Month: April 2023

Acts 2.42-47, John 10.1-10 

The Fourth Sunday of Easter, 30 April 2023, Clapham

There were always tensions at the Sheep Gate when Jesus was around. With his very different outlook, he couldn’t help but confront the people who controlled the way things worked.  Whilst those most damaged by this usual way of things, couldn’t help but find hope in the promises he conveyed by the new things he taught them, and the loving ways he treated them. 

Jerusalem’s Sheep Gate was where the country farmers herded in the creatures to be sacrificed at the Temple. For these animals the Sheep Gate was a point of no return. 

And it was to the pool near the Sheep Gate that the city sent the incurable, the paralysed and the lame. With only the condemned livestock passing by, right on the edge of the city, out of sight and out of mind of the upright citizens going about their business, the Sheep Gate was the place of no return for those people Jerusalem didn’t want or need. Their freedom sacrificed for society’s sake.

And so, to the Sheep Gate, here comes Jesus, turning things over for close inspection, turning things round in his revolution of boundless love.

When he said, ‘Very truly, I tell you, I am the gate for the sheep,’ he indicated that with his arrival, things were going to be different; that he was about to begin something new here. 

When he said, ‘Whoever enters by me will be saved,’ he offered hope of a very tangible form of salvation to the ones who the city abandoned.

When he said, ‘All who came before me are thieves and bandits,’ he criminalised the rule-makers and law enforcers of this society built on the sacrifice of innocent victims.

When he said, ‘The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that [my sheep] may have life, and have it abundantly,’ he elevated the abandoned ones from their place of rejection, promising them a fulfilled life. [2]

The sheep being taken to the temple altar, and the paralysed people at the pool, had this fundamental thing in common: society had determined that they would be sacrificed for the sake of everybody else. 

The virtuous people of that society held onto their respectability by atoning for their sins by sacrificing animals on the altar to a God they believed would forgive them through this trade-off.

And to keep their community respectable they purged it of all those who made it impure in their eyes, by sending to the edge all those who upset their equilibrium, relocating the sick, the lost and the lame to the pool by the Sheep Gate, thus removing those shameful people well away from the heart of things. Out of sight, out of mind; their well-being had to be sacrificed for the comfort of all. 

The Sheep Gate of Jerusalem symbolised a society which functioned with sacrifice at its centre. And so, standing there saying that he was the gate for the sheep, Jesus broke this powerful symbol, and announced that he’d come to offer salvation to the ones society treated as disposable. He was giving the victims of the sacrificial system something which society denied them: the freedom to ‘come and go’ ‘and find pasture’, and live abundant lives.

Now, if you think this is a story some ways removed from our lives today, please think again. For we know that animal sacrifice and the trade around it plays its part in our multi-faith society; it is practiced in our neighbouring towns and cities, and some of our Dales farmers will have received income from the sale of animals sacrificed during last week’s festival of Eid. 

And what of the idea that our culture ‘sacrifices’ those who are deemed disposable: the sick, the lost and the lame, the unproductive, the unemployed, the foreigner? We know how these are always the first to be abandoned in a society which prioritises private gain over public well-being. Isn’t it a theme of our times that those who are struggling the most, are repeatedly told that they must sacrifice even more, for the greater good of all? 

We hear privileged economists telling struggling workers ‘to accept that they’re worse off’ and to stop demanding pay rises, hypocritically preaching that ‘we all have to take our share’. And we find ourselves complicit in this system where those we undervalue are forced into punishing sacrifices for the sake of our comfort and ease – like Bangladeshi workers producing clothes in squalid factories for less than a dollar a day, so that we can buy them at bargain prices. [3]

If we accept that the economists are today’s High Priests, we can see how universal was Jesus’ message at the Sheep Gate. Wherever a society’s victims are told by its gatekeepers, ’There is no alternative’, ’There is only one way’, ‘There is only one gate’, here comes Jesus, saying, no, there are other ways to live. For ’I am the gate for the sheep. … Whoever enters by me will be saved’. [4]

You may recall that Jesus once healed a paralysed man at the pool by the Sheep Gate of Jerusalem. He had been there, in pain, for thirty-eight years. Jesus’ healing restored the man’s muscular functions and released him from the power of the sacrificial system, which had bound him to stay outside Jerusalem, for all that time. When the restored man re-entered the city the authorities who had abandoned him couldn’t stop him carrying his mat through the streets with joy. For he was no longer subject to them, but to Jesus, the open gate, the generous gate, the loving gate. Now he could enjoy freedom to roam, to come and go at will, to find the pasture which pleased him. [5]

Jesus, universally, releases every victim from the bondage of our systems of sacrifice – by becoming the Good Shepherd who goes through the sacrificial gate with the sheep. They hear his voice; they know he is there with them. Wherever someone is being sent for sacrifice, Jesus makes that journey with them. Jesus went to the cross to be sacrificed for the sin of men and women. Jesus actually gave himself to be a sacrificial lamb: ‘the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world.’ The sin, notice. The one sin. Which is society’s sin of saving ourselves by sacrificing innocent victims. 

The human instinct is to cause others to make sacrifices to save us. But on the cross Jesus sacrificed himself for the sake of others. This is the basis of ‘the abundant life’: that we can find new ways to open our hearts in generosity towards others, with Jesus the Shepherd beside us. There is no ‘out of sight and out of mind’ in Christ: where, resurrected into a new way of human flourishing,  we embrace each other and seek the common good.

In the Acts of the Apostles we hear how, after the resurrection ‘All who believed were together and had all things in common; they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need. Spending time together in the temple, daily, they broke bread at home and ate their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having the goodwill of all the people. And day by day the Lord added to their number those who were being saved.’ [6]

What a wonderful transformation in these people’s lives, now a community united in self-sacrificial care for each other. 

This is how the Christian life continues to be lived, whether in intentional communities of faith or informally, by the generous, self-giving acts of those who have grasped the wonderful realisation that Jesus’ offer of new life to us, truly does mean life in all its abundance. 

 

Notes 

[1] A rewrite of John 10 – At the Sheep Gate – Saved from Sacrifice, preached in Devon, 2011.

[2] Gil Bailie on John 10: “I am the Good Shepherd” quoted in Paul Nuechterlein, Girardian Lectionary, Resources: Easter 4a. 

[3] Graeme Wearden, Britons ‘need to accept’ they’re poorer, says Bank of England economist. Guardian, 25 April 2023; Reza Mazumder, ’Made in Bangladesh’ – ‘Made with injustice’: Sweatshops in Bangladesh. The Monsoon Project, 20 September 2016.

[4] There is no alternative: Wikipedia

[5] John 5.1-18.

[6] Acts 2.42-47.

Acts 2.14a,36-41, Luke 24.13-35 

The Third Sunday of Easter, 23 April 2023, Austwick

I love the story of the two disciples on the Emmaus Road, a story of two people who are suddenly surprised by joy. Two men who begin their journey in a mood of defeat and loss, who by the end of the story are full of warmth and wonder, having realised that the stranger they had been sharing their troubles with, the guest at their table, had been Jesus himself. They recognised him in the breaking of the bread. As the crumbs fell to the table, they were surprised by joy.

This and all the other stories of Jesus’ resurrection appearances show us that our God is a God of surprises: always seeking to surprise us with joy.

The expression, Surprised by Joy, was coined by the 20th-century Christian writer C.S. Lewis. He made it the title of his autobiography, where he talks about his early days as an atheist, someone who went out of his way to avoid God, but who came to realise that there could be no escape. 

“You must picture me,” Lewis wrote, “alone in [my room], night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet.” 

Gradually he came to admit that God was God, and knelt and prayed: he said that “perhaps, that night, [he was] the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.” He began to attend church and to read the gospels. They started to make sense to him. Lewis had acknowledged God; now God was after him to acknowledge his son. The subject was on Lewis’s mind constantly. 

In a now famous passage of Surprised by Joy, Lewis related his final step into real joy: “I know very well when, but hardly how, the final step was taken. I was driven to Whipsnade one sunny morning. When we set out I did not believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, and when we reached the zoo I did.” 

The journey to Whipsnade Zoo was Lewis’s Emmaus Road. It tells us that Emmaus Road experiences still happen in our day. They might happen to us. Writer Terry Lindvall explains Lewis’s conversion like this: 

C.S. Lewis was drawn into the kingdom of God by joy – by a taste of this blessed fruit and divine gift. Joy was the divine carrot that persuaded such a self-proclaimed donkey as Lewis to plod down the road toward Jerusalem. It was the soft, disturbing kiss of God that unmade all of Lewis’s world. Joy compelled Lewis toward the resurrection laughter of Easter… [2] 

We don’t know what Jesus has in store for us. But if we keep walking with him then we can expect joyful surprises along the way.

Remember that the first followers of Jesus were not called Christians. That came later. They were called the People of the Way. Jesus had said, “I am the way, the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” 

Now, if you are on the way that means you’re on a journey. 

And if you are travelling The Way of Jesus your behaviour will be affected by him as you go. See how those two travellers to Emmaus were affected by him as they went about their way… 

First of all, they were talking with each other about all the things that had happened. Talking and discussing about the story of Jesus. People of The Way love to do that together. 

Secondly, they welcomed a stranger to walk with them. Worth remembering when our instinct might be to avoid people who aren’t like us, particularly if they walk up to us unbidden in the street. People of The Way open their hearts and their minds to others they don’t know. 

Thirdly, the two men on the Emmaus Road shared the story of Jesus with the stranger. Something which People of The Way are always keen to do. 

Fourth, they listened to the stranger when he gave them a different view on the story they had told. When he turned the story around to show them a better way of looking at it, they listened. People of The Way will always be willing to listen and learn from others, whoever they are. 

And fifth, these two invited their companion in to stay with them. People of The Way practice hospitality, their table is always set for a guest. 

They were deeply unhappy, these men, they’d just been bereaved in the most terrible circumstances, but they kept journeying, embraced a stranger, opened themselves up to new ways of thinking, generously offered up their food and their home. They did this because they were People of The Way. And if you are on the way then you’re likely to be surprised by joy. And sure enough, they soon were. 

For joy comes through sadness, to those who walk with Jesus. On our life’s journey, we may find no detour around the tears and tribulations that come our way. But Christ is always looking to come alongside us, to bring us words of comfort and hope, to turn our mourning into dancing. [3]

So whatever diversions or deterrents life may put in our path, let us keep on the Way of Jesus. It’s the Way many of us have been on for years, the Way we may have learned from those wonderful believers who travelled before us. 

It’s a Way we maybe stray from every now and again, but which always draws us back to this table, where Christ makes himself known to us in the breaking of the bread, and may surprise us once again with joy. 

Notes 

[1] A rewrite of Luke 24 – Emmaus Road – Surprised by Joy preached at West Camel Methodist Church Anniversary Service, 19 October 2014 in turn based on the sermon first preached at Christ Church Norris Green, 10 April 2005.

[2] All Lewis quotes from Terry Lindvall, Joy and Sehnsucht, The Laughter and Longings of C.S. Lewis, Mars Hill Review 8, Summer 1997.

[3] Psalm 30.11.

Acts 2.14a,22-32, John 20.19-31

The Second Sunday of Easter, 16 April 2023, Austwick, Clapham, Eldroth

“God freed him from death, because it was impossible for him to be held in its power.” 

And death shall have no dominion. Or in other words the power of death is too weak to overcome us; the effect of death is not enough to defeat us; there are greater and brighter powers at work in the world and in the heavens than death. Death shall not dominate us. This is the meaning of eternal life.

We can know this through nature. In the deepest depths of winter looking at the bare leafless trees, the empty flowerbeds, the frostbitten grass: all looks deathly. The earth itself seems to have been overcome by death; the birds struggle to find food, and many creatures just disappear to hibernate, which is like a sort of death in the middle of life, a switching-off, a being-overcome-by-darkness. 

But death has no dominion in nature. And even in the deepest depths of winter we know this and it warms our hearts. We know that before long the spring will come, that those hibernating creatures will crawl out of their little tombs and begin to move and mix and mate again; that the trees will blossom and the birds will sing because the earth is budding with food for them; and all around, life has overcome death. And we too, being nature’s creatures, find our winter blues begin to fall away as the sun comes back and the dark nights fade. We know that death has no dominion because nature tells us. 

And we can know this through scripture. The scriptures tell us that, in Jesus, God himself has been through death. Luke wrote, “God freed him from death, because it was impossible for him to be held in its power”. And that means that God’s promise is true: that everyone else who goes through death with him also experiences what he did: a rebirth, a resurrection.

And we can experience this first, not at the end of life, but at the very start. St Paul wrote, ‘We have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life.’ [2] Baptisms are about new beginnings.

When we attend a Christian baptism we are assured that the person whose baptism we celebrate is now living a new life. A life blessed by God, in the presence of God’s Spirit. We who have been baptised can be raised each day to new beginnings because he is with us. We know that death has no dominion because scripture tells us. 

And we can know this also through each other. Now, it is undeniably hard to go through a bereavement. It is a terrible thing to endure, the loss of a loved one, a companion in life perhaps for many many years, or one who has died young, long before our hopes and dreams for them had time to come about. When they go the gap they leave behind is enormous, it seems like it could never be filled. It seems like their death puts an end to the life of the loved ones left behind, as we say, ‘how can I live without you?’ 

The bereaved go through what may feel at the time to be a sort of permanent winter: when they look out on the world all they see is an empty landscape without joy or possibility; where once they had the friendship of their loved one to enrich them, now bereaved they are like winter birds searching for scraps to keep them going; some will seek escape for safety from a world which has deeply hurt and scarred them; some will go into hibernation, turning their backs on a world which seems to no longer hold anything for them. 

And yet, time and again, we see people who’ve lost loved ones gradually finding their way out of these dark days, re-emerging into light. Perhaps a new friendship will come along and surprise them, perhaps the dedication and love of family members will give them new hope and direction, maybe they will find faith in those promises that all who have been through death in Christ will have a resurrection. Resurrection, you see, is not just for the deceased in heaven: it’s for us here on earth: God is always looking to bring new life to us. Every day. God will answer our prayers. Jesus said, “anyone who comes to me I will never drive away.” 

And while it may take years, and be a slow painful experience, we know, because we’ve seen it over and over again, that, in Christ, death will have no dominion over the bereaved. In time we will enjoy some form of resurrection.

It was St Paul who coined the phrase, ‘And death shall have no dominion’, and Dylan Thomas who popularised it in his poem of that title. Thomas felt the death of his father very keenly. As he saw that once-strong man seeming to give up the ghost on his deathbed, Dylan wrote the angry, passionate poem ‘Do not go gentle into that good night – rage, rage, against the dying of the light.’ The emotion Thomas most felt at that time was anger, an emotion felt by many people in their time of loss. I remember angrily shaking my fists at God when my beloved Nan was dying in pain and distress… Remember the anger of Jesus on the cross: “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?” I think that God responds to angry people with grace, and invites them to walk, in hope, with him. 

So after his father’s death Thomas’s anger turned to a strongly-expressed faith that his father’s death and his bereavement, would not defeat them. The poem he wrote to express this is astonishing in its imagery and its strength of feeling, and it includes these words:

Though lovers be lost love shall not;

And death shall have no dominion. [3]

Death has not defeated those we have lost, and death will not defeat us. This is the power of the resurrection. This is the meaning of eternal life. As Jesus said,  ‘This is indeed the will of my Father, that all who see the Son and believe in him may have eternal life; and I will raise them up on the last day.’ [4] 

In this way, God frees us from death. It is impossible for us to be held in its power.

 

Notes 

[1] An abridged version of John 6: And death shall have no dominion preached at Bridestowe, 2012 and Croxteth, 2008.

[2] Romans 6.4.

[3] Romans 6.9; Dylan Thomas, And death shall have no dominion. Dylan Thomas reading the poem: YouTube.

[4] John 6.40.

Acts 10.34-43, Matthew 28.1-10

Austwick, Clapham, Keasden, Easter Day, 9 April 2023

I wonder if you have ever welcomed in Easter on a hilltop at daybreak on Easter Morning? Some Christians love it – until Covid hit, people from the Bentham Churches got together at the Big Stone on Tatham Fells to celebrate together in that way; in my Somerset parishes twenty-or-so of us would make our way up to Corton Denham Beacon, the high point of a ridge straddling South Somerset and North Dorset, and as the sky slowly lit around us we would share bread and wine, the wind whipping at the edge of the cloth on the makeshift communion table, lambs skipping around us as we sang Thine Be the Glory 650 feet above the Somerset Levels, early morning traffic on the A30 London to Cornwall road twinkling as it passed by a couple of miles away below. 

I guess that many of the people who attend these sunrise services would say they were Morning People – people who habitually enjoy getting up and out at the very start of the day; for others though, those not normally up anywhere near as early, this would be quite hard, but, huffing, puffing, stretching, yawning, nevertheless they too become honorary Morning People for that occasion: Morning People, that is, people keen to celebrate the new beginnings which Easter is all about.

Mary Magdelene was a morning person, when she rose before dawn on the first day of the week to visit the tomb where she had seen Jesus laid to rest two days before.

You would imagine that she got up early simply because she couldn’t sleep – for anxiety, a sickness of her heart and mind. You would imagine Mary had been restless throughout the Sabbath, as she recalled the terrible events of the day before, sleepless for fear of what may have happened to Jesus’ body. 

There’s a deeper sense in which we can say that Mary was a morning person: because way before her Easter garden encounter with her risen Lord, Mary had seen God’s resurrection power create a new beginning in her own life and in the new community of believers to which she belonged. 

This happened at the time when Jesus cleansed Mary of “seven demons” [1]. She was suffering some form of mental or physical illness – an illness which would have caused her to be ostracised by the rest of society, because in her madness or sickness people would have dubbed her ‘unclean’. When Jesus healed her he revealed the nature of the kingdom of God – that it was a way of life in which the excluded ones are always included. As Luke later put it, “God shows no partiality, but in every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him.” [2]

When Jesus healed Mary she felt his resurrection power change her life. He had made her whole in body, mind, and spirit. He had restored her social status too, fully restored her to society – and in that moment her life began again; she became a morning person. Then on that Easter morning she came to see his resurrection power at work more clearly than ever – she understood that this was a power which could even overcome death.

Morning People are those who have been resurrected to a whole new way of seeing themselves and the world. Rejoicing that God has shown no partiality against them, they no longer feel constrained by their gender or state of health or social status or nationality; but instead, resurrected to a whole new way of being in the world they are able to love themselves, and to embrace everybody as their brothers and sisters, even those who they would previously have avoided, or demonised, or fought. 

Morning People create communities where all the old tribal barriers have disappeared, where all the old anxieties raised by our grasping at the things we feel necessary to keep our place in the tribe have disappeared, to be replaced by a generosity of spirit which is based on nothing in this world except the way of Christ’s kingdom breaking in by the power of the resurrection. 

Following her healing Mary became one of Jesus’ closest followers, becoming part of a group of women who travelled with him and his twelve disciples, “proclaiming the good news of the kingdom of God.” These women, Luke tells us, helped support Jesus’ ministry “out of their resources”. This suggestion that Mary was probably wealthy means that those nasty tales later told by Pope Gregory I that she had been a brazen hussy just don’t add up. [3] 

Mary was a morning person from the day that Jesus healed her; because something new dawned in her life which transformed her. From the day that he spoke her name and opened her eyes to his rebirth, she never stopped proclaiming the truth of his resurrection and its power to change the world for the better. Every day brings new beginnings for those who trust in the life-affirming power of God. 

This is the good news of Easter: it happened to Mary and it can happen to us. We can be Morning People too. Halleluia!

 

Notes

A rewrite of The Morning People preached at Queen Camel and Weston Bampfylde, Easter Day 2014.

[1] Luke 8.1-3

[2] Acts 10.34-35

[3] Wikipedia: Mary Magdalene