The Second Sunday after Epiphany

Second Sunday of Epiphany – St James the Great Bierton, Evensong

Psalm 96

1 Samuel 3.1-20

Ephesians 4.1-16

As many of you will know, I was a retailer before I was selected for ordination. I managed a number of flooring stores for a couple of national and international flooring businesses for approaching fifteen years.

For a number of those years, my Tuesday-morning job (after three bad coffees and a pep-talk with the team) was to pop out of the store that I was managing, and visit the ‘competition’. I would wander in and have a nose around. They knew who I was so they didn’t try to serve me; I often knew them and they me, and every so often, they were people with whom I had previously worked (I had something of a reputation as a fearsome dismisser of staff, and my rejects would tend to move to the next carpet store to peddle their trade). I would sidle up the aisles, forage through displays of rugs, take notes about prices and offers, and observe the quality of the service to the customers who had visited their store at the same time as me (I was also known to sneak up top them and offer them a better price if they popped into my stire). In retail, it is regarded as ‘best-practice’ to know the competition, for obvious reasons. It is also the fact that the more competitors that were nearby, the better the business for us all as people felt that they had sufficient choice and therefore didn’t drive off to pursue a better deal somewhere else.

There are carpet shops and there are carpet shops. I provided one kind of service, my competitor quite another. If the truth be known, we rarely overlapped, and in the end served the people of that particular town comprehensively. It is amazing how some retail parks can house three thriving yet competing carpet stores. The more the merrier.

Tonight’s readings reminded me a great deal of those days. We have the passage from Samuel which speaks of his calling; we have the passage from Paul which deal with ‘differences’ and we have the Psalm which offers the underpinning principle. If I were to superimpose the readings upon my retailing past, we would have a passage that spoke about the desire to provide flooring, one that spoke to the fact that all businesses have something unique to offer and a psalm that dealt with the basic underlying principles that all flooring stores work to, irrespective of all other factors.

However, unless you all have a burning desire to retail shag-pile, and I don’t sense that many of you do, I had better take this template and superimpose it upon our life as Christians.

If we take the essay on Unity, written by Paul to the church in Ephesus, we could easily read it and claim it as a statement of the obvious. It tells us that there are different types of Christians, which this is a good thing, and that together we will work towards the realisation of God’s Kingdom here on Earth. But is it such an obvious thing? We live in and age where we try to encourage people to conform, and more often than not, conform to our own value structure, belief patterns and habits. To some, the biological accident of gender is sufficient to preclude some from doing certain jobs in our enlightened church of the twenty-first century. To others, the way that a person chooses to worship God is enough to deem them suspicious or strange. Let us examine this in light of the model of the statistical nuclear family: each has a mother and a father, each has children, perhaps a boy and a girl. They are a whole, united and secure unit when regarded together, yet in their own right they are unique and as different as it is possible to be. It is also right that they fill the role that they are called to hold in that family unit. It is right that the mother is the parent and that the daughter is the child; for them to assume the role of the other is inappropriate and wrong at so many levels in any normal circumstance. This model can be taken and applied to a number of contexts: at the level of a parish, at the level of a Diocese, at the level of a national or international church, at the national level in civilian life, in business. Paul’s essay is a thesis on how humans’ best thrive in community – that is to say, by embracing the differences within their number. Paul’s theology is rich with this idea of the union amongst difference; his writings on the vine and its branches, on the body and its members – all say the same thing.

Paul was writing at a time of extreme tension, in an age when a new church and indeed a new religion was trying to emerge and grow in the context of two dominating faith structures: the polytheism of the Romans and the Yahwist context of the Jews. Paul was writing to support the embryonic church in the very differences with brought threat to their doors.

Paul did something else in his writings, and it is as relevant today as it was then. He communicated news from around the other churches. If we take our statistical family unit, consider how it would be if mum vanished for a week and no-one else knew where she had gone to. Imagine a family where Junior had a terrible disease and where Dad was ensconced in the sitting-room unaware. Imagine a family where a new baby was born but no-one knew about it (except mum of course). That would be judged a terrible family and finger-pointing would start in earnest. My friends, before we raise our index fingers in disgust, we must pause to think how we perform as a family of Christians in the world, in Britain, in Aylesbury, in St James. Be clear that I said ‘Christians’, not merely Anglicans. Can we, with our hand on our heart say that we know what is the big news in the Anglican Communion, the Roman Catholic Church in England, or the Aylesbury Methodist Circuit, or St. Peter’s Quarrendon? Take heart, my friends; this is a Christian failing that afflicts us all. We are, for reasons that are often not of consequence, inward looking. Facets of our community do our ‘looking out’ for us; the Mother’s Union, Churches Together in Aylesbury etc, but it is not automatic Christian behaviour to know what is happy or painful for other Christians communities or even the bit of the same community as we share that is somewhere else; it has a great deal to do with our innate desire to survive in a world that would marginalise us, and that means we batten down the hatches from time to time.

So, we have the passage from Samuel that outlines the place of calling in all our lives. We are all called to be Christians and insofar as you are all sitting here listening to me waffle on means that you have accepted that calling. We have the essay from Paul to the early church which tells them, and us, that families are made up, quite properly, of those who have to be different in order that the family may flourish. Then we have Psalm 96 which outlines the common theme for the family illustrated by Paul. We are called to praise God, in our unique way and with our different voices, as one! However, in order to do that, we need to know who our wider Christian family is, what makes them tick, what grieves them at the start of this year. As a sibling will care deeply for their welfare of the other, so we must model that behaviour in our Christian lives. We might not all agree (and how dull it would be if we did); we certainly don’t all look alike or do the same things, but we share a common mandate, to praise God together in union with every man and woman that had or has proclaimed their faith in Christ crucified.