St Nicholas

Once upon a time, long, long ago, in a – well, not in a galaxy far away, as this story takes place on this earth, but certainly in a country far away, a little boy was born. No, not Jesus of Nazareth – this birth took place a couple of hundred years later, and the little boy grew up to be one of Jesus’ followers. He was born in the city of Patara, in what is now Turkey, and you will remember from your reading in Acts that this was one of the places that St Paul visited during his travels, so it’s quite probable that his parents or grandparents were either converted by St Paul, or by the church he established there. His parents were rich, by the standards of their day, and when they died when the boy was quite young, he inherited all their money. But because he loved Jesus, he didn’t think it right to keep the money for himself, and began to give it away to the poor and needy in the area.

He dedicated his whole life to God, and was made Bishop of Myra while still a young man. One famous story about him tells of a poor man with three daughters, whom he could not hope to marry off as he had nothing to give for their dowries, something that was considered vital back in the day. And the future for unmarried women back then was bleak – slavery was probably the best option. So this young Bishop, anonymously, threw three purses of gold, one for each daughter, through the window of their house, and the purses landed in the shoes the girls had put to dry by the fire.

There are lots of other stories about this man – some probably legendary, as when three theological students, traveling on their way to study in Athens were robbed and murdered by wicked innkeeper, who hid their remains in a large pickling tub. It so happened that the bishop, traveling along the same route, stopped at this very inn. In the night he dreamed of the crime, got up, and summoned the innkeeper. As he prayed earnestly to God the three boys were restored to life and wholeness.

There are several stories of his calming storms for sailors, and one story tells how during a famine in Myra, the bishop worked desperately hard to find grain to feed the people. He learned that ships bound for Alexandria with cargos of wheat had anchored in Andriaki, the harbor for Myra. The good bishop asked the captain to sell some of the grain from each ship to relieve the people's suffering. The captain said he could not because the cargo was "meted and measured." He must deliver every bit and would have to answer for any shortage. The Bishop assured the captain there would be no problems when the grain was delivered. Finally, reluctantly, the captain agreed to take one hundred bushels of grain from each ship. The grain was unloaded and the ships continued on their way.

When they arrived and the grain was unloaded, it weighed exactly the same as when it was put on board. As the story was told, all the emperor's ministers worshiped and praised God with thanksgiving for God's faithful servant!

Back in Myra, the Bishop distributed grain to everyone in Lycia and no one was hungry. The grain lasted for two years, until the famine ended. There was even enough grain to provide seed for a good harvest.

The Bishop, of course, was made a saint when he died. And the stories of his miracles didn’t stop coming. One very early story tells how the townspeople of Myra were celebrating the good saint on the eve of his feast day when a band of Arab pirates from Crete came into the district. They stole treasures from the church to take away as booty. As they were leaving town, they snatched a young boy, Basilios, to make into a slave. The emir, or ruler, selected Basilios to be his personal cupbearer, as not knowing the language, Basilios would not understand what the king said to those around him. So, for the next year Basilios waited on the king, bringing his wine in a beautiful golden cup. For Basilios' parents, devastated at the loss of their only child, the year passed slowly, filled with grief. As the saint’s next feast day approached, Basilios' mother would not join in the festivity, as it was now a day of tragedy. However, she was persuaded to have a simple observance at home – with quiet prayers for Basilios' safekeeping. Meanwhile, as Basilios was fulfilling his tasks serving the emir, he was suddenly whisked up and away. The saint appeared to the terrified boy, blessed him, and set him down at his home back in Myra. Imagine the joy and wonderment when Basilios amazingly appeared before his parents, still holding the king's golden cup!

This man became the patron saint of children, and the patron saint of sailors, too. And as the years and centuries passed, he was revered in Christian countries all over the world, both Orthodox and Catholic. In the 11^th century his remains were moved from Myra, now called Demre, which was under Moslem rule, to a town in Italy called Bari, where he is venerated to this day. Nuns started to give poor children little gifts of food – oranges and nuts, mostly – on his feast day. And his cult spread right across Christendom.

You will notice that I haven’t said his name! Who knows who I have been talking about? Yes, St Nicholas, Bishop of Myra. And now, these days, transmogrified into Santa Claus.

It all happened, really, because of the Protestant reformation! No, seriously. Because if you were Protestant, you didn’t revere saints, so you couldn’t possibly have St Nicholas giving you oranges and nuts on his feast day! Moreover, Christmas observance was seen as inconsistent with Gospel worship. Here in England, with our gift for religious compromise, our folk traditions changed to include Father Christmas and yule logs and things, but in many Protestant countries, particularly the USA, it was considered “just another day”. But it seems that German colonists (probably not the Dutch, as they were hyper-Calvinist back then) brought the St Nicholas tradition to the USA, and gradually he became the “jolly elf” of the famous poem. And, of course, the illustrations for the Coca-Cola advertisements began to settle his image as the fat old man we know today. A far cry, really, from a young Bishop in ancient Turkey!

But what, you may ask, has this got to do with us? How does it affect us on this last day of the year? For me, it’s about legitimising Christmas. Every year, you hear people chuntering on about putting Christ back in Christmas – as if He had ever left it! And every year, the separation between the secular festival, encompassing Santa Claus and presents and greed, and the celebration of the Birth of Christ, seems to grow wider and wider. But does it? If we remember that Santa himself was one of Jesus’ most faithful disciples, doesn’t that make a difference?

Yes, Christmas is very commercialised. Yes, it’s been secularised. But in a way, that makes it better, as everybody can celebrate, whether or not they are Christian. But the roots of the secular festival are deeper in Christianity than we often realise. Next week, we will be celebrating the Epiphany, the coming of the wise men that Matthew talks about. The time when Christ was “manifest to the Gentiles”, as they say – in other words, it was made clear that Jesus was for the whole world, not just for the Jews. And we all know that today the wise still worship him. Even Santa Claus! Amen.

Remembrance Sunday 2017

The text of this sermon is very similar to the one I preached three years ago.  You can listen to the podcast to see how it differs!

The Ten Commandments

So, the Ten Commandments. Which is what we heard read in our first reading today, and which we very often hear if it is a Communion service. Totally familiar, aren’t they? Or are they?

I do wonder why they are special. If you ever read these first few books of the Bible – not Genesis, so much, but Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy, the ones they call the Pentateuch – you’ll know they are full of commandments and rules for how God’s people are to live. Do sit down sometime with a good modern translation – there are plenty on-line if you haven’t got a paper one – and have a read of them if you haven’t already.

But the thing about these rules is that many of them – perhaps most of them – are no longer relevant to us. We don’t see anything wrong in eating pork or shellfish, or in wearing polycotton or other mixed fibres. Many of us enjoy a cheeseburger from time to time. We think slavery is wrong – nobody should own another person – and that even the very generous laws about it in the Scriptures should be discarded in favour of a blanket ban. Why are the Ten Commandments any different?

I once saw on television some programme – it was years ago, and I can’t now remember what it was about or in what context we were watching it – when they asked random people off the streets to quote the Ten Commandments. Most people knew some or all of the last six, but nobody even thought to quote the first four!

And that’s the thing, isn’t it? The first four commandments are all to do with our relationship with God, and whatever else may change, God doesn’t. So we are told that we must not worship any other God; we mustn’t make statues or pictures and then worship them; we mustn’t make empty promises in God’s name and we must keep the Sabbath day rather special. And those are the commandments people don’t remember, unless they happen to be God’s people, because they simply aren’t relevant to them.

You know, if you think about it, the Ten Commandments are really about how you should think, and what sort of a person you should be. Most of the other sets of rules in the Pentateuch are about how a nomadic tribe that is just beginning to settle down should live. How to stay healthy and happy. Rules about what to eat and what not – no carrion, for instance. How sensible – an animal who died and you don’t know why might easily make you very ill. Rules about whether you have an infectious skin disease or just a boil or burn. Rules about what to do with your mildewed garments. But even these rules have, running through them, the refrain that it is to please God that people will do these things, and that if they do them,

The Israelites, of course, were not claiming land nobody had ever cultivated before. They were settling down among, and displacing, local tribes, and learning to farm for their living rather than be hunter-gatherers, as they had had, perforce, to be while wandering in the desert. We know that God had provided manna for them, although nobody seems to know what that is, but it was certainly their staple food for many years, supplemented by occasional flocks of quail. But now they are beginning to remember the stories their grandparents told them of what the food had been like in Egypt: fish, meat, leeks, onions, cucumbers, garlic, good wheaten bread.... and now they were settling down, they could grow things like that and enjoy the good life for themselves. But how? None of them had ever been farmers.

But their neighbours had. And for them, much of the ritual about farming involved going to their local shrine and worshipping their local god. Their god didn’t demand any kind of involvement on their part, only the ritual – but, of course, this was absolutely Not On for God’s people once they had reached the Promised Land. They must not go and worship other gods, no matter how perfunctorily. They need to be God’s people, body, mind and spirit. And so the rules are shot through with exhortations to be just that, to choose to be God’s people, to choose life.

As I said, we consider many, if not most, of those rules to be inappropriate today. The food rules went very early on – Jesus himself declared all foods clean, although people didn’t understand that until a bit later. But as it became obvious that you could be a Christian without being Jewish first, so the various rules gradually fell into abeyance among Christians who had not grown up thinking that this was what Proper People did. Sadly, some of the better rules disappeared, too – the one that said that every seven years you kept the land fallow, freed your slaves, and generally started again from scratch. The ones that applied to slavery – these days, we would not, by and large, dream of owning other people, although sadly it does still happen, even here in Brixton – anyway, the laws that applied to slavery were very lenient and although slaves must be freed every 7 years, they didn’t have to go if they didn’t want to. And if they ran away in between, it was considered not to be their fault – their masters must have been too harsh with them. Sadly, as we know, these laws, too, fell into abeyance and slavery became the horrible thing we know it to be.

But these rules that we call the Ten Commandments didn’t fall into abeyance. They were different, special. The first four, as I said, are about our relationship with God. Then come the common-sense regulations: to honour our parents (the first commandment, as St Paul points out, that comes with a promise attached – “Do this so that you will have a full life in the land that the Lord your God gives you.”). No murder, no adultery, no theft.... all societies have had some sort of rules about these things, even if not quite the same as ours. No lying about other people. And then the commandment that lifts even these out of the realm of blind obedience, and on to another plane, entirely: Thou shalt not covet!

That is the commandment St Paul talked about in his letter to the Romans: “For I would not have known what coveting really was if the law had not said, ‘You shall not covet.’ But sin, seizing the opportunity afforded by the commandment, produced in me every kind of coveting. For apart from the law, sin was dead. Once I was alive apart from the law; but when the commandment came, sin sprang to life and I died. I found that the very commandment that was intended to bring life actually brought death. For sin, seizing the opportunity afforded by the commandment, deceived me, and through the commandment put me to death.”

In other words, as soon as he realised it was wrong to covet, he discovered how much he did covet, and couldn’t overcome it himself. We can’t, either. After all, there are whole industries based on the human propensity to covet – you only have to watch television briefly to be inundated with advertising, telling you about products you might not have known you wanted. And if you watch sports channels, as we do sometimes, you’ll have noticed how many of these ads are devoted to on-line gambling sites. Gambling, if it tempts you – it doesn’t tempt me, so I’m not being virtuous not doing it – if it tempts you, it is tempting you to want something for nothing, a great deal of money for almost no effort or expenditure on your part. “We’ll pay out, win or lose!” they cry. “We’ll give you ten pounds for every pound you spend with us.” Golden rule of advertising: if it sounds too good to be true, it almost definitely is!

Mind you, some ads are good and useful – the ones that tell you when, say, an insurance company is giving special offers, or when a sale is on. At least, they are useful if you actually happen to want insurance, or whatever it is. As my mother always says, coupons are lovely if it’s something you actually want, but a snare and a delusion if you buy something you didn’t really need or want simply because you have a 20% off coupon!

But the point is, coveting isn’t really something we can help. It is part of our human nature to want what we do not have, or, worse, to want what someone else has. We can happily refrain from murder, adultery or theft, and we can at least go through the motions of honouring our parents and worshipping God – but we can’t not covet! At least, not without God’s help.

Of course, some religions – Buddhism, for instance – require one to be so divorced from the material world that not coveting is basically a matter of total disdain. It’s not like that for us. We need to be living in this world, engaged in it, working in it for justice and peace. And we will inevitably start to want things we don’t have, and to own things we don’t really want, and all the other things. In Jesus’ story he told, that we also heard read this morning, the tenants of the vineyard wanted to keep all the grapes for themselves, rather than yield them to their rightful owner, and all sorts of murder and mayhem ensued. And, if you remember, when the rich young ruler asked Jesus how he could gain eternal life, and said that he’d kept all the commandments, Jesus told him to sell all he had and give it to the poor, and then to come and follow him. But he couldn’t do that – he coveted his belongings too much.

Well then, how to stop? How do we learn to value our stuff, but not be so terribly attached to it that it would be a disaster not to have it any more? Well, if you ever find out, let me know! Seriously, though, the only way I know that might even begin to work is to become more and more God’s person, to allow God to work more and more deeply in your life, to become more and more the people God created us to be. And even then, we’ll probably still covet, because human beings do! But, thanks be to God through our Lord Jesus Christ, the way of forgiveness is there for us. Amen.