Sermons

It’s never pleasant to be ostracised. To have your family, your friends, your village turn their back on you. Decide they don’t want to know you.

I’ve heard stories of it happening in villages like this. Someone breaks some unwritten rule about how to belong to the community. Everyone doesn’t ignore them. But people who used to stop and chat no longer do. And you feel the cold shoulder.

I don’t know which is harder – to have life going well, or to have lots of difficulties. I’d rather life was good. Of course I would. But I don’t know which makes it harder to follow Jesus. Harder to live for God’s purposes. Harder to trust God’s promises.

If life is tough, God can seem so distant. How do we trust a God who doesn’t do anything about the problems we’re facing? If life is good, God can seem unnecessary. Why do we need to trust God, if life seems to take care of itself, and God’s already given us what we need.

With more than a year to go until the next general election, the politicians are lining themselves up. Grand promises. If we put them in power, here’s what they will do. But will they?

We’re right to be sceptical. They may be in government, but they’re not in power. So much is outside of their control. It’s hard to guarantee anything. A coup in a foreign land 4000 miles away could impact a key export market and send the pound into a dive. They can promise. But can they deliver?

Death is one of the subjects we don’t speak about today. I suspect this is because many of us have a deep fear of death.

And so we joke about it. Woody Allen famously said: I’m not afraid of death; I just don’t want to be there when it happens. And Mark Twain said: I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.

But the fact is that we joke to dodge it. The jokes are an anaesthetic for our fears.