Now large crowds were traveling with Jesus; and he turned and said to them, “Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple. Whoever does not carry the cross and follow me cannot be my disciple.

“For which of you, intending to build a tower, does not first sit down and estimate the cost, to see whether he has enough to complete it? Otherwise, when he has laid a foundation and is not able to finish, all who see it will begin to ridicule him, saying, ‘This fellow began to build and was not able to finish.’ Or what king, going out to wage war against another king, will not sit down first and consider whether he is able with ten thousand to oppose the one who comes against him with twenty thousand? If he cannot, then, while the other is still far away, he sends a delegation and asks for the terms of peace.

“So therefore, none of you can become my disciple if you do not give up all your possessions.”

Sometime ago, I came across a passage that refers to early saints in the Byzantine period in Jerusalem in an article by John Wilkinson – former dean of St. George’s College, Jerusalem, in the 1970s. He writes about how a reputation of holiness in monastic traditions was gained by the monks and nuns in Palestine after Constantine’s conversion. He says

“the desert of Judea to the east of Jerusalem became a school of monks whose nationalities were Latins, Persians, Indians, Ethiopians and Armenians. Since they were out in the desert, the monks sometimes had great influence over Bedouin tribes, and St. Euthymius, one of the greatest Armenian monks, converted Peter Aspebet, an Arab exiled from Persia, and had him made bishop of his tribe.”

Now guess what the diocese was called “the Camp” – That is your kind of diocese.

Now of course we all know that all humanity is in fact called to “the Camp” of Jesus. We all believe and trust as we confess in this place that we are part of Jesus’ camp too, and that is not just because of the costumes that we like to wear. We celebrate here, by means of divine worship, our call to be part of the Camp of Jesus. During my time here, our celebrations were often interrupted by sumptuous dinners. And it is worthwhile reminding the puritans – supposing any to have penetrated the usually secure defences of St. Paul’s – that if there is to be any true association between these two forms of celebration, divine worship and eating, as, in the Christian and indeed other traditions there very properly is, then not only the worship, but also the food, the dress and the costumes, need to be worthy of a feast.

However, there could occur a momentary misgiving, conceivably of a puritanical sort, when we come to hear the beatitudes from the sermon on the mount, the subject of our second lesson this evening, when, we hear how – to use words from Hebrews – the poor, the pious, the righteous and others are “commended by their faith.”

You will be glad to know that I did not research too much into the matter, as others may do when discharging this responsibility of preaching. But, I am also reminded of another famous list of names found at the beginning of Matthew’s Gospel, which tells the ancestry of Jesus Christ. Matthew’s genealogy could be a consolation to us here, for I presume that those who are here this evening could hardly have worse fortune, on the score of ancestors, than Jesus did. Matthew counted few worthies, but otherwise a collection of what could be considered rapists, adulterers, murderers and traitors. This of course only shows that you do not have to have a good lineage after all to turn out saintly at the end.

Our celebration today is of course a ritual and formal affair of thanksgiving, but formal and ritual as it may be, there is no reason why it should lack honesty. There is indeed a danger of religious celebration, which is at once exaggerated in piety but yet empty-headed as if we need the reassurance of a past, that exceeds morally any reasonable standard we would aspire to today. The Church is, no doubt, ordinarily sinful now. It does not need to represent itself as having been perfect before. I am not obviously saying these things inappropriately, but just to remind ourselves a bit of why we are here, why we pray, and indeed what it means to be a member of “the camp of Jesus,” if you wish. There are those who would think of the necessity of moral probity that assures us of saintly award and membership in the body of Jesus.

But, the Beatitudes it seems to me are pointing in another direction. They are not simply rules for living the moral life as much as they are a reminder of what it means to be honest, to know where you stand, and to know how you go about doing your mission as a church. There are those around us who feel they cannot rely on anything, and the things that they have accomplished for themselves in life do not really provide them with any meaning any more.

But, Jesus, says: “blest are the poor in spirit, theirs is the kingdom.” There are those who are in great amount of grief and loss and do not know where to look and where to turn; they feel lonely and lost; but Jesus says: “blest are those who mourn, they shall be comforted.” There are those among us who think that they can no longer offer much, they are no longer capable of doing much, and who do not have high hopes of the immediate future; and Jesus says: “blest are the meek, they shall inherit the earth.” There are angry people around us, who do not like to see the injustices done to so many in our society, and in the world at large, but try to carry grudges even against the perpetrators of injustice, and Jesus says: “blest are the merciful and the peacemakers; the merciful shall find mercy, and the peacemakers will be called children of God.”

Jesus turns to the crowd, and turns to us, and he says where are you in all of this? And trying to be honest about where you are, what you are and look inside yourselves is when we begin to be good stewards of the Gospel, when we begin to do our mission well. When we question ourselves like this, the question opens up for others to see where we are, and to ask the same question for themselves. In all the difficult situations that people find themselves in our world today, the question will always remain: If this is where we find ourselves. If this is where we are, and what we are, then is there anyone around who knows, understands and accepts us and gives us a future? The more we close our lives and defend it from failure and claim moral probity, the less room there is for us even to ask whether there is any who really cares for us. We end up without the need of anyone else and God becomes limited to our own man-made temples.

Is there anyone who cares for us, in whom we find our future? That is the question of your mission here. And the answer that we carry is yes … all the promises of God are held by the “yes” of Jesus Christ. He is to be found where we are found. Where the poor in spirit, the meek, the mourners, the merciful, and hungry for justice, there he is too. But, when we share that answer to the world around us, we do so with the knowledge that Jesus is already there to be uncovered. We are not simply adding him ourselves, and there is something for us to learn about Jesus from those who are listening to us too, because we never get it all fully right ourselves, and we are hungry ourselves to have a word of hope from others, a word that teaches us more about who Jesus is and where he is to be found. Our mission is never a one-way line; it is always a two-way reciprocal line with a challenge turning back at us to enlarge our hearts.

It is the relationship that makes us what we are, because ultimately the holy God we serve and love, the holy God who comes among us in sacrifice and gift in Jesus, is a God of relation, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. And we, in a very distant way, reflect something of that, as we grow in faith we are drawn more deeply into that relationship. And this relationship calls us to ask the question, which this Church has been good at asking: “who has been forgotten?” This is what you stand for.

Just like Mary reminds us in the Magnificat: God has remembered his mercy and has sought out the forgotten. And to seek the forgotten is to renew our compassion and service in our society; but, this can only be done when we get to know where the roots of human beauty and dignity are to be found. And the knowledge of the roots of human beauty and dignity grows on the soil of contemplation, visible in celebration as we do even now, and even in the face of danger, terror and death we never cease from that trust and confidence. We come together to pray, to be mindful and feel ourselves into the perspective of Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit, that our remembering might be a sign of God’s remembering for the lost in the wilderness of our world. A life of service, contemplation, celebration and seeking the lost and forgotten … Here is a mission and a challenge for all of us.

“My people have changed their glory for something that does not profit,” we heard in the book of Jeremiah. The people of Israel have gone after worthless things. The sense of drama in the Old Testament is always pointing to how the people of Israel not just put themselves as the centre of the stage of their own drama, but that even God in this drama ends up occasionally being excluded or standing in a suitably subordinate and decorative position whether in the shape of the golden calf or Baal.

“Those who handle the law did not know me; the rulers transgressed against me; the prophets prophesied by Baal, and went after things that do not profit.” The people of Israel are not content to know where they stand: “a plentiful land to eat its fruit and its good things” as a gift, but they are eager to sort out things for themselves without God – a bit like our secular modern world. We want to dictate what happens on the dramatic stage of our lives. The people of God have been given a task, and it is a dramatic and essential one, that of being a light to lighten the nations. But, the nagging suspicion remains: what if this is not quite as important as it looks? And so, whilst we are at it and as a matter of pure interest – why can’t we just dig our own cisterns?

But, God in Jeremiah tells us that without the immediate help of God to pull the people up short here, the cisterns are cracked and cannot contain water, the people have become worthless themselves and have gone for things that do not profit. And the same applies to us, if the definitions are not provided for us we have to provide our own solutions to the problems that come around our way. Or, in the language of the Gospel of today, we can come to the banquet meal and sit at the places of honour. We can without too much difficulty construct an eminently satisfying scenario for our world in which other people ought to sit at places determined in accordance to our needs. The truth is that we no less gleefully than the people of Israel in Jeremiah or the guests at the dinner in the gospel position ourselves in the centre, and insist that the reality of those around us depends upon our good pleasure, and we become the centre of attention, not God. Similarly, today, priests, doctors, and teachers have an important role to play; but they all find it hard to avoid their own revision of their environment. But, as they used to say in England, priests spend a lot of energy giving perfect answers to questions that no one is asking.

Sooner, or later, as is the case with our modern culture today, we will come to face the fact that there are other people around us who will not accept what we have designed for them. They will not accept our dictating, in as much as we will not accept their dictating. They might even come to tell us that our own seat is not the seat of honour in the front. We will face resistance, the resistance of the difference of each one of us. We may pigeonhole people as those who deserve and those who do not. We even may pigeonhole God as simply a figment of our imagination. But, we have not yet started the process of learning. Where is glory to be found? “My people have changed their glory for something that does not profit.”

One of the ironies of the gospel story today is that it shows how people are solitary individuals when they are in the company of others at a meal. The guests who come to the meal discover that they are not the centre of the gathering; they are left solitary. They discover solitude in the midst of being in the community. But, it is only when we discover this solitary character of our lives and accept it, can we begin to be serious about our humanity. When our egoism is checked and questioned, we begin to see ourselves in perspective. The question is will we allow this distancing, this solitude, to be the space where we grow in God and the space of our true freedom.

The people of Israel in Jeremiah we are told have become worthless themselves. To be worthwhile is to find that space where we can grow in God. That is when we start realizing that our individualism is a measure of our uniqueness too, and in his infinite humility, God works with this freedom of each and every one of us. The vocation of the People of Israel is not that they should obliterate themselves in God, however much it might have felt like that. God calls them to be more, not less, themselves. The Holy Spirit calls us to be more not less ourselves, the bearers of our names.

On the other hand, however enlivening this may sound, we need to constantly remember that there are no clear codes for us to follow when it comes to cooperating with God. Cooperating with God means always being aware of his presence and sit at the back seats of the banquet meal, so that he may help us know ourselves. Our following of Christ demands, both in the Gospel of today and in the letter to the Hebrews, willingness to receive God’s call without ambitions or preconceptions. The writer to the Hebrews gives some practical instructions in this way:

“Let mutual love continue. Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it”

Where is our glory to be found? It is in sacrifice and self-giving. Look at your neighbour and there you will see glory. The compassion is not simply about mere nice feelings to those around us. It is the outpouring of yourself: “Remember those who are in prison, as though you were in prison with them; those who are being tortured, as though you yourselves were being tortured.” And this means that our individual uniqueness is not an exclusive self-assertion. The hard part comes when we learn not only to cooperate with God, but also with our neighbours; learning how to be free together, and not as solitary individuals, without preconception and manipulation, just as we can only see the glory of God properly not in his omnipotent majesty, but in the overwhelming endless love in his act of self-giving at the cross.

The image we have from our readings, especially from Hebrews today is not of solitary individuals competing for their different ways, but voices of harmony, collaborating to produce a rich but subtle consistency. When we celebrate Holy Communion, we are putting ourselves into that everlasting movement of Jesus towards the Father. That is what we are here to pray for; that this Church will always be held in the everlasting divine movement of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. We all fall short and at times get things dramatically wrong. But, Jesus Christ we are told today remains the same yesterday, today and forever. If that is true, glory will dwell in this Church day after day to that same vision of joy and of giving. Through Christ, we will continually stand here and offer our sacrifice of praise.

On one occasion when Jesus was going to the house of a leader of the Pharisees to eat a meal on the sabbath, they were watching him closely. When he noticed how the guests chose the places of honor, he told them a parable.

“When you are invited by someone to a wedding banquet, do not sit down at the place of honor, in case someone more distinguished than you has been invited by your host; and the host who invited both of you may come and say to you, ‘Give this person your place,’ and then in disgrace you would start to take the lowest place. But when you are invited, go and sit down at the lowest place, so that when your host comes, he may say to you, ‘Friend, move up higher’; then you will be honored in the presence of all who sit at the table with you. For all who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.”

He said also to the one who had invited him, “When you give a luncheon or a dinner, do not invite your friends or your brothers or your relatives or rich neighbors, in case they may invite you in return, and you would be repaid. But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind. And you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you, for you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous.”

Let mutual love continue. Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it. Remember those who are in prison, as though you were in prison with them; those who are being tortured, as though you yourselves were being tortured. Let marriage be held in honor by all, and let the marriage bed be kept undefiled; for God will judge fornicators and adulterers. Keep your lives free from the love of money, and be content with what you have; for he has said, “I will never leave you or forsake you.” So we can say with confidence,

“The Lord is my helper;

I will not be afraid.

What can anyone do to me?”

Remember your leaders, those who spoke the word of God to you; consider the outcome of their way of life, and imitate their faith. Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever.

Through him, then, let us continually offer a sacrifice of praise to God, that is, the fruit of lips that confess his name. Do not neglect to do good and to share what you have, for such sacrifices are pleasing to God.

Hear the word of the LORD, O house of Jacob, and all the families of the house of Israel. Thus says the LORD:
What wrong did your ancestors find in me
that they went far from me,
and went after worthless things, and became worthless themselves?
They did not say, “Where is the LORD
who brought us up from the land of Egypt,
who led us in the wilderness,
in a land of deserts and pits,
in a land of drought and deep darkness,
in a land that no one passes through,
where no one lives?”
I brought you into a plentiful land
to eat its fruits and its good things.
But when you entered you defiled my land,
and made my heritage an abomination.
The priests did not say, “Where is the LORD?”
Those who handle the law did not know me;
the rulers transgressed against me;
the prophets prophesied by Baal,
and went after things that do not profit.
Therefore once more I accuse you, says the LORD,
and I accuse your children’s children.
Cross to the coasts of Cyprus and look,
send to Kedar and examine with care;
see if there has ever been such a thing.
Has a nation changed its gods,
even though they are no gods?
But my people have changed their glory
for something that does not profit.
Be appalled, O heavens, at this,
be shocked, be utterly desolate,
says the LORD,
for my people have committed two evils:
they have forsaken me,
the fountain of living water,
and dug out cisterns for themselves,
cracked cisterns
that can hold no water.

I think that some of you will have had the chance to visit the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, and perhaps, those who have might have been disappointed. For the new visitor, it looks an appalling mess. It would be rather difficult to miss the dark side of the place, with a clear history of bitter factional strife in the Church between the Franciscan friars and the other ancient monastic orders of the Orthodox Church who have kept the place from ancient times, to the extent that in the eighteenth century, it took a Muslim keeper of the keys to be able under Ottoman provisions to restore order and maintain a kind of status quo where all can do their business happily. However, even this gets challenged from time to time, as we hear on the news!

For many visitors, the Church is not a splendid artistic triumph of God’s grace. There are several levels of chapels, little caves, and strange corners built into and around the rock on which the Cross stood. This is in addition to the memories of political bloodshed surrounding the city. In other words, if you go to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre today, you will not come to say what the writer to the Hebrews is describing in today’s second lesson: “the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and … innumerable angels in festal gathering.”

It certainly is not the angelic heavenly Jerusalem. The cross is to be seen in Jerusalem in a place where the Church of God and the people of God have betrayed Christ. The Cross is to be seen where God is not to be seen; but seen in the history of those suffering and oppressed by those who call themselves the people of God – of all religions.

What do we make of this? How do we come to acknowledge holiness in this?

Earlier in the same chapter from Hebrews, holiness appears as something terrifying and dangerous: “a blazing fire, and darkness, and gloom, and a tempest, and the sound of a trumpet, and a voice whose words made the hearers beg that not another word be spoken to them.” The writer is reminding his readers how God descends to speak to his people on Mount Sinai, and no one should come near. “Indeed, so terrifying was the sight that Moses said, ‘I tremble with fear.’”

Not many people would like this image of holiness.

But, the writer to the Hebrews then moves to speak about a different holiness for today. He says that you (and that is you!) have come into an abundant overflowing that is overwhelming in its variety with more people than you can ever count, living and departed. You have come to a kind of holiness that involves the fellowship of all creation. This is what you step into when you step into the fellowship of Christ.

And so, to step into the Church, or indeed into St. Paul’s Church today, is not to come to a scary and frightening place. And I hear you say that surely St. Paul’s cannot be a scary and frightening place. It is coming into a fellowship of harmony (really?) with trained and untrained voices singing praises and acknowledging glory in the infinite company of all God’s creation. But, the truth of the matter is that there are people who do come to St. Paul’s and feel strange and scared too. New comers, for instance, who have no idea what to do when they are in here, might feel a bit self-conscious about what they do and whether they are to be spotted or not. The legions of masses outside who do not come to Church probably think that all that we do and say is rather bizarre and eccentric; and for many it is all rather frightening indeed.

But, if the writer to the Hebrews is true that we have come to the harmony of all creation, then there is no one who is dispensable in the fellowship. We all need everyone (even the conservatives among us!) for our holiness to be complete and reflection of the glory of God to be made manifest. No one is complete without the others. Holiness is not bound to a place, for the holiness of our God is not to be found in earthly temples. And yet, we still say that Jerusalem is holy, with all its terrible history. But, we do so, not because holiness is bound to it, but because there is seen the victory of God’s vulnerable faithfulness over the atrocities that political and religious arrogance inflict on God and his children.

Jeremiah is a prophet, as we heard in our first lesson, not because he is this accomplished mature adult, but because in his vulnerable youth (”I am a boy,” he says), God reveals his faithfulness in the midst of the people’s imperfection and disloyalty. You are holy; St. Paul’s is holy; not because it is a gathering of the well-behaved, but because we celebrate the victory of grace in the coming together of strangers and sinners who seem to trust one another enough so that they even join in repentance and common singing, expressing our deep unity in Jesus, who is described in our second lesson, as the mediator of the new covenant.

God endures our refusal of him and meets it with the gift of himself; that is why we find holiness. And so Jesus, as we heard in the gospel today, when he comes to face the indignant righteous leader of the synagogue, who does not like it that Jesus cured on the Sabbath, puts a challenge to him that is a challenge to the idea of what it means to be holy, to be kosher. It is a challenge to the alien and frightening. Why can I not heal a human being when you can water your donkey or ox? Jesus cuts through that and says “my presence is a presence of abundance, when humanity is restored to its true image.”

The people in the outside and the margins; those who are literally incapable of discharging their human potential are drawn in and made welcome; for the abundance of the fellowship is for the weak as well as for the strong and both need each other.

More importantly, it is good to remember that it is not only strangers among us who feel frightened but it might be also one of us here now, one who is considered an established member of the community. Some of us are bound to ask: “Do I really matter?” “Is my voice really going to be heard?” “I have just had all these difficulties in my personal life and people might be questioning whether I am any more important in this Church?” There are many anxieties among us flowing in.

But, if we are to keep our vision in line with the fellowship of all God’s creation, we do have to let go of some of our ways and habits we cling to in order to defend ourselves. Then, once we do let go of such habits, we also discover that there is still something quite properly frightening about the holiness of God. Because, God’s unconditional love reflects our own selfishness, our true image, which we would rather not see, and our idleness, as it has with the leader of the synagogue in today’s gospel.

The abundant holiness that we are celebrating is still a frightening holiness indeed. But, we shall still rejoice and be glad, because as we respond to the invitation: “the gifts of God for the people of God,” we are not saying that we are holy enough to deserve them, but more that these are the gifts that make us holy and that unite us with the harmony of creation, with Jesus, the mediator of the new covenant, the eternal Son of the Father, poured out for us in the power of the Holy Spirit, making us together with all of God’s creation singing: “Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord God the almighty. The whole earth is full of your glory.” Amen.

Now Jesus was teaching in one of the synagogues on the sabbath. And just then, there appeared a woman with a spirit that had crippled her for eighteen years. She was bent over and was quite unable to stand up straight. When Jesus saw her, he called her over and said, “Woman, you are set free from your ailment.” When he laid his hands on her, immediately she stood up straight and began praising God.

But the leader of the synagogue, indignant because Jesus had cured on the sabbath, kept saying to the crowd, “There are six days on which work ought to be done; come on those days and be cured, and not on the sabbath day.” But the Lord answered him and said, “You hypocrites! Does not each of you on the sabbath untie his ox or his donkey from the manger, and lead it away to give it water? And ought not this woman, a daughter of Abraham whom Satan bound for eighteen long years, be set free from this bondage on the sabbath day?”

When he said this, all his opponents were put to shame; and the entire crowd was rejoicing at all the wonderful things that he was doing.

You have not come to something that can be touched, a blazing fire, and darkness, and gloom, and a tempest, and the sound of a trumpet, and a voice whose words made the hearers beg that not another word be spoken to them. (For they could not endure the order that was given, “If even an animal touches the mountain, it shall be stoned to death.” Indeed, so terrifying was the sight that Moses said, “I tremble with fear.”)

But you have come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to innumerable angels in festal gathering, and to the assembly of the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven, and to God the judge of all, and to the spirits of the righteous made perfect, and to Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel. See that you do not refuse the one who is speaking; for if they did not escape when they refused the one who warned them on earth, how much less will we escape if we reject the one who warns from heaven!

At that time, his voice shook the earth; but now he has promised, “Yet once more I will shake not only the earth but also the heaven.” This phrase, “Yet once more,” indicates the removal of what is shaken– that is, created things– so that what cannot be shaken may remain. Therefore, since we are receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, let us give thanks, by which we offer to God an acceptable worship with reverence and awe; for indeed our God is a consuming fire.

The word of the LORD came to me saying,
“Before I formed you in the womb I knew you,
and before you were born I consecrated you;
I appointed you a prophet to the nations.”

Then I said, “Ah, Lord GOD! Truly I do not know how to speak, for I am only a boy.” But the LORD said to me,
“Do not say, ‘I am only a boy’;
for you shall go to all to whom I send you,
and you shall speak whatever I command you,
Do not be afraid of them,
for I am with you to deliver you,”
says the LORD.

Then the LORD put out his hand and touched my mouth; and the LORD said to me,
“Now I have put my words in your mouth.
See, today I appoint you over nations and over kingdoms,
to pluck up and to pull down,
to destroy and to overthrow,
to build and to plant.”