“I Could Murder You!”

February 17, 2020 / admin / 2020, Sermons

A sermon preached by the Reverend Trevor Jamison at

Saint Columba’s United Reformed Church, North Shields, February 16^th 2020

Murder, adultery, divorce and oath taking …

Previously, on Sermons at Saint Columba’s …

Two weeks ago, we had the beatitudes, the start of Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount. (5:1-12) Last week, from that same Sermon on the Mount, we had Jesus declaring, ‘Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfil.’ (5:17) I then left you hanging at the end of last week’s sermon by saying, ‘How Jesus went about fulfilling the Old Testament law and prophets is our model for doing so today. And Jesus was shockingly flexible with those rules to make them fit the situation: “he’s abolishing the law”, some thought. And we will discover that out for ourselves … in next week’s sermon.’

Well, next week’s sermon has arrived, and we are sticking with the Sermon on the Mount, to see how Jesus deals with rules and regulations contained in the Bible. If we can see what he did with them, then that will give us some idea about how we are to regard the rules that appear in our own Bible, which, let’s not forget, has an additional twenty seven books to ponder, on top of the Old Testament ones that constituted the scripture precious to Jesus and his fellow Jews. That’s challenging. And because we like a challenge, we’re looking at this passage where Jesus talks about about murder, adultery, divorce, and oath taking.

Murder, like adultery, qualifies for a place in the ten commandments: “you shall not murder.” (Exodus 20:13, 14) In today’s Old Testament reading, Moses declares to God’s people, ‘if you obey the commandments of the LORD your God that I am commanding you today … by walking in his ways, and observing his commandments, decrees, and ordinances … God will bless you. But if your heart turns away and you do not hear … you shall perish.’ (30:16, 17, 18) So, it follows that if you claim to follow the biblical law you do not go around murdering people.

That doesn’t seem too big an “ask”: don’t murder anyone. Very few people murder other people, at least around here in North Shields. I’m pretty confident that adultery is more widespread than murder. Is divorce more widespread than adultery? And as for oath-taking in the context of truth telling (which might relate to the commandment about false witness (Exodus 20:16)), most people who take an oath probably don’t give a single thought to what God might command about that.

Every one of us is agreed that murder is a big thing. From the point of view of biblical laws, taking someone else’s life without permission is the ultimate form of stealing. It’s so significant that the commandment not to steal (Exodus 20:15) is not enough by itself; murder qualifies for its own commandment. Most people don’t need the Bible to tell them that murder is a bad thing. In our society, as in many or all societies, it’s the ultimate individual crime. In this country, until relatively recently, if you took someone else’s life then society would demand yours in return. Even now, it’s murders that command the heaviest prison sentence in our judicial system, and very few would disagree with that approach.

So, it seems that this religious rule against murder is not a great challenge to us. Very few of us ever get really close to killing someone else, though the thought might cross our minds on occasion. As far as keeping the religious law, or any law, is concerned, however, it’s an open goal. We’ve never murdered anyone. We don’t intend to murder anyone. There couldn’t be an easier commandment to keep. At least, there wasn’t until Jesus got his hands on it, and set about fulfilling the law and the prophets in his own unique way.

Jesus said, ‘You have heard that it was said to those in ancient times [in the Ten Commandments part of the law bequeathed to us by Moses], “You shall not murder”; and “whoever murders shall be liable to judgement.” But I say to you that if you are angry with a brother or sister, you will be liable to judgement; and if you insult a brother or sister, you will be liable to the council; and if you say, “You fool”, you will be liable to the fire of hell. (5:21) If anger and insults towards others counts as part of “you shall not murder” then a commandment that was only for a few suddenly becomes applicable to all of us.

Anger is a universal. We all experience it, both as its object and as the one who is angry. Everyone gets angry sometimes. Some people seem to live in an almost constant state of barely suppressed rage. It only takes the smallest thing for them to get angry. By and large, we don’t like anger. We don’t like the way it makes us feel. We see what it does to others, both in its effect on those who get angry, and its impact upon those who are the target of others’ anger. All the same, if Jesus fulfils God’s law by identifying anger with murder then he turns murder from a commandment none of are likely to break during our lives into one that all of us have already broken. Where’s the good news in that?

Maybe there’s such a thing as good anger or righteous anger. After all, we used to be so much more comfortable with the idea that God gets angry, though maybe we got a bit too comfortable with that. Nowadays, when I preach that “God is love” no one bats an eyelid. If I preached ‘the wrath of God’, however, people would demand an explanation. They might think that I have time-travelled to this pulpit from a previous era; that I had been angered by a recent bad experience; or just that there is something wrong with me today.

Now, I’m convinced that God is love. The life, the teaching, the death and resurrection of Jesus have convinced me of that. As Saint Paul put it when writing to Christians in Rome, ‘while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly … God proves his love for us in that while we were still sinners Christ died for us.’ (Romans 5:6, 8) So, yes, God is love, but can God get angry? You know, I hope so.

When you’re aware that a child is being abused or has been abused, or hear that another has been murdered, it’s natural to be angry, and I would think it strange if God was not. When I see refugees on the road in Syria, fleeing from murder by bombing and bombardment, and with the prospect of worse to come, I hope God sees it too and is angry. For me, it would be very worrying to think that God was not angry in face of perpetrated injustices and consequent human suffering. If a human being was untouched by it, we would see him or as lacking something in their humanity. If God is untouched by such suffering, then God’s lacking something in God’s divinity.

So, how does that fit in with what Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount about the law against murder? ‘But I say to you …’ (5:22) says Jesus, if you’re even angry or insulting to others you’re liable to judgement. If you have ever gone as far as calling someone a fool, then you’re liable to hellfire. On that basis, anyone here today who’s liable to hellfire? The preacher raised his hand at this point, as did most members of the congregation.

Maybe Jesus was exaggerating for effect. Certainly, that’s possible. You think that you’re too good to ever be as bad a murderer? OK, but how many murders arise from those moments of anger we all know? How many arise from situations where insults were traded or where one person called the other a fool – like we’ve all thought or said at one time or another? Then, before they knew it, they’d lost it; fists were flying, the weapon nearest to hand was in someone’s hand, and it was used to deadly effect. There, but for the grace of God, go all the angry people in the world, including you and me.

Maybe one effect that Jesus wanted to have was to remind his disciples – including you and me – that we are not a cut above the other sinners, including even the murderers; to say that in certain ways we can’t even be sure that we can keep as easy a commandment as “do not murder”. Oddly enough, as well as having a role in keeping order in society, perhaps part of the point of God’s law is to remind us that by ourselves, dependant only upon our own powers, we, Jesus’s followers, aren’t able to keep the laws, and so are liable to God’s judgement as anyone else. So, Jesus fulfils the law by pointing to our need for something or someone beyond the law.

Ultimately, for our existence and for flourishing, we depend not upon the laws themselves, but on God, who is behind and above these laws. That brings us back to Jesus, the preacher of the Sermon on the Mount, not just to the content of his Sermon itself. Jesus takes the opportunity presented by the commandment to preach against the murderous aspects and outcomes of human anger. God’s anger about what’s wrong in the world, however, is decisively different from our law-breaking sort of anger. We get angry and bad things follow. God gets angry and sends Jesus, not to insult us or call us fools, but to love us and call us friends. (John 15:15)

Where anger is concerned, Jesus fulfils the law. The law’s there to keep our communities and societies from falling into chaos. Yet, at the same time, it’s impossible for us to keep in every detail, says Jesus, even where murder is concerned. For that, we depend on God to be angry enough, which for God involves being loving enough, to respond with the gift of God’s Son, Jesus Christ. So, first, we depend on God; and then, secondly, we do our best to keep God’s laws.

Following the Rules?

February 17, 2020 / admin / 2020, Sermons

A Sermon Preached by the Reverend Trevor Jamison at

Saint Columba’s United Reformed Church, North Shields, February 9^th 2020

Matthew 5: 13-20

In last week’s sermon I started with the Sermon on the Mount and with the beatitudes – its best-known bit. Jesus then went on to say, ‘Do not think that I have come to abolish the law and the prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfil. For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth pass away, not one letter, not one stroke of a letter, will pass from the law until all is accomplished. Therefore, whoever breaks one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same, will be called least in the kingdom of heaven; but whoever does them and teaches them will be called great in the kingdom of heaven.’ (5:17-19)

So, there you have it. If we are to be like a lamp on a stand which gives light to a whole house, says Jesus, and if we let our light ‘shine before others, so that they may see … [our] good works and give glory to … [our] Father in heaven’ (5:16), we need to both do and teach the whole of the law. How on earth are we going to do that? Who’s up for being so good at keeping and teaching the law that ‘your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees’?

If fulfilling the law involves keeping all the rules and regulations of the biblical Old Testament then I’m sunk, and so is any church that I’ve ever come across. Besides, churches already have a bad enough (if somewhat undeserved) reputation for telling people to follow rules we make up, but which we fail to follow ourselves. So who are we to think that we can take on the whole of biblical law and keep it? Those legal and religious professionals in Jesus’s time, the scribes and the Pharisees, never managed it, so why should we?

Is being a Christian about knowing and following the rules? A few years ago, a poll of UK Christians revealed that most of them could not remember all ten of the ten commandments. This prompted the public atheist and campaigner, Richard Dawkins to trumpet the imminent end of Christian faith in Britain. If you couldn’t remember the most basic rules of the religion, he argued, you couldn’t be a believer. As it turned out, though, when he himself was interviewed, although a biologist, he couldn’t remember the wording of the full title of Charles Darwin’s book, On the Origin of Species, yet no one was suggesting this meant he didn’t believe in evolution.

So, then, is it ok to be a Christian despite not knowing or following the rules? That sounds a bit strange, in fact unbelievable. Ok, so Richard Dawkins wasn’t word-perfect concerning a book called, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, but he knew there was such a book, he had heard of the author, and he accepts in general terms the theory of evolution pioneered by Charles Darwin. If he had not known the book or author existed that would have been another story. As with Richard Dawkins and evolutionary biology, so with Christians and our religion: we’re not required to know every detail, but we do have to have some acquaintanceship with it.

And, as it happens, we do know something about the content of our faith, even if we’re not confident about every detail. We had a good example of that a couple of Thursday nights ago in this very congregation. This happened when we kicked off our study series about women of the Bible, with the story of the woman who anointed Jesus.

We divided into four groups to talk about what we remembered about that story. We remembered lots, though sometimes we remembered differently. We were aware that there were things that we maybe once knew but just couldn’t quite recall. Then each group was given the text of the biblical story, one as it was told by Mark, one by Matthew, one by Luke, and one by John. Now we discovered that the different Gospel writers supply different parts of the story we “remember”, and sometimes they seem hazy on detail. Did this event occur in the house of Lazarus or Simon (who may or may not have been a Pharisee)?

We also found that we had picked up some ideas concerning this story about the woman who anointed Jesus that did not originate in any of the four biblical accounts. Particularly, although one Gospel writer tells us the woman was called Mary, none of them say it was Mary Magdalene. Also, although some of the Gospel writers suggest the woman was “a sinner” none of them say she was a prostitute. Yet, in the popular shared memory both Mary Magdalene and prostitution feature. So if knowing the story is part of the rules of being a Christian, then, on this occasion, we were on a sort of respectable seven out of ten, but not at the level of perfect recall that would make a scribe or Pharisee jealous of us.

But Jesus said, ‘unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.’ (5:20) It matters to know the laws, the rules, the regulations of our religion and our life, but if we are being asked for perfect recall, we will never be good enough. It matters, because without some knowledge of the content of faith you can’t believe it or practise it. At the most basic level, you can’t be a Christian without knowing something about Jesus Christ. You need to know something about his life, his death, and his resurrection. You need to know something of his teaching, of what he said. Not knowing these things does not mean you are a worse person, than someone who does know them; it would mean, though, that you are not (at least yet) a Christian.

So what makes the difference? It’s not just knowing about Jesus and about what he said that makes you a Christian. After all, Richard Dawkins knows quite a bit about Jesus and the Bible. He probably knows all ten of the commandments, as well as memorising the full title of On the Origin of Species, just in case anyone ever asks him again, but he, as he would tell you himself, is not a Christian.

So what makes the difference? The clue to that lies in something Jesus said when he told his disciples, ‘you are the light of the world.’ (5:14) he said, ‘let your light shine before others so that they see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven.’ (5:16) – so that they see your good works. There’s an important link between what we know and believe, and what we do.

It’s not that these good works in themselves are what make us into Christians or that they put us right with God when our lives have previously gone off in a wrong direction; it’s God who does that. Rather, these good works are evidence that we are aware of at least some of the law, of the rules of the game, and we are trying to respond in the right way. So maybe we can’t remember all ten of the commandments without a quick glance at Exodus chapter twenty. On the other hand, for example, although HMRC might never know about that pot of money, filling in a tax return involves reminders to us that two of those commandments are against stealing, and against false witness, and we make our decisions in that light.

We need to know something about the Bible, something about God, something about Jesus, but we can’t and don’t need to know everything. I would always recommend knowing more about the Bible, Jesus and God, as the basis for good decision-making in life. It’s never too late to learn. What matters to God, though, I believe, is what we do with what we do know here and now. Trying to apply well what we know of the content, of the rules, of the stories of Christian faith, is what matters.

That means that the situations that we face today will impact on how we interpret religious rules that were written in a different time and for different situations. How Jesus set about fulfilling the Old Testament law and prophets is our model for doing so today. And Jesus was shockingly flexible with those rules to make them fit the situation: “he’s abolishing the law”, some thought. And we will discover that out for ourselves … in my next sermon: same time, same pulpit, same preacher. See you then.

Matthew 5: 13-20

The Beatitudes are for…

February 3, 2020 / admin / 2020, Sermons

A Sermon Preached by the Reverend Trevor Jamison at Saint Columba’s United Reformed Church,

February 2^nd 2020

Micah 6: 1-8; Psalm 15; Matthew 5: 1-10

There is a story told about an American college where every student was required to take an ‘introduction to religion’ course. Whatever subject was their ‘major’ in they still had to take and pass this course. Otherwise, no graduation. Every year, though, the course was taught by the same teacher and the end-of-course exam consisted of just one question, which, for as long as anyone could remember, had been the same question: “Write an account of the missionary journeys of Saint Paul.”

Most students put read enough to provide them with the basic account of Paul’s journeys, which would enable them to complete their journey to graduation. One year, when the students in the exam hall were confronted with a one-question exam paper which asked: “Write a critical account of the Sermon on the Mount.” Soon the exam hall had emptied of students, resigned to re-sitting the exam at future date, hoping that Saint Paul would make a come-back.

One student, after staring at the paper for a few minutes, began to write furiously, filling page after page, right up until the last moment allocated for the examination. His fellow students were intrigued, so when he emerged from the examination hall, they were waiting to interrogate him. “What on earth did you find to write about for two hours?” they asked. “Simple,” he replied, “I began my essay with the declaration, ‘Who am I or anyone else to criticise the Sermon on the Mount? How much better to use this precious time to consider the missionary journeys of Saint Paul!’”

Today, I feel a little bit like that student. True, I don’t have to preach on the whole of the Sermon on the Mount. Matthew’s presentation of Jesus’s teaching covers three entire chapters of his Gospel. I only have to deal with the first twelve verse: the beatitudes. This is the best-known part of the Sermon on the Mount. Many think it is the whole Sermon.

What am supposed to say about the beatitudes? If I question them then you might ask, “Who does he think he is to criticise the Sermon on the Mount?” If I all I do is repeat them, you might ask, “What is the point of this sermon?” (the one I’m preaching not the one from Jesus). Why not just let the Saviour speak for himself and cut out the ministerial middleman?

We may think we know how to respond to the beatitudes, but is that really the case? Could familiarity lead, if not to contempt, then to a failure to recognise the nature of the challenge they present today? A journalist once wrote, “No one today would want to argue with the content of the Sermon on the Mount”, by which, as the rest of his article demonstrated he meant the beatitudes. This made me wonder, “When was the last time they read the beatitudes if he can write something like that?”

Jesus said that kingdom of heaven is the possession of the poor in spirit and those who are persecuted in the cause of right.

Jesus declared that the sorrowful find consolation, the gentle get to possess the earth, those who hunger and thirst for justice are satisfied, the merciful receive mercy, the pure in heart see God and the peacemakers are called God’s children.

I hear that and I want to say, “Well, maybe so, Jesus, but only up to a point”. And I put it that way only because I’m well known for my good manners, even in the face of provocation. And in any case, who wants to get on the wrong side of Jesus by questioning what he tells you?

All the same, my initial responses are confusion and doubt. What is this kingdom of heaven that the poor in spirit and the persecuted get to possess? Did the sorrowing families of Jews and others who perished in the Holocaust really find comfort? If the gentle really possess the earth why, so often, as Napoleon once put it, does God seem to be on the side of the big battalions. If those who hunger and thirst for justice are satisfied why is Amnesty International kept so busy? The pure in heart may see God but God’s children, the peacemakers, seem to have little standing in a violent world. At this point I find myself contemplating giving a sermon devoted to retracing the missionary journeys of Saint Paul.

Yet, as I look at this passage once again, I see something that makes me wish to embrace the beatitudes, while at the same time so terrifies me that I want to run away from them. What I see is that way before being for the world in general, Jesus’s demands, expressed in the words of the beatitudes, are for the Church: “When he saw the crowds, he went up a mountain. There he sat down, and when his disciples had gathered round him, he began to address them. And this is the teaching he gave …” (5: 1-2)

Jesus’s teaching in the Sermon on the Mount, says Matthew, is addressed to his disciples. So, as Jesus’s disciples today, we have gathered to listen to these words, not as generalised sentiments, available to ‘everyman’ and ‘everywoman’, but as directed to those who claim to be his followers. Within the Church, the beatitudes are designed to have ‘bite’, and this I find both intriguing and unsettling; attractive yet terrifying. And the more I think about that – the place of the beatitudes within the Church – the more I see in it.

‘Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted’: many of us have observed or experienced the truth that in and through the Church the sorrowing really may find consolation. Often, for example, when I conduct a funeral, it’s plain to me that that ministry, including the words of scripture and the prayers offered, provide a measure of consolation to those who mourn.

‘Blessed are the meek [or the gentle], for they will inherit the earth’: that the gentle might be blessed in the life of the Church gives me pause for thought, especially when I have observed or experienced the infighting that so often characterises groups of people who are thrown together, supposedly in a common cause. Over time, however, after the dust settles, it’s the gently Jesus-like Christians who gain the respect of the world.

Surely, too we recognise something of the reality of Church life reflected in the other beatitudes; in seeking after justice, showing mercy and being pure in heart: think of Christian Aid, supporting organisations like Compassion, and local social action. We might not have achieved complete purity of heart (sermons would be rendered redundant if we did) but as someone who has worked in the Church and in the secular workplaces, I have noticed differences. A regular diet of worship, scripture, prayer, and care sets boundaries on acceptable behaviour and shared values, even though we are not perfect.

And of course, the Church is still very much in need of peacemakers – well the URC is anyway; I wouldn’t know about the Methodists, the Baptists, the Anglicans and all the rest. Perhaps they are prefect as we are not.

When I consider the Sermon on the Mount in the context of the Church, the beatitudes become less out-of-this-world holy and more down-to-earth practical. I can relate them to situations I face together with people I know, on a day-to-day basis; people with whom I have to live and who have to live with me. The beatitudes also become more demanding, for I cannot consign them to the realms of theory, something someone else might be doing somewhere else in the world today.

So, the beatitudes give me an agenda for today’s Church, but there is ‘but’ that cannot be simply ignored …

This teaching, these demands, from Jesus may begin with us in the Church but they cannot then be allowed to remain only within the Church. We, after all, live in the world, not just in the Church. In the prophet Micah’s message we see a setting where God’s people and the world in general intersect. The people that God calls through the prophet are both his people and the whole nation. They are all told to “act justly, to love loyalty, to walk humbly with your God.” (6: 8) Psalm 15, which begins by asking who will dwell in God’s holy place, then connects all of that with money lending and taking bribes.

Also, by the end of Matthew’s Gospel, the Jesus who gathers his disciples around him on a mountain for this teaching, is the same Jesus who, from another mountain, sends them out to the nations to make disciples, baptising and preaching. (28:16-20) What begins with a group of followers, gathered around Jesus, goes on to be shared with the world.

So, for we who call ourselves Christians today, as far as the Sermon on the Mount is concerned, as far as the beatitudes are concerned, it’s really a matter of “Today the Church, and tomorrow, if not sooner, the world.”

beatitudes, Matthew 5: 1-10, Micah 6: 1-8, Psalm 15

What’s in a Name?

December 24, 2019 / admin / 2019, Sermons

A sermon preached by the Reverend Trevor Jamison at

Saint Columba’s United Reformed Church, North Shields, 22^nd December 2019

Isaiah 7:10-16; Matthew 1:18-25

What’s in a name? Whenever a baby is born one of the first things that people want to know is the child’s name. Legally, in England, I believe you have forty-two days in which register a birth, so you don’t have to name the child until then. Leave it more than a couple of days, however, and tongues begin to wag. These days, people think that names are important, though probably not as much as they did in ancient times. Nowadays, someone may be named for someone else or for somewhere or something that is important to a child’s parents. That was also true a couple of thousand years ago, but in addition, people also named a child with their future in mind.

Today’s reading from Matthew’s Gospel introduces us to two names about a baby Mary was soon to have. One name was designed to tell people who this child was, and the other was designed to tell people what he would do. And these names were ‘Emmanuel’ and ‘Jesus’. Since we are almost at Christmas, and since the whole Christmas thing first got going as a celebration of the birth of Jesus, I think it would be good to remind ourselves who Jesus is and what Jesus does, and why that’s worth all the fuss.

Who is Jesus? ‘All this took place to fulfil what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet: ‘Look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall call him Emmanuel,’ which means, ‘God is with us.’ (1:23) So, there you have it: Joseph is engaged to Mary. She’s pregnant and he knows he’s not the father. In previous times, legally, he could have had her stoned to death for this but in his times a public writ of divorce was the accepted way to go. We’re told that Joseph was a ‘righteous man’ (1:19), which means that he was law abiding. His decision not to have a public divorce which would, ‘expose her to public disgrace … [but that he] planned to dismiss her quietly,’ (1:19) shows he was a righteous man who interpreted the law in the sense of it being a command of love.

Then came Joseph’s first dream in Matthew’s Gospel. Like his Old Testament namesake, the one with a technicolour dream coat, this Joseph was a bit of a dreamer. And in his dream God’s messenger tells him not to be afraid to stay with Mary, for this pregnancy is a special work of God. Matthew then comments, ‘All this took place to fulfil what has been spoken by the Lord through the prophet: Look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel, which means, ‘God is with us.’’

Now, you don’t need me to tell you that claiming that a young woman who was a virgin had a child, is, to say the least, controversial. Arguments have raged over this, though mostly only since the nineteenth century. Some people, seeing that Matthew points back to our reading from the Old Testament prophet, Isaiah, claim that not only did it happen, it was predicted. Others argue that the child referred to in Isaiah is a different one, perhaps a son of the prophet himself; that what was said in Isaiah was that a child was coming who would be a sign that God was still with his people even at a difficult time. Then, they would argue, Matthew picked up the reference and applied it to Jesus because he was the one who, more than anyone else, truly was Emmanuel: God with us. Others still, they just dismiss the whole thing as an impossibility.

Was Mary a virgin when her child was conceived? I’ve got to say that my view on that tends to bounce back and forward in a way that’s a bit like the arguments I have just described. I don’t lose too much sleep over that or devote much time to it, though, because, the question about whether Mary was a virgin when Jesus was conceived and born is actually pretty small beer in comparison to the magnitude of the assertion that he was born at all.

‘And they shall name him Emmanuel, which means, God is with us.’ The claim in the Gospels – in the books of New Testament as a whole – is that God was born into the world in the person of a human being; it’s known as the doctrine of the incarnation. In a specific place, at a specific time, carried by and born to a specific mother; named by, and so legally accepted into the family of a specific father, God came into the world, a human being. Not, as some argued in the early centuries of the Church, God coming to earth, just appearing to be a human being; nor, according to the arguments of some others, an outstanding human being who was god-like, or promoted to godly status; but God/human, in some way we can’t explain but only witness and experience.

And that’s what Matthew signals for us: ‘and they shall name him Emmanuel, which means, God with us.’ That’s who he is. But why go to the bother? Why should God take the trouble to ‘be with us’ in or as a human being in first century Bethlehem and beyond? Well, the clue’s in the other name that Matthew reports in his Gospel. The angelic messenger in Joseph’s dream tells him, ‘She will bear a son and you are to name him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.’ (1:21)

The name Jesus, or Yeshua, or Hosea, or Joshua, means something like, “God saves.” And the message for Joseph is that you will call him “God saves” because ‘he will save his people from their sins.’ Being saved from our sins is traditionalist in-house Christian language that I wouldn’t rush to use when talking with others about the meaning of Christmas. In fact, it seems a little odd to be doing so in a sermon today. And yet, we blithely sing about it at Christmas time:

‘Yet with the woes of sin and strife the world has suffered long’: verse 3 of ‘It Came Upon a Midnight Clear.

‘No ear may hear his coming; but in this world of sin, where meek souls will receive him, still the dear Christ enters in’: verse 3 of ‘O Little Town of Bethlehem.

‘When sin departs before his grace, then life and health come in its place’: verse 3 of On Christmas Night All Christians Sing.

And although it doesn’t mention the “S” word itself the sentiment is certainly there in,

God rest ye merry gentlemen
Let nothing you dismay
Remember Christ our Saviour
Was born on Christmas Day
To save us all from Satan’s pow’r
When we were gone astray.

So, if Jesus was born to save us from our sins why don’t we talk about it more at Christmas time? Perhaps I could devote my three-minute reflection at our Christmas Eve carol service to the topic of sin. How do you think that might go down? Maybe not, then.

I suspect that we don’t want to talk about being saved from sin at Christmas time for at least three reasons. First, it might spoil people’s enjoyment of Christmas, and we have thoroughly bought into the idea that Christmas is about enjoying ourselves. No one loves a sin-obsessed party pooper. Second, we are too accepting of an inadequate understanding of sin that sees it simply in terms of breaking rules that are impossible to keep anyway, but that churches have been over eager to police all the same. Third, we don’t like to think of ourselves as sinners in the wider sense of the term that reflects the reality of life in this world.

Sin is not just about rule keeping, though that’s part of it; God’s rules about loving God, loving your neighbour and loving yourself. Sin is a condition from which we suffer. Its signs and symptoms are seen in our failure to love others as we would be loved, in failing to do what we know is the right thing, in failing to avoid doing things we know are harmful; it’s a falling short of what we know we should be, and what we believe God desires us to be. It’s a broader, deeper, bigger thing than keeping some rules (or at least appearing to do so).

And if you want to see sin at work, consider how, as a society, we celebrate Christmas. Personally, I love all the Christmas razzmatazz – lights, trees, get-togethers, food, drink … and getting presents! It is all human, joyful stuff, the sort of thing that our creator likes to see; people enjoying life. We know, however, that we fall short of the ideal in celebrating Christmas. Relationships can come under immense strain, especially if we feel we have to fake it for Christmas. Our Accident and Emergency departments will be awash with those who have overindulged, especially on the drink, And the decorations and the trees and the illuminated reindeers, and the food and drink, and the perfect gifts, come at a financial price that those with little can least afford; people driven deep into debt by unrealistic expectations heaped upon them. And don’t get me started in television advertising …. The human race: trapped into being less than God wants us to be, and suffering consequences at Christmas.

BUT! That’s not the whole story. This condition, this societal sin-sickness does not have the last word. The last word, the good news, is that rather than reject us for such shortcomings God instead chooses to be with us. The good news is that God, in Jesus, is at work to save us from this situation: ‘you are to name him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.’ From his birth and throughout his life of Jesus, God was with and is with us: ‘where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them,’ says Jesus elsewhere in Matthew’s Gospel. (18:20) And this Gospel of Matthew, whose opening verse proclaims ‘Jesus the Messiah’ (1:1) concludes with, ‘And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.’ (28:29)

So, what’s in a name? Quite a lot, when Emmanuel tells us that God is with us, wherever we are, and whoever we are, and that in Jesus this God is here to save us, whatever we have done or whatever has been done to us. And that’s the good news that the cause for our Christmas celebration.

christmas, Emmanuel, Isaiah 7: 10-16, Jesus, Matthew 1: 18-25, sin

Jesus: Successful Failure as King

November 25, 2019 / admin / 2019, Sermons

A sermon preached by the Reverend Trevor Jamison at

Saint Columba’s United Reformed Church, November 24^th 2019

The Feast of Christ the King

Jeremiah 23:1-6; Colossians 1:15-20; Luke 23:33-43

‘’One of the criminals who were hanged there kept deriding him [Jesus] and saying, “are you not the Messiah? Save yourself and us!” But the other rebuked him, saying, “Do you not fear God, since you are under the same sentence of condemnation? … Then he said, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.”’ (23:39, 40, 42)

‘Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.’ Or, on this Sunday where we celebrate the Reign of Christ as King, to put it the other way around:

Your kingdom come;

Remember me;

Jesus.

Your kingdom come: if Jesus has a kingdom then it follows that Jesus is a king, but what sort of king is Jesus? Well, he’s the most spectacular failure of a king that there has ever been.

In Luke’s Gospel there are people who are eager to label Jesus as king, but they don’t mean it as a compliment; they say it scoffingly, with scorn and derision. Luke tells us, ‘there was also an inscription over him, “This is the King of the Jews.”’ (23:38) And who put that placard, that sign, with this inscription at the top of the cross? Pontius Pilate, the representative of the Roman empire. It was he who had it nailed up there, along with Jesus. And he had it – and Jesus – put there as a statement of what a failure he considered Jesus to be. He also put it and Jesus on the cross as a reminder to everyone of what happened to people who claimed kingship without getting Roman imperial consent first: the horrible, horrible death of crucifixion.

And it was the same with his soldiers. Roman soldiers, for only they were authorised to carry out crucifixions, who ‘also mocked him, coming up and offering him sour wine, and saying, “if you are the King of the Jews, save yourself!”’ (23:37) And in making this mockery of Jesus as a failed king, Pilate and his troops were also mocking the Jewish people: “look everyone, this is the nearest thing to a king that the Jews can manage: no political authority, no military power, with an instrument of execution for his royal throne.” What a failure as king Jesus appears to be, hung on his cross, numbered among the criminals, at ‘the place which is called The Skull.’ (23:33) As the Brian Wren hymn puts it:

Here hangs a man discarded,
A scarecrow hoisted high,
A nonsense pointing nowhere
To all who hurry by.

Brian Wren (1936 – ) (R&S 225)

And by the political standards of his day (and our day) as far as being a King or any sort of ruler is concerned, Jesus is indeed, ‘a nonsense pointing nowhere’. He is not rich, he is not powerful, he has no palace, no retinue, no army. What sort of kingship is that?

Remember me: those with power and their representatives might mock Jesus but a criminal on a cross seems to think that Jesus is some sort of king: Jesus, when you come into your kingdom, remember me. This man is at the agonised end of a life that might not have been much to write home about in the first place: ‘we are getting what we deserve for our deeds,’ he tells his companion on the other side of Jesus. (23:41) Yet, at a moment when things are as bad as bad can be for any human being, he is hopeful that Jesus is the sort of king who might remember him. He is hopeful that Jesus is a good-shepherd king, one like those envisaged by the prophet Jeremiah. He hopes Jesus is a good-shepherd king who will seek out and rescue those like him, one who like sheep, have wondered far astray from life as it should be lived. ‘Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.’

How amazing would it be if God remembered you and me? In one of the funeral services in the United Reformed Church’s Worship Book we pray ‘while we live, they will not be forgotten among us,’ and also, ‘may the good things of their life leave a trace on earth.’ Humanist funerals, which are increasingly popular these days, work on the basis that any continued existence that we have after death comes by “living on” in the memories of others. Of course, once the others who remember us have died, then … Seen in this light, maybe that’s why so many people nowadays hunger after being a celebrity. Being known and remembered by so many others is the best way we humans can achieve a sort of eternal life … at least, until our show is cancelled.

With God, however, we hope that things are different. To quote again from the URC Worship Book: ‘in your eternal love [O God], they will never be lost.’ Anyone who believes in God probably doesn’t have too much of a problem with seeing God as King of the universe, as the eternal ruler of the ceaseless round of circling planets singing on their way,’ as another hymn writer puts it. (Eternal Ruler of the Ceaseless Round by J. W. Chadwick (1840-1904) R&S 623) What really blows my mind, however, is the idea that the maker and sustainer not only of the singing planets, but the solar systems and the galaxies, which are beyond number, has the time and the inclination, to remember me.

Yet here’s the king of the universe, nailed to the cross in the guise of a failed king, remembering the sort of people to whom most other people wouldn’t give a thought. The image of the invisible God,’ as it says in Colossians, ‘the first born of all creation,’ in or by whom, ‘all things in heaven and earth were created,’ (1:15, 16) expresses forgiveness – ‘Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing’ (23:34) – and offers salvation: ‘truly, I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise.’ (23:43) It rewrites human ideas of what constitutes kingship. From the perspective how human beings have understood and practised kingship, it’s a nonsense and failure, but Jesus’s brand of kingship has long outlived Pontius Pilate, Herod Antipas and a whole host of other kings, rulers, emperors and presidents, so Jesus a very successful failure as King.

Kingdom, remembering … Jesus: ‘Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.’ Today’s the last Sunday of the Church’s liturgical year. Next Sunday, Advent begins another year of re-telling the story of God’s dealings with God’s creation, including with you and me. It’s a story that ends with a reminder that God is king, but in a way that sets the standard for what constitutes good human kingship, not the other way around. God is mighty, in ways beyond our greatest imaginings, for God is the creator of all that is, all that has been, and all that is to come. Yet, at the same time – and this is the good news – no matter how tiny and insignificant we are, no matter how good or bad we are, God remembers and loves each one of us, now and for ever.

And the way we know that and are able to respond to God’s love is through Jesus Christ. In today’s Gospel reading we’re confronted with that pivotal moment where God’s remembers us even to the point of dying for us. Earlier in the sermon, I said that Jesus was a king without a retinue, but that’s not quite right. We, and the millions of his followers form his retinue. It’s different though, because a king’s retinue follows where the king goes, and King Jesus goes places that earthly kings do not. That’s why it’s appropriate that next week the story starts all over again, and we get to follow in our King’s footsteps from birth onwards.

During the next year it will be Matthew’s Gospel that we hear from the most of the four biblical Gospels. With a spoiler alert here for anyone who has never heard the story of Jesus’s birth, I can tell you that it is Matthew’s Gospel that has visitors come from the east, asking, ‘where is the child who has been born King of the Jews?’ (2:2) And so, we’ll be members of the retinue of that king who teaches us how to live, a king who heals, a king who remembers everyone, the weak and powerful, the good-living and those who have gone astray. He’s a king who forgives and saves; a most spectacular failure as far as normal ideas of kingship go, but just the sort of king that’s needed in this world.

Yes, ‘Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.’

Christ the King, Colossians 1: 15-20, Jeremiah 23: 1-6, Luke 23: 33-43

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