Paying homage: offering worship

Preached as a sermon at Croydon Minster on Sunday 5 January, 2020, kept as the Feast of the Epiphany, readings: Isaiah 60.1-6; Matthew 2.1-12.

‘On entering the house, they saw the child and Mary his mother; and they knelt down and paid him homage’ (Matthew 2.11)

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Familiar yet strange. The account of the journey and arrival of the Magi at the stable of Bethlehem, is both a very familiar scene and a rather strange one.

The very familiarity of the scene of the Magi entering the birthplace of Jesus, as represented in our crib, can make us miss some of the things that are going on and the things our imaginations add in.

For a start, the child is not a 10 day old new-born by the time the Magi arrive; the shepherds have long gone; St Matthew’s Gospel does not give us a number of how many Magi there were, although we know there were three gifts; the Magi are not actually described as Kings.

Being familiar with a scene also means we miss things that are there in the text. And tucked away in St Matthew’s account of the Magi is a little word that is really quite significant in the passage, appearing, as it does, three times.

The Magi say to King Herod: ‘Where is this child who has been born King of the Jews? For we have observed his star at its rising and we have come to pay him homage’ (Matt 2.2)

Herod responds: ‘Go and search diligently for the child; and when you have found him, bring me word so that I may also go and pay him homage’ (Matt 2.8)

St Matthew describes: ‘On entering the house, they saw the child and with Mary his mother; and they knelt down and paid him homage’ (Matt 2.11)

The recurring word is homage. Homage is a rather strange word for us today. It tends not to trip off the tongue or be used in ordinary speech.

It’s a word that seemingly belongs to medieval novels or Arthurian legend, with liege men paying homage to their lord or king. It lingers on in the British coronation rite when the bishops and lords pay homage to the newly crowned Sovereign.

But, as is the way when we read the scriptures in translation, we find that the original word used conveys something different and, usually, something more.

The word in the original Greek text of St Matthew’s Gospel is proskuneo. St Matthew’s Gospel, like St John’s, uses it a great deal, in different contexts.

The literal root meaning of proskuneo is ‘to kiss toward’. From there the term developed the sense ‘to fall down or prostrate oneself’ (as in kissing the ground), and hence ultimately ‘to worship’ or ‘adore.’

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The Magi arrive in Jerusalem at a royal palace; the natural place to look for a king to whom to pay homage: except this is the palace of a tyrannical, sadistic, puppet king, Herod, not the newly born king of the Jews. They’re in the wrong place; their expectations are off beam.

There is no reason to assume they consider Jesus anything more than a king. The proskuneo they want to pay is homage in the sense of acknowledging a royal presence.

Herod’s expressed desire to perform proskuneo is not a respectful, stooping kiss towards Jesus; but rather than infanticidal lunge to kill him. The only echo of a kiss in Herod’s desire is akin to Judas’s death kiss that consigns Jesus to arrest and trial.

So far, then, the homage of the Magi and of Herod is an empty gesture of ingratiation and nothing more.

But there is a transformation. Something moves the Magi’s proskuneo from courtly homage to reverent, worshipful devotion.

And Herod gave the game away. He asked the scribes and priests about the Messiah. For the first time the Magi heard of the promise of the One True God - the King of kings and Lord of lords - as articulated in scripture by the prophet Micah. This was the promise that the Messiah would arise in Bethlehem. The star told them about a king, the prophet told them about a promise they had never known before.

The Magi were to find something for which they had not knowingly been looking, but which their hearts longed and ached for: the Hope of the Nations, of every race and people and not solely the people of Israel.

That’s why the Book of Common Prayer calls the feast of the Epiphany, ‘The Manifestation of Christ to the Gentiles’. That’s why today is a day when we should pray for spiritual seekers, that they may find the desire of their restless hearts in the Living God.

This is the attractive and attracting light of God, of which Isaiah speaks in our first reading: ‘nations shall come to your light, and kings to the brightness of your dawn. (Isaiah 60.3). This light transforms; this light converts; this light warms hearts.

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‘On entering the house, [the Magi] saw the child and Mary his mother; and they knelt down and did him proskuneo’ (Matthew 2.11)

Entering a house, not a palace, and seeing a child with his unsophisticated mother, far from home and with no regal trappings, completed their transformation.

The expectation of the Magi, the spiritual seekers, is transformed. If they were seeking a king of the Herod mould, then Jesus was not it: courtly homage would be pointless.

So the Magi kneel, fall down, prostrate themselves, showering kisses before offering any of their gifts: of gold, frankincense or myrrh.

That is our primary proskuneo to open the treasure chest of our hearts. I know as I have got to know people here that there are many treasures to our Christ. For some it may feel that the lid hasn’t been opened for a while, is a bit creaky, but still we open it up. We open the treasure chest to give and to receive.

The Magi first give proskuneo to the King of kings. And so can we! As Christ, manifest in the sacrament, in bread and wine, is held before us we sink to our knees to receive him; receiving his offering of himself to, and for, us.

Falling to our knees in adoration, bending our hearts in devotion is not a transaction but an act of love. We don’t pay homage to Christ; we offer and give worship to him. It’s what prompts St Paul’s magnificent assertion that, ‘At the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth’ (Philippians 2.10).

May we bend our knees and hearts in adoration, hope and love.

Move on from the weather: worship; pray; love.

A sermon preached at Croydon Minster on the Ninth Sunday after Trinity (18 August 2019). Reading: Jeremiah 23.23-29; Luke 12.49-56.

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I don’t know about you, but just about every conversation I have had recently has begun with the major topic of the day – not Brexit, not Trump, not even England’s performance in the cricket or the return of the Premier League  – but, yes, the weather!

And haven’t we had a great deal to talk about: unseasonal deluges and, only a few weeks ago, a heat wave and record temperatures.

Of course, the weather has become a rather more serious business than it used to be because of the related climate issues that it highlights.

That said conversation about the weather is often a distraction. An item on BBC Radio 5 last week explored how when we talk about the weather it is often a social nicety before a proper conversation; but it can also be a way of avoiding a deeper conversation altogether. Certainly inhabitants of the British Isles have plenty of weather related topics of conversation.

In this morning’s gospel reading Jesus rails against superficial conversations about the weather and dodging the questions that go deeper.

⁵⁴ Jesus also said to the crowds, ‘When you see a cloud rising in the west, you immediately say, “It is going to rain”; and so it happens. ⁵⁵And when you see the south wind blowing, you say, “There will be scorching heat”; and it happens. ⁵⁶You hypocrites! You know how to interpret the appearance of earth and sky, but why do you not know how to interpret the present time?

We read some signs, usually meteorological ones, and ignore the ones that point to the heart of things.

There are huge questions here: how do we interpret the ‘present time’? What are the signs of the present time that we should be noticing?

Let’s just remind ourselves that the gospel passage began with stark words that still have the capacity to shock: Jesus speaks of fire coming to earth; of stress; of division; of setting people against one another.

We can set this alongside words of John the Baptist, our patron saint, (who denies being the Messiah) and says: ‘one who is more powerful than I is coming…He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire’. (Luke 3.16b) Or in Jeremiah: ‘Is not my word like fire, says the LORD, and like a hammer that breaks a rock in pieces?’ (Jeremiah 23.29)

But what of this division that Jesus says he has come to bring?

There is a great shaking up going on: disruption and turmoil. This is not ‘gentle Jesus, meek and mild’.

Jesus, like the prophets before him, is presenting a direct question in dramatic terms. The question is ‘what are the relationships that are most precious to you, and what do they look like?’

Is it your biological relationships? Is it the people you identify with because of race, class, political outlook, religious belief? Or is it the person who is different, disturbing or disfigured?

Taking discipleship seriously, being a follower of Jesus Christ, means we have to face those questions if we are to play a part in heralding the coming Kingdom of God.

This present time sees divisions based on suspicion, oppression, rampant nationalism, supremacism, casual racism, greed. Our time sees people left behind because of an inability to find a home in ‘mainstream’ society, unable to live life to the full because of anxiety about debt, housing or having a meaningful job. That’s true globally, nationally and locally.

How do we interpret all that?

Allegiance first to Jesus Christ means we see all our relationships in a different way. Jesus is clearly not about smashing up our precious relationships with those whom we love, but he is saying that the love we share for our family should spill out beyond and not be restricted just to them. As he says in regard to his own nearest and dearest, ‘My mother and my brother [and my sister] are those who hear the word of God and do it.’ (Luke 8.21)

Doesn’t all that move us away from talking about the weather?

Jesus, like the prophets, disrupts and shakes us up. That is deeply uncomfortable, but it is the beginning of turning our hearts back to the LORD and his Kingdom.

The Kingdom of God and the renewed creation is a Kingdom ‘of righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit' (Romans 14.17) says St Paul.

And we know that the Holy Spirit is not the spirit of division and enmity, but rather of binding men, women and children of all 'tribes and peoples and languages' around the throne of God (Revelation 7.9).

From the disruption and division of which Jesus speaks emerges - like gold from a crucible - the precious, foundational essentials of life in the Spirit.

So how do we respond?

We worship. We pray. We love

We worship. As followers of Jesus Christ we patiently gather in worship at the altar of God where we find that we are brothers and sisters of one another, and of the saints who have gone before us, especially when we are of different tribes, peoples and languages. Our worship, echoing the worship of heaven, models the relationships where love spills out to all around us and a symphony of praise swirls to the throne of grace.

We pray. Not to avoid the realities of the world but to be instruments of transformation, being open in prayer to be transformed by Christ, so that we can live as those who read and interpret our present time and act in Christ’s healing and reconciling name.

We love. We love when we are loved. Love is always transformative; transforming relationships, situations and ourselves. And, as St Paul reminds us, when all is shaken up, divided and stripped away, God’s love never ends (1 Corinthians 13.8a).

The message today: move on from the weather: worship; pray; love.

God or Mammon: Where are true riches to be found?

First preached as a sermon at Guildford Cathedral on 18th September 2016, on the text Luke 16.1-13.

Tax collectors Marinus van Reymerswaele

‘Mammon’ is a good old fashioned word: as the Authorised Version of the Bible renders Jesus’ words at the end of the gospel reading today: ‘you cannot serve God and mammon’ (Luke 16.13). More modern translations, accurately, translate the original Greek word, mamōnas, as ‘wealth’ or ‘riches’. But mammon conveys something a little bit more, it suggests wealth or riches that are not entirely above board, a bit dodgy or are the object of worship.

‘You cannot worship God and mammon’. It’s a pretty punchy conclusion to Jesus’ rather extraordinary parable, variously known as the ‘Unjust Steward’, the ‘Dishonest’ or ‘Crooked Manager’.

Every time I read this parable, and believe me, I read it through a number of times in preparation for preaching this morning, I find myself squirming. What is going on here? Why do I squirm and recoil when I read it?

First of all, I don’t like the manager. He’s squandering the rich owner’s property and is negligent. He clearly should have been disciplined years before. And when he’s found out - after whistle-blowers have finally plucked up courage to expose him - the manager wriggles and finds strategies to make the best of a decidedly bad situation.

Here we don’t have hot blooded sin - like rampant sexual passion, intemperate violence or spur of the moment lying, which are bad enough - but cold blooded sin, calculated plotting and scheming. This is the worst kind of white collar crime going on.

And then there’s the rich man, the master, who colludes with all of this and somehow thinks it’s laudable. Many a tycoon seems to enjoy seeing an employee being quite as devious and slippery as the tycoon himself: after all, what were his riches based on?

The debtors also quite happy to accept the freebie that they are gaining: none of them challenges the dishonesty of the manager. We might even start to think, ‘well, I wouldn’t be like the manager, and I wouldn’t be like the fat cat tycoon, but as for the debtors, well, what they did by accepting some reduction of the debt they owed wasn’t illegal: he’s rich he won’t notice…’

So what’s Jesus up to in this parable? Is he really commending all this behaviour? If we think that, then I want to suggest that we might read the parable completely the other way round.

The problem comes when we read this parable thinking that Jesus is commending it to us wholeheartedly. Jesus isn’t holding this parable up as an example to us to look at, study and replicate. Rather he is holding a mirror up and asking: ‘what do you see of yourself in this? How do you make choices as you negotiate the complexities of the world? What does all this look like to you when you are my disciple?’

This parable should make us squirm and then examine why. We should take heart from that squirming; it means that our ethical antennae are alert to the contradictions in the parable, and the cognitive dissonance it contains, because we realise that there is something profoundly wrong going on, that there is no such thing as victimless crime ultimately, and that lack of probity and honesty in small things grows and mutates rapidly into something bigger and impossible to control. Jesus refuses to give us the answers we expect but makes us do some work so that we are not the spiritual equivalent of the manager, being bad stewards of what belongs to someone else: that is to say, not being negligent and squandering our God-given gifts.

When we squirm at this parable we are drawing from a deep ethical tradition of the Hebrew Scriptures articulated by, amongst others, the prophet Amos who condemns those who exploit the poor, by making small measures, profiteer and passing off the sweepings of the wheat for good grain.

Yet we know, and this is hard too, that the world of business relies on risk, on taking a chance and exploiting an opportunity. Without entrepreneurs generating money and moving it round then economies stagnate and poverty becomes endemic: look at North Korea or Zimbabwe. The parable of the talents reminds us that money needs to move and work in an economy: the servants who made their money work and grow are commended and rewarded; the servant who dug a hole and put his talents of money in it is told that, because his expectations were nil, he should expect nothing now the master has returned.

Then there is the whole business of being financial directors, fund managers, budget holders, accountants or those of us dealing with household budgeting: each of us has to manage money, however limited or plentiful it is.

The Cathedral itself has to wrestle with a financial deficit and ask questions about endowment income, the balance of income and expenditure, prudent use of resources, the fostering of generosity.

There are plenty of good Christian disciples who are faced with the challenges money brings at work and at home, and many, I know, wrestle deeply with issues around the ethics of money, endowments, dividend yields, implications of low-interest rates and personal debt.

This is where the word ‘mammon’ comes back in. Mammon is corrupted, corrupting wealth. It is the blind pursuit of wealth hanging the consequences for the poor. Wealth becomes mammon when it is pursued for its own sake, when little corners are cut or small deceits begin and inevitably snowball into bigger ones. That is the deceit and corruption of mammon, that money is worth chasing for itself and not what it can do for others.

So then, this parable holds a mirror up to us to ask do we seek to serve God or mammon? Managing wealth with an eye to the Common Good for the building up of the Kingdom of God is one thing, blind pursuit of wealth for its own sake is quite another.

This parable moves us to ask where true riches are to be found. We need constantly to move from serving mammon to wealth that serves; from worshipping mammon to wealth that worships and is used to honour God

This is where a reading of the parable that says it is not an example but an examination actually gives us space to hold together commitment to justice, equity and fair dealings with the demands of making money and appreciating its value.

The binary choice: God or mammon has always been, and will always be, a demanding one. Our very presence here today, and the offerings we make financially and the bread and wine presented, point us away from mammon and to the pursuit of true riches and wealth which is receiving the inexhaustible riches of God, given without price and yet everything given.

© Andrew Bishop, 2016