4th Sunday of Easter: Confrontational Christianity?

Readings

Acts 9:36-43
Peter in Lydda and Joppa

Now in Joppa there was a disciple whose name was Tabitha, which in Greek is Dorcas. She was devoted to good works and acts of charity. At that time she became ill and died. When they had washed her, they laid her in a room upstairs. Since Lydda was near Joppa, the disciples, who heard that Peter was there, sent two men to him with the request, ‘Please come to us without delay.’ So Peter got up and went with them; and when he arrived, they took him to the room upstairs. All the widows stood beside him, weeping and showing tunics and other clothing that Dorcas had made while she was with them. Peter put all of them outside, and then he knelt down and prayed. He turned to the body and said, ‘Tabitha, get up.’ Then she opened her eyes, and seeing Peter, she sat up. He gave her his hand and helped her up. Then calling the saints and widows, he showed her to be alive. This became known throughout Joppa, and many believed in the Lord. Meanwhile he stayed in Joppa for some time with a certain Simon, a tanner.


John 10:22-30
Jesus Is Rejected by the Jews

At that time the festival of the Dedication took place in Jerusalem. It was winter, and Jesus was walking in the temple, in the portico of Solomon. So the Jews gathered around him and said to him, ‘How long will you keep us in suspense? If you are the Messiah, tell us plainly.’ Jesus answered, ‘I have told you, and you do not believe. The works that I do in my Father’s name testify to me; but you do not believe, because you do not belong to my sheep. My sheep hear my voice. I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life, and they will never perish. No one will snatch them out of my hand. What my Father has given me is greater than all else, and no one can snatch it out of the Father’s hand. The Father and I are one.’


Sermon
When the people behind the scenes are putting together the readings for each week, the readings they give us are usually meant to be linked. However, I sometimes find myself having to look hard to see what exactly the link might be. These two readings are of that kind because at first glance there doesn’t seem to be a great deal in common. But when we begin to look closer we can see the common thread. These two narratives are both confrontation stories.

That might not seem to be the most obvious link since, whilst Jesus certainly seems to be in confrontation with a number of Jews, Peter’s story in Acts seems to be anything but confrontational. In fact it seems to be purely based around healing and putting things right, but we have to remember here that we are in the Easter period and Easter is all about living the post-resurrection life.

Easter is about Jesus having the victory over death, so what we find in Peter’s story is his confrontation with sickness and death, as if death is an enemy to be defeated. So let’s start with Peter’s story before we look briefly at the Gospel reading and draw some lessons from them.

The story in Acts is a disturbing one to our 21st century minds because it is likely that we will look at it from the perspective of someone we know who is either very ill, or who became ill and died, and ask why God didn’t or hasn’t healed that person. Certainly that was my first thought. We take on a kind of righteous indignation, a sort of, ‘Yes God, but what about so and so? Why not heal them?’

If we’re not careful this rapidly descends into a kind of argument from righteousness and guilt, that Tabitha was clearly a righteous woman who made a very great difference to people’s lives so she was worthy of being healed, and perhaps I’m not good enough to be healed, or perhaps so and so was not good enough to be healed.

All I can say is that we must not go down that route. Jesus routinely healed people who hadn’t even heard of him, and if you recall the way he healed the paralysed man who was by the pool for thirty odd years, you may remember that that was a pagan healing site. So Jesus clearly didn’t distinguish between righteous and unrighteous people, and we should never point that particular finger at him, nor at Peter.

So whilst the temptation is to immediately start asking philosophical questions of this story, we need instead simply to see what is said, because that is what we can build on. When we look closely at the story what we see is quite remarkable, and surely not an accident. The story of Peter raising Tabitha is an extremely close parallel to the story of Jesus raising Jairus’s daughter.

In Mark’s account of Jesus we find the people standing around wailing and weeping, and here we find the widows standing around wailing and weeping. When Jesus arrived he put them all outside; when Peter arrived he also put them all outside. But here’s the clincher. Jesus says to the little girl, ‘get up’, except that, unusually, Mark tells us what he says in Aramaic which is ‘Talitha cum’.
In Acts we’re not told what Peter says in Aramaic, but we are told the woman’s name was Tabitha and that he said to her, ‘Get up’, so in Aramaic he would have said, ‘Tabitha cum’, only one letter different from what Mark has Jesus saying to Jairus’s daughter. Talitha cum and Tabitha cum.

Now since we know that Luke, the writer of Acts, had used Mark’s Gospel when writing his own, we must surely assume that when he was recording this account he used this wording on purpose to show just how Peter was following in Jesus’s footsteps. We must also notice, however, that he doesn’t do it in his own power.

Before raising Tabitha, he prayed, and likewise in the story preceding this a paralytic is healed at his hands with Peter saying the words, ‘Jesus Christ heals you’. Peter claims no power for himself, but instead heals in the name of Jesus. He is following his Lord and he is confronting sickness and death just as Jesus did.

But that’s not all he’s confronting. There is a hint at the end here that he is also about to confront the traditions of the Jews as well. The very last thing that Luke tells us is that Peter stayed with Simon the tanner for some time. ‘So what’, we might say, but think about it. A tanner is someone who works with animal carcasses. Peter was staying with someone defiled by his work.

This is hugely important because the next thing that happens to Peter is that he confronts the laws regarding what is or isn’t unclean, and as a result realises that the good news about Jesus is meant to be taken beyond Judaism into the rest of the world, amongst the unclean Gentiles like us. So having confronted sickness and death, he is now about to confront oppressive tradition. Peter is discovering that being a disciple means making difficult decisions and standing up for what he believes in.

I’m not going to go into any detail here, but in the Gospel reading we see the same kind of thing with Jesus yet again in confrontation with the Jewish leaders. Throughout John’s Gospel we see him refer to the Jews, but we should remember that John was himself a Jew, and so he is referring here to the authorities, the powers, the ones who think they’re right and Jesus is wrong.

Over and over again we see Jesus in confrontation with them as they refuse to believe his teaching or accept that the authority with which he teaches and heals come from God. Ultimately they killed him because of it.

These two stories highlight for us the need to recognise that being a Christian is not and cannot be thought of as an easy way of life. Our lives should include confrontation, and in fact if they don’t, if we are dodging confrontation we may be avoiding some of the Gospel work we’re supposed to be doing in the name of Jesus.

That is not to say that we are supposed to be angry the whole time, and especially with each other. It’s also important that we don’t get into a whole degree of moral self-righteousness and judgementalism. No, that’s not it at all. But we are living life after Jesus confronted the powers of this world, confronted the traditions of the religious system that oppressed people, and after he confronted the powers of death.

We live in the shadow of the victories he won. In this post-resurrection time we are supposed to continue the work that was doing, confronting those things that need to be confronted. Now I’d like to add a note of caution here following a very helpful conversation during the week. There is an argument that says we should confront moral issues here, and I would want to say, ‘Be very careful.’

You see we have an idea in our own minds about what is morally right or wrong, and we often assume that we are correct, based on biblical teaching. However, we might be wrong. At the moment there are factions within the church who make sexual morality a big issue of right and wrong.

Before we hop on that bandwagon we need to remember that biblical sexual ethics do not point to any one specific clear teaching beyond this one simple rule. If you enter into a covenant relationship with someone, such as in marriage, that covenant reflects the relationship God has with us and so must be treated with utmost respect, which is why adultery is so frowned upon, because it breaks the covenant relationship, but even there forgiveness is offered.

But beyond that it becomes very grey indeed. There are at least two prostitutes who are used mightily by God; there are King David and King Solomon who had numerous wives and there is the very clear understanding, especially in the Old Testament, that all members of the household, wives, children, slaves, whoever, are the property of the husband. Our idea of the nuclear family as being blessed by God is simply not present.

In fact Jesus deliberately undermines traditional families when his own comes looking for him by looking at his followers and saying, ‘Here are my mother, my brothers and my sisters.’ So when you are thinking about whether you should confront poor moral behaviour, be very careful that what you are doing is not self-righteous judgementalism tinged with scriptural ignorance.

No, instead what we find in the lives of Jesus and Peter and the other disciples is confronting oppression, sickness, death, self-righteousness. Jesus set people free from moral issues, but he angrily confronted those things which oppress others, and we should follow in his footsteps. When we think about Pentecost shortly we have to think in terms of the Holy Spirit filling the disciples so that the work which they do is not their own work but the work of Christ.

If we want to see what it is that we’re supposed to confront, we should read the prophets, which is one of the reasons why I’m so keen on the Old Testament. Listen to these famous words from the prophet Amos:

I hate, I despise your festivals, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies.
Even though you offer me your burnt-offerings and grain-offerings, I will not accept them;
and the offerings of well-being of your fatted animals I will not look upon.
Take away from me the noise of your songs; I will not listen to the melody of your harps.
But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.

When we read those verses it makes it clear to us that however good and excellent our worship may be, if we are not confronting injustice and oppression, then it is not pleasing to God. Now there are lots of good things happening in this church. There are people who are involved with Acorns hospice for children; there are those involved in Christian Aid; others work for and give to the palliative care unit in Vellore, and so on.

What we must be careful of is not to ride on their coat-tails as it were. The post-resurrection life is all about bringing more life and confronting evil when we see it, and that may be as simple as telling someone who is gossiping about someone else that you don’t want to hear them, or writing letters for Amnesty International.

So during this Easter and Pentecost season let us ask for God’s help in confronting those things which should be confronted, and in helping those who need to be helped, and for wisdom to see the difference. Amen.

References
J.R.W.Stott, The Message of Acts, IVP, 1990.
P.W.Walaskay, Acts, Westminster John Knox Press, 1998.

Election Special: View from the Vicarage - Whose Power?

And so another General Election is upon us, as well as the local elections. But the real question that I think we have to ask ourselves is how do we make decisions about who to vote for. Who do we want to be ‘in power’ and why? For me, the biggest question mark remains over that phrase ‘in power’, because as Christians our context must surely lie in these very familiar words:

“For the kingdom, the power and the glory are yours...”
or
“For thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory...”

Who’s ‘in power’ in our prayers?

So how should we feel about voting for an earthly political party to be ‘in power’?

I think that before we look at our potential local and national government, (because it would be very easy to stand in judgement), we should perhaps begin by looking at ourselves since politicians are just flawed human beings like the rest of us. It’s likely that all of us pray this prayer at least weekly and possibly daily, but I wonder how much we mean it, for this is a ‘giving-up’ prayer. It says that all this thing called power that humans seem to want actually belongs solely to God, not to us, and to pray this prayer means that we are giving up our claim on the object of our desire: power. What makes this so difficult for us is that it goes against our instincts. I’ve just been watching a programme about a monkey sanctuary and the difficulties which the keepers go through when they occasionally have to introduce a new animal to a pre-existing and stable group. What maintains the stability of the existing group is the power of the dominant male, keeping unruly behaviour in check, and if a new male is introduced it can often require a power-struggle in order to establish a new order, or re-establish the old one. We cannot deny our shared common heritage with the other higher primates, and so this struggle to establish a power base and hold on to it is second nature to much of humanity (even if we don’t acknowledge it to ourselves), and whilst this may seem like a very male dominated argument, it’s worth noting that the alpha male is usually accompanied by the alpha female (and in fact in some species it is the alpha female who chooses who will be the alpha male!), so women should not think themselves to be unaffected by this drive for power. Yet to pray this prayer is to lay aside those claims; to declare that all power is God’s.

Now this is all very well, but surely there have to be leaders, people in positions of power? I’m not sure I agree, although I hasten to add that I am not an anarchist! What I would say is that there are positions of authority that need to be filled. ‘Surely’, you might say, ‘we are dealing in semantics now?’ I would beg to disagree; there is a significant difference between power and authority. Power belongs to God alone, as we have prayed many times in the Lord’s Prayer, but God does give authority to some. However there needs to be a recognition that it is God’s power that some are given authority to wield, and I use the word ‘wield’ rather than ‘use’ on purpose. When someone thinks they have power, they are under an illusion. They may have been given authority but they have no real power. The difficulty is that those with authority often don’t seem to have the humility to realise that they merely have authority rather than real power. However when you meet someone who has been given authority and wields it in a Godly and humble power you rapidly become aware of the shallowness of the search for power. I will never forget meeting the St. Albans Diocesan Director of Ordinands (DDO), whom I had to see every month for nigh on a year and a half whilst going through the discernment process for priesthood. The contrast between him and some of the power-wielding businessmen and scientists I had dealt with in industry was very distinct. They liked their power and some seemed addicted to it and extremely protective of what they had, but Michael was different, and even now it’s not easy to describe. He was a very gentle man who laughed easily, and in fact was quite capable of giggling. He was also wonderfully fallible and had no problems with laughing at himself. What marked him out was the way he wielded the gentle and holy authority that seemed to flow from him in such a loving way. There was a sort of holy confidence about him. I looked up to him, not because he was powerful, but because God had trusted him with authority, and I suspect that was because he had given up his claims to power. He was a servant.

So we have no power really; none of us, whatever illusions our jobs or roles in society may have spun for us. But there are some, who recognise that the power is God’s, that God will trust with authority. They don’t have to be perfect, they just have to be servants and to know where power really comes from, and that it is not theirs and that it should not be pursued. So when you are voting in the national and local election, as well as sorting through the political manifestos, ask yourself whether you are looking at someone trusted with divine authority to lead from a servant heart, or someone who wants power. And while you’re at it, ask it of yourself too!

3rd Sunday of Easter

Readings
Acts 9:1-6
The Conversion of Saul

Meanwhile Saul, still breathing threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord, went to the high priest and asked him for letters to the synagogues at Damascus, so that if he found any who belonged to the Way, men or women, he might bring them bound to Jerusalem. Now as he was going along and approaching Damascus, suddenly a light from heaven flashed around him. He fell to the ground and heard a voice saying to him, ‘Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?’ He asked, ‘Who are you, Lord?’ The reply came, ‘I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting. But get up and enter the city, and you will be told what you are to do.’


Sermon
Saul intrigues me. How could a man who was so anti-Christian become possibly the most important believer, after renaming himself as Paul, in the early church, certainly from the perspective of gentiles (non-Jews) like us? Let’s consider first what has taken place up to this point. Saul came on the scene a couple of chapters earlier in the story of Acts when he appears as a bystander at the stoning of the deacon, Stephen, the first Christian martyr.

All that Luke (the writer of Acts) tells us is that Saul approved of Stephen being killed. After that Luke records how Stephen’s martyrdom was like a trigger that set off an avalanche of persecution against the early church, and Saul led much of this. He gets letters of recommendation from the high priest in Jerusalem that would give him permission to go into the synagogues in Damascus and drag any new Christians off in chains for trial in Jerusalem.

Why, then, was he so ardent in his persecution? What was it that had Saul so fired up by the early Christians that he felt that he had to pursue any believers? I suspect there are many potential answers to this question, but for me the key seems to be Saul’s personality. When we read the kind of things he writes in his letters we rapidly come to the conclusion that Saul was a passionate man who was utterly convinced that he was on the right track and that others were not.

I don’t think this is a personality trait that he ever entirely shed. In fact I would go so far as to suggest that this may even be the ‘Thorn in the Flesh’ that he referred to. People have long wondered what this so called thorn might be, and in this modern age I have heard insinuated that he had some kind of sexual flaw. But I don’t think it was that at all.

My thought is that Saul’s passion found its way out in terms of having a kind of righteous indignation that sometimes meant he lost his temper and drove others away. For example at the beginning of his ministry we find that Saul worked closely alongside a disciple called Barnabas, a nickname that meant ‘Son of encouragement’. When you read around the story you get the impression that Barnabas was a real nice guy.

The other disciples loved him and he seemed to be the kind of person that could always say the right thing at the right time to help people who were struggling. Every congregation has people like that and I can testify to just how much of a difference they can make when you’re not sure if you’re doing the right thing.

But when we read Acts 15 we find that Saul, by then renamed Paul, has a huge row with Barnabas. Apparently Barnabas had wanted to take another believer, John Mark, along with them. John Mark, however, had let them both down on an earlier missionary journey. Barnabas, perhaps typically of his encouraging nature, wanted to give John Mark another chance. Paul, however, did not.

They disagreed so violently that eventually they fell out and Paul took another believer, Silas, with him and went his own way. Barnabas took John Mark with him to a different destination. So we can see in this that Saul (or Paul) was a man who, when he believed he was in the right, could not give up. There are other places in his letters that also suggest the same kind of thing but there isn’t time to go into those here.

Now, armed with that slice of background, let’s turn back to Saul persecuting the church, and I think we can get some indication of why he was such a passionate persecuter. Saul was a pharisee, a Jew that was passionate about Torah, the Jewish Law. He believed fervently that the Torah was the way of righteousness for a Jew, and indeed refers to himself in a later letter as having been an excellent pharisee.

Now look at what the early church was called. They didn’t call themselves Christians at that point, they were called followers of the Way. Now to a passionate pharisee like Saul, the Torah was the way, and for any Jew to instead refer to following Jesus as being a follower of the Way, as in ‘I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life - no one comes to the Father except by me’ was like a red rag to a bull.

You can imagine his internal anger overflowing. ‘How dare they! How dare these Jews declare that following a man who was crucified was the way to God rather than the law!’ It’s a remarkable turn around as later in his life he turned away from the Jews and took the message to the gentiles.

But at last we have an explanation as to why Saul could have been so merciless in his persecution of the church. He was convinced that he was right, and passionate in his beliefs that they were wrong, and he considered them a threat to what he thought was the right way for Jews, and so he tried to wipe them out and stop this threat to Judaism.

But then, in what was another resurrection appearance, he met Jesus face to face in an encounter that made him blind for a time, perhaps an indicator of his inability to truly ‘see’ the truth about who Jesus was. Yet once he grasped the truth we see him become a changed man, in a sense. I say ‘in a sense’ because we see Saul become just as ardent a crusader for Christ as he was for Torah.

Except that he no longer persecutes, and we gradually begin to see a new kind of humility about him, which is highlighted by the change he takes in his name. The name Saul means one that has been asked for or prayed for, in that sense of we asked for someone and this is who God sent. Anyone who had that name may have a degree of a sense of having been sent by God as an answer to someone else’s prayer.

You can see why, in an act of humility he took a new name, Paul, meaning small or humble. It’s as if he recognised the need to be aware that he might be wrong. He had been so wrong about Christ, that perhaps he could be wrong about other things too. And I think we see that old nature of self-righteousness and the new nature of humility at war within him for some time.

What then does this passage say to us? Firstly it is a guard against self-righteousness. We can be angry, and sure that we’re correct, to the extent that we hurt other people, but we might be wrong. How much damage will we have done before there is a space for Christ to change our minds? I’ve done this myself on several occasions, this inner conviction that I’m doing exactly the right thing, and so and so is in the wrong. And on several occasions I have been chastised by God

But there is also a huge message of hope here. Saul changed, and it took him the rest of his life for that change to take effect, but God continued to use his natural gifts of passion for the good of the church. We’re here today because of St. Paul going to the gentiles. We might look at his temper and his anger and wonder why God chose him rather than gentle Barnabas, but when tuned in properly, that flame of passion was what made him so effective.

So let us accept ourselves as we are for it is the gifts we have, with all their flaws, that the Lord can use for the sake of others who have yet to hear. Amen.

Second Sunday of Easter: "Peace be with you" Really?

John 20:19-23
When it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and the doors of the house where the disciples had met were locked for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said, ‘Peace be with you.’ After he said this, he showed them his hands and his side. Then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord. Jesus said to them again, ‘Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.’ When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.’

Sermon
There’s something rather interesting about this short passage from John’s Gospel. Twice in short order it has Jesus saying, ‘Peace be with you’ and I wonder why. Wasn’t once enough? No, I suspect not because the two ‘Peace be with you’‘s seem to me to refer to two different things. The first one is what you might call reactive whereas the second is preparatory. Let me see if I can explain what I think is going on.

John makes it clear that the disciples are a pretty terrified bunch, and probably with good reason. They are in a state of fear, confusion and hope, all mixed together. The fear side is pretty understandable. A few days earlier their leader had been crucified. They had all staked the last three years of their lives on him.

He was a Rabbi, a religious teacher, who had chosen them, a bunch of ordinary men, to be his disciples. This in itself was nigh on miraculous because they were a motley bunch of men from different backgrounds, none of whom would have been classified as bright enough to study under any Rabbi. Yet he had chosen them.

Over the last three years he had trained them and educated them in the ways of the kingdom of heaven, and they had come to recognise him as the One whom God had anointed as the Saviour. At this point in time it’s not clear whether they were still under the misapprehension that he was some kind of political messiah sent to free them from the fetters of Roman occupation, although Peter’s recognition of him as God’s Son suggests that they were able to understand that he was something beyond what the people of Judah had been expecting.

However the religious authorities had decided that he was a threat to their power and to the uneasy status quo with the Romans, and so had executed him. The reason for the disciples fear, therefore, was that the next move by the authorities was likely to have been to round up all the followers and execute them too. The disciples were therefore behind locked doors in fear of their lives. So that accounts for the fear.

The hope and confusion stems from what happened in the verse before today’s reading began, which was that Mary Magdalene had come to report to them that Jesus had risen from the dead and that she had seen him. That was a cause for hope, but also for confusion. Why had Jesus appeared first to her and not to one of them? Was it just the delusions of a woman struck with grief at the loss of her closest friend and mentor?

So they were in a pretty rough state. Those of you, and I expect it’s most of us, who have lost someone close to us, or even sat with them as they were dying, will know that the first few days after their death is a period that could be likened to insanity. Nothing makes sense and every nerve is on edge. Imagine that being compounded by witnessing the loved one being publicly and slowly executed by crucifixion and we might get somewhere towards the very fragile mental and emotional state of the disciples.

That is why I say that the first thing Jesus says to them is reacting to that mental state. Someone who they saw executed appears in a locked room, and I suspect we can barely imagine the effect that would have on them in the state they were in. So he tries to calm them down, offers them his peace, and then proves it is him by showing them his wounds. Now they are filled with joy.

But then he says ‘Peace be with you’ again. Now was this reacting to their over-excited state at having him amongst them again? Possibly, but I suspect that instead he was preparing the ground for what he was going to say next: ‘As the Father has sent me, so I am sending you.’

Now why would they need to receive peace before hearing those words? Think for a moment about what Jesus has just told them. In the same way that the Father sent him, now he is sending them. Why would that be a cause of needing to be put at peace? Well think about the implications of what Jesus has just said.

The Father sent him and what happened? He was continually misunderstood and eventually crucified by the very people he came to save. Now what is he saying to the disciples? ‘As the Father has sent me, so I am sending you.’ Considering what they have recently witnessed in terms of his public torture and execution, does that sound like good news?

The Father sent him and now he was sending them. What kind of long term plans had they had for their lives? Children? Old age in the company of friends? ‘As the Father has sent me, so I am sending you.’ You might imagine their brains going ‘click, click, click...’ as they realised that the future suddenly looked rather shorter than perhaps they had hoped for.

And with the exception of the apostle John they were indeed all executed for what they believed. As the Father had sent Jesus, and it had resulted in his death, so he was sending them, and the same future awaited almost all of them. It’s no wonder that he said ‘Peace be with you’, before breaking the news to them.

But note that he didn’t leave them with that jolly note. John tells, in a different way from Luke writing Acts, of how Jesus then breathed the Holy Spirit on them. And that’s the important point that holds it all together. If he had just left them with that worrying note that they were being sent by him in the same way that the Father had sent he himself, then they would probably have been in quite a state, but he then breathed into them the Holy Spirit - the One who enables us.

This is key to the whole narrative, because I believe that the Lord says the same thing to each of us. ‘As the Father sent me, so I am sending you.’ This is the resurrection life. Too often we get to Easter day and then we forget what comes next, but here is the great commissioning of Jesus, sending the disciples out to continue what he has started, and to live with the consequences as he did.

So, are we prepared to be sent out as disciples? Are we willing to lay down our claims to what we want? This is where those with a great deal of influence and possessions can take a big gulp and wonder whether they’re up to the task because of how much it may cost them. And this is why the Holy Spirit was breathed on to us, to help us with the difficulties that will come.

‘As the Father sent me, so I am sending you.’ Do we want that, with all the implications? In our own strength it would be madness. Thank God he sent the Holy Spirit, and for more on that, watch this space. Amen

Easter Sunday - A Tale of Three Gardens

Readings

Acts 10:34-43
Gentiles Hear the Good News
Then Peter began to speak to them: ‘I truly understand that God shows no partiality, but in every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him. You know the message he sent to the people of Israel, preaching peace by Jesus Christ—he is Lord of all. That message spread throughout Judea, beginning in Galilee after the baptism that John announced: how God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and with power; how he went about doing good and healing all who were oppressed by the devil, for God was with him. We are witnesses to all that he did both in Judea and in Jerusalem. They put him to death by hanging him on a tree; but God raised him on the third day and allowed him to appear, not to all the people but to us who were chosen by God as witnesses, and who ate and drank with him after he rose from the dead. He commanded us to preach to the people and to testify that he is the one ordained by God as judge of the living and the dead. All the prophets testify about him that everyone who believes in him receives forgiveness of sins through his name.’

John 20:1,11-18
The Resurrection of Jesus
Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene came to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed from the tomb.

Jesus Appears to Mary Magdalene
But Mary stood weeping outside the tomb. As she wept, she bent over to look into the tomb; and she saw two angels in white, sitting where the body of Jesus had been lying, one at the head and the other at the feet. They said to her, ‘Woman, why are you weeping?’ She said to them, ‘They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him.’ When she had said this, she turned round and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not know that it was Jesus. Jesus said to her, ‘Woman, why are you weeping? For whom are you looking?’ Supposing him to be the gardener, she said to him, ‘Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away.’ Jesus said to her, ‘Mary!’ She turned and said to him in Hebrew, ‘Rabbouni!’ (which means Teacher). Jesus said to her, ‘Do not hold on to me, because I have not yet ascended to the Father. But go to my brothers and say to them, “I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.” ’ Mary Magdalene went and announced to the disciples, ‘I have seen the Lord’; and she told them that he had said these things to her.

Sermon
Can you remember the first time you ever stood barefoot on grass in the early morning dew? The green stems feel soft and almost tickly between your toes. The cool, damp wetness of the earth smears its loving tendrils of moisture across your feet with its gentle embrace which reminds you how much you belong to that place.

It is a joy which can move you almost to tears, and when you see someone you love, you want to hold them and hug them and remind them just how special they are. So let me tell you about three gardens, and in the midst of that I will explain why it is so very important that Mary Magdalene thought Jesus was the gardener.

A long time ago, back in the mythological mists of time, there was a garden where walked the first person, Adam. The word Adam means literally ‘Of the Earth’. Adam was made of the same stuff that the earth was made of, which is true of all humans, and is something we are reminded of every time we attend a funeral. All of the elements that go into making us come from the earth.

The real miracle is that we are so full of life when we are made of the same stuff as rocks and seas and mud. Why are we alive? Because the Lord God breathed his Spirit into us. Now I don’t know whether there ever was a real Adam, but I don’t think that’s what the story in Genesis is trying to say. Instead, just by the name, Adam, earth-person, mud-man, what is conveyed is something of this understanding that we are alive because we are breathed into by God.

And so Adam walks in the cool of the day hand in hand with the Lord God in the garden of Eden, and they are talking. Adam is telling God about his day, about the plants he has tended, the animals he has named, perhaps asking God what the point of the duck-billed platypus was, and with God smiling and saying, ‘Just because Adam, just because...’ Why are they having this conversation? Because the Lord God put Adam in the Garden to tend it. Adam was the first gardener.

All the writer of Genesis is trying to tell us is that this is how it could have been; should have been. But we all know the rest of the story. Adam complained that he was lonely, so God put him to sleep and split him into two, with the male half retaining the name Adam, dirt-man, and the female half being called Eve, meaning Life. The human pair were together earth and life, and together they were to tend the earth in partnership.

But instead they disobeyed God, the relationship between them and God was broken and they were expelled from the beauty of the garden. They went from being gardeners who tended and loved to being farmers who had to work hard an unyielding land to produce crops. Again, I don’t know whether there was an original Adam and Eve, but I do know the truth of the feeling that something has been lost, that somehow, something is missing.

For we can no longer walk in the cool of the morning in bare feet, hand in hand with the Lord God, with us both having that sense of overwhelming joy at the dew between our toes; with the Lord feeling the joy of what he had created, and with you or I feeling that we are a part of this land and connected to it. Adam was no longer a gardener. He had been given a gift and he lost it. This was the first garden.

And now the scene switches. It’s another garden; a rich man’s garden belonging to Joseph of Arimathea, and there is a tomb in this garden. Joseph had given up his own tomb for Jesus only something is not as it should be. The heavy circular stone that had been across the door of the tomb has been rolled aside and in front of the tomb a man is gingerly stepping on to the grass, feeling the joy of the cool damp grass between his toes again, perhaps remembering doing this with Adam.

When he sees Mary of Magdalene in tears, Jesus rushes to give her comfort, except through the wave after wave of grief and tears she doesn’t recognise him, perhaps because her mind cannot process what she is seeing, and so instead she mistakes him for the gardener - except she wasn’t mistaken! We so often miss this point, but you have heard me say many times that John wrote a Gospel that has layer after layer to it, and every detail is there for a reason.

Jesus, the gardener? Yes! Exactly! Listen to this, just one example from 1 Corinthians 15:45:
The first man, Adam, became a living being; the last Adam became a life-giving spirit.
And then in verse 49
Just as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we will also bear the image of the man of heaven.

Jesus, the Son of God, is the second Adam, the second gardener. He came and set right all that Adam had done wrong. Where Adam said no to God and yes to himself, Jesus, many times but especially in the Garden of Gethsemane, (and note another garden), said, ‘Not my will be done, but your will.’ And so Mary thought he was the gardener, and John the writer says, ‘Yes, exactly, he is the gardener, because he is the new Adam, and this one did it properly.’

Jesus, in ways we cannot begin to explore now, corrected the relationship between God and humanity. He said yes where Adam had said no. The second Adam, the second gardener, was in right relationship with God. And though he was in very nature God, he was born as one of us, uniting both heaven and earth in himself and making it right between us and God.

And so let me tell you about a third garden, and this one you can read about in Revelation 22. This garden is in the centre of a city, a city conceived but not yet built, although we carry it with yearning in our hearts. It bears the name Jerusalem, but not this Jerusalem, it is a new Jerusalem. And in the centre of the garden there is another tree, and we are commanded that we must eat of its fruit, instead of the tree in Eden that we should not eat from.

And the fruit of this tree is for healing, and the light which shines throughout the new city shines from God himself, and because of the work of the gardener, the second Adam, Jesus, we have been given the right to someday go and live there. And we dirt-men and dirt-women, will know that we truly belong there. And when we feel the new dew between our toes on the soft grass of heaven’s new garden we will know how much we belong because Christ bought us a place there with his life.

This is no fairy tale. One day, someday, that will be our new home, as brothers and sisters of the gardener, of the second Adam. That will be eventual home. But not yet. Because there are others who need to be told, others who need to be brought. In this meantime, this in-between time, we have work to do. Amen

Good Friday - The Centrality of the Cross

In previous years, when I have spoken at the Good Friday service it has often been to do with one or another aspect of the theology of the cross. I’ve tried to teach about what the Trinity went through with the universe-shattering reality of God the Father turning his back on God the Son as Jesus took on our sin, and became sin for us. But this year it’s not about the theology but the principle - the principle of the cross being central to our lives.

In effect, by talking about giving throughout Lent this has been the principle we have been engaging with, the giving of our selves, which finds its true focus here, at the cross. Everything up until now has been milk though rather than solids. At the cross, if we engage with the vital need for all Christians to place the principle of the cross at the centre, we are weaned and become spiritual adults. The self-sacrifice Jesus made is our model for life.

Our main reading this afternoon was from Isaiah 53. Written several hundred years before Jesus was born, it seems to describe him exactly. A man of sorrows, acquainted with suffering who was crushed by the Father in order to make his life an offering for our sin. These are unpalatable bits of theology. They are politically incorrect.

We are rightly uncomfortable with the idea of God doing this to a part of himself for the sake of drawing us back into relationship with him, but I wonder why. Is it because we don’t like the idea of God inflicting and undergoing suffering in order to take away our sin, or is it perhaps more because on some deep level we are disturbed about the lengths that Jesus would go to for our sake?

Let’s not be in any doubt about this. Jesus died on the cross because of us. If any single one of us had been the only sinner in the world, the love of God is so great that he would still have gone to the cross to bury the differences between us, to destroy the chasm that sin opens up. The only difference is that we would have been the one who had nailed God to the cross.

The theology of the cross helps us to understand what Jesus accomplished by being crucified, but the principle of the cross is, in a practical sense, much more challenging. The theology of the cross explains things in such a way that allows us to say, ‘Oh yes, I understand, that’s very interesting’, but the principle of the cross is in these very disturbing words of Christ:

“Whoever does not carry the cross and follow me cannot be my disciple”, Luke 14:27

It’s not about theology. It’s not about styles of worship. It’s not about what we wear to church. It’s not about whether we get to robe up, or lead prayers or have a seat on the PCC. It is about this ultimate principle of giving, of giving ourselves for the sake of others without there being anything in it for us. That’s what Jesus did and it’s what Christians are meant to do.

But do we? Why do you think there are church disagreements? Because we’re not carrying our own crosses. Why are there power struggles in the church? Because we’re not carrying our own crosses. Why are people dying for lack of food and water? Because we are not carrying our own crosses.

As long as it is about what ‘I’ want, not what ‘you’ need, we are not carrying our own crosses. And Jesus says, “Whoever does not carry the cross and follow me cannot be my disciple.” Why is that? I think there are two sides to it. If we carry our own cross the needs of others will take precedence over our own needs, but also, in caring for the needs of others we will learn a great truth about God that cannot be taught by words.

Let me see if I can explain what I mean. Henri Nouwen was one of the most profound spiritual teachers and writers of the twentieth century. He was a Dutch Roman Catholic Priest born in the 1930s. He was ordained at the age of just twenty five and studied psychology and moved to the US to study in the 1960's.

Such was his academic brilliance in his subject that he went on to teach at the University of Notre Dame, and the Divinity Schools of Yale and Harvard, but in 1985 he left it all behind to join L’Arche in Trosly, France, the first of over 100 communities founded by Jean Vanier where people with developmental disabilities live with assistants. After a year he moved to L’Arche Daybreak near Toronto, Canada.

It was there that he met Adam, a man with profound disabilities who could do nothing for himself. Henri Nouwen, international teacher and priest, became Adam’s carer. He began with the question, “Lord, is there any way Adam can know you as I do” but ended up asking the question, “Lord, is there any way I can know you the way Adam does?”

He called him, ‘Adam: beloved of God’ because in Henri laying down his own life and abilities and taking on the role of a carer he learned a great truth, which was that Adam was like Jesus. Adam did not need to accomplish anything in order to be loved by God. Adam was so profoundly disabled that he couldn’t accomplish anything; he could barely even feed himself.

By laying down his own life and taking up the cross, living the life of self-sacrifice, Nouwen learned at the very depths of his being that God loved him as a person and not his accomplishments, or how he looked or what he had acquired.

Now I can stand here and teach you and I this until I’m blue in the face, but unless we try and live it, we will never understand it. Henri Nouwen had been a priest for decades and had taught spirituality and written dozens of life-changing books, but it was in laying down his own life and taking up his cross that he finally learned the truth on a profound level, that God loved him for who he was, just as he was.

“Whoever does not carry the cross and follow me cannot be my disciple,” says Jesus. Why? Because unless we lay our own lives down to one side we cannot appreciate and respond to his love for us. We will go on trying to earn it, when we can’t. Remember, if you had been the only sinner, he’d still have come. And still he comes, day after day, to ask us to lay down our lives, take up our cross, and live for others.

Do not expect this to happen overnight. The true reality of this is that we learn to carry our own cross and there are absolutely no short-cuts. It is in the day-to-day principle of living like this that we begin to grow. Yes, becoming a Christian can be a true conversion which takes place in a moment of time, that one day you are not a Christian and the next day you make a decision and you are. But being a disciple is far more involved. Being a disciple is about learning discipline, learning as an apprentice from your master who is the Lord Jesus.

So what, then, is this principle of the cross? It is a lifetime journey of learning simply to live as Jesus did, in the shadow of giving of yourself away for others. It is dying to yourself. It is the ultimate act of giving. It is a path we all have to tread, and if we are forever asking whether we are getting what we want, or moaning because things are not going how we want them to go, then we must look and see what path we’re walking on, because the chances are it’s not the one to Calvary.

And if we walk on our own paths we will never understand or appreciate the love of God.

So let me ask you a few questions.

In Matthew 10:39 Jesus says, ‘Those who find their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.”

This is what Henri Nouwen did, and he discovered the truth of it in caring for Adam.

Are you tired of trying to get things the way you want them?
Are you weary of trying to be seen to be better than anyone else?
Are you holding on to your life so tightly, trying to get your way, that you are losing your life?

If the cross is central, then we will be prepared to die to all of our desires for the sake of the one who died for us. He showed us the way. We need only follow, because that’s what disciples do.

But don’t expect to get there immediately. Don’t expect to feel the weight of the cross on your shoulders on your first day on the job. But do expect the splinters to begin to bite when you start trying. And be prepared to see the effect it has on the lives of others. Amen.

Palm Sunday: Pilgrims and Power-Seekers

Readings1 Timothy 6:6-11
Of course, there is great gain in godliness combined with contentment; for we brought nothing into the world, so we can take nothing out of it; but if we have food and clothing, we will be content with these. But those who want to be rich fall into temptation and are trapped by many senseless and harmful desires that plunge people into ruin and destruction. For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil, and in their eagerness to be rich some have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many pains.

But as for you, man of God, shun all this; pursue righteousness, godliness, faith, love, endurance, gentleness.

Luke 19:28-40
Jesus’ Triumphal Entry into Jerusalem
After he had said this, he went on ahead, going up to Jerusalem.
When he had come near Bethphage and Bethany, at the place called the Mount of Olives, he sent two of the disciples, saying, ‘Go into the village ahead of you, and as you enter it you will find tied there a colt that has never been ridden. Untie it and bring it here. If anyone asks you, “Why are you untying it?” just say this: “The Lord needs it.” ’ So those who were sent departed and found it as he had told them. As they were untying the colt, its owners asked them, ‘Why are you untying the colt?’ They said, ‘The Lord needs it.’ Then they brought it to Jesus; and after throwing their cloaks on the colt, they set Jesus on it. As he rode along, people kept spreading their cloaks on the road. As he was now approaching the path down from the Mount of Olives, the whole multitude of the disciples began to praise God joyfully with a loud voice for all the deeds of power that they had seen, saying,
‘Blessed is the king
who comes in the name of the Lord!
Peace in heaven,
and glory in the highest heaven!’
Some of the Pharisees in the crowd said to him, ‘Teacher, order your disciples to stop.’ He answered, ‘I tell you, if these were silent, the stones would shout out.’


Sermon

Picture the scene, as it’s not so different from our own weather experiences. It’s a warm spring early morning, and although you can anticipate the dry heat of the day that will come, for now the sun has not long been above the horizon and its presence is comforting, warming, and joyful - not yet oppressive. The dawn chorus is past, but only just, and the people are coming out of their homes to begin the work of the day.

We know Jesus had a base at Bethany since that was the home of Lazarus, Martha and Mary, and it would not be beyond the bounds of possibility to imagine their house as a meeting place for the party of disciples about to head into Jerusalem. There would have been a sense of excitement, not because they knew what was going to happen, but because they were going, ‘Up to Jerusalem’ as pilgrims arriving for the Passover festival.

Remember that a great many of Jesus’s disciples were northerners, from Galilee, so coming all the way down into the hot dry south to go to their capital city for a religious festival was quite a happening. They would have been excited. There might even have been a bit of a carnival atmosphere about it. Have you ever had that kind of experience?

St. Alban’s diocese has a pilgrimage every Easter Monday for the young people of the diocese to make their way to the Cathedral for a special Easter service led by all three bishops of the diocese. When we moved to Bedford for my curacy one of my jobs was to take an active role in leading the youth on that walk, and I always loved that sense of togetherness.

Even though Bedford was a good 30 plus miles from St. Albans, we would still walk the whole way. Easter Sunday we would be sent out on pilgrimage by the whole congregation after the morning service, and off we would go. We’d get to Luton by nightfall for a pizza supper, and then get up at the crack of dawn, if not before, and trek off to do the remaining section. There was a real sense of togetherness and excitement despite all the blisters.

And we’d meet up with others on the way, as we drew closer and closer to St. Albans. There would be conversations about who had walked the furthest, (we always won those), and who had the best banner, and then a real sense of triumph, joy, excitement and maybe even relief as we came out of the countryside, and at the top of a valley looked across to see the Cathedral and Abbey Church of St. Albans standing proud on the hill in the distance.

Pilgrimage is an incredibly joyful occasion, something that many people never get to experience these days, and there is no reason to think that for the disciples it would have been anything less than that. I suspect also that few of them really understood what was about to happen, despite some of the ominous happenings and sayings of Jesus.

Instead there would have been a sense of joy for many of them. It’s quite possible that there would have been children present as they were far more family oriented than we are, and for some of them they would never have seen the glorious magnificence of the huge holy Temple of God perched on the top of Temple Mount.
This also helps us to clear up an issue that often confuses us. Here, at the beginning of the first Holy Week, there seems to have been a sense of celebration of who Jesus was. ‘Blessed is the King who comes in the name of the Lord’ is quite something to be shouting, with a sense of expectation that Jesus really is the anointed one, the Messiah, sent to save the people.

In other accounts in the Gospels we even hear people crying out, ‘Hosanna’ meaning ‘Save us!’ So there seems to be this sense of Jesus being recognised for who he was, even if the people had been thinking more of a political saviour, a warrior-king, than the man of sorrows that he was. How, then, did we go from this loud acclamation on Palm Sunday, to the shouts of ‘Crucify’ less than a week later?

It’s down, again, to the idea of pilgrimage. That sense of excitement of people from all over the place streaming up to Jerusalem for the Passover festival is what we observe. These were the simple ordinary folk from the outlying villages, and some, like Jesus and his disciples, from much farther afield. The ones crying out calls of ‘Hosanna’ were pilgrims on the road who had met Jesus. These were not necessarily the residents of Jerusalem, although residents may well have come out to greet the pilgrims without knowing who it was that was with them.

The centre of power is the place which rejects Jesus because his arrival could mean the loss of their power. He came with a Gospel of taking up our own crosses, and the centre of power had no intention of doing that. Jesus was a threat to them; a threat that had to be dealt with. And curiously, that brings us to the colt, which in a village would have been a donkey’s colt. No villager could have afforded a horse.

There is something in what Jesus says about the colt which highlights this difference between the power-seekers and the pilgrims. Consider Jesus’s words. He tells the disciples to go ahead and find the colt that has never been ridden and untie it. If anyone asks why, reply that the Lord needs it. Now that visual image of a donkey’s colt and the Lord sitting on it is the complete antithesis of the clutching after power and influence that takes place at the centre in Jerusalem, and what Jesus says about the donkey can focus our minds.

There are two words that describe the donkey’s state, and the action they must take with the donkey. The first one describes its current state, dedemenon, which means ‘having been tied’. In English we just add the prefix ‘un’ to describe the act of untying, but in the Greek there is a different word, lusantes, loosening. There is a state of being tied up and then the action of being loosed. Why did they loose it? Because the Lord needs it.

This is a point of the story that we miss if we’re not careful. Jerusalem was going to crucify its Messiah, just like it had so often killed its prophets. Why? Because the people were tied up with their desire for power and influence and wealth. The Lord came to loosen them.

Think again about the colt. It would have been useless to Jesus if it had still been tied up. It wouldn’t have been able to move. That is quite literally what desires for power, influence and wealth do to us. They bind us. If we want our own way it becomes like being tied to a stake from which we cannot pull away. How much use are we to the Lord unless we let him untie us, loose us, from the shackles of our desires to be first, to be noticed?

‘Loosen the donkey’s colt’ says Jesus, ‘and if anyone asks why, say, “The Lord needs it”’. The colt was no use unless it had been loosed. The powerful people in Jerusalem were tied up by their desires to hold on to power, and so they were of no use to the Lord. In fact the real and true horror of this is that not only were the Jews who were bound up by their desire for power no use to the Lord, they ended up actively working against him.

One of the biggest problems with materialism is that we cease to be able to understand spiritual things. I’ve spent time on several occasions in conversation with people eager for power, and when the conversations turned to spiritual matters I might as well have been talking in a foreign language. They couldn’t even begin to understand what I was meaning. That’s the effect of materialism and the desire for influence.

And because of the ways in which we are insecure, what follows on from that is predictable. If we cannot understand something, we may well feel threatened by it, and move to eliminate the threat. The people at the centre could not understand Jesus. His actions had always been to step away from power, and so he was all the more threatening.

People who want or have power cannot understand people who shun it. As St. Paul said of Jesus in the letter to the Philippians, (2:5)
Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave.
We still see exactly the same attitudes in politics today. Two thousand years and humanity has not changed one iota. Many want to rule but few want to serve.

And sadly the same applies in church. There’s the church whose Rural Dean had to step in because the secretary had kept its wardens in the dark that they were nearing the end of their legal tenure whilst getting her own preferred candidates into place. There’s another church where the bishop had to appoint a hard-nosed vicar to break the power of a group who had gradually stepped in and taken all the positions of responsibility.

There’s the vicar who wasn’t allowed to get his own way with the diocese so he led his church out of Anglicanism to become a free church. Free from what? Certainly not free from their vicar’s drive for power. These are just three examples I’ve come across in my own experience or have had shared with me, and there are plenty of others. And every time we do this, the people of God crucify the name of Jesus again.

‘But’, you may say, ‘Surely this doesn’t apply to me. I don’t seek after power.’ Thankfully, for many that is true, and we can usually tell who they are. Listen again to these words from the first reading. ‘...there is great gain in godliness combined with contentment; for we brought nothing into the world, so we can take nothing out of it;’

and this, ‘shun all this; pursue righteousness, godliness, faith, love, endurance, gentleness.’ You can usually tell the people who are like this, because they seem somehow contented. They have learned to love and accept that they are the person who God made them to be, and they don’t need to prove it to anyone.
So we should ask ourselves, ‘Am I contented? Or am I striving because I have something to prove to others?’ Essentially the question is, ‘Am I a pilgrim or a power-seeker?’ I would argue that the two are mutually exclusive.

Now don’t get me wrong here. This is not a question of judgement; it is a question of whether we want to be loosed by Jesus, literally untied and set-free to follow him, to be a pilgrim, to be of use to him. If we want to be set free, he will set us free, but it’s not an easy journey. I have personally found it difficult, but not impossible, to turn away from the high profile roles.

Am I going to be a pilgrim or a power seeker? Are you going to be a pilgrim or a power-seeker? What’s more important, what God thinks of you or what other people think of you. In everything that we do we should consider, ‘Is the Lord calling me to this, or wanting to set me free from the need to prove myself?’

Pilgrims are on the road to heaven, but they cannot avoid going via the cross, and we will consider that on Friday afternoon. Power-seekers are searching for their own end. That’s a very wide and welcoming path because it appeals to our nature to get the best for ourselves.

But it is a self-destructive way, and it exploits other people. It is not the way of Jesus, and it cannot be the way of his followers, yet it is such an easy trap to fall into, and we may not even realise we’ve been caught.

Reflection
What have you wanted to do with your life?
Was it your desire or have you sought God’s advice?
Are you able to lay it down if God asked you to for the sake of doing something else?
Are you content with who you are becoming, even if you have not yet become that person?
Or are you aware of so often needing to prove yourself?

Have you been dominated by a power-seeker?
Did it make you seek power for yourself?
Did it make you feel useless, unworthy of love?
How did you respond?
Do you feel the need to prove yourself?

Do not feel condemned if you are becoming aware of not being as much of a pilgrim as you would like to be. Remember the words of Jesus. ‘Untie it, and bring it here’. The Lord wishes to loose us, to set us free, to pick us up from the power road, turn us around, and set us down on the pilgrim trail.

Let that same longing grow in your own heart to be one who is walking with excitement towards heaven, rather than one who is trying to draw attention to themselves.

God gives each of us gifts to be used in his service, and it is as we lay them down at his feet that he gives them back to us to be used for his glory rather than ours. Amen.