How To Avoid Idolatry Exodus 32:1-14 (Trinity 19 Ordinary 28 Year A)

Exodus 32:1-14

Golden Calf by Gerard van der Leun. CC 2.0.

How long would you like your Bible readings in church to be? Would you cope with one that was three chapters long? I thought not.

But that’s what the commentary I consulted for this sermon seemed to claim. The author pointed out that chapters 32 to 34 of Exodus are all of a piece. They tell a story. It begins with Israel’s rebellion that we heard about, it continues with the mediation of Moses (again, we heard that), and concludes with restoration (we didn’t really get to that).

We only have one episode from that larger story to consider. How might we approach this segment of a bigger story?

As I pondered the passage, the closing words of John’s First Epistle came into mind: ‘Little children, keep yourselves from idols.’ Israel didn’t keep herself from idols. It’s our challenge to do the opposite of their poor example in the story.

Hence, our theme today is, ‘How do we guard against idolatry in our lives?’ For idolatry – the worship of false gods – is alive and well today, even if we don’t tend to bump into golden calves.

I believe that by looking at the opposite of what Israel did here, we can learn how to guard ourselves against idolatry.

Firstly, patience:

Public Domain image at PxHere.

When the people saw that Moses was so long in coming down from the mountain, they gathered round Aaron and said, ‘Come, make us gods who will go before us. As for this fellow Moses who brought us up out of Egypt, we don’t know what has happened to him.’ (Verse 1)

At this stage in their history, Israel largely only hears from God through Moses. After the Ten Commandments, they asked Moses to speak to them, and for God not to speak to them directly, because that made them afraid.

Therefore, Moses’ absence from them at this point leads to them not hearing from God through him. At this point, they lose patience and decide it’s time to make an idol. Of course, they don’t consider how the idol will speak to them in place of God, but idol-worshippers are not known for their common sense.

When we first come to faith in Jesus Christ, it’s not unusual to experience a whole series of wonderful events where God speaks to us clearly or does amazing things in our lives. Testimonies to what he does in the early stages of our faith can be quite dramatic.

However, as we go on with him over the years, God can become quieter. We wait for the same dazzling interventions and they don’t come.

For some people, it can even become a disturbing season of life, a so-called ‘Dark night of the soul.’

But for all of us, this is meant to be a season of maturing. When God is not putting on his laser light show in our lives, he wants us simply to keep on with basic obedient faith. He may not be so vociferous at this point in our lives, but when we stop to think about it, we realise he has already spoken quite a lot about how he wants us to live the Christian life. We have the whole Bible for starters: it’s just that we sometimes don’t want to do what he has plainly told us to do!

It’s important not to lose patience as the Israelites did. It’s a sign of immaturity to expect the entire life of faith to be lived in Technicolor. Often, it’s in black and white, with lots of grey.

If we lose our patience, we end up creating false gods that are designed to tickle our immature desires for the spectacular. They will never satisfy. And they will prevent us from knowing better the simple, uncomplicated ways of faith to which God often calls us.

Alternatively, if we lose our patience we demand the instant, and when God doesn’t co-operate we find some technological substitutes for him in our society. Tech becomes our idol. But it doesn’t satisfy, either.  

The first book I ever read by the late great spiritual writer Eugene Peterson was on the ‘Psalms of Ascent’, the psalms sung by pilgrims on their way to Jerusalem. He called it ‘A Long Obedience in the Same Direction’, and for most of our lives that is the discipline by which we know the true God. Yes, from time to time he will do something special and spectacular, but mostly he calls us to a patient obedience.

Secondly, memory:

Remember: free image at freepingimg.com.

‘As for this fellow Moses who brought us up out of Egypt, we don’t know what has happened to him.’ (Verse 1b)

Now granted, the Israelites wanted Moses to speak for God, but it still wasn’t Moses who delivered them from Egypt. He led them, but it was the Lord who brought them out. He orchestrated the plagues and the Passover. He divided the sea. But this doesn’t register. Without a proper memory of God, they make a pale substitute. They choose a calf, a common idol image in the ancient Near East, and make it out of ear-rings, that were often used in pagan religions of the day[1].

Many of today’s idols are similar. In a society that has lost its memory of the Christian story, we find alternatives as our gods. As Bob Dylan sang, you gotta serve somebody. And we do. Even the atheists do.

So what do we do about this? I’m preaching this at a communion service. What is at the centre of the Lord’s Supper? ‘Do this in remembrance of me.’ As we rehearse the details of the Last Supper and the Cross, we do physical actions to remember what Jesus did for us: we eat bread and drink wine. One of the many things this is meant to do is to get the story right inside us, even inside our bodies.

Not only that, in the thanksgiving prayer before we take communion, we will remember much of what God has done ever since creation. We are reinforcing our memory of the One True God. Let us take it seriously.

The church at Pentecost is a model for us. When they were heard speaking in many different tongues, the crowd said, ‘We hear them declaring the mighty works of God in our own languages.’

We hear them declaring the mighty works of God. We need to feed our minds with his mighty works. We need to recall what God has done for us in Jesus. We need to spend disciplined time reading the Bible over and over to recall what he has done down the centuries.

And we need to remember what he has done specifically in our own lives. When God has done something special in your life, do you keep a record of it? I recommend that you do. When I had my amazing experience of God providing the money to get me to theological college, I typed up an account of it. Whenever we move house, it always comes with us.

Why on earth would we settle for a feeble idol, be it money, possessions, status, or anything else? Can any of those things rescue us from sin and bring us into a relationship with the God who made the universe? Can any of those things pour the extraordinary love of God for us into our hearts?

Of course not! And to guard against such a pathetic alternative, let’s cultivate our memory of all that God has done for us – both the great acts of salvation that happened thousands of years before we were born, and also the particular ways in which the God of redeeming love has worked by his Holy Spirit to bring the revelation and provision of his Son Jesus Christ into our lives.

Thirdly and finally, holiness:

Purity by Joaquim Alves Gaspar at Wikimedia Commons. CC 3.0.

So the next day the people rose early and sacrificed burnt offerings and presented fellowship offerings. Afterwards they sat down to eat and drink and got up to indulge in revelry. (Verse 6)

Not only do the Israelites pervert worship by making the offerings due to God to the golden calf, they also become unrelenting pleasure-seekers: ‘they sat down to eat and drink and got up to indulge in revelry.’

That word ‘revelry’ is interesting. The Hebrew word is used in other places to suggest sexual activity. All this at God’s holy mountain.[2] They are pleasure-seekers, not God-seekers.

Does this mean we should instead seek to follow a spoilsport God? By no means. He has given us good things to be enjoyed with thanksgiving, while remembering not to indulge ourselves but remember those who don’t have our plenty.

But they are not ends in themselves. They are, as I said, to be received with thanksgiving. Our main focus is God. Material and physical things are to be enjoyed within that relationship, not for their own sake. You don’t have to look far in our society to see how the material and the physical are worshipped in a society that has forgotten God. These are some of our idols.

Israel is at God’s holy mountain. A few chapters earlier, they have been told they are a holy people, a kingdom of priests to God. Holiness is about being set apart for God’s special purposes. And because his followers are set apart, that leads to a different lifestyle.

It’s whether we accept that calling and commitment that will help determine whether we live to worship the One True God, or whether instead we are enslaved to our passions, having made the fulfilment of our sensory desires into an idol.

Hence, is it any accident that in our society today we have people treated for relationship addiction, sex addiction, food addiction, and the like? It’s a worshipping of sensory and material things instead of the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. Whatever helpful things the therapists offer to cure addictions, the most fundamental cure is to recognise our holy calling. Why? That holy calling is what we were made for: to be a distinctive people who witness to Jesus. It is what puts us back in the groove, fulfilling what we were made for in the first place.

We pursue the wrong things in our desire to find satisfaction. But the ultimate satisfaction in life is in hearing that call of God to be dedicated to his kingdom purposes, and to seek the power of the Holy Spirit to live that way. It’s what we were made for. It’s what engages us with the true God, not worthless idols.

Conclusion

You may listen to this and think, ‘But we all fail. How are we any different from ancient Israel? Have we not all sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, as Paul says in Romans?’

Of course, all sin is serious. All sin puts a barrier between us and God. But Israel was dead set on idolatry here. She needed the mediation of Moses before God relented and restored her.

May it be that if and when we slip, we confess quickly and return to the One who is worthy of all our worship.

[1] Peter Enns, Exodus (NIV Application Commentary), p569

[2] Enns, p571.

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How Should We Understand the Ten Commandments? Exodus 20:1-20 (Trinity 18 Ordinary 27 Year A)

Exodus 20:1-20

Ten Commandments by Wayne S Grazio on Flickr. CC 2.0.

Back in prehistoric times, when I was not a minister but simply a Methodist Local Preacher, an elderly lady approached me after a service and told me that everything would be sorted in our country if we all just got back to the Ten Commandments. O that things were so simple.

Perhaps that’s also how some American Christians feel with their campaigns to get the Ten Commandments displayed in schools and other public buildings, all despite the constitutional separation of church and state there.

However, things aren’t quite that straightforward. While the Ten Commandments clearly set out moral and social standards, it isn’t as simple a matter as trying to impose them on people.

If we set them in their context and show their purpose, this might make more sense. It might also clarify how we relate Christian faith and living to society.

Firstly, the Ten Commandments follow salvation. They do not precede it.

The children of Israel crossing the Red Sea. Image found at Picryl. Public Domain.

Listen to how they begin:

I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery. (Verse 2)

The commandments only come after God has delivered the Israelites from slavery in Egypt. It was not a precursor. It was not a condition, along the lines of ‘I will deliver you if you will first behave in the way I want you to.’

No. The commandments follow salvation. In that respect, they are consistent with New Testament faith as well as Old Testament. In the New Testament we read that we love, because God loved us first. Jesus died for our sins, and we respond. God makes the first move. Obedience is a response to salvation, not a condition of it. This is about the mercy and the grace of God.

To obey the Ten Commandments, then, is something we do because we have been saved – Israel from Egypt, and us from sin. It is a sign that we have received God’s gift, and we are grateful.

In that sense, you would expect believers to live changed, moral lives: not in order to persuade God to love us, but because we have found out that he loves us, and we want to please him.

In Deuteronomy’s account of the commandments, it is set in the context of an ancient covenant, where a powerful king has rescued some people in a weak situation in distress, perhaps captivity by another nation. In that tradition, the powerful king first set free the imprisoned people, and then set out how he wanted them to behave in response. The commandments are like this.

So should we be campaigning for the Ten Commandments to be obeyed in society? Don’t we want to be part of a culture that abhors murder, adultery, theft, false witness, and coveting? Of course we do! But they only make sense when people have first responded to God’s salvation in Jesus Christ.

Therefore, we have another duty before we ever get to start campaigning for the Ten Commandments. And that is to proclaim the Gospel. People need to know about the predicament they are in without Christ, and how God sent his Son to save them because he loved them so much.

My little old lady wasn’t quite right. People need the Gospel before they need the Ten Commandments. Then – in the words of Ephesians – that is when people will want to ‘Find out what pleases the Lord’, and the commandments tell them.

Secondly, the Ten Commandments fill out the two Great Commandments.

Heart Commandment Design by Nathan Jeffers at Flickr. CC 2.0.

Do you remember when Jesus was asked what the greatest commandment of all was? He answered by giving two. He told his questioners that the greatest commandment is to love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength, and the second is to love our neighbour as ourselves.

Now you could say that the Ten Commandments are extended illustrations of those two commandments. The first four commandments show us how to love God, and the last six commandments expound how we may love our neighbours.

We love God by having no other gods before him. He comes first in our lives. He is our highest love. He is this, not only because he is the Creator of all, but also because of what he has done for us in love. Remember the words of John in his first Epistle, ‘We love because he first loved us.’ And we begin that by loving and honouring God above and before all other people and things.

Not making a graven image is also about loving God. For one thing, other nations made idols of their gods, and God’s people are not to worship what other people worship. That could cover so many things in our society! And we are not to identify the Lord of creation with created things. He is over and above all he has made.

It’s not loving God to misuse his name, either by using it flippantly and casually, or by using it to gain power over others, such as when some Christians too easily say, ‘The Lord told me,’ or when others use the Lord’s name as a means to harming others. None of these shows love for God. Whereas, honouring God’s name and character is certainly something we do to express love for him.

Keeping the Sabbath is about doing something representative of our entire orientation towards God. We give an hour or so to worship God together, but that stands for the fact that our whole lives are an act of worship. And we keep a day in a special way as a sign that every day is dedicated to God, from the moment we awake to the moment we sleep.

Loving our neighbour begins with our family, and with honouring our parents. Does charity begin at home? Well, we’ll see it doesn’t end there, which is what some people who say that actually mean.

For me, that meant in my last appointment seeking a location within striking distance of my parents. I knew it was likely going to be the period when I would lose them both, and I didn’t see why my call to the ministry meant my sister had to have the call to be the exclusive carer for Mum and Dad in their final years. Thankfully, Methodism was sympathetic.

Of course, loving our neighbour means not murdering them! Most of us don’t! But we can treat people as being of lesser value, or as worthless. The positive side is about how we welcome and value those who are different from us. Currently, I’m reading a book about neurodivergence and faith, because I need to understand more about that, and to be supportive to families where someone has one of the several diagnoses that come under this heading.

Our spouses are our (very close!) neighbours too, and that’s why we’re commanded not to commit adultery. What our spouses need is our faithfulness, for God’s love is faithful love, and we are called to mirror that.

Refusing to steal is also about loving our neighbours. If you used AI to create an image for a poster to advertise an event, it almost certainly pulled images it had stolen from other artists when it surfed the Internet for material to be trained on. Is that fair to the original artist and their need for an income? In general, stealing from your neighbour is a threat to society, because it breeds distrust and strife.[1]

The ninth commandment is not, as commonly thought, a command not to lie, but a command not to give false testimony against our neighbour, and that use of ‘false testimony’ tells us that the context is a legal one. We know the damage caused by perjury in a court of law. The innocent are imprisoned, and criminals set free. This is not good for society. This is an area where love of neighbour by bearing true testimony is not just about personal morality but the strength of the community.

As for the final commandment, not to covet, this is the only one focussed on the heart and not actions[2]. It’s invisible. But when it becomes visible in action, it leads to the breaking of either the eighth commandment (not to steal) or the seventh (not to commit adultery). It is like a summary commandment, showing the danger to the community of living lovelessly towards our neighbour.

Conclusion

Now remember we are seeking to follow the commandments in order to show our gratitude to God who has saved us. The love-your-neighbour commandments show us that a way to show that gratitude is to contribute harmony and well-being to our society. If we were just to live for ourselves, then society will show signs of disintegration. Does that seem familiar?

And this love-your-neighbour gratitude is not some bland ‘Let’s all be nice to each other’ sentiment. It is twinned with a love for God that puts him first and above everything and everyone in our lives.

How do we live in the light of this? The Israelites became so scared of a God who spoke like this that they didn’t want to hear from him anymore. ‘Moses, we can cope with you,’ they said, ‘but will you please shut off the voice of God? We can’t cope.’ (Verses 18-19)

What a terrible mistake to say you don’t want to hear the voice of God. And so Moses says, ‘You’ve chosen the wrong kind of fear. Choose instead the healthy fear of the Lord that will keep you from sinning.’ (Verse 20)

In other words, reject paralysing fear. Instead, cultivate awe and reverence for Almighty God, such that you will grow in love for him and love for your neighbour.

He is the God of our salvation, and this is the fitting way to respond to all that he has done for us.

And as we introduce others to the God who saves in Jesus Christ, so we shall encourage them to respond to him in the same way: love of God and love of neighbour.

This will bring the social transformation my little old lady so longed for.

[1] Peter Enns, Exodus (The NIV Application Commentary), p423.

[2] Enns, p424.

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Harvest Festival 2026: The Spiritual Harvest, 1 Corinthians 3:5-9

1 Corinthians 3:5-9

Public Domain stock image. Pixabay via Picryl.com.

We celebrate Harvest Festival like it’s an enduring season of the church, along with Advent, Christmas, Lent, Easter, and Pentecost.

But it isn’t. Why do you think we need discussions every year about what date we shall use to celebrate Harvest?

No. Harvest Festival as we know it, although it has some connections in many world religions, was the invention of an Anglican priest in Cornwall during the nineteenth century. That’s all.

It’s quite modern, really.

The nearest we have in a church liturgical calendar to Harvest Festival is the Anglican celebration of Lammas, or Loaf-mas, marking the wheat harvest, at the beginning of August.

We make these things about our gratitude for all the ways in which God provides for our material needs. This leads us to remember those who do not have our abundant provision, be they in this country or around the world. Thus, we support the local food bank or Tear Fund.

It’s right that we remember this most physical and material expression of our faith. Our gratitude is paired with compassion for the poor and a concern for social justice. All absolutely right, and essential.

But what we increasingly forget is the way Jesus and other New Testament leaders use harvest as a metaphor for the growth of God’s kingdom, including numerical increase in the church. Several parables do this.

In our readings today, we hear Jesus compare evangelistic mission to harvesting:

The harvest is plentiful, but the labourers are few; therefore ask the Lord of the harvest to send out labourers into his harvest. (Luke 10:2)

And we hear the Apostle Paul countering the personality cults that had grown up in the Corinthian church by using a harvest metaphor for the growth of the kingdom:

I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth. (Verse 6)

It’s what a previous generation of Christians called ‘the harvest of souls.’

And that’s where we’re focussing today.

I planted

Planting seeds in community garden, Zambia by Anna Fawcus. Posted by WorldFish on Flickr. CC 2.0.

When Paul says, ‘I planted,’ he wants to dial down his significance in the growth of the church to the Corinthians. I’m not the big cheese, he says. It’s almost as if he said, ‘I only planted: that’s all I did.’

We have an opposite problem. Few, if any, of us could claim to be the big cheeses of mission today. By and large, many Christians in our day want to opt out of evangelism and witness. We would rather sit back and wait for people to come to us. We don’t want to do anything challenging or stressful.

And so for us, Paul’s words have the opposite meaning. ‘I planted’ reminds us that we do indeed still need to plant. They become a challenge to us. What are we doing to plant the seeds of the kingdom in people’s lives?

Maybe we are afraid of people asking questions that we can’t answer. Perhaps we are worried that we will be mocked. We forget that Jesus went to a Cross.

Planting a seed is the first stage. It doesn’t mean being able to explain everything about the Christian faith or answer every intellectual objection. It is the simple act of witness to our belief that there is a God in heaven who has come down to earth in Jesus to reveal his redeeming love for all humankind.

Planting a seed can be as simple as being open about the fact that you are a Christian and saying simply that your faith makes a difference for good in your life. Planting a seed can be as simple as getting to know your neighbours and suggesting that church might help them if they are in a crisis in their lives.

It doesn’t mean that we keep on hammering the point home. It does mean we take that first brave step to be known as a Jesus-follower, and to recommend the Jesus community as a place of healing for those who are hurting. It doesn’t mean we seek to exploit the wounded, but it does mean that out of compassion for those in pain, we offer the love of God.

Let’s not allow fear or nervousness or a sense of inadequacy stop us from planting a seed at the right time. If we do feel like that, may we allow those feelings to drive us into a dependency upon the Holy Spirit.

Remember: in the natural world, if we don’t plant, then nothing grows. The same is true in the spiritual life.

Apollos watered

Farmer watering crops in Vietnam. Public Domain at Pickpik.com.

You water where you know something has been planted. What would that mean for the harvest of mission?

Let’s say you know you have ‘planted’ somewhere, along the lines I just described. In that case, the watering that follows consists of prayer. It doesn’t usually involve continuing to badger someone, as that would be counter-productive. However, if they continue to talk or ask questions, then to respond would be watering.

So, let’s make prayer an important part of our mission strategy. Where we have seen even the smallest sign of an opening, then we pray for the person. And like all watering, that is not a one-off: we commit ourselves to regular, faithful praying.

What if our fears are realised and the person where we have planted a thought of the gospel comes back with one of those difficult questions about God and faith that we dread? In that case, the watering might be done by someone else. You might contact me as your minister and say, Dave, do you know anything about such-and-such? I might give you some ideas, or you might invite the friend to talk with me.

It’s always good, by the way, to be reading more about our faith to help our own thinking and to prepare us for those ‘watering’ opportunities. I find it tremendously sad in many congregations to discover how few of the church members regularly read books about their faith. I’m not suggesting we should put all secular reading aside, but some of us spend so much time filling our minds with froth from shallow novels or dubious TV shows that we don’t give the time that would help us learn more about our faith and be ready to water.

Then there will be the times when we have the opportunity to water where someone else has already planted. That may be the witness of another Christian, or it may also be where the Holy Spirit has gone ahead of us and done a work of preparation in someone’s life.

I believe we can see an example of that in Luke 10. When Jesus sends out the seventy in pairs ahead of him, there is an intriguing part of his instructions found in verses 5 and 6:

5 Whatever house you enter, first say, “Peace to this house!” 6 And if anyone is there who shares in peace, your peace will rest on that person; but if not, it will return to you.

Who is this person who shares in peace, or ‘man of peace’ in older translations? I suggest it is someone whom God has already prepared.

We find such people among those friends who suddenly take an interest in God questions and sincerely ask us what we think about something. Their questions will feel to us like they have come out of the blue, but truly God has already been at work there to stimulate their interest. These are people to ‘water’ by responding as best we can to their questions, by invoking the help of other Christians, and of course by praying.

God gave the growth

Photo by Arnaldo Aldana on StockSnap

I hope that in talking about planting and watering I’ve made it clear that we have a real responsibility in the harvest of mission. We cannot dodge it. When we do, the church declines.

But at the same time, we don’t convert anyone. Only the Holy Spirit does that. Only the Holy Spirit reveals to a person their sin from which they need to repent. Only the Holy Spirit reveals Jesus Christ as Saviour and Lord. God gives the growth.

We are to plant and to water, but we depend on God to give the growth. The Spirit of God shows people their need and reveals Jesus to them. The Spirit makes repentance and faith possible.

So does that mean that after a little bit of awkward and maybe embarrassing planting and watering, we can now sit back?

Absolutely not. We are back at the question of prayer. If we believe that only God converts someone, then should we not implore him to do so? If we have been planting and watering, then we turn the matter over to God in prayer.

And so, I want to ask you if you have a list of people for whom you are praying? You may have a prayer list of people who are in need, including those who are seriously ill, for example. But do you also have a list of people where you are praying that the seed of faith will be planted and watered, and that God will grow them to the point of owning faith in Jesus Christ for themselves?

I believe every Christian needs a list like that. You can start with family members who do not share our faith. You can add work colleagues, neighbours, and friends.

You may not want to make the list too long, in case it becomes too difficult or discouraging, especially if you are not used to praying at length on your own. By all means start small, with a few people. But pray regularly for them. And by that, for preference I mean daily.

It may well be a long haul. Sometimes it takes months or years to soften the spiritual atmosphere in someone. Like much of the Christian life, this is a marathon and not a sprint. Resist the temptation of our culture to expect everything to have an instant answer – although if that comes, by all means rejoice and shout it from the rooftops!

Conclusion

We talk a lot about the decline and aging of the church. A spiritual harvest should be of serious interest to us. (It should be anyway, if we care about the glory of God.)

What I offer today is not a quick fix. But if we are serious about seeing the situation change in the long term, then let us commit to planting the seeds of faith; to watering them with follow-up and prayer; and by continuing in intentional prayer because we believe that God alone gives the growth.

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The Upside-Down Kingdom, Matthew 20:1-16 (Trinity 16 Ordinary 25 Year A)

Matthew 20:1-16

Lunch by John Hartnup. CC 2.0.

Suppose you’re out and about at lunchtime, you don’t have time to go home and make lunch, and in a rush you go into the supermarket to buy a Meal Deal. The options before you can be overwhelming. A main, a side, and a drink. 

But which drink isn’t loaded with sugars? Oh well, Coke Zero again.

And the side? Do you take junk food like some crisps or a small chocolate bar, or do they have those nice small pots of grapes or pineapple?

And the main: just look at the varieties of sandwich. Never mind the fillings, do you want white bread, malted bread, a wrap, a panini, or a baguette?

Our reading today is like a sandwich or a wrap. There is a theme that tops and tails it, that wraps the parable. We just don’t see it from the selection of verses the Lectionary gives us. We hear those words at the end,

‘So the last will be first, and the first will be last.’

But we don’t realise that these are the same words used by Jesus in the verse preceding our passage. These are the sandwich words around our reading. This is our malted bread, or our wrap, or whatever we choose. Everything between these words supports this assertion of Jesus:

‘So the last will be first, and the first will be last.’

And by opening the parable with the words, ‘For the kingdom of heaven is like …’, Jesus is clearly talking here about the upside-down nature of God’s kingdom. What does this upside-down kingdom look like?

It has three qualities:

Firstly, justice:

Judgment and Justice: publicdomainpictures.net

This is how the landowner sees his treatment of those who worked for the whole day. When they complain that they worked through the heat of the whole day but some only worked for the last hour and received the same pay, he replies in verse 13,

I am not being unfair to you, friend. Didn’t you agree to work for a denarius?

The landowner is fair. These workers received the usual rate for a day’s work. It is what they would have expected when they were recruited. This is justice.

For justice is about far more than ensuring the guilty are punished. It is also about seeing that those who have done right are properly recognised and rewarded. Getting appropriate pay for a day’s labour is just that. It is justice.

Isn’t that the sort of society we want to live in? Where not only wrongdoers are appropriately sanctioned, but the righteous are recognised and rewarded? Millions in our nation – and others – aspire to something like that. Could it be one of those signs that God has set eternity in the hearts of human beings, just as the writer of Ecclesiastes said?

I think that means we need to pay careful attention when we or someone else complains that something isn’t fair. Those words, ‘It’s not fair!’ find us in childhood and never seem to leave us. It’s one thing complaining something isn’t fair when it has happened to someone else, because we can look a little dispassionately at their situation. But when we complain that we are the ones who have not been treated fairly, we might want to ask other people’s opinions, too. Because when it’s all about us, we risk the criticism of the landowner to those first workers that they were being envious (verse 16).

How might we approach a commitment to justice in our society, witnessing to it as a sign of God’s coming kingdom? Recently, I heard one minister say something like this. Pay attention to what is wrong in your community, the things that don’t match up with Christian faith, the needs that you see present, because the reverse of these things will tell you what God’s dream is for your place of how things should be.

And who are the people who should be celebrated? If the first are to be last and the last first, then these might not be the famous, the powerful, and the celebrities. Who are the people who have quietly made a difference for good in the community for year upon year? Compare this with what gets reported when the twice-yearly list of those to receive Honours from the Royal Family are published. Never mind all the actors, politicians, and musicians who hog the media headlines all year round: what about those stories of ordinary, local people who have done something worthwhile? Don’t they seem worth celebrating that bit more than the great and the good?

Now cast those people in a Christian sense. When you look at what people have done from the perspective of Christian values, where are the everyday examples of those who practise the justice of God?

Secondly, mercy:

Broken Vase by Jacquie Watkins. CC 3.0.

In verse 14, the landowner says to the moaning workers who have worked for the whole day:

Take your pay and go. I want to give the one who was hired last the same as I gave you.

‘I want to give the one who was hired last the same as I gave you.’ That’s mercy. The one hired last had not worked for the whole day and had not earned a day’s wages. But that is what the landowner paid him. This worker didn’t receive what he deserved, he received what he needed. That’s mercy. That’s the Gospel.

For in the Gospel, none of us receives what we deserve. If we did, then our sins would leave us all in condemnation. Instead, we receive what we need: the mercy of God in Christ, forgiving us our sins and making us new people.

This is what we rejoice in every Sunday when we gathered. God has forgiven us our sins in Christ, through the Cross. As far as the east is from the west, so far has he removed our transgressions from us, as the Psalmist says.

This is what gives us freedom in the presence of God. This is the greatest revelation of God’s extraordinary love for us.

This is what his kingdom is built upon, for this is the way of entry into his society. Mercy.

And if we are to live in the kingdom of God and show that kingdom to the world, then mercy must continue. We shall need to continue returning to God in confession to know the on-going mercy he offers us.

And we shall need to be a merciful people. Perhaps it’s no coincidence that today’s reading comes the week after the Gospel passage was Matthew 18:21-35, the Parable of the Unmerciful Servant. You may have had a sermon on that theme last Sunday.

For those of us who have received God’s mercy in Christ are called to extend that mercy to others. That’s why it’s more than a tragedy when the church is seen by outsiders to be condemning and judgmental. Yes, of course we must keep clear boundaries between what is right and what is wrong, but always we need to be reaching out with mercy.

So, if we are to be people of this upside-down kingdom, I urge you to remember what was preached last week – that we who have received mercy and forgiveness need to offer it to others. Yes, it is hard, but when it is, we look at the Cross where we found our forgiveness. We remember what Jesus has done for us; then we ask him to help us to be willing to release others from their debt to us.

And that truly is an example of a kingdom that reverses the values of the world. Away with all the talk of things being unforgivable. Away with replacing justice with vengeance. Let the mercy of God characterise us.

Thirdly, generosity:

A lesson in generosity by Micah Esguerra. CC 2.0.

Here’s the final thing the landowner says to the grumbling workers in verse 15:

Don’t I have the right to do what I want with my own money? Or are you envious because I am generous?

‘Are you envious because I am generous?’ These workers hadn’t witnessed injustice. They had witnessed mercy for others that was an outworking of generosity.

This brings into focus what it means to know God as Father. God the Father is generous in his love and provision for his children. As the Psalmist says, he owns the cattle on a thousand hills. He has need of nothing from us, so vast are his own resources. And he shares them out of his big-hearted love.

I know some people have a problem with calling God ‘Father’, due to their experiences of fatherhood in growing up. I did too, but not from the perspective of having had a cruel father – far from it.

No: I grew up in a family where my parents struggled financially. My sister and I received far less expensive birthday and Christmas presents than our friends. Imprinted on my memory is an incident when I was a small boy. I had gone to bed, but could not sleep, so I came back downstairs. There in the front room I found Mum and Dad divvying up their money into the different sections of the household ditty box, struggling to make things balance. I offered to give up my pocket money to help.

A series of events in my twenties changed my perspective and helped me to see that God the Father was a generous giver, when he provided in amazing ways, not least with the funds that got me to theological college.

Often in the church we say that God provides for our needs and not our wants, and there is truth in that: he certainly doesn’t approve of greed. But we must be careful not to deny the fact that he is generous. He does not ration his love: he ladles it out extravagantly. We may enjoy good things from him – the important thing is to be grateful.

In our wider society there are of course from time-to-time beautiful stories of generosity, too. But there are also opposite stories. Some (please note that word) of the objections to immigrants and asylum-seekers are based on the very opposite of generosity. We decry ‘economic immigrants’ while having no problem with Brits who move to Australia for exactly that reason. We say things like, ‘We don’t want them to have what we have.’

Now I know the immigration debate is complicated, and there are also legitimate reasons to be cautious. We do have to weed out illegal immigrants, including the minority who may want to bring terrorism and violence to our streets. We cannot house everyone. But we can have no part with the masked protestors at Portsmouth, with those intimidating the RNLI, and with those politicians who seek to stoke up fear, and think it’s fine to see opponents beaten up.

In the middle of this, surely a God who loves generously will have compassion for those who have fled their countries in fear, such as the Iranian political refugee one of my previous churches helped, and who then became a Christian as a result of their witness.

I guess it’s part of a wider question: how do we demonstrate God’s generous love to people our society despises?

And there is the upside-down kingdom, where the last are first and the first are last. Justice and mercy make for a generous place.

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The Importance of Forgiveness, Matthew 18:21-35 (Trinity 15 Ordinary 24 Year A)

Matthew 18:21-35

Photo by form PxHere Public Domain.

You won’t be surprised to know I’m going to preach about forgiveness from this passage! It became a live issue in one of my churches recently, when a local drug addict stole a donation box from the premises at the end of a coffee morning. Within the church, we’ve had different opinions on whether to support a police investigation and possible prosecution, but what we are all united on is the importance of forgiving the offender.

It’s worth beginning today by remembering what the word ‘forgive’ means. In the New Testament, to forgive is to release. Like this parable, it is often compared to a financial debt. To forgive someone is to release them from the debt to you – their moral debt, consisting of what they owe you because they have wronged you.

If you get nothing else from this sermon, please understand that to forgive is to release. It is not to excuse or to explain away, it is to release. You no longer consider the other party as owing anything to you, due to their wrong actions.

And in a sense, forgiveness releases us, too. If we hold on to bitterness, then it becomes like a chain wrapped around us. Bitterness limits us. It traps us. It imprisons us. When we release someone from what they owe us due to sin, we also release ourselves from the chains of bitterness.

With those basics established, let’s look at what Jesus teaches us about the importance of forgiveness in this parable.

Firstly, forgiveness is unlimited:

Photo by Jon Sullivan on Pixnio. Public Domain.

21 Then Peter came to Jesus and asked, ‘Lord, how many times shall I forgive my brother or sister who sins against me? Up to seven times?’

22 Jesus answered, ‘I tell you, not seven times, but seventy-seven times.

Peter probably thinks he’s being generous here. Some Jewish teachers said you could only forgive up to three instances of premeditated sin[1]. Seven times therefore makes him pretty holy, doesn’t it? Get to eight times and then the vengeance can start?

No, says Jesus. When he says we should forgive ‘seventy-seven times’, he is explicitly reversing what the Old Testament character Lamech said, not about forgiveness, but about vengeance:

23 Lamech said to his wives,
‘Adah and Zillah, listen to me;
    wives of Lamech, hear my words.
I have killed a man for wounding me,
    a young man for injuring me.
24 If Cain is avenged seven times,
    then Lamech seventy-seven times.’

Lamech’s seventy-seven vengeances are turned into Jesus’ seventy-seven acts of forgiveness.

Many of us know what this is like. We keep running into the person who hurt us. The old feelings begin to rise up. Maybe it’s the memories of old wounds; sometimes these people continue to injure us. The process of forgiveness has to begin all over again.

It’s no surprise in cases of people being hurt all over again that our society has come up with ‘cancel culture’. If we can just ban the people we think are wicked, those who say offensive things, then perhaps that will prevent future, lasting hurt.

But it doesn’t. Because cancel culture tells us that certain people cannot and will not be forgiven. As Christians, we have to deny that. Further, it doesn’t deal with the lasting pain. That can only be healed by releasing people through forgiveness.

Remember: we do not excuse people when we forgive them. They have done wrong, period. And our forgiveness only becomes effective if they receive it, confess what their sinful actions, and turn away from them. They may show this in a desire to make restitution. In the Old Testament, wrongdoers had to put right their actions. In the New Testament, remember the story of Zaccheus, the corrupt tax collector. When he met Jesus, he immediately arranged to repay what he had cheated out of people – and then some.

But whatever the actions of the other party, whether they accept our forgiveness or not, it is our Christian duty to offer it. And, if necessary, to keep on offering it.

Remember: Lamech took vengeance seventy-seven times, but vengeance belongs to the Lord, not us. We cannot be trusted with it. We forgive: seventy-seven times, if necessary. That is, unlimited. Our forgiveness is to be like the unlimited refills of drinks you get in places like a Toby Carvery or a Harvester.

Secondly, unlimited forgiveness is God’s model:

Copyright: Christian Ferrer / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0. Found at Words of Hope.

Here’s the issue: although the amount of forgiving God calls us to do can seem daunting at times, it is still nothing to the amount of forgiving he has done of us and of others. The master was owed ten thousand bags of gold by his servant; that servant was owed not ten thousand bags but a hundred, and not bags of gold but silver coins (verses 24, 28). There is no comparison.

This is the thing we need to remember throughout our Christian lives, and especially when we are finding it hard to forgive someone. How much has God forgiven me? And if he has forgiven me, what does that say about his desire for me to forgive others? If he has forgiven me at the cost of his Son dying on the Cross, what does that say to me when I am reluctant to forgive someone?

Now the snag with this as I see it is that some people will say, I’m a pretty good person, God hasn’t had to forgive me all that much, but someone else has done something far worse to me than I have ever done to anybody else. Hence, I am being asked to do something greater than has been done to me.

If that’s you, then listen to these words from the evangelist and apologist Andy Bannister:

Imagine that you died and arrived in heaven. An angel meets you at the gates of heaven and says, “Welcome, so glad you could make it, we’ve arranged a special surprise for you”. And he escorts you to what appears to be a cinema. He guides you to screen 1, sits you down alone, and gives you a large bucket of popcorn. “Welcome to the Theatre of Judgement” says the angel, smiles, then disappears as a movie begins to play.

Lo and behold, it’s the movie of your life—everything you’ve ever thought, said, or done is up there on the screen. Some bits are great, other bits make you cringe with embarrassment—all the stupid decisions, all the rude hurtful things you said about others, all those secret thoughts and selfish ambitions. All the things you did—but also the things you didn’t do.

Finally the movie ends and as the credits roll, the angel reappears. “Hope you enjoyed that,” he says cheerfully. “Now we’re going to have a second screening, and everybody else featured in the movie is going to come and watch it—all your family, your friends, your enemies, your neighbours, colleagues—everybody is going to get to watch every little detail of your life”.

Who would want that? Who would want to show that movie to their friends, family, to their dear old granny? Most of us who are really honest with ourselves know there are things deep within us that we don’t want anyone to know about—and the Bible has a word for that stuff, for that inner brokenness we try to hide from others, even ourselves. The Bible calls it “sin”.

When we are struggling to forgive or are unwilling to forgive, let’s look at ourselves. Are we really so great? And let’s look at the Cross. How much has God forgiven us in Christ?

In the light of that, why on earth would we refuse to forgive?

Because thirdly, Christians failing to forgive is a scandal:

Copyright: Creative Commons. Creator: Cyril Gravelier. Found at Marc & Angel Hack Life.

The amount the unforgiving servant demands of his fellow servant is about one fifth of what would be paid for him in the slave market. It’s possibly only a millionth of what he owes the master[2]. Yet he makes such a scene about it. The other servants are scandalised that one who has received so much grace and mercy from the master fails to act with a comparable sense of grace.

And the world is scandalised when it sees Christians acting with a lack of grace to other people. What witness is it when we act with cruelty towards others? What witness is it when we support a politician whose policies lead to the withdrawal of healthcare from the poor, the separation of children from parents, the financial suffering of many for the benefit of the few super-rich?

Increasingly, the world looks at Christians who behave like that and they say, these people don’t remotely look like Jesus, and they certainly don’t follow his teaching.

And when that happens, the world – whom we are supposed to be reaching with the Gospel – takes one look at Christianity and says, no thank you very much. We do immeasurable damage to the cause of the Gospel when we think we can hoover up the forgiveness and grace of God for ourselves, while treating others with brutality and malice. There are far too many so-called ‘deconversion’ stories around of people who heard something of the beauty of the Christian message but walked out on church because they saw a church that would not treat others with the grace they themselves had received.

Has it ever been more urgent for the church to meditate upon the Cross, to ponder just how much we have been forgiven, and then to let that dictate how we treat others?

Conclusion

I’m acutely aware this is a tough subject. Forgiving those who have hurt us can be difficult. We need the example of Jesus and his Cross to remind us what he has done for us, and to motivate us to be Christlike in this matter.

I know that forgiveness doesn’t always come quickly. And in fact, sometimes we are more concerned to push a victim into forgiveness than we are to acknowledge the wickedness of what has been done to them. The end result is that instead of forgiving, the person who has been hurt does something subtly different but damaging. That is, they suppress their anger rather than release it. The danger in suppressing our anger is that we push it down like a Jack-in-the-box. At a later point it will spring up again with great force. And if we work to keep suppressing anger, it will come out in some other form. One such way can be certain expressions of depression.

So we come back to that theme of forgiveness being about release. Release, not suppression. We may need to feel the anger and then let it go if we are to forgive in a healthy way. When we do that, we reflect Jesus.

The other day, some words of NT Wright were posted on Facebook. They were put there in commemoration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, but they seem fitting for this theme, too:

One might say that this is the vocation of the church: to take the sadness of the world and give back no anger; the sorrow of the world and give back no bitterness; the pain of the world and not sink into self-pity; but to return forgiveness and love, blessing and joy.

[1] Craig S Keener, The Gospel of Matthew: A Socio-Rhetorical Commentary, p456.

[2] Keener, p460.

1

Restoring the Sinner in the Church, Matthew 18:15-20 (Trinity 14 Ordinary 23 Year A)

Matthew 18:15-20

Loud Argument, free stock photo at Public Domain Pictures

When I was a young, enthusiastic teenage Christian who obviously knew everything, I once commented at a Bible study that the early church didn’t have any internal problems.

Unfortunately for me, my minister was present. He suggested I look at the New Testament a little more closely. The argument over circumcision that needs settling in Acts 15. The ways in which the Apostle Paul remonstrates with congregations, not least the Corinthians.

Whoops.

Our passage today from Matthew shows us that Jesus anticipated there would be problems in the church. Problems that included sin.

It’s no good us thinking, we’re a happy family, no-one will ever rock the boat here. If we think that, we won’t be prepared when something wrong happens among us. It’s best to know in advance what Jesus teaches on the subject, and to be prepared.

Firstly, our aim is restoration:

Public Domain image at rawpixel.com

The three stages that Jesus describes of going first of all privately to the person who has sinned, secondly with witnesses, and finally to the assembled congregation is quite reminiscent of the disciplinary process that was often followed in the synagogues of his day[1].

And the synagogues certainly didn’t rule out the idea of forgiveness for the wrongdoer[2], but Jesus is totally upfront in making the main motive for speaking to the one who has sinned as restoration.

That’s why you have the three stages. A private conversation. If that doesn’t work, take a couple of witnesses with you. And finally, as a last resort, before the whole congregation.

Jesus prioritises the healing of broken relationships, the repentance of the sinner, and the offer of forgiveness by whoever has been wronged. All of these are implied by the process he institutes. All of these will be provided for when he goes to the Cross.

The problem is that this is not what some people want when wrong has been done. On the one hand, some people want to be vindictive and vengeful. You can see that in our culture with the rise of ‘cancel culture’: express a socially unacceptable opinion and you are both ostracised and silenced. Such people will not go privately to the one who has caused offence, because they do not care for the costly reconciliation that Jesus is all about.

Does something like this happen in church circles at times? Yes, to our shame. Rather than challenging wrongdoing, people gossip about the one who has overstepped the mark. This is not the Jesus way.

And neither is the opposite approach, where rather than confronting the one who is out of line, we sweep everything under the carpet. We think ignoring sin is a version of forgiveness. It isn’t. Or we try to explain away someone’s patently wrong actions. This is a tacit acceptance of unholiness in the church.

Therefore, we begin with the private approach. If that doesn’t work, we take one or two witnesses with us. Remember, Jewish law normally required the confirmation of witnesses before a conviction.

Only as a last resort do we go public before the congregation. And only then do we consider banning someone from the church. It takes a serious level of proof to do that.

There will be some who say that you should never ban someone from the church and that you should always offer forgiveness. The problem with that in Jesus’ eyes is that some people are so thoroughly unrepentant that they put themselves beyond the boundaries of the believing community that banning them is only confirming the hardness of their own hearts.

By way of context, I am now in my thirty-fifth year of circuit ministry, and in all that time I have only ever banned one person, and I was instructed to do so by the police. The person in question was a known paedophile, and without telling you the whole story let’s just say he was a persistent repeat offender. For the safety of the worshipping community (and especially for the children in it) he had to be excluded. Tragically, he never fully embraced the costly actions required of him to facilitate restoration of relationships.

Secondly, our authority is heaven:

Heaven, free image from needpix.com

Listen again to what Jesus says in verse 18:

Truly I tell you, whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.

It sounds like heaven ratifies what we decide. But scholars generally think there is a better translation, albeit one that sounds a little clumsy in English:

Truly I tell you, whatever you bind on earth will have been bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will have been loosed in heaven.

This strange – to us – language of binding and loosing is almost certainly about church discipline. And in the corrected translation, it is heaven that authorises us to undertake either the banning of an unrepentant sinner (that’s ‘binding’) or the forgiveness and restoration of the repentant sinner (that’s ‘loosing’).

We do not sort out problems of sin and broken relationships in the church off our own back. It is something that the court of heaven itself deeply cares about.

Why? Jesus set up the church to be a holy community of people who were reconciled both to him and to each other. It is as the holy and reconciled community that we are a witness to Jesus in the world. Anything that damages that matters to heaven. Anything that can be done to heal and to put things right again matters doubly to heaven.

And therefore, heaven authorises Christ’s church to engage in binding and loosing. It is part of our community life to hold one another accountable for our actions. If we see one of our brothers or sisters in the church acting in a way that brings disrepute to the name of Jesus, then it is our duty to speak to them, and to initiate the process I described in the first point, all with a view to reconciliation and restoration.

What Jesus tells us here is that when we solemnly engage in that, we have divine backing for our words and our actions.

That’s why we should be careful only to do this when someone has truly done something wrong. It is not to be used as a way of putting people down that we don’t like in the church. Nor is it to be used as a way of getting our own back on someone who has done something we don’t like.

I say that with some feeling, having seen someone make something up to get another church member out of a church, and also as someone who has twice been subjected to false safeguarding allegations by people in churches who took a dislike to me. I will not share the details, as it doesn’t do me any good to dwell on these things.

No. The fact that the process to restore a sinner in the church if at all possible begins in heaven is surely all the reminder we need that we are on holy ground when something like this happens. And if that doesn’t shape our words and our deeds in a certain way, then I don’t know what does.

Thirdly and finally, our armour is prayer:

Free image at pxhere.com

19 ‘Again, truly I tell you that if two of you on earth agree about anything they ask for, it will be done for them by my Father in heaven. 20 For where two or three gather in my name, there am I with them.’

These final words of Jesus in the reading are usually quoted out of context, as if they are standalone words without a context. We quote them to talk about agreeing in prayer to ask for something. We quote them to invoke the presence of Jesus.

But they are about the subject we have been considering. The two who agree or the two or three who are gathered are the witnesses to the wrongdoing. That is the context. And it is this posture of prayer and attention to the presence of Jesus that keeps them on holy ground when dealing with sin in the church. An appropriate attitude of prayer and attention to Jesus guards against the misuses I described at the end of the last point.

It’s not just any old prayer, because prayer can become a malicious weapon in these circumstances. People include the wrongdoer in public prayer as a means of gossip rather than out of a holy desire to see restoration.

Therefore, prayer that pays attention to the presence of Jesus keeps us in the right place. Would we turn prayer into gossip if we were profoundly aware that Jesus was in our midst? Surely it is our slack attention to Jesus at times that can enable harmful talk, like gossip.

And the gossip is not justified by the wrong that the sinner has done. Remember the words of Michelle Obama about political opponents, because they are worth applying in a different context here: ‘When they go low, we go high.’ And we go high in prayer, focussed on the fact that Jesus is with us. It’s our armour. It’s our protection that helps us deal with problems in the Body of Christ in a godly way.

Not only is Christ-centred prayer our protection, but it is also God’s chosen means in our desire to someone move from their errant ways through repentance to restoration. Therefore, witnesses gathering in prayer and focussing on Jesus is fundamental to all that God – and, I hope, we – desire to see as an outcome when a member of the church has fallen into sin.

Conclusion

You may well have thought that the subject of this sermon was purely theoretical. You may wonder why on earth we have spent this time on a topic that to you sounds little more than hypothetical. If that is what you are thinking, I offer this story.

When I began in ministry, Safeguarding was only just being announced and had not come into force. How I wish it had, because I walked into a drastic situation with unsuitable children’s workers running their own empire. They did not have the best interests of the church at heart. When I challenged them, that was the beginning of eighteen months living under threats of violence and other forms of intimidation.

The other circuit ministers were highly supportive of me, having to begin my ministry like that. One of them observed that this was the sort of crisis you probably only encountered once every thirty years or so.

In parts of the world, there are defence systems against certain weather disasters that may only occur once in several decades. You might think of the Thames Barrier.

Sometimes, we just need to be ready for that ‘once every thirty years.’

[1] Craig S Keener, The Gospel of Matthew: A Socio-Rhetorical Commentary, p453f.

[2] Keener, p455.

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Upside-Down Discipleship, Matthew 16:21-28 (Trinity 13 Ordinary 22 Year A)

Matthew 16:21-28

Pineapple upside down cake recipe by hawaiianfoodrecipe on Flickr. CC 2.0.

As a youngster, I was a fussy eater. But there were certain things my Mum cooked that were amazing.

One was a recipé that a cousin of mine brought back from the Orkney Islands, after being stationed there with the RAF. Orkney Bacon Savoury. Layers of bacon, tomatoes, mushrooms, and breadcrumbs baked in the oven. Perfect comfort food for winter.

Another was her bread pudding. None of those fancy spices that you find in a bread pudding you buy from a baker’s, no thank you very much. Simple. Straightforward. Yummy.

And nobody made pineapple upside-down cake like her. Two main differences: first of all, none of those crimes against humanity that are known as glacé cherries. And no, not pineapple rings, oh no: crushed pineapple. Hence, with it being an upside-down cake, having the filling on top, crushed pineapple meant that the juices flowed down through the cake, permeating everything with pineapple flavour.

Is anybody hungry? Because I am, after typing that.

But never mind an upside-down cake, Jesus brings a whole upside-down kingdom. Nowhere is that clearer than in the way he sets things out here.

Firstly, we have an upside-down Messiah:

Courtesy Joni and Friends.

21 From that time on, Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and undergo great suffering at the hands of the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised.

We are so used to this, that we miss some of its importance. We have had two thousand years of knowing that Jesus refused the popular Jewish hopes for a Messiah as a military leader who would conquer the occupying forces of Rome. We have had two thousand years of reciting in the church that Jesus died for our sins, and that in his death he conquered sin and death.

Have we forgotten that Jesus’ suffering and death are not only for our forgiveness and salvation, but also a pattern for life? How often do we still seek to get our way by force, when Jesus didn’t? How often do we even think we are doing God a favour by seeking to power something through that we are convinced is his will?

Oh, it doesn’t have to be the use of physical force and violence. It can be the way in which we manipulate people. Is that the way Christians are to treat people? I have certainly seen that in the Methodist Church, both at national church level and in local churches. When we want to get our way, we are prone to getting it all costs. People are just collateral damage sometimes.

Let’s just pause and consider. Does any of this sound like the way Jesus the Messiah brought in the kingdom of God? Not remotely. By no means did he hold back from declaring truth, but never did he treat other people as if they were just pieces on a chessboard to be moved around so that he got his way.

So why do we reject Jesus’ upside-down model? It might be about our fear, and our own desire not to suffer. But deeper than that, there is an explanation that only works on the ‘spiritual’ level, and that is our second point:

Secondly, it is demonic forces that resist the upside-down Kingdom:

Get behind me, Satan by Ilya Repin, found at Picryl. Public Domain.

22 And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him, saying, ‘God forbid it, Lord! This must never happen to you.’ 23 But he turned and said to Peter, ‘Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling-block to me; for you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.’

Gentle Jesus, meek and mild? I think not! ‘Get behind me, Satan!’ says Jesus to Peter. Not so much ‘God forbid it,’ as Peter said, but more like ‘Satan forbid it.’

It is nothing less than the work of demonic forces to oppose the Cross and all it does. They dread the knowledge that at the Cross, Jesus will disarm the principalities and powers, as Paul tells the Colossians. The Cross will be their undoing. Peter may say things from a merely human perspective, as Jesus says, because he doesn’t want to see his Master suffer. But Jesus knows there is more at stake, and much more behind this: the power of the Cross is not only in bringing us the forgiveness of sins, it is also the conquest of evil powers. This is the only way to take them on: for by going to the Cross, Jesus will take away all their power to imprison people in shame.

You may think it is hackneyed when you watch a movie where a priest holds up a cross against a ghost, a poltergeist, a demon, or some other malevolent spiritual being. But behind that is profound truth. The Cross is God’s way of defeating evil.

And so Peter must be opposed. Jesus not only addresses him as Satan, identifying the true source of resistance to the Cross, he also says, ‘Get behind me.’ Why? Because disciples followed behind their teachers, walking behind them. Jesus is telling Peter to get back in line as a disciple. And a disciple needs to know the primacy of the Cross.

And that question of discipleship leads to the third thing we must say:

Thirdly, it’s like teacher, like disciple in the upside-down Kingdom:

Jesus and his disciples, vector image at Public Domain Vectors.

24 Then Jesus told his disciples, ‘If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.’

As a religious teacher of his day, Jesus was not imparting to his disciples a set of facts for them to memorise. Sometimes, we think that’s what teaching and education is – which also does a dis-service to what modern teachers do.

This was emphatically not a situation where Jesus gave them a set of dates to memorise for historical battles and wars, or when certain kings reigned. Nor was he teaching them a mathematical formula or the construction of an atom, or the kinds of rocks found in certain landscapes.

No. Jesus was teaching them how to live – how to live in the presence of God. I have said previously that a good modern substitute word for ‘disciple’ might be ‘apprentice.’ They were to learn how to live the godly life by observing how Jesus lived and then copying him.

This was something that all apprentices of Jewish rabbis did. They observed the rabbi’s way of life – sometimes down to the most private and intimate detail! – and sought to copy it.

Therefore, if Jesus their teacher were to be heading for suffering and death, they needed to be ready for potentially facing a similar fate. No, they would not be dying for the sins of the world or to conquer the forces of evil like Jesus. But they would face unjust opposition – persecution, even – because the world’s authorities would not be best pleased by the way the disciples reminded them of truth, beauty, goodness, kindness, and love.

Taking up our cross is not about us having our share of the general woes and pains of the world, although we are not exempt. Taking up our cross is not about the arthritis in our fingers. Taking up our cross is about being willing to suffer for Jesus.

Fourthly, that means there is a price to pay for participation in the upside-down Kingdom:

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, public domain image by Levan Ramishvili at Flickr.

25 For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it. 26 For what will it profit them if they gain the whole world but forfeit their life? Or what will they give in return for their life?

Could there be anything more upside-down? If you want to save your life, then you will lose it, and if you lose your life for Christ, then you will find it. This is about as far away from ‘Your Best Life Now’ as you could possibly be. There is no pursuing the good life or emphasising personal fulfilment here. The call is to put Christ first, even if that means death. For it is in putting him first that we find true life. This is ‘It is better to give than receive’ completely maxed out.

I couldn’t help thinking of the great German Christian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who returned to his native land from the USA to oppose the Nazis. He condemned what he called ‘cheap grace’ in the church, where the forgiveness of sins just led to an easy, comfortable life. Rather, said Bonhoeffer, when Christ calls a man, he bids him come die.

It’s all very well having the kind of prayers we often pray in churches here where we thank God for the freedom we have to worship him, knowing that we have sisters and brothers in Christ around the world for whom even gathering like we do is an enormous risk to their safety and liberty. But what Jesus says here is something of a warning to us that we are the Christians with the abnormal experience. We certainly should be grateful that we have our freedoms, but we need to guard against the way in which our freedoms can soften us up spiritually, if we are not careful.

Most of us in church today in the West might do well to reflect on what cost we have paid to be disciples of Jesus. Has it hurt us at times to follow him? Again, I don’t mean the regular pains of ordinary life that anyone may have to endure, such as those caused by ill-health or aging. I mean, have we been through the mill at times because we chose to walk the path laid out by Jesus Christ?

If we have never paid a price for our faith in Christ, we might ask whether we are serious disciples or merely consumers of that cheap grace Bonhoeffer spoke about.

To conclude:

Last Judgement by Fr Lawrence Lew, O.P. on Flickr. CC 2.0.

27 ‘For the Son of Man is to come with his angels in the glory of his Father, and then he will repay everyone for what has been done. 28 Truly I tell you, there are some standing here who will not taste death before they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom.’

We have two things here: the Last Judgment, when the Son of Man comes with his angels (verse 27), and the Ascension, when the Son of Man comes to the Ancient of Days in heaven (verse 28). We have the future, and the imminent present.

One day we shall be judged for how we responded to what Christ did for us on the Cross. But even now, Christ is reigning at the Father’s right hand. There, he prays for us that we might live in a way that turns this world’s values upside-down and witness to that coming kingdom.

How is each one of us going to live in the light of these truths?

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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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