Category: sermons

Ash Wednesday

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What is it that we are actually doing when we mark the cross in ash on our heads?

For want of a better way of putting it, I think we turn ourselves inside out. For one day, we show each other and ourselves what we’re really like. We put a messy cross on our foreheads to say, publicly, ‘I have mess. I have sin. I am not right. I need help.’

Today is about honesty. About admitting that we’re not perfect. Admitting that there is much in us which, left unchecked, will prove destructive for us, for those around us, and perhaps beyond, too.

Ash Wednesday can be seen as a service that condemns, that concentrates on what is wrong.  But as some of you may have noticed from what I tend to preach, I have this unrelenting urge to find good news in things, and I want to find good news in the ash, too.   When you start looking, there’s lots of it.

The first bit is that this service doesn’t work so well if only one person comes.  If I turned up to preside and nobody else was there, it just wouldn’t work. Why? Because the ash cross is a great leveller. It says, my sin is my own, but I am not alone in being a sinner.  It’s precisely what we see in today’s gospel reading: the woman taken in adultery is not alone. Her sin is her own, but she is not alone in having sinned. That’s the first bit of good news.

The second bit of good news is that although this is the day when we tell ourselves and each other than we are messy people, full of dirt and sin and shame, the fact is that God already knew.  The fact that we are sinful, that humanity as a whole is sinful, is not news to God. He sees us for who we are – perhaps God is the only one in the universe who truly sees us as we really are, inside – and he still loves us. Infinitely. That’s the second bit of good news.

The third bit of good news is that when we receive the ash on our foreheads we are told ‘remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return.’  We hear these words and we might remember the second account of creation in Genesis, in which God lovingly puts his hands in the earth and shapes a human being out of the dirt, breathing life into its nostrils.  The fact that we are dust is testament to God’s creativity, and God’s ability to bring life out of that which seems dead.  God has done it once. He can do it again. And again.  That’s the third bit of good news.

The fourth bit of good news is that the ash cross is tangible, and visible. It feels real.  It’s an action which changes us on the inside – the church would call what we do on Ash Wednesday ‘sacramental’.  The classic definition of a sacrament is an outward and visible sign of an inward invisible grace, whereas the ash cross is almost the opposite: an outward and visible sign of an inward and invisible lack of grace!  It means that our ‘sorry’ isn’t empty, but feels real.  And that reality is something that needs to be carried forward into our thoughts and words and actions beyond our repentance in the service. The ash reminds us that what we do, our action, the things that people see when they look at us, and what they hear when we speak – these things shape who we are inside as well as changing the world around us. We have a lent’s worth of actions ahead of us that can help us become more who God created us to be.  We may not be able to make good on all our past sins, but our actions and words can bring us closer to being who we are meant to be.  That’s the fourth bit of good news.

And finally, the fifth bit of good news is that we can wipe the ash off our forehead.  It’s not a brand, there for ever as a reminder that we are sinners. It’s a temporary mark, which rubs off to remind us that we sinners who can be forgiven.  Whether you keep your ash on for the rest of the day, or wipe it off later in the service, there comes that moment when you remove the sign of your sin.  At school, on ascension day, we draw a cross in glitter on our foreheads – to remind ourselves and each other that we are called to ‘shine as a light in the world to the glory of God the Father’.  It’s a long way to go till Ascension Day, but that commission, to be the body of Christ, to witness to the peace which can, against all the odds, exist between earth and heaven, and to reveal the glory of God, starts now.  That’s definitely good news.

The call of Nathaniel

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I love the story of the calling of Nathaniel. I love his sense of humour, and his honesty, wondering aloud whether anything good could ever come out of Nazareth (and we can substitute whatever place is the equivalent now!) but also his openness – he does, after all, come and see for himself.

But mostly I love the fact that Jesus picks him out, and seems to know him, perhaps even better than he knows himself.  There’s a painting of Nathaniel by a contemporary artist, in fact, which depicts Nathaniel under the fig tree  naked – a symbol that he has nothing to hide, that Jesus sees him simply for who he is, without pretense.

Undoubtedly, Nathaniel’s call by Jesus is very personal. And because being called is something that happens to us, personally, we might think of vocation as being a very personal thing in the sense of being about us as individuals, even a private matter.

But actually God doesn’t call Nathaniel in isolation.  One of the jobs I have done in the church is to be a vocations advisor – accompanying people as they reflect on their understanding of God’s purpose for them, so Nathaniel was helped by others to hear Jesus’ call.

Think for a moment about your own understanding of God’s call on your life – the purposes that he has for you. Now think about those who led you to be able to listen to what God was saying to you.  If you were Nathaniel, remember who was your Philip.  Remember those who were around you when you first heard the voice of the Lord speaking to you.  Give thanks for them, and give thanks for those who are alongside you as you hear his voice today.  Pray for them, and pray that you might be a Philip for those who have yet to hear, who have yet to follow.

This is true for us as individuals, and it’s true for us as churches.  It is when we listen together that we stand the best chance of hearing what God is calling us to do, and when we act together that we stand the most chance of being able to fulfil our vocation as God’s holy people for God’s needy world.  Often God calls us into something that we can do only when we do so together – and often that we can only work out we need to do when we do our working out together.

When churches work together (locally or nationally or internationally)  each church, through that church’s own life and witness and ministry, reveals something slightly different about what God’s mission is in this place, and how we as his churches might be part of that mission.  Just as Jesus’ disciples in their individual gifts and foibles each brought something unique to Christ’s earthly mission and ministry.

So one of the other things I love about this story of calling is the way that it (I think along with pretty much every calling story in the bible) illustrates that God calls unexpected and ordinary people – the fisherman, the tax collector…

I was once asked by someone if God called everyone, or if he only called special people.  I said, ‘God only calls special people, but everybody is special’.   There is a poem that I often use with my vocations people, which goes like this:

God sends each person into the world
With a special message to deliver,
With a special song to sing for others,
With a special act of love to bestow.
No-one else can speak my message,
Or sing my song, or offer my act of love,
For these are entrusted only to me.

If any of us fails to speak our message or sing our song or offer our act of love, then the world is a poorer place.  Each church also has its song, its message, its act of love – just as God graciously uses our uniqueness as human beings, and even our foibles and our weaknesses, as witnesses to his love and glory, so he also is willing to use the unique and special attributes of his many churches to reveal his love, if we will only let him!  Complete unity between all Christians may well be only a dream this side of heaven, but unity of purpose could be a reality, if each church is to fulfill what God is calling us to do in and for the world.

We – all of us together – are the body of Christ, and in the words of Teresa of Avila, Christ has no body on earth now but ours.  Ours are the hands by which he is to bless, ours are the feet by which he is to go about doing good, ours are the eyes through which he looks with compassion on the world.

We can be those hands, those feet, those eyes, in the places where we find ourselves, and we can do it, through the grace of God, if we really are diverse in gifts, but one in purpose.  Amen.

Christian Unity – a fruitful approach?

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This is something I’ve done in all age worship and in schools, to talk about what working together as churches can feel like. If you use it, you might have to find your own local examples of each kind of working together.  You can also act it out with real fruit – for number 3 you’ll need a hand-held food mixer thingy – the one with the whizzy blades that you would use for getting lumps out of soup.

1. When you go to a supermarket, each fruit has its own compartment – the oranges are with other oranges, the apples are with other apples, and so on. But when you buy some and take them home, you probably put them in a fruit bowl, all mixed together.  Sometimes working together as churches is like that. We collaborate, but we don’t have to sacrifice much.  But bear in mind that fruit ripens at different rates – and bananas are often ahead of the game and may make the rest of you change a little more quickly than you’re used to!

2. But sometimes working together feels more like a fruit salad, Everyone’s had to give a bit – we lose something of our shape, but the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, and if you need to, you can probably still tell which bit each of us contributed – the banana still tastes like banana, the apple still tastes like apple.

3. But sometimes working together as churches feels more like a smoothie. Everyone has to sacrifice a lot – and there’s no way you can tell what all the original flavours were; what matters is the the combination is more wonderful than any of the individual flavours, and that it’s the variety that went in that produces something new and exciting.

So, the question is, what are we willing to give, what are we willing to forgo?  And how will the fruits of our togetherness quench the thirst of those around us?

 

The Baptism of Christ (Matthew 3.13-end)

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Jesus doesn’t half get a good build-up in Matthew’s gospel.  Matthew 1 gives us Jesus’ family tree – tracing his lineage back to Abraham himself – and goes on to relate the events around his miraculous birth, complete with angelic messengers in dreams. Matthew 2 tells of the visit of the Magi, and the subsequent flight of the holy family to Egypt to avoid the wrath of Herod, and their eventual return  to the normality of Nazareth, where Jesus would spend the remainder of his childhood, about which Matthew’s gospel is silent.  But we have heard enough already, between the genealogy and the birth story, to know that Matthew is introducing Jesus as the real deal, the Messiah, the one that God’s people had been hoping and praying for for centuries.  We are simply left waiting for the rest of the story to unfold.

Chapter 3 jumps ahead somewhat, and the next thing we hear about is not Jesus himself, but his cousin John.  John the baptist’s job – his entire vocation – was to prepare people for Jesus’ arrival, to sow the seeds about baptism, about repentance, about the coming kingdom and about what it really means to belong to the household and family of God.  In the passage immediately before today’s gospel he is heralded by the gospel-writer as the one about whom Isaiah spoke his potent and portentous words, and then immediately sets about underlining his own humility in the light of Jesus, the One who is the come.  

So Jesus makes his first adult appearance in Matthew’s gospel.  It is clear that John is simply the warm-up act, but Jesus’ first action is to submit to John’s baptism – even John finds this hard to understand, and resists the idea at first. But Jesus insists: he wishes to be baptised not because he has sinned, but because it’s the right way to start his ministry.  All that pressure, all that expectation. All that taking on the identity of the Messiah, but knowing that he’s not going to be quite what everyone’s hoping for.  All that promise. All that that work to do. No wonder Jesus needs to be baptised before he starts doing it all.

And he would be glad that he did.  Because when Jesus left the water, he heard the most wonderful words:

“You are my son, my beloved, and with you I am well pleased.”

They’re the words that make audible the gift of the Holy Spirit that he receives at that moment, the words that make the Father’s love for him feel real.  If you’re the Messiah, if you’re confronted by all that pressure, all that expectation, all that promise, all that work to do, what you need most in the whole world is to know that you are loved, not because of what you have achieved, nor even because of what you will go on to achieve, but simply because you exist.

It’s what everyone needs to hear who has a challenge to face, or who approaches a metaphorical mountain to climb, or who simply has a life to live, which is often a challenge enough.  Every child needs to hear those words, again and again, as they grow in body, mind and spirit. And I tell every parent that as they bring their children for baptism: enabling a child to be surrounded by the knowledge that they are loved is the greatest and most essential gift that they can ever receive, and the greatest gift that any parent can give.

And Jesus needed those words, too – just as much as any of us. That’s part and parcel of his taking on our full humanity.

In the strength of those words, he faced temptation in the wilderness, beating the Devil hands down.

In the strength of those words, he emerged from his ordinary family to embrace Isaiah’s prophecy and announce the manifesto for his mission – to bring release to captives, recovery of sight to the blind, and proclamation of the year of the Lord’s favour.

In the strength of those words, he went three years of ceaseless ministry, healing, teaching, embracing, arguing, challenging, and bringing life and love to those who needed it most and making some enemies along the way.

In the strength of those words he walked the Way of the Cross, and accepted the suffering that was God’s love for the world, written in blood.

If anyone needed to hear those words, it was Jesus.

You are my son, I love you, and I am pleased with you.

But those words were not just for him. They are for all of us. We are not the Messiah. We do not have to face the Devil in person, we do not have to work miracles, we do not have to bring the dead to life.  But whatever we do face today, this week, over these next months, we need a safe place to stand, something to hang on to that is utterly reliable.  Especially at those times when we are feeling the pressure, when we feel like we have a lot to live up to, when we are having to step up to the mark and ‘be the man’ or ‘be the woman’, when those around us are looking to us to make things right, to fix everything, to live up to all the expectation.

Today, we can put our own name on the front of God’s affirmation.  Because, like Jesus, although we’ve lived half a lifetime or more, but today is the first day of the rest of our life. And we have God’s affirmation, his great words of love and encouragement, not because of what we have done, nor because of what we will do, but as a free gift, because we need it.  And in the strength of that free gift we can face whatever life will bring us.

And more than that, these words and what is behind them are not only for parents to share with their children, they are for all of us to share with one another: what ways today will there be for you to show another human being, another child of God, by your words and actions, that they are beloved and valuable in the sight of God?

Epiphany

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There have been interesting things in the night sky.

I don’t know if it’s my imagination, but Jupiter seems brighter every time I look at it (and if you’re not sure where to look, find Orion’s belt, and then look left and slightly up – Jupiter is the really bright one).

And then there’s the International Space Station, which you can track here.  The best viewing for us was Christmas Eve, around 6pm, when it would have been fairly easy to convince even my skeptical children that it was St Nicholas’ sleigh they were seeing moving across the night sky.   We still have a few more opportunities to see the ISS this month, so do follow the link above and see for yourself and give the astronauts a wave.

We don’t know what the wise men’s star actually was.

Halley’s comet was visible around 12BC, but in those days people were terrified of comets – they were seen as bringers of doom, and would never have been understood as a portent of good news.

It might have been Jupiter and Venus in conjunction, possibly also with a bright star such as Regulus just behind them, all merging together to appear, to the naked eye, as one massive, bright star. 

Or, it could have been a star in our neighbouring Andromeda galaxy exploding into a supernova – that would have appeared as a sudden, new bright star int he sky.

Or perhaps God laid on something special, just for those wise men, because he wanted to make sure they knew about the birth of Jesus, and he knew that the stars were where they looked for wisdom and meaning.  God has a long and honourable history of not hiding – in fact 0f revealing himself in precisely those ways that will ensure that we can find him if we have a will to do so.  Athanasius’ great work ‘Contra Gentiles’ is a long and enthusiastic account of what essentially amounts to a divine ambush – wherever we focus our gaze, that it where God will find a way to become recognisable.

The wonderful thing is that God chooses to do so.  He lit the touchpaper for the big bang and set the universe into motion, and yet still cared enough to make sure that when Jesus was born, three random stargazers from a faraway land got to hear about it.

And that’s the whole point with the incarnation, isn’t it?  The miracle that God, the creator of everything, would come and be part of his creation. It’s been described as trying to put the whole national grid through one light bulb, and it’s OK if we can’t quite get our head around that, because that’s also the point.

We don’t have to be able to grasp the whole thing – the massive, indescribable, all-consuming power and love of God. Because in Jesus God showed us everything we need to know in a way that we can relate to.

When we look at the night sky we see the tiny pinpricks of light and we know they are giant balls of flaming gas, some of them many times more powerful than our own sun – and we can’t even look on our own sun without damaging our eyes.  We look on Jesus and we see God is a way that we can handle – his love is God’s love, but shown to us in a way that lets us look on it, touch it, feel it.

When we look up into the night sky (and it’s a wonderful thing to do in these long nights and dark days) may we see both the majesty of God and his infinite creation and the wonderful way in which he reaches out to meet us where we are.

From Psalm 8:
When I look at your heavens, the work of your hands, the moon and the stars that you have set in their place; what are human beings that you even notice them, that you care for them?  Yet you have made them a little lower than the angels, and crowned them with glory and honour.