Who does God want you to be?

 

Eli and Samuel by John Singleton Copley, 1780

Address given at St Mary's Nenagh and Killodiernan Church on Sunday 14th January 2024, the 2nd of Epiphany

Today’s readings are mostly about people hearing God’s call and how they respond to it.

I believe that God calls each and every one of us to be the person he means us to be. But how can we be sure that a voice we hear is truly God’s voice? And how can we be sure what he is calling us to be and to do? The technical word for this is ‘discernment’, and discernment is difficult. Most of the time, in our busyness, wrapped up in our own thoughts and desires, we may not even hear God’s voice. If we do, it is often so much easier to ignore it. And sometimes what he asks of us seems so difficult that we try to run away from it.

Today I’m going to reflect a little on the readings, because I think they can help us get to grips with the problem of discernment.

In the OT reading (1Samuel 3:1-10, 11-20) Samuel hears God calling to him.

You may remember that Samuel’s parents Hannah and Elkanah had dedicated him to God as a child, and left him in the guardianship of Eli, the priest at the pilgrimage shrine of Shiloh.

The boy Samuel is confused when he hears God’s call. Three times he hears a voice calling his name. He thinks it is Eli calling for him, but it is not. At last Eli realises the voice Samuel is hearing must be from God. He prompts Samuel to respond, ‘Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening’ – only then can Samuel open himself to God and understand his vocation. He will grow up to be a great prophet and a leader of Israel.

Notice Eli’s role in the story, helping Samuel to understand what is going on. When we are trying to discern what God is saying to us, we often need someone else to encourage, support and guide us, to enable our discernment.

I have experienced this personally. I began to ask myself whether I should offer myself to lead worship, at a time when otherwise there would be no one to lead services. I had watched a diocesan reader I admired and trusted do so. But it was not until a priest recognised that God was calling me, and encouraged and guided me, that I could begin to understand my call to diocesan reader ministry. Fostering discernment is an important role in ministry.

Psalm 139 marvels at how completely God knows and understands us.

In beautiful poetry the psalmist tells us that God comprehends us completely, we cannot escape him, even if we wish we could. This is because God has made us: ‘I thank you for I am fearfully and wonderfully made’, says the psalmist.

Indeed, we are fearfully and wonderfully made. We have been made as souls with conscience and intelligence, capable of love, able to tell good from evil, truth from lies, beauty from ugliness. And it is these innate capacities which enable us to hear God’s call and discern what it is he wants of us.

In the Gospel reading (John 1:43-51) Jesus calls Philip and Nathanael to follow him.

Notice that Jesus calls Philip directly, but it is Philip who then invites his friend Nathanael to meet Jesus. This is the way that many disciples of Jesus were made at the very beginning, by one disciple passing on Jesus’s call to follow him to another. And it is the way that disciples have been made ever since.

Notice also how Nathanael initially resists the call from Jesus, passed on by Philip.  ‘Can anything good come out of Nazareth?’, he asks cynically. I suppose the rivalry between Bethsaida and Nazareth must have been a bit like that between Tipperary and Kilkenny in the hurling! It is only when Nathanael accepts his friend Philip’s invitation to ‘come and see’, and spends time in conversation with Jesus, that he gives in, finally confessing, ‘Rabbi, you are the Son of God’.

How like the way that many of us try to evade God’s call when it comes! But God does not give up on us – he knows us from the inside out, and he will not let go of us easily if he wants us for a purpose.

Philip goes on to be a great apostle, the first apostle to the gentiles, even before St Paul took on the role. Acts tells us that he was the first to bring Samaritans into the Church, and he goes on to baptise an Ethiopian court official. But what of Nathanael? We hear nothing else about him in the Bible - though perhaps he is the same as Nathanael of Cana to whom Jesus appeared at the Sea of Galilee after the Resurrection. We do know that Nathanael responded to Jesus’s call. As Jesus promised, he must have seen ‘heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending’. But God calls only a few to great things, and Nathanael may not have been one of them.

I said at the start, I believe God calls every one of us to be the person he means us to be.

There may be some here who are called to be priests, or perhaps even bishops – maybe even prophets or apostles, God help us! But almost all of us are called to much more modest things in ordinary places. Yet these too are things which God needs us for in order to build his Kingdom of peace and justice.

They may be official jobs in the church, jobs like being a church warden, or serving on select vestry. Or they may be specific ministries in the parish - there are so many, aren’t there? - reading, singing, church cleaning, washing linen, helping with flowers or refreshments after services – even volunteering for the Christmas tree festival! God calls different people at different times to different ministries to build up Christ’s body, the Church, to continue his ministry in the world.

But just as important there are tasks of service to others in the secular world. Tasks like being a carer, teaching children, healing the sick as doctors or nurses. Tasks that build and protect community, or conserve the beautiful planet we have been given. Tasks that feed the bodies and nourish the spirits of our neighbours. God needs people who will carry out all these tasks, and so many others, to build his Kingdom.

I suggest that each and every one of us should ask ourselves these questions: How has God called me? and How have I responded? We should do so often, because who it is God wants us to be, and what he wants us to do, is ever changing through the course of our lives. The beginning of a new year is a good time to do so.

And we should pray that God’s Holy Spirit will help us to discern what he wants of us. Because it is precisely when we respond to God’s call, that like Nathanael we will see ‘heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending’ and experience the joy of his Kingdom.

Let me finish in prayer with a Collect of the Word

Eternal God,
whose Son, Jesus Christ, is now exalted as lord of all,
and pours out his gifts upon the Church:
grant it that unity which only your Spirit can give,
keep us in the bond of peace,
and bring all creation to worship before your throne;
through Jesus Christ our Redeemer,
who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, for ever and ever. Amen

Salt & Light

 ‘You are the salt of the earth … You are the light of the world’.

So says Jesus to his disciples in the first part of today’s reading from Matthew’s Gospel (5:13-20). It comes after the Beatitudes at the start of the long discourse we call the ‘Sermon on the Mount’. He is surely also speaking to us as his followers today. We too are the salt of the earth and the light of the world! At least we are when we do our best to be what God wants us to be, and when we fail, we are offered forgiveness.

Salt gives savour to our food, and preserves it from going bad. If it loses its taste, if it becomes contaminated, it is useless and must be thrown out. Just like salt, says Jesus, if we are to be good for anything in God’s creation, we must be the good people God has created us to be.

Without light we can’t see what we are doing, nor where we are going, and a lamp which is hidden away is useless. Jesus tells us we must ‘let (our) light shine before others, so that they may see (our) good works and give glory to (our) Father in heaven’.

But what must we do, how must we behave, to be the salt of the earth and the light of the world?

In the second part of the reading, Jesus abruptly changes the subject to talk about Hebrew scripture.

He says, ‘I have come not to abolish but to fulfil (the law and the prophets)’, fixing himself firmly within the ancient traditions of the Jewish people into which he was born. The ‘law and the prophets’ are the major part of the Hebrew scriptures, which we call the Old Testament.

‘Not one letter, not one stroke of a letter, will pass from the law until all is accomplished’, he says. ‘Therefore, whoever breaks one of the least of these commandments, and teaches others to do the same, will be called least in the kingdom of heaven; but whoever does them and teaches them will be called great in the kingdom of heaven. For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees’ – who for all their faults did their best to be righteous, to obey every last letter of the law – ‘you will never enter the kingdom of heaven’.

Does this mean that Jesus teaches us as his disciples that to enter the kingdom of heaven, we must follow precisely every last letter of the Jewish law? Must we follow not just the Ten Commandments but also the smallest rules about purity, such as not eating shellfish or mixing fibres in our clothes? If this were true, we should seriously consider converting to Judaism!

To see what Jesus really means, we need to read the rest of Matthew Chapter 5.

Sometimes I get frustrated that the good compilers of the lectionary miss out the context of what is set to be read. In this case the passage about the law and the prophets does not follow on from the passage about salt and light, but should be read as an introduction to the verses that follow it.

In these following verses Jesus talks about his interpretation of the law, giving several examples that do not abolish or replace but extend the conventional interpretation of the scribes and Pharisees. You can read what he has to say in Matthew Chapter 5 when you get home, but here are a couple of examples:

·         ‘You have heard that it was said to those of ancient times, “You shall not murder”.’ – that’s one of the 10 commandments – ‘But I say to you that if you are angry with a brother or sister, you will be liable to judgement’. Jesus extends the commandment against murder to falling out with another person. ‘If you remember that your brother or sister has something against you … be reconciled to your brother or sister’.

·         ‘You have heard that it was said, “You shall not commit adultery”.’ - another of the 10 commandments - ‘But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart’. And we should understand that the same applies to a woman looking with lust at a man.

Notice what Jesus is doing here – he is going beyond the precise wording of the commandments to reveal the spirit of God’s law.

He also teaches us that there are circumstances when it is right to break one commandment in order to keep a more important one. Elsewhere (Matthew 32:37-39) Jesus summarises the law and the prophets, ‘“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.” This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: “You shall love your neighbour as yourself”’. Jesus heals the sick on the Sabbath because it is more important to love your neighbour than to observe the prohibition of work on the Sabbath.

Jesus’s approach to God’s law is nuanced – he is more concerned with what is right and just than in following rules like a robot.

The prophet Isaiah’s approach was the same, as Jesus would have known very well. In today’s 1^st reading (Isaiah 58:1-9a), the prophet chastises the leaders of Israel for mindlessly following the laws about fasting while oppressing the people. God wants a different kind of fasting, he says:

‘Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke?

Is it not to share your bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into your house; when you see the naked, to cover them, and not to hide yourself from your own kin?’

Following Jesus’s example, our task is surely to look beyond the words written in the Bible to discern the spirit of God’s law and to be guided by that.

This is a harder task than following the letter of God’s word, as we read it in the Bible, which heaven knows the scribes and Pharisees found difficult enough. It will require humility, open minds, and real engagement both with scripture and with other Christians, some of whom see things differently and cling to ancient tradition much as the scribes and Pharisees did.

But this is what we must do, this is how we must behave, if we are to be the salt of the earth and the light of the world, as Jesus tells us we are.

The Holy Spirit will help us. St Paul in today’s 2^nd reading (1 Corinthians 2:1-12) says to the Corinthians, ‘we have received … the Spirit that is from God, so that we may understand the gifts bestowed on us by God’. In this way, growing in maturity as Christians, we will be able to ‘speak God’s wisdom, secret and hidden, which God decreed before the ages for our glory’.

And in St John’s Gospel Jesus himself promises that ‘The Spirit of truth will guide (us) into all truth’ (John 16:13).

I finish in prayer with a Collect of the Word:

Faithful God,

You have appointed us, your witnesses,

to be a light that shines in the world:

let us not hide the bright hope you have given us,

but tell everyone of your love,

revealed in Jesus Christ the Lord,

who lives and reigns with you

in the unity of the Holy Spirit,

one God, for ever and ever. Amen

Sin against the HolySpirit

Jesus is being mobbed like a rock star in today’s reading from Mark’s Gospel (Mark 3:20-35)

He has been travelling around Galilee proclaiming the Good News and healing those who came to him, followed by crowds thronging to see this celebrity. Now he has returned home to the fishing village of Capernaum on the Sea of Galilee. Even there the crowds still press in on him, so that he and his disciples don’t have time even to eat, we are told.

But not all in the crowds support Jesus. In the reading we hear of two groups of people who want him to cease his ministry – first his family, and second a party of scribes from Jerusalem. Mark interweaves the stories of how Jesus responds to these two groups – a favourite device of his, sometimes described as a ‘Markian sandwich’.

The bread in the sandwich concerns his family. Back in Nazareth they were hearing news of what he was up to. He had given up the security of his family, and the carpenters business, for the life of a wandering preacher. They had heard how he was being mobbed, and no doubt feared that the authorities would seek to put him out of the way. He must have ‘gone out of his mind’, they thought – we must go to fetch him home and end this madness. So they set off to Capernaum, around 50km, say a 2 day’s journey on foot. We will hear what happens when they get there later.

The filling of the sandwich concerns the scribes from Jerusalem, members of the religious and civic establishment, which is threatened by Jesus’s popularity

The scribes are determined to undermine Jesus.

They cannot deny he has been healing the sick, since so many people have seen it. In those days it was believed that illness was caused by evil spirits – by demons. So they start to spread rumours about the source of Jesus’s healing power: ‘He has Beelzebul’ – the chief demon – ‘and by the ruler of the demons he casts out demons’.

Jesus understands very well what the scribes are about. He confronts them directly to their faces, dismissing their argument as a logical impossibility. ‘How can Satan cast out Satan?’, he asks. ‘If a kingdom is divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand … If Satan has risen up against himself and is divided, he cannot stand, but his end has come’.

Look at it this way, he says, ‘No one can enter a strong man’s house and plunder his property without first tying up the strong man’. Jesus turns the tables on the scribes by pointing out, ‘I am stronger than Satan because I have cast out Satan’.

Jesus has refuted the scribes’ claim that he is possessed by ‘an unclean spirit’, not the Holy Spirit from God. Now he turns their words back on them. For the scribes to say that a spirit that comes from God is not good but evil is a blasphemy, an insult to God. It is the scribes whose spirits are unclean, not Jesus.  ‘Truly I tell you’, he says, ‘people will be forgiven for their sins and whatever blasphemies they utter; but whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit can never have forgiveness, but is guilty of an eternal sin’.

Over the centuries many Christians have been confused by this unforgiveable blasphemy, ‘the sin against the Holy Spirit’. I understand it in this way. Our God-given conscience enables us to distinguish good from evil. People who cannot tell good from evil are conscience-blind. They are unable to recognise what is evil in themselves, so they cannot repent it. And without repentance they cannot be forgiven.

Sometimes Christians worry, fearing that they may be guilty of the sin against the Holy Spirit and so can never be forgiven. But they worry unnecessarily, I believe - their very worry proves they are able to repent, so they aren’t guilty and can be forgiven.

So what happens when Jesus’s family reach Capernaum?

When his mother Mary and his brothers and sisters arrive, Jesus is inside the house teaching his disciples. His family sends a message for him to come out to them. He must have had a fair idea why they had come – perhaps they had previously sent messages from Nazareth asking him to come home.

Jesus asks rhetorically, ‘Who are my mother and my brothers?’ And then looking about at his disciples, he says, ‘Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother’.

I wonder how his family felt when they heard what he had said. Did they feel hurt, spurned in favour of his disreputable band of disciples? The truth is that however much they loved him, and he loved them, his family had no right to try to make him forsake his mission.

We are not told what the family did then, but presumably they returned home to Nazareth, feeling chastened. Perhaps Mary remembered Jesus’s words recorded by Luke (2:49) when she and Joseph lost him as a child of 12 in Jerusalem, and found him after 3 days in the Temple: ‘Why were you looking for me? Didn’t you know that I must be about my Father’s business?’. But we do know that his mother Mary and his brother James did not cut themselves off from Jesus, but were faithful to him to the end, and perhaps the others too.

Mark’s sandwich story is about discernment, I think. I take two things from it.

First, Jesus has given us a tool to help us discern whether someone we encounter is motivated by a spirit of evil, as the scribes from Jerusalem were, so that we may confront and overcome the evil, as Jesus did, without violence. Any person whose conscience is so lacking that they cannot distinguish between good and evil must be motivated by a spirit of evil. They will not be able to repent the evil they do, and so they cannot be forgiven - their sin can only be eternal. Unless God intervenes, that is, because all things are possible with God - as St Paul, the persecutor of the Church, discovered on the road to Damascus.

Second, each one of us has the freedom in Christ to follow what we discern to be God’s call to us, our vocation, even if others including family and friends oppose it and say we are mad to do so. If I am certain of my call, I should be prepared to reject the intervention even of those whom I love and who love me. Equally, I should be very cautious of pressing others, even family members or a friends, not to follow what they believe is their vocation, as it may invite their rejection of me. This is not only good psychology, but acknowledges their right to hear and act on God’s call to them.

Let me finish in prayer with a Collect of the Word

Almighty and eternal God,

your Son Jesus triumphed over the prince of demons

and freed us from bondage to sin.

Help us to stand firm against every assault of Satan,

and enable us always to do Your will;

through Jesus Christ, our Lord,

who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit,

one God, now and for ever. Amen

St Michael & All Angels

An address given at Templederry, Nenagh and Killodiernan on Sunday 27th September, 
St Michael & All Angels, transferred

How do we talk about what we know but cannot see, what we perceive but cannot touch?

Today’s readings use the language and metaphor of angels and demons to talk about good and evil. Good and evil are spiritual concepts. We can’t see or touch them, but we know all about them, and we can distinguish between them, because each of us has the capability called conscience. I think this is what it means to say God has made us in his image.

Many people these days are embarrassed to talk about angels and demons. We’re modern people, they say - these are just old, unscientific, superstitious ways of talking. But hold on a moment. Scientists also talk about what they cannot see or touch. To talk about the nature of space and matter and energy, they coin strange, new words and concepts, like quarks and gluons, inflation and dark energy – with no embarrassment at all.

Others may be turned off by the highly sentimental depictions of angels we find in popular culture, and the ‘mind & spirit’ shelves of bookshops. But there is nothing sentimental about angels and demons in the Bible.

I suggest the biblical language of angels and demons is actually a fruitful way for us to talk about those very real but spiritual concepts of good and evil, and our relationship with God. Have you ever read The Screwtape Letters by CS Lewis? The letters are written by a senior demon named Screwtape to his younger and less experienced nephew Wormwood, to show him how to be a better tempter. If you haven’t read the book, you should – it’s very funny, but also full of insight into how we can be persuaded to make bad choices. I recommend it as a confirmation present, and for young people of all ages.

Let’s begin by looking at what we mean by an angel.

The word ‘angel’ is derived from the Greek word ‘angelos’, meaning simply ‘messenger’, any sort of messenger. Today we usually think of an angel as a spiritual messenger from God. People often suddenly realise what the right thing is to do in a particular situation, and make a life-changing decision - say to choose a caring vocation, or to make a stand against evil, or to decide this is my life’s partner. Sometimes this is so vivid an experience that it’s as if a voice calls them to make the right choice. That voice is the voice of an angel passing on a message from God.

The ancient Hebrews struggled to understand their relationship with God. In today’s 1^st reading (Genesis 28:10-17) we heard how Jacob in a dream suddenly realised something really important - that it is the very nature of God to care for his people. In his dream he sees God’s messengers – the angels of God - ascending and descending a ladder reaching from Earth to Heaven. Then in his dream, in the voices of the angels I like to think, he hears God make that great promise to the Hebrew people which we call the Covenant: ‘Know that I am with you and will keep you wherever you go’. As Christians we believe this applies to us as much as the Hebrews.

When Jacob wakes up from his dream he says, ‘This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven’. He makes an altar out of the stone he used as a pillow, and he names the place Bethel, meaning House of God.

Jesus knew his Hebrew scriptures very well, of course.

In today’s 3^rd reading (John 1:47-51), he is surely thinking of Jacob’s dream when he says to Nathanael, ‘Very truly, I tell you, you will see heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man’.

He says this in a joking tone, I think. But the underlying message is completely serious. Jesus is identifying himself, the Son of Man, with Bethel, Jacob’s House of God. And without saying so directly he tells Nathanael that he, Jesus, is the Gate of Heaven.

Why does Jesus not say this more clearly? Perhaps the time is not yet right for Jesus to reveal his significance publicly. But he does so later in John’s Gospel in the seven familiar ‘I am’ sayings: ‘I am …the bread of life … the light of the world … the gate to salvation … the resurrection and the life … the way and the truth and the life … the true vine’.

Not all angels in the Bible are good, however, as we heard in the 2^nd reading (Revelation 12: 7-12).

We heard about a great war in heaven: on the good side, Archangel Michael and his angels; and on the bad side, ‘the great dragon …that ancient serpent, who is called the Devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world’, and his angels.  Yes, there are bad angels as well as good ones – we call them demons! Michael and his good angels triumph, and the Devil and his bad angels are thrown down from heaven to the earth. What is this about?

We all know how weak we are, don’t we? Even though my conscience allows me to distinguish right from wrong, all too often I can convince myself that what is wrong is right, perhaps because I desire it, or because I am afraid of what will happen or what others will think of me if I do the right thing, or simply because it is more convenient. It is part of the human condition, it is what is called original sin. Sometimes it is as if I hear persuasive voices in my head, arguing bad is good, lies are true, ugliness is beauty, or hate is love. These are the voices of the bad angels that have been thrown out of heaven, messengers from the Devil.

It’s tricky, isn’t it? If I hear the voice of an angel, how do I know the message is from God? How do I know it is not from ‘the deceiver of the whole world’? So often we hear competing voices and struggle to decide which is right - echoing that war in heaven in which, thank God, good triumphs.

These words from Matthew’s Gospel (7:15-20) give us a clue, a test we can use: ‘You will know them by their fruits’, says Jesus, ‘Are grapes gathered from thorns, or figs from thistles? In the same way, every good tree bears good fruit, but the bad tree bears bad fruit’. In other words, we must use our God-given reason to look at the consequences of any decision we make, and if our God-given conscience tells us they are bad, we can be sure the voice we hear is that of a bad angel, a demon.

It is hard work to discern what is truly right from what is truly wrong. That work is the spiritual work which we call prayer. We would all do well to do more of it. Of course many unbelievers, if they are of good will, also work hard to make the right choices – they would not call it prayer, but that I think is what it really is.

Let me finish with a prayer for discernment:

Loving Father,

we pray that the voices of your holy angels

may help us to discern your will in all we do,

and to disregard the deceiving voices

which do not come from you;

May we share in the victory

of Michael and all your holy angels

as we work for the coming of your Kingdom.

In Jesus’ name we pray. Amen