Baptist Bookworm

Monday, 6 February 2023

Witch-hunts and Scape-goats

Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church
12 February 2023, 11.00am

Alice Nutter, Pendle Witch

Matthew 13.24-30, 36-43

Revelation 14.2-5, 14-16

A few years ago, Liz and I went on the trail of the Pendle witches.

It was a story I knew I’d heard of, but I didn’t know the details.

On the Witch Trial trail (which is harder to say than you might think),

we discovered a fascinating tale of murder and dark deeds in deepest Lancashire.

In brief, 400 years ago, in the shadow of Pendle Hill,

amid the pretty villages and sleepy fields,

suspicion started to grow that something wasn’t right

with some of the people who lived there.

Some women, probably medicine-women with skills in herbal healing,

were accused of witchcraft.

It’s possible that these women had actually come to believe

that they had the power to curse people,

and to access strange powers,

so there may at one level have been some truth in the accusation.

However, others got caught up in the accusations,

and in the end, twelve people were charged

with using witchcraft to commit multiple murder.

After a trial at Lancaster Castle, ten people were led outside and hanged.

The Pendle witches weren’t the only people charged with witchcraft in this period,

and the best estimate is that during the middle ages

approximately 500 people were executed for witchcraft.

This context of suspicion, which led to the ‘rooting out’ of the witches,

gives us the phrase ‘witch-hunt’,

which we continue to use to describe any such attempt to rid society

of those who represent a specific and feared practice or ideology.

From the Spanish Inquisition, which apparently no-one expected;

to the Salem Witch Trials of Massachusetts;

to the omniscient thought control of George Orwell’s fictional ‘Big Brother’;

to the McCarthyite ‘reds under the bed’ fears of the Cold War period;

to ongoing discrimination

against people from other countries,

and violence against those with black or brown skin;

- the tendency seems to be for us to reinvent the witch-hunt for each new generation.

Today is Racial Justice Sunday,

and this year marks the 30^th anniversary of the murder of Stephen Lawrence,

who was killed because he was black.

His mother, Baroness Doreen Lawrence, tells the story:

Racial Justice Sunday began in 1995,
two years after my son Stephen Lawrence
was murdered by a group of racist men
at a bus stop in London on 22 April 1993.

While much has changed in the 30 years since Stephen’s death,
too many things have not.
Too many young people still struggle to succeed
because they are disadvantaged by factors beyond their control,
and too many of the institutions upon which they should be able to rely,
are still infected with institutional racism
and the structures of bias and discrimination that uphold it.

She goes on…

The most profound social justice issues of our time
demand a collective response.
We must come together in coalition with brothers and sisters
from across the Christian community and beyond,
to ensure that the church itself is reflective
of the society we hope to build for future generations,
working together to end racism and discrimination in all its forms.

In Pendle in Lancashire, 400 years ago,

a largely rural culture took its worst fears, paranoia, and guilt,

and focused these on targeted individuals who were declared guilty

of a crime that they had not committed.

The structures of racism in our own world follow a similar pattern,

as people declare the minority guilty without cause

even as they declare themselves innocent

of demonstrable collusion in structures of oppression.

I found it particularly interesting that one of the guide books to the Pendle witch trials

says that "The evidence against them

was based on memories, hearsay and superstition."

In other words, whilst it appears to be important that the rule of law is followed,

actually the most important thing is to make the so-called guilty pay.

The role of the legal process becomes less about

establishing truth beyond reasonable doubt,

and more about allowing society to believe

that the witch-hunt has not taken it beyond the bounds of normal process.

This is why we end up with institutionalised racism

in those very structures in our society

that should be there to protect the vulnerable.

One of the characteristics of legal processes in a witch-hunt scenario

is that once accused, someone is popularly presumed guilty until proven innocent,

rather than the other way around.

The philosopher Rene Girard suggests that what we encounter

in situations such as the Pendle Witch Trials

is an example of a social phenomenon known as scape-goating.

The term scape-goat has its origins in the Old Testament,

in the book of Leviticus (16.21-22),

where we find a ritual described which has as its purpose the purification of society.

In this special ritual, the sins of the people

were symbolically laden on the head of a goat,

which was then driven away into the wilderness. [1]

This goat has become known as the ‘scape-goat’,

because it is sacrificed to atone for the sins of the whole population.

In modern language, we still speak of a scape-goat,

usually as a human victim, who is identified as an easy target

on which to discharge the accumulated hatreds of a community. [2]

Rene Girard says that the act of scape-goating isn’t simply a religious ritual,

but that it is rather an example of a universal human tendency.

Girard argues that at the base of human society is a drive, or instinct,

to imitate, to copy, to want to be like another person,

or to have what another person has.

This desire to imitate creates rivalries between people

that then have to be contained,

and Girard suggests that the rules of society

are attempts to contain the rivalries that would otherwise lead to violence.

Think of the child who has not yet learned to say ‘please’

– if they want something, they will attempt to just take it.

Eventually, and hopefully before they are strong enough to take it by force,

they will learn to say ‘please’,

and they will learn the rules of sharing,

and that sometimes you don’t always get what the other person has,

no matter how much you want it.

In other words, they learn the rules of society.

However, the rules just contain the desire, they don’t make it go away.

This is why capitalism is such an addictive ideology – but I digress.

The rules of society don’t banish the capacity for acquisitive violence

that lies within each human soul,

they just contain it,

and allow it to be exercised at a societal rather than individual level.

If I kill you because I want your stuff, society judges me guilty.

But if we all agree, as a nation,

that we want the land currently occupied by another group,

we justify together our military action to take it.

Which is why Palestine and Ukraine remain in our newspapers,

but again, I digress.

By this way of looking at things,

violence between two people

– me using violence to take what I want from you –

is contained.

But violence exercised on behalf of the many against the individual is sanctioned,

and even necessitated, as the legal system asserts its communal rule of law.

By the same token, violence exercised by the many

against another societal grouping is also justified.

In other words, if enough of us agree that it’s OK to go to war, then it’s OK.

And also, interestingly, if we do go to war,

there is then huge propaganda pressure to conform to that decision,

to cheer on and support ‘our boys at the front’.

But again, I digress.

Girard goes on, and takes his argument one stage further,

and this is where he starts to shed light on the language of the scape-goat,

on the practice of the witch-hunt.

Sometimes, he says, the conflicts within a society

cannot be contained by the civilising rules

that the community has developed.

An atmosphere develops of fear, suspicion, and distrust

between members of the society.

Mob rule threatens, and riot is just below the surface.

Eventually two or more individuals converge on the same adversary,

and then others mimic them in this,

so that in the end everybody gets drawn into a united hatred

of the targeted adversary.

As Stephen Finamore puts it,

‘The undifferentiated and unified mob converges

on one arbitrarily selected individual.’ [3]

Violence against the one, or possibly the few,

acts as a catharsis for the wider society,

expelling hostile and violent emotions from the group,

and producing a sense of calm, harmony, and peace.

The group agrees that the scape-goat must die,

the group enacts the sacrifice,

and the group feels better as a result.

By this understanding, the scapegoating of the few

serves a wider sociological function,

by assuaging the guilt of the many.

And so there is an inbuilt human tendency to scapegoat,

to witch-hunt, to name certain people as ‘other’, as ‘evil’,

and to take collective action against them.

Because if we all unite in hating them,

maybe we won’t hate each other as much, at least today.

And so we love to root out the evil,

to leave no stone unturned in our efforts to rid society

of the ones we have deemed unrighteous.

We embark on a crusade, we condemn them to hell,

because by doing so we rid ourselves

of that which makes us most afraid.

There is a certain type of religious person

who longs to root out evil in all its forms,

and to establish the rule and reign of the righteous on the earth.

They have always existed, and they probably always will.

And the current zealous campaigning
  against the full inclusion of LGBTQ+ people in church life
is the latest damaging incarnation of an ancient tendency
  to vilify and exclude the minority
by declaring them guilty of sin in such a way
  that the majority can then declare themselves not guilty of their sins.

The parable of the wheat and the weeds,

or the wheat and the tares as it is more traditionally known,

has its origin in a society that knew all about such religious extremism.

From the Zealots, eager to rid the land of the polluting and corrupting Romans;

to the Pharisees, eager to fight against pagans on the one hand,

and against compromised Jews on the other,

there were plenty of people around in Jesus’ day

who were desperate to rid society of evil.

In the parable of the wheat and the weeds,

Jesus offers a direct challenge to the mindset of scapegoating,

to the practice of the witch-hunt.

There’s no point, says Jesus, in trying to root out all evil from within human society,

because it can’t be done.

All you will do is damage the good that is growing there alongside the evil,

and the whole harvest will be lost.

So at one level, this is a parable that urges patience, forbearance, and perseverance.

However frustrating it may feel

to have to continue living alongside the unrighteous,

it’s not our job as humans to purify society.

But at another level, the parable offers a deep insight

into the nature of the human soul:

the reason we cannot root out evil from our midst

is because the evil is not actually ‘out there’ at all.

It is within each one of us.

It’s not just society that’s a mixed field of wheat and weeds;

it’s me, and you,

and each and every complex person on this complex planet.

As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn put it,

‘the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human.’

The task of the religious extremist

is shown by Jesus to be an impossible task,

because one cannot ultimately purify the human soul

through the exercising of violence,

however apparently well intentioned,

and however legally mandated, that violence might be.

People keep trying, of course, because it seems so enticing;

when we scape-goat the ‘other’, when we embark on a witch-hunt,

we feel so righteous;

we know we are right and innocent,

and they, whoever they are, are guilty and deserve their fate.

And yet, of course, none of us are innocent.

All of us desire that which belongs to the other,

all of us want what it not ours to have,

all of us long to reach out and take, by force if necessary,

that which will make us complete.

And so the crusade doesn’t work.

The inquisition doesn’t work.

The holy war doesn’t work.

There must be another way.

Well, says Jesus, there is.

Let the wheat and the weeds grow side by side.

Don’t spoil the harvest by rooting it all out too early.

Let God be the judge of what is of value and what has no value.

The thing about weeds and wheat is that,

until the harvest is mature,

it is very hard to tell the one from the other.

You get some wheat the looks like weeds,

and you get some weeds that look like wheat.

So don’t judge others, lest you yourself be judged,

as Jesus puts it earlier in the gospel (Matt. 7.1).

Each of us is a mixed bag of wheat and weeds.

There are things in my life that have no eternal value,

and which need to be consigned to the flames for all eternity.

There are things in my life that are pleasing to God,

and which he will hold safe in his eternal storehouse for evermore.

I am weeds, and I am wheat.

As are we all.

The only purification of the human soul that carries eternal value

is the judgment of God.

The only purification of the societies we construct

that carries eternal value is the judgment of God.

And all human attempts to enact that judgment on God’s behalf

become scapegoating and witch-hunting:

temporary fixes to assuage our guilt, that ultimately damage us all,

as the weeding out of the few destroys the harvest of the many.

The only scapegoat that has the capacity to take the sins of us all,

and remove them from us for all eternity,

is the sinless one who was sacrificed on the cross

for the forgiveness of the many (Heb. 13.11-12).

And yet, still human society attempts to purify itself,

to scapegoat the hated and feared ‘other’

in a desire to unite against the common foe for the good of us all.

Some seek to purify humanity by planting bombs on planes and trains.

Some by naming and shaming.

Some by manipulation.

Certain quarters of the press and media take great delight, it seems,

in dwelling upon the sins of others;

all in the public interest, of course,

for the good of the many.

Sometimes those who are scapegoated are entirely innocent.

They have done nothing to deserve their denigration,

and they are simply declared guilty

in the absence of evidence of innocence.

The language of ‘illegal migrants’ is often used

to describe those who have come to the UK as refugees to seek asylum.

And this designation of them as ‘illegal’ offers a justification for their incarceration,

and for their inhumane or sub-human treatment

through forced destitution, detention, and deportation. [4]

Similarly, the attempts to turn public opinion
against those who are striking for fairer wages,
is another example of how blame can quickly become focussed
on the very people who we ought to be valuing and protecting.

But as Paul puts it in his letter to the Romans,

‘all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God’ (Rom. 3:23).

Each of us is wheat and weeds.

Each of us wants that which it is not ours to take.

Each of us is in need of mercy, and forgiveness, and grace.

Each of us has the capacity to join the mob,

to assuage our guilt through the scapegoating of the few.

Yet each of us also receives forgiveness

from the one who went to the cross for the sins of the many.

Each of us receives forgiveness

from the only one who is in a position to judge us.

Each of us is touched by the grace of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus,

who has set us free from the law of sin and of death. (Rom. 8.2).

[1] Eerdman’s Commentary on the Bible, p. 114

[2] Eerdman’s Commentary on the Bible, p. 115

[3] Finamore, God, Order and Chaos, p. 72

[4] http://www.newstatesman.com/uk-politics/2013/09/uk-media-needs-stop-referring-refugees-illegal-immigrants

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.