A Sermon for All Saints Day (01/11/20): White in the Blood of the Lamb

 

White in the Blood of the Lamb

Revelation 7:9-17

These are they who have come out of the great ordeal; they have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.

On All Saints Day we might ask: "Who are the saints?"

Perhaps a slightly facetious answer might be: "Someone you would name a church after."

Though many a true word is spoken in jest. That definition would provide us with quite a select group of people. Methodists indeed are very narrow in who they will name churches after. Which is perhaps a little odd, because the one Christian festival beyond those which retell the Gospel story, which John Wesley was enthusiastic about is this one, All Saints. Indeed very few Methodist Churches are named after someone with “saint” in front of their name. The few that are named that way are named after a very small group indeed: only apostles, and not even all of them. So I have been minister of churches called St. Paul’s and St Andrew's, and I certainly know of Methodist Churches called St. John’s. But that is about the limit. The notable absence from that select group is St. Peter! But if a saint is someone you would name a church after, then there is perhaps another group that Methodists appear to consider saints. There is John Wesley of course. There plenty of chapels erected to his memory. And there are one or two others from the first generation of Methodist preachers:  I can think of Thomas Coke, the founder of the Methodist Missionary Society, president of the Methodist conference in 1812, after whom the large Methodist Church in the centre of Kingston, Jamaica, is named. After that the names can become rather obscure. There is William Bourne one of the founders of Primitive Methodism. And there is Robert Young who was president of conference in 1856. And there is also Peter Mackenzie, who almost no one outside the village he was minister in with the chapel that bears his name has ever heard of. Then Peter Lee who was a Methodist local preacher who not only has a Methodist church named after him but the whole town that it is located in. Though perhaps he receives that honour not exclusively for his undoubted faith. Of course we know other Christians have a more extensive list of people they will name their churches after. The word “saint” becomes a title of honour for a special kind of Christian. To be a saint is to be an “illustrious” Christian, in the proper sense, someone whose life illustrates what it is to be a Christian. And therefore someone who it is worth naming a church after - to remind us of that life

We sometimes remember though that the word saint began as a more inclusive idea. In the New Testament it simply refers to the members of the church! The church is the gathering of the saints. Though perhaps in that original context being a member of the church was a lot more demanding that it tends to be now. Much more than having a name entered on a membership roll and being handed a membership ticket. Following Jesus was demanding and risk. It possibly meant alienation from family and friends. It meant becoming part of a persecuted minority. Suffering was clearly understood to be part of the deal. And from time to time it could cost you your life. Being a Christian did sometimes mean taking up a cross and following Jesus in a quite literal sense. Committing yourself to follow Jesus was committing yourself to a costly discipleship. The bar for the church being a gathering of saints was set a little higher than simply turning up each week.

But in his vision St. John (one of the people we would name a church after) is shown something quite different:

I looked, and there was great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and all peoples and languages.

John is shown a gathering that is truly inclusive. People of types from everywhere. And there is a vast uncountable number of them. Our definitions of the saints are too narrow. John is given a vision which fulfils the promise made way back to Abraham: that his descendants would be more numerous than the stars, and that he would become a blessing to every nation. John’s vision is one of a gathering of saints for whom numbers run out. The lists of saints we might make is never going to be long enough. There is an uncountable multitude of people who are saints before God. Who this crowd are offers us a somewhat different definition of who the saints are:

These are they who have come out of the great ordeal; they have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.

That must be one of the most startling images in all of scripture, a striking oxymoron: whitening robes in blood! The “great ordeal” is the traumatic events at the heart of the vision that makes up the Book of Revelation. These are the people who have refused to be conformed to the beast and have resisted the allure of Babylon. They ones who have stayed loyal to the Lamb. The white robes indicate that these are martyrs, or at the very least they have suffered because of their loyalty to Christ. The crowd though is victorious, they are:

Robed in white with palm branches in their hands.

What John sees perhaps reminds him of the victory parade which led Jesus into Jerusalem. So he knows the connection between victory and suffering. But this, like Jesus himself, is a crowd of sufferers who have conquered. They are not conquerors who happened to have suffered. These are the weak who are made victorious by Christ, not the strong who have (falsely) claimed victory in his name.

In more prosaic less fantastical terms. The saints are those who have not accepted life on the terms that the powers of this world offers it. Indeed the reason they have suffered is because they have spoken out against that. They have not accepted that life has to be lived in terms of greed and acquisition and exploitation. And they have not be drawn away by the temptation of the things that life like that might offer. The saints are the ones who have lived the life shown in the life of Jesus. They are the ones of have taken the side of and witnessed for the hungry, the poor and the oppressed. They have done this whilst remaining alongside the poor and the oppressed, being poor and oppressed with them. They have never succumbed to the temptation of claiming power in this world on behalf of the poor and oppressed, which is a strategy which always leads to betrayal and ultimately catastrophe. Doing this in many places and at many times this has come at the cost of suffering. No one should have to suffer for doing good or for defending the weak, but the reality is that they do.

The thing that perhaps must be said is that “great multitude” is more inclusive than we might sometimes allow it to be. It includes many who never named the name of Jesus. Their inclusion is on the basis of how they live, not necessarily on the basis of the opinion they held or the words they used to describe what they were doing. But they are the ones who nonetheless lived lives that continued Christ’s life, who followed the way of the lamb and showed that life to the world.

One part of our earlier definition of “saint” was accurate. Saints are “illustrious” Their lives show us the kind of lives that should be lived by those who claim loyalty to Jesus. Part of the struggle for the Church in the present, in the places where Christianity had been dominant for so long, is that we have forgotten what saints look like, because the circumstances that create them haven’t existed. In the absence of martyrs it has become difficult for us to see what being a Christian should look like. No one should have to suffer for what they believe, or indeed for trying to do good. But being a Christian, a saint in the broadest sense, demands something more. It requires of would-be saints: witnessing against the beast, speaking out against all that it is monstrous in the world. And requires refusal to be conformed to world as it is. And most of all it requires following the way of the Lamb , the way of peace and reconciliation. The saints are the ones show us they way to become part of that great crowd ourselves.

Amen.

White in the Blood of the Lamb by Christopher Wood-Archer is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

A Sermon for the Twenty First Sunday after Pentecost (25/10/20): The Last Two Questions

The Last Two Questions

Matthew 22:34-46 

Something is happening in Jerusalem. It is one of those moments when everyone knows that a crisis is coming. Like one of those hot heavy afternoons, when the air feels thick, close and dense, that can only end in a thunderstorm before evening. Jesus arrived in the city on Sunday. He’d come, surrounded by thousands who were singing songs of hope and expectation. They had welcomed him like a liberating hero. Everyone knows that by the end of this week the storm will break. The decisive moment will have come. Each of the differing groups within Israel knows something dreadful is about to happen. What they all want to know is: Is this the day of the Lord, or is this just another of those senseless disasters that seem to afflict them? And whichever it is, whose side is Jesus on? Before that crisis unrolls, all of the interested, rival parties are manoeuvring for position. They are trying to decide from which direction the wind will blow. They are trying to figure out where they must stand to weather the crisis which Jesus is creating, and how they should respond to him. Singly and in groups the differing parties within the national life of Israel come to Jesus in these days while he is teaching in the Temple. First come the chief-priests and the scribes who were dismayed by the cries of “Hosanna!” which Jesus had prompted. Then the chief-priests come back, this time accompanied by the elders of the people, and demand to know by what authority Jesus is acting. The chief-priests come a third time, on this occasion with the Pharisees, when they realise that Jesus’ pointed stories are pointing at them. After that the Pharisees come back, this time the Herodians come too, with a trick question about paying taxes. Then the Sadducees show up with a convoluted question about the resurrection. And on each occasion Jesus gets the better of their questions and defeats their attempts to make him define himself according to their agendas, as an enemy or as an ally of any of them. Jesus remains an outlier from the groups vying for power among the people of God. He continues to speak, as he has from the beginning, with a voice and an authority that is all his own.

The Pharisees approach Jesus one last time. They have seen Jesus get the better of their bitterest rivals, the Sadducees. The Pharisees still suspect that Jesus might be persuaded to take their side. This is why they have kept coming back to him so often throughout his ministry. They still hope he might join them, and bring the crowds with him. One of them, a lawyer, approaches Jesus as he is teaching in the temple.

“Teacher,” he says, “which commandment in the law is the greatest?”

This question about the law stands like a bookend to the whole of Jesus’ teaching ministry. When he started out, when people, the Pharisees amongst them, had first begun to wonder about Jesus, he told them:

“Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets; I have come not to abolish but fulfill.” (Matt. 5:17)

The law and the prophets are the defining teaching of God’s people. To be God’s people is to hear and obey what is written in the law. To be God’s people is to hear and live by the judgements and promises  that are spoken forth by the prophets. The question that has been raised by Jesus’ ministry all along in the minds of the Pharisees, as well as in the minds of the chief-priests and elders and Herodians and all the rest, the question raised by Jesus for all who would be God’s people is: what do those things mean? Is Jesus in continuity with those things, or does his ministry bring about a fundamental break with the past? The Pharisees define themselves by their meticulous adherence to the law. They are that strange combination, they are both radical and conservative. They take hold of the law, with all that has been handed down with it for 1400 years. They grasp it with a fierce passion, and they demand the same passion from everyone around them. The lawyer’s question asks one last time: is Jesus with them?

But even this question is not altogether straight-forward. It still contains something of the deceptiveness of the questions which the Pharisees have been asking Jesus all the way through his ministry. In the Pharisees’ minds the answer to the question, “which commandment is the greatest?” is “all of them!” The commandment which regulates the fringe on their robes is as important as the one which tells them not to commit murder. Every commandment comes from God, and therefore every commandment must be obeyed with equal determination. Paul, who has something of a Pharisaic turn of mind, knows and later points out that to break one commandment is in effect to have broken the whole law of God. But as the Pharisees, and their friends the scribes, amply demonstrate, the law (and the prophets) is always subject to interpretation.

Jesus’ answer though does not come as a surprise:

“You shall love the Lord you God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.”

And Jesus, as he always does, gives more of an answer than his questioner is really looking for:

“And a second is like it. You shall love your neighbour as yourself.”

There is no controversy here. No one among the people of God disputes that these commandments stand at the forefront of the law. Their remit is so extensive as to include the intention of every other one of the 612 commandments in the law as well as everything found in the prophets. To be God’s people, in the time of Moses, at the moment Jesus stands in the Temple, and in all eternity, requires one thing: to love God. It requires that his people attend to reality, to what is really real, to what stands behind all that we experience in history and in each moment of our lives, and to know that it comes from God. To be God’s people is to know that this is all what God has done, and that it is good, and we shall love God for it.  And God’s people will love God with the intensity of heart, soul and mind, with the singleness of purpose that the Pharisees and Jesus both demand.

Yet God is an abstract. Our neighbours are real. The first commandment in practice can only be obeyed in the second. Each neighbour is made in the image of God, it is in the neighbour that God’s people encounter God. It is only by always seeking their well-being, in showing the same loving kindness shown by God, that God’s people can express their love for him. In practice, all of the law and prophets are built on this. It is hard to know who God is. It is hard to know what to do for our neighbours. The law and the prophets tell us.

The law and the prophets are but one pillar that supports the house of God’s people. The other is the hope in God which the prophets inspire. The other is the promise that God’s people will be free to serve God in holiness and righteousness without fear. The other pillar in God’s house is the promise of peace. This is what all God’s people look forward to and live in anticipation of. And this hope had become focused in the figure of the Messiah, the one anointed by God to bring about God’s reign and to establish that peace.

The crowd has already made up its mind. When they sang “Hosanna” as Jesus entered Jerusalem a few days ago they declared their belief that Jesus is the one. He is the one appointed by God to answer that prayer, “Hosanna! Save now!” This is why everyone knows the crisis is upon them. In the next few days it will become clear whether the crowd are right or not. But the chief-priests and the elders and the Herodians and all the rest are still trying to pick a side. Is the crowd right? Is Jesus the Messiah?

Is this the day of the Lord? Or is Jesus about to bring disaster down on all their heads?

Time and again Jesus has answered his opponents’ questions with a question. And he does so again.

“What do you think of the Messiah? Whose son is he?”

Here is the question about that other pillar. Who is the Messiah? What will he be like? What have we seen before that will help us to recognise him when he comes? The answer to Jesus’ question, like the answer to the Pharisees’ before it, is hardly controversial. Everyone who has paid half-attention to the prophets knows the answer to that:

They said to him, “The son of David.”

There is no one among God’s people who disputes this. This is what God’s people are looking forward to: The establishment of God’s reign on earth under a king who has the same quality of closeness to God as the great king of the past. A thousand years ago a king reigned who gave to God’s people a brief period when they were free to worship God with fear, and when among them there was peace. Of the titles which people gave to Jesus, “Son of David” was prominent among them. Though as it happens it is not a title which Jesus uses of himself. Jesus doesn’t disagree with the Pharisees’ answer, but he does wonder what it could possibly mean. He has one last question, the final exchange in the long to-and-fro between Jesus and his opponents:

“How is it then that David by the Spirit calls him Lord?”

Jesus reminds his questioners of a time when speaking prophetically in a psalm David had said:

“The Lord said to my Lord, ‘sit at my right hand until I put your enemies under your feet.’”

Everyone agrees that David is talking about the Messiah there. God says to his anointed one to sit in the place of honour until all that God is seeking to accomplish for him is finished. But in that sentence David refers to the Messiah as “my Lord.” Yet a son cannot rule over a father. The replacement cannot be greater than the original. At first sight Jesus appears to have disappeared down the rabbit hole of obscure word games that the scribes and the lawyers seemed to find themselves in. But he is in fact pointing to a fundamental contradiction in the way the Pharisees were believing in God. Indeed Jesus points to a problem for all God’s people. Being God’s people is a “tradition.” That is, it is to receive something that is being handed on. This is why the question of the law and the prophets is so important. They are the substance of what is being handed on. Loyalty to those things are what define God’s people, there is no disputing that! But the problem with tradition, the problem with receiving what is handed on is that it tends to make God’s people (small ‘c’) conservative. They look to the past and allow it to shape their present and their future. But the past is too narrow a vision to understand what God is doing. It is not enough to call the Messiah “the Son of David,” even though Jesus’ followers are still right to use that title for him. Jesus is never just a replacement, a copy, of an illustrious original. At first sight the question: “How can the Messiah be David’s son if David says. . .” at first sight that question seems like a strange, obscure question to finally silence Jesus’ opponent. But it does! It does because it finally and conclusively demonstrates that when Jesus says “The kingdom of heaven is at hand” he means something different than when the chief-priests and elders and Herodians and Pharisees and everyone else who looks to past mean when they say they are looking for the kingdom of heaven. And it is an irreconcilable difference. Jesus has not come to restore anyone’s idealised past to them.

By the end of the week, the storm breaks. Silenced, the opponents of Jesus, chief-priests, scribes, Herodians and all the rest conspire together. They contrive to have Jesus killed by the Romans. By Friday evening Jesus is dead and buried. On Sunday morning God does what God has never done before: he raises Jesus from the dead, to die no more. God gives a sign and a promise to all who would follow Jesus that they will share in his life. Jesus is vindicated. His opponents picked the wrong side. This is the day of the Lord

To be God’s people is to receive what has been handed on from the past. The law and the prophets stand unchanged and everlasting. Loyalty to that teaching is what defines the people of God. Their life is founded on, and built up from that double commandment: Love God; love your neighbour. And Jesus is the one who brings about the fulfilment of the promises made by the law and the prophets. Jesus does establish God’s reign in which God’s people can worship without fear and in which they can experience peace. But the past gives too narrow a vision of what God can do. God’s action in the world is never simply a repetition of what has gone before, nor is it ever a restoration of what is thought to be lost. What God does in Christ is new every morning.

Amen.

The Last Two Questions by Christopher Wood-Archer is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

A Sermon for the Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost (18/10/20): A Trick Answer to a Trick Question

 A Trick Answer to a Trick Question

Matthew 22:15-22

Jesus’ answers the question which the Pharisees put to him:

“Give therefore to the emperor the things that the emperor’s and to God the things that are God.”

There is a fundamental question which God’s people must always answer, how does God’s people live in the world. How do God’s people live and remain faithful and obedient to God in the face of all the powers that exist in the world? How do they retain their identity as God’s people? But also how do they fulfil the mission which God has given? How can God’s people engage with the world and do in and for the world what God wants them to. The two sides of those questions are in tension. They seem to pull God’s people in opposite directions. One impulse among God’s people is to stand apart from the world as separate and different and distinctive, as a way of maintaining their identity. The other is to become immersed in the affairs of the world and engaged in the needs of the world and its politics.

Opposition to Jesus produces strange alliances. Often it is a case of “My enemy’s enemy is my friend.” The Pharisees and the Herodians could hardly be further apart. They truly are strange bedfellows. It is a curiosity to find them united in an attempt to embarrass and discredit Jesus. They represent opposite poles of the answer to the question of the place of God’s people in the world. The Pharisees are the ones pulled in the direction of separation. Their mission among God’s people is to call them to faithfulness to God.  The Herodians represent the opposite impulse. They are the ones who accommodate themselves to the world. They engage with the world and its politics on the world’s terms Despite their opposition to one another, both the Pharisees and the Herodians recognise Jesus as a threat to them and their influence among God’s people. Jesus presents a third radical way of being faithfully God’s people in the world, that is in opposition to both the separatism of the Pharisees and the accommodation of the Herodians.

The question which the Pharisees take to Jesus is a trick question. They intend that Jesus either embarrass or incriminate himself with the answer which he must give. They wish to use his sincerity and forthrightness against him. But their question is as insincere as the compliments their followers pay to him:

“Teacher we know that you are sincere and teach the way of God in accordance with the truth and show deference to no one for you do not regard people with partiality.”

They don’t mean it. The “disciples” of the Pharisees are a strange group. This is the only place they appear in the Gospels. Surely disciples, followers, of the Pharisees are just Pharisees? What appears to be happening here is that the leading Pharisees are plotting against Jesus, but realise that Jesus will suspect a trick if they go in person. So they send their less prominent and less well known disciples, who Jesus might not recognise, to pose their trick question. What they say about Jesus is true. It’s just that they don’t believe it themselves. If they did, they would know that it wouldn’t matter who asked their question, Jesus would always give the same answer. That is what sincerity means. Jesus is always truthful. The Pharisees and their disciples say things they don’t actually believe. They are hypocrites.

The disciples of the Pharisees ask their masters’ question:

“Tell us what you think, is it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor or not?”

This is the way in which the question of the relationship between God’s people and the world takes a concrete form for the people of Jesus day. God’s people are living in a world dominated by the power of the Empire. Just as God’s people have always and will always live in this world which is dominated by the latest shape that that power takes. The question for God’s people is; can they accept that rule? To what extent can they allow themselves to acquiesce or even be co-opted by that power? Jesus of course knows that the question is a trap. It is a trick question. It is meant to present him with an insoluble dilemma, between defending the sovereignty of God and accepting the actual power of Empire in the world. And of course, as he always does, Jesus sidesteps the trick question and turns the tables on his opponents:

“Why are you putting me to the test, you hypocrites. Show me the coin used for the tax.”

Jesus’ questioners, the Pharisees, again demonstrate their hypocrisy. They are caught in possession of a denarius, the silver coin with its idolatrous graven image of the emperor and its blasphemous inscription that declares Caesar both Lord and Saviour. But perhaps on this occasion their hypocrisy is less willful, it is merely the product of the impossibility of their project. There is simply no way to separate yourself from the world. Their puritanism is unobtainable. There is no space in the world where it is possible to live apart from the world And it’s not possible to construct such a place. Try as we might we can’t make ourselves separate from the messy compromises that are necessary simply to live in the world.

Jesus’ answer is every bit as much a trick answer as the question is a trick question. His reply is subtly ambiguous:

“Give to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s.”

Jesus is carefully disingenuous. His answer can be interpreted in opposite ways depending on your outlook. And as such how you hear those words exposes what you really think. It is an ingenious reply to the question which was trying to trap him. The Heriodians can hear Jesus say:

“Engage with the world, accept the world the way it is, and deal with it on its own terms, pay the tax to Caesar and see what you can accomplish after that.”

The Pharisees can hear Jesus say:

“Hand that filthy lucre back to Caesar, get that idolatrous and blasphemous currency out of your purses and give it back to where it came from and have nothing further to do with the world after that.”

Or of course they could both hear it in the opposite way, and take offence at Jesus’ answer. Jesus pushes the question of the relationship of God’s people and the world back onto his questioners and onto everyone who is listening to him. And their response is Jesus’ judgement against them or their judgement against themselves. But Jesus has also cleverly avoided the trap which the Pharisees have set for him. He has not said anything for which he could be held accountable for in the courts of the Empire. He has not said in so many words: “Resist the Empire, do not not pay its taxes.” But nor has he said anything that shows any disloyalty to God. He has not said in so many words: “Accept the sovereignty of Caesar, acknowledge that the Empire rules here.”

This of course appears to leave us with a problem. Jesus’ answer is just as ambiguous to us as it is to the Pharisees and the Herodians. Jesus does not give us anything here to help us navigate our relationship with the world and its rulers. He doesn’t help us at this point decide how we are going to live as God’s people. Except, he does tell us how to do that in everything else he teaches. His answer here is ironic, even satirical. His listeners should know better than to accept his answer at face value. He, the Pharisees and even the Herodians all pray everyday, the Shema, the words from Deuteronomy that announce the basic faith of God’s people.

“Hear; O Israel; the Lord our God, the Lord is one.” (Deuteronomy 6:4)

There is only one God. Israel knows no king apart from God. God’s sovereignty is absolute and universal. There is nothing over which God does not rule. So when Jesus says: "Give to Caesar what is Caesar's and to God what is God’s." It cannot be taken at face value. There is nothing that isn't God’s which could be given to anyone else. In that way Jesus is close to the Pharisees. He shares with them the absolute insistence that God’s people owe loyalty and obedience to God alone. Jesus more than once reminds his listeners that it is not possible to serve two masters:

“No one can serve two masters; for a slave will hate one and love the other, or be devoted to one and despise the other.” (Matthew 6:24)

The Pharisees are right as far as their loyalty to God and their recognition of God’s sovereignty is concerned. But they are wrong in their desire to withdraw from the world or to create a separate sacred space in the world. There are not two kingdoms. The world and our lives cannot be divided into sacred and profane spaces.

The Herodians better understand that you must be involved in the world as it is. This is the only world in which we can live, and this is the world in which we have to work out our relationship with God and with our neighbours. Where the Herodians fail is in respect to the sovereignty of God. They concede too much to the power of this world. They engage with the world on the world's terms and use the world’s methods, and as a result utterly compromise the mission that God has given his people. One of the other fundamental teachings which Jesus, the Pharisees and the Herodians all share is the Great Commandment, part of which follows on immediately from the Shema in Deuteronomy:

“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart,and with all your soul, and with all you might” (Deuteronomy 6:5)

And the other half is from Leviticus:

“. . . but you shall love your neighbour as yourself.” (Leviticus 19:18)

Jesus’ answer to the question of God’s people's relationship with the world and its powers is already embodied in that ancient commandment. This is the commandment which Jesus says stands above all other commandments, and remains binding on God’s people. The Pharisees and the Herodians both fall short of the fullness of that commandment, but in opposite directions. Separatism fails to fulfil God’s call on his people by not engaging with the world and therefore failing to love the neighbours God has given us. Even as separatism seeks to fully acknowledge and abide by the sovereignty of God. Accommodation fails to fulfil God’s call on his people by not recognising the absolute and universal sovereignty of God. Even as accommodation seeks to be realistic in its dealings with the world and the power that is in it.

Jesus doesn’t give a simple answer to the question of how God’s people should live in the world. He doesn’t because there isn’t one. Nor could or should there be. And that is part of the problem. And that perhaps is why the impulse which drives the Pharisees and the Herodians and everyone like them is so powerful. Being God’s people in the world isn’t easy. But that doesn’t mean we should avoid the question. Instead Jesus offers us a challenging adventure of expressing our loyalty to God and our love of our neighbours in the actual circumstances of our lives. He calls us to live out the fulness of the great commandment, and to do that by following him where he leads.

Amen.

A Trick Answer to a Trick Question by Christopher Wood-Archer is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.