Sermons & Other Words

It would be really easy to read the story we’ve just heard as a classic morality tale, a story of right and wrong, good and bad, allowed to enter God’s kingdom or banished to the other place. Be prepared! Or be prepared to face the consequences! Be like the wise bridesmaids, who bring extra oil for their lamps and get to attend the wedding party, not like the foolish ones who let their lamps go out and find the door slammed in their faces. Simple, right?

Well, maybe. But if we look a little more closely, it becomes apparent that the story is not as straightforward as it might, at first, appear. Why does the bridegroom arrive for his wedding at midnight? What on earth holds him up so long on such an important day? Why is there no mention of a bride? Where are the foolish bridesmaids going to find an oil-dealer open for business at midnight? What is actually going on here?

This is, as so many of Jesus’s parables are, a story that works on many different levels, but today, as we gather to remember those who gave their lives for the sake of peace, freedom, and justice, I would like to suggest that one way of reading the story of the wise and foolish bridesmaids is less as a morality tale and more as a cautionary tale about the danger of making assumptions about who’s right and who’s wrong, who’s ‘in’ and who’s ‘out’, who will get to take their place at the wedding feast and who will not… a story about the misguided human propensity to draw nice clear demarcation lines between ‘us’ and ‘them’.

I wonder if anyone here feels as if they have struggled to church today, rather than, say, skipping in joyfully? I wonder if anyone feels a bit as if they are here in body but not in spirit? If anyone is thinking, already, about what they’re going to have for dinner? Or wondering if this is going to be one of those l-o-n-g sermons that make you late getting out of church and force you to gulp down your post-church cuppa? (It isn’t, I promise…) More seriously, I wonder if anyone sitting here today is wrestling with doubt, with the feeling of having hit a spiritual wall, with big questions about why they’re here, or little ones about why our pews are so uncomfortable and our building so draughty?

Well, if any of the above apply to you, I have good news for you. William Walsham How, the first bishop of Wakefield, knows how you feel. His famous hymn, ‘For all the saints’, with which our service opened today contains a verse just for you (and, if I’m honest, also for me on those days when it all feels ‘a bit much’). ‘O blest communion, fellowship divine’, he writes of those saints who confessed Jesus’s name in the world and who now rest from their labours enjoying the benefits of heaven. ‘We feebly struggle, they in glory shine’. They are saints. They inhabit the heavenly realms on the far side of those pearly gates that the good bishop imagines in his final verse. We on the other hand are, well, a bit feeble. A bit… lacking. Saints? You must be joking. We are anything but…

Today the church remembers Luke the Evangelist, the author of some of the best-known and best-loved of the stories about Jesus, including those – soon to be re-enacted in a million nativity plays – of the Annunciation to Mary, of Jesus’s birth in Bethlehem, and of the visit of the shepherds to the baby in the manger. Other stories found only in Luke are those Jesus himself tells, such as the parables of the prodigal son and the good Samaritan: stories that attest to God’s forgiveness and God’s all-encompassing love.

Luke is a consummate and engaging story-teller. And, importantly, he does not stop at telling the story of Jesus himself. He seems to have intuited that the story recounted in his Gospel is but one – admittedly hugely significant – chapter in an ongoing story: one which continues right up to the present day. Unlike the other Gospel-writers, that is, Luke, is the narrator not only of the story of Jesus, but also, in his second book, the Acts of the Apostles, of the story of the Church, the Body of Christ which lives out and retells his story anew for each generation.

The account of the sending-out of the seventy, that we have just heard in today’s Gospel reading, is another one of those stories which appears only in Luke. This is, perhaps, the reason why an ancient tradition dating back to at least the fourth century suggests that Luke himself may have been one of the seventy disciples sent out to proclaim the good news of the Kingdom. There is, it must be said, absolutely nothing to suggest that this tradition is based in fact, and yet the idea that, in this story, we might in fact be witnessing Luke’s evangelistic apprenticeship is a compelling one, encouraging us to read this story as one that is highly relevant to Luke’s aims and ambitions as a re-teller, not only of the story of Jesus, but also of the story of the Church.

When you have more than you need, build a longer table, not a higher fence…

This is, in essence, the message of Jesus’s teaching in today’s Gospel reading. Store up treasure in hdeaven, not here on earth. Be rich towards God, not rich in possessions. There is more to life than simply being able to rest on our laurels, eating, drinking, and making merry. And keeping our possessions to ourselves, guarding them in barns or behind fences, makes no sense when we remember that human lives are short and the future unknowable.

At the beginning of Jesus’s earthly ministry, immediately following his baptism by his cousin John, we are told that he is led by the Spirit into the wilderness, where he is tempted by the devil.

First, the devil plays on Jesus’s hunger, after fasting for forty days, tempting him to turn stones into bread. Secondly, the devil tests his faith, suggesting that throw himself off the pinnacle of the temple to see if God will send his angels to catch him. And finally, having failed in his first two temptations, the devil moves on to the temptations of power, glory, and authority. ‘Worship me’, the devil whispers, ‘and I will give you authority over all the kingdoms of the world, power beyond your wildest dreams’.

Of course, Jesus resists. In fact, even to say that Jesus resists is to misunderstand what is really going on here. The whole point of this episode, it seems to me, is that Jesus is not, at any point, remotely tempted by what the devil offers him. Turn stones into bread? Jesus is the bread of life. Throw himself into the void? As if Jesus has not already done just that by allowing himself to be sent to earth in the first place. And power and authority? Jesus is God! What power or authority could the devil possibly give him that he does not already have?

This year, at Messy Church, we are going to be thinking, with the children and young people who attend, about the things we do and say in church. At this afternoon’s session, we will be thinking about the Lord’s Prayer, the prayer that Jesus taught us and that his followers have been teaching one another and repeating in hundreds of different languages, across hundreds of different countries, for over 2000 years.

At the centre of that prayer lies the idea of forgiveness. ‘Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us’: I wonder how many times each of us here today has prayed those words? And I wonder how often we have paused to consider how those words might be connected to the rest of the prayer that Jesus taught us. If we do stop to think about it, I think that the Lord’s Prayer makes it clear that forgiveness lies at the very heart of our faith, because it is in the hard daily work of seeking forgiveness and forgiving others that we strive to bring God’s kingdom to life, on earth as in heaven; it is by acknowledging our need for forgiveness, our propensity to mess things up, that we try to avoid being led into temptation, and to allow God to deliver us from evil. Forgiving and seeking forgiveness, in other words, is kingdom work; it is part and parcel of following Jesus.

And the story that we have just heard in our Gospel reading illustrates this very clearly. It has been prompted by Peter, who has come to Jesus with a question. ‘So, Lord’, Peter has asked Jesus, ‘if someone wrongs me, how many times should I forgive them?’. So… what do you think? How many times should we forgive someone who does something to annoy or hurt us? What if they keep on doing it? Do we have to keep on forgiving? Twice, three times… seven times?

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.