Sunday before Lent 2022

Exodus 34.29-end, Luke 9.28-43a

At the back of Seal Church is what I think is one of our most stunning stained-glass windows. It features the story of Jesus’ transfiguration, which happens to be the story we heard in our Gospel reading today. In the middle of the picture, we see Jesus flanked by Moses on his right and Elijah on his left – Old Testament figures who were associated with the coming of the Messiah. Beneath them we see Jesus’ three closest disciples, John, Peter and James, in that order, left to right, kneeling on the ground in amazement at the sight of Jesus, who is shining with glory. Around Jesus there’s what looks like a sea of red, look more closely and you can see that the red glow is actually a sea of angel faces.

It’s as if a window has opened up into the heavenly realm and they are all peering through at us. 

Jesus is transfigured, transformed, but the disciples are transfixed, stunned into silence and stillness, lost for words. But not for long. 

Peter is characteristically impetuous.  “ Want me to build some huts for you, Lord?” he pipes up, “ Honest, it would be no trouble…”  He wants, quite literally, to “enshrine” this moment, to build shrines for Jesus, Moses and Elijah. Then, I suppose, they will be where he wants them to be, where he, and everyone else, can easily find them. It’s an impulse we can probably all understand, that desire to cling to what we might think of as our “glory days” – moments which glow in our memories, moments when we felt happiest, most successful. 

But of course, that can’t be, not for us, and not for Peter either. There’s nothing wrong with treasuring and pondering the past, but we can’t live there, and if we try to we will find we aren’t living fully in the present or open to the new possibilities of the future. 

We can’t hold back time, and neither can Peter. The cloud comes down, and Moses and Elijah disappear with it, as they were always going to do. There isn’t any way that he could have preserved this moment, and if he had been paying attention to what Moses, Elijah and Jesus were talking about, he might have realised that wasn’t what he was supposed to be doing anyway.   

We aren’t told exactly what Jesus, Moses and Elijah said to each other, but we are told that they were “speaking of Jesus’ departure”. This is story with movement at its heart – a departure, a journey. The departure in question is Jesus’ death. This story comes at a pivotal moment in the Gospel. Soon after this, Jesus sets out towards Jerusalem for the final time. Just before it and just after it, Jesus warns his disciples that he will be crucified, and promises that he will rise from death. That’s why this story is always set for the Sunday before Lent, the preparation for Holy Week and Easter.   

But the word that’s used for “departure” is a very significant one It’s the only time in the New Testament that it’s used, but it’s a word we are probably quite familiar with from the Old Testament. It’s the word “exodos”. It’s actually just a normal Greek word which means “way out” – odos means way or path, ex means out. You’ll find it in Greece in airports, train stations and shops– you leave through the doors marked “exodos.” But we’re more likely to associate it with the second book of the Bible, the book which tells the story of Moses confronting Pharaoh persuading him to let the enslaved Israelites go, the event that we know as The Exodus – same word in a slightly Latinised form. So in the Gospel story, Moses, who led that exodus and knew how difficult that journey could be, talks to Jesus, who is going to undergo a painful exodus of his own. Once we realise that, all sorts of other parallels suggest themselves. Moses’ exodus liberated people from slavery; Jesus’ exodus, his death and resurrection, will liberate those who follow him, helping them find new life, new possibilities, new communities. Those who followed Moses found themselves in the Promised Land; those who follow Jesus will find themselves in the kingdom of God. And just as Moses’ shone with glory in God’s presence – we heard about it in our Old Testament Reading, so this mountainside is flooded with divine light too, dazzling the astonished disciples.

It’s not surprising that Peter wants to hang onto the moment, but in doing so, he misses the point that it is just a moment – to be remembered and pondered, but not to be pinned down, fossilised, preserved in aspic, even it if could be. We aren’t called to a moment, but to a journey through many different landscapes and experiences, so we can discover God at work in all of them. If we can only find God in the beautiful times, in the drama of the mountaintop, we’ll spend most of our life missing him, because most of us don’t live on mountaintops. 

It's no accident that this mysterious story is followed by another which may seem far less attractive, and which we would probably struggle to turn into a stained-glass window. A desperate father has come looking for Jesus help. He wants Jesus to heal his son, who has what we would now call epilepsy. But Jesus isn’t there and the disciples haven’t been able to help. The story doesn’t say why, but I wonder whether they were even meant to have been suggesting they could. When Moses went up the mountain to meet with God, the rest of the people of Israel were told to wait. They were impatient, convinced they’d been deserted, and promptly made a golden calf and bowed down to worship it – it felt better to be doing something, even if was the wrong thing. Perhaps the implication here is that the disciples have been trying to set themselves up as healers in their own strength, taking authority which they hadn’t been given and weren’t ready for, seeking their own glory and then panicking when it didn’t work. 

Whatever the problem, though, it is no problem for Jesus. He simply takes the child, heals him and restores him to his father. Everyone is astounded at the “greatness of God” we are told, amazed at all Jesus was doing. Peter, James and John saw the glory of God on the mountaintop, but here, perhaps is a greater glory, health and hope restored, a child able to live in safety, a father delivered from fear. 

This story goes with the one before it, because it reminds us that God is just as much present when the skies are not aglow with glory, when the angels aren’t singing, when all that can be heard are the anguished cries of a sick child and a worried father. God is just as much present in the day-to-day grind of life, when the rubber hits the road and we just have to get on with the journey. God is just as much present in failure as in success. In the story of Christ, we see that God is just as much present on the cross as he is on the mountain top. 

It's easy to feel close to heaven on a mountain top, amidst beauty and grandeur. But if we learn to look for God also in the slog and the pain and the boredom of everyday life we discover that heaven is all around us, because heaven is wherever God is. The exodus, the journey, we are called to make doesn’t take us away from the reality of our lives but deeper into them, to find God at work.

It’s hard to hold onto hope sometimes. We look at the situation in Ukraine, at what seems like round after round of bloodshed in human history, needless, pointless suffering, and we ask, “where is God in all this?” There are no easy answers, but if God can be found on a cross, then he can also be found on a battlefield, or in a basement air-raid shelter, or in a refugee camp. God is either everywhere, or nowhere.  If we don’t believe that, there is no point to our faith at all. 

Sometimes we might find God on a mountaintop, in glory, in moments of radiant peace and beauty. Those moments are precious, to be enjoyed, treasured and pondered, moments which inspire and strengthen us; but this story encourages us to trust that God is at work, wherever our journey takes us, today, tomorrow and for all our future.

Amen 

Rooted in love: Third Sunday before Lent

Jeremiah 17.5-10, Luke 6.17-26

Tomorrow is St Valentine’s Day. You might love it or hate it, dread it or look forward to it, but it’s hard to ignore completely, not least because it’s such a big marketing opportunity for the shops. It’s hard to go anywhere without being confronted with the imagery connected with it, and most common among those images is the that of the heart. There’s nothing that says love like a heart.

But it wasn’t always that way. Hearts weren’t always a symbol of romance, of feelings, of emotions. Our ancient ancestors thought of emotions as coming from the gut. For them, the heart was the seat of thinking, of the will. It was the organ people used in decision making. The Greek philosopher Aristotle, thought that the brain was just a cooling device, which is understandable. After all, it doesn’t look as if it is doing anything much to the naked eye, whereas hearts are obviously beating and active – we can hear them and feel them. 

Those might seem like odd ideas, but they took a long time to change, and they are still there in a lot of our idioms. We talk about being faint-hearted or lion-hearted. We say that our hearts weren’t really in something when we have done it half-heartedly, rather than whole-heartedly. We say someone has a big heart or a soft heart, a heart of gold, or a heart of stone because they’ve hardened their hearts. Our hearts bleed, melt, sink, leap in response to things we like, or don’t. We help others out of the goodness of our hearts, pursue an interest to our heart’s content, feel young at heart , or maybe not. And I could go on. Not one of those expressions has anything to do with the organ that is pumping away in our chests, sending blood around our bodies as I speak. Nor are they just about emotion, let alone romantic love. They are about who we are “at heart” – there that’s word again -  how we approach the world, our motivations and priorities, what makes us tick, the essence of our being.

So when we come across the image of the heart in the Bible, this is what was going through the minds of those who wrote and read it first – not romance or just emotion, not just physical life, but our inmost nature. It’s there in our first reading from the book of Jeremiah. Cursed are those “whose hearts turn away from the Lord” he says.  That curse isn’t some arbitrary punishment; it’s just an inevitable result, to Jeremiah. He describes turning away from God as like turning away from water. You can’t expect to do that for long without serious consequences. Ultimately, separated from this essential ingredient of life, we shrivel up, like a shrub in the desert when the rains fail.  

But turning our hearts towards God, orienting our lives to what is good, investing ourselves in things that are life-giving has the opposite effect. Then, says Jeremiah, we become like a tree planted by the waterside. “It shall not fear when the heat comes… in the year of drought it is not anxious.” I love that phrase – “in the year of drought it is not anxious”. It doesn’t say that we won’t encounter times of drought, or scorching heat which sears us, but that when that happens, our leaves will stay green and we will bear fruit, because our roots reach down into the living water of God. I’ve known many people who have endured terrible times, and yet still seem able to find goodness in the world, still seem able to help others, to love and be loved. It’s not that they don’t suffer, despair, mourn, hurt, like anyone else, but they’ve found a source of life that goes deeper than the troubles they experience, so they aren’t destroyed by them. When you talk to them, you often find that’s not an accident. They’ve chosen to root themselves into things that are good and life-giving.  What that looks like varies from person to person, but it often includes a discipline of prayer and Bible reading, coming together with others, even when they don’t much feel like it, finding opportunities to love and to serve, and accepting the love and service of others. It has shaped their hearts, set their orientation, sunk into the depths of their being, so that their instincts are to hope, to love, to maintain their moral compass when times are hard. 

There’s heart language in today’s collect too. It’s another classic, like last week’s collect. It goes back to the 8th century, and it prays that “our hearts may surely there be fixed where true joys are to be found”. It’s not just about knowing right from wrong, but about having a heart in tune with God, and the hallmark of that, the prayer tells us, is joy, the joy that comes from being who we are meant to be, children of God, loving what he loves.  

Today’s Gospel reading doesn’t contain any mention of the word “heart”, but it seems to me that hearts are at the heart of it too.  

It is Luke’s version of the famous list of sayings often called the Beatitudes. Beatitude comes from the Latin “Beatus”, which means blessed, because that’s the word Jesus uses again and again in it. But sometimes people also talk about them as Be–attitudes. Attitudes which shape our being. Attitudes which come from the heart of us, and go to the heart of us too. 

It’s easy to assume that wealth, worldly achievements and popular acclaim are signs that we are blessed, favoured, special. But Jesus turns that upside down. Set your hearts on those, he says, and you may get them, but they’ll be all you get, and when they pass, as they always will, you may find yourself with nothing but the yawning gap where once they were – woe indeed. Learn to trust that God is present in times of trouble, on the other hand, that you’re loved by God when you have nothing, when no one else loves you, and you’ll have a blessing that nothing can take from you, springs of living water, welling up to eternal life, as Jesus puts it elsewhere. 

Today’s readings ask us to think about where our hearts are fixed, what our hearts are set on, what we are whole-hearted about. It’s often said that a clue to that is to look at our bank accounts and our diaries. What have we spent our time and money on? What have we put our best efforts into? Jesus said “where your treasure is, there will your heart be also”. What have we invested the treasure of our lives in? Have we made investments in things which will sustain us “in the year of drought”? Have we sunk our roots into God’s love? Whatever Valentine’s Day holds for us, God’s love is always there, a never-failing stream that brings the driest heart to life if we will only draw on it.  

Amen

The frailty of our nature: Fourth Sunday before Lent

 Isaiah 6.1-end, Luke 5. 1-11

Today’s collect – the special prayer for the day which I prayed earlier - began like this. O God, you know us to be set in the midst of so many and great dangers, that by reason of the frailty of our nature, we cannot always stand upright.

And don’t we just know it! We cannot always stand upright. There are probably days when it feels hard to stand up at all, after nearly two years of pandemic, with economic pressures mounting, a government that often seems on the verge of collapse, and the shadow of war between Russia and Ukraine looming. Wherever we look there’s trouble, and often that’s on top of the personal or family crises that come to us all in the course of our lives, usually when we feel least able to deal with them. 

That prayer might have been written for our times. 

But of course, it wasn’t. It’s a modernised version of one of the prayers from the old 1662 Book of Common Prayer, written by Archbishop Cranmer in the 16th century, and his times were even more troubled than ours, with all the turmoil of the Reformation and its aftermath, which eventually cost him his life. But even then, the prayer wasn’t new. Cranmer had pinched it from an old prayer book, or sacramentary, which was said to go right back to the time of Pope Gregory the Great a thousand years earlier in the sixth century. He also knew what it was like to “be set in the midst of so many and great dangers” too. He lived through times of plague and warfare, as Rome was fought over by invading Germanic tribes.  

When it comes to trouble, there’s nothing new under the sun. There’s not a moment in human history when someone somewhere hasn’t been living under the shadow of war, poverty, sickness, natural disaster and political upheaval. No one of us gets through life without facing challenges – personal, national or international – which remind us of “the frailty of our nature”. We human beings are small, limited creatures, for all our attempts to puff ourselves up, and we often face trials that are just too big for us, trials that we could never cope with, no matter how clever or hard-working we were, trials which are beyond our power, beyond any human beings power to deal with. 

The people of the Bible knew that too. 

Isaiah’s vision of God came at a moment of great crisis for his nation. Powerful nations were threatening invasion and they were facing moral and political collapse from within. It was going to end in disaster. Anyone could see that. It was all too much, too complicated. Maybe that was why Isaiah was in the Temple on this day, seeking sanctuary, peace, space to think. But he got much more than he bargained for. He saw God, “high and lofty, and the hem of his robe filled the Temple”. He saw seraphim, heavenly creatures, flying around God. It overwhelmed all his senses; the smell of the smoke, the sound of the singing, the shaking of the earth beneath him, the sheer beauty of God. And all of a sudden he saw himself and his world, exposed by the light of God’s glory. He saw how small he was by comparison, and how messed-up and tangled everything around him was, mess and tangle that he couldn’t help but be caught up in.  “Woe is me!” he cries out. “I’m in a mess, and so is the society I’m part of”. God hadn’t accused him of anything. No one was pointing the finger at him. There’s no evidence that he’d done anything in particular that was especially wrong. But he suddenly realised how frail and fallible human beings are, how inevitable it is that we will hurt and be hurt, that we will let others down and be let down ourselves, however hard we try to get things right. 

Simon came to the same moment of revelation in the Gospel reading. This is the man who Jesus later nicknamed Peter, the rock, but for now he was just Simon, an ordinary fisherman in Galilee, who happened to be on the beach mending his nets when this wandering preacher needed a boat to speak from because the crowds were hemming him in so closely on the shore that no one could see or hear him properly. Simon’s boat was the one he chose, and Jesus needed Simon to row him out, so Simon couldn’t help but listen to what he had to say.  By the time Jesus has finish, evidently some seeds had been sown in his mind, but he wasn’t completely convinced. When Jesus suggested he puts out into the deep waters to cast his nets he started off by pointing out, as the professional in this situation, that they’d tried that all the previous night and caught nothing. But maybe something in what Jesus had said to the crowd made him wonder, and he seems to have thought to himself, “why not trust this man and have a go”. The rest is history. The catch was huge. It was almost farcically huge, so big that his partners had to bring a second boat out, but both boats almost sunk under its weight. It was the abundance which seemed to bring Simon to his knees. How had this man - a carpenter, not a fisherman – done this when he couldn’t.  Just like Isaiah, he realised he was in the presence of something greater than himself, in the presence of God. His first response, like Isaiah’s was to shrink away, or rather to beg Jesus to leave him. But just as God didn’t send Isaiah away, so Jesus wasn’t going to take Simon at his word. Instead, both men are called to follow, to give the imperfect, flawed gifts of their lives in the service of others.

It’s sometimes said that the only essential qualification to be a follower of Jesus is to have been forgiven, and often the forgiveness we need most is forgiveness from ourselves for being human rather than super-human. Many people find that it’s only God’s acceptance of them that convinces them that that’s ok. The first step, the most important step, is accepting  that we can’t do this thing called life, that we need his help, that “by reason of the frailty of our nature, we cannot always stand upright” no matter how hard we try. It’s a huge relief when we realise that we don’t have to prove ourselves to God, that life isn’t an Olympic challenge we have to rise to, because we couldn’t anyway. All God asks is that we bring ourselves, as we are, into his presence; he can do the rest. Living the Gospel, loving God and one another, will always be beyond us. The only thing we can be sure of is that we will get it wrong. But God calls us to come to him, to follow him, and to go for him anyway, just as he did Isaiah and Simon Peter, because the greatness of his love is what matters, not the smallness of our ability to convey it. 

The strange thing about this story of Peter is that having brought in the catch of a lifetime, he leaves it all behind him. As the people of Capernaum enjoy a bumper supper, and probably breakfast and lunch as well, he heads off with Jesus.  It’s as if he is now able to trust that if God could provide so abundantly on this occasion, there will always be enough to see him through, even if it seems as if there won’t at first. As Jesus is arrested and dies on the cross Simon wobbles in his faith, but the resurrection shows him that God is still there, still at work. And Isaiah’s path will not be easy, either. The second half of the reading speaks of the reality that people will see but not understand, hear, but not comprehend, and that he won’t be able to do anything to make them. But the passage ends with the promise that there will always be a “holy seed”, new beginning, because God’s life can’t be destroyed. 

God can mend a broken heart, they say, but only if he has all the pieces. Our readings today call us to bring our broken hearts, our broken lives, our broken world into his presence and leave the rest to him. 

Amen

 

The frailty of our nature: Fourth Sunday before Lent

 Isaiah 6.1-end, Luke 5. 1-11

Today’s collect – the special prayer for the day which I prayed earlier - began like this. O God, you know us to be set in the midst of so many and great dangers, that by reason of the frailty of our nature, we cannot always stand upright.

And don’t we just know it! We cannot always stand upright. There are probably days when it feels hard to stand up at all, after nearly two years of pandemic, with economic pressures mounting, a government that often seems on the verge of collapse, and the shadow of war between Russia and Ukraine looming. Wherever we look there’s trouble, and often that’s on top of the personal or family crises that come to us all in the course of our lives, usually when we feel least able to deal with them. 

That prayer might have been written for our times. 

But of course, it wasn’t. It’s a modernised version of one of the prayers from the old 1662 Book of Common Prayer, written by Archbishop Cranmer in the 16th century, and his times were even more troubled than ours, with all the turmoil of the Reformation and its aftermath, which eventually cost him his life. But even then, the prayer wasn’t new. Cranmer had pinched it from an old prayer book, or sacramentary, which was said to go right back to the time of Pope Gregory the Great a thousand years earlier in the sixth century. He also knew what it was like to “be set in the midst of so many and great dangers” too. He lived through times of plague and warfare, as Rome was fought over by invading Germanic tribes.  

When it comes to trouble, there’s nothing new under the sun. There’s not a moment in human history when someone somewhere hasn’t been living under the shadow of war, poverty, sickness, natural disaster and political upheaval. No one of us gets through life without facing challenges – personal, national or international – which remind us of “the frailty of our nature”. We human beings are small, limited creatures, for all our attempts to puff ourselves up, and we often face trials that are just too big for us, trials that we could never cope with, no matter how clever or hard-working we were, trials which are beyond our power, beyond any human beings power to deal with. 

The people of the Bible knew that too. 

Isaiah’s vision of God came at a moment of great crisis for his nation. Powerful nations were threatening invasion and they were facing moral and political collapse from within. It was going to end in disaster. Anyone could see that. It was all too much, too complicated. Maybe that was why Isaiah was in the Temple on this day, seeking sanctuary, peace, space to think. But he got much more than he bargained for. He saw God, “high and lofty, and the hem of his robe filled the Temple”. He saw seraphim, heavenly creatures, flying around God. It overwhelmed all his senses; the smell of the smoke, the sound of the singing, the shaking of the earth beneath him, the sheer beauty of God. And all of a sudden he saw himself and his world, exposed by the light of God’s glory. He saw how small he was by comparison, and how messed-up and tangled everything around him was, mess and tangle that he couldn’t help but be caught up in.  “Woe is me!” he cries out. “I’m in a mess, and so is the society I’m part of”. God hadn’t accused him of anything. No one was pointing the finger at him. There’s no evidence that he’d done anything in particular that was especially wrong. But he suddenly realised how frail and fallible human beings are, how inevitable it is that we will hurt and be hurt, that we will let others down and be let down ourselves, however hard we try to get things right. 

Simon came to the same moment of revelation in the Gospel reading. This is the man who Jesus later nicknamed Peter, the rock, but for now he was just Simon, an ordinary fisherman in Galilee, who happened to be on the beach mending his nets when this wandering preacher needed a boat to speak from because the crowds were hemming him in so closely on the shore that no one could see or hear him properly. Simon’s boat was the one he chose, and Jesus needed Simon to row him out, so Simon couldn’t help but listen to what he had to say.  By the time Jesus has finish, evidently some seeds had been sown in his mind, but he wasn’t completely convinced. When Jesus suggested he puts out into the deep waters to cast his nets he started off by pointing out, as the professional in this situation, that they’d tried that all the previous night and caught nothing. But maybe something in what Jesus had said to the crowd made him wonder, and he seems to have thought to himself, “why not trust this man and have a go”. The rest is history. The catch was huge. It was almost farcically huge, so big that his partners had to bring a second boat out, but both boats almost sunk under its weight. It was the abundance which seemed to bring Simon to his knees. How had this man - a carpenter, not a fisherman – done this when he couldn’t.  Just like Isaiah, he realised he was in the presence of something greater than himself, in the presence of God. His first response, like Isaiah’s was to shrink away, or rather to beg Jesus to leave him. But just as God didn’t send Isaiah away, so Jesus wasn’t going to take Simon at his word. Instead, both men are called to follow, to give the imperfect, flawed gifts of their lives in the service of others.

It’s sometimes said that the only essential qualification to be a follower of Jesus is to have been forgiven, and often the forgiveness we need most is forgiveness from ourselves for being human rather than super-human. Many people find that it’s only God’s acceptance of them that convinces them that that’s ok. The first step, the most important step, is accepting  that we can’t do this thing called life, that we need his help, that “by reason of the frailty of our nature, we cannot always stand upright” no matter how hard we try. It’s a huge relief when we realise that we don’t have to prove ourselves to God, that life isn’t an Olympic challenge we have to rise to, because we couldn’t anyway. All God asks is that we bring ourselves, as we are, into his presence; he can do the rest. Living the Gospel, loving God and one another, will always be beyond us. The only thing we can be sure of is that we will get it wrong. But God calls us to come to him, to follow him, and to go for him anyway, just as he did Isaiah and Simon Peter, because the greatness of his love is what matters, not the smallness of our ability to convey it. 

The strange thing about this story of Peter is that having brought in the catch of a lifetime, he leaves it all behind him. As the people of Capernaum enjoy a bumper supper, and probably breakfast and lunch as well, he heads off with Jesus.  It’s as if he is now able to trust that if God could provide so abundantly on this occasion, there will always be enough to see him through, even if it seems as if there won’t at first. As Jesus is arrested and dies on the cross Simon wobbles in his faith, but the resurrection shows him that God is still there, still at work. And Isaiah’s path will not be easy, either. The second half of the reading speaks of the reality that people will see but not understand, hear, but not comprehend, and that he won’t be able to do anything to make them. But the passage ends with the promise that there will always be a “holy seed”, new beginning, because God’s life can’t be destroyed. 

God can mend a broken heart, they say, but only if he has all the pieces. Our readings today call us to bring our broken hearts, our broken lives, our broken world into his presence and leave the rest to him. 

Amen