Tag: scripture

Crossing the Lines of Division

David Herbert2 Comments

Sermon for Proper 7C – Trinity 1
Readings: Galatians 3:23–end and Luke 8:26–39

Every generation lives with conflict. Sometimes it shocks us; other times, it simply exhausts us. We ask, again and again, “Why can’t people just get on?” But our scriptures don’t hide the truth: division runs deep — in history, in systems, in souls. This sermon explores how Paul names those divisions, how Jesus crosses them, and what happens when grace refuses to stay on its side of the line. In a world chained by difference, Christ brings the freedom of unity — not by erasing our stories, but by re-membering us into something new.

Here we go again — at the risk of repeating myself…
I love preaching that brings scripture back to life, and I hope you do too.
I say this often, but it bears repeating: when we open scripture together, we are not just reading words,
we are bringing them back to life.
And we’re bringing them to life in a world of division.

There are times when the world feels more dangerous than ever.
This week has been one of them: Israel launches missiles at Iran, Iran retaliates, and then Donald Trump gets himself involved — in his customary statesmanlike manner.
And those of us on the fringes wonder, “Why can’t people just get on?”
It’s a question many of us have asked all our adult lives, as one conflict after another flashes across our screens.

It’s as if we’re surprised when conflict breaks out,
even though our scriptures describe human history as full of it.
From the moment Adam and Eve grew up enough to blame each other,
and as for their children; Cain grew jealous of Abel and killed him.

This is the backdrop of scripture: a history full of conflict, grievance and wrong.
And that shouldn’t surprise us.
Human nature leans toward grievance and defence.
We feel a moral obligation to address what’s been done to us.
We shouldn’t be surprised when we don’t get along.
The real surprise is that we ever do.
In spite of our differences, it’s astonishing how often we manage peace.

This is the human reality Paul addresses when he writes to the Galatians.
We often skip to the famous bit: “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, slave nor free, male nor female…”
And we instinctively expand it: neither young nor old, gay nor straight, rich nor poor.

But we often miss the phrase just before: “We were held in custody under the law… we were locked up.”

We were locked into divisions. Bound by binaries.
And those divisions still exist — even in the church.
There has been one law for the gay and another for the straight.
One law for men (they could be ordained), and another for women (they could not).
There was a time when it mattered whether you were married or divorced.
These divisions weren’t just opinions — they were rules.
“This is the law,” people said. “These are the boundaries.”

But Paul names these laws for what they are: temporary, partial, and not the final word.
These binaries are unequal — and unequal binaries breed resentment, not reconciliation.
The good news is that in Christ, those old structures no longer define us.
The new reality is that all who are baptised into Christ are clothed with Christ. We are one.

So what does that actually look like?
What does it look like when someone, long bound by division, is finally set free?

That’s the power of the story in Luke’s Gospel.

Here is someone completely undone by division — fragmented and chained, living among the tombs.
They call him “Legion,” which isn’t his real name.
It’s a name that suggests occupation: a Roman military unit.
Empire has invaded his soul.
He is not just possessed — he is colonised.
He has become the embodiment of a fractured, binary-riddled world.

He’s been locked up — like those Paul was writing to.
Chained hand and foot by the law of empire.
He had broken the chains, yes — but the people still kept him out.
They feared him. He had to be driven away, kept apart.

And that’s where Jesus meets him.

Jesus crosses over — not just a lake, but boundaries of culture, class, purity, power.
He goes where the pigs are, among the tombs — all unclean territory for a devout Jew.
But this is how far Jesus is willing to go to restore a life.
To say: no one is beyond healing.
He crosses all the boundary lines, the enemy lines.
No one is so divided that they can’t be made whole.

And when the man is healed,
when he is clothed and in his right mind,
sitting at Jesus’ feet,
the people are afraid.
They’re afraid by the healing.
They’re afraid of what it might mean if the old boundaries don’t hold.
If he is restored, what does that mean for the system we’ve built?

They send Jesus away.

But before he goes, Jesus sends the man home.
And notice — he is no longer called Legion.
He is “the man”. A person. A human being.
He’s been re-membered — brought back into the body, into community.
He’s been clothed not only with literal garments, but in the language of Paul, clothed in Christ.

And this rehumanised man becomes a witness.
His life, restored, is a sign that another world is possible,
a world in which division doesn’t get the last word.

Because this is what the kingdom of God looks like.
Not just healing wounds, but undoing the whole system that caused them.
Not just restoring one man, but revealing that the lines we’ve drawn,
between the first and the last, the worthy and the broken,
don’t stand in the light of Christ.

In God’s kingdom, the last become first.
The one known as Legion, the one cast out,
becomes the first to preach the good news of Jesus to his people.
The law that once divided is replaced by a love that restores.

So today, let’s stop being surprised by conflict.
Conflict and division is the rule, the law, the norm (these days)
as it always has been. That’s what we’re locked in to
and what we’re locked in by.
So let’s stop being surprised by conflict
And instead start being amazed by grace
and the freedom that is made possible in Christ
who crosses the boundaries that divide us
to help us find our peace.
No longer divided, we are made one.
That changes everything.

I’d love to hear your thoughts — how do you see these lines being crossed in your own life or community?

Beginnings and the meaning of life

David Herbert1 Comment

A sermon for the 2nd Sunday before Lent. Both epistle and gospel of the day are about beginnings and the meaning of life. This sermon was for a church in rural Warwickshire.

In the beginning. In the beginning – such a lovely phrase. In the beginning – such a good place to start.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. That’s how John prefaces his gospel.

Our scriptures open at the beginning. In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth

Some of you will remember Maureen Lipman’s British Telecom adverts. In one she rings her grandson to see how he got on in his exams. He goes through all the exams he failed. She asks, “did you pass anything?”. “I got pottery” – to which grandma says “that’s good, people will always need plates”. “And I got Sociology”. To which Grandma says, “you got an ology and you said you failed!”.

In the beginning was the Word. I’ve not got much in the way of an ology, but I’ve got enough of an “ology” to know that the Greek words for the Word is o-logos. O logos. It is from those two Greek words that we get all our ologies – whether sociology, psychology, geology, astrology, criminology – anyone awarded an ology can claim the credit of beginning to understand the meaning of an aspect of life. 

Putting aside any clever, clever ologies we may have we could all say that we have an OLOGY because the Word became flesh and dwells amongst us, with us always, to the end of time. That’s an ology that God has gifted us. He has gifted us his Word, o logos, made flesh, embodying the meaning of God from the beginning. If we want to know the meaning and purpose of God we have to look no further than Jesus.

The Word means meaning. O logos, the ology given to us, means meaning and purpose. From the beginning life has meaning and purpose. This is the viewpoint of faith, hope and trust.

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 a wind from God swept over the face of the waters. That is such a beautiful opening for our scriptures. 

Our generations, with all our ologies, have tended to scoff at this creation story. “It can’t have happened like that” we say, as if the inspired authors of this literature ever believed it happened like that. We are not looking at God’s first diary and to-do list. Inspired fiction sits alongside inspired history in our scriptures – what matters is not what happened, but what is true. In the beginnings described by the first chapter of Genesis, the openings of John’s gospel and our reading from Colossians – in all of them we have inspired theology that conveys truth.

I am ever more conscious that our scriptures are the scriptures of the Jewish people, so frequently overpowered, conquered, enslaved, exiled, occupied, persecuted, oppressed, impoverished and hated, as well as being so often disobedient and misled (just like the rest of us). They become our scriptures as long as we open our hearts and minds to join those who suffer, redirecting the power and wealth we have for their sake, becoming poor in spirit.

When we read scripture we are always looking through the eyes of a people (like Paul writing to the Colossians from prison) who suffered so much and yet dared to wonderfully imagine that from the very beginning God is working his purpose out, that there is meaning even in the midst of tragedy.

The beginnings described in Genesis and in John’s gospel and in our reading from Colossians are profound theological reflections on the meaning of life in the midst of chaos, surrounded by so much diversity and difference, a wealth of creation – and the part we are called to play. 

The “beginnings” of Genesis and John are not the start of things. It’s not a blank page. In the beginning described by John there was stuff going on. There was darkness, and the Word became the light of the world that darkness has never been able to overcome. There was darkness going on, and on and on.

Likewise in Genesis, there was stuff going on. There was formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep. In other words, it was chaos – and the creation story imagines what God does with chaos, ordering it and making so much of it for our delight.

The beginnings described by Genesis, John and Paul are all of them in the midst of things. There is always something going on. These scriptures belong to people who are in the midst of things, and passed on to those going through so much. There has been so much love gone into them – their meaning is to inspire faith, hope and love – in us, in the midst of things.

Sometimes life doesn’t seem to have any meaning – particularly when bad things overwhelm us. Sometimes that is about discovering that life doesn’t mean what we thought and that there is a new meaning we have not yet discovered. As we lose sight of the meaning of life we can often forget the meaning of God. We may have been misled into thinking of God in a way he just isn’t. 

When we lose that sense of meaning for our lives, when we’re burnt out and exhausted by excessive busyness, or responsibility, or trauma, when we’ve lost our way in the forest, then we do need to retrace our steps, unwind to the beginning to the time when there was always meaning. 

When we lose sight of the meaning of life we need to follow the sound of music and start at the very beginning, a very good place to start, the beginning when the Word became flesh and dwelt among us – a down to earth meaning, embodied in our lives, in our times and in all we try to do.

The meaning of God is the meaning of life. In our first reading, the letter to the Colossians, we have the phrase He is the beginning. Christ is the beginning for God. 

The letter continues: “in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross”.

This is the meaning of God and the meaning of life.

We are all “in the beginning” – we are part of the body of Christ who is the beginning. He is the beginning of the work of reconciliation ………. He is the beginning of the repair of broken and exploitative relationships. That is his work, his meaning and purpose. We are all “in the beginning”, in the beginning of a new creation, in the beginning of something new, in the beginning of something better as long as we listen to his word and love his meaning.

In the midst of things, a lot of which we’d rather not be in the midst of, in the midst of things we have the beginnings of life, its meaning and purpose, and the beginnings of God, his meaning and purpose – to find our way where we might lose our way. In our beginning is the Word to inspire our faith, hope and love, the ology which means the world to us.

Colossians 1:15-20

He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers – all things have been created through him and for him. He himself is before all things, and in all things hold together. He is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so that he might come to have first place in everything. For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross. 

John 1:1-14
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.

There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. He came as a witness to testify to the light, so that all might believe through him. He himself was not the light, but he came to testify to the light. The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world.
He was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him. He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him. But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God.

And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.

Reading the Bible and learning from lessons – a sermon for Bible Sunday

David Herbert1 Comment

October 29th 2023

The last Sunday after Trinity – also Bible Sunday. The readings for the day are printed below: Leviticus 19: 1-2, 15-18 and Matthew 22:34-end

Today is Bible Sunday. My aim in this sermon follows the words of our collect for Bible Sunday. We pray to God, who caused all holy scriptures to be written for our learning. My aim is to encourage you to confidently expect to learn from the Bible and that we can confidently expect to read, mark, learn and inwardly digest them.

My first point is simple. The Bible isn’t one book – seeing it as one book would make it daunting and off putting. It’s a library and a boxed set. For most of our centuries most of the readers of scripture have been people who couldn’t read or who didn’t like reading. They will only have heard scripture being read. They certainly would never have had their own copy of the book version. That only became possible with the invention of the printing press – until then you could buy a house for the cost of a Bible.

The Bible and Christianity isn’t for the clever. In Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians he reminds his brothers and sisters: “think of what you were when you were called. Not many of you were wise by human standards; not many were influential; not many were of noble birth. But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise, God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong”. (I Cor 1:26f).

It’s not about being clever, influential or posh. In fact, the clever, influential and posh are going to be the last people to “get” scripture. Hear Mary singing in her song we call the Magnificat of the rich (presumably the rich and clever) being turned empty away while he lifts up the humble and fills the hungry with good things. (Luke 1).

It’s not about being clever. It’s not the clever writing clever things for clever people. It’s people who share the experience of being bruised and battered helping those who are poor in spirit get through the experiences of being bruised and battered – and those who go to their aid. You don’t need a degree. Jesus didn’t teach in a university. He taught in the heart. 

And he taught in the heart of a people who were bruised and battered by centuries of bitter experience of empire. They’d been enslaved, persecuted, occupied, exiled, crucified. The conflict we are witnessing in Israel and Gaza has a long and complicated history and we do well to remember that Jesus taught at the heart of this history.

Those of us who read the Bible who have never known exile, persecution, poverty or who have never been at the wrong end of identity politics do well to remember that we are reading the scriptures of those who have. We read over their shoulders – at best, as their guests.

A large part of our scriptures is focused on Jesus – even a lot of the Old Testament is about Jesus, and the books of the Old Testament were Jesus’s scriptures with Psalms being his prayer book. Jesus is always understandable. He made it so. Even his enemies understood him and that is why they were so infuriated by him.

He was always casting around for images that would speak to people about his passion – his passion for the kingdom of heaven. He spoke of things his followers would know, of seeds and weeds, of leaven in loaves, of losing things and finding them again. He aimed to be understood.

The difficulty of following Jesus isn’t that he is hard to understand. The difficulty in following Jesus is facing the challenge of his teaching and accepting the cost. The response of those who want to hear Jesus has never been that they have felt mystified and lost, but have been amazed and felt found.

Today’s gospel (at least the first half) is typically simple and straightforward. A lawyer, a Pharisee, asks Jesus what the most important commandment is. (There are 613 commandments in the Old Testament.) It wasn’t hard for Jesus to choose because the answer was well known. It was what they were told to talk about at home, when they walked along the road, when they lay down and when they got up. They impressed it on their children. It was wrapped around their heads and hands and pinned to their doors, and it’s a verse from Deuteronomy: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.” The lawyer gets a straightforward answer to a straightforward question, until …

Jesus adds a second which twists the meaning. Again he answers from scripture – it’s the other reading we have had, from Leviticus: “a second is like it” he says. “You shall love your neighbour as yourself.”

That’s not hard to understand is it? But it’s hard to put into practice isn’t it? The lawyer will have known where the reference came from and what the commandment spells out. We’ve heard it ourselves this morning (from our OT reading from Leviticus) what loving your neighbour means “you shall not render an unjust judgement; you shall not be partial to the poor or defer to the great: with justice you shall judge your neighbour. You shall not go around as a slanderer among your people, and you shall not profit by the blood of your neighbour.”

This is where it gets more difficult as we deal with culture and context that isn’t ours. It all needs translating for us so that each of us hears in our own language – which is God’s intention made plain at Pentecost when everyone heard the preaching of the apostles in their own language.

Scripture always raises questions and those questions are taken up by scripture itself in many cases. Jesus adds the second commandment about loving our neighbour to the first and then says everything, the whole law and the prophets, hang on these two. But then the question is raised (in Luke’s gospel) “but who is my neighbour?” How do we translate that?

Jesus translates for us by drawing a picture of a man, bruised and battered lying in a gutter. He takes three people by this helpless victim and asks which of them was the real neighbour. The answer we all know to be the one who stopped and so generously and tenderly helped. And that person turned out to be a Samaritan – who the Jews despised. Jesus gave that lawyer and all who have shared that story ever since, a new meaning, a new twist, a new challenge and new translation to the question of “who is my neighbour?” – something along the lines that you don’t really know who your neighbour is until you’re in trouble and that your neighbour can be a total stranger reaching across all sorts of barriers.

We might argue that Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan doesn’t have the same impact on us as it would have had on those who first heard it because they were Jewish people caught up in the prejudice against the Samaritans. 

We might also be tempted to think about who we are good neighbours to – who is going to receive our kindness and generosity. Our own national history tends to cast us as winners, generally not knowing exile, occupation or poverty, so our focus may be on the helper rather than the victim. So, we could tell the story differently – such as imagining you’re in the metaphorical gutter, bruised and battered, you don’t know where to turn. You have neighbours but they don’t know you and you don’t know them. They are no help. You have family, but they’re all busy with their own lives and they’ve mostly moved away. But there was one person who saved me – and here we full in the blanks. S/he was a ——- I’d never met them in my life. They were so brave. They never left my side. There was nothing that was too much trouble.

We never know who is going to come to our help do we? And we would turn none of them away would we? And we would be forever grateful to them wouldn’t we? And we would call them our neighbour, our good samaritan. In that one person we come to understand what it means to be a neighbour – and nothing less will do.

Jesus makes it easy for his followers to understand his teaching about the kingdom of heaven. He was hardly going to make it difficult was he? He’s a teacher who loves his followers, and his followers love him for his teaching.

For those whose heart is set on God’s kingdom the Bible is easy reading and those who are powerful, rich and clever according to the kingdoms of this world are always going to find our scriptures mystifying unless they have a change of heart.

I want to finish with a word for those who read our scriptures in our worship on Sundays.

First of all, do you realise that Jesus was also asked to read scripture in worship? You’re on the same rota. So much depends on the public reading of scripture. 

Our attitude to the Bible is shaped by the way the Bible is read in worship. Those of you who take on the role of readers are translating the text from the lectern into our hearts and minds. Every word counts and will carry its own resonance, so each word needs to be heard. 

It’s important to be as inclusive as possible for the sake of the hard of hearing and the sake of those easily distracted. It’s important that the language we use is as inclusive as possible – try not to use exclusive language. Yes, at one point, “men” and “brothers” may have been inclusive terms but they no longer are and exclusive language is offensive because we can do better if we care. Our call is to love our neighbours, not to unnecessarily offend or exclude them.

Our great translators have loved us with their efforts to bring God’s word alive. It cost some their lives. We owe a huge debt to our translators. Those who read in public worship are our translators. They need our prayer. I’ll ask them to stand while we pray for them.

Let us pray: 

Loving Lord, in Jesus you make plain your word,
we pray for our readers,
that you may give them boldness of spirit
to compensate for shyness and self-consciousness.
We pray that you will be with them in their preparations
that they may translate the word of the page to the heart of our communities
through love for our neighbours,
so that all of us come to help one another
to hear, read, mark and inwardly digest
your word of salvation.

Leviticus 19: 1-2, 15-18
The Lord spoke to Moses, saying:
Speak to all the congregation of the people of Israel and say to them; you shall be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy.
You shall not render an unjust judgement; you shall not be partial to the poor or defer to the great: with justice you shall judge your neighbour. You shall not go round as a slanderer among your people, and you shall not profit by the blood of your neighbour: I am the Lord.
You shall not hate in your heart anyone of your kin; you shall reprove your neighbour, or you will incur guilt yourself. You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against any of your people, but you shall love your neighbour as yourself: I am the Lord.

Matthew 22:34-end
When the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together, and one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. ‘Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?’ He said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.” This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: “You shall love your neighbour as yourself.” On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.’
Now while the Pharisees were gathered together, Jesus asked them this question: ‘What do you think of the Messiah? Whose son is he?’ They said to him, ‘The son of David’. He said to them, ‘How is it then that David by the Spirit calls him Lord, saying,
“The Lord said to my Lord,
‘Sit at my right hand,
until I put all your enemies under your feet’”?
If David thus calls him Lord, how can he be his son?’ No-one was able to give him an answer, nor from that day did anyone dare to ask him any more questions.