Gen 40:8, ‘“We both had dreams,” they answered, “but there is no one to interpret them.” Then Joseph said to them, “Do not interpretations belong to God? Tell me your dreams.”’ Joseph is imprisoned falsely, accused of attempted rape by Potiphar’s wife. Whilst there he finds important officials fallen from Pharaoh’s grace & is asked about their dreams. Joseph says that dreams & their meanings belong to God. No surprise; the dreams are about the future, a future we have a role in, but beyond our competence to understand. That is the domain of God. Trust your future to God today.

TEXT MESSAGE COMMENTARY: A commentary on part of the Bible reading for morning prayer in 640 characters (four text messages).

Gen 39:12, ‘Potiphar’s wife caught Joseph by his cloak and said, “Come to bed with me!” But he left his cloak in her hand and ran out of the house.’ Joseph carries the dream into captivity and becomes a slave in the house of the Egyptian official, Potiphar. Here, because of the blessing of God, he is put in charge of everything, but not, of course, Potiphar’s wife. She is a powerful lady, who tries to grasp Joseph, but she is not as powerful as she thinks. Joseph has a power because he believes in a God-given dream. For a second time Joseph gives up his cloak. He doesn’t need them, his authority comes from the Lord.

Psalm 38:4-5, ‘My guilt has overwhelmed me like a burden too heavy to bear. My wounds fester and are loathsome because of my sinful folly.’ Today is Ash Wednesday, the day Lent begins & we remember our own mortality. In churches across the country there will be services of confession & people will have grey ash wiped in the sign of the cross on their foreheads. It reminds us that God is God, we make mistakes which make our lives frail, & that true freedom comes when we die to ourselves and live for God.It is a tough thing to remember, don’t be in a rush to wash the ash off…

TEXT MESSAGE COMMENTARY: A commentary on part of the Bible reading for morning prayer in 640 characters (four text messages).

Gen 37:19-20, ‘”Here comes that dreamer!” Joseph’s brothers said to each other. “Come now, let’s kill him and throw him into one of these cisterns and say that a ferocious animal devoured him. Then we’ll see what comes of his dreams.”‘ The dream is a threat, even to the dreamer’s brothers. Following the call of God is not always easy, being a disciple does not mean an easy life as there are many, perhaps some close to us, who will resist the dream that God has given us. However, God is with, Joseph begins a journey to Egypt, to fulfill the dream & lead God’s people.

This is a video we used in our evening service recently. The video is not great, but the song is! As we watched this and listened to the song we considered those things in our lives that were hard to get rid of. We thought a little of how confession is sometimes too easy, we feel bad about feeling forgiven, or other times too difficult, as if there is something we can’t bring before God. This was done in the context of Moses meeting with God at the burning bush. Moses declared he couldn’t fulfill the call God had for his life, when God persuaded him otherwise his next complaint was that no one else would consider him able to fulfill God’s call for his life. He was right, they didn’t, turns out it didn’t matter: God sent him and God was with him.

Gen 37:5-6, ‘Joseph had a dream, and when he told it to his brothers, they hated him all the more. He said to them, “Listen to this dream I had…”‘ The Joseph story is about the work of God in the ordinary circumstances of life. Yet there is a thread throughout the story of dreams, the power of dreams, & how you hold on to a dream when life around you seems so ordinary. The less than perfect world around us can erode God-given dreams, and so we must ‘never tire of doing good.’ (2 Thess 3:13)

The Transfiguration: Mark 9:2-9

The transfiguration is all about the fulfillment of the previous verse to our reading today. The first verse of chapter nine Jesus says to his disciples,

‘Truly I tell you, there are some standing here who will not taste death until they see that the kingdom of God has come with power.’

Some of the disciples see Jesus in his full glory, they see the kingdom of God with power. Those disciples see heaven unveiled and revealed for them. When heaven appears then time becomes irrelevant and so the future and the past collide: Elijah, representing the prophets, and Moses, representing the Law, appear to meet with God again. Elijah had met with God in the still small voice, Moses in earthquake and fire, and now here God incarnate.

This unveiling of Jesus, his being shown in his full glory was a similar experience that Moses had on Mount Sinai. We can read about it in Exodus 34:29. It says,

‘Moses came down from Mount Sinai. As he came down from the mountain with the two tablets of the covenant in his hand, Moses did not know that the skin of his face shone because he had been talking with God.’

You could argue that the transfiguration of Moses was Moses in the flesh experiencing Jesus in the spirit, and the second transfiguration was Jesus in the flesh and Moses in the spirit. Both of these experiences took place on a mountain, in both cases the glory and light of God shone in a way that is beyond explanation, in both cases you could see a physical difference, a real and literal metamorphosis.

There are differences though in the experience. Moses had to wear a veil because the glory shone so bright, whereas this wasn’t the case of Jesus and the disciples. In fact in 2 Corinthians 3 Paul expressly tells us that our experience of meeting with God should be different from that of Moses, there should be no need for us to wear a veil. Verse 17 says,

Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.

Whenever we meet with God it is the real thing. It is not a piece of chiseled stone in the same way that it was with Moses, it is the real presence of the living God. And further more we can have confidence to stand in that presence with faces unveiled in complete freedom because of what Jesus has done for us. We don’t get a representation of God, through the Spirit we get God himself, we share directly in the life of God, and it is this which leads us to freedom. So it is the spirit that transforms us.

In Mark 9:5-6 we are told that Peter said to Jesus,

‘Rabbi, it is good for us to be here; let us make three dwellings, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.’ He did not know what to say, for they were terrified.

Peter wanted to take a picture of what had happened, something to mark the event and capture it in time for him and the others to remember and reflect upon. He wanted to build a memorial for the event instead of experiencing it for himself there and then.

My dad is a retired languages teacher and now a priest in Lincolnshire. We used to go on holiday a lot in France, and we spent most of our time off the beaten track in some amazing countryside. We were usually visiting the lesser known Chateau, or driving through some beautiful passes. On these holiday we always used to make fun of dad because he had this catchphrase he would use as we drove around. he would pull the car over, stop the car, and then tell us we weren’t stopping, and then would try and take a photo of a sun setting behind some castle, or a river winding through the valley floor, or something like that. I guess I learnt form his mistakes, and at the same time that ‘we weren’t stopping’ I would take the few moments it would take for him to compose his shot, to soak up the scenery and enjoy the moment. Days later, back in Lincolnshire with the photos developed, we would flick through picture after picture of scenery, none of them displaying the true beauty of what we had seen.

As Peter is expressing his thought of building some kind of monument to what they have experienced, he, with the other disciples, Elijah and Moses, are immersed in a white light, a cloud of light, the presence of God and they become afraid. It is almost as if God himself tries to show Peter that what he is saying is inappropriate, and that he should enjoy the experience of God, not try and save it or replicate it. Not make a photocopy of it, and then photocopy that photocopy, and then photocopy that one, until the experience fades.

And sometimes we are guilty of the same. Sometimes we are knowingly guilty, sometimes we submit to the institution of the Church that is guilty of this. Notice that I said the institution of the Church and not the church, I love the church. Sometimes we try and recreate a memory of an experience with God instead of desiring the presence of God today. Or sometimes we come to church and watch a priest in the hope that he or she will recreate an experience of God, or maybe experience God themselves so that the members of the church don’t have to.

That cloud and presence of God which Peter, James, and John experienced is well within our grasp today, and I believe my role as a priest is not to mediate Jesus for you today, but to help you find Jesus for yourself.

It is the transfiguration that has led to the common Christian phrase ‘a mountain top experience’. This is phrase we use to describe a time that we feel especially close to God, when something amazing happens which really encourages our faith. We need to remember that the mountain top experience for Jesus is all about his death.

Peter, James, and John heard the voice of God proclaiming the messianic status of Jesus, confirming the things that have just happened: the transfiguration takes place immediately after the first time that Jesus prophesies about his own death.  Our own mountain top experiences should not just be a celebration of a time when we felt especially good about our relationship with God. Nor should they be about us seeking to freeze a moment in time, to make a photocopy of an experience of God that we can hold on to for the next years of our life where we don’t seek God on a daily basis. Nor should it be about taking a key moment in our spiritual journey and trying to market it, to build a proverbial shelter, to write a book about it, to make others think that they should feel the same.

Our mountain top experiences should be when we die to ourselves. We share in the death of Christ, we carry our cross daily, we live out our baptism each new day and don’t leave it as a long forgotten incident in our past. And so too we share in the resurrection life of Christ.  We are born again of spirit and of water. we come down from the mountain with our faces unveiled, and our new lives speak of the freedom  and grace we have found in God.

May you have a mountain top experience for yourself. May you die and may you live again. Amen

TEXT MESSAGE COMMENTARY: A commentary on part of the Bible reading for morning prayer in 640 characters (four text messages).

Gen. 27:30, ‘After Isaac finished blessing him, and Jacob had scarcely left his father’s presence, his brother Esau came in from hunting.’ One thing this story tells us is that spoken words shape lives. If words are spoken in the right context, and by a person with authority (and all of us have authority from Christ), then these words have substance. These types of words must be handled with respect because they have the power of life or death (see James 3:10).

The calling challenged: Exodus 2:11-25

Our reading tonight is pretty straight forward. It is one of those stories that you have vague recollections of hearing about in Sunday school if you belong to the shrinking percentage of people who actually went to Sunday school. Like a lot of the stories that you learn at church from the Old Testament, we are vaguely aware that the Sunday School version will have been censored for some of the nastiness – they are great stories in the Old Testament, but every now and gain something pretty bad happens, like the greatest leader of Israel killing an man and then hiding the body.

I have been asked about some of the morals and ethics that we are coming across or will come across in Exodus and for my take on them. We will let the really bad stuff happen before we begin to address those questions, so what this space.

So, Moses has been taken in by Pharaoh’s daughter, who has very obviously disobeyed her father’s order that all Hebrew male children should be thrown into the Nile. The Nile becomes water of salvation for Moses, rather than the instrument of death that the king of Egypt, this anti-God, intends; his plan is thwarted by three daughters. In fact in a brilliant twist of irony the king of Egypt ends up paying Moses’ mum to look after him – something she was desperate to do for no pay at all.

Then one day Moses goes down to be with his people. The narrative is at pains to point out that the Hebrews are Moses’ people. He sees an Egyptian beating a Hebrew. The inference from the Hebrew word is that he was beating him in such a way that the Hebrew slave was likely to be killed as a result of the beating. Not for the first time in our story this evening Moses has a strong sense of justice, but apparently doesn’t act to rashly. He has a look around him to see who is watching whereupon he falls on the Egyptian and gives him a beating that is so likely to result in the Egyptians death that some time later Moses is hiding a body. Now it may be that Moses didn’t want the Egyptian to die, but it is very telling that the word used for ‘struck down’ is the same word that is used to describe what God does to the Egyptians in the plagues that will come later on. God administers justice to the Egyptians, and here Moses acts administers justice and strikes this Egyptian down.

The next day Moses is doing his rounds a gain, this time he comes across two Hebrews fighting, so again Moses sense of justice kicks in and he steps in between them to try and stop the fight. What happens next shocks Moses on tow levels. First of all the response of the Hebrew apparently doing the beating is basically to ask Moses who the heck he thinks he is to come down here and start acting like some kind of ruler over them. Remember that Moses has grown up in the court of the king of Egypt. He will be wearing Egyptian dress, sure he has a Hebrew name, and looks a little like a Hebrew, but he has been raised an Egyptian. Moses leadership is rejected for the first time, but not for the last.

The second surprise that Moses has is that the Hebrew has obviously heard of the death that Moses thought he had gotten away with no one seeing. The Hebrew says as much in what sounds like a veiled threat to tell the king of Egypt.

The story tells us that Pharaoh does indeed here about the killing of the Egyptian and threatens to kill Moses because of that. This threat gives us a little insight into the story. Remember that Moses is essentially the prince of Egypt. He is perfectly in his right to kill some slave driver, presumably the prince of Egypt can pretty much do what he likes.

but Pharaoh knows that Moses is a Hebrew child. Moses stepping in to save the life of a Hebrew slave even though it costs an Egyptian slaver driver his life is a very worrying turn of events for Pharaoh. What the narrator has been at pains to point out the Pharaoh now sees, despite being raised all his life in the palace, Moses is a Hebrew, and a pretty powerful one at that.

So Moses has to flee for his life. He runs from the palace, he can’t run to his Hebrew people, he has already seen what their response to him has been. Moses runs to the wilderness, to the desert, to the back of beyond, a place called Midian. When he arrives there he finds a watering hole, a well. When he is there some women trying to draw water, but they are driven off by some shepherds. For the third time in the story Moses’ sense of justice rises up, he drives these Shepherds off, and then does the humbling task of watering the flock of these women. Moses stays with the father of these women, and in the end marries one of them. He marries someone who is not a Hebrew, or an Egyptian. He has started a new life, he is in a place he doesn’t belong. So when his first son is born Moses names him Gershom which means ‘a stranger there.’

Rejection

Rejection is not easy to deal with. Moses is trying to do the best he can, we can read between the lines a little – let us not make too much of it – but Moses appears to be trying to learn something of his roots, who his people are. I suppose he doesn’t have to. He could stay safely in his palace and not give the Hebrews another thought, but he decides not to do that. This ends up in him killing an Egyptian and then being rejected by one of his own people. He goes from palace to Exile in the time it takes to walk like an Egyptian.

The rejection from his fellow Hebrew will become a common theme for Moses as the decisions he makes, the leadership he exercises is questioned time and again and we’ll hear about it in the weeks to come. But as a taster in the very near future Moses will meet with God in a powerful way and will begin by doubting his own ability to do what God asks him to do. That is where it often starts: with self-doubt. God eventually convinces Moses that he can do it, and so Moses goes back to the palace to ask Pharaoh to release the Hebrews. The outcome is that the Hebrews stay as slaves and are given more work to do as quotas are increased making Moses the least popular person on the planet.

Later when the Hebrews do eventually escape Egypt, they have an Egyptian army at their backs and the red Sea in front of them, and they tell Moses that they should have been left to die in Egypt. Moses was likely not feeling overly confident in that situation to begin with, and that is just the kind of helpful encouragement he could do without.  God, of course, brings them through the Red Sea, which gives the Hebrews a chance to moan about Moses’ leadership because they have no water. Once they are given water they moan about Moses’ leadership because they have no food, once they are given food Moses goes up on to Mount Sinai to receive the Law of God which will help them live at the people of God. Whilst he is doing that the Hebrews are waiting at the bottom and building a golden calf which they worship as a god. That is not a big vote of confidence to Moses leadership or, indeed, God’s. Once Moses leads them to the edge of the Promised Land, and with the exception of two, Joshua and Caleb, every last one of the Hebrews refuses to go into the Promised Land because it looks a bit too difficult.

So in our reading tonight, Moses as he seeks to right a wrong, for the first time of many, has his leadership questioned and rejected.

Perhaps Moses should have given up there and then. This was the beginning of many challenges he would face and many doubts. Moses will be hit time and again and yet he will not get knocked down, and he certainly won’t stay down. Why not?

A Call from God

I have alifetime ambition – to be a Premier League footballer. In that ambition I too have been hit time and again. People have told me over and over that I wasn’t and am not good enough, and pretty much every time I have played football I have struggled with this nagging doubt that perhaps I can’t do it, perhaps I am not good enough. All this self- doubt, this lack of being picked to play at county level, the fact that the professional teams refused to select me for their youth academies, all these things hit me hard. So I went down and I stayed down.

What’s the difference between my heart’s desire to be a professional footballer and Moses’ desire to lead his people out of slavery? There is only one difference: God.

I want me to be a pro-footballer. For some reason God, in God’s master plan for the salvation of humanity, thinks that it is better if I am a vicar of a church in the south of Sheffield. Now if anyone wants to try and knock me down on that one then you are welcome to try. Moses has heard form God and on this one so have I. Someone asked me the other day what were the main things a vicar did. So I said there were lots if different things you might not imagine which take up your time, like tying banners to drain pipes one storey up, only to have them be blown away. But the main thing I did, as in the most important thing to me, is to share my faith, preach sermons, and gather people around the Table of the Lord. Sure there’s a load of admin, bits of networking, long term planning, structuiring, working with volunteers etc. but they are not the main thing even if they might take up most of the time. This person then asked me what I would do if I wasn’t a vicar. I told them that I would share my faith, preach sermons and try and gather people around the Table of the Lord. Call me a vicar, priest, Father, Rev, vicarage, call me what you like, that is what I will do.

Sure there are moments of self-doubt, more likely moments of self-destruction where I take a huge block of sin and lay it on the tracks of God’s plan for my life and for some reason seek to de-rail God’s vocation for me. But I have people who keep me on track, and I have God’s grace and calling as fuel for my fire, so I steam right on through it.

Some of you look around and wonder how you ended worshipping in a church that describes itself as Anglo-Catholic and very definitely has a whiff of incense around the place. Some of you look up front and wonder how it came to be that you agreed it would be a good idea to have a young, cocky, tattooed priest. The only answer I have for both questions is God. If the answer wasn’t God then we would all be in trouble.

Some of you face illness, real, hard, terrible, life robbing illness that threatens you is threatening or has taken a loved one, the kind of illness where God only seems to answer your wild prayers with the word ‘Not yet.’, some of you have the worse boss in the world and are stuck in a dead end job, some of you would like a dead end job, any job, some of you think you are pretty rubbish, some of you think that because people and situations in life seem to be telling you that all the time.

I am not here to tell you you will be healed. You will be when Jesus comes back, but this side of eternity you might not be. I’m not hear to tell you you will never be afraid again, that you’ll never doubt. I am not hear to tell you to quit your job, or that I have a job to offer you. I am not here to tell you that this time next year you will have come into some money and all that pressure will be gone.

I am here to tell you that God has called, God has purposed, God has ordained, God has given you a vocation and gifts, and then to top it all off God has said, ‘You don’t have to do it on your own.’ and God has given you the holy Spirit, the Spirit of God, part of the Godhead to be in and through your life.

If you meet with God, if you know that God is on your side when someone swings for you, you will find that no matter how much it hurts, once the dust has settled, once you have wiped the snot and blood from your nose on the back of your sleeve, you’ll look around you and find that you are still standing.

2 Corinthians 4 beginning to read form verse 6 has Paul writing to a church in Corinth. You want to see a church with issues take a look at Corinth, you want to see leadership questioned, take a look at Paul, they said he was ugly and boring. Paul says,

For it is the God who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness’, who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. But we have this treasure in clay jars, so that it may be made clear that this extraordinary power belongs to God and does not come from us. We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed; always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be made visible in our bodies.

Amen

Here’s what I have been thinking: a lot of folks have gone to church for a long time and grown up in a tradition of church. About fifty years ago the church culture and the culture of the world were in touching distance, even in the area of music. Everyone sang hymns in assemblies at school, an organ would play during intervals in the film at the cinema, music in general was pretty close to the classic tradition (from 1956 – 1960 the highest selling albums in the UK were all soundtracks to musicals, not strictly classical in music tradition, but ‘program music’ used to set a scene and paint a picture). There was, of course the emergence of Jazz and its experimentation, but even that was largely on instruments that were commonly found in an orchestra (I don’t pretend to be an expert on the emergence on popular music…that’s not true, I often pretend to be an expert on popular music, but I am not.)

Then popular culture changed, either driven by, or expressed through, a change in music: Rock ‘n’ Roll happened. Despite the piano antics of Jerry Lee Lewis everyone wanted to play guitar like Elvis, Buddy Holly, Johnny Cash et al. Then came the Stones and the Beatles. The population boom of this generation, a growth in disposable income amongst so-called ‘teenagers’, a growth in media and marketing, heck, even the fact that in the fifties you could listen to music on vinyl and didn’t need to see it live resulting in a global phenomenon, all of these represented change.

In the church choirs still sang with organ accompaniment. Many people did and still do appreciate mass settings composed by great classical composers, and the world marched on.

I love liturgy. Liturgy is not the same thing as words spoken by congregations surrounded by hymns played on the organ.

The biggest selling album of 2011 was ‘21’ by Adele, the second biggest selling album of 2011 in the UK was Adele’s debut album, ‘19’. They are both decent pop records. There is a great vocal, guitars, drums, bass, some keyboard, the odd bit of brass. How many priests have heard either of those albums by Adele? How much of our sung worship recognizes the fact that when people buy music in this country they are choosing to buy music by Adele, and/or that this is the music that is being played on radio stations listened to on building sites, mechanic’s garages, dentist waiting rooms up and down the country?

Personally I prefer the album by ‘Unknown Mortal Orchestra’, but I am not asking for our worship to be done in a kind of lo-fi, funk fuzz style; I am wondering what it looks like if we set the universal and timeless truths of the liturgy in a setting that appeals to the majority. What is, and I don’t mean this in a derogatory sense, the lowest common denominator when it comes to the songs we sing in church? To put it another way what does our music tradition look like when it reflects the Apostle Paul’s concern to be ‘…all things to all people so that by all possible means I might save some. I do all this for the sake of the gospel, that I may share in its blessings.’?

I don’t think liturgy or sung worship should be about doing what is popular outside of the church and losing the mystery of the sacrament. I don’t think sung worship in church should be motivated by consumer culture. I do believe in counter-cultural worship because the Gospel is counter-cultural. I don’t think sung worship is the sales technique of the church. I do believe that God is enthroned on the praises of his people. I don’t think organs should be ripped out of churches. I do think guitars should be allowed in (or, where it is appropriate, vinyl decks for hip-hop style music, etc.) I don’t think we should dumb down the theology of the songs that we sing. I do think that the words we sing help us learn theology.

I do think that when people come to church for the first time (they’ll only come if we invite them, and if we invite them then it has got to be because we want them there) they will likely notice four things:

1.     The welcome they receive (do we really want them there?).

2.     The songs we sing.

3.     The words of the sermon preached and how it is preached.

4.     The sacrament administered and how it is administered.

I don’t think the Apostle Paul preached the Gospel in Hebrew; he could have done, but everyone else was speaking Greek so he did it in Greek instead. After the incarnation of Jesus (done in a way that humanity at the time could grasp), there came the cross (stumbling block to Jews, foolishness to the Greeks, in other words tough for humanity). There had to be an incarnation before there was the cross, and ultimately the resurrection.

Who is the church intent on speaking to, and what are we saying?