The Parish of Marston Moor

The Archbishop of York Stephen Cottrell is to preside at a Confirmation service on Sunday 8th September in St James’s Church Bilbrough at 10am. Car lifts available for non drivers - please join us all are welcome 😊

Trinity 8, 2024, Jeremiah, Eph 2, Mark 6.30-34 53-end.

Keir Starmer, after being announced as Prime Minister, said about wanting to continue his weekly five a side football with his friends and also ensuring that he is with his family on a Friday evening so the family can share the Shabbat meal together, as is custom with the Jewish faith. I hope that he is still able to do both of these but I do wonder how easily he is going to fit these activities into his schedule, which I’m sure will only get busier and busier. He may be in charge but that doesn’t mean he will get to write his own diary.
In today’s reading from Mark’s Gospel we get a strong sense of the enormous pressure Jesus and his disciples are now feeling as they get into full stride with going out and preaching and teaching. Jesus’ diary is filling up, if not full to bursting, he is at the height of his popularity and has started causing waves amongst the religious authorities, which just adds to the pressures of his life. He is trying to persuade and teach others to go and tell the surrounding population about his teaching, and God; he is then having to pick up the pieces when they come back tired and either elated or deflated, he is the one man leader of a business that is growing day by day, and like the rest of us would, Jesus is beginning to feel the pressures.
Jesus knows that the people come to him as a preacher and teacher and they want to be taught and healed there and then, and he probably knows that if this isn’t what happens then they will go away disenchanted and share the news that Jesus isn’t all he has been built up to be. He realises that the people are living in the now and not looking into the future, they, like sheep, live a day to day existence, waiting to be told what to do in their lives, waiting for others to make the difficult decisions. Most of them will be labourers and are forced to go and wait for somebody to want them to work for them for the day. They are, and always have been, reliant on others, told what to do and when to do it.
They are very much like sheep, reliant on a shepherd to keep them fed, watered and safe. Sheep don’t worry about what is going to happen after they have eaten all of the grass, or when winter comes, they just follow the command of their shepherd. When Jesus looks around him that is what he sees, sheep with no shepherd, people with no structure or reason to their lives, with no hope for the future. Jesus doesn’t want to become the shepherd to them, he wants them to become independent, he wants them all to become shepherds, which is why he began to teach them many things, and not make decisions for them like a shepherd would, Jesus teaches them things so that they can be independent human beings and not sheep anymore.
Jesus is doing all of this in the knowledge that the disciples want his time. Want to share their joys in all that they have been able to do in his name, want to be encouraged, perhaps, because they hadn’t been as successful as they wanted to be. They were tired and hungry and just wanted to sit and eat with each other and Jesus and share their news; but Jesus prioritised the needs of others, he put their needs above the needs of the disciples. He too would have been hungry, tired, stressed and in need of rest and a time of recuperation, he felt the needs that we all feel in our life, and we can take some comfort when we can’t ever seem to get on top of things, Jesus suffered in this way too.
In Ephesians we also hear that it is in the fleshiness of Jesus we are to find help and salvation, it is not just though his death on the cross. The work we hear about Jesus doing in the passage from Mark can help us build an understanding of the belonging and wholeness that he wants to portray. Through our belonging and understanding of Jesus’s message we should be able to find comfort and a feeling that all will be well.
Because Jesus came in the flesh we can more easily feel a part of God’s family, and through this, more easily build up together the place where God lives and is present on earth. His earthly life showed that whoever we are, wherever we live, whatever preconceptions or differences we have, Jesus is in us and is to work through us, and we are to find the strength through this knowledge to stand on our own two feet and do his work.
Jesus shared his life with those followers so that he could empower them and make them feel wanted and important and to break down walls of hostility between them, he wants to do the same with us. The only way in which our bodies can be built up into the temple of God is if we stand together, forget our differences and go out as shepherds into the communities we serve.
Like the first disciples, we are sent to continue Jesus’ mission in the world. A mission that involves theory and practice, faith and works, evangelism and pastoral care. All of these elements of Christianity are not to be separated if we are to remain faithful to the example Jesus himself set us. The word pastoral comes from the word for a shepherd, and it is often seen as the practical side of our faith, and sadly by some,y as the lesser side of the faith when you compare it to evangelism. If we can always remember that our good shepherd himself combined teaching and doing, then hopefully, we will never think one is greater than the other.
We carry our faith into the world in ways that are best suited to our own gifts and situations. As we look around our congregations we can witness the different skills and gifts people have. Whatever form it takes, practical support of others, when carried out in the name of Jesus Christ, is effective evangelism. Just turning up on a Sunday, unaccompanied by doing and being, is no better than an armchair expert. Our faith is about others and not about us, and Jesus’ practical ministry is what we are to follow in our daily life, if his life is to be kept alive.

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Looking forward to this - all are welcome 😊

Presentation of Jesus/Candlemas 2024 Askham Richard
Waiting, waiting is something I keep writing about and something that most folk aren’t good at. We are coming to the end of the season of Epiphany which is a reminder that some people are good at waiting, especially if what they are waiting for they feel will change their lives dramatically and change the world. The Magi had been waiting for perhaps all of their adult lives for the star to appear and for the opportunity to go and visit the Messiah. We hear in the Gospel reading how Simeon and Anna had again both waited their adult life to see the Messiah. We might not be very good at it but waiting is very important in our general life and these examples indicate how important waiting is in our spiritual life.
However, we can wait all we like in the church today, waiting to experience the love and presence of God, but that waiting can sadly all be in vain if you are deemed by the wider church to not be able to be a, in their eyes, a true Christian, or be welcomed to live out the ministry you feel you are called to. Women had to fight, nearly as hard and long as the Suffragettes, to allow them to become Priests and Deacons, and yes some men fought alongside them. The same is now happening with the recognition of s*xuality. Those opposing true inclusion, true equality, always come to the point of ‘well the bible says this, scripture says that’.
The words of the bible led, and still lead, countries to war, and conversely the words of the bible led countries and people to peace and harmony. I trained with an American university lecturer whose knowledge of theology was far greater than any of the rest of us, during a conversation he once said to me the bible is not the full life, the full experience and hopes of Jesus and God, that couldn’t ever be recorded, so just because it doesn’t say it within scripture it doesn’t mean it didn’t occur or isn’t relevant.
The Bible was written by Men, sadly on the whole for men, however, women and others deemed as outcasts played a vital role in the life of Christ, and Jesus tried his hardest to make people become less judgmental about those they met, those that might want to become part of the faith and those who might want to minister to us. God forbid the Bishops ever feel called to ordain Karen and enable her to preside at a Eucharist here in Saint Mary’s. What would the world be coming to.
The bit about the story of the presentation of Christ which most people gloss over and perhaps don’t even hear or register, is the very first line of this reading from Luke. Mary was unable to go the Temple for 40 days because during her birth there would have been a loss of blood as well and she was therefore deemed unclean.
She had to wait those 40 days to go through the process of purification, to be deemed clean enough in the eyes of the male Temple leaders to worship and be allowed back into her place of worship. Women of a certain age wouldn’t have been allowed in the Temple during their years of having their menstrual cycle. I doubt if even the most stringent evangelical churches in the world stick to this rule anymore.
None of you fine ladies have headwear on, how dare you come to worship God without covering your head.
Sadly people, and yes it has mainly over the centuries been men, have treated the bible like the pick and mix at Woolies, which I read this week might be making a comeback.
They pick the bits that make them feel all powerful and turn a blind eye to other bits of scripture which perhaps also help them out, after all if the ladies weren’t able to come who would make the refreshments!
The PCC of Marston Moor has agreed that we will welcome any and all of the changes that are being made to be totally inclusive, whether this is in marrying same s*x couples, allowing the national church to welcome people of any s*xuality to be ordained, and although we haven’t voted on it yet I am sure we will of course welcome Karen to preside here if and when she is deemed fit to be ordained Priest.
We have also just read from the book of Malachi, which is the last book in the Old Testament. The author of Malachi is unknown, could that be perhaps because it was written by a woman, the word Malachi just meaning My Messenger. However, whoever wrote it obviously had a problem with how the priests in the Temples were carrying out their duties.
And as he grew up Jesus also had his issues with how the priests were carrying out their duties, and God forbid what he would say if he came back now and saw how the church was being run, and the inequalities that were still, after 2,000 years, occurring. Jesus criticised the priests for their over emphasis on strict rituals passed down throughout the ages. Lo and behold anybody who was still doing this today. Malachi’s protest was against those who swear falsely, those who oppress the weak, those who didn’t pay their workers what was due, against the way widows and orphans were treated, and so on. Jesus mirrored these concerns in the words he spoke and the life he led.
Jesus came to form communities, and communities where all were welcomed and had the same opportunities. If he were here today he would be stripping away the hierarchical structure we have within the church, he would continue his fight against the prejudices that occur within certain spectrums of society and faith, and of course he would definitely allow Karen to be ordained Priest.
Remember this passage about the presentation of Christ, yes remember the patience, the waiting, the faith of Simeon and Anna, but remember more greatly the pick and mix of all of our own minds when it comes to scripture, and if you are able to, to pray for the total inclusion of all people into a fair and equal Christian faith, something which sadly still seems a long way off.

Second Sunday of Advent yr B Bilbrough
So who are you. How would you describe yourself? What would you put as your epitaph on your own headstone? When I arrived here, all those years ago, somebody connected to the churches wanted to get to know me and for me to get to know them, so before they came for a chat they did a wonderful spider diagram of all the great things they were doing in and outside the church setting. When we sat down to talk we went through the multitude of things that were doing, but at the end I said, this is all wonderful, but who are you. The list was just what the person was doing, it was not who they were.
It reminded me a little bit of a lady who desperately wanted to become ordained but kept being told to come back in a year or so. She was trying to tick the boxes she thought needed ticking, but those connected with the ordination training were seeing past this doing and questioning her and asking her to question herself who she really was. In the end she must have grasped the hint and eventually she was accepted and is now a priest. So who actually are you?
Many will have wondered who this wild man, clothed in camels hair, eating locusts and honey, truly was. Apart from being a total believer of God and willing to literally sacrifice his life for God, I have never quite been able to decide whether John the Baptist was mad, scared or just very confident in himself and his message. He might have also been on some psychological spectrum, when we see people these days on the street corner in town we perhaps think the same thing. He might have been a zealot, a fanatic, proclaiming his point of view with such fervour that he wouldn’t mind being put to death for it because it would be worth it.
But I think that when he first drew breath to proclaim that the Messiah had come in the person of Jesus, John must have been half scared to death. There aren’t many any more willing to stand on a street corner in a busy city center and proclaim their faith, never mind in the middle of a desert with bandits and wild animals about. Sadly there aren’t many who are willing to share their faith over a coffee or a glass of wine. So what are we nowadays scared of?
John also wasn’t some nutcase tangled up in a weird religious sect and willing to say anything for someone who was controlling his mind. No, he was a second cousin of Jesus of Nazareth, and the son of a priest, and his own odd birth had directed him to this task, and to this moment. But he was facing his destiny without any proof or reassurances.
That is the amazing thing for me about John, he proclaims a gospel that hadn’t happened yet. He announced the Saviour before Jesus had even appeared in public or been baptised or started to heal and teach. John the Baptist was working blind, he was going ahead of the main story, he couldn’t yet see what he was describing.
He was enacting the prophecy we heard from in Isaiah’s writings centuries earlier, a form of words that had lain there all that time, read by the people and wondered about for generations. And what were these words about. Were they describing the work of Isaiah himself, so that perhaps they had been fulfilled a long time before? Or were they a sign of something still to happen to the people of Israel? And where would this voice be heard? And in fact whose voice would it be?
It was a mysterious risk John took, because he foretold something that God was going to do, and do soon. People take risks in the things they say sometimes. Businessmen and women take the risk of making some great big promise to their customers, and the responsibility is then on them to deliver on the promise, no matter what it takes and costs. John, though, was not the one to do the delivering, he was making a promise on behalf of the God of Israel, a promise that somebody else was going to have to deliver, and that should have sounded like madness or blasphemy to his hearers. Tipsters predict the outcome of horse races, and everyone knows they cannot be sued if the horse falls at the first fence. But John’s life was at stake and his promises were definite.
Just like Mary and Joseph, Anna and Simeon, Elizabeth and Zechariah, John did not have the New Testament as his script, did not have the life, death and resurrection of Jesus for his saving hope. These things had not yet happened. He just had a message and a desperate hope that the message would come true.
Now contrast that mystery and puzzlement and unsightedness with the witness-bearing that is asked of us. We do not go ahead of Jesus, we follow him. We do not introduce a story yet to be lived out, we tell a story that is ancient and tested on billions of ears. We do not wonder how people will respond to Jesus when he makes himself known to them, but we have a world full of stories of Christian strength and mercy and charity and love.
We are not faced with the terrifying task that characterised the ministry of John. The only risk we have is the loss of Christianity if we do not find the courage to share and proclaim our faith.
We have the New Testament complete before us, the fault is only ours if we do not read it for our comfort. We have the witness of the church tracing a path from Jesus’ day to our own, stretching out past all the ancestors we ever knew about or imagined. And the loss is ours if we do nothing to preserve their tradition. We have resources of scripture and the community of faith that John the Baptist might have yearned for, so the least we can do is have a little of his courage and something of his prophetic vision.
We who are called to bear witness to Jesus Christ in our day and place are called to be as convincing as John must have been, called to point in a direction in which many have gazed before now, called to obey a master who has billions of servants and not only us here. We are called to trust in words that have been spoken in almost every language of the world, words which have awakened new life in every sort and condition of people.
Our work for God is to be brave, but actually not really that brave. We are called to take risks, but the real risks were taken for us long ago. We are not John the Baptist, we will not live on for centuries in literature or memory, but let us rejoice in being who we are, then sharing that with others, knowing God is willing to share Himself with us and that he will rejoice in us because of our faith and our life. If Jesus Christ is truly a part of who you are, then you are being called to live out his life and not just do his works, so on your epitaph somebody can honestly write that you were Christ on earth.

20th Sunday after Trinity, Askham Richard Isaiah 45, 1 Thess 1, Matt 22
The Gospel reading today tells of an unlikely alliance between the Pharisees, who were sympathetic to those opposing the presence of the Romans in Israel, and the Herodians who were loyal to the Romans and their occupation. These two groups had come together to expose Jesus, both sides were very wary of who and what he was becoming so they joined forces to try and get rid of him. Sounds a bit like a question which would be asked to the panel on Question Time. Who doesn’t occasionally watch it just to see politicians and others squirm and sweat, not knowing how to answer the question without isolating themselves or their party.
They put to Jesus what they thought was a lose lose question for him. They asked him the question about paying taxes to Rome, anticipating that he would either estrange his followers by affirming Rome’s rule or estrange Rome’s supporters by advocating a non-payment of the taxes. Matthew presents Jesus’ answer as a divinely clever one that avoids the trap. Jesus’s reply is a profound comment on the relationship between the physical and the spiritual, between the sacred and the secular. More along the lines of it is who we are that is important and not what we possess.
But it is an answer which has frustrated theologians ever since, not least those who wish for a crystal clear teaching on the relationship between Christianity and politics. The question asked by many since is does Jesus, through his answer, acknowledge the emperor’s authority or not. Is the suggestion that Caesar and God can both rule, but in different realms?
It seems that Jesus’ answer is acknowledging political authority, but also setting limits to this authority. The emperor can have his denarius but the people belong to God.
The temptation to compartmentalise our lives into physical and spiritual is strong. Work and home life becomes our physical being whilst a Sunday morning or a visit to somebody who is sick or lonely is our spiritual moment. The pharisees didn’t understand that we can be both at the same time. When moral or ethical dilemmas interrupt our hum drum life, which we perhaps feel is our physical life, Jesus reminds us that we are to answer these dilemmas through our spiritual being, through our saying ‘what would Jesus do or say’, and not to turn a blind eye or opt for a quiet life. While we are engaged in secular activities, spiritual values, those of love and justice still apply, however hard it is to get these attributed to the fore of the situation.
In the second reading we hear how Paul is again saying to his listeners that there is only one God, one creator, and that man-made gods and idols are lies and delusions. Paul is telling the Thessalonians that the true God had been made known personally in the body and life of Jesus of Nazareth, the Messiah, and that it is Jesus’ life they should be taking as an example of how to live out their own lives.
The Thessalonians were, though, finally becoming God imitators, or at least Paul imitators. Until Paul had arrived it seems that nobody had thought of living out the Christian life. They perhaps wouldn’t have believed that it was possible to do so. Paul, and his immediate followers, modelled the Christ like life God wanted all his people to follow, and now to his delight the Thessalonians were themselves living out that life, and more importantly than this, they were going out into the world and encouraging others to do the same. This change in way of thinking and living, however, had consequences for the new Christians when it came down to their relationship with Caesar and the Roman rule. They were seeing Caesar for the dictator that he was, Caesar wanted not only the people of Israel to follow him politically, but he also wanted them to follow him spiritually and theologically, and because of this a revolt started to take place.
It seems that it did not occur to the Pharisees that Jesus’ answer is the correct one, and that actually life would be so much better if they could only accept his presence. People can easily read this passage as being about what a Christian response should be to a secularised authority, but it is perhaps more to do with the Pharisees refusal to take the guidance from Jesus about our duty to God. Jesus brings them face to face with God and God’s demands on their lives. Give to God what is God’s. The problem is what isn’t God’s? Jesus is reminding the Pharisees that they are moving away from their faith and more to the secular god of Rome and power
So why do the Pharisees hate Jesus so much, what is it about Jesus that challenged them? It is perhaps not enough just to say that they thought he was a mad imposter, there would have been many mad imposters in Jerusalem at this time but they did not require large conspiracies on the part of the Pharisees to remove them. No, the trouble with Jesus was the fact that they could not be sure that he was a mad imposter. They may have actually seen him as the Son of God and became scared, scared that they would lose their own authority, but perhaps more scared that they didn’t want God quite so close to their own lives because they knew that their lives weren’t the lives God wanted for them, or expected of them, and they were afraid of being punished. I watched the rugby quarter finals last weekend and you feel that the opposing team always tries to hit the playmaker of the opposing team the hardest, to try and legally get him out of the game so he can’t weave his magic and help his team win. The pharisees obviously saw Jesus in a similar vein and needed to get him out of the match, away from where he could do any damage to the comfortable lives of the Chief priests and pharisees.
And it would have been right to fear. It would have been much easier if God were like Caesar, so that we knew for sure what taxes we had to pay, but if God is actually like Jesus then we might need, painfully and humiliatingly, to recognise him over and over again, and give him everything, give him our whole self and not just what we feel is his share. So, like the Pharisees, are you scared and unwilling to get too close to God fearing what that might mean to your freedom and life, or are you like Paul, willing to give his whole life to the proclamation of Jesus Christ and His Father? Are you able to answer the call to give to God that which is God’s.

The twenty third Psalm is a very personal testimony by it’s author King David, and it is about his own personal experience with God along with his previous life as a shepherd. The psalm speaks of green pastures and still waters as well as dark valleys and enemies and adversities. King David really believes these all exist with God and what he writes is not poetic exaggeration or theoretical theology. He has experienced God in these ways, heard His voice, followed His lead, felt His care. Nowadays we forget how tough and often dangerous the work of the shepherd was in biblical time, in fact it probably is still deemed to be the toughest of the different aspects of farming. My brother-in-law farms 900 ewes and he says that the sheep only have two things on their minds during their life and that is to escape or to try and kill themselves. Keeping them safe and healthy is still a very tricky business even in the relative comfort of middle England.
The young shepherd David said to King Saul, ‘whenever a bear or a lion comes and carries off a sheep I go after it and attack it and batter it to death’. The rescue of a lamb fallen over a precipice was risky work. There were always dark valleys where marauders hid, waiting for the chance to steel the flock. Not a profession that many would want to take on.
We will all experience the emotions and thoughts King David writes about in the psalm, although like many others we do not totally understand or communicate them. I doubt that there’s a better known passage of scripture and I suppose its words have offered more comfort, calmed more fears, and encouraged more hearts than any other poem ever written.
King David wrote this Psalm to convince us that God has our best interest in mind, even though perhaps we don’t feel that He does; God wants to give us a hope-filled and fulfilling life, and a life that even extends beyond the grave. The psalm goes on to say that “He makes me lie down in green pastures.”
In other words, God provides a beautiful place of rest for us at our death; what more could a sheep want than a beautiful green pasture, and what more can we humans want than to know that Jesus is to provide the same for us. In Saint Johns’ Gospel we hear how there are many rooms or mansions for us to go to when we die, and just as sheep trust that the shepherd will make the place where they rest safe, we too place our trust in our shepherd to direct us to a safe and better resting place after our death. We are very happy to lay our lives into God’s hands when we are fit and well, and for God to lead us and encourage us, but sadly when we come nearer to death we are not quite so sure of our relationship with God.
The line “He leads me beside quiet waters” is a reminder that God goes ahead of us and leads us and is inviting us to follow. Shepherds in biblical time and still in Israel and other similar countries, walk in front of the flock, they lead whilst the sheep follow. There is no pushing around with dogs or quad bikes. The sheep trusted the shepherd and followed them wherever he led them.
On the night before his death, Jesus also reassured his friends, “Don’t be worried or afraid – I am going to prepare a place for you, so that you may be where I am.” God does not push us along in our life, or even dictate what we do, but gently and slowly he walks ahead of us through life so that we might follow him.
Some of the psalm, though, does feel quite sinister, we perhaps don’t want to be reminded that we will all walk through the valley of the shadow of death.
However, even though we do, we need to remember that we are to fear no evil, for You are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me. Having a faith does not mean we will lead a totally happy, long and pain free life, it just means that God is always present to protect you, to walk beside you through that temporary darkness and bring you out into the light once more, even when that light is in his heavenly kingdom. As I have said many times, without the freedom of allowing us to be an individual we would all turn out to be robots, only doing what we were programmed to do. Our humanity and freedom does lead to pain and hurt, but this psalm reminds us that through our faith, goodness and mercy will follow us all the days of our life, and we will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.
Jesus, as the good shepherd was prepared to lay down his live in defence of the sheep and he also promises that he will go before us, and if we have the faith to follow him, he will nourish us, guide and protect our lives and ultimately lead us at our death to His Father’s house where the next stage of our life is to take place. If we can be the opposite of the sheep my brother-in-law farms and try and keep ourselves within the safety of the flock, we are reassured in the words found in John’s gospel that Jesus, the ultimate shepherd, is determined to see his flock has life and has it in all its fullness. We are called to do the same with those around us, around us here in church but more importantly those around us in the villages and places of work. shepherding can be a difficult and costly business but Jesus loved his flock to the uttermost, so we are called to do the same.