Eighth Sunday after Pentecost
Matthew 11:16-19, 25-30
I wonder what games you played when you were a child - not sports, but a different sort of game: let's pretend. It's the most creative of game I know - all you need is a bit of imagination, and you can be anyone, anything and anywhere you want to be. Maybe you were cops and robbers, or cowboys and Indians, or astronauts. When I went round to visit them recently, I found out that Robyn and Toby have wonderfully strong imaginations in the games they play - the monsters from Doctor Who make an appearance!
My friends and I used to pretend to be horses; so we spent a lot of time cantering around the playground with the wind in our manes. Maybe that's why I still like having my hair long today. But some days I really didn't feel like playing. I just wanted to sit somewhere quiet with my book. But they kept on going on about horses! So I'd sit there and read and ignore them, and after a while they'd see I was sulking, give up and go away. Then when I'd finished my chapter I'd say sorry and we'd make friends again.
But it's not just children who sulk. Adults are very good at it too. Our feelings have been hurt, or people just won't see things our way, so we won't play with them - and when they see what they've done to us, they'll be sorry! It doesn't always work out that way, of course, and it does look pretty silly when someone's grown up to see them bearing grudges like that. No - we don't have time to talk things over. No - we're not interested in their point of view. Yes - we're being idiots.
And it's not just people today who can behave childishly and sulk. Jesus seems to be getting fed up with the people he's talking to in our reading this morning, because they're like sulky children who won't play with their friends either at weddings or at funerals. What do the people want of God's leader? John the Baptist fasted and lived like an old-style prophet, telling people where they'd gone wrong and how they should change their lives - and they didn't like that! But when Jesus came along, going to parties and welcoming outcasts with God's love, they didn't like that either - he just couldn't win!
I wonder whether we expect God to be in touch with us through the ordinary events of our lives, the highs and lows of weddings and funerals, and the ordinary stuff that happens in between. When good things happen in our lives, and we're happy, do we think: There's God, celebrating with us? And when sad things happen and we're miserable, do we think: God's crying alongside me? Or do we only expect God to be interested in playing with us on Sunday mornings between 11 and 12?
If so, we're missing out on so much with God, like people who sulk and won't play with their friends. For at every moment of every day of our lives, from waking up to bedtime, God's waiting to join in our lives, if we let God play with us. Sometimes we may feel that being a Christian is like playing let's pretend; we may not feel good enough at being Christian for God to want to be with us - but living life by playing this game is different from any other way we can use our imagination. For the more we act as though we are followers of Jesus, the more Jesus can help us to become so in reality. Give it a go this week!
R&S 531 was written to bring the tune Slane to a wider audience. Jan Struther (the author's pen name) is also famous as the creator of Mrs Miniver, a popular book of wartime reminiscences made into a film, and for the children's hymn ‘When a knight won his spurs'. Slane is an old Irish folk melody.
R&S 447 is one of Brian Wren's earlier hymns, written in 1968 while he was minister of Hockley and Hawkswell Congregational Churches in Essex; a URC minister, he has recently retired from being Professor of Worship at Columbia Theological Seminary in the States. The tune St Botolph was named for St Botolph's Parish Church in Boston, Lincs, where the composer, Gordon Slater, was organist.
R&S 453 is from the pen of another URC hymnodist, Fred Kaan, using the Jamaican folk-song tune Linstead Market as its inspiration. Its conclusion - that God offers us and all abundant nourishment - is directly opposite to the original song's mournful chorus, beginning: ‘Oh Lawd! Not a mite, not a bite'.
I wonder how it made you feel just now when I compared being a Christian to playing a game of let's pretend. Maybe it was all right at the beginning of the service, the time when children are often with us, to make that sort of frivolous comparison. But now we're getting on towards Communion, it's time for us to be serious adults, dealing with the serious matters of religion in the way Presbyterians are so good at doing.
When I was a ministerial student doing a placement at St Columba's Church in Oxford, another ex-Presbyterian church, there was a picture hung up in the minister's vestry, of a minister raising his arms and speaking vehemently to a group of male elders gathered around the table. I used to wonder what on earth he could possibly be saying to them - but whatever it was, they all looked deadly serious, as though it were a matter of life and death. And after all, that's just what Communion is, isn't it? We're remembering the last supper of Jesus with his disciples, the last time they would eat together before the horrific death to which his mission from God had led him. It's not a proper time to be cheerful.
Then why on earth - apart from the small point that it's in the lectionary for today - why on earth do we have in this Communion service our second reading from Zechariah, a reading which begins Rejoice greatly and ends with a promise of restoration? Zechariah's hearers would not welcome a frivolous prophecy, I assure you. They have returned from exile to Jerusalem, but their problems are just beginning. Remember the reading we heard last week in the Moderator's service? God's promise then - two chapters earlier than our reading this morning - is that old people will sit at peace in the city streets, that young people will play in peace. This vision seems impossible for those facing the task of rebuilding, yet it is not, says the prophet, impossible for God. But the very fact of this promise shows how bad things are right now. Maybe God will put everything right in the future - but what do they have to rejoice about here and now - except hope, which has so often been disappointed?
Of course, a little earlier in his story than the Last Supper we remember in Communion, Jesus hijacked this very passage from the Hebrew Bible and made it his own. Remember Palm Sunday, when he rode into Jerusalem on a colt, the foal of a donkey? He was making a deliberate and personal reference to Zechariah's promised coming of God's king to Jerusalem, entering in peace, on a donkey, rather than in military might on a warhorse. Chariots and battle-bows, tanks and bombs will be put into mothballs when God's king arrives. And for a few moments one Sunday hope became reality, prophecy turned from imagination to fact as he rode into Jerusalem among cheering crowds and hosannaing children.
We know, however, how the story ends: with a man dead on a cross. We are not to be fooled into being frivolous, even temporarily, when solemnity and tragedy are the true order of the day.
But hang on a moment - that's not the end of the story, and you know it as well as I do. The true end of the story is Jesus' triumphant resurrection from death - no, it's his ascension into heaven - no, it's the coming of the Spirit and the birth of the church at Pentecost - no, it's... well, come to think of it, the true ending of the story is yet to come, and there'll be twists and turns in plenty before we reach our final happy ending, of God's kingdom perfectly realised, even better than we could have imagined it.
The emphasis on sorrow and solemnity which often surrounds Communion is a true part of the story, and, sadly, a true part of our world and our lives today. When, as happened yesterday in Sheffield, a fire engine, responding to a malicious hoax call, is involved in a road accident that leaves a 35-year-old woman dead and her baby daughter in intensive care, we know there is still evil and sorrow, funerals and mourning in our world. Yet as Christians we are told that it is not the only or the final part of the story: that, as Desmond Tutu puts it, Goodness is stronger than evil, love is stronger than hate, light is stronger than darkness, life is stronger than death, victory is ours through him who loved us.
Yet it can be much harder to hold onto the hope of good news, to imagine God's better future, than to weep over the bad news that is all too evident. And the longer we've been in the world, the more ways we are aware of that things can go wrong. Maybe it's easier for children to take up the game of life with God every morning, because they have fewer failures in their memory than the rest of us have stockpiled. Sometimes we can use past difficulties as weapons, defending us against the pain of high hopes dashed yet again. When it seems as though life is bad and getting worse, why put yourself through the pain of dismantling the heavy weight of cynicism and allowing yourself to hope for God's transformation? Isn't it more sensible, more adult, just to stoically get on with life as it is?
Zechariah doesn't seem to think so. He offers hope to his compatriots in Jerusalem: hope of freedom, hope of restoration. Jesus doesn't seem to think so either. He offers hope to his followers in Jerusalem then and his followers in Sheffield now: hope of strength and help, whatever burdens are ours to carry, hope of renewal. And if we dare, you and I, to put our imaginations to work, to take on such childlike hope in God's promises of partnership and transformation; if we dare to eat and drink together, not as if we're about to go to a funeral, but as a foretaste of the heavenly wedding banquet prepared for all people - well, we're all serious and sensible people here, and as I see it, the only sensible thing to do under such circumstances is to rejoice. To rejoice greatly, what's more. For, if we're to believe C.S. Lewis, whose roots were in Northern Irish Presbyterianism, joy is the serious business of heaven.
