Wheat and Tares - political leaders

Ordinarily we tend not to talk about judgement too much. It is uncomfortable in our age of liberty to consider being brought to account. This week we have had a lot of talk of being held to account and even if the sense is a little different still it is in order that we can think about this in the context of tonight’s reading. Jesus’ parable begins with a good man, that is to say God the Father sowing good seed, actually the best seed, in the world and then another, the enemy Satan coming and sowing weeds amongst the good. Naturally the question for God is “Why do you allow evil to flourish in your field ?”

This is a question which used to come up often when I was attending a church in a city centre, especially at the late evening service attended by the young - “Why” they would ask does your God allow bad things to happen? “ And it is a good question in the context of the parable “after all master you are all powerful please pull the weeds up.” The answer we are given “but if we gather the weeds we may uproot the wheat” reminds me somewhat of the conversation between Abraham and the Lord which we find in Genesis (chapter 18).

‘Abraham came near and said : “Will you indeed sweep the righteous away with the wicked? Suppose there are fifty righteous within the city will you then sweep away the place and not forgive the fifty righteous that are in it?”  And the Lord said, “If I find at Sodom, fifty righteous in the city, I will forgive the whole place for their sake.” And you will recall that the conversation continues as Abraham progressively reduces the number of the righteous in the city.

I am not sure that the parable is quite so easily interpreted since the implication is that the weeds are there and cannot ever be other than weeds. It may be that the weeds in question were probably darnel which are difficult to distinguish from wheat in their early growth and in our post resurrection world it may be that the parable works better with this in mind. After all we have a gospel of forgiveness so weeds have an opportunity to transform - or if we have weeds in our lives then we have an opportunity to discern them and then transform them ourselves. (If your right hand causes you to sin …)

Jesus is of course talking about the kingdom of heaven and the day of judgement when the weeds and the wheat are fully developed. Then there will be no dissembling or cloaking God who knows all the secrets of our hearts will instruct the reapers to separate the wheat from the tares. It is the final snapshot, the harvest time has come and the yield is what it will be.

So it matters what we do. I have to say that watching recent events in our politics I wonder whether some have forgotten this. The intervention of our bishops is timely - and by the way to manage to get all the bishops to agree on a joint statement is astonishing, a rarity in my understanding. It matters how we behave, it matters how we speak and it matters what we do. If not propelled by the exigencies of our own world let us pray that our leaders may be compelled by the thought of the next.

Amen

Ways up the mountain : The Balkan National Park

My training incumbent who was especially interested in other faiths, notably Sikhism and HInduism, was fond of saying “There are many roads up the mountain” which he used as an analogy for seeking God. This has been on my mind recently for as you know Frances and I have been staying at the foot of the Balkan mountains in Bulgaria. Our hotel was the last building in the town and the footpaths up to the peaks started at the front door. The Central Balkan National Park is one of the largest and most valuable of the protected areas in Europe and is part of the United Nations List looked after by UNESCO and the World Wildlife Fund. There are centuries old forests of beech, spruce, fir, hornbeam and oak and the park includes ten species found nowhere else in the world. There are high mountain meadows, vertical rock faces, precipices, deep canyons, waterfalls and peaks and reports of wolves and bears. It does not begin at the hotel front door but 500 metres or so up - it is well worth reaching.

The many paths up the mountain are marked like this - painted on rocks or the trunks of trees there are green and blue trails leading to high altitude mountain refuges. Like my training incumbent’s paths to God, some of the signs seem clearer than others, easier to see and distinguish. Of course occasionally the paths run together so you have both signs on the same boulder, at other times they diverge and over time the blues and greens have faded a little and it is difficult to tell one from another. It becomes quite easy to take a wrong turning or perhaps drift from the path altogether.

What I particularly noticed on this trip was the incentive to climb! Even though it was quite hot, mostly between twenty-seven and thirty degrees and my energy levels were lower and my weight higher than when we had last taken a break of this sort, the way up, the reward of reaching a point was still a driver. It was easy to say “We’ll just look round the next corner.” We eventually acquired a map but before that we set off to reach what thought might be a refreshing mountain lake - we pressed on through woodland looking round corners ever upward following the stream until we recognized that we had missed it completely. We had strayed too high! 

Coming down is much less easy - the signs are designed to point the way upwards and on the way down they are so easily missed or ignored - only once did we manage to come down the right path and end up where we had started and often we were off the beaten track altogether.

You realise by now that this is an allegory of our journey of faith, there are various signs, more or less easily understood, convergence often with other faiths, as we explore truth, love, or peace; the perils of missing the way, that the signs naturally point upwards, the troubles of coming down. On our last ascent around 1200 metres up we came across a viewpoint looking over the valley, and there we found a set of metal tables and chairs, a playframe including a little slide, a running spring all of which had been in place for a long time and there also a tiny chapel beautifully built with tiny stained glass windows, a bell and just tall enough to step inside.
A resting place for the weary, a refreshment for the young, and inside  the chapel a wall of icons where the candles had been lit. There was no other way to be here other than on foot - someone had come up the mountain early in the morning before us, probably at dawn, and had prepared this sacred space for the travellers to rest and pray on the way to the summit.



Amen

To be trusted in a small thing

So if I am browsing in a second hand bookshop and I discover  a simple  but attractive  bookmark in a book that I do not decide to buy would it be legitimate do you think for me to move it into the book I do buy?

Here is a very small thing and you  may think it does not matter a jot - after all someone may or may not ever buy the book with the bookmark in it. But my even asking the question reveals something about my thinking.

Jack, who worked for me for a few years was in charge of buying company cars.
Now believe it or not there is little more emotive than this among the salesforce and the car aficionados. So there have to be rules. For me of course a car is a car (unless it is an MG of course then that is different) but otherwise it comes from the factory and I drive it. It takes me where I have to go. But there are some who add personal touches of upholstery, wheel trim, electronics and so on. The company policy allowed you to do this but only to a limited extent. The limits were there to avoid your Ford Escort being better equipped that the chairman’s Jaguar. And importantly for my story you had to pay for any extras yourself. Shortly after Jack ordered his own car he decided to leave the organisation. At that point while winding up his affairs some things came to light. Not only had Jack considerably exceeded the allowance for status enhancing trinkets he had not paid for them but rather added them to the cost of the vehicle. We were to be left with a long lease on a car of increased cost. So I summoned him and said “What is this I hear about you ?”
 He was not pleased and the conversation was a little difficult but I left him with a simple question “What are you going to do to put it right?”

Which is what the dishonest steward was doing. Having been caught out he set about managing his master’s estate and retrieving his debts. He tried to put things right. As we say in the Book of Common Prayer at evensong just before the absolution: 

“God desireth not the death of a sinner but that he turns from his wickedness and live.”

This then is what I think the master is commending the steward for : the steward found his master again returned to him and began to serve him. When we do wrong the solution to obtain God’s forgiveness is to turn back to God, to rediscover him.

But then Jesus in his conversation returns to my bookmark. He says this:  “He that is faithful in a very little is also faithful in much.” It is about the way we think. A way of thinking about the concluding famous observation “You cannot serve both God and Mammon” is to widen the definition of Mammon from our usual thoughts of richness, wealth and money perhaps from the abuse of the car policy that Jack was supposed to be policing -  There are two worlds- this earthly one and the eternal heavenly one. We serve either one or the other we cannot serve both.



Jesus is telling us that If we are to be trusted ultimately with the true wealth which are the gifts of eternal life then we need to behave in this world (with all of its dishonest wealth) as if we were in the other one or to put it more clearly we need to think and act as if we were already in heaven.

Amen

A cloud of witnesses

Since we have a cloud of witnesses: This is a neatly turned phrase and leads into one of the most evocative passages of the book of Hebrews. Paul having given us a host of historical examples - the crossing of the red sea, the falling of Jericho’s walls, Rahab, Barak, Gideon, Samson, David is about to press home his point with the ultimate example of Jesus and the resurrection. But does this retrospective work in today’s world? Paul would be unflattered indeed but I am minded of Jacob Rees-Mogg who notoriously begins many of his parliamentary speeches on current issues with historical parallels:

“I was thinking of Achilles sitting in his tent “ or
“I thought I would go back to Odysseus”

These do not really help; our knowledge of the classics has diminished and in any case it is all so far away from our time. I wonder then is our faith likely to be illuminated by the fall of the walls of Jericho, will they make a sufficient argument? Or have we dismissed the ancient miracles as being from a time before enlightenment and no longer pertinent to us?

But witnesses are important. My own curiosity to reestablish a connection with formal religion was stimulated by the witness of others. A man whose skills and comportment I admired was known to be a church going man - he did not flaunt that but it was a matter of general knowledge and was never denied. It made me pose the question, the one that Paul is trying to answer with his lists of past evidence of faith.

“If my man believes and practices then surely there must be something in it, I cannot simply dismiss it and in any case I want some of what he seems to have.”

Statistics show that by far most people come to faith in childhood, which is why the church spends such energy on the young. Today the regular and formal teaching of religion in schools, in assemblies and so on, a way of life until a few years ago is largely absent. Because of this there are large numbers of completely unchurched, those who have no idea of faith at all, as well as (and it is an ugly word I know) the dechurched, those who fell away as other interests took over in their lives, those who were driven away and there are diverse reasons for that and those who have been persuaded by modern secularism that there is no God.

So today the  witnesses are few. I am I know preaching to the choir, this is something we all know, but of course it makes it the more important that in our diminished cloud we witnesses well.

And we can - how interesting, by the way, that Dr. Ince having been persuaded to stand in the All Saints pulpit for better audibility said wittily “If only my mother could see me  now…” and after a moment of what seemed genuine reflection added “she would be proud.” You see despite the many failures of the churches, and they have been very great, there is still a general goodwill towards those who faithfully attend, who profess, and serve and I would say there is a hope that thoughtfulness, peacefulness, compassion, generosity, truthfulness will prevail - that the values we espouse will permeate the world.
We try to exhibit these, not ostentatiously, but gently and with humility and as far as possible consistently. In this way we ARE the cloud of witnesses and people will see it and will I pray say to themselves “I want some of that.”


Amen

Can we be ready?

Luke 12:32-40

There was a time when I had a boss who was more difficult than most and it took me a while to understand why. It turned out that he had been involved in a very serious industrial accident, suffering thirty degree burns, spending many months in hospital and having been expected to die. This had changed his whole attitude to life especially to taking risks and in his case not in a good way: he swapped out his wife for someone new, moved halfway across America, took up a new career, burned the candle at both ends and all at the same time. The trouble was he grafted his ideas onto others insisting for example that a quiet, shy, family man up sticks from the outlying suburbs of Cincinnati and move alone to Tokyo or face being fired. Following on from last week he “seized the day” alright and expected everybody else to follow. He was difficult to be around professionally and socially. There is a lesson to be drawn though:

It is one thing to read ”For the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour” and another to really feel and experience that. Greg felt it for for him the Son of Man had almost come, the house had been broken into and the thief was on the stairs. How much I wonder would our lives be changed if from the start we did know the hour of our death? It would perhaps make some things easier but in my view it is a mercy that we do not and it means of course that we do have to have the lamps lit and be dressed for action in case the master returns.

It is rather a frightening thought - will we be, are we ready? What shall we feel if Jesus came in that door just now, while we are all here,? I am sure we will recognize the Lord as he walks along past the hymn books, turns the corner in front of the wall painting of St. Christopher, and comes up this North aisle. But what will we feel, what will we be saying to ourselves, will we be ready?

Perhaps the confession from the morning service will be the most appropriate:

Almighty and most merciful Father, we have strayed from thy ways like lost sheep. We have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts. We have offended against thy holy laws.
We have left undone those things we ought to have done and we have done those things that we ought not to have done. And there is no health in us.
O Lord have mercy on us miserable offenders.

Or then again those words from the general confession - we have sinned in thought word and deed. Especially the thoughts, for Jesus knows all this, he knows every thought on our minds before it is formed, every word on our tongue before we hear them -  how can we be ready?

“Do not be afraid little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom.”

Please hear that “It is the Father’s pleasure to give us the kingdom; you may be aware of a strand of thinking that we earn our place in heaven but discard it. We can never really do that - the gift of eternal life, the gift of heavenly rest and peace, of the good things that the Father gives us are from his grace and we can be ready only when we live in a way that anticipates - our wicks are trimmed, our oil  replenished,  but which anticipates that meeting with Jesus here in the chapel knowing all and still taking pleasure in giving us his love.


Amen

Emerging from retreat

The first thing to say is that the generosity of the community of nuns at the Community of St. Mary the Virgin is so gently offered that you may overlook it. I arrive bearing the impedimenta of the world, car, telephone, computer, Google, not to mention maleness into a society that has lived together, reclusively, for years. They have grown older together, watched their sisters die, worshipped together and established a pattern of being which is focussed on their desire to know God more nearly. There is nothing boring, repetitive or unexciting about that nor I suspect about their lives as a whole but it is sustained by rhythm, peace and cadence. Yet I am welcomed (and many are welcomed) into the poem, breaking in as it were into a late stanza without the benefit of the earlier pages. This is my third year in Wantage, yet it is still, even knowing what to expect and what I came for, difficult to fall into the pattern, feeling awkward, atonal, making a colon where there should be a comma. Yet I am welcomed into their spaces, their chapels, libraries, refectory, garden and silences. The generosity so gently offered is overwhelming in magnitude.

Emerging from this into the town there are innumerable words, all around in snatches of caught conversation crashes of sound which are jarring. Firstly swearing, lots of it, outside the pub, from the windows of a passing car, among the school age, between friends somehow exchanging greetings, men women children. No poetry here, only a short drive from the dreaming spires; it is painful. The some mothers with small children issuing warnings: do not run you will fall and cut yourself, no you cannot have them now, you will drop them and lose them. Some lewd remarks are heard in the market square.

And all this, usually just so much background, is picked out unwantedly as I walk to sit on a bench in a graveyard and in doing so I recognize how truly generous the sisters have been.
But they know that.

Saul and succession

Last week there was a special Panorama programme on Brexit - I forget the title but essentially it told the story of three years of negotiations so perhaps it may have been “How did we get into this mess?” It is good sometimes to take a step back and review the whole picture away from the detail.

The lectionary we have been following from the first Book of Samuel is richly textured and tonight we reach the point where David and Jonathan realise that now a decision has to be made. How did they get there?

 Saul had been chosen as king by Samuel but when Saul does not obey God’s commands to kill the oxen, sheep men women and children of the defeated Amalekites Samuel explains that the kingship will pass to another. God commanded Samuel to go to Jesse of Bethlehem to anoint one of Jesse’s sons king. This is unknown to Saul but we of course know that it is David who is anointed to be the future king of Israel. Saul meantime is suffering from intense changes of mood which are of concern to his servants and retainers. They suggest he could be soothed by a harpist. Incidentally only this week a team from the University of Pennsylvania published the results of an experiment to show that music can dinish anxiety and lower blood pressure just as well as drugs. “Find a man to play to me “ he commands and David is duly found and brought to court. Whenever the spirit from God troubled Saul David took the harp and played, then Saul grew calm and recovered and the evil spirit left him.

Bur Saul remains anxious, he is aware that he has been rejected by Yahweh and he has to watch as David grows in stature and prowess and popularity. David slays Goliath and wins many battles against the Philistines - in the victory parades the women sing:

“Saul has killed his thousands
And David his tens of thousands.”

Saul was very angry, for this saying displeased him - they have ascribed to David tens of thousands but to me they have ascribed (only) thousands. And Saul eyed david from that day on! Eventually Saul is in such a rage that he decided to arrange for David to be killed. Warned by his friend and Saul’s son Jonathan, David escapes to be with Samuel for a while. Jonathan would like David to return to court and this is the substance of the present conversation. It is almost the last the friends will have - they agree a signal which will tell David whether Saul’s anger has or has not abated - it has not and David will be forced to flee not the wilderness once more.

As we have discovered in recent weeks succession is difficult, love of power and jealousy have not been diminished by the passage of the millennia - the human condition is the thing we Christians work to change.

Amen