My Sermon on the Second Sunday in Lent, reflecting on Abram, in Genesis chapter 15

 

On the second Sunday of our annual journey through Lent, I’d like to focus if I may on the man called the father of Israel - the first of the great Patriarchs of the Old Testament - Abraham. In fact in our reading this afternoon he’s not yet got that name. Names are important in the Old Testament, and as we meet him today he’s still called Abram. That’s still quite a good name: it means “Exalted Father” - but he’ll soon to be re-named, and his new name Abraham means “Father of Many Nations”.

We find the story of Abram / Abraham in the very first book of the Bible, Genesis. Chapter 12 tells us that Abram left his home and lands in the city of Ur in obedience to God’s call. In today’s reading he’s on the move, travelling from place to place, not yet knowing where he’s bound - only that God wants him to journey to a country that God has said he will show him.

We honour Abram (as Abraham) for his faithful and trusting response to God’s call: a reckless response in the true sense of that word - Abram didn’t reck or reckon, he didn’t weigh up the pros and cons, he just got on and did what God wanted, trusting that things would all work out as they should.

But it’s a long hard journey, and from time to time Abram’s faith and trust wobble a bit. “I am your shield,” God has told him. But Abram wonders how God can possibly deliver on his promise. God had said that Abram would be the founder of a great nation - yet he had no child of his own. His only heir, Eleazer, was the son of a slave. How - he wondered - can I be the founder of a nation?

So God says to him, “Step outside your tent, and look up at the stars, try to count them. Your descendants will be as numerous and countless as the stars in the heavens.” So Abram did that, and believed. And the next sentence in the story - Abram put his faith in the Lord, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness - we can read again in the letters of Paul, for example chapter 3 of Galatians. All who live by faith are children of Abraham.

But in Genesis Abram has another bit of a wobble almost straight away. “But how can I be sure I’m actually going to be able to take possession of this land you say you’re going to give me?” he asks. And then it all starts to get a bit weird.

Abram’s told to make animal sacrifices to the Lord, which he does. And then he goes into a trance, in which he has a terrifying vision that involves a smoking fire pot and a flaming torch passing between the divided bits of the sacrifices he’s laid out. And a covenant, a solemn promise, is made that the whole stretch of this land will belong to his descendants. And although he doesn’t get his new name until two chapters further on, here is where it’s first confirmed, that Abram will be the Father of Many Nations.

But the way it all happens is well outside my experience. I find the idea of animal sacrifice a primitive and bizarre thing, objectionable, even. But I suppose this passage is a bit like the story of Isaiah in the temple, or the apostles on the Day of Pentecost; an attempt to describe in mere words, a sense of the immediate presence and power and authority of God, and that has to be something far beyond what mere words can express.

In Abraham’s world land, flocks and family were hugely important. You were measured according to the size of your flock, that’s what gave you status and identity. And it was a shame and a sign of God’s displeasure if you had no descendants to take over from you.

If we understand that, we can see why Abram needed to know, needed to be sure, that what God had promised really would happen. The journey he and his wife Sarai are making is pointless unless it serves God’s purposes. That’s why we’re offered this story as a reading in Lent, I suppose. Lent’s the time to reflect on journeys - the one Jesus made, and our own faith journeys as his people. To take Lent seriously I need to believe that my journey is blessed by God, and that I too stand under his promise.

So let’s think about Jesus for a moment. Like anyone who might claim the title of Messiah, he has set his face towards Jerusalem. Where else would God’s servant go? Where else would a son of David go? But he goes to Jerusalem knowing that there of all places, his message will be rejected and scorned. He is going there to die. Jerusalem, the city founded by God as a light to the nations, will reject him as it’s rejected so many prophets before him.

Here’s what Jesus says: “How often have I longed to gather you to me, as a mother hen gathers her chicks under her wings.” His words are in fact a quote prophet Isaiah, saying that this is what God longs to do. But Jesus knows already how desolate and lonely his journey will be. Even his closest companions will desert him.

One of my Lenten books includes this sentence: “Our journey in Lent is incomplete until we feel in our own hearts the pain of the cross.” Why? Because the reason for the cross is all the stuff that gets in the way of my serving and loving God; and because the purpose of the cross is the love that always wants to shield me and shelter me, even though I so often push that love away.

So my Lenten journey, and yours, ought I think to be like Abram’s. Let’s be a bit reckless! Let me not plan things out in order to get the result I want; Let me instead just open myself up to God, to listen for what he wants to say to me, to place myself under his will. It’s what I pray, after all, whenever I say the Lord’s Prayer - thy will be done. God has something to say to each of us, and in his word we’ll find both promise and call. Abram made sacrifices, but we need to be a sacrifice, remembering these Old Testament words from the 51st Psalm: “The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and a contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.”

Here's the view across the town of Welshpool to Powis Castle, from the Wiggly Path, which I walk most days. Its future is possibly under threat - Powys County Council don't want the burden of maintaining it, and offered it to Welshpool Town Council (on which I sit) for a quid. But the Town Council, on a fairly tight majority vote, supported its Stategy Committee's recommendation that the Council should not take over ownership, because to add a further financial responsibility when so much needs to be raised and spent elsewhere would be wrong. With a heavy heart, I feel I have to agree with that decision, but I remain anxious that the path be secured for the town, and designated as a public footpath. I think management by a group of supporters and friends could in fact be better than simply transferring ownership from one council to another, and so I'm testing the water to see if there are people who might want to join me in setting up a "Friends of the Wiggly Path" group. Do you use it to walk your dog or bring back your shopping? Was it your route to school in childhood days? Would you like to see it developed, with places to sit, and encouragement for birds and other wildlife? If so, I would love to hear from you!

A few words on Ash Wednesday

Joel 2.1 & 2, & 12-17

Blow the trumpet in Zion, sound the alarm on my holy mountain!  Let all the inhabitants of the land tremble, for the day of the LORD is coming, a day of darkness and gloom is at hand, a day of cloud and dense fog. Like blackness spread over the mountains a vast and countless host appears; their like has never been known, nor will be in all the ages to come.

Yet even now, says the LORD, turn back to me wholeheartedly with fasting, weeping, and mourning. Rend your hearts and not your garments, and turn back to the LORD your God, for he is gracious and compassionate, long-suffering and ever constant, ready always to relent when he threatens disaster.  It may be he will turn back and relent and leave a blessing behind him, blessing enough for grain-offerings and drink-offerings to be presented to the LORD your God. Blow the trumpet in Zion, appoint a solemn fast, proclaim a day of abstinence. Gather the people together, appoint a solemn assembly; summon the elders, gather the children, even babes at the breast; bid the bridegroom leave his wedding-chamber and the bride her bower. Let the priests, the ministers of the LORD, stand weeping between the porch and the altar and say, ‘Spare your people, LORD; do not expose your own people to insult, to be made a byword by other nations. Why should the peoples say, “Where is their God?” ’

John 8.2-11

At daybreak Jesus appeared again in the temple, and all the people gathered round him. He had taken his seat and was engaged in teaching them, when the scribes and the Pharisees brought in a woman caught committing adultery.

Making her stand in the middle they said to him, ‘Teacher, this woman was caught in the very act of adultery.  In the law Moses has laid down that such women are to be stoned. What do you say about it?’  They put the question as a test, hoping to frame a charge against him. Jesus bent down and wrote with his finger on the ground.  When they continued to press their question he sat up straight and said, ‘Let whichever of you is free from sin throw the first stone at her.’  Then once again he bent down and wrote on the ground.  When they heard what he said, one by one they went away, the eldest first; and Jesus was left alone, with the woman still standing there. Jesus again sat up and said to the woman, ‘Where are they? Has no one condemned you?’  She answered, ‘No one, sir.’ ‘Neither do I condemn you,’ Jesus said. ‘Go; do not sin again.’

 

Today, Ash Wednesday, we enter a season of penitence and preparation, so it seems right to ask - What happens when we repent, what happens when we turn to God to save us? The Old Testament prophets were constantly calling the people and their leaders back to God. In our reading today the prophet Joel tells the people to turn back to God. Do what God wants you to do, and longs for you to do, he tells them. Turn back.

And if I turn back to God, can I by doing that change his mind? No, I don’t believe I can. What changes is not the mind of God, but the relationship between God and me - or, for the people Joel is writing to, between God and his people, between the people and God. For, however far from him they’ve wandered, they remain his people, loved by him, desired by him.

But even the smallest scrap of sin changes that dynamic. There are no big fatal sins as opposed to little and not all that important sins; there is just sin - sin that takes away from us the power and the right to act as though we had God’s approval. We see this in the Gospel reading from John 8, the story of the woman taken in adultery. The crowd are ready, stones in hand. “Let the one among you who is without sin cast the first stone,” Jesus tells them. And not one of those gathered there can claim the right to do it.

Lent is God’s gift to us, as a time to take sin seriously, a time to admit our failings and to work to put things right. Penitence is about saying sorry but also being sorry, the words themselves aren’t enough. It requires a commitment to grow in discipline, and perhaps also take on some new work of service or care. It requires that we place ourselves afresh under God’s authority and judgement, but also under God’s mercy, as mediated to us by our Lord Jesus Christ.

Sin is deadly. Our sin cuts us off from life, and destines us only for destruction. Except that God continues to love us, to love each one of us, to love me despite all the unloveable things in my life. While sin remains a real and deadly thing, if I’m striving to do what is right and good, then even though I will fail, even though I will fall short of my target, God meets me, meets us in our striving and trying with a boundless generosity, with a grace that’s always there for us.

Dust and ashes - the Ash Wednesday words, as a cross is marked on our foreheads: “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return; repent and believe the Gospel.” Repent and believe the Gospel, and do that with faith and hope and expectation. For you are just dust, we are just dust - but God can do the most amazing things with dust.

My final "Deanery Thought for the Month"

I thought this worth posting here  -  my final piece for our deanery magazines before retiring :-

One of the things I’ve enjoyed doing while serving in Hereford Diocese has been editing the Diocesan Prayer Diary - I’ve done it since 2016, and before that I edited it between 1994 and 2004, so it has taken up quite a chunk of my life. I’m in the middle of editing next quarter’s as I write this piece - this is the one they need in the Diocesan Office as early as I can get it to them, since they, like everyone else at this time of the year, have to contend with the Christmas rush.

It’s something of a bittersweet exercise this time, editing the Diary, as it will be my last; and, as I put together prayer biddings for February and March, I’m very aware that by then I’ll no longer be part of the Diocese.  January is my last month as a parish priest, and at times these last few months have felt like heading towards a precipice. Like Wiley T. Coyote in the cartoons, I’ll step off the cliff, spend a moment or two realising that there is now nothing under my feet, and then disappear from view.

I’m quite sure a lot of people feel the same when they head towards the gate marked “retirement”. And it’s surely even worse, I should think, when the gate you’re heading for is one marked “redundant” - an appalling word, I’ve always thought, with overtones of “no longer useful” and maybe even “no longer usable”.

I recall Bishop Richard saying at a clergy meetings that “There’ll be no clergy redundancies in this diocese, on my watch.” I was glad to hear that - not least because it’s quite clear that there are no redundancies in the Kingdom. In the Kingdom no-one is cast off as “no longer useful”.  And I confess that by now I’m beginning to look forward to a busy and useful retirement. It’ll include a little more rest and a little more time for family and friends, and outings and visiting, than maybe life has over the past few years, but it’s certainly not going to be the end of either ministry or discipleship.

Having said that, we can make ourselves “no longer useful” - as the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats in Matthew 25.31ff makes clear. The goats in that parable hadn’t ceased to be religious, in a churchy sense, but they had stopped being useful, because they’d stopped being kind. They’d stopped noticing and responding to their neighbour in need.

As it happens, Random Acts of Kindness Day falls within the next quarter of the Prayer Diary (it’s 17th February in fact, but don’t wait till then!). Kindness is the currency of the Kingdom - not random in the sense of only doing it when we feel like it, but certainly random in the sense of “It doesn’t matter who or where you are, just that you need help or comfort or encouragement, and I can give it.”  So, welcome 2025, I say! Every year is a whole new adventure, and this one certainly will be for me.  And whatever resolutions you make as you look ahead, make sure kindness is at the head of your list!

The Light of the World

This year Candlemas, the Feast of the Presentation of Christ in the Temple, falls on a Sunday. I would quite like it to have been my final Sunday as a parish priest, but instead it falls two days after my retirement! But I love Candlemas, which brings to an end the great forty days of Christmas and Epiphany, and turns us round to look towards Easter. In our gardens and even in the countryside in sheltered places, the first hesitant signs of Spring can be seen - primroses, a few early crocus flowers, here and there a crumpled celandine, the brighter yellow of aconites, and of course, the snowdrops which in places are great sweeps of white. There will probably still be plenty of wintry stuff ahead, but the lengthening of the days is becoming more and more obvious, the birds are beginning to sing, and we naturally want to look ahead.

 

Throughout Epiphany we’ve been discerning the signs that presented Jesus as the Messiah, the Christ, the one God had promised he would send to set his people free. At the Presentation itself, the official title of this day, we see how Mary and Joseph bring their child to the temple, to do what all good Jewish parents would do for their firstborn son.

For every first born son was “deemed to belong to the Lord,” and so had to be brought to the Temple, presented to the Lord - and then bought back by a gift, a sacrifice: in this case a pair of pigeons, which is what parents who were not particularly well off would offer. And as they come, they’re looking forward, just as we might if we bring a child to be christened. Praying that God will bless them as parents, and bless their child as he grows, and, I guess, wondering what life might have in store for him.

Everything changes when a child is born, and especially when a first child is born: the conversion from couple to family, from lovers to parents, in which your hopes for your child, and your child’s need of you - especially when still an infant - take precedence. Been there, done that! However well you’ve planned and organised, it’s a huge dynamic shift in life, and a challenge too.

For one thing, the stretch of the future before you now goes beyond the span of your own lives and into the span of the life you’ve made. There’ll be joyful times, but also testing times, times too of maybe pain and sorrow. That’s true when any child is born, and when the journey of parenthood begins.

But for this firstborn child there is more. One of the things I especially like about the story is the pivotal presence within it of these two old people, Simeon and Anna. They see that this is the child they’ve been waiting for, that this is the child sent from God to bring salvation for his people. So Simeon tells Mary and Joseph that their child will change not only the shape of their own lives, but the shape of the world as well - not only their future as a family, but the whole course of history. And Mary especially is going to bear some of the pain of this.

Simeon and Anna, despite their age, and despite whatever pains and sorrows the long story of their lives has brought them, are still hoping in God as they see this child, still believing that God is going to do something new. They typify for me some of the people whose quiet and trusting faith and constancy in prayer have been a support and strength for me in my ministry, the sort of people who provide the bedrock of quiet and trusting faith on which to a greater extent than sometimes we realise, the ministry of the Church depends.

But also - in their quite and patient way these two old people, Simeon and Anna, are announcing a revolution. They have been waiting and watching for God to set his people free, for a light which will enlighten everyone. And now they see this work beginning - but beginning in secret. Joseph and Mary will go quietly home to continue their exploration together of what it will mean for them to be parents, to have a family, just like any other family. The child will grow in the ordinary setting of a carpenter’s shop in a provincial town, with work to be done, and brothers and sisters to be born, and years to pass.

Not all revolutions need to be loud or disruptive. And I’m reminded how God’s glory is revealed in love and in service, in kindness and care. Cathedrals and temples are special places - but the work of faith, though it may use them and praise God in them, doesn’t actually need them. The child of Mary and Joseph will teach his friends that they can call God “Our Father” whoever and wherever they are, and know that their prayer is heard. Palaces proclaim the secular power of kings and governors, but true royalty doesn’t need pomp and circumstance, even if it makes for a good show. The child of Mary and Joseph will teach his friends the royalty of service: “Let the greatest among you be the servant of all.”

Wherever people in our world are faithful and kind as they get on with life, care for each other, and contend with the uncertainties and insecurities that surround us, God’s love is affirmed and proclaimed. And the Holy Child, once presented, is for the moment then hidden among those who know what it means to work hard, to struggle to make ends meet, and yet still to show kindness and to praise the Lord.

“Shine as a light in the world, to the glory of God,” I have said so many times at so many christenings during my ministry. As the Spring approaches and the days grow lighter, our hearts respond to those changes. We were made to live in the light, and we’re called to be bringers of light into the dark places of our world, into the dark places of our lives.

At Candlemas, we begin to look forward to the testing time of Lent, to the cross on which this King will be enthroned, and then to Easter Day, when the Paschal candle is lit with the shout of “The light of Christ!” May that light be kindled in us, and may we be witnesses to it: in kindness and in love may we be bringers of light in the name of the one hailed in the very Jewish setting of the Temple by Simeon and Anna - but presented there as the one who will be not only the glory of Israel, but the Light of the World.