{"id":3818,"date":"2020-03-17T21:07:12","date_gmt":"2020-03-17T21:07:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.pattinghamchurch.org.uk\/web\/?page_id=3818"},"modified":"2020-03-17T21:07:12","modified_gmt":"2020-03-17T21:07:12","slug":"sermon-15th-march-2020-evening","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.pattinghamchurch.org.uk\/web\/information\/sermons\/sermon-15th-march-2020-evening\/","title":{"rendered":"Sermon – 15th March 2020 – evening"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Sermons index<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Third Sunday of Lent – evening<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\n\n\n\n

Sunday 15th March 2020<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Lent 3 – evening
\nJosh1.1-9
\nEph 6. 10-20<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

Revd Preb Maureen Hobbs<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n
\"Maureen<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

\nBe strong in the Lord and in\nthe strength of his power…<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\nWhat I wonder, constitutes\npower? Faced as we are with a natural disaster \u2013 a pandemic worse\nthan anything we have seen in our lifetimes, the normal definitions\nof power seem suddenly lacking… Whether you are rich, poor,\npowerful, clever, influential, a gifted sportsman, a football\nmanager, Goverment Minister, Holywood A lister, – all it seems are\nequally prone to catch the virus that is rapidly closing down the\neconomic life of our planet!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\nIf I were to ask you to list\nthe 10 most powerful figures in history \u2013 who would you include I\nwonder? Genghis Khan? Hitler? Gandhi? Nelson Mandela? Florence\nNightingale? Louis Pasteur? Queen Elizabeth I or her father, Henry\nVIII? Madame Curie? Julius Caesar? Cleopatra? Tim Berners-Lee?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\nAs soon as we start to list a\nfew names, the problems begin. Should a list of the most powerful be\nconfined to Political and Military leaders? But what about those\nforms of power that have changed the world but have been exercised\nnot by politicians, but by mathematicians or physicists such as\nEinstein, or Engineers and Entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs or Mark\nZuckerberg, Bill Gates or Jef Bezos? And what about the great artists\nthat have shaped our cultures? William Shakespeare \u2013 who coined so\nmany words and expressions that we still use today? Or great\ncomposers like Bach, Beethoven or the incomparable Mozart? What about\nMichelangelo or Picasso?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\nNow this list does not as yet\ninclude any religious figures. So how do we rank Moses or Jesus of\nNazareth? Or the Buddha? Or the Prophet Muhammad or Guru Nanak?\nShould they not have a place?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\nWhich all goes to show that\nlists, while they have their place, can sometimes complicate matters\nrather than help us to sort them out!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\nBut what does power consist\nof? What does the Bible have to say about it?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\nWell the author of the letter\nto the Ephesians begins by saying \u201cBe strong in the Lord and in the\nstrength of his power.\u201d But then goes on to describe those crafty\npowers that seem to exist in opposition to God.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\nAnd in this context, Evil is\nidentified as the Enemy (capital E); an enemy that infects not just\nthe way the world is, but the whole cosmos. It is like Coronavirus\nbut on a galactic scale! The follower of Christ, the author says, is\nup against a negative, annihilating force that has a universal\ndimension.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\nNow this is neither\ncomfortable nor easy to grapple with. We can accept how evil might be\npersonal, in the sense that it affects individuals. One person\nmurdering another, while horrible, we can imagine. And we know too \u2013\nif we are honest \u2013 how even we ourselves have the capacity to\ncommit individual evil acts. But to comprehend Evil as a cosmic\nforce? That stretches our thinking almost to breaking point.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\nBut when we think about such\nevents as the Holocaust \u2013 something that has a dimension larger and\nmore horribly insidious than the individuals who began it? Or in our\nown history \u2013 the wars of religious persecution that ended in the\nfires of Tyburn and people being burned alive. Or the pogroms of\nStalin, Chairman Mao or Pol Pot? Were those cruelties really the\nresult of one individual\u2019s evil, or was there, in some sense, a\nlarger dimension? Or to be more contemporary, the way the Internet\nhas been used to create child abuse on a terrible, industrial scale.\nIs that the result of individual acts of evil, or is it the evil of a\nmuch larger, far-reaching, non-human kind?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\nIt is this that the author of\nEphesians has in mind when he tells us to Put on the whole armour of\nGod…<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\nSo in the light of this, maybe\nwe should forget lists of powerful people and contemplate instead,\nwhen faced with the enormity of evil, the kind of power to combat it\nthat is offered to us by God. In Jesus Christ we are given the sword\nof truth, the breastplate of righteousness and the shield of faith,\nand above all else, the gift of love.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\nSo when we are faced with evil\non a massive scale \u2013 or even a virus that is threatening our way of\nlife and the governance of our democracies, we must pray that those\ngracious gifts from God will protect and guide us, and pray too that\nGod will give us the courage to enter the battle and do what we can\nto help each other… even if that largely consists of washing our\nhands and thinking of our neighbours. Amen.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Third Sunday of Lent – evening Sunday 15th March 2020 Lent 3 – evening Josh1.1-9 Eph 6. 10-20 Revd Preb Maureen Hobbs Be strong in the Lord and in the strength of his power… What I wonder, constitutes power? Faced as we are with a natural disaster \u2013 a pandemic worse than anything we have … <\/p>\n

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