Tag: love

Sunday 25th October

Simon’s Reflection for the 21st Sunday after Pentecost

It is said that when the rule to wear seat-belts first came in in Italy, there was a lively trade in the City of Naples in the buying and selling of T-shirts with a black diagonal stripe down the front to fool the police!

Sometimes people resent rules and laws. At the beginning of the Covid crisis, behavioural scientists were concerned that members of the public might not obey the extra rules that were necessary. We have seen recently, the mad dash in some places to have one last night out before new restrictions come into force. People can sometimes become over-focussed on obeying or disobeying rules and forget the purpose they serve; like keeping ourselves and others safe in the current situation.

Sometimes we can’t see the wood for the trees.

The question posed to Jesus in today’s gospel story was not an easy question. The scribes of Jesus time counted 613 commandments in the Torah or the biblical law books. Some were regarded as “light” and some as “heavy.” As well as the biblical rules, there were many other rules that had grown up around them, so the question of which was the most important law was a difficult one. 

In his answer Jesus gives a lens through which to see the laws of the Old Testament. He goes to the heart of them and tells his listeners what their purpose was. He gives two key commandments which underpin all the rest.

The first part of his answer would have been uncontroversial. No-one would want to deny that to love God was the key purpose of the law but alongside the command to love God, Jesus placed a lesser- known verse from Leviticus; the command to love your neighbour as yourself.

The real originality of Jesus’ teaching is in the prioritising of these two and placing them alongside each other. Jesus links love of God and love of neighbour. The clear implication of  this is that you cannot love God if you do not love your neighbour.

In our Old Testament reading from the Book of Leviticus, we can see that love of neighbour seems to be defined as love of kin; i.e., love of your fellow Israelite but Jesus in his other teaching broadens the understanding of neighbour. The parable of the Good Samaritan places a much wider definition on who our neighbour is, as does Jesus’ compassionate attitude to Gentiles in the gospels. Jesus universalises the concept of neighbour.

G.K. Chesterton once wrote….”We make our friends; we make our enemies; but God makes our next door neighbour.” If you love your neighbour, you are recognising that the command to love goes beyond those that we might love because they are family or friends. You love your neighbour simply because he or she is a human being, made in the image of God, who just happens to live near you. When we do this we are recognising that we are all called to help one another through life no matter who we are. It doesn’t matter about nationality, race, gender, sexuality or any of the other irrelevant points where human beings carelessly drawn dividing lines. The impulse to look for divisions between human beings is not God-given.

So this is the heart of what God requires of us: to love God and to love our neighbour.

We know how the events of this year have helped us to recognise how important neighbourliness is. Many people have helped or have been helped by their neighbours and maybe even had more opportunity to get to know their neighbours and become friends.

 It’s amazing how sometimes you can live in a place for some time without even knowing the names of your neighbours. We can all too easily live in our own isolated worlds. It is so important to relate to our physical communities and to help to make them actual communities where there is mutual care and concern and friendship.

At its best, the internet can sometimes do this through online community groups. It’s good that people help each other online. It’s interesting the way people will post things on online groups asking for advice. Sometimes they are things that they could find out for themselves like “When does Tesco open?”  Sometimes though, they are things that the medium is really useful for like  – “Were the children supposed to wear their PE kit at school today? Can anyone tell me?” Sometimes potentially life-saving advice can be given. A man in America posted a photo on local network with the question “Is this a dead cockroach – do I have an infestation?” A very speedy reply came back from some caring soul: “No. It is the tail of a rattlesnake! Be careful.” It’s good to see people helping one another simply out of a desire to help another human being; to help a neighbour.

That is our individual calling; to love God by loving our neighbour. It is also our shared calling as Christians to build something together and that is neighbourly, churches which are also neighbourhood churches. Our churches themselves are supposed to be about good relationships where we know and help one another and where the churches themselves are good neighbours to our local community and “stitched into” our local communities.

It is often said that the aggressive individualism of our age undermines community yet in many ways the church can buy into it and we the people of the church can buy into it. Let’s take to heart instead Jesus’ teaching that we are deeply inter-connected with each other and thankfully deeply, deeply connected to our loving Creator God and let us find ways to live out that truth and put Jesus’s teachings into action. Amen.

Sunday 27th September

Simon’s reflection for the 17th Sunday after Pentecost

What do you find encouraging in today’s readings? I invite you just for a moment to reread the verses of the letter to the Philippians, verses 5 – 11; the ones that begin: “Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus….” There, have you read them? Good, then I’ll continue.

Now, I’m no biblical scholar and I don’t know enough to assess the different arguments among scholars about biblical texts. I do however believe that understanding the bible properly and with the help of good scholarship can strengthen our faith rather than weaken it, but what I want to say is what I know of that passage deepens my faith and is something that really encourages me. I’ll tell you why but first a bit of background.

The letter to the Philippians may consist of 3 letters put together. The letter or letters were written around the mid-50s AD, around 20 odd years after the death and resurrection of our Lord. Paul is writing them from prison, probably in Ephesus, and his purpose is partly to encourage the Christians of Philippi to bear with the sufferings they face and to see God at work through them, just as Paul, as a prisoner, is doing.

Many people think that the verses you read at the beginning were part of a hymn that was known by Christians at the time. There is a theory that this hymn was written in Aramaic, the language Jesus would have spoken. Paul of course wrote in Greek. Whether the words were written in Aramaic or whether St Paul composed it, I do not know, but, here’s what I’m trying to write about, what I find amazing is the things those Christians believed about the man, Jesus of Nazareth, so soon after his death!

Of what human being would anyone say that they were in the form of God and had some sort of equality with God; that they “emptied themselves” first by being born, which implies that they existed with God before birth and secondly by dying on a cross? To what human being would God give all power and authority? How did these first Christians come to believe such remarkable things about a human being? What had happened to make them believe such things?

Now some may say that people believed all sorts of things in those days. Well yes that is true. Other ancient cultures were inclined to call their ceasars or their pharoahs or their emperors  “gods” but I don’t know of an example from antiquity of anyone describing a convicted criminal as a god, do you? After all, one of the main things that is corroborated about Jesus’ life outside the bible is that he died on a cross. Jesus suffered a humiliating and degrading criminal’s death; the ancient equivalent of the scaffold or the electric chair!  I suspect those who died in such a way in those times would normally be thought of as life’s losers rather than “gods.”

Moreover, the people who first started thinking these things about Jesus were not Greeks or Egyptians or Babylonians but Jews. They were steeped in a culture which didn’t accept that men or women were “gods.” They had a strong history of opposing idolatry. Their own kings, even the greatest ones like David and Solomon, were not described as gods in the bible but, rather as very fallible human beings.

So, I still find it amazing. Something must have happened which made those people believe such things and I believe that something was the resurrection.

Paul says that the power that was in Christ can be in us. So while he is asking the Phillipians to imitate Christ’s humility and self-sacrifice, he is also saying more than that. “Let the same mind be in you as was in Christ Jesus” He speaks of the sharing of the Holy Spirit among Christians. He is saying that God can form us into more Christ-like people and a more Christ-like community, if we let Him.

Now perhaps in a way that can sometimes be even more difficult to believe, that God can be at work within us especially when we get things wrong so often.

But it does say that Christian discipleship is about more than simply being loving and kind to one another. It is definitely about that, but in order to do that we need to believe and trust in the one who emptied Himself out of love for us. We need to work at loving our neighbour and loving God at the same time as they both feed into each other. We need to let Jesus teach us what genuine love and genuine authority are and we need to learn from him.

Maybe discipleship is a bit like learning to dance. To do it well we need to learn and practice the steps but who wants to dance without music? Our relationship with God is the music. Amen.

Simon’s reflection for Sunday 6th September

The Book of Ezekiel teaches that we have a duty to challenge others when they are being sinful. Our gospel suggests that if another member of the church wrongs us we should challenge them. I wonder how we understand what our faith teaches us about difficult situations of conflict and grievance and when we should challenge others.

I don’t suppose most of us go around telling people off where we think they are doing something wrong. Sometimes though this can be a failing in courage. Some people do. I remember my mother used to get very cross if she saw people throwing stones or littering on Brighton beach and she would have no compunction about telling them off much to my embarrassment if I was with her! It takes courage to do that and a readiness to not be conflict averse. We can’t always avoid having to challenge people!

On the other hand, some people are a bit too eager to correct others and to point out other people’s faults and to take great satisfaction in doing so! Perhaps on this subject we should remember Jesus’s warnings about self-righteousness alongside today’s readings. Do not point out the splinter in your brother’s eye when you have a plank in your own!

We don’t always know the whole story. The police sent round a local circular recently pointing out that we should be aware for example that some people are exempt from wearing face masks in shops. This was in response to people being unfairly and rudely challenged by others. I suspect there have been a lot of inappropriate challenges in these tense times in this sort of case and others.

It is definitely true though that sometimes as the Book of Ezekiel teaches a failure to correct can be a failure to love. The Old Testament reading makes clear that the point of correction is not just the self-satisfaction of the person doing the correcting, it is the well-being of the person corrected. There is an important truth in this. We can’t wash our hands of one another. We all belong to one another and sin isn’t just an individual thing, it is a corporate thing. Sin doesn’t just affect the sinner. There are no victimless sins and love is not just letting people do whatever they want to.

The gospel passage reflects on a church situation where one person has sinned against another and it gives a sort of legal process of how to act in such a case. People have different views in biblical scholarship on how much this is a direct tradition of something Jesus taught and how far it may have been an application of Jesus’ teaching applied to the needs of the early church. Either way, it reflects how close-knit the early church was and also the deep sense of responsibility to one another that church members felt.

I’m not sure how exactly we could apply the advice intended for that early church to St Baldred’s or St Adrian’s.  We probably wouldn’t encourage people to tell their grievances to the whole church gathering, for example! Mind you, I have known of awkward and painful situations where that has happened and perhaps that is where a sense of grievance has grown without being addressed quickly as the gospel suggests so some elements of it may well be relevant to our churches now if perhaps not all.

The first step on the procedure is to challenge the person that has wronged us, assuming of course that we are in the right. As I suggested earlier we might first want to try to give the other person the benefit of the doubt as we should for a brother or sister in Christ and think about whether we have misjudged the situation.

But it does happen that people sometimes wrong us and we shouldn’t also put ourselves in the wrong all the time. Again, it is important to challenge wrong-doing in an appropriate way both for our own sakes and for the sake of the other person. Our duty to love even when it is difficult and even to love our enemy is not a calling to be a doormat. We are allowed to stand up for ourselves.

This is advice which applies to our wider relationships too. But the question is in what spirit do we challenge another. As the gospel implies we should not merely challenge to vent anger but rather to achieve reconciliation. As the rest of the process shows reconciliation can be hard work.

Challenging appropriately when we feel hurt or wronged can be very difficult of course. We are only human.

What makes reconciliation more likely is if there is a loving relationship to draw on. In a church community where people are doing the right things, looking after one another, encouraging and nurturing one another and seeking to follow Christ by serving others. There will be more good relationship to draw on. If we have to tell someone that they are in the wrong, it is easier to hear that if they know that we love them! It is also easier perhaps, if we are aware of our own faults and we too can accept appropriate correction from others.

If we want to follow Jesus, we can’t duck out of the hard work, challenge and self-sacrifice that taking reconciliation seriously involves. Jesus was never afraid to call out wrong-doing but he was always ready alongside that to show that he wanted the good and the well-being of the other.   Amen.