I’ve been asked to blog yesterday’s sermon. I was trying to convince our church at Murrow it needs a new notice board, but I failed miserably as afterwards the steward stood firm!
Oh well!
Yesterday I was privileged to be at the closing service for one of my former churches at Somerby, a small village just into Leicestershire just outside Melton Mowbray. It is hard when churches close and there were many emotions present in the gathering as we remembered a faithful witness over many years, a chapter closing, and a hope that the small number who worship there now might find a new spiritual home.
Ministers will tell you every church they serve becomes part of them. Stories remain special years after we’ve moved on. I remember the good folk of Somerby for one story. They had a 6pm service, and at 5.55 June, the steward would say to me “we may as well start!” They put out six chairs for six people and at 5.55 all six were present so “we may as well start!” I used to say to them how do you know no one is going to walk in in the next five minutes?
I solved it by taking friends in my car to my service there and asking them to walk in at 5.59 to find no chair they could sit in! We started at 6 after that and always put out a few extra chairs just in case.
You see, the church without thinking about it had become inaccessible and the people had started to believe only they would ever be there. If you go out to a restaurant and there’s no seat or worse no food you don’t go back, do you?
If you go to the theatre and you are told you can’t come in because you’re not good enough or smart enough, you don’t go back do you?
If someone blocks your way in, you give up.
We have an interesting Gospel story today. Two attitudes to religion at the temple. One a Pharisee, full of himself, a chair out for him in the synagogue, full of self righteousness and pomposity. A Pharisee who says to himself “look at me and how much I do - I’m very important, and I like to do my religion with my sort and I like to keep it that way.”
The Pharisee, part of God’s own people, is horrified to see a tax collector sharing his space. He says, “I thank God I’m not like him!”
Do you have a story from a time when you said a similar prayer to the Pharisee – when you gave thanks that you weren’t like someone else? Perhaps there are people you know who you find frustrating, or maybe it’s people you don’t know at all whose behaviour or life situation you just judge. What makes us act like we are superior like like the Pharisee? I thank God I’m not like the those poor people up the road. I thank God I’m not like those unruly teenagers in the street. I thank God I’m not like those people who voted to remain. I thank God my church is not like that one!
I thank God people like that don’t come here! Only put out enough chairs for us...
Our society excels in deciding on another’s fate. But who are we to judge who is in and who is out?
The Pharisee doesn’t actually speak to God. He just makes a statement seeing someone he thinks is inferior near him, daring to approach this Jesus, the so called holy man. Remember that tax collectors were lumped with sinners as undesirables. Remember that the law the Pharisee knew well had stuff in it about being clean and unclean. A common criticism of Jesus by the law abiders was that he ate with tax collectors and sinners. What is powerful about this episode Luke records is that the person you expect to pray doesn’t, he just lords it about, reminding the world how important he is, do you know people like that? There’s none in your church but they are about! I’m a steward! I’ve had churches which used to insist on having a top table at functions. There used to be a scrap who got to sit on it. My church in County Durham even had different china on the top table than the riffraff used! The person judged to be outside and rightly outside divine attention, prays. He works in the tax office, for the government, never a popular job with your neighbours; he simply prays for God to have mercy on him.
Of course, we aren’t a pharisaical church are we? Before we congratulate ourselves let’s look at how we can be. Are we as bad as only putting six chairs out, not just not expecting people to share our Christian story but not wanting them to.
We thank God in the Church that we are not like other people. We are not like that lot. And we do the same in our country. We thank God we are not like that other country, the French, or that foreigner. Listen to the Pharisee shout so loudly about what he is against: I am not a thief, a rogue, or an adulterer. But heed this as someone wrote about this passage - when we start to make a list of what we are not, the list takes on an energy of its own. The list refuses to stop.
The Pharisee bleating on so cheerfully about who he is not like, finally admits that he is separated even from his fellow worshipper who happens to be in the temple with him. The Pharisee is all alone. He separates himself from humanity one category at a time.
And the more he separates himself from those who come in need, he separates himself from God.
Meanwhile, the tax collector humbly comes and seeks God’s mercy in a beautiful and simple act of contrition. In old Russia, a lonely monk wanted to learn how to follow the instructions of First Thessalonians 5:17, "Pray without ceasing."
How can one pray without ceasing? He learned that he could pray while he breathed in and out, with a prayer that we now know as the Jesus Prayer.
"Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God,
Have mercy on me, a sinner."
The monks of ancient Greece used that prayer, and many other use that Jesus Prayer today. If anyone today is just learning to pray, you have all you need in this Jesus Prayer, in this prayer of the tax collector, "God, have mercy upon me, a sinner." When life seems to have left you out, "Lord, have mercy" acknowledges our need.
What’s the lesson of these two men sharing sacred space for us here today? That we cannot afford to be self righteous when people in need are wanting to come and give their lot to God. We need to be more open and accessible because there is a yearning for the spiritual in people we may be have judged there is no interest. The shape of the Church has to change to be more inclusive and less condemnatory. We have to expect encounter with people, and leave spare chairs.
We are currently looking through profiles for a new appointment as I return to full time Circuit ministry next September. Stationing happens a week next Thursday.
We went to visit some possible contexts this week and in one I walked into the local parish church and picked up their church magazine for November. You can learn a lot about churches from magazines and notice boards.
I learnt in a few pages they do a soup kitchen free of charge every Monday, and in their ladies loo are piles of sanitary towels as locally there is period poverty and young girls can’t afford them, and they have a specialist worker at the Methodist Church to pastor those with dementia in older age. The church responding to local need.
We should have a large sign up outside that people can see as they drive past that Murrow Methodist Church is open and this is the message we want to share with you.
I think you need a new notice board on the other wall outside at the front with less stuff in it than the one you have at the moment I say with respect! People need to know you are still open. This is a large village with people searching. You are the only church here. We have an opportunity. People like the tax collector are needing a new start. And if the door is shut, or there aren’t enough chairs or we tut at them then we face a very bleak future indeed like the lonely Pharisee.
The challenge for me in this story today is the need to remember we have to create space for the story of Gods love and new beginnings to be encountered.
At Somerby yesterday the preacher included this story: A young man beginning university arrived at a boardinghouse. A retired, wheelchair-bound music professor resided on the first floor. Each morning the young man would stick his head in the door of the teacher’s apartment and ask the same question. “Well, what’s the good news?”
The old man would pick up his tuning fork, tap it on the side of the wheelchair and say, “That’s middle C! It was middle C yesterday; it will be middle C tomorrow; it will be middle C a thousand years from now. The tenor upstairs sings flat. The piano across the hall is out of tune, but, my friend, that is middle C.”
God’s love hasn’t changed. The need to share it is as urgent as its ever been. The tax collectors are the mission field.
We offer mercy at the heart of what we are. Leave out enough chairs. Expect people. Have a larger God. Or face doom by saying I thank God no one comes near me.
We have all been there. Maybe some of us are there right now. "Lord, have mercy on us." And may our humility, with God's mercy, bring us into right relationship with our neighbour, with the world, with God.
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