Tale of a feisty widow - Twenty first Sunday after Pentecost

LUKE 18: 1-8

You know, there are times when I get angry about the safe conformist Jesus to whom I was introduced in my childhood. Why? Because the more I learn about Jesus, the more I realise that I have learnt a picture of Jesus which needs to be unlearnt.

You see, the real Jesus is so much less tameable than the “Gentle Jesus, meek and mild” who infected my childhood. For the real Jesus far from explaining away the world as it is, boldly invites us to go to places where we have never been before.

We see this so clearly in the parable of the persistent widow and the unjust judge - a seemingly safe story which challenges our temptations to live lives of quiet acceptance.

First let’s look at the widow. She is a feisty sort, the sort who would seem to have hit on girl power long before the Spice Girls revealed both “girl power” as a slogan and a disturbing 20th Century reality that the lack of talent is no barrier to fame and fortune. Anyway, our widow had no pop moghals behind her and yet still she was able to make every bit as much noise as the inane sounds of “Tell me what you want” as Scarey, Ginger, Sporty, Baby and Posh, forced themselves upon our attention.

For a widow to create a rumpus ‘though would have been seen as quite a shock. You see, widows were the nobodies of their days. This was very much a world in which women were defined by their men. And this woman had no man anymore and so she was cast adrift upon the margins of society. We don’t know whether she was young or old for this was a time in which girls were married in their early teens. This was a time when life was brutish and far too many, both male and female had their lives cut tragically short. All we know of our widow was that life would have been painfully hard for her and any children that she had. And so she would need to seek her rights in terms of finance. After all, the alternative would be to go under, possibly even to be driven to a need to offer her body so that she might live.

Well, this widow is not prepared to be pushed around and so she determines to fight for her rights. And when she encounters a judge who refuses to address her needs, she does the girl power thing. She creates a lot of noise and pesters the judge night an day until he is driven into submission. Yes, this woman may be a highly irritating nag but I put it to you that today we could do with more of her type, people who are unwilling to be held off by the sort of officialdom which lacks a capacity to be passionate about the needs of the little people.

But what of the judge. He would seem to have been one of the Roman judges of his day. That Jesus castigates one of these representatives of Roman power offers us a sign of the political Jesus who is not afraid to rail against the injustices of the empire that dominated the world. This judge would seem to be the sort of character who has no redeeming features. He is not going to upset the powerful on behalf of a nobody - no way! As far as he is concerned, the widow can go on with suffering the hardships of life for this is a shameless judge who cares not for such a woman. He is not going to bother his sorry arse about a nobody.

Well that is until things get too much. The nagging and the threatening of the widow finally begins to get too much for him. Wearied he finally concedes;

“Even though I don’t fear God or care about men, yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will see that she gets justice, so that she won’t continue wearing me out with her coming.”

Now of course, this judge bears no resemblance to the God and father of our Lord Jesus Christ. In the face of human suffering, he is a remote figure - so totally different from our God who cares sufficiently about us to share in our sufferings and to weep as we weep. But the point is that this man who arbitrarily uses power on the basis of self interest, ultimately acts on behalf of justice for the widow. How much more does the God who is deeply committed to us, reach out to us in our times of need!

This doesn’t mean that we are called to a “name it, claim it” understanding of prayer. It doesn’t take us far in understanding the mystery of so much being cruel and unfair in the world. Nor does it suggest that we are able to manipulate or nag God into doing our will. Of course not! What we have here is a warrant to seek God amidst the unfairness of life. And if that means we end up shouting at God, so what! God can take our anger, have no fear. The real offence is not our being angry with God but the times in which we treat God with indifference.

But yet, there is another way of seeing the parable. Sure, Luke interprets it against a background of an argument to be persistent in prayer. But parables have always had the power to challenge us in unexpected ways. When we feel that we have worked them out, they come back and hit us again and again in new and unexpected ways for through his stories, Jesus is in the business of turning how we see the world upside down.

Too often we have seen prayer as about our speaking to God. All too often the prayer meeting is the home of a shopping list approach to faith. And yet surely, if prayer is about getting close to God, we need to be doing a good deal more listening than talking.

So just for a moment let us turn this parable upside down. Instead of seeing God as the judge, let us see God as the widow - a persistent voice devoid of power calling for justice. Let us see ourselves as the judge. We are challenged to follow the path of justice. Yet do we ignore the inconvenient voice that persistently challenges how we see our lives and the world. Now, might not this parable be not so much about our asking God to act but instead be about God asking us to act. Seen like this, the parable becomes a challenge to us to truly live as the people of God daring to turn the world upside down by responding to the call of God to support the weak and to be God’s agents for liberation and grace. Now the parable challenges us to our very core And the essential question becomes not so much as to when God will favour justice but when will we have the faith and obedience to do God’s will in our world.

There we have it - a fascinating parable with the power to be dynamite in our world.


This sermon was preached at Northam Methodist Church on Sunday October 21st 2007

Unpalatable lessons - 20th Sunday after Pentecost

2 Kings 5: 1-14. Luke 17: 11-19

It was quite a beginning! Jesus had been baptised by John the Baptist and had gone on to that period of temptation in the desert. Now he returns to Galilee and having made an impression on the locals, he goes to the synagogue in his home town of Nazareth. At first all goes well until Jesus snatches disaster from the jaws of victory by reminding them of the wideness of God’s love as displayed in stories of old, culminating in a mention of the story of Elisha and Naaman which we have heard this morning. This story enraged them to such a degree that Luke describes its very mention as making the people furious, so much so that;

“They got up, drove him out of town, and took him to the brow of the hill on which the town was built, in order to throw him down the cliff.”

Not quite an advert for free speech!

But why should this story have such power to create such an extreme reaction?

Well let’s take a look at the story. But first let’s see who the two main characters are.

Firstly, let’s look at Naaman. He is introduced to us as a commander in the army of the King of Aram. Now Aram is basically the country which we know today as Syria. Today there is a difficult relationship between Israel and Syria. On a number of occasions during the past 60 years they have been at war with each other and when not so the peace has been uneasy. Well, some things never change. Our story which dates back about 2,800 years takes us back to another period in which there was seemingly unending conflict between the two countries. And when the Bible speaks of Naaman bringing great victories over Israel, those victories were in the main over Israel. Sure there were periods of what might be seen as armed peace but on at least one occasion after this story, the King whom Naaman served lay seige to Samaria causing a famine so bad that some people cannibalised their own children. So Naaman was a pagan who was complicit in bringing much suffering to Israel, a man who was well and truly an enemy of Israel and so in the eyes of the people of Israel, an enemy of God. A complete outsider!

Now let’s look at the other main character, Elisha. He is one of the great prophets that emerged in Israel. Following the fiery Elijah who challenged Israel to follow Yahweh rather than Baal, Elisha, other than in the story of the cursing of boys who mocked his baldness, connected positively with people performing miracles that pointed to the power of God. Indeed, Elisha would seemed to have performed more miracles than any other Old Testament prophet.

And so to our story. Naaman, despite his wealth and status, develops a skin condition that causes him much anxiety. It probably wasn’t Hansen’s Disease which we think of as being leprosy today. But it was still a social problem even if such conditions did not bring the outcast status that was the case in Israel. Certainly it was enough to greatly disturb his life. And so at this point, hope comes in the form of an unlikely person, an Israelite young girl who had been taken into slavery as a result of Naaman’s raids into Israel. The last person to offer help to Naaman you might think, this girl who had been taken away from all that she held dear. And yet, this girl goes to Naaman’s wife and tells her of the prophet Elisha who could offer a cure to Naaman’s condition. The girl begins a chain of unlikely agents of God’s grace. She, herself, is powerless both as a result of her gender in a sexist society and her status as a captive. But without her, there would be no healing. Next comes Naaman’s wife, the wife of a foreign general, once more an unlikely agent of God’s grace but it is this woman who persuades Naaman to explore the possibility of meeting the prophet of Israel. And later when Naaman doesn’t like the way that Elisha offers to heal him, it is servants who confront him and encourage him to do as the prophet has said. Do you get it? Here in this story we are finding that it is outsiders and nobodies who are emerging as the instruments of God’s grace. For God turns our expectations completely upside down. It is as Paul writes to the Corinthian church concerning the calling of God;

“He chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things - and the things that are not - to nullify the things that are.”

I wonder if today, we place limits as to who might be an agent of God’s grace. Are we truly open to the possibilities that God’s grace might be brought to us through channels that might surprise us - the asylum seeker, the prisoner, the Muslim or the street person? It is a sad reflection on the poverty of our political system that many of those who lead us or would lead us put themselves in thrall to those whose wealth makes them potential large donors or whose media power makes them the makers and breakers of careers. In contrast to this how wonderful that God works through the least likely persons in effecting real change in peoples’ lives.

Back to the story of Naaman. He goes to the King and tells him what he has learnt from the slave girl. And because he is so valuable to the King, Naaman is sent to Israel with gifts and a letter for the King of Israel. But now comes a low in the story. Israel is going through a bad time and indeed it is a bad time that will only get worse and so the confidence of Israel’s King is low. Receiving a letter that requests the healing of Naaman, Israel’s King fears that it is a ruse in order to provoke a quarrel. After all the request for healing has been made to him personally and he hasn’t a clue how to cure Naaman. Fail and it will be yet another excuse for war!

Still the news reaches Elisha and he tells the King to send Naaman to his home. Naaman turns up with all his entourage and gets an almighty shock. There is to be no immediate cure. Instead he is to wash himself seven times in the River Jordan. This infuriates him. He thinks of the rivers back in his homeland. Surely, he protests, they are better than anything in Israel. And this nationalism almost prevents him from being cured. And it would have were it not for the intervention of his servants who dare to suggest that he would have been responsive were Elisha to ask a great thing of him rather than the seemingly mundane. And today, it remains a temptation to expect God to act in great drama rather than through the mundane. Arthur Benson, whose father whilst Bishop of Truro in the days when the only place one could go after such an appointment was Canterbury devised the Service of Nine Carols and Lessons, wrote the lyrics of “Land of hope and glory.” It contains the lines which enthuse many but frankly cause me to shiver;

“God who made thee mighty
Make thee mightier yet.”

This morning I invite you to consider the possibility that the God who resists models of domination, desires not that we become mightier but as was the need of Naaman more humble. Focusing on our power and our sense of being called above others, is but a step away from God on whom we depend.

Anyhow, ultimately, Naaman does what Elisha has told him to do and the consequence is that he is healed. His initial response suggests that he is a changed person;

“Now I know that there is no God in all the world except in Israel.”

But we can not be too sure for the next two chapters of the second book of Kings are devoted to further military aggression from Syria. So, I will not bother to speculate.

Anyhow back to the offence caused by this story. If Englishmen are inclined to think of God as an English gent, the Israelites were even more inclined to identify God with their nation. This goes back to the calling of Abraham who was to be the father of a nation blessed by God. That special relationship is a feature of our Old Testament but always there are the hints that God’s love is not just for one people but for all peoples.

Back in my native Cornwall, there was a row a few years ago when the minister would not agree to the “Song of the Western Men” being sung in a Circuit service. Sons and daughters of Cornwall among you will know that it begins with the violent lines;

“A good sword and a trusty hand
A merry heart and true.
We’re going to show King James’s men
What Cornish lads can do.”

Why was it no permitted in an act of worship. The reason given was that God is the God of all people not of all things Cornish.

This story tells us that human built barriers cannot stand in the way of God’s love and grace. We may tolerate a society which designates some as outsiders but that is not the way of God. Indeed, when we seek to push others to the margins, the scriptures have a tendency to proclaim a message of role reversal. Later in this story, we find this with Gehazi, a servant of Elisha, who thinks that Naaman has got away lightly and so seeks to gain from him the money that Elisha turned down. Gehazi pays a heavy price for his actions as he ends the story with Naaman’s leprosy afflicting him.

So to the crowd that sought to throw Jesus over the cliff. Why were they so angry? Because Jesus had told how in an age of leprosy, the one case of Divine healing had been of not just an outsider but an enemy of Israel.

But before you condemn that angry crowd, answer me one question -------- how would you react if you heard that God had used a Christian to bring a miraculous healing to Osama Bin Laden?


This sermon was preached at Bideford Methodist Church on Sunday October 14th 2007

Hope amidst the ashes - Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost

Lamentations 3: 19 - 26. Luke 17: 5 - 10

A story is told dating back to the nineteenth century. The army of the German Kaiser were burning Jewish villages in what is now Poland. After one such village had been destroyed a passer by was amazed to see that an old man had pounded some boards together in order to open up for business. Looking at the old man he asked;

“What are you selling among these ruins?”

With a smile the old man replied;

“I am selling hope. You can sell water in a dry desert so the place to sell hope is on the ash heap of destruction.”

The old man had a point. Today we often talk about hope in a comfortable way. When things go well and there is not a cloud in the sky, we talk of hope. Yet surely, the time when hope is truly valuable is in the dark times such as experienced by people such as a persecuted old man seeing only destruction around him.

Too often we talk of Christian hope as if it were about unending blue skies. And yet, we need to remember that old gospel truth that glory comes accompanied by a cross. People of faith as well as those without faith have down the years experienced the sheer unfairness of life. Any gospel appeal that ignores this is totally false. As Fred Pratt Green puts it in one his hymns;

“Father hear the prayer we offer,
Not for ease that prayer shall be
But for strength that we may ever
Live our lives courageously.”

So to be of use in a world threatened by nuclear weaponry, terrorism, environmental catastrophe and the AIDS pandemic amongst other things, hope has to be for the bad times, for the ash piles of destruction.

A somewhat surprising vision of hope comes from the book of Lamentations, a book that contains poetry from a time of devastation. Its background is the destruction of Jerusalem with its Temple, as well as the surrounding areas. The go getters who might have rebuilt something good on the ashes of the city, had been taken off to exile in Babylon. Left behind were the people held to be least useful by the Babylonians, people who were indeed despised by their fellow countrymen in exile. In Lamentations, we hear these voices from the devastation in Jerusalem. And these voices are heartbreaking to listen to, for they express the pain of people who have lost all that they hold dear and who know that they are not up to the challenge of putting things right. And in their pain, they convey at times a deep sense of feeling rejected by God. For in their sufferings, they see God’s wrath being visited upon them. In the verses before our reading, we find these words concerning God;

“He has made my teeth grind on gravel,
And made me cower in ashes;
My soul is bereft of peace;
I have forgotten what happiness is;
So I say, ‘Gone is my glory,
And all I had hoped for from the Lord.’”

But this is not the final word. For whilst the pain of the disaster has infected the very being of the poets, just like that Polish Jew these poets living in the poverty and lawlessness of the destroyed Jerusalem dare to hope. Hear the hope in these words;

“But this I call to mind and therefore I have hope.”

What does the poet call to mind? Well, he is versed in the story of his people, a story of God’s goodness that has been passed down to him. And so, amidst the ashes of the city, he affirms a basis for hope in words that have resounded down the centuries;

“The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases,
His mercies never come to an end;
They are new every morning;
Great is your faithfulness.”

Hope amidst the ashes! Hope that is rooted in something greater than the physical realities of Jerusalem. Hope that is based in the loving faithfulness of God that has been the experience of a people called into Covenant relationship with God. And that hope is greater than the dreadful reality of the destruction of all the things once held precious.
This idea that hope in God is greater than physical realities is powerfully demonstrated when the poet goes on to add;

“The Lord is my portion says my soul,
Therefore I will hope in him.”

For a long time I never understood the significance of this phrase. It made little sense to me. But its background is that when the Promised Land had been divided among the tribes of Israel, the portion granted to the priests and levites was God rather than the land. Now that the land has been devastated, the poet has been able like those priests and levites to place the whole of his hope in God’s goodness, a place of hope that is much more reliable than any land. For whilst land can be taken away or destroyed, God’s goodness is for all time and is much more powerful.
Jesus also has a message of hope. Living through a time when society was brutish, he talks of the people of God being a place where hope is located. This is very relevant for our service of Confirmation. It is not that there is some great power in the institution of the church. No way! But the path of faith which today is being embraced by those who are to be confirmed, does offer a way of hope even amidst the ashes. Jesus speaks of those who have faith the size of the barely visible mustard seed, being able to command a mulberry tree with its massive root system to uproot itself and adds on to that the even greater improbability of it rooting itself in the sea. Surely this is a grotesque expectation and taken literally it is nonsense. But the message that Jesus is seeking to communicate is that faith opens up boundless and even crazy new possibilities. But we find these possibilities in partnership with God. A parable about slavery will remind us that these new possibilities are not so much entitlements but gifts of a generous God.

We need hope for all too often our reality is in the ashes. In searching for that hope, I recommend you whether being confirmed this morning or not to set your eyes on the God who has been revealed as faithful and loving in the history of Israel and also especially in the life of Jesus Christ. He offers us a hope even amidst the ashes of life. And it becomes our responsibility to embrace the hope that comes from God. For hope, is at the very centre of what is a gospel of hope. It is even that which in the words of William Wordsworth is;

“the paramount duty that Heaven lays for its own honour on man’s suffering heart.”

Hope - that which is at the heart of the gospel. Hope - that is our greatest need even, especially amongst the ashes.

This sermon was preached at a Confirmation Service at Bideford Methodist Church on Sunday October 7th 2007