Sermon for the Third Sunday Before Lent

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

There is a story about Jesus teaching the beatitudes and saying:

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Blessed are the meek. Blessed are they that mourn.

Blessed are the merciful. Blessed are they who thirst for justice.

Blessed are you when persecuted. Blessed are you when you suffer.

Be glad and rejoice for your reward is great in heaven.

And then Simon Peter said, "Are we supposed to write this down?"

And Andrew asked, "Are we supposed to know this?"

And James asked, "Will we have a test on this?"

And Phillip said, "I don't have any paper."

And Bartholomew asked, "Do we have to hand this in?"

And John said, "The other disciples didn't have to learn this."

And Matthew asked, "Can I go to the toilet?"

Then one of the Pharisees who was present asked: 

"Where are your learning and assessment objectives? What range of teaching strategies did you draw from? Did you provide a differentiated provision? Can I see a cross section of their work?

And Jesus wept. 

That one is especially for all the teachers, doubtless exhausted, and now in half term recovery!

In fact, the version of the beatitudes that I read then, the first half anyway, is the more familiar form, from the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew’s gospel. Today’s gospel reading, though, was from the beatitudes in the sermon on the plain in Luke 6. In many ways, Luke’s is the plainer, clearer version. Where Matthew’s Beatitudes talked about those who were poor in spirit, Luke talked simply about those who were poor. Where Matthew talked about those who hungered and thirsted for righteousness, Luke talked about those who were just hungry. There are other differences. Matthew’s version has no woes, but Luke’s contains warnings to the rich, the full, and those who are laughing now. There is, of course, no reason to suppose that Jesus didn’t repeat his stories, most of us do but it might also suggest that the crowd to which Jesus was talking on this occasion was very mixed, with both rich and poor present. We were told that there was a great multitude from Judea, Jerusalem, and the coast in addition to a great crowd of disciples. It was a large vast mixed group of people. More than that, in Luke, there was a fluidity between people and disciples.

That should make us pause for moment when considering whom we might consider to be a disciple or not and perhaps help us to be less judgemental about other people’s faith and practice. To be a disciple is to be a learner, a student but in this education programme, there are no vacations! This is all about our attitude to life, the idea that at every age, we all have more to learn, and that most of all, and, in order to develop our spiritual selves and senses, we need to learn and understand more about God, and to be more like Christ, the living breathing Son of God on earth. So, there are no holidays from being kind, compassionate or considerate to the point that we can actually relent from helping those in greater need than us.

These beatitudes are simple summary statements about what it means to follow Christ. He offered encouragement and hope to all who were suffering and troubled. To those who were comfortable, he called for action for others. For those who were comfortable and complacent, there was judgement, but there was always the possibility of change, or in religious terms, repentance.

This morning’s beautiful collect hinted at this; that we need to allow God to be the one who brings an end to chaos in our lives. “Almighty God, who alone can bring order to the unruly wills and passions of sinful humanity….”. That may be the nature of fallen humanity, but we know also we were built first for love and compassion. The royal law is to love God and love our neighbours as we love ourselves.

It would be easy to despair right now at all the issues in the world, at the decisions being made by the USA but in our Old Testament reading the prophet Jeremiah reminds us not to put our trust in human strength. He said, ‘Thus says the Lord: cursed are those who trust in mere mortals and make mere flesh their strength’. He too refers to the blessed, and exhorts his hearers to be counted amongst them, saying, ‘Blessed are those who trust in the Lord, whose trust is the Lord. They shall be like a tree planted by the stream. It shall not fear when heat comes’. In other words, it is not that heat will not come but that when it does, they are given assurance and more than that, we were told, ‘it does not cease to bear fruit’ – again no excuse for a holiday, we are expected to continue to bear fruit in good times AND in hard times.

Talking of riverbanks, there is a story about a holy man engaged in his daily meditation under a tree whose roots stretched out over a riverbank. During his meditation he noticed that the river was rising, and a scorpion was caught in the roots and about to drown. He crawled out onto the roots and reached down to free the scorpion, but every time he did so, the scorpion struck back at him. An observer came along and said to the holy man, 'Don't you know that's a scorpion, and it's in the nature of a scorpion to want to sting?' To which the holy man replied, 'That may well be, but it is my nature to save, and must I change my nature because the scorpion does not change his?'

Who we are, then, how we behave should not depend on others external to us. Who we are authentically as Christian people in our nature, is to be a people who love, care for and save the lost, the broken, and all for whom life is a struggle. And whatever else that involves, it must have something to do with bringing hope, encouragement, justice, love, and practical help, as Jesus did as well as bringing a challenge to others to do more as well.

In Paul’s first letter to the Church at Corinth, we heard a very clear statement about what belief entailed. Corinth was a highly cosmopolitan city, refounded by Julius Caesar in 44 BC, located on the Mediterranean coast 50 miles west of Athens. The first settlers were from Greece, Syria, Egypt and Judea. They became wealthy merchants and sponsored the Isthmian Games, a festival of athletic and musical competition in honour of the sea god Poseidon and second only to the ancient Olympics. It was a hotbed of competing ideas, beliefs and practices which is why Paul had so many problems with the church there. He had to quell some of the nuttier ideas they would latch on to.

Now, in our time, we are not in a terribly dissimilar position. We exist in a world not unlike Corinth for competing ideas, with a healthy diversity of peoples and beliefs. It is tempting, like the Corinthians, to cobble together our beliefs from what we hear that we like and put it all together. But that is called syncretism and it’s a heresy. While there is some breadth within Christian faith, we should not make the mistake of thinking that Christianity is a pick-and-mix religion. That will not do. It leads to all sorts of inconsistencies which undermine faith. People do try to do that of course. I have even heard Christians talking about reincarnation in the sense of coming back as an animal or some other creature. Let’s be crystal clear reincarnation of that sort is fundamentally incompatible which Christian faith which talks about us having a soul, of judgement and heaven, not coming back as something else. 

Paul set out very clearly for the Corinthian Church that the resurrection of Christ was a key tenet of the Christian faith. Unusually for Paul, who usually liked to write extravagantly long complex sentences, on this he was straightforward and crystal clear: if Christ was not raised from the dead, our faith is in vain. That Christ died & rose on the third day is what demonstrates that Christ had been put to death and come back from death. It is what proves to us that there is a soul, that Christ’s soul survived through death, but that therefore so can ours, and thus so can we. We, therefore, have the hope that what we see is not all that there is.

In our journey from being a set of individuals to a community of disciples, Christianity is a religion with a systematic set of beliefs which offers us clear boundaries. At the same time, Christian faith also has a width to it. As learners, we are all called to be students of how to understand this better and to lead a holier life now on earth, with the hope of resurrection to a better place, that, in the words at the end of today’s collect, ‘our hearts may surely there be fixed where true joys are to be found’. 

Amen.