Saving a broken world

Address given on Sunday 29th December 2019 at St Mary's Nenagh, the 1st Sunday of Christmas.

What a horrid story St Matthew tells us in the Gospel reading set for today (Matthew 2:13-23)!

The reading is out of order. It comes after the wise men from the East, the Magi, have departed – they are getting closer, but they will not arrive until Epiphany on January 6^th.

The background to the reading is this. The wise men, as we all know, had been following a star to pay homage to a child, born to be king of the Jews. When they reached Jerusalem, King Herod directed them to search for the child in Bethlehem, where the chief priests said the Messiah would be born. Herod slyly asked them to bring word back to him, so that he too could pay homage - but Herod was afraid of a rival king to his dynasty and he had other, murderous ideas. The wise men went on to Bethlehem, where they were overwhelmed by joy to find Jesus with Mary his mother and Joseph. They knelt down, paid homage and presented their gifts. But they were warned in a dream not to return to Herod.

Joseph too is a dreamer, and also a man of action, determined to protect his family. After the wise men leave, Joseph dreams that King Herod will seek to kill the newborn Jesus, so he takes Mary and Jesus and they flee to Egypt as refugees. He is right to be afraid. Herod is infuriated that the wise men had tricked him by not returning - he doesn’t know which child the wise men came to worship, which child to murder. So he orders the massacre of every child two years old and under in and around Bethlehem – every one. Safe in Egypt when Herod dies, Joseph dreams again that it is safe to return, and he does so with Mary and Jesus. But in yet another dream he realises that Herod’s son Archelaus, who is now king of Judea, may harm them, so he settles the family at Nazareth in Galilee.

It is a nasty tale of brutal force and the massacre of innocent children. Why should we be asked to think about it amidst the joy of Christmas? Where is God in this?

The answer is that Christmas is not just about the joyful birth of a child, however special.

There is more to Christmas than the baby Jesus, with his soft skin smelling of milk, nursed by his young mother Mary, with Joseph close at hand. More than the choirs of angels prompting rough shepherds to come to the crib where Jesus lay and to glorify God. More than the Magi, the wise men from the East, led by a star to give homage to Jesus and present symbolic presents.

Christmas is about God incarnate - God made flesh in human form as Jesus Christ, the Son of God. St John calls him the true light, the ‘Word’: ‘The Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth’. But he is born of Mary into a world in which great beauty is mixed with hideous ugliness. God’s purpose in the incarnation is to save this world, and us with it.

The massacre of the innocents reminds us that Jesus Christ was born into our world, a world that is horribly broken. A world where deadly force is used to kill the innocent. A world where families are forced to flee as refugees, where they must rely on the kindness of strangers. A world where the greed of the rich and powerful impoverishes the poor and ravishes creation. A world in which Christ is crucified.

Jesus Christ comes into this broken world to save it and us. By his life and ministry, death and resurrection, he shows us how to confront and overcome evil. He teaches us to listen to his good news. He assures us that if we repent, if we change our bad behaviour, God will forgive us. He shows us signs that the kingdom of God has come near. 

In the kingdom of God the broken world will be put back together to reflect the glory of the love of God. It is not fully with us yet, but it is near - we can see signs of it if we look with the eyes of faith, just as the shepherds and the wise men did.

Our task as Christians is to follow Jesus and work to make God’s kingdom, Jesus’s kingdom, a reality. The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit will be with us to help us and guide us. Like Joseph we must dream dreams to understand what must be done. And like Joseph we must act on those dreams.

I shall finish in prayer with a Collect of the Word

Almighty God,

you have shed upon us the light of your incarnate Word:

may this light, kindled in our hearts, shine forth in our lives;

through Jesus Christ our Lord,

who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit,

one God, now and for ever. Amen

Make straight the way

Address given at Templederry, St Mary's Nenagh & Killodiernan on Sunday 10th December 2017, the 2nd of Advent.

Let’s listen again to the prophet Isaiah’s beautiful, poetic words in the 1^st reading (Isaiah 40:1-11):

A voice cries out:

In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord,

make straight in the desert a highway for our God.

Every valley shall be lifted up,

and every mountain and hill be made low;

the uneven ground shall become level,

and the rough places a plain.

Now, we know a lot about making highways around here – just think of the recent remaking of the streets of Nenagh, and the building of the M7 motorway. Isaiah’s words could almost be an anthem for the National Roads Authority! Great cuttings have been blasted through the hills. Giant machines have moved the spoil to make embankments. Bridges have been built over rivers. All to make the road as gentle and smooth as possible.

Road building would not have been so vast in Isaiah’s time, but it would still have been a gigantic community enterprise to make the roads to allow farmers to transport their produce on pack-mules to market in Jerusalem, and to allow pilgrims to travel to the temple on Mount Zion. The roads knit together the Jewish people in the cities of Judah to their holy mountain of Zion, not just in a material way, but also in metaphor as a worshiping community. I feel sure that for Isaiah the way of the Lord was not a road for God to travel to his people on, but a road for his people to travel to God on.

Then the glory of the Lord shall be revealed,

and all people shall see it together,

for the mouth of the Lord has spoken.

In our 3^rd reading (Mark 1:1-8), in the very first words of his Gospel, St Mark recycles this road building metaphor.

John the Baptist is a wild man, wandering about the Judean desert, clothed in camel’s hair, with only a leather bag at his waist, who ate locusts and wild honey, we are told – the very image of an Old Testament prophet! Mark quotes Isaiah to identify him as: The voice of one crying out in the wilderness: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.’ For Luke he is the fulfilment of the hope expressed by Isaiah.

John proclaims ‘a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins’. And he is very successful to judge by the crowds he gathers. But John is also the self-effacing herald of the coming of another. Claiming no special position for himself, he says: ‘The one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to stoop down and untie the thong of his sandals.’ He means Jesus of course. And John continues ‘I have baptised you with water; but he will baptise you with the Holy Spirit.’

Why have the compilers of the Lectionary chosen this reading for today? John’s message of repentance and forgiveness for sin might seem at first sight out of place in this Advent season. In Advent we look forward to Christmas and the great gift that God has given us. God comes to us. He comes in the form of a little child. His parents Mary and Joseph name him Jesus. We rejoice with them at the miracle of his birth. With angels and shepherds and kings we adore him. And we believe he grows up to lead us to God through his loving self-sacrifice. So why spoil all the joy with dismal repentance for sin? I think the answer lies in the metaphor of road building.

Yes, God makes the first move. Yes, God comes to us in the person of Jesus. But he does not force himself on us. He does not compel us to accept his love. He made us with free will, and we are free to refuse him. But we cannot share in his kingdom unless we make a move in response. That essential move is like building a road to travel on towards God. Each one of us must ‘prepare the way of the Lord’ and ‘make his paths straight’. And to do so we must each accept John’s baptism for ourselves. We must admit our own sins, we must seek God’s forgiveness, and we must undergo a change of heart to follow God’s way in future. For that is what repentance means.

In the 2^nd reading (2Peter: 3:8-15) the author of 2 Peter writes to disciples who are going through a tough time.

Some are becoming weary of the work. Some have begun to doubt whether the great road to the kingdom will be finished in their lifetimes. Some are questioning the apostles’ teaching.

Time is not the same for God as it is to us, he tells them: for God ‘one day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like one day’; and God ‘is patient … not wanting any to perish, but all to come to repentance’.

So, he urges them to be patient. While you are ‘waiting for and hastening the coming of the day of God’ – in other words, building the highway to God – ‘strive to be … without spot or blemish, and regard the patience of our Lord as salvation’.

So, to sum up:

By the readings they have chosen for us, I think the compilers of the Lectionary have tried to correct any tendency we may have to be over sentimental in our anticipation of Christmas.

Yes of course we should look forward with joy to Christmas. Let us wonder at the miracle of Mary’s tiny helpless baby. Let us enjoy the stories of the shepherds and the three kings. And let us sing our hearts out with the angels in the beautiful carols we all love so much.

But let us also reflect on this. The love God shows us at Christmas is no use to us - no use at all - unless we choose to act in response, unless we choose to build a good smooth road on which we may travel to God. John the Baptist has shown us the way, by proclaiming his baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins, which Jesus also proclaims. All we need do is to commit ourselves to that baptism, to build the road - and to be patient.

Let me finish with a Gospel collect:

Merciful God,

you sent your messengers the prophets

to preach repentance and prepare the way for our salvation:

give us grace to heed their warnings and forsake our sins,

that we may greet with joy

the coming of Jesus Christ our Redeemer,

who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit,

one God, now and for ever. Amen

Saved by grace through faith for good works

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’.