4 Sunday of Epiphany – 8am Holy Communion

Revd Canon Harriet Neale-Stevens

As you came into the cathedral this morning, you may have noticed the paper doves that are hanging around the building, each one decorated with its own individual prayer. The doves have been made by the children of St Jude’s Primary School, just up the road – and as I’ve been hanging them up over the past week, I have been able to read each prayer at a time. Far from being childish or naïve, the prayers are strikingly deep and incredibly moving. They are direct, and relentlessly hopeful, and express a level of reliance and trust in God which many of us might wish we had ourselves.

Here's a selection of some of their prayers:

Thank you for being the light of the world because without you we would be nowhere.

Love is everything – love is God and love is Jesus – help us to keep loving.

Help us with our decisions every day, help us when life is hard.

Everybody needs love and God always has more love to share.

Hope is big, hate is tiny, love is big, God’s love is huge.

 

And this rather wonderful one:

Dear God please may you give joy – you are the best joy in my entire life.

There is something quite profound in the words of these children, these prayers.  Their love of God and their boldness in expressing it is quite infectious – I suspect we’d all like, for ourselves, some of their hopefulness, and their assuredness in God’s providence and care and love.

Hopeful and robust they may be, but these children are also deeply aware of the troubles of our time. They pray for peace and for an end to war, for those in need.

 

Dear God, please bring peace to the world, help us to spread peace and joy.

Help the wars to stop, help the people who have been wounded, help peace to rule.

Dear God, please help my country, Syria, to be protected from the war because it is my home.

Please help those who have no house and no money.

 

These children have identified the darkness in the world and through their prayers they call upon God to bring light. Just as we have prayed in our collect today: almighty God, creator of all things, who in the beginning didst command the light to shine out of darkness: grant that the light of the glorious gospel of Christ may dispel the darkness, and shine into the hearts of all thy people…

 

And one final prayer written on a dove reads as follows:

Dear God – hold my hand, and keep us well and safe.

This child knows instinctively that God is with them – that God in Christ has a hand in which they can place their own. That we are always in God’s keeping, that he will never let us go. 

It’s the assuredness of these prayers that has really struck me this week, as I’ve read through them. Their unfailing hopefulness, and the authority with which the children call upon God to bring their hopes to fruition.

There is something very prophetic in their words, in their confidence, in the authority of their young voices.

Today’s readings call us to consider the authority of God’s prophets, raised up from among God’s own people; from the midst of them, and yet hearkening unto God.  And children, very often, are the prophets of our own time.

Our first reading from Deuteronomy, where we met Moses reassuring the people that the Lord would raise up a new prophet – one who would speak his word directly – sets the scene for today’s Gospel.  Where we met Jesus – in the synagogue – on the Sabbath.

Jesus teaches as one who has direct authority. He’s not like the scribes who teach from the scroll, but one who is speaking words that God is putting into his mouth, one who speaks all that the Lord commands him.  Jesus is the both the prophet raised up from among the people, and the answering word of God himself.

When Jesus is present, extraordinary things come to pass. The word is no longer a hope but a living reality. Jesus’s teaching is no theory lesson but the living word in action – the word made flesh.

And so when a man with an unclean spirit comes forward in the synagogue and cries out to him – Jesus immediately rebukes the spirit inside him – Be silent, he says, and come out.  This is a new teaching – with authority – a teaching that transcends the rules and the regulations of the Sabbath – because Jesus by his very nature cannot separate the theory from the practice – he is the living word. What he speaks comes to pass – his authority is not of this world.

Be silent, he says to the unclean spirit, and the spirit speaks no more.

Be sill, he says to the raging storm and the waters of the sea come to a calm.

Get up, he says to the sick and the lame and they leap to their feet.

We know that this prophet speaks the very words of God because his word is his action. His word calls all creation to order and account.

The Greek word in this text for the kind of authority Jesus has – is to be understood as divine power – power that can overthrow evil, and take down darkness.  Through the power of Jesus’s word we glimpse the new world he is inaugurating – a world where storms are stilled, where wounds are healed and where the powers of darkness and death are overthrown.

It is the world that the children envisage through their prayers – a world of no more war, of no more hunger and thirst, of no more poverty and sickness. A world of total reliance on the power and authority of God to supply and sustain. A world where the joy and love of God run free. It is the world we hope for, and it’s a world about which the children prophesy quite naturally. They know that all is not yet complete. And that we are waiting on the Word to finish speaking, on that day when all creation will be brought to its fullness in Jesus Christ our Lord.

Amen.