The narrow opens to glory

Isaiah 66.18-21 ‘They shall bring all your brothers from all the nations’

Hebrews 12.5-7,11-13 ‘The Lord disciplines the one he loves’

Luke 13.22-30 ‘People will come from east and west, and recline at table in the kingdom of God.’

 

‘Strive to enter by the narrow door’. (Luke 13.24)

+

The Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem is a very big church and holds lots of people: it makes this one look quite modest in size.

At its heart is the birthplace of Jesus Christ.

It is one of those places where there is a palpable sense of a meeting point between things earthly and heavenly: and, of course, heaven and earth met, in Bethlehem, at the Incarnation of Jesus.

Heaven and earth meet here, in our lives, when we open our hearts, minds and bodies to his transforming and converting grace, especially when we stretch out our hands to receive him in the Eucharist.

So, back in Bethlehem, is this large, capacious church, that can hold all-comers, pilgrims from all around the globe.

But at the same time its entrance is tiny, about four feet high by two feet wide; in metric, that’s 120 centimetres by 60 centimetres: enter by the narrow door, indeed!

Some say it’s that size for practical reasons: the door was made so small to prevent armed horsemen from entering the basilica during the Ottoman period. 

Others say it’s for spiritual reasons: the tiny door causes everyone who enters to stoop before they come in, as a check to our own pride and egos.  

Either way anyone entering the church must disarm, and humbly lower themselves to enter.

It’s easiest, of course, for little children to get in.

So that ancient church is a parable, in stone, of the invitation, demands and promise of entering the Kingdom of God.

“Strive to enter through the narrow door. For many, I tell you, will seek to enter and will not be able.” (Luke 13.24)

In the Kingdom of God there is room for everyone; but entry is by ‘the narrow door’.

Strive to enter, says Jesus.

The original Greek of the Gospel says, Ἀγωνίζεσθε, (agōnizesthe) which means to strive, to struggle, to agonise.

We don’t just walk into the Kingdom of God upright carrying all our personal baggage.

That’s why he continues, ‘Many will seek to enter and will not be able’.

What chastening words these are for those who would enter on their own terms; and encouraging words for those who wrestle with faith and salvation: entry is promised, but not without cost.

We need to seek the narrow door, and knock on it: God’s will is that it is opened; but it is narrow.

There is a live, and sometimes antagonistic, debate across the Church in the West today about the language and practice of inclusion in the Church.

On one hand there are those who argue that God’s welcome is so expansive that anyone can enter the Kingdom of God; there are no significant boundaries or barriers.

On the other hand, there is the narrow interpretation that God only calls certain people, the ‘elect’, into his Kingdom.

 

Reflecting the Gospel, the Church is neither wholly inclusive nor wholly exclusive: rather the Church proclaims the abundant love of God for everyone in such a way that also makes clear that to be a follower of Jesus Christ is a demanding and costly way, a way that means we are shaped in his image, not making him in our own.

‘[Jesus] opened wide his arms for us on the cross’ (Common Worship: Eucharistic Prayer B).

It’s an embracing welcome, but on a cross.

No one is beyond Jesus’ call and his mercy: throughout the Gospels he sits down and eats with sinners; he calls the excluded of society; he prioritises the nobodies, which is how society of his day saw children; and he counted women as his disciples, unheard of before his time.

After all, ‘some are last who will be first, and some are first who will be last.’ (Luke 13.30)

So, what of striving to enter by the narrow door?

The narrow door is our turning away from sin and turning to Christ, as being baptised commits us to.

Our liturgy does the same thing: we confess our sins as our worship begins, not to be miserable or downbeat, but to say that we are taking off the baggage of sin, so that we can ‘enter his courts with praise’.

To enter through the narrow door is a struggle, something to strive for: we have to take off the things that we become all too comfortable with, they’re named in the Litany as, ‘pride, vanity and hypocrisy… envy, hatred and malice… hardness of heart and contempt for [God’s] word and [his] laws’ (Common Worship: The Litany).

But, cast off all that and we enter through the narrow door into the abundance of God’s kingdom.

To strive for something means we really want it; really desire it.

The free gift of grace costs everything.

The great Lutheran theologian and Christian martyr, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, knew this, wrote about it and lived and died it.

He went through the narrow door, such that it led to his execution by the Nazis.

And he rooted that in his conviction of ‘The Cost of Discipleship’ (the title of one of his books).

In it he speaks of ‘cheap grace’, the way we reduce the demands of the Gospel to make it attractive or acceptable to those who want to enter through a wider door:

Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, communion without confession … Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate. (Part I, Chapter 1)

That narrow door – through which we strive, struggle, agonise to enter - opens onto a limitless vision of God, so that:

Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith—that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God. (Ephesians 3.17b-19)

May we enter by that narrow door and never lose hope in God’s mercy. Amen.

No scorpions, no serpents

Genesis 18.20-32 ‘Oh let not the Lord be angry, and I will speak,’

Colossians 2.12-14 ‘God made you alive together with him, having forgiven all trespasses.’

Luke 11.1-13 ‘Ask, and it will be given to you.’

‘Lord, teach us to pray’

+

The Lord’s Prayer, the ‘Our Father’, is the model and pattern of all Christian prayer, given to us by Jesus Christ himself.

It is the starting point, and the destination of all prayer.

To have this Gospel reading given to us by the Church today is providential because we are baptising Esther, a new member of the Body of Christ who becomes an adopted child of God, and who can call God her Father, as much as he is mine and yours.

This prayer is the one that Esther, and all Christians must know and use.

The early Christian text known as the ‘Didache’, The Teaching of the Twelve Apostles, says we should pray the Lord’s Prayer three times a day – in the morning, at noon and at the close of day.

The Lord’s Prayer is a great gift to teach the new Christian so as to learn to know God's holiness, his will, provision, mercy, and protection: it’s all there.

Christian parents, godparents, catechists and nurturers should all pray the Lord’s Prayer themselves and teach it to the young in faith.

We must all be men and women of prayer to encourage and teach others in prayer.

As the Gospel told us, the disciples needed to be formed in prayer by Jesus.

It was after they had seen Jesus praying and, remembering that John the Baptist’s disciples had seen him pray and been taught how to pray, that they were ready to ask Jesus how to do it: ‘Lord, teach us to pray’.

Now you might ask, how do I teach my child, grandchild, niece, nephew, friend to pray?

Seeing you pray and praying with you are the most effective ways.

That means embedding prayer in your daily life.

In prayer give thanks for the gift of a new day; for the food you eat and meals you share; ask for guidance in how to live; bless God at the close of the day, for your ‘creation, preservation, and all the blessings of this life; but above all for thine inestimable love in the redemption of the world by our Lord Jesus Christ, for the means of grace, and for the hope of glory’ (Book of Common Prayer: A General Thanksgiving).

So, what is prayer?

Prayer is the way we grow into closer union with our heavenly Father, with Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit.

Prayer draws us into the divine love and presence, which is the goal of the Christian life.

Prayer forms our dependency on God who is the generator of our lives.

And from that deepening communion you can ‘in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God.’ (Philippians 4.6)

That’s St Paul’s way of saying that it is not just okay, it is fundamental, to ask things of God in prayer.

Abraham repeatedly asks things of God in our first reading, where he pleads on behalf of the righteous people for all those left in a sinful city.

Yet Jesus warns that we must be careful about what we ask for, as he did to the apostles James and John who asked for prestige in the Kingdom of God: ‘you do not know what you are asking’ he says. (Matthew 20.22)

They want glory, but it will be glory revealed in suffering.

We cannot know what God’s answer will be to our prayer.

We can be sure, though, that we will not be tricked – no scorpions or serpents - even if God gives what we do not expect:

 ‘If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!’ (Luke 11.13)

It may not be what you want, expect or hope for, but God’s answer will be good and beautiful and true.

‘Lord, teach us to pray.’

The disciples ask - and they learn - that prayer is the ability to walk and talk with God in the way that Moses did: ‘Thus the Lord used to speak to Moses face to face, as a man speaks to his friend.’ (Exodus 33.11)

And we speak to God as a loving, concerned, accepting parent: ‘Our Father, who art in heaven’.

When you pray, pray like this, says Jesus: he is my Father and yours, he is ‘Our Father, who art in heaven’.

Humble yourselves, therefore, under the mighty hand of God so that at the proper time he may exalt you, casting all your anxieties on him, because he cares for you. (1 Peter 5.6,7)

 

 

 

Waiting on God

Genesis 18.1-10a ‘O  Lord, do not pass by your servant.’

Colossians 1.24-28 ‘The mystery hidden for ages but now revealed to his saints.’

Luke 10.38-42 ‘Martha welcomed him. Mary has chosen the good portion.’

 

On God alone my soul in stillness waits;

from him comes my salvation.

(Psalm 62.1)

+

Our first reading today is known as the Hospitality of Abraham (better titled the Hospitality of Abraham and Sarah) when a mysterious visitation happens and they offer to their visitors the hospitality of their home.

It is a puzzling scene, because the first verse tells us that the Lord appears to Abraham, and then it is three men who are at his door.

This scene has been famously captured in an icon by the Russian iconographer, Andrei Rublev, and is often known as the Icon of the Holy Trinity.

It is little wonder that this has been understood by Christians as a glimpse into the mystery of the Holy Trinity, the One God revealed in Three Persons.

Rublev depicts the three persons as angelic figures, seated at a table, on which there is a golden, chalice-like bowl containing a roasted lamb.

So it becomes an image of the Mystical Supper, the Holy Eucharist, the place of hospitality and receiving the presence of the Lamb of God.

There is much more that can be said, another time, about Rublev’s sublime icon, and how it represents the eternal character of the Godhead.

It probable that the author of the letter to the Hebrews had Abraham’s visitors by the Oaks of Mamre in mind when he writes, ‘do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels unawares’ (Hebrews 13.2).

There is a powerful Biblical imperative to be hospitable; think how many parables and actions of Jesus are set in places of hospitality, and how often he condemns when hospitality is neglected.

Our first reading and our Gospel text open up for us fresh ways of perceiving how we welcome Jesus Christ spiritually and actually into our lives.

Both readings appear to illustrate the same thing: be hospitable to strangers because you never quite know who they are; they might be God in disguise.

But there is something different going on in the Gospel.

Jesus enters a village, which new can assume to be Bethany, for elsewhere in the Gospels we learn that this is the town in which Jesus’ friends Martha, Mary, and their brother Lazarus, live.

As we’ve seen, hospitality to strangers was, and remains, a hugely important part of Near Eastern culture, so the action of Abraham and Sarah, Martha and Mary meets cultural norms and standards.

Except, actually, Mary’s behaviour doesn’t.

Mary doesn’t do what Abraham and Sarah and Martha do, which is show hospitality by urgently preparing food and serving it to the guest.

Mary brings no food, is not frenetic in the panic of hosting an unannounced visitor.

Mary knows a different way of hospitality.

In fact, it may well be that she is the woman who turns up at the house of Simon the Pharisee when the hospitality she showed was in stark contrast to the host: he gave no customary welcome, but she gave lavish devotion to Jesus, washing his feet with her hair and anointing him with fragrant and expensive perfume, highlighting, amongst other things, Simon’s lack of hospitality (cf Matthew 26.6-13; Mark 13.3-9; Luke 7.36-50).

Here in her home Mary sits at Jesus’ feet and, even despite Martha pleadings and apologies, there she stays.

And here’s the bombshell for Martha - and for those of us who like to be busy rolling up our sleeves and doing - Jesus tells Martha that, ‘Mary has chosen the good portion, which will not be taken away from her’. (Luke 10.42)

In other words, Mary’s action is the one of deep hospitality which goes beyond being busy or frantic, but simply delights, silently, in the presence of the guest whom she recognises to be the Lord.

Verses of Psalm 62 could have been written for this scene:

On God alone my soul in stillness waits;

from him comes my salvation.

Wait on God alone in stillness, O my soul;

for in him is my hope. (Psalm 62.1,5)

Martha receives Jesus in a matter of fact way; a guest to be catered for, as did Abraham and Sarah when receiving their three visitors.

Mary is commended for welcoming Jesus in a radically different way of hospitality, paying attention to him, silently and in stillness, listening to his word.

Jesus sees that Martha’s activity is driven by anxiety and inner trouble: “Martha, Martha” Jesus says “you are anxious and troubled about many things, but one thing is necessary.” (Luke 10.41,42)

It echoes his words in St Matthew’s Gospel: ‘seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you’ (Matthew 6.33).

Disciples prioritise Jesus; from which all flows.

These friends of Jesus must learn to be his disciples.

We must learn to be his disciples, sitting at his feet, contemplating and adoring.

This is a call to prayer; learning to pray, becoming men and women of prayer.

It is first in wonder and contemplation that we welcome Jesus Christ the guest to our lives.

Mystical encounter precedes active doing.

Recall Moses at the Burning Bush, he first encountered and contemplated the presence of God before he could go and lead his people from their slavery in Egypt to freedom in the Promised Land.

Of course, a balance is to be struck between doing and being.

The Epistle of James reminds us, ‘be doers of the word, and not only hearers’ (James 1.22) reminding us not to become introspective and turned in on ourselves, but always looking first to Christ.

So today’s gospel has both a practical and a spiritual application.

First, we are to welcome strangers and friends as treasured guests.

The Rule of St Benedict nails it:

All guests who present themselves are to be welcomed as Christ, for he himself will say: I was a stranger and you welcomed me (Matt 25:35). (Rule of Benedict 53.1)

The spiritual application is that the first guest is always Christ, to be welcomed into our lives, worshipped and adored.

When we are invited to come and receive Holy Communion we find he is the host and he is the guest: he invites us to his supper, to the banquet of the Lamb of God, and we respond in humility:

‘Lord, I am not worthy to receive you, [not worthy for you to enter under my roof] but only say the word and my soul shall be healed’.

This is Mary of Bethany’s spiritual posture.

She knows she is not worthy to receive Jesus into her home, and indeed, into her life, but first allows Him to speak the word to bring her healing and peace through his presence.

She is silent in this passage not as a passive, silenced woman, but as an engaged model of discipleship, to which women and men should aspire.

The priority is to fix our gaze and attention on God, from which all else flows.

If our active life dominates our contemplative life, we need to hear Jesus’s words to Martha, ‘you are anxious and troubled [distracted] about many things’.

We live in a distracted and distracting world.

Mary of Bethany has chosen the antidote, ‘the good portion’.

Let’s sit with Mary at the Lord’s feet, to pray, to listen, to learn, to receive, to set aside self to learn from him, for therein lies true hospitality:

On God alone my soul in stillness waits;

from him comes my salvation.

Wait on God alone in stillness, O my soul;

for in him is my hope.

 

Familiar made strange: The Good Samaritan

Deuteronomy 30.10-14 ‘The word is very near you, so that you can do it’

Colossians 1.15-20 ‘All things were created through him and for him.’

Luke 10.25-37 ‘Who is my neighbour?’

 

Who proved to be a neighbour to the man who fell among the robbers?” The lawyer said, “The one who showed him mercy.” And Jesus said to him, “You go, and do likewise.” (Luke 10.37)

+

 

The parable of the Good Samaritan is perhaps Jesus’ most classic parable.

 

It’s the parable that lots of people have heard of, or refer to, even in our increasingly secularised society that doesn’t generally revert to Christian language and imagery.

 

Even if they can’t recount every detail of the parable, they will know the phrase ‘Good Samaritan’ as meaning someone who shows kindness to a person in need.

 

They may know the phrase about ‘passing by on the other side’ to mean ignoring someone in need, but not know where it comes from.

 

And almost certainly they will know the word ‘samaritan’ from the charity established by the Revd Chad Varah in 1953 after he took the funeral of a 14-year-old girl who had committed suicide.

 

The Samaritans respond so powerfully to those who need emotional support.

 

Back to the parable: we might think we know what it’s all about: snooty religious people who won’t help; the outsider who will.

 

It has the simple moral lesson help people in need, don’t “pass by on the other side”.

 

And that is a legitimate reading of the parable.

 

That reading of the parable has power when one walks the streets of Croydon, where all too often we see people lying in the doorways of shops, or around this very church.

 

It’s so difficult, isn’t it, to know quite what to do.

 

Do I go over and help; or am I just ‘passing by on the other side’?

 

Hearing this parable again should indeed make us reconsider what mercy looks like when given to another person, especially the bruised and battered, and how we go and do likewise.

 

Parables have a knack of being endlessly generative, in other words, they generate more and more meaning as you contemplate them, because they are taking you deep into the character of God.

 

The early Christian writers also remind us that the parable not only speaks to our moral sense but our spiritual sense also.

 

They give us a fresh perspective to ask what else might be said by the parable.

 

So how about this interpretation by the Biblical exegete Origen, writing in the late second and early third century?

 

One of the elders wanted to interpret the parable as follows. The man who was going down is Adam. Jerusalem is paradise, and Jericho is the world. The robbers are hostile powers. The priest is the Law, the Levite is the prophets, and the Samaritan is Christ. The wounds are disobedience, the beast is the Lord’s body, the inn, which accepts all who wish to enter, is the Church. And further, the two denarii mean the Father and the Son. The manager of the stable is the head of the Church, to whom its care has been entrusted. And the fact that the Samaritan promises he will return represents the Saviour’s second coming. (Origen – Homilies on Luke, Homily 34)

 

I wonder if you have ever thought of the parable like that?!

 

Now, we could dismiss it as pious nonsense, or reading too much into the text.

 

It certainly is not a practical reading to draw out a moral, or even political message, but it is one that seeks to draw out of the parable things we often miss.

 

What we find with it is an entry into a symbolic world to nourish the spirit, but that also has a direct bearing on our Christian faith and redemption.

 

So, the Parable both speaks of the human condition in general, and you and me in particular, and it tells us the nature of the Church, the place in which we are received, restored and made well.

 

If the man who set off from Jerusalem is Adam, the first human, then the man on the journey is you; it’s me.

 

When we move from the presence of God, of which Jerusalem is a symbol, then we become susceptible to hostile powers that assault and harm the body and soul.

 

Where do we find comfort and healing?

 

It is no longer in the Law and prophets, and remember the lawyer who questioned Jesus knew both of them well.

 

What we learn, with that lawyer, is that the Law and the prophets point us to something more, and are incomplete until they are fulfilled in Jesus Christ: in other words, the Old Testament needs the New to make all things complete, when we can truly appreciate that, ‘the word is very near you. It is in your mouth and in your heart, so that you can do it’. (Deuteronomy 30.14)

 

And can Jesus Christ be the Samaritan?

 

Well, in his humanity he is human, as we are; but, in his divinity, he is utterly other than us, you could say foreign to us, as were the Jews and Samaritans in his day.

 

And let’s see how he acts.

 

The wounds we bear are the wounds of the assaults of the evil one, and we bear the scarring of Original Sin.

 

Into our wounds Jesus pours the oil of unction and his divine healing: this is where we very obviously see the mercy of God in Christ being poured out, soothing the wounds we bear, easing the throb of pain in the scars of human lives.

 

And remember the man on the road had been left for dead; yet Christ comes to bring life, ‘life in all its abundance’ (John 10.10), the ‘life that really is life’ (1 Timothy 6.19).

 

So, in this battered state we find ourselves lying in the gutter, as it were, until Christ - who promises to share and bear our burdens - comes to us and lifts us up, we who ‘are weary and heavy laden’ (Matthew 11.28) and bears us in his arms to give us rest and healing and renewal (Deuteronomy 33.27).

 

And where is the man in the parable taken? He is taken to an inn, which, in Origen’s words, is the Church, a place of hospitality into which all the bruised and battered, scarred and scared of the world may enter to receive comfort.

 

And of course, we have heard about an inn earlier in St Luke’s Gospel: Mary and Joseph found no place to stay; and in the Parable of the Good Samaritan there is an innkeeper.

 

The irony is that no innkeeper is mentioned in the Nativity account, which would ruin many a school nativity play.

 

In fact, that word used in the text, κατάλυμα (kataluma), is often translated as ‘inn’ in English, but it more accurately refers to a ‘lodging place’, ‘guest room’, or ‘upper room’.

 

So, the Church must be a place to receive those broken and battered by all that is hostile to our human flourishing, and does so knowing that Christ - the Good Samaritan, the Lord - will return.

 

I wonder if the two denarii, the two coins represent Christ’s body and blood; his body broken on the Cross by hostile powers, his blood poured out from his saving wounds.

 

After all, as our second reading said, he came ‘to reconcile all things… making peace by the blood of his cross’. (Colossians 1.20).

 

If so, then the Church is where we meet Christ who comes to us again (as the Good Samaritan promised he would) to feed us, nourish us, heal us, restore us and get us to the Jerusalem of our hope.

 

So, the Parable mirrors Christ's redemptive work in saving humanity.

 

It is a powerful illustration of God's love and mercy which we receive, and from which our duty is to love and care for others, even, or especially, those considered enemies or outsiders.

 

Jesus Christ, the Divine One who could seem remote from us, as Samaritans were from Jews, is closer to us than we can imagine: he is our true neighbour, the one who truly shows mercy.

 

In that light we cannot but reflect his compassion and mercy out in the bruising world, and we cannot shut the doors of the church, the inn of hospitality, but draw everyone in – as we ourselves have been drawn in - so that their wounds, and ours, can be tended and their sins, and ours, can be healed and forgiven by the Lover of our souls.

Disciple and apostle

Isaiah 66:10-14c ‘Behold, I will extend peace to her like a river’

Galatians 6.14-18 ‘I bear on my body the marks of Jesus.’

Luke 10.1-9 ‘Your peace will rest on him’

 

‘The kingdom of God has come near to you.’

+

Today’s gospel reading is full of movement, challenge and commission.

It reminds us that being a Christian is not something just done in church, but involves being sent out: ‘go, in the peace of Christ’ as is said at the conclusion of the Eucharist.

Sent out to do something and be something.

Sent out to seek out and notice the Kingdom of God and, bringing healing, declare to people that ‘The kingdom of God has come near to you.’

In the preceding chapter of St Luke’s Gospel, Jesus has been talking to the Twelve.

Now he sends out ahead of him seventy-two others in pairs with a commission to get out into the harvest.

This reminds us that Jesus had way more than twelve disciples.

It tells us that there is much to harvest out in the world: the seeds of the Kingdom are ready, people are ripe for Christ: get out and bring them in to Christ!

In some ancient manuscripts of the Gospel the seventy-two are referred to as the seventy.

It’s not a significant discrepancy, and the number seventy evokes Moses being told to choose seventy men to be elders for the people of Israel.

And the LORD says that they will be given some of the Spirit given to Moses to equip them for their task. (Numbers 11:16-25)

What we see here, in the commission of the seventy or seventy-two, is disciples becoming apostles.

The disciple follows; the apostle is sent: ‘come, follow me’ (Matthew 16:24, Mark 8:34, Luke 9:23); ‘go, in the peace of Christ.’

These disciples, now apostles, they are sent out to harvest.

You are one of the seventy-two today: a disciple become apostle, bearing the apostolic faith of the Church to the world.

Classically you go out to harvest with a scythe or, nowadays, a combine harvester.

What are the apostles sent out with, so that they can harvest?

Nothing!

‘Carry no moneybag, no knapsack, no sandals, and greet no one on the road’. (v4)

So, they go out onto the road barefoot, skint, no snacks in their bag, told to be so single minded in their mission that they don’t get caught up in the small talk of greeting people as they go.

That’s why Jesus says they are ‘lambs sent in the midst of wolves’ (v3)

What does a lamb bring in the midst of wolves, other than being a delicious meal?

The lamb goes in innocency, vulnerability and sacrificially into an arena of hostility, threat and peril.

St Peter captures this sense when he says, ‘Your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour’ (1 Peter 5.8).

Lion or a wolf: the threat level to a lamb is the same.

Peter goes on to say:

Resist him, firm in your faith, knowing that the same kinds of suffering are being experienced by your brotherhood throughout the world. (1 Peter 5.8)

And how true that is.

According to the House of Commons Library, Christians in North Korea, Somalia, Libya, Eritrea, and Yemen are under severe persecution.

There have been recent fatal attacks on churches in Syria.

Lambs – our brothers and sisters in Christ - are in the midst of wolves today, and still, like us, commissioned to find the seeds of the Kingdom of God and to call people to God’s love and presence.

Our own witness as Christians is challenging in a culture that increasingly moves away from its Christian roots and takes Christian values of love, care and compassion and distorts them and sees them mutate.

It is so easy to dilute the faith received from the apostles; to consign Biblical principles to being out of date; to dismiss Christian teaching as out of touch.

The bearers of the Gospel of peace have always been persecuted, ridiculed and even killed by a world where the wolves of anti-Christ lurk.

Rather than lament the presence of wolves we have to have the courage of lambs, the courage of the lambs persecuted around the world, courage from the Lamb of God who went to the Cross to face down and defeat the powers of this world and the cosmic powers.

It is the power of the Lamb of God that is seen in the cross, the place of sacrifice for the life of the world.

It is this sign that St Paul, in our second reading, says is the one thing he will boast about (Galatians 6.14).

So, we are lambs sent in the midst of wolves, carrying nothing with us except the peace, the shalom, of God and, in our bodies, the sign of the cross.

We take no worldly achievements or recognition, but the self-emptying love of Christ.

We go to bring healing and reconciliation in the name of Jesus, to find and declare that the Kingdom of God has come near.

As disciples we hear Jesus’ word and we draw on his life and, as apostles, this word and life is lived in our day to day lives.

And it is to be proclaimed and taken out.

Can you give an account of your faith to those closest to you? Can you give an account of your faith to friends? Can you give an account of your faith to those you don’t even know? Are you ready to be one of the seventy-two?

Before we go as apostles, those sent out, we also need to be disciples, drawing on the life, presence and teaching of Jesus; to be men and women of prayer, dependent not on our wallet, what we carry with us, or what is on our feet, but dependent only on Christ, Lamb of God and Prince of Peace.

As ‘the seventy-two’ of our day let’s join the flow described in Isaiah:

I will extend peace to Jerusalem like a river, and the glory of the nations like an overflowing stream. (Isaiah 66.12)

The Birth of St John the Baptist: What will this child become?

Isaiah 49.1-6 ‘I will make you as a light for the nations, that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth’

Acts 13.22-26 ‘Before the coming of Christ, John had proclaimed a baptism of repentance.’

Luke 1.57-66,80 ‘His name is John’

 

“What then will this child be?”

 

+

 

“What then will this child be?”

 

I suspect every parent, grandparent, aunt or uncle asks that question when they hear that a woman is pregnant.

 

And, as we know from the Gospel, it was asked of John the Baptist too, our special patron saint, whose birth we celebrate today.

 

John picks the question up later in life, as we read in the Acts of the Apostles, our second reading: ‘“What do you suppose that I am? I am not he.”’

 

In other words, define me not by who I am, but by who I proclaim, Jesus Christ: ‘after me one is coming, the sandals of whose feet I am not worthy to untie.’ (Acts 13.35)

 

So, the time came for Elizabeth to give birth.

 

Let’s scroll back a little to how we got to this point.

 

St Luke tells us about Zechariah, one of the temple priests, who was married to Elizabeth from the priestly line of Aaron. (Luke 1.5)

 

You could say that John the Baptist came from an impeccable religious pedigree, but as we’ll see his name, John, will mark a change of direction, bringing the temple – the holy presence of God - to the wilderness as it was originally during the Exodus. (cf Exodus 25–31 and 35–40)

 

So both Elizabeth and Zechariah, we read, were ‘righteous before God, walking blamelessly in all the commandments and statutes of the Lord’ (Luke 1.6)

 

One of their great sadnesses in life was that they had not had children and now were ‘advanced in years’ and so that possibility seemed to have past.

 

That mattered in a society where married women without children would, in many peoples’ minds, appear cursed somehow, or must have done something wrong.

 

The Bible doesn’t see it like that.

 

Not to have children is not a sign of God’s displeasure, but the other way round: to have children is to be a recipient and bearer of God’s fruitfulness.

 

Children are always a gift from God, as the psalm puts it: ‘Children are a heritage from the Lord and the fruit of the womb is his gift’. (Psalm 127.4)

 

Even so, like Abraham and Sarah before them, Zechariah and Elizabeth thought they would not have a child (Genesis 18.11-14).

 

Sarah thought it a comical suggestion that she would have a baby at her age, which is why her son is called Isaac, a name which means ‘one who laughs’ because as Sarah said:

 

“God has made laughter for me; everyone who hears will laugh over me… Who would have said to Abraham that Sarah would nurse children? Yet I have borne him a son in his old age.” (Genesis 21.6-7)

 

It’s telling us, ‘nothing will be impossible with God’. (Luke 1.37)

 

So, it was that Zechariah was in the temple performing his priestly duties, at the ‘hour of incense’ that an angel appeared to him.

 

There are echoes here of the annunciation to Mary when Gabriel comes and tells her she will bear a child.

 

But it doesn’t go well for Zechariah.

 

Unlike like Mary’s acceptance of God’s will for her life, Zechariah doesn’t say ‘be it to me according to thy word’ (Luke 1.38) but starts querying the angelic message.

 

That earns Zechariah the temporary loss of the ability to speak; ironic given that his son will be one of the Gospels’ great speakers and proclaimers. (Luke 1.22-23)

 

There’s a deeper message in all this.

 

Israel, the covenant people of God, had lost its voice of praise, become fruitless, a barren wilderness: the very place John the Baptist will go to begin his call to repentance and prepare the way for the Way, the Truth and the Life, Jesus Christ (John 14.6).

 

John picks up this theme in later life: you can’t say we’re Abraham’s children and do nothing with that, even stones have more capacity for life than those whose fruitfulness has dried up. (Luke 3.8)

 

Yet God is on the move, and this child is a signal of that.

 

Elizabeth conceived and not only had the shame she felt around other people gone, but she was bearing an unborn child with all the potential that an unborn, yet fully alive, child has.

 

The gospel gives us details about John’s unborn life.

 

When the pregnant Mary visited the still pregnant Elizabeth and greeted her, the unborn John danced with delight in his mother’s womb, and Elizabeth says:

 

For behold, when the sound of your greeting came to my ears, the baby in my womb leaped for joy. (Luke 1.44)

 

The vibrancy of unborn life is picked up in our first reading from the prophecy of Isaiah (Isaiah 49):

 

The LORD called me from the womb,

    from the body of my mother he named my name. (v1)

 

And now the LORD says,

    he who formed me from the womb to be his servant, (v5)

 

It’s not just about John, it’s about you and me and the unborn too.

 

What then will this child become? Someone asked that about you once!

 

God forms a purpose in every child conceived before ever we take our first breath.

 

Psalm 139 reminds us of this:

 

For you yourself created my inmost parts;

you knit me together in my mother’s womb.

I thank you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made;

marvellous are your works, my soul knows well. (Psalm 139.12,13)

 

In the light of this beautiful vision of the giftedness and potential of a child it is so sad that we live in a world that disposes of the unborn, those who have no decision, agency or choice, and yet who are ‘fearfully and wonderfully made’ before they’re born.

 

Today children only seem to matter if they are wanted.

 

What a dreadful message: you only matter if you’re wanted by others.

 

The logical conclusion of that is very dark: if you’re not perfect, too weak or too expensive or a burden to others - you’re not wanted.

 

But to Christians everyone is wanted because everyone - even before they’re conceived - belongs first to God: not to a mother, not to a community or nation.

 

All people, without exception, are created in the image and likeness of God called, in many and various ways, to reflect God’s life and glory: ‘before I formed you in the womb, I called you’ as the Lord said to Jeremiah (Jeremiah 1.5)

 

John the Baptist’s life didn’t matter because Elizabeth and Zechariah wanted him: his life mattered because there was a purpose for him, formed and called by God.

 

Abortion with limits is always fatal to an unwanted child; last week MPs lifted the limits.

 

Last week MPs voted to allow medics to assist people, who lack the means or capacity, to die, with some limits. How long will it be before those limits lift?

 

In places where assisted suicide is legal the door has opened to abuses, and those who feel unwanted feeling compelled to die.

 

The Gospel of Jesus Christ is about life: life in all its abundance.

 

That’s why from earliest days his followers have rejected abortion, infanticide and ending life before it’s natural end.

 

This is from a place of compassion and valuing of every life - over which none of us is God – so that we are called to care and alleviate suffering for life.

 

Compassion and life are not in competition; and for life to flourish there needs to be compassion and care: compassionate care for frightened and confused mothers; for those living with disabilities; for those terminally ill: for every life matters.

 

Contemplating John’s call and birth is about him, yes: but also about who we are; what God calls us to be; and what life is all about.

 

“What then will this child be?”

 

Zechariah answers question about John, in the text we know as the Benedictus, said daily in church at Morning Prayer:

 

And you, child, shall be called the prophet of the Most High, 

for you will go before the Lord to prepare his way,

To give his people knowledge of salvation

by the forgiveness of all their sins. (Luke 1.76,77)

 

What then will you be?