Out In The Cold
Neh 8:9-18 John 16:1-11
I’m going back to the days of black and white television and the distant memories of childhood.
On Friday evenings I was allowed to stay up a little later than usual and one of my chief joys was being allowed to watch “The Flintstones” through to the very end.
When the credits began to roll it was always the same. To the well loved tune that I wouldn’t dare to sing at Choral Evensong – you’d have Wilma come to the front door and put out the milk bottles and go back in again. Next Fred would appear with a giant cat in his arms which he’d slam down on the step and then disappear back inside the house. Then the cat would jump back through the window – pick up poor old Fred and slam him down outside and the cat would go back in and slam the door.
And Fred would be left out in the cold banging and hollering “Wilmaaa!” and she’d never hear, she ‘d never let him in and the lights of all the homes in the village would then come on as Fred’s shouting grew all the more desperate.
As I snuggled down in my bed some minutes later – I often thought about poor old Fred and wondered what it was like to be still out there hollering.
Our Old Testament reading this evening describes the origin of the Festival of Booths whereby the Israelites would remember that they were once a wandering people without a home led by Moses for forty years in the wilderness before they came to the promised land and that there would always be a sense that they were outdoor people, pilgrims, journeymen - that they must always remember their heritage – the circumstances under which God found them and made them his own.
I once visited the Holy Land during this festival and it was curious to see in the more affluent parts of Jerusalem how families would leave behind the comforts of their lovely homes to take up residence in their gardens or even by the roadside as they followed the command to live in booths.
There is a hunch that one of the reasons behind the writing of St John’s Gospel was that it was for those who had been excommunicated from the synagogue as a result of their following of Jesus. To have been summarily cut adrift from all that you had previously valued and understood to be right must have been devastating to good Jewish people who found they simply could not get Jesus out of their hearts.
It strikes me that a theme running through the whole of scripture is the ultimate homelessness of God’s people.
That our place is in the end – out in the cold.
The chosen ones of the Old Testament – in the wilderness for forty years and then in exile.
The chosen ones of the New Testament – expelled and excluded from their spiritual home and setting off into mission scarcely knowing where they were going.
Yet in the wilderness they discovered the law.
Outside the synagogue they discovered the Spirit.
God’s people come into their own when they are forced out into the cold.
I have never understood what it is about camping that could be at all attractive.
To rough it in a tent in the corner of some windy field – with primitive cooking facilities and dubious sanitation, with unknown neighbours with strange habits – why would anyone do that out of choice?
We’ve come across many a camp site when we’ve been walking and they always seem such gloomy and bedraggled sorts of places.
Unless maybe that camping is getting back to the truth about ourselves.
That even when our spiritual heritage is buried away beneath the comforts of twenty first century living - there is something there about having no abiding homeland – that drives people out of doors and into the cold.
And they discover something true about themselves.
This morning I spoke about the characteristics of presence, partnership and prophecy as themes to guide our Christian living and that the danger of taking the prophetic call seriously is that we end up out in the cold.
We had wanted better news than this.
We yearn for inclusion and acceptance within the life of church – and there is a sense in which that is precisely what we must offer – just as our Lord did – but the breadth of his love was what got him into so much trouble and led eventually to his exclusion.
As they went round in circles in the wilderness, the people began to rumble on about the advantages of the flesh pots back in Egypt.
Those whose hearts burned with joy at the message of Jesus would still have preferred to have taken their seats in the synagogues rather than be ousted.
Out in the cold – in desert places and the streets surrounding the places of worship, in the booths set up in the streets of the city, and on the fringes of church life – here is where God is to be found.
For us found in Christ, led out of the city to the place of the skull.
The ultimate in rejection is the place where we have come to find the ultimate in loving.
So the church is losing credibility is it?
So the church is being pushed to the margins of life, losing its voice at the centre of things, seen as an amusing parody of a bygone way of looking at things.
It’s leaders are arguing among themselves are they whilst books about the non existence of God have a section in the bookshop all of their own.
We’re being pushed out into the cold.
Whilst some of this is as a result of our ineffective dallying and dallying – it is also worth looking at the company we keep. Increasingly at one with the dispossessed. A church forced to live in booths and beyond the holy spaces where we’d preferred to have huddled. Nearer than ever to the place where they staked his cross.
Perhaps this is just the situation from which the work of the Gospel inspired by the Spirit really does begin to take its true shape.
RH 21.10.07
Our prayers:
God of wilderness places and of the streets beyond the synagogue.
God of the people who live in booths and have no abiding homeland.
Meet with us we pray in our desire to serve you in these days.
Show us the places to which we should go.
The people you would have us meet.
Give us a greater awareness of the love which drove you to Calvary
That this may be at the heart of our worship and the root of our mission
Lord in your mercy…………..
We pray for those whose sense of dispossession and homelessness is a physical reality in these days.
Those who have no alternative to the cold.
We pray for all those who help the homeless and the unloved especially as winter approaches.
Ewe pray for the work of the YMCA and the Salvation Army.
For Crisis and shelter.
For all caring organisations meeting people at their deepest point of need.
Lord in your mercy…….
We pray for those we know whose lives are so different from us.
Those in far away places living under oppressive regimes or without food and water,
Those who live in fear of their lives.
The people of Burma, Afghanistan, Zimbabwe, Sudan, Iraq and the various factions which make up the Holy Land today
Lord in your mercy………………
We bring to God any sense we have of our personal aloneness – the situations in which we feel cut adrift, helpless or without root. The parts of our lives that are the most difficult to inhabit because maybe they are the closest to Christ.
So we share in silent prayer
And we remember others whose heartache is especially keen and those enduring physical hurt which sets them at a distance.
Lord in your mercy……………………