Sermon ‘The day of the Lord’ Brentor Sunday 15 November 2020 2nd before Advent
Zephaniah 1v7, 12-18         (Psalm 90v1-8)         1 Thessalonians 5v1-11         Matthew 25v14-30

What deep and searching words we have heard in our readings this morning, words whose meaning may not necessarily be immediately obvious. So do not expect in this short reflection a full elucidation of what is called ‘end times prophecy’, a subject which in itself is a contentious issue, for that we need at least a few in depth bible studies.

But as we are now about to enter that wonderful Church season we call Advent, a season, maybe like me, that you find full of excitement and hope, we can see that our readings start to take on great relevance.

The Old Testament teams with prophecies of our Lord’s first advent at Bethlehem some two millennia ago. That time which Daniel prophesised so precisely of Jesus birth in 3BC; and to which Micah located the exact place of our Lord’s birth, and Isaiah to the nature of Jesus birth, to a virgin, the blessed virgin Mary, and there are so many other prophecies.

We love to hear those prophecies, and to acknowledge that they were fulfilled in Jesus, God’s chosen and anointed Messiah, born to reconcile us to our holy God and Father, if we will but put our faith and trust in the Lord Jesus.

But is there anything more? Yes, the Old Testament has even more prophecies relating to Jesus second advent, than to those referring to his first advent, and if they have all been fulfilled, then we must expect to see those referring to his second advent also fulfilled. Prophecies that relate to the return of our Lord to rule and reign upon earth, a time which we attest to in the mystery of our faith, Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again.

However, these prophecies need very careful study to remove any confusion and contradictions that they may seem to contain. That is why we also need to read from our New Testament what Jesus himself, and the Apostles, taught concerning the second advent, and maybe that is to be a soon coming time.

The ‘day of the Lord’ that the prophet Zephaniah, a contemporary of Jeremiah,  mentioned in our reading, first refers to the immanent time of distress that was about to fall upon the people of Judah and Jerusalem. The king Nebuchadnezzar was soon to come and take the people into exile in Babylon, and to destroy the holy and magnificent Temple of Solomon in 586BC. This was the consequence, as had been told to the people by Moses a millennia before, if Israel practised idolatry and neglected the commandments and statutes they had promised to keep.
Perhaps we should ponder what may befall this our generation for its similar idolatry and rejection of God’s purposes for humanity at large.

But the prophet Zephaniah also mentions ‘a day of the Lord’ that will be experienced ‘by the whole earth and all its inhabitants’, which he describes as ‘a terrible end’. It is here that we have to take care not to confuse that ‘day’, that time, with the time mentioned by the apostle Paul which we read of in his letter to the Thessalonian Christians.

Paul says to them that they know that the ‘day of the Lord’ would come like ‘a thief in the night’, just as our Lord said it would in his discourse to the disciples on the Mount of Olives just before the last supper, which is recounted by Matthew in chapters 24 and 25. There Jesus makes it clear, as those early Christians knew and were expecting, and as we also should know, that he could return at any moment, like that thief in the night. That is why he gives us many warning that we should be ready, with our loins girded and our lamps lit, waiting for him our bridegroom, like the five wise virgins in the parable, who had trimmed their lamps.

Describing that time, still to come, the Lord said (Lk17v34), “I tell you, on that night two people will be in one bed: One will be taken and the other left”, but his coming could equally well be during the day for the Lord also says, “Two men will be in the field: one will be taken and the other left” (Mtt24v40).

We must guard against being ‘caught out’ through our complacency, mistreating our fellow servants, and hiding the talents that God has so graciously given to each one of us to serve him and our neighbours. Talents we are to use as we seek to build and hasten the coming of God’s kingdom in the here and now. Jesus expects us to be ready, ready to be ‘caught up’, snatched away in the twinkling of an eye, and so to be fore ever with him, our Lord.
Brothers and sisters I ask, are we ready and waiting for that time?

Paul says we are to encourage one another with these thoughts and promises, no wonder, especially when we look around at the many uncertainties that still remain for us all during this ongoing time of lockdown.

But Paul also goes on to give us another word of encouragement. God has not destined us, his born again children, for the prophesised ‘wrath to come’; no, we are to enjoy and rejoice in our salvation. We have the promise of life eternal with him, of transformed and glorious bodies to come in the new creation, and the presence with us now of God’s Holy and life-giving Spirit.

In psalm 32 we read, ‘Great tribulation remains for the wicked, but mercy embraces those who trust in the Lord’. Let us brothers and sisters be those who do indeed ‘trust in the Lord’.

Yes, there is a time of wrath, of great distress and tribulation that is coming upon the world, you can read about that in Saint John’s Revelation. It is a time that will proceed our Lord’s second advent, his second coming, and that ‘day of the Lord’ shall be unmistakable, it will be seen by all.

Jesus said that as the lightening is seen across the skies so will his coming be.
The angels at Jesus ascension assured the disciples that just as Jesus had gone up in the cloud, in like manner he would return to the Mount of Olives. No one shall miss that event, the time of which no one knows but God the Father.

Yes, Jesus will return. Jesus shall return to judge and to rule and reign in righteousness and peace, and you and I shall come with him and the entire heavenly host. That is our hope for a ‘new creation’, the hope for us who believe in what our Lord has promised; a new creation that will far exceed all our imaginations and expectations.

So brothers and sisters, as we look forward to this coming time of advent, may it be with great hope and expectation. We are to ‘keep awake’, for we are ‘children of light’ and are not to be as those who sleep. Let us ‘be sober’, and put on the breastplate of faith and love, together with the helmet of salvation. Let us then make every effort to support and encourage one another as we see that ‘day’ approaching.

Let us pray:
Heavenly Lord,
you long for the world’s salvation:
stir us from apathy,
restrain us from excess and revive in us new hope
as we see the dawning of the day of your coming,
that day when all creation will be healed,
we ask this through Jesus Christ our Lord.         Amen

Sermon St Eustachius 9.45 Sunday 18 October 2020  Luke the Evangelist (19after Trinity)
Isaiah 35v3-6                        Psalm 147v1-7            2 Timothy 4v5-17                        Luke 10v1-9
May I speak in the name of God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, Amen

As this morning we celebrate the festival of Saint Luke the evangelist, I want to ask you, ‘what do you know about Luke’?
Perhaps your first answer is that he wrote the gospel that carries his name, and that he then went on to write the book of Acts. If that is so, and the early church fathers like Jerome and Eusebius thought it to be so, then Luke wrote over a quarter of the text of our New Testament. But what else comes to mind?

Perhaps that he travelled with Saint Paul on mission, and was described by Paul in Colossians (4v14) as a ‘physician’ and one of his faithful companions.
Many scholars believe Luke was indeed a Greek physician who lived in Antioch in what is now Turkey, and so was most likely a gentile Christian. Early church tradition says that Luke died at the age of 84 in Boeotia in the northeast of the gulf of Corinth in Greece, and that he may have been martyred by being hung from an olive tree. His tomb was then located at nearby Thebes, and his relics later transferred to Constantinople in AD 357.

Perhaps one surprising tradition is that Luke, besides being a physician and historian, was also a gifted artist, and the first icon writer. Especially in the Orthodox faith Luke is credited with icons of the virgin Mary and child, and the Saint Thomas Christians of India claim they still have one which Thomas took to India with him in the first century.

There is in the Armenian quarter of Old City of Jerusalem, the small and ancient Syrian Orthodox Church of Saint Mark, which claims to be the location of the last supper and the home of the evangelist Mark and his mother Mary. I have seen there, a painting on leather of Mary and the infant Jesus, supposedly done by Luke, but experts date it to much later Byzantine times.

We have read in our gospel that Jesus sent out seventy of his disciples to go on ahead of him to ‘heal the sick, and to proclaim that the kingdom of God has come near’. A very good message for our time as well. One of the early church fathers, Epiphanius, Bishop of Salamis, thought that Luke was one of those seventy apostles, but that to my mind is pure speculation. Our reading however, does contains a number of important lessons for us this morning.

Jesus could see that even in the religious society of his time there was little substance and that ‘the harvest was plentiful’, but that there were few labourers to reap that harvest. That sounds more than ever like the times in which we live. How necessary it is for us to pray to the Lord for labourers for the harvest.
To pray that God will raise up more labourers in our time, like the evangelist of old, labourers from our churches who are called and anointed for mission. Let us give thanks for Fiona, who has recently joined us to do just that in the fields of growing young families as our town grows and develops.
Labourers who like John the Baptist and Jesus, will call people to repent, and as Peter said to the crowd at Pentecost, ‘repent, be baptised and filled with the Holy Spirit’.

Clearly a call to that work in not easy. It needs the leading of the Holy Spirit and the exercise of a strong faith. Those seventy were called to go out and rely on God’s provision as they were to take no purse or bag. There are many missionaries who today still live such a life of faith, relying upon God to provide for their needs through the generosity of God’s people. Maybe you know someone like that, and can encourage them in their essential and sacrificial work through your prayers and support.

When writing to Timothy, Paul could see that his active time of mission may have been drawing to a close, “I am already being poured out as a libation, and the time of my departure has come”. Since his ‘Damascus Road’ experience, Paul had given himself tirelessly to the service of the gospel, much of it at his own expense, he still worked at his trade as a tent maker. And what an epitaph he wrote for himself, “I have fought a good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith”. May that be said for each of us when our time comes.

Our Christian pilgrimage, our walk with Jesus our Lord, may have been, may still be, like ‘a fight’. A fight against the distractions and deceits of the materialism of this transient world, this physical world in which we now live, those attractions that do seem so attractive to us but must not be allowed to become our idols. But what may not be so obvious, is the fight that we as Christians also face in the spiritual realm. Peter in his first epistle (1Peter 5v8) reminds us that we must, “Be sober, be watchful, for your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour”.
So then, do we live out our lives taking care to watch out for, and to recognise those attacks that come from the evil one, and how do we then respond? That fight is another good reason for us to constantly bare one another up in prayer.

Paul could also see that the Christian life had been like a race for him, a race for which there was to be a prize at the end, ‘a crown of righteousness’. Are we running in that same race as Paul? Are we living out our lives as ambassadors for our God, and trusting to hear those beautiful words from Jesus our master (Mtt 25v21), “Well done, good and faithful servant; you have been faithful over a little, I will set you over much; enter into the joy of your master.”
I for one, and I trust you also, do hope to hear those words, and to indeed enter into the inexpressible joy of our Lord. So how do we ensure that we run the particular race set before each one of us successfully?

Some words from the writer of the epistle to the Hebrews may help us to run a successful race (12v1-2).
“Therefore, let us lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with perseverance the race set before us”. Fortunately the verse does not end there, leaving it just up to us alone to find strength to run in the race. We are told to, “Look unto Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of our faith”.
How essential it is for us as Christians to walk our daily lives aware of the presence of our Lord with us. Let us remember the words of psalm 73 (v23) “Yet I am always with you; you hold me by my right hand”.

And I wonder if we feel like Paul that “we have kept the faith”? Maybe we have had some ‘wobbles’ along the way; maybe we have had times of great faith when we could say to the mountain, ‘be removed’ and it would have removed, but maybe we have also experienced some times of doubt.

Those may have been such times when we were driven to the Lord (Mark 9v24), like the man who came to Jesus with a son having a dumb spirit, and said to Jesus, “Lord help my unbelief”. And what was the Lord’s encouraging reply? “All things are possible to him who believes”. So let us hold firm our faith and trust in the Lord, He is always with us even when we doubt.

Paul experienced God’s constant presence as he walked his pilgrimage life, because he maintained his trust in the one true God, creator of the universe. The God whom we too have come to believe in and to trust, a God who knows each of the million, million, million stars by name, and yet knows you and me.

I trust that we all hope, and look forward with confidence to the promised coming time, the day when our God will come to judge this forlorn, cruel and unjust world in righteousness. Not to judge as we so often do with only half the truth before us, but as Isaiah says (Is 11v3-4), “He-Jesus- shall not judge by what his eyes see, or decide by what his ears hear; but with righteousness he shall judge the poor, and decide with equity for the meek of the earth”. As Abraham said, “Shall not the judge of all the earth do right” (Gen 18v25).

It will be a time when God will heal the brokenhearted, and bind up all their wounds. A time when God will lift up the poor, open the eyes of the blind, and the lame shall certainly leap for joy, as the salvation of God is fully realised. I hope the thought of that time sets your pulse racing, it certainly does mine.
Let us then make sure this morning, that as we come together around the table of our Lord, to remember him in the breaking of the bread, we also allow Jesus, as he did with those two disciples at Emmaus on the first Easter day, to ‘make Himself known’, to reveal himself afresh, when we break the bread together. Let us look to be strengthened with this spiritual food, the bread of life, and may we also join with Paul, the Holy Spirit and the bride in crying ‘come’, for like them we ‘long for his appearing’.

So to return to Luke, like all the four evangelists, they each have a special symbol, and in Luke’s case what is it? Yes, it is that of a winged Ox or bull. Remembering the agrarian culture of New Testament times, that symbol would have been associated with sacrifice, service and strength. So for us as Christians it reminds us that the call to follow Jesus, our Lord and master, is a call that leads us into a life of sacrifice and service, only made possible through the strength of God’s indwelling Holy Spirit.

Let us pray;         the shorter collect for this 19th Sunday after Trinity:-
Faithful Lord, whose steadfast love never ceases
and whose mercies never come to an end:
grant us the grace to trust you
and to receive the gifts of your love,
new every morning, in Jesus Christ our Lord.   Amen

Sermon for St Michael and all angels  Brentor Sunday 27 September 2020
Daniel 10v4-21         Psalm 103v19-22                  Revelation 5v5-14                  John 1v47-51

Have you ever wanted to get a glimpse into what heaven could be like? I guess we all have. And today’s readings begin to give us a small insight into heaven’s glory. No wonder Daniel’s strength left him and his complexion grew deathly pale. How would an insight into the presence and holiness of God effect each one of us?

Maybe it would be for us like it was for the prophet Isaiah (Ch6) where we read those wonderful words, “In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord sitting on a throne, high and lifted up, and I said, ‘Woe is me! I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips, yet my eyes have seen the Lord of hosts!’”

So what was Daniel’s reaction to having the glory of God revealed to him while he was standing by the great river Tigris during the exile of his people in Babylon? His reaction was to fall into a trance, with his face to the ground. But the Lord graciously extended a hand to raise him to his hands and knees, and to call him ‘greatly beloved’. And we too are greatly beloved by God the Father, who extended His grace to us through the life, death and resurrection of our Lord Jesus, so we can meet around the table of our Lord this morning.

If you look a little further back into the prophecy of Daniel, you will recall how Daniel was so concerned for the state of his people that he had ‘humbled himself’, and then prayed a significant prayer (Ch9) for their repentance from the sin of ‘turning aside from God’s ‘ordinances and commandments’.

Does that sound at all familiar to you?
Maybe it is like the state of our nation today, and perhaps we also need to follow Daniel’s humble example, and pray in earnest for our nation.

But we have also read how there was great opposition from the ‘spiritual forces of darkness in the heavenly realm’ to that prayer Daniel had offered from his heart. It was only when Michael, the archangel intervened, that help and a response came to Daniel, probably in the form of the angel Gabriel who throughout the scriptures carries God’s messages to God’s people. So Daniel was encouraged by the words, ‘be strong and courageous’, words that we also need to hear, words to encourage us to persevere in prayer for our own nation at this uncertain time.

We also see here, that Michael, who is only mentioned five times in all the scriptures, is described as ‘your prince’ (10v21) and later as ‘the great prince who has charge of your people’ (12v1). So Michael is regarded, to this day, as the guardian angel of the people of Israel.

We also read of how Saint John was given an insight into heaven when writing his revelation. He also saw God seated upon a throne, and a mighty angel, we are not told who, proclaiming with a loud voice, “Who is worthy to open the scroll and break its seal”. Emotion grips John, as it had gripped Daniel earlier, who ‘began to weep bitterly’, because no one was found worthy to open and look into the scroll. But encouragement came also to John, this time from one of the 24 elders who surround God’s throne, telling him to cease weeping for ‘the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of king David, had conquered’, conquered all those powers of spiritual darkness, and so He was worthy to open the scroll.

This of course is a perfect description of our Lord Jesus Christ, who is described in John’s poetic language as, ‘a Lamb’, standing as if it had been slaughtered. We know that Paul describes Jesus is our ‘Passover lamb’, sacrificed once and for all, for the sin of the whole world.

That sacrifice of our Lord Jesus’ blood on Calvary’s tree has wonderfully ransomed you and me to be one among many saints from every tribe, language and people and nation. We shall enjoy our Lord’s eternal presence as we are promised that we shall reign with Him in the new creation.

But did you also notice from our reading, how significant are our prayers?
Not just those prayers for our needy nation, but all of our prayers, and of how our prayers are regarded by God? We read that our prayers are incense, a sweet smell to God. That should give to each one of us a wonderful encouragement and incentive to persevere in prayer. God loves to hear our prayers, they mingle with the incense from those golden bowls of incense rising before the throne of our great and mighty God and Father.

And what of that promise that our Lord Jesus gave to Nathanael, also known as Bartholomew, one of the very first five disciples called by our Lord? Nathanael had been amazed at Jesus insight as to who he was, and was then promised that he would see ‘heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man’, upon Jesus. Was that something to look forward to I wonder?
Does that description remind you of anyone else?
Yes, of the first Christian martyr, Saint Steven. We read in Acts that after Steven’s testimony before the Jewish council he was dragged out of the city and stoned. And what did he see?

“Look”, he said, “I see the heavens opened and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God”. What a wonderful help that vision must have been to Steven as he was being killed.
And that has also been the experience of many blessed saints martyred for their faith and testimony to Jesus, down through the centuries.

So I wonder, were those words also spoken to Nathanael by Jesus because of what was to befall Nathanael many years later when he was martyred as a missionary in Armenia?

The lesson for us is to recognise the great glory that is in the heavenly realm, and a glory that we shall one day share in. A glory that surrounds not just our God and Father, but also surrounds our Lord Jesus. Jesus who is our great high priest, and now stands at God’s right hand ready to intercede for us. What an awesome God we serve, and how gracious of God to make us His children.

Let us then join with all the heavenly host in the words John heard, ‘To the one seated on the throne and to the Lamb be blessing and honour and glory and might for ever and ever.’

May we make that our prayer, that it may also become the experience of our nation and of our world as we await that time when our Lord Jesus shall return and reign.

Let us pray:
Send your holy angels
to watch over us, O God,
that on our lips will be found your truth
and in our hearts your love;
so we may ever taste your goodness
in the land of the living;
through Jesus Christ our Lord.            Amen

Sermon St Eustachius 9.45 Sunday 9 August 2020  9th after Trinity
1 Kings 19v9-18                        Psalm 85v8-13            Romans 10v5-15                        Matthew 14v22-33
May I speak in the name of God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, Amen

Do you not just love the prophet Elijah? He is one of my favourite Old Testament characters.
A prophet who performed amazing miracles and raised the dead, and yet he was so human in his emotions, just like you and me.

You will remember he went up mount Carmel to challenge the false prophets of Israel’s Northern kingdom under their wicket king Ahab and queen Jezebel.
They were unable to bring down fire upon the sacrifice on their altar, and Elijah taunted them saying of their god baal, ‘perhaps he is musing, or gone on a journey, or perhaps he is asleep and must be awakened’.
Then when Elijah called down fire from our one true God in heaven, he used the words, ‘O Lord, God of Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, let it be known this day that you are God, and I am your servant’.
We know the fire of God fell, the sacrifice and altar were consumed, and then Elijah was called upon by God to kill those false prophets.

With such a strong faith and demonstration of his belief in God, what could possibly go wrong? As our reading described, Elijah lost his courage and fled from Jezebel when she threatened to end his life. Is that not so much like our experience at times?
We see and experience God at work in our lives, in our church, in our community, and then one testing incident, and our faith just seems to vanish.

Elijah felt so threatened that he ran all the way from Carmel in the north, to Beersheba, about as far south as he could, some 120 miles, normally some six day journey. His fear seems to have given him some superhuman strength to run that journey. And fear can invoke in us energy that may best not be used.

Having left his servant, Elijah goes on for another day into the wilderness, and flops under the many branches and flowers of a broom tree. There he sinks into deep depression, and asks God that he may die, not a good prayer to offer, but Elijah was not in his normal state of mind.
I can remember on one occasion, when sailing in a small yacht across a very choppy English channel, I felt so uncomfortable that I could have identified with Elijah at that moment, my rationality had been suspended.

But God never leaves us even if we feel He is far away. God twice sent His angel to revive Elijah, with what would seem to be supernatural food, to sustain him for another revelation and opportunity to serve Him.
And so it is for us. God always has something new and sustaining if only we can but wait and hear Him speak to us. And like Elijah, return and keep us on the path of faith and trust in Him. But first that involved another journey.

In biblical picture language it had to be for forty days, invoking the memory of the Exodus, from the old to the new, and for Elijah, it was to take him to that same mountain of the Exodus.
Mount Sinai, or Horeb, the mountain of God, where God gave to Moses the ten commandments and other requirements of the law to serve Him. We shall not go into the debates as to which mountain and where is its true location, although I favour a location in present Saudi Arabia, rather than near St Catherine’s monastery in the Sinai peninsular, but after all that is more accessible by tourists. Which ever it was a long journey of around 250 miles.

Even after time for reflection along the journey, Elijah still seems to be in depression and self pity when the Lord asked, ‘What are you doing here Elijah’ “even I only am left, and they seek my life, to take it”. Hadn’t Elijah just gone that journey in the power of the food that God had recently provided? Could he not remember all the wonderful miracles God had performed through him? God had to make one last approach to get through Elijah’s remorse, a demonstration of His power.

Yet God was not in the wind, or in the earthquake, or the fire, where was he? How was God to speak to Elijah? In that beautiful way, that God still uses to speak to His servants, to you and to me today. God was in ‘the still small voice’. We just have to take care that we are listening, that we are away from all those things that may distract us, we need to take time to be still.
Perhaps that has been one of the blessings that has come out of our time of lockdown, we have been able to be still, but have we listened for that same ‘still small voice’. What has God been saying to you? What has God been saying to me?

Maybe it has been to give us a new vision of what God wants us to do next, just as He was calling Elijah to go and anoint new kings and a new prophet Elisha, to minister and show God’s power in his place.

We see that Peter also demonstrated his great faith in Jesus when seeking to walk on the water, but as soon as he begun to doubt, he started to sink and needed Jesus hand to support him.

So if we have come to that same realisation as Jesus disciples after the storm, that “Truly you are the Son of God”, and if we have then, as Saint Paul say’s, “confessed with our lips that Jesus is Lord”, then we are saved. Saved not just to enjoy an eternity with God, not just to be partakers of the new creation and enjoy the ‘glory of God’, but to go on and to continue to serve God and build His kingdom in this our time left on earth.

May we see the power of God breaking through, the Holy Spirit working in new and unimagined ways, as we move forward after this pandemic eases.

Let us pray;         the shorter collect for this 9th Sunday after Trinity:-
Gracious Father, revive your Church in our day,
and make her holy, strong and faithful,
for your glory’s sake in Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen

Sermon St Eustachius 9.45 Sunday 19 July 2020         Trinity 6
Isaiah 44v6-8                        Psalm 86v11-end            Romans 8v12-25                        Matthew 13v24-30, 36-43

May I speak in the name of God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, Amen

Cast your minds back to that first Easter Sunday afternoon, and the road to Emmaus, Jesus draws near to two disappointed disciples on their way back home following the crucifixion, their hopes and dreams gone. Not recognising Jesus he proceeds to explain to them from all their scriptures, the Old Testament, the things concerning himself-the Messiah. Then after recognising him in the breaking of the bread after which he vanishes from their sight, they recall how their hearts had burned within them along the way listening to him.

In our short reading from the prophet Isaiah, I believe that we can see one of those scriptures that Jesus may well have referred to.
“Thus says the LORD, the King of Israel, and his Redeemer, the Lord of Hosts.”

Here I see the prophet first referring to God the Father, the Lord-Yahweh-the King of Israel, and then to Jesus-his Redeemer-the Lord of Hosts, the man seated at the Fathers right hand.
It is as Saint Augustine said, ‘Be prepared to find the Lord Jesus latent in the Old Testament, as he is patent in the New Testament’.

In this passage Isaiah also reminds us that the Lord God is the only God, he is in fact, ‘the first and the last’, he has been from eternity past and will be into eternity future. He is our eternal, unchanging, faithful and compassionate Father. Moses, the writer of the oldest psalm 90 (v2), expresses this very same thought, ‘Before the mountains were brought forth, or the earth and the world were formed, from everlasting to everlasting you are God’.

That phrase ‘I Am the first and I Am the last’, also contains the unmistakable identity ‘I Am’, revealed to Moses as the name of our one true God.
That same identity is picked up by Saint John in the introduction to his Revelation (Rev1v8) where he refers to the Lord God as ‘the Alpha and Omega, who is and was and is to come, the Almighty’.

Then at the conclusion to his Revelation, John records how Jesus himself takes on this same identity saying to John, ‘I am the alpha and the omega’ or maybe Jesus addressed John not in the Greek in which he wrote but in his natural language of Hebrew saying, ‘I am the aleph and the tav, the beginning and the end’, the first and last letters of the alphabet.
This glorious identification of Jesus with the Almighty God upon his throne, follows the great promise made by God, ‘Behold I make all things new’.
This is a promise which I trust we are all looking to be soon fulfilled, especially as we look around at the state of our hurting and decaying world.

It will be that long awaited time which the prophet Isaiah described like this (Is11v9), ‘They will neither harm nor destroy in all my holy mountain; for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea’.
What a transformation that will bring to the Holy City of Jerusalem, and not the bombs and stabbings that I witnessed when living there.

So with that exalted position of our Redeemer and Saviour Jesus in our minds, how ought we to be living out our Christian lives in this present time as followers and disciples of our Lord and God?

Well brothers and sisters, Saint Paul gives to us some direction as to how this can happen when writing to the Christians in our reading from Romans, Paul says, we have to change the way we live and think, ‘for if you live according to the flesh, you will die; but if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live’. Paul like John the Baptist, was no mincer of words!

Paul tells us what it is that makes us true ‘children of God’, what it is that enables us to call God Abba-Father, what it is to become joint heirs with our Lord Jesus to the Kingdom; it is when we allow the Holy Spirit of God into our lives and then to direct our ways.

Now that was not an easy path for Paul, and it may not be an easy path for us either. Paul described what following God had cost him when he wrote to the Christians in Corinth (2Cor11v25), ‘three times beaten with rods, once stoned, three times shipwrecked, in danger on his many journeys, sleepless nights and hunger, and his anxiety over all the churches that he had planted’, not something we would wish to emulate.

Yet how did Paul describe all this? ‘I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us’. Brothers and sisters, do we live out our lives with that thought always in the back, or preferably the front, of our minds? God has an unimaginable future ahead for each one of us who have invited Jesus into our lives, and who trust and follow him.

Saint Peter (1Pt5v6,7) expressed our walk with God in this manner, ‘Humble yourselves therefore under the mighty hand of God, so that he may exalt you in due time. Cast all your anxiety on him, because he cares for you’.

And it is not just us who wait for the glory of God to be revealed when our Lord Jesus returns, and ‘thy kingdom comes on earth as it is in heaven’.
No, Paul tells us that the very creation itself, which at present is subject to decay, or as a Physicist I would say, ‘to a continual running down in entropy’, this our creation Paul says waits ‘with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God’. Are you looking forward to that revealing?

Brothers and sisters, it is you and me who are those ‘sons of God’. It is for you and me that God is going to make a new creation of our decaying earth, and it is you and me who God is to transform into new beings in the very image of our Lord Jesus. No wonder Paul could say our hope passes all that we can possibly imagine.

We may at present be going through hard and unusual times, we may even feel that our very bodies are in decay, but we have that most glorious of hopes to sustain us, and carry us through these times. That coming glory is yet to be revealed at the time of the return of our risen Lord Jesus. It will be a time in which each one of us will participate, and in which each one of us will have their own unique part to play.

So as we now come to gather once again around the table of our Lord Jesus to ‘remember him’, not in the normal way we have come to expect, but in a way where we shall still be fed, nourished and empowered by our Lord’s body, let us remember and live out our holy calling to follow Jesus, and to be faithful to him ‘until he comes’.

Let us pray;         the shorter collect for this sixth Sunday after Trinity:-

Creator God, you made us all in your own image;
may we discern you in all that we see,
and serve you in all that we do;
through Jesus Christ, your Son, our Lord.         Amen