When I heard that Still Game was to return for another series, seven years or so after the last one, I was pleased and anxious in equal measure. Pleased because I always really enjoyed it. Anxious that it wouldn’t be as good as I remembered. In the event, I needn’t have worried and have enjoyed the first four episodes of the new series enormously. I think it’s great comedy.
 
And I think it works because, although each character is a caricature, each exaggerates only slightly character traits that we recognise, either in ourselves or in others. No one is as nosy as Isa, no one is as hapless as Winston, no one is as mean and miserly as Tam, no barman is as sarcastic and unhygienic as Boaby, but they are not so far-fetched as to be entirely unbelievable.
 
Some of you, fellow Craiglang aficionados, will know what I’ve been talking about. Others won’t have a clue. So how about a different comic story, one we all know because Reader has just read it for us.
 
At its centre is a funny wee man who does a funny thing. He climbs a tree. And funnily enough, the celebrity wants to see spots him and stops to have a chat with him, and even invites himself to dinner. Classic comedy ingredients. A funny character and an unexpected twist.
 
But there’s more to it than that. A bit like with Still Game, we see something of ourselves exaggerated, just a little bit, in Zacchaeus. For who hasn’t experienced an overwhelming sense of curiosity from time to time? Who hasn’t hung around to catch a glimpse of famous person? And who hasn’t experienced that sense of being a bit out of things, a bit on the edge, a bit excluded? And, at its most basic, who hasn’t struggled to see over or around the people in front? We know how Zacchaeus felt. We may not climb trees ourselves, but we know why he did.
 
This is one way of approaching the story of Zacchaeus. Undoubtedly, it has comic elements, and that’s possibly why the story is so well-known, so immediately appealing. It also seems to have a happy ending, and the people who end up grumbling are shown up as not very nice, while wee Zacchaeus goes and does the right thing.
 
And this is a valid approach. It is probably the way we approached it as children, with simple songs and nice pictures of Jesus smiling up at Zacchaeus. But there are other ways of approaching the story, and deeper lessons to be drawn from it.
 
Take Zacchaeus’ name. There would be something darkly comic about someone called Joy being the grumpiest person you’d ever met, or someone called Faith being a militant atheist. Something in a similar vein is going on here, because, in Hebrew, Zacchaeus means ‘pure and righteous’. And actually, he is anything but. He’s stinking rich, and like so many who have achieved that dubious distinction, has acquired his money by leaching money off the poor and the powerless. And everybody knows this. He’d probably taking money off most of the people in the town. Them shutting him out is entirely understandable. They call him a sinner and they’re right, even though they are all sinners too, just, in their own eyes, not as bad. ‘Sinner’ is a label they apply, and like most labels we apply to one another, there is truth in it, even if it is unhelpful, even if it is dehumanising.
 
Though they may contain grains of truth, labels applied to people are a way of not seeing who people really are in all their complexity. And I want to argue that seeing, rather than comedy, is the key to this story. There is the obvious concerned with seeing. Zacchaeus wanted to see Jesus. That’s why he was up the tree. Then there’s the fact that Jesus saw Zacchaeus, up there among the branches. But we need to go beyond merely physical seeing.
 
When the people saw Zacchaeus, they saw a hated person, someone who has done them harm. But that’s not who Jesus saw. He saw someone who was capable of redemption. He saw the hidden goodness in Zacchaeus, goodness Zacchaeus himself maybe knew nothing about. That’s how Jesus looks at us all, seeing past the sins to the goodness that is in us all.
 
When Zacchaeus came down from the tree and looked at Jesus, I don’t suppose he saw what he expected to see. He’d expected to see a locally famous teacher and healer. What he saw was God, face to face with him, looking into his heart. And that experience was transformative. Straightaway, with no calculation, no haggling, no bargaining, he offered to make amends. In other words, he began to see the people around, not as sources of revenue, but as victims of fraud, fraud that he had perpetrated. Rather than their money, he saw their humanity, and the harm he had done to them.
 
Beneath the charming and comic surface lies is one of the most challenging and radical stories of the Gospels. And it’s all the more powerful because of its gentleness. At no point did Jesus denounce Zacchaeus’ sins. At no point did he say, “Woe to you!” There’s no process of justice, of condemnation, of punishment for sins committed. He just said, I want to be with you, so I’m coming for dinner.
 
And that was enough to effect the most profound change in Zacchaeus. It is what Jesus says to all of us. “I want to be with you. I want to be with you in your home. I want to share food with you.” He wants to be with us because he sees past the sin, right to the essential goodness within us. In Christ’s eyes, all are capable of redemption. And when we look on Christ, and see his justice, his compassion, his holiness, our lives are transformed. Happy are those whose sins are forgiven.
 
Amen.

In preparation for today’s sermon, I took a walk. It sometimes helps clear the mind. Even if it doesn’t, it seemed particularly appropriate to walk while thinking about this story about Jesus which Luke tells us. Because it is a story set against the backdrop of walking. And so, today, I thought we should walk through this story, so to speak, stopping at points of interest along the way.
 
As we join the story, we encounter Jesus walking. It is pretty much how he always travelled, with the exception of a few trips in a boat and a ride or two on a donkey. People now are always being encouraged to walk more, because it is so healthy, good for the body and the mind. It is not so long since walking was the only way for ordinary people to get anywhere. That Jesus is walking places him among ordinary people, not above, but one of us.
 
This was not just aimless wandering. Jesus was on a journey. He was going to Jerusalem. Depending on where he started from in Galilee, Jerusalem was about eighty miles away. If you were going directly, would have been a journey of at least five or six days, but for Jesus it was much longer, because, for him and the gospel writers, Jerusalem is more an event that a place. When the gospels say that Jesus was “on his way to Jerusalem” it means he was on his way to crucifixion.
 
At this point, he was physically only a little way into the journey. We know that because Luke is as precise as he can about where Jesus was. In those times, borders would not have been as hard and fast as they are now. To our minds, there can be no region between Galilee and Samaria, for the two districts border each other. But then, of course, there would have been an area where Galileans and Samaritans lived intermixed, as is true in any place which has a land border. We need to think of this border more as an area of gradual transition, rather than abrupt change.
 
Let’s pause here a moment and ponder that image. Does it work as a metaphor for our lives, for where we are as Christian people? I think it does. I think we can think of the Church as being a border region, an area of gradual transition between the world and its ways, and the kingdom of God. The church is neither wholly of the world, nor wholly of the Kingdom. It is the place through which we gradually move from one to the other. We, followers of Christ, inhabit this border place, neither wholly of the world and not yet wholly of the Kingdom.
 
What happens in border areas, in regions between, in places of transition? Many things. We encounter the other. We meet people both like and unlike us. That, again, is how the Church should be a place where we both find comfort and challenge. Sometimes we feel uncomfortable, out of place. Sometimes we feel secure, utterly at home.
 
In this border area, Jesus was approached by ten lepers, like him in their humanity, divided from him and everyone else by their disease. But this is a place of encounter, a place of risk. The lepers risked coming to Jesus. Jesus risked being near enough to them to communicate with them. “Have mercy,” they cried.
 
They asked for mercy because they were suffering. Relief from suffering would have been merciful in their lives. In Jesus, they saw, not the source of their suffering, but one who could possibly lift it, and make them whole, whole in body again, fully able to re-join family and community from which they were excluded. “Go and show yourselves to the priests,” Jesus shouted back. An odd response, perhaps, to our ears, more used as we are to stories of Jesus’ kindness and compassion. But Jesus is recalling an old practice, described in the Hebrew Scriptures, of people suffering from leprosy seeking healing from priests. He is forming a continuity with the past. That is one of the roles of the Church too. But Jesus is also pointing the way forward, to healing, to new life. When the Church is faithful to Jesus, it does this too, pointing the way forward to new life while at the same time holding the past in deep remembrance. It values both the traditional and the contemporary, the old and the new, the past and the yet to come, neither fetishizing nor dismissing either.
 
On this occasion, it was not from the priests that healing came. The priests would have seen only flesh restored and people made healthy again. This is one of those occasions on which Jesus healed at a distance, as the lepers were walking away from him. Hold that image for a moment. We focus so much on people coming to church, imagining that this is the place that people may encounter Christ, that Jesus is waiting for people to come to him. These lepers though, were leaving him, most never to return, but still he reaches out to them to serve them at the point of their greatest need.
 
Did they ever make it to the priests? Who knows. For one, at least, the priests were no longer his priority. Seeing himself healed, he turned back to Jesus and came in thankfulness.
 
We should pause here a little. If the church is a border area, a place of transition, it should not only be a piece of encounter and challenge, but place of thankfulness. A couple of weeks ago, we sang, “Come, ye thankful people, come.” That’s us. We are thankful people; thankful for who we are and all we have; thankful to God who made us and who provides for us. When we celebrate Holy Communion, we always say, Let us give thanks to the Lord our God. It is right to give our thanks and praise. It is indeed right, it is our duty and our joy, at all times and in all places, to give thanks and praise. Our duty and our joy. Think about that for a moment. In the Communion liturgy, in the defining act of Christian worship, we assert that the source, the cause of our deepest happiness is our thankfulness to God. And that is true because thankfulness brings us close to God.
 
Thankfulness brought the healthy former leper close to Jesus, closer than he had been before. Only as we see him on the ground before Jesus, transformed by joy and thankfulness, does Luke tell us that he is a Samaritan. The information comes as a shock, as a rebuke. A rebuke to others who maybe had more reason to know better, to know that they should have been grateful to God for their healing. These lepers had been outcasts because of the disease. To Galilean and Judean minds, this man was doubly an outcast because his religion was not considered proper. But it was he who did the right thing. It is he who shows us that it is the other, the one not quite like us, be that in belief, in ethnicity, in sexuality, in social acceptability, who can challenge our assumptions and point us to truth and, indeed, if we are open, lead us closer to God. This interaction between Jesus and the Samaritan former leper challenges the temptation towards rigid orthodoxy which is not open to other wisdoms.
 
As Jesus speaks to the Samaritan before him, there is sadness in his voice. Sadness that only one returned to him. But there is commendation for the Samaritan man too. Words of kindness and blessing. And so we see how this is a story about ministry. It is a story about serving, about ministering indiscriminately. It is a story about not looking for a return on effort, but being thankful when one occurs. It is a story that shows us that return on ministry often comes from unexpected people. It is often the case that those most grateful for the church are those who have least expectation that the church will care about them. But of course, we do not minister in order to receive gratitude. We minister because we ourselves are grateful to God.
 
As we have walked through this story, alongside Jesus, on a little part of his journey, we have encountered some of the great themes of our faith – thankfulness, wholeness and salvation. Thankfulness flows from and is a response to the other two, the restoration of wholeness and the experience of salvation. It is easy to think of these somehow separate, but this little story, this chance encounter, shows that they are not. In God, through Christ, our brokenness is made whole. In this story, as in many others in the Gospels, physical illness and disease are metaphors for humanity’s broken relationship with God. Christ offers to all, the familiar and the stranger, the thankful and the unthankful, a new relationship with God in which sin is forgiven and we are made one with the One who made us. In other words, Christ secures our salvation and gives us the gift of faith to see and feel and understand that all are made well with God.
 
To God be all thanks and praise.
 
Amen.

​Just over a week ago, the National Museum of African American History and Culture opened in Washington DC. President Obama was there, of course, but sharing centre stage with him at the opening ceremony was a ninety-nine-year-old African American woman, Ruth Bonner, whose own father had been born a slave. That’s how recent slavery was in the US. Not much more than a hundred years ago.
 
Back in 2007 in this country, we marked the 200th anniversary of the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act. Churches were at the forefront of marking that anniversary because much of the credit for the Act rests with William Wilberforce; with the strong convictions he had, born out of his Christian faith, that slavery was morally wrong; and the support his long campaign received from churches. One of the things that happened around that anniversary was that we looked again at slavery and found that, although illegal, it is still flourishing, even in our own towns and cities and countryside. We tend to call it people trafficking now, but it is essentially slavery. There are slaves in Scotland, in England, all over Europe, all over the world. There are slaves working in brothels, doing domestic service, working in agriculture. Did you know that many people who work in car washes are, in fact, trafficked? A lot of the people working as old job handymen, the sort who offer to re-lay a driveway, or cut down trees in your garden, are people who have been trafficked. You can’t tell they are slaves just by looking at them. They’re not wearing chains. But there are people living in slavery, who are kept as slaves through threats and intimidation, whose passports have been illegally removed from them, whose bodies are being exploited, who are not being paid for the work they are doing. There are people from overseas who have been trafficked into Scotland, people from Scotland who have been trafficked overseas, people from Scotland trafficked within Scotland and the rest of the UK. And the traffickers constantly keep them on the move, to keep them from getting to know people who might help them.
 
Slaves, now and in times past, have always been treated as both valuable and worthless, their value being measured in the economic return they can produce for their owners and masters, everything else about them being considered worthless. But worthlessness is not a feeling confined to people in slavery, to victims of human trafficking. I read an interesting article about fashion magazines recently. I’m not a regular reader of such publications so I didn’t know that basically they are pretty much all advertisements. And the message of the advertising is this: your life will be better if you wear these clothes, use these cosmetics, follow these ten tips for a better sex life, never eat these six fattening foods, and look like these models in the pictures. That one is particularly cruel because hardly any of the women in the pictures actually look like that in real life, such are the wonders of digital image manipulation producing longer legs, unblemished skin, narrower waists, fuller breasts, shinier hair. In effect, when you buy a fashion magazine, the message is this: you’re the wrong shape, you’re ugly, wear the wrong clothes, and have a rotten sex life. Nobody needs to be told any of this, especially not women who, for generations and generations, have been told they were not as good as men. And still are. Misogyny is the basis of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. It is a feature of some parts of British politics too. In business, sport, broadcasting, churches, schools, workplaces of all sorts, sexism and misogyny are daily occurrences. Women and girls are constantly being given the message that they are worth less than men and boys. And we see the results in self harm, eating disorders, mental illness, and in unfulfilled potential.
 
All of these things make this passage from Luke’s Gospel a very difficult one. It is a passage about faith, but to modern ears, it seems to characterise a faith which is, at best, strange and irrelevant, and at worst, misleading and dangerous. When the disciples ask Jesus to increase their faith, he tells them that even the tiniest amount of faith is enough to perform miracles, and then tells them to think of themselves as “worthless slaves”. To our ears this sounds dismissive, dangerous and dehumanising.
 
So the first thing we probably think is this: since we are not replanting trees by faith alone, we must clearly have a wholly inadequate faith. And then that word “worthless” seems to confirm that, while the idea of slavery would seem to strip away even our humanity. What is Jesus playing at?
 
Well, he could just have been having a bad day, but that’s not a good explanation. It is a difficult passage, this, but we mustn’t just reject it. Instead we ought to be asking about the nature of the faith Jesus spoke of.
 
The problem arises if we think of faith in the wrong way, if we think of faith as something that is ours, as if it is something we do, something we possess, something which is somehow separate from the One in whom we have faith. If we go back to the question the disciples asked Jesus, we can see that they, perhaps intuitively, understood this. They didn’t say to Jesus – tell us how we can increase our faith ourselves. They asked him to increase their faith, acknowledging that faith is a gift, that it comes from and cannot be separated from Christ, the One in whom we have faith.
 
As Jesus often did, he provided an answer with an arresting and memorable image at its core. We often read Jesus’ words as if they were admonishing us, scolding us. But why would he do that? Why give the gift of faith to disciples and then tell them that they didn’t have enough? Why build up just to knock down? Why give just to take away? That’s not Jesus’ way. Rather than scold the disciples, Jesus is telling them, and us, that even a tiny amount of faith enough to do whatever is required of us. Because what is faith, but simply trusting in the one for whom nothing is impossible.
 
So the message of the first part of this passage is this: we’ve got enough faith already. So, no excuses, Jesus goes on to say. There’s nothing holding us back from getting on with living our faith.
 
And that’s what the second bit is about. Having faith is nothing for which we should be admired. Faith is not our possession. It is not an end in itself. It is something to be lived, to be active in the service of God. There’s a real sense that the life of faith is just something we should get on with, dutifully, willingly, obediently, and not looking for personal reward or commendation. These words of Jesus are confusing, because they use images with which we are unfamiliar and rightly uncomfortable, and he is certainly not commending or condoning slavery, but they should also be words which are strengthening and encouraging. It is all too easy to think we’re not ready, we’re not well enough equipped, that we somehow need more before we can do things in the service of God. But that’s thinking Jesus is taking issue with. All of us, he is saying, have faith at least the size of a mustard seed, and that is more than enough. So what’s holding us back?
 
Our life of faith should be willing, dutiful and obedient because our faith should not be separated from the One in who we have faith. In all things, Christ is our example. As he was willing, dutiful and obedient, so should we be. Like he said to the disciples, our concern should not be with quantity of faith. Quantity of faith is really rather a meaningless concept, for how could you ever measure it? Jesus’ words guide us to think about the purpose of faith – what faith is for. And through the image, and the story, he tells us – we already have the faith we need. Now, fulfil its purpose. Live it in the willing, trusting, cheerful service of God.
 
Amen.

​I was talking with a group of other ministers recently. One, who is just about to start his probation, asked when we wrote our sermons. Answers varied from Tuesday to Saturday, with one even claiming to start his on the Friday before. We quickly realised that we fell into two distinct groups – the people who, when they have a task, try to get it done as soon as possible, and the people who leave it until the need to get it done becomes overwhelmingly pressing. Whether this was any help to our probationer colleague, I cannot tell.
 
The story from Luke’s Gospel which Philip read for us is one of the harshest Jesus ever told. It rests on the question of whether you choose to do the right thing now, or whether you choose to leave it to the last-minute, and risk being too late. Often, Harvest Thanksgiving Sunday is a kind of feel-good Sunday, but this is certainly not a feel-good story.
 
Jesus tells it was particularly vivid clarity. There’s a man with all the trappings of wealth, the sort the prophet Amos was despising in the first passage we read, a man who consumed conspicuously, who would eat lambs and calves because they were particularly delicious without thought of how many more could be fed from a bigger, older animal.
 
Outside, on the street, unnoticed and ignored, there was a poor man, Lazarus. Around the same time, they both died, Lazarus probably from hunger and illness, the rich man possibly from overconsumption. It’s a detailed Jesus leaves out. The next we hear is that, quite possibly for the first time, the rich man notices Lazarus. There is almost a sense of injustice. How could it be that this nobody, this piece of barely human detritus, should be nestled so comfortably with Abraham while the rich man, who must have felt himself to have been so important in life, was suffering the torments of hell? Having had no use for Lazarus in life, the rich man quickly thinks one up now. Even so, he still does not lower himself to speak to Lazarus directly. Instead, he tries to order Abraham to send Lazarus to cool his tongue with water.
 
There’s a real tone of regret in Abraham’s response. He calls the rich man, ‘child’. It is affectionate, but there’s nothing to be done. He only has to look back over his life to understand his present, and indeed, his eternal situation. The rich man has had all the good things. Lazarus had had none in life. In an echo of Jesus’ mother’s words, and isn’t it wonderful to think of her forming her son’s thinking, the hungry man is filled with good things while the rich man is sent empty away.
 
But the rich man isn’t giving up. Realising his own cause is lost, he pleads with Abraham to send Lazarus to warn his brothers. Again, Abraham responds with regret. They have all the warning, all the guidance they need. A dead beggar is hardly going to convince them if Moses and the prophets can’t.
 
There is nothing that can be done. It was all too late. Does this seem like a justice to our ears? How does this story fit with our understanding of a loving and compassionate God? In truth, it fits very well. We could read this as a story about what happens after death, and many have done so, but I think that if we make that our focus, we fall into the trap of thinking more about ourselves than about others, and that is exactly what the rich man did.
 
It is natural, I think, to identify more with the rich man. Who, after all, would aspire to live a life like Lazarus’? We are also aware, though many of us struggle in certain respects, particularly financially, that, compared with many, we live comfortable lives. If you saw the BBC report from Yemen this week, and the images of children literally dying from hunger in front of the camera, you know that, although we are not dressed in purple silk and feasting on veal every day, we are all pretty well off. So, as we read this story, the question that may well come to mind is – are we bound for the fiery pit?
 
Someone who influenced my thinking a great deal was my great uncle George, a Church of Scotland minister emigrated to Canada where he pursued an academic career, ending up as Professor of New Testament in McGill University in Montreal. I remember very clearly him saying at dinner one evening, “I believe in hell, but not in the next life. Hell is here, in this life.” That made a profound impression on me and so I cannot read this story as evidence for a state of eternal torture after death. Rather, to me, it is a story about this life, not the next.
 
Because you cannot deny that Lazarus’ life in the gutter by the rich man’s gate, with dogs licking his sores, was hellish. His was a life of misery and suffering. A life like so many lead today. A life like that led by people in Yemen, South Sudan, Aleppo. In fact, in every part of the world, you’ll find people living hellish lives of suffering and deprivation. You’ll meet them on the streets of every city in this country. Through the work of Storehouse, we know that behind some of the doors of houses on this town, people are living hellish lives of suffering and deprivation.
 
Are we to respond to them because we fear there may be consequences if we don’t? Not by any means. This story is a call, not to individuals to do the bear minimum, just to societies to live the Kingdom of God. In the Kingdom of God, God’s good things are shared. In the Kingdom of God, suffering is not ignored. In the Kingdom of God, hearts and minds are open. In the Kingdom of God, people respond to each other with compassion and love, not because they are afraid for themselves. These are some of the marks of the society Christ calls us to build in his Father’s name.
 
Are we ever going to achieve this? Are we ever going to sort out the suffering there is in the world? We would love it if it could be so, but these problems are so big we can never believe they will be fully solved. But ultimately, the story of Lazarus and the rich man is not about solving all the world’s problems. It is about caring for our neighbours, but, perhaps, first seeing who our neighbours are. The rich man didn’t see Lazarus as his neighbour and he didn’t care. In gratitude of this Harvest Time for all the goodness we enjoy, we ask God is to open our eyes to our neighbours, and to open our hearts to them too, and to give us the will to share gladly what we have with them.
 
Amen.

​The way we are addressed, and the way we allow others to address us, tells us something about the relationship we have, about how close we are. How we address someone tells us too something about how we understand them, what respect we have for them.
 
We looked last week at the first of the two Christological New Testament terms which the Apostles’ Creed uses to refer to Jesus – Son of God. It is a term which carries connotations of closeness, of affection, of a familial relationship between God the Father and God the Son. This week we turn to the other Christological term, one which seems in a way more formal, perhaps more distant at first – our Lord.
 
Last week, we saw how the designation, Son of God, was not unique to Christianity, and noted how it was used in Judaism, and in ancient Egyptian religion and in Greek thought. Similarly, the term Lord is shared among many different religions, then as now. It was used by Greek rulers and Roman emperors, by Assyrian kings and great landowners.
 
So what is a Palestinian peasant doing being called Lord?
 
The term Lord  is prominent in the Old Testament. For us, who read it in translation, it is the word which is used most commonly where the original text uses the Hebrew name for God, Yahweh. So it is not surprising that it occurs frequently in the New Testament too. But it is, perhaps, still surprising that the Lord of the New Testament should turn out to be a Palestinian peasant.
 
It is widely, but not universally, thought that Paul’s letters are among the oldest texts in the New Testament. Some of the credit, though not all, for recognising the Lordship of Jesus goes to him. He wrote to the church in Rome: If you confess with your mouth, “Jesus is Lord,” and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.
 
For our purposes, this is a crucial text. In the midst of our exploration of the Apostles’ Creed, we note that this is about confession of faith, about saying with the mouth what is believed I the heart. It has been argued that these words – Jesus is Lord – is the earliest expression of Christian faith.
 
Though probably later in composition, the Gospels record people uttering this confession. We have read how, a week after the resurrection, Thomas sees the risen Christ for the first time and confessed – My Lord and my God. He says is tin front of Jesus, looking him in the face. What is clear is that calling Jesus ‘Lord’ is connected with the events of Easter. It is his resurrection that transforms understanding of him from peasant, from teacher, from holy man to Lord. Peter, explaining the Good News on the Day of Pentecost, says, “God has made him both Lord and Christ, this Jesus whom you crucified.”
 
Peter, Paul and Thomas all confessed Jesus as Lord. But this is a fundamental confession of faith for all Christians. So what is going on when we make this confession? Though we pray, “Come, Lord Jesus,” looking forward to a future event, when we say Jesus is Lord, we are also seeing something about the present – not that Jesus will be Lord, but that he already is Lord. The lordship of Christ fundamentally affects our life, as we live it day by day.
 
But it goes beyond us. Paul asserts that Jesus is “the name that is above every name” and that Christ exercises lordship over all the powers in heaven and on earth. Clearly this is a claim of cosmic significance.
 
So, understanding Jesus as Lord derives from Easter, affects our daily lives and relates to Christ’s place over the whole created order. His lordship is about his dominion over the whole of reality.
 
And that means that those who confess that Jesus is Lord must bear witness to his lordship in every area of life. And of particular importance as we consider this is the field of politics, how people interact with one another, treat one another, order the society we share. When we say, Jesus is Lord, we are asserting that all other powers and authorities must be subservient to Jesus. He is supreme. It is for this reason that Christianity and Christians were so viciously persecuted in the early centuries of the faith. They posed a threat to those who wanted to exercise supreme power themselves. Perhaps we need to ask if we are still a threat, whether our confession that Jesus is Lord still has the power to unsettle and upset, and, if it doesn’t, if Christianity has become something regarded as a harmless eccentricity, then we need to ask where we’ve gone wrong.
 
But what is it that gives validity to this claim of Christ’s supreme lordship? For that we need to turn to the verses from Paul’s letter to the Philippians which Jean read a little earlier. It is one of the key passages of the whole Bible. It speaks of how the Son of God, the Lord of lords, left behind equality with God to become the servant of humanity. This Lord does not rule as other lords attempt to rule – as an authoritarian despot. For all their apparent powers, they are not and never will be the real Lord. The true Lord of all is the servant of all. And the way he chose, and the way he directs us to choose, depends upon, not the love of power, but the power of love. We follow Christ and bear witness to his lordship only if we are prepared radically to love.
 
And that’s all about choices. It’s about choosing to give our allegiance to Christ and not to any of the other competing entities which demand our loyalty – like nation, race, party, or property. It means choosing to affirm one another, to cherish difference, to hold as important what people are rather than what they have. It means choosing love, and all of the vulnerability which comes with that. It means choosing justice, with all the cost that can entail. It means choosing life over death, virtue over sin, forgiveness over guilt. This is the ways of Christ. These are the marks of his lordship over the church, the world, the cosmos. And these are the authentic marks of the life we choose when we confess – Jesus is Lord.
 
Amen.

A moment or so after Jesus breathed his last, a Roman soldier standing by said, “Surely this was the Son of God.” What did he mean? It was not the first time Jesus had been described thus. As he rose from his baptism in the Jordan, the voice of God was heard to say, “This is my son.” What did that signify? One stormy night, when disciples were out fishing, Jesus walked to them over the water. Awestruck, they exclaimed, “Truly, you are the Son of God.” What did they mean by that?
 
In our exploration of the Apostles’ Creed, we reach, today, the words – “God’s only Son.” And our task today is to consider carefully what these words mean.
 
The phrase, Son of God, is an exclusively New Testament term. Mark uses it in the first verse of his gospel. In Luke, it first appears in the words of the angel announcing to Mary that she will bear a child. In John’s Gospel, it is John the Baptist who first calls Jesus the Son of God, while in Matthew’s Gospel, the words are heard first from the devil as Jesus underwent temptation in the desert. Throughout the Gospels, characters as varied as demons and unclean spirits, disciples – both women and men, the high priest, crucifixion spectators and even Jesus himself use the phrase. All of them meant something by it, yet it remains enigmatic.
 
The idea, of course, predates the New Testament. Moses was sent to Pharaoh to tell him: “Israel is [God’s] firstborn son.” Hosea announces his prophecy, his word from God for the people, by reminding his hearers that: “Out of Egypt, I have called my son.” In the Psalm which Margaret read to us, Yahweh tells King David: “You are my son.” Luke, in his genealogy of Jesus, traces his lineage back to Adam whom he calls Son of God. We may be left asking, who or what or how many sons does God have? How can the Creed call Jesus God’s only son? And is this not all getting just a bit to gendered?
 
We must always remember that the Bible is a record of developing thought, and that words and phrases in it, which look and sound the same, meant different things at different times. We also have to remember that biblical thinking was shaped by different outside influences, particularly, in New Testament times, by ideas coming from different schools of Greek philosophy.
 
At the time when the Creed was beginning to be formulated, Hellenistic ways of thinking– ways of thinking developed within what we think of as Greece – were widespread. These themselves were not, of course, developed in isolation, but drew on other influences. Of particular relevance to us as we consider what Son of God means is the tradition stemming from Egypt where the pharaohs were called sons of Re, the sun God. Following on from this, Greek rulers and, later, Roman emperors styled themselves sons of God. It was a way of trying to claim divine authority and project divine power. The Greeks also applied the term to workers of miracles, people who were thought to have access to particular divine powers.
 
It is helpful to know about this when we look at the Gospels because it is these connotations which are evident in the minds of the demons, the onlookers at the crucifixion, and even the disciples that night in the boat. It is these ideas of what the Son of God means that Jesus so decisively rejected, both as he resisted the temptations to power and wonder working offered by the devil in the desert, and as he resisted the calls to step down from the cross.
 
Although Jesus only uses the term Son of God about himself three times, all in John’s Gospel, he accepts it when others use it of him at key points in his ministry, such as at his baptism. He never denies it, though he seems to prefer Son of Man, and never publicises explicitly his sonship of God. But it is clear from the gospels that Jesus understood his sonship much more firmly through the prism of Jewish concepts of the sonship of God. This is the understanding which underlies the words of the Psalm we have already heard. In Jewish thought, being the Son of God is about being elected by God to that status. The Son of God is one called to participate with God and to show particular obedience to God. It has nothing to do with Hellenistic notions of power or even of divine conception. So you see how the term can properly be applied to Adam, to David, even into the whole people and nation of Israel. And ultimately to Jesus.
 
Jesus, though, takes sonship of God to a new and unique level – and that’s what the Creed points to in the world only. Whereas Adam, David and Israel as a whole were disobedient, despite God’s call, Jesus never was. Furthermore, the Bible teaches us that God and Jesus had a unique relationship. In John’s Gospel, Jesus says: “I and the Father are one.” All his work, indeed his very being, rest on his election by God to sonship and on his unswerving obedience to God.
 
The sonship of God ascribed to certain Old Testament figures is about God reaching out to creation and to humanity. The sonship we see in Christ goes much, much deeper. It is about God reaching into the very depths of human suffering, to redeem and to save. In Jesus, we learn that God’s primary concern is not himself, but the world he has made and the people with whom he has populated it.
 
And so, although Jesus’ sonship is unique, his sonship is God’s means of electing us to a form of sonship and daughtership. John’s Gospel tells us that God sent his Son into the world so that all might be saved through him. Paul assured the Galatians that, in faith, we receive adoption as sons and daughters of God. He wrote to the Roman Church telling them that, ‘we are reconciled through God’s son.’ Christ’s existence, his life, his ministry is all about reconciling humanity and God, and the goal that reconciliation is to make us daughters and sons of God – that is, free people, no longer enslaved by sin.
 
The more time we spend with the Apostles’ Creed, the more amazed I am at just how much it says in so few words. Of all the possible titles for Christ found in the New Testament, it chooses just two – Son and Lord – of which more another time. And through those two titles, it expresses the truth that, in Jesus of Nazareth, God was uniquely present in human history, uniquely so because of the intimate nature of the relationship between Jesus and God, between the Son and the Father.
 
And this matters. We tend to forget the controversies which raged about whether Jesus was of one substance with God, as the Nicene Creed puts it. But on this, the whole Gospel, the whole faith, rests. If Jesus is just a creature like all the rest of us, the whole thing falls. He’s then just an interesting, if not wholly original, teacher who had a brief career before being executed on dubious charges. But, the Creed affirms as the Bible makes clear, he is not just a creature. He is the Son of God, one with the Father, God incarnate.
 
It is because of this that we can be confident in our salvation. In Christ, we meet God on his way towards us. In Christ, God is moving towards us in order to turn us to walk the path of reconciliation, rather than the path of alienation; to elect us to be daughters and sons too, alongside Christ; to draw us into that obedience which Christ so perfectly exemplifies; and to share his work of salvation with us.
 
Amen.