redemption – The Raynville Rambler

Before the throne of God above

Image from everipedia.com
original source unknown

Today’s hymn from Sing Praise is “Before the throne of God above”. I have sung this plenty of times in churches, and as the music is in contemporary style (actually credited to Vikki Cook, 1997) I assumed the words were also recently written, even if some words such as “graven” and “thence” are a bit archaic – but then there are ‘contemporary’ churches that still use the Lord’s Prayer in its old form. The language is otherwise quite similar to that used by Stuart Townend, for example, as the theme is that of Christ’s sacrifice on the cross for our redemption.

But no, the words were written as a poem by Charitie de Chenez who was born as long ago as 1841. You can hear it read as a poem online. Wikipedia tells us that she was born Charitie Lees Smith (a less exotic name for this Victorian Irishwoman), and she was a well known religious poet of her time. This particular poem was written in 1863 in response to the 1859 Ulster Revival (of which I admit I had not heard previously). The modern tune fits well with the mood of the old words, the high notes of the middle lines being set to phrases such as “my name is written on his heart”, “my sinful soul is counted free” and “my life is hid with Christ on high”. I enjoy singing this hymn, and can well imagine it being belted out at a revival meeting.

Jesus, in dark Gethsemane

Today’s hymn for Holy Week in Sing Praise is “Jesus, in dark Gethsemane” by Alan Gaunt, set to a surprisingly upbeat English folk tune, given its dark theme. The words of the hymn, though, contrast Jesus’ sufferings with what the Prayer Book calls “the benefits of his Passion”.

The contrast in verse 1 is between the disciples who could not stay awake while Jesus wept and prayed, and us who ask him to keep us awake. I can empathise with those disciples, as when life is hectic, the brief stillness of a prayer meeting can easily lead to unintended falling asleep. Verse 2 reminds us that Jesus’ prayer “remove this cup from me … yet not what I want but what you want” was answered not with deliverance but with the strength to face death.

Verse 3 is marked as optional, perhaps because its topic of Christ descending into hell is not part of mainstream Christian teaching nowadays. Verse 4 refers to the belief that Christ’s suffering, although it was effective “once for all” in redeeming us from sin, still continues (his risen existence being beyond concepts of time): “faith … knows the anguish love still undergoes to heal our wretchedness”.

Verse 5 refers to the times we must shoulder our own cross, asking for his help to “cling to your nailed hands and, trusting, sing the triumph of your cause”, in other words, to continue praising Christ for what he has done, as a way of receiving his strength in our own troubles. The last verse asks for the Spirit to keep us praising him through both life and death.

To summarise: Jesus, then, suffered agony once upon the cross (and in the events leading up to it) but both his suffering, and his power to relieve ours, remain valid today, as do the forgiveness and reconciliation that it achieved, for Jesus has gone to hell and back, and now reigns as the everlasting Christ.

Bless the Lord, my soul

The song for today is a chant from the French Taize community, and is (as John points out) a setting of Psalm 103. The setting in Sing Praise includes nine short chants for solo cantor, each intended to be sung over a choir singing the 4-part refrain. The refrain is often used on its own: “Bless the Lord, my soul, and bless God’s holy name. Bless the Lord, my soul, who leads me into life”.

That last phrase intrigues me – “who leads me into life”. I have also seen a version of the same song giving it as “who rescues me from death”, both of them probably deriving from verse 4 of the original Psalm, “who delivers your life from the Pit” (NRSV). I happen to have a Taize prayer book so I looked to see how the community translates the psalm for their own worship: the relevant phrase is “qui rachète à la fosse ta vie” – literally, “who buys back from the ditch your life”. The translation in this English version of the song puts that idea into one of the cantor’s verses: “The Lord is forgiveness and redeems our life from the grave”.

All these carry the same idea, not yet the full Christian concept of Jesus dying to redeem us from our sins, but a foretaste of that, a germ of the idea. Without God’s blessing we would all end up in the ‘pit’ of death or Sheol – the old Hebrew concept of the afterlife as neither heaven nor hell but an undesirable, eternal nothingness or meaninglessness. A pit is a hole that is too deep to climb out of unaided, as the biblical Joseph found. To believe in God and accept his blessing is to accept a hand up out of the pit, to find meaning where there was none, to find eternal life instead of merely existence, to receive (as Jesus would later put it) “life in all its fulness”. Which is presumably why the refrain uses the more positive interpretation: if we are bought back from death, then by implication we are indeed led into life.

Imagery like this seems pertinent at this time of Covid lockdown and isolation. Today is the tenth and last day of our isolation at home, and even though the freezing weather has not been conducive to going out walking much anyway, it will be good to get out tomorrow, if only to the shop with a mask on. I can get out of this little pit and get on with life in the limited way currently allowed, and look forward to a ‘new normal’ at a later time. For those who live alone all the time and cannot get out on their own, for those in prison or trapped in controlling relationships, or in unrelieved pain, it must be far worse. For some people, even death may seem like a positive way out, and God is the only one who can lift them up.

The Christian promise is that the reality is much better than we might dare to hope. If we give ourselves to God, then we can find peace among the troubles of this life, and know that beyond death is not mere existence in a pit but a new creation where fullness of life will be something more than we can now imagine. Bless the Lord, my Soul!

Joseph in Egypt – resonances of redemption

Text of a sermon preached at St John the Baptist, Adel, Leeds.

Text: Genesis chapter 42

The book of Genesis offers us many well known stories that have passed into Christian and even secular consciousness. The longest sequence of these concerns Jacob and his twelve sons, a dynastic saga that sets the scene for the later Exodus. The passage that we heard read tonight is only a part of that sequence, towards the end of it in fact. You may well know the whole story, but in case it’s unfamiliar I will summarise it as follows:

Jacob, grandson of Abraham, had twelve sons, by his two wives and two servant girls. Joseph was the second-youngest, and Benjamin, born several years later, the youngest. These two were the only sons of Rachel, the other ten were their half-brothers, and that explains a lot that happens later in the story. As young men, the older brothers hated them because they were Jacob’s favourites, and even more so when Joseph told them of dreams that they would one day bow down to him. So they sold him to slave traders, who in turn sold him to an Egyptian official. Thrown into prison in Egypt, he escaped only when a former fellow inmate told the Pharaoh that Joseph had the gift of interpreting dreams. As a result of which, Joseph became finance and logistics minister, storing up surplus grain for the seven-year famine he had predicted. A famine that afflicted neighbouring countries including Canaan where his family lived. That’s the story so far.

So, in this episode, by which time Joseph was very well off, the older brothers come to see him to buy corn from the Egyptian stores. The whole story is rich in resonances, not only for our own time, but also for the wider message of the Gospel. Let’s look at a couple of them.

The first image that came to my mind when I pondered it is the many movements of people around the world today displaced by war, disease, famine or flood, such as the so-called caravan of migrants into the USA, or the asylum seekers crossing the North Sea in small boats. I don’t imagine for a moment that Jacob’s was the only family that went down to Egypt to seek food or work in the drought, there must have been thousands. Joseph presumably had to receive all of them to assess their needs. Far from being hostile to these refugees from natural disaster, he – and his Egyptian masters – were willing to help them. At the end of the story, Jacob’s extended family is invited to settle permanently in Egypt.

What a contrast that is to the attitudes of suspicion we so often see around us. There is good work being done in Leeds by a network of churches and voluntary organisations to support homeless people, asylum seekers and refugees. Jesus would approve – he proclaimed his mission as being to seek and save the lost, he spoke to despised groups of people, he told the story of the good Samaritan (as unlikely an idea in some people’s eyes as the good asylum seeker).

Back to the story – It’s quite understandable that Joseph, however generous to other visitors, would not want to greet his brothers joyfully as soon as he recognised them. The anger and hatred he may have felt at the time of his enslavement may have been long gone, but the wrong they had done would not have been forgotten, and how was he to know whether he could trust them now? Reuben, the eldest, reveals that he had opposed any harm to Joseph, so in sending the rest of them back with the grain they had paid for he retains the second eldest, Simeon, as a hostage.

That is the other image I want to bring out – the hostage. We know about hostages of course – it’s a practice found in probably all societies. The reason for keeping a hostage is to barter them for something – ransom money, another prisoner in exchange, or a favour from the other side. The news this week has been of a British registered tanker and its crew held hostage by the Iranians as a revenge for us detaining one of theirs. God willing, they will eventually both be released.

Joseph knew all too well what it was to be a hostage – thrown into a pit by his brothers until he was ransomed by slave traders – out of the frying pan and into the fire we might say. His second spell in imprisonment was for refusing to sleep with his master’s wife. We might call him a prisoner of conscience. We know all about them too – how about Nazanin Zaghari Ratcliffe, who is according to Amnesty International a prisoner of conscience in Iran, although she could also be described as a hostage in the international tensions between Iran and the west.

Joseph’s motive in keeping Simeon hostage, though, is different – it’s to ensure he doesn’t lose connection with his family again, and also so that he can get to see Benjamin, his youngest and closest brother.

One of the explanations sometimes given of Jesus’ death is that he was offered by God as a ransom for the evil in the world that keeps us hostages apart from God. The good news is that we don’t have to offer anything in return – the ransom is paid, we are free to go, we only need to accept that he has reconciled is back into God’s family. Much of the New Testament explores this theme of reconciliation, of drawing people back into God’s family where they belong.

So we have in the story of Joseph at least three universal themes that find their fulfilment in Jesus Christ – welcoming refugees, ransoming hostages, and restoring broken relationships. Joseph overcame the setbacks of his early life through faithful service, and persevered until they had been put right – not by vengeance, but by patience, generosity and love. May he be a model for our own discipleship.

(c) Stephen Craven 2019

The Bible in a Year – 15 June

If this is your first viewing, please see my Introduction before reading this.

15 June. Hosea chapters 1-7

There are two interesting points even in the first chapter of this action-packed book of prophecy. Firstly, Hosea was a prophet, a man of God. And yet God’s first call to him was to do something that would make him ritually ‘unclean’: to marry a sex worker and have children by her. What does that tell us? Principally, that in God’s sight anyone can be redeemed, and that love is the way of redemption.

The concept of “making an honest woman” [or man] of someone by marrying them may seem archaic or patriarchal, but the principle is still valid that for those whose lives are broken by their own upbringing or the circumstances of life, patient, forgiving, accepting love is the only way out. In chapter 3 this is spelled out – Gomer has been bought by Hosea to redeem her from prostitution, as God had redeemed his people from their sins, and she was therefore expected to remain chaste during their marriage, as Israel was expected to remain faithful to God.

To understand the rest of the book we need to note that in this wandering through the Bible, we have jumped back a couple of centuries in time from that of the exile of Jerusalem to the time of Uzziah (which dates Hosea’s prophecy to the same era as that of Isaiah). The northern kingdom of Israel is about to be punished, but not yet the southern kingdom of Judah.

The second thing we learn, then, is that their first three children were to be called Jezreel, Lo-Ruhamah, and Lo-Ammi. Names are vitally important in the Bible, and we need the footnotes in a modern translation to explain them. These children were called “God sows”, “Not pitied” and Not my people”. Explanation for the latter two is given in the text, as God would love Judah but not Israel, and just as the husband of the prostitute would love her children as his own, so God as the husband of Israel (who had been unfaithful to him) would love her descendants, i.e. the generations to come.

Chapters 4 and 5 set out the ways in which Israel has been unfaithful: idolatry of course, but also “swearing, lying, murder, stealing, adultery and bloodshed … drunkenness and orgies”. In other words they have broken every one of the commandments given through Moses which are the basis of civilisation to this day. Chapter 7 adds to this the charge that Israel relied on the military support of Egypt whence their ancestors had been rescued by God, rather than on God himself.

In and among all this, chapter 6 offers a sudden and refreshing change. Its opening verse, “Come, let us return to the Lord” is one that echoes down the ages, an offer that is always open. The results of turning to him are many: he has torn, and he will heal us; he has struck down, and he will bind us up; after two days he will revive us; on the third day he will raise us up that we may live before him” (6:1-3) The latter verse may be understood as a reference to the resurrection of Christ. And: “I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice, the knowledge of God rather than burnt-offerings (6:6) is another them found running through the words of the Prophets. Repentance, love, faith, understanding: these are the only antidotes to sin.