The creation account in Genesis tells the story of how God formed the creatures of the earth, brought them to mankind, and waited to see what he would name them. ‘Now the Lord God had formed out of the ground all the beasts of the field and all the birds of the air. He brought them to the man to see what he would name them; and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name. Genesis 2:19-20.This speaks of a profound relationship between humans and the animal kingdom from the beginning. Cave art from 40,000 years ago depicts this relationship, a two-way relationship in which mankind often took on the characteristics of animals, and animals took on the characteristics of humanity.We can see this in early Christian mosaics from the ancient Greek city of Heraclea in what is now North Macedonia, which I was fortunate to visit last week on one of Lucy Abel Smith’s fabled ‘Reality and Beyond’ tours. The location of the city is significant as it lies on an important east-west trade route that St Paul would have used in his mission to the Macedonians. Acts 16:9.‘During the night Paul had a vision of a man of Macedonia standing a begging him, “Come over to Macedonia and help us.”It is possible that St Paul visited the city and founded the church there, as by the fourth century it was an important episcopal centre. In the remains of the great Basilica were uncovered these remarkable mosaics depicting the Biblical narrative of ‘salvation’ not through the drama of human characters but through the drama of the animal kingdom.The lion representing nobility and courage, the deer representing the martyr’s faithfulness unto death, and The dove representing peace and prosperity, also from the pagan myths Cerberus, the monstrous watchdog of the underworld chained by Christ to the tree that represents his Cross.The plant world tells the same story. The tree from the Garden of Eden speaks of God’s provision, the barren fig tree that Jesus cursed speaks of humanity's faithlessness, and the Pomegranate tree whose fruitfulness speaks of life in all its fullness.The animal and plant worlds are then intimately linked to our world binding us into a relationship of mutual dependence. Today we celebrate our pets not just because we love them but because God loves them and has given them to us to care for as they care for us.Today, in Mark’s account of Jesus’ meeting with the ‘rich young man’ it is the camel who tells the story of his dilemma.‘It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of God!’ Mark 10:23The rich young man in our story was an observant Jew, religiously obeying to the letter the laws of Moses with all their many prohibitions and conditions. The unintended consequences of this rigorous legalism were that you had to be rich to be an observant Jew, and the poor were unintentionally excluded from the observance of the law and therefore, as we see in the New Testament classed as ‘Sinners’. Certain trades, such as leather workers and tax collectors could not be considered faithful Jews, even the poor and the disabled were considered to be outside the Law because they could not participate fully in the many provisions that the Law demanded.So our Rich young man was an observant Jew, yet it is clear that he felt that he lacked something necessary for Salvation. When challenged by Jesus on his observance of the Law he said, with complete honesty.“Teacher, all these I have kept from my youth” Mark 10: 20.Jesus knew that he was sincere. Often in the Gospels, we are told what Jesus said to people, not the way in which he looked at them, or the emotions that crossed his face. But here we have a glimpse into the face of Jesus which helps us to capture the mood and the drama of the whole scene.To begin with, when the young man declares that he’s kept all the commandments, ‘Jesus looked hard at him and loved him’. Mark 10:21The camel and the eye of the needle is thought to refer to the gate in the walls of Jerusalem through which traders would have to enter after all the other gates had been closed at night. To pass through this gate the camel had to be unloaded and the camel would have to kneel down in order to pass through. All this required a relationship of trust, if not love between camel and master. The camel an intelligent animal but notoriously stubborn would not do this unless there was a relationship of complete trust.This helps us to understand the young man’s issue, first his burden and then his pride. His burden was his riches and his pride was his dependence on them. Without his riches he saw himself as naked and defenseless, with his riches he saw himself as independent and powerful.What Jesus was offering was love and what he was asking of the rich young man was trust, the same relationship as between camel and master. Only where there is a relationship of love and trust can we unburden ourselves of the things that weigh us down. Only the security of God’s love gives us the peace of mind that neither riches nor status offer.God’s Kingdom is all about a new creation in which the rules of the world no longer apply. In his Kingdom you can’t push your way in by trying a bit harder, by making a bit more money, by impressing the world with good deeds, or great moral achievements, all these means of achieving status in the world have the unintended consequence of making it impossible to accept that God’s gift to us depends not on our efforts but God’s goodness.As seen in the mosaic at Heraclea we live in a world in which humanity lives in a state of dependency on God’s provision for his needs both physical and spiritual. Now God, in Jesus is doing a new thing, a ‘New Creation’ in which all are equally dependent on God’s goodness. There can be no advantages in being rich or powerful, and no disadvantage in being poor or disadvantaged. The only way to God’s heart is by receiving with faith his gift of undeserved love.Who was the Rich young man?Some commentators have speculated that the rich young man was Paul, it’s a fanciful idea but contains a truth. He tells us that he abandoned all his pride in his upbringing, training, and heritage, to gain the Messiah.“Of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of the Hebrew, as of the Law a Pharisee, as to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to righteous under the Law, blameless. But whatever gain I had, I counted as loss for the sake of Christ... Indeed I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.”Paul had discovered the unexpected benefits of being poor!“ We are treated as being impostors and yet are true; as unknown, and yet well known, as dying, and yet behold, we live; as punished, and yet not killed; as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; as poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing, yet possessing everything.” 2 Corinthians 6: 8-10“After all, he says Jesus loved me and gave himself for me” Galatians 2:20These were the riches that the young man desired and yet could not find in status or power or wealth.Maybe, just maybe it was this rich young man who later came to true riches in Christ.Just as Jesus looked into that young man’s heart and ‘Loved him’ Mark 10: 21He looks into our hearts and sees our deepest desires seeking in us the same love that “costing not less than everything” TS ElliotOur pets too speak to us of a relationship of love and trust and remind us that we are loved and can rest secure in that love forever. A prayer for peace in the Holy Land.O God of all justice and peace we cry out to you in the midst of the pain and traumaof violence and fear which prevails in the Holy Land.Be with those who need you in these days of suffering; we pray for people of all faiths – Jews, Muslims, and Christians and for all people of the land.While we pray to you, O Lord, for an end to violence and the establishment of peace,we also call for you to bring justice and equity to the peoples.Guide us into your kingdom where all people are treated with dignity and honour as your children for, to all of us, you are our Heavenly Father.In Jesus’ name, we pray. Amen.
There may be nothing so boring as speaking about your grandchildren, but I’m going to!When our first grandchild Isabella known to us as ‘Bella the beautiful’ celebrated her first birthday guess what she got from her mum and dad. Well, it seemed a bit strange to me but they gave her a pram! A bit young for that isn’t it, I thought, well I think really it’s a baby walker disguised as a pram!However, there is a serious side to this because, from the very earliest age, Bella is learning how to be an adult using toys. A child sees the world and comes to terms with all its complexities by using anything they can lay their hands on to make their own little world and reimagine ours. They have so much to teach us about the world of Jesus because that’s what he was doing in his parables of the ‘The kingdom of Heaven’My own little worldChild psychologists tell us that play is an essential part of a child’s development, not just an idle amusement because play enables the child to imagine, explore, and experiment with the world around them. Do you remember the thrill of your first train set or your first doll’s house? How real that world was, how excited you were to create your own little version of the world around you. A child can use anything, a dustbin can become a spaceship, a cardboard box, or a sailing boat, it just doesn’t matter because the child can see the endless possibilities in every object they find.Reimagining the worldJesus, then, asks us to enter into the mind of a child, to become like a child able to imagine the world as we would like it to be. ‘The Kingdom of heaven’ is the world that Jesus imagined, a world in which we would live in peace and harmony with each other, not an Edenic paradise, but a real world where we fail and fall short, but are forgiven. A world where love replaces law, and service replaces slavery. This was the kind of world imagined by the artist Henri Rousseau. His Jungle paintings, inspired by children’s picture books take us into ‘The Kingdom of heaven’ as he imagined it. It is a world without humans, maybe because he thought the world would be better off without us, but it is not a world without suffering. ‘Nature raw in tooth and claw’ is how he saw it, but innocent of the conventions and culture of the world he knew.As an artist, Rousseau himself was innocent of the conventions and culture of the established art world. As a self-taught artist who began painting at the age of 49, he stood outside the art world, but no one less than Picasso, who discovered one of his paintings at a street market recognised Rousseau’s genius and went to meet him. In 1908 Picasso held a half-serious banquet in his studio in Rousseau’s honour attended by eminent poets, painters, and writers of the period. Although never celebrated by the art establishment he is credited with inspiring many other artist movements that broke with convention, among them ‘Surrealism’ and ‘Fauves’.The world of JesusJesus was and is a child at heart. His teaching was always with stories and often with objects that were to hand. A seed, a flower, a handful of sand, and always with the words: “This is what the kingdom of heaven is like”. He invites us to enter his world and become like a child again, imagining with him what the world could be like. Today he invites us to welcome into our lives the child that is in us, for to welcome that child is to welcome him, and to welcome him is to welcome the God who can reshape our imagination and our lives.“Whoever welcomes one of these little children in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me does not welcome me but the one who sent me” Mark 9: 37.The world of powerSo we are urged to become endlessly creative, not just like a child but like God. How sad that today children are pushed into the harsh adult world of competition and testing so early that they lose the opportunity to play. It was this adult world that stunted the imaginations of the disciples and led them to argue about who would be the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. It was this adult world that focused on control rather than compassion, power rather than play, and ideology rather than imagination. This was the game the religious leaders of the day wanted to play. They refused to imagine a world where they were not in control or to play with the possibility of a different world where peace, justice, delight, and compassion might shape their lives.The wisdom of the childJames calls this ‘child’s play’, Wisdom. It comes from the humility that recognises that submission to God is the fertile soil where the fruit of the Spirit can grow: ‘Peacemakers who sow in peace raise a harvest of righteousness’ James 3:18. To submit to God is to imagine another world where negative feelings are replaced by positive thoughts and a new future for the church and the world becomes not just ‘child’s play’ but reality.
This has been a difficult and disappointing harvest season. It was often wet at awkward times, delaying both sowing and harvesting of many crops for 2024 harvest, together with higher crop drying costs before grain storage.Annual crops such as cereals are designed with a built-in biological reflex to complete their life cycles within the growing season even when sown late. This they do by short-cutting their duration to complete some reduced seed formation to ensure survival; they also abort a higher proportion of their potential grain sites along the way. The result of this is to produce fewer and smaller grains, and, thus, a disappointing harvest overall.Timing is everything in disciplined crop husbandry, for nurture and care of optimum crop yields at high quality. However, the best efforts of good farming cannot much override difficult weather or other challenges.Nevertheless, harvest provision calls for thankfulness. The characteristic response, ‘Mustn’t grumble’ to the standard question, ‘How are you? is really rather sad. By contrast, the joyful are always also thankful. An attitude of gratitude seems to arise from joy and to produce cheerful reactions, even when harvest results fall short of their expected potential.Furthermore, stubbles in fields offer at least three opportunities:We used to draw out by tractor with chains our mobile arks for pullets (young hens). They glean shed grains, thus also removing potential volunteer plants to carry over disease to the next crop. They also eat some insect pests.Some stubbles are sown with a catch crop, such as short-term stubble turnips to be grazed before the next main crop thus preventing weed colonisation, providing protective ground-cover, and manuring land.Subsoiling across stubbles when soil moisture is low enough to crack the soil at depth and break any compacted layers, noting the need to replace the deep tines as they wear quickly with the heat and friction, especially in some soil types.At Lammas, we thanked God for the first-fruits of harvest. We thank Him now for the full harvest. We are urged to faithfulness and thankfulness, not to results-based responses to God’s calling as farming people.“In everything give thanks; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus concerning you.”(1 Thessalonians 5:18).“Be anxious for nothing; but in everything by prayer with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God and the peace of God which passes all understanding shall keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus.”(Philippians 4:6-7).John Wibberley
The generation we now call Z has grown up in a multi-platform world, a world in which they can access information in a number of different ways, but they may have lost other vital skills!‘Generation Z learned to swipe before they could write!’Generation Z thinks it is more important to have a reliable wifi connection than a reliable bathroom’Analogue or DigitalGeneration Y was the last generation to write a letter!I remember the day when we got our first and last letter from our Generation Y child. Up to that point, all our other children had written to us regularly from school but this was the last handwritten letter we received and I have preserved it for posterity!However, all our children belong to what could be called the digital age whereas most of us belong to the analogue generation.The difference I think is that the analogue generation processes information differently to the digital generation. Analogue people are used to a single medium, usually words, whereas the digital generation uses many different platforms. This means that we, the analogue generation, mainly use only one of the senses God has given us to process information.The Great East Window York MinsterI use a painting to illustrate my sermon because I believe it helps if we engage more than one sense as we process what we are hearing. In fact I remember learning back at theological college that we remember and retain more, the more of our senses that are employed. My picture today is not a painting but a stained glass window, because back in the days before literacy was universal, biblical stories were told with pictures. The window contains two biblical cycles, Creation and Revelation, the beginning and the end of all things. Beneath the heavenly realm at the head of the window, populated by angels, prophets, patriarchs, apostles, saints, and martyrs, there are three rows of 27 Old Testament scenes from the Creation to the death of Absalom. Below this, scenes from the Apocalypse appear, with a row of historical figures at the base of the window. You could preach many sermons just from that one window!Multiple platformsMusic too was important to lift the spirit, and incense to convey the mystery of God. Touch and posture are also used to express worship. Today I would like you to take these holding crosses for a moment as you pray, they may help you to focus. When I was a child we used to sing a little song that went ‘Hands, shoulder, knees, and toes…. and eyes and ears and mouth and nose’ I think there was a little dance that went with it. I’m not sure whether we sang it to remind ourselves where all these parts of the body were, or to exercise, but it reminds me today that there are many more ways to listen to a sermon than sitting on a church pew. Consider for a moment the various ways in which Jesus interacts with the people in this passage.Interactive TeachingFirst, there is the interactive dialogue with the Syrophonesian woman, then there is the encounter with the deaf-mute man who Jesus took aside and stuck his fingers in his ears, and ‘After spitting, touched his tongue’ vs 33.Only after engaging physically with this man does he speak to him, “Ephphatha”Later he teaches through the feeding of the four thousand and illustrates his message through the vivid image of broken bread. Just like the little ditty we sang as children Jesus appears to want to engage us by using and even touching every part of our body.‘heads, shoulders, knees and toes… eyes and ears and mouth and nose’Holistic TherapyJesus then engages with our contemporary culture in many more ways than we do in our churches.I think that he would have used music therapy to reach disturbed children or aromatherapy to calm stressed executives or maybe started a massage clinic to treat the weary disciples!In reality, Jesus’ healings were sermons delivered not in words, but by touch and sight, smell and taste. Those who merely heard often went away unaffected, those who merely saw returned home unmoved, but those who responded with their whole being were touched and changed.Modern medicine has caught up with Jesus's methods but the Church hasn’t. Jesus engaged the whole person, the Church today only seems to engage those parts of us that can receive an analogue message rather than a multiplatform digital one.The Multi-Sensory ChurchIt is not just a problem for the Church it is a problem for us analogue Christians, we have learned to engage with parts of our minds but not with all of our bodies, and yet here we are at a service of Holy Communion. What is this if it is not a multi-sensory experience?We hear the Word but we also receive the Bread and the Wine because that too is the message now acted out in the Breaking and Sharing of the Bread and the Pouring out of the Wine. Holy Communion asks us to engage with our whole bodies:To come forward, to kneel, to put out our hands and eat, to open our mouths and drink. To taste and smell, to share in the body and blood of Christ.Engaging the SpiritThere is one dimension we have not mentioned. The spiritual, for Jesus, did not just engage the body and mind he engaged with the spirit of each person.‘’And looking up to heaven, he sighed and said to him, “Ephphatha” that is be opened. Mark 7:34As Jesus engaged with this deaf-mute there was a struggle going on at a spiritual level. Jesus was engaging with more than the man’s body and mind he was engaging with his spirit. It appears that just as his mouth was locked up and his ears closed so too his spirit was imprisoned and the implication is that until his spirit could be freed neither his body nor mind could be.“ Be opened” then reminds us that there is a dimension within each of us that words cannot reach, which even bread and wine cannot nourish. A part of us that will not respond without a struggle though we may be doing all the right things with our bodies and even believing all the right things with our minds.As we kneel and hold out our hands, as we open our mouths there is another part of us with which Jesus asks us to open up, our spirits.For us analogue Christians this may be the hardest part of us to release, but only as our spirits are released can we experience the full spectrum of a multidimensional, multi-sensory, multi-coloured, and even multi-generational world.
