Big and Little: The Parable of the Mustard Seed - A Sunday Sermon, October 5th, 2025, All Saints' Anglican Church, Rome

A Sermon for the Feast of St Michael and All Angels - September 28th, 2025 - All Saints' Rome

Nicodemus the Car Thief

Trinity Sunday

Year B

John 3:1-17

You see a car advertised. 

It appears to be the very one you want.  The right size, the right model.  Mileage looks good.   The right price.  You fire off an email or leave a voicemail – AND you get a message back within the hour.  Yes, you can see the car but no, you can’t drop by to see it.   I will come to you.  Tonight.

What gives?  Why the wait?  Why night-time?   You're right to be suspicious.   A darkened street corner in some public space, really?  You rightly wonder that maybe this person is trying to sell you something which doesn’t belong to him.

You know what belongs to you – your moveable and immoveable goods.  You’d call these your property.  You might have a list of these things stapled to your insurance policy. 

Secondly there are those things which you don’t own but which are nonetheless “your baby” – processes at work which you got rolling, an article you’ve written, an idea, a recipe, a piece of music, even, which you created that you consider yours.  

Lastly there are those things which you’ve been given to care for and to manage – the family fortune, the company secrets, the charter of the Association you belong to.  Whether any of these things belongs to you or not, you still have some sense of ownership over them.

In the third chapter of John's Gospel, Nicodemus the Pharisee pays a late-night visit to Jesus.  He’d know better than to say that he was an owner of Israel’s religious tradition.  But there’s no question that he comes to Jesus this night as a gatekeeper of Israel’s religion - one of its chief stewards – one of its guarantors - one of its border guards, if you like.  Israel’s religion is his baby.  As a religious expert and arbiter Nicodemus could be said to “get” the whole concept of God and to be one of the “go to” people for questions of law-keeping and belonging.  

Tonight Nicodemus believes he’s in a position to sell something.  He comes to Jesus expressing a genuine interest.  The night-time meeting, on the other hand, suggests a guarded caution about what Jesus is doing.  We think you’re one of us, he tells Jesus.  God must clearly be on your side given what’s happening around you in your ministry. 

One of us – one of us. 

Nicodemus presumes to stand in Jesus’ presence as somebody who believes he can include or exclude this itinerant rabbi from the mainstream. He’s offering Jesus a franchise.  And this is where Jesus stops him in his tracks. 

You see this is the deal with God – God gives to whom he wants.   He chooses unlikely partners, he gives to people who don’t deserve it, he decides to start somewhere and points his finger at Abraham wandering with his family at some crossroads on a middle eastern trade route and he says – this one - I think I’ll start here with this one – with this random - and Abraham gets what he needs because he says “Okay – start with me then”  

It’s on your curriculum, all of this, Nicodemus – I’m not telling you something you don’t know.  God gives freely and wants the world to have what he wants to give and here you are telling me that you can cut me in on your deal?  That you can let me have a bit of what you have? 

Ask yourself what anybody’s “property” consists of, at the end of the day.  Your name may be on the title deed but you’re only one of a series of people who has lived at 246 Elm Road across the span of a century.  You’re here and then you’re not.  And notwithstanding intellectual property laws, can anybody really be the proprietor of an idea?  Our conceptions of ownership don’t survive a steady gaze.  Not when we are just dust in the wind.

God crosses the centuries.  Nicodemus must know that.  The spirit of God moves here and there.  God speaks to whom he wishes.  Our drawing of circles around ourselves and our communities, our dividing up of religious resources and our “proprietary” attitude towards the story of God prevents us from being willing participants in the process ourselves and hold others back from being included.   No, Nicodemus, you don't get God - you may not draw a circle around him.  He's not your possession or something which you claim in the name of your tribe or the nation or your collection of right thinking friends.  We are not proprietors of God's Spirit although, on a good day, we might end up being followers of that same Spirit.

We don’t “get God”.  If anything, God gets us.

Who is the hero?

The Second Sunday 

after Epiphany

Year B

1 Samuel 3:1-20

I’ll start off like many other clergy around the world are doing this morning by shaking off the last remnants of our post-Christmas indolence, port wine and chocolate and remind you what the appointed readings tend to focus on in these Sundays after Epiphany: 

The presence of God – word or light – extends out into the cosmos.

The foreign Magi visit the Christ child – through them God’s gift is extended to the nations.

God “speaks” the day and the night into existence – and all the fish, and the “creeping things”, and the animals – wild and domestic - and, ultimately, even our human forerunners.  What was once formless-and-void takes on direction and diversity at God’s behest.

And today:  God speaks to the boy Samuel and reinstates the voice of prophecy in the land.  In today’s Gospel reading, Jesus calls Philip – Philip goes and tells Nathanael – the knowledge of Jesus’ mission is furthered and extended through human activity and interaction.

Ripples, then -  ripples of both voice and light extend out from the speaking source, from the shining source, into the surrounding silence and darkness – sometimes directly from God and sometimes with human agency of one sort or another:  servants, prophets and disciples.  You and me.

And that, Charlie Brown, is what Epiphany is about.  That’s what the word Epiphany means – to shine forth.

Now - speaking of human agents – maybe you have a hankering to be one of the heroes of the Epiphany season.  You might fancy yourself a Samuel or a Philip in your generation – and why not?

Why shouldn’t the young people in our little choir this morning imagine that what they sing and play and even compose could have an earth-shaking effect on how men and women understand the mystery and beauty of God’s love for the world?  Bach did it.  Hildegaard of Bingen did it.  Are you chopped liver?  Why not you? 

Or why shouldn’t the clergy in our little churches believe that God could use the words they speak, the liturgy they celebrate and the pastoral care they exercise to nurture and mediate-into-life communities of faith which would stand out in their generation and serve as a launch pad for revivals of the sort that we have seen at pivotal moments in the Church’s history?  Other priests and ministers in other generations have been a part of such movements.  John Wesley was just a bloke.  John Henry Newman was pink inside.  Why not us?  Why not now? 

Why not you in your place of work, doing what you do, making what you make, writing what you write, leading in the way you lead?   Why couldn't you make the sudden left turn necessary to change the vector of your organization in such a way that people are nourished, enlightened or changed?

You who are raising children – or grandchildren – you’d like to raise them to be truth tellers, light shiners, doers of justice, openers of doors, inventers of new ways for people to live.  And why not?  St Augustine had a mother.  Why shouldn’t you have grand hopes for the young souls over whom you still have some sway?

What makes any of this impossible?

All well and good.  We could be God’s Samuels and Philips in our own generation – or assist in the formation of such people.  Everyone loves heroes.  The world needs heroes.  Bring on the heroes or those who forge them.

But – as you might already suspect – I am about to throw a spanner in the works.  It’s what we do sometimes – cheeky clergy - and today I find it necessary to nuance my enthusiasm a little bit with recourse to our Old Testament lesson from 1^st Samuel.

Who is the hero?  Well – the first candidate who sidles up for the honour – the one who first catches our eye -  is that very fellow who will give his name to the book of the Bible - the wee boy Samuel, himself, lying on his bed and hearing a voice calling out his name.  Back home in Clermont-Ferrand our Senior Warden this morning is arranging colouring sheets for our very active children which will, doubtless, show Samuel sitting on the edge of the bed with a quizzical look upon his face because he’s just heard his name called.  Samuel gets up and wanders next door to where old Eli is sleeping. 

Eli is a tragic figure, really – educated and formed to know which way is up and which way is down he has, nonetheless, let things slip rather badly.  The sanctuary he presides over is corrupt – his sons are in cahoots with the parish treasurer to not only rob Peter to pay Paul but it appears they are paying themselves rather handsomely as well.  Samuel asks why Eli called him and Eli says that he never called him and that he must be dreaming.  He tells Samuel to go back to bed. 

God calls a second time and Samuel gets up again.  Eli – what do you want?, he asks.  Stupid boy, says Eli, let me sleep.  Go back to bed.

God calls a third time, and Samuel approaches Eli again but this time it’s Eli who has an epiphany. 

If you’re a cartoonist and one of your characters has an epiphany you usually draw this as a lightbulb appearing above that character’s head.  

Eli’s formation as a priest kicks in. 

Eli suddenly thinks a thought. 

Eli is struck by a possibility. 

Go back to bed, he tells Samuel, and the next time you hear the voice, I want you to say “Speak Lord, for your servant is listening”.

Now, I want you to understand clearly that there is nobody in this story with as much to lose as old Eli would lose if God were to start speaking to his people again after a long silence, or who would find himself as quickly displaced as he would if God were to begin to inhabit his sanctuary after a long absence.

Let that sink in.  Eli is bad and Eli is vulnerable. 

Were he to act in his own self-interest he would provide the young Samuel with earplugs.  He would put a pillow over the boy's face and lean on it.  He wouldn't do the very thing he ends up doing which is to act as a midwife for the truth to come out. 

God’s truth about the love of God for the world, God’s truth about the future of Israel’s gift to the world is, first of all, a word of challenge to Eli’s job, fortunes, family and his performance as priest, caretaker and human being.  

And here I believe I may have answered my earlier “why not” questions about me and about you with a modicum of accuracy. 

Why will our music not change the world?  Why will our priestly ministry not cause others to turn a corner?  Why will your work not have the footprint it could have and why will our children and grandchildren not thrive as heroes in their generation?  Part of the answer is that we have one eye on the task and another on other commitments – our comfort, our safety, our habits, our pension and our position.  We have an interest, at some level, in things staying the same.  We are not willing to pay the price. 

Our own self-interest may even interfere with our selfless love of our children.  That is a bitter pill, isn’t it?  Against our better judgement we raise them the way we were raised.  You see it all the time. 

Truth-speaking and light-bearing and life-giving will cost us – first of all – they cost us a great deal and we are all a bit like Eli.  We get up in the morning and see the compromised person standing before us in the full-length mirror and we say “We can get by”.  For another day, or until the end of the week or until our retirement.  We can avoid the wrath of others, we can avoid risk and we can avoid facing up to the full measure of who we have become. 

As my grandfather used to say: “It may be an ugly dog but it’s my dog”.

But hold on a minute. 

Let me remove the spanner from the works and show you what a real hero looks like:   Samuel enters the chamber of Eli a final time.  Eli asks him: “So?  What did he say?”  

The young Samuel prevaricates a little.  He tries to sugar coat things.  Eli presses him: “Spare me nothing.  Tell me exactly what he said!”

And Samuel tells him.  He tells him the whole story.  He leaves no words out.  Eli sighs and leans back against the pillow.  This is what the old man says:

“It is the Lord; let him do what seems good to him” 

Anyone who reads the story will understand completely that Eli is a bad man but, I’m sorry, it seems to this reader that Eli’s words are more akin to Our Lady’s response to the angel Gabriel,

“Be it unto me, according to your word” (Luke 1:38)

than they are to Ahab’s dreadful cry,

"Have you found me, O my enemy?" (1 Kings 21:20)

In spite of himself, his sons and his personal history, Eli has proven himself a hero – perhaps “the” hero of this morning’s Bible readings.  In spite of what our children were colouring on Sunday, the witness of Eli's words will be more helpful to us, here and now, than will sketching out the progress of the young boy Samuel.  

Samuel is precisely that - a boy.  He is a blank slate and none of us here this morning is that person.  To “locate ourselves in the story”, as we should always try to do, would be to ask ourselves the degree to which we are able, in courage and acquiescence, to cease being a block to truth and light by allowing that truth and light to land squarely on us first.  

Our contribution to the life of the Kingdom, to the health of the Church, to the future of our art, to civic society, to the lives of our children and grandchildren depends on just that.  It what folks do.  It’s a thing which can be done.  Much depends on it.

God bless you.  

You have everything to lose.  

You have everything to gain.   

The saints have shown us how to do it.  Even sinful old Eli mustered up the courage.  People do it all the time. 

A Sermon for the Fifth Sunday after Pentecost

Proper 9 – Year A

Genesis 24:34-38, 42-49, 58-67

I’m quite taken by the family’s blessing of Rebekah from the Genesis reading – the reading which Sheryl read to us this morning.

“May you, our sister, become thousands of myriads”

A young person stands at the threshold of a life which is rich and open.  There’s something appealing here – I would like my life to be that rich and that open.  I regret the parts of it which may over time have become stunted or locked up.  Lucky Rebekah.  She was young and she must have been in the right place at the right time.

There’s a moment in the first reading when Rebekah slips down the side of her camel, veils herself and prepares to meet the man she will spend her life with.  In our story, this is the happy result.  Go back a bit though.  It follows from an earlier moment after the servant explained how God had led him to Rebekah at the well when her family turns to the young woman and asks – so what do you think?  Will you go with this man?  I refer to these as “moments” by the way because they are powerful little self-contained units which communicate their contents well.  I can imagine the film scene.  I can imagine the painting which some Flemish artist might have painted.  If Caireen were up here telling you the story she would no doubt tell it with all the different voices – including the camel’s voice.

When we gather again in greater numbers at the beginning of September, someone will ask you at coffee time:  So how was your holiday with your family?  

 It had its moments – might be the reply. 

Ah, you say, let me pour myself a coffee and you can tell me about it

We are not expecting to hear about a holiday that had its minutes, are we?  We don’t care that it lasted exactly one or two or three weeks, we are expecting to hear about a holiday which had its moments – we are more concerned about its contents – either good or bad – eventful – joyful – painful. 

We use the word moment and the word minute quite interchangeably.  Take a minute to think before you answer we say to people who are about to take an exam or testify in a court case.  We could have said take a moment to think because we never meant that they should count to sixty.    The first use of the word had nothing to do with time at all – it described a unit of force.  Archimedes used the term to describe the action of levers of various lengths upon their fulcrums.  We might use the word “torque” in its place.  That alternate current meaning of the word moment should have something to do with forces of various kinds – the force necessary to overcome inertia, electrical energy or somesuch.   And even if you’re not an engineer we still use the word Momentum and the adjective Momentous which give us some sense of the difference between a minute and a moment.

And because I’m old and boring I’m going to further illustrate by relating to you a minute of my childhood.

I am ten years old and walking to school.  I walk down the path from our house and turn right on Transit Road.  I carry on to the first stop sign where I intend to turn left.  If I’m walking at my normal rate it takes me just more than a minute to reach that stop sign.    

Let me tell you about a moment from my childhood.

I am ten years old and going to school in Victoria B.C. from my house which is 200 yards from the Pacific Ocean.   I walk out the front door and down the path to the street into fog as thick as pea soup.  The foghorn on Trial Island – just off shore - is sounding its deep two-note blast.  Somebody on our street is burning oak leaves and the air is rich with the smell.  It’s also low tide and mingled in with the smell of the burning leaves is the smell of the seaweed rotting on the beach. The short trip to the first stop sign takes a little longer than a minute because I keep stopping to listen to the sounds and smell the air.  That’s a moment.   You could write a poem about it, it has a shape, it has substance.  Three unrelated worlds weave together into a fabric.  The burning leaves and the smelly beach have nothing to do with the fog or with each other, the foghorn has nothing to do with a small boy’s trip to school but the reason small boys are so often late for school and don’t get the gold star on the chart is that they stop to look at stuff along the way – at the way worlds which are them and worlds which are not them weave together at their intersection into a moment.

Being small one tends to be hit by moments – they happen to you – small people and adults who retain their sense of wonder even in their riper years – are struck by their moments.  They have little authorship over them.  They are lucky to have them. 

Let’s nail this down.  Are you one of those who would like to be fruitful and are not – to be myriads and are not – who would love to rediscover the openness, the beauty and the complexity of life and are not there today.   Doesn’t it seem a little bit cruel simply to say you should stand around until you are struck by something.    That’s no gift.  It would be a bit like saying that on behalf of the Anglican tradition we sincerely hope your lucky number comes up. 

I am compelled tell you another story.

There is a bit of family tradition handed down, from somebody on my mother’s side, that when my great grandfather was studying for the Presbyterian ministry at Queen’s College in Kingston Ontario at the end of the 19^th Century, one of the College’s previous graduates wrote back to his friends that the work he was doing in China (on the eve of the Boxer Rebellion) was proving impossible without a wife and could somebody please help him out.  The story has it that a small group paid a visit to the missionary and deaconess’ training home in Toronto and enquired of the young women enrolled there whether any amongst them felt the vocation to marry a missionary in the field. 

I cannot imagine the story without a bit of embarrassed silence.  There must, surely, have been a bit of a pause - an awkward moment.   

As it happened, the query was met with agreement by one young woman in Toronto.  Yes, she felt so inclined.  Letters presumably were exchanged and the young woman packed her trunks and sailed to China at the beginning of a hazardous decade for foreigners (and especially missionaries) living in that country.  One man’s history weaves into the history of one woman – not as an accident or a happy exception or blind luck - but as the fruit of risks taken by the one who asks and the one who answers.

In our first reading this Sunday, Abraham’s servant is given the task of finding a wife for Isaac from amongst his kinsfolk in Mesopotamia.  The servant prays to God for direction, establishes the criteria by which he will know God is so directing him and is subsequently led to the young woman Rebekah who is drawing water at the local well.  Later, when the servant has spoken with her family, they turn to the girl. 

“Will you go with this man?” they ask.   “I will” she says. 

The young woman’s agreement leads to the family’s blessing

“May you, our sister, become thousands of myriads; may your offspring gain possession of the gates of their foes.” 

The faith of Abraham’s bonded servant intersects with a young woman’s freedom to say “yes” or “no” and the story culminates in blessing.   Our story weaves together those things which simply are or which “must be” (either by God’s command or by Abraham’s will) with what “could or could not be” due to family politics and individual choice.  Energy – you see - goes into the equation from two sides.  

The question is asked.  The answer is “yes”.  The door to a world opens. 

I hope you’ll give some thought to where you are right now.  Maybe I’m preaching to the choir but you may have some sadness at the thought that you will never see an open door in front of you, or a new horizon, or be better and bigger than you are now.  Is any of this remotely important to you?  Does it hit a nerve with anyone?  Are you disappointed that you may never see the moment when you slip down the side of your camel into blessing or get from where you are now to that fruitful and hopeful place? 

Our key story this morning concerns much more than lucky cards or lucky stars.  Her moment is as much about the word “yes” issuing from Rebekah’s lips as it was about Abraham’s servant having discerned that she was the one.   Our engagement allows and even creates moments.  The weaving together of worlds happens because we want it and because we do it.  By our affirmation, by way of our curiosity and because of our willingness - by the word “yes” which we utter.  Few of us stand on ground so sloped in the right downward direction that entry and discovery are something that we merely fall into by the power of gravity or the weight of events.  Nor are our decisions ever so distilled in pure forms, apart from the ordinary particularity of our lives and families, that the choice is merely obvious. 

Secret gardens, hidden doors, the way in and the way out of labyrinths, pearls of great price discovered amongst lesser gems, all the treasures ever found in fields by nameless characters in Jesus’ parables, and - yes - the very thing which you – men and women, boys and girls - want or need - these are to be found by seekers.  

Will you go with this man?  Will you engage with this community?  There is something you can do.  You’ll do it if you want it enough.  It requires engagement and risk - undertaking tasks which extend beyond your pay-grade and beyond the bounds of what is proven to be safe. For that matter, even beyond the bounds of what is generally considered polite conversation. 

A Sermon for Ash Wednesday

A Liberal Application of Ashes III

The language used by the celebrant at an Ash Wednesday service for the “imposition of ashes” is nothing if not sharp:

Remember (your name here) that you are dust.

To dust you shall return.

Don't blurt out something like this to the stranger in the aisles of a grocery store. You might find yourself answering questions like:

Why did you say such an aggressive and unsettling thing to a stranger?

What gave you the right to intrude on somebody else's sense of well-being?

Tonight you are volunteers. And the words in question are part of the Ash Wednesday liturgy and not a personal blurt on my part. But are they even news? Who needs to be reminded that life is short and human nature is flawed? Isn't it the comic book caricature of the clergyman that he's the old guy up at the front of the church who looks at people in good health and enjoying their lives rather a lot, so that he can shake his finger at them and say – “it won’t last, you know!” 

He tells the beautiful that they will soon be old and ugly.
He tells the strong that they will weaken and fade.
He tells those proud of the recent past that their achievements are really just so much dry grass.

Why would anyone want to be such a professional wet blanket? No let this old clergyman at the front of the church rejoice with you about what everything which is good and lively and on the ascendant in your daily life.

And, frankly, like most pastors I can conjure up in my mind the faces of people who I know to be currently struggling with the deathward stance their lives have taken. They are ill and their bodies will not get better. A treasured relationship has died and will never be restored. They were sidelined in their employment or vocation. They are caught up by their own deep moral flaw or are the victims of that same flaw in somebody else. The bloom is off their rose. They’ve been around the block. They've seen too much. What more could their parish priest possibly add as he advances upon them this evening at the beginning of an Ash Wednesday service with a black and dripping thumb:

V. Remember, Roger, that you are dust. To dust you shall return.

R. Thank you, Father, I knew that.

We might hypothesize somebody who is "not in the know" about the fragility of life or the limits of their own natural goodness. They are in the darlings of everybody at work, they are regulars at the gym, they have perfect children with good teeth and an immaculate house – but in order for them to be that ignorant about life they would also have to be people who didn’t read or who had no vicarious experience of other people’s grief and contingency. I’m not sure that such people - devoid of questions, doubts or depth – even exist. If they did, then I suppose that a liberal application of ashes accompanied by aggressive words reminding them of the shortness and uncertainty of human life meant to assault their self-reliance would be perfectly in order. We might be doing them a favor although, frankly, I’m not sure you'd find them here at an evening Ash Wednesday service or our service at noon today at the office unless it were completely out of habit or unless they’d walked into the wrong doorway by mistake and were too embarrassed to get up and leave.

So why are we here? And what is this sharp language and this small plate of ashes about? What are we beating ourselves up about? It’s precisely this, I believe: If the language is sharp it is not meant to say that your lives or your activities are bad or without value. In fact, it’s a message that heads in quite the opposite direction: the sharp language underscores the tremendous value to be found in our lives, our pursuits and our allegiances by reminding us of the frame within which these events take place and that we must honour the time we have been given.

The American poet Carl Sandburg wrote a poem called Limited in his 1916 collection entitled Chicago Poems. It goes like this:

I am riding on a limited express, one of the crack trains of the nation.​
Hurtling across the prairie into blue haze and dark air go fifteen all-steel coaches 
   holding a thousand people.​
(All the coaches shall be scrap and rust and all the men and women laughing in the  
   diners and sleepers shall pass to ashes.)​
I ask a man in the smoker where he is going and he answers: “Omaha.”


What is a limitation if not the edge of something. Quite neutral really - it defines where the thing stops and something else begins. Or where the thing stops and mere space begins.

Think of it this way: You are at the bottom of Puy de Dome and you have your easel set up and your paints out on the tray. You are painting a picture of the Puy de Dome with all the paragliders swirling around its top and the funicular train heading up the slope and the communications tower on the top. There’s a lot you might dream about painting but you do not have the liberty of including everything to the infinite right or left, to the utter east or west. You’re not painting Issoire or Vichy.

Your canvas has an edge.  When the painting is finished it will have a frame and the frame defines what the subject is and ensures that it is not some other thing. Let your mind drift to Issoire or Vichy or Le Puy-en-Velay. Today, in this time and place you are painting Puy-de-Dome.

Without its frame life is, at best, undefined. If you come to one of our soup suppers down at 42 you will be dished out a bowl of soup. You will be dished out a certain amount depending on the ratio of soup to hungry humans. Look into the bottom of your bowl.  There is your meat and veg. . That is your portion. And your portion, generous or slender, is not infinite.

These ashes are not the church's attack on youth, beauty, strength, innocence, the pride in one’s achievements or healthy egos. They remind us pointedly that our time on earth is finite and the beautiful things of life and the noble things and the worthy things must be chased down and worked towards.

Or think of it this way: It is my experience that people, in the wake of a funeral, or a great and troubling event, feel disturbed. Beyond feelings of sympathy or empathy for the family of the deceased and beyond even the immediate loss of somebody loved and valued, they are disturbed about what this means for them. There is a nagging recognition of life's ticking clock. The question posed by the death of a friend or by a disasterous event are these:

Have the requisite colours been added to my painting - here in this 30th year of my life or the 40th or even the 58th? What about my broken relationships which have never been mended and which are unmended for want of a conversation or a letter? What about my youthful vow to “straighten up and fly right?” - to be courageous and self-giving? What about the midlife promise to recover that early vow?

Having thrown our handful of earth into the grave after the funeral we brush the dust from our hand as we walk back to the car and hope that the unsettled feeling passes and that life returns to normal. We wipe the smudge off our forehead with a soapy washcloth at the end of the Ash Wednesday service and with it perhaps the healthful but troubling question will disappears.

Which would be a shame, really, because that's exactly the question that this service wants to pose. It’s not an accusation that we are shallow and stupid people of whom little good can be said.

We are the living.
We are the mostly healthy.
And we have years left to us.

To become aware that we must make the most of our days, to seek out love and to take risks, to discover the enduring value of relationships and commitments would be the gift of a lifetime.


*the "III" in this indicates that this is the third iteration of a sermon which I have been slowly cobbling together over the years.  This is the third version.  By the time I retire it'll be a corker.












Posted with Blogsy

Giving Thanks in Crazy Times

A Sermon for an American Thanksgiving in France

2015 - Year B

 Matthew 6:25-33

Don't worry, says Jesus; not about food or drink, not about being

appropriately clothed.  Don't even worry about the length of your life.

You think you are alone with these concerns but you're not.

God knows you need all these things.

Yonder are the Gentiles.  Look at them strive.  Don't be like them.

Seek first the Kingdom of God and all these things (the very

things you worry about) will be added to you.

Bible readings for Thanksgiving (October in Canada and November in America) are chosen according to the same three-year-cycle as the usual Sunday lections.  This year - Year B - dwells heavily on the subject of anxiety and the Gospel reading for the day is taken from the Sermon on the Mount. 

Jesus tells us not to worry. 

Let’s clear the table first, shall we?  There are two things we need to negate (one of them completely) and something else we need to explain so that we can see clearly what Jesus then proclaims to his listeners at the end of the passage as the best and most worthy way to deal with anxiety. 

After all, this is the Sermon on the Mount.   We might imagine it to be a sort of manifesto for Christians everywhere and at all times.   Because it deals with the subjects of worry and uncertainty it may have a particular leverage on us right now.  Terrorist attacks have taken place in various places around the world.  Here in France and in Western Europe families and friends are grieving the events and losses of the last week or so. A much larger community is worried about what might take place in the future.  As an expatriate community living in Clermont-Ferrand we have some particular refinements on that worry.  When the news reached our home countries, there were enquiries from friends and family members.  Are you safe right now?  Are you secure in the future?    How far is Clermont from Paris?  Are there troops on the street?  Do you live in ethnically mixed neighborhoods?  What sort of precautions are you all taking?  So, what should be our attitude in crazy and unsettling times?  If we're being told by Jesus not to worry we want to know how.  What are we being told not to do?  What should we do instead? 

First of all some negations:  The subject at hand is not worry itself.  Jesus is not chiding those of us who worry about nonsense.  That would be easy angle to take.   That would mean that this section of the Sermon on the Mount is directed to the ten percent of the population who jump at shadows or who always imagine the worst or who have lived with a sense of dread and impending doom most of their lives and watch helplessly as this anxiety passes from one thing to the next.  For such people this anxiety is more about them than it is about the world.  Faith can have a hand in fixing that too.  So can therapy.  So, too, will friendship.  These might help us to change the way we think. That’s another sermon, though.   Maybe a pastoral conversation.  That's not what this scripture is about.  Jesus is telling his followers on the mountain side that they should not even worry about things which are real and substantial threats to them – the absence of food, drink, and clothing – up to and including the very spans of their lives.  Real things – don’t worry about them, says Jesus.

There’s something else we need to negate and clear from the table:  Is Jesus simply praising a peasant’s or poor artisan’s life by suggesting that it won’t get any better by worrying?  Jesus was speaking to poor country people about a life of subsistence which, while it was hard, was at least working for them.  How could they complain too much?  They were alive after all, weren’t they, as they sat on the mountainside and listened to him?  They were descended from people who had successfully navigated poor and difficult lives and who had scraped by.   Their parents were no more secure than they were.  But they were alive, getting by year-by-year “working for the man,” living in their villages, playing with their surviving children. Is this a sermon meant to dignify a chronic life of worry and struggle as being ‘not so bad after all – most of you will survive - look at the birds, look at the flowers’?  Why would it take Jesus to say such a thing?  They’d heard that from their oppressors and employers. No, I don’t believe that Jesus was simply praising the low and humble life by recourse to nature and family history.  Both Jesus and the crowds understood the novelty of what he was proclaiming which was the presence of the Kingdom around them - Good News for the poor - not merely the dignity of the daily grind.  It’s what drew them to the hillside in the first place.

Before we leave the idea of an inherited ability to “scrape by”, let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater.  Isn’t there a well-known path through uncertainty that others walked before us?  You may be related to people who have lived - gotten by – even thrived - in highly insecure circumstances.  Some of you have work colleagues or even school mates here in Clermont who have come from countries where physical security is a daily concern and where the tasks of raising a family and maintaining a household takes place in an atmosphere of turmoil and chaos.  You might want to ask them how it’s done - and done successfully, for that matter.  But even this is still not the point of the passage.

Don't worry, says Jesus.

The word he uses for worry has, at its root, the idea of "dividing up" (“don’t divide” or “don’t be divided up”).  In English we say "don’t go to pieces" – similar, but still not completely on the nose.  The “dividing up” behind this Greek word for worry seems to be more like taking ten one-dollar-notes and trying to apply a dollar to each bill which has come through your letterbox, or trying to deal with all threats to safety, comfort or security simultaneously and thereby turning in frantic circles, desperate and with insufficient resources. The presumption is, of course, that we are completely alone with a single tank of gas that will not get us all the way to Swift Current or a limited pot of money which will not satisfy all our creditors.  Not that, Jesus says.  Don’t do that.  Unify your effort.  Focus your energy.  Do something else first.  He even tells us what that is:  First, says Jesus, seek the Kingdom of God and its righteousness.  After that, all these things will fall into place 

Is seeking the Kingdom of God, then, just a matter of running from what we know to be the case –  what is true?  Is it a matter of going in a different and unrelated direction?   You might object that what Jesus is saying in his Sermon on the Mount is simple denial.  Well, what is exactly is true here?  The truth that hits us in the face – which needs to be reacted to (which Jesus tells us not to do) and doesn’t need to be sought out (what Jesus does tell us to do) is written in four inch headlines in the newspaper in deep red block capitals on our television screens, with drumming music in the background, as we watch the 24 hour news.  Our way of life is at stake.  People of ill will lurk in the shadows.  Further plots are suspected.  The four-inch headlines in the newspaper and the deep red graphics on the network news would tell you that last Friday evening in Paris was a Night of Evil, a Night of Chaos and a Night of Danger. We find that we easily come to inhabit a world divided into black and white, yes and no, friend and enemy, good and evil, right and left in which we have no choice but to flee, react, hide, and strike out - or just helplessly flap our hands.  That might be our character or it may be what we do when we’re not feeling in control of circumstances. You and I should suspect, though, that the truth which you don’t need to seek, the truth which simply hits you in the face, is rarely the truth. And yes, the one positive command that Jesus issues in this passage is to seek - to seek the Kingdom and its peculiar logic.

We are mature enough to tolerate a measure of ambiguity - that state of life where paradoxes abound and more than one thing is true.  The battle is not between a thing which is false and a thing which is true but between two things which are found to be true when you dig a little bit – when you seek truth out.

It’s true that evil, chaos and danger were in evidence in Paris on the Friday night in question, in Beirut the day before and in Mali a few days later at the hands of small and organized groups of terrorists.  But that very same French capital city, for example, contained a much larger community of people intent on doing some of the following things:  comforting and shielding people with a physical embrace who needed to be hidden, reassured and protected, opening their doors to people who had found themselves stranded in the 10^th and 11^th Arrondissements, working for days to ensure the appropriate medical care for the wounded who were swamping Paris hospitals and conducting all the appropriate investigations to ensure the safety of their city.  What we don’t see screaming at us in the headlines is any mention of a Night of Courage, a Night of Friendship or a Night of Helping Strangers. Little mention is made of the people who agonized within themselves in the following days and who vowed that their responses would not make them smaller people, less open to others and less capable of love.  That the truth of what occurred on a particular evening in Paris was expressed in one way and not in another was a choice that somebody made.  Somebody who is not us - who have sat on the hillside and heard Jesus tell us that in the Kingdom things are divided up differently.  

 We have rather a lot of choice in the matter.  On such a night, while the panic and the anger, the prejudice and all the frantic feelings have been flagged and then negotiated, there always remains something to do - something that makes us better and not worse, more open and not hidden away. Life in the Kingdom of God is living within a truth which men and women have chosen to seek out.    It is quite possibly not the first thing in their mind and certainly not the immediate reaction.  What is discovered is a bigger world - a place where worries and hungers are mediated by purpose.  Tell your children that.  Tell your neighbours.  There's always something to do.  And be thankful that such a world is there for the seeking. 

A Sermon
The Eighth Sunday after Pentecost
Luke 10:38-42

When my daughter was about to be born we cast about for a name.

There were family names and names from literature. Seems to me we even bought a book of “baby names”.

You join up a potential Christian name with a last name to see what sounds right and one of the names which sounded right with the surname Warren was the name Martha.

At supper with my parents one evening I floated the name Martha Warren.

What did they think?

My father objected. It was a name, he thought, which brought with it the association that she would perpetually be doing the dishes, or hoovering or cleaning up while others read or wrote or studied. He hoped his grand-daughter wouldn’t be someone like that. And the negative associations with the name Martha come from this story – of two sisters named Mary and Martha – one who sat with the male disciples at the feet of Jesus and who listened and learned – the other who kept to her kitchen and cooked and cleaned – until finally one evening she took off her apron and threw it to the floor and came storming into the front room where she said:

“Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to do all the work by myself? Tell her then to help me!”

I know someone who is proud of the fact that she is a Martha. She refers to herself as a Martha. She mentions occasions where she and the other Marthas at her church get together to do what needs to be done. There are jobs around her church which need doing and she is a person of practical bent who can look at a task and imagine a strategy for doing it. When projects are proposed somebody inevitably asks “so how are we going to get this done” and people turn to her to ask her opinion because she’s the sort of person who will know not only how to initiate a task but how to bring it to fruition. What she starts she finishes. She’s that sort of person.

Now, she believes herself to be a facilitator of any number of other ministries in her congregation, a sort of pivot in her church, if you like, around which the various other ministries and activities turn. If she wasn’t at her post then they would not be able to do what they feel called to do.

And of course – she’s not a Martha, then, is she?

Being a Martha in the context of this morning’s reading has nothing to do with being practical or even task-oriented. Martha is not presented here as a practical facilitator of other people’s ministries and activities. What earns her the mild reproach from Jesus is the fact of her jealousy towards her sister – her desire to tear her sister Mary away from what Mary feels called to do – her need to make other people in her own image, her insecurity, her anger and her need to control. Far from being the sort of person who will help someone else achieve and realize her vocation her chief desire seems to be to drag her sister back. And Jesus will have none of it.

“Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things; there is need of only one thing. Mary has chosen the better part, which will not be taken away from her.”

We may imagine, of course, a background to this story which the Gospel writers have no desire to tell us about in any detail but which we have seen acted-out in relationships between people we’ve known – relationships which develop and solidify over time: that of siblings or friends, men and women associated with each other over many years and decades, who grow so close that change or transformation becomes difficult or impossible.

What happens when, in an established marriage or relationship, one of the partners develops an interest? What happens to best friends when one of them falls in love? What happens when a hard drinking or addicted spouse decides the take the cure – gets stronger – no longer needs to be bailed out or gotten out of trouble or constantly supported? What happens when one member of any “deadly duo” decides all of a sudden to undertake some higher education or decides that he wants to go back to Church?

Brothers and sisters, husbands, wives and partners, best friends: we begin to depend, sometimes quite unhealthily, on things not changing and on people remaining for us the people they’ve always been. When they change we don’t understand. We feel abandoned – we invoke the times we were ‘there’ for them – with constancy and evenness. And this is how they repay us? Abandoning us? Moving on?

This story does not end in tragedy. Martha and Mary, along with their brother Lazarus, remain associated with Jesus throughout his ministry. Within the larger circle of the followers of Jesus they will remain key players and their home in Bethany will be a base for ministry. Martha, however, does not get her wish in this particular case and the relationship which develops from this point on will forever contain the fact of Mary’s liberty to be a disciple.

There is a word here for close friends and for those partnered and covenanted in love together – that love must contain liberty and that much of what is called love, if it is not jostled and renewed, can imprison the very people we claim to love. In such a situation we may misunderstand the other person’s claim of liberty as a challenge to us, as loss and lovelessness.

Some of God’s people are, at their very core, practical and earthy people – able to discern the physical need of the moment and make use of what is at hand to make that the possible real – earthy and “hands on” sorts of people. Our food nourishes others, our talent with physical resources provides for the needs of others – clothes them, provisions them and sets them about their tasks.

The name they give us when we’re born, however, doesn’t matter overmuch. We grow and develop as we do – because of what is in us and in response to the world we mingle with. There are always surprises, always a wrench or two thrown into our well-practised habits and solid relationships.

We have a point of faith beyond ourselves – beyond even our well practised and dependable alliances.

In the long term, love will endure change.

A Sermon

The Seventh Sunday after Pentecost
Luke 10:25-37

You’ve heard it said that “familiarity breeds contempt”. Sometimes we know something – a story or a saying - that we’d actually prefer not to hear it again. The story we’re told by parents and grandparents that seems to be a truism – we roll our eyes when we hear it yet again, one more time. I suppose that the term “good Samaritan” provokes a bit of a yawn. So-and-so is a good Samaritan – meaning that he serves on all sorts of committees – a good Samaritan – a do-gooder – someone who might not be a lot of fun in a conversation at a houseparty. Someone like that would end up making everybody feel guilty.

And yes – it’s a story that suffers from overuse – but like many of the parables which Jesus told he is, in fact, answering a question in such a way as to change minds and to change people’s perceptions. To tell us something we didn’t already know and in a dramatic fashion. It’s a shame, then, that the story suffers so from over-use.

A lawyer – or a teacher of the law – depending on your translation asks him a question. There’s something in the tone of voice of the lawyer who addressed Jesus that gets the readers back up from the get-go. Luke tells us that the question was asked to “test Jesus” but we’d have known that from the question itself. The questioner is a lawyer, after all. It’s Jesus who appears to be in the witness booth. The lawyer asks what is necessary to inherit eternal life – a very general question. Jesus asks him what is written in the law and the lawyer comes back with the two great commandments – love of God and love of neighbour. A general answer to a general question but Jesus plays along and tells him that - yes - he has it. Do these two things and you will live. Ah, says the lawyer, thinking that Jesus is guilty of imprecision – “and who exactly is my neighbour”?

There we are – the world is filled with different people. Some are friends and some are not. Tall and short, familiar and unfamiliar, rich and poor. All of them have some sort of status based on their relgion and nationality, whether they pay taxes or don’t, whether they go to church or don’t. They’re thin or fat, black or white, pleasant or unpleasant. Neighbour is a huge category – who, amongst all these people in the world is “my neighbour”.

Because we all have enemies – we may have national enemies who live in the next country over and who have invaded us in living memory. We have people who are guilty of notable crimes and about whom the tabloid newspapers scream popular indignation in three inch high headlines. We have within our borders troublesome sub-communities who live in slums on the edge of town and who are accused of being a vector for crime and disease. And these are just the targets of community lovelessness. As individuals we can name off lists of people who have offended against us and who have never said sorry. There are, it seems, people who are not only difficult to love but who we would be forgiven for not loving.

This is the problem with sweeping laws and pronouncements. Love your neighbour. But who do we have permission “not to love”. To whom does the second part of the two Great Commandments “not” apply? How does this apply in the real world where we must practise discernment – we who have a finite pool of resources and who might end up squandering them on loving the wrong people. This seems to be the import of the question on the lawyer’s part. He is hoping that Jesus will prove himself hopelessly naïve or, even better, that he will name some popular and hated character as the proper object of a faithful Israelite’s love and will bring upon himself scorn and infamy.

Jesus answers this with a story:

“A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell into the hands of robbers, who stripped him, beat him, and went away, leaving him half dead".

Ah, a victim, the lawyer thinks It will be important to know who this victim is. The victim, however, is just referred to as a man. The setup is not what the lawyer would have hoped. This is the one who must be loved – the neighbour. But is this anonymous person a neighbour? He is someone of my clan, my religion? Is he the person covered by the definition of “neighbour” in the Great Two Commandments? Is he a Roman or a tax collector or a thief or a traitor – a criminal or a foreigner?

The road from Jerusalem to Jericho is a lonely downhill road which leads through sun-baked wilderness. I have driven it and cannot imagine walking through such a lonely place. The cliffs are peppered with caves. It is a place where men can hide and for centuries have done so. Being waylaid by bandits, beaten, robbed and left for dead is one of those things that can happen to any traveller. Neutral maloccurrence – something that could happen to anybody. It must have been frustrating that the victim of the story – the presumed object of neighbour love has not yet been named and is the victim of quite ordinary violence. We are still in the realm of the anonymous until Jesus goes on with the story.

As the anonymous man lies there helpless and bleeding - a man whose tribe and lineage doesn’t seem worthy of description – there is shuffle of footsteps down the trail and somebody enters the story. This time there is a name given or at least a title. This is a priest from Jerusalem walking down the long seventeen mile hill to Jericho. Without seeming to give it a second thought – the priest changes sides of the road and passes by. A Levite – one of those who assisted the priests with the sacrifices in the temple also shuffles down the path. He too switches sides and gives the injured man a wide berth. It is noteworthy that both the priest and the Levite cross to the other side. Within their communities they are the designated religious leaders. They are people who are held in awe and esteem and who presume to mediate between human beings and their creator. And it’s these men who choose not to see the suffering that is before them. They don’t want to see it. It’s not to be included in their snapshot of the Jericho road. They choose not to engage with the anonymous victim.

Finally a Samaritan – a national enemy – someone from the other side of the tracks – somebody that everyone could reasonably despise, even in polite company comes by and ministers to the man, binding his wounds, placing him on his donkey, provisioning him with a bed at an inn and paying for his keep.

The lawyer’s question is answered but not in the way the lawyer had hoped. He would have hoped that amongst all the needy people in the world some distinction could be made between those who “qualify” and those who do not so that the loving Israelite would be able to judge between those who are worthy of love and those who are not. If Jesus had told a parable about an injured Samaritan then he and the Lawyer could have disputed at great length about whether a Jew was obligated to help a Samaritan but Jesus has an entirely different instrument. It doesn’t measure the worthiness of the object of love. Jesus won’t even name and identify the victim in this story who remains anonymous throughout. The instrument Jesus uses in his story is one which measures the willingness of the subject to be loving and not the object who remains mute and unidentified. Jesus story makes a distinction between those who will love the victim and those who will not.

Because that, ultimately is the choice we need to make. In any time of disaster, in every struggle we have with another human being, in every case of family strife, in every case of blatant discrimination in our schools or workplaces, The meter on the wall is not measuring how loveable the object of love is – whether he or she fits the category of neighbour or, more properly, falls into the category of “neighbour” but how loving the person at the other end of the equation is – how loving the giver of love, care is – how willing he or she is to be and to become “neighbour”.

We can do nothing to choose or change the status of the person who needs help. We inherit situations that are beyond our control. We cannot control which side of a border a needy person falls, or how they speak or who their ancestors were.

What is in our control is not who they are but who we will become to them.