Janet’s Blog

George Herbert, Priest

George Herbert was born in 1593, a cousin of the Earl of Pembroke. His mother was a friend of the poet John Donne. George attended Trinity College, Cambridge, and became the Public Orator of the University, responsible for giving speeches of welcome in Latin to famoous visitors, and writing letters of thanks, also in Latin, to acknowledge gifts of books for the University Library. This brought him to the attention of King James I, who granted him an annual allowance, and seemed likely to make him an ambassador. However, in 1625 the king died, and George Hebert, who had originally gone to college with the intention of becoming a priest, but had head turned by the prospect of a career at Court, determined anew to seek ordination. In 1626 he was ordained, and became vicar and then rector of the parish of Bemerton and neighboring Fugglestone, not far from Salisbury.

He served faithfully as a parish priest, diligently visiting his parishioners and bringing them the sacraments when they were ill, and food and clothing when they were in want. He read Morning and Evening Prayer daily in the church, encouraging the congregation to join him when possible, and ringing the church bell before each service so that those who could not come might hear it and pause in their work to join their prayers with his. He used to go once a week to Salisbury to hear Evening Prayer sung there in the cathedral. On one occasion he was late because he had met a man whose horse had fallen with a heavy load, and he stopped, took off his coat, and helped the man to unload the cart, get the horse back on its feet, and then reload the cart. His spontaneous generosity and good will won him the affection of his parishioners.

Today, however, he is remembered chiefly for his book of poems, The Temple, which he sent shortly before his death to his friend Nicholas Ferrar, to publish if he thought them suitable. They were published after Herbert’s death, and have influenced the style of other poets, including Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Several of them have been used as hymns, in particular “Teach me, my God and King,” and “Let all the world in every corner sing.”

Let all the world in every corner sing, my God and King!

The heavens are not too high, His praise may thither fly,

The earth is not too low, His praises there may grow.

Let all the world in every corner sing, my God and King!

Let all the world in every corner sing, my God and King!

The church with psalms must shout, no door can keep them out;

But, above all, the heart must bear the longest part.

Let all the world in every corner sing, my God and King!

So why was the gospel passage chosen today set for remembering George Herbert. Obviously he was a clever man, skilled and articulate, head hunted by the King who wanted him to do clever things.

George although he was clever ,realised that being clever wasn’t the most important thing, it wasn’t the clever stuff that would bring him closer to God, it was the ordinary stuff. Being a Christian isn’t rocket science, for probably George was the 17th century equivalent of a rocket scientist. Being a Christian is as it says in the gospel, hidden from the wise and intelligent and revealed to infants. George Herbert knew about following Jesus, about being humble in heart, about helping people carry their burdens, these are the important things, these are the things George chose rather than being the Public Orator at Cambridge. George Herbert knew about following God in the ordinary of everyday, may we be able to follow his example.

King of glory, King of peace,

I will love Thee;

And that love may never cease,

I will move Thee.

Thou hast granted my request,

Thou hast heard me;

Thou didst note my working breast,

Thou hast spared me.

Wherefore with my utmost art

I will sing Thee,

And the cream of all my heart

I will bring Thee.

Though my sins against me cried,

Thou alone didst clear me;

And alone, when they replied,

Thou didst hear me.

Seven whole days, not one in seven,

I will praise Thee;

In my heart, though not in Heaven,

I can raise Thee.

Small it is, in this poor sort

To enroll Thee:

E’en eternity’s too short

To extol Thee.

This is largely what I said at 10am; at 8am it was similar but abbreviated. 

So what is it that you don’t want the new vicar to find out about you?

What is there in your past or your  current life which you would rather I didn’t know?

The same of course applies to me, there are things which, well, I appreciate are not necessarily known by all and sundry.

The Samaritan woman does not have this privilege of privacy.

She goes to draw water at noon, she goes in the heat and the dust and the glaring harsh sun of the day which hurts your eyes. Why does she go then? All the other women go in the cool of dawn, they go when they do not have to struggle so much with the heat, they go when there is time for a chat. This woman goes at noon, because she can’t or won’t go with the others. Maybe she can no longer tolerate the harsh words, or maybe she can no longer tolerate their silence towards her. Only an outcast would collect her water at noon, only a woman whose shame has overtaken her.

She knows who she is, and so do the disciples when they turn up, ‘they were astonished that he was talking to a woman.’ A woman who collects water at noon.

Jesus knows who she is, but he still asks her, ‘Give me a drink.’

To us it seems a simple request, well, water, vessel, lower vessel in to well, bring up water give the man a drink. But Jesus has just turned this woman’s world upside down. She is the lowest of the low, she is a woman, remember Pharisees would thank God every morning for not making them a woman. Not only a woman, but a Samaritan despised by the Jews. When she asks him, “How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?” she is saying to him, “you know I can’t do that.”  

Jesus next says to her the most extraordinary thing.

“If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.”

I have a lot of sympathy with the woman at this point, she is hot, tired and dusty and the madman without the bucket has just offered her water…

“Sir, you have no bucket, and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water?”

It’s a sensible question, isn’t it.

Jesus of course is never interested in the purely sensible questions. If you are ever only interested in sensible questions then there is no allowance for God’s grace to break through in its typically unsensible way.

Jesus ignores the bucket problem…and says instead…

“Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, 14 but those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.”

It is almost impossible for us to access the depth of the imagery and metaphor, in the true meaning of this saying because we don’t live in a dry and thirsty land. We do not live our lives by a day by day or hour by hour concern for water. When the Israelites left Egypt they were not allowed by the Edomites to travel up the Kings Highway, not because the Edomites were necessarily worried about war or invasion, but because they were worried the Israelites and their flocks would drink all their water. Even today water is still a cause of dispute in the land in which  Jesus and this woman were sitting.

The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water, so that I may never be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water.”

 The woman is desperate for this water, thirst defines the life of someone in a dry land. This woman has had enough of being thirsty, and she has had enough of traipsing to the well with her water jar. Every time she goes to the well she either has to face the other women, which she has obviously chosen not to do today. Or she has to remember that she is an outcast, she sees the possibility of not having to face this every day and she sees that possibility as a solution to her problems.

They say that a friend knows all about you and loves you anyway. Maybe this woman had some friends like this, but they didn’t come to the well to draw water with her. When Jesus confronts her about the husband he is not saying to her you can’t have the water, but he is saying to her God knows all about you and loves you anyway, but you don’t run from your problems in that way. God knows all the things which you don’t want me to find out about you, and God knows all the things which I don’t want you to find out about me. The Romans passage reminds us, “But God proves his love for us in that while we were still sinners Christ died for us.”

We find in the discussion that follows that this woman, the woman people use nasty words about in the gossip at the well, this woman is waiting for the Messiah.

Jesus tells her ‘I am he.’ Many of the disciples have not yet fully grasped this fact, but Jesus has told this woman, this woman with a history, with her own problems, this woman learns that Jesus is the Messiah.

The woman leaves her water jar and says to the people of her town?

“Come and see a man who told me everything I have ever done! He cannot be the Messiah, can he?”

I wonder if somewhere at the back of her mind, however much she wants to believe, there are a few nagging doubts lurking, “Is this another man lying to me?” But she takes the risk she goes and tells the others, the others who she doesn’t go to the well with, but she tells them about Jesus, because, although she doesn’t realise it yet the water that Jesus is talking about is already gushing up out of her like a spring which can’t be contained.

This woman does what she can, she leaves her water jar for Jesus so he can drink. She goes and tell others about him, being honest about what she believes and honest about her doubts, and what happens?

The people come to find out for themselves,

“40 So when the Samaritans came to him, they asked him to stay with them; and he stayed there two days. 41 And many more believed because of his word. 42 They said to the woman, “It is no longer because of what you said that we believe, for we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this is truly the Saviour of the world.”

One day a man sat cross legged on jumper in the grounds of Glastonbury Abbey. He was sitting by the fish pond, which was beautiful and serene. The man was meditating, he had a bottle of mineral water beside him.

A woman was sitting on the other side of the pond, she was looking at the man, and at the pond. God said to the woman, “look at that man, he has a bottle of water, but his bottle of water will run out and he will soon have none left”. God said “look at the pond”, so the woman looked at the pond, she saw that there was a spring which fed the pond and bubbled and splashed and gurgled good clean water into the pond, and at the other end of the pond there was an overflow where the water which had given life in the pond, left the pond went on and gave life to other parts of the gardens and the town. God said to the woman, “be like the pond, and not like the water bottle, let me pour my spirit in to you until it gushes out and overflows from you.”

How do we become this sort of well, we remember that God asks ask to do what we can, not what we can’t. What is the thing in our life which is our water jar, something ordinary and everyday, which God needs us to give him to use for his purposes?

We, like the woman, need to go to others with our belief about Jesus, and we need to be honest about our doubts, then we can truly we can invite people to come and find out about Jesus for themselves. If we do this then like the people of Sychar, the people of Box will have the opportunity to encounter Jesus for themselves and to know that he is truly Saviour of the world.

 “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, 14 but those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.”Lord we pray that you will fill us with your life giving water, that it will gush up to eternal life in us, and will overflow to bring life to those around us.

Amen

Matthew 20:17-28

What makes a great leader?

Who have been the great leaders and revolutionaries of the past century? The Time magazine list has these twenty people on it.

David Ben-Gurion, Ho Chi Minh, Winston Churchill, Mohandas Gandhi, Mikhail Gorbachev, Adolf Hitler, Martin Luther King, Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini, V.I. Lenin, Nelson Mandela, Pope John Paul II, Ronald Reagan, Eleanor Roosevelt, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Teddy Roosevelt, Margaret Thatcher, The Unknown Rebel in Tianamen Square, Margaret Sanger, Lech Walesa, Mao Zedong.

We probably all have very different reactions when we hear the names on that list.

Jesus talked about Gentile leaders.

You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them.
The Jews knew about tyrants. Deep in their national psyche lay memories of oppression in Egypt, the times of the exiles, and foreign rulers lording it over them. More recently they had the Herod dynasty to remind them of tyranny. And of course they were subjects of the Roman Emperors. Romans knew about being tyrannical. Romans after all used decimation as military discipline. When an army unit needed to be punished, one in ten of them were selected at random and executed and the unit was said to be decimated.

Jesus said quite simply,
“It will not be so among you”

Instead, he said , “whoever wishes to be great among you must be your servant,”

When you are first ordained in the Church of England you become a deacon, it is a servant role, and usually is followed by being ordained priest a year later. But actually once you are a deacon you never stop being a deacon.

When I was ordained deacon by the Bishop of Bath and Wells we took part in an extraordinary ceremony, which I am sad to say has been cut from that diocese’s ceremony of ordination of deacons. The Bishop of Bath and Wells took off his mitre and cope, put a towel around his waist, and washed the feet of all those about to ordained deacon, as a sign of being a servant leader. The stole which we have when we are deacons and priests is meant to be a sign of servanthood. It’s meant to be a towel, to remind us that Jesus washed feet and used a towel, and so we too should be servant leaders.

At the licensing service last week it was an incredibly poignant moment for me when instead of me kneeling before Bishop Lee as it says in the sheet, Bishop Lee came and knelt beside me and prayed for me, as a sign that we are both servant leaders.

Some of you may have seen people wearing little badges or wristbands, which have the letters WWJD on them, I guess they are fading a bit from popularity now, but the WWJD stands for What Would Jesus do. Those people who wear them use them as a reminder that, before they act in any situation, that they should think ‘what would Jesus do?’

Jesus says “the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many.”

We know in most situations what Jesus would do.

Whether we do it or not is the question?

So What would Jesus do?

Jesus says at the beginning of this passage what he will do.

“See, we are going up to Jerusalem, and the Son of Man will be handed over to the chief priests and scribes, and they will condemn him to death; then they will hand him over to the Gentiles to be mocked and flogged and crucified; and on the third day he will be raised.”

Do we wish to be great?

Then we wish to be a servant.

Just as the Son of man came not to be served, but to serve,

Readings Numbers 21:4-9 and Luke 14:27-33

There is no good way to start a first sermon in a new place.

So I will begin by saying thank-you for your generous welcome to the Benefice, for all the gifts which awaited our arrival at the vicarage, and all the hard, hard work which went into the induction service, and I have been asked to convey thanks from the congregation at Wellington for the warm welcome which they received on Thursday night.
At first glance, these are not the most promising passages on which to preach one’s first sermon.
In the Numbers passage the people are complaining to the leadership and God about their state of affairs, which annoys God so much that he sends a plague of poisonous snakes as a punishment for their complaining.
In the gospel passage Jesus is talking about war and suffering and the giving up of all possessions.
So where to begin, well with the Israelites.

It’s the Israelites which intrigue me. The people have been on a long journey, they have just been refused passage up the Kings Highway by the Edomites, because the Israelites would use too much of the Edomites precious water. The Israelites are impatient, they don’t really know where they’re going, and they are not sure they know how to get there. They don’t really understand how they are living, they feel vulnerable, they are maybe scared, frightened plagued by uncertainty and their fear has made them become unreasonable.

They ask Moses
“Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness?”

I always want to shout at them at this point,
“It was slavery, harsh oppression how could you forget, they were committing genocide against you, Egypt was a bad place.”

But I forget that they are scared that they are going to die in the desert, they are scared that they are never going to get to where they are supposed to be going, and they have lost the power of reason.
They say, for there is no food and water and we detest this miserable food. They say there is no food, but there is food, it’s just that they don’t like it. In fact it has become for them a symbol of their very uncertainty.
Then come the snakes, just when the Israelites think it can’t get any worse here come the snakes and the uncertainty over death and life does not become a matter of weeks of starving slowly to death but a matter of minutes of a bite or not a bite.

Somehow the people realise that they need to come back to God, and they come to ask Moses to pray for them.
On an individual basis sometimes we get into such a state that we can’t pray, and all we can do is ask someone to pray for us. The Israelites come to Moses with a very specific request. Yes they are sorry for sinning by speaking against the Lord and against Moses, but please Moses pray to the Lord to take the serpents from us.
All the people can see is that the serpents are the last straw, they seem to think that if they get rid of the serpents everything will be alright again. They want God to answer Moses prayer for them in a specific way.

Moses prays for them, and God tells Moses what to do. God does not answer the prayer in the way which the Israelites wanted. God does not take the snakes away. God does not take away the things which are frightening them, he doesn’t take away their uncertainty about food or water, or the immediate uncertainty of whether the snake will or won’t bite.

What God gives them is a way of living with the snakes, a way of finding healing in the situation that they are in. They can look to the bronze snake, somehow that symbol of God’s love, presence and healing enables the onlooker to live.
We live in an uncertain world, sometimes we are scared and frightened and sometimes we lose our sense of reasonableness. God doesn’t promise to take the away things which cause our fears and uncertainties, what he gives us is a way of not being frightened of them anymore.
Jesus’ death on the cross is often likened to lifting up of the snake in the desert. Jesus talks about it himself, we heard about it in the gospel passage from this morning, “and just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.”
We look to the sign of God’s love for us, and we do not need to be afraid anymore. God does not change the world in the way we sometimes ask him to change the world, he doesn’t necessarily take away the scary things, or the uncertain things, instead he changes us so that we don’t need to be fearful.
So what is it that we are afraid of? There could be lots of things, ill health, family issues, dying, losing our job, losing our possessions?
The passage in Luke reminds us that following God is a serious business. God will take our fears away but we need to approach discipleship with due consideration. It’s easy to criticise the Israelites in the desert, but they had left everything behind and followed Moses into a very difficult place. Would we be prepared to do that? How far would we be prepared to go? If God asked you to give up all your possessions, what would be the thing which you would find most difficult to part with? As I was sitting in the vicarage writing this sermon it struck me that one day God will call me away from that house, which currently I love, and I wonder how will I feel about that?
We know these things and we weigh up the cost. But sometimes we forget, we complain about the state of the church, we are all uncertain about how this part-time vicar is going to work out, especially in future. We can become so unsettled by our uncertainties that we lose sight of Jesus. The things we are trying to hang on to, whatever they are. These things as our possessions can get in the way, we need to let go of them and accept that however uncertain, or worried or threatened we might feel God can stop that being frightening, he can stop it being life threatening.
God will not necessarily take our snakes away whatever they may be, but he will remind us that we don’t need to be afraid of them if we look to the hope of eternal life which we have in Jesus.

As always I may or may not have said exactly this at 8am … I tried to say this in a child friendly way at 11am, when we also made a family tree diagram, hunting the names from around the church and sticking them up on the flip chart. Then we all (adults included) drew pictures of ourselves on little paper circles (courtesy of the churchwarden) and stuck them on to the family tree of faith.

Who do you think you are?

Over the past few years it has been becoming more and more important for people to try and work out who they are. Many look into their family trees, finding both excitement and disappointment. The success of the BBC programme, “Who do you think you are?” where we can watch others finding out about themselves, has only seemed to encourage the nation in their quest.

Abraham is technically the beginning of history in the Bible, the first eleven chapters of Genesis until Abraham appears are classed as pre-history. In the first eleven chapters it is difficult or impossible to tie down events to a time or a place, but we can compare Abraham’s story to other historical evidence, we know the times and places where the story began, we know something about the people Abraham lived amongst.

The people who lived in the ancient near east at the same time as Abraham believed in lots of gods, and often these gods were associated with one place, one city, one mountain, one river. But when Abraham was called by God to go on his journey his family were set apart by their radical monotheism. They knew the secret, God wasn’t stuck in one city, or mountain or river, instead all of God was everywhere, and Abraham showed the most remarkable faith in this God of everywhere.

Abraham is considered the father of the Jewish people, the great founder, and indeed God promised not only to bless Abraham, but that every nation would be blessed through him and his family. If we think about Abraham’s family tree as God’s family what names would we choose to put on it? Who would be most important, well maybe we would think about Isaac first, one of Abraham’s sons, who was the father of Jacob. Jacob’s other name was Israel, that’s how the name Israelite evolved.

Who else might we pick out, Joseph perhaps, we’re a bit short of girls, maybe Dinah his sister. Now then there’s a bit of a gap whilst the Israelites were slaves in Egypt so how about, Aaron, Moses and Miriam, brothers and a sister involved in the Israelite flight from Egypt.

We might think of Saul and David, stuck again for a girl, how about Esther although she lived far away in Persia she was of the tribe of Benjamin and was brave in her defence of the Jews.

If we move in to the New Testament we can choose Mary, Jesus of course and then moving in to our Gospel passage Nicodemus.

Nicodemus thought he knew who he was, he thought he had is sorted out, he was part of the great Abrahamic line, so of course he was sure he was going to be part of the Kingdom of God, assured a place in God’s family tree.

But doubts obviously concerned Nicodemus, so he had to just go and check with Jesus about this.

Jesus gave him a typically enigmatic answer about being born again, we hear in the other versions of this story that Nicodemus asks excuse me Jesus but you know that physically that just isn’t possible. Jesus goes on to talk instead not about physical things but about spiritual things.

Jesus was clear, you can’t rely on your physical ancestry, you need to follow the example of your ancestry, you need to have faith and believe in this God of everywhere. Jesus was explaining his mission to Nicodemus,

“For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. 17 “Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.”

Faith then leads not only to a place in God’s family on earth, but a place in God’s family for ever.

Paul writes to the Roman Christians, they weren’t Jews, they had no hope in their Abrahamic ancestry. Paul talks about Abraham’s faith, it was his faith which marked him out as a part of God’s family, it was his realisation that all of God is everywhere, by faith we become part of God’s family of faith.

So who do we think we are? If we trace back our family tree of faith, what does it reveal? It shows that when we believe in God and Jesus, we too become heirs to the same promise that God gave to a faithful Abraham. We belong in God’s family, and we have God’s promise that “everyone who believes in him shall not perish, but have everlasting life.”

This is as ever roughly what I said…

Some of you know that I’m going to be the brownie leader after Easter, and some of you know that I’ve got a new job in the village. That new job is being the vicar, being the vicar is a very odd job because it’s so many different things, but one of the things I will be doing is sometimes coming in to school to do assemblies, and this is the first thing that I’m doing after I started my new job last night.

I wanted to tell you a story today about someone else who had just got a new job. The story is about Joshua. Joshua lived a long, long time ago in a place quite far away from here where the land is quite dry and hot most of the time.

Joshua was the assistant for a great leader called Moses. Now Moses was an absolutely amazing leader he had looked after God’s people, the Israelites for a long time. Moses had led God’s people out of slavery in Egypt. Moses talked to God on the mountain at Sinai where God gave the people his special rules to live by. Moses had looked after all God’s people for a long time, he even made water flow in the desert by hitting his stick against a rock where God told him to hit it and the water came gushing out.

Joshua was good at being Moses assistant, he liked it, Moses was the brave great leader and Joshua helped him out.

But Moses was old and one day God said to Moses “you are going to die soon”, Moses knew what he needed to do, he prayed with Joshua and asked God to make Joshua a wise and good leader.

I wonder how Joshua felt? Maybe he was a bit scared, maybe he felt he couldn’t do it, because it’s very different being the assistant and being the leader. It was all very new, and Joshua didn’t know what was going to happen.

I wonder when we last had to do something new which we didn’t know about?

I wonder if sometimes we think about what the future is going to be like and what is going to happen to us?

Something very special happened to Joshua after Moses had died,

God spoke to him, to Joshua… God said what he needed to do.

“Joshua you must lead the people across the river Jordan”.

Imagine thousands of people going across a river.

Joshua sent his assistants to tell the people, get ready to cross the river, get all you things ready, in three days we are going across the river into a new land.

So everyone started packing up and sorting out their things.

But God had to say something else to Joshua, because he was new, and perhaps a little bit worried about what was going to happen, perhaps he was anxious about what the future would hold. God said this to Joshua, “Be strong and courageous: do not be frightened or dismayed, for the Lord your God is with you wherever you go.”

I wonder if we always listen straight away when our parents tell us something? God knew that Joshua had to really remember to be strong and to trust God, because God would always be with him so God had to keep reminding Joshua. God told Joshua, not once, not twice, not three, four or five times, not six, seven or eight times, but God reminded Joshua nine times to be strong and brave because God would be with him in the future.

So what happened about the river? Well this is even more amazing. God’s people had a special box, called the ark, where they kept some of the things which reminded them that God was with them. God told Joshua get some people to hold my special box and walk with it into the river, then river dried up and all the people of God walked across to the other side, when the box was brought to the other side as well the river started to flow again.

No-one really knows how God got that to happen, but he did, and he went with Joshua and all the people, even if he had to keep reminding them to be strong and brave because he was with them.

God hasn’t changed even in all the thousands of years since Joshua was alive, he still promises to be with us wherever we are, and he still keeps reminding us to be strong and brave and not to worry about the future because he’ll be with us.

Dear God

When we are worried about what is going to happen later today, or tomorrow or next week or sometime in the future. Remind us that we need to be strong and brave, and that we don’t need to be afraid because you are with us.

Amen