Hinde Street Methodist Church 11am Sunday 17 th June 2018 Revd Val Reid. 1 Samuel 15: 34 16: 13 2 Corinthians 5: 6-10, Mark 4: 26-34

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1 Hinde Street Methodist Church 11am Sunday 17 th June 2018 Revd Val Reid 1 Samuel 15: 34 16: 13 2 Corinthians 5: 6-10, Mark 4: Here he comes, seen against the light from below, an Adonis furiously front-crawling through the waves. Naked. Well, not quite, but the shorts are skin-coloured. The imagination isn t quite given the evening off. He emerges through the surf, glistening, heaving, magnificent. Poseidon? No trident. Daniel Craig then? No but could this be a come-and-get-me call? Not to you calm down to the 007 franchise. It is Aidan Turner as Ross Poldark, of course. Let the objectification/sexism debates begin. Thus begins the Guardian s review of the new series of Poldark. The Guardian, for heaven s sake! Tongue may be firmly in cheek, but the reviewer has got his finger on the pulse of the nation. How we love a gorgeous hunk. From Mr Darcy, to James Bond, to David Beckham. Gleaming pecs can sell pretty much anything. And it s not new. Three thousand years ago, Samuel anointed Saul as the people s king. Kish a man of wealth had a son whose name was Saul, a handsome young man. There was not a man among the people of Israel more handsome than he. He stood head and shoulders above everyone else. It was the people who wanted a king as we heard in last week s lectionary. Samuel was all too aware of the dangers of vesting power in a single man. Yet he was reconciled to the idea by this Aidan Turner model king. Good looking, tall, no doubt excellent in a swimsuit. Who better to lead the people against the enemy tribes that threatened their territory indeed, their very existence? But Saul turns out to be a problem. Unreliable. Egocentric. Disobedient. God instructs Samuel to choose a new king. 1

2 But Samuel is stuck. Stuck in his grief for the king he chose. Stuck in the emotional investment he has made in Saul. Stuck, perhaps, in the dazzling appearance of the man who looked like a king. At the beginning of Samuel s story, as we heard two weeks ago, it was the old priest Eli who could not see, who was deprived of visions, whose light was burning dim. It was the boy Samuel who saw clearly. Now it is Samuel who is old, and who does not see clearly himself. I wonder if it will come to us all, in time. I ve just finished reading Lincoln in the Bardo. Winner of last year s Booker Prize. It s an extraordinary book do read it if you haven t yet! It s set in February Abraham Lincoln s young son, Willie, has just died. He is laid to rest in a marble crypt in Georgetown cemetery. Outside the civil war rages. In the cemetery, Willie joins a crowd of ghosts who are stuck in limbo the Bardo of the title. The ghosts are stuck because they are in denial about the reality of what has happened to them. When they tell their stories, they talk of being carried off in a sick-box. For a while, as I read, I assumed this was a kind of 19 th century ambulance. Then I realised that, of course, it was a coffin. Only the ghosts couldn t quite bring themselves to use the word. Because that would mean admitting they were dead And the ghosts are stuck, too, because there are things in their lives that they just can t let go of. A relationship unfulfilled. Children left without a mother. A business that needs to be managed. Anger at the way they have been treated. Or have been forgotten. Willie Lincoln is stuck because he absolutely trusts that his parents will come back for him. They promised. The Reverend Everly Thomas knows that he is dead. But he can t let go of his belief in judgement. That somehow, if he leaves this place, he will be judged. And found wanting. He can t bring himself to trust in grace. So he too is stuck in limbo. It s a book that s very funny. And absolutely heart-breaking. If you want to know what happens read it! 2

3 But reading it brought me back again to Samuel, grieving over Saul. What do we have to let go of, in order that something new might happen? Let s have a look at our gospel passage. Jesus shares these two parables with his disciples, as part of his ongoing attempt to share something of what the kingdom of heaven is like. It s a question he gets asked quite a lot. And he doesn t answer it by offering definitions. Or rules. He doesn t try to create a CPD of kingdom behaviour. Instead he tells stories. Parables riddles or enigmatic sayings. They are ambiguous and nuanced. It s up to us to make sense of them. To try to read some of their multiple meanings. In today s lectionary we are given two parables about ecology. And both will tell us something important about the kingdom. If we are prepared to let go of our preconceptions. The kingdom of God is as if someone would scatter seed on the ground, and would sleep and rise night and day, and the seed would sprout and grow, he does not know how. In this parable, the kingdom is not a seed. God is neither the sower, nor the reaper. The kingdom is the process of growing the earth produces of itself. So to inhabit this sort of kingdom, we have to let go of our desire to be in control. To determine the times and the seasons, the numbers and the outcomes. We just have to let it happen. Matthew tells this parable as the story of the wheat and tares. It s about judgement. It s about the harvest when the wheat will be safely gathered in, and the tares will be thrown onto the fire and burned. But that s not how Mark sees it. To inhabit Mark s sort of kingdom, we have to let go of our desire to judge or our fear of being judged. Like poor old Reverend Everly Thomas, we have to find a way to believe in grace. In the second parable the kingdom is like a mustard seed. The smallest of all the seeds on earth. Yet it will grow into a sizable shrub. When Matthew and Luke tell this parable, the tiny seed grows into a great tree. There is, of course, a long history of trees being a symbol of the people of Israel. Usually a mighty cedar of Lebanon. 3

4 Or a fruitful olive tree. But here, in Mark, it s just a shrub. An ordinary, everyday shrub. So we have to let go of our image of being very special, in order to inhabit this kingdom. Just as Samuel had to let go of his Poldark king, and his assumption that it would be the oldest and most handsome of the sons of Jesse who would be God s choice. Only when he could let go of those very human assumptions could he see beneath the surface. See the potential in David, the shepherd boy, the youngest brother. God s unlikely choice. So what do we have to let go of in order that something new might happen? It s a question we can ask on a personal level. On Tuesday Rachel Mann gave the fifth and final Hugh Price Hughes lecture. Her topic was Being transgender in the church today. She talked about the journey into becoming her true self. About having to let go of all the socially constructed assumptions of what a man or a woman should look like and behave like, in order to find herself. She talked about how hard it was for her, back in the 90s, when she would only be offered support and medical intervention, if she would embrace a narrow understanding of what it was to be female. And how she has had to learn to let go of that, in order to be the unique person that she believed God was calling her to be. It s a question we can ask on a political level. What binary assumptions about goodies and baddies, winning and losing, do we have to let go of in order to remain open-minded about what might come out of the Trump Kim summit in Singapore on Tuesday? What prejudices about insiders and outsiders, what commitment to economic criteria, do we need to let go of, in order to fund a society where Grenfell can never happen again? What remainer idealism, what dreams of Empire, might we need to let go of, in order to negotiate the best possible way forward for the UK and for Europe during the Brexit talks? These are not comfortable questions. And what about our church? What about Hinde Street? Do we still think we are a tree, when actually we are just a shrub? What dearly-held images of this place might we have to let go of, in order for something new to happen? But there is something else here which is important. Which we mustn t lose sight of. On Tuesday I went to a breakfast seminar organised by the Council for Christians and Jews, as part of their 75 th anniversary year. It was about the internet was it a good thing or a bad thing in 21 st century society? The first speaker was Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia. He spoke eloquently about the democratisation of information. 4

5 About his vision of a free, accessible, neutral, high quality encyclopaedia for anyone and everyone. And I thought about how I have had to let go of all my old assumptions about the authority of the printed word, about the importance of the physical space of libraries, about the hierarchy of places of learning. That s all old hat now. The second speaker was Julia Hobsbawm. She looked around the packed room, and asked us what does the number 168 represent? It s the number of hours in a week. Even with six billion users of Wikipedia, that never changes. We cannot add a single minute to our hours, our days, our weeks. She talked about the anthropological evidence that 150 is the maximum number of relationships that any single human being can hold. No matter how many friends you have on Facebook. She talked about how diplomats speak about smelling the room that there is no substitute for actually being there, sharing space, the whole history of humanity predicated on being physically present to each other. So yes we have to let go of some things, in order that new things might grow. But there are some things we have to hold on to. Things which are part of what it means to be human. Before the seminar I was chatting to a professor of journalism at the LSE. I bet St Paul would have been tweeting the good news, he told me. Yes, I said. I bet he would. But I bet Jesus wouldn t. Jesus ministry seems to have been based on presence. Sitting down to share a meal. Reaching out to touch a leper. Smearing mud on the eyes of a blind man. Somehow I can t see the incarnate God relying on the internet to reveal to us God s own nature. So when we are thinking about what we need to let go of let s not forget what we need to hold on to. Samuel, in choosing the youngest, humblest son of Jesse, had to hold on to the truth that God keeps on working through human beings. Flawed human beings. God works through Samuel, even though he is dwelling too much on what might have been; even though he is nervous about the consequences of heading to Bethlehem to anoint a new King, while Saul is still alive; even though he judges far too much by appearance. God works through David, even though he doesn t fit in with the expectations of the people; even though he is the grandson of a Moabite immigrant, enemy of Israel; even though he just like Saul turns out to be unreliable, egocentric, disobedient. 5

6 And that shrub, that grows out of the tiny mustard seed. It may not be a great, glorious, spreading tree. But it can still offer shelter to all the birds of the air; The birds who build their nests in its shadow. Let s hold on to that image. Because that says something really important about what we are really for. So when I think about the future of Hinde Street or indeed, the future of humanity I don t give up hope. We are still human beings. We still have the capacity to love as well as to hate. We still have the capacity to be kind. What new technology offers us as Jimmy Wales said on Tuesday is simply a wider platform to be ourselves. So how can we use technology to bring people who profoundly disagree with each other together in debate? How can we use it not to reinforce our filter bubbles, but to open up our minds to things we don t know, and think we probably won t like? How can we let go of what holds us back, and hold on to what lets us flourish? Paul seems to have got hold of a profound truth here: If anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see everything has become new! BUT All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation. Some things never change. The grace of God, revealed in a human being, is a constant. And so is our mission to share that grace in our fractured world. One way or another. Amen. 6