That’s one church that is clearly following the message that Christ has given us. But I believe that if you look at the church’s record being a faithful witness to the message of Christ through the years, it’s abominable, dreadful. The message being, that God loves each and every one of us with an absolute tender and steadfast love, that will never let us go; and that we are to love everyone of our brothers and sisters as Christ loved us.

There’ll be those who say that that’s oversimplified and the message is more complex than that, but if asked to condense it to just over thirty words I believe that it’s fairly close. So how has the church performed in giving that message to the world?

Christians, in the name of Christ, have fought over prestige, over money, over power. Throughout the world they beheaded and burned when people wouldn’t submit. They slaughtered people of other faiths. Any who didn’t agree, they said were damned. In the last hundred years they began to treat women as people and even as equals.

Maybe we’re going a bit too far here. I mean, if that continues then there’s going to be an expectation that in married life two partners are equal. But, seriously, if you think of the largest part of the church in the world, there’s a prohibition, quite illogically in my opinion, of women priests. In recent years we’ve read in the press instances that have been highlighted where Protestant and Roman Catholic clergy have lied and protected, to the point of betrayal of public trust, those within the church who have committed sexual abuse of the innocent. And this was due to save the church establishment, we are told, from embarrassment; to preserve its prestige. I remember reading once someone quoted ‘It’s for the greater good’.

One of the alternative readings that we could have had today is from Exodus. It’s at the point where God laid down the laws and gave Moses those tablets of stone for his chosen people, and those chosen people then turned their backs and they asked Aaron to make gods for them to worship. God had promised a special relationship, - that God would be their God and they would be His people. And straightaway they shunned that relationship. They looked for idolatry.

We might say ‘Ah well, that was in those days, we don’t have idolatry these days’. But idolatry is what we do when we don’t take God seriously, when we try to substitute something else for God. You may say that’s ridiculous of course. But is it? How important is our defence of our position, our status, our need for recognition. Dare I say even sometimes within the Church? Have we substituted other ambitions for ourselves, instead of devoting our efforts to the message Christ has asked us to impart?

This last week one of the readings again contained the phrase that Jesus used several times and in fact I was talking about it a couple of Wednesdays back, ‘I desire mercy not ritual’. It’s a quotation from Hosea, and I believe, as I stated on that Wednesday, that it has a special message for the priesthood. Christ requires mercy not ritual. Mercy is the care for each other, rather than the ritual of worship. He desires the care for each other, rather than the ritual of worship. Meaning that our routine, our phrases, our actions during our worship can become meaningless. We have to think very carefully of what we’re doing and why we’re doing it, and it has to have meaning for each one of us.

In our Gospel reading Matthew is giving an account of a parable that Jesus said, which is, in a sense, a duplication of historical events that those around him will have known, that had already happened: Israel’s treatment of the prophets, the persecution of Christians and the movement towards a Gentile constituency. The king had invited his guests and they took no notice. So he invited other people, and even some of the other people, those outside his sphere of friends, his chosen people, weren’t prepared to conform, weren’t prepared to fully listen and accept his call of love.

Our church, that’s you and me, have historically turned its back on God and done some terrible things. And I believe that these readings today, the reading from Isaiah that we heard, Isaiah telling the people to heed God, gives a clear warning that God requires us – and that’s each one of us – to come into a special relationship with Him, into a situation where we forget about status or position, where the most important thing in our lives is a life in which Christ is occupying our way of doing things, our motivation, even our daily thoughts.

This is not a relationship that we join and have life membership for. It’s relationship that we have to renew each morning. Let me just remind you of that message – the message being that God loves each and everyone of us with an absolute tender and steadfast love and that will never let us go. And we are to love everyone of our brothers and sisters as Christ loved us.

So every morning we renew that relationship.

Lord make this a special day in my life with you,
take me just as I am
wherever you want to lead me
and grant this day
I will be able to show something of your love to those I meet,
so that that meeting will bring about for them
the benefit of some contact with You

Amen.