Articles

Luke 17:5-10

To be truthful I would rather have had just read verses five and six, rather than 5-10, as what those two verses say about increasing one’s faith I think is very good:

“The apostles said to the Lord, ‘Increase our faith!’ The Lord replied, ‘If you had faith the size of a mustard seed, you could say to this mulberry tree, “Be uprooted and planted in the sea”, and it would obey you.”     Luke 17:5-6

Verses 7-10 rather annoy me:

“Who among you would say to your slave who has just come in from ploughing or tending sheep in the field, “Come here at once and take your place at the table”? Would you not rather say to him, “Prepare supper for me, put on your apron and serve me while I eat and drink; later you may eat and drink”? Do you thank the slave for doing what was commanded? So you also, when you have done all that you were ordered to do, say, “We are worthless slaves; we have done only what we ought to have done!”                                                       Luke 17:7-10

I find the whole concept of slavery abhorrent and the fact that this reading would seem to encourage ‘rough treatment’ of slaves inhuman. I realise that, Jesus is speaking, in a different context to ours and that  what Luke is trying to do is to suggest that we have things that we just have to do; like praying and that we should just do it without complaint. But, the way Luke says it though does not sit well with our 21^st century sensibilities; ‘Slave come here, get my tea. Yes I know you have worked in the field all day but just do what I say you should do.’ We might like to think that we have moved on since then but many people today still live lives of slavery and bondage. Some due to human inhumanity and others due to marital or family pressures. A better image today might be to say that just as you work or care for your family so should you try to give time to God as well. Prayer to God should be as much a part of our lives as work or caring for the family are.

This is related to what Jesus has to say about increasing one’s faith and not giving up on it when things get tough. It can be all too easy not to give time to God so that our faith stagnates or solidifies; that it stops developing. In using the word faith I also take it to include the word doubt as well, for doubt is as much about faith and not it’s opposite. The opposite of faith is certainty and certainty does not enable anyone to increase their faith for if you are certain then what is there left to discover? 

Some of my earliest memories are accompanying my Dad in his allotment. Something I did from about six months old. My Dad’s allotment was on land belonging to ‘Sutton’s Seeds’ which used to be based in Reading, until the M4 motorway was driven through the middle of the seed beds in the late 1960’s.

My Dad’s plot was next to his Uncle Jim’s plot and quite often the pair of them worked together sharing seeds and produce. I realise now that my Great-Uncle ensured that my Dad and his growing family always had enough to eat. Money was scarce but Uncle Jim was generous. So too was Auntie Dorothy, who brought me my first garden tools - small boy sized when I was about three and a half. 

My memories of the feel of the soil on my hands, the joy of harvesting what we grew and the smell of the methylated spirit stove and the subsequent ‘meths' tasting tea have remained with me all my life.

When the allotment was covered in concrete and we had moved to the west of the town I continued to help my Dad with the large vegetable patch at the bottom of our long garden. But, a passion for growing flowers now developed thanks in part to our lovely neighbours who like my great-uncle and aunt encouraged my interests by giving me plants. 

Over the years, I sort of forgot the childhood joy I found in helping to grow things to eat but lockdown in 2020 changed all that. With additional time to obsess over the garden I created raised beds in which to grow initially; sweet peas for cutting and kale for sustenance. This has continued with the sweet peas relegated to large pots and the raised beds stuffed with a variety of different brassicas, runner beans and latterly potatoes. After a few disasters with the allium family, I have concentrated on these three crops and what joy I have re-discovered in harvesting what I have grown. It still feels like magic has happened.

Especially, as I tend to think; ‘Oh! nothing will come of these seeds’. Yet every year things do grow, even things (such as this year) like broccoli that I have no memory of planting!

God’s good gifts are how I think of the produce I pick, even when the crop isn’t great because of the vagaries of our climate. God is generous and I give thanks for that generosity. 

The Hebrew people were taught to be thankful for God’s generosity as the first reading from Deuteronomy tells us. ‘Be thankful, give thanks and make a thank offering to God for all you are given’ probably sums that passage up. Paul’s words to the Philippians continue the theme as he tells those early Christians that God will always give us what we actually need, even if it is not what WE think we need. 

The Harvest, is not something we can ever take for granted. There are many across the world whose lives depend on how good their own harvest is and the effects of the Climate Emergency we are now living in, only seem to make their existence even more precarious. In our own country the Harvest cannot be relied on to bring all we need either. We do not produce enough produce to actually feed our population and we rely on goods flown across the world to appear on our dinner plates - not something that is particularly ‘eco-friendly’. Food miles can be enormous just to put vegetables in our mouths. 

Farmers are in a tough place. They are being asked to produce more home-grown food and at the same time subject to internal and external forces that can make this difficult. Much land is  also coming out of food production because it’s just too expensive to farm. The food producers of our country and our world need not only our thanks and support but our prayers too. 

This is what we are doing this morning. We are giving thanks to God for all we receive through his good Creation and we are giving thanks for those who produce the food we eat and we are praying for their well-being and continuation in doing the job we need them to do. We should never take the farming industry for granted, just as we should ever take God for granted. 

Later in this service we will use the words of the General Thanksgiving - words that have been said for over 500 years in one form or another. The prayer begins:

“Almighty God, Father of all mercies, we your unworthy servants give you humble thanks for all your goodness and loving-kindness to us and to all whom you have made. We bless you for our creation, preservation, and all the blessings of this life…” 

Like today’s readings this prayer reminds us to be thankful and to be thankful to God every day. As we give thanks for the bounty of Creation may we never take God’s generosity for granted and further that we will like my Great-Uncle Jim always share the bounty we have with others. 

John 3:13-17

There’s a moment in Oscar Wilde’s play The Importance of Being Earnest when Miss Prism, the governess, admits to having written a novel. Cecily expresses the hope that it does not have a happy ending, and Miss Prism says:

“The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means.”

In fact, as opposed to in fiction, the good often end unhappily. The world is full of innocent suffering – look no further than Gaza, where children are dying for lack of food, for evidence of that. And on Holy Cross Day we reflect on the supreme example of innocent suffering and of self-emptying love.

Today’s Epistle explores that idea of self-emptying love. 

“Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself…”

What Paul is saying is that Jesus chose to accept the limitations of human life, including our vulnerability to suffering and our mortality. The Cross is a reminder that even our most painful experiences, physical and emotional, need not separate us from the love of God. Dietrich Bonhoeffer put it this way: 

“Through every event, however untoward, there is access to God.”

He was in a Gestapo prison when he wrote those words, and he was executed shortly afterwards.

Today’s Gospel explains why Jesus emptied himself. It offers the whole Christian message in a few verses. Jesus foretells his own death on the Cross:

“…so must the Son of Man be lifted up…”

And then speaks of God’s purposes:

“For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.”

In that single sentence that Jesus utters the little word “so” – 

“…for God so loved the world...”

Words can have several meanings, and, over time, they shed some meanings and gain others. I have no doubt that the teenagers with whom I once worked as a teacher would understand the word “so” in this context as meaning “very much”.  They would say “That’s so unfair” or “That’s so the right thing to do”, and I once overheard, at a bus stop, one girl saying to another, “That’s so my bus.”  

To read this verse from St John’s Gospel as meaning “God loved the world so very much that he gave his only Son…” would not be a misunderstanding, for the Incarnation and the Passion of Christ are evidence of the extent of God’s love for humankind and on Holy Cross Day we are reminded of the extent of God’s love. 

But that isn’t what the word translated as “so” in today’s Gospel actually means. A more accurate translation would be “God loved the world in this way – he gave his only begotten Son…” Jesus is commenting on the nature of God’s love, and only indirectly on its extent. And what he is saying about the nature of God’s love is firstly that it is self-giving – it involves God coming into the world to redeem it and accepting the human condition in all its joys and sorrows. Secondly, he is telling us that God’s love is universal. The world, in the original Greek, is “kosmos” – not just Planet Earth but the whole of creation. “God so loved the cosmos…”, not “God so loved members of a particular race”, nor “God so loved the citizens of a particular nation state, nor even “God so loved followers of a particular faith”. Because it is universal, the love of God is also unconditional. 

But unconditional love requires a response, and the response may or may not be forthcoming. 

“For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.”

The second half of this verse is often used as an argument that salvation is only possible for Christian believers, for those who assent to the doctrines of the Church. 

That seems to me to be a dangerous narrowing of God’s purpose, as though God were saying “Respond to my love by agreeing with me on the fundamentals of Christian doctrine.” That’s a misunderstanding of the Greek word translated here as “believes”, for that word isn’t merely or even mainly about assenting to propositions. It’s more about trust and response and the kind of understanding that comes from experience. 

When we humans love, the response we hope for is not that another person will agree with us on all issues, but rather that someone else will love us. The purpose of God’s self-giving, self-emptying, universal and unconditional love is, surely, to evoke from human beings a love of exactly the same kind. To believe in Jesus is to respond to him with that kind of self-giving, self-emptying, universal and unconditional love. And that leaves open the possibility that those who have never heard the Christian Gospel, and those who have found aspects of Christian theology baffling and unacceptable, may nevertheless have responded in the way that the self-giving, self-emptying God both shows us and seeks to evoke in us.

Miss Prism’s preferred type of fiction involved the good ending happily, and the bad unhappily. In the light of Easter, the Cross isn’t the story of the supremely good person ending unhappily, for self-emptying, self-giving love triumphs in the Resurrection and today and every Sunday is a celebration of that.

I am pleased and privileged to have been given the opportunity to speak to you this morning about the passage from Deuteronomy, which to me is one of the most significant passages in the whole of Scripture.

You need a bit of background to help you see where this passage is coming from. In the course of leading the Israelites through the wilderness for 40 years, Moses at one point seemed to rebel against God. He took credit for performing a miracle himself, rather than attributing it to God’s love, holiness and power. Because of this, God told Moses that he would see but would not enter the Promised Land.

As Deuteronomy begins, the Israelites have arrived on the verge of the river Jordan, in sight of the Promised Land on the other side. They are about to cross over that river. The whole book of Deuteronomy purports to be Moses’ last words to them before his death. Moses of course did not write the book of Deuteronomy. It was probably written or compiled about six centuries after his death. But the authors of the book chose to write using Moses’ name to give weight to their writings, to try with his name to recall Israel to their heritage. 

So in the book of Deuteronomy Moses recalls all that God has done for his people, all that they have been through and all that they have been taught by God. He reminds them of the covenant with God and of the commandments given to them through him by God on Mount Sinai. Now the people of Israel face a new beginning, a new way of life. For more than 40 years they have been pilgrims. Now they have reached the goal which God set for them. They are about to become the possessors of land. They will have homes. They will sow and plant and harvest. They will live in a stable community. God’s will for them is that they should enjoy these new blessings.

In the course of those 40 years, Moses has seen how his people will be tempted, how they are likely to go astray. So what he gives them in these concluding words are urgent and compelling basic guidelines for how they must now learn to live in this stable community, as land owners.

 Moses sets before them a stark choice: life and prosperity, or death and adversity. Life in this context means far more than actual physical existence. Israel’s life must be centred on their God. They must at all times remember his holiness, his power and, above all, his unfailing love for them. They must always remember all that God has done for them in bringing them out of Egypt and giving them this land flowing with milk and honey. They must respond to God’s goodness with praise and thanksgiving, by worshipping only him, by walking in his ways, with entire obedience to his loving commands. In other words, they must allow their lives to be transformed.

Israel’s life is not, cannot be, just the separate lives of individuals. They are the people of God. Transformation of life must be not only of the lives of individuals but also of the life of the whole community. Observing God’s commandments, decrees and ordinances, which earlier in Deuteronomy Moses has recalled, means living in the love of God, but also living in loving harmony with other people. Those who are materially blessed have a responsibility to share with those within their community who are less so. Compassion and generosity must underpin their communal relationships. And this applies also to the poor, the widow and the stranger from abroad, those who are land-less; they too must be cared for.

They now must also have a care for the land, and for animals and birds. This relates to the ownership and right treatment of land, but even more to the fact that the land, the animals and birds are also part of God’s creation and must be seen and respected as such.

 It is right, it has always been God’s will for his people, that they should inherit the land, that they should enjoy the material blessings of a settled life. But it must be a “holy materialism”, underpinned by love of God and of others, and by the constant awareness that all “matter” comes from and belongs to God. 

 If the Israelites fail, if they turn to worship other gods, if they cease to remember the love of their God and to obey his commandments, they will lose it all. That will lead to adversity and death. They will not live long in the Promised Land. 

What Moses is telling them to do, to put it in New Testament terms, is that in the Promised Land they are to create the Kingdom of God on earth. That is life. Think how much of Jesus’ life and teaching reflects this. He healed the sick. He fed the hungry. Think also of the parables of the Good Samaritan and the Prodigal Son.  Most importantly, Jesus gave us the two great commandments: love God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength, and your neighbour as yourself. In contrast, see how completely the scribes and Pharisees had lost sight of Moses’ teaching. Their concern was not for a right relationship between God and one’s neighbour, but for strict adherence to rules and regulations, many of which were man-made and no part of the original law.

The message of this passage is not simply an ancient one addressed to people of long ago. That is what I find so exciting: these authors of many centuries ago are speaking to us. We too today face the stark choice between life and death. It is right that we should fully enjoy all the blessings of this life which we have been fortunate enough to receive in the stable community in which we live. But we must constantly remember with thanksgiving that we owe these blessings to our gracious and loving God. And we must remember our less fortunate neighbours, not only here in Edinburgh, but in Gaza, in Syria, in Africa for instance. And the condition of life or death remains the same: obedience or disobedience to the voice of God who calls us and all people into loving relationships with himself and with each other.

Therefore choose life.

Many years ago now when I was the priest at St.Mary’s, Dalmahoy a strange event happened one Christmas Eve. The Midnight Mass at that church was always very well attended – literally standing room only because of the Country Club just up the hill. This particular Christmas Eve was no different, it was packed. In fact worshippers in the aisle had to file out the back door and walk round to the front door and enter again to allow the altar party to get into the sanctuary. It was an amazing atmosphere and it seemed to take for ages for the church to empty at the end of the service.

Among the last to leave were a well dressed, and rather attractive couple who greeted me like a long lost friend – I had a mental block and could not remember their names. They, however, obviously knew me and we blethered for a while - with me desperately hoping they’d give me some clue as to what their names were. As this couple made their goodbyes the woman presented me with a beautifully wrapped box – which for some reason I thought contained a Christmas Pudding! As she gave me the gift, I recall, that she said to me: 

‘We always give presents to our friends but we never think to say thank-you to or give a present to our priest. Happy Christmas.’

I was very touched and carefully took the present home to open before retiring to bed. When I opened the gift it was not a pudding but a beautiful, hand-crafted ‘Baccarat’ glass Angel of the Annunciation. 

Bizarrely, I had been ‘haunted’ by the idea of angels for many months and this  gift seemed to crystallise all my thoughts about angels and I have wondered since if in that couple I had ‘entertained angels, unaware’?

You may have had similar experiences, those times when you engage with someone, even for a brief time, such as in the queue for a Festival event, oral the bus stop, and that brief experience seems to change your life forever. The person whose comments helped to clarify your thoughts or whose actions brought something into clearer perspective for you. These people for me ‘angels’. Whether or not they are heavenly angels is a moot point but what is important is that their transient interaction with us is blessed and holy.

This is what I think the writer of the letter to the Hebrews is getting at. The whole of the passage read this morning contains, I think, some of the most beautiful phrases in the Bible:

‘Let mutual love continue. Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers…do not neglect to do good 

and share what you have..’                    Hebrews 13

To quote just a few but all held together by that first sentence:

“Let mutual love continue.”

The gift of love which we can give and receive, hold close and share can be a powerful and life enhancing gift. It is a gift that is always different and like a diamond contains many different facets by which we can reflect and refract the light within each other and thereby experience something of the ‘Being' we know as God.

Love really does change everything but it can be dangerous too. Those deprived of love do not grow up into well rounded, open individuals. Those betrayed by love can grow bitter and ‘bleed from the soul’ if not loved again. Those smothered by love can grow selfish and self-seeking. So while love can be life enhancing it has to be respected and treated properly.

The author of the Epistle to the Hebrews reminds us to remember others less fortunate, to be content with the blessings we have, to be concerned for those in positions of leadership and to remember that the love of God, as expressed in Christ is the same yesterday, today and tomorrow. 

Acts of love be they by those known or unknown are those events that shape and guide our lives and open us up to the unexpected encounters with the living God.

At all times try to live your life to the full, love much and never shut your self off from the opportunity of receiving love, especially from angels unaware.