One Lord, one Faith, one Baptism

1. Introduction

• The feast of the Baptism of Our Lord gives us a chance to think about baptism more generally, so as well as talking about Jesus’s own baptism by John, I’m going to talk about how Christian baptism started among Jesus’s disciples, what a mess our splintered Churches have made of it since then, and the hope that we can recover some unity in the diversity of our different baptisms in future.
• But first, I hope you like this little baptism joke that I discovered. A baptism is taking place, with the congregation gathered around the font. Just as the Rector pours the water over the baby’s forehead, a 5-year old says in a stage whisper, so all can hear: “Daddy, why is she brainwashing that baby?” Hold onto that thought – out of the mouths of babes!

2. All 4 Gospels tell us of John the Baptist baptising Jesus in the river Jordan:

• Just before today’s reading, Matthew quotes John as saying “I baptise you with water for repentance, but one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to carry his sandals. He will baptise you with the Holy Spirit and with Fire”. A very striking image! John baptised penitents in water, as a sign that their sins were forgiven, washed away in the water. But he believed the promised Messiah was coming after him, whose baptism would be something wholly different.
• In today’s Gospel reading (Matthew 3:13-17), Matthew tells us that John at first refused to baptise Jesus. John recognised Jesus, which isn’t surprising because they were cousins. John believed that he needed to be baptised by Jesus, rather than the other way about, because he was already convinced that Jesus was the Messiah. But Jesus insisted, and John consented.
• Since the earliest times, Christians have been puzzled that Jesus insisted on being baptised. After all, if Jesus, the Son of God, was without sin, with nothing to repent, a baptism for forgiveness of sins seems inappropriate. Perhaps the reason is that Jesus was determined to express his solidarity with his sinful people – with you and with me – by standing with us as we bare our souls in repentance, our sins are washed away, and we receive God’s forgiveness. Solidarity – Jesus is here with us and for us, always!
• ‘And when Jesus had been baptized, just as he came up from the water, suddenly the heavens were opened to him and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and alighting on him.’ Such a beautiful image, so often captured by artists! ‘And a voice from heaven said, “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.”’ Surely Matthew must have very deliberately chosen these words to echo Isaiah’s words in today’s OT reading (Isaiah 42:1-9): ‘Here is my servant, whom I uphold, my chosen, in whom my soul delights’.
• But who saw the dove, and who heard the voice from heaven? I don’t think it can have been the crowd down by Jordan’s banks, because Matthew uses the pronoun ‘he’. This vision is surely not a public one, but a private religious experience. The pronoun is ambiguous. Is it Jesus then who sees the vision? Possibly. Perhaps this is the very moment when Jesus realised that his destiny, the destiny of the Son of God, the Messiah, was that of Isaiah’s suffering servant. But perhaps more likely it is the Baptist who sees the vision. For the writer of John’s Gospel tells us that John the Baptist testified: “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.’”
• Whatever the truth of these musings, this passage stands as a critical text for all Christians who understand the nature of God as Trinity – Father, Son and Spirit. This is the only place in the Gospels where we find all three persons together at the same time. It is the defining vision of the Trinity

2. Jesus himself did not baptise anyone, but his disciples did.

• They did so while he was alive, as the writer of John’s Gospel tells us. And he also tells us that Jesus taught that ‘no one can enter the kingdom of God with out being born of water and the Spirit’.
• And Jesus’s disciples baptised after his death, following his Great Commission, recorded in Matthew’s Gospel in these words: “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.” 3000 are said to be have been baptised on the day of Pentecost alone!
• So right from the very start Christians have used baptism to symbolise the joining of disciples into the Church, so memorably identified by Paul as the body of Christ.
• I feel sure Jesus himself really did institute baptism, and I think he meant it as a gift to unify his people.

3. Yet from the earliest times Christian people have found reasons to fall out about baptism!

• The Apostle Paul had to beg the Christians of Corinth not to quarrel about who had baptised them.
• As Christian denominations have multiplied over 2 millennia, they have quarrelled bitterly about more or less every imaginable thing to do with baptism:
  o Is baptism necessary to salvation or not? That doctrine is behind the horrid medieval practice of refusing to bury un-baptised children in consecrated ground.
  o Is it right to baptise infants, or ought baptism be reserved for adults capable of making promises for themselves?
  o Must baptism be by total immersion or is pouring or sprinkling alright. Is water required at all?
  o What form of words must be used? We baptise ‘in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit’, as Catholics and Orthodox do. Some Churches baptise ‘in the name of Jesus’, which many scholars make a persuasive case was the wording used in the primitive Church. Many Christians on both sides reject each others baptisms as invalid.
  o And Christians have disagreed whether baptism qualifies children to receive communion before they are confirmed as they approach adulthood.

4. Surely Christ must weep to see what his professed disciples have done with his gift of baptism!

• The reality of the matter is that we brothers and sisters in Christ can agree neither on what Christ asks us to do in baptism, nor on what it means. While I don’t believe that Christ wants us all to believe exactly the same – our God seems to like diversity in the natural world – I do believe he wants us to respect each other in our diversity. We break Christ’s body again when we refuse to recognise the equivalence of each others baptism.
  
• Yet there are signs of Christian hope! In 1982, theologians from a variety of denominations, working together in the framework of the World Council of Churches, were able to put forward some ideas to allow practices to converge in the areas of baptism, eucharist and ministry. As a result, some churches have changed their liturgical practices, and some have entered into discussions, which in turn have led to further agreements and steps towards unity.
• This is part of the background which has lead Rev Marie to propose that baptised children should be admitted to communion before confirmation in this parish.

5. Next week is the 100th anniversary of the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity.

• This is another initiative supported by the World Council of Churches. It reminds us how very much more still needs to be done to unite us all in faith in Jesus Christ.
• Which brings me back to where I started: ‘Daddy, why is she brainwashing that baby?’ Our brains do indeed need washing, to wash away our very human but sinful tendency to create divisions between each other, little pockets of them and us.
• Our prayer this week should be this, I think: that the Holy Spirit may so wash our brains in every denomination of Christ’s Church, that we respect each other in our diversity.
• Only then can we, in Paul’s words to the Ephesians, ‘with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, making every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace’ rejoice in ‘the one hope of our calling, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all and through all and in all.’

Angel voices at Christmas

'Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace, goodwill toward men & women'!

• This is the great song of the heavenly host, which Luke tells us the shepherds heard, when the angel announced the birth of the Messiah. It is a song of joy and exaltation, echoing the song of Isaiah’s sentinels. It is a song which we echo in so many of our Christmas carols.
• Have you heard the heavenly host sing? I certainly have, in not so different circumstances, and you may have too. I can remember my joy and exhilaration after the births of my own children. I can remember literally dancing down the wet deserted streets of Guildford at 4am, on the way back home from the hospital. It was as if the whole universe was laughing and crying and singing with me. And everyone I met over the following days shared my joy. Angel voices – a memory to treasure!
  

What exhilarating joy the shepherds must have felt at the birth of this very special baby!

• ‘They went with haste’, we are told, ‘and found Mary and Joseph, and the child lying in the manger’.
• Not just the shepherds, but Mary and Joseph especially will have felt joy and wonder: when they looked adoringly at their beautiful, helpless baby, their first-born son; when they felt the smoothness of his skin, the strong grip of his tiny perfectly formed fingers; when they caught the scent of his new-born baby hair, and heard his insistent baby cry.
• And although we’re not told of them, I feel sure that there were others there to share the joy, perhaps staff and visitors at the Inn in which there was no room, perhaps a local midwife there to help Mary with her birth.
• But not one of them could have realised just how special this baby was to be, whatever inkling the angel Gabriel may have given Mary and the shepherds.
• This baby grows up to be our Lord Jesus Christ - in John’s mystic vision, the Word of God, the true light that enlightens everyone - through whose life and teaching, and death and resurrection, we are shown the way to God.

Of course, every birth and every baby is special.

• Every baby ever born is made in God’s image, including you and me.
• And we can all call ourselves sons and daughters of God, because that very special baby, Jesus, as a grown man, teaches us to pray to ‘our Father in heaven’.
• In celebrating Christmas – in sharing the joy of Jesus’s birth - we also celebrate the miracle that every child is born with a soul which reaches naturally toward God.

There was no place for Mary and Joseph in the Inn, so Jesus was laid in a manger, so Luke tells us.

• Mary and Joseph were far from home for the birth. And soon they were to become refugees, fleeing to Egypt to avoid Herod’s persecution, far from their families and friends.
• Far too many millions of God’s children are also born far from home, as refugees. We must ask God to show us what we can do to help them. But not tonight, I think, not tonight.

Tonight we are here to share with the shepherds, and with Mary and Joseph, in joy and exaltation at the birth of Jesus, to join our hearts and voices with the heavenly host in singing:

'Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace, goodwill toward men & women!'

Prophecy

1. If there’s a common theme to the readings set in the Lectionary for today, the 2nd Sunday of Advent, it is prophecy:

• Isaiah announces (Isaiah 11:1-10) that ‘a shoot shall come out from the stock of Jesse’, on which ‘the spirit of the Lord shall rest’. Christians traditionally take this as a prophecy of the coming of Jesus.
• St Paul in his epistle to the Romans (Romans 15:4-13) quotes no fewer than 4 Old Testament prophecies, to support his case that Christ came to save gentiles as well as Jews.
• Matthew (Matthey 3:1-12) declares that John the Baptist fulfils Isaiah’s prophecy as ‘the voice of one crying in the wilderness: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord’’.

What I shall try to do today is to tease out what lies behind these three prophetic readings, and to explore what relevance they have for us today.

2. But first, what do we mean by a prophecy?

For me prophecy is more than just prediction, like a weather forecast or a racing tip. It is a much wider theory about the way things are, and the consequences this has for the future. And then there is the key question of whether any particular prophecy is true or false – has it been, or will it be fulfilled.

I don’t know about you, but I feel a little queasy about the notion of biblical prophecy. It makes me uncomfortable, because it doesn’t seem to fit with the rational, scientific world view I was educated in. I am also afraid that irrational belief in prophecy may cause people to do bad things – to sin, in other words. As I believe, for instance, that so-called Christian Zionists sin, when they use Bible texts to justify dispossessing Arab Palestinians. Yet I can’t doubt that prophecy can have, and has had, immense power. Prophecy can change history!

Prophecy doesn’t stop with the Bible, of course:

• Karl Marx prophesied 150 years ago that the conflicting interests of capitalists and workers would lead inevitably to revolution, ushering in a new communist era of equality, peace and plenty. Marx certainly inspired millions of people, not always to the good – think for instance of the suffering caused by Stalin’s collectivisation, by Mao’s Great Leap Forward, and by Pol Pot’s evacuation of Cambodian cities. All equally good candidates for sins, I think. The collapse of Communist states in the last 25 years suggests that Marx’s prophecy was false – but it may still be ‘too early to tell’, as Zhou Enlai said of the French Revolution!
• And Jim Lovelock is actually prophesying today, when he says that human lack of respect for Gaia – Earth’s evolving ecosystems - threatens the extinction of species including our own, unless we mend our ways. I am inclined to believe Jim Lovelock, myself. But we must take great care that our actions in response to his prophecies, and other prophecies, work for good and not for evil.

3. So let’s turn to Isaiah’s prophecy.

Scholars believe that the book of Isaiah was written in two periods separated by about 200 years. The Jesse prophecy comes from the first, dated to around 700 BC. The Northern Kingdom of Israel has just fallen to the Assyrian conquerors, and the population have been carried off into captivity – they are the lost 10 tribes of Israel. The Southern Kingdom of Judah, with its capital Jerusalem, is under threat.

Isaiah recognises the threat from imperial Assyria. He 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 can see the same things happening in Judah. If God’s chosen people break their covenant with God, the only result can be destruction, he reasons. So Isaiah prophesies that Judah too will be overthrown, along with Jerusalem and its Kings descended from David.

But Isaiah also believes that God would not desert his chosen people entirely. Once those breaking the covenant have been purged by the Assyrians, a remnant of faithful people will remain. In our passage today, Isaiah prophecies that a descendent of Jesse will be their righteous and faithful leader. He describes poetically, and beautifully, what society will be like under such a leader’s rule:

‘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.’

Jesse was the father of the great King David, whose descendents the prophet Nathan had said would succeed him in perpetuity. I suppose Isaiah, following Nathan, must have believed that only someone from this royal family could lead the remnant, even after the downfall of Judah’s Davidic kings. And no doubt Isaiah expected the downfall to happen very soon. But if so, Isaiah was wrong. The Davidic dynasty continued for another 100 years. When destruction came, it was the Babylonians, not the Assyrians that laid waste to Jerusalem and carted the leaders off to exile.

4. But prophecy can change history, even when it seems to be wrong!

Isaiah’s words were not forgotten. They were remembered by the exiles, who were inspired to hold firm in their 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 by religious thinkers and elaborated by prophets. By Roman times, religious Jews felt quite certain that God would send a Messiah – an anointed one - of the stock of Jesse, who would lead Israel back to the glory days of David, and rule over the gentiles. The prophets said it - it must be so!

John the Baptist believed it. Matthew reported he told his followers ‘one who is more powerful than I is coming after me, I am not worthy to carry his sandals’. Matthew believed that John himself fulfilled Isaiah’s prophecy that the Messiah would be preceded by a messenger.

Jesus surely pondered the prophetic words too. I believe he came to the conclusion that they were indeed to be fulfilled in him. But God gave Jesus the insight that as the Messiah he did not come in physical power and glory like a King, but as a suffering servant, leading his people by example – all people, both Jew and Gentile - to his loving-father God.

Mathew’s Gospel in particular, more than the other Gospels, locates Jesus firmly in the tradition of Jewish Messiah prophecy. He announces at the very start that Jesus is the Messiah, and traces Jesus’s ancestry back to David and Jesse to show that Isaiah’s prophecy is fulfilled. In his Gospel, Matthew helped the primitive Church remodel the Jewish Messiah tradition into our Christian Messiah tradition. Our tradition is encapsulated in the Apostles Creed: Jesus, the Son of God, our Lord and Saviour, was incarnate, crucified and rose again, ascended into heaven, and will come again in judgement. It’s worth saying that again: it is our tradition that Christ will come again!

5. Paul perhaps did more than anyone else to develop this Christian tradition.

As a Jew, he was steeped in the Jewish Messiah tradition, but he saw clearly that Jesus was a Messiah for all, Gentiles as well as Jews. In today’s Epistle, Paul quotes four passages from scripture to demonstrate to his readers in Rome that this isn’t just his own idea, but is inherent in the ancient tradition. It seems that there was a split between Jewish and Gentile factions in the Roman Church. Paul argues that just as Christ is an inclusive saviour, so his church must be an inclusive church.

• Most Bibles will give you a footnote, showing where Paul’s quotations from the OT come from. But if you go to those verses in our translation you will see that they look rather different to Paul’s words. Why is this? The reason is that Paul himself used a Greek translation of the OT known as the Septuagint, not the original Hebrew. This sometimes differs quite a lot from our modern translations from the Hebrew. It must take a lot of faith to believe in the inerrancy of scripture!

6. So what relevance does all this prophecy have for us, on this 2nd Sunday of Advent, 2007?

While I can’t myself believe in the predictive power of ancient scripture, I can understand some of the blessings the Jews have received from their Messianic tradition of prophecy.

• Firstly, the tradition has held their community together. Without it, there would be no Jewish people. Even today, more than 2,700 years after Isaiah, Jews still await the promised Messiah.
• Secondly, it has kept their eyes fixed on the future, on an ideal future, marked by equity and justice and peace, where in Isaiah’s words ‘the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea’.

I think that we, as Christians, receive much the same blessings from our own Christian Messianic tradition, growing out of the same root as the Jewish one.

• By looking back to the ancient scriptures and prophecies, both in the New and the Old Testaments, we bind ourselves together as the Church with Christians in every place and age.
• By looking forward to Christ’s return, we are led to try to make this world more like the ideal Kingdom that God means it to be. Christ will hold each one of us answerable for our stewardship.

So in this Advent season:

• Let us celebrate the prophecies and stories of Christ’s 1st coming as the helpless baby, Jesus.
• And let us also reflect on what we can do to make this world good enough for Christ’s 2nd coming.

Mission Sunday

1. Today is Mission Sunday. Which prompts the question, what is Mission Sunday, and what does it mean to us?

At one level, the answer is quite straightforward: it’s the Sunday which Bishop Michael designates each year for all parishes in the Diocese to collect money to support a programme of very worthwhile overseas projects, which are selected by the Diocesan Board of Mission.

Parish clergy are usually asked to exchange with other parishes on Mission Sunday, but this year Diocesan Readers like me, and Auxiliary Clergy, have been sent out to the different parishes as special preachers. This allows Dean Stephen to stay put and celebrate communion in his own parish, and gives you a different voice in the pulpit. For myself, I have to say what a pleasure and a privilege it is to be asked to come and speak to you, and worship with you, here today, though perhaps you may think you’ve drawn the short straw, since I am a very new Diocesan Reader, still wet behind the ears! I guess my main job today, but not I think my whole job, is to encourage you to give really generously to the nominated projects!

At a deeper level, I think Mission Sunday is an opportunity for us all, as Christians, to reflect on what Christian mission means, and to ask ourselves what part Christ wants each of us to play in it.

So in this address I want to do two things:
· 1st, to outline the excellent, worthwhile projects that the diocese is supporting this year
· and 2nd, to tease out what Jesus tells us about our Christian mission.

2. First, lets look at the mission projects chosen for 2007

This year the Board of Mission has chosen 11 projects to support, and set the diocese as a whole a target of raising €8,000 for them. Last year parishes contributed more than €9,700 to around 9 projects, of which nearly €400 came from this Killaloe Union, so I think this years target is a bit low – we should try to do even better than last year!

Most of the projects aim to help the poor, the sick and the suffering in countries of the 3rd world, the ‘poor south’. I would go on far too long if I spoke in detail about all of them, so I’m going to focus on just 3, and simply list the rest:

1. There is the AIDS project run by Maryknoll Missions in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, which is also supported by Christian Aid. They run an orphanage for children whose parents have died from AIDS. And they also run hospices, not just for adults, but for children dying of AIDS. It’s shocking isn’t it; one consequence of the AIDS epidemic is that hospices are needed for dying children, many of whom have been infected in their mother’s womb! Think of that when you decide how much to put in the plate today!
2. There is the Bethlehem Arab Rehabilitation Centre, run by our fellow Anglicans in the Episcopal Diocese of Jerusalem. The Holy Land, Israel and Palestine, was the cradle of our Christian faith, as well as Judaism and Islam. Today it is also the focus of much of the evil in the world. Our fellow-Christians there are suffering, as well as those of other faiths – Christ is being cruelly crucified there all over again – but still they work to bring healing in Jesus’s name to people of all faiths. They need our financial help now. Surely we must respond, as St Paul did when he organised a collection by the gentile churches for the first church in Jerusalem when it was suffering from famine.
3. There is the Uganda Mission Fund, organised by Religious Sisters Mona and Eileen Maher from Roscrea. These wonderful women went to Uganda more than 35 years ago to teach in mission schools. Their ecumenical project has already raised several thousand Euro over the last 4 years to provide at least primary education for orphans and vulnerable children. They report what a joy it is to see how happy children are to be given a chance to go to school. There is no such thing as a free education – in Uganda €25 pa is needed for a child in primary school, and €100 in secondary. Our support will make the difference for many children between having a bright future and remaining in poverty and ignorance.

The rest of the projects are:

• St Luke’s Hospital, Milo in Tanzania, which is desperately under-staffed, and needs help to train local health workers
• Leprosy research in Nepal, where the disease is still a major public health problem
• Sponsoring education for street children in Guatemala through the Toybox Charity
• The Big Bend project in Swaziland to support AIDS orphans where no less than 50% of the population is infected with the HIV virus.
• The Church in the Sudan aid programme in Darfur
• Rev Noel Scott’s humanitarian projects in the Church of the Ascension, Bulawayo in Zimbabwe.

Just two of the projects are concerned with evangelism, with spreading the Christian message directly overseas, though that is still what many people think of when they hear the word mission. These are:

• The SPCK, which for instance provides a set of basic theological books to ordinands in 3rd world countries, quite possibly the only theological books they will ever have;
• and the Bible Society, which last year provided much needed help to Churches stricken by the Tsunami in Sri Lanka.

3. All of these projects are eminently worthwhile – but how do they relate to our Christian mission?

I think we need to ponder Jesus’s words in today’s Gospel reading, before we answer this question. According to Matthew, they are the last words he spoke to his disciples, after his resurrection, at the very end of the Gospel. Let’s listen to them again: “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”

These words, and similar passages in the Gospels of Mark, Luke and John, are often called the ‘Great Commission’. Some scholars argue that the passage in Mark is a late addition to the text, and that Matthew’s original words were to baptise in the name of Jesus, not in the Trinitarian formula of Father Son and Holy Spirit. I don't thnk it matters a whit whether they are right or wrong. It is clear that Jesus claims God’s authority to tell his disciples – that’s you and me, isn’t it? - to go out into the world to spread his teaching. In other words, they – and you and me - have a mission to evangelise.

Why then are most of the projects we are asked to support today to do with charitable work overseas rather than direct evangelism? Should we perhaps focus just on evangelism? The answer, I am certain is no, and it flows from those words ‘to obey everything that I have commanded’. Jesus also teaches us that the second great commandment, alongside loving God, is to love your neighbour as yourself. Jesus makes it clear that every person is our neighbour. And Jesus makes it clear that we have a particular duty of charity to our neighbours in want and distress; he says that what we give or refuse to them, we give or refuse to him. In other words, we also have a clear Christian mission to give charitably to those in want and distress.

I am sure that we will all give generously to the Mission Sunday collection today. This will both help to relieve suffering in the poor South and help to spread Jesus’s message there. And I dare say our practical help will make just as many disciples as sermons would. We will then have done our duty by Christian mission, won’t we? No, not at all - that would be much too easy!

It is in our own communities, here in Ireland and in this parish, among the people that we live and work and play with, that we are best able to live up to Jesus’s Great Commission to make disciples. Each one of us needs to look into our own heart and use the talents God has given us to discover in what way Jesus is calling us, here and now, to be his disciple, to help him build his kingdom. We must try to be - and do - the best we can, and not be ashamed to let people know that it is Christ who inspires us. To take Jesus as a model and to live with integrity is the surest way to make disciples. It probably won’t bring worldly success or popularity. It won’t be easy, and you may find the prospect uncomfortable - but don’t be daunted! Jesus promises us spiritual help: what could give us more strength than to hear him say: ‘Remember, I am with you always, to the very end’?

4. So, to conclude:

• Yes, please be truly generous with your money in the Mission Sunday collection plate. However rich or poor you feel, 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!
• But as Christians, let us also reflect that Jesus gives his disciples a mission, not just to help neighbours in want and distress around the world, but to spread his message of love. So let us pray that Jesus will show each one of us what part he wants us to play in his mission, and let us also pray that he will give each one of us the strength to discharge our mission faithfully.

Harvest Festival

1. Introduction

• I love the harvest season. Though I’m not a farmer, I can feel their excitement, waiting for the right moment, and the mad rush when that moment comes; the combines working late into the night, the tractors drawing full trailers racing home to the barn. Beware the tractors though: I once had a car written off by one on harvest duty, which didn’t stop as fast as I did, when I met it on a narrow road!
• My own harvest is as a gardener, and it gives me great joy to pick my own produce: I was busy with other things this year and rather neglected the garden, so the vegetables weren’t great, but the plums, pears and apples are good, thank God, and so are my wife Marty’s flowers.
• I love Harvest Festivals as well, as I’m sure you do too: the colours and smells of the fruit and vegetables and flowers, the familiar harvest hymns, the cheerful people, especially the farmers whose years’ work has been crowned with success. A very few mock the Feast of St Pumpkin, and say it is a pagan not a Christian festival, but it is surely right for Christians to give thanks for all the good things God has given us.
• After all, as our 1st reading from Deuteronomy (Deu 26:1-11) shows, there are good biblical grounds for doing so. ‘You shall set the first of the fruit of the ground down before the Lord your God … Then you shall celebrate with all the bounty that the Lord your God has given to you.’ And John tells us that Jesus himself went privately to the Temple in Jerusalem to celebrate the festival of booths, which is the Jewish Harvest Festival. What’s good enough for Jesus is good enough for me!
• Deuteronomy talks about a harvest of the fruits of the earth. But in our 2nd reading from John’s Gospel (John 6:23-35), Jesus asks us to look beyond an earthly harvest, ‘food that perishes’, to a different, heavenly harvest, ‘food that endures for eternal life’.
• So what I want to do in this address is to tease out the relationship between the earthly harvest and the heavenly harvest.

2. Let us look first at the earthly harvest:

It’s so beautifully displayed in this Church, isn’t it? 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.

Just reflect for a moment on the breadth and variety of our harvest:

• We have the staples: we have wheat for bread, barley for beer, oats for porridge, hay for cattle. Our farmers were getting very worried with the wet summer this year, but in the end it has been a good harvest I’m told. The dry weather in August and September came just in time after the wet summer. I see from the Farmers Journal that cereal yields were good, if a bit down, and prices are very high. The hay and straw is saved, so the animals will be all right too.
• But there is so much more for us to enjoy: there’s milk and honey, butter and cheese, fruit and nuts, blackberries and mushrooms, plums and apples, potatoes and turnips, pumpkins and marrows, peas and beans, cabbage and lettuce, and gardens full of flowers!
• Many of us work with animals, and there are also this year’s foals, and calves and lambs and chicks. But we should also think of the fruit of our own bodies - that is our children and grandchildren born this year - thank God for them too!
• What a wealth there is in our harvest to give thanks for!

Above all perhaps we should thank God for our health and strength, and also for our intellects, our cleverness, for we couldn’t produce this wealth with out them.

• As every farmer and gardener knows, this bountiful harvest does not just appear from heaven as if by magic, it also takes intelligent planning and hard graft.
• In creating us, in his image we are told, God has created beings which are in a sense co-creators with him of the natural world. We use our God-given cleverness to bend the natural world to better meet our own needs, by domesticating and improving the breeds of different plants and animals, and by developing useful technologies. It is that work of co-creation which takes hard graft and intelligent planning.
• But we must never forget that we are not masters of the universe: God is. God’s laws don’t change: Nature is as God made it; and what we sow, we shall reap.
• I think we ought to pray more that we may use our cleverness wisely, to build up this wonderful world, not destroy it. Otherwise, our fields may become scrub, our gardens revert to wilderness, our houses ivy-clad ruins and our towns deserted. It has happened before, it may well happen again: for civilisations grow, flourish and decay. But if it does, God will still be there.

For all our cleverness, this earthly harvest is perishable and uncertain. Without God’s continuing fatherly goodness our material needs would not be met.

3. So what about the heavenly harvest?

In the passage from John’s Gospel that we’ve just heard, Jesus tells the crowd: ‘Do not work for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures for eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you. For it is on him that God the Father has set his seal.’ He then makes the great claim: ‘I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whosoever believes in me shall never be thirsty’. What is Jesus talking about?

• The teaching is difficult; at least I find it so, but then so did many of Jesus’s disciples, according to John. I find it helpful myself to interpret Jesus’s words in the context of a heavenly harvest, by analogy with the earthly harvest. Perhaps you will too.
• Just as God has made us clever, to be his co-workers in the material world, so he has made us in his image to be moral beings, to be souls. God has given us the capacity to distinguish right from wrong, truth from lies, love from hate; and to prefer good to evil, as he does. We call that capacity conscience. I don’t doubt that both our cleverness and our conscience have evolved, since that seems to be how God makes his creatures.
• God surely intends us to use our consciences to make the right choices, to do good not evil. Our right choices are the seed from which grows a heavenly harvest of good. As the old saw says, the good we do lives after us. The good we do is eternal; it nourishes our souls for eternal life. But we are not masters of our own souls, any more than we are masters of the universe: our souls are as God made them, with free will, vulnerable to temptation.
• So it’s hard to be good. We have to work at it, just as we do for the earthly harvest. It is hard work resisting temptation, putting what is right above our own desires. All too often we fail. And when we fail, the evil we do poisons our soul, and the evil too is eternal.

What a mess it is! How can we possibly be as good as God wants us to be? As good as God has made us want to be?

This is where Jesus’s teaching speaks to me:

• Jesus promises us all the help we need to reap the heavenly harvest: if we have faith in him, if we come to him, if we believe in him. He will nourish our souls. He will help us to resist temptation and to do good. And when we fail, he will suck out the evil that poisons the soul – in other words, he will redeem us. It is in this sense that he is the bread of life, that endures for eternal life.
• And furthermore, God guarantees this, by setting his seal on the Son of Man. It is as if the bread of life comes stamped by God with an eat-by date of eternity!

4. So to sum up:

• Let us thank God for this bountiful earthly harvest. God makes it possible, and we work hard for it, so we should celebrate it and enjoy it.
• But let us work just as hard for the heavenly harvest of goodness, to nourish our souls.
• And let us thank God for Jesus, who gives us the help we need to reap this heavenly harvest. If we believe in him, if we come to him, we will never be hungry or thirsty for good things.

Being a Disciple - Year C, Trinity 14

1. Introduction

• Do you know what the difference is between supporting a cause and being committed to it? Well the next time you sit down to a nice cooked breakfast you might think of this: the hen that laid the egg you’re about to eat was certainly supporting your high-cholesterol breakfast, but the pig from which the rashers came was truly committed to it!
• Today’s Gospel reading from Luke is of course about commitment – about commitment as a disciple of Jesus. To be a disciple is to be a pupil, one who learns from a teacher. That’s precisely what the Greek word used by Luke and translated as disciple, means. Jesus is telling the crowds travelling with him what it means to be his disciple.
• But at first hearing, what he says, as recorded by Luke (Luke 14:25-33), is really quite shocking, isn’t it? Surely Jesus can’t have insisted that to be his disciple you must hate your father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters? It sounds as if he wants his disciples to be cold-hearted fanatics!
• What I want to do in this address is to tease out for myself what Jesus really did mean in this passage, and what it might mean to us today. And I hope my thoughts may also be useful to you.

2. Would the crowds travelling with Jesus have been just as shocked by his teaching as we are?

• At one level, I think they might have been even more shocked. For a Jew to hate mother or father would be more than shocking – it would be a blasphemy against God himself, a violation of the 5th Commandment given to Moses. If you remember, this reads: ‘Honour thy father and thy mother: that thy days may be long upon the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee’.
• And again, although the idea of carrying the cross is a very familiar metaphor to us, two Christian millennia later, it would have been quite repulsive to a Jew at that time. Stoning was the Jewish punishment – crucifixion was a barbaric practice recently introduced by the hated Roman occupiers. To say that disciples must carry the cross would have been like saying today that they must travel in the cattle-trucks to the gas chambers and ovens of Auschwitz.
• But at another level, I think they would not have found Jesus’s words as strange as we do, at all. There’s a long tradition in the Middle-East, in Semitic languages, of using over-the-top rhetoric to make a point, which continues to this day – think of Saddam Hussein’s rhetoric about ‘the mother of all battles’ for instance. Here as in many other places in the Gospels, I think that those who heard Jesus’s words would have understood very clearly that they weren’t to be taken completely literally, but that they were used to make his point as vividly as possible.

3. So what is the point that Jesus was making? Actually, I think there are two.

First, Jesus was warning his followers that to be his disciple, to follow his road to the Kingdom of God, may cost them everything that they hold dear. Everything; absolutely everything.

• Matthew puts different words into his mouth, in what seems to be another report of the same teaching, when he has Jesus say: ‘He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me; and he that doeth not take his cross and follow after me, is not worthy of me’. The point is not to hate your family – that is just a rhetorical device – the point is that to be a true disciple of Jesus you must love him, you must love God, more than family, more than anything!
• And he was also warning his followers that before they commit themselves to being his disciple, they must ask themselves if they can see it through. Just as they would with any other project. They will be taken for fools if they make a commitment that they can’t live up to. Just as if they were building a tower – the reference is probably to a watchtower which people built in their fields so they could protect their crops. Or just as a wise king would – or a wise president for that matter - before leading his people to war. You cannot make a true commitment without having calculated whether or not you can live up to it.

But secondly, I think Jesus was also seeking to inspire his followers to make that commitment to become true disciples.

• Think for a moment about Churchill’s great speech to the British parliament and people when he became Prime Minister early in WW2: ‘I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat’. That speech was calculated to rally the British nation behind a determination to fight on for victory. He went on: ‘You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word: Victory. Victory at all costs — Victory in spite of all terror — Victory, however long and hard the road may be, for without victory there is no survival’. Churchill used shocking language in his rhetoric, to draw on the human quality of altruism, in order to rally his people behind him. And he succeeded in this aim. Altruism is characteristic of our humanity. No doubt it evolved with our species – that is how we have been made, it seems - but I prefer to see it as given to us by God, when he made us in his image.
• Was Jesus drawing on that same quality of altruism when he chose to use his shocking language? I think so. And Jesus offered his disciples a vision even finer than Churchill’s victory, a vision of the kingdom of God, which they could help bring to pass.
• I can’t believe that Jesus expected every single person in the crowds that day to feel able to make that great commitment. Perhaps there’s a role for camp-followers, for fellow-travellers, for supporters, as well as for committed disciples in the service of God. And Jesus must surely have known that even some who did commit themselves would not be able to carry it through – even that great disciple Peter denied his teacher three times! But if enough of them had not signed up to go the distance as his disciples, Jesus’s great saving project would have failed. It didn’t fail; the disciples did experience Christ’s resurrection and the gift of the Spirit at Pentecost; and we are here as Christ’s church 2000 years later, to give witness to the success of his project.
  

4. We Christians are the crowds travelling with Jesus today. What should we take from the words he spoke 2000 years ago?

Well, just the same things, I believe, that Jesus wanted those who listened to him then to take: warning and inspiration.

• Jesus warns us that we must not set out to follow him lightly – he teaches us that his disciples must be prepared to give up everything they hold dear, if that is what is asked of them. And he warns us to consider carefully whether we can pay that price before we commit ourselves to being his disciples.
• But if we listen to him, Jesus also inspires us to make that great commitment, as the first disciples did, and as so many others have done over the centuries.

St Ignatius Loyola understood this, I think, when he wrote his beautiful prayer, which I shall finish with:

Teach me, Good Lord, to serve Thee as Thou deservest:
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 Thy will.
Through Jesus Christ Our Lord.
Amen

Year C, Trinity 12 - Sabbath-keeping

1. Introduction

• In April last year Marty and I were staying with a charabanc-load of friends on the shores of Lake Maggiore in Italy at Stresa, looking out to the Borromean islands. It’s renowned as one of the most beautiful spots on earth. And it is rather fine. While I feel our own Lough Derg is just as beautiful, I rather wish our climate was as good! The lakeshore drive is lined with rather grand Belle Époque hotels – Ernest Hemingway set part of his novel A Farewell to Arms in one of them. We were in a much more modest place, but we made a point of visiting the posh ones to admire the decor. One of them had been completely taken over by a large group of orthodox Jews, who were celebrating the end of the Passover holidays, women and girls dressed just like women and girls here, but men all wearing black hats with a curl of hair showing, and boys a skull-cap. The place was full of people of all ages, children playing games and grown-ups sitting in the shade and chatting in small groups: everyone just chilling, in modern slang, enjoying spending time with family and friends - a very happy sight. But nothing electric was working: no automatic doors, no lifts, no espresso coffee machines even – absolutely nothing! It was only when I asked if there had been a power-cut that I discovered why: it was Saturday, the Sabbath, and for their Jewish denomination it would break the Sabbath law to use any electric devices.
• Now the readings set for today, from Isaiah (Isaiah 58:9b-14) and from Luke’s Gospel (Luke 13:10-17), both deal with what we should or shouldn’t do on the Sabbath. That reminded me of this surprising but happy scene in Italy. So I decided to try and tease out what the Sabbath has meant to Jews and Christians over the ages, and what it might mean for us today.
  

2. Firstly what does the Sabbath mean to Jews?

• The Hebrew word Shabbat, from which our word comes, literally means ‘ceasing’, implicitly ‘ceasing from work’. Observing the Sabbath has been important to Jews since at least the Exodus. It’s enshrined in the Fourth Commandment brought down from Mount Sinai by Moses: ‘Remember the sabbath day, and keep it holy. Six days you shall labour and do all your work. But the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God; you shall not do any work – you, your son or your daughter, your male or female slave, your livestock, or your alien resident in your towns.’ It is seen as a commemoration of God resting on the seventh day of creation in the old familiar Genesis story.
• The Sabbath lasts from sunset on Friday to sunset on Saturday. It’s a day of joyful celebration as well as prayer. Many Jews attend synagogue on the Sabbath, to worship and listen to teachers expound the Torah, our Old Testament, as Jesus did we are told. But the emphasis is on the home: candles are lit; all share in festive meals, with wine which is blessed; the Sabbath is to be honoured, for instance by taking a bath on the day before, and by beautifying the home with flowers; and it is to be enjoyed with eating, singing, spending time with the family – and with lovemaking between husbands and wives.
• But the Jewish Sabbath is also encrusted with prohibitions. Over the millennia rabbinical scholars have elaborated the simple idea of ceasing from work one day in seven into a complex scheme of prohibited actions, based on 39 categories of forbidden activities. As well as such obvious work activities as sowing, ploughing, spinning and weaving, these include lighting and extinguishing a fire. This is why the orthodox Jews I met in Italy would not use electricity on the Sabbath: they believed that small sparks from switches were equivalent to lighting a fire, which would be a violation of the Sabbath law. Jews from other denominations get over the problem in different ways I understand - for instance by using pre-set timers, to turn appliances on and off without human intervention!
• To violate the Sabbath has always been a very serious matter for Jews. The ancient punishment for it was the most severe in the Jewish law – stoning to death, though that ceased with the dissolution of the Jewish courts at the fall of the Temple. But there have always been extenuating circumstances, from the earliest times: a Jew was not just allowed but required to break a Sabbath law, if it was necessary to save a life. The problem the leader of the synagogue had with Jesus healing the crippled woman was not that he healed her on the Sabbath, but that her condition was not life threatening, and could have been left to the next day. And as Jesus pointed out, you were also permitted to water your animals on the Sabbath.
  

3. What did Jesus himself think about the Sabbath?

• This incident in Luke's Gospel wasn’t the only time Jesus got into trouble with the religious authorities over the Sabbath. Elsewhere we are told that when his disciples were criticised for not keeping the Sabbath properly Jesus declared that ‘the Sabbath is made for man, not man for the Sabbath’, and he clearly taught that it is right to do good and to save life on the Sabbath.
• On this occasion Jesus was clearly infuriated by the leader of the synagogue. I think what infuriated him was that he saw so clearly that to keep so inflexibly to the letter of the Sabbath law had completely destroyed the spirit of it. What really matters is whether an action does good or harm, not whether it fits into some abstract scheme of dos and don’ts.
• But I feel quite sure that Jesus valued the positive side of Sabbath-keeping: the opportunity for all to rest from labour, to enjoy time with family and friends, as well as to pray and worship God.
  

4. As Christianity evolved as a religion away from Judaism, Christian views of the Sabbath also evolved.

• The earliest Christians - the apostles, Paul and the disciples - were Jews, and kept the Jewish Sabbath on Saturday. But as the years passed, and the increasingly gentile Church split from the Synagogue, the Christian emphasis shifted to Sunday, in part in celebration of the Resurrection, but perhaps also to distance a gentile church from Judaism. So Christian Sabbath observance on Saturday gradually ceased, to be replaced by celebration of the Eucharist on Sunday.
• In the year 321, the first Christian Roman Emperor Constantine decreed that Sunday should be the day of rest throughout his Empire, in these words: On the venerable day of the Sun let the magistrates and people residing in cities rest, and let all workshops be closed. In the country however persons engaged in agriculture may freely and lawfully continue their pursuits because it often happens that another day is not suitable for grain-sowing or vine planting; lest by neglecting the proper moment for such operations the bounty of heaven should be lost. Note his pragmatic approach to the agricultural economy - I can’t help but think that Jesus would have agreed!
• Most Christians since then have observed Sunday as the Lord’s day, a holy day marked by worship and prayers, a holiday from work, a time for rest and recreation; like the Jewish Sabbath, but without so many prohibitions.
• At the Reformation, Puritans sought to introduce more rigour to the observance of Sunday as a Christian Sabbath, and this still persists in many Protestant circles. Perhaps in doing so, they lost something of the joyful celebration which marked the Jewish Sabbath, for all its prohibitions. I certainly remember the dourness of an Ulster Sunday only a few years ago, when it was quite impossible for a tourist to get a bite of lunch on a Sunday.
• Since the Reformation some of our fellow Christians who interpret the Bible literally have gone back to celebrating Saturday, the seventh day, as their Lord’s Day – the most notable are the Seventh Day Adventists, who number about 15 million worldwide. I ask myself: does it really matter which day we choose for our Sabbath?
  

5. So finally, what might the Sabbath mean to us today?

• I would invite you to think of Sunday, our Sabbath, our day of rest, as a great gift. A great gift that we have been given by our loving-father God, through the traditions of those who have gone before us, right back to the time of Moses. I think we should cherish it. God entitles us in this way not just to cease from working to rest, one day in seven, but to take time to enjoy our families, our friends, and if we are so moved, to be still, to worship Him and give thanks for the wonderful world we are part of. I think this wise gift is intended to help us to be properly human – humans made in God’s image - not just economic factors in production.
• Our society is changing very rapidly. Just a very few years ago, no one worked on Sunday unless they had animals to see to, or they sold perishable items, or they provided public services, or there was some other pressing need. Now more and more shops are opening, and factories and offices are increasingly working Sunday shifts. I’ve worked and shopped on Sundays myself, but I think this is a shame. Why is it happening? Is it that we are becoming distracted from our faith by insecurity and fear in the materialist Ireland of the Celtic Tiger, as RC Archbishop Sean Brady suggested earlier this week? Whatever the reason, we can choose it to be otherwise. We are entitled – God entitles us – to say ‘No’ to the dehumanising forces that would deny us one day in seven of stillness, to rest, enjoy our families and friends, and worship as we wish. Those forces can only prevail if we allow them to. The choice is ours.
• But at the same time, we should I think be careful not to interpret the letter of the law so inflexibly that we destroy its spirit, in the matter of keeping Sunday as in so much else, so that we may not hear Jesus say ‘You hypocrites!’ to us, as he did to the leaders of the synagogue.