Lent 2026

In the Kent Downs and Malling Benefice this year we are following a theme of healing through Lent *,  in sermons and in our various Lent study and reflection opportunities. 

I have put together a little booklet, as I did last year, which aims to help people engage with the Gospel reading (mostly - Mothering Sunday will look at the Epistle instead) for the coming Sunday. 

You can download the booklet here.

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*Because we are following a special theme we aren't using the standard set readings from the Church of England lectionary, in case you have wandered in from another benefice and are puzzled!

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

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Advent 3: The desert rejoices

 Isaiah 35.1-10, Matthew 11.2-11

“The wilderness and the dry land shall be glad. The desert shall rejoice and blossom,” said Isaiah in our Old Testament Reading. 

Deserts do sometimes blossom, exactly as he describes. Flower seeds that have lain dormant in the dry dusty ground, sometimes for years, suddenly spring up and flower and set seed, all in a few weeks after a sudden rainstorm drenches them. It is a wonderful spectacle, and to ancient people it must have seemed like a miracle. How could so much life be hidden in such an apparently dead landscape? 

Stories of the saints often featured miraculous flowering too. Flowers were said to spring up in the footsteps of the Irish Saint Brigid, for example. According to legend Joseph of Arimathea came to Glastonbury after the resurrection and was said to have stuck his wooden staff into the ground where it promptly burst into bloom.  I did much of my training for ministry based in the church in Glastonbury, and there are ancient varieties of hawthorn growing in the churchyard there which bloom in the winter. A sprig of those “holy thorn” trees is sent to grace the Royal Family’s Christmas dinner table to this day. 

The springs and wells which fed this unexpected flowering often litter the stories of saints too. Wells often spring up where saints are martyred, according to legends, and we find stories in the Bible too, like that of Moses, who struck a rock in the desert, as God commanded, and water poured from it. In Jewish legend, a well of water appeared wherever Miriam, Moses big sister, camped during the Exodus. The legend arose because when she died, the book of Numbers said that “the people had no water”. (Numbers 20.2)

Whether we put any credence in these stories or not, the message is obvious. There are times when we are confronted with situations that seem lifeless, hopeless, but what you see is not necessarily what you get. There is more to life than meets the eye. God can be at work even when we don’t see him. We can flourish and bear fruit in the most arid and unlikely situations, and the reason for that is that it isn’t down to us. It is the work of God, who is as much at home in a desert as he is in a fertile pasture.

In our Old Testament reading today, that’s what’s promised. The people of Israel are in exile in Babylon, and have been for many decades, long past the point where hope of return seemed sensible. And yet, says Isaiah, God would lead them home, and not only that, as they travel together with him, flowers would spring up in their path, pools of water would appear. It would be a journey full of hope for the future.  

In the Gospel reading Jesus doesn’t promise flowers in the desert in the future. He points to miraculous flowers that are appearing there and then. John the Baptist has been arrested by King Herod, and he knows he isn’t likely to get out of prison alive.  Has it all been worth it? Does his sacrifice mean anything? It’s easy to see how he might question himself, facing a squalid and terrible end, and want to know that his suffering hadn’t been in vain, so he sends messengers to Jesus. 

Jesus’ response is tender, consoling, but very, very definite. “Go and tell John what you hear and see; the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised and the poor have good news brought to them”. It’s almost as if each of these things is a flower from the desert, a miraculous bloom, which he is sending to John. “See! Here is God at work! Nothing you did, nothing that will happen to you is a waste, because love is never wasted.” 

All of us need to hear that at some point in our lives. We look back and wonder what we have achieved, what good we have done, what we will be remembered for. What is there to show for our lives? We look forward and wonder how we will cope with the future, how we will cross the trackless deserts that might confront us – illness, aging, the uncertainties that we all face. Most of us are not called to the sacrificial life of John the Baptist, but we are all called to share in God’s work of bringing healing to the sick, good news to the poor. We are all called to look for God at work and join in, to be part of a community of hope. 

God says to us “look! I have been at work, here, and here, and here, in the love you have given and received, and if I have been there in the past, why shouldn’t I be there in the future to bless and enrich you? It’s not about you, and your strength – you of the feeble knees and the fearful hearts – it is about me, the limitless creator of the universe. I spoke the light into being with a word. Flowers in the desert? Water in the wilderness?  Hope in despair? Love out of bitterness? Life out of death? Why should they be impossible for me? Watch, wait, and rejoice!”  

Amen