Sermon – Buckland 31 August Trinity 19 October 11, 2008
Posted by hillmansc in Buckland, Sermons.add a comment
Jeremiah 15.15-21; Romans 12.9-21; Matthew 16.21-28
Some news reports from the past few months newspapers:
Marriage Wrecker Revenge
A jealous husband has smashed up his pal’s motor in a boozy rage — to punish him for sleeping with his wife.
Ex-rated website
A jilted lover has wreaked twisted revenge on his ex by launching an X-rated website in her name — and filling it with raunchy snaps.
Hezbollah’s revenge on Israel
THE leader of terrorist group Hezbollah yesterday vowed to take revenge on Israel “anywhere in the world” after the car bomb killing of Imad Mughniyeh.
House wrecked by neighbour
Handyman Terry Jacob took revenge on his noisy neighbours by using his DIY skills to wreck their home. The Mr Fix-it, 52 – fed-up with their loud music – drilled holes in their roof and super-glued their locks. He also blocked drainpipes with expanding foam, threw paint over their £200,000 home and cut satellite dish wires in a four-year campaign.
Crime victims ’seeking revenge from community fixers’ says chief constable
Victims of crime are turning to a shadow justice system run by ‘community fixers’ to seek revenge, a senior police chief has admitted
Chef John wants revenge
Jungle chef John Burton Race last night vowed to wreak revenge on his ex for shutting his restaurant — and burning all his clothes. The moody cook, who is locked in a bitter divorce battle, told The Sun he will wait until he returns to the UK to get his own back on Kim, 42.
Businessman jailed for organising vigilante taser squads to take revenge on burglars
A wealthy businessman was sentenced to three years behind bars today after setting up a vigilante squad to take revenge on burglars who raided his luxury home.
The newspapers love the idea of revenge. We read these stories and might feel a host of different emotions – perhaps some people when they read them think “Good on yer for standing up for yourself”; others might feel outrage at people who take the law into their own hands; or sadness at how relationships can break down so easily.
We might even be moved to laughter at some of the stories or tears at others.
There are probably few of us here today who have acted in such decisive ways when we’ve felt like getting our own back on others. If we look at the standards of Jesus, we can see that stories like these do not fit the patterns of love. And it’s quite easy to say that we’d never do anything like this ourselves.
But, revenge, wanting to pay back people for what they’ve done to us, doesn’t only come about in dramatic ways. We can retaliate in a variety of less showy ways. Think of children – he hit me first. Think of how easy it is when someone hurts us then to go and moan about them to others, as we seek sympathy or support. Think how easy it is to spread gossip about someone. Think how easy it is to talk about them behind their backs, rather than to face it out with them.
Seeking revenge can spring out of a number of feelings – hurt, anger, envy, a sense of justice. It is, in some ways, a natural reaction, which has existed since the world began. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.
But Jesus, doing what he did so often, turned things around. In Matthew’s Gospel, he is reported to have said as part of the Sermon on the Mount: “You have heard that it was said ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth’. But I say to you, Do not resist an evildoer. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also; and if anyone wants to sue you and take your coat, give your cloak as well; and if anyone forces you to go one mile, go also the second mile.”
That Jesus felt the need to say these things implies that those who followed him – or at least some of them – needed teaching in this area. It implies that there were people who did something other than he was teaching.
And St Paul is the same. We heard from his letter to the Romans this morning. This letter is slightly different from his others, because it was written to a church which he himself had not founded. But mostly we find in Paul’s letters that when he addresses ethical issues there is a reason for his doing so.
Why does he talk about the need to use spiritual gifts wisely and stress that love is the most important gift in his first letter to the Corinthians Church? Because people were fighting over who was the most spiritual, and which gift was best. Why does he stress in other letters that there is no difference between Christians of Jewish or Gentile background, slave or free, male or female? Because people were creating divisions.
So in this letter to Romans, it is significant that he talk about people not avenging themselves but allowing God to be judge. He talks about enemies, as if they are a fact of life.
It is significant because it implies that people were acting in ways contrary to the law of Christ, and he feels they need reminding of the Christian way.
The early Christians were seeking revenge, seeking to get their own back on those who had hurt them. And in those days, unlike for most of us, lives were often at stake – Christians’ enemies were often seeking to kill them.
But Paul’s message was not only for the early Christians. There is a message for us in this today. We too need to hear the words that he wrote to the Roman Church.
Revenge is a destructive and rotten thing. The desire for revenge eats away at us and makes us bitter and twisted. The opposite of revenge is reconciliation – that is a creative act. In Christ, God sought not revenge for people’s sins, but a reconciiation, a rebuilding of the broken relationship that sin causes.
So how do we ensure that when we desire to get our own back, we act in a way worthy of Christ, and not as perhaps we want to? It takes far more courage to communicate directly with the one who has hurt us or made us angry than to seek a less direct revenge.
Communication is a key factor. It’s always hard because communication relies on both parties wanting to do that. But it’s worth it, if you can do it. It was F. F. Bruce, a well known New Testament theologian, who said that the best way to get rid of your enemies was to turn them into your friends.
It is very easy to judge the actions of others. It was Jesus, again in the Sermon on the Mount, who told people not to judge others, since they would be judged themselves. “Why do you see the speck in your neighbour’s eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own?”
If we fel like seeking revenge, we should not only try and communicate with the one on whom we seek revenge, but also to look at our own life and our part in what has gone wrong. And forgiveness comes into play. Reconciliation is never achieved by revenge, but forgiveness gives it a good chance.
We can too turn to God in our anger or hurt or our desire for justice. We can pray about our feelings, our desire for revenge. There are parts of the Bible – Psalms, Jonah, Jeremiah, to name a few – where anger and a desire for one’s persceutors or enemies to perish or suffer. Look back at the words of Jeremiah in today’s Old Testament reading where he calls on God to bring retribution on those who had persecuted him.
Through prayer, we can change our attitudes and thoughts. By filling our minds with the words of Jesus, and the desire for reconciliation not revenge, we can begin to push out the negative feelings.
There is much discussion about what St Paul meant when he quoted from the book of Proverbs the sentence about heaping burning coals on the heads of one’s enemies. Most commentators think that it refers in this context to the burning coals of remorse, that is, treat your enemies kindly and you may lead them to repenatnce.
Repaying hurt or anger by revenge is seeking to overcome evil with evil. That is not the way of Christ. Christ’s way, as St Paul iterates, is to overcome evil with good. And that is also what is at the heart of the Christian faith – that God overcomes sin and evil and death with goodness, forgiveness and love. It’s our recognition of that, of the way in which God does that through Jesus, that makes us Christians.
I am going to end with some words of Tom Wright, the Bishop of Durham: “There are many other things to be said about God’s moral governance of the world, but at the centre of the Christian story stands this claim, that when human evil reached its height God came and took its full weight upon himself, thereby exhausting it and opening the way for the creation of a new world altogether. Revenge keeps evil in circulation. . . . When we refuse to take revenge, and deliberately rid ourselves of the desire for it, we are refusing to allow our lives to be determined by the evil someone else has done. It’s bad enough that they’ve done whatever it was; why should they then have the right to keep us in a bitter and twisted state? That’s what Paul means by ‘letting evil conquer you’.”
May Christ give us grace and courage to seek reconciliation and not reveng. Amen.
Sermon – Reed 5th October 2008 Trinity 20 October 11, 2008
Posted by hillmansc in Reed, Sermons.add a comment
Isaiah 5.1-7; Philippians 3.4b-14; Matthew 21.33-46
I wonder how many of us here have had the experience of being rejected by someone we love. It’s a very unsettling and painful thing to happen, and can leave the one who has been or feels deserted deeply hurt and confused, wondering what they’ve done wrong, how they can change things back, and why things have changed.
Our love for others is something we give freely. It’s something that engages our deepest emotions and it’s something that we long to have returned. I know from listening to the experiences of others and from my own experience how hard it can be when the love that we offer is not wanted or no longer a mutual thing.
There’s something similar going on in the readings we heard this morning. We need to be a bit careful as we interpret them in recognising that we are talking about symbols and stories as well as truths.
In our Old Testament reading, we heard Isaiah talking in pictorial terms of how God created the people of Israel. He likens them to a vineyard, which God had worked hard to provide for; he could not have done more for the vines. But in spite of this, the plants produce not wonderfully sweet cultivated grapes but sour wild ones. The fruits God desired were justice and righteousness; instead he reaped bloodshed and tears.
Because the vineyard has not been looked after, God will destroy it. Those who were put in charge of it have not done their work correctly. They have not sought after righteousness and justice. They have rejected God and all his ways.
We have to be careful when we put human emotions on to God, but, knowing that we have been made in God’s image, tends to suggest that when God too is rejected by those God loves, he feels sorrow and pain, and the broken-heartedness that follows rejection.
If we were to read on after verse 7 of Isaiah chapter 5, we would discover what they have been doing wrong. Instead of caring for his people and following God’s desires, the leaders have bought up all the surrounding land and pushed others off it. They live drunken lives, imbibing from morning till night-time, feasting and ignoring God. Their riches have caused poverty to others. They have confused evil for good and oppress their people – they have brought judgement upon themselves.
The psalm also talks about how God tended the vine he had brought out of Egypt, but which now God seems to have deserted. The psalmist blames God for what has happened to Israel, but doesn’t look at how Israel has behaved towards God, rejecting God and God’s ways.
God sent the prophets to call the people of Israel back, to help them realise what they were doing, how they were destroying what he had created. But the people still did not listen.
In the end, God sent his Son, Jesus, part of Himself, and still the leaders would not listen, but, as we now know, played a part in condemning him to death.
The parable Jesus told shows how God does what he can. The tenants, put in to look after the vineyard, are the leaders of Israel. The landlord is away, but wishes to receive the fruit due to him, so first he sends servants to collect it.
In the Old Testament, the fruit was bad; we’re not told in the parable whether it was good or bad – perhaps the reason for the tenants’ actions was because they had not produced a good harvest and had nothing to give to the master, other than a few bloody servants and a dead son.
This parable begs some questions. If God is the landlord, why is he depicted as absent? Perhaps the people believed him to be absent; after all God’s people were living in an occupied nation. Perhaps the absence of God is merely a technique to make the story work. Or perhaps it is a picture God before the coming the Holy Spirit. Jesus the Son was confined by time and space; the Holy Spirit makes God available to all people in all places. The problems raised by asking such questions show the dangers of taking the interpretation of parables too allegorically.
What more could God send than his Son? Himself? He did just that, for God is the Son as well as the Father and the Holy Spirit.
As with so many of Jesus’s parables, he gets people listening by starting with a situation they know well. It may be that the idea of the absent landlord is saying nothing about God’s absence, but rather is Jesus’s way of helping people to listen. The people of the time knew all about absent landlords, who raked in the money on the back of work that they didn’t do themselves but had others to do for them.
The tenants represent the Jewish leaders, who had been called to care for God’s people, but were instead oppressing them. The servants sent by the landlord are the prophets, sent by God to call the people to return to him. The Son, as we have seen already, represents Jesus: the Son who was crucified for love of his people – the ultimate rejection.
But the people who have judged will be judged themselves. John Proctor, in his commentary on Matthew’s Gospel, picks out three important themes: fulfilment, foundation and forfeit. At the end of his parable, Jesus tells the leaders how they will forfeit God’s kingdom, because they do not produce the fruits – justice, righteousness, faithfulness, humility, kindness, love.
The old religious community will be transformed, because in the new religious community Jesus will be at the head, the cornerstone. What we miss in English is the word play; in Hebrew the word for son is ben, for stone eben. He thus makes clear that the Son who is rejected is the one who will become the cornerstone, without which the building will fall.
The foundation of the new religious community is Christ, and in using the imagery from Isaiah, Matthew, as he does throughout his Gospel, is showing how Jesus is the fulfilment of the Old Testament promises.
By the end of today’s reading, the chief priests and Pharisees finally twig that the two parables he has told, one we heard this week, the other was the set reading for last week, are against them. They want to arrest him, but their fear of the crowd is too great.
There is a warning here for all religious leaders, myself included. In any organisation responsibility and position can tempt people away from the good of those they lead. Power can be a corrupting force, and we, as Christian leaders, need constantly to be vigilant and aware that we do not forget that the leadership of Christ was not about power but about humility.
It is easy, even for us who have been called to ministry, perhaps especially for us who have been called to ministry, to lose sight of why we do what we do, to lose touch with God, to fail to lead the people in God’s ways and not our own.
It is essential that Christian leaders take the time to listen to God, to spend time with God, to receive the love that he offers and not reject it because we become too busy doing God’s work.
There are many ways of rejecting God’s love, and many of them are not conscious decisions. We know from experience that human friendships rely on contact and communication – it’s the same with our relationship with God.
This parable has stern warnings for those of us who are Christian leaders, but it also has a message for all Christians. What kind of fruit do we produce? Are we connected to Jesus the vine? Do we live in the ways God desires, the ways of faithfulness, justice, forgiveness, righteousness, humility, selflessness, goodness and love for others? How easy it is to become self-seeking and selfish, bitter and angry, proud and unjust!
But we also know the end of the story – or the next part at least. The Son who was crucified and rejected does become the cornerstone following the resurrection. So, though we too will be judged, the judgement will be considered in different ways, our slate will be wiped clean when we acknowledge the wrong that we have done.
The warning in the story is stark for all of us, and we can decide whether we join the tenants in killing the son or not. But we can celebrate too, and receive life from God’s resurrection power by accepting it for ourselves, not only in word but in deed and action and in those qualities that we allow to rule our lives.
That resurrection power will give us the ability to seek and offer forgiveness, to work for reconciliation when there is conflict, to desire healing of relationships when they are broken.
And that is, above all, what this story is about – God seeking to heal the broken relationship between people and himself. God who never gives up on those whom he loves, however much they reject him. God, to whom we can go in good times and when we are at our most vulnerable. God who will never give up loving us, in spite of what we do.
That’s a God worth believing in. It’s a God that the Pharisees had lost sight of. I pray that we may never do that, and if you’re not sure whether you know that God yet, find someone to talk to about it, because God’s love should be good news for all.
Sermon – Reed 12th October 2008 Trinity 21 October 11, 2008
Posted by hillmansc in Reed, Sermons.add a comment
Isaiah 25.1-9; Psalm 23; Philippians 4.1-9; Matthew 22.1-14
Weddings take a lot of planning, as I’m sure you know. Long gone are the days when a simple ceremony and local reception for one’s family and close friends in the pub or village hall or a barn sufficed. Weddings these days are big money.
A whole industry has grown up around them, in terms of venues for marriage ceremony and reception, bridal wear, special florists, food and drink, decorations for the venue, mother-of-the bride wear, cakes, presents for bridesmaids and guest, wedding lists, honeymoons and even top hat and waistcoats for dogs – the number of whom attending weddings, I learnt this week, is much higher than one might expect.
People, with one or two exceptions, put a great deal of effort into planning the day of their lives. Money is spent, champagne flows and everyone has a good time. As someone who is often involved in the weddings of others, it strikes me that there is a lot more planning put into one day than preparation for marriage and commitment to each other for a lifetime.
Back in the time of Jesus, weddings may not have been such big business, but they still involved parties that went on for days, and we know Jesus attended at least one from the beginning of John’s Gospel, when he turned water into wine.
Communities in first-century Palestine tended to be small, and people did not travel in general far from their childhood homes. So most weddings involved family, the close friends with whom one had grown up, and the community in which one lived. Family and community have always been important parts of Jewish life.
What that does mean is that when Jesus starts talking about a wedding banquet, everyone will have some idea of what he means. But this wedding banquet belongs to the king’s son, so no doubt it would have been more opulent than the ones the people usually attended.
Jesus’s listeners would have been familiar with the idea of the heavenly banquet. The common thread in our Old Testament reading, our Psalm and the Gospel reading for today is a feast. The tradition of the messianic banquet was part of the heritage of Israel.
If we look back to the reading from Isaiah, we are told that God will make a feast of rich food and well-matured wines. It will be the time when the Lord returns to his people.
But the other thing the readings have in common is the idea that at the feast, there are some who are not welcome.
In Isaiah, the aliens whose palace has been destroyed are the outsiders. In the psalm, God’s feast is prepared in the presence of those who trouble the author. They can watch but don’t take part.
And in the Gospel reading, there are two sets of outcasts – those who refuse the invitation and those who accept it but don’t dress properly.
The story is extreme, and Matthew has made a number of alterations to the story we find in Luke. Though we don’t know for certain, we can assume that they based their stories on the same original source and then tailored it to suit their own ends.
Matthew is very aware of how Jesus was killed, so we have this very odd situation where some are too busy to come to the party and go off to farm or business, while others kill the servants sent to call them to the party.
In Luke’s story, there is no mention of a wedding or murder, but Matthew is making clear for his Jewish readers who were steeped in scripture that Jesus is speaking in parables and referring to both the messianic banquet and the death of Jesus.
There is a link with the tenants in the vineyard parable which was last Sunday’s set Gospel reading, since both are aimed at the Jewish leaders. Christ came, but those who had received the invitation – representatives of God’s people, had not recognised his presence and had turned the invitation down. They had murdered the one who had brought the message – they had murdered the Prince of Peace.
Matthew has also added to the story the ending about the person who has not dressed in suitable clothes. It’s not in Luke. And it’s rather strange that, having made such an effort to invite people to this wedding, now someone who has turned up is thrown out.
There is a tension here between the idea of the inclusive messianic feast to which everyone is invited, but which is also exclusive of two sets of people – those who refuse the invitation and those who turn up in the wrong clothes.
What is going on here? We all know that the last thing Jesus would have been bothered about was whether people looked right.
Marriage is often used as a metaphor for God’s relationship with people. And God’s invitation is for everyone, but those who are invited must make a decision about whether they wish to respond positively or not. In the story, there were some who did not heed the invitation at all. But another heard the invitation, showed up at the feast, although he wasn’t equipped and ready. He hadn’t taken the invitation seriously.
All are indeed invited, but there is a responsibility to take the invitation seriously. To turn up to a wedding feast in old tatty clothing is not doing that. It shows no respect for the groom, for Christ.
St Paul took up the imagery of clothing in his ideas about clothing oneself with Christ. The right sort of clothes are not the tatty clothes of hard-heartedness, pride, selfishness, hatred, impatience, dishonesty, immorality, injustice, disloyalty and so on. The clothes of Christ are purity, truth, justice, honour, loyalty, forgiveness, honesty, kindness, gentleness, patience, humility, generosity, love.
The invitation is open to all, but answering yes requires a change in behaviour. Christians are called to find their unity in Christ, something Euodia and Syntyche appear to have lost. Christians are called to rejoice in God, to show gentleness to all.
Christians are called not to worry about anything – how hard that is – but worry shows a lack of trust in the provision of God. Christians are called to strive for excellence of thought and behaviour.
We are all called to join the messianic wedding banquet, but will we have the right clothes?
Will we be wearing the wedding clothes of justice and kindness or will we arrive in the rags of sin?
One way of ensuring we are properly dressed is suggested in our epistle reading this morning from Paul’s letter to the Philippians – let your requests be made known to God. When we try to change ourselves in our own strength, so often we fail. When we recognise our poverty before God, then we open ourselves to the transforming Holy Spirit who can clothe us with the right sort of attire.
The more we rejoice in God, the more our difficulties fade into the background. If we’re rejoicing in God’s goodness, it’s harder to let other worries take our lives over. Christians should be optimists because we know that God can bring good out of all. That’s hard for those of us who naturally pessimistic – those who know me well will tell you that I always see the downside first, and often need reminding of the positive, so this bit of the sermon is for me as much as for anyone else.
And the more we rejoice in God, the more our hearts become in tune with God’s values, the more loving of God we become and when we love God more, loving our friends and enemies more follows naturally.
When we wear the right clothes for the wedding banquet, we will point not to ourselves but to the glory of God. And that is what the messianic banquet is all about – the glory of God.
