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 

Earth-shattering news: Easter Sunday 2026

 

Easter Sunday 2026

Acts 10.34-43, Matthew 28.1-10

Acts 10.34-43

34 Then Peter began to speak to them: ‘I truly understand that God shows no partiality, 35 but in every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him. 36 You know the message he sent to the people of Israel, preaching peace by Jesus Christ—he is Lord of all. 37 That message spread throughout Judea, beginning in Galilee after the baptism that John announced: 38 how God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and with power; how he went about doing good and healing all who were oppressed by the devil, for God was with him. 39 We are witnesses to all that he did both in Judea and in Jerusalem. They put him to death by hanging him on a tree; 40 but God raised him on the third day and allowed him to appear, 41 not to all the people but to us who were chosen by God as witnesses, and who ate and drank with him after he rose from the dead. 42 He commanded us to preach to the people and to testify that he is the one ordained by God as judge of the living and the dead. 43 All the prophets testify about him that everyone who believes in him receives forgiveness of sins through his name.’

 

 

Matthew 28.1-10

28 After the sabbath, as the first day of the week was dawning, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary went to see the tomb. 2 And suddenly there was a great earthquake; for an angel of the Lord, descending from heaven, came and rolled back the stone and sat on it. 3 His appearance was like lightning, and his clothing white as snow. 4 For fear of him the guards shook and became like dead men. 5 But the angel said to the women, ‘Do not be afraid; I know that you are looking for Jesus who was crucified. 6 He is not here; for he has been raised, as he said. Come, see the place where he lay. 7 Then go quickly and tell his disciples, “He has been raised from the dead, and indeed he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him.” This is my message for you.’ 8 So they left the tomb quickly with fear and great joy, and ran to tell his disciples. 9 Suddenly Jesus met them and said, ‘Greetings!’ And they came to him, took hold of his feet, and worshipped him. 10 Then Jesus said to them, ‘Do not be afraid; go and tell my brothers to go to Galilee; there they will see me.’

 

We’ve just heard Matthew’s version of the Resurrection story. It’s a dramatic tale, with an earthquake and an angel appearing, shining like lightning.

 Each of the Gospel writers tells the story of the Resurrection slightly differently. Different numbers of women come to the tomb, meeting different numbers of angels, or perhaps Jesus himself. Different things happen afterwards. All the Gospel writers agree on is that the tomb was empty, the women were witnesses of that, and that it changed everything…

 But back to Matthew’s account. He’s the only one who actually shows us  the tomb being opened, and the guards shaking “like dead men” when it happens. He’s the only one who tells us about the earthquake: his story is literally earth-shattering.  

 That’s all of a piece with the rest of his Gospel. From the outset he has painted his picture of Jesus’ life on a large scale. When Jesus was born a star appeared in the sky – the very cosmos was reordered. Wise men from the East turned up at the palace, the political heart of the nation. “King Herod was frightened, and all Jerusalem with him” we are told. Not for Matthew a bunch of humble shepherds who no one would have noticed or heeded. No, this is a very public event – so public that it unleashes a massacre of the children of Bethlehem and means the Holy Family have to run for their lives.

 Much later, when Jesus enters Jerusalem on a donkey on Palm Sunday, it’s not just his disciples who notice. Once again “The whole city was in turmoil”, Matthew says. And when Jesus dies on the cross there isn’t just darkness over the land – all the Gospels have that – but according to Matthew there’s another earthquake, prefiguring the one that will accompany Jesus’ resurrection.  “The earth shook, the rocks were split . The tombs were opened and many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised….”

Sometimes Christians are told that they should keep their noses out of politics, or economics, or science or whatever else they’ve made some comment on that has annoyed someone, that they should restrict themselves to the spiritual, the personal, the private. But Matthew’s Gospel isn’t having any of that. Jesus’ birth, life, death and resurrection sends quite literal shockwaves through the world of his time, having an impact even on the earth itself. Everything is changed by this, says Matthew.

 And as I said earlier, the other Gospel writers agree with him, even if they tell the story in slightly different ways. The reason they are all so confident about this is that the resurrection had changed everything for them.

The Gospels were written in hindsight, looking back at the events they describe from several decades later. And they are written by and for people whose lives have been set on a different course because of the resurrection, people who have become part of new communities, with a new message for the world. We catch a glimpse of that radical change in our first reading.

St Peter is preaching to the household of a Roman centurion called Cornelius, a Gentile leader in the army that is oppressing Israel, someone who ought to be his enemy. But Cornelius has heard about Jesus and has asked Peter to come and tell him more. When Peter gets there, having struggled over whether to go or not, he finds that Cornelius and his household have had an experience of the Holy Spirit – God has got there before him. And he realises – and rejoices - that this is how it is going to be in God’s new creation, in the kingdom Jesus’ resurrection has ushered in. He sees new life, forgiveness, barriers broken down, resurrection happening all around him.

I have no idea what we would have seen if there had been a video camera livestreaming that first Easter Sunday at the tomb. I have no idea how the resurrection could have happened, but I am convinced that it did happen – even if I can’t understand or explain it - because the first followers of Jesus were so changed by their experience of it, filled with such hope and faith, that they were prepared to die for affirming it.  They had nothing to gain by lying about it – there was no power or glory on offer for them, only persecution. And yet they said that it was true, and went on saying it, and passed it on to the next generation and the next, and people continued to find hope in it, right down to us in our own time. The ultimate proof of the resurrection is us, the Church, Christians stubbornly insisting, as Archbishop Desmond Tutu said, that “Goodness is stronger than evil; Love is stronger than hate; Light is stronger than darkness; Life is stronger than death; Victory is ours through Him who loves us”

Another Bishop, Mervyn Stockwood, then the Bishop of Southwark, told a story of a time when he was in Moscow, before the fall of the Soviet Union, when Brezhnev was president. He had gone into the hairdresser’s salon in his hotel for a shave while on a visit to the USSR. It was around the time of Easter. As she shaved him the hairdresser noticed his episcopal cross and ring. “Was he a bishop?” she asked. He was, he said. Evidently she’d had an orthodox background, because she stopped shaving him, took his cross in her hands and kissed it, and did the same to his ring. And then, lifting up the razor blade she was shaving him with she called to the customers in the barber’s shop “Alleluia, Christ is risen” and with one voice they all replied “He is risen indeed, Alleluia!” Stockwood wrote in his memoirs that he thought to himself at that moment “Poor old Brezhnev: sixty years of atheism, and still the Galilean conquers!”

This Easter Sunday, I wonder where the Galilean needs to conquer in our lives and our world. Where are the tombs of despair and hatred that need to be broken open? Where are the place that seem godforsaken where we need to find the God who never forsakes us at work? He is there, if like those women at the tomb, we will only go and look for him. I wonder what the reality of the resurrection looks like in our lives? Matthew told his story in his way. Peter told his in another. Mark, Luke and John told it too, in their ways, but how would you tell it, this story of the empty tomb that changes everything…?

Amen

 

Mothering Sunday: Abundant Consolation

 2 Corinthians 1.3-7, Luke 2. 33-35

I was listening to someone last week who had come to talk to me – as part of my ministry in retirement I give support to others in lay or ordained roles in the church. Her husband has been living with cancer for quite a while, but now, although he is still fairly well in himself, the treatment options have been exhausted. After all the ups and downs, all the hoping that something might work, they know it is just a matter of time and, eventually, palliative care. And yet, she was remarkably calm. “We don’t know exactly what this journey will involve” she said, “but we do know that there are so many people praying for us, and that God is with us.” She and her husband had found great consolation through the prayers and support of those around her.

I reflected with her that her words had reminded me of one of the readings set for today’s services, and she gave me permission to quote her words. 

In the short passage we heard from Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians, again and again Paul uses the word “consolation” or consoled, or some variation on it. Ten times in the space of 4 verses. It’s a translation of the Greek word parakaleo, and in some ways it’s not a very good translation. The Greek word literally means to “come alongside when someone calls”. That’s the essence of the consolation Paul is talking about – someone who comes alongside us, who travels with us. The Holy Spirit is sometimes called the Paraclete – God beside us and within us day by day, but a paraclete, a consoler, can be human too. Not someone who fixes things for us, but someone who simply shares the journey.

Paul was much in need of consolation at this point. The verses around those we read tell us that he’d been in Asia – modern day Turkey – and had been through tough times there. “We were so utterly, unbearably crushed,” he says, “that we despaired of life itself”. 

And he knows things have been hard for the Corinthians too – they endure the same sufferings he does.

Paul often faced persecution, attack and arrest because of his preaching. The only way he could avoid it would be by abandoning his faith, but that’s not an option for him. It matters too much to him to give it up. He chose to walk a hard and dangerous road. The Corinthian Christians faced the same challenges as they tried to live out the Gospel message, facing “the same sufferings that we are also suffering”, Paul says.

How will Paul cope? How will the Corinthians cope? How will any of us cope with troubles that come upon us, the things that we have no way of avoiding? 

This Lent, as you know, we are following a theme of healing in our Sunday services – physical healing, healing of relationships and of the spirit, healing of our world. Today, Mothering Sunday, was, I think, meant to be a break from that theme, but it seems to me that the readings set for today do have a link with the question of healing, and it’s a very important link. What do we do, these readings ask us, about situations in which there’s no prospect of healing, in any physical sense? What do we do when there’s no way around suffering, when we have to go through it? That might be the suffering of persecution as it was for Paul. And, in our Gospel reading, Simeon warns Mary, that she will suffer because of her son’s ministry. He is only a baby at this point, but his ministry will bring the wrath of the powerful down on him and she will have to watch him be crucified. “A sword will pierce your own soul too.” Says Simeon. Or it might be the far more familiar suffering that the lady who was talking to me faced, of watching a loved one endure an illness that can’t be cured.

One of the hardest parts of mothering, or fathering, or caring for anyone we love is knowing that we can’t prevent their suffering, that we haven’t got the magic wand we long for. The price of love is grief, people sometimes say – we can’t love others without opening ourselves up to sorrow. But Paul’s words remind us that what we can do is to recognise that we, and they, don’t make the journey alone, that we are accompanied by a great crowd of paracletes, those who are alongside us. Suffering may be abundant, as Paul says, but consolation is abundant too if we are open to it.

Chief among these paracletes, of course, is God himself – the Father of mercies and the God of all consolation.” He is the one who comes alongside us in Jesus, who lived among us, died alongside two criminals, and who is present through the Spirit alongside us day by day. It is his consolation, his “alongsiding” which gives us the strength to be alongside others, and which helps us to see those who are alongside us and accept their help as we make those journeys that otherwise seem impossible. 

So on this Mothering Sunday we give thanks for all who have been alongside us through our lives, and we pray, as the words of our collect reminded us, “that in joy and in sorrow we may know the power of God’s presence,” which is alongside us always.

Amen

Lent 3

 Lent 3 2026

Psalm 42, John 3.1-15

I expect quite a few of you, like me, come from the generation that was expected at school to memorise all sorts of things – from mathematical formulae to large chunks of poetry. Most of the maths has evaporated from my mind, alas, but I can still, with a following wind, recite Portia’s speech from the Merchant of Venice – the quality of mercy is not strained etc.. Hymns and songs often etch themselves into our memories too. I have often found, when taking services in care homes, that residents who don’t remember much else can are word perfect on their favourite hymns.  

It’s not just words that we learn “by heart” though. How many skills have we picked up over the years which seemed hard when we first did them, but eventually became second nature to us? It may be plastering a wall, knitting, playing a musical instrument or operating a computer – it will be different for each of us – but there are some things we may not even have to think about anymore, which we do by muscle memory. We’ve learned them by heart. 

“By heart” is an interesting phrase. It implies that these things have, in a sense, become part of us. We can’t forget them, even if we try; they have become woven into our being.

In our readings today, we meet people who are thinking about what they have “learned by heart” and what they might still need to learn.

The Psalmist writes of his longing for God. We don’t know what has happened, but it’s clear that things aren’t going well for him. He feels oppressed by his enemy; and he feels as if God has forgotten him. And yet, at the same time, he can’t leave behind the habit of prayer, the memory of God’s love, the times when he has found hope and joy in God before. These are the things that are in his spiritual “muscle memory”. He may feel abandoned, but he has taken deep into himself over the years, learned by heart, the knowledge that God isn’t like that; he doesn’t abandon people. “My soul is cast down within me” he says, “therefore I remember you – that’s God… “Hope in God,” he tells himself, “for I shall again praise him, my help and my God.” 

The Psalm doesn’t deny or soft-pedal the reality of tough times, which come to all of us. We feel how we feel, and we don’t need to pretend to be happy when we’re not. But it reminds us that the God who we felt close to in the good times is the same God now, and still loves us, even if we feel as if he’s far away. “By day the Lord commands his steadfast love, and at night his song is with me, a prayer to the God of my life”. 

The very fact that the Psalmist cries out to God, thirsts for him, reminds him – and us - that God is still real and still matters to him. He is the God of his life. The things he has learned “by heart” about God hold him when the events he is going through threaten to overwhelm him. 

In the Gospel reading, we meet a man who has also learned things “by heart”, but now he is having to re-evaluate them completely – sometimes we have learned by heart things that don’t turn out to be helpful, negative messages about ourselves, prejudices about others. He comes to Jesus “in the dark”. That doesn’t just tell us about the time of day, but that this is a man who doesn’t want to be seen, who feels confused and doesn’t want to admit it. The world he thought he knew, the assumptions he has made about life and about faith, don’t seem to make sense to him anymore and that is hard for him to acknowledge. 

He, Nicodemus, is a respected religious expert, someone who is supposed to know what’s what, and who thought he did. Jesus is a carpenter from the backwater village of Nazareth, with no qualifications to his name, no training, no background. And yet Nicodemus sees something in him that he can’t deny is of God. He calls Jesus “teacher”; he knows there is something he needs to learn from him, but perhaps doesn’t realise how radical that will be. Jesus tells him that he needs to start again, to be born “from above” or born anew, depending on your translation, to open himself to a new vision of the world, to learn “by heart” a new understanding of God. Unless he does that, says Jesus, he won’t be able to “see the kingdom of God”. Jesus isn’t talking about Nicodemus getting a ticket to heaven when he dies; seeing the kingdom of God is about being aware of what God is doing right there, right then in Jesus.

Nicodemus knows he is missing something, like the deer that thirsts for the flowing waters in the Psalm, but finding it will take time. There will be a journey to make. Being born takes time. Learning something by heart takes time. Getting to that point where something new is second nature isn’t an instant business. 

At the end of his encounter with Jesus, Nicodemus goes away without having made any commitment. But we will meet him again, first in chapter 7 of John’s Gospel when other Pharisees are plotting against Jesus. Nicodemus challenges them, saying that Jesus should at least be given a fair hearing. And then, after Jesus dies, Nicodemus finally comes out of the shadows, bringing spices and ointment to anoint Jesus’s body, assisting at his burial. It’s taken him several years, but Nicodemus has made his choice; he has let his heart be changed by the Spirit of God. The fact that the Gospel writer names him suggests that the change was permanent, that he did, in time “learn by heart” the way of Christ and become a member of the Christian community, valued by them, his story told, his name known. 

In our Lenten series of sermons on healing, today’s theme is the healing of the spirit. It’s a healing that starts when we acknowledge our thirst for God, like the deer that longs for the flowing streams, but it needs to continue from that point, allowing that thirst to take us on a journey, learning by heart a new way as we go, which will leads us to the water that never fails. 

Amen 

Lent 1: Healing at Bethesda

 

Lent 1 2026

2 Cor 12.1-10, John 5.1-15

 

Throughout the benefice during Lent the decision has been made to have a theme of healing running through sermons, readings and the various Lent groups that are meeting.

 

So, expect to hear healing explored from all sorts of angles, from whoever is standing here over the next five weeks or so. Healing is a very appropriate theme for Lent. This is a time when we are encouraged to reflect on ourselves and our world. We don’t get very far in doing that without seeing that there are all sorts of things in us and around us which need to be healed. It may be physical healing we long for, for ourselves or someone else, but it might equally be healing in our hearts or our spirits, in our relationships, in our society, in creation itself. All of these are places where we know things aren’t right, where we often see dis-ease of some sort or another.

 

But healing isn’t a straightforward issue – that’s pretty obvious too. We may pray earnestly for someone to be physically healed, and yet it doesn’t happen. Christian leaders or churches which promise miracles usually come to grief in the end. Some are exposed as cynical frauds. Others may be entirely sincere in their beliefs, but are so heavily invested in those miracles happening because their own worth, their own faith, their own ego depends on it that when people aren’t healed they blame the victim for not having enough faith, or not praying right, or they tell them that they must be sinful in some way or have deserved their illness, or are being punished. Or they simply increase the spiritual pressure- pray louder, pray longer -  until prayer itself becomes abusive. It sounds a bit strange to say that healing needs to come with a health warning, but sadly it does.

 

It seems to me that there are two factors that are often involved when healing ministry goes awry. The first is that we forget that we aren’t God. It ought to be obvious, but it isn’t. We like to think we are in control – life feels safer that way. Of course, there are things we can do to help ourselves and others to be healthy. Diet, exercise, sleep, access to health care, clean water, vaccinations, a pollution free environment. But even if we get all of that right, we can’t guarantee that we won’t fall ill, or be injured, and (spoiler alert) all of us will one day die. We’re not in control. We’re not God. And that means that when we pray for healing, we can’t make promises. All we can do is put ourselves and those we pray for into the hands of the one who is God. Our prayers for healing need to be rooted not in our own ego, or our anxious need to feel that we can pull the strings that will make God act, but in our trust that, whatever happens, we, and those we pray for are held in his hands and loved eternally. That’s a far more precious gift to receive, a far more vital lesson to learn.

 

The second factor that often leads to problems with healing ministry is that we don’t read the Bible enough – or rather that we don’t read enough of the Bible. We light upon one healing story, and we think that if healing came to that person that way, then all healing happens like that. All we have to do is follow the pattern it gives us. But the reality is that healing comes to people in the Bible in many different ways.   And the two readings we’ve heard today are a perfect example of that.

 

If all we had was today’s Gospel reading, what might we conclude about sickness and healing? The man who was lying by the pool at Bethzatha had been ill for 38 years, we are told. Do you only get healed if you have that much patience, if you wait that long? And yet in other stories people are healed quickly. Jesus asks this man by the poolside, “Do you want to be made well?” We might conclude that if someone isn’t healed it’s because they don’t want to be, not deep down, not really. And yet, in other stories, there’s no conversation at all. Jesus heals the unconscious, maybe even dead, daughter of a synagogue leader called Jairus. He heals a centurion’s servant who isn’t even present. Sometimes he heals with a touch, sometimes with a word, sometimes even with spit mixed with mud – I’d rather give that one a miss thanks! Sometimes he casts out demons, sometimes not.

 

A really problematic part of the story we heard today comes at the end, when Jesus tells the man not “to sin any more, so that nothing worse happens to you”. Does that mean that disease is the result of sin? That can play into some really dark and damaging beliefs around healing – or might it just be that this particular man’s paralysis is the result of something he did that he shouldn’t have done. Just a few chapters later, Jesus explicitly challenges his disciples when they ask whether the blindness of a man he is about to heal is his fault or his parents – it’s no one’s fault, says Jesus.  We generalise at our peril.

 

And our first reading underlines that. St Paul writes to the Church in Corinth. He talks about the wonderful things that have happened to him, the visions he’s had, the calling he received from God on the road to Damascus, and the assurance that gave him of God’s love.  “I know a person in Christ” is just a roundabout way of referring to himself. And yet, he says, that doesn’t mean that everything in his life is easy. He has a “thorn in the flesh”. We don’t know whether that’s a physical ailment, a problematic relationship, or something spiritual, but whatever it is, despite his prayers, despite his faith, despite his close relationship with God, it hasn’t been taken away. Yet, he says, he’s come to see that through it he has learned to look for and to find God’s strength “made perfect in weakness” and that, in turn, has helped him face the “weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions and calamities” that come to him as a result of his ministry.

 

So where does this all leave us as we start our Lenten exploration of healing? In one sense, we might be feeling that it’s all more complicated than we thought. But in another sense, perhaps it’s actually simpler. Healing, whether it’s physical, spiritual, relational, societal, cosmic, doesn’t depend on us following this ritual or that ritual, using these words or those words, or no words at all. It is found – in whatever form it takes - simply by realising that we are in the presence of God, who is closer to us than our own heartbeat, who doesn’t expect us to heal ourselves, or to heal others – because we can’t – but who invites us to find our rest in him as we pray, and place others for whom we pray into that rest as well, so that, as our collect today put it, “as you know our weakness, may  we know your power to save.”

Amen

Candlemas

 Heb 2.14-end, Luke 2.22-40

Today is the feast of Candlemas. It marks the moment, forty days after the birth of Jesus, when Mary and Joseph bring him to the Temple to offer the sacrifice prescribed by the law after the birth of a baby. It was a completely normal thing for them to do, what everyone in their community would expect them to do. It would have been odd if they hadn’t, and they were probably among many other families in the Temple doing the same. 

Imagine the Temple, the hubbub, the coming and going in this vast complex of buildings, courtyards, and covered walkways. It was the focus of national life for the people of Israel, a place not only of sacrificial worship- think of the noise of all those animals, and the smell… but it was also a place to debate, full of heated discussion, maybe argument… If, when you think of the Temple, you imagine the hush of a great cathedral, forget it. This was a noisy, and sometimes smelly place, and it was full of people.

Every Jewish man was supposed to come to the Temple at least three times a year to offer sacrifice at major festivals, and often whole families came together. And then there were all the other times when you might need to make a sacrifice – if you had been ill, or had become ritually unclean somehow, or needed to make amends for something, and, as here, if you’d had a new baby. 

The sacrifice Mary and Joseph come to make was meant to be a reminder to parents that their children weren’t just theirs. Ultimately, they belonged to God. They were gifts of God, lent to parents for a time, but not theirs to own or control. God’s plans for them were bigger than theirs. That’s something that those of us who are parents still need to be reminded of sometimes. 

But it is true of all children, it was especially true of Jesus, who would grow up to change the course of human history, and do things that were way beyond anything Mary and Joseph could imagine. 

There was nothing that singled him out as different as they brought him into the Temple, though. Despite all those famous paintings we see reproduced on our Christmas cards, he didn’t glow in the dark…The only reason that Simeon and Anna knew who he was was that the Holy Spirit told them so, and their hearts were so attuned to God, shaped by decades of prayer, that they recognised God’s voice, and trusted what they heard, and acclaimed him as the Messiah, the chosen, anointed one of God, the one who would be “a light for revelation to the Gentiles” and be the glory of Israel. 

That’s where the association with candles comes from, of course and the reason this feast day is commonly called Candlemas. Back in the Middle Ages it was the day on which the candles to be used in church through the year were blessed, and people brought candles from home for blessing too. This feast happens just at the point when we might start to notice the days getting a little bit longer, if we’re paying attention, and the snowdrops – not great , colourful showy flowers, but so welcome – starting to bloom, the promise that winter will end. An old name for them is Candlemas Bells. Candlemas is about that first glimmer of light, the almost imperceptible lengthening of days, of the light we see just before dawn that tells us that the night will come to an end- some nights, especially when we are anxious or lonely, can seem as if they never will. Or imagine you were lost on a dark mountain in the pitch black – Candlemas is that tiny glimmer of torchlight in the distance held by the rescuer coming to save you, or the far-off glow of a window, reorientating you and guide you towards the safety of a house you didn’t know was there. It’s the light that promises you that help is coming, that all is not lost, the light that lifts your spirits enough for you to keep going until dawn arrives. 

That’s what Simeon and Anna see in this little baby, a reminder of the faithfulness of God, the God who doesn’t give up on us, even if we give up on him. Who doesn’t stop believing in us, even if we stop believing in him, who doesn’t stop loving us, even if we stop loving him. That was the promise they had held onto during the long years that they had spent in the Temple, and now they see it coming to fruition. 

But of course, their recognition that something special is happening is only the beginning. Having recognised him, acclaimed him and blessed him, Simeon and Anna send Mary and Jospeh out, to carry Jesus all the way back to Nazareth, where they will care for him as he grows up and becomes strong and filled with wisdom, ready to start his ministry. 

And in a way, this story calls us to do the same. Yes, it calls us to look for Jesus, as Simeon and Anna did; he may come to us in all sorts of forms, inside and outside the church, maybe in the least likely people and circumstances. Our hearts need to be attuned to God through prayer, just as theirs were. And when we find him, yes, this story calls us treasure what he means to us. But it also calls us to carry him out into the world, to shine with his light, wherever we find ourselves, so that we can bring hope to those who feel as if the long, dark winter will never end. 

That’s why at the end of the service today we’re going to do two things.

The first thing is that, as you will have seen, we’re going to end the service with some responses, drawing our celebration of Christmastide to an end, and turning towards, Lent, Holy Week and Easter. During the last hymn we will light your candles, but the crucial part of this short bit of liturgy  is actually the moment when we blow those candles out, not because the light of Christ has gone out, but as an acknowledgement that, during this long season of pondering the significance of Jesus’ birth, the light, we hope, has gone in, become more deeply part of us. 

The second thing we’re going to do is to invite someone – could be anyone, young or old- to carry the Christ Child who has lain in the manger here in front of the altar out tin the procession that ends the service , as a reminder that, like Mary and Joseph , we are all called to carry Christ into the world, to let his light shine out to others. Amen 

Epiphany 3: Change your mind

 Isaiah 9.1-4, Matthew 4.12-23

About a hundred years before Jesus was born a great victory was won by a man you may never have heard of called Aristobulus I.  He was the king of Judea, the territory around Jerusalem – he had seized power for himself after a family feud. If that wasn’t enough, he was also high priest.  

Aristobulus wasn’t content with the power he had though. He wanted more. He had his eyes on the lands to the north of Judea, the ancient tribal lands of Zebulun and Naphtali, which had once been part of Israel, but had been conquered 600 years before by the Assyrians. Their population had been scattered around their vast empire, and the lands resettled with people from other countries and faiths. It had become a ragbag of nationalities, cultures and backgrounds. That was why the prophet Isaiah called it Galilee of the nations, or Galilee of the Gentiles, a place associated with defeat and humiliation. Aristobulus wanted to change all that. He wanted to make Israel great again – sounds familiar? So he marched north with his armies and, after a bitter war he imposed his rule on this land, forcibly converting many of its people. He saw himself as the living embodiment of Isaiah’s prophecy. He, Aristobulus had “made glorious the way of the sea, the land beyond the Jordan, Galilee of the nations.”

But it didn’t last. He’d hardly had a chance to enjoy his triumph when he died, and about 40 years later, the Romans conquered not only Galilee, but Judea too, and parcelled up his kingdom among puppet kings like Herod. His mighty conquest had been no more than a flash in the pan. 

So, when Matthew quotes that very same passage from Isaiah, and applies it to Jesus, he is being much more provocative than we think. This was all very recent history to the people of Jesus’ time. We often tend to read the Gospels in a very individualistic, spiritual way, but at the time they were political bombshells, full of subversive messages. 

Right from the start of his Gospel, Matthew sets us up to hear a story that is going to be about power and how it is used, kingdoms and how they are built and ruled. Jesus’ birth is told through the lens of the visit of the Magi to King Herod, and all the horror that unleashes, and throughout his ministry Jesus challenges, implicitly and explicitly, the power of Jewish and Roman leaders. But in doing that, he has hard choices to make. What kind of leader will he be? One like Aristobulus, and King Herod, leading by force, ambitious for worldly acclaim and wealth? Of something completely different?

And that’s where today’s Gospel begins. Jesus comes out of the desert, where he has been pondering that question, and hears that John the Baptist has been arrested by Herod , but instead of being scared off by that, he steps straight into the space John has prepared for him, and begins to preach the same message, exactly the same message, in the same words. “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near”. Jesus knows that he will face the same corrupt political forces as John, and so will those who follow him, fishermen like Simon and Andrew, James and John, but he carries on preaching anyway. Repent!

Repentance often gets a bad press these days; sackcloth and ashes are rather out of fashion nowadays. But properly understood, repentance not about guilt and punishment. The Greek word metanoia, means to change your mind. Repentance is about finding a new outlook on life. Understood that way, Jesus’ message is just as compelling today as it was then.  

Do we look at the world with cynicism and despair? “Change your mind,” says Jesus, “learn to see the hope God has for you.” That’s repentance. Do we feel that our lives are pointless, that we are just on an endless treadmill? “Change your mind” says Jesus, “you matter, your life has a purpose, God is at work in you”. That’s repentance too. Do we look at the forces, political, personal, ranged against us and think, “what chance have I got against all that”? “Change your mind,” says Jesus, “God’s light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it.“  That’s what repentance looks like in practice. It’s not about despair or misery; it’s about hope. 

Perhaps it’s not so surprising then that these fishermen leapt up and followed Jesus. They had sat too long already in the darkness of oppression, injustice and hopelessness, but now the light had dawned. “The kingdom of heaven has come near” Jesus said to them. “God is here. He’s at work in the world, at work in you, if only you open your eyes – change your minds - and see it.” They weren’t especially strong, or wise, or religiously observant or good - there was nothing about them that singled them out as special - but that, in a way, was the point. God called them and God used them just as they were. And he calls us too, in the ordinariness of our lives. He calls us to stand up for those who can’t stand up for themselves, to love those others have no time for, to learn to react with mercy and forgiveness, not fear and hatred to those who hurt us. To build bridges rather than walls, to seek and to find God in the stranger, and even in the enemy, as well as in the friend.

But if we are going to do that, and keep doing that, in a world where that seems as counter-cultural now as it did in Jesus’ day, we will need to change our minds, probably on a daily basis – maybe about others, maybe about God, but first of all about ourselves, so that we can learn to see ourselves and others as God sees us, as people who are full of promise, full of hope, chosen and called, people who matter. “Repent – change your mind – for the kingdom of God has come near.”

Amen 

Epiphany 2 : “Where are you staying?”

 Isaiah 49.1-9, John 1.29-42

Two disciples of John the Baptist follow Jesus, directed to him by John. John has been preaching that God’s Messiah is coming, the one who will bring in the new kingdom of God they have been longing for in the midst of a time of oppression and occupation. Here he is, says John. Follow him. And so they do. They tag along after Jesus, unobtrusively, or so they think, just to see what’s going to happen. But Jesus knows they are there, and he turns to them and says “What are you looking for?”

They could have answered, “the meaning of life” or “the secret of happiness” or “world peace”… but no, all they can come up with is “where are you staying?” 

For many years I thought that answer was completely inane. To be honest, I wrote it off as the kind of thing that comes into your head in a moment of panic when you are put on the spot, when you want to impress someone –  the new boss, the VIP visitor, someone you really fancied – only to find that, when the moment comes you spout gibberish and forever afterwards you cringe at the memory of it. Or maybe that’s just me! 

That’s what I thought these disciples had done. “Where are you staying?” What kind of stupid question is that? But I have come to realise that actually, it is a really vital question, the thing that they really do most need to know.

Think about it. You meet someone randomly – on a train, let’s say. They sit down opposite you and you fall into conversation, and, as the conversation develops you realise that this person is a soul mate, someone with whom you feel a deep connection, maybe the love of your life. What’s the one thing you absolutely must remember to do before they get off at their station and you go your separate ways? Swap phone numbers, or email addresses, or something that will enable you to find one another again. How many beautiful friendships or even romances have been snuffed out at birth because people realised, as the train pulled out of the station that they had no way of contacting the other person again…? What a tragedy!

At the time of Jesus, there were no phones or email or Whatsapp or Snapchat or whatever. If you wanted to keep in contact with someone you needed to know where they lived, or where they hung out regularly. So, when these two disciples ask that apparently trivial question “Where are you staying?” what they are actually saying is “We want to know more. We want to get to know you better. We want to be part of what you are doing, and we can only do that if we know where to find you again.”  They don’t want this just to be a fleeting encounter, something to tell their grandchildren about one day – “we actually met that Jesus of Nazareth – just the once, but it made our day”. They realise that this man isn’t just going to make their day. He’s going to make their lives, so long as they know where to find him. 

Fortunately, Jesus hears what lies beneath their simple question, and, wonderfully, he doesn’t just give them his address and tell them that he might be able to fit them in a week on Thursday. He says “Come and see” – right here, right now.

And the story tells us that they went with Jesus and they “saw where he was staying. And they remained with him that day.”  What did they talk about? What did they do through all those long hours together. We have no idea. The Bible doesn’t tell us.

I love that about this story because it gives us the space to imagine ourselves in that situation. What would we talk about? What would we do? What would it be like for us? What difference might it make to us if we got to “stay with Jesus” like they did?

Staying. Remaining. Abiding. Dwelling. These are all very significant words in John’s Gospel – often the same word, actually, translated in different ways. The Gospel begins by telling us that “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us” and later on, at the Last Supper, Jesus talks at length about abiding. He tells us we need to be like a branch grafted onto a grape vine. “Abide in me as I abide in you. Just as the branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in me….”(15.4) He talks about the need to “abide” in his love, just as he “abides” in his Father’s love, so that “my joy may be in you” and  “your joy may be complete”.

We live in a world, and at a time, where not much seems to abide for long, where certainties seem to be crumbling. We wake up every morning thinking “What? Really?” as one shocking thing after another happens, as a world order that has remained relatively stable for as long as most of us can remember seems to be collapsing around us. There is rapid technological change to deal with too and the climate crisis. It’s not surprising if we feel unmoored, anxious about the future. What’s going to happen next? No one knows.

How shall we survive these times? Only by finding a place where we can abide, stay, remain, put down deep roots into good soil. I wonder what that means, what that looks like for me and for you? Those first disciples discovered their security in Jesus, the one who stayed with them, who stuck with them, even to death on a cross. They learned to trust the abiding love of God, and to abide in it themselves. What about us? We’re invited to come and see, just as they were, to find that “abiding place” for ourselves.

Amen 

Epiphany Sunday: Holy Curiosity

Isaiah 60.1-6, Matthew 2.1-12

Just a very short sermon today, because of the temperature of the church, [the heating has broken down, again] but I just wanted briefly to focus on one little, and to me, intriguing detail of Matthew’s story of the visit of the wise men to Jesus, something that niggles at me and makes me wonder.

A group of foreigners arrive at the court of King Herod, claiming that they have seen a new star, which they believe is a sign that the long-awaited Jewish Messiah has been born, the one promised in the Jewish scriptures who would save and deliver his people, the one people have been praying for, looking for, for centuries – the passage we heard from the prophet Isaiah looks forward to this time, a joyful time of peace and prosperity. 

The chief priests and scribes are summoned by Herod to give their expert opinion on where these men should look for the Messiah. And then the wise men are sent on their way. 

And yet no one goes with them – that’s the thing that puzzles me. Not one of those religious professionals, the priests and scribes, not one of those who have spent their lives scouring the scriptures and praying for God to save and help their nation, not one of them goes along with the wise men to check out their story, even if only to disprove it. Bethlehem is only about 6 miles from Jerusalem – a couple of hours walk. They could be back in time for tea. But they don’t go.

I can understand why Herod acts as he does. He is a paranoid megalomaniac and any talk of a new king is bound to send him into a frenzy of fear and jealousy. But these priests and scribes…don’t you think they’d at least be a little bit curious? And yet they aren’t willing even to take that short journey to Bethlehem to find out whether there is anything in the wise men’s story.

In telling this story, Matthew paints a picture at the start of his Gospel of a political and religious system which doesn’t consider for a moment that anyone outside their favoured circle might have anything to give them that’s worth having, which doesn’t consider that God could ever be at work beyond the limits of their own horizon. 

Their refusal to be curious, their apparent apathy, is rooted in prejudice, but their prejudice, like all prejudice, is rooted in fear. They are just as afraid, in different ways, as Herod, afraid of what it might mean for them if the wise men’s mysterious story might turn out to be true. Better the devil you know than the devil – or even the God – you don’t. 

Epiphany means “revelation”. This season of Epiphany, which begins today, challenges us to open our eyes and minds and hearts to God’s revelation to us, to the things God might be trying to say to us and show us - the healing and hope and life and joy and peace he wants for us. But it also challenges us to open our eyes and hearts and minds to the things in us that might make it hard to hear and receive from God. 

Like those religious insiders, we can easily be hindered by our prejudices. We may have already made our minds up about other people, so we miss God speaking to us through them. And we may have made our minds up about ourselves too. “There’s no way God could be calling me to do this – I am too old, too young, too inexperienced, too much of a mess”. 

But our prejudices, like those of the priests and scribes in the story, are usually also rooted in fear. “What if I said yes to God? What if I dared to believe that God cares about me? What if I went to Bethlehem, to the place where God is born in me? What if I took God’s call on my life seriously? Where would that lead me? Would I find myself, like the wise men, being led out on “another road”, a journey I didn’t expect to take? 

I don’t know what the answer to those questions might be for each of us, but I do pray that we will have the courage to be curious, the courage to ask where Christ might be born for us and in us, the courage to set out on the journey to meet him. “Arise, shine for your light has come”. 

Amen 

Advent 4 : Joseph's choice

Isaiah 7.10-16,  Matthew 1.18-25

 

“And he named him Jesus”. That moment, at the end of our Gospel reading, is a crucial moment, a moment which its first hearers would have been very struck by. It’s not just the name itself, it is who is doing the naming that they would have noticed. It’s Joseph, that often overlooked and side-lined character in the story of Christ’s birth.

 

Matthew doesn’t tell us how Joseph found out that Mary was pregnant, only that she “was found” to be so. Did she tell Joseph herself, or was it blurted out by a meddling sister or aunt or friend who noticed the signs and thought Joseph ought to know? However it happened, though, it wasn’t going to be something that could be hidden and Joseph had a dilemma, because he knew this child wasn’t his. He needed to do some damage limitation. He seems to have cared about Mary. He didn’t want to expose her to public disgrace. She could even have been stoned for adultery. But if he didn’t denounce her it would either look as if the child was his, and they weren’t supposed to be sleeping together yet, or that he knew it was someone else’s, which would have demeaned him in the eyes of his society. We might not – I hope we wouldn’t – think of it this way today, but that was how it was at the time. Joseph couldn’t win.

 

He weighed up his options. We can imagine him agonising in the small hours of the night, flipping between plans, desperately trying to find some way of squaring the circle, so that everyone came out of this ok. In the end, he made his choice. He worked out a solution he could live with. The least worst option seemed to be to send Mary away quietly. Least said, soonest mended. Call the wedding off, and hope against hope that people would forget about the whole sad business. That way Mary wouldn’t suffer too badly, and Joseph would save as much face as possible. Perhaps that was the moment he fell asleep, finally having made up his mind.

 

But then he had a dream, and in his dream an angel came to him, and dropped the bombshell that the child was “from the Holy Spirit” – whatever that meant – Matthew doesn’t explain it. The message was clear, though. This child wasn’t a mistake or a sign of shame, as it would have been seen at the time, but a child through whom God was going to do something new, something vital, saving people from their sins. That’s what the name Jesus means. It means God saves. It was the same as the name Joshua – the great leader who had led the people of Israel into the Promised Land after they’d been freed from slavery in Egypt.  Jesus had been chosen to lead people into a new sort of freedom. And Joseph was called to be part of God’s plan too. Mary needed his protection. This child needed his protection.

 

We often focus at Christmas on the price Mary paid, on her faithfulness and courage in saying “Yes” to God, but Joseph paid a high price too. Who was going to believe him if he said that the child was “from the Holy Spirit”? He’d be, at the very least, a laughing stock. But Joseph, like Mary, was a person of courage – a righteous man – one of those people who decide what to do on the basis of whether it is right or wrong, rather than on whether it will bring them advantage. And so, when he woke up, we’re told, “he did as the angel of the Lord commanded him”. That’s a small statement, but a huge act of commitment.  Joseph threw his own carefully laid plans out of the window and chose God’s plan instead. “He took Mary as his wife but had no marital relations with her until she had borne a son; and he named him Jesus.

 

Naming children has always been the prerogative of their parents. Grandma might or might not like their choice. Uncle Bill might have hoped they’d name it after him. But no one would seriously argue that it was anyone else’s right to name a child except the parents. In naming Jesus, Joseph takes on parental responsibility for this child. He is saying that he’ll be the one who will protect him, provide for him, teach him a trade, worry about him, do what any good father at the time would have done.   

 

But we also know, because we have heard about his dream, that in choosing the name he does, he is also committing himself to God’s plan for this child, because he chooses the name the angel told him to. Maybe, left to his own devices, he’d have called him Joseph, but he doesn’t. He takes on the responsibility of fatherhood, but he also recognises the greater fatherhood of God, who has a purpose for this child which is beyond Joseph’s understanding. He calls him Jesus – God saves.

 

How is this tiny child going to bring about any sort of salvation? Joseph doesn’t know, but Matthew gives us a hint when he quotes from a rather obscure story from the book of the prophet Isaiah, and it’s worth us taking a small detour to find out a bit more about that.

 

King Ahaz, the king of Israel, was being attacked by neighbouring kings. Things weren’t going well.  Just before the passage we heard we are told that “The heart of Ahaz and the heart of his people shook as the trees of the forest shake before the wind.” (Isaiah 7.2)

 

But in the face of Ahaz’ fear, God declares that he will act. He will defeat the attackers himself, and it will happen soon, by the time that a child who is soon to be born has grown up enough to know right from wrong, he says in the passage we heard. It is actually Isaiah’s own child God is referring to, a child he has with a Israelite prophetess, if you are interested. But, like Jesus, this child is named by God. He will be called Immanuel. “God with us”. His name will be a message, a reminder of the presence of God in these difficult times.

Isaiah’s words aren’t intended to be a prophecy of a child born in a stable six hundred years or so later, but Matthew sees an echo of this old story in the birth of Jesus, because he knows that salvation, God’s gracious reshaping of our lives, always begins when we realise that God is with us, beside us, within us, around us, close to us, caring about us. Matthew is telling us that Jesus will save people by being God’s presence among them. They will start finding the new life God wants to give them as they find God in him, healing, teaching, welcoming, loving.

 

Joseph could have said, “this child is nothing to do with me”. He could have turned his back on him and never given him a second thought. No one would have blamed him for it. It wasn’t his child. But he didn’t do that. He got involved. He named him. He cared for him. He loved him. He let this baby’s life become tangled up with his own, and in doing that he found that God was with him – Emmanuel  - in this child, and that changed everything.

 

The story asks us to consider what Jesus is to us? Is he just a theological idea, a long-ago story, an image in stained glass, paint or plaster? Or is he, in some sense, a living presence – God with us - someone we can’t forget about, someone whose life, whose ministry, whose priorities, impinge on us in a way we can’t ignore, change us too?

This story invites us into the moment when Joseph looked down at Mary’s baby and was given a choice – to take him as his own, or to leave him and walk away – and it asks us what we will do?

Amen