Second Sunday in Lent
Service Date:
28 February, 2010
Luke 13:31-35
When something bad happens in our lives, one of the things people often wonder is: How can God let this happen? If God cares for us, how come I'm hurting so much?
Every time we pray the Lord's Prayer, we're calling God our Father, and fathers are meant to look after their children. In two weeks time we'll be celebrating Mothering Sunday, and thinking how God's like a good mother as well as a good father to us; one of the reasons we think God's like a mother is when Jesus says to the people of Jerusalem, in the reading we just heard, I'd have loved to cuddle you and keep you safe, the way a hen cuddles her chicks under her wings.
So doesn't God care enough for us to keep us safe? Or if God cares, maybe God's not strong enough to stop bad things happening? Either way, it's a bit scary to think about.
Jesus may have wondered the same thing. There were people who didn't like what he was doing, people who didn't want anyone to upset the way they saw the world. They believed you should love people who are nice to you and hate people who are nasty to you. But Jesus said we should love everyone, because God loves everyone.
That was why he cared for people with nasty diseases that everyone else wanted to forget about. He cared about children, though most of the grown-ups then thought children were only important when they started to grow up and do a grown-up's work. He cared about people whose minds were ill, people everyone else was a bit afraid of because they weren't ordinary. And because he cared about them, he made them better.
But Jesus knew he wouldn't be allowed to go on doing that forever. The powerful people who didn't like him caring for everyone would do their best to stop him. And he wasn't surprised, because a lot of the people God had sent before him to show how God wanted people to live had run into trouble too. So Jesus knew he was in for a bad time.
Now he knew King Herod was after him - that had to be serious, because the people who warned Jesus weren't too fond of him either. He could have decided, Enough is enough. I've been caring for everyone else long enough. Now it's time for me to look after my friends and forget about everyone else, so I don't get in trouble.
But because Jesus believed so strongly that God cares for everyone, he wouldn't be stopped caring for people too, however dangerous it got, however much people hated him for it.
So when people wonder if God cares about us, when nasty things happen to us and we can get scared about what may happen to us, let's remember Jesus. He cared about everyone so much, he chose to go on caring for people who needed him, however bad things got. His bravery and his love shows us just how much God cares about us - not pretending that bad things don't happen but staying with us if things get bad. And because Jesus cares for us that much, because God cares for us that much, we can care for each other too.
When something bad happens in our lives, one of the things people often wonder is: How can God let this happen? If God cares for us, how come I'm hurting so much?
Every time we pray the Lord's Prayer, we're calling God our Father, and fathers are meant to look after their children. In two weeks time we'll be celebrating Mothering Sunday, and thinking how God's like a good mother as well as a good father to us; one of the reasons we think God's like a mother is when Jesus says to the people of Jerusalem, in the reading we just heard, I'd have loved to cuddle you and keep you safe, the way a hen cuddles her chicks under her wings.
So doesn't God care enough for us to keep us safe? Or if God cares, maybe God's not strong enough to stop bad things happening? Either way, it's a bit scary to think about.
Jesus may have wondered the same thing. There were people who didn't like what he was doing, people who didn't want anyone to upset the way they saw the world. They believed you should love people who are nice to you and hate people who are nasty to you. But Jesus said we should love everyone, because God loves everyone.
That was why he cared for people with nasty diseases that everyone else wanted to forget about. He cared about children, though most of the grown-ups then thought children were only important when they started to grow up and do a grown-up's work. He cared about people whose minds were ill, people everyone else was a bit afraid of because they weren't ordinary. And because he cared about them, he made them better.
But Jesus knew he wouldn't be allowed to go on doing that forever. The powerful people who didn't like him caring for everyone would do their best to stop him. And he wasn't surprised, because a lot of the people God had sent before him to show how God wanted people to live had run into trouble too. So Jesus knew he was in for a bad time.
Now he knew King Herod was after him - that had to be serious, because the people who warned Jesus weren't too fond of him either. He could have decided, Enough is enough. I've been caring for everyone else long enough. Now it's time for me to look after my friends and forget about everyone else, so I don't get in trouble.
But because Jesus believed so strongly that God cares for everyone, he wouldn't be stopped caring for people too, however dangerous it got, however much people hated him for it.
So when people wonder if God cares about us, when nasty things happen to us and we can get scared about what may happen to us, let's remember Jesus. He cared about everyone so much, he chose to go on caring for people who needed him, however bad things got. His bravery and his love shows us just how much God cares about us - not pretending that bad things don't happen but staying with us if things get bad. And because Jesus cares for us that much, because God cares for us that much, we can care for each other too.
Hymns:
R&S 575, based on Psalm 67, comes from the pen of H.F. Lyte, an Anglican vicar of the 19th century whose mother died and whose father left him at an early age. Lyte was never physically strong, and developed consumption and eventually had to live in the south of France where the weather was more clement. The tune Heathlands was first published in 1866 set to these words.R&S 197 was written by Margaret Cropper, a Quaker and close friend of the mystic Evelyn Underhill, for the Sunday School at St James Church in Kendal which she led for most of her adult life. The tune Au clair de la lune (By the light of the moon), a French nursery rhyme, comes from as early as 1576.
R&S 198 was written by the poet John Clare, who came from a farming family and gained popularity in the 19th century as ‘the Northamptonshire Peasant'. However he suffered mentally for much of his life and was confined to a mental asylum for the last twenty years of his life, writing poetry when his health allowed. The tune Surrey/Carey's was written for a paraphrase of Psalm 23.
R&S 586 comes from an original German hymn by Joachim Neander, translated and paraphrased by the poet laureate and former medical doctor Robert Bridges. The tune Michael by Herbert Howells was composed for this hymn, written over breakfast by the composer while opening his post. It is named after his son, who died of meningitis.
Sermon:
Genesis 15:1-12, 17-18; Psalm 27:1-3, 14; Luke 13:31-35; Phil 3:17-4:1That question I started with in our theme introduction is a deep, deep question, one I suspect at some point in our life we all ask of God: do you really want things go right for me? Can I really trust you to care for me, to know and to meet my deepest needs? And in our reading from Genesis this morning Abram is facing this problem head on. God has promised Abram, before he and Sarai ever set off from their homeland into the unknown, that Abram's family will become a great nation, indeed, that they will become a blessing to all humanity. And Abram has believed God.
But now, where is he? His wife Sarai has had no child. Abram has Ishmael, his son whose mother is Hagar, Sarai's slave - but no legal heir to all his wealth and achievement save a far-off cousin in Damascus. Has God tricked him? Is God truly trustworthy? Does God really understand his needs?
We in St Andrew's might have our own questions to ask of God. I'm not getting any younger; will my health hold out? What about my family, will they be all right? Will I find work that's right for me? Will this church, to which I've given time and money and love over the years, fade into nothingness as though it had never been? Does God really care about us and our needs?
God chooses an interesting way to respond to Abram's question - and if you ever do find yourself wondering along similar lines, I do recommend you follow Abraham's example and bring your complaints directly to God, who can evidently cope with us getting angry. God listens, then tells Abram to trust him even more, by asking him for a material commitment: just as now we may count our wealth in stock market certificates, all his animals were tangible signs of Abram's wealth.
The covenant made between the two that evening was the formal ratification of a sort of agreement often made in the Ancient Near East between two parties, often a king and his subject, in which in exchange for total loyalty the king agrees to protect the subject. But no king would allow himself to be questioned by his subject as God did by Abram; this relationship is much closer than that. And when Abram has signalled in this way that he is serious about his own commitment to God, God's promise is repeated, in more detail, though still with no detailed breakdown about how it would be achieved.
We don't know Abram's response, but at the time this may not have seemed too satisfactory to him, still wondering how he was ever to get a legal heir. When we have put our situation before God, we too may be left with mixed feelings: peace, that God has heard us, but also dissatisfaction: so when will God be meeting our needs? Abram's got further to go in his journey yet; so have we; as his example shows, it's not always easy to live trusting that God will make things better for us, though we cannot at present see how. Of course, sometimes what needs to alter in a situation is us, and it's not always easy at the time for us to see how we need to change, maybe in unforeseen ways, so our needs are met. But the alternative - to assume that God, like the long-awaited bus, is never going to arrive, and that we need to look out for ourselves and our own because no one else will do it for us - may not be the ideal solution either, for what we really need isn't always totally clear to us.
Part of the problem with obesity we hear so much about these days is that people are living much less energetic lives, with all our labour-saving gadgets, yet we are still eating the same amount of rich foods that were necessary for survival when we had to outrun sabre-toothed tigers. We don't always realise how much of our desire for food is need, and how much is habit. When it comes to our consumption of power, of raw materials, of finished products, it may be a similar story. Our economy is based on the expansion of consumer need ad infinitum - yet living on a finite planet, increasing our use of resources forever cannot work, even for us - let alone the developing world.
But even for those of us who are naturally frugal our perception of need is a question of mind-set as much as fact. When Paul in his letter to Philippi speaks of those whose god is the belly, he wasn't talking about those who had put on too much weight, or even Tiger Woods, but about people who felt that satisfying their own needs, rather than what God wanted, was their highest priority.
I suspect we are all tempted to make God's meeting of our spiritual needs our top priority. We want worship to be the way we enjoy it, with the music we like, at a time that is convenient for us, on dates when we are not already committed to something else. Once things are organised so our church needs are met, we want things to stay as they are. We want others to come and join us - so long as they agree to do things the way we like them. And we want God's care for us to mean we will enjoy success and avoid suffering.
If you were to show me a Christian with none of these desires, I should show you either a hypocrite or someone who really doesn't understand themselves. It is natural for us to want life to go well, as it was natural for Abram to want a son to inherit his wealth. Yet if Jesus had stuck with meeting his own needs, he would never have turned his face to Jerusalem and the cross. And as Paul tells his friends in Philippi, our natural wants - what he calls earthly things - cannot be a Christian's first priority; for our deepest need is rather for heavenly things, the love and acceptance that God alone can give us, which involves us in a greater and greater level of commitment to God throughout our lives. Just as Abram had to go through further struggle to see God's promise fulfilled in his son Isaac, Paul knew that everyone in the Philippian church would need the power of God's transformation to alter their priorities from their own needs to the acknowledgment of Jesus' authority in their lives. And the same is true for us. It's a process of transformation that the youngest among us can begin, and that the oldest among us still need to undergo.
What is the result of this process? To turn us into people of whom our psalmist writes, who can honestly say, God is my strong salvation; what foe have I to fear? In darkness and temptation my light, my help is near. Place on the Lord reliance, my soul with courage wait; his truth is your assurance when faint and desolate. This is Jesus' story too. God does not protect him or us from trouble. Yet he and we are given the assurance that no matter what happens, God's care will never fail us; and because God's care raised him from the death he endured as a result of caring for others, we can believe it's true.
