Evensong, First Sunday after Trinity 2022

 

Lectionary: Genesis 24:1-27 and Mark 5:21-43

First person, Rebekah.

Mine is a story of human migration, of family connection across vast distances. You might say I am a vulnerable young woman, taken from my father’s house by a stranger, bought with trinkets. I say to you that I possess a genuine agency of my own—and initiative—not only to shape my future and move my story on, but also to help other people move our story forward together. In truth, the big story of God’s covenant with Abraham had stalled: stalled but had not been derailed. As every migrant and every diaspora community knows, God’s steadfast love is proved afresh when we embody continuity with the past, married to a radically new, uncertain, future. Heritage is the union of history and hope, of the known and unknown. This is our faith, our story. Our society can charter as many convoys as it likes, but for the people of God, championing forced transportation is self-hatred as much as hatred of the Other.

Second person, Jesus.

With several other young men, you have crossed a dangerous body of water in a small boat. (A second crossing, despite almost capsizing and drowning the first time. Who profits from this reckless action?) The public face of our national religion believes that you bring with you a fuller manifestation of the kingdom of heaven, here on earth: something true and good that was hitherto lacking; that, he claims, we were unable to do for ourselves. He claims you are a gift to be received, and not a threat. But you should know, this public face does not speak for public opinion: you, and those other men with you, have made a wasted journey and should be turned back. It is beneath dignity even to entertain you. Go on your way, elsewhere.

Third person, the unnamed woman whose story threatens to derail the story of Jairus’ family.

For twelve years, her life had been lived behind closed doors. At first, the door was on a respectable street, but over time the money ran dry, until the door opened onto a smaller room further away from the heart of the town. The psychological room she took up shrank, too, withdrawing into herself, receding from her neighbours’ minds, though some, of course, would still bring food to her door. Every so often, her plight resurfaced, a character in someone else’s story—the claim (always later disproved) of some doctor to have found a cure; the crazy old woman no one ever saw, conjured up to scare children into obeying their mother. There, but for the grace of God, etc. Until, one day, she heard a whisper on the wind that had carried a man called Jesus to the shore and carried on inland, through the streets, the windows. She’d heard his name carried on the wind before, tales of people healed—actual, lasting wholeness restored. And that is when she made up her mind, wrapped herself in a cloak by which she hoped to pass through the streets unnoticed. If she could only touch the hem of his robe, surely that would be enough? Surely then she would be healed. And that is what she did.

He felt the power go out from him straight away. ‘Who touched me?’ he asked, turning round, scanning the crowd pressing around him. ‘What do you mean?’ his friends asked. ‘Can’t you see the crowd for the people? Any one of them might have pushed you, shoved you.’ ‘No,’ he replied, ‘Someone touched me. That is, I was touched by their plight. Without knowing one another, we were brought together, and in that meeting both of us were changed.’ Summoning up all her courage, hardly daring to believe it possible, the woman stood up, taller than she’d done in years; was seen, was heard. The crowd were shocked, drew breath to shout her down. But this man, Jesus, stood with her, affirmed her, reintroduced her to the community. And in that moment a community that had been drained of compassion for years, until it was barren, discovered a healing of its own. Or, at least, the possibility, for those who were prepared to stop, when touched by the plight of another, and not move on until they knew that God was with us in this moment, and what that meant.

 

Trinity 2022

 

Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-31

Wisdom is the overflow of God’s nature. Of that overflow, all creation springs into being, and is empowered to exist in harmony, without God’s nature being in any way diminished. And this giving-away, and its fruit, delights God. For humans to seek wisdom is not to gather and possess abstract knowledge, but to be known and to know, to respond to delight with joy, to join in rejoicing in God’s inhabited world—inhabited by every living creature—and to delight in the human race. Any learning that causes us to look down on others, or envy others, is not wisdom but to be schooled by folly.

Today, as every day, is an invitation to enter more fully into a relationship with God, our neighbour, and indeed our self-understanding, that is defined by rejoicing and delighting. By breath-taking joy, found as we look in the face of the other. This is not to deny the sorrows of life, or the wounds inflicted by folly, but to triumph over despair. To tread lightly, and in awe and wonder.

People are amazing, and what they are doing all around us today makes this world liveable, as God intended. And if you are not sure that you are amazing, all that you need to (be) know(n) is available to you, a gift given to you by God, along with the Holy Spirit. So, what aspects of human nature or endeavour are giving you joy and delight today?

For me, and my family, Jo and I have been working in our garden, trying to bring order and beauty to something that has been neglected for some time. We are no experts, but we’re learning. With our son, our last remaining child living at home fulltime, we’ve been enjoying some great tv series, displaying a vast array of skills, enormous crews of people working together to tell a story to the best of their ability. Last weekend, we joined with many others in enjoying the concert for the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee, everyone invited to a party, to lift our spirits.

Think of that song that never fails to put a smile on your face when it comes on the radio. Or that feat of incredible engineering, or stunning architecture, that you find yourself compelled to stop and admire, and enjoy. To delight in.

Yesterday, I was at Sunderland Pride. There was a real festival atmosphere down at Sunniside, full of joy and delight, in being human in humanity’s diversity. The Minster had a stall, giving away button badges and key rings and lollipops, reminding people that God loves them, hearing their stories, receiving their hopes and their anxieties and promising to hold them before God in prayer. Most of the people I spoke with were my children’s generation. Some from homes that had made them feel judged and rejected; some there with parents who made them feel loved. And over all the vulnerable emerging works of creation—human beings made in the image of God; and works in progress—the Spirit of God was hovering, watching, delighting, desiring to lead them into all wisdom, to know themselves and to know the God who is fully revealed in Jesus, in whom heaven and earth dwell together in harmony. What might these young people do, as they offer their lives to the world?

Perhaps the greatest folly of the past three hundred years has been the false dichotomy of the sacred and the secular. Secular refers to any human activity, however mundane, occurring within time and space. Sacred refers to the claim that God is connected to, and takes interest in, anything, everything. We’ve swallowed the lie that God is only interested in our turning up to church on a Sunday morning; or that what matters is the life beyond this one. The revelation of Wisdom held out to us in Proverbs is that every secular activity is a sacred activity. That every human activity in this world is meant to be a joyful partnership with the God who is fully revealed in the joiner—the master housebuilder—of Nazareth.

What will Jesus and you delight in together today?

 

Pentecost 2022

 

Lectionary readings: Acts 2:1-21 and John 14:8-17, 25-27

Once [according to the historian Josephus] there were two brothers, named Anilai and Asinai, part of the Jewish diaspora living within the Parthian empire. They were poor, fatherless boys, and their widowed mother found them apprenticeship to a weaver. Whether they were indolent, or their master unjust, who can now say; but when he punished them for laziness, they ran away to become outlaws, hiding out in the marshlands of the great Euphrates River. Other discontented Jewish boys flocked to them, and they organised themselves to extort protection money from the semi-nomadic shepherds of that region, in time establishing a small bandit state.

This displeased the Parthian governor of Babylonia, who determined to defeat them by means of a surprise attack on the Sabbath. It may be clear by now that these were not the most devout of Jews, and they fought back regardless, humiliating their attacker. Impressed, the Parthian king Artabanus III, having had enough of putting down rebellions among his own satraps, made a treaty with the brothers, recognising their control over the territory they anyway occupied.

And so, it might well have continued, had Anilai not married the gentile widow of a Parthian general he had killed in battle. This divided his camp, even coming between the brothers themselves. For Asinai was vocal in condemning his brother’s actions; so much so that the general’s widow murdered her bandit brother-in-law by poisoning him. Anilai limped on, alone, until his resources ran out. Around 33AD—as, in far-off Jerusalem Peter was addressing a crowd of gathered diaspora pilgrims—the bandit state came to an end. Of course, that state did not represent most of the Parthian Jews, but nonetheless its presence had kept them safe, after a fashion. With its demise, Babylonian discontent with their Jewish neighbours rose-up with renewed vigour, the diaspora community fleeing, yet again, in search of peace.

Some of those Parthian Jews were there on the day of Pentecost.

In truth, similar stories and more could be said of all the territories and diaspora peoples listed that day: the Parthians, Medes, and Elamites; residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene; visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes; Cretans and Arabs. In every direction around Jerusalem, contested lands, contested identities. Surrounding nations who had enslaved the Jewish people: the exodus from Egypt, the Babylonian exile. Tribes of distant relatives we don’t speak about in polite company. Nations, such as Rome, who had invaded and occupied the long-promised land. This is not so much a list of tricky place names or exotic holiday destinations as a summary of every ebb and flow of the story of God’s people, and every high tide mark they had washed up on.

Messy stories of human lives, both personal and collective. People doing whatever it takes to get by. And of God, who is not impressed by our heroic adventures, nor it transpires repulsed by our shabbiest dealings, but who sees us and who wants to be with us, wherever we find ourselves. Who, by God’s very nature, comes as Jesus to save us, to restore us, to bless us, by God’s own transformative presence, being with us—and to send us out to be a blessing, God’s own transformative presence in every place, however broken and full of ghosts it may be.

You must go looking for the stories, or else stumble across them by chance, of lives transformed by the Holy Spirit poured out on all flesh, such that the elderly sowed dreams of a future worth hoping for, and the young generation spoke truth to power in the face of whatever stood opposed to that dream. Though most of the stories are lost to time, held only now by God. But the Spirit has been poured out continuously since that day, giving rise to dreams that birth visions that mature into dreams that birth vision anew, in unbroken succession down to our own day, and far beyond.

Every Spirit-empowered, Spirit-encouraged, dream-vision-movement-reality that has changed the face of the world by drawing those on the margins, the oppressed and left-behind, to be enfolded and honoured; these are the works of Jesus, done through his sisters and brothers, of which he said, ‘these works are greater than the ones I began with.’ No longer confined to one forgotten corner of a now long-dead empire: freedom for slaves, civil rights recognised, equality for women, inclusion for those with disabilities, healing for the sick, a welcome home for the refugee. Precious things that cannot be taken for granted, and work yet still to do—new visions and dreams rising in every generation; new crises of judgement to be faced, by which all that opposes the love of God in Christ Jesus is humbled and all that shares in his glory is honoured. And all with the purpose that as Jesus is with the Father, so, by the Spirit, the Father and the Son are with us. God with us. What a time to be alive. Come, Holy Spirit.