The Centre of Gravity of the Christian Faith, Matthew 16:13-20 (Trinity 12 Ordinary 21 Year A)

(I’m aware I preached on this passage as recently as May, but on that occasion it was a Church Anniversary at a different church. This time, it has come up in the Lectionary. There will be some crossover between the two sermons, but this is a newly-written message.)

Matthew 16:13-20

Our dog loves us to take him to a park with a stream running through it. We will collect sticks and throw them into the stream for him to retrieve. He jumps into the water, swims after the stick, and brings it back to shore.

But for all his intelligence, there is one thing he has not grasped about this game. Instead of carrying the stick in the centre, he holds the stick in his mouth at its end. Although it amuses us that it can look like he has a cigar, his failure to discover the centre of gravity can have awkward consequences. He may crash the other end of the stick into the ground and break it, for example. He clearly missed the lessons about balance at doggy school.

Finding the centre is important. A briefer version of this reading forms the centre of Mark’s Gospel. But here in Matthew, the content of this passage is central to the message of this Gospel. Moreover, the reading itself balances nicely into two halves. Hence, we’re going to think today firstly about Peter’s Confession (The Christ), and secondly Peter’s Commission (The Church).

Firstly, Peter’s Confession (The Christ)

Verses 13 to 16 are about who the disciples believe Jesus to be. He starts by asking who others say he is, but then focusses the question of them: ‘But who do you say that I am?’ (verse 15)

This is the question at the centre of Christian faith and at therefore at the centre of church membership. Who do you say Jesus is?

In the Methodist Church, people are not confirmed and brought into church membership just on my say-so as the minister. If people attend a confirmation class and I am satisfied they have confessed Jesus Christ as Lord and Saviour, then I have to bring their names to the Church Council so that the church can say whether we see that these people are Jesus-followers.

And that’s important. The question is not, are they nice people? If I want nice people, I can find them in all sorts of places outside the church. There are lots of nice people in the camera club where I am a member. But only a few have Christian faith.

Nor do we simply make a decision to avoid upsetting people. Jesus himself tells his disciples here that who they confess him to be is the most important question in all of life.

Let none of us rely on being ‘good’ or ‘nice’, because that won’t cut it with God. It is Muslims, not Christians, who rely on the hope that our good deeds will outweigh our bad deeds to be admitted to Paradise. The Gospel speaks in contrast about the grace of God in Jesus, through his death and resurrection. In response, we turn from sin to him and confess him as the Christ, the Son of the living God.

And it’s a confession to be made in the midst of life and all its pressures. Note that Jesus doesn’t ask the disciples to make their confession on home territory, or in somewhere safe and familiar like a synagogue. He does this when they come ‘into the district of Caesarea Philippi’ (verse 13). Why is that significant?

The recently renamed Caesarea Philippi was as pagan a territory as one could find: famous for its grotto where people worshipped the Greek god Pan[1]

At this centre of paganism, where other gods were worshipped, Jesus wants the allegiance of his disciples.

And he wants the same from us today. He calls us to confess him as our Lord in the midst of a society that offers plenty of competing false gods. Some of these are familiar to us. Look at the worship of money and possessions. Consider the way some people are devoted to celebrities, sportspeople, and entertainers. Ponder how others put their trust in extremist politicians. Still others expect romantic relationships to fulfil them, hence the phenomenon of relationship addiction and sex addiction.

In each of these cases, good servants have been elevated to the status of bad masters. And they will not fulfil all the desires their worshippers seek from them. Welcome to Pan’s Grotto, twenty-first century style.

But there is another way by which people are tempted to Pan’s Grotto, and it has been around a long time. It is the desire or expectation to short-circuit the process of hearing from God. In the Christian tradition, we often have to ‘wait upon the Lord’ to discern what he may be saying, but some want to hear instantly. And so, they turn to horoscopes or other occult methods, where it’s not God who is speaking to them.

There is a new variation on this desire to get an instant answer. I am hearing increasing stories of people who, rather than turning to the Scriptures and prayer to seek God’s voice, are instead relying upon … AI. A recent survey showed that 48% of Christians say they would trust AI with their spiritual growth. One in three American adults believe that spiritual advice from artificial intelligence is just as trustworthy as the advice a minister would give.

Older Christians will perhaps poo-poo those figures. But sometimes it’s those older Christians who are reading their horoscopes instead of their Bible. The problem goes right across the generations.

So I make the challenge today that we all confess Jesus as Lord of our lives, and that we place all the good things of life that we enjoy or aspire to under that Lordship. And further, that in confessing Jesus as Lord before the paganism of today, we accept the discipline of listening patiently for the voice of God, instead of taking short-cuts that lead us into spiritual danger.

Secondly, Peter’s Commission (The Church)

Verses 17 to 20 build on Peter’s confession as Jesus commissions him to be the first leader of his messianic community. The Greek word used for ‘church’ in these verses, ekklésia, is used in Greek translations of the Old Testament for the People of God. And surely it’s no surprise that Jesus as the Messiah of Israel will form a community of his people.

And it is, as I have already hinted, faith in Jesus alone that is the basis for Christianity, and therefore for membership of the church. Not niceness, not sincerity, not a religious club that is the centre and circumference of our social lives, but a community of people who have put their lives in the hands of Jesus.

Now this is not humanly achievable. It only comes, because God reveals it to people and we respond, as Jesus tells Peter. When we are seeking to spread the good news, one thing we must never lose sight of is that it is not us who convert people, but the Holy Spirit. All our evangelistic witness to build the church (verse 18a) depends not upon our techniques or clever words or good answers, but on the prior work of the Holy Spirit to reveal Jesus to people. Our prayers for mission begin with praying for the Spirit of God to go ahead of us and be at work before we get there. We then ask for the grace to join in with what the Spirit does first.

Isn’t it great that it doesn’t depend on us?

And isn’t it great, too, that the church is an indestructible community? What do I mean by that? Jesus says that ‘the gates of Hades will not prevail against it’ (verse 18b). I have been fond of saying for many years now that we have misunderstood these words. For too long Christians have understood this as meaning that no demonic schemes can prevail against us, even when we are trapped in a corner. But since when did gates go around attacking people? Gates are a defensive measure! If the gates of Hades cannot prevail, then given that Hades is the place of the dead in the New Testament, this means that it is the church that is on the offensive, and even death cannot stand in our way!

So be of good courage when you hear the stories of church decline. Yes, individual churches may decline and close, and we are no exception to that if we default to making our church experience about our personal preferences rather than seeking to glorify God. But overall, the church cannot fail. We are resurrection people. We plunder death to bring life in the Name of Jesus.

Within all this, Peter has a particular commission, and it’s to leadership and authority in this community of the Messiah. That’s what the language about being given the keys of the kingdom, and binding and loosing on earth on behalf of heaven (verse 19) are about. While I certainly think my Catholic friends have taken this too far in pointing to the papacy, I nevertheless agree with them that at this point Jesus commissions Peter as the first leader of the church.

A church cannot be anarchy. It cannot be a bundle of people where everybody just does what he or she wants. For example, I have lost count of the number of times I have encountered arguments in churches about styles of worship, where mostly they come down to personal taste rather than seeking to please God. So, there are those whose responsibility it is to say, this is what the teaching of Jesus and the Gospel is. There are those whose responsibility is to show the spacious place that is the Gospel, but also the boundaries of the faith.

Now that’s dangerous talk, in the eyes of some. There are those who are not willing to be corrected. But also, as we know time and time again, there are leaders in the church who have exercised their ministry in harmful ways, hurting others to bolster their own power. This must not be tolerated: those who are called to lead are to keep to the Gospel teaching themselves as a matter of example, and that includes fidelity to a Gospel lifestyle.

Peter will discover what that means in the next verses beyond today’s reading: the way of the Messiah is the way of the Cross, and he will be shocked. No wonder Jesus tells the disciples here not to tell anyone he is the Messiah (verse 20), because right now that is too outrageous and revolutionary to be contemplated, even by his own closest followers.

But this is how the community of Jesus will live, and it will be what its leaders exemplify. Tradition tells us Peter himself, despite his initial objections, will give himself to this way, too.

It is as far from the pagan Grotto of Pan as you can realistically go.

[1] Craig Keener, The Gospel of Matthew: A Socio-Rhetorical Commentary, p424.

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The Extraordinary Faith of the Canaanite Woman, Matthew 15:21-28 (Trinity 11 Ordinary 20 Year A)

Matthew 15:21-28

Photo by it’s me neosiam on StockSnap

If you’ve ever had a baby screaming constantly in pain that has no words to tell you what’s wrong, or if you’ve ever cared for a child with a serious long-term health condition, then you might sympathise with the Canaanite woman with the demonised daughter. Jesus’ disciples are cruel and unsympathetic to the mother:

‘Send her away, for she keeps crying out after us.’ (Verse 23)

And then, before we make any progress in understanding this story, we must look at those troubling words Jesus says to this poor, distressed mother:

‘It is not right to take the children’s bread and toss it to the dogs.’ (verse 26)

There are some pretty unthinking progressive Christians who look at these words and confidently tell us that Jesus, by being a Jew of his day, was a racist, and he had to learn God’s truth from this Canaanite woman.

I know the words sound shocking, but this is nonsense. It shows they have not thought about the rest of Matthew’s Gospel. In the nativity stories, it is the Gentile Magi whose faith is commended, not the Jewish leaders. Jesus praises the faith of a Roman centurion in contrast to that of others. At the end of the Gospel, Jesus’ mission – which, yes, began with Israel – is extended to the ends of the earth.

There has to be a different explanation. We’ll come to that later, but I’m flagging up here at the beginning of the sermon that we shouldn’t accept simplistic, silly answers that don’t read the story in its wider context.

Firstly, she is persistent:

The Place of Persistence by Sheila Sund from Salem, United States, CC BY 2.0. Found at Wikimedia Commons.

Notice what the disciples say about the woman: ‘she keeps crying out after us’. It’s not a one-off. It’s continuous. The need she has for her daughter is such that she will not shut up. She will not take ‘go away’ for an answer. She will not give this up as a lost cause when she seems to be getting nowhere. She keeps crying out.

You see it in other ways, when she gets into conversation with Jesus. She doesn’t take what Jesus says lying down. She comes back at him. You could say she argues with him. Audacious doesn’t quite describe it. It’s faintly shocking that she doesn’t retreat the moment Jesus pushes back.

Like many a loving parent, she will do anything for the sake of her child. And this story effectively tells us that it’s fine to display a similar attitude towards God when we pray about deep needs, be they ours or of others.

Often, the problem is that we have been brought up to be reverent towards God, and that’s good and proper. God is holy. Reverence is a right response to him. But we take it so far that we end up being unable to speak with passion to God when things really matter, when they desperately matter.

But this woman was not the only character in Holy Scripture to speak audaciously to God about a significant need. Abraham prayed and prayed for the people of Sodom, that they be saved from divine judgment. He beat God down time and time again about the number of righteous people in the city.

Read the works of the psalmists and notice just how many of the biblical psalms are ones that lament injustice and pain. God’s people cry out to him about all that is wrong in the world and in their lives. Do they stop? No. Do they get all their theological ducks neatly in a row? No. They cry out again and again in pain to Almighty God.

Then there is the parable of Jesus recorded in Luke’s Gospel about the persistent widow and the unjust judge. Time and again, she came before that judge in the most forthright of manner, until she got the justice she needed.

Let us be in no doubt that passionate, persistent prayer is fine with Jesus. In fact, it’s more than fine. Sometimes, it is the only appropriate thing to do.  

I have heard it put this way. Think of a baby who is in distress but naturally cannot articulate its pain to a parent. So, it beats its fists against the parent’s chest, as the parent holds it. Our persistent and passionate prayer can be like that. It is perfectly fine for us to beat our fists against the chest of God. That doesn’t change the fact that he still holds us in his arms, for he is our loving Father.

Secondly, she is perceptive:

Allen’s Hummingbird by Becky Matsubara on Flickr. CC 4.0.

The Canaanite woman hears beyond those troubling words of Jesus about not taking the children’s food and giving it to the dogs (verse 26). She recognises what Jesus has already told his disciples, that his mission is to the lost sheep of Israel (verse 24). This would have been commonplace knowledge: that the Jewish Messiah was for the Jews. And who is she?

She is a descendant of the ancient Canaanites, the bitter biblical enemies of Israel whose paganism had often led Israel into idolatry.[1]

So you would think she knows her place. Israel’s Messiah is only here to bless Israel.

But she seems to know more. Perhaps it’s the close proximity and the mixing of Jews with people they didn’t want to meet, but she knows that isn’t the last word about the Messiah of Israel. Yes, he will come to the Jews. But what is the vocation of Israel? Why did God choose these people?

It wasn’t so they could simply have their own private bless-up. It was so they could bless the world. It goes all the way back to God’s call of Abram in Genesis 12. God chooses a people for himself, but the Chosen People’s calling is to bless the world.

So, yes, Jesus as Messiah comes to the lost sheep of Israel. But it can’t stop there. Why should she and her daughter also not be blessed by the God of Israel?

And as I said in the introduction, signs of this are spread all through Matthew’s Gospel, from the Magi to the faithful centurion to the Great Commission.

The blessings we receive as the Church are not for our sole benefit. We are blessed so that we may become a blessing to others. I often pray that way when I close a meeting, that we will be sent with God’s blessing so that we may bless others.

This should challenge the ungodly notion we sometimes adopt where we think that some people deserve God’s blessings and others don’t. We have certain people down as ‘Canaanites’ today, but could they be people whom God wants to bless? Does God want to bless benefits scroungers? Yes! Does God want to bless people who come to this country on small boats? Yes! Does God want to bless the politicians I despise? Yes!

Blessing is never about who deserves it. None of us deserves blessing. We are all sinners in need of grace – even the most godly or the most respected people in the church. Blessing is always about grace, ‘outrageous grace’ even, as the singer Godfrey Birtill calls it.

Which ‘undeserving’ people are we going to pray for this week, that God will bless them?

Or perhaps it’s the other way round, and we ourselves feel unworthy. We have a pervading sense of shame, whether we have done anything shameful or not. Then for us this is Good News: God delights in the thought of blessing people like us.

Thirdly and finally, she is faithful:

Free Public Domain image at PxHere.

Look at the way Jesus commends her in the final verse of the reading:

Then Jesus said to her, ‘Woman, you have great faith! Your request is granted.’ And her daughter was healed at that moment. (Verse 28)

She is a woman of faith in the qualities we have already noted: her persistence and her perceptiveness. Towards the end here, she doesn’t even reject Jesus’ challenging riddle about the children’s food and the dogs: she takes the riddle and extends it:

‘Even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master’s table.’ (Verse 27)

She certainly belongs with the other Gentile heroes of faith in Matthew’s Gospel that I have already mentioned. The Magi may have arrived at the house where the young Jesus was by the dubious method of astrology, but when they left, they followed the clear directions of God in a dream. That was faith in action. The Roman centurion with the paralysed servant learned faith from his experience of being a man under authority, and Jesus said he had never met anyone in Israel with such great faith.

Which of us wouldn’t want Jesus to say to us, ‘you have great faith’? Which of us wouldn’t want to hear Jesus say, ‘Your request is granted’? Surely that’s exactly what we long to hear from him.  It’s like wanting to hear him say to us at the Last Judgment, ‘Well done, good and faithful servant.’

The Canaanite woman’s faith had been learned in adversity, desperate as she was for her daughter to be healed. How often faith grows in such circumstances. Look at those churches that have grown despite persecution. We might prefer the thought that our faith grow while we are sitting comfortably. But comfort rarely requires great faith. (And that might be one reason for the decline of faith in the West, where we ask more questions about God and suffering than those who live with daily adversity.)

Her faith had also been formed, ironically, in exclusion – as one who was not part of the Chosen People. She was an outsider. She didn’t belong. Yet God used that to form the ‘great faith’ which Jesus commended.

I wonder sometimes whether those of us who wish we had more faith and who even ask for more faith really know what we’re asking for. What are we letting ourselves in for? Because the testing ground for great faith includes the terrains of hardship, difficulty, danger, and misfortune. You can see it in the Scriptures. You can see it in the lives of the saints down the centuries.

We may sense God leading us down a particular path for our lives, one that initially excites us. But then we discover it requires of us greater fortitude to endure than we ever anticipated. It asks of us greater forgiveness of others, including those who are in the company of the faithful, yet have a particular propensity for cruelty. But faith walks the way of the Cross.

Which of us will walk this road? Which of us will be commended by Jesus for having ‘great faith’ in him?

[1] Craig S Keener, The Gospel of Matthew: A Socio-Rhetorical Commentary, p414.

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How to Help Those in a Storm, Matthew 14:22-33 (Trinity 10 Ordinary 19 Year A)

Matthew 14:22-33

Jesus walks on the sea. Public Domain image at Wikimedia Commons via Picryl.

Let me take you back to my first appointment in the ministry, over thirty years ago. I am sitting in a circuit staff meeting, and all the ministers are expressing frustration with difficult people in their congregations.

Then, one of the ministers has a brainwave. “Let’s plant a totally new church in the circuit,” he says, “and transfer all the troublemakers from all the churches there. Keeping them in one place should contain them.’

“We’ll call it the Sin Bin Church.”

Needless to say, we never acted on this idea! But it did release a pressure valve in a tense conversation.

Rather, as has been well said, ministers should no more complain that people come to them with problems than doctors should moan that people come to see them because they are sick.

And Jesus has some troubled disciples in this story. So how does he go about it? Jesus’ example can help all of us when we want to respond to the needs of others in Christ’s name.

Firstly, Jesus spends time with the Father:

Busy cat overwhelmed by work. Easy-Peasy AI. CC 4.0.

Matthew 14 has begun with Herod’s execution of John the Baptist (verses 1-12). Jesus then wants to withdraw for some solitude (verse 13), only to be followed by a huge crowd. He heals the sick and feeds them (verses 14-21). If Jesus had needed time alone after John’s murder, how much more does he need it now?

For Jesus, it is a priority to spend time with his Father in prayer. He prayed and fasted in the wilderness before his public ministry began. He prayed before choosing the twelve apostles. He prayed most passionately of all before the Cross in Gethsemane. There is something about prayer that is essential for him.

What is it? Well, some people today dismiss prayer as useless. I can understand some of those reactions when we see some Christians writing feeble comments like ‘thoughts and prayers’ on social media posts about terrible tragedies in the world. What good are thoughts and prayers, ask the critics, when what people need is practical action?

And the church has inherited this bias towards action rather than prayer. I think it’s telling that the traditional Methodist expression when a minister wants to retire is that they speak of wanting to ‘sit down from the active work.’

And congregations expect their ministers to be busy. If they are not, they must be lazy. This causes many problems, not least that some church members are too afraid to approach their ministers, because they think they will be too busy for them.

What happened to learning from the way Jesus spent time with the Father? Was Jesus just wrong and impractical? Or have we got it wrong?

Eugene Peterson certainly thought today’s church was dangerously mistaken. He wrote an essay called ‘The Unbusy Pastor’ found in his book ‘The Contemplative Pastor’, in which he argued that being busy was a sin. Busyness, he said, can be a sign of vanity, because it betrays a mindset of wanting to appear important and significant. Or it can be a subtle form of laziness, where we abdicate the call to make decisions and fill the space with action instead. Ultimately, he said, busyness was the enemy of spirituality, because it crowds out prayer.

And I confess to that last one at times, not least this week, when I skipped my night-time prayers the evening before I wrote this sermon.

Prayer and action are not opposed to each other. Prayer is the fuel that provides the energy for the best and most holy action. Prayer is where we find direction for what to do when we act. When I don’t forget my night-time prayers, one regular part of my routine is to consider the next day’s diary and pray that I will be a blessing to all those I meet, or phone, or email.

So if we want to make a difference for Christ in the world and if we want to help people, our starting point will not be by throwing ourselves into the needs of the world. It will be by lowering ourselves to our knees before the Father.

Secondly, Jesus spends time with the fearful:

Fear. Public Domain image at Needpix.

His friends are in trouble in their boat, even though they are experienced fishermen. Yet something has gone wrong. If you put data from the different Gospels’ accounts of this story together, you will find that instead of them staying close to the shore as you would expect when crossing the ‘top’ of the Sea of Galilee, they have drifted three or four miles out. They are off course, and vulnerable to the weather conditions.

Jesus sets out from his solitude on the shore to help them, and the distance the disciples are from land is enough to knock on the head the old sceptical idea that Jesus’ walking on the water was just him walking on stones beneath the surface. However, he’s not doing this as some demonstration of power to impress them: he’s walking on water, because he is using his divine powers to meet a need: the need of those disciples.

And when he reaches them, there is something I’d like you to notice about how he interacts with them. Let me contrast it to what sometimes happens with us.

Do you sometimes find that when you meet anxious people (and the disciples have big-time, life-and-death anxiety here) that their anxiety spills over to you? It happens to me at times: I start to take on their anxiety, and I respond in a stressful way that isn’t helpful. This happens a lot in families, as a psychiatrist called Murray Bowen observed. It also happens in religious congregations, as a rabbi called Edwin Friedman noted, building on Murray Bowen’s work. Friedman called for leaders and helpers to develop something you may have heard of: a ‘non-anxious presence’.

And that is what Jesus does. Yes, he absolutely cares about the fear his disciples have and the anxiety it is causing them. But he doesn’t let it infect him. He stays, in Bowen’s word, ‘differentiated’ from them. Jesus stays secure in the strength he has found in prayer and in knowing his identity as the Son of God. Because of that, he can stay calm as he reaches them. It makes all the difference.

You can hear it in the exchange in the middle of the reading. As Jesus gets to them, the disciples are terrified, and they think he is a ghost. But he says, ‘Take courage! It is I. Don’t be afraid.’ (Verses 26-27)

By beginning in prayer to the Father, not only do we find strength and direction for what we are to do, we find our identity renewed. We are beloved sons and daughters of him, adopted into his family, and assured of his enduring love for us. These truths are underlined and renewed in us through prayer, and they enable us after that first step of spending time with the Father to take the second step of spending time with the fearful. Our peace will be a gift to those who are afraid.

Thirdly and finally, Jesus spends time with the faithless:

I find your lack of faith disturbing – by Erik-M1999 at Deviant Art. CC 3.0.

Here, I’m talking about Peter’s desire to walk on water. We normally take his basic desire as a positive. We see it as an example of faith, that we need to take risks to achieve things in the kingdom of God.

But here’s my question. Even if Peter hadn’t sunk, what would he have achieved for the kingdom of God by walking on the water like Jesus? I can’t think of anything. And although Jesus responds to Peter’s request by saying, OK, then, come to me, is that necessarily a stamp of approval on his actions? I am by no means certain.

To me, Peter’s actions here seem rather more like the wilderness temptations that Jesus resisted, where Satan urged him to do something spectacular just for the sake of it. ‘Throw yourself off from the top of the Temple.’

But that is not faith. That is testing God. Sure, faith can at times involve doing some quite dramatic things where God intervenes, but there is a purpose behind them when the Father calls us to risky actions. Here, as I said, there is nothing to be achieved by what Peter wants to do. Could it be that what he is actually trying to do is either impress the other disciples or set out on some childish form of exhilaration? Either would fit with his impulsive character.

And I think this is the lack of faith that Jesus cites in him. By allowing Peter’s rashness, he trains him in the ways of sober, sensible faith. He saves him from himself and allows him to learn this lesson. (And if you think that’s a fanciful reading of the text, let me just say that it’s the way John Calvin understood it.)

Now I realise this is a different way of reading the text from the predominant popular ways of seeing it. But when we absorb it, we see that this is good news. It tells us more about the compassionate way in which Jesus meets those in need – this time those who lack faith, or who are prone to foolish decisions. Could that not describe many of us, from time to time: short on faith and long on foolishness?

Well, if it does, then here we have Jesus reaching out to us in kindness to lift us up after we have made a mess of things. Jesus, who is rooted in prayer and his true identity, and who differentiates himself from fear as a result, can minister to us when we have been silly or stupid, when we have embarrassed ourselves and even when we have caused embarrassment to the church. He hears our cry for help, he catches our hand and says, ‘You of little faith, why did you doubt?’ (Verses 30-31)

Don’t let the failures and the foolishness of the past dominate your mind and control your outlook. Jesus comes to lift you up and take you forwards.

And we have the privilege of sharing that same good news with others, who may think God has given up on them, when he hasn’t.

Also be encouraged if your life of faith has not been spectacular. Jesus never called you to show off. He called you to trust him.

Conclusion

Jesus, then, has given us a model for serving others. He first spent time with the Father in prayer, and that enabled him then to spend time with the fearful, not taking on their fear but leading them into peace, and then time with the foolish, restoring them to quiet faith.

Is there an appropriate final response? The final verse of the reading says,

Then those who were in the boat worshipped him, saying, ‘Truly you are the Son of God.’ (Verse 33)

Perhaps that’s where we need to end, too.

In worship.

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The Virtues of Wrestling with God, Genesis 32:22-31 (Trinity 9 Ordinary 18 Year A)

Genesis 32:22-31

The London International Invitational Wrestling event took place from 10-11 December 2011. Wrestling 166 on Flickr by Greg Cullen. CC 2.0.

I was sharing at Midhurst on Easter Day about how one of my ministerial student friends in Manchester invited me and others to go with him to watch bouts of professional wrestling. I never understood the fascination and never accepted his invitations.

Why? For me, wrestling was irredeemably camp, and that’s not me. I associated it with my grandmother watching the Saturday afternoon wrestling on World Of Sport with Dickie Davies from 4 pm every week. As she cheered and booed the likes of Mick McManus and Jackie Pallo, I couldn’t wait for it to end so that we could get the football results.

Wrestling was unwelcome for me, and the first thing I want to say about this story is that Jacob’s overnight wrestling with the mysterious man was also unwelcome.

Life is challenging enough for Jacob at this point in his life. He is heading for this first meeting with his brother Esau in years. Esau, you remember, is the twin whom he tricked out of his blessing from their father Isaac. How will Esau receive him? Will he want revenge? Jacob has already prepared to soften the blow by arranging for members of his family and household to go ahead of him, along with gifts for his brother.

The mysterious man in some way represents God, given that at the end Jacob says he has seen God and lived (verse 30). What we read about here is an unwelcome wrestling bout with God, whether that was directly with God or with his representative.  

It is not too much of a jump to recognise the seasons in our own lives when we find ourselves wrestling with God, and that the experience is equally unwelcome for us. We believe God is in charge of our lives, but events happen that we do not want. Ill health. A job loss. Estrangement from family members or friends. A death. We all too easily expect life to resemble a Hallmark greetings card or the cover of a box of chocolates, only for major incidents to throw us off course.

And when they do, it is not unusual for us to end up complaining to the God who has allowed these things. As Jacob might have wondered why he had to face Esau with no certainty of a good outcome, so do we remonstrate with God for our circumstances. Very few of us accept the undesirable circumstances placidly. We are wrestling with God, although it feels like God has come to wrestle with us.

We were never promised the easy life we long for. Jesus said, ‘In the world you will have tribulation, but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world.’ He would then go to the Cross.

A little girl once asked her mother, ‘Mummy, do all fairy stories end with the words, ‘And they lived happily ever after’?’

‘No,’ replied Mum, ‘Some end with, ‘When I became a Christian, all my troubles disappeared.’’

I wish it were different. But God has not opted for a way of working where he routinely presses a button and we fly away from danger in our ejector seat. Instead, he has chosen a path that takes us through unwelcome situations to lead us into greater depth, for our sake, for the sake of others, and even for his glory. That is, after all, what Jesus did through the Cross.

To that end, he has given us resources to help us. We have the Book of Job to read. We have those Psalms that we call ‘The Psalms of Lament’, in which the psalmists eloquently and passionately bring their pain to God. They give us permission to say exactly what we think. As the early church father Athanasius said, ‘Most of the Bible speaks to us, but the Psalms speak for us.’

When we find ourselves caught up in an unwelcome bout of wrestling with God, let us pray that he will do a deep work in us and through us as he accompanies us through this time we would have preferred not to have happened.

Secondly, wrestling with God teaches us trust.

Diverse people stacking hands together at PxHere. Public Domain.

That may sound unlikely at first: why would you grow in trust in this One with whom you have wrestled and complained? But listen to the text in verse 25:

When the man saw that he did not prevail against Jacob, he struck him on the hip socket; and Jacob’s hip was put out of joint as he wrestled with him.

 When sunrise comes, Jacob will limp past Penuel (verse 31). This is Jacob, the fixer, the manipulator, the one who has sought to control his own destiny and the lives of others. Mister Independent now has a limp.

Will he now at last realise that he cannot be in total control of his lot? This is the time for Jacob truly to be a man of faith, rather than one who deceives in order to get his own way.

Faith is about both belief and trust. Believing certain things to be true about God, the world, and us. And trust in the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. Jacob’s challenge here is to embrace the ‘trust’ part of faith. A man who limps is at a serious disadvantage as he prepares to meet the brother he so sorely wronged all those years earlier. He has already tried to butter up his brother by planning to send his family members, servants, and herds ahead of him – but what if they don’t impress Esau? What if all that is left is for him to face Esau with a limp? How can the man who even wrestled for hours with God’s own representative have a chance? There is nothing left but to trust.

And when we wrestle with. God over those unwelcome intruders into our lives, be they health, relationships, work, finance, of any other major aspect of our existence, there is nothing left but to trust in God.

It’s what the Apostle Paul did with his ‘thorn in the flesh’, whatever that was. It’s what Jesus did when the Father would not remove the cup of suffering from him.

I’m not saying we shouldn’t ask God to remove trials from our lives. After all, we shall pray in the Lord’s Prayer in a few minutes’ time, ‘Save us from the time of trial.’ But there are occasions where he does his deep work when we are in the furnace before deliverance comes.

I have spoken before about examples of this in my own life. The lung surgery I had in my twenties that gave me an experience of what it is like to go through major surgery. My encounters with depression. Playing my part in caring for my father through his Alzheimer’s Disease. I would happily never have had any of those experiences. But by letting me go through these, God has given me things whereby I can support people.

The mistake would have been to listen to the lies some Christians tell about these experiences. ‘If you haven’t been healed, then you don’t have enough faith.’ ‘If you suffer from depression, then you must have committed a sin.’ For to believe those lies stops us from trusting our Father in the darkness.

God invites us to trust him as we limp along after wrestling with him. He is the One who works all things together for good for those who love him. If we are struggling right now, let us take courage to trust him.

Thirdly and finally, wrestling with God leads to blessing.

A figurine of a man holding a child at Picryl. Public Domain.

This may be the opposite of what many Christians expect. We have just spoken about trust, and many of us have gained the idea that Christian trust is something simple and serene. Struggle doesn’t enter into it: that would be the opposite of trust. We ‘let go and let God.’

Now there are Christians who seem to have a gift for such trust. But many of us do not. And we are not necessarily inferior in God’s eyes because of that. Listen again to Jacob and his mystery divine assailant:

25 When the man saw that he did not prevail against Jacob, he struck him on the hip socket; and Jacob’s hip was put out of joint as he wrestled with him. 26 Then he said, ‘Let me go, for the day is breaking.’ But Jacob said, ‘I will not let you go, unless you bless me.’ 27 So he said to him, ‘What is your name?’ And he said, ‘Jacob.’ 28 Then the man said, ‘You shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and with humans, and have prevailed.’

You might think Jacob’s request for a blessing is another example of him trying get something out of the other party at their expense. And we don’t know all his motives. But whether or not his motives are pure, the divine messenger does indeed bless him. He gives him a new name:

‘You shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and with humans, and have prevailed.’

What Jacob has done here is honoured with a blessing. God approves of his wrestling to the point of prevailing.

Yes! God invites the struggle, and ultimately, he blesses it.

If you are wrestling with God about something, I want to encourage you to continue to do so. Be persistent. Persevere. You will prevail if you do. And you will discover blessing, perhaps of a style or magnitude you never considered.

This may not only be to do with the areas of life we have already pondered where we wrestle with God over adverse circumstances in our lives. One area where it is important that Christians wrestle with God is in prayer, and especially in intercession.

There are examples in Scripture and church history of people who have done this. The prophet Daniel confessed and interceded on behalf of God’s people in respect to their sins that had led them to exile in Babylon. He was eventually granted remarkable visions of God’s will, not just for his own people, but for the nations.

In World War Two, a group of people at the Bible College of Wales gathered to pray against the advances of Hitler and the Axis forces. They believed that if they succeeded, the spread of the Gospel would be hindered. Day after day and night after night they prayed, led by a man called Rees Howells.

I have been in the company of people I would call ‘prayer warriors’, and to listen to them struggle with God over issues of social injustice and personal pain was like listening to women in labour. But they persisted, and God blessed their wrestling in prayer.

When we wrestle with God, let us resist the temptation to dismiss it as unwelcome and seek an easy life. Let us trust God even in the wrestling, and let us persist until his blessing comes.

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Parables of the Kingdom, Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52 (Trinity 8 Ordinary 17 Year A)

Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52

Airbnb: 10 Downing Street: Perfect for short stays by Dunk on Flickr. CC 2.0.

When I see pictures of Number 10 Downing Street, my only surprise is that it isn’t a revolving door. This is the week in which our nation has had its seventh new Prime Minister in ten years.

And one of the early criticisms of Andy Burnham, as he announced his first policy decisions, was that many thought he was a people-pleaser. To be a people-pleaser is a weakness. You cannot please all of the people all of the time.

21/07/2026. Bath, United Kingdom. Prime Minister Andy Burnham visits First Bus’s Bath Depot. Picture by Lauren Hurley / No 10 Downing Street at Flickr. CC 4.0.

Yet what is one of the most frequent comments I get when people discover I am a minister? They say, “Oh, it must be so hard trying to please everyone” – as if pleasing everyone is what I should do, despite the fact that we recognise elsewhere such behaviour is a weakness.

It is not my job to try to please all of you. It is my job to please God. Whether I do or not is another matter. But that is why I am paid a stipend, not a salary. A stipend is a living allowance so that I can pray and seek what God wants me to do.

All that said, I nevertheless want the content of my preaching to reach as many people as possible. And most weeks, I know that’s a forlorn hope. The theme will be relevant to some people, but not to others.

However, this week is unusual. We heard a variety of short parables from the teaching of Jesus. They come from a block of Jesus’ teaching in Matthew 13 about the kingdom of heaven. So, while I am not setting out explicitly to please any of you, I do hope this week that there may be brief relevant elements in the sermon for most people.

We have five parables in our reading, and I will offer a brief point from each.

Firstly, the mustard seed:

Mustard seeds by Jessica Spengler on Flickr. CC 2.0.

We live in a world where people think they need to get known in order to have influence for good. You have to climb the greasy pole of politics, but to do so you need to be known. You may want to publish a book to get your message across, but publishers will ask what kind of a platform you already have: how many people follow you on social media, how many are signed up to receive your email newsletter, and so on. And we have the whole realm of the ‘social media influencer’, who has thousands of followers on YouTube or maybe Instagram. There they pronounce their views and review products that have been sent them free of charge by the manufacturers.

Before we scoff too loudly at current trends, let’s reflect on how many of us said when we were children that we wanted to be famous. How many of us encouraged our own children to follow their dreams, because anybody could see their dreams come true. It’s all cut from the same cloth.

But in the Parable of the Mustard Seed, Jesus reverses this. What we do in our present obscurity leads to future greatness in the kingdom.[1] Jesus himself lived out this example. Craig Keener says that Jesus came as a meek servant, wandering around Galilee healing the sick with his group of obscure disciples. The Romans took no notice of him until he offended Jewish aristocrats over the temple system.

In a world with governments in turmoil and full of wandering teachers and magicians, Jesus’ initial arrival as a meek and politically inconspicuous servant rendered his mission as opaque as his parables, except to disciples bearing the insight of faith.[2]

Jesus was content with obscurity. Yes, Jesus, the Son of God! But he knew that even there, without being famous, without being a public face, God could and would do his kingdom work through him.

Are we content to do kingdom of God things quietly, and leave the growth to God?

Secondly, the yeast:

Yeast by Chris Campbell on Flickr. CC 2.0.

This parable says something similar but takes it a step further. It says something like this: if you are willing to accept the call to serve the kingdom of heaven in obscurity and trust the outcomes to God, will you also be open to just how much God can accomplish this way?

Let’s listen again to Craig Keener:

Although Roman cities had bakeries, Galilean women baked their own families’ bread … The amount of flour involved here … represents roughly fifty pounds, providing enough bread for over one hundred people. A housewife would not normally fix so much meal and could not knead more than this; the unnatural magnitude of the illustration probably suggests that the kingdom far exceeds daily examples to which it may be compared.[3]

Do you want to see God do big things in the world? Then learn that your part in that purpose is not to hype things up but to continue working in obscurity and praying that God will spread the influence far and wide. It’s not something we hack for ourselves.

In pointing out that the word ‘yeast’ is better translated ‘leaven’, Maggi Dawn puts it this way:

If you joined (or observed) the great trend for making sourdough bread during the COVID pandemic, you will understand this: while yeast is something you add to flour to make it expand, leaven is more like sourdough: you add the flour to it, and the new flour is absorbed into the whole. The Kingdom of God is less about making small things bigger, and more about transforming the nature of everything it touches.

Are we ready for God to do something bigger than we can conceive? Do we want him to do that? I’m sure we do. If that is the case, then our task is not to fire up the hype machine, but to continue doing kingdom work in obscurity while praying that he will transform the nature of everything he touches through us.

Thirdly, the buried treasure:

Buried treasure by Carol VanHook on Flickr. CC 2.0.

I bought my current camera three years ago. It’s far and away the most complex camera I’ve ever owned. It’s also easily the best camera I’ve ever had.

But that also means it is by some distance the most expensive camera I’ve ever bought. How did I afford it, especially on a minister’s income? I traded in every piece of existing camera equipment I owned but could do without. I sold other possessions over a significant period of time.

And I’m glad I did it. For me, it was worth it, even though the new beast took a lot of getting used to, and indeed I am still learning more about its capabilities and features.

Jesus tells us in the parable of the buried treasure that the kingdom of heaven is worth so much that it will cost us everything we have. It is not that the owner of the field now uses the treasure to lead an extravagant lifestyle; instead,

The man not only recognised that its value outweighed all he had, but he acted accordingly.[4]

You can see the question this poses of us. Christianity is no hobby or leisure pursuit. It isn’t a preference, or a taste. It will take all we have. It will reorder our priorities. We do not just add it as a layer on top of everything else: rather, we start again from scratch with our lives when we enter the kingdom that Jesus announced.

For while the gift of salvation is free, discipleship is costly. As the great German Christian Dietrich Bonhoeffer pointed out, there is no such thing as ‘cheap grace’ in God’s kingdom. How can there be when it cost Jesus everything?

Fourthly, the merchant and the jewels:

The Austrian Imperial Crown Jewels, Imperial Treasury Museum, Hofburg Palace, Vienna by Alex-David Baldi on Flickr. CC 4.0.

Just as the parables of the mustard seed and the yeast are quite similar, so are the parables of the buried treasure and this one. Both have something to say about the cost of discipleship in God’s kingdom.

But look how willing the merchant is to sell everything he has in order to buy a fine pearl. Yes, taking up the challenge to follow Jesus is a costly affair. But it is not all misery. When we throw our lot in with Jesus wholeheartedly, we shall discover that it is all worth it. We shall find the joy of the kingdom.

In that sense,

the kingdom is like the merchant, not like the jewel: it’s less about some product or result you are promised, and more about what happens to you.

The kingdom changes us. We become different people. Our values change. What was once significant to us is no longer, for the kingdom has made us see everything in all creation differently. Disposable people are now precious to God. The things that the world chases after are no longer satisfying to us. A switch has flicked inside us. Now life is illuminated in a different way. It can’t be any other way:

One who was unwilling to sacrifice everything else for the kingdom, who did not believe its reality sufficiently to stake all one’s future on it, was unworthy of it.[5]

But if we are sold out to Jesus, then everything is new.

Fifthly and finally, the net:

Setting a large haul seine by FWC Fish and Wildlife Research Institute on Flickr. CC 2.0.

This final parable, which picks up on the common sight around the Lake of Galilee of fishermen separating the edible and kosher fish from the inedible[6], makes the most serious point of all.

This is the end game. This is where it is all leading. A final judgement, where God will vindicate the righteous and send the wicked to eternal loss, puts paid to the idea that God’s love means he will save everybody, whether they like it or not. Again, Maggi Dawn puts it well:

the Kingdom of God may be the best thing ever, a matter of immense rejoicing, freely offered to anyone who wants to join it — but it’s not fluffy. It’s free, but it’s not cheap. It demands something of us, and its consequences are serious.

Jesus doesn’t tell us here who are the wicked and who are the righteous, but I think it’s safe to assume that the righteous are those who have responded positively to the kingdom message. They have embraced God’s free gift of salvation in Christ by repentance and faith and have taken on board the blessings and demands of the kingdom. They are the ones who have sold everything to gain treasure and rejoiced in their pearl of great price. They are the ones who are willing to work in obscurity like the mustard seed or the yeast, not building their own reputation but that of Jesus, as they seek to transform everything they touch.

Whichever of these parables speaks to us today, they all speak to us about our life in the kingdom.

And whichever it most relevant to us in our current situation, Jesus asks us, as he did the disciples at the time, ‘Have you understood all these things?’ (verse 51)

Have we understood the response we need to make to God’s kingdom?

[1] Craig Keener, The Gospel of Matthew: A Socio-Rhetorical Commentary, p388.

[2] Keener, p387.

[3] Keener, p388f.

[4] Keener, p392; italics his.

[5] Keener, p392.

[6] Keener, p392.

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I Can Hear Music: Are We Climbing Jacob’s Ladder? Genesis 28:10-22 (Trinity 7 Ordinary 16 Year A)

Genesis 28:10-22

I cannot sing to save my life. I cannot play an instrument (although I once made an abortive attempt to learn the guitar). But I love music. It soundtracks my life. I hear somebody say something, and I make an association with a song lyric. In the immortal stylings of the Beach Boys, I Can Hear Music.

And that was my experience coming back to this famous passage, three years since it last leapt out at me in the Lectionary. As I read the text, I thought less of theological terms and more of song titles.

I will freely concede that the author (or authors) of Genesis had no clue about the people who went through my mind: the aforesaid Beach Boys, Del Shannon, Bonnie Raitt, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, and Kate Bush for starters. But I am going to use some of their song titles to peg the teaching of this story for us.

Firstly, Jacob is On The Run:

If Pink Floyd are too weird for you, I’ll let you have Del Shannon’s Runaway

or my preferred version of that song by Bonnie Raitt:

Why has Jacob ‘left Beersheba and set out for Harran’ (verse 10)? Because he has tricked his elderly, frail father Isaac so that he can steal his twin brother Esau’s birthright. Now, his mother Rebekah, who has conspired with him against her own husband and other son, urges him not only to leave for his own safety but also because he needs to find a wife if the birthright promise is to be fulfilled through him.

Lies and deception in a family. What a mess.

And nor will Jacob be the only person to run from others or from God in the Scriptures. Adam and Eve have already tried hiding in Eden. Later, Jonah will try to escape a call of God that he doesn’t like by jumping on a ship going in the opposite direction.

But God loves runaways. Adam and Eve are unsuccessful in hiding. God uses a storm and a big fish to catch up with Jonah and redirect his life. And in this story, Jacob too cannot run from God.

God didn’t stop pursuing runaways with his love when the pages of Scripture were closed. He chased after an English professor who had had enough of ideas about God after he witnessed horrors in World War One. But later, he would grudgingly become what he called ‘the most reluctant convert in Christendom’. Looking back, he would actually say he was ‘surprised by joy.’ His name? Clive Staples Lewis.

This story reveals God’s care for runaways. He has not changed his character. I wonder whether this gives us heart for those we love who have caused us such sorrow by refusing to share in our faith. Are you like me, and have loved ones for whom you pray pretty much every day? Then take heart. God loves your runaways. Keep praying, and one day he will act to make himself known to them. He may even be preparing things behind the scenes now.

Or are any of us in some sense runaways? We may have faith, but like Jacob we may be running in fear because we know we have done something terrible. Or we may be running away like Jonah, because we fear the cost or consequences of saying yes to something challenging that we know God has spoken to us about.

Either way, the safest course of action is to give up running. God has grace and mercy for even the worst things we have done. And nowhere is their greater peace than in the centre of God’s will for us.

Secondly, Jacob Sees a Stairway to Heaven:

There is a popular misconception here, perhaps encapsulated in the old slave spiritual ‘We Are Climbing Jacob’s Ladder’:

We think we have to climb the ladder from earth to heaven. Runaways often think this. To atone for their wrongdoing, they must make the effort to attain the moral heights that they have so singularly failed to ascend.

But in Jacob’s dream, the ladder (or ramp) is placed on the earth, ‘and the angels of God were ascending and descending on it’ (verse 12). We don’t make our own way to heaven. God’s messengers check out what’s happening on earth and report to the Lord.

And it is the Lord himself who has set this ramp upon the earth to reach heaven. He reaffirms the covenant that he had first made with Jacob’s grandfather Abraham. Now the promise comes down the line. It still stands. God promises the same innumerable descendants who will bless the earth, and he promises to take care of this runaway (verses 13-15).

There’s a word for this. Grace.

This is not the popular idea of being good enough for God. It is not about keeping the rules as a way of gaining entrance to heaven. It is not about our good deeds outweighing our bad deeds, as our Muslim friends hope.

This story is an early sign of what is to come in all its fulness in the Gospel announced by Jesus and the apostles. We are all failures, whether or not we are runaways. But God has made a way back to him. The ultimate stairway to heaven will be the Cross of Christ. Grace and mercy pour out to us from the loving heart of God.

And sure, you’ve heard that thousands of times before. But it bears repeating. Even we who hear about grace every Sunday slip back into old ways of thinking and behaving from time to time. ‘I haven’t repented enough.’ ‘I haven’t lived as Jesus wants me to and I don’t deserve his love.’

Remember grace. It’s not so much a stairway to heaven as a stairway from heaven.

Sometimes we want to insert moral conditions to the receipt of God’s love, because we realise just how scandalous it is. If this grace is how God operates, then the logical consequence is that it is open to all, even to the worst of people.

Around the time of 9/11, I used to write a regular column in a local newspaper. That week, you can imagine I suddenly had to change what I had prepared. Whilst expressing horror at what the terrorists had done and saying they deserved the judgment of God, I also told the true story of Henry Gerecke, an American Lutheran minister who was appointed as the Protestant chaplain to the Nazi war criminals at the Nuremberg trials.

Gerecke had lost a son to the Nazis. He really didn’t want to be a chaplain to these monsters. But God would let him have no peace until he agreed.

And then, he set about sharing the Gospel with these evil men. Some resisted, right up until they were hung. But others wept, confessed, repented, and threw themselves on the mercy of God.

The newspaper didn’t include that part of my article.

And some of us would like to pretend that it didn’t happen. But the story is documented[1].

All of us depend on a stairway from heaven.

Thirdly and finally, was Jacob Running Up That Hill?

Now that might not seem an obvious choice of song until you remember how the chorus begins:

And if I only could
I’d make a deal with God
And I’d get him to swap our places

A deal with God. That was Kate Bush’s original title for the song, until EMI’s marketing department said that certain countries wouldn’t play it with a title like that.

So – did Jacob make a deal with God? It rather sounds like it at the end of the reading. ‘If God will be with me … if God will protect me … if God will provide for me … then he will be my God and I will give him a tenth of all I have’ (verses 20-22). If you do things for me, then I’ll do stuff for you. I have read the passage like that for years. I might even have preached on it that way.

But not anymore. It’s a vow (verse 20). And the scholar John Goldingay (whose commentary on Genesis I bought with your very kind Christmas present of a book token) says that Jacob is just beginning near the end of where God ended in the promises he made to him in the dream[2]. There might be a bit of contract language still present, and of course Jacob still has a lot to learn, but essentially the runaway has found grace at the foot of the stairway from heaven and now he makes a response of gratitude.

Forgiveness is not a cheap get-out-of-jail-free card. As the theologian Amy Orr-Ewing says in her recent book on forgiveness,

If the basis for divine forgiveness is repentance, it should follow that a perpetrator of crime – seeking divine forgiveness – is willing to pay the civil or criminal penalty for their crime.[3]

There is no deal with God, but there is the response of honesty and gratitude. As August Gottlieb Spangenburg, one of the Moravian bishops who influenced John Wesley put it in a hymn,

What shall we offer our good Lord,
poor nothings, for his boundless grace?
Fain would we his great name record
and worthily set forth his praise.[4]

Jacob himself begins with the giving of a tithe. We can give, we can pay forward God’s grace to others, we can look for a place to serve in the church, we can consider how to bless others with God’s love in the world – it may be a cliché to say that the possibilities are endless, but it’s not far from the truth.

And don’t say, I can’t do anything very well, just do something out of gratitude to God. As the late Leonard Cohen said, ‘Forget your perfect offering.’

After all, Jacob will make some very imperfect offerings from hereon in. He, the deceiver, will suffer deceit at the hands of his uncle Laban. He will be in fear and trepidation when the time comes for reconciliation with his brother Esau. He will wrestle with God through the night and come out limping.

Let us simply acknowledge that we who have run away from God have found him build a stairway from heaven to us so that he can show us his grace. Now let’s simply get on with the gratitude.

And let God hear your music.

[1] Tim Townsend, Mission at Nuremberg: An American Army Chaplain and the Trial of the Nazis

[2] John Goldingay, Genesis (Baker Commentary on the Old Testament), p454.

[3] Amy Orr-Ewing, Forgiveness: Reclaiming its Power in a Culture of Outrage and Fear, p27 n7 on p179.

[4] Singing the Faith #671 verse 1.

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The Test of Faith, Genesis 22:1-14 (Trinity 4 Ordinary 13 Year A)

Genesis 22:1-14

Abraham and Isaac by Gainsborough Dupont at Picryl. Public Domain.

The first time I took my driving test, my instructor said to me, ‘You’ll be all right, just so long as you don’t get Mr McRea as your examiner.’

You can imagine who I got. My left foot kept shaking on the clutch, I don’t know how many times I stalled, and my failure was a foregone conclusion from the first minute of the test.

On my second test, I didn’t fail. But neither did I pass. A quarter of a mile from the end of the test route, there was a nail in the road, and I sustained a puncture. Because I didn’t complete the route, I was given a ‘no result.’

I passed the third time. And on the basis of how that test went, I think I would have passed the second time, but for that pesky nail.

‘After these things God tested Abraham’ (verse 1a)

But what a test this was. When I became a father later in life than most (but nothing like as late as Abraham), this story changed from a Sunday School episode to a distressing narrative. How could you ask a parent to do this? What trauma did it leave in Isaac?

And those who hate our faith love to point to Bible stories like this one to say, look at what a cruel God your Scriptures describe. Do you really want us to believe in a God like this?

So come with me as we wrestle with this disturbing but profound passage. Abraham’s test of faith can illuminate our faith.

I’m going to divide this into three sections: speech, action, and provision.

Firstly, speech:

File:Book of Genesis Chapter 22-1 (Bible Illustrations by Sweet Media).jpg – Wikimedia Commons CC 3.0

God speaks to Abraham and gives him this shattering assignment. Sacrifice Isaac, your son of the promise.

If somebody came to me today and said they believed God had called them to sacrifice one of their children, I would doubt whether they had heard God. Why would I say that now, and yet also maintain that Abraham did hear God?

The most important way in which we test whether a claim to hear God’s voice is true is by measuring it against what we know about the general will of God. Our basic plumbline for that is the Bible. Nothing beyond and outside the Bible has quite the same status, because it concludes where it does due to the supremacy of Christ.

In this case, we know from the story of Scripture that God is opposed to child sacrifice. Indeed, when the Israelites enter the Promised Land, one of the reasons he wants them to remove the existing people is that they practice child sacrifice, and it is an abomination to him.

So why not here? Because at this point, God has not yet revealed that. Abraham doesn’t have that particular yardstick to measure against. Now as we know with hindsight, God will ensure the child sacrifice doesn’t happen here, but at this juncture in history Abraham has no grounds to rule it out. He has heard God speak. Somehow, he gets himself together to respond.

There are many things we shall consider when we are wondering whether God has truly spoken to us, and especially if it is something surprising or unusual. There are some Christians who seem to think that the wackier it is, the more likely it is to be of God. And there are others who take the opposite view.

But we shall come back to the big ones. What is the advice and experience of wise Christians? Do the circumstances point us in a particular direction? What does careful reflection and thought tell us? Who does this promote: me or the kingdom of God?

And most of all, is this consistent with what we know about the character of God from Holy Scripture?

You have all heard a lot about scammers on the Internet. One way in which they try to trick people and exploit them is by seeking to make them panic and make rushed decisions. ‘You must phone this number now’ – but it takes you to more criminals. The standard advice is to take your time if you are not at all sure.

I think it is similar with discerning the speech of God. God will not pressurise you and panic you into a hasty decision that you will later regret. Because he is full of grace, he will not be worried if you seek to test whether you have heard him speak. It is only other forces that will aim to frighten you and unnerve you.

Secondly, action:

Day Of Service by Saint Joseph’s University on Flickr. CC 2.0

Abraham acts on what he has heard God say.

It’s easy to say that but think what is behind Abraham’s action. Think of the cost, and the possible confusion.

Isaac is the child or the promise. God had previously promised Abraham and Sarah in their old age that they, despite being decades past their fertile years, would have a son. And not only that, God was going to make their descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and the sand on the seashore. So why would God now call for that same child, by now probably a teenager[1], to be killed? Doesn’t it go against all that God has revealed as his plan, not only for Abraham’s family but also for his purposes for the world?

And how would it hit him personally? As I said in the introduction, I became a father at a later age than many – although nothing like as late as Abraham! I am sure that most family and friends had thought it was seriously possible that I would neither marry nor become a parent. One of my nephews has David as a middle name, and I’ve always wondered if that was a kind gesture in case I never had children of my own. Were I to be asked to give up one or both of my children, I would become a human wreck. So what might Abraham have felt? We are not told.

But we are told he still acts in obedience to God’s voice. And that is the sign of faith: when God speaks, we respond with the appropriate action.

An awful lot of Christians seem to get worried about not knowing God’s will for their lives. Yet the truth is, he has already given all of us a lot to be getting on with. It’s just that we find some of it, such as much of the teaching of Jesus, too challenging for our liking!

It was Mark Twain who said, it’s not the parts of the Bible that I don’t understand that trouble me: it’s the parts that I do understand that worry me.

I wonder whether some of us ought to take seriously the fact that God has indeed spoken to us, and that we need to respond. It doesn’t have to be something dramatic and life-changing. It may simply be a challenge about how we conduct our daily lives.

We have read the Scriptures. We have heard them read and expounded on Sundays, and maybe in Bible studies too. I don’t think God is half as silent as we claim he is. I suspect he has already spoken quite a lot to us and has given us plenty to be getting on with. We now need to respond in faith by our actions.

Thirdly and finally, provision:

J Hudson Taylor. Photomechanical print at Picryl. Public Domain

Here we get onto the question of the lamb. Isaac asks where the lamb for the burnt-offering is. Abraham replies that God will supply one – although at that point, he is thinking that Isaac is the lamb. Then, when the angel of the Lord calls a halt to the sacrifice, Abraham sees a lamb caught in a thicket by its thorns. God has indeed provided.

Christians of course give a further layer of meaning to this. God will supply his own Son as the Lamb of God to be the offering for the world. But even without that, this is an important truth to remember in the life of faith. When God speaks and calls us to action, he will provide what we need. Speech leads to action leads to provision. This is the natural sequence in the life of faith.

James Hudson Taylor was a pioneer Christian missionary to China in the nineteenth century. He faced many challenges and discouragements in such a huge task. He lost his first wife Maria to cholera. Several children died in infancy. He lived with chronic depression.

His work meant he endured persecution from local authorities, bandits, and warlords during both the Taiping Rebellion and the Boxer Rebellion. He faced language difficulties and a harsh climate. Established organisations criticised him for adopting traditional Chinese dress. Some workers deserted him, because progress was slow.

And with no guaranteed income, he and his colleagues had barely enough money to survive.

But in that context, he wrote these famous words:

Depend on it. God’s work done in God’s way will never lack God’s supply. He is too wise a God to frustrate His purposes for lack of funds, and He can just as easily supply them ahead of time as afterwards, and He much prefers doing so.

Again, there is the pattern: speech leads to action leads to provision. And that’s the challenge. If we have heard God speak, we are called into action, while believing God will provide. That’s often the point at which we are most tested. Will we believe that God will provide for us, so that we can act in response to his challenging word?

I have seen it go both ways. I saw a youth ministry that needed to hire larger premises, which were outside its budget. But they believed God was stretching them, and that God would provide. When they said yes to hiring the new place, a Christian businessman in the town stepped forward with the funding.

But I have also seen a church that wanted to find new ways forward. It engaged a Christian architect. He presented exciting plans that would have given them new opportunities. The church was excited, too. Until it heard the cost. And then all the energy drained away. They acted as if the provision all depended on them, and not their Lord.

So which way will we go? Have we heard God speak? Are we preparing for action? Will we believe in his provision?

Conclusion

There’s a coda to this story. We shouldn’t really finish at verse 14, as the Lectionary dictates. The natural break is at verse 19. In the verses we didn’t read, God re-emphasises his purposes for Abraham and his descendants, and his settled will to bless them so that all the nations of the world will also be blessed.

God promises his blessing when in faith we hear him speak, launch into action, and trust him to provide.

Who would like to see God’s greater blessing on this church? Because this is the way.  

[1] John Goldingay, Genesis (Baker Commentary on the Old Testament), p347.

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What Jesus Says About Facing Pressure, Matthew 10:24-39 (Ordinary 12 Trinity 3 Year A)

Matthew 10:24-39

A music magazine I read has a column every month where it asks three musicians various questions, including what was the first record they ever bought, and where?

Well, how about you? For me, if you exclude the set of Freddie and the Dreamers singles my aunt and uncle gave me when I was about five, it would be that I spent a token I was given as a Sunday School prize. It was a compilation album by someone I would no longer wish to admit to having liked – Rolf Harris.

When I got to my early teens and began serious record collecting, one of my first purchases was also a compilation album: Simon and Garfunkel’s Greatest Hits.

The thing about compilations is that they pull material from various stages of a musician’s career, and the only thing that gives them continuity is the performer in question.

What we have in our passage today is like that. It seems to be a compilation of different parts of Jesus’ teaching; all put together in one place by Matthew. The nearest equivalent passages in other Gospels like Luke do not appear all together, as they do here.

What holds them together? Well, the ‘artist’ is Jesus – obviously! If there is anything more, it is about discipleship under pressure. Jesus knew his followers would be put under pressure for their loyalty to him. Even if the pressures we face on our faith aren’t quite the same, there is still a lot here to help us stay faithful when the difficulties come.

The first pressure is fear.

Fear and Phobia free stock photo from Public Domain Pictures.

In verses 24 to 31, Jesus talks about those who are like Beelzebul, the devil, and who therefore implicitly make trouble for us. But he says, if you’re going to fear anyone, fear God – yet he cares for us more than the sparrows, and he numbers every hair on our heads.

If we trust in our heavenly Father, it puts our earthly fears in perspective. Whatever happens to us, we are safe in his hands. I know that’s easier said than done at times, but it is a truth and a hope to cling onto when times are dark.

Yesterday, we celebrated just one such person at Midhurst. Pauline had been the church treasurer until earlier this year, when she was given a terminal diagnosis with cancer. While she made what she could of time with her family in her final weeks and months, there was one thing she told me more than once. And I know she told others, too.

She said, I am not worried about where I am going. I trust in the Lord, and I am safe in his hands.

And as I listened to her saying that there was no anxiety in her voice. She truly believed that. Cancer could have imbued her with fear. But she knew Jesus. And that changed everything.

Now like I said, for some of us, this is still easier said than done. It may take us a while to work through the shock of bad news. Not all of us can flick a switch and have instant peace. Some of us will take a little journey before we get to that point of acceptance and peace. I think I am one such person. And so I am preaching as much to myself as to you on this. We may have things to grieve before we can feel the peace.

But that doesn’t change the fact that this is a destination Jesus offers to all his disciples. Whatever threatens to make us afraid, God is ready and willing to give us his gift of peace. For whatever happens to us, we belong to him. As the Apostle Paul told the Romans, nothing can separate us from the love of God that is ours in Christ Jesus our Lord.

We can also be afraid when something unjust is perpetrated against us. That is the sort of thing the children of Beelzebul can do. That is why Jesus reassured his disciples that ‘there is nothing concealed that will not be disclosed, or hidden that will not be made known’ (verse 27). In other words, God will expose these people.

I don’t know whether you’ve been on the end of unjust accusations, but I have. I can think of at least two occasions when church members who had taken a dislike to me then tried to make false Safeguarding allegations against me. It took me a while to realise that God was still with me, and that I had justice on my side. But it was true. God is bigger than our fears.

The second pressure is shame.

Woman wearing black long-sleeved shirt. Public Domain image at PickPik.

32 ‘Whoever acknowledges me before others, I will also acknowledge before my Father in heaven. 33 But whoever disowns me before others, I will disown before my Father in heaven.

In other words, don’t be ashamed of Jesus. There will be plenty of social pressure to disown him or play down our commitment to him and our love of him.

In our society, it’s often more about the risk of mockery. Like the time when I was on the bus going home from school with other friends, and one of them, Clifford, said sneeringly to me, ‘I hear you had a spiritual experience last weekend.’ (I had been away on a circuit youth weekend.) I played it down.

But in other societies today or in the time of those first Christian disciples, it was much more serious. I am currently reading the autobiography of John Lennox. If you haven’t heard of him, John Lennox is Emeritus Professor of Mathematics at Oxford University. He holds three doctorates and is also a committed Christian. He has become a doughty defender of the Christian faith in the public arena and is well-known for having debated leading atheists such as Richard Dawkins and the late Christopher Hitchens.

However, what is much less known about him is the amount of his spare time in between teaching at both Cardiff and Oxford universities he gave to travelling to Eastern Europe before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall. He and others provided education in Maths, science, and Christianity to people there.

In one story of those trips that he tells in the book, he talks about a Christian family in the former East Germany that he met. The children of the family were thrown out of school at the age of fourteen for continuing to profess faith in Jesus. No more education for them, as a punishment for their faith. No access to anything other than the most menial of jobs. But they were not ashamed of Jesus.

We know how so many of those first disciples held to their faith in Jesus when confronted with the pressure to deny him and be ashamed of their faith. So, what kept them, and those young East German Christians, loyal when they could have had an easier life if they had denied Jesus?

Surely, it was knowing just how much Jesus had done for them, how much he loved them, and how much it had already cost him to do so. Do we always keep that at the forefront of our minds? If I had done that, maybe I wouldn’t have clammed up on that bus trip. Maybe some of you wouldn’t have given in to social pressures, either, if you regularly remembered that Jesus loved us to the point of death.

The third and final pressure is a bit of a shock: it’s family.

Family silhouette on seashore during sunset. Public Domain image at PickPik.

In verses 34 to 39 Jesus says that he will divide family members against each other, and you aren’t worthy to be his disciple if you don’t love him more than you love your family.

Well! Isn’t the church supposed to be pro-family? Aren’t we the ones who care about marriages not only surviving but thriving? Aren’t we the ones who preach faithfulness and a strict sexual ethic? Aren’t we the ones who put on parenting courses so that children will be raised well? We’re pretty invested in the institution of the family.

But Jesus here is not addressing people who undermine the family, who promote the easy break-up of relationships, and the idea that you put your own happiness ahead of that of your spouse. No: he is saying something different from what we typically campaign about. He is telling us that even our families can become idols. Family life can trump commitment to God.

And it’s true. How many times today do family events mean that we don’t come to worship? How about what happens when a young person from a non-Christian family shows an interest in faith? It’s not unusual for their family to put pressure on them not to get too committed. Out come all the stories about religious cults.

Jesus has an important point here. Yes, elsewhere he teaches about the sanctity of marriage and all those things. But here he warns us never to put anything above our commitment to him, not even our families. It doesn’t mean that we neglect those we love, but it does mean that our family relationships must never compromise our radical commitment to Jesus.

I understand the pull of this temptation. I waited longer than most for the right woman to marry, and then to become a father. I moved my day off to Saturday to make it easier to have family time. Hence, I still have to ask myself: is Jesus still the most important person in my life?

I know a married couple who became Christians in adult life, a few years into their marriage. One day, one of them said rather nervously to the other, ‘I’m sorry, but there is someone else I love more than you.’

I wonder whether the other spouse thought they were about to hear the confession of an affair.

But then the first spouse continued. ‘His name is Jesus.’

How do we show our loved ones that Jesus is number one in our lives? Or do we only express any dedication to Jesus within the space that our family members allow us?

We need to remember the old saying: Jesus is a capitalist. He only believes in takeover bids.

And that’s right. That’s why we call him ‘Lord.’ We cannot call him Lord and then put someone else or something else higher in our lives than him.

Maybe family is not where we feel that temptation. But for some of us, it is. And if it’s not family, who or what else is it that we are enticed to elevate to a greater priority than Jesus? Do we need to do some re-ordering of our lives?

Conclusion

Is it any wonder that these verses conclude with Jesus reminding us that we need to take up our cross and follow him?

The Cross shows us the extent of his love for us, and hence why it puts our fears into context.

The Cross is where not only sin but also shame is dealt with.

The Cross is the price Jesus paid for us all. Does he not deserve to have our first, our highest, and our greatest loyalty?

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What Mission Requires According To Jesus, Matthew 9:35-10:8 (Trinity 2 Ordinary 11 Year A)

Matthew 9:35-10:8

Jesus Christ Heals The Sick – vector image at Wannapik. CC 3.0.

Mission. It’s everything the church is sent into the world to do. It’s our proclamation in words and deeds of God’s kingdom that has come in Jesus.

And increasingly, it’s on the lips of Christians and churches. Well – at least as an agenda item for our meetings.

Maybe church decline has made us wake up to this. In a society where Christianity is no longer natural or normal, we are belatedly realising that we cannot just sit here and wait for people to come to us, as past generations of Christians did.

But then we jump into panic mode. We lift a technique or a fashionable approach off the shelf. It comes with great claims and great reviews. Perhaps there is a book that tells us of the wonderful results this method has had elsewhere.

So we try it. But it doesn’t work for us. More gloom and despair.

Could it be that we need to listen to Jesus? I know that sounds obvious, and possibly patronising, but it’s shocking how little time we do spend seeking out his voice on the matter.

I’m going to suggest we listen to what Jesus has to say about what mission requires from our reading today.

Firstly, Jesus says mission requires compassion:

Image of sheep sourced at PxHere. Public Domain.

35 Jesus went through all the towns and villages, teaching in their synagogues, proclaiming the good news of the kingdom and healing every disease and illness. 36 When he saw the crowds, he had compassion on them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.

There it is: ‘he had compassion on them.’ Compassion for the crowds is his motivation. They have been let down by their leaders. This has left them far from God. He sees their need, and he has compassion. This is why he engages in mission. Compassion.

I have to say, it is not always why we dip our toes into the waters of mission. Our motives can be different.

Martyn Atkins, a former Principal of Cliff College and Secretary of the Methodist Conference, used to tell a story about how he visited a church that said they wanted to engage in mission. He asked them why.

The reply came back that they had lost numbers and had a lot of job vacancies to fill. Otherwise, the church wouldn’t survive into the future.

Atkins observed that this was a poor motivation for mission. It was a motivation that didn’t care about the people they wanted to reach. They only cared about themselves.

Compassion is the only healthy motivation for mission. What we need to consider is not so much the future of the church as the needs of people who do not yet know Jesus.

They may not realise that they are ‘harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd,’ but that does not change their need of Christ. They may be satisfied with reaching their own standard of what it is to be a good person, but they still need Jesus. They may think they will be satisfied by chasing money, but that only demonstrates their inner emptiness, even if they don’t know it yet.

I am sure you can think of people you know who do not yet acknowledge Jesus as Lord. Some of them will be as close as your own family. However full and happy their lives may be outwardly, they are lacking the most important thing of all. Can you allow compassion to rise up within you for them, and let that drive you to prayer, just as it did Jesus?

Others of them will have the kind of needs that Jesus met in the reading. Will you allow their presenting needs also to motivate you to compassionate prayer for them, and for their deepest needs, namely to know Christ?

I hope you have a list of people you pray for regularly – and I would suggest daily. Will you ask God to let you feel something of what his heart feels for them? And as a result, will you let the compassion of the Father grow in your heart, and motivate your prayers, your words, and your actions for the people on your list?

Secondly, Jesus says mission requires delegation:

Sheldon by Dave Faulkner. CC 2.0.

37 Then he said to his disciples, ‘The harvest is plentiful but the workers are few. 38 Ask the Lord of the harvest, therefore, to send out workers into his harvest field.’

1 Jesus called his twelve disciples to him and gave them authority to drive out impure spirits and to heal every disease and illness.

Jesus delegates. Even he can’t do it all. He appoints others to share in his mission. I sometimes wonder how well today’s church has learnt this lesson.

Outside of my local church responsibilities, I have spent some time in recent years helping probationer Methodist ministers (those in their first two years of ministry). I have provided reflective supervision for some as a safe space for some to ponder how things are going. I have also served on the District Probationers’ Committee. In doing this, I have observed the crazy list of ‘competencies’ that new ministers are expected to display, according to the official documents. They are supposed to prove themselves as good preachers, as leaders of traditional and modern worship, as community figures, as pastors, as people with a prophetic voice, as able administrators, as evangelists, as wise on property issues, and so on.

Quite honestly, the system wants people who are better than Jesus. No wonder some circuits write specifications for new ministers that mean the Archangel Gabriel would be turned down. I am reminded of the lay leader who said many years ago when talking about recruiting a minister, ‘You don’t buy a dog and then wag your own tail.’

And how nice to be compared to a dog, by the way.

Oh, and if you think that’s fanciful, there was a church in one of my previous circuits, where, when the circuit asked them to provide volunteers, responded, ‘We don’t do things: we pay other people to do them for us.’

Jesus shows us a different way. Delegation. Responsibilities are shared. They cannot be loaded on one person. Even Jesus cannot do it all. He appoints apostles. They will share in his mission.

We all have a part to play in the mission of God. We do not hire someone else to do the dirty work for us. While we shall each have different gifts and strengths, we are all sent into the world to be witnesses to the love of God in Christ.

Put it another way: if compassion has motivated us to pray for people, then this is the point at which we become the answers to our own prayers. We need to be willing to do what it takes.

How can we use our gifts and talents to demonstrate God’s love to others? If you are good at cooking or baking, have you thought of making some food for a sick person, or a grieving family, or someone who is struggling financially? If you have musical gifts, can you use them to soothe people with troubled souls? If you are good with words, can you bring hope or comfort to those who are despairing?

And given that people’s deepest need is that they are like sheep without a shepherd, will you rely on the Holy Spirit to give you the right words at the right time to point them to the Good Shepherd?

Thirdly and finally, Jesus says mission requires imitation:

Compare what Jesus did with what he called the apostles to do. First, Jesus:

35 Jesus went through all the towns and villages, teaching in their synagogues, proclaiming the good news of the kingdom and healing every disease and illness.

Now, hear again what he commanded the apostles:

7 As you go, proclaim this message: “The kingdom of heaven has come near.” 8 Heal those who are ill, raise the dead, cleanse those who have leprosy, drive out demons. Freely you have received; freely give.

It’s pretty similar, isn’t it? Jesus might just as well have said, ‘Go and do what I’ve been doing.’

Simples, as the advert would say.

But I hear you protest. And I do, too. Mission is as simple as healing the sick, casting out demons, and raising the dead? Well, I don’t call that simple.

Here’s the thing. We don’t all have all the gifts of Jesus, although there’s no harm in seeking more spiritual gifts from the Holy Spirit. But we do have some.

And even if we don’t have a specific gift, there is still something for us to do. For example, some people seem to have a specific powerful ministry of intercession, but we all have the general call to pray. Others have a specific gift of evangelism, but we all have the general call to be witnesses. Some have a specific healing ministry, but we all have the general call to pray for the sick. And you never know what God might do.

Let me repeat a story I have certainly told informally in some church circles and may have mentioned in the odd sermon. I once had a political refugee join one of my churches. He had fled for his life from another country where the regime was one of the cruellest Islamic governments in the world. He had to depart so quickly he left behind his wife and young son. And he didn’t know that his wife was pregnant with their second son.

He had shown an interest in Christianity and joined our church, slowly picking up English as he went. He came to Sunday worship and small groups.

One day, after a morning service, he asked me to pray for his second son back home. He was very sick. His wife had taken him to various doctors, but none could help him. Would I pray? Of course. I said a simple, short prayer, and thought no more of it.

Until, that is, he asked to be baptised. Two of us questioned him. He said that he had never come across anything in Islam like the teaching of Jesus, especially in the Sermon on the Mount. He also noticed how Christianity treated women so much better than Islam.

And one last thing. Did I remember when he asked me to pray for his younger son? Had he told me that after that, his son had been healed?

Well, wow. Because I have never thought I had a healing ministry. That is only one of two cases I know of where I have prayed for someone and they have been healed. But this incident played its part in leading this man to Christ.

Conclusion

So how about we let the compassion of Jesus for people in need drive our mission, rather than our fretting about the state of the church?

How about we all accept the responsibility to play a part in the mission of God, rather than just leaving it to the ‘paid staff’?

And how about we begin to imitate the ministry of Jesus, even if we think what we’re doing is feeble in comparison to what he did? Because you never know what his Spirit might do through your offering.

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