Judging our political leaders

1 Samuel 15:34 - 16:13
Psalm 20
2 Corinthians 5.10-17

The Old Testament reading for the second Sunday in June was about a leadership struggle. How topical is that?

Samuel had anointed Saul as king, feeling sure that he was God's chosen leader. But then things started to go wrong and Samuel began to have doubts. Part of the trouble with Saul was his unpredictability and mood swings. Sometimes he was a highly charismatic and effective leader, sometimes he seemed to alienate those closest to him. (Does that remind you of anyone?)

But, finally, what upset Samuel was Saul's lack of killer instinct. On one occasion Saul led an army in a holy war against their enemies the Amalekites. Saul was told to utterly destroy everything but, instead, he and his soldiers kept the spoils of war which they had won in the battle.

When Samuel challenged him about this act of disobedience, Saul insisted that he had only kept the spoils - sheep, cattle and goats - to offer as a sacrifice to the Lord. Was this a typical politician's u-turn, like Hazel Blears writing a cheque to the Inland Revenue for the tax she had avoided, or was Saul being sincere? Either way, it did him no good. Samuel insisted that the Lord had now rejected him from being king.

It's difficult to know what to make of Samuel's insistence that genocide against the Amalekites, and the eradication of their whole culture and even their property and livestock, was God's will. This is the kind of attitude which we condemn in modern day Islamic terrorists, so it's impossible to believe that Samuel was right. However, Saul doesn't emerge from this episode with any credit, either. He didn’t balk at the idea of massacring all the people. He only argued with Samuel about the expenses. It seems he felt that being the leader of the nation gave him the right to reward himself, and his followers, with some of the loot.

Anyway, this expenses scandal was the last straw, and Samuel embarked on a leadership challenge. He went in search of a new king for Israel, even though - technically - this was an act of treason. A secret meeting was convened with Jesse, the leader of the Bethlehemites, one of the clans of Judah, because God seemed to be guiding Samuel to anoint one of Jesse's sons as the new challenger to Saul.

But then comes a huge surprise in the narrative. God does not judge by outward appearance. He looks deep into people's hearts and motives. How unlike the modern era! Just think about the recent row over the fashion photographs of former Europe Minister Caroline Flint, who was accused of using glamour to promote her own career? Or do you know when, for instance, the British people last chose a prime minister who was bald? (It was Clement Attlee, in fact, in 1950.) And consider the many unflattering comments there have been about Gordon Brown's manic smile in his U-Tube interview, or his glass eye? What do all these things tell us about the way we judge people today?

It's much harder, of course, for us to get to the bottom of our leaders' motives than to think about their appearance. We are surrounded by spin and counter-spin. George Osbourne, the Tory economic spokesman, condemned Alistair Darling for avoiding paying his own taxes despite being in charge of the Inland Revenue, but only last summer Mr Osbourne himself was being condemned for partying on a yacht with a corrupt Russian billionaire. How can we begin to fathom the motives of such people? No wonder that a large part of the electorate seems to doubt that any politicians can be trusted at all!

But then, maybe we expect too much of our leaders. Should we judge politicians by a higher standard than the standards we apply to ourselves? What would God find if he looked into the deepest recesses of our hearts?

Eventually Samuel had seen all of Jesse's sons, and had rejected them all, despite their strapping appearance – all that is except for one, the youngest boy, David, who was looking after the sheep. The role of the shepherd in ancient Israel was ambivalent. On the one hand it was a low status job, often given to the youngest member of the family. And here is the proof in our story. An important visitor had arrived, asking to meet all of Jesse’s sons, yet no one thought of sending for the shepherd boy – until Samuel specifically demanded a meeting with him! On the other hand, however, good shepherds were seen as an example of caring and courageous leadership. The good shepherd cared for his sheep and knew each one by name. The way that shepherds often, single-handed and selflessly, protected their flocks from thieves and wild animals, and led the sheep to good pastures and clean refreshing water, was seen as a model for how the nation’s leaders ought to behave and even as a picture of how God loves and looks after his people.

In our modern urban environment we perhaps find shepherds rather remote figures. A better comparison might be nursery school teachers and carers. Like the shepherd tending the flock, they are trusted to look after the nation's children and to protect them from harm. Some nursery school carers, however, betray that trust - like the nursery school worker who is accused of abusing children in Plymouth and taking obscene pictures of them. But many nursery school carers are inspirational. Only this week, on the radio, I heard an interview with the young woman who - aged just 21 at the time - faced down a man with a machete who was trying to kill the children she was looking after. Three times she carried armfuls of three and four year-olds out of harm's way in the playground and into the nursery where they would be safe. 'How could I abandon them,' she said, 'When they were tugging at my skirt and asking for help?' Suffering terrible wounds to her arm, hand and back as she rescued the children, she only thought about the pain and the injuries the man had inflicted when it was all over. That's the kind of protective love which we find on the Cross, where Jesus suffered and died for our sakes.

I guess our MPs, from whatever party they come, probably think of themselves as more important than childcare workers. That's presumably why they think they deserve to be paid so much more money. But it would be no bad thing if politicians were less self-serving and more like that courageous nursery school worker battling the madman with the machete without any regard for her own safety. When politicians think that it's clever to rock the boat or score political points, they are forgetting that their first duty is to look after the nation, and the wider world beyond it.

David’s career as a shepherd had, then, been the perfect schooling for his future role as king, and - guided by God's Spirit - Samuel had no hesitation in anointing him as the future ruler of Israel. But the writer of this passage wants to be able to have his cake and eat it. Yes, God does not see as mortals see, He looks into our hearts instead of being distracted by outward appearances. He chose a simple shepherd rather than a warrior to be the leader of the nation. But, as it happens, the passage tells us that David was ruddy, and had beautiful eyes, and was handsome. And, of course, he went on to become a giant killer and a famous general, too.

Thank goodness that we have Jesus, great David's greater son, to look to as our model of leadership. He is the kind of leader who never held high office and never wielded a sword. The only authority that he ever exercised was his own moral authority, which came from his goodness and compassion.

Psalm 20 is a royal psalm, used either at the coronation of the king or perhaps at an annual enthronement festival when the king and the people renewed their vows to God. It begins with the people urging God to answer the king in the day of trouble and provide him with divine protection so that he would know what to do when things went wrong. Of course, God can only fulfil the heart's desire of the leader, and fulfil all his plans, if his motives are good and honourable, but that is taken for granted by the psalmist. There's no cynicism here about politicians, only a heartfelt prayer that when we face potential disasters like global warming, terrorism or financial meltdown and record unemployment God will help our politicians to do the right thing.

The people look forward to a victory celebration not unlike the ones that greeted the election of Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair, when many people genuinely believed that things could only get better. The psalmist has no doubt that God really will give victory to the nation and make things come right through his anointed leader.

Of course, the ideal picture of kingship depicted in the Psalm seldom came true in reality. Again and again the leaders of Israel proved as frail and fickle as so many of our own MPs have done. Thank goodness, then, that in Jesus we can have a real and enduring victory over evil and injustice, which is not dependent upon political power or good governance, but on the power of God's love.

Paul reminds us in his second letter to the Corinthian Christians that all of us face a day of reckoning not unlike the publication of the MPs' expenses in the Daily Telegraph. What we have done in secret will be laid bare. Outward appearances will be replaced by the revelation of our innermost thoughts and motivations. We can only approach that day with confidence if we have clean consciences, because our true selves are well known to God and there is no Official Secrets' Act to save us from being exposed as frauds if we have been living a lie.

Perhaps we should all have a bit more sympathy for politicians, knowing that all of us risk a similar debacle to the one endured by MPs when the truth came out about their expenses claims. If we have nothing to fear it is only because the love of Christ urges us on. He has died for us all so that we might live no longer for ourselves but for him. In him we can become a new creation. We no longer need to be regarded - or to regard ourselves - in the old way, from a human point of view, as people liable to fail just as easily as our political leaders. For everything has become new.

Paul gets quite carried away in this passage with his own flights of rhetoric. It's stirring stuff, but what does it actually mean in practice?

First of all, if we're going to boast about our leaders - whether they're politicians, or community leaders, or bosses and managers or church leaders - it means that we need to find the right reasons to celebrate them. Outward appearances certainly don't count for anything as far as God is concerned. What matters is the purity of our motives, so we should celebrate and try to look for leaders of all kinds who are humble, kind, compassionate, caring and sensitive; leaders who are prepared to take risks for our sakes and to lay themselves and their own careers on the line; leaders who are made in the image of Christ.

And second, it means that this is how we should try to behave in our own little sphere of influence - as parents, grandparents, team leaders, friends, neighbours and church council members or stewards, or secretaries of the local neighbourhood watch or golf club. Sadly, the world and even the Church contains too many examples of people whose own lives have been made a misery by bad leaders of one sort or another, and who then look for a chance to exercise the same kind of leadership over others as a way of getting even.

If we are truly in Christ, we must be a new creation - breaking the mould of bad leadership and serving others with the same humility and compassion as our master. We must stand upright and take our pride not in human power of any kind, but in the name of the Lord. Then the Lord will grant our heart's desires and fulfil all our petitions.

One Love, One Heart, Let's Get Together

Acts 8:26-40, 1 John 4:7-21, John 15:1-8

What's the best piece of good news that you've heard this week? Of course, it might be something personal - news about the birth of a grandchild or one of your children getting a job, or about a cure or treatment for an illness. But maybe this week hasn't been all that eventful for you personally, and the best piece of good news you heard was something on the radio or the TV.

One piece of good news which dominated the headlines at the start of the week was the story of Ben Southall, the 34 year-old Englishman who has won a competition to live, with his girlfriend, on a tropical island on Australia's Great Barrier Reef. He'll have a three bedroom luxury villa to live in for six months, the use of a buggy to drive around the island, a private swimming pool and a wet suit for snorkeling on the Reef itself. Not only that but he'll be paid a salary of £74,000 - and all he has to do in return is write a daily blog - or Internet diary - about his experiences.

Already the story has generated more than £50 million worth of free publicity for the Australian tourist industry, making it the most successful marketing campaign of its kind. But perhaps it's not quite such unalloyed good news for MrSouthall as everyone seems to think. One Australian commentator pointed out that the island and its waters has a population of sharks, salt-water crocodiles, a breed of large aggressive birds called cassowaries - which specialise in kick boxing, seven of the ten most venomous species of snake - including sea snakes, the odd venomous lizard, plagues of box jellyfish, black widow and funnel web spiders and stingrays. And then there are the cane toads, a large and aggressive breed of toad which will think nothing of coming into your kitchen in search of food. The Australian Government advises that the only way to get rid of them is to beat them to death with a golf club or cricket bat.

Now Mr Southall is the sort of guy who rides ostriches for fun, so an encounter with any of these creatures may not be enough to spoil his time in paradise, but this catalogue of threats does reminder us that there's often another side to so-called 'good news' stories.

Sixteen to eighteen year-olds had a good news story of a kind this week - their summer exams might be cancelled completely if their schools and colleges are closed because of swine flu. But the downside of the story is that they might catch the flu themselves, and of course there are some people who surprise their teachers by doing better in their exams than they did in their course work, so it won't be good news for everyone.

Maybe eleven year-olds have more cause to celebrate. Their Standard Assessment Tests will no longer include a paper and pencil test for science. But again, the bad news is that the tests in maths and English will continue.

It's a bit like the old formula for jokes - 'Do you want the good news first or the bad news?' 'The bad news,' said the doctor, 'Is that we have amputated the wrong leg. The good news is that the man in the bed opposite has offered to buy your slippers.' And so I could go on.

The Ethiopian official was someone with a deep interest in spirituality. He was barred from entering the inner part of the Temple, because he was a eunuch and perhaps also because he was a Gentile - although the story doesn't tell us for certain about that. But he wasn't put off by these restrictions. He'd come to Jerusalem to worship, and he was going home with a very valuable prize - a copy of the scroll of the prophecies of Isaiah. Copied out by hand, it would have cost him the equivalent of many thousands of pounds. But then he could afford it; he was a very important man, in charge of the entire Ethiopian treasury.

His problem was that he didn't know whether the story he was reading was good news or bad news. He knew that it was supposed to be good, but it sounded pretty bad. He was reading about someone who had been chosen by God to represent him but who is being betrayed - led like a lamb to the slaughter. Humiliated, denied justice, unable - or unwilling - to speak in his own defence, the martyr's life is taken away. 'How can I understand this story unless someone guides me?' asked the baffled official. Fortunately, the Spirit had guided Philip to be on that road at just the right time to answer this question and 'starting with this scripture, he proclaimed to him the good news about Jesus.'

Like Philip, we live in a world hungry for meaning and crying out for good news. Like Philip, who was really a kind of church social worker by profession, we may not have any special training in sharing the Christian story but we do have opportunities to start from where people are, with the questions they're actually asking, in order to share with them our understanding of what's happening in the world. Global warming and economic recession - aren't these a challenge to the false values of greed and selfishness which are the engines that drive our whole way of life? Migration and the growing influence of people from different faiths and cultures - aren't these a reminder that the human family is made up of many different peoples and nations who are all loved by God? The breakdown of family life - isn't this a reminder that people can't expect to get along with one another, and raise their children in security and trust, without taking notice of traditional values like love and self-sacrifice?

And, of course, like Philip, we can conclude our proclamation of the Christian faith by explaining what the scripture means when it talks about God's chosen representative being led like a lamb to the slaughter and having his life taken away. It sounds like bad news, but on this occasion the twist in the tail is that it turns out to be good news after all. The death of Jesus on the cross is the ultimate example of love and self-sacrifice triumphing over evil, as Jesus deliberately confronts wickedness, prejudice and ignorance and submits to them in order to overcome them with the power of love.

After surviving an assassination attempt in New York, the reggae singer Bob Marley is reputed to have said, "The people who are trying to make this world worse, are not taking a day off! How can I?" That's pretty much the Christian response to all the bad news that seems so often to get in the way of good news. So long as people of faith or goodwill go on ceaselessly confronting evil, good news will always have the last word.

This theme of love overcoming evil is taken up in the extract which we heard from the First Letter of John. The writer says that Jesus' death on the cross is the supreme example of God's love at work and, if we live and act in the same spirit of love for one another, Jesus will live and continue to act in each one of us. And, he continues, this loving attitude casts out all fear and hatred, leaving no room for bad news to get a grip on us any more.

The writer of the First Letter of John also wrote the Gospel of John and here he reinforces the same message that, by abiding in Jesus, we can bear much fruit and be a source of love and good news. But he also reminds us that if we prefer hatred and fear, we cannot be joined to Jesus and will inevitably be cast out. Is that the downside, the bad news angle, on John's 'good news' story? Well, if it is, let's leave the last word to the good news.

The Gospel passage about the vine concludes like this: If you abide in me, and my words abide in you, ask for whatever you wish, and it will be done for you.' It's John's version of the famous saying of Jesus that if we have faith the size of a mustard seed, we will be able to say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move; and nothing will be impossible for us. Except that, for John it isn't faith which is indispensable to being able to make things happen, it's love - and love only has the power to make things turn out right. If we act in fear or hatred, we will not bear fruit.

I've quoted Bob Marley once, so I'll quote him again, this time from the words of a famous reggae song which he wrote with Curtis Mayfield in 1965: 'One love, one heart, let's get together and feel all right.' That's almost, but not quite, how John puts it in the letter. 'God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them... If we love one another, God lives in us, and his love is perfected in us.' We may not have won a prize to go and live on a tropical island with loads of poisonouscreepy-crawlies but this is real good news, which has endured for almost two thousand years and which has no downside.

Holding On

The passage which we read from the Acts of the Apostles is one of the earliest Christian sermons on record. That remains true whether it's an account of what Peter actually said, or whether it's Luke's attempt at reconstructing what Peter might have said. No doubt it's a reflection of the kind of sermon which Luke had heard the first Christian leaders preaching when he was travelling with Paul around the Mediterranean. He had been one of Paul's companions on his last fateful journey to Jerusalem, and had met James the brother of Jesus, though Peter doesn't seem to have been present on that occasion.

He knew, however, that Peter was absolutely in agreement with Paul that 'God shows no partiality.' Everyone, no matter what their cultural or religious background, is acceptable to God if they fear him, or show respect for him, and do what is right. He also knew that the first Christians were different from their Jewish compatriots because they believed and preached that Jesus was Lord of all, and that through Jesus God has brought the possibility of true peace to human beings.

Of course, this gift of peace - which is brought by Jesus - is not just what the English language means by the word 'peace'. It's a translation of the Hebrew word shalom, or the Aramaic word shlama and the Arabic word Salaam. As such, it means far more than just the absence of conflict or the feeling of restfulness. In Semitic languages like Hebrew and Aramaic it also means completeness, wholeness and well-being. Sometimes the English Bible even translates it with the word 'salvation'.

And this message of wholeness brought by Jesus had begun not just with the preaching of the early Church, but with the ministry of Jesus himself, who had spread the message of wholeness and well-being not just in his own teaching but by doing good and healing all who were oppressed. And the peace which he was able to bring to people was the sign not only that he was more powerful than the forces of conflict and disease, but also that God was with him and had anointed him, or set him apart from other people, as his chosen representative on earth.

This same message was also proclaimed, as we have seen, by the first generation of Church leaders - people like Peter and James. And they were able to reinforce its power and persuasiveness by pointing out that they themselves had been witnesses of these dramatic events, culminating in Jesus' death and resurrection, when he appeared to them and ate and drank with them after he rose from the dead.

It's clear from the message which the first Christians proclaimed that the risen Jesus had celebrated holy communion with them and had commissioned, or commanded, them to go out and spread the news that he is God's permanent representative, the judge of both the living and the dead, and therefore he - and his followers - have the power to forgive the sins of all who believe in his name.

No wonder that this radically new message set Peter, Paul and James on a collision course with their Jewish contemporaries. Although they claimed to be true Israelites, this was, in effect, a new religion.

And today, of course, this groundbreaking message is essentially unchanged. The cross decorated with flowers is a symbolic representation of the gospel of completeness, wholeness and well-being, and the singing of hymns at the church door is a symbol of the message that conflict and disease can still be overcome in Jesus' name, and that people can be put right with one another and with God if they place their trust in him.

But songs and symbols are not enough. Just as in the ministry of Jesus, strong words have to be backed up by convincing actions. The Church has to be seen to be doing good and bringing healing to the oppressed. And it's a vital task because, sadly, as we proclaim the gospel today, we face a tide of indifference and ignorance about the Christian faith, or indeed about any kind of religion.

On Good Friday we tried to give out palm crosses to the passers-by as we made our way through the streets of Hemsworth during our walk of witness. Some welcomed them, as a tiny reminder of the significance of the day and a gesture of goodwill. But many people, especially men, were hostile. From their reaction you might have thought that we were pushing drugs. This lack of empathy is what makes the task of proclaiming Jesus' message more urgent, of course. It underlines the urgency and the necessity of proclaiming our faith not only in words and gestures but with actions that promote peace and well-being.

I think we have to ask ourselves, however, what is the Church most famous for proclaiming? Is it Jesus' message of completeness and healing that makes the headlines? No, it's the constant faction fighting within the Church about sexuality, the ministry of women and other less important things. If we are to be true to the Church's original message, the message which those first preachers had witnessed Jesus proclaiming in word and deed, both before and after his resurrection, we have to make sure that what people see us working for and hear us talking about is peace, wholeness, completeness and forgiveness.

In John's version of the resurrection story, Jesus meets Mary of Magdala in the garden near his empty tomb. Unable to contain her emotion she tries to cling to him. It's an understandable reaction. She has gone, in a moment, from a sense of utter loss and despair to a recovery of hope and joy. Jesus is not gone forever. Instead, he is with her and she will never be separated from him again because he has even overcome death. But no sooner do these feelings of peace and completeness start to overwhelm her than Jesus rebukes her. 'Do not hold on to me,' he tells her, 'But go and announce the good news to others.' And, with that, she pulls herself together, contains her emotions and goes, as she has been bidden, becoming as she does so the first apostle of Jesus - that is, the first of many people sent out by him to tell his brothers, and everyone whom she meets from now on, 'I have seen the Lord!'

I think there's a message for us contained in this moving story. We, too, are not to hold onto Jesus. Our primary objective is not to have a good time - as we praise his name, and sing the familiar hymns, and decorate our cross. It's not to keep our church the way we have always known and loved it, or to tend the flame of tradition. It's not to renew our own sense of wholeness and completeness, or hope and joy in the faith. It's not simply to remind ourselves that we can never be separated from Jesus, even by death. Our primary objective, if we are to be true to the gospel proclaimed by Jesus and his first followers, is to go and announce the good news to others, not in a language that we can understand, not with our own cherished songs and symbols, not in ways that make us feel safe and secure, but in their language and their idioms, in ways that make sense to them and make them feel comfortable and secure, ways that can best convey to them the age old proclamation that we have seen the Lord.

Jesus and The G20

Psalm 118: 1-2, 19-29
John 12.12-16

Psalm 118 is what scholars sometimes call a processional psalm. It may also have been a royal psalm, where the king was led in procession to the Temple. It was certainly one of the psalms which pilgrims chanted or sang as they approached the Temple Mount at festival time. It's also one of the most often quoted passages in the Bible.

The psalm begins with a note of celebration. The pilgrims are nearing the end of their journey and they're in the mood for rejoicing as they get ready to enter the Temple precincts. The cantor chants, "Give thanks to the Lord, for he is good." And the people reply, "His steadfast love endures forever!"

We're surrounded by so much fear and uncertainty because of global warming, the financial crisis, the world's rising population and scarce resources. No one knows what the future holds, but it often looks pretty bleak. Popular films like Cloverfield and I Am Legend show us vivid glimpses of what disaster might be like, and how we might cope if it happened. But the psalm says, 'Give thanks to the Lord!' Why? Because 'he is good; his steadfast love endures forever!'

That's not to say, of course, that the trouble will all go away if we choose to sing God's praises. We still need to stop the temperature rising, and kickstart the economy, and start a green revolution to try to save our planet. But the psalm reminds us that God is on our side. He is willing us to succeed, to make a difference, to change the future. He is good! And his steadfast love endures - even in times of trouble and danger. He's not a fair-weather friend. He's the God who is with us in storms and earthquakes. His love is steadfast. It endures. So much so that it is forever. Nothing can snuff it out. Not even death.

As the pilgrims chanted their praises the procession would have wound its way through the narrow streets until it reached the gates of the Temple itself - the gates of righteousness, the gates to the place where people can meet God and be as close to him as anyone can ever come on earth. Except that the psalm says only the righteous may enter. No one else can go in.

Now if you had been a pilgrim who had trekked halfway across the known world to visit the Jerusalem Temple you might already be feeling pretty righteous, cleansed somehow from all the sordid and selfish associations of ordinary life by the privations and sacrifices that would have been entailed in making your journey. You might have marched in through the gates of righteousness full of confidence without a second thought. But the cantor doesn't feel like that. He knows that, by his own efforts, he could never deserve to enter the Temple and join in the worship of the righteous. And yet all is not lost; he need not be left behind; for the Lord has answered his need and become his salvation so that he too can enter the gates. More than that, the stone that the builders rejected - the unrighteousness person who should have been locked out of the Temple worship - has become the chief cornerstone, and this is so marvellous and unexpected that it is clearly the Lord's doing.

Who is the person, then, who is singing the psalm at this point? Is it the whole pilgrim people who, together, are saved and made righteous by God to become a cornerstone of this great act of celebration? Is it, in other words, a 'corporate' person chanting these words - a body of people acting as one? Do the pilgrims recognise, when they finally reach their destination, that there is still something missing - not matter how far they might have come - and that they still need God's saving power? Or is this a lone voice, the voice of the priest or the king, who must be made righteous by God in order to play a special role as the chief cornerstone of Temple or national life?

Although he was the one truly righteous person in human history, when Jesus hung on the cross he allowed himself to suffer the fate of the unrighteous, to be condemned and put to death, to be wounded and brought low, to be made vulnerable, to be cast out of the holy city and left to die in torment, and thus to become the bearer of the world's unrighteousness in order to show us how we might be made righteous. And that is why Jesus probably saw himself as the final and enduring embodiment of the person who sings this verse in the psalm. He is the last and greatest stone which the builders rejected, the stone nonetheless which went on to become the enduring cornerstone, the marvellous means by which the whole human race could be put right with God simply through believing in him and in his way of living and dying.

When the gates of the Temple opened to greet them, the pilgrims would have entered into their final act of praise, reminding themselves that 'this is the day that the Lord has made' and we should 'rejoice and be glad in it'. The psalm is talking here, I think, not just about our attitude to special holy days, like the day of the festival when this psalm was traditionally sung, but about every day, for every day is consecrated to God. Perhaps there is also a reference here to the idea that the day when we are put right with God is a special day, a red letter day in the calendar, a day particularly on which to rejoice and be glad. And for Christians that day is, of course, Good Friday - the day made special for all time by the death of Jesus.

There might - I think - be one false note in the psalm, where salvation is equated with success, but that really depends on what we mean by success. If you've been listening to the news this week you can't have failed to miss the stories about the G20 Summit of world leaders in London. It began with a whir of helicopters and a zoom of jets bringing the leaders from the corners of the globe, and it ended with a celebrity dinner at which presidents and their consorts clamoured to get J K Rowling's autograph and the First Lady hugged the Queen. If success means having enough power or celebrity to get yourself onto the guest list at Number 10, then I think the psalm is wrong. Salvation and that kind of success are not the same thing. The gates of righteousness do not open for successful entrepreneurs, performers and politicians, because true success has to be measured against the template of the crucified messiah, the stone whom the builders rejected. But if the plea in the psalm, for God to save us and grant us success, is a prayer for God to help the world's people come together to solve our problems with wisdom and compassion, then - of course - it does not contradict the way of Jesus at all. In a more thoughtful moment during the summit, Gordon Brown said that Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Sikhism and Hinduism all in their different ways reflect a sense that we must share the pain of others, that we believe in something bigger than ourselves and that we cannot be truly content while others face despair. If that's how we really define success at the G20 Summit then success is not incompatible with salvation after all.

The pilgrim procession seems to have ended with the people entering the Temple ahead of the priest, or the king, who stayed on the outside until they had all gone in through the gates. Then the people would turn and welcome the leader with words that the crowd would borrow to welcome Jesus on Palm Sunday, 'Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord'.

And, of course, the Psalm also calls on the pilgrims to 'bind the festal procession with branches', like the palm waving crowd which welcomed Jesus, although I'm not sure quite how you actually go about binding a procession with branches and other translations say quite different things, such as 'bind the festival sacrifice with cords to the horns of the altar' or 'with branches in your hands start the festival and march round the altar.' I think the second version is a more appealing idea of what the psalmist might have meant.

Jesus' entry into Jerusalem is supposed to be the triumphal entry of a king, just like the procession of the pilgrims who entered the Temple ahead of the King of Judah, chanting their welcome to him and carrying the branches of trees. Jesus' followers also went ahead of him, consciously echoing the same procession. Except that Jesus' choice of a donkey to ride on also evokes the words of another Bible passage, from the Prophet Zechariah, who foretells the coming of a new kind of king, a king who believes in disarmament - who will get rid of war chariots, horses and weapons and, in the words of John Lennon, 'give peace a chance'. The Gospel writer says that it was only after Good Friday that his followers realised how Jesus would fulfil this prophecy and give glory to God.

This week the leaders of the world arrived in style at the G20 Summit. No donkeys, or underground trains, or bus rides for them. But who were the true heroes of the hour? Someone wrote in an opinion piece in the newspapers that the unsung heroes were the ordinary people who came to protest about the two greatest challenges which we face - the climate crunch and the credit crunch. The writer reflected that one day the people who stirred themselves enough to go to London and join the protest will be remembered, either with gratitude or chagrin, while those of us who stayed at home will be seen to have missed the opportunity to try to bring about vital change.

Well today we remember the people who stood up and were counted among the followers of Jesus when he arrived in Jerusalem for the final showdown of his ministry. Even though they may not have understood exactly what was going on, until after the events were over, at least they were there to welcome him.

Sir Fred Goodwin and The Gospel

Genesis 17:1-16

I heard someone say on the radio the other day that maybe one good thing about the recession is that it's giving all of us a once in a lifetime opportunity to reassess the way we live and to start over again. She was certainly an optimist, a glass half-full person! But she went on to explain that because we can no long afford holidays, houses, possessions and nights out on the town maybe we now have the chance instead to re-evaluate what really matters in our lives. This is a chance to prioritise things like our health, our relationships and what we're achieving.

Of course, it's easy to push this kind of argument too far. If someone's home is being repossessed, if they've lost their job and have no prospect of getting another one soon, if they're desperately in need of a holiday or badly need some new possessions, health, happiness and relationships can be damaged, not strengthened, by a crisis and we can end up achieving absolutely nothing as a result. But I guess the point needs to be taken that we've become over-reliant on things and should consider whether there something missing in our lives that money and material success couldn't buy.

This is what Abraham and Sarah had concluded when they first heard God's call. The great age of Abraham clearly signals that, with this story, we are in the realm of legend. Otherwise, for Abraham to be able to walk at all at the age of ninety-nine would be an amazing miracle, and that's before we come to the momentous promise that - although childless at the moment - he and Sarah will become the ancestors of a multitude of nations.

What is happening in the Bible's account of Abraham and Sarah's life and wanderings is that the two of them are progressively being reborn. The way that Genesis tells their story, it's not described as a sudden transformation. Instead, it happens bit by bit, with the covenant promise being repeated by God at intervals along the way. The two of them have already left behind their old religion and customs, and their old home and settled way of life, and now - in this episode - they leave behind their old identities as well and get new ones.

It's a bit like a mid-life crisis when people realise that their life so far hasn't amounted to much and decide to go in a radically new direction. It's certainly like a religious conversion. Research has shown that most people come to faith gradually, over a prolonged period of time stretching into years. Perhaps that's what was happening here to Abraham and Sarah.

I went the other week to my first citizenship ceremony, an occasion when a group of people from all over the world swore allegiance to the Queen, to the British family and to British values like democracy and tolerance. It struck me that those of us who were born here don't have to make these commitments. We simply take them for granted, if we ever think about them at all.

Refugees and economic migrants point the way for the rest of us, I think. They challenge our ready-made assumptions and our settled ways of living by their willingness to up sticks and leave behind their old lives, their old network of family and friends, their former identities even, in order to cross new frontiers and begin life over again. This is what Abraham and Sarah did, except their their life-changing event was as much a spiritual pilgrimage as it was a geographical one. Even those of us who never leave the place where we were born can join them on that spiritual adventure.

Romans 4:13-25

Paul often talks about Abraham in his letters to the new Christians scattered around the eastern Mediterranean. He knew that Jewish people looked to Abraham as their ancestor in the faith. And, of course, he knew - because he himself was Jewish - that another distinctive thing about followers of the Jewish faith is that they keep the Law of Moses, or Torah, which was only revealed long after the time of Abraham. To this day, many Jewish people would still believe that the only way to be put completely right with God is to obey that Law. But, since he was alive long before the Law was revealed, Abraham has to be someone who kept faith with God - and was put right with God - without following the Law. And that, to Paul, is a pointer to the way things are going to be in the new dispensation which was inaugurated by the death of Jesus for our trespasses.

In a later part of Abraham's story than the episode which we heard today, the writers of Genesis tell us that Abraham's faith was counted to him as righteousness. In exactly the same way, says Paul, when Christians put their faith in Jesus that too is counted to us as righteousness. In other words, it's no longer necessary for us to try to follow the Jewish Law in order to be put right with the God in whom Abraham put his trust. So long as we live in the spirit of love and compassion which Jesus exemplified, we have done all that God requires.

Two other things stand out from Paul's account of Abraham's faith. First he emphasises that Abraham continued to hope even when hope no longer seemed reasonable by any rational standard. How could it be that Abraham should become the ancestor of many nations when he was already, supposedly, a very old man and his wife could not bear children? But he went on hoping anyway.

Second, no distrust could make him waver concerning God's promises. We live in a distrustful age, when people demand positive proof before they will believe in anything, and when the natural inclination of Mr or Ms Average is to be cynical about any sort of promises - whether they be political promises, or promises made by our employers, or vows of eternal love and devotion. The challenge for believers is to rise above that kind of mindset and allow no distrust to let us waver concerning the promises of God. God is the one person who always keeps his word and whose promise of eternal love can never be broken.

We also live at a time when hope is in short supply. Recently a government minister was ridiculed for detecting some greenshoots of recovery in the economy. I heard Tony Blair being chastised last week, also, for failing to bring peace to the Middle-East. 'Not yet,' said Tony Blair, but the interviewer seemed to think, 'Not ever!' And, similarly, there are lots of people who are waiting for Barack Obama to fail in the many goals he has set himself. Some prominent scientists are beginning to say that it's too late to prevent runaway global warming. Some financial commentators think that no one - not even Barack Obama or Gordon Brown - can stave off a full scale meltdown of the world's economy. And some political forecasters see no hope for a peaceful solution to the Israel Palestine question, or to the conflict in Afghanistan. But Abraham was a different kind of person. As we have heard already, he was a glass half-full person not a glass half-empty person. He continued to hope even when there was no room for hope

That, says Paul, is the way that Christians should be. We should always hope against hope. And that's not just a question of crossing our fingers and saying our prayers. It's about going out into the world and working for positive change in the power of God's resurrection hope, because Christians always remember that Jesus was raised, even from death, for our justification. Nothing is therefore impossible for God, and for those who love him.

Mark 8.31-38

We've already heard that Christians are called by the Gospel to be hope-filled and to work for positive change. We have heard that Abraham and Sarah, ourancestors in the faith, were glass half-full people. But this doesn't mean things can never go wrong for us and we can never face pain, or defeat or disappointment. That's the mistaken assumption which Peter made when he rebuked Jesus, and his reward was not to be praised for his optimism but to be rebuked for his godlessness. 'Get behind me, Satan!' Jesus said to him harshly.

Hoping against hope doesn't mean that whatever we do in Jesus' name will be easily vindicated. Even though we hope that right will prevail, we may have to lose our lives trying to do what is right. Hoping against hope means that even when we are overwhelmed by impossible odds, and even when we lose our lives for Jesus' sake and for the sake of the gospel, we still trust that we will be saved beyond death and in spite of failure.

Of course, Jesus is talking about his own life as a template for discipleship, about how we have to embrace his willingness to die for others if we are to follow his path of radical obedience to God. I guess we all hope and pray that we will not be brought to the sort of time of hard testing which he is describing here. But there are other more everyday lessons we can learn even if we do not find ourselves facing the final test of giving up our lives for the sake of the gospel.

We can learn from this passage to think differently from other people about the meaning of ambition, for God's understanding of ambition is totally different from the human understanding of what it means. What does it profit a man if he gains an annual pension of £693,000 and yet loses his good name? Sir Fred 'The Shred' Goodwin, former boss of the Royal Bank of Scotland, must be contemplating that question now. His ambition was to make a lot of money and secure a watertight pension that would ensure his fortune and allow him to live happily ever after, and it seems he's achieved that ambition. But what can he give to get his good name back? And how must it feel to know that everyone who once celebrated your success is now ashamed of you?

This passage also invites us to learn to think different about failure. If we are to be true to the message of Jesus we have to give churches, and ministers and lay people, permission to try risky ventures, fresh expressions of church for instance, or ambitious schemes of one kind or another, and then perhaps to fail in the attempt. And instead of condemning such boldness when things go wrong, and calling it reckless or foolish, we must be ready to say that sometimes we have to lose everything for the sake of the gospel if we are to give ourselves the chance of sometimes succeeding. For those who only want to play safe with their life will lose it.

He who sits above the circle of the earth

Isaiah 40.21-31, 1 Corinthians 9.16-23, Mark 1.29-38

Have you ever been outside on a clear, cloudless night, somewhere in the countryside, far away from the glare of streetlights, and looked up at the stars and been filled with awe and wonder? In the town or the city we see only a fraction of the night sky, but far from the bright lights of the town we can suddenly see countless stars stretching deep into the mists of time, the faintest of them billions of light years away from the Earth. And when we see the stars in all their true glory we are carried back to the exhortation of the Prophet, who said: 'Lift up your eyes on high and see!'

The Prophet is breaking new ground in this passage. At the time of his prophecy, most people regarded Israel's God as just the greatest among a multitude of different and competing gods and spirits, but the Prophet considers Israel's God to be the only god, existing outside the boundaries of time and space, sitting, 'above the circle of the Earth'. From this vantage point, 'the Earth and its inhabitants are like grasshoppers' and one hundred years of history are like the blinking of an eye. But more than that, with a truly radical sense of awareness that wasn't to be widely shared until the modern scientific age, the Prophet recognises that God is not just the Creator of the earth and the heavens but of the countless star systems beyond. We sense, from the importance which he attaches to them, that he sees the stars as far more than twinkling fairy lights, or the shining souls of fallen heroes. Whatever those lights represent for the Prophet, they are all at least equal in importance to the Earth, and God has numbered and named not just the constellations but every single star.

Of course, on hearing these new ideas for the very first time, it would be easy to conclude - as some of his listeners were doing - that if God is so strong and mighty in power, and if even Earth's rulers are as nothing in comparison with God, then the ways of ordinary people must be completely hidden from God and disregarded by him. The Prophet has to explain, therefore, that - precisely because God is the everlasting Creator - there is no limit to what he can know and understand. His interest and concern can never be exhausted, And, therefore, even if we are like grasshoppers or mini-bugs in comparison to God, so long as we put our trust in him and allow him to renew our strength, we shall mount up with wings like eagles and join him in the heavenly realms, and be able to walk and not faint even when the tempest is blowing hard against us and is withering and carrying off princes and rulers as though they were mere stubble.

The relevance of this prophecy is as undiminished today, of course, as it was when it was first uttered two-and-a-half thousand years ago. Gordon Brown famously boasted that he had put an end to boom and bust, but scarcely had his economic policy taken root than it was blown away by the global Credit Crunch. Riding on the back of successful military interventions in the Balkans and Sierra Leone, Tony Blair believed that British and American troops would quickly subdue Iraq and silence the critics of the invasion, but scarcely was the policy of regime-change planted in the desert sand than it withered in the tempest of fanatical resistance. George W Bush spent most of his two terms of office insisting that there was no such thing as man-made global warming, but Hurricane Katrina and the sudden melting of the North Pole ice cap made his power and influence seem as nothing.

A great many people around the world, including many people of faith, are setting considerable store by the election of Barack Obama as President of the United States of America. I was invited onto the Sunday breakfast show on Radio Sheffield to discuss what people of different faiths are expecting President Obama to achieve and I went so far as to say that people are hoping his election might be a turning point in history. After all, the Book of Isaiah does say elsewhere that political leaders can be God's agents, bringing change and salvation to the world. But, today's passage also reminds us that it is God, not politicians, who gives power to the faint and strength to the powerless.

Quite rightly, the motto of the United States says, 'In God we trust.' Gordon Brown recently made a slip of the tongue and described himself as the man who had saved the world from economic crisis. Even he had to laugh about that mistake! For, as he knows better than most, politicians and world leaders can come to our rescue only in so far as God enables them. He is the one on whom we must rely.

This brings us to a part of today's Old Testament passage with which some modern Christians might feel uncomfortable, for the passage describes God blowing princes and rulers away as if they were mere pawns in some celestial game of chess. It's almost as if God becomes impatient when human leaders try to find their own solutions to the world's problems and bats them out of the way just as He apparently smote the builders of the Tower of Babel, who tried to make a name for themselves by building a tower which would reach the sky. Genesis says that God was dismayed by their enterprise and scattered them because otherwise the Tower of Babel would be only the beginning of what they would be able to do. If the project succeeded, nothing that they proposed to do together would any longer be impossible for them. Clearly, that idea of how God works in history is sub-Christian, and closer - in fact - to the modern atheists' picture of God than to the modern believers' view. God cannot be causing disaster and mayhem in the world's financial markets, and to the world's climate, just to keep human beings dependent on him and to prevent us from breaking free of his control, or as a punishment for our arrogance and hubris.

For much of Christian history people have conceived of God exactly like this. So, for example, the Black Death was widely understood to be a punishment for human wrong-doing. But, even two-and-half thousand years ago, a thinker as sophisticated as the Prophet who wrote this part of Isaiah is unlikely to have been imagining God changing history on a whim or just to put human beings in their place. It's more likely that the Prophet is contrasting the timelessness and robustness of God's plans with the fragility of human attempts to solve the world's problems.

And it's likely that the Prophet has in mind the way in which the wickedness and self-centredness of human beings almost inevitably gets the better of us and thwarts our attempts to build a better world. So, for example, the industrial revolution has vastly improved the quality of life for many millions of people over the last two hundred years, but now the pollution it has caused threatens to extinguish all those gains. And the cheap loans which the banking system made available in recent years enabled many people to buy their own home or to start or expand a business venture, but the greed and folly of the bankers also meant that they didn't know when to stop lending, until disaster struck. As Robert Burns almost said, 'The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry,' but conversely, the Prophet reminds us that 'the Lord is the everlasting God. Those who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint.'

There's another sense, however, in which the prophecy might seem to fall short of Christian thinking. Isaiah conceives of a God who is above human history and yet intimately concerned with it, who at one and the same time sees us as grasshoppers and yet longs to give us the power and strength to soar on eagle's wings so that we can share his perspective on the world. His vision of God is the antithesis of the vision of Harry Lime in Graham Greene's novel "The Third Man".

Lime is sitting at the top of the big wheel in the amusement park in the centre of Vienna, looking down at the scurrying crowds with his good friend Holly Martins. Martins asks Lime whether he has ever seen the victims of the black market antibiotics which Lime peddles to the Viennese for a living. 'Victims? Don't be melodramatic,' says Lime. 'Look down there. Tell me. Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever? If I offered you twenty thousand pounds for every dot that stopped, would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money, or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare? Free of income tax, old man. Free of income tax - the only way you can save money nowadays.'

Of course, Lime's callous attitude to the dots moving about in the streets of Vienna is that they don't really matter, whereas the Prophet says that - although we do look like dots, or grasshoppers, from God's point of view - he still cares about us very much, and that's because God's nature is to care passionately about everything he has made.

However, the reason why Holly Martins comes to care about the dots is that eventually, to secure his cooperation, Major Calloway, the military policeman investigating Harry Lime, takes Martins to the children's hospital and shows him the patients crippled by meningitis after taking Lime's black market penicillin. Because he has seen close up the suffering that black market racketeering has caused, Martins can no longer disregard the victims and hands Lime over to the authorities.

The Prophet simply asks us to trust that our ways and our right are not disregarded by God. But the Christian faith goes further. The Gospel assures us that God does not disregard us because - in Jesus' death on the Cross - he has come face to face with and shared in our suffering. Jesus - and therefore God himself as well - has become one of the grasshoppers, one of the dots, moving across the face of the Earth. In other words, the ultimate good news is not that God is in his heaven and all's right with the world. The ultimate good news is that God is one of us.

St Paul develops this idea in an interesting direction by looking at its implications for his own life. If the Gospel tells us that God, in Jesus, is one of us, then his task too - as a servant of Jesus - must be to get alongside the people he meets so that they may one day understand the eternal truth that God is also alongside them in Jesus. So, when he is with Jewish people he becomes like a Jew himself and keeps the Jewish food and purification laws in order to win their trust and help them to discover the much more important truth that God is with them. When he is with Gentile people, who do not obey the Jewish law, he too lives outside the law in order to get alongside them also.

Then he adds something rather more daring to the mix! 'To the weak.' he says, 'I become weak, so that I might win the weak.' I think he only means here that, when he is living among people who are willing to eat meat that has been offered as a sacrifice to idols, he too is prepared to eat the same meat. That, in itself, would have been a shocking idea to some Jewish Christians. But clearly, the concept of becoming weak to win the weak could be taken to much greater extremes, and some of Paul's followers did take it much further than he was prepared to do. When they were living among people who were not concerned about sexual immorality, they too were prepared to turn a blind eye towards it. Among those who ate and drank too much, they too were prepared to eat and drink more than they normally would, simply in order to get alongside people and win them for Jesus.

Throughout his ministry Paul repeatedly expresses his own concerns about those followers of his teaching whom he thinks have gone too far in getting alongside the weak. And the issue has not gone away, has it? In our modern, pluralistic society, Christians still struggle to know how far we should go in setting ourselves apart from, or being different from, other people in order to set an example to them, or in becoming like them in order to win them for Jesus.

This applies whether we're talking about our attitudes to people's sexual and relationship choices, or our attitude towards sharing with people of other faiths, or our willingness to join our friends and neighbours for a drink in the local pub. While there are limits, of course, generally speaking, we have to be prepared to be like Jesus, who came alongside us and emptied himself so that he might be found in human form. We mustn't take a pharisaic, holier than thou attitude to other people. We must seek to be their friends and to get alongside them wherever possible, to understand and encourage them, strengthening them so that they may be able to mount up with wings like eagles to a new level of human being.

I have heard feminists complain that Simon's mother-in-law was expected to serve food to Jesus and his disciples straight after being ill with a fever. But I think that is to miss the point. The calling of every Christian, like the calling of St Paul, is always to serve. An obligation is laid on us to proclaim the gospel, and that is its own reward. And, after all, in doing this we are only following the example of Jesus himself, for proclaiming the message and healing the sick is what he came to do. So let us wait on the Lord to renew our strength. Amen.

P S God Loves Us!

Genesis 1.1-5, Psalm 29, Acts 19.1-7 & Mark 1.4-11

The Bible story is about the triumph of light over darkness, of pattern and meaning over chaos, of good over evil, of the Creator over the destructive forces that constantly threaten to overwhelm creation. What more fitting time to be reminded of this than the middle of winter? Christmas coincides with the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year, because Christians could see the symmetry between the Bible message and the turning of the seasons - the triumph of day over night, of life over death.

It's a message that we need to hear again and again, isn't it? In the chaos of recession we need to know that the forces of disorder and despair will not have the final word. When we hear about yet another onslaught by Israel against the Palestinians, or by Islamic terrorists against innocent bystanders in a hotel or railway station, we need to know that redemption is more powerful than devastation - that the seemingly endless cycle of bitterness, recrimination and retaliation will be brought to an end by the reign of true peace.

After the darkest night there will always be the morning. But, the good news of the Bible story is greater even than that. Even in the midst of the darkness God is with us. Even in the formless void God is moving. God gives a name, and therefore a meaning, to everything that happens. God is patiently weaving the broken strands of our disordered universe into a coherent picture. That is the faith which we proclaim. It is the message of Genesis, of the Passover from Egypt, of Christmas and Easter.

'Ascribe to the Lord glory and strength,' says the Psalmist. 'The voice of the Lord is over the waters; the God of glory thunders, over mighty waters. The voice of the Lord is powerful; the voice of the Lord is full of majesty.' The Psalmist is talking here about the waters of chaos. He isn't denying the existence of chaos and disintegration, pain and affliction, but he is asserting God's presence in them and God's ultimate power over them. God's mighty word has the compelling authority to make entire mountain ranges jump to attention, or huge trees snap like twigs. 'The Lord sits enthroned over the flood.' That doesn't mean the deluge cannot hurt us, that we are immune from harm and disaster. But it does mean that the Lord will give strength to his people and bless his people with peace. That is why all the worshippers in his Temple say 'Glory!'

So why did John the Baptiser's followers in Corinth need to discover belief in Jesus to complete their journey of salvation? Because Jesus is the ultimate proof that God really has come down into the darkness, and the darkness has not been able to extinguish his light. On the contrary, the light continues to shine in the darkness. The writer of John's Gospel and the Letters of John says, 'We have seen [him] with our eyes and touched [him] with our hands, and we declare to you what we have seen and heard so that you also may [know] that God is light and in him there is no darkness at all.' No wonder that the followers of the Baptiser recognised their need of something more.

In the film 'PS I Love You' a dying man leaves a series of love letters to be opened by his bereaved wife after his death. They are supposed to remind her that he is still with her when she feels alone and abandoned, but also to teach her - by easy stages - that the darkness of loss can be overcome and the sense of meaning and purpose can be rediscovered. The film has an unpromising start, but stick with it - it's available on DVD and it's worth watching.

The Gospel, of course, conveys the same message - that even in the dirt and poverty of a stable, God is with us, and even in the violence and suffering of a cross, God is still there. More than that, even in the anguish of total forsakenness we are not really forsaken. God always shares our forsakenness from the cross of Jesus. He is with us even in the most impenetrable darkness, even in the face of the deep formless void that is complete nothingness. The Gospel begins with God's ringing declaration that Jesus is his Son, 'the Beloved', and ends with the Centurion's belated acknowledgement of the same eternal truth.

So, Mark's story, like the whole Bible story that both follows and precedes his Gospel, is about the triumph of light over darkness, of pattern and meaning over chaos, of good over evil, of the Creator over the destructive forces that constantly threaten to overwhelm creation. What more fitting time could there be to remind ourselves of this than in the middle of winter?