Articles

Lord, do you not care? (Luke 10:40)

How many times have we been left to do things on our own without support or assistance from others?  How many times have we felt obliged to visit a family member or close friend in hospital, care home or at their home while others do nothing? How many times have we said those familiar words “Lord, do you not care?” either aloud or silently to ourselves?  The variety of personal situations both at home, at work and even at church where this question arises are endless but very real. Like Martha we can feel worried and distracted. There are times when we feel annoyed, angry, taken advantage of and even embittered. We feel unwanted, unsupported, unloved.

What struck me in today’s gospel is that there are no words spoken by Mary. She said nothing. It is her actions that speak for themselves. She sits at Jesus’ feet and listened to what he was saying. There seems to be a clash of temperaments however well-meaning Martha’s actions are too.

Think for a moment where Jesus was going. He was on his way to Jerusalem to die. I wonder what Jesus wanted when he briefly visited his two friends? Did he just want an oasis of calm having turned aside to Bethany? Did he just want a simple meal? Did he just want to be listened to, to be understood, to be loved? We are not told. What we do know is that he took time to be with both Mary and Martha. He listened attentively to Martha and offered her a different way forward. He did not despise Mary for only listening to him.

Richard Harries comments that “Religion is not in the first place about believing certain things to be true or behaving in a particular way. It is about experiencing the beginnings of a change in one’s life. For some people this may happen dramatically, when they find God’s grace to overcome an addiction or pattern of behaviour. Others find a release from crippling anxiety or guilt or a sense of worthlessness. Others experience the operation of God’s grace in more gradual ways, taking them away from self-preoccupation to a greater focus on others and their needs; and to God and what he might want of us.

There are many evils we would like to be delivered from: poverty, cruelty, war, oppression and injustice, for a start. Christians believe that this process must begin within each of us, as we discover the deliverance, liberation and freedom that comes through Christ in the service of God. It begins within but does not stop there. It is manifest in trying to do what we can to alleviate human suffering and promote the well-being of others’.

In all our readings God is showing new ways of doing things that make the whole story different. He is showing that things are not always as predictable or certain as they look or appear.  A small piece of creative thought can change what seems to be a foregone conclusion. Abraham and Sarah’s story and Martha and Mary’s story are about to change forever.

As we conclude, may the familiar prayer by St Augustine ring true:-

O Thou, who art the light of the minds that know thee,

The life of the souls that love thee and the strength of the hearts that serve thee.

Help us so to know thee that we may truly love thee.

So to love thee that we may fully serve thee,

Whom to serve is perfect freedom.

Of all the stories that Jesus told, the one in today’s Gospel is surely the most famous. Politicians regularly refer to it, and I was particularly struck to read the account of someone caught up in the mass shooting incident in Highland Park, Illinois last week, who explained that he and his family fled in fear and found refuge “in the apartment of a Good Samaritan.” It’s a story that has become a shorthand for what all that we value in the kindness of strangers.

The odd thing is that everyone refers to “the Good Samaritan”, though at no point in the Gospel is he actually described as good, even though his actions clearly are. We naturally assume that the Samaritan is the hero of the story, the good guy who is a good neighbour, and that the Priest and the Levite who pass by on the other side are the villains. The danger in that is that it has, in the past, led to an anti-semitic reading of the parable – and that cannot be what Jesus, himself a Jew, meant. And the very phrase “Good Samaritan” is, of course, offensive because it implies a prejudice (widespread among Jewish contemporaries of Jesus) that the majority of Samaritans were not good. For that reason, I’m going to refer to Jesus’ story as the parable of the mugging on the road to Jericho.

So what did Jesus mean when he told this parable? There are clues to that to be found if we focus not on the Samaritan, but on the lawyer whose questioning prompts Jesus to tell the story. The Gospel writer clearly does not approve of the lawyer. We are told that the point of the lawyer’s question is to test Jesus – in other words the lawyer (not a solicitor or an advocate, but an expert in the Law of Moses) is trying to catch Jesus out. Even his way of addressing Jesus – “Teacher” – isn’t respectful. The people who address Jesus as “Teacher” in Luke’s Gospel are critics and opponents, rather than supporters of Jesus. And when we look at the question itself, we find that the lawyer’s thinking is deeply flawed. That isn’t clear in our translation. A more accurate translation would be “Tell me the one thing I need to do to inherit eternal life.”

So the parable of the mugging on the road to Jericho is Jesus’ response to a fellow Jew who just didn’t get what Judaism was about – for the lawyer was selfishly focusing on the question “how can I inherit eternal life?” and the Law of Moses focuses not on individuals, but on the things which build strong and stable communities – loving God and your neighbour, honouring your father and mother, and not indulging in the habits of mind and the actions which undermine community. So the parable of the mugging on the road to Jericho is Jesus response to a trick question by someone who simply didn’t understand the values of the religion which he claimed to profess.

Jesus handles the lawyer’s trick question very skillfully. “What is written in the law? What do you read there?”  And the word read is important – Jesus is reminding everyone that the lawyer is educated, literate – he’s supposed to be an expert. And the lawyer doesn’t offer a reading – an interpretation – in response, he just quotes the summary of the Law of Moses that all his hearers would have learned by heart as children:

“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind, and your neighbour as yourself.”

And here’s the irony – in testing Jesus, in focusing on his own personal salvation, the lawyer had shown that he was very far from understanding the meaning of the law from which he could quote so fluently.

Jesus’ response is very important. Jesus does not say “You’re right – and that’s how you achieve eternal life”. Instead he says:

“You have given the right answer, do this and you will live.”

Meaning “If you do this, then you will live well in the here and now, and living well in the here and now is what really matters.”  Jesus is implying that being over-concerned with whether you will get to heaven is selfish.

The sensible thing for the lawyer to have done at this point would have been to walk away. Instead, having dug himself into a hole, he chooses to go on digging and asks a question even less sensible than his first one.

“But who is my neighbour?”

In asking the question he is seeking to draw a boundary – he is saying “OK, tell me whom I need to love and whom I don’t have to bother loving?”   

The Hebrew word for neighbour has many meanings – ranging from “the other person” to “friend” and even “lover”. And in the book of Leviticus we find the teaching that the foreigner who lives among Jews should be treated as a neighbour. Those verses are worth quoting because they have an obvious contemporary resonance.

“When an alien resides with you in your land, you shall not oppress the alien. The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizens among you; you shall love the alien as yourself.”

And Jesus tells the story of the mugging on the road to Jericho to make one big, simple point – that the answer to the lawyer’s question is that love knows no limits, and your neighbour is “everyone”.

The story itself is interesting. We aren’t told anything about the victim other than what happened to him – we don’t know his race, his religion or his socio-economic status. And that’s part of Jesus’ point – the victim is our neighbour whatever his or her race, religion or socio-economic status. And we certainly shouldn’t take the fact that the Priest and the Levite passed by on the other side as a pretext for any kind of criticism of the Jewish faith.

When he specified a Priest and a Levite, Jesus was setting up an expectation in the minds of his hearers. If I began a joke with the words “An Englishmen, an Irishman and a……” you would all expect the third person in the story to be…a Scotsman. In Jesus’ time, if you began a story with a Priest and a Levite, then everyone expected the third person to be an Israelite – an ordinary Jewish person. Instead, Jesus makes the good neighbour in the story a Samaritan – a member of a group whom the lawyer and the other people listening to the story would have regarded as beyond the pale. So we need to see this story as part of Jesus’ teaching that practical love reaches across the boundaries of prejudice. And that’s a teaching as fresh and as relevant today as it was two thousand years ago when the story was first told.

I’m going to finish with an acknowledgement and a quotation. Much of the material for this sermon came from a book the American-Jewish New Testament scholar Amy-Jill Levine. The book is called Short Stories by Jesus. Amy-Jill Levine concludes her chapter on the parable of the mugging on the road to Jericho with these words:

“Will we be able to care for our enemies who are also our neighbours? Will we be able to bind up their wounds rather than blow up their cities? And can we imagine that they might do the same for us?...the Biblical text and concern for humanity’s future tell us that we must.”

“God, our Father, Lord of all the world,

we thank you that through your Son

you have called us into the fellowship of

your universal Church.

Hear our prayer for your faithful people

that each in their vocation and ministry

may be an instrument of your love,

and give your servants now to be ordained

the needful gifts of grace;

through our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.

Amen.”

Ordn. of priests ASB 1980

29 years ago on the 4th July I was ordained priest and for me because of this the opening sentence from today’s Gospel is very apt:

“The Lord appointed seventy others and sent them on ahead of him in pairs to every town and place where he himself intended to go.” Luke 10:1

At the time I was ordained (or as my young nephew, 2 at the time, shouted out; ‘My Uncle Dean is being crowned’) I thought that it was significant that the service took place on the 4^th July – American Independence Day! With the emphasis on ‘Independence’! I thought; ‘Now I can go it alone, now I could change the world and more importantly the Church’ and of course I intended to do it all on my own as well. I didn’t need the help of others to do this – how quickly I realised that I was so wrong.

I was not, nor are any of us called or ordained to minister alone. For a start it is not my ministry that I exercise, it is Christ’s in which I share. My ministry only has validity when it is seen in relationship to that of Jesus - ordination is only one aspect of Christ’s ministry and my ordination as priest is only a part of the ministry to which I am called to by virtue of my baptism. Over the past 30 of ministry as deacon and priest years I have come to appreciate that my vocation to ordained ministry can only be seen in conjunction with the baptismal ministries of all my brothers and sisters in the faith. That is why for me Luke’s words:

“..in pairs..” and “..to every town..”

are vital and inspiring.

29/30 years ago I thought that I would quite likely end up as a priest in a rural area running a collection of congregations – never did I think that I’d work in a Cathedral or hold  diocesan and provincial posts or serve within a city! In fact on the mission front I can remember saying that I did not really think that mission was my thing, as I did not like cold calling or standing in public proclaiming the Word. God obviously has a sense of humour and over the past years has challenged me to continually review what Mission in the 21^st Century is all about.

Mission is vital for the life of the world and the life of the Church for it is through mission that the world can learn of the joy of Christ and the liberation of the Gospel message he proclaims. It is mission, mission that flows from the heart of God, that enflames, informs and inspires our ministry- mission and ministry cannot be separated or seen alone.

There are few of us committed to the ways of Jesus in the 21^st Century,

“ The harvest is plentiful, but the labourers few.” Luke 10:2

but there is a whole world, out there, that has yet to hear his voice and who long for it, even if they have yet to realise it. Alone we can never hope to even begin to reap the harvest but together……the possibilities are endless.

The priesthood in which I share is nothing to do with me alone I have been called to ordination on your behalf and on the behalf of all the baptised to go out into the world and do those things that you do not have time to do and to enable you into the ministries that you are called to follow.

For me the most wonderful and exciting thing about being a priest is all of you. You are the cause of my rejoicing when we join together in ministry, for together we have the potential to do many things that alone we could not achieve. Together we can shout the Good News louder than we can on our own and together we can support and encourage each other to always go on and do more.

You encourage me in what I do and for that I thank you, I hope that I may encourage you in all that you do as we collaboratively build the Kingdom of God.

Trinity 1 Good Shepherd. RAFA Service. 2022

Firstly, I want to than William for his graciousness as a former RAF chaplain for inviting me, a former Army Chaplain, or Pongo as we are affectionately called, to preach this morning at this Royal Air Force Association service!

I did serve however in a couple of tri service posts and of course on operations, we are all lumped in together, - the old joke of the Army digging in while the RAF check in, fortunately is not always the case and so I do have one or two blue credentials.

Each of us here belong to different organisations – former serving personnel, reservists, cadets, church members – and the one thing that unites us is a sense of belonging; that we are part of something greater than ourselves.

Each of the services are slightly different, but they all have core values: values which inculcate the ethos of the service, values which dictate every action and command, values which instill the highest standards of behavior on and off the battlefield. The Army, has 6 such values – Courage, Discipline, Respect for Others, Integrity, Loyalty and Selfless Commitment. The Royal Air Force is very similar with Respect, Integrity, Service and Excellence.

And for those of us with faith, well we have many values, but the military ones I think can work rather well: Courage to witness to our faith, Discipline of prayer and sacrament, Respect for others through loving others as we would want to be loved, Integrity – living out our lives in truth and selfless commitment is the sacrificial life that we are called into when Jesus asks us to take up our cross to follow him.

Whether military or church, it is a big ask to develop such values to live by: and I think that if we try and do it on our own, it is nigh on impossible.

I had the privilege to serve for a couple of years at the Infantry Training centre where all infantry recruits undertake their 6 months basic training, and they learn very early on that key to success is supporting one another – its about getting the section into a safe harbour, or the whole platoon across the finishing line of an eight mile tab – to simply look after yourself is not good – no one wants to be labelled ‘Jack’. It is an acknowledgement that no one can be good at everything and the best way to live is to look out for each other, playing to strengths, and supporting those who are struggling.

The military get that and it stays with them beyond active service: it is truly wonderful that there are organisations such as RAFA that provide ongoing fellowship, along with practical and moral support, along with so many other excellent veterans organisations and charities; I wish other organisations and institutions would follow the same example as it would make society a much stronger and supportive network.

The late Desmond Tutu, former Archbishop of South Africa, often spoke about Ubuntu – an African concept translated as ‘I am because we are.’ we are all bound together in ways that can be invisible to the eye; that there is a oneness to humanity; that we achieve ourselves by sharing ourselves with others, and caring for those around us. playing to each other’s strengths, and supporting one another’s weaknesses. it is this sense of belonging to something greater than ourselves that enables us to reach our full potential as God intended – it is others who help define us as individuals.

Being with others who share the same values, and who encourage, inspire and support us enables us to live life in abundance: And this is particularly true when it comes to faith. We have all heard the mantra that  you don’t need to be a Christian to go to church – I guess in one sense that’s true -  if I lives somewhere remote and unable to access a Christian community, this would not make me any less a Christian.

But without a sense of belonging or community, we miss out on so much.

Jesus knew this – and so when he talks about faith, he never presents it as a personal lifestyle choice that we try and live out on our own; he nearly always uses corporate language – of a flock of sheep, of houses with many rooms, and then in the reading I have chosen this morning, he talks about the relationship of faith as being like a vine with many branches. of being the true vine and us his branches, connected, dependant on one another, joined together by the grace and love of God, the vine grower.

So Faith is not just about us as individuals – it is a calling in to a shared life, it’s a calling to a sacrificial life, it’s a calling to a life where we flourish through belonging. Jesus couldn’t make this clearer in the gospel reading this morning where he says, abide in me as I abide in you. Just as the branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in me. A shared life brings much fruit.

Later on in our service, we will remember those who gave their lives for our country; for them, life was not about individualism: it was about the greater good and those dearly held values of freedom and peace… something they believed in passionately – so much so that they were prepared to lay down their own lives to preserve what they held dear.

But they are not just names on war memorials; and our calling to mind their sacrifice is far more than just remembering; if all we do is remember, then they remain just names in the past; but if we take on their values, their vision of a greater good, then they really do live on through us, and their sacrifice will not be in vain.  We continue that vision, working tirelessly for those shared values that sustain us and help us grow: putting aside individual ambition and working for the common good.

So it really is good to belong – it is in our DNA –  and through belonging, we find identity, meaning , and live life in its fullest as God intended.

Today we think of all of those branches that connect us with others, and though which we are nourished. Especially today,we give thanks for the work of the Royal Air Force Association and all veteran organisations. We pray for all those serving in our armed forces home and abroad and those who this day will be putting their lives in danger for the common good.

We give thanks for all our youth organisations and for the life skills they develop in our young people. And we give thanks to God for the community of the church - our shared life of faith, for the joy of belonging, for the strength and encouragement we receive from each other, and for the love and grace of God in whom we find fullness of life.

Almighty and eternal God, Lord and creator of all, who has brought us through adversity, hear us as we pray for all serving in the Royal Air Force today and all who have served in the past. We praise and thank You for all whose sacrifice and  service has attended the cause of peace and freedom in this nation and across this world. We also pray today for all members of the Royal Air Force Association and their work throughout the world. Amen.