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| Nothing is so bad as not trusting God |
| R.H. Benson |
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SERMON LIBRARY |
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· Deacon Debbie Wesseloo (2)
· Deacon Phillip Laurings (3)
· Dean William Mosert (1)
· Reverend Angus Paterson (0)
· Reverend Graham Alexander (1)
· Reverend Joe Thompson (2)
· Reverend Lindy Rookyard (4)
· Visiting Clergy (0)
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| Date | 2003-05-25 | | Preacher | Reverend Joe Thompson | | Title | Season 2 - Session 1 | | Sermon Details | Easter 5 - Year B
Gospel: John 15: 9-17
Are you one of those people who can spot the obscure in a picture? When reading or
watching a movie are you able to predict where the plot is going? Can you see the
picture behind the mass of colours and patterns held up before you? Or are you like
me and struggle to appreciate "modern art" where the canvas appears covered in a
myriad of colours that look as if they were painted by a demented three year old
having a tantrum.
The same is true of that test used by psychologists - the Rorschach test - you know
where they show you ink blots. You gaze at these inkblots, their irregular shapes stare
back at you. Some people are able to see all sorts of shapes and designs or imaginary
figures. For others it remains just shapes of ink on a page.
Jesus presents a picture to the disciples, which they stare at uncomprehendingly, he
has just used the image of being the vine in his discussion with the disciples, and here
he continues to say that they must be bound into him if they are to bear fruit. Without
his living support, they will be like dead branches whose only use is firewood. As
with so many of the things Jesus said, the disciples will only be able to fully realize
the importance of this story after the resurrection of Jesus from the dead and the
coming of the Holy Spirit.
In John's Gospel, this is part of Jesus' final speech before he is handed over to be
betrayed and crucified, in this he speaks of the events to come as well as what is
expected of his disciples after his ascension. Jesus describes the way things will be in
the future, where his gift of life will prevail. This new life is based on the love which
the Father has for the Son, and which the Son now chooses to share with those who
follow him. The sign that they have received this new life is that they follow the
commandments he gave them, and in this way their joy will be complete
So what is this new life about? The new life is all about friendship, a relationship of
equals rather than that of master and servant. Can we really grasp this? That we are
friends of God - no longer slaves or servants, but friends.
And so Jesus hands over the responsibility for his mission to his followers, and he
empowers them with his strength His laying down of his life in obedience to the
Father is part of this handing over. Jesus has planted the seeds of the Father's love in
their hearts and it is now up to them to go out and bear the lasting fruit. You can
almost hear them asking "but how, how can they do this?" By loving one another.
Their love for each other is both the sign and the source of the continuing power of
Christ's love in them. Only if they love one another will they remain in his love.
The story is told of Jesus walking into heaven just after the ascension, some angels
who ask what is happening to his mission accost him. Jesus replies that he has left it
in the hands of twelve friends and if they fail, then so does he. If we fail, then so has
Jesus...
The college kids were asking me about creation this past week. One of the questions I
asked them was if they believed the god they worshipped was capable of creating the
world in seven days. Mixed answers, so I said if their god wasn't up to that then
maybe they need to look at who they are worshipping, 'cos my God can do it in an
instant and continues to do so each moment of life.
We live in an age of explanation, where everything has a reason for being. And yet,
how often do we rack our brains in our attempts to understand God and his ways, but
the mystery of life consistently evades our grasp. The inkblots of creation remain just
that, a mystery, even when we measure them, squint at them and look at them from
every angle.
St John's message is that the truth behind the mystery is both simpler and deeper than
we can imagine. It is the divine love which transforms our human loving so that we
are able to affirm and value the uniqueness of everyone we meet, our challenge is to
see the lace of Christ in the other, it is this divine love living within us that leads us to
respect, delight, and support and challenge our friendships and interactions with
others, yes even those we don't like or who frustrate us or annoy us.
The Father's love for you and I lies at the heart of the search for the meaning of life, just
like the dots and curls of mysterious pictures have a meaning for us. But the secret of
that mystery is to love; if we love our world in the way the Son revealed to us, then
we unlock the mystery. And in this way we bear fruit, fruit that will last...
As Valjean sings in Les Miserables, my favourite musical, on his deathbed...
”And remember the truth that once was spoken,
to love another person is to see the face of God”
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| Date | 2005-02-26 | | Preacher | Rev J Thompson | | Title | Third Sunday of Lent Year A | | Sermon Details | Peter Starstedt sang a song in the late 60’s with the chorus “Where do you go to my lovely, when you’re alone in your bed, tell me the thoughts that surround you, I want to look inside your head.” It is a song about a girl who grew up in the slums of Naples and who became famous because of her beauty – feted by everyone. The song is sung by a man who grew up with her and he is asking if she still remembers her past.
This got me to thinking: Do we ever really know who we are? Do we all hide behind masks, and hide the true self from others? For me that is what the Samaritan woman was doing – hiding her true self from the world.
Many authors have examined the customs of the times governing the relationships between men and women and have concluded that the woman’s action of approaching the well at noontime when a man was sitting there inevitably meant that she was of dubious reputation. The later revelation about her five husbands seems to affirm the assumption. Whether this is so or not, she certainly was both a Samaritan and a woman and therefore not someone any respectable Jew would engage in conversation. But respectability was never something Jesus regarded highly.
Jesus initiates the conversation by asking her for a drink and so begins this fascinating dialogue on two levels. He is speaking about living water and the life of grace while she is thinking only of the water in the well and the mundane realities of her rather chequered life.
She says: Give me some of that living water so that I may never get thirsty and never have to come to the well again. There is a hint of incredulity and mockery in her voice. And then Jesus’ penetrating remark cuts right through her defences: Go call your husband.
Her response exposes her vulnerability: I have no husband. And Jesus reveals his knowledge about those five previous husbands and she realises that this is no ordinary man standing before her. She believes him to be a prophet and tries to engage him in a standard religious discussion about the differences between Jews and Samaritans—which is so often the sort of thing people would say when they talk to a professional religious person. It’s a question of so who is right you or me?
This gives Jesus the opportunity to speak about how all these earthly differences will soon be transcended. The woman says she knows that the Messiah is coming and that then all will be revealed. Jesus simply replies: I am He. We can almost experience the depth of the silence that must have followed that astonishing statement. Unfortunately we will never know her response because just then the disciples return from their shopping expedition and their conversation is interrupted.
St Paul, in the second reading, speaks of this strange dualism in life by referring to the journey of the Israelites out of Egypt. It wasn’t some heroic enterprise but rather was characterised by complaining and groaning as we hear in our first reading from the Exodus. “Why didn’t we stay in Egypt, at least there we had food and water?” I guess if I was there at the time I’d probably be whingeing too!
We can get so sucked into the ways of the world around us that we lose touch with our true selves. I guess like the Samaritan woman, and the lady in the song, we too long for something more in life. We too long for that living water; and just what is this so-called Living Water that will wells up to eternal life; this water which once we have drunk it we will never be thirsty again?
St Paul reminds us that this Living Water is the water of Baptism, it is the grace of Christ, it is the great outpouring of God’s love and salvation that is the direct consequence of Christ’s sacrifice on Calvary and his resurrection from out of the empty tomb. Lent is about us getting ourselves right with God, of finding out who we really are…
In our hearts we need to drink long and deep this refreshing and healing water. We need to embrace Christ and give the assent of faith to his Gospel, we need to become one with him, we need to experience his life living in us, his power living through us.
We have to become altogether new creatures just like that Samaritan woman would do and just as the woman in the song did. We need to turn our backs on our past lives, repenting of our sins and turning to our Lord. It is no longer a case of accepting Christ because that is what our parents brought us up to believe but as the Samaritans said: We no longer believe because of what you have told us; we have heard him ourselves and we know that he really is the Saviour of the World!
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| Date | 2005-03-13 | | Preacher | Rev J Thompson | | Title | Passion Sunday | | Sermon Details | Fifth Sunday of Lent - 2005
Gospel : John 11: 17-45
I am always reminded of a secondhand store on the way down to my Dad when I hear about Lazarus – it has a coffin outside. I want them to put a sign on it to say “One careful owner”. It seems a bit strange that the Church presents us with this gospel reading today on the Fifth Sunday of Lent, it seems to be clearly about the resurrection and yet we haven't got there yet, we are still plodding through Lent and have to get through Maundy Thursday and Good Friday before we get to the resurrection. Can I suggest that this text is more about death than resurrection? After all, Lazarus isn't walking around today; he had to undergo another death.
This text is more about our life and death here and now rather than about the resurrection. We will have time enough to consider the resurrection when we get to Easter Sunday and the weeks of celebration afterwards.
St Ignatius in his book on the Spiritual Exercises suggests that when we come to consider a particular Gospel passage we should put ourselves in the place of each character in turn and use our imagination to see how we would feel in the circumstances. This can be a most revealing exercise. How about putting yourself in the place of Lazarus? You are dead to everything and then you hear a voice: 'Come out, Lazarus!' You look around and there you are lying in a tomb swathed in bandages and surrounded by darkness. If we ask ourselves how we would feel the answer, of course, would be different for everyone but I think we might be surprised at how many would say: Thanks Lord, but I'd prefer to stay where I am.
But putting ourselves in Lazarus’s place we might feel we are unable to move or perhaps we might become aware of how tomb-like our present way of life really is. This exercise might arouse in us a sense of hope; rekindle a longing for freedom which has perhaps been buried for years. Putting ourselves into the place of a character from scripture can awake all kinds of thoughts within us and lead us to turn to God in prayer with new words on our lips. And yet it is something so simple that we are surprised that we never thought about it ourselves. Often we see it happen through funerals that people begin to reassess where they are in life, when they have to confront death.
I think that this Gospel reading is placed here in Lent to help us to realise that we have to live this life to the full and that it is often only through experiencing death that we are shocked into it. This can happen to us in all sorts of ways; often it can happen through a loss or bereavement, it might be through a religious experience, or a meeting with someone significant. It may be a terrible mistake that we have made or an experience of suffering. It is amazing how often it takes something negative to make us realise how much there is that is truly positive and worth living for. We never think about our health until we get sick do we?
This Gospel is here to get us to wake up from our sleep and to realise that we have some living to do. We are supposed to be Christians. We are supposed to be followers of Jesus, the best man who ever lived, the only man who ever fully lived. The only man who really understood how to live.
And if we dare to accept the title Christian then we had better take a few lessons in living. We need to stop moaning and groaning and looking over our shoulder at others and saying: Would you look at her, who does she think she is? Or Why does this have to happen to me? Let us open our eyes and talk to our neighbours and enjoy ourselves.
It is one of the points that I argued about with God before accepting His call for my own life – I’m too young and I want to have fun and enjoy life still, the Church isn’t about that! God’s response was to say I could still have fun and enjoy, and as for the Church – help them to smile as often as you can!
There are dozens of examples of people whose lies have been shaken up through their meeting with our Lord. And we have a few in the Gospel today, Martha and Mary; they both blamed Jesus for letting Lazarus die, did you you notice they both used the same words? “Lord if you had been here our brother would not have died. In my translation at home I read Jesus sighed and later on he sighed again. Sounds incredible doesn't it? And yet when they hear Jesus speak their faith is restored.
We don't experience Christ in a vacuum. We don't find him when things are bowling along as usual and we are keeping our head down. We meet him in suffering, we meet him in encounters with others, we meet him in challenging situations, we meet him when we are vulnerable, we meet him basically when our defences are down and we are open and receptive.
And he shows us the way. And the way is to be like him. And that means getting close to people, it means living for others, it means healing the sick, it means carrying other peoples burdens, it means loving the poor, it means being close to the Father in prayer, it means being cheerful and laughing! Bruce Marciano, who played Jesus in the film version of the Gospel of Matthew some years ago, said that when he was researching the role he could not find a single picture of Jesus laughing! Maybe this has been the church’s downfall. It also means dying to self so we can rise to new life in him.
As St Paul says, “live not by your natural inclinations, but by the Spirit, since the Spirit of God has made a home in you… when Christ is in you, the body is dead because of sin but the spirit is alive because you have been justified.”
I remember a sign outside a funeral parlour in New York which said: Why walk around half dead when we can bury you for seventy-five bucks?
The question we need to ask is: Why walk around half dead when we have new life in Christ? |
| Date | 2005-04-03 | | Preacher | Rev J Thompson | | Title | Harvest Festival 2005 | | Sermon Details | Gospel: Matthew 13:1-9
One of the things (of which there are many I’m sure) that Aileen really doesn’t enjoy about traveling with me is when we spot a cow or sheep I tend to remark on what a lovely juicy steak that is or how good that would be in the pot or roasted over an open flame. She prefers her meat to be neatly packaged and wrapped hygienically so she doesn’t have to think about where it came from. There are probably many who would be on her side.
In our day and age we tend to forget the importance of Harvest Festival. I wonder what was going through the mind of the Cornish vicar Robert Hawker who, in 1843, began the modern tradition of celebrating Harvest Festival in the Church’s calendar. Did he sense that with the coming “industrial revolution” people might lose their sense of God’s providence and start thinking that food came from human effort and technology rather than from the hand of God? I wonder what he would make of the modern supermarket; with seemingly fresh but completely out of season foods from all around the world.
Our children are growing up believing that milk and bread come from PicknPay or Woolworth’s or wherever - farming has changed beyond anything I would have recognised as a boy - we are all becoming more and more detached from the food that our farmers grow - vegetables pre-washed, trimmed and packed in cellophane, meat served to us on cardboard trays and sealed with cellophane. That certainly wasn’t the case in 1843; bulk transport, packaging and refrigeration have together broken the relationship between the food we eat and the land we live on. We have no idea where most of the food we eat comes from, how old it is or how it got there. We have lost touch with the land and are the poorer for it – look around at all the pollution and litter – as we used to say; “what’s the national flower of the Transkei – the Checkers packet. We have lost our relationship with Creation.
In Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus tells the story about sowing seeds to a group of people who understood the importance of this relationship. He was speaking to a small group of Galilean fishermen who would have understood how important that relationship is. At this time they were confused about the packaging of the Messiah and wondering how to present Him to the world and could they ever really make an impact on the world. Jesus says "Things may look bleak, but never underestimate what God can do.
He reminds them that some of the seeds they are going to sow will be rejected by some people – and that’s alright; some of the seeds of the Gospel will be accepted by some people who will only pay lip service to it – and that’s alright; some of the seeds will be accepted by people who don’t really believe and when things get rough they will turn their backs on it – and that’s alright, and some people will accept it and it will change their lives – and that’s alright. It doesn’t matter if people reject these beliefs now, there may come a time in their lives when things change and these seeds will flower. What is important Jesus says is that you keep on sowing, no matter the harvest now – just keep on sowing.
Just remember, every seed has within it potential.
- A seed can bear fruit 30x, 60x, 100x.
- Each rice seed, each mustard seed, each ear of corn, each pumpkin seed - tiny and inert as it seems, has within it the potential to become a plant that provides an abundant harvest. It can feed a whole community, indeed a nation.
- Each child born has within them the potential to be a loving adult!
Like Jesus’ hearers, we live in an often harsh and brutal world. But Jesus says –Keep sowing – keep sowing the seeds of hope and peace and love and justice in the world. We sow seeds -We also seek to nurture and care for the fragile seeds of love and hope sown by ourselves and others. For seeds to reach their potential, they need the right conditions to thrive and flourish.
In the parable of the sower, the seeds that was not planted in the right conditions, or nurtured and tended, withered and perished. Life, particularly in its early stages, is fragile.
So let us provide that ground, that growing environment, of Love, Peace and Justice that seeds may grow. There are many ways in which we can grow and nurture the harvest of love, peace and justice
- Give our money and see it produce harvest for the poor.
- Campaign for a more just system of international trade.
- Say your prayers. One small prayer can produce a rich harvest.
- Live simply that others may simply live - and work to stop global warming.
- Sow a million small acts of love and peace and justice in your lives and live out the gospel.
- There are few finer things that one human being can do for another than help him or her realise their potential. That is what we all should be trying to do.
- So, look past the cellophane and the carefully washed potatoes, the meat injected with red colouring to make it more attractive for us and think of the miracle of the seeds sprouting and growing into the plants around us. That is the essence of harvest festival.
If we try to follow the example of the Desert Fathers we need to look past the surface of the people who we encounter to discover the real person inside – I believe there are very few genuinely evil people - mostly there are human beings caught up behind some packaging of their own or other's making. Jesus ignored the surface and went deeper - we should do the same.
Finally let me leave you with words of Oscar Romero Archbishop of El Salvador martyred in 1980 - One person plants a seed in the soil. Another waters it. We plant seeds that one day will grow. We water seeds already planted knowing that they hold future promise. We lay foundations that will need further development. (What we do) may be incomplete, but is a beginning, a step along the way, an opportunity for God’s grace to enter and do the rest. We may never see the end results, but that is the difference between the Master Builder and the worker. We are workers, not master builders; ministers, not messiahs. We are prophets of a future not our own.
So let us sow the seed and trust God for the Harvest! |
| Date | 2005-08-21 | | Preacher | Fr Joe Thompson | | Title | 21st Sunday Ordinary Time Year A | | Sermon Details | Gospel: Matthew 16: 13-20
I want you to imagine that you are walking down the street of a beautiful country town, the sun is warm and there is the smell of exotic flowers in the air. The place seems strange to you but it’s an exciting kind of strange – so many people of different cultures, different beliefs and different lifestyles. Around you are various places of worship to gods you don’t even know how to spell, sights of things you have never even dreamed of, or would ever want to again. All around are signs to the glory of humanity, signs which point to what humans can achieve, signs which are designed to show the power of the individual, and above all signs which show what money can buy.
And as you are walking around looking at all this, so your leader turns to your group and asks,”OK so what’s the gossip about me? What are people saying about me, and about who I am?” You feel awkward but you tell him nonetheless. He smiles that little smile you have come to know so well, and then he looks directly into your eyes and asks, “Uhuh, and you, who do you say that I am?”
Perhaps we can picture Jesus goes to Caesarea Philippi with his disciples. Caesarea Philippi was so named because it was rebuilt by the Tetrarch Herod Philip in honour of the emperor Tiberius. Lying 25 miles north of Galilee, it was a beautiful place in the foothills of the snow capped Mount Hermon. Springs fed by the melting snow from Mount Hermon formed the headwaters of the Jordan River. The site was beautiful and lush compared to the dryness of much of the surrounding countryside.
Also importantly, this was formerly the area which had been called Paneas in honour of the Greek god, Pan. The inhabitants were largely Gentile, this is Gentile territory. Perhaps the Gentile background of the place was important for Jesus, it is certainly important for us, because it reminds us that the events which follow took place in a time and place in which there were many competing religious voices. Jesus is about to ask the disciples to come to a conclusion and decide who he really is. They were surrounded by other religions and they had to think what was important and make their minds up. That is very much the context in which we find ourselves today, there are many different and competing religious movements which try to claim our attention, likewise, the people whom we live alongside and work alongside are also faced with a multitude of religious choices. People in our society today are exposed to more religions than ever before. So the question which Jesus asked the disciples is an important one for us today and the answer which we give must have profound consequences not only for our own decision making process, but also for the way in which we think through our responsibilities in the religious market of our society.
When Peter declares: "You are the Messiah", he is saying what has to be said for us to be called Christian. To be Christian means believing that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God. Anything else -- anything less -- might be religious, but it is not Christian. How does Jesus respond to Peter? Jesus uses the name in Aramaic 'Petros', in Greek 'Cephas'. Whether Jesus would have used the Aramaic or Greek is irrelevant because in both languages the word refers to a rock or stone. If you and I are able to worship Jesus as the Christ, the Son of God, then in the same way, we represent the power of God at work in our own lives.
So, are we now willing to make the kind of life changing investment which is required of his disciples? If we mean what we say then we are a part of that holy people called to live a different and challenging Christian life? It is worth remembering that those Apostles gave their lives for their faith, literally.
So what about you and me? Imagine for one minute if we all gave less – to God. I have been asked to deal with the very tricky “money sermon” in the run up to DG Sunday in a few weeks time. And I must confess it is a very awkward especially when faced with Jesus’ question this morning, “who do you say that I am?” We are faced with so many difficult situations in life which challenge us on a very deep level, and the problem is that we don’t always consider our answer to His question.
What we all need to do, in a variety of situations – money is but one example – is to think through the issues and the consequences of different actions. The fact is that our churches need more money ‘given to God’ on the offering plate each week, more, not less. So how are we tempted in that situation – I’ll cut back on collection or dedicated giving because…? Someone once asked a friend of mine how much they should give to God each week. He replied by asking another question: ‘how much would you miss?’ If what we give to God, we don’t miss then it’s not enough. Loose change hardly says ‘I love you’ to God. But giving which really costs can say that.
It’s a temptation, money, but what we do with it can say a lot about our priorities, and can say a lot about the sort of people we really are.
As we get closer to DG Sunday and as we come now to baptise believers into the community of Christ, we need to reflect on that question from Jesus. Who do we as a Cathedral parish, who do we as individuals and who do we as members together of the Body of Christ say that He is in the way we exist in a world of multiple faiths. Dear friends, we should also treasure this local gathering of Christ’s too as well as these new members of that fellowship. And I do mean treasure it. ‘I will build my church,’ says Jesus, ‘and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it.’
May we too respond with Peter that Jesus is the Christ, the Saviour of the world. In His name and to His glory. Amen
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| Date | 2005-10-02 | | Preacher | Fr Joe Thompson | | Title | Michaelmas 2005 | | Sermon Details | So have you seen your first angel yet? I find it appropriate that we celebrate St Michael and all Angels at this time of the year because it is about now that you see the angels begin to appear - in shop windows and on TV ads!
If you read the New Testament carefully you will discover that angels appear at those moments which we might call the turning points or the "crisis points" of God's invasion plan for this world. At the Annunciation there was an angel; at the Nativity there were a great many angels; in the wilderness
during the first Lent there were angels "ministering unto Jesus"; during his hours of agonizing in the Garden of Gethsemane Jesus was strengthened, once again, by an angel. At the Resurrection one or more angels spoke to Mary of Magdala and the other women as they looked in vain for the body of Jesus;
and at the Ascension, two angels appeared to the Apostles as they stood
there, not certain what to do next, and told them to return to Jerusalem to
wait for the coming of the Holy Spirit. And so on. Right through Acts to
Revelation: Peter, Paul, John were all ministered to by angels at the time
of their greatest need. And so we today gather to celebrate the angelic host
and all that they do for us.
St. Michael and All Angels is a feast that focuses upon the battle between
good and evil, a battle waged on earth today, and we are told in Revelation
a battle that took place in heaven also. One reason that Michael is placed
as the leader of the angel host is because of his name, it derives from the
Hebrew meaning "who is like God". So, the question that I would like to pose
this morning is "how can we be like God in our daily lives?" Can we be
likened to God at home, at work, at play?
One of the main purposes of coming to church is to be sent out again
refreshed. What we experience in this sacred space will hopefully feed us,
strengthen us, and enlighten us to then go back into the world and to live
the Gospel of Christ. We are to be like God, like Christ, that is the
calling of all the baptised, to continue Christ's ministry on earth. And He
has given us the Angels and the Archangels to help us.
I find it appropriate to talk of angels at this time because Phil and I ask
the Confirmation candidates about now whether we become angels when we die.
I won't tell you their responses, but rather the truth - no we don't. Angels
were created when the world was created and their numbers were set at that
time, none can be added or removed from that number.
As we worship here this morning there are angels hard at work around us,
fine-tuning our imperfect efforts into something without spot or blemish to
present to God. If you are praying for someone, the odds are that there is
an angel straightening out what you and I have said with our lips so that it
corresponds more closely with what we meant to say from our hearts.
Most of us will have had the experience of being struck by a particular idea
that we ought to go and visit one of our friends that we haven's seen for a
while. We do so, and find either that the other party has been struck by
precisely the same thought, or that our visit, for whatever reason, was
particularly well-timed. The probability is in such cases that the angels
have been hard at work behind the scenes trying to produce the right
conditions under which one, or both of us, would think that particular
thought.
God's angels work unseen. but once a year, round about the end of September,
we show our appreciation for all that they do for us, rather in the way that
every theatre programme has an acknowledgement of appreciation for the large
number of people who work "behind the scenes" on a production, whose job is
precisely not to be seen during the performance.
Can we the followers of Christ today, bring some sense and sensitivity to
the world as God's messengers and protectors? St Irenaeus says that the
glory of God is man fully alive. Or to put it slightly differently God is
truly worshipped and glorified when men and women live life to the full,
body and soul, heart, mind and strength. The Christian vision of human life
isn't only about ethics and prayer; it embraces all our joys and sorrows,
our loves and our bereavements, the best times and the worst. St Irenaeus
goes on to say that the glory of man is the vision of God, which means that
men and women are most fully themselves, most fully alive, when we
understand that we are the creatures of a loving God, endowed with the
freedom to choose the way of love - for God, for others, for the world in
which we live. When angels speak, it is always an invitation to take the
way of love.
How can we echo the work of the Angels in our daily lives?
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| Date | 2005-09-17 | | Preacher | Fr Joe Thompson | | Title | Sermon 25th Sunday | | Sermon Details | 25th Sunday in Ordinary Time
Gospel Matthew 20: 1-16
The parable we have just heard, about the men labouring in the vineyard, is
probably one of the most familiar of all the parables. Our sympathies
spontaneously go out to the fellow who laboured all day and yet who receives
the same salary as the one who laboured only for one hour.
It isn't fair. No it isn't. But in a strange way it's brilliant.
Stand in the shoes of the man who's hung around all day in the market place
waiting for work. He knows it must be his fault, somewhere along the line.
He'd had an argument with his wife that morning, and tripped over the cat,
so he got there feeling a bit angry from the start. But he knew the score,
put on his best smile when the landowner rolled up, tried to look strong -
good with cats and grannies and picking grapes. But no. No job. Not picked.
Alright - time to read the Capernaum Sun, and have a leisurely coke. Another
chance at 9 o'clock, but no - his mate next to him got chosen, not him. Come
on! What's wrong? A sick feeling was developing in his stomach. 12 o'clock?
Nope. 3 o'clock? By now, he was pinned to the floor by the feeling of
failure. What was he going to tell Rachel and the children? No new camel
this year - not even a ferret. And that holiday down at the pyramids - no
chance. Why was this happening again? Why was it so unfair?
And then a minor miracle! At 5 o'clock the landowner came out again, only
this time he said: `Right lads, everybody in.' and in they all went, working
with a will for an hour. Only an hour. Not much money for an hour, but
better than nothing. Then it's 6 o'clock and the end of the day. The early
starters are looking a bit ragged but at least they'll get their money first
and be off for an early bath. But no! The late ones were called first to the
table under the olive tree. And paid the full whack! Rachel's husband looked
at the money in amazement, and then at the landowner, who smiled and nodded.
Wow! Now where was that brochure for the pyramids?
How did it feel to those men do you think? Wonderful! This story is about
grace. It's about extraordinary generosity. It's about the extravagance of
God's love. It's about a God who doesn't measure out his love and
forgiveness in little packages, carefully calculated according to our just
desserts, our goodness, our length of service, the number of early
communions or sermons we've listened to. This is about a God who gives us
grace upon grace.
It means we don't get our just desserts - and thank goodness for that. If we
really had a tariff system for the kingdom of heaven and our place in it,
I'd be in serious trouble. If the quality of my living and loving were the
criteria, I'd be trying to renegotiate terms. If my thoughts and resentments
and jealousies, and my dubious motives and my darker fantasies - if they
were all on the table I'd be preparing for the Court of Appeal already. But
wonderfully that isn't the way God works. What we get from the landowner is
full pay, as much as we can take, as much as we need. He starts with us and
our need, with a personal approach to justice, not with an abstract theory
about it. Full pay, full forgiveness, as much grace as we can take. It's
extraordinary!
One of the most difficult aspects of Christianity is the paradox of Grace
and Responsibility. We have an all-powerful God who not only has the power,
but the will and the love for us to redeem every one of us in the blink of
an eye. But along with the grace that is on offer, there is the
responsibility that He gives each of us, the choice, to either accept or
reject that grace. He can, in an instant - make our lives perfect, remove
all illness, all despair, and all sadness. He can provide everything we
need, and we need never concern ourselves about any aspect of our lives. But
He chooses not to.
What is required is that you and I accept the grace that is on offer. The
salvation bought for us on the cross by Jesus Christ is sufficient. No
amount of works, no amount of effort, can lessen or increase that salvation.
And with that acceptance comes responsibility.
So let us turn our focus from the seeming injustice described in the parable
to its setting in the vineyard. Each one of us is called to serve in the
vineyard of the Lord which is the world around us. Each one of us has work
to do for the Lord. We are Christians after all, the followers of Christ on
earth, and we are called to carry on his ministry in the world of today. We
are called to do what Christ did: preach the Good News of the Kingdom; heal
the sick; forgive the sinner; spend time alone with God in prayer, serve in
his vineyard. We are his hands and his feet and everything we do we do in
his name.
The world is our vineyard and we care for the vines: we prune them and we
protect them from frost and from predation. Some have a special role as
priests, others as teachers or lawyers or doctors or parents, but all of us
are workers in the vineyard of the Lord. All of us are baptised and
confirmed into ministry in imitation of our Lord and Saviour. And it is a
fulltime occupation. Our Christian life, therefore, is not merely restricted
to going to Church on a Sunday and saying our prayers. Our Christian life is
like a seamless robe because our every thought and word and deed we intend
to be an expression of our commitment to Christ. We are his apostles today
and our work as an apostle is carried out in our homes, in our workplaces
and in our leisure activities. Our vineyard is the world around us.
I leave you with the words of a hymn.
There's a wideness in God's mercy
like the wideness of the sea;
there's a kindness in his justice
which is more than liberty.
For the love of God is broader
than the measure of man's mind;
and the heart of the Eternal
is most wonderfully kind
Frederick William Faber (1814-63)
May His grace be visible in our lives every day. Amen
|
| Date | 2005-11-06 | | Preacher | Rev Joe Thompson | | Title | All Saints | | Sermon Details | All Saints
Gospel: Matthew 5: 1-12
Who can claim to have taught you about love? Can God or Jesus?
We come to celebrate today the Feast of All Saints, a time to remember all
the people who have had a part in maintaining the ministry of spreading the
Good News brought to us by Jesus.
Usually when we speak of Saints we think of those who died for their faith
or who lived extraordinary lives. This Feast day dates back to the 5th
century Antioch in Syria when the church dedicated a day to the memory of
all those who had been killed for their faith. Until then the church had
remembered martyrs on special days of the year, but there became more
martyrs than days in the year, and there were some whose names were not
known
At each Eucharist and at Morning and Evening Prayer we read either the
Nicene Creed or the Apostle's Creed, in which we confess that we believe in
the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church. What do these words mean that
we say we believe in?
These words which define the Church, One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic, are
also words that define the Saints - after all the Church is made up of
people.
The Saints are One because they are all together. We speak of the communion
of the saints united in their goal of service to God.
The Saints are also obviously holy. The word Saint means holy or set apart.
The Saints are also Catholic. This word does not mean Roman Catholic. We
mean 'Catholic' in the original sense of the word - the same in all places
and at all times. Thus today, on this Feast of All Saints, we commemorate
all the Saints of all countries and of all centuries and of all backgrounds.
We recall Saints of all ages, of all nationalities, men, women and children,
the poor and the rich, the old and the young, the healthy and the sick. They
all confessed the same faith. The Saints are universal in time and space;
they are 'Catholic'.
Finally, the Saints are Apostolic, for they share in the same Faith and
Tradition as the Apostles.
And so we can believe that the Saints are there to inspire us and to lead us
to God, and we can be sitting here today thinking that this is a pretty tall
order for us. but it isn't. Nobody is perfect, as St Paul says in his Second
Letter to the Corinthians (4: 7), "We hold this treasure in clay jars, so
that it may be made clear that this extraordinary power belongs to God and
does not come from us." Christianity is spread by imperfect people.
Let's bring this closer to home. who taught you about your faith? You got it
from men and women who lived by it, witnessed to it and passed it on for
twenty centuries. But more directly, you got it from other people; parents,
priests, teachers in school or church, from a friend who you could turn to
when things weren't going alright. it was through people that God made
Himself known to you.
My challenge to you this morning is how is that faith going to be passed on?
The answer surely has to be the same, through people. It can only be passed
on through people like you and me. Each one of us is called to follow the
example of Christ and to try to live it each day of our lives - we are
called to be saints.
In the early church the word saints was used to describe all the followers
of the Way not just those who were "good". Paul and other writers said quite
rightly that the people of God were called the saints. It was just a word
that meant the people of God,
living, praising, working together as we will in heaven. But then it was a
short step to say that if we are saints together, then each of us must be a
saint. But that is like saying if you've all got measles, then one of you
must be a measle!
The word saints was only ever intended to be used in the plural! But if the
saints are the people of God, and you want to call a person a saint, it's
enough to say that it's an individual who is one of God's people - who has
accepted that Jesus died for them,
and accepted Him into their life. That's all.
Remember God doesn't wait for perfect people when he wants men and women to
serve Him, He chooses you and me now today! Just remember that we are no
better than jars of clay to contain this treasure, but it isn't ourselves we
preach but Jesus Christ our Lord. We come today to remember all those people
who down the ages have struggled through the daily mire trying to remain
faithful to their calling and we reflect on our own calling to be saints to
the world around us.
Just look at the people Jesus says are blessed : the poor in spirit, the
gentle, those who mourn, those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, the
merciful, the pure in heart, the peacemakers, those persecuted for
righteousness, the abused and falsely accused. dearest friends that means
us.
Who taught you how to love, how are you passing that love on? Amen |
| Date | 2006-01-22 | | Preacher | Rev Joe Thompson | | Title | 3rd Sunday in Ordinary Time - Year B | | Sermon Details | Gospel: Mark 1: 14-20
The group REM have a song which is entitled, "It's the end of the world as we know it and I feel fine." I guess that is what todays readings are about
- the end of the world. How many of us reflect on that day and what it means
for us? Do we even think about it at all? Probably not, we are so focussed
on all the things which we have to face in our daily grind that we seldom
have the time.
Jesus began his public ministry with a tone of great urgency claiming that
time was of the essence. He certainly saw himself as following in the
footsteps of the great Jewish prophets and, as with their preaching and
warnings, his announcement that God's Kingdom was at hand had two aspects to
it. There was the proclamation of God's grace, the "good news" that the time
of salvation has dawned. God has come to us and is calling us to be a part
of His life.
But at the same time Jesus proclaimed God's Reign as an imminent judgement.
The assumption is that humanity is far from God and in practice often lives
without reference to God. The time to put things right is growing short - as
St Paul emphasises in the second reading. So Jesus starts his ministry by
issuing this urgent appeal for repentance.
Although we were originally made in the image of God and called to live in
harmony with Him, our problem is that we've separated ourselves from Him.
Our vision of things, our values and motives and our behaviour are distorted
by sin, and we look for happiness and fulfilment in the wrong places. We
follow the logic of sin and we naturally, almost automatically, put
ourselves first. We use other people; we scramble after money, power,
status, and selfish pleasure. Human society runs according to the law of
self-interest; survival of the fittest seems to be the way of human nature.
But in the mind and will of God there's nothing natural about this selfish
logic, and life in the Kingdom of God, to use Jesus' phrase, involves a kind
of reversal of the worldly, self-seeking principles we take for granted.
When Jesus talked about money and possessions it was to advise people to
give them up as much as possible. When he talked about power-relations it
was to tell his followers, "this is not how it shall be among you". When he
talked about differences in social status it was to say that under God's
Reign "the first shall be last and the last shall be first", while the
person who aspires to superiority over others must make himself the servant
of all.
God's Kingdom, then, doesn't fit in neatly with the way things usually are
in the world because the way things usually are is determined by sin. And
that was why Jesus not only declared the coming of God's Kingdom to be Good
News, but also demanded that his listeners repent.
That means two things. First of all it means that we have to acknowledge our
flawed nature, our tendency to allow self-interest to dominate. Second it
means an actual turning away from sin and a new willingness to immerse
ourselves in God's holiness and love, which then re-order our vision and
values, our motives and behaviour.
We see the way this can work in the first reading from the prophet Jonah.
Jonah's attempts to warn the people of Nineveh about the danger threatening
them was successful and, as the author puts it, they "renounced their evil
behaviour". Jesus' efforts, on the other hand, didn't meet with the same
success, and later in his ministry he often lamented the people's hardness
of heart, their indifference and the spiritual blindness of the religious
leaders. Note the contrast between the reaction of the people of Nineveh and
the reaction of the people Jesus preached to- the question we need to ask
ourselves is how well do we acknowledge our own need for repentance in this
modern age?
The danger today is not a fear of damnation or neurotic guilt, but a sort of
collapse into self-indulgence. Modern people like the idea that religious
faith will provide them with a sense of comfort and personal wellbeing but
they're not so keen on the fact that genuine holiness and closeness to God
are only achieved through spiritual warfare - an honest confrontation with
all our unholy, un-Godly tendencies. One of the interesting things about the
conflict between Jesus and the Pharisees which I came across recently is
that Jesus felt the Pharisees didn't take sin seriously enough. They thought
too well of themselves, were too self-assured and too confident that their
pious practices were pleasing to God and their sins too trivial to matter.
Repentance was for other people, not for them.
And so Jesus warns us that there is little time to wait, we need to act now
because the years of our own lives hurtle by. A year ago seems like just
yesterday. Of course, we don't know when God will call us to himself. But we
know that our lives on this earth will certainly come to an end and that our
time is running out. As St Paul says this world is passing away- time is
short. The hour has come for us to choose.
So let us choose goodness, truth, wisdom and love. Let us take the Lord
Jesus to be our guide. Let us go where he leads us. Let his words be on our
lips. Let his thoughts be in our heads. Let his joy be in our hearts and let
his love overflow in our lives. Perhaps then we can say with confidence that
Yes it is the end of the world as we know it and Yes we do feel fine!
|
| Date | 2005-12-18 | | Preacher | Fr Joe Thompson | | Title | Advent 4 Year B: Gospel: Luke 1: 26-38 | | Sermon Details | There is a story of a young Naval Academy graduate, who after completing his
first overseas cruise, was given an opportunity to display his talents at
getting his ship underway and out of port. The young officer's efficiency
established a new record for getting a naval ship underway. He was stunned,
however, when a sailor approached him with a message from their captain. "My
personal congratulations upon completing your underway preparations exercise
according to the book and with amazing speed. In your haste however, you
have overlooked one of the fundamental rules-make sure the captain is on
board before you leave."
It is easy to forget what is important in the midst of all that is going on
around us at this time - buying gifts, trying to see friends, planning
Christmas meals and so on. Today the Church has a moment for us to pause and
reflect on another time when things were so completely different - a time
when Christmas did not exist. A time when an angel came to see a young
virgin with a message from God that was utterly unbelievable - "you are to
have a son and he is to be the saviour of the world!" Spare a thought for
what must have gone through her mind!!!
Firstly she was a woman, a simple girl and therefore uneducated. And as a
woman she had no power in society, she didn't know the intricacies of the
law, and, in fact, she could not even enter the temple. How could this be
happening to her? Surely God had got it wrong? Mary is so shocked that she
replies with the first question that pops into her head, 'How can this come
about since I am a virgin?'
Mary's reaction to the angel is so typically human and gives us a wonderful
glimpse into her personality. The angel gives her a vision of glory: "He
will be great. Son of the most high.the throne of his ancestor David." and
Mary reacts entirely understandably, from her own perspective, from within
herself: "How can this be, since I am a virgin?" Now there are many ways
that you can look at this. Some interpreters think of this as Mary saying:
"Surely I cannot be what you want? How could it be that I am of any use to
God?"
Other interpreters think that Mary is saying: "look at who I am: am I not a
bit of a problem? I'm not married therefore surely not fulfilling God's
requirements so isn't this is a recipe for scandal!" Whatever you decide,
the end result is the same: Mary is not saying 'what will this cost me?' Nor
is she saying, 'what does God hope to achieve by this?' because that is not
what we think when we are thinking in terms of God and his will for us. What
we are usually thinking is 'leave me alone. Don't come too close please. I
am not good enough for you. Choose someone else. You cannot, simply cannot
want to use me.' This is what I think Mary is trying to say to the angel.
And again, the angel's response is similar to God's response to David in our
first reading, one of reassurance and compassion: God will make his home
with you, the power of the most High will come to rest within you, and that
is why you will be able to achieve what now seems impossible. God within
you, if you will accept him. Because no one is too small for God, to far
away for God, not even (look at your cousin Elisabeth) too old for God. And
faced with that truth, Mary finds the courage: Here am I, the servant of the
Lord, let it be with me according to your word.'
God will make his home within us. That is what Advent is meant to prepare us
for, and the terror of Christmas is that we are not ready, not worthy, not
nearly, and we give him a world on the brink of destruction as well, but he
will still be born among us, ready or not. And no amount of trying to shut
him safely away in a box, no amount of thinking ourselves unworthy, too
small, to bad, or too old is going to stop it happening.
But let's take another point. Yes, the angel Gabriel says to Mary 'You have
won God's favour,' but when we consider all that subsequently happened to
Mary how can we consider that she was favoured according to our way of
understanding the word.
After this episode with the angel Mary was probably ostracized by her
community and was certainly going to be 'put aside' by Joseph if God hadn't
interfered and told him through a dream to take her into his home.
She then bore a son away from her family in a strange town, which she walked
about seventy miles while pregnant to get to. She was then told that her own
soul would be pierced by a sword and subsequently had to flee to Egypt to
keep her baby safe. Later on she worried and searched for him for days while
he was in the temple. She saw him grow up to be an itinerant rabbi instead
of having a good job as a carpenter. And eventually she saw him scourged,
crucified and buried.
Looking at this it seems to be quite clear that being in God's favour
doesn't necessarily mean the good life. This is all part of the great
paradox of Christianity. To be favoured by God is to discover that that
through pain and death there is new life and great blessing. Mary's simple
'yes, let it happen to me' brought the greatest possible blessing on her and
on the whole human race.
God chooses his moment and intervenes in our life. He faces us with a choice
and we can either doubt, disbelieve and draw back or we can accept, believe
and go forward. Either way we will face difficulties. Either way God will do
what he intends and if he needs to will achieve what he wants by other
means.
So this Christmas, let us not forget the captain of our lives and leave Him
behind. Let us remember to find Christ in all that we are about over this
last week before Christmas, and to respond to His calling with an emphatic
"yes, let it happen to me' And may this Christmas be a time of great joy and
true blessedness for each one of us.
Maranatha - come Lord Jesus come.
In the name of God. Amen.
|
| Date | 2006-02-12 | | Preacher | Fr Joe Thompson | | Title | Sixth Sunday Year B | | Sermon Details | Gospel: Mark 1: 40-45
In my first year at Rhodes University I can remember attending an inaugural
lecture by one of the history professors - it was entitled "History Repeats
Itself". At the time of Jesus people used to live behind huge city walls to
keep the undesireables out, in medieval times people lived behind the walls
of the castle when danger lurked nearby, now we have security villages with
boomed entrances to keep people we don't want out. It would appear that
professor may have been on to something.
In two of our readings today we hear about people cured of leprosy, a
serious disease, that afflicted not only the leper but also his community.
The Book of Leviticus tells us that a leper, "shall remain unclean as long
as he has the disease; he is unclean; he shall dwell alone in a habitation
outside the camp."
The community feared contamination by the uncleanliness of the leper. Not
only was the leper himself unclean, but he could contaminate others even
with his presence and make them unclean too. The safest way for him to live
was in his own dwelling outside the camp. A leper was forbidden to live
within the walls of any city, especially Jerusalem. No wonder that Naaman
was so desperate to find a cure!
To be healed was to have the possibility of being readmitted to the 'camp',
reintegrated into one's own community, no longer an object of fear but a
true neighbour. When Jesus healed the leper, he opened up new possibilities
for the leper by allowing him to seek readmittance to Israel's camp. No
longer would he have to live in a 'habitation' on the outside. He could live
again within the city walls.
So the healing of the leper is a sign of what the mission of Jesus is about.
He takes by the hand those who are on the edge of God's people and leads
them into God's city, rejoicing. The leper, now cleansed from his
affliction, can go to the priest and be declared clean. He can go into
Jerusalem, to the temple of the Lord, and offer sacrifice to God.
But don't just consider the effect of this healing on the leper. Consider
its effect on Jesus' mission. Jesus has been touring the villages of
Galilee, preaching in their synagogues. But the ease of Jesus' mission was
brought to an end by the leper's behaviour. Jesus had told him not to tell
anyone about it but go straight to the priest and make his offering. But the
man started telling his story everywhere and so Jesus could not enter a town
openly. Jesus now had to stay outside the towns and villages, in places
where nobody lived; He was forced to go out into the desert to avoid the
enthusiastic crowds. He was not interested in having "fans", only genuine
followers. He would not be ready until his full identity was recognised.
That would only happen as he hung dying on the cross (Mark 15:39).
Jesus then has come to be on the outside, to be living outside the camp, in
the places inhabited by no one but such unfortunates as the leper. This is
our second sign. It tells us how Jesus has in fact come to live on the
outside. This is how he brings us inside, by coming to live with a human
race that lives 'outside the camp' as nobody, and setting us free.
Humanity has lived 'outside the camp' since we were expelled from the Garden
of Eden in which we were created. While on the inside there was a close
communion with God's creation, and an intimate friendship with God himself,
a friendship we flouted for the sake of lesser goods; on the outside we
found work hard labour, we found pain and suffering, and we found death a
cruel reality. And then God found these things too, in Christ, when he bore
our afflictions, and suffered for us a cruel death outside the camp, when he
offered the sacrifice of himself outside Jerusalem's walls.
God knows the outside from the inside. Nothing was hidden from Christ. He
came to be with us where we are - on the outside - that he might bring us
inside to where he is - lying in the bosom of the Father. He, who was rich,
became poor like us, so that we could share the riches of God. He who was
divine took the condition of a slave that he might free us for God.
And so we can ask ourselves today, what has our experience of knowing Jesus
been like? How come we do not have the enthusiasm of this cleansed leper? Is
it because our religious living is so often focused just on ourselves. It is
perhaps worth noting that the man's experience was the result of having
first been the victim of a terrible cross. It is often in our crosses that
grace appears.
Finally, we also need to ask who the lepers in our society are today.
Today's Gospel is really about all those who for one reason or another
become isolated or ostracised in our society... There are many marginal
groups -drug addicts, unemployed, the elderly, single mothers, the homeless,
alcoholics, migrant workers and asylum seekers... there are a large number
of lepers in all our societies. They are lepers because it is we who make
them so. And we use all kinds of rationalisation to justify our behaviour.
But, in any Christian community, there is no place for the ostracised leper.
God's loving hand must reach out to them as it does to everyone else. But
those loving and compassionate hands must be ours. So let us rejoice in the
fact that we have been brought in from the outside and let us move beyond
the walls which surround us to actively seek out those who are still on the
outside, And maybe in this way we can stop history from repeating itself.
Amen
|
| Date | 2006-03-05 | | Preacher | Rev Joe Thompson | | Title | Sermon Lent 1 | | Sermon Details | First Sunday of Lent, Year B
Gospel: Mark 1: 9-15
I always find it funny how God shows His sense of humour to me, yesterday I
was at a family birthday party for my niece and would you believe it the
theme of the party was Noah's Ark! I was struck by how appropriate that
theme was in terms of today's readings.
In our first reading we have the story of the flood and Noah's ark. It is a
wonderful story. And every time we look at a rainbow we are reminded of
God's promise. The rainbow-this most beautiful and transient of all things
is-as we have heard, a reminder of God's covenant; the close bond he
established with us after the great flood. He makes his promise not only to
humankind but also to every living creature. Respect for creation is not
something new; the creator himself respects the whole of creation more than
we ever could.
The rainbow is a wonderful sign of God's love because of all its wonderful
colours. How does it go? Richard of York gained battle in vain: Red, orange,
yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet. All the colours are there and all the
grades in between. And there are even colours we can't see. This shows the
breadth of God's love. His love covers the whole range of existence and even
things we are totally unaware of.
In some ancient cultures the rainbow is a sign of a weapon as in bow and
arrow; they say the rainbow is God's bow and lightning is his arrow. The
rainbow for them is a sign of anger, but for us it is a sign of God's love.
We do enough things to provoke God's anger, but in this great covenant God
says that he will be merciful to us, he will hold back his anger. Instead he
will love us all the more.
In our second reading, St Peter sees in this water of the flood a
prefigurement of baptism. In baptism we are washed free from our sins. Our
baptism becomes a special sign of God's love for us individually. By baptism
he singles us out and unites us to himself by a special bond. So how does
the water of Baptism save us? The mere pouring of some water does not
automatically or by some magic "make us Christians". Through Baptism we
become in-corp-orated into the Church, the Body of Christ (corpus Christi),
the living Christian community. Through our living in and with that
community we learn the way of Jesus, we learn how to live in commitment to
him. We learn to live a life based on truth, love, compassion, sharing,
justice and freedom.
We get support in living that life from the community of which we are a
part. We learn to grow into a people who are whole and complete in union and
harmony with our God, with others and with ourselves. And that is salvation.
And it begins here and now.
Lent is the time for us to strengthen and renew that process. Let us use it
well and not come out at the other end asking, "Whatever did I do for Lent?
We read in the Gospel about Jesus spending time in the desert-he went there
to be alone with God, but he experienced all kinds of temptations there. He
emerged victorious, just as he was to emerge victorious after his suffering
and death.
We don't need to go into the desert, we are already in the desert-the world
is a desert, it lacks real knowledge of God. With his help we can overcome
the difficulties we experience day by day. It might not appear so to others,
of course. But for us sufferings and difficulties are part and parcel of
being a Christian and we know that they are only a sign of the victory that
is to come.
When we emerge from the desert we will enter into paradise and it will have
all the beauty and more of the rainbow. Let us press on towards paradise!
Amen
|
| Date | 2006-05-07 | | Preacher | Fr Joe Thompson | | Title | Third Sunday of Easter 2006 | | Sermon Details | Gospel: John 10: 11-18
Father Methodius Michola, a Roman Catholic priest who lived in Prostejov in
Czechoslovakia died for his faith during WWII. He vigorously spoke against
the pagan ideology of Nazism in the schools and from the pulpit. He was
executed in Brno by firing squad after a summary trial. On the way to his
execution he walked slowly while reciting the rosary, the soldiers pushed
him in the back and told him to hurry up. He turned on them and said, 'Don't
hurry me, I'm praying for you and you are going to need those prayers.' The
dumbfounded soldiers didn't push him any more but let him walk at his own
pace to the place of execution.
Jesus says, 'I am the Good Shepherd.' We hear this phrase so often, we see
images such as we have in our Church of Jesus with a sheep on his shoulders.
But do we really know what it means for us in our daily lives today?
The actual word used to describe the shepherd if we look to the original
Greek was kalos. And we have to say that the word good is not an adequate
translation. It really should be something like model. He is the model
shepherd. He is the ideal shepherd. He is the very best of shepherds. He is
the archetypal shepherd.
Jesus is our best possible shepherd because he is the only one fully
qualified to be this for us. This is first of all because he is God. But
just as importantly because he is at the same time fully human.
A shepherd, in order to know his sheep and care for them, has to live among
them. He has to be close to them. Jesus not only came from heaven to earth
to be near his sheep, he actually became like them.
The shepherd became a sheep, took on our nature, and lived life in the same
way as we do (except without sin). This is why he is the good shepherd,
perfectly qualified to know us and to care for us. He is like us in our
flesh. There is no shepherd like this Jesus. And he lays down his life for
his sheep-for us. He is, in one of those marvellous paradoxes of the Gospel,
at the same time both the lamb and the shepherd-the victim and the priest.
The first reading, from Acts, similarly presents this theme of knowing Jesus
as the "shepherd and gaurdian of our souls.". Knowing the power of Christ's
name at work in our world is what Peter preaches, knowing that Jesus Christ
is the keystone. But there is a twist. Peter wants us to know the danger,
that of rejecting Jesus Christ in our lives. As Christ knows us and loves
us, we for our part, can ignore and refuse to acknowledge Christ in our
lives.
Most of us would be horrified to think of ourselves as rejecting Christ, of
abandoning our faith. But there are other lesser ways in which we reject
Christ as the keystone of our life. The truth is we do grow dim in our
knowing the light of Christ. In our busy life we forget all too often. We
neglect to set time aside in prayer, or attend a course like Alpha or a
retreat, or read a book or article on the Christian life.
These are all ways to grow in our knowledge of Christ that we take for
granted. Other people too help us to know Christ in our life. Who are the
women and men in your life that show you the face of Christ? Do we recognize
how Christ is present to us even now.
They have all been women and men who heard the voice of the Good Shepherd
and shared that voice with us in our lives. Their vocations help us to grow
in knowing Christ. Sadly, we may take this vocation as a Christian for
granted. If so, we need once again to hear the Shepherd's voice calling to
us amid our daily concerns and the loud drone of all our activities.
The vocation to marriage, with its unique call to parenthood, takes on its
richest meaning when we, as spouse or as family, together hear God's word in
our lives. When we make time together in worship, or at prayer in our homes
we hear the Shepherd's call in our hearts. However, today when the clamour
of this world rejects Christ, how do people hear God's call, that unique
sense of who I am in God's heart?
If you hear God speaking to your heart don't ignore such gentle voices. I
don't believe that God suddenly stopped calling people to a religious
vocation. Rather, today we so easily put God on hold. You might be into the
start of your career and still a voice speaks to you. God calls us, but we
for our part, must hear his voice. Don't reject the cornerstone of your
life, don't refuse Christ's calling for you.
At the end of the day, listening to this call is not wasted time. For the
early Church the image of the youthful Christ shepherding his flock was an
image of hope, it was that same hope that calmed and comforted Fr Methodius
as he walked towards his death, we need to let that same hope be ours today.
May we show the way forward to a world that is increasingly becoming
anti-Christian and even anti-God, as we follow the Shepherd of our lives and
live the hope He offers.
May you hear the Shepherd's voice speaking to your heart today and may you
follow His lead.
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| Date | 2006-04-30 | | Preacher | Fr Joe Thompson | | Title | Easter 2 Year B | | Sermon Details | Gospel: Luke 24: 35-48
Did you ever imagine there were monsters beneath your bed, or ghosts that
were hiding in your sock drawer, or did you grow up with a haunted house in
your neighbourhood? Me neither. My Dad tells the story of being a naughty
young boy (something I never was) and together with a friend riding their
bicycles wearing sheets. They used to have a great run down a hill and then
through a dip and into the nearby school grounds. At the bottom of the hill
was a tram terminus where the conductor would have to get out and switch the
overhead wires over to return his journey. One night my Dad and his friend
came down the hill as the conductor was switching the lines. As they came
past, his friend's sheet got caught in his chain and the sheet whipped off.
My Dad reckons that conductor is still running!
I've often wondered just what it is that people who claim to have seen
ghosts actually see. Whatever ghosts actually are, they are objects of fear,
and I suppose that is partly because they are signs of the grave.
But there is something else that is true about ghosts. In the standard kind
of stories we tell about them, they are not just frightening, but also
pitiable. They are often thought to be tortured souls, bound to the earth by
some terrible act, for which they must be punished or seek revenge. They are
not alive; they do not share the joys or even the sorrows of others. They
are not loved and do not love. They are hollow, barely existent, utterly cut
off from vitality.
THERE ARE MANY VERSIONS of what happened after the resurrection of Jesus.
Each gospel has a different description of events. Last Sunday we saw John's
version of what happened in the upper room on Easter Sunday. Today we have
Luke's version. The contents are similar but there are differences.
The disciples in our Gospel are frightened because they think they are
seeing a ghost, and Jesus reassures them in a straightforward way: he has
flesh and bones. He's alive. He's not a sign of the tomb. He's a sign of
life. To prove that he is alive, he eats fish with them.
By doing this, he shows he is not like a ghost in two very important ways.
Firstly, eating is part of life in a very basic way. All animals, including
human animals, must eat or they will die. Those who are dead do not eat;
eating is of the essence of being alive. But secondly, eating is one of the
most basic ways in which we establish and celebrate our relationships with
those around us. So Jesus shows that he is not like a ghost in that he is
alive: he eats. But even more, Jesus shows that he is not like a ghost, cut
off from
humanity because he eats with his friends!
It's time to put my cards on the table: I don't believe in ghosts. That is
to say, I don't believe there are spirits of dead people walking the earth
and terrorising people. Just what people who claim to have seen them have
seen, I don't know, but I don't believe they are these tormented souls.
Let's get back to Jesus' disciples, why were they so dumbstruck? They surely
felt in need of forgiveness. They surely felt guilty about deserting him,
about going home to Emmaus or back to their fishing or wherever else they
went. Then Jesus appears among them. And their guilt probably explains their
attitude of dumfoundedness.
You notice that the text doesn't say they were full of joy at meeting Jesus
again. Yes, they had some preparation for this resurrection appearance-some
of them already partly believed it. But their dumfoundedness, their
speechlessness probably hints that they were full of so many mixed
emotions-certainly joy at seeing him again but also, just as surely, guilt
at having denied and deserted him.
With the appearance of the risen Jesus the disciples experience a profound
moment of forgiveness. His opening words to them are "Peace be with you".
And he explains that this Gospel of forgiveness is to go out from Jerusalem
to the whole world.
The peace that the risen Jesus brought was a release from the shame and
failure of Jesus' first followers, and it was what transformed them into the
greatest missionaries and most courageous martyrs.
If you look at the other readings today you will also see this theme of
forgiveness. In the first reading Peter begins this preaching of forgiveness
to the nations by speaking to the Israelites and invites them to repentance.
In the second reading John, in his powerful poetic words, speaks words of
forgiveness to his readers and highlights the transformation effected in the
life of all true believers-God's love comes to perfection in them.
So let each one of us, from deep within our hearts acknowledge that we too
have frequently denied and deserted Christ. But let us also appreciate the
fact that we are also still here and that at a deep level in our hearts
really do believe in Christ as a living reality. In the words of Peter our
denial and desertion of Jesus is because at the time we had no idea what we
are really doing.
Let us open ourselves up to the Lord and experience the peace that only he
can give. Let us recognise that the wounds on his hands and on his feet and
in his side are also our wounds and that we carry them too. Let us share
this meal, this Eucharist, with each other in a spirit of joy and with the
oneness of the true disciples of Christ. And let us carry his message of
peace to all the nations just as he told us to do.
And above all let us remember that Jesus isn't a ghost, He is a living
reality in your life and mine! In His name and to His glory. Amen
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| Date | 2006-05-21 | | Preacher | Rev Joe Thompson | | Title | Easter 5 2006 Year B | | Sermon Details | Gospel: John 15: 9-17
As Christians, Jesus demands our love. In a nutshell, that is what faith in
Christ is all about. The gospel text that we just heard carries with it an
image of Jesus summing up love very succinctly. He said, "If you keep my
commandments, you will abide in my love. This is my commandment, that you
love one another as I have loved you." From the First Letter of St John we
find much the same thing. The writer says, "We know love by this, that he
laid down his life for us and we ought to lay down our lives for one
another."
There it is. That's it. The sermon is finished. We hear Jesus and then John
speaking about a new kind of love, a new definition of love that we as
Christians are commanded by Jesus to follow. All we need now is for everyone
here to sign this paper committing their lives to abide by the love of Jesus
everyday in every way for everything we do and we can skip right ahead to
the Nicene Creed. To make it easier, I'll even be the first one to sign.
If only it was that easy! Today's gospel reading is an excerpt from what St
John tells us that Jesus said to his disciples just before he went out into
the night to be arrested and crucified. It is such a famous passage that it
is easy for us to switch off when it begins to be read in church, because we
all think that we know it already. Yet if any passages in the Bible should
trouble Christians, surely they are this passage from St John's gospel and
the reading that precedes it, from the first of St John's letters.
After all, in one form or another for nearly two thousand years, Christians
have been telling each other and anybody else who would listen to them that
it's love that makes the world go round. But how much better is the world as
a result of this?
The first letter of St John tells us: "Anyone who fails to love can never
have known God, because God is love." And in this Sunday's gospel reading,
Jesus is saying: "This is my commandment: Love one another, as I have loved
you." Yet we are so accustomed to seeing failures in love, so accustomed to
seeing the very opposite of love, even in Christians, that we do not even
bother to shrug our shoulders when we hear these words again. Most of us
treat what we hear as just a wonderful but impossible ideal that has no
place in the everyday world.
In fact, though, St John's gospel is a very down-to-earth book written in a
church that had more than its share of human problems. What is important for
us to realise is that for the gospel writer ,the word 'love' - agape in
Greek -- rarely means a private emotion, but something much more profound.
When we read in today's gospel that the Father 'loves' the Son, what this
means is that he lives for the Son - that everything he is is for the Son.
And when we read that the Son 'loves' the people whom he has called to be
his friends - and that includes you and me! - it means that he lives for us.
And when he tells us to love each other as he loves us, that means that we
are being called to live for each other. For love is only real, it only
lasts, if it produces more love - as any married couple knows.
Basically, Jesus' commandment to us to love is a summons to share in his
work - his campaign to bring all human beings back into a relationship with
God. And it sounds at first as if we are being asked to do something
impossible. For he tells us that the love with which we are supposed to love
one another is the love with which he has loved us ... in other words, love
of the kind which can bring great pain to the lover, judging from what
happened to Jesus.
"Abide in My love," says Jesus. Abide: "Remain", "stay there;" not "get to"
or "enter into." As Christians, we begin by recognizing this about love: It
doesn't start with us. We don't achieve God's love or bring it about;
rather, the Lord declares that we are brought into His love by His work: "As
the Father has loved Me, I also have loved you." And now that He has brought
us into His love, He bids us to abide there-He desires that we stay.
This understanding of love is quite different from that of the culture
within which we live-a culture where love is often focused more on the
satisfaction of one's own needs rather than the needs of the other. The
person who says, "I love you," may mean only "I want you" and may even
resort to manipulation to possess you. How different that is from the
person who stands ready to sacrifice in behalf of the other person-even to
quietly walk away if that best meets the other person's needs. To understand
the love of which Jesus speaks, it helps to understand how we have debased
the word love in our common usage.
It is a great honor to apprentice under a great rabbi, so we would assume
that Jesus has chosen the brightest and best to love and be loved by - but
we would be wrong. These disciples hardly qualify as quick to learn.
Instead the Gospels present them to us as slow-a bit thick-headed-weak of
faith-sometimes denying-sometimes doubting. A few, such as Peter, James, and
John, will become prominent, but even they often veer off course. Most will
remain obscure. One will betray Jesus.
I can't help but wonder what Jesus was thinking when he chose this very
ordinary group of disciples. And yet, the growth of the first-century
church shows that Jesus chose well-perhaps we should say that he empowered
well. These disciples will do great things, not because they are great, but
because the one who empowers them is great/ the one who loves them is great.
There is an important lesson here. God chooses whom God chooses. A quick
glance around the typical congregation shows that God has not chosen the
brightest and the best. Most Godly work is done by ordinary people
distinguished by only one characteristic-they have given God their heart.
That should encourage us. It should also make us hesitant to judge any
person's potential. The star athlete and the valedictorian might be too
full of self to be much heavenly good. The person who seems to have the
least to offer might be the person that God chooses to transform the world.
God chooses whom God chooses.
What does this all mean for us today? In his Gospel, St John speaks of
himself as the "Beloved Disciple", what would it mean, we ask, if we too
came to the place where we saw our primary identity in life as "the one
Jesus loves"? How differently would we view ourselves at the end of a day?
Psychologists and therapists have a theory known as the looking-glass self:
you become what the most important person in your life thinks you are. How
would your life change if you truly believed the Bible's astounding words
about God's love for you, if I looked in the mirror and saw what God sees?
As you go out the doors of this church this morning, will you do me a favor?
Will you please say to yourself, "I'm the one Jesus loves" and believe it.
because it's true! Go out, and live in the place of abiding in Jesus, go
out and enter the exchange of giving and receiving, seeking to give first
like Jesus, and so enter and share his Sacred Heart. Seek to bear fruit,
and experience the joy of giving it away. Abide, in him and he promises to
abide in you.
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| Date | 2006-07-23 | | Preacher | Joe Thompson | | Title | Sixteenth Sunday Year B | | Sermon Details |
Gospel: Mark 6: 30-34
Today we journey on with the second in our series on Heartlines - focusing
today on RESPONSIBILITY. I must confess when I first heard the Dean ask me
to talk on this I asked myself - Why Me?
I began to reflect on that question and was drawn back to the time when I
was questioning God as to my belief that He was calling me to the ordained
priesthood. I can remember it being an agonizing time when I was searching
for any excuse not to accept the calling. I am too young, I want to enjoy
life, I'm not the suitable type, I'm not really that hot on speaking about
my own faith - it was a fairly extensive list. Finally I came to the
realization that these were all just excuses, if God was calling me to this
ministry then surely He would empower me and equip me. It was about taking
the responsibility for my own actions.
I'm sure that if we were to do a snap survey of the congregation here this
morning, most if not all of us would say that we are not worthy of our
calling. Most of us would think that we aren't suitable for the ministry we
find ourselves in - we aren't suitable types - and yet God has called each
of us to serve Him and the world we find ourselves in. Suitable or not, we
have been called and we can only answer, "Here I am Lord, send me."
Fortunately the Church isn't made up of suitable types. What makes us
suitable is our response to God's belief in our abilities - our faith, our
loyalty to God, our love for Him. The Church isn't made up of "suitable
types" but rather of the great and glorious variety of God's people - with
their many gifts and foibles, strengths and frailties - who have all
accepted the responsibility that comes from loving God, who have said "Yes"
to God.
Spare a thought for those disciples, sent out into the world to cast out
demons, heal the sick and proclaim repentance. Did they question their
suitability, did they say to Jesus, "You know what, let me just go and study
a bit more, or would you come along and just speak for me?" The Bible
doesn't say, what it does say is that they went and performed many healings
of body and spirit. They returned to Jesus and recounted their stories and
He responded by instructing them to go away to a quiet place with Him to
recharge their batteries.
And I guess that is another example of acting responsibly, sadly one which
we seem to fail in almost daily - taking the time to recharge and be alone
with God. The world around us mocks that, challenges us to forget our
calling, places increasing pressures on us to perform without allowing us
the time to draw aside and sit quietly in the presence of our Lord. As I
heard someone recently ask, "Can you remember when the shops were closed on
a Sunday, when you couldn't buy petrol on a Sunday?" It was a time when
Sunday was different to the other days of the week, when people were forced
to take a break. Perhaps our lives would not be so stressed out if we were
to revert back to that kind of thinking.
Maybe that's just an ideal; after all when Jesus and the disciples reached
the quiet place there was a huge crowd waiting for them. And Jesus realised
that He had a responsibility to them also, "for they were like sheep without
a shepherd" (verse 34). Jesus took pity on them and set to teach them
Himself - He became a shepherd for them. In the same way Jesus has become
our Good Shepherd; He cares for us His sheep, He protects us, He heals us,
He teaches us, and He seeks us out when we are lost.
Most (if not all) of us take our responsibility as Disciples of Christ
seriously. We try hard to find ways to exercise our ministries which are
within our capabilities, but sometimes we can become overwhelmed or weighed
down by the task. It is when we recognise that we can do no more and we
place our troubles in the hand of God - then we come to the realisation of
the true nature of our responsibility, we are agents of God. We are called
to love our neighbour to the best of our ability and to entrust them to the
Good Shepherd.
It is in this way that we move to the higher level of prayer - when we have
exhausted ourselves in intercession and now experience peace through
contemplation. And let us never think that this is a way of weakness or of
shirking our responsibility - it is the hope of our calling that we are
responding to.
St Paul's letter to the Ephesians speaks about the unity of the Church. St
Paul writes, "Don't forget, there was a time when you were. limited to this
world, without hope and without God. But now in Christ Jesus, you that used
to be so far off have been brought close, by the blood of Christ." (Eph 2:
11-13); because of Christ Jesus the barriers that used to keep us apart are
broken down and now we are very close. We are called to care for each other
not just because we know each other but because we are responsible for one
another in our Lord Jesus Christ. We are one body for, "in the one Spirit we
have access to the Father."
And so yes we can make excuses, yes we can make mistakes but ultimately it
is about our response to God's belief in our abilities. It is about us
answering that question, "Why Me" with "Why not Me - for I can do all things
through Him who loves me!" Amen
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| Date | 2006-06-25 | | Preacher | Fr Joe Thompson | | Title | 12th Sunday Ordinary Time Year B | | Sermon Details | Gospel: Mark 4: 35-41
I came across this story a few days ago and it caused me to chuckle so I
share it with you today.
A Priest, a Pentecostal preacher and a Rabbi all served as Chaplains to a
university in America, they would get together regularly to talk shop. One
day someone mentioned that it wasn't really all that difficult preaching to
people. A real challenge would be to preach to a bear.
One thing led to another and they decided to do an experiment; they would
each go into the woods, find a bear, preach to it and attempt to convert it.
Several days later they met together to discuss the experience.
Father Flannery, who has his arm in a sling, is on crutches and has various
bandages, goes first. "Well, I went into the woods to find me a bear. And
when I found him I began to read to him from the Catechism. Well that bear
wanted nothing to do with me and began to slap me around. So I quickly
grabbed my holy water, sprinkled him and would you believe it, he became as
docile as a lamb. The bishop is coming out next week to give him his First
Communion and Confirmation."
Reverend Billy Bob spoke next. He was in a wheelchair, with an arm and both
legs in casts, and an IV drip. In his best fire and brimstone way he
claimed, "WELL brothers, you KNOW that we don't sprinkle! I went out and
found me a bear. And then I began to read to the bear from God's HOLY WORD.
But that bear wanted nothing to do with me. So I took hold of him and we
began to wrestle. We wrestled down one hill and up another and then down
again until we finally ended up in a creek. So I quickly DUNKED him and
BAPTIZED his hairy soul. And just like you said, he became as gentle as a
lamb. We spent the rest of the day praising the Lord."
They both looked down at the Rabbi, who was lying in a hospital bed. He was
in a body cast and traction with IV's and monitors running in and out of
him, he was in a bad way. The Rabbi looked up and said through cracked lips,
"Looking back on it, perhaps circumcision was not the best way to start."
I guess it's a question of faith overcoming fear, and that seems to be what
the readings are saying to us today. The early Christian adopted a simple
drawing of a boat with a Cross for a mast as the symbol of the Church. In an
age of persecutions from the outside and controversy and conflict on the
inside, in their experience, the emerging Church must have seemed like a
boat on a storm tossed sea. When I look at the indifference towards religion
and the on-going controversy and conflict amongst Christians, I feel like
joining with those early Christians in a desperate prayer "Teacher, do you
not care that we are perishing?"
In today's reading the disciples have to make a choice of 'Faith or Fear'.
Much to Jesus' disappointment, they choose the latter.
Situated in a basin surrounded by mountains, the Sea of Galilee is
particularly susceptible to sudden, violent storms. Cool air from the
Mediterranean is drawn down through the narrow mountain passes and clashes
with the hot, humid air lying over the lake which is six hundred feet below
sea level. This causes the violent winds that churn up the water.
They were undoubtedly in a fishing boat, probably belonging to Simon Peter
or James and John. This would have seated about twelve people, with no
sails. There were cushions at the stern, which Jesus slept on. Some of the
disciples were experienced fishermen. They had weathered some storms, but
this one was unexpected. These storms normally came in the day but we know
from Mark's account that this happened in the evening. It must have been a
really ferocious storm too, because they were really frightened.
Jesus calms the wind and the waves and says to the tense disciples "Why are
you afraid? Have you still no faith?" he surely intended the link between
faith and fear. The opposite of faith is not doubt or unbelief: those tend
to be doctrinal differences. No, the opposite of faith is more often than
not, fear. We fear the unknown. Fear is like waves, ever seeking to knock us
off our footing - our faith footing.
The disciples had to learn who Jesus was, who this one was whom 'even the
wind and sea obey'. The Christian believer today is in the same boat with
the same need to learn. So what's lacking if, in our fear, we sometimes feel
like God doesn't care?
Perhaps it comes down to the question of what we really want from God. Or
better, what God really wants most to give us. Most believers will readily
admit that Jesus shows tremendous care for his people. God cares. Just after
this scene in Mark's Gospel we see him casting out demons, healing a woman
who has been in pain for twelve years, raising Jairus's daughter to life.
He has already gained notoriety for insisting that the law should serve
people, not enslave them, for promising freedom to prisoners, for defending
the widow and the orphan. This is not a man, nor a God, who remains aloof
from the human condition. After all, he too is in the storm-tossed boat with
his disciples!
We don't always recognise God's answers to our prayers. He does take us
through the storms of life in wonderful ways. If we will but look...we can
often trace the hand of the Lord providing for us or for others. A bird
builds its nest in a tree overlooking a raging waterfall. It's quite snug
and secure in the nest. It should be the same with us - we might be walking
on ice but we can rest secure in Jesus. One thing to remember is that God
doesn't call on us to take unnecessary risks so if you do come face to face
with a bear - RUN!
In the name of God. Amen
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| Date | 2006-04-09 | | Preacher | Joe Thompson | | Title | Palm Sunday Year B | | Sermon Details | Gospel: Mark 11: 1-10 and Mark 15: 1-39
Have you ever stopped to consider what makes a good leader? We hear in the
news almost weekly how the Americans are questioning their choice of George
W Bush as their leader. One article I read recently stated that had Al Gore
won the election, things in Iraq would be completely different. So is it the
promise of a better future, is it their powerful leadership qualities, is it
that we expect them to be strong or to challenge the system in such a way
that the poor can become rich? I don't know!
It is something which has always troubled me about today's readngs, both of
them. Were these people who shouted "Hosanna" the same ones who cried
"Crucify" five days later? Why? Was it because they sensed a weakness in
Jesus, did He not deliver on His promise? What caused their change of heart
so rapidly?
Across the centuries those who wielded power also wanted the glory. Roman
governors and emperors long ago made an art form of their entry into the
cities of the empire. You can still see on the arch of Galerius at
Thessalonika how the civic notables lined up outside the gates to greet the
approaching emperor and his retinue. What then should we make of Jesus and
his small band of disciples as they make their entry this Sunday into
Jerusalem?
This is the only time we see Jesus travelling other than on foot. He
requisitions his mount as a king with authority over his subjects' goods.
And the colt recalls Zechariah's vision of the Messiah who enters Jerusalem,
"riding on an ass, on a colt, the foal of an ass." (9:9)
One thing which puzzles Jewish scholars when they read this story is why the
crowds shouted Hosanna - save us - and waved palm leaves in the spring, when
this is something that is done 6 months earlier at the festival of Sukkot,
tabernacles or booths. This festival takes place in the autumn and
commemorates the period in the wilderness after the Exodus. The crowds of
Palm Sunday are waving palms in the wrong season. It would seem that Jesus'
triumphal entry into Jerusalem was designed to make a stir. He wanted to be
noticed and whether he sought it or not, confrontation was likely.
On Palm Sunday we see Jesus at the very height of his fame and popularity.
The entry into Jerusalem was the sort reserved for triumphant generals and
heroes. At that moment, Jesus could have done anything with the crowd. The
Romans must have watched anxiously waiting to see if He would incite an
uprising against their rule. The Jewish authorities must have been afraid of
a mass attack on the Temple. But Jesus did not manipulate people and would
never have called people to destruction and violence. It was to be a
Passover such as had never been seen before, a passing over from death to
new life for all of humanity.
But then, what a contrast with Christ's Passion! Mark's account of the
crucifixion is the bleakest of the four Gospels. There's no one present at
the foot of the cross to support Jesus. He does not pray for the forgiveness
of his persecutors, or offer hope to the repentant thief. Jesus does not
entrust his mother to the care of the Beloved Disciple. And before he dies
Jesus neither declares that he'd accomplished his task nor commits his life
and death into his Father's hands.
In fact his only words from the cross are his cry of dereliction, 'My God,
my God, why have you forsaken me?' And the onlookers completely
misunderstand what Jesus said. Finally, Jesus utters an inarticulate cry and
plunges into the darkness of death. Mark presents the crucified Christ as
feeling completely abandoned by God and man, totally misunderstood.
And yet everyone had proclaimed him king. As he triumphantly entered
Jerusalem the crowds had hailed him as king. When nailed to the cross, they
taunted him for claiming to be king. Pilate condemned him as 'Jesus of
Nazareth, king of the Jews.' The Roman soldiers mocked him as a king, and
crowned him with thorns. The irony of Mark's Passion Narrative is that
everyone was right in proclaiming Christ as king, but no one understood what
that meant.
The crowd had hoped for a leader who would deliver them from Roman
occupation, but Jesus had come to free us from a far greater tyranny -- that
of sin and death. In spite of appearances, Jesus was not a defeated failure,
nailed helplessly to the cross. It was there, on the cross, not in a palace
or in the Temple, that Jesus was enthroned as king. By dying on the cross he
conquered all the forces of evil hurled at him.
The very bleakness of this message is reassuring. By confronting the horror
of Christ's suffering Mark shows that the very darkness of the crucifixion
highlights the glory of its victory.
For Mark the true meaning of the 'Good News of Jesus Christ, the Son of God'
is only revealed on the cross. While everybody else misunderstood Jesus,
only the pagan centurion glimpsed his true identity. He realised that
Christ's very death proclaimed that, 'Truly, this was a son of God.' At last
someone understood Jesus!
As we begin Holy Week we are called to travel with Jesus. With the pilgrims
waving their branches, let us join those crowds in shouting "Hosanna to the
King" and joyfully welcome Jesus as the promised Messiah. As we do so, we
must remember that his sovereignty is very different from any other. If we
are to enter his kingdom and share his victory we must follow Christ on the
Way of the Cross. May we have a truly blessed Holy Week. Amen
|
| Date | 2006-10-04 | | Preacher | Fr Joe Thompson | | Title | Michaelmas 2006 | | Sermon Details | Gospel: Matthew 18: 1-10
I'm not much into boxing; in fact it is one sport that I chose not to watch.
Cassius Clay (who went on to change his name to Muhammad Ali) was one of the
few boxers that I ever remember. We tend to remember him for two things: the
famous "Rumble in the Jungle" against George Foreman (I think) and for his
statement, "I am the greatest!"
Well I guess it depends on what you consider greatness to be. If we consider
Muhammad Ali today; he's an old man suffering from Parkinson's disease who
can
barely shuffle a few paces and battles to speak. Is greatness something that
is
different to every person then?
The disciples were arguing amongst themselves as to who was the greatest of
them, each I am sure putting forward arguments that were probably very
reasonable. I mean you can just see Peter claiming to be the greatest based
on
the fact that Jesus had called him The Rock, or Andrew claiming to be the
greatest for he was one of the first disciples, or John because he was the
closest friend of Jesus. All of these arguments are based on our human
understanding of what greatness is about, and then Jesus changes all of that
by
telling them that they need to become like little children and learn to
serve if
they are to be great.
It was this question of greatness that caused the only major battle in
heaven
that I am aware of. Everything was all peaches and cream until one day one
of
the Archangels, Lucifer, or Satan, decided that he wanted some of the
greatness
of God to be conceded to him. Now there are a number of interesting facts in
this story.
Firstly the Archangel is just like each one of us - a created being given
free
choice. We can either choose to be for God or against Him - the choice is
ours.
Whichever choice we make there are consequences.
Secondly, Satan claimed some of that greatness for himself, and there were
angels who supported him in this. As a charismatic leader, he drew like
minded
angels around himself and began to challenge God's greatness. In much the
same
way today there are people who claim to be great and who draw others around
themselves to support that claim, often through false statements or
promises.
Thirdly, God does not get involved in the fight - He doesn't say to Satan,
"Alright lets go 10 rounds and see who wins!" God cannot ever force Himself
on
us. He shows us His love and allows us to make our own decisions regarding
that
love. It is the supporters of God led by the Archangel Michael who decide to
do
battle against Satan. They are the ones who attack Satan and his followers
and
throw them out of heaven, banishing them to earth to do their worst and to
prepare for the final battle at the end of time.
And so that battle continues to this day, the fight between Good and Evil.
Satan
wants to get as many followers as possible in an effort to get his revenge
on
Michael and ultimately God. And so he offers all kinds of trappings in order
to
attract people to his way of thinking, especially through false promises
that
will never come true. All of which goes completely against what God calls us
to
be - like children who know that their only strength comes from the One who
created them.
I love St Mark's version of this story because it tells us that Jesus took a
child and put him in their midst and hugged the child. Children are amazing,
you can be in the worst possible mood and that smile or hug just melts
everything in your heart - doesn't it? It is that recognition that you are
so
important in their lives that they just want to be with you and hugged in
return.
And so dear friends some questions we need to answer, who can claim to be
the
greatest in our hearts, can God? How do our lives reflect the greatness of
God?
Are we filled with the desire to just be in the presence of God and allow
Him to
shine through us? What is stopping us from running into His presence and
allowing Him to fold us into His arms and to hear Him say those precious
words,
"I have called you by name, you are mine. and I love you"?
In the name of God. Amen
|
| Date | 2006-11-20 | | Preacher | Rev Joe Thompson | | Title | 33rd Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B | | Sermon Details | 33rd Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B
We come now to the end of the Church year. Next Sunday is the Feast of
Christ the King, the last Sunday of the liturgical year. This thirty-third
Sunday is the last of the Ordinary Sundays of the year and perhaps
appropriately the Gospel is rather apocalyptic. As we end the year we are
invited to look at the end of the world-the last days. And, of course, as we
consider the end of the world our thoughts naturally turn to the last
judgement.
Is the Last Judgement something we should fear. In a real sense it is
something we should rejoice in for it marks the culmination and finalisation
of God's plan for the world. Yes, there will be some who, in Daniel's words,
will go to shame and everlasting disgrace. But these are only the ones who
totally reject God's forgiveness and love-they are those who deliberately
choose not to seek his mercy. So these symbolic stories and teachings about
the last days in our scripture readings today should fill us with hope. We
should look forward to that day when the Son of Man comes again in all his
glory. God loves us all and wants us all to be saved and to live together
with him in heaven. This is the Good News. It is Good News for us all and we
look forward to that Day of Days when God's purpose is finally achieved.
In our Gospel reading, we seem to be confronted with a more vivid painting
of the actual events that will occur at the end of time than the one in our
first reading. It even seems as if Jesus is using Daniel's prophecy to spell
out the content of his message. Jesus makes reference to a time of distress,
just like Daniel, and also teaches about the eventual period of vindication.
Our Lord resorts to the Old Testament's apocalyptic imagery of prophecy to
aid in the painting of the picture of what the end of time will be like.
Jesus himself had more to say about hell than any NT writer or speaker
(e.g., Matt 5:22, 29-30; 10:28; 13:41-42; 25:46). Through a variety of
pictures and images, the NT presents a frightening portrayal of the
everlasting suffering of those who have rejected the gospel. In Mark
13:24-37 Jesus speaks of two judgements that will come. One in the near
future, the second much later. These are the destruction of Jerusalem in
A.D. 70 and the second coming, whenever that may be.
We are currently in between the first and second comings of the Lord Jesus.
The new age broke into this present evil age when Christ rose from the dead,
but the new has not yet wholly replaced the old. We experience some of the
blessings that Jesus has secured, including forgiveness of sins, a right
relationship with God and some victory over sin. But there is much more to
come and we will have to wait for Jesus to return and take us to be with Him
in that perfect kingdom. We are 'in between' kingdoms, in this world but not
of it. We are to set our minds on God because we are citizens of heaven. As
people of God the church is called to engage urgently in mission and
evangelism because it may be a brief time before Jesus returns.
John Wesley was asked how he would change his plans for the day if he knew
that Christ was returning at the end of that day. He replied he would not
change anything. If we were to know that Christ was returning tomorrow; how
would that change our lives?
Two thousand years waiting for Jesus return seems a long time to us, but not
to God. To him it's like a couple of days. The point we are to understand is
that the Lord's return is near. We are in the very last days of this world
but we have been in these last days since the day of Pentecost nearly two
thousand years ago, and that's why we can see the signs of the times all
around us. Almost certainly that is what Jesus meant when he said:
30 I tell you the truth, this generation will certainly not pass away until
all these things have happened
Thousands of Christians, not to mention members of countless wacky cults,
have tried to guess the date when Jesus will return. They have all been
wrong. In fact they were mad even to try. Why? because Jesus says, 32 "No
one knows about that day or hour, not even the angels in heaven, nor the
Son, but only the Father.
After the first British victories in north Africa Winston Churchill said:
Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is,
perhaps, the end of the beginning. And so, one day, Jesus will return, as he
promised; and those expecting him, waiting for him, looking forward to that
time will receive him - the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End
of all things. When that happens; the work of Jesus will be completed. We
constantly have to ask ourselves if we are living as people who expect Jesus
to return; will we be ready when he does? There will be no prior warning,
for as he said, he will come as a thief in the night, as a bridegroom at
mid-night!
If you are a Christian, don't be afraid of that day, be alert, keep watch,
but don't fear it. In the words of a Graham Kendrick song based on this
passage: 'it's going to be such a good day'. It's going to be the best day
ever when the Lord Jesus returns to earth, gathers his people to himself;
when we see him face to face; and when he ushers in the new heaven and earth
where there is no more mourning or crying or pain. No wonder that in the
same Graham Kendrick song the refrain is repeated over and over again: 'make
it soon'. It's not a day to be afraid of but a day to look forward to.
That's why the bible ends on that note of eager expectation and
anticipation.
In the last chapter of the last book of the Bible Jesus says:
"Yes, I am coming soon." Rev 22.20
And His people reply:
'Amen. Come, Lord Jesus.' Rev 22.20
May that be our prayer, too
|
| Date | 2006-12-11 | | Preacher | Rev Joe Thompson | | Title | Advent 2 Year C | | Sermon Details | Advent 2 Year C
Gospel: Luke 3: 1-6
I wonder how many of us remember what this morning’s Gospel was about? It
sounds a ridiculous question doesn’t it? And yet it can be so easy to forget
these stories we have heard so often… we’ve heard it all before – so what?
I can remember Bishop Michael Nuttal, on a Quiet Day for Chaplains, talking
to us about loving the Bible and the words it contains; and really listening
afresh to these stories – that is what Advent is about, rediscovering the
wonder of these stories.
So let me ask you again – what was this mornings Gospel about? Yes John the
Baptist, but what did you hear, what did you take from the readings today?
What does the Christmas story mean for you?
Being in Advent we would probably expect the readings to be pointing towards
the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem, however, the focus of the readings today is
on Jerusalem. The prophet Baruch speaks of the restoration of God’s people
to Jerusalem after their captivity in Babylon. The idea of Jerusalem gazing
eastwards in anticipation of the return of His people from exile is really
wonderful and fits in perfectly with the Church watching and waiting for the
Second Coming of Christ. This theme of waiting for Christ is highlighted in
St Paul’s letter to the Christians of Phillipi as he urges them to increase
their love for each other so they will be ready to meet Christ when He comes
in glory.
I think the thing that stands out the most for me as a historian is St
Luke’s preoccupation with dates and times and places – he’s very specific
isn’t he? “The 15th year of Tiberius Caesar’s reign, when Pontius Pilate was
Governor of Judea… John went through the whole region of the Jordan.” The
facts are important because we are talking about actual events that happened
in historical time and in a particular place.
God didn’t create humanity as a wind-up toy and then sit back and leave us
alone to get along with it. No, God intervened – He intervened in human
history in the lives of Abraham, Moses, David, Mary and even John the
Baptist. All of these interventions were forerunners of the greatest
intervention of all – the sending of His Son into our world to bring us
salvation.
Although what I have just said may sound obvious – it is all too easy to let
go of it, to forget what it actually means. It is so easy to believe that
what we have here are nice Bible stories suitable for children or for those
who are either naïve or confused. But in the scientific rational world we
live in they don’t have much to say to us. But that’s not quite true is it?
And the reason we know this is because God has intervened in our own lives –
otherwise we wouldn’t be here would we?
So what is God saying to you and I in that intervention today and for this
Christmas:
- That we need to experience His love more deeply
- That we need to acknowledge our total dependence on Him
- That we need to turn to Him in every moment of the day (even in
the loo)
- That we need to come together as Christians to celebrate the
Sacraments
- Perhaps most importantly that we need to know Jesus as a reality
and realize anew the depth of His love in the salvation He has won for us
Today is Bible Sunday and maybe we need to remind ourselves that God has
intervened in history and that God hasn’t stopped intervening in your life
and mine. May we press on towards Christmas listening again to our old
favourite stories and to know, as St Paul says, “that the One who began a
good work in you will go on completing it until the Day of Jesus Christ
comes.” And may our hearts echo the prayer of the Church: Amen Lord Jesus
Come! |
| Date | 2007-01-29 | | Preacher | Rev Joe Thompson | | Title | Fourth Sunday Year C | | Sermon Details | Gospel: Luke 4: 21-30
People are strange, aren't they? Can you remember the hype and excitement
when Charlize Theron won the Oscar for her performance in Monster? Wow, how
cool it was to say, "I'm from Benoni, you know, Charlize's hometown. Yes we
have the Oscar - what have you got!" And yet, Ster Kinekor didn't want to
show the movie here because they felt that Benonians were too
unsophisticated to appreciate its meaning.
We need to be careful of falling into that trap when we think of Jesus
returning to His hometown Nazareth. Nazareth wasn't a tiny dorp in the
middle of nowhere; the word used to describe it is polis meaning a town or
city with as many as 20 000 inhabitants or more. Nazareth had three main
roads running around it
- The road running south carrying pilgrims to Jerusalem
- The Way of the Sea which led from Egypt to Damascus and had trading caravans moving along it.
- The Great Road to the east bringing caravans from Arabia and Roman
legions marching out to the eastern frontiers of the Empire.
Nazareth was a bustling and vibrant city.
Unfortunately the Jews of Nazareth weren't prepared to accept Jesus'
message. We are told they were amazed at "the words of grace which came from
His mouth", but they still remembered Him only as the little boy who grew up
in His dad's carpenters shop. No doubt they heard of the miracles He had
performed elsewhere and wanted to experience these for themselves; but they
were stuck in their understanding of the box they had put Him in."But this
is Joseph's son."
And to make matters worse, Jesus challenges them on their bigotry. They
believed they were special because: A. they were God's chosen people and B.
because Jesus was one of them - they had watched Him grow up and they knew
His family - He was Mary and Joseph's kid.
Jesus quotes two examples from Scripture to shatter their illusions further.
Both Elijah and Elisha had taken their message to the Gentiles, neglecting
their own people in their time of need. Now it was one thing to say, "You're
wrong", they could handle that to some extent; but, they resented His
quoting their own history back at them - especially when it proved them
wrong! Bizarrely they want to take Him out and throw Him off the nearest
cliff - these people who not ten minutes before had been enthralled by His
words! Yes, people are strange!
A genuine prophet is always reluctant, knowing the dangers of the task.
Jeremiah pleads his youthfulness as an excuse for not accepting the
prophetic call and is assured of God's help in the confrontations that must
follow. It seems like a pretty nice job, carrying God's Word to the people -
the Word that is always just, truthful and gracious. BUT, it isn't always
welcome because it is also a sword which penetrates the human heart and
exposes falsehood and injustice. The prophet must confront his own people,
sooner or later, with this gracious and penetrating Word.
These Jews had lost sight of WHY they were chosen by God - in order to bring
the Messiah into the world. God set them apart in order to teach them about
what kind of God He is. Their favoured status wasn't for their glory but so
that they could be of service to the rest of humanity.
Dear friends, as Christians, you and I are a chosen people - the beloved of
God in Jesus Christ. This gift is given to us so that we can pass it on to
others through the service of our lives. In order that we may be messengers
of LOVE, which as ST Paul reminds us is patient and kind, never jealous,
boastful or conceited, never rude or selfish, doesn't take offence and isn't
resentful. Love delights in truth, is always ready to excuse, trust and hope
and to endure all things.
The question and challenge for us is - are we living our lives like this?
Perhaps we need to read through that list again and reflect on the past
week; when were we impatient or unkind, when were we boastful or rude? Now
I'm going to stop there because I'm feeling a bit uncomfortable. When did we
allow who we are or what we do to hide what we are called to be?
May we live that LOVE today and for ever more. Amen
|
| Date | 2007-02-25 | | Preacher | Reverend Joe Thompson | | Title | Lent 1 - Baptism | | Sermon Details | Gospel: Luke 3: 21-22, 4: 1-13
Most of us don’t have a clue what happened when we were Baptised, do we? Many of us were small children like young Erin here (tomorrow marks the first anniversary of her baptism) and we passed the day in blissful oblivion to the momentous event of our becoming Christian. Perhaps this is why some Churches feel compelled to only baptise “believers” – it has to be the choice of the individual.
As Anglicans, however, we see the need for Baptism to happen at an early age. The Lambeth Conference of 1968 declared that, “Baptism is to be understood not merely as the rite of a moment but as the principle of a lifetime.” Just as ordinary life involves birth and growth, so our birth and growth as Christians is an ongoing journey towards maturity. That journey begins with our Baptism… When mentioned in the Book of Acts and Corinthians, that the whole household was baptised – surely that would have included children. And now to remove temptation – Erin can go to Grandad.
One of the seven Sacraments recognised by the Church, Baptism is a means of understanding the grace of God through the life and love of our Saviour Jesus Christ. We are baptised with Christ in His life and death and resurrection; marked forever as belonging to the Communion of the Saints who have done His will since that first Pentecost. The Church has defined a Sacrament as, “an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace.” That spiritual grace is the ability to handle the temptations of life because we have been filled by the power of the Holy Spirit – as we see in this mornings Gospel.
As Christians we follow the steps of Jesus and try to fit our own into them. The first step He took was to be baptised by John in the river Jordan. This is why, in traditional Churches, the first thing you see when you cross the threshold of the Church is the Baptismal Font. Baptism marks the start of our journey. Jesus could have gone on with His ministry but He chose to wait for God and the power of the Holy Spirit to fill Him. It was only in the power of the Spirit that Jesus was able to answer the devil when he came to challenge Jesus.
Jesus having been filled with the Holy Spirit is then led by the Spirit into the desert (not into temptation). For forty days Jesus reflected on what His baptism meant and how He was going to pursue His ministry. At the end of that period the devil approaches sensing that Jesus is weak and asks Jesus to misuse His power:
1. Turn stones into bread – it is the power to satisfy His desire rather than spread the Good News of God’s Love. This is also a foretaste of the temptation Jesus will face on the cross of Calvary – to save Himself. (“He saved others, let Him save Himself if he is the Messiah” – Luke 23: 35).
2. For political purposes – the power to satisfy selfish ambition. Jesus rejects the temptation to sell Himself to the devil – Jesus came to set us free!
3. Merely for show – the power to do something spectacular. Note that the devil also uses scripture – he quotes Psalm 91 vs 11-12. This third temptation is a direct challenge to Jesus’ divinity. Jesus proves He is the Son of God, not by disobeying His Father as the devil tempts Him to do, but by obeying.
The Gospel reading for today ends on an ominous note – “When the devil had finished every temptation, he departed from him for a time.” The devil isn’t gone for good, nor is Jesus done with temptation. Like every other human being, Jesus experienced temptation throughout His life, but unlike us, Jesus didn’t sin.
St Peter recognizes this as truth when he writes to the newly baptized Christians of Asia Minor; He advises them on the way they need to face the temptations of their daily lives. It is a reminder that we are called to live lives of obedience to God in the power of the Holy Spirit. For through our baptism in Jesus, we, “now have faith in God, who raised him from the dead and gave him glory for this very purpose – that our faith and hope should be in God.” (1 Peter 1: 21).
Baptism is to be understood not merely as the rite of a moment but as the principle of a lifetime. As we journey through this Lent may we reflect on the temptations we face and may we know we have the power of that same Holy Spirit, given to us at our baptism, to direct our hearts and minds on the pathway we should choose.
In the name of God. Amen
|
| Date | 2007-04-01 | | Preacher | Reverend Joe Thompson | | Title | Palm Sunday Year C | | Sermon Details | Gospel: Luke 23: 1-49
Today marks the start of Holy Week – the period from Palm Sunday to Easter Saturday. From the crowds shouting Halleluiah to the loneliness of a mother staring at a stump unable to believe what she has seen or gone through.
Obviously, nearly 2000 years later, we reflect on this week through the eyes of Easter Sunday, but it still marks such a highlight in the life of many Christians today. As we journey over the last few days of Our Lord in Jerusalem, we find that on each day there are similarities with how life really is for us today.
The crowds shouted, “Hosanna to the King”, and threw their clothes on the road and cut branches from the trees to express their joy. The image was well known to the Jews – it was the fulfilment of a promise made many years before. In the same way, we have the prospect of our hopes and dreams being fulfilled, but there’s a surprise because Jesus doesn’t fulfil them in the way that we expect – He transforms them. We see this so effectively in the palm leaves we hold, waved in jubilation back then, today bent in the shape of the cross. God answers us in ways that go beyond our human expectations.
As we continue into the week we have Jesus overturning the money-changers tables. Hmm – Righteous anger – how often do we get angry and is it really justified? Then there’s the celebration meal – celebrating the freedom of the Israelites from Egypt, and yet in the midst of this He does something odd. He takes a towel and washes their feet; He takes the form of a lowly servant. Jesus shows us that we may not lord it over one another but are called to serve all in humility. And then, in that very familiar meal, Jesus gives the bread and wine a whole new significance. The Servant King offers His very Self that we might experience and enjoy freedom in all its fullness.
We have the agony of the garden – we see Jesus wrestling with something He doesn’t want to face and His anguish at coming to terms with this. It isn’t hard to imagine examples like that in our own lives.
It is at this point that it all goes pear-shaped rather rapidly. Firstly, the betrayal of a close friend followed by conviction in a kangaroo court, His closest friend denying their friendship to save his own skin. Everyone who should have stayed with Him ran away and left Him alone to face the worst journey of His life.
We have Good Friday and the day He died; which has come to mean so much to so many people. The mothers’ like Mary, who have known the agony of losing their own child, share her pain. The moments when we feel that we have been crucified, broken by the actions of others, by the crosses they have placed on our shoulders that we can’t bear. There are times when we fall and need a stranger like Simon of Cyrene to pick us up. The moments of death and of something special dying – these are our Good Friday moments. Like the women who wept for Jesus, in truth we weep for ourselves. Death is a part of life and we wonder at its mystery. There are the moments when we have seen something we thought was going to last forever come to a sudden end, the shattered dreams and crushing moments of desolation.
Jesus dies and we face the silence that is death. We also find that for some life goes on as per normal; some are untouched, some weep, some mock, some are ashamed, some have jobs to do, and some just stand and embrace each other for support.
Jesus is buried and there is a gap in the story where nothing much happens. We jump from the burial to Easter Day, often ignoring Easter Saturday, but it is a day we must remember. We tend to lose it because we spend the day cleaning and decorating the Church for Easter. But there is something to be said for holding to that day of neither dying nor rising, but being stone cold.
If some experiences we go through are like being crucified and others like the joy where new life comes where previously there was death, then there must be other times (sometimes very long times) that are neither being crucified nor rising. They are the times when we feel flat and wait for the Easter to come. Jesus is with us in these moments just as He is in the crucifixion and joyous moments.
This week is the most holy of all weeks; it touches some of the most profound experiences we have and through it all we are assured of God’s love and presence even when we are tempted to think He may be absent. We come to know that God is real and present in the reality of our daily lives.
May we have a truly blessed Holy Week. In the name of God. Amen
|
| Date | 2007-06-03 | | Preacher | Fr. Joe Thompson | | Title | Trinity Sunday – Year C | | Sermon Details | Gospel: John 16: 12-15
The story is told of a priest and a world famous actor having a conversation one day. The priest asked the actor, “How is it that you actors are able, on the stage, to produce so great an effect with fiction; whilst we preachers in the pulpit, obtain such small result with the facts?”
The actor replied, “I suppose it is because we present fiction as though it were fact, whilst you, too often, offer facts as though they were fiction.”
I came across that story as I was preparing this sermon and was filled with a sense of awe as I realised that I have to preach on one of the most confusing areas of Christianity – the Trinity – and to try to present it in such a way as to preach the truth without confusing everyone, including myself! And then I remembered being faced with the same problem last year – I think the Dean has a hidden agenda!
But the more I got to thinking about it, the more I realised that today’s theme actually follows on so nicely after Angus’ sermon from last week. He spoke to us of the relationship we have with God – the ability to call God “Daddy”. So when it comes to speaking of the Trinity, we are speaking of that most basic ingredient in life today – relationships. There at the core of everything in life is the relationship between God the Father and God the Son and God the Holy Spirit. That selfsame Spirit that came to rest on the disciples on that Pentecost morning and which is at work in your life and mine today, draws us into that relationship.
Today we contemplate the greatest mystery of all, the Blessed Trinity, the source of all that was, is and is to come. Today we contemplate the inner mystery of God Himself. And I use my words advisedly; we contemplate the mystery of God. We contemplate—what else can we do in the face of God but contemplate. To contemplate is to turn our gaze on Him, to empty our hearts and minds of all other thoughts. In contemplation we become aware of His majesty, His glory, and wonder at His greatness and the extraordinary depth of His Love.
We contemplate the mystery of God. And indeed it is a very great mystery. Not a mystery in the sense of a puzzle but a mystery in the sense that we are full of wonder and awe in his presence; a mystery in the sense that our human understanding can only begin to appreciate. But God has, in fact, chosen to reveal quite a lot about Himself to us. This gradual revelation can be traced through the pages of the Old Testament and then the culmination of revelation is set forth in the Gospels in the person and words of Jesus, called the Christ.
Today we celebrate the revelation that He is three persons in one God—Father, Son and Spirit. This wasn’t handed down from the mountain in tablets of stone like the Ten Commandments, nor through other agents like Mohammed the prophet, but it was revealed directly to us by God Himself in the person of Jesus His Son. Jesus Himself is the personal revelation of God; He is God made visible in the world and to the world. Jesus taught us that He came from the Father, He told us that from now on we can call God Abba, He taught that He is the creator and sustainer of all things and, perhaps above all, He taught us that He is Love. When He returned to the Father Jesus promised us the Holy Spirit, the Paraclete, the Spirit of Truth who would guide and protect the Church keeping it holy and free from error in matters of faith.
All these things we believe as Christians, all these things we know to be true. The Blessed Trinity is the highest model for our Christian life—three distinct persons, yet one God; each living in harmony and perfect unity with each other. The three persons of the Trinity have their own roles and function but there is no disunity only perfect harmony. No-one is saying, but that’s my job or we don’t do things like that here. They work together in perfect harmony. The Church of God on earth aims to reflect this unity and this is indeed Christ’s wish and prayer for us, “May they all be one. Father, may they be one in us, as you are in me and I am in you.” (Jn 17:21) We are a living community of faith and as such we really should strive for the unity Christ prays for – sadly we don’t always get it right.
So I guess the challenge for us today is to ask, how are we living lives which reflect the Trinity; in each one of our daily lives – how do we reflect the relationship we have with God? In my lesson with the Grade 8’s (standard 6’s for those of you who get confused) this past week, we looked at the question of forgiveness and more than one child asked what that term actually means. I reminded them of an incident in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, about 10 years ago. A woman came out of one of the hearings, having been told of how her son had been killed by the security forces. She said, “I can forgive, but I will never forget.” Sadly, that isn’t true forgiveness. Forgiveness requires us to want the best for the other, to release the pain and to let go of the hurt. Why, because we too are sinners and our sin has caused pain in others’ lives too. To reword that famous saying, “we forgive because we have been forgiven first.” Nowhere, in any of my reading does God promise that this will be easy… in fact it can only be done through the power of God at work within us.
Today – may we know we are loved by God; May we know we are forgiven by God; May our lives reflect that power that comes from having a relationship with God and May we work towards the unity that binds us together with the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. For as St Paul says:
“So then, now that we have been justified by faith, we are at peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.” (Rom 5:1)
So may the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit, be with us all for ever.
Amen
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| Date | 2007-07-01 | | Preacher | Fr. Joe Thompson | | Title | Servanthood and the Church | | Sermon Details |
Gospel: Luke 9: 51-62
I am reminded of that story of the 4 bodies ANY, EVERY, SOME and NO body. Everybody is given some work to do, Anybody can do it, Somebody should do it, but in the end Nobody does it. I often think of this story when it comes to people in the Church; although strictly speaking it isn’t true because there are a dedicated group of individuals who seem to do a lot to keep things going.
Last week Fr David spoke to us about Servanthood in the home and today we speak about Servanthood in the Church. Well, in many ways – it is the same thing – isn’t it? For us, as Christians, the life of Jesus stands as some kind of pattern for us. I want to focus on two readings today - Jesus washing the feet of the disciples and this mornings Gospel – and see how we can relate them to servanthood.
Now we don't suddenly or spontaneously develop servant acts, do we? They arise from a servant heart and we can trace that right back in Jesus. Actually we can trace it back to the nature and character of God as revealed by the prophets. Isaiah's description of the Servant of the Lord reveals that it is because the Lord's Spirit is on him that he will display all those servant attributes. Jesus came to earth to reveal his Father's nature. So it is not surprising that his birth was a servant-like birth both in the fact of his coming amongst us as one of us and in the nature of his birth in the humble surroundings of a stable. The ministry which Jesus lived was a servant ministry in terms of who he ministered to and how he ministered. Looking back on Jesus' ministry, Saint Paul wrote to the Philippians: "(Jesus) emptied Himself, taking the form of a servant, and was born in human likeness. And being found in human form, He humbled Himself." (2:6-7).
So what we see on the night before his death, when Jesus washed the disciples feet, is remarkable but not unusual in the sense that it was there both as who Jesus is as part of a servant-inspired Trinity, which was always being revealed by who he was, by what he did and what he said. It's the old stick of rock illustration isn't it? Servanthood for Jesus wasn't some sort of veneer which hid a more selfish interior - it ran right through him so that wherever you cut into his life and ministry you find the word servant running right through the middle.
Most of us are a little bit reluctant to serve, aren't we? We need a little bit of incentive. It’s like a story I heard once about a biker who came to Christ. He got saved on the Thursday and three days later he went to church for the very first time. He was a big burly guy, black leather jacket, long greasy hair, unshaven, sunglasses, tattoos and pierced eyebrows. The whole church both saw and heard him arrive in the car park riding his Harley! He looked a little menacing but his heart really belonged to God.
Well the priest that day made an appeal in the notices for people to serve in the Sunday School. He said, “If there's anybody here today that would volunteer to serve in the Sunday School, please stand." Well, no one stood up. He made a second appeal. Again no one moved. Now the priest in desperation said, "Please, we’ve got to have someone volunteer to help serve in the Sunday School, to take care of our children." Well, this biker recently converted, passionately on fire for Christ, listened to the priest and his heart was moved. He rose to his feet and said, "I will gladly serve in the Sunday School." Well, in a flash, boom, twenty women jumped up and said, "No, no, no, we will serve in the Sunday School."
If we look at the life of Jesus, there are a number of features which shed some light on His view of servanthood and what we as His Church should be doing about it. Let us look a little more closely at the story of the washing of the feet:
- It was a job no one else wanted to do - what does that mean for us?
- It was a job everyone knew should have been done but wasn't! How do we respond - ignore it, complain about it or by taking it on ourselves?
- It was a job which could not be done with pride, only humility. Jesus shed his outer garment! What are the tasks at which our pride shouts out to us - you can't possibly do that! And how often do we listen?!
- It was a job which expressed practical love - apart from all that we have already said of this act there was physical touch, personal intimacy and a deep practicality about this act of service - they couldn't get on with the meal unless someone did it! Sometimes we really need to step back and think: how can I serve that person with that need?
- It embraced the unexpected – the traitor Judas, proud Peter and deserting disciples all had their feet washed! If we are honest there will be some people we love to serve and others we will avoid like the plague. The more Christ-like we are the less we will make those distinctions!
- It was a service that affirmed and built up rather than embarrassed or imposed itself. I love the way Isaiah puts it: "A bruised reed he will not break, and a smouldering wick he will not put out."
“Since we are living by the Spirit, let our behaviour be guided by the Spirit.” (Gal 5: 25). These words from St Paul are echoed in the Gospel set for today. Jesus has set His face towards Jerusalem – the final battleground – to prove His point about being the Servant of all. He is confronted by three different situations and in each shows His love for the people concerned.
James and John want to destroy the Samaritan village for not receiving Jesus; He rebukes the two disciples and humbly continues His journey. He is then confronted by a hero-worshipping man whom He challenges to give up self interest. Next come the two men who want to first go and please their families; again Jesus challenges them to search for what true servanthood requires – to move away from excuses and to get involved.
Those men whom Jesus met on the road that day probably went down that same road every single day of their lives. They were probably going to the fields to work just as they did hundreds and hundreds of times. But then that one particular day Jesus happened to meet them and as he was passing said simply but directly: Follow me.
Both quickly found an excuse because neither was ready. They probably would have liked to follow Jesus but hadn’t prepared themselves sufficiently. And I think that this is the key message for us today—meditate on these words of Jesus and do so in such a way that we prepare ourselves to serve as He has served us.
I want to end with a story of a priest on his ordination day (it’s not me)…
He spent it, obviously, in all his finery, set apart for his new ministry, the focus of attention, vested with new power and influence. He enjoyed the splendour and the lavishness of it all, and the grandeur of his new position. At the end of the day, after the ‘do' following his welcome service, he found himself alone in the church hall, stacking brown plastic chairs and felt indignant. ‘I shouldn't be doing this, I wasn't ordained to stack plastic chairs'. Then he suddenly said to himself, ‘no, actually, this is precisely what you were ordained to do.”
“Since we are living by the Spirit, let our behaviour be guided by the Spirit.” Amen
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| Date | 2007-12-02 | | Preacher | Fr. Joe Thompson | | Title | Advent 1 Year A - First Sunday in Advent | | Sermon Details | Gospel Matthew 24: 36-44
Today we begin Advent and the new liturgical year. The Advent Season is about waiting—waiting in expectation for the coming of the Lord. There are two sorts of waiting here; waiting for the celebration of Christ’s birth and waiting for his second coming at the end of time. But I can’t help wonder what exactly are we preparing for and how? Going to the gym so I can fit in 3 helpings of Mum’s trifle, or fitting earplugs so I don’t have to hear that cheesy music in every store…
In this season of Advent we spend time preparing and waiting, just as the Chosen People did through so many centuries as they hoped and prayed and longed for the coming of the Messiah. The language we use, the symbols we employ, the readings we hear, are all about a God who comes.
Of course, he does not come from afar, he stands at the door and knocks. It is not he who is far from us, but we who are absent from him. We are absent not in terms of distance but by desire. We are not anchored to where we are, in Christ, by our desire. We have allowed our desire to carry us elsewhere, to estrange us from our own heart.
That is what Advent is all about, it is not a journey elsewhere, but a pilgrimage into the deserts of our own hearts.
In these few weeks through the liturgy we become conscious of the need for a Saviour, we acknowledge our need for repentance and we accompany Mary and Joseph and John the Baptist through the mysterious events that immediately preceded Christ’s birth.
In the Gospel Jesus stresses that the Son of Man will come at a time we will not expect. That’s the point of the reference to Noah. The people did not believe that there would be a great flood and thought that Noah was foolish to build an Ark. They wrote him off and dismissed him as a madman. Christ will come suddenly and unexpectedly. It was the same at his first coming; Christ came quietly and to most people quite unexpectedly. There were however some people who were aware of who he was Mary, of course, and Joseph and John the Baptist even while in the womb. There were others to whom his significance was revealed: the shepherds in the hills and the Wise Men from the East. But to the majority his coming was unheralded and unknown.
The great difference is that his second coming cannot be ignored because it will mark the end of the world, the end of the universe, the end of time itself. The words of Christ in our Gospel today make it clear that he wants his followers to be awake and attentive. He wants them to be fully ready when that day comes. Although it will come suddenly and without warning, it should be no surprise to us Christians, it should not find us unprepared. But even more than being ready, we Disciples of Christ should be actively longing for the coming of the Kingdom. We should have an earnest yearning in our hearts for Christ to come again in glory, a sort of nostalgia for heaven.
We know that this world is but a preparation for the life to come; it has no meaning other than this. Those who put their trust in the things of this world are making a false choice; they have allowed themselves to be deceived. This difference between us and such people should be patently obvious to those around us. They ought to be able to recognise from our life style, from our conversation, from our personal priorities that we are looking forward to the Kingdom. Indeed they should be able to recognise us as people who are already living and acting as citizens of heaven. We should be as different to non-believers as Noah was to those who scoffed at him.
In St Paul’s Letter to the Romans he goes even one stage further. He says that “the time” has already come, that we are now living in what we can only call the end-times. He views this period between Pentecost and Christ’s Second Coming as a time when the Kingdom of Heaven is already breaking in on this world. This is why we shouldn’t be surprised to see miracles and other wonders that we ordinarily connect with the end-times.
But God doesn’t want us to get so bogged down and overburdened in our attempts to try to follow the right path that we don’t enjoy ourselves. He does not want us to look forward to that Day of his Second Coming with dread and in foreboding. He wants us to await his Second Coming breathless with anticipation, eagerly awaiting his arrival just as a child waits for Christmas.
For us the Second Coming and the time of judgment and the drawing together of all things in Christ are just around the corner. And this belief gives us a totally different view of the world. Yes we enjoy the world we live in and all it has to offer but there is a restlessness about us because we are waiting anxiously for its completion.
And the prayer that is on our lips is that very word Advent: Come.
Come Lord Jesus come. Come into our hearts right now. Come and raise us up to glory. Come into this world right now and bring everything that exists to its completion in Christ Jesus.
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| Date | 2007-12-23 | | Preacher | Fr. Joe Thompson | | Title | Advent 4 Year A - Fourth Sunday in Advent | | Sermon Details | Gospel: Matthew 1: 18-25
Today we focus on St Joseph, the silent man of the New Testament. He does not speak one word in the scriptures and yet he had a crucial role in the great mystery of the incarnation. Joseph is presented to us as a just and honourable man; a man of deep faith. Indeed if he had insisted on his rights, as he has at first contemplated, Mary would have been divorced and cast aside. But Joseph listens to the voice of God and does what is right.
Joseph and Mary are betrothed - all that remains is Mary going to live in Joseph's house. She goes off to visit her family and when she returns, she is pregnant. ('By the Holy Spirit' confides Matthew to the reader, letting us behind the stage and making his own position plain.) Joseph has a problem therefore. He is a just man -- he is a faithful observer of the Law. But what did the Law say? The book of Deuteronomy laid it down that a betrothed woman found not to be a virgin should be returned to her father's house and publicly stoned for the shame she has brought upon it. By the first century it seems there was a milder method of dissolving the marriage less formally. Joseph decided on this course that would not expose Mary to being so publicly shamed.
A host of questions rushes to mind - Why did Joseph decide to do this? It would not have totally spared Mary shame. How did Joseph know of the pregnancy? Did Mary explain about the angel? And what did both their families make of it all? But ought we to ask such questions, natural enough as they are? Are we not in danger of reading back into the first century anachronistic attitudes of mind quite alien to Matthew's purpose? Matthew's narrative is quite straightforward. Joseph is a man just under the Law in all his dealings. Joseph and Mary are betrothed. She is pregnant. Joseph is minded to spare her as much shame as he can. The angel of the Lord in a dream tells him to go ahead with the marriage.
It was those names which made Joseph change his mind. Those names made him see the light; those names made him overcome his difficulties. He was a good Jew, he knew his bible, he knew that God had foretold in the Book of the Prophet Isaiah that a child would be born from a virgin whose name would be Emmanuel, God with us.
A little later on in Matthew’s Infancy Narrative we hear how Joseph, again responsive to a dream, takes the necessary precautions and takes Jesus and his mother to safety in Egypt. These are the actions of a good and responsible man, one who puts his own interests in second place. As someone said recently—Joseph is the forgotten hero of the Nativity
But we also see Joseph as a man responsive to the Spirit of God. The dreams Joseph has are symbolic of his attention to the things of the Spirit, of his wish to discern the will of God. There is a deep spiritual side to St Joseph, perhaps a quiet and unshowy spirituality but one which proves to be worthy enough for the foster father of Jesus Christ
Yet in embracing this destiny he is most closely identified with the son entrusted to him, who will die a shameful death on a cross, the most dishonourable fate imaginable. He is shown to be just the father needed to raise a child who is Emmanuel, God with us, close to us in our shame and folly.
So, much of this gospel text revolves around names and reputation. Joseph is told by the angel to give Jesus his name, and so claim him as his own. He is the one, of course, who transmits to Jesus the honourable lineage of David. So Joseph is seen to be the honourable man, and most of all because he accepts to imperil his own honour and take into his care Mary and her divine son.
There is no doubt why Mary trusted him. He is a man of noble character, refusing to make a public scandal out of Mary's pregnancy. Joseph knew Mary too, and in the depths of his heart he trusted her. Of course there were difficult facts to face but it took just one mysterious dream to set Joseph's heart at peace.
Then there is Mary herself. She puts her trust in the words of an angelic messenger although few people are likely to believe her story and she knows that to bear a child can only bring shame on her family. She trusted Joseph, and God too, resisting what passes for human respectability and 'common sense'. You can just imagine the tongues wagging in that little town. Perhaps that is partly why Mary and Joseph chose precisely that moment to set off to be registered at Bethlehem -- it was a good excuse to get away from all the gossip.
Behind the human trust that we see so poignantly displayed in Mary and Joseph there is of course something much greater, the eternal trustworthiness of God and a word that can never be broken. God's total faith in keeping the covenants made with humanity is not only on a completely different scale from ours, it has another extraordinary dimension to it. Once God gives His word it immediately begins to achieve what it has promised. In fact long before God had made a covenant with His chosen people Israel, long before he had plucked the Israelites out of relative obscurity and entrusted them with His laws, there was already a more ancient covenant in operation, the unwritten promise that God had made to creation.
You see a glimmer of it in the unspoken bond that exists between an infant and its mother and her total devotion to her child. And even that is only a faint reflection of God's faithfulness to his own creation. A mother may abandon her child but God is forever committed to us.
We are being asked to trust in something much more sure and certain than a vague hope in human benevolence. God is asking us to trust Him, the One who makes eternal covenants, the One whose Word is the surety of every human word. Only God's Word can restore our credibility and put truth back into human speech. Only God's Word can restore a fragmented humanity to wholeness and ensure that honesty and fidelity prevail in human relations. The gospel tells us that Mary bears a son whose name is Emmanuel, or 'God-is-with-us'. The knowledge that God is in our midst as one of us is the guarantee of true peace on earth, the peace that comes from living in God's presence.
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| Date | 2007-12-30 | | Preacher | Fr. Joe Thompson | | Title | Christmas 1 Year A - First Sunday after Christmas | | Sermon Details | Gospel: Matthew 2: 13-23
People look at me as if I am daft (which is probably true) but I am still wishing them a merry Christmas. You can almost see it in their eyes… huh? Is this guy nuts; Christmas was last week. Most are planning their New Years Parties and thinking about New Years Resolutions they aren’t going to keep. How many people are planning to promote “peace and goodwill” for all of humanity, especially the poor and marginalized?
From the very moment of his incarnation, his birth into our world, Jesus experiences the suffering of the very poorest and most innocent. This sets the tone for his short life among us, though rich in every way that is important, Jesus shares the life of the poorest. He does so even to his death on the cross.
We have celebrated Christ's birth; we have rejoiced and celebrated to the full this very important anniversary of the incarnation. We have as Christians surely at this time of celebration and sharing of gifts made a very special effort to be kind to the poor. We have also most likely made an even more special effort to be more loving in our families. We should have tried to be especially understanding and caring with them.
In our Gospel reading for today, Joseph is warned, by God, of Herod's plans to destroy Jesus, and that he must flee to Egypt with Jesus and Mary, staying there until God tells them it is safe. Like last week, Joseph says YES to God. Being the head and protector of this 'Holy Family', there is nothing that Joseph would not do for his wife and this most Holy Child. There is nothing Joseph would not do for God...and off they go to Egypt.
Meanwhile, Herod (this is Herod the Great who ruled from 40BC until about two years after Jesus was born)... true to form, reacts the same savage way he had ruled for so many years. In an attempt to kill the "New-Born King" and be certain he had no rivals for his kingdom, Herod, totally misunderstanding the situation, sends soldiers out to Bethlehem and the surrounding area. Systematically, and by force, the soldiers searched everywhere, taking all the babies and children aged two or less and killing them.
Words cannot describe the horror, fear, devastation and utter sorrow that must have swept through land about 2000 years ago.
'A voice was heard in Ramah, wailing and loud lamentation, Rachel weeping for her children; she refused to be consoled, because they are no more.'
When we look at the death and destruction around the world.
When we look at the brutality that is carried out in the name of a religion.
When we look at the hatred and killing in the Holy Land.
We also see... ...the tears and anguish of the mothers.
Every human being alive today is a child to their mother and father.
Every human being alive today is a child of God.
We must learn to see the child in the face of everyone we meet.
All mankind must learn to see the 'child' in everyone they encounter.
...
As Christians, we believe that there is only one way we will ever get 'peace and goodwill' to all humankind in this world today; we believe there is only one way that all wars will cease in this world today, we believe there is only one way the world and all humankind will be saved....
When everyone (and I really mean everyone) when all humankind truly turns to Jesus Christ.
Jesus - the one, and the only, Saviour of all humankind.
Until that day, we will continue to see wars, brutality, death, destruction, slaughter, misery and such great sorrows as the children of Adam & Eve, God's children, continue to die. Until then, 'A voice is heard in the world today, wailing and loud lamentation, Eve weeping for her children; she refuses to be consoled, because they are no more.'
We all want to see these things end, I am sure, and we ask but what can one person like me do – how can I make a difference?
I believe we need to begin with ourselves, and look at those Resolutions more closely. Love your neighbour as yourself --that means you have also to love yourself. I don't mean in any selfish way. But take special care of yourself. Give yourself the things you need in order to be really effective as a Christian and as a human being. We need to look at those Resolutions and maybe think about including the following 4 points:
- Don't work too hard especially not to the neglect of your family life or your own health. How can you give people time if you don't have any to share?
- Take things a little easy and get some enjoyment out of life. The world is a marvellous place; take some delight in it. How can you share joy unless you experience it?
- Spend a little time each day apart from others and use this time to speak directly to God. How can you be a really fulfilled person or even call yourself a Christian unless you spend some time each day in prayer and meditation?
- Don't feel over anxious about experiencing feelings of anger or other strong emotions. It is often appropriate to have these feelings and they are not bad in themselves; indeed that are an indication you are a fully functioning human being. How are you going to be able to identify with others if you are a stranger to your own emotions?
And so may you have a Merry Christmas and a blessed New Year.
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| Date | 2008-01-06 | | Preacher | Reverend Joe Thompson | | Title | Epiphany 2007 Year A - The Epiphany of our Lord | | Sermon Details | Gospel: Matthew 2: 1-12
“We returned to our old places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods”
TS Eliot’s poem about the Wise Men – The Journey of the Magi - includes these wonderful lines. And it leads me to ask, but who were they? Whatever we are told about the magi seems to multiply unanswered questions -- why did the birth of the king of the Jews matter to them? What kind of people were 'magi'? Which was their country?
Many people may well see their own response to Christ, saviour of the world and Son of God incarnate, as similar to that of the magi as recounted by St Matthew: a puzzling and prolonged journey with a so-far muted outcome. Yet epiphany there was, and the magi could be helpful guides on complicated journeys to Christ.
St Matthew doesn't tell us there were three of them, nor that they were kings. But the Magi were, at an early stage of Church tradition, turned into Kings. Perhaps this was because of their gifts, which only kings could afford, but I wonder if there was more to it than that. It might have been because the word magus in Latin, as in Greek, quickly came to mean 'wizard' or 'sorcerer'; and sorcery was not considered a good thing in the times when Christianity had become the dominant and official religion of the Roman Empire and the nation states of Europe which succeeded it. So we have the carol 'We three Kings of Orient are..' rather than 'We three Wizards from Iraq' – kind of loses something in translation, doesn’t it!
They come to Jerusalem, asking 'Where is the infant king of the Jews?', because they had seen his star rise. They were subsequently warned in a dream not to go back to Herod, and they returned to their own country. This is a very different kind of religious tone and content to St Luke’s account of the shepherds. Neither God nor angels spoke to the magi. We do not know how the lives of the magi were changed, although they rejoiced at finding the child and paid homage. We cannot even say for certain what the title 'The King of the Jews' meant for them. Does it even matter?
The magi were led to a manifestation, an epiphany, of Jesus Christ in a more complicated and oblique way than the shepherds. The magi do not speak of the full religious content of what the birth of that child means, and we are not told that the full identity of the child was disclosed to them or by them. We can only speculate on how finding the child Jesus changed the expectations they had on setting off. But they too were led to him, and led by what at the time they could understand and respond to.
The gifts they brought have long been seen as signifying more than they were in themselves: gold for the royalty, incense for the divinity, and myrrh for the passion of Christ. Not that the magi say this or that St Matthew explained it. The Child was 'born to be King', the King who would reign over the whole world from the cross.
I was reading an article just before Christmas about aromatherapy — the author spoke about the gifts the wise men brought to the Christ Child—gold, frankincense and myrrh. She pointed out that these gifts were inherently healing gifts. Apparently today gold injections are given for some forms of arthritis, frankincense helps the breathing and myrrh is a natural disinfectant. The author also noted that most aromatherapy shops were sold out of frankincense and myrrh several weeks before Christmas.
The Christmas Gospel should not get packed away with the baubles and the fairy from the top of the tree. Look at the shepherds and the wise men: They came to the manger for the special time. They didn’t take up residence in the inn. The shepherds went back to the fields – they had sheep to watch. The Wise Men went back East, but their lives were transformed and would never be the same again.
As we come to the manger at Bethlehem, we meet one who changes our understanding of the world and will not allow us ever to see the world in the same way again. And when we leave the Christmas manger, we find that we have – like the shepherds and the wise men before us – glimpsed a vision of what the world could be. We have glimpsed a vision of true humanity – of the possibilities for our race. And that of course is the whole point of the incarnation – that we see in our own lives and our own sinful world, a glimpse of God – and a glimpse of truly fulfilled humanity.
And no, we don’t celebrate Christmas every day of the year –not in the sense of sitting by the manger – but we do take with us the vision - the vision of a new world. And like the wise men of old, we find return from whence we came – and the place is the same, but we know it differently – for we see it in the context of the manger of Bethlehem. So we see the gods of materialism and greed, the gods of shock and awe, the gods of sleaze and filth – perhaps a world which we took too much for granted in the old days – but now we have followed a star – now we have been on a journey – And we must see the world in the light of the star –And strive to make the whole world like the stable of Bethlehem.
Yes – Christmas may come but once a year, and the carol sheets may soon be packed away for another year - but for those who have looked fully into the face of the babe of Bethlehem, nothing will ever be quite the same again!
Amongst the many gifts presented to the people of New York in the months following Sept 11 was a nativity scene from craftsmen in the Italian city of Naples. The piece weighed one-ton. This nativity’s Three Kings held in their hands not gold, frankincense and myrrh but New York fire-fighter helmets. What gift do we bring to the manger and what do we take away with us? How has this Christmas made a difference in your life?
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| Date | 2008-02-03 | | Preacher | Rev. Joe Thompson | | Title | 4th Sunday of Year A | | Sermon Details | Gospel: Matthew 5: 1-12
Christianity is hard isn’t it? Especially when we are moving through those periods of darkness that Fr Angus spoke about last week. It is hard and it does not make sense – especially to the world around us. Blessed are the poor, the marginalised, those who mourn, the oppressed – it just does not make sense. And then we read St Pauls letter to the Corinthians and we hear that it is foolishness to the wise. But to those who want to hear, who are open to receive the Word of God, it makes perfect sense.
One of the reasons it is the best sermon ever given is that Jesus treats his hearers with great respect. He gives no explanations or long detailed clarifications. He simply tells them some important truths about God’s love. And as we approach Ash Wednesday and ultimately Easter, we need to question our own understanding of this.
We call it the Sermon on the Mount, a mount is just a small hill, just high enough so that Jesus could be heard by the assembled company. But we immediately recognise that it is meant to be a parallel with Moses when he came down the mountain with the tablets of stone on which were engraved the Ten Commandments.
Yet despite the obvious similarities the two situations could not be more different. The differences are a sermon in themselves. They show how differently God chooses to deal with his people. There was the great mountain with its blasted rocks and dense clouds and here is the grassy hill in the sunshine.
There was Moses the fierce old man trying to hold his people together as a cohesive group; here is Jesus who respects the individuality of each human being and who builds up his followers with extraordinary gentleness and patience. There were the tablets of the law, full of do's and don'ts and with the fear of punishment behind them; here are the Beatitudes which bring untold blessings on those who are embraced by them.
Moses was there at, near enough, the beginning, Jesus is the culmination of all that went before. God revealed himself only slowly through the centuries but we now see him revealed in his fullness in his son Jesus. As we have frequently said, to be a Christian is not to be a follower of a set of rules, it is to be born again, it is to live a new life. It is to turn around and see things from a totally different perspective. As Ash Wednesday approaches, we ask the question, what does this mean for us?
Here in the Beatitudes Jesus gives us a completely new set of spectacles to look through. Here in the Beatitudes we see the values of this world turned upside down. We see the world through the eyes of God himself. Through the eyes of the one who does the blessing, the one who makes the life of the poor, the gentle, the mourners, the fighters for justice and peace, the pure in heart and the persecuted, the one who makes all their lives a Beatitude.
The Beatitudes are a privileged glimpse at the world through the eyes of God. They are a wonderful opportunity to see things as they really are.
I can remember reading a story about an elderly brother and sister who never got along, even though they had lived close to each other all their lives. That is until she took ill and was unable to do anything for herself. Then he opened his heart to her, he sold the smallholding where he spent most of his time and devoted himself to her care.
She couldn't communicate but he talked to her all day. He dressed her, cleaned her up and even fed her with a spoon. The place was an absolute tip but he cared for her with all the love and concern he had in him. When she died the priest went to see him. He said words the priest never forgot: I never knew what love was, not till Helen got ill. It was as if his whole life had been a preparation for those few years spent caring for her in her frailness and infirmity.
He said something else “other people don't understand. They think that what they see is the real world. But we know that there is another world that's just behind this one. And there it’s the things you can't see that really count.”
There are many people in the same position, we meet them every day, they wouldn’t recognise the Beatitudes if they fell over them in the street but they live them out each day of their lives. I know this is true because I am looking at some of them right now.
Dearest friends, we are called to make this Lent different to other years – to open our hearts and eyes to live as Christ would have us live – in love. Amen
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| Date | 2008-03-30 | | Preacher | Rev. Joe Thompson | | Title | Easter 1 Year A - Gospel: John 20: 19-31 | | Sermon Details | I’m pretty sure that my son James was awake long before any of his peers on Easter Sunday morning. I got up at 04h30 to get ready for the Dawn Eucharist and he came downstairs at 05h00 and asked, “Daddy, has the Easter Bunny been yet?” He was so enthusiastic to celebrate Easter – I was pondering that thought this week… have we, as a community, been enthused by Easter? Do strangers see the Risen Christ in you and me?
We live in a world where people appear to fall in and out of love like changing a pair of socks... It shatters me when someone says, "I don’t love you anymore!" Were they ever loved? Since God is love and we must compare our love to him, we come short if we define it in any other way. Love is a commitment with a beginning and no end. Agape love draws us to the revelation of God in the Risen Christ, it cries out I love you and I can’t help loving you even though we are totally unworthy objects of his love. His love is not based on feelings but is demonstrated through actions. Those first Believers received Gods love and it became the pattern for the Early Christian Church:
The Christian Church is called to be a loving community, with this supernatural love evident to all, because He first loved us and laid down His life for us which has brought us into His community.
OT law was summed up by two commands - love God and your neighbour.
So what is the difference here Jesus calling his a new command new?
1 It was given by our Lord to his Church, not to Israel.
2 It is directed toward the disciples and their relationship with each other, so also it relates to all believers to love one another.
Christian obedience stems from love not duty. How should we love one another? Just as I have loved you. It's one thing to love one another as we love and care for ourselves. It’s a vastly greater love which gives up its own life for another, that sacrifices self interest to promote the interests of another
That Early Christian community couldn’t help but attract people to Christ, Christian love is contagious it brings others to Jesus. Because this love is a supernatural and has been received from God, showing Christian love is not an option notice what it says to love one another.
If we look at Thomas – who ran away like the others – doesn’t want to get caught up in the other Believer’s community or idea of “Church” until Jesus arrives and tells him to get his hands dirty, to get stuck in. Jesus wants Thomas to be a part of Himself, to be filled with that Love. Thomas’ response, “My Lord and My God”, is a telling one for us – how do we respond when Jesus asks us to get involved?
In confessing Jesus as 'My Lord and my God', Thomas made the most profound declaration about the person of Christ -- that he is truly God. He accepted Jesus as Lord and submitted his life to Christ's lordship. As we celebrate the resurrection of Jesus we can use Thomas's words to declare our faith and submit our lives to him more deeply.
In addition we can ask the Holy Spirit to deepen our spiritual understanding as we open our minds more completely to the witness of scripture and the Christian community. We can witness confidently to Christ's resurrection, knowing that the Spirit will use our words and witness to bring others to faith, just as Thomas was brought to faith.
And remember - Love costs....
It’s easy to say we love God when that love doesn't cost us anything more than weekly attendance at religious services. But the real test of our love for God is how we treat one another, when we are rubbing shoulders together! We cannot truly love God when we neglect those who are made in his image.
Growth will involve being pruned by God; this will involve our relationships changing.
Jesus calls his disciples friends; we too should be friends, loving one another attracting others to Christ. If we are to remain in him, we must obey him, and grow in him this is really demonstrating the extent of our love for him when we show that love to one another. May we, through our enthusiasm and Love, draw ourselves and others into the Resurrection Light of Christ.
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| Date | 2008-04-27 | | Preacher | Rev. Joe Thompson | | Title | The Cathedral as a Healing Community | | Sermon Details | Gospel: John 14: 15-21
Over the past few weeks we have looked at various aspects of our community life here at the Cathedral – today we look at the Cathedral as a healing community. Now I have to admit that the topic of healing causes my pulse to race – no pun intended!
I have always personally struggled with the concept of healing, probably because it has never been part of my life, also the only type of experience that I have had was in a Charismatic Church – where they hype people up emotionally and demand that God heals people. I really struggle with their theology and with their understanding of healing.
Not surprisingly it reminds me of a story… there was a very wealthy man who pleaded with God to be allowed to ‘take it with him’ when he died. God agreed to make an exception to the usual rule, but only allowed him one suitcase. The wealthy man was delighted, and proceeded to turn all his worldly goods into gold bars, which he then packed into a large suitcase. At the Pearly Gates, he was stopped by St Peter, who eventually agreed to call the boss and check whether or not he could be allowed in.
“What’s he got in the case?” God asked. St Peter opened it up, looked inside, and spoke into the ‘phone incredulously, “He’s brought paving stones!” God has His own way of doing things, doesn’t He? What is important to us, isn’t necessarily important to God.
As I have struggled with this concept of healing I have realised there is a difference between being healed and being cured – in fact they are two totally different things. There are things that can be cured and things that can’t. While a viral infection might be cured or a broken bone be set; what of someone who loses a leg, or is disfigured in a terrible fire? I believe it would be quite wrong to dangle the false hope of a cure in front of them. But healing is another thing. Healing is beyond the reach of curing – it reaches the parts science cannot reach. Healing deals in love, in being fully human in spite of a problem, in finding the meaning of my life even when I can’t be as you are.
It is that self-same Love that is at the heart of our Gospel message this morning. Jesus reassures His disciples, “I shall not leave you as orphans. I shall ask the Father and He will send you another Counsellor, to be with you forever.”
Jesus goes on to say, “You know the Spirit because He is with you, He is in you.” Although there are times when we feel that we don’t know the Spirit or that God is distant; He is here in each one of us. Jesus hasn’t left us alone, He has given us His Spirit – but that Spirit doesn’t dominate our lives. Rather He is there in a very gentle way, prompting our actions, keeping us faithful, perhaps most importantly healing our brokenness.
God does this so that we can grow in our love, so that it can be stretched to its limits. He allows us these difficult times so that we can overcome them and grow to our full stature in the spiritual life – even if at the time it seems impossible. Sometimes we need an experience of truth in our hearts rather than an intellectual knowledge in our heads. Sometimes intellect just isn’t enough – like the time my Grandfather died… I remember crying my eyes out at his funeral while trying to rationalise my feelings. I was glad that his suffering was over, I knew he had gone to be with God – so why then was I crying? Rationally it did not make sense.
Healing takes many forms – healing is unique to the individual because all of us are different and in different places spiritually. Like many churches, here at the Cathedral, we try to follow Jesus. If we follow him, we try to imitate him. So we try to love, to forgive, to pray, to discover God’s path for us, and above all to learn the journey of the cross.
Much of that journeying is done in a way which heals our brokenness: the Healing Group meet once a month, there are people in the Lady Chapel during Communion to pray with, there is the Prayer Chain, Guild of St Luke, Substance Abuse List, Pew Leaflet… the list is endless. As I reflected on healing within our Cathedral community, I realised that healing forms a pivotal part of our life together. What we strive to do is to enable people to find healing through the ministry of others – sharing the journey with each other. One of the most powerful ways of easing our burden is to allow someone else to help us carry that load. Note: to help us carry it, not to take it from us – that is not healing.
Now I don’t know what burdens you may be carrying – nor do I know where you are in need of healing in your life, but I believe emphatically that it is our calling as Christians, and as a Cathedral, to live as people who know the Spirit is in them and to know that healing power that comes from the knowledge that each and every one of us is Loved… “Whoever holds to my commandments and keeps them, is the one who loves me; and whoever loves me will be loved by my Father, and I shall love them and reveal myself to them.” (John 14: 21)
“Come Holy Spirit of God, and enkindle within our hearts the flame of your Love, that we may be both healed and healers within that Love.” Amen
Questions
1. What experience have you had of healing, how has this changed your outlook on life?
2. If you were to pack your prized possession into a suitcase, what would you pack?
3. Is there a difference between being healed and being cured, how would you describe the difference? Can you give examples from your own life?
4. How would you answer someone who asks, “where is God in the midst of my pain?”
5. Have you been able to share your burdens with someone else? Who, and how has their response led you closer to God?
6. Is healing affected by faith? |
| Date | 2008-06-08 | | Preacher | Reverand Joe Thompson | | Title | Tenth Sunday Year A | | Sermon Details | Gospel: Matthew 9: 9-13
The African impala is an amazing animal but it is really doff! It can jump to a height of over 3m and cover a distance of greater than 15m. Yet these magnificent creatures can be kept in an enclosure in any zoo with a 1.5m wall. Biologists tell us the animals will not jump if they cannot see where their feet will fall. Faith is the ability to trust what we cannot see, and with faith we are freed from the flimsy enclosures of life that only fear allows to entrap us.
In today’s Gospel, Jesus calls a most unlikely candidate as His follower, Matthew – a public sinner. Jesus doesn’t say, “Just before you come with me I need you to make amends and sort your things out”. He simply says, “Follow me”, He doesn’t question Matthew on his faith nor demand a sign of conversion. It seems wrong, doesn’t it – like he needs to do something or prove that he is trustworthy. It doesn’t seem important for Jesus; perhaps He saw something society ignored. Matthew had a need that only Jesus could fill.
The Church exists, not for the sake of the righteous, but for sinners. We are not holy, each one of us is a sinner and each one of us has a need that only Jesus can fill. No matter where we are in our journey of faith, as Christians we believe that even though we are unworthy sinners, we are children of the Creator of the Universe, who loves us unconditionally.
Jesus is not reassuring the Pharisees – the righteous – that everything is all right and that they don’t need Him. They believed they were the authority on holiness and righteousness and as such were above the people around them. He is asking them to question themselves as to whether they are in fact righteous. What they can’t see is that they are also sinners and are being held captive by their own blindness, just like those Impala in the zoo.
Unlike Matthew, who knows he is a sinner, they can’t benefit from God’s mercy. Sin is essentially an entrance for grace and they think they are without sin. Because they aren’t wounded, they are no longer vulnerable. Because they lack nothing, no one brings them anything. Even the charity of God can’t bandage what has no wounds. Because there was a man lying on the ground, the Samaritan picked him up; because Jesus’ face was covered with soil and blood, Veronica wiped it with a cloth. Those who have not fallen cannot be picked up and those who are not dirty will never be wiped clean.
The people around Jesus were scandalised by what Jesus said, but horrified by what He did with the sinner – He ate with them. The Gospels are full of stories about Jesus either eating or drinking or at least talking about it. After all, what was Jesus’ first miracle – He turned water into the good stuff; and His most talked about miracle – the feeding of the 5000 with 5 loaves and two fish. All of these miracles come at significant times in His ministry and they were all plentiful and glorious. Not just the food and drink, but more than anyone could ask for or want. These meals were a foretaste of the banquet prepared for us in heaven, spoken by the prophet Isaiah and dreamt of by a people who were constantly at the risk of starvation. People who were desperately in need of being filled…
Perhaps a story will illustrate my point better. There was once a tightrope walker, who performed amazing aerial feats. All over Paris, he would do tightrope acts at tremendously scary heights. A promoter read about this in the papers and wrote a letter to the tightrope walker, saying, "Tightrope, I don't believe you can do it, but I'm willing to make you an offer. For a very substantial sum of money, besides all your transportation fees, I would like to challenge you to do your act over Niagara Falls." Now, Tightrope wrote back, "Sir, although I've never been to America and seen the Falls, I'd love to come." Well, after a lot of promotion and setting the whole thing up, many people came to see the event. Tightrope was to start on the Canadian side and come to the American side. Drums roll, and he comes across the rope which is suspended over the treacherous part of the falls -- blindfolded!! And he makes it across easily. The crowds go wild, and he comes to the promoter and says, "Well, Mr. Promoter, now do you believe I can do it?" "Well of course I do. I mean, I just saw you do it." "No," said Tightrope, "do you really believe I can do it?" "Well of course I do, you just did it." "No, no, no," said Tightrope, "do you believe I can do it?" "Yes," said Mr. Promoter, "I believe you can do it." "Good," said Tightrope, "then you get in the wheel barrow."
We come here today, knowing we are sinners, but willing to take that leap of faith over the boundaries of our sin. We leap, even if we can’t see the other side – in faith, to receive from Him. And we come to this meal together, Holy Communion, to be fed with the foretaste of that banquet, trusting in His love. Amen |
| Date | 2008-06-22 | | Preacher | Reverand Joe Thompson | | Title | Twelfth Sunday Year A | | Sermon Details | Gospel: Matthew 10: 24-33
Nikita Kruschev, when he was the Premier of the Soviet Union, repeatedly denounced the policies and atrocities of his predecessor Josef Stalin. At one public meeting as Kruschev was having a go at Stalin, he was interrupted by a shout from someone in the audience, “You were one of Stalin’s colleagues, so why did you not stop him?”
“Who said that?” roared Kruschev. An agonizing silence followed as no-one in the room dared to move. Then Kruschev replied quietly, “now you know why!”
Fear can make us do things we otherwise would not do. There are many forms of fear, some are rational, others appear irrational. Fear, especially the fear of the unknown, can cause us to be so scared that we are afraid to venture out. Some of those fears can be traced back to our childhood – like the mother who was tucking in her young son during a thunderstorm at bedtime. She was about to leave when the little boy asked, “Mummy can you lie with me through the night?” Smiling, she gave him a hug of reassurance and said tenderly, “I can’t my love – I have to sleep in Dad’s room.” After a period of silence, he said in a shaky voice, “The big Sissy”.
Three times in this mornings Gospel we hear Jesus tell His disciples to not be afraid:
1. Don’t fear the hidden or the unknown – the Truth will come out.
2. Don’t fear those who threaten your existence – you have eternal life with God.
3. Don’t fear the promises and Love of God – the Creator of the Universe knows and loves you intimately. Even the hairs on your head are counted…
In the face of persecution, fear is a natural response. How often are our words and actions deliberately twisted by others? I believe that history will one day vindicate the righteous acts of all of us. As we get older, and we look back over our lives, perhaps it is then that we realize what Truth really is, and who our true friends are.
Secondly, don’t fear the limited power of our opponents. They can kill the body, which after all is going to die soon enough, but they have no power over the soul. Only God has the power over eternity. The Bible never says that we need to fear Satan, rather we need to fear God. Maybe we need to trust God’s judgement, if not in this life, then in the life to come.
Lastly we need not fear because of God’s compassionate Love for us. St Luke speaks of the 5 sparrows sold for two pennies (Luke 12:6) and St Matthew tells of two sparrows sold for a penny. This is a kind of Verimark, “Buy 4, get 1 free” offer. The person who spends 2 pennies gets an extra sparrow thrown in as if it had no value at all. God even cares for that supposedly worthless sparrow. How much more does He care for us?
It has been said that every Christian occupies some kind of pulpit and preaches some kind of sermon every day. This is never more true than parents in the home. Bearing witness to Jesus can have a profound imput on those around us, especially our children.
Like the story of 5 year old little Johnny who was helping his Mum cook supper. She asked him to go into the pantry and get her a can of tomato soup; but he didn’t want to go alone, “It’s dark in there and I am scared.” She asked him again for the soup but again he refused to go in. Finally, she reassured him, “It’s ok, Jesus will be with you in there.” Johnny walked over to the pantry hesitantly, opened the door and peered into the darkness. He was just about to turn away when an idea came to him and he asked, “Jesus, if you are in there, please can you hand me that can of tomato soup!”
Don’t be afraid, don’t be afraid, don’t be afraid.
Friends – what are you afraid of? Are we living a life where we declare ourselves for Christ to all those we meet? Or are our lives driven by the fear of what may happen to us? Remember, “whoever acknowledges me before humanity, I will acknowledge them before my Father in heaven,” and, “You are worth more than many sparrows.” |
| Date | 2008-07-20 | | Preacher | Reverand Joe Thompson | | Title | 16th Sunday Year A | | Sermon Details | Gospel: Matthew 13: 24-30, 36-43
I’m not sure about other gardeners, but it is usually about this time each year when I prune my roses and prepare the beds for Spring. So it was that yesterday I spent in the garden – actually pruning some of the trees in the complex as well as my roses.
I came across an interesting sight. In one of the trees we were cutting back I noticed another tree growing out of the hollow in one of the branches. Obviously the seed had been dropped by a bird and so here we have a tree within a tree – both growing quite happily.
I love being in the garden – watching the birds and seeing new things each time I look. We were given a garden sign which reads, “One is nearer God’s heart in a garden than anywhere else on earth.”
It is a question I am often asked by the kids at the College, “so what is heaven like?” I think we all have different views on this one – for me, I’m hoping for somewhere with natural beauty like a waterfall, a river, the sea or a mountain. It is often in these sort of places that I have found myself closest to God.
The Kingdom of Heaven was central to Christ’s teaching. Jesus didn’t tell his listeners what the Kingdom of God was; finite minds cannot grasp the glory of eternal life with God. Instead Jesus told them what the Kingdom was like using parables and stories – expressed in homely imagery that his listeners would have been familiar with… like today’s story about the wheat and the darnel or weeds.
In today’s story, Jesus cautions against removing the weeds too early as this might damage the wheat. On the day of harvest, Judgement Day, the weeds are to be removed and destroyed; the wheat is to be stored carefully. This is a description of the realities of earthly life – the constant struggle to survive and to provide the means of future life.
What Jesus is doing is highlighting the fundamental choice all of us must make in our life. Naturally He wants us to choose the good, to follow the way He outlines for us. BUT it must be our absolute free choice – and that leaves open the possibility that we might make the choice for evil. Jesus doesn’t want it to be difficult; He wants us to make the right choices without restricting our freedom. This is the most loving and caring thing He can do for us. What we need to realise, especially in the modern world we live in, is that with choice comes responsibility. We are responsible for our actions.
Yes, at the end of time there will be judgement; that judgement belongs to God alone. That judgement is not our task – we cannot be the judge when we too are under the same judgement. Now I for one, as I am sure all of us, am not looking forward to that Day of Judgement because I know that I do not deserve Heaven. We have to rely on the LOVE and GRACE of God to get into Heaven.
This may seem harsh – however, it is worth the end result – not unlike pruning a garden. As gardeners we know that we have to prune to produce a better crop in the growing season ahead. We prune our rose bushes so that in the next season our roses will have a stronger fragrance and better blooms. And so it is with life.
Life is harsh – we live surrounded by evil and evil appears to be flourishing. As St Paul says in our other reading this morning, we are called to trust; to trust in God’s judgement and to trust in His Love. After all, He is the Head Gardener. |
| Date | 2008-09-14 | | Preacher | Reverand Joe Thompson | | Title | 24th Sunday Year A | | Sermon Details | Gospel: Matthew 18: 21-35
"Many years ago, a father and his daughter were walking through the grass on the Canadian prairie. In the distance, they saw a prairie fire, and they realized that it would soon engulf them. The father knew there was only one way of escape: They would quickly begin a fire right where they were and burn a large patch of grass. When the huge fire drew near, they then would stand on the section that had already burned. When the flames did approach them, the girl was terrified but her father assured her, 'The flames can't get to us. We are standing where the fire has already been.'"
(As quoted in Erwin Lutzer, Failure, The Back Door to Success.)
God has really laid this message of Forgiveness on my heart this past week, giving me both a personal and a pastoral experience of what this means. I must say that it has not been an easy week – but it has been one of incredible spiritual soul searching on my side.
People so easily speak of forgive and forget – but can we? It is not the way humans are wired – can we ever forget past hurts when there are always triggers that can pull us back into that hurt. Sometimes it is a piece of music, or a place that we visited, or a phrase someone uses, there can be so many. D.L. Moody once said, “Those who say that they will forgive but can’t forget simply bury the hatchet but leave the handle out for immediate use.” Why is forgiveness so hard and such a challenge to us as Christians especially?
Today many people are so caught up in their own little worlds, trying to see how much they can achieve in life. People have their own agendas which do not necessarily involve much concern for other people and even less about other people's feelings. With all that's going on in the world, there seems to be such a great need for finding ways of diffusing tension and the animosity between people and nations. The Church has to play a major role in this as it seeks to bring about the healing and peace that are needed in our world.
One of the problems is that it is not customary in our society to forgive easily. Reconciliation between individuals or groups who are in conflict is certainly understood as necessary, but this usually comes a long time after a hurt has happened and then only often after protracted negotiations. In our world holding a grudge is considered quite normal and not speaking to someone who has hurt you is commonplace. It is often thought to be unnecessary to forgive and people who ought to be helping one another can be at loggerheads for years at a time.
Partly the reluctance to forgive is because of the fear of losing face but mostly, I think, because of the effort it takes. Forgiveness requires doing something; you have to go to the other or find a suitable opportunity to speak words of peace. Forgiveness is always active, it is always a reaching out, it is always involves taking the initiative.
In our Gospel reading Peter is told that he must not forgive a person just seven times but seventy-seven times. This mystical number actually means an unlimited number of times and rightly so for there is no limit to God’s love and mercy. We are called to forgive because we look through the eyes of Jesus on the cross. And in the prayer we will say/sing just now, Our Lord reminds us to “forgive us our sins/trespasses AS we forgive those who sin/trespass against us.
If we truly believe in His salvation then there can be no limits to the amount of times we forgive our brothers or sisters. There can be no limits to the extent of the love and kindness God conveys to the world through the agency of his servants, and by that I mean us!
But the readings today tell us that forgiveness is possible not by forgetting the past but by remembering it, not by focussing on our own power but on the power of our Saviour on the cross. Forgiveness is not easy to do and the capacity to forgive is not one that is wilfully achieved. No matter how powerful we consider our willpower to be we cannot force ourselves into forgiveness. In the end it is a gift from God as Alexander Pope intimated in his famous comment that 'To err is human, to forgive divine'. If popular wisdom says 'Forgive and forget', biblical wisdom, coming to a climax in Christ, says 'Remember, and so learn forgiveness'.
None of this is easy. Very little comes naturally. And certainly we all fall far short of the ideal. As Christians, we need to remember to be more forgiving and gentle with ourselves and most of all to be real agents of forgiveness and reconciliation within our community.
Those who believe in Jesus are to be ambassadors of forgiveness in the world, and messengers of reconciliation. Perhaps it is not strictly speaking something we 'do' but something we find ourselves capable of experiencing, a fruit of the Holy Spirit in us, a sign of the life of Christ in us, a participation in the divine nature, a way of relating to others in which we find ourselves (by God's grace) becoming compassionate as the Heavenly Father is compassionate. We walk where He has walked before, where the fire has already passed.
I end off with a quote that God placed in my heart on Friday morning:
“If you are finding it hard to forgive someone, place them at the foot of the cross and see if Jesus can…” |
| Date | 2008-10-12 | | Preacher | Reverand Joe Thompson | | Title | 28th Sunday – Year A | | Sermon Details | Gospel Matthew 22: 1-14
Yesterday we celebrated the wedding of the Dean and Joan’s daughter Kate to David Jonker, what a joyous occasion. Normally I don’t look forward to receptions – especially when we sit with a whole bunch of people we don’t know. They aren’t easy things to organise are they – wedding receptions – the seating plan has to be scrutinised in intricate detail as you try to make sure that family and friends combine in such a way as to promote harmony. “Don’t sit Aunty Beatrice next to Michael because they’ll argue the whole time, etc.” Thankfully yesterday was a wonderful event and our prayers go with the newly weds as they go off on honeymoon.
The wedding banquet in today's gospel parable seems to have been an equally tricky affair. The great and the good seem to have had much more important things to attend to. To make matters worse, they treated the king's invitation with contempt, even doing violence to his servants sent to call those invited to the banquet. Another set of invitations is sent out to those in the highways and the byways, to both the good and the bad, and the least in that society.
The message of this parable of the royal wedding banquet is clear. God invites the people of Israel to his wedding banquet in heaven but despite the fact that they have enjoyed his favour over so many generations they do not come. He repeatedly invites them but they completely fail to take up his invitation.
The prophets who have brought the invitation on many occasions have been ignored so God punishes the people and invites others to his banquet instead. The Chosen People have ignored his invitation so God invites all the other people of the world instead.
This story told by Jesus is certainly good news for us. We are Gentiles and we have taken up God’s invitation and we are here at the great banquet he has prepared for us. Here in this Eucharist—we celebrate the great love that God has shown us. We are gathered round his table and we feast on the most precious gifts he could give us.
We recognise that this parable is good news for us and so we rejoice, but there is also a warning contained in the story and we need to be sure we understand it. You will remember the man who is found not to be wearing a wedding garment and who is chucked out by the bouncers. What is all that about?
Well, the wedding garment is also a symbol. It represents our new life in Christ. When we accepted God’s invitation we left the old life of sin and began to live a new life of love and goodness. A new life as the children of God as Fr Angus was telling us so well last week. It is as if we left off our old clothes and put on new ones. We always feel much better wearing new clothes. We know we look good and often that helps us to act better.
So what about this man who is found wearing his old clothes at the royal wedding? The king is angry and has him thrown out. He represents us when we sin.
In those days the tradition was that when a poor man was invited to a royal feast and he could not afford a festive garment then the king would provide him one. So there was no excuse for this man to be without a wedding garment; that is surely why in the parable it says: the man was silent. He could give no reason because there was none.
It is as if we have taken off our baptismal robe and left it aside and are now wearing the old clothes of our former life. Of course, all of us sin. All of us from time to time lapse back in to old ways. But as soon as we realise this we need to come to our senses and reclothe ourselves in Christ. We must, for our own sake, return to God immediately to seek the forgiveness which he will freely grant us His children.
In becoming a Christian we relinquish our independence to an extent in order to become closer to him. We unite our will to that of Christ; his desires become our desires, his thoughts become our thoughts. Just as in a marriage, after a time it often seems as though we are making no sacrifices at all—our minds have become one. The task of a Christian is to witness to Christ’s love in the world; to be His hands and feet.
We simply cannot be outwardly religious and observant and have whole areas of our life that are unaffected by the Gospel for this would mean that our mind and the mind of Christ were at variance. I don’t mean that we should be perfect; that would be impossible but we should, at least, be working on those areas where we know we fail the most. At the very least we ought to be aware of those areas where we are going wrong, where we are failing to live our life as a Christian should.
The question we need to ask ourselves is how prepared are we for that call of invitation, to enter the Kingdom? It is clearly an invitation and a calling that requires both a freely chosen response on our part and a commitment to the values of the Kingdom. We need to be clothed in the wedding garment, we need to look forward to that wedding reception – knowing it will be a place of peace and harmony. The choice is ours, but is itself dependent on the original choice of God in Jesus, the son and heir to the Kingdom, to whose banquet we are called. He invites us to share in His banquet that we may, in the words of St Paul to the Philippians, “Rejoice in the Lord always. I say it again, rejoice.” |
| Date | 2008-10-26 | | Preacher | Reverand Joe Thompson | | Title | 30th Sunday Year A | | Sermon Details | Gospel: Matthew 22: 34-46
A teenager, tired of reading bedtime stories to his little sister, decided to record several of her favourite stories on tape. He told her, "Now you can hear your stories anytime you want. Isn't that great?" She looked at the machine for a moment and then replied, "No. It hasn't got a lap."
The two commandments quoted in our Gospel reading are not original to Jesus. This is very old teaching. The command to love God is from Deuteronomy 6:5 and the command to love one’s neighbour is in Leviticus 19:18. Let us look at the first one. “You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your mind.” These are the first lines of what was for the Jews their most important prayer – the Shema. Every Jew knows this prayer by heart from their earliest days and they recite it every morning and every evening.
The prayer continues: “These words which I enjoin on you today shall be written on your heart. You shall repeat them to your children and say them over to them whether at rest in your house or walking abroad, at your lying down and your rising; you shall fasten them on your hand as a sign and on your forehead as a circlet; you shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.”
Orthodox Jews quite literally carry out these commandments. The words of this prayer are contained in small boxes which they tie to their foreheads and to their left arm during prayer - known as phylacteries and so powerful do they consider this prayer that the phylacteries are believed to bring protection to all who wear them.
The second command, to love one’s neighbour is to be found in the book of Leviticus where it is placed at the end of a whole list of rules regarding relationship with one’s neighbour and it serves as a kind of summary - the neighbour referred to quite clearly means a fellow Israelite not a stranger. So neither of these two commands is original to Jesus nor is the placing of them both together unique to Jesus. In certain Jewish writings they are placed side-by-side in a sort of parallelism.
We need to answer that question asked by Jesus, “And you who do you say that I am?”
It is easy to love God—He is up there in His heaven and doesn’t seem to bother us too much. We can form an idea of Him in our minds and love that. It presents us with few difficulties. Much harder is to love not an idea but a person. Much harder to love is a person who fails to meet up with our expectations, one who challenges our assumptions, one whose ugliness is more than skin deep.
But then we have to show that our love is also more than skin deep.
What then counts as Christian love? Jesus' own life is the prime example. He didn't have sentimental feelings about everyone He came into contact with - or even for those He never met. But this didn't prevent Him from loving them. He even gave up His life for them. This was an act of will - not the result of sentimental feelings about the world and the human race in general. One would hardly die for a sentimental feeling; people die for principles, and the principle Christians are asked to die for is that of Christian love.
And this shouldn't be burdensome for us because it is a liberating kind of love. We don't have to feel guilty that we don't 'love' everyone - that is, feel sentimental and loving towards him or her. The kind of love that is Christian has nothing to do with feeling but everything to do with action. And action is something we can force ourselves into.
And this is what Jesus asks of us. As he says,
“It isn't those who say, Lord, Lord, who will inherit the kingdom but those who hear my Father's will and do it.”
There is a tendency in Christianity to separate works from belief -- that you can somehow have the belief without the works. What I want to suggest is that we tend to see the first commandment, 'love of God', as a 'belief' -- something in the head, while we see the second, ‘love of neighbour', as something we do, that is, being nice to people.
In other words, we tend to reduce our understanding of the 'love of God' to some kind of intellectual assent. We either believe in God or we don't. If we don't believe in God, then we go to parties and tell people that we are atheists. If we believe in God, we tell people that we are 'believers'. We may love our neighbours as well. We may be nice to them all the time, but it seems that 'love of our neighbour' can be seen as separate from belief in God. It seems that we can sit at home believing in God without doing anything else.
I think that is where the popularity of TV evangelism comes in. It tells people they don't need to go to Church; they don't need to do good works. They can sit at home believing in God, and good works is reduced to sending the TV evangelist money through their credit card.
It seems to me that this kind of thinking comes from the tendency to see Jesus' first commandment, 'the love of God', as a belief, something in the head; while we see his second commandment, 'the love of neighbour', as works, something we do, and unconnected from what we believe. We would be far better of if we did not see love of God and love of neighbour as two separate things.
And, if we have to choose, it would be far better to see them both as works, rather than belief. Sitting at home, believing in God and feeling good, doesn't get us anywhere.
You can only love and believe in God by loving and believing in your neighbour. And you can't love your neighbour on your own at home. You have to go out and find your neighbour. Find those who need help, and work and worship with those who want to do the same.
In his book Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis wrote, "Do not waste your time bothering whether you 'love' your neighbour, act as if you did. As soon as we do this, we find one of the great secrets. When you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love him. If you injure someone you dislike, you will find yourself disliking him more. If you do him a good turn, you will find yourself disliking him less."
And again in his book on the Four Loves, “To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin or your selfishness. But in that casket--safe, dark, motionless, airless--it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable...The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers...of love is Hell.”
For that teenager, trying to help his sister so too with the Jews of Jesus’ time, it was an act of the head only, and as such was completely missing the point. It has to be an act of the heart as well. |
| Date | 2008-11-16 | | Preacher | Reverand Joe Thompson | | Title | 33rd Sunday of Year A | | Sermon Details | Gospel: Matthew 25: 14-30
The multitalented industrialist, Henry Ford, was once asked to donate money for the construction of a new hospital. The billionaire pledged to donate $5,000. The next day in the newspaper, the headline read, "Henry Ford contributes $50,000 to the local hospital." The irate Ford was on the phone immediately to complain to the fund-raiser that he had been misunderstood. The wise fund-raiser replied that they would print a retraction in the paper the following day to read, "Henry Ford reduces his donation by $45,000." Realizing the poor publicity that would result, Ford agreed to the $50,000 contribution in return for the following: that above the entrance to the hospital was to be carved the biblical inscription: "I came among you and you took me in."
Today’s Gospel reading is the middle one of three parables, all of which deal with time. The first parable is that of the ten Virgins; which we heard last week. The third is the familiar parable of the sheep and the goats; the judgement at the end of time 'when the Son of Man comes in His glory'.
In today's parable Jesus describes how a man entrusts his property to his servants before going on a journey. Like the first parable this is a story about waiting; how do we prepare for the return of the Lord and what will His judgement be when He appears in glory?
The first two servants are respectively given five talents and two talents, one talent was probably equivalent to a whole lifetimes wages for such a servant—they are entrusted with something precious beyond their wildest dreams - and they proceed to double them through trade. The third servant, however, who receives one talent, digs a hole and buries it out of fear that he might lose it. The first two servants have used their time well, whereas the third has made little use of the time given him whist he waits for his master to return.
For the third servant time is not a friend, for each moment is filled with dread and fear at the thought of losing the talent that he has been given. Rather than awaiting the return of the master in joy, seeing each moment as transformed in anticipation of this future happiness, this servant's life is filled with anxiety about what tomorrow will bring.
In many ways it's easier to identify with this fearful servant than with the two successful ones. All of us are anxious about the future. No matter how secure we feel ourselves to be in this life who can say with absolute certainly what tomorrow will bring?
When a gifted young Polish actor and playwright called Karol Wojty³a decided to try his vocation as a priest, his friends tried to dissuade him by appealing to this parable of talents. He would be burying his light under a bushel if he gave up acting, he would be wasting his time. Karol, however, did not begin this journey by looking at his own gifts but rather with what God was calling him to do and so he entered the seminary. As Pope John Paul II all his theatre skills found a fulfilment that he could never have anticipated.
Far too often, we think like his friends and that 3rd servant; instead of working and loving and caring and risking ourselves for the Kingdom, we dig a hole and bury ourselves – safe and sound and dead to the world.” So I was afraid and went out and hid my talent in the ground” Jesus says –that is the road to hell on earth –the outer darkness. Jesus isn’t saying that God will strike us down, but rather that our inner self will eventually wither away and become dark and chaotic unless we take the risk of sharing with others and giving and receiving love.
We are surely all at quite different stages in relation to this gift of faith. Some of us may not even be sure whether we have it or not… There are many Christians who suffer doubts and experience long periods of darkness and disbelief. Others of us might find it a bit of a burden—knowing and believing in Jesus and his message but feeling quite inadequate to the task of sharing the Gospel with others.
Others might feel full of faith and have put a lot of effort into carrying out the precepts of the Gospel over many years and yet feel that for one reason or another God has let them down badly. They certainly haven’t lost their faith but feel a bit depressed about it and don’t know where Christ is leading them.
Still others might be experiencing a new joy as they experience some wonderful grace or blessing from God. At various times in our life we might go through one or more of these reactions – each is an acceptable part of the journey.
The parable tells us that faith is a real and wonderful gift from God. Faith is given to us according to our ability to deal with it—each in proportion to his ability, as it says in the parable. Your one talent counts to every single one for whom you use it. God has given you the gift of compassion and love and care – don’t bury your love – put it to work! Every one of us is called to care for each other. God has given every one of us the precious gift of love and compassion. And to each of us he says: don’t bury my gift or hide it away – use it – make a difference.
And God says is, don’t be afraid to use my gifts – take a risk -Yes, opening yourself up to people, loving people, is a risky business, you may sometimes get hurt or be misunderstood as Henry Ford was… Remember Jesus said, “Take up your cross and follow me”. And though the way of the cross may be one of suffering, it is also the ultimate path of love, peace, joy and life eternal. God gives us all His love and life – don’t bury it – share it. |
| Date | 2008-11-30 | | Preacher | Reverand Joe Thompson | | Title | First Sunday of Advent - Year B | | Sermon Details | Gospel: Mark 13: 32-37
A priest sent his parents a microwave oven one Christmas. His Dad unpacked the microwave and plugged it in; and literally within seconds, the microwave transformed two smiles into frowns - even after reading the directions, they couldn't make it work! Days later, his mother was having tea with a friend and confessed her inability to get that microwave even to boil water. “To get this blessed thing to work,” she exclaimed, “I really don't need better directions; I just need my son to come along with the gift!”
Today we begin the new liturgical year – Year B, during this year we hear the Gospel as told to us by St Mark. Let us make an Ecclesiastical New Year resolution to be particularly attentive to the Word of God, especially as presented to us in the Gospels, in this coming year. The Gospel of Mark is the shortest of the Gospels, and can be read through in one sitting. It is only twenty-five or thirty pages and it will take less than an hour of your time even if you read it very reflectively. Mark is much more urgent and insistent than the other Evangelists. In Mark Jesus is always going somewhere immediately or directly; he is always on the road leaving here or going there. Jesus’ teaching is always fresh, direct and to the point. No words are wasted. In Confirmation we often suggest to the candidates that if they want to start reading their Bibles, the Gospel according to St Mark is a good place to start.
We begin our new year with the Season of Advent. It is a season in which we prepare for the celebration of the anniversary of the coming of Christ into our world. It is a season which looks back to that most crucial of all events; the birth of the Son of God in the stable in Bethlehem. But it is also a season which looks forward to the second coming of Christ at the end of time. We already heard last Sunday about the final judgement; in this season of Advent we learn how to prepare ourselves and in the liturgy we express our longing for the Kingdom to come. It is a season in which those words in the Lord’s Prayer, Your kingdom come, are especially significant
In the Gospel selected for today Jesus tells us to be on our guard and to be ready for that day because we cannot know when it will come. All we do know is that the Master will certainly come and that we must prepare ourselves to be ready to greet him.
"Jesus said to his disciples." Which disciples is He talking to? Well, if we look earlier in the chapter we find that it is in fact: Peter, James, John and Andrew, the first four of the apostles to be called. And the gospel reading divides the night into four parts in which the Master of the house might come: the evening, midnight, cockcrow and the morning, just as the Romans divided the night into four watches. And who is to watch in the parable? Not all the servants of the Master, who have their own work to be getting on with, and no doubt need their sleep, but the doorkeeper. It is not unreasonable then to suppose that it is these four apostles, as doorkeepers, holders of the keys to the kingdom, who take turns to watch through the four watches of the night.
Of course, the whole household has to be ready for the coming of the Master, "each with his work", but in the first place it is the apostles who actually keep the four watches so that the house can be roused when the Master comes.
This apostolic ministry is extended to all of us by the fact Christ says at the end of the parable, "and what I say to you" - that is, to Peter, James, John and Andrew - "I say to all: Watch!" We watch in the same way as those apostles: not just looking out for ourselves, but by looking out for each other and depending on each other. We watch for Christ in the watch assigned to us: watching for Christ in the poor, the sick, the hungry, the prisoner; watching too for the hope of the gospel. We watch for Christ not just as individuals, but as part of a community, His household, the Church.
As we prepare for the liturgical coming of the master at Christmas, the Church gives us four Sundays of Advent, four watches you might say, when we look out for Him: four different aspects of the Lord's coming that we look for. In the second, third and fourth watch we will see how it is that the Lord will come. Today, though, we are reminded not only what it is we do in Advent, but who it is who is coming: it is the Triune God, the God of Abraham, recognised by Isaiah both as our Father and our Redeemer, the God who formed us as a potter forms clay. We watch for the One who enriches us with speech and knowledge and the gifts of the Spirit as we wait for the revealing of our Lord Jesus Christ.
So over these four weeks, let us watch with the Church for the Lord, and watch out for each other and those around us, that we may be better prepared to receive the Lord when He comes at Christmas, or indeed whenever He comes. It is right that, like St Paul, we should thank God that so many teachers and examples of faith surround us. But more important is that we ourselves should become one of those teachers and examples of faith. The simplest acts of kindness, the times we give encouragement or affirmation, the inclusion of other peoples’ needs in our prayers—all these are ways we can teach and give example to our faith.
Let us resolve to make this new year a year of grace, a year in which we move decisively towards God. And just remember when God gave the gift of salvation, He didn't send a booklet of complicated instructions for us to figure out; rather He sent His Son. |
| Date | 2008-12-21 | | Preacher | Reverend Joe Thompson | | Title | Advent 4 Year B | | Sermon Details | Gospel: Luke 1: 26-38
On the wall of the museum of the concentration camp at Dachau is a large and moving photograph of a mother and her little girl standing in line of a gas chamber. The child, who is walking in front of her mother, does not know where she is going. The mother, who walks behind, does know, but is helpless to prevent the tragedy. In her helplessness she performs the only act of love left to her. She places her hands over her child's eyes so she will at least not see the horror to come. When people come into the museum they do not rush by this photo hurriedly. They pause. They almost feel the pain. And deep inside one hopes that they are all saying: "O God, please don't let that be all that there is."
Did Mary in our Gospel reading today know that 33 odd years later she would be standing at the foot of a cross watching her son die and ask herself that same question? "O God, please don't let that be all that there is." Probably not, but what was she thinking, as she answered so simply, “I am the servant of the Lord, let it be according to His will”
All we know is that she made herself available to serve God; and that He found her to be a worthy instrument to carry His only begotten Son. The mighty King David was not allowed to provide a home for the Lord. But his descendent, the poor and simple Virgin Mary was chosen instead. She was not to build a temple for God but to be the temple of God.
In this story of the Annunciation, Mary is so open to God and so close to Him that God chooses to manifest Himself in the shape of Jesus who is literally born in her. Thus it is that the final decisive chapter in the story of our salvation is begun. The deep holiness of this simple girl, Mary of Nazareth, becomes the opportunity for Christ to make His appearance and to bring about the salvation of the whole human race.
On this last Sunday of Advent we begin more intensively to prepare for the celebration of Christmas. There are the many practical things to do: the buying of last-minute presents, the shopping for food and all the necessities of a great feast. It is very easy to get caught up in all the rush but we must not forget that this great feast is in honour of the Lord and we take time to prepare ourselves spiritually as well.
We look at Mary and we see in her simplicity and in her obedience to God’s will a wonderful model for our own lives. We cannot imagine very clearly what went through her mind on that extraordinary day or on the subsequent days of her pregnancy and all that came afterwards. We contemplate this great mystery and we stand in awe of what God brought into being and we pay honour and reverence to His servant Mary. And it is our prayer today that we may imitate her and be so open and welcoming to God that He may make His true home in us and that we will carry Him to all those we encounter.
God, who is both gentleness and strength, both truth and love, can make the impossible happen. But He can’t do it without us. Though He took the initiative with Mary, He was still waiting for her response; once she had acknowledged the power of God, she was the most free person on earth, with that most marvellous of freedoms, which is the freedom to say yes to God, to bring God into the world, to build a house for the God who first built us a house. We want to do good things for God; if we acknowledge first that He has to do good things for us, then we will be given the power to do Him good, and it will be Christmas.
The message of Christmas is that God intrudes upon the weak and the vulnerable, and this is precisely the message that we so often miss. God does not come that part of us that swaggers through life, confident in our self-sufficiency. God leaves His treasure in the broken fragmented places of our life. God comes to us in those rare moments when we are able to transcend our own selfishness long enough to really care about another human being.
God's hears those prayers and it is in just such situations of hopelessness and helplessness that His almighty power is born. It is there that God leaves his treasure. In Mary, in that Mother in Dachau, and in all of us, as Christ is born anew within.
Take the year 1809. The international scene was tumultuous. Napoleon was sweeping through Austria; blood was flowing freely. Nobody then cared about babies. But the world was overlooking some terribly significant births.
For example, William Gladstone was born that year. He was destined to become one of England's finest statesman. That same year, Alfred Tennyson was born to an obscure minister and his wife. On the American continent, Oliver Wendell Holmes was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts. And not far away in Boston, Edgar Allan Poe began his eventful, albeit tragic, life. It was also in that same year that a physician named Darwin and his wife named their child Charles Robert. And that same year produced the cries of a newborn infant in a rugged log cabin in Kentucky. The baby's name? Abraham Lincoln.
If there had been news broadcasts at that time, I'm certain these words would have been heard: "The destiny of the world is being shaped on an Austrian battlefield today." But history was actually being shaped in the cradles of England and America. Similarly, everyone thought taxation was the big news--when Jesus was born. But a young Jewish woman cradled the biggest news of all: the birth of the Saviour.
As we approach that stable in Bethlehem, may we open our hearts to realise that there is more to Christmas than the rush and chaos, may we open our hearts to make a home for the Christ-child and may we respond in that same way, “ I am the servant of the Lord, may it be to me according to His will.” |
| Date | 2009-01-04 | | Preacher | Reverend Joe Thompson | | Title | Second Sunday after Christmas Year B | | Sermon Details | Gospel: John 1:1-18
Booker T. Washington describes meeting an ex-slave in his book Up From Slavery: "I found that this man had made a contract with his master, two or three years previous to the Emancipation Proclamation, to the effect that the slave was to be permitted to buy himself, by paying so much per year for his body; and while he was paying for himself, he was to be permitted to labour where and for whom he pleased.
"Finding that he could secure better wages in Ohio, he went there. When freedom came, he was still in debt to his master some three hundred dollars. Notwithstanding that the Emancipation Proclamation freed him from any obligation to his master, this black man walked the greater portion of the distance back to where his old master lived in Virginia, and placed the last dollar, with interest, in his hands.
In talking to me about this, the man told me that he knew that he did not have to pay his debt, but that he had given his word to his master, and his word he had never broken. He felt that he could not enjoy his freedom till he had fulfilled his promise."
It is around this time that people make all sorts of promises or resolutions, isn’t it, many of which they will never keep? But what about the promises we make to God? All too often we make promises to God that we will do this or that, or that we will stop doing the other. Do we really treat those promises as if our lives depended on them or are they, as Mary Poppins said, “pie-crust promises – easily made and easily broken”?
In today’s Gospel St John looks at things differently from the other Evangelists. He takes a longer view; he is more reflective and gives more of a theological and personal perspective. St John is called the Beloved Disciple because he never used his own name in the text of his own Gospel. He always referred to himself as the disciple Jesus loved. It is clear that John experienced in an extraordinarily profound way that Jesus loved him. We can see this directly from the text of his Gospel, most notably in the case of the Last Supper where John placed his head on Jesus’ breast and at the Crucifixion where Jesus places the care of his mother into John’s hands. If only we all had such an awareness of the depth of the love God has for us.
These first eighteen verses of introduction to his Gospel are all about asking the question... Who is Jesus? This, of course, is the question we must all answer for ourselves in the end. The other Evangelists take different approaches. St Matthew gives a long genealogy to show that Jesus came from the line of Abraham and David. St Luke begins with the story of John the Baptist while Mark begins with the Baptism of Jesus. St John goes right back to the very beginning of creation. Jesus is the Son of God, and is therefore eternal, and so was there at the start. And it is through him that all things came to be.
Most memorably, St John describes Jesus as The Word. In the beginning was the Word. Here he plunges straight into the depths of Trinitarian theology. Jesus, the Son of God, is the eternal Word of the Father. Talking about Jesus as the Word of God can sound rather abstract. We live in a culture where words aren't taken very seriously; we are bombarded by meaningless phrases meant to make us part with our hard-earned money. The ancient world took words much more seriously. For one thing, most cultures have had in their past some sense that words can have power, that the right words in the right circumstances might make things happen. We see this in our own culture in the interest in spells, a confused belief in powerful words that might change the world.
Far from being an abstract account of things, St John's Gospel is trying to get across this astonishing meeting of the cosmic and the everyday. This Word of God, through whom everything was made, has become one of us: 'we have beheld his glory'. St John gives us a way of understanding the rest of his Gospel: when we see Jesus, we see God, not hidden in human form but revealed to us, shown to us, so that we can behold his glory. The image that we have, the very unexpected image we have, of the powerful Word of God, through whom everything was made, is the tiny baby of Bethlehem.
“Our lives are fields that primarily contain weeds. We cannot produce strawberries. We can mow the weeds, but that effort alone will never produce acceptable fruit. If we really want that fruit we will have to go deeper. We must plough up the whole field and start again with new plants. “
As we go into 2009, may we really consider the promises we make to God, and the words we use. May our resolve never weaken and may we find, like that black man, the meaning of true freedom. God gives us the opportunity to start again, to make things new, to dig deep into our souls to find and experience His love for us – because that is what He promises us through the gift of His Son that Christmas long ago. |
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