Harvest justice and righteousness

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

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

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

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


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


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

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

Thanks be to God for giving us so much joy!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The golden calf

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Debt forgiveness

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Clean & Unclean

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Walking on water

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Teeth will be provided!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The road to Emmaus

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

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

St Luke is an immensely skilled story-teller.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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