Trinity 3: Who counts?

 Trinity 3 2026

Gen 21.8-21, Matthew 10.24-39

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Amen

Trinity 1 . Learn what this means...

Trinity 1 2026 8 and 10am W Malling

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Amen 

Pentecost Sunday: Mother tongues

 Pentecost 2026 WM 8 and 10am

Acts 2.1-12, John 7.37- 39

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I will not leave you orphaned: Easter 6

 Easter 6 2026

Acts 17.22-31, John 14. 15-21

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Amen 

The gate for the sheep: Easter 4

 Easter 4 2026

John 10.1-10

“I am the gate for the sheep”, says Jesus. Gates and gatekeepers are very much the theme of the Gospel reading today, and that theme is just as relevant now as it was when the Gospel was written. Our news is full of debates about who belongs and who doesn’t - in our local communities, in our nation - and about who gets to decide that and on what grounds.

We are hardwired – like many other animals - to favour those who are like us, those who look or sound as if they are part of our tribe, and to be suspicious of those who don’t. It goes way back into our evolutionary history, but it can be very problematic. We don’t live in scattered kinship groups as our ancient ancestors did. We live in a complex interlinked world, where we need and are enriched by all sorts of people, and ideas, including those that are different from us. By the time we’ve had breakfast, our lives have touched and been touched by people on many continents. Our cup of tea – and what can be more English than that? – will probably have come from Kenya or India, our orange juice from Brazil. We are shaped by ideas that our ancestors might have thought foreign too. None of us would be sitting here in church, none of us would be calling ourselves Christians, if foreigners hadn’t, long ago, landed on these shores bringing news of a new faith, rooted in the life, death and resurrection of a man from the far-off, alien, Middle East. 

Yet we so often struggle to make real space for newcomers, not just tolerating them, but recognising them as people who come with gifts to share. That’s true on the small scale as well as the large. In friendship groups, in workplaces, in clubs and societies, in families, the incomer can struggle to be accepted, especially if they have the temerity to suggest some new way of doing things.   “Who do you think you are? This is our group. This is the way we’ve always done it…”

Gates and gatekeepers – they seem to be an inescapable feature of human life.  

And that brings me back to the Gospel where we find Jesus talking about gates and gatekeepers too, but who is he talking to? “Very truly I say to you”, he begins, but who are the “you” and what’s been happening to prompt his words?

If we look back at the chapter before this, Jesus is in Jerusalem, somewhere near the Temple – he’d actually just been chased out of the Temple by stone-throwing mob who were offended by the message he was preaching. As he’s walking along, he comes across a man who had been born blind, and he heals him. He spits on some mud, smears it on the man’s eyes and sends him off to wash, at which point the man discovers he can see, for the first time ever – hallelujah! Cue the general rejoicing, or so you might think. But, to cut a long story short, it doesn’t turn out that way. The onlookers, this man’s neighbours, don’t know what to make of it – they are very disturbed by what’s happened. They summon the Pharisees – religious experts - to come and give their opinion. Some people say he can’t be the same man as the blind beggar they’ve been walking past for years. The man’s parents are even summoned to bear witness to the fact that this is, in fact, their son. The man is asked to explain himself, but he can’t. All he knows is that someone called Jesus put mud on his eyes, told him to wash, and here he is, healed. What’s the problem with that? 

The problem is that the Pharisees have taken on the role of gatekeeper. They are the ones, they believe, who decide whether people are ‘in’ or ‘out’ of God’s favour, in or out of his family, and they are scandalised because  Jesus is not “one of them”. As far as they are concerned he is a sinner. He doesn’t interpret the Jewish law in the way they do. It doesn’t matter what he does, how self-evidently good it is, as far as they’re concerned it must be wrong, because he’s the one who is doing it.  

Eventually Jesus hears about the commotion, and comes to find out what’s going on. He rebukes the Pharisees. This man had been physically blind, he says, but their refusal to see God at work in their midst, to acknowledge this wonderful, blessed thing that had happened is a far worse sort of blindness. You can imagine how well that goes down.

They think of themselves as gatekeepers, protecting something vital, protecting the purity of their culture and religious tradition – maybe they even thought they were protecting God - but in reality their actions and attitudes are denying people – God’s beloved flock – the fulness of life God wants for them.  

Jesus talks of himself as the gate, and the shepherd who looks after that gate, but it’s not a gate that imprisons or restricts. It’s a gate which allows people through which people “come in and go out and find pasture,” somewhere which is safe so they can grow into people who have “life and have it abundantly”. 

That was the experience of the man he had healed. His blindness would have made it almost impossible for him to live anything like a normal life. Like many disabled people at the time, his only option to support himself was begging. It’s not just his eyes that are opened by his healing; it’s his whole life, his whole world, his potential, his place in his community. It’s all changed, and yet the Pharisees, and some of his own neighbours, seem to think it would have been better if things had stayed as they were for him. 

Today we are invited to look at ourselves, to look at the situations in which we may be tempted to “gatekeep”, to try to control and restrict other people’s access to God. Instead Jesus calls us to let him be the gate, and the gatekeeper, who can create a space that is far bigger than we imagine for a flock that is far bigger than we imagine, to “come in and go out and find pasture” so that they - and we - can live abundantly in the blessing God wants for us all.

Amen 

Questioning Thomas: Easter 2

 Easter 2 2026

There’s a great little feature in the Guardian each week called the Kids’ Quiz. It’s not a quiz for children, it’s a quiz by children. They set the quesitons – and very good questions they are too. 

Recently, Esther aged, 6, asked “how many lions are there in the world?”  Around 28000 is the answer, about a tenth of the number there were a century ago. Or Aariya, aged 7, asked why our little finger is sometimes called our pinkie finger. It turns out to be from an Old Dutch word, pink, which meant small. There is a complicated link between that and the colour pink – but you’ll have to ask me about that afterwards. 

I particularly loved a question from Rocco, aged 10, though. Why does water make clothes look darker, despite the fact that water has no colour? Good question, Rocco. The explanation, I learned from the quiz answers, is that the thin layer of water on top of wet clothes traps some of the light that would otherwise have bounced back to our eyes – it bounces around inside the layer of water instead. So, less light is reflected back to us which makes the clothes seem darker…

Children are great questioners. Of course they are, because the main job of a child is to learn and grow, and we can’t do that unless we are curious and prepared to ask questions. Perhaps I could have worked out why wet clothes are darker than dry ones, or googled it, or asked my husband – there’s no point in being married to a retired physics teacher if you don’t tap him for this sort of knowledge – but the truth is that I had never thought to wonder, never thought to ask the question. 

Every year, on this Sunday after Easter, we hear the story of Thomas. He’s often called Doubting Thomas, but really it would be far more accurate, and far fairer, to call him Questioning Thomas. A man who isn’t content simply to go along with the crowd but needs to know things for himself, to ask his own questions, and make his own decisions.

We only meet him a few times in the Gospels, but when we do, this is the thing that stands out about him. For example, at the Last Supper, Jesus speaks of his death and says he is going away “to prepare a place for you”, he tells the disciples that “you know the way to the place where I am going”. The rest of the disciples do that thing that we all do when we haven’t got a clue what someone is talking about but don’t want to look stupid. They nod politely, look blank, and keep quiet.

But not Thomas. He says, “Lord we don’t know where you are going, so how can we know the way?” It’s a perfectly sensible response. Your satnav won’t give you directions to Maidstone if you don’t tell it that Maidstone is where you want to go.  

And Jesus’ honours Thomas’ question – the only person who is honest enough to say “I don’t know!” . “I am the way, the truth and the life”, he says. That might not seem to make things much clearer, but it tells Thomas, and us, that it is Jesus himself who is the map. Following his way of life, a way of sacrificial, generous love, will take us where we need to go. 

And now, in today’s Gospel reading, here is Jesus honouring Thomas’ questioning nature again. Has Jesus really risen from the dead, Thomas wants to know? He isn’t simply going to believe it because the other disciples say so. That’s just groupthink.  He needs to know for himself. And Jesus honours that. He turns up for him, just for him. Thomas matters that much. His questions matter that much. 

Of course, as Jesus says, there will be others – including those for whom John is writing his Gospel, including us – who won’t get to see the risen Christ in the way that Thomas does, but this story tells us that it’s ok to question, in fact it’s vital to question. Otherwise our faith isn’t our faith, it’s just something we are borrowing from others, going along with because they do, or because it’s how we were brought up. 

I grew up going to church with my family, but my own Christian faith really came alive for the first time when a teacher at my school started a Christian club. I was about 10 or 11. One day the teacher read a passage from Isaiah – “Seek ye the Lord while he may be found. Call upon him while he is near”. And it hit me between the eyes – I was being called out on a great big God hunt – not in the sense that God was hiding, but in the sense that I was being called to discover him day by day, to open my eyes to his presence, to see him for myself.  Fifty-five years or so later, I’m still doing that, expecting God to surprise me. Where might I find God today, who might I see him in, what might I discover, how might I learn to love more and better? 

We thought about good questions earlier – why do wet clothes look darker than dry ones? – but I wonder what our questions about faith might be? They might be deeply personal, or they might be ones that we can share. They might be questions that can be answered in a sermon, or with a conversation with someone – I know all the clergy and lay ministry team here in our benefice would be happy to listen. Or they might be ones that lead us towards baptism, or confirmation, or some form of training or further study, or to join a home group where we can discuss faith with others. There are a number around the benefice, and more can be arranged!

Thomas’ story invites us to be aware of and honour our own questions, just as God honours them, to ask those questions – of ourselves, of others, of God - because each of us is called out on our own journey. And who knows where that journey might lead us? 

Thomas, according to legend, ended up travelling east with the Gospels, and is acclaimed by the people of South India as the one who brought the Good News to them.

We may not be called to make such a dramatic journey, but our journeys of faith are just as important, to us, to others, and to God, and they start with that gift of holy curiosity which Questioning Thomas shows us. 

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