SERMON 83 - SUNDAY 10 JULY 2016

 Sermon at St. John’s Parish Church, West Grimstead – Sunday 10 July 2016

Luke 10:25-37

May I speak in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.  Amen

The parable of the Good Samaritan is probably the best known of all of Jesus’s parables – by both Church-going Christians and non-Christians alike. The word “Samaritan” is now synonymous with helping others in times of stress and difficulties and especially people with suicidal ideations. 

In essence the parable tells us that if you want to be a Christian, a true follower of Christ – this is how we should behave and act.  When we see somebody by the roadside broken down, then we should go to their aid and give what comfort and support we can.  Most people know this parable beginning with the words of Verse 30 – “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho” without reading or hearing the words of the preamble to this story beginning, as we did today at Verse 25. To skip the first five verses is to read the passage out of the context which prompted Jesus to tell this story in the first place.  Let’s look at those first five verses in a little more detail this morning.

First of all, it is important for us to understand that within Luke’s narrative of Jesus’s life, set out in his Gospel, this event occurs well into his ministry and, as we heard last week, he has already sent out the seventy-two disciples to spread the new good news of the coming of the Kingdom of God and how to inherit eternal life.  Mission is well under way and has caught the attention of the Jewish authorities in a big way.  They feel threatened by this new ministry – that it might subvert and detract from the established way of Jewish worship and adherence to its customs and religious observance.

There was a great fear; therefore, amongst the Jewish lawyers and elders, the keepers of the Torah, that Jesus was preaching a form of religious anarchy or heresy.  They were concerned that his teachings went against the Jewish view that a very strict observance of the law was the proper way to salvation and appease God.  We read, therefore, at the very outset of this passage in Verse 25 that it was “a lawyer” or in the words of the NIV translation “an expert in the law” who stood up, not to ask a question for his further understanding, but, as it is written by Luke, “to test Jesus”.  To see, in effect, whether what Jesus had been preaching and teaching fell in line with the Jewish law of observance and belief.  ‘What must I do’ he asks ‘To inherit eternal life?’ By this question he is testing Jesus to see if he will answer in a way consistent with the observance of the law and Jewish teaching or whether he might give an answer which will contravene it and therefore condemn him.

As a qualified lawyer myself, of over 40 years’ experience, I have spent many happy, and unhappy, hours in court as an advocate.  One golden rule I was always told during my training was when cross examining a witness never to ask a question to which the advocate did not already know the answer.  The whole purpose of cross examination is to get the witness on the other side to say something which you know will aid your own client’s case. Conversely, avoid questions which might provide an unknown answer as that answer might have the unfortunate effect of condemning your own client.

Here is an example from real life.  During the course of an employment tribunal I conducted for an employee in Middlesbrough I had been given information by the employer that as you drove out of their factory compound there was a sign which read:

 “Do you have any company property in your possession? Staff taking property off site without permission will be treated as thieves and will be prosecuted”.

Our defendant (a delivery driver) had taken a hammer, several plastic bags and a ball of string off site for his own use. Please don’t ask me why.  He was duly caught and dismissed.  During my cross examination of him in court I thought that I would go for the “jugular” and just before I finally sat down I ended with one last, as I thought, crushing question – imagine the scene

“Oh, Mr. Smith, just before you sit down, just one final question I’d like you to help me with.  There is a sign as you leave the factory gates, isn’t there?” 

“Yes, that’s right, a big sign”

“How times a day on average do you think you pass it as you go to and from the factory in the van”?

“About six or seven”

“Would you like to tell the court what is written on that sign?”

“I’d love to, but unfortunately I can’t – you see, I can’t read or write”

I then compounded the situation by asking a quick supplementary one:

“So how do you read road signs when out on your deliveries?”

“With extreme difficulty”

 So you see, I have quite a bit of sympathy for our lawyer in Luke’s Gospel because I am sure he was confident that Jesus would fall foul of his cross-examination style question or be unable to answer but like me he was pole-axed.

As ever Jesus, deals with the question very carefully and cleverly by turning it back on his questioner with another question.  This was not entirely and unknown way of dealing with a question and in Jewish culture was quite a common way of answering but, in Jesus’s case, he was a master at this as we can observe many times in the gospel passages ending ultimately with his discourse with Pilate before his sentencing.

Jesus ironically asks the lawyer if he knows the law and the lawyer answers Jesus’s own question with those two Commandments which Jesus himself preached himself time and time again – “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind” and “Love your neighbour as yourself” and Jesus tells him that he answered correctly.  He tells him that if he does this he will live – that is – he will have eternal life – the answer to the original question.

However, just like me in that employment tribunal, the lawyer is not content to leave it at that but has to put forward a supplemental question – we are told to justify himself (or perhaps his own known failings at the latter part – to love his neighbour – something which for many of us can be difficult at times.  He has to ask the question – a typical ploy of lawyers, for a definition of the words which make up the law – “who is my neighbour?” or “what is the legal definition of a neighbour?”

Jesus answers this question will telling the story of the Good Samaritan in order, just as I did with my little story about the Middlesbrough employment tribunal, to give a clear example of how it works in practice.

I don’t intend to dissect the story in great detail because, as I said at the beginning of this sermon, we all know it so well – but it is important to pick out one or two salient points which I believe have great significance to us today.

We are not told whether the man on the journey is a Jew – he is simply referred to as a man going down from Jerusalem to Jericho. As he was “going down” from Jerusalem I think it is fair to assume that he was Jewish.  Therefore, after he has been mugged, the first two individuals who passed by on the other side would have been his close neighbours – a Jewish priest and a Jewish Levite (a member of that select group whose role was to look after the temple and worship – a sort of lay minister or church warden type).  Both being Jews and being heavily involved in the church or Temple, they would have been expected to know that they should love their neighbour.

At this time Samaritans were hated by the Jews.  That hatred was well steeped in history going back to the time of the return from the Exile when the Samaritans (the remnants of the former 10 Jewish tribes of north tried) to prevent to establishment of a southern Jewish province by those returning from the Babylonian captivity.  All we need to know for the moment is that this hatred was long and deep-seated. 

It was for this reason that Jesus chose to use a Samaritan as the person to come to the aid of the Jewish mugged victim. In essence, Jesus is telling the lawyer the definition of “neighbour” is anyone who isn’t you or God.  In other words, God loves us, we should love ourselves as God loves us and we should love all others as God loves us and them.  There are no boundaries to this love.  It encompasses all of God’s created beings.

Today we are seeing increasing persecution and intolerance between people of different nationalities, races and creeds. It has upset me recently that following the Brexit vote there appears to have been released an open xenophobia.  I don’t necessarily blame Brexit for this but it worries me that this has been bubbling below the surface for some time and the recent opportunity to debate the issue has highlighted this.

We as a Christian community are called upon by Jesus through the Holy Spirit to be that voice which reminds people that those two great commandments – loving God and loving our neighbour – are the true way to a better life for all on this planet as well as our own eternal life.

We seem to be in a political vacuum in this country at the moment.  Vacuums are dangerous as they can suck in dirt and evil and extremism can emerge.  As Christians we can and should show, by the way we live our lives, that we can be like the Good Samaritan, willing and able to go to the aid of those who feel mugged by our sometimes intolerant and self-centred society.  We can set an example and be true to the scriptures we profess to read and follow.  Never before has this seemed so important as it does today.

Amen

MFB/83/08.07.2016

SERMON 82 - SUNDAY 3 JULY 2016

Sermon at All Saints’ Church, Whiteparish  - Battle of the Somme  – Sunday 3 July 2016

May I speak in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.  Amen

Amen.

When I was a child at school in the playground, we would spend our break times and lunch times playing war games.  Back in the late 50s and early 60s our cinemas and TV screens were full of heroic war films where the blood looked fake and our heroes, by and large, always won the day; surviving  the massive onslaughts from the nasty guys on the other side in grey German uniforms.  In fact in those days most uniforms were grey as we only had black and white TV sets. We would re-enact the Dambuster’s Raid over the ditch behind the primary school I attended in north Lincolnshire where real blood was spilt one day when Geoffrey Tufnell’s head was split open as he tried to destroy one of the great dams by ducking, not quite low enough, under a  piece of ironmongery designed to keep us little ones out!  The Germans had never thought of that one!

We were fed tales of daring do’s, films like Reach for the Sky, The Cockle Shell Heroes, The Guns of Navarone, 633 Squadron, the Cruel Sea which all told of the excitement which a relatively recent conflagration had engendered.  If we are honest, some of us were a little disappointed that we hadn’t lived through the war – it seemed such good fun; but for our parents it certainly wasn’t and they frequently told us so.

More recently films, thanks to modern graphics technology, have spared us little from the true horror of war.  My heart still beats fast with adrenalin when I watch those opening minutes of Saving Private Ryan, and we have films telling us some of the story of battles like Gallipoli in the First World War.

When I was at school, 100 years would have taken me back to the Crimean War of which I knew very little. I had virtually no idea why English soldiers died near the shores of the Black Sea. That seemed just such a long time ago and today, as we remember one of the biggest and most costly battles of the First World War it must appear, from the point of view of our younger generations – a complete remote and distant world.  We must thank God for that but as we sit here today, warfare of a very different, but equally terrifying style faces us.

This past week, following two massive upheavals to the English – the decision to withdraw from the EU and the dismissal of England’s national football team of the Euro 2016 competition by largely amateur Iceland, a third occurred in Turkey when gunmen opened fire and killed and injured so many at Istanbul’s International airport – an airport I am familiar with. Why?  What was the purpose of such destruction?  I think this same question was asked 100 years ago.

  On the Somme, there were over a million casualties – 1,088,907 is the official figure.  It started as an offensive by the Allied Forces against German lines which had dug in over a complex series of trenches. The plan was for a quick and decisive push after the heavy artillery had softened up and broken up the Germans’ defensive lines over a six day period. That first push on the first day following the bombardment resulted in nearly 100,000 casualties – think of it, twice the population of Salisbury mown down in a single day. Both sides thought they were fighting for a just cause. Both sides would have looked up to heaven for God’s blessing on their cause.

The Sixth Commandment tell us “Thou shalt not kill” and as Christians we are expected to adhere to that principle and the two commandments which were given to us by Jesus Christ himself – To love God and to love our neighbour; to love our enemy even!  The waging of war seems totally contrary to both the commandments of the Old Testament and the teachings of Christ.  Theologians have therefore grappled with this problem over the centuries with two schools of thought having emerged – and excuse me if I lapse into schoolboy Latin for a moment – jus ad bellum or the “right to go to war” and jus in bello – “right conduct in war”.  St. Augustine of Hippo argued that Christians should not be afraid to pick up the sword and fight to protect peace and punish wickedness and writing nine hundred years later St. Thomas Aquinas set out three basic rules which justified going to war:

·         First, just war must be waged by a properly instituted authority such as the state. (Proper Authority is first: represents the common good: which is peace for the sake of man's true end—God.)

·         Second, war must occur for a good and just purpose rather than for self-gain (for example, "in the nation's interest" is not just) or as an exercise of power. (Just Cause: for the sake of restoring some good that has been denied. i.e., lost territory, lost goods, punishment for an evil perpetrated by a government, army, or even the civilian populace.)

·         Third, peace must be a central motive even in the midst of violence.^[15] (Right Intention: an authority must fight for the just reasons it has expressly claimed for declaring war in the first place. Soldiers must also fight for this intention.)

Recently theologians have added a third dimension to the idea of a just war:

Jus post bellum or “the right to proper conduct and re-construction following a war” – i.e. not exploiting the vanquished or taking revenge for revenge’s sake.

In 1992 the Roman Catholic Church came up with a Just War Doctrine (sometimes mistakenly known as the “Just War Theory”) to help their flock understand how Christians could ever condone acts of violence in a war setting.  This was in the context of controversy surrounding the First Gulf War. Their four points were as follows:

·         the damage inflicted by the aggressor on the nation or community of nations must be lasting, grave, and certain;

·         all other means of putting an end to it must have been shown to be impractical or ineffective;

·         there must be serious prospects of success;

·         the use of arms must not produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated (the power of modern means of destruction weighs very heavily in evaluating this condition).

All too often those going to war, or more accurately, those caught up as instruments of the belligerents, do not know themselves exactly why they find their lives on the line.  In the case of the Battle of the Somme it must have seemed, at times, incomprehensible to those crouching in the muddy, vermin ridden trenches as what was going to be achieved by shifting forwards a few kilometres across a landscape with seeming little strategic value to them.  Nevertheless, both sides prayed to the Almighty for courage and strength and protection believing their cause to be the right or just one.

Very often, before going into battle the soldiers on each side would take solace from the words of the 23^rd and 91^st psalms, both of which we are singing today in their form as hymns. For most, the words provided comfort in overcoming the fear of death and the thought that they might never see their nearest and dearest again; but they were also making a plea to God to help them triumph over their enemies in order to remove the root of the evil they perceived.

We look back now and sense the futility of it all.  The First World War started with excitement and a deep sense of righteousness.  Soldiers sang jolly songs as they set off for the slaughterhouse of the trenches.  Songs we still hear today like Tipperary and Pack up your Troubles. Marching off to a war to end all wars.

Some conscientious objectors and later deserters were shot and only recently pardoned; but there can be no mistaking the valour and courage of those who, whether or not they believed in what they were doing, gave their lives for a cause they believed to be just.

Europe has, by and large, lived at peace for the last 75 years.  Certainly there has been no major conflagration as we saw between 1939 and 1945.  Memories of the horrors of both of the last World Wars still do remain fresh thanks to our modern media. A recent visit to Auschwitz testifies to the potential inhumanity of humankind.  But today we face increasing attacks upon our Christian beliefs and values which would and could throw away any sense of warfare being just.  Are we prepared to stand up for those important values in the face of these attacks?

Those men we remember and honour this morning fought for decency and the protection of what they thought were the values which God would wish to preserve.  As Christians we respect them today but we also need to honour them by the way we lead our lives in this modern day and age and protect the values which they fought and died for.  In the words of the famous hymn – “Onward Christian Soldiers” for as disciples we are also the soldiers of Christ.

When you go home, tell them of us, and say,

for your tomorrow we gave our today.

Amen

MFB/82/01.07.2016