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.
Oscar Wilde’s famous story ‘The Portrait of Dorian Gray’ could have been written to illustrate today’s gospel reading. Dorian Gray has his portrait painted as a young man; it reflects his youthful innocence and beauty. As Dorian grows older he remains youthful but strangely the marks of his uncontrolled and selfish lifestyle begin to distort the features of his portrait until it becomes so ugly he decides to destroy it. In the moment he destroys the portrait he dies and a strange transformation takes place. The portrait once again shows him as a youthful man but the marks of his evil distort and disfigure his dead body.Rembrandt Self Portraits 1628-1669We can see a similar transformation over time as we examine Rembrandt's self-portraits. In the case of Rembrandt what we find is a growing sense of self-knowledge as life takes its toll and bankruptcy brings wisdom. The self-portraits thus create a visual diary of the artist over a span of forty years. They were produced throughout his career at a fairly steady pace, he was still painting portraits in 1669, the year he died at the age of 63.These self-portraits trace the progress from an uncertain young man, through the dapper and very successful portrait painter of the 1630s, to the troubled but massively powerful portraits of his old age. Together they give a remarkably clear picture of the man, his appearance, and his psychological make-up, as revealed by his richly weathered face. Kenneth Clark stated that Rembrandt is "with the possible exception of Van Gogh, the only artist who has made the self-portrait a major means of artistic self-expression, and he is absolutely the one who has turned self-portraiture into an autobiography."The Beautiful lifeA rather cruel quotation, variously attributed to Abraham Lincoln, Albert Schweitzer, Coco Chanel, and others makes this point about our faces:“When you are young, you have the face God gave you. At 40 you have the face life molded, and at 60 you have the face you deserve”Jesus is challenged to answer the same question, ‘What makes a life beautiful?’ We are familiar with all the remedies that advertisers offer, but they can only help us look good on the outside, what we need is help on the inside.Servants and MastersIn Jesus' day, the secret of a beautiful life was ritual purity, eating and drinking the right foods, washing regularly, and touching only those things that were uncontaminated. These rules and regulations were encoded in the ‘traditions’ and were strictly observed by the Pharisees and teachers of the Law. The traditions and the law were indeed given by God to lead his people to holiness but over time they had become not servants but masters. Sadly this is what happens to many of God’s good gifts. Money, sex, power, and even food are all gifts of God that have been given to us as servants to enable us to lead good lives, but as our masters, they have become monsters.Prisoners of the law.Paul uses this phrase to describe the reality of evil. He calls himself “A prisoner of the law of sin at work within my members.‘What a wretched man I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? Thanks be to God, through Jesus Christ our Lord.”Romans 7: 23-25.Paul, like Jesus, clearly points us to our own appetites and desires as the source of evil. Evil comes not from the outside but from the inside of us. We must face the reality that it is we who are responsible for the transformation of the beautiful gifts of God into the source of evil. When we allow these gifts to become our masters we become their prisoners. Even the Law of God, Paul points out, given to lead us to God, can become a cruel taskmaster turning us into tyrants and hypocrites when it no longer serves the purposes of God.Many of us have puzzled over the problem of evil, how can God allow it to exist in His world? The answer lies within us. As we consider our lives we must ask the question, ‘What drives us, who are our masters, and who are our servants?’ True holiness begins as we focus our desires and ambitions on God. Somewhere we all need a portrait of ourselves that reflects what is going on inside us! When we can see ourselves as we really are the answer to our dismay is not to destroy that image but to hand it over to the one who has put to death the sin that destroys us, and be transformed by the new life that he gives us.
