Taste and see that the Lord is good. (pslam 34:8)

Sunday 2^nd August is Trinity 8 – Proper 13

Isaiah 55: 1-5. A wonderful passage extolling all people to hunger and thirst for the really essential life-nourishing sustenance. Implicit in this piece is the fact that human beings spend so much of their time and energy on ephemeral inconsequential things. So, what does really feed us? For Isaiah, he would refer you to the perfect law of God, which Christians have had spelled out to them in Christ is the law of Love made perceptible through God’s Spirit – made tangible through the sacraments of the church. In the Eucharist we literally feed on God’s very self.

Romans 9: 1-5. Paul articulates his pain and confusion that he is convinced that Jesus is the Messiah and saviour of all, and yet confused as to where that leaves the Jewish people (of which of course Paul is one – as was Jesus). There is much heartfelt internal wrangling for Paul and this central dilemma has muddied Christian/Jewish relations ever since to this day. Some Christian commentators might say that Christianity has simply “replaced” Judaism though personally I prefer to say that the Christian faith has “fulfilled” Judaism

Matthew 14: 13-21. There is rich symbolism in the feeding of the 5000. It recalls the Israelites being fed by Manna from heaven. Here in this “deserted place” Jesus is the new Moses who brings redemption from slavery and want. Secondly it recalls the feeding/multiplication miracles of the great prophets Elijah and Elisha and thirdly it foreshadows the Christian Eucharist “he looked up to heaven and blessed and broke the bread”. This moves the emphasis away from ordinary sustenance to the greater miracle of faith in the sacrifice of Jesus. The sheer abundance of food, 5000 men plus an equal number of women and children all fed with twelve basketfuls of scraps left over, speaks of the super-abundance of love and Grace at the heavenly banquet.

 “Man is what he eats”

This was a statement by a materialist philosopher called Feuerbach.

He didn’t realise it but he was expressing the most religious idea of man.

For in the Bible this is the definition of man presented in Genesis chapter one. After the instruction to be fruitful and multiply, man is presented as a hungry being and everything in the world has been given to us as food.

“Every plant yielding seed, every tree with seed as its fruit, every green plant”.

Mankind must eat in order to live. He must take the world into himself and transform it into himself, into flesh and blood.

We are indeed all that we eat, and the whole world is presented as an all embracing banquet table for man.

And this image of the banquet  remains throughout the whole Bible, the central image of life.

It was the image of life at its creation and also the image of life at its end. The fulfilment of life is that you eat and drink at my table in my kingdom. Jesus says this to his disciples at another meal – the last supper.

In the Bible food is given as communion with God. All that exists is God’s gift to man and it all exists to make God known to man.

In Genesis God blesses everything which means that he makes all creation the sign and means of his presence and wisdom, love and revelation.

In Christianity we have often divided the world into two competing halves. We divide it into Spiritual versus material, sacred versus profane, supernatural versus natural, but in a holistic non-dual Christianity there is no division.

This way of seeing the world as a unity is brought to fruition in the sacraments generally but primarily in the Eucharist, which is Christ’s gift to his church.

The Eucharistic elements are both material and spiritual. Just as life itself is – we are both material and Spiritual.

This is the overarching narrative within which we read those beautiful words of Isaiah where God invites us as hungry and thirsty people to eat and drink bread, wine, rich food, milk and all of it is free.

This is the overarching narrative within which we read about the feeding of the 5000 with five loaves and two fish and twelve basketfuls of scraps left over.

God is bountiful and his love is so fulsome that there is more than enough to go round everyone with more to spare.

This is the overarching narrative within which we approach the throne of Grace this morning.

We offer bread and wine to God and he returns it to us as the bread of heaven.

We are indeed what we eat.

As the psalmist says “Taste and see that the Lord is good. Happy are those who take refuge in him” (34:8)

Accessing God's wisdom

Sunday 26^th – Trinity 7 – Proper 12

1 Kings 3:5-12. When asked what God should give him, Solomon famously requests Wisdom – the most highly prized attribute for a near Eastern King. Although the narrative describes Solomon as a child, he may have been around twenty at the time so the description can also be seen as indicating humility as much as his actual age.

Romans 8: 26-39. The final part of chapter 8 articulates the fact that all things, meaning the longing of creation, the activity of the Spirit and even man’s inarticulate cries do not exist apart from the will of God. God can even use our weakness and turn it to the good. God, foreknew, predestined, called, justified and glorified. The point here is not to figure out who is in and who is out but to emphasise that God is the one who designs and desires our salvation. No human can secure it and no human can jeopardize it. God decides and God is love and nothing can separate us from that love.

Matthew 13: 31-33, 44-52. A collection of parables including the mustard seed and the leaven emphasising how the gospel will grow from a small base and act almost imperceptibly as an agent keeping society configured towards the good, and then the parables of the treasure and the pearl which tell of the incalculable necessity and value of the gospel. We end with the dragnet which is similar to the wheat and tares parable from last week and is typically Matthean in its message of threat and punishment.

It causes a great deal of anxiety for some Christians that we are such a small percentage of society as a whole but the parable of the yeast is a powerful corrective to that view.

Now you could describe a parable as God’s wisdom distilled into story form and in the parable just as a small amount of yeast can make the whole loaf rise. In the same way a few Christians whose lives are oriented towards God can have an enormous influence on society as a whole.

Yeast isn’t obvious or even visible but its presence is unmistakable. We would only notice if it was no longer there at all. Both active and cultural Christians together contribute to keeping the orientation of society as a whole pointing towards righteousness and trying to embody God’s wisdom.

This is the central premise of author Tom Holland’s book “Dominion” that the imprint of Christian assumptions, culture and worldview lie embedded so deep within Western culture that we don’t even notice it any more.

We all play our part contributing to the fabric of society however large or small our individual contribution may be, and none of us can accurately measure how what or who we may influence.

But we do know that as part of the body of Christ all of us are needed to contribute what we can.

Those of us who do find and believe that God is in Christ reconciling the world to himself are like those who have found the pearl of great price. We have stumbled across and found the truth. The kingdom of God becomes indispensable and eternally necessary to us and we more consciously embody and advance the way of Love in our lives. When this happens the influence we have on society as a whole as the leaven, can develop but we have to use great wisdom in order to do so.

Wisdom is the greatest attribute we can exercise, and it was wisdom that Solomon asked for to enable him to carry out his God given role as leader of the Jewish people.

Wisdom is the good application of experience and knowledge, understanding and insight. Wisdom can also be a repository of the collective wisdom of groups of people like the church so we learn and grow by mining the collective wisdom of the church.

So reading great minds like Thomas Aquinas, Augustine, Thomas a Kempis, or Mother Theresa and many, many, others, for example, one benefits from their great learning and contemplation of the Bible and reflection on lived experience.

Wisdom has always been closely associated with God, with whole books like Proverbs, Ecclesiastes and Job being dedicated to the use and application of  Wisdom. And wisdom famously depicted as a female voice, Sophia, in the Bible describes her association with God at the dawn of creation in Proverbs and saying how she delights in the human race. This underlines how important and  fundamental is wisdom to the Judeo-Christian tradition.

Also it says in proverbs that the beginning of Wisdom is the fear of the Lord, fear in this case meaning awe and respect and submission to God, so humility is closely associated with wisdom.

People often ask what is the way forward for the church in the 21^st Century. They also ask about what they themselves are to do?

In the end, as a community and as individuals we need to pray for wisdom to act wisely to be the leaven in our community and network of contacts. Through keeping close to God we will discern our way forward as it reveals itself to us. At national, local and individual level I recommend that we pray this wise and simple prayer written by Amy Carmichael that seeks to build God’s church.

“Holy Spirit, think through me till your ideas are my ideas”

Put yourself in God’s way, be open and willing to receive his promptings and His way forward will make itself apparent.

Amen.

   

There's a wideness in God's mercy

Sunday 19^th July – Trinity 6 – Proper 11

Wisdom 12: 13, 16-19. One of our options for today was the opportunity to hear a reading from the Apocrypha. The thrust of this treatise on “Wisdom” is that God is merciful to all that he created and He does not need to justify himself to anyone. His mercy though should not be mistaken for weakness, but it comes from his strength. The main message is that as followers of this God we too must use whatever power or strength we possess to act in the same way. “The righteous must be Kind” (Verse 19)

Romans 8: 12-25. The magnificent extent of this part of chapter 8, challenges any theology that limits God’s redemption to just human beings. We need to be more extensive and more embracing in our view of God’s all-encompassing sovereignty over all creation. Our identity within this great scheme of things is as “children of God” and so we have the right to speak to God in familial terms. Being “joint heirs with Christ” makes Jesus our brother and in him we are all brothers and sisters.

Matthew 13: 24-30, 36-43. The sovereignty of God to decide the extent of human salvation is given a twist in this parable (which only appears in Matthew). The takeaway message for us is that you cannot judge the destiny of anyone because we just cannot tell. Wheat and tares (Darnel) are indistinguishable from each other in the early stages of growth. God is sovereign, merciful, and just. God decides, not us.

We sing a hymn called “There’s a wideness in God’s mercy” that accurately describes the relative readiness to judge harshly on the part of human beings generally and God’s readiness to show Mercy. One of the verses goes

But we make his love too narrow by false limits of our own

And we magnify his strictness with a zeal he will not own

One of those limits of our own that we apply is that we generally suppose that redemption is limited to just human beings but any such position has to deal with this monumental piece of writing by St. Paul in chapter 8 of Romans. When we read verses like John 3: 16 that tells us that God so loved the world – we hear God so loved humanity (and he does) but the world is much greater than ourselves.

Paul is much plainer when he says “The whole creation has been groaning in labour pains” waiting for redemption just like us.

God’s mercy extends to all things and the mere fact that “matter” matters should inform a Christian environmental ethic. We are stewards of God’s creation.

That God indwells everything is part of the sacramental understanding of Christianity – that God can be present in bread, wine, oil, water, a flower, a grain of wheat, the stars, and in our hearts.

The sourceless source of all things is God the Father, and He loves all that he has made including you and I.

He wills our salvation, was willing to go to the cross for it, and took the sins of the whole world on his shoulders.

A friend of mine at college used to do a caricature vindictive priest who used to say,

“God bless you all” “But not you or you and especially not you!” (pointing at certain people. Let’s not make God in our own judgemental image

This human tendency to judge and judge harshly goes against the very concept of Grace which is free and unmerited. To put limits on Grace means it is no longer Grace.

God wills the salvation of all things and people, but we like to limit his salvation to just certain people in certain places who believe certain things. We use our own criteria.

That is the underlying message of the wheat and the tares in the gospel parable by Jesus.

Our inclination is to try and pull up the weeds amongst the wheat ourselves but Jesus says no. Leave it until the harvest. God decides and if there is any sorting out to do I’ll do it – thank you very much.

We all do it of course. I am as guilty as the next person. I have to continually remind myself that I am not God. That is a hard job I think you’ll agree!

Don’t judge anyone unworthy of salvation because God saw fit to die for that person. Grace is a hard message to preach, because radical Grace is, well just so amazing.

It undermines human wisdom. In the wisdom of Solomon reading we started with we ostensibly have God trying to defend how merciful he is and says in effect. Because I am so merciful don’t make the mistake of believing that I am weak. My mercy comes from my strength.

And that is how followers of God in Christ are also to act if they want to follow the way of Jesus. Those who have any strength or power in their hands are commanded to show mercy whenever they can. That is not a sign of weakness, as the world’s wisdom would have us believe but a sign of real strength.

In showing mercy ourselves, even and perhaps especially to those we judge don’t deserve it are real imitators of Christ.

At the level of simple personal interaction with each other as it says in the book of Wisdom – The righteous must be kind.

Sowing the seed

Sunday 12^th – Trinity 5 – Proper 10

Isaiah 55: 10-13. Isaiah’s prophesy of the active word of God coming to fruition employs wonderful symbolism taken from the natural world. The specific world event being foretold is the return of the Jews in exile in Babylon, and the joy that return elicits is beautifully expressed. This return from exile happened in 539BC after an edict issued by the Persian King Cyrus the Great

Romans 8: 1-11. This most famous of the chapters of Romans is spread over three Sundays. He starts by recollecting that there is “now no condemnation for those in Christ Jesus” and then introduces the theme of living either according to the “flesh” or the “Spirit.” These are two different mindsets, rather than two separate moral choices. It means either living your life according to the values and standards of the world in rebellion against God or living your life with your mind set on the Spirit of God which is life and peace. The Spirit is God’s not ours and he is given as a gift which we can choose to unwrap or leave in a cupboard on a shelf. But the Spirit of God will raise us just as it raised Jesus from the dead.

Matthew 13: 1-9, 18-23. This parable and explanation of this extraordinarily incompetent Farmer’s efforts mirrors closely the experience of the church both then and now. Flat rejection by some, short-lived enthusiasm from others which melts away quickly when trials and the pressures of life weigh them down, but also success, when people believe with joy, understand the message and let it flourish in their lives.

Last Sunday was marvellous because it was like returning from exile after having been banished from the church.

Returning from exile, coming home after being lost in the wilderness, are the central motifs of the Judeo-Christian tradition.

The two central motifs that have moulded the Jewish character and history are the returning home after slavery in Egypt, and returning home after exile in Babylon are the historical reference points but the Spiritual message is the same.

God in Christ is calling us all to come home to Him after all humanity was banished from the Garden of Eden. Jesus is the new Adam calling us all home. We started to explore that last week and how we enact our coming home in the Eucharist. In receiving the body and blood of Jesus we actively demonstrate physically what we feel spiritually.

This week we start to unwrap the spiritual underpinning of our sacramental devotion.

The glorious starting sentence of Romans 8 “There is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” should lead us to straighten our backs, strengthen us and give us resilience, assurance and resolve. These are words of real spiritual nourishment.

Those words rest on the conviction that Jesus died “for the life of the world” as it says in John’s gospel.

We have eternal life as a permanent possession because He not only died for us, he was raised for us also. So spiritually we die to an old way of life and start living for God in the power of God’s Spirit.  

The gospel message I’ve just outlined is the “seed” that is sown by the church, and the church is all of us here.

And the gospel is the seed being sown in the parable

What happens to that spiritual seed mirrors closely the experience of the church both then and now. Flat rejection by some, short-lived enthusiasm from others which melts away quickly when trials and the pressures of life weigh them down, but also success, when people believe with joy, understand the message and let it flourish in their lives.

And this flourishing in our lives, is what the church is about. Flourishing people is the best advertisement for the gospel that we have.

When people see the difference the gospel message has made in our attitude to life and the values that guide our living and the decisions we make, and that difference is attractive, we are walking billboards for the gospel.

It was Francis of Assisi that said, “Preach the gospel at all times, use words if you have to.” Meaning that a changed life is worth a thousand words and arguments

Of course the parable pre-supposes that all manner of people will hear the gospel when preached and we can’t know how it will be received.

Not knowing how it will be received is not a reason not to preach the gospel of Grace because what we are doing is offering people a gift.

The gift of God, forgiveness, a moral compass, wholeness, assurance and peace. The gift of God means being able to perceive the glorious mysterious depth of creation.

It is like changing from seeing the world in black and white to seeing in glorious technicolour. We are offering in fact a free up-grade to people’s lives.

How they respond is not in our control. But first the gospel must be made known in order to make any response at all.

We are the privileged ones, who have responded to God’s call made through Christ to follow him. Because of that we gain the right to call ourselves children of God and make sure that others hear the same call.

The Call of God

Sunday 5^th July – 4^th after Trinity (Proper 9)

Zechariah 9: 9-12. This piece of messianic prophesy is quoted in Matthew and John’s gospel so is well known and is seen as a prophesy of Christ’s triumphant entry into Jerusalem, not on a war horse but on a Donkey symbolising peace. His dominion stretches to the ends of the earth. The “You” in verse 11 (2^nd person feminine singular!) refers to Israel – the daughter of the covenant – and assures them that they will be delivered from all their enemies.

Romans 7: 15-25. The Power of sin is pervasive, and Paul has already said that sin can even use and subvert the law to its own ends even though the law is “holy, just and good”. So if sin can subvert the law how much more will it be capable of using and subverting every good intention and desire of human beings? A difficult message to preach, especially to Christians trying to do good, knowing that even as we may re-double our efforts they will be undermined by the pervasive power of sin. But take heart! As much as we may be flawed and have feet of clay, and have no may of achieving anything by our own merits Christ has already done the work and died for us and there is now “No condemnation” for anyone who knows the saving work of Christ, no matter how much we fail.  

Matthew 11: 16-19, 25-30. Both John the Baptist and Jesus are criticized but for different reasons. John is a crazy ascetic, and Jesus is a self-indulgent libertine. It is like children squabbling in the playground over whether to play “funerals” with John (mourning their sins) or “weddings” (celebrate the dawning kingdom) with Jesus. But both are necessary and complimentary.

Then Jesus compliments those who see as “infants” – sincerely and with honesty – that he is the only Son of his Father in heaven. The final three, well known verses tell us that those who find this truth will experience a peace that passes all understanding.

  

Your king comes to you, humble and victorious, riding on a Donkey writes Zechariah. “The bringer of peace” prophesied by Zechariah Christians put a name to -  Jesus Christ and this peace bringer is I believe needed now more than ever when all our lives have been upended by the health crisis and fractures in society have erupted into street demonstrations and our society is threatened by possible mass unemployment.

The peace of God speaks not just of a truce, a temporary cessation of hostilities but a permanent sense of inner peace and wholeness, which speaks  to us naturally of communion with God and our fellow men and women.

Our spiritual communion with God is given flesh, is incarnated, in this service of Holy Communion.

Our offering of bread at the altar represents everything we are and everything that is offered to God. It is then blessed broken and shared out and given back to us as representing the body and blood of Jesus whose life was poured out for the Life of the world.

We offer mortal life and have eternal life given back to us.

This mystery speaks of the real presence of Christ not only in or restricted to the elements themselves but present in this whole assembly.

In church we are used to speaking about “having a calling” or responding to God’s call. But in Church we habitually and wrongly restrict that sense of calling to things like ordination. That is indeed a specific call but there is also an overriding primary call to everyone to return to God. So the call is to everyone but as Christians we are all responding to God’s call because we recognise God’s voice when Christ speaks.

We are all called primarily to be in communion with Christ and we are all responding to that call in the communion service.

In the gospel reading, Jesus upbraids people for wilfully misunderstanding what he or John the Baptist were about and goes on to say that this truth has been revealed to people who receive the truth as infants – which means accepting him with sincerity, openness and honesty. Accepting him without an agenda or an axe to grind – accepting with humility.

As you come to receive the sacrament of God’s real presence, here Jesus himself is calling you forward.

So imagine Jesus standing here in front of you, beckoning you forward and saying to you…

“Come to me all that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens and I will give you rest.

Take my yoke upon you and learn from me.

For I am gentle and humble in heart and you will find rest for your souls.

For my yoke is easy and my burden is light”.

Hear him call.

And when you rise to come forward to answer the call, you can be sure that Jesus will rush to meet you, just like the Father in the parable of the prodigal son. You meet and then you feed on his very being and communion is experienced.  

Let that communion with God, strengthen you and give you that inner peace and security that is your anchor both in this life and the next, for all eternity.

Amen