Thought for the Week

6 July 2008 – Seventh Sunday after Trinity

Collect:	Lord of all power and might, Who art the author and giver of all good things; Graft in our hearts the love of thy name, Increase in us true religion, Nourish us with all goodness, And of thy great mercy keep us in the same; Through Jesus Christ thy son our Lord, Who liveth and reigneth with thee, In the unity of the Holy Spirit, One God now and for ever. Amen.
Readings:	Zechariah 9, 9 – 12
	Psalm 145, 8 - 15
	Romans 7, 15 – 25
	Matthew 11, 16 – 19, 25 – end

Do you feel like a little child this morning ? Probably not — how great to be one, to think like one. No responsability no cares, just an innocence that is clearly recognised by God and through Him by the Son.

How about the reading from Zechariah! It’s mind blowing I think. Zech was born in Babylonia — a child of the Exile — and returned to Judah in 538BC. He was a priest as well as being a prophet. And what a prophesy! « See, your king comes to you, righteous and having salvation, gentle and riding on a donkey, on a colt the foal of a donkey »; and again « He will proclaim peace to the nations ». All this written about 520BC. The Babylonian exile ended in about 539 BC, but did not bring with it any political independence for the Jews; and at the time Zech was writing, the promised land fell under the domination of the Persians.

You can imagine the frustration of the Jewish nation; Jerusalem in ruins, the good old days seeming as far away as ever, and apparently never to return, and the reign of the one true God not on the horizon. Into this state of being, of mind came the prophesy of Zech. And yet, when that prophecy is realised and notwithstanding the expectation built upon it and similar prophesies by other prophets, the Jewish nation didn’t recognise what they had.

You can imagine the frustration that Jesus was experiencing.

Returning to our Gospel reading it might be worth looking at the nature of a child before going any further. Of course we talk in generalities, but a child tends to be accepting, unpretentious, with no preconceived ideas, no baggage that the years have placed on its shoulders — it all adds up to an innocence. Is this what Jesus is here talking about? I don’t think so — what he is doing is drawing a very distinct line between the arrogance of the intelligentsia of his day who did not accept his message and the ordinary folk like the tax collector, the prostitute, the poor, the humble. The intelligencia of course being the Pharisees, the Saducees and the lawyers all of who had made the message of God so complicated, so beset by hoops to jump through that in fact no ordinary person could hope or aspire to achieve — the result was they all gave up trying.The Pharisees etc. themselves were interpreting the law, became the sole interpreters and administrators of the law; as a consequence what God meant was in their hands.

In this setting, Jesus’ message was like a breath of fresh air. It was simple, easy to understand, possible to put into action without any necessity for intellectual superiority. It all centred around one emotion, an emotion most if not all human beings are capable of; love. Love God and love your neighbour as you love yourself. In Mark Ch 12, in response to a ‘I’ll catch you out if I can’ challenge put to him by a lawyer as to which is the most important of commandments, Jesus replies “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength”, i.e. with every bit of you. He continues with “love your neighbour as yourself”. This is finished with the words “there is no other commandment greater than these”.

This was a great freedom that the Jews had not enjoyed under the old law whch had become, under the administrators, cumbersome, onerous and impossible to comply with.This breath of fresh air was a freedom under the umbrella of love both of God and your neighbour. St Augustine of Hippo described it like this: - love God and do what you like.

But we do need to be careful. Although Jesus thanked his Father for revealing the message Jesus brought to little children, it does not as a consequence mean we should be childish in our appreciation of His message. We do not have to leave our minds behind; we do not have to be non-questioning. Indeed the disciples were continually asking questions to get deeper into what Jesus was saying — the warning for us is against intellectual arrogance that prevents us from accepting certain truths at their face value or the answers to the questions that we don’t like. Because they call into question our intellectual superiority — in this respect there is a type of fear that takes over. To this extent the humility and simplicity of the child is what is being spoken of.

Fear is a basic human emotion — a very strong motivator. The fear of the philosopher, the free thinker is that in having to resign oneself to accepting answers you don’t like for what ever reason, particularly answers that are intellectually, philosophically untenable, one is thus resigning one’s self will. The fear of being out of control. The surrender of the will to that of Christ and to the workings of the Holy Spirit leaves us out of control of our own lives, which for some is a fear they cannot live with. Better to use one’s reason to reject the argument.

There is the story of Einstein in his last days giving a series of lectures at Princeton University. By this time he was quite ill and exhausted — and after the lecture questions were limited to just one. A student rose and asked of Einstein what one fact in his life had impressed him the most. His response: - that Jesus Christ as Saviour should take on flesh and die for him. Einstein the man who developed the theory of relativity, Einstein perhaps the greatest philosopher of the 20^th century endorsing the thinking behind Charles Wesley’s hymn « And can it be ».

So its simple isn’t it; be childlike but not childish, love God — and the extent that we love God can be measured by the extent to which we love our neighbour, and have faith in Christ. Surrender our will to that of the Holy Spirit.

But we are, as Paul had discovered, only human. And in his letter to the Romans Paul in what is perhaps his greatest writing sums up the situation very well for us.

« I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do ». How many of us can identify easily with his lament found in verse 18 of our reading:- « I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For what I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not want to do — this I keep on doing. » Paul examines this phenomenon in himself, and as often as I read this passage I relate to it completely — it could have been written for me . Perhaps when reading this passage you feel the same. But in good old Paulian fashion, having presented the problem and how the problem has taken over, he then destroys it. « What a wtretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God — through Jesus Christ our Lord. »

It is the belief in Christ, that faith that we have in him that rescues us from the feelings of “What’s the use?” of “Why carry on?” Of that feeling of no matter how hard we try not to do things that are upsetting to God we do them — and of the despair and resignation of perpetual fighting with in us that follows. There is a feeling of being in a quicksand which envelopes us and drags us under.

When Paul wrote his letter to the Ephesians in about the year 60 some three years later he was able to put it this way « For it is by grace that you have been saved through faith and this not from yourselves it is the gift of God — not by works so that no one can boast. »

That is why no matter how hard we may try, how ever hard Paul tried, he and we do not do what the mind wants. This war is waged within us and the answer is what makes the Christian faith distinct from all other religions, philosophies, ways of life etc. We do not have to do anything to gain the forgiveness of our sins, to put us right with God — it has already been done. Jesus Christ dealt with it on the cross through God’s good grace. What Christ did on the cross is available to everyone for « God so loved the world that He gave ……..» THE WORLD.

Robert Stuberg is one of those life coach people — you know, find your true potential, he calls it Unique Potential, then put it to good use by following his instructions. However, he has said something which I think resonates with our Gospel reading today. « The trouble with many of us is that we underestimate the power of simplicity. We have a tendency it seems to over complicate our lives and forget what’s important and what’s not. We tend to mistake movement for achievement. Wetend to focus on activities instead of results. And as the pace of life continues to race along in the outside world, we forget that we have the power to control our lives regardless of what’s going on outside. »

I believe it is the power of that simplicity that Jesus was referring to when he gave thanks to his Father for the revelation to little children. The Christian faith is for everyone, it is available to all without exception, Christ’s sacrifice was for all, it requires a simple belief uncomplicated by theology. Grasp it, take hold of it accept Christ’s sacrifice for you that’s all you need do.

Yes of course you can go further into it if you want to, yes of course there is a place for what we call theology, but don’t allow that to over complicate the simplicity of Christ’s message. Paul recognised the danger when he wrote to the Corinthians: « My message and my preaching were not with wise or persuasive words, but with a demonstration of the Spirit’s power, so that your faith might not rest on men’s wisdom, but on God’s power »

Fundamentally, let us in our faith be as the little children included in Jesus’s prayer to his Father. Amen.

Mel Fancy: Lay Reader, Anglican Chaplaincy of Midi-Pyrénées & Aude

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