Sermon
delivered at All Saints Parish Church, Whiteparish – Sunday 9th August 2015
Job 39:1 – 40:4; Psalm 91; Hebrews
12:1-17
May
I speak in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit and may these words be a
blessing to all who hear them. Amen
In preparation for my house
move, I recently reviewed the sheer number of books I possess and came to the
conclusion that I would need to undertake a major cull – but like so many book
lovers, I know I will find it excruciatingly difficult with having so many interests
– books on theology, astronomy, political biographies, art, music, history,
geography, not to mention my extensive collection of books on industrial and
other forms of archaeology, maritime history, railways and buses and tramways.
That’s without starting on the non-fiction!
Indeed, I know full well that most information can now be gleaned
through electronic technology and Wikipaedia remains a constant companion of
mine; but to dispose of my books would still be sheer pain.
However, there is one section
of my library which contains dozens and dozens of books which can be loosely
described as “Self-Help” or “Psychology” – those I bought at a time when I
thought they would bring me the answers to all my problems – those written by
business gurus suggesting how I could make my business more profitable, reach
out to get more clients, those written by health gurus telling me how I could
look and feel better – they obviously are still in pristine condition! – those
written by a number of people containing psychological tests in order to
ascertain my personality and suggesting what best form of occupation would suit
my personality; books on leadership and so on.
However, there sitting in
amongst all of these is a specific genre about “parenting” – and there are
dozens of them – from the cradle to dealing with the emotions of teenagers with
titles like “The Sixty Minute Father”, “Getting through The Troublesome Teen
Years”, “Bringing up Teenagers”. I’ve
even attended courses in the past on parenting to see if there was any magic
formula available to deal with troublesome toddlers and teenagers. These courses taught me only one thing – I
wasn’t alone and everything I experienced in bringing up my children had been
experienced by others before and all we were really doing was sharing
experiences – with so many different ideas and suggestions on how to deal with
similar situations as there are books.
I well recall attending my
first ante-natal class with my then partner.
At one point we were split into two groups – prospective mothers and
prospective fathers. Each group was
asked to come up with a set of the most important questions they wanted to
bring up to those running the course. The
result was fascinating – the prospective mothers wanted to ask questions relating
to the actual birth – “would it hurt? how much? what pain reducing methods were
available?” Should they have gas and air or a TENS machine? etc. etc. The
fathers’ main pre-occupation was “how much does it cost to bring up a child?,
how and who should discipline the child, what happens if you and your partner
don’t agree upon how this should be done? When should you put a child’s name
down for a particular school”? Hence the purchase of so many books on this
topic with so many different ideas.
The one thing that came out
of all this was that I was determined to be the best father I could be – books
or no books. My own parents had not, as
far as I could establish, resorted to texts book but just got on with it. Looking back, I didn’t have the most prosperous
of childhoods in terms of material things – my first bicycle was second hand, I
had “Minibricks” instead of Lego; I had a Twin Trix train set instead of the Hornby set I wanted and so on.
But what I did have were very loving parents – my father lovingly building for
me, from scratch, a lovely castle with a draw bridge and populating it
carefully with cavaliers and roundheads – which I later ungraciously swapped
with a friend for cowboys and Indians; and my mother taught me how to play
cricket and would often join me and my friends on our small rear lawn where we
re-enacted great Ashes Test match games!
I still treasure those moments.
The bible consists of 66
books – 37 in the Old Testament and 29 in the New and book often overlooked,
and often thought of as being in the Old Testament is Hebrews which, to my mind is one of the loveliest and instructional
of all the books. It is found immediately after the books which have been
ascribed to Paul and sits between Paul’s letter to Philemon and the epistle of
James (my favourite book). Although the
style is similar to Paul’s, scholars now believe that it was not written by
him.
The letter is written
specifically to Jews turned Christians and is a very important book for us
because it places Jesus’s ministry and death very much in the context of Jewish
history and culture at the time making it clear that Jesus’s ministry and death
and resurrection is a continuation of God’s endless love for his people; but
also warning about the dangers of unbelief – recalling where things had gone
wrong in the past in the Old Testament and calling Jesus the one and only great
High Priest – emphasising the mission of Paul that salvation is only through
Faith alone and not simply by a strict adherence of the Jewish laws. He recalls
that it was by Faith that certain things happened in the Old Testament – the
falling down of the walls of Jericho, the parting of the Red Sea and so on for
example.
In the passage we read this
evening, the writer is reminding his readers that throughout their history God
has had occasions to rebuke them – and a reading of Judges or many of the Old
Testament books give countless examples of where the wrath of God has appeared
to fall down on those of his people who have lost their faith or deliberately
gone against it. It is then, the writer
of Hebrews says, that God will discipline his sons (followers/us) but he does
it, not as punishment, but to get us back on the right track.
At the beginning of this
service we acknowledged in the opening prayers that “we have erred and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep – we have
followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts”. Our Christian doctrine and theology
acknowledge that we have done and will continue to do this but if we put our
faith in our shepherd he will pick us up and bring us back into the fold.
When I swapped those lovely
and carefully chosen civil war figures for some cheap cowboys and Indians out
of a cereals packet, I was severely admonished by my parents and made to do
penance by returning to the scene of my crime, my friend’s house, and swapping
them back. Highly embarrassing for me
but I duly did do that, probably cursing my parents as I did so, but it taught
me a lesson, the value of things and an appreciation of the gifts given to me
by my father. So much so that even
today, 50-odd years later, I can still remember the incident vividly.
The writer of Hebrews goes
on to say that our Father God, in disciplining us, is acknowledging us to be a
legitimate member of his family – just in the same way when we join a club we
are bound by its rules and regulations. It authenticates us. The disciplining
we receive from God is often in the form of hardship as part of the refining
process to mould us into the persons he wants us to be. In the Old Testament
Book of Malachi (Chapter 3) the writer talks about the Messiah coming as the
refiner, the purifier, as God’s instrument to make us pure and righteous as he
intended. Refining can appear as a destructive
process on first glance but is the first part of making us pure.
Just in the way we should
and hopefully did respect our parents, although sometimes it does happen until
later in life, so we should love and respect our Father God. We should do it
with a good grace. It’s a simple task –
in theory.
My teenage children can be
very trying at times and often will challenge my decisions which might not
always fall in with their own thoughts and plans; but at the end of the day
they invariably do understand why I might have had to “refine them”. If I have succeeded in doing that and, at the
same time understand the same process in my relationship with God, then I can
happily throw those books away or give them to somebody else who is currently
struggling.
Amen
MFB/62
No comments:
Post a Comment