In God we trust

Jeremiah 14: 7-10, 19-end. Two laments from Jeremiah where the sins of the people are acknowledged but where God is also accused of letting his people down and ignoring them. This feature of Judaism, being ready to criticise God, is largely absent from Christianity. It is an interesting question whether we would benefit either psychologically or spiritually by adopting a more Jewish perspective?

2 Timothy 4: 6-8, 16-18. Scholars tell us that this is not a genuine letter by Paul but that doesn’t diminish its spiritual power. In it, Paul is depicted as remaining steadfast and valiant, sure of Christ’s ultimate victory and his own vindication despite being left to face his struggles alone.  Imagery taken from the games which were a prominent feature of city life in the ancient world has provided hymn writers for generations with attractive imagery.

Luke 18: 9-14. The man who was justified before God was not the proud man sure of himself and his status, but the sinner who was aware of his shortcomings, was ashamed of them and threw himself on God’s mercy. A valuable lesson that it is grace by which we are saved not works.

The themes today are the human condition and our relationship with God.

Jeremiah in his laments admits to the communal wickedness of the people yet still craves the help and support of God.

The end of Jeremiah’s piece today acknowledges the fact that there is no other God from whom they can ask for help so it is in effect a plea for mercy.

In his letter, Paul too is at the end of his tether, left alone by his supporters, but he has an unshakeable faith in the mercy and goodness of God. He is sure that he has followed God’s will and plan and is confident of his prize which he calls the “crown of righteousness”.

He felt God’s closeness and in his weakness that gave him strength.

Acknowledging our weakness and sinfulness before God is exactly the point of the gospel reading today. The proud man, sure of his own righteousness, and looking down on others with disdain is not the man who was justified before God. He doesn’t have a right relationship.

The man who was justified (that is declared righteous in God’s eyes) was the man who fully acknowledged his sins, was sorry for them, and begged God for mercy.

The tax-collector in this parable displays a proper self-knowledge and proper humility before God, whereas the Pharisee seems to think he is God’s equal and is blind to his true status.

Knowing that the line between good and evil cuts through every human heart and realising our need of God’s mercy lies at the heart of the Biblical revelation.

The core Christian understanding of our faith is that we all have sinned and all of us need to rely on God’s mercy.

We are saved by faith in God’s grace.

God’s Grace saves us. Totally free, unmerited saving Love and mercy offered to every single one of us. This is presented as an objective fact – the truth.

How we make that truth effective in our lives is through having faith in God’s Grace.

Putting yourself in God's way.

Sunday 20^th October – Trinity 18 – Proper 24

Genesis 32: 22-31. Jacob wrestles with God and neither prevails. But God blesses Jacob and says that from now on his name is “Israel” which means struggle with God. This enigmatic story has intrigued me from the instant I first heard it and of course theologically means that our relationship with God is characterised more by inward struggle than meek compliance.

2 Timothy 3:14 – 4:5. The phrase “all scripture is inspired by God” has been misunderstood by many to mean that all scripture is dictated by God. Also, in context, when this piece was written what counted as “scripture” was the Old Testament and most of the Apocrypha. The new Testament gospels and letters were not yet counted as such. God breathed yes, but distilled through the culture, passions, personalities, prejudices, and wishful thinking perhaps of the writers and editors of the Bible and manifest in various genres that require different ways of reading and interpreting them. Luke 18: 1-8. The meaning of this parable is NOT that God is an unjust judge but the opposite is being posited. If even an unjust judge will do what is right by this vulnerable woman then how much more will God who IS just answer the prayers of his people.

One of the difficulties in reading and interpreting the Bible is that it is sometimes difficult to project oneself back into the culture and appreciate the context in which it was written. The genre of writing is also important. Whether a book is history, theology, prophesy, Apocalyptic, poetry, or wisdom literature obviously makes a difference to how a book is read and sometimes books are written in multiple genres just to confuse the issue.

There is a way of combining the twin themes of using God-breathed scripture and the practice of prayer together into a pleasing whole.

This method of prayer comes from the Ignatian tradition named after Ignatius Loyola which sidesteps the difficulty of trying to understand what the author or authors was trying to say.

You read a passage of scripture slowly a couple of times and prayerfully and ask God to reveal Himself through the text.

If all scripture is God breathed, the Spirit is there lying behind and circulating through the text. You are asking God to reveal Himself and to speak to you today, with a message or a word or an impulse that stands apart from the surface meaning of the words.

Prayer is after all about communication and God guides, comforts, teaches and admonishes us by his Holy Spirit.

This method of prayer seeks direct communication from His Spirit by using the Bible but isn’t concerned with the author’s stated message as far as we are able to understand it.  

Slowly rolling the words around in your mind, some words may stand out for some reason, some images or impressions may form in your mind. This is God communicating with you bypassing the actual surface meaning of the text.

This is a quiet meditative way of praying which gives greater emphasis to the theology of presence and listening and discerning than we normally engage in via discursive petitionary prayer.

In some parts of the Old Testament it can be hard to see the grace filled loving purposes of God in many pieces but the people who wrote it were inspired by God to do so. God can use any scripture through which to communicate and using this contemplative method it tries to connect God’s Spirit to our Spirit.

Finding the Spiritual meaning in a Bible story as enigmatic as Jacob wrestling with a man who turns out to be God himself is actually one of the more explainable ones.

The giving of a new name signifies a change of status in the Bible and the name is a clear indicator of the nature and identity of the community of Israel.

Human experiences are depicted in terms of a struggle with the divine, an element that is very much played down in the Christian tradition though Jesus struggling with his role in the passion narratives, sweating blood in the garden of Gethsemane is surely some warrant if one were needed that servile unquestioning obedience wasn’t always easy.

As the most complete revelation of the nature of God that we have, it behoves us all to read the Hebrew scriptures through Jesus tinted spectacles. Things like genocides and massacres are directly attributed to God which we now realise, having the revelation of Jesus, God wouldn’t own.

The divine wants to communicate with you, using communication in the widest possible sense. Don’t box yourself in to thinking that God can only reach you in certain prescribed ways. His ways and thoughts are far above our ways and thoughts.

Placing yourself consciously in God’s way aids the communication process and you have to pray as you can, not as you can’t. But knowing of different ways gives you extra opportunity to experiment with prayer to find a style that suits you.

When you are trying to build a relationship - any communication is good no matter what outward form it takes or in whatever location you happen to be.

Your Life Hidden in Christ

Sunday – 17 after Trinity – Proper 23

2 Kings 5: 1-3, 7-15. In this encounter Naaman is too high and mighty to enact a simple remedy, expecting due deference and complicated rituals instead, so it is comforting to note that human nature hasn’t changed much since then. Apparently, leprosy was unknown in these days so although that is how the ailment is translated in our Bibles it is more likely to be eczema of some sort. There are hints of inter-religious dialogue and connection as well as hints relating to the cleansing nature of Baptism.

2 Timothy 2: 8-15. A reminder of the core of the gospel which is “Christ raised from the dead” is the start of our lection today. The template “dying with Christ in order to live with him”, is obviously metaphorical, and entails a dying to self, which entails ego and self-interest, and self-centredness, in order to live for God – that is a God-centred life.

Luke 17: 11-19. Like Naaman in the opening tract from 2 Kings, the object of interest is another foreigner – a Samaritan. This is an exercise in early Christian universalism, reaching out beyond Israel, to the schismatic neighbouring Samaritans. He was the only man healed that returned to give thanks to Jesus (God). People with skin diseases were excluded from religious festivals so their healing brought them back from social and religious exclusion, which may have been the original thrust of Luke’s story, although he is perhaps a bit unrealistic as no Samaritan would surely report to the Jerusalem priesthood to record their healing.

Christ is risen. This is the absolute core of the gospel.

And the fact that Christ is risen is of universal importance and application. Christ being raised is of equal surpassing eternal importance to an Amazonian forest dweller, a Ukrainian tractor driver, a Bombay slum dweller, a millionaire New Yorker, a Slovenian super model, a Chinese factory worker, a Nigerian street pastor or a Budleigh retiree.

It doesn’t matter, who you are or your station in life, or your culture, ethnicity, or stated religion or lack of any religion, because if we believe as we do that the resurrection of Christ is an objective fact, it follows that when Jesus said “I am the truth” that was a truth with universal human application.

Of course, it has a cosmic significance as well, incorporating all created matter, but the human application is where we start.

We get glimpses from the Old Testament, like God saving Nineveh, a pagan city to the astonishment and dismay of Jonah;

We heard this morning of God working to heal another pagan, Naaman through the prophet Elisha.

In Jesus’ own ministry on earth, he often lauded the faith of schismatic Samaritans as we heard this morning, when he indiscriminatory healed some people and only one came back to give thanks – and he was a Samaritan.

Jesus was born in Galilee, known as Galilee of the gentiles and worked in gentile areas, like the Decapolis, which were mixed Greek cities and mixed with the poor, the outcasts, prostitutes, the diseased, the tax collectors.

His message of “Life in all its fulness” was for all people at all times and in all places.

So when the risen Christ gave the great commission, to make disciples of all nations, this is the natural impetus behind all missionary evangelizing.

There are consequences to accepting these truths of course. Accepting Christ is one thing, living as he commands us to live is a much harder task. Being a Christian can hurt, physically, as Paul suffers, or more likely nowadays socially mentally and psychologically, and spiritually.

To love the unlovely is hard. To love your enemies is even harder. And to die to self is possibly the hardest thing of all. We are asked to supplant our will with the will of God in order to act as he would act – as Jesus acted

All other religions have their own way of emphasising this loss of ego and self-interest.   In Islam you submit to the will of Allah – in fact the word Islam means submission. You replace your will with the will of God. In Buddhism, the control of self-serving ego is central to their philosophy but in Christianity it is slightly different.

We don’t stop loving ourselves. We are called to love others as we love ourselves. We have a new dignity and status as “children of God”. We are called to love and serve as God loves. We are called to be imitators of Jesus Christ in our attitudes, our will and our actions. As Christians we are called to become more fully ourselves – the person that God always wanted us to be.

We all have unique personalities and God honours that individuality. He entered this world as an individual human being. He doesn’t want to create a homogeneous, faceless mass of people indistinguishable from each other.

God doesn’t and won’t overwhelm you. Everything is with consent and done with love and your best interests at heart. That is what we learn from the life of Jesus. That is how He acted.

As Christians, we will share a family likeness because we all on the same path at different stages, but we cannot and will not all be the same. I, though I say so myself am pretty spiritually sensitive to mood and atmosphere and I am sure that the Spirit is flowing more freely through the churches in the R.M.C. than He has done before.

That Spirit is of a risen saviour, who wills that we flourish and become the best versions of ourselves that we can possibly be. Praise be to God.

Come ye thankful people come.

Sunday - Harvest festival 

Deuteronomy 26: 1-11. The true spirit of Harvest is one of Thanksgivng, and Moses commands offerings of Thanksgiving to God for being delivered from slavery in Egypt into the land flowing with Milk and Honey

Philippians 4: 4-9. Paul directs us to offer prayer, supplication (asking earnestly) and thanksgiving to God and in so doing we receive “the peace of God which passes all understanding”. That divine peace being a wholeness and contentment that the Hebrew people call shalom (Salam in Arabic)

John 6: 25-35. The sentence “I am the bread of life”, that which nourishes and sustains and causes all growth, is at once the property of God (Yahweh translates as “I am”) and is placed in the mouth of Jesus as the “image of the invisible God”(Colossians 1:15). The words of Jesus nourish us because they are the words of God.

Last year I gave you the whole story of the Bible in 3 gardens. This year I miss out the garden of Eden and the garden of gethsemane and start straight at the vineyard full of ripe juicy grapes which represents Jesus’ saying;

“I am the true vine” with us being the fruit being fed by his spirit.

Jesus presents us with another “I am” saying this morning;

“I am the bread of life”.

Feed on God; His wisdom and words, and the result will be Peace of mind.

Thankfulness for the nourishing nurturing fruitfulness of God is the primary sentiment that underpin Harvest festival.

Now, In the modern world whenever the planet is being discussed you are most likely to hear horror stories about the environment and climate change than anything else.

And that is important because if those things can threaten the extraordinary fruitfulness of the world, we should obviously seek to limit any damage, but today we concentrate on the extraordinary fruitfulness of this planet.

The current population of the world is 7.7 Billion people.

That means that the world has to produce enough food to feed 7.7 Billion people every day of the year.

If people are lucky enough to eat three meals a day, that means 7.7 billion breakfasts, 7.7 billion lunches and 7.7 billion dinners every single day.

53.9 billion breakfasts a week, about 2800 billion breakfasts lunches and dinners every year.

These are extraordinary amounts, but the most amazing thing is that the world can do that because it is so bountiful and fruitful.

Of course there are parts of the world where people don’t have enough to eat, and closer to home we have people who struggle to afford adequate food but the problem there is not that the food doesn’t exist – that is a problem of unequal distribution and economics and are different problems.

The world produces more than enough food to feed everyone. In fact, apparently a full third of all food produced in the world is wasted every year that is 1.3 billion tonnes of food. And all developed countries have the same problem

Our planet is a marvellous place. The scale and variety of food (and flora and fauna) produced is mind boggling.

Harvest festival is a time to remember just how wonderful it is, and what we need to protect. The world is special. Not barren rock, or huge balls of gas like all the other planets in our solar system. We are very lucky people. Another way of saying we are lucky is that we are blessed. And as a way of acknowledging that we are blessed is to give thanks. We say  “Thank you” But thank you to whom or what? As Christians we give thanks to the creator of this marvellous, fruitful bountiful planet. We thank God.