Trinity 17 "By what authority"

Trinity 17 2026 WM 8am

Philippians 2.1-13, Matthew 21.21-32

A friend of mine told me he was once questioned by the police because someone had accused him of impersonating a priest. This was ironic because he was, in fact, a priest. Eventually he managed to convince them, but it was an uncomfortable moment.

Proving that we are who we say we are is an inescapable part of modern life. In many jobs that means wearing a uniform, a badge or a lanyard. But back in Jesus’ time, it wasn’t as simple as that.

In the Gospel reading today Jesus is asked for his “badge of office” by the chief priests and elders as he stands in the Temple, teaching the crowds. “By what authority are you doing these things and who gave you this authority?”

It was the last week of Jesus’ life, and the battle lines had already been drawn with these religious leaders. They knew Jesus was going to be trouble. He’d created a stir, riding into Jerusalem on a donkey, echoing a prophecy in the book of Zechariah about the Messiah, He’d overturned the traders’ tables in the Temple. He’d annoyed a lot of important people – not least the Roman authorities, who were always on the watch for rebellion brewing. Who did he think he was? He wasn’t a priest. He wasn’t from some recognised rabbinical school. He wasn’t a member of the ruling council. He was just a carpenter from the backwater province of Galilee. There was nothing about his external appearance or his background which said “Messiah” as far as these temple officials could see. And yet he was acting as if he had a right to be where he was, proclaiming what he said was God’s word, doing what he said was God’s work.

“By what authority are you doing these things and who gave you this authority?”

Jesus’ response points them away from his outward appearance and his unlikely background as a carpenter’s son. Instead of answering their question he throws one back at them. “By what authority did John baptise?” If these leaders say John the Baptist had God’s authority, why didn’t they follow him themselves? John had been executed by King Herod, but he had been popular with the crowds, who had flocked to him. Jesus is forcing these religious leaders to choose. Whatever they answer someone won’t like it – Herod, or the masses. How will they choose? Will their choice be based on who they are more afraid of, or on whether they think John was right or not? 

To help them weigh up their choice, Jesus tells them a parable.

A man has two sons. One says he won’t do the work his father’s asked him to, but then does it anyway. The other says he will do it but then doesn’t. Which son would you rather have? The first son, of course, because at least at the end of the day the work will at least have been done.

The proof of the pudding is in the eating, we might say. 

Ultimately it’s not the badge you wear, but the work you do that matters, says Jesus.

That applies in all walks of life. You can call yourself an architect, but if everything you build falls down, someone will soon be disputing your right to the label. You can call yourself a chef, but if all your customers get food-poisoning, you will soon find yourself out of a job. 

“The tax-collectors and prostitutes are going into the kingdom of heaven ahead of you,” says Jesus. That sounds very offensive to these leaders, but that is because they are thinking of the kingdom of God like any other royal court room, a place where precedence is decided based on your status – your badge of belonging, your membership of the club - rather than your actions. But Jesus didn’t think of the kingdom like that. To him it was found wherever God was at work, changing people, forgiving people, healing people. The tax collectors and prostitutes who had come to him were already in that kingdom, already in the throne room, because they were already letting God change, forgive and heal them. That’s why they flocked to Jesus. It wasn’t his words but his whole way of life that transformed. He came and ate with them when no other respectable person would. He insisted that they were equal members of his new community and stood up for them when others questioned that. Ultimately, he died rather than going back on that message. “He emptied himself, taking the form of a slave… He became obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross” says Paul in our first reading.

Jesus didn’t need a badge that said “Messiah” on it, because it was written right through him. It was his authenticity that convinced those who followed him. You can’t fake that, and you can’t disguise it either.

But now comes the really scary part, because that beautiful hymn of faith that we heard in our first reading says “Let that same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus”. Paul isn’t telling the Philippians who Jesus is. He is telling them who they – and we – are meant to be. He is calling us to live with the same authenticity, the same love and trust and humility, that Christ himself displayed. “Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling,” Not work out in the sense that we might work out the answer to a puzzle, but work out in the sense of putting something into practice. Put into practice the message of God’s love, says Paul. Live what you believe.

And if we are genuine in “letting God be at work in us”, there may be some fear and trembling. Real change can feel scary. And that is just as it should be. Either our faith matters - this faith we come together to celebrate and ponder week by week – in which case we should be doing everything we can to live it, working it out in our lives, or it doesn’t matter, in which case why do we bother to come at all?

Badges and labels have their uses, but it is the testimony of our whole lives which ultimately tells others who we are - and whose we are – people in whom God is at work, citizens of his kingdom, part of his family, growing in his likeness day by day. Let us pray that it will be so for us.

Amen

Trinity 15 - Calculation and Grace

Trinity 15 2026 Kings Hill

Matthew 18.21-35

 

“How many times should I forgive?” asks Peter.” Seven times?” “No, seventy-seven times”, says Jesus. 

If I’m honest, there are times when I just want to sit Jesus down and say “really? Is that what you mean?” 

Most of us will have struggled at some point to forgive someone who has hurt us. We know it’s not straightforward, especially if they have done us serious harm. And to do it again and again? Is that even wise?

And to hear, as we do at the end of the Gospel reading that if we don’t forgive others from our heart, we will suffer endless torment, just piles on the guilt. 

And it can be dangerous. Sometimes people think that they should stay in situations where they are being hurt or abused when they really need to get out because they think that’s what Christian teaching on forgiveness tells them to do.   

“Really Jesus? Is this what you mean?” No, I don’t think it is.

Part of the problem is that we take these words out of context. 

Jesus is speaking to his disciples here about how they should look after the communities of people they will one day be responsible for in the early Church. It was a ragbag collection of very different people – men, women, Jews, Greeks, slaves, free, rich and poor. There were bound to be tensions , times when things went wrong and people hurt each other, whether they meant to or not. That’s what groups are like. 

Last Sunday you may have heard the passage immediately before this where Jesus gives advice on dealing with some of those tensions. Go and see the person who’s hurt you privately first, he says. If that doesn’t work take someone else. If that doesn’t work involve the wider group. If that doesn’t work, it may be that that person needs to be kept at a distance from the community for everyone’s safety.  

This is what’s in Peter’s mind when he asks his question. “How many times can we go around that process? When does the moment come when we say, enough is enough?”

He wants a rule, a number, something he can put in a disciplinary policy.  But Jesus tells him that if he tries to turn forgiveness into a calculation, he will have missed the point. That’s what Jesus rather ridiculous answer means.

Imagine trying to keep track.

“That's number thirty-five…”

“Hang on, was that thirty-five or thirty-six?”

By the time you got anywhere near seventy-seven, you would have lost count.

Peter wants to reduce the complexities of human relationships to arithmetic. Jesus wants him to think more deeply. That’s why he tells a story, a parable.

Parables, like any other story, aren’t handbooks. They don’t tell you what to do. They just invite you to step inside them and try them out for size. How would it feel if I was in that situation? Who do I empathise with? Does it remind me of my own life? How does it touch my own heart? 

Most parables are rather over the top. They are meant to be, to grab our attention. In this one, the king in the story has lent his slave a ridiculous amount of money for some unfathomable reason. Ten thousand talents. It’s a huge sum. Talents, by the way, were Roman units of currency, not the ability to sing or dance. One talent was worth around 16 years wages for an ordinary labourer, so 10000 talents is one hundred and sixty thousand years wages. Like I said, the story is meant to be a bit ridiculous. This is an unpayable debt. That’s the point. The king knows he will never get this money back, and we might think that if he had any sense he wouldn’t have lent it in the first place. But he did, and now it’s gone forever. What can he do? He decides that the future is more important than the past. He cuts his losses and cancels the debt. 

Imagine you were that slave. The relief!

Instead of having to pay back 160,000 years’ worth of wages, he is free. 

Imagine the gratitude that he should be feeling. But the tragedy is that he doesn’t. When he meets another slave who owes him just a small amount, he refuses to show him any mercy at all. 

It’s baffling. Despite all that’s happened to him, he has no compassion for this other man who is as desperate as he was, and he has him thrown into prison.  

When the king hears of it, he’s not impressed and the first slave is rearrested, condemned to be tortured “until the debt is paid” which will be never, since it is so huge. 

Let me be clear. This story isn’t telling us that God is like this. Parables don’t work like that. They are much more complex and subtle than that. As I said earlier, they invite us to try them out for size, to step into their world to get a better insight into our own. 

This parable invites us to ask what we think forgiveness is for, how it works. In particular it reminds us that forgiveness doesn’t mean saying that the wrong that was done to us doesn’t matter, or that things can just go back to the way they were. The money the king lent, and the money the first slave lent to the second slave is gone.  There is no going back. But there could have been a way of going forward, if the first slave had decided to take it. Tragically, he didn’t.

If someone has hurt us, there is no way they can wind back time and unhurt us again. Words that have been said can’t be unsaid. If someone cuts us, there is always going to be a scar, however well it heals. But this story tells us that we don’t have to stay stuck at that point, exacting continual revenge. If we do that, we end up suffering just as much as the person who hurt us – that’s what the endless torment in the story is about. 

In the end, forgiveness is about freedom. It unshackles us from those who have hurt us. We find our freedom by giving them theirs. We don’t have to try to change them or rescue them. We don’t have to let them live rent-free in our heads. They are God’s children, just as we are, and we can leave them in God’s hands. What went wrong between us may not be mendable this side of the grave, but it doesn’t have to define the rest of our lives – or the rest of theirs. 

You don’t need me to tell you that getting to that point isn’t always straightforward. It can be the work of a lifetime, and it can’t be hurried. But it starts, it seems to me, where Jesus’ parable started, with a stupendous act of generosity, the gift of Jessus, God’s ultimate demonstration of his love for us. The tragedy the story is that, for whatever reason, the first slave didn’t appreciate the generosity that he had received. If he had done, perhaps he wouldn’t have needed to act as he did towards his fellow slave. If we want to do better than that, we need to know first of all that we have been set free by God, that we are safe in his hands, that we don’t need to be afraid, that we can live with open hands and hearts towards others. We love, because God first loved us. 

 

Peter wanted a formula to calculate how many times he should forgive.  Instead, Jesus called him to discover what it meant to be forgiven, so that he could live with the same generosity towards others as God had showed to him, and to all of us. 

Some debts are unpayable. Time can’t run backwards. We can’t undo the past. We can’t change other people. But the good news is that the future can look different from the past, by the grace of God.  

Amen

Trinity 4: Welcoming Grace

 Trinity 4

Romans  6.12-end, Matthew 10.40-end

I wonder if you are a sesquipedalian. In case you don’t know, that means a lover of long words. Sesquipedalian. If you are a sesquipedalian, then here’s a long word for today – antinomianism. It’s at the heart of the first reading today, from Paul’s letter to the Romans.  Nomos is Greek for law, and anti means you’re against it. 

I can think of lots of people who are against laws – hardened criminals for example, or small children when it’s bedtime – but antinomianism is a bit more than that. It’s a theological or philosophical idea, and in Christian contexts, it has its roots in the idea of salvation by grace, but it takes that idea to its extreme. 

If we are saved by grace – God’s free gift to us, his endless, indestructible love and forgiveness – then why does it matter what we do? It was a question which bedevilled the Protestant Reformation. Martin Luther, was a monk who nearly drove himself to despair at his own failings – not big things, but countless small ways he didn’t feel he lived up to the ideals he believed he should. His big breakthrough came as he studied the letter to the Romans and found in it the good news that it wasn’t his works or his prayers, or the rituals he undertook that put him right with God – who could ever be good enough for that? No, it was God’s own decision to love him and forgive him – and all of us - that mattered.  It is grace that saves us, not anything we can do for ourselves. It wasn’t that the Catholic church didn’t believe that or teach it, but somehow, at least for this one rather over-anxious monk, it had got lost in the thickets of complex rules and traditions that held sway over his life.

But there were some groups who took this idea and ran away with it. They decided that it meant they could do what they wanted. It didn't matter. God had forgiven them. They had their ticket to heaven and no one could take it away. In the mid 17th century, for example, a group who became known, rather disparagingly, as Ranters, decided that they didn’t need to observe any moral law at al. Some of them thought it was wrong to do so. If you kept externally imposed laws it was a sign that you didn’t really trust God’s forgiveness and were trying to earn it by your good behaviour.

The splendidly named Abiezer Coppe wrote in a pamphlet, “I can if it be my will, kiss and hug ladies, and love my neighbour's wife as myself, without sin. There’s no evidence that he actually did this, but he believed it would be fine to do so, a demonstration of his assurance that he was saved, and that was that.

The historian Diarmaid MacCulloch summed it up like this, “Antinomian freedom might be expressed by such gestures as ecstatic blasphemy, joyous tobacco-smoking and running naked down the street.” ( A History of Chrstianity p 653) Don’t try it at home!

Of course, if they had read the letter to the Romans a bit more carefully they might have seen that this was nonsense from the start. Paul is very aware of the dangers of this interpretation of grace – it sounds as if some of the Roman Christians have been suggesting it. “What then?”, says Paul. “Should we sin because we are not under law but under grace? By no means!” 

Salvation is not a get out of jail free card, to be guarded until you need it and then deployed at the vital moment as you approach St Peter at the pearly gates. It is the beginning of a new way of life in the here and now. Yes, it will go on into eternity – “the end is eternal life”, as Paul puts it – but eternity starts now, not at the moment of death. If we wait until then to start living as people who are forgiven and saved, then we will have missed the fullness of joy and the sense of wholeness that God wants for us in the present moment. We are living in the kingdom of God right now. Salvation is not me getting into heaven when I die, it is us, making the world a better place, living in ways that lead to life, hope, joy, peace, wholeness for us all. Because salvation in the Bible isn’t just a personal, individual thing, it is something that affects whole communities, something we live out together. The arguments which tore Europe apart during the Reformation about whether salvation was gained by works or by grace through faith, arguments which led to so much suffering, missed the mark anyway. It was never about what happened to people at the pearly gates, and everything about what was happening right then as people discovered, or didn’t, the life God meant for them and their communities.

In the Gospel reading Jesus talks about getting a reward, but it’s clear from what he says that he doesn’t see this as a medal to be handed out at the end of our lives. It is something which is the natural consequence of the way we live, the choices we make, which shape us into God’s likeness – or twists us out of alignment so that his image in us is marred and spoiled.  You can’t miss the world “welcome” in this short passage. It comes six times in three short verses. It is perhaps more accurately translated as “receive”. Welcome can sound a bit vague – just being nice to people. But receiving someone means taking them to yourself, letting yourself be changed by them.  If you receive a prophet, says Jesus, then you will listen to their prophetic words and that will change you. If you receive a person who makes things right – a righteous person – someone who brings healing and restoration, then you will inevitably be healed and restored to some extent yourself. People can bring the smallest thing – a cup of cold water – but if we receive it, it will change us. I think we’ve all been aware of the importance of a cup of cold water this week! We are continually reshaped into God’s likeness by the things and the people we receive, the things and people we welcome into our lives. We are continually saved by God’s gracious gift of himself, his grace to us, which enables us to become the people we were meant to be, individually and together.

So today, we are invited to think about who and what we are receiving, welcoming into our lives, who and what we are allowing to change us, and whether that change feels like life or death, like salvation or not. We don’t need any long words to know the importance of that.

Amen

Trinity 3: Who counts?

 Trinity 3 2026

Gen 21.8-21, Matthew 10.24-39

Abraham, that great Old Testament hero of faith, who obeyed God’s call to go from his native land to a new home far away! Abraham who trusted God that he would have more descendants than there were stars in the sky despite he and his wife, Sarah, being old and childless. What a hero!

Except that in today’s first reading we discover that there is a very dark underbelly to the story. It was a hard thing for Abraham and Sarah to believe in God’s promise of descendants. Of course it was. According to the Bible Abraham was seventy years old when they set off and Sarah was well past the menopause and they had no children. Years passed, and no child arrived. So they decided to try to make this promise come true themselves. It was Sarah’s idea initially, but Abraham was more than happy to go along with it. She owned an Egyptian slave, Hagar, who she gave to Abraham. Have a child with her, she said, and it can count as ours. No one asked Hagar what she thought or wanted. She was enslaved. She had no choice. 

Hagar conceives, and gives birth to a son, Ishmael. Everyone assumes he will be the heir until Sarah, unbelievably, also conceives and gives birth to a son, Isaac. That’s where today’s reading picks up the story. You don’t have to be a trained family therapist to see how complicated this is all going to be, and how likely it will be that it will all end in tears. It could have come straight from an East Enders’ storyline. Two half-brothers, playing together now, but set to be rivals in the future. Two mothers, one with all the power and privilege, the other with none now that her son has been displaced.  And Abraham in the middle of it all, frankly coming across as weak and indecisive. “The matter was very distressing to Abraham” we’re told, “on account of his son…” Which son? We’re not told, and I think that’s deliberate, because the whole thing is a mess in Abraham’s mind. 

But this was only ever going to end one way. Of course, Sarah’s son is now going to inherit, not the son of an enslaved Egyptian. Notice the way Ishmael’s name isn’t used once in the story, as if he’s already being shuffled out of the narrative. He is redundant – the spare born before the heir who turns out not to be needed and whose existence has turned from a blessing into a problem. Abraham bows to Sarah’s demand that Hagar and Ishmael should be sent away into the desert. He gives them some bread and water, but that’s more of a sop to his conscience than a real help. It’s not going to last long. There’s no way they can survive, but at least their deaths will be out of sight and out of mind. Abraham and Sarah won’t be confronted with their responsibility. 

But that’s where the story takes a strange turn, because instead of staying with Abraham and Sarah, the storyteller takes us out into the desert with Hagar and Ishmael.  We see what Abraham and Sarah don’t – the water running out, Hagar laying her child down under a bush to die, weeping bitterly, knowing that there is nothing she can do. But we also see the moment when God intervenes.  “God heard the voice of the boy” – Ishmael’s name actually means “God hears”. God shows Hagar a well nearby, and we discover that their story isn’t ending; it is just beginning. “And God was with the boy, and he grew up” we’re told, out there in the wilderness. He has a future, a life that includes marriage and a family – a wife from Egypt, Hagar’s home.  Arab nations still trace their descent from Abraham through Ishmael, and Muslims regard him as a prophet. 

It’s a moving story, but the thing that strikes me most powerfully about it is that the Bible tells it at all.  As the saying goes, “History is written by the winners”, and it’s usually written to show those winners in a good light. Even if there are failures along the way, they are told as part of a narrative that puts the winners in the centre of the story, that focusses on them. This story doesn’t do that; it puts Hagar and Ishmael centre stage, despite the fact that they will play no further part in the story which the Old Testament tells.  

They matter anyway, we are told, just because they exist. God cares about them, hears them, sees them, makes them a priority. However disposable and irrelevant they seem to Abraham and Sarah, and to the whole thread of the story of the nation of Israel, they aren’t irrelevant or disposable to God. As Jesus says in today’s Gospel reading this is the God who sees every sparrow that falls from the sky. The injustices that are committed in secrecy and darkness, like driving Hagar and Ishmael out into the desert to die, are seen by God, and can’t be concealed forever, even if you are the great patriarch, Abraham, or the matriarch, Sarah. 

It’s meant to surprise us, but perhaps it makes more sense when we understand when and why this story was written down. The first five books of what we call the Old Testament, the ones that tell the stories of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, Joseph and Moses, enslavement and rescue from Egypt, were shaped into the form we have them now when the Jewish people were in Exile in Babylon conquered by the mighty Babylonian empire. Israel had been a great nation under the rule of great and powerful kings like David and Solomon, but now it looked like they had no future. What had gone wrong? How had it come to this?  Did God no longer care for them? Was this the end for them? It certainly looked like it.  

The Scriptures that emerged from this time were written to answer those questions – particularly those first five books – Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy. They were reassuring - Look at the way God rescued your ancestors from slavery in Egypt – he can rescue you too. For people who felt utterly defeated and hopeless that was important to hear.  God wouldn’t abandon them in Babylon because that wasn’t the kind of God he was. He was a God who cared about those who were powerless. 

But the message was also challenging. It said to them – the God who sees and hears you when you are on the receiving end of injustice also sees and hears those to whom you deal it out. “Do not deny justice to the foreigner or the fatherless,“ says the book of Deuteronomy” and do not take a widow’s cloak as security. Remember that you were slaves in Egypt, and the LORD your God redeemed you from that place.” (24.17-18) That’s why those Biblical storytellers tell us about Hagar and Ishmael, focussing on them, when Abraham and Sarah would really rather they were forgotten. They seemed completely irrelevant to the future course of the story. But no one is irrelevant to God. No one’s life matters less, or more, than anyone else’s. 

The story of Hagar and Ishmael should still challenge us today. Who counts? Who matters, and why? Do people only matter because they are useful to me, part of my story, or do they matter in and of themselves? Who is heard and seen, and who is ignored? 

This week both the government and the Church of England have apologised publicly for what happened in mother and baby homes for women who had children outside marriage in the mid 20th century. They were put out of sight and out of mind, treated as if they didn’t matter, sometimes pressured into giving up their babies for adoption. Their stories have taken decades to come to light, because the society of the time didn’t think they deserved a hearing. Today also marks the last day of refugee week. We may feel as if we hear about refugees a lot, as if they are everywhere in the news, but it’s usually only in an impersonal way, as if they can all be lumped together. That’s not the same as hearing their stories, seeing them as individuals, knowing what drove them out of their homes, putting ourselves in their shoes.

Hagar and Ishmael’s story helps us to do that, if we are prepared to let it. It reminds us to ask whose stories we aren’t hearing, whose lives we are putting “out of sight and out of mind”, and to try to look at the world through their eyes, not just our own. If we can do that, we may even find that we are, for a moment, looking at the world through the eyes of God, who sees and hears and loves us all.  

Amen

Trinity 1 . Learn what this means...

Trinity 1 2026 8 and 10am W Malling

Romans 4.13, Matthew 9. 9-13, 18-26

“Go and learn what this means” says Jesus, “I desire mercy and not sacrifice.”

Some things can be learned in a few minutes, or a day or so. We may have learned things in childhood which we’ve never had to revisit; times tables, how to read. Once we’ve mastered them, they stay with us. But there are other things which take a lifetime to learn, and, in truth, we probably never feel we’ve got them completely sorted out; the meaning of life, the mystery of love. Every person we meet, each twist and turn of our paths, changes our perspective, teaches us something new, but only if we let it. 

In today’s Gospel we meet some people who choose to let life teach them, and some people who don’t.  

None of what happens to Jesus on this particular day is on his to do list. He is just walking along and stuff happens. He comes across a tax collector, someone despised as a collaborator with the Roman oppressors, sitting at his tax booth. This man, Matthew, was the last person Jesus should have wanted to associate with if he claimed to be a loyal, faithful Jew, let alone the Messiah.  And yet Jesus does notice him, pays attention to him, calls Matthew to follow him, to join him on a journey of discovery which will lead through the cross, to the resurrection, and the new community of the Church, of which Matthew will one day be a leader.

The Pharisees – self-appointed gate-keepers of what was considered to be right and holy – are aghast. What kind of teacher worthy of the name would keep such bad company? The disciples of John the Baptist are equally baffled, but as Jesus explains to them, sometimes you have to put aside what you thought you knew and start afresh – new wine needs new wineskins. 

As if that wasn’t enough, though, Jesus then has two more encounters, equally unplanned and equally challenging. A leader of the synagogue, a prominent man, comes running to him, completely distraught. His daughter has just died, but maybe, maybe, Jesus can pull her back over that boundary between life and death, if he is quick enough. It’s a big ask and not just because it’s a big miracle. It’s a big ask because, if this little girl is dead, and Jesus comes and “lays his hand on her” he will make himself ritually unclean according to Jewish law. It will take seven days, and some complex rituals for him to be purified again. It’s not something you would lightly ask of a stranger.

But Jesus sees this man’s desperation and goes with him anyway. They haven’t gone far, though, when he is interrupted again, this time by a woman who has suffered from haemorrhages for many years - some sort of gynaecological condition. Her condition would have rendered her unclean in the eyes of the law, just like a dead body, and her impurity would transfer to anyone she touched. But she’s desperate too, and maybe she thinks that what Jesus doesn’t know won’t hurt him, so she quietly reaches out to touch Jesus’ cloak, thinking he won’t notice. But he does, and he knows that it’s important not to let her slip away anonymously: for her sake so that she knows she has nothing to be ashamed of, for the sake of the onlookers, so that everyone watching knows she is healed and can be restored to her community, but also because he wants to be crystal clear about what the kingdom of God is meant to look like, what God’s priorities are.  

These stories – the calling of Matthew, the healing of the woman and the raising of the little girl are all linked by those words Jesus speaks to the Pharisees. “Go and learn what this means, ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice’”. He’s quoting from the Old Testament prophet Hosea (6.6). This isn’t new. These are words those around him should be very familiar with, but knowing the words and ‘learning what they mean’ are two different things.

The law of Moses was meant to be a great gift, a guiding principle to help people live together in the way God wanted them to. The sacrificial rituals at its heart were meant to provide a way of sorting things out when they went wrong, resetting the balance. But the trouble with laws is that it’s very easy to let them become an end in themselves and forget what they were meant for, and that was often what happened; they became a way of sorting the insider from the outsider, the acceptable from the unacceptable. 

The Bible –the Old Testament and the New – repeatedly proclaims a God who is bigger than this. One of God’s primary attributes is summed up in the Hebrew word “hesed”. It’s often translated as “mercy”, but it’s really far bigger than that. “Hesed” means loving-kindness, compassion, empathy; it is rooted in an awareness of others as whole, human beings, with feelings and perspectives as real and important as mine are to me and yours to you. It’s about seeing others as unique, complicated, multi-faceted, precious people, each one created and loved by God. That’s “hesed”, and the Bible tells us that it’s how our merciful God sees us, and how Jesus saw those he encountered, whatever their society thought of them. And it’s how we are called to see one another too. But it’s not easy to do. It’s much easier to stereotype, to lump people into clumsy categories, to scapegoat, to make quick assumptions about who matters and who doesn’t than it is to see each person as an individual. 

That’s why “Hesed”, mercy, is something we struggle so much to practice. It isn’t something we can learn in a day, or a week, or a year. It takes a lifetime. You can’t sign up for an evening class in it or learn it from a YouTube video either. It is learned, as it was for Jesus, in the encounters we have with those around us: the person in the queue behind us in the supermarket or sitting next to us on the train; the colleague at work; the family member who drives us nuts. In each encounter, in each moment, we are offered a chance to open our eyes, to pay attention, to trust that God is at work, to expect that something sacred is happening in the people we meet, even if we will never know what it is. If we can do that, with the help of God, perhaps we might “learn what it means” to live mercifully day by day.

Amen 

Pentecost Sunday: Mother tongues

 Pentecost 2026 WM 8 and 10am

Acts 2.1-12, John 7.37- 39

If I were to ask you what your mother tongue is, I wonder what you would reply. My guess is that for most of us here today the answer would be English, but perhaps not all. But we all have a mother tongue –the language we find it easiest to speak, the language we think and dream in. It’s the language we learned from our primary caregivers – mothers or others – when we were young, and it shapes and forms us. But our mother tongue isn’t just English - or French or Swahili. It’s our own distinctive way of speaking that language. Perhaps we naturally use long fancy words, or we don’t. We may use slang or jargon specific to our job. We may have favourite words or turns of phrase which our friends and family recognise as unique to us. Our “mother tongue” is shaped by and reflects the whole of our life experience – class, upbringing, hobbies and enthusiasms. We can speak other peoples’ mother tongues for a while. It’s called ‘code switching’ – adapting what we say and how we say it to fit the situation. Perhaps you have a “telephone voice”? And I can bet the teachers among us have a “teacher voice”.  We all need to ‘code switch’ from time to time, but it’s not the voice that is really us, that expresses who we really are – our mother tongue, our native language. 

Mother tongues are at the heart of the reading we heard from the Book of Acts earlier. Crowds of people have come to Jerusalem from every corner of the ancient world – traders, travellers, maybe some pilgrims who’ve come for this Jewish feast of Pentecost from one of the historic Jewish settlements around the Mediterranean, places where Jewish communities had kept their faith, but mostly spoke the local languages. All of a sudden, we are told, they see a bunch of excited Galilean Jews erupting onto the street, talking loudly about God. And the strange thing is that those visitors from far off lands – the Medes and Parthians and Elamites and all the rest - seem to hear them speak in their own native languages, their mother tongues. 

Imagine you are in that crowd. You’ve come to Jerusalem from some isolated little hill town in Cappadocia – in the Anatolian highlands of what is now Turkey. Your mother tongue is Cappadocian – an ancient language, but not very widespread at this point. The Aramaic language you hear all around you in Jerusalem, the native language of this place, is completely incomprehensible to you. It’s just a babble. You feel far from home, maybe a bit homesick too.

Suddenly, though, you hear people talking your language, telling you about a God who loves you in Cappadocian, like a fellow native. “What does this mean?” you say. And you realise that what it means is that the God these people are speaking about is a native of your home too. He doesn’t just know the vocabulary and grammar of Cappadocian. He knows its hills and streams like the back of his hand, as you do. He knows that funny shaped rock that marks the path down to your village, and the way the tree in the village square has a broken branch where you swung on it too hard as a child. The God you are hearing about is a native of your place. You’ve come here, perhaps looking for him, but you have just discovered that he was at home with you all the time. He’s not just a Jewish God, who you can read about and worship in translation. He speaks the language of your tribe, and more wonderfully than that, he speaks your own, personal language too, that unique tongue which is rooted in and shaped by all the things that have happened to you. This is the God who gets you, who understands you, in a way that only someone who shares your mother tongue can ever do. You don’t have to explain yourself or translate yourself for him. You don’t have to code switch, or use words that feel foreign to you. You can tell it like it is, in your way, and God will hear it like it is because God knows it like it is for you. This God is your God and always has been.

And of course, if that is true for our Cappadocian traveller in first century Jerusalem, it is true for you and me too. 

The Holy Spirit’s arrival in the hearts of the disciples on the Day of Pentecost is described in very mysterious, dramatic terms – rushing wind, tongues of fire, but in some ways that’s the least important thing about this story. Most people, most of the time don’t have that sort of experience of the Holy Spirit, but that doesn’t mean that the Holy Spirit isn’t at work. It’s that moment when we realise that this “faith” thing has to do with us, that God has to do with us, that this matters to us and the way we live our lives, even if we can’t understand it or explain it – that’s the Holy Spirit at work. I often wonder what draws people to church, why you are all here. Sometimes I ask people straight out. They look at me a bit funny, but I ask anyway. Often the answer is “I don’t know. I just felt I had to be here”. That’s the Holy Spirit at work, God speaking your mother tongue, the language that only you and God can fully understand, making a connection with you which you can’t just ignore or walk away from. 

God is at home in each one of us through his Spirit, speaking our language. That is the great revelation of Pentecost. 

It’s tempting to stop there, and just enjoy that, but I’m not going to, because that message doesn’t just have profound implications for our personal spiritual lives, but also for the way we treat others. 

Over recent weeks and months, we’ve seen the upsurge of what I think is a deeply disturbing “Christian nationalism”, falsely equating Christianity with Britishness. We’ve seen people brandishing crosses as if they were weapons, wearing the flag of St George (who was from Cappadocia, by the way, and never came anywhere near England), and even dressing up as Crusaders, as if that time in history was something to celebrate. We’ve seen Christian faith turned into a tribal marker. But the Gospels are clear that it isn’t symbols which show that we are God’s people. Nor is it words – even the words of the Lord’s prayer. And it certainly isn’t nationality. In Matthew’s Gospel, chapter 25, Jesus tells us that it is when we see him in the hungry and feed them, in the thirsty and give them drink, in the stranger and welcome them, in the naked, the sick and the prisoner and care for them. That’s what shows that the Holy Spirit is at work in us, causing rivers of living water to flow out of our hearts, as Jesus puts it in today’s Gospel, living waters that bring life and love to others, not death and hatred.

“What does this mean?” said the crowd on the day of Pentecost. And we are invited to ask the same question. What does it mean to know that God speaks my mother tongue? And what does it mean to know that he speaks the mother tongue of every other person on the planet too? Amen 

I will not leave you orphaned: Easter 6

 Easter 6 2026

Acts 17.22-31, John 14. 15-21

“I will not leave you orphaned” says Jesus in today’s Gospel reading. I wonder what images come to your mind when you hear the word “orphan”. Perhaps Little Orphan Annie, or Harry Potter, or a character from Charles Dickens – his stories are full of orphans like Oliver Twist or Pip from Great Expectations. Orphans are common in Victorian novels, partly because there were so many of them, in an age when parents died of many things they would now easily survive. I’ve looked back into my family tree, and found my great-great grandfather, John, in a workhouse at the age of 5 with his older sister. His mother had died of cholera, and for a long time I couldn’t find any trace of his father. At 13, John was working as a farm labourer, then became a navvy, travelling around the country labouring to build the new-fangled railway system – which turned out to be the path his father had taken too, having to leave his children in the workhouse to grow up there, going from one railway site to another, rarely, if ever seeing them as he moved from job to job.  John eventually married and had his own family – 8 children – but they and his wife travelled with him around his navvying jobs, living in Railway huts in the temporary settlements that were built near each work site. It sounds as if he didn’t want to repeat the pattern he had known as a child. 

Or perhaps when you hear the word “orphan” you think of the many orphans there are around the world now in places where life is still fragile and perilous. There are reckoned to be around 153 million orphans in the world, and that number is being added to daily by conflict, poverty, poor health care and displacement. India alone has 30 million orphans.

The word “orphan” is a powerful and somewhat terrifying one. It is every parent’s worst nightmare to think of their children having to navigate the world alone, and every small child’s worst nightmare to find themselves alone without a friendly adult to help them. 

But of course Jesus isn’t speaking to small children when he speaks the words we heard today. He’s speaking to his disciples on the night before he dies. They are grown adults, burly fishermen who’ve sailed boats through gales, tax-collectors who’ve had to deal with the Roman political and military machine, women who have lived on the margins of their societies, and had to develop quick wits and courage. Yet he recognises that when they lose him, first to crucifixion and then as he ascends to his Father in heaven, they will feel lost, bereft, uncertain. They will have to make their own decisions, as they take on the work he has called them to. And it won’t be easy. They will face persecution. They will feel orphaned. 

The fact is that, however old we are, however much we’ve been through, we all come to points in our lives when we realise we can’t face life on our own, when we look around for someone who knows what they are doing or who at least looks as if they do. We may be grown up chronologically, but there’s a small child in each of us, looking for help and guidance. 

“I will not leave you orphaned” says Jesus. What does he mean? The rest of the reading makes it clear. Through his Holy Spirit, he says, they will feel his presence in an even deeper way than the way they have until then. Up until now, they have had to physically be with him to see him, hear him and feel him. But the Spirit of God will be within them, like the sap that rises through the grapevine, like the blood that circulates through their veins, closer than their own heartbeat. And the Spirit will be known too in their community – the Spirit isn’t some personal possession but will be in the love that draws them to each other. 

In our first reading, from the book of Acts, St Paul stands on a well-known debating place in Athens, the centre of philosophical learning in the ancient world. Athens was home to people of every philosophy, every religion and none. He had walked there past a bewildering array of shrines to this god and that goddess and had even found one to “the unknown god” – a way of hedging your bets just in case you’d left some god out of your worship. The shrines were mute testaments to the human longing to reach out beyond ourselves, to find support and care in a vast and sometimes lonely universe. But Paul is confident as he talks to these people that he has found the source of the love that really matters. “We are God’s offspring” he says. We are his own children, known, loved and held in his safe embrace, children of a God who loved us so much that he came among us himself, served us and died for us, and who builds us into a community so that we can share that love with one another, and let it spill out to others too.

“I will not leave you orphaned”. Whatever we face, we do not face it alone, but surrounded by love that nothing can destroy. 

Amen