Joakim's God Talk

The healing touch

2012-02-12T13:49:00.004Z

Address given at Templederry and Killodiernan on Sunday 12th February 2012, the 2nd Before Lent, Year B (incorrectly using the readings for Proper 1!)

Leprosy is the link between the OT and NT readings we’ve just heard.
In the OT reading (2Kings 5:1-14), we are told about how Naaman, the commander of the Aramean army from what is now Syria, is cured of leprosy by following the Prophet Elisha’s instructions to bathe in the River Jordan. And Mark (1: 40-45) tells us how Jesus cured a man with leprosy who begged him to do so.

True leprosy, now properly called Hansen’s disease, is a dreadful illness. It’s a chronic bacterial disease of the peripheral nerves and respiratory tract. It causes skin lesions, loss of the sense of touch, and over many years progressive disfigurement and disability. Until the 1930s it was incurable, but happily the infection can now be easily cured by a cocktail of drugs, and the WHO is coordinating efforts to eliminate it altogether in the near future. But despite being cured of the infection 2 to 3 million people worldwide are still estimated to be permanently disabled by its long term effects. It is right for us to continue to support the charities that work to help them.

Before the development of modern medicine, Hansen’s disease was often confused with other skin diseases, such as psoriasis and ringworm. They were all lumped together as leprosy, and sufferers – called lepers - were greatly feared, because leprosy was believed, incorrectly, to be highly contagious.

In Jesus’s time, religious law decreed that lepers were ritually unclean, and anything or anybody they touched also became unclean, so people avoided any contact with them. Theirs was a cruel fate. They were forced to live away from villages and towns with other lepers, and were obliged to warn other people of their presence by crying out ‘Unclean, unclean!’ If ever someone was cured – and real leprosy was incurable, so it must have been some other skin disease – the leper would have to go to be examined by a priest and take part in a complicated ritual involving animal sacrifices, as described in the book of Leviticus. Only then would the former leper be allowed back into Israelite society.

But leprosy is not what either reading is really about, I think.
The story of Naaman is surely not about his leprosy, but about how pride must be overcome before a person can find favour in the sight of God. It was only when Naaman could put aside his pride in his own greatness, and his pride in his own country, that he could be made clean by obeying the Prophet Elisha’s instructions. How greatful he must have been to his servants for encouraging him do so when he was stamping off in a a huff!

And Mark’s story is about Jesus, and about how Jesus responds to those in trouble who come to him – the leprosy is purely incidental. Let's look at it a bit more closely.

The leper comes to Jesus and begs him, ‘If you choose, you can make me clean’.
And how does Jesus respond? Jesus is ‘moved with pity’, we are told. ‘Moved with pity’ does not really capture the strength of the original Greek, which literally translated means ‘gut-wrenched’. Jesus was gut-wrenched by the leper's plight.

Then ‘Jesus stretch(es) out his hand and touch(es) him’. Those who saw it, or heard about it later, would have found this extraordinary, quite scandalous – a deliberate breach of the purity laws by a man who called himself a preacher. The leper was unclean, cursed by God perhaps. By touching him Jesus was making himself unclean. And those who associated with him risked becoming unclean themselves. Yet, ‘moved with pity’, Jesus does not hesitate. He reaches out his hand to this suffering human being and touches him – something, perhaps, which the leper had not experienced since his disease was first detected, perhaps years before. In this very human gesture Jesus makes manifest the love that he knows his Father in heaven has for all his children.

And this touch is a healing touch. ‘I do choose’, says Jesus, ‘Be made clean!’ And the leprosy leaves the man.

This little tale shows us, I believe, how we too can receive healing from Jesus when we are in trouble. When we are in trouble we can feel shunned by society, cut off perhaps from friends and family, by their anger, fear or embarrassment because of what has happened. But if we come to Jesus in prayer and ask him, he has the power through his Father in heaven to reach out with a loving touch to heal us, as he healed the leper. He may not choose to heal us physically – miraculous healing is very rare these days – but he will surely choose to heal us spiritually, to give us the strength to bear the trouble, whatever it is.

And the tale also shows us how we should behave when we encounter those in trouble who seek our help. Jesus did not shun the leper, and we who bear Christ’s name should model ourselves on him. When those who are shunned in our society come to us for help, we must reach out to them with a loving touch, like Jesus. And that includes those whose circumstances horrify us, for instance AIDS victims, drug addicts, sex abusers, prostitutes - as well as the plain feckless.

Jesus sternly warns the newly cleansed leper not to tell other people what has happened.
‘See that you say nothing to anyone’, he says, ‘but go, show yourself to the priest, and offer for your cleansing what Moses commanded, as a testimony to them.’

Why should Jesus want to keep his healing miracle secret? Perhaps he foresees that news of the miracle will make him a celebrity, and get in the way of his ministry. For that is just what happens: the former leper ignores Jesus’s warning; he tells everyone who will listen and crowds flock to see Jesus, ‘so that (he) could no longer go into a town openly, but stayed in the country.’

But I prefer another explanation. Perhaps Jesus fears that the former leper may be stigmatised if his connection with Jesus is made widely known. For Jesus already knows that he will be a controversial figure – he has already shown he is prepared to break the law by touching a leper, and that will not be the end of it. So he advises the man he has cured to go quietly to the priest. If the priest hears Jesus was involved, he might withhold his declaration of cleanliness. And only the priest’s testimony will make other people believe the former leper is clean again.

We are not told what happened to him, but I wonder if the former leper lived to regret ignoring Jesus's warning.

So to finish, thanks be to God for the insights to be found in today’s readings from scripture!
Among them are these:
(1) We need to overcome our foolish pride before we can find favour in the sight of God.
(2) Jesus will reach out with his loving touch to heal us if we bring our troubles to him in prayer. And
(3) We should follow Jesus’s example by reaching out to others in trouble, no matter who they are.

God cares for us, his children!

2012-02-05T16:44:00.004Z

Address given at Portumna, Eyrecourt and Banagher on Sunday 5th February 2012, 3rd Before Lent (Year B, Proper 0)

What beautiful poetry Isaiah (40:21-31) has given us in today’s Old Testament reading!
It is actually a fragment of a rather longer poem, which goes on for several chapters. The poet invokes the sense of how small and insignificant we humans are in the face of the immense universe around us, and in the face of its Creator.

It is he who sits above the circle of the earth,
and its inhabitants are like grasshoppers;
who stretches out the heavens like a curtain,
and spreads them like a tent to live in;

Hasn’t every one of us experienced this same sense of awe at our own smallness - for instance when we look out from a high place at a big view? For me it brings back the memory of standing on top of the hill above Black Head, looking out beyond Aran, out across the vast ocean - next parish Boston, as they say.

And it is not just you and me, the little people, who are as nothing.
The poet continues: It is he

who brings princes to naught,
and makes the rulers of the earth as nothing.
Scarcely are they planted, scarcely sown,
scarcely has their stem taken root in the earth,
when he blows upon them, and they wither,
and the tempest carries them off like stubble.

It is good, I think, for the powerful of this world to be reminded that they too are insignificant. And it is good for us to remember it too. We have no reason to fear princes and rulers, since they, like us, will wither and be carried away.

Then the poet invites us to look up at the stars, as today's psalm 147 echoes:

Lift up your eyes on high and see:
Who created these?
He who brings out their host and numbers them,
calling them all by name;
because he is great in strength,
mighty in power,
not one is missing.

I am intrigued by this idea of numbering and naming stars. I think for the poet it must represent having power over them, in a magical kind of way.

Astronomers today, using ever more sensitive telescopes, survey the stars and register them in gigantic star catalogues, so that they can find any one of them again if they want to study it. And as astronomers first discovered more than 150 years ago, not far from here using the great telescope at Birr, we now know that there aren’t just stars out there, but a myriad of galaxies, each one consisting of more stars than we can see with the naked eye. If anything, we are even more insignificant than the poet could ever have imagined!

Astronomers will never catch them all. But if they could, that would not give them the power the poet ascribes to the Creator.

Faced with such a God, is it possible for any of us to feel anything but frank terror?
Yet the poet goes on to reassure us that God, YHWH in the original Hebrew, translated here as the LORD:

.. gives power to the faint,
and strengthens the powerless.
Even youths will faint and be weary,
and the young will fall exhausted;
but those who wait for the LORD shall renew their strength,
they shall mount up with wings like eagles,
they shall run and not be weary,
they shall walk and not faint.

The images are very powerful, aren’t they? Which one of us would not wish to ‘mount up with wings like an eagle’? I certainly would, particularly after watching the recent TV series on birds in flight. But it’s a big claim to make that such a mighty creator is concerned with the faint and the powerless. Why should we believe it? The answer, I suggest, lies in our shared experience of faith and the example of Jesus.

Jesus knew his Hebrew scriptures very well.
Quite likely he had this whole poem by heart. I feel sure that he felt the same awe we do when he contemplated the magnitude of creation and his own place in it. A little before our Gospel passage, Mark tells us that the Spirit drove him out into the wilderness where he was tempted for 40 days. I imagine Jesus, in the barren, rugged Judean uplands, looking up at the stars, filled with awe.

Perhaps part of his temptation concerned doubts about whether YHWH really cared for him, small as he was. If so, his faith was strengthened. He overcame these doubts, and went out to teach all who would listen that this mighty God cares for all his creatures, as a father does. And he taught us to pray to ‘Our Father in heaven’.

In today’s reading from Mark’s Gospel (Mark 1:29-39) we heard that when Simon hunted for Jesus and found him praying in a deserted place, Jesus said: ‘Let us go on to the neighbouring towns, so that I may proclaim the message there also; for that is what I came out to do’. What was this message? It was surely the message Mark has already summarised in these words (Mark 1:15): ‘The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent and believe in the good news’.

I like to think that the good news is that not only does God love us, but that he has given us the faith to believe that he does. We human beings seem to be primed to faith - it comes naturally to us. Even though we are faint and powerless we have been given the faith to believe in Isaiah’s caring God, who is the same loving Father that Jesus teaches us about.

It is because of this faith that we are enabled to be fearless, to act like true human beings made in God’s loving image, able to walk and not faint, able to run and not be weary, able to mount up with wings like eagles.

Thanks be to God for the faith that God cares for us, his children!

The Wise Men's Quest

2012-01-08T16:00:00.004Z

Epiphany sermon preached at Templederry & Killodiernan on Sunday 8th January 2012.

At Epiphany, in our Western Church tradition, we remember the Wise Men from the East.
As Matthew tells us in the reading we’ve just heard (Matthew 2:1-12), they follow a star which leads them to find and adore the baby Jesus. But the tradition in the Eastern Church is different - they remember a different Epiphany - the Baptism of Christ, when the Holy Spirit descends like a dove, and a voice from heaven says 'This is my beloved Son in whom I well pleased'. That's nice to recall on this joyful day when we baptise Hollie Linda Clarke.

The story of the Wise Men is so familiar to us, ever since we first heard it as children. Over the centuries it has grown with the telling, as the best stories always do. Story-tellers and artists have embellished it from their imaginations. Matthew’s unspecified number of Wise Men became three kings, riding on camels and bearing expensive gifts for the Christ-child. And the kings acquired names unknown to Matthew along the way - Caspar, Balthazar and Melchior - beautiful, exotic names.

It happened this way, I suppose. Matthew’s Wise Men were foreigners bringing gifts. People remembered OT texts referring to foreign kings who bring gifts. We have heard some today. Psalm 72 says: ‘The kings of Tarshish and of the isles shall pay tribute; the kings of Sheba and Seba shall bring gifts’. Today’s reading from Isaiah (60:1-6) says: ‘Nations shall come to your light, and kings to the brightness of your dawn… A multitude of camels shall cover you, the young camels of Midian and Ephah; all those from Sheba - Sheba again - shall come. They – the kings that is - shall bring gold and frankincense, and shall proclaim the praise of the Lord’. At first people must have thought Matthew’s Wise Men were rather like these OT kings. Later they came to the conclusion they were just the same. The number of the gifts the Wise Men brought no doubt explains why there are three of them. I’ve no idea where the names came from, though.

Leaving aside these embellishments, it’s not easy to see Matthew’s simple tale as plain history. The idea of a star which moves and then stands still seems absurd to us today. So is it any more than just a pretty story for children? Let’s examine it a little more closely to find out.

Matthew’s Wise Men are on a quest.
A quest is a kind of story in which heroes follow a long, hard and dangerous journey to find an object of great value before returning home. Such stories have been told since time immemorial. An ancient example is Homer’s Odyssey; Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings is a more modern one.

The object of great value the Wise Men are looking for is a rather special human child: ‘Where is the child who has been born king of the Jews?’ they ask in Jerusalem, ‘For we observed his star at its rising, and we have come to pay him homage’. We are not told why they associated this star with a king of the Jews, but no doubt as learned astrologers they were led to do so by their sacred scriptures

The learned people in Jerusalem, the chief priests and scribes of the people, similarly draw on their ancient scriptures, from the prophecy of Micah, to answer the Wise Men’s question. They suggest the Wise Men look in Bethlehem for ‘a ruler who is to shepherd my people Israel’. But it's strange, isn't it, the chief priests and scribes are strangely indifferent to the Wise Men's quest – they don’t even bother to send someone with them to report back what if anything they find.

King Herod, however, ominously asks the Wise Men to let him know when they have found the child, ‘so that I may also go and pay him homage’.

The light of the star is what leads the Wise Men on their quest.
This light leads them to the Christ-child with Mary his mother. There, at the culmination of their quest, they are overwhelmed with joy. They kneel in homage and present their gifts, signifying that the royal king they seek is in fact - this baby. Now that’s amazing, isn’t it? They have travelled so far, suffered such hardships, to find what? A tiny, vulnerable, human child, just like so many they could have found without stirring from home!

One great truth buried in Matthew’s mystical story is this, I believe - the Wise Men’s quest is our quest too. If we have the tenacity they had to follow the light of their star, like them we will find that baby, who is, as St John puts it, ‘the true light, which enlightens everyone’.

Light represents all that is good and true and beautiful, all that is worthy of God. This, surely, is what light means to Isaiah, when he addresses God’s people the Israelites, saying, ‘Arise, shine; for your light has come, and the glory of the Lord has risen upon you’. I believe that Isaiah’s words are addressed to us just as much as to the Israelites - we too are God’s people. ‘Our light has come, and the glory of the Lord has risen upon us’. We too should be overwhelmed by joy, like the Wise Men!

After finding what they seek, the Wise Men return home – the proper end of any quest.
No doubt they were changed by all that had happened to them, perhaps unsettled by it. They would surely be better able to appreciate what was good in their homelands, but be less tolerant of the bad.

But notice this dark note: Matthew tells us that ‘having been warned in a dream not to return to Herod, they left for their own country by another road’.

They had good reason - Herod had form. He had already executed a wife and several sons he suspected of disloyalty. Now Matthew goes on to tell us he orders the massacre of every child under 2 years old in Bethlehem, because he fears that the child found by the Wise Men might usurp his throne. Jesus only escapes their fate because Joseph was also warned in a dream to flee with Mary and Jesus to Egypt.

The characters in Matthew’s story illustrate three ways in which people respond to the good news of Jesus Christ.

First there is Herod. He reacts with hatred and murderous hostility – just as some people do to this day.

Then there are the chief priests and scribes of Jerusalem. There reaction is one of complete indifference. They are so engrossed in their own affairs that they completely ignore the good news. How like so many people today!

But the Wise Men respond with adoring worship, seeking to lay at the feet of the Christ-child the finest gifts they can bring.

The story of the Wise Men is surely much more than just a pretty tale for children
It is an adult fable which shows us how to respond to the good news of Jesus Christ.

To ‘follow your star’ has entered our very language as a description of single-minded determination to be the very best we can be.

Let us pray that, through God’s grace, we may follow the same star that led the Wise Men to the Christ-child - to be the very best that we can be - for him!

Mission Sunday collection for Luyengo Farm Project, Swaziland

2011-11-20T13:29:00.004Z

The parable of the sheep and the goats (Matthew 25:31-46) is vivid and memorable - so typical of the stories Jesus uses to convey his teaching.
And its message is clear – God will judge us in accordance with our response to human need.

In NT times sheep and goats were usually kept in mixed flocks, as they still are in the Near East. But it was sometimes necessary to separate them into their kinds, at shearing time for instance. Or at the approach of hard weather – sheep are hardier than goats and can be left to graze over winter in the uplands, but goats must be brought down and folded in the shelter of the valley. Or to manage grazing – sheep eat only low growing herbs while goats will eat the leaves of bushes so that when forage of one kind is running out the appropriate animals must be moved to other grazing.

Jesus uses this image of separating sheep and goats, so familiar to those he was talking to, as a metaphor for how people can be separated into two kinds. ‘When the Son of Man comes in his glory’, says Jesus, ‘… he will separate people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats, and he will put the sheep at his right hand and the goats at the left’.

Those that are righteous will be blessed by God and receive everlasting life, and those that are not will be accursed and receive eternal punishment. ‘Then the king will say to those at his right hand, “Come, you that are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world”, and ‘he will say to those at his left hand, “You that are accursed, depart from me into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels”’.

The test for whether a person is righteous or not – to be blessed or accursed - is how he or she responds to the human needs they encounter. The king tells those who are blessed, “I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me”. He tells those who are accursed that they did none of these things.

And when both kinds of people express surprise because they did not recognise him, the king tells them, “Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me”.

Jesus confronts those who hear him, then and now, with this great truth: help given to those who need it is help given to him as the Son of Man, the king; and in contrast help withheld is help withheld from him. God is our loving Father, we are made in his image, and it is our Christian duty to help his children, our fellow human beings.

This teaching of Jesus is wonderfully apt for today, Mission Sunday.
Mission Sunday is the day designated by the Bishop for a special collection for overseas mission. In previous years the money has been split over many projects, all most deserving, but inevitably this has meant that none received very much. But this year the Diocesan Board of Mission, with the support of Bishop Trevor, has decided all the money should be directed to a single project in Swaziland. By concentrating resources in this way our diocese can make a real difference, which seems like a very good idea to me.

Most of you will remember Amy Hanna’s inspiring talk about her experiences in Swaziland on Mission Sunday last year. She told us that this small landlocked country squeezed between South Africa and Mozambique, with a population of around 1 million in an area about the same as Northern Ireland, is desperately poor – most people live on less than €1 per day. And she shocked us by telling us that as many as 40% of people have HIV, with the result that Swaziland has the lowest life expectancy in the world, just 32 years.

The poorest of the poor in Swaziland need help. The Anglican Diocese of Swaziland recognises that it is their Christian duty to respond. They have initiated a programme to help people affected by HIV, which includes these elements:

Care Points: Places run by parish churches where orphans and vulnerable children can come after school for fellowship and food, and to interact with adults who care and will listen. Swaziland has 140,000 orphans. 15% of all families are headed by a child.

Home Based Care: Anglican teams of retired nurses visit homes, bringing painkillers, antibiotics, vitamin supplements etc to supplement the antiretroviral drugs supplied by the state.

Egumeni: In Swaziland this is the reed fence around a homestead where women sit and girls learn from their mothers and grandmothers. The egumeni programme is about passing on wisdom from generation to generation, and in particular training in safe behaviour and self respect - not just a matter of morals but a matter of life and death in Swaziland.

Life Skills: A training programme for teenagers, enabling them to take control of their lives and stay safe, covering topics from personal identity to safe sex.

The programme sounds splendid, doesn’t it? There is just one problem – paying for it. But the diocese, supported by USPG Ireland mission partner Andrew Symonds and his wife Rosemary, has identified a way to do so.

The diocese owns 200 acres of good agricultural land, with unlimited access to water, at Luyengo Farm at Big Bend.

An investment of €300,000 would turn it into a productive commercial farm. Part of the site would be used to produce baby vegetables for export. Three harvests annually would create regular seasonal employment. Pigs would be fed from farm waste.

A commercial partner has agreed to provide half the investment and USPG Ireland seek to raise the other half on behalf of the Diocese of Swaziland.

The income from the farm is expected to rise to €40,000 in the 2nd year. And what will be the result? The diocese will become self-sufficient, with a steady, reliable income to pay for the HIV/AIDS programme.

Our Mission Sunday collection this year will go to support this Luyengo Farm Project.
As the Bishop of Swaziland the Rt Revd Meshack Mabuza puts it, ‘As a church we see agriculture as an answer to the continuance of our AIDS ministry. This land that we have is arable and fertile, with plenty of water running through it. We must use it, and we desperately need your help to get started’.

The Board of Mission has challenged the whole diocese to raise at least €40,000 for it this year. That may seem a lot, but it is only €20 for each active member of the diocese. It is therefore a challenge we can meet, if we choose, and meet in a single year. This collection is the first bite at it, and they invite us to use our creativity to find ways to raise more in the next 12 months.

I commend the project to you. By helping the Diocese of Swaziland we are helping Swazi people in need, and as today’s Gospel teaches us, when we help those in need we are helping Jesus himself.
So please be truly generous with your money in the Mission Sunday collection envelopes. However rich or poor you may feel in these recessionary times, we are all rich compared with the people who will be helped by it. If you usually put a coin in, look for a bigger one; if you planned to put in a note, pull something bigger out of your wallet.

Our heavenly Father will bless us for our generosity!

Bridesmaids

2011-11-06T16:58:00.005Z

An address given at Portumna, Eyrecourt and Banagher on Sunday 6th November 2011, the 3rd before Advent.

I hope you are wise enough to check the oil level in your central heating tank regularly.
When I read through today’s reading from Matthew’s Gospel (25:1-13), I was prompted to rush to check my own tank, and I was very glad I did because there were only a few inches left.

It’s an awful pain when the oil runs out, as I know only too well, because it happens to me far too often. And I don’t just have problems with central heating oil, but other oil too. Patrick Towers teased me this week, advising me to check I had enough fuel in my car today of all days, lest I be shown up as a ‘foolish Diocesan Reader’. This struck a nerve because it reminded me of my mother, God bless her. She would always ask me as I drove away whether I had enough petrol, because she knew I’d run out twice in a fortnight years before – she never accepted my excuse that the fuel gauge was broken and I had to dip it with a stick to see if I needed a fill.

The bridesmaids in the Gospel story - or the virgins as older translations had it: the Greek word simply means an unmarried girl – needed oil for their lamps. The wise ones made sure they had enough, but the foolish ones didn’t. We would all like to think we are like the wise bridesmaids but I fear I’m often more like the foolish ones.

The story Jesus tells about the bridesmaids may seem a bit strange to us in Ireland in the 21st Century.
In our wedding tradition we don’t expect bridesmaids to have to wait up with oil lamps for the groom to turn up in the middle of the night. But those who heard the story from Jesus would have found it all quite familiar.

In Jesus’s time the tradition was for the bridegroom to go around the houses of his friends and relatives before the wedding so that they could congratulate him and rejoice with him – a bit like our stag-nights I suppose. And the bride’s unmarried friends – the bridesmaids – would gather to escort the bridegroom to the house where the marriage ceremony would take place, when he finally arrived with his friends. When they got there everyone would join in a big party – the wedding banquet - which might go on for several days. No one could be sure when the groom would arrive - perhaps the suspense of waiting added to the general excitement, or perhaps it was a bit of a game for the groom’s friends to see if they could catch the bride’s friends napping.

So in Jesus’ story the wise bridesmaids, who came prepared with extra oil for their lamps, get to join in the bride’s big day and enjoy the party. But the foolish bridesmaids, with no extra oil, not only have the shame of being late for their friend’s wedding, but they are shut out and miss the party too.

Jesus finishes by saying ‘Keep awake therefore, for you know neither the day nor the hour’. Those who heard him would have grasped the moral of the story straight away – it is to ‘Be prepared’, just like the Girl Guide’s motto. If you are wise you will be prepared. If you are not prepared you are foolish.

Jesus tells the story as a parable about the kingdom of heaven.
‘The kingdom of heaven will be like this’, he says. But what did he intend the parable to convey to those who heard him?

Since ancient times Christians have taken the parable as an allegory of the 2nd Coming of Christ in the end times. The bridegroom who is delayed stands for Christ, the time of whose coming we cannot know; he will judge between the faithful and the unfaithful – the wise and the foolish – in a Last Judgement; the wise bridesmaids stand for those faithful Christians who will receive their just reward in heaven - represented by the wedding banquet; and the foolish bridesmaids are those who are unfaithful - they will be excluded from the heavenly kingdom.

Matthew believed with all the earliest Christians that Jesus would return again within their lifetime to usher in the kingdom of God which he had preached. Earlier in his Gospel (16:27-28) he quotes Jesus saying, ‘For the Son of Man is to come with his angels in the glory of his Father, and then he will repay everyone for what has been done. Truly I tell you, there are some standing here who will not taste death before they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom’.

As time passed, later Christians began to realise that Jesus wouldn’t necessarily return in their lifetimes - the first Christians had died. Jesus was delayed like the bridegroom. So they came to believe that Christ’s 2nd Coming would be at some indefinite future date, at the ‘end of time’.

I’m not convinced by this theology of the 2nd Coming – it smacks too much of a vengeful, not a loving God. I don’t think it is what Jesus meant to convey to those he spoke to.

But there is another way of looking at the parable, a way I prefer. Perhaps when Jesus refers to the undefined future coming of the bridegroom – or to the end times, because this parable is surrounded by other end-times parables - he is really talking metaphorically about a typical time, any old time. No one can know when that time will be, but perhaps Jesus is telling his disciples that each one of them should expect to personally encounter him again, during their lives not in the indefinite future. That is when they will be judged, depending on whether they are ready to greet him or not.

Looked at this way, the parable teaches us that Jesus’ disciples – like the bridesmaids – must prepare themselves to be ready to greet him – as the bridegroom – whenever he comes. And who are Jesus’s disciples today? – You and I, all of us, of course!

If we are wise, we will prepare ourselves to recognise and respond when Jesus returns – though in truth he never really left us: ‘Remember’, Jesus says, ‘I am with you always, to the end of the age’ (Matthew 28:20).

If we are wise, we will prepare ourselves to hear and respond to the prompting of the Spirit – ‘The Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything’, says Jesus, ‘and remind you of all I have said to you’ (John 14:26).

If we are wise, we will prepare ourselves to discern that still small voice of the God Jesus calls his Father – to which we should respond as Eli advised Samuel to do: ‘Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening’ (1Samuel 3:9).

If on the other hand we are foolish, if we are unprepared, if we are not ready when the time comes, we will miss the opportunity our Trinity-shaped God freely offers to each and every one of us, the opportunity to share in the joy of his kingdom, the opportunity to share in the joy of doing what is right and just, simply because that is what God calls us to do.

Ultimately, if we cannot respond to God we condemn ourselves. That surely is the sin against the Holy Spirit, the only sin that can never be forgiven.

Harvest justice and righteousness

2011-10-16T18:26:00.005+01:00

A harvest festival address given at Dorrha on Sunday 16th October 2011

We all love the harvest season and Harvest Festivals, don’t we?
Just look around us at this beautifully decorated church, filled with harvest bounty - how can we fail to feel thankful? The decorators have every right to be proud of their skilful arrangements. Those who have grown the produce have every right to be proud that the best of it should be displayed here in God’s house. We all enjoy the colours and the smells of the fruit and the vegetables and the flowers, we all enjoy the familiar harvest hymns, and we all enjoy seeing so many cheerful people, filled with a sense of accomplishment, now that the year’s work has been crowned with success.

Let’s also take a moment to reflect on the sheer breadth and variety of our harvest:

We have the staples: we have wheat for bread, barley for beer, oats for porridge, forage for cattle - and I saw a pile of good black turf in the porch. Farmers were worried by the lack of sun earlier, but in the end it’s been a good harvest - so my farming neighbour tells me, and he’s not usually so positive. Yields are generally up a bit, and prices are good, though broken weather damaged some of the hay, he tells me.

But there is so much more than staples for us to enjoy. There’s milk and butter and cheese, fruit and nuts and honey, blackberries and mushrooms, plums and apples, potatoes and turnips, pumpkins and marrows, cabbage and lettuce, peas and beans. My beans have done particularly well this year, despite a slow start – after filling the freezer there’s more than enough to share with friends. My wife Marty has had terrific strawberries and flowers too. And generous beekeeping friends have given us lovely honey, as I wait impatiently to harvest my own next year from my new beehive.

There are the animals too – we have this year’s foals and calves and lambs, chicks, ducklings, and goslings to delight us. And we must not forget the fruit of our own bodies, our children and grandchildren born this year – I rejoice in a new grandson, Cormac, born in September.

Psalm 65:12-13 expresses it in beautiful poetry, ‘The pastures of the wilderness overflow, the hills gird themselves with joy, the meadows clothe themselves with flocks, the valleys deck themselves with grain, they shout and sing together for joy’.

Thanks be to God for giving us so much joy!

In the OT reading from Deuteronomy (8:7-18), Moses speaks to the Israelites as they wait to cross into the Promised Land.
‘The Lord your God is bringing you into a good land’, he says, ‘a land with flowing streams, with springs and underground waters welling up in valleys and hills, a land of wheat and barley’. Well, God has placed us in just such a land, hasn’t he? We live in ‘a land where (we) may eat bread without scarcity, where (we) lack nothing’. It is surely right for us, like the Israelites, to ‘eat our fill and bless the Lord (our) God for the good land that he has given (us)’.

But Moses also gives the children of Israel a warning. As they enjoy all these good things, he tells them, ‘Take care that you do not forget the Lord your God, by failing to keep his commandments, his ordinances and his statutes, which I am commanding you today’. For, he says, it is God who makes it possible to have all this wealth of good things. And, he adds, if you fail to keep his commandments – that is if you fail to live as God intends you to live – terrible things will happen to you. In the very next verse he says, ‘If you do forget the Lord your God and follow other gods to serve and worship them, I solemnly warn you today that you shall surely perish’.

In his long speech to the Israelites, of which today’s reading is a tiny part - and it is long, taking up almost all of Deuteronomy - Moses restates the Ten Commandments, and expands on them at length, as a rule of life for the Israelites. Moses believes God is just and righteous; God has made a covenant with the Israelites; this requires them to behave with justice and righteousness to other Israelites, because that is what God does.

“Justice and Righteousness” - these two words are like mirror images, because to do what is just is to do what is right and, vice versa, to do what is right is to do what is just – these two words run right through the OT like a vein of precious metal through rock.

In his life and teaching Jesus extends Moses’ idea of God’s covenant of justice and righteousness to apply to all people, Israelites and gentiles alike. And it is Moses’ rule of life that Jesus summarises for us when he says: ‘You shall love the Lord your God’; and ‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself’. Love of God and love of neighbour go together like two sides of the same coin.

In our 2nd reading, St Paul encourages the Corinthians to be generous (2Corinthians 9:6-15).
Paul is organising a collection for the poverty-stricken church in Jerusalem among the gentile churches he has planted. He has just told the Corinthians about how generous the Macedonian Christians have been - and he clearly had already told the Macedonians how generous the Corinthians would be - now he urges the Corinthians to be generous too.

He tells them what every farmer and gardener knows – you reap what you sow: ‘The one who sows sparingly will also reap sparingly, and the one who sows generously will also reap bountifully’.

He tells them they must not think they are under any compulsion to give more than they feel they can, because, he says, ‘God loves a cheerful giver’.

But he reminds them that God has given them quite enough so that they can afford to be generous. ‘God is able to provide you with every blessing in abundance’, he says, ‘so that by always having enough of everything, you may share abundantly in every good work’.

And he tells them that by being generous, not just to the needy in Jerusalem but to all others, they will both glorify God and benefit themselves spiritually. ‘You will be enriched in every way for your great generosity, which will produce thanksgiving to God … because of the surpassing grace of God that he has given you’.

We must, I think, listen very carefully both to Moses’ warning and to Paul’s urging.
Moses warns against breaking God’s covenant of justice and righteousness. Consider the situation that faces us today. The global crash continues to blight the lives of so many of us, and looks set to do so for years to come. And the gathering environmental catastrophe threatens to unpick the very web of life on this planet on which we all depend, as we are slowly, perhaps too slowly, coming to realise. Could it be that both crises result from a failure to keep God’s covenant? I rather think they do. Both crises are driven by human greed - by people who always want more and more, because they reckon they are worth it – such people worship Mammon in place of God, I think.

Paul urges generosity as a positive value. God who is just and righteous will generously supply more than enough to allow us all to flourish. But it is in our own interests to respond justly and righteously, by taking no more than we need and generously sharing the surplus with those with little.

I wouldn’t for a moment suggest that anyone here is greedy or ungenerous - though none of us is perfect. But it is plain for all to see that greed and lack of generosity are deeply embedded within the globalised world we live in. To change this won’t be easy, but it is necessary. Both as a society and as individuals, we need to cultivate justice and righteousness; we need to know when we have enough, we need to recognise when our neighbour has too little, and we need to listen when God calls us to share what he has so graciously given us. If we can’t do that, the future for the human race is dire.

So as we enjoy this harvest bounty, let us rededicate ourselves to justice and righteousness.
Let us love God and thank him for his good gifts. Let us also love our neighbours and share his gifts with those in need of them. And let us pray that all without exception may have enough.

In this way we can join together to pronounce this blessing on all our communities:

Blessed are we when we sing God’s praises
and walk together faithfully on God’s earth.
Blessed are we when we proclaim God’s justice
and share together the fruits of creation.
Blessed are we when we are guided by God’s wisdom
and live together in harmony with God’s world.

The golden calf

2011-10-09T15:38:00.004+01:00

The story of the Golden Calf (Exodus 32:1-14) is a strange and ancient story.
The setting is Mount Sinai more than 3000 years ago, at the start of the 40 years that the children of Israel wander as nomads in the desert, after their escape from Egypt and before they arrive in Canaan, the land promised to their ancestor Abraham.

The characters are the Israelite people, Aaron the priest, Moses the prophet who is Aaron’s younger brother – and Yahweh, translated as the Lord. Yahweh, the Israelites were convinced, was the one true God, with whom they had a special relationship.

The story is part of the foundation myth of the Israelites, through which they understood their special relationship with God and its implications for how they should live. But does it have any relevance for us today?

Let me reflect on the characters in the story, before addressing that question.

But before that I must go back a bit to set the story in context.
Three months after Moses led the Israelites out of Egypt they reached Mount Sinai. There Yahweh spoke to Moses and gave him what we know as the Ten Commandments, and a lot of other detailed instructions about how to behave, which Moses relayed to the people. The Israelites confirmed their covenant with Yahweh, saying ‘All that the Lord has spoken we will do, and we will be obedient’.

Moses then climbed the mountain a second time, where Yahweh speaks to him again; this time giving precise instructions for building the portable tabernacle in which Yahweh will dwell with his people, and how Aaron and his offspring are to lead the people in worshipping him. We are told that ‘Moses was on the mountain for forty days and forty nights’.

That's when we come to the story of the Golden Calf in today’s reading.

Turning to the characters, we begin with the Israelites.
Can you empathise with them? I can.

They must have felt very insecure – as refugees surely do today - they had left behind all that was familiar in Egypt, however onerous their slavery had been. And now Moses had left them - perhaps he would never come back? perhaps the messages he brought from Yahweh were an illusion? No doubt they felt a need for the reassurance of something familiar and concrete to focus their hopes for the future on. It is very human to seek something to live for, something to give meaning to life – it is sometimes said that there is a God-shaped hole in every person which must be filled one way or another.

So ‘the people gathered around Aaron and said to him, “Come make gods for us, who shall go before us”’. Aaron went along with them. He took their gold jewellery – their rainy day savings, I suppose – and he made it into a golden calf, just like the familiar idols they had known in Egypt. The people shouted, ‘These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt’. And they worshipped the golden calf with sacrifices - and they ran wild in an orgy of feasting.

Oh what faithlessness! The people are breaking the first two of the Ten Commandments they so recently vowed to keep: ‘I am the Lord your God… you shall have no other gods before me’; and ‘You shall not make for yourself an idol’. They are putting something made by human hands, an idol, in place of Yahweh, the God who made all things, to whom they are bound in a covenant.

So what about Aaron?
With Moses away Aaron is the Israelites’ leader. He is a levite, a descendent of Levi, an hereditary priest of Yahweh. Yet he makes the golden calf, an idol, when the people, or some of them, came to demand he do so - because, he later tells Moses, he was frightened of these people.

But I don’t think he joined in the people's idolatry. In fact he seems to have tried to divert the people from it. He declared that ‘Tomorrow shall be a festival to the Lord’ – that is to Yahweh, not to the idol. Perhaps he believed that he could present the golden calf as a symbol to represent Yahweh, to help the Israelites worship the one true God. But if so, he was terribly wrong – they worshipped the golden calf as an idol - and then they ran amok.

Aaron was surely a weak leader, and he displayed bad judgement.

Then there’s Moses.
Moses is a prophet, someone who converses with Yahweh and articulates Yahweh's wishes to the people.

On the mountain Moses receives the insight to see that the Israelites needed something concrete on which to focus their worship. And he also receives a vision, written on tablets of stone by Yahweh, of what would provide just such a focus without replacing Yahweh by an idol.

Moses also receives the insight that the Israelite people are wilful, inclined to ignore Yahweh’s wishes when it suits them; ‘I have seen this people, how stiff-necked they are’. He feared that Yahweh in his wrath would wreak a great vengeance on the Israelites. So he pleads with Yahweh to spare them, reminding Yahweh of his promises to Abraham, Isaac and Israel. ‘And the Lord changed his mind about the disaster that he planned to bring on his people’, we are told.

But unlike Yahweh, Moses is entirely unforgiving. After the passage we heard, we are told of his fury when he came down from the mountain and saw what was going on. He broke the tablets of stone on the ground. He took the golden calf, ‘burned it with fire, ground it to powder, scattered it on the water, and made the Israelites drink it’ – rather like rubbing a puppy’s nose in its own dirt, I suppose. And then he incited the sons of Levi to slaughter 3,000 of the Israelites who had worshipped the idol and were still running amok. There is blood on Moses’ hands, and not for the first time.

And where is Yahweh in all this?
Yahweh worked through Moses to teach the children of Israel, 1st that it is wrong to worship an idol in place of the one true God, and 2nd that the one true God is faithful and will keep his promises.

Moses understood that Yahweh is not like one of the jealous, vengeful gods of popular belief in the ancient Middle East. Yahweh is faithful to his people - Yahweh can be relied on to keep his promises. Yahweh does not go in for collective punishment. But Moses also believed that Yahweh would in the fullness of time individually punish those who disobeyed him; he heard Yahweh say, ‘Nevertheless, when the day comes for punishment, I will punish them for their sin’.

Our Christian understanding of the one true God has moved on from the Israelites’ ideas about Yahweh. In particular we have Jesus Christ’s example of loving self-sacrifice, and we have his message that God will forgive our sins if we only repent. Our God is not just faithful, but also merciful. I believe that Moses probably misheard what Yahweh had to say about punishment. God does not punish his people – we bring punishment on ourselves when we fail to repent

So is anything in this strange story relevant for us today? I think so.
First, surely, we must all recognise that we are not so very different from the Israelites – like them, like all human beings, we are all too likely to be ‘stiff-necked’, to put something we create in place of God. Pleasure, possessions, money - country, class, tribe - party, markets, economic systems – how easy it is to make any of these into a golden calf. When we do, we lose touch with the kingdom of God in which all people can flourish - and bad things happen. Isn’t that what the global crash is about? Isn't that what the gathering ecological disaster is about? That is why God forbids idolatry, I think. We must always be on guard against golden calves, focus our worship and attention on God our loving Father, and work to make his kingdom a reality.

Second, I think Christian leaders should reflect on Aaron. Aaron made an idol for the people to worship - perhaps out of fear, perhaps because he thought people needed a concrete image to help them worship the one true God. He was weak, he was wrong. Is it possible that some Christian leaders today allow the dogmas and rituals of their churches to obscure the God that Jesus shows us? They should take care they do not – and that includes me when I lead MP and talk to you from this pulpit!

Debt forgiveness

2011-09-11T17:18:00.005+01:00

When I first read today’s NT reading (Matt 18:21-35), I thought to myself ‘How topical’!
Jesus tells us a story about debt forgiveness, as an analogy for how the kingdom of heaven works. And debt forgiveness is the big political issue being debated in Ireland just now. The question is, should distressed mortgage borrowers have part or all of their debts cancelled, or not?

I think it’s worth reflecting on what Jesus is teaching Peter and the disciples through the story, before asking what relevance it might have for the debt forgiveness debate.

The story Jesus tells is about a king who wishes to settle accounts with his slaves.
The king has lent 10,000 talents to a slave - an unimaginably large sum, in today’s money well over €1billion. The slave cannot repay it, so the king threatens to make him bankrupt – to sell him, his family and all his possessions to recover what he can. But when the slave appeals for mercy, the king out of mercy forgives him the debt and lets him go free.

But slave #1 has lent 100 denarii to another slave - a more modest sum, equivalent to roughly 100 days wages, say €10,000. As slave #1 leaves the king’s presence, he sees slave #2, grabs him by the throat and demands to be repaid. He ignores slave #2’s pleas for time to pay and has him thrown into the debtors’ prison.

When the king hears about it he is furious. He calls slave #1 to him and says, ‘You wicked slave! I forgave you all that debt because you pleaded with me. Should you not have had mercy on your fellow-slave, as I had mercy on you?’

Jesus expects us all to see that slave #1 is a nasty piece of work. How unjust it is for someone who has been forgiven such an unimaginably large debt to force another to pay a modest one! So the king acts justly when he hands slave #1 over to be tortured until his whole debt has been paid.

But the story isn’t really about debt forgiveness.
Consider the context in which Jesus tells it. Peter has come to Jesus to ask, ‘Lord, if another member of the church sins against me, how often should I forgive? As many as seven times?’ To which Jesus replies, ‘Not seven times, but I tell you, seventy-seven times’.

Now, the Rabbis believed that God would only forgive a sinner three times, based on an obscure text from the prophet Amos; and since nobody could be more merciful than God, no one should forgive another more than three times - ‘Three strikes and you’re out’, as it were.

Peter went beyond that to suggest seven; perhaps hoping that Jesus would commend his greater mercy. But in his response Jesus teaches Peter and the other disciples – and through them us – that there should be no limit to our mercy toward our neighbour.

Jesus tells the story to explain why this is so. He concludes it saying, ‘So my heavenly Father will also do to you, if you do not forgive your brother or sister from your heart.’ God’s mercy, Jesus is saying, is without limit. God forgives each one of us an unimaginably large amount of wrong. Therefore God expects us to forgive whatever modest wrongs other people have done to us. And if we don’t, we will forfeit God’s forgiveness ourselves.

The story is about the forgiveness of sins, not about the forgiveness of debts. It is about how Jesus’s disciples must be forgiving of the people who do them wrong, if they wish to receive God’s forgiveness for the wrongs they do.

Even so, does the story have any relevance to the debt forgiveness debate?
Only, I think, if we can identify clearly people who are suffering and need to receive the mercy that God shows us. This is not necessarily easy, so it is quite possible that Christians will conscientiously come to differing conclusions - this is my view for what it's worth.

The debate centres on ordinary people who took out large mortgages to buy overpriced houses during the recent bubble. No doubt they were foolish, but they did so to a chorus of experts advising them it was the right thing to do, that there would be a soft landing. Now they find their houses are worth a fraction of what they paid, and more and more can no longer keep up the mortgage payments, because their pay has been cut or they’ve lost their job.

Many, particularly young families who bought at the height of the bubble, face a lifetime of scrimping to pay a never ending debt, effectively making slaves of them. Without relief they will suffer terribly for their foolishness or just plain bad luck. And for many, relief must involve more than just rescheduling payments and extending mortgage terms – it will be necessary to forgive part or all of their debt.

There are some who argue against this, to avoid something they call ‘moral hazard’. But Irish banks have been given untold billions of Euro with which to pay back the money they so crassly borrowed from bondholders. In effect we the people of Ireland, and our friends in Europe, have forgiven them their debts, even though bondholders have forgiven nothing. What about the ‘moral hazard’ of that? Is there one law for high finance and another for the little people? I suggest it is our Christian duty to forgive the foolishness of ordinary folk and reject arguments about ‘moral hazard’. It is the morality of Mammon and nothing to do with Christian morality.

We must as a society – we remain a Christian society – find ways to help those crushed by impossible debts.

Clean & Unclean

2011-08-14T15:36:00.004+01:00

Address given at Templederry & Nenagh on 14th August 2011, the 8th Sunday after Trinity, year A.

To be ritually clean was all important to Jews of Jesus’s time.
Jewish law forbade anyone who was unclean from approaching God in worship, and such a person would be shunned by all pious Jews. They believed that a person or thing was made unclean by contact with a wide range of things, from a mouse to pig meat, to a dead body, a menstruating woman, or a gentile. And this uncleanness was, so to speak, infectious. If a mouse touched a pot, the pot became unclean and anything put in it became unclean. Anyone who touched or ate anything from the pot became unclean. And anyone who touched such an unclean person became unclean themselves.

No doubt these ideas had their ancient roots in sensible, practical hygiene. But by the time of Jesus they had nothing to do with good sense or hygiene. Religious leaders had elaborated in religious law a complicated system of purifying unclean things to make them clean, which included ritual washing of hands before meals. For the scribes and Pharisees, following the correct washing rituals had become as important as keeping every other aspect of the Jewish Law, including the Ten Commandments. The rituals had got quite out of hand.

This is the background to today’s reading from Matthew’s Gospel (Matthew 15:10-20).
Just before the reading, a party of scribes and Pharisees from Jerusalem has challenged Jesus, saying ‘Why do your disciples break the tradition of the elders? For they do not wash their hands before they eat.’ Jesus chides them, calling them hypocrites, for insisting people obey the details of a man-made tradition while ignoring the spirit of God’s law expressed in the Ten Commandments.

Then he turns to the crowd, telling them, ‘Listen and understand: it is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person, but it is what comes out that defiles’. As he explains to Peter, ‘What ever goes into the mouth enters the stomach, and goes out into the sewer. But what comes from the mouth proceeds from the heart, and this is what defiles. For out of the heart come evil intentions, murder, adultery, fornication, theft, false witness, slander. These are what defile a person, but to eat with unwashed hands does not defile.’

In other words, Jesus says, what matters to God is not ritual observance, but the state of our hearts, because it is the state of our hearts that leads us to bad deeds. No wonder the Pharisees took offence! If Jesus is right, their whole theory of religion is wrong, their rules and regulations about purity are pointless. Instead true religion requires them to look inside themselves, to control their human impulses which lead to bad deeds. It si these which offend God, which lead them into sin

We Christians don’t have rituals to purify ourselves as many religions do, including modern Jews, Muslim’s and Hindus.
Though that doesn’t mean we don’t have taboos – I’ve yet to see horse on the menu in Ireland, though it is a delicious meat!

But we have built up great edifices of ritual and tradition over time, as all religions have. No doubt ritual and tradition can be helpful – but only to the extent to which they help us look into our hearts and strive to live as God intends us to live, loving God and loving our neighbours as ourselves. In today’s reading Jesus teaches us that we must not let our rituals and traditions get in the way of this. But unfortunately ritual and tradition all too often do just that, causing disputes between Christians.

Some issues are quite trivial, such as whether or not to share the sign of peace. Others are more serious. Details of ritual and tradition keep Christians of different denominations from recognising each other’s baptism, or sharing in the Lord’s Supper. And our Anglican Communion is threatened by schism over disputes about the ordination of women and the acceptability of homosexual behaviour, in which people appeal to tradition to make their cases.

Christians engaging in such disputes should, I think, reflect on Jesus’s teaching in today’s Gospel. What matters is the state of a person’s heart, and the deeds it prompts, not their ritual observance and tradition.

And all Christians should also reflect on Jesus’s advice on how to deal with Pharisees.
This what he says: ‘Every plant that my heavenly Father has not planted will be uprooted. Let them alone; they are blind guides of the blind. And if one blind person guides another, both will fall into the pit.’ In other words, he says, leave it to God to deal with those who wrong.

When we conscientiously disagree about what is right or wrong, we should not try to bludgeon our opponents into accepting our view. We must do what our God given conscience and reason tell us is right. But we should leave those with whom we disagree to go their own way. If that causes schism, so be it. If they are wrong, if they are ‘the blind leading the blind’, our heavenly Father will deal with them in his own way.

As he will deal with us if it is we that are wrong! We need to pray for guidance, and listen carefully to the prompting of the Holy Spirit, so that we do not fall into the pit like the Pharisees of Jesus's day.

Walking on water

2011-08-07T14:12:00.005+01:00

Address given at Dunkerrin and Shinrone on 7th August 2011, the 7th Sunday after Trinity.

Have you ever been out on the water at night in a small boat in a gale? I have, and I can tell you I was terrified!
I was a teenager, and it was a wild night. To get back to the cottage on an island in Lough Derg, my mother and I had to row less than a hundred yards. It was blowing a gale, with a big sea running, and waves breaking. With one oar each, side by side, we pulled against the wind, inching forward, sometimes being thrown sideways as the wind caught the side of the boat, shipping water all the while. We made several attempts and were thrown back, but eventually we made it to calmer waters, and arrived safely on the other shore. By that time I was shaking like a leaf, terrified. My mother probably was too, though she never let me see it of course. It taught me a lesson I’ve never forgotten: respect for the water – it’s not our native element, and we underestimate the power of wind and wave at our peril.

Today’s reading from St Matthew’s Gospel (Matthew 14:22-33) brings this memory back to me. The same event is recorded in Mark’s and John’s Gospels. I feel I can identify with the disciples, even though I suppose I wasn’t in real danger, as they must have been. The Sea of Galilee is renowned for the fierce and dangerous storms that suddenly appear out of nowhere, and abate just as quickly. I see it in my minds eye as rather like our Lough Derg – it’s about 40% bigger in area and wider, but not so long. And sailors know how quickly a squall can blow up on Lough Derg.

The disciples had got into trouble in one of Galilee’s notorious storms.
Immediately after feeding the 5000, Jesus sent the disciples off in a boat, while he told the crowds to go home, and went off up the mountain to pray by himself.

The disciples had set out in the evening light, unaware of the coming storm. Mark tells us that Jesus ‘saw that they were straining at the oars against an adverse wind’. I imagine the night was bright and moonlit for Jesus to be able to see the little boat.

‘Early in the morning’, Matthew tells us, Jesus ‘came walking toward them on the sea’. The Greek words translated as ‘early in the morning’ literally mean ‘in the 4th watch of the night’. In those days, with no clocks, time during the night was counted in 4 watches of 3 hours each. So sometime between 3 and 6 am, Jesus, walking on the high ground after praying all night, saw the little boat struggling through waves and spray, and came down to help.

But what is this about Jesus walking on the sea?
Should we imagine Jesus far from land, in the middle of the lake, walking on the water, stepping over the waves? This is how most Christians have imagined the scene, I suppose, and many artists have depicted it. But we should be aware of a possible problem with translation here. The Greek words translated as ‘on the lake’ could equally mean ‘towards the lake’, or ‘at the lake’, that is by the lake shore.

The truth is that there are two perfectly possible interpretations of this passage. The first describes Jesus miraculously walking on the water in the middle of the lake. In the second, the disciples’ boat is driven by the wind to the shore, Jesus comes down from the mountain to help when he sees them struggling in the dim light of dawn, and Jesus walks through the surf towards the boat. Both interpretations are equally valid. Some will prefer one and some the other.

When the disciples saw Jesus they were terrified, believing him to be a ghost, until Jesus spoke to them, saying, ‘Take heart, it is I; do not be afraid’.

However we interpret the Greek, the significance to the disciples is perfectly clear: In the hour of their need, Jesus came to them, to help and reassure them.

Only Matthew adds the detail about Peter trying to walk on the water too.
It’s a charming vignette, and so in character for Peter, from the other things we know of him. He was brave and impetuous, but he often found it hard to live up to his good intentions. Remember, it was Peter who swore undying loyalty to Jesus only to deny 3 times that he knew him just a few hours later.

When Jesus said ‘Come’, Peter bravely ‘got out of the boat, started walking on the water, and came toward Jesus’. But his courage failed him and he started to sink. ‘Lord, save me!’ he shouted, and ‘Jesus immediately reached out his hand and caught him, saying to him, “You of little faith, why did you doubt?”’

Whether Jesus was miraculously walking on water, or whether he came through the surf on the shore to help the disciples in the boat, Peter surely learned this: It is not always easy to follow Jesus, but Jesus is always there to catch you when you stumble and sink.

Finally, is there anything we can learn from this story, 2000 years on?
Well, surely the same things that Peter and the disciples learned! They were privileged to know Jesus the man and to sail the Sea of Galilee with him. But we are privileged too to know the spiritual reality of the living Christ.

In life the wind is often against us. Life for every one of us sometimes feels like a desperate struggle, with ourselves, with our circumstances, with temptations, with sorrow, with the consequences of bad decisions we have made. But none of us need struggle alone. In the hour of our need, Jesus will come to us as he did to the disciples long ago, to help and reassure us. Just listen for his voice saying, ‘Take heart, it is I; do not be afraid’!

If we seek to follow Jesus, we will find like Peter that it is not always easy. It will test our faith at times. Our faith will not always be enough and we will have doubts. But when we feel ourselves going under, if we cry out ‘Lord save me’, Jesus will be there for us, just as he was for Peter, reaching out his hand to catch us. Jesus is always there to save us when we are sinking. Just listen for his voice saying, ‘You of little faith, why did you doubt?’

Teeth will be provided!

2011-07-17T16:11:00.002+01:00

Sermon given at Templederry and St Mary's, Nenagh, on 17th July 2011, the 4th Sunday after Trinity.

Have you heard the old joke about the hell-fire preacher?

Reaching the climax of his sermon about the day of judgement, in ringing tones he declares the fate of thosewho fail to meet the standards of God’s Kingdom: ‘They will be thrown into the furnace of fire, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth’. At which point an old woman puts up her hand and says “But Rector, I have no teeth”, to which the hell-fire preacher replies “Madam, teeth will be provided”.

Joking aside, it is always worth pondering the parables Jesus uses to teach his followers. The parable of the weeds of the field in today’s reading from Matthew’s Gospel (13:24-30, 36-43) is no exception. So let’s look at it a little more closely.

The images Jesus uses in his parable would have been very vivid and familiar to a Galilean audience.

Weeds were one of the curses against which a farmer had to labour before the discovery of weed-killers - and I guess they still are. In this parable the weed is no doubt bearded darnel, a kind of rye-grass. In its early stages darnel is indistinguishable from wheat. Only when they both produce seed-heads can they be told apart. But by then their roots are so intertwined that the darnel can’t be weeded out without damaging theroots of the wheat. Weeding would only reduce the yield of wheat.

The wheat and darnel can’t be safely separated while they are growing, but in the end they must be, because the grain of the darnel is slightly poisonous. In quantity it causes dizziness and sickness. So the master in the parable gets the reapers to separate them at harvest time. The darnel will be bundled up and burned, while the wheat will be threshed and gathered into the barn.

The idea of an enemy deliberately sowing weeds in someone else’s field would also have struck a chord. It was a crime forbidden in Roman law, which prescribed a punishment for it, so we can be sure it happened.

Jesus tells the crowd that the parable is about the kingdom of heaven, and Matthew records him later explaining it to his disciples, to help them – and us – understand what he meant by it. It is one of several parables recorded by Matthew in which Jesus likens the kingdom of heaven to different things – others are a mustard seed and yeast mixed with flour and water to make dough. Jesus is teaching by analogy, and I feel sure we should not take it too literally, but rather look for the underlying messages.

It is the devil, says Jesus, who sows the weeds, the children of the evil one, in the field which is the world.

We all know instinctively, don’t we, what is right and what is wrong. We have been created as souls with consciences, in the image of God, to use the imagery of the Book of Genesis. But we all also experience insistent little voices within us which tempt us to do what our God-given conscience tells us is not right. Theologians call it original sin. Jesus personifies it as the work of the devil. But in these post-Freudian times I think it may be easier to think of it as the bad part of ourselves, that part of own psyche which allows and even encourages us to damage ourselves and others.

Let me illustrate how insidious it is with some examples. Advertising campaigns play on our innate greed by whispering, ‘Because you’re worth it’. They also tell us we can be rich and happy if we buy a lottery ticket, or bet with Paddy Power. It is the thin end of a very fat wedge. Further down that wedge we find unscrupulous interests that seek to persuade us that we and our communities will benefit if we only permit them to build a casino resort in Two-mile-borris. Rev Brian Griffin has taken a brave and principled Methodist stand against it, drawing our attention to the evidence of the damage such developments have done elsewhere. I think we should applaud and support Brian Griffin's stand.

However, Jesus warns us against pulling the weeds in case we uproot the wheat.

He is teaching us not to be too quick in our judgements of others. We are all too liable to classify and label people as good or bad without knowing all the facts. And people can change. We can be redeemed from sin by the grace of God, and equally we can disfigure a good life by a sudden collapse into sin. As Jesus says elsewhere, ‘Let he that is without sin cast the first stone’.

We are not entitled to make a final judgement about the righteousness of any other person – only God has that right. It is God alone who can discern the good and the bad. It is God alone who sees all of an individual and all of a person’s life.

Of course we can’t help forming opinions of others, using our reason which is also God-given, and we are right to do so. And it is surely also right that we should let such opinions guide our actions when appropriate. But we must never forget we may be mistaken, as I may be in my opinion of those promoting the Two-mile-borris casino (though I don't think I am). And we would do well to remember the Quaker maxim – ‘There is something of God in every person’ – and do our best to find it.

But of one thing Jesus assures us – we will be judged eventually, every one of us.

‘Just as the weeds are collected and burned up with fire, so will it be at the end of the age. The Son of Man will send his angels, and they will collect out of his kingdom all causes of sin and all evildoers, and they will throw them into the furnace of fire, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.’

When Jesus talks about the ‘end of the age’, I don’t think he would wish us to take it literally as the final moment of time. Rather I think we should see it as a time which will come to us all – as certain as our own death – in which we see ourselves as God sees us: in one piece from our conception to our death; how we have touched those we have met for good or ill; all the good in us, and all the bad too.

At this time we will see clearly: we will burn with torment and shame for the sins we have caused and the evil we have done in our lives. We will weep and gnash our teeth. But for the good we have done, we ‘will shine like the sun in the kingdom of the Father’.

Let us pray then that by God’s grace and mercy his angels may find us more like the good seed than the weed seed, and gather us up to shine in the kingdom, not burn in the furnace.

The road to Emmaus

2011-05-08T16:05:00.002+01:00

An address given at Templederry & Killodiernan on the 3rd Sunday of Easter, 8th May 2011

Going to Emmaus, Robert Zünd, 1877, Kunstmuseum St. Gallen

St Luke is an immensely skilled story-teller.

In today’s NT reading (Luke 24:13-35), he has given us one of the world’s great short stories, as he relates what happened between Jerusalem and Emmaus on that first Easter day.

He is economical with words, but he paints a vivid scene. There is suspense and character development too. And like the best short stories it leaves us with more questions than answers.

Let’s try to enter the story in our imaginations.

Two disciples of Jesus, Cleopas and his friend, set off walking on the road to Emmaus in the late afternoon.

They walk into the setting sun – Emmaus is about 7 miles west of Jerusalem, much the same as the distance from Templederry or Killodiernan to Nenagh. Their journey will take 2 hours, more or less. And as they walk, they talk – trying to make sense of the shocking events of the last 3 days.

They had hoped that Jesus of Nazareth was the Messiah who would redeem

Israel

. But the chief priests and leaders had handed him over to the Roman authorities to be condemned to death and crucified. Their belief in him was shattered, their dreams turned to ashes. And early this very morning, some women of their group had astounded them by claiming to have had a vision in which angels said this Jesus was still alive. The shock of his crucifixion must have unbalanced them. And yet …

As Cleopas and his friend walk and talk, they fall in with a stranger walking the same road. It is Jesus, Luke tells us. But for some reason they do not recognise him, even though they know him so well. Will they recognise him later? We are kept in suspense.

When they explain to him what they are talking about, this stranger/Jesus says, ‘Was it not necessary that the Messiah should suffer these things and then enter into his glory?’ He goes on to interpret for them all that the Hebrew Scriptures have to say about the Messiah. Their hearts are strangely warmed by this conversation. Yet still they do not recognise him.

When they get to Emmaus they press this stranger/Jesus to stay and eat with them because it is late. Finally, only when ‘he took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them’, they recognise the stranger to be Jesus. He promptly vanishes – but everything is changed for them, changed because they recognise the risen Christ.

Cleopas and his friend recall how their hearts burned within them while Jesus expounded scripture to them on the road. They hurry back to Jerusalem to find the other disciples to tell them about meeting Jesus. But before Cleopas and his friend have a chance to tell their story, those who remained in Jerusalem tell them excitedly, ‘The Lord has risen indeed, and he has appeared to Simon’.

Luke’s story of the road to Emmaus leaves so many questions hanging.

For instance, why did Cleopas and his friend not recognise Jesus until they ate together? I can’t believe it was just because the setting sun was in their eyes.

The Gospel stories in which the disciples meet Jesus after his resurrection are mysterious. His friends find it hard to recognise him – not just the disciples on the road to Emmaus, but Mary Magdalen who mistakes him for a gardener, and Simon Peter and other disciples who meet him as they are fishing on the shore in Galilee. He appears and disappears suddenly. The risen Christ is not just Jesus’s corpse magically brought back to life. The stories, I think, are about spiritual meetings - not physical meetings, as you and I might meet as we come and go.

And Christians have continued to meet the risen Christ in ways which change their lives. Just as Paul met Christ on the road to Damascus. Just as St Francis heard Christ speak to him in a ruined church outside Assisi. And just as innumerable others have felt Christ’s presence make their hearts burn right up to our own day. This should not surprise us – after all, in the last words of Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus tells his disciples, ‘Remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age’.

Cleopas and his friend recognise Jesus when the stranger says grace before their supper – when he gives thanks for the food they are about to eat: ‘He took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them’. This is quite simply what Jesus used to do at the start of a meal. He did it at the last supper, but the Gospels record him doing so many times before. I think he intended his Eucharistic action – the Greek word literally means ‘thanksgiving’ – as a sign that God’s kingdom is present with us. God’s kingdom in which we take God’s good gifts, processed by human hands, give thanks for them, and share them with our neighbours. May God grant that like Cleopas and his friend we too may encounter the risen Christ in the Eucharist, which we with all other Christians re-enact to this day as Holy Communion.

I would love to know what Jesus said to Cleopas and his friend, what made their hearts burn so.

How amazing it would be to hear Jesus open the scriptures in person!

But I will never know. Any more than I can know what Jesus meant when he said ‘Was it not necessary that the Messiah should suffer these things and then enter into his glory?’ Or know what happened when Jesus appeared to Peter. Luke simply does not tell us.

Yet that surely is as it is meant to be. I feel certain that the risen Christ reveals to each one of us just those things which are right for us, which we need to know. We recognise this is Christ at work because we feel our hearts warmed. But there are other things which we will never know, which we are not meant to know, and which would do us no good to know.

Good Friday Vigil - Watching & Enduring

2011-04-23T15:57:00.002+01:00

It was my privilege yesterday to lead the Three Hours Vigil in St Mary's, Nenagh, meditating on Christ's last words from the cross. We heard readings from scripture and reflections on them. We listened to Theodore Dubois' The Seven Last Words of Christ performed by the Exultate Festival Choir and Orchestra. And we spent time in silence and prayer.

The Three Hours Vigil:
Watching and Enduring

Meditation on the Last Words of Christ

Good Friday, 22^nd April 2011

Introduction

· In the next 3 hours we are going to join inwardly in events that happened nearly 2000 years ago, when Our Lord Jesus Christ was cruelly executed alongside two common criminals, after a travesty of a trial, on trumped up charges, at a place called Golgotha, just outside Jerusalem.

· This is a vigil, not a church service. Like all vigils, it is about watching and enduring.

o We are the watchers. We are watching Jesus as he dies slowly, suffering in agony on a cross. And to help focus our thoughts, we have a life-size cross looming in front of us. It is made of rough-hewn timber, not sanded or varnished, roughly bolted together. The craftsman who made it to this specification would not allow his name to be put on it, because it does not properly display his skill. We can imagine that Jesus’s cross would not have been so very different, a crude, functional instrument of torture.

o We are watching with Jesus, but we are not enduring. Jesus is enduring. He is enduring not just physical, but spiritual torments of desolation, as life drains from him.

o And as we watch Jesus endure, let us try to make sense of this dreadful scene. Is it possible for us to feel – really feel - the magnitude of what Jesus, our Lord and saviour, our friend and brother, did for us so long ago on the cross? It’s difficult, at least I find it so. But let us try.

· To help us, we’re going to meditate on the Seven Last Words of Christ on the cross, as recorded by the Gospel writers. And to place these in context, we are first going to meditate on the events last night in the Garden of Gethsemane and the events of his trial first thing this morning.

· Our meditation will be broken into 20 minute sections, during which we shall hear readings from the Gospels and reflections on the readings, we shall listen to the beautiful choral music of Théodore Dubois’s Seven Last Words, and we will also spend time just being still, pondering in silence the passion of Christ.

12.00 Noon. The Garden of Gethsemane

“Abba, Father, for you all things are possible; remove this cup from me; yet, not what I want, but what you want.” (Mark 14:36)

Reading Mark 14:26-50

Reflection

· Jesus has just spent the evening sharing a meal with his disciples in an upper room – his last meal, the Last Supper, which we re-enact as the Eucharist, as Communion. Then he leads them out walking in the night, out of the city.

· Let’s enter into the scene in our imaginations. There must have been a moon, or they could not have seen the way, but without street-lights the heavens would be ablaze with stars, such as we rarely see these days. It would be pleasantly warm. And as they walk Jesus talks, always teaching them. At the Mount of Olives, Jesus shocks them by saying that they will all desert him; they protest they never would. Then they go into a Garden, the Garden of Gethsemane. I imagine fruit-trees in it: figs, vines, perhaps oranges and lemons. And no doubt carefully tended patches of herbs and vegetables. The air would be heavy with Mediterranean scents.

· But Jesus is agitated. He knows this is the end-game; that at last the authorities are moving to arrest him; that the outcome will be his death. He leaves the others, taking only Peter and James and John with him. He is visibly distressed; he goes on ahead to pray by himself. “I am deeply grieved, even to death; remain here, and keep awake”, he asks them.

· And alone now, Jesus opens his heart in prayer to his loving-Father God, “Remove this cup from me”, he pleads, “yet, not what I want, but what you want.” He knows what is in store for him: the cutting off of fellowship; the severing of joy; the utter darkness, loneliness and desolation beyond endurance. But yet he is perfectly obedient to God’s will, perfectly trusting in his Father’s love. He is a model for us of how to behave when we see the abyss open in front of us. As we will: of one thing we can all be certain, we will suffer the separation of death from all we love.

· Jesus knows what is in store for him, but he does not waver in his trust in the love of God, not for one moment. Even when Peter and James and John cannot stay awake for a single hour to watch with him as he wrestles with the temptation to run away. Even when his chosen disciple Judas betrays him with a kiss. Even when all his disciples flee, as armed men take him away. He knows how unreliable they are, but even so, how it must hurt him! Would you or I be any different to them? Have we never been guilty of desertion or betrayal?

Silence

As we start our first period of silence, you might like to focus your thoughts on 2 things:

· On Jesus’s perfect obedience to the will of our loving Father God, and

· On our own unreliability as his disciples

Prayer

Lord Jesus, in the garden of Gethsemane you faced in prayer

the devils last and greatest temptation:

to take the easy way, the sensible solution,

that was not the will of your Father.

Give us grace, Lord, to listen

to the quiet insistent voice

that draws us up the Calvary path,

far from the world’s highway:

the path that leads to the cross,

but also to the empty tomb

and the glory of resurrection;

for your name’s sake. Amen

John Kingsnorth (adapted)

12.20 The Trial

“If I tell you I am the Messiah, you will not believe; and if I question you, you will not answer. But from now on the Son of Man will be seated at the right hand of the power of God.” (Luke 22:67-69)

Reading Luke 22:54-23:25

Reflection

· One thing that strikes me about Luke’s story of Jesus’s trial is the sheer variety of people involved. As well as the great and powerful who sat in judgement, there are the ordinary folk: there’s Peter, trying to be inconspicuous in the courtyard of the High Priest’s house, and there are those who challenged him there; there are the guards who taunted Jesus; and there’s the rent-a-mob who cried, “Crucify him”.

· Peter was a brave man. John tells us it was Peter who cut off the ear of the High Priest’s servant with his sword. And Peter dares to follow Jesus and his captors back to the High Priest’s house. Yet even brave Peter denies he knows Jesus three times: when the cock crowed, Jesus’s wordless glance reduces him to bitter tears. Would I have been more faithful? Surely not. I’m not as brave as Peter. But we can all take heart that the gift of the Spirit at Pentecost turned the Peter who denied Christ into the Peter who declared his faith boldly in public.

· The guards were brutal men. They blindfolded Jesus, they mocked him and they slapped him around a bit. The point was humiliation. There are still people like that today – just call to mind those shocking photographs from Abu Ghraib. We may not have done quite such ghastly things ourselves, but have we never been guilty of deliberately humiliating someone? Perhaps we’re not so different from them.

· Jesus was actually tried 3 times, by 3 distinct authorities: by the Jewish assembly of elders, by Pilate the Roman Governor, and by Herod the ruler of Galilee.

o A few years ago I saw a TV series on Christ’s passion. It gave a vivid picture of the self-serving, ruthless arrogance of the Temple leaders. To put him out of the way, they try to get Jesus to convict himself from his own lips of blasphemy, a capital offence in Jewish law. I believe Jesus really did think he was the Messiah, the Son of God. But according to Luke Jesus avoids saying so: he neither confirms nor denies it, saying instead the equivalent of ‘if you say so’. I prefer this to Mark’s account, where he says ‘I am’. It seems so much in character for Jesus to try to leave the outcome entirely in his Father’s hands. Yet, in their eagerness to be rid of Jesus, the elders break their own rules of evidence and convict him. But before we condemn them, ask yourself: am I any better? How often have I rushed to judgement, and condemned a court for releasing someone I believe to be guilty?

o They send Jesus to Pilate because only the Roman occupiers can confirm a death sentence. But notice that they don’t accuse him of blasphemy in front of Pilate – that wouldn’t cut much ice with a Roman. Instead they accuse him of being a dissident, claiming he is King of the Jews. Pilate believes he is innocent, and doesn’t want to execute him. He tries again and again to find a way of letting Jesus off: he sends him to Herod, who mocks him and sends him back; he offers to have him flogged; and he seeks the approval of the rent-a-mob crowd to release him. But the mob howls for Jesus to be crucified and a murderer Barabbas to be released. And Pilate is a weak man; a weak man seeking to avoid trouble. He caves in under pressure and washes his hands of this innocent man. But before we condemn Pilate, ask yourself again, am I any better? How often have I gone along with the crowd, for the sake of an easy time, and given my tacit approval for something I know to be wrong?

Music Introduction

O all ye who travel upon the highway,

Harken to me, and behold me;

Was e’er sorrow like unto my sorrow?

For the Lord Almighty hath dealt bitterly with me;

Call me now no more Naomi, from today call me Mara.

Silence

As we move into our 2^nd short period of silent meditation, you might like to focus your thoughts on the human weaknesses displayed by the different characters in the story. Which of them are you most like?

Prayer

O God our Father, whose Son was unjustly tried

and sentenced to death,

yet commanded us to love our enemies:

strengthen those who suffer for the sake of conscience.

When they are accused, save them from speaking in hate;

when they are rejected, save them from bitterness;

when they are imprisoned, save them from despair.

And to us your servants give grace to respect their witness

and to discern the truth: for the sake of Jesus Christ,

our merciful and righteous judge. Amen

Episcopal Church,

USA

(adapted)

12.40 The 1^st Word

“Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” (Luke 23:34)

Reading Luke 23:32-38

Reflection

· We have come to spend three hours in vigil from 12 to 3; but if we had arrived at Calvary at noon, we would have missed three of his seven words from the cross. We are told that they crucified him at 9 in the morning. The 1^st word came as the nails were hammered into his hands and wrists: “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.”

· It’s astonishing, isn’t it? Here is someone more concerned for the people who are causing him agony than for himself who suffers the agony; and at the very moment that the agony is being caused! I remember the time that I slammed the car door shut on my mother’s fingers, God bless her. As I hopped around crying, “Mum, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to”, she screamed in pain and cursed me. She couldn’t forgive my carelessness in the moment of her excruciating pain. But Jesus could, even though he knew that they did mean to.

· You might say, "Oh, Jesus could forgive because he was God." But that misses the point, I think, which is that God became a human being, one of us; and, as one of us, forgave his fellow human beings who caused him pain.

· What is our attitude to those who give us pain? Is it modelled on Jesus? It’s hard to be forgiving, isn’t it? Particularly when the person who hurts us means to do so, or doesn’t mind hurting us. If we’re to imitate Jesus, we must ask ourselves, “Is there anyone I do not forgive?” There probably is, and if there is, shouldn’t we ask our loving-Father to forgive them, even if we can’t quite do so by ourselves?

· And let us think for a moment of those who wielded the hammers, and drove home the nails. What a sin it was to crucify the best man who ever lived, the Messiah, the Son of God! But are we any better than them? Have we not driven home the nails ourselves, many times? I know there are times when my thoughtless, selfish actions have caused real hurt to others of God’s children, and there are times when I have lashed out deliberately, and times I have said things that can never be unsaid, in pain myself and driven to cause pain. I need to hear Jesus say to me, “Father, forgive him, for he does not know what he is doing”

Music First Word

Father forgive them, for they know not what they do.

And the people clamoured,

“He is death guilty; take him; let us crucify him!

Be his blood on us then, and on our children!”

Then they did crucify Jesus and the two thieves,

One on his right hand, the other on his left hand.

Silence

As we sit in silence, let’s focus our attention on this cross in front of us. Let’s try to imagine Jesus hanging there, and marvel at his amazing capacity for forgiveness. As we hear him say “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do”, let’s ask ourselves, “Is there someone I need to forgive”?

Prayer

Lord Jesus Christ,

you asked forgiveness for those who crucified you,

for they did not know what they were doing.

We acknowledge that we are often caught in the web of the world’s sin;

that we fail to recognise the deceitfulness of our own hearts,

the depths of our own self-seeking;

that we crucify you afresh.

Forgive us, O Lord, all our wrong doing,

against you, our neighbour and ourselves,

and help us to forgive those who cause us hurt;

for your mercies’ sake. Amen

Llewellyn Cumings
13.00 The 2^nd Word

“Truly, I say to you, today you will be with me in Paradise” (Luke 23:43)

Reading Luke 23:39-43

Reflection

· Jesus did not hang on his cross alone - two others shared the agony with him. He was innocent, but they were not: they were criminals. We are not told what their crimes were, but I think they must have been pretty heinous. The Romans did not lightly sentence men to crucifixion. Today’s equivalent of their crimes might be murder in the course of a robbery, or child abuse, or a terrorist atrocity.

· In his agony, one of these bad men taunts Jesus. Jesus does not respond in kind, he simply bears the insults. But the 2^nd bad man rebukes the first: he acknowledges Jesus’s innocence, and he admits his own sentence is deserved. He says, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.” Jesus does respond to the second man, with his 2^nd word from the cross: he says to him, “Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise.”

· What a remarkable contrast between the two criminals who are suffering, and Jesus’s response to them! But what is it that makes the difference?

o I think Jesus doesn’t respond to the 1^st man, because nothing Jesus could say would do any good. The 1^st man is so wrapped up in his own pain and degradation that he can only spew out hatred. His is a lost soul.

o Even though the 2^nd man is in the same agony, Jesus perceives that he loves God, that he knows he has done wrong, and that he is capable of feeling sorry for someone else, for Jesus. Jesus does not use his power to bring him down from the cross, to make it all better – that would be supernatural, and that doesn’t seem to be the way God works. Instead Jesus reassures the man that God loves him, even though, like Jesus, he is dying on a cross. It is really a spiritual miracle: despite all the mess, today they will truly be together in Paradise!

· God calls each one of us to carry our own cross, as a Christian, in our own way. Perhaps it is only by enduring our own personal cross, enduring without losing sight of God’s love for us and our common humanity, as Jesus and the 2^nd criminal did, that we too can be with Jesus in Paradise.

Music Second Word

Verily, thou shalt be in paradise today with me.

Amen, so I tell thee.

Hear, O Lord remember me when thou comest into thy kingdom.

Silence

Another silence in the shadow of the cross. You might like to use it to think about your own personal cross, if you have one, or what it is that you most dread happening, if you don’t. Can you endure it, without losing sight of God’s love, and your own humanity? Remember the words of Psalm 23:

“Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil;

for thou art with me, thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.”

And let us pray for those who are suffering but cannot feel God’s loving touch, that feel unloved and unable to love. May they too hear Jesus say, “Truly, I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise.”

Prayer

Lord Jesus Christ,

you spoke the word of promise

to the criminal who turned to you

in the last hours of his life.

We thank you that it is never too late

to repent and to believe in you.

Reassure all who, nearing death,

acknowledge their sins

and seek your grace and forgiveness.

Have mercy on all people, O Lord,

and on us, unworthy sinners as we are,

for you are our Saviour and Redeemer. Amen

Llewellyn Cumings

13.20 The 3^rd Word

He said to his mother, “Woman, behold your son!” Then he said to the disciple, “Behold your mother!” (John 19:26-27)

Reading John 19:25b-27

Reflection

· Thank God I’ve never had to watch a public execution. It is an ugly thing, a degrading thing – that is the point of it, to degrade the victim. I find it hard to understand, but people have always thronged to watch them – even today where they’re still allowed. This degradation is part of what Jesus had to endure: his enemies jeering; the curious simply there for something to do, a bit of fun; those who loved him, grieving in front of his eyes.

· It must be particularly gut-wrenching to watch the child you have loved and nurtured suffer the prolonged torture of crucifixion. It took hours, not just the 3 hours of this vigil. Yet Mary his mother finds the strength to stay close by Jesus in his agony. How completely torn she must be: repelled by his ghastly death, yet drawn to be near her beloved son in his last hours. In Mary at the cross we see an image of the eternal love at the heart of motherhood, and of the suffering it can bring. I thank God too that I have never had to suffer the death of a child.

· Mary the mother of Jesus is supported in her vigil by four others: her sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene, as well as someone not named, but described as the ‘disciple whom Jesus loved’. Scholars have identified Mary’s sister as Salome, the mother of James and John, the sons of Zebedee. The ancient tradition of the Church is that the disciple Jesus loved was Salome’s son John, the writer of John’s Gospel. If scholars and tradition are right, it is Jesus’s cousin John who is there with Mary at the crucifixion.

· It’s moving, isn’t it, that in his 3^rd word from the cross on the brink of his death, Jesus should commit his mother Mary to the care of his cousin John, and John to the care of Mary, to look after each other, and to comfort each other’s loneliness when he was gone. A truly practical example of the love of God at work in evil times.

· The first three words from the cross display Jesus’s compassion for others, even in the midst of his own torment: he has asked forgiveness for his torturers; he has assured the criminal of a place with him in Paradise; he has provided for his mother and the disciple he loved. He has hung on the cross now for more than 3 hours. There is nothing more he can do, but conserve his remaining strength for the job of yielding himself to death.

Music Third Word

See, O woman, here behold thy son beloved.

See yon mother bowed in anguish,

Who beside the cross doth languish,

Where on high her son is borne.

Is there mortal who not feeleth

To behold her where she kneeleth,

So woeful and all forlorn.

Silence

As we watch in silence in front of the cross, we remember how Jesus gave Mary his Mother into the care of John, and John into the care of Mary. Let us remember all those who are bereaved and missing their loved-ones. Let us pray that they may find the love and support that Mary and John gave each other.

Prayer

Lord Jesus Christ,

in your last hours of pain

you took thought for your mother

and commended her to the beloved disciple’s care.

Help us, when trials overtake us,

to have thought for our loved ones

and for those in need about us.

Make us to know that we are members of your family,

and that nothing can separate us from your love:

for your name’s sake. Amen

Llewellyn Cumings

13.40 The 4^th Word

“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46)

Reading Matthew 27:45-49

Reflection

· Time has moved on as Jesus labours at dying. Now it is approaching 3 in the afternoon, and Jesus speaks again a 4^th time: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

· What terrifying implications flow from these words! Jesus has always felt himself so close to his loving-Father God. Has God really forsaken his obedient son, at this moment of his greatest need? If so, what hope is there for our wayward souls? Is our faith vain? We are compelled to seek answers.

· The onlookers misunderstand Jesus’s words in Aramaic, “Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?” They think he is crying out for Elijah, and some wonder whether that great prophet will come to save him miraculously. Could we too be misunderstanding him?

· It is possible that as he waits to die Jesus is recalling a Psalm. Psalm 22 begins in desolation and dejection with these words, but it ends in soaring triumph:

He has saved my life for himself; my descendents shall serve him;

this shall be told of the Lord for generations to come.

They shall come and make known his salvation, to a people yet unborn,

declaring that he, the Lord, has done it.

Perhaps Jesus never experiences the withdrawal of the love of God at all. Or perhaps the evangelist puts these words in his mouth to echo the Psalm.

· Some people suggest that this is the moment when Jesus feels the whole weight of the world’s sins, which he must do, so that he can atone for them and bring us salvation. Paul in his 2^nd Letter to the Corinthians says, “For our sake (God) made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” Others don’t feel very comfortable with this theology of atonement, because it makes God out to seem more vengeful than loving.

· Another way of looking at it is in more human terms. It seems to me that Jesus could not be Jesus unless he had plumbed the absolute depths of human experience. There are times when every one of us feels that God has forgotten us; when we simply cannot comprehend why a loving God would let some awful thing happen, and we feel absolutely alone and bereft. Perhaps this is such a moment for Jesus. It is very Hell! There is an echo of this in the Apostles’ Creed, where we say ‘He descended into Hell’. Isn’t it comforting to think that there is no place we might go, where Jesus has not been before us? Even Hell!

Music Fourth Word

God, my Father, oh why hast thou forsaken me?

All those who were my friends, all have now forsaken me;

And they that hate me do now prevail against me,

And he whom I have cherished, he hath betrayed me.

Even the vine that I have chosen and that I have planted:

Wherefore art thou now so strongly turned into bitterness,

That I by thee am crucified?

Silence

Let us be silent again in front of the cross, as we think of the spiritual torment Jesus is expressing in the words “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” When we feel forsaken and abandoned by God, let’s remember that Jesus has been there before us. It will pass.

Prayer

Lord Jesus Christ,

who endured the darkness of spiritual despair

that you might bring us to God:

be near to all who suffer alone

and are conscious only of pain and darkness.

In the immensity of your compassion

reveal yourself to them, O Lord,

that they may know that they are not forsaken

but are surrounded by your love:

for your tender mercies’ sake. Amen

Llewellyn Cumings

14.00 The 5^th Word

“I thirst!” (John 19:28)

Reading John 19:28-29

Reflection

· Time is starting to move very slowly now for Jesus on his cross. On Golgotha it is nearly 3 o’clock, and Jesus is close to death. But here we still have nearly an hour to watch with him.

· Jesus’s 4^th word from the cross revealed his mental and spiritual suffering. This 5^th word, “I thirst”, reminds us again of his physical suffering. When he wrote his Gospel around 100AD, John may very well have included these words deliberately, to refute the views of Gnostic Christians that Jesus as God was pure spirit, and incapable of suffering as humans do. We can’t avoid Jesus’s suffering; even if we feel we can’t bear it, we mustn’t turn away; we have to face squarely the excruciating physical pain of the Cross. Excruciating – the word literally means ‘from a cross’.

· So let us focus on what was involved with crucifixion.

o The nails would have been hammered through Jesus’s wrists, not the palms of his hands as imagined in medieval pictures, because only bones can support the weight of a body.

o The arms would be spread quite wide, because if the angle were narrow Jesus would have died too quickly from suspension asphyxiation. Even so he would have felt he could hardly breathe. And to get relief by hauling his body upward on the nails would be very painful.

o Death could come either from asphyxiation, or by shock and dehydration. Liquid loss from the scourging and exposure in bright Judean sun would lead quickly to dehydration.

o Jesus would have become very thirsty. As dehydration worsened, his heart would begin to race and his breathing would become fast, he would experience headache and nausea. At about 15% fluid loss he would begin to suffer muscle spasms and vision loss. Death would follow later.

o It could take days to die on a cross. If the executioners wanted to speed the process up, they would smash the victim’s legs to cause traumatic shock and hasten death. Jesus did not have to suffer this because his death came mercifully fast, but the two criminals beside him did.

· If you can bear it, look up at the cross behind me; imagine that broken body hanging there in excruciating pain. Excruciating pain which Jesus accepted obediently, as his loving Father’s will. Excruciating pain which Jesus accepted willingly, to show us the way to enter God’s kingdom.

Music Fifth Word

I am athirst.

And the Jews, then passing by him, all did rail upon him,

And wagging their heads at him, they said unto him,

“Vah! Thou wouldst fain destroy the temple,

If thou be Jesus, Son of the Father,

Now from the cross descend thou,

That we behold it, and believe on thee when we behold it.

If thou art king over Israel, save thyself then!”

Silence

Let us keep silence. No words can do justice to the courage Jesus shows as he endures the cross.

Prayer

Lord Jesus Christ,

you thirsted in anguish of body and soul on the cross:

thirsting for drink;

thirsting for the accomplishing of God’s work;

thirsting for the salvation of the world.

In your infinite longings for us, O Lord,

lead us to yourself, the fountain of living water,

that we may find our thirst quenched

in knowing you and doing your will,

now and forever. Amen

Llewellyn Cumings

14.20 The 6^th Word

“Father, into thy hands I commit my spirit.” (Luke 23:46)

Reading Luke 23:44-46a

Reflection

· The moment of Jesus’s release draws near; it will not be long now.

· As a skilled storyteller Luke emphasises the tragic drama being played out on Calvary by describing an ominous darkness. The sun’s failure is an image of creation gone awry. Scholars and commentators are uncertain and divided on the significance of the rending of the curtain of the temple. But you may like, as I do, this thought: it is as if the veil hiding the presence of God from us was torn down as Jesus died. From now on all people have direct and equal access to God, through Jesus’s self-sacrifice upon the cross.

· The next to last word Jesus utters on the cross is a prayer, “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.” If he had felt truly forsaken by his God earlier, now he is confident once again that God loves him. He offers his spirit back to God, in the certainty that God will keep it safe.

· “Into your hands I commend my spirit” is a quotation from Psalm 31. In later centuries this psalm was often used in Jewish evening prayer to commend oneself into God's care during the night's sleep. There is something very childlike and trusting in the way Jesus uses this verse. Who knows, perhaps Mary taught her little son to say it as a bed-time prayer, as my mother taught me this one:

Now I lay me down to sleep;
I pray the Lord my soul to keep.
If I should die before I wake,
I pray the Lord my soul to take.

· To this verse Jesus adds the word “Father”. Jesus was not alone in addressing God as Father, “Abba” in Aramaic, but it was characteristic of his teaching. He taught his disciples, and you and me, to pray to “Our Father in heaven”. This not only teaches us that God is like a loving father to us, but also teaches us that Jesus is like our brother. He is one of us, experiencing all the joys and sorrows that we experience.

Music Sixth Word

Father into thy hands I now commend my soul.

For thou art my God and my Father.

Silence

As we keep silence under the cross, let us look our own death squarely in the eyes, and ask for the grace to be able to pray with Jesus, “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.”

Prayer

Lord Jesus Christ,

who in the hour of death committed yourself

into your Father’s hands:

be with us when the time comes

for our departure from this world.

May your grace sustain us at the end;

may we know ourselves accepted by our Father;

and may we pass peacefully into your presence,

where faith turns to sight,

where we shall see you face to face,

and we shall be forever with the Lord. Amen

Llewellyn Cumings

14.40 The 7^th Word

“It is finished!” (John 19:30)

Reading John 19:30-42

Reflection

· The other Gospels tell us that at the moment of his death Jesus uttered a great cry, but only John tells us what it was: “It is finished!” It is a shout of triumph. He didn’t whisper it, like someone forced to admit defeat. He didn’t mouth it in relief that his agony is over. He threw back his head and he shouted it. “I have done it!” he is saying, “I have faced the very worst, and I have won!”

· By his victory won upon the cross, our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, our friend and brother, shows us all the way to vanquish sin and death with the weapons of love. It is only left to us to follow.

· The note of triumph in Jesus’s last word from the cross this Good Friday is a foretaste of his resurrection which we celebrate this Sunday. But before we meet him again on Easter Morning, we must follow him to the tomb, as Matthew tells us his mother Mary does with Mary Magdalen.

· In Jewish law, in Deuteronomy (21:22), it is written: “When someone is convicted of a crime punishable by death and is executed, and you hang him on a tree, his corpse must not remain all night upon the tree; you shall bury him that same day.” The Temple authorities have no option but to arrange with Pilate for the bodies of Jesus and the two criminals to be taken down.

· But where to bury him? No doubt the little party of disciples from Galilee does not have the resources to do so decently. Two people step forward to help. Joseph of Arimathea is rich and powerful, a member of the Sanhedrin, and a secret disciple of Jesus: he provides the tomb - his own, we are told. Nicodemus is also a secret disciple; he had visited Jesus at night, because he was afraid to do so publicly: he provides the ointments and spices needed to embalm the body. Together they make sure that Jesus is buried with decent reverence.

· It’s amazing, isn’t it? These two people, who were afraid to support Jesus publicly while he was alive, are able to do so as soon as he is dead. All the cowardice, the hesitation, the prudent concealment are gone. Jesus has not been dead an hour, when his words reported by John (12:32) begin to come true: “And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.” Jesus is already showing his risen power to be a magnet of souls.

· But we are running ahead. Here, now, Jesus has just cried “It is finished!” His lifeless corpse hangs on the cross in front of us. Yet he is victorious. Let us meditate on that.

Music Seventh Word

It is finished!

And he did bow his head and rendered up his spirit.

And it was about the sixth hour, and the sun was darkened,

And darkness covered the earth until about the ninth hour;

And the veil of the temple was rent, and all the earth did quake;

And the rocks were rent, and all the graves were opened wide.

Christ, we do all adore thee,

And we do praise thee forever,

For on the holy cross hast thou

The world from sin redeemed.

Christ, we do all adore thee,

And we do praise thee forever,

Silence

As we move into our last period of silence in front of the cross, let us use the beautiful words of the C14th Latin prayer Anima Christi to focus our thoughts. It goes like this:

Soul of Christ, sanctify me
Body of Christ, save me
Blood of Christ, refresh me
Water from the side of Christ, wash me
Passion of Christ, strengthen me
O good Jesu, hear me
Within Thy wounds hide me
Suffer me not to be separated from Thee
From the malicious enemy defend me
In the hour of my death call me
And bid me come to Thee
That with thy saints I may praise Thee

For ever and ever. Amen.

Prayer

Lord Jesus Christ,

you willingly suffered on the cross

all that was necessary for our eternal salvation

and drained the cup of sacrifice to the last.

We thank you for your great work of redemption,

achieved once for all at infinite cost,

by which we are reconciled to God.

Help us to rest our faith on what you have done

and to know that the way to the Father’s presence

is open to us all through the cross,

now and forevermore. Amen

Llewellyn Cumings

Betrayal on Wednesday in Holy Week

2011-04-20T21:25:00.002+01:00

A reflection on the Gospel for Wednesday in Holy Week, given at Compline in Killodiernan on 20th April 2011

Betrayal is the theme of the Gospel reading we’ve just heard (John 13:21-32).

‘Very truly, I tell you, one of you will betray me’, says Jesus to his disciples. Few things hurt as much as to be betrayed by someone who is close to you, someone you love.

Jesus loved and trusted Judas. Jesus had chosen Judas to be one of his inner-circle of twelve closest disciples. Jesus had appointed him to be treasurer of the little group – he held the common purse. And Jesus and Judas had just shared food together in a very special Eucharistic way – what we now call the Last Supper.

Yet Jesus knew quite well Judas was going to betray him. He looked Judas in the eye and said to him, ‘Do quickly what you are going to do’. And Judas went out, out into the night. When they meet again a few hours later, Judas has brought a detachment of soldiers and police to arrest Jesus in a garden just outside the city.

How it must have broken Jesus’s heart to be betrayed by the friend he loved!

But that is not the only betrayal Jesus suffers that night.

We know too that his disciples cannot wait and watch for even 1 hour, as Jesus wrestles with his feelings in prayer. We know that the disciples run away when the soldiers come to arrest Jesus. And we know that Simon Peter, who was brave enough to follow Jesus and his captors back to the High Priest’s house, denies three times he even knew Jesus before the cock crowed.

‘Lord, who is it?’ says the disciple Jesus loved, at the prompting of Simon Peter. Who will betray you? ‘It is the one to whom I give this piece of bread when I have dipped it in the dish’, replies Jesus.

The truth, I feel sure, is that Jesus gave each and every one of his disciples a piece of bread at his Last Supper. They will all betray him, each in his own way.

Would I have behaved any better than the disciples? I don’t think so. I would have sworn blind I did not know Jesus to avoid arrest myself. I’m not as brave as Peter - I would not even have followed to the High Priest’s house – I would have run away like the other disciples. I too would have fallen asleep as my friend and teacher wrestled in prayer. As I did once as I sat while someone I loved lay dying.

How often each one of us has betrayed Jesus, just as the disciples did!

We may not have sold our Lord and Master for 30 pieces of silver, like Judas. But how often have we failed to respond when Jesus asks something of us? How often have we run away, like cowards, from doing what we know is right? How often have we denied our faith when others challenge us?

Yet Jesus knows our human frailty and loves us all despite it, just as he loved his disciples - just as he loved Judas. He will forgive the pain our betrayals cause him if we turn to him in penitence and faith.

A prayer of St Richard of Chichester

Thanks be to Thee, Lord Jesus Christ
for all the benefits Thou hast given me,
for all the pains and insults

Thou has borne for me.
O most merciful Redeemer,

Friend, and Brother,
may I know Thee more clearly,
love Thee more dearly,
and follow Thee more nearly,
day by day. Amen.

Palm Sunday Allegiance

2011-04-17T19:52:00.013+01:00

Address given at Templederry and Nenagh on Palm Sunday, Lent 6, Year A, 17th April 2011

Do you like old familiar stories? I do – and Jesus’s triumphal entry to Jerusalem (Matthew 21:1-11) is certainly an old familiar story!
I’ve heard it just about every Palm Sunday since I was a child, from one or other of the Gospels – it is one of the few stories told by all four Gospel writers.

The scene is set just before Passover, a time of great anticipation and excitement, perhaps a little like the run up to our Christmas. Jerusalem is teeming with people preparing to celebrate the festival - not just people from Jerusalem and the villages around, but Jews of the diaspora from all over the known world. Passover was then, and still is, perhaps the most important festival for Jews, one which even today they like to celebrate in Jerusalem. It commemorates the time when God delivered the children of Israel from slavery in Egypt, when God’s angel ‘passed over’ the Israelite houses, but struck down the first born in Egyptian houses, to persuade Pharaoh to let the Israelites go, in a terrifying demonstration of God’s power.

At just this time, Jesus chooses to ride into Jerusalem on a donkey. Matthew tells us that he sends his disciples to collect it along with a colt from a village near Bethphage - perhaps nearby Bethany, less than 2 miles East of Jerusalem, where his friends Mary, Martha and Lazarus lived. Jesus gives them a password to use: if anyone objects they are to say, ‘The Lord needs them’.

As he rides the donkey, Jesus is surrounded by a cheering crowd of supporters. They lay their cloaks on the road in front of him, and spread branches from trees for him to ride over. And they shout ‘Hosanna to the Son of David! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord! Hosanna in the highest heaven!’ Hosanna in Hebrew means ‘save us now’. We use these same words today as an acclamation in the Communion service, just after the Sanctus. Matthew tells us, ‘The whole city was in turmoil’.

The spectators did not know what was going on, but his cheering supporters tell them, ‘This is the prophet Jesus from Nazareth in Galilee’. It was clearly a massive demonstration of allegiance by Jesus’s followers.

But why does Jesus choose to arrive in Jerusalem in this dramatic way?
Matthew has already told us that Jesus foresaw what fate awaited him in Jerusalem - the authorities, the chief priests and the scribes, wanted him dead. You might have expected him to slip into Jerusalem quietly, not rivet every eye upon himself. But no, Jesus deliberately plans his dramatic entry – he makes arrangements in advance for the donkey to be ready for him, and no doubt he expects his followers to cheer him.

Jesus surely intends his dramatic entry to convey a message to those who see and hear about it, a message without words. But what message exactly? One clue is the verse of prophesy from Zechariah 9:9, ‘Tell the daughter of Zion, look your king is coming to you, humble, and mounted on a donkey, and on a colt, the foal of a donkey’.

In Ireland today we’re inclined to see a donkey as a second class horse. But donkeys were often ridden by kings in the ancient Middle East. Horses were reserved for warfare - a king riding a horse was a leader going to war. But if a king came in peace he would ride a donkey.

The crowds following Jesus – including his closest disciples - believed him to be the Messiah promised in scripture, the anointed one of God. And they expected the Messiah would be a powerful military leader, who would throw out the hated Roman occupiers, and re-establish Jerusalem as the capital of a glorious independent Jewish kingdom, like that of David and Solomon.

But Jesus knows this is not the role God wants him to play. His loving Father God has chosen him as the Messiah to show people the way to God’s kingdom - a spiritual kingdom - not to establish an earthly kingdom. As he will shortly say to Pilate, ‘My kingdom is not of this world’.

So Jesus, in a deliberate echo of Zechariah’s prophesy, claims the allegiance of the people as the Messiah, the anointed one of God. Yet he does so not as an earthly king displaying warlike power, but as a king of peace humbly riding on a donkey. Jesus’s message to the crowds in Jerusalem is this, I think. ‘Follow me, I am the Messiah, but not the Messiah you imagine’.

The old familiar story echoes down the millennia – but what does it mean for you and I today?
Well, for one thing, it reminds us that Jesus the Messiah claims our total allegiance, just as he claimed the allegiance of the crowds in Jerusalem 2000 years ago. He is our king in the sense that we give him our whole-hearted personal allegiance. That is precisely what a king is - someone to whom we give our personal allegiance.

When we acknowledge that our first loyalty is to Jesus, we are liberated. No longer are we bound absolutely by other claims on our loyalty, by queen or president, by country, race or class, by family, party or county. We no longer fear these powerful forces. We are made free, free to follow the conscience God has given us, free to do what is right. We become fully human, made in the image of God. St Paul captures it beautifully when he says (Romans 8:38-9), ‘For I am convinced that neither death nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord’.

And for a second thing, it warns us that we might be mistaken - mistaken in what we believe God wants of us through Jesus.

The crowds following Jesus 2000 years ago were mistaken to want to make the Messiah into an earthly king to lead their national liberation struggle. They were blinded by their own interpretation of scripture and by their own desires. The same could be true of us, or of any of our different churches.

Is it possible we could be wrong, and those with different beliefs are right? We would do well never to dismiss that possibility. We should instead admit our human fallibility, engage prayerfully with those who believe differently to us, and always, always be alive to the promptings of the Spirit which Jesus sends to guide us.

Let us put on the armour of God

2011-03-06T18:17:00.006Z

Today we come to the last of this series of 5 addresses on Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians
In the first 3 we explored key theological themes:

Last Sunday we looked at the ethical implications of Paul’s theology in the form of the advice he gave the Ephesians about how to behave as members of Christ’s Church. I summarised like this:

In God’s household - Christ’s Church - we must be kind and forgiving, we must live as children of light’.

Today we turn to the very end of the letter, Ephesians 6:10-20.

It is hard to be kind and forgiving much of the time, to live as children of light, very hard.
Paul knows that the Ephesians can be so only with God’s help – only by God’s saving grace, through faith, just like good works.

‘Finally, be strong in the Lord and in the strength of his power’, Paul urges them. ‘Put on the whole armour of God’.

The armour of God is a striking metaphor, isn't it? For the Ephesians no doubt it conjured up the image of a Roman Legionary - for us, perhaps, the scary looking equipment of coalition troops in Afghanistan – light-weight body-armour, Kevlar helmet and night vision goggles. Paul no doubt also had in mind Isaiah’s description (59:17) of God’s breastplate of righteousness and helmet of salvation.

‘Put on the whole armour of God, so that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil’, says Paul. I suppose we all have that sense sometimes of a voice whispering inside our head, tempting us to do what that other voice, our conscience, tells us to be wrong, to be displeasing to God. Paul personifies it as the wily devil, but it is really part of us, that part of our psyche that is disobedient to God. It is that part of us that is responsible for all the petty human sins we are all guilty of to a greater or lesser extent – the lies, the malice, the dishonesty, the words intended to hurt others - as well as our failures to be kind and forgiving, as God is kind and forgiving to us.

But there is more evil in the world than we create by our petty human sins.
As Christians we must confront evil outside us as well as within us.

‘For’, says Paul, ‘our struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh,’ - or our own natures - ‘but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places’.

Paul’s words sound like science fiction, don’t they? The ‘cosmic powers’ and ‘spiritual forces’ could almost be the Martians in HG Wells’ ‘War of the worlds’, or the Borg in ‘Startrek’.

But these evil powers and forces are real. Wicked ideologies, xenophobia and national interests too often cause the evil of war and violence. Bad economic and social systems generate the evil of hunger and poverty, ravish the planet’s resources and damage the precious web of life. What are they but ‘spiritual forces of evil’? And then there is disease and natural disaster that cause untold suffering. What are these but ‘cosmic powers of darkness’? We don’t understand why God permits such things – but they are surely not ‘acts of God’, since they are contrary to all God’s loving purposes.

Christians must ‘stand firm’ against all these evils, but to do so we must ‘take up the whole armour of God’, in order to ‘be strong in the Lord’.

Paul models the armour of God on the state-of-the-art equipment of a Roman legionary of the 1st Century.

There is ‘The belt of truth’. The belt a Roman soldier wore was a wide piece of thick leather which protected his lower abdomen, his guts. The truth is God’s truth – the truth of the good news Jesus proclaimed. It is that truth which gives us the guts to resist evil.

There is ‘The breastplate of righteousness’. The legionary’s breastplate was made of overlapping iron bands fixed to leather to protect the chest and heart from swords, spears and javelins. A righteous person relates to God in the way God intends. Righteousness, knowing what God intends us to be, protects the integrity of the Christian heart.

There are ‘Shoes … (to) make you ready to proclaim the gospel of peace’. The Roman military boot, open like a sandal, with thick leather soles and hobnails, enabled legionaries to march long distances without suffering blisters. Christians too must be able to travel far to proclaim the gospel of peace. It is ‘shalom’, inner wellbeing, the peace of the kingdom of God.

There is ‘The shield of faith’. The rectangular legionary shield, made of bent-wood and covered with leather, was soaked in water before battle to extinguish flaming arrows. Christian faith acts like a shield to turn temptation aside.

There is ‘The helmet of salvation’. Made of iron or bronze, with a neck-piece at the back and hinged cheek-pieces, the ‘Imperial Helmet’ was designed both to protect the head and intimidate opponents. For Christians, salvation is about God forgiving our sins. Knowing that our sins have been forgiven, we can think clearly, stand firm in the face of evil and not be intimidated by it.

Finally there is ‘The sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God’. The legionary sword was the short steel ‘gladius’, used in hand to hand combat for cutting and thrusting – it’s the origin of the English word ‘gladiator’. The Holy Spirit reveals the word of God to us, what God wants, what is good and right and true, and this is the weapon with which Christians must fight evil. Notice it is the only offensive weapon Paul mentions – everything else is defensive armour.

So, as Paul urges the Ephesians, ‘Let us put on the armour of God’.
Let us prepare ourselves to fight the good fight, to confront and defeat evil wherever we may find it, not just in our own natures, but in all the dark places of the world. We cannot be successful by ourselves, but God through Christ has given us all that we need for the spiritual fight – the whole armour of God.

Paul finishes his letter by urging the Ephesians to pray. ‘Pray in the Spirit at all times in every prayer and supplication. To that end keep alert and always persevere in supplication for all the saints’ - 'for all the saints', that is, for all Christians, because we are all saints in the sense Paul uses the word. Prayer by every Christian for all Christians raises the morale of Christ’s Church for the spiritual battle with evil in all its manifestations.

I shall finish with our parish prayer for March. It is a verse from St Patrick’s Breastplate, a powerful invocation of the name of Christ. It can be our breastplate too, part of the armour of God for us, which we can use whenever we feel anxious or fearful in the face of the enemy.

Christ be with me, Christ within me, Christ behind me, Christ before me
Christ beside me, Christ to win me, Christ to comfort and restore me
Christ beneath me, Christ above me, Christ in quiet, Christ in danger
Christ in heart of all that love me, Christ in mouth of friend and stranger
Amen

Kind and forgiving, children of light

2011-02-27T18:37:00.004Z

The 4th of 5 addresses on Paul's letter to the Ephesians on the 5 Sundays before Lent. This one given was given in Templederry, Nenagh and Killodiernan on Sunday 27th February 2011, the 2nd before Lent.

The first four and a half chapters of Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians are about theology.
They are about the relationship between God – as Father, Son and Holy Spirit – and human beings – both individually and together as the Church.

In the first 3 of these 5 addresses, we explored key theological themes:

‘We must start with Christ’;
‘In Christ God is saving us by grace through faith for good works’; and
‘In Christ we are members of God’s household, Christ’s Church’.

We looked at Paul’s beautiful metaphor of the church as like a building, knit together by Christ as the corner stone, with the Apostles and Prophets as foundation. And although we didn’t examine it, Paul at the beginning of Chapter 4 gives another lovely metaphor of the church as like Christ’s body, with Christ as the head and Christians as its different parts, each given different gifts and different roles.

But in today’s reading (Ephesians 4:22-5:14) Paul moves beyond his theology to look at its ethical implications for how the Ephesians should behave to each other.
‘You were taught’, says Paul, ‘to put away your former way of life, your old self … and to clothe yourselves with the new self, created according to the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness’.

Paul continues with specific advice about how Christians should behave to one another:

We must speak the truth to our neighbours, because we are all members of one community.
If someone angers us, we must seek to make it up. Anger is not wrong in itself – remember, Jesus often showed righteous anger, for instance when driving the money-changers from the Temple. But if we let anger fester – if, in Paul’s words, we ‘let the sun go down on (our) anger’– we allow sin a way into our lives – we ‘make room for the devil’.
We must be honest in all our dealings – we should work for what we get, not steal it. And why? So that we have something to share with those in need. Robin Hood stole from the rich to give to the poor – but this is not the Christian way: we must work, so that we have a surplus to give away in charity.
We should avoid evil talk – words intended to hurt others rather than help them – and this includes ‘obscene, silly and vulgar talk’, because ‘fornication and impurity of any kind, and greed’ cut us off from God. I find it interesting that Paul links fornication and greed in this way – for surely what is sinful about fornication is the greedy grasping at our own pleasure without thought for others.
And we should weigh up carefully what we hear, in order to avoid being ‘deceive(d) … by empty words’ into doing anything which would incur God’s wrath.

So, says Paul summarising, ‘Put away from you all bitterness and wrath and wrangling and slander, together with all malice, and be kind to one another, tender-hearted, forgiving one another as God in Christ has forgiven you… Live as children of light' – what a beautiful image - 'for the fruit of the light is found in all that is good and right and true.’

And finally Paul quotes from what scholars believe is one of the very earliest Christian hymns, “Sleeper, awake! Rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you”.

Paul’s message to the Ephesians - and to us, for we are the present day Ephesians – is this: ‘In God’s household we must be kind and forgiving, we must live as children of light’. This is how God wants Christians to behave to each other, and towards neighbours. In fact, we are to love our neighbours as ourselves, just as Jesus taught us.

If you’ve been reading ahead, as I suggested, you will have found the next section of Ephesians (5:21-6:9) challenging.
Challenging particularly for women, but also I hope for those of us who are men! It would be wrong of me to just ignore it, I think. So let me try to unpick it.

‘Be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ’, Paul tells the Ephesians. This ethical principle of mutual submission, of being subject to one another, is derived from his theological insight, that as God’s adopted children ‘In Christ we are all members of God’s household’ - Jew and Gentile, slave and free, men and women. Few would argue, I think, with the idea of mutual submission between those who live together in the same household – it is surely a recipe for peace and harmony!

But then he goes on to consider three pairs of personal relationships, in which he calls on one party to be subject to the other:

‘Wives, be subject to your husbands as you are to the Lord… Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church’.
‘Children, obey your parents… And fathers, do not provoke your children to anger’.
‘Slaves, obey your earthly masters … as you obey Christ… knowing that whatever good we do, we will receive the same again from the Lord… And masters, do the same to them. Stop threatening them, for you know that both of you have the same Master in heaven.’

‘Wives, be subject to your husbands’, indeed! What a shocking thing for Paul to say! Nowadays almost all of us see equality between men and women as a fundamental human right, so Paul’s words shock us to the core today. But let’s not forget how recent this view is - in Irish law a husband owned all his wife’s assets until the Married Women’s Property Act of 1870, it was not until 1923 that Irish women got the general right to vote, and the ‘marriage bar’ required women to resign from the public service on marriage as late as 1973.

It’s hard not to see Paul as a sexist old curmudgeon, isn't it, but he was a man of his own time. Among all ethnic groups then – Jews, Greeks and Romans – women had few rights and were legally just appendages of their husbands. Paul made no attempt to lead his churches to challenge this, any more than he led them to challenge the institution of slavery. He seems to have shared the general view that women should be submissive and that there was nothing wrong with slavery. But if he didn’t share that view, it was surely wise of him not to challenge it directly – since the result would surely have been even greater persecution of his small and vulnerable churches.

But starting from his theological conviction that ‘In Christ we are all members of God’s household’, he argues for mutual submission, seeking to balance social and Christian obligations. The social obligation on a woman to submit to her husband is balanced by a Christian obligation on a husband to love his wife. The social obligation of children to obey their parents is balanced by a Christian obligation on parents to treat children fairly. And he balances the social obligation on slaves to obey their masters, with a Christian obligation on masters to treat their slaves well.

This is what we should learn from Paul, I believe - the ethical principle that we should be mutually submissive, one to another in all our personal relationships. We should apply it within our own society, in which we all accept the equality of women and the unacceptability of slavery, and we should also apply it within our own families. In giving advice to wives and husbands, children and fathers, slaves and masters, he was making the best attempt he could do to apply that principle to the specific social circumstances of his own time. It would be wrong to insist on it today in our different social circumstances. We should try to do better today than Paul could in his time!

I shall finish with a prayer:

Loving Father God,
may your Holy Spirit help us
to be kind and forgiving members
of your household the Church,
and show us how to be mutually submissive
in all our personal relationships,
that we may live as children of light.
Through your Son Jesus Christ we pray.
Amen

Members of God's household

2011-02-20T13:07:00.006Z

The 3rd of 5 addresses I am giving on Paul's letter to the Ephesians on the 5 Sundays before Lent. This one given was given in Templederry and Nenagh on Sunday 20th February 2011, the 3rd before Lent.

Today we take the 3rd of 5 bites at Paul’s letter to the Ephesians.
Taken as a whole the letter is, I think, the finest expression of Paul’s vision for his churches. It is an answer to the question, ‘How should Christians, as God’s adopted children, behave in God’s household, which is Christ’s Church’.

In the 1st and 2nd bites we reflected on the themes ‘We must start with Christ!’, and ‘In Jesus Christ, God is saving us by grace through faith for good works’.

This Sunday we look at the 2nd half of chapter 2, and a bit of chapter 3 (Ephesians 2:11-22, 3:8-13). The theme is ‘We are all members of God’s household, which is Christ’s church’.

What sort of people were the Ephesians to whom Paul wrote?
In Paul’s time Ephesus was the Greek-speaking capital of the Roman province of Asia, with a population second in the Empire only to Rome itself, perhaps as many as half-a-million. It was as vibrant and cosmopolitan, multi-ethnic and multi-faith as any modern European city is. And it was rich, as I saw from the amazing archaeological remains when I visited it 20 years ago, including an amphitheatre big enough for 20,000 spectators - still used for concerts.

Paul stayed in Ephesus for 2 years on his 2nd missionary journey, according to Acts. His first dozen or so converts had been baptised by John the Baptist – they were Jews like himself no doubt – Paul re-baptised them in the name of Jesus and they received the Holy Spirit. At first Paul preached the gospel in the Synagogue, but he encountered opposition there, so he withdrew elsewhere with his growing flock of Christians, both Jews and Greeks. By the time he left 2 years later, he had converted enough followers of the Greek goddess Artemis to threaten the business of local silversmiths who specialised in making shrines to her, provoking them to a nasty riot.

By the time Paul wrote his letter it is clear the Ephesian church was overwhelmingly Greek.

Paul addresses the Ephesians as ‘you Gentiles by birth, called the “uncircumcision” by those who are called “the circumcision”’
Called that is, by Jews – like Paul himself – who were traditionally brought up to despise and dislike Gentiles, whom they saw as immoral and unclean.

Paul believes absolutely in the continuity of the new faith in Christ that he preached, with the old faith of the Jews. He reminds the Ephesian Gentiles that before they became Christians they were cut off from the true God that the Jews knew. They were ‘aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world’.

But he is intensely conscious also of the staggering change that Christ brings to all people, Jews and Gentiles alike. Christ has ‘create(d) in himself one new humanity in place of (Jews and Gentiles), thus making peace, reconcil(ing) both groups to God in one body through the cross’. All Christians, whatever their background or traditions, are made one people in Christ, ‘for through him (all of us) have access in one Spirit to the Father’.

Paul’s insight is just as important for us in Nenagh today as it was for the Ephesians then. Our town, our country, is increasingly cosmopolitan like Ephesus. Our neighbours come from many countries, speak many languages and hold many faiths. The old divisions of Catholic and Protestant are increasingly irrelevant. All our churches must work together, we must break down the barriers between us, we must move from being exclusive to being inclusive, if we are ever to make a reality of Paul’s vision of one new humanity in Christ.

Only then will we be able to hear Paul’s words clearly, ‘So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are citizens with the saints and also members of the household of God’.

Paul goes on to describe the Church as being built like ‘the household of God’.
The Church as a building is a lovely, suggestive metaphor. It is an alternative to the slightly more familiar metaphor of the church as the body of Christ, which Paul also uses later on in the letter (Ephesians 4:11-16).

It is ‘built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the cornerstone’, says Paul. ‘In him the whole structure is joined together and grows into a holy temple in the Lord; in whom you also are built together spiritually into a dwelling-place for God’.

Without the right foundations a building is unstable – as unfortunate people living in new Dublin housing estates have recently discovered, when foundations made from unsuitable pyrites rock swelled and cracked. The right foundation for the church is the teaching of the apostles – those Jesus sent out, of which Paul understood himself to be one – and the prophets – no doubt Christian as well as Hebrew prophets. As the church we must be grounded solidly in scripture before we can build anything worthwhile using tradition or reason.

In Paul’s day builders made sure the walls of a building were true by carefully aligning them with a cornerstone – Jesus serves that function for the church. Jesus joins all of us together into a structure worthy of God, in which we can find God present.

Is today’s church recognisable in Paul’s description? Or do we see instead a building site with a higgledy-piggledy jumble of jerry-built shacks and lean-to extensions, where the architect’s plans have been ignored? I rather think we all need some lessons in construction!

We are all members of God’s household, which is Christ’s church - whoever we are, wherever we come from!
Paul believed that by God’s grace he was chosen ‘to bring to the Gentiles the news of the boundless riches of Christ, and to make everyone see what is the plan of the mystery hidden for ages in God’.

God’s plan, in Paul’s words, is ‘that through the church’ – through God’s household, of which we are all members – ‘the wisdom of God in its rich variety might now be made known … in accordance with the eternal purpose that he has carried out in Christ Jesus our Lord’.

This is the heavy responsibility we bear as Christians, as members of God’s household, built into Christ’s church – to make known the wisdom of God in all its rich variety.

Let us pray through ‘Christ Jesus our Lord, in whom we have access to God in boldness and confidence through faith in him’, that we may together play the parts God has given us in his plan as he intends we should play them.

Eternal God and Father,
whose Son at supper prayed that his disciples might be one,
as he is one with you:
draw us closer to him,
that in common love and obedience to you
we may be united to one another
in the fellowship of the one Spirit,
that the world may believe that he is Lord
to your eternal glory;
through Jesus Christ our Lord.
Amen

There are printed copies of the first 3 addresses at the back of the church, if you missed any or want to look back at them. But there’s no substitute for reflecting on Paul’s words for yourself, so you might like to read a chapter or so of Ephesians each week to keep pace with me. If you want to read ahead we will be looking at Ephesians 4:22-5:14 next Sunday, with the theme ‘In God’s household we must be kind and forgiving and live like children of light’.

Saved by grace through faith for good works

2011-02-13T14:41:00.004Z

The 2nd of 5 addresses I am giving on Paul's letter to the Ephesians on the 5 Sundays before Lent. This one given was given in Templederry and Killodiernan on Sunday 13th February 2011, the 4th before Lent.

Today we take a 2nd bite at Paul’s letter to the Ephesians.
In the 5 Sundays before Lent we are taking 5 bites at Ephesians. Taken as a whole it expresses Paul’s vision for his churches – it is his answer to the question, ‘How should Christians, as God’s adopted children, behave in God’s household, which is Christ’s church’.

If you miss any of the 5 addresses, or want to read them again, printed copies are available. But there’s no substitute for reflecting on Paul’s words for yourself, so you might like to read a chapter or so of Ephesians a week keeping pace with these addresses.

In our 1st bite last Sunday, after looking at the context of the letter – who wrote it, to whom, and why - we saw how Paul in chapter 1 almost bludgeons us to recognise that ‘We must start with Christ!’

This Sunday we look at the first half of chapter 2 (Ephesians 2:1-10), which we have just heard.

But before we turn to Paul’s words, I invite you to travel back in your memory to your early childhood – what did it feel like to be you?
I was blessed with a childhood filled with love and happiness, and I hope you were too. But not everyone is so blessed – if you weren’t, you might imagine some other time when you did feel filled with love and happiness by the presence of another.

As a baby, my mother made me feel completely and utterly loved – my father too, but she spent much more time with me - can you conjure up the warmth and scent of your mother, that sense of complete happiness and safety in her presence? I responded, I suppose, in the only way I could respond, with complete trust and love in return.

As a toddler, I was often bold, as toddlers are. But even when I could see I’d done something to make her unhappy, I was still sure of her love. I could learn to say I was sorry and mean it. And in response she would forgive me, give me a cuddle, and the warmth and closeness would be renewed – can you recall the rush of relief that came with that cuddle?

And as I grew up, imitating her, encouraged by her, I learned how to behave, how to be a good boy – at least some of the time, how to be ‘a useful engine’ like Thomas the Tank Engine, how to be kind to others - including the dog and the cat, and my baby brother, hard as that sometimes seemed! I began to learn the difference between right and wrong, and I began to understand that happiness comes from doing right. And that lesson of course is one we never stop learning as long as we live.

‘You were dead’, says Paul to the Ephesians – and we are all Ephesians!
‘You were dead through (your) trespasses and sins’.
We are all souls with consciences. We are all made in the image of God, and we have all eaten of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, to use the imagery of Genesis. Yet like all human beings we so often do wrong or fail to do right – that is a matter of observation, part of the human condition.

You followed ‘the course of the world… the ruler of the power of the air… the spirit that is now at work among those who are disobedient’.
We don’t see the world the same way people in Paul’s time did – they believed the air teemed with demons under Satan’s influence that put evil thoughts into people’s minds. And yet… We know, don’t we, that the spirit of a place and time is a powerful influence on us, for good or ill? I have seen marriage-breakdown sweep through a social circle in a small community like an epidemic, bringing untold hurt to children and adults alike. And we must all be aware of how so many of us bought into the Celtic Tiger ethos of greed and excess, with the evil results we are now struggling to live with.

You lived ‘in the passions of our flesh, following the desires of flesh and senses’.
We are so primed by our natures to always want more, aren’t we? More and richer food and drink, more sex, more comfort, more excitement, more luxury, more than our neighbour has. And today as never before we are bombarded with messages to tempt us, ‘because we’re worth it’.

Our own failures, social pressures and our greedy desires cut us off from God. And they make us feel dead to all that is good and true and beautiful, dead to God.

‘But God’, says Paul, ‘out of (his) great love, made us alive together with Christ’.
‘(God) raised us up with him and seated us with him in heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in ages to come he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness towards us in Christ Jesus’. ‘For’, says Paul, 'by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God… For we are what (God) has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works’. What wonderful poetic words!

In summary, ‘In Jesus Christ, God has saved us by grace through faith for good works’. This is Paul’s great message to the Ephesians – and also to us. It is a dense and coded formula – as hard to understand as Einstein’s famous equation, ‘E=MC2’. Let me try to tease out what it means.

Despite our trespasses and sins, God has saved us – he has healed us and made us whole, reunited us with himself – he has made us rise from the dead like Christ.
God has done this by his grace alone, by his loving kindness towards us – it is not our own doing – there is nothing we could possibly do to deserve it.
God has done this through faith – our faith in Jesus Christ, who leads us to God and shows us all that is good and true and beautiful.
And it is because Christ has led us to God that the Spirit moves us to be the kind of people that God has made us to be – people who do good works.

In Ephesians Paul speaks of salvation as something completed, in the past.
But it is better, I think, to see it as something that is continuing, as Paul himself does elsewhere – we are ‘being saved’.

Salvation is surely a dynamic psychological process – much like the process of socialisation we experience as children. That is why I asked you earlier to imagine how you felt as a child as you were learning how to behave.

When God shows us his grace - his loving kindness – in Jesus Christ, we respond with faith in Christ, and we feel enveloped in God’s love.
Our conscience tells us when we offend against God’s love, and we hear Jesus call us to repent – to change our ways. And when we do repent, God responds by forgiving us. We are saved. No longer crushed by a burden of guilt, we feel loved and close to God again.
When we feel touched by God’s love, we can respond to the prompting of his Holy Spirit to do good and reject evil, to live as the sort of people God wants us to be.
And this dynamic process of being saved continues as long as we live.

In Jesus Christ, God is saving us by grace through faith for good works.
Let us give thanks for this message from Paul to the Ephesians – it is surely also meant for us. Amen

Next Sunday we shall look at the 2nd half of Chapter 2 (Ephesians2:11-22), and the theme ‘We are all members of God’s household’.

We must start with Jesus Christ

2011-02-06T13:10:00.005Z

On the five Sundays before Lent I shall be giving a series of addresses on Paul's Letter to the Ephesians. This is the first, given in Templederry and Nenagh on Sunday 6th February 2011, the 5th before Lent.

Today and the next 4 Sundays I shall be talking about Paul’s letter to the Ephesians.
When the Rector invited me to give a series of themed addresses I confess I gulped hard several times. But something prompted me to reply, ‘Why not?’ And when I thought about possible themes ‘Ephesians!’ jumped straight into my mind, as if somebody had put it there.

In many ways it’s the supreme expression of Paul’s vision for his churches. I see the whole letter as Paul’s answer to this question: ‘How should Christians, as God’s adopted children, behave in God’s household, which is Christ’s church’. Its often poetic imagery is just as relevant today as it was in Paul’s time, I think.

I’m enjoying the challenge of probing deeper than I've done before into Ephesians and what it means. Inevitably in just five addresses I can only talk about some of its themes, but I hope you will find my take on it thought provoking. If you miss an address one Sunday, or want to come back to one, there will be paper copies available.

But there is no substitute for reading and reflecting on Paul’s words for yourself. So I would encourage you to take down your Bible at home and read perhaps a chapter or two of Ephesians a week, keeping pace with these addresses. It’s quite short – 6 chapters take up just 6 pages in my copy.

This week I shall first look briefly at the context of the letter, and then turn to examine the great theme of chapter 1, ‘We must start with Jesus Christ' - he is the source of all our blessings.

What is the context of Ephesians - who wrote it, to whom, and why?
The letter claims to be written by ‘Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God’. But many scholars doubt that it was written by Paul himself, for reasons of style and vocabulary. They suggest that it may have been written by a slightly later author in Paul’s tradition, drawing on other letters, in particular Colossians, in order to summarise and pass on Paul’s thinking about the church.

In the version handed down to us the letter is addressed ‘to the saints who are in Ephesus and are faithful in Christ Jesus’. But most scholars today think that it is really a circular letter sent to several of Paul’s missionary churches, and wasn’t written specifically to the Ephesians at all. The earliest manuscripts omit the words ‘in Ephesus’. And it is strangely impersonal, unlike Paul’s other letters. There are no personal messages or references to specific events in Ephesus, even though Paul knew the Ephesian church and people very well.

Ultimately I don’t think these scholarly arguments matter a whit. What does matter is the quality of the thinking in it about the nature of the church and its role in God’s plan of salvation. I shall continue the ancient tradition of calling its author Paul and those to whom it’s addressed Ephesians.

We are all saints! Did you realise that? You, you, all of you, and me too – we are all saints, at least in the way that Paul uses the word - ‘hagios’ in Greek means one who has been made holy. The idea that a saint is someone with a halo, someone who is peculiarly good, someone able to grant miracles through intercession, is a much later idea, a medieval superstition. We are saints because by the grace of God we are Christians, ‘faithful in Christ Jesus’, to use Paul’s words. Our baptism was an external and visible sign of the inward and spiritual grace that God has made us holy.

In fact I suggest that we should see Paul’s letter as addressed to us – we are ‘the saints who are in Ephesus’!

Paul begins his letter (1:3-14) by counting the ways in which God has blessed the saints.
It is an amazing, poetic passage, a single sentence in the original Greek. The subordinate clauses break one after another like waves on a seashore, pounding in the message that God, in Paul’s words, ‘has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places’. It is the same message we heard in the Gospel reading (John 1:14-16): ‘From (Christ’s) fullness we have all received grace upon grace’.

The name of Christ echoes and re-echoes through Paul’s words:

‘In Christ’, God ‘chose us … before the foundation of the world to be holy and blameless before him in love’.
We are not Christians because we choose to be, but because God has chosen us to be - and we can trust God not to change his mind, because he chose us from the very beginning.
‘Through Jesus Christ’ God has ‘destined us for adoption as his children …, according to the good pleasure of his will’.
God adopts us as his beloved children, full members of the household of God, because God's Son Jesus Christ introduces us to him.
‘Through (Christ’s) blood we have redemption and the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of his grace that he lavished on us’.
It is Christ’s example of self-sacrifice upon the cross which shows us the way to redemption and forgiveness. It is a gift from God we do not deserve.
In Christ, God has revealed ‘the mystery of his will … as a plan for the fullness of time, to gather up all things in him’, that is in Christ, ‘things in heaven and things on earth’.
The Greek word translated here as ‘plan’ is 'oikonomia' - also the root of the English word 'economy', which we are probably tired of hearing in this election time! It literally means the stewardship or overseeing of a household or institution. Paul is saying here that God’s purpose in overseeing his creation is that the whole of it should be drawn together in Christ. The whole of creation - chosen, adopted, redeemed and forgiven, all in Christ - what a breathtaking cosmic vision!
‘In Christ we have also obtained an inheritance’. Those who hear Christ’s ‘word of truth, the gospel of salvation and … believe in him’, are ‘marked with the seal of the promised Holy Spirit’ And ‘this is the pledge of our inheritance towards redemption as God’s own people’.
It is precisely because we feel Christ’s promised Spirit at work in and through us, that we can be sure that God has chosen and adopted us as his children, and has redeemed and forgiven us.

Paul almost bludgeons us to recognise that we must start with Christ! This is the key message Paul begins with. This is the message which I hope you will take away from all my words today. We must start with Christ – everything else, including the church insofar as it is a human institution, can only be secondary to Christ.

Paul continues, thanking God for the Ephesians’ faith and the love they show the saints.
He prays in beautiful words that they may know ‘the immeasurable greatness of (God’s) power for us who believe’ - we will shortly pray them for ourselves as our parish prayer for February.

And finally Paul drives home again to the saints at Ephesus, that Christ must be their starting point, finishing the 1st chapter with these words: ‘God put this power to work in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand … And he has put all things under his feet and has made him head of all things for the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all’.

‘Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ’

He must be our only starting point! Amen

Next week we shall look at Ephesians 2:1-10, and the theme ‘We are saved by grace through faith for good works’.

May Jesus's disciples be one!

2011-01-24T11:34:00.004Z

I was very privileged to be invited to give this address at the Evening of Prayer for Christian Unity, hosted by Nenagh Catholic parish in St Mary's of the Rosary on 23rd January 2011.

Dear friends, brothers and sisters in Christ.
How wonderful it is to come together from our different Christian traditions to worship, to hear God’s word, and to pray together for the unity of Christ’s disciples!

As we do so, we follow Jesus’s new commandment, to love one another as he has loved us, and we echo his prayer, that his disciples may be one, as he and the Father are one.

On behalf of those here from other traditions, I want to thank the Catholic parish for calling us together and for hosting us in this beautiful church.

There are some – Baptists, Methodists and the Living Water prayer group - who sadly cannot be with us tonight, because of prior commitments, but I know they too are with us in spirit and would wish me to extend their greetings to you.

The worship materials we are using this evening were developed in Jerusalem.
Christians in Jerusalem today live under tremendous pressure, from both the political and religious situation and their dwindling numbers. But despite that, they are communities of faith which worship, pray and study together, which work for the good of their society, and which pray for unity of Christ’s Church and the coming of the Kingdom of God.

Representatives of their many Christian traditions meet informally each month as the Ecumenical Circle of Friends. The World Council of Churches and the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity asked them to prepare materials for this year’s Week of Prayer for Christian Unity.

They chose as a theme ‘All things in common’, and they invite the world-wide Church to pray with them not only for Church unity, but for justice and peace in the Holy Land and throughout the world.

They invite us to pray for unity, but that is not the same as uniformity. God loves diversity in the life he has created, and I don’t doubt he loves the diversity among his disciples, their different ways of worshiping, their different ways of understanding their faith. The unity we pray for is surely not uniformity, but a unity of love for one another, and a unity of purpose, to proclaim together, to all who will listen, the good news proclaimed by Jesus Christ.

The theme chosen by Christians in Jerusalem is a challenge to us all.
It is taken from the description of the earliest Christian community in Jerusalem in Acts (2:42-47), which we have just heard. How hard it is to see these characteristics of the earliest Church in today’s splintered Christian landscape!

‘They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers’. Fellowship in breaking bread? We encounter such difficulty sharing the Eucharist together, not just between our different traditions but even within them – I’m thinking of my own Anglican communion - for profound theological reasons we are told. But can these so-called obstacles really be insurmountable?

‘All the believers were together and had all things in common; they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need’. Living simply so that others can simply live? Christians live embedded in the greedy consumer culture around us, in which we are defined by what we possess, and we are constantly urged to acquire more. God’s creation suffers to feed the greed, and the needs of the poor and vulnerable are too often ignored. As Christians we may be personally generous - but do we do enough to challenge that pervasive culture of greed and waste, with Christ’s values of loving God, and loving our neighbours as ourselves?

How will we respond to the challenge from Jerusalem?
Will we leave here today with a warm feeling that we have done our duty by praying together for unity this one day of the year?

Or will we leave here determined to act together this coming year to bring unity closer, a unity of love, and a unity of purpose to proclaim together the good news of Jesus Christ?

Let us join ourselves in Jesus’s prayer, that we his disciples may be one!

Here is the Lamb of God

2011-01-16T12:58:00.008Z

Adoration of the Lamb,

Detail of the Ghent Altarpiece, Jan Van Eyck

‘Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!’
Beginning with these words from St John’s Gospel (1:29-42), John the Baptist publicly testifies to the great truth about Jesus, which had suddenly come to him as he baptised Jesus the day before – that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God.

And pointing to Jesus, the Baptist says to two of his own disciples the next day, ‘Look, here is the Lamb of God!’ One of them is Andrew, who after spending a day with Jesus goes to find his brother Simon Peter, to tell him, ‘We have found the Messiah’. Andrew and Peter go on to follow Jesus and become two of his chosen apostles.

Jesus as the Lamb of God is such a familiar image, isn’t it? We’ve all seen those icons of Christ as a lamb holding a cross. And we still sometimes use the Agnus Dei during communion, which I remember from my childhood in the ancient chant, ‘O Lamb of God, that takest away the sins of the world, have mercy upon us’.

The seal of the Moravian Church, featuring the Agnus Dei.

The image is so familiar that we often don’t realise just how strange it is – the Son of God represented as a small, vulnerable lamb. Wouldn’t a noble beast like a lion be more appropriate for the Son of God? CS Lewis in his Narnia books chose Aslan, a fearsome lion, not a tame lion, to represent the Christ-like character in his stories, not a lamb. Jesus chose to describe himself as the Good Shepherd, not as a lamb. So why does the evangelist have John the Baptist describe Jesus as the Lamb of God?

The image of the lamb had layer upon layer of symbolic meaning for Jews at the time of Christ.
It would remind them of the old story of the Passover Lamb (Exodus 12). The Israelites are told to sprinkle the blood of a lamb on the doors of their houses, as a sign to the Lord to pass over the house without killing the firstborn within. The Lord strikes down the firstborn of the Egyptians and the firstborn of the Israelites live. The Passover Lamb protects and saves the Israelites and they escape from Egypt.

It would remind them of the daily sacrifice in the Temple in Jerusalem of ‘two male lambs a year old without blemish’, one in the morning and one in the evening, as an offering to God (Numbers 28:3-4), an offering intended to turn God’s wrath away from the sins of the community.

So the lamb would have represented reconciliation with God, and forgiveness of sins – atonement in the language of theology. The English word atonement originally meant ‘at-one-ment’, being put in harmony with someone.

And the lamb would also have represented uncomplaining gentleness. Jeremiah writes, ‘But I was like a gentle lamb led to the slaughter’. And Isaiah writes of God’s suffering servant, ‘Like a lamb that is lead to the slaughter … he did not open his mouth’.

Today we are horrified by the cruelty and injustice of sacrificing living animals to God. It also horrified the prophet Isaiah (1:11-17), who told the people of Judah that God did not want their animal sacrifices, but rather wanted them to ‘cease to do evil, learn to do good; seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow’. But his words were ignored, perhaps because of vested interests - the privileged status and livelihood of priests would have depended on sacrifices continuing, and sacrifices were no doubt cheaper and easier for the well-to-do than Isaiah’s alternative. Jewish practice of animal sacrifice did not cease until the destruction of the Temple by the Romans in 70AD.

Jesus taught his disciples that God would pardon their sins if they truly repented. In perfect obedience to God’s will, he submitted to a cruel death upon the cross although an innocent man. Perhaps it’s not so very surprising that his disciples, the first Christians, should identify Jesus with the sacrificial lamb, as John does, and as Paul did too.

As the years passed, early Christians came to see the self-sacrifice of Jesus on the cross as the final and complete atoning sacrifice, taking their sin away, reconciling them to God, and making further ritual sacrifice of animals unnecessary.

The imagery of Christ as the sacrificial lamb lived on after animal sacrifice ceased.
Christians have always meditated upon it. And very many have pondered just how Christ’s death on the cross reconciles us with God – that is, how atonement works. Theologians have come up with innumerable theories.

There’s ‘ransom’ atonement: Adam and Eve are held to have sold humanity to Satan at the time of the Fall; Justice requires that Satan be paid a ransom to free us from his clutches; God pays the ransom on our behalf through Christ’s death; Justice is satisfied and we are freed from Satan’s grip of sin and death. I can’t accept the dualism of this theory. I believe in one God, and I do not believe in any kind of anti-God like Satan.

There’s also ‘substitution’ atonement: the debt humans owe for their sin is not to Satan but to God himself; human kind deserve God’s punishment for sin; God’s Justice means that God cannot simply forgive the sin without exacting punishment; but God takes the punishment on himself by sending his Son to die on the cross in our place as a substitute; and this cancels out human sin, allowing us to receive forgiveness and be reconciled to God. This theory repels me, because it makes God appear to collude in the unjust punishment of Jesus, rather than being the loving, forgiving and merciful Father that Jesus revealed to us.

And then there’s ‘moral influence’ atonement: Jesus’s self-sacrifice on the cross shows us how to deal with the consequences of sin, and also demonstrates God’s love for us; we respond with repentance, and receive God’s forgiveness; we are reconciled to God and transformed by the Holy Spirit. I find this a much more satisfactory explanation of atonement.

But all these musings of theologians are like smoke compared to the fact of atonement.
Human attempts to define the purposes of God must always be inadequate, and we should not let differences of opinion about how atonement works divide us one from another.

Rather we should rejoice together in the reality of atonement - that Jesus Christ reconciles us to God, who will forgive our sins if we repent.

It is to this reality that John the Baptist points when he says, ‘Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world’.

God has come close to me, as close as my own skin

2011-01-09T13:58:00.007Z

Today the Church asks us to remember the Baptism of Christ.
So I take this opportunity to reflect on what Jesus’s baptism means, both to those at the time, and to you and me 2000 years later.

But first I invite you to picture again, in your minds eye, the moments after John baptised Jesus, as described by Matthew in his gospel (3:13-17).

Here is Jesus, a man in the prime of his life, about 30 years old. He is glistening wet from receiving John’s baptism of repentance, as he walks up out of the river Jordan. Then, suddenly, the heavens burst open. The Spirit of God descends like a dove to settle on him. And the voice of God declares from heaven, ‘This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased’.

It is a striking and dramatic scene which engages our senses – it’s easy to imagine being there, isn’t it? And artists have painted many beautiful images of it over the centuries.

The Baptism of Christ, Joachim Patenir, c. 1480-1524, Kunsthistorische Museum, Vienna

I don’t believe Matthew the Evangelist was an eyewitness to Jesus’s baptism.
Nor is he likely to be the same person as Matthew the Apostle, the tax-collector Jesus called to be one of the twelve, a while later.

Whoever he was, Matthew is describing an epiphany, in which God reveals himself to be the Father of Jesus and sends his Spirit to Jesus. The very same epiphany, bringing together Jesus at his baptism, the dove and a voice from heaven, is also described by Mark, Luke and John. It must have been part of the common tradition of the earliest Christians on which Matthew and the other evangelists drew when writing their gospels.

For Christians by the 4th Century AD these baptism passages came to be seen as supporting and illustrating the doctrine of the Trinity, the idea that the one God consists of three persons, Father, Son and Spirit. They are the only passages in the NT where we encounter all three persons together at the same time, in the same place.

Matthew, like any educated Jew of his time, would have known the prophesy of Isaiah well. He would surely have noticed the parallels with today’s OT reading (Isaiah 42:1-9), in which God declares, ‘Here is my servant, whom I uphold, my chosen, in whom my soul delights; I have put my spirit upon him’. But there is this crucial difference: for Isaiah, God identifies his chosen one as just a humble servant; whereas for Matthew, God identifies Jesus as his beloved Son.

What did John the Baptist make of Jesus’s baptism?
John recognised Jesus when he came to ask for baptism, not surprisingly since they were cousins close in age. John says to Jesus, ‘I need to be baptised by you, and do you come to me?’ What’s going on here?

John proclaimed ‘a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins’ (Mark 1:4). He called people to repent, and baptised them as a sign that God forgave their sins. I think John must have believed Jesus was such a good man that he had no need of baptism, repentance and forgiveness. But John knew he did need them himself.

The gospels tell us next to nothing about Jesus before he started his ministry. However Luke (2:41-52) does tell us that Jesus amazed the teachers in the Temple with his understanding when only twelve, and that afterwards Jesus ‘increased in wisdom and years, and in divine and human favour’. John’s reaction confirms Luke’s picture of Jesus as a man widely seen to be remarkably holy and charismatic.

John would also have recalled Isaiah’s description of God’s chosen servant in today’s reading, ‘He will not cry or lift up his voice, or make it heard in the street; a bruised reed he will not break, and a dimly burning wick he will not quench; he will faithfully bring forth justice. He will not grow faint or be crushed until he has established justice in the earth.’ Perhaps John recognised the Jesus he knew in Isaiah’s description - softly spoken, filled with compassion for the damaged and the weak, yet determined and passionate for justice.

Despite John’s reluctance to baptise him, Jesus insisted, and John consented. And we know John then experienced the same epiphany described by Matthew, since John’s Gospel records him saying: “I saw the spirit descending from heaven like a dove, and it remained on him. I myself did not know him, but the one who sent me to baptise with water said to me, ‘He on whom you see the Spirit descend and remain is the one who baptises with the Holy Spirit.’” Only then does John realise the full truth, that his cousin Jesus is not just a remarkably holy man, but is in fact the promised Messiah, the incarnate Son of God.

I wonder what his baptism meant for Jesus himself.
Jesus very deliberately chose to ask John for baptism, and insisted on it – it must have been of great significance to him.

Matthew gives us a clue when he records Jesus saying to John, ‘it is proper for us in this way to fulfil all righteousness’. For Jews, righteousness meant obeying God’s law and doing God’s will. Jesus clearly believed God wished him to be baptised by John. But baptised for what purpose?

Perhaps God's Spirit prompted Jesus to seek John’s baptism at the very start of his ministry in order to demonstrate that Jesus was God’s incarnate Son, not just a good man like Isaiah’s servant. This was certainly the effect it had on John. But Jesus himself surely also needed to be certain of his identity before beginning his ministry. Is it possible this is also the very moment when Jesus finally understood that he was Christ the Messiah, the Son of God?

Whatever the truth of this, Jesus clearly associated himself quite deliberately with John’s proclamation, ‘Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near’ (Matt 3:2) - because he went on to proclaim this message in his own ministry (Matt 4:17). And I like to think that Jesus did so because he wanted to show his solidarity with sinful people like you and me, who desperately need to repent and be forgiven, even if Jesus had no such need himself.

So to finish, what does Jesus’s baptism mean to you and me, 2000 years on?
Well, no doubt there are many answers. But this one strikes me.

The epiphany at the baptism of Jesus marks a great new insight into the nature of God as the Trinity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. As God says through Isaiah in the 1st reading, ‘See the former things have come to pass, and new things I now declare’.

Before it Jewish religious thinkers could only conceive of the relationship between God and a human being as that between a remote master and a terrified servant. After it Christians could begin to see the relationship as one in which God is incarnate in a human being like you or me.

Everything is changed and made new. God ceases to be a remote figure and we are no longer afraid. God comes near to us, as close to us as our own skin. We feel his presence to be like that of our loving Father; to be like thst of Jesus, his Son, our friend and brother; to be like that of the Spirit which inspires all that is good and true in us.

Let us thank God for Jesus’s baptism, most particularly for the insight it gives us into God’s intimate and loving nature as Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

Remembering Prophets

2010-12-05T12:31:00.004Z

An address given on the 2nd Sunday of Advent 5th December 2010 at Nenagh (it would have been given in Templederry too, but the service there was cancelled due to the icy conditions).

Today we lit the 2nd candle in the advent wreath to remember the prophets.
And today’s readings are concerned with two of the greatest of them: Isaiah in the Old Testament (Isaiah 11:1-10) and John the Baptist in the New (Matthew 3:1-12). Christians see their prophetic words as referring to the incarnation of God in Jesus, and the coming of Christ’s kingdom.

We shouldn’t see prophets, I think, as being like weather forecasters, or racing tipsters, who foretell the future without engaging in it. Rather a prophet is someone who expresses a vision of the way things are, and the consequences that flow from this, which powerfully influences those who listen, so that they act to make that prophetic vision a reality. Prophets change history through their words!

Let me try to tease out what these prophets’ words say to me.

Let’s start with Isaiah’s vision of a world of peace and justice.
‘The wolf shall live with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the kid, the calf and the lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them.’

A beautiful image - but we all know, don’t we, that the strong prey on the weak; the natural world is all about survival of the fittest. ‘Nature, red in tooth and claw’ – the phrase comes from Tennyson's long poem ‘In Memoriam’ (canto 56). In it the poet contrasts the idea of a good and loving God with the terrors of an uncaring Nature. He talks about a person of faith,
Who trusted God was love indeed
And love Creation's final law-
Tho’ Nature, red in tooth and claw
With ravine, shriek'd against his creed

Surely Isaiah’s vision of predator and prey at peace together can be nothing more than a fairytale? That’s not the way the world works. What’s going on here?

The context is important, I think.
Isaiah is writing in Jerusalem, the capital of Judah, at a time of great danger. The Assyrians have just conquered Judah’s twin kingdom of Israel and carried the people off as captives, and now they threaten Judah. Isaiah believes that the social and political collapse of Israel was caused by its failure to live up to the spirit of the law given in Sinai – and he sees the same thing happening to Judah. Isaiah has just prophesied that Judah too will be overthrown, but he can’t believe that a God who is faithful will desert his chosen people completely – once the Assyrians have purged those who have broken the covenant, surely a faithful remnant will be left.

So in today’s reading Isaiah prophesies that from the root of Jessie, a new shoot will rise up. From the ruins of Jerusalem, of the kingdom of Jessie’s son David, a new kingdom of justice and peace will arise, worthy of God’s favour. It will be marked by ‘the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and fear of the Lord’. Its ruler – from the stock of Jesse – ‘with righteousness … shall judge the poor, and decide with equity for the meek of the earth’.

It is a vision of the kingdom of heaven. In such a society the powerful will not prey on the weak. Isaiah’s vision is about people, not nature. Survival of the fittest should not – must not - apply in human society, however much it does in the natural world.

Isaiah was wrong in his belief that Judah would fall to the Assyrians.
The Assyrians mysteriously abandoned their attack on Jerusalem. When destruction came, 100 years later, it was the Babylonians, not the Assyrians who laid waste to Jerusalem and carried its leaders into exile.

But Isaiah’s vision was not forgotten. His words were remembered by the exiles. His vision inspired them to hold firm in their traditional faith, to keep their identity as a people, and to return home when conditions allowed.

Over the centuries that followed, Isaiah’s words were studied and elaborated. By Roman times, religious Jews felt quite certain that God would send his Messiah – his anointed one – of the stock of Jesse, who would rule over the Jewish people, as Isaiah had prophesied, with righteousness and faithfulness.

John the Baptist believed in Isaiah’s prophecy and expected God to send his Messiah.
As Matthew reports, he told his followers ‘one who is more powerful than I is coming after me, I am not worthy to carry his sandals’. Matthew also believed that John himself was the messenger that Isaiah said would announce the Messiah, ‘the voice of one crying out in the wilderness: “Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight”. John called the people to, ‘Repent,’ – to make a new start, to change their lives – ‘for the kingdom of heaven is at hand’ – the kingdom of Isaiah’s vision.

Jesus surely pondered Isaiah’s words too. I believe he came to the conclusion that they were to be fulfilled in him. But God gave Jesus the insight that as the Messiah he must come not in physical power and glory like a king, but as a suffering servant, leading his people – all people, Jews and gentiles – by his example, to the kingdom of heaven which his loving father God willed.

The early Christians, steeped in the Jewish Messiah tradition, were convinced that Jesus is the shoot from the stock of Jesse in Isaiah’s prophesy. The spirit of the Lord rested upon him. He preached the kingdom of heaven. He died that we might be saved, he rose from the dead, and he ascended to God. Surely, they said, he will return to rule with righteousness and faithfulness over God’s kingdom of justice and peace.

So what of us today? Do we believe in Isaiah’s vision?
In our own time, as in Isaiah’s, we are faced with danger and uncertainty. But we must never give up hope.

Isaiah’s vision is in front of us – the world can be like the kingdom of heaven, filled with justice and peace. John’s call echoes in our ears, to make a new start because the kingdom of heaven has come near. Jesus has shown us the way as God incarnate. He has sent us the Spirit to lead us, and fire to drive us forward, just as John said he would. Our task as Christians is to do our bit to make his kingdom, the kingdom of heaven, a reality.
God is faithful to his faithful people.

‘They will not hurt or destroy
on all my holy mountain;
for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord
as the waters cover the sea.’

Isaiah’s vision is not a fairytale, because for God all things are possible!

Remembering - and the kingdom of God

2010-11-14T14:52:00.008Z

An address given on Sunday 14th November 2010, the 2nd before Advent, Remembrance Sunday, at Templederry & Killodiernan.

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years contemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.

Rev F A O (Derick) Sanders CF(EC) in battledress

Today I wear a poppy in my father’s memory.
He was dragged - unwillingly - into the maelstrom of the 2nd World War. As a Chaplain to the Forces he landed in Normandy on D-day, he was there at the crossing of the Rhine, and he ended up in the ruins of Berlin. He spoke little about his experiences, not to me or to most others I think - but he was marked by them. He felt it right to wear the emblem of a poppy on Remembrance Day, in memory of his comrades who died, and in memory of the scenes of murderous destruction he had witnessed. I thank God that my life has not been scarred by war in the same way his was.

Many people choose to wear a poppy today, but not all do. And we should be mindful of the sensitivities of others, particularly here in Ireland. It is surely right to remember our family and friends who have suffered in war – for they are part of us. It is right to remember the horrors of war – lest by forgetting we allow them to happen again. And it is also right to support the charitable work of the Earl Haig Fund.

But how we remember is important, I think. Jesus proclaims, ‘the kingdom of God has come near, repent and believe in the good news’ (Mark 1:15). War is the very opposite of the kingdom of God. Our remembering should be mingled in equal measure with repentance. We need to repent the very human tendency - which we all share - to hate those not of our tribe, to treat them as enemies, who all too often we seek to kill and maim in war. And we should not let others manipulate our remembering to reinforce the tribal instincts that promote war.

Let us join together in faith and penitence in a minute’s silence, in remembrance of all those who have died, been maimed or suffered in war; men, women and children; whether military or civilian; on whichever side, and on no side.

Ever-living God, we remember those whom you have gathered from the storm of war into the peace of your presence; may that same peace calm our fears, bring justice to all peoples and establish harmony among the nations, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

What a beautiful vision of the kingdom of God Isaiah (65:17-25) paints in today’s OT reading!
The Lord is ‘about to create new heavens and a new earth’, says Isaiah. ‘No more shall the sound of weeping be heard in it, or the cry of distress.’ It will be a place of peace, in which, ‘the wolf and lamb shall feed together, the lion shall eat straw like the ox’. ‘They shall not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain, says the Lord’.

For the Jews of Jesus’s time, the holy mountain was Mount Zion, one of the hills on which Jerusalem is built, with the Temple at its summit. Herod the Great had extended, adorned and beautified the Temple in the years before Jesus was born. Judging by the remains excavated by archaeologists and descriptions from the time, it must have been a stunning building.

I imagine that visitors must have seen the Temple as like a foretaste of Isaiah’s new creation, a model of what the kingdom of God would be like when it was realised on earth, a monument to peace and plenty for all.

But Jesus did not see the Temple in this way, as the NT reading (Luke 21:5-19) tells us.
For Jesus the kingdom of God that he cares so passionately about – his kingdom – is not built of stones, no matter how magnificent. His kingdom is not of this world, as he later tells Pilate at his trial. He recognises that the Temple with all its sacrifices, priests and temple-taxes is an unsustainable burden on God’s people. And he knows, as we do, that all material things turn to dust in the end. So when he hears some people admiring the magnificence of the Temple, ‘how it was adorned with beautiful stones and gifts dedicated to God’, he publicly foresees its utter destruction. And of course he is proved right – some 40 years later it is indeed destroyed in the course of a Jewish rebellion against Roman rule.

Some who were listening to Jesus miss his point completely. They ask him to tell them how to know exactly when this destruction will happen. Many people in Jesus’s time were just as consumed with apocalyptic fears about the end-times as some folk are today. But Jesus will have nothing to do with it - he does not feed their fears. Instead he warns them not to believe people who claim to be able to forecast such things. And he tells them not to fear that the end is imminent, even when they hear of awful events, such as ‘wars and insurrections’, ‘earthquakes’, ‘famines and plagues’.

Then with amazing frankness, Jesus uses the occasion to teach his disciples what is in store for them, and in a strange way to reassure them.

Jesus knows that the political and religious authorities are determined to get rid of him, to put him out of the way. The end game is upon him – in just a few days he will be seized, tried and executed on the cross. And then the authorities will turn on his disciples. ‘Before all this occurs’, he says, ‘they will arrest you and persecute you; they will hand you over to synagogues and prisons, and you will be brought before kings and governors because of my name’.

But Jesus promises to help them to hold on, to stand firm and testify to the values of the kingdom of God which he has taught them – that is what matters, whatever may befall them. ‘For I will give you words and a wisdom that none of your opponents will be able to withstand or contradict’, he says. ‘You will be betrayed even by parents and brothers, by relatives and friends; and they will put some of you to death. You will be hated by all because of my name. But not a hair of your head will perish. By your endurance you will gain your souls’.

I put it to you that Jesus’s disciples in all ages – including us – should be reassured by his words. Jesus will help us to proclaim the values of the kingdom of God. It may be that in Ireland today we're not likely to be killed for sticking up for the kingdom of God, though we may very well suffer in other ways. But that is our duty as disciples. Desertion in the face of the enemy is shameful. By our endurance we will gain our souls.

To suffer or die for the kingdom of God is not the worst thing that can happen to us.

Vines & Grapes

2010-11-14T14:26:00.004Z

A talk for children at the Family Service on Sunday 14 November 2010 in St Mary's, Nenagh. The theme was The Vine.

Children, I’m going to talk to you today about vines, because that is the theme of the service.

Perhaps those of you at the back could come up to the front with the girls choir, because I have something to give you.

The grown-ups can listen in if they want to, or go to sleep, but they should be very good and quiet as mice.

What is this? (hold up a bunch of grapes) - Grapes

What kind of plant do grapes grow on? – Vines

Do you like to eat grapes? – Yes! Well here they are for you to share.

Grapevines are wonderful plants.
Here is a picture of a grapevine.

Grapevines like to grow in countries that are much drier and hotter in summer than Ireland is, so they don’t grow very well here. To get really good sweet grapes in Ireland you have to grow them in a glasshouse. But they grow well in Palestine where Jesus lived, and everyone there then knew as much about vines and grapes as we do about apple trees and apples, because you could find them in every garden.

A vine grows from a big old trunk every year. It has roots that go down a long way to find every drop of water and all the nutrients it can. The water and the nutrients make a rich sap which the trunk pushes up to feed its new growth. In spring and summer the vine grows branches and leaves, and produces flowers which turn into tiny grapes. During the autumn, the tiny grapes swell and ripen until they are the sweet juicy fruit we can buy in the shops. And all the time the vine-grower has to tend it. He has to cut out any branches or twigs that break. And he carefully prunes any branches and twigs that aren’t growing as they should. If he doesn’t tend it properly, the vine won’t produce a big harvest of good fruit.

How are those grapes, by the way? Are they sweet and juicy? Yes! So the vine-grower has done his job well!

In today’s reading (John 15: 1-8), Jesus tells us a story about vines.
Jesus uses the picture of a vine to show us what our relationship should be with him – as his followers – and with God – his and our loving Father.

‘I am the true vine’, he says. Have you noticed these words written in our beautiful stained-glass East window? They are there to remind us of Jesus’s story.

And he goes on to say, ‘my Father is the vine-grower’ - that's God, and ‘you are the branches’ - that's you here, everyone over there, and me too.

If I were a vine branch, I’d want to produce good fruit – and I’m sure you would too. In the same way, we all would like to be the good people that God wants us to be.

That means we must hold tightly to Jesus like branches to a vine trunk. Just as the vine branch needs rich sap from the vine trunk to produce good grapes, so we need the kind of spiritual food which only Jesus can feed us with, to be as good as God wants us to be.

We grow and learn throughout our lives, not just as children, but as grown ups. We learn from our experience. As we live and learn, we must expect God to teach us hard lessons sometimes. God, our loving Father, is like a skilful vine-grower. We must let him prune out any bad bits in us, so that the good bits in us will produce good fruit. That is what learning from experience is all about, and we should rejoice in it.

So, every time that you eat a really juicy grape, and every time that you look at that beautiful stained-glass window, I want you to remember Jesus’s story about the vine:

Jesus is the true vine that feeds us

You and I are like branches of the vine

God, our loving Father, is like a skilful vine-grower

If we hold tightly to Jesus and we trust in God, we can and we will produce good fruit to please him - as sweet and juicy as any bunch of grapes!

Harvest in the wilderness

2010-10-17T18:59:00.004+01:00

Address given at the Lockeen Harvest Festival, Sunday 17th October 2010. It was a great privilege to be invited back, three years after the last Harvest I attanded there. Year A readings (Deuteronomy 8:7-18 and Luke 17:11-19)

We all love Harvest Festivals, don’t we?
Looking around us at this beautifully decorated church, filled with harvest bounty, how can we fail to feel thankful? The decorators have every right to be proud of their skilful arrangements, and those who have grown the produce have every right to be proud that the best of it should be displayed here in God’s house! We all enjoy the colours and the smells of the fruit and the vegetables and the flowers, the familiar harvest hymns, and the cheerful people, filled with a sense of accomplishment, now that the year’s work has been crowned with success.

And it’s not just human beings who feel thankful, I fancy. Have you come across John Betjeman’s well known poem, The Diary of a Church Mouse? The Church Mouse has a lean diet for most of the year, nibbling on old service books, floor polish and the stuffing of hassocks. He doesn’t care much for Christmas or Easter or Whitsun, but he dines like a king at Harvest:

For me the only feast at all
Is Autumn’s Harvest Festival,
When I can satisfy my want
With ears of corn around the font.
I climb the eagle’s brazen head
To burrow through a loaf of bread.
I scramble up the pulpit stair
And gnaw the marrows hanging there.

My farming neighbour tells me it’s been a good harvest this year – and if he says so it must be true, because he’s not usually so positive! His grain yield is a bit down, due to the dry summer, but the harvest was easier than last year, moisture is low, and he’s anticipating a good price. Dairy farmers are also happy, he tells me, though dry-stock folk a bit less so. Sheep farmers are pleased too. And those of us like me with gardens are delighted with our excellent crops of fruit and vegetables.

We really do have so much to be thankful for. In the OT reading from Deuteronomy (8:7-18), Moses speaks to the children of Israel as they wait to cross into the Promised Land. ‘The Lord your God is bringing you into a good land’, he says, ‘a land with flowing streams, with springs and underground waters welling up in valleys and hills, a land of wheat and barley’. Well, God has already placed us in just such a land: Ireland is well-watered; our yields of wheat and barley are among the highest in the world. Instead of ‘vines and fig trees and pomegranates’, we have cherries and plums, apples and pears, raspberries and currants. We may not have olive trees, but we have rape-seed for oil. It is ‘a land where we may eat bread without scarcity, where we lack nothing’. It is surely right for us to ‘eat our fill and bless the Lord our God for the good land that he has given us’.

But we are not all farmers, and in other respects we are suffering a hard, bitter season.
We are shocked and angered by revelations of financial mismanagement by so many of our leaders. The actions of bankers, developers and politicians here have made the global crash worse than in other countries. Many have lost their jobs, many more have had their take-home pay cut, the old find their pensions are not what they expected. Services are being pared; people are struggling to pay mortgages on homes now worth just a fraction of what they paid for them. And we are being told that we face four more years of increasing pain to bring our public finances back into balance.

It is also slowly – too slowly – dawning on us that our modern consumer lifestyle is not sustainable. To feed this lifestyle, human beings are over-exploiting the Earth’s resources of fossil energy, minerals, water and fertile land. If this continues God’s planet which nurtures us will be damaged, and we will suffer with the rest of creation.

Our lifestyle is also unjust. Everyone can’t enjoy the high consumption that we do in the developed world – there are simply not enough resources to go round. The rich unjustly take the lions share, and so deprive the poor of their aspirations to development.

We know we will have to make changes, but we do not yet understand what and how. We are anxious; we are frightened. And for many people it is difficult to feel thankful.

How is it that we find ourselves in this position?
The root cause of the problems we face is surely that old fashioned sin of greed, to which human beings have always been liable – greed for money, greed for possessions, greed for a lifestyle richer than our neighbour has.

Could it be that we have been forgetting God, and saying to ourselves, ‘My power and the might of my own hand have gained me this wealth’?

Our situation is a bit like that faced by the children of Israel as Moses led them out of Egypt into the Sinai desert, long before they ever get to the Promised Land.

God is leading us ‘through the great and terrible wilderness, an arid waste-land with poisonous snakes and scorpions’. We are being humbled. We are being tested. God has given us a task on our journey - to build a sustainable and just society, more like the kingdom of heaven than the one we know today, the kind of society in which all can flourish. We are journeying through a wilderness - but in the end the journey will be good for us – we will enter the Promised Land.

We need cleansing just as much as the lepers that Jesus met on the way to Jerusalem. (Luke 17:11-19)
We need to be cleansed of sinful greed. Without that we cannot be successful in the task God entrusts us with. And we can be sure that Jesus will cleanse us, if we recognise our sin for what it is, and call out to him, as the lepers did, ‘Jesus, Master, have mercy on us!’

But let us not be like the nine lepers who failed to show their gratitude. Let us be like the one who turned back, praising God, to thank Jesus. It is against the grain of society today, it is counter-cultural. But if we praise God and show our gratitude, Jesus will bless us, as he did that Samaritan, saying, ‘Get up and go on your way; your faith has made you well’.

Others will notice the change in us. Our positive, unselfish, grateful attitude will attract them. They will be inspired to work with us to build that sustainable, just society in which all will flourish.

God will look after us on our journey in the wilderness; he will make ‘water flow from flint rock’ and he will feed us ‘with manna that our ancestors did not know’; in fact he will continue to bless us with good harvests. Enough to meet our needs if not our unreasonable wants. And we must give thanks for them, as we are doing today, because our joy will bring others to join us.

Betjeman’s Church Mouse was surprised at harvest time to be joined in the church by so many field mice from outside. The poem finishes:

But all the same it's strange to me
How very full the church can be
With people I don't see at all
Except at Harvest Festival.

As Christians we must go forward confidently, certain that God will bring us into a good land:

There will be economic recovery – thank God!
We will build a sustainable and just society, more like the kingdom of heaven – thank God!
And like the children of Israel we must ‘remember the Lord our God, for it is he who gives us power to get wealth, so that he may confirm his covenant that he swore to our ancestors, as he is doing today’ – thank God for that promise too!

Foreigners & Exiles

2010-10-10T13:33:00.003+01:00

‘Blow, blow, thou winter wind, thou art not so unkind as man’s ingratitude.’
These words came to my mind as I read today's passage from Luke's Gospel (17:11-19). They come from Shakespeare’s As You Like It, sung by a character who is an exile in the Forest of Ardenne.

Luke tells us that Jesus healed ten lepers, and only one came back to show his gratitude. ‘Were not ten made clean?’, says Jesus, ‘But the other nine, where are they?’

I fear I’m more like the nine ungrateful than the tenth grateful leper – and I dare say you are too. How many of us do not owe an immense debt to someone else? Perhaps to a friend, a teacher, a doctor, who has done something for us that we could not possibly repay. Or to our parents - a week’s neglect on their part would have killed us when we were new born. Yet how often do we forget to express our gratitude, how often do we not even bother to say thank you?

And we are often ungrateful to God as well. He has blessed us with so much: he has given us a wonderful world so perfectly made to meet our needs for food, clothing, shelter and beauty; he has given us the capacity to form deep loving relationships as parents and children, as friends and lovers; and God has even given us his only Son to show us the way to his kingdom, the way of self-sacrifice which leads through the cross. When times are bad we may pray to God with desparate intensity, but when times are good we are inclined to forget to be grateful. On Sundays we recite automatically the words ‘Almighty God, we thank you for feeding us’, but how many of us ever offer even a silent grace before meals, I wonder?

Jesus saw that the one who came back was a Samaritan. ‘Was none of them found to return and give praise to God except this foreigner?’, he says.

As an ethnic group the Samaritans were heretics - they did not behave, or believe, or worship as the Jews did – they were ritually unclean. They were disliked and despised by their Jewish neighbours – somewhat as many Irish people dislike and despise immigrants or travellers today. But Jesus teaches his disciples a lesson by drawing their attention to this particular outsider, who was the only one to turn back, praise God for his healing and thank Jesus. And Jesus publicly blessed him, saying, ‘Get up and go on your way; your faith has made you well’.

Jesus is never dismissive of people who are different in race, culture or faith, and we should not be either, if we are to claim the right to call ourselves Christians. We can have much to learn from those who are different – those of us who were at Monday’s celebration of Creation Flourishing might reflect on the lesson about joy in worship which Suma and Priya from India taught us in their traditional dance of praise and thanksgiving.

Jeremiah (29:1,4-7) gives the exiles in Babylon some good advice in today’s OT reading.
Let me summarise it. Get on with your lives; build houses and live in them, plant gardens and eat what they produce, marry and have children. But also, seek the welfare of the city where you find yourself, and pray for it, because in its welfare you will find your welfare.

Others at the time were stirring up the Jewish people to rebel against the Babylonians. But history shows that Jeremiah was wise. It seems the Jews did as he advised, they prospered in Babylon and retained their identity, so that some 70 years later, after Babylon in turn had been overthrown by the Persians, their descendents were able to return to Jerusalem and restore the Temple.

It is good advice for migrants everywhere. It is good advice for the New Irish that we have brought to our country. And it is good advice for the many Irish people who will likely be forced by the economic crash to emigrate over the next few years. Our children and young relatives may well be among them - how heartbreaking it will be for them and for us. But let us pray that they may build good lives in their new communities and work for them to flourish, because if their new communities flourish, so will they.

The majority of us, though, will stay in Ireland to cope with what looks likely to be a long recession. We are shocked and angered by recent revelations of economic mismanagement. The economic landscape has changed. The future will not be one of ever-growing material prosperity as we expected just 2 or 3 years ago. We know much will have to change, but we do not yet see clearly what and how. We are scared by the uncertainty. And we risk falling into a communal psychological depression which would prevent us addressing the real problems we face.

In a way we are like internal exiles in our own country.
Jeremiah’s advice is good for us as well:

Get on with your lives, he says. We must not look back at what we feel we have lost, but instead look forward.
Build houses and live in them, he says. Well, we won’t need to build much soon, but what we should do is to seek new uses for the ghost estates, the offices, the commercial properties and factories lying empty all over Ireland. We must adapt them for fruitful purposes.
Plant gardens and eat what they produce, he says. We are blessed in Ireland with bountiful renewable resources: our land and seas, energy from wind, ocean and geothermal heat, skilled people and vibrant culture. Let us use them productively – they will feed us like gardens.
Marry and have children, he says. Ordinary human life can and must continue – let us use our capacity for deep loving relationships as parents, children, friends and lovers, to support and care for one another.
But also, says Jeremiah, seek the welfare of the city where you find yourself, and pray for it, because in its welfare you will find your welfare. Let us strive to build a just and sustainable society for the future, because only in such a society can we all flourish.

And as recovery comes - which it will, thank God - let us behave like the grateful Samaritan and remember to turn back, to praise God, and to give thanks for all he has given us.

Faith & Duty

2010-10-03T13:50:00.004+01:00

Address given on Sunday 3rd October 2010, the Eighteenth after Trinity, in Nenagh.

In today’s NT reading, Luke (17:5-10) records two short sayings of Jesus.
They are memorable, because Jesus, as he always does, paints vivid pictures in simple everyday language.

But they are also paradoxical, I think, because although they seem simple on the surface, it is only after pondering them for a while that we can begin to grasp their true implications.

In these two sayings, Jesus is giving his followers – then and now – two important rules for living as God’s beloved children: a rule of faith, and a rule of duty. Let's look more closely at them.

First, the rule of faith
The apostles said to Jesus, ‘Increase our faith’. Jesus replied ‘If you had faith the size of a mustard seed, you could say to this mulberry tree, “Be uprooted and planted in the sea”, and it would obey you.’

I wonder whether the apostles felt when they heard this that Jesus was exasperated by their request? Was he criticising them for not having even the merest smidgeon of faith? Because of course they knew very well they couldn’t expect a tree to obey their command!

But once they thought about it they would realise that he was simply telling them the truth, in his typically vivid way.

Surely what Jesus really meant is this. They mustn’t use the excuse of too little faith to avoid doing what God asks of them. If they have any faith at all, no matter how small, they must act on it. They must trust that God will work his purpose out through them - and get on with it. They will find that they can do things they never thought they could – miraculous things.

And I think, perhaps, that we have experienced the truth of this in our own parish, in a small way. When we discovered that St Mary’s needed a new roof which would cost hundreds of thousands of euros, we didn’t at first believe that we could raise the money. But when we overcame our fears, when we trusted that God would not let us down, when we acted on our little faith, then we discovered that by God’s grace, with the help of our neighbours and the wider community, we could perform a little miracle. We raised enough money to complete the roof in a little over a year, and we have gone on to replace two more!

The rule of faith that Jesus gives us is this: do not fear that you have too little faith; instead trust in God and obey the promptings of his Spirit; you will discover that you have faith enough to do things that might seem impossible.

Second, there’s the rule of duty
Jesus asks his followers to imagine that they are slave owners. A slave owner wouldn’t dream of thanking a slave for doing what he is ordered to do, says Jesus – that’s just what a slave is meant to do! But then he asks them to imagine their role reversed, with them in the role of slaves in relation to God. ‘So you also, when you have done all that you were ordered to do, say, “We are worthless slaves; we have only done what we ought to have done!”’

Now, we’re not at all comfortable today with the idea of slavery – thank God! Slavery was abolished largely because Christian men and women came to realise that it contradicted the biblical conviction that every human being is created in the image of God – though shamefully, not until nearly 2000 years after Jesus’s death. I doubt that many of Jesus’s disciples owned slaves themselves – they weren’t rich folk – but slavery then was part of everyone’s common experience – they would have understood what Jesus was talking about very well.

If Jesus were making the same point today, he might say something like this.

‘Imagine you’re a multi-millionaire, who employs a housekeeper, a personal assistant and other staff. When they do their job, you don’t go out of your way to thank them, or give them a bonus, because you pay them well to work for you – doing their job is only what you expect of them.
Now, put yourself in God’s shoes. He employs you to serve him by doing good, doing his will. He has given you this wonderful world and all its resources to meet all your reasonable needs. You don’t expect God to give you any special reward just because you have done what he asks of you, do you? You’ve only done your duty!’

The rule of duty that Jesus gives us is this: behave like servants of God; the Holy Spirit will tell you what God wants of you if you listen for it in prayer; your Christian duty is to do what he asks. But you should not expect to earn any special favour from God for doing it – it is no more than what is your duty to God.

We have no right to expect good things in this life, nor a place in heaven, just because we have done a few good deeds – and inevitably failed in many others. Yet Jesus reveals to us a God who is like a loving Father. He assures us that God will forgive our failures if we ask him to, and that he has prepared a place in his kingdom for his faithful servants. But it is a matter of God’s grace and not our own merit.

Let us then resolve to live our lives according to Jesus’s rules of faith and duty:

Let us trust in God, and believe that though our faith is little it will be enough to achieve God’s purposes.
Let us be servants of God, doing what is right and our duty, not because we expect to be rewarded for it, but just because it is right and our duty.

St. Ignatius Loyola captures this beautifully in his prayer

Teach us, Good Lord, to serve you as you deserve:
to give, and not to count the cost;
to fight, and not to heed the wounds;
to toil and not to seek for rest;
to labour and not to ask for any reward,
save that of knowing that we do your will.
Through Jesus Christ our Lord,
Amen