Tag: Revelation 22

The blessing of being alongsides

David HerbertLeave a comment

A reflection on Psalm 1 and Luke 6:17-26 for two small congregations in a group of parishes in vacancy.
The 3rd Sunday before Lent – Year C

In last week’s gospel (Luke 5:1-11) crowds surrounded Jesus so much that to find space for himself Jesus needed to get into a boat on the lake as crowds gathered around Him to hear His teachings.

We have another crowd in today’s gospel (Luke 6:17-26). There’s a large crowd of his disciples (including the twelve he called “apostles”), and “a great number of people from all over Judea, from Jerusalem, from the coastal region around Tyre and Sidon” who had come to hear him and be healed of their diseases.

In the context of safeguarding we need to note that Luke has underlined where Jesus was in relation to the crowd. He is not “high up”, over others. 

In the boat on the lake he would have been lower than his hearers. 

And in today’s gospel Luke paints a different picture to Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount. Luke has them all on a level place – Jesus on the level with all the people. 

In this, and so many other ways, Luke is wanting to show how Jesus stands in relation to others – never overbearing, never patronising, always side by side – as typified by walking incognito with disciples to Emmaus. 

There is no distance between Jesus and the people. He was there with them, eye to eye, shoulder to shoulder, side by side, valuing relationship over hierarchy.

That’s the position you’re hoping to fill, isn’t it? You’re hoping for a priest who will ask your permission to come alongside, as your helper. It’s probably also the position we long to be ourselves, alongside others with others alongside us.

None of us are ever safe when people look down on us, and nobody is safe from us as long we look down on them. Jesus’ physical positioning in relation to others guarantees safety. He is the good shepherd.

That’s how Jesus positioned himself, alongside us, always on the side of those he blesses. What is our position? Where do we stand?

The psalmist points to those who take a very different position. They “walk in the counsel of the wicked”, “linger in the way of sinners” and join “the assembly of the scornful”. They’re condemned. They won’t stand the judgement of the law of the Lord or stand in the “congregation of the righteous”.

There is another way. That is the way of Jesus and all those who delight in the law of the Lord, meditating on his law day and night. They’re the ones blessed and the psalmist sees them like trees “planted by streams of water, bearing fruit in due season”.

There is a clear choice: the way of the wicked, or the way of the Lord. It’s either blessings or curse.

I had to go to a two column format to get our two readings on one sheet of paper. But in so doing I have shown the pairings: 

Blessed are all you who are poor, but woe to you who are rich
Blessed are you who hunger now, but woe to you who are well fed now
Blessed are you who weep now, but woe to you who laugh now
Blessed are you when people hate you, exclude you and insult you, and woe to you when everyone speaks well of you

This is the law of the Lord. This is Jesus’ teaching. This is the law of the Lord according to Luke who has already given us Mary’s song celebrating the ways of God in scattering the proud, toppling rulers from their thrones, raising the humble and humiliated, filling the hungry with good things and sending the rich empty away. This is the law of the Lord. (Luke 1:46-53).

This is the law of the Lord brought to us by Luke who has already told us how Jesus preached in the synagogue about the law of the Lord being good news for the poor: freedom for prisoners, recovery of sight for the blind and liberation for the oppressed. (Luke 4:18-19).

This is the law of the Lord our scriptures describe as blessed. This is the law that delights the blessed but which the wicked, the sinners and the scornful scorn. This is the law that those who are blessed think on day and night, according to Psalm 1.

They are like a tree planted by streams of water, bearing fruit in due season, with leaves that do not wither.

When I read that verse this week my mind went to a sculpture called The River of Life which runs down the main shopping street in Warrington. The sculpture was built by Warrington Council after two bombs were detonated by the IRA, killing 3 year old Johnathan Ball and 12 year old Tim Parry and injuring 56 others. It was the day before Mothering Sunday, March 20th, 1993.

The city council turned to a sculptor to discuss a memorial. Stephen Broadbent was the sculptor. He saw that the street was not just physically broken, but spiritually broken as well. He wanted to design something that would be “a symbol of renewal and faith in the power of the human spirit to triumph over adversity and to invest the future with hope.”

His inspiration was the image of the river of life in Revelation 22.
The angel showed me the river of the water of life, as clear as crystal, flowing out from the throne of God and of the Lamb down the middle of the great street of the city. On each side of the river stood the tree of life, bearing twelve crops of fruit, yielding its fruit every month. And the leaves of the tree are here for the healing of the nations.

And so it is. Now, flowing down that street is the River of Life  he made and on either side of the streaming water are trees, one for each month, each bearing fruits of the Spirit for the healing of the nations, for all times and seasons.

And so it is in Psalm 1 where the blessed are like a tree planted by streams of water bearing fruit in due season. I wonder that Stephen Broadbent himself is one of those trees, planted by the stream of tragedy and violence, leaving blessings of hope and healing through the season of trauma and grief.

I’ve seen photocards with these verses from Psalm 1. In them the stream is picturesque with sunlight reflecting from its gentle flow. The psalm doesn’t say the water is safe. 

The stream may be dangerous, fast flowing floodwater, a tidal wave, or deep or toxic. 

Or with a stretch of the imagination, the waters could be the waters that have to break for us to be born or baptised. 

Or the stream and the metaphor may be a metaphor for life.

Does the law of the Lord raise up people who delight in the law that there should be people by all the rough waters of life, that there should be lifesavers of healing, hope and blessing bearing fruit for all seasons of difficulty and danger?

It’s worth visiting that sculpture in Warrington. It’s on Bridge Street. It was always Bridge Street. The street hasn’t been renamed because of the sculpture and its intention to bridge the awful violence that tore people’s lives apart.

And here we are. The Bridges Group of Parishes – so called because of the bridges of the villages that make up the group of parishes. And the bridges are there to bridge the waterways that cut through the landscape.

We’ve reflected on Jesus’ position in relation to the crowds that streamed to him. We’ve reflected on the Psalmist’s position on those who delight in the law of the Lord.
We’ve reflected on the sculptor’s position in relation to the trauma of a community.
What about our own position?

Are we bridge builders and lifesavers? Do we delight in the law of the Lord, meditating on his law day and night? Are we blessed as agents of blessing, healing and hope? Or are we a curse on the poor, the stranger, the refugee, and all those vulnerable to losing their life at sea because we take our cues from the scornful, lingering in the way of sinners, taking the counsel of sinners?

Where are we as the river of life flows through our lives? Are we bridgebuilders offering healing where there has been division, hope where there has been despair? Are we like trees that bear the fruits of God’s Spirit, the fruits of love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control (against which no other law can stand) (Galatians 5:22f)? 

What is our position in relation to those Jesus blesses? Are we on their side, or are we on the side condemned by Jesus, with those who’ve grown rich at the expense of the poor, those who have stuffed themselves while so many go hungry, those who can afford to laugh while the rest of the world is in bits, those who walk the corridors of powers and still exclude, insult and reject others?

For as long as we delight in the law of the Lord, for as long as we seek to understand it, we will be on the side of those in the roughest of waters.

We’re all at sea in our small boats

David Herbert2 Comments

This is a reflection on the sea and the troubled waters we call life for the 4th Sunday after Trinity (B).

I spotted “the other boats” in the gospel reading for the day, from Mark 4:35-end (text below). They played on my mind as we prepare for a UK election which some want to turn into an election on immigration. It made me think – “we’re all at sea” and the forecast is for more storms. This sermon comes with a health warning – it is metaphor heavy.

The first verse we see when we open our Bibles is “In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep while the spirit of God swept over the face of the waters.” (Genesis 1:1-2) 

The last verses in our Bibles are also about water – the “river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb, through the middle of the street of the city, feeding trees bearing fruit for all seasons and leaves for the healing of the nations”. (Revelation 22:1-2)

In the beginning of the Bible there is total darkness. In the end, there is only light – no darkness and no hiding.

The Bible begins in water and ends in water. And between the two there is all the difference in the world – as different as night and day.

The Bible begins in water. The water is chaos. The first thing God does is make light. The second thing he does is sort the waters out. He separates the waters of heaven and earth, gathered the water together and let dry land appear. That’s how it began. 

This is a theological view of life. This is how we open our Bibles. We open them with an understanding that we are all at sea. From the very beginning we have been surrounded by water, the sea, the deep. We’ve been on flood alert since the time of Noah.

Probably all of us here have had times in our lives when we have felt overwhelmed, engulfed or drowning – and used these metaphors to describe how we felt, using so many metaphors drawn from our collective experience down the ages of chaos and the sea. So much of our language reflects this. Like “we’re out of our depth”, or “we’re in it up to our neck”, or “we’re all at sea”.

The Bible begins with water and ends with water. From day one there is storm after storm. The waves crash all around us until that day when the waters become calm and do God’s bidding of giving life and healing to the whole of creation.

These are the times we live in, when there is one storm on top of another. For the time being we are between the devil and the deep blue sea. (Another popular saying.)

These are the times Jesus lived in as well. The storms he faced were different to ours. With his contemporaries he was assaulted by religious oppression and exclusion, a taxation poor which kept them in poverty and debt, and an occupation by a foreign power which robbed them of their freedom.

His attitude at times like these is captured in the snapshot we have of him in today’s gospel reading. They’re all at sea. A great gale arose, and the waves were beating the boat and swamping it. And Jesus slept. Calm as you like.

There were other boats. It’s strange how you miss details like this. I must have read this passage hundreds of times, but I’ve never seen those four words before. There were other boats. Have I never noticed these other boats because the focus has always been on Jesus’ boat? Have I only spotted these boats now because of the small boats that desperate refugees are taking to to escape to safe havens. 

(Isn’t it terrible that some people are turning the election into an election about immigration and the people in these small boats?) It is Refugee Week – and we need to spot their boats, not stop their boats. There is a growing refugee crisis – that means a crisis for a growing number of refugees. 1 in 69 of the world’s population is now displaced, largely because of conflicts around the world. It’s important we respond to their Mayday.  M’aidez. Help me! It is, after all, the refugees who have the problem – all those who have no safe routes for escape. They have enough problems without being turned into a political football.

We’re all at sea. We’re not all in the same boat. We’re not in the same boats as the refugees. We’re all in our different small boats. We’re all at the mercy of troublemakers, powers-that-be, the forces that make waves, and the sea so dangerous. 

There’s a well known fisherman’s prayer that captures our plight. It’s become known as the Breton Fisherman’s Prayer: 

Dear God,
be good to me;
the sea is so wide, and my boat is so small. 
Amen.

They’re words from a poem by Winfred Ernest Garrison.

It’s not surprising that so many make that prayer their own. The words fit the experience we call “being all at sea”.

The sea is our life with its currents and tides, its ferocity and deceptive charm constantly eroding and undermining us. The challenge of our lives is how we navigate these waters.

We are like those who, in the words of Psalm 107 “go down to the sea in ships and ply their trade in great waters”, who have seen the works of the Lord and his wonders in the deep. While they were at their wit’s end as they reeled and staggered like drunkards, they cried to the Lord in their trouble and he brought them out of their distress. He made the storm be still and the waves of the sea were calmed.

Our lifetime at sea is summed up in our baptism. We are soaked in deep water, and brought through water as if this is an acknowledgement of our life at sea, weathering the storms faced by us all, Jesus included. The question we’re asked in baptism is, “Do you turn to Christ?” Our response then is “I turn to Christ”. It’s stated as a promise. Perhaps it should be stated as a habit. 

In the storms of life, when you’re all at sea, when you feel you’re drowning, do you turn to Christ? The faithful ones, like the ones in the psalm, will say, “Yes, I turn to Christ. He’s the one who can sleep in the storm. He’s the non-anxious presence. We turn to him to hear him say ‘Peace! Be still!’ – and when we do, the wind dies down and we feel the calm.”

It’s easier said than done because in the midst of things it is too easy to panic.

The waves that have panicked me have been so slight compared to what others have faced. Dare I say I’ve done enough doom scrolling to sink a battleship? I am only beginning to learn to wake Jesus in my mind, to hear him in the head of the storm, to find better things to think about, to take his word as gospel. 

I know that when the sea calms for me, it calms also for all the other small boats.

Here we gather. We call this gathering place the NAVE – the Latin word for ship. We are shipmates in our small boat.

Here we are, all at sea, our metaphorical sea. The metaphorical weather is awful. Even though the long term forecast is for beautiful, calm weather, immediately, all we can expect is one storm after another. There are dark forces within us, and all around us, threatening us – driving so many from their homes, driving them to the edge, condemning them/us to their/our fate on the sea of life.

We are shipmates. We’ve been through it before. We’ve been through the waters of baptism. We’re used to turning to Christ – who in today’s gospel we see in the same boat as ourselves. In the rage of the storm he makes himself heard. We hear him call us “beloved”. The wind and the sea hear him. ‘Peace! Be still!’ they hear him say. For the moment they obey him.

Here we are, churches in the Bridges Group of Parishes – like a bridge in troubled water for all those who live in these six parishes. When we’re weary, feeling small, when times get tough, when we’re down and out, when darkness comes and pain is all around – we know the words of the one even the wind and sea obey.

Mark 4:35-end
On that day, when evening had come, he said to them, ‘Let us go across to the other side.’ And leaving the crowd behind, they took him with them in the boat, just as he was. Other boats were with him. A great gale arose, and the waves beat into the boat, so that the boat was already being swamped. But he was in the stern, asleep on the cushion; and they woke him up and said to him, “Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?” He woke up and rebuked the wind, and said to the sea, ‘Peace! Be still!’ Then the wind ceased, and there was a dead calm. He said to them, ‘Why are you afraid? Have you still no faith?’ And they were filled with great awe and said to one another, ‘Who then is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?’