5th July Patronal Festival
Psalm 54, Hebrews 13:10-16, Matthew 10:29-30 Patronal Festival for Thomas Becket
(we transfer it usually 29th December see http://www.excitingholiness.org/first-edition/index.cgi?m12/d29.html )
What is your favourite sort of river?
Would you choose a grand majestic city river like the Thames in London or the Vltava in Prague or the Tiber in Rome, or even the Avon in Bath.
Maybe you like your rivers a little smaller perhaps a little navigable river, on which one can paddle a canoe or row a little boat, maybe there are bits of the Wye which stir your heart.
Perhaps you like your rivers even smaller, perhaps little like the Bybrook, perhaps even a mountain brook or stream which will flow bubbling and gurgling through the heather topped moor until it meets up with others in similar vein which will come together to make a larger watercourse.
When Abraham left Ur on his great journey when he discovered that all of God is everywhere his route was determined at the beginning by the flow of the two great rivers the Euphrates and the Tigris. Abraham began his journey needing the support of those two rivers and the communities they supported.
Rivers are important they give us water to cleanse and sustain us they provide landmarks to follow and even transport and recreation for those who enjoy swimming, fishing, kayaking or even recreational bridge building.
Many of the great old testament narratives involve rivers. The events of the beginning of Exodus occur around the river Nile, the events of the second half of Exodus are defined by the lack of a river, or any much water at all in the wilderness.
Then the beginning of the next stage of the story finds God’s people crossing the river Jordan into the promised land.
In the New Testament narrative of Jesus’ ministry again begins with a river, the river Jordan again, as Jesus is baptised, and his position as God’s Son is revealed and confirmed to him and all those around him. Jesus is baptised in the river where hundreds of people had been coming and turning from their sins and coming back to God. As John baptises Jesus, the two soggy cousins dripping with river water, a voice comes from heaven and speaks of Jesus ‘You are my Son with whom I am well pleased.’
And as Abraham began the great human journey into what it means that God is God, beside rivers that give life, then John’s great vision of heaven in the book of revelation also speaks of a river.
Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, as clear as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb down the middle of the great street of the city. On each side of the river stood the tree of life, bearing twelve crops of fruit, yielding its fruit every month. And the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations.
Some of you are currently sitting above a river, probably.
What I can say is that if you go and stand on top of the table at the back there is water flowing in a channel underneath, where it travels underneath the downstairs old boiler room I do not know.
We live in this place, this geographical place, which is defined by its water.
The Spring which somehow feeds not very poetically into our old boiler room and then I know not where. The Springs which rise in the Spring field and then travel through the water course via the pond in the wilderness in to the Bybrook. The Bybrook itself.
All these water sources have defined our place and the people of this place for years past. The evening that Fiona Castle came to speak here one of the band who were playing came up to me and said, a proper church building, he’d only ever belonged to house churches. And I was so proud when I said to him, people have been praying in this place for at least 800 years, this place and the community around it which is defined by the water on which we sit and flows around us.
So what was it and what is it that has defined the faith of the saints in this place over approximately a millennium give or take a few centuries we don’t know about.
Our reading from the Psalm today includes this phrase,
Surely God is my help;
the Lord is the one who sustains me.
This was written thousands years ago, but the Psalmist recognises that it is God who sustains. God has sustained the Christians in this place, like the rivers and water here sustains the physical life God has lifted up and sustained the Christians here over centuries. God has provided them with water of life both physical and spiritual.
God sustains us with his care, one of my favourite Christian poems is this,
Hair 54, 329, 635 fell out today
God noticed.
God isn’t an absentee creator God, he didn’t create the world say, that’s good then disappear, he stuck around to sustain and care for us.
When Jesus says
“Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground apart from the will of your Father. And even the very hairs of your head are all numbered.”
One of the hardest conceptual tasks for the Christian is to believe and to live our lives like we believe it.
People have lived their lives here for centuries knowing and believing this, they have lived here through the Black Death, the Peasants’ revolt and the industrial revolution, two world wars and the rest, and the faithful have known this, that God sustains and cares for each one.
So what has given the saints, and by that I mean all those Christian believers through the centuries, so what has given the saints their confidence to believe that the omnipotent creator God cares for them and the boldness to approach this God. The confidence comes through Jesus, through knowing that he has made it possible for us to approach God. In the Hebrews passage it says this.
And so Jesus also suffered outside the city gate to make the people holy through his own blood.
We, the people, have been made holy through the blood of Jesus.
What then should we use as a symbol of this holiness, well for centuries we have used the symbol of water. For those of you who have either been lucky or unlucky enough to attend a baptism which I have conducted here recently will appreciate that I like the symbolism of water, very much
Remember your baptism…
When by water you were washed
Not to clean your body
But to clean your soul.
For in baptism God has promised
To forgive you, to renew you,
To let your sad and soiled life be clean again:
You are not destined to be dirty.
And so the river reminds us that like the saints throughout the ages, we are sustained by God’s goodness, like the saints throughout the ages we are cleansed through his grace.
What should our response be to this sustenance and grace?
The Psalmist knew how to respond,
I will sacrifice a freewill offering to you;
I will praise your name, O LORD,
for it is good.
Hmnn a freewill offering, a sacrifice, should I be sending for the goats…
No, what does the writer to the Hebrews say.
Through Jesus, therefore, let us continually offer to God a sacrifice of praise—the fruit of lips that confess his name. And do not forget to do good and to share with others, for with such sacrifices God is pleased.
What sacrifice does God like Christians to make? He is pleased when we praise him, and when we do good and share with others.
That is what God calls us to.
I have preached for more than ten minutes on the day we remember Thomas a Becket, or ordinary Thomas Becket if you prefer, without mentioning him once.
Thomas is a man with a chequered reputation, was he just a stuck up Archbishop trying to pull one over on the King, or was he a holy man whose holiness annoyed the King so much that the only response to such holiness was obliterate it with violence. More than 800 years later it’s probably hard for us to see through the veil of history, we know thought that lots of people were very upset when he died, not least the King, who was penitent to the extreme.
The last lines of the psalm
For he has delivered me from all my troubles,
and my eyes have looked in triumph on my foes.
So what for Thomas, surely if God loved him God would have stopped him being hacked to death in his own cathedral. It is no accident of design that Thomas’ emblem is a sword hacking through a Bishop’s mitre.
Did God love Thomas? A or just plain Thomas Becket, of course he did, in fact he still does. And when the sword went into Thomas’ head God knew each hair that fell as he was killed, he knew the number of each one as it fell on to the stone floor.
What does the river teach us of this?
Back to revelation,
Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, as clear as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb down the middle of the great street of the city.
Life from God is not just for now, here on earth, but we cannot be separated from God’s love by anything, especially not death. We no longer rely on physical water to sustain or cleanse us, but the image of new life in heaven still stems from the river. This river of the water of life, but the sort of life with God we find hard to imagine, and when John tries to write down his incredible vision of it he struggles to find words to describe it. But amongst the words he does find, the image that we find accessible is the river the water of life.
So next time you see running water, maybe even as you leave the church today maybe you can remember these truths, these truths which sustained the Christians here over the ages, and Thomas himself. That God cares and sustains for us, giving us life physical and spiritual. That God has cleansed us from our sins through Jesus’ death and resurrection, that we are not destined to be dirty.
Then let us remember that this care and forgiveness is not only for now, but also for the future, remembering the image of the river of life in heaven.
If I could have held this service in the Bybrook I would have done. But that’s OK we have our image, and we know water passes beneath our feet.
We come to the river to pray, we come to give our sacrifice of praise. We come to the river to pray, we come to repent ,to receive forgiveness and be cleansed. We come to the river to pray, We come to rejoice in God’s gift of life,