One of the things we can’t avoid in life is rules; rules, regulations, laws. We have them in everything we do in life and it’s just as well we do because could you imagine what life would be like without rules? I’m sure we’ve all tried to play games at times with someone who ignores the rules of the game, someone who cheats in other words, and we know how difficult and annoying that can be. I’m sure there are more than a few of us who’ve had fallouts, arguments and maybe even fights with someone who’s cheated during a game. And imagine what life would be like if there was no law against theft, for example. How would we all feel if someone quite openly stole something of ours and when we complained to the police, they just shrugged their shoulders and said, ‘There’s no law against it.’ So we have to have rules, set standards of conduct that are designed to make life run more smoothly by making it fair for everyone, so that we’re all on a level playing field as the saying goes. And we go through life expecting that the vast majority of people at least, will stick to the rules.

Having said that, one of my favourite quotes, lines from the film Reach For the Sky actually, and something I very much agree with, says that,

‘Rules are for the guidance of the wise and the obedience of the foolish.’

That saying doesn’t mean that only foolish people stick to the rules while wise people break them. What it means is that, while we understand the need for rules, we also understand the need to be flexible in applying them. It’s a saying that reminds us that rules can’t cover every situation we might come across. It reminds us that there are always exceptions to the rules because rules can’t cover every situation. I think it also highlights a very fundamental problem when we apply rules which is the potential for conflict between the ‘spirit of the law’ and the ‘letter of the law’. It also reminds us that a good rule can be misused, misinterpreted, or over zealously applied to bad effect. It warns us that a good rule applied in too strict a way, can be just as bad, if not worse, than having no rule at all.

This morning’s Gospel reading at St Gabriel’s, the story of Jesus healing on the Sabbath, is an example of how a strict interpretation of a rule, and an over-zealous application of a rule, completely negated the spirit of the rule. In this case, the on how to observe the Sabbath. I’m sure we all know the commandment about the Sabbath, but just to remind you, it says:

“Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days you shall labour, and do all your work,  but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work, you, or your son, or your daughter, your male servant, or your female servant, or your livestock, or the sojourner who is within your gates. For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.

I think what stands out in this commandment is how it begins and ends – God commands that the Sabbath is kept as a holy day because he himself has blessed it as a holy day. The problem though, is in the way this law, this rule was applied. The emphasis was put on resting and doing no work. It’s true that people were, and are, encouraged to worship God, to pray and to study the Scriptures on the Sabbath, but is this all there is to making the day holy?

Holiness, as we know, is about being dedicated to God and so the Sabbath is intended to be a day dedicated to God. It’s a day when we’re called to put aside our own business and dedicate ourselves to being about God’s business. Part of that is to worship and pray and study the Scriptures, but isn’t a large part of being about God’s business our calling to love our neighbour, to cater to the hungry and thirsty, to be hospitable to the stranger, to give aid to the poor and the sick?  But how can we do these things if we’re forbidden from doing any work on the Sabbath? And if we can’t do these things on the Sabbath, even when they’re necessary, can we really keep it as a holy day?

This is the essence of the conflict between Jesus and the leader of the synagogue in this Gospel story. Jesus healed on the Sabbath, a work obviously, but one that made the day holy because doing it was being about God’s work. But in the synagogue leader’s rigid interpretation of the law, it was a very unholy thing to do, a thing that defiled the Sabbath, because it involved working. So in this instance, too rigid an interpretation of the letter of the law, negated the spirit of the law. In effect, this rigid interpretation and application of the law made keeping it worse than having no law at all because it stopped people from observing the essential thing about the Sabbath which is to keep it as a holy day. 

There are actually, 39 types or categories of work that Jewish law prohibits on the Sabbath, and also some prohibited by rabbinic law. But making lists of what’s allowed and what’s prohibited always leads to problems. For one thing, we can’t list everything in such a way that every possible situation or extenuating circumstance is covered. So that leaves loopholes in the rules which some people will be only too happy to exploit for their own purposes. And whenever things are written down, we have the potential for ambiguities and different ways of interpreting what’s been written. And, of course, once we have differences in interpretation we open the way for differences and inconsistencies in applying the rules, which automatically leads to disagreements about the rules. And all this leads to even more problems; the problem of people insisting that their interpretation of the rules is the right one, and the problem of people making up their own rules and passing them off as the rules.

People who do this are perhaps like those whom Jesus speaks about in the Gospel reading at St Mark’s this morning, people who try to enter the kingdom of God by ways and means other than the ‘narrow door’ Jesus tells us we must enter by. And this is a very common problem.

To coin a phrase, I wish I had a pound for every time someone’s said to me, ‘I’m not a Christian (or ’I don’t go to Church’), but I’m a good person and I live a good life.’  Perhaps they are and they do, but by who’s standard are they and their lives ‘good’? Usually, it’s by their own standard which is almost certainly not the standard by which God judges who and what is ‘good’.

How many people, for example, have we all met who fall out and argue with others regularly because they can’t control their tongues, especially what they say about other people? And how many of these people excuse what they do by insisting they they’re ‘only telling it like it is’? Only telling it like it is. Really? Isn’t what they’re actually doing telling it the way they see it which is not the way it is, but only their opinion and interpretation of the way it is. And how often do people like this influence others so that have a bad opinion of someone that’s actually based on nothing more than tittle-tattle, malicious gossip? And yet aren’t these often the very people who insist that they’re ‘good people’ who lead ‘good lives’ – Not like such and such a body down the road. If people round here knew what they were really like, if they knew I know, that’d open their eyes. I could tell you a few things about them if you’ve got a week or two to spare! Or some other such. But what is it that Jesus said?

“… everyone who is angry with his brother will be liable to judgement; whoever insults his brother will be liable to the council; and whoever says, ‘You fool!’ will be liable to the hell of fire.”

But still, in their own interpretation of what’s good and bad, right and wrong, those who do this do very often do insist, that they’re ‘good people’ who lead ‘good lives’.

And if we think about the Church, how many people in the Church think their way, and only their way, is the right way? How many people in the Church not only criticise, but condemn others because of their tradition, their liturgy, their denomination? And how much of this criticism is based on the premise that ‘We’re right’ and so anyone and everyone who doesn’t do things our way must be wrong? But in fact, how much of what we regard as right and wrong in the Church all boils down to nothing more than our own interpretations and opinions?

We have rules, and we need rules, in our lives, and we have them and need them in the Church too. But we always have to remember the need to be flexible in our interpretation and application of rules. As Christians, we’re called to love God and love our neighbour as ourselves. Every other law and commandment we have is summed up in these two great commandments, so everything we do, both in Church and in our lives should be done in such a way that we keep these commandments as well as possible. But that means we have to be flexible about the way we keep them. For example, as Christians we should be keeping the Sabbath holy by being in Church on Sundays to show our love of God in our worship, our prayers and by listening to the Scriptures. But if someone calls you, in urgent need of help on a Sunday morning, what do you do? The answer is, you do the most loving thing because that is keeping the spirit of the law. You might, in a sense, be going against the letter of the law by being late for Church, or by missing Church altogether that Sunday, but you will have given glory to God and shown your love of God, by showing your love of your neighbour so you will, still, have kept the Sabbath holy.

Rules are made for the guidance of the wise and the obedience of the foolish. We all want to enter the kingdom of heaven and Jesus tells us that to get there, we have to find and go through a narrow door. We find that door through faith in him and by living in obedience to his commandments, his rules, not ours. He also tells us, in the parable of the Ten Virgins, that only the wise find their way to the kingdom while the foolish don’t. So let’s be wise and find that narrow door by doing our best to keep every day as a Sabbath, a holy day, a day to be doing God’s work. That might mean that, at times, we have to use the rules for guidance only, but isn’t that what Jesus did?

Amen.

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The Propers for the 21st Sunday of Ordinary Time can be viewed here.

I don’t know if any of you have a favourite book of the Bible, one you read more than any other or just like more than any other, but if we were to do a survey of this question, it’d be no surprise whatsoever if the result came back that the favourite book of the Bible amongst you was the Book of Psalms. I do know that a lot of people love the Psalms and turn to them in times of trouble. I also know that the Book of Psalms is the most searched book of the Bible on many Bible websites. So it seems that, overall, the Book of Psalms is the most popular book in the Bible.

Whatever your own favourite book of the Bible is, it’s not really surprising that the Book of Psalms is the most popular. I’ve heard the Psalms described as the Scriptures in miniature because in the Psalms we find all the themes of the Scriptures. We find praise of God and prayer to God; judgement and salvation; prophecy and wisdom; exhortations to godly living and warnings against ungodly living; and we find every human emotion and condition of life described in the Psalms.

One of the things we read about the human condition in the Psalms is this, from Psalm 139:

For you formed my inward parts;
you knitted me together in my mother’s womb.
I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. 

Psalm 139 speaks about God’s intimate knowledge of his people, in effect, it says that God knows us better than we know ourselves. But what does it mean to say that we’re ‘fearfully and wonderfully made’?

I’m sure we all know from the Scriptures that fear of the Lord is the beginning of Wisdom and that fear of the Lord has nothing to do with being frightened of God but means to have a deep respect and reverence for God and his words and ways. So being made fearfully tells us that respect for God and his words and ways is something that we have within us as human beings.

But to be ‘wonderfully made’ is a little bit harder to understand because the word ‘wonderfully’ doesn’t really convey the meaning of the original Hebrew the Psalms were written in. The Hebrew word ‘pahlah’ which we translate as ‘wonderfully’ actually means ‘to distinguish’, to mark as separate and different.

To say that we’re ‘wonderfully made’ then is to say that we’re set apart, it’s to say that each one of us is made to be different. It implies too that each and every one of us has been set apart by God and given our own unique calling. So to say that we’re ‘fearfully and wonderfully made’ is to say that we all have within us a deep respect and reverence for God and his words and ways, and that we all have our own unique, God given, vocation in life.

Of course, as we’re all only too well aware, an awful lot of people don’t seem to have or show any respect or reverence for God or his words and ways. But that’s no doubt because they’re never taught or encouraged to. It’s one thing to have a gift or talent, a natural ability perhaps, but if people are never told they have it and are never taught or encouraged to use it, they may never even know they have it. Indeed, in our increasingly secular atheist society, many people are being actively encouraged not to have any respect or reverence for God and his words and ways at all. And because of that, they may never get to fulfil their own unique, God given vocation, the thing God created and called them to do because they don’t even know they have one.

Actually, very few of us know just what our God given vocation is but nevertheless, if we recognise that we are fearfully made, if we do have a deep respect and reverence for God and his words and ways, we may fulfil our God given vocation anyway, without even realising it, simply because we live out our lives fearfully. We have that deep respect and reverence for God and his words and ways, and we live out our lives accordingly. 

The Psalm tells us that we’re all fearfully and wonderfully made but today we give thank for and venerate someone who is a great example to us of just what it means to be fearfully and wonderfully made, and to live accordingly. Someone who did have and show deep respect and reverence for God and his words and ways, and fulfilled their God given vocation because of that, the Blessed Virgin Mary.

For many people, the fearful and wonderful making of Mary began with her Immaculate Conception, the teaching of the Church that, in order to be able to carry his Son in her womb, God granted Mary the special grace of being conceived without original sin. Not everyone agrees with this teaching because it’s not in the Scriptures and it also poses some awkward questions about Jesus and his Incarnation. But if we leave that to one side, there’s no doubt that Mary was fearfully and wonderfully made. Just think about her words to the archangel Gabriel when he told her that she’d been chosen to be the mother of God’s Son;

“Behold, I am the servant of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word.”

In those words we see that deep respect and reverence for God and his words and ways of someone who knew that they were fearfully made, and who acted accordingly. In those words we see someone who knew that they were wonderfully made, someone who knew they’d been called and set apart by God to fulfil a unique vocation. We could say that Mary was at least told what her vocation was, so at least she knew what God had wonderfully made her to do, but it wasn’t an easy thing she’d been called to do, and it was her fear of the Lord, her deep respect and reverence for God and his words and ways that allowed her to speak those words and fulfil the vocation she’d been wonderfully made to carry out. And through Mary’s response to being fearfully and wonderfully made, our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ was fearfully and wonderfully made in human flesh.

Jesus, of course was someone else who knew that he’d been fearfully and wonderfully made. We see that in the story of him being found in the Jerusalem temple when he was just a young boy. We see it in his answer to Mary and Joseph who’d been frantically searching for him for days;

“Why were you looking for me? Did you not know that I must be about my Father’s business?”

Ultimately, his Father’s business, the thing Jesus had been fearfully and wonderfully made to do, was to bring salvation to the world and open the way to eternal life for us, by giving up his life for the sins of the world.

Whilst the Church of England calls this the Feast day of the Blessed Virgin Mary, according to the Roman Catholic calendar, what we’re celebrating today is the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the bodily raising of Mary into heaven at the end of her earthly life. As with the Immaculate Conception, this isn’t something we find in Scripture; it’s a tradition of the Church that dates back to the 4^th Century. And so, as with the Immaculate Conception, this is a teaching of the Church that not everyone can agree with. But, however she was raised there, can we really doubt that Mary is in heaven? Can we really doubt that someone who fulfilled so well what God had fearfully and wonderfully made her for was rewarded with eternal life? Surely not, because if we do, what hope is there for the rest of us who may not fulfil, at least so well, what we were fearfully and wonderfully made for?

Mary is often called an example to Christians, and this is yet one more way that Mary can be an example to us. Like all of us, Mary was fearfully and wonderfully made. Like us Mary was given a deep respect and reverence for God and his words and ways. But unlike most people, Mary lived accordingly and so she was ready to accept her unique God given vocation when she knew what it was, and she was prepared to fulfil it, regardless of what that might mean for her personally. As a result, Mary has been raised to eternal life. And so it can be for us. If we can live fearfully, with deep respect and reverence for God and his words and ways, we can fulfil what we were wonderfully made for, our unique God given vocation. Whether we know what that is or not, we can fulfil it, whether we realise we’re doing it or not if only we can live our lives fearfully, as Mary did. If we can do that, can we doubt that, like Mary, we will be raised to eternal life too, through her son and God’s Son, our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ?

Amen.  

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The Propers for the Blessed Virgin Mary (The Assumption) can be viewed here.

I’m sure we’ve all come across the saying, ‘Don’t put off until tomorrow what you can do today’. I’m equally sure that we all know what that saying means – it’s a warning about something that can affect us all, and probably does affect us all at one time or another – complacency. It’s a warning about having a lack of urgency to do something, even when we know that what we have to do needs to be done and should be done.

I’m sure we know this saying, I’m sure we know what it means, and I’m also sure that this kind of complacency is something we’ve all suffered from at times. We’ve no doubt all been faced with a task that’s difficult or unpleasant, or one that we just don’t feel like doing for some reason, perhaps because we have other, easier and more pleasurable things to do, and so we don’t do what we know we should. We think ‘Oh well, I can always do it tomorrow’ and so we put it off. But, as another saying reminds us, ‘Tomorrow never comes’ and so what we’ve put off today until tomorrow, sometimes never gets done at all. 

One of the things we hear quite a lot about these days are ‘bucket lists’. I’m sure we all know what a ‘bucket list’ is, it’s a list of things we want to do or achieve during our lifetime before we ‘kick the bucket’. In other words, before we die. I don’t know how many of you have a ‘bucket list’. I know people often talk about things on their list but whether or not they actually have an itemised list of things they want to do before they die or not, I don’t really know. But whether we have a list like that or not, I’m sure we all have in the back of our minds at least, an idea about things we’d really like to do before we ‘kick the bucket’. And yet, how many people, as they come towards the end of their lives, can honestly say that they’ve done everything they wanted to do? How many of us can say that? Probably very few indeed, if any.

Next month, I’m going to fulfil one of the things on my ‘bucket list’ by going to the Passion Play in Oberammergau in Germany. For those who don’t know the story behind the Passion Play, it’s something that dates back to 1634 and an outbreak of bubonic plague in Bavaria. After half of the residents of Oberammergau had died from the plague, the remaining villagers vowed that if God spared them from the plague, they would perform a play, every 10 years, depicting the life and death of Jesus. After they’d made the vow, there were no more deaths and so the villagers fulfilled their vow and have continued to do so ever since.

The reason I mention this is because I first heard about the Oberammergau Passion Play from Fr Neville Ashton and over the years I knew him, it’s something he often said he’d love to see. So when I decided I was going to go to the 2020 play, I asked him if he wanted to come too, and he jumped at the chance. Unfortunately, the 2020 play was cancelled, ironically due to the outbreak of Covid-19, and postponed until this year. Sadly, Fr Neville died in the meantime and so he never did get to see the Passion Play. But, during his adult life alone, he had five opportunities to go to the Oberammergau Passion Play before 2020, and never went. And when he finally did decide to go, circumstances prevented him from going. So if that was an item on his ‘bucket list’ it’s one that he never managed to ‘tick-off’ even though he had a number of opportunities to.

I used that story as an example of how, by putting things off until tomorrow that we could do today, we might never get to do them. The example I used is one from everyday life because it’s an example of someone never getting to experience the pleasure of travelling to see a play because they let so many opportunities to do it pass by. But this is a problem that can affect our faith and our lives as Christians too.

Complacency in our faith and in our lives as Christians comes, I think, in two ways. The first comes with our response to that core teaching of the Reformation, justification by faith, the belief that we are justified, made right with God and saved, on account of our faith alone. There’s no doubt whatsoever that faith is essential to our salvation. Jesus said that the work of God is,

“…that you believe in him whom he has sent.” 

And the will of God is that,

“…everyone who looks on the Son and believes in him should have eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day.”

But with faith in Jesus comes a commitment to live according to his commands and teachings. As he said at the end of that great body of teaching we know as the Sermon on the Mount,

“Everyone then who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock.”

And yet how many people do we know whose faith makes little if any difference to their lives? People whose commitment to faith in Jesus goes no further than coming to church from time to time? People who come to Church and yet, in their daily lives, act as though they’ve never heard of Jesus Christ nor know any of the things he taught? People who are, in fact, Christians in name only. And yet so many people like this think that they are right with God simply because they come to Church, or perhaps not even that, but think they’re right with God simply because they say, ‘I believe’? What is this other than complacency, a self-satisfied attitude that leads people to believe that they don’t have to do anything more than they want to do and are doing? But isn’t this the very attitude that Jesus condemns in the parable of the Rich Fool that we read last Sunday?

The second way complacency in our faith shows itself is related to our Gospel reading this morning.

The message of this morning’s Gospel is that we always need to be ready to do God’s will, to do the words that Jesus spoke. That we need to be ready, always, to spring into action to carry out Jesus’ teaching and commands, at a moment’s notice. And we need to be ready because we never know when Jesus will return. This was a teaching, a warning, that the first Christians very much took to heart; they really did believe that Jesus would return very soon, probably within their lifetimes. And so for them, there was no time to be complacent; they couldn’t afford to put off doing what Jesus commanded until tomorrow, they had to do it now. But Jesus said those words almost 2,000 years ago and we’re still waiting for him to return. So for us, that urgency has gone. We’re complacent because such a long time has passed since Jesus said we had to be ready at all times for his return that we always think we have more time. So if we miss an opportunity to put Jesus’ words into action today, it’s not too terrible is it because we can always do it tomorrow. But can we?

Our own experience should tell us that if we miss an opportunity to do something, there’s no guarantee that we’ll ever get another chance. Many of us, perhaps all of us, will have experienced that in some way during our lives. And it’s the same when it comes to putting our faith into practice. If we have an opportunity to do that today, and don’t, there’s no guarantee that we’ll get the chance to do it tomorrow. The particular circumstance may have changed by the time tomorrow comes. The person we could have helped today may have moved on by tomorrow. Perhaps we might not get the chance to do tomorrow what we failed to do today because Jesus does return and finds us unprepared and not busy carrying out his wishes. That may not happen during our lifetime, but one day our time on earth will come to an end and then, just as happened to Fr Neville Ashton who put off going to see the Passion Play in Oberammergau until it was too late, it’ll be too late for us to do tomorrow what we’d put off doing today. And in that case, and in the words of the parable in this morning’s Gospel, how will the master treat us? Will we be lashed, or even cut off with the unfaithful?

This morning’s Gospel makes it clear to us that, when it comes to living out our faith, we can’t afford to put off until tomorrow what we can do today. So what can we do to avoid the fate that Jesus tells us awaits the lazy and complacent who think they can do that? Perhaps one way we can work towards removing complacency from our lives as Christians is to treat every day as though it was our last. To treat every today as though we were sure to meet Jesus before tomorrow comes. Perhaps to see the events of each day as a ‘bucket list’. Not to make a list of what we need to do at the start of the day and then try to work through it during the day, we can’t do that because we never know what the day will bring, what opportunities the day will present us to be about the Lord’s business. But at the end of the day to look back on the events of the day, to think about what opportunities we had to put our faith into practice and then to ask ourselves a question; If I meet the Lord before tomorrow comes, is what I’ve done today enough to give me a place at the table at God’s heavenly banquet?

Amen.

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The Propers for the 19th Sunday of Ordinary Time (Trinity 8) can be viewed here.