Janet’s Blog

 (After we had begun the service I realised my notes were in the vestry, since I had preached most of it in Chapel Plaister at 8am I didn’t go back for my notes, I’ve never done that before it seemed to receive a positive response, if you were there you can see if what I said was what I intended to say and if it would have been better with my notes)

When Baldric says, ‘I have a cunning plan my lord’, in the Blackadder television series,  there a are a few things of which one can be certain.

 

The plan will almost certainly not be cunning,

 

And it almost certainly should not even be granted the title of ‘plan’.

 

Occasionally Blackadder himself might come up with a plan,

 

He always will think it will be cunning,

 

Possibly a plan so cunning that you could stick a tail on it, call it a fox and make it professor of  cunningness at Oxford University.

 

Today’s readings show a series of plans, which show a varying degree of cunningness.

The new king in Egypt didn’t know about Joseph and he was worried about the Israelites. He says ‘come we must deal shrewdly with them…’

So the pharaoh begins with cunning plan number one,  oppress them and make them slaves.

Doesn’t work. The more they were oppressed the more they multiplied and spread.

Cunning plan number tow, tell the midwives to kill the babies.

Oh, please. I wonder if this is going to work. No of course not and what’s more he swallows the midwives story about the Israelite women giving birth before they arrive.

Only one cunning plan left, tell them to put all the baby boys in the Nile…

Might work I suppose.

But then comes Moses’ Mum. She hides Moses for three months. How I don’t know, I love to think of him tucked up under her robes, but I don’t know how she did it.

 

The she follows Pharoah’s command to the letter, she puts her baby boy into the Nile.

 

But she has a cunning plan, she puts him in the Nile in a tiny boat.

Up to this point it has seemed that the humans have been in charge of the cunning plans but what happens next is part of God’s bigger, and more cunning plan.

 

Pharoah’s daughter sees Moses crying, and rescues him, and gives him back to his mother to care for and then raises him as an Egyptian Prince thus giving him exactly the start in life he needs for when God calls him from the wilderness and tells him that he is going to be the deliverer of Israel. In amongst all these human attempts at cunningness, God’s plan is the one which is the one which will bring salvation to his people.

 

In the gospel passage we find Jesus asking the disciples what they have heard people speculating about the current cunning plan.

 

Who is Jesus? How is this cunning plan going to develop? We hear that various people believe Jesus is someone from a cunning plan of the past. John the Baptist, or Elijah, or Jeremiah or one of the prophets.

When trying to develop a cunning plan there is the problem of a plan being too new to be acceptable. We’ve always done it this way, and so this is the way which we need to do it. This is the way it is done, this is the plan, why would we need a different one? Or people who don’t actually see that there could actually be a different sort of plan. In a way the people who are saying that Jesus is John the Baptist, or Elijah or Jeremiah are falling into that pattern. This is the way in which God has always acted previously, and so he must be going to act in this way again.

 

Simon Peter has had a switch turned on his head. He realises in this moment that God is about to reveal a completely new and cunning plan for salvation.

Simon Peter says, ‘You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.’

I wonder if Peter actually has any idea about what this plan will hold. Other translations have Peter say, you are the Messiah. The anointed one. Peter realises that Jesus is the one they have been waiting for, but if you read on in the passage and remember Peter’s denial of Jesus he had no idea what God’s plan would entail. Perhaps as Moses’ mother and sister had no idea what God’s plan would entail, but they were willing to be part of the plan. God’s plan.

 

We know that God’s cunning plan included death and resurrection for Jesus. Even when Jesus told the disciples that was what was going to happen they still didn’t really catch on. Not until Easter, and then Pentecost, not until the disciples had run away into hiding after Jesus’ death  then been drawn out by the mad women claiming resurrection. Then the plan began to dawn. Then it began to be clear.

 

Jesus says to Peter, you are a rock and on this rock I will build my church.

And evil will not be able to overcome it.

So far this sermon has been about God’s great cunning plan for salvation, a plan which was so cunning that nobody, even those closest to it saw it coming.

This cunning plan for salvation which we see being worked out in the earliest stages of the salvation story in Exodus, then we see the later stages of the plan in the gospel.

 

Great, fantastic, but then Jesus talks about the church.

What’s the job of this church which Peter has to be the rock for? At the end of Matthew’s gospel we here what is often referred to as the great commission.

“Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptising them in the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. And remember. I am with you always, to the end of the age.”

 

God’s plan to do this is the church which Peter will found, the church is the outworking of God’s cunning plan. It’s a sobering thought, if we look around us self doubt could creep in. God how can you really mean us? How can we be anything in your cunning plan for salvation? God however doesn’t have a plan B for this, we are it. We need to fulfil the requirements of the great commission, here today.

 

I don’t suppose Moses’ mother, or Pharoah’s daughter or Miriam Moses’ sister knew what they were doing in God’s plan. The disciples certainly spent a lot of time fumbling around in the dark not knowing what they were doing in God’s plan, so there is hope for us.

 

We need to pray that God will show us what we should be doing in his plan, and that he will give us the strength and hope and grace enough to do it.

 

If you put the word reasonable into the internet search tool google and hit the I’m feeling lucky button, it links you to the Austhink home page.

 

Austhink is a critical thinking research, training and consulting group specializing in complex reasoning and argumentation. Essentially trying to train Australia to be truly reasonable.

 

From the renaissance and gathering pace with the enlightenment reason became the god of Western society, everything was deemed to be reasonable, being reasonable was the most important thing, everything needed to make sense. Experiments needed to be undertaken, hypotheses proved. Things need to be measured, answers sought out, reasoned and held accountable.

 

On the GEC building in New York built in the 1930s it says over the door, Wisdom and knowledge shall be the stability of thy times…

With hindsight it is easy for us to say, well maybe not.

 

I wonder what might be the most unreasonable thing that you have done. I find myself unwilling to share even any thoughts I might have about this.

 

Ezekiel was often called by God to do unreasonable things. In today’s OT passage he is called to pack his things, all that he can carry, as if he is going into exile…but to do this in the street so that everyone can see him. The unreasonableness does not stop there, when he is packed, at night he is to break out, to dig through the city walls, all this is prophetic action, this is unreasonableness, to dig through the city walls to pretend that you’re going into exile when you don’t have to all this unreasonableness was what God asked of Ezekiel.

 

What about the gospel passage, well is Jesus asking us to be unreasonable? How can we go on forgiving, if someone hurts you seven times seems indeed a generous amount for forgiveness, but Jesus says no, seventy seven times. How can Jesus be asking us to forgive so unreasonably?

 

Jesus tells this parable, the king who in all reasonableness expected the debt to be paid, when it became obvious it wouldn’t be he not unreasonably took the appropriate action. When the debtor begged for forgiveness he very unreasonably forgave him. The debtor did not behave so unreasonably towards the person who owed him money. What did the king think?

 

Then his lord summoned him and said to him, “You wicked slave! I forgave you all that debt because you pleaded with me. Should you not have had mercy on your fellow slave, as I had mercy on you?’

 

I want to try and take you back to a moment in my past, so we need to imagine it’s 1990 and we’re all sitting in a large kind of boring modern room, and the Christian union drama group are standing before us, wearing denim dungarees and checked shirts and humming the theme tune to the Waltons, that classic TV show about family life. In the sketch John Boy has left home squandered the family’s money and is now returning having just realised the terrible mistake he has made. John Boy is running in slow motion back towards his father, he gets to the point where they could touch each other, the humming stops. The Father goes to slap him firmly around the face, John Boy says, “But Father?”

But the father says “Well isn’t that not even half what you deserve…”

 

 

How can Jesus call us to be so unreasonable?

 

How can he call us to love so much?

 

What is the most unreasonable thing that we have ever done?

 

What is the most unreasonable thing, that God has ever done?