Tenth Sunday after Trinity by Fr Jack

Genesis 37.1-28

St Paul’s Epistle to the Romans 10.5-15

St Matthew’s Gospel 14.22-33

Does anyone else get flashbacks and shivers to Andrew Lloyd Webber productions hearing the story of Joseph again? But in all seriousness, What a sorry tale of jealousy and greed. Favouritism, violence. How quickly things can go wrong.

The Human condition is writ right through the readings given for today. In a way this should encourage us of course: God can use, does use, chooses to use imperfect creatures to bring about God’s loving purposes for creation. That means God can use even you and me in our incompleteness too.

St Paul is also encouraging. His words overflow with passion and positivity.

It’s worth pausing for a second and looking at these lines to the Early Church in Rome. Typically Pauline in their passion and positivity about faith, about how our faith is the path of eternal life, and a path we are called to share.

But, how often have these positive and passionate assertions by St Paul been used by those who have come later to build fences? Used, not just just to build up, but like Joseph’s brothers today to throw others down into the pit.

Some people use texts like this to try and say who is saved and who is damned. Who’s in, and who’s out. St Paul says we are saved by faith. So that means we can know who ISN’T saved.…? But that is not what St Paul says. That’s not in the text. The Apostle makes only positive statements about salvation here, and elsewhere too.

He isn’t a solicitor delineating the fine detail of a contract. He isn’t a civil servant designing the minutia of how a governmental process will be administered. St Paul, always, is an artist working in great big theological brushstrokes, in colour and shape. He isn’t an engineer detailing every nut and bolt on a plan drawing of a structure, he is a painter depicting with fresh eyes a new landscape (a new post-resurrection landscape) in glorious colour and form for others to see and gasp and be enthralled. That (I suggest to you) is how St Paul does theology: like an artist, not a bureaucrat.

Fullsome and exhuberant. Right through his New Testament writings his words can barely keep up with his theology as he maps out this new canvas, this landscape of life, now, how we can understand it in the light of the resurrection of Jesus.

So, as I’ve said, it would simply to be mistreating the text to use it as discriminator. He does not speak systematically or technically: negatively and positively. St Paul speaks positively of salvation: who is saved. He is not trying to say who is not.

It is very often true of Jesus too, less often than with St Paul. But it’s a feature of how we read scripture that’s worth acknowledging. We often want the black and white lines, and so we see them or invent them, even when often Sacred Scripture does not actually offer them to us.

So we come to today’s Gospel. Last week, the little group of us at Mirfield for the weekend heard one of the monks, Fr Nicolas sat in his sermon thst the Gospels at the moment are events that happened in Jesus ministry, but they also work as wonderful parables for our own lives. (Here too I suppose we find an invitation - like with St Paul - to read scripture positively, in a maximalist way, not a mean and boxed in way).

This moment in Jesus ministry speaks to all of us I suspect.

Life. The storms of life. Events that overtake us. Perhaps times (perhaps a lot of the time) when God has seemed far away.

St Peter, when his faith wobbles.

What speaks to you. What resonates with your experience or that of someone you know?

For myself, I remember Br Jude, another of the monks last weekend speaking about how God proves Himself trustworthy. And yet, for me, I am constantly having to relearn that.

Life’s events or my schemes and doings fill my world view and sense of myself. I’ve got to do this or that. I worry about this or that. I want this or that. And occasionally I might let God know about it, but basically I’ve got to get on with it myself, because I don’t actually trust God to deliver. And again and again, God proves Himself trustworthy. Not because God is my Executive Assistant who runs around making everything happen for me, but because God will actually provide all that is real. Whenever I’ve schemed I’ve had to learn again and again that God has something more real in mind. And what is real is always better than my cardboard cutout unreal nonsense.

That is one of the things that prayer teaches us. Prayer, real prayer, a real pattern of scripture, silent prayer, and rigorous Sacramental life is also a parable of today’s stormy Gospel.

Prayer is a journey into darkness and unknowing  as much as light and understanding, but it is no less real for this. No less essential and life changing. But the darkness and unknowing thst comes with maturity in prayer is often just what happens when a finite creature like us comes into the company of God.

Likewise, my belief - it wavers. My understanding - it’s patchy. My life - has storms and confusions.

All these things are not failures of prayer or belief or life. They are just part of the reality of the thing. Just as storms happen at sea. But what is true for St Peter and the others is also true for us.

It is all about our relationship with God in Christ.

In all these things God is with us.

What will you take from the readings into the week ahead?

As we shortly head from this altar back into the fray of normal life - back into the squabbles of Joseph’s brothers, however that looks for you at the moment: worries, health, work, geopolitics, holiday, whatever metaphor of Joseph’s brothers is your day to day at the moment.

As we said, right at the start, we go imperfect creatures, that God in His perfect love and power is choosing to use, to bless, to work through.

And we don’t go unchanged or unaided. We have received Holy Communion. We have St Paul’s passionate positivity to model ourselves after.

We go with Jesus to find Jesus in the days of the week ahead be they stormy or whatever the weather of our lives.

And - if we take nothing else from this rich treasure trove of Scripture today - Jesus says to us again the phrase He is recorded as saying more than any other in the New Testament: ‘Do not be afraid’.