Sermon: A Sermon for Lent 2

Preacher:

Chris Hollingshurst

Date:

Sunday 16th March 2025

Venue:

Guildford Cathedral

Service:

6pm Choral Evensong

Before ordination, I worked as a logistics and distribution planning manager for a major parcels company. It was fascinating. Whether I was dealing with road-borne parcel traffic, or express air parcels, the issues were the same: how to get the parcels to their destinations for the lowest cost that would result in a high-quality reliable service.

The core task of the distribution industry involves trying to anticipate what might go wrong and plan to stop it happening; failing that, to have ready on the shelf a back-up recovery plan to recover – or at least minimise the delays to – the delayed parcels.

This all entails a blend of ambition and pragmatism. Taking risks with the marketing strategy might get new business but if the operational processes including the sorting offices don’t process the items reliably then things will quickly fall apart. 

Quality of service and revenue will tumble, and losses result. Getting it right involves ambitious thinking, forward planning and careful budgeting before a single parcel is sorted.

I detect similar themes of ambition and pragmatism in this evening’s New Testament reading from Luke’s gospel. Make sure you have sufficient funds to build the tower, says Jesus. Make sure you have sufficient funds to pay for it. Otherwise it won’t happen, and you will be embarrassed. 

If you’re going to fight for something, work out first whether you have a chance of winning. If you bite off more than you can chew, then have the good sense to settle with relevant parties before you make things even worse.

As always, understanding the context of Jesus’ words is vital. Jesus’ two pictures of the tower and the battle would have resonated strongly with his listeners.

So there was a hugely important construction project going on at the time, that Jesus’ listeners would have been aware of: not a tower, it’s true, but a temple, in Jerusalem. Herod the Great had started a massive rebuilding programme, and his sons were continuing with it. By Jesus’ day it was two-thirds complete – but to what end?

In what we have as the previous chapter of Luke’s gospel, Jesus has already warned that God had abandoned his house. Forty years or so later, all of Jerusalem was sacked and the Temple destroyed – its folly plain for all to see.

Yet whilst Herod’s Temple was to have been God’s dwelling on earth and the sign that Herod’s family were the kings of the Jews, Jesus had come as the true King – to build, indeed to be, the true Temple. Were His listeners and followers ready to serve in that kind of kingdom?

If there was to be a battle perhaps, at least in the mind of the first century zealots, it would be with the Roman occupiers. Many of Jesus’ contemporaries saw the Romans in their land and resented it, some joining local resistance groups and freedom fighters.

But if they had known just how powerful the occupiers were and what sort of forces they were squaring up to, might not at least some of them have sought peace?

Yet whilst many of Jesus’ contemporaries wanted to fight Rome, to gain their freedom, and win God’s victory over the pagan hordes, Jesus had actually come to fight the real battle against the real enemy. Were His listeners and followers ready to enlist in that cause?

Across Luke chapter 14 as a whole – so not just this evening’s passage but the verses either side as well there are numerous warnings and hard sayings of Jesus about the life of faith. Half measures don’t cut it. You might as well do nothing as go half the way. Hate your family, give up your possessions, carry your cross with full and calculated commitment - yes, exactly like someone building a tower or fighting a battle.

I wonder though, just how many, on listening to Jesus that day, would have grasped the implications of this cutting of ties with contemporary Jewish symbols and aspirations? For although Jesus’s mission was focussed on a nation, his purposes encompassed all of God’s world.

The scholar Tom Wright has helpfully observed:

‘Those who followed Jesus would… incur the wrath both of their Jewish contemporaries for going soft on nationalist agendas, and of Rome, for launching a kingdom-movement. Carrying a cross was not a metaphor in Jesus’ day.’

He adds:

‘Perhaps we need to consider the symbols and aspirations of our own society. Where are the towers, and where are the wars, that our world is hell-bent on building and fighting? How can we summon the human race once more to costly obedience?’

So how might we apply this passage today? How do we face the challenge, not only of living up to Jesus’ demands, but of placing them before the world?

We don’t have to look too hard see the literal towers bearing the names of their owners and built to flatter their egos. Oh, and the odd space rocket as well. Meanwhile, the drip of the daily news feed makes it impossible to escape hearing about the ongoing military conflicts around the world.

But what about the symbolic towers humans have built? Military might? Rampant nationalism? Materialism and the accumulation of wealth at any cost?

Or those wars in the broadest sense which hit the weakest the hardest? Culture wars fuelled by deliberate misinformation? The war being waged on a scorched earth and a bleeding planet? The ungodly strivings within the institutions and synods of Christian churches?

There are towers and battles or wars everywhere we look and, just like in the logistics and distribution industry, a considered and thought-through approach is vital.

I have come to realise that the combination of ambition and pragmatism I mentioned also have a place in placing Jesus’ demands before the world. For Christians hold an ambition to see God’s kingdom in every corner of the world, beginning with our own back yards; and we set about realising it best with a pragmatism that knows how to work with those who are persuaded of the rightness of kingdom values.

Some of the words that Jeremiah attributes to God in this evening’s Old Testament exhortation to repent help us to see what this might look like in practice. For godly words and actions always come, at one time or another, from the humility of the penitent rather than the posturing of the arrogant.

So Jeremiah prophesies,

‘Act with justice and righteousness, and deliver from the hand of the oppressor anyone who has been robbed. And do no violence to the alien, the orphan and the widow, nor shed innocent blood.’

If this all sounds a bit challenging, try to read the love between the lines. For the commitment that Christ calls us to is total in human terms, because God’s commitment in Christ to us is limitless in eternal terms.

As we deny ourselves, take up our cross, and follow Christ, we enter increasingly deeply into a life-giving relationship with the Creator, Redeemer and Sustainer of the world… and into deeper relationship through Christ with one another.

The Stations of the Cross - which we begin to mark following this evening’s service - help us to see the price of God’s unconditional love in action.

The Stations invite our repentance, lead us into fresh humility, and invite us to follow Jesus in receiving and sharing that Love with family, friends, neighbours and strangers. I hope many of you will join us shortly, and in coming weeks.

Meanwhile, a word of warning to finish.

I discovered that being a contingency planner in a large parcels planner does two things. It leads one to assume that something will always go wrong, and it burdens one with an overbearing sense of responsibility to sort out problems single-handedly.  And if one is not careful it can affect one’s attitudes negatively for life.

However, the good news is that living up to the call of Christ in and for the world is not all down to us. Although we are called to a whole-hearted, intentional and committed faith, living generously and standing against injustice, we don’t do any of it in our own strength!

As we face the challenge of living up to Jesus’ demands and placing them before the world, be encouraged and know that we do so as the Spirit-filled Body of Christ together. We do so in the love and the strength of Jesus Christ - who has entered our life, and died our death - that we might embrace the love and the strength of God and share in God’s mission to a broken world.