Jesus remains forever (Hebrews 7.24)
Proper 25B (Last Sunday after Trinity)
Take heart ... he is calling you (Mark 10.49)
[Unlike most sermons published on PreacherRhetorica this script takes a text from the scripture readings of the day and generalises from it. No attempt is made to analyse any part of the set readings. Instead the sermon offers a kind of 'summing up' that's meant to be encouraging.]
A couple of travellers' tales:
It’s a blazingly hot day. The town is busy, noisy and hot, its’ small streets crowded with people. She carries in her hand a sheaf of papers, things that must be attended to at the other office at the far end of the street. he walks out of the office door into the brilliant sunlight and makes her way through jostling tourists, shoppers, pensioners, and youngsters idling time away, animated conversations whilst still astride their motorbikes. Half way along the street there is an open square, one side of it occupied by the town’s parish church. As she draws near, she steps off the pavement, and enters the church. Crossing herself, the papers still in her hand, she kisses an icon, and turns and leaves the building, resuming her errand to her company’s office. Her visit to the church has taken only seconds – but a momentary diversion in a working day, but devotion real enough nevertheless.
Through the course of the day many others will do as she does. Hardly a word will be spoken, except perhaps “Good day” to the elderly widows at the door, the ceremony of each visit identical, brief, almost stylised, - an unaware stranger might even think these little gestures perfunctory. Yet through the course of a day, a gentle tide of local people make their way in and out of the church in the centre of this small Greek town.
The village is quiet. It always is during weekdays as many of the villagers must travel a distance to their work, there is no local school, and the farms, although busy, have a very small number of workers. What movement there is along the street comes in fits and starts – a group of walkers, a couple of horse riders, a car load of people looking for a country pub in which to have lunch. Some of them stop to look around. A few of them make their way to the parish church – they read memorials, admire the paintings hung on the wall, comment on the history and the architecture. But that is all. Mostly
they seem a little disorientated, maybe even embarrassed, as if they have lost the memory of what this place is for.
Sometimes they happen upon a service – half a dozen people or less, gathered for the Eucharist. Most turn and leave hurriedly, unwilling to become involved. A few, but not that few, are rather irritated to find their rural ramble
interrupted – “When will this be over so that we can have a proper look around?” Some think it peculiar to find the building used on a Thursday morning. They had come to enjoy the Cheshire countryside and muse on history – alert only to the romance of times past.
The tale of two churches, 1800 miles apart. One almost at the western most extreme of our continent, and the other at
the eastern. The geography has some bearing. The more northerly and westerly you go, the more icy the waters are when it comes to religion. Ireland being the one exception, but even there things are changing fast.The chill waters of secularism and indifference to religion run deeper and deeper. Whereas to the East and to the South, the old ways of religion still have power about them. The habits of faith still hold sway, at least to a degree, and the courses of the lives of individuals and communities are marked by the observance of age-old ceremonies. God is woven into the fabric of everyday, a constant presence now not an embarrassed leftover of yesteryear.
One famous Sociologist describes us in Western European as religiously amnesiac – as a community, as a people, we have amnesia when it comes to religion. We who are gathered here are part of a tiny minority, our neighbours have
largely forgotten how to be religious. For them it just doesn’t work any longer. Our Christian heritage is a fruitful
vine that produces the most luscious of wine – yet somehow we can no longer taste it. It is as if Christianity has become deeply unfashionable amongst us. We don’t want to live in this cranky old house, thank you very much, let’s have something new. That old stuff of Church – well, who cares? Religiously amnesiac.
Of course I paint the picture too broadly. There is much else to be said, I know. But there is sufficient truth here to profoundly trouble us all.
As one well-known journalist recently put it, “Spirituality is sexy, religion is outmoded.” He pointed out that as so-called
mainstream Christian religious practice dwindles in Western Europe, so the interest in spirituality is burgeoning.
Here is an idea that, one way or another, is being constantly repeated inthe popular media. We are told that as fewer and fewer Europeans believe or even take seriously the teachings of Christianity, more and more of those same Europeans are eager to adopt all kinds of esoteric spiritual practices. A book recently published in the UK deals with the vast array of
spiritualities available to us, Druidism, several types of witchcraft, British Israelites, Transhumanism etc. etc. but misses out almost entirely the rich tradition that is the church – let alone anything about the other major faiths present amongst us. Such is the prejudice we now face. The history, traditions, and religious experiences of humanity are trawled to find techniques and methods that will appeal to the modern person, but Christianity is ignored. In the bookshops the shelves devoted to “Mind, Body and Spirit” are loaded down with colourful delights, whilst the shelves headed “Christianity” contain an uninspiring selection of Bibles and a few prayer books. The shelves reinforce the truth of the journalist’s story.
This is a story so often told that we’ve all started to uncritically believe it. More than a generation ago we were being told that the explosion in drug abuse was a symptom of spiritual questing. These years further on that explanation no longer seems plausible. Similarly, the easy equation that substitutes what goes under the catch-all phrase “spirituality” as the
replacement for centuries of religious practice, may eventually come to be seen as a spurious comparison. Is like
really being compared to like?
When the columnist says “spirituality is sexy” the idea being used is that of the attractive, compelling, enticing image that sells things. In the jargon of marketing, the aim is to make the product “sexy” so it is sought after, fashionable and trendy. This is the language of disposability. One trend is replaced by another. Fashions come, and fashions go.
The product that was all so desirable yesterday, cannot be given away today. If being in the mode is theprevailing fashion or custom, then religion becomes the thing that is most definitely not “sexy.” In a world where the market is everything, that is the ultimate put-down, the ultimate devaluing of anything.
But the market is not everything. When it comes to people, and to some things as well, each of us voices the thought of
what we feel to be “beyond price.”
All efforts that try to sell religion are bound to ultimately fail. Spirituality is often sold as a technique to aid the acquirement of happiness. It becomes a way to be in-touch with your“true-self,” at home in your mind and body and relationships. It becomes a range of methods to improve yourself. t is even sold as a tool for effective management of people. In being all these things, it becomes just another aspect of what sells.
Christian religion, however, has as its sole focus a gracious God who loves to the ultimate and beyond. It offers nothing in the direct sense of selling self-improvement, and yet promises everything. It is not a technique or a method, and yet it goes to the very heart of a person. That our religions first title was “the Way” is profoundly significant. We are a people always travelling on. Yes, says Jesus, my way does turn upside down the common way of seeing things, but take heart, those who come with me, those who learn from me, no matter what is thrown at them, will find a deep and lasting reward. We see the world anew.
The picture we use of our discipleship may be travelling, it may be learning, it may be building; it may be growth.
All those pictures offer something and all of them point towards becoming, towards development, towards a process, a shift, a development. Travelling on, learning on, growing on – Together. We are simply learning to live in the love of God that is the source of all life. Live in that house which is God’s gift. Go on your way for faith will make you well.
He was applying the dead dog principle, or is it the dead donkey? I can’t remember, but anyway the idea is that to make sure your vine is really productive, when you plant it new it should be buried over a dead animal. It turned out to be a principle too far.
He had persuaded his wife that it was a good idea to plant a vine against the house wall – she had envisaged something more directly ornamental. Against her better judgement she finally agreed. A local nursery was visited, a vine procured. Then came the first problem. Inadvertently closing the car boot too soon he managed to chop off the tope of the plant.
Outside their front door, a high brick wall marked the garden boundary. The wounded plant was placed on top of the wall, awaiting planting. Was it the wind, was it a child, who knows? When he can to plant the vine, it had fallen off the wall, its stem split in two – well, in fact just a little stub of a stem remained attached to the roots, the leafy bits were completely useless.
That’s where the dead dog principle comes in. His wife said he’d made such a mess of the plant that he might as well
bin it. But no, he said, he’d plant it, and to try to give it a life giving boost he’d put plenty of bone meal under it – a good organic fertilizer, not quite a dead dog, but maybe near enough.
And so he did. Unfortunately, the family Labrador couldn’t distinguish between a bone and fertilizer. When next they
looked out of the kitchen window, the playful puppy has disinterred the unfortunate vine and throwing it into the air, and catching and shaking it, apparently in the hope that it might turn into the thing of which it stank.
Let me not labour the story. The now soil-less stump was rescued and planted again. ... ... And it grew, and it grew and it grew. Producing the most beautiful lush foliage and each year a presentable crop of sweet grapes against the vicarage
wall that was its home.
The vine was a lesson in itself. Its too easy to think of the vine image as referring to something that’s terribly fragile, difficult to maintain, needing lots of effort and protection. But a vine isn’t like that at all.
Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Hosea and the Psalms all use the image of the vine, and the picture is almost always of degeneration in the sense of growing wild. Vines grow with a vigour that is simply stunning. Jesus takes this common image of a common thing and turns the metaphor – rampant growth here isn't the wild ramblings of a briar – the hedge that runs amok.
No here, the new growth, the different growth, is reaching out, is shooting spurs, not in disarray – but in fruitful hope. Yes, it goes in all directions, it won’t easily be constrained in its search for sun and water and nutrients, but as long as it is connected somewhere to the core, that’s enough. On a vine the fruit is always on the new growth.
So often I hear the image of the true vine used in a constraining way, defining the plant in a neat topiary, its margins clipped and uniform. But that is not the image in John’s gospel – the vine grows on, defying our well ordered logic,
chasing away towards the sun, eager to produce what is sweet, and abundant with.
That’s what our travelling on together is to be like – sorry to mix the metaphors so – but you get my point. Take heart – what we do as Christians may be deeply unfashionable – but we mustn’t let that detract us from living our tradition of faith together and finding delight in it.
Across the road from the Cheshire village church with which I began, lives Miss Ev. For years now she has been unable to get out of her little cottage due to her severe arthritis. Everyday of her adult life Miss Ev has prayed the collects of the church and made intercession for others. The world that passes by her door sees none of this, yet I cannot think it foolish to believe the world is blessed by Miss Ev. The indifferent, the downright hostile, the confused, the wayward, and the
self-concerned, all of us blessed by prayer simply, lovingly, constantly, maintained. No such labour is in vain.
Let’s go to it – together! Take heart, he is calling YOU.
[Unlike most sermons published on PreacherRhetorica this script takes a text from the scripture readings of the day and generalises from it. No attempt is made to analyse any part of the set readings. Instead the sermon offers a kind of 'summing up' that's meant to be encouraging.]
A couple of travellers' tales:
It’s a blazingly hot day. The town is busy, noisy and hot, its’ small streets crowded with people. She carries in her hand a sheaf of papers, things that must be attended to at the other office at the far end of the street. he walks out of the office door into the brilliant sunlight and makes her way through jostling tourists, shoppers, pensioners, and youngsters idling time away, animated conversations whilst still astride their motorbikes. Half way along the street there is an open square, one side of it occupied by the town’s parish church. As she draws near, she steps off the pavement, and enters the church. Crossing herself, the papers still in her hand, she kisses an icon, and turns and leaves the building, resuming her errand to her company’s office. Her visit to the church has taken only seconds – but a momentary diversion in a working day, but devotion real enough nevertheless.
Through the course of the day many others will do as she does. Hardly a word will be spoken, except perhaps “Good day” to the elderly widows at the door, the ceremony of each visit identical, brief, almost stylised, - an unaware stranger might even think these little gestures perfunctory. Yet through the course of a day, a gentle tide of local people make their way in and out of the church in the centre of this small Greek town.
The village is quiet. It always is during weekdays as many of the villagers must travel a distance to their work, there is no local school, and the farms, although busy, have a very small number of workers. What movement there is along the street comes in fits and starts – a group of walkers, a couple of horse riders, a car load of people looking for a country pub in which to have lunch. Some of them stop to look around. A few of them make their way to the parish church – they read memorials, admire the paintings hung on the wall, comment on the history and the architecture. But that is all. Mostly
they seem a little disorientated, maybe even embarrassed, as if they have lost the memory of what this place is for.
Sometimes they happen upon a service – half a dozen people or less, gathered for the Eucharist. Most turn and leave hurriedly, unwilling to become involved. A few, but not that few, are rather irritated to find their rural ramble
interrupted – “When will this be over so that we can have a proper look around?” Some think it peculiar to find the building used on a Thursday morning. They had come to enjoy the Cheshire countryside and muse on history – alert only to the romance of times past.
The tale of two churches, 1800 miles apart. One almost at the western most extreme of our continent, and the other at
the eastern. The geography has some bearing. The more northerly and westerly you go, the more icy the waters are when it comes to religion. Ireland being the one exception, but even there things are changing fast.The chill waters of secularism and indifference to religion run deeper and deeper. Whereas to the East and to the South, the old ways of religion still have power about them. The habits of faith still hold sway, at least to a degree, and the courses of the lives of individuals and communities are marked by the observance of age-old ceremonies. God is woven into the fabric of everyday, a constant presence now not an embarrassed leftover of yesteryear.
One famous Sociologist describes us in Western European as religiously amnesiac – as a community, as a people, we have amnesia when it comes to religion. We who are gathered here are part of a tiny minority, our neighbours have
largely forgotten how to be religious. For them it just doesn’t work any longer. Our Christian heritage is a fruitful
vine that produces the most luscious of wine – yet somehow we can no longer taste it. It is as if Christianity has become deeply unfashionable amongst us. We don’t want to live in this cranky old house, thank you very much, let’s have something new. That old stuff of Church – well, who cares? Religiously amnesiac.
Of course I paint the picture too broadly. There is much else to be said, I know. But there is sufficient truth here to profoundly trouble us all.
As one well-known journalist recently put it, “Spirituality is sexy, religion is outmoded.” He pointed out that as so-called
mainstream Christian religious practice dwindles in Western Europe, so the interest in spirituality is burgeoning.
Here is an idea that, one way or another, is being constantly repeated inthe popular media. We are told that as fewer and fewer Europeans believe or even take seriously the teachings of Christianity, more and more of those same Europeans are eager to adopt all kinds of esoteric spiritual practices. A book recently published in the UK deals with the vast array of
spiritualities available to us, Druidism, several types of witchcraft, British Israelites, Transhumanism etc. etc. but misses out almost entirely the rich tradition that is the church – let alone anything about the other major faiths present amongst us. Such is the prejudice we now face. The history, traditions, and religious experiences of humanity are trawled to find techniques and methods that will appeal to the modern person, but Christianity is ignored. In the bookshops the shelves devoted to “Mind, Body and Spirit” are loaded down with colourful delights, whilst the shelves headed “Christianity” contain an uninspiring selection of Bibles and a few prayer books. The shelves reinforce the truth of the journalist’s story.
This is a story so often told that we’ve all started to uncritically believe it. More than a generation ago we were being told that the explosion in drug abuse was a symptom of spiritual questing. These years further on that explanation no longer seems plausible. Similarly, the easy equation that substitutes what goes under the catch-all phrase “spirituality” as the
replacement for centuries of religious practice, may eventually come to be seen as a spurious comparison. Is like
really being compared to like?
When the columnist says “spirituality is sexy” the idea being used is that of the attractive, compelling, enticing image that sells things. In the jargon of marketing, the aim is to make the product “sexy” so it is sought after, fashionable and trendy. This is the language of disposability. One trend is replaced by another. Fashions come, and fashions go.
The product that was all so desirable yesterday, cannot be given away today. If being in the mode is theprevailing fashion or custom, then religion becomes the thing that is most definitely not “sexy.” In a world where the market is everything, that is the ultimate put-down, the ultimate devaluing of anything.
But the market is not everything. When it comes to people, and to some things as well, each of us voices the thought of
what we feel to be “beyond price.”
All efforts that try to sell religion are bound to ultimately fail. Spirituality is often sold as a technique to aid the acquirement of happiness. It becomes a way to be in-touch with your“true-self,” at home in your mind and body and relationships. It becomes a range of methods to improve yourself. t is even sold as a tool for effective management of people. In being all these things, it becomes just another aspect of what sells.
Christian religion, however, has as its sole focus a gracious God who loves to the ultimate and beyond. It offers nothing in the direct sense of selling self-improvement, and yet promises everything. It is not a technique or a method, and yet it goes to the very heart of a person. That our religions first title was “the Way” is profoundly significant. We are a people always travelling on. Yes, says Jesus, my way does turn upside down the common way of seeing things, but take heart, those who come with me, those who learn from me, no matter what is thrown at them, will find a deep and lasting reward. We see the world anew.
The picture we use of our discipleship may be travelling, it may be learning, it may be building; it may be growth.
All those pictures offer something and all of them point towards becoming, towards development, towards a process, a shift, a development. Travelling on, learning on, growing on – Together. We are simply learning to live in the love of God that is the source of all life. Live in that house which is God’s gift. Go on your way for faith will make you well.
He was applying the dead dog principle, or is it the dead donkey? I can’t remember, but anyway the idea is that to make sure your vine is really productive, when you plant it new it should be buried over a dead animal. It turned out to be a principle too far.
He had persuaded his wife that it was a good idea to plant a vine against the house wall – she had envisaged something more directly ornamental. Against her better judgement she finally agreed. A local nursery was visited, a vine procured. Then came the first problem. Inadvertently closing the car boot too soon he managed to chop off the tope of the plant.
Outside their front door, a high brick wall marked the garden boundary. The wounded plant was placed on top of the wall, awaiting planting. Was it the wind, was it a child, who knows? When he can to plant the vine, it had fallen off the wall, its stem split in two – well, in fact just a little stub of a stem remained attached to the roots, the leafy bits were completely useless.
That’s where the dead dog principle comes in. His wife said he’d made such a mess of the plant that he might as well
bin it. But no, he said, he’d plant it, and to try to give it a life giving boost he’d put plenty of bone meal under it – a good organic fertilizer, not quite a dead dog, but maybe near enough.
And so he did. Unfortunately, the family Labrador couldn’t distinguish between a bone and fertilizer. When next they
looked out of the kitchen window, the playful puppy has disinterred the unfortunate vine and throwing it into the air, and catching and shaking it, apparently in the hope that it might turn into the thing of which it stank.
Let me not labour the story. The now soil-less stump was rescued and planted again. ... ... And it grew, and it grew and it grew. Producing the most beautiful lush foliage and each year a presentable crop of sweet grapes against the vicarage
wall that was its home.
The vine was a lesson in itself. Its too easy to think of the vine image as referring to something that’s terribly fragile, difficult to maintain, needing lots of effort and protection. But a vine isn’t like that at all.
Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Hosea and the Psalms all use the image of the vine, and the picture is almost always of degeneration in the sense of growing wild. Vines grow with a vigour that is simply stunning. Jesus takes this common image of a common thing and turns the metaphor – rampant growth here isn't the wild ramblings of a briar – the hedge that runs amok.
No here, the new growth, the different growth, is reaching out, is shooting spurs, not in disarray – but in fruitful hope. Yes, it goes in all directions, it won’t easily be constrained in its search for sun and water and nutrients, but as long as it is connected somewhere to the core, that’s enough. On a vine the fruit is always on the new growth.
So often I hear the image of the true vine used in a constraining way, defining the plant in a neat topiary, its margins clipped and uniform. But that is not the image in John’s gospel – the vine grows on, defying our well ordered logic,
chasing away towards the sun, eager to produce what is sweet, and abundant with.
That’s what our travelling on together is to be like – sorry to mix the metaphors so – but you get my point. Take heart – what we do as Christians may be deeply unfashionable – but we mustn’t let that detract us from living our tradition of faith together and finding delight in it.
Across the road from the Cheshire village church with which I began, lives Miss Ev. For years now she has been unable to get out of her little cottage due to her severe arthritis. Everyday of her adult life Miss Ev has prayed the collects of the church and made intercession for others. The world that passes by her door sees none of this, yet I cannot think it foolish to believe the world is blessed by Miss Ev. The indifferent, the downright hostile, the confused, the wayward, and the
self-concerned, all of us blessed by prayer simply, lovingly, constantly, maintained. No such labour is in vain.
Let’s go to it – together! Take heart, he is calling YOU.
