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 

Trinity 1: Living in a terrifying world

Trinity 1 Proper 7  - Gal 3.28, Luke 8.26-39

As some of you may know, I have a patent method for getting my head around a Bible passage which I have developed over the years. I call it reading the Bible with our heads, our hearts and our hands. Reading the Bible with our hearts means asking what we feel about it, how it connects with our own lives and world. Reading it with our hands means thinking about what it might call us to do in response, but before any of that, we need to read the Bible with our heads, to notice the details – who’s involved?, where does it take place? when? and what happens? Good storytellers don’t waste words. And that’s certainly true of the Gospel writers. If they tell you something, it’s because they want you to know it. They think it’s important. 

Today’s Gospel story is a classic case of this, especially when it comes to the “who and where”. If we don’t get those, we may miss the meaning of the whole story. 

So – who? Who do we meet in this story?

First, of course, there are Jesus and his disciples. Then there’s this poor man, living among the tombs outside his city, clearly very distressed. He tells Jesus his name is “Legion”; we’ll come back to that later. Then there are the demons who possess him. Demons might seem rather alien to our way of thinking, but we need to go with the flow and accept them, because they are important characters in this story. Then there are the unfortunate swine, who end up at the bottom of the lake, and their indignant swineherds. Pigs were unclean animals to Jewish people, so what are they doing here? And finally, there are the townsfolk, the neighbours, friends, maybe family, of this man. We might expect them to be glad when he is healed, but instead they beg Jesus to go away. That’s not what usually happens when Jesus heals people. He is usually besieged by crowds bringing him every other sick Tom, Dick and Harry in the neighbourhood, so what’s going on?

To answer that, we need to know a bit about where this story is set.

We’re told it’s in the “country of the Gerasenes”, which is “opposite Galilee”, on the other side of the lake from the predominantly Jewish areas where Jesus had been born and usually ministered. The land he’s come to is sometimes called the Decapolis, literally the “ten cities”, Gentile settlements founded after Alexander the Great’s conquest 300 years earlier. That explains the pigs – Gentiles were quite happy eating them - but it would have surprised some of Jesus followers that he went there. Why should he care about these foreigners?

But there’s something else significant about the location of this story, something Luke’s first hearers would have known, even if we don’t. Northern Galilee and the Decapolis was where the Roman Army, the occupying force, garrisoned its troops. It was fertile land, and an army marches on its stomach. The Romans set up their camps in this area because there was food available - to buy, if the population were lucky, to seize by force if they weren’t. The pigs that ended up at the bottom of the lake may have been destined to be some Roman squaddie’s bacon butty. 

The presence of the army is hinted at in the name this man calls himself - “Legion”. A Legion was the name given to the largest unit of the Roman Army – around 6000 people – that was what that word meant to the people of Jesus’ time. It would be a bit like calling yourself “battalion” today. Luke isn’t just telling us that this man has many demons; he’s telling us what kind of demons they are, and why they are so terrifying to him.

No wonder the swineherds, and the local population, are so alarmed by the loss of those pigs. No wonder they just want Jesus to go away. What will happen if the bargain they’ve made with their oppressors – we feed you; you leave us alone – breaks down? 

Rome made its presence felt through brutal demonstrations of power; crucifixions, enslavement, bloodthirsty gladiatorial “games”, savage suppression of any hint of rebellion. This was the backdrop to everyone’s lives. It’s what this man who called himself Legion had grown up with. What might he have witnessed? What might he have been caught up in? We don’t know, but whatever it was, he’d have had good reason to be terrified out of his mind. There’s nothing insane about finding occupation, war and brutality unbearably distressing. Today we might say he had PTSD, but his description of an army that lives in his head, the Legion inside him, is just as valid and powerful a way of talking about it. 

And, of course, everyone around him is terrified too. They may have been able to push it down inside themselves. They may look as if they are coping, but when those pigs go off the cliff, it becomes obvious that their sense of security is only skin deep. 

This isn’t a story about one man’s mental health problems – something that’s gone wrong in his head. It asks all of us how we manage to live in a world that’s objectively and realistically often terrifying. Iran, Israel, Russia, Ukraine, starvation, climate chaos; pick your own catastrophe – there is no shortage. And that’s without considering the personal challenges each of us might face, the personal burdens we bear. We’re out of our depth from the day we are born, always at the mercy of forces beyond our control - disease, disaster or the deeply rooted hatreds that erupt into violence between nations. How do we live in a world like this without it destroying us?

Legion finds his answer in his meeting with Jesus. He acclaims him as “Son of the Most High God”. He realises that he’s in the presence of someone who is greater than the power of Rome, greater than the demons that possess him, and yet – and this is what really transforms him - Jesus believes that he matters, and treats him as if he matters, with dignity and care. He’s not even of the same faith and ethnic background as Jesus and yet he is loved. 

Jesus doesn’t promise him that nothing bad will happen to him. Jesus doesn’t promise to overthrow the Roman army. There were many who hoped he would, who were looking for a “strong man” leader; as people still do. But Jesus refuses to be that person because he knows that ultimately you can’t defeat hatred with military force, you can only defeat it with love. 

It is by loving this man that Jesus helps him discover the ultimate safety he really needs, and he sends him back into his fearful community so that they can find it too. It’s the same safety we all need; the awareness that we are known and loved, that we matter, whatever happens to us and around us. It’s the story Jesus’ life, death and resurrection tell us. The cruel force of Rome might crucify him, but the God of love is stronger, and holds the ultimate power. 

It’s not wrong to be terrified by what we see happening around us. It’s realistic, because life can be terrifying – but Christ calls us to look beyond and beneath what terrifies us to the greater reality of God’s love, the everlasting arms in which we, and all creation, are held. And if we can let that knowledge sink into us and transform us, then, just as it does with Legion, it might also spill out to others and make the world a little less terrifying for us all.  

Amen

Woven into God's heart: A sermon for Trinity Sunday, preached at St Mary's Church, Platt.

Trinity Sunday 2025 - A sermon for St Mary's, Platt

Romans 5.1-5, John 16.12-15

Christian faith started with experience - raw, dramatic experience; the experience of those who knew Jesus in the flesh and felt that in him they were meeting the God they already knew as Father and Creator; the experience of those who watched Jesus die, but later met him alive again; the experience of those who felt God’s presence on the Day of Pentecost, a presence they called the Holy Spirit. These experiences were utterly real – experiences always are, by definition. 

The problem with experience, though, is that it can be very hard to put into words.  “You had to be there!” we say of some extraordinary experience we’ve had.  It’s a bit like being in love. You know it when you feel it. It can change your life, set you on a completely different course. But try to describe it and you’ll probably be reduced to syrupy clichés that never really capture the unique relationship you’ve found with that person who is, to you, the most special person in the world.

That’s what the early Christians discovered when they tried to talk about the experiences they’d had. No matter how clever they were, they were never going to be able to sum it up in words – you had to have been there to know what they had known, to feel what they had felt.  

To add to that, they were trying to explain all this across barriers of language and culture.

The first Christians were Jewish by background and spoke Aramaic. But they took their faith out into a predominantly Greek speaking and Greek thinking world. Greek was the language of learning, of philosophy, the language you used when you wanted to talk or write about ideas. The Greek philosophers like Plato had laid the foundations of a world view which was very different from that of those who had grown up in Galilee and Judea. Their image of God was different. The God of Greek philosophy was distant and serene, perfect and unchangeable, with no personal interest in the doings of humans. The God of the Hebrew Scriptures – our Old Testament – was passionate, personal, sometimes seeming to change his mind, so in love with his people that he would do anything for them.

If God was an unchangeable, perfect, complete, serene being in a distant heaven, how could he be present in a carpenter from Galilee, thought the Greeks? How could he learn and grow as a child? How could he suffer and die? How could he move through the world inspiring and enthusing people? How could he be part of our messy reality at all?  And how were the experiences of God as Father, as Son and as Holy Spirit related to each other? What was happening to God the Father when God the Son was dying on the cross? Were they three different Gods, or three parts of one God, or something else completely…? Every attempt to answer these questions neatly seemed to tangle things up further. 

 

Theologians argued for centuries.  The arguments often became bitter and divisive, no more than tribalism. Ironically, and tragically, those divisions undermined the very thing the first Christians were trying to express when they talked about their experience of God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, the sense of wholeness, reconciliation and peace they’d found. 

The first disciples felt God come close to them in Jesus. “All that the Father has is mine” we hear in John’s Gospel, the same Gospel that begins by telling us that the “Word became flesh and dwelt among us”. Heaven had been born on earth, and earth was lifted to heaven.  “We have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ” Paul proclaimed in our second reading. The things that had made them feel cut off from God, whether that was the condemnation of others or their own sense of failure or unworthiness, were swept away. God was with them in Jesus, touching those who’d been told they were untouchable and unfit to enter God’s presence. “Look, here I am sitting down to eat with you,” said God in Jesus, “travelling the road with you, laughing and crying with you, sharing the good times and the bad, enduring the worst that human beings can do to one another.” And when Jesus ascended into heaven, they found that bond – that peace that passed their understanding – hadn’t left them, because God was present with them in his Spirit.

As they took that message out into the world, they discovered God was present with them in one another as well. They were drawn together across the divides of their society – remember all those languages they miraculously spoke on the Day of Pentecost. Jew and Gentile, men and women, slave and free were united in one body. They didn’t always get it right, but they tried to live as equals, a radical thing to do in their stratified and divided world, where great gulfs separated rich from poor and powerful from powerless. And they did so because they had discovered that being woven into the heart of God meant they were woven into each other’s hearts as well.

That was a compelling but challenging message then, and it’s just as compelling and challenging now. We live in a world that is deeply divided too. Where differences of outlook and perspective spiral into mutual suspicion and bitterness at the drop of a hat, where if people don’t look like us, act like us or think like us we all too easily see them as a threat. We watch the news and see things falling apart, nations falling apart, communities falling apart. Perhaps we feel that we are falling apart too torn apart by all the competing demands on us, the barrage of information coming at us. 

The idea of the Trinity wouldn’t have arisen unless people had felt there was something important about it – after all, you wouldn’t make it up. They wouldn’t have clung to it and wrestled with it unless they felt there was something in it they couldn’t let go of, something essential to Christian Faith. The tragedy was that they often lost sight of what that important thing was. It wasn’t about providing a litmus test for orthodoxy, a way of tripping up people you felt were heretics, a box to tick to decide who was friend and who was foe.  

The important thing about the idea of the Trinity is that it calls us back again and again to that glorious truth that at the heart of God is a loving relationship, which we are all of us, together, woven into.  

The astronaut Chris Hadfield was once asked what it felt like to go out on a spacewalk. You have to imagine him, floating in space, with Earth shining below him and the blackness of space beyond, as you hear his answer. He said  “It is the most magnificent experience, hanging onto all of humanity with one hand, between Earth’s riot and the bottomless universe.”

That says it for me. To believe in the Trinity is to believe in - and to follow - a God who holds all things, Earth’s riot and the bottomless universe, friends, strangers, enemies, all that has been and all that will be, the whole of me, the whole of you - and who loves it all. 

Amen