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Sermon for
3 before Advent - Evening 6.11.2016
1 Kings
3. 1-15
Romans 8. 31-2end
If God were to appear to you
in a dream by night and to say, "Ask what I should give
you." , I wonder what your reply might be? I wonder what
would mine?
It's a more theological version
of the game that I am sure we all played as children - "if
you were to find Aladdin's lamp and be granted three wishes,
what would you wish for?"
But God is no genie to be kept
confined in an old lamp or a bottle or any of the other containers
that folklore tell us serve as suitable prisons for troublesome
genies.... And of course those who ask for gifts from genies
sometimes find they get more than they bargain for.... (to
mix my metaphor rather) You remember the myth of King Croesus
- famed for his miserliness, who asked that anything he might
touch would be turned to gold? But who then found he could not
draw close to his wife or children and could not even feed himself?
Starving to death as the richest and loneliest man in the world
is no consolation. Donald Trump, please take note! Success is
not only to be measured in economic terms or by how much you
have outwitted the Inland Revenue!
We know that in our reading
this evening, Solomon asks for the gift of wisdom, and is granted
this along with that of great wealth and renown; no other king
could be compared with Solomon.... Although, interestingly, while
all this came true, it did not stop him going off the rails at
the end of his life - allowing his many foreign-born wives and
concubines to import the worship of their native gods and goddesses
and forgetting his resolve to only follow the God of his father
David. And it did not take long after his death for the kingdom
to fall apart... but that, as they say, is another story.
Solomon was famed for the subtlety
of his legal judgment - how to decide between litigants making
contradictory claims; and this was one of the main jobs of a
king at the time of Solomon, if they were not actually leading
their armies to war.
Today of course it is all rather
different. Our own Queen has no direct role in either government
or the judiciary, although both swear allegiance to her - or
at least to the Crown she represents. Even though this does not
stop them falling out from time to time, as we have witnessed
this week. Now I do not propose to get into the rights and wrongs
of Brexit or otherwise, but it does strike me as essential to
any modern democracy that the judiciary remain staunchly independent
of the executive in government. So I do not believe that High
Court Judges can or should be called "enemies of the people"
merely for fulfilling their role... We will just have to wait
and see what the Supreme Court of appeal decides!
But back to God and his gifts
to Solomon... and to us.
Paul reminds us - usefully
it seems to me, that God has given us the greatest gift he can
in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. And a gift moreover that
we do nothing to deserve. It does not depend on us offering burnt
sacrifices or being ourselves particularly holy people - although
I am sure it pleases God when we choose to live according to
the - fairly reasonable - principles that God has given us. But
even if we fail to live up to the ideal of the person we might
be, God's love is still there for us.
In Christ there is no condemnation.
He has paid the price for us. He has given up his life for our
sakes so that we no longer have to fear death as the entry to
oblivion or worse. God will care for us in this life and beyond
- and as we were reminded this morning, God is a god of the living,
not of the dead. Even though we often seem to try and live our
lives assuming the opposite. We are happy to ask God to take
care of all those whom we have loved and lost. Next weekend
we will be preoccupied by remembering all those who died in the
last two great world wars and all the smaller battles since....
including those that are going on even as we meet here. And we
commend them into God's care. But how often to we remember to
include God in our day-to-day lives and concerns?
Death is still real - but for
us, for those who believe, it is not the end and nothing more
can separate us from the great overflowing and outpouring love
that the creator has when he looks at each and every one of us,
his children - regardless of the number of times we mess things
up.
God may feel sad when he sees
our mistakes - especially when we seem to try and exclude him
from our lives, our decisions and choices, but he never withdraws
his love from us and there is no force in heaven or on the earth
that can deflect his beam of love ' in which we live and move
and have our being.'
Last night was bonfire night.
The anniversary of the arrest of Guy Fawkes and his co-conspirators
who were doing their best - for very sincerely held views - to
undermine (literally) the government and judiciary of their day.
While these days I find the whole firework thing a pain and a
nuisance (largely down to two terrified dogs who begin to shake
and shiver at the first sound of a rocket going off), there is
still something rather wonderful that over 400 years later we
still want to remember the defence of law and order in this land.
I just wish that as many people thought to remember on Sundays
and every other day of the week how much God loves and values
them and wants to bless them with his gifts - and what a price
God was prepared to pay for them, for us. Amen.
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