"What on earth is Mike playing at???????!!!!!!!
What a silly man he is being!
"How could he allow himself to get swept along by that awful, empty-headed Vicky & then to marry her! - when he has those two mature & sensible children, Roy & Brenda, both now grown up & both being very supportive & both still missing their lovely mother Betty, who only died last year! And as for that awful Jim, Alastair's father, what a great pity he moved into the village! "
You won't know what I'm going on about if you watch the TV soaps but you will if, like me, you are a great follower of the Archers on Radio 4. You get much better pictures on the Radio!
All that is a rather roundabout way of commenting on today's Epistle. From time to time some of the British newspapers take great delight in reporting comments from some poor unfortunate Judge, unwise enough to admit in court that he has not heard of a certain Pop singer or TV celebrity. You know the kind of thing - "Err, Mr Rumpole, Who is Dirty Den? What is Meatloaf? What kind of animals are these Arctic Monkeys?" So, the Judge is presumed to be out of touch with the members of the jury & unable to understand the people in the dock!
Today's Epistle, from the Letter to Hebrews, tells us that Jesus is not out of touch with us or unable to understand us & all that we experience - "we have one who has been tempted in every way that we are, though he is without sin." Jesus was tempted as we are but did not yield to it. He knew the human condition, our human condition, fully. He knew what it was like to be "one of us."
So, this gives us confidence to make our approach to God &, when we do, we find - not judgement & punishment as we were brought up to believe in times past but rather mercy & grace when we most need it. God's loving generosity is total, in fact it's quite insane - God loves us & continues to love us, whatever we do or whatever we think or whatever plottings we get up to!
Archbishop Desmond Tutu used a saying when he spoke at our Church's Provincial Conference some years ago. I tend to use it rather a lot, so you'd better know where I got it from! He said, "We are good because we are loved; not loved because we are good!" Think about it! -
"We are good because we are loved; not loved because we are good!"
So, to move on to the Gospel -:
"It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into the Kingdom of God!" says Jesus in today's Gospel reading. Comfortable words for people like us because I suppose nobody here would regard themselves as rich!
But maybe we've overlooked something - the simple fact that the men who were writing the Gospels were also using imagery, poetic imagery. In a way, Jesus was a poet. If you take poetry to be a literal description of anything you'll find yourself very wide of the mark.
People once did this to the poor camel going through the eye of that needle. The eye of the needle, we used to be told, was a narrow gate in the city wall of Jerusalem - for which there is no evidence of any kind! It was a well meant, but totally misguided, interpretation.
Or, it was said, 'camel' really meant 'rope' because the Greek for camel (kamelon) is very close to the Greek word for rope (kamilon) & a rope can't go through the eye of a needle!! as though that made it any easier! We'd better just allow the camel & the needle to be a piece of vivid imagery, which is almost certainly what it was. Such graphic exaggeration is typical of many of the genuine parables & sayings of Jesus. And such a humorous exaggeration of that sort is more likely to have come from Jesus than from a more serious-minded follower editing the texts later on!
It's interesting to see how Jesus, who is that two-edged sword referred to in the Epistle, how Jesus knows exactly where it's sharp edge must go - into the man who asks what he must do to inherit eternal life. Jesus looks at him & Says, "Today!!" - go, sell all you have & give to the poor - & then follow me!' But notice also that, although Jesus has found the painful point of this man's life, he has done it with love. He does not let the Disciples mock him & he makes it clear that he knows just how hard a thing he has asked. So much so that the disciples begin to panic about their own position!
As, perhaps we also should!
The young man in this story had great possessions & he was told to go & sell them. But it belongs to the poet to see in material facts a concrete symbol for some law of life, some spiritual principle, which can't be directly expressed. It seems as though, in the young man's material riches - Jesus saw something applicable to everyone, whatever their bank balance.
If not, why did the Gospel Writer then hammer home the point to the disciples, who were certainly not rich & had already given up everything to follow Jesus? The very emphasis of Jesus' words shows him feeling his way towards something that He intuitively knew to be of immense importance to everybody.
The same principle is true with regard to the people we know & the people we love. Nothing on earth brings us so wonderfully to our human condition, or opens so wide the gates of the Kingdom of God, as other people. But that is always on condition we don't try to make capital for ourselves out of them. If what we want is to be in with the 'in-crowd' or to be known as the one with the best house or car or boat, then our friends & our lovers won't bring us life in all its abundance. They may bring us a few thrills & a few kicks but they will carry with them persistent anxiety about whether we still count, whether we still have shares in that particular world.
"We are good because we are loved; not loved because we are good!"
And the most destructive riches of all are religious riches. How prone we are, all of us, to trust in them! It may be our sound attitude to the Bible, or to the Doctrines of the Scottish Episcopal Church, or our very "spiritual" approach to sex, drink & drugs. Or it may be our superior sense of freedom which leads us to despise others, like the way that St. Paul despised Jewish Xnity. Sometimes our religious riches may consist of a whipped up sense of sin - to have really succeeded in making ourselves feel 'there is no health in us' - very dangerous riches indeed!
Or it may be those warm feelings when we pray - very valid as a gift from God when they come unsought but likely to close off any access to the Kingdom when we pray in order to have them & won't pray unless we do! In that gospel reading Jesus was talking about relying for your wealth on what can only leave you spiritually bankrupt.
"We are good because we are loved; not loved because we are good!"
But with God all things are possible. What seems to happen is that we slowly become aware of the game we are playing &, just as slowly, we become convinced that it just isn't worth the candle. What, perhaps, we need is not a stronger will but a deeper insight; not more strength but more light. When, with our total being, we begin to realise that riches are the one thing which prevent us from being rich, then we shall no longer hanker after them.
Such insight comes to us through the ordinary events of daily living - but not just in one day and certainly not without much bewilderment and pain. It is in that way that we discover the gospel truth of gaining our life by loosing it, of death and resurrection - that's the proper, full meaning of Resurrection!
"We are good because we are loved; not loved because we are good!" Amen!
Sermon by: Malcolm Aldcroft