Harvest in the wilderness

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Foreigners & Exiles

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Faith & Duty

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Imagine you’re a multi-millionaire, who employs a housekeeper, a personal assistant and other staff. When they do their job, you don’t go out of your way to thank them, or give them a bonus, because you pay them well to work for you – doing their job is only what you expect of them.

Now, put yourself in God’s shoes. He employs you to serve him by doing good, doing his will. He has given you this wonderful world and all its resources to meet all your reasonable needs. You don’t expect God to give you any special reward just because you have done what he asks of you, do you? You’ve only done your duty!’

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

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

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

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

St. Ignatius Loyola captures this beautifully in his prayer

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

Love casts out fear

Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams preached a thoughtful and challenging sermon at an ecumenical service in Copenhagen Cathedral during the Climate Change talks last December. This is a slightly adapted version. I am very much indebted to him for his insight. And I hope he will forgive me the sin of plagiarism!

‘Perfect love casts out fear’, says St John in his 1st Epistle, as we heard in our opening sentence from scripture.
John is talking about how Christian confidence in God’s love and forgiveness leads us to be fearless. Our confidence, our fearlessness, is built on seeing love at work through us – not just warm feelings or positive emotions or even kind actions, but the love that really sets people free and brings something new into the world: God’s love, reaching into the deepest tangles and knots of our human condition, the love that was the essence of Jesus’s life and death and resurrection.

As Christians, we must be fearless in protecting God’s creation, because when God looks at all he has made he finds it good, as we read in Genesis. We must show in our lives some echo of God’s delight in his creation.We are called to be, God enables us to be, a channel through which God expresses his love for all creation.

Love casts out fear.
If our starting point is the belief that God wants us to rejoice and delight in creation, our whole attitude to the environment will not be anxiety, or a desparate search for ways to control it. It will be an excited and hopeful search to understand it, and to honour its complex interdependent beauty.

If we have any fear, it should be fear of spoiling the heritage God has given us, fear of forgetting the overwhelming scale and depth of his gift and of our responsibility to care for it, fear of forgetting that we are called to show the same consistent and sacrificial love for creation that we must show towards our fellow human beings.

And the truth is that we cannot show the right kind of love for our fellow human beings unless we work to keep the earth a secure home for all people and future generations.

At the present moment, the human species is faced with the consequences of generations of failure to love the earth as we should. Human beings have been polluting the atmosphere and waters, living on the pigs back on non-renewable resources, causing the extinction of other species, causing our planet to warm dangerously – ultimately risking the collapse of the web of life which sustains all species, including ours.

We are not doomed to carry on in the downward spiral of the greedy, addictive behaviour that has brought us to this point. But fear still rules our hearts and imaginations. We are afraid because we can’t imagine how to survive without the comforts of our existing lifestyle. We in the rich world are afraid that the rapidly growing developing economies will take advantage of us. Those in the poor world are afraid that our older, richer economies will use the excuse of ecological responsibility to deny them proper and just development.

So long as this fear dominates our thinking, we are stepping back from love – love for creation itself, which we must look at as God looks at it – love for one another and for the generations still unborn, who need us to do whatever we can to guarantee a stable, productive and balanced world to live in – not a world of chaotic and disruptive change, of devastation and desertification, of biological impoverishment and degradation.

Love casts out fear.
The truth is that what is most likely to get us to take the right decisions for our global future is love.

There is a temptation to underline fear to persuade one another of the urgency of the situation: to say things are so bad, so threatening that we simply must do something.

It would be all too easy, for instance, to enlist Jeremiah’s terrifying vision of the destruction of creation in our 1st reading (Jeremiah 4: 11-12, 22-28) as a stick to wave at doubters. ‘I looked, and lo, there was no one at all, and all the birds of the air had fled. I looked, and lo, the fruitful land was a desert, and all its cities were laid in ruins.’ But that would be wrong, I think. Jeremiah’s words relate to his own time and place – the precarious position of the Kingdom of Judah and its people, faced by the rising imperial power of Babylon. Scholars tell us that most likely Jeremiah’s words were remembered, collected together and no doubt edited after the disaster he foresaw had already taken place, after the leaders of Judah had been carried off in captivity to Babylon, where they reflected on what had happened to them, and where as survivors they took comfort from God’s promise not to make a full end of them.

Our situation is quite different. We may be tempted to think bitterly that the human race is still not frightened enough by what is in store for us if we don’t change our ways. But that kind of fear could simply paralyse us, as we all know. It could make us feel that the problem is so great, so insoluble, that we might just as well pull the bedclothes up over our head and wait for disaster to strike. What’s more it could make us just blame one another or just wait for someone else to make the first move because we don’t trust them. We need more than that for lifegiving change to happen.

Love casts out fear.
As we respond to the global environmental crisis as Christians, there are two simple things we can say to ourselves, our neighbours and our governments.

1st: Don’t be afraid – but ask questions.

• Ask how the lifestyle you live looks in the light of God’s command to love God and your neighbour. Ask how Government policy looks in the same context. Ask what would be a healthy and sustainable relationship with this world, a relationship that manifests both joy in and respect for the earth.
• If we really love God’s creation, each one of us will repent of any greed and excess in the way we live – and as Jesus teaches us in today’s 2nd reading (Luke 15:1-10), ‘there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents’. We will start to make changes to tread more lightly on God’s world ourselves. Our families, friends and neighbours – even Governments - will notice the changes we make and our joy in and care for God’s world. By God’s grace they will be led to do the same themselves

2nd: Don’t separate environmental concerns from trust for one another.

• In a world like ours with limited resources there can be no trust without justice, without the assurance of knowing that my neighbour is there for me when I face insecurity or risk.
• We must work for justice and strive to build up trust. If we allow God to teach us trust and if we learn to live in trust and seek justice, the whole of creation will feel the effects. Selfishness will give way to liberation, human beings will flourish alongside a flourishing creation, and the result will be to God’s glory.

Let us not be afraid – let us act for the sake of love, not out of fear.

Of honey-bees and human beings

Address given on 8th August 2010, the 10th Sunday after Trinity, at Templederry, St Mary's Nenagh and Killodiernan

What wonderful creatures honey-bees are!
Last week at the Nenagh Show one of the most popular stands was the Beekeeping Association’s, where I watched bees at work through glass inside a sealed hive. What business, what industry!

We all love honey of course, and the finest church candles are always made from beeswax. But even more important is the service bees give the rest of creation by pollinating flowers. I am concerned not to have seen a single honey-bee in my garden this year - not one! I think their absence may account for the bad set on my broadbeans. So I’m planning to take a beekeeping course this winter, and set up a hive in the garden, to see if that helps.

Wild bee colonies have been killed off, we are told, by the Varroa mite, an alien species human beings have inadvertently introduced from overseas. This is just one of many ways in which human action is damaging biodiversity – in other words, unravelling the wonderful web of life which God has created on this planet. He made it through evolution, the mechanism he has chosen to continuously create new life.

Bees have evolved in an intricate three cornered dance of life with flowering plants and animals including ourselves. In this dance, plants provide pollen and nectar to sustain bees; bees in return pollinate the flowers so that they can produce fruit and seeds; the fruit and seeds in turn sustain animals, which in wonderfully ingenious ways distribute seeds to start a new generation of plants.
How wonderfully God's purposes are worked out! God’s purpose in creating bees, I think, is simply that they should be good bees, playing their part in the dance of life alongside all the other creatures he has created to sustain the web of life. The scarcity of bees should shock us out of complacency. We thwart God’s purpose if we do not protect them.

In God’s eyes, I think, we are not so very different to honey-bees!
Surely God’s purpose in creating us is simply that we should be good human beings.

Like bees we are small, vulnerable creatures, short-lived, subject to disease. Unlike bees, I suppose, we are made in God’s image, as souls with consciences. We are able to reflect on what is right and wrong, and to plan for the future, in a sense to be co-creators of it with God. But with this privilege also comes our susceptibility to those spiritual diseases which we call sin - spiritual diseases like greed and selfishness, which all too often lead us to hurt our fellow human beings and damage God’s creation.

Todays readings tell us much about how to be the good human beings God wishes us to be - and how to resist our innate susceptibility to sin.

In the OT reading, Isaiah (1:1,10-20) proclaims a great insight.
God has no use for empty rituals and sacrifices, says Isaiah. From the dawn of our species human beings have sought to placate, even manipulate, gods they have seen as angry and untrustworthy as well as powerful, in order to benefit themselves – and many still do today. But all this is folly: ‘What to me is the multitude of your sacrifices? says the Lord; … I cannot endure solemn assemblies with iniquity’.

Instead, Isaiah tells us, God wants us to ‘cease to do evil, learn to do good’. God will bless us when we behave as good human beings should, treating others as we would want them to treat us, if our circumstances were reversed – a principle often called the ‘golden rule’, which we Christians share with many others of different faiths and none. We are to ‘seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow’.

In the NT reading (Luke 12:32-40), Jesus reveals deeper truths.
Jesus understands that people are often selfish and greedy because they are anxious and afraid for the future. So he tells the disciples – and through them, us – that we should put aside such anxiety. God knows what we need, and God will give us all we need when we work for his kingdom – in other words, when we try to be the good human beings God wants us to be. ‘Do not be afraid, little flock’, he says, ‘for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom’.

God has given us all that we have - and we have been given so much, haven't we! - in order that that we may be generous with it, not hoard it. What we give away, to those who need it more than we do, is in Jesus's words ‘an unfailing treasure in heaven, where no thief comes near and no moth destroys’. If we want to be good human beings we must focus on that kind of spiritual wealth, rather than accumulating material wealth, for as Jesus says, 'where your treasure is, there your heart will be also’.

And we must be alert at all times for opportunities to respond generously, as and when God prompts us to do so. As Jesus puts it, ‘Be dressed for action and have your lamps lit’. We should not put off calls on our generosity, waiting perhaps for a better time or a more pressing need to come along. We are mortal – we do not know when God will knock on the door to call us out of this life. ‘You also must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour’, says Jesus. And it would be shameful - shameful, when he does come knocking - as we know he will - to admit that we wasted the opportunities he gave us - the opportunities to act like the good human beings he created us to be.

Just at the moment we are hearing a great deal about the devastating floods in Pakistan, caused by exceptionally heavy monsoon rains. 14 million people have been affected and more than 1600 people have died already, with more likely. The aid agencies are calling urgently for donations to help relieve their distress. You might care to ask yourself this, ‘Is God giving me this opportunity to give generously to help those who are suffering now?’

Let me finish with prayer:

O God, grant us the grace:
to cease to do evil and learn to do good;
to be unafraid and generous with your gifts,
so storing up unfailing treasure in heaven;
to be always alert for opportunities
to be the good human beings you created us to be.
In the name of Jesus Christ our Lord we pray.

Loving God is not enough

An address given at Templederry, Nenagh and Killodiernan on Sunday 11th July 2010, the 6th after Trinity

Have you ever had your wallet stolen or your bag snatched?
I hope not, but no doubt many of us have at some time or another. If you’re one, you will understand my mixed feelings of foolishness, helplessness and fury when I discovered my wallet had been stolen when I was on holiday recently in Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia.

It was upsetting. First I was angry with myself for being so foolish as to let it happen – I had hung my jacket on the back of my chair by the street on a restaurant terrace. The thief just dipped his hand in my pocket - I saw it on security footage later. Then I felt helpless, with no money, no plastic cards and no driving licence, in a foreign country where I couldn’t speak a word of the language. But the restaurant manager, the police and our hotel staff were all very sympathetic and helpful, just as they would be in Ireland if the same thing happened to a visitor here, I’m sure. I still had my passport, and my wife still had her plastic cards so we could continue our holiday. Yet as I began to deal with the hassle of replacing cards and licence my fury with the thief only grew.

… But I wasn’t mugged and left half-dead, like the man the Good Samaritan helped in today’s NT reading. Thank God for that.

I want to reflect a bit on the familiar Good Samaritan story as Luke tells it (10:25-37).
The story was prompted by a lawyer, we’re told – a learned professional man – who asks Jesus ‘What must I do to inherit eternal life?’ – in other words, how must I behave to be worthy of God’s favour. Jesus bounces the question back at him, saying ‘What does God’s law say?’ When the lawyer answers, ‘Love God, and love your neighbour as yourself’, Jesus agrees with him, saying ‘Do this and you will live.’ Remember, both Matthew (22:37-39) and Mark (12:31) tell us Jesus had said as much himself when asked what the greatest commandment was.

But then the lawyer chances his arm again, asking Jesus, ‘And who is my neighbour?’ It is in reply to this that Jesus tells the story of the Good Samaritan. Let me recap.

A man travelling from Jerusalem to Jericho is robbed and left for dead. A priest and a Levite travelling on the same road pass by on the other side, ignoring his plight. (A Levite, by the way, was someone privileged to help the priests in the Temple – a bit like a Diocesan Reader, I suppose!) Then a Samaritan comes along. Unlike the other two, he stops and helps the traveller, treating his wounds, taking him to a safe place, even paying for him to be cared for out of his own pocket. When Jesus asks which of the three was a good neighbour, the lawyer replies, ‘The one who helped’ – the Samaritan. Jesus tells him, ‘Go and do likewise.’

Jews of Jesus’s time understood well enough their obligation to protect and care for their neighbours in need. ‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself’, is a quotation from the book Leviticus (19:18) – it is a command from God. But many people in Jesus’s time questioned who fell into the category of neighbour, just as we are inclined to do now: surely God did not expect them to love those who were not good people like them, those of different cultures and beliefs, people they did not like, or who did not like them? Perhaps Jesus sensed that the questioning lawyer felt like this.

Jesus’s own view of the matter is quite clear. Through his story Jesus teaches the lawyer - and us - that we must treat every human being as our neighbour and love them as we love ourselves, whoever and whatever they are.

Loving God is not enough; God wants us to love our neighbours too.
No doubt the priest and the Levite both loved God. But for whatever reason neither could bring himself to help the robbed man. Perhaps they feared touching a man who might be dead would make them unclean according to Jewish law, or perhaps they just did not want to get involved. They passed by on the other side - they did not behave like loving neighbours.

God wants us to respond with unconditional love to our neighbours in need.
Even if we feel they have brought their troubles on themselves. The road from Jerusalem to Jericho was notoriously dangerous, a mountain road descending 3600 feet from the Judean hills to the bottom of the rift valley, through twisting rocky gorges where brigands lurked. You might say the man who was robbed was reckless, even asking for it by travelling alone on that road. But when he needed help the Samaritan responded.

It is our response to a neighbour's need that counts for God, not who we or they are.
Samaritans were despised and disliked by orthodox Jews. They were heretics who did not follow Jewish law, untrustworthy, outside the pale. We might compare them to Travellers or muslims in our society. Yet it is this despised outsider who shows himself to be a loving neighbour of the traveller who was robbed.

To follow Jesus means we must love our neighbours as ourselves.
And this truth has consequences for us today, which are brought into stark relief by the Great Recession we are living through.

So many neighbours in our own community are falling into need. Unemployment has soared. People on low incomes are falling into debt. Services for the disabled are being cut. Young families are struggling to pay the mortgage on homes worth a fraction of what they paid for them.

Amos in today’s OT reading (7:7-17), fiercely prophesies that God in his wrath will destroy Israel and its royal house - he doesn't hold his punches does he? The reading does not explain why - but Amos in the following passage does. He rails against those ‘that trample on the needy, and bring to ruin the poor of the land’, those who ‘practice deceit with false balances, buying the poor for silver and the needy for a pair of sandals, and selling the sweepings of the wheat’. Doesn’t it sound familiar? Don’t today’s media commentators sound just like Amos as they assign blame for the economic crash and forecast future disasters to come?

But as Christians we are surely asked to do more than rant at those to blame for robbing the people. Jesus calls us to practical action to relieve our neighbours’ distress to the best of our ability. He calls us to be Good Samaritans - ‘Go and do likewise’, he says to the lawyer. What will I do in response. What will you do?

I shall finish with a prayer:

Loving God,
your Son Jesus Christ taught us
that every person is our neighbour,
to be loved as we love ourselves.
Move our hearts through your Holy Spirit
to be like the Good Samaritan.
Point us to those who are in need.
Show us how we may best help them.
And strengthen our will to do so.
We pray this in Jesus’ name.
Amen

Our Friend and Brother

Address given on the 6th Sunday of Easter, Rogation Sunday, 9th May 2010 at Puckane Church, which the Catholic parish has kindly allowed the Killodiernan congregation to use while repairs are made to their own.

‘You did not choose me but I chose you’, says Jesus to his disciples.
These are perhaps the key words from today’s reading from St John’s Gospel (John 15:9-17). They contain a wonderful spiritual truth: it is not we human beings who choose Jesus – it is Jesus in his grace and love that chooses us – Jesus whom we believe to be the Son of God.

The whole reading is an amazing passage, so dense with meaning! It’s well worth reading and re-reading and pondering on, for what it reveals to us of the relationship between Jesus the Son of God and ourselves as his disciples. You might like to take out your Bible sometime at home and look again at John Chapter 15, and reflect on it.

Here are some of the things that occur to me when I do so.

Jesus calls us to joy.
‘I have said these things to you so that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be complete’, says Jesus.

Christians are meant to be men and women of joy, not wreathed in gloom with long faces. We are sinners of course, but redeemed sinners. How can any of us fail to be happy when we walk the paths of life alongside Jesus?

Jesus calls us to love.
‘This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you’, says Jesus.

Sometimes we live as if we are sent into the world just to compete with one another, to quarrel with one another, or even to fight one another. But Christians are sent into the world to show what is meant by loving our neighbours as ourselves.

And the love Jesus is talking about is not a soppy, sentimental love – it is a flinty, self-giving love. The test he gives us is this, ‘No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends’. That is the love that Jesus lived and died for – that is the love he calls us to share with one another.

Jesus chooses us to be his friends.
‘I do not call you servants any longer, because the servant does not know what the master is doing; but I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father’, says Jesus.

Jesus was a teacher, and his disciples called him ‘Master’ as a term of respect. He taught them how to live as God’s people – to love God, and to love our neighbour as ourselves – as he still teaches Christians today, in words and actions which echo down the centuries to us.

But here he tells the disciples they are more than servants to him as Master. They are his friends – his partners in doing his Father’s work – and down the centuries he still chooses those who follow him to be his friends.

Jesus offers us intimacy, intimacy with himself, but also with God, who we should not see as a distant stranger but as our close friend.

Jesus chooses us to be his ambassadors.
‘I appointed you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last’, says Jesus.

He does not choose us to live a life retired from the world, but to represent him in it.

He sends us out to be advertisements, to bear fruit which will stand the test of time. The way to spread Christianity is to be Christian, to show others the fruit of a Christian life; not to argue others into faith, or worse still to threaten them into it, but to attract them into it.

Jesus welcomes us as his brothers and sisters, sharing with him in God’s family.
He taught us to pray to ‘Our Father in Heaven’. If we share the same father, then Jesus must be a brother to every one of us, and we too are God’s children.

And Jesus gives us the rules for maintaining harmony in God’s family: ‘If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love’.

So, in conclusion:
Jesus models for us what it is like to be God’s Son, by his life and ministry, by his death and resurrection, and through his words recorded in the Gospels – he is a constant spiritual presence with us in every age.

Jesus chooses us, chooses us to be his joyful, loving friends, his ambassadors, brothers and sisters in the family of God.

And this is just what we need, I believe, to flourish as human beings, because it answers a deep psychological need that we all share – we can only truly love God and love one another if we first feel specially chosen ourselves.

Let me finish with the much-loved prayer of Richard of Chichester, an English bishop and saint of the C13th – it is a gem of Anglican spirituality, capturing the joy of being chosen by Jesus:

Thanks be to Thee, Lord Jesus Christ
for all the benefits Thou hast given me,
for all the pains and insults Thou has borne for me.
O most merciful Redeemer, Friend, and Brother,
may I know Thee more clearly,
love Thee more dearly,
and follow Thee more nearly,
day by day.
Amen.