Janet’s Blog

 

White clothes are just impractical.

Anyone who has tried to get grass stains from cricket whites will tell you that.

Anyone who has ever been at a wedding where the bride has spilled a glass of red wine can tell you that.

Anyone who has to fight, chocolate fingers away from white robes can say they just don’t work.

And we won’t mention the wedding where the eight year old in the white bridesmaid dress was trying to eat chocolate fondue for dessert…

These days we have more ways than ever before to make our white clothes white. We can use vanish in wash stain remover, we have plentiful supplies of hot water, bleach, even enzyme filled detergent which can digest 99.9 % of stains known to human kind.

So we find ourselves in Revelation marvelling at a great multitude of people, a multitude so large that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people and language, standing before the throne and in front of the lamb.

Who are these people? These people so numerous that no one could count.

In one very real sense these people are the descendents that Abraham was promised. These people who are God’s family, those gathered by God. What are they doing these people? What makes them distinctive? They are wearing white robes…

White robes?

We all know that white clothes are just impractical.

These people are wearing white robes and holding palm branches in their hands and they are praising God.

Who are these people? John hears from one of the elders in heaven, who these white clad people are, the elder says “These are they who have come out of the great tribulation; they have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.”

Washed in blood. Washed in blood?

We know that washed in blood does not equal white.

Washed in blood equals red and then brown. A long time ago, longer than I care to remember, I used to be able to draw the electron path of the iron ion in the haemoglobin molecule in blood and explain about why that made blood red. Then when blood ages in contact with air, essentially the iron rusts and goes brown.

Washing in blood doesn’t make white, blood is one of the top stains that biological washing detergent makers are always trying to dissolve.

This doesn’t make sense. But this is John’s revelation of heaven and we give it no justice if what we require of it is that it makes sense. This is John’s glimpse of heaven. He tries to explain it as best he can, we bring that understanding to it.

The phrase “New World order” has been used to describe different things, originally it seems to have been coined to describe the period after the first world war with the formation of the league of nations. Then again after world war two in retrospect  to describe the hope surrounding the united nations and the bretton woods system. The again after the cold war, new world order was used to describe the new start. These were all to big hopes, too big aspirations, and the new world order each time seemed quickly to sour.

But what John is describing, in revelation really is the new world order. White is not impractical in the new world order, washing in blood brings sparkling whiteness, in the new world order where what we know and understand from our experience of brokenness has been turned on its head.

We shouldn’t be surprised that the new world is different, Jesus’ words in the beatitudes, tell us that this will happen.

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

Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.

Blessed are the meek…

The people who are despised in the old world order, are blessed in the new world order. Those who have no power, no position, no dignity, who are otherwise demeaned, these are the people who have come out of the great tribulation, they have washed their robes and put them on sparkly white.

John I fell is struggling for words to describe the new things going on, and so he describes in the most human terms what heaven is like, no more hunger, or thirst, or scorching sun. God will wipe every tear from their eyes.

When I take funerals sometimes people are brave enough to ask me what heaven is like.

Which would be a sensible thing to do, if I knew.

There’s no map, there’s no signpost, when the Russian cosmonauts came back from space and reported that God wasn’t there, I do think they were missing the point. But if heaven isn’t up there, even if for a long time that was how people found it helpful to understand it, we must know that heaven is somewhere else.

I am reminded of that old brownie song..O you’ll never get to heaven, in brown owls’s car, because brown owl’s car won’t get that far…

So what does Jesus teach us about heaven in the beatitudes, if we look at the second half of each saying it goes like this… theirs is the kingdom of heaven, they will be comforted, they will inherit the earth, they will be shown mercy, they will see God, they will be called children of God, theirs is the kingdom of heaven, great is your reward in heaven,..

There is not much more comforting than having your tears wiped away, and that is what John sees in heaven, people see God, people are not hungry or thirsty they are freed from their physical concerns…

I am reminded of the words in the baptism prayer which we sometimes use.

Remember your baptism…

Through which you became a part,

A member of the body of Christ.

You stand in a great company

Of saints living and dead –

Of people from every continent, race

And skin colour; Christians everywhere.

 

You belong to them,

They belong to you;

All belong to Jesus.

 

Remember your baptism…

For in it you are bonded to Christ

Who died and was buried

And who rose again.

 

You are baptised into Jesus’ death,

So that at death, like him you will rise again.

 

Remember your baptism…

The sign and seal and kiss of God

In the name of the Father,

And of the Son

And of the Holy Spirit.

On all saints day what is it that we can remember?

We remember that heaven is full of people, more that anyone can count… we know some of these people. Some of these people sat in these pews, some of these people taught us Sunday school, some of these people prayed for us before we were born. Some of these  people are our relatives and our friends.

We know that they no longer live constrained by the old world order, that the fruition of the new world order has become the reality for them.

One of the most impenetrable mysteries for me is that God made us as eternal beings, but our time here is important.

But when our time here is gone, we remain with eternity. But eternity not like the world we know, eternity like Jesus hints at in the beatitudes, eternity like John has his vision of.

U2 sum something of this up in their lyric,

We’re packing a suitcase, for a place we’ve never been, a place that has to be believed, to be seen.

What should we pack?

Maybe a white robe, ready to be washed sparkly white by blood, in God’s new world order.

 

 

 

 

On 3^rd June 2007 I was walking through Malaga airport.

 

It’s hard to know where to begin with any story, especially when it’s a story which we all know or have a part in or an opinion of.

 

I begin in Malaga airport on 3^rd June 2007.

 

People were walking past me.

 

Not unusual you might think.

 

Some people walked past me again.

 

Some people walked past me a third time and tried to look at the eyes of the tired child I was carrying head on my shoulder.

 

These people just wanted to make sure in their own mind that the sleepy, blondish blue eyed four ish year old girl I was carrying out of Spain wasn’t Madeline McCann.

 

Which probably explains why I still check the doors twice at bedtime, and why the week after we got home from Spain I found myself praying fervently standing beside the votive candle stand in the building of the church where I worked.

So I was praying for Madeline

“Where is she Lord, just where is she?”

And God said, “I know where she is, and I am there with her.”

And God said, “I know where she is, and I am there with her.”

God needed to tell me that, because I was praying like I didn’t really believe it.

 

Julian of Norwich was an interesting lady, she lived in Norwich and nobody knows her real name. She’s called Julian because that’s the name of the church where she lived.

Julian lived in uncertain times, there was religious persecution, a war, financial insecurity and the ever present problem of the plague. The Black death. People were healthy at breakfast and dead by supper. She might have looked a bit like this. She was the first woman to write a book in English and she was incredibly holy.

She had a near death experience and whilst she was on the edge of dying she had a series of 16 visions about God which she then wrote into her book ‘Revelations of Divine Love.’ Which was published in about 1393.

One of her visions was about trying to understand God. If you are not allergic to nuts, then you might want to pick up a hazelnut and put it in your hand.

Now is the time for us to all practice our middle English.

“And in þis he shewed me a lytil thyng þe quantite of a hasyl nott. lyeng in þe pawme of my hand as it had semed. and it was as rownde as eny ball. I loked þer upon wt þe eye of my vnderstondyng. and I þought what may þis be. and it was answered generally thus. It is all þat is mad. I merueled howe it myght laste. for me þought it myght sodenly haue fall to nought for lytyllhed. & I was answered in my vnderstondyng. It lastyth & euer shall for god louyth it. and so hath all thyng his begynning by þe loue of god. In this lytyll thyng I sawe thre propertees. The fyrst is. þt god made it. þe secunde is þet god louyth it. & þe þrid is. þat god kepith it.”

OK so maybe she was a mad woman who spent years after her visions walled into a church building in Norwich.

God had said to her, look at the hazelnut, everything God has made, everything we heard about earlier, all the stars and galaxies, the whole universe sits like a hazelnut in the palm of God’s hand. And what does Julian need to remember about it, that God made it, God loves it and God cares for it.

 

The whole universe sits like a hazelnut in the palm of God’s hand.

Does your head hurt? Mine does if I try to apply my mind to that too much.

Last Thursday I was driving on the M5 and I was listening to Melvyn Bragg ‘In our time’, on the radio. I don’t usually listen to Melvyn Bragg on radio four, I usually find him too irritating but they were talking about maths. Now some of you may know I have a bit of a soft spot for mathematicians, enough said.

 

This is how Melvyn introduced the programme.

In 1900, in Paris, the International Congress of Mathematicians gathered in a mood of hope and fear. The edifice of maths was grand and ornate but its foundations, called axioms, were shaking with inconsistency and lurking paradox. And so, at that conference, a young man called David Hilbert set out a plan to rebuild them – to make them consistent, all encompassing and without any hint of a paradox.

 

Hilbert was one of the greatest mathematicians that ever lived, but his plan failed, spectacularly, and it did so because of the incompleteness theorems. These were the work of Kurt Gödel and they changed the way we understand maths, took us to the very limits of logic and sent challenges spilling out into the worlds of physics, philosophy and beyond.

So why was I so fascinated? Well I learnt that there is more than one kind of infinity.

That made my head hurt some more…

But more importantly Kurt Godel effectively proved that there will be some things which we can never prove.

There are some things which are too big for us to understand, and we will never be able to understand them with human logic.

This was undoubtedly an important step for mathematics, but I would venture to suggest that Julian had already had something to say about that.

Let us go back for a moment to the Psalm

1.The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands.

2.Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they display knowledge.

We have had our head challenged about how we think about God, but how does it affect our heart, our everyday lives, our grocery shopping.

Shortly after I was ordained I was working with a man who very reluctantly came to me and admitted that he had been praying and had been having amazing spiritual experiences and he felt that God was so close to him that when he finished praying he said he was exhausted. He seemed a bit worried about this but I tried to reassure him.

If we believe that prayer is you as a human individual interacting with God, the spiritual being who created the universe, then you are allowed to feel a little tired.

I have a few problems with a philosopher called Descartes.

Descartes was a Christian, maybe my problem with Descartes is not so much himself, but what other people did with his work.

Around 1600 Descartes would sit in the bread oven, where it was nice and warm, and think.

He thought and thought and eventually he came up with this phrase, Cogito ergo sum. I think therefore I am.

But this has led to a huge pressure of understanding to be placed on people, and ever since then people have become so focused on understanding something in their heads, that they find it hard to accept that something is real unless you can understand it.

Mediaeval gothic church builders built big church buildings because they wanted their buildings to point towards the glory and huge size of God.

This is Bath Abbey built about 100 years before Descartes was sitting in his oven. I think the oven also doesn’t help me with Descartes…

This building was built into a culture where an upstairs was an architectural achievement.

This building pointed towards a big God, a really big God.

But by the time the Victorian’s came along I just get the feeling they were building churches in which to keep their pet God. Who wasn’t very dangerous, or majestic, reason could be applied to God and so it was reasonable to believe in him, but with reason came the presumption of understanding God, of constraining God within our own finite understanding. Had God become domesticated?

 You’re still waiting for me to tell you how this affects your grocery shopping, well bear with me…

I went to the Roman Baths in Bath yesterday, I have a season ticket and I was with our friends who were staying. They were doing fine at looking after their five children so I actually had time to listen to the Bill Bryson audio guide and he had two really good things to say.

One was that when you think the water coming out of the spring probably fell on the Mendips 10,000 years ago it makes the Romans seem like recent visitors. We could all sneak a quick reminder look back at the hazel nut at that point.

But also he drew my attention to the curses, and what they were about. There is one about a stolen cloak, and one about a stolen or lost pair of gloves. These people had gone to the trouble of finding a piece of lead, writing these crimes on the lead, asked Minerva to condemn the thieves to eternal punishment and thrown them into the sacred spring. Oh come on we want to say get a life. But how often do we get caught up in that sort of pettiness, that sort of trouble, hoe does that catch up on our lives and consume our energies, when there are more important things to be doing. We are the believers in a great big God, it is our response and responsibility not to be caught up in pettiness. It does not really matter in the end which of the 165 brands of tuna we get from Sainsburys’ if we can eat and live our lives.

So now  a little exercise, I’d like everyone to breathe in and then breathe out. Good, now do it again thinking as you breathe in God in me and as you breathe out I in God.

God is so big he is there in that breath, in the littlest thing too. When we ask God to inspire us we ask him to be breath in us, the thing which gives us life, the breathing which controls our being.

Then God in this place, we know that God meets with us here in this place.

He has promised to be with us, when two or three are gathered together in my name, God is here with us.

God does not desert us when we leave this building, he does not stay here when we go home.

He travels with us, he is already there in a place when we get there, however horrible or dark or unhappy that place may be he is already there.

I haven’t talked much about Jesus. The gist is this. Christians believe that Jesus’ death and resurrection are what has opened up this love for us. But we do not believe that God’s love for us shown and expressed for us in the resurrection is time limited. The resurrection was a cosmos changing event, which changed time before, time after and all time to come. In Romans Paul talks about this nothing can separate us from the love of God…

He is with us every moment of every day, and will be forever.

Our challenge is to live our lives like he does.

To live our lives like the creator God for whom all things created are like this hazelnut held in our hand.

To live our lives as he breathes in and out with us in every step in every place where we go.

If we really manage to do this it will change us. This is exciting, reassuring, comforting, challenging, and will sometimes scare us witless.

We do not believe in a domestic pet God, even one which is sometimes nasty and savage. Abraham’s great journey into monotheism, his understanding that all of God is everywhere was the first step in the great faith journey we have taken, which Paul reprises in his letter to the Romans.

Go do your shopping like the God who created the universe is with you.

Go comfort your friend who is mourning with the knowledge that God is closer to you than breathing.

Go live your lives, be who you can be, pray that we can understand what it really means to us that wherever we are God knows where we are and he is there with us.

 

 There is the heart stopping moment in many a good western,  where the saloon bar doors swing and there stands the new sheriff. Shiny star badge on his waistcoat, the clientele in the bar fall silent and wait to see what has happened, what will the sheriff say? Who is in the bar room that day who really didn’t want the sheriff to walk in? What is going to happen now the law has come to town?

Unless it is our occupation, or we are facing a particular situation, I wonder if we ever have any thoughts about the law at all? We take it for granted that we live in a place that is governed by law, and the justice system is more or less just. As outsiders observing the situation in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina perhaps the sudden catastrophic descent into a completely lawless situation was one of the most shocking aspects of the disaster.

In Exodus we find God giving the Israelites a set of laws. A structure for them, as a people, as we have been hearing, they have been suffering from a huge amount of uncertainty, and uncertainty destabilises society. They need things to be set down, laws to govern them, laws which distinguish the new order from the order that they were used to in Egypt.

Political anarchists are those who advocate the absence of the state, arguing that common sense would allow for people to come together in agreement to form a functional society allowing for the participants to freely develop their own sense of morality, ethics or principled behaviour. The rise of anarchism as a philosophical movement occurred in the mid 19th century, with its idea of freedom as being based upon political and economic self-rule. This occurred alongside the rise of the nation-state and large-scale industrial capitalism, and the corruption that came with their successes.

So why in Exodus does God not take the Anarchist point of view?

Why does God feel the need to provide a set of rules by which his people are to live?

 Why doesn’t God believe that people would come together in agreement to form a functional society allowing the participants to freely develop their own sense of morality?

 I dare to suggest that God perhaps knew humankind too well to think that anarchy would be a good idea. After all God had watched Cain and Abel, ordered the flood, destroyed Sodom and Gomorah and seen what the Egyptians would do to his people. God knows that humans need laws, they need laws because we can’t or won’t do it by ourselves.

So here they are the ten commandments, the Decalogue, to give it it’s posh name. For many of us these are ingrained into our culture, our understanding of who we are and what life means that I’m not sure we pay them all that much attention. I wonder if we had a quiz how well we would do at naming all ten? If I was allowed to set you homework from a  sermon it would be this excellent question I stumbled across yesterday.

Which of the ten commandments is most challenging for our society? I don’t set homework from my sermons but if you have a couple of moments this week maybe you could have a think. Which of the ten commandments is most challenging for our society, and why?

There is another question too, a question for each one of us, and the confession we used earlier may well have triggered something for you in this. Which of the ten commandments is the most challenging for us as an individual and why? Certainly no answers on a postcard with regard to this. This is a matter for you and God, but for each of us there will be an issue, one of these things with which we struggle.

Psalm 19 is a great psalm, you may have recognised a bit of it, the Psalms were the songbook of the Jews, the songs to sing to remind themselves about God and humans and so when in Psalm 19 it talks about the law of the Lord being perfect and reviving the soul this is what the holy Jews would have had as their spiritual bread and butter. Reminding themselves about the goodness of God.

So the chief priests and the Pharisees would have said that they were people with great regard for God’s law, people who loved God’s law, that for them God’s law was more precious than gold. The Pharisees we particularly interested in extending God’s law from the temple to everyday areas of life.

Which is why the response to the parable of the Tenants is so interesting?

The tenants are lawless people, they would be the proverbial neighbours from hell, they didn’t pay their rent and killed the rent collectors, they beat one, they killed another, and stoned a third. This is not law abiding activity, this is behaviour which surely would require the sheriff to come riding in on his white stallion and sort out.

Ever rent collector which was sent to collect the lawful rent was treated in the same way, then the owner sends his son. Who is also killed.

So how do the chief priests and Pharisees respond?

When they heard Jesus’ parables they knew he was talking about them. If you really were just, if you really were a law abider, if you were really confident in your love of the law, how could you believe that these lawless tenants in the parable spoken by the  person commonly acknowledged to be a prophet. How could you believe that these people were you?

I think the chief priests and Pharisees really knew what God had known all along. That people need a code, a law, people need guidance because we all will naturally go astray somewhere. Even the best people, even the people whose heart is fixed on the words of the psalm, who really believe that the law of the Lords is perfect, reviving the soul. Even these people will go astray somewhere.

The response of the chief priests and Pharisees, even if they perhaps knew that they were wrong, was to work towards arresting Jesus. Their response is to compound their mistake, and they reject the answers that Jesus is giving them.

Jesus talks about himself as the capstone, who will be rejected, then he says this very curious thing, he who falls on this stone will be broken to pieces, but he on whom it falls will be crushed. Neither of which seem very good options to me. Crushing or broken to pieces. Sometimes God’s transforming power in lives of individuals and communities is likened to God building a mosaic. God takes broken pieces and turns them into something beautiful and gracious that not only wasn’t there before, but wouldn’t have been possible without the brokenness. God knows that we are broken people, he has always known that, that’s why we had to have laws in the first place.  But Jesus’ death and resurrection show that through God’s grace it will be as broken pieces, we are built together to be the people of God.