This sermon is based around Exodus 2. 1-10, Colossians 3. 12-17 and John 19. 25-27.
Today is Mothering Sunday, and you may be thinking that that’s the reason we are in pink. It’s not, we are halfway through Lent, this is the midpoint. And because being human we will be either miserable about our fasting or we will just be drudging through without thinking about it too much we have one day when the fast is relaxed a bit to give us a glimpse of what we are headed towards and to encourage us to enter the second half of lent with renewed focus. So for one day only we can relax our fasting a bit and we can enjoy ourselves a bit more, which is admittedly very handy being on the same day as Mothering Sunday. We all probably have very different experiences of motherhood; we all have one, some may be very good and some maybe not so good, some of us are mothers, we may have people in our lives who we think of as mothers to us and we may be that person for other people. The whole idea of motherhood is huge and complex and nowhere is this truer than in the Bible. Our Old Testament and Gospel readings today give us two different aspects of motherhood, the challenges and difficulties faced by two different women. The first is of a woman who gives birth while the Israelites are slaves in Egypt, the Pharaoh, for fear the the growing number of Israelites may pose a threat, has ordered that all boys born to the Israelites are to be killed, so she hides him for fear that he will be killed too. And then when he is too big to hide any longer she places him in a basket and leaves him to float away down the river with no idea what will happen to him, it’s a huge sacrifice. It’s hard to imagine the strength it must have taken for her to let him go, knowing that if she kept him he would be killed. Our Gospel reading today is about another mother and is particularly appropriate as the church celebrated the feast of the annunciation yesterday when the angel Gabriel came to Mary to ask her to be the mother of Jesus. Here we have the true cost of that yes, having been at times pushed aside by Him she now watches as He dies, as Simeon prophesied at Jesus’ dedication ‘a sword pierces her heart’. In a few days she will be one of the first to the tomb. And it is here as Jesus is hanging on the cross that we see His true heart. Racked with pain, knowing that His end is near and all that His death will mean, in those moments before the victory is won He pauses. Whilst many conquerors and leaders forget about the people around them as they push on towards the victory Jesus stops and makes His last testament, trusting the care of His mother to one of His closest friends. As the firstborn it was His duty to care for her into her old age and knowing that He cannot do that He ensures that someone else will. This is a God who cares immensely about people. We as a church are called to do the same, the church is sometimes talked of as a mother; needing the same characteristics as the best of mums in order to care for those in her care. That isn’t just for the Bishops, Priests, Deacons and lay ministers to do, that is the role of all of us. We heard in our reading from Colossians a list of characteristics for the Christian community to strive for, they resonate today particularly as we think about those in our lives who have been mothers to us and they are the characteristics we should strive to show as a church to those within and outside of our walls; compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, patience, forgiving, loving, willing to gently correct those who have strayed and grateful for all we have been given. Let us be a church that truly cares for people, not one that is too caught up in its grand plans and ideas. Not all of us will be mothers, I never will be one, but we all have the opportunity to be a small part of being mothers to people, be it as Godparents, Aunts and Uncles or simply as friends. And we should strive to display some of those qualities we see in Colossians to those around us who need it, to guide those who are in need of that care and that love. So this mothering Sunday as we give thanks for our mothers and grandmothers, let us also not forget to give thanks for all those who have at some point in our lives been a motherly figure to us, who have cared for us in the darkest of times and who have guided us to be the people who are here today. May God give us the opportunities to be that person to someone else, and may we as a Church develop into one that cares for the people of our communities as the best of mothers cares for her children.
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Based upon Genesis 3: 1-7 and Matthew 4: 1-11.
It is fitting that as we begin our journey towards Easter, the great feast of our Salvation, that we should start at the beginning, with the Fall. As we journey through Lent the Old Testament readings will take us through the story of our salvation, starting here with the Fall, then the call of Abram and the promise to make of him a great nation, the wandering of that nation in the wilderness under Moses, the anointing of David as King, through the Exile and onto prophecies of the Messiah. I encourage you to read the Old Testament readings again each week and to trace God’s plan unfolding towards Easter. But that’s all to come, back to today; God has finished creating everything and places humanity at the centre of the garden to care for it and to bring order to it. Now I don’t want to get into debates over whether this passage is to be taken literally or figuratively because either way the message of the passage remains: God created us and tasked us with the care of His creation and asked us simply to obey Him, giving us guidelines to live by as any loving parent would. God puts humanity in the garden with the job of looking after it, we are left to look after the world and given all of it to enjoy apart from the fruit of one tree, that one tree is off limits. So what’s the next thing we do? Well, why can’t we eat from that tree. The serpent comes along, and in the light of the New Testament we know that the serpent is the Devil coming to tempt. This passage is the archetypal story of every sin we ever commit. Eve isn’t under duress, she can easily refuse the serpent, this may be a part of the creation which God instructed them to bring order to, and yet she doesn’t she’s already starting to question God’s instruction and the serpent is giving her fuel to aid her questioning. The devil sounds even incredulous in his asking, ‘did got actually say?’ it has a tone of ‘surely He can’t have said that, no way’ and in doing so he plants the seed that God’s words are open for questioning, that humanity can hold God to account and ignore what He says. As I said a moment ago, Eve enters into conversation, rather than sending the serpent on its way for questioning God she entertains the notion and responds ‘well yes we can, but not this one because we will die if we even touch it’. She’s overcorrected here, God has never said that they cannot touch it and in her overcorrection she paints God as stricter than He is, she has entered the debate on the terms of the one who is seeking her downfall. And then the serpent places the cherry on the top ‘you shall not die, you will become like God’, by denying the judgement of God he negates the risk and then tempts further by suggesting that eating the fruit will put them on a level footing with God, they can cut God out of the loop of what is right and wrong, in choosing the fruit they decide that they want to know for themselves without God, they reject God and choose to do their own thing and live without Him. How familiar is this pattern, we are free to choose to live however we wish but have guidelines given by God to help us to reach our full potential and to enable full relationship with God and each other. We decide that we can question God’s authority, we know better or the Bible is speaking broadly on a topic and this little thing isn’t included in what isn’t allowed, God wasn’t thinking of this thing. And surely He couldn’t mean that anyway. And actually if I remember correctly God is rather harsh about this stuff and petty and actually if I do this I will be truly free and liberated and my life will be better. In our moments of temptation, when we falter, all too easily divine love looks like envy, our service to Him more like slavery and a suicidal plunge looks like a leap to freedom self fulfilment. The fruit is tempting and good to look at, we always want what we cannot have. And then because Eve has eaten Adam copies: Eve did it first. It’s all too easy to justify not living our lives as God calls us to because other Christians aren’t doing it either, they’re not doing it and they’re fine so why shouldn’t I. We justify our sin in so many ways yet what comes from sin, and what came from that first rebellion is death, not physical death, they didn’t keel over upon eating the fruit, but spiritual death, they are cut off from God and each other. The first thing they do is realise they are completely exposed to each other and to God and so they make clothes to hide themselves from each other to keep other people out, and then they hide from God. They die spiritually and start putting up walls. And every time we sin we build up walls between ourselves and God and between ourselves and other people. And in our fallen state we cannot resist doing wrong, we keep choosing what we know we shouldn’t. Now let’s look at today’s Gospel. Jesus undergoes the same testing as we see in Genesis, take a bite, look at all you could have if you stop listening to God and listen to me. The difference here is that Jesus doesn’t fall under the first hurdle, or the second, or even the third. He resists every time. He undergoes the same temptations we do and resists, in fact He goes the rest of His life resisting sin and doesn’t fall once. Now Jesus is just as human as you and I, He underwent the exact same level of temptation that we all do under the same conditions that we all do so what is the difference between Jesus and us and Adam? Jesus is living His life completely open to God, living His life solely for His Father and He is rooted deep in Him. He refuses to listen to creature over creator, refuses to follow His impressions over His instructions and refuses to make self-fulfilment his goal. If we look at these passages there is one clear difference, look at their responses to the temptation, Eve starts a conversation, she opens up to it and starts rationalising it. Jesus shuts it straight down, He doesn’t even entertain the possibility and what’s more there is difference in their method. In the first passage they are relying on their will power, I can do it, I can resist, I can make it happen,a nd how often do we do the same. But their will power fails because will power isn’t real power, real power is in the Word of God. Real power is rooted in God’s Word to us in scripture. And we see this in the Gospel, Jesus responds to every temptation with scripture, He bats them away with God’s Word, trusting in its truth. Even when the devil turns around and quotes scripture back at Him to justify what he is offering Jesus knocks it back with further scripture. So often we find stuff in the Bible to justify what we are doing but all too often we are using it out of context and for our own purposes and not truly seeing what the Bible is actually telling us. Now I don’t think any of us are under the illusion that we are Jesus, that we can live perfectly as He did, but we can learn from His example to live better for God, we need to stop relying on ourselves because our wills break and we all have our weaknesses, and start relying on God, if we are to respond to temptation as Jesus did then we need to be rooted in scripture, we need to know our Bibles and what they tell us, we need to be digging into them to strengthen ourselves. But we don’t need to fear when we do sin, when we do fall, because our salvation is not dependant on us, we are not made righteous through our own actions. Jesus has done that as Paul wrote in his letter to the Romans, just as sin and death entered the world through humanity’s rebellion, so new life and salvation came into this world through Jesus. As Eve took and ate and humanity fell so Christ invites us in this Eucharist to take and eat and enter into His saving work. When we do fall we fall back on His grace and His saving death and resurrection. We can trust in God to help us resist temptation and we can trust in Him to catch us when we do yield. So this Lent let us look at our lives, let us remove those things that keep us from God, resist temptation and open to God, leaning on Him for our strength and His Word for our help. But let us not lose heart when we do sin, because Easter is coming, when we celebrate Jesus’ saving work that redeems us from despair and gives us everlasting life. |
AuthorAn Anglican Curate in my 20's I was raised in an Anglican Church, went to a Youth Club run by an Evangelical Church, attended a Baptist Church while at Uni and was a member of a New Monastic Community after graduating. As such my faith has been influenced by these experiences and traditions into what I hope is a more rounded viewpoint. Archives
September 2022
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