SERMON 94 - SUNDAY 26 MARCH 2017

Sermon at Holy Family RC Chapel, Whaddon  -  Evening Prayer  – Sunday 26th March 2017

Psalm 31:1-16 Micah 7; James 5

Let the words of my mouth, and the meditation of my heart, be acceptable in your sight, O Lord.  Amen

We now find ourselves well into Lent and I wonder how you are all doing with your Ash Wednesday resolutions?

Following the events of Wednesday 22^nd March in Westminster my son, who is currently studying at the University of Hull, telephoned me to say that he had been watching the events in Westminster unfold on TV (apparently like a lot of modern students he doesn’t appear to have any lectures or seminars to attend on some days of the week!) and that he had concluded that “religion” was the cause of most troubles in the world.   Unfortunately I didn’t have the time or inclination just at that moment – he had phoned me at a particularly difficult time – to enter into a long protracted theological discussion with him but in essence he had reached the view that much of the terrorism and hatred in the world was caused by people with differing and opposing theologies arguing that, as my son put it “my non-existent supreme being is better than your non-existent one” – an echo of the philosophy of Nietzsche.  The conversation left me feeling slightly depressed but also very reflective on what he had said.  I promised him that we would have a much longer and deeper discussion on his philosophical ideas.  After all, he does have a point. My belief in God, as a Christian, is based on some ideas which have and will continue to be challenged by people who would call themselves “enlightened”.  Indeed, what is Faith if it is not based on trust and feelings which can be so difficult to articulate in terms of scientific proof.  Unless we are prepared to examine carefully our faith and be prepared to have it tested, it can easily stagnate and not grow.  Doubting Thomas wouldn’t believe in the risen Christ until he had seen Jesus and felt his wounds. When he was allowed to do so Jesus told him “You have believed because you have seen and felt but how much more blessed will be those who have not seen yet have come to believe” [John 20:29].

I have recently just finished reading an excellent book by Paul Bradbury who is the Church of England’s pioneer minister down in Poole who was tasked with setting up and expanding a Christian community amongst the housing estates and secular community of that town.  He was expected to “hit the ground running” but as time passed on he realised that much more can be achieved by listening to God through contemplative prayer and leading a contemplative life rather than rushing around relying on our own egos and other people’s ideas and very often achieving little in return.  He used the resources he had around him and let everything go to God.  Paul Bradbury uses the Book of Jonah as a good example of where we as humans can think we know better than God.  Jonah was given a commission – he ran away from it only to be caught up with by God using a big fish.  When eventually Jonah arrived at Ninevah and that city repented of its evil ways, Jonah sulked because it was not destroyed as he hoped God would do.  Paul says Jonah’s story is like many of us.  We have our own agenda and we expect that God will follow and support us whereas it’s the other way around. 

In our Psalm and both of our readings the theme is very similar.  A lamentation for the way of the world and the turning away from God.  You have been given a copy of Psalm 31 this evening – do take it away and read it from time to time during this week and particularly the prayer in Verse 15 – “My times are in your hands; deliver me from my enemies and from those who pursue me.” [NIV].  How often do we feel that we want to pray these very words?  How often do we feel in despair and so helpless?  Just like my son was feeling when he heard of so much evil happening in a place – Westminster – he knows quite well.  The psalmist does, however, have hope and looks to God to save him from the evil doers.

In our first reading this evening, from the minor prophet Micah, we see a similar situation. Micah says “The faithful have disappeared from the land and there is no one left who is upright.  They all lie in wait for blood and they will hunt each other with nets” [Micah 7:2].

But in James 5 we are encouraged to be patient in our suffering – “As you know, we consider blessed those who have persevered.  You have heard of Job’s perseverance and have seen what God has finally brought about.  The Lord is full of compassion and mercy”. [verse 10 – NIV].

James, in the final few paragraphs of his letter tells us what we should do – pray and praise.  Pray when we are in trouble, pray when we are sick, praise God for all the blessings he has bestowed on us.

Jesus throughout the gospels often uses examples of agriculture in his parables.  The mustard seed, the sower, and so forth.  Bradbury, in describing his ministry in Poole tells the story of how he acquired an allotment.  There was a great waiting list for such a piece of land but he was given a plot quite quickly.  He soon discovered why – it was a piece nobody previously had wanted because it was a reclaimed part of an old car park.  The soil was inches thick and full of rubble, stones and broken up tarmac.  It took him and his flock nearly 3 years for it to be turned into something remotely fertile. It was an immense struggle but the day came to plant the vegetable seeds. Paul describes how there was then nothing further that could be done but to wait and let God’s wonderful work of nature take over.  A little weeding here and a little watering there but the creative process of growing was left entirely in the hands of God.  James in verse 7 says exactly this “Be patient, then brothers until the Lord’s coming.  See how the farmer waits for the land to yield its valuable crop and how patient he is for the autumn and spring rains”

The message I think is one we should take on board when the things seem tough, when the world seems against us, when, like that piece of land nothing seems to yield fruit because the ground seems devoid of nourishment.  By our faith we can keep going but it requires us to also be patient and wait upon the Lord.  There is a lovely worship song which was played at Spring Harvest at the time I felt called to ministry – “Strength will rise as we wait upon the Lord” with the lines “He will lift us up on wings like eagles”.

I hope that my son will come round to understanding that a faith, a belief in God’s righteousness and love, in our fundamental Christian philosophy through Christ’s teachings the world can be a much better place and that we can bring down the Kingdom of Heaven on earth and that God will lift us up on wings like eagles.

Let us pray

Almighty God,

We ask that you give us patience as we wait to hear from you as to what you wants for us.

Sometimes we feel tired and frustrated in this difficult and broken world as we battle with our struggles and see so much hatred, violence and greed around us.

We pray that your Kingdom will come and that your will be done here on earth as in Heaven and that we all love one another as the beautiful creatures of the one true God.

We ask this all in the name of your Son and our Saviour, Jesus Christ

Amen

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SERMON 93 - SUNDAY 12 MARCH 2017

Sermon at All Saints’ Church, Whiteparish  -  BCP Evensong  – Sunday 12th March 2017

Numbers 21:4-9;  Luke 14:27-33

Let the words of my mouth, and the meditation of my heart, be acceptable in your sight, O Lord.  Amen

This evening we’ve heard two rather gloomy sounding readings – not much it appears on first glance to excite or gladden the Christian heart and probably the sorts of passages which many non-Christians believe the bible is full of – lots of negativity and little optimism.  But if we drill down further we can be assured that contrary to what first appears in those texts, we have much to be thankful for and that following Christ is indeed something to cherish and evangelise.

Which of us has not felt, at some time in their life, like those Hebrews in our first lesson?  Having been brought out of Egypt after the ten plagues, and having won a great battle against the King of the Canaanites,  Arad,  they find themselves wandering and wondering about why they left their slave masters in that land of seeming plenty to be brought by Moses into the desolation of the Sinai Desert – the wilderness – where we read they spent forty years wandering about until eventually they reached the promised land.  Time for three new generations to have been born before they finally settled.  No wonder they cried out “Why have you brought us out of Egypt to die in this wilderness? There is no food and no water, and we detest this miserable food?”  

It must have seemed pointless and presumably many of the older members of the group would have died on the way – indeed, Moses himself was not to live to cross into the Promised Land.  It all seemed just such a hopeless and futile exodus. However, the people’s complaint about “this miserable food” was a reference to the manna which God had provided to them day after day and, as this was bread from heaven, the blasphemy of this statement was a major wrong to God resulting in the people being stricken by the serpent.

Of course, we know how it ended – with the Hebrews crossing into Canaan and the land of milk and honey there to establish the kingdom of Israel;  but at the time they could not know how it was going to end.  The only way they could have any hope was to keep faith with Moses who remained in contact with God.  Any lack of trust in Moses was, in fact, a lack of trust in the same God who had delivered them from captivity in Egypt.  I wonder what wilderness do you or I now think we are in? How difficult is it for us to trust in God at times of extreme hardship or when we don’t really know where we are going?  Eventually, we read that the people of Israel recognised that in speaking in the way they had done had been disrespectful to God – although it did take poisonous serpents to do so.

In our Second lesson, Jesus does continue this theme in that he tells a great crowd of people who have been following him that great sacrifices are needed if a person wishes to be a true and genuine disciple of his.  

This is a theme which is repeated time and time again throughout Jesus’s teachings and therefore is something which we all need to consider an important aspect of our Christian following – to follow Jesus, to become his disciple it is necessary to give up all your possessions.

Lent is a time when we often choose to give something up – when we fast.  However, why do we do this?  For what purpose do we fast?  If you are giving something up what are you doing in its place?  The answer is that we should be giving out – not just giving up – we should be reflecting on our Christian lives and the teachings of Christ and acting accordingly.  It is one thing to feel good about one’s self, to feel self-righteous but it is quite another to use that self-sacrifice for God’s greater power and glory and for our fellow humans.

Jesus, in his sermon to the people in our Second Lesson, is asking that we consider carefully what and how we are living our lives – to think carefully about what we are doing.  As he puts it – even when building a tower then we should not even lay the first foundation stone until we have carefully thought out whether we have the resources to finish the project; similarly when going to war, he says, we should consider again whether we have the resources to win and if not whether peace terms would be better.  In our daily lives that’s about spending time with God and praying to seek his guidance on all our projects and ideas.

Likewise, when we set out on a course of fasting or giving up we should determine what the outcome could or should be and be prepared to give our all for it – not some half-hearted measure – paying lip service to what we think we should be doing without some real understanding and measured outcome.  Again we need prayer to guide us.

Jesus wants no half measures, he wants total commitment from his disciples.  In the same way Moses was looking for total obedience from his followers through the desert even if, at times, things didn’t look so good.

During this Lent I have chosen to find more time and space in my day to listen to God and to try and hear and understand what plans he might have for me and my ministry following significant changes in my life.  I want to be more contemplative – something which can be very hard for an extravert like me; so that I can hear God more clearly.  Prayer is not simply about listing  our requests in a babble of supplicatory prayers but allowing time for God to speak to us and not hastily dismissing him when our lists of requests do not seem to be answered in the way we would like.  The people in our first lesson wanted bread but instead they got a strange substance called manna which clearly was not as tasty but did fill their stomachs.

The Hebrews with Moses wanted a quick fix – nothing has changed, in this 21^st Century with all our modern technology.  We expect our computers to give us quick fix answers at the click of a mouse.  Jesus is telling us that often there are no quick fixes as we would like, we need to place everything in God’s hands and follow him unconditionally and unreservedly free from all those possessions (and here I am not talking about material ones necessarily) but distractions which would separate us from our wholehearted commitment to God.

So my message to you this evening is “What things are we doing or thinking which keep us from a full commitment to God?”  It might not be chocolate, or wine, or sweet puddings or biscuits but something far less obvious and perhaps like the young ruler, something much much harder but which will help you to carry our cross and fully follow Jesus.

Let us pray

Almighty God, we thank you for your Son Jesus Christ who gave his life on the Cross that we might be freed from our sins

We ask that you show us what crosses we carry and help us to give up those things which can keep us from wholeheartedly and unconditionally following him as his disciple

We ask that when we pray your Holy Spirit will guide us in what we say and more particularly help us to listen to your words of wisdom and guidance.

We ask this all in the name of your Son and our Saviour, Jesus Christ

Amen

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SERMON 92 - SUNDAY 5 MARCH 2017

Sermon at All Saints’ Church, Whiteparish  -  Morning Worship  – Sunday 5th March 2017

Genesis 2:15-17; 3:1-7; Romans 5:12-19;  Matthew 4:1-11

Let the words of my mouth, and the meditation of my heart, be acceptable in your sight, O Lord.  Amen

We are all familiar, I hope with the words of the Lord’s Prayer – that prayer which Jesus gave to his disciples and followers and which we recite every week and contains the well know lines:

“Forgive give us our sins (or trespasses as the old version has it) as we forgive others and lead us not into temptation”.

I emphasise the “and” because despite what many may think, temptation and sin are two different sides of the same coin.

As we now enter into that great period of reflection in the Christian calendar, Lent, we may hear a lot about sin and temptation.  Many of us may have decided to give up something for Lent as a way of expressing our commitment to our Faith – following Jesus into the wilderness before he began his earthly ministry leading to his eventual death of the Cross.  As Jesus himself says, if you want to follow me you must take up your own Cross – and that, to some extent, is what we do during these six weeks of Lent – contemplate upon our own life’s commitment to Christ and the nature of the Cross we have to bear to truly follow him.

To be tempted, is not in itself a sin; only if we accept that temptation, which is to disobey God, is the sin committed. In the Lord’s Prayer we ask not to be tempted for if temptation does not come our way then, ergo, we cannot be led to sin.  A removal of the temptation is an act of prevention which is always the best outcome –  ask any doctor, police officer or fire officer - yet we are very fortunate as Christians because we know that if we are tempted and we do sin there is still a cure.  In the words of the same prayer, we can ask for forgiveness but, in the same breath, only if we forgive others too.  That is, what Desmond Tutu, calls the cycle of forgiveness.

This morning, in our readings, we are dealing with some extremely deep theological issues – issues which have taxed and been debated by eminent theologians for centuries. 

Our first reading, from Genesis, is well known to us as well as many outside of the church.  Having created the world and populated it with animals and humans, and having seen that all was good, God rested on the seventh day we are told; but it wasn’t long before things started to go wrong (as they always seem to do when humans are involved) and the first great temptation appears – that wonderful tree bearing such tempting fruit – made even more tempting by the Serpent, appealing to the curiosity of Eve by saying that eating the fruit will make Eve as knowledgeable as God.  What a great temptation and humans, being what they are, who wouldn’t be tempted?  How many of you, when confronted with a sign chalked on the pavement by a street lamp standard, or close to a doorway or fence with the words “Wet Paint” or “Wet Cement” haven’t been tempted to just test the truthfulness of that statement with a finger?  I know I have and invariably I have discovered the accuracy of the statement by acquiring horribly sticky fingers or hands. The sign is there to warn with an implied request not to touch.  By touching we may have discovered the truth but we have also been disobedient.  Our temptation has turned to sin.

Adam and Eve were given very strict instructions, we read, not to touch or eat the fruit of this tree yet in doing just this they were being disobedient to God and therefore sinned – resulting in the punishment meted out by the Fall.

In our epistle reading from Paul’s letter to the Romans, the apostle is comparing the sin of one man, Adam, “his trespass” to use words familiar to many in the Lord’s Prayer, to the action of one man, Jesus, in his “act of righteousness” as Paul calls it, leading to justification (salvation) for all through our belief that Jesus died on the Cross to save us from our sins.  In other words, the situation is put right, the Fall is reversed and humans, through Faith, can be restored in God’s grace to being what God always intended them to be. But it is important that they do have Faith – something beyond simple belief but a commitment to the teachings of Christ and to follow him unreserved and unconditionally.

Romans 5 is not easy to read in isolation to the whole Letter to the Romans and Paul’s way of speaking or writing can, at times, be quite difficult to follow and it does require quite a bit of study beyond just listening to snippets being read out on a Sunday morning.  The twelve earlier verses of Romans 5 set the scene for us a little better in that Paul reminds his reader that it was only through the suffering of Jesus upon the Cross, an act of the deepest humiliation for a human being to suffer at that time, can we share in the glory of God together with a belief that Jesus died for our salvation. That is the fundamental cornerstone of our Faith. 

Paul says “we know that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character and character produces hope and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us”. (Romans 5:4-5)

Wow, what a wonderful explanation of our Faith. God’s glory, God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit.  I particularly love the passage “hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit.”  If you get nothing further from this sermon this morning please do take away that one line – “hope does not disappoint us because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit”.

But, as Christians, that does not mean that we are now immune from temptation – why else would we need continually to pray that we should not be led into that very thing we seek to avoid. I am a great believer in spiritual warfare – good versus evil – the subject of so many books and films – even the Harry Potter series has this as its main overriding theme.  I believe in this context, the greatest and most disobedient temptation is therefore a moving away from God by indulging in our own fantasies and ambitions as opposed to those plans and desires which God has for us and by worshipping other gods – today they might be money, cars, a hedonistic life without thought or empathy for others, a forgetfulness and lack of appreciation of God.   We have no greater example of the spiritual warfare which we can be up against than the account of Christ himself being tempted by the Devil in the wilderness which formed the text of our gospel Reading today.

Here the Devil is testing God through the temptations of Jesus.  Three things Jesus is tempted with – things which any of us could probably equate to temptations which we have faced or have to face – first, tempting Jesus to turn stones into bread.  We know, from the first miracle that Jesus can do such things – he turned water into wine at a wedding – but the difference here is that the Devil is asking him to prove that he is the Son of God by this action not, as previously, as an act of love for his mother and the hosts at the wedding; second, by again proving he is the Son of God by testing God himself to save him from a fatal death by jumping from the temple roof – this would be not only putting God to the test but disobeying his Father who would, in due course, see his Son die of the Cross when similar jibes were exclaimed and finally, an attempt to make Jesus fall down and worship the Devil – a direct disobedience to God’s First Commandment which Jesus himself later proclaimed to be the first of two of the greatest Commandments.

So, we can take comfort and courage that though we may be tempted, so too was Christ.  It is how we deal with those temptations which will make us stronger and able, more closely, to follow Christ and the will of God.  We have the Holy Spirit to guide us and it is ever more important that we continue to have a strong dialogue with God through prayer and reflection.

In front of you there are some small pieces of paper and hopefully a pen.  If you wish to, and there is absolutely no compulsion to do so, I invite you to write down, anonymously, any temptations which you feel you need to avoid, especially during this period of Lent, it might be eating chocolate, drinking wine, having that second helping of bread and butter pudding, gossiping, not reading your bible, watching Jeremy Kyle, anything at all and place the folded paper in the basket here at the front.  After the services we will take them away and destroy them after we have prayed the Lord’s Prayer over them.

As you do that let us pray:

Father we thank you that you gave your Son, Jesus Christ

To die on the Cross to save us from our sins

We ask you to lead us not into temptation so that we are not tempted to sin against the Holy Spirit and be led away from your saving grace.

Knowing that faith leads to salvation and hope will not disappoint us, we ask that we may always live our lives founded on the three great principles of Faith, Hope and Love.

Amen

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