Twelfth Sunday after Pentecost
Ian (church secretary) comes up to the front in the middle of announcing the reading, as if to interrupt Sarah
Ian: Sarah, could I just have a quick word with you?
Sarah: Can't it wait? I am in the middle of a service, you know.
Ian: Yes, I can see that. But I've just been thinking -
Sarah: Instead of focussing on the service? Tsk, tsk.
Ian: - we really do have a problem, Sarah.
Sarah: Sorry. What sort of problem do we have?
Ian: It's that Mission and Care group meeting, the one that was going to be in October. I've just had a text message from the Moderator, and it's had to be moved forward.
Sarah: That doesn't sound too much of a problem.
Ian: He wants it next Sunday. Straight after the service.
Sarah: Well, that's a bit inconvenient, but the Congolese church doesn't come in till two o'clock. If we start it on time, we should be sorted out by then.
Ian: But what about food? You told me they had excellent food at the Shiregreen meeting, so they'll be expecting a good meal here. They'll have come from churches all over Sheffield. What do you think we should do?
Sarah: I don't know! They didn't train me for this at college! Why is church life such a struggle sometimes? All I can think of is to go ahead with the service as normal, and pray for inspiration.Let's get on with it Start by doing the Gospel reading.
Ian: If you really think so... Our first reading this morning is from the Gospel of Matthew, Chapter 14, verses 13 to 21.
Now when Jesus heard this, he withdrew from there in a boat to a deserted place by himself. But when the crowds heard it, they followed him on foot from the towns. When he went ashore, he saw a great crowd; and he had compassion for them and cured their sick. When it was evening, the disciples came to him and said, ‘This is a deserted place, and the hour is now late; send the crowds away so that they may go into the villages and buy food for themselves.' Jesus said to them, ‘They need not go away; you give them something to eat.' They replied, ‘We have nothing here but five loaves and two fish.' And he said, ‘Bring them here to me.' Then he ordered the crowds to sit down on the grass. Taking the five loaves and the two fish, he looked up to heaven, and blessed and broke the loaves, and gave them to the disciples, and the disciples gave them to the crowds. And all ate and were filled; and they took up what was left over of the broken pieces, twelve baskets full. And those who ate were about five thousand men, besides women and children.
[Pause]
Ian: Are you thinking what I'm thinking?
Sarah: I'm thinking that in an organised and hospitable church like ours people can respond at short notice. The people from Network... and the Neighbourhood Group... and the Elders... are all here, so we can discuss all this during coffee.
Ian: You wanted lots of people to come to the Mission and Care Group meeting anyway, to get to know people from other churches, so why don't we invite the whole congregation? This is a special occasion. If we like it, we might even do Sunday bring-and-share meals more often - after all, people stay for Sandwich Sundays.
Sarah: Well, the Moderator warned he might come and shut us down, but he'll be so impressed that we can turn on a good spread at such short notice, that he'll be working hard to keep us open!
[Ian sits down]
Sarah: Just to reassure you, there is no emergency, and no plan for a bring-and-share lunch at St Andrew's next week. But if something like that did happen, how would we react? It can be a challenge to change our habits when something unexpected happens. But whenever we share what we have with others, whether it's little or much, Jesus is at work in us.
Crowds followed Yesu to the hills (Tom Colvin)
R&S 338: Stay with us, God
R&S 495: Father, hear the prayer we offer
The last few weeks we've been looking at Paul's letter to the church at Rome, and he's been sounding really confident, almost arrogant - he knows how it is, and he's going to tell us, whether we agree or not. But this morning we see Paul in a more vulnerable mood, agonising over his family, his friends, his nation: the chosen people who for so long had been a light to the rest of the world, reminding others of God and God's promises to humanity. How can it be, he asks himself, when it is so clear to me that Jesus is God's Messiah, the one to whom everything else is pointing, that they cannot see it?
Some of us can sympathise directly with Paul; for some of those whom we love most dearly cannot see or value what we see and value in our Christian faith. But all of us can sympathise with his struggles to try to come to terms with something in our experience that should not be.
Maybe we struggle with the great gap between rich and poor, between the obesity of some and the malnutrition of others, between the comfortable and the desperate, in which we inevitably play a part through our involvement in the economic systems of this country. Maybe we cannot understand the wars and conflicts that still rack this world, twenty-one centuries after the coming of the Prince of Peace, some of them even waged in his name. Maybe it is the pain and frailty that comes to many with old age, or the suffering of innocent children, or the death of those we love, or the destruction of nature. Maybe it is even the way this church is going down in numbers, in spite of the faithful service so many have given to it for so many years. I should be surprised if anyone here had had no struggles to make sense of our lives.
So what do we do with our unanswered questions? Some of us will try to suppress them - mind over matter! - believing that what cannot be cured must be endured, and that endurance is easier with a measure of forgetfulness. That can work for a while. But struggle that is suppressed will inevitably come out somehow - in bad health, in high stress levels, in anger or in depression. And such symptoms can make an already bad situation worse.
Others may be tempted into obsession over unanswered questions going round and round in our minds, robbing us of sleep, making us unable to concentrate on anything or anyone else. That is no better.
So can our faith offer us any resources to help us cope in such circumstances? We say in the United Reformed Church that we believe that the highest authority for what we believe and do is God's Word in the Bible, alive for God's people today through the help of the Spirit - but in practice, do we mean it?
Can the Bible be of any help to us?
I wonder sometimes whether we avoid group Bible study in this church because we struggle with its difficult questions, yet feel we should not be struggling.
After all, we've been going to church for thirty, forty, fifty years. Surely we should know all the answers by now, know the book inside out and back to front? If we don't, it's easier to conceal our ignorance at home than to parade it in a group where everyone else seems to know so much more than we do. In any case, we may feel sceptical about the Bible's ability to help us - after all, it was written so long ago for people in such different cultures from ours, so how can it really speak into our twenty-first century lives?
This week I've been in Windermere as one of the teachers on a course about studying the Bible for URC students training to be ministers and church-related community workers. Some had just done their first year of study, some had finished their courses and were about to find a church and a few, like Shirley Knibbs, now working with the Sheffield South Group of churches, had just been ordained. They came from many parts of the country, with many backgrounds, many ways of understanding God. But what they all had in common was the way they believed the Bible is worth struggling with.
And these students are not alone. The whole United Reformed Church has declared this academic year from October the year of the Bible, this book through which we believe God communicates with us. Here in St Andrew's we will be having four special Sundays to focus on the Bible, bringing out the understanding we already have, challenging us to deepen that relationship.
So what's in store for us this year? Maybe the story from the Hebrew Bible we have heard today can help us understand something of how that deepening relationship between us and the Bible may unfold.
Jacob has led a successful life in worldly terms - four wives, twelve sons and a daughter; oxen, donkeys, sheep; slaves aplenty. Jacob has promises from God about his children's inheritance. But weighing on his mind are the wrongs he did his brother when they were both young men: the theft of Esau's birthright and of Esau's blessing from Isaac, their father. Now they are about to meet again at last, how will Esau react? Jacob's family, his possessions can do him no good now. He sends on lavish presents to Esau; he sends everything and everyone he values away over the river Jabbok. Alone, he waits in darkness, wrestling with his anxieties. And unexpectedly, a real struggle comes his way, a stranger who wrestles with him until daybreak. The result? Stalemate: the stranger has dislocated Jacob's hip, but he will not loosen his grip on his opponent. As day dawns, Jacob demands a blessing from the stranger, the first blessing he has earned and not tricked out of someone. And the blessing given? A new name: Israel, the one who strives with God. Though the stranger will not give his name, we realise that it is God with whom Jacob has been wrestling all night - and that God is pleased with Jacob's refusal to give in.
When we come to the Bible with our own questions, not questions someone else thinks we should be asking, it will not always be plain sailing. If we are looking for clear instructions on nuclear war or bioethics we will be disappointed. And since the issues that perplex us are not usually simple, we will also be frustrated if we expect every Christian who reads the Bible to come to our own conclusions. Yet if we take a lesson from Jacob's experience, there are two things we can look for from Bible study if we, like him, do not tire of wrestling with the texts. Firstly, a new way of naming: fresh insight into ourselves or others. And secondly, hope that through our ongoing struggle with the words of the Bible, and with the unanswered questions of our lives, we too will witness God's determination to forge creation's joy from wretchedness.
