Sermons & Other Words

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…

Just recently we have had a new person join our Friday evening Bible Discussion Group. It is always wonderful when new people pluck up the courage to come along to something that will help them deepen their faith, and it’s even more fabulous when that faith is brand new and they are full of joy and enthusiasm for all that there is to learn about the amazing adventure of following Jesus. What could be better than the opportunity to introduce a new Christian to the uplifting and inspiring experience of reading the Bible? What could be better?

Well, it could, potentially, be a just a teeny bit better if the lectionary were to help out a bit more with the whole ‘uplifting and inspiring’ thing, instead of delivering messages like the one that we heard Jesus giving to his disciples last week, when he tells them that ‘they will hand you over to councils and flog you in their synagogues; and you will be dragged before governors and kings because of me’; or like the message of the passage we have just heard, which warns us that Jesus has come not to bring peace but a sword; to set a man against his father and a woman against her mother; that following him means taking up a cross… and no follower of Jesus can be unaware of what that cross means – judgement, scorn, humiliation, agony, death. Uplifting and inspiring it ain’t!

Passages like the one we’ve just heard, or indeed like our Old Testament reading in which we saw Hagar and her son Ishmael banished and left to fend for themselves in the wilderness, raise the question of how we should approach those bits of the Bible that disturb and unsettle us (and there are many that might fit into this category) and about how engaging with them (rather than just skirting over them or pretending they don’t exist), far from discouraging faith and discipleship, might actually build us up in our faith and make us better disciples.

One of the ways in which we can begin to approach ‘difficult’ passages like today’s is by looking at them in context. The stories that the Gospel writers tell about Jesus are precisely that: stories. They are not rule books and they are not collections of mottos or sayings, uplifting or otherwise. They are stories, which go beyond the short passages that we read here in church on a Sunday morning, and which really only make sense when looked at in their entirety.

So let’s put today’s passage in context. It follows on directly from the reading we heard in church last week, in which Jesus chooses his twelve closest followers and sends them out to heal the sick, cast out demons raise the dead, and, above all, to proclaim the good news of the kingdom, to let people know the amazing truth that, in Jesus, God has drawn very close to humankind – so close as to share our very human nature itself. And the episode culminates at the beginning of the next chapter of Matthew’s Gospel, when some of the followers of John the Baptist come to Jesus to ask him if he really is the Messiah: ‘Are you the one who is to come’, they ask, ‘or are we to wait for another?’. ‘What do you think?’, Jesus replies, with barely concealed impatience. ‘Look around you! Blind people see again. Deaf people hear. Lame people walk. Dead people come to life again. Work it out for yourselves!’.

If you’ve caught a train anytime in the past decade or so, you will have heard (probably multiple times!) the slogan ‘See it, say it, sorted’! It’s not, perhaps, the catchiest of messages, but it seems to me that this is precisely what Jesus is saying to John’s disciples: ‘say what you see and you’ll understand who I am – you’ll understand what’s going on here, that God’s kingdom is being realised here and now’. And that is also what Jesus is telling his own disciples in the passages that we have heard today and last week. Let people see what God can do: cure the sick; cast out demons; raise the dead. Say words that speak of God’s truth: the kingdom has come, Jesus is the Messiah. And then? Well, then leave the rest to God. The disciples’ job – and our job – is not to ‘sort it’ for ourselves. No, the really good news is that, if Jesus is the Messiah and the kingdom has come, then God has already sorted it.

That is the truth that Jesus holds up before the disciples of John as proof of his identity. And that is the truth that Jesus sends his disciples out to reveal. Does that make it easy? Well, no. Is their mission a dangerous one? Sure, it is. Jesus is clear about that.But he is also clear that they are not on their own and they are not starting from scratch. And this is emphasised in what I think are the key verses for understanding this passage.

‘Nothing is covered up that will not be uncovered, and nothing secret that will not become known’. The disciples’ job, I have said, is one of uncovering, of revelation, of making known that which God has already done. Jesus sends them out as sheep among wolves, to speak truth in the face of deafness, to reveal truth in the face of blindness, to preach peace and love even though he knows that that message will be taken and twisted into the language of division and hatred, to wield that truth like a sword, to carry that truth like a cross, and not to flinch at its weight. He sends them out not to create a better world through their own efforts, not to build God’s kingdom, but simply to reveal it, to point to where God is already active.

And he sends us out too to do this same work, because this work is ongoing. It’s the work of the Church now as much as it was of Jesus’s first followers. It’s the work of all who believe… and not just those who wear a dog-collar, but each and every one of us. And, yes, this is where it gets a bit scary, of course. But Jesus knew that this would be scary. That’s why he tells us not to be afraid. To remember that the God who knit us together in our mothers’ wombs knows and loves and cares about every hair on our heads, knows us better than we know ourselves, and wants to see us flourish and grow, not come to harm. The world may seek to knock us down, but the God who gives flight to the sparrow, and who provides wells of water in the desert, picks us up, holds us fast, nourishes us and quenches our thirst, and, above all, is with us always.

‘Don’t be afraid’, Jesus reassures us. He tells us what to do, how to start on this work of discipleship. And the good news is that it doesn’t necessarily involve leaving home, giving up everything, putting ourselves in the way of danger, healing the sick or raising the dead. No… the first and most important thing that Jesus asks of us is really quite simple. ‘What I say to you in the dark, tell in the light, and what you hear whispered, tell from the rooftops’. The first step in answering Jesus’s call to discipleship is to see what God is doing and to say it, to share it… If you enjoy our service here this morning, tell someone about it. If you’ve heard something about Jesus this morning that has made you think differently about what it means to be a Christian, share that with someone. If you’ve been a churchgoer all your life, so long that you’ve long stopped thinking about why you’re here, have a think right now about how you’d respond to someone who asked why you come? What is it about being a Christian that you’d like to bring out into the light so that others can see it? What is the good news that you’d like to shout from the rooftops? Or are you perhaps someone who still feels as if you’re moving through shadows? Someone to whom God is whispering, perhaps barely audibly, ‘come and see’? If you are, don’t be afraid. Ask someone to show you, to tell you… to help you bring that dimly perceived sense of ‘something’ out into the light, to turn up the volume on that whisper until it starts to make sense.

Don’t be afraid. Yes, Jesus warns his disciples that following him can be costly. But he also reassures them that God has it sorted and that all will ultimately be revealed. In the meantime, he asks us to do two quite simple things: to see it – to bring Jesus into the light – and to say it – to shout what we have seen from the rooftops. And that’s it! Sorted!

This past week, as you will have realised if you follow us on social media, has been ‘Volunteers’ Week’, and we have been trying there to thank some of the people who give up so much of their time and energy to support this church in a huge variety of ways: servers, sacristans, musicians, those who help in the Community Centre and behind the bar, PCC members, and so on…

We have been trying to convey our thanks, I promise; but I am willing to bet that some of you are already bristling slightly. What about the refreshments teams? The welcomers? The comms team? The finance team? What about Marjorie, who slaves over a hot photocopier for us every week to produce our orders of service? What about Dave and the amazing work he does taking all our food donations to the food bank? What about the flower team? The open church volunteers? What about our amazing tech team? What about the people who do those most unromantic of jobs… like unblocking the loos?

What – come to think of it – about me? Not me, Claire, of course; I’m pretty much the only person here who’s not a volunteer… I mean, you, all of you. There is not one person participating in this service this morning who does not contribute in some way to the beautiful and varied body of Christ that is the Church of God in Whitkirk. From the youngest to the oldest, whether you are here in person or watching online, even if you’re just here as a visitor today, you are part of something bigger than yourself to which you have voluntarily given yourself.

The words ‘volunteer’ and ‘voluntarily’ both derive from the Latin, voluntas, which means will, or desire. To volunteer is to give oneself, of one’s own free will, to an activity which is for the good of the community and not purely for one’s own benefit. In a Christian context, volunteering implies an attempt to align our own free will with the will of God for us and for the communities of which we are a part. Volunteering can therefore be seen as one of the ways in which we try to live out the commandment – the greatest commandment – to love our neighbours as ourselves. Loving our neighbours means wanting what is good for them, wanting what God wants for them; and volunteering is a way to ensure that God’s will for our neighbours is realised.

But if volunteering is fundamentally about aligning our wills with the will of God for us and for our neighbours, then volunteering is connected not only to love but also to vocation… for how can we know what God’s will for us might be if we are not able to discern where God might be calling us, in this season and in this context.

In church circles we often think of vocation in a very narrow way, in reference to the vocation to ministry of some sort, lay or ordained, but most often the latter. The reality, though, is that God calls all of us – every single one of us – all the time. There is never a time, from our birth to our death, when God is not calling us, seeking to draw us closer in love, inviting us to respond, to serve, and, above all, to love, and love, and love some more. Which brings me to today’s readings, which provide us with no fewer than four examples of what it might look like to hear and to respond to God’s call.

The simplest of these calls is that of Matthew the tax-collector. Jesus sees him sitting at his tax booth, invites him to follow him, and he does. There is no back story, no build-up to this call. As far as we know it comes from nowhere. And yet there is nothing far-fetched about it. Already this year, two people have contacted me, entirely separately of one another, telling a very similar story: ‘I’ve been an atheist my whole adult life. But now, apparently out of the blue, I think I believe in… something… something I am prepared to call God or Jesus’. And these stories should not surprise us. We are very good at tuning out God’s call and turning our attention elsewhere, but sometimes it becomes impossible to ignore… and then there is nothing for it but to ‘do a Matthew’: to get up and follow Jesus.

Abram too knows what this feels like. Unexpectedly, at the age of 75 and with a wife who has been unable to have children and who is now, in any case, well past childbearing age, Abram hears God’s call to leave everything and go to an unspecified new place where he will become the founder of a great nation. He hears God’s promise that through him all the families of the earth will be blessed. The promise makes no sense, and yet Abram does not demur: ‘Abram went’, we are told, ‘as the Lord had told him’.

The call makes no sense. And yet God, for whom nothing is impossible, does make sense of it. Abram has his son. And centuries later, another Matthew begins his account of the life and works of Jesus, the son of God, a light to lighten the Gentiles, a blessing for all nations, with the words, ‘An account of the genealogy of Jesus, the Messiah, the son of David, the son of Abraham…’. God calls. Abram responds. And, 42 generations down the line, his response comes to fruition.

And something of Abram’s trust in a God who can do impossible things emerges also from the final two stories in our Gospel reading, both of whose protagonists show quite extraordinary faith. In their stories, the leader of the synagogue and the woman with the haemorrhage are not called to up sticks, leave everything, and be led to a new place like Matthew and Abram; rather, they are drawn by their faith into a life-changing encounter with the living God, who is Emmanuel, God with us.

‘My daughter has just died’, the leader of the synagogue says, ‘but come and lay your hand on her, and she will live’. There is no doubt in his mind. Jesus can save his daughter. Amid the confusion of the wailing, the flute-players and the commotion that follows a tragic and untimely death, the leader of the synagogue does not allow himself to be frozen by the grief that he must inevitably be feeling. In the midst of death, he is propelled – called – by his love for his daughter towards the source of all life, and through his faith his daughter is restored to him.

And what of the woman with the haemorrhage? For twelve years she has suffered from a dual affliction: not only from her physical symptoms, but also from the shame and exclusion of being ritually unclean, unable to participate fully in the life of her community, literally untouchable. She too is drawn to Jesus by faith. She too does not doubt for a moment that he can heal her: ‘If I only touch his cloak’, she says ‘I will be made well’. She epitomises those who feel, even now, that God’s call is not for them, those who feel that they have nothing to contribute, those who are excluded or who fear the judgemental gaze of others. And she too, through the healing touch of the one whose love excludes no-one, is made well.

Our stories today, then, could not be more appropriate for this volunteers’ week, as we celebrate those in this community who respond – each in her or his own way – to God’s call. They are reassuring stories and inspiring ones. They remind us that God’s call does not demand special qualifications or abilities of us. God does not even require us to be particularly good or holy people: ‘Don’t panic’, God reassures us, ‘for I have come to call not the righteous but sinners’. God does not require us to be youthful and sprightly either. Abram is 75 when God calls him and 100 years old when his son Isaac is born. God does not require us to be powerful or important. God calls those who hold positions of authority and those who are outcasts alike. No, God merely requires us to have faith – the faith we see in Abram in Matthew, in the leader of the synagogue and the woman with the haemorrhage. God requires us to believe that we are beloved, that we can make a difference, that, as members of the body of Christ, we can be Christ’s hands and feet and eyes and ears and Christ’s heart, overflowing with love, here and now.

So, my friends, please know that your contributions to the life of this church are valued. Your presence here (including your online presence) is valued. You matter and your contributions matter, above all else because they are offered in the service of God and because they stand as a testimony to your faith. And that is, truly, something to celebrate.