On God the Lover's love for Israel, and on that "Israel" too.

Sermon. 03/08/2025. St John the Evangelist, Ovington,

Trinity 7 (Year C. OT: Continuous Track)

 

Hosea 11:1-11

 

You may remember that I said that in this long season of Green, this year the Old Testament readings follow a cycle of their own. We make our way through some edited highlights of some Old Testament books. So there’ s a good reason to concentrate, at least from time to time, on the Old Testament reading. This I shall do today.

 

Hosea hears God proclaim:

“When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I called my son.”

Moving stuff.

 

One thing I have learned over the years, and all the more so over recent weeks, is that many people struggle with that very word, “Israel”. It’s not that people are “against”, or simply “for”. Rather it’s a word people don’t always know what to do with. In truth, it is a word which means a whole string of things. So I think it does make sense to pause, and spell out the range of meanings of the very word, “Israel”. These are preliminaries, but – as I know what I am going to say, I may as well warn you – the preliminaries will take up the greater part of what I have to say. If you are going to lay something out, you have to lay it all out.

 

1.    Israel is firstly a proper noun. It is the name of a person. Genesis is dominated by the stories of Abraham, his son Isaac, and his son Jacob. And another name for Jacob is Israel. “Israel” does mean something like “he struggles with God”, which is intriguing in itself. But that intrigue is for another time.

2.     Secondly, Israel is the name for a whole people. When Hosea has God say: “When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I called my son”, the “son” in question is not the person, Jacob-Israel. Jacob is long deceased. Here he is referring to the whole people, afflicted by slavery in Egypt, who are led by Moses through the Red Sea into the wilderness and freedom. They are the distant descendants of the person Jacob-Israel. We see this especially in that they are in twelve tribes. And (with some complications) the twelve tribes are named after the twelve sons of Joseph, and Joseph was the son of… (who else?) Jacob-Israel.

3.    Thirdly, when the people freed from slavery finally do settle in the Promised Land, things – we can be blunt about it – things, by and large, do not go well. For a while, a united kingdom does emerge, and it’s name is Israel. But it’s not too long before the united kingdom divides into two. The Northern kingdom goes by different names. But the most usual name is, yes, “Israel”. Israel then stands for one of the two Kingdoms of the divided People. (The Southern Kingdom is called Judah.)

4.    Fourthly, when times are good in the land, and when times are hard in the land, we come close to having to say that the Land itself is a character in the story of the People Israel. In the story as we have it, it is a land promised to Abraham and Sarah, and, once the promise is made, it changes everything. It changes the land. So Israel can be a shorthand for “the Land of Israel”. Think of Land with a capital L; it’s Eretz Yisrael in Hebrew. I say again: it is a character in its own right. For example, if the People are unfaithful, God does at times say he will send them into exile. But at other times it is expressed differently: the Land itself will spew them out (e.g. Leviticus 18.28).

It isn’t hard to say why this is the case. It is because it is stressed over and over that the Land is God’s gift to the People, a living gift as it were. It is not the People’s natural right. God chooses to give it to them – to “gift” it to them – so that God, People, and Land can form a virtuous circle. So every time a member of the People of Israel plucks grain, or eats a grape, or works the fields, or enjoys a feast, it’s as if the Land itself encourages them to remember God and give thanks.

 

These are the biblical uses of the word “Israel”. You can see that already it is pretty complicated. Whenever we read in the Bible “Israel”, we may do well to ask: is this the person; is this the whole people; is this the nation united; is this the Northern kingdom over against the Southern; is this Land itself (whatever is happening to the People)?

 

But we are not done with the preliminaries yet. For, on top of all that I have said, we know that we of course live many centuries later. And, for us ,“Israel” has yet other meanings.

 

5.    So, fifthly, Israel today means a nation state. The State of Israel (Medinat Yisrael in Hebrew; Medinat Yisrael not Eretz Yisrael). It was founded in 1948, by decisions of the United Nations. It was one of, well, any number of nations formed in the second half of the 20^th century – the decades when the Empires came to an end. (For comparison, India became an independent republic in 1950; Nigeria became independent in 1960.)

6.    Sixthly, it has to be said that when newsreaders and commentators today say “Israel”, they typically don’t exactly mean “the State of Israel”. They really mean more concretely: “the current government of the State of Israel”. The State of Israel is a democracy. Some would want to qualify that. But the point is that its government changes. (In fact, governments change an awful lot in Israel; they have more elections than most other nations.) This confusion - this conflation - between the fifth and the sixth meanings of Israel (the State of Israel, and the current government of the State of Israel) is a common one. To be honest, it is the kind of thing that happens all the time in commentary. If we say “the UK has improved its relations with Japan, but China has become more critical of Belgium” (I’m deliberately inventing an example, so that we don’t get distracted), each time we don’t really mean the sovereign states in question, in all their glorious and pristine abstraction, we mean the current governments of the UK, Japan, China, and France. So really a handful of powerful people. There is nothing suspicious or dishonourable about conflating these two meanings. But it can lead to misunderstandings, and mis-steps in conversations and debates.

 

The State of Israel is of course the national home of the Jewish People, though/and it has always had a substantial minority who are not Jewish. The United Nations planned it that way, based on earlier understandings emanating from our governments in the UK. In that sense, then, there is a link between the modern meanings of Israel and the biblical meanings. And that link is the Jewish People. But! But the links are at each point very complicated, multisided, and disputed.

 

This is important. If someone says: “I defend the right of the State of Israel to exist”, it is vital that we don’t hear that in itself as saying: “God promised this Land to the Jews as descendants of Abraham, and that is all there is to it”. That’s collapsing almost all the meanings of “Israel” into one. Now, such people do exist – people that will say they defend the right of the State of Israel to exist because of promises in the Bible. But many and most people who want to defend that right of Israel’s existence don’t believe that in that simple way, if they believe it at all. By the way, the name for someone who defends the right of the State of Israel to exist, because of a belief in the right of the Jewish people to self-determination, is “Zionist”. That is what a “Zionist” is. That is all that “Zionism” means. It does not mean someone who supports the current policies of the government of the State of Israel.

 

Another thing is just as important. It is this: criticism of the current government if the State of Israel is allowed, and can be timely and necessary. Many of us say it is timely and necessary. Such criticism is not anti-Jewish or antisemitic. It’s just better to be clear that you are criticising the current government, and not the State as such. And there would be an exception: if you use unequal scales. If, for example, you say that the nations of the world have to get involved in messy compromises and even militarism as they protect their people (as that is how life is), and you also say that the regime of the State of Israel must be perfect, or it forfeits the right to exist, then you are using unequal scales, and that would be anti-Jewish. But if you criticise the current government of the State of Israel as you would and do criticise other nations, then you need have no anxiety that you are being anti-Jewish.  

 

We are nearly done with the preliminaries(!) To sum up: if you read “Israel” in the Bible, ask which meaning applies on this occasion (person, People, united kingdom, Northern kingdom, Land itself), and if you speak of “Israel”, the modern nation, be clear if you really mean the current government of the modern nation (and don’t be afraid to repeat that phrase ad nauseum to avoid misunderstanding).

 

“When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I called my son.”

 

I hope we can now both understand, and be even more moved by these words.

 

Hosea is prophesying against the Northern Kingdom (which is “Israel” of course!). He says that God says that they have gone after other gods. They have lost themselves to idolatry. And for this Hosea has God speak words of judgement, and (we may as well say it) of condemnation. The Kingdom of Israel is like an unfaithful spouse. The Kingdom of Israel has failed. The message of Hosea is of divorce. It’s over between God and God’s People.

 

Except of course it isn’t.

 

In truth, this claim – this judgement, this condemnation – is also part of the preliminaries. It is a preliminary that the People have gone after other gods dead gods, who are not the Living God, and that some sort of lust for dead gods has taken over. It’s a preliminary that, because of this, God would be within God’s rights to disown them. Preliminary, because… it turns out… that is not God’s will. God says – and it’s there in the text; it is not hidden –

 

“I can’t help myself. I still love my People. I am still going to stick with them, and help them, and guide them.”

 

Just listen to God. This is God speaking to the people of the covenant in the 8^th century before Christ, and this is God speaking to the Church in 2025, and this is God speaking to you:

 

“How can I give you up…?
    How can I hand you over…?...
My heart recoils within me;
    my compassion grows warm and tender.
I will not execute my fierce anger…
for I am God and no mortal,
    the Holy One in your midst,
    and I will not come in wrath.”

 

In other words:

“I can’t help myself.

I love you.

I am devoted to you.

I stick with you.

I can’t help myself.”

 

Now, this – this - is the Word of the Lord.

Amen.

 

Sermon for Trinity Sunday: the Practical Heart of the Christian Way

 Trinity Sunday, 04/06/2023.

 

Isaiah 40:12-17, 27-end

[2 Corinthians 13:11-13]

Matthew 28:16-20

 

It’s Trinity Sunday. There’s a joke. An old joke, a stale joke maybe. At least some of you will have heard it before. It says that a priest, a lovely pastor but not intellectually gifted,  got into the pulpit on Trinity Sunday, and said:

 

“In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

The Trinity!

The Trinity is a mystery!

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.”

 

Well, that was more laughter than I was expecting. I flagged it up as something of a stale joke. In fact, while I am all for comedy, I go further: it is a joke I hate.

 

I hate the idea - widespread though it be – that the doctrine of the Trinity is something for intellectuals only.

I hate the idea – widespread though it be – that the doctrine of the Trinity is something for the obsessives, the keenies only.

I hate the idea – widespread though it be – most of all I hate the idea that the doctrine of the Trinity is abstract.

 

So yesterday morning I wrote a sermon, setting out why I believe the doctrine of the Trinity is not abstract. But! But it did not flow. (And it if doesn’t flow for me, it surely cannot flow for you.) I pondered prayerfully why. It came to me it was because all the time I was trying to make some kind of argument about how the doctrine is not abstract, I was of course engaging with the idea that the doctrine is abstract. So it did not work as a sermon. A sermon proclaims the gospel - the joy, the simplicity, and the compassion of the Holy Gospel. And nothing else.

 

We need to take a step back. We need to admit that, somehow, we find that for us in the West it has become natural to think of the doctrine of the Trinity as an abstraction for intellectuals or for keenies. We feel in our bones – we don’t need to articulate it, we feel it in our bones – that it does not impact upon our lives.

 

So let us take ourselves away for a moment from the West. Let us imagine ourselves in the East, in the world where Eastern Orthodoxy is the air we breathe. You may think of Russia or Ukraine (though of course you may think of those for not-good reasons). You may though also think of Bulgaria, Serbia, Romania, Greece or Cyrpus. What do we find?

 

First, we find that the service is long. There is no embarrassment about this. The idea is that worship is not something you “fit in” to your schedule. Worship takes you into heaven. That is a journey that cannot be rushed. Consider this prayer, as the gifts of bread and wine are brought in:

 

We who in a mystery represent the Cherubim

and sing the thrice-holy hymn to the live-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.

 

There is practical wisdom here. Strange as it may seem, it takes time for us (for most of us) to be willing to lay aside all the cares of this world.

 

Second, there is much repetition. There is no embarrassment about this. There is no reason to think the journey to heaven is a simple line from A and B. And surely we don’t just think of God as holy, we experience God as holy, as we repeat:

           Holy God

           Holy, strong

           Holy and immortal,

have mercy upon us.

 

Holy God

           Holy, strong

           Holy and immortal,

have mercy upon us.

 

Holy God

           Holy, strong

           Holy and immortal,

have mercy upon us.

 

There is practical wisdom here. Our journey through this life itself is not a straight line either. It is more like a spiral. We revisit the same themes, over and over, only from a different perspective.

 

Third, we find that every word, or almost every word, is not spoken but chanted. There is no embarrassment about this. The idea here is that worship is not about propositions that we analyse and discuss, and then agree or disagree with. Worship is more like making a work of art. It involves imagination and memory, always. There is practical wisdom here. Remember how much easier it is to remember a song than words merely spoken.

 

Fourth, this is likely to apply to the Creed itself. The Creed may be said,  but is likely to be chanted – this because the Creed too is not really about propositions, that we might find in mathematics or logic. In the service in Greek, the Creed is called To Symbolon tes Pisteos. “The symbol of faith.”

Symbol. So you see it really isn’t:

“Here are the core sentences about what we have worked out with our analyses of God”.

It is much more:

“Here we bring together our wisest counsel about who it is we trust”.

 

And, in the Creed-Symbol, the Greek Pisteuo eis (“I believe in”) means less:

“My belief-system deduces that”

and more:

“I place my trust in…”

I place my trust in the Father, who…

I place my trust in the Son, who…

I place my trust in the Spirit, who…

 

This is our Creed-Symbol too (it’s the same Creed).[1] We use the word “Creed”, which comes from the Latin, credo, “I believe”. And some say that credo comes from two words, cor, do. This means it means: “I give my heart to”. And there is wisdom here. If you come to church for purely cultural reasons, you are welcome and you always will be. But if you come here for more, I suggest it is to learn to place your trust where your trust truly belongs, to give your heart to whom you can trust utterly.

 

And, fifth, in the service, the Creed-Symbol has its own introduction. It is a dialogue between priest or deacon and people. It goes like this.

 

[Priest:]         Peace to all!

[People:]       And to your Spirit!

[Deacon:]      Let us love one another, that with one mind we may confess:

[People:]       Father, Son and Holy Spirit, Trinity consubstantial and undivided.

 

And there is wisdom here. Placing our trust in Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, only makes sense if we already hope or want to be committed to loving one another. And, indeed, the other way round is as true: placing our trust in Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is what enables us to love one another - love being more than a feeling, love being an entire disposition.

 

“Let us love one another, that with one mind we may confess /

Father, Son and Holy Spirit…”

Eastern Orthodoxy is perhaps not for everyone. I get that. So let us return to the West. I do want to say that I believe this understanding is deeply biblical. If I were to choose one Bible verse to show the doctrine of the Trinity within the Bible, in all candour, it would not be any of our readings today. It would be the gloriously simply monosyllabic: “God is love”. That’s from 1 John 4:8.

 

Remember that, for Christians, when we meet with God, we really meet with God. We don’t meet with an idea of God. We don’t meet with an idea from God. We do not meet God pretending to have such and such a nature, because that is what God considers edifying for creatures. No. It is authentically God whom we meet, and who calls us into intimacy with God. And this means – this must mean - that God is love, even before creation, even outside of creation. God is love, and therefore God is relationship, in Godself.

 

And, I say again, this is not an abstract idea. It is not a fact we might stumble on, which leaves us unaffected. Rather, this is an invitation.

 

Here some more from 1 John [4:7f]:

“Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love.”

 

Blessed Feast. Amen.

 

---

[1] I am naturally aware of the Filioque exception, but thought it would deflect from the main line to mention this.

Sermon: Our Need for the Prologue to John

 

Sermon. St Mary’s Little Ilford. 25.12.20 (live-streamed only).

Christmas Day

John 1.1-14

 

As the Church throughout the world has her traditions, so individual churches have their traditions. You know the sort of thing. These are the expected carols. The tree goes up then and goes there, and is taken down then. We call the candle of the Third Sunday of Advent the pink, no the rose, no the pink, no the rose candle.

 

Well, families and persons have their traditions too. (I am not telling you anything you do not know.) Here is one of mine. Whenever I preach on Christmas Day on today’s Gospel reading, I first apologise. I apologise in case there are people in the congregation, perhaps guests (who are very welcome), who came to church precisely to hear what gets called “the traditional Christmas story”. You know its parts: the angels, their song, the shepherds, their listening, the Holy Family, the journeys, the lack of room, the child bound up safe in a manger. You get none of that in today’s Gospel. None. So I always allow for the possibility of disappointment, at precisely this point in the service. (And this year I can’t see quite how disappointed you are! And I am quite a connoisseur of your disappointed expressions, for reasons to obvious to name!)

 

Some may even feel more than disappointment. They may feel a frustration bordering on resentment. “Why do we have to have this Gospel reading?” they may be thinking.

·        They may think: it’s poetry, doubtless melodious in the original, but it has no point of contact with my life.

·        They may think: it’s abstract theology, that just shows us that some people in the early church had too much time on their hands, and turned to empty speculation about the inner workings of Gd.

·        They may think: in truth it’s ideology. It’s a power thing. All that talk about our Founder (and only our Founder) being one with Gd and being Gd is just an elevated way of saying “Our Gd is bigger than your god”.

Well, I won’t surprise you one tiny iota, if I say that any who are thinking any of these things have got things really rather wrong. I go further: I feel this Gospel reading - this Prologue to John – this headline message to the whole Gospel of John - may be just what we need to hear, here and now.

 

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with Gd, and the Word was Gd… And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen [the Word’s] glory…”

 

The Word was with Gd, and the Word was Gd. There is in truth nothing abstract here. Here is Gd’s revelation, Gd’s promise to us that Gd is (in Gdself) communication. Even before – outside of – the creation of the universe, Gd is love and communicative Love. It is not so much that we find love in the world (though we do), as that we find the world in Love.

 

Anything but abstract, here is our bedrock hope. If in this strangest of all years, at this strangest of all Christmasses, we have found ourselves close to rock-bottom, then we need to hear and dwell on the fact that at the bottom is this Rock. This. Rock. Love, communicative love - love which finds the words, the gestures, the silences, the actions, the songs, the dances which show love, which show you how loved you are – this love, in all its varieties, is there to be found and always will be. Because it is out of such communicative Love that the world is made, that you are made. 

Preachers often preach about the love of Gd. Perhaps too often. In any event, we can hear the words of the love of Gd, and have them wash over us. We can think: "That's the reference to Gd's love, done and dusted. So far, so predictable." So I cannot know if anything that I say here will hit home. But I do insist: whether we can hear it fully or not, here is bed-rock. Here is the rock. 

 

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with Gd, and the Word was Gd… And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen [the Word’s] glory…”

 

That the Word became flesh is

·        both a natural development of the Hebrew story, because in that story Gd is constantly accommodating Gdself to be alongside weak and foolish human beings,

·        and something utterly shocking, for flesh is weak.

We know it, brothers and sisters. Our flesh is weak. Not only is it vulnerable to knives and guns and such, but this year we have had it put right in front of our eyes how our flesh is vulnerable to microscopic attack, how invisible entities that are so insubstantial that biologists aren’t even sure they can be called organisms in their own right, can enter into our flesh, and send us into agony, and kill us. (Over time, you wouldn’t thank me for dressing this up.)

 

Gd knows just how weak we are. In our weakness (in all of its parts) we have not shocked Gd, or let Gd down. Gd knows our weakness. From the inside Gd knows – is acquainted with – our weakness (all its parts). He is in solidarity with us, and our anxieties and sadness, our legitimate anxieties and sadness. We are flesh, and Gd knows how fleshly flesh is.

 

“And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen [the Word’s] glory…”

 

Do we see the Word’s glory? Our instinctive answer may be: No. Not now, no. The glory has departed. All we get to do is muddle through at best, and desperately fight stress, and heaviness of heart, and terrors, and harm, and pain, at worst. No glory here. Except there is – there is – glory here. When we care for each other, picking up the phone (as you do). When we care for ourselves and others, donating to food banks and refugee organisations (as you do). When we care for the world by speaking out about the wrongness of racism and all the rest of it (as you do)…

if we have eyes to see – when we have eyes to see – there is the Glory of Gd the Word.

 

Not that that is all is all that is to be said about the Glory of Gd the Word. We are here – and I do want to say that we are all “here”, we are gathered as one - to worship. We are drawn to worship. We know – even if we don’t say it – we know that Gd is attractive, is beautiful, draws us in. Our orientation to worship already intimates the Glory that is there to greet us. And this is our birth-right. (That’s a message in today’s Gospel too; I invite you to read it over again in the course of the day.)

 

It is true that so many of the prompts that make for the sense of the glorious worship of the Glorious One are diminished or just plain absent right now.

·        No singing together.

·        No processions or elaborate liturgical flow.

·        And, saddest of all (or at least joint first with not singing together – I am a realist), no sharing of a meal of bread and wine, such as has sustained us, year in, year out.

But Gd is unchanged.

 

The angels, their song, the shepherds, their listening, the Holy Family, the  journeys, the lack of room, the child bound up safe in a manger. We have given you none of that in today’s Gospel. But if ever there were a need to replace the microscope, which examines the story in its finest details, with the telescope, which enables us to see the biggest possible picture, to see the panorama, that need would be ours today.

 

Seeing the panorama

·        reveals Gd is Love, is communicative Love, with a longing to communicate love to you, not because you’re always simply lovely, but because that is who Gd is;

·        reveals that Gd knows what it is to be flesh, to be weak as flesh, and so is alongside us in our weakness (in all its parts);

·        reveals that Gd’s Glory is found in every single act of kindness, and overflows (precedes) all our actions and intentions, such that Gd is saying to us always, in season and out of season, in church and out of church, in pandemic and out of pandemic, “Come to my Glory, bathe in my Glory, rest in my Glory".

 

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with Gd, and the Word was Gd… And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen [the Word’s] glory…”

 

Merry Christmas. Christ is born. Glorify him. Amen.

Sermon: Knowing Gd (At The) Well

Sermon. St Michael and All Angels. 15 March 2020.  

Lent 3

John 4.5-42 

Jesus meets the Samaritan woman by the well. Much could be said – much no doubt is being said at precisely this moment up and down the country– about what the Jews of Jesus’ day thought of non-Jews in general and Samaritans in particular. Much could be said – and not doubt is being said at precisely this moment – about the attitude of men in Jesus’ day towards women. And at least as much can be said as to whether the woman here, with her history of husbands, was a great sinner, or more likely to have had a huge dose of bad luck, or of abuse. These are all good themes. For another time.  

What I want to bring today is that the well is a character in its own right. The Holy Land is desert country, with a thin strip of fertile ground. Water is always precious (we too are a little more aware of this than normal). Wells are always extra precious. So vital – literally life-giving – is water, and so rare are wells, that wells might be seen as both the banks and the market-places of the rural Holy Land of Jesus’ day. Everyone in the area would know where Jacob’s well was.  By the way, we still do.  

But more than that, everyone would know the stories attached to wells, sometimes of war, sometimes of love. It was at a well that Abraham’s servant met Rebecca, who gave him water, and who, through that encounter, goes on to become the wife of Isaac.  So wells are not just water-delivery devices, not just as important as banks and as oft-used as market-places, they are also places were intimacy is possible. Where one person can speak to another, over a drink of water. Indeed, where courtship might take place.  

So this is indeed a set-up. I mean the story is set up for us to expect an intimate encounter. Here it is not courtship, and no wedding follows. But I want to suggest that, though not sexual, it is no less intimate than courtship. I say this because this is clearly how the woman experienced it. “He told me everything I had ever done.” Jesus saw her, saw her life. And note: saw her without any shaming. Neither part speaks of shame. The woman’s shame is something we may read into the story. She was fully seen as she truly was. She was fully known. To be fully known is intimacy. This intimacy is promised for us, too.

   

* 

Jesus also says: “We [Jews] worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews.” Here too the theme is intimacy. This is, I admit, a little harder to explain. I know this may sound like it’s just an expression of superiority or even exclusiveness, but it need not be anything of the sort.  

People standing in the Jewish tradition truly know Gd, Jesus says. And to know Gd in the Bible does not mean to understand Gd. It does not mean to have the right thoughts about Gd, the right definition and terms. It means to be acquainted with Gd. To be with Gd. And, even, yes, surely, to have intimacy with Gd. Some of you will remember from the older translations that “to know” in the Bible can sometimes even mean “to have sexual relations with”. So if Jewish people know Gd, it means they have all they need for all good proper life-giving intimacy with Gd. Indeed, surely we need to speak of the miracle of intimacy with Gd. It is a gift Gd gives.  

There still seems to be something harsh about Jesus’ words here. Jews have intimacy with Gd as Gd wills it; Samaritans do not. Why does Jesus say this?  

Different answers are possible. Let us look at one thing: what separated the Jews and the Samaritans when it comes to revelation. We know this. Again, we know this because it applies to this day. Samaritans believed and believe that revelation is found only in the five books of Moses, from Genesis to Deuteronomy, which I have often called “Torah”. Jews believed and believe that revelation is also found – if differently found - in the writings of the Prophets and the Psalms and other later texts.  

That, by the way, is the reason the Samaritans insist that the Holy Mountain is Mount Gerizim and not Mount Zion in Jerusalem. Gerizim is mentioned in Torah; Jerusalem isn’t.  

There is more: in Jesus’ day it may well not have been settled quite which books made up the third section of the Jewish Bible, the Writings.  

So simply put: Jews believed that revelation goes on. It is not closed. It is not all settled. We both know Gd and we go on getting to know Gd.  

We both know Gd, and we go on getting to know Gd. This is the promise that we Christians share with Jews. Of course, John’s Gospel insists strongly that the new story of our going on to get to know Gd is intimately bound up with Jesus himself. For us, this story itself comes out of the middle of revelation. But the core point is one, for Jews and Christians alike: we both know Gd and we go on getting to know Gd.  

Brothers and sisters, we are going to need to hold on to this truth.  

For a matter of months (at least) our worship here will be different (at least). I can tell you: I find it weird. It is not a minor adjustment, being forbidden to touch. And we know that ahead we may not be able to gather. It is a near-certainty that we will not be able to take the sacrament to some people in their homes, at least not without a great rigmarole. Principal pastoral care will probably be by phone. And these are but the direct consequences of the virus Covid19. Dare we even name the indirect consequences? The people with other medical needs which cannot be met. The companies which will collapse. The things we will have to do without.  

We will be called upon to pray for our nation facing a clear and physical crisis, and it will be harder to pray together as we should wish. This is painful.  

So, here, together, today, let us take stock.  

Even now, Gd goes on being Gd.  

The promise of intimacy with Gd is unchanged.  

Today and soon, we may well feel that we have to come to know Gd away from our usual practices and comforts.  

We may feel we are starting from scratch.  

But Gd knows us fully and sees our lives in full.  

And our salvation is from the Jews.  

This means: our salvation is from those who first believed that the revelation, the intimacy, goes on.  

We are called, as yesterday so today, as today so tomorrow,  

both to know Gd and to go on getting to know Gd.  

Amen.