Summer Fair!

 

Of corn and clay pots

 Trinity 1 (Proper 4) Year B – Eucharist – 2.vi.2024

(Deuteronomy 5.12-15; 

2 Corinthians 4.5-12; 

Mark 2.23-36)

One sabbath Jesus was going through the cornfields; and as they made their way his disciples began to pluck heads of grain.  The Pharisees said to Jesus, ‘Look, why are they doing what is not lawful on the sabbath?’

The Pharisees accuse Jesus’ disciples of breaking one of the commandments of the Law. They are walking through the fields and start plucking at the growing stalks to take the grain. It’s not that they are trespassing. It’s not that they are guilty of theft in stealing the farmer’s corn. Their crime is of breaking the commandment that they should keep the sabbath – that they should refrain from work on the holy day of the week.

People these days may not give much thought to that piece of Jewish Law. It first appears in the Book of Exodus chapter 20, when Moses receives the Commandments from God on Mount Sinai. Today’s First Reading from the Book of Deuteronomy repeats that Commandment in a slightly different form. But what you can say of both is that if you take the list of the Ten Commandments it’s this one – to observe the Sabbath as a day of rest, a day to refrain from working – which is the longest. The injunction to refrain from idolatry comes pretty close in terms of length. But what we might consider to be the most serious of the Commandments almost trip off the tongue in terms of their brevity: “You shall not murder. You shall not commit adultery. You shall not steal.” Even “Honour your father and your mother…” gets no more than a single sentence.

“Remember the Sabbath day… Observe the sabbath day and keep it holy…” It’s this Commandment which is given most space in the Jewish Law. So when the Pharisees complain to Jesus about what his disciples are doing, they feel they have a serious point to make. Even walking more than a certain distance on the Sabbath day was restricted – and still is in modern Jewish observance. Plucking ears of wheat was prohibited because any gathering of grain from the fields counted as work.

But Jesus disagrees; “The sabbath was made for humankind and not humankind for the sabbath…” His words have become a proverb that people sometimes still quote in its non-inclusive form: “The sabbath was made for man, not man for the sabbath.” You’ll probably agree. But it shouldn’t be quoted just to justify doing whatever you want. That’s what I want you to remember: that this Commandment is the longest of those you’ll find amongst those given to Moses as the Jewish Law.

Look up the Ten Commandments and you’ll find you’re given not just a rule – you’re also given a reason. It’s because there are six days when you can get on with your everyday jobs or labour. Most people now would say that five days of work is quite enough. You need time off, time for something different. In the version of the Ten Commandments which you find in Exodus there’s a reason given – that God created the heavens and the earth in six days and rested on the seventh. Both Exodus and Deuteronomy say that you need to be able to rest from work – and not only you, but the people you share your home with, and even slaves, livestock and foreigners who have come from outside the community. Think of how politicians talk about curbing immigration, but at the same time our care system would collapse without those people who have come from abroad. There needs to be protection for all. When many politicians may speak of the need for “flexible working practices,” we have to ask – are they simply seeking to justify the exploitation of people who are forced into working when they really could do with some time off. “Workers’ rights” go right back into the Old Testament. And the reading from Deuteronomy has Moses remind his people: “Remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt…” Remember how you were mistreated there. Think of what it means to have been set free. So don’t condemn yourselves to continual labour once again. And think of how you should treat other people too…

Perhaps the Pharisees push things too far. They want to catch Jesus out. When he heals a man in the synagogue on the sabbath they don’t say anything, but they get together to think of whether they can use it as a pretext to take action against him.

What Jesus says – and what is fundamentally the reason for this longest of the commandments – is that humanity is what counts. Take seriously our own human needs, our need to be relieved from the grind of work and the burden of labour. Our need for refreshment. Our need of space for renewal, so that we can regain our perspective. And in remembering this commandment, see that it applies not only to us but to other people whose work we might take for granted – see that it’s about people we might take for granted.

St. Paul in our reading from 2 Corinthians speaks of his task as “proclaiming Christ as Lord,” and says we should understand ourselves as “slaves for Jesus’ sake.” But that’s not a slavery of exploitation. It’s about finding God’s glory in Jesus – and that’s to say that God himself is revealed to have a human face.

Paul goes on with words that are so important: “We have this treasure in clay jars…” We are called to contain all that God gives us. We may feel that we are taken for granted; we may take ourselves for granted. But we are precious because God calls us to be vessels of his Holy Spirit. In those tasks we undertake, God gives us a purpose. There are times when life gets us down: “We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed…,” but then he adds, “not driven to despair.” Times when we feel “persecuted” – but not forsaken; “struck down” – but not destroyed.

How can we live our lives as Christians? It’s all a journey. That’s something we learn from the first disciples to follow Jesus. They leave their daily labour to discover something new. So much of what they learn seems to come not from words with which they are taught but simply from being with Jesus – there they are in today’s Gospel, walking with Jesus in the fields. It’s as they go that they discover new ways of looking at what they had taken for granted.

We need to find time to detach ourselves from the concerns which so much preoccupy us. We learn about God’s will for us not only through study, but by making space for God – in silence and stillness, in finding joy as we recognise the gifts of creation and renewal which he holds before us. We might count ourselves to be “clay jars,” like common fragile pots -  not to be taken for granted or ready to be broken, but so that we may find our calling to hold the treasures we receive from God. If God’s love is to be made visible, it is to be made visible through us.

On friendship

 6th Sunday of Easter– Eucharist – 5.v.2024

(Acts 10.44-48; 1 John 5.1-6; John 15.9-17)

Some words from today’s Gospel:

“You are my friends.... I do not call you servants any longer, … I have called you friends…”

Forget for a moment the words I’ve missed out – it’s the emphasis on friendship that concerns me here… Here’s a poem by a priest, R S Thomas, who had something of a reputation for grouchiness:

A pen appeared, and god said

"Write what it is to be

Man." And my hand hovered

long over the page

until there, like footprints

of the lost traveller, letters

took shape on the page’s

blankness and I spelled out

the word "lonely" And my hand moved

to erase it, but the voices

of all those waiting at life’s

window cried out loud “It is true.”

This is R.S.Thomas’s poem, “The Word.” Pretty well the antithesis of those words of Jesus I first quoted. Thomas was writing not just as a poet but as a priest who wrestled with the human condition and the barriers we find in communication with God and other people. What he says is what people often want to avoid saying. Where we try to be chirpy and answer the question, “How are you?” with that expected non-threatening response, “Fine,” Thomas instead is embarrassingly honest… “Write what it is to be a man”… “and I spelled out the word ‘lonely.’

I wonder how R S Thomas would fare if he were going through the selection process for ordination today. One of the questions candidates for ordained ministry are asked when they get to the stage of facing a diocesan selection panel concerns how they relate to other people. How are relationships in their family? And what about “friendships”? It’s the interpretation they give to that question which has interested me. Giving their answer, people will say they have anything from two or three close friends to many hundreds. It used to be the Christmas card list that could get out of control. Now people can’t afford the stamps for that, but instead people might reckon up the hundreds or even thousands of “Facebook friends” they have. But do they count? What constitutes a “friend”? Sometimes you might just think, I’ve got the wrong people on this list! When people start a speech off by addressing everyone as “Friends,” you might wonder whether they really have you in mind – and if so, what do they mean by “friend”? It’s a warning to politicians who might well come out the worse for wear if their audience is truly honest, and to clergy who address their entire Parish Magazine readership as “My Dear Friends…” – and then put the same letter before the whole world on the Internet. A businessman once said to me, “I don’t have friends, just acquaintances…” That’s a depressing observation, not least for its honesty. In our churches I hope we can do better, but there is a trap where in seeking to be friends with everyone, you end up being friends with no one in particular. 

Friendships can mark us and form us as the people we are. R S Thomas thought that the human condition was “lonely”, but that’s a heart-breaking observation that perceives what is missing in the lives of people who have come to think that way. We need other people. We need friendships which remain real despite the distance of space and time. We need people who are there for us when we need them – and at the same time need a readiness to be a friend to them through all the life-changes we experience. And we need an openness to celebrate new friendships. It’s something I find really moving when some one says, “May I count you as a friend?” It’s a question that needs to be asked more often…

That’s where our relationships within our churches can be so important. I’m so much moved when I see people who are there for each other – ready to talk, knowing when to be quiet, offering support gently when it’s needed. It’s something I find often at funerals when you see who is there and realise just how much that particular person had meant to so many people; perhaps how much support those present had given, how much the person they are there to mourn had been someone who had brought many different people together. I found that last week in taking the funeral of Angela, “the lady with the dog,” as so many people knew her. Angela had her own particular needs – but also the gift of putting people on the spot. She’d talk to people in the street; sometimes she would knock on their door; some of us she would phone; she’d turn up before opening time at Christmas and Summer Fairs at St. Cuthbert’s - and go home loaded down with tombola prizes. How you responded, I realised, said something about you / about me. She was ready to be your friend – and sometimes friendships can be testing. Are we ready to be friends to others?

Sometimes people say, “Don’t presume upon friendships.” I’ve found myself pondering whether this is a good rule. And this is where we need to get theological. The Book of Common Prayer, in its current edition dating back to 1662, includes the wonderfully-named Prayer of Humble Access for use at Holy Communion: “We do not presume to come to this thy Table, O Lord…” it begins. Don’t make presumptions, it seems to say. But then there is a twist in the prayer. What you should not presume is your own state of worthiness: “We do not presume to come to this thy Table,… trusting in our own righteousness, but in thy manifold and great mercies.” You can presume when it comes to your relationship with God in Christ, for Christ has made us his friends and called us to his table. “I have called you friends.” These are his words in today’s Gospel – his call to us is to sit with him and eat. The modern version of that prayer you’ll find in our “Common Worship” booklets on page 10: “Most merciful Lord, your love compels us to come in.” This version misses out the reference to presumption – and perhaps a problem in modern society is that people presume just too much! – but it gets it right that it’s God who takes the initiative in calling us into fellowship with him. “You are my friends…” says Jesus, and he calls us to be friends to him and to each other.

St Gregory of Nyssa – in the 4th century – wrote:

This is true perfection:

not to avoid a wicked life

because we fear punishment,

like slaves; not to

do good because we

expect repayment, as

if cashing in on the

virtuous life by enforcing

some business deal.

On the contrary,

disregarding all those

good things which we

do hope for and which

God has promised us, we

regard falling from God’s

friendship as the only

thing dreadful, and we

consider becoming

God’s friend the only

thing truly worthwhile.

For Gregory, friendship with God was the one essential. Everything else followed from it. God loves us, and we see it because he doesn’t count the cost when he sends his Son into our world. Here is someone who will go to the Cross for us. But he reminds us: “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” Love and friendship are there to be given and received freely, without charge. We are called to be friends of God and friends to each other.

But can we do it? Don’t we find ourselves counting the cost? Can I afford to be his or her friend, we might find ourselves asking? That’s when friendship can be seen to cause obligation. It’s to fall into the trap of thinking that if we are to be a particular person’s friend then we have to emulate his lifestyle, reciprocate with presents of similar worth and match the magnificence of their dinner party invitations… The fact is that friendship does need to be worked at, but never so that you lose sight of who you really are, never so that friendship with one person or group causes you to shun another.

“You are my friends if you do what I command you,” says Jesus – “that you love one another.” The new commandment of Jesus is not an order that he lays upon us. 

“You are my friends… love one another…” People with the wrong idea might expect that if God gets mixed up with this world and wants to put things right he would “lay down the law.” But he doesn’t. Christ comes not to lay down the law, but to lay down his life. God takes the initiative of friendship with his people. He loves us, and draws us into his love. He counts us his friends, in a friendship that we can presume upon, in a friendship we are to share with others.

Vocation Sunday – a living or a life?

 4th Sunday of Easter– Eucharist – 21.iv.2024

(Acts 4.5-12; 1 John 3.16-24; John 10.11-18)

‘We know love by this, that the Son of God laid down his life for us – and we ought to lay down our lives for one another.’ (1 John 3.16)

There are days when you can wake up and think, “I just don’t know how much longer I can go on doing this.” Perhaps that’s not something that everyone feels, I’m not sure that even most people have felt it, certainly I hope not most of the time. But at least some people will say those words – and say them some of the time.

“I don’t know how much longer I can take this…” It might come out in words like these, and it might be said about marriage or some other relationship which is being endured – which saps the spirit rather than builds it up. It might be the experience of illness, borne personally or in caring for a loved one who gets no better and whose needs are ever greater and more demanding. “I don’t know how much longer I can stand this…” someone might say when they are the victim of misunderstanding or find themselves in the midst of a mess of their own personal making. Or it might be work and pressures which overwhelm rather than fulfill the individual.

What allows you to be the person you really are, rather than the individual you are forced into being? And what keeps you going regardless of all those pressures bearing upon you? I ask these questions because today is observed by the Church as “Vocations Sunday” – and vocation is about the recognition of calling, about seeing what I am called to be… more than a job, beyond planning a career, and where you need to hold in balance circumstance and reality.

From time to time I get asked – frequently by children and teenagers, “How old were you when you decided to become a Vicar?” I remember being asked that by one of my children! I didn’t normally expect questions like that from him that might require some profound attention to what I’ve been doing with my life. But the question arose from the vulnerability that young people might feel when the pressure is on them to make choices… How you decide when you’re that young what subjects you want to pursue at A-level or university? How do you know what job you might want to do? What if you might make the wrong choice? These days it’s the case that most people will be expected to make several career changes during the course of their working lives, but that’s not much comfort when you’re starting out and that first big choice confronts you. I suspect that it was much easier when I was growing up. There were no fees to find for a university education, you could do what you want, many people finished their degrees not much clearer about what they were going to do with their lives – there just seemed to be much more time available before those critical choices had to be made.

But of course the question that gets put to me, “How old were you when you decided to become a Vicar?”  - it’s the wrong question. I’m not sure I ever decided to become a Vicar. Being a “Vicar” is a job – in fact it’s a job-title, though a convenient one and rather easier to get your tongue round than “priest-in-charge” which is what my job title is in the parish of Castleside, as opposed to being Vicar of Benfieldside. I’m only a “Vicar” because first of all I’m a priest – and being a priest is both more and less than a job. A job is something you do. A priest is only something you can be. You’re ordained to it – something about you is said to be changed by ordination, but only after it’s first recognised that it has to do with the person you are. There’s careful assessment in the selection of clergy, but fundamentally the issue which prevails above any question of abilities and skills is, “who is this person? – what is at the root of their being? – how are they being called to respond to God’s calling?” And if that sounds terribly profound, it’s not because there is a set of answers which can be ticked, and mean you can go forward successfully to be ordained. It’s because they are questions which need to be answered about each and every person if we are truly to respond to God. Everyone has a calling if we are truly God’s people. It’s a calling that needs to be addressed from the time of our baptism – individuals known by name, baptized in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. From that time on God lives in us, we live our lives in God. But do we recognize it? What difference will it make to our lives? What is God calling me to be? 

And the answer can be worked out in many career choices, as people do many jobs. The call to priesthood doesn’t necessarily require working it out by doing one particular job. Many people continue a secular job day-by-day in a variety of careers. Our own Phil Carter has been ordained after retirement from a life of teaching. Since ordination I’ve always been one of the stipendiary clergy – paid by the Church – but it doesn’t always have to be that way, and I would still go on being a priest, whether paid or not. I might be nearing the time when I have to retire, but I’ll still go on being a priest. “I don’t know how much longer I can go on like this…” That’s a statement that perhaps in the future won’t be so much an indication of desperation as a statement of financial reality if the Church simply finds itself unable to pay its clergy – but they wouldn’t stop being priests.

Vocation – and the question of what constitutes a call from God – is something that sometimes has to be addressed in the most difficult of circumstances. When I have found the going tough, I have had to recognize just how many other people have to carry on with their own lives and in their own calling. If I found it tough to be a single parent and a priest, just how tough is it for anyone else? Can you be a single parent and a Christian? Yes, of course! So whatever people might have gone through in difficult times, everyone has to ask the question, “What is God saying to me?” “What particular task or calling does God have for me?” A church which recognizes the realities of daily living will be a church in which clergy and lay people with a particular call to ministry will find those realities bearing personally upon them.

“How much longer can I go on like this?” For me as a priest there needs to be a reality to my calling. For anyone I’d say that being tested in your calling – in the circumstances of daily life – is not the same as the denial of that calling. Asking myself - where should I be now? - I’ve learned to appreciate so much more where other people are in their lives, how they fulfil their callings. You can change a job, but it doesn’t mean that you give up a calling. I could stop being a Vicar, but I’d go on being a priest. I’ve learned that you can cease to be a husband, but I can’t envisage not being a father.

That’s about being what I am… who I am. Priesthood is not just about me – that wouldn’t be priesthood, because the priest should exercise priesthood to enable people in their own vocation and calling. You can’t be a priest on your own. You need support – support which I’ve learned to value so much. And you need to recognize what other people must be enabled to do by the fact of your priesthood.

Prayer is fundamental. “How can I go on?” There are those disciplines which you simply do. Like prayer. And if the priest needs to get on with prayer as part of the stuff of daily living, then it’s something for every other Christian too. Love is the other fundamental. Love in which we so frequently fail, but which is nevertheless our motivation and the basis of our calling. The recognition of love is the recognition of our being in God. Which brings me back to those words from our 2nd reading with which I began: ‘We know love by this, that the Son of God laid down his life for us – and we ought to lay down our lives for one another.’

Calling us by name

Easter Day – Eucharist – 31.iii.2024

(Acts 10.34-43; John 20.1-18)

“They put him to death by hanging him on a tree; but God raised him on the third day and allowed him to appear, not to all the people but to us who were chosen by God…”

Today we have a choice of Gospel readings – either Mark’s or John’s account of the Resurrection. I’ve been very much torn as to which to choose. But the reading we’re told always to have is not from the Gospel at all. It’s from the Acts of the Apostles where we find these words spoken by Peter the Apostle. However confused the story of Jesus’ death and resurrection might have become – and we find marked differences in the accounts of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John – there are two things that are clear: that Jesus died on the Cross; and on the third day he rose again… and he rose because God raised him. This is the heart of the Easter Gospel: Passion and Resurrection; the coldness, reality and inescapable fact of death – and the new life of the Risen Christ. 

But how we experience that will vary from person to person. There is some confusion between the Gospels as to who is the first witness to the Resurrection. In today’s choice of Gospels, Mark and John agree that it’s Mary Magdalene who first finds the stone which had blocked the entrance to Jesus’ tomb now rolled back. But while in Mark’s account Mary and the other women enter the tomb to find a young man dressed in white telling them that Jesus has risen, St. John’s Gospel has Mary leave as soon as she finds the stone moved, so that it’s Peter and an unnamed disciple who first make their way into the tomb to find it empty. We might wonder what is going on? And perhaps this is part of the truth of Easter - that the writers of the Gospel don’t feel obliged to get their story agreed between them. This is not a fiction artfully constructed. It’s the simple record – with all the confusion of the day - of the undeniable fact of the Resurrection. So our readings today start with Peter’s testimony in the Acts of the Apostles. Jesus died – and he rose again. The risen Jesus has appeared and there are people who saw it, but it’s not for everyone to need to see it. The Resurrection is more than an event you need to witness personally for yourself.

And Resurrection is more than finding a resuscitated body. It’s first of all an empty tomb. But an empty tomb is not proof of Resurrection. In St. John’s account, Peter does not know what to make of this vacated space with its empty grave clothes. The disciple who accompanies him says that he went in and believed – but he still hasn’t put it all together… as John tells us, “as yet they did not understand the scripture, that he must rise from the dead.” It will take time before the truth of what they are witnessing sinks in. The Easter story is something that tells us that we can believe – and faith can be a very real thing – but we still won’t necessarily be able to make sense of every problem or setback that life has in store for us us. That’s what Resurrection is about: God active and alive, something we can believe in, even when we don’t feel or understand it.

How is it for Mary Magdalene, the first person to discover the tomb disturbed? St. John tells us that she found the stone moved,.. and she ran for it! Someone must have taken the body of Jesus away. There’s more agreement between Mark and John as to what happened next: when she finally looks into the tomb she finds either one or two men dressed in white. In Mark’s Gospel she and the other women are told that Jesus has been raised – and the disciples will see him… at which they flee in terror. St Mark’s account ends saying that they couldn’t tell anyone about this, because “they were afraid.” And there’s little comfort in St. John’s account. The angels ask why she is weeping. She can only state the obvious that she weeps for her Lord, killed on a cross, and it seems his body cannot even be left in peace. Mary, before she can experience the fullness of Christ’s Resurrection has to acknowledge her loss. For us Easter faith is not a miracle cure for all our woes. It can come only when we recognise the extent of our fears and anxieties, all those issues we would rather not own up to which sap our spirit...

There’s an Easter hymn that strikes a chord for me:

When our hearts are wintry, grieving or in pain,

thy touch can call us back to life again,

fields of our hearts that dead and bare have been:

love is come again like wheat that springeth green.

Easter is not a matter merely of addressing the historical facts of the Resurrection, the emptiness of the Tomb, and the nature of Christ’s Risen Body. Easter is the time when we need to let God address us, to bring before him in Christ those ‘fields of our hearts that dead and bare have been.’ At Easter we do not shy away from the darkness within our souls, the wintry hearts, the grief and pain we may bear. But we find this one man who has been through it all before us: loving those about him, bringing life into broken bodies and relationships, a man who knows the full extent of human joy and sorrow, yet also experiences the pain of betrayal, the anguish of being deserted by friends in his time of greatest need; even on the Cross he has spoken words of care and forgiveness; until finally he has entered even into death itself and the darkness of the tomb. 

Only when Mary can say why she weeps does she turn to find the risen Jesus standing by her all along. She thinks he’s just the gardener, though something moves her to share her grief with him. It’s his response which brings home the truth of Easter to her. He simply speaks her name: “Mary.” It was Jesus who by his touch had brought her healing when they first met. Now he touches her by saying her name – this is how God comes to her in Christ; this is how we know that God knows us and is alive to touch our hearts.

Jesus loves us literally to death – his own death. So that his risen life is life for us all, if only we are ready to accept it. He speaks to us as he spoke to Mary. ‘I have called you by your name, you are mine,’ go the words of a chorus. And how true that is! That is why the use of our name at Baptism is so important. Christ calls to us from the start, whether we hear him or not. 

In a few moments we will renew our Baptismal Vows. As you declare your faith, remember that at your Baptism you were called by your name as the water was poured over you. As we are baptised in Christ he calls us by our name. Will we recognise him as he calls? Will we see him in the stranger, even as Mary finds him in a man she thought was a gardener? Will we find him in our neighbour, in our friends, in those from whom we are divided by misunderstanding and the inadequacy of communication or the frailty of our love?...

... love lives again, that with the dead has been:

love is come again like wheat that springeth green....

 

Forth he came at Easter, like the risen grain,

he that for three days [....] in the grave had lain,

quick from the dead my risen Lord is seen:

love is come again like wheat that springeth green.

Alleluia. Christ is risen! He is risen indeed. Alleluia!

Holy Week at St. Cuthbert's Church, Shotley Bridge

 

Holy Week at St. John's Church, Castleside