Methodist Bishop

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The story of the two brothers, and the controversy that prompted it

Matthew 21.23-32 What sort of friends and relations would we really like to have? No one wants the kind of friend who promises to help us but then never materialises when the time comes. Nor do we really want friends and relations who refuse to help us but then grudgingly turn up when the time comes - perhaps after we call them up and tell them things have reached crisis proportions. The ideal friend or relation is the person who's enthusiastic about helping us from the start and turns up on time without being pestered. Yet today's lectionary reading isn't about that kind of person. We live in a very sceptical society, where we find it very hard to trust the people who shape our lives. And I don't just mean political leaders, but opinion shapers, experts and teachers of all kinds. We constantly look for their feet of clay, confident that they will be found to have them. Andy Burnham has tackled this head on by promising that he's an honest man of the people who will...

Happiness

Matthew 13.31-33, 44-52 What does the word ‘happiness’ mean to you? Originally happiness simply meant 'flourishing' - having a good existence, doing well, but very quickly people began to ask questions like, can you be happy if you have no children, or if - when you die - your children don't seem to be flourishing? Then people began to distinguish between being happy because we lead a comfortable life, being happy because we're successful or powerful, and being happy because we've got ourselves together, we're at peace in our souls. Some people are driven by ambition. They can never be happy unless they're successful. Others give up comfort and wealth to pursue a contemplative life. The English thinker John Locke said that happiness means different things to different people. Another question flows from this. Would we be happier if we simply took life as it comes, or can we make ourselves happier by striving to achieve our own brand of happiness? To give a...

Jacob and Jesus

Genesis 25.21-34, Matthew 13.10-17 The stand out thing about Jacob is his ambition. He was born grasping his older brother's heel, because they were twins. For identical twins to be born holding onto one another is extremely unusual but for non-identical twins it's even more unusual, so it was remarked upon at the time and was remembered. And Jacob got the name, perhaps it was a nickname, ‘The Supplanter’ - literally one who grasps another person by the heel’. We know the brothers weren't identical twins because one was born covered in fine hair and the other was born smooth; one had red hair, or a ruddy complexion, the other did not; one was an outdoor type, the other liked to stay close to home; one was impetuous and reckless, the other was cool and calculating; one had a sense of humour, the other did not. The story of how Esau sold his birthright, the right to receive his father's blessing, for a bread and lentil stew, might have been funny if its consequences we...

Rising to New Life in Christ & Taking Risks for God

Romans 6.1b-11 & Matthew 10:24-39 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 onl...

True Faithfulness Mixed with Compassion

Genesis 18.1-15 & Matthew 9.35-10.8 In the New Testament Abraham and Sarah become examples of true faithfulness. Like Jesus’ twelve disciples they gave up everything in order to obey God's call. God made huge promises to them - but they were mostly promises for future generations yet to come, not for them personally: a promised land and innumerable descendants. And crucially God didn't explain how these promises were going to come true, given that - as the years passed - Sarah remained childless and eventually reached the menopause, or at least the peri-menopause. They had left home, family and the comforts of civilization behind, and travelled into the wilderness, all on a promise of delayed gratification. No wonder that Sarah laughed when one of the strangers repeated the promise that she and Abraham would still have a child together. As Keir Starmer has discovered, people are more impatient now. They don't want a promise of good times in five years or ten years fro...

Overcoming separation

1 Peter 1.3-9, John 20.19-31 This year our eldest son will turn 40, but back in the day - when he was five or six perhaps - he was a master at delaying bedtime. Just as we were trying to tuck him into bed he would come up with a range of intriguing and important questions which he felt we wouldn't be able to resist. For instance one of his questions that I remember is, ‘Where is God?’ When we counteted with something like, ‘God is everywhere,’ he was ready with his next question, ‘If God is everywhere, why can't we see him?’ It's a good question, and it takes us straight to the heart of today's lectionary readings. That was exactly the question which Thomas posed to the other disciples about the risen Jesus on the First Easter Day, and which the writer of the First letter of Peter addresses too. At Meriden we have been using a Lent liturgy which was written by the awarding winning poet and children's author Jan Dean. In her spare time she’s also a Church of Englan...

Waiting for God

Genesis 16, Matthew 4.1-11 Many passages in the Bible, and especially in the Old Testament, are a challenge for anyone who believes that the whole of Scripture is the inspired revelation of God. The stories they relate can be very upsetting, especially when measured by modern standards of behaviour. Hagar finds herself in an abusive relationship. She’s a slave and probably a young teenager. Slavery was an accepted institution in ancient Israel. Slave girls were often captured in raids carried out by warring neighbours. But in Hagar's case she was probably sold into slavery to settle a family debt. Sarai's decision to make Hagar sleep with her husband takes Hagar's slavery to new depths. No doubt Abram wasn't the only man in ancient Israel who slept with his wife's slave girl. Jeffrey Epstein was still procuring sex slaves for himself and his entitled friends in the Twenty-first Century. The unusual thing about Hagar's story is that it appears in a sacred text....

Effective Apostles

Mark 6.1-13, 2 Corinthians 12.2-10 It's very appropriate, perhaps even providential, that as a new local preacher begins her journey the Gospel reading for this Sunday should happen to be the one about the call of the first local preachers. Before we come to that we have some rare comments from Jesus about the nature of his call from God. Ironically, the people who know us best - our family, friends and neighbours - are sometimes the hardest to convince that we have something inspirational to say. As the song says, they know us too well. Familiarity breeds not necessarily contempt but at least scepticism. Perhaps that's only to be expected. All saints or inspiring leaders have feet of clay and those best acquainted with us are all too aware of our weaknesses, which can sometimes conceal our strengths. However, that doesn't really explain the failure of his family and neighbours to trust the claims of someone as truly inspirational as Jesus. Perhaps they just couldn't be...

God knows us like our bestest friend.

Psalm 139.1-7, John 18.33-37 God knows us like our bestest friend. That is both reassuring and alarming. My wife gave me a birthday card when she was still my girlfriend. It said, 'Lets be best friends for ever and a day!' And that's just what we are. After a while best friends know exactly what you are thinking. Sometimes my wife and I say the same thing at exactly the same moment. After a while best friends can tell one another's stories. My wife hates it when I finish a story that she began. But then sometimes she will break into one of my stories. I look at her and she says, 'What?' And I say, 'You're doing it to me!' It's a standing joke in our family. Best friends know how one another are feeling. Sometimes my wife says, 'Didn't you know that I was upset?' And I say, 'Yes, but I didn't know how to respond.' But I still knew. And God knows us far more intimately than our very bestest friend. That is both deeply reass...

Do we have the guts to follow Jesus?

Romans 5.1-8 What does it take to change the world? Because it was New Year a newspaper once published 100 ways to slightly improve your life without even trying. That’s an attractive proposition, isn't it - making things better for ourselves and the world around us with very little effort? Here’s a sample of the suggestions. For instance, the article says that if we want to get fit we should aim to exercise on a Monday night ‘because nothing fun ever happens on a Monday night’, so we won’t be missing out on anything. And if we want to avoid unnecessary arguments it advises us ‘not to be weird about how to stack the dishwasher.’ It says that ‘we should always be willing to miss the next train,’ we should always ‘ask questions and then take care to listen to the answers.’ For foodies, it advises that ‘we should eat salted butter, because life’s too short to waste on the unsalted sort.’ And more seriously, we should try to ‘buy secondhand’, we should write to our MP whenever s...

Transfiguration

2 Peter 1:12-21 Whether the writer is the real Peter, or just someone writing from his point of view, he claims to be the older Peter living in Rome just before he was put to death for following Jesus. People often say, as they get older, that time seems to fly by faster and become more precious. It’s not an original idea. It’s what the writer says here. Memories become more important with age too. We have so many of them and they become ever more precious the further away in time they get. There is always the fear of losing our memories, or indeed of losing the ability to remember. For the original eyewitnesses of Jesus’ life and work there was a desperate anxiety to pass on their memories of him and make sure they were cherished. It’s fashionable to say that the Christian story is a ‘clever made-up story’ only loosely based on the real life of Jesus. But this isn’t a new claim. The writer of 2 Peter talks about it here. He affirms that the Christian story is based on real ...

Saying sorry

Luke 15.11-24 Have you ever realised that you've done something wrong? That you’ve hurt someone else? Perhaps you didn’t mean to. Perhaps you didn’t really care how they felt at the time. Perhaps you hurt them on purpose. But then you felt sorry and wanted to put things right. Did you manage to do that? The only way to really put things right is to say sorry. And we can also tell God that we’re sorry and that we want to do better. Saying sorry isn’t easy, though, is it? It can go wrong. Have you ever used the word ‘But’ in an apology? I know I have. ‘I’m sorry but…’ The people who ran the Post Office have practised different 'buts' and excuses when they tried to explain the huge miscarriage of justice which saw hundreds of subpostmasters bankrupted or imprisoned. And Boris Johnson had a lot of practice at this. ‘I’m sorry we had a party during Lockdown, but we had all been working very hard.’ We should never use ‘but’ when we say sorry because it suggests we’re not complet...

The kindness of strangers

Luke 10.21-37 We often read the parable of the Good Samaritan in isolation, as if it were a self-contained story. But it isn’t. It belongs in a specific context in St Luke’s Gospel. We know this from the way it begins: ‘Just then a lawyer stood up to test Jesus.’ Just when exactly does the lawyer stand up, though? Just after Jesus has said, ‘I thank you Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and the intelligent and have revealed them to infants; yes, Father, for such was your gracious will.’ In private to his disciples he has also said, ‘Many prophets and kings desired to see what you see, but did not see it, and to hear what you hear, but did not hear it.’ Just then up pops the lawyer. Granted that he would not have been party to the private aside to Jesus’ disciples about important people desiring to see and yet not seeing what is now being revealed to little children, it would still be pretty brazen for anyone to try to test Jesus ab...

True prosperity and greatness

Psalm 1, Proverbs 31.10-31, James 3.13-18, Mark 9.33-37 The Psalmist assumes that all of us are constantly being encouraged to follow the advice of the wicked. The task of the believer is to resist that advice, and instead to follow God’s way. We might think that it’s easy to resist the advice of the wicked. But just think about advertising, which insidiously encourages us to want new things. We might think, for instance, that we will try not to buy new clothes because manufacturing cloth does a lot of damage to the environment. But then along come the adverts! The wicked are people who encourage us to go against our better judgement, to make unwise and godless choices. And when they’re not trying to influence us to do the wrong thing, the Psalmist says that the wicked are scoffing at believers for trying to do the right thing. The last US election illustrates what the Psalmist means, although the sharp contrast between the wicked and the believers doesn...

The consequences of sin

Genesis 3:16–24; 4:1–16 Today's passages talk about the consequences of sin. In summary, sin - separation from a right relationship with God - leads to conflict with other human beings. Partnership is replaced by competitiveness and attempts to dominate one another. The easy mutually caring relationship which Adam and Eve enjoyed when they were good friends with God is replaced by male domination and patriarchal control. And farmers are soon at odds with nomadic herders. Their self regarding attitudes bring Adam and Eve into conflict with Nature too. Eve seems to find childbirth more difficult, perhaps because she can no longer count on loving support - at least from her husband. Adam seems to find farming more difficult, perhaps because he now sets out to subdue nature instead of working sympathetically with it. And Cain the nomadic herder is soon in conflict with Abel, the settled farmer, after his offering to God is rejected. We don't know why this was. Perhaps his motives ...