For those who want a change from the Gospel

Trinity 6 – Amos 7:7-15

As I write, we have just witnessed the resignation of a cabinet minister after his extramarital affair became public knowledge (although it is a fascinating sign of the times that his crime wasn’t adultery but breaking social distancing rules!). This event led to the usual spate of social media comment, with opinion divided between ‘His private life is his own business’ and ‘If he can lie to his wife, how can the electorate trust him?’ Our readings today give us the Bible’s take on this question, as two prophets confront rulers over their behaviour and morality.

Amos’ victims are Amaziah, the high priest who presided over the corrupt sanctuary, and King Jeroboam. The vision of the plumb-line, so beautifully captured in the Coventry Cathedral sculpture, communicated the fact that both the shrine worship and the dynasty would be destroyed. The priests have presided over two false sanctuaries in the Northern Kingdom, and have offered illegal sacrifices while the nation, ruled over by Jeroboam, has descended into injustice, corruption and complacency. You can get the flavour of the nation by reading the rest of Amos’ book. His vision of the plumb-line forms a fitting summary: the nation has become bent.

Like Herod 600-odd years later, the recipients of this prophetic lashing were not happy, so Amaziah attempts to gang up on Amos with the King’s authority. The accusation is that ‘the land cannot bear all his words’. The fact is, lands never can bear the words of righteous prophets once they themselves have abandoned righteousness. The truth hurts, and so we try various methods to silence it.

The reaction of Amaziah is a textbook example of what people do when their evil is confronted. First of all, he tries to twist Amos’ words and his intentions, and reports this false information to others. He can only think in terms of politics: Amos is seeking to raise a revolutionary army to overthrow the King. It doesn’t occur to him to listen for the voice of God through the prophet’s words. Those who dare to criticise us, or the status quo, can only possibly be doing so for their own sinister ends.

He then seeks to discredit Amos. You can almost hear the sneer in the words ‘you seer’. In a land which had known its share of false prophets, eccentrics and oddballs, it is easy to mock away any threat. The same, of course, happens today when Christians attempt to stand up against all kinds of behaviour which is contrary to Scripture. They’re just religious nuts or puritans who are totally out of touch with the real world, which, according to one recent statement by an Anglican bishop, ought to be allowed to set the agenda.

Amaziah’s final resort is simply to get rid of him – go somewhere else and do your prophesying. Just leave us alone to live our lives in peace. Go and get lost in some backwater somewhere. Amos responds by both denying and affirming his prophetic vocation. He hasn’t come from any prophetic background, and had never sought this career. He didn’t enjoy moaning about people, another reputation which prophets seem to have had in Israel. I’m not some kind of professional prophet who does this kind of thing for fun. But then he tells of his calling: God called him and took him. As he has said earlier (3:8) ‘The lion has roared – who will not fear? The Sovereign Lord has spoken – who can but prophesy?’ When God puts his finger on you, you don’t exactly have a choice: you have to say what he tells you to say, and what he has told me to say is that this corrupt nation is going to go off into exile and punishment.

So what do we do with this text? The easiest application is to think of times when we have been persecuted by others because we have done what we believed God was telling us to do. I can think of many examples from my own ministry down the years, and it is a great comfort to occupy the moral high ground by claiming solidarity with Amos and the other prophets whom Jesus said Israel delighted to persecute.

But a more difficult application might be to ask questions about whose voices we might be resisting, and what tactics we are using in order to drown them out. No-one likes to be told off, and it’s particularly painful when we know at some deep level that our critics might just be right. Hebrews 12 talks about this very thing, our reluctance to bear godly discipline, and we all know what it is saying. But the fact is that Amaziah, Jeroboam and the whole nation could have been saved had they listen to the voice of God through his prophets. What is stopping you simply from giving in, saying sorry, and mending your ways?

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The Real and the True

Till death us do part

For those who want a change from the Gospel

Trinity 5 – Ezekiel 2:1-5

40 years ago this weekend I was ordained as a Deacon in the Church of God. On the Sunday evening I was to preach my first sermon in my new church, where I would serve for four years. Nobody knew me from Adam, apart from the Vicar who had appointed me, so this was a chance to make a good first impression. Imagine my delight when this passage from Ezekiel came up as the set lesson, especially the bit about God sending me to obstinate and stubborn people. I can remember saying with a big smile ‘I’m sure that won’t apply here!’ How wrong could I be?

Today’s readings are about new commissions and sendings, with Ezekiel being commissioned here, and the 12 disciples being sent out in the Gospel reading. In both cases God’s words to Ezekiel proved to be highly applicable, not least to those of Jesus’ disciples who ended up giving their lives for the message of the Gospel. Many of us who have been in church leadership for more than six months will also know something of the pain of rejection and personal spite: it has been a poignant thing this weekend to see all those photos on facebook of the hopefuls, many of whom I have helped train, excitedly parading with their bishops after ordination services. What could possibly go wrong?

The passage itself gives us a couple of interesting insights into the prophetic ministry which should always form a part of the work of any church leaders, which are worth exploring, not least if we are those who are the recipients of ordained ministry. Here are five of them, including, as always, something from beyond the verses set for us.

The need for the Spirit. We shall return to v.2 at the end, but for now one interpretation of it is the complete powerlessness of Ezekiel even to stand up without the Spirit’s help. Ordination services include prayer and waiting for the Spirit to come upon candidates to equip them for ministry, and my own memory is of feeling completely inadequate for the task, and desperately in need of God’s help. What a great way to enter ministry! Much more healthy than ‘Great! I’m ready – let me at it!’ How do you pray for your church leaders? Maybe to pray for more of God’s Spirit for them would be a great thing to do.

The need for a specific calling. God is very clear about what exactly Ezekiel has to do, and among whom. The Israelites are to be his subjects, not anyone else. And what are those Israelites like? God spares no details in telling the prophet just how hard this is going to be (v.3-4). I have known times when the specific calling of God to me has kept me there in the firing line. That sense of God’s call has been my anchor in times of doubt and desperation, when all I wanted to do was run.

The need for realism. I can remember hearing an ordination sermon, preached not from the Bible, as is customary, but from a Greek vase. It had images carved on it of young animals being released from cages, and leaping with exaltation at their freedom, but unaware that they had been released so that the hunters behind them could begin their sport. The preacher likened the sense of freedom that finally training was over and the candidates were being let loose to the ignorance of the animals that they were soon going to be shot at! The preacher (who did also say some positive things) was warning the new ministers that life was not always going to be smooth of joyful. He was doing them a favour!

The need for determination. Here we move beyond the set passage to v.6, where God exhorts Ezekiel to make sure that he says what he is given to say, even when people don’t like it. Prophetic ministry should be more afraid of disobeying God than it is of upsetting other people. Again and again in my various diocesan jobs I have met clergy paralysed by fear of ‘what people would say’ if they actually led their churches forward in mission. I am aware, as a trainer of leaders, that nowadays its all about collaboration and shared ministry, but there must come times when a leader says ‘This is where we’re going – If you don’t want to come along, that isn’t going to stop the rest of us.’ I’m not advocating dictatorial leadership, but I am advocating determined leadership. One day I’m going to write a book about it!

The need for wisdom. I promised you a different take on v.2, and it’s based on these words: ‘As he spoke, the Spirit came into me.’ It is a hallmark of OT prophetic thought that words matter: the words themselves have the power to bring about what they say. Wittgenstein was the first of many philosophers to explore ‘speech act’ theory. If someone says to me ‘You’re fired!’ those words are not just statements of information, but they actually cause my employment to come to an end. In the same way we can talk about forgiveness, but when we say ‘You’re forgiven’ something real changes. That’s why the absolution in services is so important, and to miss it out such a big mistake. God’s words ‘stand up on your feet’ enable the prophet to do so, as the Spirit works through those very words. The other side of this is the power of words to harm, abuse or undermine; to curse, in fact. Those filled with God’s Spirit and called to his ministry have a huge responsibility in what they say – it might just actually come to pass! One church leader used to pray daily ‘Lord, give me a character strong enough to carry the anointing you have given me.’ A wise prayer indeed.

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For those who want a change from the Gospel

Trinity 4 – Lamentations 3:22-33 (Related)

In this podcast at the start of this year I introduced a two-parter on Lament, and I made the point that this is something of a forgotten art in the church today: ‘We don’t lament, we just whinge!’ Today our lectionary invites us to revisit lament, but, needless to say, in a nice way, where we focus on the few positive verses in this otherwise unremittingly miserable book. This passage, the inspiration for the hymn ‘Great is thy faithfulness’ comes at the midpoint of the lament, and while it offers another view and some hopeful faith in God, it isn’t the book’s last word.

Verse 21 introduces this change of mood with the word ‘I’: ‘This I call to mind, and therefore I have hope’. But who is ‘I’, exactly? If we explore that question, we will discover something important about lament and about ourselves. We need to go back to 3:1, although it isn’t easy to explore the identity of ‘I’ in that verse, since in the TNIV the word is hardly there: ‘I am one who has seen …’ the Hebrew word translated ‘one’ is geber, which is usually translated not just as ‘one’ but actually as a mighty warrior, a man who is supposed to protect and defend others. But rather than managing to do that, ‘I’ have been afflicted, driven out and sickened.

Behind this little word come the feelings of every goalkeeper who has let in a penalty, every parent who has seen a child suffer and felt that somehow they ought to have done something to prevent it, every soldier wounded and defeated in battle, and perhaps every priest who has seen their church age and decline and simply could do nothing about it. If the traditional attribution of this book to Jeremiah is correct, it is easy to see how he might have seen himself as the geber, the prophet, the mighty man of God, whose calling was to warn the nation about disaster in order that it might be averted. Geber isa word full of shame and guilt. It was up to me to sort this, to protect others, to make it all go away, and I failed. Completely. I had one job …

No wonder there is an attempt to blame God for this failure. Even his prayers went unanswered: God was out to get him, and there was nothing he could do to fight back. But then comes the nice bit, and in the passage set for us there is hope in spite of the previous chapters, and interestingly, in spite of the two remaining chapters, which return to lament as potent as that in the first two. So are our verses a defiant expression of trust in God, even though they are wrapped up and almost overwhelmed by hopelessness? Or are they a shoulder-shrugging resignation: if I don’t somehow cling on to God, I’ve got literally nowhere else to go. Or are they a triumph of the true over the real: nothing in me experiences these verses as how things really are, but my faith is mature enough to know that they are true, whatever I may be feeling at this moment. We don’t know, and in a sense they’re not the point of the book, nor of lament in general, otherwise they would have formed the climax to the book, not just a slightly less painful interlude at tis centre.

This is a word, I believe, for all of us who feel that we have been failures. It is an invitation to acknowledge that sense of having blown it, to sit in silence and feel the pain, to bury our faces in the dust. It is not really a passage of certainty: like Joel 2:14 there is that motif of ‘Who knows? God might just do something if we lament enough’. V.29 brings the uncertain feeling that there may yet be hope, but it isn’t guaranteed.

Our culture, and our Church, is not good at this. We try to blame failure on anyone or anything but ourselves. Church is declining because of Sunday Trading, or mini-rugby, or anything but us. You can’t expect anything different nowadays … you’ve heard all the excuses. This passage invites us to the paradoxical freedom of admitting our failure, of having become broken when we ought to have been the strong defender, of sitting in the dust without moving on too quickly to the happy ending. And it’s a reminder that it is God, not us, who are ultimately the faithful ones.

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Romans Part 11

6:15-23

Modern slavery

For those who want a change from the Gospel

Trinity 3 – Job 38:1-11 (Related)

Retirement brings many joys: one of them is box sets. Lockdown has of course helped with this, but we do like our thrillers. Recently we’ve watched two. The first had an ending which was, quite frankly, an anti-climax. We’d worked out who did it very early on, but discounted that character as being far too obvious. But the second twisted and turned, and until we got to the final session it could have been anybody. That was, of course, far more satisfying.

The end of the book of Job could be seen as a bit of an anti-climax too. Job had lost everything, literally, and the temptation is set out in 2:9 – why doesn’t he just curse God and be done with it all? So the question is set up: is he only living in obedience to God because God has blessed him, or can he continue to praise him even when he has nothing left? Then follow 36 chapters of agonised theology as his so-called friends try to convince him of their pre-formed beliefs in a just God and an orderly universe.

Finally we reach chapter 38, which is God’s reply. It begins in a way which is pretty standard in other Near Eastern texts from the time, as God is pictured as a master architect who has built the universe from carefully-drawn plans. But then there is a twist, as a much more female-inspired image is used, that of God giving birth to the sea and quickly wrapping it up in tight garments, and placing the new baby in a cot from which it can’t escape. It is in this second, much rarer image, that really challenges belief. The sea is often thought of as evil and hostile. This may come from a Babylonian creation myth called the Enuma Elis, where the god Marduk battles again Tiamat, a writhing sea monster, defeats him, cuts him in half, and makes heavens and earth our of each half. The Israelites, of course, didn’t believe a word of it, but that didn’t stop them from alluding to the story, just as we might talk about Pandora’s Box without necessarily believing in it as historical truth. You can see echoes of it in Genesis 1, some of the Psalms and in Isaiah. So what Job 18 appears to be saying is that God gave birth to chaos, an idea so outrageous as to beggar belief. Chaos isn’t in the universe by accident, or because of some great cosmic mistake: it has always been a necessary part of the master plan. I’m reminded of a programme I watched a few years ago which said that lightning strikes and forest fires were vitally important for the Earth’s ecology, just as death is for animals and humans. In Scripture God can and does use natural phenomena for punishments, but by no means always.

The chaotic, the destructive, the unpredictable, therefore, is woven into the material of the universe. Once we get this, much of the agonised wrestling with human suffering is made redundant. The ‘Why me?’ questions can be answered simply and honestly ‘Why not?’ We don’t after all, have any divine right to a comfy life. This is just where Job’s friends got it so horribly wrong, as they couldn’t shake off the cause and effect mindset: if I’m suffering, it’s because I have done something wrong. And if I haven’t done anything wrong, I shouldn’t be suffering. God says to Job, and of course Job knew it all along, that it doesn’t work like that. Stuff (or worse!) happens. Two chapters further on God is going to tell Job to be more behemoth, a large mythical creature which looks and behaves suspiciously like a hippo, and which is one of the most powerful of beasts. ‘Man up!’ says God in effect. Be more like him! We may feel this is not the most helpful pastoral approach to those suffering loss and bereavement, but as a piece of metaphysics it works perfectly. The world is chaotic, it always has been, and always will be. Get used to it and stop taking it personally!

Well, OK, but how does that help? Is the Christian Gospel no more than ‘Stop whingeing and worship God’? No, because there is hope, not that this world will suddenly start behaving itself and making life nice for us, but because it, and its destructive elements, will pass away. If we only have hope for this life, wrote St Paul, we are more pitiful than anyone. But there is good to come, to which the evils of this world are not worthy to be compared. We look for, yearn for, agonise for, the new heavens and earth where death, mourning, crying and pain will be no more (Rev 21). And, fascinatingly, there will no longer be any sea.

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Romans Part 10

15:1-14

Dying to sin

Romans 5:11-21 – Would you adam and Eve it!

For those who want a change from the Gospel

Trinity 2 – Ezekiel 17:22-24 (Related)

The event of the Exile of Judah in the 6^th century casts a long shadow in both directions throughout the OT. Before it happens the people are warned again and again about the possibility, and during and afterwards there is a sense that everything has changed, and can never be the same again. 2 Kings 25 tell the tragic story of Nebuchadnezzar’s end game, and he is indeed a master strategist. Twice before his greed to conquer Judah has been thwarted by their forming alliances with the powerful nation of Egypt, but this time he is not going to let them slip through his fingers. He is concerned to dash all hopes of a future for the nation, so he publicly shames their king, Zedekiah, by blinding him, after having had his sons his sons killed in his sight. The monarchy and David’s dynasty are no more: there can be no restoration, no hope. He also burns down the Temple and destroys the city walls: the people will have no worship, nor any protection from the hostile world around. He is deliberately trying to cause as much displacement as he can, in order to wring from God’s people any last drops of hope for the future.

Many today are feeling a similar sense of displacement from the world in which they felt at home. Britain no longer belongs in Europe, and from the Eurovision Song contest to Sausages the hostility of the nations from whom we have chosen to separate ourselves is increasingly being felt. We no longer feel we can trust a word which issues from the mouths of any politicians, the Royal family is in disarray, social problems are on the increase, and all of that is made infinitely worse by the continuing onslaught from a microscopic virus which has besieged us as Nebuchadnezzar did Jerusalem, and which shows signs of renewing its attack. So what theological resources does Ezekiel offer us for such times of social dislocation?

First of all, he gives validity to grief. The natural and appropriate response to being in such a mess is tears, rage, despair, and the whole gamut of feelings which come with any bereavement. Jeremiah is the prophet par excellence who articulates our grief for us, but Ezekiel has this kind of lament as a theme too. It’s not just OK to feel like we do, it’s perfectly natural. Jeremiah is quick to silence those who try to pretend that this is just a blip, or that things will be OK simply because we’re Jewish (or English). I wonder to what degree these kinds of emotions are allowed to be felt and expressed in our public worship in church.

But secondly, and this is where we focus in on our passage, this chapter speaks of the sovereignty of God over all that is going on for us. The chapter uses a series of parables or allegories to show that God knows what he is doing, and that he is perfectly capable of regrafting a small part of a tree into a new and fruitful setting, where it will both flourish itself, but also provide shelter for others who choose to nest there. Known in other parts of the OT, from Noah to Isaiah and Elijah, as ‘remnant theology’, this motif demonstrates again and again that God will never let his people vanish completely from the face of the earth, and that from the last remaining bits of a dying tree new growth and flourishing can spring forth. The mountain on which it is to be planted is significant too: it clearly symbolises Mount Zion, the home of both Israel and the Lord himself. It has lain desolate for decades, but it is soon to be the place of restoration.

But the third motif is perhaps the most powerful. There, in a place of security, God’s people will be free to stop worrying about enemies and concentrate instead on being that blessing to all nations which was part of God’s original call to Abraham all those centuries ago. In a church which, post-Covid, is in many places fearing for its existence, and in others continuing to sing the songs about walking in faith and victory, this text gives a reminder to our true calling, the calling which has been ours since the beginning. We are to call dislocated and fearful, angry people home.

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