Today's Advent Liturgy
in the New International Version reads, in part:
“He will stand and shepherd his flock in
the strength of the Lord, in the majesty
of the name of the Lord his God. And they will live securely, for
then his greatness will reach to the ends
of the earth.
And he will be our
peace when the Assyrians invade our land”
I don't know about you,
but I find that prophecy strangely comforting in these dark days!
“He will stand and
shepherd his flock in the strength of the Lord, in the majesty of the
name of the Lord his God.” “And he will be our peace when the
Assyrians invade our land.”
However, as we all
know, a text without a context is a pretext, so rather than just
taking the words as a lovely Christmas prophecy – which of course,
on one level, they are – let's look a bit deeper and find out a bit
more about Micah, and what he was talking about.
Micah was a prophet in 8th-century Judah, more or less a contemporary with
Isaiah, Amos and Hosea. As with so many of the prophets, the book
starts off with great doom and gloom.He prophesied
the destruction of Jerusalem,particularly because they were simply
dishonest and then expected God to cover for them: “Her leaders
judge for a bribe, her priests teach for a price, and her prophets
tell fortunes for money. Yet they lean upon the LORD and say, Is not
the LORD among us? No disaster will come upon us.” But Micah
said, “Well, actually....” As one modern paraphrase puts it: “The
fact is, that because of you lot, Jerusalem will be reduced to rubble
and cleared like a field; and the Temple hill will be nothing but a
tangled mass of weeds" An archaeologist called Roland de
Vaux has excavated village sites only a few miles from where Micah is
thought to have lived, and he has something very interesting to say:
“The houses of the tenth century B.C. are all of the same size and
arrangement. Each represents the dwelling of a family which lived in
the same way as its neighbours. The contrast is striking when we
pass to the eighth century houses on the same site: the rich houses
are bigger and better built and in a different quarter from that
where the poor houses are huddled together.”
During those
200 years, Israel and Judah had moved from a largely agricultural
society to one governed by a monarchy and with a Temple in Jerusalem.
The distinction between the “Haves” and the “Have nots” had
grown, as it does still today. But Micah tells the powerful ones –
the judges, the priests, the rulers – that God doesn't prop up any
so-called progress that is built on the backs of other people. For
God, justice and equality matter far more than progress or growth.
But God's people disagree, and they try to stop Micah, and other
prophets, telling them God's truth; they only want to hear
comforting, agreeable prophecies about how their crops will flourish
and there will be plenty of wine!
But when Jerusalem has
been destroyed, when her people have been carried off into exile,
then a day will come when a new leader will be born to them, a leader
who will “stand and shepherd his flock in the days of the Lord”,
and “who will be our peace when the Assyrians invade our land.”
I expect you realise
that these prophecies were often dual-purpose; they did and do refer
to the coming of Christ, of course, but they also often referred to a
local event, a local birth. We don't know who Micah was originally
referring to, who would be born in Bethlehem, but we do know that,
for us, these prophecies refer to Jesus.
“He will be our peace
when the Assyrians invade our land.” These days we worry rather
more about Syrians than about Assyrians – whether we are concerned
about the number of refugees seeking asylum here, or whether we are
more concerned, as we should be, about how relatively few our
government is allowing in. Some people, I know, worry that we
shouldn't allow them in in case they turn out to belong to Daesh and
want to commit acts of terrorism, but those are the tiniest of tiny
minorities among those fleeing Syria.
We call them
“migrants”, lumping them all under one umbrella. The term is
supposed to be neutral, less laden with emotional baggage than
“refugee” or “asylum seeker”. It isn't, of course, because
people then talk about “illegal immigrants” or “economic
migrants”. And it's noticeable that if we Brits go to live abroad
we aren't called migrants – I did the whole economic migrant thing
back in the 1970s, when I went to work in Paris for some years after
leaving school, but nobody called me a “migrant”, economic or
otherwise – I was an expatriate! And people talked about cultural
exchange, and our young people learning about different lifestyles,
and so on, and it was all considered a Good Thing.
And, of course, many of
your families, and perhaps some of you are the first generation who
did so, many of you came over here to work and contribute to our
society and learn about our way of life – and have enriched this
country beyond all measure! Maybe you can remember the bewilderment
of arriving here, not too sure of your welcome, not too sure what
life in this cold and rainy land was going to be like.
Even if someone does
make it across the Channel, their problems aren't yet over. They
aren't allowed to work while their claim for asylum is being
processed, and although they do get an allowance, it really isn't
very much. Not really enough to live on, and certainly not enough for
a comfortable lifestyle. And if they are found not to be in imminent
danger of death back home, they are thrown out again, and if that's
on their records they can't really go and try their luck somewhere
else in Europe.
I don't know what the
answer long-term is. The politicians will have to work that one out
between them. But we need to pray for all migrants, and do what we
can to help. That may be only donating a few pounds to the Unicef
appeals that we see daily on our televisions, or we may be called to
do something more “hands-on”. Whatever, though, we mustn't think
of it as someone else's problem!
Because Jesus will be
our peace, so Micah tells us. If we believe Matthew's account, he was
himself a refugee for awhile, when they fled to Egypt to avoid
Herod's troops. As I understand it, God won't necessarily keep the
bad times from us, or protect us from what lies ahead, but Jesus will
be there with us in the midst of it all. And I, personally, find
that reassuring.
Our Gospel reading,
too, told of someone who badly needed reassurance. Mary has just met
the angel and been told that, if she will, she is the one who will
bear God's son, and she has said “Yes”. But it's early days yet
– there aren't any physical signs that she is pregnant, she has
never slept with a man, what is it all about? But one thing the
angel had told her, that she hadn't already known, was that her
cousin Elisabeth, surely far too old to be having babies, was six
months gone. So Mary goes off to see Elisabeth – incidentally
this, for me, is one of the pointers that she was living in the
Jerusalem area at the time, whether at Bethlehem or Jerusalem itself
– tradition has it that she was one of the temple servants –
because she would never have been able to travel all that way between
Nazareth and Jerusalem on her own.
Anyway, she arrives at
Elisabeth's front door, and there is Elisabeth with a large bump, and
Elisabeth, filled with the Holy Spirit, confirms all that the angel
had said. And Mary bubbles over into love and joy and praise, and
even if the words of the Magnificat are what St Luke thought she
ought to have said – rather like Henry the Fifth's speech at
Agincourt being what Shakespeare thought he ought to have said,
rather than what he actually did say – even if they are not
authentic, they are probably very close to reality! We sung a
metrical version of her song just a few minutes ago. And it reminds
us that God is turning accepted values upside-down by having His Son
born to a virgin mother in a small town in an occupied land.
“Tell out, my soul,
the greatness of his might! Powers and dominions lay their glory
by. Proud hearts and stubborn wills are put to flight, the
hungry fed, the humble lifted high.”
In the culture of the
day – as in ours – it was thought that prosperity was a sign of
God's blessing, and poverty rather the reverse. But no, that was not
what Jesus was, or is, all about. Instead, he himself was born to an
ordinary family that, within a couple of years, was fleeing for its
life into exile, and when they did dare go home, they didn't dare go
back so near Jerusalem, but moved up to the provinces.
Mary was so brave,
saying “Yes” to God. I don't know how much she understood, but
of course Joseph could – and seriously considered doing so – have
refused to marry her, and then where would she have been? But the
angel reassured Joseph, and Elisabeth reassured Mary. All was not
totally well, but God was with them.
And that's the message
to take into this Christmas, isn't it, as we stand on the brink of
another war, against an enemy we cannot defeat – for even if we
destroy Daesh, as we destroyed Al Quaeda, there will be another
group, and another.... all may not be totally well, but God is with
us. And God's son, Jesus, will be our peace when the Assyrians
invade our land. Amen.
This is similar, but not identical, to the sermon preached on this Sunday three years ago. In view of the tragic events in Paris which took place on Friday, 13 November, it did change a bit.
I also unexpectedly preached a children's sermon, which I didn't record. I asked them to tell me the story of the Good Samaritan, which one of them did, very efficiently, and then I reminded them that a Samaritan was a person of a different race and often Jewish people hadn't wanted to know about them. But I said the point was, he had helped, and when they saw upsetting news stories on television or in the papers, always to look for the helpers - the police, the fire service, the ambulances, and the ordinary people, like you and me, who are helping - because that's what Jesus would do.
“So, friends, we can now –
without hesitation –
walk right up to God, into “the Holy
Place.”
Jesus has cleared the way by the blood
of his sacrifice, acting as our priest before God.
The “curtain” into God’s presence
is his body.
So let’s do it –
full of belief, confident that we’re
presentable inside and out.
Let’s keep a firm grip on the
promises that keep us going.
He always keeps his word.”
That's a modern translation of part of
our first reading today,
from the letter to the Hebrews.
I don't know how much you know about
this letter;
it's thought to date from around the
year 63 or 64 AD,
before the Temple in Jerusalem was
destroyed
and before the Eucharist became a
widespread form of Christian worship.
Nobody knows who wrote it, either;
arguments about its authorship go back
to at least the 4th century AD!
Probably one of Paul's pupils, but
nobody actually knows who.
The Temple in Jerusalem is still
standing when this letter is written.
The author uses it to contrast what
used to be –
in the olden days only the High Priest
could go into God's presence,
and he had to take blood with him to
atone for the people's sins and his own.
Nowadays, it is only Christ, the great
High Priest, who can go into God's presence –
but he can and does take us with him.
We can go with Jesus into the very
presence of God himself, confidently,
just like you'd walk into your own
front room.
The thing is, of course, that it's all
because of what Jesus has done for us.
We can't go into God's presence, as the
prayer says,
“trusting in our own righteousness”.
If we are to go in with any degree of
confidence,
it is because of what Jesus has done
for us,
arguably whether or not we recognise
this.
The author of the Letter to the Hebrews
tells us that Christ takes us in there in his own body.
I don't know about you, but for me that
rather helps clarify what St Paul said about our being part of the
Body of Christ –
and in that Body, we can go into God's
presence.
There is nothing we can do to make it
any easier or any more difficult;
it is all down to Jesus.
We are made right with God by what
Jesus has done, end of.
It isn't about whether we have
confessed our sins –
although I hope we have faced up to
where we have gone wrong.
It isn't about whether we have accepted
Jesus as our Saviour and our Lord –
although I very much hope we have done
so.
Neither of those things will save us.
Only God will save us –
and as soon as we reach out a tentative
finger to him,
and sometimes even before, he is there,
reassuring us that we are loved,
we are saved,
we are forgiven.
The trouble is, all too often we focus
on sin as though that were what Christianity were all about.
We even tend to think the Good News
goes
“You are a sinner and God will
condemn you to hell unless you believe the right things about him.”
Erm, no.
Just no.
We do things like that.
We are quick to condemn, especially
people in public life.
Just read any newspaper, any day.
We are slow to forgive –
we don't believe people can change, we
keep on bringing up episodes in the lives of our nearest and dearest
that might have happened a quarter of a century ago!
But God is not like that.
God is love.
God is salvation.
We don't have to do anything, only God
can save us.
Yes, following Jesus is not an easy
option, we know that.
If we are Jesus' person, we are Jesus'
person in every part of our lives –
it isn't just something we do here in
Church on Sundays.
It affects who we are when we are at
work,
or at home with our families,
or going to the supermarket.
It affects what we choose to do with
our free time,
who we choose to spend it with –
not, I hope, exclusively people who
think the same way as we do.
You see, the thing is, you never know
exactly what God's going to do.
An acquaintance of mine is a fairly
well-known author whose books have been published both here and in
the USA.
She is just a little older than I am,
and three years ago she announced on
her blog that she had met Jesus and was
now a Christian.
You don't really expect people to
become Christians just before their 60th birthday, but it
happened to her.
God reached out to her and, as she put
it, everything changed.
Yet she was still herself.
Another
fairly well-known author –
well,
well-known to me, anyway,
but
if you don't read science fiction or fantasy you'll not have heard of
either of these lovely women –
confirmed
in the comments on this blog that she, too, is a believer,
although
you couldn't have actually read some of her books and not realised
that.
And
one of her comments read, in part:
“I'm
still who I was, probably more so. . . . I was scared of the other –
of
becoming the cookie fresh from the cutter, just like every other
cookie.
But
individuality and diversity appears to be built in to the design
concept.”
Individuality
and diversity appear to be built into the design concept.
Yes.
God
has created and designed each one of us to be uniquely ourselves.
When
we are told that we will become more Christ-like as we go on with
Jesus,
it
doesn't mean we'll all grow to resemble a first-century Jewish
carpenter!
We
will, in fact, become more and more ourselves, more and more who we
were intended to be.
Incidentally,
my friend is now in urgent need of our prayers as her husband,
another fantasy and mystery author, who is a very great deal older
than she is, has had a stroke and is now in a care home.
So
we will remember Robin and Peter in our intercessions later.
Salvation
comes from God, through nothing you or I can do, although we are, of
course, at liberty to say “No thank you!”
But
if we say “Yes please”, as I suspect most of us here have said,
at one time or another, then everything changes.
I've
spoken before, although not, I think here, about the consequences of
healing.
For
make no mistake, my friends, when God touches our lives, things
change.
Sometimes
it is our behaviour which changes –
perhaps
we used to get drunk, but now we find ourselves switching to soft
drinks after a couple of glasses.
Perhaps
we used to gamble,
but
suddenly realise we haven't so much as bought a Lottery ticket for
weeks, never mind visiting a bookie!
Perhaps
we used to be less than scrupulous about what belongs to us, and what
belongs to our employer,
but
now we find ourselves asking permission to use an office
envelope.
Very often these sorts of changes happen without our
even noticing them. Others take more struggle –
sometimes
it is many years before we can finally let go of an addiction, or a
bad habit.
But
as I've said before, the more open we are to God,
the
more we can allow God to change us.
Sometimes,
of course, we cling on to the familiar bad habits,
as
we don't know how to replace them with healthier ways of acting and
thinking, and that's scary.
But the point is, when God
touches our lives, things change.
They
changed for my friend, I know they changed for me,
and
they will have changed for many of you, if not all of you, too.
So
where does this leave our reading?
Jesus,
in our gospel reading, reminded us that we mustn't go running this
way and that way,
convinced
of doomsday scenarios every time we hear a news bulletin.
Yes,
the world as we know it is going to end some day –
it
wasn't built to be permanent, just ask the dinosaurs!
We
don't know how and why it will end;
in
my youth, I would have assumed it would end in a nuclear war that
would destroy all living things.
These
days that is less probable,
but
what about runaway global warming or an asteroid strike?
Or
just simply running out of fossil fuels and unable to replace them?
The
answer is that we simply don't know.
Unlike
the first Christians,
we
don't really expect Jesus to return any minute now –
although
I suppose that is possible.
We
do, however, accept and appreciate that this world is finite and that
one day humanity will no longer exist here.
And
we mustn't be scared all the time, either.
Yes,
our news headlines can be very scary –
but
isn't God greater than terrorists?
Isn't
God greater than Islamic State?
And
we musn't get bogged down in details, either.
There
has been such a silly row in the USA this week because Starbucks
haven't put Christmas symbols –
not
Christian ones, but snowflakes and so on –
on
their red cups this year.
Too
silly – the God we worship is so very much bigger than whether or
not a corporation has decorations on its cups.
There
are many good reasons not to go to Starbucks, but that really isn't
one of them!
And
what about the rows in this country about people who chose not to
wear a poppy, or how deep the Labour leader bowed when he laid his
wreath.....
It
is all so unimportant when we are also taught that we will be raised
from death and go on Somewhere Else.
We
don't know what that Somewhere Else will be like,
nor
who we'll be when we get there –
although
I imagine we'll still be recognisably ourselves.
But
we do know that Jesus will be there with us,
and
that we will see Him face to face.
But
eternal life isn't just pie in the sky when you die, as it is so
often caricatured.
If
we are Christians, we have eternal life here and now;
so
often, it's living it that's the problem.
So
I'm going to conclude with part of the quote from Hebrews with which
I began:
“Jesus
has cleared the way by the blood of his sacrifice,
acting
as our priest before God.
The
“curtain” into God’s presence is his body.
So
let’s do
it –
full
of belief, confident that we’re presentable inside and out.”
Today's readings are all about change.
Things changed for Job, and things changed for Bartimaeus.
So, then Job. It's a funny old story,
isn't it? Do you know, nobody knows anything about it – what you
see is totally what you get! Nobody knows who it was written, or
when, or why, or whether it is true history or a fictional story –
most probably the latter! Apparently, The Book of Job is incredibly
ancient, or parts of it are. And so it makes it very difficult for
us to understand. We do realise, of course, that it was one of the
earliest attempts someone made to rationalise why bad things happen
to good people, but it still seems odd to us.
Just to remind you, the story first of
all establishes Job as really rich, and then as a really holy person
– whenever his children have parties, which they seem to have done
pretty frequently, he offers sacrifices to God just in case the
parties were orgies! And so on. Then God says to Satan, hey, look
at old Job, isn't he a super servant of mine, and Satan says, rather
crossly, yeah, well, it's all right for him – just look how you've
blessed him. Anybody would be a super servant like that. You take
all those blessings away from him, and see if he still serves you!
And that, of course, is just exactly
what happens. The children are all killed, the crops are all
destroyed, the flocks and herds perish. And Job still remains
faithful to God: “Naked I came from my mother's womb, and naked
shall I return there; the Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away;
blessed be the name of the Lord.”
So then Satan says, well, all right,
Job is still worshipping you, but he still has his health, doesn't
he? I bet he would sing a very different tune if you let me take his
health away!
So God says, well, okay, only you
mustn't kill him. And Job gets a plague of boils, which must have
been really nasty – painful, uncomfortable, itchy and making him
feel rotten in himself as well. Poor sod. No wonder he ends up
sitting on a dung-heap, scratching himself with a piece of broken
china!
And his wife, who must have suffered
just as much as Job, only of course women weren't really people in
those days, she says “Curse God, and die!” In other words, what
do you have left to live for? But Job refuses, although he does,
with some justification, curse the day on which he was born.
Then you know the rest of the story, of
course. How the three "friends" come and try to persuade
him to admit that he deserves all that had come upon him – we've
all had friends like that who try to make our various sufferings be
our fault, and who try to poultice them with pious platitudes. And
Job insists that he is not at fault, and demands some answers from
God!
Which, in the end, he gets. But not
totally satisfactory to our ears, although they really are the most
glorious poetry.
Here's just a tiny bit:
“Do you give the horse its might?
Do you clothe its neck with mane?
Do you make it leap like the locust?
Its majestic snorting is terrible.
It paws violently, exults mightily;
it goes out to meet the weapons.
It laughs at fear, and is not dismayed;
it does not turn back from the sword.
Upon it rattle the quiver, the flashing
spear, and the javelin.
With fierceness and rage it swallows
the ground;
it cannot stand still at the sound of
the trumpet.
When the trumpet sounds, it says "Aha!"
From a distance it smells the battle,
the thunder of the captains, and the shouting.
Is it by your wisdom that the hawk
soars,
and spreads its wings towards the
south?
Is it at your command that the eagle
mounts up and makes its nest on high?
It lives on the rock and makes its home
in the fastness of the rocky crag.
From there it spies the prey;
its eyes see it from far away.
Its young ones suck up blood;
and where the slain are, there it is.”
Wonderful stuff, and it goes on for
about three chapters, talking of the natural world and its wonders,
and how God is the author of them all. If you ever want to rejoice
in creation, read Job chapters 38, 39 and 40.
My father is on record as saying he
wants Job 39 read at his funeral.
Anyway at the end, as we heard in our
first reading, Job repents "in dust and ashes", we are
told, and then his riches are restored to him.
But would even more children and riches
really make up for those seven children who were killed? I doubt it,
which is one of the reasons it’s probably a story, rather than
actual history. But the point I want to make this morning is that
God intervened in Job's life, and things changed. At first they
changed for the worse, but then they changed for the better.
And the same thing happened to
Bartimaeus, as we heard in our Gospel reading. Jesus touched him,
and his life was changed beyond all recognition. In John's version
of the story, we're told a little bit about the consequences of the
healing. For Bartimaeus life changed immediately. My sister-in-law,
who is blind, says that not only would he have been given his sight,
but he would have been given the gift of being able to see, otherwise
how would he have known what he was looking at? He wouldn't have
known whether what he was looking at was a person or a camel or a
tree, would he? But he was given the gift, so he knew.
And he
could stop begging for his living, he realised, and he went and did
whatever the local equivalent of signing-on was. And, of course
there were lots of mutterings and whisperings – Is it him? Can't
be! Must be someone new in town, who just looks like him!
“Yes,
it's me,” explains Bartimaeus, anxious to tell his story. “Yes,
I was blind, and yes, I can see now!”
“So what happens?”
ask the neighbours.
“Well, this bloke put some mud on my
eyes and told me to go and wash, and when I did, then I could see.
No, I don't know where he is – I never saw him; Yes, I'd probably
know his voice, but I didn't actually see him!”
And the
neighbours, thinking all this a bit odd, drag him before the
Pharisees, the religious authorities of the day. And they don't
believe him. Not possible. Nobody born blind gets to see, it just
doesn't happen. And if it did, it couldn't happen on the Sabbath.
Not unless the person who did it was a sinner, because only a sinner
would do that on the Sabbath – it's work, isn't it? And if the
person who did it was a sinner, it can't have happened!
They
got themselves in a right old muddle. Now we, of course, know what
Jesus' thoughts about healing on the Sabbath day were – he is on
record elsewhere as pointing out that you'd rescue a distressed
donkey, or, indeed, lead it to the horse-trough to get a drink,
whatever day of the week it was, so surely healing a human being was
a right and proper activity for the Sabbath. But the Pharisees
didn't believe this. They thought healing was work, and thus not a
proper activity for the Sabbath at all.
So they decided it
couldn't possibly have happened, and sent for Bartimaeus's parents to
say “Now come on, your son wasn't really blind, was he? What has
happened?” And his parents, equally bewildered, say “Well yes,
he is our son; yes, he was born blind; yes, it does appear that he
can now see; no, we don't know what happened; why don't you ask him?”
And the Bible tells us they were also scared of being expelled from
the synagogue, which is why they didn't say anything more.
Actually, they must have had a fearful mixture of emotions,
don't you think – thrilled that their son could suddenly see,
scared of the authorities, wondering what exactly Jesus had done, and
was it something they ought to have done themselves, and so on. And,
of course, wondering how life was going to be from now on. Very soon
now, their son probably wouldn't need them any more; now he was like
other people, he could, perhaps, earn a proper living and even marry
and have a family.
So the authorities go back to Bartimaeus,
and he says, “Well, how would I know if the person who healed me is
a sinner or not? All I know is that I was blind, and now I can see!”
And then they asked him again, well, how did it happen, and he gets
fed up with them going on and says “But I told you! Didn't you
listen? Or maybe you want to be his disciples, too?” which was, of
course, rather cheeky and he deserved being told off for it, but then
again, I expect he was still rather hyper about having been healed.
And he does go on rather and tells them that the man who opened his
eyes must be from God, can't possibly not be, and they get even more
fed up with him, and sling him out.
And then Jesus meets him
again – of course Bartimaeus, not having seen him before, doesn't
actually recognise him – and reveals himself to him. And
Bartimaeus worships him.
But life for Bartimaeus had changed
beyond all recognition.
Change happens. This has been a year
of enormous changes for Robert and me, some of them good, and some of
them less good. Robert has retired, which has meant enormous change
for us both; we have had a new kitchen installed, and we have bought
ourselves a motor home. That's all good change, although very
stressful while it was happening. And it was a very sad change when
my parents sold their home of nearly sixty years to move into a
smaller house in the village. As my mother says, although they have
settled down, it isn't home, and they feel as though they are
permanently staying somewhere.
Like many people, I don't respond well
to change. I get very stressed and cross, and I feel rather sorry
for Robert and the rest of my family who have put up with me this
year.
But the thing is, we often don't have a
choice about changes. They happen. In our two readings, life
changed enormously for two people. And these changes were instituted
by God himself into their lives. In the end, it was a change for
good for both of them, but it must still have been enormously
stressful while it was happening.
Not all change is from God, of course.
But with any change, whether we instigate it, or whether it seems to
come on us out of the blue, we can't see the long-term consequences.
We don't know what is going to happen, as we can't see the future.
We can't see round “The bend in the road” as one author put it.
But God can. Nothing that happens to
us can surprise God, as God sees all times as now. When we say “No”
to God, when we block God from acting, God always has a plan B. God
knows – but does not influence – how we are going to react.
And when changes happen, when we are
overwhelmed by change, that is when we can most trust God. God can
see round that bend in the road. Good things may be on the way, as
they were for Bartimaeus, as they were for Job, or bad things may be
about to happen – as, indeed, they did to Job for a time. But
either way God knows, and God will be there with us through them.
Even when it feels as if God's just slapped us in the face and left
us to cope. That's only what it feels like, not what really
happened.
So, of course, we need to practice
trusting God while things are on a fairly even keel, so that when the
upheavals happen – and they will – when they happen, we can go on
trusting God, and knowing that God is with us, even in the midst of
the storm. Amen.
Welcome! I am a Methodist Local Preacher, and preach roughly once a month, or thereabouts. If you wish to take a RSS feed, or become a follower, so that you know when a new sermon has been uploaded, please feel free to do so.
Please comment if the sermons have met with you where you are!