The Gift of Being Ordinary

Happy new year to you all! Does Christmas seem like a distant memory? Did you get some lovely gifts? Everything you wanted? As we’re celebrating Epiphany today it seems appropriate to think about our gifts- the ones we gave and the ones we received- and the thought behind them. 

I spend ages choosing presents but somehow I feel I’ve never quite got it right, whilst there’s always a lot of thought and care behind the gift I always worry about how it will be received.

We can see the meaning and symbolism behind the gifts the Magi bring to Jesus, but I wonder what Mary and Joseph actually thought when they opened them? I’m sure the gold would have come in handy, particularly when it came to organising their safe passage to Egypt, and I’m sure they appreciated the depth of symbolism in regard to the Frankincense and Myrrh, but I secretly imagine Mary in particular wishing they’d have turned up with something a bit more practical for the care of a new born, son of God or not.

I don’t want to lean towards gender stereotypes but I’m sure you’ve heard that if it had been three wise women that had turned up they’d have brought a casserole, cleaned up the stable and organised a nappy laundering service.

Now I’ve preached a lot on Epiphany, maybe more than any of the other festivals, and I’ve always looked for a different angle than talking about the gifts, I don’t know if I’ve ever even mentioned them on epiphany before so I made a conscious decision this year to reflect upon the gift aspect of this festival as it inspires our own gift giving, which if you were to take an objective look at Christmas, away from our lens of faith, it would seem to be one of the most central things about the season.

The predictability of a gift sermon is it ends up being about our own gifts and what we bring to the manger and therefore to the body of Christ, and this sermon was going to look very different to how it turned out, the themes were the same when I was planning it in my head but then….my family became obsessed with the new Disney film Encanto which came onto the Disney channel on Christmas Eve…I think we’ve watched it 7 or 8 times now.

So what is Encanto about? Well it’s about a very special family who each have, I’m sure you can guess…magical gifts…that is all except one. The central character, Mirabel has no gift. She’s completely ordinary and the whole town knows it. The family matriarch, their Abuela (the film is set in Columbia so there’s lots of Spanish names and references, Abuela is grandma), Abuela sees this lack of gift as a failure, something which will damage the family.

I’m sure I’ve mentioned before that I’m a film nerd, and it’s these ordinary characters like Mirabel that I always find the most relatable and interesting. Not the special, magical or superhero characters. 

I think a huge part of that is because I myself have always felt completely ordinary- don’t worry it’s not a self esteem or self-worth thing, I know I’m fabulous, but very ordinary, which is perfectly ok, because most people are it’s what keeps the world turning. 

Imagine how exhausting it would be if our lives were full of extraordinary people! And yes, we are all special and unique and extraordinary and uniquely loved my god…but in an everyday kind of a way.

What I mean is that we’re not all destined to be a top concert pianist, Olympic swimmer, noble prize winner or Prime minister (although the bar for that one is quite low).

What we see in Encanto is the weight and burden of the gifts upon those who’re labelled as special. Luisa has super strength but feels the weight of the entire town upon her, she feels she would be worthless if she couldn’t fulfil everyone’s expectations, that her only worth is in service. 

Isabella is beautiful and can create flowers and plants out of nothing, she makes everything around her beautiful. She feels the need to be perfect in all things and all times- this includes nearly marrying a man she doesn’t love because it’s expected of her. She never makes anything for herself and when she does she’s surprised and amazed to see it’s a spikey little cactus.

And poor Bruno, he follows the fate of so many biblical characters. He’s the family prophet who sees the future and is rejected for telling people difficult stuff they don’t want to hear.

And who is it that saves the day, the family and the town – fingers in your ears if you don’t want spoilers – but it’s Mirabel, of course it is. Ordinary, gift-less and in no way special. Or is she?

Because I see our ordinariness as a gift. How many magi were wandering around Bethlehem? Not many. How many shepherds? Dozens, maybe even 100s dotted around the outskirts of the city. Beyond ordinary, the lowest rung on the social ladder, and whilst the magi’s visit rounds off our manger story, let’s not forget that the shepherds received a personal invite from God’s holy messengers. They knew they had nothing to bring, utterly gift-less, and yet they came.

Now this is part of a gift sermon when we’re asked to contemplate our own gifts and what we can bring to the manger to lay before the Christ child, and how we can use our gifts to contribute to the body of Christ, but I’m not going to ask you to do that.

We have amazing, gifted, glorious people in this room but what I want you to do is contemplate and celebrate your ordinariness, because God does. The special, the exalted, the lifted up…are these the people Jesus chooses to spend his life with when grown? Is that the family and community God incarnate chose to be born into? Nope. Ordinary. The most extraordinary being chose ordinary because ordinary matters. 

Ordinary is what keeps the world turning, keeps us going, feeds families, cares for the sick, runs towns and cities, operates valuable services, puts kids to bed…and continues the cycles of love and living that God put into the world when God chose to create earth and life and humankind. Our extraordinary ordinariness. 

And as we contemplate our beautiful, ordinary lives, remember that this is what God chose that first Christmas, yes Jesus was for from ordinary, but his choice of an ordinary life, to begin with, is all the proof we need of how much God values us and what we bring to the world. And go and watch Encanto, it’s got some banging tunes. Amen.

Inspired, Nourished and Well Fed

Today is Bible Sunday, a day in our church calendar set aside to celebrate our scriptures and perhaps reflect a little upon their importance in our own lives. We’ve had two examples in our readings this morning of how and why this collection of writings is still important when so many say otherwise.

In Isaiah we have this wonderful invitation to the abundant life God has to offer us, an invitation which lets us know that everyone has a seat at the table, that God’s deepest wish is to feed and nourish us in such a way that we live the most fulfilling lives we can.

In the reading from John, Jesus reminds us that by reading and understanding scripture we know God by understanding God’s relationship with humanity and woven throughout them is the knowledge of who Jesus is, the living and breathing Word of God.

Rev. Janet Morely writes “There’s a well-known saying whose author I haven’t succeeded in tracking down. The internet claims it is by either Karl Barth or an anonymous African woman. ‘There are plenty of other books I can read – but the bible is the only book that reads me.’ …the bible can pose questions it is going to take a lifetime for me to answer, if I ever do. [the Isaiah reading asks of us] What exactly does nourish and satisfy my heart?”

What I find most remarkable about the bible is the sheer breadth of the writings it contains. I truly believe is reflects almost all of human experience: love, betrayal, politics, spirituality, poetry, sexuality, family life, nature, law, wisdom, myth, lament, correspondence…and all bridging about 1000 years of human history- that’s truly remarkable.

So I feel the worst, most disrespectful thing we can ever do is take these writings at face value. We say at the end of our readings “this is the word of the Lord” but that’s never sat well with me. We can’t ignore the human factor; scripture can be God inspired and Spirit breathed but was still written by men- almost exclusively male- at a particular point in time for a particular purpose. It’s the humanity of the bible that I believe makes it come to life.

It contradicts itself in places as we do, lets us know its ok to debate these things and that we can see things from many angles- why else include a gospel narrative from four perspectives? Or include lament psalms where the writer is raging at God’s perceived abandonment?

The bible shows us even chosen people are flawed and get it wrong- David, Solomon, Moses, the disciples…they all show us their worst, warts and all traits but God chooses and uses them anyway, again showing that we each have a place at the table.

Taking scripture at face value, as inerrant and literal truth is a very modern concept, born out of a backlash to enlightenment thinking in the 19th century and pushing this agenda has led to what I feel is the rejection of The Bible as a source of wisdom and nourishment. 

When something is peddled as literal truth it’s the agenda of those setting what those absolute truths are which get taught. The Isaiah reading reminds us that God’s thoughts are not our thoughts and God’s ways are not our ways, but as humans we repeatedly fall into the trap of forgetting we’re the ones made in God’s image, not the other way round. If we are preaching the bible literally and have fixed an idea of God made in our own image we preach a narrow gospel and a narrow God.

And indeed the bible has inexcusably been used to control, punish and traumatise. And this still goes on today.

Whilst we aren’t innocent of this, the joy of our Anglican tradition is allowing scripture to live and breathe and take its place in relationship with our tradition and with our ever-changing world. 

Whilst training for ministry I spent several months on placement at St Peter’s House, the Manchester University chaplaincy and church. At the end of bible readings instead of “this is the word of the Lord” they posed the question “what does this mean for us today?”. This has become my own question whenever I’m preparing a sermon or trying to discern the value of any portion of scripture, and I guess it’s a question that today we might ask of the whole Bible; what does this mean for us today?

Is it something that will entice us to pull up a seat at the table, something that can nourish and satisfy us?

For me, as with so many matters of faith, it becomes about relationship. I see the Old Testament as the documentation of humanity’s relationship with God in all it’s up and downs, our repeated turning away from God and God’s constancy, never abandoning us no matter how many times we fail, mess up or turn away. God always loves us through whatever we throw God’s way.

The New Testament documents God living amongst us in the person of Jesus in order to help us better understand who God is; to enable us to deepen and continue that relationship of love. It’s a record of how we tried to interpret what we learned from that experience.

Through all of this collection of writings, I think the overall purpose or meaning or intention is to have a document which, in a messy and human way because the human factor makes it messy, because we’re messy, a document which is hoping to teach us how to love as God loves, that asks the big questions of us – reads us – in order to draw us to the invitation of abundant life and help us take our seat at the table.

Inspired, nourished and well fed.

Based upon:

Isaiah 55:1-11

An Invitation to Abundant Life

Ho, everyone who thirsts,
   come to the waters;
and you that have no money,
   come, buy and eat!
Come, buy wine and milk
   without money and without price.
Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread,
   and your labour for that which does not satisfy?
Listen carefully to me, and eat what is good,
   and delight yourselves in rich food.
Incline your ear, and come to me;
   listen, so that you may live.
I will make with you an everlasting covenant,
   my steadfast, sure love for David.
See, I made him a witness to the peoples,
   a leader and commander for the peoples.
See, you shall call nations that you do not know,
   and nations that do not know you shall run to you,
because of the Lord your God, the Holy One of Israel,
   for he has glorified you.

Seek the Lord while he may be found,
   call upon him while he is near;
let the wicked forsake their way,
   and the unrighteous their thoughts;
let them return to the Lord, that he may have mercy on them,
   and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon.
For my thoughts are not your thoughts,
   nor are your ways my ways, says the Lord.
For as the heavens are higher than the earth,
   so are my ways higher than your ways
   and my thoughts than your thoughts.

For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven,
   and do not return there until they have watered the earth,
making it bring forth and sprout,
   giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater,
so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth;
   it shall not return to me empty,
but it shall accomplish that which I purpose,
   and succeed in the thing for which I sent it.

John 5.36b-end

But I have a testimony greater than John’s. The works that the Father has given me to complete, the very works that I am doing, testify on my behalf that the Father has sent me. And the Father who sent me has himself testified on my behalf. You have never heard his voice or seen his form, and you do not have his word abiding in you, because you do not believe him whom he has sent.

‘You search the scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that testify on my behalf. Yet you refuse to come to me to have life. I do not accept glory from human beings. But I know that you do not have the love of God in you. I have come in my Father’s name, and you do not accept me; if another comes in his own name, you will accept him. How can you believe when you accept glory from one another and do not seek the glory that comes from the one who alone is God? Do not think that I will accuse you before the Father; your accuser is Moses, on whom you have set your hope. If you believed Moses, you would believe me, for he wrote about me. But if you do not believe what he wrote, how will you believe what I say?’

Childlike Vulnerability

How many of us have day-dreamed about being great? Imagined that at the end of our lives- or preferably during it- someone might say “that Fiona Jenkinson, she was great”. Greatness means different things to different people I guess, so what might that mean to you?

It might be lifting the FA cup as the captain of your beloved football team, taking the chequered flag at Silverstone and being crowned F1 world champion, could be winning an Olympic gold medal or a Nobel prize in your chosen field. It might mean being Prime Minister or Archbishop of Canterbury. It could be heading up a charity that’s able to support a huge number of people in need. 

This kind of greatness is all to do with achievement and it’s usually something you can see reflected through other people’s eyes, that external validation boosts our own ego and helps us to confirm to ourselves, yes I am pretty great. 

It’s probably the case that as Christians we believe greatness to be something very different from these achievement based factors, that it might be something closer to the teaching in the reading from James this morning, that to be truly great we might possess the wisdom of God, first pure, then peaceable, gentle, willing to yield, full of mercy and good fruits, without a trace of partiality or hypocrisy. 

This makes me curious as to how the disciples were defining greatness in our gospel reading, and what led them to be having that discussion is the first place.

We find them with Jesus on the road, on a long and lonely journey. Jesus thinks this might be the right time to try and explain to them something that’s going to be really hard for them to hear- they’re soon going to be leaderless. He tries to explain to them that he’s going to die, that it has to happen, and that most importantly he’ll rise again. 

Sadly they’re not ready to hear it, they don’t understand and are scared by what Jesus is telling them, but rather than ask questions or ask for more explanation they stick their heads in the sand and fall into the kind of petty squabble we’ve seen them have before- who’s the best.

Maybe something of what Jesus has said has sunk in, maybe their banter about which of them is greatest is in part due to the fact that one of them will soon need to step into the leadership role that opens up when Jesus is arrested and killed.

I’m sure Jesus could hear what was going on behind him because when they reach Capernaum he gathers them together and asks “right lads, what was all that chat on the road about”. They fall silent, he’s talked to them about this kind of thing before and they probably know he’s got a few opinions to share.

He tells them what we’ve heard him say before- if you want to be lead, first you have to serve and serve everyone- be last of all and servant of all. Then he takes a child and tells them if you welcome a child like this you welcome him, and even more than that you welcome God.

Jesus completely flips the idea of greatness on it’s head and places the most vulnerable in society into the conversation.

But to truly understand this teaching I think it’s important to have an understanding of what children meant in this society because Jesus isn’t necessarily talking about welcoming the innocent and sinless, or children as we understand them now. The idea of children as angelic and innocent started in around the 18th century. Children weren’t revered as a symbol of innocence as they are now. 

When we’re talking about children in 1st century Palestine we’re talking about someone with no place and little value to the wider system. Infant mortality is estimated to have been around 30%, and although it’s difficult to know it’s thought that a further 30% died by the age of 9. If a child lived long enough to be useful the boys would be replacing the workforce and the girls married off to make more children to keep the cycle going.

Now we know children were loved by their families, of course they were, we see this in the story of Jairus’ daughter, but to society it was a different matter. How many children had Jairus and his wife already lost before the age of 9? Was that why their daughter was so precious? Yet with limited birth control how many families were welcoming children that were unwanted and seen as a burden until they were old enough to work or be married- if they lived that long.

There was no sentimentality about childhood. It was scary and it was messy. By telling the disciples the most important act of leadership is service, and the most important act of service is to welcome a child, Jesus is telling them that greatness is to be hospitable to a worthless, financially unviable human who has a high chance of dying on them. In short to serve those who can offer them nothing in return and might actually end up costing them something, financially and emotionally.

Now the easiest place to see ourselves in this gospel story is in the disciples, the community of Jesus followers trying to figure out how to serve, live and lead with Christ’s teachings, but something struck me after our church planning day last Saturday when Huw remined us of our need to be open with each other in our broken stories and vulnerabilities.

What if we’re the child? Hiding our broken stories and vulnerabilities is something we learn as we grow, we see the world’s response to them and the need to have an outward show of being OK, when we’re far from OK. What if our call as a community, our way to engender the gentleness born from the wisdom from above as James puts it, is to present ourselves childlike before each other, without those acquired ways of hiding our true selves. 

To be here, fully ourselves, vulnerable in whatever way we’re vulnerable, but knowing 100% that we’ll be fully loved, fully accepted and served by each other? Not scared of the cost of that service to our sisters and brothers? If we’re to serve the most vulnerable as if we’re serving Jesus himself surely it’s also part of our Christian calling when we’re the one who’s most vulnerable, to let our community care for us as if were letting Jesus himself care for us?

What if someone thought we were great because we were able to open ourselves up to them, present our truly authentic and vulnerable self, and by doing so gave them permission to do the same? And how might a community look who joined together without masks, without affectation, to be a place of welcome and service? Pure, peaceable, gentle, willing to yield, full of mercy and good fruits, without a trace of partiality or hypocrisy. 

I feel this is the community we’re evolving into and from our planning day, having been apprehensive about the path ahead, I’m now excited about what might be possible and about what we can do as a people called to serve the world round them.

Based on James 3.13-4.3,7-8a 

And Mark 9.30-37

Me or We?

Today is the feast day of St James the Great, and we heard a little bit about him in our readings this morning. We heard about his death from St Paul, and in our gospel reading we had a little snapshot of one incident that may tell us a little of who he was, or at least who he was before Jesus’ death and resurrection.

So what do we know about him? Despite his and his brother’s aspirations to be at Jesus’ side in God’s kingdom, James the Great’s name probably came from his height, the other James probably being a bit shorter. He was the brother of Gospel writer John and with John, Simon Peter and Andrew, was one of the first to be called by Jesus. He was a fisherman but a man of means, his dad, Zebedee, employing several other men.

He's witness to key gospel events such as the Transfiguration and the healing of Jairus’ daughter. He also calls for hellfire to be called down upon a Samaritan town, only to be rebuked by Jesus and along with his brother gets the nickname the “sons of thunder”.

He is of course the patron saint of Spain and, according to legend, his remains are held in Santiago de Compostela in Galicia. When the 25th July falls on a Sunday like this year it’s considered to be a particularly holy year in the Spanish, Catholic tradition.

And this rather fiery sounding character actually inspires the most popular Christian pilgrimage of the modern age, the Camino de Santiago, having attracted over 300,000 travellers over the years. The popularity of this act of pilgrimage, discovery and faith is an interesting parallel to the character we see in todays gospel reading; maybe his own pilgrimage began here as he reflected upon Jesus’ response to his mother’s request, not fully understanding it until he had journeyed with Jesus through his death and resurrection and then met his own death as a follower of Christ.

“What do you want” Jesus asks as the family approach him. And this is our question too. What do we want from Jesus? From life? From our church? What motivates us? What matters most to us?

What do we think James and John really want from him? Greatness? Power? Security? Status? This story appears in the gospels of Matthew, Luke and Mark, but only in Matthew is their mum included. Matthew is big on detail, so I’m thinking the detail of her being there matters. Her sons have walked away from a profitable family business to join a religious sect. Even if she herself is a “believer” she’s also looking out for her boys. She wants to know they’re going to be ok, to have the status she believes is fitting.

But the message of God’s equality hasn’t quite sunk in yet and Jesus responds “you do not know what you are asking”. 

He tries to explain what power looks like to God, that whoever wishes to be great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be your slave; he tells them that ultimately his own pathway will lead to his death and that to truly follow him they must understand that this may be, and for James will be, their fate too.

It doesn’t feel very hopeful does it? it actually feels really sad. Most of these young men do die for their beliefs, with only John that I can think of reaching old age, his fate to recall all that happened and perfect his beautiful and poetic gospel and other writings, but without these men and without his brother.

So what’s the message that we should take from this gospel? That if we truly believe, our fate is to suffer like Jesus? I don’t believe that at all. The message I want to share is about where our motivations come from? Are we “me” centred or “we centred”?

That’s a little bit trite I know but when the Zebedee family come to Jesus their only concern is for their own fate and status, they want to know they’re going to be looked after. Jesus tries to explain that in God’s kingdom no one is first or last because everyone is first and last. That’s true equality. 

We have to think about where we fit in the bigger picture, that we’re each part of something bigger- our church, our town, our city, our country, our world. 

There’s nothing that’s just about us. And following Jesus isn’t going to bring power and status and glory- I would question any form of Christianity that looks like that.

Because I think that to follow Christ means we have to expect nothing but hope for everything. Now what I mean by this is that we can’t expect our lives not to be touched by illness or tragedy, financial problems, stress or difficulty. If we’re truly equal with our fellow humans we have to expect that bad things happen to everyone, regardless of our faith or belief. 

But we can “hope for everything”, by which I don’t mean to hope for greatness, wealth or status but to hope to see the world we believe is possible, to hope to see the world God knows can exist if we each take ourselves out of the centre of things and work towards a world where we put others at the centre, a “we” world not a “me” world.

Now to strive for equality doesn’t mean treating all people equally and it’s taken me a long time to figure this one out. If we think about the words of the Magnificat, Mary states that to achieve equality the rich must be brought down and the poor raised up, this way we meet in the middle.

Stepping out of the centre and looking in gives us a better viewpoint to see where our service is most needed. Who’re the people who need to be lifted up, and who needs to be brought back down- who has placed themselves so far above the ones they’re meant to serve that they’ve completely lost perspective and are only serving themselves? Part of our communal life is to hold them to account.

When we share our eucharist, even as oddly and at times metaphorically as we’ve shared it over the last 18 months, we’re saying to Jesus “I can drink your cup”, I can choose to try to live a communal life, a life of service, a life where I do my best to lift up those who need it and hold to account those who are only serving themselves. 

But there’s a reason why we don’t just have communion once, unlike our baptism it’s not a once only deal, we need to ask ourselves time and time again: can I still do this? Do I still want this? Can I still drink from this cup? We need the cup to be refilled so we can keep drinking from it, we need to be sustained, reaffirmed and reminded. Even Jesus asked if the cup could be taken from him, and if it’s ok for Jesus to ask then it’s OK for us too.

And sometimes we’re the ones who need serving and to be lifted up, at other times we need to brought back down and remined that we’re all servants. Joining together in communion with each other, repeating this act, helps us to refocus and be ready to say “yes, I can still do this” as we continue on our own personal pilgrimages, but are very much a part of something much bigger than just ourselves.

God of the Desperate

I was recently involved in delivering a teaching session for the current ALM module, which is about prayer and spirituality. The session I was asked to be part of was about prayer for wholeness and healing, which I’m very passionate about.

For me the whole ministry around wholeness and healing is a very practical one, it centres around loving people through adversity and empowering them to find peace and make their relationship with God and creation more whole. If physical healing also happens that’s a bonus.

We all know how rare and random healing miracles are, they appear to have very little to do with the strength of someone’s faith or how many people are praying for them, but the question inevitably came up in the teaching session- why aren’t miracles happening now?

In the version of the great commission as told in Mark’s gospel Jesus tells the disciples they’ll preach, baptise, cast out demons and heal. My response to this is usually that as we understand the concept of demons very differently to 1^st century Palestine, has our understanding of healing also changed? And yet we’re presented today with 2 very clear examples of physical healing miracles.

Due to the indiscriminate nature of healing miracles, both in the bible and our own lives, I always think they must tell us more about God than they do the individual. But that’s not to say the details don’t matter.

The most important question we should ask ourselves when reading the bible is “why did someone choose to write this down?” Why is it important? What are they trying to tell me? Why these details? And there are some really interesting details in this seemingly familiar but incredibly complex reading.

If we take the healing of Jairus’ daughter it’s interesting that we’re given the father’s name, his status is important. We’re told 3 times that he’s the leader of the Synagogue. As someone of such importance and high standing he’s risking everything by asking for Jesus’ help. We know the leaders of the synagogue were in direct opposition to Jesus, they were seeking his downfall and eventually conspired to bring it about. But none of that matters when your 12 year old child is dying, loyalties and logic go out of the window. Jairus’ love for his daughter was stronger than his pride or politics. He’s willing to try anything to save her, he’s desperate.

As Jesus heads out to heal this 12 year old child he encounter’s the unnamed woman who’s been haemorrhaging for 12 years, it can’t be a coincidence that she’s been suffering for the same time Jairus’ daughter has been alive. This detail fascinates me. It’s a really interesting time span as 12 years as a lifespan is nothing, for anyone to die aged just 12 is horrific. In the context of the family in our reading this girl would have been considered to be on the cusp of adulthood, nearing the transition from a child with all the hope and expectation that brings. But 12 years of life is nothing.

But 12 years suffering a debilitating illness? 12 years bleeding, being ritually unclean, excluded socially, excluded from your faith, spending every bit of money in the hope of a cure yet finding yourself even worse and completely cut off from everyone and everything which you value? In this case 12 years must feel like forever. Those of you who have a chronic illness I’m sure will understand her frustration and desperation. This woman is willing to try anything, she, like Jairus, is desperate.

And here is what I think links these 2 situations more than anything. We interpret these stories as ones of great faith, Jesus declares it, so we don’t examine it further. Yes, these people do have faith that Jesus’ will heal them…but in both cases it’s as a last resort. They’ve literally tried everything else, there’s nowhere else they can go. They turn to Jesus in utter desperation, with nothing else to lose- because the woman has lost everything already and because for Jairus he’d rather put himself in the woman’s position- be cast out socially and from his faith community, than lose his daughter.

This is where we see what these miracles tell us about God, the God of love, the God of the outcasts and marginalised, the God who heals those who are desperate, unloved and have nothing, the God who takes us in when we’ve risked or given up everything.

Jesus restores for Jairus the most important thing in his life, and gives back to the woman the life she’d lost, and even though in the narrative she’s unnamed he calls her “daughter”. God loves us, even the least of us, as much as Jairus loves his daughter, will go to any length to save us, and names us amongst God’s children. There’s something which I find incredibly affirming about these miracles, something which tells me so much about God.

The child who Jairus is prepared to give up everything for is a girl. This isn’t his son who’ll continue the family name and maybe stand alongside him at the temple, his motivation for risking his reputation and standing is purely motivated by love. I’m certain Jesus sees this.

Our unnamed and unknown women being healed and then called “daughter” by Jesus tells me that just like the disciples we revere and have sainted this woman is a beloved child of God. She matters to God. Both these people matter to and are loved by God even if they don’t matter to their society. It’s a reminder than God sees us and knows us and loves us even when nobody else does. We all matter to God, no matter other people’s opinions of us, or our opinion of ourselves. And we’re all capable of accessing a healing that yes, may not bring us a physical health but can bring us a spiritual one.

Through God we can see our own worth, and see how we’re seen by God, loved by God and how we matter to God. We can be healed of the things which stop us from loving ourselves and prevent us from being at peace with ourselves, the kind of peace which whilst it can’t protect us from illness or grief or even death, can enable us with the skills to better deal with the difficulties that we encounter, to better relate to God’s creation and ultimately to better see or own place and worth within it.

This sermon is based upon Mark 5:21-end

That's the Point

If, like me you’re someone who potentially spends more time on social media than is probably good for you, you might be aware of a bit of a Twitter Storm over the Easter Weekend. 

Professor Alice Roberts, an anthropologist and President of Humanists UK, and someone who I have a lot of time and respect for, caused a bit of upset by tweeting on Good Friday, “Just a little reminder today. Dead people don’t come back to life”. This understandably caused a bit of a backlash, writing it as she did on one of our most holy days. 

Now the 280 characters which Twitter allows doesn’t give much scope for nuanced argument but the general gist, from both believers and non-believers, was it was a bit mean-spirited to put a statement out there that was clearly only meant to disrupt on Good Friday, and that a militant atheist is as unpleasant a thing to encounter as a militant Christian- a belief that I share, because absolute certainty is something I find utterly scary, whichever side of an argument the certainty is on.

We have some magnificent, stirring hymns don’t we? I wish we could sing them I'm church at the moment! “Blessed assurance! Jesus is mine”, “no more we doubt thee! Glorious Prince of life” and in the moment when we’re belting out those words we believe it completely. But when I encounter a fellow Christian who spouts such rhetoric and certainty outside of our singing I feel quite uncomfortable, because I don't quite trust it.

It may be they believe utterly in what they’re saying, in which case they're perhaps being a bit dishonest with themselves because faith and doubt aren’t opposites, they’re siblings. They live side by side and one informs the other, they’re forever entwined within us and to deny one is deny a part of ourselves- whether we’re denying the possibility we might have doubts or denying the possibility that the world contains a spark of divinity.

This is why I like the fact that St Thomas, forever labelled as the doubter, has such a prominent place in our little church. 

Some of our historians will know the background of the who commissioned the windows here at St Michael’s but I’d be interested in hearing if we know the reasons behind some of the less obvious choices of who they depict. The illustrations of episodes from Jesus’ life make sense, and probably the St George window too, but then we have saints Oswald and Aidan, the Celtic saints, hidden behind the organ loft.

And then, in the central focus of the building, above the altar and alongside our patron saint and our Lord we have St Thomas. 

Why does he have such a place of prominence? Did those who commissioned him share my belief that faith and doubt must live together, is it sending a message that even before our own time St Michael’s has been a safe space to have questions and doubts?

There’s a reason why this was the community that brought me back to my childhood faith. If I’d walked into this community and been met with a series of certainties and immovable facts, such as the rejection of the science I believe is all part of God’s creation, or a condemnation of the LGBT people in my life who are all beautiful spirit-filled children of God, well I would have turned on my heel and been right out of that door again, but this community is what I long for in every faith community-  a place that respects ideas, encourages debate and allows questions  and indeed doubt.

The only certainty I was met with here was the certainty of God’s love, but not necessarily an explanation of what that ultimately means or any boast of having the key or knowledge to accessing anything those on the outside of the community couldn’t.

I find the centrality of Thomas reassuring and a comfort. It’s a sign of the values that have underpinned this community for generations.

But what of Thomas himself? We know so little of him; we know he’s a twin, it’s Thomas who says to Jesus “we don’t know where you’re going” leading to one of the passages most commonly read at funerals. It’s Thomas who travels with Jesus on learning Lazarus has died and in tradition it’s Thomas who took Christianity to India and we have a strong Marthoma community here in Manchester, part of those South Indian traditions.

But in the passage we hear today John is using Thomas in a very deliberate way. His declaration of “my lord and my god”, his testimony to the living, breathing, bodily Jesus, is absolutely to do with his witness and declaration of faith; “these are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name.”

The encounter with Thomas is incredibly visceral, his declaration is sparked by physical contact, the proof that this is the same Jesus who died on the cross, not a representation but the same body with the same wounds. 

At Christmas the emphasis is on the incarnation and bodily presence of God amongst us, but we sometimes forget this is central to the whole of Jesus’ life and never more so than in the Easter and Resurrection narrative. 

John’s is definitely the gospel to remind us of this and should be a reminder of our embodied faith, and should shred the long-held belief that our bodies and their functions are shameful in any way; God created our bodies and chose to be incarnate, chose a body just like yours. John’s is the gospel of body and blood; where the Holy Spirit is physically breathed into the apostles.

This passage shows us the body tortured and killed on a cross is the same body Thomas touches and who he then realises is both man and God. That’s why this is special, that’s why this matters. 

To return to Professor Robert’s controversial tweet- Dead people don’t come back to life. That’s the point. That’s the marvellous, miraculous, central point of the entire story. This doesn’t happen, except here, and in all our faith and our doubt we choose to believe in the miracle. We choose to have faith.

Some days there may be more doubt wrapped up in that faith than others, but we still choose to come back to our faith, because there’s just something, something about this story, something about this man that’s leads us too to declare “my Lord and my God”

So yes, we will have doubts, yes we will have questions, but it doesn’t take away from our faith. It holds our faith to account, it helps it grow and change and evolve. It ensures we that like creation itself we never stand still or stagnate but keep growing and maturing, it helps our faith to become bigger and our relationship with God to become more whole.

Epiphany of Love

I think it was Johnny Lee who sang “Looking for Love in all the Wrong Places” I’m a little bit young to remember that song but it sort of describes where the Magi are at in the beginning of our Gospel story. Not that they that know they’re looking for love! They have an idea of what or who they’re seeking but by the end of their tale what they’ve sought and what they’ve found are not entirely the same.

In Huw’s sermon a few weeks ago he talked about how through this very strange and unsettling year we’ve had, many people have either been searching for something- whether it be meaning, purpose or hope in the wrong places, or that when we have found something which has meant something to us or given us joy or hope amid the hopelessness it’s been something and somewhere unexpected. 

Our Magi are searching for a king, an important king; they know there’s going to be something very special about this king, worth them embarking on what would have been a very long and not very easy journey. Scholars have tried to pinpoint over the years where these men may have journeyed from and the best guess is part of the Persian empire, estimating a 400-700 mile journey.

This would not have been an easy or safe trip so they must have placed a great deal of importance on what they were doing. And they did the really obvious thing, after losing sight of the star which had led them to Israel they headed to the capital city of Jerusalem, headed to the palace and asked the guy in charge if he knew where the new king was being born!

This was a pretty foolish error on the part of our travellers, they couldn’t have had an understanding of the political situation, that news of a powerful leader being born would cause a man like Herod to take cruel and divisive action. The actions of the Magi, looking in the wrong place, directly leads to the massacre of innocent children.

But they knew a powerful king was being born and so they go to where they think the seat of power is- in the palace. 

The news that the Messiah was going to be born should have delighted the people of Jerusalem and the priests but they, like Herod, are greatly disturbed. They know their leader has power because he’s in the pocket of their Roman occupiers and is ruthless enough to hang onto this power by any means. Herod is so feared that the news of the birth of the leader predicted to liberate the Jewish people is not recognised. 

In defence of the Magi, when the star which has led them disappears they mustn’t have felt they had any other option. They haven’t come all that way to fail and by going to the palace they have access to Herod’s advisers and can pinpoint a town where the king is to be born. When they leave Jerusalem their guiding star reappears and they’re able to fulfil their objective of finding what they had come so for to seek…or had they?

Because what they thought they were going to find and what awaited them as I’ve already said were not entirely the same. 

They come looking for the one who would be the king of the Jews, the prophesised Messiah, long predicted to be a great military leader to liberate the Jewish people with military power. To empower the nation to take control back as the Jewish people had done generations earlier when they’d marched into this land and took occupation from those that lived there before them. 

But that’s not the leader Jesus was destined to be. I wonder what the Magi thought when on arriving in this unremarkable town the star led them to the outhouse used for the animals? When they discovered the king’s parents to be so…ordinary, when measured against the human makers of power and greatness? 

Whatever and whoever they expected to find at the end of their journey what awaited them was both ordinary and extraordinary.

They found a family, ordinary by appearances. They found God’s love made physical and embodied in a human child and in the love he generated in his parents. 

They had thought, as did the people of Jerusalem, that power resided in the palace with Herod, but God’s statement by choosing to have his son born to these people in these circumstances is to declare that the greatest power lies in the lives of the most seemingly ordinary people.

Throughout this last, most extraordinary, twelve months we’ve seen the power of ordinary individuals. As governments and those in authority in many countries have struggled in their response to the global pandemic we’ve seen how the actions of single people can effect so many. 

We’ve realised the measures a single person can make in their daily lives to help contain the virus and seen reports of how a lack of personal responsibility has had dire consequences for many.

We’ve also seen the people who have gone above and beyond in their personal actions to make things better for others, we know of the heroes of the pandemic such as Sir Tom Moore, and those with high profiles such as Joe Wicks and Marcus Rashford but then there’s the likes of my friend Camilla, supposed to be traveling the world at the start of 2020 but she returned to her home-town in Italy when their hospitals were at their fullest to work nursing patients with covid.

There’s the NHS staff who’ve returned from retirement or other careers to support the frontline, shop workers ensuring our essential and non-essential needs are met, teachers negotiating moving from in person to online teaching and back again. And then there’s the teams of individuals the world over who’ve poured all their time and resources into developing vaccines to ensure we eventually return to the lives we love and miss.

So many unnamed and unknown to us, have individually and collectively been extraordinary. As we’ve looked to those we believe hold the power to control and help our current situation it’s people like ourselves, our neighbours and members of our communities who’ve had the power to help, uplift and inspire us; through love, through duty, through a sense and needing to do what was right or just trying to do their jobs in whatever way they could. 

Regarding Epiphany I read this week that only in darkness can we see the stars, and in our recent darkness many stars have revealed themselves.

The message of Epiphany is that of the revealing of Christ to the Gentiles, the realisation that kingship means something very different to God than to humankind and that a tiny child can hold all the power in the world. This is the great revelation; the greatest power on earth is love and God is the source of that love.

In every act of love God is revealed over and over again and my greatest source of hope through all this has been the constant revelation of people’s goodness and kindness, as goalposts have moved and the hope of the things I usually have to look forward to have diminished, my own epiphany is that my hope doesn’t live in a wish to return to our lives as they were, although I dearly do wish for it; my hope, as it always should be, is in the continual revealing of God in the goodness of the ordinary and in the simplicity of love.

Matthew 2.1-12

After Jesus was born in Bethlehem in Judea, during the time of King Herod, Magi from the east came to Jerusalem and asked, “Where is the one who has been born king of the Jews? We saw his star in the east and have come to worship him.”

When King Herod heard this he was disturbed, and all Jerusalem with him. When he had called together all the people’s chief priests and teachers of the law, he asked them where the Christ was to be born. “In Bethlehem in Judea,” they replied, “for this is what the prophet has written:

“‘But you, Bethlehem, in the land of Judah,

are by no means least among the rulers of Judah;

for out of you will come a ruler

who will be the shepherd of my people Israel.’”

Then Herod called the Magi secretly and found out from them the exact time the star had appeared. He sent them to Bethlehem and said, “Go and make a careful search for the child. As soon as you find him, report to me, so that I too may go and worship him.”

After they had heard the king, they went on their way, and the star they had seen in the east went ahead of them until it stopped over the place where the child was. When they saw the star, they were overjoyed. On coming to the house, they saw the child with his mother Mary, and they bowed down and worshipped him. Then they opened their treasures and presented him with gifts of gold and of incense and of myrrh. And having been warned in a dream not to go back to Herod, they returned to their country by another route.