A sermon for Advent 2

 

The ancient writings we have are there to guide us, so that by sticking at it, and by the encouragement of the scripture, we might have hope.  (Romans 15.4)

The BBC World Service is, among many other things, a friend to those who are unexpectedly wide awake in the middle of the night.  So, at 3.00 in the morning, one morning last month, I learnt about an Australian novelist called Melissa Lucashenko.  She has won a lot of prizes – and she has given most of the money away.

The story is this.  Lucashenko, as you might suspect from her name, has eastern European heritage.  Australia is a melting pot of immigrants from Europe and from elsewhere.  But, what she didn’t know as a child, was that one of her grandmothers was an indigenous Australian, aboriginal.  Luckashenko was one of those whose family allowed her skin colour to be passed off silently as southern European so as not to attract the extreme prejudice which aboriginal people suffer.

But once she knew about her aboriginal heritage she wanted to explore it.  More than that, eventually she wanted to re-inhabit it.  Eventually she moved to live on what had been her grandmother’s lands.  She discovered its culture. 

She didn’t come to think of that simply as more communal and more environmentally aware.  Fundamentally, she found that family and land and values were all part of what she calls a single tapestry.  An interdependence of people and place just seemed natural.  Singing songs about it, telling stories about it, making paintings of it, were all part of inhabiting it.

And it also meant she came to regard the culture and values in which she had been brought up as a bit too individualistic and a bit too exploitative.  That is to say many people like me might tend to focus on ourselves, what I’m entitled to, what would benefit me.  And we may tend to view things around us simply as resources for our own use.

So she was not surprised that people like me are surprised that she gave away the prize money.  For her, it had simply become the most natural thing to do.  If I receive an unexpected gift, why wouldn’t I want to share it?  With the neighbour whose business is struggling.  With the single parent nearby who is finding it hard to make ends meet; she had been such a single parent herself.

Anyway, that is what has been feeding my soul over the last few weeks.  But this is meant to be sermon and not an inspirational talk, so let me take a further step.  What I think I have found myself asking myself a lot over the last few weeks is ‘isn’t Christianity meant to be a bit like that?’.

Every Christian person will have been brought up in one of the diverse cultures of the world.  We absorb the value system around us.  We simply pick up what is an acceptable way to behave.  We don’t notice what has shaped our attitudes. 

Most people in a feudal system must have simply assumed it was normal.  Most people in a society which is formed around ideas like avoiding shame and maintaining family honour will live by that code.  Most people like me will assume that doing as well for myself as possible, and taking as much as I need from the resources around me as possible, is a natural way to be.

But is what we are doing turning up her each week, at least in part, an attempt deliberately to inhabit a different way of understanding the world?  And the singing, story telling, artistic expression are all part of it. 

And in particular we deliberately expose ourselves to three sometimes quite long chunks of scripture each week.  It comes in a three year cycle.  As it happens, two weeks ago we had the last readings for the third year of the cycle.  Last Sunday we went back to the beginning again.  We are on the second set of readings for Year A today.

The Gospel reading is John the Baptist calling people to repentance.  And the word translated ‘repentance’ is a compound of ‘after’ and ‘thinking’ – so it is exactly something which grows out of a fresh way of understanding things.

I think it is in Luke’s Gospel that there is a bit of the story Matthew misses out.  People ask what this repentance things actually means in practice.  Jesus’ reply there isn’t about our spiritual lives.  If you’ve got more food and clothing than you need, share it.  If you work in finance, don’t be tempted to make more profit than is reasonable.  If you have power over people, don’t use it to extract money from them.

So we are not surprised that most people are surprised by Christian understanding and behaviour when they do see it.  Really hard things like forgiving enemies.  Turning the other cheek.  Freeing people from obligations.  Sacrificial acts.  Praying for those who are nasty to us.  A failure to keep a record of wrongs.  Not making anything of the money we do give away simply because we’ve forgotten about it as soon as it is done.

But the verses from Luke aren’t actually part of our readings for today, so let me land finally somewhere quite different, on a single verse from our second reading.  We’ve actually been hearing it read for a second time in a few weeks.  A part of Romans 15 was used for Bible Sunday in Year C just a few weeks ago.  A different part is set as a reading for the Second Sunday in Advent in Year A today.  And the two happen to overlap for one verse:

The ancient writings we have are to guide us, so that by sticking at it, and by the encouragement of the scripture, we might have hope. 

The purpose of all this isn’t that we are better at Bible Study.  It isn’t that we learn to point fingers at the culture around us.  Or at the Christian people we know who don’t measure up.  Or at ourselves as falling short.  It is that we might have hope. 

I suspect that the reason I was so caught by the story of Melissa Lucashenko’s prize money was that fundamentally it was eliciting hope in me.  There are other ways of understanding the world.  There are other ways of responding to its challenges. 

The life and teaching of John the Baptist and Jesus of Nazareth have always been trying to elcit that awareness and response.  We need showing the way.  We need to stick at it.  We need to be encouraged on the way.  But it is that we might have hope.   

The ancient writings we have are to guide us, so that by sticking at it, and by the encouragement of the scripture, we might have hope.    

The picture is stone quarried from the Lincoln edge waiting to be used for repairs to Lincoln Cathedral, which is in the distance.

Thou disentedst

At the weekend, the Cathedral marked 30 years of girl choristers.  I was first living in Lincoln and attending the Cathedral in the mid-1990s.  I looked out my much used copy of the first CD they produced which I would have bought a liitle later. 

All I could find was the CD case, not the disc itself.  Perhaps I played a track for a service or group at some point, brought the case home, and left the disc behind in whichever machine had been used?

A specially commissioned new setting for George Herbert’s King of Glory, King of Peace was sung at the commemoration service.  I’d always assumed the hymn was the whole of one of his poems, but I was in fact struck by lines which I’d never sung or heard.

The growest soft and moist with tears,

   thou relentest;

and when Justice called for fears,

   thou disentedst.

A quick looking up showed the hymn consists of six of Herbert’s poem’s seven verses, first placed by Robert Bridges in the Yattendon Hymnal in the 1890s (the parish hymnbooks which also introduced All my hope on God is founded, words translated by Bridges).

Perhaps Bridges left out the verse so that the remaining six could be set out in pairs as a three verse hymn?  Perhaps he judged the verse as the least easily comprehended or least felicitous?  The hymn has certainly always felt complete without the verse.

Now I know, I am sorry that the idea of God’s grief was lost (long before twentieth century theological speculation about whether God suffers).  I’m also treasuring the idea that our potential fear of God’s justice is misplaced.

 

There are no levers to pull

 

Yesterday began with the opening verses of Isaiah, the set first reading at Matins.  God is revolted by the sacrifices his people offer, sees their festivals as futile, and turns his ears from their persistent prayer.  He pleads with them instead to ‘learn to do good, pursue justice, support the oppressed, champion the orphans, and plead the widow’s cause’.

The day ended at a consultation event for the diocese’s developing new strategy.  Although almost the first PowerPoint slide reminded us that one of the three strands of its long existing strategy is ‘joyful service of the community’, every one of the ‘emerging themes’ of the new strategy focussed on the life of the church.  There was no hint that ‘kingdom seeking’, justice promoting or marginalised supporting was to feature in our future.

The work being done, we were told, is undergirded by a Theological Reference Group, but the Diocesan Secretary declined an invitation to name a theological insight which informed the process or these themes. 

‘Raising the spiritual temperature’ has been much referenced in diocesan communication, and was there as both one of three new objectives and repeated slightly strangely as one of the five ways to reach these objectives.  Someone asked what this actually meant, and was told that the Bishop has written three papers about it and a young communications officer present was working on how this might be summarised accessibly.  Things used not to be done like that.

So we got on with the set task anyway.  We had post-it notes to affix to laminated posters of the five emerging themes, unsure of what some of them meant (‘a church in reach’?), uniformed about the actions the ‘lever groups’ (seriously?) were considering recommending, and unable to query whether they were actually the themes which capture the directions in which we should go. 

But things took a turn this morning when I went back into the dedicated section of the diocesan website where I had previously found the first of the Bishop’s papers, and now found all three, laid out across sixteen pages.  It is almost the only thing there with actual content about anything other than the process of developing the strategy.

The Bishop’s papers do not advocate the sort of shift towards a more cult-like enthusiasm which the slogan might make people fear.  They actually set out a vast range of the sorts of things (‘a miscellany of many regular tropes and themes’) about Christian spirituality which I have been taught for sixty years, which I have taught for forty (very often with exactly the same illustrations and references the Bishop uses), and some of which I have sought to practise.

Early in the first paper, he acknowledges the kingdom grows in hidden and unexpected ways.  He says he ‘treasures those who witness through service’.  In the second, he says growth ‘is not just about size – it is about health, attitude and outlook’.  In both the second and third, he references the Five Marks of Mission (only the first two of which are about the life of the church, while the last three are about service of neighbour, community and world).  He even situated the pursuit of Carbon Zero in the last of these.

While I continue to be puzzled and even troubled by the narrowness of the emerging themes with which we were presented, and about by the educational design of the evening, it would be hopeful if the proposals which do emerge grow from these steers.

I also wonder if the reassurance will apply more widely.  I even hope that the yet to be released Seeking God: Seeking Growth material, which the Bishop mentions and of which I recently spent eighteen months in Grimsby fruitlessly asking to see drafts, might also turn out to be well pitched.  Perhaps even like the sort of Mission Action Planning tool which the diocesan Mission and Training Development Forum was sharing with the diocese when I was a member of that team at end of the last century.

So I’m again almost nostalgic for Robert Warren’s Missionary Congregation approach which we promoted then – a church both ‘distinctive’ (something not totally unlike ‘raising the spiritual temperature’?) and ‘engaged’ (not allowing inevitable concerns for church flourishing to distract us from being deeply involved in the concerns of a place).  What if a new diocesan strategy turned out to be about renewing faithfulness – giving thanks for the dedicated right approach through the unpropitious time of the last couple of generations and encouraging a recommitment to them in this present time?

The view is one which those climbing to the belfry in Grimsby Minster see, and will be fully populated with a welcoming congregation when a new Vicar is launched there at a service this week. 

That we might have hope

 

I have been drawn into the Epistle set for those who observed last Sunday as Bible Sunday. 

Perhaps the most predictable choice of Epistle was set last year in our three year cycle of readings: ‘all scripture is inspired [God-breathed] and is useful for teaching’ (2 Timothy 3.16).  The purpose being ‘that everyone who belongs to God may be equipped for good works’ (3.17).  A preacher’s temptation might be to seek to express what it is about scripture which gives it authority, and which should provoke action.

But this year we were offered ‘by encouragement of the scriptures we might have hope’ (Romans 15.4), a focus on us as being what is inspired by it, something which elicits hope.  Authority not found by theory (there is even the possibility of some idolatry of the Bible in that?) but verified by grace discovered in engagement with it.

And the verse nests in the middle of Paul wrestling with living together with those specific aspects of whose theology and practice we are sure is wrong: ‘put up with the failings of the weak’, ‘not to please ourselves’, ‘for the good purpose of building up the neighbour’ (15.1,2).  The set passage doesn’t finish ‘so that we may glorify God’ but ‘live in harmony with one another so that we may with one voice glorify God’ (15.6).

We happen to be (once more, still) in the middle of church dispute, and I happen to have also been rediscovering Simon Tugwell’s Ways of Imperfection: Christianity has to be a disappointment, precisely because it is not a mechanism for accomplishing all our human ambitions and aspirations... necessarily involving a remaking of our hopes.

Meanwhile, late October is the time for Christmas decoration to go up on Steep Hill.

Including Samaritans

 

Matthew is careful to categorise Samaritans (perceived as an heretical Jewish sect) with non-Jews rather than with Jews.  He does so in one of Jesus’ mission commissioning:  ‘Go nowhere among the Gentiles, and enter no town of the Samaritans’ (10.5).  It is his only reference to them, although presumably they are caught up with the whole non-Jewish category in the final commissioning: ‘Go make disciples of all nations’ (28.19).

But Luke invites us to value them quite differently.  It was an old thought which came back to me again on St Luke’s Day yesterday.  The clues may be in his second book, Acts, explicitly identifying them in the mission commissioning at the very start: ‘You will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth’ (1.8). 

He then tells of them as the first successful mission field: ‘all except the apostles were scattered throughout the countryside of Judea and Samaria... Philip went down to a city of Samaria proclaiming the Messiah to them... (they) listened eagerly... hearing and seeing the signs... they were baptised both men and women... (and) the apostles at Jerusalem heard that Samaria had accepted the word of God’ (8.1,5,6,12,14).

So, when we look back to his Gospel, it is the first Christian Samaritans who might have been in his mind as he wrote.  Perhaps he even knew such Samaritan Christians.  If so, the three stories of Samaritans which his Gospel uniquely preserves are not just about a category of ‘outsiders’ but about ‘insiders’: ‘I’ve included some stories of Jesus already valuing you, dear often discriminated against fellow Christians, dear first fruits of the church’s mission’.

Luke tells of Jesus rebuking those who wanted revenge on a hostile reception in one of their villages (9.52-55).  Luke record’s Jesus story of a Samaritan’s exemplary care of neighbour, contrasted with that of two Jewish religious officials (10.30-37).  Luke highlights one Samaritan’s thankfulness to Jesus, contrasted to nine other apparently non-Samaritans (17.11-19).

Mark, on whose earlier, shorter Gospel Matthew and Luke build, mentions them not at all.  John does the once, the story of the woman at the well at Sychar, but that is a story for many other days.