RonBlog

Sunday 3rd October, 2010 Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost

Sentence
‘Who is greater, the one who is at table, or the one who serves? But I am among you as one who serves,’ says the Lord Luke 22:27
Collect
Faithful God, have mercy on us Your unworthy servants, and increase our faith that, trusting in Your Spirit’s power to work in us and through us, we may never be ashamed to witness to our Lord, and may obediently serve Him all our days, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen

OLD TESTAMENT LESSON Lamentations 1: 1 – 6

How deserted lies the city, once thronging with people! Once great among nations, now become a widow; once queen among provinces, now put to forced labour! She weeps bitterly in the night; tears run down her cheeks. Among all who loved her she has no one to bring her comfort. Her friends have all betrayed her; they have become her enemies. Judah has wasted away through affliction and endless servitude. Living among the nations, she has found no resting-place; her persecutors all fell on her in her sore distress. The approaches to Zion mourn, for no pilgrims attend her sacred feasts; all her gates are desolate. Her priests groan, her maidens are made to suffer. How bitter is her fate! Her adversaries have become her masters, her enemies take their ease, for the Lord has made her suffer because of her countless sins. Her young children are gone, taken captive by an adversary. All splendour has vanished from the daughter of Zion. Her princes have become like deer that can find no pasture. They run on, their strength spent, pursued by the hunter.

Psalm 37: 1 – 9
Do not vie with the wicked: or envy those that do wrong
For they will soon wither like the grass: and fade away like the green leaf.
Trust in the Lord and do good: and you shall dwell in the land and feed in safe pastures
Let the Lord be your delight: and He will grant you your heart’s desire
Commit your way to the Lord: trust Him and He will act
He will make your righteousness shine as clear as the light: and your innocence as the noonday
Be still before the Lord and wait patiently for Him: do not be vexed when someone prospers, when they put their evil purposes to work
Let go of anger and abandon wrath: let not envy move you to do evil
For the wicked shall be cut down: but those who wait for the Lord shall possess the land

EPISTLE 2 Timothy 1: 1 – 14

From Paul, apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God, whose promise of life is fulfilled in Christ Jesus, to Timothy his dear son. Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God the Father and Christ Jesus our Lord.
I give thanks to the God of my forefathers, whom I worship with a clear conscience, when I mention you in my prayers as I do constantly night and day; when I remember the tears you shed, I long to see you again and so make my happiness complete. I am reminded of the sincerity of your faith, a faith which was alive in Lois your grandmother and Eunice your mother before you, and which, I am confident, now lives in you. That is why I remind you to stir into flame the gift from God which is yours through the laying on of my hands. For the spirit that God gave us is no cowardly spirit, but one to inspire power, love, and self-discipline.
So never be ashamed of your testimony to our Lord, nor of me imprisoned for his sake, but through the power that comes from God accept your share of suffering for the sake of the gospel. It is he who has brought us salvation and called us to a dedicated life, not for any merit of ours but for his own purpose and of his own grace, granted to us in Christ Jesus from all eternity, and now at length disclosed by the appearance on earth of our Saviour Jesus Christ. He has broken the power of death and brought life and immortality to light through the gospel. Of this gospel I have been appointed herald, apostle, and teacher. That is the reason for my present plight; but I am not ashamed of it, because I know whom I have trusted, and am confident of his power to keep safe what he has put into my charge until the great day. Hold to the outline of sound teaching which you heard from me, living by the faith and love which are ours in Christ Jesus. Keep safe the treasure put into our charge, with the help of the Holy Spirit dwelling within us.




GOSPEL Luke 17: 5 – 10

The apostles said to the Lord, "Increase our faith'; and the Lord replied, "If you had faith no bigger than a mustard seed, you could say to this mulberry tree, "Be rooted up and planted in the sea"; and it would obey you.
Suppose one of you has a servant ploughing or minding sheep. When he comes in from the fields, will the master say, "Come and sit down straight away"? Will he not rather say, "Prepare my supper; hitch up your robe, and wait on me while I have my meal. You can have yours afterwards?” Is he grateful to the servant for carrying out his orders? So with you: when you have carried out all you have been ordered to do, you should say, "We are servants and deserve no credit; we have only done our duty."

NOTES ON THE READINGS

Old Testament Lesson
It would not be possible for us, at this distance in time, to know what it felt like to have had Jerusalem destroyed and people exiled. Small wonder that the book is titled ‘Lamentations,’ eh! But it underlines something that needs to be wider known. So often the assumption is that God is there to provide protection for the believer, Jew or Christian. The reality is very much otherwise. Please spend some time checking the extent to which the ordinary vicissitudes of life impact on the People of God, who need to come to terms with and adapt to all the rigours involved. Were that not the case, then the said People of God would be wimps beyond belief!!!!! Struggle is what produces maturity; protection produces little more than shadows of humans. And this is true in all of life.

Psalm
As I was typing in the Psalm for today, the thought struck me how unacceptable the sentiments would be in much of today’s world. Blow you, Jack, I am all right is the general sentiment, and a recent test on TV of people’s honesty underlines the extent to which dishonesty reigns. Small wonder, then, that the world is in turmoil. It is strange to me, that these ancient verities are ignored to a large extent, when if that were not the case, life would be so much fairer and safer ... and the wide disparity between haves and haves not would be very much reduced.

Epistle
Here we go again, with the same or similar views to the earlier readings expressed, as Paul encouraged Timothy in his life and ministry. It is not as if the Faith is about something exotic or esoteric; it is all quite simple and straightforward, even if it does run so contrary to the spirit of the present age and time.

Gospel
And talk about contrary! There is not likely to be a lot of people who would agree with the views and attitudes expressed in this passage, now is there? We are far more likely to have people demanding that their presence be noted and their status well on view. Servant? Bah! Hogwash!!!!!
Here is one of the principle reasons for rejection of the Faith by many of those in today’s world – or at least our part of it. Power and position are the ultimate goals for rather too many. And the result of that way of life shows up in the dysfunction of what passes for community and even family.

There is no way in which the Christian position is ‘different’ just for the hell of it. It is different because this is the time-honoured way of finding a peaceful and beneficial way of living. When I look out for you, and you for me, and each of us for the rest of us, then all of us are safe and life can be lived peacefully if not profitably. Love is the real factor that makes life tick, and while this may not be rocket science, it is reality (and not in the television sense, let me tell you.)

NOTES FOR A SERMON

I have commented before of the way in which so many people have departed from faith on the grounds that they expected this from God or that, and were disappointed. If God is Almighty, why does He not interfere and stop such things as wars, as hatreds, as disasters, and such? It has to be said that much of the perceived problem comes from .... making God in our own image, if I may dare to say so.

Even quite recently (as I write this) a most serious issue has arisen within our own wider family, a matter of possibly terminal illness, with one who has long been convinced that God would look after that part of the family because they are Charismatics. Even when contrary evidence and experience had damaged their family quite some years back, there remains the expectation of miracle. Time will tell, of course, but it is the expectation that concerns me.
Over the decades I have been involved in discussions and debates with people involved in both World Wars, whose faith was destroyed, they tell me, because of the totally horrific things that they witnessed. There is no way I would ever to dare to debate their experiences, for although I have been immune from such things, there is no way anyone could, for instance, be a Holocaust denier with any veracity. So the fact of those horrific things is not for debate: their assessment of God, I suggest, could well be.

There is so often and so easily that assumption that if God is Almighty, then He could, were He real, put a stop to such horrors. It is a simple, and sadly simplistic theory that does not stand up to examination, not only for God, but for a generation or two of parents may I dare say. How often I have heard the complaint that parents had little or no influence on their demanding and unresponsive children. ‘What could I do?’ has been the catch-cry, and I have been rude enough to suggest that they have taken the easy way out, surrendering responsibility to their children. There have been others who have gone the other way and demanded total obedience from their kids, often with results more disastrous than those who surrendered. Either way has resulted in great heart-searching and sometimes heart burn, for there is little in life harder to cope with than deliberately wayward children.

The real reason for taking up this issue is dual: one, to offer an alternative, and the other, to point to something that may be of great surprise to a lot of people. The cause of that surprise is found in Scripture, and particularly in the Old Testament. It is not necessary to read the whole lot of that rather large volume, but to check out some parts of it. What may be more surprising still is that the reason we have this document lies in the fact that it constitutes the Hebrew answer to the life question – why is there all this stuff-up in life anyhow?

I wonder if that got you sitting up and thinking?

Part of the answer is to be found in that most remarkable (and even more totally misunderstood) Chapter 3 of Genesis. The story of the fall. It is story, parable, not history – myth or legend if you like. It was and remains an attempt to understand where all this trouble stems and stemmed from. I am not talking ‘original sin,’ for that is a rather gross misunderstanding of what the tale conveys. But it is about cause and responsibility. It is a tale to help me begin to understand me. And you. It is the age-old demand to be boss, and you my vassal. Reason? I know best, of course, and you do not. Ego! Self. Very damaging.
And how does one respond? The normal human reaction is one of force. Father knows best, and don’t argue, or you are dead. The Cain and Abel response.
And the rest of the Bible, or the latter part of the Old Testament, shows that such an approach only aggravates the problem; it does not solve it. Read some of the prophets, and see how different an approach they offered, and anticipated a divine involvement in the whole business, the Suffering Servant approach being one of them. Or read Ezekiel who talks about real shepherds. Serving not controlling. Love not force, persistence not power. Now it all sounds so terribly easy, and it is nothing of the sort, but any good parent worth their salt will not demand, but offer a better way.
Oddly, many of those who oppose Christianity consider it to be mere superstition, and I have the hide to wonder why. The Faith has all to do with operating with justice, truth and integrity, and being a persistent parent as the prophets see God as evidencing. It was no easy business for the Loving Father to watch His own people acting like foolish and recalcitrant idiots. His reaction was not to step in and stop their stupidity – for the simple reason that such a course of action would reduce people to something far less than human. Like any parent, He would offer correction, until His next path was (and remains!) to step back and allow them to follow their own direction, in the hope and longing that they would see the disaster in front of them, and turn back to a more sensible path. This is described in Scripture as the ‘wrath of God,’ which was no belting over the head, but a waiting for a more reasoned response from them.
When it comes to World War I or II, or wars subsequent or before, who was responsible? TRULY! And the answer is us! Humans, foolish, selfish, ego-centric humans. And yes, quite a lot of them were Christian ... who either were not aware of their apostasy, or did not care a damn. Germany was Christian in both major conflicts. And so were their enemies. That first Scrap was, remember, the War to end Wars! And who remembered and for how long?

So before you go and call God for everything, or decide He no longer exists (if ever He did!) then stop and remember how He operates, and see just who is responsible for all the issues and problems, and see where He is perhaps longing over you to change direction, and return to truth and justice and integrity. Or, if you have no room left for God, then simply stop and see just who is responsible and then you change direction, and return to truth and justice and integrity.