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