Month: October 2018

Jonah 3.1-10, Mark 1.14-20

Remembrance Sunday, 11 November 2018

Austwick, Clapham, Keasden

 

The 1918 Armistice is at the heart of our commemorations today, as we recall those images of troops returning home in scenes of great celebration. What did they bring back from the war – those who did return? Some came back with heroic stories, of bold actions which won battles and rewarded medals. Some with stories of the camaraderie and comradeship they had found in battle – a new community which for many stretched even across enemy lines, with a sense of solidarity with the troops from the other side too.

Some returned from the battlefield with a heightened sense of right and wrong, a politicised view of life, as never before critical of God and of State. Some brought back forms of madness, shell-shock, despair, anger which would never heal. And yet others brought back silence; as if all they had experienced had numbed them. And the families of these combatants developed the skill of listening to the gaps, learning from what went unspoken.

My great-grandfather, John Cyril Davies, was a ship’s carpenter on the Cunard passenger liner Lusitania, torpedoed by a German U-boat off the coast of Ireland in May 1915. 1,198 passengers and crew lost their lives that day, but John Davies was one of the 764 who survived. 

As one historian wrote, ‘The world was shocked in 1912 by the loss of the Titanic to an iceberg, but the shock bore no parallel to that felt by the loss of the Lusitania, which was needlessly sacrificed to the insatiable gods of war.’ [2] 

My great-grandfather never spoke of these events, and so his silence raised many unspoken questions for us. Like: Where was God in all this suffering? That’s a hard question to answer. In the loss and anguish of war it’s easier to see where the Devil is. 

For I put it to you that the Devil is in the ideology of the Nation State, wherein nationalism displaces God as the focus for a people’s faithfulness, where the flag displaces the cross, the anthem drowns out the hymns of devotion: an ideology which drives so many of the conflicts of our times. [3]

I put it to you that the Devil is in the pursuit of religious and political utopias, whose devotees are convinced that the use of force is necessary to ensure the power of the good. [4] 

And I put it to you that the Devil is in the idea that violence fixes violence, when we all know full well that an eye for an eye, being taken to its extreme, is making the whole world blind. For like the ideology of nationalism, and like the pursuit of utopia, the belief in the power of redemptive violence is an idol of our times. [5]

The most devilish detail of all is the mistaken view that our God supports such idolatries. This angry, vengeful God who demands blood sacrifices of his subjects and judges in blood and fire – this God of the old scriptures, this God of violence: is the God before the Gospels; the God of the old news; the God of no good news.

In the words of a great contemporary prophet, the philosopher René Girard, 

“Violence is a slavery; it imposes upon people a false conception of God as well as everything else. This is why is is a closed kingdom. To escape from violence would mean to escape from this kingdom to enter another kingdom that most of us cannot even imagine: the kingdom of love which is also the kingdom of the true God, this father of Jesus of whom the prisoners of violence don’t have the slightest idea”. [6]

So where is God in all this? Who is God in all this?

I put it to you that our God is a suffering God, who struggles alongside soldiers in the trenches and other arenas of war, and who then accompanies them home. “War is the crucifixion of God, not the working of His will” said the WW1 Army chaplain Geoffrey Studdert Kennedy, aka ‘Woodbine Willie’. “Human strife is not God’s method, but His problem,” he said. [7]

This suffering God sits with those at home, waiting anxiously for their loved ones’ return. A God of modest things, whose great skill is to help humans to learn to be humane in the everyday exchanges of ordinary life.

A God whose kingdom is very much of this earth, as taught by Jesus to ordinary people in everyday places – the dining table, the mountainside, the sea shore. See how he called the fishermen Simon and Andrew, James and John to join him in proclaiming the good news of this kingdom, a new way of life which he inaugurated at that time, to grow like a mustard seed from that very moment on, and to last for all time.

Mark how in the story of Jonah, the errant prophet was salivating over the prospect of an angry God wreaking his violent judgement on the people of Nineveh – but how God rejected the way of destruction and offered them salvation.

At the very end of the book of Jonah God says, ‘Should not I pity Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than 120,000 persons who do not know their right hand from their left…?’ [8] And in response to God’s grace, the king of Nineveh said, ‘All [of us] shall turn from [our] evil ways and from the violence that is in [our] hands.’ [9] 

This is good news for every society – ever; the king and the people of Nineveh caught a glimpse of a different kingdom, a new way of living, a release from the slavery of violence, and they embraced that gift gratefully.

What did they bring back from the war, my great-grandfather, the ones you remember today, those whose lost lamented comrades in arms our poppies represent? Most brought a desire to move on, to turn from that violence and to live now in peace. To find love, to make a home, to build families, to apply themselves to neighbourliness and community. 

I believe that God was with them, as they went about the humble, but noble, task of making the peace. Because peace-making is the everyday detail, the real-time values, of the kingdom of God.

And so in this hour, let us honour the memory of those whose lives were lost to war; and let us embrace the spirit of those who were forever changed by war: by considering if and how we can renounce violence in all its forms and commit our lives to the humble, but noble, task of loving God, loving our neighbour, loving our enemies – of making and keeping the peace.

 

 

Notes

[1] A rewrite of What did they bring back from the war? (The Jonah version) preached in West Camel and Weston Bampfylde in 2015. Based on the sermon What did they bring back from the war? Reflection for ‘Till the Boys Come Home’ preached at Corton Denham, 30  November 2014.

[2] Patrick O’Sullivan, The Sinking of the Lusitania, p.29. See also my blog post The silence of John Davies, my great-grandfather, Lusitania survivor.

[3] ‘Blair believes in the power of force to ensure the triumph of the good.’ John Gray, Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia, p.137.

[4] Craig M. Watts, Daring to Call it Idolatry: Nationalism in Worship. Red Letter Christians, January 11, 2013.

[5] See my James Bond, ISIS, and the myth of redemptive violence, after the work of Walter Wink.

[6] René Girard, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, p.197, paraphrase.

[7] Christopher Craig Brittain, Religion at Ground Zero: Theological Responses to Times of Crisis. Chapter Two, Religion in the Trenches: Chaplains in the Great War.

[8] Jonah 4.11

[9] Jonah 3.8

Revelation 21.1-6a, John 11.32-44

All Saints Day, 4 November 2018

Eldroth, Keasden

 

Just last month the Roman Catholic Church canonised the late Oscar Romero, who as Archbishop of San Salvador, the capital of El Salvador, was a vocal advocate of the rights of the poor under that country’s repressive regime throughout the 1970s, and who was assassinated by a right-wing death squad whilst saying mass in a San Salvador chapel on 24 March 1980, aged 62. 

250,000 mourners from all over the world attended his funeral, where the Pope’s personal delegate eulogised Romero as a “beloved, peacemaking man of God,” and stated that “his blood will give fruit to brotherhood, love and peace.” These were words of defiant hope rather than realism, because even as they were being spoken, on the streets near San Salvador Cathedral smoke bombs exploded and rifle shots were fired, and in the consequent panicked stampedes many people were killed and injured. [1]

Words of defiant hope rather than realism, but Romero’s eulogy nevertheless carried a deeper truth about him and all the saints: that the Saints are in the business of making things new. Oscar Romero was sainted not because his opposition to the violence of all sides in the Salvadorian Civil War succeeded in changing things politically – it didn’t. For over a decade following his murder innumerable people disappeared, and according to UN reports over 75,000 people were killed. 

No, Romero was sainted because when he spoke out about human rights abuses the silenced poor of that country heard him speaking their voice; he was sainted because when he preached a gospel of peace he opened up the possibility of another world in the hearts and minds of his congregations; he was sainted because his example of self-giving love for the most vulnerable people inspired countless others across the world to live lives of self-giving love for the sake of others. The Saints are in the business of making things new: there are many who over the past forty years have testified that the inspirational words and example of Oscar Romero turned their world around.

Likewise that other famous recently-canonised saint Mother Teresa, whose Missionaries of Charity provided care for, in her words, “the hungry, the naked, the homeless, the crippled, the blind, the lepers, all those people who feel unwanted, unloved, uncared for throughout society, people that have become a burden to the society and are shunned by everyone”. From a congregation of just 13 sisters when she began this work in 1950, there are now over 4,500 Missionaries of Charity running homes, relief work and charity centres worldwide. [2] 

Controversially, to some, Teresa never made a priority of physically saving people’s lives, seeing that as an impractical aspiration in the conditions in which she worked. Rather in her Homes for the Dying she focused on giving people the experience of “A beautiful death”. “A beautiful death”, Teresa said, “is for people who lived like animals to die like angels – loved and wanted.” 

The Saints are in the business of making things new: these days much is being spoken about the ways in which people can prepare for ‘a good death’; for many families this has been a great blessing. It could be said that Saint Teresa of Calcutta helped popularise this way of thinking.

Are the saints perfect, though? Are they unreachable in their devoutness and strength of spirituality? When Malcolm Muggeridge produced his 1969 documentary about Mother Teresa, Something Beautiful for God, the Home for the Dying was so dark inside that his film crew thought it unlikely they’d be able to use the footage. Back in England, though, they discovered that the footage was extremely well-lit, and Muggeridge called it a miracle of “divine light” from Teresa. Other crew members put it down to the new type of ultra-sensitive Kodak film they were using. [3]

I quite like the bathos of that, because it offers us respite from the idea that Teresa was perfect and in some way holier than anyone else, and invites us to see her and every other saint as people more like you and me. No-one likes a plaster saint, after all, do we? Or no-one relates to them easily. Those who make a show of being without moral faults or human weakness. 

Some serious criticisms have been made of Mother Teresa’s work – for the low quality of medical care she provided, or suggestions of forced conversions, among other things; criticisms hopefully being addressed by the Missionaries of Charity going forward. But these criticisms do help us see Teresa not a perfect religious sister serving God in an aura of “divine light”, but an ordinary woman muddling along in the darkness, following her instincts to do the best she could for others.

The Saints are in the business of making things new: they don’t do it perfectly. Because like us they are imperfect people. But they do it. That’s the thing. And so they’re saints because they invite us to see that we can be in the business of making things new, too. 

I really doubt the story is true of old Irish Saint Kevin and the blackbird, but I love it all the same. Kevin, as was his daily habit, going into the woods to pray, placing himself inside a very large hollowed out tree; stretching out his arms in devotion making them look like branches; and a blackbird lands in one of his turned-up palms, settles down to nest and lays its eggs. Seeing, feeling all this, Kevin keeps his arm out and palm open for days and weeks, until the moment that the eggs hatch and the newborn birds are fledged and fly away. 

In the words of the poet Seamus Heaney,

… since the whole thing’s imagined anyhow,

Imagine being Kevin. Which is he?

Self-forgetful or in agony all the time

 

From the neck on out down through his hurting forearms?

Are his fingers sleeping? Does he still feel his knees?

Or has the shut-eyed blank of underearth

 

Crept up through him? Is there distance in his head?

Alone and mirrored clear in love’s deep river,

‘To labour and not to seek reward,’ he prays … [4]

I love the silly old story of Irish Saint Kevin and the blackbird because whenever I hear it, it renews my vision of how deep and how precious is our relationship with the earth and all other living things. It gives me pause to think of how, like Kevin, I might labour and not seek reward for the good of these creatures of earth. Kevin does the saint’s work in my heart, mind and imagination. 

And so I appeal to you today, to find some time to spend again with your favourite saints, to re-discover the stories of their imperfect but devoted lives.

For the Saints are in the business of making things new: they can renew our vision of ourselves and our place in the world, and, standing, walking, living in their company, they help us go about the business of making things new, too.

 

Notes

[1] Wikipedia: Óscar Romero.

[2] Wikipedia: Mother Teresa.

[3] Wikipedia: Mother Teresa: Recognition and reception: Elsewhere.

[4] Seamus Heaney, St Kevin and the Blackbird.

 

 

 

Isaiah 55.1-11, John 5.36-47 

Bible Sunday, 28 October 2018, Austwick, Clapham

 

I’ve concluded this week that I’m a very popular person. I’m popular because people keep making generous invitations to me, usually by post or on the computer screen. Through the letterbox and in my inbox this week I’ve had eye-catching messages saying:

‘Come to our lovely new hair salon!’ (Well I would but I get mine shaved at home); 

‘Come to Laura Ashley – buy a lovely pink crochet trim coordinate top’ (I know I wear a black dress on Sundays, but I think I’ll pass on that); 

‘Come to Tesco – we’re cheaper than the rest!’; 

‘Come to Asda – we’re cheaper than the rest!’; 

‘Come to Morrisons – we’re cheaper than the rest!’; 

‘Come to us for a year’s free digital TV’ (Read the small print – it’s not free at all); 

I think I’ve changed my mind – I’m not popular after all. Just put on by all this stuff that assaults my senses every day. All of these are designed to look like generous invitations. But we all know that none of them are. 

How we long for a genuine invitation; one which isn’t trying to exploit us. How we long for an offer which comes with no strings attached – really. How we long for a world where all this trivia and grinning dishonesty could be replaced by depth, integrity, decent relationships, real rapport. 

We get other kinds of invitations in our lives. Friends, when we are young, call and say, “Come out to play!” Grown-up friends invite us to come out for the evening. There’s that famous invitation from Mae West: “Come up and see me sometime!” – which you may think is a bit vulgar but at least it’s to do with the earthy stuff of real human relationships in all their messy beauty. 

What did your Mum always say around mealtimes when you were outside or upstairs playing: “Come and get it!” Now there’s an offer you seldom refused. That’s an invitation which has love and care behind it: four words which call you to the heart of family life, to the heart of community, the meal table. 

We heard an invitation in today’s Isaiah reading. It’s from God:

“Come, all you who are thirsty, come to the waters; and you who have no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without cost.”

I’m in danger of becoming cynical because of what junk mail and celebrity culture and post-truth politicians do to me; but “Come, come to the waters…” how I long to overcome my unbelief when I hear a genuine, generous, no-strings-attached invitation like that. 

How I long to learn how to overcome the drive to consume and conform to the shallow ways of our culture, and to learn to root my desires in the Word that can be trusted. God yearns for this too:

“Why spend money on what is not bread [God says], and your labour on what does not satisfy? Listen, listen to me, and eat what is good, and your soul will delight in the richest of fare. Give ear and come to me; hear me, that your soul may live.”

God’s Word is the Word that can be trusted. This is the invitation to something wholly other – which is good and deep and true. Which will not take from our pockets – but will add to our spirits and our souls. 

This Word is alive in the world today, calling out its invitation to us behind the clamour of the marketplace. If we tune our ears we can hear it – the Word of God in scripture, the Word of God among us, the Word of God within us. 

We can hear The Word of God in scripture – on every single page. Whether we read the bible carefully each day at home, or listen to it being read to us each week in worship, if we tune our ears to expect words of wisdom, wonder, inspiration, guidance, the scriptures will come alive for us. 

We can hear The Word of God among us – because Jesus is alive: “The Lord is here; his spirit is with us” – we say these words each week in church and if we tune in to God we can believe them anywhere. “The Lord is here; his spirit is with us” – in the kitchen, at our workplace, in ordinary places and places of fear and wonder: we can know that Jesus is with us there. 

We can hear The Word of God within us – because alive inside us, we have both the scriptures and the Spirit of God. There are scriptures we know so well that they’re part of who we are – those bible verses which have been with us from childhood and still sustain us, complete statements like the Lord’s Prayer or the Lord’s My Shepherd, and soundbites like “Do not be afraid”, or “You are made in God’s image” or “I am the bread of life”. [2]

And if it is our desire, the Spirit who lives in us, will connect us to God and make these words come alive in us, over and over again. 

Today is Bible Sunday, when we are encouraged to rediscover the power of The Word in our lives. And last night the clocks went back, a little jolt in our year which reminds us how closely we are tied in to the cycles of time and nature. Hear again what God says through Isaiah:

As the rain and the snow come down from heaven, … so is my word that goes out from my mouth: It will … accomplish what I desire and achieve the purpose for which I sent it.

God’s Word is consistent, just as autumn follows summer. And God’s Word makes life flourish just like the water cycle from which food grows. This is the Word that can be trusted. 

It’s a radical word – it goes against the grain. What are we to make of God’s invitation to those who have no money, “come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without cost”? It has the same sort of meaning and same sort of impact as a Skipton Town Councillor saying to a Big Issue seller outside Rackhams – “Get off our streets – and come, come to live in my house for the winter, come and eat my food.” 

And it’s a living Word. The world is full of stories of people who have taken it to heart and made such a difference – there are plenty of you in this room today. Jesus told people off who diligently studied the scriptures but refused to come to him. Life comes not from the words on the page but from the God they refer to, the living God who calls us to come and experience life alongside him. 

As we skim through our junk mail distracted by special offers, as we click through the adverts popping up on our iPads, as we struggle with constant pressures to consume and conform, may we learn to trust the Word of God more than any other word; to guide, inspire, and fulfil us. 

 

 

Notes

[1] A rewrite of The Word that can be trusted, first preached in Wavertree in 2003.

[2] “For the Word of God in scripture,

For the Word of God among us,

For the Word of God within us,

Thanks be to God.”

– from the Iona Abbey Morning Prayer service, Iona Abbey Worship Book 2017 Edition, pp.66, 112.

Hebrews 5.1-10, Mark 10.35-45

Twenty-First Sunday after Trinity, 21 October 2018, Eldroth

 

You know when I see the writer of the Hebrews describing Jesus as The High Priest of the Order of Melchizedek, it strikes me that that name sounds like the name of a fantasy hero. You know, from the world of fantasy films and video gaming, which is of course very popular among the young. It is a place of heroes and anti-heroes, moving in combat between different worlds in a fast-flowing series of scenes, endlessly battling to gain and regain power of different sorts. These fantasies often draw on well-known myths and legends, on scripture and folklore.

Each character tends to come from a particular class: a class that excels in combat, or magic, a professional or criminal class. The influential fantasy game Dungeons & Dragons features four classes of players: Fighting Men, Thieves, Wizards – and the Clerics, who specialise in healing and supportive magical abilities. [2]

There are numerous Priests in fantasy gaming. The role-playing video game franchise Final Fantasy has sold over 135 million units worldwide. ‘The Priests [in Final Fantasy] are physically weak and vulnerable, but their healing powers are quite significant. Their powerful Holy spell and … their curative magic … makes them offensively valuable.…’ [3]

Famous priests in fantasy gaming include Nightcrawler, a superhero in the Marvel Comics X-Men series, and Father Markus Kane, in Fahrenheit, a paranormal thriller set in New York City. [4] The fantasy genre goes wider than games, of course. Look at the mainline TV schedules – Doctor Who, with its fantastic creatures from all manner of orders and worlds; and the massively popular Game of Thrones, whose Red Priests and Priestesses possess the power to bring people back to life. [5]

Have you ever visited the Harry Potter film studios in Hertfordshire? I think it’s one of the most fantastic places I’ve ever been to – fantastic in every sense of that word. In a vast arena of full-size sets created for the series of fantasy films, I was overwhelmed by the scale, the craftsmanship, the creativity and above all the tremendous imagination which went into creating each set and each character, down to the tiniest details. It’s a wonderland, a world of creation.

On the film studio tour I read a quote from Steve Kloves, one of the films’ screenwriters, considering why the Harry Potter films appeal so much to their vast worldwide audiences: ‘The thing about Potter,’ he said, ‘is that it’s very earnest about expressions of things like loyalty, courage and redemption. Audiences were hungry for that.’ [6]

Which suggests that beneath the thrills of the fantasy world, its fans are searching for something deeper. They are looking for values which they can take from the stories and apply in their ordinary lives, away from the screen.

So, back to Jesus as The High Priest of the Order of Melchizedek. What sort of character is he; and what are his powers? Could the Christian story have that something which people are looking for?

The Order of Melchizedek was the oldest and greatest of all Israel’s priestly lines. Genesis affirms that Melchizedek was “priest of God Most High”. Abraham paid tithes to Melchizedek, and in the Psalms David pronounced that the future King of kings or Messiah was a “priest for ever after the order of Melchizedek.”. This order of priests were the most powerful of all. You would want them on your side in any holy battle. When the writer of Hebrews called Jesus the High Priest, he placed him at the very pinnacle of this order. [7]

Maybe some fantasy fans will be drawn to Jesus the High Priest of the Order of Melchizedek, if we tell them about him. They will certainly find something surprising, something unique. Because of all the heroes of scripture, Jesus plays to a different set of rules. They called him Messiah, but Jesus didn’t behave the way they’d expected. For the High Priest of the Order of Melchizedek turns out to be not a cleric militant, not a crusader advancing the cause of righteousness with arms, armour, and magic. Jesus uses his powers in a unique way. He is the king who came ‘not to be served but to serve’; he is the messiah who ‘gave his life a ransom for many’. 

Jesus breaks the mould. He breaks the rules. If he was a character in an online game he would melt the computer down because he just would not co-operate with the rules of engagement. This is the great appeal of Jesus the High Priest of the Order of Melchizedek, not so much his absolute holy power, but the way he refused to use it in violence on others. His self-giving love breaks the cycle of death. Only he can do this. This is very good news in a world of violence, whose online games, TV dramas and big-screen fantasies trap us in a web from which it seems there is no escape – where we are consigned to play out endless battles, over and over again, to gain and regain power of different sorts. 

People are caught up in this because they are offered no alternative, in the fantasy world or the political world or the business or academic or social world. Yet we hunger for values like loyalty, courage and redemption. The values displayed by The High Priest of the Order of Melchizedek. 

Point people towards Jesus and you point them to a whole new liberating way of life, in which the loving creator God enables you to live outside conflict, in generous relationships with others. In the online game Darksiders II, we are told, ‘Death Comes For All’. [8] But this is in the fantasy world. In the reality of God’s world, Jesus comes for all. And he comes as a servant, he comes as a gift.

 

Notes

[1] A rewrite of The High Priest of Melchizedek – hero for our times? first preached in Devon in 2012, and published in my Devon Sermons, and in modified form in Somerset in 2015.

[2] Wikipedia, Character class, Cleric.

[3] Caves of Narshe website, Final Fantasy Tactics Job Classes: Priest.

[4] Wikipedia, List of fictional clergy and religious figures: Priests.

[5] Game of Thrones Wikia: Red Priest.

[6] Steve Kloves quote from a display photographed at the Warner Brothers Studio Tour, London.

[7] Genesis 14.18, Psalm 110.1-4.

[8] Soundtrack narrative from the Gameplay Trailer, Darksiders II – “Death Comes For All”

 Hebrews 4.12-16, Mark 10.17-31

Twentieth Sunday after Trinity, 14 October 2018

Austwick, Clapham, Keasden

 

‘It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.’ Here’s Jesus is trying to be funny. We’d call it satire. Just like the satirical jokes we’ve been looking at together today. [2] 

But the ‘camel through the eye of a needle’ joke was no joke to the rich man, who knew that in repeating it Jesus was echoing the dark humour of every poor man and woman in their society – a humour based on the observation that the rich were rich because (deliberately or not) they exploited the poor. And here’s Jesus saying that if they continued to exploit and bring suffering on the poor then they would not enter the kingdom of heaven. 

When Jesus recited the commandments to the rich man he included a new one: ’You shall not defraud’. Many poor tenant farmers in that society would experience their payments being held back, or their deposits of goods or money not being returned. So if a wealthy person had defrauded any poor people in such ways he could make restitution by reimbursing them. 

But we get the impression that this particular rich man wanted a God who would sanctify his lifestyle without requiring him to change it. The problem with that sort of a God is that he can only achieve this by allowing others to suffer.  That sort of a God absolves a rich man from any responsibility to the poor by permitting the accusation that the poor bring it on themselves. That sort of a God absolves a rich man from any responsibility to the natural world by putting economic growth above care for the earth and its creatures, by making an idol of consumerism. 

We can satirise it, but really it’s no joke. And you and I may feel awkward about the rich man’s story, for we know that in absolute terms we are the rich of the world today, that we benefit from the mechanics of wealth creation just as the rich man did, its economics and the theology which underwrites it. Even if we don’t mean it to, our comfortable living comes at the expense of others – it troubles me to know that I composed this sermon on a laptop computer produced by Asian children working excessive hours in dangerous conditions for poverty wages. Our comfort comes at the expense of the earth – as this week’s wake-up-call from the United Nations on climate change once again clearly shows. [3]

But please hold onto this thought: God is not in the business of making us guilty; in scripture it is Satan who is the accuser, God is the one who brings good news. [4] This exchange between Jesus and a rich man might make us question our own wealth, but we shouldn’t feel condemned by it, for this potent piece of scripture contains good news both for the poor and the rich.

The key to understanding all this, is the reason why Jesus told the rich man to sell up and give his money to the poor. Mark says he did it because, looking at the rich man, he loved him.

Now, this is a remarkable statement. This is the only place in Mark’s gospel where Jesus is said to have ‘loved’ someone. Jesus felt keenly, deeply, for the rich man in his situation. Jesus set the rich man his challenge because that was the loving thing to do. 

But how could that be? It makes no sense to us in our driven, acquisitive, privatised society where the compulsion to own and consume more and more for ourselves is just like the compulsion which drove Jesus’ rich man and his peers to grab more and more land, taxes and property from their poor. Surely, our culture says, the loving thing to do is to look after ourselves and our families first and forget the rest – not give away what we have to strangers.

But you may have heard of the concept of affluenza, a condition of our age defined as the ‘painful, contagious, socially transmitted condition of overload, debt, anxiety, and waste resulting from the dogged pursuit of more’. [5] There is a growing body of evidence that the countries, including ours,  with the greatest inequalities between rich and poor are the most inefficient and socially unstable – we are suffering a serious breakdown in social cohesion and trust. [6] Lifting such burdens from us, is surely the loving thing to do.

So Jesus sees the consequences of wealth creation and his heart fills with love for a rich man lost, a man searching for release from all that harms his well-being, longing for the deepest things which money cannot buy. Jesus invites the man to turn his back on his alienating lifestyle, he’s guiding him  towards another way of being altogether, in turning his heart towards a God whose love for him can release him from his wealth addiction, and free him to create new, redeeming relationships with others who he will no longer view as competitors, but companions with him on the journey through life.

This has taken us all a long way from that quip about the camel and the eye of the needle. It’s not a joke any more, what Jesus is doing, but it is a wonder, it is a joy.

I read a challenging quote by the Franciscan friar and well-known author Richard Rohr, saying that,

Christians are usually sincere and well-intentioned people until you get to any real issues of ego, control power, money, pleasure, and security. Then they tend to be pretty much like everybody else. We are often given a bogus version of the Gospel, some fast-food religion, without any deep transformation of the self; and the result has been the spiritual disaster of ‘Christian’ countries that tend to be as consumer-oriented, proud, warlike, racist, class conscious, and addictive as everybody else – and often more so, I’m afraid. [7]

The alternative way which Jesus offered the rich man, he also offers us. Summed up in two commandments: to love God and to love our neighbours. ‘Christianity is not a religion that gives some people a ticket to heaven and makes them judgmental of all others,’ says the writer and activist Jim Wallis. ‘Rather, it’s a call to a relationship that changes all our other relationships. Jesus told us a new relationship with God also brings us into a new relationship with our neighbour, especially with the most vulnerable of this world, and even with our enemies.’ [8]

In loving the rich man, Jesus invited the rich man to love his neighbour, knowing that in so doing both would find life in its fulness. The notion of The Common Good has fallen into neglect in our times. But it can be reclaimed – and this call to love our neighbour is the foundation for re-establishing and reclaiming it. [9]

Now we might say that these are all nice words, but an impossible task in these selfish, self-absorbed times. That’s what the disciples said to Jesus too. But Jesus just looked lovingly at them and said, ‘For mortals it is impossible, but not for God; for God all things are possible.’ [10]

 

Notes

[1] This talk is an altered version of Love comes blinking through the needle’s eye, preached in Somerset in 2015, using material from The rich man’s God or the God of the victims?, preached in Devon in October 2012. My exegesis of Mark owes a great deal to Ched Myers, Binding the Strong Man: a Political Reading of Mark’s Story of Jesus, p.271-276.

[2] The cartoons on this page, lifted from the internet, were handed out for the congregation’s amusement with the orders of service.

[3] Ethical Consumer, Shopping Guide: Laptops; Jonathan Watts, We have 12 years to limit climate change catastrophe, warns UN, Guardian, Monday 8 October 2018

[4] See my Mark 8 – Satan the Accuser and God the Chooser, based on a sermon of the same title by Paul Nuechterlein.

[5] John de Graaf, David Wann & Thomas H. Naylor, Affluenza: The All-Consuming Epidemic, quoted in Wikipedia, Affluenza. With acknowledgement to Paul Neuchterlein’s sermon, Maybe this is Good News after all, delivered at Zion Lutheran, Racine, WI, October 15, 2000.

[6] Clare Bryden, Peril of eating all the pie, Church Times 12 October 2012, reviewing Joseph E. Stiglitz, The Price of Inequality.

[7]  Richard Rohr, Breathing Underwater: Spirituality and the 12 Steps, widely quoted online. 

[8] Jim Wallis, On God’s Side: What Religion Forgets and Politics Hasn’t Learned About Serving the Common Good, p.3/4.

[9] Wallis, p.3/4.

[10] Mark 10.27.

 

Hebrews 1.1-4,2.5-12, Mark 10.2-16

The Nineteenth Sunday after Trinity, 7 October 2018

Austwick

 

Jesus caused a scandal wherever he went. And if the events described by Mark happened today, he’d be causing a scandal again. Mark tells us that “He put his arms around the children, laid his hands upon them…” 

But he hadn’t been CRB checked. He was breaking all the Child Protection taboos. In our society, adults are actively discouraged from touching children. The implications are that we can’t be trusted to be caring, to be intimate, with children; we are scared off showing our care for lost or distressed youngsters for fear that our holding their hand or our kindly hugs might be misunderstood: and so our young ones grow up untouched by us, distanced from us physically and emotionally. 

“He put his arms around the children, laid his hands upon them, and blessed them.” What right does he have to impose his religious beliefs on these innocents? That would be the cry today. How dare he presume to bless them: they should be left alone to find their own blessing in their own way and their own time, from their own God. 

So Jesus’ behaviour is scandalous behaviour, now, just as it was at the time it actually happened. Though the cause of the scandal was different then. As Mark describes it, people were bringing their children to Jesus to be blessed by him – and what sort of people would bring their children to Jesus for a blessing? It’s likely that they were society’s vulnerable ones, society’s struggling ones, society’s suffering ones. The sort of people who may have given up hope of a good life for themselves but who would try everything they could to try to provide a better life for their children.

These people – the poor of the world – had seen in Jesus something special, something wholesome, something holy, something which they wanted their children to have a share of. Just a simple blessing – it could make all the difference to their vulnerable youngsters’ lives.

It was the disciples who were scandalised by this: they saw this as a distraction from Jesus’s main purpose, which was to engage the concerns of the privileged adults around, the law-makers and law-keepers who were, on this occasion, intellectualising around the thorny matter of divorce, and no doubt trying to trip Jesus up over his stance on the subject. 

The disciples were comfortable with this sort of exchange, for to their ears the good news of the Kingdom of God was a grown-up message; the gospel was a serious business to be mulled over by thoughtful people in theological debate, not something to be interrupted by the messy, troubled poor and their screaming, wriggling kids. 

But Jesus saw things differently. The disciples’ attitude towards these little ones made him angry. Jesus wanted his scandalised disciples to understand that the grown-up gospel was something which could be understood by the children of the poor; could be embraced by families who were suffering, and – astonishingly – that “the Kingdom of God belongs to such as these.” 

What Jesus wanted his disciples to hear on that day in Judea is what Jesus wants us to hear today: that the Kingdom of God belongs to the little ones, the struggling ones, those who our privileged  conversations tend to neglect, sideline, demonise; the ones we’d rather ignore. 

These untouchables; the ones we are frightened to engage with, the ones whose suffering makes us feel uncomfortable, the ones who disturb our self-indulgent ways: those who know they need to be blessed by God, those who aren’t afraid to be touched by him, those who want to be embraced by him: the Kingdom of God belongs to such as these.

When we encounter suffering people, it disturbs us. Their struggles raise thorny questions for us and we struggle to find the answers, or to face the answers when they require a change of heart, or mind, or lifestyle, from us. In such moments we might recall how Jesus set aside the intellectual, theological debate of the moment to simply embrace these little ones who brought their children to him. Jesus was touched by these people, and he touched them. Not with answers to satisfy the troubled mind, but with an embrace and a blessing to soothe the troubled heart.

Is this what society’s troubled ones most want – someone to embrace them, to take them in their arms, to offer them a blessing? When we open ourselves to someone who is suffering, there is a blessing in our acceptance of them and in our listening to the cries of their hearts. 

This is not to deny the little ones the terrifying questions raised by their situation. These remain to be addressed, for sure. I found it revealing to wheel back in this passage of Mark to the debate with the Pharisees about the legality of divorce. It is legal for a man to divorce his wife, according to the law of Moses, but Jesus privileges the law of creation – which says that when two come together they become one flesh, joined together inseparably by God. Jesus teaches that creation’s law intends that marriage should be indissoluble; the permission to divorce is not part of that fundamental intention, but an accommodation to the hardness of the human heart.

Jesus’ teaching may sound harsh to us; when it comes to divorce, we’re liberated people. But remember that the people around Jesus that day were not. I’d argue that Jesus is actually sparking some form of liberation here in what he says. For his strong emphasis on the high dignity of marriage could be construed as strengthening the position of women in the community. Where the divorce laws of Moses favoured men and made women vulnerable, Jesus’ suggestion that women could initiate a divorce was unusual, and his teaching that men and women were equals in marriage was unprecedented. [2]

So here in Jesus’ teachings which elevate women, and his actions towards the children which followed, he displays a remarkable  compassion for the most vulnerable ones. The Kingdom of God is a community which embraces those who suffer most from the laws of hard-hearted men. The Kingdom of God is a community that welcomes and protects the weak.

 

 

Note

[1] A substantial rewrite of my earlier talk Touching the suffering, preached at Bratton Clovelly in 2012.

[2] See the discussion on this passage in Paul Nuechterlein, Girardian Lectionary, Reflections, Year B, Proper 22B.