Sermons & Other Words

And Mary said: ‘My soul magnifies the Lord’.

My soul magnifies the Lord…  As I was thinking this week about what I might say this morning as we celebrate our patronal festival and hear again those amazing words attributed to Mary herself, I found myself increasingly intrigued by the image of magnification with which Mary opens her great proclamation. 

What does it mean for this young woman, miraculously pregnant with God’s Son, presumably still trying to make sense of what all this might mean, for her and for her unborn baby, but clearly having already grasped something of its life-changing – no… world-changing – import, to announce that her soul magnifies the Lord?

In every story – every book or film – there comes, sooner or later, a turning-point in the narrative: a point when a series of apparently disparate threads come together and move the story on, giving it a new direction and a new sense of purpose, and ultimately moving it towards the conclusion that the author has, presumably, planned all along.

And sometimes the narrative that is our lives also contains moments like these. We meet the love of our life. We move to a new place where new opportunities, new paths, open up before us. We choose one road rather than another, and it leads us, perhaps, to the place where we always needed to be…

In the Gospel passage we have just heard we witness just such a narrative turning-point. Jesus’s ministry until this point has been apparently aimless, which is not, of course, to say that it has been insignificant, but only that it does not seem to have had a clear goal or destination.

Since his baptism by John in the River Jordan, he has wandered with his disciples around Galilee and the surrounding regions, teaching, healing, telling stories and performing miracles, as we have heard in our Gospel readings over the last few months. He has become known, has gathered a following, gained a certain visibility. There have been hints as to his true identity – he commands the wind and the waves and they obey him, as God harnesses the power of wind and water on the first day of Creation; he feeds a great crowd with bread, as God had fed the Israelites in the wilderness with manna, bread from heaven – but these have remained no more than hints. Now this is about to change.

If you attended the ‘National Emergency Briefing’ film that was shown here on Friday evening, you will have heard, among many other worrying statistics, a warning about the risks that climate change poses to food security not only globally but also here in the UK, where we are – compared to many parts of the world – blessed with a temperate climate and fertile land. We learned that three of the five worst cereal harvests ever recorded in England have been recorded in the last decade, following periods of extreme weather. And this matters because it drives the price of food up, leads to shortages, and drives those who are already struggling ever closer to poverty, to reliance on food banks, and to hunger.

And this matters, too, because to live with food insecurity is to live a life that is insecure, unstable, disadvantaged across the board. Food is, we can all agree, not a luxury but a necessity. The American politician and diplomat, Adlai Stevenson, in a speech he gave in Minnesota in 1952, went so far as to claim that ‘a hungry man is not a free man’. If you are struggling to feed yourself or your family, that struggle will be a factor in every choice you make, every aspect of your life.

Are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin…

Ah wait! I forgot…. it’s sermon time, not story time!

We all love stories, don’t we? (Perhaps even more than sermons…). Human beings have always told one another stories, from the tales of hunting outlined in the cave paintings of our Neanderthal ancestors to the goings-on of Eastenders or Emmerdale… And chapter 13 of Matthew’s Gospel, is, in fact, full-to-bursting with these stories. It opens with the parable of the sower, which we heard two weeks ago, and continues with the parable of the weeds and the wheat, which we discussed last week. And then… well, then, as we hear in today’s reading, Jesus seems to be on a roll… telling one story after another, some of them so short that they feel more like a proverb than a real story: the mustard seed, the yeast, the hidden treasure, the pearl, the net. So many stories! The proliferation of stories in this chapter suggests that, for Jesus, they are an important way of communicating. But why?

Well, why do any of us tell stories?

It has been suggested that stories are one of the ways in which we seek to make sense of the world around us. In a world which often feels arbitrary and confusing, stories create patterns. They give a shape to experiences that would otherwise seem meaningless and random: Hercule Poirot solves the crime, the prince finds his princess, Odysseus returns to Ithaca, the hobbits make it back to the Shire, the very hungry caterpillar is transformed into a beautiful butterfly. I don’t know how many of you saw the wonderful Arts Guild production of Little Shop of Horrors this week. The story is fabulously bonkers, of course, but might we not see even there a cautionary tale for our time about genetic modification and the prioritising of profit over people?

Well, maybe… but it’s also true that not all stories come with an easily identifiable lesson and some only come to make sense to us in retrospect. A story that we read at face value as a child, may take on a whole new level of meaning when we revisit it as an adult. Some books – the Bible is one of them, of course – repay reading and re-reading multiple times and deliver fresh insights every time.

Isn’t life messy? Isn’t it complicated?

A few weeks ago, I took a few days’ retreat at the Community of the Resurrection in Mirfield. I stayed in what they call ‘The Hermitage’: a converted stable or outbuilding of some sort, which contains a table and chairs, a bed, a fridge, a microwave, a shower… and not much else. And I was fine with that. Life is pretty simple when it revolves around just eating, sleeping, thinking, reading, reflecting, and praying, and my little hermitage provided all I needed (and nothing more) for those few days.

But a retreat is, by definition, not ‘real life’, not ‘everyday life’; and real, everyday life is, as I said, both complicated and messy. Real life rarely feels like moving in a straight line from A to B without hesitation, deviation or repetition. Real life so often involves getting it wrong., messing things up, starting again, going round in circles; it involves frustration, disappointment, loss, pain.

We touched on this last week, when we heard the parable of the sower. The sower sows seed everywhere, but some falls on the path and gets eaten by birds, some falls on rocky ground and fails to thrive, some falls among thorns and gets choked, and only a small proportion falls on good soil and flourishes and grows. Life is messy, and so often stuff – birds, rocks, thorns… whatever these represent in our lives – gets in the way of our full flourishing, of our becoming the people God calls us to be.

Today’s Gospel reading – another parable about sowing and growing – adds another layer of meaning to the parable of the sower. In this parable the sower sows good wheat on his good land, but an enemy comes along while everyone is asleep and sows weeds among the wheat, so that when the wheat comes up it’s all tangled up with the weeds.

A few weeks ago in our Gospel reading we heard about how Jesus sends out his disciples to cure the sick, and proclaim the good news of God’s Kingdom. As he sends them out, he says: ‘The harvest is plentiful, but the labourers are few’. Sending the disciples out to tell people about Jesus, then, is like sending out labourers to bring in God’s harvest. But, of course, you can’t reap what you don’t sow… Today’s reading helps us to understand where this plentiful harvest has come from. In particular, I think, it helps us to understand why Jesus insists that the harvest is plentiful, despite the fact that he still has only a relatively small number of followers at this early stage in his ministry, and despite the resistance that he meets and the persecution that he knows his disciples will come up against. Where, we might ask, does this plentiful harvest come from?

The parable that Jesus tells is well-known, of course. A sower goes out to sow. He scatters seeds and some fall on the path and get eaten by birds, some fall on rocky ground where they lack the soil to flourish and grow, others fall among thorns and get choked by the weeds and fail to thrive, but some fall on good soil and produce a great and abundant harvest.

Jesus even tells us what the parable means. The seeds that fall on the path are those people who hear the word of God but fail to take it in. The seeds that fall on rocky ground are those who hear and respond to the word of God, but whose roots are flimsy, who give up on God as soon as the going gets tough. The seeds that fall among weeds are those who hear and respond to the word of God but who get easily distracted by material things or by the banal-but-necessary details of their everyday lives. The seeds sown in good soil, however, are those who hear and understand the word of God. These are the people who really bear fruit. This, surely, is the harvest that Jesus sends his disciples out to reap…

There’s just no pleasing some people, is there? Last winter was too wet. The spring was unseasonably cold. But this summer is shaping up to be just way too hot. Like Goldilocks, we so often seem to move from one bowl of porridge to another, proclaiming one too hot, another too cold, another too salty or too sweet, restlessly moving from one to another in search of the one that’s just right…

And – dare I say it? – we can be like that about our faith too (and, yes, I do include myself in this). Smells and bells or happy-clappy? Traditional hymns or modern worship songs? The Book of Common Prayer with its ‘thee’s and ‘thou’s, or Common Worship and inclusive language? How often do we let our personal preferences get in the way of our desire to meet with God in worship?

If – like me – you recognise something of yourself in this ‘Goldilocks’ approach to worship, then it may reassure you to know that Jesus himself had to contend with this same attitude.

In our readings over the last couple of weeks, we have been hearing about some of the challenges of being a disciple of Jesus. Sometimes they have not made for easy reading.

Let’s just recap for a moment. Jesus sends out his disciples with no money in their purses and no spare clothes in their bags… not least because he sends them out without bags. He tells them that they will be handed over to councils and flogged in synagogues, dragged before kings and governors, disowned by their families, hated by all. He concludes by saying that, in order to find life, they will need to be prepared to lose their lives. Challenging words indeed…