns than that?
No thorns, no throne...no cross, no crown.
There is the picture of the Servant King. This is no Caesar with his armies. This is the King who is with his people, their servant in a kingdom his followers accept voluntarily, and the kingdom of God is a present reality as well as a future.
II
So what do we do about our following of the Servant King?
Let me remind you of a nursery rhyme:
Pussycat, pussycat, where have you been?
I’ve been up to London to visit the Queen.
Pussycat, pussycat, what did you there?
I frightened a little mouse under a chair.
Ruth and I were talking toward the end of last week about what we would do if we were introduced to the Queen. I had to admit that I would be nervous – afraid I would make some mistake – forget to bow or worse. I would be concerned that I followed the correct protocol. I would certainly buy a new suit for the occasion and want to look my best. I would see it as a wonderful moment, and I would never forget it.
How do we feel about the Servant King?
When we meet in prayer with him each day, are we as I might be if I were introduced to Her Majesty – aware of the special nature of the moment – or are we as Pussycat who went up to London.
Do we use our daily meeting with him for no better purpose than frightening a little mouse under a chair? Do we meet with him each morning with a sense of immense privilege, and open our hearts to learn how this day we can serve him within the kingdom of God more effectively?
Or do we conclude the interview of prayer with a perfunctory Amen and get down to writing up the shopping list?
Do we seek his compassion and spirit in order to live as servants who are in empathy with our needy neighbours, or do we frighten a little mouse under a chair?
Do we actively think about those in need whom we know about and seek the compassion of the Servant King so that too might be compassionate servants who seek to be with the friend who suffers?
Or do we frighten a little mouse under the chair?
Do we remind ourselves of the suffering that we learn about every day on the television screen or read about in the newspaper or in a World Vision Bulletin or a Medicines Sans Frontieres journal?
Do we remember that the Servant King is in the midst of that suffering, and calling us to be involved too?
Or do we frighten a little mouse under a chair.
Pussycat’s way of dealing with his royal meeting was to miss his opportunity.
In our morning meeting with the Servant King in our time of prayer, we too can miss the opportunity. We are called to far more important tasks than frightening little mice under chairs, but it is so easy for us to spend time doing things which are no more significant than that.
Remember that our Servant King says to those who would be in his kingdom,
If any man would come after me,
let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.
For whoever would save his life will lose it;
and whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel’s
will save it.
We are called to serve.
Could there be a better calling?
We are in the service of the Servant King who wears the crown of thorns, the crown that speaks of suffering with the sufferings of others.
We are not professional counsellors who remain aloof from the problems of those who ask our help.
We are servants who shoulder the burdens of others when we are invited to do so, as compassionate friends and servants.
And the Servant King with the Crown of Thorns is shouldering the burdens with us.
My early mornng study has been the Letter to the Hebrews for some weeks now. It's a good start to the day.
I've been working on it for some time, in fact for quite a few weeks and I'm through the document as far as the 8th chapter. It's a demanding document to work through because, if for no other reason it consists of very tightly-knit argument.
Part of its interest lies in the fact that we don't know who wrote it, when it was written, and who the readers were. My own view, in examining the internal evidence, is that it was probably written after the destruction by the Romans of the Jerusalem temple, which places it post-70AD and therefore after the lifetimes of some of the apostles including Paul. I think there is light evidence that it could even be a generation after that, but certainly no later than the end of the first century.
The writer? We have no means of naming him, but we can say on the evidence of the letter itself that he was a hellenised Jew (i.e., a Greek-influenced Jew) who was familiar with the LXX of the Hebrew Scriptures (i.e., the Greek translation of the books we call the Old Testament, made in the 3rd century BC in the Egyptian city of Alexandria).We can also say with confidence that he was familiar with the Alexandrian method of using allegory to interpret the Hebrew Bible and build Christian understanding. It's clear from the content of the letter that the author was also well versed in classical Greek learning, certainly including Plato.
The readership? They too were probably hellenised Jews, and the allusions made in the letter suggested that they were comparatively well educated. We do not know where the readers were geographically located.
What we do know is that the writer was a skilled debater, the evidence for which lies in the letter itself. Using Alexandrian allegorising, and not a little Platonism, he builds a picture of Christ as the eternal and real high priest opening the way for people to God. He is the real, heavenly high priest, to be compared with earthly copies of the priesthood.
For me, the key is the notion of the reality of the heavenly high priest, the genuine, the real high priest, seen by the author of Hebrews to be Christ.
That does not have to be a literal picture, of course. It can be symbolic for a modern western mind. It speaks to me of the need always to ensure that the basis of my life is the reality of the enduring, the truths which are for any age. My focus is upon the truths of Christianity, and that places my faith firmly in the person of Christ in whom I find the way to the Living God.
That is where my purpose, my hope, my faith, my undrstanding, my spiritual health find their focus.
The Spirit of Talbot House in Victor Harbor
By Tony Gates
Many are unaware that Victor Harbor, through its branch of Toc H, has an ongoing link with the Ypres Salient of the First World War.
The branch reaches the age of 80 this year, having been established in 1935. Just as importantly, the roots of Toc H were established in the Belgian town of Poperinge 100 years ago on December 11th. Poperinge lies 8 miles to the west of Ypres (now known as Ieper) in the hop-growing area of West Flanders. The trenches of that terrible battlefield were therefore very close.
The needs of troops on breaks from the front line were many, not the least being recuperation. The British Army leased a house in Poperinge for that purpose. One of the most effective chaplains of the First World War, “Tubby” Clayton, was appointed to set up an Every Man’s Club in the house, which came to be named Talbot House. It was referred to by Army signallers at Toc H, code for T H (Talbot House).
Tubby Clayton generated a remarkable spirit in the club, which was always attended by very large numbers of troops from the trenches. A piano was constantly in use in the ground floor recreation room, always with many willing singers. A billiards table provided hours of enjoyment. Many simply relaxed in the garden at the rear of the house and enjoyed the peace which was such a contrast with the horror of the trenches. Hillarious evenings on some occasions and deeply moving evenings on others were spent in the concert hall set up in a separate building adjoining the garden. The chaplain’s office was approached through a door which proclaimed, “All Rank Abandon, Ye Who Enter Here.”
The top floor, which had once been a hop loft, was converted into a chapel which Tubby called The Upper Room. The altar was a carpenter’s bench, found in the garden. There could hardly have been a more appropriate altar in a chapel where the carpenter of Nazareth was remembered. Many thousands of servicemen climbed the stairs to receive Holy Communion in those terrible days of war. Some received their first communion in the Upper Room, many their last. The branch chaplain has been four times to Talbot House and his wife has been twice. He has climbed those stairs to the Upper Room many times, always with the sense that of entering a sacred place.
Talbot House, known as ‘a haven from hell’, was an oasis where a spirit of mutual support, encouragement and service were expressed in deep comradeship. Its effect was so powerful that after the war, when Tubby Clayton set up the Toc H movement to continue that spirit, great numbers of those who had served in the Salient and found a new spirit at Talbot House, joined immediately.
The spirit continues today in Toc H branches throughout the world, all involved in service to the community, all based on willing volunteering.
Most branches have a special project. At Victor Harbor the special project is the camp site in Waggon Road, a fine facility which has served South Australia for many years. Included among those who have used the camp site are young people with disabilities. There is little doubt that Tubby would have been especially pleased about that. Over its 80 years of existence the branch has engaged in projects to support a number of groups, including hospitals. Leprosy missions, migrant hostels and prison inmates.
The branch meets in its room at the Victor Harbor Railway Station once a month and welcomes any who would like to join in the work of supporting the camp site and being involved in other projects which might occur from time to time. The meetings always involve a ceremony which centres upon lighting of a lamp which reminds us that in service we have a light to share with the world. The lamp bears a cross with double cross pieces, the cross of the city of Ypres’ coat of arms.
Tony Gates, a member of Toc H, Victor Harbor, a man deeply interested in history, plans to write the story of the branch in 2016. He believes that 80 years of branch life is reason enough to put the history into a connected narrative.
A number of Toc H members from South Australia, including two from the Victor Harbor branch, will be going to Poperinge for the centenary celebrations in December. is expected to be a very moving occasion.
Enquiries concerning Toc H in Victor Harbor can be directed to Betty Dawe on 8552 1445.
Meetings are on the first Tuesday of each month at 2pm and the spirit of Talbot House is celebrated in gratitude for all that the movement has accomplished in 100 years and all that the branch has meant for 80. However, the future is the focus while the past is a reason for gratitude.
TONY GATES 2015
Around the year 70 AD a major document was produced in the imperial city of Rome. The writer is generally thought to have been a man named John Mark, a person with no apostolic authority, but who had known the apostle Peter well. In fact he had spent a good deal of time with him. He had probably listened to Peter's preaching many times and knew the stories he told by heart. Perhaps he also had access to pieces of teaching which were orally current in the young Church.
What were the circumstances when this crucial document was produced?
First, it is important to note that the only scriptures available to the Christians of the time were Jewish documents that made up what we call the Old Testament. But the documents available were not restricted to those we know in our Old Testaments today. There were other documents which were consulted. Moreover, the canon (offical collection) of the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) had not yet been fixed. That was to occur 20 years later at a place called Jamnia, and at least one of the reasons was the Jewish need to establish what was authoritative for Hebrews in the light of other documents becoming available, including Christian. So it's important to note that there was no fixed Old Testament, but the Christians had access to the books which at Jamnia were given official recognition. They were read in Greek translation, rather than in the original Hebrew.
There was, of course, no New Testament. Paul's letters, however, had all been written and delivered to the respective churches. One of them, probably his most profound and most carefully thought through, had arrived in Rome a dozen years before, and had perhaps been read by John Mark. It is unlikely that he was unaware of its existence.
The Jewish temple in Jerusalem had either been destroyed or was about to be destroyed by the Romans.
The young Church had already endured persecution under the emperor Nero, so there were no illusions about the possibility of danger that could materialise at any time under Roman rule.
In these circumstances John Mark set about putting his stylus to papyrus and recording the important teaching and events of Jesus' life that he had learnt from Peter. It was to be the document we know as Mark's gospel.
No other Gospels were in existence. It would be at least five years and perhaps more after Mark's gospel's writing that the other two synoptic gospels appeared. The three gospels of Mark, Matthew and Luke are called synoptic because they see the life and work of Jesus in pretty much the same way, though not identically. John's gospel came 25 to 30 years after Mark, and is a very different kind of document from the synoptics.
Mark states the purpose of the document in the first sentence: 'The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ.' Some of the manuscripts from which the gospel is translated add 'the Son of God.' So Mark's purpose is to declare in his document the glad tidings of Jesus Christ, or Yeshua the Messiah. A few sentences later, he shows the purpose of Jesus' ministry in the words, 'Now after John was arrested, Jesus came into Galilee, proclaiming the gospel of God, and saying, "The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the gospel".' Mark gets quickly to the point, ensuring that we know from the very beginning what the document is about. The story moves on quickly as time after time John Mark uses the expression 'and immediately'. There is a breathless progression through the preaching and healing ministry to the final conflict which brings about trial and crucifixion and the empty tomb.
When we read Mark we are reading the first New Testament gospel to be written, though it was not to become part of the New Testament for many years. It took a century, from approximately 50 AD to about 150 AD for all the books of the New Testament to be written. No doubt they were seen to be authoritative gradually as they became known more widely. When was the New Testament formed? We don't know. What we do know is that the first mention of it was in 367 AD when Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria, in his annual pastoral letter to the churches, mentions as authoritative the 27 books we call the New Testament today.
Enjoy reading Mark!
15.10.16
The second temptation that Matthew describes in the early part of his gospel is Jesus' ascent to the pinnacle of the temple. What rich symbolism there is in the pinnacle!
The temptation to star is strong at times, and among the biggest foolishnesses of life is succumbing to that temptation. Do we sometimes see ourselves in imagination in a metaphor of sailing through the firmament, the star of stars, to be admired by all those lesser of our fellow-creatures?
There is a dream I have experienced and know that others have experienced. In those strange moments in sleep when the mind acts without our bidding, once or twice we have been flying. I remember in one of those rare dreams being aware of how easy flying was. It seemed to be a natural part of being me. Was it putting into the uncontrolled mind of a dream a deep yearning that in conscious moments has no place at all, yet somewhere deep enough it has its being?
Can we admit that there are times when we wish to soar? I think perhaps we do. To soar is to leave the problem of men and women below us, to leave the difficulties of relationships below us. In flying we star. If those who are earthbound have any function, it is to admire us.
Isn't this what the incident of the pinnacle is saying about Jesus? I cannot believe that this man was different in that sense. He, as we, must have had his moments of fending off the temptation to look for admiration, to seek a starring role. All the evidence is that he resisted it, but it is unrealistic to think that he was not tempted.
In our dream of flying, we are not relating. We are starring. Is there, then, such a desire hiding within us to ascend to the pinnacle and be admired? Whether we launch ourselves from it or simply watch the view of those we hope are admirers below us, we star.The pinnacle of the temple is the symbol of wanting to be admired.
Perhaps in small measure the need to be admired is okay. That it is there, hiding behind the curtain of urbanity, disinterest or, dare it be said, piety, can hardly be denied. It is in its extreme, disfunctional form that it becomes destructive and we forget that the major value of people lies not in their willingness to admire us, but in their willingness to share themselves with us, to relate and enrich us, to offer us the privilege of knowing them.
I like to remind myself that Jesus, who was surely tempted as we are to look for the starring role, chose instead the path of the servant.
Preached at Newland Memorial Uniting Church on the Third Sunday in Advent, December 14th, 2014
(Readings: Psalm 126 Isaiah 61:1-4,8-11 1 Thessalonians 5;16-24 John 1:6-8,19-28
James McConnachie, who is the editor of Author, the quarterly journal of the Society of Authors, earlier this year said this about reading: "...the true business of reading...is an encounter with another human consciousness - with a writer's voice".
That's one of the reasons why reading is exciting. We experience an encounter with another human consciousness - with the inner life of another human being. It isn't just words on a page.
This morning's Gospel reading gives us an opportunity of just such an encounter as James McConnachie was talking about. We have an encounter with the consciousness of not, perhaps, a writer's voice, but certainly a speaker's voice - that of John the Baptist. He speaks to us through whoever the author of John's Gospel was (and there is another human consciousness to encounter), but there is no reason to believe that this voice from the John the Baptist is not authentic. When asked who he was, he replied, "I am the voice of one crying in the wilderness, 'Make straight the way of the Lord'."
The advice that voice in the wilderness gives is that we should prepare, or make straight, the way of the Lord.
I
The background is important.
John the Baptist is echoing another voice, a voice from the Hebrew Bible that we usually call the Old Testament. That other voice is of a messenger whose name we don't know, but who had an important message for a group of people returning to their homeland.
They had been captives of the Babylonians in the area we know broadly as Mesopotamia. Specifically, they had been captives in the city of Babtylon by the Euphrates river. They had yearned for home, as expatriots do, and the great day had arrived. A Gentile, that is, a non-Jew, conqueror of the Babylonians, had decreed that they should return to their homeland. His name was Cyrus. He was a Mede from the area of Persia, and the Old Testament says that he was anointed by God for the task.
So a large group of Jews is returning to their homeland, liberated by a Gentile - the only non-Jew ever described as anointed by God for a task, the only non-Jew ever to be seen as a Messiah - and the unknown prophet of the 40th chapter of Isaiah declares:
"A voice cries:
'In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord,
Make straight in the desert a highway for our God.
Every valley shall be lifted up,
and every mountain and hill be made low;
the uneven ground shall become level,
and the rough places plain,
and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed,
and all flesh shall see it together,
for the mouth of the Lord has spoken'."
Every time I read or hear those words I hear the words and music of Handel's Messiah, but I also find myself thinking of the extraordinary feats of civil engineering achieved by Italian engineers on the road round the western coast of northern Italy. It is the most uneven terrain you could imagine. Towering mountains and deep, deep valleys. It is anything but even ground, yet even so, for motorists, and for that matter for railways trains, 'the uneven ground (has) become level.'
Anyone who has travelled that coastline either by road or rail will know the massive achievement that making the uneven ground level for travellers is. It has been done of course with tunnels of great length and viaducts of enormous height. And wherever possible, both road and rail have been made straight - something which could not be had they followed mountain contours or valley meanderings.
Magnificent civil engineering has made it possible for road and rail to be level and straight.
II
What has this to do with John the Baptist and with our own Advent preparations? Quite a lot.
It gives us some understanding of the mind of John the Baptist, an encounter with his consciousness and perhaps also that of the writer of John's Gospel. When John the Baptist described himself as a voice crying in the wilderness, "Make straight the way of the Lord," he was well aware of the passage in Isaiah which called for the ground to be prepared for the Lord who would be glorified in Jerusalem with the returning exiles. But Jerusalem must be prepared for it. People's hearts - those of the returning exiles and those of the people who had remained resident in Jerusalem - had to be prepared for the new day.
In John's time the new day was the coming of 'the Word made flesh', - the voice made flesh - the Gospel writer's way of introducing his listeners to the expected Messiah.
Let's follow this encounter with the consciousness of John the Baptist through for a few minutes, because it's very easy to forget that the personalities in the Bible were real people and real people have their own views of the world to share.
In the case of John the Baptist, we find it easy to think of him as a stern, unfeeling man who has only stern words to say. The picture of a man dressed in camel's hair clothing with a leather girdle around his waist and living on locusts and wild honey does not inspire thoughts of a warm-hearted man moved by compassion.
I had this view of John the Baptist until one day I saw for the first time, in Venice's Accademia Gallery, Titian's strinking painting of John. He stands straight-backed, sharp-featured, dressed in camel's skin. He has a head of thick, black hair, and an almost jet-black beard.
Yet that was not the whole picture of John in the painting, and at first I could not see what it was that suggested something else. Then I saw it. In the corner of one eye there is a tear. John is seen to be a man, almost like Jesus, weeping inside over Jerusalem.
I had never thought of John the Baptist in that way before, and I began to wonder why Titian had painted him in that way.
And my thoughts went to his message, the message of the voice crying in the wilderness. And I saw that this man, given his message, was identifying with the grace of God in the return of the exiles from Babylon.
In that great moment of Jewish history there was rejoicing, but there was need for more than rejoicing.
The exiles who had maintained their faithfulness to God were returning to a different Jerusalem from the one they had left. Some had remained behind in Jerusalem - had never been taken into exile. Some of these had inter-married with non-Jewish partners, and the later, but not much later, book of Ezra confirms that.
Those returning had been more faithful than those who had remained in Jerusalem. Moreover much of Jerusalem's city and walls had been destroyed or badly damaged. Other gods were being worshipped.
But most of all, a reformation was needed in Jerusalem. The path must be made straight and level if the glory of the Lord were to be experienced in the return to the homeland. The plight of the Jews in exile had called for compassion: the plight of Jerusalem had also called for compassion - but also for reformation - for turning round from the practices which had brought dishonour upon the city.
Later in the book of Isaiah Jerusalem is living with the disappointment of the great dreams of the return from Babylon not having been realised.
The passage from Isaiah read a few moments ago reflects that time when the return is well into the past; there has not been much of a reformation at all and the city iss till in ruins. Other gods are still being worshipped.
Yet still in the book of Isaiah there is optimism. The broken-hearted will be bound up; those who mourn will be comforted; they will be given garlands instead of ashes, gladness instead of mourning; the ancient places in ruins will be built up; the devastations will be raised up, and so on.
All this is in the mind of John as he makes his proclamation to a much later people of Judah in the time of Jesus.
So in my encounter with the consciousness of John the Baptist I find compassion as well as stern warning. I find one who knows where he, as a Jew, has come from. I find a man whose compassion is melded with a warning that reformation is necessary. I find a man steeped in his Jewish scriptures who seeks the will of God as a passion in his life. This, I believe, is how John the Baptist saw his world, his God and his people. And we can share in that God-centred vision and consciousness.
How he has something to say in and to the circumstances of his own day and to ours?
The way of the Lord is yet to be straightened. The highway of our God is still to be levelled. The civil engineering of the spirit remains to be done. John points to the Source of personal, internal reformation who is also the resource for societal reformation in the One who is the Word - the Voice - made flesh who dwelt among us.
He points to an encounter with another consciousness, that of Jesus of Nazareth who, as the Christ of faith, leads us to open hearts, confession of our failure to be all that we are created for, and a new depth of relationship with God.
John leads us to an encounter with the consciousness of Jesus whose spiritual eyes saw his own reality as loving God and loving neighbour, and seeking justice, equity, mercy and compassion in society and peace with God for those who seek him. It is the loveliest consciousness of all and we can't help but be attracted by it and to it.
III
So in these days of Advent how are we - you and I - as individual seekers after a deeper spiritual relationship with
God, preparing the way of the Lord, making his path level and straight?
How are we doing our civil engineering of the spirit?
The best civil engineering projects are built on careful groundwork, and our groundwork, our foundational work, is time given to deepening our relationship with God in Christ.
Titian's picture of John the Baptist shows a lamb at his feet - John's Gospel's Lamb of God - and the head of his staff is in the form of a cross. That leads us to contemplation of the depth of love of the One to whom John the Baptist points.
It is the way of God and of us that we deepen that relationship with God in Christ, that we allow God to remove some of the barriers of spirit - the gradients and the obstacles of all within us that oppose the free working of the spirit of Christ, in and through times given to honesty in prayer, laying ourselves open before God without pretence, consciously allowing him to work within us - prayer too for one another, which is loving our neighbour as ourselves, as well as loving God with our whole heart and spirit and strength.
The time of Advent is one of the best of all opportunities to nurture and bring to fruition a new openness of heart. Let us resolve to bring in the spiritual earthmovers and bring the high places low and the low places high, so that a level and straight road is prepared in our hearts for his coming.
In the current edition of Sojourners magazine (September - October 2014), Eboo Patel, a Muslim American, shares some thoughts from his summer reading, including the statement that relativism and fundamentalism are today's most common religious paths. Patel defines fundamentalism as "Being me is based on dominating you," and relativism as "I no longer know who I am when I encounter you."
It is not difficult to see that we live in a time flooded with both positions. Neither has any significant contribution to make to improving society and solving the problems which generate division. Fundamentalism encourages division and relativism lives with it. To add a third position, those who chant the mantra that religion has caused most of the wars history records and therefore religion is anathema simply add to the problems through historical error.
There is always a better way of doing things and while both fundamentalism and relativism are to be avoided, there has to be a positive, contributing position. In fact, my faith is of little worth unless it has immediate bearing upon the real problems faced by the peoples of a fractured world. That means that the first step is understanding what my own faith can offer.
I speak and write most authentically when my voice and my pen are informed by my faith. I need to understand that faith as comprehensively as I can. My desire matches that of Patel's as he demonstrates it in his writing as a Muslim. Faith, be it Christian, Jewish or Muslim, can be an important contributor to building a better world.
My Christian perspective is that the teaching of Jesus of Nazareth waits still to be understood as a peacemaking contributor to a better world, while I note that major advances in social betterment have been effected by the Church. That's the hub of the position that lies between relativism and fundamentalism. To judge a religious position usefully, one should look to see how it benefits society. My faith should be judged well only when it works for social justice. The Hebrew prophets preached continually the need for justice and equity, compassion and mercy. They were political beings concerned with the removal of social evils. At times they thundered the message of social reform. Justice and equity are inseparable from faith if it is to be called Christian. It is a point where I can meet like-minded Muslims and Jews as people of faith who wish to make a difference in the world.
Jesus of Nazareth was a man committed to the same prophetic vision and was also one who encouraged people of faith to be peacemakers. "Blessed are the peacemakers" is a scene-setter for the Sermon on the Mount, and should anyone decide not to take that beatitude seriously, he or she has at least to recognise that the Sermon goes on to urge the readers to love their enemies and pray for those who persecute them, thus highlighting that it is not peacekeeping that Jesus urges upon us, but the more creative and more potent activity of peacemaking. That means that people of faith at their best are those who are so committed to peacemaking that they are actively involved in it in their everyday relationships. They bring the Hebrew potency of Shalom to it, a deliberate outreaching in goodwill to create community well-being, understanding and a peacemaking environment.
Such peacemaking and problem-solving includes taking every participant seriously and being supportive of contributors, offering them a mind open to considering their positions on the basis of facts accessible to everyone that they offer in support of their position.
Those who have the most to contribute are those in whom such a faith is part of who they are. Self-understanding allied to a firm sense of personal and religious identity make possible a creative contribution to critical questions of social justice today. People of faith who are free of the two stated extremes can make the strongest contributions of all because they are not tied (or do not have to be) to the aims of political parties or national organisations. Faith communities are international communities and are well-placed to lead the way.
How can Chrisian faith, Jewish faith, Muslim faith contribute to social justice and increased understanding of what it means to be human?
Good starting points are Patel's article, 'A Theology of Interfaith Co-operation', the books he cites, 'The Heretical Imperative' (Peter I Berger) and 'Why Did Jesus, Moses, the Buddha and Mohammed Cross the Road?' (Brian McLaren), the foundation scriptures of the faith we hold, going out of our way to be informed about critical issues, and making connections with others who seek a better world.
It needs to be said that the scriptures should be read in a spirit which separates them from the frameworks imposed upon them by fundamentalists and others who want to control understanding and interpretation.
A recent edition of 'Sojourners' magazine tells us that American Senator Cory Booker, speaking at a "World Change through Faith and Justice" conference, declared, "When I claim to be a Christian, it should be a radical statement."
Any objective reading of the Gospels will suggest that Senator Booker was right in his claim. Jesus of Nazareth was one with the prophets of the Old Testament in promoting a teaching of commitment to justice and equity, compassion and love.
Personal faith is important, and the building up of the Church as a community whose members love God with all their heart and soul and daily deepen their relationship with him is critical, forming the faith and empowerment base from which to reach out and seek justice and equity under the command to love our neighbours as ourselves. The neighbour, of course, is the person in need, no matter where in the world that person is to be found. He or she might be in northern Iraq suffering under the terrorism of ISIS, "The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria" which increasingly presents itself simply as "The Islamic State". The person in need might be in Honduras, where President Hernadez's military police have established a state of terror. The inequities might be at home in Australia where the gap between the richest and the poorest becomes greater each year, as it becomes greater in other western nations and the poorest are the marginalised. They, the marginalised in our own culture, are also our neighbours to be loved as ourselves.
The easy response is to make a donation to the Salvation Army or, if we want to improve living conditions in other countries, to World Vision, or to another charity. That is important, and not be decried. We must go on giving as best we are able. Yet that alone is not loving our neighbour as ourselves. Radical faith has more to do than that. First, we need to be informed, to learn from whatever reliable sources we can find what life is really like for the neighbour-in-need. Unless we are informed about what is happening in Honduras, in Iraq, in Syria, in El Salvador, in Guatemala, in the recent denial of democracy in Hong Kong by the Chinese Government, in the world of disability in Australia, in the world of the unemployed, in the world of the down-and-outs, we can have little effective influence. Speaking from ignorance is never helpful.
With improved information and understanding we can write to newspapers and politicians and any responsible agencies, setting out our arguments for the need for justice and equity and the actions which seem, on the evidence, to be appropriate to bring about peaceful but effective change in a spirit of compassion and love. Love is here defined as always wanting the best for one's neighbour, no matter what colour his or her skin or the nature of that person's faith or lack of any.
"When I claim to be a Christian it should be a radical statement," declared Senator Booker. The senator was surely right. To be a Christian is about personal faith, but it is also about influencing change. The fight for justice and equity is not an optional extra.
16.10.16
The third temptation that Matthew records Jesus being subjected to is to do with political power. The setting is 'a very high mountain'.
The high mountain is the symbol of decision. From the high mountain you can see as you can see from no other place. The good country and the bad can be seen.
The life of power can be seen from the spiritual high mountain. So can the life of servanthood. It is not always easy to see which is the good. We might say, "If I had the power to do it, I would end poverty." That, surely, is altogether good. We might say, "If I had the power to do it, I would build a hospital in every village, even the smallest, and finance their operations." The chances are that we would not. The history of the use of power shows that we almost certainly would not. The statement, 'Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely' is seen to be far from cynical but rather a container of truth which is borne out in all that history shows us of the use of great power. In the end, power has a habit of using its user.
On the high mountain we can choose differently. From the spiritual high mountain we can also see the Vision Splendid, and it is a vision of servanthood, of making a difference in the world of quality and degree that power cannot make. Indeed, servanthood is the necessary counter to power. As power corrupts, bringing disintegration to identity, so servanthood is discovery of personal essence. It is the life which is found in its losing. As a person shares himself or herself in serving, he or she becomes more himself or herself. As a river is only a river by flowing, so one becomes oneself as life flows in sharing. The paradox is that life increases; the flow brings no depletion.
The high mountain is the place of choosing. The choosing has to be done well, because the choice contributes to forming the life of the chooser.
The high mountain is the symbol for choosing. Look at any high place and meditate upon it. What will you choose? What shall I choose? They are the moments which form us.
In my study of Matthew's Gospel I have just arrived at the first four verses of chapter 4. Jesus is, as Matthew writes it, 'led up into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil.' That first statement is important. The purpose of the wilderness experience is temptation. When he became hungry Matthew states that 'the tempter came and said to him, "If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread." That is an extraordinarily rich statement for spiritual reflection, even for meditation. It is especially so in the light of the response Matthew records: 'But Jesus answered, "It is written, 'Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.'"'
The scriptural identity of 'the devil' is presented here in his 'Job' role of the 'tempter', whose activity is not without benefit for us.
Why did 'the tempter' become an important part of Jewish belief? There can be no definitive answer, but it is reasonable to surmise that our human understanding that we grow or fail to grow under the pressure of temptation had more than a little to do with it. Each time we are tempted we grow a little or we wither a little. Temptation resisted is growth here or there, character developed and strengthened. To indulge temptation is to hang onto a link with infancy. Thus, temptation is always an opportunity. The tempter, in Jewish faith, therefore, is not necessarily an evil influence, and can as likely be seen as a beneficiary. Did the devil, or Satan, become an evil opponent of God in Judaism? I invite you to do your own study of the Old Testament, if possible in the chronological order of composition of the books, and discover your own answer to the question. What is undeniable, however, is that in Christianity such a development did take place.
How did Jesus see the devil or Satan? There is no doubt in my mind that in his response to Peter he perceived the devil, or Satan, as the Tempter. There is no other way to understand the words, 'Get thee behind me, Satan!' They acknowledge the temptation he was facing.
In this present temptation, stones and bread are featured. Jesus is hungry. Whether he had the power to turn stones into bread or not is unimportant. What matters is that if he had turned them into bread, he would have lost.
Extended time in the wilderness, in a spiritual sense, perhaps including fasting, is represented by the stone. The stone is an opportunity because the wilderness, the temporary retreat from the world, is an opportunity. The opportunity is for growth of a deepening spirituality, a growing towards God. The bread represents falling to the temptation of abandoning the spiritual opportunity, giving up on the discipline, and therefore loss of growth in grace, growth in faith, growth of absorption into the Divine.
I think the two objects, a stone and a loaf, on display, would be fine symbols of temptation mastered and temptation succumbed to, opportunity grasped and opportunity missed.
Value the stone.
14.10.16
S2025DEL0203b
16.2.25 Delamere Uniting Church 0915
RCL Jer.17:5-10 Ps.1 1 Cor.15:12-20 Luke 6:17-26
TREES, WATER AND WISDOM
I
In the days some decades ago when I was the minister of a church in Whyalla, I used to spend some of my holiday breaks in the Flinders Ranges
One of the sights I quickly became used to was the presence of red river gum trees, Eucalyptus camaldulensis. You can’t help noticing that you often see long lines of them, with the lines being anything but straight. You know as soon as you see that line of red river gum trees that there is a watercourse there. That is where Eucalyptus camaldulensis likes to be.
It isn’t always a flowing stream. More often than not, it’s a dry creek bed, but sometimes those dry creek beds become raging torrents, as I have seen up there in the Flinders Ranges. And the red gums get the flooding they love.
In addition to that, it has a deep taproot system which enables it to find water deep underground and so thrive on the banks of dry creeks – dry, that is, for most of the time.
They are trees self-planted near underground streams of water and their leaf does not wither.
The tree that finds water not only survives, it thrives.
As I pointed out at the Newland-Port Elliot church last Sunday, there is no portion of the Bible which, to my knowledge, lacks a relevance to everyday living and a lesson in spiritual growth. The tree beside water is a fine example of that kind of relevance.
On that score, we have not the usual one text, but two to focus on for our thinking.
One is from Jeremiah:
“Blessed is the man who trusts in the LORD,
whose trust is the LORD.
He is like a tree planted by water,
that sends out its roots by the stream,
and does not fear when the heat comes,
for its leaves remain green,
and is not anxious in the year of drought,
for it does not cease to bear fruit.”[1]
Doesn’t that remind you of the red river gum?
The other text for our focus is from Psalm 1:
Speaking of the person whose delight is in the law of the LORD, it reads (and ladies please substitute ‘she’ for ‘he’)
“He is like a tree
planted by streams of water,
that yields its fruit in its season,
and its leaf does not wither.”[2]
For me, these are wonderfully paired to speak to us of the spiritual life, of the life of faith, of wisdom.=P=
We are thinking this morning of trees, wisdom and water.
II
So where is wisdom? Perhaps it’s a bit unexpected that Jeremiah starts with where the foolishness is. He tells us that the person who trusts in wholly human resources is among the foolish and is like a shrub in the desert.
What a powerful image that is. A shrub in the desert. (far from water?) The person who relies wholly upon human resources Jeremiah tells us, is one who “shall dwell in the parched places of the wilderness”[3] The parched places! Far from water! Where there is no refreshment. A spiritual drought.
There is, he tells us, no wisdom in placing our trust in human resources only. So, I repeat, where is wisdom?
The answer is important. Wisdom is determined by where you sink your roots. Let’s go back to the red river gum, Eucalyptus camaldulensis. It is the perfect tree to symbolise the important spiritual lesson in Jermiah and Psalm Onebecause it has the kind of taproot system which reaches down well below the surface to find its sustenance.
Where do we sink our own roots in search of sustenance? Do we search for sustenance inmoney, prestige, control, diversions, big-noting self, popularity, influence? I don’t think many people have found contentment or fulfillment in any of those.
Jesus takes us to at least two of those in this morning’s Gospel reading:
“Woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation.”[4]
“Woe to you, when all men speak well of you, for so their fathers did to the false prophets.”[5]
Those who have sunk their roots into money, into riches? “Woe to them,” Jesus says. Why? Because the money is all they are going to get. They already have their consolation, and it’s only money.
There are, of course, those whose poverty puts them in real need of money. They are not the people Jesus is referring to. He is speaking to those who have sunk their roots into riches to find their sustenance. All they get is measured in dollars and cents.
Jesus does not seem to think that is much of a reward. He invites us all to think about that. Do we agree, or don’t we? In case we are tempted to think he is a bit cavalier about money, we should remind ourselves that since leaving the carpenter’ shop and commencing his ministry, he has been unemployed, with no regular income. He knows what it is to be less than comfortably off.
Well, he does not seem to think that being rooted in the desire for riches is all that wise. But we might have sunk our roots into being popular in the hope that being popular will sustain us. Jesus’ comment?
“Woe to you, when all men speak well of you, for so their fathers did to the false prophets.”
There is nothing wrong with being popular. Some are deservedly popular because they are fine people, but if you sink your roots into the need for popularity, there will always be those who tell you what a fine person you are, but you might well never know if it is sincerely meant. After all, Jesus said, there was no shortage of men who were ready to butter up the false prophets of Israel. There was no sincerity in their praises.
III
Where, then, to sink our roots to find real sustenance, genuine sustenance, wholesome sustenance?
Eucalyptus Camaldulensis sends its roots deep down to find water. And it is so appropriate to illustrate Jeremiah’s words, who speaks of the man who trusts the Lord as one who is
“like a tree planted by water,
that sends out its roots by the stream”
Water, spoken of so often of in the Bible, almost always has spiritual symbolism. Psalm One speaks of the man who delights in the scriptures as
“like a tree
planted by streams of water,
that yields its fruit in its season,
and its leaf does not wither.”
Trust in the Lord and delight in the scriptures are roots finding sustenance that matters.
The question is, what does the water stand for? You remember that in John’s Gospel, Jesus meets a woman by Jacob’s well, and there, not surprisingly, he has a conversation with her about water. In order to understand that often misunderstood episode in the Bible, there is one critical point that must be understood. Water, in the Middle East, was a precious commodity.
You might legitimately answer and say, “Well, what’s new. Of course it’s precious Ater all, it’s precious wherever youare. It’s critical for life.” And you would be quite right. Water is precious everywhere. But when we read the Old or New testaments, the geography is Palestine.
If you and I want water to boil in a kettle, we turn on a tap and out comes the water. When we stand under a shower, we turn taps on and that wonderful water soaks us and we feel the luxury of it. But in Biblical times you could not do anything like those two examples. It was a very dry land. The one constantly flowing river was the Jordan. Other wadis fed into it, as they do today of course. But, like many of the watercourses of the Flinders Ranges, they were and are dry for much of the time. It meant in Biblical times that there was great dependence upon wells and the hard work of drawing the water up in the vessels available. Water was very, very precious in Palestine in those days. That is why water in the Bible gets so many mentions so positively.
So we return to this encounter by the well. Jesus tells the woman that the water she has come to draw will last a very limited time, then she will have to draw water from the well again, but he can give her water that will cause any who drink it never to thirst again! She misunderstands and begs for that water so that she never has to draw water from the well again.
Thomas Green in his fine book on prayer, “When the Well Runs Dry”[6], describes this incident as “a comedy of errors”, and perhaps it is, but if so, it is a comedy easily understood because water was so precious that the woman could hardly be expected to think of anything other than the H2O she drew from the well in the heat of each day. Here is the key verse:
“Every one who drinks of this water will thirst again, but whoever drinks of the water that I shall give him will never thirst; the water that I shall give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”[7]
The water that is received, because it is given. The water that will be a well within him (or her). The water that is Eternal life.
Eternal life? If you believe that Jesus was the incarnation of God, then of course the “water” he offers is Eternal life, which is essentially Divine Life, the life of the incarnate One.
I can’t help thinking of that beatitude in the Sermon on the Mount,
“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied”[8]
In Christ, the incarnate, of course they shall be satisfied – of course we shall be satisfied, for the righteous life is Divine life, Eternal Life, or to return to John’s Gospel, the “water” he offers to the thirsty.
Where, then, is wisdom? Eucalyptus Camaldulensis shows us, with roots running deep down into the water we cannot see. Wisdom in the context of our readings being considered this morning, lies in making our roots deeply in the water of life, the eternal life, the Divine life that Jesus was offering to the woman at Jacob’s well and which is offered still.
IV
What is required of us? Perhaps the better question is, What are the options open to us? As both the Psalm and Jeremiah point out, One option is to make our way of life with the values of the material and place our trust wholly in human resources, the option which is foolishness. The other is to trust in the Lord, be built by the scriptures and, to learn from Jesus the parable of the red river gum, Eucalyptus Camaldulensis, to make our roots in the water of life that he, Jesus, offers – the water that wells up within to Eternal life.
One last word is to do with keeping that taproot open to feeding. It is called Prayer.
Oh, how easy it is to allow the multiplying cares of the day to push prayer to the perimeter. It is so very easy, and I say that from personal experience. The great Jewish teacher, Abraham Joshua Heschel, reminds us of a story of a Rabbi Isaac Meir who wondered what a certain Jewish shoemaker should do about morning prayer. ‘His customers were poor men who owned only one pair of shoes. The shoemaker used to pick up their shoes at a late evening hour, work on them all night and part of the morning, in order to deliver them before their owners had to go to work. When should the shoemaker say his morning prayer? Should he pray quickly the first thing in the morning, and then go back to work? Or should he let the appointed hour of prayer go by and, every once in a while, raising his hammer from the shoes, utter a sigh, “Woe unto me, I haven’t prayed yet!”? Heschel writes, “Perhaps that sigh is worth more than the prayer itself.”[9] His point appears to be that the sigh indicates a real desire to pray, but a quick prayer would be a mere formality. A deep desire to pray is the beginning of making time, and that can be difficult. Yet prayer is the very channel through which God blesses us. Jesus, stretched always by crowds calling upon him, nevertheless maintained those times of drawing away from the crowd to make time for private prayer.
`Prayer has as one of its great elements, being open to God. Once we realise that the words we use, if we use any, are less important than listening in the silence, we are at the heart of prayer. It is our spiritual petrol station, or recharging point. But for us it is not litres or amperes that we take in, but the Spirit of God, the water of Eternal life, and a wholly committed trust in God. That is his gift to us. Thanks be to God. Amen.
STTA170
Something to Think About
RG
I am the bread of life
The picture is of a stained glass window in London’s St Paul’s cathedral, photographed by Ruth during our recent visit to Europe.
As I look at Jesus holding a sheaf, I readily think of one of his I am sayings in John’s Gospel,
I am the bread of life.
This is truly one of the deepest sayings in the New Testament. When we speak of bread, we know that we are talking about a staple, or principal food for life. Jesus noted that when he reminded his listeners that the Israelites in the wilderness ate manna (bread) which God supplied. They needed bread to avoid starvation.
Yet he speaks of something deeper here. He tells us that he is the staple (principal need) for spiritual life, the state of being in which our spiritual yearnings are met so that our hunger for them is satisfied. A.J. Gossip, one of the most effective preachers of the past, observed,
He is as necessary to us as our food. In sober fact he is our food, enabling us to meet life’s calls upon us and to keep (spiritually) hale and healthy.
Spiritual life essentially is life with God whose presence is unfailing. We enter into that life in Jesus, the bread of life. Indeed, God reveals himself to us principally in him who is our spiritual bread.
The late William Barclay described Jesus as
The final authority on God, on man, on life.
That’s quite a claim, but experience of Jesus, the bread of life, confirms it.
We are all able to partake of the bread of life.
Shalom
Tony Gates www.gatestotheworld.net
