Methodist Bishop

Matthew 6.25-34 Christians have long argued that consumerism is disastrous. There are two arguments for this.  The first says that it is spiritually corrupting. We end up in an endless quest for more things and new experiences, but this will never satisfy us. Better by far to emulate the natural world and take life one day at a time, because it is only spiritual fulfilment that will really make us content with our lot.  The second argument says that consumerism is irresponsible and drives us to use up more and more finite resources while releasing more and more pollutants into the atmosphere and the seas. The catastrophic consequences are already all too apparent. But what’s the alternative to consumerism? For better or worse, a certain amount of consumption keeps the economy afloat because - as Karl Marx observed - workers are also consumers and if they aren’t consuming anything many of them will inevitably be thrown out of work. Advocates of a ‘circuit breaker’, to try to st...

Matthew 13.1-9,18-23 The time has come to say ‘farewell’ and two songs come to mind.  The first is the farewell song at the ball in the Sound of Music, when the children are about to go to bed.  There's a sad sort of clanging from the clock in the hall And the bells in the steeple too, And up in the nursery an absurd little bird Is popping out to say "cuckoo"… There’s something slightly sad and faintly absurd about saying farewell without being able to say proper goodbyes. The other song is ‘So long, it’s been good to know yuh!’ by Woody Guthrie: Well, the churches was jammed and the churches was packed, But that dusty old dust storm it blew so black That the preacher couldn’t read a word of his text, So he folded his specs ‘n’ took up a collection, sayin'... So long, it's been good to know yuh, So long, it's been good to know yuh, So long, it's been good to know yuh, But this dusty old dust is a-gettin' my home And I've gotta be driftin' along...

Psalm 145.8-14 Israel had emerged into history as a federation of tribes committed to the idea that they didn’t need a national leader because God was the one true leader who united them all. This idea didn’t survive contact with reality. In no time at all people like Gideon, who was supposed to be an inspired leader acting on God’s behalf to provide much needed leadership in a time of crisis, was acting like a dynastic ruler and trying to get his sons to succeed him. Before long the idea took hold that an anointed king was needed to represent God to the people and the people to God. Fledgling democracy gave way to emerging dictatorship, and all within a few pages of the Bible. But the Biblical concept of leadership was further complicated by the enduring idea that kings might hold temporal power but prophets and priests are still called by God to speak truth to power and keep it in check, to remind the king (or queen) who’s really the boss. And the idea driving this relationship, that...

Zechariah 9.9-12 (NRSVA) What does a true leader look like? Someone who - like Pontius Pilate - is defined by their obstinacy? Someone who wraps themselves in Churchillian posturing and jingoistic slogans? Someone who’s one of the people? Someone who’s the epitome of calm and rational argument? Zechariah’s prophecy breaks the mould of leadership. A true leader doesn’t sweep to power with war horses and chariots or in a hail of arrows. They do still command peace to break out - and their dominion will indeed have no boundaries - but they proclaim its arrival from the back of a donkey. The prisoners of hope will be set free, not by fighting in the streets but by a silent revolution unfolding in people’s hearts and minds. In that sense the true leader is indeed a ‘popular’ leader. They’re not a typical political leader, they’re an inspirational, charismatic, prophetic leader with a similar approach - despite their many faults and failings - to people like Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther Ki...

Matthew 11:16-19 (NRSVA) One of the fascinating things about this passage is that it gives us an intriguing glimpse into Jesus’ own childhood. This isn’t St Luke’s version - where a saintly and erudite Jesus sits listening intently to the scribes debating in the Temple. This is a recollection from Jesus’ own lips. Like any preacher or teacher he’s reaching into his own memory bank for illustrations. We need to put out of mind any ideas we might have about teenagers hanging around together in the marketplace drinking cheap cider. Before the Twentieth Century there was no concept of being in between childhood and adulthood. At the time of Jesus you were either a child or a grown-up, in his case apprenticed to his father. Adolescent girls weren’t allowed to mix with boys and were soon married off, and teenagers of both sexes were probably too busy to do much socialising anyway. So this is a childhood memory. At a loose end after doing their chores or attending scripture classes, the child...

Romans 7.15-25a With considerable psychological acuity, St Paul understood - long before the theories of Sigmund Freud turned this into science - that we can genuinely believe in something, and want to do it, but find ourselves completely unable to follow through. Something deep and primitive is embedded in our nature, a sort of instinctive self-centredness - that will not let us go. We are, in fact, enslaved to it. More than that, patterns of behaviour become embedded in our psyche because of long forgotten events in our childhood. So we play out the thwarted love that a jealous toddler feels for its mother when she sleeps at night not with the child but with the father. And as we grow older, the way that we’re treated by our parents, and their role models - good or bad, shapes the way that we respond to others and treat them in our turn. Parents can never be perfect but we can only hope that they were good enough to save us from further psychological damage. How can we escape from th...

Romans 6.12-23 The New Revised Standard Version rather slavishly follows the Authorised Version of the Bible here, on which it’s based. Wilfully ignoring the modern connotations of a phrase like ‘you once presented your members as slaves to impurity’, it persists in using this rather archaic translation of a Greek word that really means ‘limbs’. What Paul seems to be saying is that in the past we were zombies for sin, but now we that we’ve given our lives to Christ we can enjoy God’s free gift of eternal life - we can truly live in him. Mind you, taking into account the conduct of American presidents past and present, it’s easy to understand why the American translators of the New Revised Standard Version obstinately stuck with the word ‘members’. Perhaps they felt it’s new sexualised meaning wasn’t entirely inappropriate. What Paul is saying still works when it’s understood as a way of allowing God to take control of some of our more fundamental drives and instincts. But in a time of ...

Jeremiah 28.5-9 (NRSVA) This passage describes a battle of the prophets, a sort of prophesying contest which happened in the Temple. The Prophet Hananiah faced down Jeremiah and told him that he was getting it all wrong. The Kingdom of Judah wasn’t facing disaster, instead things were just about to get a lot better. The heavy yoke of the King of Babylon was about to be broken and the people who’d already been taken away into exile would be allowed to return, bringing with them the treasured sacred objects that had been looted from the Temple.. This put Jeremiah in a difficult position. He was convinced that Hananiah was mistaken, but to deny the truth of such a hopeful prophecy wasn’t going to increase his own dismal popularity ratings. So he’d no alternative but to solemnly endorse what Hananiah was saying. ‘Amen! May the Lord do so; may the Lord fulfil the words that you have prophesied.’ But he added a warning. The reputation of people who promise good times will always be measured ...

Psalm 89.1-4, 15-18 (NRSVA) This is one of the royal psalms which may have been sung at the coronation of a new ruler or on other national holidays. It begins by celebrating the rock solid reliability of God’s promises and then focuses specifically on his covenant with the royal house of David. God is supposed to have promised David that his descendants would rule over Israel forever, although building his throne from generation to generation - which was probably intended to mean the same thing - is in fact a slightly different idea. It implies only the continuity of the government and nation state established by David. Be that as it may, God’s favour towards Israel can only mean that the people of Judah can afford to be joyful and should exult or rejoice in God’s name. Their horn of plenty should always be full and they should expect to be shielded from harm. The king is God’s appointee, so what could possibly go wrong? This is the sort of sentiment which encouraged Hananiah to oppose...

‘Make haste to answer me!’ Psalm 69.7-18 (NRSVA) This psalm has been a source of inspiration ever since it was first composed. Jesus’ disciples remembered verse 9 when he got upset with the moneychangers in the Temple at Jerusalem. ‘Zeal for God’s house has consumed him,’ they thought, (John 2.17). A similar zeal has consumed generations of Methodists so it’s ironic that we now find ourselves locked out of our much loved church buildings. Many people continue to put their hope in worship life returning to normal again, while others hope that perhaps we shall rethink what ‘God’s house’ really means. Paul quotes the same verse in Romans 15.3, when he says that the Roman Christians should ‘build up’ or encourage their neighbours because ‘the insults of those who insult you have fallen on me.’ But he’s not saying that when people think ill of them this reflects badly on him. He hardly knew them. He’s saying that this verse applies to Jesus himself. When people insult Jesus, those insults a...

Matthew 10.40-42 Today congregations from all denominations are having to rethink what it means to be church. The old model is no longer working. Perhaps it never did, and perhaps our failure to adopt the right model helps to explain the gradual decline of organised Christianity in the West.  The prevailing model for the last 150 years has been congregations gathering together primarily for worship. Whether worship means having a good sing, or sharing communal prayers, or gathering around the table to share Holy Communion, it’s been focused on honouring and praying to God.  But does God need our songs of praise? Do we really need to gather together to draw God's attention to the world's problems? And what are we expecting to achieve by meeting Christ in bread and wine at the table of the Lord? In chapter 10, as we’ve seen before, Matthew uses the way Jesus and his disciples engaged in mission to suggest another way of being church - an alternative model which might be more app...

Jeremiah 20.7-13 (NRSV) This is a page from Jeremiah's spiritual journal where he reflects privately on the difficulties of being a prophet. His name’s forever associated with doom and gloom; to this day people accuse pessimistic forecasters of being ‘a Jeremiah’. And of course his bleak warnings got on people’s nerves. They took turns either to reproach him for lowering national morale or to deride him for being a ‘remoaner’, always imagining disaster instead of planning for success.  Even his friends distanced themselves from Jeremiah. After all, he’d spent time in prison for his stand against the government’s foolishly optimistic policies. ‘Terror is all around!’ they whispered, ‘Why not conform?’ When he still refused to listen there was understandable pressure on his allies to denounce him. Some people tried to entice him to change sides, others tried to wear him down. His enemies tried to take revenge on him for the damage that his fearless campaigning had done to their reput...

Romans 6.1b-11 (NRSVA) The arguments which Paul sets out in his letter to the church in Rome became - much later - the foundations on which the Protestant interpretation of Christianity was constructed. They were also deeply influential for early Methodism. It was while he was listening to Martin Luther’s explanation of Paul’s Letter to the Romans that John Wesley found his heart strangely warmed by a new understanding of what being a disciple of Jesus really means. Paul’s predicament was that he was eager to visit the new and influential church in Rome but most of the Christians there didn’t know him personally, and what they had heard about him had left them feeling deeply uneasy. Paul found himself compelled, therefore, to set out the truth about what he believed, in contrast to the stories that were circulating about his teaching. Chief among these seems to have been the idea that human beings are irredeemably flawed by a deeply ingrained self-centredness and can only trust in God’...

Matthew 10.24-39 This section of Matthew’s Gospel is a collection of Jesus’ sayings, all of which are also found in other New Testament passages. One, an amplification of some words found in Mark’s Gospel, also closely parallels one of Micah’s prophecies about families turning against each other, as well as being almost identical to a saying recorded by Luke. Did Jesus say similar things on different occasions, some shorter and more pithy, others longer and more resonant with Micah’s warning? It’s more than likely that he did. There’s almost a random quality about this grouping of Jesus’ sayings. Almost all of them also occur in Luke’s version of events, and some are echoed by John, but in completely different contexts. They are then, what people sometimes call, ‘floating sayings’ - memorable phrases or comments, but no one knows when Jesus said them or how many times. I say, the grouping of the sayings looks ‘almost’ random because, on closer examination, they all seem to be about co...

Romans 5.1-8 This passage is a beautiful explanation of the meaning of Jesus’ death on the cross. ‘While we were still weak… Christ died for the ungodly… Rarely will anyone die for a righteous person… but God proves his love for us in that while we were still sinners Christ died for us.’ Our covenant relationship with God is sealed when we have ‘faith’ in Jesus’ death, which gives us ‘access to this grace in which we stand’ and makes peace between us and God. But is Paul right when he says, ‘Rarely will anyone die for a righteous person - though perhaps for a good person someone might actually dare to die’? The coronavirus pandemic has reminded us that people do die for another, often without knowing those they put their own life at risk to save. I think, for example, of doctors who have come out of retirement to work with coronavirus patients, some of whom have died. Perhaps it’s  not so rare as Paul imagined, but this way of living and dying exemplifies how God loves us. Paul do...

Psalm 100 Some of the psalms are psalms of lament, which has made them particularly appropriate for study and contemplation during the pandemic. But Psalm 100 is a psalm of rejoicing. The psalmist imagines crying out with joy to the Lord or making a joyful noise. God calls forth gladness. ‘Come into his presence with singing,’ says the psalm, echoing the exaltation of God by the whole creation, something which we most emphatically cannot do during lockdown and its aftermath. Just looking around at nature convinces the psalmist that God is for real. Verse 3 says, ‘He made us, and we are his’ or, ‘he made us, we did not make ourselves’.  The latter meaning has always seemed less likely to translators. Why on earth, they have wondered, would we want to make ourselves? But, in fact, we’ve become used to shaping nature to suit ourselves - cutting down forests to grow more crops, selectively breeding plants and animals, creating urban living and high speed travel as well as super-connect...

Exodus 19.2-8a In the Bible God is revealed as a ‘covenant’ God. A covenant can come across as transactional, ‘If you do this for me, I’ll do that for you’: “If you obey my voice and keep my covenant…” If! I don’t think it's really intended in that sense here in Exodus. I think the covenant is envisaged as being more like an ‘undertaking’ or ‘pledge’ or ‘promise’. ‘If you do this, I won’t let you down!’ But obedience isn’t necessarily the real emphasis of this passage. Nicholas King points out that ‘if you obey my voice’ is only one way of understanding the Hebrew text in verse 5. Another way of translating the same expression is, ‘If you are really going to hear my voice’. In other words it could be about listening. “If you really listen to me I will be able to make you special.” In the context of discipleship the covenant promise is both a wonderful gift and a huge responsibility, an invitation and a challenge. If we really listen to God we have the potential to become special pe...

One of the things that the coronavirus pandemic has reminded us about is that we’ve been living in an age of ‘cheap grace’. Life was easy for most of us, most of the time. The bad things and the bad times were the exception, not the rule. So we took for granted foreign holidays, cheap food, convenient travel and gainful employment. That was the natural order of things and when it went awry it needed to be restored. Being a Christian, if we’re honest, was pretty easy. We had to remember our less fortunate neighbours and try to do something to help them, but for most of us, most of the time, life was fairly good. When tragedy struck we had to be ready to deal with it, if we could, but if we were lucky it might be long delayed. We’re not the first people to live in an age of ‘cheap grace’. When Christianity first became the official religion its adherents had the same experience. They went overnight from being on the edge of society, not entirely respectable, persecuted even, to becomi...

Matthew 9.35-10.8 Often the terms apostle and disciple are used interchangeably, especially when referring to the twelve men whom Matthew, Mark and Luke tell us Jesus chose to be his first missionaries. However, Luke diverges slightly from the others. For him The Twelve are just the first wave of missionaries and he links Jesus’ challenge to go out and bring in the harvest with the call of seventy missionaries. Are they apostles too? Strictly speaking they ought to be because the word ‘apostle’ simply means ‘messenger’ or ‘someone sent out with instructions’, whereas a disciple is an ‘apprentice’, or someone who 'follows' or 'learns' from their teacher. Clearly The Twelve, and Jesus’ other followers, started out as his apprentices or students, but at some point on their journey he commissioned many of them to become messengers too. This applies, for example, to Mary Magdalene and even to people who never met Jesus during his earthly ministry. Paul was fiercely dete...