Sermon by the Rev. Dr James Currall

It is really good to be back with you again, perhaps for the last time, as my ministry is calling me to:

“Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. The harvest is plentiful, but the labourers are few.”

So we are moving away and contemplating moving really concentrates the mind on so many things. The people that you will leave behind, the familiar places and of course what you will take with you.

Have you considered recently how much stuff you have or the extent to which the stuff that you have controls your life? In the last year, I have retired from secular employment, which involved clearing an office of the accumulated stuff of several careers. As new things came along, rarely did old ones fully finish and so the papers, the books and the other artefacts accumulated. More recently the same thing has been happening at home (and if Anna were here, she would say not half fast enough) because in 5 weeks time we are moving and the eye-watering quotations from removers certainly make you think.

Living in a materialistic society as we do, it is easy to become dominated by a spirit of acquisition. At a personal level it is also easy to excuse certain types of acquisition as justified. Once I started training for ministry, there were notes from courses, interesting articles for essays, books for background reading and extending theological understanding and so on and so on. Up to now I have been very lucky in having a well stocked University library to supplement my own shelves, but in the future, on the northern shore of the Dornoch Firth, such resources will not be so readily available. All very worthy, but accumulation just the same. Like the rich man and his barns, it is so easy to lose one’s soul if one doesn’t watch out.

Over the last month or two, we have given quite a lot of things away to people who could make better use of them than us and I am sure that is all to the good. Offering and giving is perhaps a small step towards counteracting the spirit of acquiring and hording and on quite a few occasions has clearly made a quite disproportionate difference to the recipient. But none of this justifies lives centred around stuff.

When Paul went on his travels, spreading the good news of the Gospel, he asked the Christian communities that he established to give what they were able to the ‘home’ community back in Judea. He did not require them to do so, he just urged them to respond to the Good News by desiring to give to support others. The response was not always the same. The churches of Macedonia, in Thessalonica and Philippi, although they were relatively poor in means and faced considerable challenges, were very generous in their response, giving well beyond their means, out of their own poverty, whilst the church in Corinth, although it members were relatively wealthy, was considerably less generous. Shades here of the widow’s mite.

So in Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians, he is praising them for the things that they excel at: “faith, speech, knowledge and utmost eagerness” and urging them to add to these virtues generosity. He is not seeking to strong-arm them into doing so, but to do so as an expression of their love, the love that comes from God. Paul sees this love and generosity as being a natural consequence of Christian maturity. When he praises the Corinthians spiritual gifts, he is convinced that if these are genuinely from the Holy Spirit, they must give their recipients an growing sensitivity to the practical needs of their fellow Christians.

His argument is that Jesus as the Christ, was like the Corinthians, rich, but he humbled himself to become poor for them (and us), more like the Macedonians. This underlines the fact that Jesus’ existence did not begin in Bethlehem, but “in the beginning”. So it was his birth in the last years of Herod the Great when out of his richness he became poor for the sake of mankind. As Paul wrote to the Philippians:

“Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death - even death on a cross.”

The contrast between those who have much and those with little is also played out in the healing miracles that we heard in our Gospel. Jairus and the woman with the haemorrhage could hardly have been more different from one another, in sex, status, public recognition, approach and how Jesus dealt with them. Jairus a synagogue official, a man of position in the community, a man of means. He is a Jewish leader, who perhaps despite his reservations realises that the only hope for his daughter is Jesus and so throws himself publically on Jesus’ mercy and the crowd love it – something interesting is bound to happen.

But his mission to Jairus’s house is interrupted by a woman with a simple, perhaps even superstitious, faith as she seeks to touch his clothing. She has no power or influence, she has spent all her money on remedies that didn’t have any effect. Her illness makes her ritually unclean and so her approach to Jesus is much more furtive and anonymous. She tries to access his healing power without being detected. But furtive and anonymous doesn’t work with Jesus, cast yourself on his mercy and he takes charge of what happens and how it happens. In a pressing throng of people, he asks the seemingly ludicrous question – “Who touched me?” and she feels that she has no option but to reveal herself and that absolute faith that Jesus could heal her makes it so.

However the delay results in the death of Jairus’s daughter. Those close to him have little faith and send word that it is too late so not to bother Jesus any further. Perhaps Jairus’s faith begins to waver and he feel not a little irritation over the delay but Jesus says to him – “Do not fear, only believe.” “You showed faith in coming to me, but now you need to continue to believe, even when that is difficult.” And on that basis Jesus proceeds to Jairus’s house where the household is making a great commotion. Jesus again says something which seems totally implausible “Why do you make a commotion and weep? The child is not dead but sleeping.” And they all laugh at him, what a daft thing to assert. Undeterred, Jesus with just three disciples goes to the little girl and invites her to get up. She does so; Jairus’s continuing faith has been justified.

What we see in these two healing miracles is that faith comes to fulfilment only in a very personal encounter with Jesus. Only when the two people in desperate need, enter into dialogue with him. From their quite different backgrounds and circumstances, they both have to get to the point of a deeper, fuller faith in Jesus. Jairus continues in spite of the evidence that it is too late and the woman comes out of the shadows, meets his gaze and kneels at his feet. Faith is not something vague or impersonal. As psalm 130 says:

“Out of the depths I cry to you, O LORD. Lord, hear my voice! Let your ears be attentive to the voice of my supplications!”

We each need to seek Jesus out, kneel at his feet, in pleading, in seeking forgiveness or in thankfulness. This is the Jesus who transcends material possessions, who transcends power and influence and who transcends much of what we cling to in our lives. This Jesus exhorts us:

“Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume and where thieves break in and steal; but store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust consumes and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”

This Jesus will give to one who truly believes that peace that the world cannot give and the assurance of life in the world to come.

Amen