Month: December 2019

Christmas Eve, 24 December 2019, Austwick 

John 1.1-14 

 

Some people have a way with words, but we’re not all like that. I wonder if you ever get lost for words? I know I do, sometimes. Yes, even preachers and pastors who ought to have a word to say to anyone in any given situation, can struggle to find the right word for the moment. 

When someone we know has just been bereaved, or made redundant, or had bad news about their health, it’s hard to find the right thing to say to them when we see them. That’s normal. Or when something wonderful happens, which breaks through the mundane ordinariness of everyday life, like a marriage proposal or a birth, then too we might lose our tongue. The news is so wonderful we can’t express our feelings about it very well. Perhaps that’s why when we first meet a new tiny baby suddenly all the words we can find to say are ones like ‘aaaah’ and ‘ga-ga’ and ‘coochie-coo’. 

But we know that we should try to find the right words. 

If I love you, how do you know that, unless I tell you? 

If I love you, how do I know that, unless I tell you? 

Though gestures and postures and body language do tell us a lot, it is when we speak out what is inside us that that thing becomes true. 

Only then do our feelings, our thoughts, our instincts, come alive. In that moment our words become flesh. When we speak out what is inside us, lights come on in our head and our heart. Because we’ve found the right word to describe ourselves, we understand ourselves more fully, and those we’re speaking to know us more fully too. 

Think of that moment, for instance, when you first say ‘I love you’. It’s then that suddenly love comes alive, where before there was only an ambiguous silence. 

It’s like when God said ‘Let there be light’, there was light, where before there was only a brooding darkness. Yes, back to the start of creation, to before God was known, to create a beginning God had to find a Word to speak out. And when God said, ‘let there be light’ – and only then – did light appear. 

Since the very beginning, God has struggled to find the right Word to describe Himself to us. God tried describing Himself in Creation – sun, moon, stars, all of that beauty and wonder – and that is still enough for many people, but God had more to say about Himself than creation could tell, so when that wasn’t enough he tried flesh and blood. He tried saying it in Noah, in Abraham, in Moses, in David, in John the Baptist, but each of them had their flaws and quirks and just didn’t say it well enough in the end. [1] 

It was another John, the gospel writer, who finally announced it: ‘The Word became flesh’, John said. ‘And lived among us’. And on the cusp of Christmas morning, we know what flesh he’s talking about. In the flesh and bones and blood and brains of a man in history God finally managed to express who God fully is, and simultaneously what being fully human is all about. And here we are tonight, aware that that word is Jesus – God’s most perfect and most precious Word. Jesus – the Word become flesh. 

Notice that Jesus didn’t come knowing exactly the right things to say. He came as ‘a small crying child, beginning a life of risk and suffering’. [2] Now, we can relate to that because we all live lives of risk and suffering; and the Christmas message is that we can invite that Word to be with us in our risk and suffering, to help us to embrace what it is to be more fully human. Rowan Williams says that ‘God shows us how, by his grace and in his Spirit, we can respond to the tormenting riddles of the world.’ 

Our world is full of words – too many words to take in, in the domain of Twitter, Facebook, advertising and 24-hour rolling media channels. So many words that in a sense, none of them mean very much to us at all. And we’ve got so used to being told so many blatant lies in plain sight by those who are supposed to be bearers of light to us, that a form of deep cynicism or despair enfolds us these days, combined with a longing for someone to please tell us the truth, to model the truth for us.

So many of us are waiting for a substantial word to come to us – one that lasts more than a nanosecond, one that has more depth than a flicker on a screen. One that has no agenda to manipulate us for gain but is purely loving and giving to us. We are waiting for a word of love or healing, a word which will switch on lights in our head and our heart, a word which can save us and help us find the way towards being fully human. 

And so here we are, on a special night, in a service of Holy Communion, soaking in and sharing and singing the words which speak of that one Word which, we sense, might just answer the questions and cries of our hearts. In your coming for communion tonight you draw yourself near to the Word. I pray that the Word will awaken in your life afresh this Christmas and increasingly fill your life this coming year. The one word which describes God fully: that word is Jesus, who fleshed out for all to see who God truly is and who we can truly be.

 

Notes 

An adaptation of John 1 – Finding the right Word preached in Devon on Christmas Eve 2012 and John 1 – Finding the right Word, preached at The Church of the Good Shepherd, Liverpool, Christmas Eve 2005. 

[1] See ‘Word’ in Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking, a Seeker’s ABC, p.120

[2] Rowan Williams, The Archbishop of Canterbury’s Christmas Message to the Anglican Communion 2005

Romans 1.1-7, Matthew 1.18-25

Fourth Sunday of Advent, 22 December 2019, Clapham 

 

This is a talk about Joseph: and about when you’re doing the right thing feels like you’re doing the wrong thing.

In the old days when the Christmas story was told, Joseph was treated as a figure of fun. The medieval Mystery Plays present Joseph as an old man who thinks his young fiancee has been unfaithful to him. Comic in the way that Chaucer’s ‘The Miller’s Tale’ is comic, with its unfaithful wife and cuckolded husband, in the York Mystery Play the enraged Joseph suggests that it was no angel who slipped into Mary’s chamber, but rather a devilish young lover. The comedy relies on the audience knowing that Mary was a virgin after all. But behind this comic tale is a tragic struggle – the struggle which Joseph had, in doing the right thing, when doing the right thing felt to him like he was doing the wrong thing. 

Doing the right thing involved taking Mary at her word, and taking her hand in marriage. But to Joseph, steeped in the traditions and culture of his day, this felt so very wrong. If Mary was pregnant with another’s child – whether by the Holy Spirit or by some other man – then everybody knew that divorce was the only acceptable way for Joseph to go. Joseph knew that taking any alternative action invited the derision and shame of everyone around, heavily impacting his standing in the community, his business, his prospects. In the York Mystery Play, weighed down by this dilemma, Joseph breaks down completely with sorrow. Only a divine intervention persuades him to do the right thing and take the bold step of faith in marrying Mary. [1]

I imagine that at some time or other you have faced that sort of dilemma: when doing the right thing felt to you like you were doing the wrong thing. It’s a predicament we sometimes face at Christmastime over those decisions we have to take about which family members to invite to our meal – or whose invitations we should accept. When it’s the case that whatever decision you take someone will miss out, or someone may take offence, then, even when convinced you’re doing the right thing you can still feel like you’re doing the wrong thing.

Doing the right thing when it feels wrong is a long Christian tradition, going all the way back to Jesus who saw that the right thing was to heal people who came to him on the Sabbath, although it was so very wrong in respect to the laws of the day. Jesus, who saw that the right thing was to give Caesar what Caesar demanded – raising the hackles of the anti-Roman protestors, Jesus’ peers, to whom this was anathema; but adding that the right thing was also to give to God what was rightly God’s – the whole of our lives, all our devotion, which was to the Roman mindset entirely wrong, to the Roman emperor treasonous.

Doing the right thing when it felt so very wrong is the mark of the Christian saints and martyrs, like Margaret Clitherow of  York whose conversion to Catholicism came at a time when the Roman faith was outlawed in England, and whose convictions led her to be repeatedly imprisoned for failing to attend church, and to risking her life by harbouring and maintaining priests, a capital offence which eventually led to her execution. [2] 

Doing the right thing when it felt so very wrong is the mark of those Christians who have campaigned for what they’ve seen as just causes, however little those causes were embraced by others at the time. Like the slave trade abolitionists struggling with popular criticisms that their campaigns attacked their neighbours’ entire way of life, their nation’s economy, the stability of democracy itself; and those Christian abolitionists troubled by the declarations of high churchmen and statesmen that slavery was established by God and sanctioned in the Bible. [3]

When apartheid ended in South Africa in 1994 ‘some Black people wanted harsh penalties for the perpetrators of apartheid crimes. Others thought that investigation of past wrongs would jeopardise the fragile new democracy, while others simply wanted to forget the past.’ [4] But Archbishop Desmond Tutu was convinced that the country needed to engage in a process of ‘true reconciliation’ which would ‘expose the awfulness, the abuse, the hurt, the truth.’ [5]

When the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was set up under Archbishop Tutu’s chairmanship, ‘it was not accepted by all parties to the conflict. Senior political and military leaders under apartheid, and former members of the liberation movements, were equally unconvinced that they needed to apply for amnesty.’ [6] When the weight of opinion is against you, doing the right thing sometimes feels wrong. It may take a divine intervention to persuade you to take the right path: the conviction born of faith, forged in a life of prayer and worship, supported by fellow-travellers.

In our society today it feels so very wrong to call for an end to consumerism, to learn to live with less for the sake of the planet. But increasingly voices call us from the margins to do just this, for it is the right thing to do. “Some people can just let things go, but I can’t, especially if there’s something that worries me or makes me sad,” said Greta Thunberg this year. [7] And though it must have felt so very wrong to protest, alone, outside the parliament building on a school day, to her it was unquestionably the right thing to do.

You know, we can laugh off Greta just as our medieval forebears laughed off Joseph. Or we can take them as exemplars – them, and Margaret Clitherow, and the abolitionists, and Desmond Tutu and others who come to our minds. We can allow ourselves to be encouraged by their examples and harmonise with their willingness to embrace struggle for the cause of right…. whether that struggle relates to a matter of worldwide importance, or whether it’s about a personal situation close to home.

Let us pray.

God, make us bold enough to follow our convictions about what is the right thing to do, even when society is telling us something quite different, even when we feel the censure of those we love, even when the cause – which we cherish as just and true to you – seems a lost cause. Guide us so as not to be misled by our enthusiasms, use us as you have used so many others from the margins to make a difference in following you and building a better world. Amen

 

Notes

[1] Joseph’s Trouble about Mary in Richard Beadle, Pamela M. King, eds,York Mystery Plays: A Selection in Modern Spelling.

[2] Wikipedia: Margaret Clitherow.

[3] Wikipedia: Christian Abolitionism, Christian views on slavery.

[4] Tutu and his role in the Truth & Reconciliation Commission. South African History Online, 4 April 2011, updated 27 August 2019.

[5] Goodreads.com: Quotes.

[6] Desmond Tutu, Truth and Reconciliation Commission, South Africa. Encyclopaedia Britannia

[7] Jonathan Watts, Greta Thunberg, schoolgirl climate change warrior: ‘Some people can let things go. I can’t’. Guardian, 11 March 2019.

James 5.7-10, Matthew 11.2-11

Third Sunday of Advent,15 December 2019

Austwick, Clapham 

 

‘Blessed is anyone who takes no offence at me’ – said Jesus to the disciples of John. 

And the church leader James instructed his flock, ‘Don’t grumble against one another, so that you won’t be judged.’

But we love a little grumble, don’t we? Election-time is a great time for grumbling, things like, “voting won’t change anything,” or “I’m sick of hearing about Brexit,” or “all politicians are as bad as each other.” And Christmas-time brings out the grumbles: about the length of the queues at the one-till-that’s-open-at-Booths; about the price of postage stamps; about the parish council’s choice of village decorations; about the music at the carol service; about how much brazil nuts cost. Grumbling helps us let off steam when we’re stressed out; grumbling helps us feel a little better about ourselves, and particularly how much better we are than the people we’re grumbling about.

‘Blessed is anyone who takes no offence at me’ – said Jesus to the disciples of John. Knowing well how the grumbling against him had already begun. For the disciples of John had seen Jesus as John’s brightest hope, the one to rise up from their ranks and save the people from their subjection to Rome. They liked what they saw in his healing miracles and his radical message of good news to the poor – for surely that meant them. They had him lined up as their all-conquering Messiah. But when he started preaching loving one’s enemy and praying for one’s persecutors the grumbling started in earnest. When he spoke against the use of violence and walking the second mile and turning the other cheek – they took offence. 

They weren’t the only ones who took offence at Jesus. His home-town crowd at Nazareth took badly to his prophetic speech and tried throwing him off a cliff. The religious establishment were scandalised by his Sabbath-day healings. When at the Jerusalem Temple he protested against those who had turned the holiest place into a marketplace, those with vested interests plotted how to silence him permanently. King Herod took offence at Jesus even before he was born. And even his own disciples took offence at him, when he started talking about his forthcoming death.

Why is Christianity so unpopular? Maybe it’s because people take Jesus seriously. When people take the words of Jesus seriously, when people take the words of Jesus at face value, they’re bound to take offence. For Jesus’ teaching, if followed through, pinpoints how we’re each no better than the people we grumble about – in truth, we’re often worse. Jesus’ teaching, if we take it seriously, shows us that to become better we need to turn our ways completely around. That offends a lot of us. And that’s why most of us, most of the time, prefer to avoid Jesus, or worse still, pay him lip-service instead.

But – ‘Blessed are those who take no offence at me’.

Blessed is Mary, small-town-teenaged Mother of God, who with her great fears and anxieties might have turned her back on the angel, shut her ears and her heart to Gabriel’s message, but who embraced it all, in faith, instead.

Blessed is Joseph, caught in the centre of a moral scandal not of his own making, who seeking to protect his own reputation might have walked out on Mary and never returned, but who acted exceptionally, opened his heart, held his nerve, took on the responsibility.

Blessed are the shepherds, seated comfortably on the ground, who in their terror might have turned and fled at the sight of the heavenly host, but rather listened to the voice of the angel, conferred together and took the walk of faith downhill to Bethlehem. 

Blessed is the innkeeper who might have done what all his peers did and shut the door on a couple of migrants with a high-risk pregnancy, but who chose to make a generous and precarious act of hospitality instead.

This week, I say:

Blessed are those who decide to stop moaning about the garish Christmas lights in the house windows opposite, and cross the road with a bottle to share with their neighbours instead.

Blessed are those who don’t avoid the Big Issue seller on the freezing cold street, but stop for a few minutes of conversation.

Blessed are those who chuck away their newspaper telling them nasty tales about the feckless poor bringing problems on themselves, and instead spend a day volunteering in the foodbank,  listening to the real stories.

Blessed are those who respond to that inner voice telling them to clear the snow from their elderly neighbour’s path, however much they’d rather be indoors by a nice warm fire.

Blessed are those who bury their differences over the family meal-table at Christmas – and commit to rebuilding broken relationships next year.

And so….

Blessed are we, if we do not take offence at Jesus, and his challenging, life-changing words.

Blessed are we, if we put an end to our grumbling and let it give way to grace.

Blessed are we if, in faith and hope and joy, we commit to become better people, to turn our ways around.