Seventeenth Sunday after Trinity 2021

 

Seventeenth Sunday after Trinity

Lectionary readings: Esther 7:1-6, 9, 10; 9:20-22 and James 5:13-20 and Mark 9:38-50

Our Old Testament reading today is taken from the Book of Esther. After the people of Jerusalem were carried off into the Babylonian exile, and had lived as exiles for some seventy years, they began to return home, in successive waves. However, some chose not to uproot and return. The story of Esther concerns the Jewish population that had made its home in Susa. It is a story that Jewish congregations listen to, in one sitting, each year, as a kind of pantomime, complete with a spoilt king; not one but two brave queens; a poor but wise uncle; and a wicked villain who is booed each time he appears. It is a story of a people saved from genocide; and it invites us to sit with the tension that not every genocide is averted…

Our New Testament reading today is taken from the Letter of James. In it, we are exhorted to pray, at all times. When things are tough, pray. When things are going well, pray. When someone among us is sick, pray. Because prayer, at least the prayer of a righteous community, is powerful and effective. But not every prayer is answered in the way that we hope for. And so, again, we are invited to sit with tension, to accept complexity, to embrace and allow ourselves to be embraced by mystery. To wrestle with the fact that every person in the Gospels who asks Jesus for healing is healed; the fact that there is only one occasion when the disciples were unable to deliver a boy from demonization, and even then Jesus instructs them where they went wrong. Our understanding of unanswered prayer must lie on the far side of this presentation of the gospel, not fall short of it.

Our Gospel reading today is concerned with scandals in the Church—Greek, skandalizó, to cause to stumble—and how to deal with them. The scandal that precipitates Jesus’ teaching is that John informs Jesus that he saw a man driving out demons in Jesus’ name and told him to stop, because he was not one of the Twelve. John is clearly anticipating a reward but receives a rebuke instead. Jesus declares, anyone who is not against us is for us. The scandal in question here is that John was determined to exercise a simplistic understanding; to rule on who was in and who was out—in such a way that maintained his own position and place of influence. But Jesus will have none of it. Better for John and for the Church that he be cut off than that he continue cutting others off.

The Eastern Orthodox theologian Kallistos Ware wrote, “…it is not the task of Christianity to provide easy answers to every question, but to make us progressively aware of a mystery. God is not so much the object of our knowledge as the cause of our wonder.”

Our readings this morning are given not to provide easy answers but in order to inform our awareness of a mystery. To encounter the God who is with us, in every circumstance, whether joyful or sorrowful, often hidden from our sight by our determination to be satisfied with the limits of what we can know or understand. And, encountering this God, to find ourselves caught up in wonder, lost in worship. Amen.

 

Fourteenth Sunday after Trinity 2021

Fourteenth Sunday after Trinity 2021

Mark 7:24-37

We’re driving (well, Jo is doing the driving part) back Up North from Down South, where we have been celebrating my uncle S & aunt P’s golden wedding anniversary. And once again I’m writing a sermon on my phone (another uncle asked, can’t you stay another night and do your sermon by Zoom?).

S & P are the most gracious of hosts, and were in their element welcoming their guests, family and friends from far and wide, after so many months of restrictions. Their garden was set out with chairs around small tables, each one furnished with an assortment of glasses and bottles of wine. Between them, aunt P and my cousins H and B laid on the most amazing spread, a buffet table to return to again and again, and somehow never running out.

It was a lovely, relaxed gathering, and we so appreciated both seeing relatives we don’t get to see often enough and meeting others for the first time, including cousins’ children and my cousin’s dog, Megan, an adorable springador (springer spaniel - black labrador cross) who sat under a chair and occasionally risked a sneaky inching forward towards a discarded plate. “She’s very good, so long as you keep an eye on her.” “Your dog, or your daughter?” “Hah! Both.”

In our Gospel reading this Sunday, from Mark chapter 7, we hear an account of Jesus in conversation with a culturally Greek, ethnically Syrophoenician, woman. Her daughter is afflicted by a demon, and she asks Jesus to help her. Jesus responds, it is not fair to take the children’s food before they have eaten their fill, and throw it to the dogs. The woman replies, yes Lord, but even the dogs beneath the table get to eat the crumbs that fall from it. For this, Jesus does as she asks. When she returns home, she finds the demon gone.

It is an exchange that centres on the imagery of food shared, of children and dogs, against a background of undeserved, unwelcome pain.

In the culture of the time, dogs were not pets, like Megan, but scavengers. There’s a verse in the Law of Moses that instructs that any meat come upon in a field mauled by wild animals should not be taken up for human consumption but given to the dogs. What the lion leaves behind, the dogs clean up. That scenario, however, is in almost every detail the opposite of Jesus’ scenario. But there is a book in the Hebrew Bible, one that would be familiar to Greeks, that includes a memorable image of dogs and shared food.

Ecclesiastes chapter 9 opens by observing that time and chance impact upon the righteous and the unrighteous, the clean and the unclean, without distinction. This is vexing (evil, though not in a moral sense). The end of all is death. ‘But whoever is joined with all the living has hope, for a living dog is better than a dead lion.’ (9:4) This being so, the best advice is ‘Go, eat your bread with enjoyment, and drink your wine with a merry heart; for God has long ago approved what you do.’ (9:7)

Time and chance impact us all. That was clear as we gathered together, to celebrate fifty years of marriage, the joys of having girls and raising them to become strong and compassionate women, the joy of grandchildren. But alongside that, coming out in conversations around the garden and across the afternoon, the weight of time and chance. The impact of a pandemic on our children. The impact of Brexit and the pandemic on the provision of care support for the elderly. Memories of relationships that had broken down; and affirmations of new beginnings, second chances. Family members in hospital, under investigation, awaiting a diagnosis that itself may be unwelcome. Time and chance.

And in the face of all that, how precious to join together, to attend to the making and mending of connection with all the living; for whoever is connected to all the living has hope. Some days—months, years—you’re living a dog’s life, scavenging what you can get. Living off the memories of the last time I saw uncle S and aunt P, at my parents’ golden wedding anniversary, the weekend before the first lockdown. But a living dog is better than a dead lion. Because, hope. We come through the ravages of time and chance, not unscathed, but carried by hope. By the knowledge that life goes on, fleeting but good, so much gift, so much worthy of celebration. Yes, there we acknowledged the challenges of life, but we shared warmth and laughter, so much laughter.

This weekend, I have eaten bread—and salads and quiche and vegetarian coronation and lemon and lime cheesecake and banoffee pie—with enjoyment; and drunk wine—and Pimms and vintage port—with a merry heart. And today, simpler fare, bread and wine. Both occasions, a celebration of life; a grateful participation in the sheer gift of life; a renewing of hope, empowering us to face time and chance. Even the crumbs, communion wafers, are enough, bringing us from our scattered and at times troubled lives, back to wholeness.

I’m thankful for the sermons of scripture, and the sermons of life. Thankful for the sacrament of Communion, and for the sacrament of Marriage, for how they gather lives together and refuse to distinguish between ‘sacred’ and ‘secular’ spaces, between churches and gardens. Between the religious, and those who aren’t. This is the wisdom of God, who from long ago approves of you.