Tag: troubles

When prayer gets risky: what Abraham and Jesus teach us

David HerbertLeave a comment

There are lessons to be learned about how to pray in both readings appointed for the 6th Sunday after Trinity (Proper 12C). This sermon explores what it means to pray like Abraham and Jesus. The readings are Genesis 18:20-32 and Luke 11:1-13.

I want to begin, as I so often do, by saying how much I love preaching that brings the scriptures back to life. Surely that is the point of preaching — to let these ancient words breathe again, so they speak into our lives with all their surprising grace and challenge.

Today we have lessons in prayer.
One from Abraham and one from Jesus — both treasured in scripture,
both handed down through generations as pearls of love.

As I’ve grown older, I’ve become more and more aware of something about our scriptures.
They are not the comfortable writings of comfortable people.
They are the scriptures of a people who know what it’s like to be beaten,
to be hated, to be exiled and poor.

They are the treasures of those who have discovered the good news of a kingdom
so different from the kingdoms that rule over them —
kingdoms of injustice and indifference.

I had a small taste of that kind of indifference this week — two and a half hours on the phone with the TalkTalk supposed helpdesk, after an engineer had supposedly fixed our broadband the day before.
It was one of those maddening, circular conversations where no one seems able to help and your time seems to mean nothing.
And I found myself thinking: in the empires we live under today, it’s often shareholder profits that come first — and customers, ordinary people, come last.
It’s a small thing, a First World problem, but it reminded me how easily we’re made to feel powerless, unheard, even invisible.

The kingdoms of this world haven’t changed that much.

And that’s what makes the scriptures so precious.
They are not polite reflections from the powerful. They are the prayers and stories of those who know what it’s like to be last — and who dare to believe that in God’s kingdom, the last are first.
A kingdom that lifts up the last, the least, and the lost.
A kingdom that puts the bullies and tyrants last and sends the rich away empty.

It’s against that background that we hear Abraham’s prayer and the prayer we have always said Jesus taught us.


Think of Abraham’s life.
It was no easy road.
God singled him out and called him into migration — forced him to leave everything he knew for a future he could not see.
He endured famine.
He had to make his way, as many migrants still do, with deception and lies just to survive.
His faith was tested to its limits.

And here we see him in conversation with God about Sodom —
a violent and corrupt city, a city whose sins cry out to heaven.
Abraham could have said, “Yes, Lord, wipe them out. They deserve it.” But he doesn’t.
Instead, Abraham pleads for Sodom.
He bargains with God for the sake of any righteous people who might live there.
“What if there are fifty righteous? Forty? Thirty? Twenty? Ten?”
Each time God agrees to spare the city for their sake.

Do you see what’s happening?
Abraham stands in the gap for a city most would have written off.
He prays out of love — even love for an enemy city.
This is no detached, polite prayer.
This is bold, persistent intercession.

Abraham dares to hope that God’s mercy might outweigh God’s judgment. And God listens.

This is how the beaten, hated, and poor pray:
not from a place of superiority,
but from within the mess of the world.
They pray not only for themselves
but for their neighbours, even their enemies.


And then we come to Jesus.
His life, too, was marked by difficulty.
Born into a world ruled by empire,
he knew poverty, rejection, and violence.
When his disciples ask him to teach them to pray,
he gives them words shaped by that reality:
“Father, hallowed be your name.
Your kingdom come.
Give us each day our daily bread.
Forgive us … for we ourselves forgive.
Do not bring us to the time of trial.”


This is not a safe or sentimental prayer.
It is a radical act of trust and love.
It longs for a kingdom where tyrants no longer rule,
where the hungry are fed, where debts are forgiven,
and where the trials of this world are ended.

And notice: it’s not “give me my daily bread” but “give us our daily bread.”
This is the prayer of a people —
a community that knows its dependence on God and on one another.

This is the prayer of those who, like Abraham, refuse to give up on the world.

And Jesus doesn’t just teach this prayer — he lives it.
From the cross, he prays, “Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing.”
Even in the moment of his own suffering, Jesus intercedes for his enemies.
He shows us that to pray in the midst of trouble is to love in the midst of trouble.


So what do we learn from Abraham and Jesus?
We learn that prayer is not for the strong and self-sufficient but for those who know their need.
Prayer is not an escape from the world’s mess but an entry into it.
Prayer is where we bring the beauty and the brokenness of the world before God and ask for nothing less than its redemption.

This is the radical love at the heart of prayer:
love that prays for the beaten and the poor,
but also for the violent and corrupt.
Love that does not give up on God’s mercy, even for Sodom.
Love that says, “Your kingdom come,”
even when the kingdoms of this world seem unshakable.


So today, as we join together,
lifting our voices in the prayer Jesus taught,
let us remember:
this is not a polite religious exercise.
This is the prayer of Abraham bargaining for Sodom.
This is the prayer of Jesus calling down the kingdom of heaven.

It is the prayer of those who dare to love their enemies and pray for those who persecute them.
It is the prayer of those who believe that God’s mercy is wider than we can imagine.

It is where we have a say, particularly those who come first in the kingdom of God –
those who otherwise have too little say in anything else to do with them.

These are the pray-ers we join when we dare to pray as Jesus and Abraham have taught us.

So let us pray boldly.
Let us pray persistently.
Let us pray with hearts full of love –
for the world, for our enemies, for the kingdom that is coming.
Let us be one with those Jesus counts first –
joining the last, the least and the lost in their prayer.
Amen.

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?’

Troubled Times and Mistaken Identities: sermon notes for Trinity 10A

David HerbertLeave a comment

Readings: 1Kings 18:9-18 and Matthew 14:22-33

It is so odd seeing one another in masks isn’t it? It affects our communication because it hides so much of our expression. So much is communicated through the muscles of the lower part of our face. It also makes identification more difficult. I had thought that new guidance would have meant that I would be preaching through a mask this morning – I was thinking how difficult that is going to be.

The idea of masks fit both our readings this morning – because we have two cases of mistaken identity. People thinking that they had seen one thing, but had seen something else altogether.

The first mistaken identity is when the king, Ahab, meets Elijah. Ahab asks Elijah, “Is it you, you troubler of Israel?”

Elijah replies to tell Ahab how wrong he is. He says to Ahab: “I have not troubled Israel; but you have, and your father’s house, because you have forsaken the commandments of the Lord.”

So, who is the troubler? Is the troubler Elijah? Or is it the king who is the troubler? Is Elijah right in claiming that the king’s misrule – the lack of good government is the trouble with Israel?

From Elijah’s point of view (the point of view of scripture), it is Ahab and his wife, “that Jezebel” who had caused all the trouble for Israel by forsaking the commandments and by their fanatical religious persecution, rounding up the “troublemakers”, killing off the prophets and the opposition.

In our own troubled times we have similar identity parades – but with a different cast. People are paraded before us as troublemakers and are made our scapegoats. So within living memory, “Jews”, “blacks”, “gypsies”, those who are gay have all been paraded before us as the troublemakers – and final solutions have been devised to kill them off. But they haven’t been the troublemakers (however militant they may have become). They have been the troubled – and their troublers have been their accusers. The accusers, the persecutors, have been the real troublemakers.

Similar processes are at play when people are demeaned in today’s politics as “doomsters and gloomsters”, or “remoaners”. That is how opposition is dismissed in British society these days. That is how troublemakers are dismissed.

There have always been peacemakers who have been mistakenly identified as troublemakers. Nelson Mandela was despised by the media as a troublemaker. So was Mahatma Gandhi. So was Martin Luther King. So is Greta Thunberg by some. They are not troublemakers but instead have resisted the troublemakers.

John Hume died last week. He lived through that chapter of Irish history we refer to as “the Troubles”. For his political opponents he was regarded as part of the trouble. But he turned out to be a hero of those troubled times refusing to be swayed by the troublers. He was very much one of the architects of the Good Friday Agreement and the peace of the Agreed Ireland.

Martin Kettle, in the Guardian (August 6th) wrote:

He was a political leader who was confronted with a deeply divided society. He was a bridge builder where flag-based identities and community suspicions loomed suffocatingly large. He recognised that building bridges meant talking to, and listening to, the extremes as well as the centre ground. He saw there was no future for a system in which one tradition exercised total power and ignored the excluded. He took the long view about the hard journey that had to be taken. And he never gave up on it.

Do you see how contemporary that exchange between Ahab and Elijah is? “Aren’t you the troublemaker?” “No, you are the troublemaker.”

The Ahabs do not want anyone rocking the boat. They are threatened by them  – not realising it is their monstrous rules which are rocking the boat.

We are living through very troubling times. So many of our landmarks have gone. We can’t touch those we have hold dear. We don’t know what’s going to happen to our jobs. Children don’t know whether they will see their friends in September. Poverty is alarming us. And the World Health Organisation is saying from a global perspective that we haven’t peaked yet. We have never been this way before.

And this brings us to the second case of mistaken identity.

In our gospel reading the disciples are all at sea. All night long the waves have been buffeting their boat. They are all exhausted – so understandably they don’t recognise Jesus when they see him walking towards them. They see him as a ghost, probably as the sea monster, the troublemaker responsible for their troubles and nightmare.

Of course, nothing could have been further from the truth and the disciples realise that when Jesus tells them who he is. He says: “Take heart, it is I. Do not be afraid.” Jesus didn’t refer to himself by his name, Jesus. Instead he said, “It is I” – this is “I AM”, the great I AM – the name by which God chooses to be known to the world.

This is no troublemaker walking on the lake, walking on the water. This is God walking as if a bridge through troubled waters.

This is the one Psalm 89 refers to as the one who rules over the surging sea and who stills the mounting waves. For Job, God alone stretches out the heavens and tramples the waves of the Sea. One commentator, Carol Works, says of this, that “God controls chaos with his toes”. Nobody else does that. And here as they see Jesus walking on the lake they began to see that this must be God – because only God does this.

Chaos is described in terms of “troubled water”. We go through “stormy times”. Nothing is “plain sailing”. We are “all at sea”. How many times do these sort of phrases come to mind in times of trouble? They come from deep in our collective memory – maybe from our birth, or even the waters of the womb.

Jesus calls Peter into troubled water.

“Come” Jesus said to Peter.

“Come” he says to all who would listen to him.

“Step into the water”.

“Get out of your depth”.

“Don’t stay in the shallows”,

“step into the depths, where there is danger, where there is trouble”.

“Join the troubled, don’t be spectators of them.”

“Sail the same waters as the migrants – hear their Sea Prayer (Sea Prayer is a poem by Khaled Hosseini)

“Join Elijah, MLK, Greta Thunberg resisting the evil currents of our culture”

“be prepared to be accused and persecuted as troublemakers”

Those who do are blessed. Jesus said:

 “Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account.” (Matthew 5:11)

So Peter, the first disciple, responds to Jesus’ “come”. He steps out but becomes frightened by the storm and begins to sink. He cries out to the lifesaver who catches him (remember that Peter was called to be a “catcher of men”).

Other disciples follow. Into the troubled waters of our chaotic times we are called. We are not called to safety but to danger.

I wonder whether this gives us a different understanding about our baptism. What are the waters of baptism other than that stormy lake, or the waters of chaos over which the Spirit of God hovers at the beginning of creation, and hovers at our second birth in baptism – in our re-creation?

We are called into trouble, not away from trouble. We are called into deep water by the one in whom we have the confidence to save us and catch us.

What makes us shy away is we are short of confidence that we can cope. It feels like drowning. We too are people of little faith. But that is OK. Jesus still calls us. “Come” he says to Peter knowing his little faith. “Come” he says to us. “Come, don’t doubt that together we will tread these troubled waters, together we will build bridges. With you in me and you in me we will calm these troubled waters. Don’t be afraid.”

So Jesus calls us in these troubled times. He calls us to join Elijah, Peter. They are not the troublemakers – the trouble has already been made. He calls us in these troubled times and that becomes our vocation – here and now. The gospel reading was intended to hearten those who found themselves in trouble, to accept God’s call to step out in faith. It is the same for us. Peter was the first disciple – we follow as disciples.

We are not called to walk by on the other side, but to get involved. We may not feel that we are very good in trouble, or dealing with conflict. Maybe it is lack of practice. Maybe we have a lot to learn. Maybe we will get that sinking feeling. But Jesus holds his hand out to us at the same time he calls us “Come” – he does show us the way to walk through troubled times.

If we thought it was going to be plain sailing we have probably mistaken God’s call. And if we remain untroubled we may in fact be part of the trouble – a troublemaker.