Month: September 2024

Clapham Harvest Festival, 6 October 2024  

Did you know that this month across England people celebrate Apple Day? Apple Day was launched on 21 October 1990 as both a celebration and a demonstration of the variety we are in danger of losing, not simply in apples, but in the richness and diversity of landscape, ecology and culture too.

The first Apple Day celebrations, in the old Apple Market in London’s Covent Garden, brought fruit to that market after 16 years’ absence. Forty stalls were taken. Fruit growers and nurseries producing and selling a wide variety of apples and trees rubbed shoulders with juice-and cider-makers, as well as writers and illustrators with their apple books.

Apple Day is now an integral part of the calendar of many villages, local authorities and city markets. It is a focus for activities organised by the Women’s Institute, National Trust properties, Wildlife Trusts, museums and galleries, horticultural societies, shops and restaurants as well as for schools and colleges, villages, parishes, allotments and garden orchards.

In Yorkshire, for instance, last weekend Newby Hall near Ripon held their annual Apple Day which included a hotly contested Apple Throwing Championships where whoever throws an Apple the furthest over the River Ure wins a prestigious title and trophy. There were also apple pressing demonstrations, cider tasting, a display of the many apple varieties grown in their orchards and advice from the Northern Fruit Group all things fruity.

The success of Apple Day has shown what the apple means to us and how much we need local celebrations in which, year after year, everyone can be involved. In city, town and country, Apple Day events have fostered local pride, celebrated and deepened interest in local distinctiveness, the specialness of places. 

Apple Day has played a part in raising awareness not only of the importance of orchards to our landscape and culture, but also in the provenance and traceability of food. It has played its part in the developing network of farmers’ markets and is helping people everywhere to discover they are not alone in valuing the links between food and the land, between natural resource use and the impact we have on nature.

The apple can be a symbol of what is being lost in many aspects of our lives and shown that anyone can take positive action towards change. Over the years, Apple Day has been celebrated in a wonderful variety of ways by a diverse range of people. Doctors’ surgeries, coronary support groups, and the Cancer Research Campaign have taken Apple Day as a novel way of encouraging healthy eating. Each year, alongside tasting, juicing, baking, pruning and grafting, an imaginative array of games and creative activities have flourished – ranging from simple apple printing to mummers’ apple plays, new songs and poetry evenings. But invariably, year after year, the most popular event is the display, tasting and buying of numerous varieties of apples and the presence of an expert to aid their identification.

How many different kinds of English apple can you think of? I cheated and looked it up on Wikipedia, which lists 62 varieties, from the Allington Pippin to the Yarlington Mill; from the Woodcock to the Beauty of Kent; from the Knobby Russet to Laxton’s Superb. There may be many more.

It’s no coincidence that Apple Day comes at Harvest time. A celebration of the harvest of fruit. When I was a vicar in Somerset our farmers provided our harvest suppers with copious supplies of their home-made cider; I don’t have much recollection of how those evenings ended… 

Harvest is a festival which gives you and I permission to be amazed at the way that nature provides for itself, and for us, so generously. As in the variety and range of English apples.

And if we permit ourselves to be amazed at these things, then we become grateful; and because grateful, then prepared to be gentle with all this life we share, and generous with all that nature gives to us.

Harvest is an occasion to be appreciative, and to recommit ourselves to caring for the earth, its creatures, the world’s suffering ones, and each other. Ths Harvest, we might raise a glass of cider to that.

Eldroth Harvest Festival, 6 October 2024  

“It’s a grand thing, to get leave to live” – a lovely quote from the hillwalker and writer Nan Shepherd, from her memoir, The Living Mountain, a meditation on her experiences of years of walking in the Cairngorms.

“It’s a grand thing, to get leave to live” – there’s an almost childlike joy in these words. A childlike amazement at the wonder of life in the world around us.

Nan Shepherd wrote about the almost overwhelming experience of seeing things in nature on her walks among the hills.

“How can I number the worlds to which the eye gives me entry?” she writes “The world of light, of colour, of shape, of shadow: of mathematical precision in the snowflake, the ice formation, the quartz crystal, the patterns of stamen and petal: of rhythm in the fluid curve and plunging line of the mountain faces. Why some blocks of stone, hacked into violent and tortured shapes, should so profoundly tranquillise the mind I do not know. … A certain kind of consciousness interacts with the mountain-forms to create this sense of beauty.” 

Another experience which she describes very well is that of walking inside clouds – on one occasion, above Loch Etchachan, “a cloud so thick that when the man who was leading went ahead by so much as an arm’s length, he vanished, except for his whistle.” She continues:

That cloud, like others inside which I have walked, was wet but not wetting. It did not wet us till, almost at the summit, it broke in hard rain, and we could at last see the corries, scarfed in mist. Some clouds savage the wayfarer on the heights – clouds from below, up here they are rain, or sleet – some nuzzle him gently but with such persistence that he might as well walk through a loch. 

Or the wet may be more delicate, condensing in droplets on eyebrows and hair and woollen clothing, as has happened  by morning with the dew after a night outside. Or the cloud may be hardly more than a sensation on the skin, clammy, or merely chill. 

Once I was inside a cloud that gave no sensation whatever. From within it, it was neither tangible nor visible, though as it approached it had looked thick and threatening. We were on the flank between Sgoran Dubh and Sgor Gaoith, on a cloudless day of sun; and suddenly there was the cloud, making steadily toward us, with a straight under-edge about the 3000 feet level.

We thought: we’re in for it! But nothing more happened than that the sunshine went out, as though a switch had clicked; and in some twenty minutes the sun clicked on again, and we saw the level under-edge of cloud pass away across the Einich valley. Inside the cloud had been just dry-dull.

Nan Shepherd says that “To walk out through the top of a cloud is good. Once or twice,” she says, “I have had the luck to stand on a tip of ground and see a pearled and lustrous plain stretch out to the horizons. Far off, another peak lifts like a small island from the smother. It is like the morning of creation.”

Walking on a hill whilst “being aware, using the whole of one’s body to instruct the spirit” can reveal “a secret life one has and knows others have.” 

This is the way a child receives the world, body and sprit alive together to all that is before them. And “Whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it,” said Jesus. 

I’d say that Harvest is a festival which gives you and I permission to be amazed, in childlike wonder, at the world around us, for all the life expressed from the clouds in  the skies above to the clouds sitting within our dale, and the clouds reflected in the lakes and gently flowing becks.

Harvest permits us to be amazed at the way that nature provides for itself, and for us, so generously. And because amazed, then grateful; and because grateful, then prepared to be gentle with all this life we share, and generous with all that nature gives to us.

Harvest is an occasion to be appreciative, with childlike wonder, and to recommit ourselves to caring for the earth, its creatures, the world’s suffering ones, and each other.

Harvest 2024: Alfred Wainwright

Keasden Harvest Festival, 22 September 2024  

 

You will have heard of Alfred Wainwright, the Blackburn-born fellwalker, guidebook author and illustrator famous for his guides to the Lakeland Fells written in the 1950s, and for designing the first guide to the Coast to Coast Walk between St Bees in Cumbria and Robin Hood’s Bay.

Wainwright is credited for the saying, “There’s no such thing as bad weather, only unsuitable clothing”, although it’s my guess he was only repeating what he’d heard many northern country folk say to him while on his travels.

He loved the hills of the north, maybe all the more because he spent most of his life cooped up in a municipal office, albeit in Kendal, where he served as the Borough Treasurer from 1948 until 1967. In his Pictorial Guide To The Western Fells he wrote:

“The fleeting hour of life of those who love the hills is quickly spent, but the hills are eternal. Always there will be the lonely ridge, the dancing beck, the silent forest; always there will be the exhilaration of the summits. These are for the seeking, and those who seek and find while there is still time will be blessed both in mind and body.” 

Wainwright knew our area here, these hills, very well indeed. Amongst his other books were A Pennine Way Companion (1968) and Walks in Limestone Country (1970).

So he walked these heights, he crossed these moors, just as half a century later you and I do. I wonder if you recognise, in this extract from his book A Pennine Journey, things about the experience of walking these hills which you yourself have found:

“Oh, how can I put into words the joys of a walk over country such as this; the scenes that delight the eyes, the blessed peace of mind, the sheer exuberance which fills your soul as you tread the firm turf? This is something to be lived, not read about. On these breezy heights, a transformation is wondrously wrought within you. Your thoughts are simple, in tune with your surroundings; the complicated problems you brought with you from the town are smoothed away. Up here, you are near to your Creator; you are conscious of the infinite; you gain new perspectives; thoughts run in new strange channels; there are stirrings in your soul which are quite beyond the power of my pen to describe. Something happens to you in the silent places which never could in the towns, and it is a good thing to sit awhile in a quiet spot and meditate. The hills have a power to soothe and heal which is their very own. No man ever sat alone on the top of a hill and planned a murder or a robbery, and no man ever came down from the hills without feeling in some way refreshed, and the better for his experience.” 

Wainwright had a reputation for being “curmudgeonly” although Eric Robson, once chairman of the Wainwright Society, said that this was overstated.  “He was a complex man,” Robson said. “He was shy, and he engaged his brain before opening his mouth. He liked solitude.” I would say that his writings reveal that he had something of the spiritual about him. 

“To be spiritual is to be amazed,” wrote the Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel. “Our goal should be to live life in radical amazement, [to] get up in the morning and look at the world in a way that takes nothing for granted. Everything is phenomenal; everything is incredible; never treat life casually. To be spiritual is to be amazed.” 

Wainwright was forever amazed about the mountains and fells, the countryside around him. And he shares this deeply spiritual vision with all who enjoy his books.

Now, whether or not you think of yourself as a spiritual person, I’d say that Harvest is a festival which gives you and I permission to be amazed, at the world around us, for all the life expressed from the heights of the skies to the rivers and ocean depths; amazed at the way that nature provides for itself, and for us, so generously. In because amazed, then grateful; and because grateful, then prepared to be gentle with all this life we share, and generous with all that nature gives to us.

Harvest is an occasion to be appreciative and to recommit ourselves to caring for the earth, its creatures, the world’s suffering ones, and each other.

In his guidebook to Lakeland’s Central Fells, Wainwright writes these words: 

‘an inexpressible humility fills the heart … I must hasten now to the Scafells, noblest of Lakeland’s cathedrals, while good health and appreciation of beauty and simple reverence and gratitude remain with me, for when I have lost these blessings I shall have little left.’

James 3.13 – 4.3,7-8a, Mark 9.30-37

The Sixteenth Sunday after Trinity, 22 September 2024

Austwick, Clapham 

Who is wise and understanding among you? In an ephemeral world full of newscaster soundbites and social media snapshots we yearn for wisdom – the slow, considered truth of those who have nurtured inner depth and open understanding of themselves and others. [1]

Show by your good life that your works are done with gentleness born of wisdom. In a harsh world dominated by the brutal politics of ambition, where our lives are governed  by institutions so large they are incapable of care for the individual, we yearn to be touched by gentleness. [2]

But if you have bitter envy and selfish ambition in your hearts, do not be boastful and false to the truth. In our yearning to belong, our desire to be recognised, our need to be loved, we bend ourselves out of shape, mould ourselves into other people’s image of who we should be; we lament the damage that this causes our soul, and long to be at peace with ourselves by being true to ourselves. [3] 

We are hungry to be rid of envy and selfish ambition, we ache for an end to disorder and wickedness of every kind. By coming here, week by week, year by year, we show ourselves keen to embrace the wisdom from above, that pure, peaceable, gentle wisdom, of God. 

We desire to be at peace with ourselves, to be able to bring peace to the world around us.  For a harvest of righteousness is sown in peace for those who make peace, writes James.

The beginning of the wisdom we seek, is our willingness to take a good long look at ourselves, recognising the reality of which James writes: that conflict in our world isn’t caused by things outside us; it comes from within. 

That desire to have what others have, to be what others are, is deeply ingrained in us. It’s at the heart of all our disputes, be they little village spats or international conflicts, be they family feuds or civil wars, and they’re hard to overcome. But they can be; if we ask. James says,

You do not have, because you do not ask. You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, in order to spend what you get on your pleasures.

This seems to be about prayer. Its about the difference between praying for the things we desire because other people have them, prayers which feel more like letters to Santa Claus than conversations with God – and praying for our desires to be aligned with God’s desires for us.

As St. Augustine puts on it in the opening prayer of his Confessions: “our hearts are restless until they rest in thee.” We begin to move away from envy and selfish ambition when we begin to set our desires on what God desires for us, not what others desire, when we start to fix our heart on imitating God rather than following other people. As James continues,

Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you.

Our longing to be at peace with ourselves and the world, begins to take shape when we prayerfully acknowledge the desires which are driving us, and relinquish them, in our hearts, to God.

Now James has got to the heart of the deep conflict in human nature – and identified a way to work towards healing. But James leaves out Jesus – and we need to ask, is it really possible for us to discover what God desires for us and to begin to turn our desires towards God, without the help of Christ as the go-between who helps us to understand and set that desire? 

For us, Jesus is the Son of Man who knows all about human desires. Some novelists and filmmakers who have dabbled in this area have been dubbed heretical by some, but being fully human Jesus must have known what it felt like to be in relationships, entangled in human desires.

And Jesus is also the Son of God, whose relationship with the Father is our model for divine desire. How The Son looked towards the Father is how we might look, what he prayed to the Father illuminates how we should pray, and so on. As we find in today’s gospel story, where Jesus finds his disciples arguing about who was the greatest.

Now, the disciples had heard Jesus many times teaching, ‘Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all.’ But it may have been a shock to them, seeing what he did next.

Then he took a little child and put it among them; and taking it in his arms, he said to them, ‘Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me.’

The shock here is that Jesus turned the eyes of the disciples away from each other – away from those competitive relationships with each other which were their obsession, those competitive relationships of desiring what the others had in terms of status and position. And he turned their eyes towards a little child who he put among them – placed at the centre of their attention. 

Now from what we know and can imagine, children in that society were largely invisible, powerless, the lowest in status of anyone. To make them the centre of attention was a radical gesture of Jesus, designed to reshape the disciples view of who and what was important in life, to reform their desires from being among the greatest, to paying attention to the least.

Children are often caught up in our competitiveness: witness the lengths that parents go to to ensure their child succeeds in school. Children are always victims of our conflicts: I say just one word, divorce, to illustrate that point. And children are problematic: with their physical, emotional needs, with the financial burden they bring, with their new-fangled behaviour which we adults cannot fathom. Children are so often on the receiving end of adults’ violence, their misshapen, misdirected desires – it was the same in Jesus’ time as now. [7]

But Jesus took the child in his arms – directing his attention away from the squabbling disciples and focussing his attention on this little one, just as a loving father would his son, and telling them, ’Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me.’

Here is Jesus inviting us to welcome those who have nothing to offer us but their vulnerability; encouraging us to divert our attention away from the endless struggle for our own status to reach out in compassion to the little ones of the earth. Here is Jesus showing us that when we turn our hearts outwards, away from our own selfish instincts, when we re-set our desires to embrace others, when we cease from our competitiveness and instead place ourselves in a position of self-giving love, like a parent towards a newborn child, then our restless hearts will learn to rest in him. 

Notes

[1] An Adbusters-influenced paragraph. Adbusters is ‘the journal of the mental environment’ which is currently publishing its Manifesto for World Revolution series – ‘a tactical manual for fighting back against the capitalist algorithm that threatens the very essence of the human spirit’.

[2] A paragraph influenced by my reading of Theodore Roszak, Person/Planet: The Creative Disintegration of Industrial Society, in particular Chapter 5, ‘Too Big.’, p.131ff.

[3] Here the influence is the mimetic theory of Rene Girard and the treatment of James (and Jesus) here owes a good deal to Paul Nuechterlein, girardianlectionary.net, Year B, Proper 20b.

[4] Matthew 14.22-23.

[5] John the apostle is traditionally held to be the author of the Gospel of John, see eg Wikipedia.

[6] John 12.6: ‘[Judas] kept the common purse…’

[7] See Ched Myers, Binding the Strong Man: A Political Reading of Mark’s Story of Jesus, p.266-271 for a fuller discussion of ‘The Child, the Family System, and the Roots of Violence’.

James 3.1-12, Mark 8.27-38

The Sixteenth Sunday after Trinity, 15 September 2024, 

Austwick, Clapham, Eldroth

‘Who do people say that I am?’ asked Jesus; for he understood that the names we call each other acutely affect our relationships. 

‘Who do people say that I am?’ Jesus wanted to be seen as the person he knew himself to be, resistant of the untrue images imposed on him by others.

This was a joyful, lightbulb moment for Peter. He replied to Jesus’ question saying, ’You are the Messiah!’, brightly expressing his vision of Jesus as The One sent to save the people, a leader who would liberate Israel from their Roman oppressor, using all the temporal power he could muster. 

But Jesus was quick to silence such talk and to present the quite different way he saw himself. He calls himself a ‘Son of Man’, in other words a mortal just like Peter. Refusing to be seen as a messianic saviour wielding aggressive worldly power: rather, Jesus was intent on teaching Peter that he would express his saving power through his suffering at the hands of the world’s powerful ones. 

And sure enough, the glory of Jesus would be shown through his dying and then his rising again. The power of this Suffering One was of a different kind altogether – the power of life over death.

But why did Jesus call Peter ‘Satan’? ‘Get behind me, Satan’: That seems like a very extreme reaction against Peter’s confession of faith in him; a terrible name to use against the faithful friend and follower who had just expressed such profound belief and confidence in him.

Well, elsewhere Jesus describes Satan as ‘the father of lies’, ‘a murderer from the beginning [who] does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him.’ [2] And Jesus’ rebuke teaches Peter that it is a lie that there is no alternative to the messianic powers of the world which rule through  military force and the power of political, economic systems. There is another way, made known through his teachings about the kingdom of heaven, the kingdom of God.

Jesus asserts that it is a lie that all we Sons and Daughters of Men are trapped in the futile battle for position and recognition and influence which is the way of the world. There need not be that struggle, when we learn to rest in the grace of God, accepting that we are embraced in his love.

It is fascinating that the gospel of Mark records this discussion about identity. It seems so current, so contemporary a subject. For ‘Who do people say that I am?’ is a question at the heart of our culture, which we come across all the time, and which involves us, whether or not we want it to. 

Have you ever been asked by a website or by your phone to set up a profile for yourself? Unless you’re extremely adept at avoiding all contact with digital technology, I’d be surprised if you hadn’t. My NHS app wants me to set up a profile, with my name and contact details on it; so does the bank; and the tax office; and pretty much every other body I’m connected to. My Amazon account wants my profile to include a picture of myself, so that anyone clicking into my Wish List can see that it’s me – or the version of me that I choose to display. Currently that’s a photograph taken on a North Wales beach about a decade ago, where I’m wearing a Panama hat at a jaunty angle. Whereas for my Facebook profile I’m in full clerical mode baptising a baby at Eldroth. Everyone knows that these profiles barely describe the true ‘me’, they are a tiny part of the full picture of who I am. 

‘Who do people say that I am?’ is the flip-side of the more profound question, ‘Who do I think I really am?’

Rejecting the name of ‘Messiah’, Jesus called himself The Son of Man, a Suffering One. By doing this he was placing himself in the company of all the powerless ones in his society, the despised, the marginalised, and everyone who struggles. [3] 

For many in our society today the fundamental struggle is to know themselves and to be known by others. The technology which increasingly rules our lives demands that we display a public face: which can be a crushing pressure, particularly on those who have learned to measure their worth by the amount of followers or likes they have on social media. ‘Those who want to save their life’ by keeping up appearances, find themselves defeated by this ceaseless, exhausting, task. 

This same technology also mines all the data which we generate moment by moment through our mobile devices, our virtual assistants like Alexa or Siri, our car’s black box, our TV set and digital doorbell, meaning that those who own the technology also own all the information about us which these devices record. ‘Those who want to save their life’ by entrusting more and more of it to these technologies and the companies and oligarchs behind them, may ask uneasily, ‘But who do they say that I am?’, ‘This detailed but incomplete version of myself that they own, what could they do with it?’ 

Many, in our increasingly surveilled society, worry about what happens if their data is wrong, or wrongly interpreted, and they are powerless to challenge or change it. As in the recent case of the 17-year old first-time driver whose car insurance company ‘threatened’ him with debt collectors over black box data that suggested he was driving his 18-year-old VW Polo at 540mph. [4] Or for that matter, the little rural church hit with ridiculously inflated electricity bills because the readings which the smart meter are giving bear no relation at all to reality.

Society’s focus on personal identity can cause people to feel alone in this world, separated from others, individuals vulnerable against the powerful forces of the corporations which rule our lives: which is why in our times many, from the margins, are working hard to rebuild community, to unite with others to resist all in our world which harms us. [5]

‘Who do people say that I am?’ is a burning question of our times. It is good news indeed that he who called himself ‘The Son of Man’ is one – in community – with everyone who suffers in this world. His divine power is totally unlike, and works in opposition to, the ways of the world’s Messiahs, Lords, and techno oligarchs, against the worldly structures and powers which separate us from our true selves and from those communities which might affirm and support us.

Think of one name Jesus called himself, ‘The resurrection, and the life’. He explained that this means that ‘Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live’.[6]

Those who suffer loss of face, loss of favour, loss of self, even loss of home or income, in this image-obsessed, data-driven society, can come to him to begin again, to put their anxious struggles behind them, to learn to rest in the grace of God, and to know that they are embraced in his love.

 

Notes

[1] A partial rewrite of the talk ‘On Calling God Names’ preached in Yorkshire in 2018 and in Somerset, 2015, and What’s in a name? preached in Devon in 2012.

[2] John 8.44.

[3] Hengel, Crucifixion: In the Ancient World and the Folly of the Message of the Cross, p.86f in Ched Myers, Binding the Strong Man: A Political Reading of Mark’s Story of Jesus, p.245

[4] Chloe Louise, Car insurance company ‘threatened’ cancer-stricken first-time driver, 17, with debt collectors over black box data that suggested he was driving at 540MPH in his 18-year-old VW Polo. ThisIsMoney.co.uk, 16 October 2023.

[5] Naomi Klein, Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World. p.327-334.

[6] John 11.25.

A sermon by Samantha Dennis [1]

James 2.1-13, Mark 7.24-37

Sunday 8 September 2024, Austwick, Keasden

I wonder what springs to mind when you hear the word education. Perhaps your thoughts take you back to your school days. If so, I expect there will be a range of emotions in the room – some of you will have loved just about every moment of school, others will have hated every second and maybe the rest of you will be more philosophical, and remember the good and the bad. I expect you can also remember a teacher who had an impact on you.

Teaching is a demanding profession, but the rewards are great; helping pupils to grow as learners and as people is a privilege. The pleasure of working with and being with children is that it never fails to amaze us and amuse us. From the 3-year-old, having held two minutes silence on Remembrance Day, saying she thought of her uncle (a soldier) in her head and Jesus in her heart; to the 5-year-old consoling her teacher, when learning about the death of Jesus, by telling her not to worry as we get a new one every Christmas!

However, the challenges for our teachers are great too. Education in this country is a continually and rapidly changing landscape driven by the political party in power and the inspectorate. The foundations for these agendas are to improve exam results and close the achievement gaps between social groups – the haves and have-nots. So, a clear moral purpose but one that could go further … and it does!

Church schools have a vision for education that extends to the whole sector. It is a vision drawn from John 10:10, a vision for ‘Life in all its fulness’, rooted in wisdom, dignity, hope and living well together. 

The children of our local Church school, Austwick Primary, wear a school badge which says “Let your light shine.” These are the words of Jesus in Matthew 5:16, and they are at the heart of the school’s Vision Statement which talks about the children, having been ‘nurtured by our loving, respectful Christian environment’, thus being enabled to ‘step out into the world with courage and hope, as shining lights, illumined by knowledge, skills and understanding.’

Of course, our schools should be teaching the three Rs, but this vision is an example of what needs to be imparted for our young people to be the best version of themselves.

Today’s schools are places where our young people are encouraged to explore spirituality, places that develop the whole child and go beyond the three Rs; places that aim to prepare young people for the rest of their lives. None of us are ever really the finished project, so our young people are also equipped to be lifelong learners.

Our schools should be places where our children can ask those big questions, explore their spirituality and discover what it is that they believe. The same is true of our churches. They should be places of good soil where everyone can continue to learn and flourish in the love of Christ.

Jesus was, of course, a teacher, who taught using a range of techniques, most of them not overly different from those used today. He certainly knew how to engage people verbally, to test and to challenge them, as in today’s gospel encounter with the Syrophoenician woman. And he was adept at using drama too, as in the way he put his fingers into the deaf-mute man’s ears, spat and touched his tongue, looked up to heaven, sighed and said to him, ‘Ephphatha’, all to illustrate his healing powers.

Jesus of course often taught using parables – everyday stories put to work as prompts for learning. Many teachers will use story to explain something new and complicated. Jesus said, ‘Those who have ears to hear, let them hear,’ and I am sure many teachers today can be heard to say ‘Are you listening to this? Really listening?’ when a pupil fails to concentrate. As the saying goes, some things never change.

Jesus provoked people to concentrate. He encouraged them to listen beyond the words of his stories – to listen to the meaning within. He wanted them, and He wants us, to be like the good soil – fertile soil; ready to meet with God, to really get to know Him with the ultimate reward that fully nourished we will be able to flourish.

In Jesus we have a teacher who calls each of us, of any age, to continually learn. 

To be wise by reflecting on our experiences and by holding Christ at the centre of everything we do. 

To treat everyone with dignity and respect regardless of background. 

To live well together by disagreeing well and acknowledging we are not all the same. 

And he offers us hope, a hope of life beyond the here and now, a hope that in the darkest times, the light will eventually break through. 

A hope that everyone should know.

 

Note

[1] This sermon, with minor adjustments, is substantially that of Samantha Dennis, an Anglican Self-Supporting Minister (Diocese of Derby), and Deputy Director of Education (Diocese of Southwell and Nottingham), as published for September 2024: Education Sunday by the College of Preachers.