Tuned into God

 A Sermon for Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church

Sunday 23 August 2026

 

Exodus 20.3–11 · Luke 13.10–17

I was playing that guitar a few minutes ago,
            and before I played it,
            I tuned it.

You can tune a guitar entirely from the inside.
Finger on the fifth fret,
            tune the next string to match,
                        then the next,
            until every string is in a proper relationship with every other string
            and the whole thing is beautifully in tune.

And it's fine.
            It's fine right up until the piano joins in.
Because relative tuning tells you how the strings sit against each other;
            it can't tell you where any of them ought to be.

Concert pitch has to come from outside
            – a fork, a pipe, an app –
            a note the guitar could never have made for itself.

For those of you who don’t know this building inside out,
            my office is just up there, in that top corner,
            on the other side of the wall where the organ pipes are.

Usually this is a perk of the job:
            somebody practises
and I get an hour of Bach for nothing
            while I answer emails.

But once a month,
            before the recital,
            the organ is tuned.
Thousands of pipes,
            one at a time.

And it is not beautiful.
It's hours of a single note held and worried at and held again,
            that horrible wavering beat
as two pitches slide towards each other
            and don't quite arrive.

There are mornings when I have to get my coat
            and find somewhere else to be.

Two things I've learned from the wrong side of that wall.
The first is that tuning is not a pleasant experience.
            We talk about being in tune with God as though it described a mood;
            but from where I sit it sounds like an ordeal.

The second is stranger.
            Nobody decides to go out of tune.
The organ doesn't choose it.
            It drifts – temperature, humidity,
            the heating coming on in October.
It goes out of tune
            by standing perfectly still in a room where the weather changes.

Which is exactly how it happens to us.
Nobody here woke up one morning
            and resolved to start worshipping something else.
We just sat still in a warm room
            while the weather changed.

So: the first four commandments.
            Not a moral audit.
A tuning note.

The list you can't get God onto

Last week we spent our time on the fact that nineteen comes before twenty
            – God rescues first and legislates afterwards.
These aren't the terms of entry.
            They're the shape of a life that's already free.

So: "You shall have no other gods before me."

I've heard that preached,
            and preached it myself,
            as a question about priorities.
What's number one in your life?
            Is God top of the list?

But the phrase translated "before me"
            means something closer to in front of my face
            – in my presence, over against me.

It isn't a ranking.
            It's a spatial image.

Which means the first commandment
            isn't asking to be at the top of your list.
            It's declining to be on the list at all.

A tuning note isn't competing with the organ for attention;
            it's a different kind of thing.
And the moment you treat it as one item among others
            – God, family, work, health,
let's see if I can get God up to third this year –
            you've misunderstood what it is.

Luther put it as well as it has ever been put:
            whatever you set your heart upon and put your trust in,
            that is properly your god.
So the question was never whether you worship,
            but what you've tuned to.

And the alternatives aren't private spiritual preferences.
These people have just walked out of Egypt,
            where the god they served
            had a name and a face and a building programme,
            and his name was Pharaoh.

What competes for our undivided attention
            is rarely another religion.
It's a system.
            It's what our diaries have already decided
            before we've prayed about anything.

The image that's already been made

Then: "You shall not make for yourself an idol."
No carved thing,
            of anything in heaven above
            or on the earth beneath.
Which is far more interesting than a suspicion of art.

In the ancient Near East
            a divine image did a particular job.
The statue in the temple was where the god was locatable
            – fed, housed, consulted,
            tied to a place and a throne.

And the living image of the god,
            in Egypt and Assyria and Babylon alike,
            was the king.
The king is where you look
            to see what the god is like.

Now hold that next to Genesis 1.
Let us make humanity in our image,
            according to our likeness.

The whole species,
            not one royal man.

Israel takes the most exclusive claim in the ancient world
            and hands it to everybody.
To the slave.
            To the woman.
To the stranger passing through.

So the second commandment
            isn't God being precious about representation.
It's God refusing to be owned, localised,
            carried at the front of somebody's parade
            – because the image has already been made,
            and it's your neighbour.

Where do you look for the likeness of God?
            Not up there.
But across the aisle.
            Or two doors down.
            Sleeping in a doorway on Shaftesbury Avenue on a Tuesday night.

Every idolatry narrows that.
It says the image is here and not there,
            in us and not them,
            in this nation and not that one.

Idolatry is always a shrinking
            of who counts as the likeness of God.

Which is why what we do in this room
            and what we do outside it
cannot be pulled apart
            – and I'd rather show you that than argue it,
because Luke shows it to us,
            in a synagogue,
            on a sabbath.

The name you carry

But first, the third: "You shall not make wrongful use
            of the name of the Lord your God."

Most of us were taught this was about swearing.
            But it isn't, or not mainly.

The verb underneath it
            means to lift, to carry, to bear
– you shall not carry the name of the Lord your God
            emptily, to no purpose.

So the question isn't whether you say the word.
            It's what you carry it onto.
Whose banner. Whose policy. Whose war.

And I could name the obvious offenders,
            and we could all agree comfortably about people who aren't in the room.
I'd rather not.
            Because we're the ones who carry the name.

That's what the word Christian means
            – a nametag,
his name, borrowed and worn in public.

And no institution is better placed to hollow it out than a church,
            because we say it so often and so fluently
            that it costs us nothing.

To say "Lord, Lord" beautifully at eleven on a Sunday
            and mean nothing by it on Monday
            is precisely what the third commandment is worried about.
Not blasphemy. Fluency.

The commandment with the guest list

And then the sabbath,
            which gets more words than any of the others
– more than murder, more than theft –
            and which we've most thoroughly reduced to personal wellbeing.

Read the guest list.
You shall not do any work
            – you, your son or your daughter,
            your male and female slave, your livestock,
            and the alien resident in your towns:
the migrant,
            the one without papers or protection.

This commandment isn't addressed to the exhausted.
It's addressed to whoever has power to make other people work,
            and it tells them their rest is worthless
            if bought with somebody else's labour.

It's a labour law before it's a spiritual discipline,
            and Deuteronomy says so out loud
– remember you were a slave in Egypt,
            therefore keep this day.

Notice, too, who isn't on the list.
The "you" addressed is a male householder,
            and his wife appears nowhere.
Hold onto that,
            because Luke is about to hand us
            a woman nobody had counted.

Which is live rather than historical,
            because the person with power over somebody else's time,
on any given day,
            is nearly all of us.

It's the email I send at half past ten at night,
            knowing perfectly well what that does to whoever reads it.

It's the thing I ordered on a Sunday
            because I wanted it Monday,
which is somebody's shift in a warehouse
            and somebody's van on my street.

The economy that never stops
            isn't run by a Pharaoh in a palace.

It's run by all of us,
            one entirely reasonable decision at a time.
Egypt, it turns out,
            is a collective effort.

The woman who could not look up

So to Luke 13,
            a synagogue on a sabbath morning,
and a woman bent double for eighteen years
            who cannot stand up straight.

Start with what she is doing there.
Eighteen years bent towards the floor,
            eighteen years of feet and paving
            and the hems of other people's clothes,
and she is in the synagogue,
            on the sabbath,
            keeping the fourth commandment.

Nobody in this story has been more faithful to it.
            Nobody has got less out of it.

And Jesus sees her
            – which is worth pausing on,
because to be seen by someone who cannot lift her head,
            you have to come to her
            and get low enough to be seen.

He calls her over.
            He tells her she is set free.
He puts his hands on her,
            and she straightens up,
and the first thing she does with a body that works
            is praise God.

Which is what worship looks like
            when the tuning has done its work.
Not a mood.
            A posture.

Then the leader of the synagogue objects,
            and on impeccable grounds.

There are six days for work.
            Come on one of those.
He isn't a monster,
            and he isn't a stand-in for somebody else's religion
– he's a religious professional
            protecting good order in a building he's responsible for,
and if you want to know who he most resembles in this room,
            it's the man in front of you.

His mistake isn't that he loves the commandment too much.
It's that he's taken it for a fence
            when it was always a rescue.

And notice he doesn't say it to Jesus.
            He says it to the congregation.
Which is a very churchy sort of cowardice,
            and I've done it myself.

And so Jesus answers with an argument about knots.
            Every one of you unties your ox or your donkey on the sabbath
                        and leads it out to water
            – and in Luke's Greek
                        the word for untying that animal
                        is the same word used for what has just happened to this woman.
Loosed. Untied.

You do it for livestock without thinking twice.
            She has been tied for eighteen years.
Ought she not to be untied,
            on the sabbath day of all days?

And then he calls her a daughter of Abraham.

Nobody else in scripture is called that.
There are sons of Abraham all over the place,
            but she is the only daughter,
and he says it out loud
            in a building where the commandment she has kept so faithfully
            was written in words that didn't quite have room for her.

The image had already been made.
            It just took somebody willing to look down to see it.

So the sabbath is not a fence around God's day.
            It's the day the knots come off.

And that argument in the synagogue
            isn't religion against freedom;
it's an argument inside the tradition
            about what the tradition is for,
which is the only argument worth having,
            and the one we are having here this morning.

Because here is the thing that ought to keep us awake.
It's entirely possible to keep all four of this morning's commandments
            – no other gods, no idols,
            the name honoured, the sabbath guarded –
and still be the man in that story.

Beautiful worship.
            And a woman still bent double.
Piety that leaves the world exactly as it found it.

And it's just as possible the other way round:
            to love your neighbour on willpower alone,
            running on your own supply until there isn't any.
That's tuning the guitar to itself.
            Fine, right up until somebody else joins in.

When you can't hear the note

Let me finish honestly,
            because I don't want to leave you thinking
that being tuned into God is a feeling of being in tune.

Some of you came in this morning
            and could not hear the note.
You've done the tuning
            – the prayer, the turning up, the trying –
            and there's been nothing on the other end for a while.

That isn't failure.
It's most of the Psalms,
            and it's the sentence from the cross.
And it was, for eighteen years,
            the experience of the most faithful person in this morning's Gospel.

So notice what the women do at the end of Luke's story.
            They watch him die.
They see where the body is laid.

They go home and prepare spices and ointments
            – and then, chapter 23, verse 56,
            on the sabbath they rested according to the commandment.

On the day when God had,
            as far as they could tell,
            gone silent for good,
they kept the fourth commandment.

Not because they felt anything.
But because it was the day,
            and it was the commandment,
            and it was what you did.

That's Holy Saturday,
            and it may be the most honest thing
            the New Testament says about faith.

Sometimes tuning isn't an experience.
Sometimes it's just turning
            towards where the note is supposed to come from,
and being here again next week
            – bent double, if that's what it takes,
but here.

The practice holds you
            when the feeling doesn't.

And then it's the first day of the week,
            and they go to the tomb,
and everything is different
            – and they only found out
            because they'd kept the sabbath first.

We're about to sing
            "Take my life, and let it be."
Havergal wrote it as a list
            – hands, feet, voice, silver, gold, will, heart –
            and it can sound like an inventory of things surrendered.
I'd rather you sang it as a tuning:
            every part of the instrument, one at a time,
turned towards a note it could never have made for itself.

That note has been sounded.
It was sounded early on a Sunday morning
            at the mouth of a tomb,
it hasn't stopped since,
            and it isn't ours and never was.

All that's asked of us
            is that we turn towards it,
and let it do its slow and unlovely work,
            one pipe at a time,
until we can stand up straight.

Amen.

Nineteen Comes Before Twenty

A Sermon for Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church

Sunday 16 August 2026

Exodus 19.1–6; 20.1–2 · Matthew 22.34–40

There is a test you have to pass
            in order to become British.
It's called the Life in the UK test,
            and it consists of twenty-four multiple choice questions
which you have to answer in forty-five minutes,
            having paid for the privilege,
and you need eighteen of them right.

The official handbook that people revise from
            ranges across the Bronze Age,
            the Reformation, the rules of cricket,
            and the height of a certain wheel on the South Bank.

I have met people who have taken it.
            Without exception, they knew more
            about this country's history by the end of it than I do,
and rather more than most of the people I know
            who were born here and have never had to sit anything at all.

I'm not going to stand here and mock it.
            There are worse ways of doing this,
            and the people who administer it are mostly kind.

But I want you to notice the shape of the thing,
            because the shape is the point.

First you demonstrate. Then you belong.
            First the evidence, the documents,
                        the fee, the biometric appointment,
                        the letter that comes or doesn't come.

Then, if all of it goes well,
            the ceremony in the town hall
            and the little flag and the photograph.

Prove, and then belong. That's the order.

That's how nearly everything in our common life is arranged,
            when you start looking for it.
Belonging is a thing you earn,
            and having earned it you can lose it again,
            and everyone knows it.

Which is why I want us to spend some time this morning
            with a mountain in the Sinai desert,
because what happens there happens the other way round,
            and once you've seen it
            you can't unsee it.

One: nobody asks

Here's the first thing about Sinai
            that I think we routinely get wrong: Nobody asks.

Three months out of Egypt, says Exodus 19:1,
            they come into the wilderness of Sinai
            and they camp in front of the mountain.

And there is no scene
            in which the people gather at the foot of the rock
            and say to Moses,
            go up and find out what he wants from us.

There's no negotiation. There's no request for terms.
            God simply speaks, and the very first thing God says
            is not a requirement at all.

It's a piece of history.
            "You have seen what I did to the Egyptians,
            and how I bore you on eagles' wings
            and brought you to myself."

That's a sentence about the past.
            It's entirely indicative.
            There isn't an imperative anywhere in it.

And look at where it says they were brought –
            not to Canaan, not to the land, not to safety,
            not even to freedom in the abstract.
To myself. The destination of the exodus,
            according to God's own account of it,
            is God. Everything else is scenery.

And then the whole thing happens again
            at the top of chapter 20.

Before the first commandment,
            before "you shall have no other gods before me",
there's a sentence: "I am the Lord your God,
            who brought you out of the land of Egypt,
            out of the house of slavery."
We tend to call that the prologue, and we skip it,
            the way you skip the terms and conditions.

Jewish tradition doesn't. In Jewish numbering
            that sentence isn't the preamble to the Ten Commandments.
            It is the first of them. The First Word.

Sit with that for a moment.
            In the oldest way of counting,
            the first of the Ten Commandments commands nothing whatsoever.
It just tells you who God is
            and what God has already done for you.
And only after that
            does anything get asked.

The American preacher David Lose
            puts it as memorably as anyone has:
            nineteen comes before twenty.

The relationship comes first.
            It's primary, literally – it's chapter nineteen.

The ethical demand comes second,
            literally, in chapter twenty.

And you cannot reverse the order
            without breaking the thing entirely,
because the commandments only make sense
            as the description of a life
            that has already been rescued.

Now I want to be honest with you,
            because there's a word in verse five
that a lazier sermon would step over,
            and I don't want to step over it.

"Now therefore, if you obey my voice
            and keep my covenant,
            you shall be my treasured possession out of all the peoples."

There's an if. There is a condition in there,
            and anyone who tells you
            the Bible only ever deals in unconditional grace
            hasn't read this chapter with their eyes open.

But look carefully at what the condition attaches to.
            The rescue isn't conditional.
The rescue has already happened;
            it's in verse four, past tense, done.
Nobody at Sinai is being asked
            to earn their way out of Egypt,
            because they're already out.

What's conditional is the vocation.
            What's on offer, if they will have it,
            is to be "a priestly kingdom and a holy nation"

Not better individuals.
            But a different kind of people altogether.
A whole nation functioning as priests,
            which is to say
a whole nation standing between God and the world
            on the world's behalf.

That's the offer.
            That's what you can say yes or no to.

And I'll tell you where that phrase surfaces again,
            because it's my particular hobby-horse
            and you'll forgive me.

When John of Patmos wants to tell
            seven small, frightened, unimpressive churches
scattered around the coast of Asia Minor
            who they actually are,
he reaches straight back to Exodus 19
            and says that Christ
            "has made us a kingdom,
            priests to his God and Father."

He says it in chapter one,
            and he says it again in chapter five,
and both times he says it
            in the teeth of an empire
that had its own account of who ran the world
            and its own priesthood to prove it.

Sinai's covenant formula turns up in Revelation
            as an act of resistance.
This is who we are. Whatever Rome says.

One more thing before we leave the mountain,
            and it's uncomfortable, so let's not pretend otherwise.

Nine verses after our reading stops,
            Moses tells the people
            to prepare themselves for the third day,
and what he says is:
            "do not go near a woman."

Judith Plaskow built a whole book on that sentence,
            and the title says it:
Standing Again at Sinai.

At the founding moment of the covenant,
            the community is addressed
            as though it were entirely male,
and half of Israel is standing there listening to instructions
            that assume they're not in the room.

That's in the text.
            It's in our text.
And I mention it
            because a priestly kingdom
that hasn't noticed who it habitually addresses
            and who it habitually overlooks
is not yet the thing God is describing,
            and that is as true of us in 2026
            as it was of them in the wilderness.

Two: somebody asks, and not in good faith

So that's Sinai, where nobody asks.

Now come forward a very long way,
            to a courtyard in Jerusalem
            in the last week of somebody's life.

Matthew has been running a sequence of traps.

The chief priests and elders
            have tried Jesus on the question of authority.

The Pharisees and Herodians
            have tried him on the tax,
which was a beautiful trap
            and he walked straight through the middle of it.

The Sadducees have tried him on the resurrection
            with that ludicrous story
            about the woman and the seven brothers,
            and he's silenced them.

And now the Pharisees regroup,
            and they send in a lawyer –
a nomikos, a specialist in the law –
            and he asks the question
            we've been circling all morning.

Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?

Matthew tells us he asked it to test him.
            It isn't a seeker's question. It's an examination,
in the week when the examinations were getting serious,
            and everybody in that courtyard
            knew where this was heading.

And Jesus answers a hostile question
            by reciting the Shema. Deuteronomy six,
the words a faithful Jew says
            on waking and on lying down,
            the words written on the doorpost.

Love the Lord your God
            with all your heart
            and all your soul
            and all your mind.

And then he does something the lawyer didn't ask for.

He volunteers a second one, from Leviticus nineteen,
            and he says it's like the first.
You shall love your neighbour as yourself.

And then the line that only Matthew gives us:
            on these two commandments
            hang all the law and the prophets.

Hang. It's an ordinary enough verb
            and I don't want to build a cathedral on it.
But it is the word you use
            for something suspended,
something whose whole weight is carried
            by the point where it's fixed.

And the man saying it
            is about four days away
from hanging, on a Roman cross,
            outside the city wall,
which is what empires do to people
            who answer their questions like this.

I say that because the two great commandments
            have had a soft life among us.
Love God, love your neighbour –
            it's the sort of thing that gets printed on a banner,
            and it sounds like a recommendation to be nice.

It isn't. In Matthew it's said under interrogation
            by a man on his way to an execution,
and everything hangs on it,
            and he means everything.

The law and the prophets.
            The whole edifice.
If it doesn't come down
            to love of God and love of neighbour
then whatever else you're carrying,
            you're carrying it for nothing.

And notice, please,
            that Jesus does exactly what Sinai does.
He doesn't answer the question "what is required?" with a list.
            He answers it with a relationship, twice over.
Vertical and horizontal. God and neighbour.

And Matthew's Jesus refuses
            to let you have one without the other,
which is why the second is "like" the first –
            the Greek word here means of the same kind,
            cut from the same cloth.

You cannot love God
            in a way that leaves your neighbour untouched,
and you cannot love your neighbour
            in a way that has nothing to do with God,
and every attempt any of us has ever made
            to run one of those without the other
            has ended in something ugly.

Piety without justice curdles.
            Activism without contemplation burns out.
They are two sides of one coin
            and Jesus will not let us spend them separately.

Three: we ask, constantly

Which brings us here.

The question we ask, in church,
            in one form or another, week after week,
            is: what do I have to do?

What's required? Am I doing enough?

And underneath that question, almost always,
            is the older and more frightened one,
which is: do I belong here,
            and on what terms,
            and what would I have to do to lose it?

I want to say to you
            as plainly as I know how
that the Bible answers that question
            in the wrong order on purpose.

You are not being assessed.

The rescue is in the past tense.
            Nineteen comes before twenty,
and there is no version of this
            in which you demonstrate first and belong afterwards,
because God has already gone and done the belonging
            without waiting to see how you got on.

And then – then – having settled that, the commandments arrive,
            and they turn out not to be about you at all.

Read them again with Egypt in mind,
            because Egypt is what the prologue puts in mind.

Out of the house of slavery.

Every single commandment describes a society that is not Egypt.
            Don't murder, because in Egypt they threw babies in the river.
Don't steal, don't covet your neighbour's house
            or field or anything of his,
because coveting is precisely
            what an extractive economy runs on
            and the brick quota was where it ended up.

Keep the sabbath, and make sure your son
            and your daughter and your workers
            and the migrant in your town
            and even your animals get it too –
because Pharaoh gave nobody a day off,
            and when they complained
            he told them to make bricks without straw.

Walter Brueggemann calls the sabbath commandment
            an act of resistance and he's right.

The Decalogue isn't a purity code for individual souls.

It's the constitution of an alternative society,
            drafted by people who had recently escaped from the other kind
and knew exactly what they never wanted to build again.

And that's why Jesus reaches for Leviticus 19
            for the second commandment,
and I'd love you to go home
            and read the whole chapter,
because sixteen verses after
            "love your neighbour as yourself"
the same chapter says this:
            the alien who resides with you
            shall be to you as the citizen among you;
you shall love the alien as yourself –
            for you were aliens in the land of Egypt.

Same logic. Identical.
Your memory of having been a stranger
            is the engine of how you treat the stranger.
Not charity.
            Not generosity from a position of security. Memory.

So when we are told,
            as we are told constantly
            and from several directions at once,
that belonging in this country
            is something to be earned
            and evidenced and paid for and periodically re-proved,
and that some people's belonging is provisional
            in a way that other people's is not –
when we're told that,
            we are not being told something politically controversial
            that the church should stay out of.

We are being told something
            that runs directly against the First Word.

And there are people in this building this morning
            for whom that is not a debating point
            but a letter on the doormat,
and the church that reads Exodus 19 aloud on a Sunday
            and has nothing to say to them on the Monday
            has not understood what it read.

And I want to say this here,
            because it belongs in the sermon
            and not in the notices.

This isn't something we've only talked about.

Some of you were part of the community sponsorship
            that brought sisters here from Syria,
            and supported a couple from Afghanistan,
and you know what that actually involved –
            the paperwork and the housing
            and the endless phone calls,
the dentist and the doctor and the bus routes,
            and the ordinary, undramatic business
of standing alongside people
            while they built a life again.

It was hard. It took a long time.
And it is one of the truest things
            this church has ever done.

We want to do it again.

We're looking to build a new team,
            a bigger and stronger one this time,
            working alongside our partner churches.
So if something in you moved just then,
            or if you've been quietly waiting to be asked –
            come and talk to me.
I would be very glad of the conversation.

Because this is us, this is who we are called to be :
            A priestly kingdom. A holy nation.

Standing between God and the world,
            on the world's behalf.

That's the offer at Sinai
            and it's still the offer,
            and it's the only thing worth being.

So hear it in the right order,
            and hear it as the first and greatest word,
            the one that commands nothing:

I am the Lord your God,
            who brought you out of the land of Egypt,
            out of the house of slavery.

You were carried here.
            You didn't pass a test.
            You are not on probation.

The love came first,
            it has always come first,
and everything else we do together
            is simply what it looks like
            to have been loved like that in public.

Nineteen comes before twenty.

Thanks be to God.

The Patience of Christ

A Sermon for Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church

Sunday 12 July 2026

Ezekiel 34.1–6, 11–16 1 Timothy 1.12–17
Luke 15.4–7

Friends, it’s good to be back.

And "good to be back" is doing rather a lot of work in that sentence,
            not because I’m not glad to be here, I am.

But because there is a particular strangeness
            about walking into a building which is at once entirely familiar
            and somehow not quite where you left it.

Old friends greet you, and you remember them perfectly,
            but they have lived three months you’ve not been part of.

New rotas have started, new people have joined the church, (I hope!)
            …and one quietly discovers, walking back in,
that whatever sense of identity one had as Minister of this church
            doesn’t survive a long absence entirely intact.

It has to be picked up again, gently,
            like something fragile that someone has been keeping safe for you
            while you were away.

So before I say anything else this morning, I want to say thank you.
            To those who have preached and prayed and led,
            and served and made coffee and opened the door to strangers,
                        and wept with those who weep,
                        and rejoiced with those who rejoice,
            over the last twelve weeks.

A church does not stop being itself when its Minister steps away for a season.
            It does, however, become differently itself.
And one of the gifts of a sabbatical, perhaps the chief gift,
            is that you come back and discover
that what you thought you were holding together
            was being held together by something else all along.

Which is, I think, why this morning's reading
            from the first letter to Timothy lands where it does.
Because this is a letter written into precisely that situation.
            A church that is no longer in its first flush.
            A community that has lived through the absence of those who founded it.
            A second-generation Christian community in the city of Ephesus,
                        working out what it means to be the church
                        on the far side of the apostles.

Most scholars now think that the Pastoral Epistles,
            the two letters to Timothy and the letter to Titus,
were not written by Paul himself but in his name,
            by someone in the Pauline tradition perhaps a generation later.

That is not a scandal.
            It was an accepted way of writing in the ancient world.
And what it tells us is that there was a community who,
            faced with new questions and new pressures,
reached back to the voice of their founder
            and tried to speak with him into their own moment.

They asked, in effect, what would Paul say to us now?
            And then, with reverence and considerable nerve, they tried to say it.
That is, when you think about it, a deeply Baptist thing to do.
            To reach back into a tradition and to ask it to speak again.
            To trust that the voice of those who went before us
                        still has something to say,
            even when we are the ones who have to say it.

So here is "Paul," in the broadest sense,
            speaking into a church that is figuring out its identity.
And here is what he says.
            "I am grateful to Christ Jesus our Lord, who has strengthened me,
            because he judged me faithful and appointed me to his service,
            even though I was formerly a blasphemer, a persecutor,
            and a man of violence."

Notice those three words.
            A blasphemer slanders the holy.
            A persecutor hunts down those who follow a different path.
But the third descriptor is the one that makes me stop:
            The man of violence here is not just a thug.
The word carries the kind of arrogance
            which the ancient world thought even the gods would punish,
            the violence of the one who believes they have God on their side.

Paul is not merely confessing that he did harm.
            He is confessing the precise quality of the harm.
He had Scripture. He had tradition.
            He had the conviction that he was doing God's work.
And he was, in fact, terrorising the church.

That is not a small admission.
            And it doesn’t come from someone trying to soften his past.
It comes from someone who has looked at it with both eyes open
            and has refused to look away.

And the move that follows is the one I want us to sit with this morning.
            Because Paul does not say
            that he was forgiven despite his religious violence.
He says that he received mercy
            because his life now stands as a worked example,
                        a kind of living illustration,
            of what God's patience can do.

"I received mercy for this reason," he says,
            "that in me, as the foremost,
            Jesus Christ might display the utmost patience."

And the grace, he says, overflowed.
            Not abounded. Overflowed.
Grace did the thing, and then did more of it, and then did more.

I don’t want to leave this in the first century,
            because the text doesn’t let us.

The figure of the religious persecutor
            whose violence is sanctioned by sacred conviction
is not a museum piece.

We have seen, these past two and a half years,
            what religiously authorised violence looks like in real time.

We have watched the destruction of Gaza,
            and increasing settler incursions in the West Bank.
And we have heard Palestinian Christian theologians,
                        Munther Isaac chief among them,
            call out and critique the use of Scripture
                        to justify the killing of children.

Their gift to the wider church has been to insist that we name what we are seeing,
            and naming – as Paul came to discover – is where grace begins.

We have seen our own government equivocate and arm
            and refuse to call things by their proper names.

I name this not to score a point this morning,
            and not because I have come back from sabbatical
            with a list of things I am angry about,
though I will not pretend that anger has been absent from these three months.

I name it because the text is about precisely this,
            and a sermon that reads 1 Timothy 1
without naming the religious violence of our own moment
            would be a sermon that has lost its nerve.

But of course this is not only Gaza and the West Bank,
            it’s also Hamas and Hezbollah,
            and it’s the evils of European Antisemitism,
            and it’s America and the religious nationalist right,
            and it’s Sudan, and it’s Ukraine, and I could go on.
And it’s not just Christianity or Judaism or Islam,
            because all religions, and all nations that claim religion,
            are capable of enacting violence that they claim to be divinely sanctioned.

But notice what the text does and doesn’t do.
            It doesn’t say that the violence does not matter.
            It doesn’t say that grace makes the harm disappear.

What it says is harder than that.
            It says that grace can reach even there.

That a man who held coats while Stephen was stoned,
            who breathed threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord,
            became the apostle to the nations.

Not because his past was erased,
            but because his life was turned around,
            and the very thing that had been a weapon became a witness.

If grace can do that,
            then there is no one for whom we are permitted to give up hope.

Not the soldier. Not the settler. Not the politician.
            Not the person who uses God's name to justify cruelty and harm.
And, lest this become too comfortable, not ourselves either,
            on the days when we have stood by, or stayed quiet,
            or signed a petition and decided that was enough.

And friends, this is hard.
            Holding hope in the face of what we've watched is hard.
Refusing to give up on anyone,
            including the ones doing the harm,
including ourselves
            on the days we have not been who we wanted to be,
this is not something we can do
            by gritting our teeth and trying harder.

It is, in the end, a contemplative discipline before it is an activist one.
            Or rather, the two are the same discipline seen from different angles.

We can only hold space for the transformation of others
            because we have known ourselves held.
We can only refuse to draw lines around grace
            because we have felt the lines we drew around ourselves dissolve under it.

The patience that this text speaks of, the patience of Christ,
            is something we learn by being on the receiving end of it
            before we are ever asked to extend it.

And one of the things I'm grateful for, after three months away,
            is having had time to sit with that again.
Time to listen.
            Time to be reminded that whatever we do for justice and for peace
            is sustained not by our resolve but by being held.

Which brings us to the shepherd.
            Jesus tells the story, in Luke 15,
in the hearing of Pharisees and scribes
            who are grumbling that he eats with sinners.

A shepherd has a hundred sheep. One is lost.
            He leaves the ninety-nine in the wilderness,
            and goes after the one until he finds it.

And when he finds it, he puts it on his shoulders,
            and he calls his friends and neighbours, and he throws a party.

We have domesticated this story. We have made it sweet.
            But it’s not sweet. It’s barbed.
Because the people Jesus is telling it to
            would have heard the echo.

Ezekiel 34. The great chapter on the shepherds of Israel,
            in which God indicts the religious leaders of his own people
            for being shepherds who feed themselves and not the flock.

"You have not strengthened the weak," God says through the prophet,
            "you have not healed the sick,
            you have not bound up the injured,
            you have not brought back the strayed,
            you have not sought the lost."

And then God says, in the most extraordinary turn in the prophets:
            Very well. I will do it myself.
I will be the shepherd.
            I will go and find them.

So when Jesus tells the story of a shepherd who goes after the one,
            he’s not telling a pastoral parable.
He is telling Ezekiel 34.
            He is saying, this is what God's shepherding looks like,
            and you, religious leaders who are grumbling
                        because I eat with the wrong people,
            you are the shepherds who would not go.

Jesus is claiming that the party he is throwing with these tax collectors and sinners
            is a foretaste of the party heaven is throwing.
And he is critiquing those who are standing outside it
            complaining about the guest list.

The story of the lost sheep, in other words,
            is not a parable about how God loves us all very much in a general way.

Rather, it is a parable about a God
            who goes where the religious leadership refuses to go,
            and brings home the ones the religious leadership has written off.

Including, by the way, the religious leadership themselves,
            on the day they finally let themselves be carried.

Which brings us back to our writer in Ephesus,
            and the way he ends this passage.
Because if you’ve been paying attention,
            you will have noticed that the section closes
            not with an instruction but with a song.

"To the King of the ages, immortal, invisible, the only God,
            be honour and glory ever and ever. Amen."

It is easy to read this as decorative. A pious flourish.
            But it’s not.

In Ephesus, in the late first century, this is a fighting sentence.
            Ephesus was a city of many gods
                        and of one emperor who was also a god.
            To say that there is one King who reigns over all the ages,
                        immortal where Caesar is mortal,
                        invisible where the imperial statues are everywhere visible,
                        the only God where the pantheon offers so many,
            is politically pointed, to say the least.

The doxology is not an escape from the violence the passage has just named.
            It’s the alternative to it.

It is the declaration that the powers which license cruelty in God's name
            are not, in fact, God.

There is one King of the ages,
            and he is not on a throne in Rome,
and he is not in Washington or Westminster or Jerusalem,
            but rather he is the one whose patience has met us in Jesus Christ.

So. First Sunday back.
            What are we being invited into, you and I,
            as Bloomsbury, in the season ahead?

Three things. And I will be specific.

First, we are being invited to tell the truth about ourselves.

Not in a spirit of morbid self-examination,
            but in the sober honesty that this passage models.

The church that can name its complicities
            is the church that can be free of them.

We are not a perfect community.
            We have, like every church, our own histories of harm
            and silence and failure of nerve.

The invitation is to name them, gently and clearly,
            and to put them down at the feet of the King of the ages,
            who already knows.

Second, we are being invited to refuse to give up on anyone.
            And that includes the people we find easiest to write off.

The politicians we cannot bear to listen to.
            The Christians whose theology we believe is doing damage.
The members of our own families who have hurt us.
            The version of ourselves we have decided is beyond help.

Grace overflows, refuses to be measured,
            and we are not authorised to draw a line
            on the far side of which it cannot reach.

Third, and this is the one I most want us to hear this morning,
            we are being invited to keep singing.

To let the doxology be the floor under our feet.
            Because the work of being a church that tells the truth
            and refuses to write people off will cost us something.

And the only way to sustain it is to remember,
            every Sunday and every weekday in between,
who the King of the ages is,
            and that he is not, in the end, any of the kings
            who are trying to bend the world to their will this week.

It is indeed good to be back.
            And so let us go on together, in the patience of Christ.

Amen.