PENTECOST

Acts 2:1-11

Matthew 12:14-21

Being a Christian is like living with a permanently uncompleted jig saw. Many of the bits you know about and have found the rightful place for them. There’s the tradition of your local church affecting you more than perhaps you might imagine. There’s the culture of your confessional Church and the place of religion in your national tradition. There is the bible of course and how you read it is critical,  and then there are your own emotional needs and  intellectual pilgrimage as well as the effect the people you have known and loved has had upon you. These are all part of the uncompleted picture. But there’s also the historical origin of the Church, which we celebrate today, and perhaps that’s the hardest bit to find and fit into the picture. How it all started. What actually happened.

Clearly a man had was dead, brutally killed. Yet there are rumours of him being alive in people’s memories and in their minds as well but independent of both, undeniably and forever alive. Anxious friends sharing these experiences meet in a closed room. And then this invasion of spirit like wind and fire, a presence that throws open the doors and opens the mouths of friends who soon find themselves in the streets of Jerusalem giving intelligible voice to their faith and experience in the languages of many people to hoards of astonished listeners. That’s the story we receive. How do we fit it into our jigsaw? So much of the Jesus story is rational, this bit exceeds rationality.

In some ways it is beyond analysis. It’s a story of a strange event told at least second hand some years afterwards; a paranormal event, a corporate mystical experience and one which has practical consequences. There is a word for it –‘theophany’ meaning a physical manifestation of the presence of God. It’s a noisy affair and in the streets Jews from many parts of the world, meeting to celebrate the harvest feast of Pentecost, demand an explanation for all this fuss. The friends seem not so much to tell people about the experience but to tell them what it confirmed. Soon Peter is telling them about ‘Jesus of Nazareth, a man attested to you by God’.

It’s important to note that an inexplicable event then becomes intelligible – people hearing about it and about Jesus in their own language. The experience is ltransitory and less important than the consequences. But let’s think about the tongues of fire that leap over the heads of the friends. Fire that is elemental, unpredictable, transferable.

1. Elemental

Fire is part of the givenness of life. Volcanic fire beneath the thin crust of earth, sand and rock. Fire darting with sudden ferocity from the sky in a storm, Primitive humans harnessing and controlling fire for warmth, food, light and eventually for industry – minerals from the ground fired into iron, copper, lead and steel. The sun – a ball of fire and the provider of life. Fire is basic to our being. It is elemental.

So is God. The danger for religious people is to regard him as extra rather than elemental – the bit that makes our lives bearable rather than the giver of all things and chief participator in them. It was to the people that those confused, dear, faithful friends ran to as they left their spirit-filled room, not with a domestic but a global reach to their faith.

Christianity is not primarily about believing certain things ; is not a private experience for personal fulfilment; is not an unexpected bonus which like a dog with a bone makes us retreat to the kennel to protect and play with what we’ve got; not something added on, but something from the foundation of the world. There. Being and becoming.

There’s a wonderful phrase in one of Paul’s letters  – 2 Corinthians 5:4,5 – where he talks about us being swallowed up by life, a life which is guaranteed by the spirit. God is our breath; part of our being. In hospital recently one of the several forms I had to fill in included a question about my religion. I put ‘Christian’ but I would have liked to have said something about an approach to life that sees God in all things (there wouldn’t have been room for that) – even Paul’s idea of being swallowed up by life. ‘Religion’ sounds like an added bit to life, not life itself.

It’s important today to argue for God. Thinking about him, let alone a response to him, is not in many people’s minds but we must open out a conversation about him, not so that we throw religion at people but together explore life.: living with the assumption that as we exist, so also does God. He is the elemental truth of our being.

2. Unpredictable.

It is very hard to control fire. I remember the Australian bush fires in the mid 1990’s, causing acres and acres of devastation to wild life and the destruction of homes and farms. When the burning seemed to be at an end it was then discovered that the fire had gone underground and was still a potential danger. So easily fire can take hold and with a sudden change of the wind wreck havoc, become unpredictable and very hard to control.

And so it is with God. With its frequent re-telling in polite church cultures, we have lost the terror in the Pentecostal story. We assume that these first friends of Jesus left their place of meeting to do something for God – but they may have left the room in the hope that they could get away from this invasion of pure spirit. Much of old testament prophecy is about the destructiveness of God – fire is a central image of him in action. You cannot control God.

…but we behave and organise our church worship as if we can. I’m amazed how in our prayers we interpret God to himself as if we know all about him and he might not know about himself., (too much prayer is the equivilent of flattery). We don’t know all about him. ‘Do not hold me’ says Jesus in one of the resurrection narratives, ‘because I am not yet with my father’. Holding on to God is what we want to do, holding on and holding him down. Incarcerating in word, stone, brick, liturgies, traditions, doctrines the ever living, ever restless, unpredictable God.

It’s no wonder that the idea of Holy Spirit is unfamiliar to us. Images of father and son connect with our humanity. The God of spirit and of fire is by definition indefinable. His freedom is absolute. Now he is here, then he is there. Where next will he be, the Scarlet Pimpernel of the Universe? All we can say is when he comes, we want to be there with him.

3. Transferable

Once fire became a friend rather than an adversary to primitive societies, it was necessary to make sure it was always available. And so a burning brand was kept alight – its flame passed on to another when it was nearly at its end. Flints and tinder became the means of instant fire, as the sun shone through quartz or glass to set fire to dry leaves. The fire was no longer just arbitrary but could be arranged. It was transferable. The light and warmth in one place could become the same in another.

And so it is with God.  He is available to everyone everywhere. He may discriminate in favour of the poor – we have learned that from the way Jesus lived – but he is for everyone. That is a very difficult thing for religious people not only to believe it but to behave as if they believed it.

For six years I had this strange life of popping in and out of other people’s churches – meeting and worshipping with a congregation and then off to some other church to do the same. I hope I was always a friend but, to some extent inevitably, also a stranger. Sometimes it wasn’t easy to get into the church – doors didn’t lead to where I thought they ought to go. Too often it was hard to get into the culture of the church. It felt as if the God worshipped in such a church had become the church’s possession and the good news of Jesus Christ had become the private conversation of the faithful. God had become the fire cooling in the hearth.

Evangelism isn’t a public relations exercise of the sort practiced by politicians and commercial interests who want to sell us something and take us over, but an attitude which allows the fire of God – O.K. to warm us, but more to move us on and out and beyond to some new experience. It will happen differently, along the lines of our personalities, always naturally and when it happens it will be out of our hands. For God is himself and God must be free.

And so the story of the first (and unrepeatable?) Pentecost. The understanding and application of it is one of the bits of the Christian picture we may find difficult to fit into the jig saw puzzle of our Christian discipleship. For it is not precise but as volatile as wind and fire, the divine enigma that is out of our control but which in constantly surprising ways, energises us.

POWER

Readings :

Acts 4:5-18

I John 3:16-24 

John 10:11-18

Without too much effort, I find a point of connection between these three readings. Let’s look at them.

John 10:7-18

Why was the image of a shepherd and his sheep such a powerful one for Jesus? It was of course part of the world he knew, but whilst he and his mission are described in over fifty different images in the N.T., this is the one that was particularly remembered and has been an evocative one for Christians ever since. I’ve been looking some of the many paintings of the Good Shepherd on the internet – loads of them, with Jesus a saintly tall bearded figure in flowing robes, sometimes cuddling a little lamb. But looking after sheep was a tough and dangerous job in biblical days. It was a 24 hour job and shepherds could be rough characters themselves, even the good ones. Their power may have been limited to a particular role, but it was total.

If in biblical times you were a young boy and were asked what you wanted to do when you grew up and you chose this job, it could have been a worrying time for his parents. ‘Think of something else, love : baker, or a mason or even a priest, but not a shepherd; we’d never know where you were. It was a tough and lonely job.  Sheep were a prime commercial commodity and for any good shepherd protecting the flock was a major responsibility. Sheep needed good pasture but good shepherding as well. You had to be resourceful and if necessary powerful, defending yourself and your sheep against thieves who were out for an easy picking.

During those ‘lost’ years when he worked in his father’s joiners shop, Jesus must have devoted himself to prayer and reading the Jewish scriptures, and done a lot of thinking.  I’ve counted over 60 references to shepherds and their flocks in the O.T. and most of them by the prophets, notably the prophecy of Ezekiel, who was as visionary as any of them and wilder than most. The 34th chapter is all about sheep and those who should but sometimes don’t shepherd them. Ezekiel rails against shepherds, who feed themselves, clothe themselves in sheep wool, slaughter the fatlings but don’t feed the sheep. Because you have done such a bad job, says the Lord God through the prophet’s voice, I’ll do it myself. Scattered I will find them. Hungry, I will feed them and the injured I will heal. Wild animals will be banished from the land. The trees will yield fruit and the earth vegetation, and the sheep will live in safety.’ He ends with the firm statement ‘You are my sheep, the sheep of my pasture, and I am your God’.  

Jesus will have read those words. A moment of recognition perhaps as he read ‘’I will seek the lost, and I will bring back the strayed and I will bind up the injured and I will strengthen the weak. But the fat and the strong I will destroy. I will feed them with justice.’ God will be the shepherd’ says the prophet. Jesus may have said to himself, ‘is that what I am’  ? By whatever means he has this deep insight into the truth of who he is and his unique relationship to God and what he has to do with his (short)life. The Good Shepherd. A pastoral image but a powerful one as well. As near to God himself as makes no difference.

2. Acts 4:5-12

So with that in our minds, let’s look at the story from the second of this morning’s readings. ‘I will feed them with justice’? Well here’s justice or at least the holders of power who should be exercising justice. Here they are, all of them, the elders, the scribes and the priests – the whole funny family lot of them, the grisly crew holding on to what power the Roman authorities have allowed them to keep, keen to exercise it in a case they fear may result in public disorder – something the authorities in all times and places fear most. John and Peter had been speaking to a huge crowd, many of whom seem to be convinced by their preaching as they had been moved by the healing.

And, they are ‘ordinary and uneducated men’! say the powerful.’ Only people like us, extra-ordinary and schooled in the scriptures, can argue with their peers’,. Jesus alive was problem enough, now dead it should have been the end of it, but here his ideas are resurrected (as his followers believe the man himself has been). And the dangerous person confronting them and speaking? A fisherman from Galilee! You couldn’t get more ordinary than that. The assembly of the great and the not so good, and they are sorted out by an artisan from the country who should know his place but doesn’t.

So, a clash between the privileged and the powerless, between position and disposition. An immense problem for the powerful who rule by the book. And here is a situation that is without precedent for the fathers of the faithful, and there is no room for it in their rule book. Luke who probably is the author of Acts tells us that Peter spoke with the power of the Holy Spirit. That’s where his courage and eloquence came from. The story in Acts goes on to explain the predicament the authorities found themselves in – someone ill had been made well, and Peter and John – the heroes of the day - refuse to be muzzled. They are not open to any deal. ‘Well at least keep quite about it’ is the lame ending to the story, and the apostles say,’ no way’ –whether it is better to listen to you than to God you will have to judge’. The powerful elite who control religion lose their authority and crumble into an embarrassed silence.

What respect do you have for authority? Our local Council, delicately balanced between the two majority parties. The Coalition government –selling off civic and national responsibilities to companies whose first interest is to make money for their shareholders. The Police. The City. Bankers. The Bible – important for what is there but important too for how we read it. Our Church Council. The Methodist Conference. ‘Them’. And what happens when you strongly disagree with the people who have power?  Especially if you believe their power is misused, what do you do then?

Some old friends visited us a little while ago and we were remembering some of the protests we had been involved in – a few marches, some public meetings and letters to the press (we still do a bit of that). One or two victories perhaps, but mostly unsuccessful protests. Have we given up, we asked each other?

Have you given up? That hymn which I was taught to sing when a small child –

Jesus bids us shine
With a pure, clear light,
Like a little candle
Burning in the night.

In this world of darkness
So let us shine You in your small corner and me in my mine’

Is that what we are reduced to? ‘You in your small corner’. Finding a place to hide and looking out at the world, shining, but sheltered.

3. I John 3:16-24 

How we regard God is so important; how we think of him; as essentially who he is. Loads of images of God in the bible and many of them to do with power – with authority again. But the heart of God as we understand it is that he is loving. He- is -loving, full stop. It is his nature. That’s him. That’s not news to us. That’s what we celebrate when we are together as a worshipping congregation. O.K. we need to be reminded of it now and then, but not as if we have ever thought otherwise. We may take it for granted, lean on it, snatch it as a right – and that’s all bad, which is why it’s not out of place for us to make our confessions when we are together as we are now. We are judged by such love, challenged by it, but the truth that it is there, is the confidence at the centre of our faith. And his love is for the world.

As a congregation we are now based in a community new to most of us that we have to learn and respond to. We had a little rehearsal of that when some of us were angry (love is often angry) at what seemed to be the inevitable closure of our local secondary school which is a focus of community in this often disadvantaged part of the city. Politicians and the parents did most of the campaigning but it was a cause near to the heart of many of us. And it was a campaign that was successful and I for one am sorry that only by becoming an academy could the school be saved. But it was a sort of victory for justice. There is this wonderful phrase we heard from the bit of the first letter of John, ‘Loving not in Word or speech but in truth and action’.

Most of us know each other fairly well, by character and by face. But there is something else that holds us which is more than friendship and habit and it is, though we are not often bold enough to say it, the presence and the power of the Holy Spirit. The extra that is more than our personalities, more than we see and know, and which is indeed spiritual and comes from God himself. So easily the word can slide from our lips without engaging our minds. Let’s look forward to our celebration of the day of Pentecost with a sense of our own need to be owned and empowered by God.

We have been thinking about power. The tough, pastoral power of looking after people as the Shepherd cares for the sheep.

The power that can confront those who misuse their authority, shaming them to repentance and a recognition of their own weakness.

And the power of love; love from the spirit of God shared amongst us.

Powerful people? Us lot? Yes. Yes. Embrace it. Take hold of it. Put it to work.

ALDERSGATE

Romans 1:16-17;3:22b-28

Matthew 7: 21-29

As a methodist minister seeking temporary refuge in a United Reformed Church I suppose I should refer to May 24^th - a major Methodist festival Day, for it was then in 1738 that John Wesley in the company of Christian friends meeting in ,London, had what has often been called, his evangelical conversion and as he wrote in his diary, ‘I felt my heart strangely warmed’. Unlike some of the new-wave Christian movements that were around at that time with the then novel idea that even poor people could be God’s friends, the Methodist movement that began to rapidly evolve was strong in its emphasis on the improvement of human life and the principle of social justice. There’s a delicious bit of local history when Wesley and Beau Nash met each other in Bath, both deeply hostile to each other before they ever met!

That warmed heart of this otherwise serious and rather prim Anglican cleric in a meeting room in

Aldersgate Street, London

, was kindled as someone was reading the preface to Luther’s notes on Paul’s letter to the Romans. A fascinating conjunction of three very strong-minded men and if they all ended up in heaven I should love to be present at their first meeting. other. I guess Paul would be in the chair and the other two would be working very hard to set the agenda.

Four significant one might say Protestant words in our reading from the letter to the young Roman church.

1. I am not ashamed of the gospel. Many years ago I read a book by the Presbyterian minister James S. Stewart. It was called ‘Heralds of God’ and was like many such books I read in my relative youth, about evangelism. The trumpet sound of faith! There is this gospel imperative clear from the New Testament and always strong in the reformed tradition, that the good news is for everyone and everyone should have a chance to hear it. But what is one to do with the embarrassment and shyness that can make us if not ashamed, certainly cautious – the strength of the secular society the world has become that pours scorn on all faith statements and – quite properly – often warns us against the sort of blind-folded faith that ends up as bigotry and bone-headness.

But it was the simplicity of the gospel that was Paul’s embarrassment and may be our’s too. This story of a good man loving the poor into believing in a benign and present God – God of all things; and my God! King of the hidden but profoundly real kingdom that is in the air we breathe, in the flesh that need not imprison us, in the humanness that we share, in the ever living spirit of Jesus abroad in the world and sacramentally known in the breaking of bread and the drinking of wine. The gospel is about a gift – the gift of a life lived fully and freely with God who is the giver of it. Nothing to be ashamed of there. The human spirit’s yearning for love, life and freedom keeps on bubbling up, challenging the hard secularism and the religious fundamentalism abroad in the 21^st. century. And though we find it difficult to use the right words, there is a listening ear in every part of the world for what we call new life in Christ. Be critical, observant, gracious and humble about our Christian truth, but don’t ever be ashamed.

2. And then the Jews first. Paul – the converted but still as he believed it, faithful Jew– makes room in his idea of the kingdom for his fellow believers to come home first. Let’s think for a moment about this ancient, abused, nomadic, perceptive, arrogant, proud people. Jesus was a Jew, and if he moved away from the faith of his fathers, his beliefs were still founded on them. It has become a fashionable field of new testament theology, to emphasise his Jewishness and to set him almost entirely in the messianic tradition. I resist that – on the basis of hunch rather than scholarship. It’s his uniqueness and his freedom of spirit that fascinates me and draws me to him. But- he –was- a -Jew, that astonishing tradition of faith, surviving against all the odds, is the bedrock of Christianity. I don’t know about firsts and lasts, but we owe it to our history and to the ways in which the Jewish people through the years have been marginalized and misjudged, to be very careful not to slip into the abyss of anti-Semitism or contrarily, the bunkers of uncritical Zionism.

But that doesn’t mean that we should be immune from some of the qquestionable consequences of Jewishness, the most significant of which is the state of Israel - notionally a secular state, but inspired by the passion and nostalgia of a nomadic people searching for land and identity. The practical wish to ‘come’ home; indeed o have a home.  Christians like all libertarians are right to condemn the way the present government of Israel views its Palestine neighbours and indeed anybody else who disagrees with them. So we have this delicate task of honouring our spiritual forbears but dissenting from the excluding politics of the first Jewish nation in more than 2000 years.

3.Then what becomes of boasting? asks Paul? There are a few Christians around who have no sense of irony and believe and behave as if they were the sole interest of God. I have heard many testimonies of faith intended I am sure to bring glory to the converting power of the gospel, but they have been so much about me, so full of how awful it was to have been a sinner and how wonderful not to be one now, that its felt more ego-centric than Christ-centred. This is an abiding question for many religious people – ‘who’s in and who’s out’? There are better questions, like ‘who is God’. Paul says. ‘yes Jews and Gentiles on the same terms are in and there are no favourites. Dynamite for the Jews but also a disturbing thought perhaps for many non-Jews. ‘There’s no ritual you have to perform and no tribe you have to belong to : God takes the lot of us on equal terms. So, no room for boasting.

Historically it has been the triumphalists – Christian, Muslim and Jew – who have endangered the delicate plant of true religion. Such people were around for Jesus. We think he was probably less dismissive of the pharisees than the gospels suggest – the evangelists wrote-up the tension between the two, many scholars suggest. But they were a problem – they were boasters rather than seekers. It’s a great challenge in our Age – to believe firmly but gently; to have your own convictions and at the same time to be open to those of others.

4. Since God is one. This is the belief that each of the Abrahamic religions have in common. There are other things too and we should look for areas of agreement rather than mapping out battlegrounds of dissent, but this unity of God, his aloneness, answering to no other powers, responsible for all that is, before, during and after the creation of the universes, is a vital one. God not lost in our theologies, not imprisoned in the words of scripture, not confined by the creeds and statements of faith by which we try to describe him – but God, free and absolute. More than we shall ever know, and yet so much that we do know, and which delights our hearts and inspires our minds.

Father, Son and Holy Spirit enriching our sense of God, but never detracting from his singularity.  The great foundation of our faith, a faith for which many have struggled in the face of doubt and disaster. Martin Luther – we see him as the strong man of faith – in fact he spent nights fighting doubt, and one morning the family saw, after he had prayed through the night hours he had scratched across his table, the words ‘I have been baptised.’ Not only the unity but as well the nature of God was Luther’s struggle. The God he said he had once hated had been a God of vengeance. The God he came to love and serve, turning western Europe into a cauldron of controversy, was the God his ’dear’ Paul taught him to love as he himself he came to believe, was also loved.

And so this verse of his hymn as he faced the political and ecclesiastical opposition which marked his life –

That word they never can dismay

However much they batter

For God himself is in the fray

And nothing else can matter.

Then let them take our life,

Goods, honour, children ,wife.

We will let all go,

They shall not conquer so

For God will win the battle.

 ‘Let God be God’ is the title of one of many books written about Luther. When we say our prayers there is only one who hears us, from whatever faith-system we speak. ‘Since God is one’ as Paul says.

Protestant words, these four assertive phrases of Paul? I think so – protestant in the original Reformation meaning – certainly a protest against the imperial corruption of truth in the then Catholic Church; but more a protest for a faith…….

which sets people free for God and each other;

where no race has exclusive rights to the attention of God;

where there is no place for pride, for all is of grace;

and where the supremacy and unity of God is the ground of religion.

Paul had never been to Rome when he wrote this letter.  I wonder how after reading it the churh anticipated his first and it seems his only visit to them, this thoughtful man who had a closely reasoned faith. A man who knew where he stood.

And us?

To the Church in Ephesus

TO THE CHURCH IN EPHESUS

Ephesians 2:11-22

Mark 6:30-34, 53-56

Ephesus is where Paul lived for a couple of years. It’s in modern Turkey, west of the Mediterranean, the remains of the temple of Artemis still one of the wonders of the world. We were there in the Spring of last year; an astonishing moment to sit in the theatre where Paul had once stood. He is probably writing from prison in Rome, certainly he refers to his imprisonment seeing it almost as a way of honouring Christ: ‘I am a prisoner for Christ Jesus’, he says. The letter has a quite different flavour from the few others we have from his hand. It is less personal. Only at its end does he refer to anyone by name: Tychicus, ‘ a dear brother and a faithful minister in the Lord’. Some scholars assume that this may therefore have been a circular letter sent via his friend to others in various churches Paul had founded. Some of the earliest copies of the letter don’t specify Ephesus at all.

If that is the case it helps to explain the different style of the epistle. Some scholars doubt whether it was written by Paul at all, for whilst it includes many of his traditional themes, it does so in a new, rarefied, dogmatic way as if it was Paul’s final and considered theology. He writes with enormous authority. All by himself, perhaps, without comforters and friends, his incarceration means that he focuses on what for him is the essence of the new faith he has so bravely advocated, often against much opposition and despite physical violence. He writes as a Jew but specifically to Gentiles. All the old so called ‘rules’ about the chosen race have been cancelled by the coming of Christ and he makes some quite enormous, even formidable claims for the centrality of Jesus to Christian faith. Let’s look at some of them.

First, then, Jesus himself.

Paul rarely refers to him as Jesus, more often as Christ Jesus or Christ. The man of Nazareth who went about healing the sick and teaching the poor as we have heard this morning in the gospel reading, has become for Paul an elemental figure, existing before the foundation of the world and now set in heaven as the power that is above all earthly powers. It is almost as if the earthly ministry didn’t happen and the terrible end to it on the cross and the wonderful resurrection that followed it are of lesser importance than these almost apocalyptic views of the glorified and ascendant Christ. Nothing is too great for Paul to claim in his vision of the person and power of Jesus.

Reading these tremendous ideas I was reminded of the colourful and technically brilliant otherworldly films of popular culture, where all that is normal has been transcended into a new realm of reality beyond our sight and senses. But whereas in such culture, the baddies often seem to win, and there’s more gore than glory, in Paul’s imagination this is an elemental story of goodness triumphing. Sometimes we perhaps claim less for Christ than we should. Paul urges us to see the coming of Christ and his impact on the human story in a far wider perspective than we are used to. He writes of the ‘immeasurable greatness of his power….’ruling from heaven’. But the work that will go on, for the glorified Christ will purge us of our sins so that we can be re-created in him. So Paul will have nothing to do with the meek and mild picture of Jesus, and claims for him everything that otherwise we might associate with God.

Second the Church

There is no doubt in Paul’s mind that the Church is part of the gospel – born of the good news and destined to convey the good news to the world and for Paul, the Jew, particularly to the Gentiles. The church is gifted by God. Many members but various gifts. He names some of them. ‘Some would be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors and teachers to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, until all of us come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to maturity, to the full stature of Christ.’ So what was true of one man, Jesus, our gathered gifts form some sort of equation to his.

That’s a very high definition of the Church indeed, and one not easily recognisable in any picture of your average local Church. And yet if we lack such depth and richness of spiritual life, we do have at least an intention associated with his. Whilst we know that we aren’t all the same; and honour our differences; we seek a unity of common life. We live in utterly different times from Paul, this stern but dear man trying to guide his churches from the uncompromising incarceration to which he has been reduced. But his vision is an inspiration and a rebuke to us – when God welcomes us into the community of faith, he equips us to live as brothers and sisters in Christ. It’s a high aspiration but without it we are in danger of becoming creatures of habit, limiting our life together because we don’t expect anymore from each other than we have had before. For Paul the Church is a vital creative experiment in how people can live together, creatively, peaceably and in love.

Third, individual Christian behaviour. Paul the puritan comes to the fore in these six chapters, again reflecting perhaps his limited horizons as he sits in his prison cell. He is fiercely moral in his expectation of how Christians should live, as ‘children of the light – for the fruit of the light is found in all that is good and right and true.’ As opposed to what he calls ‘unfruitful works of darkness’. So – don’t get drunk, for that is debauchery; don’t be foolish (he would have been appalled at the mak average programme on TV  designed for triviality and titillation, as I am ); put away all bitterness, wrath, anger, wrangling and slander and be kind to one another. Obscene, silly and vulgar talk is entirely out of place, he says. He warns against greediness which he sees as a form of idolatry, a timely condemnation for us of the astonishing and insatiable greed of certain bankers for whom clearly money (our money often) has become a plaything and a god. Instead we are to be imitators of God as beloved children, living in love as Christ loved us.

It’s when Paul gets on to family relationships that we become aware of the years that divide us from him. The husband is the head of the wife as Christ is head of the Church, but they are to be loved, the two becoming one flesh, a brave statement against the customs of his day and one that still has to be remembered in our day. Children are to obey their parents, and slaves (ouch!) are to obey their earthly masters with enthusiasm and masters mustn’t threaten them.: knowing that both have the same master in heaven. Whilst it’s true that slaves in that age were often members of the wider family and treated as such, we have learned that no one has the right to rob another of their liberty. And Christians have eventually been foremost in arguing for that belief.

Fourth, humanity

A sectarian is someone whose belief takes them away from society and lands them in a small self-interested group which by choice exists alongside rather than with the rest of the world. (Back to the bankers and into all the religious weirdoes who listen to no one but each other). Despite his high doctrine of what the Church should be like, Paul is less of a sectarian than we might imagine. He was, for example proud of his Roman citizenship and whatever the failings of that imperial nation, he recognised its global reach and the rough justice by which its subjects were governed. Paul is in Rome because he demands that– as a Roman –his trial should take place there. It was precisely against Jewish sectarianism that Paul argued for the right of everyone to hear the gospel and be changed by the generous and gracious love of God.

From the Father, says Paul, every family in heaven or on earth takes its name. ‘We must speak the truth to our neighbours’, he says, ‘for we are members of one another’. One of the three churches I was responsible for in the 1980’s  was a small community church in the Borough of Newham, surrounded by low rise flats.( And its still there!). We had a morning and then an afternoon service, when only three or four of us, sitting in a circle, were the congregation.

 I was doing the equivalent of preaching one Sunday afternoon and said we must love our neighbours. ‘You should meet my neighbour’ said Doris, and gave us a long spiel on what she was suffering from the woman in the flat above her. And it was terrible. Well, it’s like that. Unless we are extremely saintly, we don’t instinctively love the funny people around us. And yet, they – even the really nasty and totally irresponsible ones who live as if no one else mattered – are part of the human family. Paul, the strict moralist, still accepts that the saints and sinners, kind and cruel, gentle and violent people are all and equally part of a broken unity, but one which has the potential to be made whole.

Conclusion

I have hardly done the beginning of justice to the six chapters of Paul’s deeply thoughtful letter, but trying to do so raises the question of how we read the bible. The words of scripture and our reading and reflection on them can be - should be -two different things. The biblical tradition is where we meet each other as Christians in fellowship and at worship. Without that binding of lives in common belief, we would just be a load of individuals paddling our own canoes and looking around sometimes to check that other boats are moving roughly in the same direction as we are. The bible’s varied writings gathered over many years, is our book of reference. But belief without reflection can be little more than a habit we have grown accustomed to. So read it, a little of which we have done this morning, but read it as yourself in the day in which you live, and with a devoted but critical eye. Thank God for St Paul. But you are not him, and each of us as ourselves and within a Christian community, have to find our own way. The Bible is not an excuse to ignore our intelligence, but a profound way to enrich it.

Fourth Sunday after Easter

Readings – Psalm 23

             1 John 3:16-24

             John 10:11-18

I have been looking at the list of ‘special’ Sundays in Methodism. There are fourteen of them. They could be called special interests Sundays, asking worshippers to remember aspects of the church’s beliefs and commitments that otherwise might be forgotten. Today is one of them -Vocations Sunday.

Prospective Methodist ministers are required to give an account of their ’call’ to ministry and the more imaginative or religious of us come up with stories of dramatic moments of revelation that turns us into little St. Paul’s or Martin Luther’s, all of them doubtless true. I have such a story rooted to an occasion and although insufficient alone to keep me going for 60 years, it was where it all began for me, and I value the moment. A call from God is not restricted to members of the clergy of course. There is a personal vocation for all of us and a general one which everyone shares. You may recall signposts on the way to your discipleship and significent moments when there was a sense of new direction. It may be a bit too generalised for we are not all the same, but one name that could be given to the Christians is that they are ‘The Called Ones’.

Pursuing the theme, do today’s readings help us to identify and refresh our sense that we are what and where and who we are because that’s what God wants for us?

Psalm 23

Throw out all the rest and if only one of the psalms is to remain, this is the one many of us would settle with. It’s about total dependence on God. He is the one who fulfils all our wants. There are strong words of love certainly but also intimations of control. He ‘makes’, he leads’, he ‘prepares’, he ‘anoints’. But the main tenor of the psalm is companionship. Life is a journey, we are never alone and even when the valley is dark and you are surrounded by enemies, the Lord is with you.

Many of the other psalms dare to doubt that. It’s precisely a sense of loneliness and desertion that makes many of the psalmists cry out for help or even vexation at the neglect of God. And we have known that feeling perhaps. But what God promises, he fulfils. John Wesley begins his notes on the opening verses of the Letter to the Romans –‘Paul, a servant of Jesus Christ, called to be an apostle’ - with the comment ‘While God calls, he makes what he calls.’ So our vocation is something that once begun is a continuous pilgrimage with God. Not a moment of decision followed by years of looking backwards, but a life of grace sustained by the dependable promises of God. ‘He makes what he calls’.

1 John 3:16-24

But this is a life not of self-satisfaction but of action. Love is more than word or speech says the writer of John’s letter, the truth of it is found in how you live and how you care for others. You are called not to spend your life enjoying favour and privilege but giving pleasure to God by fulfilling his commandments. I saw a T shirt in a local shop with the words ‘God loves everyone – but I’m his favourite’. Too many people have built theologies on that belief. ‘Once I’ve got the good opinion of God, that’s it’. As if faith is the end instead of the beginning. If God has favouritism it is comprehensively inclusive –not some of us out but all of us. In other words, no favouritism; all are favoured.

There’s hardly a day that goes by when amongst all the manipulative offers of credit facilities that come through our letter box at home – as well as the promise of the best pizza’s you can buy and the Co-ops latest price cuts- there isn’t also an appeal for often immensely needy causes. There is so much dire need in the world! You would go mad as well as have no bread to eat if you responded to only a fraction of them. This is the nagging never-ending pain of vocation!

And yet this is where our vocation draws us -to practical love. We had this rather odd event at a Circuit church in March – an afternoon especially for carers, for people who in one way or another are helping to look after people in the churches and their local communities. As a group of us began to organise how the time together could be spent, we realised that what we were planning was indeed a definition of the Church –a community of people who care. We can never do it all and we can never do enough, but nor are we are ever left off the hook of conscientious love – within and beyond the church.

John 10:11-21 ( Sacrifice)

Back to the sheep and shepherd image in the gospel reading, but here with a more sober tone. Here there is conflict and a conflict which will be met not with violence or desertion, but with sacrifice. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.  You will remember the eastern custom where the shepherd is himself the gate to the fold. An enemy wanting to get to the sheep has to get to the shepherd first. He puts his life into danger for their sake. And here in John the simile is extended to picture a community far greater than the immediate one – there are other sheep who are not of the fold.

We can never know how much of John’s gospel is reportage or how much reflection. The general opinion is that it is much more an extended mediation on the significance of Jesus than a description of his life, ministry, death and resurrection. We don’t have to leave it to the wisdom or whatever of the scholars. Just by reading John’s gospel one is aware of marked differences between this and the other three. So here the death of Jesus is anticipated within the familiar pastoral parable. His life is not taken from him – he has the power to give it, as he has the power to take it up again.

 I asked them to be read this morning, but the last verses we heard are not included in the lectionary reading, which I think is a pity. As if we have to escape from the immediate controversy which is what happened when Jesus was around. His hearers divided, some saying Jesus was demonic, out of his mind and shouldn’t be listened to, others arguing that healing someone who brings sight to the blind can’t be anything but good. Controversy followed him in life and has been a mark of the cutting edge of the gospel ever since. This is strange stuff and it’s no surprise that Jesus should be thought of as mad or demonic. Beware a sanitised Jesus, reducing him to a religious talisman who supplies all our needs and creates a total absence of questions and uncertainties, so that he sets the agenda and we follow it and there are no problems to wrestle with.

For example I feel that the traditional emphasis on the death of Jesus as being caused by the will of God – and its there in scripture - threatens to deny that Jesus had a mind of his own, himself struggling to find his destiny, rejecting the idea that he should lead the insurrection that some people expected of him. ‘Down with the Romans,’ ‘Purge the Temple’. It was the cry of many messiahs, but not his.

To see Jesus as the Saviour born only to die – a sacrificial lamb absolving the sins of humanity - also denies the freedom of religious and political leaders often in unholy alliance to do the wrong thing. We are here into one of the difficult in-balances of theology – does history make itself or does God make history? We want to hold on to both possibilities – God was in it all the way but he was not, surely, manipulating events as if he was the master and everyone else were puppets in his hands. We have to work this one out for ourselves. The bible is indeed a book full of stories, but not all of them are of equal value and they have to be read through the eyes of your contemporary knowledge and experience.

Back to our theme -, vocation, which supremely for Jesus involved sacrifice and means for us we speak for love rather than hatred, conciliation rather than aggression, argument rather than force, actual reality not virtual reality; that we examine our instinctive attitudes and bring them under the searching light of the gospel.

Our sacrifice is unlikely to be anywhere near to how it was for Jesus, but like him we may not always be understood. We face the scorn of atheists and fundamentalists of all sorts and sizes, and the uncritical secularism that shapes the life of our age, though which perhaps – and there are few signs of it!- may bring us to a new level of realism.

So, what does God want you to do with your life? Or, to put it differently, what are the ways in which you fulfil yourself and employ the skills you possess? In the church, in your closest relationships, in your time alone and with others who are dear to you. How is your life a blessing to others, and faithful to your vision of God and the good life? What is our vocation? If we are the ‘called out’, to where does God send us ‘back’?

Finally, has vocation to do with age? God only able to break through to us, when we are young. It may be so but I hope it isn’t. Unlike our culture, God doesn’t worship youth and is not limited by the bright eyed expectations of the young. The great challenge for mature people is not to say ‘its all over, I’ve lost touch with some of the things I once believed in and sometimes I feel that God has lost touch with me’.  O.K., Samuel was young when the voice of God called him – and it took him enough time to get round to hearing and identifying the voice. Remember Abraham and Sarah, they were no spring chickens. Have those of us who are older stopped listening for it?

That hymn ‘I the Lord of sea and sky’ with its chorus -

‘Here I am Lord. Is it I, Lord?

 I have heard you calling in the night.

I will go, Lord, if you send me;

I will hold your people in my heart.’

So -keep listening.?

Your usefulness to God is not over. It may be near to its new beginning.

                                    

E A S T E R

Readings: Acts 10:v.34-43

            Mark16:1-8

Easter Day is special. It’s a day for songs and beauty, for purity and happiness; a day to dream and love and hope. Feasting and gladness is the order of the day. It’s a joyful day; a day to affirm that impossibilities can become reality; a day when our humanness is made radiant by the indwelling of God, a day when an old story becomes the narrative of our lives. For this is the day of resurrection, and a single cry from the past is echoed in the hearts of those who hear and believe it. ‘He is risen!’. Charles Wesley is right –

King of glory! Soul of bliss! 

Everlasting life is this

Thee to know, thy power to prove

Thus to sing, and thus to love’ .

You can’t enter into the joy and mystery of resurrection until you face the death of Jesus that preceded it. Of course.  So we make a space together to think now, as well as to sing.

The facts as we know them. A good man was killed by a hasty coalition of people who wanted him out of their way. It was an appallingly cruel and brutal death, an execution reserved for felons and murderers. It was the death of a man of peace who lived as a poor man amongst the poor and, though grounded in the religious culture of his day, moved far beyond it, his message of new life and new dignity before a God of grace and love embracing all sorts of people, especially those who were disadvantaged by estate or condition. A death that left his closest friends dazed, confused, suddenly utterly alone and afraid, his body summarily buried in a borrowed tomb. Removing the evidence and hiding from its shame.

As you know there are widely differing and indeed contradictory accounts in the gospels and echoed in some of the epistles, about what happened after the death. Scholars recognise that probably Mark’s account at the end of his gospel is the oldest and most reliable. It is terse and factual - verses 9- 20 are likely to have been inked in by another hand – and probably reflect how it is when you are bowled over by an unlikely event such as when someone dear to you is  killed, and then returns?  So much reportage, so much to try and get into focus and context.

Very probably Matthew and Luke base their versions on Mark’s and John on all three, and other sources unknown to us. For all sorts of reasons, they develop the simple statement into a narrative that reflects their own reasons for sharing their beliefs in the importance of Jesus and no doubt with the particular audience they want to address in mind. Grab a group of Christians in any age, and each of us will tell a different story – the impact of events, our own experience and background all help to create different responses and explanations.

So, Matthew is keen to emphasise the guilt of the Jews in his version; Luke in his gospel is preparing a message which becomes important in the composition of his second screed, the Acts of the Apostles, namely that the Risen Christ commands his disciples to preach repentance and the remission of sins. John writes a much more detailed version which includes the story of Thomas and his doubting and how that ended when he saw the marks of nails in the hands of Jesus, and as he had insisted wanting to see before he could believe, thrust his hand in his side. There are some people who think John’s might be the earliest of the gospels – partly because of such detail –, but not many. John Robinson, onetime Bishop of Woolwich wrote a book propounding the theory, but unlike much of the rest of his original thinking in the wild 60’s and temperate 70’s, it had few takers.

These differences require some sort of response by us. People who read the bible as if God dictated it word for word, ignore the differences; others who believe in synthesis have suggested ways in which the diversity can be accommodated. I am helped to understand this most significant of Christian beliefs as we read the scriptures by recognising that fact and symbol, though of course related, are never the same; that event and interpretation though related are not the same, that dogma and faith are not the same. Theology matters but it can obscure the drama of faith and reduce the theatre of our salvation to a verbal tract.

There was an event. Something beyond explanation, happened. Out of the confusion and desperation that followed the death, one single truth remained for the disciples. What seemed plain at the time – that their story was at an end – ceased to be true. All the accounts converge on that basic conviction. He is alive! Not as he was, not in this visionary sense for ever and indeed the claim is that it was only for a few days, but enough the same man in the same time- sequence for his friends to be transformed, as he had been. It was not over. Their story was but at its beginning. The time for mourning  was over, the long hard pilgrimage of learning a new life was over, now was the time to share and open out that pilgrimage, to tell the story, and  still to be disciples for there was more to learn, but now to be apostles as well.

There is this extraordinary sense of dynamism in the N.T., which is where our interpretation of the event must begin. Of course there were immense differences amongst people of the new faith, reflected in the resurrection accounts we have mentioned. James and his friends founded the new church in Jerusalem, conservative lot as they were, holding to the idea that the gospel was primarily if not entirely a message for the Jews. Meanwhile Peter and Paul were scurrying around the Mediterranean world and discovering that the gospel was for everyone, and the Holy Spirit (shock horror) had no favourites, alarming news to James and his uptight mates.

 What was true then has been true of the church ever since, though we have tried to ignore the truth that interpretations differ, they do, and there is no one absolutely authentic template on which to form a church and define its doctrines, though the simple cry ‘he is risen’ takes us near to it. Paul struggled o to balance diversity with unity, even if the old pharisaic attitude to truth still clung to his coat tails. But for all of them in their different ways, the dynamism was there, and sustained an amazing missionary enterprise that spread to Asia Minor and perhaps beyond. That’s how the event was interpreted, the joy of finding that the Lord had risen, became the power of a new way of living and being and finding and telling, and the church of truth and love was  born.

And still lives? Something happened and it still happens in loads of different ways, not always understood or acknowledged. That wonderful shout on the first Easter morning ‘’he has gone on before you’ is the motivating premise and promise of our lives. We shall argue our case as far as we can; we know that we are surrounded by a regiment of dissenters who insist on putting religion in one box and science in another and never the twain shall meet; we recognise that some of our Christian sisters and brothers are into absolutes and are better at finding heretics than discovering how to share love; we acknowledge the existence of doubt –for ourselves as well as for others; but something happened that was so real that we have entered into it and believe and base our lives on a response to Jesus Christ which is not an historical endorsement but a contemporary experience.

Jesus lived a simple life but has been used as an excuse for the extravagance of some of our famous buildings and too much of the pomp of our apparel and the assumed power of how the Church addresses the world. Not all our inheritance is good, much of it is bad. Today however we remember that coming from God there is a gift of personal encounter with the living values of Jesus and which belong to each of us: creating our tears of compassion, our anger at injustice, our suspicion of cliques, our commitment to open communities, our love for the forgotten poor, our rebuke to the heedless rich, our acceptance of personal shame and our willingness to be forgiven and to start again

All this and  more is not the result of wishful thinking or inherited custom, but the consequence of the stone rolled away and the spirit of Jesus abroad in the world.

‘He lives, he lives, who once was dead

 He lives, my everlasting Head’.

We are not fools chasing antiquarian ideas like archaeologists digging up the signs of a past drawing us back to a lost world, but existentialists whose lives are grounded in a story that once happened but belongs to the present and motivates and sustains our future. So be it.

So it is. Amen.

PALM SUNDAY

Psalm 118:1-2,19-29
Matthew 21:1-11

Jerusalem was quite a small city compared with some in the ancient world but it was massively populated at the time of the festival of Passover. It was the ambition of every Jew to get there at least once in their lifetime. It was packed with happy people remembering the flight from Egypt, Yahweh accompanying them on their travels and the eventual settlement in their new land, great for them, but hard luck for the Canaanites who were already there. The end of captivity once – oh that it could happen again! So it was a time of heightened religious fervour as people filled the streets and the homes and inns of the city. A sort of Mardi Gras festival, but without the music.

St John tells us that Jesus had been to Jerusalem before (indeed John puts the cleansing of the Temple at an earlier time), but this was certainly his last planned visit; the victim believing that he was in a sense dictating the awful things that were soon to happen to him. No surprise that when the death of Jesus was told years later and in the process interpreted, there should be thoughts of the sacrificial lamb. There is something terribly innocent and vulnerable about the way this good man presents himself; something unbearably ironic about the way that he was welcomed by segments of the great crowd, some members of whom would be baying for his blood a few days later.

In that much larger crowd there would have been pilgrims from many parts of the Mediterranean world, brought to Jerusalem by their common ancestry but, especially because now they lived in other places, they came as people influenced by Greek and Roman as well as Jewish culture. If one can very roughly summarise the distinctive elements in those cultures, the Jewish mind was firmly rooted in the mighty acts of God throughout their history. It was a culture of facts, fables about facts, there present with them in the synagogue every Saturday as the scrolls were opened and their adventures with God were remembered. It was a religion of body and spirit and deep defining connection with the Living God, who was their god.

The Roman culture, as at this time the divinity of its ruler in Rome was being explored, was oppressive to its conquered territories, expecting obedience or at least honour to be given to their many gods, though the Romans acknowledged that many peoples had many different religions. They brought with them a physicality and a carnal indulgence that put body before spirit. Interestingly they were quite happy to enrol conquered nations and tribes into the Roman family. Ethnicity was no problem to them, and Rome was particularly – warily perhaps – respectful towards Judea, much the smallest of its vassal states.

But for both cultures, a dominant influence in their awareness of the world around them and the hidden world that may also exist, was the Greek tradition for which material reality is suspect and spiritual reality the real thing. The old Platonic idea that what you see is only a parable or allegory of what is beyond sight, was very powerful in people’s consciousness: what is beyond was the real thing. In the several sects that grew out of the Jesus story after his death, it wasn’t the truth that you see that was important – many people said -but the truth that lay behind it. So much so that some sects decided that Jesus wasn’t a real man at all, but a figment of God’s imagination.

And it’s that sort of wisdom – the kingdom that will never come, a kingdom beyond reach – which Jesus resisted with his gospel of the come and always coming Kingdom. St. Paul compares the hidden wisdom, never to be found in this life, with the apparent ‘folly’ of clowning Christians to which you and I belong. Real wisdom! And it’s the folly of believing in the Palestinian peasant who rode into Jerusalem on a donkey and died on a cross, a terrible death and the public sign of villainy and shame, but at the same time a sign of forgiveness and hope, that we come to meet in this and every Holy Week and whom we meet as we gather before his table to remember him.

Paul was no ignoramus. He was almost certainly a Pharisee by training, a Roman citizen and proud of it and fully aware of Greek culture and language; his letters probably written in the form of Greek familiar to the Jews. This was the common language of the civilised world at that time. He confesses to the Roman church that he is a debtor both to Greeks and to the barbarians, saying several times of course that in the end it doesn’t matter who you are or where you come from, for all can be one in Christ.

So he was aware – as was Jesus - of this Greek idea of sliding away from what you see to what is beyond sight. It could be helpful but if shrouded in irrationality and mysticism, it was dangerous. For Paul, Jesus was a real man who died a real death and although much thought had to be given to what this meant, spiritual reality was not to be divorced from spatial reality. What had actually happened mattered. A real man and real events – not just signs of God but God himself in action. And so this whole topsy-turvey thing – a leader who many would like to protect from his own innocence rather than follow him; a leader who says that the new way to be human is to put away the sword and face aggression with love; the leader for whom strength is found in fragility- is such a strange idea that many generations of his followers have resisted it and found another way, turning to the familiar macho world of authority and power.

By the second century the religious perceptions of Jesus were already being distorted The normal social hierarchy practiced in the Roman tradition and everywhere else became the way the young Church organised itself. In the name of unity, Episcopal power and the separation of the church into clergy and laity quickly became the way the Church organised itself. It reached its final devastating error when the Emperor Constantine’s soldiers scratched a cross on their shields and went into battle crying by ‘Christ we conquer’, and its apotheosis when the Popes claimed total religious and temporal power as vicar of Christ on earth. Unity interpreted as control became the objective, but it also became the excuse for condemning every deviation from the embarrassingly simple ways of Jesus. And we live with the consequences and remnants of all that.

So how do we relate in 2012 to the man on the donkey, on this April Fools Day as he comes into his own? We embrace him and all that he represents on this strangest of days. For here is the authentic moment in which our truth is born. Hosanna indeed - ‘God save us’! -the God who in the triumphal entry of his Son into Jerusalem redefines greatness as gentleness and humility, revealing the true priorities and nature of God.

It is a quiet and difficult belief to share in our noisy, macho world which is as devoted to brutality and violence as at any time in history, where governments wage war in the name of democracy (which can only ever be learned not imposed), their leaders refusing to doubt their own rightness – indeed righteousness ( listen to people of faith when they say ‘I believe; but listen very carefully and critically when politicians say the same), and where factions within a country fight each other for dominance, and the little people between them are smashed into death or poverty.

Some of us may become or continue to be pacifists arguing that the Christian cannot take arms –the earliest Christian tradition. Others may be nuclear unilateralists. Some may join the opposition to the renewing of the Trident, unable to agree with the argument that it is logical to prevent other countries from possessing what this country is upgrading. Some may find the constant diet of violence and sexual innuendo on TV and in the media a form of aggression which they want to resist. Some of us will want to seek a 21st century reform of the Church so that people of all insights and opinions who want to share life with us and enrich our fellowship, will be welcome – Jew, Greek, slave, free, male, female as Paul said , adding for today, black, white, heterosexual and homosexual, rich and poor.

All of us will want to compare our own values and behaviour with this astonishing moment that we celebrate today- an intensely political moment when the powerful are challenged not with might but with meekness. This is the new wisdom, plain not hidden, a present invitation not a some-time promise. Paul again: ‘Jews demand signs and Greeks desire wisdom, but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom. And God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.’

A good man, more close to God than anyone else has ever been, rides calmly into Jerusalem. that maelstrom of memory and hope, at Passover time. The simple cry of an evangelist – ‘come back to Jesus’ - is never more apposite than it is on this day.