Eighth Sunday after Trinity 2021

 

Eighth Sunday after Trinity 2021

Lectionary readings: 2 Samuel 11:1-15 and Ephesians 3:14-21 and John 6:1-21

 

Over the summer months we are taking a deep dive into what it means to be human, and how to live in love and faith, in the context of changing understandings of human identity, changing patterns in relationships and families, changing sexual attitudes and activity. These are everyday bodily matters, of everyday flesh-and-blood lives, to which if our faith means anything at all, it must surely have a bearing.

This week, I have been reading a book written by a friend of mine, an Australian woman, Mandy Smith. The book is entitled Unfettered: Imagining a Childlike Faith beyond the Baggage of Western Culture. The author shares her story of rediscovering what Jesus meant when he said that unless you become like a little child, you cannot enter the kingdom of heaven. She sees childlikeness as a genuine alternative to the false choice between ‘the anxiety of adultish hyperengagement (we’d better fix this) or … the despair of childish disengagement (we’re beyond hope).’ (p. 5) She writes: ‘I propose that a way forward can be found in Jesus’ surprising invitation to the kingdom through childlikeness. Here’s why: 1. Children identify and engage as whole (thinking, feeling, sensing, embodied, relational) selves. 2. Children know how to engage without taking on full responsibility.’ (p. 3)

Our Old Testament reading today is the sordid tale of king David raping the wife of a friend and then having that friend murdered in order to cover his tracks. This is, I would suggest, adult behaviour—or what, evoking ‘childish’ behaviour, Smith coins ‘adultish.’ Not that every adult commits adultery, or murder, but representationally adult in several ways. First, David is not present, where we expect him to be present. The natural thing for a king to be doing in the springtime was leading his army into battle, but instead, he engages in restless distraction. Children live in the now, adults fret over the past and the future. Second, David experiences, and surrenders to, the urge to possess what he sees. It is not enough to note beauty in the world and enjoy it for its own sake, far less thanking God for the beauty he has given to another. Children do not need to possess; adults do. It is learned behaviour we are shaped into. Third, as soon as he has taken what he saw, David no longer wants it, discards the woman, for his appetite is satisfied only for a moment. Fourth, when things take an unplanned turn—the woman conceives—David attempts to solve the problem, by increasingly desperate means, ultimately writing a death warrant for an innocent man who has been his faithful friend and servant through bad times as well as good.

In our Gospel reading we hear John’s account of the feeding of a crowd of about five thousand adult men, and afterward of Jesus walking on the water. It is a passage marked by bodies, and by appetite. The crowd has an insatiable appetite for signs, without making the connection to what they point to; an appetite for food, perhaps with a carelessness that leaves twelve baskets of waste; an appetite for a form of liberty, won and maintained by coercive force: ‘they were about to come and take him by force to make him king’—and even the disciples are caught up in this approach, ‘Then they wanted to take him into the boat’ against his will, the boat, instead, immediately reaching the land towards which they had been heading.

Philip sees the problem, the impossibility of satisfying such insatiable, adultish appetites. He moves rapidly from anxious adultish problem-solving to childish despair. But the adult is disarmed by the innocence of a child, a boy who offers up his packed lunch. It is obvious to a child that you feed the hungry, not the appetite. If you are hungry, and I am not, have my food: “Here you are, mister!” It is a whole response, not separating thought from feeling, self from neighbour. Nor does the boy harbour delusions of grandeur, that he can feed five thousand with his lunch: that is not his responsibility; he plays his part, and trusts that it is enough, that someone else will take it up. It is a child’s response.

Jesus’ response is also childlike, as it always is in the Gospels. First [here I am drawing on Smith citing Hans Urs von Balthasar, pp. 35, 36], he trusts in the goodness of the Father, knowing he can do nothing by himself, only join in with what the Father is doing. Second, dependent on his Father, aware of his need—for Jesus gets hungry too—he is thankful for the Father’s provision. He took the bread and gave thanks for it. Third, in childlike humility and gratitude, Jesus shares with others, five thousand of them. Fourth, he lives in the fullness of the moment. We’re told that these events took place near to the Passover festival, the annual commemoration of the exodus from slavery in Egypt. The first Passover meal was eaten standing up, coat on, ready to flee into the night. But on this mountain, Jesus makes the people sit down, rest, eat at leisure: discover satisfaction with who you are, who you are with, what you have. Not ‘know your place!’ within the exploitative rules of the world; but, find your place, in God’s good rule.

What Jesus asks of the crowd, who press after him, is that they share a picnic together. That they feel the grass beneath their feet, tickling their arms as they lie down in the warmth of the sun. That they feel the ground pressing back against their hips, forcing them to shift their pose, their bodies searching for comfort, for a best fit. That they laugh at the way the grass stains skin green, as if drawing on us, human canvas. That they take bread in their hands and tear it and pass it, making sure that no-one is left out, while the little ones wriggle and dance and trust that there is food for their hunger and grass to soften their fall. That they become childlike, for, unless you become like a little child, you cannot enter the kingdom of heaven. What Jesus asks of the disciples, who have just had their contracted adult horizons expanded again to that wonder children know in the world without needing to possess what they behold, is that they get in the boat. But even now, it is not long before they are rowing against the wind, straining against where it would carry them, while Jesus goes for a walk in God’s kingdom with such innocence it hardly matters whether it is grass or water beneath his feet. Oh disciples, you cannot enter the kingdom by the grasping means of the empire!

Last Sunday afternoon, we had a picnic for the families who come to Messy Church. A first step back, after eighteen months unable to gather-together. We didn’t advertise it wider than the regular crowd, a crowd of about thirty rather than about five thousand. But it was good. Really good. Perhaps this summer we need to picnic more. Or even go outside to receive communion bread in our hands. Perhaps in such small steps, our bodies will teach us what we knew once before and need to rediscover, to be more fully human.

After all, as Paul knew, and dared to proclaim to the church in Ephesus, Christ dwells in our hearts, makes himself at home in our bodies, in God’s love fleshed-out in the breadth of our hipline, the length of arms stretched wide to invite embrace, the head-shaking height of children who have grown so much—how much!?—over the past eighteen months, and in the deep-seated response of unruly emotion. Childlike, whole, made to be filled with all the fullness of God.

 

Sixth Sunday after Trinity 2021

Lectionary readings: Ephesians 1:3-14 and Mark 6:14-29

 

The Herodian dynasty was incredibly complicated, and extremely murky. On the death of Rome’s vassal king Herod ‘the Great’ in 4 BC, his kingdom was divided between three of his sons, and his only sister. Herod Archaelus—son of Herod the Great and his fourth wife, Malthace—became Ethnarch of Judea; but he was so poor a ruler that the Romans deposed him in AD 6, sending him off into exile in Gaul and turning Judea into a Roman province overseen by a Roman governor. Herod the Great’s sister, Salome I, became Tetrarch of Jamnia, Azotus and Phasaelis, until her death in AD 10, when her territory was folded-into direct Roman rule. Herod Antipas—the full brother to Herod Archaelus—became Tetrarch of Galilee and Perea, where he ruled until he was sent into exile in Spain in AD 39 by Emperor Caligula. Philip—the son of Herod the Great and his fifth wife, Cleopatra of Jerusalem; half-brother to Archaelus and Antipas—became Tetrarch of Gaulantis, Batanaea, Trachonitis and Auranitis, lasting until his death in AD 34.

It is Herod Antipas, Tetrarch of Galilee and Perea, who we find in our Gospel reading today. He had married Phasaelis, daughter of King Aretas IV of Nabatea (yes, Phasaelis is the same name as part of Salome I’s territory, a name given in honour of Phasael, a brother of Salome and Herod the Great—their mother being a Nabatean). But later, while on a trip to Rome where he stayed with his half-brother Herod II—son of Herod the Great and his third wife, Mariamne II (in his Gospel, Mark wrongly names Herod II as Philip)—Antipas fell in love with Herodias, the wife of Herod II—and granddaughter of Herod the Great and his second wife, Mariamne I. Herod the Great had executed his second wife, Mariamne I, and their two sons Alexander and Aristobulus IV for allegedly conspiring to murder him. Aristobulus IV was Herodias’ father, and his death left her an orphan while still a minor. Herod the Great engaged her to her half-uncle, Herod II. This displeased Herod the Great’s eldest son, Antipater II, son of Herod’s first wife, Doris; Doris and Antipater having been exiled when Herod married Mariamne but recalled when Mariamne and her two sons were executed. Therefore, Herod demoted Herod II to second in succession, behind a restored Antipater; only to have Antipater executed soon after, for allegedly plotting to poison his father; moving Herod II briefly back to the front of the succession line; only to write him out of his will, just days before Herod’s death, on account of Herod II’s mother, Mariamne II, having known about the poison plot of Antipater, son of Doris, and yet not having brought it to her husband’s attention. Fortunately for Herod II, he had been living in Rome, and in this way avoided his father’s tendency to have his sons executed.

Herodias, last seen married-off to her half-uncle Herod II, divorced her husband in order to marry her other half-uncle, Herod Antipas. And he had to divorce his own wife, Phasaelis, an act that provoked his father-in-law, King Aretas IV of Nabatea, to declare war—a war that Herod lost, despite dragging in his Roman allies. But first, Aretas had to secure the safe return of his daughter, the exchange taking place at the frontier fortress of Machaerus. According to the historian Josephus, it was also here, on the border of their two territories, that Herod flexed his muscles by hosting himself a birthday party—it would have made more sense to host such a party, for Galilean dignitaries, at his capital, Tiberias—a party at which his step-daughter, Salome (named for her great-great-aunt) (this Salome would later be married to her step-father’s half-brother, Philip—from where Mark’s confusion might arise) performed seductively, and in return he promised her anything, up to half his kingdom (though, technically, it wasn’t a kingdom). And her mother, Herodias, who herself witnessed the execution of her father and uncle and grandmother as a young girl, calls for more blood, the head of John the baptizer, an influential figure vocal in his disapproval of her second marriage.

John was no fool in warning Antipas against this relationship. Eventually his patron, the Emperor Tiberius (for whom he had named his Galilean capital, Tiberias), died in suspicious circumstances, to be replaced by Caligula. Caligula was an old friend of Antipas’ nephew, Herodias’ brother Herod Agrippa, and Agrippa made a land-grab move against Antipas, resulting in Antipas and Herodias being sent into exile in Spain.

I did warn you that it was incredibly complicated, and extremely murky. What contrast, our reading from Paul’s letter to the church at Ephesus! Listen again:

‘Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, just as he chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world to be holy and blameless before him in love. He destined us for adoption as his children through Jesus Christ, according to the good pleasure of his will, to the praise of his glorious grace that he freely bestowed on us in the Beloved. In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of his grace that he lavished on us. With all wisdom and insight he has made known to us the mystery of his will, according to his good pleasure that he set forth in Christ, as a plan for the fullness of time, to gather up all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth. In Christ we have also obtained an inheritance, having been destined according to the purpose of him who accomplishes all things according to his counsel and will, so that we, who were the first to set our hope on Christ, might live for the praise of his glory. In him you also, when you had heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation, and had believed in him, were marked with the seal of the promised Holy Spirit; this is the pledge of our inheritance towards redemption as God’s own people, to the praise of his glory.’ (Ephesians 1:3-14)

These short verses are full of Father God’s plan that we should have an inheritance as adopted children within the kingdom of heaven, bestowed upon us in love. Not calling for our blood, where we have betrayed God, but bringing about our redemption even through the undoing, the transformation, of human violence through the power of forgiveness. A will—an intention set out, and to be honoured—that will not be re-written, but that is for the fullness of time; not dividing a kingdom into lesser authority but gathering up the entire cosmos in Jesus. Not a paranoid, filicidal ruler; but a wise, generous king who establishes a people, and gives them not what they ask—up to half of his kingdom—but more than we could ask or imagine, the Holy Spirit, God’s active life-bringing presence in the world. Mystery made known!

David, in our reading from the Old Testament (2 Samuel 6:1-5, 12b-19) saw it from a long way off and rejoiced. John ushered it in, and even ushering him out (Mark 6:14-29), the Herodians could not hold it back. If you are a Christian—if you turn to Christ as Saviour and submit your life to him as Lord—then this adoption as a child of God is the foundation of your identity, on which all other constituent parts—gender, sexuality, relationship status, ethnicity, nationality, education, vocation—indeed, every other facet—either rise or fall. It is foundational, from before the foundation of the world. This status—recipients of grace—is not something we have to defend against others, nor scheme to secure. It is freely bestowed, in accordance with divine good pleasure, with the delight the Father has in his children. It is a sharing of blessing, from the Father to the children and the children to the Father, blessing that characterises heaven, and transforms earth as it is in heaven. What a contrast, with the way of the world, the self-serving way exemplified by Herod but entirely recognisable today. In God’s mercy, may we resist such distortion of our souls, to the end of our days; and, instead, participate in God’s boundless love, to the praise of his glory.

 

Fifth Sunday after Trinity 2021

Fifth Sunday after Trinity 2021

Lectionary readings: 2 Samuel 5:1-5, 9-10 and 2 Corinthians 12:2-10 and Mark 6:1-13

This week, the governing body of the Methodist Church voted to permit same-sex marriages, by 254 in favour with 46 against. The legislation comes out of many years of at times painful conversation, and includes provision, through a freedom-of-conscience clause, for those ministers who oppose the move. But, of course, the conversation is not ended: such conversations must continue if covenant relationship is to be sustained; and some Methodists may choose to leave instead of continuing on together. And, of course, this wide-ranging conversation is one that the Church, in all her denominations and traditions, is needing to have; and an ongoing conversation in the Church of England.

This summer, and over the autumn, we are responding to the request of the Archbishops of Canterbury and York, that we engage with Living in Love and Faith: Christian teaching and learning about identity, sexuality, relationships and marriage. We shall really get into it in the early autumn, with the help of the Living in Love and Faith course; but the most significant thing of this teaching and learning is that it is built around listening to one another, and together discerning what the Spirit of God is saying to the Bride of Christ, the Church. Not top-down—though it is a facilitated process—but in the midst. And as we reflect on our readings this week, I hope to draw out some principles concerning learning together.

Our reading from the Old Testament is a record of David becoming king, after the death of Saul. This was by no means a given, no fait accompli. There were certainly different camps, and undoubtedly those who wanted to see which way the wind would blow and then want to make sure they were seen in step with the direction of travel. And yet, in a time of existential crisis, all the tribes come together, and recognise that the Lord has made David the shepherd of his people, and that they were David’s flesh and bone. For us, as the Church, we believe that Jesus, the descendent of David, is our shepherd and our king; and that we, the Church, who share in his flesh and his blood, are the very mystical body of our Christ, our deliverer. There is both something unique about the one around whom we gather, and something participatory about the experience. As we gather to discern the nature of the rule of Jesus over our shared lives, we, also, should expect such discernment to be corporate, speaking and listening together.

And then, a small detail: when David occupied the Jebusite stronghold to create his new capital, he built from the Millo inwards. The Millo, archaeologists suggest, is a large, stepped stone structure, on which a massive royal palace was built. The Millo, then, is an outward sign of an inward grace: for, as the body of Christ comes together, the rule of Christ is extended in, and through, our lives.

Our reading from the Gospel parallels this. At the start, Jesus is teaching, with his disciples gathered to him. His neighbours ask, ‘From where does this man get his authority? We know his people; they’re just ordinary people. This man is a carpenter, not a rabbi, not a miracle-worker.’ And, indeed, in the face of their unbelief, Jesus was limited in what he was able to do. He moves on, moves beyond the familiar; and he sends out the twelve, his followers, giving them authority to do the things that Jesus has been doing. The mind of Christ, the mission of God through Jesus, dispersed. They are to go in vulnerability, and they should expect to experience both welcome and rejection.

Where they experience welcome, they are to stay, as a liberating, healing presence. Where they experience rejection, they are to keep moving on, shaking the dust off their feet. In biblical imagination, human beings are dust, stirred-up, animated by the wind of God’s breath or Spirit. Jesus says to his disciples, act this out: stir up the dust with your feet, then let it settle; let them know, the Spirit came to animate you, but you have chosen the stillness of death instead.

Nonetheless, the kingdom of God is extended, as the followers of Jesus step out in faith and exercise their delegated authority, calling for repentance, a change of direction in step with God’s will. Discerning the way forward together, on the way, together. Enabling freedom for those who are demonised, and therapeutic healing for those who have endured long-term malaise.

In our New Testament reading, from the Corinthian correspondence, Paul takes us on a little further. The context is that some other followers of Jesus are discrediting Paul’s teaching, and indeed his character, to his friends. It is something that he clearly found painful. He wrestled with getting caught up in arguments with them, over personal experience; and seems to come down on holding personal experience as important, for sustaining one’s own relationship with God, without placing too much weight on it. Indeed, Paul implies, that disagreement is used by God to curb our own excesses.

Three times, Paul says, he asked Jesus to remove the thorn in his flesh. This is often taken to refer to a physical ailment, but it seems to me more likely to be a reference to Numbers 33:55 (‘But if you do not drive out the inhabitants of the land from before you, then those whom you let remain shall be as barbs in your eyes and thorns in your sides; they shall trouble you in the land where you are settling.’) and Joshua 23:13 (‘know assuredly that the Lord your God will not continue to drive out these nations before you; but they shall be a snare and a trap for you, a scourge on your sides, and thorns in your eyes, until you perish from this good land that the Lord your God has given you.’) In other words, ‘God, please remove from me this group who follow me around, undermining the work I believe that you have called me to!’ But the Lord answered Paul, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness.’

How, then, might this help us learn together, concerning matters on which we might disagree—perhaps passionately? Firstly, our personal experience matters, but more for our own sake than as a weapon with which to win an argument. We should share our experience with humility, and hear the experiences of other people with wonder at the mystery of our union with God, which is in Christ. We should seek to know one another as ‘a person in Christ.’ Including those who see things very differently. For all we know, these persons in Christ are given to us, a person in Christ, because we need one another, because the truth is not in my ‘me’ or in their ‘me’ but holds us. For all we know, one size does not fit all, and the discernment we seek is of a platform large enough to extend the royal palace of heaven, to draw us inwards, deeper into the divine mystery.

That vision does not remove us from discomfort, but holds us in the place of weakness—even torment, at times—a sufficient grace, for me, for you, for each one of us, in which vulnerability the power of God to transform all is made perfect. In learning together, we are not seeking the right answer, but the shepherd-king, the carpenter-prophet, bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh, whom we thought we knew, but had failed to honour.

As we commit to learning together, let us commit to doing so to the best of our ability, listening attentively, and choosing to honour one another, that we might grow together into the fulness of Christ, in love, and peace, and joy, and wisdom. And when the dust settles, may it signify a welcome rest on our pilgrimage, not the departure of God without us. Amen.