Sermon: John 18: 33-37/Revelation1: 4b- 8

Today is Christ the King Sunday, the last Sunday before Advent, and so our readings are about Jesus as king and our focus is on God's kingdom.

Of course, we live in a kingdom! And our king, as his mother before him, calls himself a servant of the people – he is in his role to serve us. This is a model from our faith, from Christianity – the model of the servant king.  But, still, how different to the way Jesus lived out his kingship.  In spite of all that King Charles does and all the places he visits and his heart for our planet.  In spite even of his recent cancer diagnosis and treatment, King Charles remains insulated from the pain and suffering in the world.  He lives in palaces and travels in entourages and eats banquets and receives the best care for his medical needs.

Already then, we start to identify the differences between King Charles and King Jesus.  No palaces for Jesus.  No luxuries.  No privileged lifestyle that sets him above those around him.  Jesus is not able to walk away from pain.  It is all around him as he teaches and heals, and the climax of his time on earth finds him unable to avoid one of the most painful deaths that humans have ever invented.  This is a very different king and a very different kingdom.

 
Our Gospel reading today gives us John’s version of the conversation between Jesus and Pilate.  There are not many words here and yet so much is said. You can feel the space between these two men as they respond to the situation they find themselves in.

Let’s look at Jesus’ words in verse 36.  He says: My kingdom is not of this world.  If it were, my servants would fight to prevent my arrest by the Jews.  But now my kingdom is from another place.

When we think of God’s Kingdom – the kingdom of which Jesus is king – these words are vital.  Jesus’ kingdom is not of this world. Jesus says that if his kingdom was of this world his servants would be fighting.  But this is not what God’s kingdom is about: we do not need to fight to protect Jesus, to stop him being hurt or killed.

Jesus’ coronation was with a crown of thorns that pierced him.  Of course, this crown was given to Jesus to mock him.  But it is also a potent symbol of his kingdom.  He is a king who does not leave others to suffer – he suffers with his people.  It is very apt that our suffering servant King’s first crown is one of thorns that brings him pain. 

We are not Christians to avoid pain – that is not how it works. As we reflect over the past year I know that suffering has been quite central in the experience of some of us. Suffering is never easy, it is never something that we choose for ourselves and it is not what God desires.  But I wonder if we can find some encouragement as we recognise that Christ’s kingdom is born out of pain, and suffering, and poverty. 

For me this raises a question: where is Christ’s kingdom being born into our world at the moment?  In the suffering that we see on our TV screens and hear on our radios, God seems absent.  I do not believe for one moment that God causes any of that suffering and pain.  I do not believe it is his will.  But I do believe that his kingdom can be found there – that Christ himself can be found in that pain: he is there with the suffering; with the injured; with the maimed; with the hungry; with the naked; with the poor and homeless.  If Christ feels absent to us, we may need to look for him in a different place: we may need to look for him amongst the suffering and find him in our own suffering.

Even in these difficult times, when we see suffering all around us, God says to us:  Be still and know that I am God. 

Are you a Miranda fan?  Over the past few years Miranda has struggled with chronic fatigue.  She had to give up the work which she loved and face up to some difficult realities.  I am a fan and on the day I was writing this I listened to an interview with her on the program ‘Young Again’. It was not a big part of what she said but in explaining what she went through and what she learnt she mentioned ‘being still’ – not running from the emotion welling up in her but being still in it.  To find God’s presence in these times of suffering we need to still ourselves: God is always there.  Don’t beat yourself up if God feels absent – that is not what God wants.  Still yourself; just be still; and just trust.

Later in our passage Jesus says (verse 37): You are right in saying I am a king.  In fact, for this reason I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth.  Everyone on the side of truth listens to me.

More powerful words.  Jesus says that the reason he came into the world was to testify to the truth, and that everyone who is on the side of truth listens to him.

And Pilate responds, ‘What is truth?’

We live in a world where truth is constantly compromised.  We live in a world where we can not trust what our public figures say; where we can not trust film and photographs.  It feels like there are many, many people in the world currently who would echo Pilate’s words and say, ‘What is truth?’

Different versions of the Bible translate the last words in verse 37 slightly differently, but I wonder, what does it mean to be ‘on the side of the truth’, or to ‘belong to the truth’, or to ‘love truth’?

The opposite of the truth is lies.  We all know how destructive lies can be.  In personal relationships lies destroy trust and love.  This translates and magnifies when lies happen on a community and national level.  Lies undermine love; they undermine trust; they divide people.  God is love and God is one.  God is the opposite of lies: God is truth.  Of course this is one of the descriptions Jesus gives of himself:  I am the way, the TRUTH and the life.

One thing we do as we come to church each week is to confess.  Again, here we find the truth.  We need to bring the truth of our failures to God to mend that relationship with him.  Truth can be difficult to say, and painful to hear, but there is something about the truth that liberates us and cleanses us.  Earlier in John, Jesus talks of ‘knowing the truth and the truth setting us free’.

When truth is painful, or awkward, the temptation is to sweep it under the carpet, or bury it, or ignore it, or to numb ourselves from the pain it causes.  Can I may be just give one example of this?  Climate change is real – it is happening and it is already having a huge impact on people’s lives across the planet.  But it is a hard truth to face.  To be honest, it is an overwhelming truth to face.  So, what do we do?  We ignore it.  We pretend that it is not our problem.  We convince ourselves that there is nothing we can do about it, that we have no responsibility.  We may numb ourselves from the pain it causes, by drinking alcohol, or booking holidays, or going to concerts – we throw ourselves into something else.  I completely understand this.  But I believe also that God wants us to face the truth – it will be painful; it is painful.  We may need to mourn and grieve together but Jesus didn’t just say he was the truth, he also said he was the way and the life.  And here is his model to us: his way is not to avoid the pain and suffering.  His model is to go through the pain and suffering, facing and being the truth, and find the life that is on the other side of this.  Life in all its fullness and colour.  That seems difficult to believe, it may seem impossible, but God’s kingdom is an ‘upside down place’ where truth is found in contradictions: where suffering can bring joy and where death leads to life.
How do we testify to our faith in our current age? We need to seek the truth and face the pain. 

Is there a truth you have swept under the carpet? That you have numbed yourself to.  In God’s ‘not of this world’ kingdom maybe that is something that you need to go away and start facing.  It may bring pain, but God is in that pain, and I believe he will show you the way through it.

Verse 7 of our Revelation reading says:  Look, he is coming with the clouds, and every eye will see him; and all the peoples of the earth will mourn because of him.

When I read this, I thought: why will we be mourning? The answer that came to me is that I will be mourning because I have missed the point of my life here on earth.  Jesus will come with his truth, and I will see my life for the sham it often is.  I will see that I have not faced the truths in this world, I have not grieved, and I have not let myself suffer to find that deeper relationship with my God.

God invites us into his kingdom.  His kingdom which is born in suffering, that abides in his truth and ultimately brings the love and life which we all seek.  I encourage us all to face the truth Christ brings us, to not shy away from the suffering it might bring: to seek that deeper life with our God who is love and longs for us as we long for him.

 

Musing #9: Reality

“Our hardest and holiest work is to not look away”

Yesterday evening I went to the shops and when I got home my 15-year-old daughter was watching a Dispatches program on Channel 4 entitled, Kill Zone: Inside Gaza.  The graphic footage of what has happened and is happening to people in Gaza was harrowing.  There were no advert breaks during the program but, where the adverts would have been, a notice warning viewers that they may find some of the images distressing and that they included footage of injured children. I asked my daughter: Do you want to watch this? She nodded.  So, I sat with her, and we watched the horror that is reality for so many unfold before our eyes.  Knowing that this reality is only one of many around the world which seem impossibly inhumane and unliveable.

What should I do as a parent?  As a mother my primary concern was for my daughter: how would she respond to these images?  And yet I watched children with multiple injuries and listened to them talk of the multiple family members they had lost.  Their reality is so bleak.  As I went to bed I looked out my window and thought that in another part of the world, somewhere I can not see, that reality continues.

A couple of days ago I was listening to a radio discussion about a novel set in the near future, or may be the present, which deals with climate change.  In the novel one of the characters observes people laying out their towels on a British beach in the sunshine and says to another character: How can they do this?  How can they carry on as if nothing is happening? Don’t they realise that this is our planet falling apart? (or words to that effect).  In the discussion the author and the other participants talked of how we live in two different realities: most of us are fully aware of the effects of climate change and the suffering and radical changes they will bring, but at the same time we have to carry on with life, so we do. 

The realities of our own life in the here and now tend to supersede any other realities that we know of.  We tune out some of the news we hear: we numb ourselves to the pain that we know exists.  And, often, we have pain and anxiety in our own reality which can not be easily brushed aside: it is as real as the suffering on the other side of the planet and as real as the suffering that is coming.

The quote above is from Rabbi Sharon Brous.  These words - our hardest and holiest work is not to look away – struck me as true on so many levels.  It is easy to look away; to carry on as if nothing is happening; to let things happen to other people; to ignore the person I had an argument with.  But is it right? What is hard is also holy work: when we face the ugliness of humanity something shifts in us.  If we can stay with that pain we open up cracks that let Love in, even in the midst of the suffering.

We can not function and take on all the realities that exist on our planet at the same time: the pain would break us.  But neither do I want to ignore them.  I know that when I sat down to watch that program last night – doing so not because I wanted to but because I wanted to see what my daughter saw – I opened myself up to the suffering of other human beings.  I witnessed other lives and, in some intangible way, I let their souls speak to mine.  Did anything change?  In the horrendous situation I was watching, the news this morning would seem to say a resounding no.  But, did anything change?  Somewhere inside me I think something did, because I recognised and acknowledged another human being in pain.

At the beginning of Rabbi Sharon Brous’ reflection that I read this morning she says: A Rabbinic text from the ninth century declares that every person is accompanied, at all times, by a procession of angels crying out, “Make way, for an image of the Holy One is approaching.”

Every person… My prayer is that we will know that for ourselves, and that we will honour it in each person we meet and in those that we see in their suffering on our screens.  Let us not turn away from them but do the hard and holy work, reaching out – in what ever way we can – into the pain of our kin.

 

All is Well: A Journey in Contemplation

g Reality

It may seem like a strange question, but: what is reality?  It seems to me that in the clamour of modern life we have lost our hold on what reality is.  Many of us know this through our experiences of social media.  We scroll through posts and know that, whilst we can touch base with people, much of what we see is not ‘real’.  More than ever before, we have the opportunity to curate our own lives and to portray a life that is not real.  We can reach across the ether and ‘hold hands’ with a friend – give them a virtual hug – but this can come at the price of not living in the present: not interacting with the people on our doorstep and the environment in which we live.

Human beings are amazing creatures and the exponential rise of technology means that many of us – especially in developed nations – live lives that are insulated from what it means to be alive.  We don’t have direct contact with the source of the things that enable us to live: our water comes from taps; our food comes from shops; our heating comes through radiators.  We take for granted: shelter; full stomachs; clean water and warmth.  And in the same way that we have lost contact with the physical sources of life, so too have we lost touch with the spiritual source of life.  God/Love gets lost in all the superficial things we hold onto and we seek solace through various forms of addiction – to food, drugs, alcohol, pleasure.  Always seeking more, bigger, better.  Trying to hold on to youth and beauty instead of seeking the inner wisdom that comes from a life in touch with reality.

This is not to say that life is easy.  Life trips us up all the time.  It throws ‘curve balls’ at us that knock us off balance.  And sometimes that fall is exactly what we need.  Sometimes that fall takes us face-to-face with reality and we are able to let go of the things that have blinded us.

It is a hard message to hear, but a true one.  We need to spend some time in darkness, and we need to recognise our current trajectory given our lack of care for our planet.  Human beings are amazing creatures, and yet despite all our knowledge and scientific discoveries we too often run away from the truth.  When there is bad news there is only so much we can take and then we seek comfort – comfort that is often taken at the expense of others who are far away enough for us to ignore.

I struggle with this.  I struggle to live in a world where I know that other people suffer, where the planet is being exploited and destroyed, where it seems that too many of us – and in that I include myself – are too lethargic, or scared, or selfish to act in love for the whole of humanity and the planet.  It is all too much – the problems seem too big to even conceptualise, so I disappear back into my comfort zone.

I believe that God wants us to live in reality.  To face the darkness and, indeed, to dwell in it sometimes.  It is there that we can escape the clamour of the world: we can find God and God can find us.  It seems counterintuitive in many ways and yet it is the pattern of nature - life leads to death and death to life – the very pattern that Christ as a man lived out in his time on earth.  He did not turn his back on the realities of life – he reached out in love and when death sought him out he absorbed the hatred that put him there and accepted his path.  In accepting his path, he found life.

In many ways it seems crazy to be writing these thoughts and ideas under the title of ‘All is well’ when our world is such a mess.  But I honestly believe that when we face the reality and ugliness of our world and ourselves, it is then that God/Love enters us with the reassurance that ‘all is well’, and we become aware of a bigger reality.  A reality that is cosmic and beyond our understanding. We gain a peace that we don’t understand and yet is more real than any we have previously experienced.

Meditation has been described as ‘practising dying’.  In meditation I sit in silence and I let go of all that is inside me: I just sit.  The way of contemplation is a ‘letting go’ not just of the physical, but also of the ego – a letting go of myself.  Jesus taught us to give up our lives and take up our crosses.  Why such a tough request?  Because that is the way of life and peace.  God does not come to punish us in this, he comes to us in Love and wants us to find the Love that he planted in our souls at the very beginning; that he planted in the whole of his creation.

The darkness we experience is sometimes an unknowing.  Whilst I am energised to understand more about how our universe functions, I am conscious that there are always more questions.  Whilst I love to find out more about how people work and to find empathy, I am always faced with people and situations that surprise me and that I don’t understand.  Sometimes I need to let go of the desire to understand and sit in the mystery of it all.  God/Love is mystery and sometimes our journey is a road of un-knowing.  Sometimes we need to unpick what we thought we knew and trust the falling; trust the mystery; trust the darkness.  Let go of our need to be in control and trust that God/Love will always catch us.

Through darkness we find light.  Fighting for justice and peace, valuing our planet and every human life, is not something we can do without this inner journey.  We will burn out; we will lose hope.  We need to do the inner work that takes us to the real reality; that affirms that ‘all is well’.  Then we will live in hope and faith, and love will be our source and our guide.

 Musing #6: Let feelings be your teacher

How do you feel today? Maybe if you pause for a moment you can tune in and sense that you’re just ok.  Or maybe there’s an anger inside you, or an anxiety or a fear bubbling up.  What do you do with that emotion?  Does it consume you: eat away at you? Or do you consume it – bury it or repress it? Ignore it?

The way I respond to my emotions and feelings differs but what I am finding myself more able to do is to observe them: notice what I am feeling and be aware that it is just that – a feeling.  Feelings come, and feelings go.  An image was given to me of a mountain that stands solidly as storms pass, as snow falls, as sunshine lights up its beauty.  I am the mountain – you are the mountain.  Our emotions are the weather – they come, and they go; sometimes just what we needed, sometimes exactly what we didn’t want; sometimes a storm will last a while but not forever – the storm will pass.  Another day or season will come, and the feeling will be different. 

I find this picture helpful: it speaks to me of the equanimity I find through contemplative practices; it speaks to me of the peace that is beyond understanding.  But I am encouraged not to ignore these emotions.  A different image is found in Rumi’s poem ‘The Guesthouse’. This speaks of us as houses to which all manner of emotions arrive as guests, and his encouragement is to invite these guests in because they have their work to do: they are gifts from the beyond.  And I think, yes, let me listen to how I am feeling – let me welcome that feeling and let it teach me.

Some emotions are painful, and our instinctive reaction is to push them away or to deny them.  But what is that pain trying to communicate to you?  Just as physical pain can alert us to an injury, a danger or a disease, I find myself seeing emotional pain as a pointer to something.  And I want to listen and find what that something is – what is that messenger from beyond trying to say to me?  Is it alerting me to an ‘injury’ that I have suffered or inflicted? Is it aware of a danger that I could prepare for? Or has it seen a habit that is becoming like a disease in me – incapacitating me in some way?

The world is not an easy place to live at the moment with the effects of climate change ever more apparent; and wars; inequalities; violence.  In all this suffering I know I am not the only one who has retreated from the news – it all feels too much.  But something has been nudging me recently to re-think this decision.  I do not wish to sit in the 24-hour wash of news without an awareness of its impact on me.  But I do feel a need to take some time to sit with the news – however horrendous it may be - and feel the emotions that emerge.  Oftentimes my response to the news is one of powerlessness: I don’t know what to do about all that is going wrong in the world at the moment.  I wonder, if I sit with the emotions that the news evokes, will they become my teacher?  If I can welcome those emotions into my guest house what work will they do?

Many of our physical ills result from our attempts to numb ourselves from painful emotions and feelings – numb ourselves from our human reality.  What if we were to stop numbing ourselves, feel the pain and let it teach us?  I honestly don’t know what would happen, but I am confident that it would draw us nearer to the Love that sits at the centre of the universe.  The Love that does not wish us any harm but wishes to transform us and turn our pain into joy.

Photo by Angel Barnes on Unsplash

Rumi’s 'The Guest House' being read: https://fb.watch/pWBz_S7Ujz/

 

 Sermon: Nehemiah 8: 1-4a,8-12/ Colossians 3:12-17

Theme: Rebuilding the Walls and Drawing near to God

About this

I prepared this talk for a service in my village church in October 2020.  We were going into winter after the first Covid lockdowns – life hadn’t really opened up again.

As I read it again it still felt pertinent.  We live in a damaged world and it is important that we take our responsibility for this.  God’s response when we do this is not one of condemnation.  S/he longs for us to rebuild our walls and draw closer – see the error of our ways and choose the path of love as we move forward.

I have edited it very slightly.  There is a link to the Nehemiah passage: the Colossians passage is the last paragraph of the talk!

Link to Nehemiah:  https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Nehemiah+8%3A+1-4a%2C+8-12&version=NIVUK

I’m not sure how familiar you are with the story of Nehemiah.  It is worth putting this passage into context.  Nehemiah worked for the King of Persia – a position that gave him money and power – but when he heard about the situation in Jerusalem – the walls destroyed, the city in ruins - he was overcome with grief and asked the king for permission to leave and rebuild it.  In the chapters leading up to our reading we learn of Nehemiah’s prayers and action, of how he worked with the people of Jerusalem to re-build the city walls – if you read chapter 3 you will find a list of all the people who were working together to repair the wall.  You get a sense of the people all catching hold of Nehemiah’s vision and joining the work.  The work doesn’t come without problems – Nehemiah had to sort out situations which had caused some to be living in poverty, he faced opposition to what he was doing and people tried to stir up problems for him with the king – but Nehemiah held steady and with a huge team effort the wall was completed and ‘by the seventh month the Israelites were settled in their towns’, many of them returning from captivity.

For me there’s a picture here already of our spiritual lives.  Because we lose our way: we get captured by other things around us, and our walls get damaged.  We need to recognise this, as Nehemiah did, and come back to God and rebuild our walls – as a community and as individuals. These are difficult times.  I wonder where we’re feeling damaged at the moment.  I wonder what has captured us.  I wonder what it is we need to return to, and where we need to start re-building?  These are difficult times for us as individuals, as a church, as a village, as humanity.  Are we alert to what is happening in all this spiritually and are we ready to come back to God and start re-building?

Back to our passage.  Nehemiah has returned to Jerusalem.  The people have worked; the walls are rebuilt; the people of Israel are together again.  So, is it time for a party? Not just yet. First, they gather together to hear from the ‘book of the teachings of God’.  From early morning until noon – men, women and children, stand and listen to the teachings of God.  Listening attentively with the Levites explaining to them what was being said.

What struck me as I read this passage was their response.  The people cried as they listened to the words of the teachings.  Why did they cry?  My first thought is that they must have been exhausted with everything that they had been through both in the last few months, and before then.  I wonder if they could really believe where they were and what they were doing.  But from what is said their tears were not tears of joy at the completion of the wall, or tears of relief that they are coming together as a people.  These are tears of regret and repentance.  As they heard the word of God they realised how far they had strayed.  They realised just how far they had gone wrong.  And not just them, but their ancestors before them.

I am struck that we are in a very similar place.  When we gather to hear God’s word does it not show us just how far we have strayed?  And not just us but our ancestors?  The world that we live in is a result of our greed, our selfishness, our desire to be right, our desire to have an easy life.  We live in a broken-ness of our own creating – where many experience loneliness, where there is hate, prejudice and discord, where people suffer from hunger and violence, in which the very planet that sustains us is reaching breaking point.  When we gather to hear God’s word, we see how far we have gone wrong, and -yes – our reaction is surely to cry.

But the second thing that struck me in this passage is the response of the leaders.  They say, in verse 9, “This is a holy day to the Lord your God.  Don’t be sad or cry.”  And Nehemiah in verse 10 says: “Go and enjoy good food and sweet drinks.  Send some to people who have none, because today is a holy day to the Lord.  Don’t be sad, because the joy of the Lord will make you strong.”  The joy of the Lord is our strength – familiar words.

When we come to God, when we listen to his word, when we recognise all that we have done wrong – all the ways in which we have ‘strayed’ - he doesn’t condemn us, he loves us more.  ‘Draw near to God and he will draw near to you’.  The people of Israel had been scattered, Jerusalem had been destroyed, but this was a time of rebuilding and regathering, of drawing near to God.  Even as we recognise all the ways in which we have gone wrong we are drawing near to God.  And when we draw near to him in this way, he draws near to us and brings us joy. 

Verse 12 says: Then all the people went away to eat and to drink, to send some of their food to others and to celebrate with great joy. They went away to celebrate, and to share with each other.  Do you see that already they have understood something different?  They don’t want anyone to be missing out – all are included.  So, verse 12 finishes: They finally understood what they had been taught.  They understood, and they went with a new energy to live in a new way. 

When I hear God’s teaching in the context of all that is currently happening in the world, in the reality of my daily failures and disappointments, I think I begin to understand.  I am so thankful that God is greater than I can imagine; I am so grateful that God is love; I find peace and joy in knowing that I can’t fully understand God but that doesn’t stop him being with me and opening my eyes to see him at work.  And my understanding gives me energy to live in a new way – not to keep God’s love to myself but to share; to grow through connecting with others.

How do we make the joy of the Lord our strength, in such an uncertain and difficult time?  I think we begin by recognising where we have gone wrong.  We listen to God, we rebuild and restore, we live in a new way.  And we keep doing that: each time drawing a little closer to God.

The New testament reading for this week could have just been read as todays talk.  It is a clear passage about how to live.  I’m going to read it just now and I would ask that we let it show us where we have gone wrong, and encourage us to live in a new way because God loves us.

Colossians 3: 12-17 

God has chosen you and made you his holy people.  He loves you.  So always do these things: show mercy to others, be kind, humble, gentle and patient.  Get along with each other and forgive each other.  If someone does wrong to you, forgive that person because God forgave you.  Do all these things; but most important, love each other.  Love is what holds you together in perfect unity.  Let the peace that Christ gives control your thinking, because you were all called together in one body to have peace.  Always be thankful.  Let the teaching of Christ live in you richly.  Use all wisdom to teach and instruct each other by singing psalms, hymns and spiritual songs with thankfulness in your hearts to God.  Everything you do or say should be done to obey Jesus your Lord.  And in all you do, give thanks to the father through Jesus.