Impatience

Posted on May 20, 2012 by trevorsweb

I have been remiss of late and not posted my sermons on this site. Not that I haven’t preached, just that I’ve been distracted. I shall try to do better. Immediately! This preached at Winwick on The Sunday after the Ascension.

1 St. Peter 4.7-11 / St. John 15.26-16.4

I don’t know about you, but I find waiting difficult. Yes, I know I’m an Englishman and proud of it, especially in this year of our Sovereign Lady The Queen’s Diamond Jubilee. And I know that the English are good at waiting, especially in queues. But somehow, that bit of my English DNA got lost.

Waiting on the post for an expected letter or parcel is purgatory. Having to wait until after the Queen’s Speech to open my Christmas presents is hell – God bless your Majesty, but even for you I find it so difficult to wait.

Doing nothing isn’t an option. I couldn’t bear to be retired with nothing to do. I’m not like the man who said that sometimes he likes to sit and think, and other times he just sits. My theme tune is, “Why are we waiting?”

I absolutely hate those television shows where you are made to wait to hear the result of something. And our winner tonight is….. that’s not building suspense, it’s just plain cruelty!

I’m one of those who pray to God to give me patience – right now!

And yet, in our Church Calendar we are now in one of those periods of time when we are waiting for something. The Lord ascended in to heaven after his post-resurrection appearances, leaving the apostles, as they now were, to wait for the coming of the Comforter.

Of course, God in his wisdom — ‘cos he knows that at heart much of mankind is like me, impatient to the extreme — of course God in his infinite wisdom didn’t make us wait that long for the promised Comforter. In our Church Calendar he makes us wait just ten days, from the Thursday of Ascension Day to the Sunday of Pentecost, the day his Spirit came into the world.

But to the impatient – I think of Peter the impetuous – for the impatient, even those ten days will have been very difficult to bear. So should we learn something from God’s delay? Should we embrace patience as a virtue, which my mother always said it was but I never quite believed her?

Certainly we are called to be patient in prayer. Truly might it be said that all good things come to him who waits and continues to pray. And God does hear persistent prayer, though to be frank he doesn’t always answer it in the way we want or necessarily expect so some prayers seem unanswered.

So I will try to remember the lesson of the gap between Ascension and Pentecost, and I will try to be more patient.

But please, God, please forgive me if I still don’t want to endure the dreadful false suspense of television’s so called talent shows.

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Humility may be the cross we are asked to bear

Posted on March 7, 2012 by trevorsweb

May the words of my lips and the meditations of our hearts be always acceptable in your sight, O Lord our Strength and our Redeemer.

1 Thessalonians 4.1-8 /Matthew 15:21-28

I can’t think of anyone with a greater air of authority than Jesus. Yes, he was approachable: the very best leaders are. But you would think that if said something, then that was it. Jesus had spoken and what he has said must be true. You don’t question it.

Yet when he refused to heal the daughter of the woman of Canaan, she argued with him.

Her first approach was to ask for his help. And Jesus said nothing in reply. He seemed just to ignore her. Which didn’t mean that he didn’t hear her plea, any more than we might think when he doesn’t answer us immediately that he doesn’t hear our prayers. He hears us, he listens: but sometimes he chooses not to respond immediately.

She tried again, and this second approach to Jesus for his help was met with an apparent refusal. You’re a Gentile, he said, and I am sent first to the lost sheep of Israel. Gentiles were second-class at best in that time, not deserving of any sympathy or help, guilty of all manner of sins, both real like us all but also imaginary in the distorted prejudices and racial biases of the Jews. Bad people who didn’t deserve anything good to happen to them.

Yet the Canaanite woman persisted, and more than that: the Bible tells us that she worshipped Jesus, and then simply repeated her prayer. “Lord, help me.”

And now the Lord delivers a divine insult: he says she is no better than a dog, and while the children – the children of Israel, that is – while the children need food it would not be right to waste any of it on a mere dog, on a mere Gentile.

On Sunday you heard Sandy preach on the text from St Mark which reads:

If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.

The Canaanite woman accepted this apparent humiliation and doing that showed her humility before Jesus. OK, she said, I’m no better than a dog to you, you are so much greater, wiser, better, higher than I am. No more to you than a stray dog might be.

But even dogs are allowed the crumbs which drop from your table. In our humility we lick them off the floor and we’re thankful for them. Calling us curs and dogs won’t drive us away.

So she didn’t so much deny herself as humbly recognise herself for what she was: completely humble before and in the presence of God, in this case in the form of Jesus our Lord. She didn’t so much deny her self as humbly accept it.

And as I said to another group earlier this week, denying our will and our wilfulness, humbly bowing before God in humility and yielding entirely to his will is the cross he asks us to bear.

The Canaanite woman bore that cross and received her crumbs from the table: and what crumbs they were! The healing of her daughter though her faith and, it has to be said, her humility.

May God grant us faith, and may he grant us humility, and the crumbs we receive from under his table shall be to us the greatest of riches. AMEN.

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The mutability of language won’t be fixed

Posted on February 29, 2012 by trevorsweb

May the words of my lips and the meditations of our hearts be always acceptable in your sight, O Lord our Strength and our Redeemer.

Isaiah 59-1-9a / Matthew 12.38-50

In our church notices this week there’s a reference to an online petition which reads: I support the legal definition of marriage which is the voluntary union for life of one man and one woman to the exclusion of all others. I oppose any attempt to redefine it.

The context, of course, is the widely used phrase “gay marriage” in place of the more formally accurate term “Civil partnership.”

No, the petition says, marriage by definition is the union between a man and a woman and we will fight tooth and nail to keep that definition.

Now: words grow, they develop, they change their meanings all the time. Indeed, I’m of an age where the very word ‘gay’ used to be used in the sense of jolly and bright and enjoyable. It is only in quite recent times that it has been taken over to mean homosexual.

Yet this petition is unprecedented in that it tries to fix the definition of a single word for all time. The French, naturally, try to do that all the time. They have an Academy whose task it is to police the French language, preventing it from becoming contaminated with foreign words. In fact the French Academy has little success, and their language changes despite them. As for English, in any single sentence we could be using words whose origins were in Anglo-Saxon, Norman French, Gaelic, Viking, German, Latin, Greek, Arabic – we have always borrowed and adapted our language to the times in which we live, and it makes for a free and dynamic, highly effective means of communication, to the extent that it is the lingua franca of the whole world, itself a delightful example of the English language’s flexibility: a Latin word and a word derived from Greek to describe a language – now predominantly English – which useable by peoples of many different tongues!

So are the petitioners justified in trying to fix the meaning of the word ‘marriage’ for all time?

In this morning’s Gospel, Jesus quite openly and blatantly redefines a pair of common words. Words and concepts don’t get much more basic than ‘mother’ and ‘brother.’ Yet Jesus points to his biological mother and to his brothers, and he says, “Who are they?” And pointing to his disciples he says firmly, “Here are my mother and my brothers. For whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother.”

No one has ever suggested a petition to strike that from the Bible. Naturally, because it isn’t that simple. Jesus was redefining a whole different set of relationships. Of course his disciples didn’t at that moment in time become biologically the brothers of Christ, let alone change gender and become his mother. Jesus was simply extending the use of the language to illustrate the depth and importance of the relationship he had with the disciples, using a word we could understand like ‘brother’ to point to an idea and an ideal which is truly beyond us, the brotherhood, the fellowship, the union in love of all people with himself.

And those who glibly use the phrase ‘gay marriage’ are trying to do the same thing, trying to encapsulate in a phrase the idea that two people of the same gender can feel as deeply, as tenderly, as passionately, as truly as any loving heterosexual couple. And fixing the definition of the word ‘marriage’ by some arbitrary law to exclude them won’t change that.

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A sower’s work is never done…

Posted on February 15, 2012 by trevorsweb

May the words of my lips and the meditations of our hearts be always acceptable in your sight, O Lord our Strength and our Redeemer.

2 Corinthians 11.19-3 / St. Luke 8.4-15

We’re all familiar with the parable of the sower in today’s Gospel, so I’m not going to repeat it, though it does repay careful reading and thought because like all the parables of Jesus, there are layers upon layers of subtleties built into it, some of them of course needing some study of the way of life of a rural smallholder in first century Palestine.

But we know the story well enough to save that for another time. This morning, in the brief time allowed, I want to look at the implications of the story for each of us, an exercise which I think is often conveniently glossed over by preachers who says in a very meaningful voice things like, “Ah, yes, the seed is the Word of God which we must spread. And sadly there will be those who will hear it and fall by the wayside, but others will flourish and bear seed an hundredfold.” And that’s it.

And I’m left thinking, “Yes, but… “

For example: we know the seed is the word of God because Jesus said so when he began to explain the parable to the disciples. But who is the sower? We are not told here in Luke, but in Matthew 13:37 Jesus said, “He who sows the good seed is the Son of Man…”

But that’s from a quite different parable, and I want to suggest that we might be the sowers in this parable. We who have the responsibility of spreading the Word of God whether through the words we speak, or the life we lead, or the prayers we breathe to use Mary Sumner’s daily prayer.

It is, of course, still Christ’s word which he is sowing but trusting us to be his agents here on earth.

But before we sow the seed, the ground needs to be prepared. If we are to sow the seed, which is the word of God, in the hearts and souls of others, we need to prepare those hearts and souls so they might be receptive to it, just as the sower in real life prepares and tills the ground into which he sows his seed.

And of course, despite our best efforts, there will be those who won’t hear it, so stopped are their ears by the devil in the form of personal and private cares and concerns. And there will be those who do hear the word and receive it gladly, but who, for lack of support, wither and die.

So our responsibility doesn’t begin with spreading the word: we have to prepare the ground. And our responsibility doesn’t end when we’ve spread the word: we need to support and nurture the frail seedlings until they stand alone and produce their fruit in turn. And our task doesn’t end there because the next season begins right after the harvest: some might say the task never ends.

Nor does what we need to learn from this parable, because I thought about all that, and then I said to myself, “Yes, but…”

So another example: we can nod understandingly when we think, “Oh yes, the ground needs to be prepared.” But… what does that actually mean in practice? And how exactly do we nurture the frail seedlings?

Topics for another time, and topics for our continuing prayers.

Thanks be to God.

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Racing towards Easter!

Posted on February 8, 2012 by trevorsweb

May the words of my lips and the meditations of our hearts be always acceptable in your sight, O Lord our Strength and our Redeemer.

1 Corinthians 9.24-end / St. Matthew 20.1-16

It is sometimes said by mathematicians that there are three kinds of people in the world: those who can count, and those who can’t.

Well, the folk who named this last Sunday Septuagesima certainly couldn’t count! The name means ‘seventieth’ and it’s popularly thought to be 70 days before Easter, but if you count them, it’s only 63: Septuagesima Sunday is three weeks before Lent so nine weeks before Easter. Nine weeks of seven days are just 63. I think.

As always with things in the Church, and in the Church calendar which don’t entirely add up you can find any number of cute explanations, all of them seemingly invented to explain a discrepancy. So if you don’t count Thursdays, Saturdays and Sundays as days of fasting, Septuagesima Sunday is the last opportunity to feast before you start forty days of fasting for Lent.

If you’re one of those who can’t count, none of that will matter a great deal, and if you can count, you won’t necessarily care! It becomes simply a name to remind us that we are about to enter the season of Lent which is followed by Eastertide, the most glorious celebration and festival in our Christian calendar, the remembrance of the passion and the resurrection of our Lord and Saviour, the central event which ultimately and distinctively entirely defines our faith.

In our epistle for today St Paul wrote of running a race, and if we were to use his imagery for this time of the year I’d want to say it’s more of a marathon than a sprint. It’s a long haul from now until the celebration of Easter, and we’ll pass a number of waypoints in the race.

We’re going to pass Shrove Tuesday, followed by Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent.

Then the forty days of Lent to reach Easter via Passion Sunday, Palm Sunday, Maundy Thursday, Good Friday and Holy Saturday.

And yes, I’ve left out some of the more obscure days of this season like Collop Monday, or Shrove Monday as it can be called!

The Church at large has got out of the habit of recognising this pattern of devotions in its entirety and its detail, I think to our great cost.

But just as some of the less popular sports can be followed on minority television channels – did you know for instance that you can watch virtually 24/7 table tennis on Channel Four, providing you watch Swedish Television? — just as some of the less popular sports can be followed on minority television channels, I hope you will permit me to chart our progress in this seasonal race in our Wednesday morning services.

If so, here goes! Septuagesima is when we come under starter’s orders!

On your marks! Get set! GO!

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I want to be good! But no one will let me!

Posted on January 25, 2012 by trevorsweb

May the words of my lips and the meditations of our hearts be always acceptable in your sight, O Lord our Strength and our Redeemer.

Romans 13.1-7 / St. Matthew 8.23-end

One of my favourite characters in Dylan Thomas’s great poem Under Milkwood is No Good Boyo.In the 1972 film version which starred Richard Burton as the voice of the narrator, it was David Jason who played the part of No Good Boyo, the lazy fisherman who liked to spend his days dreaming of Mrs Dai Bread Two and of wet corsets.

I warm to him particularly with his line, “I want to be good. But no one will let me!”

It’s an interesting idea, that we want to be good but somehow we are prevented by other people who somehow force us to be bad.

You hear it in the playground, inevitably. “It wasn’t me, Miss, he pushed me!”

“It wasn’t my fault, Miss, she made me do it!”

As we grow up other factors come into play. For some, it is the threat of punishment which keeps us on the straight and narrow. The official phrase is “punishment as a deterrent.” But the figures show that this approach is effective in only a minority of people. The majority of people who have been in prison for a criminal offence go on to re-offend and are sent back to prison.

For others, the reason we don’t commit crimes isn’t the fear of punishment but the reverse: it’s because we love good.

Like No Good Boyo, we want to be good.

It’s a subtle difference which was lost on very many preachers back in the times I call the ‘dark ages of the Church’ when it was generally held that the way to save people and to bring them into the Kingdom of Heaven was to convince them utterly of their base, depraved and grossly sinful nature.

“You’re all doomed!” might have been the cry, “And you’re all going to hell!” – unless of course you repented, came to church every week and regularly filled the coffers with cash to keep up the good work of salvation.

But Paul says, “ye must needs be subject, not only for wrath, but also for conscience sake.” You must turn away from sin not because God will be angry if you don’t, but because he loves you, and he will be hurt by your sins, and because if you love him, you want what he wants too.

Again, that’s not to say that God cannot and will not be angry: in the words of our Prayer Book service when we have provoked “most justly [his] wrath and indignation against us,” and our Lord’s summary power over, and punishment of, the demons who so afflicted the Gadarene men. Jesus cast the demons into the pigs who promptly ran over the cliff top to their doom, and the doom of the demons which had been cast into them.

God certainly can and will punish us for our manifold sins and wickedness, but he doesn’t want to. He wants us to be good. We want to be good.

And so we should at all times let go, and let God. Not be swayed by the world around us, those who would keep No Good Boyo in his state of wickedness, but instead seek to know and to do what God wants us to do. And what he wants us to do is to be good, for love of him and not for fear.

AMEN

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Serendipity?

Posted on January 18, 2012 by trevorsweb

May the words of my lips and the meditations of our hearts be always acceptable in your sight, O Lord our Strength and our Redeemer.

Romans 12.6-16 /St. John 2.1-11

Our Gospel reading for the Second Week after the Epiphany is that very familiar passage describing our Lord’s first miracle, the changing of the water into wine at the wedding of Cana. I have read that passage many times, heard it read many times, preached on it and heard it preached on many times. It is very familiar. I thought I knew it very well.

And then, when I was preparing for this morning, I noticed for the very first time the four words which start the passage. “And the third day…”

I must have read those words, or heard them, hundreds of times, but I had never really noticed them. And of course, having spotted them my immediate question was, “the third day of what?”

Tempting to think that it was simply John saying that it was Tuesday. We generally acknowledge that the Sabbath – which for the Jews was our Saturday – the Sabbath was the seventh day of the week, so Sunday was the first day and Tuesday was therefore the third.

So was John writing, “One Tuesday there was a wedding in Cana of Galilee…”

Possible, I suppose, but it doesn’t really make any difference which day of the week it was, the important thing was the miracle. So did John mean something else?

To cut a long story short, in truth nobody over the years has ever come up with a definitive answer to the question. Some have suggested that it was symbolic of the day of Christ’s resurrection – on the third day he rose again – but at least in that case we know it wasn’t Tuesday because we know which day the Gospel writers were calling the first day: the day of the crucifixion, the day of Jesus’s death. And on the third day he rose again…

But it’s a bit farfetched to think that John was flagging up the resurrection in his story of the first miracle…

Some writers have suggested that really this passage of John’s Gospel was put in the wrong place and that it should actually be chapter in Chapter 4 where it might fit better.

But whatever the real reason, it was a huge delight to me to discover yet again that there is always something new in the Bible. That we can still be surprised by the Bible, even by passages which we thought we knew so well.

Of course my sudden discovery of this little mystery, which sent me scuttling to the commentaries to find the answer only to have the question reflected back to me by Tom Wright’s commentary – “By the way,” he writes, “what do you think John meant when he wrote “on the third day”?!!! – my sudden discovery of this little mystery in the Bible isn’t earth-shattering or life –changing. Not, for example, like the passage from Romans which John Wesley almost certainly knew by heart but hadn’t truly understood until that evening in Aldersgate in 1738 when he felt his heart strangely warmed. But it is a reminder that the mysteries of God are so deep that we can’t ever know them fully; and that from time he time, if we keep our ears and our eyes and our minds and our hearts and our souls open, just occasionally he imparts a little wisdom to us, even sometimes where we think we already know what we’re doing.

Thanks be to God.

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Thank God we can change…

Posted on January 12, 2012 by trevorsweb

May the words of my lips and the meditations of our hearts be always acceptable in your sight, O Lord our Strength and our Redeemer.

Romans 12.1-5 / St. Luke 2.41-end

In today’s Gospel reading we catch a fleeting glimpse of the boyhood of our Lord. He, along with his parents and other members of the extended family had gone up to Jerusalem to celebrate the Passover as they did every year. It was a great time of rejoicing, a great time to catch up with friends and with members of the family who lived away. Much like Christmas in our time, I suppose.

It was only on their way back that Mary noticed that Jesus somehow wasn’t with them. You can imagine something of her state of mind. Oh, he was a good boy, articulate, able to speak up for himself, no doubt, able to fend for himself. But you can imagine her fears, her anxieties, her 12 year old child missing, who knew where, and who knew in what danger?

Finally she found him. It took her three days, but finally she found him sitting in the synagogue cheerfully chatting away with the doctors of the law and more than holding his own.

It was if a twelve year old boy these days were found in the House of Commons happily discussing policies with government ministers. Or a twelve year old boy holding deep and meaningful conversations with both Archbishops and all the diocesan bishops at General Synod.

But nevertheless, May let him have it with both barrels of a mother’s anger born out of love and fear for her child now hugely relieved to see him in no danger.

“Son, what are you doing? Don’t you know we’ve been worried sick about you these three days? Your father and I have been frantic!”

And what does he say? “Mother, it’s what I do.”

Our only inkling from the Bible that throughout his life, even from a child, Jesus clearly knew who he was: the son of his Father, God. Why wait until he was, as the scholars tell us, 30 years old before he set about his three year earthly ministry? We don’t know. We just know that clearly it was his nature to be the son of God.

“It’s what I do.”

I think it’s not the same for the rest of us. I’ve been reading that a lot recently in various reports and studies. The scientists and the humanists say that we are what our genes and our upbringing make us. But unlike Jesus who was and is the same yesterday, today and forever, I believe that all we human beings are changeable, thanks be to God. Because it’s in our human nature to be imperfect and sinful. To make mistakes. In fact, I came across that phrase, “It’s what I do” at the end of a sentence which rang many bells for me. It went, “I make mistakes, it’s what I do, I speak without thinking, I act without knowing. It’s what I do.” And without change, we perish.

But thanks be to God, thanks to God’s saving grace and the death and resurrection of his Son, I don’t always have to do what I do. I can change. I can daily strive to live more nearly as my God wants me to. Not conformed to this world, but transformed by grace and by the renewing of my mind to be a living sacrifice in the service of Him who never changes.

AMEN

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Interlude

Posted on January 10, 2012 by trevorsweb

I haven’t posted a sermon here for a while, mostly due to the pressures of time, what with setting up the new church web site, Christmas and so on. And I was in two minds about posting the next one, dated 11 January 2012, one of my short Wednesday morning sermons which the Vicar likes to call ‘a blessed thought rather than a sermon’ to emphasise the necessity of brevity. They really are the hardest to write, and all too often I leave it very late to write them, far too late to do them justice: I quote approvingly the apology attributed to Blaise Pascal: “I have made this letter longer than usual because I lack the time to make it shorter.”
When I have time (sic!), I will revisit this topic. Meanwhile, if you read my sermons I crave your indulgence and forgiveness if sometimes they lack clarity. But then I am a seeker: I haven’t found the whole truth yet!

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Romance and witness

Posted on November 30, 2011 by trevorsweb

May the words of my lips and the meditations of our hearts be always acceptable in your sight, O Lord our Strength and our Redeemer.

Romans 10.9-end / St. Matthew 4.18-20

Today, November 30th, is celebrated throughout Christendom as St Andrew’s Day. He is, of course, the patron saint of Scotland whose flag, the white cross on the blue ground recalls the tradition that St Andrew was crucified like his Lord, but on a diagonal cross.

St Andrew is also the patron saint Greece, Romania, Russia and the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople, and in folklore a man much associated with customs relating to romance and marriage. Well, not in Scotland, but in the other countries of his patronage, if a woman throws a clog over her shoulder and the clog lands pointing to the door, marriage is assured within the year.

In Poland women place  pieces of paper, on which they have written the names of potential husbands, under their pillow and first thing in the morning they take one out, and that allegedly reveals their future husband.

In Slovakia and parts of the Czech Republic those same bits of paper are baked into little pieces of dough, called Halusky. When cooked, the first one to float to the surface of the water would reveal the name of the future husband.

In parts of Romania young women light a candle from the Easter candle, the Paschal candle, and bring it, at midnight, to a fountain where they ask St. Andrew to let them glimpse their future husband.

While in Austria they are much more direct, rather less subtle and on St Andrew’s Eve the young women drink a quantity of wine and  then perform a spell, called Andreasgebet (Saint Andrew’s prayer). They would do this while nude and kicking a straw bed. This was supposed to magically attract the future husband. You can see how it might!

But for all that romance, the Christian reverence for St Andrew lies in two facts: firstly that he was the first disciple called by Jesus, according to St John’s Gospel. And, from the same witness, it was Andrew who brought his brother to Jesus, and his brother’s name, of course, was Simon Peter, to whom the Lord gave the keys of the Kingdom of Heaven which is his Holy Church.

And these things mean that he was quick and ready to believe in the Messiah, probably sharing some of his brother’s impetuous nature. And, for what I really want to stress today, he was quick not only to believe in the Christ, he was quick and ready to witness to his belief. Witnessing to his new faith, speaking out, seeking more disciples and believers was the very first thing Andrew did.

And that’s a lesson and an example to us all today. As St Paul wrote to the Romans,

…if you confess with your mouth, [that] Jesus is Lord, and [you] believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.

For it is with your heart that you believe and are justified, and it is with your mouth that you confess and are saved.

We don’t have a dismissal as such from this service, but if we did, I would change the usual words and say, in honour of St Andrew: Go in peace to love and speak of the Lord. In the name of Christ. AMEN

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