Sermon for Mattins (Morning Prayer) on 3rd October 2023 at All Saints Church, Penarth
Readings: https://bible.oremus.org/?ql=563256396
It occurred to me that you might be a bit fed up if I spent the next 10 minutes talking about the Last Supper, Jesus shocking the disciples and forecasting that one of them was going to betray him, but then going on to celebrate very first Holy Communion. I think it will be a bit of an anticlimax to hear a sermon all about that and then not to receive communion, but as you know, we are not doing a holy communion service this morning.
If we look at our other lesson, the reading is from the prophet Ezekiel who was writing from exile in Babylon, making a prophecy about the circumstances under which God’s chosen people the Israelites would return to Jerusalem. Our reading comes after a few lines in which Ezekiel mentions that the existing people, who are currently in Jerusalem, have suggested that the Israelites should go away and find somewhere else. It resonates; it’s sad, even today.
It does have the well-known lines about the Lord promising to the Israelites that when they come to Jerusalem he will give them ‘one heart and put a new spirit within them’; he will remove the ‘heart of stone’ from them and give them a ‘heart of flesh’ so that they may ‘follow God’s statutes and keep his ordinances, and obey them’, so that ‘they shall be his people and he will be their God.’
In one sense the whole of the Old Testament is all about the history of Israel’s being obedient and then disobedient to the Lord their God and all the various consequences thereof. Again, I think it doesn’t really fit for me to go into that in more detail this morning. We would need a learned seminar at least.
So if I’m not going to spend a lot of time on our lessons – I hope that you will forgive me for so doing – what do I want to dwell on? Perhaps it’s not strictly true, that I am completely ignoring our readings, because I saw something in the passage from Ezekiel, which sparked a thought within me, which I hope will be worth our pursuing together. That is that after Ezekiel has finished his prophecy, we are told that the cherubim lifted up their wings ‘with the wheels beside them.’
If you go to the beginning of the book of Ezekiel, in the first chapter, he says that he was among the exiles by the River Chebar, and the heavens were opened, and he saw visions of God. He saw extraordinary visions of four living creatures, the cherubim, with four wings, and four different faces each; and there were wheels.
It was sometimes described as the vision of the chariot. ‘When they moved, [the wheels] moved in any of the four directions without veering’. Perhaps the mechanical engineers in our congregation will be able to confirm that this is, perhaps, one of the earliest references to Ackermann steering that we’ve come across in literature.
But anyway, there is something on wheels; and that’s what piqued me, because in among all the other things we have to deal with at the moment in our lives, there are a lot of people exercised about something on wheels, namely, the 20 mile an hour speed limit.
Now, I want you to be immediately reassured; I am not about to turn into Jeremy Clarkson, or side vehemently with one or other of the parties in the Senedd, on this issue: but it did seem to me that it was a good opportunity for us to discuss how we put our faith into practical effect in today’s world.
Is there a Christian way to look at the 20 mile an hour speed limit? I suppose the key to all this, if we are Christians, is to ask, what would Jesus do? If Jesus was around today, how would he approach the 20 mile an hour speed limit? What is the Christian approach to it?
This is a bit like when I was studying Latin and Greek at school and university and we had to do prose composition; you might be given the Times editorial from a couple of days earlier and asked to put it into the Latin of Tacitus or the Greek of Demosthenes. Our teachers delighted in finding modern passages with things that didn’t exist in classical antiquity, such as trains and aeroplanes. What is the Ancient Greek equivalent of Concorde?
It’s just the same problem that we have in this case, wondering what Jesus would have done about the 20 mile an hour limit. What sort of car would Jesus be driving? So far as I know, the only form of locomotion which Jesus used was a variety of ponies, starting with Shanks’ and extending to the famous ass on Palm Sunday.
Presumably there were horses and carts, but the only ones that we hear about in the Bible are chariots, predominantly in a warlike context. In Psalm 20, for instance, ‘…some trust in chariots, some in horses, but we will make mention of the name of the Lord our God.’
But I don’t think that a chariot is really a parallel with a motor car today, or even with an SUV, come to think of it. If that was the case, Jesus would have been rumbling about in a tank or an armoured fighting vehicle. I certainly don’t think that I see Jesus riding on a Challenger II on his way into Jerusalem. No, it looks as though Jesus was much more often travelling at 4 mph, walking pace, or alternatively, at maybe 5 knots in a fishing boat on the sea of Galilee.
So what is the underlying message, which we could draw a parallel with, over the gap of 2000 years? I would like to suggest that it is a message about slowing down, that whatever form of locomotion we are using, whether it is on foot or in a car, or in a chariot or on a train, or in a boat, the message of the 20 mph zone is to slow down, and moreover, to slow down for reasons given which have to do with care for our environment and so as to avoid harm to our neighbours, by not running them over.
I think that when we consider God’s creatures and caring for them, slowing down will be good for all creatures, not only cutting down the number of people knocked down on the road, but it will also be good for animals; cats and squirrels, for example.
Do you think that Jesus would go along with this sort of reasoning? I wonder if, by contrast, there were actually any experiences that Jesus would have had, which would have given him a taste for speed. On the water, the only thing I can think of again points to slowing down, when he stilled the storm, so force 10, 70 mph, winds dropped to a pleasant breeze.
As you can see, I am beginning to think that Jesus is coming out as Captain Slow, but maybe there are other factors that I haven’t taken into account. Maybe there is such a thing as Captain Too Slow. What do you think Jesus would have done? Let us dwell on that with a little prayer, every time we set our speed limiter to 20 in the car.
Amen.
Hugh Bryant
hughdbryant 