Patronal Festival and Farewell service

 Patronal Festival and final service – July 7 2024

“I thank my God every time I remember you”, writes one of our two patron saints, St Paul to the church in Phillipi. When I pondered which Bible readings to choose for my final service at Seal, there was never any doubt that this would be one of them. 

I don’t know whether I intended to stay as long as I have done here in Seal, but eighteen years later, I’m still here. Now and then, a Bishop or Archdeacon has asked me whether I might feel like moving but my answer has always been “No, why would I, when Seal is the best parish in the universe?” 

That’s not to say it’s all been easy, of course. No community can exist without disagreements - not if it is a real community, where people are allowed to be real people, in all their baffling diversity. But if we stick with one another through the ups and downs, we learn to see God in each other, and once you have seen that, happily, it is something that you can never quite unsee, even if you wanted to. 

I have often described ministry as a “Great God Hunt”, not in the sense that God is hiding from us, making himself hard to find, but that we are invited each day to open our eyes to his presence around us, to wonder where we will stumble across him that day. Usually, if I spot that “good work” of God in people’s lives as Paul puts it, it’s in the things I haven’t planned or worked at. Instead, it will be in the comment of a child in school collective worship, or a story, an idea, a joy or a sorrow someone tentatively shares with me, a moment of connection, a sense that something is happening which really matters. There have been countless moments like this, countless times when I have seen the “good work” of God in you. “I thank my God every time I remember you”, 

But this passage isn’t just about looking back to the past. It is also very much about the future. Paul prays for this little congregation in Phillipi, “that their love may overflow more and more.”  He doesn’t pray that nothing bad will ever happen to them – after all, he’s in prison when he writes these words. Nor does he pray that they will be successful in worldly terms, with thousands flocking to join them. No, he prays that their love “may overflow more and more” so that there will one day be a “harvest of righteousness” because of them, things that have been put right in the world, ways in which their love has made a difference. 

Before I was ordained, my good friend Carol, who was a Reader in the church she and I attended, told me about a conversation she had had with another Reader, called Dot. Dot wasn’t a great academic theologian or a particularly eloquent preacher and yet, somehow, people who came into her orbit seemed to be wonderfully changed by the experience. One day Carol asked her what her secret was. Dot paused and thought, as Carol waited for some erudite pearl of wisdom, till Dot said “you’ve just got to love them…” Many of you will have heard me tell that story before, and I don’t apologise for that, because it is one that I’ve carried with me through the years, and returned to again and again, especially if I was feeling tempted by the latest fad or fashion swilling around in the church, looking for some magic wand to wave over the difficulties of church life – not enough people, not enough money, arguments and frustrations.  “You’ve just got to love them…”, said Dot, and she was right, though I think I’d want to add that you’ve got to let them love you too, and we have both felt mightily loved here.

In church life, some ideas succeed, while some sink without trace. The numbers in church go up and down for reasons that aren’t always obvious. Clergy have to record those numbers in a register after every service, but I’ve learned to be sceptical about those statistics, because as ever with statistics, we only count the things we can count, and we then try to convince ourselves that they are the things which actually count. The problem is that there’s no column in the service register for the most important question of all, which is “did people go away at the end knowing they were loved?”, reminded, or perhaps discovering for the first time, that, just as they are, they are precious to God. That’s what really counts, if only we could count it, because if they did, they will have found a love which can’t but overflow to others, and change the world for the better.

So we look back with gratitude, and we look forward with hope.

But what about the present? What can we say about this moment, now? 

A few weeks ago, as I was decluttering in advance of our move, I came across three ring binders, which turned out to contain the scripts of all the sermons I’d preached in the early years of my ministry, before I had a computer to store them on, including my very first sermon after my ordination as a Deacon in 1993. I was evidently preaching from Romans Chapter 12, “present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God” and  I told the congregation about the point in the ordination  service where those of us being ordained had literally “presented our bodies”. One by one, as our names were read out, each of us took a big step forward towards the Bishop– we were told to make it obvious, a sign of that step forward into a new ministry and a new life.  Retirement may sound like a step backwards, but in reality, like every other part of our journey of life, we have to go forwards to embrace it, and that’s what I hope to do, as deliberately as I did at my ordination, continuing that “great God hunt”, looking for God at work in this new stage of life.  

But this moment is also a step forward for you.  The period between one vicar and the next can be a tricky and unsettling one to navigate. It is tempting to retreat, to hunker down and just wait, but I hope you won’t do that. I hope instead that you will hear the invitation in this time to step forward, to discover new gifts, grow closer together, support and encourage each other. 

And if that sometimes feels a bit scary, as it probably will, for you and for us too,  perhaps we can take comfort from today’s Gospel story, which features our other Patron Saint, Peter. He steps forward, right out of the boat he is sailing in on this stormy sea, and after a few steps, unsurprisingly, he starts to sink. He realises he is way out of his depth, and that people, in any case, can’t walk on water. But in that moment, he cries out “Lord save me”, and the Lord does save him. Jesus didn’t ever rebuke him for getting out of the boat and trying. In fact, it’s Jesus who calls him to do so, not because walking on water is a great party trick if you can manage it, but so that Peter can discover that whenever life overwhelms him, Jesus will be right there.   

I thank my God every time I remember you… and I pray that your love may continue to overflow, as it has done to us over these last 18 years. And I pray that we will all  have the courage to step forward, out of the boat, even if it means sinking a bit from time to time, so that we can learn to stretch out our hands and find that we are held securely by the one who will never let us go. 

Amen

Trinity 5 2024

 Trinity 5 2024

I expect we’ve all been aware in the news over the last week or so of the  search for Jay Slater, the 19 year old who went missing in Tenerife, especially coming hard on the heels of the death of Dr Michael Mosley in similar circumstances. It’s hard not to fear the worst as the days pass.  We’ve seen too, the desperate pleas of his family, in particular his mother, for more help, more action, more feet on the ground to look for him.  The local search and rescue teams probably are doing all they can, but I am sure we can understand and sympathise with the feeling that the family want to throw all they have at this in order to find Jay. Who among us would feel any differently about someone we love?

We meet a parent with that kind of desperation in our Gospel reading today. Jairus, one of the leaders of the local synagogue, comes to Jesus to ask him to help his twelve-year-old daughter who is “at the point of death”.  Jairus is a respected, significant man in his local community, but he thinks nothing of throwing himself at the feet of this carpenter from Nazareth, begging “repeatedly” we are told. But he didn’t need to beg, because Jesus very willingly responds and sets off with him to his house. I am sure Jairus feels a huge surge of relief.

But as they hurry towards his house, just as Jairus thinks a chink of daylight is dawning on the darkest day of his life, Jesus stops, and looks around him, saying that someone has touched him. What’s he on about? They’re in a crowd. Of course someone has touched him. But Jesus won’t be hurried. He waits until a woman steps forward reluctantly, and admits it was her. He listens as she tells him her story - “the whole truth” – and my experience is that can take some time – before he sends her on her way, healed and blessed and restored to her community, which would have considered her unclean because of her illness. 

Can you imagine what Jairus might be thinking and feeling as all this plays out? After all, this woman’s condition was hardly urgent. She’d been ill for twelve years, coincidentally – or perhaps not - the whole of his daughter’s lifetime. Couldn’t she have waited another few hours, another day? For his daughter, every second counts.  

And sure enough, when they reach Jairus home, they find that those seconds have counted, and that she is already dead. The mourners have turned up, and all the rigmarole leading up to a burial, the weeping and wailing, is well underway. If only Jesus hadn’t stopped to heal that other woman, he might have saved her. After all, Jairus has seen that he has the power to heal. He just hasn’t been in time to heal his daughter, because he was healing someone else. 

And who was that other woman anyway? Jairus was a leading figure in his community, and his daughter had all her life before her. The anonymous woman was a nobody, even in her own eyes – she didn’t want to be noticed at all. She’d been marginalised by her condition, and bankrupted by her attempts to find healing. 

But, Jesus seems calm, unhurried, as he takes control of this chaotic, grief-stricken crowd, sending them away firmly, and taking just a small group of the family into the girl’s house. “She is not dead but sleeping” he says.

Biblical commentators argue about whether this was literally true or not. It could have been that she was just so deeply unconscious that she had been taken for dead; we don’t know. But either way, Jesus brings her back to life, back to health, back to her family. All had seemed to be lost to Jairus, as the minutes had ticked away while Jesus’ attention was elsewhere, wasted on this other women, but Jesus knew what he was doing. He knew there was time enough for both of these suffering individuals, and most of all, he knew that in God’s eyes, each was as important as the other, neither deserved attention more, or less, than the other. 

Suffering is a great and incomprehensible mystery. Why do bad things happen to good people? Why do some recover, and some not, even with the same treatment?  When we are ill, or a loved one is, we often say that “it isn’t fair – what have I done to deserve this?” We might appeal to science – “I’ve always eaten my five a day, walked my 10000 steps”. Or we might appeal to faith “I’ve always been a good person and helped others”, but underneath it there is an assumption that health or illness are rewards or punishments doled out in the game of life to those who have passed some test or other and are judged more, or less, worthy. 

Whatever else these stories tell us, they knock that idea firmly on the head. In the eyes of their society, Jairus’ daughter is worth more than the woman with the haemorrhage – and if we had to ration their healthcare, I wonder what choice we would make. She is certainly, and understandably worth more to her father. But the woman whose healing delays Jesus is also someone’s daughter, as Jesus points out. Jesus calls her daughter – the daughter of God – just as beloved to God as the child of this wealthy and influential leader. 

There is a deep human tendency to look at life as a competition, one we are desperate to win, but we don’t have to compete for God’s love, these stories tell us. Jairus’ desperate demonstration – throwing himself at Jesus’ feet and begging repeatedly – were no more or less persuasive than the quiet act of a woman who just reached out her hand in a crowd to touch Jesus cloak, hoping never to be noticed. Jesus had the time to give them the time they needed. 

The last verse of Paul’s letter to the Corinthians, which we heard earlier, underlines this. He has asked the church in Corinth to help their fellow Christians in Jerusalem, where there is a famine. They have said they would, but then just haven’t got around to making good on their promises. Paul thinks he knows why, and he’s probably right. They are thinking “if we give our money away, what if we need it ourselves?” But as they dither and procrastinate, people in Jerusalem are dying. 

Paul reminds them of the story of the Manna in the Wilderness, God’s provision of daily food to those who were trekking across the desert with Moses on their way out of slavery in Egypt. Every day there was enough for everyone to gather what they needed, but if anyone tried to gather more than that, they found their hoard would be full of worms the following morning.  Gradually they learned that it wasn’t a competition; “the one who had much did not have too much, and the one who had little did not have too little.”

We live in an unequal world. That is not God’s plan, and all the studies show that inequality damages us all in the end. We are called by the Gospel to change that, and the change starts I think, by taking on board that health, wealth and status are not signs of people’s worth to God.

The good news of these stories is that God doesn’t love you more than me, or me more than you. He doesn’t love the young more than the old, or the rich more than the poor, or even the good more than the bad. He doesn’t need to make these calculations. He doesn’t need to ration his love, or his time and attention, because they are inexhaustible, there for all of us.

Amen

Trinity 3 18

 

Ezekiel 17.22-end, Mark 4.26-34

 

Do you remember the Sycamore Gap tree, felled overnight last year in a completely baffling act of vandalism? I’d be surprised if you didn’t. It unleashed a huge wave of outrage and grief, and quite a lot of arguments about why we seemed to care more about this tree than the millions of people whose lives were destroyed by hunger and war every day.

That was a fair challenge, it seems to me, and yet, the loss of the tree, that particular tree, seemed touch a very deep nerve.

Trees are powerful like that. They figure in many different faiths and mythology. Norse myths tell of Yggdrasil, the world tree. The Buddha sat under a Bodhi tree and gained enlightenment, and of course the Bible starts with trees – the tree of life, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. What was it about the Sycamore Gap tree, though, which people found so powerful? It wasn’t an especially old tree, like those ancient yews which can often be found in churchyards, and which might be thousands of years old. It was planted, deliberately by the landowner only about 150 years ago. It wasn’t a rare tree either. The vicarage garden is full of sycamore seedlings, from the trees just beyond its boundaries, lodging themselves all over the place and putting tap roots down to Australia if I don’t spot them quickly enough. Frankly, if they want a replacement they can come and take their pick… It wasn’t even an English native tree. Sycamores were only introduced to England in Tudor times.

 

It was, it seems to me the fact that it stood alone, in that gap between the hills, strong and upright. You couldn’t miss it if you were there. It cried out to be photographed, and it was, thousands of times as well as appearing in feature films. People noticed it, proposed under it, celebrated births and mourned deaths under it. It was often described as iconic in the days after it was felled; its destruction seemed to symbolise the destruction of something far wider, and the fact that seedlings and cuttings have been grown from it a symbol of hope, and a refusal to accept that destruction. The first seedling was given to King Charles, as if those who did so were making a link between the tree and the spirit of the nation.

 

That’s something that the people of the Bible would have recognised, something which Ezekiel, in our first reading, was drawing on. He  was writing for a people in exile, a people who thought that they had lost their place in God’s heart and in his plan. They thought that the family tree of Israel, had been cut down at the roots, and was gone for ever. Not so, says Ezekiel. The kingdom of Judah, as they knew it, may have been destroyed, but God is more than capable of growing it again, he said, from the smallest of cuttings, and see it grow into a great cedar, the mightiest of trees. His vision is about restoration and hope, and it was a vision that was cherished in the centuries that followed, nurturing a belief that  Israel would eventually be recognised and honoured again, looked up to, just like a noble cedar of Lebanon would be, no matter how many foreign armies conquered it.

 

At the time of Jesus, yet another of those conquering armies had taken over Israel. Once again the nation was humiliated. That’s why Jesus’ message that a new Kingdom, the Kingdom of God , was coming was so welcome, and why many  people were so willing to acclaim him as the Messiah, the anointed one who would bring all this to pass.

 

But there is a twist in this story, a twist in the way Jesus tells his parable of the kingdom. The tree Jesus talks about isn’t a cedar of Lebanon. It isn’t even a 70 foot high sycamore. It’s a mustard tree. The precise identification is something biblical scholars argue over, but it’s probably a plant called Salvadora Persica, which is a scraggy, sprawly shrub that grows pretty well everywhere in the Middle East and right across to India. It isn’t fussy about where it grows, and will even grow in salty soil. In Israel it gets to a couple of metres tall, and left to its own devices can grow into dense thickets. It harbours plenty of wildlife, just as Jesus’ parable says, and has various medicinal and food uses, including making toothbrushes by shredding the ends of its fibrous twigs – it’s sometimes called the toothbrush tree – but there’s nothing very splendid about it. It might even turn into a bit of a nuisance if it is growing in the wrong place.

 

Jesus is very deliberately subverting the image of the noble cedar, the symbol of strength. His vision of the Kingdom of God isn’t of something outwardly impressive, all power and glory, but of a stubborn, wild, weedy, tangly shrub, which pops up wherever it wants to.

 

I can imagine a lot of scratching of heads at this. What’s the point of this kingdom if it is so – literally – weedy? If you are looking for something to symbolise your kingdom, something that will look good emblazoned on the armour, you’re not going to choose the mustard tree. And yet, this is a tree which persists. It survives. It welcomes. It provides many things, for many species – space, safety, nourishment - even toothbrushes.

 

What is Jesus telling us about God’s kingdom, God’s work, here? First, that it is God’s work, not ours. This is a tree which grows of its own accord, where it wants to. Second, this parable tells us that God can be at work in the most unlikely of places. He doesn’t need a carefully curated space. He shows up in people and in situations that may seem ordinary, or unattractive or even inconvenient to us. His kingdom doesn’t announce itself with trumpets and a golden glow of glory. Far more often it comes quietly, and is noticed only with those who have eyes to see it. Third, this parable says that the hallmark of God’s work is that it is always hospitable - it welcomes and includes. There is room in it for everyone, something it can give to everyone, if they are prepared not to turn their noses up at something so humble.

 

A faith which is focussed on tidying people up, sorting them out, controlling what they do and say and think may seem appealingly neat and controllable, but it isn’t the kind of faith Jesus came to share with us. He came to bring us life in all its fullness, life that affirms and welcomes the messy realities of life, that is less concerned about how it looks, and more concerned with making sure that everyone knows they are welcome and can belong. That “family tree”, that place of healing, and nourishment, belonging and connection truly is the greatest tree there is.  

Amen

 

Trinity 1 2024

 Deut 5.12-15, Mark 2.23-3.6

 

 

One of the most famous images in Western Art isn’t painted on canvas or hanging on a gallery wall. It is painted on a ceiling, high above its viewers. It was painted, rather reluctantly, by an artist who had at first refused the commission because he said he thought of himself as a sculptor, not a painter. He was only persuaded when he was told he could have free rein over what he painted. The result were the extraordinary frescos painted by Michaelangelo in Sistine Chapel in the Vatican, and in particular, the one I am thinking of,  the Creation of Adam, the first in a series of images inspired by the book of Genesis.

 

Everyone recognises it, even if they don’t know anything about art. Most people don’t even need to see the whole picture to recognise it. Just the outstretched hands of Adam and God, almost, but not quite, touching. It’s so famous that it’s been turned into a meme, altered, and captioned  in all sorts of ways over the years. I’ve seen versions where Adam is holding a pin card reader out to God, or where Adam and God are stroking a dog, photoshopped between them with the caption “And God said, ‘Let there be a good boy’ and there was a good boy”. And those are just some that can be shared in a sermon without getting me into lots of trouble.  It might all seem a bit irreverent, but in a way, those meme makers are doing exactly what the image meant them to, pondering what might be happening in that encounter with God, in that small space between God and humanity as they reach out to each other.

 

What brought that image into my mind today was a curious coincidence in our Bible readings. I doubt it was the main reason for these passages being chosen, but it caught my attention. Today’s Old Testament and Gospel reading both talk about outstretched arms or hands.

 

In the Old Testament reading, God calls the people of Israel, coming to the end of their wandering in the desert, to remember that it was he who rescued them from slavery in Egypt, “with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm”. That’s why they must keep the Sabbath holy. It’s a weekly reminder that it wasn’t their actions which brought them their freedom, but God’s. Keeping the Sabbath, ceasing from work, helps us to see that we aren’t indispensable, that the world can turn without us, that we can’t do it all, have it all, save ourselves, however clever or hardworking we are,  and more than that -  we don’t have to. It reminds us that we are still loved and worthwhile even if we aren’t doing anything, if we can’t do anything, that we are loved and worthwhile in God’s eyes simply because we exist.

 

That’s a huge relief - especially for someone about to retire! - but more seriously, it ought to prompt us to think carefully about our attitudes towards anyone who finds themselves unemployed or underemployed or facing barriers to work. The phrase “hard-working families” is everywhere as we approach a General Election, and I hate it for the way it disparages families, and single people, who would  love to have a job but can’t find one, people whose disabilities, or society’s attitudes to them, are barriers to work, people whose caring responsibilities mean they can’t earn a wage, asylum seekers who want to work, but aren’t allowed to. Valuing people only or mainly for the work they do is damaging and it runs completely contrary to how God sees his creation.  

We matter to God because we are, not because of what we do.

 

That’s underlined in the Gospel reading. The Pharisees are watching Jesus like hawks, waiting for him to slip up. First, they spot his disciples picking heads of grain as they walk through a wheat field on the Sabbath. But it’s not stealing or damaging the crop that bothers them. That doesn’t seem to be an issue at all. It’s that they are working on the Sabbath, because plucking grain, even just a head or two of wheat, is work – harvesting – in their minds. Jesus has an answer for that, drawn from the story of King David,  and they can hardly argue with David, a great hero to the Israelites. But when a man comes to Jesus in the Synagogue on that same Sabbath day who has a withered hand they think they’ve got him bang to rights. They don’t see the man, whose “withered hand” would have made it very hard to live a normal life; he doesn’t seem to count. All they see  is an opportunity to denounce Jesus.

 

And that’s where the second outstretched arm in our readings comes in comes in. “Stretch out your hand” Jesus says, inviting this man to do what he hasn’t been able to do perhaps for years, maybe never. The man stretches out his hand, and as he does he is healed by the power of God, by that outstretched arm which saved the Israelites from slavery.

 

The Pharisees are outraged, but perhaps triumphant too. Jesus has just given them a stick to beat him with, and they go straight off to conspire with the Herodians, supporters of King Herod, who also want to get rid of Jesus. Normally these two groups were at loggerheads, but “my enemy’s enemy is my friend”, as they say.

 

Jesus knew that they would react this way. He knew it would cause outrage that he had healed someone on the Sabbath. But he saw someone in need, and knew that his need was more important than the heartless interpretation of the Sabbath laws which the Pharisees demonstrated. “The Sabbath was made for humankind, and not humankind for the Sabbath”, he had said, and here was a perfect illustration of that.

 

Those of you who took part in our Lent Course this year may remember that we spent some time thinking about the word “Tend” as we considered our calling as a church to care for others, to tend those around us. Tend, I explained, came from a word that meant “to stretch out”. Tents are made of stretched out material. Tendencies are things we have a leaning towards.  We pay attention to things and people that matter to us, leaning or stretching towards them. Tendons allow our limbs to stretch out, as this man does to Jesus, and finds, for the first time in we don’t know how long, that his tendons work.

 

He can only do this, though because Jesus “tended” to him, paid attention, noticed him, and valued his need for healing above the rules he had grown up with, and the risk of providing his enemies with ammunition against him.

 

This is what that Sabbath is really meant to be about, says Jesus, a day when bodies and minds and spirits broken by the weight of unrealistic expectations can be healed, and a world which values people solely by their economic activity challenged. It’s a day when we practice this idea, so that we can take it with us into the rest of the week. The Sabbath, kept properly, reminds us that whether we are able bodied or disabled, working or not working, we matter to God and are loved by him. It invites us, week by week, to stretch out to God, as he stretches out to us.  

Amen

 

 

 

 

 

 

Pentecost 2024

 

 

Acts 2.1-21, John 14.8-27

 

Pentecost is traditionally the time when the Church recalls and celebrates the Holy Spirit descending in power on the disciples as they waited in Jerusalem. Jesus had called them to take his message out into all the world. They didn’t even know how to begin, but the Spirit swept away their questions and propelled them out into the streets; they couldn’t do this, but God could.

 

This isn’t the first time the Bible talks about the Holy Spirit, though. The Hebrew Bible, our Old Testament, is full of the Spirit. The Spirit hovers over the waters of chaos at the beginning of creation, and it fills the prophets with the knowledge of God’s word. The Gospels, too, tell of the Spirit overshadowing Mary when she hears she is to bear God’s son, and descending like a dove on Jesus at the moment of his baptism. The Spirit is everywhere in the Bible, not seen, but very much felt in people’s lives, the transforming power of God, God’s “here and now” presence in his creation. People may struggle to describe the Spirit, but the Spirit’s actions are life-changingly real to them.

 

In the story we heard from the book of Acts today, the Spirit comes like a rushing wind and flames of fire, but it also brings the rather puzzling gift of speaking in unknown languages. Visitors from every corner of the world hear the message the disciples proclaim and understand it, as if it is being spoken by a native speaker, someone like them.

 

Who are these people? Some may have grown up in other faiths, but felt drawn to Judaism – the proselytes the story refers to - but many came from Jewish ex-pat communities, founded over the centuries around the ancient world. Some of them, though not all, may have spoken or read Hebrew, but their first language, the language they used day to day, was whatever the majority around them spoke – Parthian, Phyrgian, Libyan, or whatever. And however devout they were, their way of understanding and practising their faith would have evolved over time too.  It’s the same for migrant communities everywhere. They may look back to their countries of origin with nostalgia and affection, but when they go back they often find they don’t really fit in any more. They’ve changed and so have the communities they came from.

 

Language is often a symbol of that gulf. Second generation migrants don’t tend to be “at home” in their parent’s language. It’s not their mother tongue anymore. And that doesn’t just mean their vocabulary changes. Our mother tongue, the language we learn first, both reflects and shapes the way we think. We sometimes say, “I know where you’re coming from”, if we think we understand someone,but it’s only really true if we come from the same place ourselves, sharing a language, a background, a culture, similar life experiences.

 

Whether they expected it or not, these visitors “from every nation under heaven” almost certainly felt a long way from home in Jerusalem, further from home than they expected, maybe a bit homesick  But in the midst of this alien land, they were transported right back to the deserts, mountains, pastures, coastlands, of the land of their birth when they heard their own language spoken, and not as if in translation, as a second language, but as if by someone who came from there too.

 

That’s the point of this detail of the story. It isn’t just there to amaze us. The author doesn’t even try to explain how it could happen. He is trying to tell us a deeper truth about the God whom he follows and serves; the truth that God is at home with us, each of us, with us, wherever we are from, wherever we are, wherever we are going.

 

God is at home with us because we are his creation. According to Genesis 2, after God had made a person out of the dust of the earth, he breathed his own breath – a word that can also be translated as Spirit – into that person to bring them to life. And that same Spirit still dwells within us. In Paul’s letter to the Romans, we are told that the Spirit prays within us “with sighs too deep for words”. We don’t have to struggle when we can’t find the words to express ourselves to God, because God already knows us; his Spirit is there in the depths of our being; God knows us better than we know ourselves.

 

The belief in a God who speaks our native language, who knows “where we are coming from”, who speaks from the depth of our experience is a huge comfort, of course. But it doesn’t just affect our personal spiritual lives, giving us comfort and reassurance. It should also affect the way we look at the world around us. That’s because if I believe that God speaks in my mother tongue – the native language of a 64 year old, white, Englishwoman from Devon, a priest, wife and mother, with my own particular life story – then I have to believe that God also speaks in your mother tongue, from the depth of your experience too, and that you therefore have wisdom I need to hear, coming from a perspective that I don’t have.

 

It's often tempting to think that the answers we’ve discovered to life, the universe and everything, the solutions we’ve found to the problems that beset us, should apply to everyone else too. If they aren’t like us, then they should be, and we will do our best to make sure they become so, even if it means doing a violence to their own sense of self. It’s the essence of colonialism, the belief that we know better than others what will make them happy and successful – or even that we know what “happy and successful” looks like for them. It can lead to all sorts of problems when we think like that, especially if we have power, as we try to squash others into our mould. A belief that God may be speaking in someone else’s mother tongue challenges us to listen, deeply and humbly, for their sake, but also so that we can hear the wisdom of God that speaks through their lives and experiences.

 

Today, and every day, God speaks in the mother tongue of each of us, knowing “where we are coming from” because that’s where God comes from too. We may sometimes feel alienated or out of place, as if we don’t fit in the world. We may feel like strangers, or be treated as if we don’t belong. We may treat others like that too. But the Pentecost calls us to see that God is at home in each one of us. And that changes everything, just as it did for Jesus first followers on that Day of Pentecost, long ago.

 

I’d like to finish with a sonnet by Malcolm Guite, written for this day, which reminds us of that God whose “mother tongue” is love.

 

Pentecost - a sonnet by Malcolm Guite

 

Today we feel the wind beneath our wings
Today the hidden fountain flows and plays
Today the church draws breath at last and sings
As every flame becomes a Tongue of praise.
This is the feast of fire, air, and water
Poured out and breathed and kindled into earth.
The earth herself awakens to her maker
And is translated out of death to birth.
The right words come today in their right order
And every word spells freedom and release
Today the gospel crosses every border
All tongues are loosened by the Prince of Peace
Today the lost are found in His translation.
Whose mother-tongue is Love, in every nation.

 

Amen

Easter 6 2024

 

Easter 6 2024

 

Abide, abide, abide… You can’t miss that word in today’s Gospel reading. It follows on from last week’s Gospel reading when Jesus compared God’s people to a vine. If you remove the branches from the main stem, the vine can’t bear fruit, and the branches will die. They need to “abide in the vine” so that the sap can run through them.  

 

Abiding might not sound like the most exciting word in the dictionary. It is literally static, about staying put, about a God who is just there, about us just being there with him.  But often just being there for someone is the most important thing we can do, and that others can do for us. When we are going through tough times, it’s the people who are there for us, noticing how we are, keeping step with us, waiting with us, who are most helpful, not the ones determined to fix us or save us or find solutions.  But abiding is just as important in happy times too.

 

Abiding is the essence of friendship.  You don’t go for a coffee with a friend armed with an agenda to work through – that would make it a business meeting. You probably don’t have any particular outcome in mind. It’s just about being together, abiding with one another.

 

In the very first story in the Bible, the story of Creation we meet a God who just wants to be with his creation, and in particular with the man and woman he has made. He comes looking for them in the garden as he strolls around in the cool of the evening, enjoying the world he’s made. He doesn’t seem to have any particular job for them. He just wants to be with them. He calls out “where are you?”, but there is no answer, because they are hiding from him, ashamed because they’ve eaten from the one tree he has told them not to. It’s a moment of deep tragedy, as that easy sense of “abiding” is lost. God’s commitment to them and love for them never alters, but from then on, it’s as if their relationship with him is changed. They can never quite trust that God really wants to be with them. Why would he, when they have let him down?

 

The disciples Jesus is speaking to in the passage we heard are about to illustrate that pattern perfectly. This passage comes from Jesus’ long conversation with them on the night before he dies, at his Last Supper with them. Soon he will be arrested and tried and crucified. And far from abiding with him, they will all run away, but of course three days later they will discover that their desertion isn’t the end of the story, that he is still with them, that his abiding friendship for them hasn’t been destroyed and never can be. We may wander off. We may hide. We may try to cut ourselves off from God, but God never cuts himself off from us.

 

The first reading too, is about abiding. It’s part of a much longer story, and probably doesn’t make much sense unless you know the context. It’s from the Acts of the Apostles, the stories of the early Church as it formed in the months and years after the Ascension of Jesus. A man from Caesarea has sent messengers to Peter, one of the early leaders of the church, asking him to come to visit him and tell him about Jesus. The problem is that the man, Cornelius, is a Roman, and not just a Roman, but a Roman Centurion, part of the occupying army, and, of course, he is a Gentile, not a Jew. He sounds like a good egg. He prays and he gives generously to the poor, but he hasn’t been brought up to observe the Jewish laws around things like food. If Peter goes to visit him, what will he be confronted with? What if Cornelius offers him a bacon butty when he gets there? What if there are statues of other gods in the house. Romans normally had an array of household deities in domestic shrines and there’s no indication that Cornelius didn’t.

 

But just before the summons to Cornelius comes Peter has had a vision, a vision of a great sheet of animals being lowered down from heaven, every one of which the Jewish law said was unclean. In his vision, though, God tells him to kill and eat them. Peter is disgusted at the thought, and proceeds to try to tell God that he can’t because God has forbidden him to…To which God replies that as he is God, that’s really up to him, isn’t it…?

 

The vision is a challenge to Peter, but also a reassurance. Maybe God’s love is broader than he has imagined? Emboldened by this thought, he sets off for Cornelius’ house. He thinks he’s taking God to them. He’s excited to start them off on their journey of faith.  God is already there. He’s barely opened his mouth to explain the basics of the faith to them, when the assembled household are all filled with the Holy Spirit, just as Peter and his fellow disciples were on the Day of Pentecost. Whatever reservations he has had melt away, and Peter not only spends that day with them but several more. He abides with them, with all the cultural challenges that brings, because he sees that God abides with them too.

 

These are readings which challenge us to consider abiding in all its forms. Who do we abide with, stick to, commit ourselves to? Who do we struggle to abide with, to be around? We sometimes say “I can’t abide so and so. They really irritate me” – we reject any connection with them. Why is that? What does it tell us about them, but more importantly what might it tell us about ourselves?

How do we feel about “abiding” generally? Do we have itchy feet, a restless sense that we always want to be somewhere else, or are we content to be where we are and look for God within it? It’s appropriate that it’s today that we receive the record produced by the Sevenoaks Decorative and Fine Arts Society today of our church. This building, and all it contains is itself a testimony to centuries of “abiding”, of people who committed themselves to maintaining this building as a place of prayer and peace, and to finding God in the community of those who shared Seal Church with them, abiding with one another, with all the challenges that can bring.

 

But most of all, it seems to me, these readings ask us to think about the God who abides with us, and invites us to abide with him, because that’s what the Bible tells us he wants. He starts out trying to abide with his people in the Garden of Eden, goes on to wander the world with them, abiding with as they get into and out of slavery in Egypt and assorted other disasters. He abides with them when they let him down. He abides with them through the words of his prophets, calling them back to him. Finally, and for Christians most perfectly, he abides with us in Jesus, who “became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth”.

 

In him we see God where God always wanted to be, not a distant monarch, not a terrifying judge, not just a provider of things, a fixer of things, but a friend who walks with us on our journey, just being there, a companion, who broke bread with his disciples and is found in the bread we break together too, someone who calls us into a community of abiding, enduring, lasting love.

Amen 

Easter 5: The wilderness road

 

Easter 5 2024

Acts 8.26-end, John 15.1-8

 

‘This is a wilderness road’. That little detail in our first reading is in brackets in English translations, apparently an aside, and yet, as things in brackets often are, it’s an aside that we’re meant to notice, something that will help us make sense of the whole story.

 

‘This is a wilderness road’.. It was literally true. Sadly, we have probably all become familiar with the landscape this story takes place in – the road from Jerusalem to Gaza - that flat, parched, bleached landscape of endless sun-baked plains, through which refugees and Israeli troops have moved over the last six months.

 

But I don’t think the author of the book of Acts was just concerned to describe the setting. The point about wildernesses is that they are wild places, uninhabitable, dangerous. There’s no support if you get into trouble. You might find yourself alone and vulnerable. You might get lost. You might even die. And this man whom he meets sounds as if he feels out in the wilderness in more than just the geographical sense.

 

He is in a wilderness spiritually too, confused and uncertain. He’s described as an Ethiopian. He could be of Jewish descent – there were Jewish communities scattered all around the ancient world - but he is probably just one of the many people who were interested in Jewish faith and felt an affinity to it. He is described as being a “court official of the Queen of Ethiopia, in charge of her entire treasury”. He is a wealthy, powerful man. But he is also a eunuch. He may have been a castrated slave or captive. There may have been an accident or illness which left him infertile. Or he may have been born with some intersex condition, but the result was that he was unable to have children. Eunuchs were a popular choice for powerful offices like this in the ancient world. If a man had no children, and no possibility of having any, it was thought that he would be more loyal and less tempted to cheat his employer in order to build up an inheritance for them.

 

But this man would have discovered a problem when he reached the Temple in Jerusalem, because  there were strict rules, set out in the Hebrew Scriptures, about who could and could not enter the Temple and take part in the worship, and being a eunuch, along with a whole range of other disabilities and illnesses, would have ruled him out. It was all to do with a belief that anyone coming into the presence of God in the Temple had to be perfect, unblemished – that applied to the sacrifices that were offered, but also to the people too.

 

It sounds as if this must have been his first trip to Jerusalem, maybe the trip of a lifetime, otherwise he would have known this beforehand. Perhaps he had had to ask special permission to go from his boss, the Ethiopian Queen. Presumably he had made the trip in good faith, and it was an enormous commitment. It was over 2000 miles – a huge trek up through Egypt - but when he got to the end, he would have been rejected, or at the very least, treated as unwelcome, unwanted, unclean, left in no doubt that he shouldn’t have been there. No wonder he’s confused. Does God want his worship or not? It’s not as if he could do anything about his condition. He didn’t choose it. It wasn’t his fault. But it doesn’t feel like that to him as he sits in his chariot, puzzling over the Hebrew Scriptures, reading from the book of Isaiah.

 

He wouldn’t, of course, have had what we know as the Bible – there wasn’t a one volume collection of writings at this stage, either for Jews or Christians. People would only have had scrolls of single books, and maybe just one of those. So it’s possible that Isaiah was all the Scripture he knew. If it was, we can see where his confusion comes from, because Isaiah’s words, written for his people at a time of national catastrophe, were meant to reassure them that despite the exile in Babylon they were living through, despite the apparent failure of the nation of Israel, God still loved them. His prophecies included a number of sections now often now often called the “Suffering Servant Songs”, describing a figure who was “despised and afflicted, a man of sorrows and acquainted with infirmity”, someone who had “no form or majesty that we should look at him” someone “from whom others hide their faces. The verses which the Ethiopian was quoting are part of this passage, from Isaiah 53. “In his humiliation, justice was denied him…His life is taken away from the earth”.

 

Scholars were, and still are, divided on what, or who, was in Isaiah’s mind at the time – a future Messiah? A current figure? Or maybe this was the personification of Israel itself, disgraced and humiliated.  But, whoever he is, Isaiah describes a man who was broken and who apparently has no future. “His life is taken away from the earth.” It’s easy to see the Ethiopian eunuch recognising himself, someone with no children to carry on his line. Yet Isaiah also describes this Suffering Servant  “the righteous one”, one whom God welcomes, honours and uses.

 

I think we are meant to assume that it’s this passage, this idea ,which has appealed to the Ethiopian, and drawn him to make this long trek. Here at last, there seemed to be a God who would welcome even him, but when he got to Jerusalem, he found that those who claimed to follow that God didn’t.

 

“Explain it to me!” he asks Philip. So Philip, in the right place at the right time, by the guidance of the Spirit, does. He tells the Ethiopian “the good news about Jesus”,  that there is one who has just recently lived out the truth of this passage, welcoming those who were humiliated and broken, allowing himself to be humiliated and broken on the cross, and yet God has honoured him, against all expectations, raising him from death.

 

And suddenly in that dry, barren wilderness they come to an oasis. Water in the desert, life in the midst of death. And the Ethiopian says “what is there to stop me being baptised?” Nothing, is the answer. There was plenty to stop him worshipping in the Temple – hundreds of years of deep-rooted prejudice – but there is nothing to stop him getting down into this water and being welcomed into the community of those who follow Jesus, a disfigured, disgraced man who had been raised from the dead in the ultimate affirmation of God’s favour.

 

It’s a story from a world in many ways very different from our own, and yet it speaks loudly and clearly still today, because we still live in a world which often judges by very narrow standards – physical appearance, health, wealth, intellectual ability, social recognition, the ability to fit in. We still live in a world where people with disabilities, people who’ve fallen on hard times, people whose lives don’t fit the tidy moulds we like to squash them in and who have no hope of winning in the rat race are looked down on and judged.

 

But the good news about Jesus is the same as it was when Philip told it to that Ethiopian eunuch. Jesus knows about broken bodies and spirit – his own were broken on the cross. We don’t need to be perfect – physically or spiritually - to come to him. Everyone is welcome to “abide in him”, to be grafted into the vine, not be left out in the wilderness, playing a vital part in the life of the whole, bearing fruit, making a difference, blessing the world.

 

Amen