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The King we worship, love and serve is no mere powerful deity. He is no supreme being wielding power at a whim over our lives and destiny, nor is he a remote and uncaring being who does not worry how we feel or how we thrive. No, the King we serve is a spiritual King and a servant. One who was prepared to take human form and to serve the basic needs of us, his creation.

Our King is no dictator or uncaring governor our King is a loving and caring parent who is always seeking and hoping the best for us, always willing to love us despite what we may or may not do and ready to challenge us to do better than we thought we could.

The Gospel accounts of Jesus do not read like the life of a King. His was not a life of privilege or comfort. His life was one of service to others, healing and caring for those society rejected. He was a leader but no bully and his followers were a motley crew with their own baggage to carry let alone their imperfections. Yet, this rag-tag King inspired those who listened to him with not only their ears but their hearts as well and this King still does that to those like us this very day. How many other Kings or monarchs still influence anyone two thousand years later?

Listening to the words of Jesus and the promptings of God can lead us into pastures new and fresh. We must, however, continue to pray and listen to Jesus and like the disciples to be ready to respond to his call to be a friend to the needy, seeking to do good at all times and to be thankful to God and to each other for all we have and all we share in the name of the Word made flesh, Jesus Christ the servant King.

I know that my Redeemer lives, and that at the last he will stand upon the earth; and after my skin has been thus destroyed, then from my flesh I shall see God (Job: 19:26)

Radio 3 has been running a series entitled “Soundscape of a Century”.  Some of you may have listened to it this past week. It relives a hundred years of the BBC.  It is a soundscape of classical music and sounds from the archives, decade by decade.  Many of the musicians and artists have long since died but even the mention of the name of a song or radio programme will invoke memories not only for ourselves but also of our parents and grandparents. The decades I listened to recently were the 1940’s and 1950’s. These included Roy Plumley’s “Desert Island Discs” first broadcast in 1942; Kathleen Ferrier’s singing of “What is life without thee” from Gluck’s tragic opera “Orpheus and Eurydice” recorded in 1946; and “How does your garden grow” which became “Gardeners’ Question Time” in 1951. Think for a moment what these names invoke.

The month of November is traditionally a time in which the Catholic Church remembers those who have died. We had the great Feasts of All Saints and All Souls last week. In a fortnight’s time we shall celebrate the Feast of Christ the King bringing to an end the liturgical year and then a new year will seamlessly start again with the beginning of Advent. We look forward to those things which still await us and in which we have hope. The circle of life continues year by year yet at some point our own journey, at least in this life, will come to an end. We will move into a new dimension and realm, much of which is unknown, but to which we are given insights and promises.  Through our own faith; through what we read in scriptures as well as seeking to follow the one who said “I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in Me will live, even though he dies”.

In our reading from Job, he has reached the end of his tether.  All those who should have loved and supported him have abandoned him. Those who have relied upon him and looked up to him as their master, provider, husband and father have all turned against him but still he cannot quite turn against the one who has been all those things for him – God.

The theologian, Jane Williams comments that “Job is certainly angry with God. He wants a written record of all that he has been through so that he can present it to God and demand a satisfactory answer. Does he want justice? Does he want health? Does he want his position back? More than anything he wants to stand in the presence of the living God and hear from him that he is loved and vindicated and that the relationship between them still exists. Like us, Job needed to know, above all else that his Redeemer lives”.   

In closing I want to read part of Malcolm Guite’s poem from “Sounding the Seasons” which picks up on today’s readings:-

Tangled in time, we go by hints and guesses,

Turning the wheel of each returning year.

But in the midst of failures and successes

We sometimes glimpse the love that casts out fear.

Sometimes the heart remembers its own reasons

And beats a Sanctus as we sing our story,

Tracing the threads of grace, sounding the seasons

That lead at last through time to timeless glory.

Over the years I have grown to love this time of the Christian Year when we remember the departed; those we love but see no longer and miss terribly; those we never knew but whom we respect the memory of and those called ‘saints’ by the Church. When we sing; ‘For all the saints ...’ saints for me means not just those ‘official’ saints but those hidden saints as well.

In the ‘official’ lists of saints we have those remembered for their pious lives our courage in the face of adversity and they are listed as; saints, martyrs, teachers and writers, doctors of the faith, virgins and holy women, apostles and evangelists, religious (nuns and monks), bishops and pastors, missionaries, Christian rulers and workers with the poor. You can then also divide them into Celtic saints, Scottish, Welsh, Irish and English saints, saints of the Roman Church and saints of the Orthodox Church. Quite how many ‘official’ saints there are is hard to discover and probably as many as we might know today a similar number will

have been forgotten or demoted as perhaps never existing! And, their memorial days can change as well for example St.Thomas the apostle is remembered on 3rd July in the revised calendar and on 21st December in the Scottish Prayer Book! You can take your pick! Others like St.Christopher, beloved of many motorists and travellers now officially don’t have memorial days. That’s where All Saints Day comes into play as a day when all saints remembered and forgotten are celebrated if not by specific name but in spirit.

Coming on close to All Saints Day is All Souls Day as this day I love more than All Saints because it is the day we remember and pray for, with love and thanksgiving, our own particular saints who may not be called such but to us as saints anyway. Our loved ones departed are as precious to us in death as they were in life and having a celebratory day to remember them by name I think is very important. It is important as we can feel them close to us as we call them to mind and speak their names. Reading the names on the list of the departed always moves me to tears of both sadness and joy. Joy in that

I may have known them and sadness in that I can no longer speak face to face with them, at least not in this world. For me this year is particularly poignant as I remember both my sister Jane and father David. As I read their names I am assured that they may be gone but in no way are they forgotten. Although they may now be part of that ‘great cloud of witnesses’ they are still close to me and no more so as we gather around the altar to celebrate the Eucharist.

In our Eucharistic liturgy, and remember it is in liturgy that we express the beliefs of our church we pray:

Help us, who are baptised into the fellowship of Christ’s Body to live and work to your (God’s) praise and glory; may we grow together in unity and love until at last, in your new creation, we enter into our heritage in the company of the Virgin Mary, the apostles and prophets (the saints) and OF ALL OUR BROTHERS AND SISTERS LIVING AND DEPARTED.

What those final few words mean is that as we gather around the altar and pray the Eucharistic prayer we do as a truly corporate and encompassing act with those around us in church this morning and all those who have died and gone before us and who now stand and worship in the presence of God. The boundary between Heaven and Earth at this point in the Eucharist is very minimal and we living and departed can almost ‘touch each other’. I reflect on this very often as I stand at the altar as under it are the ashes of many of our departed members, who I believe are still worshipping with us but in Heaven.

‘Eucharist’ - means ‘thanksgiving’ and it is what Christ instructed us to do in his memory and in gifting us this Sacrament not only do we give thanks to God for Christ but we do it with all who have shared in the Eucharist at anytime both the departed and the living. The Eucharist is continual and everlasting, there is never a minute of the day or year when somewhere in the world the Eucharist is not being prayed. It is on that continuum that our departed loved

ones still pray with us as we celebrate together Christ’s wonderful gift and instruction.

For all the saints ... days to celebrate with joy and thanks for all the departed known and unknown to us now and always.

The poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge was one of the first thinkers to make the point that words are living and dynamic. He put it like this:

“The written word is not only the vehicle of thought, it is the wheels.”

The wheels of thought. Wheels enable things and people to move. Words, Coleridge was suggesting, can move us in the sense that they can inspire us to change and to grow. He shocked his contemporaries by urging them to read their Bibles as they would read any other book. They were shocked because they didn’t understand that Coleridge was a man who read everything with a deeply thoughtful and critical attentiveness.

He was not, of course, saying that the Bible is just any other book, for he was a person who had a deep reverence for Scripture. His point was that if, when we open our Bibles, we switch off our powers of imagination, our intelligence, our openness to new meanings, we limit the Bible’s ability to speak to us, to move us and to change us. To use his own metaphor, we put the brakes on the Bible’s wheels.

Turning to today’s Gospel, it sounds as the congregation in the synagogue at Nazareth that morning was being attentive. Luke tells us that when Jesus finished reading, “the eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him”. Perhaps they had noticed that Jesus had edited and rearranged the words of Isaiah as he read them. He combined two separate passages in order to include those words about proclaiming the release of the captives, and he left out a phrase about “the day of vengeance of our God.”  It’s interesting to reflect on Bible Sunday that Jesus was selective in his use of Scripture.

Christianity has in common with the other two great Abrahamic faiths, Judaism and Islam, that it is a religion of the book, and on Bible Sunday we celebrate the way in which God speaks to us through Holy Scripture. What sets Christianity apart from Judaism and Islam is the fact that when we use the phrase “the word of God” we may be referring to the Bible, or we may be referring to the person of Christ – the Word of God incarnate. God speaks to us not only through the fragile and ambiguous medium of words but also the loving vulnerability of a human life, the life of Jesus.

We need to hold on to those two meanings of the phrase “the word of God”, for they remind us that the Word of God is not primarily the written word, but the Living Word. If we read and interpret the Bible apart from Christ, we run the risk of looking for and finding the comforting certainties about morality and doctrine that, from time to time, we all crave. And that, as Coleridge would say, puts the brakes on the Bible.

That’s clearly the mistake that the congregation in the synagogue at Nazareth made. At first, they were impressed.

“All spoke well of him and they were amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth.”

They were impressed even though he had said something very startling:

“Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing”

By saying that, he was claiming to be the Messiah, God’s anointed, the one about whom Isaiah prophesied that he would “bring good news to the poor” and “proclaim the release to the captives”.

Yet as his sermon continued – and for this you need to read on in chapter 4 of Luke’s Gospel – he said challenging things which so angered them that they turned into a lynch mob intent upon killing him. The change of mood happened because Jesus went on to challenge their ideas about what the Messiah would accomplish.

That’s a powerful reminder that any of us can fall into the trap of finding what we would like to find in the Bible, rather than letting its words challenge and question us. If the Bible is the word of God, then it isn’t a receptacle for our thoughts and prejudices. It is the wheels of thought and wheels are for movement.

Coleridge believed that absolute truth is not to be found in the written word, not even in the written word of God, but only in God and in what we know of God in Jesus Christ. He urged people to read the Bible thoughtfully, critically and prayerfully – to read the word of God as lovers of Jesus the incarnate Word – and in so doing to draw closer to God.

It’s a curious fact about the Russian language that the word for “word” – slovo - is very similar to the word for “glory” - slava. And the resemblance is a family likeness, for they share the same ancestor, and they are also closely related to the verb slyshat, which means “to hear”. To read the Bible thoughtfully, open-mindedly and prayerfully is to have the humility of the hearer and it is in hearing the word in this way that we may draw closer to the glory of God and be moved and changed by our encounter with it.

What is this that I hear about you? Give me an account of your management. (Luke 16: 2)

How many times have we listened to rumours about someone or something without checking the facts or speaking to the person themselves?  In some strange way there is something attractive about a rumour. We can elaborate on it or embellish it particularly if we do not like the person anyway or they have hurt us in some way in the past.  After all, will anyone actually believe that the rumour is true? We have only to look from time to time at the headlines of our newspapers to see which famous celebrity might be having a public dispute with another. Do we really need to know the intimate details?

The parable of the Unjust Steward is one about which no less a biblical authority than Augustine is said to have remarked “I can’t believe this story came from the lips of our Lord”. This story appears only in Luke; even Luke appears to be troubled by it.  Some scholars believe that Luke added a few clarifying verses at the end.  Luke has Jesus say that we cannot love God and money. This may be true but how does this really relate to the parable?

Here we come to what may be the theological heart of this story. The unjust steward forgives. He forgives things he has no right to forgive. He forgives for all the wrong reasons; for personal gain and to compensate for past behaviour. This is the message in this strange parable; go ahead, forgive it all, forgive it now, and forgive for good and for selfish reasons, or for no reason whatsoever.

This uniquely Lukan parable is generally considered one of the most difficult passages in the Gospel. The difficulty pertains primarily to the endorsement of the actions of the “unjust” household manager by his master and seemingly even by Jesus.

Some of the key motifs that occur in the parable of “the Prodigal Son” re-appear here. The unjust manager in this parable is somewhat similar to the prodigal son. The same Greek word that is employed to describe the prodigal son’s squandering of his wealth (diaskorpizo) is used to describe the charges against the manager. The term has the connotation of careless or irresponsible spending. Both the son and the manager are responsible for (or have been charged with) actions that result in huge financial loss. The respective responses to their squandering distinguish the two parables. The father forgives the son and welcomes him back to the household joyfully, but the master dismisses the manager without verifying that the charges against him are true, or even giving him an opportunity to offer an explanation.

Given the unforgiving nature of the master’s response, the story should have been called the parable of the “Unforgiving Master”. In short, the parable of the Prodigal Son emphasises forgiveness and love for the lost. It sheds light on the nature of relationships in a context where God plays a central role. In contrast, our parable today is more about some of the defining characteristics of human relationships and how they work themselves out.

We are called to be faithful, to act with integrity, to be honest. Above all, to love one another and to forgive. May God give us the strength to do this.

Oh God, from whom all good proceeds; Grant that by your inspiration we may think those things that are right, and by your merciful guiding may do them; through Jesus Christ our Lord.