Riding into Jerusalem: a tale of two parades

Sermon preached at Abington Avenue URC on 29th March 2015 (Palm Sunday). Text: Mark 11:1-11.

So, who here likes a good parade? I’ve seen or been in quite a few in my time. They can be exciting, colourful, fun. Lots of floats, lots of costumes, tons of people watching and cheering and celebrating.

Here are a few parades that spring to mind. Northampton Carnival – it’s bright, it’s colourful, it’s wonderfully multi-cultural. What’s not to like? And we were lucky enough to be at Disneyland Paris a few years ago – one of the best bits about Disney is their parades. And I wasn’t at this one, but there’s the [Northampton] Saints and their fans celebrating their cup wins last year. And there are many other examples of parades, some celebratory like carnivals around the world, some political like anti-war demonstrations, and some that are a bit of both like Gay Pride parades.

The ancient world was keen on a good parade too, but their parades often had a more military feel to them – here’s an example of what Romans called a triumph. In some ways, this one isn’t very different in some ways from the Saints parade – it’s about celebrating a victory. For the really big victories, there were statues and monuments built. But being the Romans, there was probably a lot of violence involved, and of course your experience of being on the losing side was a lot nastier than those beaten by the Saints discovered.

Of course, the Romans weren’t the only ones who did victory parades. The Jewish victories were
often accompanied by parades. Two hundred years earlier, before the coming of the Romans, the Maccabees had swept aside the rulers of the day, who had no respect for Jewish worship, and entered Jerusalem to the waving of palm branches, to rededicate the Temple. But in Jewish tradition, leaders who came in war arrived in the city on a great horse. Leaders who came in peace arrived on a donkey.

We’ve talked a bit about the donkey already in Jesus’s entry to Jerusalem [using an excellent drama as the children's talk], so let’s think about the parade. And there’s one crucial thing to be said about that parade. It was not the only parade happening in Jerusalem that day. There was not one parade in Jerusalem but two. There was the one we’ve been hearing about, that we remember today, but it was another one that everyone would have noticed.

That day was the start of Passover week, the greatest festival in the Jewish calendar. People came to Jerusalem from all around Israel and beyond. As Passover celebrates the Jewish people being freed from slavery in Egypt, it was a sensitive time in the eyes of the Romans, as the current rulers of the Jewish people. So they increased the number of soldiers in the city, and the governor of the province, Pontius Pilate, spent the week in the city instead of his usual base at Caesarea on the Mediterranean coast.

And so the big parade that day was the entry of Pilate and his troops into Jerusalem. Two biblical scholars, Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan [The Last Week], have written a lot about that other parade, and here’s how they describe it:

Imagine the imperial procession’s arrival in the city. A visual panoply of imperial power: cavalry on horses, foot soldiers, leather armour, helmets, weapons, banners, golden eagles mounted on poles, sun glinting on metal and gold. Sounds: the marching of feet, the creaking of leather, the clinking of bridles, the beating of drums. The swirling of dust. The eyes of the silent onlookers, some curious, some awed, some resentful.

By contrast, imagine the parade that Jesus led. He sat on a donkey, which as I’ve said was the symbol of peace. He was surrounded by peasant folk, many of them from the wild north of Galilee. They were waving some kind of branches, which we call palm leaves but may just as well have been bits of straw picked up from the fields. This was a big contrast to Pilate’s parade. It was not glamorous. It was not impressive. But to the people calling out to him it really mattered.

And we can see just how much it mattered from what they were crying out. They didn’t call out “Hallelujah” or “Hooray” or “Welcome”. They shouted out a single word, again and again. HOSANNA. We’ve heard that word so many times, associated with this day, that we’ve lost its meaning. It has come to be a word of praise, but that’s not what it means. It means SAVE US, WE BEG YOU. Save us from this terrible system. Save us from the Romans who tax us to the hilt to pay for their roads and palaces and soldiers. Save us from the temple authorities who are corrupt and demand lots of little taxes when we go to worship God. Save us from the soldiers who attack us if we say the wrong thing. Save us from all those who are controlling our lives and making it a misery. It’s a cry from the heart. And it’s a deeply political cry.

So it’s no mistake that the word Hosanna is shown here on a protest banner. Because it was a word of protest. They go on: blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord. Blessed is the coming kingdom of David. These are not songs of praise. They are cries to come and shake everything upside down, to bring about a new kingdom.

All these words are quotes from the psalm that we read earlier, which was used at the entry to the Temple on festivals, so they were familiar words. But they are strong statements about the kind of king they want, the kind of king they see Jesus as. This is a moment of transformation, of change. If you know the musical Jesus Christ Superstar, perhaps you remember the moment when the crowds are singing “Hosanna, hey sanna, sanna sanna ho”, and at the same time the priests are singing “Tell the rabble to be quiet, we anticipate a riot – this common crowd is much too loud”. This is a triumph of a very kingly sort, albeit a Jewish triumph rather than a Roman one.

But of course as the words here from that song show, the mood of the crowd gradually changed. They started by asking Jesus to like them, and ended up asking Jesus to die for them. And of course that’s where Jesus was headed as he moved into Jerusalem. His alternative form of parade was setting out a new form of kingship and a new form of kingdom, one based on justice and peace rather than on exploitation and violence. He didn’t come to be the messiah so many people expected, overthrowing the system through force, although his first action when he returned to Jerusalem the next day was to confront the corruption and exploitation found in the Temple.

But of course all this put him into direct conflict with the authorities, both the religious leaders and the Romans. And they couldn’t tolerate that. Which led him in the following week to his trial and death. But there’s a time to think of those terrible events, and the unexpected aftermath when God brought good out of evil and raised him from the dead, as Holy Week progresses and leads on to Easter Sunday.

Today I think it’s right to stick with Palm Sunday, with Jesus’ alternative parade leading into Jerusalem and the contrast with Pilate’s parade, the one everyone was talking about. Because we’re faced with a choice on Palm Sunday.

Which parade are we going to choose?

Are we going to choose the glitzy one, the exciting one, the one with the money, the one that the people in charge want us to choose? Are we going to follow the parade of the Oscars on the red carpet, the soldiers marching in their triumph, the parades of the powerful?

Or are we going to follow the humbler parade, where the leader is a man of peace who comes to challenge the ways that we do harm to other people, that we let others do harm? Are we going to follow the parade where the people are ordinary folks, rather poor, crying out for help for change in a system that oppresses them?

Because the choice is with us today. There are still two parades going on. There is a parade of power and there is a parade of justice. Can we have the courage, knowing where it leads, to follow the parade that Jesus leads us in?

Let us pray [prayer taken from Godspace by Mustard Seed Associates]

Let us enter the city with Jesus today,
And sing hosannas to our king,
Let us turn our backs on the powers that grasp and control,
And open our hearts to the son of God riding on a donkey.
Let us join his parade,
Surrounded by outcasts and prostitutes, the blind and the leper.
Let us follow the one who brought freedom and peace,
And walk in solidarity with the abandoned and oppressed.
Let us shout for joy at Christ’s coming and join his disciples,
Welcoming the broken, healing the sick, dining with outcasts.
Let us touch and see as God draws near,
Riding in triumph towards the Cross.

Amen.

Losing your life to gain it

Sermon preached at Paulerspury URC on 1st March 2015. Texts: Mark 8:31-9:1 and Genesis 17:1-7,15-22.

Image: Diocese of Newcastle

So today is the second Sunday of Lent. If you’re giving stuff up or doing things differently, you’ve probably started by now. I struggle a bit with Lent, having grown up in the Church of Scotland, where they’re very good at austerity and self-denial, but in my childhood they still regarded the church year as a bit suspiciously Catholic. Nowadays I rather like the church year, but I certainly don’t fast to any great extent. Like many people I tend to give up one symbolic thing that makes a bit of a difference but not a huge one. Some years I’ve given up caffeine, but I’m not a saint so that’s just too difficult. This year I’ve given up chocolate. And I try to take up something positive too, such as some more focused spiritual reading, or a programme of giving like Christian Aid’s Count Your Blessings, or one focused around generosity like the programme called 40 Acts.

In today’s gospel reading, Jesus invites his followers – that would be us – to give up something more fundamental. Their lives – or perhaps their soul, depending on which translation you read. We’re going to look in a bit more detail about what Jesus meant by that, how it relates to what we’ve heard about Abraham, and how it affects us in Lent and the rest of the year.

This conversation takes place at a pivotal point of the gospel of Mark, at the start of a series of discussions about who Jesus is and how that relates to his disciples, which lead in to the narrative of Jesus’ passion. Immediately before we hear about Jesus talking about his suffering and death, he asks his disciples who people say he is. They answered that some said that he was Elijah, some another prophet, some John the Baptist. Then Jesus asked them a crucial question, one we all ought to be able to be answer with all our heart: who do you say that I am? Not who do all those others say Jesus is, but who do you say he is? And Peter, ever impetuous and ready with a quick answer, says four words that in many ways seals his fate: “You are the Messiah”.

But what does that really mean? We know who was the Messiah as far as most people were concerned at that time – the anointed one, the one sent by God to lead his people out of servitude, to bring them to freedom, the great leader that the Jewish people were waiting for. But of course Jesus wasn’t that kind of leader. Here’s what Jesus said was the nature of Messiahship: to be rejected and condemned by the authorities, to be put to death, and ultimately to rise from the dead. Unthinkable stuff.

And unthinkable is pretty much Peter’s view of the matter too. We’re told that Jesus spoke openly of all these things, that he didn’t make any secret of them. Not too comfortable for Jesus’ best bud. Having just announced that Jesus is the Messiah, Peter can see the rosy future changing to something much darker. Lots of suffering for this man he admires and likes, and possibly for himself. So he responds a bit like child might do in sticking his fingers his in ears and going ‘la la la, I can’t hear you’; but Jesus will have none of it. He links Peter to the Accuser, haSatan, the one who undermines. Horned demons aren’t the point here – this Satan is the silken quiet voice who says “don’t worry, you don’t really have to go through with it”. Jesus is very clear: yes I do. And as he goes on to say, so do you.

Instead, in very vivid language, he lays out what discipleship is like, what it costs but what it gains. Much of the rest of passage is in strange apocalyptic language. For Lent, it’s a very eschatological passage, more like the sort of thing we read at the start of Advent – all that stuff about the Son of Man coming in his glory.

Now a word about Biblical scholarship here. A fairly reasonable thought is: did Jesus really say these things? Could he really have been so explicit about the nature of his death? Is this not one of those passages which was inserted, or at least amended by Jesus’ followers long after death given what they then knew? And if he’d laid it out what so strongly, why would the disciples have been so distraught and bewildered by the events we call Good Friday and Easter Sunday? Surely they’d be forewarned?

On the face of it, I have a lot of sympathy for this view. But actually there’s quite good biblical evidence to suggest that he might have said something a lot like this. The rebuking of Peter is a very solid tradition, and it’s the sort of thing that the early church, having been led by Peter, seems unlikely to make up. And I’m not convinced it matters that much. It fits with the Jesus that we know now. It makes sense for us.

So what does it really mean for us in practice? I’m going to suggest that Jesus lays out three steps: denying yourself or losing your life, taking up your cross, and gaining a new life.

What does it mean to lose your life? Is this a metaphor or to be read literally? Many of the disciples literally did that thing. But the word for life here (psyche) refers to one’s mind or soul. So it’s something about losing your identity, putting off the old person and taking on the new. In the ancient world, following Jesus’ call involved a profound change of identity. The disciples had already had to put aside their jobs and possibly their families to follow Jesus. They had become someone different. And Jesus is saying that to become his disciple, you have to become someone different. To take on a new identity.

We saw this in the Genesis reading, where Abram and Sarai were called upon to change their names, to take on a new identity. They’d given up their homes and their lifestyles, but now they were asked to change their self-understanding through their name. The theologian and historian Karen Armstrong, a former nun, writes very vividly of the ceremony when she took her final vows – she was symbolically buried and brought back to life as a new person. And of course, like Abram and Sarai she took a new name as a nun.

For those of us who have been Christians all our lives, or at least for many years, this is a difficult experience to imagine. However Lent gives us some experience of a partial form of losing our old identity and becoming something new. However we choose to follow it, Lent gives us the opportunity to gradually strip away the things which separate us from God – the luxuries and complexities of the world, the lack of generosity which prevents us from loving God and our neighbour. It’s about living more simply, in a more reflective and thoughtful way, and thus bit by small bit in losing our sense that what matter most in life are cars, and food, and quarterly budgets, and technological gadgets, and even church committees. It’s about seeing these things for what they are – merely vanity, like vapour trails in a clear blue sky.

So to move to the second stage, Jesus says that his disciples must take up their cross and follow him. Today the cross has lost a lot of its meaning as a symbol. It’s something that belongs to jewellery and smart symbols in beautiful churches. Even the more gory re-enactments of the crucifixion in Catholic countries on Good Friday, or movies like Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, don’t really give the full sense of what it meant to those Jesus was talking.

In the world of 1st century Palestine, the cross was the worst possible death imaginable. It was the death given to traitors and slaves. It was deliberately humiliating, slow and drawn-out. Going back to the world of Wolf Hall [mentioned earlier in all-age address], it was the equivalent of being tortured on the rack and then hung, drawn and quartered. Anne Boleyn’s beheading was actually a merciful execution. Crucifixion was horrible and humiliating. So for Jesus to draw any sort of connection with the cross must have been a shocking thing for his listeners – not just the disciples, but the wider crowd – to hear. What Jesus was saying was that as a follower of his, you’d be going up against the authorities, and you’d be in personal physical danger.

This is a hard one to allegorise or soften. Yet clearly Jesus isn’t calling us today to stand up against the state and to lose our liberty or our lives for it. Some followers of Jesus have done just this. I’ve been privileged to meet some of them or hear them talk – the liberation theologians of the Philippines who worked out of Christian conscience to undermine the Marcos regime; the anti-apartheid campaigners in South Africa who lost their liberty in the face of that evil system; the protestors against Trident in this country who have sailed boats in the face of submarines armed with weapons of mass destruction or cut the wire of the Faslane base to plant flowers on it. I couldn’t do those things myself, but I’m convinced that they were taking up their cross.

But for each of us, there are undoubtedly times when we are faced with an easy choice or a difficult choice, and we know really that the difficult choice is the one we ought to take, but we’re afraid. And that’s when we need to take up that cross, to be willing to sacrifice our own good for what we know to be right. As one author I read online writes about this verse, what are you willing to risk as a follower of Jesus? If you have a measure of wealth, or comfort, or privilege, are you willing to risk these things? Whatever the consequences for yourself or those who depend on you? To speak for myself: I work in a professional job and I’m the main wage earner in our family. Imagine if I was faced with a situation where I saw such appalling practice in my work, say mistreatment of others, that I had to become a whistleblower and take the matter public, despite what it would do to my job. Thankfully I’ve not faced that situation, and I strongly doubt it’ll happen where I work now. But in principle it could, and would I have the courage to do the difficult thing?

But taking up one’s cross can happen in small ways as well as big ones, and that’s where Lent comes in again. What we take up in Lent is not so much suffering. But we take up space to be a better disciple of God, we take up reflection, we take up discipline, we take up generosity. As I said earlier, it’s St David’s Day. One of his most famous sayings was in the last sermon he preached before he died, when he said:

Be joyful and keep your faith and your creed. Do the little things that you have heard about and seen me do. I will walk the path that our fathers trod before us.

This idea of doing the little things, which is often written in cards for St David’s Day, is a powerful part of taking up your cross. Making hard choices can happen in small ways as well as big. We can see this even in our shopping behaviour. It’s Fairtrade Fortnight at the moment, and choosing to buy fairtrade is no longer especially radical or especially hard, but it does involve some cost, and for some people it involves giving up a favourite brand. In our house we’ve been trying hard to reduce our use of products containing palm oil, which is the cause of a lot of environmental damage and child labour – which is tough because very many products in supermarkets contain it, and we’re only part of the way there – but we’re trying to do those little things as well.

And last of all, Jesus promises us that if we do these hard things – be willing to lose our past comfortable identity, and to stand against the powers of the world despite the danger to ourselves – then that’s the only way to save our own lives. Despite the eschatological language of the end of the passage, I think it’s a mistake to see this primarily in terms of the life to come. The word ‘save’ is almost one of jargon in Christian circles, and some scholars suggest that the word ‘rescue’ carries the meaning better of what Jesus is offering. If you want your life to mean something, you need to follow Jesus, and in these ways that he has outlined.

This isn’t something we can do alone. Abraham and Sarah, in their new identities, entered into a covenantal relationship with God. Jesus calls us not to take on a set of intellectual views, to believe some words, but to enter into relationship with him, to follow him where he leads. And we do this by supporting each other through our struggles to take up our cross. We do it together, as the body of Christ.

And together we gain so much. This is about the richness of life that Jesus promises us here and now, living life in abundance. It’s about following the path of Abraham, to gain wholeness, and a new sense of our role in God’s plan. It’s about following the path of Sarah, to gain freedom from the expectation to be someone else’s person, and the right to be our own person. And it’s about following the path of Jesus, to gain life in the very richest and fullest sense. It’s something to be followed during Lent, and throughout our lives – individually and together.

Let us pray.

Lord God, help us to follow in the way of Jesus, when it is easy and when it is hard. Help us to learn how to deny ourselves, how to take up our cross, and how to glory in the new life you promise. Make us resilient together so that, at all times and in all places,  we will stand and give glory to you. Amen.

Patient and impatient waiting

Patience is a virtue. We wait for God's good time to give us wisdom. Many spiritual traditions are built around silent waiting - sitting in stillness with God and with others, being ready for his calling to speak and to act. I practised that discipline through Quaker worship for many years. It's a powerful discipline - hard work but at its best it can carry a deep experience of God's presence and his will.

This morning's reading in my daily prayer podcast, Pray as you go, which follows the Roman Catholic daily lectionary, comes from Psalm 40. It begins "I waited patiently", and goes on to talk of being called by God to speak in the 'great congregation' of the people.

But sometimes impatience is called for. Yesterday, the Church of England consecrated its first female bishop - something wonderful to see, but that should have happened many years ago. It was right for the campaigners for women priests and bishops in the Church of England to be impatient.

And today is Holocaust Memorial Day. 70 years ago, the death camp at Auschwitz was liberated by Russian soldiers. Nobody in that camp should have had to wait a single day more - the earlier it had been liberated, the more lives would have been saved. Impatience was right in that case too.

The scriptures are full of impatience when faced with injustice - "how long, O Lord?" (Psalm 13). It's a legitimate emotion, one that comes from the heart. But it's a generous emotion, not for one's own sake but for that of others.

Patience in our own case, waiting for inspiration or calling. Impatience in the face of injustice. That is surely the way to which we are called.

Changing countries, changing boundaries

I've been reading the excellent book 1913: The World before the Great War by Charles Emmerson. He lays out a compelling portrait of the world in the year before the First World War (through a picture of 20 different cities across the world). He observes that the world of 1913 is often viewed through the lens of the catastrophe and carnage of the Great War, but that the war was not inevitable and there was much else happening other than the run-up to war.

Reading the book made me very aware of countries and their boundaries. The world was carved up into several large empires which no longer exist or are much reduced (notably the British, Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian and Russian empires), while many of the countries we now take for granted as universal were part of one of those empires or another entity.

Europe in 1914 (Image: Diercke International Atlas)

If we look specifically at Europe (whose own boundaries are contested, but is often taken to go as far east as the Caucasus Mountains and the Ural River), there were 26 countries in Europe in 1914 (an easy year to get data for), while there are 46 today.

Europe in 1914 consisted of: Albania, Andorra, Austria-Hungary, Belgium, Bulgaria, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Monaco, Montenegro, Netherlands, Norway, Ottoman Empire, Portugal, Romania, Russian Empire, San Marino, Serbia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.

Europe today (image: Diercke International Atlas)

Europe in 2015 consists of: Albania, Andorra, Austria, Belarus, Belgium, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Kazakhstan, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Macedonia, Malta, Moldova, Monaco, Montenegro, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, San Marino, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, Ukraine, United Kingdom, Vatican City.

For completeness, it's worth saying that there are four states which geographically are wholly (or almost wholly) in Asia, but which are often associated with European institutions, including the European Union: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Cyprus and Georgia. And there are six states which are not widely recognised internationally except by a few states: Abkhazia, Kosovo, Nagorno-Karabakh, Northern Cyprus, Transnistria, South Ossetia. (And here's the part where I confess that my lists are extracted from Wikipedia, which is generally reliable for uncontested topics, but doesn't always handle controversies so well - so probably each state in this paragraph would be placed elsewhere by some people.)

Of the nineteen states which didn't exist in 1914: 8 were part of the Russian Empire; 5 were part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire; 2 were part of Britain and its empire (Ireland and Malta); 1 was part of Denmark; 1 was part of Serbia; 1 was part of Italy; and 1 (Poland) was split between Austria-Hungary, Russia and Germany. Austria-Hungary, as well as losing its empire, formally split into two successor states, Austria and Hungary. Many of these changes happened in 1918 after the First World War, but others happened at a later time.

Enough already of lists and stats. Here's the moral: boundaries change. Nations in one time are not nations in another time. Sometimes boundaries change as a result of war, sometimes due to economic pressure, sometimes due to democratic will - or all of these together. But boundaries of nations change over time. 

This is important because we are in a time when European boundaries are under question again. Scotland and Catalonia had independence referendums (of different kinds) in 2014, Ukraine's boundaries became threatened by Russia. The Balkans are quieter than they were, but not entirely settled. And there are independence movements, with more or less support, in various regions of current European states. 

Future boundary changes are hard to predict, but one thing is almost certain: the political map of 2115 will not be the same as that of 2015. And it might look just as different from 2015 as the modern map looks from that of 1914. Countries are not static entities.

Waiting for Jesus to arrive

Sermon preached at Abington Avenue URC on 21st December 2014. Recording available on church website. Main text: Luke 1:26-38.

The Annunciation - Henry Ossawa Tanner

Wait. The time is not yet here. Stop. Take a deep breath. Christmas is coming, but it has not yet arrived. We are still in Advent – however much the shops and the telly and the manic preparations and even the nativity plays tell you otherwise, Christmas has yet to arrive. We wait in anticipation for the coming of Jesus into the world.

And so in today’s gospel passage we go back in time in terms of the Christmas story, to events nine months before the birth of Jesus – back to March as it were. Back to the time of Mary’s waiting, for something genuinely new to happen, for something amazing to come into the world through her.

Now waiting and babies go hand in hand. They never come when you expect them. Doctors and midwives like to give due dates, but they’re estimates at best, even though they shape our expectations. Both our children were born about ten days after their due date, and I vividly remember the time we were waiting for our son Gregory to arrive. Everything was on hold, my parents were staying to be with our daughter when the baby was born so the house was full, Becky was getting increasingly uncomfortable. We were ready. I kept thinking of Jesus’ teaching about being watchful and not knowing the day or the hour of his coming (dads can think about that sort of thing, not actually having a huge baby inside them) – and as an aside it was only after we’d chosen his name that I found out that the word for watchful is where we get the name Gregory. So we watched. We were ready. We waited.

I can well imagine that was how things were for Mary when she was waiting for Jesus to be born. Was that how it was for her before she heard about the news of the birth? Going by Luke’s account, we don’t know anything about her life up to that point, except that she was betrothed to Joseph but not yet married, which took place a year after betrothal. Given the pattern of the times, she was probably a teenager. There are plenty of later thoughts about her. The early church had the tradition that her mother Anne had been barren, prayed to God for a child and became pregnant in her later years, whereupon she dedicated Mary to life in the temple – so that according to this tradition Mary grew up surrounded by the ideas and practices of the temple. This isn’t an idea you’ll find in the Bible, but it’s found in a number of written works from the first few centuries after Christ and subsequently in the Muslim holy book, the Qu’ran, which has a lot to say about Mary.

So she might have been deeply reflecting on God’s calling for her, preparing for something to happen in her life. But that’s speculation. She might just as much have been doing the everyday stuff, or planning for her wedding, or having a bit of a rest. And then, all of a sudden, an angel comes to her. How did she know he was an angel, not just some bloke? She didn't, and we don’t. There’s no mention of miraculous appearance, or wings, or heavenly lights, the kinds of things we associate with angels. In the first place, an angel is a messenger from God, and earlier in Luke we’re told in rather lovely words that he stands in the presence of God. We’re told by Luke that the angel’s name was Gabriel, which partly because of this passage is a name that Christian tradition (and indeed Jewish and Muslim tradition) has run and run with. Quick one for your next pub quiz: how many times does the name Gabriel appear in the Bible? Four times is the answer – here, earlier in Luke where Gabriel appears to Zechariah, father of John the Baptist, and twice in the book of Daniel. Really, he’s not a major character. And he doesn’t announce himself to Mary by name anyway.

So Mary doesn’t know a lot about this person who greets her. Which makes it not so very surprising that when he calls her favoured one, and says the Lord is with her, and even (according to some translations) says that she is blessed among women, her first reaction is “y’what?”. She is, to put it more politely, perplexed. Flummoxed. Surprised. Incredulous. Because this is turning out to be a far from ordinary day.

But notice this: before she gets any news of her great task, she’s told that she is blessed and favoured by God. And she hears this straight from the source, from a messenger who stands in the presence of God. Now how good is that? It’s news we all need to hear. But of course it’s news that we can find throughout the Bible. We are blessed by God, we are God’s favoured ones. Genesis tells us that we are made in the image of God, that we have life breathed into us by God. Much of the Old Testament is about God’s blessing upon a people who do or don’t want to know. And it’s absolutely the central message of Jesus. He tells us that he came so that we might have life, and have it to the full. He showed us in his life, through his teaching, through his death, that we are blessed by God. So if you feel sad or worried or are losing hope, remember that the words of the angel to Mary apply to you, apply to me, apply to us all: “Greetings, you who are highly favoured! The Lord is with you. You are blessed by God.”

And Mary – Mary waits. So the angel goes on. And now he tells her the news that to us, 2000 years on, is incredibly familiar, but to her must have been mind-blowing. She’s going to have a baby. And not just any baby, but one who is going to be truly great, to sit on the throne of David, to reign forever, to be called the son of the Most High, even to be holy and to be called the Son of God. These are royal titles, they’re the kind of titles that the Roman Emperor gave himself. To us, the term Son of God is associated solely with Jesus, but emperors were forever being called son of God. But very clearly these are not the sort of titles you expect for the baby of a young woman from nowhere in particular.

And then finally Mary reacts – from incredulity about the greeting to incredulity about the mechanism. Because of course, she says, she’s a virgin. Now the idea of a virgin birth is something totally outside of normal human experience. For many people throughout church history, it’s a central idea for seeing Jesus as fully human and fully divine, and to question it is heresy of the worst sort; for many people today, it’s too bizarre to be taken seriously. There are also sound biblical reasons to doubt it. I don’t really know what I think about how Mary conceived Jesus. Maybe it’s just a metaphor for an ordinary conception given especial holiness. But if God is going to carry out an extraordinary act, he certainly could have chosen to do it by extraordinary means.

And actually, I don’t think the mechanism is the interesting part about it. In ancient Jewish teaching, the question about any story was not “what actually happened?” but “what does this teach us?” And the angel gives us the clue – that the Holy Spirit is acting especially in the world, is breathing life into this child just as God has always done, but a life that is fully divine as well as fully human. The angel in Matthew’s gospel quotes the book of Isaiah, and gives the child the title of Emmanuel, which means God-with-us. That is the reality of the incarnation – God is taking on human flesh. This baby is to be a human being, but he is also going to be God.

And that brings me to a deeper layer of meaning. By taking on human flesh, God fundamentally changed the nature of the world. And by giving us the gift of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, he fundamentally changed the nature of those who follow him. Our ridiculous, vulnerable, frail human flesh has been given the greatest possible seal of approval by God: he chose to wear it. But we, the church, the followers of Jesus, are the now the body of Christ, that self-same incarnated body. So we have a responsibility continually to bring about that incarnation in our own lives. I really like the words of the German 14th century mystic, Meister Eckhart, who in a Christmas sermon once proclaimed:

What good is it to me if Mary gave birth to the Son of God 1400 years ago, and I do not also give birth to the Son of God in my time and in my culture?  We are all meant to be mothers of God.  God is always needing to be born.

I find that an amazing calling – to be part of bringing God into the world, here and now, continuously. To be a mother to God, whether or not you’re a mother (or even capable of being a mother) to human life. In the Eastern Orthodox church, Mary is referred to as the God-bearer. We are all called to be bearers of God. Just as heaven is not something to be experienced after death but in the here and now, so too the incarnation is not something that happened once and never again, but goes on happening again and again.

Of course what Mary did was to give birth to God in a very particular and unique way. She was the pioneer, the one who went before us all to make it possible for us to come to know God. Mary was not a passive vehicle. She was an active agent in all this. Her response might sound quite passive in some ways, quite submissive. And many of the classic images we have of Mary do show her as quite submissive. But I think her response is more like a shout of acclamation. Let it be so! Yes I will! This thing is going to happen!

And there’s something important going on here in how she is addressed and responds. Many scholars observe that the structure of what the angel says to Mary exactly parallels the way in which the prophets in the Old Testament were called. There is a greeting, a startled reaction, an exhortation not to be afraid, a divine commission, an objection, a reassurance, and the offer of a confirming sign. This is the way Moses was called by God, it’s the way Isaiah was called, it’s the way Samuel was called. Mary’s response to the angel of “Here I am” even echoes the response of Samuel. There’s really compelling evidence here that Mary’s encounter with the angel is a prophetic calling, that Mary herself is a prophet.

And the next words we hear from Mary are undoubtedly prophetic words – the extraordinary song that we call the Magnificat, where Mary speaks of God’s power and his justice, of the world turned upside down, of the powerful brought low and the hungry fed. These are a vision of an alternative kingdom. It is a vision which Jesus brought into being fully, with the coming of the kingdom of God through him, but it is a vision which was first given to Mary.

Now Protestants rather under-rate Mary – she’s such a major figure in Catholic spirituality that many Protestants have put her to one side, just to be brought out at Christmas time, and maybe Easter, as a rather peripheral figure to the story. But this passage shows us Mary can be our model, our teacher – the one who heard the angel’s assurance that she was blessed by God, the one who was perplexed at first and asked searching questions, but then understood her calling and responded to it with a great YES! The one who participated with all her body and her heart and her soul in bringing God to earth. And the one who was willing to see God’s coming kingdom in all its fullness of life.

And Mary waited, ready for the time to come.

And so this is my hope and my prayer: that we all, this Christmas time, might be willing also to act as bearers of God, as agents for bringing God into the world through our lives and our actions, and that we might be willing to listen to the angel, and to see the upside-down kingdom of God in all its glory. That we might wait as Mary did, and might participate in the incarnation of our Lord, here and now, in this place and in everything we do. Let us all be willing to say with Mary: “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word”.

Amen.

The coming of the kingdom: judgement and justice

Sermon preached at Paulerspury URC on 23 November 2014. Text: Matthew 25:31-46.

Image: Pulpit Fiction

Imagine a preacher, a man who has inspired great crowds with the power of his words, with the depth of his spirituality, with the strength of his actions. But he’s angered the powerful, and he knows his time is short before they come for him. So he gives one last set of instructions to his followers. He’s often been a bit obscure, asking questions and telling stories, but now he speaks clearly and directly.

And that was the situation Jesus found himself in, when he spoke about the sheep and the goats. According to the gospel of Matthew, it’s the last thing Jesus says to his disciples. Thereafter the gospel is all about betrayal and trial and death. So in some ways it’s not that surprising that what he teaches them is about judgement, the coming of the King in glory. Endings must have been much on his mind.

But what he talks about isn’t so much about what happens THEN. It’s about what happens NOW. It’s about how we, Jesus’ disciples past, present and future, are called to live our lives. It’s about the nature of the kingdom of God, and it’s about how we live out the values of the kingdom of God in the here and now.

Because so much of the time when Jesus talks about the nature of kingdom of God, he’s talking about the present reality, about a place and a way of being that we can access now, rather than what we will encounter after death or the last judgement. We heard this in the call to worship, where Jesus talked about the kingdom being among us now. And this passage seems to me anyway to fall into the category of apocalyptic writing, like the books of Daniel and Revelation, where the last things are presented with striking and often quite odd imagery, but the message is really about the here and now.

Part of Jesus’ apocalyptic language is to talk about judgement. Now judgement, in some circles, is Not Cool. Modern liberal society doesn’t quite like taking sides, of saying this is right and this is wrong. And for laudable reasons. Jesus reminds us in the Sermon on the Mount not to judge others so that we are not judged ourselves.  But here he powerfully presents a king that judges. The king judges not according to some arbitrary law, not according to his whims, but also not according to what the sheep and the goats believed. He judges them by their actions. He judges them by how well they have feed the poor, welcomed the stranger, visited the prisoner and so on.

And so he follows the route of so many Jewish prophets and shouts out for justice. Because if there is no judgement, ultimately we can’t have justice. At some point, you need to come off the fence and say, these people are being treated shamefully. I will treat them differently. That’s what Jesus calls his followers – what he calls us – to do. Those who follow this will have eternal life.

It’s worth saying that the phrase translated as ‘eternal life’ at the end of the passage is argued by many scholars to refer not to living for ever after death, or not only that, but rather to living fully within this world. It’s the same idea as the kingdom of God being among us. It’s the same idea as Jesus saying in the gospel of John that he had come to bring us abundant life (that was about sheep as well). Jesus is saying that if we want to live a rich and abundant life, full of joy and satisfaction and spiritual uplift – that we can only do this if we also look after those who are in need.

And so the King separates the sheep and the goats. A famous image. You can buy a pair of socks in all good cathedral bookshops where the left one has goats on it, and the right one has sheep on it. I’ve been puzzling about the difference here between the two species though. Images of sheep and shepherds are everywhere in the scriptures, but what’s so wrong with goats? Did the people of Jesus time hate goats so much? The strange answer is that they didn’t really. Both animals were kept for milk, meat and their hides. Both were ritually slaughtered in the temple. The most curious thing about them is that the varieties of sheep and goat in Israel of Jesus’ day were very hard to tell apart. They behaved rather differently, but looked the same.

And that seems to be the basis of the distinction Jesus is making between the two species here. They look so similar, but act so differently. The sheep are those who don’t think about it very hard, who care for God’s people without really being told to do so. The goats – they might be leading moral lives in some sense, but they’re basically those who when faced with human need, give the answer of Cain: “am I my brother’s keeper?” Probably most of us are a little bit of sheep and a little bit of goat, but Jesus is very clear about which one he prefers.

Both sheep and goats, though, are really surprised to be told that their actions or inactions towards the poor and needy have to do with their response to Jesus. But that idea, that doing good deeds towards strangers, has a long history. Abraham met and welcomed strangers and later found that they were angels. In the letter to the Hebrews we are told “Do not forget to show hospitality to strangers, for by so doing some people have shown hospitality to angels without knowing it”. And many traditional cultures, from the Celts to the Russians, have stories of people meeting strangers. The Celtic blessing known as the Rune of Hospitality ends with the lovely words: “often, often, often,  goes the Christ in the stranger's guise”.

This idea of surprise, of seeing Christ in the most unlikely people, was spoken about beautifully by Oscar Romero (archbishop of El Salvador), in a sermon he preached just ten days before he was killed by government agents because he was a champion of the poor and the oppressed in his country. Romero said:

What terror has been sown among our people that friends betray friends whom they see in trouble. If we could see that Christ is in the needy one, the torture victim, the prisoner, the murder victim, and in each human figure so shamefully thrown by our roadsides would see Christ himself cast aside, we would pick him up like a medal of gold to be kissed lovingly. We would never be ashamed of him.

How far people are today, especially those who torture and kill and value their investments more than human beings, from realizing that all the earths millions are good for nothing, are worthless compared to a human being. 

The person is Christ, and in the person viewed and treated with faith we look on Christ the Lord.

And with that I would like to say Amen and sit down. Except that there’s one more thing that to me is crucial about this passage. It’s a passage about justice. And it calls us clearly to act. But I believe it calls us not just to feed the hungry, but to ask why they are hungry and to fight for justice that means they are no longer hungry. It calls us not just to welcome strangers, but to stand up to racists and those who would persecute immigrants. It calls us not just to visit people in prison but to ask whether prison is the right place for them, and whether they’re being treated properly there. As we enter Advent next week, we’re once again reminded of Mary’s song about the God who “has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly [who] has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty”. I believe Jesus is calling us to seeking that kind of justice as much as he’s calling us to individual action.

Consider foodbanks. They’re an act of Christian compassion. They’re feeding the hungry, they’re recognising the person of Christ in one individual at a time. It’s important that churches up and down the land are organising them, staffing them, giving food to them. But they’re also, in the memorable words of Liz Dowler, a professor of food policy, "an inadequate plaster over a gaping wound". That food banks exist in a hugely affluent society is a scandal and a disgrace. They shouldn’t have to exist.

Or, to take a different story, I was shocked to read yesterday that Walmart, the largest supermarket chain in the US, puts out boxes so that their poorly paid staff can feed each other. Which I find horrible. Colleagues giving to each other, friends recognising those who are poor and feeding them –those are acts of Christian compassion. But the question first is why Walmart are paying their staff so badly that they have to do such things.

Jesus calls us to be sheep, caring for the needy, and calls us to do it in the here and now. And by doing that we will know the kingdom of God in the here and now. Thanks be to God.

Amen.

Pastoraliana

I'm a townie, or at least a suburbanite. I've lived most of my life in (often on the edge of) cities and large towns. I've never had an urge to live in the countryside or a village. Countryside for me means mountains and big lakes, not low rolling hills and thatched cottages.

Moreover, I've never much liked pastoral music (apart from Beethoven's 6th Symphony and even that is far from my favourite of his symphonies). The continued popularity of Vaughan Williams' The Lark Ascending, long topping the Classic FM annual listeners' poll, has always baffled me.

However, I've been powerfully affected by the pastoral sentiments of Frostiana, Randall Thompson's setting of seven poems by Robert Frost. The OU Choir, of which I'm a member, performed the suite today, and I've got a lot out of learning the piece. Our conductor, Bill Strang, talked us (and the audience) through the subtle history of the poetry and the music.

The poems are very much pastoral in theme, and the musical setting fits it. They talk of woods, farms, flowers, paths, pastures, cows, stars and villages. They're small scale pieces, local in intent. Many almost feel impressionist: they capture a moment in time and display the scene in detail. Only in a few places do they explicitly address big themes.

The big themes are most prominent at the start and the end of the piece, with settings of the poems "The Road Not Taken" (Frost's famous poem about decisions, of roads diverging in a wood) and "Choose Something Like a Star" (the most abstract piece, about the voice of a star). The latter seemed very appropriate to sing the day after the first human spacecraft had landed on a comet (including several OU scientists). These themes are strong and clear ones, although The Road Not Taken is often misunderstood. There are subtler themes in the five poems in between, and many layers to each of them.

But the overwhelming feel of the piece for me is its pastoral sensitivity. The countryside in question is that of New England - Frost and Thompson both lived much of their lives in New England and were both associated with the town of Amherst, Massachusetts, for whose 200th anniversary the piece was written. And yet it's really striking that several of the poems were written in (old) England, when Frost was seeking to establish himself as a poet (and under the influence of the English writer Edward Thomas with whom Frost formed a close friendship); and that Thompson wrote most of the music while living in Switzerland. So the pastoral scenes are wider than they first appear.

I can't say that Frostiana has made me want to move to the countryside, certainly not around Milton Keynes or Northampton. But it has certainly given me a more sympathetic sense of the value of pastoral life.