In the name of God, loving Father, risen Son and ever present Holy Spirit. Amen

All things being well, we will be baptising the newest and youngest member of the church family this Sunday in the service at St Peter and St Paul church. I say all things being well, because of being on holiday and recording these thoughts a bit ahead of time and in today’s topsy turvey world – who knows if we will or we wont do things a  few weeks away!

2020 has been a very unusual year in which to be born, I want us to imagine what we might want to say in a few years times – to our little one being baptised today  about the circumstances of the year of her birth. By that time she would be old enough to understand sufficiently (in her teens perhaps – when she will be preparing for confirmation and taking on a faith commitment for herself). By then we will have foresight and hindsight and somehow all that besets us currently will have moved on to the next big thing and then the next.

Interestingly as with all things in the future we just don’t know how it will all pan out for us and for her. Will even the words sound strange? – coronavirus, lockdown, social distancing, face coverings. Or will they all still be with us part of how things always are by then.

Despite this in our strange times it has been a time to take stock and work out what matters in our life (and not some of the things that had taken too much prominence that were just glitter and froth!)

For once it would probably be easier to be talking about our faith instead of talking about the times around our little one’s birth because what it means to have faith is constant. In talking about why having faith in God matters with a young person preparing for confirmation, we would be on stronger and more certain ground and would probably find it easier to string the words together.

Why faith matters to us and what it is all about in our day to day life – This kind of statement is what Paul is doing in our extract from the letter to the Romans this morning. One of my commentaries described this passage as being like a string of beads – like these.

The beads are each of the pithy sayings in that passage that will help us live our faith well. Pearls of wisdom like let love be genuine, rejoice in hope, and weep with those who weep. The string that binds the beads together is God’s love for us. Showing us a way to live well following the example of Jesus. These are all things we will want the little one we are baptising to know, experience and grow in to in her walk of faith.

We want her to experience love that is genuine, people outdoing one another in showing honour and serving the Lord. We want these things to be foremost in her walk from this day and as she grows. It is the responsibility of her parents and godparents to particularly help in this but also the responsibility of her church family to support and aid them in their endeavour, and to be encouraging everyone in their walk of faith.

The very first phrase ‘let love be genuine’ could be the heading for this whole reading. The first half about how we should be as the body of Christ his church, and the second how we should be with our wider society – showing we are Christian by our love.

It is always worth digging into to which word is being used for love in that phrase let love be genuine. In our language we have one word for love, in the languages of the Bible there are many – which are used differently. The word used here is the intimate sort of love – conjugal love between a man and a woman. Love that made our little one in the first place in the heart of God’s love for us, but also to indicate the intimate relationship we now have with God through the death of Jesus and the work of the Spirit in us.

We know the difference between love that is sincere or genuine and love that isn’t too! It can be deeply hurtful when we find that in our human relationships when love we thought was sincere and genuine turns out to be a façade or fake!! We will not experience this in our love for God – because his love is the source of all love we experience surrounds us, fills us and overflows. Our little one being baptised on this day is a beloved child of God as are we all beloved children of God – we may be a little older and sometimes wiser, but God never stops loving us – with genuine and sincere love. Love for us in this life and the next whenever our time comes.

The depths in this Romans passage would be well worth reflecting on further; for both our community life as a church and our life in the world. Paul does not make out the going will always be easy in either sphere. Be patient in suffering for example or bless those who persecute you. There is a particularly strong section about not avenging or taking revenge. The old 2 wrongs don’t make a right adage is helpful.

There is also much there to build us up and encourage each other. So important in our days and so important for the little one we baptise today as she grows in the faith from this day.  Encouragements to

• Rejoice in hope

• Persevere in prayer

• Outdo one another in showing honour

Honour is a bit of an old-fashioned concept – respect, value, cherish might be good ways to understand it. I have bought our little one a bracelet to mark this special day. Obviously not for now, but as a keep sake of her baptism. Her family will be able to remind her of these beads of teaching. The beads themselves are from Nazareth (where Jesus grew up) and the string holding them together represents God’s love for us all. The beads form a circle which reminds us of the never ending love God has for us – for yesterday, today and forever. I have put this passage from Romans in with it, in the most child friendly version I could find.

Those near enough will see there is one other bead on the bracelet which is a little cross to remind us of the saving love of Jesus. For as we heard in our gospel passage Jesus said If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.

This symbolises the cross bringing new life and genuine love for this little one and for all of us Amen    The New Revised Standard Version (Anglicized Edition), copyright 1989, 1995

Trinity 11 – Romans 12: 1-8 and Matthew 16: 13-20

I wonder if any of you watch or listen to Prime Minister’s question time when it is broadcast?  I used to often hear it on the radio when the broadcast of parliamentary proceedings was a fairly new thing and George Thomas was Speaker of the House.  It is noticeable that many of the questions to the Prime Minister are the same – often asking him or her what their engagements are for the day, as the format is restricted.  MPs then have a follow up question which is more pertinent, often to a matter that relates to their constituency.  I mention this because when I looked at today’s gospel reading, I had a touch of deja vue, as it is the same gospel that I preached on at the end of June on the feast of St Peter and St Paul.  I was tempted to do as the Prime Minister does and say ‘I refer my honourable friends to the sermon I preached on this subject recently’.  I also considered an even worse cheat of just repeating the same sermon until I remembered that although I am at Pen Selwood this week, everything we do goes to both churches, and although it was Wincanton’s patronal festival, it was shared with you on line and you would certainly have caught me out!  If you do want to hear my sermon on the gospel for today however, it is still available through the parish website!  There is also an almost certainly better reflection on this passage available on the Diocesan website given by Rev Canon Dr Rob James, the Canon Chancellor of Wells Cathedral.

So today we are looking at the wonderful passage from Romans 12.  At the end of all his letters, Paul moves on from theology to practical advice, and this is what is happening here.  Over the last few weeks we have been reading chapters 8 – 11 in Romans, which are always worth studying, but take some effort.  Now Paul is talking language that even I can understand.  In the first verse he distances himself from the Greek way of thinking, that the spirit was the only part of a person that was important, the physical was often the problem.  Paul however starts by saying that to be complete in our worship, we must dedicate our bodies to God as a spiritual act.  My favourite translation of these verses is J B Philips in which verse 1 reads: ‘With eyes wide open to the mercies of God, I beg you, my brothers, as an act of intelligent worship, to give him your bodies, as a living sacrifice, consecrated to him and acceptable by him’.

Dedicating our bodies means dedicating all that they do – whether we are writing a sermon, mending an altar frontal, cooking the dinner or weeding the garden we are serving God.  If we think of it in that way, we might find ourselves approaching the mundane with a different mindset.  Some of our well-known hymns take up this theme – New Every Morning is the Love, and Teach me my God and King both spring to mind.

In the next verse Paul includes our minds as well.  The word ‘repentance’ is often used in the church as an act of turning to God and this often comes from the Greek word ‘metanoia’ which literally translates as changing your mind.  Not changing your mind in the sense that I might decide to have coffee, then change my mind and have tea, but in a far more profound way; literally changing your mind for a new one as you might if you took a purchase back to a shop to change it.  I have always liked the J B Philips translation of v2 which reads:

‘Don’t let the world around you squeeze you into its own mould, but let God re-mould your minds from within, so that you may prove in practice that the plan of God for you is good, meets all his demands and moves towards the goal of true maturity.’

I love the picture this gives me of God filling our minds like a plastic bag or a balloon and pushing them outwards to be the right shape, not the shape that the world would have us fit into, and the practical outcomes of letting Him do this.  But after that Paul gets really practical – beginning to sound almost like an old-fashioned nanny – ‘don’t get above yourself’!  We need to have a realistic knowledge of the gifts and abilities that God has given us and work to our strengths.  The picture Paul gives of the church as a body is often used and very useful – I am very aware that if I tried to walk everywhere on my hands I would not get far, and yet without a fair assessment of ourselves and each other that is what we as a church would be trying to do.  We can sometimes get downhearted when we see the skills and gifts of others, but we don’t realise how important the seemingly lesser tasks are.  We recently lost a member of the leadership team at Tiny Church.  She never created craft activities or told stories or lead the singing, but she is the person we miss the most as she was always there making sure that the crayons and tables were put away so that the children didn’t trip over them, and that no child escaped through the south door when parents weren’t watching.  We miss her enormously, but she always said that she didn’t do anything special.

We have been thinking a lot today about the uncertainty of the future – I was pleased to hear Bishop Ruth use a phrase in her message that I included in a reflection recently – I do not know what the future holds, but I do know who holds the future.  Whatever is coming our way, whatever shape the church may take in the future, the one thing I am sure of is that we will need each other and the support we can give each other more and more as time goes on – we, who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually we are members one of another.

It has become clear over the past few months, that we are able, both as churches and as communities to pull together and look out for each other.  I pray that when we find out what the ‘new normal’ is going to be, we will not lose this.

Trinity 10

Romans 11: 1-2a, 29-32 and Matthew 15: 21-28

I think it is fair to say that we are living in fairly difficult times.  My newspaper is carrying stories about the numbers of migrants crossing the Channel and the possibility of calling out the Royal Navy to prevent them from landing.  As I write this the MOD is considering this. One of our largest political parties is deeply divided over accusations of anti-Semitism within its ranks.  The Black Lives Matter movement has launched a toolkit called BLM in the Stix designed to help people in rural areas – people like you and me – to understand and to fight racism in their areas.  As one of the organisers puts it: ‘… (it) is about getting people who are not racist to become anti-racist, especially for people who live in rural areas who might be thinking we don’t have that much racism around here’.  The reason we are unable to sit near to our friends in church or to sing hymns is because the world is suffering a pandemic of a virus that makes no distinction about who to infect beyond that you need to be human.  And to crown it all we learned just last week that Bishop Peter has been diagnosed with leukaemia and is receiving chemotherapy.

Both our readings today speak directly and very clearly into this situation.  I had to read the passage from Romans several times in order to work out what Paul was saying, but actually he is being very clear.  Reading between the lines a bit it seems that there may have been anti-Semitism in the church as early as Paul’s time, or possibly a developing idea that as His chosen people had not all been faithful, God had abandoned them in favour of those who followed His son.  Paul is quite emphatic in dealing with both of those ideas.  God’s calling is irrevocable.  The history of the Jewish people may be a chequered one, but I am in no position to cast any blame.  My walk with Him has been just as wobbly at times.

And then we come to the story of Jesus dealing with a foreign woman in a way that makes us just a bit uncomfortable.  We need to look carefully at what was going on here.  Jesus has been teaching the crowd who are following him everywhere he went making it impossible for him to rest, he has been healing sick people, and he has been challenged by the Pharisees who came to debate the detail of keeping the law relating to hand washing. Somehow that seems quite appropriate for our times!  He is tired, and the only way he can escape to recharge his batteries and get some time with the disciples is to go across the border to another country – modern day Lebanon and about 30 or more miles away.  Jesus is now in gentile territory, and it seems that at last the crowd have gone home for a while.  Peace at last!

They are then approached by someone who is both of the two things that are dreadful to a devout Jewish man.  She is a woman and a gentile – either one of those things is enough to make a Jew ritually unclean – and she is both!  Not only that, she is very determined, to the extent that when Jesus appears to ignore her, she continues to shout at the disciples.  They recognise that she wants to talk with the organ grinder and not the monkeys, and ask Jesus to do something, so he challenges her faith.  In calling Jesus ‘Son of David’ and Lord, and in kneeling before him she has already demonstrated that she knows who he is, and that he has come to save his people.  She still believes though that he will not be exclusive.  Jesus reply to her is not quite as nasty as it would appear at first reading.  He is not talking about throwing food to the stray dogs that may be around, but rather about cooking a meal for your children and then feeding it to your family pet.  She takes up the challenge, agrees with him but points out that family pets get the leftovers when the family has eaten.  Any of us who have had children and dogs know how quickly the dog will learn that it is good to be around when the child is in the high chair, as food often gets pushed off the tray, and they will also recognise the sound of plates being stacked after a meal – that is the time that leftovers often find their way into the dog’s bowl.

This conversation is probably not as unfriendly as it sounds – it is a shame that we only have written accounts of the sayings of Jesus filtered through translation, and cannot hear his tone of voice.  The more I look into this passage, the more I get the feeling that this woman made Jesus laugh, and he finishes the conversation by saying – go home – your daughter is well.  His healing is total – he doesn’t ever make anyone just a bit better, and this brings us full circle to the words from Romans – the gifts of God are irrevocable.

The Canaanite woman seems to me to demonstrate the three virtues that Paul mentions at the end of the great chapter about love in 1 Corinthians 13.  She has faith – if she didn’t think that Jesus could heal her daughter there would have been no point in asking.  She has hope – that he will do something for her even though she knows she has little right to ask.  And finally, she has love – love for her daughter that gives her the determination not to accept no for an answer but to continue to challenge.  The gospels tell us of two occasions when Jesus performed healing miracles for gentiles – once for the centurion whose servant was ill, and this one and in both cases he remarks how these people have more faith than any he has found in his own people.  Both times he heals at a distance, and both times he heals completely.

My commentary says this, ‘This miracle was another important lesson for the disciples. The Jews had priority in God’s kingdom program. However, God would deliver Gentiles who also came to Him in humble dependence relying only on His power and mercy for salvation.  In this miracle of mercy there is a clear foreview of Gentile blessing …’.  This is the promise for us to hold on to when we almost despair about the state of our world.  The gifts of God are irrevocable.

 

Thanks be to God

 

A Prayer for Bishop Peter

 

O Lord, you are our strength and our shield.

Your love sustains us through all the challenges we face.

We place into your hands all who are facing challenges,

In this time of such uncertainty.

We hold before you all who are dear to us.

Particularly we pray for our Bishop, Peter,

His family and friends and all who love him,

As they face these coming months.

May they know your strength and protection,

Your healing and your love,

In the name of Jesus,

And in the power of the Holy Spirit,

Amen