Trinity 14

A Syrian Mother and a Syrian Son: these are extended notes, but not an exact transcript, for my sermon on the occasion of baptising Sienna, aged 4.

The other day, Sienna and I were talking about the latest Disney Pixar movie, Inside Out [hold up character bag, to illustrate]. The story concerns a young girl, and the emotions that exist inside her. The emotions are called Joy, Sadness, Disgust, Fear, and Anger. They influence her actions, and they colour her memories [hold up yellow, and blue, hi-bounce glitter water balls, to represent memories coloured by joy, and sadness].

In the story we heard this morning about Jesus, we met a mother who had a young daughter. And this story, too, is full of the emotions. Imagine the emotions inside that woman. Sadness is sad for her daughter, whose plight no one can help. Anger is angry that this situation should be inflicted on an innocent child. Disgust does not fail to notice the way other people look at her child, and judge her. Fear imagines the worst for the future: where will this end? Joy hears the word on the street – Jesus has come to town. Maybe, just maybe…

The woman finds Jesus, and begs him to help. And he responds by saying that it wouldn’t be right to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs at their feet.

Her emotions look at one another. Anger explodes “Did he call us a dog? Did he actually say that out loud? Why…!” Disgust answers back “You Jews think you’re better than everyone else, but you’re not so special yourselves.” Sadness sighs “Well, we tried. It was always a long shot. Let’s go. I’m feeling sad.” Fear adds “Let’s go quickly, before they all start laughing at us!” And Joy says “Did you not see the look in his eyes? That was a look of love, not hate.”

In effect, Jesus says, “Why would you even ask me for help? Don’t you know that my people consider your people to be sub-human [to be dogs; to be a swarm]?” and the woman replies, “Yes, but even your people aren’t completely devoid of compassion, of humanity…”

Following Jesus means, among other things, training our emotions to look to him, to learn from him.

You will have seen in the media this week images of children of around the same age as Sienna.

Sadness can respond, “What a mess. But what can be done?”; or sadness can respond, “Lord Jesus, you promised that those who mourn will be comforted; would you please surround these people with your comfort; and show us how we can express that too.”

Disgust can respond, “How can these people be so greedy that they are willing to sacrifice their children?”; or disgust can respond, “How can we live with ourselves while we ignore our neighbours?”

Fear can respond, “They want to take what we have from us!”; or fear can respond, “Father God, these people must be very scared. Would you surround them with your protection, and lead them to a place of refuge; and may we welcome them.”

Anger can respond, “Who is to blame?”; or anger can respond, “We must stand up to injustice!”

And joy can respond, “Count our blessings that we live in a pleasant place”; or joy can respond, “We can do something to help; and while it will be hard, it will be fun too; it will build up our community as we embrace others.”

…

Twelfth Sunday after Trinity

Joshua 24:1-2a, 14-18 and Ephesians 6:10-20 and John 6:56-69

 

“...but as for me and my household, we will serve the Lord.” Joshua 24:15

This morning, I want us to think about households and about serving.

In our first reading, we heard Joshua, who led God’s people into the Promised Land, setting before them the choice, who will you serve?

In our Gospel reading, we heard Jesus (incidentally, the name ‘Jesus’ is the Greek version of the Hebrew name ‘Joshua’) set before his twelve closest disciples the choice, who will you follow? who will you serve?

And in his call to stand against the devil and take upon ourselves the armour of God, Paul, writing under house arrest, asks the same question, who will you serve?

You will always serve something, or – more accurately, beneath the outward appearances – someone. Why? Because you were created to serve.

We are created to serve, not because we were created to be God’s Minions, but because we are created in the likeness of God, who comes ‘not to be served, but to serve’ (as hymn-writer Graham Kendrick put it).

We are not masters of our own destiny. We can ignore, but not change, this reality. So you will always end up serving someone, and the question is, who will it be?

Joshua is clear that he, and his household, will serve the Lord.

Peter is clear that, having come to know Jesus, they could not imagine serving anyone else. By the way, like Joshua, Peter is speaking on behalf of a household: his household was the first household to serve Jesus (in the Gospels we see both Peter and his mother-in-law leading by example), and the house at the centre of that household remains to this day, preserved beneath a twentieth-century church with a glass floor enabling you to look into the world of the Gospels.

Paul is held under house-arrest, but even there he is serving God, and not only through his writing. In one of his other letters written while under house arrest, he informs us that his circumstances have allowed him to make the gospel known throughout the whole imperial guard (Philippians 1:12, 13) and that some of them (some of ‘Caesar’s household’) have come to faith in Jesus (Philippians 4:22). There is a beautiful irony there, though also a very real tension for those involved. Their outward, external identity was located in a household serving the self-proclaimed divine-man Caesar; but their true identity was as a household who had chosen to serve Jesus as Lord.

We are created to serve, and unless we are able to serve, we will experience frustration. However appealing the idea of being waited on hand and foot might sound, it could never satisfy us. So why is serving God so hard? Why is putting others before ourselves so challenging?

We must be freed to serve. Joshua helped the people to remember that God had brought them up ‘out of the house of slavery’. Remember, we serve because we are created in the likeness of a God who first serves us; but there are things that enslave us so that we are unable to serve. Things like pride, or fear, or listening to the voice in our head that says we don’t have anything to offer and while God can use others he couldn’t use me. Things like resentment, or loss of hope, or...

Just as we were all created to serve, so we have all ended up in the house of slavery. God had come and set his people free, in the hope that they would use their freedom to bring freedom to others; in the hope that they would have compassion on those who lived as slaves to harsh masters. Freed not only from something, but also freed for something. Our experience of freedom is meant to have the same impact in our day; but the fact remains that we cannot free ourselves: we need to be set free.

The good news is that in Jesus, God has come and set us free to serve. That Christ has set us free to be as we are made to be. Either we experience this, or we are yet to discover it, or we have somehow forgotten and have reimagined our chains; but in Christ that freedom is available to us every day.

You were created to serve, and you have been freed to serve. But even that is not the whole story. And it comes back to being made by God and for God, not to be his Minions but to be his family, his household, sharing life together. We do not serve on our own, but alongside God, and in the power of the Holy Spirit living in us.

We must be empowered to serve. This is what the Holy Spirit does. The Spirit enables Peter to see that Jesus brings fullness of life, though not everyone could accept it. According to Paul, the Spirit strengthens us; speaks to us through even the hardest and most immobilising circumstances; enables us to pray at all times, regardless of what we are going through; and helps us make known the mystery of the gospel.

To serve in our own strength would be overwhelming. It might win us admirers in the short-term, but it would be utterly exhausting, and ultimately futile. The good news is that we are empowered to serve, wherever we are and whatever we are facing. Either we experience this, or we are yet to discover it, or we have somehow forgotten and have exhausted ourselves; but we can be re-filled with the breath of the Spirit every moment of every day.

Over the summer I have been greatly encouraged by so many examples of so many members of our Minster household serving God and the people of Sunderland – and one another – through being part of the Sunderland Summer Specials, through the Recovery event that took place on Friday (where we celebrated lives being set free from some of the more visible and less socially-acceptable addictions), and in many other ways. You are a living sermon illustrating what it looks like to be created, freed, and empowered to serve. And if you are here today because you are intrigued by what is going on, but you have yet to discover these truths, or you have known them to be true but somehow or other you have forgotten and want to discover them afresh, then please don’t go away today without speaking with me or Fiona or someone else who will be happy to pray with you.

Next Sunday morning we shall have a service of celebration giving thanks for all that God has done through the Summer Specials in particular. There will be opportunity for some to give short testimonies of your experience of serving the Lord over these past weeks. But why wait a week, when you can go out and tell someone today, or tomorrow?

Evensong : Trinity 7

Deuteronomy 30:1-10 and 1 Peter 3:8-18

Recurring themes running through our readings today:

blessings and curses;

being scattered and gathered,

(or, turning from and turning to);

deep and mysterious matters of the heart...

and the overarching theme of Covenant, one of the great structural themes of the Bible.

What is a blessing? Anything in your life that is good, anything – be it a skill or a relationship – that by practice bears fruit. Whatever is life-giving to you, and through you life-giving to others, bears witness to your response to God’s invitation to enter into fullness of life. And when we bless others, we speak that same invitation to them: ‘Be fruitful!’ Something within them will always respond, however complicated that response might be, because it is the nature of creation to do so.

What is a curse? A curse is not the opposite of a blessing, or even the absence of a blessing, but a particular form of blessing that places temporary constraint* on fruitfulness, creating room for others. Let me illustrate it like this: if you hold out your hands in front of you – palm facing palm, like a fisherman recounting the size of his catch – to represent a blessing, and then widen them to represent further blessing, and widen them again to represent yet more blessing, by now you are hitting the person sat next to you in the face. Sometimes blessings need boundaries – boundaries that help us re-examine our blessings in the light of the blessing of, and for, others – and that is how curses function. They humble us in our pride, in order that, in due time, God might lift us up again. When we hit up against such boundaries, they are an invitation to turn back to God.**

The images of being scattered and gathered are another way of describing curses and blessings. What feels like being abandoned by God, and being reconciled with God, are both expressions of God’s fidelity towards us – and reveal the fidelity he longs for from us in return. You see, the overarching theme here is covenant fidelity.

In the Ancient Near Eastern world, tribal chieftains would make life more secure for their people by entering into covenant agreement with the heads of other tribes. They would cut animals in two, creating a corridor of blood between them, and stand at either end. Then they would pass each other, taking one another’s place, symbolically identifying themselves as the chief of the other tribe, before returning to their own place, their own tribe. And they would often mark themselves with a cut that would leave a scar, as a permanent reminder of the covenant they had made: becoming blood brothers.

From then on, if either tribe was attacked, the other would come to their aid. This is the covenant that God – as chief of the heavenly beings – and Abraham – as chief of a nomadic group of herdsmen – entered into. It was the covenant restated when the people of Israel created a door of blood, as God passed by them into Egypt to fight for them and they passed out of Egypt to Sinai to meet with God and to travel together through the wilderness and to the Land of Promise. This is the covenant restated when Jesus came into the world, smeared in blood, and gave up his life, again smeared in blood. And even though death could not hold him, Jesus bears his covenant scars on his wrists and ankles for ever.

So, where is our covenant scar? It is not on our body, but on our heart. In the symbolic language of the Bible, the heart is the seat of our will, our decision-making. And that is where God has marked us with a scar, a tender place, a permanent reminder. If you have a significant scar, you can feel it long after the sharp pain of the initial wound is a distant memory. Not all of the time, but at certain predictable times, such as when there is a change in the weather. In a similar way, at turning-points we feel our covenant scar. When we face a decision, a choice that will move us closer to Jesus or further away from Jesus, our scars are a reminder of our covenant – as his scars are to him.

So, where do you see evidence of blessing in your life? Remember to give thanks. Remember to include God in the circumstances, so that you share the fruit together: Jesus loves a celebration! Remember to include others, so they might benefit too. Remember to tell others, so they can learn what it looks like to have God as our covenant partner in an uncertain world.

And, where do you experience curse, constraint? What isn’t flourishing as you might hope? In what part of life does it feel like you keep hitting a brick wall? Here is an opportunity to ask God, as Jesus did from the cross,

‘Where, O Lord, are You to be found in this place, this circumstance?

When will you come and rescue me?

And what unseen work are You up to, in my heart, in the meantime?’

*In the symbolic language of the Bible, curses stretch for 3 generations, while blessings stretch for 1000 generations.

**Even when people malign others – when we curse others or are cursed by others, with no intention of blessing – God works to bring good out of the circumstances, ensuring that curses are a particular form of blessing even where blessing was never the intention of the one who curses. Jesus’ covenant scars exemplify this.

Trinity 6

Amos 7:7-15 and Ephesians 1:3-14 and Mark 6:14-29

This week, I have been at the Durham Diocese Clergy Summer Gathering, where our theme was children and young people. Among other things, we reflected on biblical images of children. In our readings this morning, we are referred to as God’s adopted children; but we also heard the story of a young girl who was exploited, by men for whom she was brought in as a sexualised fantasy object and by her mother who manipulated her to manipulate her step-father in order to bring about a murder. That seems very contemporary to me. The Bible never shies away from holding a mirror to ourselves, in our beauty and our brokenness. And in some of the free time around the margins of our time away, I reflected on today’s readings in the light of all we were considering.

I was struck, reading Amos, by the question, who does God speak through? It is clear that there is an expectation that God speaks through those in power – the priest, and the king – and that they mediate God’s word in such a way that their interests are protected – the king’s sanctuary, and the temple. If they were to look at the vision God showed Amos, they would have seen an impressive wall, a sign of strength. But Amos sees a plumb-line, which reveals that the wall has been built without necessary care, and has become precarious.

Amos’ voice is dismissed. He is not qualified to speak here. He does not have the right background, the right training. And yet, he replies, the Lord had spoken to him and sent him.

We need to listen to the voice of those on the margin of our worshipping community, the ‘untrained’ who speak from a different experience, from everyday life – and who may bring the word that brings us life by putting to death our self-importance. And those on the margin include our children.

In our reading from Paul’s letter to the church at Ephesus, Paul repeats the words ‘us’ and ‘our’ and ‘we’ and ‘you/your’ [plural] again and again. At the heart of the passage Paul states that ‘With all wisdom and insight he [the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ] has made known to us the mystery of his will’ which is ‘to gather up all things in him [Christ]’. But this is not made known just through the few: God speaks to us through us. We need to listen to what God is saying through one another – again, including our children.

Our Gospel reading stands as a warning, of what it looks like when those with power seek to silence the voice of one speaking from the margins – and even exploit others, vulnerable others, in order to achieve this. It is a desperate situation – and one that, ultimately, does not achieve its aim. But it is easily done when we believe that the role of the priest is to speak rather than to enable each to find a voice.

We discern what God might be saying to us – as a community and personally – as we listen to one another. So that is what we are going to do. First, take a moment to reflect: was there anything in particular that stood out for you as the lessons were being read out today?

... Now take a couple of moments to share that thing with the people sat next to you. Don’t worry if you have nothing to say: the Holy Spirit doesn’t speak through everybody on every occasion; but the Holy Spirit does speak through everybody over time, if we create the space for that to happen.

... If someone shared something, they have already acted in response to the Holy Spirit’s question ‘What do you see?’ and prompt to, ‘Go and tell’. But it may be that there is a further response that is necessary, either for them personally or for us as a community. Let me encourage you to discuss that further over coffee after the service; and if you feel that there is something that we need to hear as a community, to write it down and/or share that with myself or Fiona or Sheila. Thank you.

Second Sunday after Trinity: BCP

1 John 3:13-24 and Luke 14:16-24

The genius of the parable as a form of teaching is that parables can be adapted to suit different contexts. Matthew and Luke both recount Jesus telling the parable of a great banquet, but telling it in different ways.

Matthew frames Jesus’ whole ministry in terms of proclaiming impending crisis: the call to ‘repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near’ (Matthew 4:17). That is to say, turn back, return to God, in the light of an imminent day of judgement! In the same way that the immediate prophetic horizon of the Old Testament prophets was the destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonian Empire (which took place in 587/586BC), so the immediate prophetic horizon for Jesus was the destruction of Jerusalem by the Roman Empire (which would take place in AD70).

Luke frames Jesus’ whole ministry in terms of proclaiming Jubilee: God’s favour expressed as good news for the poor, freedom for captives and the oppressed (Luke 4:16-21, where Jesus reads from Isaiah 61:1-2. For more on what Jubilee meant, see Leviticus 25 and 27). That is to say, Matthew and Luke focus on different dimensions of Jesus’ message, Matthew looking to an event in the near future (the now-and-not-yet kingdom of heaven is coming), and Luke to an event in the now (the now-and-not-yet kingdom of God has come).

So Matthew records Jesus telling the parable of the great banquet as a parable of God’s judgement on unrighteous Israel, culminating in the destruction of Jerusalem. Behind the action of the false god Caesar, in which those who currently enjoyed power and prestige would suffer horrific death, stands the judgement of the true King of heaven. In contrast, Luke records Jesus telling the same parable as a parable of Jubilee, in which those who had been pushed to the margins found themselves included. While the powerful experience a marginalisation they have not previously known, there are no gory deaths: the focus is justice, not bloody overthrow.

Someone gave a great dinner and invited many. But they all alike began to make excuses. If the excuses sound at all reasonable to us, that should be a warning to us of just how far we have accommodated worldly power in our own lives. The first has just bought land, without even seeing it. This is a clear violation of the Jubilee, where all ancestral land that had been mortgaged to a creditor had to be returned, liberating families from the burden of debt and the captivity of poverty. This restoration took place only twice every century, and so to take property in this particular moment was effectively to hold others captive for a full fifty years.

Another invited guest has just bought five yoke of oxen, and wants to try them out. Again, this is a clear violation of the Jubilee, in which the land was to lie fallow for a year. It is not only the tenants of God’s land who are to experience release: Jubilee extends to the land itself. Of course, to embrace a fallow year requires trust in God’s provision. To buy oxen and put them to work in this particular moment is to disregard and dishonour God.

Yet another invited guest has just married. Surely this is not a violation of the Jubilee? Don’t rich and poor alike marry? Well, in Numbers 36, Moses is called upon to settle a dispute. It has already been established that daughters can inherit land; the concern is that if unmarried daughters inherit land and then marry into another Israelite tribe, and if the land is subsequently mortgaged to a creditor, then at the Jubilee redemption it will be restored to that tribe and not her ancestral tribe. The concern is that marriage can result in the permanent loss of connection to the land, which was the inheritance of the people. In this version of the parable, where the first two excuses reveal violation of the Jubilee, Jesus’ listeners would have understood marrying in this particular moment as an attempted land-grab in violation of the Jubilee.

The RSVPs come in, and none of the invited guests are attending. So the owner of the house instructs his slave to bring in the poor, the crippled, the blind, and the lame. This is done, but the slave reports back that ‘there is still room.’ The master sends his slave out again, to compel people to come in, that his house may be filled. As far as Jubilee is concerned, once you have fulfilled the letter of the Law, there is still room to go further, to bring more people in to the experience of justice and freedom.

How might this parable of the Jubilee relate to us, in Sunderland, today? Our reading from 1 John instructs us to love, not in word or speech, but in truth and action. Love is expressed in providing help to those in need. This week has seen the publication of the Cinnamon Faith Action Audit, which has found that in Sunderland, faith communities – overwhelmingly churches – run over 400 projects serving the community. These include work with children, young adults, the elderly, the isolated, those in financial crisis, asylum seekers, those with addiction, those trapped in trafficking or prostitution, alleviating homelessness, skills and employment, and creating safer communities. More than 2,000 volunteers reached almost 80,000 beneficiaries in 2014, delivering services of a total financial value calculated at over £3.5 million. On average, each church or faith group was delivering 7 social action projects; with 4 paid staff working 1,939 hours; and 39 volunteers giving 5,553 hours; providing support for 1,395 beneficiaries; at a financial worth of £62,666 (paid staff hours, plus volunteer hours calculated using the living wage of £7.85 and a small supplement for management time).

The poor, the crippled, the blind, and the lame are being brought in. And there is still room. The Jubilee that Jesus proclaimed is alive and well in Sunderland, because it is still, and always will be, needed.

We return to this place, to the house and presence of our Lord and master, in order to receive his word. First, he feeds us, nourishes us – but this is not the banquet itself. Then he says, go out…and bring in... Let us be strengthened in our duty, and serve with joy.

First Sunday After Trinity

Genesis 3:8-15 | 2 Corinthians 4:13-5:1 | Mark 3:20-35

On our dining room wall there are photos of our children, including one of each of them on their first days at school, which happened to be in three different cities, Sheffield, where they were all born, Nottingham, where I was at theological college, and Liverpool, during my curacy. What can be seen is temporary. Who I was at birth, at seven, at fourteen, at twenty-one, at twenty-eight, at thirty-five, at forty-two – or, at least, who I understood myself to be, and who others took me to be – differs one from the other. Like icebergs, only a small and melting part of who we are is visible; most of our selves are interior, hidden as much to us as to others, buoying us up in an eternal sea.

Today I want to consider the temporary outer nature, which is [beautiful in its many stages of] wasting away; the eternal inner nature, which is being renewed day by day; and the crucial role hiding plays at the meeting-point of the two.

Let me set the scene for the reading from Genesis. The human family, embodied in our first parents Adam and Eve, were given three gifts by God: firstly, the gift of a vocation, to enable harmony within God’s creation, characterised by fruitfulness and rest; secondly, the gift of abundant provision, which is what fruitfulness looks like; and thirdly the gift of limit-setting, which is actually what rest looks like, given in order to spare us from being overwhelmed by the wonder and mystery of life. But we, again embodied in our first parents, ate of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil; our eyes were opened to our nakedness; we were afraid, and hid. As embodied persons this surely includes physical nakedness, but actually describes being overwhelmed by a glimpse into the enormous, mysterious life we were created for, terrifyingly desired and just as terrifyingly costly.

We are made to be a particular person who stands in the presence of other particular persons, including God; and who enjoy ourselves and the other as gift. (This is what it means to be made in the likeness of the Trinity.) This being present in the presence of another is easy in innocence, when we have no idea that it will cost us everything – just this week, I watched a baby interact with every adult in a café – but is overwhelming when our eyes are opened to the enormity of our own possibility and that of every other person. When I was fourteen, all I wanted to become in time was a husband and a father. When I became a real husband to a real wife, and a real father to three real children – all of whom change through time – I discovered that I hoped for something far beyond the ability of the person I have become.

The man and the woman hide. Now, the instinct to hide is a reflex common to all animals God has created, and learning to hide well is an essential skill. Hiding gives us the space we need in order to closely observe, to observe ourselves as well as others; a place where we will be safe until we are ready to step into the presence of another person, not as an innocent who knows not what we are doing but as one created for real relationship with real others. Indeed, hiding, done well, is good – as we will see in Jesus. But when we fail to hide well, we fall back on hiding badly, because we have presented ourselves too soon.

The first place the man and woman hide is among the trees of the garden. The calling to fill the earth [provision; fruitfulness; including relationships] and subdue it – that is, calm its raging storms [limit-setting; rest; involving struggles] – has become overwhelming to them; and so they hide in that part of their vocation they can see in the present – as gardeners of the Garden. And here they hide well, by which I mean that from their hiding place they carefully observe God, and what they observe enables them to overcome fear and step out from the trees.

But in this beautiful story we also see what hiding badly does to us. The thought of filling the earth is overwhelming. Adam hides within the immediate relationship he can see in the present - ‘the woman you gave me’. But he does so badly, the encounter defined by blame and not delight. Fruitfulness is frustrated. The thought of subduing the earth is also overwhelming. Eve hides within the immediate struggle she can see in the present, represented by the serpent. She also hides badly, the encounter defined by deceit and not honesty. In shifting blame [movement, with false intent] rather than owning responsibility, rest is frustrated.

Both male and female hide from what is invisible, or too large to see, in what is visible: the temporary, passing, wasting-away outer edge of our vocation and relationships and struggles. Even though this edge is falling away, it provides the place from which we can see the next step emerge, the place from where we can step into our ‘being renewed’ selves rather than being pushed unprepared.

Jesus also hid and watched, but always hid well. He hid within his vocation: for thirty years of obscurity as a builder, forty days in the wilderness, at the festival of Booths, in the tomb. He hid within his relationships: observing others with compassion before stepping from hiding to respond to a woman ostracised by her neighbours, a woman longing for her child to be healed, sisters weeping for their dead brother, a woman in a garden weeping for her lord. And he hid within his struggles: asleep in the bottom of the boat while his friends wrestle the storm that rises within them as much as about, until he is ready to step forward and restore calm with a word.

Hiding is an essential skill; and God is so gracious in recognising this. Eavesdropping as two guilty children are being questioned, can we glimpse the knowing gaze and loving smile of a wise parent? God’s response is to re-state the vocation of humanity to enable harmony in creation; and, in parallel promises, to re-affirm first to the woman and then to the man that, though their labour will be hard, they will ultimately know both fruitfulness [met desire] and rest [under the protection of human relationship, in life; under the protection of the earth, in death]. In three successive declarations, the eternal perspective on vocation, on relationships, and on struggles are revealed, beneath the surface of what is presently visible.*

We hide, holding on to a role in the community that has, in part, defined us, before we let it go and step into the next chapter in the story of our inner nature. We hide, holding on to our children as, well, children, before we know them, and are known by them, as adults. We hide, holding on to perceived enemies [including ourselves], before we dare to meet them as potential friends.

Letting go of what is temporary and stepping into the next temporary season has its own timing. This is a mystery; and mystery is not meant to be understood but, rather, to be experienced. Wherever you are hiding today, whatever immediate past you must let go of, whatever immediate future you must take hold of, God comes, looking for you, wanting to know you and to be known by you in that intimate moment where we disappear and appear. Parent and child, caught up in a game of hide-and-seek. It is a beautiful encounter – and it can be yours today.

[*By such steps, the man and the woman are able to move out from the Garden into the world that must be tamed. Finally, God sets an angel to prevent them going back, for hiding is instinctive to us, and while it stops us from charging ahead too soon, it can also prevent us from stepping out at all. We can never hide in the same place twice, for once a hiding place has served its necessary purpose, it is lost to us forever.]