Sermon for Lent 5

Reading: John 11:1-45

Today’s Gospel is yet another of the long passages from St.John’s Gospel that we are working our way through this Lent. With the arrival of Common Worship, and the adoption of a new lectionary, it was decided that stories that last for many verses would be kept intact, rather than being abridged, or split over several weeks. So here we have the story of the raising of Lazarus in its entirety.

I sometimes feel that there is an elephant in the room with this story. If Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead, then why not extend this to everyone? Why should any of us die? This question becomes all the more pressing when we ourselves are faced with death. A significant person in our lives dies. Could not God have prevented this? No, life is not like that. We all have to face death. Except for the fact that here is a story of Jesus raising someone from death. It was Lazarus, and today’s Gospel tells the story of this.

Straight away we face a question of biblical interpretation. If we are presented with the story of an event, in the pages of the Gospels, are we to assume that what is presented is meant to be an objective and historically accurate account of what has happened, such as might be found in a scientific paper of today? The answer must be that the Gospels are not like that. I am convinced that stories like this do not appear out of nowhere. Something happens and it is remembered. The story is interpreted, put into a theological context and passed on. The point of retelling the story is not to keep alive the past, but to express an important truth for the present moment. So we need to approach this story with an open mind. What is God saying to us through these verses?

One thing to consider is what we mean by death? In our own time we have had to reopen this question. With the rise of organ transplantation, and the need for speed in transferring the organs, deciding when a person really is dead has needed to be defined with greater precision. There was far less precision in Jesus’ day. A lifeless body would have been counted as dead. This is a key feature in the parable of the Good Samaritan, in which it is the Samaritan who gathers up the beaten man lying on the road. The Priest and the Levite, both of whom passed by on the other side, were not without compassion. The probability that the man was dead meant that they could not have gone near him without making themselves ritually unclean. So was Lazarus really dead? We cannot inject such a scientific question into so ancient a text without doing violence to the text. The story describes the stench that comes out of the tomb, indicating the decomposition of the body, as if to make the point that yes, Lazarus really was dead. Whether this is a vivid memory of the original event, or an element of the retelling of the story, is a question we cannot answer.

What this Gospel passage proclaims to us is that here, in a dark situation of utter hopelessness, Jesus comes and transforms the situation. In the face of tragedy, he brings hope. Where there is despair, he offers the promise of new life. I think the context of this story is not questions about the deadness of Lazarus, but the situation of our own lives when we face trauma, despair, hopelessness and even death. The point of the Incarnation is that God himself takes on human flesh and comes to live in our midst. Whatever the darkness of this present moment, God is there alongside us. When the things of our earthly journey look to be without hope, Jesus raises our eyes to discover new hope and new life with the breaking in of his kingdom. There is no sense of turning back the clock here. The promise of Jesus is not to remove the challenge of the present hour, as if to return us to better times. Rather, at the heart of the Christian message is the challenge to let go of the things of this world and to surrender ourselves into the life of God’s kingdom. Ultimately, the Christians life is one that affirms death and dying, and faces up to our mortality with both acceptance and hope. We do this because, even in the present moment, we have already stepped into a different dimension in which ‘God is among us. He will dwell with us; we will be his peoples, and God himself will be with us; he will wipe every tear from our eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away.’ (Rev 21). 

This Gospel, including the story of Lazarus, was written in the light of the resurrection of Jesus and the explosion of New Life that poured out from the empty tomb and empowered people with the Holy Spirit. By the grace of God, we are drawn into the resurrection life, which is why Jesus transforms our crying into dancing and our sadness into joy. As we travel though Lent towards Palm Sunday and Good Friday, we do so in the knowledge that Jesus gives his life for us and we, held in such transforming love, have been transported into a new world in which the life we live is eternal.

Sermon for Lent 4

Reading: John 9:1-41

I wonder what we make of the story of a blind man receiving his sight as Jesus heals him. As I was growing up, I found myself questioning such biblical accounts. I suppose I settled on the perspective that Jesus could heal people, because he was Jesus, but you don’t find things like that happening today. Or do you? I was at college with someone who was steadily losing her sight. On leaving college, she was ordained, but she had to have service books run off for her with increasingly large typeface. She was told that there was no hope of a cure. Her optic nerve was degenerating, and she would end up totally blind. Then, one day, she was waiting in the doctors’ surgery and her sight simply returned. They could find no trace of any problem with her optic nerve. Neither could they offer any explanation for what had happened and her miraculous cure.

This raises two questions for me. Firstly, the need to believe in and to hope for the miraculous. Our limited human minds can only perceive and understand so much. We might say that the miraculous is something that goes beyond our present understanding of what is possible. Secondly, if sometimes people receive what appears to be a miraculous cure, why does this not happen for everyone? One thing is certain. As we grow older, our list of ailments increases. My wife and I have been meeting regularly for meals with two other couples for almost 40 years. We remember the days when our conversations were about the challenges of being the parents of young children. Nowadays, sharing the state of our medical complaints usually finds some place in our conversations. To put it bluntly, as we grow older, we start to fall to bits. No amount of prayer can hold back the ravages of time. The hope of the life of the Kingdom of God is not about eternal youth, but a readiness to let go of the things of this world and to embrace the new world of the eternal.

Should we pray for healing? The answer must be yes. Even if we face a terminal sickness, being supported, upheld and surrounded by prayer can make all the difference. And sometimes physical symptoms can be caused, or made worse, by inner unrest and dis-ease. Finding inner peace, through our own prayers and the prayers of others, can result in physical symptoms being cured. Prayer for healing must include the hope of new life and the expectation of the miraculous, which might include the person getting better, or finding strength to cope with what is uncurable, or even fining release and wholeness through the blessing of death.

The story of Jesus curing a blind man ought to lead us to expect new life and new hope in our own lives, yet not always the result we might expect. It points to the fact that the encounter with the risen Christ can and should be a transforming experience for us. Responding to God, who in Christ reaches out to touch our lives, brings new life and new hope, even in the face of suffering.

Why does John include this story in his Gospel? Well, we might think it was a remarkable event and that it ought to be reported. Yet this Gospel was not written like that. It is not a newspaper report. It is a story that is packed with meaning about the significance of Jesus and his message for the world. It is set in the context of the ongoing dispute between Jesus and the religious leaders of his day. Does God cause such suffering as this blindness? No – but Jesus is going to use this situation to give glory to God. Can Jesus be one sent from God? Apparently not, they decide, for he is breaking the Sabbath by healing on this day. So the point of the story become clear. Jesus is proclaiming himself to be the light of the world. He brings with him illumination and sight. And he sharply contrasts this with the blindness of the religious leaders. They have eyes, but they cannot see the truth. In their blindness, it is hidden from them.

Throughout this Lent there is a series of long passages from the John’s Gospel, which all revolve around sight. Jesus talks about being born of the Spirit. He converses with the Samaritan Woman at the well about the living water that only he can give. Now, in today’s Gospel, Jesus is contrasting darkness and light and saying that it is he who can lead us to seeing the truth. We live in a time when there is much discussion in the world-wide Church about matters of human sexuality. At the level of national churches, it has become so divisive that, at the Lambeth Conference this summer, a number of bishops will make a point of staying away. There is an issue here about how we interpret scripture and to what extent we are bound by this text or that. Surely, people argue, if a text says something, then we are bound to live by that. My problem is that Jesus often broke the letter of the law, when it came to scriptural texts. If he saw the need, he would heal on the sabbath, because PEOPLE were more important that slavishly keeping the letter of the law.

All this points to the core of Jesus’ message. He was a Jew by birth and he grew up steeped in the religious practice of his time. He knew the Hebrew Scriptures so well that, it is reported, even as a child he was able to debate with the scholars of his day. Yet living a life, which is constrained (and even stifled) by the ticking of an endless line of legal boxes and which seek to control every aspect of your life, is not the spirit-filled life of the Kingdom that Jesus came to give us.

Look! Jesus said. Open your eyes and see the life of the Kingdom all around you. Live in the expectation of the miraculous. Live with the hope that God can transform any situation and that he will lead us that are beyond our present imagination. He calls us to an attitude of life in which we open our eyes to discover God in everything around us and hear his voice speaking to us, even in situations of brokenness and suffering. Scripture points us to Jesus, and Jesus is the way into the Kingdom of Heaven. Scripture should not so much rule our lives as inspire us to open our eyes and discover the risen Christ, who walks beside us through the journey of this life. He does not make suffering go away, but he transforms human living as, continuing on the journey of life, we find ourselves already stepping into the Life of the Kingdom. "I am the light of the world", Jesus tells us. Our prayer must be that Jesus opens our eyes to see that light and, in doing so, draws us into a community that joyfully celebrates all that it means to live as Children of that light.

Coronavirus

I discovered a clip, from 2015, featuring a speech made by Bill Gates. He wheeled on an oil drum and said that, as a young man, they had always kept one of these in the house, filled with provisions for use in the event of nuclear war. He went on to point out that we still spend unbelievably massive amounts of money on nuclear weapons and nuclear deterrence. However, he continued, it will not be nuclear bombs that wipe out tens of millions of people, but a virus. By contrast to what we spend on protecting ourselves from nuclear attack, he said, we spend nothing on creating a response to the viral attack that is coming. Indeed, just such an attack is now upon us.

We are surrounded by bugs. Indeed, our guts are home to a whole community of bacteria, which are an essential part of our digestive system. Some bugs, whether bacteria or viruses, are deeply harmful to us. Their life cycle and speed of duplication means that mutations will occur at a rate that seems very rapid to us. They evolve fast and, at times, even jump species. Outbreaks of virus infections in recent years, such as bird-flu or swine-fever, have led some to wonder what the fuss is about. Why the alarm? Today’s pandemic is why? It was never a question of IF the pandemic, but WHEN? In 2018 the UK National Security Strategy warned that a pandemic was inevitable. “We estimate that a pandemic could cause fatalities in the United Kingdom in the range 50,000 to 750,000, although both the timing and the impact are impossible to predict exactly.” In 2012 the Tory government’s Health and Social Care Act had further fragmented and privatised the NHS. The following year the British Medical Association had written: “The fragmented nature of the new health system will require that each organisation … [is] aware of the plans in place to deal with potential outbreaks of ill health, such as pandemic flu or legionnaires disease.” Since then there has been a steady move to reduce hospital beds and to restrict the budget of the NHS. In Germany there are 29.2 Critical Care Beds per 100,000 of the population. In the UK that figure is 6.6.

A key underlying problem is that we have over-populated this planet. Globalisation, together with both intense concentrations of people in cities and cheap and easy access to international transport, has created the perfect opportunity for a new virus to flourish and multiply. We have known this was coming, but we have done little in the way of preparation. Now, not only are many in danger of losing their lives, but our whole way of life and the very economic foundations of our society are under threat. In the short term, the question must be how our society can survive for the eighteen months or so before a vaccine is readily available. In the longer term, profound questions about how we order our lives must be answered. Money is simply the means by which we transact the deals that make a society possible. If large sections of society no longer have the work, the money or the means to make the necessary transactions to keep a roof over their head or feed their family, then the whole system collapses and lawlessness takes over. This virus will change life as we know it and challenge some of our deepest assumptions. Life will never be the same again.

The Gospel and Toilet Rolls

I wonder if you have ever heard of the Theta Trading Game? We came across it many years ago and we have used it several times with youth groups. If you don’t want me to give the game away, stop reading now. Otherwise, read on. This is how it works. You take a reasonably sized group of people (say 20) and, in a large building, church or hall, you divide them into three groups, each different in number. The groups move to different parts of the room and a facilitator hands them cards and explains the game. The cards represent three items they need to survive. Let’s assume these are, oil, wheat and rice. One card represents the amount of food one person needs to survive for a year. Each person needs one of each of the three cards to survive. Once the cards have been handed out, the group is asked to look at the cards and decide what their prospects are for the coming year. Then the game begins. Each group is asked to appoint a trader, who can visit each of the other groups in turn so as to engage in trade deals. Let’s assume that group A has just three people, with three rice cards, no wheat cards and ten oil cards. It ought to be possible to trade some of their excess oil to acquire the three wheat cards they need. But, before trading starts, they need to discuss what might be considered to be a sensible and prudent policy, in terms of having some reserves, in case of unforeseen disaster. The traders set off to do their trading and then report back to their group what they have achieved. It is now becoming obvious that the different groups have very different levels of resources. Group C, which has twelve people in it, has nothing like enough to survive and nothing spare with which to trade. Group B’s size and fortunes are somewhere in the middle. Trading continues until it is deemed that the game has come to a standstill.

What is interesting is to see how the game plays out and what the end result might be. On the few occasions we have run this game, it has always been great fun, but has also produced some startling results. On one occasion, war broke out between islands. On another, one island mounted a raid against their neighbour and stole what they needed. On another, the islanders resorted to cannibalism. When told they had ended up with too many people for the resources they needed, they simply said that they had survived, because they had eaten two of their members.

There is a punch line at the end of the game. After an enjoyable, yet fantastically intense evening, you reveal that for twenty people there were twenty wheat cards, twenty oil cards and twenty rice cards.

Life is not quite that simple, but as we look at the frantic buying up of pasta, tinned food and toilet rolls, I cannot but think that the number of people in our country has not altered discernibly since last month and the things we need to sustain life are much the same. Yet the frantic rush to overstock on such things as toilet rolls, which means that the next household has none, reminds me very much of the Theta Trading Game. In is reported that, in some shops in London, fighting is breaking out. The basic instinct for survival kicks in, civilized human behaviour begins to break down and some fundamental natural selection takes hold. A strong person has the advantage over a weak person, in the fight for the last packet of toilet paper. A tall person can reach the last packet on the top shelf, which is beyond the reach of a short person.

There is a challenge here for all of us, as a society, to seek to put aside the social/political divisions of recent years and to start caring for each other in a rediscovered cherishing of what it means to live in community. For Christians, our opportunity to gather in worship might have been curtailed for a time, but there is the opportunity here of seeking to live out what it means to give of ourselves in the service of others and to show something of the love of God in the value and care we give to them. ‘Who is my neighbour?’ is a Gospel challenge we must take to heart. ‘How can I serve my neighbour in need?’ is surely the exact question we need to fire our imagination, as we live as the Church in these troubled times. And it is through the witness of such service that we will be people who can offer hope in a time which, for many, now seems so dark.

Jean Vanier

Like so many people, I have been deeply affected by the news about Jean Vanier and the report that, over many years, he systematically subjected six different women to sexual abuse. Our thoughts and prayers must go out to those women and to the world-wide communities (L’Arche) that he founded. For them, this revelation has involved deep wounding, either through the revelations themselves or (in the case of the women concerned) though the longstanding experience of being the victims of abuse at the hands of one who was held up by many as a modern-day saint.

My mind goes back to May of last year, when Jean Vanier died. I remember using him as an illustration in a sermon I was giving. I spoke with approval of the impact he had had on the warring Primates of the Anglican Communion and how he had led them in washing each other’s feet. I quoted things he had said. To love someone is to show to them their beauty, their worth and their importance. We are not called to do extraordinary things as Christians, but to do ordinary things with extraordinary love.  I said that he lived the Gospel message and challenged the world to do the same.

I wonder now what to make of that foot-washing and those quotes. The image of the Primates washing each other’s feet remains a powerful one. The two sayings I quoted still speak powerfully to me of what it means to seek to live by the values of the Kingdom. Yet I can no longer quote them. They are words that have somehow been soiled by the actions of the speaker. Vanier did not behave in a way that showed those women their beauty, nor did he act with extraordinary love. I can no longer look up to him as someone who lived the Gospel message.

I see no difference between Vanier and the likes of John Smyth, Jonathan Fletcher or Peter Ball. Each was an outstandingly charismatic leader, and each achieved a position of power and influence that made them untouchable and (seemingly) beyond reproach. I wonder if such ‘saints’ always have clay feet. Perhaps the danger lies in the way we place others in such high esteem, until they find themselves in a place of unaccountable power. To say that is not to excuse or explain away the wicked things that such men of power have done, but it ought to act as a warning to us not to put our faith in such people. They have exercised a worldly power (dressed up as spirituality) which has dazzled many, although not their victims.

Perhaps real saintliness is to be found in ordinary people who, without public acclaim, simply get on with the business of living out lives of selfless love and compassion for others. There are many such people in our churches and perhaps, if we feel uneasy or despondent abut church numbers, we ought to celebrate and support their ministry with greater enthusiasm. When Bishop John Baker (of Salisbury) visited a hospice for men dying of aids, he said, “In the love I have seen those men give to their dying partners, I have seen the face of Christ!” To live in a way that shows the face of Christ is what we are called to do, both as individuals and as the Church. For all their other achievements, those leading churchmen, now shown to be abusers, will not be remembered as people who showed the face of Christ to the world.