Blessed are the poor in spirit,
Blessed are those who mourn,
Blessed are the peacemakers
And today, blessed are the meek.
You’ve already had a few moments to consider what meekness might be. Let’s spend a moment or two thinking about what meekness definitely isn’t.
(At this point we watched a clip from 'The Apprentice' where the candidates are introduced in all their arrogant glory!)
Rhona and I don’t sit down to watch much TV together, but the Apprentice is one of the few programmes we just can’t miss. There’s something absolutely compelling about watching folk like that falling flat on their faces week in and week out.
I’m sure the TV production company egg the contestants on, but they all come out with this utterly arrogant tosh at the beginning of the series and part of the fun is seeing Alan Sugar puncture their egos when they make a mess of the tasks they’ve been assigned to.
They start out the series pumped up, aggressive and ruthless because they believe that’s the way to get on in business, and to a degree they’re probably right. But even in the hard-nosed world of Lord Sugar and his ilk, too much of that’s not a good thing.
The most aggressive contestants are often the first to be fired because they haven’t got the skills to get on with other people. And the ones who do best tend to be the ones who learn a little humility and humanity along the way.
Arrogance, in all its forms, gets peoples’ backs up. A lesson, perhaps, for any billionaires planning to make substantial investments in the North East of Scotland.
We don’t like arrogance. But equally well, the jury’s out on ‘meekness’. It’s not a popular word in our day and age. It carries overtones of spinelessness or timidity. If someone described you as meek, I’m not sure you’d take it as a compliment.
So part of what I want to do today is redeem that word, because in the ancient world, and in the thought world of the Old and New Testments, meekness was seen as a virtue, and not a failing.
Aristotle thought of virtue as a happy medium between two extremes, and meekness – the Greek word ‘praus’ – is exactly that.
Aristotle observed that there are folk who are too easily angered, and folk who don’t care enough to get angry about anything. In his view, ‘meek’ is the word that describes the person who gets that balance right. The person who gets angry at the right time about the right things.
And there’s clearly something in that. Gentle Jesus meek and mild took children in his arms and blessed them, but he also threw the tables over in the Temple courtyard and chased the moneychangers out with a whip. Angry at the right time about the right things. Measured, in other words.
That same idea is found in a nautical use of the word ‘praus’. A meek wind, was just what you were needing if you were a sailor. You didn’t want a gale that could wreck your ship, or a light breath that wouldn’t carry you anywhere. But a fair, strong wind – a ‘praus’ wind - was just right for making progress.
So we can see right away that meekness isn’t the same as weakness. Meekness is strength that’s measured and under control.
Another everyday usage of ‘praus’ in the ancient world came from farming. Horses or donkeys which had been broken and tamed for use were described as ‘meek’. They were both controlled and controllable. They could get things done.
Sometimes the word was used in medicine. Doctors spoke of a ‘meek’ remedy, which was one that was soothing and could take away pain.
But more often than not, meekness was held up as a virtue against pride. The meek person was aware of his or her limitations and was teachable, unlike the proud person who thought he or she knew it all.
Quintilian, the great Roman teacher of oratory once said of a class he was taking “they would no doubt be excellent students if they were not already convinced of their own knowledge!” Had he been living in our day, he would have been tuning in to the Apprentice!
So contrary to what we might have thought, it’s good to be meek.
And when Jesus said “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth”, his original hearers would have picked up on something straight away. They’d have heard echoes of Psalm 37 which says almost exactly the same thing.
The Psalmist urges his hearers not to worry when they see the wicked or arrogant prosper, and not to try and copy them. Why? Because in God’s good time, “the humble will possess the land, and enjoy prosperity and peace”. Or as it says in other translations: “the meek shall inherit the earth”.
Now throughout Psalm 37, the writer contrasts the way of self-reliance against the way of meekness or God-reliance:
Self-reliance/ God-reliance (meekness)
Fretting / Trust
Envy / Contentment
Anger / Delight
Scheming / Hoping
Impatient / Patient
Restless / Settled
Prosper Now / Prosper in Future
“Driven out” / “Inherit the earth”
Throughout the Scriptures, Old Testament and New, this is writ large time and time again so we don’t miss it. If we rely on our own strength and ignore God we’ll find trouble, If we admit our need, and make room for God, we’ll find blessing.
Now let’s pause for a moment and remember to whom Jesus was speaking that day. A mishmash of a crowd, and closer to hand, his own disciples. Was this a message they needed to hear?
Do you remember the four ways people responded to the threat of Rome?
Pharisees – all about purity. They were angry and worried, scheming in the background. Envious of Jesus’ popularity.
The Herodians – all about compromise. They wanted to prosper now by making alliances with Herod and with Rome. They were worried about their place in society.
The Zealots – Impatient for change; Angry at living under occupation. Plotting revolution.
And the Essenes – They fretted about sin and were restless for change, so they washed their hands of everybody else and tried to set up their own Utopian societies in the desert.
Not much meekness or trust or patience evident in those responses.
And we might have expected better from the disciples, but they didn’t have a monopoly on meekness either.
The brothers James and John were nicknamed “Boanerges” which means “Sons of Thunder”. Judas and Simon had revolutionary tendencies, and Peter was just Peter – bumbling and barging his way through life like the big burly fisherman he was. Opening his mouth and putting his foot in it almost every time.
Remember how Jesus caught them arguing about which one of them was the greatest? And the time James and John cornered him and asked him if one could sit at his right hand and one at his left when the Kingdom finally came? The very opposite of meekness. They needed this teaching too, these young Apprentices.
And so do we,
Perhaps some of us will be naturally inclined to meekness. But I think most of us will have to stir ourselves in one of two ways.
Remember what Aristotle said about meekness as a virtue – it’s always found somewhere in the middle of two extremes?
Maybe those of us at the timid end of faith need to find the courage to stand up and be counted. Doing nothing and saying nothing while professing faith is not meekness. It’s weakness. As the Irish politician Edmund Burke reminds us, “All that it takes for evil to prosper is that good people do nothing”.
And maybe those of us at the more vociferous end of the spectrum need to learn to tone it down a bit. Not to bully or cajole with our words. Not to present every option in the form “it’s my way or the highway”. Not to act like we always know it all, but to swallow our pride and become teachable.
If you cast your eye across the pages of the Scriptures, it’s staggering how many of the leading lights were, in their own way, meek individuals. Moses had a stammer; Jacob was always second best to his brother Esau, the alpha-male; David was the runt of the litter; Ruth was a refugee; Jeremiah was just a scared young lad when he was called to be a prophet; Mary was an unmarried teenager when she gave God her yes.
It’s reminding me of an old adage you’ve heard from me before: God doesn’t need our ability. He needs our availability, In the light of what’s been said this morning, maybe we could put it this way. God doesn’t need people who think they know everything. He needs folk who are humble enough to learn. People who are meek.
This Tuesday is the tenth anniversary of my ordination. And I spent the year leading up to that as an apprentice, working with a minister called Martin Forrest in Possilpark in Glasgow. I hadn’t intended to do my probationary year in the inner city because in the long term I didn’t see myself in that kind of ministry, but I really liked what I saw of Martin and his church and knew he’d be a good guy to learn the ropes from.
I’d had some exposure to inner city ministry prior to that, but Possil was a notoriously bad area, even for Glasgow. Crime and drugs and all that goes with them were endemic. Martin had between 80-100 funerals a year and many of them were drug or violence related deaths. And I remember talking to Martin right at the beginning of my time there and wondering aloud whether I would be tough enough to survive fourteen months there, full time.
“It’s not about being tough” he said. “There are more than enough tough guys in this parish. That’s not what people here need. They need somebody who can be kind and listen to them and treat them with respect.”
Crucial words for me, right at the beginning of my time there. That’s exactly how Martin was with folk, and that why, after 13 years of service there, he was missed as much by the community as was by the church.
“Blessed are the meek” says Jesus. “For they shall inherit the earth”.
Not the pushy ones. Not those who court the powerful, or take up arms, or act tough, or think they know it all. The meek.
And when will they inherit it? In God’s good time. It may be a long time coming. But the future, in him, is certain.
One last observation before I go, in the form of a question. Why is it the meek who inherit the earth, and not some other group of folk?
As I thought about that, I remembered a key scene from the Lord of the Rings movies.
In the story, a Ring of immense magical power is forged by the dark Lord Sauron. The ring is lost, but after millennia it’s finally rediscovered and a council of all the races of Middle Earth is called to decide what to do with it. Some want to use it as a weapon against Sauron, others want to hide it somewhere safe, but it becomes clear that their only real option is to destroy it in the volcanic fires in which it was forged. But who will bear the ring on this quest? Can anyone be trusted with it, or will its power corrupt them and see them using it for their own ends?
Old enmities come to the surface as the meeting descends into a shouting match. The different races can’t agree about who will bear the ring.
And in the midst of all the chaos, a Halfling called Frodo – a member of the smallest and least significant race – steps forward and offers to carry the ring to its doom, and quite possibly his own. His courage and humility shames the others into silence, and they agree to his becoming the ring-bearer.
And what we come to understand later is that Frodo is exactly the right person for the task, because he’s the only one who didn’t covet the ring for himself.
In Tolkein’s story, the meek one is given the ring.
In God’s story, it’s the meek who inherit the earth,
The reason’s the same in both cases, I think:
the meek are the only ones with whom it can be trusted.
Amen, and thanks be to God.
Wednesday, 1 December 2010
Blessed Are The Peacemakers
Prior to sermon we watched an excellent video clip by Poppy Scotland in which veterans reflect on their experiences in the forces and in war. The opening quotation picks up on the last line of the video.
“I wish to God somebody would just sit down and say “let’s stop this carry on”.
I first saw that clip a couple of years ago and it’s stayed with me ever since. Not only is it beautifully made, it sums up a great deal of what needs to be said on Remembrance Sunday.
It reminds us of the courage and camaraderie of the men and women who served, and serve, in our armed forces. It gives us some idea of the burdens they carry – the heavy responsibilities and terrible memories that they have to live with. And it reminds us of the sheer waste of war and the awful consequences for our world when nations or governments or neighbours decide they have no better option than to fight one another.
“Why do the nations rage, and the peoples plot in vain” says the Psalmist.
Why indeed?
It strikes me there are only a handful of reasons why wars are ever fought: greed for land or natural resources; enmity for people of a different race or religion; or fear of the consequences of not taking military action.
Very rarely, wars are fought to restore justice or protect the innocent, but by and large, most wars start because of greed, enmity or fear. And if you wanted, you could distil that down even further into one good-old fashioned Biblical word – the word ‘sin’, which is shorthand for leaving God out of it and going our own sweet way.
Why do the nations rage and the peoples plot in vain?
Because of sin. The basic problem of the human heart. A problem that sets us against God, against one another and even against ourselves: bringing division and robbing us of peace. And it has always been so.
In the Genesis story, we’re told that in the beginning, Adam and Eve were at peace, walking with God in the cool of the day. But then comes the famous incident with the apple. The newly created humans go their own sweet way. And what happens? Division. God blames Adam. Adam blames Eve, Eve blames the serpent, innocence is lost and harmony evaporates.
And the sins of the fathers are visited on the children.
Eve has two sons, Cain and Abel. Abel offers an acceptable sacrifice to God, Cain doesn’t. Cain gets jealous and decides to murder Abel. And God says “What have you done? Listen! Your brother’s blood is crying out to me from the ground!”.
And it still cries out to this very day; from the gutters of Baghdad, the hills of Helmand Province, the back streets of Belfast, the ovens of Auschwitz, the beaches and fields of Northern France, the grassy plains of Africa; from every place where blood has ever been shed in anger.
And with a remarkable unanimity, those who’ve fought in and survived these wars find themselves echoing the last soldier’s words in the video we’ve just watched.
“I wish to God somebody would just sit down and say “let’s stop this carry on”.
Well somebody did sit down; 2000 years ago on a hillside in Galilee; with a group of folk around him as divided and diverse as they could possibly be.
Orthodox Jews, pagan Gentiles, city dwellers, country folk, rich and poor, righteous and unrighteous.
And on seeing that crowd, rife with cultural, religious and social tensions, Jesus spoke these words: “Blessed are the peacemakers. For they shall be called children of God.”
We’ve been speaking about the Kingdom of God these past few weeks, and part of what the Kingdom’s about, is you and I learning to heal the divisions that opened up in Eden. Learning to choose the way that leads to peace, even when that way is immeasurably tough.
Blessed are the peacemakers.
I wonder what you think of when you hear the word ‘peacemaker’? Perhaps like me you’re thinking of some worthy individual in khaki fatigues sitting down in a tent somewhere, trying to get two warring sides to agree.
Or someone in a suit, patrolling the halls of the United Nations building, whispering urgently into the ears of the politicians and generals who hold the balance of power in the worlds’ conflict zones.
Whatever truth there is in those images, I don’t think that’s what Jesus means us to take from these words.
It’s much more down-to-earth than that. It’s about how you and I are in daily life. Are we the kind of folk who divide and polarise, or the kind of folk who draw people together and bring unity? Are we troublemakers or are we peacemakers? Willie Barclay puts it this way – “Blessed are those who work for right relationships – for they are about God’s work”.
You see, the way of the world since Eden, is to reduce things to the comfortable falsehood of back-and-white certainties. We’re right, they’re wrong. We’re good, they’re bad. We’re chosen, they’re not chosen. God loves us; God hates them.
We’re expected to take sides, because that’s how things work in a fallen world. You have to choose sides, they say. Are you with us or are you with them? Black and white.
But here’s the thing – if God has met me, in all my ambiguity, in all my mixed motives and incompleteness, and if God has spoken into all of that, and declared his love for me despite all that I am, how can I deny God the right to speak into others lives in the same way, even if I think of them as my enemy?
When you really get a hold of the grace of God – or better still, when the grace of God really gets a hold on you – suddenly the world doesn’t seem as black and white as it once did. You’re less ready to pigeonhole; to give up on people; to assume the worst. Because God hasn’t pigeonholed, or given up on, or assumed the worst of, you.
The more you begin to see others from God’s perspective, the more reluctant you are to judge them or condemn them. It sounds terribly wishy-washy and liberal doesn’t it?
But it sounded that way on Jesus’ lips too. Later on in this same chapter of Matthew’s gospel he says: “You have heard that it was said, “Love your friends and hate your enemies”. But now I tell you: love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may become the children of your Father in heaven. For he makes his sun to shine on bad and good people alike, and gives rain to those who do good and to those who do evil”.
“But God – don’t send your rain and sunshine on those people! You know what they’re like. Don’t bless them. Bless us! We’re your children”.
“And they too are my children, though as yet they may not realise it. And if you come at them in my name with hatred and venom and fear, is it any wonder they get confused about what my love is like?”
How do you come at people? How do you view and respond to them?
Troublemakers can’t see beyond the differences and divisions between folk, and they deal with people accordingly. Greed, enmity, fear, argument, progroms and war follow.
Peacemakers see further, because they see the other with the eyes of God – a God who wants nobody to perish and everyone to come to repentance and faith. Healing, reconciliation and true peace – shalom – follow.
Want to know which you are this morning? Troublemaker or Peacemaker? Look behind you. If there’s a trail of argument, fall-outs and grudges littering your past, maybe that’s your answer. And maybe today’s word is a word for you. It’s not too late to change, but you’ll need God’s help to do it.
But let me finish with one more observation. Jesus says blessed are the peacemakers. He doesn’t say “Blessed are the peace-lovers”.
We all love peace, but in a world like ours it has to be made. Peace will not fall into our laps. It has to be worked for.
And the temptation is always to sit back and not deal with things, supposedly in the interests of peace, when what’s really needed is that we take the bull by the horns and deal with situations instead of avoiding them.
There’s a high cost in that. Because sometimes, in working for peace, you ruffle feathers that need to be ruffled. You expose things that others would rather sweep under the carpet because you know that real peace isn’t possible until everyone faces up to reality.
As I was thinking about today, it struck me with renewed force just how ironic it is that one of Jesus’ titles, according to the prophet Isaiah, is the Prince of Peace.
When you take a look at his life and ministry, it strikes me that it was anything but peaceful. The ongoing battles with spiritual evil, the very public spats with the Pharisees, the plotting and scheming that went on among his enemies, the controversy that followed him almost everywhere he went. And then, at last, of course, his arrest and scourging and crucifixion.
That’s what the world does to peacemakers.
But right ‘til the end, what’s he doing? He’s doing what peacemakers do. He’s trying to reconcile people with one another and with God.
He looks down and sees his mother, weeping: standing beside the beloved disciple, John. And feeling her loss, he says – “Take this man to be your son. John, take this woman to be your mother”.
To the thief, dying beside him and finally admitting his guilt, he promises reconciliation with God – “Today you will be with me in paradise”.
And in a black-and-white world where we’re taught to hate our enemies, he prays that those who nailed him to the cross might be reconciled with God: He says “Father, forgive them. For they don’t know what they’re doing”.
Blessed are the peacemakers, said the Ultimate peacemaker. For they shall be called children of God.
Where in your little corner of life, is there a need for a peacemaker?
At home, maybe? Or at work? In the clubhouse, or in the boardroom?
Someone who can be strong enough not to take sides, and risk falling foul of everyone because you refuse to caricature people. Someone who refuses to write people off. Someone who can say what needs to be said in the right spirit, rather than shooting from the hip and aiming for maximum damage.
It’s a costly way to live. But it’s the Kingdom way. And it leads both to blessing, and to peace.
“I wish to God somebody would just sit down and say “let’s stop this carry on”.
I first saw that clip a couple of years ago and it’s stayed with me ever since. Not only is it beautifully made, it sums up a great deal of what needs to be said on Remembrance Sunday.
It reminds us of the courage and camaraderie of the men and women who served, and serve, in our armed forces. It gives us some idea of the burdens they carry – the heavy responsibilities and terrible memories that they have to live with. And it reminds us of the sheer waste of war and the awful consequences for our world when nations or governments or neighbours decide they have no better option than to fight one another.
“Why do the nations rage, and the peoples plot in vain” says the Psalmist.
Why indeed?
It strikes me there are only a handful of reasons why wars are ever fought: greed for land or natural resources; enmity for people of a different race or religion; or fear of the consequences of not taking military action.
Very rarely, wars are fought to restore justice or protect the innocent, but by and large, most wars start because of greed, enmity or fear. And if you wanted, you could distil that down even further into one good-old fashioned Biblical word – the word ‘sin’, which is shorthand for leaving God out of it and going our own sweet way.
Why do the nations rage and the peoples plot in vain?
Because of sin. The basic problem of the human heart. A problem that sets us against God, against one another and even against ourselves: bringing division and robbing us of peace. And it has always been so.
In the Genesis story, we’re told that in the beginning, Adam and Eve were at peace, walking with God in the cool of the day. But then comes the famous incident with the apple. The newly created humans go their own sweet way. And what happens? Division. God blames Adam. Adam blames Eve, Eve blames the serpent, innocence is lost and harmony evaporates.
And the sins of the fathers are visited on the children.
Eve has two sons, Cain and Abel. Abel offers an acceptable sacrifice to God, Cain doesn’t. Cain gets jealous and decides to murder Abel. And God says “What have you done? Listen! Your brother’s blood is crying out to me from the ground!”.
And it still cries out to this very day; from the gutters of Baghdad, the hills of Helmand Province, the back streets of Belfast, the ovens of Auschwitz, the beaches and fields of Northern France, the grassy plains of Africa; from every place where blood has ever been shed in anger.
And with a remarkable unanimity, those who’ve fought in and survived these wars find themselves echoing the last soldier’s words in the video we’ve just watched.
“I wish to God somebody would just sit down and say “let’s stop this carry on”.
Well somebody did sit down; 2000 years ago on a hillside in Galilee; with a group of folk around him as divided and diverse as they could possibly be.
Orthodox Jews, pagan Gentiles, city dwellers, country folk, rich and poor, righteous and unrighteous.
And on seeing that crowd, rife with cultural, religious and social tensions, Jesus spoke these words: “Blessed are the peacemakers. For they shall be called children of God.”
We’ve been speaking about the Kingdom of God these past few weeks, and part of what the Kingdom’s about, is you and I learning to heal the divisions that opened up in Eden. Learning to choose the way that leads to peace, even when that way is immeasurably tough.
Blessed are the peacemakers.
I wonder what you think of when you hear the word ‘peacemaker’? Perhaps like me you’re thinking of some worthy individual in khaki fatigues sitting down in a tent somewhere, trying to get two warring sides to agree.
Or someone in a suit, patrolling the halls of the United Nations building, whispering urgently into the ears of the politicians and generals who hold the balance of power in the worlds’ conflict zones.
Whatever truth there is in those images, I don’t think that’s what Jesus means us to take from these words.
It’s much more down-to-earth than that. It’s about how you and I are in daily life. Are we the kind of folk who divide and polarise, or the kind of folk who draw people together and bring unity? Are we troublemakers or are we peacemakers? Willie Barclay puts it this way – “Blessed are those who work for right relationships – for they are about God’s work”.
You see, the way of the world since Eden, is to reduce things to the comfortable falsehood of back-and-white certainties. We’re right, they’re wrong. We’re good, they’re bad. We’re chosen, they’re not chosen. God loves us; God hates them.
We’re expected to take sides, because that’s how things work in a fallen world. You have to choose sides, they say. Are you with us or are you with them? Black and white.
But here’s the thing – if God has met me, in all my ambiguity, in all my mixed motives and incompleteness, and if God has spoken into all of that, and declared his love for me despite all that I am, how can I deny God the right to speak into others lives in the same way, even if I think of them as my enemy?
When you really get a hold of the grace of God – or better still, when the grace of God really gets a hold on you – suddenly the world doesn’t seem as black and white as it once did. You’re less ready to pigeonhole; to give up on people; to assume the worst. Because God hasn’t pigeonholed, or given up on, or assumed the worst of, you.
The more you begin to see others from God’s perspective, the more reluctant you are to judge them or condemn them. It sounds terribly wishy-washy and liberal doesn’t it?
But it sounded that way on Jesus’ lips too. Later on in this same chapter of Matthew’s gospel he says: “You have heard that it was said, “Love your friends and hate your enemies”. But now I tell you: love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may become the children of your Father in heaven. For he makes his sun to shine on bad and good people alike, and gives rain to those who do good and to those who do evil”.
“But God – don’t send your rain and sunshine on those people! You know what they’re like. Don’t bless them. Bless us! We’re your children”.
“And they too are my children, though as yet they may not realise it. And if you come at them in my name with hatred and venom and fear, is it any wonder they get confused about what my love is like?”
How do you come at people? How do you view and respond to them?
Troublemakers can’t see beyond the differences and divisions between folk, and they deal with people accordingly. Greed, enmity, fear, argument, progroms and war follow.
Peacemakers see further, because they see the other with the eyes of God – a God who wants nobody to perish and everyone to come to repentance and faith. Healing, reconciliation and true peace – shalom – follow.
Want to know which you are this morning? Troublemaker or Peacemaker? Look behind you. If there’s a trail of argument, fall-outs and grudges littering your past, maybe that’s your answer. And maybe today’s word is a word for you. It’s not too late to change, but you’ll need God’s help to do it.
But let me finish with one more observation. Jesus says blessed are the peacemakers. He doesn’t say “Blessed are the peace-lovers”.
We all love peace, but in a world like ours it has to be made. Peace will not fall into our laps. It has to be worked for.
And the temptation is always to sit back and not deal with things, supposedly in the interests of peace, when what’s really needed is that we take the bull by the horns and deal with situations instead of avoiding them.
There’s a high cost in that. Because sometimes, in working for peace, you ruffle feathers that need to be ruffled. You expose things that others would rather sweep under the carpet because you know that real peace isn’t possible until everyone faces up to reality.
As I was thinking about today, it struck me with renewed force just how ironic it is that one of Jesus’ titles, according to the prophet Isaiah, is the Prince of Peace.
When you take a look at his life and ministry, it strikes me that it was anything but peaceful. The ongoing battles with spiritual evil, the very public spats with the Pharisees, the plotting and scheming that went on among his enemies, the controversy that followed him almost everywhere he went. And then, at last, of course, his arrest and scourging and crucifixion.
That’s what the world does to peacemakers.
But right ‘til the end, what’s he doing? He’s doing what peacemakers do. He’s trying to reconcile people with one another and with God.
He looks down and sees his mother, weeping: standing beside the beloved disciple, John. And feeling her loss, he says – “Take this man to be your son. John, take this woman to be your mother”.
To the thief, dying beside him and finally admitting his guilt, he promises reconciliation with God – “Today you will be with me in paradise”.
And in a black-and-white world where we’re taught to hate our enemies, he prays that those who nailed him to the cross might be reconciled with God: He says “Father, forgive them. For they don’t know what they’re doing”.
Blessed are the peacemakers, said the Ultimate peacemaker. For they shall be called children of God.
Where in your little corner of life, is there a need for a peacemaker?
At home, maybe? Or at work? In the clubhouse, or in the boardroom?
Someone who can be strong enough not to take sides, and risk falling foul of everyone because you refuse to caricature people. Someone who refuses to write people off. Someone who can say what needs to be said in the right spirit, rather than shooting from the hip and aiming for maximum damage.
It’s a costly way to live. But it’s the Kingdom way. And it leads both to blessing, and to peace.
Tuesday, 9 November 2010
Blessed are Those who Mourn
Of all the Beatitudes - this surely is the one that sounds strangest to our ears.
Blessed are those who mourn.
In the face of all that we know about human suffering and have experienced of human suffering, those words can sound terribly glib to our ears.
Blessed are those who mourn.
How? We might well ask. How are they blessed?
Where’s the blessing for the widower standing beside a grave, or the mother burying her child, or the man or woman who feels for a spell that their whole world is collapsing because of something that’s happened to them?
Where’s the blessing for those who mourn?
We might find ourselves silently seething at Jesus’ words. For a while at least.
And then we might remember the time he took himself away to a lonely place when he discovered his cousin John had been executed by Herod. Beheaded for the sake of an old man’s pride and lust. Or the time he stood at a tomb and wept because his friend Lazarus had died. Or the time his own mother stood at the foot of the cross, watching the embers slowly dying in her son’s eyes.
Blessed are those who mourn
However strange those words sound, they’re birthed out of all the pain of human experience. And it’s wise to remember that this morning, as we begin to try and understand just how those who mourn can be considered blessed.
When we think about mourning in our culture – quite naturally, the first thing we think about is death and bereavement. And I’ve never found the pain of that particular kind of loss better expressed than in this poem by Kathy Galloway, who composed it on the death of her mother. It’s called “You were here, and now you are not”.
There is nothing to compare with the pain of death.
You were here, and now you are not.
That’s all.
I search for you in old photographs, letters,
Things that you touched,
Things that remind me of you,
But they cannot fill the space you occupied.
The space is in me too,
Bleeding round the edges where you were torn away.
In the night, strange shapes haunt the space….
Regret, fear, fury,
All the things we might have done.
All the shattered dreams.
How can I go on with this hole inside me?
Partial person!
Don’t let me fill the space with the wrong things.
Don’t let me cover it up,
To eat me from within.
Give me courage to bear my emptiness,
To hold it gently
Till the edges stop bleeding;
Till the darkness becomes friendly;
Till I see the star at its heart;
Till it becomes a fertile space,
Growing new life within it.
If I had not loved, I would not have wept.
This love you have given me;
This love I have carried;
This love has carried me.
And I know that though I cannot see you, touch you,
The love does not go away.
Carried by this love,
We are not divided.
And there will be no more weeping.
Until you’ve experienced it, and we all will at some point, there’s no way to sum up the pain of bereavement.
It comes to us in different ways- for some, the mourning starts long before death as we watch a loved one decline mentally or physically. For others, it comes with a terrible suddenness through illness or tragedy.
For a spell everything seems unreal, then too real. We find it hard to focus, we feel numb. We struggle to function. We find great support and solace from the folk around us, but we know too that in a few short weeks, or even days, they’ll return to their normal lives while we’ll still be carrying the pain of our loss.
With time, and prayer, the pain diminishes and the scars heal over. But the emptiness remains with us. And we must reckon with it.
Give me courage to bear my emptiness, Kathy Galloway says.
To hold it gently
Till the edges stop bleeding;
Till the darkness becomes friendly;
Till I see the star at its heart;
She’s asking for help to find the blessing for those who mourn; the star at the heart of her empty darkness.
And in the next verse she begins to realise what that blessing might be, and where her comfort might come from. She says:
“If I had not loved. I would not have wept”.
She’s realising that the measure of her pain is also the measure of her love. She only feels such sorrow because she’s been so richly blessed in her mother.
The loss is terrible, but the loss itself awakens her to the reality and strength and selflessness of love, both human and divine. And that, in the middle of her darkness, gives her a star of hope to navigate by. A star that can guide us, like the wise men of old, into the presence of God,
Is that the blessing for those who mourn, maybe? That in the displacement and sorrow that mourning brings, we realise how fragile life is, and how much we need the comfort our eternal, compassionate God promises us?
Eugene Peterson thinks so – he translates this beatitude with these words:
"Blessed are you when you feel you've lost what is most dear to you. Only then can you be embraced by the One most dear to you"
As I’ve thought about this strange beatitude this week, one of the things I’ve come to understand is that mourning, in all its shapes and forms, is not always about death, but it is always about loss.
That came out in the brainstorm. People find themselves mourning for a host of different reasons.
For some, it’s the irretrievable breakdown of a relationship. After years of investment in a marriage, a couple decide they have to go their separate ways. After years of loving care, a son or a daughter makes some bad choices and cuts off all lines of communication. After years of friendship, things turn sour somehow and the relationship’s spoiled. And we mourn the loss of the way things were.
For others, it’s their hopes and dreams that they mourn. The life partner who never materialised; the child who never came safely to term; the relationship that seemed to offer so much but didn’t deliver; the job that held such promise but proved to be a dead end. The painful loss of things that now can never be,
Others find themselves mourning because of the kinds of things they see going on around them in the world. Milton wrote of Paradise Lost, and even a cursory glance at the papers or the news reminds us daily how far we are from paradise. And on a more local level, if I had a pound for every time people tell me things were better in the old days, I’d be a wealthy man. Folk mourn for changes in the way of life that nurtured them, and the countryside and the villages in which they grew up. We’ve lost something compared to those days, they feel.
And still others mourn because we seem to have lost God in our part of the world. You don’t need me to rehearse that story. Where are the young people? Where are our own children on a Sunday morning? Why don’t they feel the same way about faith as we do? Do you remember the days when this or that church organisation was bursting at the seams?
And maybe, in some of us, there’s an even deeper sense of loss which says “And you know what – I’ve been in the church all my life, and I still don’t feel as close to God as I’d like to or as I ought to. I can’t seem to shake off the flaws and sins that hold me back. Sometimes I wonder if God’s wasting his time on me, or whether I’m wasting my time on him”.
Mourning is all about a sense of loss –
Regret, fear, fury,
All the things we might have done.
All the shattered dreams.
And though Kathy Galloway’s words are about bereavement, they could just as well be about any of those situations I’ve just described:
There isn’t one of us here who isn’t, in some deep place, mourning for something.
This morning, in this beatitude, Jesus is announcing that blessing comes, even in those places. There is a star at the heart of that darkness.
Following it will take time and faith, but if you can find the courage to do so, you will find the comfort that Christ promises.
I want to finish with another poem that’s dear to me. It’s by the French Priest and Palaentologist Teilhard de Chardin and it’s called Slow Work. And I offer this as a promise of God’s comfort to everyone here today who needs that particular blessing. Whatever the nature of your loss, these words are for you.
Above all, trust in the slow work of God.
We are, quite naturally,
impatient in everything to reach the end
without delay.
We should like to skip
the intermediate stages.
We are impatient of being
on the way to something unknown,
something new.
And yet it is the law of all progress
that it is made by passing through
some stages of instability –
and that it may take a very long time.
And so I think it is with you.
Your thoughts change gradually –
Let them grow,
let them shape themselves
without undue haste.
Don’t try to force them on,
as though you could be today
what time and grace and circumstances
will make you tomorrow.
Only God could say what this new spirit
gradually forming within you will be.
Give our Lord the benefit of believing
that his hand is leading you,
And accept the anxiety of
feeling yourself in suspense and incomplete.
Let us pray
God, in our mourning and our loss,
we know, perhaps more than ever, that we are incomplete.
Help us not to hide it, but to own it.
Not to evade it, but face up to it,
Because you promise us a blessing, even in our loss.
As our frailty becomes clear,
Reassure us with your strength.
As our brokenness comes into the light,
Continue your slow work of healing,
And bring us,
By the light of a friendly star,
To the comfort and rest that are found
In your presence alone.
Hear us because we ask all these things in the name of your Son, Jesus Christ,
The Suffering Servant and The Risen Lord.
Amen
Blessed are those who mourn.
In the face of all that we know about human suffering and have experienced of human suffering, those words can sound terribly glib to our ears.
Blessed are those who mourn.
How? We might well ask. How are they blessed?
Where’s the blessing for the widower standing beside a grave, or the mother burying her child, or the man or woman who feels for a spell that their whole world is collapsing because of something that’s happened to them?
Where’s the blessing for those who mourn?
We might find ourselves silently seething at Jesus’ words. For a while at least.
And then we might remember the time he took himself away to a lonely place when he discovered his cousin John had been executed by Herod. Beheaded for the sake of an old man’s pride and lust. Or the time he stood at a tomb and wept because his friend Lazarus had died. Or the time his own mother stood at the foot of the cross, watching the embers slowly dying in her son’s eyes.
Blessed are those who mourn
However strange those words sound, they’re birthed out of all the pain of human experience. And it’s wise to remember that this morning, as we begin to try and understand just how those who mourn can be considered blessed.
When we think about mourning in our culture – quite naturally, the first thing we think about is death and bereavement. And I’ve never found the pain of that particular kind of loss better expressed than in this poem by Kathy Galloway, who composed it on the death of her mother. It’s called “You were here, and now you are not”.
There is nothing to compare with the pain of death.
You were here, and now you are not.
That’s all.
I search for you in old photographs, letters,
Things that you touched,
Things that remind me of you,
But they cannot fill the space you occupied.
The space is in me too,
Bleeding round the edges where you were torn away.
In the night, strange shapes haunt the space….
Regret, fear, fury,
All the things we might have done.
All the shattered dreams.
How can I go on with this hole inside me?
Partial person!
Don’t let me fill the space with the wrong things.
Don’t let me cover it up,
To eat me from within.
Give me courage to bear my emptiness,
To hold it gently
Till the edges stop bleeding;
Till the darkness becomes friendly;
Till I see the star at its heart;
Till it becomes a fertile space,
Growing new life within it.
If I had not loved, I would not have wept.
This love you have given me;
This love I have carried;
This love has carried me.
And I know that though I cannot see you, touch you,
The love does not go away.
Carried by this love,
We are not divided.
And there will be no more weeping.
Until you’ve experienced it, and we all will at some point, there’s no way to sum up the pain of bereavement.
It comes to us in different ways- for some, the mourning starts long before death as we watch a loved one decline mentally or physically. For others, it comes with a terrible suddenness through illness or tragedy.
For a spell everything seems unreal, then too real. We find it hard to focus, we feel numb. We struggle to function. We find great support and solace from the folk around us, but we know too that in a few short weeks, or even days, they’ll return to their normal lives while we’ll still be carrying the pain of our loss.
With time, and prayer, the pain diminishes and the scars heal over. But the emptiness remains with us. And we must reckon with it.
Give me courage to bear my emptiness, Kathy Galloway says.
To hold it gently
Till the edges stop bleeding;
Till the darkness becomes friendly;
Till I see the star at its heart;
She’s asking for help to find the blessing for those who mourn; the star at the heart of her empty darkness.
And in the next verse she begins to realise what that blessing might be, and where her comfort might come from. She says:
“If I had not loved. I would not have wept”.
She’s realising that the measure of her pain is also the measure of her love. She only feels such sorrow because she’s been so richly blessed in her mother.
The loss is terrible, but the loss itself awakens her to the reality and strength and selflessness of love, both human and divine. And that, in the middle of her darkness, gives her a star of hope to navigate by. A star that can guide us, like the wise men of old, into the presence of God,
Is that the blessing for those who mourn, maybe? That in the displacement and sorrow that mourning brings, we realise how fragile life is, and how much we need the comfort our eternal, compassionate God promises us?
Eugene Peterson thinks so – he translates this beatitude with these words:
"Blessed are you when you feel you've lost what is most dear to you. Only then can you be embraced by the One most dear to you"
As I’ve thought about this strange beatitude this week, one of the things I’ve come to understand is that mourning, in all its shapes and forms, is not always about death, but it is always about loss.
That came out in the brainstorm. People find themselves mourning for a host of different reasons.
For some, it’s the irretrievable breakdown of a relationship. After years of investment in a marriage, a couple decide they have to go their separate ways. After years of loving care, a son or a daughter makes some bad choices and cuts off all lines of communication. After years of friendship, things turn sour somehow and the relationship’s spoiled. And we mourn the loss of the way things were.
For others, it’s their hopes and dreams that they mourn. The life partner who never materialised; the child who never came safely to term; the relationship that seemed to offer so much but didn’t deliver; the job that held such promise but proved to be a dead end. The painful loss of things that now can never be,
Others find themselves mourning because of the kinds of things they see going on around them in the world. Milton wrote of Paradise Lost, and even a cursory glance at the papers or the news reminds us daily how far we are from paradise. And on a more local level, if I had a pound for every time people tell me things were better in the old days, I’d be a wealthy man. Folk mourn for changes in the way of life that nurtured them, and the countryside and the villages in which they grew up. We’ve lost something compared to those days, they feel.
And still others mourn because we seem to have lost God in our part of the world. You don’t need me to rehearse that story. Where are the young people? Where are our own children on a Sunday morning? Why don’t they feel the same way about faith as we do? Do you remember the days when this or that church organisation was bursting at the seams?
And maybe, in some of us, there’s an even deeper sense of loss which says “And you know what – I’ve been in the church all my life, and I still don’t feel as close to God as I’d like to or as I ought to. I can’t seem to shake off the flaws and sins that hold me back. Sometimes I wonder if God’s wasting his time on me, or whether I’m wasting my time on him”.
Mourning is all about a sense of loss –
Regret, fear, fury,
All the things we might have done.
All the shattered dreams.
And though Kathy Galloway’s words are about bereavement, they could just as well be about any of those situations I’ve just described:
There isn’t one of us here who isn’t, in some deep place, mourning for something.
This morning, in this beatitude, Jesus is announcing that blessing comes, even in those places. There is a star at the heart of that darkness.
Following it will take time and faith, but if you can find the courage to do so, you will find the comfort that Christ promises.
I want to finish with another poem that’s dear to me. It’s by the French Priest and Palaentologist Teilhard de Chardin and it’s called Slow Work. And I offer this as a promise of God’s comfort to everyone here today who needs that particular blessing. Whatever the nature of your loss, these words are for you.
Above all, trust in the slow work of God.
We are, quite naturally,
impatient in everything to reach the end
without delay.
We should like to skip
the intermediate stages.
We are impatient of being
on the way to something unknown,
something new.
And yet it is the law of all progress
that it is made by passing through
some stages of instability –
and that it may take a very long time.
And so I think it is with you.
Your thoughts change gradually –
Let them grow,
let them shape themselves
without undue haste.
Don’t try to force them on,
as though you could be today
what time and grace and circumstances
will make you tomorrow.
Only God could say what this new spirit
gradually forming within you will be.
Give our Lord the benefit of believing
that his hand is leading you,
And accept the anxiety of
feeling yourself in suspense and incomplete.
Let us pray
God, in our mourning and our loss,
we know, perhaps more than ever, that we are incomplete.
Help us not to hide it, but to own it.
Not to evade it, but face up to it,
Because you promise us a blessing, even in our loss.
As our frailty becomes clear,
Reassure us with your strength.
As our brokenness comes into the light,
Continue your slow work of healing,
And bring us,
By the light of a friendly star,
To the comfort and rest that are found
In your presence alone.
Hear us because we ask all these things in the name of your Son, Jesus Christ,
The Suffering Servant and The Risen Lord.
Amen
Blessed are the Poor in Spirit
Turn with me to Matthew 4 vs 23.
Over the past few weeks we've been looking at idea of the 'Kingdom' which is absolutely central to Jesus’ teaching and ministry.
You'll recall that after years of thought and preparation, his first words in ministry were– “The time has come! The Kingdom of God is at hand! Change your minds (repent) and believe the good news”.
Jesus came not just to announce but to embody the Kingdom and he did so in a difficult context because his country was under occupation by Rome. A couple of weeks ago we looked at the four typical responses of the day to Roman occupation: (SLIDE)
Armed Struggle – Zealots
Compromise – Herodians
The Way of Purity and Observance of the Law – Pharisees
The Way of Withdrawal – Essenes
Over and above all those responses, Jesus proclaimed a different way, a different reality – the Reality that he called the Kingdom of God.
He used word parables to describe it, like the Parable of the Sower and the Soil
And at other times he used visual parables to say something about it, like when he drew a little child into the midst of the crowd and said that it's such as these who inherit the Kingdom.
But what we have before us in today’s reading, and in the remainder of Matthew chapters 5 to 7, is as close as we get to a clear manifesto for the Kingdom of God. And it’s my guess that though we probably know many of these words well, we might never have taken the time to dwell on them and realise just how countercultural and counter-intuitive they are.
So between now and Christmas we’re going to be looking at the beginning of this section in Matthew which is known as the Beatitudes – a word which simply means ‘Blessings’.
Matthew tells us in 4:23 that Jesus went all over Galilee teaching in the synagogues and preaching the Good news about the Kingdom.
And further on in verse 25 he tells us that large crowds followed him from Galilee and the Ten Towns, from Jerusalem, Judea, and the land on the other side of the Jordan.
And that’s significant. Matthew’s telling us that in that crowd were all kinds of people.
The Decapolis (or Ten Towns) was an area to the east of the Jordan, settled by Alexander the Great and it showed a strong Greek influence on architecture and culture and religion. Some in the Decaplois would have worshipped the gods of Greece and Rome.
Alongside them in the crowd - but presumably not too close! - were strict Jews, with their Moses and their law and their kosher food and their customs – people who shunned the Gentiles as being unclean and different.
There would have been country folk and city dwellers, priests and prostitutes, righteous and unrighteous, God-fearing and god-ignoring shoulder to shoulder. The whole smorgasbord of life in Palestine in those days gathered together to hear Jesus teach.
And Matthew tells us that on seeing those crowds, Jesus went up a hill, presumably for audibility, and sat down, which is the position a rabbi always chose when he was teaching his followers.
And so he began what is widely acknowledged to be one of the greatest orations ever delivered.
And it’s important, right at the outset, that we grasp that what Jesus is doing here isn’t giving us advice, or presenting a 7 step programme that will help make us better disciples. Or giving us something to aim at. The beatitudes aren’t a to-do list.
What Jesus is doing here is making an announcement. He’s telling us how things are in the Kingdom.
The theologian Tom Wright says that in the Beatitudes, “Jesus is not saying ‘Try hard to live like this.’ He’s saying ‘People who already live like this are in good shape” – they’re beginning to get a handle on what the Kingdom’s about.
It’s an announcement of the way things are in the Kingdom of God which is now at hand. So with that in mind – how does he begin?
Well the GNB translates v3 in these terms:
“Happy are those who know they are spiritually poor; the Kingdom of heaven belongs to them.”
Now let me say a few word about the terms “Happy” and “poor” before we go on.
The Greek word that the GNB translates “Happy” is makarios, which doesn’t really mean happy in the sense of having a smile on your face. That’s the word eulogetos in the Greek.
Makarios carries more of a sense of being fortunate or being blessed. It means that God’s on your side and is favourable towards you.
“Poor” here, is not materially poor, but spiritually poor. And the word Jesus chooses is not the Greek word “penes” which is used to describe the everyday poverty of a man who has to work hard to feed himself and his family, but instead the word ‘ptochos’ which means utterly broke, penniless.
So with that in mind, what Jesus is saying here is this: “Fortunate are you when you know you have precious little to recommend yourself to God with. God is on your side and the Kingdom of heaven is yours. Blessed are you when you know your need”.
Now – to whom is that word Good News in the crowd assembled there?
It seems to me that’s it’s Good News to everyone who realises that they are falling short of the mark and don’t make the grade, whether Jew, Gentle, righteous or unrighteous, It’s good news for everyone who feels condemned never to make the cut.
And it’s Bad News for those in the crowd who think they have it all together and can rest on their laurels.
It’s utterly counter-intuitive.
You see life tells us that it’s the successful who are blessed. Those who keep their noses clean. Those who work hard and pay their taxes. Those who never slip up, at least in public. Those who never break the rules. They’re the ones God blesses, and only them.
That was the religion of the Pharisees. Work hard, keep all the rules and maybe then God will hold you in some regard.
I grew up with something approximating to that gospel. But that is not the gospel of Jesus Christ. That’s a gospel of works.
Remember this image from two weeks ago? (Slide of Cycle of Grace) The gospel of the Kingdom begins with the Good News that we are loved by a gracious God even though we don’t deserve it. And accepting that basic truth about ourselves changes everything. It sets us on the cycle of grace.
We still need to change and grow and mature in our faith. There’s still sin that needs to be recognised and weeded out. But we do it in the full knowledge that we are loved and accepted by God and that he is on our side.
The gospel of Jesus Christ, the gospel of the Kingdom of God is not – “sort your life out and God will love you.” It’s “God loves you, so go and sort your life out.” Those two ways of viewing things are worlds apart.
“Fortunate are you when you know you have precious little to recommend yourself to God with. God is on your side and the Kingdom of heaven is yours. Blessed are you when you know your need”.
It sounds totally counter-intuitive. Maybe even offensive to religious ears. But stop and think about how many of Jesus stories, or his dealings with people gave out the very same message.
The prodigal son: profligate and disrespectful, welcomed back by his Father before he could do one thing to make recompense other than wend his weary way home.
Despised little Zacchaeus up a tree, finding grace and not condemnation in Christ, and finding his life transformed.
The parables where those who should have been in the know are invited to a feast, and when they decline for spurious reasons, the gates are thrown wide for all the undeserving and unexpected who want to come in.
And how many of Jesus’ sharpest words were reserved for those who thought of themselves as having arrived?
Remember the parable of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector? The one loudly paraded his virtue before God in prayer, while the other could barely raise his eyes to heaven in shame. But it was the Tax Collector and not the Pharisee who went home forgiven. One knew his need, while the other didn’t.
Blessed are you, says Jesus, when you know your spiritual poverty.
I wonder if there were some in the crowd who lifted their heads at those words.
Some who’d always felt beyond the Pale because of the hand life had dealt them; or because of poor choices that they’d made.
Some, genetically predisposed to worry or self-doubt and feeling like they never managed to get things right.
Others, maybe, exhausted in trying to live up to the expectations the Pharisees had placed upon them, and wondering if there wasn’t a better way to live a faithful life.
Blessed are you, said Jesus.
Says Jesus.
Blessed are you if you’re honest enough to know you haven’t got it sussed yet.
Blessed are you if you wish, deep down, you had the resources to do better at this thing called life.
Blessed are you if you long for things to be different, but you can’t even put a name to it yet.
Blessed are you in your spiritual poverty – For God is on your side, and the Kingdom of heaven is open to you.
Over the past few weeks we've been looking at idea of the 'Kingdom' which is absolutely central to Jesus’ teaching and ministry.
You'll recall that after years of thought and preparation, his first words in ministry were– “The time has come! The Kingdom of God is at hand! Change your minds (repent) and believe the good news”.
Jesus came not just to announce but to embody the Kingdom and he did so in a difficult context because his country was under occupation by Rome. A couple of weeks ago we looked at the four typical responses of the day to Roman occupation: (SLIDE)
Armed Struggle – Zealots
Compromise – Herodians
The Way of Purity and Observance of the Law – Pharisees
The Way of Withdrawal – Essenes
Over and above all those responses, Jesus proclaimed a different way, a different reality – the Reality that he called the Kingdom of God.
He used word parables to describe it, like the Parable of the Sower and the Soil
And at other times he used visual parables to say something about it, like when he drew a little child into the midst of the crowd and said that it's such as these who inherit the Kingdom.
But what we have before us in today’s reading, and in the remainder of Matthew chapters 5 to 7, is as close as we get to a clear manifesto for the Kingdom of God. And it’s my guess that though we probably know many of these words well, we might never have taken the time to dwell on them and realise just how countercultural and counter-intuitive they are.
So between now and Christmas we’re going to be looking at the beginning of this section in Matthew which is known as the Beatitudes – a word which simply means ‘Blessings’.
Matthew tells us in 4:23 that Jesus went all over Galilee teaching in the synagogues and preaching the Good news about the Kingdom.
And further on in verse 25 he tells us that large crowds followed him from Galilee and the Ten Towns, from Jerusalem, Judea, and the land on the other side of the Jordan.
And that’s significant. Matthew’s telling us that in that crowd were all kinds of people.
The Decapolis (or Ten Towns) was an area to the east of the Jordan, settled by Alexander the Great and it showed a strong Greek influence on architecture and culture and religion. Some in the Decaplois would have worshipped the gods of Greece and Rome.
Alongside them in the crowd - but presumably not too close! - were strict Jews, with their Moses and their law and their kosher food and their customs – people who shunned the Gentiles as being unclean and different.
There would have been country folk and city dwellers, priests and prostitutes, righteous and unrighteous, God-fearing and god-ignoring shoulder to shoulder. The whole smorgasbord of life in Palestine in those days gathered together to hear Jesus teach.
And Matthew tells us that on seeing those crowds, Jesus went up a hill, presumably for audibility, and sat down, which is the position a rabbi always chose when he was teaching his followers.
And so he began what is widely acknowledged to be one of the greatest orations ever delivered.
And it’s important, right at the outset, that we grasp that what Jesus is doing here isn’t giving us advice, or presenting a 7 step programme that will help make us better disciples. Or giving us something to aim at. The beatitudes aren’t a to-do list.
What Jesus is doing here is making an announcement. He’s telling us how things are in the Kingdom.
The theologian Tom Wright says that in the Beatitudes, “Jesus is not saying ‘Try hard to live like this.’ He’s saying ‘People who already live like this are in good shape” – they’re beginning to get a handle on what the Kingdom’s about.
It’s an announcement of the way things are in the Kingdom of God which is now at hand. So with that in mind – how does he begin?
Well the GNB translates v3 in these terms:
“Happy are those who know they are spiritually poor; the Kingdom of heaven belongs to them.”
Now let me say a few word about the terms “Happy” and “poor” before we go on.
The Greek word that the GNB translates “Happy” is makarios, which doesn’t really mean happy in the sense of having a smile on your face. That’s the word eulogetos in the Greek.
Makarios carries more of a sense of being fortunate or being blessed. It means that God’s on your side and is favourable towards you.
“Poor” here, is not materially poor, but spiritually poor. And the word Jesus chooses is not the Greek word “penes” which is used to describe the everyday poverty of a man who has to work hard to feed himself and his family, but instead the word ‘ptochos’ which means utterly broke, penniless.
So with that in mind, what Jesus is saying here is this: “Fortunate are you when you know you have precious little to recommend yourself to God with. God is on your side and the Kingdom of heaven is yours. Blessed are you when you know your need”.
Now – to whom is that word Good News in the crowd assembled there?
It seems to me that’s it’s Good News to everyone who realises that they are falling short of the mark and don’t make the grade, whether Jew, Gentle, righteous or unrighteous, It’s good news for everyone who feels condemned never to make the cut.
And it’s Bad News for those in the crowd who think they have it all together and can rest on their laurels.
It’s utterly counter-intuitive.
You see life tells us that it’s the successful who are blessed. Those who keep their noses clean. Those who work hard and pay their taxes. Those who never slip up, at least in public. Those who never break the rules. They’re the ones God blesses, and only them.
That was the religion of the Pharisees. Work hard, keep all the rules and maybe then God will hold you in some regard.
I grew up with something approximating to that gospel. But that is not the gospel of Jesus Christ. That’s a gospel of works.
Remember this image from two weeks ago? (Slide of Cycle of Grace) The gospel of the Kingdom begins with the Good News that we are loved by a gracious God even though we don’t deserve it. And accepting that basic truth about ourselves changes everything. It sets us on the cycle of grace.
We still need to change and grow and mature in our faith. There’s still sin that needs to be recognised and weeded out. But we do it in the full knowledge that we are loved and accepted by God and that he is on our side.
The gospel of Jesus Christ, the gospel of the Kingdom of God is not – “sort your life out and God will love you.” It’s “God loves you, so go and sort your life out.” Those two ways of viewing things are worlds apart.
“Fortunate are you when you know you have precious little to recommend yourself to God with. God is on your side and the Kingdom of heaven is yours. Blessed are you when you know your need”.
It sounds totally counter-intuitive. Maybe even offensive to religious ears. But stop and think about how many of Jesus stories, or his dealings with people gave out the very same message.
The prodigal son: profligate and disrespectful, welcomed back by his Father before he could do one thing to make recompense other than wend his weary way home.
Despised little Zacchaeus up a tree, finding grace and not condemnation in Christ, and finding his life transformed.
The parables where those who should have been in the know are invited to a feast, and when they decline for spurious reasons, the gates are thrown wide for all the undeserving and unexpected who want to come in.
And how many of Jesus’ sharpest words were reserved for those who thought of themselves as having arrived?
Remember the parable of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector? The one loudly paraded his virtue before God in prayer, while the other could barely raise his eyes to heaven in shame. But it was the Tax Collector and not the Pharisee who went home forgiven. One knew his need, while the other didn’t.
Blessed are you, says Jesus, when you know your spiritual poverty.
I wonder if there were some in the crowd who lifted their heads at those words.
Some who’d always felt beyond the Pale because of the hand life had dealt them; or because of poor choices that they’d made.
Some, genetically predisposed to worry or self-doubt and feeling like they never managed to get things right.
Others, maybe, exhausted in trying to live up to the expectations the Pharisees had placed upon them, and wondering if there wasn’t a better way to live a faithful life.
Blessed are you, said Jesus.
Says Jesus.
Blessed are you if you’re honest enough to know you haven’t got it sussed yet.
Blessed are you if you wish, deep down, you had the resources to do better at this thing called life.
Blessed are you if you long for things to be different, but you can’t even put a name to it yet.
Blessed are you in your spiritual poverty – For God is on your side, and the Kingdom of heaven is open to you.
Children, Grace and the Kingdom
No matter how many books you’ve read, or TV programmes you’ve watched, nothing can prepare you for when it happens to you.
You’ve bought all the equipment in readiness; you’ve spoken to knowledgeable friends; you’ve tried to imagine just what it’s going to be like. But you really haven’t a clue.
Until that newborn baby emerges into the world, bloody and screaming, you have no idea what it means to be a parent.
I remember the day when Rhona and I came home from the hospital with Ross. I don’t think I’ve ever driven quite so carefully in all my life! And when we got home I vividly remember us putting his carry cot on the sofa, with him still sound asleep, and then Rhona and I just looking at each other as if to say “what do we do now”?!
Of course, before too long, it becomes very clear exactly what you have to do. Because this little one you’ve brought into the world is utterly dependent on you for all its needs. So for a while, life becomes a cycle of feeding, changing, washing, burping – that’s the baby, not the parents – and maybe even a little sleep if you’re lucky.
Pretty soon you realise that one of the many miracles of parenthood is how something so small can so completely turn your life upside down.
It’s a labour of love. There’s no other way to describe it. But of course, with the labour come immense rewards.
I remember going in to check on Ross one evening in the first few weeks, and when I got through to the bedroom he was awake. And for the first time, really, he looked at me – really looked at me. And those dark eyes just stared at me with a perfectly pure and open gaze. It was like looking down an infinitely deep well.
They say that the eyes are the window of the soul – well I felt in that moment I was seeing right into that wee one’s soul; right into the centre of his being. And somehow - in that beholding of each other - we connected. It was one of the most precious moments of my life.
It’s hard to put into words the bond between a parent and a child without sounding sentimental, and those of us who are parents, and all of us who were children, will know that the course of these relationships doesn’t run smoothly all the time.
But for good or ill, the bond is always there, like an unseen umbilical tying us to the people who nursed us through those early years of life.
And I’m sure that’s why these people in our reading this morning brought their children to Jesus for a blessing.
If you’d stopped them that afternoon and asked them “why are you doing this – why are you bringing your kids to Jesus” I’m not sure they’d have had a ready answer. They’d probably have had to stop and think for a few moments, because they’d have been puzzled by the question.
And the kind of answer they’d have come back with, I think, would have been quite vague. “We just want them to be ok. We want them to be happy – to have a good life”.
And by “a good life” they wouldn’t mean wealth and status and power and influence, necessarily. They’d mean contentment; happiness; love; purpose. Because these are the things a good parent wills for their child, above all else.
Could Jesus guarantee these things? Would a touch of his hand ensure that everything would always work out fine? Maybe they thought so, but I’m not so sure. Fast forward with me to the end of Jesus’ life, and see a weeping mother beholding her son nailed to a cross. Imagine how that must have felt. Whatever God guarantees us, it’s not a trouble-free life.
But what God does guarantee is that faith, a reaching out to him, can change our perspective on life. And today’s story is a good illustration of that.
See how he welcomes these children? See how angry he is that the disciples try to keep them away? In the culture of the day, children were right at the bottom of the pecking order. They were to be seen but not heard. How dare these people bother the Messiah with children, when he was already tired and busy with important things!?
But Jesus rounds on them for thinking like that. “Let them come” he says “Let them come. Don’t you realise that the Kingdom belongs to such as these?”
There’s that word again – the Kingdom. The Kingdom belongs to such as these, says Jesus. Not the powerful and the privileged, not the movers and shakers and manipulators; but those with the simplicity and straightforwardness of the child.
The child who has no trouble accepting others as they are, or accepting his or her own self as a person of value.
Jesus means us to learn something about the Kingdom from the child, because unlike children, we have real trouble accepting our acceptance.
Kids have no problem with that at all. They grow up in the blissful assumption that they matter and that everybody loves them. In the early years at least, they have no problems with self-image; in fact, very often the problem is convincing them that they’re not the most important person in the world!
There’s a lovely story about a man who woke up at night in the middle of a fierce thunderstorm and went down to check on his three year old to make sure she wasn’t frightened, because she’d never experienced a storm before.
And when he into her room he found her spreadeagled against the window like a starfish. “What on earth are you doing?” he said. “I’m trying to make myself as big as possible” she said. “I think God’s trying to take my photograph”!
But there’s a truth there that the child gets, but the grown-up misses. We matter to God. We’re his beloved. We’re the one he wants to behold. Not because we’re special but because he is gracious. Not because he thinks we’re perfect, but because we are his children.
“Look at the child” says Jesus, “and learn”. The child accepts everything as gift because he trusts that his parents love him. When will you learn to do the same with your Father in heaven?
And therein lies the sharp edge to this story, because Jesus goes on to say “whoever does not receive the Kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it”.
Now over the years, people have read a great deal into that statement. Some think it’s about humility; others about innocence. But I think they’re wrong. I think it’s about accepting the fact that you – just as you are - are God’s beloved.
The clinical psychologist Dr Frank Lake, did a great deal of work on how human beings develop, and he summed up his findings in what he called the “Cycle of Grace”
The cycle of grace begins with being accepted. When we grow up in a setting where we’re loved and valued, even when we mess up, we learn that we’re acceptable. That knowledge helps us become strong and accept that our lives have significance. And with that confidence as our foundation, we’re able to go on and achieve things in life.
That’s how children develop, or at least should develop.
But of course it doesn’t always work that way, and part of Frank Lake’s great insight was the realisation that in many of us the cycle actually works the other way round.
We crave the acceptance we’ve never had. Maybe we didn’t get it at home or at school. So we throw ourselves into the business of trying to achieve. We hope that achievement will make us feel significant and strong and make us acceptable to other people.
We get caught in a cycle, not of grace, but of works.
How many of us get trapped in the cycle of works, running ourselves in to the ground because we’ve never really heard the voice that tells us that we’re accepted?
The writer Rob Parsons tells the true story of a boy who grew up in the shadow of a very demanding father. On one occasion the boy ran home from school having got the highest marks in the country in a music exam. He got 97%. And he ran in the door shouting “Dad – I came top in my exam. I got 97%”. Do you know what his father said? “So where did you lose the 3%”?
Small wonder he grew up to be a wounded and bitter man after years of that kind of treatment.
Take a look again at that diagram.
Which way round are you living life? The Cycle of Grace or the Cycle of Works? Has your childhood set you on one path over and against the other? It’s worth spending some time thinking that one through.
And then ask yourself, which way round are you living out your faith? Have you realised that the good news of Jesus Christ begins with a gracious God who loves us despite our failings, and wants to see us grow stronger, and find significance and achieve things in his name?
Or are you caught up in the cycle of works, thinking that you have to work your way into the good books of an angry and grudging God.
It’s no accident that Jesus embraced these little children just moments after he’d been having heated debate with the religious leaders, the Pharisees.
Seeing those stern men, so preoccupied with working their way into God’s favour, Jesus welcomed the little children in his arms, and in so doing, deliberately showed us another way, The way of the Kingdom. The way of grace.
Grace, which sees us as we are, fickle and fallen, and yet loves us as we are. Grace which insists that we are God’s beloved, and asks us to begin to live as though that were true.
Have you heard those words today, because they’re for you. Learn from the child. Choose grace over works, and the Kingdom over the World. Accept your acceptance.
Amen and thanks be to God for his word.
You’ve bought all the equipment in readiness; you’ve spoken to knowledgeable friends; you’ve tried to imagine just what it’s going to be like. But you really haven’t a clue.
Until that newborn baby emerges into the world, bloody and screaming, you have no idea what it means to be a parent.
I remember the day when Rhona and I came home from the hospital with Ross. I don’t think I’ve ever driven quite so carefully in all my life! And when we got home I vividly remember us putting his carry cot on the sofa, with him still sound asleep, and then Rhona and I just looking at each other as if to say “what do we do now”?!
Of course, before too long, it becomes very clear exactly what you have to do. Because this little one you’ve brought into the world is utterly dependent on you for all its needs. So for a while, life becomes a cycle of feeding, changing, washing, burping – that’s the baby, not the parents – and maybe even a little sleep if you’re lucky.
Pretty soon you realise that one of the many miracles of parenthood is how something so small can so completely turn your life upside down.
It’s a labour of love. There’s no other way to describe it. But of course, with the labour come immense rewards.
I remember going in to check on Ross one evening in the first few weeks, and when I got through to the bedroom he was awake. And for the first time, really, he looked at me – really looked at me. And those dark eyes just stared at me with a perfectly pure and open gaze. It was like looking down an infinitely deep well.
They say that the eyes are the window of the soul – well I felt in that moment I was seeing right into that wee one’s soul; right into the centre of his being. And somehow - in that beholding of each other - we connected. It was one of the most precious moments of my life.
It’s hard to put into words the bond between a parent and a child without sounding sentimental, and those of us who are parents, and all of us who were children, will know that the course of these relationships doesn’t run smoothly all the time.
But for good or ill, the bond is always there, like an unseen umbilical tying us to the people who nursed us through those early years of life.
And I’m sure that’s why these people in our reading this morning brought their children to Jesus for a blessing.
If you’d stopped them that afternoon and asked them “why are you doing this – why are you bringing your kids to Jesus” I’m not sure they’d have had a ready answer. They’d probably have had to stop and think for a few moments, because they’d have been puzzled by the question.
And the kind of answer they’d have come back with, I think, would have been quite vague. “We just want them to be ok. We want them to be happy – to have a good life”.
And by “a good life” they wouldn’t mean wealth and status and power and influence, necessarily. They’d mean contentment; happiness; love; purpose. Because these are the things a good parent wills for their child, above all else.
Could Jesus guarantee these things? Would a touch of his hand ensure that everything would always work out fine? Maybe they thought so, but I’m not so sure. Fast forward with me to the end of Jesus’ life, and see a weeping mother beholding her son nailed to a cross. Imagine how that must have felt. Whatever God guarantees us, it’s not a trouble-free life.
But what God does guarantee is that faith, a reaching out to him, can change our perspective on life. And today’s story is a good illustration of that.
See how he welcomes these children? See how angry he is that the disciples try to keep them away? In the culture of the day, children were right at the bottom of the pecking order. They were to be seen but not heard. How dare these people bother the Messiah with children, when he was already tired and busy with important things!?
But Jesus rounds on them for thinking like that. “Let them come” he says “Let them come. Don’t you realise that the Kingdom belongs to such as these?”
There’s that word again – the Kingdom. The Kingdom belongs to such as these, says Jesus. Not the powerful and the privileged, not the movers and shakers and manipulators; but those with the simplicity and straightforwardness of the child.
The child who has no trouble accepting others as they are, or accepting his or her own self as a person of value.
Jesus means us to learn something about the Kingdom from the child, because unlike children, we have real trouble accepting our acceptance.
Kids have no problem with that at all. They grow up in the blissful assumption that they matter and that everybody loves them. In the early years at least, they have no problems with self-image; in fact, very often the problem is convincing them that they’re not the most important person in the world!
There’s a lovely story about a man who woke up at night in the middle of a fierce thunderstorm and went down to check on his three year old to make sure she wasn’t frightened, because she’d never experienced a storm before.
And when he into her room he found her spreadeagled against the window like a starfish. “What on earth are you doing?” he said. “I’m trying to make myself as big as possible” she said. “I think God’s trying to take my photograph”!
But there’s a truth there that the child gets, but the grown-up misses. We matter to God. We’re his beloved. We’re the one he wants to behold. Not because we’re special but because he is gracious. Not because he thinks we’re perfect, but because we are his children.
“Look at the child” says Jesus, “and learn”. The child accepts everything as gift because he trusts that his parents love him. When will you learn to do the same with your Father in heaven?
And therein lies the sharp edge to this story, because Jesus goes on to say “whoever does not receive the Kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it”.
Now over the years, people have read a great deal into that statement. Some think it’s about humility; others about innocence. But I think they’re wrong. I think it’s about accepting the fact that you – just as you are - are God’s beloved.
The clinical psychologist Dr Frank Lake, did a great deal of work on how human beings develop, and he summed up his findings in what he called the “Cycle of Grace”
The cycle of grace begins with being accepted. When we grow up in a setting where we’re loved and valued, even when we mess up, we learn that we’re acceptable. That knowledge helps us become strong and accept that our lives have significance. And with that confidence as our foundation, we’re able to go on and achieve things in life.
That’s how children develop, or at least should develop.
But of course it doesn’t always work that way, and part of Frank Lake’s great insight was the realisation that in many of us the cycle actually works the other way round.
We crave the acceptance we’ve never had. Maybe we didn’t get it at home or at school. So we throw ourselves into the business of trying to achieve. We hope that achievement will make us feel significant and strong and make us acceptable to other people.
We get caught in a cycle, not of grace, but of works.
How many of us get trapped in the cycle of works, running ourselves in to the ground because we’ve never really heard the voice that tells us that we’re accepted?
The writer Rob Parsons tells the true story of a boy who grew up in the shadow of a very demanding father. On one occasion the boy ran home from school having got the highest marks in the country in a music exam. He got 97%. And he ran in the door shouting “Dad – I came top in my exam. I got 97%”. Do you know what his father said? “So where did you lose the 3%”?
Small wonder he grew up to be a wounded and bitter man after years of that kind of treatment.
Take a look again at that diagram.
Which way round are you living life? The Cycle of Grace or the Cycle of Works? Has your childhood set you on one path over and against the other? It’s worth spending some time thinking that one through.
And then ask yourself, which way round are you living out your faith? Have you realised that the good news of Jesus Christ begins with a gracious God who loves us despite our failings, and wants to see us grow stronger, and find significance and achieve things in his name?
Or are you caught up in the cycle of works, thinking that you have to work your way into the good books of an angry and grudging God.
It’s no accident that Jesus embraced these little children just moments after he’d been having heated debate with the religious leaders, the Pharisees.
Seeing those stern men, so preoccupied with working their way into God’s favour, Jesus welcomed the little children in his arms, and in so doing, deliberately showed us another way, The way of the Kingdom. The way of grace.
Grace, which sees us as we are, fickle and fallen, and yet loves us as we are. Grace which insists that we are God’s beloved, and asks us to begin to live as though that were true.
Have you heard those words today, because they’re for you. Learn from the child. Choose grace over works, and the Kingdom over the World. Accept your acceptance.
Amen and thanks be to God for his word.
Monday, 4 October 2010
Seeds, Soil and the Kingdom
It’s sometimes said that “Jesus came preaching the Kingdom of God and what he ended up with was the church.”
I wonder how you react to that statement. Like it or loathe it, there’s probably more truth in it than we’d care to admit.
Just out of curiosity I did a quick search through the gospels looking for the words ‘Kingdom’ and ‘Church’. The word ‘Kingdom’ appears 118 times in Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Anyone like to have a guess how many times the word ‘church’ appears? Twice – both in Matthew’s gospel. Church is not a word that was often found on Jesus’ lips, largely because it hadn’t been invented yet. He tended to speak about the Kingdom, which is shorthand for the whole idea of God’s benevolent reign making itself felt on earth.
When Jesus teaches us to pray “Thy Kingdom Come” in the Lord’s Prayer, he goes on to explain those words in the next clause – “Thy will be done on earth, as it is in heaven”. Wherever God is acknowledged, wherever his will is done, knowingly or unknowingly, you have a little outpost of the kingdom.
It’s only as we get further into the story and further into the New Testament that the word ‘church’ begins to appear more regularly as Christian communities begin to form in towns and cities across the Mediterranean world in response to the story of Jesus. But the word Kingdom stays on the radar, appearing a further 36 times in the remainder of the New Testament.
So from the very beginning, there were two things in view. The big idea of the Kingdom – which was what Jesus came to preach and teach about; and the church, which was the local community of men and women who were trying to live as citizens of the Kingdom. The Kingdom is the ‘end’. The church is one of the means to that ‘end’.
These pictures might help make sense of it. Venn diagrams.
The Kingdom – God’s will being done on earth as it is in heaven – that’s the big idea Jesus came to preach about. That’s what God wants for the world. And the church is a subset of the Kingdom. A group of people called to live by the values of God’s Kingdom in a world that more often than not doesn’t appreciate them. The church exists to serve the purposes of the Kingdom.
But here’s the thing. Too often we’ve done that poorly. Read any of the New Testament letters and you’ll see just how quickly the ideals of the Kingdom get messed up or ignored by the church. Scandal, disputes, greed, arguments about status – none of these things have any place in the Kingdom, but where two or three are gathered together in God’s name and call themselves a church, they’ll be right there in the midst.
Here’s what that Venn diagram looks like. There’s still much in the church that’s of the Kingdom – area of overlap. But there’s much of it that’s not. And that’s why it’s important for us to take some time over the next few weeks to remind ourselves what the Kingdom’s about, and reflect on the ways in which we, as individuals and as a congregation, need to change so we can become more rooted within it.
What we have before us this morning is a parable of the Kingdom and as I’ve been thinking about it this week I’ve come to the conclusion that the powers that be have given this story the wrong name.
It’s often called the Parable of the Sower, but the sower isn’t really the focus.
This parable’s all about the soil and if you keep that in mind, that will help you understand what’s going on in this story.
The sower sows the seed, we’re told, and the seed is the word of God.
Now who’s the sower? If you’d asked me a week ago, having heard this parable for years, I would have said “God”, but Luke never says that. And neither do Matthew and Mark in their versions of the story. The sower is never identified with God. The sower is anyone who brings the word of God to someone else.
But of course that leads us to another question – what do you mean by “the word of God? “Now straightaway some of us might be thinking “it’s the Bible”. But it can’t mean that here because the Bible wasn’t written when Jesus was telling this story!
And throughout the Bible, we read of the “word of God” coming to people in a host of different ways – as they pray, as they converse, as they listen to prophets and preachers speak, as they look around them and reflect on what they’re seeing or experiencing. The word of God is more than the written word.
It’s when something of the truth of God moves us in a personal way. When we hear something or read something or see something that feels like it was meant for us. Like God’s trying to get us to understand something. That’s what it’s like when the word of God comes to us.
The real question is, will we receive that word when it come to us? Will the soil of our lives be prepared enough to accept it?
Luke tells us that Jesus was speaking to a great crowd, and within that crowd he discerned four kinds of people. Four kinds of soil.
Some seed fell on the path, he says – on the hard soil. In those days there were often paths and rights of way through the fields, and they were trampled hard by the passing of feet.
And when the seed falls on the path, it just bounces off and lies there. There’s no receptivity. The birds have a field day.
Are some of you like that, Jesus asks? Have you hardened your heart against the message because you don’t want to think about it or the implications it might have for your life? That’s a dangerous game to play.
CS Lewis wrote a wonderful book called the Screwtape Letters, in which he takes on the persona of a Senior Devil, advising a Junior Devil how to lead astray the human he’s been assigned to. Read a wee bit of one of the letters to you.
Bear in mind that in this passage “The Enemy” is God, the ‘patient’ is the human, and “Our Father” is the devil himself.
I once had a patient, a sound unbeliever, who used to read in the British Museum. One day, as he sat reading, I saw a train of
thought in his mind beginning to go the wrong way. The Enemy, of course, was at his elbow in a moment, Before I knew where I was I saw my twenty years' work beginning to totter.
If I had lost my head and begun to attempt a defence by argument I would have been undone. But I was not such a fool, I struck instantly at the part of the man which I had most under my control and suggested that it was just about time he had some lunch. The Enemy presumably made the counter suggestion (you know how one can never quite over hear what he says to them) that this was more
important than lunch. At least I think that must have been His line for when I said 'Quite. In fact much too important to tackle at the end of a morning", the patient brightened up considerably; and by the time I had added “much better to come back after lunch and go
into it with a fresh mind", he was already half way to the door.
Once he was in the street the battle was won. I showed him a newsboy shouting the midday paper, and a number 73 bus going past and before he reached the bottom of the steps I had got into him an unalterable conviction that, whatever odd ideas might come
into a man's head when he was shut up alone with his books , a. healthy dose of "real life" (by which he meant the bus and the newsboy) was enough to show him that all "that sort of
thing" just couldn’t be true, He knew he'd had a narrow escape and was fond of ridiculing that experience in the years to come. He is now safe in our Father’s House.
Is that the game you’re playing this morning? You know God’s word is coming at you, but you keep putting it off and putting it off because you just don’t want to engage with it. That’s a dangerous game to play because in the end you might just win it.
Some seed falls on the path, says Jesus – and gets stolen away. But other seed falls on rocky ground.
Now rocky, here, doesn’t mean filled with pebbles and stones. There were swathes of the countryside which looked fertile but were really just topsoil on a thick bedrock of limestone. Things could grow there, but not flourish because there wasn’t enough moisture and the soil was too thin to give them deep roots.
There are some, says Jesus, who hear the word gladly, but it doesn’t sink deeply enough into them, and when the time of testing comes they fall away.
How deep does it go? I guess that’s the question here.
That was a live issue not long after Jesus’ day when Luke and the other evangelists were penning their gospels. At first the Christians were kicked out of the synagogues, then they were actively persecuted by the Jewish authorities, and latterly the Romans got in on the act too.
You don’t get through those times without deep, deep roots.
And though we don’t face the same kinds of persecutions in this country – though others do elsewhere – for all of us there come times when our faith is sorely tested. Spells when things get decidedly rocky.
Someone falls ill, or dies. A situation spirals utterly out of control. Circumstances conspire to kick us when we’re already down. We get a hard time at home or at work because we believe. I’ve seen men and women come through those times of testing with immense courage and dignity. And I’ve seen others whose faith has crumbled under the pressure.
Same circumstances – different outcomes. What’s the difference? Well it seems to me that those whose roots go down deepest are the ones best equipped to weather the storm. That’s not deep theology. It’s just common sense. Walk through a forest after a gale and see which trees stand and which ones have toppled.
So a key question from this part of the parable is “What am I doing to root myself deeper into God? What do I need to do to take responsibility for my own spiritual development?”
Hard soil; Rocky soil and then thorny soil.
Jesus tells us that some of the seed falls among thorn bushes, and though it grows, it never bears fruit because the place it’s growing is so congested.
And what interested me when I read this part again are the things that Jesus says lead to this unfruitfulness. Worries, riches and the pleasures of this life. Strange bedfellows in a way; so why does he lump them together? What have they got in common? Worries, riches and pleasures?
As I thought about it, I realised that the common denominator is that they all have an amazing ability to distract us.
When I’m worrying, my focus is on my problems and not on God. When I’m well-off my focus is on how to protect and enlarge my wealth, and not on God When I’m pursuing my pleasures, my focus is on what I want and what I think I deserve and not on God.
Sunday by Sunday as we come together and listen to the word, seeds are sown here of another way of living – a Kingdom way that brings perspective to our worries, and frees us from slavery to wealth and inspires us to live for more than our own pleasures.
But unless we take time to tend the soil of our lives those little seeds will never come to fruition. They’ll be choked by all the other things we give priority to – things that seem far more urgent, but in the long run are shown to be far less important.
So the question Jesus wants us to face is “How am I living? What are my priorities? And are they the right ones for my faith to grow and become fruitful?”,
Because that, in the end, is what it’s all about. That’s the reason the sower sows. He wants a harvest.
And when the seed falls on good soil – soil that’s prepared and receptive – the fruitfulness comes. The soil doesn’t have to try hard. It doesn’t have to strain and struggle. It just has to do its job by holding on to the seed and letting it grow.
Carter had a seed of an idea from God way back in 1994, and the soil of his life was ready to accept it. Carter is 75, African American, and a taxi driver in Washington DC. He’s nothing special, in the eyes of the world anyway.
And this is his story as it’s told by author Brian McLaren.
Excerpt from “The Secret Message of Jesus” – p 87-88
“I don’t do any of this by myself. God is doing it through me”.
Remember what I said earlier? The soil doesn’t have to try hard. It just has to do its job. If it’s receptive, the fruitfulness comes.
In your orders of service you’ll find six questions that will help you reflect on what we’ve talked about this morning, but the most important one is the last.
What is one thing will you change in response to what you have heard this morning?
Maybe it’s time to dig up that hard soil; or put down deeper roots into God; or find different ways of living so that your spiritual life’s not choked by all your other priorities.
God’s word has gone out today through this parable, just as it did all those years ago. Seeds have been sown. What kind of home will they find in the soil of your life?
I wonder how you react to that statement. Like it or loathe it, there’s probably more truth in it than we’d care to admit.
Just out of curiosity I did a quick search through the gospels looking for the words ‘Kingdom’ and ‘Church’. The word ‘Kingdom’ appears 118 times in Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Anyone like to have a guess how many times the word ‘church’ appears? Twice – both in Matthew’s gospel. Church is not a word that was often found on Jesus’ lips, largely because it hadn’t been invented yet. He tended to speak about the Kingdom, which is shorthand for the whole idea of God’s benevolent reign making itself felt on earth.
When Jesus teaches us to pray “Thy Kingdom Come” in the Lord’s Prayer, he goes on to explain those words in the next clause – “Thy will be done on earth, as it is in heaven”. Wherever God is acknowledged, wherever his will is done, knowingly or unknowingly, you have a little outpost of the kingdom.
It’s only as we get further into the story and further into the New Testament that the word ‘church’ begins to appear more regularly as Christian communities begin to form in towns and cities across the Mediterranean world in response to the story of Jesus. But the word Kingdom stays on the radar, appearing a further 36 times in the remainder of the New Testament.
So from the very beginning, there were two things in view. The big idea of the Kingdom – which was what Jesus came to preach and teach about; and the church, which was the local community of men and women who were trying to live as citizens of the Kingdom. The Kingdom is the ‘end’. The church is one of the means to that ‘end’.
These pictures might help make sense of it. Venn diagrams.
The Kingdom – God’s will being done on earth as it is in heaven – that’s the big idea Jesus came to preach about. That’s what God wants for the world. And the church is a subset of the Kingdom. A group of people called to live by the values of God’s Kingdom in a world that more often than not doesn’t appreciate them. The church exists to serve the purposes of the Kingdom.But here’s the thing. Too often we’ve done that poorly. Read any of the New Testament letters and you’ll see just how quickly the ideals of the Kingdom get messed up or ignored by the church. Scandal, disputes, greed, arguments about status – none of these things have any place in the Kingdom, but where two or three are gathered together in God’s name and call themselves a church, they’ll be right there in the midst.
Here’s what that Venn diagram looks like. There’s still much in the church that’s of the Kingdom – area of overlap. But there’s much of it that’s not. And that’s why it’s important for us to take some time over the next few weeks to remind ourselves what the Kingdom’s about, and reflect on the ways in which we, as individuals and as a congregation, need to change so we can become more rooted within it.What we have before us this morning is a parable of the Kingdom and as I’ve been thinking about it this week I’ve come to the conclusion that the powers that be have given this story the wrong name.
It’s often called the Parable of the Sower, but the sower isn’t really the focus.
This parable’s all about the soil and if you keep that in mind, that will help you understand what’s going on in this story.
The sower sows the seed, we’re told, and the seed is the word of God.
Now who’s the sower? If you’d asked me a week ago, having heard this parable for years, I would have said “God”, but Luke never says that. And neither do Matthew and Mark in their versions of the story. The sower is never identified with God. The sower is anyone who brings the word of God to someone else.
But of course that leads us to another question – what do you mean by “the word of God? “Now straightaway some of us might be thinking “it’s the Bible”. But it can’t mean that here because the Bible wasn’t written when Jesus was telling this story!
And throughout the Bible, we read of the “word of God” coming to people in a host of different ways – as they pray, as they converse, as they listen to prophets and preachers speak, as they look around them and reflect on what they’re seeing or experiencing. The word of God is more than the written word.
It’s when something of the truth of God moves us in a personal way. When we hear something or read something or see something that feels like it was meant for us. Like God’s trying to get us to understand something. That’s what it’s like when the word of God comes to us.
The real question is, will we receive that word when it come to us? Will the soil of our lives be prepared enough to accept it?
Luke tells us that Jesus was speaking to a great crowd, and within that crowd he discerned four kinds of people. Four kinds of soil.
Some seed fell on the path, he says – on the hard soil. In those days there were often paths and rights of way through the fields, and they were trampled hard by the passing of feet.
And when the seed falls on the path, it just bounces off and lies there. There’s no receptivity. The birds have a field day.
Are some of you like that, Jesus asks? Have you hardened your heart against the message because you don’t want to think about it or the implications it might have for your life? That’s a dangerous game to play.
CS Lewis wrote a wonderful book called the Screwtape Letters, in which he takes on the persona of a Senior Devil, advising a Junior Devil how to lead astray the human he’s been assigned to. Read a wee bit of one of the letters to you.
Bear in mind that in this passage “The Enemy” is God, the ‘patient’ is the human, and “Our Father” is the devil himself.
I once had a patient, a sound unbeliever, who used to read in the British Museum. One day, as he sat reading, I saw a train of
thought in his mind beginning to go the wrong way. The Enemy, of course, was at his elbow in a moment, Before I knew where I was I saw my twenty years' work beginning to totter.
If I had lost my head and begun to attempt a defence by argument I would have been undone. But I was not such a fool, I struck instantly at the part of the man which I had most under my control and suggested that it was just about time he had some lunch. The Enemy presumably made the counter suggestion (you know how one can never quite over hear what he says to them) that this was more
important than lunch. At least I think that must have been His line for when I said 'Quite. In fact much too important to tackle at the end of a morning", the patient brightened up considerably; and by the time I had added “much better to come back after lunch and go
into it with a fresh mind", he was already half way to the door.
Once he was in the street the battle was won. I showed him a newsboy shouting the midday paper, and a number 73 bus going past and before he reached the bottom of the steps I had got into him an unalterable conviction that, whatever odd ideas might come
into a man's head when he was shut up alone with his books , a. healthy dose of "real life" (by which he meant the bus and the newsboy) was enough to show him that all "that sort of
thing" just couldn’t be true, He knew he'd had a narrow escape and was fond of ridiculing that experience in the years to come. He is now safe in our Father’s House.
Is that the game you’re playing this morning? You know God’s word is coming at you, but you keep putting it off and putting it off because you just don’t want to engage with it. That’s a dangerous game to play because in the end you might just win it.
Some seed falls on the path, says Jesus – and gets stolen away. But other seed falls on rocky ground.
Now rocky, here, doesn’t mean filled with pebbles and stones. There were swathes of the countryside which looked fertile but were really just topsoil on a thick bedrock of limestone. Things could grow there, but not flourish because there wasn’t enough moisture and the soil was too thin to give them deep roots.
There are some, says Jesus, who hear the word gladly, but it doesn’t sink deeply enough into them, and when the time of testing comes they fall away.
How deep does it go? I guess that’s the question here.
That was a live issue not long after Jesus’ day when Luke and the other evangelists were penning their gospels. At first the Christians were kicked out of the synagogues, then they were actively persecuted by the Jewish authorities, and latterly the Romans got in on the act too.
You don’t get through those times without deep, deep roots.
And though we don’t face the same kinds of persecutions in this country – though others do elsewhere – for all of us there come times when our faith is sorely tested. Spells when things get decidedly rocky.
Someone falls ill, or dies. A situation spirals utterly out of control. Circumstances conspire to kick us when we’re already down. We get a hard time at home or at work because we believe. I’ve seen men and women come through those times of testing with immense courage and dignity. And I’ve seen others whose faith has crumbled under the pressure.
Same circumstances – different outcomes. What’s the difference? Well it seems to me that those whose roots go down deepest are the ones best equipped to weather the storm. That’s not deep theology. It’s just common sense. Walk through a forest after a gale and see which trees stand and which ones have toppled.
So a key question from this part of the parable is “What am I doing to root myself deeper into God? What do I need to do to take responsibility for my own spiritual development?”
Hard soil; Rocky soil and then thorny soil.
Jesus tells us that some of the seed falls among thorn bushes, and though it grows, it never bears fruit because the place it’s growing is so congested.
And what interested me when I read this part again are the things that Jesus says lead to this unfruitfulness. Worries, riches and the pleasures of this life. Strange bedfellows in a way; so why does he lump them together? What have they got in common? Worries, riches and pleasures?
As I thought about it, I realised that the common denominator is that they all have an amazing ability to distract us.
When I’m worrying, my focus is on my problems and not on God. When I’m well-off my focus is on how to protect and enlarge my wealth, and not on God When I’m pursuing my pleasures, my focus is on what I want and what I think I deserve and not on God.
Sunday by Sunday as we come together and listen to the word, seeds are sown here of another way of living – a Kingdom way that brings perspective to our worries, and frees us from slavery to wealth and inspires us to live for more than our own pleasures.
But unless we take time to tend the soil of our lives those little seeds will never come to fruition. They’ll be choked by all the other things we give priority to – things that seem far more urgent, but in the long run are shown to be far less important.
So the question Jesus wants us to face is “How am I living? What are my priorities? And are they the right ones for my faith to grow and become fruitful?”,
Because that, in the end, is what it’s all about. That’s the reason the sower sows. He wants a harvest.
And when the seed falls on good soil – soil that’s prepared and receptive – the fruitfulness comes. The soil doesn’t have to try hard. It doesn’t have to strain and struggle. It just has to do its job by holding on to the seed and letting it grow.
Carter had a seed of an idea from God way back in 1994, and the soil of his life was ready to accept it. Carter is 75, African American, and a taxi driver in Washington DC. He’s nothing special, in the eyes of the world anyway.
And this is his story as it’s told by author Brian McLaren.
Excerpt from “The Secret Message of Jesus” – p 87-88
“I don’t do any of this by myself. God is doing it through me”.
Remember what I said earlier? The soil doesn’t have to try hard. It just has to do its job. If it’s receptive, the fruitfulness comes.
In your orders of service you’ll find six questions that will help you reflect on what we’ve talked about this morning, but the most important one is the last.
What is one thing will you change in response to what you have heard this morning?
Maybe it’s time to dig up that hard soil; or put down deeper roots into God; or find different ways of living so that your spiritual life’s not choked by all your other priorities.
God’s word has gone out today through this parable, just as it did all those years ago. Seeds have been sown. What kind of home will they find in the soil of your life?
The Kingdom
We’re not quite sure whether it’s arrived yet. It might be here, and then again it might not. It’s kind of hard to say.
We’re not very clear about who’s bringing it, and what will happen when it arrives, but we’re fairly sure that it’s going to be a good thing.
We’ don’t really know what it’s going to look like, but we keep praying for it to arrive anyway.
So what on earth am I talking about?
It’s that elusive reality called the Kingdom of God.
Every week, when we gather together and say the Lord’s Prayer as part of our worship, we’re invoking the Kingdom. “Thy Kingdom Come” we pray, week in and week out. But what exactly IS the Kingdom of God?
Well, the natural place to start would be with what the Bible has to say, but the problem there is that the Bible itself seems to contain contrasting ideas about what the Kingdom is:
On one hand Jesus tells us that we’re to seek it out. But he also says that it doesn’t come with our careful observation.
He tells us to try and enter the Kingdom; but then he tells us that somehow it’s already within us.
He tells us that it’s near; but elsewhere he says it’s not of this world.
Small wonder we’re confused!
Making sense of all this is a bit like trying to do a jigsaw puzzle when you don’t know what the picture on the box is. And we might be tempted to give up and not bother if it weren’t such an important thing to try and understand.
Because it is important! According to Mark, after years of thought and prayer and preparation, the first words Jesus spoke at the beginning of his public ministry were these: “The right time has come and the Kingdom of God is near”. According to Jesus, that’s the gospel message.
And as he hangs, dying on a cross at the end of his ministry, the last words that he hears are spoken by a thief being crucified alongside him “Jesus, remember me when you come into your Kingdom”.
And in between those two extremes, Jesus spoke constantly about the Kingdom. He used parables to explain it; he drew a child into the middle of his hearers to exemplify it.
He sent the disciples out two by two to preach it. And when Pontius Pilate drew him aside and subtly suggested that he might be able to save his hide if he stopped talking like he was Jewish royalty, Jesus flatly refused. He was a King; but his Kingdom was not of this world.
It’s a puzzle all right, but it’s not one we can afford to pack up and throw into the back of the toybox. It’s actually the very core of the message that Jesus wanted us to hear. And over the next few weeks we’re going to be immersing ourselves in the some of the parables and the teaching that Jesus used to try and convey the essence of the Kingdom.
But we won’t hear and understand them clearly unless we know a little about the world in which Jesus lived and ministered, and that’s what we’re going to do this morning.
Israel, 2000 years ago, was occupied territory. The Jews in those days probably felt about the Romans the way Palestinians feel about Israelis in today’s world.
They were God’s chosen nation; they believed that they had a special place in God’s purposes for the world. So why on earth had they been subjugated? Why had God let this happen to them?
And more pressingly, perhaps, what could they do about it?
Broadly speaking, there were four typical responses to the problem of Rome, represented by four groups that you’ll have heard of as you’ve engaged with the gospels over the years.
The first group were the Zealots. They were the self-styled freedom fighters. “The reason we’re oppressed is that we’re too frightened” they said. “We need to rise up! We need to fight back against the oppressors and show them the same kind of ruthlessness they’ve shown us. If we start putting our lives on the line, then God will see how earnest we are and intervene”.
Jesus had at least two Zealots among his twelve disciples – Simon the Zealot (the clue’s in the name) and Judas, whose nickname Iscariot is thought to come from the little dagger called a Sicarii that one class of Zealots was known to carry.
So the Zealots were the Freedom Fighters.
Then there were the Herodians: so named because they supported Herod, the Jewish puppet King placed there by Rome. Their view was pure pragmatism – “Rome’s too powerful” they’d say. “There’s no point even thinking about resistance. We’d be far better to play the game and co-operate and try to make the best of it.
The Sadducees, who you’ll have heard of in the gospels, tended to align themselves with the Herodians.
A third group, the Pharisees, put forward another way. The way of purity. If we really observe God’s law, they said, everything will go well for us. If there’s less sin and more piety among our people, then God will intervene and liberate us. We need to crack down on sin and sinners.
And that, of course, led to the Pharisees’ obsession with the minutiae of the law.
A fourth group, the Essenes, thought that the Zealots, the Herodians and the Pharisees had it all wrong. As far as they were concerned, the only way to please God was to distance yourself from the corrupt political and religious systems and create an alternative society out in the desert. And that’s exactly what they did. They established communes in the Judean wilderness, and it was in one such community, in Qumran in 1947, that the Dead Sea Scrolls were found.
So those were the four options available to you if you were a first century Jew wondering how to live with Rome on your back.
• Fight for freedom – Zealots,
• Compromise – Herodians
• Purify – Pharisees
• Withdraw – Essenes
But then one day, you’re out and about when you see a crowd gathered beside a small hill. And there’s a young man speaking to them. He has them in the palm of his hand.
“Turn away from your sins.” He proclaims, “The Kingdom of heaven is near”.
Now you know enough to know that any talk about alternative Kingdoms is very unwise in the present political climate. Kingdom is an inflammatory word in Caesar’s Empire. And sure enough, a Roman soldier strides over and starts to break up the crowd roughly when he hears the discourse going in that direction.
It could get nasty – hackles are raised. But the young man doesn’t rise to the bait. You watch as he calmly defuses the situation, and gets folk to disperse in peace.
‘Who is that guy?’ you wonder. The part about turning from sin sounds like the Pharisees, but the Kingdom stuff sounds far more like the Zealots. But if he were a Zealot there’s no way he’d have taken that from a Roman soldier. He’d have been spoiling for a fight.
You’re intrigued. So when you hear that he’s speaking to a large crowd outside town the following week, you tag along.
“Do you want to know who’ll be blessed?” he says. “Not the powerful ones with lots of money and weapons. No – the poor will be blessed. Not the ones who can shout the loudest and get their way. No – the meek will be blessed. Not the ones who kill their enemies, but those who are persecuted for doing right. Not those who play it safe, but those who stand up for the sake of justice. Not the clever and sly, but the pure in heart. Not those who make war, but those who bring peace.”
Now you’re more confused than ever. He can’t be a Zealot because he’s preaching peace instead of revolution. And he can’t be one of the Herodians because he’s speaking out against the rich and powerful. He can’t be an Essene, because they’ve given up on everyone else. Maybe he’s a Pharisee of some kind?
But then word reaches you through a friend that he can’t be! Apparently he rounded on the Pharisees one day - called them whitewashed sepulchures to their faces because they look good from the outside, but are full of death and decay on the inside. And then later that week he was seen at a party with prostitutes, drunks and Roman collaborators. Not the kind of place a good Pharisee would be found.
This man, whoever he is, seems to be a bundle of contradictions.
Either that, or the way he’s proclaiming is so new and radical that no-one’s been able to grasp it yet.
What he seems to be calling people to is a new political and social and spiritual reality that he calls the Kingdom of God, or the Kingdom of heaven.
It’s a Kingdom not of this world, but invading this world. Setting itself up in direct opposition to the rule of Rome. But if you’re part of this kingdom you won’t overcome by slitting Roman throats like the Zealots. On the contrary – if a soldier slaps your face, you offer him the other cheek. If he forces you to go one mile, you go two. You choose a better option than passive submission or angry retaliation. You choose the kingdom way.
If you’re part of this kingdom, you won’t join the Pharisees in cursing and damning sinners to hell. And you won’t run from them to the desert in disgust like the Essenes. You’ll refuse to judge them, and treat them with the kind of gentleness and respect they deserve as children of God, however troubled. You’ll be less concerned about their polluting influence on you than the possible healing and reconciling God might bring through you.
If you’re part of the Kingdom, you won’t settle for the status quo. You won’t turn a blind eye to injustice as long as your own nest is feathered. That’s the Herodian way. Instead, you’ll make radical decisions about how you live that will be a sign to others that you don’t march to the beat of the world’s drum.
If you’re part of this Kingdom, you may well be thought weak, naïve or stupid. They’ll dismiss you as a crank or crucify you as a threat. But the one thing they won’t do is ignore you.
And on that note, here’s a thought to end with. Have you noticed that for many people in our part of the world church is little more than an irrelevance?
We’ve just had a week’s very public discourse about the rights and wrongs of the Pope’s visit to Britain, and the relevance of Catholicism in today’s world.
Isn’t the tenor of that whole debate a sign that somewhere along the line the church has veered away from the radical Kingdom way Jesus was proclaiming? Isn't there a huge irony in the fact that most of the debate has centred around the wealth and power and violence of the church, when these are the very things the Kingdom of God seeks to undermine?
For many people in our part of the globe, Christianity's become an irrelevance. Why is that? Is it because we've compromised too much, like the Herodians, and become indistinguishable from the world around us? Is it because we've retreated into our safe ecclesiastical havens, like the Essenes? Is it because we've grown angry and embittered like the Zealots? Is it because we stand and carp on the sidelines like the Pharisees, instead of getting on with the costly business of learning how to demonstrate love in a fallen world?
Were the teacher to come among us and examine our lives as individuals, as a congregation and as denominations, would he see signs of the Kingdom he came to proclaim? Or would he remind us once more that when the salt loses it’s saltiness, it’s no longer fit for purpose?
Jesus came to open up to us this mystery called the Kingdom. In the weeks to come, may God help us understand more than ever just what that means for you and me.
Amen
We’re not very clear about who’s bringing it, and what will happen when it arrives, but we’re fairly sure that it’s going to be a good thing.
We’ don’t really know what it’s going to look like, but we keep praying for it to arrive anyway.
So what on earth am I talking about?
It’s that elusive reality called the Kingdom of God.
Every week, when we gather together and say the Lord’s Prayer as part of our worship, we’re invoking the Kingdom. “Thy Kingdom Come” we pray, week in and week out. But what exactly IS the Kingdom of God?
Well, the natural place to start would be with what the Bible has to say, but the problem there is that the Bible itself seems to contain contrasting ideas about what the Kingdom is:
On one hand Jesus tells us that we’re to seek it out. But he also says that it doesn’t come with our careful observation.
He tells us to try and enter the Kingdom; but then he tells us that somehow it’s already within us.
He tells us that it’s near; but elsewhere he says it’s not of this world.
Small wonder we’re confused!
Making sense of all this is a bit like trying to do a jigsaw puzzle when you don’t know what the picture on the box is. And we might be tempted to give up and not bother if it weren’t such an important thing to try and understand.
Because it is important! According to Mark, after years of thought and prayer and preparation, the first words Jesus spoke at the beginning of his public ministry were these: “The right time has come and the Kingdom of God is near”. According to Jesus, that’s the gospel message.
And as he hangs, dying on a cross at the end of his ministry, the last words that he hears are spoken by a thief being crucified alongside him “Jesus, remember me when you come into your Kingdom”.
And in between those two extremes, Jesus spoke constantly about the Kingdom. He used parables to explain it; he drew a child into the middle of his hearers to exemplify it.
He sent the disciples out two by two to preach it. And when Pontius Pilate drew him aside and subtly suggested that he might be able to save his hide if he stopped talking like he was Jewish royalty, Jesus flatly refused. He was a King; but his Kingdom was not of this world.
It’s a puzzle all right, but it’s not one we can afford to pack up and throw into the back of the toybox. It’s actually the very core of the message that Jesus wanted us to hear. And over the next few weeks we’re going to be immersing ourselves in the some of the parables and the teaching that Jesus used to try and convey the essence of the Kingdom.
But we won’t hear and understand them clearly unless we know a little about the world in which Jesus lived and ministered, and that’s what we’re going to do this morning.
Israel, 2000 years ago, was occupied territory. The Jews in those days probably felt about the Romans the way Palestinians feel about Israelis in today’s world.
They were God’s chosen nation; they believed that they had a special place in God’s purposes for the world. So why on earth had they been subjugated? Why had God let this happen to them?
And more pressingly, perhaps, what could they do about it?
Broadly speaking, there were four typical responses to the problem of Rome, represented by four groups that you’ll have heard of as you’ve engaged with the gospels over the years.
The first group were the Zealots. They were the self-styled freedom fighters. “The reason we’re oppressed is that we’re too frightened” they said. “We need to rise up! We need to fight back against the oppressors and show them the same kind of ruthlessness they’ve shown us. If we start putting our lives on the line, then God will see how earnest we are and intervene”.
Jesus had at least two Zealots among his twelve disciples – Simon the Zealot (the clue’s in the name) and Judas, whose nickname Iscariot is thought to come from the little dagger called a Sicarii that one class of Zealots was known to carry.
So the Zealots were the Freedom Fighters.
Then there were the Herodians: so named because they supported Herod, the Jewish puppet King placed there by Rome. Their view was pure pragmatism – “Rome’s too powerful” they’d say. “There’s no point even thinking about resistance. We’d be far better to play the game and co-operate and try to make the best of it.
The Sadducees, who you’ll have heard of in the gospels, tended to align themselves with the Herodians.
A third group, the Pharisees, put forward another way. The way of purity. If we really observe God’s law, they said, everything will go well for us. If there’s less sin and more piety among our people, then God will intervene and liberate us. We need to crack down on sin and sinners.
And that, of course, led to the Pharisees’ obsession with the minutiae of the law.
A fourth group, the Essenes, thought that the Zealots, the Herodians and the Pharisees had it all wrong. As far as they were concerned, the only way to please God was to distance yourself from the corrupt political and religious systems and create an alternative society out in the desert. And that’s exactly what they did. They established communes in the Judean wilderness, and it was in one such community, in Qumran in 1947, that the Dead Sea Scrolls were found.
So those were the four options available to you if you were a first century Jew wondering how to live with Rome on your back.
• Fight for freedom – Zealots,
• Compromise – Herodians
• Purify – Pharisees
• Withdraw – Essenes
But then one day, you’re out and about when you see a crowd gathered beside a small hill. And there’s a young man speaking to them. He has them in the palm of his hand.
“Turn away from your sins.” He proclaims, “The Kingdom of heaven is near”.
Now you know enough to know that any talk about alternative Kingdoms is very unwise in the present political climate. Kingdom is an inflammatory word in Caesar’s Empire. And sure enough, a Roman soldier strides over and starts to break up the crowd roughly when he hears the discourse going in that direction.
It could get nasty – hackles are raised. But the young man doesn’t rise to the bait. You watch as he calmly defuses the situation, and gets folk to disperse in peace.
‘Who is that guy?’ you wonder. The part about turning from sin sounds like the Pharisees, but the Kingdom stuff sounds far more like the Zealots. But if he were a Zealot there’s no way he’d have taken that from a Roman soldier. He’d have been spoiling for a fight.
You’re intrigued. So when you hear that he’s speaking to a large crowd outside town the following week, you tag along.
“Do you want to know who’ll be blessed?” he says. “Not the powerful ones with lots of money and weapons. No – the poor will be blessed. Not the ones who can shout the loudest and get their way. No – the meek will be blessed. Not the ones who kill their enemies, but those who are persecuted for doing right. Not those who play it safe, but those who stand up for the sake of justice. Not the clever and sly, but the pure in heart. Not those who make war, but those who bring peace.”
Now you’re more confused than ever. He can’t be a Zealot because he’s preaching peace instead of revolution. And he can’t be one of the Herodians because he’s speaking out against the rich and powerful. He can’t be an Essene, because they’ve given up on everyone else. Maybe he’s a Pharisee of some kind?
But then word reaches you through a friend that he can’t be! Apparently he rounded on the Pharisees one day - called them whitewashed sepulchures to their faces because they look good from the outside, but are full of death and decay on the inside. And then later that week he was seen at a party with prostitutes, drunks and Roman collaborators. Not the kind of place a good Pharisee would be found.
This man, whoever he is, seems to be a bundle of contradictions.
Either that, or the way he’s proclaiming is so new and radical that no-one’s been able to grasp it yet.
What he seems to be calling people to is a new political and social and spiritual reality that he calls the Kingdom of God, or the Kingdom of heaven.
It’s a Kingdom not of this world, but invading this world. Setting itself up in direct opposition to the rule of Rome. But if you’re part of this kingdom you won’t overcome by slitting Roman throats like the Zealots. On the contrary – if a soldier slaps your face, you offer him the other cheek. If he forces you to go one mile, you go two. You choose a better option than passive submission or angry retaliation. You choose the kingdom way.
If you’re part of this kingdom, you won’t join the Pharisees in cursing and damning sinners to hell. And you won’t run from them to the desert in disgust like the Essenes. You’ll refuse to judge them, and treat them with the kind of gentleness and respect they deserve as children of God, however troubled. You’ll be less concerned about their polluting influence on you than the possible healing and reconciling God might bring through you.
If you’re part of the Kingdom, you won’t settle for the status quo. You won’t turn a blind eye to injustice as long as your own nest is feathered. That’s the Herodian way. Instead, you’ll make radical decisions about how you live that will be a sign to others that you don’t march to the beat of the world’s drum.
If you’re part of this Kingdom, you may well be thought weak, naïve or stupid. They’ll dismiss you as a crank or crucify you as a threat. But the one thing they won’t do is ignore you.
And on that note, here’s a thought to end with. Have you noticed that for many people in our part of the world church is little more than an irrelevance?
We’ve just had a week’s very public discourse about the rights and wrongs of the Pope’s visit to Britain, and the relevance of Catholicism in today’s world.
Isn’t the tenor of that whole debate a sign that somewhere along the line the church has veered away from the radical Kingdom way Jesus was proclaiming? Isn't there a huge irony in the fact that most of the debate has centred around the wealth and power and violence of the church, when these are the very things the Kingdom of God seeks to undermine?
For many people in our part of the globe, Christianity's become an irrelevance. Why is that? Is it because we've compromised too much, like the Herodians, and become indistinguishable from the world around us? Is it because we've retreated into our safe ecclesiastical havens, like the Essenes? Is it because we've grown angry and embittered like the Zealots? Is it because we stand and carp on the sidelines like the Pharisees, instead of getting on with the costly business of learning how to demonstrate love in a fallen world?
Were the teacher to come among us and examine our lives as individuals, as a congregation and as denominations, would he see signs of the Kingdom he came to proclaim? Or would he remind us once more that when the salt loses it’s saltiness, it’s no longer fit for purpose?
Jesus came to open up to us this mystery called the Kingdom. In the weeks to come, may God help us understand more than ever just what that means for you and me.
Amen
Wednesday, 22 September 2010
Reaching Out - From Illusion to Prayer
I’ve struggled with the sermon this week. Struggled more than usual, that is!
It’s not because I’m exhausted after the rigors of the 1-Up weekend! On the contrary – spending time those young people was a real blessing.
And it’s not because the rest of the week’s been especially busy either.
The problem I’ve had is knowing where to start, what to say, and where to end. None of which are minor considerations in the preparation of a sermon!
Today we come to the last of a series sermons based on Henri Nouwen’s book “Reaching Out”, a book in which he describes three movements of the spiritual life. Three ways in which the Spirit acts within us to bring change.
We thought about the movement from loneliness to solitude. How our essential aloneness can be turned from a negative into a positive if we learn to build times of silence and reflection into our day, Times that bring us healing and perspective.
Then we thought about the movement from hostility to hospitality. How we need to overcome our natural reserve and cultivate an hospitable attitude to life which allows the stranger, in time, to become a friend.
And today, we’re looking at Nouwen’s third and final movement – which he calls the movement from Illusion to Prayer. And it’s here, at the final fence, that I’ve pulled up short.
You see, the first two movements are essentially practical – there are things you can do in response to them. You can consciously set time aside for solitude; you can cultivate an attitude of hospitality.
But this last movement is much closer to us than that – it’s much more about who we are than what we do: and it’s often those personal, half-understood things that are hardest for us to put words to.
When I’m visiting couples who are getting married, one of the questions I often ask them what it is that they love about each other. And you’d be surprised at how many folk are completely stumped by that. It’s so close to them that they’ve never really thought about it, or tried to articulate it.
It’s the same with Nouwen’s idea of moving from illusion to prayer. What he’s asking us to do is reflect not on our practice, but on our whole disposition to life. And it’s his argument that though this movement comes third on his list, it’s actually the foundational one for the spiritual life.
Without a firm grounding in prayer, the solitude we create will be tend to be vacuous, and the hospitality we try to show to the stranger will tend to become onerous.
“Solitude and hospitality can only bear lasting fruit when they are embedded in a broader, deeper and higher reality from which they receive their vitality” he says.
For Nouwen, that reality is prayer. Prayer is the soil in which a spiritual life begins to grow – the loam into which the roots of our lives burrow down; growing strong and gaining nourishment.
Maturity, says Nouwen, means no longer seeing prayer as one of the many things we might choose do with our time, but as the fundamental disposition of our lives.
And the problem is, he’s right.
If there is a God out there – and if there isn’t, why are we wasting a perfectly good Sunday morning stuck in here? – if there IS a God, then getting our lives in tune with him is the most important work we can be about.
But that means unmasking some of the illusions we live by: and who wants to do that?
I don’t want to do that. I love my illusions. They’re there at my side when I wake in the morning, and they whisper sweet nothings into my ears as I go to sleep. They’re as close to me as my own skin and bone.
At the risk of turning the pulpit into a confessional let me share a few of my favourites, just to see if they ring any bells with you.
Number 1 Illusion – I can do this all by myself. I’m capable, I’m educated, I’ve got a half-decent set of genes which makes me a reasonably well-adjusted person. I don’t really need to invoke God much. I can get on with most of this under my own steam,
Number 2 Illusion – My life’s my own. It’s my time and my money and it’s entirely up to me how I choose to spend them. Apart from my nearest and dearest and the folk who pay my wages, I’m not really accountable to anyone.
Number 3 Illusion – I’m indispensible. If I didn’t do things, they wouldn’t get done and the world, quite possibly, would stop turning.
Number 4 Illusion – I’m immortal. I refuse to contemplate the possibility of my death except on those occasions when I find myself in an aircraft several thousand feet above the ground. On those occasions I shall allow myself a brief prayer and admission of mortality but on landing I shall breathe a sigh of relief and push such ideas back into the furthest recesses of my mind.
I could go on. And you, no doubt, could add a few of your own.
And the thing is, most of the time we get by quite nicely with our illusions. But for every single one of us, there will come a time when something happens that shakes our world and reveals them for what they are. And if that hasn’t happened to you yet, it will do
We thought we were omnicompetent, and then we meet a situation in life we just can’t deal with. We placed all our hope in that person and then they cynically betray our trust. We forget how vulnerable we are, and then sickness or death visits our homes and turns everything upside down.
On a global scale, misguided men hijack aeroplanes and fly them into skyscrapers, shattering our illusions of invulnerability. We stare, slack jawed, at the place where our confidence used to stand.
No-one’s described the futility of our illusions of permanence better than Shelly in his poem Ozymandias: he writes:
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said:—Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter'd visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock'd them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
These little lives we lead, however grand, have no more permanence about them than a house that’s built on sand. We need a firmer foundation to build on, and that is exactly what prayer provides us with.
Prayer, properly understood, grounds us in God; because prayer is the discipline of reaching out to God in all times and places – worshipping, thanking, confessing and asking; deferring to him in all things – seeking him in all things. Setting aside our illusions and laying hands on his reality.
The 19th century mystic Theophan the Recluse says “Make yourself a rule always to be with the Lord, keeping your mind in your heart and do not let your thoughts wander; as often as they stray, turn them back again and keep them at home in the closet of your heart and delight in converse with the Lord”.
This is more than saying your prayers. This is a disposition of prayerfulness. A cultivation of the awareness of God in our daily lives.
Setting aside time for prayer is part of the discipline that helps us grow, but so’s the turning and turning and turning to God in the ordinary things of the day. It doesn’t have to be about developing burdensome regimes; it’s about doing what you’re already doing more prayerfully. The author Brian McLaren calls it ‘faithing your practices”.
My friend Beth used to manage a café in one of the churches I worked with; every morning she’d prepare all the sandwiches for the day and she would pray as she made them - thinking about the people who were going to be coming through the doors that day.
My friend Matt was tasked with the job of auditing the car mileage books for all the ministers in our Presbytery. A boring job if ever there was one! He returned them with a note of thanks for all the pastoral work those books represented, having prayed for each congregation as he inspected them.
Our Celtic forefathers and mothers were past masters at this. They had a prayer for all of the ordinary things of life. As they’d poke the remnants of last night’s fire to get it going again, they’d pray:
“As I stir the embers of my daily fire, I ask you, living God, to stir the embers of my heart into a flame of love for you, for my family, for my neighbour and for my enemy.”
When they splashed their faces in cold water each morning, they’d say “Let me awaken to you, Father, Son and Holy Spirit”.
Simple prayers that faith our everyday practices. Maybe that’s the place to start, if this is all new to us.
What could you pray before you lift the phone, or send that email, or answer the door? How does God see the person you’re about to engage with?
What could you pray as you do the ironing, or write a memo, or drive the combine, or change a nappy, or drop the kids off to their class.
As you walk the dog, or go to the gym, or hit the shops, what prayers could you carry with you in your heart?
It’s these little things, these turnings, that help move us on from our illusions about how life is and root us more firmly in God’s deeper reality.
We realise that we can’t do it ourselves; that we’re not our own; that we’re not indispensible and nor are we immortal. But paradoxically we don’t mind, because we know that for all our frailty, we’re grounded in God through Jesus Christ. And when the rains descend and the floods come, our lives will be safe in him.
It’s not because I’m exhausted after the rigors of the 1-Up weekend! On the contrary – spending time those young people was a real blessing.
And it’s not because the rest of the week’s been especially busy either.
The problem I’ve had is knowing where to start, what to say, and where to end. None of which are minor considerations in the preparation of a sermon!
Today we come to the last of a series sermons based on Henri Nouwen’s book “Reaching Out”, a book in which he describes three movements of the spiritual life. Three ways in which the Spirit acts within us to bring change.
We thought about the movement from loneliness to solitude. How our essential aloneness can be turned from a negative into a positive if we learn to build times of silence and reflection into our day, Times that bring us healing and perspective.
Then we thought about the movement from hostility to hospitality. How we need to overcome our natural reserve and cultivate an hospitable attitude to life which allows the stranger, in time, to become a friend.
And today, we’re looking at Nouwen’s third and final movement – which he calls the movement from Illusion to Prayer. And it’s here, at the final fence, that I’ve pulled up short.
You see, the first two movements are essentially practical – there are things you can do in response to them. You can consciously set time aside for solitude; you can cultivate an attitude of hospitality.
But this last movement is much closer to us than that – it’s much more about who we are than what we do: and it’s often those personal, half-understood things that are hardest for us to put words to.
When I’m visiting couples who are getting married, one of the questions I often ask them what it is that they love about each other. And you’d be surprised at how many folk are completely stumped by that. It’s so close to them that they’ve never really thought about it, or tried to articulate it.
It’s the same with Nouwen’s idea of moving from illusion to prayer. What he’s asking us to do is reflect not on our practice, but on our whole disposition to life. And it’s his argument that though this movement comes third on his list, it’s actually the foundational one for the spiritual life.
Without a firm grounding in prayer, the solitude we create will be tend to be vacuous, and the hospitality we try to show to the stranger will tend to become onerous.
“Solitude and hospitality can only bear lasting fruit when they are embedded in a broader, deeper and higher reality from which they receive their vitality” he says.
For Nouwen, that reality is prayer. Prayer is the soil in which a spiritual life begins to grow – the loam into which the roots of our lives burrow down; growing strong and gaining nourishment.
Maturity, says Nouwen, means no longer seeing prayer as one of the many things we might choose do with our time, but as the fundamental disposition of our lives.
And the problem is, he’s right.
If there is a God out there – and if there isn’t, why are we wasting a perfectly good Sunday morning stuck in here? – if there IS a God, then getting our lives in tune with him is the most important work we can be about.
But that means unmasking some of the illusions we live by: and who wants to do that?
I don’t want to do that. I love my illusions. They’re there at my side when I wake in the morning, and they whisper sweet nothings into my ears as I go to sleep. They’re as close to me as my own skin and bone.
At the risk of turning the pulpit into a confessional let me share a few of my favourites, just to see if they ring any bells with you.
Number 1 Illusion – I can do this all by myself. I’m capable, I’m educated, I’ve got a half-decent set of genes which makes me a reasonably well-adjusted person. I don’t really need to invoke God much. I can get on with most of this under my own steam,
Number 2 Illusion – My life’s my own. It’s my time and my money and it’s entirely up to me how I choose to spend them. Apart from my nearest and dearest and the folk who pay my wages, I’m not really accountable to anyone.
Number 3 Illusion – I’m indispensible. If I didn’t do things, they wouldn’t get done and the world, quite possibly, would stop turning.
Number 4 Illusion – I’m immortal. I refuse to contemplate the possibility of my death except on those occasions when I find myself in an aircraft several thousand feet above the ground. On those occasions I shall allow myself a brief prayer and admission of mortality but on landing I shall breathe a sigh of relief and push such ideas back into the furthest recesses of my mind.
I could go on. And you, no doubt, could add a few of your own.
And the thing is, most of the time we get by quite nicely with our illusions. But for every single one of us, there will come a time when something happens that shakes our world and reveals them for what they are. And if that hasn’t happened to you yet, it will do
We thought we were omnicompetent, and then we meet a situation in life we just can’t deal with. We placed all our hope in that person and then they cynically betray our trust. We forget how vulnerable we are, and then sickness or death visits our homes and turns everything upside down.
On a global scale, misguided men hijack aeroplanes and fly them into skyscrapers, shattering our illusions of invulnerability. We stare, slack jawed, at the place where our confidence used to stand.
No-one’s described the futility of our illusions of permanence better than Shelly in his poem Ozymandias: he writes:
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said:—Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter'd visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock'd them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
These little lives we lead, however grand, have no more permanence about them than a house that’s built on sand. We need a firmer foundation to build on, and that is exactly what prayer provides us with.
Prayer, properly understood, grounds us in God; because prayer is the discipline of reaching out to God in all times and places – worshipping, thanking, confessing and asking; deferring to him in all things – seeking him in all things. Setting aside our illusions and laying hands on his reality.
The 19th century mystic Theophan the Recluse says “Make yourself a rule always to be with the Lord, keeping your mind in your heart and do not let your thoughts wander; as often as they stray, turn them back again and keep them at home in the closet of your heart and delight in converse with the Lord”.
This is more than saying your prayers. This is a disposition of prayerfulness. A cultivation of the awareness of God in our daily lives.
Setting aside time for prayer is part of the discipline that helps us grow, but so’s the turning and turning and turning to God in the ordinary things of the day. It doesn’t have to be about developing burdensome regimes; it’s about doing what you’re already doing more prayerfully. The author Brian McLaren calls it ‘faithing your practices”.
My friend Beth used to manage a café in one of the churches I worked with; every morning she’d prepare all the sandwiches for the day and she would pray as she made them - thinking about the people who were going to be coming through the doors that day.
My friend Matt was tasked with the job of auditing the car mileage books for all the ministers in our Presbytery. A boring job if ever there was one! He returned them with a note of thanks for all the pastoral work those books represented, having prayed for each congregation as he inspected them.
Our Celtic forefathers and mothers were past masters at this. They had a prayer for all of the ordinary things of life. As they’d poke the remnants of last night’s fire to get it going again, they’d pray:
“As I stir the embers of my daily fire, I ask you, living God, to stir the embers of my heart into a flame of love for you, for my family, for my neighbour and for my enemy.”
When they splashed their faces in cold water each morning, they’d say “Let me awaken to you, Father, Son and Holy Spirit”.
Simple prayers that faith our everyday practices. Maybe that’s the place to start, if this is all new to us.
What could you pray before you lift the phone, or send that email, or answer the door? How does God see the person you’re about to engage with?
What could you pray as you do the ironing, or write a memo, or drive the combine, or change a nappy, or drop the kids off to their class.
As you walk the dog, or go to the gym, or hit the shops, what prayers could you carry with you in your heart?
It’s these little things, these turnings, that help move us on from our illusions about how life is and root us more firmly in God’s deeper reality.
We realise that we can’t do it ourselves; that we’re not our own; that we’re not indispensible and nor are we immortal. But paradoxically we don’t mind, because we know that for all our frailty, we’re grounded in God through Jesus Christ. And when the rains descend and the floods come, our lives will be safe in him.
Monday, 30 August 2010
Reaching Out - From Hostility to Hospitality
Last week we started a series of sermons on the spiritual life and I introduced Henri Nouwen’s idea that there are three movements in that life.The movement from loneliness to solitude (reaching out to yourself), the movement from hostility to hospitality (reaching out to others) and the movement from illusion to prayer (reaching out to God).
But I realised that I didn’t say much about Nouwen himself and why he's someone worth listening to.
Nouwen was a Dutch Priest and academic who had a very successful career, teaching at both Yale and Harvard, speaking all over the world and writing over 40 books. But as he reflected on his life he realised that he didn’t like the person he was becoming in that rarified environment.
So quite late on in life he responded to an invitation to join a movement called L’Arche; an initiative setting up care homes where folk with profound disabilities could live in community with their assistants. He moved to France and became a member of the first L’Arche community, of which there are now 100 worldwide.
It changed his life, and in his later years he wrote a great deal about the gifts that disabled people bring into our lives; how they help us re-connect with what’s truly important in being human.
Nouwen tells a story of how, as a priest, he’d often be called on to lead services in l’Arche and say blessings over the residents. One day one of the residents called Johnny came up and said “Henri – I want a blessing” – so Nouwen made the sign of the cross over him and said “In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit” – that’s what he’d always done and that’s what was expected of him in that tradition. And Johnny said – "Henri – that doesn’t work. I want a real blessing!"
Later that day there was a service. Johnny came up to him again and said “Henri – I want a blessing." But this time the wee man stood in front of him and wrapped his arms around him and put his head on his chest. And Nouwen realised that what Johnny needed more than anything was just to be held and to have good things spoken over him in God’s name. So that’s what Nouwen did – he wrapped his arms around Johnny, almost hiding him in his clerical robes – and he said “Johnny - you are the beloved of God. You are chosen and special. You have good gifts to share with all of us. We in this community love you, not because you do great things, but because God loves you just as you are.”
And Johnny detached himself with a big smile and sat down saying “That’s right, Henri! That’s right”. And after that, all the disabled folk wanted that kind of blessing. And so did some of the assistants!
What was the difference?
Well in that second form of blessing, Nouwen created a space where good things could be shared in a way that was unhurried, attentive and deeply personal. And it seems to me that there we have the very essence of hospitality.
“Practice hospitality” – the word says.
That doesn’t just mean have folk round for a bite to eat, though it certainly does mean that.
It means practicing a way of life with friend and stranger that’s generous with your time and your attention. It means making space that’s not rushed; where you’re really present; where you’re receptive and open to the other, while still being yourself. Where you choose to see the potential in the stranger, rather than the threat.
For many of us, that attitude won’t come easily. God will need to teach us to be more hospitable.
There’s something in us that’s naturally defensive and private. John Donne said that no man is an island, but in terms of skin and flesh and bone that’s exactly what we are. We’re all self-contained little units and to be honest, we quite like it that way. Within the limited range of family and a few close friends, we’re secure, but going beyond that takes us out of our comfort zones. We’re not hostile to others, to use Nouwen’s phrase. But we are guarded; closed off. We give very little away. We need to move from hostility towards hospitality
I wonder how much of our hostility is about fear? Fear of causing offence, or taking offence. Fear of the unknown. Fear of folk knowing our business. Fear of being found wanting. Here’s a story you know well which flags this up.
As Jesus and his disciples were on their way, he came to a village where a woman named Martha opened her home to him. She had a sister called Mary, who sat at the Lord’s feet listening to what he said. But Martha was distracted by all the preparations that had to be made. She came to him and asked, “Lord, don’t you care that my sister has left me to do the work by myself? Tell her to help me!”
It changed his life, and in his later years he wrote a great deal about the gifts that disabled people bring into our lives; how they help us re-connect with what’s truly important in being human.
Nouwen tells a story of how, as a priest, he’d often be called on to lead services in l’Arche and say blessings over the residents. One day one of the residents called Johnny came up and said “Henri – I want a blessing” – so Nouwen made the sign of the cross over him and said “In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit” – that’s what he’d always done and that’s what was expected of him in that tradition. And Johnny said – "Henri – that doesn’t work. I want a real blessing!"
Later that day there was a service. Johnny came up to him again and said “Henri – I want a blessing." But this time the wee man stood in front of him and wrapped his arms around him and put his head on his chest. And Nouwen realised that what Johnny needed more than anything was just to be held and to have good things spoken over him in God’s name. So that’s what Nouwen did – he wrapped his arms around Johnny, almost hiding him in his clerical robes – and he said “Johnny - you are the beloved of God. You are chosen and special. You have good gifts to share with all of us. We in this community love you, not because you do great things, but because God loves you just as you are.”
And Johnny detached himself with a big smile and sat down saying “That’s right, Henri! That’s right”. And after that, all the disabled folk wanted that kind of blessing. And so did some of the assistants!
What was the difference?
Well in that second form of blessing, Nouwen created a space where good things could be shared in a way that was unhurried, attentive and deeply personal. And it seems to me that there we have the very essence of hospitality.
“Practice hospitality” – the word says.
That doesn’t just mean have folk round for a bite to eat, though it certainly does mean that.
It means practicing a way of life with friend and stranger that’s generous with your time and your attention. It means making space that’s not rushed; where you’re really present; where you’re receptive and open to the other, while still being yourself. Where you choose to see the potential in the stranger, rather than the threat.
For many of us, that attitude won’t come easily. God will need to teach us to be more hospitable.
There’s something in us that’s naturally defensive and private. John Donne said that no man is an island, but in terms of skin and flesh and bone that’s exactly what we are. We’re all self-contained little units and to be honest, we quite like it that way. Within the limited range of family and a few close friends, we’re secure, but going beyond that takes us out of our comfort zones. We’re not hostile to others, to use Nouwen’s phrase. But we are guarded; closed off. We give very little away. We need to move from hostility towards hospitality
I wonder how much of our hostility is about fear? Fear of causing offence, or taking offence. Fear of the unknown. Fear of folk knowing our business. Fear of being found wanting. Here’s a story you know well which flags this up.
As Jesus and his disciples were on their way, he came to a village where a woman named Martha opened her home to him. She had a sister called Mary, who sat at the Lord’s feet listening to what he said. But Martha was distracted by all the preparations that had to be made. She came to him and asked, “Lord, don’t you care that my sister has left me to do the work by myself? Tell her to help me!”
“Martha, Martha,” the Lord answered, “you are worried and upset about many things, but only one thing is needed. Mary has chosen what is better, and it will not be taken away from her.”
If hospitality means "making space where good things can be shared in a way that’s unhurried, attentive and deeply personal. A space where you’re present and receptive to the other"
then for all that Martha's invited Jesus and his entourage into her home, is she exercising hospitality of that kind?
No! She’s rushing, she’s overbusy, she’s inattentive, she’s not present to them.
Why?
I think it’s because she’s afraid. She’s afraid of not living up to expectations. Hostesses are supposed to do this and this and this and if I don’t do it, then I’m a failure. Word will get round that I’m a poor hostess! I have a reputation to maintain!
And Jesus looks at her with kindness and says “Martha, Martha. You are worried and upset about many things. Put down your pots and pans. Come and sit here with us. I don’t want your food right this moment. I want your company”.
I wonder how many of us are crippled by the fear of not living up to expectations. We miss the opportunity to act hospitably because we feel the pressure of the things that must be done.
I can’t have those people round. The house is a mess.
I can’t see you that evening, I’ve got too much on.
I’ll put off that phonecall ‘til I’ve got the time.
I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve kicked myself because I’ve realised, with hindsight, that I’ve been in too much of a rush; expectations have dragged me away or kept me away and I’ve missed a real opportunity to be with someone in a meaningful way.
So here’s an exercise we could all try this week. Force yourself to linger with someone. Don’t run away to whatever it is you have to run away to; take a deep breath and stay, and ask God to redeem the time. Make that hospitable space where good things can happen
But there's another story I want to bring into this:
Jesus entered Jericho and was passing through. A man was there by the name of Zacchaeus; he was a chief tax collector and was wealthy. He wanted to see who Jesus was, but being a short man he could not, because of the crowd. So he ran ahead and climbed a sycamore-fig tree to see him, since Jesus was coming that way.
When Jesus reached the spot, he looked up and said to him, “Zacchaeus, come down immediately. I must stay at your house today.” So he came down at once and welcomed him gladly.
All the people saw this and began to mutter, “He has gone to be the guest of a ‘sinner.’ ”
But Zacchaeus stood up and said to the Lord, “Look, Lord! Here and now I give half of my possessions to the poor, and if I have cheated anybody out of anything, I will pay back four times the amount.”
Jesus said to him, “Today salvation has come to this house, because this man, too, is a son of Abraham. For the Son of Man came to seek and to save what was lost.”
There’s a lovely irony in this story and I don’t know if you’ve noticed it before this morning. It’s Zacchaeus’ house they go to, but it’s Jesus who’s offering hospitality.
Let’s look at our definition again:
Hospitality means making space where good things can be shared in a way that’s unhurried, attentive and deeply personal. A space where you’re present and receptive to the other. And thats' exactly what Jesus does here.
Look at what he does. He stops what he’s doing – he was on his way somewhere, but he stops. He calls Zacchaeus down by name and opens up a space where they can spend time together: “I must stay at your house today”. And he did all this in the face of a crowd who hated Zacchaeus because he’d colluded with the Romans to rip them off. They’d banished him. He was an outcast in his own village.
But Christ chose to see the potential in the stranger, not the threat. He was bigger than that. More sure of himself and his God.
And that one hospitable exchange, in the face of years of hostility, was enough to completely turn Zacchaeus’ life around.
It isn’t always as dramatic as that, of course. But the principle still holds true. It’s hospitality that overcomes the strangeness of the stranger and creates the possibility of their becoming friends.
I wonder who the strangers are in our midst? Chances are they don’t come from a different country or speak a different language. More likely they’re people who work in the same company; or live in the same street; or sit five pews ahead of us. Or maybe they’re folk from within our own extended family.
And their strangeness - or stranger-liness - isn’t about differences in culture or religion. It’s just about the fact that we haven’t ever got to know one another, or we lost touch with one another a long time ago.
Who’s coming to mind just now as I speak? Is there someone you feel you should be making more of an effort with just now? What could you do to open up an hospitable space for them this week?
There’s so much more we could say on this, but if you’ve heard the central message this morning, that’s enough. Hospitality’s not getting the best china out and serving up a great meal; not just that, anyway. It’s an approach to life. An approach to the people we come across on our journey that’s generous, unhurried and open.
It’s Henri Nouwen opening his arms and making a space for blessing; It’s Martha putting down the pots and pans for a while and finding a space on the floor beside Jesus; it’s Jesus making space for the one person that nobody else could be bothered with.
And the more you read about Jesus, the more you see how that hospitable approach coloured almost everything he did.
He ate with Pharisees and prostitutes; preached love for enemies; healed untouchables; praised Gentiles for their faith; found time for individuals in the midst of the crowd. He made space to visit and chat and teach and heal. He made time to play with the children. He never allowed himself to be driven on by others’ expectations when something good was unfolding right then and there.
He kept solitude, drank deep of his Father’s love for the world, and returned to the crowds replenished and ready to give.
And like Henry Nouwen, he opened his arms in blessing on the cross, and encircled not one beloved individual, but the whole beloved world.
"Practice hospitality" the Scriptures say. Are you beginning to see just what that means?
The movement from hostility to hospitality, Nouwen writes “is the movement in which we become less and less fearful and defensive and more and more open to the other and his world, even when it leads, as it did with Christ, to suffering and death”
May God bless us with souls deep and wide enough to be truly hospitable.
Amen
If hospitality means "making space where good things can be shared in a way that’s unhurried, attentive and deeply personal. A space where you’re present and receptive to the other"
then for all that Martha's invited Jesus and his entourage into her home, is she exercising hospitality of that kind?
No! She’s rushing, she’s overbusy, she’s inattentive, she’s not present to them.
Why?
I think it’s because she’s afraid. She’s afraid of not living up to expectations. Hostesses are supposed to do this and this and this and if I don’t do it, then I’m a failure. Word will get round that I’m a poor hostess! I have a reputation to maintain!
And Jesus looks at her with kindness and says “Martha, Martha. You are worried and upset about many things. Put down your pots and pans. Come and sit here with us. I don’t want your food right this moment. I want your company”.
I wonder how many of us are crippled by the fear of not living up to expectations. We miss the opportunity to act hospitably because we feel the pressure of the things that must be done.
I can’t have those people round. The house is a mess.
I can’t see you that evening, I’ve got too much on.
I’ll put off that phonecall ‘til I’ve got the time.
I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve kicked myself because I’ve realised, with hindsight, that I’ve been in too much of a rush; expectations have dragged me away or kept me away and I’ve missed a real opportunity to be with someone in a meaningful way.
So here’s an exercise we could all try this week. Force yourself to linger with someone. Don’t run away to whatever it is you have to run away to; take a deep breath and stay, and ask God to redeem the time. Make that hospitable space where good things can happen
But there's another story I want to bring into this:
Jesus entered Jericho and was passing through. A man was there by the name of Zacchaeus; he was a chief tax collector and was wealthy. He wanted to see who Jesus was, but being a short man he could not, because of the crowd. So he ran ahead and climbed a sycamore-fig tree to see him, since Jesus was coming that way.
When Jesus reached the spot, he looked up and said to him, “Zacchaeus, come down immediately. I must stay at your house today.” So he came down at once and welcomed him gladly.
All the people saw this and began to mutter, “He has gone to be the guest of a ‘sinner.’ ”
But Zacchaeus stood up and said to the Lord, “Look, Lord! Here and now I give half of my possessions to the poor, and if I have cheated anybody out of anything, I will pay back four times the amount.”
Jesus said to him, “Today salvation has come to this house, because this man, too, is a son of Abraham. For the Son of Man came to seek and to save what was lost.”
There’s a lovely irony in this story and I don’t know if you’ve noticed it before this morning. It’s Zacchaeus’ house they go to, but it’s Jesus who’s offering hospitality.
Let’s look at our definition again:
Hospitality means making space where good things can be shared in a way that’s unhurried, attentive and deeply personal. A space where you’re present and receptive to the other. And thats' exactly what Jesus does here.
Look at what he does. He stops what he’s doing – he was on his way somewhere, but he stops. He calls Zacchaeus down by name and opens up a space where they can spend time together: “I must stay at your house today”. And he did all this in the face of a crowd who hated Zacchaeus because he’d colluded with the Romans to rip them off. They’d banished him. He was an outcast in his own village.
But Christ chose to see the potential in the stranger, not the threat. He was bigger than that. More sure of himself and his God.
And that one hospitable exchange, in the face of years of hostility, was enough to completely turn Zacchaeus’ life around.
It isn’t always as dramatic as that, of course. But the principle still holds true. It’s hospitality that overcomes the strangeness of the stranger and creates the possibility of their becoming friends.
I wonder who the strangers are in our midst? Chances are they don’t come from a different country or speak a different language. More likely they’re people who work in the same company; or live in the same street; or sit five pews ahead of us. Or maybe they’re folk from within our own extended family.
And their strangeness - or stranger-liness - isn’t about differences in culture or religion. It’s just about the fact that we haven’t ever got to know one another, or we lost touch with one another a long time ago.
Who’s coming to mind just now as I speak? Is there someone you feel you should be making more of an effort with just now? What could you do to open up an hospitable space for them this week?
There’s so much more we could say on this, but if you’ve heard the central message this morning, that’s enough. Hospitality’s not getting the best china out and serving up a great meal; not just that, anyway. It’s an approach to life. An approach to the people we come across on our journey that’s generous, unhurried and open.
It’s Henri Nouwen opening his arms and making a space for blessing; It’s Martha putting down the pots and pans for a while and finding a space on the floor beside Jesus; it’s Jesus making space for the one person that nobody else could be bothered with.
And the more you read about Jesus, the more you see how that hospitable approach coloured almost everything he did.
He ate with Pharisees and prostitutes; preached love for enemies; healed untouchables; praised Gentiles for their faith; found time for individuals in the midst of the crowd. He made space to visit and chat and teach and heal. He made time to play with the children. He never allowed himself to be driven on by others’ expectations when something good was unfolding right then and there.
He kept solitude, drank deep of his Father’s love for the world, and returned to the crowds replenished and ready to give.
And like Henry Nouwen, he opened his arms in blessing on the cross, and encircled not one beloved individual, but the whole beloved world.
"Practice hospitality" the Scriptures say. Are you beginning to see just what that means?
The movement from hostility to hospitality, Nouwen writes “is the movement in which we become less and less fearful and defensive and more and more open to the other and his world, even when it leads, as it did with Christ, to suffering and death”
May God bless us with souls deep and wide enough to be truly hospitable.
Amen
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