bible – Consider the Lilies

Sermon: Attitude of Gratitude

Given on 12th October 2025 at St Mary’s Church (Iffley, Rose Hill, Donnington)
Luke 17. 11-19

One of the games I remember playing as a child, that we played when our children were little was Happy Families (we still play it sometimes!).

The traditional Woodland version (unquestionably the best version) has families of animals – moles, mice, hedgehogs, shrews and they are they are shuffled and mixed up and you have to bring the families together by asking each other if they have Mr, Mrs, Miss or Master shrew, hedgehog etc.

The twist to our family games is that if when you are given the card you didn’t say thank you, you had to hand it back again. This meant that your competitor knew what cards you had and so you then invariably lost the game.

It was a very clever way of teaching us a lesson in manners and in learning the importance of saying thank you.

Thank you.

The first phrase most of us were taught as children. We have been drilled into us the importance of saying our p’s and q’s – (please and thank you’s) – I bet every single one of you said thank you when given an order of service when you arrived. It’s an automatic response and so we don’t often think about it very much.

In our Gospel reading we heard the story of the thankful leper. It could be read as a moral tale about the politeness of one leper over and above the other nine, seemingly rude lepers who don’t bother to say thank you to Jesus who had brought about their healing.

“Were not ten made clean? But the other nine, where are they?“

We could read it as Jesus being rather like the grandparent being a bit affronted that they haven’t received a thank you letter three weeks after Christmas.

But this is not a story about the polite leper. It is not a moral tale about the importance of being a good citizen.

Let’s look at the passage.

The Cleansing of the Ten Lepers, c. 1035-1040, Codex Aureus Epternacensis (Wikipedia Commons)

Jesus is on a journey towards Jerusalem and as he goes on his way he is confronted by ten people with a skin disease. The bible gives them the generic term ‘leprosy’, but this wasn’t what we understand that to be now ‘Hansen’s disease’ – it was a term that covered a whole range of skin diseases.

These conditions were considered impure by Jewish law and so these people were outcasts from society, separated from family, unable to go to the temple to worship.

These 10 lepers kept themselves apart (as was lawful) and so when they saw Jesus they cried out to him from a distance.

“Jesus, Master, have mercy on us”

We often read this and think that the lepers here were asking for Jesus to heal them. They weren’t. They would have had no expectation that they would ever be cured from the disease. In the New Testament Lepers are not healed, but made clean. It is an important distinction. There was no understanding of healing for leprosy. You either had it, or you didn’t. If you had it, then you lived as if you were dead. It’s why lepers often lived in the tombs or in the uninhabited parts of cities. If you didn’t have it, then only Priest could declare you clean and you could enter back to society.

The lepers who cried out to Jesus weren’t asking him to heal them. They were asking for mercy. For kindness. They saw in Jesus someone who might be kind to them, even though they were outcast, feared, sick, alone.

And Jesus sees them, and tells them to go back to their community, to go and show themselves to the priests. (Note: did they feel dismissed by Jesus at this point I wonder?).

And as they do as Jesus says, they are made clean. They are restored from living as if they were dead, to being fully human again – with family, community, companionship.

We don’t get to know what happened to the nine lepers. They do just as Jesus asks of them.

But one leper seems to be aware of the magnitude of the kindness he had experienced that he turns back to Jesus – “He prostrated himself at Jesus’feet and thanked him”.

“And he was a Samaritan”. Samaritans were the outsiders and so this man was the outside of the outsiders. Perhaps this is why he was so thankful – because he knew so deeply what Jesus had done for him.

And in turning back to Jesus in thanks he is told that:

‘your faith has made you well’.

‘Made well’ in Greek is – σῴζω (pronounced sod-zo) – it can be translated as “made well,” in the sense of being healed. But it can also be translated as “saved,” in the sense of being brought through mortal danger. And it can be translated as “made whole,” in the sense of being completed and made to be what you were meant to be all along.

The Samaritan is ‘sodzo’. He’s blessed by being made clean and then when he turns to Jesus to give thanks he’s blessed again: he has been physically healed, but more than that – he has been made whole, he’s come back from the dead, he’s fully alive again. And he can’t help but respond in thanks.

Thanksgiving is such an integral part of the Christian life. Not just politeness, but recognising all we have is gift. Not just in the good times. The psalms are full of prayers of thanksgiving in the midst of troubles and difficulties.

I’d like to tell you the story of a Lutheran pastor named Martin Rinkart

Rinkart served in the German city of Eilenburg during the horrors of the Thirty Years’ War — a time of violence, famine, and plague. In 1637, when the plague swept through the city, he was the only surviving pastor left. That year alone, he conducted over 4,000 funerals, sometimes fifty a day — including the burial of his own wife.

And yet, in the midst of such sorrow, he wrote the hymn “Nun danket alle Gott” (Now thank we all our God) that we still sing today:

Now thank we all our God,
With heart and hands and voices,
Who wondrous things hath done,
In whom His world rejoices;
Who from our mother’s arms
Hath blessed us on our way
With countless gifts of love,
And still is ours today.

Rinkart’s thanksgiving was not naïve. It was defiant faith.
Like the healed leper, he turned back in gratitude — not because life was easy, but because God was still good.

We are not, I hope, going through anything like as grim as the plague in C17^th Germany but we do go through times of struggle and hardship. Can we develop lives that have thankfulness at it’s core – an ‘attitude of gratitude’?

Not just because this is known to be good for us, but because it helps to make us more whole.

Social researcher Brene Brown found in her study of people who lived what she calls ‘whole hearted lives’ that:

“without exception, every person I interviewed who described living a joyful life or described themselves as joyful actively practiced gratitude and thanksgiving”[1]
She goes on to say:

“It’s not joy that makes us grateful; it’s gratitude that makes us joyful”.

So let’s embed gratitude into our lives.

Imagine you hare having a meal given by a great friend. Everyone enjoying each others’ company, when there is a pause and someone decides to toast the person who provided the meal and thanks them for all they’ve done to support them over the year. It changes everything doesn’t it. It makes that other person feel seen and valued.

Let’s do this this week. Not just being polite, but really thankful. Find someone we are really grateful for and let them know. Tell them, write them a card, call them on the phone. I assure you it will bring you, and them, joy.

And let us be thankful to God for all the blessings we have in our lives.

We are about to come to the Eucharist meal in just a moment. Eucharist means thanksgiving. When we come to this table we are not just saying ‘thank you’, we are living it.

The Eucharist reorients our lives towards Jesus again. As we share in this thanksgiving meal we, like the thankful leper, are turning towards healing, wholeness and sodza.

End with the words of the hymn:

Now thank we all our God,
With heart and hands and voices,
Who wondrous things hath done,
In whom His world rejoices;

Amen

[1] Brene Brown, Gifts of Imperfection

Sermon: The Good Samaritan

Trinity 4C – 13.7.2025
Deuteronomy 30. 9-14; Luke 10. 25-37

All Saints Church, Bracknell Road, Ascot, Berks – Wall painting (Wiki Commons)

I read that parables are meant to ‘comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable’. (1) The trouble with parables like the one we’ve just read is that we have heard it so many times that it’s hard to hear it afresh and hear what God might be saying to us today.

The Parable of the Good Samaritan is probably the most well-known of them all. Most of us can’t remember a time when he hadn’t heard the story. And of course even the word Samaritan now conjures up the image of someone you can call up in a time of crisis.

Just yesterday a friend of mine visited our house and she was in a wheelchair and was struggling to get to the house from her car and a couple of tourists helped her. She told me she’d met a couple of ‘Good Samaritans’.

The trouble with this parable is that we all know what it means already, or perhaps we all think we know what it means. We should be nice, kind people like the Samaritan, and help others in need, and we should not be people who cross the road on the other side like the priest and the Levite.

I’m going to be bold here and I’m going to assert this morning that the parable of the Good Samaritan might not be what you think it is – a story about how we should help others. Instead we’re going to think about what in this parable might ‘afflict’ us alongside the more ‘comfortable’ message

Luke tells us that Jesus was approached by a lawyer, who sought to test him asking ‘what must I do to inherit eternal life’ (v.25). This kind of debating was common in their culture – it was a way of honing ideas and sharpening understanding – it wasn’t necessarily a negative thing.

Jesus doesn’t answer the question but asks the lawyer what he thinks. He draws from the Shema (the law), correctly quoting Deuteronomy and Leviticus: ‘you shall love the lord your God with all your heart, mind, soul and strength, and love your neighbour as yourself’.

Tick. Gold Star.

The lawyer asks a follow up question, ‘and who is my neighbour’ (v.29).

The lawyer often gets bad press. It’s a good question – we need a bit of clarity on this. We might ask the same. We can’t love everyone, surely. We can just about manage our own families and friends. We only have to walk down Cornmarket and see numerous people at the side of the road – it leads to constant guilt. Where are the boundary lines here.

Our street, our parish, our city, our country, people like us, people who are Christians as well?

What the lawyer is really asking is perhaps, ‘who is NOT my neighbour’.

He was a lawyer and lawyers want clarity. I read somewhere that he presumably wanted something on the order of:

“A neighbour (hereinafter referred to as the party of the first part) is to be construed as meaning a person of Jewish descent whose legal residence is within a radius of no more than three statute miles from one’s own legal residence unless there is another person of Jewish descent (hereinafter to be referred to as the party of the second part) living closer to the party of the first part than one is oneself, in which case the party of the second part is to be construed as neighbour to the party of the first part and one is oneself relieved of all responsibility of any sort or kind whatsoever.”^{^[2]}

Jesus doesn’t answer this directly, but responds with the story we know so well.

A man is robbed and left for dead at the side of the road. The religious people see the man but pass by on the other side, presumably because they were afraid of contaminating themselves by touching a dead or dying body and then being unable to fulfil their duty.

The Samaritan man sees the man and walks over the road towards him. He is moved with compassion, he treats and binds up his wounds, puts him on his animal, makes sure he’s cared for going the extra mile.

‘Go and do likewise’.

It’s a beautiful example of how we might live, loving and caring for those in need.

A few years ago on Christmas Eve my son cut his hand really badly whilst wrapping presents. We had to leave our evening meal to rush to the hospital and on the way a tire blew out. We’d left so quickly we hadn’t remembered to take a wallet (before the time when our phones were wallets!). A passing cyclist saw us and stopped. He not only helped get the car to the side of the road, but he hailed a taxi to the hospital and insisted on paying the taxi himself. Truly a Good Samaritan.

But where we see ourselves in this parable makes a difference to how we read this.

On a good day we might see ourselves as the Samaritan helping the man, and I suspect this is the role we’d all like to think we play!

On a bad day we might see ourselves in the priest and the Levite walking by on the other side.

But there is a third option – we might be the beaten man, lying helplessly in the dirt on the side of the road.

So, where might Jesus’ Jewish hearers have seen themselves?

It is very unlikely they would have seen themselves in the Samaritan. In first century Palestine, Samaritans and Jews hated one another. This was a bitter and entrenched hostility along religious, geographic and ethnic lines.

They might be the priest or the lawyer, but Luke’s readers were more likely to have imagined themselves as the man in the ditch than the Samaritan. Jesus deliberately chooses an enemy to be the one who acted like a neighbour to make his point, adding another layer of challenge to his story.

‘Who is my neighbour?’ – in this situation the neighbour turned out to be the least likely person they could imagine.

This brings us to the heart of the gospel message of salvation. That Jesus, seeing our deepest need when we are in a metaphorical ditch, battered and bruised by life, sees us, is moved by compassion, binds up our wounds, picks us up and heals and cares for us, and pays what we owe so we don’t have to.

In this way of reading the parable we are not the Samaritan – Jesus is. We are the one in the ditch needing Jesus’ healing touch.

All of which makes me wonder whether there is yet another lesson in this parable: that God often shows up where we least expect God to be, and though the people we least expect.

Who, we might ask, do we have the hardest time imagining God working through? And then we should probably expect God to do just that!

The challenge in this parable is that Jesus pushes the very notion of boundaries or line at all. For Jesus, there is no ‘us’ and ‘them’ at all. The Samaritan and Jew were divided by history, culture and theology, yet their obligation to love supersedes it all.

All the boundaries we humans put up, be it race, sex, gender, sexuality, conviction, these are all challenged here. Our call to love God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength goes hand in hand with our call to love our neighbours. And this love looks like a man in a ditch being helped by his arch enemy.

And so, like the lawyer, we’re left not with the comfortable question, “Who is my neighbour?”, but with a far more afflicting one:
Will I allow myself to be loved by someone I would rather keep at a distance?

This parable isn’t just a call to compassion: it’s a challenge to our categories. It invites us to look again at who we are willing to receive love from, and who we are willing to become vulnerable before.

The story of the Good Samaritan reminds us that God’s grace and goodness can come from unexpected places, through unexpected people. And perhaps, the real test of neighbourliness is not only how we give love, but how humbly we receive it.

Let us pray:

Lord Jesus, we give thanks for this familiar parable and for the power it has to both comfort and afflict us. Thank you that you showed us the way to life and love, and that way is one that crosses boundaries and challenges assumptions. Help us to see you in those we encounter, and help us to both give, and receive love from those we least expect. Amen

Sermon: Guiding Light

A reflection at Eventide – February 2025
Revd Clare Hayns

John 1. 1-7
The Bright Field by RS Thomas

I’d like to tell a little story as we think about the light in the darkness.

When my son Simeon was 15 years old my sister took him and his younger cousins on a challenge. They set out to walk the three peaks of the British Isles within 24 hours. Ben Nevis (Scotland), Scarfell Pike (Lakes), Snowdon (Wales). In order to do this in the time, one mountain – Scarfell Pike – has to be scaled at night-time. They set off but at some point got disorientated. They were near the top on a section with small hills on top of which were piles of stones (cairns). But to the side was a steep drop, so they needed to follow the course of the hills and the stones.

But it was really dark, and they couldn’t make out their steps to stop tripping or going off course. So, they came up with a plan. Simeon offered to go on ahead of them to the top of the next hill. And he stood by the cairn and shone his torch back towards the rest of the group, and they all then made their way safely (they also made it with 15mins to spare!)

I remembered this because we’ve been thinking about light and darkness throughout this Eventide season. Last month we turned off all the lights in church and reflected on what was dark and difficult, confusing and disorientating.

Much of life can seem like stumbling along a hillside in the dark wondering what on earth it’s all about, and not quite sure of the way ahead, or why we’re here, or where we’re heading.

John’s gospel begins in a way which mirrors the creation story of Genesis. Which begins with darkness, formlessness, and void:

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. Genesis 1. 1-3

And John’s gospel begins:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. ²He was with God in the beginning. ³Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. ⁴In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. ⁵The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. John 1. 1-5

This is a profound theological statement. That Christ was there right at the beginning of all things, when light was created out of darkness. And that this light was now to be seen in the person of Jesus who was born as a child in Bethlehem, and that through his spirit, each of us is given that same light.

You may have read Richard Rohr, if not, I encourage you to. I heard him speak at Greenbelt once and he told us that Christ is not Jesus’ last name, not his surname! It is a description who he is. Which is why in John’s gospel we get these ‘I am’ statements, which seem almost boastful.

Jesus says, ‘I am the Light of the world’. Remember, light is not so much what you directly see as that by which you see everything else.

Simeon’s light enabled the hikers to see everything clearly. One of the challenges of the Christian life is to learn to see as God sees. In other words, we have faith in Christ so we can have the faith of Christ. That is the goal.

So often what we first see as disaster can turn out to be an opportunity.
What once seems darkness, turns out to have a crack of light as Leonard Cohen sings in Anthem (“there’s a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in”)
What seems to be death, turns out to be life.

Contemplation is one of the ways we can align ourselves more closely with Jesus so that we can learn to see.

Richard Rohr says: “Most people do not see things as they are because they see things as they are, which is not to see at all”. And he says: “We need to look at Jesus until we can look out at the world with his kind of eyes”[1]

I will end with the words of the beautiful poem The Bright Field by RS Thomas which invites us to stop hurrying, to turn aside, to look towards the light which will stop us from stumbling in the darkness. This light is revealed to us most gloriously through Jesus, the light of the world:

Life is not hurrying
on to a receding future, nor hankering after
an imagined past. It is the turning
aside like Moses to the miracle
of the lit bush, to a brightness
that seemed as transitory as your youth
once, but is the eternity that awaits you.
RS Thomas, A Bright Field

Garden Song is now available to buy….

Hi all,

We want to share the good news that our new book ‘Garden Song: exploring the psalms through paintings, reflections and prayers’ is now available in shops.

It’s a similar style to our previous book ‘Unveiled’, but this time we look at 30 psalms through Micah’s beautiful artwork, some short reflections, and prayers.

“Micah and Clare have created a beautiful, multisensorial entry point into the psalms. In this lovely book they give us an accessible way into these ancient songs, inviting connection with the created world, with our deepest longings, with our everyday, often prosaic lives and with the one who loves us. Dwell, ponder, enjoy!”

The former Bishop of Reading, Olivia Graham

You can buy the book here, or at other retailers.

We’ve also created a Spotify Playlist which goes with the book as each psalm has a suggested piece of music to listen to. A link to the playlist ‘Garden Song Psalms’ is here.

Micah and I opened the package with the book from the publishers BRF on Thursday at The Jungle, and you can see a video of us seeing it for first time here.

Thank you for all your support. We really appreciate it!

We hope you enjoy it.

Clare and Micah

Epiphany Awakenings

Sermon for Epiphany 2B
preaced at College Communion (Christ Church) and Wesley Memorial Church (Oxford)
January 14^th 2024

Readings: 1 Samuel 3: 1-10 and John 1. 43-end

Before moving for my curacy in 2011 we lived in Horspath, just beyond the ring road behind the Mini factory. The village had two central buildings on either side of the road. On one side was the Church of St Giles and on the other side was the village shop and Post Office run by Vipin and Jayshree Patel.

As I was moving I heard rumours that the post office had been closed because Mr Patel, formerly a pillar of the community, had been accused of putting his hands in the till.

I confess I didn’t do anything about this. It seemed odd and unlikely, but we were moving away, and who knew what was true.

I now know the truth, as do we all. I also now know that although many in the village were kind to Mr and Mrs Patel, others bullied and vilified them. They even had a cross placed outside their shop and home, with a wreath on it and RIP Vipin Patel. They were prosecuted and acquitted in 2021 but, like so many others, have still not received a penny and so can’t retire despite being elderly and unwell.

Vipin and Jayshree Patel were cleared in 2021 but have still not received compensation. You can read more here. Their son, Varchas Patel spoke eloquently on behalf of his father on BBC Breakfast.

We’ve been hearing stories like theirs all week, particularly since ITV aired the brilliant Mr Bates v. the Post Office. If you haven’t seen it I commend it to you. If you’ve been living under a rock this week, over 900 sub-postmasters were charged with false accounting, fraud and theft, and many lost their livelihoods, their standing in the community, and some even their lives.

For years these poor people have been trying to make themselves heard but no-one seemed to be listening. Not the Horizon helpline they called endlessly. Not the Post Office corporation who pursued them through the courts. Not the politicians they appealed to.

And it took a drama to finally wake us all up to what’s been happening. And we’ve woken up to a huge injustice, probably the worst corporate scandal of our era. And it’s caused national outrage. It’s been a national epiphany in a way. I think of an epiphany as a lightbulb, or ‘aha’, moment.

We are in the church season of Epiphany, where we consider the manifestation of God in the person of Jesus. We hear how, in numerous ‘aha’ moments in the bible, ordinary people have their lives transformed and changed by encountering Jesus.

And our Bible readings today look at three aha moments. Three people who have an epiphany, an awakening moment of one kind or other.

In our OT reading we have Eli and Samuel; and in the Gospel we have Nathaniel.

The story of Eli and Samuel might be a familiar one to you.

Samuel was the longed for son of Hannah, the woman who went to the temple every day to cry out to God for a child. She cried so hard the priest Eli thought she was drunk (you can read Hannah’s story here) .

Eli teaching Samuel depicted in a window at Christ Church Cathedral, by Edward Burne-Jones

A child eventually came (Samuel), and when he was a young boy he was given to the Lord as promised by his mother, and lived under Eli’s protection to work in the temple. His job seemed to be to guard the holiest space ‘the ark of the Lord’ as this is where he was sleeping in our reading.

Samuel was literally asleep when he was woken up by word of God. Not once but four times!

The first three he didn’t understand who was speaking. He assumes it’s Eli. Perhaps he was the only person to ever spoke to the boy. Perhaps Eli regularly called out for help in the night – he was elderly and so maybe he did. Samuel certainly doesn’t think it’s God, and frankly why should he, he’s never heard God before.

It’s a great story.

Samuel gets up and runs to Eli’s room ‘here I am’, and each time he’s sent away. This happens three times and on the last time Eli works it out.

Eli tells him to go back and say to God:

Speak Lord, your servant is listening
1 Samuel 19

There’s a difference between hearing and listening isn’t there.

Samuel heard a voice, but he wasn’t actually listening.

I’m often blamed by my sons for not listening. I’m distracted by many things, and they talk a lot. Often I’m hearing words and do the hmm hmm thing, where I can then zone in when a question is asked. If challenged I can usually parrot the last thing they said, but if honest haven’t really been listening, and they can tell!

Listening is hard, but we know what it’s like to be heard, and what it’s like not to be heard.

The producer of the ITV programme on the PO said she thought it had hit such a nerve with people as it ‘stands for all the ways everybody feels unheard’.

Samuel hadn’t yet learned to listen to God.

Samuel did not yet know the Lord, and the word of the Lord had not yet been revealed to him.
1 Samuel 3.7

Listening is something we learn to do, it’s not easy. It takes practice. And the same applies when we listen to others, and to God. True listening is a skill and it takes practice and we often need guidance. Taken me years and still not always very good at it.

Many use contemplative exercises to learn to listen. We need to guild up slowly, and can often benefit from the wisdom of our elders for this.

One thing is true though. It is impossible to truly listen whilst doing something else at the same time. Maybe this is why God speaks to Samuel whilst he’s lying in bed at night.

The old man Eli also needed an epiphany, an awakening, and this came through the prophetic words of his young prodigy Samuel.

Eli spent all his days in the temple taking care of the life and work of the sacred space. But despite this it seems that this didn’t bring him close to God.

The word of the Lord was rare in those days; visions were not widespread
1 Samuel 3.1

This seems rather an understatement as in the passage beforehand it seems that Eli’s sons had been doing just the thing our poor Sub Post-Masters had been wrongly accused of.

They were ‘scoundrels’ and thieves. They had been waiting for people to offer meat for sacrifice and then they would steal the meat for themselves. And they did this in full knowledge of their father who made a feeble effort to bring them into line but wasn’t able to stop them. (1 Samuel 2.25)

The message that Samuel was given in the night was a difficult one for Eli to hear.

I am about to punish the house of Eli, from beginning to end… because his sons were blaspheming God and he did not restrain them.
1 Samuel 3.13

It was a hard message, and all credit to Eli that he enabled Samuel to speak up with this message, telling him not to hide anything from him.

Prophetic truth-tellers are not often popular, but they are doing the work of God.

Perhaps Alan Bates is a prophetic voice in this recent Post Office situation. He spoke the simple truth even though that was unpopular, and he brought an injustice into the light. That’s surely the work of God.

Prophets wake us up. And if we’re honest, sometimes we’d prefer to stay asleep. I confess there are many issues I can’t quite wake up to.

In our Gospel reading we see another character who experiences an awakening to the truth. Nathaniel.

Jesus is gathering his disciples and he’s already recruited Andrew, Peter and Philip, and Philip goes to tell Nathaniel what they’ve experienced.

But Nathaniel’s first reactions reveal how he’s kept from seeing truth, even when it’s right there, in the person of Jesus.

Can anything good come from Nazareth?
John 1.46

Nathaniel can’t believe the messiah could come from a backwater, small town place so far from the centre of things. His prejudice almost keeps him from seeing Jesus. Nathaniel might have been prevented from seeing Jesus, but Jesus saw Nathaniel:

I saw you under the fig tree before Philip called you
John 1.48

Despite all these very human failings, God comes close to Samuel, Eli and Nathaniel and reveals himself to each one of them, in different ways. Each of them is called to serve. Each of them has an awakening.

Jesus sees and hears us, and each one of us is called in some way. Perhaps we are all invited to wake up in some way. The challenge is that sometimes we might prefer to stay asleep, as once we wake up we often then have to do something, change in some way, love people we find it hard to love, confront an injustice we might prefer to ignore.

I wonder who we relate to most in these characters from scripture, or who we are most challenged by?

Is it Samuel who is physically and spiritually woken up as he learns how to listen to God and, despite being young, begins his prophetic ministry? Do we feel we are asleep to God? Perhaps we feel we wouldn’t have a clue what God sounded like if he called our name? Might God be gently challenging us to wake up to hear his voice lovingly calling us into his service. Perhaps he has something unique for us to do or say if only we’d listen.

Or perhaps we feel more akin to Eli, tired in faith and going through the motions. Perhaps God is waking us to the fact we have something to offer that we can share with others. Perhaps, like Eli, we could be guides to those young in faith. Or perhaps we can see God speaking in the lives of others even if we’re not sure we can hear him ourselves in our own lives.

Or, like Eli, do we need to wake up to a particular injustice that’s happening under our very noses and in our own neighbourhoods.

I wish I had done more in Horspath, gone round to speak to the Patels, and asked more questions.

Or might we be like Nathaniel, not noticing Jesus right there with us because we think he couldn’t possibly be in somewhere as backwater as with us in our little lives.

Because that’s exactly where Jesus is. With each one of us, calling us by name, into a life that’s awake. Awake to God, to others, to ourselves.

It’s a challenging life, but one that is far better than being asleep. And it begins with us saying these simple words:

speak Lord, your servant is listening
1 Samuel 3.19

Amen

Songs of the Spirit: The Benedictus

Based on a sermon for Christ Church Chapel, February 2021

And you, child, will be called the prophet of the Most High;
    for you will go before the Lord to prepare his ways,
to give knowledge of salvation to his people
    by the forgiveness of their sins.
By the tender mercy of our God,
    the dawn from on high will break upon us,
to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death,
    to guide our feet into the way of peace.

Luke 1. 76-79 (the full text of the Benedictus is here)

One of the best things about living at Christ Church is being able to get up early in the morning and go for a walk in the meadows before it fills up with joggers, dog walkers and people taking their daily legally sanctioned strolls. It is gloriously peaceful and if I can get up early enough to see the sun rising and I’m reminded of the promise in the Benedictus that ‘the dawn from on high will break upon us’.

The Benedictus, the Song of Zechariah, has been said or sung in early morning worship since it was introduced by Benedict of Nursia in the sixth century. It is a song of blessing (‘Benedictus’ means blessing in Latin) and hope. But it is a song that also speaks of times of hardship. It begins, ‘Blessed be the Lord the God of Israel; who has come to his people and set them free’ – we are reminded that God’s people were once enslaved, had enemies and longed to be able to worship God in freedom.

Zechariah’s song sprung out of a time of hopelessness. The Bible tells us that he was an elderly priest who, with his wife Elizabeth, was ‘getting on in years’. They had no children. The priests would take on a week’s duty in the temple where they officiated at services: a bit like being Canon-in-Residence in our Cathedral. One day whilst in the temple Zechariah encountered an angel who promised him a son, to be called John. He was told he would have ‘joy and gladness’, that the child ‘will be great in the sight of the Lord’. (Luke 1.13)

But Zechariah didn’t believe the angel.

“How will I know that this is so?” he asked. “For I am an old man, and my wife is getting on in years.” (Luke 1.18)

From that moment he became mute, unable to speak at all. He remained silent throughout the entire pregnancy and didn’t speak until his baby was eight days old. It was only when he announced, ‘His name is John’ that his tongue was freed and he began to sing his song of blessing and hope.

One reason the Benedictus is said every morning is that in monastic times there would be a time of ‘great silence’ between Compline and Matins. Saying the Benedictus is a reminder that we, like Zachariah can break our nightly silence with praise.

Within the Benedictus there are great themes of hope and salvation.

There is hope for the salvation of the people of Israel: ‘a mighty saviour’ is on his way. There is hope for Zechariah’s son John who will prepare the way for Jesus with his father’s prophetic blessing upon him. And there is hope for all people: for each one of us.

‘The dawn from on high shall break upon us, to shine on those who dwell in darkness and the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace.’
Luke 1.79

A few days ago a dense morning fog descended on Oxford. You could hardly see a thing. Just the vague outlines of people walking in meadows. It was one of those days when you could only just make out a few steps ahead. Yet later in the day the fog lifted, clear and beautifully bright.

This seems an apt metaphor for our times. Perhaps we are deep in the fog, in the gloom, not knowing what the next steps are? Many people are struggling to keep going and to keep positive. The future seems unclear. What can we plan? When will be able to gather with our friends and family? We are still in uncertain times.

The Benedictus reminds us that we can have hope and that the dawn shall break.

The light shall shine in the darkness.

Hope is different to optimism – which is about blindly believing things will be better.

Emily Dickinson writes:

“Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul
And sings the tune without the words
And never stops at all.”
Emily Dickinson ‘

Often hope is delicate and very fragile, sometimes just a flickering candle, a clump of daffodils, a ‘thing with feathers’.

Hope is rooted in trust. Trust that God has brought God’s people out of the shadows in the past, and will do so again.

We can trust that the fog is not the only weather: it shall lift.

The dawn from on high shall break upon us.

This is an edited extract of a sermon given by Revd Clare Hayns on February 7^th 2021.