Remembrance Sunday: Today and tomorrow

Job 19.23-27a, Luke 20.27-38

I’m sure that over the next few days, in this season of Remembrance, we will all hear at some point the famous words we know as the Kohima Epitaph, 

When you go home, tell them of us and say

‘For your tomorrow, we gave our today.’

The Epitaph is inscribed on the memorial at the Commonwealth War Graves Cemetery in Kohima, on the India-Myanmar border, the site of a crucial battle in WW2, and they are especially treasured by those who fought in the Far East, but they are powerful words for all of us. 

They capture perfectly that sense of loss not only of the lives those who died were living then, but of the futures they might have had, the lives they would have gone on to live, which were laid down for the futures of others – our futures, the lives we lead now.

They are a reminder that Remembrance Sunday isn’t just about death; far more fundamentally it’s about life. Every year, it is a wake up call to us all to be aware of what we treasure, of all that is precious in our everyday lives, and how easily it can be lost when hatred and division spiral into violence and bloodshed. 

My father served in the Royal Navy throughout the Second World war. He was part of the evacuation operation from Dunkirk, sailing seven times across the channel to rescue soldiers from the beaches, and then served on small Motor Torpedo Boats off the coast of Yugoslavia, trying to distract German U-boats so that the Yugoslavian resistance could do its work. It was dangerous work. Like many other veterans, he rarely talked about it, and certainly never glorified it, so I wasn’t sure what reaction I would get when I asked him once if he would talk to my son about his war for a project he was doing at primary school. He agreed, and I remember him saying “It’s good that they learn about it” he said, “so that it doesn’t happen again.” What mattered to him wasn’t just remembering the past, it was remembering the past, in the present, so that the future could be different, and I’m sure he wasn’t unusual in that.

Our Bible readings today are about the past, present and future too, about life and death. 

Some Sadducees come to Jesus, with a very strange question. The Sadducees were one of a number of religious groupings in first century Judaism and were largely drawn from the elites, the upper classes, the people who ran the Temple. As Luke helpfully tells us, they didn’t believe in life after death. That may come as a surprise, because that’s often assumed to be an intrinsic part of religious faith, but it was an idea which had only very slowly taken hold in Judaism. The Jewish scriptures – our Old Testament -  are rather vague, and not always consistent about what happens after death.

But by the time of Jesus most people did think there would be some sort of general resurrection and judgement at the end of time. It was only really the Saducees who held out against this view though. 

They come to Jesus to see where he stands, with a rather ridiculous scenario. “So,” Jesus, “what if a man dies without heirs?” By Jewish law, if this happened his brother was supposed to marry his widow, and her children would count as heirs for his dead brother, so there was someone to carry on his name. But what if the second husband died before she had a child, they asked Jesus, and the next brother married her, and the same happened again and again and again until she had gone through all the brothers? If there was a resurrection, whose wife would she be?

You can almost hear Jesus sighing. Where to begin? His answer is blunt – he knows a strawman argument when he hears one. Basically he says “what happens after death is nothing like anything you can imagine – it’s not just more of this life, it’s something completely outside your ability to understand. All that matters is that whether we live or die, we are the presence of God, “to whom all are alive”. 

In our Old Testament reading Job says, “I know that my Redeemer lives…in my flesh I shall see God, whom I shall see on my side, and my eyes shall behold and not another.” He has lost everything – family, wealth, health – and he knows that ultimately, like all of us, he will lose even his life. There will come a time when - “worms destroy my body” as the King James version of the Bible puts it,  which I think is rather more vivid than the version we heard today “after my skin has been thus destroyed”.  But living or dying, he knows he can’t lose God, and God can’t lose him, and that is what matters most to him. Living or dying he is with God; that’s all he needs to know to help him in this present moment, to get through this time of pain and sorrow.

On Remembrance Day we look back to the past, of course, with gratitude to those who have gone before us, those who gave their today so that we could have a tomorrow. And we look forward to the future, to the peace of God “whose will is to restore all things” as the collect put it. But most importantly we are called to look at the present, to look for the God who is the God of living, the God who is with us now, calling us to live this day well, to see and deal with the things which prevent his peace from becoming a reality; the resentments, the prejudices, the words and actions which diminish others, and, left unchallenged, grow into hatred and war. The present is the only thing we have any control over. Today is where we can make a difference. 

We may never – please, God – have to lay down our lives in war in the way that those soldiers commemorated by the Kohima Epitaph did. We may never have to give our today physically so that others can have a tomorrow. But that doesn’t mean that our “today” doesn’t matter, because our “today”, however unimportant is might seem in the grand scheme of things, shapes tomorrow for those who come after us. The God who is present with us today calls us to take it as seriously as he does.

Amen 

All Saints Sunday 2025

All Saints Sunday (readings for 4th before Advent)

Isaiah 1.10-18, Luke 19.1-10

“Zacchaeus, hurry and come down, for I must stay at your house today…”

I wonder how you feel about unexpected visitors. Are you the kind of person who cheerfully expects people to take you as they find you – dust and all - or would you be mortified if someone turned up when you hadn’t had a chance to put the hoover around?

Zacchaeus wasn’t expecting to host Jesus on the day he heard he was coming through Jericho. He thought he’d be lucky even to catch a glimpse of him. He was short, we are told, and couldn’t see over the heads of the crowd, and even if he could have done, it’s clear that this particular crowd weren’t exactly well-disposed to him. 

He was a chief tax collector, “and was rich” the story says. Tax collectors have probably never been the most popular of people, but in 1st century Palestine they were particularly hated because the taxpayers knew that the money they took was going to be used to fund the Roman occupation. They were being made to pay for their own oppression. 

Tax collectors often seem to have skimmed off money for themselves too. Zacchaeus admits he has done this, and the fact that he is rich underlines it.  

So tax collectors were regarded as cheats, and collaborators as well. No wonder people didn’t like them. No wonder this crowd grumbles when Jesus calls Zacchaeus down from his hiding place in the sycamore fig tree and invites himself to Zacchaeus’ home. How could he eat and drink under the same roof as this sinner? 

But Jesus isn’t bothered. After all, he has a track record of associating with outcasts, and being criticised for it. Zacchaeus may not seem like an outcast – he has wealth, and the favour of his Roman masters. In some ways he is part of the in-crowd, but Jesus sees the lonely, rather desperate man beneath all that. Zacchaeus climbs a tree to see Jesus, but actually it is Jesus who sees him.  

The effect on Zacchaeus is transformative. Instantly, before he and Jesus have had any real conversation at all, he announces that his life is going to change, that he’ll give half his possessions to the poor and repay those he has defrauded four times over. Jesus didn’t have to persuade him with any clever theological arguments. He didn’t have to shame him – there are no words of accusation or blame here. All he had to do was announce that he was coming home with Zacchaeus, staying in his house. Everything seems to have changed for Zacchaeus in that simple act of homecoming.

We sometimes describe our deepest moments of change as times when something “came home” to us, when something strikes at the heart of us. It can be a challenging time. We talk about the “chickens coming home to roost” – there have been some high profile examples of that in the news this week - the moment when we wake up to the reality of something we’ve done and have to face the consequences. It can be a heartsink moment, but it can also be a new beginning, because it’s only when we see what’s wrong that we have a chance of changing it. 

But for that chance of change to mean anything, condemnation on its own isn’t enough, challenge on its own isn’t enough, and that’s what makes Jesus’ simple action so powerful. He doesn’t just bring home to Zacchaeus the accusations which the crowd clearly want to throw at him, that he is a cheat and a collaborator, he also brings home to Zacchaeus that, cheat and collaborator as he is, he is still loved by God. 

“Today salvation has come to this house” says Jesus, “because he too is a son of Abraham”  - he belongs just as much as you do, Jesus says to the grumbling crowd. He is a fellow human being, part of the family of God. Jesus isn’t talking about getting a ticket to heaven when we die – that’s not what the Bible usually means by salvation. He is talking about the change Zacchaeus needs here and now in his heart, in his life, the change that will spill over into the world around him, because God has come home with him, and God has come home to him. 

“Cease to do evil, seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan and plead for the widow,” our Old Testament Reading reminded us .This is what counts as far as God is concerned. These things are the evidence – not fancy words or rituals – that God has come home to us, that “salvation has come to our house”.

We don’t know anything about Zacchaeus’ life after this. There are a few legends – the Eastern Orthodox churches say he was the first bishop of Caesarea Maritima on the coast of Palestine. And there’s a very far-fetched medieval Catholic legend which says that, under the nickname of St Amadour, from the Latin word for Love, he travelled to Southern France and became a hermit in a cave dug out of a cliff face which eventually became a shrine to the virgin Mary. It still bears his name, they say - Rocamadour. I’ve been there – maybe some of you have. But the Bible tells us nothing more about him. 

I’m convinced, though, that the change in him was genuine and lasting. And the reason I’m convinced is that he is named. Peripheral characters in the Gospels – the bit part players we meet only once - are very rarely named. I can only think of four others,– Jairus, Bartimaeus, Simon the Leper and Simon of Cyrene, who helped carry Jesus’ cross, and who we are told in a throwaway comment is “the father of Alexander and Rufus”.  Usually, though, the people Jesus encounters along the way are anonymous - a blind man, a Samaritan woman at a well. We don’t need to know their names for the story to make sense. We don’t need to know Zacchaeus’ name for this story to make sense – he could have just been “a tax collector”.

And yet, Zaccheus along with these few others, is named. The only plausible reason I can think of for that is that the early Christian communities for whom the Gospels were written would have known this man, or known of him.  Luke’s Gospel was written about 50 years after the events they described – that’s like 1975 to us, well within living memory, so it’s quite likely that there would still be people around who’d come across him. I’m not a Biblical literalist, who thinks everything in the Gospels has to have happened exactly as it is written. But it seems to me, working from logic, that this isn’t the tale of some anonymous character, created as a plot device. To the people who first read Luke’s Gospel this is Old Zacchaeus, who their mum and dad knew, who told his story to anyone who would listen to him, ad nauseam, because it was the most important moment in his life, the moment when his life turned around.

Today we celebrate All Saints Sunday, that moment when we think of the saints who may not be famous, not the big hitters like St Peter, St Paul, St Francis, but all those people, named or unnamed, whose lives have been changed because the love of God came home to them, connected with something deep within them, made sense of their lives in a new way. Today we celebrate all those who found that a light had been kindled in them, maybe just a small light, but one that made a difference to the way they lived their lives, and who passed on that light to others, and, eventually, to us. The feast of All Saints reminds us that God wants nothing more than to come home with each of us, and come home to each of us, not with condemnation but with the love that brings us the salvation we need, the change that changes the world. 

Amen 

Trinity 18: A good listening to

 Jeremiah 31.27-34, Luke 18.1-8

I remember an advert for the Children’s Society from a few years back which featured a very disaffected looking teenage boy – someone who looked like he might be up to no good - staring straight out of the poster, and the caption was “What he needs is a good listening to”. It has stuck with me ever since. What he needs is a good listening to. 

During thirty plus years of ordained ministry I have done a lot of listening. People tell you stuff when you are a priest. You hear happy stories, sad stories, stories of old hurts and regrets and family feuds. You hear extraordinary stories of spiritual experiences which people think no one else would believe. Couples booking their weddings tell you how they fell in love. Baptism families tell you about the birth of their children. And you hear whole life stories of people whose funerals you are preparing to take – both the bits the family want you to include and the bits they don’t – you soon discover that it’s vital to know which is which!  You often hear things people have never told anyone else.

Listening is one of the great privileges of ministry, but I have come to realise that for many people it is quite rare to be listened to. There are long waiting lists for counselling on the NHS, and private counselling is expensive, and anyway, it’s not just when we’ve got a problem that we need to tell our stories and feel that we’ve been heard. Being listened to is a basic need for all of us, whether things are going well or badly. It reminds us that we are known and loved, that we matter.  

In the parable we’ve just heard we meet a woman who is desperate to tell her story and be listened to. We don’t know what’s happened, but she comes to the local judge for justice against some unnamed opponent. Instead of a listening ear, though, she gets the brush off. He doesn’t want to know. He “neither feared God nor had respect for the people” we are told, and he even says it of himself. He doesn’t care, and he knows he doesn’t care, and he doesn’t care that he doesn’t care. But the widow doesn’t give up. She keeps turning up on his doorstep until, very reluctantly, he hears her grievance and gives her justice. He still doesn’t care – but he’s so fed up with her that he gives in. 

Parables, like all stories, invite us to step inside them and try them out for size – how would we feel in this situation, who would we identify with, what would we do? They aren’t always – or even usually – simple moral or theological lessons. They are more like mirrors which show us ourselves and help us to reflect on the world we live in.

And that’s certainly the case here. It’s tempting, when we come across a powerful figure in a parable, to assume it’s meant to be a picture of God. But this judge, who is the complete opposite of everything a good judge should be, certainly isn’t that. Quite the opposite. But he is meant to help us think about what we think God is like. Through this rather over-the-top story, Jesus asks us a very important question.  “When you pray, who do you think you are praying to? Is it someone like this uncaring judge? Is this what you think will happen if you cry out to God? That you will be given the brush off. And when you do cry out for healing and are still ill, when you cry out for an end to war in the world and it doesn’t seem to come, do you conclude that it’s because the God to whom you cry doesn’t care? Is this what you think God thinks of you, that you are nothing but a nuisance, a bother to him?”

When we need “a good listening to”, whether that is from a fellow human being or from God, one of the reasons we are sometimes reluctant to reach out and open up to others is that we don’t think they want to hear what we need to say. We feel like we’d be bothering them. We feel like we’re taking up their time and space. We’re afraid of being rebuffed, sent packing.  

The same can easily be true of our feelings about God. We all carry around in our minds an image of God. Even if you don’t believe in God, you will have some image of the God you don’t believe in…We can’t help it. We are people with imaginations. If we imagine him to be like this unjust judge, it’s no wonder we don’t want to take what’s on our hearts to him, and yet, if we don’t, how can anything change?

This story is set in the context of a longer conversation with some Pharisees who have asked Jesus to tell them when “the kingdom of God is coming”. They are thinking in terms of some grand supernatural event when God will swoop into history to overthrow the Romans and usher in a new and better age on earth. 

Whether their question is genuine, or a trap for Jesus isn’t clear, but Jesus’ answer to them is. He says that “the kingdom of God is not coming with things that can be observed, nor will they say , Look here it is, or There it is! For in fact the kingdom of God is among you…” or in some translations,  within you. They’re looking for a magic wand, for someone to intervene “out there”, but Jesus tells them that, if things are going to change, the place God needs to work is within their own hearts and lives. “Be the change you want to see” we sometimes say – it’s a quote attributed to Gandhi, though he never actually said it. But I think Jesus goes further. “You want to see the kingdom of God around you,” he says. “Then you will have to start by letting it become established within you first.” 

We can’t ‘be the change we want to see’ unless we have been changed ourselves first. As God says to Jeremiah in our Old Testament reading, “I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. No longer shall they teach one another or say to each other, ‘Know the Lord’, for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest.” 

To be changed like that, says Jesus, we need to pray, to keep turning up in God’s presence – however we do that, whether it’s in church or at home with a cup of tea, or out walking the dog - turning up with our questions, with our doubts, with our laments, with our anger, with our sorrow, with whatever is on our hearts.

Prayer is a mystery. I don’t know how prayer might affect events out there in the world. But I do know that it has an effect on those who pray, changing and shaping us, inviting us to discover a God who isn’t some unjust judge, but someone who listens and hears us. And when we get the “listening to” we need, then we can start to “be the change we want to see” that will change the world around us.   

Amen 

Trinity 15: Small acts of hope

 Trinity 15 2025 West Malling

Jeremiah 32.1,3a,6-15, Luke 16.19-31

I wonder what you made of our first reading today, from the prophet Jeremiah. If the answer is ‘not a lot’, I don’t suppose you are alone. Hanamel, Baruch, and all the rest of those names the poor reader had to cope with – who are they? Where’s Anathoth? What on earth is going on, and why should we care? And all that talk of buying and selling… It sounds like the record of a particularly dull day at a conveyancer’s office and in a way, that’s exactly what it is. But it’s well worth exploring, because actually it’s a profound story about hope, and we could all do with a bit of that at the moment. 

It was the tenth year of the reign of Zedekiah, king of Judah, Jeremiah tells us, and the eighteenth year of the reign of Nebuchadrezzar, king of Babylon. That’s a bit like saying it was  1939 or 1940 to us – a time of foreboding, a time when it was clear that trouble lay ahead. Jerusalem, the capital of Judah was already being besieged by the mighty Babylonian. They had conquered large swathes of the Middle East, and little Judah was next. Only a fool could fail to see it, but, sadly, King Zedekiah was that fool. He was so convinced that it would all be fine – or so scared to admit that it might not be - that when Jeremiah warned him that disaster was coming, Zedekiah had him imprisoned. All that defeatist talk was bad for morale – better to shut him up than listen to him.

Jeremiah couldn’t do anything to change the king’s mind, any more than we are likely to be able to change the minds of leaders today who seem hell-bent on leading us into war and climate catastrophe. But God’s message to Jeremiah, and to us through him, is that it’s not just leaders who make a difference, who have the  power to create and destroy hope. It’s down to all of us. And that’s where the rather convoluted story about buying and selling of land – that dull day at the conveyancer’s office – comes in. 

Jeremiah’s cousin, Hanamel, is selling a field, at Anathoth, Jeremiah’s home town, the place where his extended family had lived for many generations - just an ordinary field. It might have grown wheat or olives, or provided grazing for livestock. But now Hanamel wants rid of it. 

Why?

The most likely explanation is that he’s trying to liquidate his assets. What use is this field going to be when the marauding Babylonian Army sweeps in and takes all the land for itself? King Zedekiah might not be prepared to accept that his nation is going to be conquered, but it must have been pretty obvious to everyone else.

But who’s going to want to buy land with an invasion looming? Nobody with any sense, you’d think. Step forward, Jeremiah… As Hanamel’s cousin, according to ancient Jewish law, Jeremiah has first right of refusal on this land. Hanamel probably doesn’t think he’ll want it, but he has to ask anyway, and to his surprise, Jeremiah leaps at the chance – God has told him this would happen. Quick as a flash he rustles up seventeen shekels of silver – a fair price, scholars think. He’s not trying to get a bargain. He finds witnesses, has a proper, legal deed drawn up and makes sure everyone sees him make the transaction – he’s still in prison, in “the court of the guard” so there are plenty of people around. Then he gives the deeds to Baruch, his scribe and tells him to put them in an earthenware jar, to keep them safe “so that they may last for a long time”. They will need to, because when the Babylonians conquer the land, they will send the inhabitants into an exile which will last over 70 years.  

It’s very unlikely Jeremiah ever got to farm that field himself. He may never have seen it at all. He seems to have been taken to Egypt when Jerusalem fell, and would have been long dead by the time the occupation ended. And he must have known that. But he still bought the field. “This won’t last for ever”, he is saying, “Thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel; Houses and fields and vineyards shall again be bought in this land.” God hasn’t finished with his people.

Buying a field may seem like a small, mundane act, but it isn’t just a land deal; it’s a statement of faith in the future, faith that there will be a future. It’s a declaration of hope, and of trust in the God who enables Jeremiah to hold onto that hope. It is a small action with a big meaning.

Small actions are at the heart of Jesus’ parable in the Gospel reading too. Lazarus, the beggar at the rich man’s gate, would have been content with the scraps that fell from his table. He wasn’t asking for much. But the rich man wouldn’t even give him that. Like King Zedekiah, he doesn’t seem to want to see what – or who - was right in front of his eyes, right under his feet in fact as he went in and out of his gates.

Why? Perhaps because if he saw Lazarus, if he got to know him, he might also see himself more clearly, his own selfishness and greed. Things might change, and who knew where that might end? But not doing anything, refusing to do those small acts of kindness, turns out to have consequences that are just as profound for him - and not in a good way.

This story, very much in the form of a folk-tale, isn’t meant to provide a systematic theology of the afterlife, by the way. Essentially, it’s satire. It’s larger than life. What we do matters, says Jesus, even, or perhaps especially, the small things. As Mother Theresa once said “Not all of us can do great things, but we can do small things with great love.” What we do, day by day, may seem insignificant to us, but it can make a huge difference to others. 

For Jeremiah it was buying a field. For the rich man it was – or could have been -  taking notice of Lazarus at his gates. For us it might be listening to someone who is different from us, learning about their lives, rather than leaping to judgement on them. It might be getting involved in our local community, rather than just moaning about it. It might be thinking more carefully about what we buy, and who made it and whether they were treated fairly.  It might be as simple as saying hello to a neighbour, having a chat with someone we pass in the street – we may be the only person they talk to that day. All of these things, and so many others, however simple they seem, plant seeds of kindness for the future. They are our statement of faith that goodness is indestructible. We may never see what those seeds grow into, but if we don’t plant them, they won’t grow into anything. 

It’s so easy to feel hopeless about the world, to feel that the challenges are too big for us, and to switch off. But God’s message to us is the same as it was to Jeremiah. He hasn’t finished with us or with the rest of his creation. He isn’t defeated by the evil in the world, any more than he was defeated by the crucifixion of his son. Death and despair don’t have the last word. Life and hope do, because God hasn’t stopped loving us. And he hasn’t stopped calling each of us either, not to do great things in most cases, but to do small things with great love – or as much love as we can muster – to do the things that are at our own gates, under our own noses.  That’s where hope lies for the future. That’s what changes the world.

Amen. 

Trinity 7 Belonging and belongings

 Luke 12.13-21, Colossians 3.1-11

If ever there was a subject guaranteed to raise family tensions, it is the matter of inheritance. Who gets what from mum and dad? Who has been done out of what was rightfully theirs? What happened to that hideous, but very valuable jug…? Even in the best of families it can stir deep feelings. I was once told in hushed and scandalised tones of the story of a stepmother in my own family’s history, whose children snaffled the money that allegedly should have come down our side of the family tree. She died more than a century ago, and I doubt whether there was even much money to be snaffled, as the family weren’t wealthy, but all the same, it just wasn’t right…

Inheritance squabbles are as old as the hills, as we can see in our Gospel reading today. “Someone in the crowd said to Jesus, Teacher, tell my brother to divide the family inheritance with me…” 

He doesn’t get the answer he expects - as Jesus points out, he isn’t a family lawyer - but he does get the answer he needs, in the shape of a very pointed parable.  Like a lot of Jesus’ parables, it’s meant to be over the top, a bit ridiculous. I’m sure he hammed it up as he told it. But it’s carefully told, and every word counts.

Imagine for a moment that you were acting Jesus’ parable out just as it’s written. How many actors would you need to tell this story of the rich fool? The answer is just one, at least until the very last line, when God puts in an appearance.  This rich man seems to live in a world of his own – despite the fact that he obviously didn’t. The land of a rich man produced abundantly, it begins. What? It produced all by itself? I don’t think so. There are surely armies of unseen farm labourers working this land to make those crops appear, perhaps a family too – but this man seems blind to them.

When he realizes he has nowhere to store all this abundance, he says to himself – he talks to himself a lot, because there isn’t anyone else in his world to talk to - he says to himself  “I will pull down my barns and build larger ones…” Notice the pronouns - I and the My.  Again, we ask, is he going to do this all himself? Is he a demolition engineer and a master builder now as well? Is he going to lug around all the timber, manhandle it into place single-handed? I rather doubt it. But as far as he’s concerned, he’s the centre of the universe. In fact, he is the universe. 

He talks to himself again. Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years, relax, eat, drink be merry.  But that’s the point when his self-centred, self-obsessed world comes crashing down around his ears. All of a sudden, another voice booms out, another character bursts into the scene. Apparently, it isn’t all about him after all. You fool, says God, this very night your life is being demanded of you. And the things you have prepared, whose will they be? His life isn’t his to do what he wants with – it never has been. It isn’t his to possess and control – it never can be. No man is an island, entire of itself, said the poet John Donne. We exist in relationship, to others, to God, to the world around us. We can’t go it alone. 

Jesus talks about the importance of being rich towards God. What does that mean? It has sometimes been said that the beginning of faith is the moment when we are able to say, “there is a God, and it isn’t me”. If we can get that straight, all the rest will follow. There is a God, and it isn’t me.  When Jesus talks about being rich towards God, he is pointing to the importance of acknowledging that there is something, someone, beyond ourselves, greater than ourselves. 

The squabbling brothers who come to Jesus are destroying something that is of infinitely greater worth, their relationship with one another. One’s life does not consist in the abundance of possessions, he tells them. The value of our lives isn’t rooted in what belongs to us, but in who we belong to – our families and community, our world, and God himself. 

Paul writes to the Colossians and tells them “your life is hidden with Christ in God”. We are held in the heart of God, secure and precious to him already. We don’t have to earn his love by our own anxious striving, and we don’t have to worry that others might be more beloved than we are – that’s often at the root of the kind of sibling rivalry that prompted Jesus’ story – because God’s love is infinite, there is room for all of us. 

That leads him onto his really revolutionary claim that “there is no longer Greek and Jew, circumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave and free”. He lived in a highly stratified society, where everyone knew their place, but he insisted that we are called into community when we follow Christ, called to look for God at work beyond ourselves as well as within ourselves, to see ourselves as part of something bigger than ourselves, part of the whole of God’s blessed creation, not in a world of our own, like the rich fool of the parable.

This call to community is as vital now as it has ever been.  

Knowing it affects us emotionally, spiritually and as a society. Recent studies have revealed alarming rates of loneliness, especially among young people in their late teens and early adulthood but also affecting many others. Now that it is so easy to retreat into virtual, online worlds, we are learning how important it is to make real connections in the flesh and blood world too - it’s one of the great gifts churches can bring, and one reason why it’s important just to show up, to be here. 

Knowing that we are part of something bigger also affects our relationship with nature. If we see ourselves as the centre of the universe, we also tend to see the world as just there to provide for us, only valuable if it is valuable to us, and that can lead us to exploit and degrade it and take more than our fair share. If we have to build bigger barns maybe we have more stuff than we need?

And, of course, getting our place in the universe right affects our relationship with God. If we think we are God, self-sufficient all by ourselves, then, like the man in the story, we are going to be disappointed, because however rich, however clever, however powerful we are, none of us can cheat death, that great leveller. And more than that, if we try to live as rugged individuals, we risk missing out on the meaning and the joy God meant us to find in a life lived in him.

So, Christ calls us to care less about belongings and more about belonging, less about what we have in our hands and more about whose hands hold us and whose hands we can hold, less about our treasure, and more about knowing that we and all God’s creation are treasured by him, infinitely and eternally. 

We don't know what happened next to the man who came to Jesus asking to sort out his inheritance squabble with his brother but let us hope he realised that he had the riches he really needed, and more to share, and let us hope we realise it too.

Amen

Teach us to pray: Trinity 6

Trinity 6 2025 Proper 12

I wonder whether you’ve ever been tempted by those self-help books that promise some new and clever way to sort your life out.  “Seven habits of highly effective people” and such like? Or perhaps you’ve been drawn in by clickbait headlines on the internet; 14 steps to becoming a millionaire, 27 ways to keep your cat happy. I made up those last two, but they’re probably out there somewhere. Human beings are suckers for a quick fix, a magic wand.   

It’s a hunger that’s as old as the hills and I think we see it in the request Jesus’ disciples put to him in today’s Gospel reading. They see Jesus praying and they ask him “Lord, teach us to pray, as John taught his disciples” We don’t know what John  taught about prayer – this is John the Baptist we’re talking about - but any self-respecting religious leader would have been expected to have something distinctive to offer, a new technique or insight for their followers – otherwise, why follow them? But if that’s what Jesus’ disciples were expecting, I think they may have been a bit underwhelmed by his response. 

The prayer he gives them, which we know as the Lord’s Prayer, is just 38 words long in Luke’s version. Matthew’s version, and the versions we pray in church are slightly longer, but not much. None of them take longer than about 20 seconds to pray, even at a leisurely pace. 

But more to the point from the disciples’ point of view, there’s absolutely nothing in the Lord’s Prayer that would have been new to them, nothing that wasn’t already there in the Hebrew Scriptures, the books we know as the Old Testament, which they had grown up with.

The Old Testament often calls God Father, and sometimes Mother too. 

The importance of hallowing God’s name, respecting God, is there in the Ten Commandments. 

The prophet Isaiah spoke of longing for God’s kingdom to come on earth as in heaven  600 years before Jesus; he dreamed of swords being beaten into ploughshares and wolves and lambs living peaceably together. 

God had always been seen as the provider of daily bread - the things we need to live – like the manna he gave to his people in the wilderness. Forgiving and being forgiven – reconciliation - is a thread that runs right through the Old Testament, too, and the Psalms are full of appeals to God to deliver people from the trials that beset them. 

It's almost as if Jesus is saying “you don’t need to ask me how to pray. You know all this already.” Knowing what to say isn’t really the issue. The problems we have in prayer are rarely about techniques, they are about our image of the God we are praying to, and our relationship with that God.

Prayer, put simply, is just us as we are meeting God as God is. But who are we, and who is God, and what sort of relationship is it?

So Jesus goes on to use images of relationships which are meant to be  close and loving to help us think about our attitudes to prayer and the God we pray to – images of friendship and family. The man who comes at midnight to ask for bread isn’t knocking on the door of a total stranger. We could understand the homeowner’s reluctance if he was. And if he kept on badgering him as he does in the story, the homeowner would have probably called the police if it happened today. But these two men are supposed to be friends; that’s what makes the homeowner’s reaction so puzzling. If we feel we have to batter the door down to get a friend to help us, we might wonder whether that friendship is worth having.

The story is meant to be ridiculous. It’s meant to take us by surprise. We know this isn’t the way friendship is supposed to work, and yet, Jesus is saying, isn’t this sometimes the way we think about our relationship with God, that we have to wear him down with prayers, twist his arm to get what we want?  In the same way, we might rightly be suspicious about accepting food from someone we didn’t know – how do we know it’s safe to eat? – but a child should be able to trust that their parents won’t give them a stone instead of an egg, a scorpion instead of fish, and yet, do we think God wants us to be safe and happy, or do we sometimes think he’s trying to catch us out and punish us? 

Jesus asks his disciples to think about what’s going on in their hearts and minds as they come to God in prayer, and he asks us the same. Get that right and it doesn’t matter what words we use, or whether we use words at all – companionable silence is fine with those we’re close to. 

Prayer is us as we are, meeting God as God is. Understanding it is simple; it’s doing it that can be complicated and costly. First, it means knowing ourselves – being aware of who we are as we come to God, the things we are trying to hide, the burdens we bear, the things we really want to say, rather than the things we think we ought to say – it’s ok to shout at God. Read the Psalms and you’ll find he is quite used to it…

But it also means knowing who God is, or at least what our image of God is. And we all do have an image of God – we can’t help it. Even if you don’t believe in God, you will have in your mind some image of the God you don’t believe in, and maybe I wouldn’t believe in that image either…

Those images of God are shaped in many ways – by our families of origin, our schools and churches, through films or art. Whether we like it or not, they inevitably creep into our prayer life, affecting our ability to pray, so we need to be conscious of them, to ask ourselves why we think of God that way, and whether they are helpful images. Do we think God is the kind of friend who would turn us away if we came to him in desperation at midnight? Do we think of him as a fickle and demanding parent, who just might give us a stone or a scorpion instead of good, nourishing food? Or dare we believe, as Jesus did, that God is faithful, and loving, delighting in us, and wanting us to delight in him, even if life isn’t always easy or painless?

“Lord, teach us to pray”, ask the disciples, but Jesus knows that it’s not new techniques they need, not a big thick book of words, or some secret ritual. It’s their relationship with God which is the key to their prayers, what they believe about the person into whose presence they are coming.

Perhaps you think of yourself as a praying person. Perhaps you don’t. But maybe this week we could all take some time to ask ourselves the questions these stories ask. Who is God to me? And why? And what might happen if God and I simply sat down together for a while, or went for a walk in each other’s company - no agendas, no expectations, maybe not even any words; just us as we are, meeting God as God is?

Amen

 

Who is my neighbour?

Colossians 1.1-14, Luke 10.25-37

The Good Samaritan Window
St Mary, West Malling

A lawyer – a religious expert – comes to Jesus, full of questions.  “What must I do to inherit eternal life?”  he begins. I’ll come back to that opening question later, so tuck it away in your mind somewhere. “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” 

Jesus answers his question with another question “What does the law say?” “Love God and love your neighbour” says the lawyer. Perhaps he’s a little insulted – everyone knew that summary of the law – so he goes on quickly, trying to regain the upper hand in this discussion. “But who is my neighbour?” 

In response, Jesus tells a story, one of the most famous stories in the New Testament. It’s even featured in one of our stained-glass windows here at St Mary’s. It’s so familiar, though that the danger is it goes in one ear and out of the other. We know what it’s telling us, don’t we. Be kind and helpful, even to those who are different from you…  That’s obvious, isn’t it?

Well, there’s nothing wrong with that message, of course, but I’m not so sure it’s the message of this particular story. To explain what I mean, let me ask a question. Whose perspective is this story told from? Through whose eyes are we seeing what happens? 

The answer is that it’s told from the perspective of the unfortunate man who has been beaten up and left for dead. We’re not told anything except what he could have seen and experienced and known as the events unfold. 

The story doesn’t tell us, for example, why the priest and the Levite pass him by without helping - because the injured man had no way of knowing that either as he lay there watching them disappear into the distance. 

Their behaviour is often explained by saying that they were going to the Temple to serve there. They were in a hurry to get to their important jobs or didn’t want to make themselves ritually unclean and unable to serve because they’d touched a dead body. Actually, that’s very unlikely, because the story says they were coming “down” the road, and that means they must have been travelling away from Jerusalem, not towards it, because Jerusalem is up in the hills, and Jericho below sea level. I’ve been on that road, and it’s one long descent.

But now I’m doing it, aren’t I, centring the priest and the Levite through my speculations. It is so easy to do. We want to give them a back story, to understand, maybe excuse them, perhaps because we know we pass people by on the other side too. But I am sure it’s deliberate that we aren’t told their back stories, because the injured man wouldn’t have known those back stories either. All he knows is that he sees someone coming who could help, who should help – not least because he is a fellow Jew - but doesn’t. And then he sees another man who could and should help, but he doesn’t either. 

But then, when all hope seems to be lost, along comes a Samaritan.  Again, we are tempted to put him centre-stage. We even call this story “The Good Samaritan” though Jesus doesn’t give it a title and neither does Luke. But actually, we’re told very little about him, and again, nothing the injured man couldn’t have known, simply the fact that he is from the despised nation of Samaria, whose people the Jews saw as heretics and enemies. We don’t know why he stops, any more than we knew why the priest and Levite don’t. We don’t know what his motivation is, because the injured man doesn’t know it either. All he knows is that this very unlikely person has given him the help he needed. 

Why does this story work so hard to keep bringing us back to the injured man, despite our desire to wander off with the other characters?  It’s because he is the one we are supposed to identify with. We might want to identify with the Samaritan. We might hope we’d act like him. We might fear that often we’re more like the priest or the Levite, and identify with them through guilt. But they aren’t supposed to be the centre of this story.  

Its central question isn’t “who do we help? It’s “who are we be willing to be helped by?” We’re meant to be asking ourselves what we would feel like if we were vulnerable, helpless, hurting.

Most people, in my experience, find it a great deal easier to give help than to receive it. It can feel humiliating to need help, especially if the helper is someone you don’t get on with. If we have to fall flat on our faces, I’m sure there are people we’d rather weren’t around to see it. But like this injured man, we may not have a choice. 

And that brings me back to that opening question, which I asked you to tuck away and remember. “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” the lawyer asked Jesus. “What must I do?” This is a man who is used to being in control, having power and using it – doing things. He’s used to providing for himself through his own efforts. Eternal life, to him, seems to be just another thing that he can and should get for himself, if he does the right things, prays the right prayers, performs the right rituals, lives in the right way. 

Jesus turns his thinking upside down, though, by inviting him to identify with the helpless, injured man who is really at the centre of this story. This could be you, he is saying. It could be any of us. Frailty, pain, loss are part of being human. Whether it’s a mugging on the Jericho Road or some other disaster that befalls us, none of us gets through life without needing help at some point ; it’s not our fault, nothing to reproach ourselves about. That can be hard to acknowledge, because we like to feel that we are in control, but it’s true. This lawyer strikes me as someone who might struggle accept help, and who might especially not want to accept help from Jesus. A carpenter from Nazareth? Who does he think he is to be claiming to speak with the authority of God? 

In John’s Gospel Jesus is actually accused of being a Samaritan – either that or that he is demon-possessed, the crowd says – the one is as bad as the other to them. Either way, it shows how hard it was for many people to accept that he might have something to say that was worth hearing, and it casts this story in an interesting light. 

This is not a story about how we should help others, though of course we should. It is, primarily, a story about our need of help, and the importance of being open to it, however it comes to us. That might be in the small acts of kindness which we are tempted to rebuff because we want to go it alone and are too proud to accept help. But ultimately, it is surely also a story about the grace of God, that unearned and unearnable, gift which “rescues us from the power of darkness” and brings us to a safe lodging where all our hurts can be healed. Amen