In the name of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, Amen.
Yesterday, 9 November, is a date of great significance for Germany. As the media has been reminding us, it was the date that the Communist authorities opened up the Berlin Wall, 30 years ago, in 1989. But 9 November is also the anniversary of other historic events which led to that war, so that it has become known as ‘the Day of Fate’.
It was on 9 November 1918 that Kaiser Wilhelm abdicated, making possible the Armistice a few days later, on 11 November, which ended the fighting of the Great War, and which we in this country keep as our Remembrance Day. On 9 November 1923, an attempted coup d’état in Munich the so called Beer Hall Putsch- but brought Hitler national attention. By 1938, his Nazi party was in power, and 9 November that year they carried out a pogrom which saw synagogues and Jewish shops destroyed, Jews beaten and murdered, and the start of the removal of the Jews into concentration camps.
So it is ironic that the fall of the Berlin wall should have happened on 9 November. That event finally ended the division of the country which had prevailed since the Second World War, a war caused, of course, by aggression racism, antisemitism and extremist nationalism.
In the name of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, Amen.
Spirituality is a word which is much on vogue these days. And like many
vogue words, it has many meanings, for it is a very vague concept. We hear
about Celtic spirituality, and Buddhist spirituality. You hear of people whose
spirituality doesn’t seem to have much connection with religion- for example,
there are those who say they find the sacred when they climb high mountains. In
fact, I think that for many people, spirituality is a word they use to talk
about what are really religious things. The trouble is that ‘religion’ has
become a bogey word. It has become associated with fundamentalism, with
violence, with everything that’s not progressive. And so, rather than speaking
about religion or faith, people use that nice vague foggy term, ‘spirituality’.
Many people think of spirituality as ‘religion-lite’- slimmed down
religion, without doctrines or a commitment to a religious organisation, like
the Church. In fact, of course, the spirituality industry has its doctrines and
beliefs. It has commercial organisations behind if, for it has become a
money-spinning business. So we should be a bit suspicious of anything or anyone
who uses the word ‘spirituality’ in that loose way.
Yet spirituality is at the heart of all the great religions of the
world. I would go as far as to say that if Christianity is to recover some of
its lost vitality, we need to rediscover the importance of Christian spirituality.
What do I mean by that? Let me explain.
Sometimes people think that the Bible is just a list of doctrines or dos
and don’ts. But the Bible is at the heart of Christian spirituality.
For the Bible is full of spiritual resources. There are many prayers in
the Bible (not just the ‘Our Father’ which the Bible tells us Jesus taught to
his disciples). The Bible has its own prayer book, the Psalms. And the greatest
hymn writers and spiritual writers were soaked in the imagery and stories of
the Bible. But in order to release the power of the Bible to assist our
spirituality, we need to use our imagination. For the Bible is a book of
stories and images and ideas, full of things to spark our imagination as we
think about our spirituality. ‘The Lord is my shepherd’… bringing me through
the valley of the shadow of death to cool waters and green pastures- what a
beautiful image!
Today’s Bible readings give us some clues about the ingredients of a
truly Christian spirituality. The passage from Second Timothy is about the
Bible. The Gospel passage is about the Bible, and prayer. Those should be good
places to start to think about our own, Christian, spirituality. So let’s think
for a moment about them each in turn.
But today’s Epistle reading doesn’t seem to encourage much imagination. This
is a letter which was written to someone who was concerned with getting the
doctrine right. He writes:
All Scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching the truth, rebuking error, correcting faults, and giving instruction for right living.
And so it is. But we have to watch that we don’t think that ‘teaching
the truth, rebuking error, correcting faults, and giving instruction for right
living’ causes us to boil the Bible down, so that all it consists of is a list
of doctrines and dogmas, of dos and don’ts- which is, sadly, what many people
have done to the Bible. Yet the Bible is above all a book of stories, telling
the grand story of how God has interacted with human beings. You wouldn’t read
a story book as if it were a car maintenance manual. So why don’t we let the
stories of the Bible speak to our imagination, as well as our intellect? Treat
the Bible, not as an instruction manual, but as a work of art. Let it speak to
you- not just to your mind, but to all your being. You are allowed to use your
imagination when you read the Bible. That way, you will find that the Holy
Spirit will speak to you from the pages of the Bible in a much deeper way.
But Second Timothy reminds that, for Christians, the Bible is going to
be central to our spirituality. You know, sometimes other Christian
denominations somehow find it easier than we Presbyterians to use the language
of spirituality. And as a result, sometimes we get a bit suspicious about what
they are getting up to.
When I was a teenager, I got a job as a Church organist (I sometimes
think that I should keep quiet about being a Church organist, in case some day
I arrive to discover that the organist isn’t well and I end up getting two jobs
on a Sunday!). Anyway, this organist job was in the local Episcopal church. It
was quite a challenge to me, because they had this (as I thought) elaborate
sung liturgy. I wondered, for a while, where all these words had come from. But
slowly it dawned on me that most of what they sung- the Gloria in Excelsis or the Kyrie
Eleison, all these prayers with strange names which I really didn’t know
much about- it all came straight from the Bible. All those fixed prayers of
which I had a Presbyterian suspicion were full of quotes from and allusions to
the Bible. It was a thoroughly Biblical service.
In the Church of Scotland, instead of prayers books we make much of our
hymn books. But the best hymns are just the same- full of Biblical imagery and
quotations. Consider our first hymn this morning: ‘Immortal, invisible God only
wise’. That first line is almost a direct quote from the first letter to
Timothy in the Authorised Version, chapter 1, verse 17:
Now unto the King eternal, immortal, invisible, the only wise God, be honour and glory forever’.
The best, classic, hymns can be taken apart, line by line, and you can
trace their origins back to something in the Bible. Truly the poets and the
hymn writers have been much better at bringing the Bible alive than the
theologians and the scholars. We need to be creative, use our imaginations, let
God speak to us from the Bible to all our personalities- not just our minds,
but our spirits as well.
The Gospel reading today is a story- a parable of Jesus. As usual, he
has taken a familiar situation from everyday life, and used it to say something
very deep and important about God. For Jesus understood the importance of
imagination. His stories are works of art. He can take a rather unpromising
idea and use it to great effect.
There was once a lawyer in the High Court in Edinburgh, who, in pleading
in mitigation for his client, told the court how much a week his client had to
live on. ‘How much?’ said the judge, ‘I spend that amount on my lunch’. So why
are judges are paid so much? Well, part of the reasoning is that that way they
should be incorruptible. It’s no use trying to bribe them, because they are
well off enough, thank you very much. Well-paid judges, it’s claimed, help to
ensure that the law is administered fairly.
But it is not always thus. Certainly not in Palestine in Jesus’ day. Jesus
tells us a story about a corrupt judge,
In a certain town there was a judge who neither feared God nor respected people.
And he’s saying to his listeners- you know the sort of judge I mean- a
judge susceptible to a bit of bribery. So even if you have a good case, unless
you’re willing to pay, you might never get a hearing.
But here’s another character in the story:
And there was a widow in that same town who kept coming to him and pleading for her rights, saying, “Help me against my opponent!” For a long time the judge refused to act…
…for this was just a poor widow woman- she had no clout. But she was
persistent: she kept on and on at him, and
at last he said to himself, “Even though I don’t fear God or respect people, yet because of all the trouble this widow is giving me, I will see to it that she gets her rights. If I don’t, she will keep on coming and finally wear me out!”
And Jesus says to his listeners, ‘Do you hear what this corrupt judge is
saying? Even someone like this can be persuaded to listen to the plea of
someone in need’. If even a bad man can be persuaded, imagine what God is like:
Now, will God not judge in favour of his own people who cry to him day
and night for help? Will he be slow to help them? I tell you, he will judge in
their favour and do it quickly.
This little story about from a corrupt legal system becomes, in the
hands of Jesus, a masterful illustration to remind us of what God is like. God
will not be slow. God is reliable. God will listen to us. These are all factors
which should inform our spirituality.
The letter to Timothy warns that that at times people will ‘give their
attention to legends’. And strangely, today is one of those times. For much of
what gets called ‘spirituality’ is little more than superstition. There are
people who think crystals can heal you. We can put a man on the moon, send
probes to Mars and look with space telescopes at the most distant galaxies, but
still people read the horoscopes (although there is not an ounce of scientific
evidence for it). I think it is very sad that people put their future in the
hands of astrologers, when at any time they could turn to God. Put away your
tarot cards, throw away your crystal balls. There is a much simpler way of
dealing with your worries about the future. Jesus taught that God will listen
to us: ‘Take it to the Lord in prayer’, as the old hymn has it.
And so one mark of a genuine Christian spirituality is that it will be a
confident spirituality. Jesus tells us that we can rely on God. We are not in
the hands of fate. The stars do not determine our destiny. We don’t need to
learn what the Tarot Cards mean so we can get a glimpse of the future. No- we
have a God who will listen, who loves us, who will be there whatever lies ahead
of us. As Paul put it in his letter to the Romans:
For I am certain that nothing can separate us from [God’s] love: neither death nor life, neither angels nor other heavenly rulers or powers, neither the present nor the future, neither the world above nor the world below- there is nothing in all creation that will ever be able to separate us from the love of God which is ours through Christ Jesus our Lord.[1]
It’s so simple. Perhaps it’s too simple for many people. But a truly
Christian spirituality will be a straightforward and confident sort of
spirituality. For our God is one doesn’t need bribed or nagged. You don’t need
to be through a great spiritual rigmarole in order to get in touch with our
God. For the Bible assures us that the immortal, invisible, inaccessible God
has come to us in Jesus Christ. God has come to us in a teller of tales, an
artist of parables, a carpenter who healed the sick, made time for the outcast
and who despised those who made religion complicated, or superstitious, or who
tried to sell God’s grace. The God of Jesus of Nazareth doesn’t require an
exotic or complicated faith. We just need to be confident that God is there for
us, and hears our prayers. That, my friends, is a truly Christian spirituality.
Ascription
of Praise
To God be honour and eternal dominion! Amen.
1 Timothy 6.16 (GNB)
Biblical
references from the Good News Bible, unless otherwise stated
Every so often, I get a tune stuck in my head, something catchy which I can’t shift all day. It happened this week, as I was pondering our Gospel story for today. It’s a story is about gratitude, and I was thinking of the one man who came back to say thank you to Jesus, when a song- which I must have heard when I was a child, in Sunday school or a school assembly- sprung into my head. I didn’t have the sheet music (so you’re not getting to sing it today), but I found the words, and goes something like this:
I nearly forgot to say: Thank you!
For flowers and thrushes and things,
For daisies that dapple the meadow,
And patterns on butterfly wings,
For stars that shine, for winds that blow,
The sun that melts the ice and snow;
I nearly forgot to say: Thank You!
For rainbows that follow the rain;
But really I want to say: Thank you!
Again and again, and again.[1]
Does anyone recognise that? It comes from a Christian musical of the 1970s: here’s a recording.
‘I nearly forgot to say thank you’ is what I imagine the one man who came back had to say to Jesus.
In the name of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, Amen.
One of the brainiest Christians of all time was man called Anselm, a Norman who became Archbishop of Canterbury around 1,000 years ago. He’s famous for writing a treatise on the existence of God which began with the first words of our Old Testament reading, Psalm 14: ‘Fools say to themselves, there is no God’. And he went on to try to prove, through a very subtle philosophical argument, that the fools were wrong.
With atheism being so fashionable among some people nowadays, it’s tempting for us to misunderstand the beginning of Psalm 14. We all know people who say, ‘There is no God’, and they are not all fools. Perhaps in Anselm’s day, when the existence of God was taken for granted by so many, it did seem you’d have to be a fool to deny the existence of God. Today we have no such consensus. Indeed, there are plenty of people claiming we’re the fools: people like you and me who do believe in God are the fools!
In the name of God, Father,
Son and Holy Spirit, Amen.
I have
just been reading a remarkable account of a British traveller who, just a few
months after September 11 2001, walked across Afghanistan. It was just after
the American-led invasion of the country, which drove the Taliban out of Kabul.
The author writes:
The country had been at war for twenty-five years; the new government had been in place for only two weeks; there was no electricity between Herat and Kabul, no television and no T-shirts. Villages combined medieval etiquette with new political ideologies. In many houses the only piece of foreign technology was a Kalashnikov, and the only global brand was Islam.[1]
In the name of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, Amen.
This morning at St Stephen’s we had the joy of celebrating the Sacrament of Baptism. We baptised Caitlin Liddle, the granddaughter of Sandy and Rosemary Cumming. The baptism of a child is a time of great joy for the child’s family and friends. But it is also a celebration for the Church for family. For baptism remind us of many of the joyful truths of the Gospel. It reminds us that God calls us by name, that we all of us belong to God. And it reminds us about how new beginnings is at the heart of our faith.
In the name of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, Amen.
I used to belong to a student Christian organisation at university. At the end of each term, we would meet, as we always did, for a meal together. But at the end of the meal, instead of hearing a guest speaker as we usually did, we would remain around the meal table and share the Sacrament of Holy Communion, led by a local clergyman, a chaplain, or one of the Divinity Faculty staff. That experience completely upended all my thoughts about Communion. Sitting around the same table where we had just shared our meal was a powerful spiritual experience for someone who was more used to our rather formal and traditional services in my home church. It was a reminder, also, that sometimes in the church we make things too complicated! This was a reminder of how it started- a meal with friends in an upstairs room.
In the name of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, Amen.
God presides in the heavenly council; in the assembly of the gods he gives his decision (Psalm 82.1).
Today’s Psalm asks us to picture a strange scene. The scene is a ‘heavenly court’, or an assembly of gods. The Lord God of Israel presides- but he’s not the only god there- he’s speaking to other gods.
This Psalm must be harking back to the earliest days of Israel’s religious history. In ancient times, people tended to believe in a lot of different gods- the Greeks had Mercury, Apollo and Zeus, the Egyptians made gods of the Pharaohs and worshipped Ra the sun god alongside other lesser deities. The genius of Israel’s faith was that they began to see that their tribal God, the God Moses had met in the desert, this God who had no name, this strange God who insisted on love and justice- this God was maker of heaven and earth, was greater than all the other gods, was, indeed, the only true God. This was an incredible insight that changed the world. But it was a change that happened gradually.
In the name of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, Amen.
I once knew an elderly lady who told me she had been worshipping in the same local country church all her life. She told me that, when she was a wee girl, her family had to go to church each Sunday. Her father was a gamekeeper, and if he wasn’t there the laird would have noticed and he’d have lost not just his job, but his tied house as well. Homeless and jobless if they didn’t go to church.
Thank goodness, we live in a different age nowadays. There is no great cultural expectation that we have to go to church. We come because we want to. It’s our own choice. And that old lady in continued to come to church, not because she was forced to, but because she wanted to.
Today, Church Leaders have released a joint statement regarding the UK’s imminent exit from the European Union. This was accompanied by a letter from Church Leaders addressed to partner Churches and Church organisations in Europe.
Read the statement here: http://www.jointpublicissues.org.uk/statement-from-church-leaders-ahead-of-31st-january-2020/
Scripture Readings: Micah 4.1-5
