Month: November 2021

Jeremiah 33.14-16, Luke 21.25-36

First Sunday of Advent, 28 November 2021, Austwick

Have you ever made a promise you didn’t keep? I know I have; often with the best intentions of keeping it but ultimately failing; occasionally just to keep another person happy or to avoid conflict or dodge a difficult decision – the sort of empty promises which tend to come back to bite you.  

We’re all only human, we’re bound to get caught up in promises made and broken, well intentioned words which don’t work out. And we’ll also be on the receiving end of those broken promises sometimes, with the emotional pain, sadness or anger that goes with them.

In our time and place, people are inclined to disbelieve promises. We live in an age of empty words in public life, the broken promises we’re daily dealt leading to a breakdown of trust between the people and those meant to serve us. It is a crying shame and a real crisis of our times. 

In private life too, we make it hard for ourselves by making promises we cannot keep. I’m thinking of the modern trend in non-religious marriage ceremonies for couples to create their own vows. Almost always they are along the lines of “I will always be at your side”, “I will never let you down”: absolute promises that will inevitably fail. What wisdom, then, in the words of the traditional marriage vows, promising devotion and commitment along realistic lines: “for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health…” and so on.

In all of this we appreciate the importance of creating and cherishing moments in our lives when we speak words of solemn promise. Our marriage vows are the obvious ones, or the words spoken for us or by us at our baptism, the oaths we make in a court of law. Words freighted with deep and heavy meaning, words we don’t speak lightly, and we do, deeply, intend to keep.

And we appreciate the power of words to transform, to form new worlds from promises made. When we make a vow we know that our words express our promise that the people we once were will be transformed into different people for the future. Isn’t it interesting that even people who don’t regard themselves as religious, nevertheless feel the need to utter such words of promise in a church or on a bible, in the presence of a God who hears, and helps us hold those promises.

Solemn, truthful, and absolutely serious, these are like the words which God himself spoke to Jeremiah: ‘The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will fulfil the promise made to the house of Israel and the house of Judah…’

The days are surely coming. Our God is a God of certain promise. Those who first heard Jeremiah’s words would remember the earlier promises of God, fulfilled – his promise to Noah of mercy and new beginnings for a broken world, his promise to Abraham of a new nation, to Moses and his people of a promised land. And now, they hear God make the promise of a ‘righteous branch’ to spring up – one who would bring justice and righteousness to a land troubled by injustice and unrighteousness, one who would bring salvation to Judah and safety to Jerusalem – one they would call The Lord, ‘our righteousness’.

For us, that promised man is Jesus. For us, Jesus is the source of all that is just and right. For us, Jesus is the one who brings salvation and keeps us safe. 

How much we need the certainty of that man of promise today. For we live in a world which promises itself that our civilisation and progressiveness will save us whilst we’re aware as never before of how our ceaseless consumption is causing our forests to burn, our villages to flood, our sea cliffs to fall. It’s a world we recognise as being very much like the world Jesus described to his disciples in this passage which we heard today, where ‘People … faint from fear and foreboding of what is coming upon the world, for the powers of the heavens [seem to] be shaken.’

It’s vital to our understanding of his message to appreciate that Jesus was speaking to the current situation in his time and place. In the gospels his context was always the conflict between the Jewish people and their Roman oppressors, and his prophecies were always about the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Temple, which did take place in AD70. His message was not that he would come again at some vague indeterminate time in the future to sort out our mess; his message is that although the Temple falls, he is the new Temple – in other words, he is the new way to God, [2] and he’s coming into our lives right now whenever we turn to him. Listen: for he speaks; watch: for he acts in our current situation, in our time and place.

The words of Jesus in today’s gospel passage don’t feel that comfortable. Luke has freighted his message with the language of apocalypse. But Jesus’ words serve to impress on us that though the signs of the times seem dark, and we may feel the weight of the burden of them, nevertheless he is coming into the world, and that means that our ‘redemption is drawing near’. 

Although the Temple falls, he is the new Temple. What are the ‘temples’ of our day? The systems of the world we have given our obedience and service to throughout our lives, we see them crumbling before our eyes. The time is up for oil; democracy is broken; the god of endless growth is an emperor without clothes. But we live in the hopeful promise that Jesus is coming into the world. 

When is Jesus coming into the world? It can’t be a day too soon. Truth is that Jesus is coming into the world each and every day, every moment we open the door of our hearts to him.

But how can Jesus bring redemption to this world? Are his promises empty words? No, Jesus can bring redemption to this world through the lives of his followers as we live out the values of his peaceable, gracious, loving kingdom, through small acts of kindness towards neighbours, friends, and in particular towards our enemies, those who persecute us, and the vulnerable ones around us.

This is the promise which Advent brings. Words with the power to lift the heaviness of the world from our shoulders; words which shine light into the world’s darkness as we let the sure promise of Jesus’ presence and power unfold in our lives. 

There will be some promises of Jesus which you have always found especially helpful or comforting or inspirational, those gospel passages and messages which have always encouraged you and helped you on your way. In this prayerful time we share this morning, and every day of Advent, you might bring those special words to mind. Listen: for he speaks; watch: for he acts in our time and place.

‘Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away’, he tells us.

So today, again, with confidence, hold on to Jesus, and his words of promise to you. 

 

Notes

[1] A rewrite of the sermon preached at Eldroth and Keasden in 2018, in Devon in 2012 and in Somerset in 2015.

[2] See Paul Nuechterlein, My Core Convictions, Part 3 on his Girardian Lectionary website, outlining N. T. Wright’s ‘groundbreaking work on Jesus as a Jewish apocalyptic prophet. Luke 21, as a parallel to Mark 13, is a key passage for Wright’s thesis. For almost a century, New Testament scholars have assumed along with Albert Schweitzer and Rudolf Bultmann that either Jesus or the evangelists or both were wrong about the end times – namely, that they expected them to arrive within a generation. Wright challenges this entire line of thinking, hypothesising instead that Jesus was predicting the cataclysmic events of the Roman defeat and destruction of Judea, which did happen within that generation.’

Daniel 7.9-10, 13, 14, John 18.33–37

Christ the King, Sunday 21 November 2021, Clapham

Today, we celebrate the festival of Christ the King. In some ways it’s the oddest occasion in the Church’s calendar. 

Why would I say that? After all, the songs of Christian people the world over have been forever full of praise for Jesus seen as a monarch: from ‘Praise, my soul, the King of heaven’ to ‘This is our God, the Servant King’; and our creeds proclaim Jesus as one whose ‘kingdom will have no end’. 

I call it odd because if you look closely at his life story as told in the gospels, you’ll realise that Jesus never positioned himself as a king, in fact he went out of his way to avoid being seen as one. Look at the way he wriggles through Pilate’s interrogation on this subject. Although the focus of his teaching was the Kingdom of God, he was clear that meant something entirely different from the kingdoms of this world.  

The scriptures show us how Israel’s kings were each at best flawed, and at worst their lust for power, possessions and military might was satisfied at the expense of the poorest and most vulnerable in the land. And to this day, we seem to be subject to living this. It’s sometimes called the way of empire; or a domination system, in which those few people who make up the governments, organisations, and institutions that regulate human affairs, control the many to their own advantage. [1].  

In Jesus’ time and place the domination system was sustained by the Roman occupying forces, and their client Jewish king Herod Antipas. Their voracity for power and wealth, their expansion programmes fed by high taxation, land possession and slave labour, meant that this was a time of great struggle for the mass of ordinary people in the land. [2] 

Jesus stood for God the Father, and that meant him standing  against the domination system of his day. He spent his ministry confronting the powers-that-be, and proclaiming the Kingdom of God, the gracious, gentle and generous power that emerges on earth wherever people allow God the Father to rule. You might say that Jesus’ whole life was a series of prophetic acts defying the kingdoms of the world and symbolising the values of this new Kingdom: 

• Not born in a palace to the tolling of cathedral bells, but in a barn in the cold of the night. 
• Not born to a noble family, in the lineage of the elite, Jesus’ father was an ordinary carpenter, his mother a modest country girl. 
• Not educated in a military academy, Jesus sought out his learning in the temple, at the feet of teachers of scripture, forming his leadership style in humility before the Father. 
• Not moving in the circles of the famous and gifted and rich, Jesus’ closest friends were fishermen and common folk.  
• Not showing his powers at the helm of great warships or at the head of great state banquets, in the gospels we find Jesus on the road healing the lame, giving sight to the blind and famously ‘eating with tax collectors and sinners’. [3] 

His parables provoked his listeners to consider the ways of unjust stewards and punitive employers in contrast to the gracious ways of God. On Palm Sunday Jesus ridiculed the pomp and power of Pontius Pilate by riding into Jerusalem on a donkey, posing as a mock king. [4] From his subversive statement ‘Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s’, through his cleansing of the Temple [5], all the way to his execution by the powers who ruled his world, Jesus determined to show them that if he was a king, he wasn’t their kind of king at all.

The powers-that-be sent Jesus to his death, precisely because the directly challenged them. Jesus was crucified to satisfy the demands of the domination system, that subversives should be silenced so that the kingdoms of the world can be maintained. The high priest Caiaphas spoke for the powers-that-be when he said, ‘It is better that one man should die for the people than for the whole nation to be destroyed.’ [6] and so they arranged for Jesus to be accused, condemned and crucified. 

Now, we see things from the other side of the cross. We look on that scene, where above Jesus’ crown of thorns is Pilate’s inscription: ‘King of the Jews’. And see in it a terrible, wonderful irony. Because with hindsight we realise that what died with Jesus on that cross was the authority of the domination system. Because Jesus died an innocent victim of trumped-up charges, the true motives of those who executed him were revealed to all who had eyes to see. And because Jesus had spent his life announcing the coming of the Kingdom of God, we realise that what was born at Jesus’ resurrection was the power for that Kingdom to continue growing in the world – in the lives of all who put their hearts together with the heart of God. And wherever this Kingdom grows, so the powers of the world’s kingdoms diminish and decline. 

As Archbishop Desmond Tutu famously puts it, “Goodness is stronger than evil; love is stronger than hate; light is stronger than darkness; life is stronger than death; victory is ours through Him who loves us.” [7]

 The first person whose eyes were opened to this was that centurion at the foot of the cross, who looked up at the executed Jesus and proclaimed. “Truly this man was the Son of God!” [8] Now, in that place and time there was only one person who could be called the Son of God: and that was the Emperor of Rome. For a centurion of Rome to say what he said marked a real conversion in that man. The centurion knew what he said was heresy, but his eyes had been opened to a whole new perspective in which his status as a subject of Caesar’s kingdom began to be subject itself to his new status as one who had entered the Kingdom of God, right there and then.

To that centurion the Emperor of Rome was no longer divine – Jesus was. Caesar was no longer king in his life, for Christ had become King of his heart. And for those of us who have had our eyes opened in the same way, that is why today we proclaim Christ as our King. Jesus now reigns in glory at the right hand of the Father [9], and every time we pray, ‘Thy Kingdom come on earth as it is in Heaven’ we invite him to help us to align our hearts with his heart, to put him first, to live under his direction, and only then, in light of that, to respond to the pressures the world places on us. In the words of Henry Williams Baker: 

The King of love my Shepherd is, 

whose goodness faileth never; 

I nothing lack if I am his, 

and he is mine for ever. [10] 

 

Notes

Adapted from Jesus – killing the king, raising the Kingdom preached at the Church of Ss Asaph and Cyndeyrn, Llanasa, 2013.

[1] Walter Wink, The Powers That Be: Theology for a New Millennium

[2] Marcus J. Borg, Jesus: Uncovering the Life, Teachings and Relevance of a Religious Revolutionary, p.77-108

[3] See my children’s poem Jesus – a funny sort of king for more along these lines.

[4] See Marcus J. Borg, John Dominic Crossan, The Last Week, What the Gospels really teach about Jesus’ final days in Jerusalem, p.2-3, and my sermon, Jesus’ crowd is a Flash Mob for more on this interpretation of Palm Sunday.

[5] Mark 12.17

[6] John 11.50

[7] Desmond Tutu,  An African Prayer Book

[8] Mark 15.39

[9] Acts 2.33

[10] The King of love my Shepherd is, Henry Williams Baker, 1868

Psalm 16, Mark 13.1-8

 Remembrance Sunday, 14 November 2021

Austwick, Clapham, Keasden

“When you hear of wars and rumours of wars, 

do not be alarmed;

this is but the beginning of the birth pangs.”

Now, for obvious reasons I don’t have personal first-hand experience of birth pangs. I have on many occasions come home from church on a Sunday evening to find myself watching Call The Midwife with the cries and screams of those East End mothers, and on a couple of occasions I have been that hapless man in the maternity ward, sitting alongside a woman in agony, helpless to know what to do or say.

But only those of you who have been through childbirth really know what the birth pangs are like. Having experienced them once some say, “never again”, and stick to that. Others, overtaken by the joy of having this new life appear, will somehow put the painful struggle behind them and determine to go through it all again.

Jesus said, “When you hear of wars and rumours of wars, do not be alarmed; this is but the beginning of the birth pangs.” Whenever you hear apocalyptic language like that in the New Testament the context is the First Jewish-Roman War. The gospels, John’s Revelation and the other books were all written in the immediate aftermath of the Jewish rebellion which ended with the Romans destroying Jewish towns, displacing their people and appropriating their land, all around the symbolically momentous destruction of the Jewish Temple and Jerusalem itself in AD70.

For many Jewish people at that time, their lives turned upside-down, their society in ruins, it must have felt like the beginning of the end for them. Defeated, displaced and in disarray, how could they ever re-form and re-build?

The gospels portray a Jesus foreseeing these events a generation earlier. And his message is that this is not the beginning of the end; rather it’s the end of the beginning, for, as every midwife knows ‘the beginning of the birth pangs’ is part of an unstoppable process which will lead to the start of a new life. Jesus’ message does not deny the pain that we feel in times of war and conflict; but it carries the hopeful meaning that in those times when our land is troubled, our world is aching, then we are pregnant, with the possibility of the birth of a new ‘kingdom’ in which human conflict and its consequences – of poverty, famine, disease – will be no more. 

Today we gather to honour the memory of those who gave their all in the conviction that their struggle, their suffering, in war, was worth it: for they saw it as the end of the beginning, the means to open up the possibility of a new life for the people and the world they were fighting to protect. And so it proved in many ways following World War Two, with the genesis of organisations which have brought nations together for mutual flourishing – like the UN; and financial protection – The World Bank; and in this country the post-war settlement saw the much-celebrated birth of the NHS and a welfare state system which for a few decades provided a genuine safety net for the poorest and most vulnerable of our citizens. Beyond the terrible pangs of war, the relief of reconstruction and renewal.

And so this short sermon ends with a question about today. For we may not in this country be at war right now but – in common with every other society on Earth – we are living through agonies wrought by a global pandemic, distressed by the shocks of severe economic changes, anguished by the awareness that our very existence is now challenged by the severity of climate change with its reportedly fast approaching tipping-points. 

Do these agonies mark the beginning of the end for us; or can we rather see them as the end of the beginning? Are the troubles of today the birth pangs of a better world which we can shape if we engage with the struggle through them, if we act hopefully, create imaginatively, and commit to the earth and each other – all peoples together?

Those who have faith in Jesus Christ can affirm that in the way of life he demonstrated and taught, he opened up the possibility of a better world for us. People of goodwill, of all faiths and traditions, are already engaged in many different ways in shaping this better world: by changing their lives to live more gently on the earth, to live generously towards others, to restore the common good in place of antagonism and conflict.

It is good that we are here, to take the time to consider the lives and the character of the people we remember today: to contemplate their self-giving commitment to fighting for a better world; to be encouraged thereby to open up space in our world to make new beginnings possible. When we step in to play our part in this work of re-creation and re-birth – then we honour them.

Jonah 3.1–10*, Mark 1.14–20

The  Third Sunday before Advent, 7 November 2021, during the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26) in Glasgow.

In our rapidly-overheating world one of the many myths currently being busted is the myth that we human beings always put our survival first. It is true of other species; who, ‘when confronted by an impending threat, such as winter, invest great resources into avoiding or withstanding it: by migrating or hibernating, for example. Humans are a different matter. It seems that the more we  learn about the chronic threat of climate and ecological breakdown, the more we go out of our way to compromise our survival. [1]

We are more engaged than ever before in those activities fatally damaging our planet, like we’re hell-bent on ever-more coal-burning, car use, deforestation, throwaway food production, and so on. Is this behaviour of ours a wilful last-ditch binge like we’re guzzling all the buffet and booze left on the Titanic? Or is it rather that because we’ve been so poorly informed – often deliberately misinformed [2] – on this topic that we’ve just not realised the impact of what we’ve been doing? 

The book of Jonah has only four short chapters. I commend it to you, because as well as being very funny it’s a text which can speak to our times. At the start we find God distressed by the behaviour of the people of Nineveh; it’s only at the very end that God explains his concerns to Jonah: God is troubled, he says, that the people of Nineveh ‘do not know their right hand from their left’. 

What could that mean? The context is that Nineveh, on the eastern bank of the holy River Tigris was the flourishing capital of the Neo-Assyrian Empire: Nineveh the Great, they called it,  transformed by King Sennacherib into a capital worthy of his vast empire through one of the most ambitious building projects in ancient history, in which he expanded the size of the city, constructed great city walls, numerous temples, a royal garden, and the Southwest Palace, which Sennacherib called his ‘Palace without Rival’. For several decades Nineveh was the largest city in the world, three days walk across, according to the book of Jonah. [3] 

We can imagine that life in Nineveh in Jonah’s time was as comfortable as is life in any of our affluent cities today: its people well-supplied with luxury goods and comfort foods in and out of season, entertained and cultured, busy with industry and finance, new homes, new builds, the work of constant expansion. And yet, despite all this greatness they enjoyed, a compassionate God saw how the Ninevites had become a people who didn’t know their right hand from their left, a people – in other words – losing their way, troubled in their ease, psychically impoverished in their wealth.

Were they troubled in knowing that their great city of empire thrived at the expense of nature: clearing land, diverting watercourses, demolishing forests, carving quarries out of hillsides: all to facilitate the building of their homes and stadia and streets? Was their psychic unease rooted in a shamed awareness that their comfort came through other people’s suffering: the native people removed by force off their land; tenant farmers priced out of their meagre existence; the everyday enslavement and exploitation of the workers who serviced the smooth running of the empire?

If so, then we might identify ourselves with the people of Nineveh in Jonah’s time; for like them, we too are sadly aware of the many ways that our ease is enabled through the domination of nature and the domination of other people; and this troubles us deeply. On the climate crisis we feel we can’t do right for doing wrong: for example, when we virtuously give up plastic bags we then learn that producing our replacement organic cotton tote bags has an environmental impact 20,000 times worse than plastic. [4] Bewildered by insights like this, we can feel like we’re a people who don’t know our right hand from our left. Unsure of what is right and what is wrong we’re haunted by the question, how then should we live? In this sense we are all Ninevites now.

But the Nineveh story offers a strange kind of hope to us in this week where the world’s leaders meet to discuss action on climate change and we, the people, wait in hope and fear to discern the shape our future might take. For the Nineveh story offers us a glimpse of some unlikely heroes – for it was the actions of the people which effected change in Nineveh; and this unexpected and very welcome twist invites us to consider what this might mean for all of us – Ninevites – now.

In the story, God’s chosen messenger Jonah refuses to take on his prophetic task, runs away not once but twice, like a convinced environmentalist in our day fearful of being ridiculed or attacked for speaking out. And the king of Nineveh in Jonah’s time was too engaged in a political and military struggle against his brother for the overall rule of Assyria, to be involved with the concerns of the people. Except, of course, just enough to keep onside with them to hold on to their support.

It was the people who caused the sea-change which saved Nineveh. God got to them before Jonah did; the people had been somehow conscientised by God’s yearning for them to wake up and face the uncomfortable truths about their contradictory and fatally compromised situation, to open their eyes to their errant behaviour; and they had begun to turn – to take first steps to walk a different path. The starting point for them was to put on sackcloth and proclaim a fast.

In another of this story’s lovely comic turns the next scene shows the witless king of Nineveh, hearing what the people had done, then himself deciding to put on sackcloth and proclaim a fast. ‘Who knows?’ he says, ‘If we all turn from our evil ways God may turn things around for us.’ How the crowds must have loved hearing the king repeating their own words back to them as if he’d thought of it all himself from the start. Was this a case, as Greta Thunberg might have put it if she’d been there, of a politician ‘pretending to take our future seriously’? [5] Or had the king been convinced by the people’s hopeful action, convicted and genuinely changed?

Regardless of his motive, when the people acted hopefully the king was compelled to follow. We might take the key story of the book of Jonah as the salutary tale of the king who took his lead from the people. Does that thereby encourage you that the future of the planet is by no means entirely reliant on the outcome of one conference – significant though it is – but is probably far more reliant on the ordinary people of the world realising that we have to change; turning our backs on our old ways and beginning to do things differently ourselves: the people lead, the politicians follow.  As that young Swedish campaigner said last month, ‘Hope is not passive; hope is not ‘blah-blah-blah’. Hope is telling the truth; hope is taking action; and hope always comes from the people’. [6]

To this day the Orthodox Church celebrates what they call The Fast of Nineveh; three days commemorating the hopeful new beginning those Ninevites made in fasting and repentance. [7] If you like the idea that there’s something of the Ninevites in us today, and if you’re keen to take hopeful steps forward for the sake of this world we love, whose survival we long to assure, then perhaps you’ve found yourself in a very good place to start, here, rooting and grounding yourself in this, our humble act of prayer – for we the people, and the governors of the nations and the principals of the corporations who will follow our lead.

 

Notes

* The Common Worship Lectionary inexplicably omits verses 6-9; I have thus restored it to this passage to enable the readers’ appreciation of the effect of the people’s actions on their king.

[1] George Monbiot, Capitalism is killing the planet – it’s time to stop buying into our own destruction. Guardian, 30 October 2021.

[2] See the Union of Concerned Scientists website.

[3] Wikipedia: Nineveh; Sennacherib.

[4] Zoë Schlanger, Your cotton tote is pretty much the worst replacement for a plastic bag. Quartz, 1 April 2019. Quoted in George Monbiot, Capitalism is killing the planet – it’s time to stop buying into our own destruction. Guardian, 30 October 2021.

[5] Greta Thunberg mocks world leaders in ‘blah, blah, blah’ speech – BBC News, 28 September 2021.

[6] Greta Thunberg mocks world leaders in ‘blah, blah, blah’ speech – BBC News, 28 September 2021.

[7] Wikipedia: Fast of Nineveh.