Where is Advent in Advent? Where is Christ in Christmas?

 

Sermon. 14 December 2025. St George’s, Saham Toney

Advent 3 (Year of Matthew)

 

A word about why today is “Rejoice Sunday” / “Gaudete Sunday”, and why today’s candle is pink, or, as we are all sophisticated here, “rose”. We light the rose candle. The answer may be that it comes from another age.

 

The short answer is that the tradition used to be that the Introit – the very first piece of music was a quotation from Philippians, namely:

“Rejoice in the Lord always, and again I say rejoice!”

or in Latin

“Gaudete in Domino semper, iterum dico gaudete!”

So, you see: Rejoice/Gaudete Sunday.

 

The longer answer is that… this may seem to come from another age. In this age, in 2025, Christmas still means something in our society – and that’s putting it mildly. But how the secular Christmas and the Church Christmas fit together, is… difficult. I’m not making a lazy preacherly point about the dangers of “consumerism”. I’m referring quite particularly to timings. In the secular world (if we are honest), Christmas begins on 1 November. The moment the ghosts and ghouls of Halloween have been tidied away, at least the perfume adverts come out. And people throw themselves into it by December. Then, come (say) January 2^nd, they take down the tired decorations, and join a gym. In the secular world, January is the natural time to do a bit of pruning, to introduce a bit of self-discipline. So that’s: feast in December and fast in January.

 

In the Church (and I know this isn’t new to you), it’s precisely the other way round. Advent is (or is supposed to be) a season of penitence. Now, penitence doesn’t mean feeling bad about ourselves. That’s a misunderstanding. Very little spiritual growth comes up from the parched soil of feeling bad about yourself. Penitence means reflecting, taking time out, being still, being quiet, and noticing what emerges, what insights about how we are living we have. And, when we can just pause enough to be candid about ourselves, we can hurry to place ourselves under God’s forgiveness, we can receive God’s forgiveness, and find some newness of life. We can change things about our lives.

 

It is just the case that that stillness and quiet can go deeper, if we go without the things we normally rely on for comfort, reassurance, to get us through the day. So – it’s worth saying it bluntly – Advent is supposed to be in that sense about going without. It has been and can be called the “Little Lent”. Abstinence. Penitence… Scarcely Christmassy words. But this season of reflection then explodes into the joy of Christmas, and Christmastide, which lasts at least for 12 nights, but arguably goes on to Candlemas in February (40 days).

 

A little Lent. The next thing to say is that Church knows that it can be good for us to go without, and to be self-reflective and ask hard questions of ourselves. But! But we mustn’t place on ourselves a burden we cannot bear. So, when we have a reflective season, the Church is gentle, and allows ourselves to relax our discipline, roughly in the middle of said reflective season. We do this in the middle of Lent. That’s called Laetare Sunday, but you probably know it better as Mothering Sunday. And in the middle of Advent we do it on Gaudete Sunday, Rejoice Sunday… today. So the colour of the day is “lifted” from the darkness of purple to the lightness of rose – or, if you insist, pink.

 

What do we do when the Church calendar and the world’s calendar are frankly in opposition? Each sees the other as doing it the wrong way round. I don’t think we can simply ignore the world and make Advent a little Lent, and go without. If we end up not going to “Christmas parties” throughout December, or going to them but feeling guilty, we will simply convey to others that Christianity is the opposite of fun. But I also don’t think we can simply surrender, and start singing Carols in November. In truth, the Church year is like an intricate, delicate web, with fasts and feasts carefully set out. If we seek to cut out one bit, we may break the whole web. We may lose more than we think. What, then? How to find a good middle way? Well, I have given this some prayerful thought, and have some suggestions. They will be for next year now!

 

We might wish we did not have to face these questions. We might – not exactly to coin a phrase – we might campaign to “put Christ back into Christmas”. With Christ back in Christmas we can put Advent back in Advent! What do you think?

 

Now, that phrase – “put Christ back into Christmas” has been around for most of my life. I think I remember people saying in the 1970s/80s. Then it was meant as criticism for too much consumerism. Then in the 90s, there was, year in year out, a news item in the press claiming that some local authority or other had “banned” Christmas. It was never true. It was always the press putting two and two together and getting 22. But what is true is that the very idea that Christmas is the birthday of Jesus has receded into the background of wider culture over recent decades. And now this year the phrase “putting Christ back into Christmas” has taken on a third meaning.  

 

Yesterday, Mr Stephen Yaxkey-Lennon, who goes by the name of Tommy Robinson held an event in London (he called it a concert) to campaign to “put Christ back into Christmas”. It turned out to be rather modest. His account is this: he hated the church. Then he converted to Christianity in prison thanks to a chaplain (that can happen – I know that can happen), and now wants to make sure that others – indeed, the nation – celebrate Christmas, and that we rejoice in being a nation with Christian roots.

 

So far, so good. Of course, that all sounds wonderful. But it is not so simple. One of Stephen Yaxley-Lennon’s many convictions is for spreading hateful lies about a Muslim foreigner. And his public presence has been all about speaking ill of foreigners, and of Muslims, including Muslim Britons. So he’s long waved the flag and gone on about Britishness and Englishness in an intimidating way. And – and this is crucial – he hasn’t repented of any of that. There is no evidence that he has come to see that Christianity is all about care for the stranger, about hospitality… and about gentleness, about being vulnerable and not exercising power over others, about love, about a willingness to see and care for those who are harmed by the powerful or pushed out by the mob… and more simply is about respecting people and telling the truth.

 

Of course, repentance is ultimately a secret thing, a matter of the heart. But, when you’re a public figure, it’s fair to hope and to expect that something of that repentance will spill out into your public life. And in this case, it has not.

 

So, on this day when we remember John the Baptist, we need to remember the command he put to those around him:

“Bear the fruits worthy of repentance” [Matt 3.8].

“Don’t presume to say to yourselves: ‘We have Abraham as a father’” [v. 9].

Don’t presume to say: “I am a Christian in a Christian nation.”

But bear the fruit worthy of repentance.

 

When someone not only does not bear such fruit, but can express no interest in bearing such fruit, we have be aware of that. We need to be as wise as serpents. We don’t write the person or their faith-journey off. But we can be resolute in looking for those signs of an understanding of authentic Christianity in which flags and power over others don’t really figure.

 

Of course, we can only do that if we also spin the command of John the Baptist around to us.

“Don’t presume to say: ‘I am a Christian and have St George’s as my church’”. But bear the fruits worthy of repentance.

 

Now, one fruit of repentance – and there are lots – is joy, of course. We cannot all be joyful all the time. Life is not like that. You won’t find me pretending that it is. But we can, today, and over and over again, orient ourselves towards joy, so that when the time of full rejoicing comes, we are fit to rejoice.

 

And so let us say, on this Gaudete Sunday, this Rejoice Sunday:

Rejoice in the Lord always, and again I say rejoice! 

Amen.

What to do with the new covenant?

 

Sermon. 19/10/2025. St Peter’s Merton, St George’s, Saham Toney

Trinity 8, Year C

Jer 31.27-34

Luke 18.1-8

 

Today I am going to push us a little. I don’t mean push, so as to make you fall down (God forbid); I mean push in the sense of giving you a gentle but clear nudge. I am going to offer some teaching which may be challenging. I am – I will say it right away – going to be bringing some insights from the Jewish tradition. You can take it!

 

The first reading today, from the prophecy of Jeremiah, contains a passage Christians tend to find extremely moving. Words on the “new covenant”. A covenant where the Law or Teaching or Guidance of God (the Torah) is written on people’s very hearts. A covenant it is so very natural for Christians to see fulfilled in Jesus. The Law, the Very Teaching of Very God was written on Jesus’ heart (Christians believe), and so, among other things, Christians are freed from the need to practise all the commandments there are in the Written Law (the Torah, as the first five books of the Bible).

 

Now, every word I have just said may be true, and I am not disagreeing with the import of what I have just claimed. But! But Jewish friends are likely to say: Believe what is right for you to believe, but please just not that that is not the plain meaning of the text in Jeremiah. Christians are indeed very comfortable thinking that Jeremiah’s New Covenant is revolutionary, but we miss just how revolutionary it is.

 

We think it means that we (Christians, everybody) can happily leave behind sacrifices, and temples, and rules about “clean” and “unclean”, and indeed almost every rule. For now it is what we feel or contemplate on the inside that counts. But Jeremiah is imagining something that may make all of that seem like so much tinkering

 

Listen again: “No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, ‘Know the Lord’, for they shall all know me…”

 

So this goes way beyond getting rid of finicky rituals. It means there are no laws at all any more.

 

Think about it. If the ways of God are written on people’s hearts, what would the police, or the courts, or the prisons have to do? They would grow mouldy. And, yes, we might need a government to (you know) make sure the streetlamps were lit, but not to deal with crime (there isn’t any), and not to deal with bitter conflicts (there aren’t any). It is a certain kind of anarchy. Jeremiah is picturing a certain kind of anarchy.

 

But that’s the easy bit. Harder is facing up to how in Jeremiah’s vision there is a lot less for synagogues and for churches to do. For surely one whole strand of what churches and synagogues do is… teach. But – we have just heard it - teaching falls away. Another whole strand is encouragement. We come together to encourage each other (to say words which amount to “Know God… know Jesus…”). But – we’ve just heard it - encouragement falls away. We could still meet for worship, but that would be about it.

 

No laws; no teaching. No teaching; no laws. This is actually what Jeremiah describes as the new covenant. One question is: Is this our reality? And of course it is not. But here’s a different question:

Is it even attractive?

 

I’m serious. And I will seriously push/nudge us a little bit further. You see there is one Jewish reading of this new covenant of Jeremiah which sees it as deeply un-attractive.

 

Indeed, some say that what we have here is Jeremiah at his most negative. Jeremiah already is the most gloomy prophet (he curses the day of this birth [Jer 20.14]). Here (so the argument goes) Jeremiah slips further down, into despair. He thinks that God will give up with all the older covenants. In the older covenants (think Noah, Abraham, Moses and Sinai), God wanted to cooperate with human beings. Work with. To persuade, cajole, exhort, train, and bring in. Always alongside human beings, never forcing their hand. Never forcing them. But here Jeremiah imagines that God will just kick the whole game-board over, with all the pieces, and start again. Start again with people not as we understand them, people who obey God automatically, like automata, like robots. They will obey God, because they simply have no choice. They are God’s AI-people. That’s sad, we may feel, and the argument is: It is meant to be sad.

 

I have pushed us. Sometimes it is good to come to a familiar – a beloved – text, and, yes, be nudged to see it in a different way, a challenging way. It isn’t Bible Sunday today (that is next week), but there is no harm in us spending a moment or two rediscovering the Bible as strange. Not estranging. We are not estranged from God. But God is still so different from our expectations that God’s word comes to us as strange.

 

Here endeth the lesson!

 

And now a story. I was a student in Dublin many years ago. I spent a happy afternoon wandering around its main park, Phoenix Park. I knew that Pope (now Saint Pope) John Paul II had celebrated mass there in front of well over a million faithful. (That was before I was there [it was in 1979])! There was, you won’t be surprised to hear, a cross, to mark the very spot where he stood. And a text. A simple text. It said simply:

Be converted every day.

 

Be converted every day. I come back to this, time and time again. Day by day, you might say!

 

So I want to say that whatever the meaning of Jeremiah’s new covenant (and remember that Jeremiah himself might not have known quite what he was saying), one thing we can do is… make it our own, here and now. In this case, we can ask:

 

What would it mean,

if the very law of very God were written on my heart,

today?

What, then, would I do?

How then would I live?  

 

It is something you may have to sit with. It is something worth sitting with. You may not get an instant answer. You may well not, you probably won’t, you almost certainly won’t get an instant answer. But you can be like the persistent widow of today’s gospel, and keep coming back to the point.

 

What would it mean,

if the very law of very God were written on my heart,

today?

What, then, would I do?

How then would I live?  

Amen.

Angels: Fearful and Friendly, through and through

 

Sermon. 28 September 2025 St Nicholas’ Ashill and St George’s Saham Toney

St Michael and All Angels [transferred]

 

I believe in angels
Something good in everything I see
I believe in angels
When I know the time is right for me
I'll cross the stream, I Have a Dream

I Have a Dream, a fantasy
To help me through, reality
And my destination, makes it worth the while
Pushin' through the darkness, still another mile

I believe in angels
Something good in everything I see
I believe in angels…

(ABBA)

Words of… who knows?...

If any of you think that this is a relatively recent song, I have to tell you, it came out in 1979, which makes it just shy of half a century old. Half a century! Brothers and sisters, your lives are more precious than you realise.

 

It’s a pleasant song (many of us think). What is more, ABBA were ahead of their time, seeing something others could not then see. It is as if they knew how belief in angels was going to explode in the decades ahead. Do you remember when bookshops started having “Mind Body Spirit” sections? Well, books about angels soon became a significant part of that new genre. Angels as gentle, calming, encouraging, on your side, gently nudging you to feel better about yourself.

 

There is something good in everyone I see, including me!

 

It is all well and good. I believe it can be a good thing to attend to our self-esteem, and, yes, seek to have a healthy esteem for yourself. But! But it has to be said that this understanding of angels tells us nothing – nothing – about angels as we find them in the Bible.

 

It can be said bluntly: in the Bible, angels are scary. Angels are scary. I don’t mean, of course, scary like a horror story. Not that. I mean scary in the sense of awesome, and awe-some in the full sense. Today the word “awesome” is thrown around. People say: “that cup of tea was awesome; thank you”. But the original meaning is powerful.

It means: inspiring awe.

It means it is fearful and enormous and powerful and not altogether safe or comfortable. It means fearsome;

causing fear, even while it also draws you in.

This is who angels are in the Bible:

causing fear, even while they also draw you in.

 

How do I claim this? Precisely because…

What is that angels in the Bible most often say?

It is: “Do not be afraid!”

 

A moment’s digression. I warn you now: in Advent, I am going to be on the stricter side of things. I am going to discourage us from celebrating Christmas too much before it comes. However, today I am allowing us just a taste from Handel’s Messiah, to make the point I want to make here.

Remember:

There were shepherds abiding in the field,

         keeping watch over their flock by night.

         And lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them,

         and the glory of the Lord shone round about them,

and they were sore afraid.

         And the angel said unto them:

         “Fear not…”.

 

So, one thing we can do on this Feast of St Michael and All Angels – also called St Michael and All the Bodiless Powers – one thing we can do – and it is not a small thing – is calmly note that when we have to do with God we are involved in awesome things, with fearful things. A Russian Orthodox teacher, Metropolitan Anthony, once put it this way:

To pray is not to enter the cave of a pussy cat;

it is to enter the cave of a tiger.

We had better believe it.

 

But! But many of you will be ahead of me at this point. You will be thinking: all that is true, but I am only telling half the story. We have already heard the other half, and we had better take that seriously too. That is: the fearful angels say:

Fear not;

do not be afraid;

you don’t have to fear us, we are indeed here for your good.

This is indeed a truth as important as the awesome nature of angels.

They are fearsome, but/and/but/and they come from Loving God, from God who loves us. They come to us with messages from Loving God, God who loves us, God who brings us to better places. So the fear of awe is inevitable, but the angels do not want us to stay in the fear.  

 

So the second thing we can do on this Feast of St Michael and All Angels – also called St Michael and All the Bodiless Powers – is give thanks for the angels that are and will be among us. Give thanks for the angels that are and will be among us.

 

I say they are here, because Jesus himself implies that each one of us has at least one Guardian Angel. In Matthew 18.10, Jesus says that children (“little ones”) have their own angels. By the way, Jesus doesn’t give the details of the numbers. Children must have at least one Guardian Angel, but it might be many more; maybe each have 1,000 angels. And again, if we know anything – anything – about the faithfulness of God, of how God comes to us and stays, then we can have perfect confidence that children don’t lose their angels when they become adults. That would be against God’s ways.

 

Why do I say they will be here? We actually confess that angels will be here within this service. The claim is hiding in plain sight. Here are some words I think you will know:  

“Therefore with angels and archangels, and with all the compony of heaven,

we proclaim your great and glorious name,

for ever praising you and saying

Holy, holy, holy Lord...”

 

Yes, when we gather around the bread and the wine,

to give thanks to the Father,

and to remember the Last Will and Testament of the Son,

and to call down the Spirit,

then we can be most sure that the heavenly host is with us.

So we sing the hymn of heaven, known both to Isaiah and to the writer of Revelation: “Holy, holy, holy!” Adoration. We adore.

 

Here is a prayer which acknowledges that the angels will be among us, a prayer from another tradition (from the Orthodox liturgy):

 

We, who in a mystery represent the cherubim,

and sing the thrice-holy hymn to the life-giving Trinity,

let us now lay aside all the cares of this world,

that we may receive the King of All,

who comes, invisibly escorted by the angelic hosts.

 

Let us make it our own.

[Prayed again, repeating each line.]

Amen.

Matthew, Evangelist of the Presence of God

 Sermon. 21 September 2025. St Peter’s Merton.

 

Feast of St Matthew, Apostle and Evangelist

 

Gospel: Matthew 9.9-13

 

A blessed Feast of St Matthew! What can we say of Matthew? The historically critical among you will say: precious little. There are two references to him. One we have heard, as today’s gospel reading. A certain tax collector is called by Jesus to follow him, and this causes controversy if not consternation. But it happens! And his name is Matthew. A little later [Matthew 10.3] he is named as one of the Twelve. Tellingly, there, too, he is called “Matthew, the tax collector”.

 

And that… well, that is it. No further references in that gospel, and nothing in Mark, Luke, or John, unless the tax collector Levi, called by Jesus in Luke’s Gospel [Luke 5.27ff] is one and the same person (which is possible).

 

We of course feel we know Matthew much better than that. Because we are in the habit of thinking of him as the person who wrote the Gospel which now bears his name, the first Gospel in the ordering of the New Testament (which is not to say the first to be written). The habit of thinking of Matthew as evangelist is ancient. Papias of Hierapolis – remember him? His dates are approximately 60-130 AD. And he wrote: “Matthew put together the oracles in the Hebrew language, and each one interpreted them as best he could.” That means Matthew wrote in Hebrew or Aramaic, and others translated it into Greek. And that claim attached itself to the gospel we know. Linguists now think that is unlikely that Matthew wrote in Hebrew, or Aramaic. There are certainly phrases in Matthew which are structured like Hebrew phrases. But most scholars now think that Matthew was deliberately setting out to sound “biblical” (to sound like the Old Testament), when he wrote these.

 

No matter! The link was made, and Matthew the tax collector has at least in pious imagination (nothing wrong with pious imagination) dissolved into Matthew the writer of the gospel bearing that name.

 

What then can we say of Matthew as the writer of the Gospel of Matthew? Much in every way.

Of the material which only Matthew brings, we might consider:

the mysterious story of the Magi from the East;

or the still-well-known injunction not to cast your pearls before swine;

or how Peter tries to walk on water.

And so on. They say there are 28 passages unique to Matthew.

 

Today, though, let me mention just two.

When it comes to the birth of Jesus, it is Matthew and only Matthew [Matthew 1.23] who quotes Isaiah [Isaiah 7.14], saying

“‘…the virgin shall conceive and bear a son,

and they shall name him Emmanuel’,

which means, ‘God is with us.’”

 

Only Matthew calls Jesus “Emmanuel”, which is Immanu El, God-with-us or God-is-with-us. (Or if you want to be yet more literal it is Immanu, with us, El, God – so it is “With us, God!”)

 

So what? So what that Matthew calls Jesus Emmanuel? It’s a passing reference of which nothing is made – funnily enough, much like the passing reference to Matthew the tax collector? I don’t think so.

 

How does Matthew’s Gospel end? It ends with Jesus, risen Lord, at the summit of a high mountain, giving the command to the disciples to teach and baptise among all the nations (or all the peoples), and concluding (concluding his speech and the whole gospel)… how?

 

Jesus says: “And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.” [Matthew 28.20b].

 

I, God-is-with-us, am with you always.

 

Brothers and sisters, in the Gospel of Matthew we have

the most direct promises of the presence of God and of Christ,

the presence with us,

the promised presence with us.

With us is God!

 

What to do with

the promise of the presence of God and the presence of Christ,

with us, for all time?

 

I cannot tell you. And there is this:

I dare not even assume that it is something that is necessarily welcome.

You see: anthropologists say that an awful lot of religious ritual – in all religions – is actually about keeping God or the Higher Power in its place.

The idea is: if we do this, God won’t come too close.

But that is not how we as Christians are called to behave.

We are called to welcome the promised presence of God and presence of Christ, with us, for all time,

and (crucially) to let that promised presence make a difference to us.

 

I, God-is-with-us, am with you always.

 

I do want to return for a moment to Matthew the tax collector. We have seen that Jesus’ calling a tax collector caused controversy and even consternation. Why? Because tax collectors, in this time and place, were thought to be all collaborators, doing the dirty work of the occupying power, the Romans. In other words, those around Jesus were convinced of what we would call a conspiracy theory. The conspiracy is this: all those who work for the government are crooks, in it for themselves, not on the side of the people; and the government itself is malign. 

 

The conspiracy is this: all those who work for the government are crooks, in it for themselves, not on the side of the people; and the government itself is malign! That claim – and thousands of variations of it – is something claimed on social media every second of the day. We live in a cynical age. It seems that people have never been more distrustful of – more hostile to – the government and those who work for the government. There are all kinds of moves to fight back against the wicked government, the powers-that-be, or the supposed “elite”.

 

And I feel compelled to say that such cynicism is dangerous.

 

Criticism of the government is of course permitted; it is important; it is a right. But cynicism can corrode us. We can come to enjoy just a bit too much looking down on those we feel have let us down.

 

Remember: Jesus saw through the outer “accidents” of Matthew’s life –

his work, his role, his status;

what his taskmasters demanded of him;

maybe (yes) the short cuts he allowed himself to take –

Jesus saw through all of that and saw…

saw an apostle, one called to be with Jesus.

So let us not let criticism of actions become cynicism for people.

There may be – will be - other hidden apostles out there.

 

There are other hidden apostles.

Maybe you are one of them.

Know yourself with the one who is God-is-with-us.  

Amen.

Harvest Festival and the Harvest of our Lives

 Sermon. 7 September 2025. St John the Evangelist’s, Ovington.

Harvest Festival.

Reading: Philemon 1.1-21

 

When was the last time you sat down and read through a whole book of the Bible?...

 

I have some news for you: in a sense, you just did it.

 

This morning’s first reading is the whole of the book of Philemon (there are diverse pronunciations of that word). We heard verses 1-21 of Philemon, but there is no verse zero (of course), and there is no verse 22. What we have is the whole of the book – by which we mean of course the whole of the letter – of Philemon. And by the letter of Philemon we of course mean Paul’s letter to Philemon. Philemon is the recipient; Paul is the writer. (And scholars do tend to agree that this is a letter than genuinely goes back to Paul, by the way.)

 

So, one thing you can harvest today, right away, is a certain satisfaction for having completed a whole book of the Bible. (But just a gentle note, if you ae tempted to move from satisfaction to smugness: there are at least – at least! - another 65 to go.)

 

The letter is short, but profoundly moving. Paul is writing to Philemon, because Philemon’s slave, Onesimus, has run away and ended up with Paul somehow, and Paul wants – no he really, really wants – he really wants Philemon to receive Onesimus back, not as a slave, but as a friend. So Paul tries to use all he has, to make the argument. He commands; but no, he resists commanding; he pleads; he reminds Philemon that he could command but doesn’t. So Paul is torn, but torn only about how to make the best case for his dear friend, Onesimus.

 

I suggest what we can harvest here is some real insight into Paul, Paul the man. Paul is often thought of as a “cold fish” (and worse than that). Yet here, here he pours he heart out. He does not hide his passionate, warm friendship, both with Philemon and with Onesimus.

 

As is typical, Paul begins with thanksgiving:

“When I remember you in my prayers, I always thank my God because I hear of your love…”

I always thank my God.

What better harvest theme!

It is time to give thanks, it is time for thanksgiving, for, indeed, all good gifts around us, and for hard work by so many to bring us those gifts, and (frankly) for our peace and ease, freeing us to enjoy those gifts.

I always thank my God.

 

I have said it before and I will say it again: if you want the royal road to God, the swiftest road to God, the most direct, it is not hidden; it is the route that comes from thanksgiving.

I always thank my God.

 

There is something we need to note about how Paul describes Onesimus.

First a language lesson, for those who like such.

 

Onésimos [sic] is one word for “useful” in Greek. It comes from ónesis, meaning profit or gain. Paul hints at this, when he says that before The-One-Called-Useful (Onésimos) was useless, but now he is useful. Here he is using different words, it is true. He uses words related to chrestos which means “useful” yes, but “useful” already with a tendency moving towards more than that, towards meaning “good”. “Good and useful” we might say, in English.

 

Now Paul says that

Onesimos was a-chrestos, which means “useless”, “not fit for purpose”,

but has become eu-chrestos, which is stronger even than chrestos.

So we have a hierarchy:

onesimos - useful

chrestos – better than useful, actually good

euchrestos - better than that something or someone who is really good at whatever it is: “just the thing!” “just the person!”

 

Note, then, that

Onesimus was use-less when he was a slave,

and is profoundly use-full as a free man.

And that might seem the wrong way round.

If you could, just for a moment, bracket out all ethical concerns, if you could just think it terms of how it would help you – be honest now – wouldn’t a slave be useful for you?...

After all, they have to do exactly what you tell them to do, when you want them to do it.

Surely a friend is less useful, in that you have to encourage or persuade them to do what you’d like them to do, and even then they may not?

 

The wrong way round.

As a slave, useless;

as a free person, a freed person, useful

(more than useful, more than more than useful, very good, just right).

 

Brothers and sisters, there are harvest themes here.

 

How are we to sow the seed of the love of God, so that we reap the harvest?

 

Today we learn that we can only do it – as Christians, we can only do it – by accepting that we are not God’s slaves, to be bossed around, but God’s friends, God’s free friends, God’s freed friends. It is not that we deserve to be God’s friends. It is not that we have done good deed after good deed after good deed for so long that we cross some line, and God finally relents and says: You have earned your reward; I bestow on you the title of friend. Not that. It is that God has decided, by God’s own inscrutable will, to call us his friends, and to call us as his friends.

 

Not slaves, but friends.

As slaves, frankly useless; as friends, much better than useful.    

 

What kind of harvest are we letting grow to maturity in our own lives?

What kind of harvest are we?

I want to insist it is all right not to know!

Most of the time, we don’t know what harvest we are making possible in the people we meet.

And why should we know what harvest we are making possible in our own lives?

 

You know, from Psalm 23:

“Surely goodness and mercy will follow me, all the days of my life”?

I have a friend who insisted strongly on this. He said: That is the point: the goodness and mercy follow you;

you don’t get to see them!

It is meant to be that way.

 

In short, do not worry what kind of harvest you are preparing out there, in the world. Don’t worry what kind of harvest you own life is yielding.

The best way to ask yourself if you are being useless or useful to God is to ask yourself:

Am I living out of a conviction

that I am a slave of God,

or am I living out of a conviction

that I am (I have been made) a friend of God?

 

Blessed harvest to you all.

Amen.