Whose image is this?

 18/10/26          All Saints         Trinity 19              1Thessalonians 1:1-10           Matthew 22:15-22

Jesus said to them, ‘Whose image is this, and whose title?’  The pharisees answered, ‘The emperor’s.’ Then he said to them, ‘Give therefore to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s.’ 

In a couple of minutes we are going to think about our gospel reading - what the situation meant to Jesus and what it means to us, but first we will take a brief excursion into an everyday story of 19th Century country folk - Pride & Prejudice. If you haven’t read it I’m not going to give away the ending. If you haven’t read it the real spoiler is that I’m going to talk seriously about it and that gives a wholly false impression. It’s very funny. 

The story is seen through the eyes of Elizabeth Bennett and concerns her meetings with the rich and handsome Mr Darcy.  Darcy and Elizabeth belong to very different social classes - something of which he is keenly aware. When they first meet he is at his most arrogant, pompous and aloof and displays a level of entitlement that she finds both infuriating and laughable. That is to say - she takes against him - so when beyond all her expectations and for reasons she utterly fails to understand (but are perfectly obvious to us readers) he falls for her and proposes she gives him short shrift - something he finds hard to credit - how could she in her position spurn his offer. 

Now her first impression is true all the faults she sees in Darcy are really there.

But though Elizabeth’s first impression is true it is not the whole story. 

Everything begins to change for her when on a visit to Derbyshire with her uncle and aunt she, believing him to be in London,  visits his house - it’s of a scale that expects passing visitors to drop in and admire and there Elizabeth meets the staff that look after the running of the place- people who have known Darcy all his life and they show her a side of him which is kind and compassionate with a strong concern for the welfare of others - they know him to be a good man.. Elizabeth Bennett’s first impression is true but now she has a more rounded picture.

We’ll come back to Pride and Prejudice in a moment. 

What is our impression of God?

The Old Testament presents a picture of a God who is compassionate but only approachable on his own terms.

So at one point as he is leading the Hebrews through the wilderness in search of the promised land Moses asks God if he can see him. 

‘And the Lord said, “I will cause all my goodness to pass in front of you, and I will proclaim my name, the Lord, in your presence. I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion. But,” he said, “you cannot see my face, for no one may see me and live.’’’                                                                     

What is God like? Is this our image of Him? Of a distant and aloof majesty who is far beyond our understanding?

 If that is the impression we gain from the OT we are right - we cannot possibly comprehend the fullness of God. It’s true, but it isn’t the whole truth. 

In a moment we are going to look at our gospel and the picture we will get there of what God is like is very different from what Moses saw. Jesus - God incarnate doesn’t dilute our understanding of God’s glory, he expands it. The Son who is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation did not come to reduce our idea of the majesty of God, he enriches it by showing us how well it fits into the human and so reveals the rather unlikely way we can play our part in the building of the kingdom of God here on earth.

In Pride and Prejudice Elizabeth Bennett’s first impression of Darcy is given depth when she visits his home. And it’s when God comes to our home that we see him most clearly.

And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.

It’s when we see Jesus that we get a new level of understanding of who God is, of what God is like. In Jesus we see God close, intimate, calling us friends. We see him vulnerable wanting company, companions co-workers who will travel with him as far as they are able. We see Jesus compassionate, patient, painstaking, we see him declaring the love of God for his creation despite all its sin and corruption, declaring his commitment to humanity despite the the personal cost, expressing in everything he does that God does not give up on people. We see that in a way we can understand because it’s God at ground level

The way God reveals himself in the Old Testament is true, but we get closer to him when we look at Jesus.

Let’s go on to look at the Matthew reading. This is very much God in the rough and tumble of life. The Pharisees set a trap for Jesus ‘Is it lawful to pay taxes to the Emperor’ That is ‘Do you accept that we are Rome’s subjects and they have the right to levy tax?’ 

In a News interview a standard ploy is to ask an apparently simple question when the interviewer knows that giving a simple answer will alienate half the listening audience. That’s what the Pharisees are inviting Jesus to do.

But he avoids their snare. He takes a coin - who’s image does this coin bear? Caesar’s. Then give it to him and give to God the things that are God’s. 

Why is this such a good answer? Well what or who bears God’s image? 

Jesus himself does ‘The Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation’ If you want to know what God is like says Paul look at Jesus  He bears the true reliable image of the Father. 

And when in the gospels we see the compassionate vulnerable loving Jesus giving everything of himself to those around him then this is him giving the coin that bears the God’s image back to his Father 

But he is not the only one who is the image bearer Let us make humanity in our image, in our likeness, Who else bears God’s image? We do.

 The Pharisee’s coin bore Caesar’s image so give it to Caesar but people bear God’s so give yourselves to him.

 We know what that meant for Jesus - what does it mean for us.

How can we look like the image of God that Jesus shows us.

When Paul wrote to the Thessalonians he was delighted by the way they were answering the question.

We always give thanks to God for all of you and mention you in our prayers, constantly remembering before our God and Father your work of faith and labor of love and steadfastness of hope in our Lord Jesus Christ.

They were a church marked by faith, love, hope in Jesus - the detail of what that means will be different for every church -  21st century Southport will look very different from 1st century Thessalonika - and the detail will be different for every church member - we are a body and we all have different gifts - each of which is needed.  

It’s easy to think that faith love and hope are just there - we either have them or we don’t - that’s not Paul’s view. Look at the words he chooses.

‘Work’ ‘labour’ ‘steadfastness’ - none of these are words of ease - sometimes faith love hope may come easily but often it has to be a deliberate choice. The image of God we see in Christ is unflinching in faith love and hope. And we are to become imitators of the apostles and of the Lord,’ How did God - Jesus - behave when he came to our home? With compassion and  patience, he set his face to what is good, wholesome and true, He came as the servant king 

How to be the church? We are to imitate him - as individuals and as a church - together as the company of Christ in this place - extraordinarily we are those he sees as colleagues, fellow workers, friends - the  people he wants to be with.

And it’s as we build the church that the two images of God come together 

The picture of God Paul paints can seem a long way from the glories that Moses saw but Moses is the distance shot whilst Paul is the close-up. What we are building by our work of faith, labour of love, steadfastness of hope is a holy temple built to be inhabited by the Glory of God.

Matthew 15: Jesus and the Canaanite woman

 16th August 2026                                       All Saints  Southport                                          Holy Communion

Matthew 15: 10-28                                                                                            Romans 11:1-2a, 29-32

Eleven days ago I took the mid week communion service and by a quirk of the lectionary that Wednesday and this Sunday have the same gospel reading so if you were at the midweek communion ten days ago I’m afraid you will already have heard most of this sermon - if you are in that rather limited group  my apologies.

The last part of our reading where Jesus is speaking to the Canaanite woman is a passage I’ve never much liked and so have always tended to skip over. Jesus seems so abrupt with the woman, so apparently uncaring, so unlike the him we see elsewhere in the gospels. 

I don’t buy the suggestion - which I have heard - that he was testing her faith, and that what seems so hurtful on the page was actually said with a twinkle in his eye. 

If your child is so tormented that you are prepared to go into the midst of a people who despise you, because the person who is at the centre of that crowd just might be the one person who can help her, if you are courageous enough to do this,  what sterner test of your faith do you need. What good would a further humiliation do for you?

When I looked again at the passage it struck me what the problem was. Simply put I was never intended to hear this. Matthew was not writing for me. 

I read this as a 21st Century Christian Gentile. Matthew was writing 2000 years ago for his Jewish contemporaries.

What did he want to say to his readers?

Why did he think this particular healing was worth recording?

And what might he be saying to us?

A little context - two earlier sections in the chapter have been about Jesus dealing with the misuse of Jewish law and how the scribes and Pharisees have found ways of  weasling  round it - so if you say your money is given over to God it means you are let off the commandment to honour your parents and  as we heard in the reading  - people concentrated on the purity of their diet much more than  the purity of their heart. It’s very human to try and bend rules to our own best interest, we will recognise it in ourselves. This world of the law would have been very familiar to Jesus. He grew up in it and he knew how misleading it could be. 

When we come to the story of the Canaanite woman Jesus and his disciples have moved out of the Jewish heartland and are being  assailed by an intensely irritating and demanding Gentile woman who wants Jesus to heal her daughter. She is inconvenient in every possible way and  the disciples want Jesus to get rid of her and Matthew makes it clear to us in the way he reports the meeting that she is absolutely the last person that the religious authorities would imagine that God’s prophet, let alone the Messiah, should have anything to do with. It’s obvious Jesus should tell her to go away and leave him alone - but he doesn’t. 

‘Jesus answered her, ‘Woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish.’ And her daughter was healed instantly.’

Matthew shows Jesus redefining what it means to live by the law 1) Don’t try and wriggle round the plain commandments, 2) don’t use dietary purity as a substitute for a clean heart - those were theological arguments but here - more controversially - Jesus breaks a behavioural code 3) He does not accept the boundaries that have been set up to deny this woman and her child the grace of God, and so though she seems utterly unsuitable to the disciples this is what this woman and her child are given. He is saying to the disciples, ‘you are not the gatekeeper’s of God’s grace.’ It’s a very easy trap to fall into - someone is not our kind of person - we judge them - we persuade ourselves that God will feel just the same as we do. Thankfully God doesn’t. 

Jesus declared that the way the Jewish authorities were dealing with the law concealed God’s intentions for his people rather than illuminating them.

The Pharisees and scribes saw the fundamental purpose of the law as preventing wrongdoing.

Whilst Jesus saw it as more than that.

Listen again to Jesus summary of the law - 

 The first commandment is this:

‘Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is the only Lord.

You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart,

with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength.’

The second is this: ‘Love your neighbour as yourself.’

There is no other commandment greater than these.

On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.

Jesus sees the fundamental purpose of the law as promoting what is good, illuminating the purposes of God.

And this is what I think Matthew would have wanted us to take from this passage

These two great commandments are good in themselves, but what happens if we keep them? 

A couple of weeks ago Pete Spiers preached and said the heart of Jesus ministry and preaching was the kingdom of God and I think he was right

What happens when a group of people take these commandments seriously? 

They begin to look a little bit like the kingdom of God - how we behave says a great deal about what we believe God is like and these two commandments can be our approach to ordinary life.

The trouble with some hymns, some images of heaven is that they are not ordinary enough - think of those things that give us our simplest deepest truest pleasures, those times when we are most aware of being close to God’s grace - often it won’t be in a service but in the goodness of the everyday when it is working in line with the two commandments  

 I remember being surprised by how enthusiastic the psalmists are about the law in general - something I thought narrow and dour -until one day the penny dropped  - the psalmists knew the law ws not to exclude them - on the contrary it was God reaching out to them in welcome, God explaining to them the etiquette of his Kingdom 

So in our passage we see Jesus explaining and demonstrating the law so it is fit for the life we are supposed to be living. For us learning what it means for us will be a lifetime project, but Matthew has given us a direction of travel, and our communion service gives us food for the journey.

Οn the road to Emmaus

 19/4/26                          1 Peter 1:17-23                             Luke 24:13-35                             Easter 3

Normally when I read this passage the question that niggles at me is how did Cleopas and Mrs Cleopas (perhaps) not realise it was Jesus they were talking to? It’s a mystery and a lot of the substance of the passage is about grappling with mystery - the mystery of the incarnation, the mystery of the crucifixion, the mystery of the resurrection - and looking forward to the mystery of the ascension - the mystery of God’s nature.

At the beginning of his confessions St Augustine is overwhelmed as he tries to describe God

Then what are you, my God? What are you, I ask, except God, the Master? Who is a master except - the Master? Or who is a god except our God? The highest, the most excellent, the most powerful, all-powerful beyond all-powerful, most merciful and most just, most remote and most present, most beautiful and most powerful, unmoving but ungraspable, unchangeable but changing everything, never new, never old but making all things new...You are always active and always at rest, gathering in but not in need, carrying and filling and protecting, creating and nurturing and bringing to fulfilment, searching though you lack nothing….he continues. In the hierarchy of things beyond our understanding the Cleopas problem is quite small beer.

So let’s look at what is happening in the reading. We’re going to follow the Cleopases on the way  to Emmaus on the first Easter Day - a seven mile journey - about as far as St Peter’s is from Burscough - and eavesdrop as much as we can. All we know about them is what we’ve just heard - they’re followers of Jesus, probably not of his inner circle - but nonetheless they are people who had heard him preach and have seen him deal with pressing crowds, with intractable illnesses, with aggressive questioning and because of what they know of him  they have trusted themselves to him. So despite the crucifixion they still hold he ‘was a prophet mighty in deed and word before God and all the people.’ but how then has it gone so badly wrong. 

From the passage it sounds as though after Good Friday a core of those who loved Jesus had gathered together to give each other support - what do we do now? - They couldn’t unknow what Jesus had taught them but neither could they make sense of it without him. 

So Saturday had been dreadful, but on that Sunday morning into that confused grief-stricken company news had come. ‘Some women of our group astounded us. They were at the tomb early this morning, and when they did not find his body there, they came back and told us that they had indeed seen a vision of angels who said that he was alive. Some of those who were with us went to the tomb and found it just as the women had said; but they did not see him.’  

Of course, we know what comes next in the story but none of Jesus’s followers did. For them everything was still up for grabs. The Cleopas’s haven’t seen Jesus, if Jesus has somehow survived - hooray - but what does it mean. ‘People we trust have told us something extraordinary,  something hard to believe something impossible to understand.’

 They have no idea what is going on. Which is why even though this is the the first Easter day and you might have expected them to be cheerful they’re not. It’s why ‘when Jesus asks them ‘What are you discussing with each other while you walk along?” They stood still, looking sad.’

Now we can eavesdrop “Oh, how foolish you are, and how slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have declared! Was it not necessary that the Messiah should suffer these things and then enter into his glory?” beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them the things about himself in all the scriptures. I have always thought it would be wonderful to have heard this. Jesus taking the Old testament prophecies, and explaining them.

It only occurred to me as I prepared this sermon that perhaps we do have hints. Luke’s gospel begins by telling his readers he has taken a great deal of trouble to check with eyewitnesses, and the most reliable people he could find that his account was as accurate as possible and in his first few chapters there are explanations of how OT prophecies point to Jesus.

Mary’s magnificat, Zechariah’s prophecy, Simeon’s  Nunc dimittis ‘for my eyes have seen your salvation, which you have prepared in the presence of all peoples, a light for revelation to the Gentiles   and for glory to your people Israel.’Then Simeon blessed them and said to his mother Mary, ‘This child is destined for the falling and the rising of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be opposed so that the inner thoughts of many will be revealed—and a sword will pierce your own soul too.’

Jesus took words and ideas they knew intimately and reworked them. From now on they wouldn’t go to scripture to work out what the Messiah would look like they would go to Jesus and then see what the scripture looked like when lived out in flesh and blood. 

If we had been just a little behind them on the Emmaus road we would have seen  Mr and Mrs Cleopas transformed from the gloomy ‘Are you the only stranger in Jerusalem who does not know the things that have taken place there in these days?’ to renewed hope as the stranger spoke to them, ‘Were not our hearts burning within us while he was talking to us on the road, while he was opening the scriptures to us?’ We would have seen the spring come back into their step. 

But the penny didn’t finally drop till at the meal table he took the bread and blessed it. Then their eyes were opened ‘and they recognised him; and he vanished from their sight.  The unhappy confusion they had been left with that morning had been blown away. 

Jesus showed them that what happened to him had been the only way to bring about not just Israel’s redemption but ours too. Resurrection is the.  introduction of a Kingdom that starts by changing our hearts. Confusion became wonder. God in Jesus had gone far beyond anything they expected so That same hour they got up and returned to Jerusalem; and they found the eleven and their companions gathered together. Then they told what had happened on the road, and how he had been made known to them in the breaking of the bread.

The important mystery this passage addresses is not why they they didn’t recognise him, it’s what Jesus resurrection means for us.

It isn’t just about one man miraculously cheating death. Jesus’s appearances aren’t just the demonstration of a successful escape act ‘Look the grave couldn’t hold me.’ Jesus had to explain God’s plan to to them before the Cleopases could know him 

The resurrected Jesus is our first sight of God’s pattern for all his people. The Jesus the Cleopases meet on the Emmaus road is God’s new order in flesh and blood - this new resurrection life is his promise to us. 

Resurrection and Ascension are the other side of the Nativity coin. At Christmas Jesus is born and all of God inhabits human form - now Jesus is raised and will ascend to God, and when he goes back to the father he doesn’t shrug off his humanity like an old set of clothes, he takes his full human identity with him ‘Do not let your hearts be troubled. Believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father’s house there are many dwelling-places. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, so that where I am, there you may be also.’  Jesus ascended is our man in heaven.

There is no escaping the mystery of our faith - God must be beyond our understanding, but in Jesus, his birth, his life, his death, his resurrection we discover that though God is beyond our understanding, he is not beyond our knowing and we are not beyond his loving and in that is our comfort, consolation and hope.   

Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote, ‘For I greet him the days I meet him, and bless when I understand.’ We don’t need to understand the hows of God’s actions to receive his grace.

Fruitfulness at work

 18/1/26                  St Peter’s                                    Epiphany 2     

 Colossians 3:12-17                                                 John 1:29-42

The section of the Fruitfulness course we’ve come to this morning is ‘Making Good Work’. The author reminds us that work is part of creation, it’s part of who we are, and  although we live in a frustrating and fallen world and this affects everything we are involved in, we still can work in a way that brings glory to God.

That is true even for those of us who are no longer in paid employment. In our Gospel reading we see Jesus beginning to call his disciples - follow me - get to know me - learn from me - there’s no sense here or anywhere in scripture that this is a call that comes with a retirement age.

But what is our work - how are we to bring glory to God? In John’s gospel glory often means seeing the truth about who Jesus is. Our work then is to show as much of the truth about Jesus as we can by the way we live, it is to point to Jesus - it’s to show something of what the kingdom on earth looks like. 

This is not an easy work - Dorothy Sayers wrote ‘God underwent three great humiliations in his efforts to rescue the human race. The first was the incarnation, when he took on the confines of a human body. The second was the Cross, when he suffered the ignominy of public execution. The third humiliation is the church. In an awesome act of self-denial, God entrusted his reputation to ordinary people.’

And of course sometimes the church, made up of ordinary people, gets things disastrously wrong.

One of my first clergy jobs was as Chaplain to Birmingham Markets - based at St. Martin’s in the Bullring. Every year the Trader’s had a conference in Blackpool - and because it was quite unusual for a market to have a chaplain they used to take me along as a kind of mascot. One year I was chatting to someone who was very friendly who said he could never contemplate believing in God - he’d been to a church school - and had been regularly severely beaten - he wasn’t alone in this, it was what the priests running the place did. And of course he was right not to believe in a Jesus of brutality - for Jesus to be portrayed in this way is identity theft - if he had believed in that Jesus he would have been believing in a false God. What he had seen was the opposite of grace and compassion.

People look at the church and what they see there shapes their understanding of the nature of God.

I’m sure that what that trader went through would now be illegal, but that’s no help to him recovering a true sense of God’s love and care for him

The Greek myth of Procrustes is about an inn keeper who insisted that his guests fitted into his bed exactly - if someone was too short he stretched them on the rack till they fitted, if they were too tall he lopped off the extra bits and so he acquired their belongings. It didn’t end well for Procrustes, the hero Theseus was too much for him. 

None of us think the intentions we set out with are bad or unreasonable, nobody intends to be the villain. I imagine that the school the trader went to thought it was doing the best for its pupils  - they had an idea of the proper shape for a good christian child and believed if they weren’t quite right they could be beaten until they were a better fit. A version of Procrustes bed.

Of course their methods were wrong but so was the end they had in view. Beware of the idea that our faith is one size fits all. God meets us all differently and the response of each of us to God will differ. How could it be otherwise? No friendships are exactly the same, no marriages are exactly the same, each of the disciples had an individual relationship with Jesus - this variety is part of the glory of our faith. God has made each of us as individuals with potential to grow into a unique element in the mosaic which is the people of God.   

When I was at university the Christian Union had a network of prayer groups for different Missionary Societies which all tended to be rather niche and rather small. The one I went to was for Wycliffe Bible translators and there were three of us - one cold, wet evening - it was in Manchester - I hadn’t had a particularly good day and I was late for the start and arrived feeling particularly flat. The other two had started but when I got in they stopped for a moment to welcome me in and for some reason, that evening it was transformative for me. A trivial incident but fifty years later - though I have forgotten some details and I bet my friends don’t remember it at all, for me it is still  a moment of grace. God’s grace meets us at our particular point of need and enables us to see him more clearly. It nourishes our growth into the people he intends us to be - and the more we become those people the greater  the possibility that those outside the church will see something of the actual truth about who Jesus is.    

 Making good work Our job description then is to live and work in such a way that God is glorified, that the truth of what he is like, his grace, can be seen and known.

How do we fulfil this as individuals and as a church.  We aren’t just given a job description, In Colossians we also get a dress code Of course, God’s clothing is bespoke so not only is the way we clothe ourselves in the virtues tailor made to us, so too it will fit the person on the receiving end. 

Paul writes ‘As God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, we have a high calling how can we live in a way appropriate to it

clothe yourselves with compassion, Compassion is a love that takes the initiative. It seeks to meet the need of another so they will thrive. How can we as a church put on compassion? 

kindness, what I received from my friends - how kind are we?

humility, does not mean  pretending to be rubbish, it means having a proper estimate of our own strengths and weaknesses. It means meeting others knowing they are as much the beloved creation of our Heavenly Father as we are.  

meekness, does not mean being a push over, it does mean listening to others and easing off on the assertiveness 

and patience. To quote the Psalm ‘Our times are in your hand’

As God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness and patience

But we are not perfect and it is difficult - we are all equally important but uniquely made. If the church is to show God’s glory each of the facets that we all bring needs to have its place. Easy to say hard to do. Difference makes makes occasional misunderstanding inevitable

Bear with one another and, if anyone has a complaint against another, forgive each other; just as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive. 

When the church is a community of forgiveness and reconciliation it is a powerful witness to what God is like. How can we make that an active part of church life.

Above all, clothe yourselves with love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony.  

And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in the one body. 

And be thankful. 

 If we take these things seriously it won’t guarantee those moments of grace when we know God has touched us, but they will mean that they happen more often - that understanding that so much more has gone on in a conversation, or a casual meeting that we can only account for it by God’s active presence.

The course calls us to live and work in a way that brings glory to God.And that is 

as much about the relationships we build as the projects we accomplish.

It won’t always feel like work; often living a godly life - enjoying what God has given us, exercising the gifts we have in a way that is constructive will mean doing what we find most satisfying. And so His glory is seen.

Paul's Farewell

 12/10/25                       2 Tim 2:8-15.      St Peter’s.  Luke 17:11-19

This morning we are going to spend most of our time with Timothy, and then have a brief look at the gospel.

This letter of Paul’s is particularly poignant. It’s the last of his writings that we have and we see him in it at his most human. He’s in prison and knows his time is short ‘As for me I am already being poured out as a libation, and the time for my departure is near. I have finished the race.’ It’s not unusual for Paul to mentions the people he knows in his letters, but this comes across as writing to a family friend - he knew Timothy’s mother and grandmother - he’s seen Timothy growing up - and above everything  now he wants to encourage Timothy in his faith, and give him the best possible advice he can for a future that he knows he will not see. In many ways what he says is very simple - he doesn’t give Timothy a new teaching but points him back to the basics.  ‘Timothy always remember what you know and rejoice in it.’

And that is what we are going to do this morning. We’re going to spend some time remembering so that we can give thanks. 

I’m going to introduce three areas Paul suggested to Timothy then we’ll keep a short silence for us to recall memories of our own and then give thanks for them

Timothy - Paul says - remember what you have seen in me - remember how I have lived, how I have given myself to Jesus’s service - I was brought up as a Quaker and at a Friend’s funeral  the suggestion is made to the mourners that we give thanks for the grace of God we have seen in the life of our departed friend. Now it’s very possible that there will be people we are grateful to - for how they have shown us something of Jesus in the way that they live, something they have said to us, that something of God in them has also drawn us closer to God. But we don’t need to wait till someone has died to give thanks for what we have seen of God’s grace  in their lives. Give thanks for the person. 

Remember Timothy the hope you have in Jesus, - For us too - remember Jesus living and dying for us, his companionship when things have been difficult - the moments of grace that have sometimes come when we have felt flat or hopeless or trapped - we may have let him down, but still he is there - ‘if we are faithless, he remains faithful for he cannot disown himself’ - the grace of knowing God walks with us his gift, but it doesn’t always come in a spiritual package- it can be a cup of tea when you’re at your wit’s end, an unexpected warmth of welcome.  Give thanks for the graces you have noticed 

Remember Timothy who you follow and the task you have been given - this we too need to remember - each of us are different, each of us is a different part of the body of Christ with a different role to play. What is our role? How do we play it? 

Jesus is our example - what does that practically mean for we who are not perfect. Rowan Williams suggests a guide, ‘What is in tune with the life of Christ? What opens, rather than closes, doors for God's healing, reconciling, forgiving, and creating work to go on? Even if we go on to make a mistake, we have not done it by shutting the door on God. We have done our best to leave room for God.’

 Give thanks for the task you have been given and the part you can play in the body of Christ.  

The people who have inspired us, the graces we have experienced, the tasks we have been given, the way we are Christian will be as individual as we are - this is what we are to remember - we are not called to be anybody else. The path Paul is pointing Timothy - and us  towards will lead him to the fulness of life that is our Christian hope

Now the the briefest of looks at Luke. Ten lepers all are healed, all are cleansed, but only one returns to give praise to God and it is this one - the outsider, the Samaritan - who is made well. What does this mean? All were all healed, all were cleansed but only this one was made well.

Sometimes I think we short change the gospel/good news when we simply focus on forgiveness, on cleansing - as though all that Jesus had come to do was to give us a get out of Jail free card. He came for  much more than that - Jesus came so that we would not simply be forgiven by God, he came that we might be reconciled to him, he came so that our relationship with his Father which was broken by our sin could be made good. Jesus doesn’t just want us forgiven - he wants our company;  he doesn’t just want that we should no longer be his enemy, he wants us as friends. 

This I think is what is happening in our gospel to the leper who came back - imagine the scene - he’s not coming back quietly - ‘Look look what God has done for me’ and he throws himself at Jesus feet. He is made well - perhaps this is what reconciliation looks like, perhaps this is what Paul wants Timothy to remember and perhaps this reconciliation, this making well, this loving companionship is what Jesus wants for us too