Month: September 2022

2 Timothy 1.1-14, Luke 17.5-10

The Sixteenth Sunday after Trinity, 2 October 2022

Eldroth (Harvest), Clapham

Guard the good treasure entrusted to you, says Paul to Timothy. 

For there is treasure all around us if we look. Treasure in the people with whom we share our days; treasure in the creatures whose home is this precious earth; and treasure in the earth itself and all that grows and flourishes within. 

Guard the good treasure entrusted to you. Guard the people in your care.

The young ones in our streets, schools and homes are our treasure. Guard them with kind words, good listening and attention to our example. 

The old ones in the village farms and houses are our treasure. Guard them with graceful giving of our time and support, and faithful conversation.

Our peers are our treasure; our neighbours, colleagues and companions. Guard them with ever-deepening friendships of laughter and dissent.

Guard the good treasure entrusted to you. Guard the creatures in your care.

The birds in their skies and the fish in their rivers are our treasure. Guard them with clean air and clear water and gifts of needed food in season.

The companion animals in their homes, the livestock on their farms are our treasure. Guard them with nutrition and protection, and the touches and words of our love.

The creatures of their field-edges, gardens, hedgerows and woodlands are our treasure. Guard them with generous growing of their sustaining food and generous sharing of space and place in respect for their needs.

Guard the good treasure entrusted to you. Guard the nature in your care.

The earth trodden by our feet is our treasure. Guard it with enriching nutrients and cycles of work and replenishing rest.

The skies above our heads and the seas around our coasts are our treasure. Guard them by using restraint: cutting waste to keep poisonous fluids out of the waters, motoring less to keep poisonous gases out of the air, and switching down to save the stars from light pollution.

The flowers, plants and trees – wild and random, or nurtured and arranged, are our treasure. Guard them with our loving cultivation of all that makes them flourish.  

Guard the good treasure entrusted to you, says Paul to Timothy. 

And Jesus said, Know your place on this earth: throw off your desire to dominate and control; act as servants of the soil, of the creatures and of humankind. 

For humankind and the soil are profoundly related. We are intimately bound with the land. We are taken from the ground; our food is derived from it; we are commanded to till and to keep it; and like every other organism, we return to it.  We are therefore to ‘keep’ it, not dominate it  We are to guard and protect the ground. For when Genesis says we are to ‘till’ the earth, it uses a Hebrew word which means that we are the servant of the ground.” [1]

And if serving the ground seems too daunting a task to us then hear what Jesus says: do only what you ought to do on this earth. In other words, throw off your desire to fix every problem, to save every lost soul; accept the wonderful gifting that God has given you – with its limitations: be satisfied to act within it. The Spirit of power and of love and of self-discipline you are offered will help you to act within your perfect imperfection on this earth and to fulfil no more and no less than what you are meant to be in life.

Guard the good treasure entrusted to you. 

Know your place on this earth: do only what you ought to do.

 

“And then all that has divided us will merge

And then compassion will be wedded to power

And then softness will come to a world that is harsh and unkind

And then both men and women will be gentle

And then both women and men will be strong

And then no person will be subject to another’s will

And then all will be rich and free and varied

And then the greed of some will give way to the needs of many

And then all will share equally in the Earth’s abundance

And then all will care for the sick and the weak and the old

And then all will nourish the young

And then all will cherish life’s creatures

And then all will live in harmony with each other and the Earth…” [2]

And then the age to come will dawn upon us,

the age to come which is beginning now, 

and will become an age of grace, peace, and equitable love for all. [3]

 

Notes

[1] For more on serving the earth, see my The Famished Man and The Bloated Man: learning to serve at harvest time, 18 September 2022.

[2] Judy Chicago, Merger Poem. judychicago.com. In Geoffrey Duncan, ed, Dare to Dream: A Prayer and Worship Anthology From Around the World. p.113.

[3] See also my The Parable of the Prodigal Manager, 25 September 2022.

1 Timothy 6.6-19, Luke 16.1-13

The Fifteenth Sunday after Trinity, 25 September 2022

Austwick, Keasden (Harvest)

This is The Parable of the Prodigal Manager. The one who had taken his boss’s instructions a little too lightly and squandered his profits. I picture him as an estate manager who was never very good at collecting debts from the tenant farmers, and whose landowner boss, feeling his reputation in the business community to be threatened, one day counted his losses and having had enough, told the man to get ready to clear his desk and leave. For the Prodigal Manager this was a moment of desolation, for, facing the sack he asked himself, “What will I do now? I’m not strong enough to lift and I’m too proud to beg.” It was a moment of desolation that became for this Prodigal, an epiphany. For, realising that he had nothing to lose, he gambled on a plan which, if it worked, would make his boss look good again and would make the poor tenant farmers feel even better.

So the desperate Prodigal Manager forgave a portion of the amount owed by his master’s debtors. It turned out to be a win-win scheme; for on the one hand, with people assuming that the manager was acting on the landowner’s orders, this debt-release made his boss look generous and charitable in everybody’s eyes. And on the other hand, the Prodigal facing financial ruin sent out a lifebuoy to those tenants who he could see were drowning in debt. 

I’ve called this The Parable of the Prodigal Manager for good reason. For immediately before it in Luke’s gospel is the familiar Parable of the Prodigal Son; and Luke must have put these two stories together for a reason. Their similarities are obvious and threefold: 

First, the men who let down their seniors by squandering money entrusted to them: the Prodigal Son his father’s inheritance, the Prodigal Manager his boss’s profits;

Second, their both reaching a moment of desolation, a lowest ebb when all seemed lost and their choice was either to despair and accept ruin, or to swallow their pride and take a gamble on a course of action which might just end in their being rescued and restored;

And Third, in both cases the acceptance of the senior men when the Prodigals returned bowed, bruised, but in the Prodigal Son’s case absolutely forgiven, so much so that the father threw a party for his squandering wandering son; and in the landowner’s case this surprising turn where instead of reprimanding the Prodigal Manager for further diminishing his shrinking profits, he praised him for his innovative loss-leading scheme, commending him, we’re told, because he acted shrewdly.

There is a difference between these two stories, for in the Parable of the Prodigal Son there is a third main character, the other brother who never put a foot out of place on the farm, and was fiercely jealous of the fuss his father made over his squandering sibling on his return. In the Parable of the Prodigal Manager no such character appears – but I would venture to say that perhaps that person has instead taken the form of everyone in Jesus’ audience on that day, and every reader of Luke’s gospel ever since, you and me today included, who has struggled to come to terms with the way that not only the landowner, but also Jesus himself, seems to commend what looks like dishonesty with money, an act of financial deviance. 

Why did Jesus affirm what he calls ‘the children of this age’ for being ‘more shrewd in dealing with their own generation than … the children of light’? Why would he say that it was admirable to ‘make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth’? If these questions torment us it’s because Jesus wants us to take this crucial point to heart: ‘No slave can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth.’ He’s challenging us to work out our own position.

The uncomfortable reality which may begin to dawn on us is that if we look at the Prodigal Manager’s act of financial chicanery and judge it to be immoral then maybe that’s because that’s the way that people who serve wealth would see it: if you’re wrapped up in a worldview which revolves around the acquisition of wealth then you’ll be horrified by this tale of a juggling act with someone else’s money which in business terms looks imprudent or even immoral.

However – and this is Jesus’ underlying message – if instead we look at the Prodigal Manager’s action as being an imaginative gesture which brought benefits to his boss and his fellow debtors, a juggling act which somehow made diminished returns end up enriching everybody – then maybe that’s because that’s the way that people who serve God would see it: if you’re wrapped up in a worldview which revolves around the ethics of grace, embracing forgiveness and committed to actively loving both enemy and neighbour, then that’s how you would see it.

Consider how this might play out in our own world… and often does. In charitable giving which brings no financial benefit to the giver but blessing to everyone involved in that transaction. In communities creating their own local ways of barter and exchange of food and services, or their own localised energy production and distribution. In farming co-operatives which bypass the supermarkets. On every initiative which might follow a vision of a larger ­economy but is first and foremost inspired and driven by a vision of a better society. [2]

Consider how this may come into the trickier ethical issues of our time, as we ask: do we use for good purposes, money which we know has been gained through bad practices? Do we fund the care home from a charity set up by a slave-trader? Scholars who look closely at the language of Luke’s gospel point out that it’s inaccurate to call this The Parable of the Dishonest Manager, and more accurate to call it The Parable of the Manager of Money Gained Dishonestly, or unethically. Luke is uncontroversially assuming that as a matter of course the landowner in the story would have been using every trick in the statute book, every profit-making tactic however underhand, to squeeze the most money he could from his struggling peasant tenants. 

Jesus seems to affirm the practice of using Money Gained Dishonestly, or unethically, to bring blessing and win friendships with others. Which raises questions like these which I know some communities have faced in the past: should we use gambling profits – National Lottery funding – to set up our church coffee shop? Should we let the arms trade fund our youth centre? And taking Jesus’ teachings seriously should influence our approach to disinvestment, a current challenge of our day.

These questions contribute to the work of those people Jesus calls The Children of Light: those who want to serve God not money; those who want to put community before personal gain; who want to put the health of the good earth and its creatures before surplus yield; those who are convinced that it is possible to use the resources of ‘this present age’ – however tainted and compromised they may be – to put them to good use, to begin to shape ‘the age to come’ – which is already beginning, and will continue to grow into an age of grace, peace, and equitable love for all.

 

Notes

[1] This sermon owes everything to the detailed reflections on this parable of Paul Nuechterlein in his Girardian Lectionary, Reflections, Year C, Proper 20C, in particular his summary of David Landry and Ben May, “Honor Restored: New Light on the Parable of the Prudent Steward (Luke 16:1-8a). For another approach to this parable see also my previous sermon (2016, 2019) Forgive anyway! which is an adaptation of Paul Nuechterlein’s 1998 sermon The Reign of Compassion.

[2] Leader: Liz Truss has misread the times. New Statesman, 21 September 2022: “After a decade of austerity that has frayed the public realm, and an unprecedented period of wage stagnation, voters are craving security and an active state. Ms Truss’s free-market, small-state individualism is ill-suited to the temper of these times. She has little or nothing to say about the improvement of public services, the UK’s regional inequalities and the common good. She is not a bridge-builder; she does not aspire to reach out across difference in order to build a new cross-class coalition. Even the Union between England and Scotland – which the Queen so cherished – seems of little concern. The Prime Minister may have a vision of a larger ­economy but she has no vision of a better society. This creates an opening for Labour and the opposition parties, ideally working together, to forge a new settlement.” 

 

1 Timothy 2.1-7, Luke 16.19-31

The Fourteenth Sunday after Trinity, 18 September 2022

Austwick, Clapham, Eldroth

It was the night of the Harvest Supper and The Famished Man loitered in the shadows outside the village hall as the guests made their way indoors. Among them was The Bloated Man, who loved Harvest Suppers, partly because he loved any supper, any opportunity to gorge himself on a hot cooked meal prepared by someone else, but mostly because Harvest Suppers gave him the chance to make a show of his great wealth and a pitch for his generosity by dominating the bidding in the charity auction at the end. 

After the Harvest Supper The Bloated Man emerged, as he did every year, alone, but with a carrier bag full of wine bottles and a great big box full of fruit and veg, spilling out onto the pavement. The Famished Man, as he did every year, followed The Bloated Man as he made his way along the street to his big mansion house just the other side of the Parish Church. Along the way an apple fell from The Bloated Man’s box and The Famished Man picked it up and bit into it ravenously. Noticing this, The Bloated Man turned to The Famished Man and said, “Here, Lazarus, carry this box to my gate.”

The Famished Man Lazarus, being emaciated, almost buckled under the weight of the food, struggled along the road with it, and when The Bloated Man had unlocked his big metal gate and Lazarus handed the box back to him, a punnet of grapes fell out onto the ground. Lazarus hungrily reached for it but The Bloated Man said “Put that back”, and this having been done, locked the gate behind him leaving Lazarus to scrabble for the few grapes which had rolled away on the path.

Then, gripping the railings which surrounded the mansion Lazarus watched horrified as The Bloated Man made his way, not to his front door but to a row of wheelie bins at the side of the house. Lazarus groaned as The Bloated Man opened the lid on a bin and poured all the contents of his food box into it, followed by the box itself, then turned, picked up the carrier bag of wine bottles, and went inside.   

The Bloated Man loved the idea of service: as long as that meant others serving him.

The Bloated Man loved the idea of sacrifice: as long as that meant others making sacrifices which benefitted him.

The Bloated Man loved the idea of charity: as long as that meant public gestures which cost him effectively nothing and made him look good in other people’s eyes.

And in Hades, where he was being tormented, he looked up and saw Abraham far away with Lazarus by his side. He called out, “Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue; for I am in agony in these flames.” But Abraham said, “Child, remember that during your lifetime you received your good things, and Lazarus in like manner evil things; but now he is comforted here, and you are in agony.”

[We are now in our Harvest season and] The story of the Rich Man and Lazarus is a fitting one for harvest. For at root it is a parable about hunger and how we respond to it. It is a parable about food and what we do with it. It is a parable about God’s good earth and how we live on it. It is a parable about serving and being served.

It is also a parable of extremes – contrasting a very wealthy man with a very impoverished one. It’s like our own world, where the richest few have eye-watering wealth whilst the poorest half of the world’s population barely subsist. [1] We here are undoubtedly closer to the Rich Man than to Lazarus in global wealth terms but that doesn’t necessarily mean we’re like The Bloated Man in the way that we deal with hunger, food, and the earth.

For there will have been some at that Harvest Supper who handed The Famished Man some fruit as they saw him begging outside; others who gave him cash. Maybe even a generous couple who bought The Famished Man a ticket for the Supper and invited him to sit and eat with them.

There will have been some at that Harvest Supper who each day for weeks and months beforehand had caringly tended their vegetable patches to grow the food to display and eat that evening. Others who made their living on the land, raising animals, growing crops, with all the intimate understanding of nature and its ways that such a life brings.

The Supper happened because some took the time and skill to prepare hot food for those who came; and there were those who served it to the guests. And others again who took home parcels of fruit and veg and people’s tinned gifts, and the following day gave them away to the sick and housebound and lonely ones of the village.

There is real goodness in serving others, which brings joy to both the servant and the served. This has been forefront in our minds this past week as we’ve recalled the life of our late Queen Elizabeth. We have many times heard that speech she made as a young princess, declaring before all the peoples in her care that her whole life ‘whether it be long or short’ would be devoted to our service.[2]  And much has been rightly said about how very thoroughly she fulfilled that solemn vow. She took her inspiration from the life and teachings of Jesus, who himself said, “I am among you as one who serves.” [3] 

Somewhere inbetween the Rich Man and Lazarus we are called to the joy of serving others and serving God’s good earth. Which we may consider to be very much the same thing. 

Because our scriptures insist that God as Creator has absolute sovereignty over the environment.  We must use it only in accordance with His will; and we shall answer, collectively as well as individually, for all our decisions in this area. Our traditions and our instincts teach us that there is an intimate link between humankind and the soil.  We are intimately bound to the land. We are taken from the ground; our food is derived from it; we are commanded to till and to keep it; and we return to it.  We are to ‘keep’ it, not dominate it  We are to guard and protect the ground. And when Genesis says we are to ‘till’ the earth, it uses a Hebrew word which means that we are the servant of the ground.” [4]

We may deal with hunger, food, and the earth as servants of the earth and its creatures.

There is joy in service of this kind because when we serve the earth then the earth from its richness returns goodness to us. In the same way there is joy in serving others because in doing so we find health and strength in the mutual blessing this brings. 

It’s what we may take from the life of a Queen committed to the common good. It’s what we can learn from the scriptures and from the good earth itself. [5]

Notes

[1] Esme Campbell, Widening of the wealth gap: the rise of billionaires. University of Manchester, Global Social Challenges, 12 July 2022. 

[2] A speech by the Queen on her 21st Birthday, 1947. Royal Family website.

[3] Luke 22.27. 

[4] Alastair McIntosh, Introduction to the Isle of Harris Proposed Superquarry Public Inquiry Theological Testimony: Statement of Supplementary Witness – Rev. Prof. Donald Macleod, Free Church College, Edinburgh. Adapted.

[5] John Bell, ‘The Earth is the Lord’s’ section of the talk Inheritance Tracks – For Our Children’s Children. Greenbelt Festival, 2022.

Luke 15.1-10

The Thirteenth Sunday after Trinity, 11 September 2022

Austwick, Keasden

 

The closest I ever got to Queen Elizabeth was when I was privileged to stand alongside our churchwarden emeritus, Bob Matthews, in Liverpool Cathedral in April 2004 as The Queen presented him and 77 other men and 78 women with purses containing Maundy coins, as was her annual practice: the 78 representing her age in years at that time. As she came alongside us The Queen acknowledged me with a brief glance, appropriately so, for all her attention was rightly on Bob, who was there in recognition of his many years of faithful service to the church and community of Croxteth, the housing estate where he’d always lived. 

Like many in Croxteth Bob’s family life revolved around the massive English Electric factory which had employed so many in the area in its heyday in the middle years of the 20th century. An electrician, he’d worked hard to carve out a respectable life with his family in their council house with well-tended garden, helped his children grow up into good careers, and as the factories began to close and the people began to experience the losses of decline as he drew nearer to retirement he committed himself to his churchwarden duties – conducted faithfully and well – and to organising social events for older people: Bob’s Bingos were legendary in the area. 

So on the day that the Electrician met the monarch, what struck me about The Queen’s brief exchange with Bob was the sincere respect she showed him in the way she spoke and presented herself towards him. In that moment Sandringham estate met Croxteth estate – as equals. It was the first sign for me that this monarch with the grandiose title of Defender of the Faith did truly get what that faith was about – that God loves and values each person equally, whatever their station. She showed it in the way she held Bob’s hand, held her eyes to his, listened well to him, and blessed him with her words of genuine affirmation.

I was reading this week about The Queen’s keen sense of humour, with Angela Kelly, The Queen’s dresser saying that Elizabeth was a talented mimic, and liked to tease Kelly by imitating her Liverpudlian accent. So I imagine The Queen enjoying picking up more Scouse expressions in the talks she had in Liverpool Cathedral on Bob’s special day. 

Our nation is in mourning at the loss of one who ruled us with genuine love and high regard. Each of us understood this at some level, and that’s why monarchists and republicans alike are moved today by the emotion of this moment in our national life. 

Loss comes to us all, in different ways. For many people, losing The Queen is bringing back to the surface their own bereavements, the pain of being without their lost loved one is keen again just now. Bereavement is the greatest loss – for however strong may be our hope of eternal life, the hope of resurrection and the reunion to come with those we love, the physical loss is irreversible. Our prayers are with all who feel this deeply today.

There are other losses in life, of course. None of them trivial. I remember once joining with others in a motorway service station cafe to help a young woman find a lost earring. When a plasterer found it in a corner seat by the TV and returned it to the woman, she was deeply grateful, even though we could all see that the earring was very ordinary, nothing special at all. “I know it’s only a cheap thing,” she explained, “but it belonged to my best friend, you see. I was with her when she bought it, it cost her six pound fifty. But she loved it. It really matched the colour of her eyes. And she died last month. Cancer. But when she was ill she gave this to me. It means a lot to me.” [1] This felt for me like a ‘Kingdom of Heaven moment’. For it can feel like we’re never as close to glory as in those moments when we rediscover something precious we’ve lost, and we share, with others, the joy in finding it.

Now what bothers most people most of the time are things like how to find the way back to the train station in a strange town, how to recoup the lost income from those weeks spent off work ill, how to lose – weight! and find – health and fitness!  What most people are looking for daily are things like food and drink and shelter. Loss is all around us, and in hard times, increasingly palpable.

When I think of the widow on her hands and knees looking for that lost coin it reminds me of that other widow Jesus talks about in Luke – the poor widow who he saw put two small copper coins into the treasury, of whom he said, ‘out of her poverty she has put in all she had to live on.’ [2] Losing a coin – for a widow, that was a very big deal indeed. Just as losing a sheep is a big deal to a shepherd.

Jesus’s descriptions of heaven are always rooted in earth; salvation is like those moments of celebration where lostness gives way to found-ness, moments we all know and feel from time to time. Just as The Queen was always keenly present in the company of ordinary everyday people, so also Jesus is always seeking redemption in the company of those who know they’re lost.

Now the religious people facing Jesus in their self-righteousness want to separate out the lost and the found; they drive a wedge between the spiritual and the physical, the holy and the profane. But Jesus is having none of it, for he never does. He knows that every single person is sometimes lost and sometimes found, and sometimes in that holy moment where lost and found collide and a hint of heaven flashes forth. We well know that even The Queen had her lost times – that traumatic flight home from Kenya on her father’s sudden death; her Annus Horribilis; the last two years without Philip and many other hard times. She taught us to understand where she always went to begin to be found again. She always went to her saviour in prayer.

Where is Jesus at our times of loss? It’s the cry of many people’s hearts at times such as these. Well here he is, on his knees alongside the widow on her kitchen floor looking for that elusive coin; there he is, hacking through brambles on the hillside with that sweating shepherd searching for the one lost sheep; he is right here with you, the lost one, looking for a way out of your lostness, searching for that heavenly moment when you will be found again.

You have to know you’re lost before you can be found. Loss and lostness may be painful, challenging, draining, but embracing our lostness is the first step towards our rediscovering ourselves; our, if you like, redemption.

God values the lost. And considers no loss insignificant. Even seemingly small losses, in the most ordinary places, God knows are important. This is the good news Elizabeth always celebrated and lived: that if we look we’ll find Jesus, out here, on this lost earth where the lost things and lost people are, find him looking with us for those moments where lost and found collide and we get a glimpse of heaven.

 

Notes

This talk draws from Living where lost and found collide preached in Somerset in 2016.

[1] One of my contributions to the compilation Wise Traveller: ‘Loss’, also included in my talk Heaven in Ordinary, Greenbelt Festival, Cheltenham,August 2007.

[2] Luke 21.3-4.