Psalm 129. On the narrative you live by

Three stories with a common theme to kick us off this morning – one in the form of a video, one a story and one a photograph.

We'll start with the video first.

(At this point I showed a short clip of Fernando Torres missing an open goal against Manchester United the previous weekend - a glaring miss).

For all his ability, the only narrative that's playing out around Torres is 'here's the £50 million player who's turned into a flop'. He seems stuck in a story he can't get out of.

My second story comes from my visits down to our local nursing home - Balmedie House. There's a lovely lady there who I'll call Mary and she's at the stage in her life where she can't really remember things from day to day, and we have the same conversation every time I'm down there. She sees my collar and says "Are you a minister?"  "Yes" I say. "Church of Scotland?".  "Yes - that's right. Belhelvie's my parish".  "Aw – I’m a Piscy" (Episcopalian!) she says, "but it’s nae sair!" (it's not a problem)

Why that memory, I wonder? Why ‘it’s nae sair?’ Did she feel awkward or different growing up a 'Piscy' if everyone else was Church of Sotland or RC?

My third story comes from a recent visit to Belfast with two colleagues. We did a bus tour of the city, and were taken into both the Loyalist Shankhill Road and the Republican Falls Road, and many of the gable ends of houses there are painted with cultural and paramilitary murals. We all agreed that the one below was the most striking of all. Black and white images show some of the atrocities perpetrated against the loyalist community over the years of the troubles, and questions how justice is - or isn't - being worked out in their favour.

Where are our inquiries. Where is our truth? Where is our justice?

Those words read like a howl of pain from a community that's trapped in the past and can't get past the things that have happened to it. It sounds like they are defined by the ways in which they have been wronged.

So those are our three stories. And the common theme is that in different ways, and to different degrees, all three describe people who are trapped in narratives they can’t seem to escape from. One story has become the dominant story that they are living out of.

One of the most perceptive and probing questions I think I’ve ever heard came from the lips of the Irish poet and mystic John O’Donohue. “What are the seven thoughts that have shaped your life and made it turn out the way it has?” he asked. There’s something to mull over by the fireside as the long dark evenings start to draw in! “What are the seven thoughts that have shaped your life?”

I’ve thought about that a lot, and I’ve never managed to get past the first two or three!

And for today, maybe it’s enough to simplify O’Donohue’s question and ask: “What one thought is shaping my life just now?”. What’s the story I’m living out of?

And the reason I ask is because it’s all too easy to get stuck in a bad narrative. One way of thinking, or of understanding ourselves and our situation, can end up swallowing all the others.

Our Psalm this morning starts with a bad narrative – one about pain and enemies and oppression.

“Israel, tell us how your enemies have persecuted you ever since you were young”.

And if you know a wee bit of your Biblical History you’ll remember some of the stories. The way their baby sons were taken and slaughtered by their Egyptian taskmasters. The forced labour, bullied out of them by beatings and murders. The many battles they had to fight to finally enter the promised land, and the constant threat of war and invasion on their borders once they’d settled there.

Israel knew a thing or two about enemies and persecution.

And that thought makes me want to pause for a moment to give our struggles a little perspective.

I doubt that there’s anyone here who doesn’t have some difficult folk to contend with in life. We all have. And when you’re in the thick of those situations it can feel intolerable. And sometimes that’s exactly what it is – intolerable. By any rational measurement, things are genuinely awful for you. You need the help of friends and family, maybe even professionals, to help sort things out.

But much of the time, I think we only feel it’s intolerable. Examined in the cold light of day, the things we get so het up about don’t really amount to much, yet we get irate about them.

We magnify little things and get enraged by them; we read a significance into things that simply isn’t there. We do the exact opposite of what the Scriptures say and instead of dealing quickly with any anger we feel towards someone, we store it up and let it fester. And we end up making mountains out of molehills.

May God spare us from ever making real enemies – the kind that Israel had, and that some folk in today’s world still have. The kind who come knocking on your door at midnight to thrash you within an inch of your life and leave your back looking like a ploughed field.

Unless we’re very unlucky, in this part of the world I think the enemies people have most problems with are the ones within, rather than without.

Maybe it’s your pride that’s the enemy – that’s made life difficult for you. Maybe it’s your temper. Your rare ability to start a fight in an empty room.


Maybe it’s your stubbornness, or your low self-esteem, or your need to take over and be in control.


Maybe it’s what the apostle Paul calls the belly gods – the gut-level desires and hungers that take us over if we let them.

Any one of these, unchecked, can come to be the dominant narrative of our lives.

I knew a man in Glasgow years ago and it was a standing joke among his friends that if you hadn’t seen him for a while and you asked him how he was doing, he’d always say “Well, I’m alright NOW”!

He was caught in a bad narrative where he was always a victim. And nothing ever seemed to change.

Mike Yaconelli tells a story about a nine year old girl called Margaret who for some reason kept irking her teacher. And one day, in a rage, the teacher made her stand at the front of the class, and forced the other 25 girls to come up and write cruel things about her on the blackboard. Margaret is fat. Margaret is stupid. Margaret is a bad person.

It took that woman 40 years to escape the shadows that were cast over her soul that day. Those words became the narrative of her life.

It’s all too possible for one narrative to take you over.

How can you know if that’s happening to you?

The simplest answer to that, I think, is to listen to yourself. What do you talk about? What do you keep gravitating back to, in your speaking and your living and your thinking?

Are there times when you catch yourself halfway through a sentence thinking “oh no. here I go again”. That’s a strong clue that one narrative is beginning to take over.

But the good news today is that it doesn’t have to be that way.

Psalm 129 begins with the Psalmist saying “Israel, tell us how your enemies have persecuted you ever since you were young”.

The Psalmist is inviting Israel to tell a story. And you know as well as I do, that the only time you encourage someone to tell a story is when you already know there’s a good ending!

What does Israel say?

V2 – “Ever since I was young, my enemies have persecuted me cruelly.”

Those are the facts. The facts are a given. But it’s what you do in the face of those facts that matters.

“my enemies have persecuted me cruelly, but they have not overcome me. They cut deep wounds in my back and made it like a ploughed field. But the Lord, the righteous one, has freed me from slavery”.

How do they get out from under this narrative of oppression? They pick up the strains of another, better narrative and they begin to live out of that.

How did Israel escape from slavery in Egypt? Moses – trembling, stuttering Moses, gathers his courage, makes his way back to Pharaoh and speaks the word ‘God’ into a situation that seemed godless. And as he does so, memories are stirred, and hope is kindled. There IS another story they can live out of – the God story.

Or think of David, who wrote many of the Psalms – hiding out in caves because the King he used to serve, King Saul. has turned on him for no reason and wants him dead. David could so easily have chosen the victim narrative, or the revenge narrative. They were a good fit in those circumstances. But he chose the God story. He chose the way of trust, patience, forgiveness and honour.

Or think of Jesus – living in a country under Roman occupation where it seemed that there were only two options: submission or waging a near-suicidal guerilla war. Again – the victim narrative or the revenge narrative looked like the only possibilities.

But Jesus showed how to live out the God-story. He embodied a third way, a defiant pacifism that forced the authorities to recognise the Jewish people as people.

When you study his teaching about turning the other cheek, and going the second mile you realise that these are deeply subversive practices. They force the Romans to see the Jews as people – people who refuse to accept the narrative role they’re expected to play, because they have a better story they’re living out of. One that tells them that first and foremost they’re not Roman subjects but the beloved children of God.

The Psalmist has a good story to tell this morning

The enemy oppressed. But they have not overcome.


The Lord, the righteous one, has freed me from slavery.

I wonder what oppresses in your life just now?

Time? Work? Responsibility? Something to do with how you perceive yourself? Someone who’s making life difficult? We all have our stories of oppression.

But the good news today is that they needn’t be the dominant narrative of our lives.

The Lord , the righteous one, can set you free. says the Psalmist.

And he will do, if we set ourselves to listening for the strains of his story.

As I was thinking about this morning, I remembered a movie I haven’t seen for absolutely ages - Shirley Valentine.

Shirley’s a middle aged housewife, living out of a narrative she’s grown tired of. Her husband Joe and her daughter take her completely for granted, and whatever spark and individuality she once had has been all but extinguished by dull routine. She’s unhappy, but she’s more or less resigned to how things are.

And then her friend wins a competition where the first prize is a trip for two to Greece, and she offers to take Shirley with her. It sounds like an impossiblilty - Joe would never allow it. But a little part of her begins to dream.

She puts a brightly coloured poster of Greece on her pantry door, and it lights up her drab kitchen. She looks at it all the time, wondering what it would be like to go there, and eat different food and meet different people, and drink a cold glass of wine sitting beside the sea in the evening sunlight.

And then something happens that makes her decide that that’s exactly what she’s going to do. Thursday night is always steak night in their house, but Joe freaks out when she dares to cook him egg and chips for a change and he literally throws it back in her lap.

Shirley’s had enough. She goes to Greece with her friend, and falls in love all over again – not so much with the place, or even the local womaniser she has a dalliance with. She falls in love with life again, and with being Shirley Valentine.

The movie ends with Joe, her husband, walking stiffly down to the harbour in his black suit, shirt and tie, and walking right past Shirley as she sits, having that glass of wine by the sea. He doesn’t even recognise her any more. It’s only when she speaks that he realises who she is. And the film ends with him, bewildered at the change in her, joining her for a drink by the sea.

We don’t know how things will pan out, but we know that for Shirley, and we hope for Joe, things will end well because she’s found a better narrative to live out of.

And the image I want to leave you with this morning, is that poster of Greece on Shirley’s pantry door. Something that pointed beyond the drab or difficult now to something better.

There are times when I feel like a broken record. Sometimes I feel like all I do in my preaching is encourage you to read and reflect and pray. But I want you to realise that’s not because God demands it of you. It’s not meant to be a dull duty, like washing up or cooking egg and chips.

For a believer, prayer and reading and reflection are like the poster of Greece, reminding us that there are other, better stories to live by. They open up possibilities; they make us realise that there are other ways to be, And in the humdrum of our everyday lives, with their burdens and their pressures, that’s a message that all of us need to hear again and again and again.

I began this week feeling pressurised by the weight of things not done. And when I feel that pressure, my regular temptation is to get the head down and crack on with it, prayerlessly and grumpily. I live too much of my life out of that narrative.

But this week something, most likely the Holy Spirit, nagged me to sit down and keep company with God before I began to do anything. So I did. And I read these words in a little book I use when I come to pray:

“It is a great loss if we greet every day with clenched hands stuffed with our own devices. We will never know what is out there waiting for us if we don’t extend an empty hand to the world and wait for the wonder to happen”.

That metaphorical glance at the poster was enough to remind me to live out of God’s story that day, and not my own. To unclench my hands a little and wait for the wonder.

I’ll probably have to learn the same lesson again this week, and the week after and the week after that but thank God he never tires of drawing us into his story and setting us free.

Psalm 128. On obedience or lack of it.

It would be unfair of me to ask you what I was preaching on two years ago. To be honest, I don’t think I could remember what I was preaching on two years ago if it weren’t for the blog!

But those of you with good memories will remember that we started looking at the Psalms of the Ascent - 15 Psalms numbered 120-134, which were sung by pilgrims as they made their way up to Jerusalem for the great feasts of their faith: Passover in spring, Pentecost in summer and Tabernacles in early autumn.

These gathering were a huge event in the lives of the Jewish community – several days of feasting and worship and fellowship – and the songs they sang as they travelled dealt with the stuff of life, lived under the rule of God.

We left off at Ps 127 and between now and Remembrance Sunday we’re going to be looking at the remaining 7 Psalms, beginning today with Psalm 128.

And as I prepared for today I remembered something from two years ago – I always find it really hard to get past the first couple of verses!

“Happy are those who obey the LORD, who live by his commands” says the Psalmist

Does that sound familiar? Given that the Hebrew word esher also means ‘blessed’ it might remind you of the Beatitudes in Matthew 5 which we studied last year. And you’ll remember from that series that the Beatitudes aren’t pithy good advice – they’re a declaration of how things are. The Psalmist isn’t offering advice here – he’s saying: “This is how things are’ – if you obey God, and you live by God’s commands you will experience blessing.

So it’s a promise – but the problem is, the promise only holds for those who……. obey.

I wonder what your gut reaction is to that word ‘obey’?

I know that I don’t like it. I found myself reacting to it, and for a preacher that’s always sign that there’s something there worth exploring.

So I started to dig down into my associations around that word ‘obey’. And the first thing that came to mind was Barbara Woodhouse!

For those of you under 30, for whom that cultural reference will mean nothing, Barbara Woodhouse was a bossy, matriarchal figure who appeared on our screens in the early 1980’s and had a rare ability to train dogs and get them doing what she wanted.

Her signature move was to bark ‘sit’ at them, at the same time as making a sharp hand gesture, and amazingly the dogs seemed to respond!

And part of me associates ‘obedience’ with that kind of image. Obedience implies a definite pecking order, and I don’t like where I am in that pecking order. I want to be the one giving the commands, not taking them. And I don’t think I’m alone in that!

I wonder how many married women here took vows promising to obey your husbands?! How are you doing with those vows, I wonder. I can tell you now, your daughters and grand-daughters won’t be taking vows in those terms!

And men – why is it we find it so hard to ask for directions when we’re lost? When the flat pack furniture arrives, why are we so reluctant to read the instructions?

The answer is, we don’t like being subordinate – not even to a stranger we’ll never meet again, or to a piece of paper!

Implicit in notion of our obeying is the understanding that we’re not in charge, and that doesn’t sit easily with our egos.

We like being masters of our own destiny and we don’t like being told what to do, even if it’s God who’s doing the telling.

So that’s the first thing to note from Psalm 128: We have this resistance within us to obedience; a resistance that’s largely to do with our egos.

But there are times in life when we do find ourselves being obedient.

And broadly speaking, those times fall into three categories – Times when we have to be obedient, times when we’re afraid not to be obedient, and - more positively – times when we want to be obedient.

Sometimes we have to obey people for no other reason than that they’re above us in the pecking order.

They’re the boss and we’re the worker, They’re the teacher and we’re the pupil. They’re the drill sergeant and we’re the private out square-bashing.

They have a status to which we have to defer. They may not use it well, they may not even deserve it! But the rules of the game say that within reason we have to do what they ask us to do.

We obey because we have to.

Then secondly there are times when we obey because we’re scared of what will happen if we don’t.

Ever noticed how all the traffic on the A90 suddenly slows down to a sedate, law-abiding 65mph when we spot a police car cruising up ahead?


If you were standing at the cashpoint one evening and felt a knife pushed up against your ribs, would you think twice when the mugger told you to hand over your money?


And if the flight attendant announces that it’s time to buckle your seatbelt and adopt the brace position, you don’t argue with her. You just do what she says.

We readily obey when we’re afraid of what will happen if we don’t obey.

But I think the third instance of obedience is the most interesting, Sometimes in life we obey because we want to.

We see something in the other that inspires us because of its beauty or its skill, or its accomplishment. And we want to be like that.

The way they handled that situation; or danced so effortlessly; or filled the room with music; or swung that golf club, or ploughed that field; or showed such courage.

We want to be like them, and so we apprentice ourselves to them. We readily accept everything they’re ready to offer by way of instruction because we’ve seen something of the art in what they do and we want it for ourselves.

Eugene Peterson, who I often quote, was the son of a butcher, and from an early age he was raised to work in his father’s shop, learning at the elbow of men who had been dealing with meat all their lives.

He says “The day I was trusted with a knife, and taught to respect it and keep it sharp, I knew adult hood was just around the corner. “That knife has a will of its own” old Eddie Norcrist, one of my dad’s butchers, used to say to me. “Get to know your knife”. If I cut myself, he would blame me, not for carelessness but for ignorance – I didn’t ‘know’ my knife.

(Under their instruction) I also learned that a beef carcass has a will of its own – it’s not just an inert mass of meat and gristle and bone but has character and joints, texture and grain. Carving a quarter of beef into roasts and steaks was not a matter of imposing my knife-fortified will on dumb matter but respectfully and reverently entering into the reality of the material.


Not so much by words but by example, I internalised a respect for the material at hand. The material can be a pork loin, or a mahogany plank, or a lump of clay, or the will of God, or a soul. But when the work is done well, there is a kind of submission of will to the conditions at hand – a cultivation of what I would later learn to call humility. It is a noticeable feature in all skilled workers – woodworkers, potters, poets, pray-ers, and pastors. I learned it in the butcher shop.


What Peterson’s just described to you is a brilliant description of discipleship. The apprentice, the disciple, willingly sets ego to the side so they can learn from someone who knows more and knows better than they do. They accept their status and become teachable because they want to have what the master has. They obey because they want to.

So to summarise, there are three reasons people like us, people with egos, obey. We obey because we have to, because we’re scared not to, or because we want to.

“Happy are those who obey the LORD, who live by his commands”.

To the extent that you are, why are you obeying God this morning?

Is it out of duty? Do you feel that you have to for some reason?

Is it out of fear? Do you worry about what will happen to you if you don’t?

Or is it because you want to? Because you’ve come to understand that everything you love about life, everything that makes your soul sing and your mind marvel can be traced back to him. You stumble and fall and mess up and start again but always this thing’s ahead of you – this deep truth that somehow, life at its best, is all about him.

I love those opening exchanges in John’s gospel we heard earlier, and especially Jesus’ opening gambit to these two guys who are doing a not-very-good job of trying to follow him.

“What are you looking for?” he asks them. And you know, I don’t think they had much of a clue how to answer that. They just knew that there was something about this man that made them want to be with him. The best they can offer by way of a reply is pretty pathetic. “Where do you live, Rabbi?”.

“Come and see” he answers kindly. And they do. And so begins a lifetime of discipleship.

Over the years I’ve come to believe that God wants our obedience not for his sake, but for ours. He wants to teach us how to live; and to bless us in our living. But he can’t until we’ve signed on as a disciple - a lifelong learner.

The days of the week are your school. The Holy Spirit is your tutor; the Bible is your source text. The assigned task for each day is to learn how to live well and faithfully in this place and with these people. This workplace, these colleagues, this family, these neighbours, this church.

That situation that could be so much better.

That criticism that came out of nowhere

That need that suddenly became apparent

That task that’s needing some attention

That person who’s needing some help

This is the raw material God gets us to work on – Peterson’s slab of meat, or plank of mahogany or lump of clay. This is the stuff you have to work with each day. How will you work with it?

This is more than Sunday mornings, folks. This is life lived in apprenticeship to the Holy Spirit of God. Discipleship, by another name.

The promise of today’s Psalm is that if we apprentice ourselves to God, we will find blessing.

Our homes, our family life, our relationships will become places where we know the peace and presence of God, even in hard times.

It comes at the cost of obedience. But for a disciple, that’s a small price to pay.

John 3:16 - Part 5

I began this service by putting up the words "EVERYTHING YOU KNOW IS WRONG" in bold lettering via Powerpoint.

Don’t take that personally! The last time I saw those words they were among hundreds of provocative sound-bites being flashed up on stage at a U2 concert in front of 60,000 people

But as we draw this series in John 3:16 to an end, I know I’ve had to shed some wrong ideas as we’ve got beneath the skin of this most well known of texts.

Is God fed up of this world he’s made? John 3:16 says 'No' – he loves it with a passion.

Is Jesus just another prophet, another good man? No – he’s the only begotten Son – made of the same stuff that God’s made of.

Is ‘believing’ just agreeing to certain propositions about God? No – it’s far more than that. It’s about deciding to trust God with everything that you are.

And is the word ‘perishing’ a metaphor for the fires of hell? Well, when you actually look at it, Jesus doesn’t use the word hell even once in John’s gospel, and only a handful of times in Matthew. He speaks about judgment a great deal in all four gospels, but he uses a wide range of metaphors to describe it; and it’s the idea of decay and destruction that are to the fore rather than punishment.

So in that vein, it’ll come as no surprise to you today, as we come to consider the words Eternal Life, that they’re probably not about heaven, and they’re probably not about a life that goes on and on and on for ever.

Let me try and explain why, and then go on to suggest what these words do mean.

The words we translate ‘Eternal Life’ in the Greek are zoe aionios which means – quite literally – the life of the ages. There are several words for life in Greek: Bios, your physical life; Psuche, the life of the mind; Zoe – spiritual life – part of your being that’s in connection with God. Hopefully we get that bit.

But aionios is a wee bit trickier. Our words ‘eternal’ or ‘everlasting’ don’t really do the trick because as soon as we hear them we think of time and duration, But that’s not really the sense of the word in the Greek. Aionios is more about where something originates, than how long it goes on for.

It’s more about the quality of something rather than the quantity.

For example, in the letter to Jude, mention is made of the 'eternal fire' which destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah. But those fires aren't still raging! The fire is 'eternal' because it comes from beyond, from eternity, not because it goes on and on and on.

So the phrase ‘Eternal Life’ isn’t so much about a geographical place called heaven, as a kind of Life that God wants to bless us with. A life that has its origins in eternity.

There are other places in the gospels where Jesus talks directly about heaven – there’s a perfectly good Greek word for heaven – the word ouranos. But he doesn’t use it here.

And that’s because he’s not talking about heaven at this point – he’s talking about this life that has its roots in eternity, in God himself. A life that deep down we all long for, even if we don’t recognise it.

Hard to get your heads round, I know, but bear with me!

Now let’s think about that longing for a few moments.

If you pay a little attention to yourself and to the people around you, it isn’t long before you start noticing what seems to be a universal truth about human beings…

Earlier this week I was in the bank, and it was quiet enough for the teller to start chatting to the woman in front of me in the queue:

“Is that you just back from holiday” she said.

“Aye – we were in Bulgaria”.

“Did you have a good time?”

“Aye it was great – lovely and relaxing. But then you have to come back home again don’t you?!”

“Aye it’s always the same – you look forward to it for ages and then it’s over before you know it”.

We’ve probably all had that conversation! But what I want you to notice is the wistfulness behind the words. There’s a longing being expressed; a gut-level longing for things to be different in some way.

And when you start paying attention to yourself and to the people around you, you start noticing that same wistfulness cropping up all over the place.

A man takes himself outside to sit on the back porch and light up a cigar. It’s a solitary sacrament he reserves for a bad day. Under the open sky he sheds the claustrophobia that comes with too much talk, or too many misunderstandings. He sucks in the bitter smoke and then, in one breath, consigns it to the breeze. In his mind he cradles the angry glow of the exchanges that led him here, but in the cool night air they quickly turn to so much grey ash. He finds himself wishing that things could have turned out differently.

A woman wends her way through the kitchen, clearing up the mess that everyone else seems oblivious to. She unloads the washing machine, sticks on the second load of the day, all the while rehearsing the mental checklist which tells her the kids are ready for school – packed lunch, water, snack, homework, gym kit, waterproof jacket.

Horseplay in the hallway doesn’t improve her mood; sometimes it feels like they deliberately try it on when their dad’s offshore. She carries so much of the responsibility she feels like a single mother sometimes, albeit a married single mother.

After the usual brinkmanship and cajoling, the children are finally ready to go. She’s tired out before the day’s really begun. She knows her life is more than this, but there are times when she wonders.

And today, on the tenth anniversary of 9/11, families in many countries are kneeling at gravesides, or wishing they had a grave to tend, because their loved ones were spirited away in the black clouds that rose as the towers fell, and they were never found.

We have to step lightly around their grief this morning; keep a respectful silence in deference to their anger and their regrets. But rising up within all of us on a day like today is the unspoken yearning to live in a world where such things no longer happen.

We live in an age that’s very sceptical toward any claims about universal truth. And yet here, in the heart of human experience we find just that very thing. A universal truth. And it’s this.

We all long to be in a better place.

We wish our workaday life was a bit more fulfilling.
We wish our relationships could always be plain sailing.
We wish we could have things back the way they were before age, or illness or death crossed our threshold uninvited.

Some of our wishes are noble and others are less so; but in different ways we all long to be in a better place.

What would your better place look like, this morning? It’s worth thinking about. Here’s a little tool to help you chew that one over.

How would you finish this sentence… if only I could…..

Go back in time and do things differently
Get that break I’ve been waiting for for so long.
Get out from underneath that responsibility
Become a different person..
Make him or her into a different person

You can fill in the gap for yourself. But there’s a gap to be filled in all of us, I think. We all long to be in a better place, in some way.

And there’s nothing new under the sun. It was just the same back in Jesus’ day.

Jewish thought held that there were two eras of time. Two ages. There was ‘this age’, or ‘this present age’ in which life was a constant struggle between right and wrong, good and evil. It was this age in which we lived and moved, and in which the story of salvation was being worked out.

And then there was ‘the age to come’, an age of glory and wonder when God would finally be all in all – when evil would be put in its place and the world would become what God had always wanted it to be.

One age characterised by dispute and dischord. One by harmony and joy. One by fragmentation and one by reconciliation. One now and one still to come.

And according to the Hebrew scriptures, the primary quality of life in the age to come is right relationships. Things get fixed between us and God, between us and each other, between us and the creation.

21 They will build houses and dwell in them – says Isaiah.
they will plant vineyards and eat their fruit.

22 No longer will they build houses and others live in them,
or plant and others eat.
For as the days of a tree,
so will be the days of my people;
my chosen ones will long enjoy
the works of their hands.

25 The wolf and the lamb will feed together,
and the lion will eat straw like the ox,
but dust will be the serpent’s food.
They will neither harm nor destroy
on all my holy mountain,”
says the LORD.

This is life in the age to come. And to a degree, it sounds like a fairytale.

But maybe that’s the thing about fairytales – maybe they keep popping up across cultures and generations because they’re an echo of a deeper truth that won’t be silenced. The truth that there is an age to come – an age marked by the joy, peace, meaning, loving and knowing that flow naturally when we finally experience God as our all in all. And when Jesus talks about Eternal Life - that's what he's talking about.

Life in the age to come, eternal life, heaven, whatever you want to call it, it all boils down to one thing - knowing God. And if you were listening carefully to this morning’s reading, you might have picked that up already. As Jesus prayed with his disciples on the night that he was betrayed he said:

“Father, the hour has come. Give glory to your Son, so that the Son may give glory to you. For you gave him authority over all humanity, so that he might give eternal life to all those you gave him. And eternal life means knowing you, the only true God, and knowing Jesus Christ, whom you sent."

Eternal life, at its simplest, is knowing God and receiving the life that he offers us.

And the twist Jesus brings to this story is to insist that that eternal life can start now, if you want it to. By the grace of God, you can bask in tomorrow’s sunshine today. You don’t have to wait for it. You can have it now.

What do you have to do? Jesus has already told us in John 3:16. Believe! Trust God with your life. Surrender. Then, as well as you can, develop the disciplines and habits that will keep you close to him: keep his life growing inside you. That’s what it means to really believe.


We started out by recognising that there’s something in each of us that wants to be in a better place. We all share that feeling in different ways. It’s part of the human condition.

But as I go on in life, I’m beginning to learn, ever so slowly, that very often the answer to that longing is not to give in to it. Sometimes it is, but often it’s not.

When I keep company with Jesus in prayer, I discover that although my desire is often to be in a better place, his desire is that I learn to be better in the same place.

If I live my life, following my desires I can end up like a fool, chasing the rainbow’s end. I never get where I want to be

But if I live out of his life, his age-to-come life, I grow. A little bit of the harmony and peace and love of the age to come spill over from the future into the now, and help transform it. A little piece of the kingdom begins to come.

The life of the ages would say to the woman in the bank queue

“Don’t pine for Bulgaria, darling! It sounds like you need to find a bit more peace and leisure in the life that you’re living”

“Don’t nurse your grievances, man on the back porch. You are forgiven. Now go and forgive and make things better”

“Your life is more than your tasks, busy mother. You’re far more than that, you know”.

“You have so much love to give, dear families kneeling beside those graves. You were, and are, deeply loved. Are there others around you who now need the blessing of the love that you long to give?”

This is what happens when the life of the age to come starts to take root in us. Ever so slowly, perspectives, attitudes and behaviours begin to change.

Think back to when I asked you to finish the sentence, “If only I could….” What would it look like if God’s eternal life could come and fill that place within you that longs for things to be better? What would that mean for you, and for those around you? Because that's what God wants for your life.


Today the building work at Ground Zero will pause for a few short hours. Progress over the past decade has been painstakingly slow, but at last the outline of the new buildings is beginning to rise above the Manhattan skyline, filling the aching void left by the twin towers.

May God, who loves the world, fill the spaces where we ache, where we long for things to be better, with his own eternal life. And may that life teach us to be better, and live for his glory, right where we are.

Amen, and thanks be to God for his word.