The Kosmos-World

Sermon preached at St Mary's, Nenagh on 20th May 2012, the Seventh Sunday of Easter, the Sunday after the Ascension, year B

“I see trees of green, red roses too, I see them bloom for me and for you, and I think to myself, what a wonderful world.”

 I apologise for my bad singing! But I’m sure you all recognise this song – it’s perhaps best known sung by Louis Armstrong. And it’s true isn’t it! We all know what a truly wonderful world God has made for us to live in - a veritable Garden of Eden, if only we would learn to look after it and use it rightly.

St John uses the Greek word ‘kosmos’, meaning ‘world’, no less than 13 times in today’s  reading from his Gospel (John 17:6-19). But this is not the beautiful material world which God made and saw ‘was very good’, as the 1^st chapter of Genesis puts it. I shall call what John has in mind the kosmos-world, to distinguish it from God’s wonderful world. The kosmos-world is a place of spiritual death, filled with souls cut off from God: a place where greedy people trample on each other to grab more for themselves; a place where violent people kill and torture other people; a place where cynical people despise what is good and true and beautiful. And we all know the reality of that kosmos-world too, don’t we!

For John the very opposite of the kosmos-world is eternal life, as he tells us in the preceding verses, ‘This is eternal life, (to) know you the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent’. And the author of 1 John echoes this in today’s 2nd reading (1 John 5:9-13), ‘This is the testimony: God gave us eternal life, and this life is in his Son’.

In the Gospel reading, Jesus prays to his Father for his disciples.

It is the night of the last supper, just after he has washed the disciples’ feet. It is immediately before he goes out with them to the garden of Gethsemane, across the Kidron valley, where he will be arrested by soldiers and police led to him by Judas Iscariot. Jesus is praying for his disciples, but he is also teaching them, for he prays out loud in their hearing. His words are dense with meaning - perhaps because he knows this is his last opportunity to speak to them before he is arrested, tried and executed.

It would take a very long sermon to tease out all the nuances of his prayer. So I shall pick out just three points about the relationship between Jesus’s disciples and John’s kosmos-world.

1. Jesus’s disciples are in the kosmos-world, but they do not belong to it. God has given the disciples to Jesus, in the sense that God has made them able to respond to the word of God which Jesus has given them. They have been brought to know and believe the truth that Jesus is sent from God. That is what sets them apart from the kosmos-world, even while they remain in it.
2. The kosmos-world has already shown it hates Jesus’s disciples because they do not belong to it. Those mired in evil, in cynicism, violence and greed, cannot co-exist with those who live by God’s values. So Jesus calls on his Father to protect his disciples from evil, when he is no longer there to do so in the flesh.
3. Jesus does not ask God to take his disciples out of the kosmos-world. Just as God sent Jesus into the kosmos-world, so Jesus sends his disciples into it. God sent Jesus to redeem the kosmos-world from within. Jesus sends his disciples to continue his redeeming work there.

The kosmos-world is a metaphor for the evil we encounter all around us, day by day.

It’s hard to see evil for what it is in the abstract. It comes in so many disguises. I think it helps to focus on concrete examples. There are so many to choose from - but let’s focus on the child abuse which has so disfigured Irish society.

We were shocked to learn of the abuse perpetrated by a very few priests and religious in RC parishes and church institutions – a small minority, but still far too many. But lest we are tempted to believe it is not our problem too, we are now hearing the testimony of those abused in protestant institutions, such as Bethany Home in Rathgar and Westbank Orphanage in Greystones. 219 Bethany children are buried in unmarked graves in Mount Jerome Cemetery in Dublin. Many who survived were sent into dysfunctional and abusive situations in places like Westbank.

It is now clear that the evil of child abuse extended far beyond the abusers themselves. It extended to their colleagues and superiors who colluded in it by failing to stop the perpetrators. It extended to organs of the State which failed to exercise their duty of care. And it extended throughout Irish society, to all of us who knew there was something wrong, but could not bring ourselves to say so publicly, thus allowing the evil system to fester for decades.

We must not forget that more children have been abused outside the churches than within them. But it is almost incomprehensible how so many who professed to be Jesus’s disciples could have gone so wrong – but they did. And that must be a lesson to us all not to underestimate the forces of evil. Every one of us needs God’s grace to prevent the forces of evil overcoming us.

So to sum up:

·       The wonderful world God has placed us in is good. We should rejoice in it, and give thanks for it. But as Jesus’s disciples, we must always be on guard against the evil that spoils it.

·         As disciples we live amidst evil, but we do not belong to it, because God has given us to Jesus.

·         As disciples we must be ready to suffer personally when we confront evil and refuse to collude with it. But we can take comfort that Jesus intercedes for us, asking God to protect us from something much worse than suffering – that is, from being drawn into evil ourselves.

·         Our task as disciples is to continue Jesus’s redeeming mission. We have been set apart to confront and defeat evil wherever it is found, not to hide ourselves away like cowards in the face of it.

Little children, love one another!

Address given at Templederry and St Mary's, Nenagh on 6th May 2012, the Fifth Sunday of Easter, year B.

‘Little children, love one another!’

If you find these words strangely familiar, you’re probably right! I am repeating the sermon I gave in this very church on the 5^th Sunday of Easter three years ago. I make no apologies. It’s not just laziness. This message is crucially important for us today, I believe, when angry voices are raised in the Church of Ireland and the wider Anglican Communion, and even in our own Nenagh Union of Parishes.

The author of St John’s Gospel, John the Evangelist, was from early times believed to have also written the 1^st Letter of John, from which today’s 2^nd reading was taken. There is a lovely story told about him by St Jerome, that great Doctor of the Church who translated the Bible into Latin. He was writing around 400AD, some three hundred years later. The story goes like this:

The Evangelist continued preaching even when he was in his 90s. He was so enfeebled with old age that he had to be carried into the Church in Ephesus on a stretcher. And when he was no longer able to deliver a long sermon, his custom was to lean up on one elbow and say simply: “Little children, love one another.” This continued on, even when John was on his death-bed. When he finished, John would lie back down and his friends would carry him out. Every week, the same thing happened, again and again. And every week it was the same short sermon, exactly the same message: “Little children, love one another.” One day, the story goes, someone plucked up the courage to ask him about it: “John, why is it that every week you say exactly the same thing, ‘little children, love one another’?” And John replied: “Because it is enough.”

If you want to know the basics of living as a Christian, there it is in a nutshell. All you need to know is, “Little children, love one another.” If you want to know the rules, there they are. And there’s only one. “Little children, love one another.” For John, once you put your trust in Jesus, there is only one other thing you need to know. So week after week, he would remind them, over and over and over again.

‘Little children, love one another!’

This is precisely the message that John gives us in today’s 2^nd reading (1John 4:7-21). And he keeps on repeating it throughout his 1^st Letter. 1John is quite short, only 5 pages in my Bible – you might like to take down yours when you get home and read the whole thing.

John tells us that the reason we must love is that God first loved us. God loved us so much that he sent his only Son, Jesus Christ our Lord, into the world to be ‘the atoning sacrifice for our sins’.

What does this talk of an atoning sacrifice mean? We all know our own sins, don’t we? Our inveterate wilfulness – doing what we know we shouldn’t, and not doing what we know we should. That, and our own guilty consciences, cut us off from the love of God. It would be quite wrong to imagine the atoning sacrifice as a vengeful God taking out our sins on Jesus. Rather Jesus has shown us how to reconnect to the love of God despite our sins, through his example of self-sacrificing love, and by his teaching that if we repent God loves us enough to forgive our sins. This is Jesus’s atoning sacrifice, sealed by his victory on the cross. Jesus turned the apparent defeat of the cross into victory by his obedience to his Father’s will even unto death. No doubt this is the good news about Jesus that Philip proclaimed to the Ethiopian eunuch in today’s 1^st reading (Acts 8:26-40).

John tells us that if we don’t love each other, people we can see and touch, then we surely can’t love God, who we cannot see and touch.

Jesus tells us in John’s Gospel (John 15:12), ‘This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.’  Jesus’s love is not an easy, sentimental kind of love. It’s easy enough to love those who are lovable, but Jesus also tells us (Matthew: 5:44), ‘Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you’. That is the sort of edgy love that John reminds us Jesus asks of us. The kind of edgy love that is so very difficult.

We should make love our priority. Forget about ego, forget about career. Forget about political divisions and bankers’ greedy mistakes. Forget about the silly divisions that we constantly let creep into the Church. Forget about likeability too – we don’t have to like those we love, but we must love even those we don't like.

Love one another. God loves us. We ought to – no, we must – love one another. That’s what it’s all about.

“Little children, love one another … because it truly is enough.”

Jesus rose from the dead on the 3rd day

Address given at Templederry, Nenagh and Killodiernan on Sunday 22nd April 2012, the 3rd Sunday of Easter, Year B

We believe that Jesus Christ rose from the dead on the 3^rd day.

We profess this faith every Sunday, when we say the Apostles’ Creed, or the Nicene Creed at Holy Communion. But why do we believe it?

Luke gives us one reason in today’s reading from his Gospel (Luke 24:36-48). It is the testimony of the disciples. While scholars tell us he was writing some 45-50 years after the events he describes, he is clearly drawing on earlier sources and traditions, reaching back to the first disciples.

The scene is the upper room. The upper room in which the disciples shared the Last Supper with Jesus. It is the night of the first Easter Sunday, the 3^rd day after Jesus’s crucifixion, death and burial. Jesus’s disciples are gathered together. They are discussing excitedly the amazing reports that Jesus, who they saw on the cross and know to be dead, has appeared to Simon, and to Cleopas and his friend on the road to Emmaus. Then, ‘Jesus himself stood among them and said to them, “Peace be with you”’.

Luke is at pains to report that this is no spirit or ghost, but Jesus in the flesh. “Look at my hands and my feet”, says Jesus, – the disciples would have seen the wounds of his crucifixion, the marks of the nails hammered through his wrists and through his ankles - “see that it is I myself. Touch me and see; for a ghost does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have”. And Jesus goes on to eat a piece of grilled fish in front of them.

 It is rather mysterious. Jesus seems to appear suddenly out of nowhere, just as he does in the other accounts of people meeting him after the resurrection. But these accounts are a powerful testimony to the first disciples’ certainty, not just that Jesus rose from the dead, but that this was how it had to be, this was what God had ordained. Luke reports the risen Jesus teaching them, “Thus it is written, that the Messiah is to suffer and to rise from the dead on the third day”.

Jesus the risen Messiah goes on, “Repentance and forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem. You are witnesses of these things”.

Notice that Jesus does not want his disciples to remain in the upper room - within those four walls, safe behind a closed door, looking inward. Instead he commissions them to go out into the wide world beyond, to proclaim to everyone the call to repentance and forgiveness which was from the start at the centre of Jesus’s teaching.

And proclaim that call is just what Jesus’s disciples did, as we read in the Acts of the Apostles.

Those frightened disciples who deserted Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, those bewildered, doubting disciples of that first Easter day, are transformed. They are transformed by the Holy Spirit at Pentecost into a body of believers – a church – which proclaims Jesus’s message of repentance and forgiveness, and carries on his healing mission.

In today’s 1^st reading (Acts Acts 3:12-19), Peter has just healed a man lame from birth, in the name of Jesus Christ, to the astonishment of the crowd of bystanders at the gate of the Temple. And he uses this as an opportunity to preach the good news of Jesus Christ.

‘Why do you wonder at this’, he says, ‘or why do you stare at us, as though by our own power or piety we had made him walk? … The faith that is through Jesus has given him this perfect health in the presence of all of you… Repent therefore, and turn to God so that your sins may be wiped out.’

A rabble of disciples - rabble is the only word for it - is transformed. Transformed at first into one small church, it spreads rapidly, throughout the Roman Empire and beyond. Despite persecution and internal bickering, over the centuries it extends and multiplies right across the world, to all peoples, carrying on Jesus’s mission and preaching his message of hope. Our parish today, 2000 years on, in the Nenagh Union, in the Diocese of Killaloe in the Church of Ireland, is one small part of it.

For me this transformation is another, perhaps a stronger, reason to believe in the reality of the resurrection.

With St Paul's insight we see the Church as like the body of Christ, who is its head.

We are Jesus’s flesh and bones and sinews - you and I - to do his will until he comes again.

Let us pray that in the life of our church community here we may meet him together, and go out into the world together, to proclaim his message of repentance and forgiveness, and continue his healing mission, just as the first disciples did.

Jesus rises again from the dead, when we come together as a Christian community.

Remove this cup from me

Short reflection given at Portumna, Eyrecourt and Banagher on the 6th Sunday of Lent, 1st April 2012 - Palm Sunday, also known as Passion Sunday.

After that long Passion Sunday reading from the Gospel of Mark (14:1-15:47), I feel sure you’ll be glad to know that I’m not going to preach a long sermon too!

Instead I ask you to reflect with me for just a moment on Jesus’s prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane:

‘Father, for you all things are possible; remove this cup from me; yet, not what I want, but what you want.’

Jesus is distressed and agitated, we are told. He is certain - quite certain - that what he is doing is the will of God, his loving Father. He knows what is likely to happen next – his execution as a dangerous agitator, perhaps even the agonising death of crucifixion.

And Jesus does not want to die. He is a man in the full strength and vigour of his early 30s. He loves life, he loves his friends, and he loves his ministry to those who need healing and forgiveness. So he prays to his loving Father for himself, that his death may be averted - ‘remove this cup from me’.

But that is only half his prayer. Even more important for Jesus than his own distress at the prospect of death is that his loving Father’s will should be done. So he finishes his prayer with ‘yet, not what I want, but what you want’.

This prayer of Jesus should be a model, I think, of any prayer we pray for something for our selves.

When I desperately want something, it is right and proper for me to pray to God for it. If I cannot ask God for it, who can I ask? But I must never forget how much more important it is for God’s will to be done, than for my human wish to be granted. So I should always finish a prayer for myself with Jesus’s words, ‘yet, not what I want, but what you want’.

In the end, like Jesus, we must trust that our loving Father knows what is best for us.

Cleansing the Temple

Address preached in Templederry and Killodiernan on Sunday 11th February 2012, the 3rd Sunday of Lent.

What an uproar Jesus caused in the Temple on the day John describes in today’s NT reading (John 2:13-22)!
‘Making a whip of cords, (Jesus) drove all of them out of the Temple’. All the ‘people selling cattle, sheep, and doves’, together with their animals. ‘And the moneychangers’ too - Jesus overturned their tables, and poured their coins out on the floor.

This incident – known as the Cleansing of the Temple – is also described in slightly different words by the other 3 Gospel writers, Matthew, Mark and Luke.

The place is the Court of the Gentiles, the outermost court of the Temple, beyond which gentiles were forbidden to go on pain of death- only Jews were allowed in the inner courts. The time is just before Passover, the busiest time of the year in Jerusalem, when many hundred thousand pilgrims would be in Jerusalem. The animals are there for pilgrims to buy to make the ritual animal sacrifices required by Jewish law at that time. The moneychangers are there to change ordinary Roman money into the special Jewish money, which pilgrims were required to use for Temple purposes because Roman money was considered unclean.

Let’s enter into the scene in our imaginations. You can see people running in every direction, animals panicking. Listen to the traders yelling, cattle bellowing, sheep bleating, doves cooing. Hear tables go thump as they hit the floor, and coins chink as they roll underfoot. Smell the pervasive smell of the animals. And at the centre of it all strides Jesus, wielding a whip, incandescent with righteous anger, quite awe inspiring. It’s not how we usually think of Jesus, is it?

What Jesus does is done very deliberately - it took time and planning to make the whip of cords. It is a kind of acted parable – but what does Jesus mean by it? Let’s look at it a bit more closely. And as we do we should remember that Jesus would have more than one reason for doing what he does, just as we typically do.

John disagrees with Matthew, Mark and Luke about when the incident happened.
John places it right at the start of Jesus’s ministry. But Matthew, Mark and Luke put it right at the end, just after the triumphal entry into Jerusalem. Who is right?

Some people in order to resolve this discrepancy suggest that Jesus cleansed the Temple twice – once at the start of his ministry and again at the end. But I don't buy that - I can’t believe that having done it once Jesus could ever have got within an asses roar of the Temple again.

The incident seems to fit much better at the end of Jesus’s ministry, after his triumphal entry to Jerusalem, as one of the reasons the Temple authorities were so keen to do away with him. If I had to choose between John’s timing and that of the other three, I would go for the three.

But that doesn’t mean John is altogether wrong. He is simply writing from a different point of view to the others. He is writing not an historical account of Jesus’s life, but a Gospel designed to demonstrate the significance of Jesus. At this point in it he combines together events which could well have happened at different times in a different order, but which mark Jesus as the expected Messiah. The words his disciples remember, ‘Zeal for your house will consume me’, are a quotation from Psalm 69, which would have been recognised as a reference to the Messiah. And the Jews too implicitly recognise this by asking Jesus for a Messianic sign, ‘What sign can you show us for doing this?’ To show Jesus as Messiah is what is important for John, not chronological accuracy.

As John sees it, Jesus demonstrates by his acted parable that he is the Messiah, both to those who were there, and to those who read John’s words, including us in John's far future.

Then again, perhaps Jesus intended to show up the corruption of the Temple system.
The Temple had grown immensely rich on the Temple tax, which every Jew over 19 had to pay to support Temple sacrifices and Temple ritual – one half-shekel a year, around 2 days pay.

The Temple’s insistence on taking only Jewish money gave the moneychangers a profitable business, and no doubt the Temple expected something in return - a licence fee we might call it charitably. The moneychangers grew wealthy by charging excessive commission. Their practice was to charge a commission for every half-shekel changed, and a second commission on every half-shekel of change if a larger coin was tendered.

The animal dealers were coining it too. Pilgrims felt obliged to buy their animals for sacrifice inside the Temple, even though they cost more than animals outside. The Temple authorities appointed inspectors to check that animals offered for sacrifice were perfect and unblemished, as the Law required. In addition to charging a fee, the inspectors were believed to take backhanders from Temple dealers - anyway, they always seemed inclined to find fault with animals not bought in the Temple.

The fact is that ordinary pious Jews and pilgrims were being fleeced by the Temple system. It was a public scandal. This would surely have enraged Jesus. Just as it would if our own Church were to make unreasonable financial demands on its members.

But there is a deeper reason why Jesus acted as he did, I think.
To understand it we need to reconstruct what Jesus actually says.

Each of the Gospel writers recalls Jesus’s words slightly differently. John has him saying, ‘Take these things out of here! Stop making my Father’s house a market place’. But Mark has him say this, ‘Is it not written, “My house shall be called a house of prayer for all the nations”? But you have made it a den of robbers’. Matthew and Luke have something similar, but miss out ‘all the nations’.

I think Mark’s words are closest to what Jesus actually said. Jesus knew his Hebrew scripture – our OT – very well. The first part, about the house of prayer, is a direct quotation from Isaiah (56:7): in it the Lord God declares he will welcome gentiles who come to him. The second, about the den of robbers, is from Jeremiah (7:11): in it the Lord declares he will destroy the Temple if the people of Judah do not amend their ways. Mark’s words and the texts they reference make perfect sense on Jesus’s lips in the context of the Cleansing of the Temple.

This is how I interpret Jesus's actions and words:

God welcomes all people, gentiles as well as Jews, to the Temple, his house of prayer. The only part of the Temple gentiles are allowed to enter is the Court of the Gentiles. But the clamour there of trading and the changing of money makes it unsuitable for prayer and worship. People who abuse the Temple by depriving gentiles of a place to pray and worship must amend their ways, or the whole Temple system will be destroyed.

This, I think, is what Jesus meant to convey to those present by his acted parable.

And I also think that through it Jesus conveys a clear warning to his Church today:

Unless our Church is inclusive, unless our Church welcomes all people and makes a space for them in which they can worship and pray, our Church will go the way of Temple in Jerusalem – it will be brought to destruction.

The healing touch

Address given at Templederry and Killodiernan on Sunday 12th February 2012, the 2nd Before Lent, Year B (incorrectly using the readings for Proper 1!)

Leprosy is the link between the OT and NT readings we’ve just heard.
In the OT reading (2Kings 5:1-14), we are told about how Naaman, the commander of the Aramean army from what is now Syria, is cured of leprosy by following the Prophet Elisha’s instructions to bathe in the River Jordan. And Mark (1: 40-45) tells us how Jesus cured a man with leprosy who begged him to do so.

True leprosy, now properly called Hansen’s disease, is a dreadful illness. It’s a chronic bacterial disease of the peripheral nerves and respiratory tract. It causes skin lesions, loss of the sense of touch, and over many years progressive disfigurement and disability. Until the 1930s it was incurable, but happily the infection can now be easily cured by a cocktail of drugs, and the WHO is coordinating efforts to eliminate it altogether in the near future. But despite being cured of the infection 2 to 3 million people worldwide are still estimated to be permanently disabled by its long term effects. It is right for us to continue to support the charities that work to help them.

Before the development of modern medicine, Hansen’s disease was often confused with other skin diseases, such as psoriasis and ringworm. They were all lumped together as leprosy, and sufferers – called lepers - were greatly feared, because leprosy was believed, incorrectly, to be highly contagious.

In Jesus’s time, religious law decreed that lepers were ritually unclean, and anything or anybody they touched also became unclean, so people avoided any contact with them. Theirs was a cruel fate. They were forced to live away from villages and towns with other lepers, and were obliged to warn other people of their presence by crying out ‘Unclean, unclean!’ If ever someone was cured – and real leprosy was incurable, so it must have been some other skin disease – the leper would have to go to be examined by a priest and take part in a complicated ritual involving animal sacrifices, as described in the book of Leviticus. Only then would the former leper be allowed back into Israelite society.

But leprosy is not what either reading is really about, I think.
The story of Naaman is surely not about his leprosy, but about how pride must be overcome before a person can find favour in the sight of God. It was only when Naaman could put aside his pride in his own greatness, and his pride in his own country, that he could be made clean by obeying the Prophet Elisha’s instructions. How greatful he must have been to his servants for encouraging him do so when he was stamping off in a a huff!

And Mark’s story is about Jesus, and about how Jesus responds to those in trouble who come to him – the leprosy is purely incidental. Let's look at it a bit more closely.

The leper comes to Jesus and begs him, ‘If you choose, you can make me clean’.
And how does Jesus respond? Jesus is ‘moved with pity’, we are told. ‘Moved with pity’ does not really capture the strength of the original Greek, which literally translated means ‘gut-wrenched’. Jesus was gut-wrenched by the leper's plight.

Then ‘Jesus stretch(es) out his hand and touch(es) him’. Those who saw it, or heard about it later, would have found this extraordinary, quite scandalous – a deliberate breach of the purity laws by a man who called himself a preacher. The leper was unclean, cursed by God perhaps. By touching him Jesus was making himself unclean. And those who associated with him risked becoming unclean themselves. Yet, ‘moved with pity’, Jesus does not hesitate. He reaches out his hand to this suffering human being and touches him – something, perhaps, which the leper had not experienced since his disease was first detected, perhaps years before. In this very human gesture Jesus makes manifest the love that he knows his Father in heaven has for all his children.

And this touch is a healing touch. ‘I do choose’, says Jesus, ‘Be made clean!’ And the leprosy leaves the man.

This little tale shows us, I believe, how we too can receive healing from Jesus when we are in trouble. When we are in trouble we can feel shunned by society, cut off perhaps from friends and family, by their anger, fear or embarrassment because of what has happened. But if we come to Jesus in prayer and ask him, he has the power through his Father in heaven to reach out with a loving touch to heal us, as he healed the leper. He may not choose to heal us physically – miraculous healing is very rare these days – but he will surely choose to heal us spiritually, to give us the strength to bear the trouble, whatever it is.

And the tale also shows us how we should behave when we encounter those in trouble who seek our help. Jesus did not shun the leper, and we who bear Christ’s name should model ourselves on him. When those who are shunned in our society come to us for help, we must reach out to them with a loving touch, like Jesus. And that includes those whose circumstances horrify us, for instance AIDS victims, drug addicts, sex abusers, prostitutes - as well as the plain feckless.

Jesus sternly warns the newly cleansed leper not to tell other people what has happened.
‘See that you say nothing to anyone’, he says, ‘but go, show yourself to the priest, and offer for your cleansing what Moses commanded, as a testimony to them.’

Why should Jesus want to keep his healing miracle secret? Perhaps he foresees that news of the miracle will make him a celebrity, and get in the way of his ministry. For that is just what happens: the former leper ignores Jesus’s warning; he tells everyone who will listen and crowds flock to see Jesus, ‘so that (he) could no longer go into a town openly, but stayed in the country.’

But I prefer another explanation. Perhaps Jesus fears that the former leper may be stigmatised if his connection with Jesus is made widely known. For Jesus already knows that he will be a controversial figure – he has already shown he is prepared to break the law by touching a leper, and that will not be the end of it. So he advises the man he has cured to go quietly to the priest. If the priest hears Jesus was involved, he might withhold his declaration of cleanliness. And only the priest’s testimony will make other people believe the former leper is clean again.

We are not told what happened to him, but I wonder if the former leper lived to regret ignoring Jesus's warning.

So to finish, thanks be to God for the insights to be found in today’s readings from scripture!
Among them are these:
(1) We need to overcome our foolish pride before we can find favour in the sight of God.
(2) Jesus will reach out with his loving touch to heal us if we bring our troubles to him in prayer. And
(3) We should follow Jesus’s example by reaching out to others in trouble, no matter who they are.

God cares for us, his children!

Address given at Portumna, Eyrecourt and Banagher on Sunday 5th February 2012, 3rd Before Lent (Year B, Proper 0)

What beautiful poetry Isaiah (40:21-31) has given us in today’s Old Testament reading!
It is actually a fragment of a rather longer poem, which goes on for several chapters. The poet invokes the sense of how small and insignificant we humans are in the face of the immense universe around us, and in the face of its Creator.

It is he who sits above the circle of the earth,
and its inhabitants are like grasshoppers;
who stretches out the heavens like a curtain,
and spreads them like a tent to live in;

Hasn’t every one of us experienced this same sense of awe at our own smallness - for instance when we look out from a high place at a big view? For me it brings back the memory of standing on top of the hill above Black Head, looking out beyond Aran, out across the vast ocean - next parish Boston, as they say.

And it is not just you and me, the little people, who are as nothing.
The poet continues: It is he

who brings princes to naught,
and makes the rulers of the earth as nothing.
Scarcely are they planted, scarcely sown,
scarcely has their stem taken root in the earth,
when he blows upon them, and they wither,
and the tempest carries them off like stubble.

It is good, I think, for the powerful of this world to be reminded that they too are insignificant. And it is good for us to remember it too. We have no reason to fear princes and rulers, since they, like us, will wither and be carried away.

Then the poet invites us to look up at the stars, as today's psalm 147 echoes:

Lift up your eyes on high and see:
Who created these?
He who brings out their host and numbers them,
calling them all by name;
because he is great in strength,
mighty in power,
not one is missing.

I am intrigued by this idea of numbering and naming stars. I think for the poet it must represent having power over them, in a magical kind of way.

Astronomers today, using ever more sensitive telescopes, survey the stars and register them in gigantic star catalogues, so that they can find any one of them again if they want to study it. And as astronomers first discovered more than 150 years ago, not far from here using the great telescope at Birr, we now know that there aren’t just stars out there, but a myriad of galaxies, each one consisting of more stars than we can see with the naked eye. If anything, we are even more insignificant than the poet could ever have imagined!

Astronomers will never catch them all. But if they could, that would not give them the power the poet ascribes to the Creator.

Faced with such a God, is it possible for any of us to feel anything but frank terror?
Yet the poet goes on to reassure us that God, YHWH in the original Hebrew, translated here as the LORD:

.. gives power to the faint,
and strengthens the powerless.
Even youths will faint and be weary,
and the young will fall exhausted;
but those who wait for the LORD shall renew their strength,
they shall mount up with wings like eagles,
they shall run and not be weary,
they shall walk and not faint.

The images are very powerful, aren’t they? Which one of us would not wish to ‘mount up with wings like an eagle’? I certainly would, particularly after watching the recent TV series on birds in flight. But it’s a big claim to make that such a mighty creator is concerned with the faint and the powerless. Why should we believe it? The answer, I suggest, lies in our shared experience of faith and the example of Jesus.

Jesus knew his Hebrew scriptures very well.
Quite likely he had this whole poem by heart. I feel sure that he felt the same awe we do when he contemplated the magnitude of creation and his own place in it. A little before our Gospel passage, Mark tells us that the Spirit drove him out into the wilderness where he was tempted for 40 days. I imagine Jesus, in the barren, rugged Judean uplands, looking up at the stars, filled with awe.

Perhaps part of his temptation concerned doubts about whether YHWH really cared for him, small as he was. If so, his faith was strengthened. He overcame these doubts, and went out to teach all who would listen that this mighty God cares for all his creatures, as a father does. And he taught us to pray to ‘Our Father in heaven’.

In today’s reading from Mark’s Gospel (Mark 1:29-39) we heard that when Simon hunted for Jesus and found him praying in a deserted place, Jesus said: ‘Let us go on to the neighbouring towns, so that I may proclaim the message there also; for that is what I came out to do’. What was this message? It was surely the message Mark has already summarised in these words (Mark 1:15): ‘The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent and believe in the good news’.

I like to think that the good news is that not only does God love us, but that he has given us the faith to believe that he does. We human beings seem to be primed to faith - it comes naturally to us. Even though we are faint and powerless we have been given the faith to believe in Isaiah’s caring God, who is the same loving Father that Jesus teaches us about.

It is because of this faith that we are enabled to be fearless, to act like true human beings made in God’s loving image, able to walk and not faint, able to run and not be weary, able to mount up with wings like eagles.

Thanks be to God for the faith that God cares for us, his children!