Sermon: Luke 1:5-17 Preparing a people for Christmas

 

We’re hosting the family Christmas at our house this year. This will be our first Christmas back in Australia, back with the family. So this Christmas is kind of a big deal for us. Also, this will be our first Christmas that will include our nephew Zach, who was born while we were stuck in the UK last year.

Of course, hosting Christmas means doing a lot of preparation. You have to get things ready: we have to make sure the place is clean and tidy for visitors – we can’t have dirty laundry taking up all the space on the couch! We need to make sure we have enough places for people to sit; we need to have sufficient food and drink for the day, and make sure that it meets the allergy and dietary needs of our guests, and make sure we have somewhere to put it (we don’t have a dining table); we need to have presents ready, and somewhere to put them (we don’t have a Christmas tree); and we need to make the house look at least a little bit Christmassy (we don’t have decorations).

Now I’m sure anyone who has organised a family Christmas will agree with me that you cannot do all this preparation on the day. It’s an important occasion, and it’s just not something you can throw together at the last minute. Not with a satisfying result, anyway.

As Christians, at Christmas we are celebrating the arrival of the most important person ever to walk the earth. We celebrate the birth of Jesus: the son of God, who comes to earth in fully human form, to be God with us – “Jesus, our Immanuel” as Charles Wesley so beautifully puts it in Hark The Herald Angels Sing. He comes into the world the same way we all do, born as a little child, but for so great a purpose it is hard to fathom – “born that man no more may die”, as Wesley again writes.

And so it should come as no surprise to us that with such an important person’s arrival – literally the most important person in history – coming for such an important purpose – no less than the salvation of all humanity – God must make preparations for the arrival of Jesus into the world. In fact, these preparations span for over a thousand years before Christ’s birth! I understand that you have been hearing sermons on some of the Old Testament prophecies which foretell the coming of Jesus and what his life and death would be like, and what they mean. And when we look back to the covenants that God made with humanity, be it David, Moses, Abraham, or even Adam and Eve, we can see how they all point towards a time when Jesus would come to do away with sin and death, be a blessing to all nations, and draw to God a kingdom of sons and daughters that has no end.

But as anyone who has prepared a Christmas function knows, no matter how much good planning you do in the weeks leading up to Christmas, there are always some things that are done in the days and perhaps hours before the guests arrive. If you order fresh seafood, you don’t get it weeks in advance – you wait until the last possible moment to collect it! And in the same way, in the Christmas story we learn God’s preparations take place right up to the moment of Jesus’ birth. And one thing that I find absolutely fascinating is the role that children play in the Christmas story of preparing for the arrival of Jesus. This is represented in part by the birth of another child in the months leading up to Jesus’ birth – a part of the Christmas story that doesn’t often make it onto Christmas cards or into Christmas carols. I am talking, of course, about the birth of John the Baptist.

Like Jesus, John’s birth is also miraculous – born to a husband and wife too old to have children. His birth is also announced by an angelic visitation, and his name is also given by the angel. Although John is not born at the same time as Jesus, being an older cousin by a few months, his birth is still very much part of the whole Christmas story as told in the gospel of Luke. And it’s this story I want us to remember today, because it has something to say about the kind of role we as Christians should be playing in preparing for the arrival of Jesus, and it also says something about the kind of work we do at Horizons Family Law Centre.

Let’s start by reading Luke’s account of John’s birth in Luke chapter 1, starting at verse 5: “5 In the time of Herod king of Judea there was a priest named Zechariah, who belonged to the priestly division of Abijah; his wife Elizabeth was also a descendant of Aaron. 6 Both of them were righteous in the sight of God, observing all the Lord’s commands and decrees blamelessly. 7 But they were childless because Elizabeth was not able to conceive, and they were both very old.

8 Once when Zechariah’s division was on duty and he was serving as priest before God, 9 he was chosen by lot, according to the custom of the priesthood, to go into the temple of the Lord and burn incense. 10 And when the time for the burning of incense came, all the assembled worshipers were praying outside.

11 Then an angel of the Lord appeared to him, standing at the right side of the altar of incense. 12 When Zechariah saw him, he was startled and was gripped with fear. 13 But the angel said to him: “Do not be afraid, Zechariah; your prayer has been heard. Your wife Elizabeth will bear you a son, and you are to call him John. 14 He will be a joy and delight to you, and many will rejoice because of his birth, 15 for he will be great in the sight of the Lord. He is never to take wine or other fermented drink, and he will be filled with the Holy Spirit even before he is born. 16 He will bring back many of the people of Israel to the Lord their God. 17 And he will go on before the Lord, in the spirit and power of Elijah, to turn the hearts of the parents to their children and the disobedient to the wisdom of the righteous—to make ready a people prepared for the Lord.”

God had spent thousands of years – a whole nation’s history in fact – preparing the way for the arrival of Jesus. Even this was a fulfilment of a prophecy in Malachi chapter 4:5-6, 400 years before the birth of Christ, which reads, “See, I will send the prophet Elijah to you before that great and dreadful day of the Lord comes. 6 He will turn the hearts of the parents to their children, and the hearts of the children to their parents; or else I will come and strike the land with total destruction.” But God also knew that when Jesus actually arrived, people would not be ready for him. As it says in John 1:10, “10 He was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him. 11 He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him.” God knows that people need to be primed, that the way needs to be prepared. A special arrival needs a special preparation. In this case, Jesus is so special that he needs someone born before him whose whole life’s work is to prepare the world for him. This is John the Baptist’s mission.

But what really intrigues me is how God says John the Baptist will prepare the way. I’ve talked about Christmas preparations – preparing the house, preparing the food, and so on. But John the Baptist’s ministry of preparation isn’t about preparing a path or an event – it’s about preparing people. “He will bring back many of the people of Israel to the Lord” says verse 16, “to make ready a people prepared for the Lord” says verse 17. That is the focus of John the Baptist’s ministry, because that is God’s focus in the coming of Jesus: to draw all people to himself.

And the first person that needs to be prepared is John. Because that’s what all these prophecies about his birth are really showing: that God is preparing this child for this ministry. Look at verse 15, “he will be great in the sight of the Lord. He is never to take wine or other fermented drink, and he will be filled with the Holy Spirit even before he is born.” Let me ask you: How many Australians do you think prepare for Christmas by not drinking alcohol? But seriously, we can see here that there is a mixture of God’s work in this child – he will be filled with the Holy Spirit –  and also the influence of his parents, ensuring that he has a holy upbringing – abstaining from alcohol was a religious vow from way back in the Old Testament.

Ultimately, while I am sure God will gladly bless our Christmas plans, our feasts, our church services and family activities if we bring them before him, I think what God cares about most is people. And if we care about preparing people for the coming of Christ, that must include preparing ourselves. How much of our Christmas preparations this year have centred around preparing ourselves for celebrating the coming of Christ? I’ll admit that before I wrote this sermon, it wasn’t high in my mind. My focus was about the event, the meals, the celebrations, even my sermons – all outward things. But it wasn’t until I sat down and started writing this sermon that I really reflected, “What am I doing to prepare myself?” Don’t let the Christmas season pass you by without having sat down just once and reflected on the amazing and miraculous truth about the arrival of God into our world as a child, and how that truth might be reflected by you into the lives of those around you.

Because remember this isn’t simply an inward focus: just like John’s life was being prepared to allow him to prepare other people for the arrival of Jesus into the world, our self-preparation is so that we might also be helping others to prepare for the arrival of Jesus into their lives.

How might we go about preparing others for the arrival of Jesus? Let’s look at what the angel Gabriel says to John’s father about that, in verse 17: “And he will go on before the Lord, in the spirit and power of Elijah, to turn the hearts of the parents to their children and the disobedient to the wisdom of the righteous—to make ready a people prepared for the Lord.”

As people who are familiar with the ministry of John the Baptist, this description of his ministry as given by the angel may seem a bit strange. We think of John preaching a baptism of repentance and the forgiveness of sins, as he is described in Luke chapter 3. We might think of him baptising Jesus. These describe well John’s ministry of going before the Lord and preparing the way. We might even recall some of his words recorded in Luke 3, where he tells the crowd, “Anyone who has two shirts should share with the one who has none, and anyone who has food should do the same”; he tells the tax collectors, “Don’t collect any more than you are required to”; and he tells the soldiers, “Don’t extort money and don’t accuse people falsely—be content with your pay.” We can see here someone seeking to turn the hearts of the disobedient to righteous wisdom.

But how does turning the hearts of parents to their children fit into the ministry of preparing people for the coming of Jesus? In John’s story we see it happen immediately – even before he is born. Later in Luke 1 we’re told that when Mary, now pregnant with Jesus, goes to visit Elizabeth, “41 When Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting, the baby leaped in her womb, and Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit. 42 In a loud voice she exclaimed: “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the child you will bear!” Before John had even been born, Elizabeth’s heart was turned to listen to her child, and prepared for the arrival of Jesus into her home. And that’s an amazing story. But what does it tell us? What might turning the hearts of parents to their children, and the disobedient to the wisdom of the righteous, look for us as Christians today?

To illustrate just one example of how this might work, I want to tell you what it’s like for a client coming to Horizons Family Law Centre for help. The story I’m going to tell you is made up – it’s not the story of a single client, instead it is a mish-mash of the stories of many clients. This is partly to help keep their confidentiality, but also partly because there is so much commonality in the stories of so many of the people we help who are in real family crisis.

A parent calls our legal advice hotline. This person can be of either gender – we help both mums and dads with family law issues. They are distressed, anxious, and confused. Their relationship with their partner has broken down. They have moved out – now the kids are with one parent and not the other. They tell us that their ex-partner is a terrible person who has treated them badly. They don’t know what to do next; what they do know is that they hate their ex-partner, and they don’t want anything to do with them ever again. Their situation is complicated: often there are money troubles (if they had enough money to hire a regular lawyer, they probably wouldn’t have been referred to us); perhaps there has been some kind of family violence; there may be health issues with the parents and/or the children; they don’t have grandparents nearby to help with the kids; one parent might want to move interstate or even overseas for work or family support; the parents have different religious beliefs, different thoughts on where the kids should go to school or what sports they should play or how they should be raised.

When they come to us, they are in the middle of a very painful situation: they have been hurt, and often they want to lash out. In their hearts, they want revenge for the hurt they are feeling, for the years they have lost, for the difficult situation they now find themselves in. And so they will ask questions like, “How can I stop my ex‑partner from seeing the kids ever again? How can I stop them from getting any money? How can I force them to do things my way?”

Then they speak with one of our lawyers, and we explain to them the way the family law system works, the sorts of options they might have, and the things they may face in the months and years to come. For more complicated family situations, we offer face-to-face advice clinics in three churches around Sydney (and we’re looking at starting a fourth next year). Last year we took about 1000 calls from people asking for legal advice about their family situation. For many of those, we speak with them two or three times, or perhaps have a conference with them, and give them a listening ear, some high quality advice specific to their situation, and they are able to move forward in a healthier way. For about 10% of them, so about 100 a year, we might offer more specialised assistance, like helping them with legal documents or a mediation with their ex‑partner. And about 10% of those – fewer than ten – are so complicated, so high conflict, and so in need, that we might agree to assist them through the court process.  Some of those clients we have walked alongside for four years or more.

But whether we speak to a client on the phone only once, or whether we journey with them for years through a complex legal situation, we are in a unique position to turn the hearts of the parents to their children. We are very fortunate that in Australia one of the fundamental principles of family law is that all outcomes must be in the best interests of the children. Right from the start, this is advice that we can give to our clients: we know you are feeling hurt and you feel like you deserve something, but think about your kids; what is best for them? Do they miss their dad? Are they really better off growing up without a mum in their life? Is it good for them to see the two of you fighting all the time? You are their parent: are you really thinking about what is best for them, or about what will make you feel better?

And we are in a unique position to turn the hearts of the disobedient to the wisdom of the righteous. We counsel our clients to show grace and mercy in their dealings with their ex-partner. Yes, this person may have hurt you in the midst of your messy relationship breakdown. You absolutely do not need to stay with them any longer. But they are still the other parent of your kids. You may need to give them a chance. You may need to recognise that they have made mistakes, like we all do. You may need to consider forgiveness, in order to allow these mediations to continue, in order to keep this matter out of court, in order to help you move on with your own life, in order for your kids to get the best result possible. You may need to consider what benefits the other partner will bring to your kids. You are both still parents, and both of you will need to keep making sacrifices for the good of the kids.

Not once in any of those explanations did I mention the name of Jesus. But can you see how someone’s heart might have the way prepared for him? Their hearts have been turned to their children; their hearts have been turned towards righteous wisdom. They have received good legal advice about their situation, which is a real and tangible help with a problem they see right in front of them; but they have received that help in a way that gives them a taste of God’s plan: God, the heavenly Father who has turned his heart towards us as his children at a great cost to himself; God, who makes known the ultimate righteous wisdom to the disobedient, by showing us his grace and his mercy through forgiveness.

Our clinics are run through churches, so our clients are also able to connect with a church that offers them help them with meals, or a children’s play group, or a domestic violence counselling support service. Every single client at Horizons sees the power of gospel wisdom in their own family situation, and is drawn that much closer to Christ through their contact with us. And when they ask us why we’re doing these things, why we offer this service without getting any government funding, or even just comment on how nice and helpful we are, like John the Baptist we can say, “Oh, but I only do this because there is one greater than me, the straps of whose sandals I am not worthy to untie.”

Maybe you think, “Oh, but I can’t be like John the Baptist. I don’t have a law degree. My job doesn’t give me these opportunities. I wasn’t born with the introduction of angels.” In which case, I would like to introduce you to John the Baptist’s parents, Zechariah and Elizabeth. We’re told in verse 6, “Both of them were righteous in the sight of God, observing all the Lord’s commands and decrees blamelessly.” Who do you think is responsible for keeping young John the Baptist away from alcohol, keeping him on his religious vow? Who raised him, fed him, supported him in his ministry of being a voice of one calling in the wilderness? Who brought him up in a household where the Lord’s commands were observed blamelessly? Where do you think he learned the wisdom of the righteous? It’s really easy for us to spiritualise John the Baptist – after all, he was introduced to the world by an angel, just like Jesus, and so it’s easy to think everything about his life was simply provided by God. But the truth is John the Baptist was miraculously conceived, but into the family of ordinary parents whose hearts were already turned to their child, who already lived by the wisdom of the righteous.

When Zechariah is first told about the coming of his son John, the angel says to him, “He will be a joy and delight to you, and many will rejoice because of his birth.” Of course Zechariah and Elizabeth were proud of John. But their role in raising him and supporting him led to many rejoicing because of his ministry. In a very real way, they shared in John’s ministry. And it’s the same for you here at Waitara Gospel Chapel, supporting us in the work of Horizons Family Law Centre. Those of us in the office are seeking to turn the hearts of parents to their children, and the disobedient to the wisdom of the righteous; we are seeking to make ready a people prepared for the Lord. But you who support us, who encourage us, who pray for us, you are right to take joy and delight in this ministry too, because there are many who rejoice because of it – a thousand calls last year alone!

Christmas is a very difficult time of year for most of our clients. It’s hard to prepare for Christmas when the relationship of two parents has broken down, when they struggle to communicate effectively, when there is extra financial stress, extra holiday preparation, two families now wanting to have the kids. We often get calls over Christmas from clients about a breakdown in the plans for their children to be with them, or because a situation has otherwise escalated and they don’t know what to do. Earlier I said that we shouldn’t let Christmas go past without having a moment to sit down and reflect on the amazing and miraculous truth about the arrival of God into our world as a child. How hard must it be for those people to prepare for remembering the coming of Christ into the world in the midst of their family crisis? Our hope at Horizons is that through turning the hearts of the parents to their children, and the disobedient to the wisdom of the righteous, we might make ready these people, so that when Christmas comes, they are a little more prepared for the coming of our Lord.

Sermon: John 13:31-38 Love One Another

 Another one of my sermons, including framing notes at the start, and stuff that didn't make the cut at the end.

John 13:31-38 sermon

In light of Jesus’ death, he makes three points:

1)      It will glorify God

2)      The disciples can’t go with him – this is something only Jesus can do

3)      Our job is to love one another

When Peter tries to take God’s job, he is reminded of the irony

4)      we don’t die for God, he dies for us

With Judas’ betrayal, the capture, trial and crucifixion of Jesus is imminent (and with it, the resurrection).

God will be glorified (that is, his glory will be revealed) through what is about to happen. Not eventually; he will be glorified at once, right now, through what is happening at this moment in history.

Jesus has talked about this before, but with his enemies. To them, he said they would die in their sins because they don’t know the Father and have not recognized the Son. But these are “my children”; they cannot come because while Jesus’ role on this earth is nearly complete, the role of the disciples has so, so much more to go.

And that’s wrapped up in his “new” command: love one another. Yes, the focus is on the family of believers. And yes, this is missional – our love for those outside the church is the invitation for them to join us; our love for those inside the church is why the invitation is worth accepting. And all that love together is the supernatural sign which shows that Jesus is involved.

Laying down our lives is an easy offer to make (but a harder one to follow through on!); Christ calls most of us to take up our crosses daily. We may well follow later – but at this moment it was Christ’s job, and that is something we have to leave to him.

Note also the amazing irony in v37 which points out the laughable inadequacy of our attempts to “stand up for God”, where Peter says, “I will lay down my life for you.” Jesus response is, “Will you really lay down your life for me?” Peter can’t even stay faithful for the next few hours; meanwhile Christ lays down his life for all humankind.

 

At Christmas time, everyone has a role to play, even kids. For most of our married life, Penny and I have spent Christmas with her family – the Towers – and each year the family take turns hosting and catering, each year Phil has to put on the silly hat and hand out presents, each year Greg supplies Christmas music. With the birth of the first grandchild – Zach –Christmas will probably focus around Zach for the next decade or so, and so it’s Zach’s role to be the centre of gift giving; I’m guessing maybe that Santa will start playing a much larger role in our Christmases than he has for the last few decades.

At the family Christmas, there are some roles that anyone can fill – like giving or receiving gifts, everyone does that. And some roles only certain people can fill. Only one person can host, for example. We’re hosting the family Christmas at our house in Thornleigh this year. If Penny’s brother was hosting it in Newcastle on the same day, that would put the family in an impossible position: they can’t be in both places at once! We can’t both play the role of host.

We’re continuing with our sermons in John, and if you look in your Bibles at the passage we’re going through today – John 13:31-38 – you might see a heading something like “Jesus predicts Peter’s denial”, which is a shame because while that does happen, it is probably not the key focus of this passage. This is Jesus’ farewell discourse – his final words to those who he knows will stay faithful to him long into the future – and it goes for the next few chapters. In this first section, Jesus focuses on what roles everyone has to play in this most monumental moment in history.

Last week we learned that even Judas has a role to play - his role of betrayer was so important it is predicted in Scripture. This whole process gets kicked off with Judas playing his role. Now Jesus talks to his friends about the role they all must play; and John records this in his gospel because he knows there are some important truths for the church about the role we play in God’s plan as it continues to unfold.

Once Judas leaves, Jesus starts by highlighting just how important this moment in history will be, saying, “Now the Son of Man is glorified and God is glorified in him. If God is glorified in him, God will glorify the Son in himself, and will glorify him at once.”

When we say “glorify” we often mean talking something up, making it sound better, downplaying its bad points. Some talk about how Christmas glorifies commercialism and consumerism by focusing on buying presents and spending money on things people don’t really need. 

But “glorify” means something else too: it means when something reveals how great it really is. It’s not until you fully decorate your Christmas tree and turn on the Christmas lights that you can experience the tree “in all its glory”. And that’s what Jesus is saying here: his crucifixion is not talking God up, but is in fact revealing God in all his glory, because Christ’s death on that cross is the ultimate act of love for humanity

And Jesus says “now; at once” because this isn’t a shameful death that maybe one day will be seen by future generations as a good thing. He’s saying right at this moment we see how great God really is, in this time of betrayal and denial and despair and death, we see God in all his glory.

And because of that, this is a role that only Jesus can play. Only God can save us, and only God is worthy of such great glory. So here he is, dying the death that we deserve so that we don’t have to. That’s why Jesus says, “Just as I told the Jews, so I tell you now: where I am going, you cannot come.” In chapter 7 Jesus had said this same thing to the crowds, and the people listening thought, “Will he go where our people live scattered among the Greeks, and teach the Greeks?”  They aren’t clueless though: in chapter 8 they know that death is involved in what he’s saying. There Jesus tells the Jews “I am going away, and you will look for me, and you will die in your sin. Where I go, you cannot come.” This made the Jews ask, “Will he kill himself? Is that why he says, ‘Where I go, you cannot come’?” They knew he was saying something about death.

And it is about death, but not only Jesus’ death. It’s about what happens after we die. That’s why Jesus says to his opponents, “you will die in your sins”.  They will look for a messiah and they’ll never find one, because he was standing in front of them the whole time and they rejected him. They will certainly die, but where Jesus goes they cannot follow.

In today’s passage when Peter says to Jesus, “Lord, why can’t I follow you now?” he knows it has something to do with death too. That’s why he offers “I will lay down my life for you”. And Jesus knows that Peter will in fact die for his faith – church history tells us Peter was crucified upside down for his faith – and so Jesus says, “You cannot follow now, but you will follow later.”

Why can’t Peter follow Jesus where he is going now? Because Jesus is saying his role is not just about the where – death – but about the why – to redeem the lost. You can almost taste the irony in Jesus’ words when he responds to Peter, “Will you really lay down your life for me?” If our salvation relied on Peter dying for us, or him dying for Jesus, we’d all be toast: before the rooster crows he’s already denied Jesus three times!

Peter wants to host Christmas dinner, but he doesn’t know how to cook, he can’t even afford a chicken, and the lease on his house expired on Christmas Eve. Nothing is gained by Peter offering to lay down his life for Jesus at this point. He might be passionate about Jesus now, but as Jesus points out, that passion won’t be enough to carry him when the rubber hits the road. Jesus has a role to play that is his alone. Jesus isn’t being harsh about this to his friends – he calls them “my children”, which is a huge term of endearment – he’s just being realistic. As God’s son, Jesus has a role to play that no-one else can.

Why might that bother us? Why aren’t we always happy to just let Jesus be Jesus and step in to save us from ourselves? Oh, there’s so many reasons. Maybe we hate relying on others, and want to be able to do everything ourselves, so having Jesus die for us makes us feel weak. Maybe we feel we’re not worth it, and having God’s son die for us is too big a price to pay, so we should really pay it ourselves. Maybe we think God is too easy-going, and there are people he dies for that really shouldn’t be saved, to the point that we’d die to keep them out; or maybe we feel God needs to be more generous, because some of our loved ones have turned their backs on him, but really they aren’t bad people so they should make the cut, and we would die to get them in.

Jesus is saying here that’s not our role; it’s his role. It’s God’s price to pay, it’s God’s love to show, it’s God’s glory to be revealed. We all want to follow Jesus, but this is one thing we can’t follow him in. We don’t get to be God. We have to let Jesus be the Saviour.

And that’s okay, because like Christmas, we all still has a role to play. And it is a most excellent part that we get to play, because Jesus says, “A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.”

How is that a new command? That sounds like a typical Christmas message, doesn’t it? “Joy to the world! Love one another! Merry Christmas!” We hear this all the time. Was it new to them? Jesus already said that the Old Testament laws are summed up in Love The Lord Your God, and Love Your Neighbour As Yourself. Nothing new about those commands!

And yet this command from Jesus is so important that Jesus repeats it in John 15. There is something so amazing, so striking in this new command, that John repeats it in his first letter to the churches 11 times, and then twice more in his second letter!

So what is it about this command that is so striking? Well, I think for starters it’s so simple! “Love one another” – it’s a C4K lesson, it’s Sunday School stuff. And yet those of us who have been around a bit know that it only gets harder –Jesus says “as I have loved you”, and the more we understand how much Jesus has loved us, the more we realise how hard it is to really love one another that way. It shows us just how high God’s standards are, how impossible it is to reach them, and yet how worthwhile it is to pursue them anyway. Have people in the church sometimes hurt one another through trying to love each other? Sure. But whatever harm might have been done by people trying to follow this command and doing it badly would certainly not have been reduced by them not trying to follow it at all. Loving one another is always a better way.

But there is a trap here. It’s really easy for us to let this command blend in to the other things that Jesus said about love, like “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.” But Jesus’ command is separate from that. “Love one another” is, in a way, an exclusive command. “One another” is not everyone. He’s talking to his friends, to his disciples, telling them to love each other. And of course this doesn’t deny or downplay what Jesus has said elsewhere about loving your enemy, or loving your neighbour, loving the marginalised, the oppressed, the sick, the poor. We know that Jesus did all these things, and we should follow his example. But Jesus also picked people out of the crowd, people he travelled with, spoke with, shared life with, gave a new command to. Think of all the special moments he shared with the disciples alone. Jesus loved his disciples, and his command is for them is to love one another as he loved them.

There’s an amazing story about the Apostle John that is passed down through the early church fathers, and written down by Jerome in the 300s in his commentary on Galatians: “The blessed John the Evangelist lived in Ephesus until extreme old age. His disciples could barely carry him to church and he could not muster the voice to speak many words. During individual gatherings he usually said nothing but, "Little children, love one another." The disciples and brothers in attendance, annoyed because they always heard the same words, finally said, "Teacher, why do you always say this?" He replied with a line worthy of John: "Because it is the Lord's commandment and if it alone is kept, it is sufficient."”

I love that story, because to me it embodies just how much these words, “love one another”, touched John’s heart, just how important they were to him. But perhaps you’re asking, “Why did Jerome record this story about John in his commentary on Galatians, which was written by Paul? Why isn’t it in a commentary on the gospel of John, or one of John’s letters?” Because Jerome tells this story in his commentary on Galatians 6:10, “Therefore, as we have opportunity, let us do good to all people, especially to those who belong to the family of believers.” That is what it means to love one another.

Someone once said it this way: “It’s not that Christians love the world less; it’s that we love one another more.” I’d say that as Christians we love the world more if we love one another more. Look at Jesus’ words in verse 35, “By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.” This love that seems so exclusive, so inward focused, is actually the way that everyone will know that we are Christ’s disciples; it’s one of the things that makes joining the kingdom of God so attractive. The way we love others tells the world about Jesus; but the way we love each other in the family of believers makes people want to be a part of the family.

And this makes so much sense! Have you ever found yourself alone at Christmas, without family to celebrate with? Before Penny and I were married, I was part of a small number of young men in my church who didn’t have families to celebrate Christmas with. When people in the church realised this, they started inviting us to their homes to celebrate Christmas with them. Sometimes it would be other people who also didn’t have their families close by to celebrate with – they would invite together a group of Christmas refugees, and we’d celebrate together, and that was lovely.

But I remember one year I was invited by one family to join them for their family Christmas. There was mum and dad, and grandpas and grandmas, and the kids and cousins – and me. And they sat around a table weighed down with food till it was creaking, and they laughed and ate and drank and prayed and enjoyed the day together – and I was there. I got to see how that family treated each other, how they celebrated with one another, how they loved one another. And of course I didn’t fit in – I didn’t know their Christmas traditions… I didn’t even know everyone’s names – but for a young man who grew up with family Christmases where everyone got drunk and angry and violent, seeing how this family loved one another and kept Christ at the centre of their Christmas made me desperately wish I was a part of their family.

As followers of Christ, disciples of Christ, friends of Christ, when we go out and love others, we are not just inviting them to follow Christ, but to join us in following him. And when we love one another, we show them that that invitation is worth accepting.

How do we love one another? That’s a sermon in itself! But I’ll say this, something that I think is reflected in the people to whom Jesus first gave this command: there’s something about how you form a community that helps people love one another. Jesus’ disciples spent regular, meaningful time together; they were a group bonded together by Jesus, and yet they had a willingness to be open to others. In my mind those things are all vital to allowing Christians to love one another. That describes bible study groups, prayer groups, other small groups… and it can even describe a church service and even a whole congregation.

But for it to work, for us to be able to love one another effectively, we have to spend regular, meaningful time with one another. You might have a discussion about the footy over coffee every Sunday – that’s regular but not meaningful. You might be willing to share about your life with people, but you only turn up twice a year – that’s meaningful but not regular!

We have to have groups that are linked together by Jesus: if all we do is listen to sermons and then rush off without talking to anyone, or if we choose to sit at home and watch the sermon on YouTube at our leisure, but never actually meet with others, we love Jesus, but will struggle to love and be loved by one another. And if we join a local cycling group, we may love and be loved, but we may not share the bond of Christ.

And these groups have to be open to others joining – otherwise the idea of loving one another as an invitation is wasted! Of course we love our families, but realistically, unless you’re going to adopt a bunch of people, the only time you ever really invite people into your family is when they marry one of your kids. We have to be able to invite people into our group so that when they see how attractive the invitation is, they can actually accept it.

Obviously I’m not saying we need to avoid casual conversations, or cycling groups, or having families! I’m saying that as well as loving our families, as well as loving our neighbours, as well as loving God, if we are going to follow Christ’s new command, we have to make time in our lives to love one another as the family of believers.

That’s not always easy, even once we make the time! I think back to Gary Chapman’s book, The Five Love Languages, which talks about the five big ways that humans express love for each other: physical touch; words of affirmation; acts of service; quality time; and giving gifts. It can be tricky, because the way we show love is also the way we expect love to be shown, and we can sometimes miss each other. And we’re not perfect! Think about Peter: he wasn’t perfect, he didn’t fully understand what Jesus was saying, he wanted to do something that wasn’t his role, and he couldn’t even stick with Jesus till morning. But he loved Jesus and loved the church, so much that he eventually did die for them.

So brothers and sisters, this Christmas, as we seek to love our families, and to love our neighbours, let us also love one another, because it is the Lord's commandment and if it alone is kept, it is sufficient.

 

How are we doing that, Waitara Anglican? It’s Christmas, and we have Christmas services, we’ve already had Christmas activities, and a lot of it is geared towards inviting others – loving them enough to offer them an invitation to join us in what we do together. And it is so important that we hold open the doors of church so that everyone feels welcome to come and join us in following Christ together. But do we also make sure that when they come they see a community of friends who love one another so much that they can’t help but say, “See how they love one another!”?

 

 

In 2019 Penny and I flew from Namibia to New Zealand to attend the wedding of Emily Stoupe nee Smith, who for a time met with us here at Waitara Anglican and helped a lot with the music. We had walked with her and her fiancé through very difficult times, and of course wanted to be a part of their wedding. I actually gave a very nerdy wedding talk about supervillains at their wedding. But one thing that completely amazed me was seeing all the members of the women’s Bible study run by Emily Carpenter. They all took the time and effort and expense to fly to another country to attend the wedding of someone who couldn’t even continue being a member of their Bible study anymore! Those women love one another.

Penny and I could tell our own story of how loved we felt while we were in Namibia, receiving prayers, emails and financial support from the church and its members. And the church in Namibia felt loved too, knowing that their Christian brothers and sisters here in Australia were prepared to send a theologian all expenses paid to teach them at their Bible college.

So as a church, we definitely have it in us to be loving to one another, to make show others that our invitation is worth accepting. But I am fully aware that not everyone in church always feels like that. A few years ago a wonderful Christian family man, involved in church, told me that he felt more loved, more supported, more cared for by his weekly cycling group than he did by his church. And I was so sad. But probably not as sad as he was. How does a church – an organisation with full-time pastoral staff, small groups, a whole raft of programs aimed at people young and old, and rosters of volunteers including literally a job that involves welcoming people – get trumped in loving one another by a bunch of guys in spandex riding bikes around and drinking coffee?

Maybe we could flip the question over to ask of the excellent example we have of Emily’s women’s bible study group: how did they cultivate such love that you could see it from outside and made you wish you were a part of it? My first thoughts are that they spent regular meaningful time with each other; they were a small enough group to get to know each other well and grow bonds with each other; and they were willing to be open to each other about their needs.

Those three things – regular, meaningful time; a small enough group to bond; and a willingness to be open – are common to the Bible study group, the cycling group, and even to us as missionaries.

 

Prayer: 24/10/21 (Rev 2:18-29)

 Heavenly Father,

You are mighty. With your feet of bronze you stand strong and unmoveable against your enemies, and with your eyes like fire your sight can pierce our hearts and see us for who we really are.

We hope that as we come before you today, you will look into our hearts and see our deeds, our faith and our love, as we seek to serve you and persevere in your service. All that we have done and all that we seek to do, we want to be able to commit to you. 

And yet we know that despite trying to be faithful, we can so easily fall short. There are so many in this world who compete for our attention, who teach us to think things and to do things that are against your will for us. Often we listen to these voices because they promise to give us things we crave for ourselves: whether they be pleasures we think will make us feel happier, secrets we think will make us seem cleverer, or rulers that will make us more powerful. Father, please forgive us for opening ourselves to these voices that speak against your truth. Help us not to tolerate such false teachings, but to always turn our faces to you, to seek out your will and to follow what we hear from you to the exclusion of all others.

We thank you for all the activities and opportunities to serve you that you lay before us, and we think of all the opportunities that will become available as the lockdown restrictions ease. We thank you that we will soon be able to meet together again, and we pray for our church leaders as they decide how this can be done in a safe and inclusive way. We pray for all of those who have suffered because of the pandemic, and pray that you will be their comfort. Help us as a church to continue to hold to our love for others as you have loved us. 

We thank you that you have not placed on us a burden we cannot bear, but instead ask us simply to hold on to the amazing message of grace and mercy that you have given us through your son Jesus Christ. We thank you for the provision of well-trained Bible teachers who provide our church with sermons and Bible studies where we can learn your message to us more fully and more deeply. We thank you for the provision of Nick Speyer to our church while Marty was on leave, and we thank you that Marty had the opportunity to rest. Please be with them, and with all of our preachers and Bible study leaders as they help us to hear your voice more clearly. We remember our brothers and sisters around the world who do not have such easy access to high quality Christian teachings, and pray that you will make your gospel known clearly and powerfully throughout the world.

All these things we pray in your son's name,

Amen

Sermon: Rev 2:8-11 Smyrna (Jesus Among The Churches)

 

Today we’re continuing our series on Jesus Among The Churches, looking what Jesus said to the churches at the beginning of the book of Revelation. And you might be wondering “Why is Ben on the ceiling? Why is the video upside down?” You might have even paused the video to see if you can figure out what the problem is. Maybe you tried turning your device over to make things the right way up. Or maybe you’re thinking, “Ha ha, Ben made a mistake in filming his sermon.” Because you know that videos are supposed to go up a certain way, so if a video is upside down then something has gone wrong with it.

But this isn’t a mistake. I’ve done this on purpose to make a point. When things aren’t the way they normally should be, we notice. We recognise it. And not only do we recognise it, but we think of it as wrong. There is an order to the world, a way things should be and should work, and when things don’t follow that order, we notice it, we feel it, and often it’s not a good feeling. If I left the video upside down for the whole sermon, you may refuse to watch to the end, because it’s just too weird. It’s uncomfortable. So let me fix it.

There. But my point still stands: when things in our world are flipped upside down, we notice. We notice, and sometimes we react badly to it because it makes us uncomfortable. Well, in his little letter to the church at Smyrna (only 4 verses), the big lesson that we learn is that Jesus flips the world upside down: often, the way things are valued in this world is upside down to the way things are valued in eternity; often, the actions we take in this world are upside down to their consequences in eternity; and often, the truth of this upside down reality makes people so uncomfortable that they become threatened, angry, even violent.

Smyrna was a wealthy city on the coast of Asia Minor – in modern day Turkey it’s now called Izmir. At the time, Smyrna described itself as the “first city of Asia in size and beauty”, and an ancient visitor to the city said that the people of Smyrna “had the most beautiful of cities under the sun … a friendly sea at their doors, which held the springs of the zephyr” and that the city was crowned “with porticoes and pictures” and they had “gold in excess of what they needed”. It sounds a bit like Sydney! Big, beautiful, wealthy, coastal breezes – everything you could possibly want in a city, right?

But there was a group in Smyrna that wasn’t enjoying the good life. According to Jesus’ letter, the church in Smyrna was suffering. But it wasn’t suffering a series of unfortunate events – droughts, illnesses, earthquakes or some other tragedy. It was suffering at the hands of the people around them. The church in Smyrna was afflicted – literally “pressured” – they were slandered, they were persecuted. And despite the famous wealth of the city, the church in Smyrna was poor.

Now it’s not clear whether the church in Smyrna was in poverty simply because it was made up mostly of poor believers – after all, we know from early church history the gospel spread most rapidly among the empire’s most needy and forgotten peoples – or whether there were some wealthier benefactors in the church who had their property confiscated because of their beliefs – that did happen at the time. The simple fact is that they were poor, which means they lacked power and influence. And it is much easier to persecute people when they are poor, and it is much harder to defend yourself from persecution when you are poor.

But this is the first area where Jesus flips the world upside down in his letter to the church at Smyrna. Jesus says to them in verse 9, “I know your afflictions and your poverty – yet you are rich!” Because even if the church is the poorest group in all of Smyrna, they have something that their richest neighbours are missing – a personal relationship with the First and the Last, who died and came to life again: the Lord Jesus Christ. No-one else in that city of gold and sea breezes and harbour views can boast that; yet Jesus can say that the poor, downtrodden church in Smyrna is rich because they have a relationship with the most high God – something that money can’t buy.

This is just the first upside down flip that Jesus highlights in his letter to the church at Smyrna, and yet it is huge! Jesus said it – not just here; not just to the church at Smyrna. He said it to his disciples: “You cannot serve both God and money.” He said at the Sermon on the Mount: “Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.” He said to the crowds: “the worries of this life and the deceitfulness of wealth choke the word, making it unfruitful.” He said it to the Pharisees: “What people value highly is detestable in God’s sight.” He said it to the back of the rich young ruler: “How hard it is for the rich to enter the kingdom of God! Indeed, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.”

Just think of all the things in our society that we value according to their wealth or monetary worth. Imagine if the most valued classes at school weren’t those that got you into the highest paying jobs, but were what equipped you best for growing your relationship with Jesus!

That might sound unbelievable. Some might even think it’s fanciful. “That’s not how the world works,” some might say. But I’ve seen it. I’ve seen it first hand. I’ve seen a situation where 39% of the population can’t get work, where the poor fish for food in the garbage of the rich and live in whole townships of tiny shacks made of whatever detritus they can cobble together. When there simply are no jobs – not even for the university educated, let alone for the unschooled – learning how to sing songs of worship to God in the choir is much more valuable than learning calculus.

As upside down as it might seem, when you factor in eternity, the way that life really works is that while being poor doesn’t necessarily bring you closer to God, being rich is one of the deadliest distractions from God there is.

And that’s only the start of Jesus’ upside-down message. Remember, the church at Smyrna is not only poor, it is afflicted – it is under pressure, it is being persecuted. It seems that there are two elements to the persecution that the church at Smyrna is facing. People who were describing themselves as Jews were speaking against the church, and because of that slander Christians were facing prison and death at the hands of the Roman Empire. And we might think of persecution coming from similar quarters: there are those who seek to attack the church because they want to undermine its message; and there are those in power who feel threatened by the claim that it is God who is in charge, that Christians will not bow down to any authority that tries to supplant the rightful authority of God, that real riches aren’t measured in money and power.

But Jesus gives us another perspective: he tells the church at Smyrna that it’s the devil who puts some of them in prison to test them, and that those who are slandering them – who call themselves Jews, but are not – are doing the devil’s work in their slander: they’re nothing more than a Synagogue of Satan. Jesus makes it clear that persecution is primarily not a physical problem but a spiritual one. Paul says in Ephesians that “our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil”. And as such, its solution is also not physical but spiritual.

And here’s the next big flip upside down that comes from Jesus: he claims that if they remain faithful throughout their persecution, then even if they are killed, he will give them life; not only life, but the life he gives them will be a victor’s crown (which is like an Olympic gold medal) – it will be proof of their victory, of their success. It will be proof that by being persecuted they won at life!

And again, this is not just the message Jesus has for the church at Smyrna. He said it at the Sermon on the Mount: “Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” He said it to the disciples: “You will be handed over to be persecuted and put to death, and you will be hated by all nations because of me… but the one who stands firm to the end will be saved.” He said it to Peter: “no one who has left home or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or fields for me and the gospel will fail to receive a hundred times as much in this present age: … —along with persecutions—and in the age to come eternal life.” He said it in his final words: “I have chosen you out of the world. That is why the world hates you.”

And what’s even crazier still is that the early church believed Jesus! Paul said to the Thessalonians: “you will be counted worthy of the kingdom of God, for which you are suffering.” James, Jesus’ brother said it too: “Blessed is the one who perseveres under trial because, having stood the test, that person will receive the crown of life.” Paul said it to the Philippian church: “you will be saved—and that by God. For it has been granted to you on behalf of Christ not only to believe in him, but also to suffer for him”. After Peter and John were flogged by the Sanhedrin for preaching the gospel, we’re told “The apostles left the Sanhedrin, rejoicing because they had been counted worthy of suffering disgrace for the Name.” And Peter in his first epistle said these amazing, shocking words: “Dear friends, do not be surprised at the fiery ordeal that has come on you to test you, as though something strange were happening to you. But rejoice inasmuch as you participate in the sufferings of Christ, so that you may be overjoyed when his glory is revealed. If you are insulted because of the name of Christ, you are blessed, for the Spirit of glory and of God rests on you. If you suffer, it should not be as a murderer or thief or any other kind of criminal, or even as a meddler. However, if you suffer as a Christian, do not be ashamed, but praise God that you bear that name.”

Two things about persecution that I think we need to be clear on. First of all, it’s not persecution if people just don’t want to listen to you, or if restrictions include restrictions on the church. Your workplace does not need to give you an opportunity to preach to your co-workers in the lunch room. The government is not persecuting churches by requiring they stay closed during a pandemic. Not everything is persecution; some things just cause suffering, and some things just make us complain like the Israelites in the desert because we don’t get what we want.

Secondly, Christians do a lot to try and alleviate suffering in the world, to fight injustice, to value life, to protect the weak. We do that because we know that’s what God wants for everyone – that’s the picture of heaven that Jesus himself brought with him to earth when he healed the sick and ate with the sinner and fed the poor and showed love to the lost and marginalised. But we can sometimes forget that Jesus also died, and he died willingly. Even though no-one could have stopped him if he said no, Jesus said yes to the cross, because he knew that no matter how worthwhile his life was – and it was: just think about how much we get from studying Christ’s teachings and his actions in the world – but no matter how worthwhile his life was, Jesus knew that our eternity with God in the forever kingdom was worth dying for.

And so Jesus writes his letter to the church at Smyrna and identifies himself as “him who is the First and the Last, who died and came to life again”. And he can say to them “I know your afflictions and your poverty” – he knows them because they are his afflictions! He can say to them, “And yet you are rich” because they are being given the opportunity to gain true riches by being counted worthy of suffering for his Name – as Paul puts it in that amazing verse in Romans 8, we “share in his sufferings in order that [we] may also share in his glory.”

Again, this might sound fanciful. It may sound unreal. But I have seen it. I used to work for a ministry called Barnabas Fund, a charity that supports Christians living in contexts of persecution. Back in 2004 I went to a conference in the middle east for Christian leaders from persecuted churches. We talked about things like how to design churches to prevent bombing attacks; how to comfort Christians forced to flee their homes. Topics that have probably never come up for our church’s ministry think tank. But all of these leaders, whether Coptic or Orthodox or Catholic or Protestant or Pentecostal, all of them wanted to focus not on how to help their congregations escape persecution and flee to safety, but on how to encourage them to remain faithful to Christ even when facing death. These are not people with a death wish! They don’t want to be persecuted! But they see that faithfulness to God in the midst of their own people was more important even than life itself. They want to win at life. They want their crown, and they rejoice at the opportunity to get it.

The church at Smyrna faced slander, imprisonment, the confiscation of their belongings, and they even faced death, all for simply witnessing to the glory of God in Jesus Christ. Jesus has no warnings for the church at Smyrna. He has no rebuke or correction. Jesus’ message to them was simply this: I know your afflictions; Don’t be afraid; Be faithful; Hear what I say. Let’s work backwards through those and see what’s in there for us.

We need to hear what Jesus said to the churches, and we need to accept it as true, despite it turning our world upside down. He says “The one who is victorious will not be hurt at all by the second death.” The second death is explained later in Revelation as being one of two results of the final judgment: when the end time comes, the dead will be judged, and those who have faith in Christ will go on to be with God for all eternity in a new heaven and a new earth; those who do not have faith in Christ will be thrown into the lake of fire – this is the second death. Our eternal destination should be our primary concern, both for ourselves and for all other people. Jesus has made it clear that true riches are only found in a relationship with God, and true victory in life is being faithful to God till the end. We need to listen to Jesus, and let those truths turn our world upside down.

With that in mind, Jesus tells us to be faithful. Our lives need to be a living witness to Christ and his message. Our lives need to speak to the truth of Jesus’ words – that the most important thing in the world isn’t money or power or prestige, but it is knowing God personally. Our lives should show people that we are rich because we know him personally. Our lives should bear witness to that truth, so that when we talk, that’s what people hear; and when we walk, that’s what people see; and when we invite people to come along on the journey with us, that’s what people experience. Being faithful to Jesus means making that truth the defining feature of our lives every day. We should be known for living out what Jesus is known for.

Not only is that truth going to mean putting our life with Jesus ahead of our ability to earn money, but it means when we talking about the truth and live it out and invite others to join us in it we need to expect that people out there will want to stifle or silence that truth, because it turns their world upside down and makes them uncomfortable. People are going to slander us, try to make us seem stupid and wrong and not worth listening to. If we speak up for the marginalised and seek justice for the oppressed and try to alleviate the suffering of the poor, the powerful are going to get upset because we are turning their worlds upside down, and some of us will be put in prison. If we are prepared to send our sons and our daughters out into this world so that others can hear about Jesus, some of them will be killed. This won’t happen because we are amazing superhero Christians, but because Jesus says this is what being faithful looks like in a world where persecution happens; it is how we can share in his sufferings, so that we might also share in his glory.

By being faithful, we’ll attract the devil’s attention, and there will be tests. And that’s why Jesus says Don’t Be Afraid. In the upside down world of Jesus, he tells us that poverty can bring us closer to God, and that persecution allows us to share in his glory. But the thought of facing poverty, slander, prison and death in order to be faithful to Jesus is still a scary thought. So when I imagine Jesus saying this, I don’t hear it as a command: Do not pass Go, Do not collect $200, Do not be afraid. I hear it like what we would say to a child in a thunderstorm or when it’s dark: it’s okay, don’t be afraid. Yes, it’s scary, but you don’t have to be afraid of what you’re about to suffer.

And the reason I hear it like that is because of the first thing that Jesus says to the church in this letter: I know. I know your afflictions and your poverty. Jesus knows that being faithful in the face of persecution is hard. When he was in the garden of Gethsemane, Jesus knew that the Jews were coming to hand him over to the Romans, who would mock him and spit on him, flog him and kill him, and he was afraid. He sweat blood. He begged God to take that cup from him. He remained faithful, but it wasn’t easy even for the Son of God! So when he says I know, he knows! And we can find comfort in that, in knowing that Jesus knows what he’s asking of us.

I know your afflictions. Don’t be afraid. Be faithful. Whoever has ears, let them hear what the Spirit says to the churches.

Sermon: Leviticus 25:39-55 - Slavery: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

 

Hi everybody! Ben Carpentier here.

I feel like I need to start with an apology for the click-baity title of my talk - Old Testament Slavery: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly. I can imagine some people seeing that and saying, “Slavery, good? There’s nothing good about slavery!” And they’re right. The Old Testament law on slavery is one of the areas of the Bible most attacked by non-Christians, because in today’s world slavery is pretty much universally an evil – and yet here in Leviticus we find laws creating a structure for slavery and servitude among God’s people. People ask how we can worship a God who seems to approve of, or at the very least condone and institutionalise, an evil like slavery? Let me say right from the beginning I’m not going to be condoning slavery or defending it; I’m not going to try and explain slavery away, or suggest that it served some necessary purpose in ancient times. I’m not going to make comparisons between Biblical slavery laws and other slavery codes of the ancient world to show that biblical slavery is comparatively better than others.

I don’t need to do any of these things, because my job as a preacher is to put forward what God says through the Bible, and God does not make any of these arguments. Instead, the Bible makes it clear that slavery is a tool of oppressors, and that God stands against oppression. And yet it is true that, when God is formulating the governance and laws for his redeemed people as they move into his promised land, as we have just read in our Bible reading, God includes laws about slavery.

These are not laws outright banning slavery, but laws restricting slavery. And that is pretty confronting. It’s easy to think that if God allows for something in his law, even in a restricted way, he is obviously condoning it or even supporting it. But this is the exact argument that the Pharisees make to Jesus about divorce in Matthew 19:7, when they asked him, ““Why, then, did Moses command that a man give his wife a certificate of divorce and send her away?”” They are asking, "Why did God put divorce into the law if he does not condone it?" In verse 8 Jesus replied, “Moses permitted you to divorce your wives because your hearts were hard.”

Jesus spends that whole conversation explaining that God’s plan for marriage is that it should be for life – one flesh that should not be separated. But God knew that sin would wreck some marriages. He knew some people would seek to break their marriage vows. It’s a terrible thing that hurts families and put women especially in a very vulnerable position. But it's going to happen, because people's hearts are hard. So God made laws to cover it to ensure that, even in this situation that goes against his will, there will be limits.

And in the laws related to slavery, there is a similar logic at work. God’s plan does not require anyone being a slave. But God knows that sin will wreck some people’s livelihoods. But the fact is wherever there are desperate people capable of being oppressed, slavery lives and thrives. So God set down some hard limits, not just to protect people, but so that we would know that he stands against oppression.

But none of that means there is anything good about slavery. So why is my talk entitled “The good, the bad and the ugly”? Because the picture of God rescuing Israel out of slavery in Egypt is the defining picture of his relationship with his people in the Old Testament – it gets mentioned over and over again in the OT law; twice just in our passage today! And the theme of slavery continues to play a huge role in our understanding of Jesus’ work on the cross for our salvation, and our relationship with God as Christians. Now, I am not at all saying that God’s actual rescue of Israel from slavery, or his use of slavery as a metaphor for our relationship with him, somehow redeems slavery or makes it any less awful than it is. In fact, slavery’s awfulness is the point! There may not be anything more comparable than slavery to describe how oppressive sin is, how it traps us, how helpless we are, and how we need to be rescued from it.

Not only that, but the language of master and slave helps to illustrate the relationship that we have with God. We see that in Leviticus 25:43, “Because the Israelites are my servants, whom I brought out of Egypt, they must not be sold as slaves.” The English translation uses two different words – because they are my servants, they must not be sold as slaves – but in the original Hebrew it’s the same word. God did not rescue the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt to set them free to do whatever they wanted: he redeemed them out of slavery so that they could now serve him only.

And the picture goes even further still. Did you know that slaves could inherit the estate of their masters? Here in Leviticus 25:46, and elsewhere in the OT law, we read about people volunteering to become “slaves for life”. And you might wonder, why would anyone voluntarily become a slave to another person for the rest of their lives? Well, one answer is that if you chose to become a slave for life, you stood in the line of that family’s inheritance if the head of the house had no children. You might recall that Abram complained to God in Genesis 15:3, “You have given me no children; so a slave in my household will be my heir.” This was one of the only ways that a foreigner could inherit a parcel of Israel’s promised land.

And this practice of adopting lifelong slaves into the family as heirs was also popular in the Roman culture of Jesus’ time. The New Testament makes it clear that we are more than merely slaves of God – we have been adopted into the line of inheritance. Romans 8:15 says, “The Spirit you received does not make you slaves, so that you live in fear again; rather, the Spirit you received brought about your adoption to sonship.” The word “adoption to sonship” there refers to this adoption of an adult as the heir. Our story as the people of God is one of redemption out of slavery to the oppression of sin, and into the position of heirs of God.

How does this adoption happen? By God himself humbly taking the place of a slave for us. Jesus told us in Mark 10:43: “Whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, 44 and whoever wants to be first must be slave of all. 45 For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.” As Jesus, God became a slave to each and every one of us; he served us; he gave up his life for us. And he did it voluntarily – as if any of us have the power to force God to do anything, much less to enslave him! So when God calls on us to be his faithful servants, who he adopts as heirs, he is asking nothing more than what he has already done for us first. There may not be anything good about slavery, but the story that it tells about how God relates to us is definitely Good News.

So now let’s move from the good to the bad. You may think I don’t need to explain to you why slavery is bad. But it’s worth looking at what God has to say about slavery in the Law, because it serves to further show us that God understands and does not condone the oppressive nature of slavery. We can start with the first verse of our reading, Leviticus 25:39: “If any of your fellow Israelites become poor and sell themselves to you”.

Let’s just pause there. No-one wants to become a slave. To say that OT slavery was voluntary makes it sound like putting your hand up for a church roster. No, slavery is a last resort: if slavery was one of your options, that’s because your other options were poverty, starvation or death. Straight out of the gate we’re seeing it's desperation and poverty that leads to slavery.

So “If any of your fellow Israelites become poor and sell themselves to you, do not make them work as slaves. 40 They are to be treated as hired workers or temporary residents among you”. The Old Testament laws make it very clear that there is a delineation between “hired workers” and “slaves”.

What were the key differences between a hired worker and a slave? There are two main differences. The first one is the kind of work slaves do. Slaves could be a lot of things in ancient times – nursemaids, doctors, business managers :Joseph was basically the prime minister of Egypt as a slave! – but there were some jobs that only slaves did: chopping wood, carrying water, brick-making, mining, working the oars in large ships. These jobs were menial, back-breaking, often dangerous.

But God understands how bad slavery can be: he has already redeemed his people from such back‑breaking labour in Egypt! Allowing the Israelites to enslave each other in this way goes against that message of redemption. So he commands that when an Israelite sells themselves into slavery to a fellow Israelite, they must not be made to do such work. Instead, they must be given the work of a hired worker. This would most usually be farm work – which is still rigorous, hard work! But it is the work that any Israelite with a plot of land would already be doing. It is work with dignity.

The second difference between a slave and a hired worker is found in Lev 25:44: "Your male and female slaves are to come from the nations around you; from them you may buy slaves. 45 You may also buy some of the temporary residents living among you and members of their clans born in your country, and they will become your property." Hired workers can come and go as they please. Slaves are another person's property. And I could talk about all the different things that this means from a legal perspective. But from a slave’s perspective, it really only means one thing: someone can control what you do using violence.

Again, the OT Laws have a whole bunch of limits on the use of this violence - if someone beats a slave to death, they are a murderer; if they cause a serious injury to a slave, the slave automatically gains their freedom; if they treat a slave so badly that they run away, the slave cannot be returned to them. But as a slave, you can still be beaten. Listen to this chilling rule in Exodus 21: "Anyone who beats their male or female slave with a rod must be punished if the slave dies as a direct result, but they are not to be punished if the slave recovers after a day or two, since the slave is their property."

As a slave, your physical wellbeing is in someone else's hands. If your whole family is enslaved, that means they can beat your spouse; they can beat your kids. This is what it means to be a slave. Being a slave is terrible. Again, God understands this miserable reality, and so he puts in this clause that the people he has freed from slavery shall not be ruled over so ruthlessly by their own people.

Furthermore, the period of their servitude is limited. In other places in the Law, it talks about becoming a slave for no more than six years, and being released in the Sabbath year – so every seventh year was a Sabbath year where fields were not worked anyway. This kind of slavery is understood to be in repayment of smaller debts that could be worked off in a shorter time.

But here in Leviticus 25 it talks about slaves working “until the year of Jubilee”. The Jubilee happened every 50th year – after the seventh of seven Sabbath years – and brings about a huge resetting of Israel’s economy. In Australia, our economy is heavily reliant on the real estate and construction industries. Since 2010, house sales were three times more likely to be made to someone who already owned more than one home than to a first home buyer. But in Israel, there were no land sales! Every family was assigned a parcel of land when they first moved into the promised land. But fortunes change, harvests are fickle, maybe not everyone is a great farm manager, and so sometimes people got into financial difficulty and were forced to sell their land to someone else.

But that is the land promised to them by God: how can they sell it? And the answer is the year of Jubilee. Whenever an Israelite “sold” their land, the price took into account how many years were left until the next Jubilee, when they or their family would get their land back.

Of course, if you sold all your land, how could you feed your family? The reason most people would sell their land is because some terrible debt had befallen them, in which case they would find their whole family in slavery – but for such a large amount, six years isn’t enough, so they would become slaves up to the next jubilee, when slaves were freed and land was returned to its rightful owners. 

These debts could be paid off earlier - we read about that from verses 47 to the end, where family members or even the slaves themselves can pay a redemption price before the jubilee has come - but in the worst case scenario, you always knew that, come the Sabbath year, or come jubilee, even if you hadn't saved a cent, even if no relatives had come to your rescue, God ensured that your land and your freedom would be returned to you. Can you imagine everyone in Australia losing all their investment properties every 50 years to people who don’t have houses? That’s how revolutionary Jubilee was.

Jubilee shows us that God’s inheritance to us is eternal – it cannot be traded away for a bowl of soup when you are in desperate times. It also shows us that God's provision is full of compassion: he doesn’t want anyone to be trapped in an endless cycle of generational poverty, desperation and oppression, so he designs a model of governance which does not allow wealth to become excessive, and does not allow poverty to remain entrenched. I wish I could do a whole sermon just on the jubilee, because it is a revolutionary way of rethinking how society can value its people above and beyond the bottom line of profit at all costs, and especially at the cost of oppressing the poor and desperate.

Because now we get to the ugly reality of slavery: it exists wherever the poor and desperate can be oppressed - which means that it still exists today.

In modern times we've made slavery illegal, and so we think that we don't have slaves anymore. But making it illegal never made it go away – it just drove it underground, into the hands of organised crime. Now we call it human trafficking. Sometimes people are kidnapped off the street. But it’s far more common that people are put into a cycle of ever-increasing debts they can never repay; or they are tricked into forced labour with the offer of an income to help feed their family; or they lured into remote areas with promises of work, only to find they don’t get paid, but now they are beaten if they try to escape. There are young women and young men who flee abuse at home, only to find themselves seduced by pimps who use coercion and drugs to sell them into prostitution.

Slavery might be illegal in every country on earth, but today it’s bigger than ever: more people are thought to be in modern slavery today than at any time in history. And it doesn’t just exist somewhere else: every single person who is listening to this talk owns things that were made with the profits of slave labour. Cobalt is a key ingredient in the batteries of phones, laptops, electric cars and home storage batteries: the majority of cobalt is mined by slaves. Much of the charcoal used in the forging of steel is made by slaves. The bricks used to build the sweatshop that our cheap clothes are made in were made by slaves. Imported seafood is 17 times more likely to have been caught by slave fishermen. One study estimates that up to 89% of women in prostitution are trafficked. The list goes on, but the truth is always the same: anywhere poor, desperate people are able to be oppressed, slavery lives on.

If you don’t believe me, then go to the website slaveryfootprint.org and take their survey to find out how many slaves work for you. You will be shocked.

This problem is so big. What can we possibly do? Let me break it down into three simple points: Remember, Rethink, Renounce.

It’s easy to feel powerless. Human trafficking is a huge, international problem, and the governments and law enforcement agencies of the world don’t even fully understand it, let alone have the power to swiftly end it. What can one person, one church do? We can remember. Remember that our God is the God who brought his people out of slavery in Egypt – a whole nation of people all at once! Our God is the God who detests oppression, who stands up for the cause of the poor and the desperate. We can remember the work of Christians before us like William Wilberforce, who fought slavery once before, and succeeded in making it illegal. We can remember those who are suffering in our prayers. I can recommend joining the prayer network of International Justice Mission – IJM. They will send you a weekly prayer update about their work in helping free people who have been enslaved across the world.

It’s also easy to feel like nothing will ever change. Our society is built on supplying us with whatever we want, on companies racing to the bottom in terms of prices, on not asking questions about how anyone can afford to produce things so cheaply, on people having the freedom to make as much money as they want and to spend it in any way that they want, so much so that we now have billionaires racing each other to see who can fly into space first. But we can change how we think. We need to rethink how we see the world, and make sure it aligns with God’s principles of Jubilee. How does this plan or policy or practice reflect God’s desire that everyone is given what they need to sustainably provide for their families, and that the sources of wealth should not become excessively stored up with one person or group of people? How might these plans, policies or practices be threatening the welfare of the poor and desperate, and how can they be changed to protect their interests?

A really simple example of how our church is already doing this is our food pantry. It’s only a small thing, but if it allows a family to keep food on their table and removes one element of financial stress, that contributes to reducing that feeling of desperation which can so easily lead to someone being in a position where they can be oppressed. Even just being a member of a church community has been shown to reduce the likelihood of someone becoming a victim of human trafficking.

It’s easy to just keep on living the lives we are, because that’s what we were doing yesterday, and it’s what everyone else is doing, and it’s how our whole society is set up to run. But we actually can’t do that. We are called by God to renounce – to voluntarily give up – those things in our lives and in our society that are contributing to the oppression of the poor and the desperate. And that is not going to be easy, and it’s not going to happen overnight. We can’t just give up electronic devices, especially when doing so would make us unable to work, unable to study, and in the midst of COVID unable to even connect with each other.

But at the same time, when our remembering and rethinking points out to us places in our own lives that are polluted by human trafficking, we must renounce them. And that most usually means making more ethical purchasing choices, buying from those who can guarantee that their supply chains are free of human trafficking and oppression. Which means buying less, and buying things that are more expensive. Which is hard, because it actually means paying the real cost of the products we use, not an artificially low price that is reduced at the expense of other people’s freedom. That is a real, concrete way of ensuring that the poor and desperate have ways of sustainably providing for their families, and reducing the risk of intergenerational poverty preventing their families from ever being able to escape that desperation.

In all the history of humanity, slavery still has not disappeared. Nor will it, because there will always be poor and desperate people, and those willing to oppress them. But at least the Israelites knew that even if they had to sell their house and their land, and even sell themselves, the year of jubilee ensured that their slavery and poverty would come to an end.

These are huge, society-wide, nation-wide, international problems. But the law of jubilee in Leviticus 25 relied on each of God’s people following his laws to make sure that in their homes people were not being oppressed. So let’s start with that. According to my slavery footprint, I have 13 modern day slaves working for me. How many of those can I set free in seven years, by my next Sabbath year? How many can I set free in 50 years, when it is my Jubilee?

CT Studd, who played on the English cricket team in 1882 in the first Ashes match and was also a missionary in China, India and Africa, put it like this: “If Jesus Christ be God and died for me, then no sacrifice can be too great for me to make for Him.” These are sacrifices God calls us to make, not just today, but every day and throughout our lives. Jesus gave up everything to become a slave for us; so no sacrifice can be too great for us to make for Him.

The Starpath Staff - an Artefact game

 The Starpath Staff

I was made from a sapling oak grown in a lonely field, possibly from an acorn buried by a confused squirrel. My wood was stripped, treated and used as a walking staff, passed down from father to son over generations in the Treue clan, worn smooth by the hands of many men of the same blood. I eventually ended up in the hands of the sixth son of six sixth sons, a wizard of remarkable natural ability called Macsech. Once he achieved power as a fully fledged wizard, Macsech decided to imbue me with magical power, since I was already a remarkable object both in history and make.

First, he had me planed into a hexagonal shape, and shod with meteoric iron. Then, taking me to a place of natural leylines, where mages of old had erected a stone circle, Macsech planted me into the centre of the circle on the night of the summer solstice. After ceremonially cutting his palms, he grasped my shaft with both his bloody hands and called out words of power, binding me to the Treue lineage. Once the ritual was complete, the places where Macsech gripped my shaft had dark wood marks of the wizard's fingers and palms; otherwise, the rest of me took on a redwood lustre.

I quickly became known as Macsech's Starpath Staff, because it was obvious where the wizard had walked when one looked on the ground and saw my hexagonal mark left in the ground. I was always said to have a SERIOUS air, as though to say I should not be messed with; I had a kind of WARM pulse, reminiscent of heartblood; and I was known to be incredibly LOYAL to my maker, never leaving his side, even by force.

Eventually I would just become known as the Starpath Staff. But I'll always think of myself as Macsech's: it is his hands that still grip my haft.

One day, the king grew paranoid at the growing power of the Treue family - due to its powerful heritage and large landholdings supporting the large family - so he marched against Macsech and the Treue clan. Standing atop his tower, Macsech called upon the power in me to protect the Treue, and struck my butt down upon the roof of the tower six times. In doing so, he summoned six winds that pushed back the armies of the king, until they were simply unable to enter the Treue lands. The spell burned my butt with scorch marks that could never hence be removed.

As an object of magical power, I have a better sense of the true nature of magic which eluded even Macsech in the heights of his power as an archmage. Because at its heart the essence of magic is chaos which wizards strive to bring into order, I always feared that this chaos, if too deeply tapped, would overcome the Treue and plunge them into chaos, destroying the family. My purpose is to draw together and protect, strengthen and empower the Treue. I am of their blood; I am part of their family. Indeed, aside from their land itself, I am their longest lived member. So they must never discover the inner chaos of the magic they wield.

After many years and more adventures, Macsech finally passed on, and I was passed on to his sixth son, Vol. Like all sixth sons, Vol was quite independent of the family, and also had the natural magical ability of his fathers. Scarred by the attack of the king on their lands as a child, Vol decided that it was time for a change of government; one which would place his family in a position of safety, prosperity, and comfort. He was also an ambitious young man though, and felt himself more intelligent than the average person, and more deserving to rule than the present line of kings. In fairness, they were unhealthily paranoid, and probably slept with their sisters or something.

It was in the hands of the wizard Vol that I struck down the king himself. Vol entered the king's presence, and of course was made to relinquish all weapons before entering his court. However, when the king and Vol came to blows when arguing about the king wishing to resume control of the Treue lands, I found my way into Vol's hands, and struck the mighty blow that smote the king in his place, using the fury of the Treue to extinguish not only the king himself, but his entire lineage to the sixth degree of separation. Apparently this was a little bit excessive - there were a few cousins of Vol who had been married into the royal line in generations passed, who suddenly disappeared - but since many of the king's royal guard were also his family members, it placed Vol onto the throne almost immediately and without contest. It seemed efficient at the time.

Vol never really lost me... but I had become FEARED. My power was now considered both legendary and terrible. As a symbol of Vol's power and right to rule, I was mounted above his throne. And there I stayed. Vol never touched me again.

It was 10 years and six days later that I would again feel the ground under my butt, and the touch of Treue fingers around my shaft. This time, the enemy was a foreign power, seeking to invade the country. Of course, now, the whole country was the domain of Treue blood - crown land and all that - so when Vol's sixth son, Riarra, was called to lead the armies of the land into battle to protect its borders, he reached over the throne and took hold of me. He was but a boy when his father became king, but he knew full well my power; he knew that I had made his father king. He did not take me lightly.

Riarra was too much a sixth son, however. Oh yes, we went to war. He still felt loyalty to his family. But he was an independent soul, and he resented having to go into battle when he would have much rathered spending his time in the substantial library of his wizard-king father. He knew that, though he might carry the mystical heritage of his father, his eldest brother would inherit the political rule. And this was what Vol always wanted - he was politician first, wizard second. Riarra, on the other hand, just wanted to lose himself to the magic.

This meant he was also much more discerning in his use of my power. He knew that his own people feared my power. And so, weaving his magic around him, he snuck unseen into the enemy camp, planning to use my power to weaken the entire army. He was successful - of course he was, with my help. From the middle of their camp, I sent the enemy soldiers into a chaotic frenzy. They drew their swords and struck at each other, seeing themselves all as their own worst enemies. The night was one of screaming and blood. The army destroyed itself before the next sunrise.

Unfortunately, I am the Starpath Staff, and although Riarra was invisible to the eye, I continued to leave my stamp upon the ground where he trod. The enemy general - a woman by the name Condur - saw these marks, and struck out wildly towards Riarra. He blocked the blow with my own shaft, and I did my utmost to protect him. He survived, but the sword split me in two. The explosion was devastating. It wasn't my fault: I was not built to be broken! I was attempting to arrest the chaotic power of the magic. But this was too much, and it all came out.

It would be a long time before I was reformed. Riarra dropped me like a piece of garbage - well, two pieces - and ran. I fell into the trampled mud of the enemy camp, and there I stayed. Blood fell about me as the soldiers continued to vent their bezerk rage on one another. Then rain fell, turning the ground to mud. Then snow fell, and remained until the next spring. Finally, after the snow had thawed, I was found again.

The man who found me was Deyflin, leader of a group of bandits who had stumbled across the deserted camp of soldiers and the carnage which had been covered through the winter. As the frost thawed, it revealed bodies to be looted and tents to ransack. I had sat there alone for the winter, but not lonely - my warmth meant there was a little patch of grass around me free of the winter chill, which attracted small animals scavenging for food among the snow and ice. Deyflin also came to me with a hunger - a hunger for wealth and power. In that he reminded me of Macsech's son, Vol. Upon seeing my two halves sitting on the bare ground, where not even snow dared to fall, he felt the same fear that my power had inspired in others. But if you want to lead a group of cut-throats, you quickly learn that you can't show any fear. So with a display of bravado, he called out to his fellow bandits, exclaiming that he had found some obviously powerful item, and then once he had ensured they were all watching, he reached down and grabbed the two pieces of my shaft in each hand.

He awoke a few minutes later in a tree. I had to make sure he took me seriously. The second time there was less bluster, and a bit more respect. After all, I did sense in him a hint of Treue blood - the grandson of an illegitimate union - and since I was getting bored, that was good enough for me. Besides, I needed to be repaired and brought back to my former glory.

Deyflin took me back to his "court". It was a far cry from Vol's actual kingly court - a ramshackle longhouse, a few wattle and daub huts, and now several more tents than they had before looting the decimated soldier camp. Deyflin was no stranger to violence or battle, and upon sensing the power in my halves, he made the decision to have me turned into two fighting shillelagh instead of trying to reform my original staff form. Having my head shod with cold iron - I suppose meteoric iron is hard to come by as a bandit - I now had two heads, and he carried me holstered upon his belt.

Now, I've got to say that before this I had only very rarely been wielded in anger. Macsech was the type to walk softly and carry a big stick. But Deyflin walked softly and carried two big sticks. He was a master at cracking heads. He was ruthless, but not unnecessarily violent. He knew that if you crush the snake's head the body goes limp, and together we travelled the dark paths of the night, finding the dens of thieves, pirates and other low-lives, catching their leaders unawares, and beating seven colours of refuse from them. Some had to die - you know these leader types: they can be very stubborn - but others were willing to cede their groups to Deyflin after a good enough beating. After a few years of consolidation, he had really earned his title King of Bandits, and had groups under his control up and down the countryside.

It was at this time that my name changed, as did my reputation. No longer did I leave my star path in the dirt; now I travelled the paths lit only by stars. And I was no longer one, but two - in the hands of Deyflin, I became the starpath staves.

But alas, all good things come to an end. As Deyflin's power grew and consolidated, he needed my power less and less. We sat atop a makeshift throne more and more. Despite the pivotal role I played in building up his power base, the stories increasingly spoke of Deyflin and his power and his skills, and the starpath staves didn't really factor in. I became just another set of weapons in the arsenal of the bandit king - weapons that were used less and less.

Ten more years! Ten long years went by, ticked by, inched by in the flickering light of a scarcely used armoury, before I saw the sun again, and felt the warm touch of Treue skin upon my hafts once more. Apparently Vol had made numerous promises to his nobles that he would take care of this bandit king menace, and so one day the king's knights came crashing into the longhouse, there was chaos left and right, and I was cofiscated - confiscated, can you believe it?! - and, collected up with all the other weapons, we were assigned to the king's armoury instead, for the use of his fighting men. I dreaded sitting in an armoury for more years, and I very nearly took it out on the knight who grabbed me, but when he touched me I could tell that he was the son of Tezzer, who was the son of Yeltsin, who was the son of Framlin, who was the father of Macsech. So I showed him some mercy.

Of course, knights are not mages, and to them I was just a stick - well, two sticks. They like swords and spears and lances and the like. I was easily the most powerful weapon in the armoury - I had killed a king's whole family in one blow! I had crushed the skulls of some of the biggest badass bandits out there! But no, I wasn't shiny and sharp enough. I wasn't an axe with delusions of grandeur; I wasn't a kitchen knife gone mad. Well, it didn't matter to me anyway. I could bide my time.

Turns out I didn't need to wait that long. It turns out that Tezzer's son - who was named Framlin also, after his great grandfather - was given a quest to go and slay a horde of undead which had been raised by an evil necromancer in the swamps to the west. Apparently these skeletal warriors were unharmed by swords and spears, because their blades simply glanced off their magical bones. Enter the starpath staves. I knew how to crush bones good. I mean, er, well. I spent a long time in the hands of warrior types. They are not known for their good diction. It rubs off.

Framlin the Younger was dispatched as part of a circle of knights to go and face this undead menace. Young Framlin wasn't as confident fighting with two hands as Deyflin had been. Knights are more of a sword and board - that is, shield - type of warrior. At one point, Framlin had even been considering leaving half of me behind, to use me as a club. Can you imagine? A club!? What am I, a slab of wood dragged across the field by a neanderthal to club a woolly mammoth? No thank you. While dual-wielding might seem awkward, when done properly it is a thing of finesse and fury. I made sure that once he had one half in his hand, the warmth of his family blood called to his off hand to take my other half. I gave him a few pointers - just little tips in muscle movement and weight distribution that I had learned from my time with Deyflin - and together, Framlin the Younger and I went out to face the evils of the swamp.

Now this circle of knights were a proud bunch, and they called themselves the Light of Men. They were going to fight supernatural darkness, after all, and they felt they had the blessing of their god on their side. They started off haughty and light-hearted. But once they faced their first platoon of skeletal fiends - warriors who neither tire nor fear, who fight until each bone is broken, whose eyeless sockets and baleful grinning skulls would strike fear into the most hardened heart - after they had lost their first friends to the rusty blades and bony clawing hands, the Light of Men darkened considerably. Simple warriors were no match for the dark mysticism against which they fought, yet fought they did; with Framlin wielding my might, they were eventually victorious, driving back the darkness of the necromancer's foul magics into the foul swamps where they belonged. I protected Framlin every day he was in that awful swamp: not only from skeletal warriors, but from the cold, the damp, the biting flies and the diseases that travelled on the putrid air. I kept his spirits high, allowing him to combat the unholy fear these undead soldiers brought with them. Framlin and five of his fellows returned victorious to the castle, thanks to me.

Together with all the other weapons and armour of the returning heroes, I was BLESSED by the king's archpriest. It was only at this point, as I was brought into court for the ceremony, that King Vol recognised me! I was returned to my position above the throne, and there I stayed, watching over the king's rule, his good and bad decisions, his victories and defeats. But I played no part in them. I just sat there, back on the wall, and watched.

Tol gave way to Tem, who passed the crown to Sestus, who had only daughters and left the throne to Cyrele, who ruled a long, long time. Cyrele's grandson inherited the throne: his name was Tongor. Then there was Ellin, then Nifal, then Elcede. Centuries of peace and prosperity passed. Not only that, but while the bloodline of Treue grew broad, it seemed to become more shallow. The wealthier and more successful the family became, the fewer children they seemed to have. Several generations passed with no sixth sons, and I feared that magic might forever leave the bloodline.

Eventually, peace becomes the norm and the watchword; the treasure more valuable to the kingdom than gold. Meanwhile, the name of the starpath staves has become a byword for power, violence, infamy and bloodshed. Despite being blessed by the archpriest of old, I was considered an object of a bygone era. Magic was dying, and with it the influence of all things magical. Eventually it was decided that it is unseemly for me to be left above the throne as I symbolised outmoded concepts, and so after hundreds of years I was removed, relocated to the vault of a small church in the outskirts of one of the king's towns.

I suppose my next keeper would be the historian, Balarriel. He was an old man, a priest by trade I believe, though his love was objects of old far more than people of the present. He became the curator of the collection of sacred objects of which I was part, and when he realised that he had me under his care - the actual starpath staff, wielded by the legendary Macsech of the royal family Treue - he became more than a little besotted with me. Of course, he never wielded me - he knew better than to touch the staff of Treue blood when he was of some inferior family - but he treated me with great respect and care. The small rear hall of the chapel that all we holy artefacts called home was hidden away from the public - no pilgrims came to see the relics that time and culture would rather forget - but Balarriel was intrigued with stories of my maker and the magic he wielded. Macsech and I had traversed the length and breadth of this land, after all, and there were scant few square miles which had not at one time felt the imprint of the starpath staff in their soil at one point.

But Balarriel cared less about Macsech than he did about unlocking the secrets of the power of the magic he had wielded. I had been around; I knew the destructive power of the chaos, and I was not going to let this befuddled old historian unleash it on the world. He was not worthy. He was no sixth son. He was not Treue. So I led him astray. I never spoke to him, and he never laid a finger on me, but all it took was a flickering of the candlelight to highlight some passage on a scroll while shadowing another, or a chance gust of wind to flip a page while he was off making his tea, or a warming of the hearth fire to lull him to an early night's rest. I led him down the wondrously ludicrous path of alchemy, and within a few years he had lead on the brain and hemlock under his fingernails. He died of something - I don't even know what, I didn't much care. It was only once he was gone that I realised it was unlikely anyone else was going to come and pay attention to me. I had relegated myself into the past. I had become FORGOTTEN.

It's difficult to know how much time passes inside a room with no windows. After Balarriel died, there was the occasional visitor into our room, but after a few years there wasn't even a light under the door. Time passed. It stayed dark. That didn't bother us too much: it's not like we have eyes; we just know what's going on. The sounds of dereliction and decay were our only companions. We could hear the other sacred items tarnishing, fading, tearing, falling apart. It came to be that whenever something actually broke, it was such a break to the monotony of nothingness that we would actually briefly glow with the dull, red light of our warmth. We started talking to ourselves. Don't call us crazy: it's easy to talk to yourself when you are actually in two parts already. Thankfully, we aren't identical - the break from the wretched sword blow by that enemy soldier woman - what was her name again? - didn't cut us cleanly in half. So now we are the long and short starpath staves. Long staff mostly talks about our time with Vol, with Deyfrin and with young Framlin. Long staff likes to remember the battles, the victories over foes. Short staff is more reflective. Short staff reminisces about the chaos we sewed when Riarra took us into Condur's camp - Condur, that's her name! - or when Balarriel spoke of Macsech. Then we get sad. Both of us miss Macsech. The best times were always with Macsech.

Though we have travelled up and down the land, we began to dream of returning to the ancestral land of our family, the Treue - to the field where our sapling first grew, where Macsech's tower first stood, and where the Treue generations long called home. They probably don't even live there anymore. They made the castle their home. They probably gifted their ancestral lands to some minor nobles by now. By now our brother and sister oak trees in the neighbouring copses are probably gigantic - or they have been turned into houses, or boats, or seige weaponry, or other mundane uses. What was that? Oh, it was the tapestry wearing through and falling to the floor in a cloud of dust. Good guess, short staff! Long staff had predicted the next thing to go would be the collection of religious texts, but those little worms have a few years to go yet.

All of a sudden there is light. And it's not sunlight, nor is it the light of a flame. It is some strange, unearthly light, almost as if lightning had been captured and put inside a flask. It is too white, too clean, piercing among the dust and cobwebs (even that family of spiders had long since passed away, once the other insects had precious little to feast on). And what's that? There is a person! No, wait, two people! A man and a woman, or at least that's what it seems. We can't tell from what they are wearing - so strange! They must be foreign. Both wear their hair long, but only one has a beard. We assume the one with the beard is a man. The other has a slighter build. We assume she is a woman. Although their argot is nothing we have heard before, the manner in which they talk reminds long staff more than a little of Deyfrin. It has that cruder air, that dash of bravado, that hint of desperation. But who cares who they are: it's real live people! Amazing!

He - we're calling him Flin, because he reminds us of Deyflin - is off investigating the tomes. They look more like Swiss cheese than they do books anymore. He doesn't seem impressed. But the girl - we'll just call her Missy for now - she seems more interested in the table upon which we rest. She might see us! She's got to see us: most of the other things here have rotten, decayed, rusted. But not us. No, long staff and short staff have the Treue blood imbuing us with warmth, with energy. She probably would have noticed our faint glow if those awful, garish white lights they carry didn't flood out everything else. Regardless, her eyes are sharp enough, because she does notice us. Missy says something, loud enough that Flin interrupts his endless nattering - probably complaining that everything looks like rubbish here - and he comes over to look. Yes, it's definitely us they have seen. We're the best objects here by far. Missy seems curious; Flin sounds more dismissive. We can just imagine what he's saying: "What, two sticks? Worthless." He probably prefers swords.

But Flin was still the first to pick one of us up - long staff, of course – probably compensating. Missy, not to be left out, picked up short staff. Flin starts swinging long staff about - he's obviously got no idea what he's doing - and long staff remembers young Framlin, remembers helping him out by adjusting the weight a little here, quietly suggesting a direction there. Long staff is enjoying the memories of battle so much, long staff is almost trying to convince Flin of how worthwhile we are. We can't think of anything worse than being left in this sacred crypt, this mausoleum for forgotten holiness. Flin just didn't seem to get it though: it was as though he'd never wielded a weapon in his life. He just couldn't seem to appreciate our fineness.

So when Missy picked up short staff, short staff decided to also go all out, to convince her that the starpath staves were worth rescuing from this dank place. At first, short staff filled her with warmth. She was confused, intrigued, but still not quite coming to terms with our power. So short staff decides to show how serious we are, and levitates her off the ground. It's a relatively low level magic, but Macsech found any number of uses for it back in the beginning. Besides, we don't want to expose the new keepers to too much magic all at once; not with the chaos it so often brings.

Funny, Missy and Flin seem absolutely astonished at the little bit of levitation. Flin is pointing his torch at Missy and making it go click. Strange little box torch. Long staff says it actually shows a picture of Missy floating off the ground on its side. That's a novel magic! Why would they be so impressed with a little levitation when this Flin can control such fine illusions? No matter, short staff did the trick, and certainly got both of their attentions. Missy is now holding short staff in both her hands, her own torch box sitting in our place on the table, and in the light can see the original imprint of Macsech's left hand in the wood of short staff’s shaft.

At the same time, Flin is looking over at Missy, and thoughts are clearly running through his head. He looks down at long staff, gives another experimental swing, and then looks back at Missy, particularly at her head. He takes a few quiet steps forward - very much like Deyflin now, quiet and malevolent - slowly raising long staff up higher. He clearly sees the value of the starpath staves now, and long staff was never against the occasional crushed skull, so why not? We don't want to be split up, after all. Closer and closer Flin stalks, coming within melee distance. And at just the moment the blow is being struck, Missy places her left hand into Macsech's mark on short staff.

There is a lurch, as though years, decades, centuries flash past. Missy's mother, you see, was a Hastings, but her great great grandmother was a Berdwyn, and her great grand aunt had been a Vauxnell, and her great great grandmother had been a Rombi. A Rombi by blood, but by marriage she was a Treue. Macsech's wife had been a Rombi before he married her. This girl, short staff suddenly realised, is a daughter of their master! She is of Treue blood! She is family! And long staff was now a hair's breadth from her skull.

We dig deep into our memory, and remember the magic that protected the family from those who long ago would harm them. We remember the bad king. We remember Vol. Long staff clatters to the ground, the hand which had been holding him having disappeared into the dusty air. Along with his entire family. And their families. And probably their gardeners and mathematics tutors. No matter: for when Missy Hastings turns around, she will only think that Flin had left, left and dropped long staff at her feet. So she reaches down to pick up long staff. Why shouldn’t she? She has nothing to fear. After all: she is family.