Sermon for the Cathedral Eucharist, 2nd September 2018 Proper 18B

“Spiritual but not religious” is an increasingly popular description for many who’ve turned their back on the traditional, institutional practices of faith but who still acknowledge that they are more than simply bodies and brains.

Even the “Coventry welcome” that graces the cover of your order of service proclaims a measure of distaste for “organised religion”...(I guess it would be cheating to claim that I’m much too DISorganised to be in danger of any such thing myself) – though it would be hard to think of anythign more symbolic of religious institutions than an Anglican Cathedral congrgation busy about its Sunday worship.

One way and another, religion is getting a pretty bad press these days – and perhaps that’s understandable.

After all, ours is an age that values personal choice and freedom above almost everything else...yet the very origin of the word “religion” is all about binding “Obligation, bond, reverence” says the dictionary definition, before reminding us that the word comes from the Latin “religio” - to tie...from which we also get ligature, ligament etc.

If you’re a free spirit believing passionately in the autonomy of the individual then why WOULD you choose to be tied into a way of life that might seem to be all about restictions, about the law of “thou shalt not”…

What possible benefit could there be? How could such practice help you to grow?

At first glance it seems, actually, as if Jesus might agree with this view. The Pharisees, who are the supreme practitioners of the RELIGION of Judaism, have come from Jerusalem to investigate what’s going on around this charismatic itinerant Galilean...And their first criticism is that his followers are sitting light to their religious obligations. Those Pharisees are very very anxious that the disciples are neglecting personal hygiene – you can imagine them saying to one another “It’s the slippery slope! If we let this go, they’ll have broken every one of the commandments by tea-time”. They’re great ones for the minutae – but in their focus on the details they’ve lost sight of the big picture. They have clung zealously to all the demands of the torah, but not to the purpose behind it – to create a people set apart in a special relationship with God…

If that’s not the main agenda, - if that relationship is not reflected in every aspect of life, - in our words AND in our deeds– then we’re practising the kind of religion that is simply not worth the paper it is printed on. Jesus has lots to say about the ways in which our behaviour reflects our state of inner being...the truth of our hearts. It’s just not possible to conceal that, long term – from one another, from ourselves and of course from God. Even, or maybe especially, if that truth is ugly – spoiling our cherished self-image – it cannot be evaded for long. That’s what defiles. So the message is that our aspirations to practice true religion will achieve nothing if we’re not actually connecting with God.

This is the situation Jesus presents to the Pharisees. He recognises the good intentions behind their adherence to the law. These are not his natural opponents, but rather brothers who’ve become distracted along the way.

Jesus knows that they WANT to be in a right relationship with God – but that’s not the way they’re living. Instead they’ve used obedience to the letter of the law as a substitute for living into its reality of love.

“This people honours me their lips but their hearts are far from me...” - and what’s in those hearts cannot but leach out, spoiling all their aspirations, defiling them even as they engage in a relentless pursuit of religious purity.

James makes the same point “Be doers of the word...”

Religion exists not to create ties that restrict us from really living but to give us a trellis which supports us as we grow in faith and love…

For James there seem to be two opposing forces competing for our time and energy...and that time and energy comes as a gift from God, an outpouring of grace give to us that we might bless others.

This is the essence of true religion.

Not the observance of rituals, not obedience to laws for their own sake but time used in loving service…

Put like that it sounds so simple – and so obvious. You’ve known it for years.

To choose the good is to practice pure religion, a reflection of the goodness of the Father of Lights from whom all good things come...to tie ourselves thoroughly into our relationship with him and to allow God to transform us as we respond to grace at work in us.

Easy!

But somehow it never is.

As a friend said, It’s not WHAT you know, but what you DO with what you know.

We may know that when we fail to “walk the talk” - when we hear the word but let it slip from our minds immediately, changing nothing in ourselves, we’re falling tragically short...but that doesn’t always inspire us to do something about it.

But I’m very much afraid that ACTION is not an optional extra. Really, it’s not.

When I was quite a small child I remember going out one Sunday with a school friend’s family – who were, rather startlingly in the cosy middle England of the early 1960s, not practising Christians. As we passed a church, the congregation were pouring out and my friend’s mother said, without a trace of irony, “Look at the good people”. It seemed natural and easy to equate the practice of religious observance with a matching life-style then.

5 decades on, immured as we are in investigations into historic sex abuse, conscious of the weight of institutional imperfection, I can’t imagine she’d have made the same connection…

“BE DOERS OF THE WORD.

Walk the talk. - or there’s no point to any external observance of our faith.

It is the Gospel in ACTION that will make our worship pure and vital...will transform empty ritual into life-giving encounter.

Without that, we might just as well stay at home with the papers.

So, let me say it again. True religion can be measured in the impact of Sunday’s worship on the working week. If there’s no visible difference in the way we respond to the needs of a broken, hurting world...if we worship Christ in Word and Sacrament on Sunday but ignore him in those troubled and troubling people whom we meet on Monday morning...then we’ve overlooked the vital ingredient and got stuck with the superficialities as surely as those who glance at themselves in the mirror but fail to really see themselves at all.

We receive richly from God – so that we can give generously in response to God’s grace. Remember, the point of religion is to bind us, one to another, and fix us firmly in our relationship with God.

Left to myself, I know that I’m easily distracted, prone to wander off course – so actually a few ties to keep me heading in the right direction are entirely welcome, even necessary.But it’s the direction that matters – the orientation of our lives towards the God who is wholly, and eternally LOVE – with no variation or shadow of change...

Sermon for the feast of Ss Simon & Jude, Coventry Cathedral 2018

Today we remember the apostles Simon and Jude.

Actually this may be one of those times when remembering is overstating things a bit, and if you find yourself wondering what you actually know about either of these saints, don’t despair. You’re almost certainly in good company (though I’m not going to invite you to turn to your neighbour and compare notes).

Simon – and Jude. By no means the most famous of the twelve followers of Jesus. Both of them suffer from working alongside more famous characters who share their name. Simon is NOT Peter...This is Simon the Zealot, the jealous one, who was probably linked with the Jewish nationalist movement (no, not the Judean People’s Front, NOR the People’s Front of Judea!) , bent on ousting the Romans from occupied Israel. Today he would probably be viewed as a potential terrorist and given a wide berth.

Jude, also called Thaddaeus (but often referred to as Judas NOT Iscariot) is indeed Jude the obscure, the patron saint of lost causes and last resorts. Because of the confusion with his better known but universally unpopular namesake, a belief arose that practically NOBODY would ask for his help as an intercessor...and thus that he worked extremely hard for the few who did...hence his patronage of lost causes. To my knowledge, there is only one shrine dedicated to St Jude in England in Faversham,Kent. A friend of a friend, ordained, once visited and was asked by one of the welcomers at the shrine whether there was any special reason for the visit. His answer “I'm a parish priest" (which he’d intended to follow with “interested in places of pilgrimage”) produced the speedy and sympathetic response" Oh, I see. We get alot of those."

St Jude, it seems, is up for a challenge and will always go the extra mileif his help is invited.Though a letter at the end of the New Testament is ascribed to him, it tells us nothing about the man at all, and may well have been written by someone quite different…

Simon – NOT Peter. Judas – NOT Isacariot. Ordinary and undistinguished. Reminding me just a little of those conversations I had in my first months here, when again and again someone would say apologetically “Well, of course, we’re NOT Birmingham” - as if all the energy and purpose of life was to be found elsewhere.

Reminding me too, of the dreadful habit that the Church of England fell into for some years of defining those clergy who give of their time and talents without any payment by what they were not “NON stipendiary priests”.

It’s never a good idea to define any one or anything by what it is not, really.

Still Simon and Jude are not really in the first rank of famous Christians..not dwellers in the limelight at all, but they are faithful followers who managed to stick with Jesus throughout his public ministry...and of course that's where their value lies.
Simon and Jude, remembered, not because of what they did, but because of who their friends were, who their friends are. Part of a small group that changed the world. They didn’t choose their own individual way: they devoted their lives to following Jesus, and so their lives will always be remembered. Their story reminds us that being a Christian isn’t a matter of just “me and my God”. It's about all of us travelling together... Being a Christian is a corporate act: you can’t make it on your own. Christianity is the least individualistic of all the world's religions...we share corporate responsbility for one another and for the world that God loves só much. We need each other, we need to be part of the body of Christ, in order to be saved. More, we don’t get to know God alone: we come to know God together – and we need the different insights, gifts and understanding that the whole faith community, young and old, can bring.

In our gospel reading from John, Jesus speaks to the twelve apostles including Simon and Jude after his Last Supper. He’s already told his disciples that they must love one another as he loves them; as they gave themselves to Jesus so they must give themselves to one another; and they must stick together, because the world outside will hate them as it hated Jesus himself.

That’s what we’re called to do as disciples of Jesus. To love one another and stick together: to be together with all other Christian people; to be friends of the friends of Jesus.
‘Any friend of yours is a friend of mine’.

Sometimes that seems surprisingly hard. We look at our fellow Christians and, really, they aren't the people we would choose to share our lives with. Our tastes and our habits don't match. Indeed, we struggle to spend time together at all...Judging by the gospels, the 12 apostles thought each other really rather strange and didn’t get on too well either: but they learned to become a community of love in Jesus Christ. Perhaps the persecution that they suffered strengthened the bond. It's noticeable today that where the church is allowed to exist in peace and prosperity, precious energy is wasted in factions and disagreements. Instead of working together for the Kingdom, we work against one another...whether our divisions are over human sexuality, our preferred translation of the Bible, or the relative merits of robed choirs or music groups When we don't need to stand together, against the world, we are shockingly prone to indulging in in-fighting that does nothing to mark us out from the crowd. We don't seem to be strangers and aliens in our broken world, but very much at home in it, as broken as our neighbours...

But we are called to something different. To unity on the foundation that is Christ...
There’s a very good visual image of all this which Paul gives us in today’s epistle reading from Ephesians ch.2. It’s the picture of us as God’s building. Jesus Christ is the cornerstone, the first key stone which is laid and which is the point of reference for the rest of the building. There’s a lovely phrase about the cornerstone in Isaiah 28.16, from which this image comes:

I am laying in Zion a foundation stone, a tested stone,
a precious cornerstone, a sure foundation:
‘One who trusts will not panic.’

Or as our collect for the day says, ‘God builds the Church upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Jesus Christ himself as the chief cornerstone.’ We are part of God’s building. Next time you have the opportunity go and look at a drystone wall: there are lots to be found just down the road in the North Cotswlds. Look at the stones...so many different shapes, irregular, unpolished, not matching one another but all having a place, necessary to give structure and strength. That's how the Church works. As individuals we fail....but together....well then, when we feel alone or isolated or meaningless or weightless – as Isaiah tells us, Don’t panic! We belong in Jesus.

Sometimes that call not to panic feels like a really tall order. We hear the call to be holy, the reminder that we are citizens with the saints above...we look at our own lives, with all their failures and unfinished business.....and.....well, most certainly I for one DO panic. There's só much I long to change...

But you know,all of us are broken people in one way or another, and it's those broken people that Jesus calls to him. A church of broken people finding strenth together, through our unity in Christ.

We may not have chosen each other, but each of us is here because, wonderfully, God has chosen US. And God asks us, not to judge and exclude each other, but to love and serve and find Christ in one another, even in those with whom we profoundly disagree. That can be very costly, of course. In a place like this, with a specific vocation to reconciliation, it can seem to mean that we are called to sacrifice our own views, however passionately we might hold them, for the sake of offering hospitality to the views of others. That is really really hard – and there will be times when holding our ground or speaking out in dissent is a prophetic act – but we can’t assume this. There will be other times when we are só intent on our own point of view that we never really hear the other viewpoint at all – and that’s not something to be proud of. Excluding difference is never part of our calling as Christians, though we may find ourselves making a journey to a new understanding together.

The world may hate us, but we are called to love...and to love inclusively.

We do not stand against one another but FOR all God’s people, of every kind and condition;

We belong together in love, whatever decisions are made elsewhere.

As Isaiah says: One who trusts will not panic. Don’t panic – for all of us who follow Jesus, whether conservative or liberal, gay or straight, black or white, famous or forgotten, men or women have a place in God’s household, the community of Jesus, who is the cornerstone of God’s Temple which will last for ever.

Do not panic. Love one another.

Sermon for Evensong at Coventry Cathedral, 9th September 2018

One of the more challenging aspects of preaching at Evensong is the way that Old and New Testaments sometimes seem to offer us such very different pictures of God as they recount the story of God’s dealings with humanity, so that it’s quite hard to know what to do with them.

So tonight we are confronted in Exodus with a God who seems capricious, deeply partisan, maybe even rather egotistical as events are mapped out.

It’s impossible not to ask what harm it would have done if, instead of ramping up Pharoah’s resistance, God had instead worked to SOFTEN his heart.

OK, so the Exodus story would have lacked a bit of drama without the plagues, the Passover, the crossing for the Red Sea – but THINK of all the lives that might have been saved, the fear and grief avoided….

Yet we are told explicity (in verse 4 of our first reading) that God chose to harden Pharoah’s heart...to so arrange events that Pharoah flew in the face of wise and compassionate leadership with the dubious justification that, in effect, all this would be good for God’s image.

“I will harden Pharoah’s heart and he will pursue them. But I will gain glory for myself through Pharoah and his army and the Egpytians will know that I am the Lord...”

In other words – that’ll show them.

Arguably, of course, this says little about the true nature of God and a great deal about the mindset of God’s people, guilty then as now of sometime forming God in their own image. That’s a danger we can all fall prey to once in a while, I suspect. The Israelites really needed to confirm their own status as Very Important People, and aspired to this by confirming THEIR God at the top of the tree.

That’s a version of salvation history that’s not easy for us to deal with...particularly this picture of a deity who is actively out for his own glory…

It’s hard to imagine how our prayers would run tonight – or at any other time – if this remained our key understanding of God.

We’d offer a lot of humilty, blended with at best anxiety, at worst dread, fear, trembling.

Would we even choose to approach God at all? Or be tempted to stay far away...

Who knows how he might be feeling? Those first-born Egyptian infants, after all, had done nothing to provoke his wrath...the soldiers of Pharoah’s army were only obeying orders...It would seem foolish to engage with this unpredictable character, but if needs must, then the keynote must surely be GREAT respect but absolutely NO affection.

And of course, it is absolutely true that we should never sit lightly to our relationship with the One in whom all things hold together, but we are given a very different picture of God as we enter the world of the New Testament and hear what Jesus has to say about his heavenly Father.

Yes this IS the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob – Jesus leaves us in no doubt about that- but we meet him in a new way, not only, and supremely, in the person of his Son – but also in the way the Son relates to the Father.

While we always need to remember that the status of a father in a 1^st century Palestinian household was very different from the casual friendliness of “dear old Dad” today, with a clear sense of paternalistic authority held as of right...nonetheless the idea that WE, you and I, are invited into that kind of “Father/child” relationship with GOD is, frankly, mind-blowing.

Remember, Moses and those who came after him were given such an abiding sense of God’s holiness that they weren’t even allowed to pronounce his name...the point of the Hebrew letters that we repeat as “Yaweh” was that they were unpronouncable, - because God’s name is unsayable.

And now – suddenly – Jesus is inviting us to make a relationship with a heavenly Father and is focussing on what one commentator has called the “essential kindness of God”.

And, actually, that essential kindness is the thing to cling to no matter what.

When you pray say “Our Father”...

And so the prayer unfolds, in all its blessed familiarity.

Words we may have said at bedtime every day of our lives.

Words we sing and say together in this place day after day after day.

Countless times.

Countless voices saying “Father..” “Father” “Father”….

– and we’re in danger of failing to notice what it really says to us.

We pray with the confidence that God will supply our daily needs.

We pray with the assurance that if we come to God conscious of our sin and brokenness, and ask for forgiveness – we WILL be forgiven.

We pray, knowing that God is interested in what we are saying...that he cares about US and not simply about the “glory of his name”.

This is worlds away from the picture of God that the Exodus passage painted.

Yes God is awesome, amazing, beyond all that we can aspire to...BUT nonetheless

God wants us to know ourselves as members of God’s family….As Jesus invites us to call God “Father” he invites us, too, to rediscover our place in creation...We are made, as the catechism puts it, to know, love and serve God here on earth so that we may finally be happy with him in heaven.

WE exist “for the glory of his name” - but in glorifying God we both celebrate and receive God’s gift of Love that is lavished on creation.

Of course we must always remember that “Our Father” is “in heaven”. Forget the slippers, and the cosiness of a family hearth.

We are invited into intimacy but balance that with reverence. We are wonderfully welcome to approach (there is something so hugely appealing about that vision of going into a secret place, having “time out” alone with the God who knows us through and through and loves us all the same) but while we are invited to come close, this is never, ever cosy.

God remains GOD...Hallowed, holy, revered…

Once again, our tapestry of Christ in glory helps me out.

Remember Jesus tells us that to see him is to see the Father. All God’s power and glory present in Christ, true God and true man.

So – look up and see him – awesome, beyond our reach and our understanding.

But notice, too, the human being standing between Christ’s feet.

Dwarfed. Insignificant. But held there safely.

Prayers spoken there will be heard.

Sins taken there will be forgiven.

And God who keeps watch over Israel, will keep watch over us too – and deliver us from evil, no matter how parlous the times may sometimes seem.

So – PRAY. Pray this prayer that reminds us of who we are and who God is.

Of how to live in relationship with God and of what that relationship can mean in our lives and our world.

Pray confident in God’s grace and his abiding love, which Jesus both shows and tells us.

Amen

A time to remember - a post for Baby Loss Awareness Week

It was a long time ago now, that first experience of baby loss. I’d hardly known I was pregnant when my sleep was disturbed by fearful dreams – and in the morning, blood – so much more blood than I had imagined.

Not long married, I’d been uncertain that I even WANTED to be pregnant until that possibility was taken away, before I had really come to terms with it’s reality.

And I wept, and wept again – wondering if, like my own mother, I would now spend a decade failing to conceive, wondering if the arms that suddenly longed to hold a child might be left empty for good.

I was blessed that time. A visit to my GP to lament the fact that I felt sick and tired even though the miscarriage was now some time behind me revealed that the reason for those symptoms was a new pregnancy – not a replacement for the lost baby but a whole new focus for hopes, dreams and imaginings. And in time my daughter was born, and it was very good.

Only then it happened again. And again. And again. Each time later in the pregnancy, culminating in my little Matthew, born at 19 weeks on Bonfire Night But because of one successful pregnancy, I was told there was no need to investigate. It was, apparently, “Just one of those things”…and it was inappropriate to mourn the losses when I had a beautiful healthy daughter to enjoy.

Somehow what was appropriate didn’t matter. Mourning did.

For a while it wrecked my burgeoning relationship with God. The day I sat in a wretched heap in the car outside Brompton Oratory while my husband was at Mass, yelling at the Almighty “You needn’t think I’m going in there to worship YOU you  ****ing ****” – and heard a voice saying, quite calmly “That’s fine, Kathryn. I’ll just stay out here with you then” was a turning point – but it took a long time before I was able to LIKE God again.  

Some good things, many indeed, came from the experience.

Friendships that have lasted many years.                                                                                                       An NCT conference on baby loss which drew women together from across London and beyond, even in a snow storm (I’ll never forget the sight of Prof Winstone sitting on the platform in his snow boots, because he’d walked across London to be with us – nor his promise to us that he, at least, saw our losses as bereavements and not just as medical events).                                                                                                                                                                    A sense that that perhaps I have a better understanding of some kinds of grief now, and that that understanding is a precious gift in ministry.

But – I might have had 7 children (maybe 9 – but perhaps we just count those positive tests that came to nothing). SEVEN! And still, 25 years since the last loss, I’m uncertain how to answer when I’m asked how many children I have.

So, in this Baby Loss Awareness Week, I’m counting them all.

Each one loved and precious to God – and to me.

What about sky-writing? A sermon for Evensong at Coventry Cathedral, 19th August 2018

I wonder if I’m alone in finding it a bit frustrating, the way God seems to speak to God’s people in unmissable, unmistakeable ways right through Scripture – yet I can really struggle to hear God for myself, even when I’m trying particularly hard to pay attention.

“Oh for sky-writing!” is quite a familiar cry, as I imagine how lovely it would be if God spoke to me the way God spoke to Abraham, Isaac, Jacob – and Moses!

Surely it wouldn’t be that difficult for God to oblige.

After all, the Moses whom we encounter in tonight’s reading hasn’t exactly got top credentials as a super-spiritual man of God when our story begins. 40 years on from that promising start as the baby in the bullrushes,he has fled from Egypt, after losing his head entirely and lashing out in a rage that leaves an Egyptian dead. Brought up as a prince, Moses is now quietly shepherding his father in law’s flock. Absolutely nothing distinguished about this in any way at all…

He’s just getting on with life.

He’s not looking for a new job, not contemplating his own destiny, or that of his people.

Indeed, if you look at the start of the passage from Exodus, it seems God hadn’t been too concerned about them either.

Though we read Exodus with a perspective shaped by our grasp of the over-arching sweep of salvation history, there’s not much sense of that about the place if you read this passage in isolation.

The Israelites groaned in their slavery and cried out, and their cry for help because of their slavery went up to God. 24 God heard their groaning and he remembered his covenant with Abraham, with Isaac and with Jacob. 25 So God looked on the Israelites and was concerned about them.

God remembered!!!

The God we meet in the Hebrew Scriptures is often very human.

He can be talked round (remember Abram bargaining with him over Sodom and Gomorrah).

He gets angry (there’s quite a lot of smiting about).

And, at this point as tradition has it, he has allowed his thoughts to stray (presumably the only way in which the Exodus story-tellers could account for the sufferings of Israel in Egypt).

Very very human.

Then suddenly, God is recalled to Godself by the cries of God’s people and determines to do something about it.

This may, of course, inspire questions for you.

If God heard and intervened then – why not at all the other countless times in history when people have begged God to act, and been apparently disappointed?

What about the Holocaust?

Or my dear friend’s cancer?

Or the flooding in Kerala?

Did we just not cry loud enough?

That’s one of the great problems of faith – and you’ll not be surprised to learn that I haven’t found a wholly satisfactory answer.

PART of it, though, might be hinted at a bit later in our Exodus reading.

We don’t tend to remember obscure ancestors who got everything wrong, and it seems to me that even in these early chapters of Moses’ adventure there's a constant impetus to redemption and hope so that we’d probably infer, even if we were hearing the Moses story for the very first time, that this story had a happy ending.

But I wonder if you have ever noticed how precarious his story really is.

Preparing this sermon I was brought up short by a phrase I’d never noticed before

When the Lord saw that he had turned aside to see, God called to him..

Despite what we’d imagine to be an unmistakeable sign that God was up to something – Moses might have ignored that piece of flaming shrubbery.

I’m told that there is at least one desert plant that can spontaneously burst into flames – so that perhaps the burning bush wasn’t as absolutely extraordinary as we might expect.

He could have walked on by...

“When the Lord saw that Moses had turned aside to see...”

God had been waiting for Moses to CHOOSE to come close.

God wasn’t sure of God’s man.

Perhaps other potential leaders had already walked past, turning away from a starring role in history, and yet God still waited in hope for a response.

Moses had a choice...and he might all too easily have missed the moment.

Even sky-writing can be overlooked, after all.

“Earth’s crammed with heaven, and every common bush afire with God. But only he who sees takes off his shoes; The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries.”
wrote Elizabeth Barrett Browning in Aurora Leigh.

Only he who sees takes off his shoes…

Keep your eyes open.

God speaks to us in so very many and varied ways...so don’t close your mind to the possibility that something apparently ordinary, absolutely rooted in the rational, might still be a message for you.

Let me tell you a story.

It was, after all, something that we might manage to rationalise away to nothing.

Surely I’m not the only person to do that?

May I tell you a story – of God speaking in a way that was about as far removed from burning bushes and sky-writing as it’s possible to imagine?

Once upon a time, on a weekend course, I was sent out on a Franciscan walk without watch, phone or any agenda except attending to what God wanted to show me. Anxious but obedient, I set off down the drive, taking time to look and listen as I very rarely do. Having suffered all my days from a fair degree of short-sightedness, I tend not to be a very visual person, and it was good for me to learn to gaze without hurrying on to the next thing.

Normally, of course, I would never have met the spider.
As it was, I nearly missed him, as he span his line around an ivied tree.

He had one of those mottled grey-brown bodies that was very much at home amid the layers of autumnal leaf-mould. I watched him scurrying along the bridge he was building from his own body, hardly breathing for fear that I might damage the fragile work of engineering that was before me. But then the rain started…large, heavy drops, which shook the dying leaves around his workplace. The spider froze, midway between one twig and the next, stopped dead in the very midst, the very moment of creation. Perfectly camouflaged amid the dead twigs and bark, suspended on his own silken way, stretched, elongated, he looked nothing like a spider at all.. I waited.
And waited.
As time passed, I became desperate for him to move.

I began to doubt my own memory. Had there ever really been a spider at all, or had my eyes been playing tricks?

I longed to shake the branch again, to prompt him to move, to reveal himself.

I knew deep down that I had seen him, that what I now gazed at, willing him to move, to prove the truth of my experience, had only paused upon its delicate and dedicated course.

I knew, but still I longed for confirmation, for fresh evidence of a reality that should need no proof.
Then I heard God laughing.
“Kathryn” he said “You’re doing it again. Don’t you realise that you do this with me, again and again and again? We spend time together. I fill you with a sense of joy and awe at my presence, and you focus completely on me. Then the time comes for you to leave the mountain, and even as you head homewards the doubts crowd in. “Was it really God?” you ask. “Perhaps I just felt happy because it was a beautiful place and a special day. Perhaps I was bouyed up by the presence of loving friends.”

You will the moment to repeat itself, to confirm its truth.
That spider is a spider, even though its intricate work appears to halt, even though it seems to vanish, and merge into its own small world.

And I am God.

You may lose sight of me too, may wonder if you ever really glimpsed me here…but I have the whole created world in which to hide or show myself. You need not doubt the evidence of your eyes”

Only he who sees takes off his shoes...

God’s message that day didn’t involve a life-changing new direction, or some amazing act of spiritual heroism….but it did encourage me to pay attention – a revisiting the story encourages me again and again because God is still speaking – to you and to me.

We know what happened next in the Moses story, because he was attentive and obedient to God, albeit after a bit of negotiation.

We can’t know what might have happened otherwise – but we do know that Moses had a choice.

When God saw that he had turned aside – THEN God knew that Moses would work with God in leading God’s people to freedom.

And, then as now, history is lived forward, understood backwards – and you have a part to play in God’s work in the world.

So, believe me, - this is holy ground, right here and right now.

The God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob – and Moses too – waits for us to choose to turn towards him, to willingly involve ourselves in God’s mission in the world.

Not our ways - a sermon for Evensong at Coventry Cathedral 29th July 2018

There are some people out there who believe that if you’re friends with God, you’ll lead a charmed existence.

They are those who’ve listened to preachers of a prosperity gospel and managed to forget that the subject of the Gospels themselves, Jesus Christ, was subjected to a terrible death, which he had done nothing to deserve.

Those who want to feel that the otherwise disturbing muddle of life circumstances is contained within an absolutely ordered universe, where good behaviour is rewarded and bad behaviour punished.

If they want to hold on to that world view, they would do well to avoid reading the book of Job, source of tonight’s first reading.

Job, you see, is an upright man, revered by many, approved by God, and his life circumstances when the book begins affirm the belief that was prevalent in Old Testament times, that worldly success was a sign of a good life, and a testimony to God’s favour.

God looks at Job and smiles with loving pride.

Have you considered my servant Job? There is no one like him on the earth, a blameless and upright man who fears God and turns away from evil.’

However, - and it is an BIG “However” , things don’t stay that way for long.

Convinced that Job’s righteousness is only possible because all is going well for him, Satan persuades God to allow him to test Job’s faith. Disaster strikes, Job loses children, cattle, and later health and strength – all part of a process that seems to us at best capricious. What is God really up to, when such things happen?

How can we continue to have faith in one who deals so unfairly with humanity?

Enter Job’s friends, rallying round as best they can – though it turns out that they are not actually much help to him at all.

Like so many others before and since, they want answers to the problem of suffering – and in the absence of answers, they’re prepared to furnish some of their own. It’s perfectly understandable. We all want to make sense of the pain and evil we see around us. We want to find safety in an explanation, in some kind of reason.

If we can explain things, then we can tame them.

If we understand why bad things have happened, then we can make sure that they won’t happen to us….

Except, somehow, we can’t.

I’m sure that Job’s comforters set out with good intentions, but their attempts to help him make sense of his ordeal, their wild misreadings of the situation, and, their refusal to shut up and just be with him in his pain consistently made things worse….and in our reading this evening, Job reaches the end of his tether.

His friend Bildad has been eloquent about the ways in which the wicked can expect to come to a bad end and now, though popular myth presents Job as the embodiment of patience in the face of adversity, that’s definitely not the image he’s presenting to the world.

“How long will you torment me and crush me with words?”

he cries, taking over the initiative after being on the receiving end of torrents of misguided advice. Now it is Job’s turn to ennumerate all the ways in which he has been hurt, excluded,crushed at every turn….

It seems to him his friends are co-conspirators with God, intent on making things unbearable for him – and Job makes no attempt to conceal how badly he is suffering.

“Have pity on me, have pity on me, you my friends;for the hand of God has touched me. Why do you persecute me as God...”

With friends like these, who needs enemies? Job has repeatedly protested his innocence, maintained that there is nothing, NOTHING in his life that would justify the suffering he is experiencing – but his words seem to be falling on deaf ears as they continue to try to apply the law of cause and effect to his situation.

Will he die before he is vindicated?

Will he never achieve justice?

Lest the worst happens, Job longs to create a lasting record of his truth.

23“Oh that my words were now written!
Oh that they were inscribed in a book!
24That with an iron pen and lead
they were engraved in the rock forever!

Speech is lost in the moment, the written word more permanent, books treasured for longer still but for real immortality, words engraved on rock may endure for centuries. Job is buying time for his truth to out, his reputation restored.

But into this tumult of injured innocence drops suddenly a music of absolute, unshakeable tranquility

“I know that my redeemer liveth and that he shall stand on the latter day upon the earth”

As happens elsewhere in the Old Testament, the glorious music of Handel’s Messiah threatens to completely seduce us, so that we lose sight of the original intention here, the words subverted by a very different musical code. Though we cannot help but think “Jesus” when we hear the word “Redeemer”, Job’s appeal is to a different source of help. The Hebrew word he uses, “ga-al” means to redeem or to act as a kinsman-redeemer – a figure familiar in Jewish law and practice. Redemption here has to do with “release from legal obligation or deliverance from desperate circumstances, closely connected with a payment necessary to effect that release” It was this principle that was at work in the story of Boaz and Ruth, as Jewish law made provision to redeem family members in dire straits. Recognising himself at the end of all his resources, Job looks longingly for such a one to come to his aid.

In the history of his people, God had repeatedly taken on that role, saying to Moses, “I am Yahweh, and I will bring you out from under the burdens of the Egyptians…. I will redeem you with an outstretched arm, and with great judgments” (Exodus 6:6) or later, during the Babylonian Exile, speaking through Isaiah, “Don’t be afraid, for I have redeemed you. I have called you by your name. You are mine”

Job seems to have perfect confidence that his redeemer IS at hand...though as he anticipates the destruction of his earthly body we’re left to wonder quite what he is looking towards. So to whom is he appealing? We honestly cannot know – but this is certainly not the calm declaration of unshakeable faith that Handel’s music suggests. Job has recognised God as his accuser – so it makes little sense if he turns to him for vindication. That seems to be nonsense, no matter how beautifully we set the words to music….though Job is expert at bridging the gap between reason and experience, saying earlier in his trials

“Though God slay me, I will trust him”

And perhaps that’s the answer.

The problem of suffering is real and intractible for those of us who claim God’s essential goodness….but it’s something we cannot ignore.

So what, if anything, does all of this have to say to you and me today? What does it say in a world where wild fires claim the lives of children on holiday with their parents, where a compassionate and able oncologist falls a victim to cancer himself, a much loved man active the service of others receives a terminal diagnosis out of a clear blue sky,where some families seem to be buffetted by disaster while others sail blithely on?

Don’t look in the book of Job for answers...but, if you look hard enough, you might just get a glimpse of how to live with the questions.

You see, I think Job teaches us that there is nothing whatever wrong with asking God “why”, or telling God exactly what we’re feeling when God offers no satisfactory answer. Wrestling for a blessing, as Jacob once did by the ford of Jabbock, forces us into God’s arms, even as we struggle. As the book of Job continues, God speaks to him out of the whirlwind, reminding him once again that his ways are not our ways, nor his thoughts ours.

We are limited, fallible, mortals...and in verse after verse we are reminded of this. God is always greater, always beyond our comprehension...We can and do protest, but a God who is small enough to fall in with our expectations would be no God at all…

Yes, dreadful things happen – and we rightly protest and lament but in the end, we come face to face with the reality of God and can either fall silent in prayer or turn away forever.

The Holocaust survivor Eli Wiesel writes of the day when the rabbis put God on trial. Gathered in Auschwitz they debated through long hours as day turned to night, coming finally to the conclusion that God WAS guilty – that he had a debt to pay to humanity. Profound silence followed this verdict until one of the rabbis observed

“It’s time to worship God” - and they all went to pray.

To whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life