Twelfth Sunday after Trinity 2024

 

Lectionary readings: Proverbs 9.1-6 and John 6.51-58

I wonder, what is your favourite meal? [This is not a rhetorical question.]

And what is it about that meal that makes it your favourite? [Again, not a rhetorical question.] Perhaps it has to do with the flavours and textures of the food. Perhaps associations with particular people or special memories are factors too.

I wonder whether there is a meal that you like to make, to share with others? That is, of course, a labour of love. And I wonder whether you have ever taught someone else to make that meal; or, indeed, whether someone else taught you? There is a world of difference between following a recipe from a cookbook and a family meal passed down from generation to generation.

In our reading from the Old Testament today, wisdom is personified as a hostess. Again and again throughout the Bible relationships between people, and between people and God, are built around a table. This is the place of encounter, to which we are invited, and to which anyone who wants to live in harmony with their neighbour comes.

There is something we need to note and take to heart here. We need to learn to eat with others, not simply to feed others. When we feed people but do not eat with them, we create a power dynamic that places them in our debt; but when people eat together the barrier between ‘us’ and ‘them’ is dismantled. I appreciate that some people are shy around folk they don’t know, and the kitchen is a safe place to hide in—I am one of those people myself, and my neurodivergence is a big factor; whenever I spend time with other people, I need to go away and recharge. But, collectively, we need to learn to eat with people, not just feed them. It isn’t, primarily, about physical hunger, but about our common need for connection.

There is a proverbial saying that You Are What You Eat. At a physical level, a healthy diet increases our fitness, while, over time, an unhealthy diet harms us. The same is true spiritually speaking. What we consume shapes us, for good or evil. If our daily diet is a particular newspaper or other news source, it will shape us in very particular ways, and largely, in a context of constant and instant news, towards anxiety. If our daily diet is social media, we will be intentionally shaped by algorithms to be quick to judge, harshly, on matters about which we are very largely uninformed, and to never be satisfied but to always want more. Social media might be an alien world to you, but we all consume something, and we are all being consumed by the thing we consume, whether by hate or by love.

Jesus says, make me your daily bread. Eat of me. Take me into you, and see how you will be transformed, over time, into the fullness of what God intends for you.

How do we do that? By building our lives around him. By finding, through experimentation, daily, weekly, and less frequent patterns that enable us to eat his flesh and drink his blood. Patterns such as setting apart some time each day to prayerfully read and meditate on scripture, perhaps a psalm or Gospel passage, perhaps using the daily prayer resources of the Church of England so that we are reading along with many others, or perhaps using resources prepared by 24/7 Prayer or Scripture Union or BRF with people of different ages and stages of life in mind. Patterns such as taking communion week by week; and by eating food with others, at a table, on a weekly basis. I know of at least one member of our community, who lives alone, who goes out or breakfast with friends every week. And patterns such as reducing or restricting less healthy food. Watching television is not wrong, but if we are watching too much, perhaps we need to set ourselves limits, not in a legalistic way, but in a way that sees it as a treat rather than a staple of our diet.

Wisdom says come to the feast. We feast on God in worship, in acknowledging that God is good all the time, in every circumstance and situation, and in contrast to the impact of sin and death in the world, which is insubstantial in comparison and fleeting, but gets a lot of attention.

And if this is already your pattern, who might benefit from what you have learnt?

 

Eleventh Sunday after Trinity 2024

 

I wonder how your days are? Collectively, it might be said that we are going through difficult times; though I am not sure that these times are very different from any others. At a personal level, as we grow older we may become more comfortable in our own skin; and as we grow older still, we may feel that our bodies begin to let us down. You don’t have to be an Olympian to know that our moments can have real highs and lows – and that sometimes the deepest lows come hard on the heels of the most dizzying heights. That was certainly so for the prophet Elijah. I wonder whether you can relate to his story? Let’s take a closer look at it.

As we do so, a couple of things to be aware of. Ancient Hebrew has far fewer words than modern English, and so the same word can have multiple meanings. Also, language conveys our understanding of the world, and ancient Hebrew works at both a literal/material and metaphorical/spiritual level.

We read that Elijah ‘went a day’s journey into the wilderness.’ Let’s break that down.

The word for wilderness/desert is, at root, also the word for mouth/speech. This is both fascinating and unsurprising, as the wilderness is the place where God speaks, or, more accurately, where humans speak with God.

The word for journey is also the word for Way, as in a way of life, which is worked out through conversation – which is also the same word.

The word for day is also the word for daily.

So, at a literal/material level, Elijah ‘went a day’s journey into the wilderness.’ And at a metaphorical/spiritual level, it is Elijah’s practice to be in daily conversation with God. We would call that prayer.

Now, some would argue that we work out which of the possible meanings a word should be given by the context. But I would argue that where a word can be understood in more than one way, it should be understood in more than one way. Because the context for the spiritual is always material, and the material is always spiritual. They belong together.

So, I would take it at face value that Elijah, whose practice it was to be in daily conversation with God, took a walk into the wilderness. And there he sat down under a broom tree.

Now, the broom tree also appears in Job chapter 30 and Psalm 120. For Job it is a symbol of those expelled by society, which Job applies to himself to say he feels rejected by God. That is interesting, given the days we live in, where some are calling for immigrants to be expelled from our society, and others are calling for the expulsion of racists. Are we brave enough to see ourselves in the eyes of immigrants and racists, alike, and to lament where we find ourselves as a society? Psalm 120 links the wood of the broom tree, which was prized for how well it burned, with a peacemaker dwelling amongst those who hate peace. That also feels pertinent to our days. In any case, this is where Elijah chooses to sit down, to stop walking on the way, to end his conversation. He has had enough. Perhaps you have had enough, too.

God sends a messenger, an ambassador, who comes to Elijah as he sleeps, breaks off some branches from the broom tree, heats some flat stones on them, and bakes flat bread on the stones. (I love cake, but it is a misleading translation.) That is to say, God answers Elijah (who was not asking a question or seeking a continuation of their conversation) with food and drink. Again, I would take this at both a material and a spiritual level. Sustenance for body and soul. These, also, go together.

Elijah awoke, ate and drank, and lay down again to sleep. Later, the ambassador returns, wakes him again, provides him with more food and water, and tells him that he needs to eat and drink if he is to have the strength [this word also means chameleon; weird, huh?] that he needs to undergo the journey ahead of him. That journey takes him to Horeb, the mountain of the Lord.

Horeb means Desolate. God waits for us in the place of our desolation. In the place where nothing else can console us. God waits for us, and, moreover, sustains us on the conversation that will bring us to that place, to confront ourselves, stripped of all the many outer layers with which we have tried to blend in, to mask ourselves [chameleon].

This is necessary work, and it is hard work. To find ourselves standing before God, defenceless against divine love, is not something we can do in our own strength. It is only possible because we are strengthened by Jesus, we are incorporated into him – and through him, into the inner life of God – because we are clothed in Christ [chameleon].

God sends his Son into the world, saying, ‘Get up, eat and drink. Come to me, feast on me. You shall find rest for your bones and healing for your soul.’ Day by day, walking with him on the Way, meditating on God’s word, sharing in this communion.

So come, eat and drink.

 

Tenth Sunday after Trinity 2024

 

Tenth Sunday after Trinity: Exodus 16.2-4, 9-15 and John 6.24-35

Our Gospel reading this Sunday (John 6.24-35) gives us the aftermath of the feeding of the five thousand. The context is this. Galilee was a hotbed of rebellion against Roman rule. There had been an uprising in 6 CE sparked by a tax census (this is the census that gets mentioned in Luke’s account of the birth of Jesus, albeit badly handled in translation: Luke’s point isn’t that this was the census that displaced Joseph and Mary, but that this was the most famous—or, notorious—census; and it was the most famous because of the rebellion it sparked). There will be another uprising in 46 CE and yet another in 66 CE, but at this point, in the early 30s, a crowd of men are chasing Jesus around the Galilean countryside with the intent of making him the focal point of an uprising. There are five thousand of them, plus women and children; but the unnumbered women and children aren’t an afterthought: the point is this, that five thousand men is roughly the size of a Roman army legion. They are coming to Jesus and saying, ‘Look, we have a legion at your disposal: lead us!’ [1] Jesus responds by instructing them to organise themselves into groups of between 50 and 100—that is, the size of a ‘century’ of soldiers led by a centurion (‘At last! Now we are getting somewhere!’)—but then, instead of handing out weapons, he hands out bread and fish.

When it becomes clear that the crowd still intends to make him their king by force, Jesus slips away. They don’t realise until the next day, when eventually—and confused as to how this had happened—they find him once more on the other side of the lake. ‘How did you get here?’ they ask.

And Jesus engages them in a wide-ranging conversation. A conversation about what it is they truly desire, and how deep that longing goes. A conversation about work, and how or even whether God can be encountered in everyday life or revealed through our everyday actions. A conversation about wisdom, someone in the crowd quoting from the Wisdom of Solomon (a Jewish text translated into Greek in Egypt; Wisdom chapter 16, which speaks of divine judgement and mercy, of God’s word as nourishment and healing, and of God leading mortals down to the gates of Hades and back again).

And in this conversation, Jesus calls them—and us—to believe in him: that is, to be with Jesus, in order to become like Jesus, and do the things that Jesus did (this is what distinguishes disciples from the crowds) [2].

In that conversation, Jesus claims to be the bread—the sustenance—of God that comes down from heaven and gives life to the world: ‘I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.’

Many in the crowd will decide that this is not what they are looking for, will go back to their homes and wait for someone else to come along. But some will take Jesus at his word, as God’s daily provision for their deepest desires, to live in harmony with God, with themselves, and with their fellow human beings.

Jo and I have just spent a week camping with some fourteen thousand other people—including two thousand children and another two thousand teenagers—at a festival of worship and hearing from God. And we have heard testimony from around the country of how hungry the younger generations—children, youth and young adults—are for God. 95% of them aren’t in our churches. Their hunger is, in part, because they are starving, because they haven’t been fed, spiritually, by the generation that raised them. But we have heard, and even seen with our own eyes, stories of children and teenagers asking their parents to bring them to church (that is to say, bringing their parents with them). We have heard stories of young adults having dreams about Jesus and turning up at churches saying, ‘Tell me about this Jesus I have been dreaming about!’ At St Nic’s we have welcomed children and prepared them to receive communion, because they are hungry for Jesus, who feeds us with his very self in word and in sacrament. And my expectation is that we will see more of this, over the months to come; and that we need to be ready.

This weekend we have seen violence on the streets of our city. People without hope, whose fear is exploited, who feel that they need to project a show of strength to hide how scared they are. People offered scapegoats and a society to rail against. These people, many though not all of them young, are hungry too. We can turn their anger back against them and perpetuate division; or we can love them and pray for them, pray that they might meet Jesus, and that we might have opportunity to introduce him to them.

And if you are hungry for the bread of life today, come, take, eat. There is more than enough to share.

 

[1] With thanks to Bishop Ruth Bushyager for highlighting this, in her bible readings on Mark’s Gospel, at the New Wine 2024 festival.

[2] John Mark Comer writes about this well in ‘Practicing the Way’ (SPCK 2024).

 

Fourth Sunday before Advent 2023 (or All Saints' translated from 01 November)

 

Lectionary readings: Revelation 7:9-17 and Matthew 5:1-12

I am a parent. Not everyone is, of course, by any means, but many people are, and I often hear parents say things like, “I don’t really mind what my children do in life,” – that is, what their gifts or passions might be, or how they might put those to work – “as long as they are happy.” And I think that this bears some consideration. They clearly cannot mean, ‘I want my children to experience an unbroken state of happiness,” because the state of happiness is always a temporary condition, in response to pleasant circumstances. We surely want our children to have such experiences; but we also know that they will also experience anger – and in the face of injustice, rightly so – and grief and a host of other responses to life that make us human; and we will want them to become the kind of adult who can feel and recognise and regulate and respond well to the whole spectrum of emotions. So, when we say that we want our children to be happy, I think – I hope – we are talking about trait happiness, or the predisposition of personality towards happiness; possessing the kind of character that faces adversity with the underlying belief that all shall be well, at least in time.

Another way of putting this, then, might be to say, “as long as they are secure.” And the question arises, if we want our children to be happy, to be secure, how best can we equip them for that?

Jesus spoke about how we can nurture the enviable personality trait of happiness – in Greek, makarios – often translated as blessèd.

The kind of people whom he identifies as being happy people might surprise you: those who are poor in spirit, who mourn, who are meek, who hunger and thirst for righteousness, who are merciful, pure in heart, peacemakers, persecuted for righteousness’ sake, reviled, and slandered. We might want our children to be some of those things – peacemakers, for example – but we probably shy away from hoping that our children will be reviled. And what does ‘poor in spirit’ or ‘meek’ even mean?

I think that Jesus is describing what today is called operating from a secure attachment to God as our caregiver, enabling us to feel secure in the face the losses and threats we all experience in life, whether bereavement or conflict or injustice or malicious false report.

Now, there is a large body of research into happiness that suggests that our default underlying level of happiness or unhappiness in life is fairly stable and significantly shaped by hereditary factors, by the underlying happiness or unhappiness of our parents and our early childhood experience. There are good neurological reasons behind this. Children are remarkably resourceful. We seek happiness, or security, from our caregivers. If they are able to provide us with a secure base, from which we can explore the world and to which we can return to receive comfort when we experience distress, then we learn the right balance of self-reliance and reliance on others. If, for whatever reason, our caregivers are unable to provide us with a secure base, we find the strategies that provide us with some form of connection, that meet our need for comfort or recognition. Again, research shows two main strategies, anxiety, and avoidance: that is, overly reliant on others to manage our emotions, or overly self-reliant. We work out what works – for example, in some families, keeping rules results in reward while breaking rules results in punishment, and so we learn to keep the rules; in other families, we learn to pay attention to social cues, to micro changes in someone’s facial expression – and our brains train themselves to prioritise these things and ignore other things. And later in life, we find ourselves reacting to other people in ways that follow these scripts.

So, we might relate to God as someone whom we can coexist with if we keep the rules; or as someone whose response to us is unpredictable, and we are never sure whether we are acceptable or if we are a nuisance.

How we view God will, in turn, affect how we view trouble. If we believe that, as long as we keep the rules, we will avoid getting into trouble, and yet trouble comes looking for us, we may be predisposed to blaming ourselves: somehow, perhaps even in a way we aren’t aware of, we have offended God and rightly brought down his wrath against us. Or perhaps, if you were raised in a legalistic household in which you never felt approval, you have come to believe that no matter how hard you try to keep the rules, you can never be acceptable to God. Or, then again, perhaps you rebel against God, because breaking the rules will at least result in attention, even if that attention is harsh, and attention is better than being ignored.

If, on the other hand, we grew up in an unpredictable environment, say with an alcoholic father or a drug-addicted mother, when trouble finds us, we may be predisposed to blaming God, who we perceive as unpredictable, capable of love but also of outbursts of anger. Our survival tactics kick in, and we stay away from God until he has sobered up, fend for ourselves, or try to appease. Perhaps we see ourselves as a martyr, that as long as God is punishing us, however unjustly, someone else we love is spared.

But what served us well, or kept us safe, in the past does not necessarily serve us well today. Moreover, it might not align well with the freedom God desires for us to live in. For example, we might withdraw from people because (so we believe) doing so protects us from the pain of losing them; but God wants us to know love, and to experience being comforted – or, consoled – when we inevitably experience loss.

The good news is that our underlying level of happiness is fairly stable, but not fixed: it really is possible to experience change and growth throughout the whole of our lives. If you are, by personality, an anxious or an avoidant person, you don’t have to stay that way. Jesus calls us to follow him, to take responsibility to respond to him, to learn from him, to repent – which means a change of mind – and believe – which means to walk out a new way of being in the world.

Which brings us back to the Beatitudes, the list of those who are blessed, or happy, or secure. Except that now I want to draw our attention from the word makarios, blessed, to the word hoti, translated ‘for,’ or, ‘Why? Because…’ These people are not secure because of their circumstances; they can be secure, in the face of disturbing or unsettling circumstances, because of God’s dependable character. God, who rules over the skies and the earth and the realm of the dead, who holds together past, present, and future, who is the very source of life, of consolation, of strength-under-control, of justice, of compassion, of innocence, of peace, who catches us up into this glorious goodness that makes all things well.

One of the disciples sitting on the mountainside listening to Jesus speak is a young boy called John, who has only recently started out on learning from Jesus. Decades later, as an old man, exiled from his community by the Roman empire, this same John has another apocalypse, or revelation of what is really going on behind the scenes, behind the way in which the world appears to run. He sees a multitude, all of whom have come out from tribulation, from circumstances in which they were without options, who have been rescued from destruction into God’s safety, preservation, welfare. Whose needs are met, and whose tears are erased. Our reading from The Revelation to John and our reading from The Gospel According to Matthew are the same revelation, seen from two different points – childhood, and old age – with a lifetime of experience between. Everything John has known has proven the Beatitudes to be true; nothing he has seen has invalidated their claims. And that, of course, is what they are: an invitation to discover what God is like, how truly good God is.

November begins with All Saints’ Day, when we remember the many children, women and men who have discovered these things to be true in challenging circumstances down through the centuries; followed by All Souls’ Day, when we remember those sisters and brothers in the faith who demonstrated these truths to us, personally, in and through their living and dying. Today we are invited to repent and believe, to unlearn the false ideas we have held about God and to lean into a fuller knowledge, whether for the first time or the seventy-seventh. Come and see, that the Lord is good! ‘Amen! Blessing and glory and wisdom and thanksgiving and honour and power and might be to our God for ever and ever! Amen.’

 

Twentieth Sunday after Trinity 2023

 

Lectionary readings: Exodus 33.12-23 and Matthew 22.15-22

Through September and October, we have been journeying through the book of Exodus and asking how do we, as the people of God, stand before God on holy ground? We might reframe that question like this: what kind of church do we need to be? The church, in this nation, has experienced a long period of decline. But historically, the church in this nation has experienced cycles of growth and decline, waxing and waning fortunes. Christianity has been found wanting and abandoned; only to be rediscovered again when alternatives have failed to deliver. So, what kind of church do we need to be in our time of decline and in order to be ready when the tide turns again? This was the theme when the clergy of Durham Diocese gathered together for their annual study day on Monday gone. Together our guest speaker invited us to reflect on our calling to be a pilgrim people, a priestly people, and a prophetic people. It seems to me that these three themes are found in our readings today, and so I want to share them with you.

To stand on holy ground is to be a pilgrim people. Moses asks God, ‘Show me your ways.’ That is, show me your road, your journey. He knows that he has been called to lead the people up, to ascend to where God is; and he asks to know the road. This is the language of union with God or being formed by God into the likeness of Christ. It points us to Jesus: when Thomas asked, ‘How can we know the way to the Father?’ Jesus declared, ‘I am the Way.’ And God says to Moses, ‘My presence—literally, my face or faces—will go with you and I will bring you to the place where you will settle.’

God always calls us out from wherever we have settled, in this world, to be strangers and pilgrims, citizens of the kingdom of heaven under the lordship of Jesus, living away from home, longing to return one day. That is why God sends us internationals—students, and workers, and asylum-seekers; people who are not especially welcome in England—to remind us of who we are. And God is revealed among us as reflected in the faces of those we journey with, in black and white faces, young and old faces, male and female faces. We are not English or South African people who happen to be Christians, but Christians who happen to be English or South African, or from wherever else it may be.

And we are a parish church. The word ‘parish’ comes from the Greek word for ‘strangers,’ for those who live outside the walls of the house or the city: we are a church for those who live beyond the walls of the church, for outsiders. We seek the welfare of the society among whom we live, but our first loyalty is to the kingdom of heaven, of which we are also ambassadors. And so, at times the Church will both affirm and challenge government, just as this week Mr Biden has both affirmed and challenged Mr Netanyahu. When the Church is critical of government, people say the Church should stay out of politics; they tend not to say that when the Church affirms government, but there we are. To stand on holy ground, as pilgrims, is to welcome the stranger, the alien from another land, among us—and to take a stand against xenophobia and racism.

To stand on holy ground is also to be a priestly people. We are a royal priesthood. The priestly role is a representative one. Humanity is called to bless the earth, to care for all God’s creation. The Church is called to bless humanity, so humanity as a whole can better fulfil its calling. And within our tradition, some are called to be priests to the Church, to bless the Church so that the Church as a whole can better fulfil her calling to bless humanity to bless creation. Listen to this quote from the sociologist Stefan Paas:

“The minority situation of the church is not first a problem but rather a privilege and a calling. If I go to church as the only one from my street or my family, I do this also on behalf of my street or my family. To be a Christian at that moment means to be a priest on behalf of those who live in my neighbourhood, to offer sacrifices on behalf of the family. Parents go to represent their children, children to represent their parents, neighbours to represent each other.”

[Stefan Paas, Pilgrims and Priests: Christian Mission in a Post-Christian Society, p.213f]

I am your priest, and I pray for you, but we—you—are a priestly people. We come before God representing our neighbours, our representative worship pointing to the day when every knee shall bow, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord. Nonetheless it is worth asking, how might we become more fully representative? Moses said to God, ‘Show me your glory.’ And God replied, ‘I will, but you cannot see my face.’ But God had already said, ‘My face, or faces, will go with you.’ The glory of God is reflected in our faces—in your face and my face—but what we see reflected there is God’s back. What we see, reflected in one another’s faces, is where God is going ahead of us. The glory of God we see in the oldest faces here is the bounty of wisdom, and as we grow older we will meet God there waiting for us. The glory of God we see in the youngest faces is the bounty of wonder, and energy, and adventure, for God remains childlike while we grow old. So, if there are too few younger representatives of our parish present with us, we see something of God’s glory but whole other aspects of God’s glory are hidden from us. Yet, the future God is leading us into continues beyond our generation, and so we should expect to see God’s glory reflected in the faces of children. Their presence renews us. To stand on holy ground, representing our neighbours before God, and seeking to be more fully representative, is to ask, who is missing? and what must we do differently, to make room for them, to be the place where god’s glory is revealed?

Lastly, to stand on holy ground is to be a prophetic people. Moses says, ‘Show me your ways’ and ‘show me your glory’. Jesus says to those trying to trap him, ‘Show me the coin used for the tax.’  The coin reveals the ways and the glory of the emperor: Roman roads carving up an empire, the fruit of the earth and work of human hands pouring into Rome. In this worldview the human is first and foremost an economic unit, a slave to the market. The same view prevails today. Our education system is designed to form future economic units to replace the ones that get discarded at the end of their productive working life. Foreigners are viewed as coming here to steal our jobs. Jesus recognises that we live in this world but insists that we are not of it. That we are to view humanity as bearing God’s likeness, of pointing to God’s ways and God’s glory.

To stand on holy ground is to view work as a holy calling, the way in which we, as members of the Church, bless humanity, and as members of humanity, bless the whole creation. To see people not primarily as economic units, but as creative partners in God’s good activity in the world. To see children not as future workforce but as given as gift to the world with their own vocation, which we might help them to discover. To see those who are retired, or disabled, or who choose to step out of full-time employment for a season to raise a family or care for a family member, or for whom life is overwhelming to the extent that they cannot participate in the game of being model citizens, not as a drain on society but as those who reveal something of the glory of God among us. To stand on holy ground is to take a prophetic stance, declaring in word and action that human beings have inherent value. This is why, for example, we are to take Safeguarding seriously, nurturing an environment where all, including and especially the most vulnerable, can flourish as fully as possible, free from harm, rescued from exploitation.

How do we, as the people of God, stand before God on holy ground? Or what kind of church do we need to be? We are called to be a pilgrim people, a priestly people, a prophetic people. As we seek to walk these roads, we shall witness God’s glory, and witnessing God’s glory, we shall be changed. We shall be changed, and a way made in the wilderness, for others to travel, to come to know Jesus for themselves. Amen.

 

Nineteenth Sunday after Trinity 2023

 

Lectionary readings: Exodus 32.1-14 and Matthew 22.1-14

I want to suggest that Jesus is the key to our reading the Bible. That every part of the written Word points us to the incarnate Word, and that the incarnate Word is the lens through which we must interpret the written Word. I recognise that this might be called a logical fallacy, being a circular argument; but then, I don’t believe that logic is well-equipped to handle transrational experiences such as love or death or God or suffering. The Church proclaims that Jesus is the alpha and the omega; the beginning and the end; the initiation, and the completion. I want to bear this in mind today.

In our Gospel reading today, I want to suggest that Jesus tells this parable as a corrective to popular expectation concerning the Messiah. I want to suggest that the son for whom the king throws a wedding banquet is the Messiah of their expectation; that the servants are the people of Israel, and perhaps the political-cultural-religious leaders of the people; that the invited guests are the surrounding nations, called to recognise the heir to the throne of king David, but either indifferent or openly hostile; and that the fate that befalls them is the expected overthrow of the armies of Rome. I want to suggest that, as a corrective, Jesus presents himself as the man who appears, unnoticed, centre-stage, who confounds expectation (refusing to wear a wedding gown is culturally offensive; Jesus repeatedly offends scribes, priests and Pharisees, who ultimately plot to have him killed), is interrogated by the ruler but remains silent, and who is bound and taken outside the walls to the place of despair and impotent anger, the place of public execution. I want to suggest that Jesus reveals to us that God rejects violence as a justifiable means to any end; and that, by fully identifying with us in our deep grief, God, in and through Jesus, fashions light from darkness, life from death, glory from suffering, hope from despair.

But we are journeying through the book of Exodus, and asking what does it have to teach us about how to stand on holy ground? So, how does this Jesus help us to understand, and respond to, the strange and disturbing conversation between God and Moses?

First, let’s consider the context. God has brought the people out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery, and to his holy mountain. There, he has spoken, ten words that call into being life. One of those words concerns the people as living images (or icons, or idols) of their God, an ardent God of steadfast love, who observes the impact of the iniquity of one generation on the lives of the generations that follow them, but who himself fashions kindness to countless thousands who, in turn, observe his love for them. These ten words are followed by further instruction, and then God calls Moses up the mountain to meet with him alone. It has been forty days and forty nights (recalling the time Noah spent in the ark) since anyone has seen Moses, while God gives him detailed instructions regarding the construction, dedication, and use of the tabernacle—the place where God will dwell in the midst of the people and meet with them—and the consecration of priests to oversee this space. This consecration involves burnt offerings, whose pleasing aroma will rise before the Lord God.

Seemingly abandoned, and growing anxious, the people call on Moses’ brother, Aaron, to fashion idols for them, visible images of gods who will lead them. This is a clear departure from the words spoken by God in their hearing, the very kind of decision-making that results in negative consequences for several generations, though in no way negating God’s activity to fashion kindness in their lives.

It is at this point that God—who observes such things—speaks to Moses, saying, “Now let me alone, so that my wrath may burn hot against them and I may consume them; and of you I will make a great nation.”

At this point, one might accuse God of setting the people up to fail. I do think that God is testing the people; but I don’t think the nature of the testing has anything to do with failure and punishment. Any good teacher will assess their class, to ascertain what they have understood; where the group as a whole, or given individuals, need further instruction, or even a different approach. Seen in this light, God, Moses, and the people, discover that the people are yet to learn how to see God reflected in their neighbour, in one another—they think they need some other image. This needs closer attention. If we can see Jesus in the bread and wine, but not in one another, our learning is incomplete.

What are we to make of ‘wrath’? It is a word that has only appeared once before in the story, in the context of God’s care for the resident alien, the widow and the orphan (Exodus 22:21-24), a care the people are to share, remembering that they themselves were aliens in Egypt. The word is rooted in the word for ‘nostril,’ and the sense of smell is more strongly attached to memory than any of our other senses. Wrath, then, appears to be concerned with taking a deep breath in through the nose, and being reminded of something by the smell, by the kindling of a sensation in the nostrils. It should be remembered that God has just spent forty days and forty nights instructing Moses concerning the burning of fragrant incense and of roasting meat.

This burning wrath will ‘consume’ the people. The word, which does not occur in exactly this form anywhere else, can mean accomplished, completed, finished. It resonates with Jesus’ words on the cross, “It is finished!” It has to do with process, and a coming through something, in continuity and transformation, as perhaps, for example, grieving well brings us through bereavement to new life beyond loss.

Might we read Exodus 32:10 in this way: that God tells Moses to go from him, carrying his instructions, acting with urgency, that incense and fat smoke might rise, filling God’s nostrils, establishing a deep memory—for the people, as well as for God—and bringing the people to completion as a great nation, in some way fashioned from Moses?

Moses’ immediate response is to plead for his people. It is clear that he sees something terrible in the experience of God’s wrath, fears that the completion it brings will amount to annihilation rather than consummation. This is an understandable reaction—even if it blots out the memory of the bush that burned but was not consumed, trees always symbolising people in biblical imagery, in this case the presence of God in the midst of his people—but it does not necessarily make Moses a reliable witness in this moment. (None of us are fully reliable witnesses.) Nonetheless his heart for his people is revealed, and this is consoling to God, who takes up this compassion as raw material in fashioning the kindness he has promised in response to human failure.

This is not to remove passing judgement on wrongdoing from the nature of God, or negative consequence from human action; nor even to seek to wash over troubling passages in the Bible, of which there are many; but to seek to take seriously Jesus as the fullest revelation of God—to whom all scripture points and through who we read all scripture—and his rejection of violence as a means to an end. It is to de-couple ‘wrath’ from ‘shock and awe,’ and ask whether, instead, it has more to do with grief and the need—even, and perhaps especially, for God—for consolation.

What, then, does this have to do with us?

Our first response to people who find life overwhelming, who are seeking to fashion a life that works from whatever means they have to hand, should be one of compassion. When Jesus saw the crowds, he had compassion for them, for they were like sheep, lost without a shepherd. Wherever we are, we find ourselves standing on holy ground when we show compassion towards others.

Arising from this compassion, we should both go to them, and go to God. We should pray for them, and teach them to come to God, who observes the mess we make, for ourselves and our families, but is committed to fashioning goodness and kindness in our lives. Prayer should be an act of memory—the memory of a community, and the perpetual creating of new memories—the testimony of God’s goodness and mercy, the hope on which we stand. An act of navigating loss and disorientation—at times, prayer will have no words—and coming, in time, to a fresh experience of steadfast love. Again, if we are to learn how to stand on holy ground, we are going to have to learn how to pray.

Life is messy, at times very messy. But God does not write us off, happy to start again with someone else. God journeys with us our whole pilgrimage through this world, and we reflect God’s suffering and glory. May we be strengthened to stand before the Lord today, without fear and with great joy. Amen.

 

Eighteenth Sunday after Trinity 2023

 

Lectionary readings: Exodus 20.1–20 and Philippians 3.4–14 and Matthew 21.33–46

I wonder what comes to mind when you hear mention of the Ten Commandments? Perhaps you’ve known them used as a blunt weapon for exercising control, wielded by Catholic nuns in schools or American Evangelicals in the public square? Perhaps they give rise to unwelcome feelings of inadequacy or failure, a sense of shame? Perhaps you believe them to be obsolete, a fossil record from another age? Is it even conceivable that they might be words of life?

There’s a God whose story is told in the Bible, whose name is Yahweh, which means ‘I call into being.’ We first meet this God in the first verse of the first book of the Bible, when they ‘call into being’ ‘the heavens and the earth,’ fashioning worlds of Sky and Earth and Sea. In response, all life unfolds, watched over by appointed guardians, until it fills every vast open space and tiny nook and cranny, complete with catastrophe and failure, mutation, and imaginative leaps along the way. Dinosaurs and dung beetles, pygmy shrews and kangaroos, penguins and pandas, crocodiles and condors, humpbacked whales, and woolly mammoths. This company loving God calls into being angelic beings [gods] and human beings and invites all creation to participate in the miracle of life. But not everything, not everyone, does so choose, at least not consistently.

After many adventures, with many friends, this God appears to Moses. Moses is a trauma survivor trying to rebuild a life, complete with catastrophe and imaginative leaps along the way. Yahweh convinces him to join forces and return to Egypt, to his beginnings, to liberate Moses’ people from the pantheon of Egyptian gods to whom they lived in bondage. And having mounted a successful operation to free them, this God introduces himself to the people. ‘I am Yahweh, the one who calls you into being.’

Whenever God speaks, it is to call something into being, to shape the world in a particular way, so that life can flourish. The ‘Ten Words,’ or Commandments, are words of life, continually calling a people—the people of [this] God—into being. They underwrite a moral universe and are also permissive invitations to respond, complete with those catastrophes and imaginative leaps along the way, already noted above.

The first word establishes an enduring freedom from the fear of a return to debt bondage. [This is the most common form of slavery in the world today, experienced by over 8 million people.] Yahweh, who has rescued this people in the immediate past, proclaims that the day will not come to pass when some other god will recapture them. Literally, Yahweh—who is eternal—will not live to see it. Even when Yahweh does later hand the people over to other gods, as the consequence of their unfaithfulness, terms are clearly stated and upheld—a seventy-year-long exile. If we were to trust this first word, if we were to seek to be shaped by it, we would reject the path of seeking to control others, would reject manipulation as a legitimate use of whatever power we have in the world. We might find ourselves on such a trajectory, but we would turn around, turn back. Even if we did not, life, as God has decreed it, would turn us back, eventually.

The second word establishes steadfast love as the way Yahweh will reconcile all creation, across space and time, including the realm of the dead, even in the face of rebellion. Love is the way, and love wins, in the end. A people seeking to be shaped by this word are empowered to be living images of this god of steadfast love: hearing, seeing, speaking, acting in and for love.

The third word establishes the absolute refusal to weaponize God against our neighbour. A people shaped by this word are freed to love the Other, those who look different and live differently to us, those whom we might otherwise fear. My God, do we need to embrace this word today.

The fourth word establishes delight in regular rest from labour, a delight that reveals God as King over creation and history. A people shaped by this word are set free and empowered to be strengthened by joy. When I was growing up, in a nation misshaped by austere religion, Sundays dragged on like long Covid. Where I live these days, they are, perhaps, a day in search of a purpose. What might it feel like, not to hold out for the weekend in a way that devalues the rest of the week, but to set apart one day in seven to revel in God’s sheer goodness?

The fifth word establishes human participation in God’s glory. For mortal creatures, this results in a weight, or heaviness, that increases over time: so, there is a dignity, or gravitas, to aging. The fifth word sets the people free from idolising youth or fearing old age; frees the young to cherish the old, and the old to continue to share with the young the life they gave them in the first place.

The sixth word negates murder. Unlawful killings occur; but they will not have the final word. This God commits to calling light from darkness, hope from despair, life from even unlawful death. Moses himself is a murderer, in his past: this word takes that burden up and transforms it, so that Moses can be one who brings life to many. This word so fully establishes the world that even when ‘the Word took on flesh,’ and was murdered—an act that is both deicide and genocide—the murder of God and of humanity is negated in the resurrected Christ.

The seventh word negates adultery. Infidelity occurs, with unoriginal repetition, pulling a community into psychological and material chaos; yet, here again, God declares that infidelity will not have the final word, for God commits to negate it, to call healthy relationships into being, again and again. This word, then—like all the others—is grace to those who stumble, good news to the poor in spirit.

The eighth word negates loss—whether of property, as in theft, or persons, as in kidnapping—by stealth. Stealth catches us out, when we least expect it; but this, too, however tragic, however great a violation, will not have the final word.

The ninth word negates deception, false testimony. It reveals a principle we have already seen in this people’s history. Joseph was sold into slavery, his brothers deceiving their father that he was dead. This Joseph was later thrown in prison, the victim of false testimony. Yet from such hopeless circumstances, God called into being the feeding of an empire through seven years of famine.

The tenth word negates false desire. We stumble down the road of laying claim, in our heart, to what has been given to another; but, sooner or later, we are confronted by God, who transforms our desire, so we are more able than before to love rightly. To treasure what has been given to us, and to value what has been given to others without needing to possess those gifts for ourselves.

The ten words really are words of life, re-ordering the universe, establishing a world that is truly as its Creator intended. And yet we only have to look around to see that even (sometimes, it feels, especially) those who claim to believe in the God who established such a world don’t live as if it were possible, let alone the real world.

The people said to Moses, ‘You speak to us, and we will listen; but do not let God speak to us, or we will die.’ And they were right. If we even hear God speak, we will experience death—which is why so many of us do not wish to hear God speak today. But all that will die is all that needs to die, to be returned to earth, that life might reemerge.

This is why the church-planter Paul speaks of the treasures of the Law being incomplete until they find their fulfilment in Christ Jesus, his Lord; why he regards his entire history—personal and corporate—as manure; why he longs to share in Christ’s death and resurrection; as his life, and the life of the household of God, unfolds, to fill the Roman Empire and beyond, from the sea of slaves to the small corners occupied by freemen and the elite, spreading to every continent, century, and  culture.

And, yes, we’ve found ourselves lost in catastrophes, needing imaginative leaps. But what God has called into being cannot be undone. God is not done with us yet. Love wins, in the end.

 

Twelfth Sunday after Trinity 2023

 

Lectionary reading: Romans 12.1-8

Recently, Jo and I, along with two of our three children, took a week staying at a self-catering holiday cottage. I say cottage; it was, in fact, an industrial building sitting over a drain.

Which doesn’t sound very appealing. Let me explain.

It was located on fenland, where farming land lies below sea-level. The fields have a network of drains, that feed into the Mother Drain, a waterwork the width of a canal but deeper and without narrow boat traffic—as such, it provides a key habitat for certain species, including the kingfisher. The building was a former pump house, in fact two, one on either side of the drain, formerly used to pump excess water from the drain into the river that runs alongside it at a slightly higher altitude. The buildings themselves had been converted into a beautiful home, one side occupied permanently by the owners and the other side let out to guests. The outside is industrial, the inside, full of natural light. It was in the middle of nowhere, with nothing to do except sit on the patio and read and keep an eye out for sight of a kingfisher, fishing from a perfect branch set on two iron prongs rising just above the water.

And finally, on the last morning, I saw one, flying down the canal towards its perch, but then—perhaps it saw me—turning in mid flight and flying off in the direction from which it came. It was fleeting. But it took my breath away.

 

The Anglican poet priest Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote As kingfishers catch fire:

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies dráw fláme;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves—goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying Whát I do is me: for that I came.

Í say móre: the just man justices;
Kéeps gráce: thát keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is—
Chríst—for Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men’s faces.

All creation does as it was created to do, being itself, unique and precious, to the glory of God. The human, alone, struggles with this, or perhaps finds it too lowly; we seem hell-bent on making people conform to the spirit of the age. But the good news is that we are not abandoned to our fate or judged on our best efforts.

Paul, writing to the church in Rome, declares,

‘Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God—what is good and acceptable and perfect.’

Don’t allow yourself to be moulded from the outside in, by a fearful, hostile world that seeks to put wonder to death, but be transformed from the inside out, by Christ at work in us, and through us. Like an old industrial building being given a new life full of light and beauty and offered as a place of rest and recreation in the world.

When we offer ourselves to God—our bodies, as a living sacrifice—we become a place in the world where Christ plays, childlike, trusting, beloved. When we speak hope that brings life, when we serve others, when we teach wisdom, when we encourage the weary, when we are generous with our time or money or material possessions or words, when we model faithfulness in our relationships, when we respond to the hurting with compassion—it is Jesus himself doing these things, transforming us from the inside out, and the world through us.

For this we were made, and this we proclaim. May your eyes be opened to see how and where Christ is, and wants to be, at play among us, today and through the coming week.

 

Tenth Sunday after Trinity 2023

Old Testament reading: Genesis 37.1-4, 12-28

Jacob settled in the land where his father had lived as an alien, the land of Canaan. (37.1)

This account begins by noting the contrast between Jacob and his father Isaac—and, indeed, his grandfather, Abraham. Whereas Abraham and Isaac lived a life of pilgrimage, moving from place to place, Jacob has stopped moving. He has sat down, has settled. Perhaps he is weighed down by grief at the death of his father, Isaac. Perhaps he feels some need to compete with his bother Esau, whose descendants have established a network of cities while Jacob was living in exile. Whatever his motive or motives, even if his sons must travel significant distances with the flocks, Jacob is staying put, thank you. As far as Jacob is concerned, his days of living a provisional life are behind him. But life rarely, if ever, works out as we expect it to.

This is the story of the family of Jacob. Joseph, being seventeen years old, was shepherding the flock with his brothers; he was a helper to the sons of Bilhah and Zilpah, his father’s wives; and Joseph brought a bad report of them to their father. (37.2)

Joseph is a young man, second youngest of Jacob’s twelve sons. When we meet him, he is an apprentice shepherd, learning the skills of tending to the flock from his older brothers. And he brings a bad report concerning them to their father. We don’t know what the basis of the bad report was, but perhaps it was simply that they refused to train him. Perhaps they were unwilling to see themselves replaced by this younger person; after all, they knew what they were doing, and he didn’t; their experience meant that they did the job well, whereas it would take twice as long to train the young ’un, and even then, he wouldn’t do it as well as they did. Perhaps they had forgotten that once upon a time, someone older and more experienced had taken the time and effort to teach them.

In any case, they cannot even speak civilly with their younger brother. The lectionary reading skips over some of Joseph’s own immaturity in expressing his sense of sacred purpose; but who would he even have processed that with? When nurturing the young adult becomes too challenging, his father falls back on favouritism, which is not the same thing at all. Meanwhile, his brothers abandon any pretence of training him, and drive the flock north without their young apprentice. Jacob sends Joseph after them.

He came to Shechem, and a man found him wandering in the fields; the man asked him, ‘What are you seeking?’ ‘I am seeking my brothers,’ he said; ‘tell me, please, where they are pasturing the flock.’ (37.14c-16)

Joseph heads off after his brothers, but when we meet him again, he has gone completely astray. In contrast to the purposeful pilgrimage of previous generations, he is wandering around without direction. Eventually, somebody finds him and asks, what is it that you are seeking? What is it that you earnestly desire? What is the thing you are entreating God for in prayer? And Joseph responds, I am seeking my brothers. I am directionless and alone in the world, and I am seeking affinity, a tribe, a community I can be part of. I am seeking belonging. Tell me, please, where I can find my people, who will help me grow into the human being—or human becoming—I am created to become.

This is the cry of a generation of seventeen-year-olds living alongside us today. A cry that is arguably more acute than it has been for many generations.

And when we see them, a distance off, we have a choice. To throw them into a pit or make them someone else’s problem; or to create space for them to discover who they are, with all the inevitable missteps along the way.

Either way, God will bring about his purposes through them. The question is, are we too settled in our ways to welcome it?

 

 

 

Seventh Sunday after Trinity 2023

 

The Old Testament reading for this Sunday, Genesis 28:10-19a, continues the story of Jacob.

Last Sunday, we read the beginning of the Jacob story. Jacob is born gripping onto his twin brother Esau’s heel. Esau goes on to make a reputation for himself, but when he comes to the end of his resources he must surrender the life that is his by right, to receive life back from his brother as gift. I suggested that Esau is a type, or representative, for us and our desire to make a name for ourselves in the world; and that Jacob is a type for Jesus, the brother who will not let us go and who holds out his life in us as gift to all who will surrender the life they cannot keep.

This Sunday, we find Jacob in the wilderness, having left his family home. When night falls, he sleeps, and dreams, and in his dream he sees a ziggurat reaching to the heavens. This is the same structure known as the tower of Babel, the first concerted human effort to build a lasting renown. In his dream, the Lord comes and stands next to him and promises never to leave him, wherever he goes, and to bring him home, and to give him many descendants.

I want to suggest that this points us to the temptations of Jesus, where immediately after he is baptised in the river Jordan, Jesus goes into the wilderness and is tested by the satan, or counsel for the prosecution in the heavenly court. Jesus is offered the rule over all earthly kingdoms, but turns this down, choosing instead to trust the Lord God to be with him wherever he goes (even descending into hell) and give him hope of many descendants in the land of the living.

Jacob awakes from his dream and declares that the Lord was present in this place, and he had not known it. God is present in every place—and perhaps especially the places of our failure, our vulnerability, and our wrestling with our motives—but God is only known to us by divine self-revelation.

Where have you been surprised to encounter the living God?

Where do you need to encounter God today?

 

Sixth Sunday after Trinity 2023

Lectionary readings: Genesis 25:19-34 and Romans 8:1-11

The Old Testament reading this Sunday introduces the story of Father Abraham’s grandsons. Twin boys, they wrestled with one another even before they were born.

Esau was the first to break out from the confines of their mother’s womb, a man in a hurry to prove himself. But his brother Jacob refused to let go of him, arriving in the world gripping his brother’s heel.

As they grew up, Esau earned a public reputation as a skilful hunter, a man whose exploits fed bellies and hungry imaginations; while Jacob was a quiet man, a private person, easily overlooked by the wider community.

But the day came when Esau returned from the hunt exhausted and famished. Utterly at the end of himself, his strength, and his resources, to the point of believing he was about to die. Jacob was cooking a stew. Esau asked for some, to revive him. Jacob replied that it would cost Esau his birthright, as the firstborn. Esau responded that his birthright was of no use to him in this moment; but Jacob insisted, and Esau agreed. Then Jacob gave his brother bread and meat, and drink, because Esau had surrendered his right; and Esau was revived and went on his way.

Esau surrendered his life as right and received it back as gift.

And from that day on, whatever Esau did was attributed to Jacob in him.

This account points to Christ, and our relationship with him.

We are Esau, desperate for independence, to earn a reputation, to be master of our own life. “What do you do?” we ask one another, and “Where are you from?” How far have you come from where you started out?

This is the life we build.

Yet, quietly, God and life and circumstance trick us out of the independence we prize. Our bodies age, our strength fails us. As any parent will tell you, just as they have figured out how to parent a three-year old, she is six, or twelve, and the goal posts have moved and keep moving. One step ahead of us.

Saint Paul, writing to the church in Rome, called it living according to the flesh.

‘The flesh’ is a term the Scriptures employ to describe unaided human effort. The flesh is not inherently bad—we are made in the image of God, God’s good creation in whom God delights. But the flesh is inherently compromised—sin invades and affects us like long-Covid. It is perfectly possible to live according to the flesh, for a long time—perhaps even a lifetime—especially with the kinds of resources—the privileges—many of us have, as highly-educated middle-class professionals; and it isn’t a bad thing…but, sooner or later, it will kill you. Eventually, we will run out of ourselves.

Esau says to Jacob, the brother who would not let go of him, ‘Give to me of the food you have prepared.’ But Jacob will not be ignored, turned to only in crisis: “Oh, God, if you only do this one thing for me, I will go to church every week, for ever!” You cannot bargain with God. Jacob has what Esau needs, but for Esau to receive it will cost him his self-sufficiency.

This is the life we surrender.

Jesus is the brother who will not let us go, whose grasp on us will not be broken, though we pass from the womb to the world, or the womb of this world into the world to come. This Jesus possesses the food that revives both body and soul, and it is ours to have. This is both a free gift, and a prize that costs us everything. For though we cannot buy this food, it is ours when we surrender the life that is ours by right—

a life that is dying, and of no use to us—

in exchange for the life of God. The Spirit of God that raised Jesus from the dead—

when he laid down the life that was his by right—

living Christ’s life in us.

This is the life we receive.

That’s a hell of an heavenly exchange.

Until you run out of yourself, you will have no need for God. I don’t mean that until you run out of yourself, you won’t perceive your need for God. I mean, you won’t need God. God has built enough blessing into creation. But when you come to the end of yourself, you arrive home at last. To the aroma of home-cooking, and a choice to make.

Come and eat. Everything is ready. We were just waiting for you.

  

Third Sunday after Trinity 2023

 

I have been sitting with this verse over the past week:

‘Those who find their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.’

Jesus (Matthew 10:39)

It seems to me that this verse is key to understanding the gift of life, the purpose of life, and the redemption of life.

Life, here, is the vital breath. That gift both given to you, and that you are to the world; a gift never given before, or again. The God who created the universe, who holds all of time and space, did not want a universe that you were not part of.

The first invitation of life is to find your life, to discover the unique nature of the gift you have been given. This takes time, learning, searching. Trial and error. Having a go. Missteps, and retracing our steps.

We discover that we are good at cricket. Or that we are terrible at cricket, but good at playing the cello. One member of our congregation found something of his life crawling through potholes. Not for me. We are all unique.

Perhaps we get married. Perhaps we have children. Perhaps we are the first person in our family to go to university or join the army and see the world. Perhaps we move from one workplace to another.

It is tempting to think that the invitation to find our life is an invitation for youth, but no. If you are still alive, life is still holding out that invitation. Indeed, it is essential, for life to be renewed, just as the seasons and cycles of nature renew the earth. It is never too late to discover a love for something new, something life-giving, revealing, or sustaining. The invitation to find life is not time-limited (indeed, I have a hunch we will carry on finding our life for all eternity). But the things we find are time limited.

If to find means to learn or discover, especially after searching, to lose means to utterly destroy. And this, too, is part of the experience of life. A time to search and find, and a time to lose; a time to be born and a time to die. Both/and. Neither one without the other.

Everything we find, we shall lose. Perhaps all of our peers have married, and we are not married. Perhaps all our peers have children, and we have not had children. Or we have had a child with profound medical needs. Or we had a child who died. Perhaps we went for a promotion or another job and didn’t get it. Perhaps we were good at sport, but injury forced us to stop playing. Perhaps we have retired, and who are we now, without the structure and status of work? Perhaps our children have left the nest. Perhaps we have been widowed. The life we had, or the life we had hoped to have, utterly destroyed.

Just yesterday someone said to me, ‘Life can feel very unfair at times.’ And I suppose that it can. Though I wonder whether our sense of un/fairness is skewed, towards those we know personally, or by a sense of entitlement, or by God’s refusal to conform to our expectations of what a god should be and do. In any case, I know it to be true that the more firmly we try to grasp what we can never hold on to, the more pain we inflict upon ourselves, and others.

Jesus says, those who lose their life for my sake shall find it. What does that mean? ‘For Jesus’ sake’ means that we set Jesus as the end of our life, not the means to some other end. Not the ticket to heaven so we can be reunited with our family. Not the escape from fear of hell. Not the guarantee that God will spare us the suffering common to all life. Not the means to any other end. Jesus, the all-in-all, with us and for us, sharing our joys and our sorrows.

Jesus meets us where we are. This is good news for those who are finding their life, because finding your life is difficult. It takes effort, commitment to searching. Steps, missteps, repentance (turning around, retracing steps, trying again) and forgiveness (of ourselves, of others). Finding life can be hard work, and sometimes it is tempting to give up, to settle for less, for existing but not living, to breathing but not the vital breath. But Jesus draws near, and in his presence there is healing, rest, a lifting of those burdens that can be lifted and a sharing of those burdens that cannot. In his presence there is power to keep going, and someone to share the joy with.

And this is good news for those who are losing their life, too, which is all of us. Jesus does not shy away from suffering but embraces our humanity—and in so doing saves us from our inhumanity—drawing us to God and neighbour, so we can say, with the apostle Paul, ‘I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.’ (Romans 8:38)

Where are you finding your life today? Take a moment to give thanks, and share the joy, with Jesus.

Where are you losing life today? Take courage. Bring your fears to Jesus, and love will rescue you, bring you to well-being. Glory follows suffering, resurrection life follows the surrendering of our life. Those who lose their life for Jesus’ sake will find it.