Sunday's contribution!

Epiphany 6 yr A
The Headlines in this weeks Shetland Times reads “Grim reality hits home….” And in the article Sandy Cluness the Convenor says “Its never going to be a good day….”
It must be a sad time of life to think “Its never going to be a good day!” and I work with people for whom this thought is very much the case. There is never any escape from a grim reality, and doom sits on the shoulder every day only to be replaced by anxiety.
A the risk of trying to point out the obvious, a world in which there is no hope, where there is no escape from “badness”, is a living hell, and is to already endure the eternal suffering so often associated with a mythical or real hell.
I put it to you that we cannot and must not allow ourselves to be dragged into the scenario that its never going to be a good day. Either in a personal living, for that would be to become Mentally and emotionally unwell, or in a corporate sense for that is a lost and broken society…. Of which I trust we are not.
Last week we noticed the challenges that the exiles returning faced, and the conflict of interests as they struggled with rebuilding both temple and society at the same time. Not one at the expense of the other, but both together.
Today we read in the Apocraphyl book (also from the post exilic time) how choice continued to play a part in the lives of people and society. We have placed before us some fairly stark choices, most notably to choose between life or death.
Against the agonising choice comes the knowledge that god is alongside us and understands us. In point of fact the choice is our choice…. Not God’s Choice. God is predisposed to be with us, to love us, to redeem us as his chosen people.
But the choice is ours… there is the challenge for us.
Sometimes people make wrong choices, sometimes we make mistaken choices. That cannot ever be the end of things, and the Christian Church stands for those who say it is never the end of the line. It is never beyond redemption.
In our own Christian living we must be resilient to the temptation to draw a line under either our own lives or the lives of others. Jesus never did this and he always accepted people no matter what.
It is perhaps interesting that the gospel reading today seems to show Jesus at his worst and his best. At his worst, because it may appear that he puts the bar above the attainment of all but the few. At his best, because we see him speaking to the people where they were at with all the concerns of that particular day at hand. He is not remote.
We certainly must not take this passage away from its context, or for that matter the words before and after. We all know the damage that can be done from taking a portion of a story and thinking we have the whole picture, or from overhearing part of a conversation and believing we have heard it all.
The words we have today are set against the struggle to know what it was to love perfectly, it was not about minor rules and regulations. Jesus is holding the whole law before people, not chosen excerpts. The whole law whose purpose it was to remind the people of God’s very close presence with them in their struggles. God wanted his people to win….. God wants us to choose life.
In choosing life, or in having this option always before us, we are called to be people who have hope ever before them.
In the Book the barefoot Disciple, which we are going to focus on during Lent, Stephen Cherry recounts the time when he gave up grumbling for Lent. He noticed what a difference it made not just to himself but to those around him. So often we also find it easier to frown than to smile.
A few years ago now I watched an interesting film called “Pay it Forward”.
The scenario was that a young boy (as a result of being set a task by his school teacher) began to pay it forward rather than “pay it back”. You do something good to someone, you help someone, you be generous to someone, you love someone…. As the first thing not as the result of something. This First act is the paying it Forward and it results in other doing the same thing in their turn.
This small action by the school child eventually led to a huge wave of positive loving actions, which swept the society….. everyone felt better, everyone’s life improved, and the whole outlook was good not negative.
God sets before us the choice to live, may the people we meet and speak with this week see reflected in our own voices and actions that we have chosen to live and love. And the Dawn from on high will break in on us as the people who have sat in darkness suddenly begin to see a light.