My parents, had they still been alive today, would now both be in their late 90s and so they were of a generation that grew up without TV. For them, as for millions of others of theirs and similar generations, home entertainment meant listening to the radio and playing records on a gramophone or record player. It’s not too surprising then that when I was growing up, even though I don’t remember a time when we didn’t have a TV, the radio or records would be playing in our house every bit as often as the TV would be on.

So when I was growing up I heard a lot of radio programmes. I must admit that I don’t remember too much about the programmes themselves except how annoying I found the habit of the presenters and DJs to constantly talk over the music they were playing. One thing I do remember though, from one early morning radio programme, that I heard on one particular morning, is the words that were spoken rather than any music that was played.

It must have been a ‘Thought for the Day’ slot in the programme or something like that and on this particular day the presenter was talking about a time when a younger member of his family had fallen seriously ill and, despite the prayers of other members of the family, had died. The presenter said how angry this had made him, and although he was now a Christian, at that time he was agnostic but even so, his anger was directed towards God. He said that he wanted God to be real, not to just exist, but to be a real, live person whom he could get his hands on because he wanted to put his hands round God’s throat and throttle him for allowing this young person to suffer and die and for putting his family through such pain. Even more, the presenter said he wanted God to have a family so that he could throttle the life out of them, so that God could know what it’s like to lose someone you love; so that God could suffer in the same way that he and his family were suffering. The thought for that day he wanted to make though was that later, when his anger had subsided, he realised that suffering isn’t God’s fault because people usually suffer at the hands of other human beings, and the world is the way it is because the world and it’s people have, to a very large extent, turned their backs on God and the love that Jesus Christ came into the world to proclaim and show. And he also realised that God had experienced the pain of seeing a loved one suffer and die, in the Passion and Cross endured by Jesus. And indeed, in the suffering of the world because each and every one of us is beloved of God.   

I’m not sure when I heard those words, I’m not sure whether it was shortly before or shortly after I’d returned to the Church after my teenaged absence, but I have always remembered it. And I think one of the reasons I’ve remembered those words is that I’m reminded of them whenever I read or hear the parable of the Persistent Widow and the Unjust Judge, which we’ve just heard in our Gospel reading.

On the surface, the similarity is recognisable but not particularly remarkable; the widow isn’t getting the justice she thinks is due to her and so she keeps pestering the judge until she gets what she wants. So, as Jesus said, this is a parable about the need to pray, always, and not to lose heart even when our prayers go unanswered at first because, in the end, they will be answered. But if we look at this parable in a little more depth, the connection between it and the words I heard on the radio all those years ago become clearer.

Our translations of this parable vary, but whichever translation we use, the unjust judge says something like,

“…because this widow keeps bothering me, I will grant her justice, so that she may not wear me out by continually coming.”

But a more literal translation would be,

“…because this widow causes me so much suffering, I will grant her justice, otherwise she will keep coming and end up giving me a black eye.” 

I think the similarities between that literal translation of the parable, and the sentiments expressed in that radio programme are very clear; the anger at someone who could give us what we want but doesn’t, and the wish to cause suffering and do physical violence to them because they haven’t given us what we want.

In the parable, of course, Jesus contrasts the unjust judge with God by saying that even an unjust judge will give justice eventually, if we’re persistent enough in our demands for justice, so how much more will God, who is a just judge, gives us justice and how much more quickly will he do that than an unjust judge. But this is where we run into a problem with this parable.

Jesus says that God will give his people justice ‘speedily’. But, as we look at the world around us, we can’t help but ask, where is God’s justice? We all know, I’m sure, that our prayers aren’t always answered in the way we’d like them to be, nor as speedily as we’d often like them to be, regardless of how often and how earnestly we pray. So what’s going on here, what is Jesus saying?

If we take Jesus’ words at the end of this parable as a whole, I think we can make sense of what he’s really saying. Jesus said,

“…will not God grant justice to his chosen ones who cry to him day and night? Will he delay long in helping them? I tell you, he will quickly grant justice to them. And yet, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?”

I think what these words imply is that God’s justice will come quickly, but only when the time for judgement and justice comes, and that is when Jesus, the Son of Man returns. That is when everything will be put right but the problem for us is that we have no idea when that will be, and it might not be in our lifetime. Nevertheless, we, as God’s people, are called to keep faith and persevere in prayer until Jesus returns, whenever that might be and however long that means we have to wait for justice.

That is difficult for us because we want to see justice now. We want to see the wrongs of the world put right now. And we want to see the suffering in the world end now. And that’s only natural because we think and operate on the short span of our human lifetimes and when we don’t see these things happening, when it looks as though our prayers aren’t being answered, it’s very easy for us to be disheartened. We can give up on prayer because we don’t think our prayers are being answered. We can become very angry at the injustice and suffering in the world, and angry with God too, if not for allowing these things to happen then at least for delaying in doing something about it. And, in the end, because of these things, many people start to question faith itself, and many give up on their faith.

The real problem for us, I’m sure, is that we simply don’t understand at times just what God is up to in and amidst all the injustice and suffering, either in individual lives or in the world at large. But we’re not alone in that. In the Scriptures, doesn’t Job lament the bitterness of life, the injustice of it all, especially the injustice of the good and innocent who suffer? Doesn’t he wonder how we can make sense of it all in light of our belief in a just and loving God? But in answer God begins by asking Job a question;

“Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?”

In fact, God doesn’t really give Job any answer at all except to imply that Job  has no right to question God because he, Job, is only looking at things in human terms and neither sees nor understands the bigger picture. 

And in the New Testament, doesn’t Peter rebuke Jesus, criticise Jesus and tell him how wrong he is when Jesus tells the disciples that he must go to Jerusalem where he will suffer at the hands of the religious authorities and be put to death? And doesn’t Jesus, in turn, rebuke Peter by telling him that he’s looking at things through human eyes rather than God’s eyes, in other words, that he doesn’t understand God’s ways?

It is natural for us to do that though because we are human, and we want to see things happen that we think are right and we want to see them happen in our own lifetime. So, and as the Scriptures tell us, it’s only natural for us to question God, to wonder what God is up to, even to become angry with God for not doing what we think he should be doing. But, in the end, we have to accept that our ways are not God’s ways, and he works on a cosmic scale and timescale that we simply can’t comprehend. We have to remember that, just like Job, we were not there when God laid the foundation of the earth.

We need to remember too, that there is no human emotion that God doesn’t understand, not only because he created us in his own image and likeness, but also because his Son has lived on earth as one of us. Jesus himself wept at the grave of Lazarus, his friend. He wept at the fate of Jerusalem and his own people because they wouldn’t listen to what God was saying to them. The Father knows what it’s like to see his loved ones suffer and die because it has happened to his chosen people, Israel. It happened to his own Son, Jesus Christ. And it continues to happen today because he loves each and every one of us as his own children.

So, when we see the injustice and suffering in the world, let’s try to remember that it’s not God’s fault. Let’s try to remember that it doesn’t happen because God doesn’t care and doesn’t love us. When we see these things, let’s try to remember the parable of the Persistent Widow and the Unjust Judge and try to remember that these things will be put right, but in God’s good time, not necessarily in ours. And let’s persevere in faith and in prayer so that we will be ready for Jesus’ return when all will be made well.

Amen.

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The Propers for the 29th Sunday in Oridnary Time can be viewed here.

Last Sunday, at our Harvest Festival, the theme of our services in church, and of my sermon, was thanksgiving. And that’s a theme that carries over to this Sunday too because our Gospel reading this morning is the story of Jesus healing the ten lepers, of whom only one is grateful enough for what Jesus has done to give thank and praise to God for his healing. So today I’m going to speak about thanksgiving again but this time, not in terms of what we can do in our daily lives to show thanks to God for all he’s done for us, but about what we can do in church to show our thanks, and in particular about the way we can do things in church to show our thanks to God.

During this last week, an organisation called i sing POP visited St Gabriel’s School. If you’ve not heard of them before,  i sing POP is a Christian organisation which goes into schools to teach the children Christian themed pop songs. They help the children learn the songs, teach them the Christian values and theology that underlie the songs, and then, towards the end of the week, they hold concerts in which the children perform the songs along with the dance moves and actions they’ve been taught, to accompany them.

On Thursday of last week, as I usually do, I went into school to lead the assembly and because I knew the i sing POP concerts were being held later that day, I spoke to the children about using music as a way of giving thanks and praise to God. I said that this was something we read about in the Bible and especially in the last few Psalms which speak about singing our praises to God and praising him with dancing and with music. After I’d said , I asked the children a question. I asked,

“If you bought someone a birthday present, or Christmas present, and when you gave it to them, they just said something like, ‘Oh, right. Thanks.’ what do you think that would say about that person?”

And the answers I got were that that person was “mean”, “unkind”, “not very nice”, that “they don’t appreciate it” and that “they’re ungrateful”.

Those were the kind of answers I was expecting, and hoping for actually, and  I used them to encourage the children show their thanks to God and their praise of God by singing with enthusiasm in the concerts later that day. And I have to say that they did, they did take part enthusiastically in the concerts, they enjoyed taking part, the adults who came to the concerts enjoyed them, and everyone went home with a smile on their face.

But how different is that to what often happens, perhaps usually happens, in our churches on Sunday mornings?  Now, I’m not saying that we should ditch our traditional hymns in favour of pop songs. And I’m not saying that we should start waving our arms around when we sing or dancing in the aisles to our hymns, but I think we, and as I said last Sunday, by ‘we’ I mean we in the Church generally, not necessarily just we here, we could show a little more enthusiasm when it comes to singing God’s praises and offering our thanks to God. I’ll give you an example of what I mean.

I remember well one Low Sunday (that’s the Sunday after Easter Sunday) in a church where I served as a curate. This particular Low Sunday was also a Parade Sunday, and the parish had a lot of uniformed organisations. There were brownies and guides, cubs and beavers, their leaders and parents, as well as the regular members of the congregation and so, quite unusually for Low Sunday, the church was packed. So, when we set off in procession at the start of the service, I expected the Introit hymn, which was Praise, my soul, the King of heaven, to raise the roof. The organist played the introduction to  the hymn and …… well, instead of the great song of praise to God I was expecting, what we got sounded more like a funeral dirge, and one that hardly anyone in church knew at that; they can’t have done because it sounded like hardly anyone was singing it.

Later, when I went into the pulpit to preach, I looked out at a sea of unhappy looking faces and bored children. And so I asked the children a question that day too. The question was,

“Do you think coming to church is boring?”

I don’t think they, or anyone else knew quite what to make of that, and they just looked at each other, not knowing what to say. So I asked them again, and eventually, and one by one, they said “Yes”. To which I responded,

“I’m not surprised.”

My intention that Sunday had been to say something about the joy of the Easter season but, in light of what I heard and saw in church that morning, it seemed appropriate to ask that question and to ask where is the joy of the Easter season when people in church look and sound like they’re at a funeral or sat in a dentist’s waiting room, rather than celebrating the most wonderful event in all of human history, the Resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ? And to ask too, what does that say to those outside the Church and to the young people in church that morning about our sense of thanks to God and praise of God for this most wonderful thing he’s done for us?

Obviously, if we belong to a church that doesn’t have an organist, or any other way of playing music to accompany congregational singing, we can’t sing the praises of God in a literal sense. But that doesn’t mean we can’t show enthusiasm in our thanks and praise. Regardless of whether we have congregational singing in church or not, we can still raise the roof, so to speak, in our praise of God by showing enthusiasm in the way we join in with the spoken congregational parts of our services and in the way we respond to the prayers and biddings in our services.

The core of the Mass, the service of Holy Communion, call it what you will, is the Eucharistic Prayer. The word ‘Eucharist’ comes from the Greek word for thanksgiving, so the Eucharist Prayer is a prayer of thanksgiving to God for all he’s done for us, and if we think about the words of the Eucharistic Prayer, it’s quite obvious that’s what it is. In it we give thanks and praise to God for sending his Son, our Lord Jesus Christ to be our Saviour. We thank God for the saving death of Jesus through which we have hope of the resurrection to eternal life. We praise God by echoing the song of the angels. We recall the Lord’s Supper and invoke the Holy Spirit that bread and wine will be for us the body and blood of Christ. We proclaim our faith that Christ has died, is risen and will come again. We rejoice in Christ’s Resurrection and  Ascension; we look forward to his return in glory and celebrate our redemption. We thank God for the privilege of being able to stand in his presence and serve him. We pray that he will accept our thanks and praise. We pray that he will bring us into his kingdom where we can praise and glorify him for ever. And we declare that he should be honoured and glorified for ever. And then the Eucharistic Prayer ends with what’s known as the Great Amen.

Amen means ‘So be it’. Our ‘Amen’ to the Eucharistic Prayer is our declaration that we agree with all that’s been said in the prayer. It’s our declaration that we truly believe in all we’ve said in the Prayer. It’s our declaration that we sincerely hope for all we’ve prayed for in the Eucharistic Prayer. And it’s our declaration that we truly believe that God will grant us what we’ve prayed for in this great thanksgiving prayer. So this is The Great Amen; the Amen, the So be it, to all we believe and hope for as Christians. And yet, at the end of this great prayer, what do we hear? Very often what amounts to a little Amen; a barely audible Amen. Now I know that the clergy are often quite a distance from the congregation when the Great Amen is said but at times, and a lot of times it must be said, it sounds as though a lot of people in church are whispering the Great Amen, if they’re saying it out loud at all.

I‘m not saying that people don’t say the Great Amen, but it often sounds as though they’re doing little more than simply moving their lips, as though they’re saying the Great Amen so quietly that it’s not audible to anyone except themselves. Where is the enthusiasm in that? Where is the enthusiasm for what we’ve just heard and declared and prayed for in the Eucharistic Prayer in a barely audible ‘Amen’ to it all? The Great Amen is something that should be said loudly, clearly, and boldly as the rubrics, the instructions, in the Common Worship Service of Holy Communion puts it.

I know that Anglicans, Church of England people, are often noted for their reserve, for not showing their feelings too much or acting in a demonstrative way that will draw attention to them. So perhaps they think that if they sing or speak too loudly their stiff upper lips may break? I know too that people don’t like to draw attention to themselves because they worry what other people may think of them. They might be genuinely shy people. They might think they can’t sing and so they don’t. The fact of that matter is that, unless there’s some medical reason that they shouldn’t or that they physically can’t,  everyone can sing. Not everyone is a good singer, but everyone can sing. And in any case, we’re not in church to win the approval of our fellow human beings, we’re here to offer our thanks and praise to God. And we should do that with enthusiasm because we have so much to give thanks and praise to God for.

One final thought, if we don’t sing or join in with the congregational parts of our church services, or if we only do these things very quietly because we’re embarrassed about other people hearing us and worried about what they’ll think of us, just bear in mind the words of our Epistle this morning. St Paul implies that when we stand before Christ to be judged, he will treat us  according to the way we have acted towards him. If we’re too reserved or embarrassed to sing out our thanks and praise to God’s now, if we’re too reserved or embarrassed to do those things enthusiastically now, to do those things loudly and boldly now, will we still be able to hope that Christ will sing our praises to the God the Father when the time comes that we need him to do that?

Amen.   

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The Propers for the 28th Sunday of Ordinary Time can be viewed here.

One of the things that the Church has done throughout its history is to Christianise pagan festivals, to take over pagan festivals and supplant them with Christian festivals, and one example of that is the festival we’re celebrating today, Harvest Festival.

We don’t know when or where people first held thanksgiving celebrations for a good harvest, but it’s believed people have been doing this since prehistoric times. But the Harvest Festival as we know it in this country, as a thanksgiving service in church, only dates back to the 1840s and we know that some of the early Harvest Festivals were specifically designed to put an end to the local customs and excesses associated with the end of the harvest. For example, the first Harvest Festival in Norfolk took place in 1854 and it was held because a vicar, the Rev Dr Beal, wanted to,

“…put a stop to the disgraceful scenes which too often characterise the close of harvest, and to the system of largess, which gives rise to cases of the grossest description.”

The largess, in question in this case seems have had nothing to do with generosity in giving, and more to do with the copious amount of alcohol that was consumed on these occasions.

Quite apart from being a very good thing to do from a social point of view, to put an end to mass drunkenness and the gross behaviour that led to, holding Harvest Festivals was a perfectly understandable thing for the Church to do. In those days, people relied on the produce of their own land, not only for their food but also for their livelihood. In the mid-19th Century, well over 60% of the working population of this country worked in agriculture, and so a good harvest was essential; it was something to be prayed for, and something to give great thanks to God for after it was gathered in. But today, we live in a very different country and world. Today only 1% of the working population of this country work in agriculture and even in these days of Brexit, war in Ukraine and supply chain issues, our shops and supermarkets are full of food from all over the world. Even if we do see empty shelves in our shops and supermarkets from time to time these days, we’re not short of food. People may not always be able to afford to buy all that they need, but that’s another issue; there’s always food available and we don’t rely on the produce of our own land for that food.

Regardless of whether we have a good harvest or a bad harvest, food is always available.

And as our country and the world has changed, our understanding of a Harvest Festival has changed with it. Today, whilst we still do give thanks to God for the produce of the land, in tends to be in more general terms, the land, wherever that might be, rather than our land. Our focus in these services is often on those in the world who are short of food, those in countries where the produce of their own land is still so important to both life and livelihoods. And we quite often call these services Harvest Thanksgivings rather than Harvest Festivals and we use them as a time for giving thanks to God not just for the food we eat but for all he gives us and has done for us.

In that, out Harvest Thanksgiving has a lot in common with the Feast of First Fruits we read about in the Book of Deuteronomy. First Fruits, or Shavuot was originally an agricultural festival, a time for the people of Israel to give thanks to God for the first produce of the harvest from the land he’d given them. But in addition to that, it was also a time to give thanks to God for their ancestor, Jacob, and for their nationhood. It was a time to remember their suffering in Egypt and to give thanks to God for hearing and answering their prayers. A time for giving thanks to God by remembering that

‘…the Lord brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, with great deeds of terror, with signs and wonders. And he brought us into this place and gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey.’

Later, and as it is still today, Shavuot also became a celebration of the giving of the Law on Mount Sinai and so what started as an agricultural thanksgiving festival, has become a more general festival of thanksgiving for all that God has done for the people of Israel.

But on this day when we’re encouraged to give thanks to God for all he’s done for us, I do wonder what the Church of today means by thanksgiving. I wonder to what extent do we, and by ‘we’ I mean the Church generally, not necessarily us as individual members of the Church, really give thanks to God for all he’s done for us?

At the Feast of Shavuot, the people of Israel remember their founding father, Jacob, and on Thursday last, at the feast of St Michael and All Angels, the Old Testament reading was that well known story of Jacob’s Ladder. As you’ll no doubt remember, that’s the story of Jacob’s dream of a ladder reaching from earth to heaven on which angels descend and ascend. In the dream, Jacob speaks with the Lord himself and when he awakes, he names the place Bethel, the house of God, because this is a place where God comes down to earth. In fact it’s a place so holy that Jacob anoints the very stones on the ground there.

In my sermon on Thursday, I said that our churches are also Bethels, they’re also places where God comes to earth because didn’t Jesus say that where two or three gather in his name he is there with them? Jacob called Bethel “an awesome place” which was “none other than the house of God” and “the gate of heaven.” But how do we treat our churches, our Bethels? We make them holy by dedicating them to the worship of God and then we’re told to use them for anything and everything but the worship of God, in fact, we can even be rewarding for making the worship of God secondary to any other use we want to put our churches to. The Church itself can exert pressure on people to agree to close a church down altogether and then praise them for agreeing to do so. And why? For money. I ask you, is this any way to treat these awesome places, these houses of God, these gates of heaven? Is this any way to give thanks to God for all he’s done for us? Is this any way to give thanks to God for giving us that greatest Bethel of all, the coming to earth of his Son in the Incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ, by turning his house into a den of thieves? I’m afraid that far from seeing thanksgiving in this, I’m more reminded of those prophetic words of Isaiah,

“This people honours me with their lips, but their heart is far from me;

in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the commandments of men.”

As I’ve said in the past, there’s probably not much we can do to influence what the Church as an institution and as the business it seems intent on becoming, does. But that doesn’t mean we, as individual members of the Church, have to follow suit in our own lives. We can give thanks to God and show thanks to God as individuals and as parish congregations. And there are so many ways we can do that.

For example, today we’re giving thanks to God for the produce of the land and for our food, but we can do that each and every day, simply by saying grace before we eat. It’s so simple, but how many of us remember to do that?

As Christians we’re called to be a people of prayer. I’m sure we all do pray on a daily basis but how do we pray? Do we simply pray for things, the things we’d like or would like God to do? Or do we remember to give thanks to God in our prayers for what we have and for what God has already done for us? One way of doing this is to practice what’s called ACTS of prayer. ACTS is an acronym that stands for Adoration, Confession, Thanksgiving and Supplication. In other words, when we pray we praise God, we confess our faults and sins to God, we thank God for what we have and what he’s done for us and only then do we offer our supplication, only then do we ask things of God.

One of the things the Church seems to be doing today, rather than giving God the first fruits of all it has, is giving God what’s left over after it’s done whatever else it wants to do. How else can we interpret the Church’s preoccupation with closing churches and cutting the number of full-time clergy to save money, whilst at the same time employing people to deal with secular issues and whilst at the same time too, the Church’s fortune grows ever larger? Again, we don’t have to be like that, but what we do need to do is to ask whether or not we are giving God our first fruits, the very best that we have to offer.

When it come to our giving to our parish church, for example, could we give more? I’m not saying that to give proper thanks to God we have to leave ourselves in need because whilst it’s true that Jesus spoke on many occasions about the danger of riches, he also said,

“If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away. For it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body be thrown into hell.”

So the underlying teaching is that we’re called to give up whatever holds us back from truly following him. Scripture doesn’t say that money is the root of all evil but that the love of money is the root of all evil. So, when it comes to our giving, are we being realistic, or could we give more?

And when it comes to our time and talents, could we give more of these? I’m not saying that anyone has to spend every spare minute of  their lives, 24/7, in church, or on Church business, so that they have no time for anything else, but to make those things a priority in our lives. So when it comes to worship, to make it a priority to be in church every Sunday and on Feast days of the Church. And to give a fair share of our time and talents to the Church and to the life of the parish rather than fitting those things in, if we’ve got time and if we can be bothered, after we’ve done everything else we want to do.

When it comes to giving thanks to God, we have a lot to give thanks for, not least for our salvation and the promise of eternal life he’s given us through his son, our Lord Jesus Christ. So let’s give God proper thanks for all we have, and all he’s done for us. That doesn’t mean giving so much we drive ourselves into poverty and it doesn’t mean spending every waking moment either in church or on Church business, but it does mean giving to God the very best of what we have. So let’s give thanks to God, and let’s make sure that when we do, we’re offering him our first fruits and not our leftovers.

Amen.    

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The Propers for Harvest Thanksgiving can be viewed here.