Methodist Year A sermons

Ascension Day Acts 1: 6-14

2008-07-09T00:52:00.000-07:00

And so today we come to the first Sunday after Ascension Day, a day which is all too often bypassed in the life of the church today. For in a way, the Ascension is something we find hard to imagine. I confess that I find it difficult to think of the Ascension without picturing in my mind the Apollo spacecraft lift offs which were such a big part of my school days. And of course, I know that the idea of heaven up in the skies above and hell in the depths below is a pre scientific view that was allegedly mocked by the soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin with the words;

“I don’t see God up here.”

So it that I know that my pictures of the Ascension of Jesus are inevitably flawed. It is clearly beyond us to comprehend exactly what the disciples witnessed other than to appreciate that Jesus is not subject to the physical restraints that we experience. As Markus Borg puts it;

“He is no longer restricted to or confined to our dimensions of time or space as he was in his historical lifetime.”

Powerfully, Ascension reminds us that Jesus is no longer physically with us but yet he is alive and a presence in our lives and in the world. As Fred Pratt Green memorably puts it in his Easter hymn;

“Christ is alive! No longer bound
To distant years in Palestine,
He comes to claim the here and now,
And conquer every place and time.”

This reminds us that Jesus is today as alive as ever. More than that, it informs us that his scope is greater than ever before for the physical limitations that we experience are for him now in the past. Yes, the Jesus who was crucified, is through Ascension set free to affect the world yet more than when restricted to a small portion of Middle Eastern land.

And yet this must have been a difficult experience for those who were closest to him. Those of us who have seen loved ones move to distant places know only too well the stomach pangs that come from physical separation. And for those closest to Jesus, this pain would be added to by them being taken out of their comfort zones. Notice how at the beginning of our scripture reading their concern was about restoring the Kingdom to Israel - a somewhat narrow concern. Yet Jesus whilst giving no answer to this matter, tells them that now they are to be called to think and act in a much bigger way. The very people who had failed Jesus in Gethsemane, are told that their future is to be standing up for and propagating the good news about Jesus in Jerusalem where they have failed him. And then the calling gets wider - firstly to surrounding Judea, on to hated Samaria a place to which they have in the past been hostile and then on to the very ends of the earth and all manners of peoples.

An unbelievable calling! A calling well beyond the capacity of this parochial bunch who this far have quite a record of not stepping up to the mark. But note here that this is not some sadistic challenge in which they are destined to fail. On the contrary the calling is linked to a promise, the promise of the Holy Spirit. For the promise is that the Holy Spirit will give them a power for the tasks that lie ahead, the Holy Spirit will enable them to do things beyond their expectations and imaginations. In this we see a linkage which continues to be relevant today. Calling and promise are entwined. For the promise is to enable the calling to be followed through whilst the calling is only given with the accompaniment of the promise that enables it to be given reality.

And so it is that Ascension is about the story of Jesus going on. During Easter we have seen his love in the self giving of Good Friday. In his resurrection we have seen God’s resounding Yes to all that Jesus has said and done, the victory over death, hatred and violence. Now through Ascension we see Jesus set free from limitations so that the story might continue through the likes of you and me as we are given help by the Holy Spirit. And now the story is no longer tribal or nation. On the contrary it is now for all nations and for all peoples.

I don’t know about you but I have always liked the men in white with their message to the followers of Jesus that they need not look into the sky. You see there is far too much speculation. The “Left Behind Books” are but one example of a tendency to speculate about end times and the likes. And such speculation is utterly useless and wasteful as Jesus has already intimated. There is no point idly looking above when there is a world to engage with and much work to be done.

Those present at Ascension made their ways back to where they were staying. With the family of Jesus and a number of women they engaged in community. They spent time in prayer as they sought to be about the continuation of the work of Jesus. And when Pentecost came, they went on to the streets of Jerusalem and soon they continued that work in Judea, Samaria and truly to the ends of the world as it then was known. And today as heirs to the promise of the Spirit, we are called to engage with the world in all its diversity sharing the hope that is at the heart of the message of Christ, loving and giving value to all those who experience need, condemnation or rejection, and building community.

Having during recent weeks looked at the stories of Jesus and celebrated that he is alive, today the story becomes personal. For now it is about us - how we follow on from Jesus. Yes, now it is about the Gospel according to us!

BIDEFORD METHODIST CHURCH MAY 4TH 2008

CHURCH ANNIVERSARY - The Sower

2008-04-27T09:13:00.000-07:00

MARK 4: 1-20

The parable of the sower - I guess that at least one or two of you are wondering if I have had a bit of a senior moment. After all, this is a parable that is often visited at Harvest Thanksgiving but Church Anniversary - well it just does not see to belong.

But believe you me whilst I have my fair share of doddery moments, I was in no way experiencing one of them when I decided that I would preach on this parable for tonight’s service. So why are we looking at this parable? The reason is quite simple - it speaks directly into the ministry of the church for today.

It helps to appreciate the realities of Palestinian agriculture. The common practice was for small family farmers to eke out a basic living from marginal plots whilst wealthy landowners kept the best land for themselves. The peasant farmers would throw their seed earnestly hoping for the best. After all the stakes were high. They would need sufficient return to feed their families, pay the rent and invest in sufficient seed in order to repeat the cycle again the following year. If the yield was insufficient and they fell into debt the farmer would face the prospect of borrowing from the wealthy landowners against the security of their land. If the cycle of failure continued and debts could not be repaid, they would face the prospect of losing their land to the lenders and of having to work to pay off the debt.

This system was fundamentally unjust. It deprived the peasant farmer of real choices in life. For truly such people were in chains. And yet Jesus in this parable gives a picture of a better tomorrow. His parable envisages a bumper harvest way beyond the expectations of his hearers, a bumper harvest that could make all the difference, the bumper harvest that would break the cycle of poverty and struggle. Beyond reasonable expectations, it looked to a future of liberation.

Sometimes, we downplay this aspect of the Gospel. We speak as if our aspirations can be measured in the size of congregations. This is absolute piffle. Much better to small and faithful than be seduced by a cult of numbers in pews or the trimmings of success. We need once more to touch base with the inspirational words of James Russell Lowell who proclaimed;

“They are slaves who fear to be in the right with two or three.”

And a part of our calling is the work of liberation which lifts people up from being nobodies to the value that God would bestow on all. This means that the church must be a community that confronts the prejudice that excludes in all its forms. This means that the church must be a place that embodies in word and deed radical inclusion for every single one of God’s children. After all has not Jesus spoken of coming that all may have life with abundance. Of course this speaks into the role of the church as a prophetic voice.

I wonder if anyone read today’s Sunday Times which proclaimed that the richest 1,000 people in Britain have seen their wealth quadruple over the past decade. When I read that, I wanted to puke. For I see plenty of the struggles of people even within my own town whose lives feel as bare and who are a limited in choices as the sower of whom Jesus told. I have no time for an easy accommodation with the powers that be if they cannot see the corruption in extreme wealth and life denying poverty side by side. Our faith is a faith that takes material seriously, a faith that is sorely misrepresented if we see bums on seats as more important than the denial of a good life for those at the bottom of the pile. Oh I know that the church matters but may we never forget that the church is not an end in itself but a signpost that points to God’s Kingdom of justice, peace and joy for all.

Back to the parable and we find the differing outcome of the seeds that are sown. Sowing on poor soil, it is no surprise that much of the soil would land in the places where it would fail to bring a yield. This is a simple fact of life. And I think that today in our efforts to make the Gospel real in peoples’ lives, there is here an echo. Much of what we do bears no obvious fruit. And yet, surely our greatest calling is to faithfulness rather than to success. Now I have no problem with planning or prioritisation - these are obvious realities in the ongoing life and work of the people of God. But they must never blind us to the reality that what we are about in the mission to which God calls us, is the incredible reality that God’s grace is for all. There is no nook or cranny that is beyond God’s love, no place of darkness that cannot be illuminated by the light of God, not one of our Hells that cannot be transformed by grace.

Of course, in many an exposition of this parable we have found ourselves contemplating the difficulties of sowing God’s seed. We are encouraged to think of the factors that seem to be obstacles to God’s work. Lack of roots, troubles and persecutions, the lures of this world, all these things come to mind. Such things represent challenges and remind us that God’s mission requires patience and a capacity to resist the temptation of shortcuts. And as those of us on the Pioneer Disciple Course will be finding, mission in God’s world involves a need for understanding of what is happening in that world.

But yet, it can be more personal. Use your imagination for a moment and picture the sower as being not us but God. Picture ourselves as the seed that is thrown, landing on various soil. You may imagine yourself in the varying cataegories of where the soil has landed. And if you are like me, that will not be easy because I know that at different times I am each of those seeds. For generally we are all a mixed picture. More and more I think that we fail to conclusively fit into neat boxes such as saint or sinner. At different moments, we can be both of these things and a whole lot more beside. So here this parable serves to challenge us about addressing our points of weakness so that we might grow in fruitfulness to God living lives and being in community in such a way as to make a difference and to bring about the signs of the Kingdom of God.

Fremington Methodist Church, today you celebrate another year as a community of God’s people in this village. You can look back with gratitude at past blessings. You can also look ahead to a continuing part within God’s ongoing mission. May this parable encourage you to move forwards with God, seeking to be the seeds that produce a yield.

But don’t expect it to be easy. Don’t expect great applause for this Gospel is full of challenge and controversy. Jesus, himself, was met with hostility for in so many ways it is a challenge to the orthodoxy of not just his but any age. Yet here is a challenge to both love and sow wastefully for if we hold back no seed is sown. And if no seed is sown there can be no yield.

So go forwards dreaming dreams and seeing visions of what can be. For we are called to simply allow ourselves to be a part of God’s unlimited possibilities. Holding nothing back, who knows what might be?

FREMINGTON METHODIST CHURCH SUNDAY APRIL 27TH 2008

EASTER 6 If you love me

2008-04-27T01:19:00.000-07:00
JOHN 14: 15 - 21

“If you love me”

Don’t those words send a chill through you? The note of qualification is all too present. How often those words are used by a child, a lover or even a parent as a precursor to some demand or other. They are the words that make you feel apprehension as to the contents of your wallet or your bank balance - provided the credit crunch hasn’t emptied these things already.

And yet now these words are coming to us not from one on the make but from Jesus himself. And so we get the feeling that we are about to find out the true cost of faith.

But what follows is perhaps even more demanding. What will we do if we love Jesus. The daunting response to that is;

“You will keep my commandments.”

Wow! For me those words take me back to a friend from my teenage years who advised me against being confirmed into the Methodist Church. After all the miserable so and sos would turn my life into an unending endurance of boredom in which anything remotely enjoyable I might do, would bring the wrath of the religious thought police down upon my unsuspecting head.

And to be honest this is the sort of text that I used to dread hearing preaching on. I always feared that a sort of Christian Taliban would tell me that I couldn’t enjoy a pint, the punk music which I loved in my youth and to be honest still do, or chasing women. Now there may well be good reason for a measure of restraint in these things but we do a violence to this scripture if we suggest that this is what Jesus is talking about here.

For to Jesus, the essence of his teaching was not the petty restrictions that have damaged many peoples’ perceptions of religion, but instead was about love. Think back to a teacher of the law who came to Jesus asking what was the most important of the commandments only for Jesus to respond;

“The first is ‘Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one; you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.’ The second is this, ‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself.’ There is no commandment greater than these.”

See, it is love that is at the heart of the commandments of Jesus. And indeed only a few verses before our scripture reading, in the same dialogue at the Last Supper, Jesus has given one final commandment;

“I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”

So when Jesus says;

“If you love me you will keep my commandments”

He is not talking about ethics. He is simply saying that those who love him with be people who are people of love.

Now I know that love can easily be a debased word. It can be spoken in a shallow way such as on a first date or in the desire for a few moments of peace. At times the word seems divorced from any reality. Some of you will remember the song “Both Sides Now” penned by Joni Mitchell, a song revived in the film “Love Actually” - a song which contains the words;

“I’ve looked at love from both sides now
From give and take, and still somehow
Its loves illusions I recall
I really don’t know love at all.”

And the reality is that far too many lives are marked by an abundance of love talk accompanied by a great shortage of love action. For the love that Jesus speaks of is a love that in gratitude is directed to God and which also develops for other peoples including ultimately as demonstrated by the example of Jesus, those whom we might see as the most unlovely. And that love directed at others goes well beyond fancying or fluffyness. It is the love that seeks the best for others even when they are awkward or living in a way that is destructive to self or others. And is this not what we see in Jesus? - that great capacity not to see or to freeze people in their worst moments but to see amidst the tattered realities, preciousness and even potential.

And make no mistake, love really changes things. This week I read of some of the tensions after the erection of that dreadful Berlin Wall. Apparently in the early days thereafter, truckloads of stinking garbage was dumped from East Berlin into West Berlin. Anger developed and many in the west wanted some sort of payback. And yet, the Mayor took a very different path. He asked that beautiful, fragrant flowers be gathered. These flowers were taken to a place along the wall before being poured over to the east along with a banner that proclaimed;

“We each give what we have.”

And if we are to be followers of Jesus who love Jesus, we need to get into offering reconciliation where there are barriers, peace where there is confrontation and love where there is hatred. Why? Because we are called to give what we have and these are the things that Jesus offers to us.

And Jesus tells us that help is at hand. In our Scripture reading, he has talked of a promise. Soon the friends with whom he is speaking will be without his presence for soon he will die for love. Yet, he wants them to know that they will not be without God. That is why he promises them that they will not be orphaned for the Holy Spirit, the go between God. Will be with them to assist them in their futures. The Holy Spirit will guide them and enable them to live out the way of love.

This morning I want to encourage you to travel the journey of love. Oh there is life without love but it is a waste of time or as the poet Mary Oliver puts it;

“not worth a bent penny or a scuffed shoe.”

Its value is negligible. But Jesus points us to a better way - the way that he has embodied, the way of love. Each person here this morning is within his circle of unending, divine love. God’s love for each of us is as powerful as that of any parent, lover or friend - passionate and without condition. And yet he asks us to let it embrace our entire being that we might model love with all that we are.

“If you love me, you will keep my commandments.”

And what are those commandments? In one solitary word - love!

BIDEFORD METHODIST CHURCH - SUNDAY APRIL 27TH 2008

Easter 5 Simeon says

2008-04-20T09:45:00.000-07:00
LUKE 2: 25 - 33

There are times when the lectionary seems just a little perverse. Today’s lectionary is one such occasion. We are still in the season of Easter and yet the Gospel reading for the second service today, takes us right back to beginnings, to the time when Jesus was still a helpless, gurgling baby.

And yet the story of the presentation of Jesus at the Temple is a story that is bubbling with meaning and important messages that we do well to take seriously.

Let’s for a moment go back to just before our reading from Luke’s Gospel begins. For we find two significant early events in the life of Jesus. Firstly, he was circumcised on his eighth day in accordance with Jewish requirement and with along with that he was named Jesus or Yeshua as it probably was in the Hebrew. Secondly, there was the purification of his mother which would have been 40 days after the birth. This would be combined with a sacrificial offering.

Why does this matter? Well it is important to remember the Jewishness of Jesus. Yes, we can say that Jesus is for all people but the specifics of his birth are that he was born, lived and died a Jew. And his parents were quite clearly observant Jews. To fully understand Jesus, it is important to appreciate that he was a Jew and not a Christian. That heritage needs to be taken seriously if we are to be diligent in seeking an understanding of Jesus.

It also leads us into the matter of anti Semitism. The church needs to be aware that there is a long history of Christian anti Judaism which has been a breeding ground for anti Semitism. The failure to appreciate the Jewishness of Jesus, has often led to anti Jewish violence particularly at Easter. That this unsavoury history of anti Jewish Christian thought was a contributing factor in the Holocaust is beyond doubt. As the Dabru Emet statement of Jewish scholars makes clear, whilst the Holocaust was not a Christian event, it could not have happened without the history of Christian anti Semitism. Certainly we need to exercise care in how we read the Gospels for whilst at times our translations suggest a negative picture of Jews, these Gospels were written by Jewish men to point us to a Jewish saviour. Where hostility is suggested, it needs to be read in the context of a family quarrel in which the possibility of a middle ground is squeezed out.

So anti Semitism is not a valid Christian option. In the coming fortnight much of the country will be having local government elections. We are an exception. Now I have deliberately never used the pulpit to endorse political parties - it would be an improper thing to do. However, I have absolutely no hesitation in affirming that a vote for the BNP is a vote against Christ. Why? Because this political party comes from a background of neo Nazism which has historically been involved in vicious anti Jewish campaigning. It makes no difference that it now has taken to turning its bile against Muslims, may of whom are themselves semitic peoples. It is the same poison directed against specific people who are other than the perpetrators of hate. Look at it this way. Jesus came from a people who have more than most been at the receiving end of hatred and prejudice. This being so, invalidates all prejudices against other groups who from time to time enter the firing line. Such prejudice is wrong on principle as well as being contrary to the teachings and practices of Jesus.

But in these rituals something else can be discerned. That something is the material lack of wealth on the part of the Holy family. Back in Leviticus, there had been laid down the requirements for the sacrifice to be made when the days of a mother’s purification were over;

“If she cannot afford a lamb, she is to bring two doves or two young pigeons, one for a burnt offering and the other for a sin offering.”

Well Luke suggests that it is the poorer option of payment that is taken by Mary and Joseph, not entirely surprising as they will soon be living in the backwater of Nazareth. Now this does not mean that they were amongst the desperately poor. It merely suggests that they were people of limited means - not exactly the sort of people likely to have a child that would turn the world upside down. These are simply humble folk coming to consecrate their first born child to God - as should be the imagery of our infant baptism.

But now something remarkable is to break in on this everyday Jewish happening. And the sign of it is an old man named Simeon. An elderly man, he longs to end his days in peace, released from regrets. Within him as the flesh grows weak, however is a hope and a longing that he might witness the consolation of Israel. And in a split moment, that longing finds fulfilment. Driven by the Holy Spirit, he enters the temple courts. Seeing Mary and Joseph with the child, he takes the child into his arms and says the words that we echo in our Nunc Dimitus, used at many a funeral;

“Lord now lettest they servant depart in peace.”

It’s OK. He can leave this world in peace for now he is sure that God is fulfilling the hopes of all the years. And he, Simeon, is a witness to this. Now he can leave this world in peace and tranquillity for he knows that God has stepped into a world of woes - through a peasant couple and their baby. Whilst we too often make a hash of dying, this man is able to go in peace.

But what is particularly wonderful is how this man grasps the significance of the child. Any nationalistic expectation that he had hitherto had, goes out of the window. As indeed should our feeble efforts to portray God as an Englishman. I am reminded of a church in Cornwall where at a civic service the civic leaders intended that Robert Hawker’s “Song of the Western Men” be sang. It’s a sort of Cornish National Anthem and frankly with words as meaningless as most National Anthems. But because of the violent air to those words which hearkened back to a Cornish rebellion when James 11 incarcerated Bishop Trelawney, the minister refused to have it sung in an act of worship - a stance I hope to take should I ever be confronted with similar circumstances. Quite a row broke out and a lot of nonsense was spoken by the Councillors of Cornwall - not unusual believe you me! The one note of sanity was when the minister said that what was sung should reflect the fact that we worship “the God of all peoples and not all things Cornish.”

Well Simeon would agree on that for now he speaks of a salvation;

“prepared in the sight of all people,
A light for revelation to the gentiles
And for glory to your people Israel.”

Do you get it? This very Jewish boy is not a revelation of a tribal God but of a God whose salvation and grace is for all the nations of the world. Whilst we erect walls that keep people apart, this Jewish child reaches out beyond each and every one of these barriers. And in a sense that was not new. Whilst in ancient Israel, there were those who saw God as being for one nation, the Hebrew Bible has far more about welcoming foreigners than loving neighbours - something the British Government might just take on board when deporting unsuccessful asylum seekers to lands such as Iraq, Zimbabwe and Uzbekistan where they face unsafety or cancer sufferers to lands that cannot provide sufficient medical care.

But the picture I like most from Simeon is that of providing light. The more time I spend in North Devon, the more I become aware of people being trapped in darkness. My town has many inadequately housed people, people unable to find stimulating employment, people trapped in addiction be it alcohol, drugs or gambling, people struggling for a sustainable lifestyle that will not keep putting them in conflict with the law, people even young people sinking into a morass of depression. Christ offers a light to these people by telling them that they count and are of worth, and by kicking our behinds that we might challenge the morally bankrupt structures of our society that have become a force for continual darkness. And that which is the case in North Devon is equally the case elsewhere - sometimes even more dramatically. This Christ directs a light on all that dehumanises or creates fear. His light shines in the darkest of places. And all of this was revealed to Simeon. Easter tells us that despite undergoing death, Jesus is alive and God has given a Yes to all that Jesus has said and done. If we need to see more of that purpose, well Simeon has seen to it for us - it is to bring the light that will bring salvation to those entombed in darkness

TORRINGTON METHODIST CHURCH SUNDAY APRIL 20TH 2008

EASTER 5 - The martyrdom of Stephen

2008-04-20T02:40:00.000-07:00
ACTS 7: 51-60

It’s a story of religious violence, a story of the violent death of a religious dissident. A death brought about through the brutality of stoning!

Indeed our story leads us into the difficult subject of such a brutal method of killing being not merely suggested but actually commanded by religion.

Now today we think of stoning as being a punishment that belongs to the world of Islam. Indeed, the only countries I know of in which stoning is carried out are some of the countries in which Islam is the dominant faith. These include Saudi Arabia, Iran and parts of Afghanistan. Having seem a part of a video of this atrocious barbarity, I can only describe it a sickening and evil. Yet, it is worth noting that there is no endorsement of stoning within the Quran - rather it is the Hadith collections concerning the way of the Prophet that endorse this method of killing.

Today, there is a debate concerning such Hadiths within Islam. Indeed, amongst others, Tariq Ramadan the Muslim academic who has written extensively on an interpretation of Islam within modern society and who is currently lecturing at Oxford, has called for a moratorium on capital and corporal punishment in the Muslim world. And he is certainly far from alone in pursuing such an argument.

Now, I hope that Muslim reformers are successful. But before we think that stoning is simply an Islamic problem, it is possible that its acceptability in early Islamic society may owe something to the fact that its religious roots can be seen in the Hebrew Bible, our Old Testament. Within the Arabian Peninsula at the time of the Prophet, there were both Jewish and Christian presences. And indeed many of our Old Testament prophets are to be found within the Koran, people such as Abraham and Moses. So there would have been an exchange of religious ideas going on.

In this we learn much of stoning being promoted as an act required by God. The crimes for which the first five books of our Bible endorse stoning include;

- touching Mount Sinai

- cursing or blaspheming

- adultery (which includes urban rape victims not screaming loudly enough)

- preaching the wrong religion

- breaking the Sabbath

- cursing the King

- and my favourite which I occasionally remind James of, being a disobedient son.

Thank God that nowadays not even the most extreme, unbalanced Christian, in this country anyway, demands that those scriptures are adhered to.

Indeed, I cannot reconcile any teaching of a religion of love with such a practice of execution with maximum suffering as is the reality with stoning.

Actually, I would go much further. I cannot reconcile execution or indeed killing of any sort with following a religion of love. The five countries reported by Amnesty International as being responsible for 88% of known executions - China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and the USA - merit pariah status in those parts of the world that claim to be civilised. Indeed, Amnesty’s estimate that at its current rate of executions, approximately 370 people will be executed by a bullet in the head during the Olympics makes all the excitement generated by people hopping, skipping and jumping, seem somewhat tawdry.

You see, as Christian, we have a particular interest in this subject. We follow a Lord and Saviour who was publicly and brutally executed by the powers of his day. And in his living and dying we are granted a picture of one whose perspective and values are as different as can be from those of the executioner. Indeed, the only time other than his own execution that we find Jesus near such an event, is the occasion recorded in John’s Gospel where a woman caught in adultery is brought before him. By the law of Moses, albeit that capital punishment was a matter for Rome, she merited stoning to death. Yet the response of Jesus was to challenge whoever was without sin to throw the first stone. And when the accusers melted away, he dismissed her with;

“Go now and leave your life of sin.”

See, at the heart of Jesus’ approach was the desire that people should learn from their failings and live better lives. Always at the core of his being was not a longing for law or justice but the unfolding of grace, that which is kinder to us than we can ever deserve - grace which the cross shows us being directed at us even when we are at our most vile. Oh may we never forget that we would be without hope in encountering a holy God were it not that the chief characteristic of that God is grace. But that grace is for us even when we are at our worst. As Charles Spurgeon, the great Baptist preacher put it;

“Nothing in man can be an effectual bar to God‘s love.”

Anyhow back to our Bible reading. It is as much a story of religious inspired violence as the Inquisition or those who fly planes into buildings. It is as much a case of mob violence and hatred as any example we see in the world today. And it is centred against a man called Stephen. This man was of those who had been set aside to take care of the needs of the most vulnerable people such as widows. He seems to have been diligent in this task. He seems also to have been a powerful witness on behalf of Jesus Christ. And so in response to this, a plot began amongst those within the synagogue who felt threatened by the new Christian movement. And so Stephen was tried for blasphemy - along with heresy the time old accusation that religious people have used against those with whom they disagree. But Stephen demonstrates great courage. Facing the Sanhedrin that had not so long before condemned Jesus, he gives it to them straight. He recites a history of his and their own peoples’ disobedience to God. One can imagine the heckles rising. But then as if he was the first person to contemplate writing a book entitled “How to lose friends and alienate people” he ends with a furious denounciation;

“You stiff necked people, with uncircumcised hearts and ears! You are just like your fathers: You always resist the Holy Spirit! Was there ever a prophet your fathers did not persecute? They even killed those who predicted the coming of the Righteous One. And now you have betrayed and murdered him - you who have received the law that was put into effect through angels but have not obeyed it.”

Strong stuff! And it sure brought great fury upon him. For his religious judges drag him outside the city walls and there they stone him to death. And Stephen dies bravely with the prayer that Jesus should receive his Spirit and the entreaty that echoes that of Jesus on the cross, that this violent deed should not be held against the perpetrators.

And that is the end of the story. Or is it? You see, one of those present at this stoning was Paul or Saul as he then was. We do not know what impression the martyrdom of Stephen made on him. We know that at the time he approved - in other words he accepted a religious understanding that dehumanised him to the dignity of those who were other than him. And yet, one wonders if what he saw, might not have touched him somewhere in his soul even if it would take some time before he could identify with Stephen. But we know that heroic self sacrifice can bring great effects. Over a century later, when there had been many more Christian martyrs in the tradition of Stephen, Tertullion the African Christian leader who became Bishop of Carthage, would observe;

“The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church.”

And down through history those words have been abundantly true. For the history of Christianity is a history in which many have suffered the ultimate penalty out of their adherence to Jesus Christ.

And why is this so powerful? In part it is because there is in the Gospel a pattern of death not being the end. We see it in Jesus Christ who was well and truly killed yet raised more alive than ever. We see it in the saints of history and even in our own age. Who can forget Archbishop Oscar Romero whose courageous stand against economic injustice and paramilitary violence led to his being slain as he celebrated the Mass - a man who had prophetically proclaimed just a week before that fateful gun shot;

“I have been frequently been threatened with death. I should tell you that as a Christian, I do not believe in death without resurrection. If they kill me I will come to life again in the Salvadorean people. If they kill me from the moment I offer my blood to God for the redemption and resurrection of El Salvador, my death will be for the liberation of my people and as a testimony of hope for the future.”

How right he was, for today Oscar Romero remains a huge inspiration for Christians not just in El Salvador but throughout the world. You just cannot censor love. You cannot censor grace. You cannot censor the Gospel.

We are meeting in the season of Easter. We know only too well how we can devalue the lives of others and become persecutors just like the crowd calling for Jesus to be crucified or the mob that dragged Stephen to be stoned. We need to guard against the tendencies within ourselves to treat others as lesser, as expendable. We need to guard against the tendencies within ourselves to feel that our understanding is so right that we must stamp on those who see the world or even faith in a way that is different from us. For all of us have within us the possibilities of being persecutors for persecution is not just done by monstrous characters.

But also we need to live within the Easter hope that sees death giving way to resurrection. Sure, we may not have the courage of the army of martyrs whose blood has been shed but from the we can learn that violence, hatred and deaths are not last words. For they give way to peace, love and life. For the victory of all that is beautiful is ensured by the resurrection of Jesus - and so the triumph of the stone throwers is but a temporary aberration. The defeat of what they represent is truly inevitable.

ALWINGTON METHODIST CHURCH SUNDAY APRIL 20TH 2008

Easter 4 Have I got good news for Ninevah ( a non lectionary sermon)

2008-04-13T06:39:00.000-07:00
JONAH 1: 1 - 17

As if being someone who has struggled with depression for longer than some serve a life sentence isn‘t enough, crazily I find myself working as a Methodist minister. Sure there are very many good things about being a Methodist minister but there are also difficult things such as working for the church at a time when the mainstream church is we are told in a state of decline - and the statistics sure bear that out with Methodism struggling more than most. And as someone whose every school report spoke of extreme shyness, there are times when being in a public role is about as close to torture as it is possible to get - without being water boarded by George Bush and his merry friends.

So why? It’s not that I fell in love with chapel culture as a youngster in Cornwall - far from it! It’s not that I am committed to a system that will ensure that things stay as they are or even enable us to visit the past - far from it! It’s not that I long to see the world in black and white with clear rules - far from it! It’s not that I wish to stand against things that are new and unsettling - far from it! These things are totally and utterly meaningless to me - even in some cases abhorrent!

No the only thing that makes me voluntarily stand here this morning is my belief in a word called “grace.” What is grace? Well in short it is the sovereign favour of God for all humankind irrespective of our deeds, earned worth, or proven goodness. In the words of the U2 song by that name, grace is a “thought that changed the world,” that which finds beauty and goodness in everything. And such is the nature of God who finds beauty and goodness in each of us, God who sees the potential within us however buried from the world it might be.

And this morning, grace is at the heart of our service. We have seen it in the three baptisms that have taken place. All three children are so young, too young to have earned God’s favour. And yet we baptise them into the family of God in celebration of God being committed to them in love, with Jesus living dying, being raised and interceding to the Father for them. In the words of our liturgy and in words that we have sung, we can look at these children knowing that the story of Jesus is a sign of God’s love for them - “All this for you.” Yes, God is for us, even at cost, before we could know anything of it. Yes, God loves us well before we are able to love God.

But even this does not reveal the full scope of grace. And that is why this morning, we find ourselves looking at the story of Jonah. And what time we have wasted on speculation about man eating fish and the likes - time wasting that has diverted us from the incredible power of this story. For I am convinced that what we have is a Biblical satire which reveals great truth to us just as Jesus reveals so much through the parables that he told.

Anyhow, first let’s look at the likely background to the book of Jonah. The view of most scholars is that it was written about 500 years before the birth of Jesus. The elite of Jewish society who had been in exile in far away Babylon, had returned to Jerusalem and begun the task of rebuilding their community, their city and their temple once more. Under the leadership of Ezra and Nehemiah, this rebuilding had taken a somewhat nationalistic turn in which foreigners were distrusted. Two examples of this were Ezra forcing men to separate from their foreign wives and the rejection of the offer of help in rebuilding the Temple from Samaritans. Xenephobia at it worst and religion at its most hateful!

And so we encounter this story that paints a subversive alternative view of what being God’s people is all about, a story full of unforgettable imagery. And the story is hung around the person of Jonah, son of Amittai, a fiercely nationalistic prophet who is mentioned in the Second Book of Kings. This Jonah is in our story told to go to Ninevah, the capital city of Assyria, the historic empire that includes portions of modern Turkey, Syria, Iran and Iraq. Such a suggestion would have shocked the first readers of this story for Assyria had been a violent empire. Indeed it was the great enemy that, soon after the historic Jonah, overran much of the Northern Kingdom of Israel taking many into exile and repopulating the lands with amongst others those who merged with the remaining population in Samaria to become the despised Samaritans. Jonah like most of those who first heard the story would hardly want Assyria to be given a second chance when instant destruction was a more palatable alternative. So in our story, Jonah decides to reject the commission and to go in the opposite direction. Anyhow thanks to a storm he gets thrown overboard and swallowed by a fish. Vomited up, he once more gets the commission and this time he goes to Nineveh - only he is so successful that the King takes heed and leads a process of repentance. And at this God shows mercy. Poor old Jonah hits the very depths of depression. He is devastated and angry with God - so angry that he goes to a place to sit alone wishing he could die. Sat in the shade of a shelter he has made, he is blessed by the provision of a vine to protect him from the sun. But when the vine is chewed by a worm his mood deteriorates further. And so the story ends with God rebuking him with these words;

“You have been concerned about this vine, though you did not tend it or make it grow. It sprang up overnight and died overnight. But Ninevah has more than a hundred and twenty thousand people who cannot tell their right hand from their left, and many cattle as well. Should I not be concerned about that great city?”

See it! The story is a warning that when we put limits on the love and grace of God as Jonah did, we are putting ourselves further from God than those whom we might see as the outsiders. For God’s grace is not merely for a nation or a type of people but it is for all. To the nationalists who dominated the rebuilding of Israel after exile, no suggestion could be more scandalous than the people of Assyria being within God’s love. For here is the absolute prohibition of exclusion.

This story which we have too often tamed into being a fishy story, this story which we have wasted far too much time over arguments about historicity, is a thoroughly outrageous story that outraged respectable opinion when it first emerged. And I believe it continues to do so today. For here is the message that all are of value to God even those who are caught up in a life denying, destructive, decadent culture as was the case with Assyria. God’s love is as much for the outsider as the insider. God’s love is for the reprobate as much as for the saint. God’s love is put out by none of the stenches that we create.

I worry that too often Christianity has been defined as not being as others. If you read the Daily Mail you find Christianity being defined as much by not being Muslim as anything else. But building barriers does not take you closer to God as can be illustrated by that particular rag trawling only recently for stories to reinforce prejudice against East European migrants. But you cannot define Christianity in terms of rejection. It just will not do!

You see, Christianity is rooted in a vision of inclusive love. It is so rooted in this story and indeed in the life of Jesus. God wills good for all and that includes those who are slaughtered by the weapons we make and sell. It includes those who are incarcerated for God does not say “throw away the key and forget them.” It includes those who are deemed to be life’s losers. Why? Back to that U2 song;

“Because grace makes beauty
Out of ugly things.”

That is the wonder of grace. Not based on the anti Christian shame culture that pervades society but on the limitless possibilities that flow from the love of God.

Yes, grace turns the world upside down. And because of that we have been hesitant to let it invade our world. It is a bit like the late Donald Soper who visited this church for the 75th anniversary celebrations, once put it;

“Christianity has not been tried and found wanting; it’s been thought too hard and never tried.”

And there’s the rub! Grace is a fundamentally revolutionary concept. It is uncomfortable to the powers within our world. But Christianity in its earliest days had an uneasy relationship with the powers until the coup when a non violent faith based on grace suffered a takeover at the hands of the bloodstained Emperor Constantine in the fourth century. And yet, the message of grace has never been eliminated.

Today, the church stands on the verge of marginalisation. And that is no bad place to be. It is after all where Jesus stood. Church privileges are challenged as never before and the church is but one of many voices. Yet here comes the opportunity to re-emphasise the one and only thing we have to offer - grace! You do not have to have earned it as baptism has reminded us. You do not have to deserve it as the news in Ninevah reminds us. It is simply that which God offers us. It is God’s statement that every one of you count and if society says otherwise, then society is infiltrated by demonic values. The task of the Christian Church is to challenge the culture of domination with that which liberates. And that is grace. My grace be lived and experienced by each of us. May grace be unleashed in the public policy of this and other lands. Enough of domination! Enough even of justice! Grace is our hope!

And it is that and that alone which keeps me within the church. Good news for Ninevah of old and all the Ninevahs of today.

BIDEFORD METHODIST CHURCH SUNDAY APRIL 13TH 2008

Easter 4 - Jesus the Good Shepherd

2008-04-05T02:28:00.000-07:00
JOHN 10: 1-10

It’s fine to talk about “Good Shepherd” Sunday on the fourth Sunday of Easter but most of us in today’s Britain start with the great disadvantage of knowing precious little about shepherds. We rarely see them and the little we know of them probably owes much to the rustic literature of Thomas Hardy and creations of his such as Gabriel Oake in “Far from the Madding Crowd.”

So is this one of those Sunday that we would do well to dispense with? Not quite, in my opinion. For if we explore the metaphor, we find that this is a Sunday that can enrich our understanding of the God we encounter in Jesus Christ.

The image itself is ancient. It can be found as a metaphor as far back as the ancient Egyptian Pharoahs who saw themselves as having royal responsibilities as well as privileges. And these responsibilities included care for the subjects for our word “pastor”comes from the Latin translation. Within Israel, the symbolism can be seen in the shepherd boy David becoming Israel’s greatest King, the same David who is eternally associated with the psalm that begins with those words that have resounded down through the centuries;

“The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not be in want.”

And now today we are invited to think of Jesus as our shepherd. An image that may help us see something of the meaning of Jesus as our shepherd, comes from Hawaii. The novel “Hawaii” by James Michener tells of an old man who contracts the leprosy that makes him an outcast in that society. His future can only be away from all he cherishes and those whom he holds dear - in the horror of a leper colony. The old man shares his sad news with his family but now his wife offers to become his “kokua.” These “kokuas” are healthy people who willingly commit themselves to accompanying and nursing a leprous patient. In so doing they take on the risk of catching the disease and experiencing the same suffering as those whom they offer themselves to. No wonder that they are asked as they prepare to go aboard the ship that will take them to their new lives;

“Are you sure you know what you’re doing?”

After all to be a “kokua” demands a special level of commitment, commitment that can only come out of love. Jesus, the shepherd, demonstrates just that sort of commitment - the commitment of one who is prepared to sacrifice all out of love for the likes of you and me.

We see such a lifestyle in the Palestinian shepherd who would have shared in all the hardship and dangers of the flock, constantly alert to the dangers of attack. Theirs was a way of life that left them on the margins of society, unclean when it came to the religious observances of the day, and poor prospects as family men given that the protection of the flock would involve their own families being left vulnerable at night. Oh, the reality is so far removed from the cuddly image of shepherds that we see in our Nativitys.

And so it was with Jesus. Now all too often domesticated by the church, Jesus lived a counter cultural lifestyle which took him away from security, daring to express by words and actions the grace of God for all peoples in ways that scandalised so many of the respectable. Rather than exalting princes or religious leaders, he was often to be found with the most rank of outsiders telling them that they had a stake in the Kingdom of God. And through it all, he was attracting the enmity of the predators of his day, predators who would eventually get their way in his being hounded to a brutal public execution, causing even his family to question the path that he was treading. And all of it for you and me with a focus as intent as any shepherd protecting his flock from danger.

Today we look to Jesus as our shepherd. When Jesus spoke to his hearers, it was in a world in which many claimed a right to lead and guide. After all, Jesus was in a controversy with other religious leaders. When John wrote his Gospel, he wrote to a church with a veritable collection of would be leaders amidst a world in which the Gospel was very much a minority religious understanding. But, amidst the claims of so many, John forcefully reminds us that the true leader, the true guide, the true shepherd is Jesus. Why? Because John’s Gospel is written precisely so that we

“may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.”

For John, Thomas is spot on when having met the Risen Christ, he declares;

“My Lord and my God!”

And if Jesus is Lord and God, then the post of “Shepherd” is filled and we have no need to look elsewhere. Sure, the insights of others may have much value. Sure, ambitions, hopes and dreams may enrich our lives. But these things can never be our masters. That position belongs exclusively to Jesus and is no longer up for grabs.

And more than that, had our reading gone but one verse further, and we would have read that Jesus proclaims himself to be the “good shepherd.” Now I am not one of those who believes that Jesus should be worshipped simply for being God. It is not going too far to say that the object of worship must surely be worthy of worship. And at times down through the years, the church has given us a pretty poor picture of God. And this is a problem for other than a bit of unworthy wheeler dealing in our approach to God based on self interest, there is absolutely no point in worshipping a Lord who is other than good. If God is more vengeful than me at my worst, the whole things is a preposterous waste of time. For surely, the one whom we worship and whose guidance we accepts has to be better than you and me at our best. And whatever our difficulties with some scriptures, given that God is as God is revealed in Christ, then God is truly good. To know what God is like, we simply have to look at Jesus, and then we find that God is good beyond all measure. And that goodness is revealed in Jesus braving hostility and danger so that we might have life to the full, to the max!

Now, all these things are rather comforting. Shepherd images do that to us. And such is right for it is important to know that Jesus is for us as much in the times when we stray as when we are safely in the flock. And psychologists can tell us much about the importance of belonging. But before we contentedly wallow in these things, let’s not ignore the challenge that comes from Jesus being the shepherd. I simply refer you to Brian Stoffregen’s lectionary notes in which he refers to hearing a lecture by Ed Friedman who referred to a friend of his who had watched Palestinian shepherds with their sheep. He noticed that the most common action of shepherds to their sheep far from being coddling them was to hit them in the ass with a rod - not quite the empathetic action we might expect. So this morning it is that I encourage you to be grateful for the courageous love and care offered to you by the good shepherd who is Jesus but also be ready for kick up the arse that we each need to be true followers. Such is our Gospel - we receive unmerited love but from time to time we need the Gospel of the arse kick if we are to be what God intends us to be so that we might have life to the max!

ALVERDISCOTT METHODIST CHURCH - SUNDAY APRIL 13TH 2008

Easter Day - From tears to joy

2008-03-22T15:48:00.000-07:00
JOHN 20: 1-18

It was a miserable start to the day. Filled with desolation at what had happened but two days previously, Mary Magdalene went on pilgrimage to the tomb of Jesus whilst it was still dark. She had no reason to hope - only reason to weep. And on her arrival, what she saw must have been like a kick in the teeth. The ultimate desecration had happened. Someone had rolled the stone away. Given that grave robbing was a sufficiently big problem to cause an imperial edict against it t have been proclaimed, there could only be once conclusion - not only had Jesus been killed in a humiliating way but even in death he was not being left in peace.

Soon she would meet two of the followers of Jesus - Peter and the Beloved Disciple. Ultimately they would both enter the tomb and see the strips of cloth lying there. Now we are told that the Beloved Disciple did at this point believe but even then such belief was incomplete.

Soon the men have gone off to wherever they were staying. But Mary Magdelene remains at the tomb. Stuck in a Good Friday world, she is left to weep. We can barely imagine the extent of her agony. But now things begin to change. We are told that she sees two angels where Jesus should have been lying and they engage her in conversation before she turns to face what she thought was the gardener. It is only when this man calls her by name, that she realises just who she is speaking to. It is Jesus! And now the transformation in Mary Magdelene takes effect. “Rabboni!” she cries. And with that she embraces him with such commitment that Jesus has to tell her to stop. But now the tears have been replaced by joy and the Mary who returns to the disciples is as different as different can be from the Mary who had set off that morning. Why the change? Well, the reason is in those words on her return;

“I have seen the Lord!”

And for her just as ultimately for the other followers of Jesus, the world became transformed. Sorrow gives way to joy. Fear gives way to boldness. And a world drenched in the tears of Good Friday becomes a multi coloured world on Easter Day, no longer filled with despair but pregnant with new and wonderful possibilities.

And so this day is full of meaning for us. It is an event that affirms our value in the sight of God. I guess that the fear of rejection is one of the greatest fears within us. We live in a society that is prone to squashing people, squeezing the sense of self worth out of them. And yet the Easter story shows us Jesus taking the place of those who are most despised and rejected. He has become as one with them in his ministry and this can be seen in his death. In this he shows the degeneracy of society which is built on the imposed suffering of those who are scapegoated. His vision is of a Kingdom which embodies rejection of scapegoat for it is a Kingdom that embraces humanity in its diversity rather than excluding and rejecting. That Kingdom of radical and peaceful inclusion gets an emphatic YES through the resurrection of Jesus. The Nobodies become Somebodies in the new order to which Resurrection points. To use the title of a children’s song from Barney the Dinassour, “Everyone is Special.”

In today’s Mail on Sunday, there is for once an article worth reading. It is an Easter message by the archbishop of York, John Sentamu. In it he makes mention of how several years ago, he was a member of the inquiry into the murder of Stephen Lawrence. Feelings ran high especially when the four young men suspected of committing the murder appeared. Amongst the angry throng, there were four equally young men with iron bars concealed in their trousers, waiting for the chance of a revenge attack. Sentamu went out to tell these men that violence was not the answer. Their reply was;

“Bish, we don’t believe in God.”

Sentamu responded;

“It doesn’t matter. God believes in you.”

And this morning I want to tell you that everything about Jesus including his death and resurrection should tell you that God believes in you!

But not only is the Easter story telling us that God believes in each and everyone of us regardless of our status and failings but it also speaks to us about hope. As we have seen the Easter story is rooted in the appearances of Jesus to heartbroken people who had lost the capacity to hope, people who knew only shattered dreams. Back in 1992 when South Africa’s future was uncertain, Archbishop Desmond Tutu was asked if he felt able to remain hopeful as he looked at the pains of uncertainty. His reply was;

“I am always hopeful. A Christian is a prisoner of hope. What could have looked more hopeless than Good Friday? But then at Easter God says, ‘From this moment on, no situation is untransfigurable.’ There is no situation from which God cannot extract good.”

Indeed as Rev Nathan Baxter, the retired Dean of the Washington National Cathedral, puts it in challenging words that speak of how Easter can be as real to us as it was to those caught up in the Easter story we contemplate during this time of year;

“Remember this: Easter is not just a holy event that happened almost 2,000 years ago in Jerusalem. It is a little Easter on whatever day we discover our need for the love of God. When we discover that all the Good Fridays of our lives cannot destroy the love God has for us.”

So this morning I invite you to respond afresh to the old story. Once more God invites you to move forward trusting in him who wipes away your tears and invites you into the circle of joy.

Christ is risen! This is the time for celebration!

BIDEFORD METHODIST CHURCH SUNDAY MARCH 23RD 2008

Easter Day - The Power of Love

2008-03-22T09:57:00.000-07:00
MATTHEW 28: 1-10

Rowan Williams put it well when he says that when we celebrate Easter;

“we are standing in the Middle of a second ‘Big Bang,’ a tumultuous surge of divine energy as fiery and intense as the very beginning of the universe.”

What a claim that is - that the day we are celebrating is on a level with the very beginning of time. And yet whilst both ‘Big Bang’ and ‘Resurrection’ are in many ways beyond the scopes of our imagination, together they do so much to define our understanding of the world. The former brings the world into being and is in essence the science of creation - through which a loving God sets of the cosmos with its bright array of possibilities. The latter transforms how we see the world that is known to us and how we see ourselves. Both are within the realms of mystery. Both bring into play new realities.

And yet both come without expectation. One of the strongest evidences for the Resurrection of Jesus is that his followers did not expect it. On Good Friday and Holy Saturday we go about our lives contentedly because we know what the outcome of the story will be. And in that we lose some of the power of the story. For to those closest to Jesus, the inbetween time was a time of hopelessness and despair. Their world had caved in. The hopes and dreams that had been theirs, now lay totally and absolutely devastated. Their world was shrouded in complete darkness. All that remained was to visit the tomb - those painful visits that we all make in times of loss.

And so it is that Mary Magdelene and another Mary - the mother of James according to the other synoptic Gospels - came to the tomb. According to Mark and Luke, their intent was to anoint the dead body of Jesus but of this intent there is no mention made by Matthew. Indeed it is surely questionable whether the authorities would have allowed them to go about such a task. But anyhow, what matters is that such an anointing never happens and this becomes a most unusual visit to a tomb. Matthew tells us of an earthquake and an angel sat in the tomb, with Roman guards outside frozen in a state of petrification. The angel tells the news that Jesus is risen and tells the women to let the disciples know for Jesus is heading for Galilee where it had all began. And then as the women who are by now a combination of joy and fear, hurry away to take the good news to the disciples, they are met by the Risen Christ.

Every year we tell these Gospel stories of the appearances of the Risen Christ. And whilst the accounts of the Gospels have their differences, what they have in common is that there was no expectancy of resurrection and indeed those closest to Jesus had big difficulty in believing in it. Why? Because the Resurrection of Jesus was outside of their world vision. For the Resurrection of Jesus cannot but change how we see God, the world and ourselves. Yes, like ‘Big Bang,’ it is a defining moment!

But how does it serve as a defining moment? Well, William Sloan Coffin puts it well;

“Easter has to do with the victory of seemingly powerless love over loveless power.”

In the story of Holy Week and the Passion of Christ, we see plenty of loveless power. We see loveless power in;

- the Authority of the Empire of Rome with its military might and power of life and death

- the economic power based upon the temple where the poor were exploited by the families who controlled the trade

- the religious power of the High Priest and Sanhedrin silencing the voices that might just undermine them and their positions of dominance over peoples’ lives

- the power of a mob who normally would have been subject to power but who were now relishing the moment of being able to decide a man’s fate.

But all this power rooted in domination, power that on Good Friday would seemed to have been triumphant, falls before the power of love. The power of love which had been demonstrated in the liberating teaching and healings of Jesus as well as in his self giving death, receives a resounding YES from God in the act of Resurrection. Here is the emphatic approval for all eternity of that all inclusive love embodied in Jesus. Now we begin to get the Resurrection message that

- Life is stronger than death

- Love is stronger than hatred

- Non violence is stronger than armies and weaponry

- Inclusion is victorious over all that excludes.

Put bluntly the message of Resurrection confronts much of what we glibly accept. It speaks to us of a new way, Christ’s way, which embraces human dignity and dares to dream of realising a new reality of peace, building people up and respect for what Rabbi Jonathan Sachs describes as “The Dignity of Difference” rather than our lazy acceptance of inevitability of conflict, shame culture and fear of diversity. Resurrection challenges us to question where we are going when

- a Ghanaian widowed mother of two, Ama Sumani, dying of cancer is deported to a land where it was known that she would be denied the drug that would have prolonged her life

- failed asylum seekers from Zimbabwe are threatened with deportation and the promise of imprisonment on their arrival by the ever tender, Robert Mugabe

- great games can be hosted and the most lethal of weapons afforded and yet basic housing is left an unfulfilled dream for all too many, even here in Bideford

- the children of this country were fund to be the unhappiest in the west in a recent survey despite Britain being the 5th wealthiest country.

You see, Resurrection is not a safe subject. It means that we have to take this Jesus and the Kingdom he proclaimed very seriously. His message challenged the norms of his day and the response can be seen in Good Friday. To expect it to be warmly welcomed today is a pipe dream born from the womb of ignorance.

And yet, it has to be the basis of our hope. Without Resurrection, hope is dead. But with Resurrection comes hope to battered lives and smashed up communities. For new and fresh beginnings become possible through the resurrected one who says;

“Behold I make all things new.”

This evening I want to encourage you to put Resurrection at the heart of your faith. I do believe that it points us to life beyond the grave. I take the Apostle Paul very seriously when he writes;

“For as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive.”

I take him seriously when he says that without Resurrection our faith is futile. And as one who is often involved in accompanying people whose lives are coming to an end, and in comforting those who are bereaved, this is important to me and I wholly believe it. But I am equally convinced that Resurrection is as much about our living as followers of Christ.

Gene Robinson is the Episcopal Bishop of Mew Hampshire. His appointment was controversial due to the fact that he had been in a same sex partnership for some years. In the melee surrounding his appointment, he received many death threats and indeed before his consecration he was asked to provide his blood type so that if he was attacked at the consecration, treatment could begin on the way to hospital. Writing for the online Anglican publication “The Witness” at Easter a couple of years after the events, he looked back making the following observation;

“I remember saying to our two grown daughters, who were worried and anxious about my well-being, "You know, there are worse things than death. Some people actually never live -- and that is the worst death of all. If something does happen, remember that the God who has loved me my whole life, will still be loving me, and I will have died doing something I believe in with my whole heart."

As I strapped on my bulletproof vest just before the service, I remember feeling blessedly calm about whatever might happen. Not because I am brave, but because God is good and because God has overcome death, so that I never have to be afraid again

That is the power of the resurrection. not in what happens after death, but what the knowledge of our resurrection does for our lives and ministries before death.”

Mighty words indeed that remind us how we are in the care of the one who has defeated the most dreaded of enemies. Words that encourage us that we can journey forwards knowing that we are accompanied by a living, loving God. A God who sets each of us free and takes away the fear of hopelessness. Jurgen Moltmann came to faith amidst the ashes of his country’s defeat in the Second World War. He first read the Bible in a prisoner of war camp. There he sought hope and found it in the risen Christ and hope has been a theme of his writings ever since. In his “Jesus Christ for today’s world” he puts it this way;

“ In the image of the resurrection of the body, life and death can be brought into harmony in such a way that death doesn’t have to be repressed either. In this spirit of the resurrection I can her and now wholly live, wholly love and wholly die, for I Know with certainty that I shall wholly rise again. In this hope I can love all created things, for I know that none of them will be lost.”

My favourite film of all time is “Dead Poets Society.” In that film the inspirational albeit unorthodox teacher, John Keating, seeks to inspire the pupils of a stuffy school where boys live out their parents’ dreams. In once scene he takes them to look at the pictures of past pupils who are long dead. He urges them to get close to the glass and asks them if they hear what those pupils are saying to those of today. At that, Keating starts to whisper

“Carpe Diem! Carpe Diem!”

before sharing the words in English -

“Seize the moment! - Have an extraordinary life boys!”

So today as we celebrate the “surge of divine energy” that is the Resurrection, we are called once more to live out the counter cultural Kingdom that Jesus proclaimed. His work of radical inclusion of all peoples as being of infinite worth goes on. And it continues with the Risen Christ. May we live extraordinary lives as Easter People daring even to be a little bit subversive.

Carpe Diem! Seize the moment!

BIDEFORD METHODIST CIRCUIT EASTER SERVICE SUNDAY MARCH 23RD 2008

Palm Sunday - The heat is on

2008-03-16T07:45:00.000-07:00
It’s a day of excitement. Jesus arrives in Jerusalem as he has done many times before. Only this time it is so very different. Now his mission is reaching its climax and he has come to confront the powers of his day.

And as he enters the city in a meticulously planned entry, there is much expectation surrounding him. Now, I do not think for a moment that the whole city was filled with excitement. Amidst the bustle of the coming Passover celebrations, the streets would have been full. Probably only a limited number of people were caught up in the events of the day for otherwise Rome, paranoid at such times, would surely have intervened as a matter of order. But for those who were involved in these events, this was surely a heady day.

And how they celebrate as Jesus comes into the city upon a donkey. Cloaks are placed on the road whilst branches are cut from the trees and placed on the road whilst some go forwards shouting;

“Hosanna to the Son of David!

Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!

Hosanna in the highest!”

So what is this day all about? You see, it is a day that we have made safe for those sweet processions with donkeys, processions that so very often would seem to be so very distant from the passions and the radical challenge posed by that entry which we remember today.

Let’s for a moment look first at Jesus riding on a donkey. The detailed preparation for this suggests that we have here no accident. Far from it, we have before us a highly subversive piece of street theatre in which all was deliberate. There is a fulfilling of ancient prophecy from Zechariah even to the point of Matthew improbably suggesting that Jesus was riding two animals. And yet the riding on a donkey is highly significant. For whereas we tend to have a less than exalted image of donkeys thinking that their main purpose is to provide rides for children at such cultural centres as Blackpool or Skegness, they were well regarded animals at the time of Jesus. So well regarded as to be fit to carry a King. But here comes the rub, the donkey was fit to carry a King who came in peace whereas a horse was the means of transport for a King who came for war.

But then those branches and the shouts. Well to understand that we have to go back about 200 years to a story that was well known to Jesus’ contemporaries albeit not included in our Bibles unless we have the Apocryphal books. Anyhow a tyrant named Antiochus Epiphanes had tried to destroy thr practice of Judaism with great brutality. An elderly priest named Mattathias had rounded up his sons and they had launched a sort of insurgency. It was a bloody affair. And it took some 20 years and the loss of many lives before it came to a successful conclusion. When one of the brothers led his victorious troops into Jerusalem the First Book of Maccabees tells us, he was greeted with praise, palm branches and music. Now there are clear echoes of this in the welcome that Jesus receives in our Palm Sunday narrative.

And quite frankly there’s the rub. Because this hints at an expectation as to what Jesus would be. For many in the crowd, there would be the hope that Jesus would be the one who like the Maccabeans would bring freeedom from an oppressive overlord. Even Zechariah’s prophecy would be remembered as coming in the context of the destruction of hostile enemy nations. Of course this expectation could only be whispered. After all not that many years before, a Zealot revolt led by Judas of Galilee and Zadok the Pharisee had been punished with the public crucifixion of all 2,000 people captured during that rebellion. Surely, the years of hurt might be brought to an end by this Jesus. No wonder the shouts of “Hosanna” meaning “Save Us” pierce the air.

Indeed, the failure of Jesus to meet these expectation may well have been a significant factor in the change in public opinion during that week. For the week would end with a crowd that may have included some of the first crowd now crying out;

“Crucify him!”

But we need to hold it here. Because Jesus doesn’t lead a bloody insurrection, does not leave us with a Jesus merely uttering pious sentiments. Far from it. Palm Sunday is full of radical challenge. And there are two ways that I feel we need to be aware of that.

The first of those ways is in Jesus living non violence. The American theologian Walter Wink has written much in recent years about what he calls the “myth of redemptive violence.” Wink contests that this myth rather than Christianity, Islam or any of the other world religions, is the dominant myth in our world today. He roots this myth back into early Babylonian creation myths and notes its prevalence in much of the television we inflict on our children today. Its essence is that evil is defeated by what is often seen as heroic against the odds violence. Violence redeems ths bad situation. Commemorating as we are doing this week the fifth anniversary of the Iraq war, we see the power of this myth. If there is an evil or an unplatable situation the answer is force - John McCain a possible future President of the USA singing, “Bomb. Bomb bomb, bomb, bomb Iran” only last year to a well known Beach Boys song. And the same goes on in a smaller way in just about every playground. The myth is strong and drowns out all talk of mercy, peace and reconciliation.

But Jesus confronts the myth. He has done so in his ministry time and again. He will do so again when Peter draws a sword in Gethsamene. For the King who comes in peace on a donkey comes proclaiming and embodying a love that is more powerful than any weapon of mass destruction. And in now way is that contrast more clear than the events of this day. Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossman project the possibility of two processions on that day. From the West Pontius Pilate and his military enter the city with all the apparatus of state power, coming to remind the people at this notoriously volatile celebration, just who is boss. From the East, Jesus and his followers enter the city with all their powerlessness. And yet, despite a day of darkness looming later in the week, it is the powerless unarmed Jesus who brings transformation to the world rather than the imperial might offered by Pilate. Contrary to the voice of the “myth of redemptive violence” it is Jesus that we need rather than the Superman our culture cries out for.

But finally, whilst his path is non violent, Jesus does indeed confront the powers. You do not need to kill or bomb to confront effectively. It is the Nobodies of the world who enter the city with Jesus. And in the week ahead, Jesus will continually challenge the powers on behalf of the Nobodies. This would continuee within the early church. And that church would challenge the symbols of empire and the exploitation of one human by another. For Jesus comes as the King who offers a very different Kingdom to that of Rome or even the empires of our day. His is Kingship rooted in self giving love and mercy rather than in the cult of domination. And today as then he challenges so much of what we think is our Christian way of doing things. The hostile crowd who would say he was no friend of Caesar were right then. And still today they are right. This Jesus is truly the great subversive who subverts even those things we do not question.

So into a bustling city comes Jesus laying down the gauntlet. Still today he lays down that gauntlet. And he invites you and me to move from the domain of the Pilates of this world to the Kingdom that he embodies.

ALWINGTON METHODIST CHURCH Sunday March 16th 2008

Lent 5 - Out of the depths

2008-03-09T09:36:00.000-07:00
PSALM 130

“And now I am happy all the day.”

So ends the chorus of a popular hymn. And whenever I hear it I get the urge to throw up. Why? Because nothing is to me more alien than those words. They just don’t ring true with my experience of life.

I freely admit to having a very powerful depressive streak in my life. There are times when I find functioning very difficult indeed. I’ve been through some of that this week and even this evening I know that I am struggling. But hey I am not alone. And this evening I want to get across the message that Christians who are feeling down are as much a part of the body of Christ as those who are at the top of the mountain. Indeed some of us are in both situations at differing times.

Now don’t bother feeling sorry for me. I won’t have it. After all I am in some pretty good company. Winston Churchill used to tall of being plagued by the “black dog” - something I can identify with him in even if not in much else. Martin Luther was so affected by depression that on one occasion his wife dressed in black, explaining to him that from the way he had been behaving she assumed God had died. And dear Vincent Van Gogh, the artist who had once been a pastor, in an extreme attack of depression, cut off his ear. So you can see that the company, if not the experience, is pretty good.

Now I can offer no easy responses to the problem of feeling down. If I could you would be able to direct at me the call to heal myself. I simply want this evening to make the point that for some if not most of us, there are times when we can feel wretched. And if we are to be real then we should not have to hide it. Oh be gone cult of unending happiness. Instead let us embrace reality and banish artificiality.

Now any serious reading of the scriptures makes clear that following God is not about entering on an unending “Happy Clappy” convention. Indeed the thought of such a thing is to me at least nausea inducing. The scriptures are very honest in showing us quite a range of human feelings and experiences. So I find Psalm 130 to be a helpful piece of scripture. Indeed its first verse is so real;

“Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord.”

There is no posing here. The author recognises the situation in which the author is ensconced and knows that there is no benefit in trying to put on a front to God. The author feels wretched and is prepared to recognise it in the presence of God. And surely if there is a requirement on us when approaching God, it is to be real. That being real means a recognition of where we are and also an expression of desire as to what we might become.

Anyhow despite the pain, the Psalmist clearly longs to be in communication with God. This is good as communion with the God who is the source of our being, enables us to experience the deepest of realities. After all is it not an important desire that we should be in relationship with the one to whom we owe our being. Indeed many have argued that we only find true fulfilment in harmony with God - that this is a need within each of us. Man at war with God is hardly likely to be at peace with fellow man. And if our Being is the product of God then surely God understands us better than we can even understand ourselves.

Still within our Psalm there are two essential revelations about God which are of help to us in our desire for peace of mind.

The first of these is that God is forgiving by nature. The Psalmist grasps what we see in Christ - namely that God has deep wells of forgiveness. Too often, we find ourselves thinking that we can never be forgiven. Indeed we can become dominated by our failings. Yet despite the church too often portraying God as austere and remote, the truth is that God longs to forgive us. Like the father in Jesus’ story about a Prodigal Son, God’s nature is to be all forgiving without regard as to how far we have roamed. It is as demonstrated by Jesus upon the cross amidst mockery and abuse yet crying out;

“Father, forgive them for they do not know what they are doing.”

Forgiveness without limit regardless of the extent of our offences! It is this that is the means by which we are put right with God rather than the special pleading of the Psalmist based upon hours of waiting on God.

Secondly, there is reconciliation with God made available. The Psalmist links this with God’s work in both past and future. We see God’s unfailing love in his dealings with Israel going back to ancient Covenants. We see it going forwards in the work of Christ which is able to bring us full redemption. The sins of the past can be as if they never happened. God has wiped them away. And this is surely life changing for here is God’s love breaking into our hearts enabling us to make new beginnings - all thanks to Christ who has entered into our world and suffered and died that we might embrace the peace with God to which Jesus points.

None of this makes life a bed of roses. Hard times and injustices continue in the world. At times we may feel rather rejected. At times our faces may have tears rather than smiles. Yet hope can not be obliterated because God is for us even when we are at our lowest - indeed maybe more so at such times. The Psalmist kindly points us to a love that will not let us go, a love that we witness in the Passion of Jesus Christ who journeys to a cross with all the pain and rejection that this entails, out of a courageous and passionate love for you and me. He is on our side amidst our vulnerability. For surely God is for us even when we feel furthest from that love.

Now we await his entry to Jerusalem. We await the witness to that love on Calvary. And we await its vindication through resurrection on Easter Day. And then we celebrate by accepting an invitation to his table where we find wonder of wonders, that not only are forgiven and loved but we are right royally accepted as we are. And so we find meaning in the amazing truth that the Maker of the Stars and Seas is for us - no more than that the Maker of the Stars and Seas invites us to be his friends.

Wow!

NORTHAM METHODIST CHURCH Sunday March 9th 2008

Lent 5 Hope in the darkest hour

2008-03-09T03:13:00.000-07:00
EZEKIEL 37: 1-14 John 11: 1-45

I found a story that I liked only yesterday. It’s about a man who had just moved to a new city. Sat in a taxi, he was looking for somewhere that would be good for dinner. Leaning forward, he tapped the driver and said, “Hey mate!” - only for the driver to let out a blood curdling scream followed by his losing control of the vehicle which in the next few moment almost hit a bus, jumped the curb and stopped only inches from the window of a crowded restaurant. After a prolonged silence in which all that could be heard was two hearts beating like base drums, the driver turned around and said;

“Man you scared the living daylights out of me!”

The passenger who was still in a state of shock replied;

“I’m sorry, I didn’t realise tapping you on the shoulder would scare you so badly.”

Quickly the driver explained;

“Well, it’s not your fault. This is my first day driving a taxi. For the past 25 years I’ve been driving a hearse.”

Today as approach Easter, we are reminded of the reality of the shadow side of life. Ant timely that is for our faith has to take seriously the dark realities of life if it is to be real. Sure we can rejoice as we shall do on Easter Day but many a time of rejoicing can only come after times of darkness and even despair.

Ezekiel certainly knew about the dark side of life. After all this priestly prophet was living through what many felt to be a time of calamity. Jerusalem had been destroyed and many of its more able people such as Ezekiel himself were living in distant exile in Babylon far from what they knew best and cherished most. All around him the temptation to give up was at its greatest. And yet this prophet sought to communicate a message that all was not lost. For God would never abandon his people and despite all that had happened could be trusted. Despite the past, and Ezekiel had plenty to say about that, there was still a future to look forward to.

Part of this vision of hope is to be found in the vision of the valley of dry bones. The valley envisaged may well have been an actual battle site from one of the battles that had reduces the people to such a sorry state. What matters from the vision is that these unburied bones are as dead as dead can possibly be. They are caput - finished! There is no reason to place any hope in them. And yet through the Spirit, these bones are enabled to rise up, find life and renewed purpose.

What is the vision all about? Quite simply Ezekiel is proclaiming the message that the shattered defeated people of Israel who are as finished as dry dead bones, may experience a new life - a new life not rooted in anything special about them but rooted in the purposes of God. The God who will raise Jesus from the dead, the God who will equip that motley group of Galilean followers of Jesus for mission, the God who today empowers the church of Christ - that God brings new hope and life to a people who have sunk into despair and who are to all intents and purposes dead. And perhaps we need to engage ourselves with that vision of Ezekiel when we are tempted to lose hope for our world.

And then from John’s Gospel we find that familiar story of the raising of Lazarus. Here we find a foretaste of the resurrection of Christ. Listen for a moment to those words of Jesus when Martha rebukes him for not coming quicker;

“I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die.”

This, the sixth of John’s seven signs that Jesus is the Messiah, the son of God, shows Jesus possessing Divine power over the greatest of humankind’s enemies, death itself. Certainly John’s narrative points to Lazarus being very much dead. And one day he would be again. But Jesus is here revealed as the one who is able to bring new life from death in these sense here of bringing a man back to life just as in his hands as we die to what we have been he is able to make us into new creations that will reflect his love in a way that we could not have previously envisaged. For the time for being born from above is not at the moment of our physical death but here and now. As Lindy Black puts it so eloquently, it is a case of;

“From womb to tomb and vice versa!”

This morning we are reminded of the shadow side of life with all its pain. More of it we will see in the hatred and violence that leads to Good Friday. And if we are to be real, there is no way that we can ignore the darkness. And yet it cannot be the whole picture for in those moments of our greatest helplessness, God is weaving exciting possibilities of new beginnings. Today we see those new beginnings being dreamt of within a vanquished humiliated nation and in coming to fruition in a corpse that is especially mourned by two sisters. Why? It all boils down to the Divine love that wills only the best for us. We have seen it in Jesus of Nazareth bringing new life for all manner of people in Galilee through healings and the granting a new sense of their value. This is what the Kingdom of God is all about. As former Roman Catholic priest John Dominic Crossan puts it;

“Life out of death is how the people would have understood the Kingdom of God, in which Jesus helps them to take back control over their own bodies, hopes and their own destinies.”

Indeed! Life out of death! And that we shall see afresh as we enter into the Easter story and find once more of death being unable to hold back the new life embodied in Jesus - the new life that is the source of all our hope

GAMMATON METHODIST CHURCH Sunday March 9th 2008

Opening story comes from Billy Strayhorn

Lent 4 - Eyes opened to love

2008-03-02T04:41:00.000-08:00
John 9: 1-13, 28 - 42

It is one of those less than endearing facts of life that those who get the worst deal in life tend to also have to put up with the sneers of those who are more fortunate suggesting that in some way they are to blame for the kicks in the teeth that they endure. An example is the Poor Laws which existed until some way into the 20th century. Sure they protected the poor from being unable to exist but surely I cannot be alone in finding something repugnant in the wealthy assessing who is deserving poor and who is undeserving poor. My own great grandmother was but one of many who ended her life being subjected to this onslaught on her human dignity. Thank God for the arrival of the welfare state which put an end to this nonsense. May it never return although recent pronouncements as to who may and who may not have local authority housing fills me with no small measure of alarm.

Or Gospel reading this evening tells us of man who was down on his luck and who suffered the same sort of pious sneers as to whether his sufferings were his own fault. He was a blind man who had to beg in order to exist. I don’t know about you but I shudder when I hear the question put to Jesus by his closest followers;

“Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?”

The theology behind the question is surely vile to us. It represents a theology that provides us with a repugnant view of God, a view of God that were it to be true would in all honesty make it impossible for me to worship God. And yet it was not seen as the view of crackpots. Far from it. This question came out of the orthodoxy of he time of Jesus. After all, a theology had come to prevail from the time of the exile which suggested that if a person or nation was faithful to God, then rewards and blessings would follow. As for a person of nation that was unfaithful, the opposite outcome would occur. And to be fair it was a theology that enabled people to make sense of the horrors of the destruction of Jerusalem and the exile of the elite. More than that it was a theology that enabled those who returned to create a nation that took faithfulness to God seriously.

But the problem was that it created an image of a thoroughly capricious and petty God. So it becomes a theology that is an abomination. And yet it had deep roots. We see it in the friends of Job who rebuke him amidst his sufferings - in love of course! We also see it in those who suggested that the victims of a collapsed tower at Siloam were necessarily particularly sinful. In that regard Jesus rejects this wretched perspective. And so he does in this case.

So let us be clear that a theology that suggests God is pleased with the rich or the healthy but displeased with the poor or the sick is a total abomination. It is no better than the vomit of Satan. And so it needs to be rejected and exposed wherever it rears its ugly head. Indeed, let any theology that denies the absolute love of God be confronted. Instead may we seek to always represent God as all loving as is seen in Jesus. For the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ cannot be in conflict with the loving, inclusive Jesus. Do you get it? Theology matters because it is important that we do not misrepresent the God to whom we point people towards. Be gone indeed, every life denying image of God!

So what does Jesus do? He sees an opportunity to work for good in a bad situation. Only the past week, I was at a meeting concerning the housing crisis in Bideford. The problem of people being unhoused or inadequately housed in Bideford or Anywhere else for that matter is nothing short of scandalous. I shiver at a system that leaves people uncertain of shelter or having to walk the streets for much of the day until they can return to temporary abodes whilst money can be found for weapons of mass destruction, gambling dens or appeasing the self interest of life’s greatest winners in a material sense. It is nothing short of a moral and spiritual disgrace. But sadly we cannot obtain the necessary changes to this shocking state of affairs. So rightly Christians and others are getting together to develop a scheme that will seek to bring hope to some of those whose needs is greatest. For suffering has surely to bring a challenge to engage with the problem.

And Jesus engages with this man. In John’s account he doesn’t even wait to be asked to help. He just gets on and helps a man in need. Making mud with saliva Jesus spreads it on the man’s eyes - there are echoes here of the second creation story in Genesis. He tells the man to wash in the pool of Siloam on the south side of the Temple. And the result is that the man is enabled to see. Now hold on to this. Jesus responds to suffering by opening up the possibilities of God working loving purposes in the situation. And that is surely a good model for us.

But this story is not just about a healing. It is about a transformation. Let me tell you a story. It goes like this. One day a Christian and a Communist were sat on a park bench watching the world go by. As they observed the goings on, they noticed a poor, drunken beggar dressed in rags. The Communist pointed to the beggar and said, “Communism would put a new suit on that man.” But the Christian responded, “Maybe so, but Jesus Christ can put a new man in that suit.” Now for me this should not be seen as an either/or story. The Marxist in me entirely approves of the words of the Communist - to each according to his needs is not a bad concept. But it doesn’t go far enough. It doesn’t solve the problem for problems can keep repeating themselves. A new creation is needed to go along with the social transformation. And in John’s story, the greatest miracle is the transformation that takes place within the blind man.

What is the transformation? Well I don’t know how many of you watched Monty Python’s “The Life of Brian.” It’s actually quite a good film and if you read interviews with the team you will find that it was not intended to make fun of Jesus but to make fun of how we are prone to searching for gods made in our image and to be honest of the church - and I think there are times when people are entitled to do just that. Anyhow there is one scene in which Brian who has become a messiah figure due to public misunderstanding, is harassed by a beggar crying out;

“Alms for an ex leper.”

We are encouraged to believe that this is a leper who has indeed been healed by Jesus after many years of leprosy accompanied by begging. In the dialogue there is a cute moment when Brian asks the ex leper who cured him only to get the answer;

“Jesus did. I was hopping along minding my own business. All of a sudden, up he comes, cures me. One minute I’m a leper with a trade, next minute my livelihood’s gone, not so much as a by-your-leave.. You’re cured, mate. Interfering do-gooder!"

And in that we see that healings such as this one are not just about a cure to an illness but about entering a totally new way of life. This blind man would probably have developed a security from his practice of begging. He has done it for years. But now as a man who could see, that practice had been taken away from him. He would have to learn to live a very different way. How this man did so we are not told but in his conversation with the Pharisees we see a man rise to levels that can hardly have been expected. The man who had begged for his subsistence, the man who had had to please others so that he might have the necessities of life, now becomes a man who is not prepared to be browbeaten but who is prepared to argue his case with those learned Pharisees. Yes, the man has been transformed and now he is a new creation. So never forget that Jesus is in the business of changing people. He transforms them into new creations. And this is part of the business of the church today.

But finally the blind man seems to see better than the Pharisees. Hence that mysterious phrase of Jesus;

“I came into this world for judgement so that those who do not see may see, and those who do see may become blind.”

There is indeed an irony that a blind beggar would seem to see better than the religious professionals. There is a temptation to reach that point where one cannot see the wood for the trees. And amongst these quite definitely devout people that state had been reached. For there are times when we all need to see the most important truths of all. I am reminded of a story about Karl Barth who may have been the greatest theologian of the 20th century. His “Christian Dogmatics” are certainly a most impressive legacy. Yet coming towards the end of his life he was asked after a lecture what he considered to be the greatest truth that he had learnt in his fruitful life. His reply was this;

“The greatest truth I have ever learned is ‘Jesus loves me this I know, for the Bible tells me so,’”

And that my friends we need to see - that Jesus loves me, you, the cussed guy down the road who drives us crazy and yes also the Muslim bowing down to Allah. Never, ever forget that the love of Jesus is for all. Otherwise all we are left with is sanctimonious mumbo jumbo!

And that is at the heart of seeing. Forget your aspirations at knowing the truth to all life’s big questions. Search for truth for unfocused devotion can be a dangerous thing but have the humility to know with Paul that our knowledge is partial and that we see as through a darkened glass. Still remember that the love of God for all and through all is what matters most.

One of the best hymns to have come out of America in the 20th Century was Thomas Dorsey’s “Precious Lord, take my hand.” Sung at the funeral of Martin Luther King, its background was in the unexpected deaths of Dorsey’s wife Nettie and the child she was carrying. Dorsey went through guilt at not having responded to an instinct to remain with her rather than travel to a revival meeting. He also felt let down by God until he came to a place of resolving to listen closer to God and in that fund peace. That peace took him to a piano late at night in a music school and there as he played a melody came that most memorable of hymns;

“Precious Lord, take my hand
Lead me on, let me stand
I am tired, I am weak, I am worn
Through the storm, through the night
Lead me on to the light
Take my hand precious Lord, lead me home

When my way grows drear
Precious Lord linger near
When my light is almost gone
Hear my cry, hear my call
Hold my hand lest I fall
Take my hand precious Lord, lead me home

When the darkness appears
And the night draws near
And the day is past and gone
At the river I stand
Guide my feet, hold my hand
Take my hand precious Lord, lead me home

Precious Lord, take my hand
Lead me on, let me stand
I'm tired, I'm weak, I'm lone
Through the storm, through the night
Lead me on to the light
Take my hand precious Lord, lead me home.”

May our eyes like those of the blind beggar be opened to the courageous, unconditional love of God that comes to us through Jesus. May we see!

TORRINGTON METHODIST CHURCH - Sunday March 2nd 2008

Mothering Sunday - Our Mother God

2008-02-29T14:26:00.000-08:00
1 SAMUEL 1: 20 - 28 JOHN 19: 25 - 27

I remember back in 1999 when the Methodist worship Book came out. The circuit in which I was working on the Isle of Man decided to purchase a number of copies for use throughout the churches. Generally it was well received. There was just one matter that caused concern - the Communion service in which God is addressed as both “mother” and father.” And I know that for some, that one reference to God as “mother” invalidated the whole book.

And yet I think that that one reference was entirely justifiable. Now don’t get me wrong. Next week we will not be praying to;

“Our mother who art in heaven.”

That is not how Jesus taught the Lord’s Prayer and it is not how it has been prayed for two millennia. And I’m far too much a respecter of tradition to disregard either scripture or the historic teachings of the church.

And yet I equally do not want to ignore the motherhood of God. And in that I have some worthy colleagues. Listen for a moment to Anselm who became Archbishop of Canterbury just six years after the death of William the Conqueror. Nor regarded as a liberal trendy, he had this to say;

“Jesus, you are gentle with us as a mother with her children.”

And then listen to the greatest religious thinker that this country has ever produced, Mother Julian of Norwich, who over six hundred years ago wrote;

“As truly as God is our Father, as truly God is our Mother.”

Now of course most Biblical references to God portray God as male. That is hardly surprising given that the social context in which the scriptures emerged was one in which men were dominant. But there are exceptions. In the Old Testament there are to be found verses which provide us with images such as God being as a woman in childbirth, a mother unable to forget the child she has fed and a midwife attending a birth at a time when only a woman could serve in that role. And the list could go on much longer. And within the Gospels, Jesus likens God to a woman searching for a coin whilst Jesus takes on himself female imagery in his lament over Jerusalem when he cries out;

“How often have I longed to gather your children together as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing.”

Now of course, God is beyond gender. Being spirit, God does not have the attributes that make us male or female. Indeed, it is irrelevant for in the very first chapter of Genesis we are told that God has created male and female in God’s image. Of course Jesus lived as a man although it is his humanity rather than his gender that is significant in him being the means of our salvation.

Speaking of God as “father” or “mother” doubtless provides us with a quite a range of pictures. Observing the media and hearing people’s stories suggest that whilst for most people there are positive responses to the term “father,” there are those for whom the term is a block on any relationship with God. And yet our stereotypes of fathers and mothers can fall short of reality. I know in many a home the ultimate threat may have been;

“Wait till your father gets home.”

But we know that fathers are not necessarily the fearsome disciplinarians that those words imply. After all in some homes it is the mother who is the strict parent whilst the father may have great qualities of caring, patience and compassion which are often associated with mothers. Time and again the stereotypes are seen to be removed from the realities.

Surely God combines both fatherhood and motherhood in God’s dealings with us. Indeed God represents the very best that can be hoped for of both fathers and mothers. Truly, God is the altogether lovely perfection of parenthood. In the parable of the Prodigal Son, the Father figure who is intended as a representation of God, in some ways behaves as a mother would do. He shows restraint in the face of the Prodigal’s insensitive request for his inheritance. When the Prodigal returns he is most unmanly in running to meet the Prodigal and in kissing him. And then when the other son refuses to join the celebration, he takes on the mother’s role as a peacemaker rather than thrashing the lad as would have been expected of a father. No wonder that Rembrandt in his painting, “The Return of the Prodigal son” has two very different hands of the father touching the returned son - one being very muscular whilst the other has the elegance and gentleness of a woman.

So whilst I am not going to start praying the Lord’s Prayer by beginning with “Our Mother” rather than “Our Father”, I do think it is important to recognise that in God’s we find the wholeness and the perfection of both fatherhood and motherhood. Our God is the divine parent to whom we owe our lives and in whom we find all that we could want in a parent. Yet ultimately, this is about our search for ways to relate to God and to describe God. And then the list of ways in which we can see and experience God would seem to be endless. Our language can never fully describe the wonder of God,

But finally what thought can we take away? I think it is this. God loves us passionately. God is concerned for our well being. And God cannot stop being concerned for us even when love becomes painful. He is what we would wish a parent to be and more besides. So today let us just wallow in God’s love - the love without limits!

BIDEFORD METHODIST CHURCH - Sunday March 2nd 2008

Lent 3 - Not so gentle Jesus (Non lectionary sermon)

2008-02-24T09:23:00.000-08:00
JOHN 2: 13-22

I think the first prayer that I learnt came from Charles Wesley. It began;

“Gentle Jesus, meek and mild,
Look upon a little child;
Pity my simplicity,
Suffer me to come to Thee.”

If that wasn’t bad enough, I attended a church where proudly displayed was what I now know to be Warner Salmon’s painting “The Head of Christ.” It’s the picture that most of you will have seen (500 million copies have been produced) in which Jesus has flowing blonde hair, blue eyes and makes the late John Inman look like The Terminator. In short it is a picture that has always made me want to protest;

“What a wimp!”

In both prayer and painting I think we have got Jesus very badly wrong and I for one have had to do a bit of unlearning. Which is just as well because today’s reading portrays Jesus in a manner that is hardly “meek and mild.” So let the real Jesus be unleashed!

And that Jesus is certainly blazing with anger in John’s Gospel. Now John puts the clearing of the Temple at the beginning of the ministry of Jesus whereas the other Gospel writers put it as the follow up to the triumphal entry on Palm Sunday. Some would argue that there could have been two such events but given the importance attached to the Temple as a centre of religious and economic life in Jerusalem, it is surely inconceivable that Jesus would have been allowed two such outrages. After all the American scholar EP Sanders argues that this is the event that was the trigger for the execution of Jesus. So I am inclined to think that this episode occurred at the timing suggested by the first three Gospels whilst John being more concerned with significance than chronology has found it suitable for his purposes to tell this story at the beginning of his Gospel.

So let’s for a moment look to the temple itself. The Temple at the time of Jesus was the third Temple ( or a major development of the second Temple depending on your point of view) to be built on that site. Building had begun under Herod the Great at about 20 BCE. It would not be totally completed until about 63 CE under Herod Agrippa. It was a thoroughly magnificent building made of white marble that gleamed in the daylight. Hugely impressive, it conveyed a message about the greatness of Israel’s God and it was the centre of Israel’s religious and economic life. So to confront the Temple establishment was a bold and audacious move by Jesus.

So to what exactly did Jesus object? It wasn’t simply that there was a market place. This was normal in any temple cult. Currency need to be changed from that of Rome to Jewish money in order for the necessary payment to be made. Appropriate livestock had to be sold in order for sacrifices to be made and that which was brought in needed to be inspected. And yet, protesting that God’s house has been turned into a “market” Jesus unleashes his full fury upon the traders - making a whip of cords to drive the animals out of the Temple, scattering the coins of the money changers and overturning their tables.

Wow! This is no meek and mild Jesus. This is a Jesus who is furious, a Jesus who is not going hang around to observe social etiquette. But why? In part it is because the Temple traders are using religion as a means to carry out extortionate practices at the expense of poor worshippers. After all, Jesus is here in line with the prophetic tradition in rejecting the exploitation of the poor. And he knows only too well that much of this commerce is in fact controlled by high priestly families such as that of Annas (Jospehus refers to the “bazaars of Annas“) which included his son in law Caiaphas who figures in the trial of Jesus. No way is Jesus prepared to sit back and see an elite carrying out sharp practice to the detriment of worshipers, many of who would have been impoverished. Instead, we witness a courageous stand against the dominant powers.

Another cause of the anger of Jesus may well have been that the activities about which he protested were going on in the Court of the Gentiles. This Court was as far as gentiles could go. And yet, they were hardly experiencing worship in the midst of a bazaar. Jews could go further especially if they were men but this was as good as it got for gentiles. Now whilst most of what Jesus has been doing has been with his fellow Jews, he has hinted that God is for all peoples in for example his conversation with the Samaritan Woman at the Well and in the parable he told of a good Samaritan. Here, he can no longer abide a system which has been abused in such a way as to keep people from a full experience of God’s love. It has to end! I just wonder to what extent our proclamation and attitudes today keep people who are other than us, away from a full experience of God’s love today.

So there we are. Jesus, far from being meek and mild, is eyes ablaze with anger. His actions are the actions of fury. So perhaps we need not be afraid of anger. Indeed, I would suggest that there are times when we should embrace anger even when that anger is directed towards the places where many would not wish it to be placed. I certainly feel anger at the production of instruments that could carry out mass killing including when they are done by my own country. I certainly feel anger at the opening of casinos and bookies that exploit human weakness. I certainly feel anger at the toleration of homelessness and inadequate housing in a country where such need is often but a few yards from ostentatious wealth whose desires seem to be much more listened to in high places than the cries of the needy. So let there be no mistake - at times anger and the action that goes with it is a Christian duty! Be gone meek and mild church! Arise a church of militancy for the dispossessed, the voiceless and the victims!

But still this is not the point at which to stop. As Jesus is challenged, to give a sign for what he is doing, his answer is;

“Destroy this Temple, and I will raise it again in three days.”

How do we interpret this? Well certainly one possibility is to see it in terms of a prophesy of the imminent destruction of the Temple. John’s readers will know that this has happened in 70 CE.

But I guess that most Christians will see it as pointing to his own body. For ultimately the risen Christ will be all that the Temple should have been as the place to meet with God. As we travel through Lent on the way to the events of Good Friday and Easter, we see in Jesus the all sufficient means through which we may approach God and experience the fullness of God’s love. A day of anger in Jerusalem has shown the temporary nature of the Temple as a means to God. Instead we can see in the passionate courage and love of Jesus that in him all our hopes and dreams can be wisely invested.

A world without the Temple seemed an impossibility. Today, we still put our hopes in wrong places be they nation, leaders or even British values. These things are not necessarily wrong in themselves but when we depend on them, they become a form of idolatry. The only place that I can encourage you to invest your allegiance and hopes in in Jesus Christ who is God made flesh. He is thoroughly reliable.

ALVERDISCOTT METHODIST CHURCH February 24th 2008

Lent 3 - Good news for Outsiders

2008-02-24T04:38:00.000-08:00
JOHN 4: 5-26, 39-42

This morning time is short and we face a scripture that speaks profoundly to us. So I just want to highlight a little of the message that comes at us from this encounter between Jesus and the Samaritan woman at Sychar.

Firstly, that this meeting ever happened tells us something important about Jesus. You see, this encounter comes against a background of over 500 years of enmity between Jews such as Jesus and Samaritans. Its roots lay in the planting of new peoples into the area by Assyrian conquerors. With time not only was there a racial issue between two people but a religious issue also. For Samaritan religion had come to a different place than Jewish religion. As the dialogue makes clear one of the differences was in the place of supreme worship of God. For Jews, the Temple in Jerusalem was the place that counted. Samaritans on the other hand looked to Mount Gerizim which was close to the scene of this encounter. Once a temple had stood there but Jewish leaders had destroyed it a century earlier.

By the time of Jesus, both parties had their grievances and so they tended to have as little to do with each other as possible. Indeed most Jews would have avoided going through Samaria but Jesus didn’t.

Anyhow, our scripture finds him thirsty by the well when a Samaritan woman arrives. Firstly he asks her for water and out of that engages her in conversation. Nothing unusual in that you might think. But in that culture it was unusual. For as verse 9 makes clear, Jews did not normally associate with Samaritans. And more than that it was not normal for a man to engage in private conversation with a woman other than a member of his family, something which led to the disciples being surprised at finding Jesus talking with a woman. Do you get it? Jesus was not letting the conventions of the day get in the way of proper and respectful conversation with this Samaritan woman. To most Jewish people, she was an outsider but to Jesus she was quite simply a person worthy of respect.

Now it would seem that her experiences of life had not been altogether kind. We are told that she had had 5 husbands before her current partner. Often this is interpreted as suggesting that she had a particularly sinful lifestyle. Her coming to the well at a time when the Sun was at its hottest rather than earlier in the morning, is often interpreted as suggesting that she was ashamed to be with other women who knew her story all too well. But this is reading too much into her story. The woman may simply have been unfortunate, a victim of bereavement is a society where life expectancy was not all that could have been wished. She may have been harshly treated by men in her life to a point where some of the spark had been knocked out of her so that she preferred to stay away from company. We do not know. What we do know is that if others thought her not to be worth their time, that was not a view shared by Jesus.

Oh make no mistake, here we find the worth of all people being affirmed by Jesus. Differences for him were not an excuse to erect the barriers. Whilst our rag the Daily Mail was this week exposed offering money for stories that would reflect badly on East Europeans living in this country, Jesus systematically knocks down the walls we build against people who are deemed to be other. Indeed, in his respectful dialogue with a woman of other faith, perhaps we can see a model as to how we can dialogue with people of other religions in this country. This means being prepared to listen and even to seek the help of those who are “other” as Jesus does in his request for water, rather than hectoring them or dehumanising them.

Now, this is pretty traditional interpretation. Jesus is on the side of the outsider and this has important significance in how we treat outsiders today be they of other religion, other lands especially asylum seekers or those who are deemed to have in some way or other to have flawed lifestyles. The love of Jesus is for all and we do no favours when we put limits on the love of God.

But I think there is something else going on here. It is too easy for us to see Jesus as the insider and the Samaritan woman as the outsider. You see, that is not the whole picture. This encounter is not in Israel. It is in Samaria. It is on the home turf of the Samaritan woman. She is the one who is at home. And in this place it is Jesus who is the outsider. Consciously and deliberately Jesus has made himself into the outsider. And this can speak to Christian living today. In a real way, Christians need to get used to being the outsider in what is effectively post Christian society. Forget about a past when Christianity in its corrupted form of Christendom dominated. Look to today where we are surrounded by many a Samaria and like Jesus respond to the challenge to engage with a society in which Christians are the outsider. There is a real temptation in times of falling church numbers in Britain, west Europe and increasingly the USA to retreat into a bunker mentality. And yet the example of Jesus urges us away from that. Jesus urges us to positively engage with the diversity of humanity especially with those whose experience of rejection is greatest. If Jesus can be the archetypal outsider, then that is the place for us.

This story is at a well. People who lived in the Middle East in those days as today knew only too well the worth of water - pity Coca Cola with their wasteful use of water do not know this worth. Shortages of water are a problem for much of the world. And yet vital as that is, Jesus offers this Samaritan woman a vision of “living water” which will bring refreshment for all time. This was an is the offer of Jesus. In our world of the rat race in which the rats all too often do their worst to those who cannot keep up, Jesus offers the living waters of his presence, his love and his acceptance. He brings grace, a word that can change the world, through which he gives us a value that we can never earn. This grace is something that we can mediate to others. Just as Jesus stood out against life denying culture in his time, so to are we called to challenge the grey arbiters of power in our world with a vision of grace.

The Samaritan woman rejoiced in her encounter with Jesus. She tells what has happened to her fellow Samaritans. Jesus stays a couple of extra days with the historic enemy. And it is they who discern that Jesus “really is the Saviour of the world.”

And what more of this Samaritan woman? We know no more of what happened to her although I cannot but think that this encounter was life changing to both this woman and to Jesus. But across the world she goes on being celebrated. In Mexico, La Samaritana is celebrated on the fourth Sunday of Lent with specially flavoured water being given so as to commemorate her gift of water to Jesus. In Russia she is honoured as Svetlana which means “equal to the apostles.”

What an elevation for this outsider! But this is the Gospel of the ultimate outsider in which outsiders still find favour.

BIDEFORD METHODIST CHURCH Sunday February 24th 2008

Lent 2 - Moving with God

2008-02-17T02:27:00.000-08:00
GENESIS 12: 1-6 JOHN 3: 1-17

I am one of those people who finds it hard to warm to that patriarch of Genesis, Abraham. A man who on two occasions puts himself before the well being of his wife by pretending that she is his sister so as not to disillusion powerful men who wish to sleep with her, is not exactly the sort of person I admire. That he is recorded as exiling his first child and her mother, being prepared to sacrifice his child whether it be Isaac as in the Jewish and Christian traditions or Ishmael as in the Islamic tradition, and that he seems to have difficulty getting on with people leading to a splitting with Lot and even the unleashing of a war, mean that to be honest I don’t find Abraham to be the sort of guy I would choose to go out for a pint with.

And yet, Abraham is a venerated figure in three religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Why should that be? I think that the answer is that this deeply flawed man is at the same time a man who is prepared to give himself to doing what he feels God to be calling him to, even if this means that he is in more than one way entering new territory.

At the time we meet him, he is already advanced in years. His family have already made a great move. They have travelled from Ur which is probably in what is now South East Iraq to Haran which would be on the Syrian/Turkish border. Their goal has been Canaan but they have not arrived at that destination.

But now comes a call from God;

“Go from the country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you.”

Now I know that migrations on the part of nomadic people were not unusual. But there comes to all of us a time when we want to feel settled. We can all find ourselves held to the places and people that are familiar. Nothing unsettles us quite as much as change.

And yet, this elderly man demonstrates a remarkable level of obedience to God. He get up and moves even though he does not know where he will be going. And in so doing, he abandons the props with which he had lived including his extended family. All of this for an uncertain future! All of this responding to a promise that this elderly man who is married to an elderly woman, would be the founders of a great nation. It sure is obedience even to the point of being just a little crazy.

And if you follow the story, you will find that deeply flawed Abraham keeps trying to do what God calls him to. And of course through his first two sons, Ishmael and Isaac, he is seen as fathering two great nations.

Now, Abraham may not be the primary figure in any of the religions. For Judaism, I would suggest that Moses is more significant. And certainly for Christianity it is Jesus who is of prime significance whilst for Islam, it is the Prophet Muhammad who is seen as the greatest of God’s messengers. But within each of those faiths, Abraham is a vital figure. Jewish circumcision looks back to him and Jewish people see themselves as children of Abraham. For Christians, his significance is seen in Matthew’s genealogy of Jesus going back to him and his portrayal in the Letter to the Hebrews as a great example of faith whilst Muslims see him as the prime example of Hanifism, faith in One God.

But the greatest Biblical tributes to Abraham are found in his being described as a friend of God. We first find this incredible description of Abraham in Isaiah (41:8) and it is repeated in the Letter of James where we find it written;

“Thus the Scripture was fulfilled that says, “Abraham believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness” and he was called the friend of God.”

What a description of Abraham’s relationship with God! It is unique. And it comes about because Abraham believed the incredible promise of God and acted accordingly.

Yes, Abraham is an example of a man who responded to a dynamic understanding of God. He had the capacity to appreciate that God is not simply about the continuance of the status quo but God challenges us to see the world in new ways and to move with God even when that moving takes us into the realism of uncertainty and unpredictability.

I think that there is also movement going on in our Gospel reading. In it we find a well known encounter between Jesus and a man named Nicodemus. Now, Nicodemus was a part of the religious establishment. After all he was a Pharisee, people who were certainly known for their orthodoxy. More than that he would seem to have been a member of the ruling council, the Sanhedrin. And yet, we find him crossing boundaries by coming to speak to Jesus. Oh, we would not have been short of learning. He could have been given the position he occupied. But this Nicodemus was no closed mind and so having heard about Jesus, he was prepared to abandon the safety of past understandings to see if through Jesus he might be enabled to move forwards. In Nicodemus is the ultimate reproach for the closed minded. He is a reminder that precious as inherited truth is, God is always challenging us to new ways of exploration.

The encounter begins with misunderstanding but in the ensuing dialogue there is much that merits contemplation. This morning, I just want to briefly touch on two insights from this scripture.

Firstly, there is talk of a new birth. The same Greek word can be translated as meaning “born from above” and “born again.” My impression is that Jesus is speaking of being “born from above” whilst Nicodemus understand him to be speaking of being “Born again.” That at any rate is where the commentaries leave me.

But think for a moment. Is not being “born from above” quite a revolutionary thought? You see, at the time of Jesus one’s birth status was important. One’s place of honour depended upon it. It was a factor for life in a society in which status was so very important. But wait for it! If we are “born from above” as children of God, then surely we all have a new status. We are all lifted up. And with that then surely distinctions of social class begin to fade away. More than that, in a world in which the only arena in which men and women could free associate with one another was where they were brothers and sisters, this concept of being all children of God surely challenged both segregation and the ranking of men above women. Truly, we miss all too often the vision that comes from being “born from above” that Jesus is heralding a social revolution in which all might find hitherto denied dignity. No wonder that the Apostle Paul was later to write thos earth changing words;

“There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.”

Of course, Christianity is about so much more than social reform but it is undeniable that it challenges honour systems that put some above others. Within the gospel is the seeds of social transformation and part of our discipleship is to work out and live its meaning for today.

And secondly, there is the message of Divine love directed at the world. Ancient Israel seems to have lived with a tension between those who saw God’s love as directed exclusively in the direction of Israel and those particularly within the prophetic tradition who saw that love as being wider, directed even as illustrated in for example the Book of Jonah towards the greatest of Israel’s enemies. John 3: 16 has often be used as a clincher verse for exclusion of non Christians from God’s love. This morning I resist that debate but urge you to here evidence that God is attached to the whole world. And that attachment to the whole world is so great that the Son has been sent in order that we might from now be experiencing the quality of life which comes from being in the unending presence of God. And in that presence transformation is worked out as instanced by for example John Newton who following his conversion to faith in Christ eventually came to that second conversion that did not just lead him away from the slave trade that had been his livelihood but into campaigning against that which he now could no longer tolerate.

I think that both Abraham and Nicodemus are examples of people who were prepared to resist the temptation to stand still. Had they stood still, then their lives would never have flowered as they did. Both learnt that just clinging to the place that they were at, was not sufficient. Our God is a dynamic God who urges us forwards. This can serve to mean that our understandings of God need to develop, that our understandings of the injustices of the world need to move forwards and that even how we worship is a not something that should be left fossilised.

Today, we live in a fast changing world. Often Christianity is regarded as irrelevant at best. You and me are called to be a part of God’s mission in our world. By all means cherish that which is our inheritance but for goodness sake, do not close down the doors on God doing something new. Time and again, we need to have the nerve to ask if we are currently in the right place with God. We need to be open to stepping out into the unfamiliar for God most certainly does not stand still. The question for every Christian church this Lent is whether we are accepting of fossilising or whether we are prepared to move with God and God’s mission.

ALWINGTON and NORTHAM METHODIST CHURCHES - Sunday February 17th 2008

Lent 1 Choices

2008-02-10T06:22:00.000-08:00
Genesis 2: 15-17; 3: 1-7 Matthew 4: 1-11
In his “Confessions”, St Augustine writes;

“Give me chastity and continence but not just now.”

I guess, we all know the reality of temptation. It is a part of being human. That has always been so and always will be. And today, as we enter into the season of Lent, we are met by scriptures on this very subject of temptation.

From the Old Testament has come the story of what has traditionally been referred to as “The Fall.” It is a story that shows man and woman breaching the one boundary given to them by God. It is a story that reminds us that there is a real temptation to breach boundaries and to take on ourselves those things that belong to God. How we see those boundaries today, is a matter of some debate. After all God has called humanity into the process of creativity. So at what stage do we over step the mark in matters such as the application of scientific knowledge? A big one for ethicists there!

Now, the story operates on one level as a reminder of our need for humility. We learn through it that we have a real temptation to step outside of God’s will. From the story has come an understanding of “original sin” which sees humanity as sharing in a falling short of what God would wish us to be. And in so many ways as Paul recognised, Adam is representative of humanity.

But the story has so much more to tells us. Firstly it reminds us that the things we do bring consequences. The disobedience of Adam and Eve brings exile from the garden for them amongst other things. And indeed shame enters into the human experience. And still today, we know what it is to live with the consequences of the choices we make. That is why it is so important to make our peace with God and with others as we worship.

But the story need not be seen as entirely negative. The Orthodox tradition has been particularly helpful in offering a positive outlook on this story. They would suggest that acquiring knowledge of good and evil is a picture of our being enabled to grow up. You know, as a father I am having to learn to let James and Kaye make their own decisions. A part of me would love to wrap them up in cotton wool and protect them for all of their lives. But what would that do to them? It would leave them as but little children for all of their lives. So all I can do is to seek to influence them but to then allow them to make their own decisions even when I might wish they made other choices. It is painful at times but it is the duty of a love that respects them. Likewise this story can be seen as God showing his love for humanity by enabling us to enter into choices, even those that are not in keeping with God’s will. Put simply, the story can be seen as God telling us that we can be free beings who grow through experience rather than utterly dependent little children, forever in nappies.

Now, if Paul sees Adam as a representative person, he equally sees Jesus as a representative person. From Adam, Paul sees death entering the world through disobedience. Through Jesus, he sees the greater power of life entering the world through obedience. Why? Because Jesus is the one who is victorious over temptation!

The tempting of Jesus at the beginning of his ministry is a reminder of the full humanity of Jesus. He is tempted in every way as we are. Matthew sets the temptations in the wilderness shortly after Jesus had been baptised at the Jordan by John the Baptist. The temptations which in length of time equate to the length of Lent are temptations as to the nature of his forthcoming ministry. Tired and hungry as he was, Jesus must have found it hard to resist these temptations to make things so much easier. Each of them was attractive to Jesus - after all temptation has no power if it is not attractive.

Those temptations have meaning today. Turning stones into bread is not a bad thing of itself and yet as the answer of Jesus reminds us, the good is no substitute for the best. Jumping from a pinnacle of the Temple into the depths of the Kidron Valley relying on God’s intervention, would certainly be spectacular even by the standards of some of today’s tele evangelists. But forcing God’s hand is hardly a stance of worship or discipleship. And then doing a deal with evil to attain power is alien to God’s character in every way. And how many have made that particular error of going along with this and that so as to climb a greasy pole believing that with them at the top things would be so very different - only to discover that the result of selling one’s soul is that the compromiser is different and the wrongs just go on and on!

One thing that always catches my eye as I look at the tempting of Jesus, is that the use of the scriptures in temptation. There we see the danger of the clincher verse so beloved by literalism. For Scripture can be used in destructive ways. That is why in Methodism saying “The Bible says” is not enough. To take seriously scripture, we use the Wesleyan Quadilateral in which scripture is in dialogue with tradition, reason and experience. Furthermore, there is value in seeing the scriptures through what we know of Jesus. Given that Jesus is seen to have been all loving, embracing and inclusive, we do well to recognise that we have a problem if our understanding of a scripture is at odds with what we know of Jesus. Always, our theology needs to be in touch with the Word made flesh that is Jesus.

Finally, I want to make a contemporary point. In the past three days, listening to the radio and reading the newspapers has at times made me ashamed to be British. I refer to the controversy over the Archbishop of Canterbury’s lecture to lawyers on Thursday. I have read the lecture and subsequent clarification by the Archbishop. I am not sure of the extent to which I agree or disagree with him as yet. But I do know that I am disgusted at the misrepresentation of the lecture and vilification of the man. I beaing a bear with a small brain, know that at times his arguments are hard to understand and I wish that he would be a little easier to understand (although many of the lawyers present were very impressed at what they heard). Contrary to what is being portrayed, he did not call for a parallel system of law to be introduced. Sections of our media are guilty of bearing false witness in this matter and of inflaming tensions that they themselves have done much to fan. In the case of that great theological publication, the Sun which has sent Page 3 girls to Lambeth Palace and a sound system playing “Rule Britannia”, the coverage has been totally mendacious. The front page on Thursday was nothing short of incitement to hatred! And sadly, far too many have jumped on a bandwagon without bothering to find out what the Archbishop said, such as the MEP I heard on Friday night on 5Live who was quick to condemn the Archbishop but had it eventually squeezed out of him that he had only read a newspaper account - Peter Hitchens managed a similar performance of ignorance on a Welsh radio channel.

I hope that we don’t as a society fall further into a soundbite method of discussing complex issues. The question of law and religious minorities is complex. May we not fall into the temptation of following the voices of hatred whose desire to hold on to exclusion results in denigrating a most reflective holy man, a man who seeks to give value to all. But of course, we wouldn’t be the first to do that would we?

Bideford Methodist Church Sunday February 10th 2008

Transfiguration Sunday - The transfiguration of Christ

2008-02-02T14:37:00.000-08:00
MATTHEW 17: 1-9

It hardly seems possible but as we enter February, we are but days away from Lent and the contemplation of the way of the cross. Our next few weeks will be weeks in which the Passion of Christ is at the centre of our thinking. And indeed today’s Gospel reading is very much in the shadow of the Passion. Only a short while before the event which we shall today consider, there has been a high point and a low point in the understanding of those who travelled with Jesus. The high point has been the declaration of Simon to Jesus;

“You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.”

“He’s got it!” we are inclined to shout. And Jesus seems to have shared our pleasure for in response to this momentous declaration, he has told Simon that now he shall be known as Peter which means “Rock.” And amazingly, on this rock, will Jesus build his church.

The low point has been a total misunderstanding of the
Messiahship of Jesus. This has been revealed in Peter’s reaction to what that Messiahship entails. For when Jesus speaks of the imminence of his suffering and death, Peter cannot but rebel at the thought;

“God forbid it, Lord! This must never happen to you.”

And for this desire to protect Jesus, Peter has thrown at him by Jesus, one of the great put downs of all time;

“Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me; for you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.”

Poor Peter! In practically no time, he has gone from “Hero to Zero.” He must have felt crushed. No doubts about his sincerity but surely a case of being sincerely wrong. And his journey to real understanding would have a lot further to go.

But, however humiliated Peter felt himself to be, Peter was by no means chucked out of Jesus' inner circle. Indeed but six days later, Matthew tells us, Peter along with James and John was taken up a high mountain by Jesus. But this would be no ordinary trip up a mountain. On the contrary, it would be an experience to remember for the rest of their lives! An experience that would take them into a wonder so much greater than could be conceived by the scope of their imaginations! An experience that would be teeming with meaning!

So what happened upon that mountain? Well, they certainly saw Jesus in a way that they had never seen him before. Matthew speaks of Jesus’ face shining like the Sun and his clothes becoming dazzling white. Echoes here are to be found of Moses' face shining after an encounter with God. Oh here, they see that Jesus is so much more than they had hitherto realised - the result being that here was an experience not just of Jesus being transfigured but equally of the three disciples being transformed.

Indeed, the experience is about more than an inexplicable change in Jesus’ appearance. It goes so much deeper than that. Firstly, the disciples see Jesus talking with two venerable figures from the past. How they are able to recognise Moses and Elijah we are not told but that he should be seen as in conversation with these men, is highly significant. After all, Moses was known as the great lawgiver of Israel and Elijah was known as the greatest of the ancient prophets. Matthew’s readers would certainly understand the message contained here, that Jesus represents the completion of the Law and the Prophetic tradition. They would get Matthew’s message that in Jesus the hopes of all the years were finding fulfilment. In Jesus, the story of ancient Israel was finding its true meaning and its ultimate goal.

But further revelation was to come. As James, John and Peter know not what to do, there come a voice from the heavens. In part it echoes the voice from the heavens that was heard at Jesus’ baptism, as it proclaims;

“This is my Son, the Beloved; with him I am well pleased.”

But then comes an addition;

“Listen to him!”

I would guess that these words were important to Jesus. Too often we underplay his full humanity in our desire to affirm his divinity. But that humanity is a core part of our Christian doctrine. And that humanity would mean that in tough times, Jesus would need to be able to look back and find assurance to enable him to face those times. As the barbarism of a cross would loom ever closer, he would need to be able find assurance that he was in God’s will - anything less and you turn Jesus into an automaton!

And for Peter, James and John, this message would also be important. Soon they would face despondency as Jesus was taken from them. Soon they would know what it was to take huge risks for the gospel. And in such times, the ability to look back on a moment of assurance, would be invaluable. And invaluable it most certainly was for as we find in the Second Letter of Peter;

“For we received honor and glory from God the Father when that voice was conveyed to him (Jesus that is) by the Majestic Glory, saying, “This is my Son, my Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.” We ourselves heard this voice come from heaven, while we were with him on the holy mountain.”

You see the wonder of this occasion did not leave them. It was a memory to savour as they sought to live out their calling as followers of Jesus. But let us not forget that important as wonder and awe are, so to is the call to listen to Jesus. After all if we do not do so, we end up with a distorted understanding of God who as David Jenkins has reminded us “is as he is in Christ.”

So what of our response? Poor old Peter was reduced, as I guess we would have been, to speaking gibberish. In a way his suggestion to build tents for Jesus, Moses and Elijah, represents our tendency to seek to institutionalise religious experiences rather that let them transform us. For always one of the great temptations is to hang on to what feels good to us rather than to engage with real discipleship in a world that is so very often uncomfortable and filled with pain. We need to be fed spiritually to be truly equipped for service but if all we do is to wallow in the good feelings that can be ours, then the call of Christ is rejected and his words are treated as unheard. Jesus and his friends will come down the mountain and immediately encounter a boy who is disturbed and in great need of help. The need of such suffering and marginalised people serve to remind us of the temptation to be so self centred as to be so seemingly heavenly minded as to be no earthly use. After all, in terms of our Christian discipleship, the purpose of the magnificence of the mountaintop is to equip us for service in the valleys.

Now we stand ready for the journey that eventually leads to Calvary. As that journey nears its end, we will see Jesus’ agony at Gethsemane. Once more the same three companions, Peter, James and John, will be taken with him. Once more they will fall short, three times falling asleep while Jesus was praying out of his deep anguish.

The presence of Peter, James and John at these two events of opposing extremes, mountain and valley, reminds us that suffering and glory are intrinsically linked. The follower of Jesus cannot ask for the glory without the self giving for to ask for such is to ask for that which is other than the way of Jesus. Ultimately it is the Crucified Lord who will also be the Glorified Lord.

As for us, well we can cherish what is revealed about Jesus through the accounts of his Transfiguration. We can cherish the varied experiences through which we are taken to the mountain top. But then, our calling is, strengthened by such experiences, to follow Jesus and to serve him even in the lowest valleys.

GAMMATON AND ALVERDISCOTT METHODIST CHURCHES - SUNDAY FEBRUARY 3RD 2008

Epiphany 3 - Light from the margins

2008-01-24T14:39:00.000-08:00
MATTHEW 4: 12-23

The excitement is growing. Matthew can contain himself no longer. After all the times are now well and truly changing. And the world is beginning to look very different. Listen for a moment to those momentous words that he cribs from Isaiah;

“The people who sat in darkness have seen a great light, and for those who sat in the region and shadow of death, light has dawned.”

So rejoice! For here are the birth pangs of hope. Here is the greatest of transformations that can be hoped for.

And at the heart of it all is Jesus of Nazareth. Fresh from baptism and temptation, he is beginning his ministry, a ministry that calls for a change in how we live - a change rooted in his proclamation of the Kingdom of Heaven!

But if you are one of those who see hope as coming from the centres of power, prepare yourself for a great surprise. For the light that is banishing darkness is based not in the places of wealth and pomp. On the contrary, the movement in which God brings hope is firmly located among the margins.

I guess that many would expect the Messiah to begin his work at the centre of religious, economic and political power that is Jerusalem. But No! Far from it! He begins his work among the agricultural and fishing community that is Capernaum a few miles away from Nazareth. That he begins in Galilee, which as a result of Assyrian settlement policy was a religious mishmash if ever there was one with about a half of the population being gentiles, is scandal enough. But the effect is compounded by his conscious decision to leave Nazareth not for one of the nearby cities where the power of the elite was maintained, but for the remoteness of life amongst the powerless.

And now Matthew looks back to Isaiah’s prophecy of the peoples of ancient Zebulun in which Nazareth is located and ancient Naphtali in which Capernaum is located, seeing a great light intrude upon their darkness. What a vision! And now says Matthew it is being fulfilled. The first provinces to have been overrun my Assyria some seven centuries earlier as a result of what was seen as the wrath of God, are now the first places to hear the good news of Jesus which is the dawning of hope for humankind. In the places of humiliation the places looked down on by the clever Jerusalem elite, light blazes forth.

And then there are his associates. Whereas most rabbinical students sought out their teachers, Jesus is seen here to take the initiative in choosing those who would be his companions. Later these followers will include political extremists on opposing sides of the divides of the day. But here, we see the first four followers to be called being two sets of fisherman brothers. No big deal, we might say. But people of such limited education as these, people according to one commentary who were part of a trade whose reputation for greed and sharp practice was on a par with money lenders - well they hardly seem to cut the mustard as those who would make any significant impact on their world.

And yet as Jesus rejects the temptation to be a one man show, it is very ordinary run of the mill working men, who are brought into the great enterprise. For the Jesus movement is a movement that will reject every commonly accepted means of acquiring power and influence.

But it will be a movement that will bring greater change than any of the armies that ever marched. Indeed, from its very beginning, the Jesus movement brings change. Armed with a message of the need for individuals and society to repent, to change direction, it comes as a harbinger of change that will leave nothing as it had hitherto been. For at the heart of message of Jesus is a Kingdom, the Kingdom of heaven, which will have a much greater claim to devotion and loyalty than any of the powers that swaggered around at that and any other time, past or present. Now was the pointer to a rule that enabled things to be very different, the rule of values of love which had lain at the heart of the Word becoming flesh. And this would be a Kingdom facilitated not by coercion but by love and grace embodied to perfection in Jesus of Nazareth. And this would be a Kingdom that would bring good news to those who were on the margins. For as Jesus teaches of Divine love for all peoples and as Jesus brings liberation through the healing of all manner of diseases and demonic possessions, people who had hitherto been Nobodies, come to find themselves valued and of worth.

This would include those fishermen. Their trade was not without economic rewards. But in many ways they knew what it was to be controlled by the powerful. Most fishermen were far from self employed entrepreneurs but people who worked for Roman interests who paid them according to the size of their catches. They may well have leased their rights from toll collectors. But now with Jesus, they no longer depend on the oppressive power of Rome. Sure, they will still do some fishing but they have by responding to the call of Jesus moved from dependence on the oppressive power of Rome and its acolytes to a dependence on the liberating grace of Jesus. Now they find themselves engaged as those who “fish for people.”

Now this idea of fishing for people is not without its problems. It sounds dangerously coercive and often we hear talk of looking for the bait that will hook our targets. Well the bait image doesn’t work as these were fishermen who relied on nets rather than bait. Still, we are left with the coercive image even if there is such a thing as being captured or grabbed by love. And perhaps we do well to note that in ancient times fishing could be used as a metaphor for judgement and teaching. I am not sure that we can easily translate this one into today’s world but suffice to say, Jesus is speaking of an involvement in a life changing experience. Our lives and our communities do not have to be stifling and dull. He has come to offer something much greater - a life that is truly with abundance! Never, should we portray following Jesus as something that is grey. Far from it, Jesus invites you and me into a multi coloured life and calls on us to be his instruments in enabling it to be experienced by others and by a wider community.

So Jesus begins a ministry that will be good news for all marginalized people. Lepers will rejoin community life. Sick people will be made well. Sinners will experience forgiveness and wondrous grace. And as Matthew’s Gospel draws to a close, we will learn that we meet Jesus in the hungry, the naked, the stranger and the imprisoned. For here is a good news that does not pour holy water on the structures of domination and injustice. It is instead a good news that will afflict the comfortable just as it comforts the afflicted. And for that reason, power structures will always seek to tame and domesticate the Gospel.

Yes, there is a Great Light shining in the Places of Darkness. But it is a light not just for the marginalized but coming from the places of marginalisation. Soon those followers of Jesus will be taking their hope to the world. But before that, at the tomb from whence Jesus has been raised, women will be told to send the disciples back to marginalized Galilee where they will see Jesus. Why Galilee? Why the place where it all started? Because it is among the marginalized that Jesus is at home. It is in such places that we too can meet with him. For, still today he is amongst the marginalized. Still today he enables those who have sat in darkness, the wonder of the great light that can never be put out.

ALVERDISCOTT METHODIST CHURCH SUNDAY JANUARY 27TH 2007

Holocaust Sunday - Responding to the darkness

2008-01-23T06:14:00.000-08:00
LUKE 10: 25-37

In “Night” which is surely one of the most haunting books ever written, Elie Wiesel tells of being forced at Auschwitz to watch the hanging of three people including a young boy. The boy takes a long time to die and amidst the horror, the young Wiesel hears a man ask;

“Where is God now?”

Within himself Wiesel hears a voice answer the man;

“Here he is - He is hanging on the gallows.”

The murder of God! Quite a thought especially for a devoutly religious Jew!

And of course the Holocaust with all its horrors remains a powerful presence in all of our thinking about God and seeking to live as God’s people. It challenges our temptation to offer facile answers to what are big questions.

Certainly it challenges our notions of God being in control over all things. After all, how can this be reconciled with children being thrown into flaming ovens? Instead the case for an emphasis on God’s vulnerability and dependence in place of omnipotence, surely needs to be taken on board. For God is not so much a controller of events as an often suffering participant.

This leaves the likes of you and me with freedom to make choices. We have responsibilities. A sad feature of Germany in the 1930s and 1940s is that amongst those who made life denying choices were Christians and Christian organisations in a land with a long Christian heritage. Yes, there are the Dietrich Bonhoeffers and Martin Niemoellers who resisted the regime at considerable cost to themselves but they were well and truly outnumbered by those who out of varying motives such as nationalism, anti Judaism and fear, collaborated with the Nazi regime, in some cases to the bitter end.

Now, none of this makes the Holocaust a Christian phenomenon. The Dabru Emet statement by Jewish scholars makes that quite clear. But it does not let Christianity of the hook, saying;

“Without the long history of Christian anti Judaism and Christian violence against Jews, Nazi ideology could not have taken hold nor could it have been carried out.”

These words point to the dangerous tradition of falsely representing Jews as Christ killers - a tradition which along with other factors such as blood libels has left Jews subject to a long history of violence down through the centuries especially at Easter. Doubt not that bad theology can cost lives!

The Holocaust reminds us that we need to be accepting of those who are other. Eleven million people were murdered in the Holocaust. Six million were Jews with political and religious dissidents, Roma gypsies, Poles, Jehovah’s Witnesses, disabled people and homosexuals also numbered among the victims - simply for not fitting in with Hitler’s plans for an Aryan master race.

Other genocides have taken place for similar reasons. Armenians murdered in vast numbers by the Ottoman Empire, Tutsis and Hutu sympathisers in Rwanda and even today the events in Darfur - all bearing testimony to a tendency to be unable to offer dignity in difference.

Of course, prejudice is often born of ignorance and the prejudiced mind does not normally will such horrific outcomes as the Holocaust. But our prejudices are surely potentially the midwife to the violent and destructive. Not long ago, I stood in a queue listening to a conversation between two people as to their hatred of Muslims. I am sure/well hopeful that these people, who seemed quite pleasant in the few moments when they were talking on other subjects, would not wish physical harm on Muslims. But as I stood feeling a powerful urge to jump in on the conversation, I wondered how many such equally ill informed and ignorant conversations about Jews and other groups of people targeted by the Holocaust, would have taken place in just such surroundings in Germany and indeed this country, in the first half of the last century.

Jesus has something to say about prejudice. He does it through the Parable of the Good Samaritan in which a battered Jew finds that the neighbour who helps him in his moment of need is a Samaritan. This is a story that would have drawn gasps from Jesus’ hearers for they knew and doubtless felt the shock of a story which challenged a poisonous prejudice between two peoples that had existed for over 500 years. For this story was not just Jesus telling his fellow Jews that they shouldn’t be unkind to those wretched Samaritans. No it was more! Jesus was telling them that those whom they had despised did not merely merit toleration but that they had resources of kindness and goodness to offer. They could benefit from and learn from their ancient enemies.

I cannot see another Holocaust happening in West Europe in my lifetime. Yet, there are the seeds of prejudice and exclusion all around us. Holocaust Memorial Day is a day in which we need to respond to the challenge to embrace humanity with all its diversity rather than to hold back from and to judge harshly those who may be other than we are. Nationality, race, religion and sexual orientation should not be the causes of distancing or failing to engage as neighbours with others. For to use such as these to deny the Divine Spark in others is to send God into exile from our lives.

But the pressures are around us. In particular, we find sections of the media who continually seem to seek to incite an anti Muslim reaction. Whilst accepting the reality that bad religion can and does exist within Islam as elsewhere, we need to protest at any incitement to exclude. Surely too much of that has already happened in history.

Our calling is to be radical disciples of Jesus in affirming the dignity of human differences. Our calling is to resist the drumbeat of conformity when it would dehumanise others. I am reminded of how when awaiting trial in a Berlin prison, Martin Niemoeller was greeted by a prison chaplain with the words;

“But Brother Martin! What brings you here? Why are you in prison?”

Pertinently, Niemoeller replied;

“And brother, why are you not in prison?”

This morning we look back and see humanity at its very worst in dehumanising those deemed to be other. In the teachings of Jesus we see an invitation to embrace diversity. It is a lesson we need to go on learning. Rightly, today we look back so that we may live better in the future. For in the words of the founder of Hasidism Bal Shem Tov, words found in the main hall of the Holocaust Memorial at Vad Yashem;

“Forgetting lengthens the period of exile! In remembrance lies the secret of deliverance.”

BIDEFORD METHODIST CHURCH SUNDAY JANUARY 27TH 2007

Epiphany 2 - Disciples come to Jesus

2008-01-20T09:00:00.000-08:00
JOHN 1: 35-42

I have long given up hope of finding a perfect church. The more time I spend around churches, the more convinced I become that the perfect church is but a fictional creation. And were there to be such a thing as a perfect church, I would suggest that you and me stay well clear of it because our presence would it soon cause it to cease being a perfect church.

More than that, I don’t think that there has ever been a perfect church. Oh, I know some people talk about the church in its earliest years, the New Testament church, as being perfect. But to be brutally frank, to talk in such a way is merely to parade one’s ignorance. Read Paul’s letters to the Corinthians if you believe in that particular fairy tale and as you see the vast array of problems in that particular community, you will soon be disabused of any such notions. And if you think that they were any more harmonious that the church of today, well try reading Paul’s letter to the Galatians where so het up is the Apostle that he suggests that it would be better for certain trouble makers to castrate themselves - not the sort of language normally directed in this church!

And our history ever since has had more than a few dark spots. Dan Brown in his “Da Vinci Code” makes great play over the complicity of the church in Europe in the slaughter of literally millions of women as witches. We have a terrible history of intolerance towards those who are other as instanced by the Crusades directed at the Islamic East, the persecution of Jews and colonial expansions that have claimed to be taking the Gospel to other lands in Africa and the Americas yet in which all too often there has been a cavalier insensitivity towards indigenous populations. And of course there are those times when cruelty has been visited on fellow Christians who dare to have a differing view on matters of faith. Read Foxe on the sufferings of English Protestants under Queen Mary or equally read of the cruelties carried out in the name of Reformation. Look to the theological barbarism of John Calvin with regards to dissidents such as Michael Servetus who was burned at the stake, or his opponent Jacques Cruet concerning whose execution Calvin wrote;

“With God and his Sacred authorities before our eyes we say, in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, Amen… We condemn you Jacques Gruet, to be taken to Champel and there have your body attached to a stake and burnt to ashes and so you shall finish your days to give an example to others who would commit the like.”

What bloodthirsty blasphemy to link intolerance and barbarity to a God of love!

And yet, I wonder if we have learnt the lessons. The American Christian academic Marcus Borg has written of the attitude of his university students to Christianity in these terms;

“When I ask them to write a short essay on their impression of Christianity, they consistently use five adjectives; Christians are literalistic, anti-intellectual, self-righteous, judgemental and bigoted.”

And if that were not enough, research published last year by the Barna Group into the attitudes of Americans between the ages of 16 and twenty nine, showed a real hostility to Christianity on a previously unknown scale with nine of the top twelve perceptions being negative with particularly high negatives being “homophobic”, “judgemental,” “too political” and “insensitive to others.” Only 16% of non Christians had a “good impression of Christianity.”

Now of course that is America and this is Britain. There are after all differences. On the one hand there is a much higher ratio of church attendance in America than is the case in Britain. On the other hand, in America there are powerful and increasingly alienating presences such as the religious right whose popularity especially post Iraq may well be on the wane. No clear equivalence can be found in Britain. Sure, talk to young people for long and you will quickly pick up on a measure of hostility to all forms of organised religion but here I suspect the greater problem is the dead hand of apathy. Either way, it is clear that there is considerable resistance to Christianity especially amongst younger people.

And so to today’s Gospel reading. Jesus has just been baptised by John in the Jordan. And what do we find? Well, contrary to those impressions found by the Barna Group, here we find a Jesus who is exceedingly attractive to his contemporaries. Two of those who had been followers of John the Baptist, hear John speak of Jesus as “the lamb of God.” And in a moment they are up and on the move, seeking to follow Jesus. And so impressed at what they find are they that one of them a man named Andrew wants to share the good news and so he finds his brother, Simon, and tells him the earth shattering news;

“We have found the Messiah.”

And so Simon benefiting from one to one evangelism, probably the most effective form of evangelism, comes to Jesus and becomes a follower. The pattern is repeated later within the same chapter. For Philip responds to the direct call of Jesus to be a follower and then invites his friend Nathaniel to join the fold which after overcoming something of a negative attitude to Nazareth, he does. Yes, quite a model of friendship evangelism. And also a pointer to Jesus as an attractive companionable person. And does that not speak to our sense of what it is to follow Jesus? Oh, as the poster in my cousins’ bathroom used to proclaim;

“From sour faced Saints, good Lord deliver us!”

Indeed if we look at the story of Jesus, we find someone who embraced life and all manner of peoples. Time and again, his opponents castigated him for enjoying the company of and enjoying dinner parties with what they considered the wrongs sort of peoples. But still he embraced needs be they to occur at a wedding where wine ran out or lepers exiled to the edges of communities, people who had been no better than they ought to be or women denied a full life as a result of menstrual bleeding. Nobody, absolutely nobody regardless of race or religion, was beyond his embrace of love and the granting of dignity. And it carried on with his followers who challenged taboos of gender, slavery, religious background and social class. And when they were at their best, such was their attractiveness that according to the Acts of the Apostles, they enjoyed “the goodwill of all the people.”

Are there not hints of what we should seek to be there? It is when we are at our most inclusive that we are closest to the spirit of Jesus. When we embrace those who hurt most without regard as to whether they have brought it on themselves, we are nearest to the gospel. And when we impose a judgementalism on those who are other or when we pour holy water on state violence, then we are furthest from Jesus. If we want to be followers of Jesus, we need to seek the good precisely where we are least inclined to find it. And if that seems crazy, well it is about bringing such a change that Jesus has come into the world, the Word made flesh. As William Coffin so beautifully puts it;

“The incarnation says as much about what we are to become as it does about what God has become.”

Anyhow, back to the Gospel narrative. Jesus is beginning to gather a group of people around him. They certainly will be a motley crew. Ranging from terrorist sympathisers to collaborators with Rome, they will be quite a collection. In the main they will be what we would consider to be working class men. They will be called to places and situations beyond their previous experiences or expectations. But such is the nature of being a follower of Jesus. It is as Bishop Spong puts it, a case of;

“Christ calls me beyond my boundaries.”

And for none of them will that be more true that for Peter. Impetuous but certainly not hypocritical, Peter is one who will call it as he sees it, even if he is going to have an awful lot of relearning to do. At times he will seem so close to Jesus yet there will be the times when he gets it wrong - questioning the way to the cross, denying that he knows Jesus on the night of betrayal and even later initially getting in the way of Paul’s outreach to the gentiles. But here, Jesus gives him the name “Cephas”, an Aramaic name that will translate into Peter meaning “Rock.”

Oh do tell me he’s having us on! Simon Peter as “Rock” - No way! Surely, the old blunderbuss is as far removed from “Rock” as one could imagine. But whilst Jesus may just have a wry smile at the irony of it all, I do not believe that he is having a laugh at Peter’s expense or indulging in sarcasm. Jesus is being real.

Now to some, this is about authority. Peter is seen as the first Bishop of Rome and so it’s about authority. And as I was saying earlier in this sermon, Christianity is at its worst when it becomes bound up in questions of authority and power. If you want an authentic Christianity, then for Pete’s sake don’t go praying for the restoration of Christendom. For the true Gospel gets lost when real power is in the hands of the church and the so called Princes of the Church play their Machiavellian games. When the Church has power to exclude and the temptation to be involved in military force and coercion, it is then that we squeeze Jesus out.

More likely, Jesus was talking about dependability. In the past week, the Diana Inquest has been hearing from former butler, Paul Burrell, who has often spoken of being her “Rock”, the one on whom we can depend. The validity of that claim has of course been debated in the media. But here Jesus is telling Simon Peter that he is going to be a “Rock.” In other words people are going to depend on him. And how true that turns out to be as we follow his story. But he has to grow to meet the challenge but surely here is a powerful example of how Jesus sees us not so much as we are now (frozen in our failings) but as what we can become with him.

And in that there is a picture for us all. Like Peter we need to learn what it is to have people depend upon us. We need to seek God’s help to grow that we are able to meet the challenge. For in an aver changing world in which there are great uncertainties, there is surely a need for more than a few “Rocks.”

Certainly today the church has a clear perception problem. We don’t come over nearly as attractive as Jesus - far from it! To retreat to the bunker and see enemies over every hill is no answer but a sure recipe for developing paranoia. To dream of a rebirth of Christendom is judging by experience to seek a path to that which brings out our very worst. Mission today requires a much simpler response - a response in which we become as dependable as a “rock” but a “rock” which has a smile, a “rock” which is all embracing reflecting the inclusive love of Jesus.

May we be honed to be that “Rock.”

TORRINGTON METHODIST CHURCH - SUNDAY JANUARY 20TH 2007

This sermon owes a debt to Mad Priest and Daniel Clendenin

Covenant Sunday - Deal or No Deal?

2008-01-13T01:35:00.000-08:00
JEREMIAH 31: 31-34 John 15: 1-10

Back in 2005, Noel Edmonds was finally forgiven for inflicting Mr Blobby upon the British public and allowed back on prime time television after a lengthy absence to be the presenter of a new show, “Deal or No Deal.” Despite my very best efforts I have at times had to endure this particular show. For those who do not watch it, the contestant is provided with a box with one of a number of sums of money attached to it. As the contestant gets rid of boxes held by future contestants, he or she is able to form a view as to the likelihood as to whether they are likely to win a sizeable sum. From time to time, the show is interrupted by a shady character called “The Banker” who makes an offer of a deal to the contestant. In effect the show is about a battle of wits between contestant and banker. Both seek a deal in which they get the better of the other.

The Old Testament contains deals or as it put it “Covenants.” They represent agreements between God and God’s people. Following the example of ancient agreements between powerful Kings and less powerful Kings, there is the warning of sanction should the covenant be broken. And certainly the Old Covenant was broken by Israel. And by the time of Jeremiah with destruction and the reality of exile all too obvious, there was a sense that Israel was paying the price for breaching the Old Covenant.

But Jeremiah does not see the death of hope. Instead he is granted a vision of the relationship between God and humanity that is rooted not in the legal but in the wonder of God’s grace. This New Covenant is seen by Christians as being brought about through the Jesus who freely gives of himself that we might experience his salvation. Through him we are offered an unconditional love that is for all time and forgiveness for the times in which we mess up.

It is a bit like the relationship between a parent and a child. Any half decent parent knows that they will love the child born to them no matter what. There will be times when the child needs correction but however, impossible and ungrateful the child might be, there is love, that whilst such things might impoverish the lives of parents and child, can still never be broken.

And that is how it is with this New Covenant. God takes the risk of loving you and me. In taking that risk, God invites you and me to come alongside God, to identify ourselves with God’s work. To respond to the torrent of Divine love with a response of love from our hearts that finds identification in our lives.

This morning we gather with the opportunity to renew our Covenant with God. But let us be clear about one thing - should we decline to do so, God who is the perfection of parenthood, will not stop loving us. God has not left Godself with the wriggle room of a get out clause. God will go on loving each and every one of us because that is how God is. Like the father in that story Jesus told about the Prodigal Son, God will go on waiting for us and loving us, longing that one day we might respond to love and make the relationship complete.

Oh, we know all to well about the deals accompanied by threats. We know about the deals in which one party seeks to get the better of another party. But this is so very different. Before us stands the God to whom we owe our very beings, the God who is the enabler of the beautiful world, the God who is revealed to us in the self giving Jesus, the God who offers us a future, the God who offers us total and absolute love. Is that love to be unrequited? Or are we so touched that we are so absolutely bowled over that we want our lives to be a loving response, lives which really count as a gift to God.

God is reaching out to us right now. How shall we respond? Deal or No deal?

BIDEFORD METHODIST CHURCH - Sunday January 13th 2008

ALWINGTON METHODIST CHURCH - Sunday January 20th 2008

EPIPHANY 1 - The baptism of Jesus

2008-01-10T00:40:00.000-08:00
MATTHEW 3: 13-17

Doesn’t time fly? Last week, we were contemplating those mysterious wise men from the east, the magi bringing their gifts to the infant Jesus. Now in the space of a mere week, he has become a grown man of some thirty or so years and he is once more down south - only this time he has come seeking baptism from Cousin John.

He’s what? Yes, he is seeking to be baptised. And if you feel uncomfortable about that, well you are in good company. For John himself is not exactly won over on the idea. And he only does so as a result of a bit of persuasion on the part of Jesus.

And call me a heretic if you will but I’m inclined to agree with John. After all, his mission is about preparing the way for the greater more powerful one, the one whose sandals he is unfit to carry - Jesus! So surely, he has a point when he is reticent about baptising Jesus. It is a sign of things being turned upside down.

And yet it happens. It is no accident or moment of madness. For as Matthew records it;

"Then Jesus came from Galilee to the Jordan to be baptised by John.”

That is putting it clearly as a very deliberate event, an event that serves as a springboard for Jesus as he prepares to be the very embodiment of good news. And more than that, it is a highly significant event in itself which tells us much about the Gospel that is about to unfold.

So why should this event be so important?

One reason is not so far removed from the message of Christmas. We heard that the baby of Bethlehem would be called “Immanuel” which means “God with us.” But now we see an expansion of this glorious truth for here we see Jesus sharing in our humanity. Seeing the deeply flawed gathering of people who have come to John, Jesus does not as some remote Deity condemn these people for their shortcomings. Far from it! He joins them. He gets down in the river with them. Yes, what we witness here is Jesus not giving it to them straight as some might wish but Jesus being alongside this motley gathering of humanity. For as One who is truly as human as he is divine, he associates and identifies himself totally with us. Truly, he comes as a brother and so it is that we are able to sing that much loved hymn of old;

“What a friend we have in Jesus.”

But more than this, there is the heralding in of something that is new. John has quite uniquely been baptising his fellow Jews and doing so with a baptism for repentance. He has been challenging people to change the direction of their lives. But with the baptism of Jesus we see the beginnings of Christian baptism that brings in new dimensions. Yes, it symbolises the washing away of sins but it also has so much more. In the baptism of Jesus, we witness the presence of the Holy Spirit and Jesus hears the voice from heaven declaring him to be God’s beloved son. And both of these things lie at the heart of Christian baptism. Yes, there is the turning from evil by instead being guided by God. But in Christian baptism we welcome the presence of the Holy Spirit who is the greatest of enablers. And we rejoice in the parental love of God which is offered to all peoples. Oh yes, baptism marks our being grafted into God’s family in which rather than being set up to fail, we are loved deeply and strengthened by the very author of our lives.

Indeed, baptism tells us that we are both loved and given a task. Jesus was told by the heavenly voice that he was loved but the voice declaring pleasure in him, marks the fact that he also had work to do. Human resource specialists would tell us that being valued and having a purpose are significant motivating forces in our lives. An example of this is the Jewish psychologist Victor Frankl who was held in Nazi concentration camps in World War 2. After the war, he attributed his survival through those grim days to two factors. One was the knowledge of his wife’s love. The other was his desire to rewrite the book that he had written but which the Nazis had destroyed. Love and purpose! And there is plenty of both to be found in baptism - the unlimited love of God and the calling on each of us to play our part as signs of God’s Kingdom of grace.

And finally, there is assurance in the baptism of Christ. The humanity of Jesus means that like us he had a need to feel assured of God’s favour. And in the words of the voice there came that assurance. I suspect that this was truly sustaining in the darker moments of his life. And like Jesus we have the times when we need assurance especially during those dark nights of the soul. John Wesley knew this so very well after his long spiritual search. And so one of the emphases that he preached was;

“All can know that they are saved.”

It is not so much that baptism makes us the children of God or grants us the Holy Spirit but that it gives us assurance of these things. Looking at baptism gives us an assurance of these realities. Not for nothing did Martin Luther, that great German reformer who nonetheless was regularly afflicted by severe depression, in his darkest times walk around saying repeatedly the words;

“I am baptised.”

So today as we look to the baptism of Jesus, we can rejoice that his baptism points us to the message of our baptism - the good news that by God’s grace we are all SOMEBODIES who are divinely loved and divinely called.

NORTHAM METHODIST CHURCH JANUARY 13TH 2008

First Sunday after Christmas - Herod takes the stage

2007-12-29T16:02:00.000-08:00
MATTHEW 2: 13-23 GALATIANS 4: 23-29

And so after six days of celebrating the birth of Jesus, we land today with an almighty bump. Our lectionary writers have clearly decided that by now we have had all the nice thoughts that we can take and so they provide is with Matthew’s snuff movie. Cynics might even scoff and say that it is time we got back to the real world.

For now, it is not angels, shepherds or even mysterious magi who take centre stage but it is King Herod the Great who arrives to take to the stage as the villain of villains. One can but imagine the hisses that Matthew’s early readers would hold for this megalomaniac.

But first of all let’s set our reading against Matthew’s background. There can be little doubt that Matthew is telling the story of the coming of Jesus in a way that will link it with Israel’s tradition as well as surpassing that tradition. His account is full of illusions to ancient stories such as that of the Exodus. Indeed his story of the magi is intended to fit in with the prophetic traditions of ancient Israel. And for this reason, there is a regular debate as to what belongs to history and what belongs to proclaiming the significance of the Christ child. This morning whilst accepting Keener’s conclusion in his commentary on Matthew’s Gospel that;

“The event is thus neither historically documented nor historically implausible”

I shall approach the story assuming historic truth although such an assumption quite frankly makes little difference to this particular homily.

Now, Matthew’s background is the journey of the magi from a place to the east of the Roman Empire on a quest for a “King of the Jews.” Foolishly, they have allowed their quest to come to the attention of the hierarchy in Jerusalem including King Herod. Indeed they have even met with Herod promising to return to him after finding the infant King. Matthew tells us that they have not returned as a result of a dream and now in yet another twist Joseph in a dream has been warned of the King’s malevolent intentions and been advised to take the child to the relative safety of Egypt.

Don’t you just love it? After a year in which the newspapers who have recently been writing of a war on Christmas have continually bashed asylum seekers, we find the ultimate irony. Jesus himself along with his family begins his life as a refugee in need of asylum. Oh, here we see revealed something of the challenge that Christmas presents. For Jesus is as one of those who has most need of voices to speak for him whilst such voices are all too often inconspicuously silent. During my training, I spent time at an asylum reception centre and found myself less that proud to be British.

And if it seems irrelevant let me take you for a moment to Uzbekistan where according to a report last month by the American human rights organisation Human Rights Watch, prisoners are routinely beaten and subject to electric shock, asphyxiation and sexual humiliation to extract confessions, a conclusion backed about the same time by the UN Committee against Torture and indeed in 2002 by our British embassy in Uzbekistan which provided evidence that two prisoners had been boiled to death. And then consider that following an attempt to send a dissident back to those same tyrants four weeks ago, an MP who raised the matter was informed in writing by the Home Office;

“I confirm that it is Home Office policy to remove political dissidents to Uzbekistan, if the independent judiciary has deemed an asylum claim to have no basis.”

And whilst there is regularly a babble of noise against asylum seekers, this was greeted with silence. Am I being political? Of course but so is this story!

Anyhow back to Matthew’s story, we find that Herod’s response to the failure of the magi to return to him is to give the draconian order that all boys in the Bethlehem area aged two years or under should be killed. There is paranoia about such an order. And yet alarmingly it is by no means inconsistent with what we know of Herod. He was, after all, a King who ordered the execution of three of his own sons and one of his wives. He was after all the King who left instructions for one member of every family to be killed so that at the time of his burial a nation that had never taken this man who coming from an Idumaean background was suspect in his claims to be Jewish in the opinion of many observant Jews, to its hearts, might mourn.

And so we have that devastating story of what has become known as the “massacre of the innocents.” It is a painful echo of an ancient Pharaoh who had ordered the drowning of the Hebrew boys. And whilst the number killed is generally thought unlikely to have exceeded 20 given that Bethlehem probably had a population of about 1,000 ( the probable reason for no historical records existing), the power of stories such as this is that nothing appals the sensitive more than the indiscriminate slaughter of children. We feel that particularly in regards to the three Holocausts of the 20th century in Armenia, Nazi Germany and Rwanda where prejudice, paranoia and hatred were so strong that children were subjected to wholesale slaughter simply for being. And the horror of this story surely speaks against sanitised language that dares to see children as the legitimate collateral damage of conflict. Indeed Matthew brings home the perversity of Herod’s deeds and their consequences by recalling Jeremiah’s account of the mourning of Ramah, a town 10 miles north of Jerusalem where over 500 years previously in a national and for many a personal calamity, captives from Jerusalem passed on the way to exile in Babylon. And the awfulness of the situation is intensified by reference to Rachel who had died in childbirth and who is seen by Jeremiah as a mother of all, refusing to be comforted. A heart breaking picture indeed! A picture of now as well as then!

Still for the Holy Family the time of exile comes to an end. Joseph has another dream in which he learns that Herod has died and the time has come for him to return. But there is still a problem. The division of Herod’s kingdom was such that his son Archelaus ruled in Judea. This man turned out to be almost as cruel as his father. Within 10 years he managed the near impossible in uniting those ancient enemies, Jews and Samaritans, in successfully appealing to Rome to depose him. So dodging oppression as is the want of refugees, the Holy family move north to the obscure small town of Nazareth where an exiled clan originating from Judah had returned form Babylon at about 100BC, a place where the Holy family could live under the relatively benign rule of another of Herod’s sons, Herod Antipas who will appear in the story of Christ’s Passion.

For Matthew, Jesus living in Nazareth was the fulfilment of a prophecy stating;

“He will be called a Nazorean.”

Now such a prophecy is not to be found in our Old Testament and we cannot know where Matthew got it from. And yet these words are not without significance. Of course they can as Matthew surely intended point to the town of Nazareth, a town so insignificant as to be unmentioned in the Old Testament, a town believed by archaeologists to have been unpopulated from the upheavals caused by the Assyrian army in the eight century BC until the second century BC and at the time of Jesus being the home to no more than about 150 people. And yet there may be more than this that is conveyed. For we may have a play on the term Nazirite, one who is one wholly dedicated to God like Samuel and Samson who were both consecrated by vows made whilst they were in their mother’s wombs - even if Jesus did not follow their example as for example in their drinking no wine. But perhaps, the important message is that the Holy family are now returning to the toils of normal life. Away from angels, Joseph has to make a living. And about this time, there were opportunities for a builder such as Joseph in nearby Sepphoris destroyed as a result of civil war during the reign of Herod the Great and ultimately from the suppression of riots upon his death. Now under Herod Antipas it was to be rebuilt as his showcase that it might become the “ornament of all Galilee.”

So today, our Gospel reading has pulled us up with a jolt. The angels have gone and Jesus is now far from a Christmas card situation. Now he is a vulnerable child in a world where there is much cruelty. Whilst the powerful plot now against him and will do so as his story unfolds, the lowly, the outsiders and those who like the magi who are mobile come and will as his story unfolds come to follow him. For they are the ones who have not invested all in the world as it is but they are those who can share in the dream of a new world as is embodied in Jesus. As his mother has cried out in Magnificat, the babe of Bethlehem will turn the world upside down, bringing down the powerful and lifting up the lowly. For gentiles, slaves and women will have equal value to Jew, Greek, free person and men. For Christ has come for all that all might know the love of God and find dignity.

John’s prologue has spoken of light shining in the darkness. This morning we have been reminded of darkness in the person of Herod. And rightly so! For we dare not let our Christmas get stuck in sentimentality. We need to be real and to see in Christmas the source of hope for both daily living and the times when the storm clouds envelope us. We need to see the call to identify with Christ in confronting all that oppresses and destroys.

So be gone cheap sentimental Christmas that never gets beyond jollities and warm thoughts! Welcome Christmas that brings challenge and change, that dares to see God at work in the hum drum and the darkness of this world! Be gone Christmas that accepts as inevitable the injustices of this world! Welcome Christmas that dares to look to a future when Jesus will destroy the powers of evil and reign in peace and love!

So let Herod take the stage that we might see the greater power of love and mercy that is embodied in Jesus Christ!

Torrington Methodist Church Sunday December 30th 2007

Christmas Day - The Word became flesh

2007-12-24T14:52:00.000-08:00
JOHN 1: 1-5, 14

And so the big day has arrived. Today is Christmas Day when we celebrate the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem. Two of our Gospels, those written by Matthew and Luke, tell of this birth in colourful language. They tells us of travels, Mary and Joseph, shepherds, wise men and even angels. They provide the material which we weave into our Nativity plays.

But all of that is missing from our Bible reading this morning. Instead we have a meditation about the “Word.” This "Word" is and always has been Divine. It cannot be separated from the godhead. But John wants to say more than that and so in one of the most incredible sentences ever written, he writes;

“And the word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory.”

Wow! God has become flesh like you and me! So if we want to know what God is like, we only have to look at the Word made flesh.

Well that is a big issue. But this morning I want to share a view as to how the birth of Jesus is of help to us.

Some of you may know that during the period when I was waiting to move to the Isle of Man, one of the jobs I did was as a relief worker for the Devon and Cornwall Autistic Trust. I found it to be a difficult job. I think the reason is that I never really understood what made our clients anxious. I guessed but I didn’t always get it right.

Three years ago in his Christmas letter, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams told of watching a video presentation by a therapist working with children who have autism. The Archbishop told of a disturbed lad beating his head against a wall and then walking quickly up and down the room, twisting and flicking a piece of string. To the Archbishop’s amazement, the therapist began to do the same things as this lad. Incredibly after two days the boy began to smile at the therapist and even to respond to her touch. As the Archbishop put it;

“when the therapist gently echoes the actions and rhythms, the anxious and wounded mind of the autistic person sees that there is, after all, a link with the outside world that isn’t threatening. Here is someone doing what I do; the world isn’t just an unfamiliar place of terror and uncertainty…. And so relationship begins.”

Now the Archbishop goes on to suggest that humans are wrapped up in themselves but God acts to bring us out of our isolation just like the therapist in the video. He lives a life like ours with all the mundane things that help to make up our lives. Speaking our language and responding to our deeds and words, he enables communication and relationship between God and humanity. And he shows us through this life that is so full of love, that we can have a healthy relationship with God which is life affirming.

Years ago, the then Bishop of Durham, David Jenkins spoke of a simple creed that went like this;

“God is.
He is as he is in Jesus.
Therefore there is hope.”

So let’s go for it. Let us celebrate this Christmas Day, buoyed by the conviction that God becoming a human being is great news. Let us rejoice in the message of this day that God is truly for us!

Bideford Methodist Church Christmas Day December 25th 2007

This sermon owes much to lectionary notes by Chris Lockley concerning the Archbishop of Canterbury's letter for Christmas 2004

Christmas Eve - Holy night

2007-12-24T14:00:00.000-08:00
LUKE 2: 8-20

It begins like any night. Out in the fields shepherds go about their monotonous work. Theirs is a humdrum world that offers few possibilities. Theirs is a world in which they have little status - the bottom of the pile is where they belong. It’s a world of darkness.

Nearby in Jerusalem Rome is all powerful. Caesar Augustus is at the peak of his powers. Hailed as son of God and the bringer of good news to the world, the painful reality is that his power is built on oppression, brute force and exploitation. His puppet King, Herod, is a man who undertakes great building projects including even the rebuilding of Jerusalem’s temple. Yet he is a man of capricious cruelty from which even his own family is not safe. It is a world of darkness.

And yet into such a world of darkness, a change is coming. But its beginnings are not with the followers of Caesar or Herod. They are not even with the bloated religious establishment. Instead the change is first felt on those hills where many labour for but a subsistence. To these men comes a revelation, a revelation of good news. A mighty liberator? No! But wait for it a baby lying in a manger where even animals would feed.

It sounds improbable. How can a baby in downtown Bethlehem be the bringer of hope? And yet the possibility can not be discounted for even the very heavens are full of the excitement of this night. And what a message!

“Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace among those whom he favours.”

Oh yes, this is a night in which the world is being changed in such a way that it can never be as it was before. This is a night that will divide the human story into a “Before” and an “After.”

What of those shepherds? Well they take a risk. They leave the fields and their work to go to Bethlehem to see for themselves what has happened. And there they see the Holy family - Mary Joseph and Jesus. But these are transformed men. They eagerly share the angelic message with all who will listen. And as they return to the fields, they go back in Luke’s words;

“glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen, as it had been told them.”

To borrow a phrase from C.S. Lewis, they were “surprised by joy.” Much they may have been unable to understand but before them lay a world pregnant with teeming possibilities. And yet but five miles away, Herod along with his Roman masters, the Temple establishment were untouched by the wonder of this night!

It is a foretaste of what is to come. The centres of power would never be reconciled to the gift of this night. Soon Herod would try to kill the child. Thirty or so years down the line a Roman governor would succeed where Herod had failed and the powerful men of the top religious body the Sanhedrin would be cheerleaders at that killing. For the babe of Bethlehem would as in his Nativity identify himself with the humble, the powerless and the outcasts. The babe of Bethlehem would grow to be the upside down King who would stand the unjust and oppressive structures of the world upon their head. His would be a Kingdom in which none would be written off for his coming is a non violent invasion of our world by Divine love and unlimited grace.

Our world today knows the reality of darkness. Across its continents leaders plot their violence and muffle out the cries of the poor, the outcasts and the voiceless. And yet the world can never be as it was before that night. God has engaged with our world and in Christ has brought light to the places of darkness, light never to be erased.

On this holy night, let us celebrate the embrace of God that reaches us through the babe of Bethlehem. May we like those shepherds journey towards the Christ child and then let him be born in our hearts. After all as that great mystic, Meister Eckhart put it;

“What good is it to me if Mary gave birth to the son of God and I do not also give birth to the son of God in my time and culture.”

Aye, a holy night that changed the world. A holy night in which is revealed the light to draw thee and me into the wonder of God’s gracious purposes.

Bideford Methodist Church Midnight Communion 24th December 2007

Carol service - The real war on Christmas

2007-12-23T09:07:00.000-08:00
I have clear expectations when it comes to Christmas Day. Most years I return from Midnight Communion and fall into bed by 1am. Come about 8am, I force myself out of bed and grump around while James and Kaye open their Christmas gifts. I then go back to the church in Bideford to take the Christmas Day service after which I return to fill myself with turkey aided by generous portions of stuffing whilst Christmas Pudding is added to my clotted cream. By 3pm I am asleep in the arm chair - I am never conscious for the Queen’s speech not that that worries anyone at the Palace too much!. Tea causes me to rally a little but by about 10pm I am well and truly ready to lay my carcass down to sleep.

It never changes and it is thoroughly predictable. And judging by my reading in the past days there are newspapers and indeed readers who have unchanging expectations for Christmas. Despite the fact that most of our Christmas traditions are from the last 150 years or so, we get a barrage of stories every years telling us that Christmas is under attack. Of course, many of these stories turn out on examination to be myths but they get recycled year after year. And if you read the great British tabloid media you end up thinking that Christmas is all about Santas, little children in Nativity plays and of course the great British way of life. And whilst I quite like most of this personally, I find myself increasingly pushed into Grumpy Old Man mode, tempted to let out a loud cry of “Humbug!”

Now why should I be such a misery guts. Well the reason, is that too often this annual crusade by the Mail, Express and Sun is often a front to attack diversity through the use of ridicule. But my objection actually runs deeper. You see, there’s nothing wrong with the trappings of Christmas. BUT when the trappings block out the reality, then it is the time to utter a loud protest.

Too often, we use Christmas to suggest that our society is at heart wonderful and our way of life is unimpeachable. It is as if it were God’s approval on that which we hold dear. But wait a moment! For if we look to that which happened in Bethlehem 2,000 years ago, there is something subversive going on. It is as if God is roughing up our world!

Look first of all to Mary. A girl of what would be called nowadays Middle Eastern appearance, probably no more than in her very early teens for marriage happened early in that culture. And now she finds herself pregnant with an explanation that few would believe. And more than that, she must have felt great fear for she would have known all too well that to be pregnant ahead of marriage other than my the man to whom she was betrothed, would have meant that he would be expected to terminate the marriage arrangement leaving her and her child on the margins of society desperately fending for themselves for the rest of their lives. And the reality was even blacker for this was a society dominated by religion. And the followers of Scripture would know only too well that the ancient Book of Deuteronomy prescribed the punishment of stoning for young women who got pregnant by other than the man to whom they were betrothed. That it didn’t happen was down to the Romans but many would say it was what her type deserved.

And yet, Mary accepts the work of God in this. And in Magnificat sees this as a sign that God is going to turn the power and wealth structures of the world upside down. No wonder a hymn based on Magnificat begins with the immortal line;

“Sing we a song of high revolt!”

Anyhow, Joseph contrary to the norms of his times, sticks with Mary and so they come to Bethlehem for a registration. But five miles from Jerusalem with its Roman garrison and even closer to Herod’s palace, this is the place where Jesus is born. So close to the great men of power of this time, Jesus enters the world virtually unnoticed. Virtually unnoticed but not totally for there will be visitors. Some of these will be shepherds, notorious ruffians whose work meant that they were seen as people cut off from proper religious observance. And then there will be men from beyond the east of the Roman Empire - men of different race and religion whose interest in astrology would have brought many a frown from the religious elite. A bunch of total outsiders if ever there was one. And yet it is the outsiders who see that which religious and political insiders miss. For surely a new age is a dawning.

But there are others who welcome Jesus. We know that Jesus had relatives down in Judaea - after all Mary had visited her relative Elizabeth down there. And hospitality to relatives was an important duty in Palestinian society. Now often we have talked of there being no room at the inn. But pause for a moment. The word that Luke uses here is kataluma which elsewhere he uses of a guest room and is not the word he uses for a commercial inn in the Parable of the Good Samaritan. Luke is here suggesting that there was no room at the guest room but surely this would mean that Jesus was born in the family quarters which would have been raised above where the animals rested at night with a manger at that point of the room that the animals could reach when hungry. Now we see Jesus being born into the home of a peasant family who lovingly and indeed sacrificially make space for the Holy family. What a contrast to the machinations of Herod in his palace and the indifference of the religious elite.

So what’s the story of Christmas about? Well God is seen to be working amongst the lowly and in this we see a prediction of a new age in which the norms that we often accept come under challenge. Jesus himself belongs amongst the humble and he welcomes the outsiders. His way will always represent a challenge to the powerful for his way is a way that says an emphatic No to domination. In him, God is well and truly roughing up those structures that bring oppression and injustice.

Is there a war on Christmas? In a way there is. When people are shamed, when people are treated as unimportant or when those of other races and faiths are rejected, when the peace song of the angels is ignored, there most certainly is a war on Christmas. To truly celebrate Christmas is to embrace the all inclusive love of Jesus and to, like the people of Bethlehem, make space for him in our lives whatever the cost.

Alwington Methodist Church Carol Service Sunday December 23rd 2007

Advent 4 Confronting the shame

2007-12-22T08:08:00.001-08:00
ISAIAH 7: 10-17 MATTHEW 1: 18-24

And so we are all getting ready with hope for the coming Christmas celebration. It is as we so often sing “the season to be merry.” But wait! Our Gospel reading is hardly the stuff of sweet dreams. For within what is revealed there is a nightmare situation to be faced by Joseph.

Now we know very little of Joseph. He doesn’t even get a speaking part in the Gospels. In fact he does not attract very many mentions at all and the last mention of him is some 12 years on. After that he fades into obscurity and possibly an early death - at least by our standards.

But of course being in the background does not take from the significance of a person. I know that from experience. I have only ever seen one picture of my maternal grandfather who died back in the 1930s. I have seen nothing that he wrote and the only story that I know of him is of his fear as a young man that the boat on which he was travelling to begin his life in Chile might sink as a result of cards being played on board for money. Well it didn’t sink thank goodness. After all if it had I wouldn’t be here. For many years later after his wife had died, he returned to Cornwall and married my grandmother beginning a new family that would amount to five children to add to the six children he had had in Chile. In all the years that I knew my grandmother, I never once heard her refer to my grandfather by name. He was always “your mother’s father.” A figure shrouded in a mist I often thought. Yet he and the Chile connection are highly important to our identities.

And so it is with Joseph. We know little of him but we can not but feel for him in the nightmare that he faces. And the heart of that nightmare is that Mary to whom he was engaged was pregnant!

Now I wonder if today we fully appreciate the shock that this would have entailed. In the first place given that we are told that Joseph had not had sexual intercourse with Mary, there is the big question;

“Who’s responsible?”

After all, Joseph can be forgiven for a less than charitable feeling towards his fiance. If you watched the Liverpool Nativity on BBC 3 last Sunday, you will have seen a reminder of the pain of a man whose woman is pregnant and he sure knows that he isn’t responsible. It is the sort of pain that makes you want to hit something or someone, the sort of pain that makes you want to let out a scream. After all this is the stiff of betrayal. And stories of virgin conceptions - well they are too far fetched and after all to hear such a story is like having a knife twisted deeper and deeper into the wound!

But it’s not just about love crashing down. It’s also about the fabric of society. Remember this was an age in which a woman’s virginity was worth a high price monetarily. No family wanted the inheritance to be endangered by children born of women from outside the extended family. And more than that, Joseph would like any man of that day, have seen in what had happened, another man cheating him of what was rightfully his.

Do you get it? The situation confronting Joseph was total and absolute disaster! So what is he to do? If he goes through with marrying Mary and bringing up a child that is not his, he faces a life of humiliation. If people assume that he is the father, well they will both face a degree of moral censure. If people assume that the father is another man, then Joseph will look a bit of a fool who is easily walked over. In short there is no happy solution for them together - at least for Joseph. A taint of scandal and his own suspicions are about as far away from love’s young dream as it is possible to get.

But there is no ease in splitting. Matthew suggests that Joseph is tempted to quietly cease the betrothal. After all he is convinced that Mary has committed adultery and adultery required divorce as a matter of requirement rather than as an option. This could be done with a legal minimum of two witnesses to bring the contract to an end. And quietly may seem to be the kind option. It would on the face of it avoid a fuss although in a culture rooted in the practice of shame, a culture in which single parents did not fare well, it would leave Mary and her child facing an uncertain future on the margins of society with ostracisation being their constant companion.

And yet it could have been worse than this. That this option bad as it was, was considered by Joseph is a sign of his decency and love for Mary. For certainly he had it within his power to publicly disgrace and humiliate her. And believe you me, the fundamentalists of his day would have argued that this is precisely what he ought to do. After all it was the Biblical option. Why? Well listen to these words from the Book of Deuteronomy;

“If a man happens to meet in a town a virgin pledged to be married and he sleeps with her, you shall take both of them to the gate of that town and stone them both to death - the girl because she was in a town and did not scream for help, and the man because he violated another man’s wife. You must purge the evil from you.”

And at this we can thank God for the pagan Romans for they had control over capital punishment and did not implement this law. But look at that law and know that many in Nazareth would have said a loud Amen to it and know that Joseph had the power to make Mary’s life quite literally unbearable.

Anyhow whilst he was in turmoil about all of this, Joseph has a dream. And in it, an angel vindicates what Mary has told him and tells him that the baby is of the Holy Spirit. Joseph is to stick with Mary and to make her his wife. And guess what? He’s not even going to be allowed to choose the baby’s name. Even that is taken away from him. For he is to call the baby Jesus which means “The Lord saves.”

Now all we know is that Joseph is obedient to this message. I cannot help but wonder if he has those dark nights of the soul when he would have questioned the authenticity of the dream. Certainly along with Mary he was troubled when Jesus stayed behind at Jerusalem at the age of twelve and we know that Mary had her concerns in later years. But despite the anxieties, the fact is that Joseph at great cost to his reputation among his contemporaries, obeyed the message of the dream. And in so doing, he is an example to all of us who would seek to follow a God of love and who will not let ancient Scriptures be used as a block on the ways of God that are all loving and all merciful. In the context of his times, Joseph takes the path of not allowing religion to get in the way of the love and mercy that is of God.

And of course Joseph’s nightmare creates the opening for God’s hope and love to be revealed. Of crucial importance is the link with Isaiah’s seventh chapter. Whilst Isaiah’s young woman was precisely that in Hebrew, the Greek translation followed by Matthew, uses a word that means a virgin, the more important (in my view) connection is that the child will be “Immanuel” meaning “ God with us.”

But is God being with us to be welcomed? Is this presence to be dreaded? After all we know that religious people have at times given us a pretty dark view of God. So we cannot but ask if God is for us? Or is God full of rage at us due to our failures.? It’s a question that we all ask from our varying vantage points.

Recently I have been revisiting William Shakespeare’s King Lear which I studied during A Levels. The stigma over circumstances of birth which hangs around the Christmas story and which was exploited by early opponents of Christianity was still very much alive. And in the play, Edmund the illegitimate son of the Duke of Gloucester, bears the scars fearing that his half brother Edgar is preferred. At one point the cries out;

“Now gods stand up for bastards.”

At Christmas we do indeed meet the God made flesh who will stand up for all those who are marginalized be they lepers, sinners or even tax collectors. But it is more than that. At Christmas, by the very circumstances of his scandal tainted birth, Jesus becomes as one with those who are marginalized. He who arrives the subject of gossip and of the tut tutting of the religious and their leaders. And it is with the marginalized that he is ever to be found be it his scandal hit parents, the outsider shepherds and the foreign religiously unsound magi of the birth stories. Later we will see him with women, foreigners and those who are often termed sinners, talking and even partying. For his presence is not to bring good news to institutions that oppress but instead it is to be good news to those who know only too well what rejection is. Rejection will ultimately be his lot and yet in his rejection he brings a hope to the world that despair can never overcome, a light to the world that darkness can never put out. In him, we are able to discover the reality of being the beloved of God. Oh sure, there are the times when he will challenge and confront us but he will absolutely never stop loving us.

Joseph knew his share about the nightmares that life can throw up. Those nightmares are all to real. But we celebrate on Tuesday because he responded to his nightmare in a way that enabled the birth of the one in whom we invest a million dreams. For the One who has come, offers to all the worth that destroys the shame culture that we see casting a dark shadow above his birth. He is the Divine gift of love and even today he is being born into a multitude of lives. And even today he shares in the joys and sorrows of our lives. But most of all he is with those whose needs and pains are greatest for after all it was they who were his companions in his Nativity. And still, he tells us not just to speak for those who are the poor, the marginalized and the victimised but to see his presence in them for there is where he choses to belong.

Buckland Brewer Methodist Church Sunday December 23rd 2007

Carol Service - Light in the darkness

2007-12-09T06:54:00.000-08:00
It’s that time of year again. The lights are on in town and cards are beginning to be sent and received. This weekend we received our first Christmas cards of this year and believe you me, most of them have quite idyllic pictures. They warm the cockles of our hearts and believe you me, there are times when that is just what we need.

And yet, we know that neither the first Christmas or that of 2007 are quite as idyllic as we would like to think. The first Christmas takes place against the background of an army of occupation that was being resisted by methods that might be described as terrorist - sounds familiar!. Mary and Joseph were hardly regarded as love’s young dream for the circumstances of Mary’s pregnancy were the stuff of scandal in an age when shame was an even greater form of suffering than the Sun would like it to be today. No wonder the first recorded visitors to Jesus were those absolute outsiders the shepherds. And down the road thanks to a bunch of gullible men whom we somehow think of as being wise, there would be Herod the Great a meglomaniac of a ruler who is prepared to slaughter the young in an effort to get the newly born king of the Jews.

And in 2007 we know all to well that Christmas for many will hardly be “the season to be jolly.” And the reasons for this will be many. For some it will be a time of fear due to conflict. For others it will be a time dominated by financial insecurity whilst for others sickness and sorrow will be all to constant a companions. No wonder that in the USA many churches have “Blue Christmas services” for those who feel to battered to make merry yet still desire to celebrate the good news of Christmas as best they can.

And yet Christmas is a time of good news. As John recognises in his prologue in talking of Christ coming into the world;

“The true light that gives light to every man was coming into the world.”

Do you get it? Christmas is not God’s gift to an idyllic world. It is God’s gift to a world with much that is dark. And of course the greatest of wonders is that darkness cannot put out light.

So how does Christmas bring a light into our darkness?

Well firstly, it reveals the true nature of God. You see, it is all too easy from a casual reading of the Old Testament to come to a dangerous understanding of God seeing God as remote and vengeful. But that is not the true picture for Jesus is the image of God and reveals God to be as he is - that is all loving, generous and inclusive.

Secondly, Christmas is a time in which a greater love than the world has ever known enters it. As Christina Rossetti puts it;

“Love came down at Christmas,
Love so lovely, love divine
Love was born at Christmas
Star and angel gave the sign.”

Here, the world is invaded by a love that will be ultimately revealed as self giving and courageous as the Babe of Bethlehem shows the fullness of Love Divine by enduring the worst of peoples’ darker side up to death on a cross. And in that and in his living, we see him being “God for us” whatever the state of our lives might be.

And finally, the Christmas story is a story that has within it the power to inspire people to work for a new world. At the moment there is the stirring of a rumpus over BBC 3’s production of a “Liverpool Nativity” which will be a contemporary retelling of the Christmas story live on the streets of Liverpool. It touches the sense of scandal around the birth of Jesus and goes on to encounter issues of asylum given that the Holy family became refugees as a result of paranoia in high places. To me this is the sign of Christmas being a living tradition which challenges the accepted norms of our day. For as we explore the story, is there not good reason to conclude that we are all too often insufficiently political - and if the refugee experience of Jesus doesn’t have something to say about the British Home Office announcing its intentions to deport Uzbeki dissidents back to a state that routinely tortures dissidents and has even employed boiling alive, I don’t know what can speak to such situations.

So there we are - just three ways in which Christmas represents light coming into the darkness;

- revealing the nature of God

- being the ultimate sign of a love that is for all

- challenging how we see injustices.

So you see, whatever the newspapers may tell us, it’s not just about Santas or even school nativities great as those things are. For ultimately Christmas speaks to something much much bigger - how we see ourselves and yet bigger again how God sees us!

Gammaton Methodist Church Carol Service - December 9th 2007

Advent 2 -- Voices of Hope

2007-12-08T14:43:00.000-08:00
Isaiah 11: 1-10 Matthew 3: 1-12

Back in the 1980s when there was considerable controversy over the economic policies of the Thatcher Government, we began to hear mentions of TINA or to put it in every day language, “There is no alternative.”

Whether you consider that view to have been correct is not a matter that belongs to this sermon. But our readings point us in the direction of questioning the status quo and looking for a world that can be very different indeed. We are encouraged to believe that we do have choices and to believe that there is so much more to life than marching to the drumbeat of conformity.

Let’s for a moment look at our reading from Isaiah. Now Isaiah of Jerusalem is sharing a vision of hope not in good times but in times of monumental insecurity. He is writing at a time when the Northern Kingdom of Israel is about to fall to the armies of Assyria and those same armies would soon endanger the Southern Kingdom of Judah where Isaiah lived. The world as his contemporaries knew it was falling in. Around them darkness seemed to be triumphant. And yet Isaiah proclaims a message of hope, a message of a better future. Rooted in the hope of a King in the line of David who will restore the good old days, he speaks in expectancy of a future King who would have the Spirit of God within him, a King who would do what is right, bringing a preferential option for the poor and a new age of righteousness.

But then the vision gets even grander for Isaiah goes on to talk of a future in which all the hitherto known enmities would be at an end. Here the language begins to sound positively utopian;

“The wolf will live with the lamb,
The leopard will lie down with the goat,
The calf and the lion and the yearling together.”

And I guess we listen to those words and think that these are nice thoughts but surely the prophet could do with a reality check! After all these things go against nature and should all creatures go vegetarian, there would be serious implications for the food chain.

But of course this language is not so much about the present age. Rather it is a vision of the reign of God that is to come and which is the future we are preparing ourselves for in this season of Advent.

But wait! Whilst at advent we look forward to God’s future in which there will be the peace and well being implied by the Hebrew word, “Shalom,” surely there are implications for us today. After all, seriously waiting on God means taking God’s future seriously and seeking the foster the signs of that future amongst us.

Back in the 19th Century, Edward Hicks who was a Quaker artist painted a picture entitled, “The Peacable Kingdom.” Were you to see the picture, you would at first notice a remarkable resemblance to Isaiah’s vision. All of Isaiah’s animals are to be found here. But there is something else as well. For on the left of the picture in the background are to be seen white settlers and native Indians. And what are they doing? They are making peace. For this is a portrayal of William Penn, a Quaker after whom Pennsylvania is named, making a treaty with
the local Indians at Shackamaxon under an elm tree. You see, this painting looks both to the vision of the peacable kingdom and to the contemporary signs of that Kingdom. Yes, here is both a depiction of Isaiah’s hope for the future and a depiction of that hope being taken seriously in the present tense.

But, if Isaiah offers a voice of hope, how you may ask does John the Baptist fit into such a pattern. After all, our first impression on meeting him is of one of those noisy Hellfire preachers whom many of us hoped we had heard the last of. He is not even nice to his hearers, addressing them as vipers , the sort of language which is a disciplinary offence if used by Methodist preachers against their congregations.

And yet, there is hope to be found in John the Baptist. For as he confronts the Sadducees who had misused religion to further the status of an idle wealthy elite, and Pharisees who have got hung up on the letter rather than the spirit of the Jewish law, he points his followers to a new future. And this future can be discovered in his call to “Repent” a word which taken literally is a call for a change of mind. This uncomfortable man is proclaiming a message to people who know the pain of injustice only too well, that there is an alternative, the Kingdom of heaven which is drawing near. And in this Kingdom, we are offered very different realities than those which are so suffocating in the present.

Once more as with Isaiah, we are challenged to envisage a new reality that is at odds with so many of the dark realities of the present. We are called to dare to think outside the box and to follow a path of nonconformity before those things which deny the possibilities of abundance of living. There always are alternatives

I wonder if we ever really appreciate the importance of hope. I don’t mean the optimism which can see where things are going to get better but the hope which seeing the difficulties dares to make leaps of faith to create new possibilities. It is that which we need as much as the very air that we breath. An example of this is the Jewish psychiatrist Victor Frankl who spent the last three years of the Second World War in Nazi concentration camps. Despite seeing many of his fellow prisoners give up, he was later to bear testimony that it was hope that kept hom going - the hope to rewrite the book that his gaolers had destroyed and the sadly to be unfulfilled hope that he would be reunited with his wife.

Isaiah and John the Baptist were both men of hope. Isaiah hopes in a future Davidic King despite the royal line having been morally contaminated. His vision of the peacable Kingdom speaks of the fiery beats being led by a child, possibly the young King Hezekiah. But most of all he places his hope in the Spirit of God resting upon a future King. For John, hope is placed in the one for whom he is preparing the way, one whom he probably doesn’t know but one who is more powerful than John himself, one whose sandals John is unfit to carry.

Desmond Tutu tells a parable about a light bulb that shone so brightly that it became convinced that its achievement was die to its own merits. One day, the bulb was taken out of its socket and placed upon a table. There despite its efforts it could do nothing, disconnected as it was from the source of its power. How much we need to remain connected to God who is the source of our hope!

Advent calls us to hope. It does not fail to take darkness seriously but it refuses to accept that darkness has the final say. Advent calls us to look to God’s future with hope that is rooted in the power and the nature of God. It encourages us to see that with God there are possibilities to be explored for alternatives in the here and now.

Oscar Wilde once said;

“We are all in the gutter but some of us are looking at the stars.”

May we as we look to that time when God’s Kingdom will come with great power, look up at the stars and may we rejoice and take hold of the possibilities that God gives us to be pointers to that great hope to which Advent points us.

Bideford Methodist Church - Sunday December 9th 2007

Advent 1 - A dangerous Advent to you all!

2007-12-01T03:56:00.000-08:00
ISAIAH 2: 1-5 MATTHEW 1: 1-17

And so Christmas draws near. The lights in town are on and shops proudly display a range of gifts for the season. All around, there is the excitement that comes from knowing that Christmas will soon be upon us.

But what is it that we look for in Christmas? Well often I hear people saying that they want a traditional Christmas, a Christmas that is familiar in our singing the same carols we always sang, eating the same meals we have always eaten in precisely the same way and all the other things that they have done since time immemorial.

And of course, the result is that whilst Christmas may be a time when our hearts are gentler towards others, ultimately we have domesticated Christmas, made it safe! It has become a lovely break amidst the darkness of Winter but ultimately we have denied the power of Christ entering into human experience, to change our lives and the world.

So it is that we need to emphasise the importance of Advent, that time when we do not just prepare for Christmas but for the coming of the Kingdom of God in all its fullness. And this preparation surely presents us with a real challenge as we begin to see that what happened 2 millennia ago in Bethlehem is not just a sweet little story but the sign of God demonstrating real involvement and commitment in our world through the coming of the baby who cannot be left gurgling in a cot. For to leave him there would be to deny his calling to travel with him that we might be his followers as his Kingdom which is earth’s ultimate destiny is revealed in great power. And here lies a warning. For that Kingdom is a harbinger of change in our lives and in the world. As Pope Benedict has put it;

“We could say that Advent is the time when Christians should awaken in their hearts the hope that they can change the world, with the help of God.”

Not so safe now is it? No longer is it the season merely to warm the cockles of our hearts. Instead it is the season to witness and to identify with God’s imperatives to challenge the wrongs and the shortcomings of the world in which we live. Advent has become a time for dangerous nonconformity. Be gone sterile, safe Advent! Instead I wish a dangerous Advent to you all!

And as we travel to a dangerous Advent, our Bible readings are found to be full of radical and subversive inspiration.

Let’s look first to our reading from Isaiah. It comes from a time of great peril. After all this was the time when the armies of mighty Assyria were on the prowl. Within a few years, the Northern Kingdom of Israel would fall to this super power and the Southern Kingdom of Judah in which Isaiah was based would be threatened with the same outcome. And yet amidst the terror of the age, there were those who dared to think that God desired a much better reality than that through which they lived. And amongst these people was Isaiah. For his dream was of a world in which God would put an end to war. Listen for a moment to those great words of hope;

“He will judge the nations
And will settle disputes for many peoples.
They will beat their swords into ploughshares
And their spears into pruning hooks.
Nation will not take up sword against nation,
Nor will they train for war anymore.”

Utopian words? Words divorced from the painful realities of Isaiah’s time and ours? Maybe and yet this vision of what can be in a future when God’s Kingdom is brought to completion, should surely inspire us in the here and now. After all, how can we sing the words of Edmund Hamilton Sears without willing the reality when we sing those visionary word that reflect upon the song of the angels at that first Christmas?

“And man at war with man hears not
The love-songs which they bring.
O hush the noise, ye men of strife,
And hear the angels sing.”

For in Christ we see the path of non violence lived out. In him we see the breaking of the walls that divide and separate one from another. And so whilst at Advent as we hear this great prophetic vision, there should be rejoicing whenever arms manufacturers find their life denying companies going out of business ( not always a popular view in a world in which the arms industry exerts great influence and provides a destructive employment for far too many!) and replaced by life enhancing business as suggested in a conversion to agricultural implements by Isaiah, it goes further. For our calling is to be peacemakers, Shalomites, who bridge the chasms of our day and perhaps this Christmas we see that particularly in regards to our relationship with the Islamic world. For here is a situation that certainly does not need the incendiary flame throwing that is becoming all too popular but which needs instead the rebuilding of relationships between what are in essence along with the Jewish people, but blood brothers with a common ancestry from Abraham. Surely, this Christmas as the Holy Land groans with ever increasing pains, the time is right to heal ancient rifts just as Jesus built bridges with those who might have been expected to be his foes those two millennia ago.

This advent, may we hold firm to the Jesus who shows us that we follow not a tribal God but a God of all peoples who urges us to cease the continued shedding of blood and instead follow the path that leads to peace, reconciliation and a unity amidst our diversities.

But let’s not stop there. Look on to our Gospel reading, a strange choice you might think, a genealogy. But wait. Are we not living in an age in which family history is becoming increasingly cherished. Many of us have watched “Who do you think you are?” and been at times entertained and at times deeply moved. Within my only family, there has been much research done especially by one of my cousin. We have found ourselves to be related to Henry Martyn the Anglican missionary and a Bible Christian known as Foolish Dick Hampton who had quite an influence in Porthtowan despite being like many of us preachers, incapable of proper employment. We have also had dark discoveries such as finding that one of our ancestors has a Member of Parliament as a brother - I can’t help thinking a highwayman would have been better! Still every family has its black sheep!

But what of the genealogy of Jesus? Well the first thing to notice is that it is composed in a most unexpected way. You see the practice of Jewish genealogies was for them to only include men. Women quite simply do not belong in Jewish genealogies. But Matthew breaks with convention and includes four women. And what a choice of four women. For a start they are not exactly a line up of good Jewish stock. Most of them are gentiles by background even if they come to accept Israel’s God - in Ruth’s case even coming from the despised land of Moab. But the offence does not stop here. For these are women whose conduct in the main is tainted with the suggestion of scandal. Look for a moment at their stories.

We have Tamar. Twice widowed by the sons of Judah, she finds herself denied by Judah of the marriage to a third brother which would have then been the custom. So when Judah’s wife dies, to gain an heir, Tamar disguises herself as a prostitute and sells her body to the father in law who does not know her identity.

And then there is Rahab. We learn of her in the story of Joshua’s conquest of Jericho. Courageous in her help of Joshua’s spies, there is a strong suggestion that she was a prostitute.

And what of Bathsheba. Possibly a victim of an element of coercion from David, she is remembered primarily for being a party in the adultery that was to lead to the death of her husband Uriah.

And as for dear sweet Ruth, let’s just say that her approach to Boaz on the threshing floor is just a little bit forward. The film just night have to be broadcast after the watershed!

So what are we being told? Well on the one hand, Matthew is showing us through the genealogy that Jesus has impeccable credentials to be the one through whom God will bless Israel. After all, he is a descendant of Abraham and David. But more than that, the genealogy especially as it relates to the four women, demonstrates that this Jesus is not simply to be for the insiders. Gender, race and reputation are hardly to stand in the way of the blessing of Jesus. His family tree is a pointer to the unbelievably good news that he will bring hope to those who are the most marginalized. And in this we find the response to the sort of religion that is the most destructive of all - that which is sufficient to be virtuous but inadequate to be inclusive.

Here is the message that every person is of value to God. And everyone counts in the site of God. And if only those newspapers that are currently starting up the annual bilge about a so called war on Christmas, ever got around to taking Jesus seriously, perhaps we would be spared the increasing assault on asylum seekers, those of other faiths and those who are forever frozen by what are essentially dark forces into forever being branded in their worst moments.

In Advent, we dare to look ahead to what is yet to be. We look to that time when hearts are turned to the ways of Christ. But as we travel through Advent, we are not called to be passively looking above. No, instead we are called to be those who are available to be the signs of the Kingdom of God.

But don’t expect great ovations for it. Remember that Jesus himself ended up being abused whipped and publicly executed. For that which he embodied in his living and teaching, was a threat to the norms and the powers of his day. Dare we expect it to be any other today. So this Advent let us take Jesus seriously. Let us seek to explore what is the nature of his Kingdom and then let us, even us, resolve to be with his help the signs of that Kingdom. And if the road is lonely and counter cultural, hearken to the words of James Russell Lowell;

“THEY are slaves who fear to speak For the fallen and the weak;
They are slaves who will not choose Hatred, scoffing, and abuse,
Rather than in silence shrink From the truth they needs must think;
They are slaves who dare not be In the right with two or three.”

So as we enter into Advent, let us exercise our freedom to engage once more with the Christ who cam to us at Bethlehem and whose Kingdom will ultimately prevail. And as we do so may we turn away from the temptation to be mushy, instead holding on to the good news that leads us to a path of peace in which all people are seen as desirables to be cherished.

So let us embrace a dangerous Gospel based Advent.

A truly dangerous Advent to you all!

Gammaton Methodist Church - December 2nd 2007.