I want to begin with a few words of wisdom for Fathers:
By the time a man realizes that maybe his father was right, he usually has a son who thinks he's wrong. – Charles Wadsworth
A child is not likely to find a father in God unless he finds something of God in his father – Austin Sorensen
You’ve got to do your own growing, no matter how tall your father was – Old Irish Proverb
“Never raise your hand to your kids. It leaves your groin unprotected”.
There’s lots of ready wisdom about Fatherhood out there, but let’s face it – most men don’t really like being told how to do things.
I told you last week that I got an i-Pod touch for my birthday and when I opened it up one of the things that amazed me was that there were no instructions with it. There was just a wee sliver of paper with some basic information and a website address, but hardly anything else to tell you how to work the thing. Classic Macintosh minimalism!
And my guess is that the reason they do that is because they know that no-one reads those things anymore. If you want to, you can go to the website and download a manual the size of a phonebook telling you how to work it, but most of us just want to jump in there and figure it out for ourselves. All we need is the basic information and we’re away.
I think that’s the way most of us who are dads approach parenthood too. We’re not inclined to read the manual - not until things start going wrong, maybe! - but we really want to know how to do the basics well. If we can master that, not much can go wrong.
Today’s story from Genesis is a God-send in that respect, because packed into these few verses are most of the things we need to know about raising kids.
What we heard together earlier is one chapter in the long long story, of the family that grew to be the nation we call Israel today. Abraham was the patriarch whom God chose and promised to bless; Isaac was his son, and Jacob and Esau his twin grandsons.
And today’s story begins with a family dispute. Two family members bickering over money and land; something that would, of course, never happen in our day.
Jacob and Esau were at loggerheads. Esau, the firstborn, was an outdoor kind of guy who loved hunting & fishing; Jacob was a gentler, more introverted kind of man. Isaac favoured Esau, while Rebekah, his wife, favoured Jacob.
Now in the 27th chapter of Genesis, Isaac has grown very old & blind, & he’s decided it’s time to pass on the blessing to his oldest son.
Now a Jewish father’s blessing was a formal passing on of the father’s authority to his oldest son. And since the oldest son was assuming the leadership of the family, he also received a double share of his father’s possessions. So this was important stuff.
In vs’s 2-4 Isaac tells Esau, “You see that I am old and may die soon. Take your bow and arrows, go out into the country, and kill an animal for me. Cook me some of that tasty food that I like, and bring it to me. After I have eaten it, I will give you my final blessing before I die.”
So Esau leaves, and while he is gone, Rebecca seizes the opportunity to secure the blessing for Jacob, because he was her favourite. She quickly prepares some tasty food & tells Jacob to put on Esau’s best clothes. To help fool blind old Isaac, she puts goat skin on Jacob’s hands & arms to make them feel hairy. Then she sends him in with the food to ask for the blessing.
Listen to vs. 19, “I am your elder son Esau; I have done as you told me. Please sit up and eat some of the meat that I have brought you, so that you can give me your blessing.”
Now Isaac was suspicious because Jacob’s voice didn’t sound like Esau’s. So he asked, "How did you find it so quickly, my son?" Jacob replies, "The Lord your God helped me find it."
Then vs. 21, Isaac says to Jacob, “Please come closer so that I can touch you. Are you really Esau?” Jacob moved closer to his father, who felt him and said, “Your voice sounds like Jacob's voice, but your arms feel like Esau's arms.” He did not recognize Jacob, because his arms were hairy like Esau's; so he blessed him."
And the blessing that was given is found in vs’s 27-29. As he came up to kiss him, Isaac smelt his clothes — so he gave him his blessing. He said, “The pleasant smell of my son is like the smell of a field which the Lord has blessed. May God give you dew from heaven and make your fields fertile! May he give you plenty of corn and wine! 29 May nations be your servants, and may peoples bow down before you. May you rule over all your relatives, and may your mother's descendants bow down before you. May those who curse you be cursed, and may those who bless you be blessed.”
After he received the blessing from his father, Jacob left. Shortly afterwards Esau came in with the meal he’d prepared to receive his father’s blessing.
Listen to vs’s 33-34. "Isaac trembled violently & said, `Who was it, then, that hunted game & brought it to me? I ate it just before you came & I blessed him - & indeed he will be blessed!’ When Esau heard his father’s words, he burst out with a loud & bitter cry & said to his father, `Bless me - me too, my father!’"
If you want to know how the story ends you’ll need to read on in the book of Genesis, but it’s this business of Isaac’s blessing I want us to focus on this morning.
The author Gary Smalley reckons there are 3 ingredients in that blessing that should be present in every family home, and when they’re there and practiced consistently, then our kids grow up secure & confident in themselves, able to go out into the world & function well.
The first ingredient is meaningful touch.
Jacob went close to his Father, who reached out and touched him and embraced him. And almost every time a blessing’s given in Hebrew culture, it involves touching - the laying on of hands, a kiss, an embrace - something that conveys acceptance & love.
Mark tells us that that people regularly brought children to Jesus so that He could give them his blessing, and he’d take them in his arms, or set them on his knee and hold them tenderly as he prayed for them.
He knew exactly what children need to feel loved & accepted.
A kind touch is a precious gift, and the need and desire for that gift stays with us throughout our lifetimes.
When our first child, Ross, was born the midwife got me to remove my shirt while she cleaned him up, and then she plonked him down on my chest while my wife was being attended to. It was a wonderful experience: skin to skin contact within moments of his arrival that helped him feel safe and secure and made me feel proud as anything.
And then last week, at the other end of the age spectrum, I encountered a man with dementia who’d previously been a little difficult when I’d visited the nursing home he stayed in. This time I crouched down to his level, held eye contact and took his hand, which he proceeded to stroke like a pussycat! But that physical contact made all the difference in our relating.
Touch is one of the most important ways we communicate our love and acceptance of someone.
But words are important too – and that’s our second ingredient: appreciative words.
Listen to what Isaac says as he blesses his son in the last part of vs. 27, "Ah, the smell of my son is like the smell of a field that the Lord has blessed. . ."
Now to our ears that’s not an obvious complement, but when I was thinking about it I remembered what it’s like when my kids come in and give me a hug after a whole afternoon in the garden. They carry some of that breezy outdoor freshness in with them on their clothes.
And to an old outdoorsman like Isaac the smell of the wind and the fields was a great smell. It was a compliment, a positive message that communicated his love & affection.
We cam be so quick to criticise and so slow to praise, can’t we? And yet those words of praise and encouragement have an immeasurable effect on the one they’re spoken to.
Rob Parsons is the Director of a charity called Care for the Family and he’s spoken worldwide to millions of people on strategies for raising kids and building strong marriages. He’s a brilliant communicator now. but when he was a wee boy he didn’t do well at school because he struggled with the academic side of things and his self-esteem was rock bottom.
Rob’s teacher was on the ball with this. Every day he’d get a child up to hold the paper for him while he cut it with a guillotine, and they’d do it on a rota system so everybody would get a turn. And when his time ccme, Rob took his turn like everyone else.
But the next day the teacher called him up again, and the next day and the next. Nobody knew what was going on. At the end of the week, Rob was called up again and as he turned to go back to his seat, the teacher said “Robert Parsons is the best holder of guillotine paper in this school”.
And for all his achievements in later life, Rob still says that’s the kindest and most important thing anyone has ever said to him.
The amazing power of our words. Let’s use them wisely.
The third and final ingredient is the affirmation of worth.
Notice what Isaac says in vs. 28, “May God give you dew from heaven and make your fields fertile! May he give you plenty of corn and wine!”
He’s saying, "May God give you the best, because you’re worth it”.
But what is the best? That’s one I think our culture gets wrong too often, especially as we deal with our children.
Too often we think that giving our kids the best is about buying them all the stuff they need or worse still, all the stuff they want. We live in a part of the world where that’s possible for many of us because salaries tend to be high. And we want to show our kids that we love them, so we buy them stuff.
But is that really the best we can give them?
Deep down I think we know it’s not.
What they really want are the most valuable things we have to give them: our time and our attention. And there’s a cost for us in that which hurts much more than dipping into our pockets for the latest gadgets.
A famous author was once asked why she thought she’d become so successful. Was it down to the books that had influenced her, or the education she’d had, or the ideas she’d crafted? She smiled and said it was none of those. She’d become a great writer because when she entered her father’s study at home he’d greet her with a smile that lit up his whole face and let her know she was loved to the very core. The way he treated her let her know she had worth, and that made everything else possible.
Our friend Julie Canlis tells of a time in her childhood when things were difficult for her and she was shocked when one day her dad stopped by her school and pulled her out of the class.
“But I’m not sick” she said. “And you’re supposed to be at work”. “Yeah, I know" he said. "But this isn’t a sickness day. This is a wellness day. Let’s go and be well together.” Took a day off his work just to be with his daughter, eat ice cream, go to the park and visit the museums. She knew she was worth something by the end of that day.
Are you affirmed in your worth this morning?
Are you affirming those you love in their worth?
And lest we leave this conversation on the purely human level, have we realised that the greatest affirmation of our worth doesn’t come from those we live with or work with or socialise with, but from the God who gave us life in the first place.
The God, who the Scriptures tell us, gave up his own Son on the cross, so that we could be set free from the power of sin and death.
If your sense of your own worth is based solely on things - even good things -that will pass away, like people or careers, or wealth, then your worth is transitory.
But if it’s based on the truth that you are the beloved child of God, known from all eternity, redeemed at the greatest price, then no-one can ever take your worth away from you.,
When I worked in inner-city Glasgow there was a resource we used in children’s work which was especially geared to the needs of urban kids. And I’ll always remember one piece of advice it gave; it said you can’t expect children to understand the concept of the love of God if they come from homes where they don’t receive much in the way of human love. With that in view, we realised that our task in working with these kids wasn’t so much to teach them something, as to model God’s love to them.
And that principle holds in general, I think.
If we want not just our children, but all the folk in our lives to know something of the love of God, then we are the ones who have to model it and make it real for them. And there’s no better place to start than those three simple ingredients: meaningful touch, appreciative words, and affirmation of worth. The way of Isaac’s blessing.
Thursday 29 July 2010
Wednesday 28 July 2010
The Sound of Silence
About six years ago I took myself away for a few days to do some thinking about the future. I was beginning to think about moving on from my work as a Community Minister in Glasgow but wanted to sort through the reasons for that and make sure I was making the right decision in the right way.
So I took myself off to a wee house in the mountains with a couple of books and spent some time going back to basics and asking myself prayerfully what it was that I really want to be about in ministry because deep in my heart I felt I wasn’t finding it there.
And over the course of that time, those desires crystallised around four key things. I realised that what I need to feel fulfilled, not just in ministry, but in life, are these four things:
Space, Settledness, Significance and Silence.
Once I’d come to that understanding, I realised that I wasn’t going to find enough of those to sustain me in community ministry, and that meant it was time to move on.
So here we are – five years plus in the parish. And though no parish is a panacea, we have more space, both literally and metaphorically; we’re now more settled in a community, and significant things have happened and are happening in the work that’s going on here.
But silence? Well, that’s the weakest link. Always has been and always will be, I reckon,
I’ve been thinking a lot about silence and her twin sister solitude over the past few weeks, largely because I’ve been reading the Irish poet and theologian John O’Donohue and it’s something very close to his heart.
O’Donohue says there’s a place in the soul that neither space nor time nor flesh can touch. This is the eternal place within us. It would be a lovely gift to yourself, he says, to go there more often – to be nourished, strengthened and renewed. But the only threshold to that place is the silence of solitude.
The mystic Thomas A Kempis picks up the same theme in words that many of us would recognise as the call of our own hearts: “O God the Truth, I am often wearied in reading and hearing many things. In you is all I wish for and desire. Let all who teach fall silent, let all things created fall speechless before you. Do you alone speak to me”.
There’s a basic law here of the spiritual life being expressed here. A law that we go against to the detriment of our souls. The only way to a deepening relationship with God is through the disciplines of solitude and silence.
Why? Because we need to find that still centre within ourselves from which we can respond to the myriad demands on our time and energy and emotions. If we spend no time there, we’ll be at the mercy of everything and everyone and before long those demands will grind us down.
O’Donohue argues that one of the reasons people are suffering from stress so much these days isn’t that they are doing stressful things, but that they allow so little time for silence.
The modern world conspires against silence and we have to be utterly countercultural to recover it. We have to switch off the TV, or the laptop, or the i-Pod, or the mobile. We have to put down the book or the newspaper for a while. We have to do what feels wholly unnatural at the beginning, and create ways to keep company with ourselves and with God for a while. Praying through the day, reflecting on a line or two of Scripture. Anything to get ourselves back in the place where we’re still enough to hear God speak to us.
I don’t intend to expound the Biblical passage we read this morning, - we’ll keep that for another day when I’ve swotted up on Revelation – but I chose it for one beautiful line. “When the Lamb broke open the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven for about half an hour”.
Silence in heaven. Can you imagine the hush and the reverent expectancy of those moments? And what follows? Prayer flows out of the silence as a sweet offering to God, and in response to those prayers, God makes things happen on the earth.
Silence flows into prayer, which flows into activity. How often we try to make that river flow the other way.
We rush into activity without pausing to touch base with the one in whom all things hold together.
This morning, if you’re stressed, is it because you’re never still enough to listen either to yourself or to God?
If you’re feeling out of touch with yourself or God, is it because you’ve ignored the invitation to step over the threshold and experience silence and solitude for a wee while?
When were you last still and prayerful? How can that discipline become a part of your life’s pattern? How much longer can you go on without it?
Let me close with a parable that touches on these themes, and I’ll leave it with you to reflect on without further comment.
Once upon a time there was a man who lived on the edge of a bustling city whose people had forgotten how to be still. They threw themselves into work, they threw themselves into leisure and for two weeks every year they threw themselves onto sun loungers and fell asleep beside blue-tiled swimming pools.
Rarely, if ever, were they awake and not doing something diverting. If they didn’t have something to listen to, something to watch or something to do with their hands they quickly became unsettled. Diversion became a way of life; yet curiously, almost no-one paused to wonder what they were being diverted from.
The man in our story was strange, though. He craved silence; not just for its own mysterious beauty but because of what happened when he set time aside to be still and quiet. Otherness crept into the room, or disclosed itself having been there all along – he was never quite sure which.
Sometimes he had doubts. He’d chide himself for foolishness and fall back into his daily routines, but somehow he could never be content with his distractions. He worked hard, he tried to play along, but underneath all his attempts to fit in there was a restless spirit, searching this way and that for something he could not name and did not know. This otherness.
It happened that one day the urge was upon him and he set his feet upon a trail leading up through the forest to the hills behind the city. The track was barely discernable among the stinging nettles and wild flowers but every once in a while - standing drying dishes at his kitchen sink - he’d lifted his eyes and seen solitary figures veering off the highway and clambering through the undergrowth before disappearing into the maze of birch and pine. He’d stare after them, wondering what on earth they were doing in there.
“Soon I’ll know”, he thought, pushing the nettles aside with a mossy branch and grunting with the effort of the steep climb.
Within a few moments of broaching the tree-line he found himself immersed in the primal reverence of the forest; stirring leaves; the song of unseen birds; sunlight filtering through the treetop canopy; the earthy smell of new life mingling with decay. The more he walked the more he felt at one with himself and his surroundings.
Far off to his left, a narrow path climbed up a heathery bank strewn with boulders to the crest of the summit, but the distant sound of running water roused his curiosity and drew him further down into the depths of the forest.
Making his way across a carpet of brown pine needles. he emerged into a small clearing where a little stream gurgled its way through a gully. And there they were – sitting on fallen trees and boulders as if they’d been waiting for him to arrive. Four women and two men, none of whom he recognised but who welcomed him with smiling eyes like long lost friends.
“Sit down” said a young woman with auburn hair, patting the tree stump beside her. “This is where it happens”.
Such was the rightness of being there that he did as she asked without consciously forming the obvious question in his mind: “What happens?”.
“What do I do now?” he asked, looking into her eyes with a calm curiosity.
“Just wait and listen” she said. “And be. Soon you’ll understand”.
Lowering his head, he closed his eyes for a moment and slowed his breathing in readiness for whatever was about to happen. And then he felt it - a sudden, qualitative change in atmosphere like an unblocking of the senses. He felt more real; more present.
Opening his eyes, he saw a window hanging in mid air about twelve feet in front of him. It was white in colour, unglazed, and with one horizontal and one vertical slat. Translucent white curtains stirred gently at either side.
Through the frame, where the forest should have been, he saw a clear sky of eggshell blue which would have been unremarkable if he’d seen it anywhere else. Yet the more he gazed, the more he became aware that he was staring into the world of the otherness.
A stiff breeze from beyond cooled his face and made the curtains billow like washing on a clothesline. It felt like an invitation – something addressed to him – and he made the only response he could think of; inhaling deeply to fill his lungs with the essence of that place. His soul quickened with its goodness. Though he couldn’t describe the scent, from that moment onward any of his favourite smells – brewing coffee, a Sunday roast, his lover’s perfume, a wild rose – could evoke something of this moment, though never quite capture it
And then he heard the voices, carried on the same wind: hints of conversation in languages he couldn’t understand; laughter; singing; the murmurs of a vast crowd. The air was heavy with the weight of unseen presence. There were people beyond that window, but instinctively he knew there was something different about them. He felt like a child sitting on a darkened stairway, listening in as the adults talked and joked in the next room. Hearing them speak brought a yearning to be more than he was; to be better than he was.
As he listened, the voices began to tail off into a deep, expectant hush.
And then, from the otherness, came a word spoken from eternity: spoken for all that has ever been, but in this moment spoken only for him.
It sounded like the voice of an old friend he had not yet made, and it said:
“Come and see”.
In later years he couldn’t remember if the words that rose within him passed his lips or simply sounded in his heart, but everything within him said “I will”.
With that, the window faded from sight, and though sad that the moment had passed, he now knew the goal of his heart’s longing. The one who’d called him; the one who’d fashioned such a world. For the hints and shadows of that place seemed to him more real than the stones and trees around him or the silvery brook tumbling down off the hillside. Yet for all that, he loved them more for having tasted something of the glory that lay within and beyond them.
The others stood up and moved toward him, gathering him in a group embrace. “Do you see now?” said a smiling older man; grey haired and slight of frame. “There is more! You were right to think it!”.
“Nothing is ordinary” added the other man; tall, with a black beard. “The poet Hopkins was right - Everything is charged with grandeur. The otherness is all around us all the time if we only have eyes to see and ears to hear”.
“You have to learn how to live in this world mindful of what you’ve discovered” said the auburn-haired girl. “You have to stay in touch with the truth of the otherness.”
A heavy-set older woman nodded in agreement: “That’s why we come here. It’s hard to keep remembering. Things have a habit of fading when you get back to the city and its ways. Be mindful of that, son. We need this time. And we need each other to stay strong.”
And he did stay strong, for many years. Leisurely visits to the woods bred a deep faith in the reality of the otherness.
Each day, as he went about his life, he’d find himself seeing signs of the otherness in the most unexpected places and his heart would lift because he knew that there was this hidden life deep down in the depths of things. In the ordinary tasks of the day, in the lives of the people he met, in the beauty of the turning world.
Yet as time passed, the weariness of living among people who dismissed the very idea of otherness began to grind him down. No matter how he tried to put his experience into words, no matter how often he encouraged them to visit the woods for themselves, it seemed to make little or no difference. They were rarely still. They were always distracted. Even those who on occasion ventured up to the woods with him rarely saw the window and what lay beyond.
He grew despondent, and His visits to the woods grew less frequent. He started avoiding the other folk who visited the forest. The spells of stillness and silence that had marked his days were discarded for noise and busyness. He began to throw himself into everything he did to avoid the troubling thoughts that came to mind when he was on his own. Materially, he prospered. But he was no longer at home with himself.
His city-friends confided that they were glad he’d got past that strange phase he’d been in. Yet the truth was, his heart was growing cold. Beneath the surface, he felt hollow. Rather than expanding, his life seemed to be contracting to something vanishingly small.
Standing at the kitchen sink one evening, he saw a flash of auburn hair disappearing into the forest; and unbidden, an echo of that voice he’d heard from beyond the window all those years ago filled his mind: “Come and see” it said, in the same measured, accepting tones.
Setting down his tea-towel, he pulled on his walking shoes, picked up the mossy branch that sat at the back door, and started the long climb up the nettled hillside to where the trees, the window, and another way of living beckoned.
A way that realized that in the maelstrom of modern life, stillness and silence and disciplined attention are the threshold not only to the presence of God, but the presence of our own true selves.
So I took myself off to a wee house in the mountains with a couple of books and spent some time going back to basics and asking myself prayerfully what it was that I really want to be about in ministry because deep in my heart I felt I wasn’t finding it there.
And over the course of that time, those desires crystallised around four key things. I realised that what I need to feel fulfilled, not just in ministry, but in life, are these four things:
Space, Settledness, Significance and Silence.
Once I’d come to that understanding, I realised that I wasn’t going to find enough of those to sustain me in community ministry, and that meant it was time to move on.
So here we are – five years plus in the parish. And though no parish is a panacea, we have more space, both literally and metaphorically; we’re now more settled in a community, and significant things have happened and are happening in the work that’s going on here.
But silence? Well, that’s the weakest link. Always has been and always will be, I reckon,
I’ve been thinking a lot about silence and her twin sister solitude over the past few weeks, largely because I’ve been reading the Irish poet and theologian John O’Donohue and it’s something very close to his heart.
O’Donohue says there’s a place in the soul that neither space nor time nor flesh can touch. This is the eternal place within us. It would be a lovely gift to yourself, he says, to go there more often – to be nourished, strengthened and renewed. But the only threshold to that place is the silence of solitude.
The mystic Thomas A Kempis picks up the same theme in words that many of us would recognise as the call of our own hearts: “O God the Truth, I am often wearied in reading and hearing many things. In you is all I wish for and desire. Let all who teach fall silent, let all things created fall speechless before you. Do you alone speak to me”.
There’s a basic law here of the spiritual life being expressed here. A law that we go against to the detriment of our souls. The only way to a deepening relationship with God is through the disciplines of solitude and silence.
Why? Because we need to find that still centre within ourselves from which we can respond to the myriad demands on our time and energy and emotions. If we spend no time there, we’ll be at the mercy of everything and everyone and before long those demands will grind us down.
O’Donohue argues that one of the reasons people are suffering from stress so much these days isn’t that they are doing stressful things, but that they allow so little time for silence.
The modern world conspires against silence and we have to be utterly countercultural to recover it. We have to switch off the TV, or the laptop, or the i-Pod, or the mobile. We have to put down the book or the newspaper for a while. We have to do what feels wholly unnatural at the beginning, and create ways to keep company with ourselves and with God for a while. Praying through the day, reflecting on a line or two of Scripture. Anything to get ourselves back in the place where we’re still enough to hear God speak to us.
I don’t intend to expound the Biblical passage we read this morning, - we’ll keep that for another day when I’ve swotted up on Revelation – but I chose it for one beautiful line. “When the Lamb broke open the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven for about half an hour”.
Silence in heaven. Can you imagine the hush and the reverent expectancy of those moments? And what follows? Prayer flows out of the silence as a sweet offering to God, and in response to those prayers, God makes things happen on the earth.
Silence flows into prayer, which flows into activity. How often we try to make that river flow the other way.
We rush into activity without pausing to touch base with the one in whom all things hold together.
This morning, if you’re stressed, is it because you’re never still enough to listen either to yourself or to God?
If you’re feeling out of touch with yourself or God, is it because you’ve ignored the invitation to step over the threshold and experience silence and solitude for a wee while?
When were you last still and prayerful? How can that discipline become a part of your life’s pattern? How much longer can you go on without it?
Let me close with a parable that touches on these themes, and I’ll leave it with you to reflect on without further comment.
Once upon a time there was a man who lived on the edge of a bustling city whose people had forgotten how to be still. They threw themselves into work, they threw themselves into leisure and for two weeks every year they threw themselves onto sun loungers and fell asleep beside blue-tiled swimming pools.
Rarely, if ever, were they awake and not doing something diverting. If they didn’t have something to listen to, something to watch or something to do with their hands they quickly became unsettled. Diversion became a way of life; yet curiously, almost no-one paused to wonder what they were being diverted from.
The man in our story was strange, though. He craved silence; not just for its own mysterious beauty but because of what happened when he set time aside to be still and quiet. Otherness crept into the room, or disclosed itself having been there all along – he was never quite sure which.
Sometimes he had doubts. He’d chide himself for foolishness and fall back into his daily routines, but somehow he could never be content with his distractions. He worked hard, he tried to play along, but underneath all his attempts to fit in there was a restless spirit, searching this way and that for something he could not name and did not know. This otherness.
It happened that one day the urge was upon him and he set his feet upon a trail leading up through the forest to the hills behind the city. The track was barely discernable among the stinging nettles and wild flowers but every once in a while - standing drying dishes at his kitchen sink - he’d lifted his eyes and seen solitary figures veering off the highway and clambering through the undergrowth before disappearing into the maze of birch and pine. He’d stare after them, wondering what on earth they were doing in there.
“Soon I’ll know”, he thought, pushing the nettles aside with a mossy branch and grunting with the effort of the steep climb.
Within a few moments of broaching the tree-line he found himself immersed in the primal reverence of the forest; stirring leaves; the song of unseen birds; sunlight filtering through the treetop canopy; the earthy smell of new life mingling with decay. The more he walked the more he felt at one with himself and his surroundings.
Far off to his left, a narrow path climbed up a heathery bank strewn with boulders to the crest of the summit, but the distant sound of running water roused his curiosity and drew him further down into the depths of the forest.
Making his way across a carpet of brown pine needles. he emerged into a small clearing where a little stream gurgled its way through a gully. And there they were – sitting on fallen trees and boulders as if they’d been waiting for him to arrive. Four women and two men, none of whom he recognised but who welcomed him with smiling eyes like long lost friends.
“Sit down” said a young woman with auburn hair, patting the tree stump beside her. “This is where it happens”.
Such was the rightness of being there that he did as she asked without consciously forming the obvious question in his mind: “What happens?”.
“What do I do now?” he asked, looking into her eyes with a calm curiosity.
“Just wait and listen” she said. “And be. Soon you’ll understand”.
Lowering his head, he closed his eyes for a moment and slowed his breathing in readiness for whatever was about to happen. And then he felt it - a sudden, qualitative change in atmosphere like an unblocking of the senses. He felt more real; more present.
Opening his eyes, he saw a window hanging in mid air about twelve feet in front of him. It was white in colour, unglazed, and with one horizontal and one vertical slat. Translucent white curtains stirred gently at either side.
Through the frame, where the forest should have been, he saw a clear sky of eggshell blue which would have been unremarkable if he’d seen it anywhere else. Yet the more he gazed, the more he became aware that he was staring into the world of the otherness.
A stiff breeze from beyond cooled his face and made the curtains billow like washing on a clothesline. It felt like an invitation – something addressed to him – and he made the only response he could think of; inhaling deeply to fill his lungs with the essence of that place. His soul quickened with its goodness. Though he couldn’t describe the scent, from that moment onward any of his favourite smells – brewing coffee, a Sunday roast, his lover’s perfume, a wild rose – could evoke something of this moment, though never quite capture it
And then he heard the voices, carried on the same wind: hints of conversation in languages he couldn’t understand; laughter; singing; the murmurs of a vast crowd. The air was heavy with the weight of unseen presence. There were people beyond that window, but instinctively he knew there was something different about them. He felt like a child sitting on a darkened stairway, listening in as the adults talked and joked in the next room. Hearing them speak brought a yearning to be more than he was; to be better than he was.
As he listened, the voices began to tail off into a deep, expectant hush.
And then, from the otherness, came a word spoken from eternity: spoken for all that has ever been, but in this moment spoken only for him.
It sounded like the voice of an old friend he had not yet made, and it said:
“Come and see”.
In later years he couldn’t remember if the words that rose within him passed his lips or simply sounded in his heart, but everything within him said “I will”.
With that, the window faded from sight, and though sad that the moment had passed, he now knew the goal of his heart’s longing. The one who’d called him; the one who’d fashioned such a world. For the hints and shadows of that place seemed to him more real than the stones and trees around him or the silvery brook tumbling down off the hillside. Yet for all that, he loved them more for having tasted something of the glory that lay within and beyond them.
The others stood up and moved toward him, gathering him in a group embrace. “Do you see now?” said a smiling older man; grey haired and slight of frame. “There is more! You were right to think it!”.
“Nothing is ordinary” added the other man; tall, with a black beard. “The poet Hopkins was right - Everything is charged with grandeur. The otherness is all around us all the time if we only have eyes to see and ears to hear”.
“You have to learn how to live in this world mindful of what you’ve discovered” said the auburn-haired girl. “You have to stay in touch with the truth of the otherness.”
A heavy-set older woman nodded in agreement: “That’s why we come here. It’s hard to keep remembering. Things have a habit of fading when you get back to the city and its ways. Be mindful of that, son. We need this time. And we need each other to stay strong.”
And he did stay strong, for many years. Leisurely visits to the woods bred a deep faith in the reality of the otherness.
Each day, as he went about his life, he’d find himself seeing signs of the otherness in the most unexpected places and his heart would lift because he knew that there was this hidden life deep down in the depths of things. In the ordinary tasks of the day, in the lives of the people he met, in the beauty of the turning world.
Yet as time passed, the weariness of living among people who dismissed the very idea of otherness began to grind him down. No matter how he tried to put his experience into words, no matter how often he encouraged them to visit the woods for themselves, it seemed to make little or no difference. They were rarely still. They were always distracted. Even those who on occasion ventured up to the woods with him rarely saw the window and what lay beyond.
He grew despondent, and His visits to the woods grew less frequent. He started avoiding the other folk who visited the forest. The spells of stillness and silence that had marked his days were discarded for noise and busyness. He began to throw himself into everything he did to avoid the troubling thoughts that came to mind when he was on his own. Materially, he prospered. But he was no longer at home with himself.
His city-friends confided that they were glad he’d got past that strange phase he’d been in. Yet the truth was, his heart was growing cold. Beneath the surface, he felt hollow. Rather than expanding, his life seemed to be contracting to something vanishingly small.
Standing at the kitchen sink one evening, he saw a flash of auburn hair disappearing into the forest; and unbidden, an echo of that voice he’d heard from beyond the window all those years ago filled his mind: “Come and see” it said, in the same measured, accepting tones.
Setting down his tea-towel, he pulled on his walking shoes, picked up the mossy branch that sat at the back door, and started the long climb up the nettled hillside to where the trees, the window, and another way of living beckoned.
A way that realized that in the maelstrom of modern life, stillness and silence and disciplined attention are the threshold not only to the presence of God, but the presence of our own true selves.
Life with a big 'L'
We learn more about people from the questions they ask than the answers they give, Voltaire once said.
7 days of people watching at the General Assembly confirmed that for me last week. After just a few of the debates you could tell which commissioners were asking questions because they were genuinely interested, and which were up on their hind legs because they just liked the sound of their own voice.
The questions we ask say a lot about us.
Today’s story revolves around a question and a questioner, and versions of this story are found in three of the four gospels, each of them supplying a little more of the detail.
Matthew tells us that this rich man who came to see Jesus was young, and Luke tells us he was a ruler, so the story’s often called the story of the Rich Young Ruler.
And we know very little about him, other than what we read in these few verses. Some commentators reckon he was something of a show-off, trying to impress Jesus with his clean record, and others think he was genuine – seriously trying to work out what life is all about.
And I tend to think he was genuine. If he wanted to blow his own trumpet he could have asked his question when there were lots of people around to hear; he wouldn’t have waited ‘til Jesus was on his way out of the city.
My guess is that he’d probably spent ages hanging around nervously, as you do in these situations, watching and waiting for an opportunity to go up and speak to Jesus. That’s what folk do around famous people, when they’re looking for an autograph or a conversation.
But he spent so long trying to screw up his courage, that he nearly missed his chance. Jesus was heading off again, so in desperation the young man runs up, kneels before him, and blurts out his question:“Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?”.
Now it’d be much easier to understand the sense of that question if you’d actually been there.
How did those words tumble out of his mouth? How did he look when he said them? Was this about self-aggrandisement? Or was there an edge of desperation in his voice because he’d been down every avenue he could think of and he still couldn’t find the answer.
Well, again, I think it’s the latter. This could have been an extravagant show designed to flatter Jesus, but I think it’s genuine. Christ was no fool, and Mark tells us that having looked at this young man, and heard his question, he loved him.
“Good Teacher, what must I do to receive eternal life?”
Now for us to hear and understand that question correctly, we need a bit of background.
Because when you and I hear the phrase ‘eternal life’, straight away we think about the afterlife, as though this young man were asking how he could get to heaven.
But in the context of the time, he’d have meant something completely different. The Jews had little concept of life after death, or heaven as the final destination for our spirits. Those ideas are rarely spoken of in the Old Testament.
In Jewish understanding, the consummation of all things comes not when we go to heaven, but when God comes to us; when the quality of life God enjoys finally infuses and suffuses the earth once and for all, and the kingdom finally comes.
So for the Jewish mind of the day, ‘eternal life’ wasn’t a synonym for heaven. It’s that quality of life that’s characteristic of God, and which those who love God aspire to for themselves and for the world. It’s life with a capital L – real Life, true Life, God’s Life, breaking through in the here and now.
So when this young man asks about ‘eternal life’ he’s really saying “How can I be more in touch with God? How can I experience more of his life within me?”
And I’m intrigued by what Jesus has to say next. Surely this is the cue to launch out on a big discourse about prayer and worship and synagogue attendance and meditating on the scriptures? All the things you and I would have been saying if we’d been asked.
But he doesn’t do that. Instead he says:
“Well, you know the commandments. Don’t murder. Don’t commit adultery, don’t steal; don’t make false accusations; don’t cheat; respect your father and your mother”.
And you can almost hear the young man’s disappointment at that reply. “Teacher, I’ve obeyed all these commandments since I was young”
I’ve done all of that, he says, and it doesn’t work. It hasn’t brought me any closer to God. There has to be more to it than this.
And of course, there is.
Jesus has been setting him up. And he’s been setting us up too, because he wants us to learn the same lesson.
Listen to that list of commandments again. “Don’t murder. Don’t commit adultery, don’t steal; don’t make false accusations; don’t cheat; respect your father and your mother”.
Do you notice anything strange about that list? I have to confess, I’ve known this passage for years and it’s only in the past wee while that the penny’s dropped with me.
What I’d completely overlooked is that in this list Jesus only mentions about half of the ten commandments – the ones that speak about our relationships with other people.
The ones he doesn’t mention are the first four. The ones that speak about our relationship with God. “You shall have no other Gods before me. You shall not bow down to any other God. You shall honour God’s name. You shall not worship things your hands have made”
They’re all missing. But the young man doesn’t notice. And neither do we, if we’re honest. And that’s exactly the point.
The way of religion is always to reduce faith from a living relationship with the God who made us, to a dry moral code that tells us how to behave. But that can’t satisfy anyone. That’s why this young man’s heart was empty. Maybe that’s why many of our churches are empty too.
One of the sad truths about today’s world is that people looking to connect with God often don’t see the church as the place where that happens. And that’s a travesty.
The very heart of our faith is the I-Thou relationship that’s expressed in the first four commandments; God calling you and me to reckless, self-abandoning love for him.
Without that relationship, our hearts will be as unfulfilled as that of the rich young ruler, who came to Jesus with an impeccable moral record, but knew full well that he hadn’t really tasted eternal life. Life with a capital L.
In the latter chapters of John’s gospel, as Jesus speaks with his disciples, he spells out for them exactly what eternal life is. Praying for them, knowing full well that the next day he would be crucified, this is what he says:
“Father, the time has come. Glorify your Son, that your Son may glorify you. 2For you granted him authority over all people that he might give eternal life to all those you have given him. 3Now this is eternal life: that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent.”
Maybe being a Christian is just this – wakening up to the reality that God doesn’t want your mere obedience. He wants you, with a passion. And he wants to give you life. With a capital L.
Once you’ve realised that, you’re on your way.
The Irish poet and theologian John O’Donohue says this: “once the soul awakens you can never go back. From then on you’re inflamed with a special longing which will never again let you linger in the lowlands of complacency and partial fulfilment. The eternal makes you urgent”.
There’s a question to mull over today. Is there an urgency in your heart about the things of God?
Or is that desire, such as it is, being stifled by other things?
That was certainly the case with the rich young man, and Christ knew it. His wealth was choking him. It had become an idol.
“You need only one thing” Jesus said. Go and sell all you have and give the money to the poor; and then come and follow me”
Only one thing,, maybe, but the one thing he found hardest to do.
Now don’t get distracted by the business of him giving up his money. This isn’t a black and white statement that rich is bad and poor is good. Jesus knew plenty of people who had money and he didn’t ask them to give all their wealth away.
This part of their discussion isn’t really about riches. It’s about idolatry. It’s about getting rid of whatever pushes God from his rightful place in our lives.
For this young man, it was wealth. Wealth had become an idol for him, and he hadn’t even realised it. For you and me, it could be a host of other things, some of them ignoble, but some of them noble. An idol isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It might be a good thing that we’re relating to in the wrong way.
One of the phrases that’s used a lot at mealtimes in our house at the moment is ‘don’t fill yourself up with that’. The kids tend to dive in and gulp down their water and scoff their bread before they get into the meal proper.
Here’s a question that might help reveal some of our idols. What do we tend to ‘fill up on’, other than God. What are the things that in subtle, and sometimes not-so-subtle ways. tend to crowd God out of our lives?
Work can become an idol for some of us. We work hard; long hours often, and it seems hard to find room for God in the middle of all of that. But is there a little part of us that quite likes it that way? Does that help to keep God at a safe distance?
Do we need to work quite so hard? Do we really need those things that we’re working so hard to be able to afford?
Maybe our pastimes have become an idol. We can’t make time to read or pray or get to church regularly, but there are other things that never seem to fall out of the diary. We make unbreakable commitments to our pleasures.
And on a deeper level, some of us make idols of our feelings. Our bitterness, our lust, our envy, our frustrations. They can take over us and end up dominating the way we think about ourselves and relate to others. God takes second place to our concerns and desires rather than helping us to befriend them and put them into some kind of order.
Well all have our idols. And God knows only too well what they are.
Mark tells us that Jesus looked straight at the young man with love and said “You need only do this one thing. Give up your riches”.
Is there one thing God’s asking you to give up today? One thing which, if you’re honest with yourself, you know takes a higher priority than he does?
It won’t be easy. It’s hard giving up your idols. But if Jesus is right, it’s even harder to enter the Kingdom of heaven while you’re still holding onto them.
Did this young man enter the Kingdom and begin to experience eternal life? Well, Mark doesn’t tell us. All we know is that he left Jesus’ company with a heavy heart and a lot to think about that day.
But right at the end of Mark’s gospel, there’s a strange incident that might give us an answer.
In his account of Jesus’ arrest in the Garden of Gethsemane, Mark gives us a little piece of detail that none of the other gospel writers include. He tells us that “a young man, wearing nothing but a linen garment, was following Jesus. When (the soldiers) seized him, he fled, naked leaving his garment behind. Mark 14:51.
Of course, the conspiracy theorists have a field day with that one, involving as it does the spicy elements of youth, nakedness and violence. But one plausible suggestion for that strange story is that this is the rich young man, finally come to show Jesus that he’s done what he’d been asked to do. That he’d given away everything but the clothes he was standing up in.
Rightly understood, the gospel of Jesus Christ demands everything of us. Everything. Self, wealth, relationships, career, time, energy. Everything we are, everything we possess, must come under his Lordship.
But, says Christ, those who respond with passion and urgency will receive far more in return – they will begin to experience the kind of life that replenishes the heart. Life that’s real. Life that’s Eternal. Life with a big L- both now and hereafter.
7 days of people watching at the General Assembly confirmed that for me last week. After just a few of the debates you could tell which commissioners were asking questions because they were genuinely interested, and which were up on their hind legs because they just liked the sound of their own voice.
The questions we ask say a lot about us.
Today’s story revolves around a question and a questioner, and versions of this story are found in three of the four gospels, each of them supplying a little more of the detail.
Matthew tells us that this rich man who came to see Jesus was young, and Luke tells us he was a ruler, so the story’s often called the story of the Rich Young Ruler.
And we know very little about him, other than what we read in these few verses. Some commentators reckon he was something of a show-off, trying to impress Jesus with his clean record, and others think he was genuine – seriously trying to work out what life is all about.
And I tend to think he was genuine. If he wanted to blow his own trumpet he could have asked his question when there were lots of people around to hear; he wouldn’t have waited ‘til Jesus was on his way out of the city.
My guess is that he’d probably spent ages hanging around nervously, as you do in these situations, watching and waiting for an opportunity to go up and speak to Jesus. That’s what folk do around famous people, when they’re looking for an autograph or a conversation.
But he spent so long trying to screw up his courage, that he nearly missed his chance. Jesus was heading off again, so in desperation the young man runs up, kneels before him, and blurts out his question:“Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?”.
Now it’d be much easier to understand the sense of that question if you’d actually been there.
How did those words tumble out of his mouth? How did he look when he said them? Was this about self-aggrandisement? Or was there an edge of desperation in his voice because he’d been down every avenue he could think of and he still couldn’t find the answer.
Well, again, I think it’s the latter. This could have been an extravagant show designed to flatter Jesus, but I think it’s genuine. Christ was no fool, and Mark tells us that having looked at this young man, and heard his question, he loved him.
“Good Teacher, what must I do to receive eternal life?”
Now for us to hear and understand that question correctly, we need a bit of background.
Because when you and I hear the phrase ‘eternal life’, straight away we think about the afterlife, as though this young man were asking how he could get to heaven.
But in the context of the time, he’d have meant something completely different. The Jews had little concept of life after death, or heaven as the final destination for our spirits. Those ideas are rarely spoken of in the Old Testament.
In Jewish understanding, the consummation of all things comes not when we go to heaven, but when God comes to us; when the quality of life God enjoys finally infuses and suffuses the earth once and for all, and the kingdom finally comes.
So for the Jewish mind of the day, ‘eternal life’ wasn’t a synonym for heaven. It’s that quality of life that’s characteristic of God, and which those who love God aspire to for themselves and for the world. It’s life with a capital L – real Life, true Life, God’s Life, breaking through in the here and now.
So when this young man asks about ‘eternal life’ he’s really saying “How can I be more in touch with God? How can I experience more of his life within me?”
And I’m intrigued by what Jesus has to say next. Surely this is the cue to launch out on a big discourse about prayer and worship and synagogue attendance and meditating on the scriptures? All the things you and I would have been saying if we’d been asked.
But he doesn’t do that. Instead he says:
“Well, you know the commandments. Don’t murder. Don’t commit adultery, don’t steal; don’t make false accusations; don’t cheat; respect your father and your mother”.
And you can almost hear the young man’s disappointment at that reply. “Teacher, I’ve obeyed all these commandments since I was young”
I’ve done all of that, he says, and it doesn’t work. It hasn’t brought me any closer to God. There has to be more to it than this.
And of course, there is.
Jesus has been setting him up. And he’s been setting us up too, because he wants us to learn the same lesson.
Listen to that list of commandments again. “Don’t murder. Don’t commit adultery, don’t steal; don’t make false accusations; don’t cheat; respect your father and your mother”.
Do you notice anything strange about that list? I have to confess, I’ve known this passage for years and it’s only in the past wee while that the penny’s dropped with me.
What I’d completely overlooked is that in this list Jesus only mentions about half of the ten commandments – the ones that speak about our relationships with other people.
The ones he doesn’t mention are the first four. The ones that speak about our relationship with God. “You shall have no other Gods before me. You shall not bow down to any other God. You shall honour God’s name. You shall not worship things your hands have made”
They’re all missing. But the young man doesn’t notice. And neither do we, if we’re honest. And that’s exactly the point.
The way of religion is always to reduce faith from a living relationship with the God who made us, to a dry moral code that tells us how to behave. But that can’t satisfy anyone. That’s why this young man’s heart was empty. Maybe that’s why many of our churches are empty too.
One of the sad truths about today’s world is that people looking to connect with God often don’t see the church as the place where that happens. And that’s a travesty.
The very heart of our faith is the I-Thou relationship that’s expressed in the first four commandments; God calling you and me to reckless, self-abandoning love for him.
Without that relationship, our hearts will be as unfulfilled as that of the rich young ruler, who came to Jesus with an impeccable moral record, but knew full well that he hadn’t really tasted eternal life. Life with a capital L.
In the latter chapters of John’s gospel, as Jesus speaks with his disciples, he spells out for them exactly what eternal life is. Praying for them, knowing full well that the next day he would be crucified, this is what he says:
“Father, the time has come. Glorify your Son, that your Son may glorify you. 2For you granted him authority over all people that he might give eternal life to all those you have given him. 3Now this is eternal life: that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent.”
Maybe being a Christian is just this – wakening up to the reality that God doesn’t want your mere obedience. He wants you, with a passion. And he wants to give you life. With a capital L.
Once you’ve realised that, you’re on your way.
The Irish poet and theologian John O’Donohue says this: “once the soul awakens you can never go back. From then on you’re inflamed with a special longing which will never again let you linger in the lowlands of complacency and partial fulfilment. The eternal makes you urgent”.
There’s a question to mull over today. Is there an urgency in your heart about the things of God?
Or is that desire, such as it is, being stifled by other things?
That was certainly the case with the rich young man, and Christ knew it. His wealth was choking him. It had become an idol.
“You need only one thing” Jesus said. Go and sell all you have and give the money to the poor; and then come and follow me”
Only one thing,, maybe, but the one thing he found hardest to do.
Now don’t get distracted by the business of him giving up his money. This isn’t a black and white statement that rich is bad and poor is good. Jesus knew plenty of people who had money and he didn’t ask them to give all their wealth away.
This part of their discussion isn’t really about riches. It’s about idolatry. It’s about getting rid of whatever pushes God from his rightful place in our lives.
For this young man, it was wealth. Wealth had become an idol for him, and he hadn’t even realised it. For you and me, it could be a host of other things, some of them ignoble, but some of them noble. An idol isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It might be a good thing that we’re relating to in the wrong way.
One of the phrases that’s used a lot at mealtimes in our house at the moment is ‘don’t fill yourself up with that’. The kids tend to dive in and gulp down their water and scoff their bread before they get into the meal proper.
Here’s a question that might help reveal some of our idols. What do we tend to ‘fill up on’, other than God. What are the things that in subtle, and sometimes not-so-subtle ways. tend to crowd God out of our lives?
Work can become an idol for some of us. We work hard; long hours often, and it seems hard to find room for God in the middle of all of that. But is there a little part of us that quite likes it that way? Does that help to keep God at a safe distance?
Do we need to work quite so hard? Do we really need those things that we’re working so hard to be able to afford?
Maybe our pastimes have become an idol. We can’t make time to read or pray or get to church regularly, but there are other things that never seem to fall out of the diary. We make unbreakable commitments to our pleasures.
And on a deeper level, some of us make idols of our feelings. Our bitterness, our lust, our envy, our frustrations. They can take over us and end up dominating the way we think about ourselves and relate to others. God takes second place to our concerns and desires rather than helping us to befriend them and put them into some kind of order.
Well all have our idols. And God knows only too well what they are.
Mark tells us that Jesus looked straight at the young man with love and said “You need only do this one thing. Give up your riches”.
Is there one thing God’s asking you to give up today? One thing which, if you’re honest with yourself, you know takes a higher priority than he does?
It won’t be easy. It’s hard giving up your idols. But if Jesus is right, it’s even harder to enter the Kingdom of heaven while you’re still holding onto them.
Did this young man enter the Kingdom and begin to experience eternal life? Well, Mark doesn’t tell us. All we know is that he left Jesus’ company with a heavy heart and a lot to think about that day.
But right at the end of Mark’s gospel, there’s a strange incident that might give us an answer.
In his account of Jesus’ arrest in the Garden of Gethsemane, Mark gives us a little piece of detail that none of the other gospel writers include. He tells us that “a young man, wearing nothing but a linen garment, was following Jesus. When (the soldiers) seized him, he fled, naked leaving his garment behind. Mark 14:51.
Of course, the conspiracy theorists have a field day with that one, involving as it does the spicy elements of youth, nakedness and violence. But one plausible suggestion for that strange story is that this is the rich young man, finally come to show Jesus that he’s done what he’d been asked to do. That he’d given away everything but the clothes he was standing up in.
Rightly understood, the gospel of Jesus Christ demands everything of us. Everything. Self, wealth, relationships, career, time, energy. Everything we are, everything we possess, must come under his Lordship.
But, says Christ, those who respond with passion and urgency will receive far more in return – they will begin to experience the kind of life that replenishes the heart. Life that’s real. Life that’s Eternal. Life with a big L- both now and hereafter.
Christian Aid reflection
Stand with me for a moment at the edge of Matopeni.
Timbered shacks stretching miles into the distance. The stench of filth and decay mingling with the smell of open fires and food being prepared.
Children running barefoot through the reek, ragged but smiling. The old sleeping away their last weeks and months indoors, away from the sunlight; the middle aged – and middle age in these places is your mid-twenties – going about what work they can find to stave off hunger and desperation. Their eyes tell a story.
How would you feel, walking over the open sewers of Matopeni; stepping gingerly on the springy planks that can’t hold back the river of filth when the rains come?
How would you feel, entering one of these shacks where one room houses ten people? How would you feel, being offered whatever food and drink hospitality could muster? How would you feel, listening to the conversation and the stories of what makes for these peoples’ lives? How would you feel when you got back home and tried to pick up the threads of your own life?
Some of us have had that experience. Maybe not in Matopeni, but in India or Bangladesh, or other parts of Africa or Asia. We’ve known the jarring horror of the realisation that huge swathes of the world, vast stretches of urban sprawl, lack the most basic essentials that we take utterly for granted in this country. Clean water, a steady supply of power, sanitation, food, a safe, clean home to live in.
For those of us brought up in the West, standing at the edge of Matopeni, or places like it, can awaken a sense of despair that takes a long time to recover from, because the problems seem so vast; so utterly insoluble.
But when Catherine Kithuku and Catherine Nyaata look out on Matopeni, they see something different. They see a vision of change.
A person with vision can look at the worst set of circumstances and see the potential that lies within them.
I’ve been finding that out again recently as I’ve read a book called ‘The Jesus Way’ by Eugene Peterson. In one chapter he writes about the idea of holiness – God’s coming close to us – and talks about a well known passage in the book of Isaiah where the prophet has an overwhelming vision of God which re-sets the whole course of his life.
Angels thunder, the temple shakes and Isaiah is undone: “Woe to me” he cries “I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, the Lord Almighty”.
But an angel touches his lips with a live coal, purifiying him, and sends him out on his life’s vocation as a prophet.
Now that vision, which is celebrated by both Jews and Christians alike, takes place in the Jerusalem temple – which is, of course, exactly the kind of place you’d expect visions to occur
But Peterson’s point is that that encounter with God is not normative. And he cites two others envisionings which take place in much less conducive surroundings.
The first is that of Moses – standing in the barren wastelands of Midian with sheep dung on his shoes. A murderer on the run, tending someone else’s flocks somewhere in the back of beyond. And it’s there, in the midst of seeming hopelessness that the life-changing encounter with God comes by way of a burning bush.
And the second vision is the one we read this morning from the book of Revelation. A book that in coded language conspired against the utter dominance of Rome in those days and promised that in the struggle between good and evil there could only ever be one winner – the God of our Lord Jesus Christ.
But who pens these words? The Apostle John in exile; stuck alone on the island of Patmos waiting for death.
And to whom does he write them? Fledgling Christian congregations facing not just scorn and ridicule, but active persecution from Rome and the Jewish communities from whom they’ve emerged.
Do you see the point Peterson’s trying to make?
Visions don’t just come in the heady spiritual atmosphere of the temple. They come in the baked, stony planes of Midian. They come in an arid prison cell in Patmos, They come amid the flies and stench of Matopeni.
They come when people, in the face of all the evidence that screams ‘hopelessness’ at them, open themselves up to what God wants to do, and will do, if his people can find their courage and keep faith.
Christian Aid’s Theme this year is POVERTY – LET’S END IT, which sounds hopelessly naïve until you remember that just a fraction of the money that’s disappeared down the black hole of the global recession would have been enough to sort out the problems of the 2/3 world. The money has always been there to do it – what’s been missing is the popular will to make it happen.
We might wonder if things will ever change. But in a way, that’s not the question. The question is, is it part of God’s vision and plan that poverty and injustice be ended, and the answer to that is an unequivocal ‘yes’.
In Revelation, John writes of a day when heaven and earth will be one, when God will dwell with his people, and there will be “no more death or grief or crying or pain”. But he’s by no means the first to cast that vision.
Listen to these words from the prophet Isaiah, chapter 65, which were written 8 centuries earlier
“The Lord says “I am making a new earth and new heavens. The new Jerusalem I make will be full of joy, and her people will be happy. There will be no weeping there, no calling for help. Babies will no longer die in infancy, and all people will live out their life span. The work they do will be successful and their children will not meet with disaster”.
What I love about that passage is that those words aren’t just about a spiritualised future when all the wrongs will be righted. They’re about a spiritualised now. They’re earthy. Isaiah’s talking about real people here – not disembodied spirits. He’s talking about real people who are working, having children, living their lives and even dying. But in a world where poverty and injustice are things of the past.
That’s’ what God wants to see, not just in the future, but now. And if that is part of God’s vision for the world, the question is ‘what can we do to help make that vision a reality?’. How can we help make his Kingdom come?”
The scale of the task is huge, but it reminds me of the old joke – “How do you eat an elephant?” – “One bite at a time”.
Catherine Nyaata’s project hasn’t changed Kiambiu from a slum to a leafy suburb. But they have got drains now, and they have got toilets and showers. It’s a small beginning, but it’s a start. It’s inspired her community to think bigger, and it’s given Catherine Kithuku hope that the same can happen in Matopeni.
For those women, and the communities they represent, the vision of a changed world that John and Isaiah hold out to us this morning isn’t something vague or ephemeral. It’s as solid as the ground we walk on because they are sure it’s part of God’s plan for the world. It’s coming is as sure as the dawn.
But in order for it to become a lived reality, it takes people like them, and like us, to commit to the vision. Not to stand, despairing on the margins, feeling nothing can be done, but taking up the cause, taking up our cans, maybe, and making the difference we can make for the sake of the coming Kingdom.
Timbered shacks stretching miles into the distance. The stench of filth and decay mingling with the smell of open fires and food being prepared.
Children running barefoot through the reek, ragged but smiling. The old sleeping away their last weeks and months indoors, away from the sunlight; the middle aged – and middle age in these places is your mid-twenties – going about what work they can find to stave off hunger and desperation. Their eyes tell a story.
How would you feel, walking over the open sewers of Matopeni; stepping gingerly on the springy planks that can’t hold back the river of filth when the rains come?
How would you feel, entering one of these shacks where one room houses ten people? How would you feel, being offered whatever food and drink hospitality could muster? How would you feel, listening to the conversation and the stories of what makes for these peoples’ lives? How would you feel when you got back home and tried to pick up the threads of your own life?
Some of us have had that experience. Maybe not in Matopeni, but in India or Bangladesh, or other parts of Africa or Asia. We’ve known the jarring horror of the realisation that huge swathes of the world, vast stretches of urban sprawl, lack the most basic essentials that we take utterly for granted in this country. Clean water, a steady supply of power, sanitation, food, a safe, clean home to live in.
For those of us brought up in the West, standing at the edge of Matopeni, or places like it, can awaken a sense of despair that takes a long time to recover from, because the problems seem so vast; so utterly insoluble.
But when Catherine Kithuku and Catherine Nyaata look out on Matopeni, they see something different. They see a vision of change.
A person with vision can look at the worst set of circumstances and see the potential that lies within them.
I’ve been finding that out again recently as I’ve read a book called ‘The Jesus Way’ by Eugene Peterson. In one chapter he writes about the idea of holiness – God’s coming close to us – and talks about a well known passage in the book of Isaiah where the prophet has an overwhelming vision of God which re-sets the whole course of his life.
Angels thunder, the temple shakes and Isaiah is undone: “Woe to me” he cries “I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, the Lord Almighty”.
But an angel touches his lips with a live coal, purifiying him, and sends him out on his life’s vocation as a prophet.
Now that vision, which is celebrated by both Jews and Christians alike, takes place in the Jerusalem temple – which is, of course, exactly the kind of place you’d expect visions to occur
But Peterson’s point is that that encounter with God is not normative. And he cites two others envisionings which take place in much less conducive surroundings.
The first is that of Moses – standing in the barren wastelands of Midian with sheep dung on his shoes. A murderer on the run, tending someone else’s flocks somewhere in the back of beyond. And it’s there, in the midst of seeming hopelessness that the life-changing encounter with God comes by way of a burning bush.
And the second vision is the one we read this morning from the book of Revelation. A book that in coded language conspired against the utter dominance of Rome in those days and promised that in the struggle between good and evil there could only ever be one winner – the God of our Lord Jesus Christ.
But who pens these words? The Apostle John in exile; stuck alone on the island of Patmos waiting for death.
And to whom does he write them? Fledgling Christian congregations facing not just scorn and ridicule, but active persecution from Rome and the Jewish communities from whom they’ve emerged.
Do you see the point Peterson’s trying to make?
Visions don’t just come in the heady spiritual atmosphere of the temple. They come in the baked, stony planes of Midian. They come in an arid prison cell in Patmos, They come amid the flies and stench of Matopeni.
They come when people, in the face of all the evidence that screams ‘hopelessness’ at them, open themselves up to what God wants to do, and will do, if his people can find their courage and keep faith.
Christian Aid’s Theme this year is POVERTY – LET’S END IT, which sounds hopelessly naïve until you remember that just a fraction of the money that’s disappeared down the black hole of the global recession would have been enough to sort out the problems of the 2/3 world. The money has always been there to do it – what’s been missing is the popular will to make it happen.
We might wonder if things will ever change. But in a way, that’s not the question. The question is, is it part of God’s vision and plan that poverty and injustice be ended, and the answer to that is an unequivocal ‘yes’.
In Revelation, John writes of a day when heaven and earth will be one, when God will dwell with his people, and there will be “no more death or grief or crying or pain”. But he’s by no means the first to cast that vision.
Listen to these words from the prophet Isaiah, chapter 65, which were written 8 centuries earlier
“The Lord says “I am making a new earth and new heavens. The new Jerusalem I make will be full of joy, and her people will be happy. There will be no weeping there, no calling for help. Babies will no longer die in infancy, and all people will live out their life span. The work they do will be successful and their children will not meet with disaster”.
What I love about that passage is that those words aren’t just about a spiritualised future when all the wrongs will be righted. They’re about a spiritualised now. They’re earthy. Isaiah’s talking about real people here – not disembodied spirits. He’s talking about real people who are working, having children, living their lives and even dying. But in a world where poverty and injustice are things of the past.
That’s’ what God wants to see, not just in the future, but now. And if that is part of God’s vision for the world, the question is ‘what can we do to help make that vision a reality?’. How can we help make his Kingdom come?”
The scale of the task is huge, but it reminds me of the old joke – “How do you eat an elephant?” – “One bite at a time”.
Catherine Nyaata’s project hasn’t changed Kiambiu from a slum to a leafy suburb. But they have got drains now, and they have got toilets and showers. It’s a small beginning, but it’s a start. It’s inspired her community to think bigger, and it’s given Catherine Kithuku hope that the same can happen in Matopeni.
For those women, and the communities they represent, the vision of a changed world that John and Isaiah hold out to us this morning isn’t something vague or ephemeral. It’s as solid as the ground we walk on because they are sure it’s part of God’s plan for the world. It’s coming is as sure as the dawn.
But in order for it to become a lived reality, it takes people like them, and like us, to commit to the vision. Not to stand, despairing on the margins, feeling nothing can be done, but taking up the cause, taking up our cans, maybe, and making the difference we can make for the sake of the coming Kingdom.
Love Wins - An Easter Day Sermon
The verdict’s in. The word’s got out. The tomb’s empty and the Lord is Risen. LOVE WINS
Boys and girls, thanks for that brilliant summary of the whole story of Easter, especially the part about the cross. It’s really important that we hear that story today because otherwise we leap from Palm Sunday to Resurrection and only the folk who made it to the Good Friday service pause to spend time thinking about Jesus’ death.
But the cross, and the story of what was happening there is what Easter’s all about.
If you look at all 4 gospels, something like 30-40% of the material is about this last week in Jesus’ life, and his crucifixion. In Mark’s gospel it’s more like 50%. One commentator went so far as to describe Mark as a ‘Passion Narrative’ with an extended introduction!
So that part of the story is hugely important. But what does the cross actually mean?
If I were to take a straw poll here this morning, I’m guessing these are some of the answers I’d get:
It’s what makes us right with God.
It’s God dealing with the problem of our sinfulness.
It’s Jesus taking the punishment that should have been ours so that we can go free.
And that’s all true.
The prophet Isaiah – 7 centuries before Christ, spoke of one who was to come – a suffering servant, and this is what he said. (Isaiah 53)
Surely he took up our infirmities and carried our sorrows, yet we considered him stricken by God, smitten by him, and afflicted. But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was upon him, and by his wounds we are healed. We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to his own way; and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.
I wonder if that was one of the Scriptures Jesus opened up with the disciples in that conversation we read about this morning?
So the cross is the great transaction that makes peace with God possible for sinful people like you and me. But the thing is, we have to close with that. We have to take hold of it for ourselves. That comes through again and again in the New Testament writings as Jesus’ followers began to make sense of everything that had happened on the cross.
Jesus’ disciple John, puts it this way – “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life”
The promise is for whom? “Whoever believes” – and that’s belief in the sense of trust. In that text there’s an offer, but also a condition.
Peace and life are what God’s offering. But the terms of that offer are surrender. Set down your old way of life; set down your determination to be your own god; set down your pride; set down your weapons. Then, and only then, will your hands will be free to receive forgiveness.
Is that a choice that you’ve made yet? Because according to Jesus, and the weight of the New Testament, it’s that choice that makes someone a Christian and nothing else.
But in truth, that’s not really what I want to speak about today because that description of what the cross is about, is part of the story, but not the whole story.
When we see the cross solely as a bit of sin-management on God’s part, we diminish what it’s really about. Because it’s so much more.
It’s not just about where we go when we die. It’s about how we choose to live in the here and now. Are we going to live according to the ways and means of the world, or the way of costly love exemplified by Christ as he went to the cross? We have choices to make. Are we going to go God’s way, or the world’s way?
Christ was faced with that kind of choice every day of life, but especially in Holy Week.
Look at what happened to him.
He rides into Jerusalem on a donkey, heralded as a king, but the people completely misread the sign. They wanted war, he, peace.
The Pharisees question his authority at every turn, endlessly looking for ways to trap him.
Judas grows dissatisfied with his methods and decides to betray him.
He sweats blood over what’s about to happen to him in Gethsemane, but his three closest friends can’t manage to stay awake and suffer with him.
He’s arrested by the Temple Guard, falsely accused, beaten, mocked and spat at by the religious leaders.
His friends run away. His closest friend Peter denies that he even knows him.
He’s ritually humiliated and brutalised by the Roman guard, flogged to within an inch of his life, and then led through the streets carrying his own cross. He’s stripped naked, nailed to the cross beam, and hoisted into the air in utter humiliation.
The people who gather to watch, abuse and vilify him even as the last breaths seep from his body. At the foot of the cross they gamble for his clothes.
He was questioned, betrayed, deserted, denied, spat on, struck in the face with fists, mocked, stripped naked, insulted, beaten, lied about, falsely accused, convicted, condemned, crucified, scorned, bruised, rejected, hated, stared at, left naked in public to die and finally killed.
And what is his response to everything that happens to him?
Luke tells us that from the cross, looking down on those who’d strained nerve and sinew to put him there, and looking back to everything that had gone before, he prayed “Father, forgive them – for they don’t know what they’re doing”.
All throughout his ministry, Jesus had choices to make.
He had to choose whether to fight evil with evil, or with something else. And in every case, he always responds with love.
When evil’s levelled against him, he never responds in kind. He never fights fire with fire. He never resorts to the ways of the world to overcome the world. His response is always that of love.
And what this miracle of the empty tomb shows us is that no matter how weak or ineffectual the way of the cross looks, in the end LOVE WINS.
The world did the worst it could do to Jesus. But it still wasn’t enough to keep him down. LOVE WINS.
God IS LOVE says the Bible. And if that’s true, there’s only one outcome – LOVE WINS. And the sooner we realise that the only winning ticket in town is the way of God’s Love, the better.
Will you be able to remember that this time tomorrow? When you leave church today, go back home, spend the rest of the afternoon and evening as you see fit, and wake up tomorrow to face the same old same old, will LOVE WIN? Or will you fall back on using the ways of the world to try and overcome the world?
In the passage we heard earlier, Jesus takes the disciples through the scriptures that speak about his suffering to help them understand why the cross had to happen, and then he charges them with these words “You are witnesses of these things”.
“You are witnesses of these things” he says. Not just in the sense that you’ve seen them with your eyes, but if you live and act in the way God wants you to in the world, your life will become a sign to others that in the end, LOVE WINS.
Preparing to leave his disciples Jesus told them “In this world you will have trouble.” – One of Jesus’ promises we’re rather less keen to claim. “But take heart! I have overcome the world.”
The verdict’s in. The word’s got out. The tomb’s empty and the Lord is Risen. LOVE WINS
(with thanks to Rob Bell)
Boys and girls, thanks for that brilliant summary of the whole story of Easter, especially the part about the cross. It’s really important that we hear that story today because otherwise we leap from Palm Sunday to Resurrection and only the folk who made it to the Good Friday service pause to spend time thinking about Jesus’ death.
But the cross, and the story of what was happening there is what Easter’s all about.
If you look at all 4 gospels, something like 30-40% of the material is about this last week in Jesus’ life, and his crucifixion. In Mark’s gospel it’s more like 50%. One commentator went so far as to describe Mark as a ‘Passion Narrative’ with an extended introduction!
So that part of the story is hugely important. But what does the cross actually mean?
If I were to take a straw poll here this morning, I’m guessing these are some of the answers I’d get:
It’s what makes us right with God.
It’s God dealing with the problem of our sinfulness.
It’s Jesus taking the punishment that should have been ours so that we can go free.
And that’s all true.
The prophet Isaiah – 7 centuries before Christ, spoke of one who was to come – a suffering servant, and this is what he said. (Isaiah 53)
Surely he took up our infirmities and carried our sorrows, yet we considered him stricken by God, smitten by him, and afflicted. But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was upon him, and by his wounds we are healed. We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to his own way; and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.
I wonder if that was one of the Scriptures Jesus opened up with the disciples in that conversation we read about this morning?
So the cross is the great transaction that makes peace with God possible for sinful people like you and me. But the thing is, we have to close with that. We have to take hold of it for ourselves. That comes through again and again in the New Testament writings as Jesus’ followers began to make sense of everything that had happened on the cross.
Jesus’ disciple John, puts it this way – “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life”
The promise is for whom? “Whoever believes” – and that’s belief in the sense of trust. In that text there’s an offer, but also a condition.
Peace and life are what God’s offering. But the terms of that offer are surrender. Set down your old way of life; set down your determination to be your own god; set down your pride; set down your weapons. Then, and only then, will your hands will be free to receive forgiveness.
Is that a choice that you’ve made yet? Because according to Jesus, and the weight of the New Testament, it’s that choice that makes someone a Christian and nothing else.
But in truth, that’s not really what I want to speak about today because that description of what the cross is about, is part of the story, but not the whole story.
When we see the cross solely as a bit of sin-management on God’s part, we diminish what it’s really about. Because it’s so much more.
It’s not just about where we go when we die. It’s about how we choose to live in the here and now. Are we going to live according to the ways and means of the world, or the way of costly love exemplified by Christ as he went to the cross? We have choices to make. Are we going to go God’s way, or the world’s way?
Christ was faced with that kind of choice every day of life, but especially in Holy Week.
Look at what happened to him.
He rides into Jerusalem on a donkey, heralded as a king, but the people completely misread the sign. They wanted war, he, peace.
The Pharisees question his authority at every turn, endlessly looking for ways to trap him.
Judas grows dissatisfied with his methods and decides to betray him.
He sweats blood over what’s about to happen to him in Gethsemane, but his three closest friends can’t manage to stay awake and suffer with him.
He’s arrested by the Temple Guard, falsely accused, beaten, mocked and spat at by the religious leaders.
His friends run away. His closest friend Peter denies that he even knows him.
He’s ritually humiliated and brutalised by the Roman guard, flogged to within an inch of his life, and then led through the streets carrying his own cross. He’s stripped naked, nailed to the cross beam, and hoisted into the air in utter humiliation.
The people who gather to watch, abuse and vilify him even as the last breaths seep from his body. At the foot of the cross they gamble for his clothes.
He was questioned, betrayed, deserted, denied, spat on, struck in the face with fists, mocked, stripped naked, insulted, beaten, lied about, falsely accused, convicted, condemned, crucified, scorned, bruised, rejected, hated, stared at, left naked in public to die and finally killed.
And what is his response to everything that happens to him?
Luke tells us that from the cross, looking down on those who’d strained nerve and sinew to put him there, and looking back to everything that had gone before, he prayed “Father, forgive them – for they don’t know what they’re doing”.
All throughout his ministry, Jesus had choices to make.
He had to choose whether to fight evil with evil, or with something else. And in every case, he always responds with love.
When evil’s levelled against him, he never responds in kind. He never fights fire with fire. He never resorts to the ways of the world to overcome the world. His response is always that of love.
And what this miracle of the empty tomb shows us is that no matter how weak or ineffectual the way of the cross looks, in the end LOVE WINS.
The world did the worst it could do to Jesus. But it still wasn’t enough to keep him down. LOVE WINS.
God IS LOVE says the Bible. And if that’s true, there’s only one outcome – LOVE WINS. And the sooner we realise that the only winning ticket in town is the way of God’s Love, the better.
Will you be able to remember that this time tomorrow? When you leave church today, go back home, spend the rest of the afternoon and evening as you see fit, and wake up tomorrow to face the same old same old, will LOVE WIN? Or will you fall back on using the ways of the world to try and overcome the world?
In the passage we heard earlier, Jesus takes the disciples through the scriptures that speak about his suffering to help them understand why the cross had to happen, and then he charges them with these words “You are witnesses of these things”.
“You are witnesses of these things” he says. Not just in the sense that you’ve seen them with your eyes, but if you live and act in the way God wants you to in the world, your life will become a sign to others that in the end, LOVE WINS.
Preparing to leave his disciples Jesus told them “In this world you will have trouble.” – One of Jesus’ promises we’re rather less keen to claim. “But take heart! I have overcome the world.”
The verdict’s in. The word’s got out. The tomb’s empty and the Lord is Risen. LOVE WINS
(with thanks to Rob Bell)
If Only You Knew
What kind of day is Palm Sunday? A day of celebration, or a day for sober reflection?
If we’d finished today’s reading at verse 40, we’d assume it was celebration and get on with the tickertape parade.
But Luke doesn’t let things end there. There’s more going on here than we first realise, because as Jesus draws near to Jerusalem he begins to weep, and murmurs to himself – “If you only knew today what is needed for peace”.
We puzzled over that in the Monday group. Why was Jesus so upset?
He’d planned this for ages; He’d primed friends in Bethany with a password so they’d let the disciples take away this unridden colt. He rode down into Jerusalem in exactly the way Zechariah had prophesied 500 years earlier, and people knew this mode of arrival was a deliberately provocative claim to be God’s messiah.
At last his cards were on the table. He was bringing things to a head. And the crowd loved it.
So why the tears?
Put simply, I think it’s because they just didn’t understand what he was about, and he knew it.
He wasn’t there primarily to feed their bellies and cure their diseases, though that’s why many followed him.
He wasn’t there to start a holy war against the Romans, though that’s what some were hoping for.
He wasn’t even there to bring down the Pharisees – he wanted to reform his own religion, not destroy it.
No. He was there, riding into Jerusalem, to reconcile broken humanity to God at the cost of his own life. He was coming to be the agent of peace.
But the crowds that day did not want that kind of peace. They thought peace came through bread, or miracles, or entertainment. They thought peace came through revolution; or following the letter of the law.
“If you only knew today what is needed for peace! But now you cannot see it. You did not recognise the time when God came to save you!”.
With that in mind, forgive this little exercise in imagination, which I should preface with the rider “Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is purely co-incidental”.
As Jesus descended from the Mount of Olives, the sound of the disciples’ cheering faded away and he found himself atop a sand dune looking over the parish of Belhelvie.
Down on the beach, a woman takes her dog and her troubles for a long walk in the sea air.
A young couple stroll hand in hand near the shore, life stretched out before them like the strand at low tide. They are learning that loving someone is a decision and not just a feeling.
Overhead, a helicopter clatters its cargo of workers 300 miles through the sky for another fortnight of work, frustration, tiredness and banter. They are restless ‘til they get there. Restless ‘til they get back.
And Jesus thinks “If you only knew what’s needed for peace”.
In the car park, a young woman helps her father out of the vehicle and into his wheelchair with some effort. They both wonder how they are going to cope.
In the nursing home, anxious relatives meet staff to see if the place is suitable for mum, now that she can’t look after herself properly anymore.
In a small bungalow, a widowed pensioner ignores the TV programme that’s on and stares unseeingly at the chair that used to be occupied.
And Jesus thinks “If you only knew what’s needed for peace”.
At the school, the bell rings and the usual gaggle of mums and the occasional dad wait for the children to start spilling out of the building. Some chat, others study their feet in uneasy solitude. All carry with them the silent stories of their lives.
In the shop a man glances up at the top shelf for a moment before buying a six pack that probably won’t see him through the afternoon. The woman behind him avoids eye-contact as she buys her daily half-bottle and 20 Silk Cut.
In Belhelvie, a young mother gazes at her newborn son and wonders what lies in store for him, and how she can help him find his place in this off-kilter world.
And Jesus thinks “If you only knew what’s needed for peace”.
In Whitecairns, a couple argue about vows that have been broken.
In Blackdog a couple argue about vows that they’ve never taken.
In Bridge of Don a couple go about life under the same roof as strangers, as though their vows meant nothing.
In Balmedie a group of teenagers gather in the park and self-consciously set about the business of hanging around and looking bored.
In Belhelvie a recently retired man pushes his lunch to the side and wonders how to fill the rest of his day.
And Jesus thinks “If you only knew what’s needed for peace”.
In Potterton a woman stares in the mirror and reads in her face the signs of the diagnosis she’s just been given.
In a byre near Belhelvie a farmer worries about weather, fuel prices, sick animals and a persistent ache in his lower back.
In a people carrier on the Dyce road a mother silently counts to ten as her children start fighting for the hundredth time that day.
And Jesus thinks “If you only knew what’s needed for peace”.
In a cottage off a single track road, an elderly lady wonders if she will hear the voice or feel the touch of another human being today.
In a gridlocked car on the A90 a man adds up his overtime in his head and wonders if the extra hours are really worth it.
In bungalow in Balmedie, a couple discuss the worrying trends in their teenage daughter’s behaviour.
In a church where some, none, or all of these folk gather each week,
The Spirit tries to help them recognise
That the time of God’s coming to them is NOW;
This God-filled, God-conscious moment.
God, in Christ, stands before the proud walls of our lives,
Knowing full well the struggles that lie within,
And weeps for our brokenness in all its manifestations.
The peace we crave, the shalom of God,
is found in following this strange king,
going to his death for our sake.
But will we recognise him when he comes?
Will we recognise that now,
This very moment,
is the time of our salvation.
If we’d finished today’s reading at verse 40, we’d assume it was celebration and get on with the tickertape parade.
But Luke doesn’t let things end there. There’s more going on here than we first realise, because as Jesus draws near to Jerusalem he begins to weep, and murmurs to himself – “If you only knew today what is needed for peace”.
We puzzled over that in the Monday group. Why was Jesus so upset?
He’d planned this for ages; He’d primed friends in Bethany with a password so they’d let the disciples take away this unridden colt. He rode down into Jerusalem in exactly the way Zechariah had prophesied 500 years earlier, and people knew this mode of arrival was a deliberately provocative claim to be God’s messiah.
At last his cards were on the table. He was bringing things to a head. And the crowd loved it.
So why the tears?
Put simply, I think it’s because they just didn’t understand what he was about, and he knew it.
He wasn’t there primarily to feed their bellies and cure their diseases, though that’s why many followed him.
He wasn’t there to start a holy war against the Romans, though that’s what some were hoping for.
He wasn’t even there to bring down the Pharisees – he wanted to reform his own religion, not destroy it.
No. He was there, riding into Jerusalem, to reconcile broken humanity to God at the cost of his own life. He was coming to be the agent of peace.
But the crowds that day did not want that kind of peace. They thought peace came through bread, or miracles, or entertainment. They thought peace came through revolution; or following the letter of the law.
“If you only knew today what is needed for peace! But now you cannot see it. You did not recognise the time when God came to save you!”.
With that in mind, forgive this little exercise in imagination, which I should preface with the rider “Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is purely co-incidental”.
As Jesus descended from the Mount of Olives, the sound of the disciples’ cheering faded away and he found himself atop a sand dune looking over the parish of Belhelvie.
Down on the beach, a woman takes her dog and her troubles for a long walk in the sea air.
A young couple stroll hand in hand near the shore, life stretched out before them like the strand at low tide. They are learning that loving someone is a decision and not just a feeling.
Overhead, a helicopter clatters its cargo of workers 300 miles through the sky for another fortnight of work, frustration, tiredness and banter. They are restless ‘til they get there. Restless ‘til they get back.
And Jesus thinks “If you only knew what’s needed for peace”.
In the car park, a young woman helps her father out of the vehicle and into his wheelchair with some effort. They both wonder how they are going to cope.
In the nursing home, anxious relatives meet staff to see if the place is suitable for mum, now that she can’t look after herself properly anymore.
In a small bungalow, a widowed pensioner ignores the TV programme that’s on and stares unseeingly at the chair that used to be occupied.
And Jesus thinks “If you only knew what’s needed for peace”.
At the school, the bell rings and the usual gaggle of mums and the occasional dad wait for the children to start spilling out of the building. Some chat, others study their feet in uneasy solitude. All carry with them the silent stories of their lives.
In the shop a man glances up at the top shelf for a moment before buying a six pack that probably won’t see him through the afternoon. The woman behind him avoids eye-contact as she buys her daily half-bottle and 20 Silk Cut.
In Belhelvie, a young mother gazes at her newborn son and wonders what lies in store for him, and how she can help him find his place in this off-kilter world.
And Jesus thinks “If you only knew what’s needed for peace”.
In Whitecairns, a couple argue about vows that have been broken.
In Blackdog a couple argue about vows that they’ve never taken.
In Bridge of Don a couple go about life under the same roof as strangers, as though their vows meant nothing.
In Balmedie a group of teenagers gather in the park and self-consciously set about the business of hanging around and looking bored.
In Belhelvie a recently retired man pushes his lunch to the side and wonders how to fill the rest of his day.
And Jesus thinks “If you only knew what’s needed for peace”.
In Potterton a woman stares in the mirror and reads in her face the signs of the diagnosis she’s just been given.
In a byre near Belhelvie a farmer worries about weather, fuel prices, sick animals and a persistent ache in his lower back.
In a people carrier on the Dyce road a mother silently counts to ten as her children start fighting for the hundredth time that day.
And Jesus thinks “If you only knew what’s needed for peace”.
In a cottage off a single track road, an elderly lady wonders if she will hear the voice or feel the touch of another human being today.
In a gridlocked car on the A90 a man adds up his overtime in his head and wonders if the extra hours are really worth it.
In bungalow in Balmedie, a couple discuss the worrying trends in their teenage daughter’s behaviour.
In a church where some, none, or all of these folk gather each week,
The Spirit tries to help them recognise
That the time of God’s coming to them is NOW;
This God-filled, God-conscious moment.
God, in Christ, stands before the proud walls of our lives,
Knowing full well the struggles that lie within,
And weeps for our brokenness in all its manifestations.
The peace we crave, the shalom of God,
is found in following this strange king,
going to his death for our sake.
But will we recognise him when he comes?
Will we recognise that now,
This very moment,
is the time of our salvation.
Meditation on Luke 6:6-11
You held the room in the palm of your hand. They got more than they bargained for that day.
The man beside you kept his eyes lowered, his limp arm tucked safely into his belt.
But you were slowly surveying the room, eyes lighting on the hard faces of the men who had come to love the law more than the God who gave it.
What does the law allow, you said. And maybe your voice carried some anger. What does the law allow? To help or to harm?
And that’s a question we must hear today. For there’s a Pharisee in every one of us.
There’s a part in each of us that’s always right, even when we’re wrong
A part that sees the fault in everyone but ourselves.
A part that’s closed its mind to other viewpoints, and its ears to other voices.
It’s there in all of us. But with God’s help it needn’t rule us.
What will it be? says Jesus. What attitude will you take?
Will you help, or will you harm?
In that choice that has to be made; that situation that has to be handled; that person who has to be worked with; that task that has to be accomplished.
Will your attitude help, or will it harm?
When the stranger sits in your place. when the baby cries in the church; when they start asking for volunteers; when you realise there’s a new person around today.
Will your attitude help or will it harm?
When people judge the church by your way of life; when you’re tempted to slip the knife in when no-ones looking; when you want to lash out because your pride’s been wounded. When it would be so much easier not to stand up and be counted.
Will you help or will you harm?
What does the law allow? Two things only, says Jesus. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul strength and mind, and love your neighbour as yourself. Anything beyond this is harm.
Lord, have mercy.
Having looked them in the eye, Jesus turned to the man with the paralysis and said “Stretch out your hand”.
He unbound his arm, with its sickly, white pallor, and, for the first time in years, flexed his fingers. Within moments colour and energy had returned; veins stood up on the back of his hand as he curled and uncurled his fingers with a childlike joy.
“Stretch Out Your Hand”, Jesus says to us, addressing the places where we feel paralysed.
Some of us are stuck because no-ones really shown us how to live well.
Some are holding back because they’re scared to fail or be found wanting.
Some feel their lives are in limbo until a decision is made, or a situation changes.
Some are hemmed in by circumstances over which they’ve no control.
Where are you paralysed? What does God want to bring to life within you?
(Pause)
Lord set us free – help us stretch out our hands. And help our congregation do the same, for there are ways in which we as a community are paralysed too.
There are tasks we need to do here; initiatives that could benefit the people in our parish and give the gospel a good name.
But we are too busy, too afraid, too reticent to get involved. And our witness, as a congregation, withers.
Lord, set us free. Help us stretch out our hands, that what you do in and through us might be seen and acknowledged in this place and beyond.
Because we ask it all in Christ’s name.
The man beside you kept his eyes lowered, his limp arm tucked safely into his belt.
But you were slowly surveying the room, eyes lighting on the hard faces of the men who had come to love the law more than the God who gave it.
What does the law allow, you said. And maybe your voice carried some anger. What does the law allow? To help or to harm?
And that’s a question we must hear today. For there’s a Pharisee in every one of us.
There’s a part in each of us that’s always right, even when we’re wrong
A part that sees the fault in everyone but ourselves.
A part that’s closed its mind to other viewpoints, and its ears to other voices.
It’s there in all of us. But with God’s help it needn’t rule us.
What will it be? says Jesus. What attitude will you take?
Will you help, or will you harm?
In that choice that has to be made; that situation that has to be handled; that person who has to be worked with; that task that has to be accomplished.
Will your attitude help, or will it harm?
When the stranger sits in your place. when the baby cries in the church; when they start asking for volunteers; when you realise there’s a new person around today.
Will your attitude help or will it harm?
When people judge the church by your way of life; when you’re tempted to slip the knife in when no-ones looking; when you want to lash out because your pride’s been wounded. When it would be so much easier not to stand up and be counted.
Will you help or will you harm?
What does the law allow? Two things only, says Jesus. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul strength and mind, and love your neighbour as yourself. Anything beyond this is harm.
Lord, have mercy.
Having looked them in the eye, Jesus turned to the man with the paralysis and said “Stretch out your hand”.
He unbound his arm, with its sickly, white pallor, and, for the first time in years, flexed his fingers. Within moments colour and energy had returned; veins stood up on the back of his hand as he curled and uncurled his fingers with a childlike joy.
“Stretch Out Your Hand”, Jesus says to us, addressing the places where we feel paralysed.
Some of us are stuck because no-ones really shown us how to live well.
Some are holding back because they’re scared to fail or be found wanting.
Some feel their lives are in limbo until a decision is made, or a situation changes.
Some are hemmed in by circumstances over which they’ve no control.
Where are you paralysed? What does God want to bring to life within you?
(Pause)
Lord set us free – help us stretch out our hands. And help our congregation do the same, for there are ways in which we as a community are paralysed too.
There are tasks we need to do here; initiatives that could benefit the people in our parish and give the gospel a good name.
But we are too busy, too afraid, too reticent to get involved. And our witness, as a congregation, withers.
Lord, set us free. Help us stretch out our hands, that what you do in and through us might be seen and acknowledged in this place and beyond.
Because we ask it all in Christ’s name.
The Disappearing Vicar
Where did he go?!!
Sorry there haven't been any posts for a while. This is largely down to a change in preaching style during Lent where I was using fewer notes and didn't want to work things up into a text for the sake of blogging. You had to be there! I will be returning to that style of preaching later in the year as folk responded well to it and I enjoyed the freedom it brought. But for now, I'll upload what I've prepared in terms of full texts since then. Be blessed.
Paul
Sorry there haven't been any posts for a while. This is largely down to a change in preaching style during Lent where I was using fewer notes and didn't want to work things up into a text for the sake of blogging. You had to be there! I will be returning to that style of preaching later in the year as folk responded well to it and I enjoyed the freedom it brought. But for now, I'll upload what I've prepared in terms of full texts since then. Be blessed.
Paul
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