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Sermon: Sunday 26th April, 2015

26/4/2015

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There are many things I love about this time of year; longer light and warmer days; daffodils and crocuses; catkins and cherry blossom. I love all these things, but if there is one thing guaranteed to make me go “Aww”, it is the sight of lambs in the fields, particularly when they are very wee and kind of sit there, looking helpless and vaguely bewildered.

I put it to you – you'd have to be pretty hard of heart not to find this a delightful, life-affirming sight. A sight so cute cannot fail to make us go a bit gooey, a bit sentimental.

But there's a problem with this. What I've described is at townie’s response to the sight of lambs in the fields. Only someone brought up in the city, I suggest, could get so sentimental. And today, I want to suggest that that kind of sentimentality can be harmful to us because it may distort our response to Christ.

Let me tell you of my only real experience of shepherding. When I was a student, I spent a month on Fair Isle, halfway between Orkney and the mainland of Shetland. I was there to practice being a minister, and it was a very good place to do it because, in such a small community, you very quickly become involved in everything that is going on.

Fair Isle is basically divided in two by a wall that stretches across the island. The people live on the south side of the wall and the north side, apart from the lighthouse, bird observatory and airstrip, is common grazing land. That’s where the island’s sheep live. Once a year, they are all gathered in, and I was there when it happened. To do this, every able person on the island walks right to the northern tip and then fans out in a long line stretching right across the island. They drive the sheep ahead of them towards the wall. Then the people at either side of the island start driving the sheep towards the sheep fanks in the middle of the island. Deftly, they all get penned in. Then people who know what they are doing wade in among them and howk out all the young male lambs that have been born that spring and summer. Lifting them up bodily, the shepherds apply a firm squeeze where it hurts with a tool a bit like a pair of pliers and castrate the lambs. The lambs let out a sound the like of which you've never heard and, I guarantee you, every man present winces a little. Then there is the shearing, a matter of physically wrestling every adult sheep to the ground, tying its legs and giving it a good scalping. Once sheared, each sheep is then released and it runs off back to the moorland in great indignation. At other times, sheep are gathered, put in crates and loaded on a boat and sent off for slaughter. This is the reality of sheep farming, of shepherding. I learned on Fair Isle that real shepherding is very far from the kind of pastoral, rural idyll that is sometimes depicted. It has nothing to do with cuteness, or sentimentality.

I say this because it is something most of us probably don’t encounter and have therefore forgotten. And so, when we hear and read passages such as our psalm today, and our Gospel reading, we do so through muffled ears and tinted eyes. Our image of the work of the shepherd, and of the relationship between shepherd and sheep, can be far too idealised. And why does that matter? It matters because when we apply that image to reading these passages, it may distort our understanding of them and consequently it may be harmful to our faith, because it can encourage too narrow a focus.

The image of sheep and shepherding is undoubtedly an important one in the Bible. Abraham is provided with a ram to sacrifice in place of his son Isaac. Jacob has extensive flocks. David is called from shepherding sheep to shepherding God's people as their king. Shepherds are among the first to hear of Christ's birth and he himself speaks of himself as a shepherd on a number of occasions. But if we allow ourselves tot narrow an understanding of the metaphor of shepherding, we are in danger of drifting into too narrow an understanding of our relationship with Christ and of the purposes of faith.

The problem is, it can all become too sentimental – perhaps a particular danger for urban people. We get caught up in the idea of being cared for and protected, of Christ the shepherd going to extraordinary lengths to look after us, to include us, to ensure we don’t get lost. And that’s good, that’s part of it, but it is not the whole story of the life of faith.

For a start, it lumps us together as fairly indistinguishable, not terribly individual and is not particularly active creatures. Sheep are by no means the intellectual giants of the animal world. If they get wandered or lost, it is not really their fault. It is because they are a bit stupid. That's not really the case with us. When we go astray, it is entirely our responsibility, and very often the consequence of our own conscious choices. So to identify ourselves too closely with the sheep in this metaphor for our relationship with Christ can lead to too great an abdication of responsibility, to seeing faith as something primarily for our benefit, for our comfort and protection. I think there is a whole lot more to it than that.

A question posed by the writer of the first letter of John struck me very powerfully when I read it last week. “How does God’s love abide in anyone who has the world’s goods and sees a brother or sister in need and yet refuses to help?”  No one can have failed to have been horrified by the loss of life this week in the sea between Libya and Europe. All our powers of empathy and imagination cannot summon up what it must be like to be so desperate as to set off in a vastly overcrowded, leaky, open boat for a five day crossing of the Mediterranean. We cannot have any idea of the terror as a boat tips up, capsizes and hundreds are thrown in the water. From one boat on one night over 700 where drowned; 26 survived and only 24 bodies were recovered. “How does God’s love abide in anyone who has the world’s goods and sees a brother or sister in need and yet refuses to help?” What is Europe but a place and a people which has the world’s goods? It is the decisions of the governments of Europe, our own included, which have led to the deaths of these people whose choice was between certain death at home or possible death at sea.

The writer of this letter of John answers his question when he says, “Little children, let us love, not in words in speech, but in truth and action.” Fine words are not enough. Action is what shows what is really in our hearts, if the love of God abides in us.

This is a call not just to be sheep, not just to see faith as something which gives us comfort and protection. Faith makes us, not sheep, but shepherds. It calls us from passivity to activity. It takes us away from our own comfort by calling us to responsibility for others. God loves us, but we cannot be content to keep his love to ourselves. We must do as we are bidden and share it, not just in words or speech, but in action. That we in Europe, who have the world’s goods, must help those we see in need is just one example. I would argue that our whole lives, and all our politics, should be mindful of those in need, for God has made them our priority. The metaphor of shepherd and sheep can only go so far because sheep cannot become shepherds. That, though, is precisely what Christ asks of his sheep – that we become shepherds with him, rough and hard as that life and calling is.

Amen.

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Sermon: Sunday 19th April, 2015

19/4/2015

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Sometimes it takes a long time to accept that something is true. Scientists often encounter this. Good science involves pushing at the boundaries of human knowledge and often that means proving to people that something they thought was right, had always thought was right, is not in fact so. Often the church has been the first to man the barricades against new truths. Church people were vehemently opposed to the idea of evolution when Darwin first published it. Some still are. Rather famously, it took several hundred years for the Roman Catholic Church to admit that Copernicus and Galileo were right about the earth orbiting the sun, rather than it being the other way around. Climate change is a good example from our own times. It is taking a long time for people to come round to the view that it is a reality, and even longer even for those who do believe in it to start to make changes in their own lives to address it.

We see the phenomenon of difficulty in recognising truth in many more mundane ways to. It can take people along time to accept the truth that an abusive partner won’t to change and they cling for a long time to the belief that the latest punch or slap or insult will be the last. When someone is convicted of a crime, it often takes those who have known them a long time to believe that that person could have been capable of such an act.

It takes a long time to accept and embrace new truths, in part because we don’t like our existing beliefs to be up-ended, and partly because it takes so much effort and thought to change our beliefs. This Easter, reading the stories told variously by the four evangelists, I have been struck by how honest they are about how hard it was for Jesus’ disciples to accept, and come to terms with, and embrace the fact, that he had risen. On Easter Day, we thought about how quickly everything has happened, from Jesus entering Jerusalem to Jesus being laid in a tomb. We know from our own lives that it can take a long, long time to come to terms with the death of a loved one. That is especially so if the death has occurred suddenly, or violently, or to someone young. All three of these applied to Jesus. The disciples and the others in Jesus’ inner circle had no time at all to come to terms with his death. The women had not even been able to complete the rituals of burial by the time he had risen. That’s one reason why they found his resurrection so hard to accept.

And here’s another. It was just so unexpected. So unlikely. Impossible really. Certainly, Jesus had spoken about it, but often he had used metaphors and anyway, it seemed impossible, so why waste effort learning to believe in it in advance. Certainly, they had seen, or at least heard about Jairus’ daughter, and Lazarus, but these were miracles performed through the power of the living Christ, a logical extension, if you like, of the power to heal.

And here is another reason. People like things to be explicable. If something happens, we like to be able to explain the reason. In our age, we turned to science. In earlier ages, people turned to legend or the supernatural to explain the hitherto inexplicable. Neither science nor superstition have the tools to explain Christ’s resurrection. But faced with certain incontrovertible facts – the stone rolled away, the tomb empty and the grave clothes abandoned – and by some witness testimony from the women which they weren’t sure whether to believe or not, they were naturally spending time trying to make sense of it all.

Luke tells us that it was while the eleven and their companions were talking that Jesus appeared. No wonder they were terrified. They leapt to the first available conclusion – this must be a ghost. But Jesus asked them why they were frightened and had doubts. Quite a lot of this sermon so far has been devoted to answering that question. He showed them his hands, and feet, and invited them to touch him. What a mixture of emotions they felt. Joy and disbelief were mixed up together. He asked for something to eat. You can imagine that they must have been wondering if this was real. One of them handed him a piece of fish. As he put it to his mouth, they must have wondered if they would be able to see it going down. But they couldn’t, because he was not a ghost. He was alive.

He talked to them. Luke just gives what must surely be a very brief summary, just enough to point his readers towards the scriptures Jesus quoted. We should not be deceived into thinking that it all just became perfectly clear there and then. Such a fundamental change in belief takes a long time to make.

I think it is important for us to recognise this for two reasons. One is about ourselves and one is about other people. For us, it tells us that faith is a struggle. Christianity asks us to believe and accept things which our rational minds rebel against. But it is in doing that that we open up to new possibilities, possibilities of relationship with God through Christ, and therefore of relationship in Christ with God’s creation and with each other. When we enter, through resurrection, into relationship with God in Christ, we enter into the fullness of the experience of the love of God. It is always there, but it is through faith that we feel and know it. That’s what makes the struggle made by the disciples, and everyone else since who has come to faith, worthwhile.

Understanding how hard it is to accept the truth of Christ’s resurrection ought also to affect our mission. We cannot reasonably expect people to hear the good news and simply and immediately accept. Human beings are not like that. It takes time. It takes patience, and it takes believers being prepared to be alongside those struggling with faith for a long time. Instant results very rarely bear fruit, as Jesus himself reminded us in the parable of the sower.

And here’s another thing. Resurrection is frightening. It so deeply contradicts everything else we expect and know to be true. So we shouldn’t be surprised that many remain deeply sceptical. Our task, at least in part, is to help others to confront their fear, as the disciples and their companions did for each other, while Jesus stood among them, eating fish.

But the primary reason resurrection is alarming is not because it is so unexpected. It is because it calls for a response. Christ’s change from being dead to being alive changes us and challenges us. Once we accept it, we cannot go back, only onwards – onwards with Christ into the uncertain adventure of faithful service.

Amen.

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Easter Sunday Sermon

5/4/2015

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Good Friday Meditation: 3rd April, 2015

4/4/2015

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This is an ugly week, a week of betrayal and denial, a week of suffering, of pain, a week of torture and death. Consider the sights of this week. Soldiers coming by night with spears and clubs. Palaces playing host to trials – the visual expression of human power, pitted against the power of God. Whips and a purple robe. Thorns, crudely fashioned into a parody of a crown. A wooden cross and iron nails. A little hill used as a rubbish dump and a place of execution. A rock cut tomb.

Consider the sounds of this week. Betrayals, denials, false accusations. Shouts of hatred, sneers of mockery. Words of forgiveness too, amid the crack of whips, the hammering of nails into wood, the groans and cries of the condemned, the weeping of the women.

But think too of the smells of this week. The smells are important. There would have been the smells of sweat and blood and of a city’s refuse. But there are smells at the beginning and at the end of the week, smells of overwhelming beauty. It was at Bethany, at the beginning of the week, that Mary, the sister of Martha, poured out a pint of pure oil of nard over Jesus’ feet, and the perfume filled the whole house. At the end of the week, as Jesus is laid in the tomb, his body is embalmed with a mixture of myrrh and aloes, and wrapped in linen cloths.

The myrrh harks back to the story of the Magi. Their gift foretold this moment. It is said that of all the senses, smell has the greatest power to evoke emotions and memories. The route from nose to brain is very short and direct. These smells, of nard and myrrh and aloes, communicate with us on a very deep, primal level something of beauty and peace and love, of things which transcend the worst which humans can do. They speak to us of the essential nature of God, which is truth and peace and beauty and love, for these and all good things have their origin in God. The fragrance of truth and peace and beauty and love are God’s gift to us. They overcome the stinks of blood and sweat; they will remain when even the bitterest words of hate and betrayal and wrong have faded; they will outlast the horror of cross and nails and linger beyond even the memory of deepest pain. Truth and peace and beauty and love are what we have to hold onto, as Christ lies in his tomb, and we await the glory of Easter Morning.

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Sermon: Sunday 5th April, 2015

4/4/2015

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“He is going ahead of you into Galilee.”

It had been such a fast moving week. Six days ago, Jesus and his disciples had been at dinner with friends. Over the next day or two, he had done some fairly rash things in the Temple – overturning the tables of the money changers, driving out the animals waiting to be sold for sacrifice. That had all happened before the Passover, when, at table, Jesus had made some momentous announcements which the disciples had probably not even begun to comprehend. Events had overtaken them. Judas had gone, and done his worst. Jesus had been arrested. There had been a trial, of sorts, that very night, before the High Priest and the Council. Jesus had not spoken, had offered no defence. On the basis of lies and false evidence, he had been convicted and sent, early the next morning, for a second trial before Pilate, the Roman governor. Again, without proper prosecution or defence, he had been convicted and sent to die. He was on the cross by nine in the morning and dead by three that afternoon. Before nightfall, he was in the tomb and then it was the Sabbath, and everything stopped. No work could be done, no rituals observed. It is a sudden and complete cessation of activity.

Dealing with death is always complex. So many emotions come into play. At the forefront, often, is grief. We feel the loss of the one who has died very acutely. There can be confusion too, sometimes fear or uncertainly, often a kind of numbness which defies description. And there can be other feelings which we are maybe less willing to name. One of them can be relief. There can be relief when we have seen a loved one suffer and know that the suffering is now over. There can be relief that the burden of caregiving has now been lifted, relief that something more like normal life may now resume.

If we know these to be true in our own lives and experience, then it is not unreasonable to suppose them to have been true for the disciples. Clearly, there was enormous grief, made all the more bitter for the shocking and sudden manner of Jesus’ death. But there was probably relief too. The worst had happened. Terrible though it was, at least they had personally survived. It seemed like it was now all over, and normal life could resume, after a fashion.

I like Mark’s Gospel because he is the least theological of the Gospel writers, the one with least by way of a personal agenda. That means that what he writes is the least filtered by considerations of how the reader will interpret what he has written. That means, at least to my mind, that what we have here is the most authentic, least embellished account of Jesus’ life. Nobody is being made to look good, to look heroic. As near as is possible, Mark tells it like it was.

So, on this first day of the week, who is there? Three women. And that’s all. So that tells us who wasn’t. The Romans aren’t. Their job is done. The Chief Priest and the members of the Council aren’t. They are back to normal already. Even Peter, the hero of John’s account of this morning, is not there. Nor are the other ten remaining disciples. Just the three women.

And that’s worth pausing to note. The people in this story are the ones who are used to doing the necessary but unpleasant things in life. It is they who would have looked after the ill, they who would have dealt with the mess and pain and danger of childbirth, they who would have drawn water and tended hearths and cooked and cleaned, they who would have known what to do during and after a death. And though none of these tasks was exactly glamorous, and though many would have involved getting their hands dirty, all were tasks made possible and necessary by love.

So it was with love that these women came to the tomb, to do what they knew was necessary, to complete the loving care of Jesus’ body which had been cut short by the Sabbath. But it went beyond this. Every tending of a body, every funeral ritual is about coming to terms with a death. This death had robbed them of a particular hope. It seemed that, as Jesus died, his promise that God would reign for the benefit of the world died with him. They grieved the loss of a loved one and mourned the loss of hope.

But as they reach the tomb, another emotion surfaces – terror. Finding the tomb open, they are addressed by a young man in a white robe, at whose identity and being we are left to guess.  He tells them that Jesus is risen. It is too much for them. Only a fool would suppose that grief could turn instantly to joy. Because of their fragile and conflicted emotional state, the good news of this story escapes those who first heard it. The message the young man gives is that the dream is alive, God is not dead, and that the reign of God begun in Jesus’ ministry continues.

“He is going ahead of you to Galilee.”

Why the terror? There is nothing inherently frightening about an empty tomb, or a body which is not there. The white clad young man does not seem frightening either. Rather, what is alarming is the sudden change in reality. The women cannot make their peace with death, because, although it was real, it is no longer so. Jesus is once again one step ahead and is beckoning his disciples to follow him. They might have approached the tomb relieved that the ultimate price had been paid. Now it seemed that that was no longer so, and that there was more to come. The challenge of costly discipleship was on again. No wonder they were terrified.

True to Mark’s unvarnished telling of this story, the women run away, and say nothing to anyone, so great was their fear. Today, that maybe shows us how we should respond. Today it is enough to know that Jesus is risen. It is not necessary to say more. And though we have sung, “this joyful Eastertide, away with sin and sorrow,” that is not the whole emotional story. For as last week ends and this begins, we are in a maelstrom of emotions. There is joy and gladness, but if our response to Jesus’ resurrection is authentic, there should also be fear, alarm, terror, as there was for Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome. For Jesus is risen and he has gone ahead of us and is beckoning us to follow. Follow we must, even though we cannot know or calculate the cost of discipleship.

Amen.


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    Posts here are by Sandy Horsburgh, Minister of St Nicholas Buccleuch Parish Church.

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Dalkeith: St Nicholas Buccleuch Parish Church (Church of Scotland) 119 High Street, Dalkeith, EH21 1AX
Scottish Charity Number SC014158