Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost: Holy Communion
Service Date:
4 October, 2009
Psalm 8
Yesterday, I was at the Northern College annual service for graduating students - St Andrew's supports them financially, so we get an invitation every year. Their principle, John Campbell, said that every time he went back to the Bible, after all his teaching years, he found something new. And looking at Psalm 8 for our service this morning, I found a new question coming to mind. When it says, ‘on the lips of children and of babes you have found praise to foil your enemy' - what does it mean? I went to the commentaries, which just shows you how desperate I was. But the answers I found didn't inspire me.
Some said that because children are so small and weak, it shows how powerful God is that only such fragile support is needed against God's enemies. But that sounds as if God thinks of children as weapons - no.
Some reminded us that Jesus used this psalm, when he was entering Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, in great triumph, and children were singing his praises in the Temple. The religious authorities wanted him to stop them, but he quoted this psalm against them. So they see it as a foretelling of Jesus' life. Well, I can certainly see its relevance. But it doesn't seem fair to the generations before and after Jesus if it didn't have something to say to them too.
Some in our own church used to take it as an encouragement to uneducated preachers outside the Church of England, who weren't allowed to study in Anglican colleges like Oxford and Cambridge, to spread God's word, even though they didn't have letters after their names. But though you don't have to go to college to tell people about God, I don't think that's what the words mean.
So what do I think it means? Well, I live in a little mid-terraced house between two young families. And not a morning goes by when some little darling doesn't pipe up in the early hours, either out of sadness or excitement or frustration, right through the thin walls into my ears. Young children are loud. And when they're someone else's, I find it can be annoying, especially at 6 in the morning. But when, occasionally, one of our church children is heard in the middle of a prayer, that's different. Tyris or Harry or Thomas or Zachary are part of us.
God must feel that way about every child, since every one is part of God's creation. Every young voice raised to show a child's alive is praising God by its very existence, and when we're not able to cope with the volume, we're not yet fully appreciating God. More generally, each of us has parts of God's creation we really love, and other parts we would happily do without. When we get to heaven, it's my own private theory - you won't find it in the Bible - that we'll finally understand how all the things we couldn't cope with, such as toddlers bellowing with excitement, are praising God in their own way. For when we get to heaven, nothing in us will oppose God any more.
So to get us in practice for heavenly appreciation, our next hymn, as well as praising God for the beauties of the countryside, also thinks about townscapes as scenes of God's praise. And since honesty as well as love is part of our relationship with God, I invite you to sing all the lines or verses describing things in which you do see God at work, and to listen to others singing the rest.
Yesterday, I was at the Northern College annual service for graduating students - St Andrew's supports them financially, so we get an invitation every year. Their principle, John Campbell, said that every time he went back to the Bible, after all his teaching years, he found something new. And looking at Psalm 8 for our service this morning, I found a new question coming to mind. When it says, ‘on the lips of children and of babes you have found praise to foil your enemy' - what does it mean? I went to the commentaries, which just shows you how desperate I was. But the answers I found didn't inspire me.
Some said that because children are so small and weak, it shows how powerful God is that only such fragile support is needed against God's enemies. But that sounds as if God thinks of children as weapons - no.
Some reminded us that Jesus used this psalm, when he was entering Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, in great triumph, and children were singing his praises in the Temple. The religious authorities wanted him to stop them, but he quoted this psalm against them. So they see it as a foretelling of Jesus' life. Well, I can certainly see its relevance. But it doesn't seem fair to the generations before and after Jesus if it didn't have something to say to them too.
Some in our own church used to take it as an encouragement to uneducated preachers outside the Church of England, who weren't allowed to study in Anglican colleges like Oxford and Cambridge, to spread God's word, even though they didn't have letters after their names. But though you don't have to go to college to tell people about God, I don't think that's what the words mean.
So what do I think it means? Well, I live in a little mid-terraced house between two young families. And not a morning goes by when some little darling doesn't pipe up in the early hours, either out of sadness or excitement or frustration, right through the thin walls into my ears. Young children are loud. And when they're someone else's, I find it can be annoying, especially at 6 in the morning. But when, occasionally, one of our church children is heard in the middle of a prayer, that's different. Tyris or Harry or Thomas or Zachary are part of us.
God must feel that way about every child, since every one is part of God's creation. Every young voice raised to show a child's alive is praising God by its very existence, and when we're not able to cope with the volume, we're not yet fully appreciating God. More generally, each of us has parts of God's creation we really love, and other parts we would happily do without. When we get to heaven, it's my own private theory - you won't find it in the Bible - that we'll finally understand how all the things we couldn't cope with, such as toddlers bellowing with excitement, are praising God in their own way. For when we get to heaven, nothing in us will oppose God any more.
So to get us in practice for heavenly appreciation, our next hymn, as well as praising God for the beauties of the countryside, also thinks about townscapes as scenes of God's praise. And since honesty as well as love is part of our relationship with God, I invite you to sing all the lines or verses describing things in which you do see God at work, and to listen to others singing the rest.
Hymns:
R&S 339 was written by Brian Wren in 1973, as a rewriting of Wesley's hymn: And can it be. The tune Abingdon was written by Erik Routley, organist of Mansfield College, Oxford, named after the town where he honeymooned.All things bright and beautiful is well known, but as some of the new verses we sing today point out, the beauty of God's creation is to be found in towns as well as in the countryside. The tune Royal Oak is adapted from a 17th-century English folk melody.
R&S 437 comes from Luke Connaughton, a Roman Catholic hymnodist writing in the 1970s. The tune Worlebury was written for this hymn.
R&S 663 is frequently sung at Pentecost, but the need for God's Spirit to make us and all things new is not confined to that time of the liturgical year. The tune Hyfrydol was written when its Welsh composer R.H. Prichard was just 20; the name means ‘melodious'.
Sermon:
Psalm 8; Mark 10:2-12So far I may have been sounding as thought I wanted to say of God's creation: ‘Whatever is, is good'. But that's hard to maintain with the universe we know: just look at this week's news, with long-ago rape and current child abuse competing with typhoons and tsunamis for our horrified attention. Our Gospel reading this morning seems to be falling into dismal line, too. In Matthew, Mark and Luke Jesus is recorded as being against divorce and remarriage, but here in Mark's Gospel, the earliest, we have Jesus' most apparently uncompromising condemnation of those who remarry after a first marriage breaks down. Here, as in Psalm 8, I am forced to ask myself: what does this mean? But here, unlike Psalm 8, there are evidently consequences arising from how we respond to this difficult text, consequences with an immediate bearing on people's lives.
In a way, I'm working backwards here from what is to what should be. As you will know, unlike some other churches, our denomination is generally happy to celebrate the remarriage of people who have gone through divorce. Yet like the other churches, we too have Mark's Gospel before us.
So what has made us able to take this step?
Partly it's because unlike Roman Catholic or Anglican churches, we don't see marriage as one of the sacraments, something like baptism or communion that tells us directly about God. We see it as a partnership between people, an agreement sealing a relationship. And sadly, like the relationship between people and God, this agreement sometimes breaks down.
If a previous marriage has broken down, we ask people contemplating remarriage to think and pray very carefully over what went wrong last time, so that mistakes are not repeated. But we also believe that mistakes can be forgiven, that God offers us a new start in life. And this is something we have learned from the Gospel stories about Jesus, who called tax collectors away from collaboration with the occupying power into God's kingdom, who healed paralysis and forgave sins, who brought lepers back into community. Where there is damage, according to those stories, there is always an opportunity for God's healing and transformation.
So what can we make of this story, seemingly so rule-bound and condemnatory? Can this really be Jesus talking?
That's an interesting question. For if we take the cameo of Jesus in the house with his disciples, teaching them directly about the impossibility of remarriage without adultery, a strange anomaly arises. Jesus' private teaching runs: if a man divorces his wife and marries again, he commits adultery. And likewise, if a woman... but hold on a moment. In the Jewish society of that time, and indeed in Orthodox Judaism today, while a man could divorce his wife, a woman could not divorce her husband. In Roman law, however, either party could initiate divorce proceedings. So this saying must have been either originated or updated for the benefit of Christians from a Gentile background. Do you remember, a while ago, my suggesting that while Jesus gave us the parable of the sower itself, it may well have been others in the early church who added the longer explanation of what sort of person each sort of soil represented? In this case too, it seems quite possible that while Jesus did indeed debate divorce with the Pharisees, and did underline the crucial importance of the marriage bond as two people being made into one by God, it was his followers who later added a rider forbidding remarriage to divorcees. And as we descendants of Calvin know, it's all too easy to elaborate inspiration into a system more rigid than anything its originator had in mind.
So what may all this have to do with those of us who have not experienced divorce? There seem to be two different attitudes to marriage here, attitudes which may be seen in wider contexts too. Firstly, Jesus' recognition of all that is good in marriage: of the God-given support and partnership which can be found in a loving relationship of mutuality between two people, which spreads wider than itself to bless children and friends and society in general. Such a relationship does not come instantly; it arises through years of vulnerability, of learning, if sometimes through gritted teeth, to appreciate the other person with all their gifts and enthusiasms. I know I'm speaking to many experts in this congregation alone. But sadly, such a quality of relationship does not arise from every wedding day, for some choose to keep up the defence of a hard heart. And that is why the possibility of divorce is still necessary.
Secondly, though, there is the legalistic attitude that, rather than focussing on the ideal, puts unbearably heavy penalties on failure.
We have been asked today to mark an international day of prayer about climate change, with the Copenhagen UN Summit coming up in November, when nations must decide what commitments they can make in order to minimise global warming. Often the environmentalist take on our planetary future has taken the second, legalistic approach I've just described: activists try to frighten us into living greener lives, for fear of environmental catastrophes to come. And just as in those churches which prohibit divorce altogether, people find ways to ignore the ruling or to get around it, ways which do not promote the desired end, but just leave us feeling guilty and furtive. How might it be if, instead, we followed Jesus in focussing our attention on the good things God has given us in our beautiful planet; if we decided that for our own sake and that of future generations it was worth looking again at those aspects of our relationship with it, such as our dependence on the motor car and on fossil fuels, that are clearly breaking down?
If you think I'm being too idealistic, think again about what we are about to do together. We are about to remember Jesus' many meals with outsiders before his death, his last meal before dying, echoing God's rescue of slaves, and his joyful breaking of bread with friends after God raised him to new life. Our faith is built on the transformation of slavery to freedom, of woundedness to healing, of death to life. We will eat and drink in hope of our own transformation from despair to hope, from sorrow to joy; and that of the whole world, including its horrendous headlines. In heaven, I will hear a toddler's bellow and smile - if there is any 6am in heaven, which I wouldn't like to surmise. In heaven, we will recognise and love everything that gives God praise, and all our tears and pain will be a thing of the past. But now is the time to practise that appreciation of one another and of our beautiful planet; now is the time to practise being God's friends, even if our attempts might make anyone but a proud parent wince. And let me make it clear, I'm not talking about the choir!
