Month: August 2020

Isaiah 51.1-6, Matthew 16.13-20

The Eleventh Sunday after Trinity, 23rd August 2020

Austwick, Keasden and online

“Look to the rock from which you were hewn, the quarry from which you were dug.”

I looked a sheep in the eye the other day. Climbing a stile, there it was beneath me, one of those stubborn ones which rather than fearfully turn and run away, decided to stay and face me off. In those moments when our eyes locked and I studied the structure of its bony face, I had the feeling that I was looking at something prehistoric, something so ancient and grafted to the earth that it might have been sculpted from the rocks beneath us, just as the stone wall was, on which I stood.

We share our lives with – no, more than that, our lives themselves are sculpted by – these rocks beneath our feet through our relationship with them. The thick flat cap of Millstone Grit which is the summit of Ingleborough, the preponderant pavements and pedestals of limestone, the grey Silurian boulders of Norber; the Pendle Grit which is the foundation of these moors: all these rocks, over 400 million years old, which underly us. [1]

Those who work the land are particularly hewn by it: its shape and form and character determines the shape and form and character of your days, whether rebuilding a wall or retrieving an errant lamb from a limestone gulley. The rocks determine the route of the paths we take and the roads we travel; and our homes, our places of sanctuary, are themselves formed from these quarried stones.

Those who may not be native to this area but who have settled here, are equally formed by this environment. Wendy Jennings last year published a book reflecting on what she called her ‘Search for God Away from the Church’, in which she wrote:

The natural world: learning from it – learning in it; that last is, I realise, an inestimable gift that Keasden has given me; a kind of gift so many people are deprived of by concrete-and-tarmac-heavy lives. All round me is my moorland – not ‘my’ in any possessive sense, but this place that I love so much with its openness and its quietness that help thought to clarify itself, challenge itself, contradict itself, re-order itself – whether I’m out striding in sun, wind or rain, or sitting here in my pool of light, with the moorland stretching away outside the windows. I’m not sure how much of this search I could have managed without its space. [2]

“Look to the rock from which you were hewn, the quarry from which you were dug.” Many people sense how, in our increasingly disconnected and digitised world, physical places are still vitally important to us: for as one writer puts it, ‘Place is space that has historical meanings, where some things have happened that are now remembered and that provide continuity and identity across generations. Place is space in which important words have been spoken that have established identity, defined vocation, and envisioned destiny. Place is space in which vows have been exchanged, promises have been made, and demands have been issued.’ [3]

Scripture helps us understand ourselves as people who are placed. Our relationship with places, with the rocks from which we were hewn, is a major theme in the Bible: which calls us to tend the land and attend to each other in love and grace, under the direction and guidance of a generous, giving creator God. But scripture also asserts that we are people on a journey, ultimately a journey between two very specific places – from Eden to the New Jerusalem. From Abraham and Sarah setting off to Canaan to start a nation, through Moses leading a captive people towards a Promised Land, to the early apostles of Jesus going out from Jerusalem into the world to share their Saviour’s story: our spiritual forebears lives were bound up with particular places, and with the journeys of faith which led them there. [4]

This journeying aspect of life is why “the rock from which you were hewn, the quarry from which you were dug” may refer not only to those physical places which form us, but also to the deep sources of our spiritual and emotional life – to our relationships with others, to those who we might regard as our ‘rocks’. To those who have helped form us, and who have supported us through life’s changes and challenges.

When I consider a ‘rock’ of my formative years, I’m not picturing a giant of a man, but the tiniest of women, my grandmother, the gentlest of characters, the simplest of Christians, and the one who was always present to us and for us, the still and steady point in our moving world. Each day involved some time in her old back kitchen with a cup of tea and conversation, down-to-earth care and affirmation. This is the Holy Ground on which I stand. Who was – or is – your rock?

Our ‘rock’ may be a person, or a place – or an institution. You may feel that source of strength and confidence which has resourced you for life has been a school, perhaps, or a place of work, or a social or charitable group to which you’ve belonged. Or your ‘rock’ may be that piece of music or work of art which, whenever you return to it, comforts or inspires you, gives you renewed joy for your life’s journey. Or similarly it may be that book or poem, or prayer, which you read and re-read often, for it is a source of strength and blessing to you.

Or our ‘rock’ may be less tangible than that, but no less present to us or powerful. For as Christians we stand on the rock of Christ, ‘the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation, for whom and in whom all things in heaven and on earth were created, in whom all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through whom God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, on earth and in heaven.’ [5] And we stand on the rock of the Church, which was built on the foundation of ordinary folk like Peter the fisherman in whom Jesus put his absolute confidence and faith, despite Peter’s shortcomings, just as he now puts his confidence and faith in us, to continue to speak out and live out the Christian Way, however unsteady about that we may feel ourselves to be.

In this destabilising time, let us return to the rock from which we were hewn. In these unsteady moments, let us find our feet, to stand firm in the quarry from which we were dug.

 

Notes

[1] Wikipedia: Norber erratics; Tom Barron, StoneCarve: Heritage: Landscape; F. Moseley, The Geology of the Keasden Area, West of Settle, Yorkshire: Proceedings of the Yorkshire Geological Society, 30, 331-352, 1 December 1956.

[2] Wendy Jennings, Coming, Not Going: A Search for God Away from the Church. p.124.

[3] Walter Brueggemann: The Land – Place as Gift, Promise, and Challenge in Biblical Faith.

[4] This paragraph draws on my 2013 sermon Where we are placed on the way to the city.

[5] Colossians 1.15-18.

Isaiah 56.1,6-8, Matthew 15.21-28 

The Tenth Sunday after Trinity, 16th August 2020

Clapham, Eldroth – and online

You know, we live in an age of intemperate speech. I won’t list any examples, because you know:  from presidents to people in the post office queue, folk can be very rude. Maybe someone’s been rude to you and it still rankles; or maybe you’ve said something hurtful which you now regret. So you’d expect me to preach a sermon saying, let’s show we follow Jesus by not talking intemperately, let’s share the love of God by not being rude to others. But hold on – what’s happening here? – in today’s gospel reading Jesus is very rude to people. 

Jesus was rude to the Pharisees. He’d called them ‘hypocrites’; quoting God saying, ’This people honours me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me’. He’d seen the difference between their holy words and their ungodly actions, how they preached to people their rules about food purity and cleanliness, whilst forcing these poor people to pay their temple taxes, meaning days of hard dirty work out in the fields where eating with clean hands was impossible. So perhaps we can see why Jesus offended them when he challenged them. And why they walked away angry with him. 

Jesus was rude to a Canaanite woman too. Rude to her not once, not twice, but three times. When she first shouted for help to heal her daughter,  Jesus didn’t answer her at all. How rude was that, ignoring her cries for help. And then he was rude to her again, saying, ‘I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.’ Which was another way of telling this woman to go away, because she didn’t come from Israel, she came from Canaan. So, sick daughter or not, he wouldn’t have anything to do with her. How rude was that….? 

But this woman wasn’t put off by Jesus’s rudeness. She didn’t walk away offended like the Pharisees had. She was determined to get something out of Jesus, however offhand he was being with her. So she knelt in front of him, saying, ‘Lord, help me.’ And Jesus was rude to her again. Very rude to her this time. He said, ‘It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.’ 

Did we hear that right? Did Matthew write that down in his gospel correctly? This woman, asking his help for her daughter – did Jesus really call her a dog???  There’s no getting away from it – and many writers and theologians and preachers have tried to get away from it over the years – but you really can’t: yes, Jesus was calling her a dog. This insulted her, and all her people.It was tantamount to him saying ‘It is not fair on the Israelites I’ve come to save, for me to waste my time on a Canaanite like you.’ How very, very rude was that….! You can imagine the reaction if they’d had Twitter in those days: Hey! Watch your mouth, Preacher Man! hashtag: #CaananiteLivesMatter.

This woman wasn’t a hypocritical religious type. She just wanted Jesus to heal her suffering daughter. And even after all his insults, she didn’t take offence and walk away like the Pharisees had. Instead she replied, ‘Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master’s table.’

And stayed to see how Jesus would react to that.

That put an end to Jesus’ insults. Realising that this woman had seen through his rudeness, to  believe that even if he’d come to save the lost sheep of the house of Israel, his power, his holiness, his grace, his healing, is large enough to extend to others too – to Canaanites, to people like her.

After all, Jesus had just fed five thousand people and there were twelve baskets left over. It looks like  this woman had understood the symbolic meaning in that miracle: that Jesus has enough to share with everyone, even those usually not included, even the enemy, the rejected ones; the dogs eating the crumbs. No wonder, then, that she rode all Jesus’ rudeness and demanded the crumbs from his table. Recognising that she had got his message, Jesus answered her, ‘Woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish.’ Her daughter was healed instantly. And everyone who witnessed this incident learned what was then an astonishing new truth – that God is for all people, not just one nation. 

But what of Jesus’ intemperate speech? Why would he be so rude, what was he thinking? After all, he’d just been lecturing the Pharisees on watching how they spoke! Well, let’s recall that in Matthew 11.6 Jesus said to John the Baptist’s disciples: ‘Blessed is anyone who takes no offence at me.’ And let’s note that here, when Jesus is rude to the Pharisees and then to the Canaanite woman, the Pharisees are offended; the Canaanite woman is not offended. This all reveals to us that the opposite of offence is faith. The pious and law-abiding Pharisees lacked faith, and a Gentile ‘dog’ has great faith. 

Jesus was pushing it with the Canaanite woman, but his rude remarks created a rude awakening – she passed the test of faith. But when he pushed it with the Pharisees, they failed that test and, offended, set off to do away with him. Part of me thinks Jesus was being playful with them; you can imagine it in his tone: using harsh words teasingly, in the same way he had teased the woman at the well about her husbands, and goaded the rich young man about giving his money away.

The message here is that if we take our faith seriously we should expect to find that Jesus will push it with us. He will tease out difficult demands which intrude into our lives. He’ll tell us to love our enemies, for instance, to pray for those who persecute us. How rude and ridiculous is that? He’ll tell us to do things with our wealth which our accountants wouldn’t. He’ll tell us to do things with our time which our spouses wouldn’t. He’ll raise questions about our motivations and desires which might discomfort us.

If we listen to these demands of his then we may either walk away offended, or embrace them as the positive challenges to our faith they’re intended to be, ways to help us grow as his disciples. 

So the message from the Pharisees and the Canaanite woman is this: when Jesus provokes us with his hard words and difficult demands, let’s not take offence; but instead, keep faith, keep prayerfully working on these things with Jesus. He will help you do this; he will teach you; he will open up to you whole new worlds of blessing. Let’s be ready for a rude awakening.

 

Notes 

[1] A rewrite of Matthew 15: Jesus is rude, preached in Liverpool, 2008.

[2] This paragraph based on quotations from David McCracken, The Scandal of the Gospels: Jesus, Story, and Offense cited in Paul Nuechterlein, Girardian Lectionary: Notes on Proper 15A. 

1 Kings 19.9-18 Matthew 14.22-33

The Ninth Sunday after Trinity, 9th August 2020

Keasden, Austwick – and online

When the disciples saw Jesus walking towards them on the lake,

they were terrified, saying, ‘It is a ghost!’

Once, on a primary school visit to a church one girl asked me, ‘Has this church got a ghost?’ 

Why did she ask that question? Did she think that all churches are scary, ancient buildings surrounded by gloomy old gravestones, the sort of places where ghosts and ghouls feature in popular fiction or in stories passed around the schoolyard and the family home? Perhaps she’d heard about the Black Canon of Bolton Abbey whose restless soul stalks the ruins in his dark cassock, cloak and hat. Or the ghostly choir who people have heard chanting in the abandoned Chapel of Nine Altars at Fountains Abbey. [1] Maybe the girl’s question was prompted by those memorial stones surrounding her on the church walls, commemorating people who used to walk that place – and maybe, in her imagination, still do. These might be friendly ghosts – of benefactors, of beloved clerics, for instance. But still, ghosts. 

Church is so familiar to us that we may find it hard to comprehend how others could be frightened of it. But that fear is real for many people: whether it’s fear of ghostly presences, or some other form of fear based on the the way that some people have been hurt or mistreated by Christians – ex-pupils of church schools who experienced brutal discipline; divorcees frozen out of their congregations for failing to uphold marriage; and so on. I sense that the fear of the Church has increased since light began to be shone on the many shameful abuses of children – and adults – previously hidden and held painfully by the victims alone; worsened by revelations of how many of these abuses were deliberately covered up. I sense parents distancing themselves and their children from church to protect them from us.  

This is sadder still when we accept that so much of the Church’s abusive behaviour over the centuries has been justified by its theology, by Christian teaching that God is a distant, all-powerful force to be feared. Whose obsession is with judgement and who is waiting for the opportunity to punish us for our sins. Sobering to think that so many memorial chapels were erected by families fearful of the eternal destiny of their deceased ones, seeking to pay their way into heavenly favour. 

I felt the pain of this at Betty Woodburn’s funeral service on Monday as I committed her gentle, loving Christian soul to God using the words, “The Lord is tender to those that fear him”. That  phrase could have been translated as ‘love him’ or ‘worship him’, but we’ve settled on ‘fear’. Why has Christianity been so focussed on fear? No wonder children may be spooked by it.

Fear features prominently in today’s miracle story – of when Jesus walked across the water towards Peter and the others in their boat. There’s their existential fear when their boat was being battered by the waves, far from the land, with the wind against them. And then there’s their terror of that apparition of a figure emerging through the spray, walking towards them on the lake. No wonder the disciples, seeing this, were terrified, saying, ‘It is a ghost!’ 

Did Jesus intend to generate fear in them? Had he earlier abandoned them just so that they could feel the fear of the storm? Had he chosen to reappear in such an unnerving way to strike the fear of God into their hearts? The gospel suggests not, for Matthew reports that, seeing their fear, immediately Jesus spoke to them and said, ‘Take heart, it is I; do not be afraid.’ 

This reminds us of something quite new and wonderful which we can see breaking into scripture with Jesus. Amidst all those fearful bible passages, those texts of terror [2], comes Jesus speaking words of peace; in particular the words, ‘do not be afraid’.

Matthew’s gospel begins with an angel appearing to Joseph and saying, ‘do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife’; in the Sermon on the Mount Jesus says, ‘do not be afraid; you are of more value than many sparrows’. ‘Do not be afraid’, said Jesus to his terror-struck disciples on the Mount of the Transfiguration. In the Garden of Gethsemane the angel told the women, ‘Do not be afraid; you are looking for Jesus who was crucified. He is not here; he has been raised.’ And shortly after, the first words the risen Christ spoke to these trembling friends were, yes, ‘do not be afraid’. [3]

For so long we have been taught that Christianity is a journey towards an angry God who will judge us for our wrongdoings – that life is a pilgrimage of fear. But what we have here, in the gospel, is a different story altogether. Rather than us walking in trepidation towards that terrifying God, what we find is our Jesus walking towards us – who are terrified – to greet us with words of comfort and peace. ‘Do not be afraid’ is Jesus’ signature message. ‘Do not be afraid’ is the first thing he wants us to hear every morning; ‘Do not be afraid’ is what he whispers to us through every change and chance of life; ‘Do not be afraid’ is what he tells us in the eye of every storm. 

‘Do not be afraid’ is so, so comforting to hear in this time of the coronavirus. This week I heard a man whose mother died recently, but not of Covid-19, who said, ‘I think she really died of fear. She suffered badly from kidney disease, which made her feel vulnerable to coronavirus, and she was so terrified of getting it that the anxiety killed her.’ And I heard of young men who have taken their own lives through fear of the ruin coming to them having lost their jobs and income. [4] 

These are extreme examples of the everyday fears and anxieties we all feel in this deeply disturbing time we’re in. And the background to all this, 75 years this week after the annihilation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, is our insecurity about the choices our world leaders make on our behalf, to continue to invest in weapons of mass destruction rather than work together to feed us all.

If we’re haunted by the fear of catching this virus, then Jesus walks towards us saying ‘Do not be afraid’.

If the ghosts of our past fill us with trepidation of judgement, then Jesus comes to us saying ‘Do not be afraid’.

If the anxieties of life threaten to overwhelm us, then Jesus approaches us saying ‘Take heart, it is I; do not be afraid.’

In any given moment when we may feel – like Peter – out of our depth, then Jesus reaches out his hand to catch us, saying ‘Take heart, it is I; do not be afraid.’

 

Notes

This talk draws from Jesus: a ghost on the waters? preached in Devon, 2011.

[1] Joseph Sheerin, 10 of the Most Haunted Buildings in Yorkshire. Leeds-List, 28 October 2019.

[2] A phrase borrowed from Phyllis Trible, Texts of Terror: Literary-Feminist Readings of Biblical Narratives.

[3] Bible Gateway, search on “Do not be afraid” in Matthew.

[4] Patrick Cockburn, Short Cuts: Thanington Without. London Review of Books, Vol. 42 No. 15, 30 July 2020.