Playing politics. It’s an activity that many people really don’t like. They want those in positions of authority to be altruistic, to work for the common good. They don’t like seeing people using an issue for personal advantage or personal gain. We don’t like the feeling that the words or actions of another person are not entirely straightforward, that there is another agenda being pursued. We don’t like it when we see it in public life, or in the workplace, or in the church, or in family life. It undermines trust.
 
Yet, much as we don’t like people playing politics, it goes on all the time, in every sphere of life. In every situation, you will find people manipulating and manoeuvring to gain influence and power, or to preserve them if they have them.
 
There is a political game going on in our gospel reading, and a pretty serious one at that, a deadly one, potentially. It shouldn’t surprise us to find people playing politics in the gospels. The story of Jesus’ life is a story of real life, and this sort of thing goes on all the time. It is also particularly prevalent where genuine political issues are at stake. And they certainly are in the gospels.
 
The Gospels are intensely political. It simply defies common sense to see them in any other way. At all times and in all places, people have been vying for power and influence. That’s small-‘p’ politics. Palestine in Jesus’ time was seething with political manoeuvring. That’s clearly in the background to our reading this morning.
 
And not just in the background either. It is right there in the foreground too. And we should not make the mistake of thinking that Jesus was somehow above this. He was right in there among it. His life and his teaching are deeply political, which may be why he so divides opinion.
 
The action in today’s reading takes place near Jerusalem, the centre of political power. Jesus is on his way there, both to stir things up, and to suffer. Some Pharisees come to intercept him. More often than not, his encounters with Pharisees were confrontational. They were people of position, members of the establishment, and they didn’t like their position being challenged. They didn’t like what they said being contradicted. They may not have been at the top of the heap, but they liked the way the heap was arranged. They didn’t like people challenging their authority or upsetting the social or political order.
 
Nearer the top of the heap, but not right at the top, sat another figure. Herod was a kind of king, but pretty much a puppet of the Romans. He was a man of whom Jesus had every right to speak harshly. His father, also Herod, had tried to kill him as an infant, killing instead many innocent children. The current Herod had killed Jesus’ cousin, John the Baptist. These Pharisees came to warn Jesus that Herod wanted to kill Jesus too. But this was not news to Jesus. And it is unlikely that the Pharisees came motivated by genuine concern for Jesus. Note the first words they said – “Get away from here.” That was their real concern. The expected trouble for themselves if Jesus came to Jerusalem, and they didn’t want that.
 
They were right, of course. And Jesus could see the game they were playing, the scheme they were hatching, and he didn’t want to play along. He was pursuing an agenda more important than preserving his own life, an agenda which, in order to fulfil, would entail the loss of his life. Jesus knew that, hence the references to finishing his work on the third day, words which only make sense to those who can look back and understand that Jesus’ work of redeeming humanity was completed, not on the cross, but at his resurrection.
 
He knew the resistance which would face him in Jerusalem, the seat of power. All places of power are strongly resistant to change, even while they employ the language and rhetoric of change to justify their positions. But Jesus was resolute. He knew the political machinations that were going on but he plunged in anyway.
 
And he did so because that was what his life’s work was. To put it simply, Jesus’ life’s work was the overthrow of the old order, the order of the world dominated by sin and all the ways sin takes shape – by preserving privilege, by oppressing the weak, by hoarding wealth, by perpetuating suffering and hunger and warfare. When God sent his son, he sent a revolutionary. No wonder the establishment wanted him dead, or at least far, far away. They hated what he stood for.
 
His mission and his objectives were plain from the beginning. His birth was announced to shepherds, widely considered then to be generally dishonest and untrustworthy, and then to some mystic foreigners. His manifesto was about releasing captives, about lifting the poor out of poverty, about freeing the oppressed. He went around confronting evil wherever he found it, often personified in the form of demons possessing people. His mother, a peasant girl, had sung of the proud being scattered, the powerful being deposed, the lowly lifted up, the hungry fed, the rich being sent away empty. Her son told rich people to get rid of what they had; he provided food and wine in prodigious quantities; he demolished the arguments of the clever and the powerful. He told people to love their enemies, to turn the other cheek, and he kept company with people polite society thought of as the dregs.
 
All this deeply unsettled the establishment which doubtless worked then as it works now, by concentrating wealth and power in the hands of a few, by dividing society, by looking after its own at the expense of everyone else. Jesus understood this, and challenged it, and refused to be co-opted into it. For his love was not limited. He did not just love his own, but longed to gather all, even those who hated him, under his protection. I imagine him standing on a hill, looking over at Jerusalem, knowing the people there and what they would do to him, yet still longing for their redemption.
 
The challenge for us is this. If we want to shelter under the arms of Jesus, we need to accept all the other people we will find there, all the people Jesus loves. His love is universal, including all the people we cannot love ourselves. And when we stand close to Jesus we cannot do so without accepting his agenda; an agenda of radical change, the pursuit of which requires the systems of the world, not only to be challenged, but to be overthrown. Like many good revolutionaries before and since, Jesus knew his cause mattered more than life itself. In fact, his cause is life itself – life in Christ rather than death in sin. His life, his death, his resurrection began the revolution to redeem all people, to rescue us from what oppresses and divides, to liberate us from the worst of ourselves. Do we dare to follow him, to join him?
 
Amen.

On Wednesday last week, many churches, principally Anglican and Roman Catholic, will have held Ash Wednesday services. The liturgy for Ash Wednesday is sombre and reflective. The message of the service is that we will all die, and the ritual marking of the foreheads of worshippers with ash is a reminder that from dust we came and to dust we shall return.
 
Why is it done? Death is a topic many avoid, but we shouldn’t. For us, who are heirs to the promise made through Christ, it should hold no fear. We are assured that there is nothing, not even death, which can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. It has been said that death is a great teacher, that it teaches us to live. Remembering that we shall all die reminds us that our time here is limited. The lesson of that is clear. We do not have time to waste. That’s what I mean when I say death teaches us to live.
 
The tradition is that the book of Deuteronomy, which literally means ‘the second book of the Law’, consists of speeches delivered by Moses on the day he died. It is his last testament. To him had been given the Law. On this, his last day of earthly life, he expanded upon it, interpreted it, emphasised certain bits, explained things in more detail. He speaks of what the Law means, its purposes and how it is to be observed. The Law is not just a catalogue of things which are prohibited. It is at least as much a description of how to live. It teaches its adherent to live well.
 
The section we have read comes from a part which deals with how to celebrate the Feast of Weeks. This was a festival which Moses announced earlier in this collection of speeches. It was to be a celebration of the beginning of the harvest, a celebration of the gathering of the first fruits. Our reading concerns how this celebration was to be conducted.
 
There were to be particular words spoken and particular actions completed. The first fruits were to be put in a basket and carried to the priest in the appointed place, who would lay them on the altar. The grateful worshipper was to recite a particular litany which recalled the saving actions of God, reaching back through the story of the ancestors.
 
It begins: A wandering Aramean was my ancestor. This wandering Aramean is Jacob, also known as Israel. The litany recalls that he was homeless and desperate, a man unable to eat because of famine. By migrating to Egypt, God took them to where there was food. He provided for them. But there was a cost, and that was to be aliens in a foreign land. As has been the experience of so many who have left their homes for another place in order to survive, the Israelites suffered great oppressions and persecutions. But they cried to the Lord for rescue, and God heard them and brought them out of the land of their suffering. He cared for them and blessed them by settling them in a land flowing with milk and honey, a fertile place, the fruits of which they were to bring before God in thankfulness each year.
 
There is something tremendously powerful about ritual actions and ritual words, a power we tap into in our services, a power which infuses all authentic worship. The power of this liturgy established by Moses is that it takes the worshipper far beyond simple thankfulness for the first fruits of the annual harvest. It offers a vision of what it means to be the people of God.
 
It does this, first, by making, each year, a conscious identification with the ancestors, not because they were people of might and valour, but because they were powerless and helpless. Their wandering, their hunger, their afflictions and their cries are all remembered. Why? Because the only reason there can be anyone standing to give thanks is because God heard and God rescued. The faithfulness of God was made manifest in the redemption of the powerless. It happened because God did what he said he would do. He delivered Israel from the power of the Egyptians.
 
But that’s not the end of the matter. After giving instructions for the annual thanksgiving, Moses also instructed special giving to take place every third year. This was to be put aside for the support of those who were powerless now, as the Israelites had been powerless in Egypt. Special care was to be taken of the homeless, the widows, the orphans and those who were from foreign lands. The thankful, faithful Israelites were to respond to God’s blessing of them by being a blessing to others.
 
Sometimes when we read the Old Testament, the world it describes can seem so very different from our world and from our experience of life. And of course it is, but not so much in this lesson. As Moses, on the day of his death, was teaching people to live, so this passage continues to address universal themes and continues to teach us to live. This is for those who aspire to be faithful people of God. This is for those who want to live in obedience to him.
 
It teaches us three things. First, it instructs us to recall that our redemption is rooted in God’s faithfulness. God makes promises to his people and God keeps those promises, and his care is particularly for the homeless, the lost, the oppressed, the afflicted and the marginalised. God will find you and love you and care for you even when no one else can, not even yourself.
 
Second, we are to be thankful, not just for what God provides, but for his faithfulness in providing it. The things that sustain us do not come to us by accident but through the constant providence of God. God is utterly reliable, and we are to remember that.
 
And third, our thankfulness is most fully expressed when we share what we have been given, when we become channels by which God’s blessing flows onwards and outwards to the vulnerable and the marginalised.
 
Powerfully, the passage calls us to a life of imitation of God, a life living in God’s way. As God acts on behalf of the powerless, so must we; but not only that, because God acts with and through the powerless. That means that when we have power, no matter how limited, we must share it and work with those who have none. And it means that when we are powerless ourselves, we need to be ready for God to work through us. God’s work, begun among the Israelites in Egypt, and continued in the wilderness and in Canaan, continues when his people choose to be faithful to God.
 
Amen.

Sermon
Sunday 7th February, 2015
 
A moment can mean so much. A moment can change so much.
 
A moment of compassion can change another person’s day. A smile from a stranger can create a connection which can lead to friendship. A moment’s carelessness, or a thoughtless word, can have far reaching consequences too.
 
Sometimes the significance of the moment is clear in that moment: the moment your eyes first meet and you know that the person before you is going to be deeply special in your life, the moment a child is born the moment a diagnosis is received. But equally, many moments pass and we are unaware of their significance, only realising later that something you did, or something you said made a difference to another person.
 
And there are other times when you know, in the moment, that something significant is happening, but it takes a long time after for the full significance to be understood and appreciated. There are times when we know our lives are being changed, but we cannot, in that moment, fully know how. A wedding, a time so full of hope, but also of uncertainty, might be one such moment. A baptism might be another.
 
Neither of these moments in life are destinations. Both, rather, are turning points, when our lives shift course and take a different path, one whose route and destination we may try to predict, but cannot know until we walk it.
 
Another moment like that was the Transfiguration. That’s what we call the event Luke described in the portion of his Gospel Nan read to us this morning. It is an inadequate name, a name conjured to describe a fleeting moment, a unique event never seen before or since. It is a mysterious event. It draws us in, even if we will never fully understand it.
 
Whatever happened, what is interesting to me is the reaction of Peter, James and John, the disciples who witnessed it. They understood one thing right away. They understood that what they saw, whatever it was, was significant. Beyond that, they were completely clueless. It was a moment whose significance only gradually began to unfold.
 
They nearly missed it though. They were very sleepy, just like they were to be in the garden of Gethsemane as Jesus prayed on the night before he died. I think Luke wants us to make that connection. Their sleeping in Gethsemane was about missing the significance of that moment, as they had so often missed the significance of Jesus’ talk of his own death.
 
It is only by looking back from beyond the events of Jesus’ death and resurrection that the meaning of the Transfiguration begins to emerge; that we and the disciples begin to see Jesus as the fulfilment of the Law given to Moses; that we see Jesus as the fulfilment of the promise that God would intervene decisively in creation, the promise communicated through the prophets, represented in this story by Elijah.
 
It is only in the light of the resurrection, that the radiance of Christ on the mountain of the Transfiguration is seen to be a revelation of his divine glory, a glimpse of the truth that Jesus is God.
 
Did the disciples fully understand this? Can we? I doubt it. The Transfiguration is a glimpse of God who is beyond our full comprehension, but whose mystery only serves to draw us towards him.
 
Today, we are celebrating a double baptism, a mother and her son. Whenever we celebrate a baptism, or Holy Communion, I experience something terribly hard to define or describe. I am in the most extraordinarily privileged position, as an ordained minister, of enacting, before you and with you, the sacred mysteries of our faith. These are moments which we cannot fully understand, yet they are moments freighted with significance. They are moments which change our lives, yet in the moment we cannot necessarily imagine how. They are moments in which God is glimpsed, incorporating us, through his Son, into his life; mysteries which draw us closer to God.
 
Because of the baptisms this morning, I hesitated over how much of the Gospel we should read. At first, it didn’t seem appropriate to read about a deeply suffering child and a parent, frantic in his helplessness. Somehow, that seem to introduce a jarring note into a moment of joy, thanksgiving and hope.
 
But without reading on, without hearing about the foot of the mountain as well as about the top, this story does not make so much sense. Without the story of the suffering boy, what goes before would remain simply a moment of awe and mystery. But that is neither the whole story of faith, not its purpose.
 
We who are called, in faith, through the waters of baptism, into awareness of and relationship with the loving yet mysterious God shown to us by Christ, cannot remain for ever on the mountaintop, for ever in the moment of awe. Special moments, be they the once and once only Transfiguration, or the once in a lifetime moment of baptism, or the occasional celebration of Communion, or the weekly gathering to hear God’s word, are there to reveal God to us, to change us by that revelation, and then to send us out, out to where children suffer, out to where parents are helpless, out to where life is real and raw and gritty and painful, for that is where God wants us and that is where God is.
 
The moment of Transfiguration on the top of the mountain prepared the disciples for life at the bottom of it, for mission. Our encounters with God do likewise.
 
Peter, James and John received a transformative glimpse of the Son of God on the mountain top. But it was to be only after another sleep deprived night, on another hill, that Christ was to be fully revealed to them, arrayed, not in dazzling robes, but crowned with thorns and hung on a cross. This is what makes our faith authentic. In Christ, God is not only the God of glory, of mystery, of awe. God is the God of deepest suffering too, whose love for us is so deep there is nowhere he will not go to be with us, no suffering too great he will not endure it with us.
 
Amen.

 
It was just an ordinary Sabbath at the Synagogue. There would have been the normal rituals, the reading of scripture, the recitation of psalms. Week by week, most of the men would have been expected to take a turn unfolding the scripture. The carpenter’s son had been heard doing just that in nearby Capernaum. He should take his turn in his home town too. So the scroll is handed to him. He unrolled it and found the place he wanted. A part from Isaiah. He read:
 
“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me
to bring good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives
and recovery of sight to the blind,
to let the oppressed go free,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.”
 
There is an expectant hush. What will he say?
 
“Today, this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”
 
What joy! At last, God is going to sort everything out. They are poor people, ground down by all sorts of circumstances, suffering in all sorts of ways, all living under an overwhelming sense of oppression. Now this young man was telling them everything was going to be all right, not sometime, but now. This year. God was going to favour them. ‘What a good message,’ they all began saying to each other. ‘From Joseph’s son, don’t you know. Who would have thought it?’
 
But they’d interrupted him. He had more to say. He was talking about himself now. This wasn’t so good. He was telling them that he expected them to make demands on him, to do the wonderful, unexpected things he had done elsewhere. He was telling them they would reject him and what he said. They didn’t like this nearly as much.
 
Then he told them some stories, stories they knew, but he was drawing from them lessons they really didn’t like. It was insulting, an outrage. They were furious. But murderous though they were, it wasn’t to be by this crowd, and it wasn’t to be upon this hill that he was to die. But the shadow of the cross is already crossing his path.
 
It is one of the paradoxes of God that God is always and everywhere present, but that God is also always particularly present in certain people and in certain situations. That Sabbath, God was everywhere, but also particularly in Jesus. We understand that, but it would have been the most enormous surprise to the people in the Nazareth Synagogue. To them, if God was anywhere in particular, it would be in Jerusalem, not in the neighbourhood carpenter’s son.
 
But the point was this. God isn’t necessarily where you most expect him. And God doesn’t necessarily work though the people you’d most expect. So why not the local carpenter’s son?
 
Jesus picked two stories to make his point. He mentioned a story about Elijah. In his day, there has been a terrible drought which led to a terrible famine. Many people suffered. All were deserving of help. But God sent his prophet to one widow among many. This widow didn’t even worship the God of Israel. Yet it was to her that Elijah was directed and in her that God’s power and presence were made known. God chose to be particularly present to an outsider, not to one of the faithful ancestors of these faithful Nazareth synagogue goers.
 
Jesus mentioned another story. Many in Israel suffered from leprosy. Many of Israel’s enemies did too. Few could have been as high profile as Naaman, commander of the Syrian army, enslaver of an Israelite maiden. But it was in him, through the prophet Elisha, that God worked a miracle of healing, by which Naaman was won over to God.
 
So what was Jesus saying, and why did it enrage the congregation? He was saying this. You may have invited me to preach in your synagogue, but you’ll never accept me. It is not in you that the Lord’s favour will be found. God knows that, and now, as so often in the past, when God is doing a new thing, it is among the outsiders that he does it. You can see why it upset them.
 
But why does God do this? Why do new things, why start new stories with people ignorant of him? I think it has something to do with complacency, something to do with the narrowing effect of expectation. If you know all the old stories, if you are comfortable repeating them, perhaps you are less able to see the new if it doesn’t fit what you already know. Perhaps you tend to look back, rather than look around, and see what you expect rather than what is actually there.
 
That is an uncomfortable thought for churchgoers. Are we not the people of God? Do we not expect God to be most active among those who love him most? To work most with those most ready and willing to work with him? Are we the Nazareth congregation of our time, enraged by God working out new things elsewhere, in new people? Or rather, do we just not see that happening?
 
The fact is that the creative, creator God is always doing new things among new people. We heard how God asked Jeremiah to be a prophet. ‘There must be many better, more experienced, more eloquent people than me to be your prophet,’ Jeremiah protested. But still God chose the unexpected one, just a youth, an outsider from the religious establishment. Reading between the lines of Paul’s letter to the Corinthians, we see God working out a new narrative of love amid a disputations bunch of badly organised, argumentative, self-promoting, sometimes snobbish people.
 
God is doing new things now. Through volunteers from many countries who have travelled to Lesbos to help people off boats, through thousands more collecting clothes and boots to send to refugees, God is proclaiming liberty to captives in our own time. Through the compassion and generosity of ordinary people who give to foodbanks like the Storehouse, God is bringing good news to the poor in our time. These are just two examples
 
But do other new things that God is doing involve us? Can they? Or are we the insiders, angry, disappointed at being passed over while new things happen with new people? What Jesus was saying is that the people God chooses when he has something new afoot are outsiders. Not the one’s you’d expect. Not the ones with power and resources.
 
Now think about the Church. It used to be powerful. It used to have plenty of resources. It used to have plenty of people. It used to be right at the centre of society. No longer. The church has been pushed to the margins. So often, we feel helpless, without enough people and without enough resources and with no power whatsoever. But still we think of ourselves as insiders. Maybe, just maybe the changes in the church which have taken place over the last fifty years or so, and which we call decline and count as failure, are not these things at all. Maybe, just maybe we are still in the care of our loving, powerful God, the eternal God who sees all history in a single span. And maybe, just maybe God has ben preparing his church to be, once again, the outsiders in which a new narrative will be unfolded, moving his church to the margins to be among the people who need God most. It is time, not to look back, but to look around, to be alert to the new, the God given opportunities. The things is not to assume we already know what God will do. The thing is to be ready for whatever God chooses to do next.
 
Amen.