For those who want a change from the Gospel

Trinity 18 – Genesis 32:22-32 (Related)

Let me introduce you to a chap called Arnold van Gennep. He lived from 1873 to 1957, had a great moustache, and was a French folklorist (what a brilliant job!). He was responsible for the idea of ‘liminality’. Limen is apparently the Latin word for a door or doorway, and van Gennep suggested that all of us go through ‘doorways’ in life, where things change for us. That journey, he suggested, happens in three phases, the pre-liminal, where we’re preparing for change, the liminal, where we actually do change, and the post-liminal, which is about readjustment now that life is different. Last June our daughter got married, and we lived with her through that liminal experience. Pre-liminally she had to sort out a house to live in, get a wedding dress, organise cake and all the rest of it. The liminal part was the Wedding day: when the priest said ‘I now pronounce you husband and wife together’ everything changed. Now she’s living through the post-liminal phase, readjusting to married life. Other liminal experiences would include having a baby, starting a new job, moving house, and, or course, dying. All involve those three phases.

Poor old Jacob goes through a liminal experience in today’s reading. You’ll remember that he cheated his brother Esau out of his birthright, and they had been separated for years. But now Esau is coming to get him, with small army of 400 men. Jacob knows that this is going to be decisive, a liminal experience, where he will either end up reconciled or dead. So he enters the pre-liminal phase by preparing. He divides his family and possessions into two groups, so if Esau gets one lot, the others might escape. Then he prays, a prayer for survival (v.9-12), and then he gets practical again, preparing and sending gifts to pacify Esau, in the hope he might buy him off. And then it’s the fateful liminal night. He sends his wives and family and all his possessions away. He is alone by the River Jabbok. Whatever this night brings, he’s never going to be the same again.

Then he meets – who? A man who turns out to be God? Or maybe an angel? It’s hard to tell, but the result is that they spend all night wrestling. Jacob wants his name and  his blessing. Instead he gets a new name, and a disability. Although he does feel blessed – to see God and still to be alive is about as blessed as it gets! But he is left physically different by the encounter, and he enters the post-liminal phase as the sun dawns on a new day.

This is such a rich story, with so much to say about the changes and chances of our lives, and those liminal experiences which leave us different. This story teaches us, I believe, about

Something for us to do

Something for us to pray, and

Something for us to understand.

1)         Something for us to do

I love the balance between practical preparation and heartfelt prayer. If I can buy Esau off, O Lord, all well and good, but if not, can you save me? All liminal experiences require practical preparation in the pre-liminal stage, and Jacob shows us the relation between prayer and practice. There is stuff we can do – to just ‘leave it all in God’s hands’ sounds superspiritual but is ultimately a bit silly. Those bridesmaids’ dresses are not going to make themselves. And yet there’s fervent prayer too. Whatever we do without God’s blessing is not going to get very far.

2)         Something for us to pray

But there’s something beyond a mere prayer for survival. Jacob wanted to know God’s name. He wanted to know God better, to be on more intimate terms with him. To give someone your name is a bit like giving them your mobile number nowadays. It puts you in new, closer relationship. How can we let the changes in our lives help us understand God better, and draw us closer to him?

3)         Something for us to understand

Jacob was left different as a result of his liminal night of wrestling, and  part of that was his limp. He becomes aware of his vulnerability, and has a physical visual aid to remind him. Post-liminally he has to learn to walk with that limp, as well as living in a new relationship with his brother, with whom there is reconciliation a few verses later. When we meet God in some life-changing ways, it isn’t the case that everything changes for the better, and we need to know that. Many would testify to some kind of a ‘limp’ after a profound encounter with God. The art is to understand that ‘limp’ as part and parcel of God’s blessing.

For those who want a change from the Gospel

Trinity 17 – 2 Kings 5:1-17 (Related)

Last week in the church I attend we restarted the invitation to prayer ministry at the Eucharist, a practice which here, and I suspect in many churches, has gone by the board during the Covid lockdown, and which is either being forgotten or reinstated with some hesitancy. Our readings today consider two incidents of healing, both of people with leprosy, one by the prophet Elisha and the other by Jesus. I’d like to consider the first under the guiding question ‘How do I get what I want?’

The answer in our world is, of course, by buying it. The more money we have, the greater our ability to buy everything from food and fuel to education and healthcare. Whilst I feel sorry for all those poor £150,000+ per year earners who had the promise of a pay increase dangled before them only to have it cruelly snatched away within a few days, the fact is that the important people in our society are those with enough money to buy influence. Naaman was such a person, and he was used to the kind of power and authority described in Mt 8:9: he tells people to do something, and they do it. But the one thing he couldn’t command was his own body, which had become infected with leprosy. How was he going to get what he wanted?

He found the route to healing, somewhat unexpectedly, through a servant girl, a real nobody, but a nobody with a story to tell about a somebody. And not just through a servant girl, but also via his wife, another relatively unimportant person in that culture. Nevertheless Naaman hasn’t got the message yet, and he sets off laden with riches with which to buy his healing. He goes, quite naturally given his status, to the King. Elisha hears and intervenes before warfare breaks out, but again Naaman is disappointed at the offhand reception he gets from Elisha, and the undramatic and seemingly unhygienic method of his healing. At this point his pride almost costs him his healing, but it is another group of servants who persuade him to suck it up and do what he has been told (for a change). The healing ensues, and again his mindset leads him to try and pay for it. Finally he gets it, and asks for a gift instead, which will enable him to worship the God he has come to see is the true God. he has received not just a new body, but a new Lord into the bargain.

Throughout this story there is a thread about power and humility, a thread which we do well to consider. In a world where power, money and influence are believed to get us what we want, and where humility is seen as weakness, the gospel reminds us that humble submission to God is the route to his heart and favour. It has been interesting to consider the contrasts between our late Queen and our former Prime Minister, and to notice which one is held in the higher regard by the greatest number of people. Perhaps the one word-group used most frequently of Her late Majesty during the mourning period was ‘service/servant/serving’. In our story, in spite of her royal status, she has lived far more like the various servants who were able to speak wisdom with humility than the two quarrelling Kings. And people have noticed. Like Matthew’s centurion she knew that she only had authority because she was under authority from a higher King.

I’m guessing that most of those who get to read this blog are not the kind of people to pay higher rate income tax, but this story reminds us of who will eventually get what they want, inheriting the earth and entering with joy into the Kingdom of Heaven. Once again, the Bible invites us to live differently, to act counter-culturally, and not to fall for the lies that earthly power is worth everything. As Neader’s hymn reminds us:

Human pride and earthly glory,
sword and crown betray his trust;
what with care and toil he buildeth,
tower and temple, fall to dust.
But God’s power, hour by hour,
is my temple and my tower.

For those who want a change from the Gospel

Trinity 16 – Habakkuk 1:1-4, 2:1-4 (Related)

Well would you believe it? The Lectionary has thrown these passages at me just as I’m drawing to the end of teaching my students a module which is all about the book of Habakkuk. We’ve taken it to bits, put it back together again, and tried to apply it. So thanks to them in advance for all their ideas which have contributed to this blog. I would advise reading the whole book – it won’t take long, and will give you a much better sense of what’s going on than these two snippets.

The interpretation of the whole book hangs on how we understand one word in v.4 – the ‘wicked’. Are they the Assyrians, who in the mid 7^th century BC had just obliterated the Northern tribes and were now turning their attention to Judah in the South? Or are they the Babylonians who had defeated the Assyrian empire and in 604 captured Philistia, right on Judah’s borders? I don’t think either of these really works. A third alternative is that the wicked are the people of Judah itself, and, having warned them through prophets for two hundred years or more, God is now intent on punishing them by using the Babylonians to overrun them. This is what did happen in 597. The reference to ‘The Law’ in v.4 is the clincher for me. Why would anyone be surprised if Assyrians or Babylonians didn’t keep the Jewish Law? This third interpretation helps us, I believe, to place ourselves right in the story, and see how our relationship with God makes sense in today’s world.

Habakkuk is living in a time when the nation is broken, and is going to pot. What he describes in v.2-4, injustice, violence, conflict and strife, is as fresh today as it was then. The rich line their own pockets while the poor starve or freeze to death, policemen rape women, gangs can execute innocent people on their own doorsteps, no-one trusts anyone else, and meanwhile a hostile nation nearby is on the rampage and is destroying its neighbour, whilst threatening nuclear war. The parallels are uncanny. So Habakkuk, like most of us today, wants the answer to three questions. Why are you letting this happen, O Lord? Where will it all end? And how are we supposed to live through times like these? The whole book answers each of these questions, but here’s a spoiler for questions 1 and 3. God is in control, he knows what he is doing, and it’s all under his control. And one day all the earth will come to recognise, and acknowledge his glory (2:14).

But it is the middle question which our lectionary invites us to consider, stopping as it does at the ‘punchline’ of 2:4. This verse, (mis)quoted by Paul in Romans  1:17, ‘The righteous shall live by faith’, became the watchword of the Protestant Reformation, with its attack on the idea of ‘salvation by works’, in other words our ability to somehow earn our own salvation, either by good works or by repeated religious rituals. In fact that simply isn’t what Habakkuk is saying, or what the Hebrew really means. A much better translation would be ‘The righteous will survive through their faithfulness’. In other words, not everyone in the nation is wicked – this is called ‘Remnant theology’ and it’s a common motif in the Bible, that of all those who think they are God’s people, only a faithful few really are living for him. You see this in the Elijah on Mt Carmel story, in Isaiah, and in many other places. However bad things look, God always keeps for himself a remnant who are faithful to him. So those who are really living for God and avoiding the idolatry and the wickedness which inevitably stems from it, will survive the Babylonian punishment by remaining faithful to God. Don’t join in with the idolatry which is so prevalent, but, more subtly, don’t give up believing that God is in control and he does know what he’s doing. In our time too we see a small but faithful church struggling to make sense of a world going to pot, and Christians often being tempted just to throw in our lot with the nasty spirit of the age, or to all intents and purposes to give up believing in God at all.

There is a major emphasis in the book on waiting (1:2, 2:1), and in a world which needs instant answers and solutions this is difficult for us. To slow down, to keep questioning God, but above all to believe that the revelation awaits an appointed time, is what it means to remain faithful. There’s a lovely image in 3:19 which is not about prancing about joyfully but rather sure-footedness (cue film clip from David Attenborough of ibexes leaping down a mountainside to avoid being eaten by a fox – you can watch it here). Keep your nerve, keep your trust in God, who does know what he’s doing, stay sure-footed in negotiating the present crisis, and long and pray for that time when the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord (2:14).

For those who want a change from the Gospel

Trinity 15 – Amos 6:1a, 4-7 (Related)

My faithful followers will of course have noticed that I missed out last week’s OT Lectionary blog. This was of course out of respect for her Late Majesty, and not in any way because I completely forgot! But this week’s passage has taken me back to the sad events of last weekend, and the message of Amos is, I believe, as important as ever.

Our new PM, when she wasn’t busy reading from the Bible, was telling us that she ‘knows’ that our great country can pull through all its current crises. And at Her Majesty’s funeral and surrounding events there was a sense, and maybe on this occasion an appropriate one, that Britain really was Great under her reign. Certainly no-one, worldwide, does pomp and grief quite like our armed forces and the Church of England. Personally I found it all very moving, and for once was proud to be an Anglican, and almost proud to be English. But as we move towards the end of the period of mourning (a thoroughly biblical idea, by the way, that mourning should stop and we should move on after an appropriate period of time), our problems as a nation will still be there, with rampant inflation, food and fuel poverty for many, and continued divisions along so many different fault-lines. What was totally absent, both from the pep-talks of Mrs Truss and the celebrations of the life of Queen Elizabeth, was any sense that our problems might have something to do with our abandonment of God and with human sin, so ably demonstrated to us by our previous PM. If we are a proud and arrogant nation, recent events will sadly have reinforced this in us, paradoxically, in the light or our late monarch’s profound and public Christian faith.

If that’s how you see the state of the nation at the moment, then you’ll understand Amos completely. ‘Woe to you who are complacent!’ he thunders out in v.1. This is nothing less than a curse, pronounced with prophetic spiritual power, and believed to bring about what it said. He paints a picture of a nation where at least some of the people are living lives of luxury, not sleeping on the floor as most people did, not living off a veggie diet, not as a fad but because they simply couldn’t afford any meat, let alone the choicest. Some of the language of this passage hints at sacred idol feasts, but it may simply be describing drunken partying rather than false worship – we’re not sure about this. But either way the main point is the same: they did not grieve over the ruin of the nation (v.6). For them, as for today’s fat cats, millionaires and other figures of the élite, life was actually pretty good, even if the hoi polloi were starving and other nations were poised to attack. Eat, drink and be merry, and hope things would continue like that for the foreseeable. So it is left up to Amos to pronounce God’s opinion of the state of the nation, and his verdict is damning: your feasting and decadence will come to and end, and you will be the first to be taken off into captivity (v.7).

It has been said that if you like the book of Amos, you don’t understand it. The tone almost throughout is one of judgement on an arrogant nation which thinks it is doing fine, thank you very much. But there are three mistakes we can make in reading judgemental passages like this one. First of all, we can believe that God’s anger is the opposite of his love. This is an error which goes back at least to the 2^nd century, and which led a heretic called Marcion to excise from his Bible all of the OT and all the bits of the NT which mention or quote from it, on the basis that the two testaments tell us about two different gods, the nasty angry one of the OT and the nice one, revealed to us by Jesus in the NT. God’s judgement is not the opposite of his love, it is the outworking of it, because people whom he loves are groaning in poverty because of the greed and arrogance of others. As a God of righteousness he cannot stand by and do nothing while his people suffer, at least not for long. He judges because he loves, and he judges those who fail to love.

Secondly, God’s judgement is not the same as his condemnation. He doesn’t like being angry, but he does love showing mercy. He would rather that sinners turned from their wickedness and lived. Judgement, therefore, is always aimed at repentance and change, not eternal rejection. That will come, but in his patience he wants to give us every possibility of turning back to him.

But thirdly, and most personally, judgement is not always about ‘them’, over there or back then. It is easy to see how sinful others are, but the real point is to use the Bible as a mirror in which to look at ourselves. Where does this passage reflect my sinful lifestyle, not just that of Israel two and a half thousand years ago. And what must we do which they failed to do?

Finally, in a shameless plug for my son, if you like House Music and our dear late Queen, you might like Steve’s tune which he has recently made public here. Do share it if you like it, and rejoice in the fact that, as Archbishop Justin said so clearly, if we are among God’s children, as she is, we will meet again. Goodbye and Thank You Ma’am. For everything.

For those who want a change from the Gospel

Trinity 13 – Exodus 32:7-14 (Related)

One of the clichés I’m fed up of hearing is the oft-stated assertion that prayer doesn’t change God, but it does change us. When we pray for something, it doesn’t talk God into giving it to us, but rather we talk ourselves into not wanting it after all! In a liberal and deistic Church where it is politically incorrect to suggest that God might actually do anything, we have lost sight of the power of direct and specific intercession to affect our lives and situations. So let’s have a look at this story of Moses the intercessor and see what the Bible actually says.

It’s worth saying that the whole incident was driven by fear, and that the people had every right to be afraid. Hunger and thirst were very real possibilities in the desert, and whether death came quickly or slowly it was a very real prospect. But as is so often the case, fear has distorted their perceptions of reality. First of all, they had distorted their view of Moses. In spite of his repeated assertions that it was God who was going to lead them to the Promised Land, they were fixated on him. It was all his fault: he had brought them out into the desert to kill them. As I write two Tory hopefuls are slugging it out to see who will be the Prime Minister to lead the nation out of the mess their party has got it into, and the more optimistic (or naïve) are hoping for a human leader who will make everything all right again, and stop them either starving or dying of hypothermia. If you put your faith in a human leader who then goes awol, there is a real panic.

Then they acted out of their distorted perception of who God was. They needed a god they could actually see, one they had made in their own image, and who would come to save them. Having cast the idol, they believed that it was this god, the one they had just made for themselves, who had and who would lead them. And finally they acted out of a distorted perspective of their whole situation, the whole journey they were on. The Hebrew uses two different words for their journey through the desert. Alah means simply to go from one place to another, like getting a bus to town, whereas yatza is a technical term for a slave being taken out of bondage and into freedom  – it’s the world used extensively in chapter 21 for the freeing of slaves. While God and Moses talk about yatza, the people only use alah. Their fear has made them lose sight of the fact that they are being set free: they merely see a long journey which isn’t going to end up much better than where they had come from.

So with these three distortions in mind, it is easy to see how God might just be a bit cross with them. This is where Moses the intercessor comes in. Note first that Moses doesn’t have his own mind changed. He is in no way tempted by the offer of becoming the father of a great nation instead of Abraham. Instead he argues with God, using three different techniques to drive home his prayers. He reminds God that they people are his: your people, whom you brought out of Egypt (v.11) It’s like a couple of parents saying ‘Look what your son has been up to!’ The people are not someone else’s; they are God’s.

Then he asks about the PR effects of mass destruction. What will all the people around think if you destroy your people? he asks. This just won’t look good on you. But finally, and this might just be the clincher, he claims God’s promises and his character. You’ve promised, and I know you’re not one who breaks promises. So God relents, and a much milder punishment is meted out (because God is righteous, and he can’t just tolerate wrongdoing.

Did God really mean to wipe out the whole nation? Or was he just testing Moses, inviting him to be the prophet he was meant to be, to stand in the gap in the wall and protect the people as Psalm 106 describes? One day we might find out, but the story as it stands encourages bold intercession. Put it alongside other biblical texts about the power of intercession, and it gives us, I believe, a strong encouragement to cry out to God in situations of evil and injustice, to claim God’s character and his promises, and to watch for the salvation of the Lord.

For those who want a change from the Gospel

Trinity 12 – Deuteronomy 30:15-20 (Related)

If you’re a fan of the rather gruesome 1996 film Trainspotting you’ll be familiar with the call to ‘choose life’ and Mark Renton’s decision ‘I chose not to choose life. I chose something else’, the ‘something else’ being heroin addiction, crime and degradation. In the previous three chapters of Deuteronomy Moses has been setting out for the nation, on the edge of the Promised Land, the choices they have, and the consequences of those choices. In this chapter, he urges them to choose life, which, in the light of the promised blessings and curses, seems a no-brainer. Yet they choose something else, again and again, and so do we. Why on earth are wrong decisions so attractive, and the right paths so difficult to walk in? Jesus himself urged his followers to go through the narrow gate rather than following the wide road towards destruction (Mt 7:13). Why do we constantly make choices which fly in the face of common sense, which we know will cause trouble, but we take them anyway?

One reason, I believe for this daft course of action, has to do with timescale. The consequences of wrong choices do come, but often they come slowly and gradually, rather than instantly. This gives us the impression that we have somehow cheated the system, that we have a kind of immunity which nobody else has. And for Christians it can lead us to believe that God is ‘tolerant’ and doesn’t really mean it when he promises the consequences, because he is after all a God of ‘unconditional love’. So the more we sin and get away with it, the stronger our belief grows that God doesn’t really mean what he says, or that it doesn’t apply to us. That is true of individuals, but we are also seeing the consequences nationally as our life seems to be falling apart.

I don’t know if you were struck reading today’s passage by the long-term nature of it all. There are references to the people’s children in v.2 and 19, for example. There is a reference in v.16 to increasing, in other words having families and descendants, and there is the promise that they will enjoy long life in the land in v.20. The promises of blessing are not short-term; neither are they just for the current hearers. They are about the nation and its long-term future. To steal Peter’s words, the promise is for you and for your children. So presumably the opposite is true. The fruits of disobedience will grow, but they will take time. The people will not live long in the land (v.18), but they will be there for some time before the consequences of their sin are made manifest. We might therefore see that one of the roots of sin is the desire for instant gratification. We want what we want now, and we’re not bothered about the longer-term consequences, either for ourselves or for others. Like Renton and his fellow addicts, we crave that fix now, and we’ve just got to have it.

In today’s Gospel reading Jesus urges his followers and potential followers to count the cost, in other words to think ahead. He never promises an easy life for those who walk with him: in fact he promises the very opposite. We need, I believe, in our laudable attempts to evangelise by making the gospel appeal to people, to be careful that we help them to think long-term. People need the gospel not because it will make them feel better, or give them peace, or purpose, or any of the other feel-good factors which we so often promote and share testimonies about. People need the gospel because it’s true, and because it’s worthwhile, and because without it there will be eternal consequences. It seems paradoxical that the more we make the gospel attractive, the more the Church declines in numbers and in influence. But to acknowledge the difficulty of walking the right path, but to call people to it anyway, seems a far more Christ-like approach to evangelism.

So with Deuteronomy, and Moses’ pep-talk before the people finally cross into the land. We know, of course, the next bit of the story, and how the nation’s choice of something else rather than life led them into all kinds of trouble and eventually into captivity in Babylon while the land God promised them was reduced to rubble. Moses’ words ring down the years for us too. Choose life, because that’s the right thing to choose, even if we have to wait until our Promised Land to see the promised blessings.

For those who want a change from the Gospel

Trinity 11 – Jeremiah 2:1-14 (Related)

We’ve had a few trips into the life and times of the prophet Jeremiah recently, but this week we find ourselves back at the start of his book, in what provides an intro to everything else he’s going to say, rather like the Abstract of a PhD Thesis which sets out the main arguments in order to help people decide whether they want to read all 250 pages or not. Chapter one is famously about his call and his reluctance to obey, and then comes the summary of his message. I’ve chosen to add on the three verses before our lectionary passage, since I believe there’s an important lesson there. Jeremiah, as we know, was the prophet whose task was to announce to the nation that downfall and captivity were inescapable, and he ministered around the time of the start of the Babylonian exile, around 600 BC. He was not a happy bunny, although his work is not without hope, but to this day we call a long passage or speech full of doom, gloom and misery a ‘jeremiad’.

He’s going to spell out in great detail exactly what it is that the nation has done wrong, but in his abstract he makes it simple. Israel has done four things wrong (not just the two he mentions in v.13.

They’ve lost that loving feeling. V.1-3 looks back to the wilderness period, when, according to God, they followed him through the desert with all the love and devotion of a newly married bride. Immediately we have an important paradox: just which Bible is God reading? If you’ve been following my ‘Wilderness Years’ series of podcasts (if you haven’t, you can find them here, or by searching RevJohnLeach blog on Spotify or iTunes) you’ll know that the story was anything but one of love and devotion. It was grumble central, with the people constantly moaning, grizzling, disobeying and rebelling, to the point where Moses wanted to end his own life. So how could God look back from Jeremiah’s time and see it all as such a positive period? The answer is that he forgave. And forgot. When we forgive people, we’re often left with a trace remembrance of what they did to us, and there’s a shadow which remains between us: can we really trust them again? There’s a wariness which creeps into the relationship (at times appropriately), and however much we say we forgive, we’re still cautious. Well God isn’t like that. He remembers our sins no more. When we’re tempted to feel that our relationship has been marred by something we’ve done, that since then God has been cautious towards us, that there’s a shadow between us, we’ve failed to understand how God forgives. If he can look back on those 40 miserable years and see them as the honeymoon period, he can certainly start off again with us and a clean sheet. But the problem here is that they had lost that first love, even if he hadn’t.

They’ve found fault with God. As so often in marriages, when the love and affection dies, the carping sets in. By this time they have arrived and settled in the promised land, but they have turned against the God who so lovingly led them there (v.5).

They’ve chosen new gods instead. V.13 uses that famous picture of a nation who have turned away from the clean sparkling water which God gives them, and dug their own wells which are full of mud and muck. The nation thought they could do without God, as has ours for decades, and now they are drinking the filth their own hands have produced. But there is another big big mistake, hidden in v.8:

They failed to carry out a reality check. As their fortunes declined, they never once stopped to ask the question ‘Why?’ Why is God no longer with us? Why has he deserted us? Why are the rich getting richer and the poor poorer? Why are other nations queuing up to invade us? Why are the streets no longer safe? Why is corruption rife? The people had got used to life as it was, and had failed to stop and ask ‘Why?’

Back in 2014 the C of E published a report called Anecdote to Evidence which was a research project into church growth. The headline from it came from Professor David Voas of UCL (our arch rivals at King’s London) who famously said this:

“There is no single recipe for growth; there are no simple solutions to decline … What seems crucial is that congregations are constantly engaged in reflection; churches cannot soar on autopilot. Growth is a product of good leadership (lay and ordained) working with a willing set of churchgoers in a favourable environment.”

It is this reflective attitude, rather than soaring on autopilot, doing what we’ve always done without ever stopping to ask ‘Is this working?’ which leads to church health, and it could have led to national health for Israel too, had they only been able to pause, think and change. Jeremiah’s great complaint is that they never even stopped to ask the question.

For those who want a change from the Gospel

Trinity 10 – Isaiah 58:9b-14 (Related)

When the exiles returned from Babylon around 539 BC they found a land somewhat different from what the glowing promises of Deutero-Isaiah had led them to expect. It was not until 445 BC that Nehemiah succeeded in rebuilding the city walls, and for nearly 100 years people had quite literally been eking out a living in the dust and rubble of their once proud city. They also found people in the land. Not invaders who had come to conquer or colonise – who would want to colonise a heap of stones? – but rather those who had always lived in the land alongside them, but had not been to Babylon with them, presumably because they had no skills in which the Babylonians were interested. These ‘peasants’ were treated with disdain, because the only true Jews were now those who had been through the experience of exile.

The exiles must have felt disappointed, that God had somehow sold them a pup through Deutero-Isaiah’s words. They had come from frying pan into fire, and had been roasting for 100 years. Their hopes for God’s protection and provision, for the restoration of their national life, had been dashed, and they no doubt felt cheated. So the prophet re-articulates their hopes for them (v.10-12, 14) and identifies three issues which are coming between them and God’s blessing. It is an interesting cluster of issues, and to read the book of Nehemiah alongside this passage brings illumination and explanation.

First the prophet identifies pointing fingers and malicious talk. This may be about the ‘racism’ directed against those who had every right to live in the land, but who were now regarded as foreigners, and treated as nobodies. Hand in hand with this goes the oppression of the poor, and Nehemiah suggests that this was both the ordinary people’s oppression of the peasants but also the oppression of ordinary people by the small but privileged elite, who, according to Haggai, were creaming off funds given by Emperor Cyrus for rebuilding projects and using them to sustain extravagant personal  lifestyles.

The pointing fingers of the racists and the greed of the ruling élite are of course nothing new, but the prophet makes clear the link between national health and the people’s morality, and he blames their lack of fortunes directly on these two facets of their behaviour. Bu then he adds a third, which might seem surprising to us: sabbath-keeping.

The idea of the sabbath is a really important issue in the OT, and is of course enshrined in the Ten Commandments. Yet to our ears it seems a bit outdated, in a nation where people are forced to work so hard that Sunday is their only chance for recreation and rest, where shopping and sporting activities compete for our attention, and where mobility means that many people are away on holiday or visiting friends or family. So why pick on this issue as such a vital one for the health of the nation? There are some clues within v.13 which may help us to understand.

It is worth saying, of course, that Christians are not bound by Sabbath laws as the Jews would have been, and that the Christian Sunday is not the direct equivalent of the Jewish Saturday. But nevertheless the principle of Sabbath is a sound one, built in by God in his grace because we need it, and neglected at our peril. So what does v.13 teach us about the importance of Sabbath?

First of all, to break it is to do what we please. Sabbath is a reminder that as Christians we have submitted ourselves to the Christ by whom we were bought with the price of his blood, and we find wholeness and fulfilment in being in submission to him, not by doing whatever we feel like. Sabbath is about obedience. Secondly, to break the sabbath is to resent it. Amos 8:5 condemns those who regard the Sabbath as a nuisance because it gets in the way of money-making. To deliberately keep one day free from work and the pursuit of wealth is a weekly reminder of the importance of things other than money. Sabbath is a call not to live by bred alone, and to allow others to do the same. But behind these outward observations is something deeper. We are called to regard all this as a delight, not an imposition; a blessing and not a bit of a pain. Sabbath reminds us that God really does want to be good to us, whether it feels like that or not, and to throw his blessings back in his face, apart from anything else is downright rude. Joy in the Lord and triumph for the nation are to be found both in what we stop doing, but also in what we value doing.

For those who want a change from the Gospel

Trinity 9 – Jeremiah 23:23-29 (Related)

This is a great passage to go with today’s Gospel, about Jesus bringing division rather than peace (Lk 12:49-56). Jeremiah is well known as a bit of a misery among the already dour OT prophets. The calling of God on him was a heavy one, and we know quite a bit more about his personal life that we do about those of other prophets. Since chapter 11 he has been in conflict with the ‘leaders of Judah’ or, as they are described, her ‘shepherds’. He has one message, and they don’t want to hear it. Things begin to hot up in chapter 21, where Jeremiah turns his attention onto his opponents. Today’s passage is part of this condemnation of those who claim that God is saying something different to them from what Jeremiah is hearing.

So what is this great divide all about? What controversy can possibly be causing all this trouble. What is it which causes the dramatic pronouncement of ‘Woe’ to these leaders in 23:1? This word signals a solemn curse, and has real power to it. Jesus pronounces woes on the towns around the Sea of Galilee in Luke 10, and if you visit the Holy Land today you simply won’t find those places. Woes matter! So what is such a serious issue all about? In a nutshell, the leaders wanted peace when in fact there was no peace. Jeremiah had been consistently warning the people that their abandonment of true worship and the consequent lack of moral standards would be met by God’s punishment as they were carried off into exile. But the leaders obviously had a vested interest in keeping that message off the public radar. They resented the idea that a new, true leader would come and dethrone them, and no doubt, as with all corrupt leaders through all time, they were profiting financially from unchallenged greed. So this upstart prophet was a threat to the status quo, and had to be stopped.

One strategy, of course, was to fight fire with fire. If they could produce their own prophets to say what they wanted, it was simply Jeremiah’s word against theirs. Produce enough of them and the majority, surely, would win. So the real question here is about how one discerns the authentic voice of God from the voices of self-interest and the status quo. Jeremiah’s defence is simply to claim that the false prophets were just that, and had not heard God, but were making things up to suit their own ends. He begins by reminding his hearers that God knows the false from the true, even if humans find it difficult at times. In our brief passage he makes three points about true versus false prophecy.

The first is that just because we claim, or even believe that a word has come from God, it might not have done. There is an interesting juxtaposition in v.25-26. The prophets are lying prophets, speaking from the delusions of their own minds, yet they claim to be speaking in God’s name. Just putting ‘Thus says the Lord …’ in front of a prophecy is no guarantee of its genuineness. Whether they really believed that they had the mind of God, or whether they were deliberately setting out to deceive is not clear, but it amounts to the same thing.

Secondly, false prophecy will tear God’s people apart. This is an OT equivalent of ‘by their fruits will you know them’. If so-called words from God lead people away from him, rather than back to him in repentance, they cannot possibly be the genuine article. And of course a real prophet would know that.

And thirdly Jeremiah asserts, with Jesus, that genuine prophecy is often tough to hear. In three clear pictures Jeremiah distinguishes true words from God as being like a consuming fire, a threshing machine to separate truth from lies, and a sledgehammer which cracks rocks open. None of these images is cosy or comfortable, any more than God is comfortable for those deliberately opposing or ignoring him.

So does that mean that God’s word to us will always be harsh and rebuking? Is it in the very nature of the prophetic that it is only there to tell us off? The answer, I believe, is ‘only if that’s what we need’. Like the Holy Spirit himself, prophecy is there to comfort the disturbed and to disturb the comfortable. We can trust our God to say to us what we need to hear, when we need to hear it. True prophecy just feels right to those whose heart’s desire is to please God at any cost.

For those who want a change from the Gospel

Trinity 8 – Genesis 15:1-6 (Related)

The cycle of stories about Abraham and Sarah contains two profoundly important conversations between God and Abraham, here and in Gen 18, where Abraham intercedes for the city of Sodom. In both cases Abraham appears a bit cheeky, if we’re honest, in the way he speaks to God. Whilst these conversations have been seen as authenticating holy boldness, is there more to them?

This conversation begins, though, with God, not Abraham. He tells Abraham not to be afraid, which raises the question of what or whom he might be afraid of. He has just rescued Lot, and perhaps fears a counter-attack and retribution from Lot’s enemies. But as the conversation progresses, it becomes clear that God is addressing a much deeper fear. However, he begins by describing himself as Abraham’s shield and reward. The shield is a protective piece of armour, set between the attackers and the victim: God sets himself between Abraham and all that would harm him. As for the great reward, there’s the rub, which allows Abraham to voice his real complaint. In spite of God’s promise three chapters earlier, he has still not given Abraham a son and heir. So Abraham responds by saying (and I paraphrase) ‘It’s all very well that you plan to reward me, but you haven’t given me the one thing which I really need to make any sense of my life. It’s not that I’m not grateful, but without a son everything you give me will end up being left to my servant. So thanks, but when are you going to reward me with the very thing you promised but have not done?’

For many people there is that One Thing. For Christians who believe in a God who answers prayer, the dilemma is made even more difficult. They simply can’t put it down to ‘life stinks’ or bad luck or whatever. God has promised, but he hasn’t followed through. For many couples it is the same issue, that of childlessness. For some people if goes back even further: they long to find Mr or Miss Right but it just hasn’t happened. Many struggle with chronic health conditions, or unfulfilling work, or … You can fill in the blanks yourself, and maybe you can even fill in your own blank. Many do what Abraham feared, and go to the grave with unfulfilled promises. These are real pastoral issues for so many people.

This passage offers no false hope, but does, I think, make a couple of important points for those struggling with unfulfilled hopes and shattered dreams. The first, which will seem harsh, is to ask exactly what is it that God has promised? Sometimes we struggle because God hasn’t done what we would like, but when we think about it, he has never promised to. If I spend my days in unfulfilled longing for a Ferrari and a holiday cottage in Provence, I need to ask myself the question ‘When exactly did God promise me those things?’ Unanswered wishful thinking can be as painful as unanswered prayer, but it is not the same. God has not necessarily promised me all the things I would like him to have promised.

The second, though, is more positive. This is not just wishful thinking on Abraham’s part. He can look back to the day when God specifically said to him that he would make him into a great nation. He promised! So where is it? I’ve not even got one son, let alone a nation! It’s an audacious thing to say to God, but the response is for God to restate the promise in even more detail. Your nation will not come from Eliezer of Damascus – it will come from your own natural offspring. And when I say ‘nation’, I mean this many! Look at the stars above and the sands beneath your feet. That’s what I promised, and here and now I make that promise to you again.

Of course Abraham had to wait for this reiteration of the original promise to come to pass, and in the meantime he tried to make it happen himself, and had to hear the promise a third time, around 25 years after he first heard it. We are impatient creatures compared to God, and so many of our unanswered prayers are not because God has said ‘No’ but because he has said ‘Not yet!’ But if you have some Big Issue, and are sure that God has spoken to you and has promised, it’s OK to ask him to remake the promise to you, and to ask for confident patience as you wait for him to act.