Passion Sunday sermon

 17/3/24.   (Passion Sunday)          St Peter’s Birkdale                Holy Communion

Jeremiah 31:31-34                                                John 12:20-33

Imagine yourself in Jerusalem at the time of the gospel. You are one of Jesus followers - not one of the inner circle, you don’t know Jesus especially well - not like the twelve who were always with him - you might only have talked to him a few times - one to one - but those times you’ve had his full attention have changed you, he’d seen the truth of who you are now, but that was OK because he also saw the truth of who you could become and in company with him that change no longer seemed impossible.

Something you heard Peter say once, ‘Who else could we follow, Lord? You are the one who has the words of life.’ And you can say yes to that - it’s what talking to him felt like. And you’ve seen his words of life in action,  you were there when he raised Lazarus from the dead - you still find it hard to believe your eyes. Not that it made Jesus popular with the religious authorities - he’d never been flavour of the month, but raising Lazarus turned  the heat up a notch.   

some went to the Pharisees and told them what Jesus had done. Then the chief priests and the Pharisees called a meeting of the Sanhedrin. “What are we accomplishing?” they asked. “Here is this man performing many signs. If we let him go on like this, everyone will believe in him, and then the Romans will come and take away both our temple and our nation.”

Caiaphas, who was high priest that year, spoke up, “You know nothing at all!  You do not realise that it is better for you that one man die for the people than that the whole nation perish.” So from that day on they plotted to take his life.

Therefore Jesus no longer moved about publicly among the people of Judea. Instead he withdrew to a region near the wilderness, to a village called Ephraim, where he stayed with his disciples.

The chief priests and the Pharisees had given orders that anyone who found out where Jesus was should report it so that they might arrest him.

Jesus was in danger - and he was dangerous to know - the closer he and his followers came to Jerusalem the tenser the atmosphere. If the disciples had said to Jesus, ‘When we celebrate Passover this year could you try and blend in’ - it would have been hard to blame them 

But that was never his way, even so when he started to make arrangements to ride in on a donkey  as publicly as possible in a way that unmistakably fulfilled prophecy,  their hearts must have sunk. As his follower your heart sinks too. There is danger and there is dancing in the dragon’s jaws. Is he going to drag you down with him. 

But … Jesus rides in, the crowds roar for him and then …. nothing happens.

The disciples must have been on a high ‘Coming in to Jerusalem like that wasn’t so crazy after all, He must have known this would get the people on his side, the temple authorities have had the wind taken out of their sails.’ Relief.

We know things that they didn’t know. We know Jesus has set his face on the path that will lead him to the cross, the disciples don’t. 

Inevitably we see everything from Palm Sunday onwards as Jesus’ end game- they didn’t. 

So when Philip and Andrew go to Jesus about some Greeks who want to see him it feels like getting back to normal. Until what Jesus says points in exactly the direction they had hoped to avoid.

First he says, “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified.’ In John’s gospel  talk of glory is talk about the utterly human Jesus displaying the utter fullness of God’s presence - Look at him, this is God in the flesh  - But then Jesus says , unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds. 

 It’s an image that’s easy to map Jesus’s future onto. Jesus, God the Son, is here to work the possibility of mercy into the fabric of human life and the only way that can happen is through his death. In purely human terms what did it cost him to walk this path for our reconciliation? At least as much as it would cost anyone else. The coldblooded courage he shows required just as much from him as it would from us. He had no exemption from fear and pain.

 But Jesus is talking about more than what is going to happen to him He is speaking of the pattern of life for his people ‘Whoever serves me must follow me, and where I am, there will my servant be also. Whoever serves me, the Father will honour’  What do these words mean for us?

As followers of Christ this is a pattern we attach ourselves to - the seed must die. We know where that took Jesus but for the vast majority of us following him doesn’t mean martyrdom, it doesn’t even mean as I rather expected when I was younger that God’s will for me would be to force me to do the thing I least want to do. It’s hard to look at Jesus and his friendships, the way he dealt with people and believe he valued misery for it’s own sake.

What following Jesus should do is shift our priorities, our ultimate loyalty. At the very least the seed going into the ground so it can bear fruit means my recognising that my life is not all about me.

We are all called to follow Jesus - but  our call does not come in a vacuum. 

It is in the middle of our own actual not theoretical lives, in the midst of its real possibilities, responsibilities and challenges that we each have to work out how to best play the cards we have been dealt in the service of his kingdom of justice and reconciliation.

We are not called to be self denying for the sake of it, not called to a one size fits all pattern, however onerous or virtuous. We are called to bring all that we know of who we are to all that we know of God, which will not always be easy. If we do it with integrity sometimes it will feel like a wrestling match.

And so we wrestle...In the preface to ‘The Splash of Words’ Mark Oakley writes about scripture in a way that can be expanded to include our whole relationship with God. ‘To take the bible seriously does not mean shrinking it into your own particular system of thinking about God, others and yourself. To take the bible really seriously means engaging with the variety of its texts, its history, the cultural, interpretative and ethical questions that need addressing, as well as the similar questions they ask of us. It is to invite the comfort and the unease of their inspiration, artistry, open-endedness and teasing of human pride. We mustn’t close down the conversation with texts. We spend a lot of time asking whether the bible is ‘true’ and miss the fact that the biblical texts are often asking us ‘Are you true?’ This is the real question that readers of the bible should face - others are a distraction -’

The trouble with a question like ‘Am I true?’ is that whilst it’s obviously important it’s hard to be quite sure what it means 

On Friday’s Thought for the Day Richard Harries gave a hint of an answer. He talked of being being shaped by the assumptions and prejudices that were part and parcel of the culture he was born into, some of which he now sees as clearly wrong and he wondered how many of those prejudices were still swirling around in society, indeed how many of them were still lodged in his own understandings. 

Being true means learning to recognise and confront some of the evasions and self-deceits by which we usually live our lives. It’s part of the work of Lent but not a work we do alone Jeremiah speaks of God’s help

“I will put my law in their minds

    and write it on their hearts.

I will be their God,

    and they will be my people.

The reward is that the more we can lose of the baggage that skews our understanding of ourselves and the world around us the closer companionship we can have with Jesus as we walk in his way.

Books to be read during Lent

 A Lenten Interlude - which will largely be about the books I’m reading as a discipline - though discipline is not quite the right word.

The books I have read have always been a piecemeal selection and there are many glaring omissions. Since 2004 I’ve been using Lent to fill some of those gaps.

Some books are obviously christian, but the majority are there because I felt I should have read them, or need to read them again. Some have been hard work, others a complete delight e.g. To Kill a Mockingbird, which was in the first clutch of books chosen and one of the reasons it seemed a good practise to continue.

I’ve decided to put this interlude into a blog for two reasons a) one of this year’s books -  a reread of Bird by Bird - suggests writing regularly and this seems a good way to enforce it, and b) I hope it will encourage attentiveness to what I’m reading  

This year’s books are:

Demon Copperhead - Barbara Kingsolver√

Small Island - Andrea Levy√

Tesserae - Denise Levertov√

Bird by bird - Anne Lamott

Magisteria - Nicholas Spencer√

With a subs bench of

Light Perpetual - Francis Spufford

The Underground Railway - Colson Whitehead

Christian Wiman - The Long Home√

Getting Better - Michael Rosen

A memoir of my former self - Hilary Mantel

This is the story of a happy marriage - Anne Patchett

Killing the Black Dog - Les Murray√

Baptism of Christ

 7/1/24.                    St Peter’s Birkdale             Baptism of Jesus

Genesis 1:1-5                                                          Mark 1:1-11

Last week Rod preached on  six words that spoke about Jesus

‘And_ the_ word_ was_ made_ flesh’  

Jesus - God incarnate.  Jesus - fully God, fully human. 

This week I’m going to speak about the relationship of the Father to the Son but  I’m going to need twelve words - though they are in two groups of six. ‘You_are_ my_ Son, the_ Beloved;   with_ you_I_ am_well_ pleased.’

What wonderful, encouraging, reassuring words these must have been for Jesus to hear. 

But we might ask why did Jesus the Son of God need encouragement? Because he was as also human as we are. And he was going to do something quite new - which left even his cousin John the Baptist bemused.

How so?

Well we have grown up with gospel stories of Jesus so we think ‘How else would you expect a Messiah to speak or behave?’ 

John the Baptist was expecting someone quite different. He recognised who Jesus was - but Jesus wasn’t the Messiah the prophetic tradition had led him to expect. John imagined a hard nosed fire and brimstone Messiah - like him but more so.

Jesus confounded those expectations. His way was so much kinder, so much more welcoming than John had expected that he began to wonder if he’d made a mistake - listen to this passage from Luke 

 ‘When John heard in prison what the Messiah was doing, he sent word by his disciples and said to him,“Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?” Jesus answered them, “Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them. And blessed is anyone who takes no offence at me.”’  This was not the Messiah John had expected. 

John was confounded. What were Jesus own expectations?  We don’t know

Jesus came to John to be baptised and so began his public ministry. 

What was he going to do next? There were no guidelines for him. He had, by himself, to find a way of being Emmanuel,  God with us - in his ordinary everyday world - He was filled with the fulness of God but what that was going to mean? 

He discovered it for himself as he taught and healed and restored,  

as he fed people,  and listened to them,  and went to their parties, 

as he confronted difficulties, as he dealt with opposition, as he kept on reaching out however often people missed the point or misrepresented him. 

We his followers have each other as sounding boards but each step Jesus took was into untravelled territory.

There could be no guidelines to show him how to live as Emmanuel. 

In our reading Jesus is at the start of his public ministry, it’s before he knows just how hard it is going to be. He does know his role is unique, he knows there is no closely scripted plan of campaign, he knows it will be relentlessly demanding. He knows the time of the prophets and lawgivers is over, Jesus isn’t simply Moses or Elijah writ large. 

He is certain the time is right for him to enter the public domain hence Baptism , but after that his journey has no signposts, no guides. So with everything else he was feeling there must also have been loneliness.

How encouraging, how reassuring then that the Spirit should descend on him like a dove and that he should hear his father saying, ‘You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.’

He is setting out into the unknown - how grateful he must have been to know he was going with his father’s love, trust and blessing.

‘You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.’

This is the first way I read those twelve words but there’s a bit more because in themselves they aren’t particularly spiritual words or even unusual. Indeed the feeling behind them is one we will be familiar with

Christmas is often a time of gatherings - family reunions, catching up with old friends and when Christmas festivities  work well - and they often do - one of the  threads is delight in the groupings we are part of - we are with  our children or our parents or our friends and have looked around at those we love in  joy and gratitude - I know it isn’t always the case, and I know there will always be imperfections and blemishes in any human relationships - but when we are part of it or see it - we know it to be grace, that it’s more than we deserve - as we look around us we can find ourselves echoing the words - slightly adapted for our circumstances - that God said to Jesus. 

The words the Father  said to the Son are not just a theological statement, they are the words of a fond parent.

 

A stage further - in the passage John talked of Jesus baptising with water and the Spirit and  we are shown what that Baptism meant for Jesus. It affirmed him in who he was, it set the seal on his work and ministry, it was an assurance of the Father’s love. 

We are the people of Christ -  those who Paul calls ‘in Christ’ - those who receive the Spirit as part of our following of Jesus, so in some measure we share in the Father’s regard for his son. In some measure this is how he thinks of us. God looks at us and says yes to us 

He has things for us to do - tasks we are fitted for both at home and in the wider world - there is work - but it is because we are in Christ not because of what we have done our starting point is the declaration ‘You are my child, my beloved; with you I am well pleased.’  These words are for us to hear too

The catholic priest Donagh O’Shea wrote this ‘The passion and death of Christ belong to us as fully as if we had suffered them ourselves.' I must have read this in St. Thomas (Aquinas) years ago as I crammed for exams in theology, but it failed to strike root in the mind's weed patch. Having rediscovered it, I think of little else at Mass. Christ is our brother: the Father cannot see us apart from him. So we stand before our Father with pride and joy, not in tortured anxiety.’ 

We get things wrong - of course  - we are far from perfect - we know that,  our behaviour and attitudes often disturb the relationship we have with God -  that’s true but He has always known what we are like and He came anyway.

We don’t have to understand what makes God tick, we can just  be grateful that 'The Father does not see us apart from his Son - ‘the beloved in whom he is well pleased.’

Matthew - Parable of the Talents 29/11/23

 19/11/23          St Peter’s                        2nd before Advent     

1 Thessalonians 5:1-11                         Matthew 25:14-30

Our gospel reading is a parable about the kingdom - a subject that Jesus talked about a lot. He prayed about it, and spoke about it, and taught his disciples about it. Wherever he went he didn’t just teach about it but brought it into being - not in its fulness - his promise is there is more to come - but still the true taste of what God’s kingdom is like.

In a few minutes,  just before we take communion, Your Kingdom come  will be part of our prayer. 

But what does that mean and how can we be part of the answer to one of our most regular requests?

Rather ambitiously we’re going to look at three questions - what is the kingdom? what part have we been given? And how do we go about playing that part  - you’ll be surprised by how short and inadequate my answers are.

What is the kingdom?

 Last night Hilary saw Macbeth about the struggle for a throne, I’ve just finished reading ‘The Uncommon Reader’ which says a lot about what it means to be a monarch. But they are not what Jesus was talking about. In Macbeth the crown is taken by violence, and held and lost by violence - kingship as power and the court a place of survival of the fittest. The king and kingdom are about ruthless domination.

Alan Bennett’s book, written in 2007 and with the Queen as the main character is  funny, light and short , but it gives a strong sense of  the rather stuffy protocols that govern court life that  she  had to navigate. 

These are not pictures of the kingdom Jesus is talking about but if it isn’t the brutality of Macbeth’s court or the hidebound protocols that the Queen had to contend with what is it?

The best picture I know of what he meant by the kingdom of God here on earth is given by Rowan Williams and my apologies because I’m fairly sure I’ve already quoted this to you but it bears repeating.   

When reading the Gospels you sometimes get the impression that if anywhere in ancient Galilee you heard a loud noise and a lot of laughter and talking and singing, you could be reasonably sure that Jesus of Nazareth was around somewhere nearby. Jesus created fellowship wherever he was. And it is one of the things in the Gospels that is remembered as most distinctive about him, because even then some of his friends were embarrassed by it. The indiscriminate generosity and the willingness to mix with unsuitable people were already, in the first Christian generation, just difficult enough for the Gospel writers to scratch their heads and cough just a little bit about it. But they could not deny it or suppress it. It was too vividly remembered. Jesus sought out company and the effect of his presence was to create a celebration, to bind people together.

This doesn’t sound like a kingdom at all, but where Jesus the king holds sway - there is the kingdom of God. 

It isn’t a place or a hierarchy or a power block, it’s a community that recognises Jesus as king. It’s a place of welcome and reconciliation. It’s for everyone. It’s an attractive community that is seen as good news even by people without a religious bone in their body. 

Three characteristics we will come back to - indiscriminate generosity, willingness to mix with unsuitable people and joy. This is the kingdom we are praying will come.

What part have we been given? 

Listen to our reading  the kingdom is like a man going on a journey, who called his servants and entrusted his wealth to them. To one he gave five bags of gold, to another two bags, and to another one bag, each according to his ability. I am used to reading this as a story as though the master has given the  servants a test to sort out the useful ones from the useless but this isn’t what it means. 

What helped me to take it more seriously than that was to read something Dorothy L. Sayers - the detective story writer 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.’

Jesus is saying ‘the Father has taken what is most precious to Himself and genuinely put it into our care, he has made his kingdom on earth our responsibility. We creatures are being charged by the Creator with joining Him in working for His kingdom and then being sharers of it with Him. 

We are the servants who have been given the gifts to grow the kingdom. What part have we been given - he wants us to help make the communities we are part of - obviously the church, but going beyond that into our neighbourhoods as well - more like the kingdom of God.

Third question How do we do it? How do we live as good servants?

Churches and communities are local groupings and what one looks like will be very different from another. Our brothers and sisters in Ukraine, in Palestine, in Israel, are facing very different problems from us, so how they live out their faith may well look very different, but any community of the Kingdom will share some common characteristics 

 Indiscriminate generosity - God is a God of grace it is in his nature to give - so that should mark us too - whether money, time, concern - the gifts we have been given are for using. 

The trouble with preaching about something is that it makes it sound more religious than it actually is. What God wants is for his people to be welcoming and recognisably good news. We are called to be good neighbours.

Jesus was always displaying his willingness to mix with unsuitable people. He would talk to anyone whether good, bad popular or unpopular - sometimes people said of him  if he knew what the person he was talking to was like he would have nothing to do with them, but he did know and he was still there chatting. We are called to welcome rather than judge the people we meet.

The third characteristic is joy. In the parable different servants were given different amounts to work with depending on what they were good at. The work God gives to us will fit with who we are and where we are. We are all in different places, we all have different capacities, we all have different strengths and weaknesses but what is common is that we are people of the kingdom and we should nurture its values in all our relationships. 

The contacts we have with each other should reveal what God’s kingdom is like to others - creative, just, true, joyful, hospitable, a place where each person matters and knows it.

The people who were with Jesus had found their proper place in relation to him and one of the results of that was joy and if we are in the right place at the right time doing the right thing then joy will be there too.  

One of the frustrating things about serving God is we don’t know how we are doing. A talent was money rather than a gift and if you invested it it was easy to see the result. Not so for us - the only person who can say how we are doing is God. He knows what He is asking of us and how well we are responding, and he brings his own judgment to bear and his view of success is unlikely to be the same as ours - after all we are following someone who thought that washing people’s feet was not beneath Him, who saw the mood of the crowd following Him shift from welcome to condemnation and who was  betrayed and deserted by his closest friends before being crucified - this God may well have a topsy turvy idea of success. 

What we do know from the parable is that the one option that is not open to us is to have a faith that makes no difference to how we live. Burying our gifts away isn’t allowed. 

And this leads us back to where I’ve normally started. The third servant and his fate. This is someone who has removed themselves from the work of God, who has not let their relationship with Him affect how they behave. A challenge to us who follow Jesus - is the way we live shaped by His values? It’s a challenge and a warning, it isn’t a judgement. There is no need for anyone to find themselves in the third servants position. 

What’s Jesus saying to us through the parable? - Take it seriously that I have trusted you to be the  kingdom of God on earth. It isn’t a test  that will set the level of out reward in heaven  - we are participants in His work now - the Kingdom He has given us to grow is the one we share with Him now.

But don’t let this paralyse you - bring your kingdom life into the way you do everything. This is not a call to be religious but to develop a  compass that will point us in the direction of the kingdom of heaven  so wherever we are, whoever we’re with we will know what is good and then so live. 

Sermon - Parable of the wicked Tenants

 08/10/23                          St Peter’s                        Trinity 18     

Philippians 3:4b-14                                       Matthew 21:33-end 

A few years ago the author Hilary Mantel was interviewed about Wolf Hall - her historical novel about Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn. She said the tricky thing was keeping in mind that even though she knew the story’s ending the people involved didn’t. What to us seems inevitable is to them only one of several possibilities. 

Anne Boleyn had great hopes for her future path but hadn’t realised Henry VIII was so fixated on having a son he was ready to sacrifice anything and anyone if he thought it would improve his chances. Anne Boleyn failed him as he saw it so the future she had expected was violently taken from her. Hilary Mantel creates an atmosphere where we encounter characters before their future is fixed, where everything still seems possible

This fluidity is something to remember when we read the bible. We hear a well known story and think how could it be otherwise but nothing was laid down for the people involved. They didn’t know how things would turn out

We’ll come back to that in a moment but first let’s look at our gospel.  

A landowner sets up a vineyard, leases it out and goes abroad. Come harvest time he sends his people for his share. The tenants violently reject the landowner’s servants. He sends more, the same thing happens, so he sends his son. ‘Excellent’ think the tenants ‘if the son is dead we can hang on to his inheritance’ . So they kill him.

‘Now’ says Jesus, ‘when the owner of the vineyard comes, what will he do to those tenants?”

“He will bring those wretches to a wretched end,” his hearers answered, “and he will rent the vineyard to other tenants, who will give him his share of the crop at harvest time.”

Jesus replies, ‘“Therefore I tell you that the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people who will produce its fruit.

Jesus has not been subtle in this parable. He’s given  a potted history of God’s dealings with Israel and their failure to be the light to the nations they were supposed to be. Even when God sent his prophets and teachers and eventually his son  to call them back they dealt badly with them.  so their role in God’s plan is passed on to others. The chief priests and the Pharisees get the point, they know he is talking about them and it sharpens their sense that he is a threat.

We’ll come back to the parable too but now to the epistle - 

When we think of Paul we think of the saint, the theologian, the person who did as much as any of the early followers of Jesus to shape the church -  For us the shape his life took is inevitable and necessary, but he  underwent such a change of direction I don’t suppose it ever felt like that to him. 

Paul wrote his letters were sent before we had the gospels.  Until then what Jesus said and did would have been kept alive by his followers telling and retelling what they remembered. After his conversion Paul would have soaked all this up so I’m sure he will have known this parable.

Just imagine what an impact it would have had on him when he first heard it. 

Sometimes when we hear a bible story we have to think about where we might be in it - in the good samaritan are we the victim, are we the robber, are we the samaritan, are we the person who walks by, in the prodigal son are we the returning prodigal or are we the unwelcoming elder brother. 

But Paul could have had no doubts in this one  

‘But when the tenants saw the son, they said to each other, ‘This is the heir. Come, let’s kill him and take his inheritance.’  So they took him and threw him out of the vineyard and killed him.’ 

That was where Paul had been standing ‘a Hebrew born of Hebrews; as to the law, a Pharisee; as to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to righteousness under the law, blameless. If anybody met the criteria of the unjust tenants it was Paul. He had rejected Jesus the cornerstone as zealously as anyone.

He must have thought, with all I had already done with all I intended to do how could I be forgiven, how could Jesus reach out to me?  And yet he did and Paul’s life was turned upside down.   

In our reading he begins by laying out all the religious reasons he had had for preening himself but goes onto say I so much prefer knowing Jesus to all the status I had before that it all seems rubbish. The standing I had in the community carried privileges but it was hollow. Now I know Jesus and the more I know him the better it is. 

So this may not surprise us - passages  like this are how we have built up our picture of Paul - but this is where we have to think like a historical novelist - nothing in his early life prepared him for this and if we think his future was inevitable we will miss his sense of wonder, of incredulity, about how things have turned out. Yet whatever gains I had, these I have come to regard as loss because of Christ. And we will miss his gratitude - that was what fuelled his life after his meeting with Jesus on the Damascus road - his faith, his writings, his zeal, his readiness to suffer, his constant work so that the early church should be faithful in their following of Jesus, his letters, his missionary journeys are steeped in his gratitude that for all his past history Jesus still held out his hand to him. And now Paul wants nothing more than to know Jesus better.

Paul’s future was gloriously reshaped - rather than being an agent of destruction, by the grace of God he became an agent of life. And in that there is hope.

When we hear the news - climate crisis, war, hunger, social instability the temptation is to think the path is fixed, Paul shows us otherwise - even the most intractable circumstance, even the most difficult people can change. 

How can we share Paul’s hope, how can we add it in to the world around us? Jesus said the kingdom of God will be given to a people who produce the fruit of the kingdom  

What are these fruit? 

The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness,  gentleness and self-control. - As we bear these fruit so will God’s kingdom grow - Since we live by the Spirit, let us keep in step with the Spirit. This is the path we are given to give to be people of hope

As we try and nurture the Spirit’s fruit in our lives, it is quite possible that we will find ourselves in places we never expected to be,  but if we keep in step with the Spirit however unlikely or even unwelcome the place we will not be there alone.