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.
