A Sermon on the 11th Sunday after Trinity (28th August 2022)

 Readings - Ecclesiasticus 10:12-28 and Luke 14:1, and 7-14

My newspaper last week warned that we should expect higher levels of crime this winter - especially crimes like burglary, car theft and shoplifting - because of the cost of living crisis. I guess they’re right. Some people will be driven to it by desperation; and there’ll be others who’ll see the present situation in terms of opportunity - a licence to steal, you might say.

Probably most of us have at some point been victims of crime. We were burgled in a previous parish - our house was broken into while we were asleep upstairs; and I’ve had things stolen from me in the street, too. And I know that crimes like this have a bigger impact on us than just the loss of money or valuables. It leaves us feeling vulnerable; if we’re burgled our home feels violated, no longer our own. We’re not only victims at the time it happens, we go on being victims for a while afterwards, even if we’ve not been physically harmed - which of course can happen as well.

No-one likes that sort of crime. But we might be a bit more relaxed about other ways of breaking the law, like exceeding the speed limit, or parking on a double yellow; we might even go so far as to excuse parking for free in a place where you’re supposed should have paid, even though I guess technically that really is a crime and not merely a misdemeanour. And what about those little workplace crimes like taking a few pens or paper clips home from the office? After all, there isn’t really a victim, is there, of that sort of crime?

If there is victimless crime, is there also victimless sin? Here are the seven deadly sins, so called: lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy and pride. The first six of those do obvious damage, and you can see there are victims. People get damaged by the lust and greed and wrath of others. People get hurt by people’s envy or gluttony. People get let down or neglected where there’s sloth. But perhaps pride might feel a bit different.

You could imagine circumstances in which pride is something positive. A worker taking pride in their work, a gardener being proud of their vegetable plot or flower border? And even though maybe some folk do get a bit puffed up and proud in a way that’s annoying to those around them, there’s not much actual damage caused, surely?

Not so, wrote the author of Ecclesiasticus, from which our first reading came. Pride is where all sin starts, he tells us; to persist in pride leads to depravity. And even if pride itself doesn’t look too damaging, it leads on to things that are, because pride is something that denies the sovereignty of God. In his book Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis takes the same line when he writes, “Pride leads to every other vice: it is the complete anti-God state of mind.” While Dante defined pride as “love of self, perverted to hatred and contempt for one's neighbour”.

So what begins with being a bit puffed up and tending to show off can become something altogether more serious - because it’s inward looking and selfish. Jesus saw in the Pharisees a sort of religion that could so easily build a sense of superiority to others. At the same time this way of thinking downgraded God into playing just a bit part at best. This sort of religious activity was all about me, and not really about God or my neighbour.

So it was easy for a Pharisee to start to think of himself (and it would be himself, I guess) as better than other folk. Pharisees were people who took enormous care never to put a foot wrong in the way they lived; they took their religion so seriously that all their time and effort went on making sure they never ever strayed outside what the Law of Moses required. So they knew themselves to be quite literally holier than thou. And while I don’t suppose all of them let that go to their heads, for some of them that’s clearly what happened. Jesus called them whited sepulchres - they looked good on the outside, but inside they were full of pride.

And Jesus, as ever, was very practical in the way he tackled the problem. He was at a dinner party, so he talked about dinner parties. Don’t grab the best seat, he told the folk there, who, it seems, were doing just that. You’ll look really foolish when the seat you’ve grabbed gets assigned to someone else and there’s nowhere for you to go except the very bottom of the table. But if you start down there instead, maybe your host will call you up higher. That’s good advice for a dinner party, but of course Jesus meant it also as good advice for a disciple. As God’s people let’s not be anything other than humble in his sight. We’re servants, not masters, we’re learners, not graduates, we’re sinners, not paragons of virtue.

And what about when you give a dinner party? Jesus had some sensible and practical advice to anyone thinking of sending out invitations: don’t choose a guest list to impress, made up of people who are sure to invite you back; no, instead invite those who need a hand up or a hand out. They’ll not be able to pay you back, but God will. And again, that’s not really advice for a party-planner so much as for a disciple. It’s about choosing to live in a way that looks outwards rather than inwards - a way that’s generous, and recalls what the great prophets of old had to say about God’s special favour towards the poor, the needy, and anyone who needs a helping hand. 

Pride persuades us to act in ways designed to impress our own peer group; that’s what’s important to the proud person - their own status and the admiration of those around them. But we’re called to be disciples, followers, people doing our best to be as like Jesus as we can be. And the genuine disciple, the true pilgrim, is the person who gives rather than takes, who shares rather than keeps, who is generous because we serve a generous God. Those who care for those for whom God cares, those who take the humble place, those who always ready to serve. And a generous Church is one that adds life, and gives hope, and welcomes and affirms.

A Sermon on the 10th Sunday after Trinity (21st August 2022)

Do the things God wants you to do, and act with kindness and generosity towards your neighbour in need, and, says the prophet Isaiah, “you will be like a well-watered garden.”

It’s nice when the sun shines, but too much of it may not be good news for the gardener, especially when like in my garden, and awful lot of what you’ve got is in pots. It doesn’t take long for things to dry out, so the late evening watering session is very important. Thankfully, we have several water butts, and we’ve so far avoided a hosepipe ban, but it’s quite an effort each day, and even so not everything on my patch managed to survive that spell of very hot weather.

It was of course really good for our weddings. We’ve had a lot of gloriously sunny wedding days this summer. But one or two have happened in the rain, with brides sheltering under the yew trees and people rushing for umbrellas. When it’s rainy I tend to remind my wedding couples that in the Bible rain is always a sign of God’s blessing. They don’t necessarily seem all that convinced when I say it - but it is in fact quite true.

We find it hard to think of rain as a blessing, because for us rain is mostly something that spoils things, that sends us home from our picnics in the park, stops us playing outside, and isn’t much fun. Though as a child I did always enjoy splashing in puddles, so it wasn’t all bad! But we did have to put up with Dad staring mournfully at the rain streaking down our windows and moaning about all the jobs he couldn’t do outside.

In the Holy Land, rain was always precious stuff; without it the crops failed and the people went hungry. This year, perhaps we’ve had just a taste of that. The grass has been turning to dust under our feet; fields had ceased to be a patchwork, because everything had turned the same dry colour. So last Monday morning found me just standing out on my lawn and letting it rain on me, and I can tell you it felt really good.

We read in scripture that “the rain falls on the just and on the unjust” and we interpret that in terms of bad things happening to good people as well as wrong ‘uns; but really it’s telling us that the good things and the blessings of life fall both on those who obviously deserve them and on a fair few who perhaps may not.

But whether or not we like rain, it’s worth remembering that one person’s blessing may not seem that way to another. Me as a child on holiday didn’t have the same attitude to sun and rain as the grown up me looking over the shrivelled and wilting plants on my vegetable patch. We’re rarely all praying the same prayers when it comes to the weather! And yet some of the things, rain included, we don’t always think of as blessings can be, even so.

Last week I did a house blessing; I blessed each room of a cottage that had been hugely changed in the course of its recent renovation. I don’t often get asked to do house blessings, and it’s always a privilege when I do. You may wonder what the point is of blessing inanimate objects, houses and their contents included - but as I went from room to room with appropriate prayers, I was in fact asking a blessing not on the house itself, but on the house as a lived in home, and on the people who’d be meeting and eating and living in it.

A few years ago I partnered with the local fire service chaplain in blessing the new fire engine that had arrived at the station in Severn Street; and again, we weren’t so much blessing the machine itself as the work it was there to support, and the people who’d be manning it in demanding and maybe dangerous situations - as well as the people for whom its arrival on the scene would be an urgent and much needed blessing.

So we asked God to bless the firefighters to be themselves a blessing to all who needed their help. Jesus blessed everyone he met, and his high call to all who offer themselves as his disciples is that we should be blessings ourselves.

We should be, harking back to my opening words, like the rain that restores and brings to life a well-watered garden. There’s a reading I sometimes hear at weddings - I can’t remember exactly how it goes, but it says something about the secret of a happy marriage being not choosing the right partner, but choosing to be the right partner. And in just the same way, my prayer for myself and for all who share my ministry isn’t that blessings might fall upon us just so we can feel good and be safe, but so we can ourselves be a blessing to others. As the prayer of St Francis begins, “Lord, make me a channel of your peace . . .”

And where religion gets in the way of blessing, then that religion is wrong, because it simply isn’t true to the heart and mind of God. How can we claim to worship the Lord when in fact what we do and how we live - and perhaps also the rules that govern our churches - deny his love? This of course was the situation Jesus faced as he healed the seriously arthritic woman he encountered on the Sabbath day within the weekly service.

I could feel some sympathy for the synagogue president, as Jesus sabotaged all his plans for an orderly act of worship. But Jesus tells him and the others: you’d let loose your ox or your donkey on the Sabbath, surely? (they would, of course) So how can we not release this child of Abraham from the bonds that are holding her? To say “God bless you” isn’t enough - we have to be a blessing.

And when, at the pearly gates or wherever, you and I some day are called to account for how we’ve been, on the long day’s journey we call a life (and yes, I know we’re saved by grace, not by works; by God’s love, not the tally of our own good deeds) - what will really matter? Not my word perfect Bible knowledge, nor my sweet singing, my regular attendance, or how well I kept the rules; what will matter is how closely I’ve walked with Jesus, and whether my heart has been in tune with the heart of my Lord. For we’re judged I’m sure mostly by whether God’s many blessings to us have become blessings we’ve shared, and blessings we’ve been, along the way.