Prospect           
John 11:1-45      

There is a pious legend that Lazarus, after Jesus raised him from the tomb where he'd lain for four days, never smiled again during the thirty years he remained alive on the earth.  It had something to do, apparently, with the imprisoned souls he'd seen in Hades while he was there.

The story of Lazarus' rescue from the grave is the final of a list of seven "Signs" which Jesus accomplished in the course of his earthly ministry as John relates it in his Gospel.  From the changing of water into wine in the second chapter to the raising of Lazarus in the eleventh, the Gospel is doing the opposite of what we used to do in Primary School when we were small.  Our activity was called Show and Tell.  We would bring some physical object into the class and then tax our vocabulary and narrative skills by telling the other boys and girls what the thing was.  John, in the Prologue, which we are possibly most familiar with from services of Midnight Mass or the end of Nine Lessons and Carols, tells us, right at the beginning, that Jesus is Word, light, power and love.  

We have the telling first.  

What follows in the Gospel are the signs - the showing that this is indeed so.

We carry the narrative of salvation with us.  These are words and stories which we know, if not by heart, then in the back of our minds.  Occasionally when reading or referring to a particularly well known Scripture in church on Sunday I see your lips move.  I know you know them.   In these seven signs, but even more so in the evidence of the testimonies of men and women across the ages, God takes these words and makes them flesh.  Water becomes wine, the sick are made whole, the outcast is welcomed in and the impossible task is accomplished.  

Prospect        
1st Samuel 16:1-13     

Seven sons of Jesse the Bethlehemite are each paraded before the prophet Samuel and no, it appears that none of them is quite right.  God himself had told the prophet to anoint, as King, the one that he would point out from among Jesse's sons.  The passage from 1st Samuel relates an ongoing interior conversation between God and Samuel as the boys each walk by:  

"No, not that one - and not that one.  Still no joy - this isn't him either."  

Jesse is unaware of Samuel's deeper purpose.  He simply presents seven of his eight sons to a visiting prophet - a great man - who has paid them the honor of a visit.    Jesse brings out the cream of his crop: strong boys - articulate and presentable.  David, the eighth son, could reasonably be kept out of sight in a supporting role.  After all, somebody needs to cover the chores and duties of his older brothers. It is this forgotten eighth son who Samuel eventually calls for.

As a group, all three readings for this Sunday take discernment as their theme - either the choice in discerning a forward path or the wisdom in discerning why things work out the way they do.  It's Lent: We'd do well to ask ourselves why we make the decisions we do and set the priorities we live by.  How do we make decisions for ourselves and for others?  How do we listen to God?  Do we, in fact, have that many options about how to conduct our lives?  

We would be challenged, by this first reading from the Old Testament, to ask ourselves what we do not put on the table when we chart a forward path.  What do we discount because of prejudice?  What do we forget or neglect to mention because of shame?  Our friends and our enemies are both curious about the things we avoid in conversations.  Employers will always ask specifically about items we gloss over on our CV.  Try as we might to avoid the subject, our parents will always identify the one bit of homework which hasn't been done.  That's what's important.  That's what piques their interest.
The Old and New Testament are shot through with stories of God doing great things by using, as his starting point, what has been forgotten, neglected, overlooked, avoided, scorned or fibbed about.  The raw material for your next step may already be on your person.  You shouldn't be surprised to find it in your back pocket..

Prospect 
John 4:5-42 

The conversation between Jesus and the Samaritan woman at the well is an unusual conversation.  
Jesus is, first of all, not on his home turf.  Traveling from Judea in the South to Galilee in the North he could easily have skirted Samaria - as pious travelers frequently did if they were concerned about coming into contact with something or someone which would render them unclean.  Jesus takes the short route and ends up in a Samaritan town called Sychar at high noon.  

He is out of place - a solitary Jew in a Samaritan village with his disciples gone off on an errand.  A woman shows up at noon to draw water at the local well.  The woman in the story is also out of place. This is an unusual time for her to be doing this sort of thing.  Her contemporaries had all been by the well the cool of the morning.  It might indicate someone who was disorganized in her household habits or, as is mostly likely the case, somebody who was sincerely hoping not to bump into anyone she knew.  Women talked when they were together at the well.  The woman in our story has a chaotic life story.  Other women  at the well might have talked about her.

Jesus doesn't care that she is a Samaritan.  He doesn't even seem completely perplexed by her complicated personal history.  He asks her for a drink of water.  She rambles on - nervous and bemused at being spoken to by a stranger.  She's even prepared to enter into an ecumenical discussion about the differing practices and holy places of the Jews and the Samaritans.  Jesus dismisses these bluffs and platitudes as religious nonsense.   He proceeds to tell her exactly who she is and who he is and what might ensue should she ever come to her right mind and ask him for the gift of life - summed up in his words about Living Water.

So many of the transforming moments in both the Old and New Testaments occur when the comfortable safety of stable and respectable life is either lost or set aside.  The character in a biblical story about transformation is more than likely to be a wanderer, a prisoner, an expatriate, a social outcast or a solitary seeker.  

You might not seek such a life for yourself.  If it is thrust upon you, however, take heart.

Unaccustomed times and places are putty in God's hands.  

A Liberal Application of Ashes

Are they for everyone - this plate of dirty ashes on my desk?  Some of us don't need to be reminded that life is short and human nature flawed.  I'm seeing, right now, the faces of those I know to be struggling with the deathward stance their lives have taken.  They are beset by acute or chronic illness or are enduring the death of a primary relationship.  They have found themselves sidelined in their employment or vocation.  They are caught up in their own or somebody else's deep moral flaw.  They find themselves burdened by the emotional weight of jobs in which, frankly, 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:  

Roger, you are dust.  To dust you shall return.  Thank you, Father, I knew that.

If the gesture were an assault upon stupidity or shallowness then this would only apply to a narrow slice of humanity who could, I suppose, be especially invited to a service confected just for them - in the ascendent at work, regulars at the gym, perfect children and a perfect house, devoid of questions, doubts or depth.  A liberal application of ashes accompanied by words reminding them of the shortness and uncertainty of human life might, I imagine, provide a theological vessel into which future experiences of failure and contingency could be poured.  But only once these things had happened and once they could be believed.

No, I would submit that these ashes are for everyone - even for the majority of us who are reasonably well but who have been around the block.  They represent something other than the Church's presumption that people aren't aware how life's building blocks are pretty basic stuff - oil and carbon scraped off at the end with a little fluff and lemon juice.  Instead of being bad news about the lives we lead, though, they point us to the value of those lives by providing a frame.

The artist painting a picture of the Puy de Dome or the Pentland Hills or the Mostar Bridge does not have the liberty of including in his painting everything to the infinite right or left, to the utter east or west.  The painting has a frame which defines what the subject most definitely is and ensures that it is not some other thing.  Without its frame life is, at best, undefined.  We are dished out a certain amount.  In the bottom of the bowl is our meat and veg.  Our portion, generous or slender, is not infinite.

It is my experience of people, in the wake of a funeral, that they feel disturbed.   The immediate loss is in the process of being digested and understood.  But beyond any feelings of sympathy or empathy for the family of the deceased and beyond even the loss of somebody loved and valued, there is a nagging recognition of life's ticking clock.  Have the requisite colours been added to my painting - here in this 56th year of life?  What about the broken relationships which have never been mended?  What about the phone conversation not initiated or the letter unwritten?  What about the vow to straighten up?  What about the youthful promise to be courageous?  What about the midlife determination to recover that courage?  Having thrown our handful of earth into the grave we brush the dust from our hand as we walk back to the car.   We return from the Ash Wednesday service and wipe the smudge off our forehead with a soapy washcloth.  

We are the living.   We are the mostly healthy.  We have years left to us and, while there is still time, we have the means to value better what we have within our frame and within our bowl.  A sharp message about life's meagre span grants us the gift of a lifetime.

Prospect                                                                           
Matthew 4:12-23  

 The broken down houses in the village of Bethsaida at the north end of the Sea of Galilee highlights the loneliness of the place.  It's been abandoned for centuries - this town of Andrew and Peter and James and John.  Everyone has gone.  One of the lonely houses here has been identified as the House of Zebedee the fisherman - marginally bigger and perhaps more prosperous than the neighboring buildings.  In fact, one of the loneliest characters in the New Testament must certainly be "old Zebedee" himself in this week's reading from Matthew's Gospel.    

 Zebedee began his day in a boat by the Sea of Galilee with his two sons James and John.   He finished it alone after the two boys stepped out over the gunwales onto the beach and became followers of Jesus.  They formed part of a coterie of men and women following Jesus who proved a disruption to their extended families, who broke out of their niches in village hierarchies, who disappointed their parents and who ceased to function within their guilds and syndicates.  As such they wasted an education and abandoned whatever promotions they had received to this point.  Nothing was ever the same again.  Not for them.  Not for their families.

 They might have been called quitters or splitters or leavers.  Someone out there, no doubt, considered them an utter waste of space.

 Now old Zebedee has no one to fish with.   That's a shame.  It's not by accident that the reader feels the poignant loneliness.   He could not possibly have been made to understand that his sons had left something good for something better.  His boys were simply up and gone.

     These opening chapters of the Gospel are about exciting times - Jesus is calling together his band of followers.  We are here reminded that we can start again in the midst of life - that the call of Christ comes to those who already have a history - that there are none of us nailed into place.

But every "turning to" is a "turning away" and every "yes" is a "no".  How many doors have you shut in your lifetime?  And do you regret these departures?  In your cleaving to Jesus, in your excitement about his words and your recognition of the compelling part of his character which seemed to call you out directly, were you at all conscious that you were leaving something behind?

 Did you hear the door click?

Prospect   
Matthew 1:18-25    
                                                                                      
There are so many people in the Christmas story.  

The combined tea towels and pillow cases of several families would scarcely cover all the shepherds and angels needed to complete the cast of a Christmas Pageant.  Nor is it all nineteenth century invention either, like so many of our Christmas traditions.  There are, in fact, a lot of characters in the stories from Luke's and Matthew's Gospels.  Some of them are mere bystanders, only incidental to the main action.  Others play a central role, enabling (or perhaps even trying to impede) the main action of God becoming flesh and dwelling among us.

When Tony Jordan, a writer of popular British television, was tasked with writing the screenplay for the BBC's take on the Nativity in 2010 he struggled with the tradition which dressed all these extra characters in "big square beards with sackcloth wrapped around them".  Early television and movie renditions of the Nativity story merely fitted them in where there was space - like we might arrange a set of crib figures, shepherds and Wise Men on a too-small coffee table.

Looking for "the story within the story" he struggled with the characters of "the others" for weeks.  
Late one night, bleary-eyed and with an overflowing ashtray, he came to the realization that the other characters, major and minor roles, were important *exactly because* the son of God came for them - "for you" says one of the angels to a shepherd on a hillside in Jordan's screenplay - this all happened for you.    

And so, as we do every year, we take our place in the tableau.  We read somebody else's words and recount deeds and events which took place during this or that Census in the eastern end of the Roman Empire a long time ago.  We may play the role of one of the major or minor characters in the story, or read the words of the Prophet Isaiah or St John the Evangelist from the lectern, but that's not who we are.  We live here and now, caught up in the lives and relationships we know so well.  

We are us.  All these things took place and were accomplished for us and for others like us.

Prospect 
Philippians 4:4-6                                                                                        

Rejoice in The Lord always.  Again, I say, rejoice.  

This Sunday is called Gaudete Sunday and the candle in the Advent wreath will be pink instead of the usual purple.  So why?

Advent and Lent are easily mixed up.  In both seasons there are serious reflections about the path humanity is taken and the need to return to the straight and narrow.  Lent (in the period leading up to Easter) is more strictly a penitential season where Advent (leading up to Christmas) the emphasis is placed more on expectation and anticipation rather than sorrow and regret.  
Instead of ruminating about our shortcomings we are asked pointedly about our hopes.  
The traditional Introit sung at the beginning of the service of Holy Communion in churches across the ages took as its text the words of St Paul in Philippians 4:4

Gaudete in Domino semper:  iterum dico, Gaudete  

Rejoice in The Lord always:  Again, I say rejoice!    
  
The future is an unknown terrain.  It contains all the necessary transformations which might spell trouble for us -  loss, change and uncertainty.  But it contains everything which could be the making of us as well.  How we look at the future is important and Paul in Philippians 4:4-6 prescribes rejoicing as the proper stance.  Rejoice!  Rejoice that God is in that future, and that love is there as well - community, friendship and new projects.

This Sunday we are saying goodbye to three of our key parishioners - David, Kathy and Sara - all of whom have been important members of our parish and our community of friends.  We feel and will continue to feel their loss.  They, themselves, have no certain knowledge of what awaits them but we have more than enough reason to suspect that in their future too, God will be there and love as well - community, friendship and new projects.

The same congregation which will witness the departure of these old friends with our blessings will include families who are only now beginning to find their way among us as a Christian family.  We still confuse their children's names after many weeks.  The shoes that David, Kathy and Sara leave behind them will, in time, be amply filled by others.  

The candle is pink because the future which is dawning is good.  
Rejoice!  God will take care of us.    

Prospect
Romans 15:4-13

Paul tells his readers in this week's reading from the Epistle to the Romans that a backward glance into Israel's scriptures should give them reason to hope for the future.  If they keep their eyes open to what is presently happening around them in a church which is bringing together elements of society which had previously been at enmity into one fellowship in Christ, they should again have reason to hope for what is to come.

So to where the risk lies:  to the unseen future.  Paul launches into a blessing at the end of the passage.

"May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing,
so that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit."

Belief here is not mere credulity.  Not all whims and hungers will magically be provided for.  You've never promised your own children that.  When you usher your grown children into the world, with some assurance that things will be well, you are not telling them that nothing will ever go wrong.  You are telling them, hopefully, that they now know enough to find their way through.  And that the ideals they have gleaned from the communities of their childhood are valuable.  Most importantly, they are portable.  They can be exercised in new circumstances and within new communities long after grandparents, parents, parish priests and teachers have gone to their reward.  The past and the present prepare us for the future.

So, too, with Paul's description of hope, but with an added dimension.   Yes, those who desire to be numbered among the servants of the living God can harvest from the past and the present exactly what is needed to take the next step in a new direction.  But God, through the power of his Holy Spirit, also walks along with his Creation and moves within the human family he is drawing to himself.

All of the "fear nots" of the Gospels are here present - that whole history of faith which stretches back to Abraham.  We are a part of that history.  What he has done in the past, he will do again.



 

Prospect 
Psalm 122  

"Jerusalem is built as a city that is at unity with itself"  

If you've ever been to Jerusalem you know that the countryside is divided with high walls.  Unity?  How accurate is that today?  Was it accurate during the 20th century, maybe, or during the days of the Ottoman Empire?  How about the Crusades or the dying days of the Roman Empire?  How about the time of Jesus?  Go back even further:  Add the Persians to the mix or the Babylonians.  

You might hold out for some shred of glory and unity in the days of David or Solomon, but I suspect that even a cursory reading of the Books of Samuel and the Books of Kings moves more in the direction of Jerusalem being a place of intrigue, energy and turmoil.  Civic and religious unity in the Holy City?  Possibly not.

I can attest to the fact, though, that the city is alive this day with pilgrims.  From all countries in the world men and women meander through the groups of soldiers in east Jerusalem on their way to places which stand, for them, as symbols of wholeness, unity and transformation.  What do they see that the news media doesn't?

We are perhaps looking for the wrong thing. The reality of the world always appears to contrast with the reconciliation God promised to Abraham and with what the prophets saw in their visions. What Mary proclaimed in the Magnificat and what John the Baptist foretold is not negated by the humanity of Jesus and the initial rejection of his message by many. With such a vision of unity (with God and between people) in the heads of faithful people, schools and hospitals are built, sinners are forgiven, strangers are welcomed, the poor are provisioned and nations are evangelized. These are as incontrovertible a series of facts as any disaster on the front page of the newspaper.

We are in the business - you and I, John the Baptist, Mary and King David - of seeing "into things" and not merely describing what has hit us on the head.

Keep your eyes open.  Act on the vision!

Proper 27 - Year C

Haggai 1:15b-2:9 

A project manager?  Of course!  A couple of good hammer-and-nail men?  Even better!  But why would you need a prophet on a building site?  Maybe so God can be heard saying something to the people like the following:

“The silver is mine, and the gold is mine, says the Lord of hosts.  The latter splendor of this house shall be greater than the former, says the Lord of hosts.”  

This line from the prophet Haggai, beloved of stewardship preachers across the ages, comes from the mouth of one of the Minor Prophets.  Along with his contemporary Zechariah and the prophet Malachi (who lived a generation afterwards) Haggai prophesied to the nation following the return of the Jews from Babylon and during the period of their rebuilding and reestablishment in the land of their fathers.  This week’s reading from Haggai is significantly enriched by reading the events recorded in Ezra chapters 3-6 but particularly from chapter 4 on.  After having received permission and encouragement from the Persian King Darius himself for the rebuilding of the Temple, and having seen the emergence of capable leaders, Zerubbabel and Jeshua, it was the people themselves who began to lose heart and to listen to those voices within and around them which suggested that failure was inevitable.  

Momentum was lost and doubts abounded.

Enter the preacher - the prophet:  What Haggai does here is to remind the people that the resources they need to complete their work and to fulfill their destiny as God's people in the land never really were locked up in the hand of their adversaries after all.  Nor were these cut off from reaching their destination because of the logic of the balance sheet.  The needed resources - in this case silver and gold - were given into the earth by God and God can release them for his purposes.  

Let the adversaries think they control them, then.  God will shake those nations up.  Let the balance sheet say what it will.  The chief weapon in God's hand is his word and the retelling of his mighty acts in the past.  The proper response to God's promise, spoken through the prophet, is courage.  

The project will move forward when the hearts of men and women are turned.

Sermon notes on Luke 19:1-10

Proper 26 - Year C

Luke 19:1-10

People who have been bullied over the years may become bullies and abusers themselves.  The Gospel writer tells us that Zacchaeus was a “chief tax collector”.  Luke is here describing a nasty man in nasty employment.  “Tax farming” was standard practice in Jesus’ time and the job of collecting taxes was outsourced to men who were thugs or who at least had thugs in their retinue.   Of course they added a percentage for themselves.  They were opportunists and bullies in the pay of oppressive powers (the Romans in Judea or the Herodians in the Galilee).  

It might come as no surprise then, given my opening statement, that St Luke further describes Zacchaeus as being “short in stature” - “a wee little man” as the children’s song goes.  One could editorialize the whole episode and see a lifetime’s worth of  payback against his own community - the slow working out of a well-developed grudge.  He remains an outsider but now a powerful and dangerous outsider.  

The story hinges around Jesus’ shouted command to Zaccheus up a Sycamore tree, where he listens to the sermon from a safe but privileged vantage point.  “Zacchaeus!”, Jesus shouts.  “Come down!”.  The community’s (and perhaps the reader’s) expectation is that Jesus will now confront and damn the unloveable traitor and exploiter of the people.  Charismatic leaders do that with bullies - they confront them.  Win or lose they will not leave them unchallenged.  

Jumping to the end of the story, one finds the onlookers robbed of a bloody confrontation and a satisfying denouement.  Jesus’ words to Zacchaeus are a form of confrontation but one which leaves the hated man unbloodied.  There has been no fatal blow.   The “righteous” expectations of the community are unsatisfied.  

What does it mean to be confronted by love, convicted by kindness, bowled over by opportunity or bashed over the head by a second chance?    Any other response on Jesus’ part would merely have confirmed Zacchaeus in his distance from God.  Jesus appears to be interested in change more than he is in damnation.  This interest in the “lot of sinners” is the tax collector’s only hope.   It is the only hope of the gathered onlookers in this story.   It is also the only hope of the contemporary readers of my imperfect retelling of this story.  Our interest in the perfect justice of God might be ideological or even theological.  Our interest in his blessed mercy is intensely personal.

Sermon notes on Joel 2:23-32

“I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh!”

So God speaks through the prophet Joel to communities which have struggled to force a harvest from their fields with little rain. So he speaks to people who have barely been able to retain a sense of vision and purpose in times which are hard - both politically and spiritually. It will all come to pass. The times will be good again.

This time of restoration, with fields bearing the full weight of heavy heads of grains, with sons and daughters fit for prophecy and with old men (and presumably old women) seeing into the depth of things with wisdom and insight has always, in the Christian tradition, been seen in light of the gift of God’s spirit on the day of Pentecost.

First of all the gift is given - it is not confected through human effort and cunning plans. It arrives in God’s good time.

Secondly - the gift is poured upon ordinary human flesh: Ordinary humans - with the rustic abilities common to their humanity - find that their ordinary speech now wins over nations and convinces individuals. Hospitality - rather than being the simple ability to set a table and provide a roof - becomes a spiritual gift.

The Church has always had a table set in its midst.

Our sons and daughters and our old people: Note how those of us who consider themselves at the apex of their abilities as wage earners, parents, movers and shakers are here reminded that God spreads his talents far and wide and that we must look to the edges of our family - to youth and to elderly people to see what God is doing next.

The reading from Joel is both thrilling and humbling - a reasonable foretaste of the Advent season where we will marvel at how God uses whom he wills to bring about the transformation of the created order.





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Sermon notes on Jeremiah 29:1, 4-7. For expats everywhere

Interesting, isn't it, that God (through the prophet Jeremiah) does not say to the exiles in Babylon that they have been merely hard-done-by and captured by an evil King. He tells them that he, God, is the one who has sent them into exile there. These would have been bitter words for them to hear. They might have wanted more sympathy.

Last week we heard the words of the Psalmist (Psalm 137) from the same epoch asking "How shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange land?" This week the question is answered.

God says: You will take your sojourn in Babylon seriously. It's where you live now. Your health depends on the health of the city and your prosperity on its prosperity. Allow your family life to be touched by the community you live in and extend your own hand upon your surroundings as well. Let genuine relationship flourish.

Above all pray for the city in which you live and lift up its life to God.

France is not Babylon. America, Canada and Great Britain are not the promised land. One should hesitate to make too direct a comparison between our world and the Biblical world we happen to be reading about. Nonetheless we ought to examine which reflections herein might apply to us:

1) While there are accidents of history (work or family necessities) which move us hither and thither we are involved, as people of God, with a Creator, Redeemer and Inspirer who has always uprooted and replanted his people. He does it for their good and he does it for the good of the world he sends them into. It should not surprise you that you are here with a purpose.

2) The world in which we feel like aliens or visitors is a beautiful world. God wants something for it and you are a partner in that work. You - and not someone else. Here - and nowhere else.

3) Even the symbols which God, through his prophet, recommends - the building of houses, planting of gardens and the contracting of marriages - may mean something for us. What is the visible sign we do, or could, exhibit which shows that we want to belong to the society in which we are presently living?

At the very least let us be curious about this and consider it.



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Proper 20 - Year C
Luke 16:1-13

This parable stumps rather a lot of people. Jesus seems to be praising a manager who plays fast and loose with his employer's money. I believe it makes the most sense when the character of the Dishonest Steward is set alongside the characters introduced in last Sunday's lectionary reading:

- A shepherd has lost a sheep and must search for it.

- A homemaker of modest means loses a valuable coin and must spend her day looking for it because she is poor.

- A king, who has committed himself to waging war, is outnumbered and outgunned by an opposing army and must sit down with his foreign minister and figure out what peace negotiations might look like.

I can put this character of the Dishonest Steward shoulder to shoulder with these three individuals and make the greatest sense of this difficult story while squinting only a little bit.

Jesus seems to be plumbing the depths of human behavior in individuals facing threats. In a world where a thing of value risks being forever lost, the human organism rebounds with great energy to face the threat. The shepherd combs the valleys, the woman sweeps out her house, the king sits down to settle his dispute and the Dishonest Steward fiddles the books. Faith's analogue, then, would be this rising up of the organism in the face of disaster - girded for action, thinking quickly on his or her feet and unwilling to take no for an answer.

Jesus poses questions to his followers: Are you willing to follow me? Will you forsake family for me? Will you drink the cup which I drink? Will you leave the confines of your religious subset? Will you endure the scorn of your friends for doing so? If you are serious you will not allow the opportunity of following to pass.

What, then, would the faith of such followers look like? Well, Jesus says, you'll find it in a plethora of ordinary human dynamics. Take this woman, for example - this shepherd, this King or even this steward. See how ordinary people clutch this valuable thing like it was their last and only hope.

Such a valuable thing is God's Kingdom. Such a clutching is the faith of the Church.

---------------

An older sermon on the same text (and with some of the same conclusions) can be found here.

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Proper 18 - Year C
Pentecost 16
Luke 14:25-33


The word “decide”, coming to us from Old French and beyond that from Latin, means to cut something (caedare) off (de) - hence, decaedere. It means to fall on one side of an ambiguity by turning away from the other option. There’s that poem by Robert Frost you read in school about the diverging paths in a forest. If you are a truly decisive person, you will have any number of roads behind you which were not taken and travelled.

It depends what you want. As a salesman, in this week’s reading from Luke’s Gospel, Jesus seems not to want to make a sale at all costs. He reminds us, his hearers, that we can have what we want. If we want him, however, and to be a member of the Kingdom which he is ushering in, there will be a cost to that decision. Jesus does not cajole them (or us) with false promises. He doesn’t anesthetize them (or us) with respect to the risks and the costs. He wants us to decide.

Some of us spend rather a long time in those woods looking at the two paths and even attempting to place a foot on each without doing ourselves an injury. We will need to say our “yes” and our “no” to something if we ever hope to get anywhere. We need to come to terms with the fact that decisions are costly.

Being husbands and wives, mothers and fathers, members of a local church and members of God’s Kingdom requires of you a positive affirmation of the life that goes along with that. You might have been surprised at what these roles required - but you suspected all along that there would be a cost.

All your pursuits - your jobs, your family roles, your engagement with the world and your fellowship in this parish church - require, as a first step, not an immediate application of work and energy but, rather, the answer to that nagging question about what you want. Disfunctions may stem less from our lack of native ability than they do from a lack of positive desire. Do you want any of these things enough to walk out of the woods and follow the path?

Jesus puts it plainly: It’s up to you. What do you want?





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Proper 6 - Year C
The Fourth Sunday after Pentecost
Luke 7:36-8:3
(cf. Matt 26:6-13, Mark 14:3-9 and John 12:1-8)


This Sunday's Gospel takes three slightly different forms in Matthew and Mark and Luke and a completely alternate retelling in John's Gospel:

A woman of ill-repute breaks into a dinner party made up of worthy people. She anoints Jesus with costly and fragrant ointment and weeps. The onlookers are aghast that Jesus should allow someone so sullied to have physical contact with him or (in Mark and Matthew's version) that expensive ointment has been so extravagantly wasted.

Is it only my imagination or do notorious sinners secretly save things up: money in numbered accounts or bodies buried somewhere?  It seems to me that they accumulate people.   They gather confederates to keep their secrets and friendly policemen to turn a blind eye. They keep a pot of expensive perfume at home to make their world smell better. They save up alibis or excuses which they rehearse. They must even convince themselves. They collect a series of routes home which bypass the people who know them and could denounce them. In the long run the lies they tell to hide their misdeeds become complicated and interlocking and hard to maintain.

Even those who may not consider themselves particularly notorious sinners will recognize this accumulated burden which they bear around in secret upon their shoulders. It may all become too much - as it did for this woman who, one day, decides to end the pretense. She hears the buzz in the market that Jesus is in her neighborhood and will be eating with Simon the Pharisee at his house. She knows the place and that Jesus is a perceptive prophet. There she will be known and exposed. She will come clean.

 It will all come pouring out.

When we love, testify or confess we spread our riches about. We empty our account. And rather than leaving us bereft, the perfume fills the room. Until this point the road has always carried us away from community, away from friendship and away from confident commerce with strangers. Jesus’ very presence can coax us from the tree where we've been hiding, up from the beggar’s corner that has been our lot in life - into community, into friendship and into forgiveness.






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The Second Sunday of Easter - Year C

John 20:19-31

God takes his time with us.

He converses rather a long time with Abraham about his plans for his family.  He reasons with Moses, he endures the complaints and the expressions of uncertainty from the prophets Isaiah and Jeremiah.

And so it should come as no surprise, when Thomas sets the challenge that he will not believe until he himself sees the marks of the nails in Jesus' hands and the wound in his side, that Jesus should condescend to appear to the doubtful disciple to clear the matter up.

God desires faith from his people.  Given that all the best things in life are invisible - love, purpose, community - we will not avoid having to, at various points in our life, throw our efforts and our actions behind things we cannot see or quantify. Them's the breaks! 

In order to live lovingly or courageously we need to take a leap of faith.  Otherwise we'd never marry or have children or aspire beyond a small enclosure of assured results.  It would be poverty.

But it hurts a bit - the uncertainty.  We can foresee the possibility of abject failure. 

While God desires such faith from us - in particular our faith in the one he has sent to be a bridge between himself and his creatures - the faith he requires of us is not blind.  We will, I believe, look back upon our years and recognize those moments when God drew near to us in our weakness and made such belief possible and reasonable.  We were not left simply to figure it all out for ourselves.

Doubt is not the absence of faith.  Faith comes in response to hearing the Gospel proclaimed and it is the fruit of a long conversation in which God stirs the pot - filled as it is with the fears and doubts which are proper to human beings.  Faith is the response which issues when the doubts have been discussed and disclosed.

As it was with Abraham.  As it was with Moses and the prophets. As it was with Thomas.

Sermon Notes

John 2:1-11

When the wine ran out at the Wedding at Cana, Mary turned to Jesus and told him about it.  

Folks are a bit divided on whether Our Lady was among the angels at this point in the story.  Was she, knowing who her son was, simply letting him know that he would need to intervene in this unfortunate turn of events - or was she was doing what we all have a tendency to do when an over-planned event reveals a fatal glitch.  We comment out of one side of our mouth to the person sitting next to us:

"They missed that detail, didn't they?"  

The technical term is schadenfreude.  Its not a pretty thought. Come to think of it, it's not even a very pretty word.

Its all quite accurate, though.  The emperor truly has no clothes, the diva does have a busted zip at the back of her dress, and the preacher did, in fact, forget his notes.  All these aspired to great things while being, essentially, quite ordinary and fallible.  The Scots have a particularly memorable phrase which sums up such a state of affairs:

"Fur coat and nae knickers"

But do try to be both humble and bold.  It is no credit to the Gospel that we fail to reach beyond our abilities.  

We will continue to ask, undeserving as we are, for our Lord to involve himself in our lives' projects, which are the best we can produce given who we are - overreaching and too big for our boots.   As a congregation here at Christ Church, Clermont-Ferrand, our services will contain moments of confession where we acknowledge our brokenness and the fragmentary nature of our faith and ability.   They will also, however, contain reflections on stories such as this week's Gospel reading which point us to the person of Jesus, who touches and transforms the very matter which fails us and who declares himself, in his actions at the Wedding at Cana, to be the master not only of thoughts and reflections but also of the very ordinary resources we require for life and ministry, health and wholeness - for provision for ourselves and for the world we serve. 

Proper 25 - Year B

Pentecost 23

Mark10:46-52  

You'll find a recurring character both in stories about Jesus, and in the parables which Jesus told: It's the man or the woman who will not shut up - even when they’ve been told to.  

In the Gospel parables we meet such characters as the widow who hammered on the judge’s door until he delivered justice to her (Luke 18:1-8), or the neighbour who arrived at midnight asking for bread to feed a traveling friend and would not be turned away until the door was opened for him  (Luke 11:5-8).  

In stories concerning Jesus there is the Canaanite woman looking for healing for her daughter who shouted out and caused a fuss even though she’d been told to stop disturbing the master (Matthew 15:21-28).   In this Sunday’s Gospel reading, the role is played by blind Bartimeus who, when he heard that Jesus was walking by, made a complete spectacle of himself in spite of the disciples’ protests until Jesus walked over to him and healed him.

Politeness and goodness we oftentimes conflate with silence.  We do this particularly with respect to children.  Concerning ourselves, we worry perhaps that we might appear dependent or lose face in the community were we to express our needs openly and passionately?  

And yet Jesus seems to find that this very importunity - this same honest expression of need is something akin to faith - some part of faith - an example of faith - on the part of those who come to him openly and honestly and even loudly.

Tell someone, then, what you need.  Go ahead.  Tell God what you need.  

Not all silence is golden.

Annual Convention!

The annual Convention of the Convocation of Episcopal Churches in Europe is taking place in Clermont Ferrand this week.  Representatives include lay and clergy members from Belgium, France, Austria, Germany and Italy as well as the Convocation's missionary in Romania.

Abundance!

Over forty varieties of dry sausage were available at a market stall in Place de la Victoire here in Clermont-Ferrand France (where I live now - if you haven't been keeping up).

France is not any easy place to maintain an imported lifestyle. You will forever be looking for habitual things which are impossible to find.

If, however, you are willing to adopt what is novel and dissimilar to what you've lived with before then you're where you need to be.

Sermon Notes

Mark 10:17-31

I have not travelled extensively in the U.S. One of my memorable trips there was to visit cousins in New Mexico - Albuquerque mostly - with a couple of side trips to Santa Fe, Roswell (of course!) and chunks of the Chihuahuan desert.

I confess that the first few days were spent wondering, frankly, what the point of the place was.

The usual indicators of beauty - lush vegetation and abundant water - were conspicuously absent. I suffered from a delay of several days before desert colours started to jump out and desert creatures began to be noticed.

The spirit of the place, its beauty and its order, only made an impression once I had divested myself of my expectations and prejudices. The painted mountains of the Bosque del Apache took some time to sink in. Flecks of life and colour drew attention to themselves because they were not swamped by the monochrome green of a west coast rain forest. They maintained their tenacious hold not only on the desert floor but also on the consciousness of this observer who had learned to look out for them only when he had left something else behind.

More sharp and unequivocal words from Jesus in this week’s Gospel reading: We must divest ourselves of those things which obstruct and prevent our entry into the Kingdom of God. We are asked to divest ourselves of what stands “instead of” God’s Kingdom. This will include the things we have built for ourselves and earned for ourselves and padded ourselves with.

When we have ceased to rely on the well-worn path and left behind the familiar things we will find that we have entered a landscape not of our own making. It is no wasteland. It contains people, challenges and adventures. We are not alone there. We have brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers. We have work to do.

Sermon Notes

Mark 8:27-38

Back in the day, if anybody asked me what a particular thing "meant to me" the hairs on my neck would rise up. I frequently felt manhandled back in college by people who would insist that I examine the subjective experience of things rather than their objective status or existence.

Surely what things "meant to me" was less important than what they actually were. No?

Well, perhaps not. It's taken thirty years of arguing or seeing people argue about the obvious things in front of them to admit that, no, the universe is not full of rocky little atoms wanting to be identified by somebody clever.

The subjective experience of things is important. Pablo Neruda can write a poem entitled "Ode to My Suit" and find, in his threadbare daily garment, a universe of meaning which would pass over the head of his tailor or his dry-cleaner.

In the reading at hand, from Mark's Gospel, Jesus is concerned to ask what his disciples think of him – who they believe him to be. A variety of opinions are being bruited about in the marketplace - that he was the reincarnation of some historic prophet or, perhaps, John the Baptist brought back from the dead. No, says Jesus, sod the competing opinions, I want to know who you say that I am.

This would appear to be something more than a mid-term exam. Nor is Jesus asking how the disciples are feeling.

We are prompted, like them, to declare what we know and believe. Ignorance and the darkness are too often safe and comfortable states and places in which to hide. If there is any connection at all between faith and "saving knowledge", it is that such knowledge involves allegiance. We step forward and reach out to the person known or believed in.

Jesus being God's Messiah means something to us. We do not acknowledge that merely as a fact, but must follow that knowledge and wed ourselves to it - even if the path that knowledge leads us along includes a Cross -

Jesus' Cross or ours.

Bugs

One comes across a number of interesting tidbits in the course of preparing a sermon which will have absolutely no place in the finished product. More's the pity

from Gabriel Sylvan's "More Bible Mistranslations and Curiosities"

THE "BUG" BIBLE (ZURICH, 1535)

Miles Coverdale, who published the first complete edition of the Bible in English, utilized the more distinctly Protestant translations of William Tyndale (1530-34). Coverdale's Bible owes its nickname to the fact that Psalm 91:5 is rendered Thou shalt not nede to be afrayed for eny bugges [Hebrew pahad] by night. The archaic term bugges (whence our "bogeyman" and "bugbear"), also used in Matthew's Bible (Antwerp, 1537), was justly re- placed by "terror" in the Authorized (King James) Version of 1611.

Sermon Notes

July 29th, 2012

John 6:1-21

My parents knew an old Dutch carpenter who, when you asked him if he could provide you with a particular wood screw, clamp or word-working tool, would generally say that he had "Yoost da dinks" (Just the Thing).

There are things which we all need: food, drink, safety and security or a roof over our heads. We hunger without them. Our lives become complicated because we don't have them. All things being equal we may eventually get them. We then promptly forget about these good things until the next time we find ourselves in need.

The fact that we often take the things we have for granted, or that we are largely unmoved by the fact that other people in the world don't have them, might indicate that we understand "things" but not what these things "mean".

Jesus feeds a hungry crowd with bread and fish that are fantastically multiplied in his hands.

The technical problem which the disciples encounter in having allowed such a large crowd to follow them into the wilderness without any logistical support is solved but this is not the issue. Crowds begin to grow in the future because of the possibility that they will a) see a miracle and b) be on the receiving end of a magical picnic lunch. Jesus later chides the crowds because this is not the point.

Food in the wilderness "means" that the ordinary things of life in God's hands become nourishment for the world. A small basket of bread and fish providing a banquet for so many "means" that our ordinary talents (such as they are today) and our life situation (such as it is in 2012) is sufficient raw material for a rich spiritual engagement as a member of God's Kingdom.

We don't need to be different people than we are. It's not necessary that we live in a different place with a different family or with a different set of gifts and attributes.

Where we are, and what we have in our baskets right now, is sufficient. It is, in fact, "Yoost da dinks".

Sunday the 22nd of July

Sermon Notes

Ephesians 2:11-22

The congregations Paul visited and wrote to were often quite mixed gatherings: Those with a background in Judaism were thrown together with people from gentile backgrounds. Wealthy (or at least comfortable) citizens in the congregation counted themselves fellow members with servants and slaves. Foreigners mingled with locals. The leadership of women was acknowledged to a degree which made non-Christian onlookers uncomfortable.

In such a mix there is a tendency to quietly wonder who makes up the "core" of the church and who is "outside". Some of the controversies lurking behind the New Testament letters stem from just such an attempt on the part of one group to establish themselves as the earlier or better members of Christ's flock.

Paul's words to the Ephesians remind us that our backgrounds, our national identities, our personalities and our individual attributes are merely the raw material from which God creates something new and better. As individuals we not as important as what we will become when we are gathered together with people from the other side of the railway tracks.

Sermon Outline
Mark 6:14-29

Mark's Gospel shows us a picture of Herod Antipas as a man divided between his sin and his salvation.

As brutal and arbitrary as any ancient ruler Herod, nonetheless, cultivates a residual place in his heart for the preaching of John the Baptist - his consistent and fiery critic - who he has imprisoned in the dungeon. One thing leads to another and Herod is forced, because of his passions and the public vows he has made, to behead John in his prison and to present the prophet's head to his stepdaughter - known to us, traditionally, as Salome.

The prophet John is finally silenced. The message he preached, however, has only begun to make itself known.

A painting by Peter Paul Rubens called "Herod's Feast" hangs in the National Galleries in Edinburgh. It's a ghastly rendering of the very moment when the head of John the Baptist is brought on a plate to Herod's table.

 It is, I might add, a particular favourite of Edinburgh schoolboys brought on outings with their classes to the Galleries.

In the painting, the assembled guests look down the table to where Herod is seated as host. He, and not the severed head, is the focus of attention. On Herod's face is written the anguish of a man who is sorry that he has silenced his opposition - his small channel of grace.

Our enemies, you see, are not always our enemies. Sometimes they are the only people able to speak the truth to us.

There are moments when we would do almost anything to be rid of the trouble we sense within us - the unrequited longing, the dissatisfaction and inner turmoil - or the critics around us.   Cut the head off, we might, mutter - put it out of our consciousness, forever.

And this would be a good and efficient thing to do unless, of course, things were seriously amiss in our households and in our souls. That nagging voice would the be the best thing about us and not the worst - a voice which we would silence at our peril.





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Pause For Thought
BBC Radio 2
June, 2012


It’s a religious platitude that we bring nothing into this world and carry nothing with us out of it at the end. As anyone knows, however, who has moved house we seem to do our level best to compensate for this state of affairs by accumulating an incredible weight of stuff during the middle bits between our arrival and our departure.

Where does it come from?

There are presents given to us by people who obviously don’t know us very well: Books we have no interest in or executive toys which we are too busy to play with.

Then there are the outdated things. Our interests were different, once upon a time, and we collect things associated with a particular hobby and pursuit. And then we moved on and lost interest but all the trinkets, the tools are still there in a box marked “Miscellaneous – Very”. Outdated too are the ill fitting clothes which we once looked good in before the outward development of the belly out front and the backside out back. We’d be embarrassed to try and shoehorn our way into these old clothes.

In both cases these things no longer match our shape or our interests. They are no longer part of who we have become.

Moving house – like many forms of spiritual discipline – is a stripping back of the illusion of who we – or other people – thought we were. We get rid of what is not us – and so we get closer to the truth – the truth of what we have genuinely become.





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Pause for Thought
BBC Radio 2
June, 2012

I have construction going on next door.

It’s never much fun for the neighbours - the incessant clatter and the work vehicles blocking the road.

I live up at the end of a quiet street. The quiet was always something very attractive about this posting. All that ended when they started gutting and rebuilding the house next door. We’re told that they couldn’t get planning permission to raze the place to the ground. The Council insisted that something of the old remain. I imagine the construction costs are just as large. They didn’t rip the house down and build again. It will be a new house based on an old frame.

Many of us are given the option to reinvent ourselves a couple of times in adult life. Following a major life change, a divorce or a bereavement – or because we arrive at a point of life where we recognize that we could change tack completely.

The children have moved out. The dog has died. And so we take up the challenge.

How do you rebuild yourself when you have the option? You may want to keep a few things

When you remove the mouldering wallboard and strip off the roof, rip out the mixed hedge, knock down some of the interior partitions and make larger more functional rooms – is it the same house just because the exterior walls are standing.

We are all something old and new – there are a few fundamental principles which we want to retain – a few basic ideas about the universe – about family – about love, faith and generosity which we will continue to anchor ourselves in. Our house is not something so much like a house of cards that one change will cause the whole thing to tumble down.

The dreadful wallpaper, however, is optional – as is the layout of our small rooms which were never adequate to house all the people we love or to host the experiences which we value.




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Pause for Thought
BBC Radio 2
June, 2012

It’s my baby!

Not, of course, that it’s an actual baby complete with pram and rattle.

It might be our job we’re talking about or the book we’re writing. It might be our role as chairman of some local committee or our involvement with some activity or group of people that we’ve committed ourselves to for a period of time. There’s nothing there, mind,which excludes the child we’ve raised, fretted over, chided and bored to death with our stories. It’s just that the metaphor is moveable. It can be widely applied.

As is the case with all things or people we are important to, we sometimes forget that we are not indispensable. If we suggest to ourselves and others that without us they could do nothing – that we are their beginning, middle and end – but this, more often than not – provides an occasion for us to be dropped gently on our backsides.

We announce that we are moving on and find ourselves surprised how quickly our former colleagues and our employers put the ad in the papers advertising the position and call a meeting where they discuss our attributes and our shortcomings. They make an honest assessment of the past few years and decide that not only do they want to do as well when we are ultimately replaced. They would like to do better. It is no longer our baby.

And what about our real honest-to-goodness babies? Even they – it would seem – need to develop apart from us. Too soon they begin receiving sustenance from sources other than us – start keeping their cards close to their chests. They discover mentors who are not their parents and ways of life which are not in keeping with what we want for them.

All good work takes on its own life – and a building block of wisdom, it would seem, is that we are participants in the Cosmos and not the authors of it. The people and the areas of work we love have their own life – they always have – and we would be happier keeping a light grip on it.



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Peace Unto Zion