speaker-1: Jesus isn't a purity project. He he took on our flesh as dirty as can be. so you know, we've got half the church that thinks it's unmasking. power and control, the other half of the church thinks it's about the purity of the human heart. Jesus is sort of combining the two.

speaker-0: Hello and welcome back to How Then Shall We Preach from St. Martin in the Fields with me, Jolly Gosnald.

speaker-1: Me some well else.

speaker-0: Sam, it's good to be with you. We are separated by the sea yet again. that you're back in

speaker-1: Yeah, that's right. We're making a habit of this. No no theological divide. Not a not a

speaker-0: you're you're back in London though. How how's everything there?

speaker-1: I'm back in London. It's pretty warm as you can tell from my attire. And you are in foreign parts.

speaker-0: I am. I'm in Italy. I'm taking part in an ecumenical week for young Christians from across Europe and across the world.

speaker-1: What are doing now?

speaker-0: I am actually technically too old, but they they allow me back anyway. it's good to be here. and I'm yeah, I'm I'm embracing a bit of peace and calm and quiet, and also being bitten by copious amounts of mosquitoes. But

speaker-1: I'm sorry about that. Thank you.

speaker-0: what can you do? Sam, we're here to discuss the readings for the sixteenth of August, Sunday the sixteenth. And I haven't particularly invested in this week, Sam, because I'm preaching at St. Martin in the Fields on our Sunday morning service on the sixteenth of August. So whatever you tell me, will will directly go to the congregation. Of course,

speaker-1: But you've you're well prepared and you've already got it.

speaker-0: you know, I I've no to be honest, I I've spent Because I found out a while back that I'd be preaching on this and you know, like a good diligent student, I've been thinking for a while about what I might say. but I'm actually quite tempted by all of the readings. And so I've sort of found myself going, I think I I want to talk about this, or actually I want to talk about that. So I'm hoping something from our conversation today might help me make that decision for death. Exactly.

speaker-1: You're over the edge. Yeah. Okay. So we start at the top.

speaker-0: Start at the beginning there. we're in Genesis forty five and we are back with Joseph.

speaker-1: Well, again, we we've had one excerpt from this story. We just get the two, I think. I think we'll move on next week. So you might already have covered this, but I suspect you won't, because I think if you're going to talk about the Joseph story, this is this or Genesis fifty, which I don't think does appear in the lectionary, is is the place to go because the theological issue is very much in The middle of this passage, God sent me before you to preserve for you a remnant on earth and to keep you keep alive for you many survivors. So it was not you who sent me here, but God. So that you know, this is possibly, I mean, I think when Karl Barth in his Church Dogmatics starts his description of Providence. He he starts with this passage or at least or this or the Genesis fifty, I'm not sure, but they're both similar. This question of how Joseph came to Egypt and to what extent God was behind it, and whether this is predestination or predetermination or or providence, you know, these kinds of words. And I think it's a really important theological theme. Because for two reasons really. well, I suppose yeah, two reasons. First of all, it's extremely important in the lives of our congregations. You know, not everybody feels there's a Mr. Wright waiting out there for him, for them. but many people still do. And that sense that I mean to if we take that sort of ring by the spring idea that people have often on American college campus that there's a Mr. Wright for you and if you haven't met him by the summer of your second year and got a ring on your finger by the time well sorry your third year by by the time you leave in your fourth year, then somehow you've missed your moment in life to meet your life partner. I mean it it's you know the phrase ring by the spring is only a a phrase because it's so often repeated. And that sort of sense that actually there is a plan for your life and you could somehow miss the boat to join it is so powerful in people's lives. And not just within the Christian fold. I think that can exist in secular world as well. So that's one reason why it's important. And then the second reason why it's important is do you believe A that the incarnation was always in the plan. or if you believe B that the incarnation was a response to the fool, was the fool always in the plan? So these are huge theological questions. obviously the first set up on a personal level and the second set on a macro theological level, but they're all tucked away inside This story. So, you know, you're clearly not going to resolve them in ten or fifteen minutes, but they they're well worth researching and and and looking into. And you know, to what extent do we think that this was the plan for Israel to be saved by going down into Egypt? if you want a very different perspective on this story. Michael Northcott's book, The Moral Climate, is a very impressive book on ecological ethics. And Michael, if people know his work, is always one for a conspiracy theory and does an extraordinary reading, I think fairly early on in the book, if I remember, of this story as Joseph as a kind of original exploiter of the environment. So it's quite an anti Joseph reading, but it's well worth looking at with Michael Northcott The Moral Climates now of the book. so it's not the whole book, but I think he does a good 10 pages on it, and it's really impressive and memorable. So there's a lot, you know, that would be another way of talking about this story, but it's but you know, providence is the issue that shouts out to you. And you know, obviously, if you have no notion of Providence. Providence, then you're almost in a deist world where God is detached from creation. If you have a overdetermined notion of providence, it takes away human free will and it raises all sorts of questions about why God doesn't fix a lot of stuff. Yeah. So I would have a Christological, Christocentric notion of Providence that the story is always about Jesus and is relevant, interesting. and illuminating to the extent that it anticipates or reflects Jesus. because, you know, if you take this at face value, then what happened in the later part of the story, well, as we'll look at next week, I think, you know, Jacob's descendants became slaves. So was that always part of the package too? You know, it's it once you go down the providence route it can be quite difficult, but you can't avoid it. So anyway, all of those things, more questions than answers there.

speaker-0: Yeah, absolutely. Good. Well that's something to think about. let's press on and we'll have a look at Isaiah fifty-six.

speaker-1: Right, so this is this is one of those passages you really do need to do a bit of homework on. I mean it's clearly there because the gospel refers to the end of in fact Not this gospel, but you know the Palm Sunday Gospel, where Jesus chases the money changers out the temple, quotes Isaiah 56, verse 7, My house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples. And clearly the reason we've got this linked Old Testament reading is because of the question of whether the gospel is for Israel or for the Gentiles or or both. So that's why it's there, but You know, it i it it can sound like another kind of bit of Isaiah, and and you know, the difficult thing is to remember there isn't such a thing as just another piece of Isaiah. They're you know, they're they're all in the Bible for a reason. Yeah. And I think the context of this, as I recall, is that we thought when Cyrus, you know, in Isaiah forty-five, I think it is, becomes king, you know, in other words, the Babylonians are thrown out by the Persians. that the remnant of Judah will be sent back any day. Well this is ten chapters, eleven chapters later, and that hasn't happened. So soon my salvation will come is I know it hasn't turned out as as it was supposed to, but it's happening soon. And maintain justice and do what is right is, you know, be patient, hold the faith. Yeah. it's coming. So so you know, is that that's kind of thing, but you know, so there's a there's a guideline there to how to behave when deliverance hasn't yet come. And then, you know, one of the things that Judah discovers in exile in Babylon is that not all the Babylonians are that bad. And some of them can in some ways find a place in God's covenant. so, you know, the key verse is verse eight. I mean, I I know people will want to talk about verse seven, but in I I think the verse eight is the key one because the same Lord who gathers the outcasts of Israel, in other words, brings the exiles home any day, is g is going to gather others to them. Yeah. Besides those big abots. So the same sort of gathering force, everlasting arms that draw in Israel back from exile will draw in other people. And you know, because we're Gentiles and we're kind of used to that, we don't see the extraordinary wonder of these words. This is an extraordinary thing to say. It isn't to us because we wouldn't be reading this text unless quite this had been taken seriously for two thousand years. But at the time it was written, presumably two and a half thousand years ago, this was a knock me sideways thing to say.

speaker-0: And presumably then if we're to sort of apply it pastorally or think about it for the church today, is there something you know, is this an opportunity for a sort of inclusion sermon or you know, the people that you think might not be outs might be outside of the church.

speaker-1: definitely but I think that sermon is almost certainly gonna be on Matthew fifteen, not on Isaiah fifty six. So this is just a sort of one of those matching Old Testament readings, which is nice to buy it.

speaker-0: Yeah. Okay, good. Very helpful. All right. we're gonna have a look at Romans chapter eleven.

speaker-1: Well, you'll be relieved to know, because we're recording this ahead of August the second, that my August the second sermon will say everything that you want to know or discover about Romans nine to eleven. So I think I should be getting you off the hook if you want.

speaker-0: So I don't need to give my Roman sermon this time round. Okay, good.

speaker-1: I I think probably not, unless you want to say I I think the vicar was wrong on a few points and I just want to spend my time.

speaker-0: We could save some time, I could just get up there and say well what Sam said a couple of weeks ago

speaker-1: What Sam said a couple of weeks ago, that's more or less yeah, as you went. So you know, there I think we talked last time about the shape of of Romans or even the time before, about the shape of Romans nine to eleven. That's to say number one, it's bewildering that the majority of the Jews have not accepted Christ. That is because they're disobedient and proud. But they are still God's people. And this is Paul. I'm not saying this is what I think. This is all coming out of nine Romans nine to eleven. But they God has taken this opportunity to embrace the Gentiles as well. And the faithfulness of the Gentiles will humble the Jews into coming back to the party, rather like the elder brother of the prodigal son. So that's the structure of those chapters. And we're getting towards the end of the argument here, where he's getting into the territory of. The Gentiles' faith will make the Jews envious and will make them join the party. So, but we still get, I mean, you notice that this passage is the first two verses of Romans 11 and the l you know, and four verses near the end. So it's not a continuous passage. They're trying to do the best to summarize Romans eleven and In a few verses, which is obviously a big challenge. but we get absolutely solidly in 11 verse 2 and 11 verse 29, God has not rejected him's people. The gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable. You know, and the reason why this is so important is if we can't trust the permanence of God's promises to the Jews, then we can't. trust the permanence of God's promises to us. And you know, that's a big deal. So that's why it matters so much. But it's still a problem because why why haven't the Jews all accepted Christ? This is a this is a great mystery. Well today we'd say because the people who have accepted Christ have behaved so appallingly towards the Jews. But you couldn't really say that at this time. Anyway, all of those things will be disentangled. and resolved in satisfying and faith-building ways on the second of August. So you don't you worry.

speaker-0: Don't miss out. In fact, by the time this is in your ears, dear viewers, it will have been the 2nd of August.

speaker-1: Those that those inform that information will already be in the public domain. Absolutely.

speaker-0: Absolutely. So we will also put a link to that in the description. I do open one question about th I guess the last well the last verse, verse thirty two, and this question of well, this statement, this idea that God has imprisoned all in disobedience so that he may be merciful to all. It sounds on a h just hearing that line, it sounds to me something like, Well, you know, God just wants wants to be merciful, so he's he's sort of trapped us in this sort of loop of hurting ourselves and one another and p you know, whatever it might be, walking away from him, just so God can be God. And that could present quite a problematic view potentially.

speaker-1: Yeah, I mean it's a bit like a tennis player going four love down in the first set in order to show their magnificence by coming back to win six four. Yeah.

speaker-0: Sure.

speaker-1: It it no, it it is a far it it is a stretch, this argument, shall we say? Th there's what he's trying to do is create some kind of equivalence between Jews and Gentiles. The they're they both have disobedience and they can both receive mercy. You know, it's an extraordinary argument and you're not allowed to say, I don't know what Paul thought he was doing but you are allowed to say, look at the situation he was dealing with where there was clearly tension in Rome between Gentile and Jewish leadership of the church and he's trying to get them both to have the best and greatest respect for one another.

speaker-0: The all is perhaps more important than the the sort of scaffolding around it, perhaps. There's something that you know you've all got this in common here.

speaker-1: Yeah, I guess that's right. Yeah. I mean, you know, words like pride and disobedience, they're quite difficult, really. But there's a lot of them in Romans nine to eleven because Paul is trying to come to terms with why the the Jews of his time didn't all follow Jesus. That you know, that wasn't one of the factors that anyone took into account. Yeah. And and, you know, so I I always say, you know, the two questions about the New Testament led to the writing of the New Testament is, you know, if Jesus is the Son of God, how come they crucified him? And then secondly, in in what sense should Christians live, given that the anticipated parousia eschaton hasn't immediately followed Pentecost. And so, you know, this is this question is directed, you know, at that, really. W w of the first one of those.

speaker-0: Absolutely. Good. Okay, well, we're going to come on to the gospel. And Sam, we actually have a listener question about the gospel. So I'm sure you've got plenty to say on it, but I'm going to ask their question first, if that's all right. they're talking about they're wondering whether it's okay to excuse Jesus' attitude as it showed how human he was, i.e., still processing the Pharisees' hostility and his own disciples' lack of understanding. Or would you just not mention it and or make light of it and focus instead on the remarkable change of attitude towards the woman and maybe go from there to speak of God's ever-widening grace or something? She said, I'm struggling with wanting to apologise for Jesus, which I realise is probably not appropriate.

speaker-1: Yes. Well I I wouldn't go down the apologising for Jesus route, certainly. now I did preach a a sermon on the mark equivalent of this passage a couple of years ago, September twenty twenty four, Mark seven. And so th there you know there are there are differences in in in the Matthew version and The marked version, the most obvious difference being that, you know, here we've got this long section on clean and unclean. and we can come back to that in a moment. But if we just I mean they're really kind of different. So the I mean you can make a link if you want to. but I'm I'm not sure that's really time well spent. and it's the kind of occasion where if I was simply going to preach on the second story, I'd leave the first story out of the reading. I I do do that occasionally just to to focus the mind really and not to have a long, you know, long gospel reading where you're only going to talk about half of it. so so there are what I talked about in this sermon and it and it and it was a sermon inspired by Richard Hayes' book, The Wideness of God's Mercy. Now Richard Hayes was the leading scholar of New Testament ethics. and one of the leading New Testament scholars of his time. He was a close colleague and friend of mine at Duke Divinity School. He died a couple of years ago, just after I preached this sermon. And that that may sound like a rather self-centered thing to say, but the reason for mentioning it is that he published, he wrote a book called The Moral Vision of the New Testament in about 1993 or thereabouts. And it it took a conservative line on sexuality. And it it was the most influential book on New Testament ethics of its generation. And so that was n quite a big deal. And even when he became dean of Duke Divinity School, and and at that point the United Methodist Church had a conservative line on sexuality, you know, he more or less held that line, even though in personal conversation I was aware that he'd shifted his position personally. Well, his son remains an Old Testament professor at I think Emory, but I might be I might have got that mixed up. that's to say in in in Atlanta. and basically his son persuaded him so Richard was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in twenty fourteen, and as you probably know, that's usually a life expectancy of a year. So he wasn't expecting to live longer than a year after 2014. And amazingly, and through the ministrations of one or two friends of mine, he found a treatment that kept him alive for another 10 years. But in the last two years of his life, he and his son wrote a book called The Whiteness of God's Mercy, which is really about saying There's a minority report and a majority report in the Old Testament or in the Bible, and you know, the majority report is this is just for Israel. you've got to remain clean and you know, in the end there's no place for you lot if you're either not a Jew or you don't keep certain purity laws, for example, and other and so what I talked about in the sermon is that that sense of a majority report and a minority report runs through the Bible, but what happens in the New Testament is that after the minority report surfaces in some places of the Old Testament, and we've just seen one in Isaiah, where there seems to be a place for the nations in God's plan. But in the New Testament, the minority report, that it's for everybody, not just the Jews and the the sort of the clean, takes over. Now, what I talked about in the sermon a couple of years ago is that this is, if you like, the definitive story, or at least Mark's version is the definitive story of where the minority report takes over, because Jesus' reply to the woman is a majority report reply. Don't you realize this isn't any of your business? Get lost. and the woman persuades him that of of the minority report, and he comes along, you know, it's it's pr pretty much the only case in the New Testament when Jesus changes his mind. So it's a big deal. so So what I argued in the sermon, and obviously there's huge implications of this for sexuality, that the the tragedy is that the that the church has ignored this passage and back to its own version of the Old Testament minority report. But actu majority report, and but actually the New Testament is really about the minority report. No one lies outside the wideness of God's mercy. so I sent it to Richard just a couple of months before he died and we had a correspondence about it and he's he was kind enough to say if I'd sent him the sermon six months before, he'd have included it in the book because it more or less articulated in a couple of thousand words what the whole book was saying. Well, that's hardly surprising because I'd only read the book about a month before I wrote the sermon. I don't claim complete credit for that, but I just wanted to tell that story to give a sort of personal element to it. And and of course his change of heart and mind on this issue has been hugely significant in debates around this. Not least because he was to his dying day, just under two years ago, a close friend of Tom Wright. who and same sort of generation. and Tom Wright, of course, notoriously still maintains a conservative position on sexuality. So You know, I did I did wonder who Richard had written the book for, but I did wonder, you know, how that close personal relationship might have played into what his audience might be. And and of course the reception of the book was divided between finally, you know, good good for Richard who's had the humility to put his hand up where he got it wrong and written an outstanding account of, you know, c inclusive exegesis, and the people that you know, on the conservative side, some of whom said, you know, Richard was so great and wonderful until bizarrely, just before he died, he wrote this really weird book, which we can can therefore discount. so you can imagine that's how you know people people think it's fantastic scholarship if it actually gives scholarly reasons to maintain the position they already think. Yeah.

speaker-0: What? Yeah.

speaker-1: Anyway, so that's that's so the other thing to say about and this'll be more familiar to you is is that yeah, I I have talked about this dialogue with Canaanite woman, Sara Phoenician as she called in the Mark account, as a classic case of over accepting. Because you know, in the improvisation book that I published twenty two years ago and was re reissued as a second edition in twenty eighteen. I talk about different motifs in improvisation in the theatre, one of which is over accepting, and this even the dog's line is a classic case of over accepting. There's not really time to go into all the details of that now, but but if you are interested in improvisation, that's where to find more on it. And this is an absolute classic passage. And the surprising thing is again, it's not Jesus that does it, it's it's the Canaanite woman that does it. so but we shouldn't leave without because you've you said you're still all these passages are under review so we need to we need to give them all a fair hearing. and we haven't talked about the first half of the gospel passage. Sure. w you know which is obviously about purity and you know we are Still obsessed with purity in our culture. And I think this is worth pointing out. I talked about this in a sermon at St. Martin's during the pandemic. I think it was August 2020, when this passage came up six years ago. And I talked about three the ways in which we're obsessed with purity. first of all, food, you know, vegan. Isn't that a purity statement? secondly, sex. You know, just look at the white dr people still wear white dresses at weddings. If that's not a purity thing, I've never seen one. and reputation, you know, probably the biggest one of all right now. paying somebody to clean up your Google citations because of that dodgy thing that you don't want still to turn up. you know, and may well be completely misleading. And so it's I don't criticize people for cleaning up their Google stuff. I'd criticise people for going straight to Google and assuming what Google tells you or AI tells you about somebody is the truth about them. Sure. So I think the sort of cleanup stuff is similar. But but I also I think it's important to realize that this conversation in Jesus' time was, you know, the real purity issues was that. The Romans were ruling over the Holy Land and the Pharisees and the Sadducees and the Zealots all had different purity ideas of how to respond to it. The pure the Pharisees favored personal renewal. Sadducees were considered unclean because they went for political collaboration. The Zealots, more clean political rebellion Essenes, notoriously withdrew to the Dead Sea. I actually just saw the Dead Sea Scrolls last week, so I'm full of Dead Sea and Essenes and stuff. And of course, what you find out when you look into the Dead Sea Scrolls is they're not sure the Essenes wrote it. they're not sure they're about the Essenes. Are the Essenes a different sect from the way it is? Qumran? There's you know, it's all historically to be disputed. Anyway, there's some very interesting little bits of parchment on which the Dead Sea Scrolls, which are much smaller than I expected. So and of course the pandemic was a massive purity project. So you know, that was all about remaining clean. Yeah. but in in the end, Jesus isn't a purity project. He he took on our flesh as dirty as can be. so you know, we've got half the church that thinks it's unmasking. power and control, the other half of the church thinks it's about the purity of the human heart. Jesus is sort of combining the two. So so there you go. Have you made your decision? Was that was that

speaker-0: Well, it's definitely complicated it, but I will whilst on my mom on my retreat, I think I will take some time to sit with what I've just heard, probably play it back a couple of times, and try to start writing this sermon.

speaker-1: Hopefully that gives you enough to play with. Definitely.

speaker-0: Thank you so much, Sam. Thank you everyone for joining us. you can find us as always on YouTube, on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. And do send in your questions to us. It's great to have listener questions and it's great to engage with them together. I think that's all we've got time for though. So we will see you next week.

speaker-1: Indeed.