"Jesus loves Osama" - "Are you having a laugh?" Epiphany 7

Genesis 45: 3 - 11, 15
Luke 6: 27 - 38

Out in Australia, for once the churches are eclipsing the cricketers in the media. The reason is not just that the Poms aided by the New Zealanders have dented Australia’s sense of invincibility. It is as much about a controversy that currently surrounds some Baptist churches.

You see, a number of Baptist churches have recently displayed billboards that proclaim the message, “Jesus loves Osama.” Not surprisingly, there has been a reaction. For some there has been disbelief that churches should erect such billboards. They cannot be so crazy. Or to borrow my son’s favourite phrase when unconvinced by something his father says, “You’re having a laugh aren’t you.”

But now even the politicians are getting drawn in. Prime Minister John Howard who is even less qualified as a theologian than he is as a would be statesman, has suggested that the church could have “chosen a less offensive way of spreading its message.”

Now on the one hand I get his point. There are not too many people less deserving of Divine or human love than Osama Bin Laden. According to most Islamic scholars he is a heretic and his Al Qaeda is to all intents and purposes nothing other than a death cult. The man deals in death and destruction and offers no vision of society that could seriously be considered enlightened. In short, his life is far removed from Jesus as it is possible to imagine.

But wait a moment! By using the offensive example of Osama Bin Laden as being loved by Jesus, those Australian Baptists are revealing something of the scandalous truth concerning the love of Jesus. You see, if Jesus loves Osama Bin Laden, then surely Jesus loves every person no matter how dysfunctional or tawdry their lives might be. If Jesus loves Osama Bin Laden, then surely no person is beyond the love of Jesus. However low we might have sunk, surely this means that Jesus never gives up on us.

And certainly if we look at the life of Jesus, we find precisely that. He took a terrorist zealot into the community of his twelve closest followers. But he also called a tax collector who was to all intents and purposes a collaborator with the hated occupying Roman army. He brought a dignity to a woman who came from the ranks of the longstanding enemies of his people, the Samaritans, and did so even though her love life was a matter of some scandal. And time and again, he shared table fellowship with a motley crew of sinners and outsiders to the horror of the religious establishment who knew that such table fellowship involved a statement of acceptance of such reprobates.

But more than that, even when he was being personally wronged, he never stopped giving value to those whose evil was directed at himself. His patience towards those members of the religious establishment who sought to trap him, seems to have known no limit. And when evil did its worst in the Garden of Gethsemane, he tells Peter to put his sword away and even brings healing to one of those who had come to bring about his destruction. And then, and then on the Cross, his cry was not a curse but;

“Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.”

None of this means that Jesus is not concerned about right and wrong - he clearly is- but it means that Jesus is committed in love to all of humanity, as much when at our worst as when at our best. And that is the wonder of grace which should be the unending hymn of the church of God.

But now we meet another twist. For not only is Jesus the one who loves all but here he seems to be calling on those of us who seek to follow him to embody such love even to those who are our enemies.

“Are you having a laugh?” we respond. For all of us know that there are those who do great evils to others. Are there not we ask times, when evil of such magnitude is performed, that to ask the victim to love is but an act of cruelty?

Well, I think there is a sense in which Jesus is here using hyperbole, an exaggerated language to make a case for a different way of seeing the world. Yes, there are those who seem to rise to the challenge but for most of us, well we are not like Joseph able to show love to those who wreck our lives. And anyway, by the time Joseph is reconciled with his brothers, his fortunes have been transformed and from being reduced to slavery and jailbird, he is now raised to the highest office in the land along with the prestige that goes with it. He may see it as God’s plan but for many who suffer, mention of God’s plan can only give rise to hollow laughter.

More and more I am convinced that these words are addressed to for the situations in which we have power to effect a change for the good that we be prepared to use our power for good. For certainly, Jesus is here changing the ways in which we see our world.

Now just for a moment, we need to face the major objection to the teaching of Jesus. That objection is rooted in the violence of our world which in the face of wrong sees but two responses. The first of these responses is the cowardly option of “flight“, running away. This solves nothing. The other option is to “fight” but this takes the risk that we become the very thing that we are opposed to.

Jesus, on the other hand offers us the possibility of a creative way of confronting evil. For just a moment or two let’s look at his seemingly passive suggestions of how to relate to those who wrong us.

Firstly we see him suggesting turning the other cheek which on the face of it seems like the actions of a doormat. But it is not! The reason is that the only way you could hit someone on the right handed cheek would be with a backhanded action of the right hand as in those days the left hand was for cultural reasons kept for unclean tasks. The purpose of using the backhand would have been not so much to injure as to humiliate. Turning the other cheek would have meant the aggressor had to hit in the normal way but to do so would be to recognise that the victim was an equal rather than a subordinate. So Jesus is suggesting a stand that refuses to accept further humiliation.

Secondly we see Jesus suggesting that where a person is forced to give up their outer garment in order to pay off a debt in a society in which many were forced into indebtedness, that they should also remove their undergarment and give that also. Now given that poor people had only two garments to wear in the first place, this would mean nakedness. But the shame of nakedness in that culture would not be so much upon the naked person as on the person who witnessed it or the person who caused it. For here is Jesus suggesting a means by which the downtrodden should rise above their shame. The world is turned upside down.

Yes in all of this, Jesus is suggesting ways of resisting evil without the destruction of enemies. And that is at the heart of this teaching. By all means challenge evil! By all means do not be a doormat! But whilst there is no obligation to like those who do wrong, Jesus cautions us against willing their destruction and succumbing to hatred.

Desmond Tutu who chaired the “Truth and Reconciliation Commission” in South Africa after the painful years of apartheid puts it well;

“To be human, we live in community, we have to restore community and in the end only forgiveness will achieve that. A person is a person through other persons. Your humanity is caught up in my humanity.

If you are dehumanised, then inexorably I am dehumanised. For me to be whole, you have to be whole. If you are a perpetrator, a torn and broken human being who has lost your humanity, then I too am less than whole.”

Too right! For us to be truly human means living in community and we are all damaged when that breaks down. Of course, society must protect itself from those who bring destruction to it. Nowhere does Jesus dispute that. But the challenge is that we protect society often through the rule of law whilst not seeking to obliterate the possibilities of growth in even the most depraved.

At times, all of us struggle with this teaching yet within it we see a reminder that all are children of God made in the image of God, however much the image has been marred. And it is that we are called to remember in our local community hard as it may sometimes be, and in our national life. For if we heeded the call to follow the ways of Christ, we might be less ambivalent as a nation to torture, less inclined to send asylum seekers back to face death and less inclined to entice people into the indebtedness of problem gambling.

But now, we are on the edge of Lent. Now we prepare to follow Jesus on the road to Calvary. Now we prepare to see the wonder of a love which ultimately shows our pale imitations up for the pathetic efforts they are. Soon we will hear once more that cry upon the cross, the cry that has resounded through two thousand years of human violence and cruelty;

“Father, forgive them for they do not know what they are doing.”

And we will recall again that those words are not just for the torturing killers of two millenia ago but for us today even for the Osama Bin Ladens. For the love of Jesus is so immense that it pleads for all and in so doing speaks to us to dare to be a people of reconciliation and peace.

You lift me up Epiphany 6

Jeremiah 17: 5 - 10
Luke 6: 17-26

Several years ago, I went with my wife to see my cousin Keith play the part of Henry Higgins in “My Fair Lady.” Based on George Bernard Shaw’s play “Pygmalion”, one of its endearing characters is Alfred P. Doolittle. This father of the central figure Eliza, admits to being one of the “undeserving poor.” As he puts it;

“I ask you, what am I? I’, one of the undeserving poor; that’s what I am. Think of what that means to a man. It means that he’s up against middle class morality all the time. If there’s anything going, and I put in for a bit of it, it’s the same story: “You’re undeserving; so you can’t have it.”

His view is also neatly put in a line from the play which never quite made it into the musical;

“What is middle class morality? Just an excuse for never giving me anything.”

Now, let me put my cards on the table. I am deeply uncomfortable with talk of the undeserving poor. My family history includes a great grandmother who began her days in the workhouse and who would have ended there if she had not been so badly broken that her last weeks of life in 1914 were instead spent in the beautifully named “lunatic asylum.”

Now I do not deny that there are some people who seem to be undeserving but such people are to be found in all areas of society and include both rich and poor. But, the sort of venom that I found directed at some of those at the bottom of the pile particularly from some of the media in the late 70s and early 80s, was positively dehumanising. It was born in arrogance and treated other people with contempt. And it has its equivalent manifestations today with the dismissal of sections of society as “chavs.”

Clearly we live in a world in which there winners and losers. They make our newspapers all the time. It is not just about wealth as the sad story of the death in the past week of Anna Nicole Smith reminds us. Here was a woman who climbed up the greasy pole of materialism using her body as her prime asset. Married to an aged billionaire with motives that were certainly challenged by her family, in the years that followed his death, her dignity became pealed away and with only her sexuality to live on, she died alone, a thoroughly tortured soul. If only, if only, her life could have been rooted in a trust in the Lord as Jeremiah encourages us to have, rather than in those who used her, abused her and ultimately deserted her.

And on the subject of losers, in the last fortnight we have had the news of the forthcoming expansion of gambling in our country. I can’t for the life of me understand it. We have already over 300,000 problem gamblers in Britain. Indeed one of the women who has been so criticised in the aftermath of Celebrity Big Brother, went onto the show simply to save her house from repossession, a situation she faced due to such a gambling problem. And yet, we stand on the edge of a deliberately induced gambling expansion. The immorality of such an act astounds me and reminds me of Jesus words that for those who cause the little ones to stumble, it would be better that a millstone were fastened around the neck and they be drowned in the depth of the sea. But sadly, those with addictive personalities who are the casualties of this wretched innovation, will doubtless be labelled as feckless and the undeserving poor.

But, Jesus offers us another way. At a time when affluence and success were seen as marks of the approval of God with their absence being seen as a sign of Divine disapproval, Jesus turns the world upside down in what has become known as the Sermon on the Plain. For here in his teachings about blessings and woes, Jesus addresses the world of winners and losers in a material sense as opposed to the spiritual basis of the Beautitudes in the Sermon on the Mount. With echoes of Mary’s Magnificat which Luke has also recorded, Luke records Jesus as specifically offering a blessing who are poor, hungry and who weep. This blessing we can see in part expressed through Jesus being particularly present with those at the bottom but it should also be seen as representing a message that the Kingdom of God offers the prospect of change, the prospect of role reversal. And in his ministry we see Jesus time and again offering a liberation and a dignity to those whose experience of life is akin to a kick in the head.

But alongside blessings, Jesus also speaks of woe, woe to the rich, the full and the laughing. And before we look to the local squire or those who salt away their gains in the Bahamas and the likes, we need to pause. Or in global terms, I suspect that each of us here is very much in the top 10%. By simply being British, even if we are well down the order within our country, we are still the rich in global terms. And few of us show signs of being other than well fed. Woe to us?

Now the immediate problem we find here is that we know that some of those with whom Jesus spent time, were people of some wealth. After all, how else could Jesus and his disciples have financed themselves in their mission. An upper room for a Passover meal would have cost money and we know that Jesus was buried in the tomb of a wealthy man.

Now whilst I guess that Jesus would have a critique of some ostentatious wealth, I think that the key point of the Woes is to remind us that material wellbeing can be very much a matter that is temporary rather than permanent. To build one’s life on material gain is to build on sand as the parable of the rich fool reminds us all to clearly. What matters is that the rich should have a true solidarity with the poor.

Oscar Romero, the great Archbishop of El Salvador, preaching shortly before his martyrdom put it like this;

“Do you want to know if your Christianity is genuine? Here is the touchstone: Whom do you get along with? Who are those who criticise you? Who are those who do not accept you? Who are those who flatter you? Know that Christ once said, ‘I have come not to bring peace but division.1 Some of you want to live more comfortably, by the world’s principles of power and money, but others have embraced the call of Christ.”

And the call of Christ is about an affirmation of the value of all. We see it demonstrated in the story of Desmond Tutu. Brought up in a society that treated black people such as himself as less than white people, he was stunned one day when walking with his mother, he met a priest. The priest addressed young Desmond’s mother as Mrs Tutu, he doffed his cap and he moved to the side so that she might have priority in passing. Desmond had seen nothing like it before and so the example of that priest, Trevor Huddlestone, was of significance in leading Desmond Tutu to himself becoming a priest. Why? The actions of a man of God had shown him that in God’s sight he was truly a somebody.

And in Jesus, we see one who used his every teaching, his every work of power to turn those who were thought of as nobodies into somebodies. Time and again he lifted people up. Those who were at the bottom of the pile, those who had made wrong choices, those who had seemingly little to offer, he lifted them up!

And still today, he lifts people up out of his inexhaustible grace. With him there are no Nobodies, only Sombodies! If we today feel battered, he lovingly lifts us up. With him there is no Poor Law distinction between the deserving and undeserving. For his grace is so generous that it goes beyond what any of us can rightly claim to deserve. So today, I invite you to be about his work of lifting people up but as you do so, do not neglect to allow yourselves to be lifted up by him or his messengers who just may be the last people you can imagine yourself being lifted up by.


Preached at Alwington on Sunday February 11th 2007

Called to Serve Epiphany 5

Isaiah 6; 1-8
Luke 5; 1-11

Several years ago after being accredited as a Methodist local preacher, along with others who had recently been accredited or who were nearing that point, I was invited to visit the then Chair of the Cornwall District. I cannot deny that I went somewhat reluctantly. After all I expected a sort of talk on how to be good Methodists. Surely there would be warnings about conducting ourselves in a responsible fashion, keeping our distance from strong drink and wild women, and of course the warning to be careful not to teach anything contrary to our doctrines or at least to beware of the paths that might lead us into heresy.

Well to my relief, we got none of that stuff. Instead we were challenged to become the awkward squad. We were told that as the younger preachers in the District we should be those who saw it as our duty to challenge the status quo. Where we had a vision of what might be, we were told to state it and if ignored to state it louder. And where we felt concern at the realities we encountered, we were told to challenge them and if ignored to challenge them all the louder.

I went home quite joyful. I never knew that Methodism could be such fun although on at least one occasion I was to get myself close to being disciplined as a preacher for taking the advice a little too enthusiastically.

The point of this is that we sell the call to follow Christ short if we portray it as being about rules. This morning, I want to offer three aspect of the call to follow the God who reveals himself in Christ.

The first aspect to consider is that the call to follow God is rooted in revelation as to the otherness of God. This is particularly powerfully revealed in the call of Isaiah. At a time when Uzziah who had led Judah through a period of stability and prosperity is dying, Isaiah receives a vision of the majesty of God, a vision that leaves him all too aware of his own inadequacies. For now he has had a vision of the glory of God which exceeds all the superlatives that we can envisage in our human discourse. God’s greatness is revealed and as God overcomes Isaiah’s resistance, he is left to ultimately cry out;

“Here am I. Send me!”

For fishermen at Lake Gennesaret, the revelation of God comes in a very different way. Experienced fishermen, frustrated from a fruitless night going about their trade, by following the advice of the carpenter Jesus at an hour when fishing offered little prospect of success, they get a catch of such a magnitude that even with the help of other fishermen, the nets that had been untroubled at night begin to burst. And so Simon Peter filled with wonder at an encounter with the Divine, like Isaiah utters words concerning his own inadequacy, before like that great Prophet responding to the call.

In a real way, the path of discipleship has to begin with an encounter with God which reveals to us the unlimited and inexhaustible wonder of God. It can be summed up in the title of an old book written by J.B Philips entitled, “Your God is too small.” It is as we begin to see that too often we have squeezed God into a box that is incapable of confining God that we begin to glimpse that God is altogether “Other”, greater than we can imagine and so is worthy of our devoting our lives to seeking glimpses of the Divine mystery.

Secondly, the calling is as much about our being as our doing. Just as God far from being passionless and removed as demanded by the Greek philosophers, is passionate about our well being as is shown in his grace which showers value and love upon each of us, we are called to be transformed people. Perhaps this is best summed up by Kate Wilkinson’s well known hymn;

“May the mind of Christ my Saviour
Live in me from day to day,
By his love and power controlling
All I do or say.”

The great hymn writer, Isaac Watts gets hold of this idea of sharing in the passion for vulnerable humanity that is seen in Christ. One of his neglected hymns, “Blest is the man whose bowels move” expresses this rather well - although I guess with a title like that, it would be hard to expect any congregation to sing it with a straight face. Nevertheless, I shall try to read its first two verses as reverently as possible because of the valued points that Watts makes;

“Blest is the man whose bowels move,
And melt with pity to the poor;
Whose soul by sympathising love,
Feels what his fellow saints endure.

His heart contrives for their relief
More good that his own hands can do;
He, in the time of general grief,
Shall find the Lord has bowels too.”

Now leaving aside jokes about irregular Christians, mention of bowels at the time of Watts referred to deep feelings. And is not part of following Christ about having deep feelings for those who are seen as losers in our competitive society? Is not part of following Christ about having deep feelings for those who are hurt and devastated for as Watts reminds us, such is the way of our Lord. And following the way of that Lord unleashes great potential for God alongside us empowers us well beyond our natural strengths and abilities.

And certainly, we see this passion in Isaiah’s support for the poor and his denunciation of the injustices around him. And we can find it to in the life of the early Christian communities when the likes of Simon Peter ensured that life’s casualties were very much a part of the early Christian communities, helped as much as possible, for they were following the Lord who time and again raised the standing of the lowly, the poor and the dispossessed and in so doing confronted the powerful.


And finally, the calling of God is a calling that makes us not spectators but participants. Isaiah becomes a voice that reflects God in tempestuous times whilst Simon Peter becomes a fisher of men whose efforts for the rest of his life are used to connect people with God and to form communities of faith. In these things, God does not reject human creativity and individuality but is the One who empowers the people of God.

It does not necessarily mean abandoning all that went before. Isaiah remained at the Court in Jerusalem although he could never be the same. Simon Peter probably carried on with fishing. After all he had a mother in law and so probably a family to support and certainly soon after the resurrection, Christ finds him back in Galilee fishing according to John’s Gospel. But whilst much may have been as before, the calling to be participants in God’s work is unending.

And what of us today? We too are called by God. We need to have a big picture of the wonder that is God. We too need to have our world vision transformed by God that we care about things that matter to God. And we, even we, are need the Epiphany of seeing that we are called to participate in God’s mission helped by the enabling God. Our age, health, family responsibilities, places of work, all impact on how we are to participate. But the God who in love has redeemed us and calls us, wants each of us to be a part of God’s mission. It may be that we are called on to be involved in some activity or other for we are the hands, the feet and the voice of God in our world today. It may be to encourage others in their tasks or it may well be to be those before God in prayer. This morning I encourage each of you to contemplate how to respond to your particular calling in the knowledge that we are all called to be a part of God’s team.


Preached at Bideford and Clovelly on February 4th 2007