Wouldn’t the arrogance of the rich man Jesus describes have fitted perfectly in the Celtic Tiger years? Wouldn’t he have made a perfect companion for the head of Anglo-Irish Bank who declared, “we worked the scene and maximised the moment, the world watched in astonishment”. ‘You fool!’, says God to the rich man; ’you fools’ he would say to those in our own time, “This is how it will be with anyone who stores up things for himself but is not rich toward God.”

The arrogance of the financiers has left us with numbers that are overwhelming—the billions poured into Anglo Irish Bank; the money going into NAMA; the government deficit this year; the money that the government must try to cut from its budget—it has now reached the point where any number less than a billion seems small. In the midst of the overwhelming numbers, there is a danger of losing sight of people. In the announcements, in the debates, in the political conflict, there is too often a losing sight of the fact that numbers represent lives and families and homes.

“Watch out! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed”, says Jesus. How would Jesus respond to the papers, to the television and radio news, to the seeming unending stream of bad news? How would he have responded to the fools whose life consisted in ‘the abundance of his possessions.’

At the heart of Jesus’ ministry, there is a concern for individual people. Repeatedly, throughout the Gospels he is confronted with large crowds; there are huge numbers with which to deal; yet, time and again, he finds time for individuals. The very people who are overlooked by our barrages of economic statistics are the very people with whom he identified.

Following Jesus in our own time means going beyond the numbers to being mindful of the people behind the figures. Would we not have felt sympathy for the thousands of ordinary people who were the victims of the system?

Jesus takes the side of the individuals, the ordinary people, but what does the church say?

Even Vincent Browne in his column in the Sunday Business Post last year wrote, “I continue to be intrigued by those who profess to be Christians, yet are not embarrassed by the question of whether Jesus would think such vast disparities in wealth and income were fair. And if Jesus did not think they were fair, why then don’t Christians support doing something radical about it?”

It’s a fair question. If we believe in a man who condemned greed and arrogance and who was angry at those who said, “Take life easy; eat, drink and be merry”, how do we think Jesus would have responded to our own times?

I think there are clear pointers in the New Testament as to what might be the shape of Jesus’ economic programme, if he were finance minister.

Jesus is concerned about individuals and I think he would be angry at any government that stood back and watched as unemployment rose. Work would be the lynchpin of Jesus’ policy.  Work is something good; work is not a necessary evil but something that is done for God.  The Letter to the Colossians Chapter 3 says, “Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for men, since you know that you will receive an inheritance from the Lord as a reward. It is the Lord Christ you are serving”.

In Jesus’ economic programme there would be jobs for everyone who was able to work.  Jesus would have been mystified that when Ireland had full employment in 2004 and was having to recruit thousands of workers from overseas, there was still an unemployment rate of 4%.  He would have been mystified that 4% of the workforce was caught in welfare dependency. In a biblical model of society, there would be work for everyone. The Second Letter to the Thessalonians Chapter 3 says, “For even when we were with you, we gave you this rule: “If a man will not work, he shall not eat.”  Leaving people simply doing nothing in the boom years weighs heavily on us now.

Would not a greater degree of equality would be important in a biblically-shaped economic policy? A fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work.  Luke Chapter 10 and the First letter to Timothy Chapter 5 say, “The worker deserves his wages.” If people are to be properly rewarded, then there cannot be the huge differentials between the top executive salaries and the weekly wage of the working man.

How can one man put in a week in the office and earn millions a year for taking his company into virtual bankruptcy, requiring a bailout from taxpayers, while a man engaged in hard physical labour gets a few hundred a week for his efforts?  If the worker deserves his wages, then the massive differences in rates of pay need to be reviewed.

Saint Paul would have become angry at measures that hurt the weakest in our society, particularly the cuts in health and education. In Acts Chapter 20, he says, “You yourselves know that these hands of mine have supplied my own needs and the needs of my companions. In everything I did, I showed you that by this kind of hard work we must help the weak, remembering the words the Lord Jesus himself said: ‘It is more blessed to give than to receive.’”  ‘Help the weak’ says Paul, not hurt them.

It is not something radical that needs to be done, it is something Biblical. A Biblical policy is one where people matter; where work is a mark of dignity; where there is fairness in reward; where no-one is left in want. It’s not a policy that would be welcomed by those who have done well at the expense of ordinary people, but they didn’t welcome Jesus either.

“You fool”, says God to the rich man. May God give us grace to cope with the fools in our own time.

“For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are–yet was without sin”. Hebrews 4:15

Everything known about James Edmeston, writer of ‘Lead us, heavenly Father, lead us’ seems to have been condensed into a single paragraph, leaving us to try to make deductions about his thoughts as he wrote the hymn. Perhaps, putting what we know of his life, together with the words he wrote, we can form some impression of what his faith meant to him.

James Edmeston was born in 1791 in Wapping in east London, an area that was to become part of the London docklands as the city grew and trade expanded. From an evangelical family, Edmeston was baptised at Bull Lane Independent Chapel in Stepney where his mother’s father served as pastor for some fifty years. Educated in Hackney, where his family had moved, Edmeston trained as an architect and surveyor, starting out on his professional career in 1816, when he was 25.

In the architectural world, Edmeston became known for having Sir George Gilbert Scott articled to him for training. Scott was to rise to fame for his buildings in central London His attachment to Edmeston’s practice in Bishopsgate, arose because Edmeston was recommended to his father by ‘the travelling agent to the Bible Society.’

Edmeston’s attachment to literature seems as strong as his attachment to his profession, he kept a substantial library and started publishing volumes of poetry while in his mid-20s. Perhaps it was his liking for the literary qualities of the Church of England Prayer Book that prompted Edmeston to leave the evangelical Independent chapel tradition in which he grew up and to become a member of the Established Church. In 1866, a year before his death, Edmeston reflecting on his life, wrote, ‘From early years I had a strong leaning towards the Church of England, the service of which I always found more congenial to my own feelings.’

Edmeston valued his church membership, becoming churchwarden of his local parish of Saint Barnabas at Homerton in London, a prominent position in times when the Established Church dominated the life of the country. Edmeston must also have devoted a great deal of time to his writing, for he wrote the extraordinary total of two thousand hymns; it was said that he wrote a hymn every Sunday. For many years he contributed hymns to the ‘Evangelical Magazine’; a later writer was to comment that they were “of various degrees of merit”.

Edmeston seems to have had a particular commitment to children’s ministry, something not common in an age when children were simply regarded as younger versions of adults. He wrote many hymns marked by their simplicity and the directness of their message in his attempts to communicate the Christian faith to young people. Edmeston was concerned with the practical as well as the spiritual welfare of children and he was a strong supporter of and regular visitor to the London Orphan Asylum.

‘Lead us, heavenly Father, lead us’ first appeared in ‘Sacred Lyrics’, a collection of Edmeston’s writing that was published in 1821; it is the only one of the 2,000 hymns he wrote that is still in regular use, but perhaps it is quality and not quantity that matters, for it has become one of the most popular traditional hymns.

The hymn is titled “A Hymn to the Trinity” in one collection, and we see the verses beginning with Father, Saviour and Spirit. As we read through the lines of the hymn, do we catch glimpses of Edmeston’s feelings in the way he expresses his personal faith in God?

“O’er the world’s tempestuous sea”: anyone living in London, particularly anyone born in Wapping, as Edmeston was, would have been aware of the importance of seafaring life. In the days before heavy road and rail transport, Edmeston as an architect would have depended upon waterborne supplies. He would have been keenly aware of how rough seas could disrupt human plans and applies that insight to his spiritual journey; he was dependent upon God in those moments when there was no other help at hand, but, with such help, there was no need for any other. Edmeston thinks dependence upon God is something to be celebrated, through it we possess “every blessing”.

“Saviour, breathe forgiveness o’er us”, recalls the appearance of the risen Jesus to his disciples in the upper room. The Risen Lord is not some superman but is someone who has been through our human experiences. When Edmeston wrote about Jesus feeling our “keenest woe”, what experiences did he think about? Perhaps the plight of the orphans in the asylum he visited; perhaps the daily grinding poverty he would have encountered as he rode through the streets of London.

The editors of the hymnbook, on the pretence that the word ‘dreary’ had lost the meaning it once possessed as a word for sad, have changed Edmeston’s lines, ‘lone and dreary, faint and weary, through the desert thou didst go” to “self denying, death defying, thou to Calvary didst go”, which is a pity, because Edmeston knew better what he was trying to say (and is a considerably better poet) than the committee who changed the words.

The point of the verse is that Jesus identifies with us in every way and maybe he felt ‘dreary’ at times; maybe there were moments when he felt thoroughly cross and fed up; aren’t those thoughts part of being human? “We do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses”, says the writer of the Letter to the Hebrews. “Death defying” makes Jesus sound like a circus stuntman and is not faithful to the Gospel account. Jesus does not defy death, he succumbs to death in order that he might destroy its power forever. In my book, there is a big difference between defying something and destroying it!

Edmeston concludes the hymn with a poetic prayer to the Holy Spirit. The Spirit brings many gifts, but foremost amongst them are love, joy and peace and these are sought in Edmeston’s lines: heavenly joy, love and peace that cannot be destroyed.

Scott once commented that his former mentor was better known as a poet than as an architect. Perhaps it was a comment that stung Edmeston; perhaps a man who wrote a hymn every Sunday had his mind on higher and greater things than human reputations. James Edmeston was a man of great commitment—even in former times, not many of his hymns found great popularity—yet he persisted because his service was to God and to no-one else.

‘Lead us, heavenly Father, lead us’ , like its writer, is profoundly spiritual and profoundly practical; it acknowledges God as he is and it acknowledges ourselves as we are. Singing it, may we have a sense of God as the one who comes to share our life that we might go to share his life.

Hospitality is at the heart of being Christian.

On a July morning last year, a group of Irish people arrived into the diocesan guest house in Rwanda, I recognised them from a few days previously. They were staying at the most expensive hotel in the capital and visiting projects in the diocese with promises of all the things that the two building developers in their number could do if they were impressed with what they saw. (It would have been churlish to have pointed out that my old shoes probably had greater net worth than the two developers). Valentine, the cook had prepared a meal for the group, eight places were set at the table. “We haven’t time for that”, said the group’s leader, “we’ll just take the drinks and be on our way; we have an itinerary to keep up with”. They grabbed every bottle of soft drinks and left. Valentine stood and watched, a look of shock on his face. To abuse a person’s hospitality was one of the greatest possible insults.

The African host came back in through the door and I apologised for what had happened. “Do not worry”, he said, “I know that Irish people are not like that—and, you know, food in Africa never goes to waste”.

Last April, I returned to the diocese with two members of my Dublin parish. We were to attend the opening of a new church in a poor area of a city. Twenty-five members of that church had put on their Sunday best and had travelled to the airport, nineteen of them in a single minibus, in order to greet us as we arrived: there were handshakes and hugs and a song of welcome. Hospitality, for them, was regarded with far greater respect than by the Irish group last year .

Hospitality is assumed to be at the heart of being a Christian in Jesus’ teaching today. When Jesus is trying to teach his followers about God, he uses examples of generous human hospitality.

When we use the word ‘hospitality’ today, it has lost the strength it had in times past. For us hospitality has come to mean welcoming friends at our own convenience. In Jesus’ time it was altogether more demanding, it meant putting yourself out for others, without hesitation offering a welcome to those who came to the door.

Look at Jesus’ teaching – firstly, there is the person whose friend has arrived at midnight on a journey. People didn’t much go out that late at night, everywhere would have been closed and bolted and in darkness and there would have been dangerous people around. Yet the guest must be fed, so he is prepared to go out into the dark and call at another house to try to get food. The one in the house where the person calls doesn’t want to get out of bed at such an hour of the night – the place is locked up and all his family are in bed, yet, because a person has called for help, he will get up and give the man what he needs.

This is the picture that Jesus uses to illustrate God’s generosity towards us, and, if we are to be God’s people, then this must be the standard of generosity that we show to others.

Being a Christian is about much more than just believing, it’s about following, about showing in our lives what we say we believe with our lips. The weakest part of the life of the church today is discipleship, living out of the Christian faith. What we say we believe on Sundays often doesn’t make much difference to our lives during the rest of the week.

Jesus uses the example of hospitality because it is very simple and easily understood. It’s something that demands direct personal involvement, it asks much more of us than attending worship, or putting money on a plate or giving to charity, it asks that we get involved with people who are strangers, with people who are not like us, with people whom we might not even like. It demands personal sacrifice and making sacrifices is not something we like doing We live lives in a society that tells us that we should be centred on ourselves. What we are told by the media and by the advertisers and the by so-called lifestyle experts is that what matters is what we want and that we shouldn’t do anything that doesn’t make us feel good.

Jesus would have no time for those who would tell us that we should live our lives for ourselves. Jesus would tell us that we had to make a choice and that it is a hard choice. Jesus would tell us that we choose either living life God’s way, including all the practical, everyday sacrifices that demands, or we choose to live life our own way, and that we do not pretend to be Christians.

‘Just as you received Christ Jesus as Lord, continue to live in him’, says Paul in the Epistle this morning. Continuing to live in Jesus means you and I personally making our own response, in practical ways, each and every day.

Growing up in a small rural community in the west of England, there wasn’t much regard for book learning, nor were university graduates accorded much respect. The main concern always was the constant work necessary to try to make a living form the small farms. People were always very wary of anyone they regarded as having learned more than was necessary.

My mother would regularly warn me about a man who had gone to university but had none of what she described as ‘common sense’. In fact, this man was so far removed from knowing the things that were considered important that, when he got a puncture in his bicycle tyre, he didn’t know how to fix it. When I went off to London to university at the age of 18, it was expected that I would return not knowing how to do the most basic things. For the people in our village, there were doers and thinkers and you couldn’t be both.

They were not people who went to church, but if they had and they had heard the story of Mary and Martha, there is no doubt they would have taken Martha’s part. Martha was a doer, a worker, someone who achieved things. They would not have understood why Jesus says that Mary has taken the better part. Mary would not have got the hay cut; she would not have fed the cattle; she would not have saved the crop in the wet summers we had year upon year.

Jesus does not suggest that doing things is not important – what he’s concerned with is that Martha seems only concerned with doing things. There are always more household chores that could be done if you look for them. Martha seems as though she has decided to do her entire spring clean just as Jesus has arrived. Saint Luke tells us that she was distracted by her many tasks. Now either she is doing things she does not need be to be doing at that moment, or she is letting the things she has to do get blown out of their right proportions. This is a modest household in First Century Palestine, Martha could not have had so much to do that there was not five minutes to sit down and be quiet. If you had asked the farmers at home whether they had to work for every waking moment, they would have had to admit that there were moments in most days when even they sat down and thought. My grandfather always lingered at the table after the end of meal, after everyone else had gone, drinking his tea in silence and thinking about who knew what?

The question is one of priorities. Jesus’ challenge to Mary and Martha is whether the things of God are a priority over all the other daily concerns. Mary believes they are, Martha has not stopped to think about it.

What our priorities living here today? What are the priorities of people in our community? Irish people traditionally gave great priority to the things of God, but, we know, that in recent years as the country has enjoyed hugely greater economic growth people took less and less time for prayer and for thought. The only concern became getting on, with doing things, with making money, with having things. God was squeezed out. Martha would be a model of peace and tranquillity compared to some of our young executives.

Our society shifted from one where there was prayer and reflection but a lack of economic dynamism, to one where is frantic economic activity and no time for spiritual things, and where is it now? Perhaps we gained and lost the world and, in doing so, lost our soul.

One extreme or the other leads to poverty. There needs to be a commitment to doing things to create the material wealth that makes life better for everyone, but there must also be a commitment to the things of God to ensure we are not a society where only money matters and where higher values disappear.

We need to be both Mary and Martha – to bring together in our lives both a desire to get on and do things and the desire to stop and to look for God and to listen to what he says.

I wonder where our community stands on the scale of activity on the one hand and prayer on the other. If the question is never asked, if we never say to ourselves, ‘why am I doing what I’m doing?’ If we never stop look and around ourselves and look for some meaning in the years that pass, we can reach a point where we have only sadness and emptiness.

I remember a television play some years ago. It was set in the North of England in an old industrial area was about a man who kept racing pigeons – a very popular activity in parts of England as it is in parts of Ireland. He had worked hard all his life, earning money, keeping his family, getting on with things. As he grew older he spent more and more time with his pigeons. When he finally reaches a crisis point his life he is challenged about the pigeons; he confesses that all through the years it was in his pigeons that he found something that wasn’t just about work or the house. In his pigeons he found a world outside of his ordinary existence; in the speed and flight of his pigeons he found a beauty he didn’t meet elsewhere. It was a sad play about a community, about a society, that had material wealth and spiritual poverty.

We need the story of Mary and Martha to help us keep life in balance. When we get so caught up with material things, we need the reminder that Jesus gives, that Mary has chosen the better part.

“What must I do to inherit eternal life?” Do we ever ask such questions? Do we ever stop and ask where this life is going?

I’m 50 this year; maybe it’s the sort of moment to stop and ask questions.

I went home to Somerset for two days at Easter, spending three and a half hours touring around one morning. I never went more than four, or perhaps five miles, from parents’ house. Langport, Huish Episcopi, Aller, Somerton, Long Sutton, Pitney—little towns and villages that were very rural and very English. It was a time to be quiet, a time to remember the people I had known, a time to think about the years gone by.

At Huish, I went to my grandparents’ grave and stood silently. It didn’t seem three years since I had buried my grandmother. Standing there I thought about all my memories of them. The General Election had just been announced on the BBC. I knew they never voted, my Grandad once said that their votes would simply cancel each other out—which in Somerset would mean that one voted Liberal and the other voted Conservative, I used to try to guess which, I suspect my Nan was the Tory.

I wished I had brought a poetry book with me; there was a poem my Nan, who was devout in saying her prayers, and my Grandad, who thought this life was our lot, would both have liked.

One of the last times I saw Nan was on a summer’s evening. She lay in bed in her low ceilinged room. The view from the window was unchanged from my childhood memories; her neatly kept front garden, the cast iron railings which had escaped being cut down and taken away to be melted down during the war; across the road fields rolling away into the distance; to the left the entrance to the farmyard; to the right, across the road, the house of the Becky family. Even the sounds were familiar, cattle and tractors and voices. Lying in her bed those summer evenings, I wondered what memories she pondered, what hopes she still treasured.

I would have loved love to have had Charlotte Mew’s poem “An Old Shepherd’s Prayer” with me that morning. Maybe it would have captured something of how they both felt.

“Over, from under the eaves there’s the starlings flyin’,
And down in the yard, fit to burst his chain, yapping out at Sue
I do hear young Mac.
Turning around like a failed-over sack
I can see team ploughin’ in Whithy-bush field and
meal carts startin’ up road to Church-Town;
Saturday arternoon the men goin’ back
And the women from market, trapin’ home over the down.
Heavenly Master, I wud like to wake to they same green places
Where I be know’d for breakin’ dogs and follerin’ sheep.
And if I may not walk in th’old ways and look on th’old faces
I wud sooner sleep."

In my mind’s eye, the shepherd’s room is in a farmhouse like my grandparents’. The old shepherd has white hair and gnarled hands, lying in an iron bed with the hand-sewn quilt over him. There is a jug on the washstand beside the bed. His breathing is wheezy as his strength ebbs slowly away and he hears all the sounds including the bark of his collie sheepdog called "Mac". The old shepherd’s wish for heaven is for rolling green hills and old friends and for work to do like he’s always done, and if heaven is not like that, well, he would just rather not wake up.

It is a very evocative poem and I think it challenges our thoughts about what we believe about this life and about the life to come.

Belief in a world to come amongst people today is vague. The Church is concerned with the here and now, with getting on and doing things, with numbers, with being relevant, with having a good image, it’s not concerned with talking to people about dying and eternal life.

The disciples would have been astonished at us. “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” asks the lawyer. It’s the question right at the heart of the Christian Gospel. When Saint John writes down his account of the Good News it is to answer this question. John writes that he has written his book so that we may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing we may have life in his name. The old shepherd would have understood what John was saying, he has no doubt about the life to come, his only concern is what this life might be like.

Read the story of the early church, and it is about inheriting eternal life. In the Acts of the Apostles we see Jesus’ followers being prepared to give their very lives for this hope of heaven. They are summoned before the Jewish Council who have forbidden them to preach about Jesus and Peter stands up and says, "We must obey God rather than men". Read from Revelation, that last book in the Bible, and it is about the hope of eternal life. Jesus will return in glory, he is the beginning and the end, the one who was, who is and who is to come. No timidity there. No blurring of the message. No vagueness about what they are hoping for.

“What must I do to inherit eternal life?” asks the lawyer. Do we ever ask the same question? What is it that we believe about life to come? I suspect, most of the time, we probably don’t give it much thought.

At the heart of our faith, and at the· heart of our identity, there is this man Jesus who dies and rises again and who says to us that we can share this new life with him if we want. Yet there is a sense of embarrassment when we talk in such terms. If someone got up at a vestry meeting and said and said, "Isn’t it great that we can live forever?" there would be a cringing sensation and we would quickly go back to talking about the accounts or groups and unions, or whatever.

The old shepherd in the poem is very far removed from Scripture. The Bible doesn’t say that heaven is going to be what we want, but at least the old shepherd has a hope of heaven. Faltering as he may be in his faith, at least the old shepherd believes in a heavenly master who calls us to account and who offers an eternal reward.

The whole Gospel story is a response to the lawyer’s question. John writes so that we may believe and that believing we may have life in Jesus’ name. Do we believe this? Are we prepared to stake all that we have on our hope of heaven?

“What must I do to inherit eternal life?” How do we answer when we are asked?

Regular blog readers will recognize the “Old Shepherd’s Prayer”; it has often featured on the blog

Luke 10:2

‘The Lord of the harvest’—how often we forget that the church belongs to him.

A man, now gone to glory some years once told me of how he had learned that lesson. He was ordained before World War II and spent his ministry in small country towns. The communities were settled places, one generation after another fulfilling the trades and running the businesses. Being secure made some people relaxed; it made others obdurate. These were not places given to change, what had done for the past would do for the present.

The old canon had suggested changes in the parish that were not universally well received and a meeting had taken place. Heated words were exchanged and the canon, still a young man in those times, feared that he had lost the support of one of the leading members of his church. In a small community, such a division could reverberate for years to come. The row could have provided gossip amongst the whisperers of the town for months ahead.

Sunday morning came and the inexperienced young rector, who would grow into the wise old canon, approached the morning service with a great deal of trepidation, with the sinking feeling in his heart that the tension from the previous week’s meeting would be carried into the church that Sunday morning.

Looking down the church as the worshippers filed in, he caught sight of the man who had been his chief protagonist, sitting in his usual pew. With a great deal of uncertainty, he walked down the nave, in his cassock, and put out his hand to shake hands with his opponent and to wish him ‘Good morning’. The man smiled at the rector and shook his hand warmly.

“Thank you for coming this morning”, said the rector.

The man looked quizzical. “What do you mean ‘Thank you for coming’? Am I not here every Sunday?”

Wrongfooted, the rector searched for words. “Well, yes, what I mean is ‘thank you for coming this morning after the disagreement last week”.

The man looked the young clergyman directly in the eye, “Barry”, he said, “always remember whose church this is”.

The old canon told me the story after he had retired in the early 1980s, the story came from the late 1940s. He pondered the man’s words again, as he must have done countless times over the intervening years, ‘Always remember whose church this is’.

“I never forgot those words”, he said, “never forgot them: ‘Always remember whose church this is’”.

That conversation from the 1940s is as meaningful now as it was sixty years ago.

The church does not belong to anyone; it belongs only to God. No hierarchy, no synod, no diocese, no parish, no cleric, can change that fact. The very word “church”, comes from the New Testament Greek word ‘kuriakos’ meaning ‘belonging to the Lord’.

Had that one simple fact, recognized by an ordinary member of an Ulster country parish in the years after the War, been more recognized by the church down through the centuries, perhaps history would have been very different.

‘Always remember whose church this is’, said the man. His words help us understand what Jesus is saying as he talks to his friends. ‘The harvest is plentiful, but the labourers are few; therefore ask the Lord of the harvest to send out labourers into his harvest”.

The harvest does not belong to the church, it belongs to the Lord. For any group of people, or any person, to pretend that the church belongs to them is for them to put themselves in the place of God. The church, says Jesus, does not depend on people’s own initiative, the church depends on the Lord sending his labourers into his harvest.

Had this simple verse of Scripture been taken seriously, had people accepted that the church belonged to God and to no-one else, history may have been very different. The sad and violent history of relations between Christians and Muslims would not have progressed as it did down through the centuries. No Christian could ever have contemplated killing someone else in the name of religion if they had realized that it was not their church, and it was not their place to speak or act as if they were the church.

In our own country, had we realized that the church was not ours, but belonged to the Lord, then we would not have had the terrible abuse of children because the church would not have become embedded in the life of the State and would never have grown to have had the power it exercised and would never have become a place of opportunity for abusers. Corruption and the abuse of power come from people putting themselves in the place of God.

From the international stage, down to the life of the local parish, it is one church, one ‘kuriakos’, and it does not belong to us. ‘Always remember whose church this is’, said the man in Co Antrim, sixty years ago.

“Ask the Lord of the harvest to send out labourers into his harvest”. It was, it is, and it will always be, his harvest; the church is no more than group of labourers. May we always remember our place and always remember who is the Lord.

In one parish in the North, we had a Canadian family as members of the church for eighteen months. Rod had been a priest in the Anglican Church of Canada for 38 years prior to his retirement; he and his wife Susan had two teenage children. They were at once the most charming and the most disarming people I knew. They were very always warm and friendly but they would come up with questions we had never even thought about – why does your church do things this way? Most of the time I had to admit that I had no idea, we had always done things this way: people were used to doing things this way; we didn’t know any other way of doing things; people wouldn’t like another way of doing things.

Rod and Susan made me think about the church I was in. Why did we do things in the way we did? What were we doing about making our church a place where people who were not members would want to come? The questions were asked, and changes were made.

Look at what Paul says in the reading from the letter to the church at Galatia, ""Since we live by the Spirit, let us keep in step with the Spirit." Paul’s words would have annoyed some people, "neither circumcision nor uncircumcision have any value". Paul is saying to the people in his own time that they need to ask questions, that they need to change, because their old traditions, their old ways of doing things, no longer counted for anything. The only boast of Christians, Paul concludes in the letter, was to be in the cross of Christ and through the power of the cross they were to be new people.

Paul doesn’t say these things for the sake of it, he doesn’t suggest things should change because he likes novelty, he does this so that the Good News of Jesus Christ can be carried out to different people and different cultures. If all the Jewish rules and traditions had been attached, the Church would have been so weighed down by its history that it could never have made any progress in new and different areas.

If Paul was with us today I wonder what he would say. When he looked at our traditions I wonder which ones he would say counted for nothing. His comments could be painful. Things we held dear might have to go. We would be made to realise that if we live by the Spirit, then we must keep in step with the Spirit.

Rod and Susan asked questions, not to be awkward, but because it was part of their experience of the church in Vancouver. To be continually asking questions about what one was doing and why one was doing it was vital in one of the most secular places in North America. To fail to touch the lives of the people in their parish would have been to fail to keep Jesus’ command to go out and make disciples.

Looking at Paul’s words to the Galatians and looking at how secular society is faced by the church in Canada, perhaps we need to ask questions about how we are going to face the increasingly secular society that surrounds us now.

How does the world out there see us? And, when they meet with us, are they presented with the Good News of Jesus Christ, or are they presented with traditions that they cannot understand which seem to have little to do with the man from Nazareth?

How are we reacting to the daily changes around us in Ireland? The Church as a whole is thought strange by an increasing number of people who go nowhere and believe nothing. The people amongst whom we live are becoming like people elsewhere in the western world. They are content to let us carry on with our traditions, but they themselves have no real interest in what who we are or what we say.

What questions do we need to ask of ourselves if we are to become like those whom Jesus sent out? What changes do we need to contemplate if we are to be Jesus’ people for our time?

It is hard for us to imagine what it is like for someone to step inside a church for the first time – when they look around how much of what they see is part of the Good News of Jesus Christ and how much of what they see is part of more recent tradition? When they join in worship, how much of what we do is at the heart of the Gospel and how much is a matter of our own custom and preference?

Next time you are in a different church imagine yourself as someone who has never set foot inside a church before. Ask yourself about what is going on and what is being said. Then compare what is done and said with the straightforward Gospel story of Jesus – how much was at core of what it means to be Christian? How much was tradition and custom that had been added on?

"Since we live by the Spirit, let us keep in step with the Spirit," says Paul. He is concerned only with what is essential. We have to ask ourselves what is essential. If we are to be a church that is reaching out we have to ask ourselves how much we have which is not important. "The only thing that counts is faith expressing itself through love", says Paul. Are we like the supporters of the old ways, the people Paul opposed? Or are we people in step with the Spirit?

The part of England in which I grew up was an area full of legend and superstition. In ancient times it would have been a place of marshes and rivers and little islands. Even now, when the mists come down and lie across the levels, it is easy to imagine that you can see all sorts of things.

At the centre of the district was the little town of Glastonbury, the legends about which would fill many books. I grew up learning all the old tales and superstitions. Most of them were harmless folk stories; they gave a bit of life to an area which was very boring. Nothing ever happened in our area, and it was nice to think that maybe in some past time interesting and important things had taken place.

When I was young, Glastonbury was beginning to be attractive to all sorts of other people. They had no interest in Joseph of Arimathea, or King Arthur, or the old tales which we had learned. They had ways of life which seemed strange to our old-fashioned farming community. Nowadays, the new arrivals would have been called New Age travellers, in those days they were hippies. They were altogether different from the people I knew. To be fair to them, most of them were innocent and harmless. They believed in love and peace and thought they could find it in our little corner of the country.

But the hippies brought people’s attention to thoughts and ideas which were very different from the things we were taught in school. They had ideas that we thought were strange.

Some of them had come to Glastonbury because they believed that Glastonbury Tor, the hill outside of the town, was the centre of the Earth. Given the fact that I could see Glastonbury Tor from my bedroom window, I found it hard to believe it was the centre of anything. The hippies believed in all sorts of things. They believed that there was power in crystals and pyramids. They believed that the future could be foretold; some of them believed that you could tell a person’s future by reading Tarot cards; some of them believed in astrology, that our lives were controlled by the stars.

The people who gathered around Glastonbury included some who believed in “black magic”; trying to call up the spirits of the dead; trying to use the powers of darkness. They seemed to have believed strongly in the black and sinister powers. One man who got a house in our village is said to have moved because someone painted a pentagram, a five pointed star, a symbol of black magic, on the door of his house.

Being so frightened by a symbol painted on your door that you move house? Maybe there was more power behind this stuff than we imagined; maybe there were powers beyond our comprehension.

Maybe in order to understand the fear of the man who moved house, we need to look at the story of Legion in today’s Gospel and ask ourselves how we understand it.

Jesus goes to the region of the Gerasenes and is met by this man who is described as ‘demon-possessed’. Modern psychiatric medicine would come up with a different diagnosis and modern Bible scholars would tend to explain this story in a way very different than the explanation in the past.

But we are faced with a question? Can we simply explain this story simply in terms of modern science, or do we believe that there are supernatural forces at work, beyond our comprehension?

On one hand there are those who tend towards a more scientific and rational view of the world, the people who would see Legion psychiatrically disturbed, who would see in Glastonbury, and all that stuff that surrounded it, simply human efforts to create some sort of spirituality. On the other hand, there are those who would see Jesus’ encounter with Legion as a meeting with real spiritual evil, and who would see behind non-Christian spirituality a power of darkness.

Where do we find ourselves in the argument? My education and my experience of doing occasional chaplaincy work in the Downshire psychiatric hospital at Downpatrick tells me that there are people who could have behaved like Legion; I was sometimes met with strings of expletives. On the other hand, there are unexplained aspects of the story, how the man is suddenly cured and what was it that suddenly panicked the pigs? I can explain parts of the story, other parts cannot be explained.

Being rational, the sort of stuff the hippies believed has been around for generations, it never had much impact in the past are is unlikely to do so now.

But people being rational would also explain away the Christian faith. I would have friends who would say, ‘you don’t believe that old stuff, do you?’ If there is no spiritual power behind all the Glastonbury stuff, if we say it is harmless, do we also say there is no spiritual power behind the Christian faith? Do we say that religion is just humanity reaching out for some meaning in life and that we have an explanation for everything?

What the Bible records many times is God engaging in a head on conflict with cosmic powers of darkness and evil. Are we to say that is all old-fashioned?

Being a Christian always means treading a fine line. On one side, we need to be able to apply our God-given faculty of reason, but in doing so we need to to remember that on the other side there are all the things that we cannot explain.

‘When Jesus stepped ashore, he was met by a demon-possessed man from the town’, Jesus meets the man with calm logic and reason, but he also meets him with spiritual power. We need to follow that example, to be people of logic and reason, but always also to be spiritual people.

One of my favourite children’s talks asks why the fishermen made good followers of Jesus. The answer is that they had strong hands, strong hearts and strong voices.

Adults generally shy away from the third of those qualities. We may have strong hands to help people and strong hearts to cope with hard situations, but how often do we have strong voices? How often do we speak up? How often do we say the things that need to be said, particularly when we might be the only person saying them?

The prophet Elijah does not shy away from speaking in the strongest terms. If something is wrong, then Elijah says so and leaves no room for doubt. I always thought Elijah was a refreshing contrast with the way the church often speaks.

Church statements on even the most serious of matters have often been closer to the lyrics of Colum sands than to the words of Elijah. One of Sands’ songs has a refrain that goes:

“Whatever you say, say nothing, when you talk about you know what
For if you know who should hear you, you know what you’ll get
They’ll take you off to you know where for you wouldn’t know how long
So for you know who’s sake don’t let anyone hearing singing this song.”

It is easier to say nothing, to keep our heads down, to not risk saying anything that would annoy people, to avoid the danger of being unpopular. It is hard to imagine many people in the churches in Ireland being as forthright as Elijah in their comments on those in authority.

There comes a point when Christian people have to stand up and be counted. There comes a point when we can no longer have a faith that is just private and personal. If our faith means anything at all it has to have something to say what is going on around us.

Elijah reaches this point. He cannot remain faithful to God and remain silent when he witnesses evil and corruption. He speaks out against what is wrong and it brings him trouble. In 1 Kings 19, he gets into so much trouble that his life is in danger. He runs and runs and hides in a cave where God speaks to him, not in an earthquake, or in the wind, or in a fire, but in a still, small voice.

The God that most of us want is the God of the still, small voice. We want a God who is quiet and gentle, we want a God who is private and personal. We don’t want a God who drives us out to face a hostile and violent world. But the God who speaks to Elijah is the God who sends Elijah out into the world to do the very things that we don’t want to do.

Elijah is sent out to meet evil and violence and to oppose them. So when it comes to the murder of Naboth in today’s reading we see Elijah answering God’s call to go and denounce the evil of Ahab and Jezebel. Elijah does so in no uncertain terms, he cannot have spoken more graphically than he does in the words we heard—the dogs will lick up Ahab’s blood.

What does God ask of us? These are uncertain times for the church, uncertain times for our standing in society, surely God doesn’t want us to be rocking the boat? Maybe we need to ask ourselves whether we believe in the God of Elijah, the God of Scripture, the God who intervenes, the God who is passionate about justice and righteousness; or whether we believe in an a la carte God, someone we can pick up when it’s convenient and ignore when he makes us feel uncomfortable.

The one thing that the God of Elijah does not want is the very thing that is happening in the churches. God doesn’t want the church to turn in on itself and yet more and more we see churches turning their backs on the world. We see fellowships and new churches where there is no concern whatsoever to pursue God’s justice in the world. We see Christianity becoming a private spirituality, something people buy into when they feel a need for it. We see an evangelical spirituality that is based not on the Bible, as was the evangelicalism of centuries past, but is based on a feelgood religiosity. We see a Church where we are very far from the example of the prophet Elijah.

To be like Elijah means engaging with the world so that we can take on the evil and the violence that threaten all of us. The thought of getting involved in public and political activity causes us discomfort, it hasn’t been part of our tradition. Protestant churches have traditionally been concerned with the individual’s relationship with God, ethical matters for us have been matters of personal morality. Protestant churches have emphasised abiding to the law and being obedient to those in power. Elijah’s denunciations of evil and corruption haven’t figured too largely. in our way of doing things. If we read the Bible and take it seriously we have to take the awkward and uncomfortable challenges as well as the easy ones.

If we watch the news and believe that our faith has nothing to say about the stories we see, we really need to ask ourselves whether we believe in the God whom Elijah served. If we don’t believe in a God of justice we don’t believe in the God of the Bible, and if we don’t believe in the God of the Bible we really need to ask ourselves, “what is my faith about?”

Strong hands and strong hearts are fine—but the time comes when we also need strong voices.

The story ends well for Elijah and the widow of Zarephath and her son. They survive the famine and her son is brought back to life—were we telling it as a children’s story, we would say ‘and they all lived happily ever after (well, Elijah did in the end, after a few more adventures). But what about the people who had no happy ending? What about people whose loved ones died of starvation and disease? Why was there no happy ending for them?

Why is God so odd sometimes? Why does he allow some people to suffer and others to go through life without a hitch?

It’s not as though the good are rewarded and the bad are punished; sometimes it seems the exact reverse applies. Sometimes the bad seem to get whatever they want and good people are left to suffer. There must have been many good and honest people in Zarephath and in the country around who suffered terribly during the three year famine; what had they done to deserve such a fate? There is no answer.

If Jesus had been there, what would he have done? Perhaps it’s a crass question, but it is a valid one. If being a Christian means anything then it must mean taking the life and teachings of Jesus as a reference point for our own behaviour.

Jesus himself gives an answer to the question in Saint Luke Chapter 4, “I assure you that there were many widows in Israel in Elijah’s time, when the sky was shut for three and a half years and there was a severe famine throughout the land. Yet Elijah was not sent to any of them, but to a widow in Zarephath in the region of Sidon. And there were many in Israel with leprosy in the time of Elisha the prophet, yet not one of them was cleansed—only Naaman the Syrian.” It’s not really an answer; more a repetition of the question. Jesus seems to be saying that this is the way the world is; that the world is a unfair place.

Jesus understands unfairness, look at his story.

It begins with Mary, a Jewish teenage girl who is pregnant and is under suspicion. She could have faced being stoned to death. Even Joseph is uncertain about this and is only convinced when he has a vision of an angel.

They are poor and, like all poor people, they get pushed around by people in authority. They are forced to travel seventy miles to Bethlehem because of bureaucracy. When they get there they have to sleep in an animal shed and the girl’s baby is born there. The townspeople couldn’t care less. The only people who bother with them are a gang of shepherds, is this fair?

The child is no sooner born than Herod, the local petty tyrant starts having babies killed because he fears a threat to his power. Mary and Joseph and their baby escape—but what about the babies that didn’t? What about those murdered by Herod’s men? Was this fair?

Jesus and his mother are taken off to Egypt as refugees, by Joseph who has to support them by earning what he can as a carpenter. Herod finally dies and they return to live in Galilee after perhaps two years as refugees. Was this fair?

Read on through the story and there is no fairness. John the Baptist, Jesus’ cousin, a few months older than him, is brutally beheaded because of the drunken lust of Herod who wants to please his lover. This Herod is the son of the Herod who had the babies killed. Was any of this fair?

Finally, Jesus himself is executed because the religious and the political powers didn’t like him asking questions all the time. He was too dangerous and had to be destroyed.

There must have been moments when Mary railed against God over things that happened. There must have been moments when she stood and she shouted, ‘God, this is not fair’. Countless millions of people down though the centuries have had cause to say those words, ‘this is not fair’.

Life is not fair and life would be senseless if it were not for the man who lived though unfairness after unfairness. At the age of 33 he lies dead in a borrowed tomb. Then on a bright spring Sunday morning he walks out alive, destroying the power of death.

Life is not fair—but God comes and shares our lives with us. Jesus goes to the town of Nain and he sees a widow mourning the loss of her only son. Perhaps he remembered Elijah at that moment, perhaps he remembered the story of Zarephath, perhaps he felt a sense of all the unfairness of the world. ‘When the Lord saw her’, says Saint Luke, ‘he had compassion for her’. An unfair story has a happy ending.

Jesus understands unfairness.

When life is unfair and without explanation and there is nothing left but to stand and rage, Jesus understands us.