Can these bones live?

29^th March – Lent 5

Ezekiel 37: 1-14. The bodies of a defeated people left unburied, their bones picked clean by animals and dried and bleached by the hot sun is a vision of utter defeat and lifelessness and without hope. As such it can be allowed to speak powerfully into many historical situations as well as be applied to our personal post death futures and the future of all things. “Can these dry bones live?” is a question that could be posed to the current state of civil society and economic activity. The answer is clear from the text. The people are re-constituted and finally have the breath of God breathed into them. This foretaste  of the notion of new life out of death can be applied as I say to many different situations, large and small. Ultimately it tells us that God is the author and sustainer of all life – and can even bring new life out of death.

Romans 8: 6-11. Life according to the “flesh” or the “Spirit” are not talking about two separate parts of a person (an explanation that has led to historically and religiously harmful views about the human body) but two ways of living. Living according to the flesh is living in a way that is shaped by and controlled by the values and standards of the world as opposed to living by and being controlled by the values and standards of the kingdom of God. We are talking here about two separate mindsets and one set on God means life and peace. The Spirit of God who raised Jesus from the dead, is the same Spirit that lives in each believer, and our hope is vested in the hope that the spirit that gives us life and peace now, will raise us also on the last day.

John 11: 1-45. The raising of Lazarus is puzzling in that Jesus (according to the story) knew that he was going to die but delayed going to Lazarus so that when Jesus raised him it would be a miraculous sign, the last and greatest of the “signs” in John’s gospel that started with the turning of water into wine. Carrying on the theme of God being the author of life, the Spirit that ultimately would raise Jesus from the dead, here works through Jesus, to raise Lazarus but there is a very important difference. Lazarus was not resurrected to eternal life; he was re-vivified to live the rest of his mortal life until he presumably died again. When Lazarus emerged from the tomb he was still bound, also in stark contrast to the resurrection stories of Jesus in the gospels where the linen cloths were laying in the tomb. In both instances though the Spirit of God the Father is Lord of life, both in this mortal realm and in the next.

The valley of dry bones is a picture that will resonate in these dark times when we look around at the health, social and economic devastation being caused by the coronavirus crisis.

“Can these bones live?” is a question that we might all be tempted to ask. The unequivocal response from the Judeo-Christian tradition is a resounding “Yes!”

The Christian gospel says that from the depths of despair, unjustly inflicted suffering, feeling forsaken, mockery and finally death on the cross, the Spirit of God raised Jesus from death to eternal life. This is of course the central motif of the Christian religion – that no matter how bad things are – even from death itslef there is no darkness so dark that God cannot bring forth light and life from it.

This holds true for our own mortal life of course – life after death - but this motif holds equally true for situations in this life also.

From a specifically Christian perspective it is what the late great Harry Williams CR called “True resurrection” and so offers a Christian perspective on all disasters in the world including the coronavirus Pandemic.

Christianity has always been a truly realistic faith in that it recognises pain suffering and death and looks it square in the eye, bears it when necessary but hopes in redemption. We have never shied away from the reality of suffering and loss and even says we can often grow from it.

The shortest verse in the Bible occurs in the story of the raising of Lazarus – our gospel reading this Sunday morning. It is “Jesus wept”

On the Cross Jesus also says “My God, my God Why have you forsaken me?” so along with grief, he also knows the spiritual darkness of feeling being abandoned by God.

In short, Jesus knew and felt exactly as we do in our darkest moments. After his death there was then silence for a day – a time of blank mind-numbing confusion – until that most glorious day – Easter Sunday – when the whole picture changed, and new life emerged from the grave.

Easter Sunday was the day that new hope, and new life and new possibilities dawned upon the world. Christians are called to live life according to this trust in a God who is able to bring life out of death is what Paul means by living according to the Spirit.

“Hope springs eternal in the human heart”, says Alexander Pope in his ethical poem on the state of man called “An essay on man” a poem which sought to vindicate the ways of God to man. A people without hope are a broken people but a people with hope can work miracles.

My love and prayers are with you all.

Mothering Sunday

Exodus 2: 1-10. In this tale, Pharaoh’s daughter directly disobeys her father’s decree to kill all Hebrew boys and becomes a story of bold female cooperation and sympathy. The miraculous deliverance of a future ruler are not uncommon in world cultures but the fact that the future saviour of the Hebrew people has an Egyptian name lends some credence to the fact that Moses is not an invented figure. God works through women, as well as men, to achieve his aims.

Colossians 3: 12-17. An uncontroversial list of virtues which invites reflection rather than head scratching. “Sing psalms, hymns and spiritual songs” says Paul. What hymns the early church would have sung is anyone’s guess of course. As far as I am aware, western hymnody started with Gregorian chant and I’m not sure how far back Orthodox chant goes but music has obviously had a close connection with Christian worship from the very beginning

Luke 2: 33-35. Marian devotion, more catholic than protestant has its roots in Luke’s gospel and in this small extract we have the origins of Mary as the suffering mother forever by his side and one of the inspirations behind Michelangelo’s awe inspiring “Pieta”, a non-Biblical yet stunning and moving high point of Christian art. In a spiritual sense one intuits the pain that all mothers (and Fathers) may have to bear. The pain one feels when your child is derided, misunderstood, hurt or in extreme cases tortured or killed.

Mothering Sunday was originally an observance from the 16^th Century when people on the 4^th Sunday of Lent would return to worship at their “Mother church”, defined variously as either the church they were baptized in, the cathedral, or even their parish church.

Mother’s day started in 1908 in the USA, when a lady called Anna Jarvis succeeded in persuading the US Government to have a special day for Mothers, which was the culmination of three years lobbying since she held the memorial service for her own mother in 1905.

These two related but different occasions have essentially merged in the popular imagination, so the original reason for Mothering Sunday has all but been forgotten, even in the Christian churches.

This is no bad thing in my opinion because it is surely the lauding of the nurturing, mothering instinct that lies at the heart of both occasions, especially as the church was known as “Mother church” for that reason.

God, which we routinely call Father, of course, because that is what Jesus did, is complete and perfect so must include both masculine and feminine attributes.

As Genesis (1:27) says, “So God created man in his own image, male and female He created them.”

The fulness of God is found in the complimentary attributes of both men and women. There are gender differences between men and women, and while these can be greater or lesser, in certain individuals, in God the totality is a combination of them both.

We attribute certain traits and characteristics to each gender, and while these are not exclusive to either sex, for the majority of people they tend to hold water.

St. Paul speaks of the God of all consolation, which is a trait found, in our experience, exhibited more by Mothers than in Fathers. Not exclusively obviously but more generally. In our Colossians reading, compassion, kindness, humility, meekness and patience, are commended by Paul for all people, but these are characteristics associated more, in our real lived experience with women more than men.       

It is ironic that while the Roman catholic church is so often heavily criticised for its exclusion of women from power and influence, the elevation of Mary in its theology, introduces a more balanced understanding of Divinity than is sometimes encountered in mainstream Protestantism.

But today, notwithstanding all of that, we celebrate Motherhood. Not all women are or can be mothers, but all of us, both men and women have Mothers.

Human beings are not perfect of course and sometimes our relationship with our mothers may have been strained or difficult. But we are called to be merciful and forgiving towards all human frailty, just as Jesus was. Whatever your relationship was, or is, like with your own mothers, their role is the most important primal role in society – to nurture life within themselves, to bear life, and then nurture that life to adulthood and independence. It is no wonder that we expect so much – nothing much short of perfection in fact. The weight of expectation and the responsibility is immense, so let us spare a few moments to thank our own mothers for everything they did for us and are for us, to forgive any shortcomings, either real or perceived, and to pray for all our mothers, alive or dead, and all future mothers, who need every bit of help they can get.

  

A Life Giving Stream

Exodus 17: 1-7. The Israelites had been set free from Egypt, delivered through the Red Sea, fed by Quails and Manna but still they can ask “Is the Lord among us or not?”. The passage makes three points. Any religion based on “signs and wonders” is liable to be superficial and always leave people wanting more. It will tend towards self-centredness and wish fulfilment. Second, God works through these imperfect vessels anyway – including us today – to fulfil his purposes. Third, anyone called to lead God’s people is liable to experience their ingratitude.

Romans 5: 1-11. The result of our justification is “peace with God”. We may find talk of God’s wrath difficult but salvation from the wrath of God are the terms in which Paul explains the gospel. This peace and hope of salvation also affects the perspective we have on the present, especially our sufferings. They can be seen as character building, or as the refining of our characters. Reconciled with God through the death of Jesus we now have this hope of salvation through his resurrection life.

John 4: 5-42. Jesus meeting the Samaritan woman at the well is rich in theological ideas. Central is the one that true worshippers of God will worship in Spirit and in truth, not at Gerizim or Jerusalem. Talk of the Spirit as “living water” is supplemented by the notion that doing the will of the Father is “spiritual food”. This story is also remarkable for providing a rare unequivocal declaration of Jesus’ status as the Messiah in verse 26.

Water is the very stuff of life, essential to all life, essentially and particularly human beings. The Persian word for a well-watered walled garden is “Paradise” a word that has made it into the Bible and into English usage.

Water quenches and cleanses, it keeps us alive. So when Jesus uses water as a metaphor for the Spirit of God, those meanings carry over.

“Living water” is a phrase used to describe fresh flowing water, as opposed to still, stagnant water – a difference close to the heart of a people used to hot and desert conditions.

The spiritual water Jesus offers the Samaritan woman and all people who ask for it, will keep us permanently sated.

But we must actually want to drink from this stream. There is an old adage,

“You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink”

In spiritual terms the desire to drink, to ask God to fill you with his Spirit, is synonymous with the actual drinking of that Spirit.

You, in asking God to fill you with his Spirit is asking to be filled with God for as Jesus says,

“God is Spirit, and those who worship him must worship in Spirit and in truth.”

God is not confined to a particular place – either to the Temple in Jerusalem or on Mount Gerizim as the Samaritans insisted.

He is not excluded from any particular place by the same token.

God is here in this place, just as God is present everywhere.

What we do in this church building is consciously focus our attention on God, and explore what his Spirit is saying to us and how God might be trying to guide us.

Asking to be filled with God’s Spirit is the unarticulated intention of every church community gathering.

I believe in the real presence of God in this assembly. For what is the alternative – the real absence of God?

At the start of the Eucharistic prayer we affirm His presence. I either say “The Lord be with you” to which you reply “And also with you” or much more pointedly “The Lord is here” followed by “His Spirit is with us”

We consciously drink of God’s Spirit from the moment we sing our opening hymn to the final blessing. In communion we sacramentally take God into ourselves in bread and wine – though today through the bread alone.

The result of being filled with living water is then fleshed out by Jesus using the metaphor of food to describe the doing of God’s will.

Jesus says “My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to complete his work”

Being filled with God’s Spirit has consequences. It affects our values and the way we relate to other people and the whole planet.

After discerning God’s will, we try putting it into action through our words and deeds.

There is no blueprint for dealing with any of modern life’s situations, except keeping close to God in worship, reading the Bible and praying to God in Spirit and in truth and waiting for a path to become clear.

But we have a great set of reference points. We start with Love and we end with love.

Take up your cross

Luke 14:27-33 

²⁷ Whoever does not carry the cross and follow me cannot be my disciple. ²⁸ For which of you, intending to build a tower, does not first sit down and estimate the cost, to see whether he has enough to complete it? ²⁹ Otherwise, when he has laid a foundation and is not able to finish, all who see it will begin to ridicule him, ³⁰ saying, “This fellow began to build and was not able to finish.” ³¹ Or what king, going out to wage war against another king, will not sit down first and consider whether he is able with ten thousand to oppose the one who comes against him with twenty thousand? ³² If he cannot, then, while the other is still far away, he sends a delegation and asks for the terms of peace. ³³ So therefore, none of you can become my disciple if you do not give up all your possessions.

“Taking up your cross to follow Jesus”

In the first century under Roman occupation this carried a far heavier political connotation than it does today.

We are more likely to equate “carrying a cross” with more generalized suffering like a health scare or an inescapable family crisis.

The cross though was a particularly savage means of execution that was reserved for sedition against the Roman state. Never forget that the charge nailed to Jesus’ cross – the eventual reason they proffered for carrying out Jesus’ crucifixion at all was the charge that Jesus claimed to be “The King of the Jews” - a direct threat to the absolute supremacy of the Roman emperor.

Jesus is saying that we should place the aims and values of the Kingdom of God above the values and aims of the secular authorities if they contradict each other– the Kingdom of God trumps the kingdoms of the world.

It is another way of saying “Seek ye first the kingdom of God”.

The values of God that shine through most from the pages of the Hebrew scriptures are Justice, freedom, humility and national self-determination.

We find these and other important values are the outworkings of the central law of Love through Jesus, which we learn through the pages of the New Testament as the fulfilment of all the law and the prophets.

So Christianity has always been political. Jesus was executed for a perceived political crime against an occupying foreign power. The Jews couldn’t have legally killed Jesus however much they might have wanted to – that could only be done by the real political power in the land.

Personal freedom and impartial Justice are kingdom values and wherever they are undermined or subverted anywhere in the world, it is a moral duty for any Christian to work to make sure they are upheld. They are bedrocks of the Western world and we are mighty fortunate to live in a country where however imperfectly these values still underpin our society.

Tom Holland, the author, has a thesis that all western civilisation is either consciously or subconsciously entirely suffused with Christian values. They are the default position of people who know or understand virtually nothing about Christianity or even fulminate against it.  We often get depressed about how small and insignificant we appear to be nowadays on the national and international stage, but the values of Christendom have sunk very deep indeed into the collective psyche of the western world and the whole world is a better place for it.