Baptist Bookworm: January 2023

Monday, 30 January 2023

The Sound of Silence

A sermon for Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church

5^th February 2023

1 Kings 19.9-18
Matthew 14.22-33

I made an interesting discovery many years ago,
and this was that I can actually walk on water.

You don’t believe me? It’s true, I promise.
  Well, sort of…
It happened like this:

Liz and I went on holiday to the Austrian Tyrol
  and had a lovely week taking cable cars to the tops of mountains
  admiring views, and taking a few walks

At the top of one of these mountains, near Mayrhofen,
  there was a beautiful lake, crystal clear, and blue to match the sky;
And there, floating on the lake, were what I can only describe
  as three very large hamster balls

And a sign on the bank, written in English, proclaimed the slogan:
  “You can walk on water! It’s fun!”

Liz turned to me and said, ‘you want a go in one of those, don’t you?’
  And I thought, yes I do,
  but I also don’t want to make a complete fool of myself in public!

Well, as we stood watching,
  a young German girl, about ten years old, decided to have a go.
So the man in charge pulled one of the balls from the water,
  opened a zip in the side so the girl could climb in,
  and then pumped it back up again with her inside it.

All she had to do then was to step off the little pontoon,
  and start walking on the water.

Well, she stood there, and stood there, and stood there,
  and then after a minute, started crying in frustration,
  because she didn’t have enough courage to step off onto the water.

Eventually the man in charge let her out, and she walked back up the bank,
  looking very upset with herself for not doing it.

Right, I thought, I’m in!
  Maybe if I do it, she’ll see it’s OK and then she’ll have another go too.
So I walked down onto the pontoon,
  and, after a brief discussion about my height-to-weight ratio,
  before I knew it I was zipped up inside the large clear spherical ball,
  and it was my turn to step out onto the water.

Well, I did it, I really did.
  I stepped onto the water.
  And then I fell over,
and then I stood up again,
  and then I fell over again,
and already you’re getting the idea
  of how the next exhausting five minutes went.

Once, I managed five steps, at a run...
  And then I fell over.

Liz, meanwhile, was stood on the bank videoing the whole thing
  and laughing quite a lot
Apparently I drew something of a crowd,
  and when I eventually cried enough,
  and was pulled back to dry land
I got a small round of applause
  not for my success at walking on the water,
  but in appreciation of the inherent comedy value
  in seeing someone repeatedly and determinedly falling over
  whilst stuck inside a giant hamster ball on a mountain-top lake.

See, I told you I could walk on water,
  and yes, the video is on Facebook.

In today’s gospel reading,
  we heard of another Simon
  who stepped out onto the water in the middle of the storm
  and found that the reality of walking on water
  wasn’t quite as edifying as he had perhaps hoped it would be

And taken together with the story of Eijah in his cave
  today’s readings invite us to consider those times in our lives
  when we find ourselves at the centre of the storm,
  or in the eye of the whirlwind
  those times when we find ourselves in the midst of the earthquake
  or caught in the heat of the fire

They invite us to think about those times in our lives
  when things don’t turn out quite as we had hoped they would
those times when we discover that we can’t actually walk on water
  despite our best efforts to do so,
  those times when we start to sink, to scrabble, to go nowhere
  those times when we fall over again and again and again
  and the rest of the world seems to be laughing at us
  those times when we seek for God and hear only the whistling of the wind
  or the crashing of the earthquake
  or the rushing of the fire

Sometimes these times in our lives are of our own making,
  sometimes they are the result of our own stupidity,
  or our own sinfulness
  or our own frantic efforts to spend our lives in a whirlwind of activity

But sometimes they just come on us out of the blue
  like a sudden storm in the mountains
  which seems to come out of nowhere on an otherwise clear day:
The unplanned illness, the bereavement, the redundancy,
  the end of a relationship
All these and so much more can come upon us
  and overwhelm us

And at such times, God can seem impossibly absent.

Despite our longing to find God in the midst of our distress,
  in the midst of our turmoil,
we find that every which way we turn
  we are deafened, defeated,
  tossed about, overwhelmed
  burned and shaken
In the midst of our fear and doubt,
  sometimes God is not there

At such times we may seek frantically for God
  in those places where we have found him before:
  searching for God in the familiar places

We may long to experience the majesty of God, the awesomeness of God,
  telling ourselves that surely this is the God we need in our distress:
  The God who is more powerful, more mighty,
  than the terrifying events of our unfolding lives.

We may seek the God of security,
  into whose eternally strong and everlasting arms
  we can throw ourselves once again.

And yet the reality for many of us is that all too often at such times,
  in spite of our best efforts,
  we simply cannot find God

So where has this great and mighty God gone?

This was the question facing Elijah the prophet
  as he sat in his cave, cold, alone and afraid

Only a few weeks earlier,
  God had been dramatically present
  in the fire that had rained down from heaven on Mount Carmel
  at Elijah’s command,
  to consume the water-soaked offering
  in the famous stand-off with the prophets of Baal.

Only a few weeks earlier,
  God had been in the miraculous storm that ended the drought in Israel
  as the cloud no bigger than a person’s hand
  had grown to a mighty deluge of heavy rain.

Elijah knew from experience where to find God when life was tough:
  God was in the fire;
  God was in the storm.

But now the storm had turned on Elijah,
  and the fire of King Ahab’s revenge was threatening to consume him.
He was on the run, afraid for his life,
  and stranded in the inhospitable wilderness.

And at this moment of abandonment,
  Elijah did what many have done before and since,
  and he wished himself dead.

How quickly things change!

How quickly we can make the transition in our lives
  from glory and success
  to despair and despondency.

But God had not finished with Elijah,
  and in the midst of his doubt and self-pity,
  God gave him bread and water to strengthen him
  for the next stage of his journey through the wilderness

Which brings him to where we find him today:
  in the cave in Horeb;
  alone, abandoned and afraid.

And in his cave, Elijah heard a voice
  telling him to go outside, onto the mountain,
  because the Lord is about to pass by.

‘At last!’ we can almost hear him cry...
  ‘God’s back! And this time he’s angry!’

And sure enough, true to form, there’s a whirlwind.
  and Elijah knows God will be in the whirlwind,
  but God isn’t.

And then there’s an earthquake,
  and Elijah knows God will be in the earthquake,
  but God isn’t

And then there’s a fire,
  and Elijah knows God will be in the fire,
  but God isn’t.

Where has Elijah’s God gone?
  Why is God not to be found where God has been found before?
  What has changed?

But then, after the wind, the earthquake, and the fire,
  came the sound of sheer silence.

This was something new for Elijah.
  He was used to finding God in the midst of the tumult and turmoil
  of his battles with the idolatrous God Baal and his false prophets
  But the last place Elijah would look for God would be in the sound of silence.
  What noise does silence make anyway???
  What does silence sound like?

<PAUSE>

We have a phrase, don’t we:
  ‘The silence was deafening’?
which we might use to describe, for example,
  a significant lack of response.
So I might ask for volunteers for the coffee rota,
  and comment that the silence of the response was deafening.

But the sound of sheer silence heard by Elijah was not a sound of emptiness,
  not a sound of inactivity or indifference.
It was, rather, a silence pregnant with new possibility.
  It was the silence of expectation,
  the silence of hope

Because in the sound of sheer silence,
  Elijah encountered God in a new way:
In the silence that followed the wind, fire and earthquake,
  Elijah received a new commission.

No longer was he to be the prophet of whirlwind activity,
  no longer was he to be the prophet of fiery temper,
  no longer was he the prophet who shook the very ground of people’s being.

The confrontations with the false prophets of Baal,
  the skirmishes with Ahab and Jezebel and those like them,
were all conflicts in the great battle against evil,
  which, dramatic though they were in their own right
  were not going to win the battle.

The sound of silence, for Elijah,
  led to a call to serve God in a new way:
His new commission was to appoint Hazael, Jehu and Elisha
  as the new leaders of the people of God

The storms of Elijah’s life
  that had led him ultimately to the despair and solitude of the cave
now gave way to a quiet purposefulness
  that led him back to the world,
  but in a new way, with a new commission.

Elijah’s encounter with God in the silence that followed,
  when all the activity and storms and fire
  and earthquake had brought him to his knees
was a life-transforming encounter
  with the God who meets each of us in the depths of our despair
  offering us renewed hope, renewed life

The disciples made this same discovery
  late one night in the middle of a storm
  in the middle of the lake

Their boat was far from the land
  and the wind was against them.

These same disciples had, of course, only earlier that day,
  witnessed the miracle of the feeding of the five thousand.

But the glory of that day in the sun
  must have seemed just a distant memory to them
  as they struggled through the long dark night:
  cold, afraid, in danger and in fear.

The Jesus who had seemed so real to them a few hours earlier
  was now nowhere to be seen
  and they were alone and abandoned
  on the treacherous waters of the lake.

And then, just when they thought it couldn’t get any worse,
  a spectral figure emerged from the storm,
  walking towards them on the surface of the lake.

Is it any wonder they were convinced
  that they were seeking a ghost?
Is it any wonder that they cried out in fear?

But then they heard the voice:
  not the voice of the storm, not the voice of a ghost,
  but the voice of their friend and teacher,
  coming to them across the water
  encouraging them to take heart,
  to not be afraid.

In the midst of the storm, they heard their master’s voice,
  and realised that they were encountering him here in a new way
as the voice of calm, the voice of peace,
  in the midst of the storm that threatened to overwhelm them.

And then Simon Peter jumped in with both feet, quite literally,
  out from the boat and onto the water,
  walking across the water - really doing it!
  not some desperate scrabble to go nowhere
  but really walking on the water

But then, no sooner had the realisation hit that it was happening,
  than the fear set in, and he started to sink beneath the stormy waters

The encouragement from Jesus to not be afraid,
  received only moments before, was forgotten
as the fears of the storm and the waves and the water
  came crashing upon him
and so Simon Peter needed to be rescued
  with Jesus catching his hand as he went down to the depths.

‘You of little faith, why did you doubt?’
  asked Jesus of Peter,

And he might well ask the same of us too,
  might he not?

How often have we been where Peter was?...
  doubting and afraid as the waves close over our heads;
the reassurances of the past lost to us in the trials of the present.

How often have we been where Elijah was?...
  wishing ourselves dead and unable to hear the voice of God

And yet the testimony of scripture
  is that neither Peter nor Elijah were abandoned.
The surprising reality for both of them
  was that they encountered God in a new way
  from the depths of their distress

Peter, Elijah and the disciples discovered that their vision of who God was,
  their understanding of the way God is present in this world
was transformed by their experiences of him
  in the midst of the storms that threatened to overwhelm them

Elijah had wanted so desperately to see his world changed,
  he had wanted to see the evil regime overthrown, the false idols banished,
  and knew he had a calling from God to play his part in this.

So he had started as an activist - all thunder and whirlwind,
  and God had indeed been with him in his activism,

But in time he was brought to a realisation
  that the battle was not going to be won through glorious skirmishes.
Evil could only finally be defeated
  by taking the deeper, longer, harder path
  that was revealed when the storm, earthquake and fire had passed by.

This is the lesson of the sound of silence:
  Activism can only get you so far

It was the same with Jesus and the disciples in the boat.
  The miracles which they had witnessed,
  miracles of healing wholeness and feeding and stilling,
  were indeed signs of the coming kingdom of peace,
  they were indeed dramatic battles against the powers of evil and doubt.

But the disciples had to come to a realisation that ultimate victory over evil
  would only be won through the cross.
Not, as the disciples expected, through a whirlwind assault on Jerusalem
  to free the people of God from the forces of Rome.

They had to realise that victory over the power of evil
  could only be achieved by following a harder and more dangerous path.

It was only by following Jesus to the cross,
  and by waiting through the long silence of Easter Saturday,
  that ultimate victory over the dark powers of death could be won.

It was only through the silencing of all voices at the cross
  that God could be heard to speak the decisive words of new life in Christ.

So what of us?

Do we, like Elijah,
  long to see evil powers and principalities banished from our world?
Do we, like the disciples,
  long to see peace and justice and righteousness?

If so, then we can rejoice that we are on the side of the angels.

But the reality of our lives is that we don't have to look very far
  to encounter the false idols of materialism,
  the false gods of hatred and suspicion.

We don’t have to look very far
  to find the seductive lure of power and wealth,
  the creeping suspicion of the other,
  the fear of the different.

In the face of such evil,
  we might well ask ourselves how this battle
  against the principalities and powers of this world will ever be won?

Sometimes we may see glimpses of the coming kingdom of Christ
  in the midst of our own frantic lives
Sometimes we may find ourselves in a whirlwind of godly activity
  as we play our part in unmasking the false prophets for what they are.
Sometimes we may see the hungry fed
  and realise that the kingdom of God is truly at hand
Sometimes we may even walk on water

But sometimes we may begin to sink to the depths,
  sometimes we may want to hide in a cave and wish ourselves dead,
sometimes we may doubt whether God is with us at all,
  and it is at such moments,
  when we are with the disciples in the boat
  or with Simon Peter on the lake
  or with Elijah in his cave
  it is at such moments as these
  that we catch a tantalising glimpse
  of the way of Christ

So sometimes we may need to kneel in the silence,
  waiting for the voice of God to come to us in a new way
  as the incessant noise and frenetic activity of our daily lives are stilled

Sometimes we may need to hear afresh the voice of Christ,
  telling us not to fear as the storm rages around us

Sometimes we may need to clasp the hand of Christ,
  our only hope as the waves threaten to overwhelm us,
  our rescuer from the forces that would drag us down to the depths

Sometimes we may need to have faith,
  that God is still with us, and has not left us
  even when it feels as if we are alone and abandoned

The victory of Christ, you see,
  is not only about activism and activity
  it is not solely about power and politics
because one day, these too shall pass

Rather, the ultimate victory of Christ involves the way of the cross.
  It involves the solitude and fear of the cave,
  it involves a long night on the lake when the storm has turned against us,
  it involves sinking into the water that we once walked on.

Which lead us to a new realisation
  that at such times as these
  we are walking with our Lord on the way of the cross
And we can be assured that when all else has failed us,
  we can still hear the true voice of our Lord,
  calling us to trust him as we go together to the cross,
  as we go to apparent defeat,
  calling us to wait in silence through Easter Saturday,
  for the glorious day of resurrection and new life.

It is as we tread the path of the cross
  that we hear the voice of God coming to us afresh

The Psalmist gave voice to this hope and longing when he said:

Psalm 85:8-11 Let me hear what God the LORD will speak, for he will speak peace to his people, to his faithful, to those who turn to him in their hearts. ⁹ Surely his salvation is at hand for those who fear him, that his glory may dwell in our land. ¹⁰ Steadfast love and faithfulness will meet; righteousness and peace will kiss each other. ¹¹ Faithfulness will spring up from the ground, and righteousness will look down from the sky.

Thanks be to God.

Monday, 23 January 2023

Paternoster

A Sermon for Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church

29 January 2022

Matthew 6.5-18
Deuteronomy 6.4-9

When Liz and I were undergraduates
at Sheffield University back in the early ’90s,
the Biblical Studies department where we were studying
was situated on floor ten of a building known as the Arts Tower.

This Grade 2 listed 1960s skyscraper dominates the skyline of Sheffield,
and is loved and loathed in equal measure,
in a similar way to that that in which the Barbican divides opinion in London
– but the Arts Tower is steel and glass, rather than brutalist concrete.

Anyway, there were a couple of normal lifts,
but the main way of getting around within the building
was to use a thing called the Paternoster Lift.

Has anyone ever seen or been in one of these things?
It’s like a giant bicycle chain of carriages,
each one big enough for two people,
that runs from the bottom to the top of the building,
in constant, if rather slow, motion.

The carriages have no doors,
and you simply wait for a vacant car to come along, and step on,
only to then step off at the floor you want.

It’s both brilliant and terrifying,
and still going strong I’m told even all these years on.
Of course, as you step into the void from the tenth floor or higher,
anticipating the imminent arrival of something firm to stand on,
you mutter a little prayer to yourself.

Hence, so the rumour goes, it is a Paternoster Lift
because, for those of you whose Latin is a little rusty,
  Pater Noster is Latin for ‘Our Father’,
the opening words of the Lord’s Prayer in Matthew’s gospel.

Of course, it may be that the circular motion of the carriages
is reminiscent of counting the beads in a rosary,
but I think I prefer the nervous prayer explanation!

But I wonder if the Paternoster lift can tell us something significant
about the way people often use the Lord’s Prayer?

I suspect that for many, maybe even for some of us,
it’s a little rote-prayer, learned in childhood and recited when needed,
either because it’s that point in the service again,
or because it’s that point in the rosary again,
or because some other pressing need for prayer has triggered it.

For many of people, particularly those who have had a Roman Catholic upbringing,
just saying ‘Pater Noster’ is enough
– the opening words infer the rest of the prayer;
and I think this tells us something profound
about the nature of the Lord’s Prayer;
which is that the way it begins is of the utmost importance.

If the Lord’s Prayer is the definitive Christian prayer,
I’m going to suggest that the opening words
are the most definitive phrase within it.
They define what follows.

The practice of using the opening couple of words
to signify that which follows
is far from unique to the Lord’s Prayer
– the Jews did it, for example, with the prayer known as The Shema,
which we had read to us earlier from the book of Deuteronomy.

In many ways, the Shema is a kind of fore-runner to the Lord’s Prayer,
and it similarly gets its name from its opening words
– Shema in Hebrew means ‘hear’,
and indeed the prayer begins, ‘Hear, O Israel’…

How things begin is important,
and the Lord’s Prayer begins, in Matthew’s gospel, with ‘Our Father’.

Interestingly, in Luke’s gospel, it just begins with just ‘Father’,
and this is the word I want us to focus on for a few minutes this morning.

You see, the language we use about God,
the words we use to describe or address God,
reveal a lot about who we think God is.

The Lord’s prayer, for example, could have begun
‘Our God’, a fairly neutral statement;
or possibly ‘Our Lord’, or even ‘Our King’,
both of which would suggest far great levels of authoritarian divinity.
‘Our King’ would actually have made a lot of sense,
given that part of what follows is a prayer for God’s ‘Kingdom’ to come
on earth as it is in heaven.

But no, the Lord’s Prayer begins by turning to God
as the heavenly ‘Father’ of those offering the prayer.

The Jews, of course, had a tradition of praying to God as ‘Father’,
and although it’s not found frequently in the Old Testament,
it certainly formed part of the devotional tradition of Judaism
within which Jesus grew up.

The most common images for God that we find in the Hebrew Bible
tend to revolve around God as Creator, King, or Judge,
and although God as Father is there, it isn’t common.

Possibly this was a reaction against those other ancient religions
that believed in the notion of divine parenthood,
with the gods having sex with humans
who then give birth to superhero-type offspring.
Actually, there is an ancient echo of this in the Genesis story of the Nephilim,
but that’s another sermon for another day.

Anyway, when it comes to Israel’s understanding of God as father,
there are two key aspects to this.

Firstly, Israel considered itself a ‘son’ adopted by God,
particularly so with regard to God’s decisive action
in bringing them from slavery in Egypt.

So, Moses tells the Pharaoh
Exodus 4:22-23 Then you shall say to Pharaoh,
  'Thus says the LORD: Israel is my firstborn son.
²³ I said to you, "Let my son go that he may worship me."'

And this idea of Israel as God’s child
can be found elsewhere too the Old Testament,
from Hosea (11.1) to Isaiah (54.5-9), to the Psalms (103.13-16).

But the second way in which Father imagery is used of God, particularly in prayer,
is the way God is spoken of as ‘Father’ to the king of Israel,
for example in 2 Samuel (7.14) God promises to be a father to the King,
and that the King will be his special son.

The combination of these two facets of the fatherhood of God,
firstly as the convenantal father
who rescued them from Egypt and adopted them,
and secondly as the father of the King of Israel,
directly feed into the way
Jesus would have understood the phrase ‘Our Father’,
when it is used of God.

God is the father of Israel collectively,
but also specifically God is the father of its key figurehead,
the king of the line of David.

So, in Matthew’s gospel when Jesus is referred to as the Son of David,
there is a sense in which he is being cast
as the key figurehead of the new Christian community
– it is not merely David who is his ancestor,
but also God who is his father.

And this idea of Jesus as the son of God
becomes important for Matthew
because it defines the community of those around Jesus
as being those who see themselves as children of God.

In 12.50, Matthew records Jesus as teaching that
‘whoever does the will of my Father in heaven
is my brother and sister and mother’.

The point is clear: those who, like Jesus, obey their heavenly father
become, like him, children of God.

Just as God was the father of the King, and also of all Israel,
so God is the father of Jesus, and also of all his disciples too.

So, in the sermon on the mount, where we find the Lord’s Prayer,
we also find Jesus telling his disciples several times
that God is ‘their’ father in Heaven (5.16, 45; 6.1; 7.11; cf. 18.14; 23.9).

And this sense that they have been adopted as children of God,
as Israel of old was adopted as a son of God,
is seen to carry with it a responsibility to live accordingly
– the children are expected to behave
in ways that bring honour to their heavenly Father,
for example by doing good deeds.

In this, of course, the disciples are being contrasted with the Pharisees,
who are presented as having betrayed their status as children of God
by focusing on outward piety
rather than on genuine transformation of the heart.

So, for us to say ‘Our Father’, at the beginning of the Lord’s prayer,
is for us to take a momentous step of faith.

We are not merely naming God as Father in some generic sense,
we are specifically identifying ourselves as his children.

We are, in effect, naming ourselves as the new Israel,
adopted by the God who brings us too from slavery to freedom,
and who releases us from our enslavements
to those desires and temptations
that diminish the image of the Father in us.

And this has implications for the way we will live
– we must be those in whose lives good deeds are visible,
those who imitate the likeness of our heavenly father.

As Jesus rather uncompromisingly puts it in the Sermon on the Mount,
‘Be perfect, as your heavenly father is perfect.’ (5.48).

We should not pray, ‘Our Father’, lightly!

But there is another side to being an adopted child of God,
and that is that we are the beneficiaries of the fatherly care of God.

Not in the sense that God will automatically give his children everything they ask for
– what kind of good father does that?
But rather in the sense that God is attentive to our needs,
knowing what we need before we even ask him (Matt. 6.8).

In so many ways, this can be a freeing insight
for the person who wants to come before their heavenly father in prayer.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve grown weary of the kind of prayer
that seeks to articulate all my needs and desires to God.

When I was a teenager I was encouraged to keep a prayer list,
and to cross things off it when they were answered.
Honestly, it was one of the worst things I ever did for my prayer life
– because it reduced prayer to a functional activity,
as if by my naming of things in some spiritual formula
I could in some way affect their outcome.

I’ll say this as bluntly as I know how:
I don’t think prayer changes God,
or God’s mind, or God’s activity in the world.

In fact, I’ll go further:
I have a suspicion that to utter a prayer list
according to some set incantation such as,
‘in the name of Jesus Christ, Amen’,
might actually be sorcery.
I am deeply concerned when humans think they can control God
by invoking prayer rituals or practices.

I want prayer to be so much more
than presenting God with a shopping list of my needs;
and I don’t want the guilt that comes
from missing something or someone out of my prayer list;
and surely God, if God exists, just knows this stuff already?!

Well, yes he does, as Jesus says,
Matthew 6:7-8 When you are praying, do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do; for they think that they will be heard because of their many words. ⁸ Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him.

God knows our needs before we do,
and so prayer can become something very different
to just telling God our needs in the hope that he will meet them.

Prayer to God our Father
is prayer offered to the one who already knows us
better than we know ourselves,
and who loves us more than we love ourselves.

Such prayer is not about changing God,
or changing the outworking of God’s love in the world.
It is about bringing ourselves into alignment with the love of God
who is reaching out to us, and through us, and with us,
to draw the world to himself.

And, as Jesus himself discovered in the Garden of Gethsemane,
prayer does not stop the difficult stuff happening to us or those we love.
Contemplating the horrors of the cross that lay before him, Matthew tells us
that Jesus ‘threw himself on the ground and prayed,
“My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me;
yet not what I want but what you want.” (Matthew 26:39)

The prayer in the Garden did not avert the cross,
but it did allow Jesus to embrace it.
And this is what it means for us to pray to God our Father;
the future is still before us, with all the joys and sorrows that it holds,
but in prayer to our loving Father,
we are drawn into the all-embracing love of God.

And it is we who are changed by this prayerful encounter.
It is we who are called to set aside our selfishness, and our fear,
and all the pretentions that mask the image of God in our lives.

He is our Father, and he welcomes us into his presence
as we draw near to him in prayer.

And I know the point I’m about to make has been made many times before,
but it is worth making again.
For some of us, the image of God as Father is deeply problematic.

Human fathers, even at their very best,
will only ever by poor reflections of God the Father,
and at their worst they can be terrible perversions
of what Godly paternal love should look like.

Some of us here today will have suffered violence and abuse
from fathers who should have been different.
Some of us will have suffered the absence of a father through our formative years.

So I’m just going to say, if Father God doesn’t work for you, that’s fine.
It’s only an image, it’s just language.
All language of God is inadequate anyway, so feel free to substitute.
If Mother works better for you, go with that.
Or maybe ‘Idealised Parent’?
Or whatever language captures for you
the experience of being loved unconditionally
by one who longs for your presence.

If we’re going to hallow the name of God,
then we’d better use a name that is worth hallowing.

But for now, if you’ll allow me, I’ll stay with the language of God as Father;
as it’s there in the text, and it carries helpful meaning for many, if not all.

So, ‘pray in this way’, says Jesus: ‘Our Father in heaven…’

And here we hit straight up against another preconception of God
that can be less than helpful.

If God is our Father in heaven,
does this mean that the one we are praying to
is some kind of absentee God,
sitting up there, metaphorically speaking, on a cloud
and attended by putti and cherubs?

Certainly, if the medieval artwork of God-on-high is to be believed,
that is exactly what ‘Our Father which art in Heaven’ looks like.

However we have to recognise that what is at play here
is a pre-scientific cosmology
that might have worked two thousand years ago,
but doesn’t really work so well for us today.

In the ancient Jewish spiritual tradition,
they pictured the heavens as a kind of reflection of an earthly royal court.
So, just as a king on earth had courtiers and attendants,
and sat on a raised throne indicating his power and authority,
so they saw God sitting on his throne up in heaven,
surrounded by the heavenly host of his attendants and armies.

And heaven was very definitely ‘up’ there somewhere, high above the clouds.

Sometimes, they thought,
the veil between the heavens and the earth wore a bit thin,
particularly if you went up a mountain;
it’s one of the reasons people in the Bible
often seem to go up to mountain tops to pray, or to meet with God.
They were, they believed, quite literally closer to God there.

Well, I’m pretty sure that none of us think
that going up a mountain takes you literally closer to God.
Figuratively speaking, maybe
– I absolutely do get the sense of transcendence
that a magnificent view can offer.

But not literally.
I’m not closer to God in an aeroplane than I am in church!

So I think we need to intentionally set aside the view
of Our Father in Heaven as a distant God,
enthroned above the clouds
and removed from our lives experiences of the world.

I think that a more helpful way of thinking of God as our Heavenly Father
is to embrace this language as speaking to us
of a God whose nature is to embrace all of the created order.

He is the God of the heavens and the earth,
the God of nature, the God of all peoples,
the God of all animals and all plants.

Our Father in Heaven is a vision of God
whose love and care extends to the vastness of all that is;
and so to think of ourselves as children of this God
is to name ourselves as those
who are called to share with him in the task of universal love.

Rowan Williams has said that,
‘Very near the heart of Christian prayer
is getting over the idea that God is somewhere a very, very long way off,
so that we have to shout very loudly to be heard.
On the contrary: God has decided to be an intimate friend
and he has decided to make us part of his family,
and we always pray on that basis.’[1]

So praying to Father God in heaven
is not praying to the sky,
hoping anxiously that the distant God can hear and will respond.

There is a profound paraphrase of the Lord’s Prayer
developed by the African Fellowship of Union Church in Istanbul
that captures this sense of the heavenly God
who desires to make himself available
to all people everywhere who call upon his name.

I discovered it in a book on the Lord’s Prayer by Nijay Gupta,
which has been very helpful to me in the preparation of this sermon.[2]
And with this I’m going to close:

Our Father Who Art in Heaven
You are in Istanbul, in our flats and hotels
in Taksim and Beyoglu.
You are within us and in our homes.
You are in Africa, Europe,
Australia, and the Americas.
In Yugoslavia and Russia.
You are with the hungry and dying children in Somalia.
Also in Liberia, Bosnia, Ethiopia,
Sri Lanka, Kuwait, and Iraq.
Amen.

[1] Rowan Williams, Being Christian, p.66.
[2] Gupta, Nijay K. The Lord's Prayer. Smyth & Helwys Bible Commentary. Macon, Georgia: Smyth & Helwys Publishing, Inc., 2017, p.51.

Wednesday, 18 January 2023

Beatitudes not Platitudes

A Sermon for

Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church
22 January 2023, 11.00am

Mount of the Beatitudes, Galilee, 2022.

Micah 6.8

Matthew 5.1-12

In Monty Python's memorable take on the sermon on the mount,

in the film 'The Life of Brian',

we get to see the response to Jesus' preaching

by those stood at the back of the crowd,

barely able to hear the preacher on the hilltop in the distance,

and misunderstanding his words to great comic effect.

If you haven't seen it for a while,

your homework this week is to watch it with my blessing.

The exchange includes everything

from blessings on cheesemakers rather than peacemakers,

to a discovery that it's the meek and not the Greek who shall inherit the earth,

which, as Mrs BigNose points out,

‘is nice, isn't it, because the meek have a hell of a time’.

After a brief fight, the characters agree to head off to catch a stoning,

and as they leave one of the Jewish revolutionaries is heard to mutter,

'Well, blessed is just about everyone
with a vested interest in the status quo, as far as I can tell.'

To which his friend replies,

'Yeah. Well, what Jesus blatantly fails to appreciate
is that it's the meek who are the problem.'

And I suspect it was ever thus,

that those at the back of the crowd are ideologically, as well as geographically,

distant from the voices at the centre.

Of course, what the Python team have intuitively picked up on

in their version of the sermon on the mount,

is something that we see throughout Matthew's gospel:

which is that some people, just a few,

get the truth of the message that Jesus is proclaiming;

whereas others, the majority, are distant from him

and react badly to what they think they have heard.

This is almost certainly a reflection

of the situation facing the community that Matthew was writing for,

some fifty years after the time of Jesus,

where those in the small struggling congregations of Jesus-followers

were finding that most of those

with whom they were trying to share the good news of their faith

were disinterested at best,

and more often actively hostile to the challenge

that the message of Jesus brought to their world and worldview.

And so Matthew gives his readers the sermon on the mount,

with its memorable opening lines known now as the beatitudes,

to succinctly capture the force and energy of the preacher on the hilltop,

whose voice continued to echo down the decades to their own time,

offering comfort and challenge in equal measure

to any who would dare to take the time to listen.

And it has ever been thus.

Radical Jesus-following has always been a minority sport;

and I would suggest that those times where Christianity

has done a deal with power to get its message heard more widely

have always resulted in a dilution of the message

away from its radical core.

In any form of Christendom,

the beatitudes become a blessing, as Python put it,

on just about anyone with a vested interest in the status quo,

and the heart of it all gets lost once again.

And the problem is as real for us today

as it was for Matthew's community in the first century;

the beatitudes of Jesus are all too easily reduced to the platitudes of Jesus,

as statements of revolutionary challenge

become aphorisms of anodyne comfort.

Do you remember that the Bible reading at Donald Trump’s inauguration?

saw Revd Samuel Rodriguez read the Beatitudes

from Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount.

It seemed to me to be almost beyond irony

that the inaugural speech of Jesus’ ministry

should be set in such stark contrast

with the inaugural presidential speech that followed it;

and yet I suspect for many of those listening,

who saw in their new president a voice

for their pro-life, religiously conservative agendas,

there was no irony at all.

The radical revolutionary message of Jesus

is all too easily domesticated to powerful agendas,

and we need to take care to hear it afresh,

lest we too miss the demands it makes on us and our own lives.

And what does this blessèd word ‘blessèd’ mean anyway?

I mean, it's all very well asserting that the meek and the mourning are blessed,

but one has to wonder what earthly use is that to the person crippled by grief,

or too timid to speak up or out?

A few years ago, in an attempt to get to the heart of the beatitudes,

I thought I'd have a go at re-rendering them.

The paraphrase I created is in the foyer,

and you may well have read it.

But I’d like to read it again for you now.

I want to make it clear that I'm not, here,

seeking to re-write the words of scripture;

rather I'm offering a reflection on the words of Jesus that Matthew gives us,

to help us engage with them in fresh ways.

Blessèd are those who refuse the lie that one life is worth more than any other,
for theirs is the future of humanity.

Blessèd are those who have stared long into the abyss,
for theirs is honesty beyond grief.

Blessèd are those who resist retaliation,
for the earth will never be won by force.

Blessèd are those who would rather die for truth than live with compromise,
for the truth will outlive all lies.

Blessèd are those who forgive the unforgivable,
for they have seen the darkness of their own souls.

Blessèd are those who know themselves truly,
for they have seen themselves as God sees them.

Blessèd are those who are provocatively nonviolent,
for they are following the path of the son of God.

Blessèd are those who choose to receive violence but not to give it,
for the future is born out of such choices.

Blessèd are you when you stand up for truth
and hell itself decides to try and destroy you.
You're not the first and you won't be the last.

I'm telling you now, nothing makes any sense unless you learn see it differently,
and then choose to live that alternative into being.

So firstly, I wonder, what does it mean to be blessed?

It’s not a word we use a lot, really, is it; at least not in its archaic form

of two syllables with an accent over the second ‘e’ – bless-èd

It has resonances of Shakespeare and the King James Bible;

and it’s modern pronunciation of ‘blest’

has lost much of its depth of meaning in contemporary usage,

often reduced to a vague assertion of feeling fortunate.

As in, ‘I’m blest to have you has a friend’.

It’s further popular rendering as just ‘bless’ has robbed it of almost all meaning,

becoming little more than a patronising response to someone who has tried,

but failed, to achieve anything worthwhile.

As in, ‘Look at that drawing she’s done, Bless!’

Ugh.

Anyway, I wonder if we can find a way to bring it back to relevance,

to rediscover the force of what Jesus was doing by proclaiming a blessing

on the meek, the mournful, and the merciful.

In the Jewish religious context of the first century,

one of the great theological debates

was that of who was worthy to receive the blessing of God?

The Jews held that they were God’s chosen people,

called from among the nations,

and blessed by God with the gift of a ‘special relationship’ with him.

But within this general calling and blessing, there was a further level of disparity

between those who were regarded as blessed, and those who were not;

and there was much discussion as to what God’s blessing looked like.

If you think that the prosperity gospel of health and wealth is a new phenomenon,

and unique to Christianity,

then think again, because the ancient Jews got there first.

There was a school of thought that held that if you were obedient to the covenant,

you would experience the blessings of God as a reward for your faithfulness.

These blessings might be financial,

or related to health, or to family life, such as having lots of children.

It’s not quite, ‘touch the screen, and you’re gonna be healed’,

but it comes from a similar place,

in terms of seeing God’s blessings

as linked to human obedience and sacrifice.

Jesus wasn’t the first to challenge this idea,

and, for example, the book of Job is an extended piece of theological reflection

on why bad things happen to good people,

questioning where God is in the face of human suffering.

Again, these are not new questions…

The prophet Micah, who we heard from in our first reading this morning,

also questioned the nature of the sacrifice that God might require,

in order for his blessings to be dispensed.

He asked,

“Shall I come before him with burnt offerings?
Will the LORD be pleased with thousands of rams,
with ten thousands of rivers of oil?
Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression,
the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?"

And the answer that he hears to this question is radical:

He has told you, O mortal, what is good;
and what does the LORD require of you
but to do justice,
and to love kindness,
and to walk humbly with your God?

It is in this tradition of Micah and Job,

that Jesus started proclaiming blessings

on those whom others would despise.

Many voices told people that their vulnerability was a curse;

Jesus, however, proclaimed it as a blessing.

And so…

Blessed are those who refuse the lie that one life is worth more than any other,
for theirs is the future of humanity.

This really is the great lie,

it is the great deceit of Satan.

Because the moment any one of us starts to believe

that one life is more precious to God than any other,

then the door is opened for all manner of evil to take root and flourish.

Against this, the radical message that Jesus proclaimed

was that the kingdom of heaven

belongs to those with a poverty of spirit;

to those with an un-inflated view of their own self-importance;

to those who know that any value they have in life comes from God,

and not from any achievement or status they may hold.

But so many of the messages of our society

fly in the face of true poverty of spirit.

From the advertisers’ mantra that ‘you’re worth it’

to fevered assertions of America, or indeed any nation, First,

and the nationalistic protectionism that comes

from a mindset of ‘my country right or wrong’.

Friends, we need to recover a Godly sense of our own value,

and to discover in that, the value of those others

whom we could otherwise so easily diminish.

And so the challenge continues:

Blessed are those who have stared long into the abyss,
for theirs is honesty beyond grief.

Bereavement can sap all hope, but there is hope here:

that those who have learned to live with great loss

may discover through their grief the brutal honesty of human mortality,

in ways that others will never grasp.

The comfort for those who mourn is not won easily, or quickly;

and it comes through pain and tears.

But in a world which despises weakness,

and which denies the transience of life,

the ability to out-stare death is a blessing known only to some;

and yet is a great gift that they bring to humanity.

We each of us, in our own way, one day,

will look death in the face,

and on that day we will need those who have seen that face before,

and learned to live with its reality.

And so the challenge continues:

Blessed are those who resist retaliation,
for the earth will never be won by force.

We can build walls and missiles to our heart’s content,

securing our borders with Mutually Assured Destruction,

and ever more stringent restrictions on movement.

We can make our pacts and alliances,

and stand in solidarity with countries of like-mind.

We can love NATO or hate it.

But, says Jesus, the earth does not belong to those with guns, or missiles,

it belongs to the meek;

it belongs to those who resist retaliation,

to those who will commit themselves

to alternatives to the spiralling violence

that generates strike after counter-strike.

The future belongs to those who will build bridges and not walls,

to those who turn swords into ploughshares

and guns into statues.

We will need creativity and courage

if we are to stand against the prevailing mind-set of retaliation.

But it is a fight that is worth the effort,

because all other paths lead to death.

And so the challenge continues:

Blessed are those who would rather die for truth than live with compromise,
for the truth will outlive all lies.

We live in a world of fake news,

and alternative facts.

We live in a post-truth world,

where the lie wins the argument if it’s said loud enough and often enough.

We are constantly invited and cajoled to abandon truth,

and follow the herd.

And yet where in this is righteousness,

where in this is truth?

The answer, to quote the X files, is that the truth is out there,

we just need to seek it out, and then speak it out.

And this is not easy – it is hard, thirsty work, seeking the springs of righteousness,

but we must not abandon the quest,

and we must resist compromise.

And so the challenge continues:

Blessed are those who forgive the unforgivable,
for they have seen the darkness of their own souls.

Many years ago I heard the late Jill Saward speak at Greenbelt,

you may remember her, she was a victim of the Ealing vicarage rape attack.

And the courage with which she faced the crime that had been done to her,

and her willingness to speak language of forgiveness as a path to wholeness,

had a profound effect on me.

And in my pastoral work I speak sometimes

with those who have been greatly wronged,

victims of abuse of all kinds,

and I have never found it appropriate to tell anyone

that they must forgive their abuser.

But when someone comes to the conclusion

that the path from victimhood

lies through the dark valley of forgiveness,

and when they realise that despite the wrong done to them

they share common humanity with those who do wrong to others,

something profound can shift,

and a moment of blessing can emerge.

But when we think of this on a global scale,

when we bring to mind the terrorist atrocities of all the years,

from Isis to the IRA and beyond,

and when we see the historical scars of un-forgiveness

written across whole societies and nations,

we can begin to see why mercy is a blessing that cuts both ways.

And so the challenge continues:

Blessed are those who know themselves truly,
for they have seen themselves as God sees them.

Socrates famously said

that ‘an unexamined life is not worth living’.

And I find myself wondering more and more

whether the journey of discipleship in Christ

is primarily a journey into the love of God,

which takes shape in our lives

as we learn to see ourselves not as we want to be seen,

and not as others see us,

but as God sees us.

The challenge here, is that God sees us with the unflinching gaze of love,

and we so resist the idea of being loved.

We live with such suppressed guilt, such internalised self-hatred,

that the idea of being loved, of being truly forgiven and accepted,

is as alien to us as our long lost childhoods.

And yet, and yet God loves us,

and forgives us,

and when we learn to see ourselves as God sees us,

we discover purity in place of pain,

and we find the face of God in the midst of our complex existence.

And so the challenge continues:

Blessed are those who are provocatively nonviolent,
for they are following the path of the son of God.

The path of peacemaking is not supposed to be straightforward.

It’s never just a passive pacifism that lays down and dies

when confronted with violent opposition.

Christ-like nonviolence is something far more creative,

something far more subversive.

Jim Gordon, former principal of the Scottish Baptist College,

wrote that the

Followers of the crucified Lord have a long tradition of resistance
through revolutionary love, bridge-building hope,
perseverance in peace, and joy in trumping injustice.[1]

And those of us who are watching with concern

as violence escalates on the international stage,

will need to be provocatively nonviolent

if we are to speak out a different, more Christ-like narrative,

for people to learn to live by.

And so the challenge continues:

Blessed are those who choose to receive violence but not to give it,
for the future is born out of such choices.

It is a truth that there are many places in the world

where the followers of Jesus face persecution

because they will not compromise on what they know to be right.

The temptation to turn an experience of persecution into a quest for vengeance

is ever before those who have been wronged,