Today, on the Fourth Sunday of Lent, known as Laetare Sunday, the sombre purple of Lent softens into rose. Thinking what to say today, I saw the importance of home and the theme of homecoming woven throughout the readings and mirrored in the focus of Mothering Sunday. In Joshua, the Israelites celebrate their first Passover in the Promised Land, a long-awaited homecoming after years in the wilderness. In the Gospel, the Prodigal Son returns to his father’s house, and we witness the joy of reconciliation. And in Paul’s words to the Corinthians, we are reminded of the ultimate place of belonging, as being reconciled to God in Christ, the one who makes all things new. Many of us knows the longing for home. I still remember the first time I was away from home as a child, on a school trip. The adventure and excitement couldn’t quite take away the ache of homesickness. Home is where we are known, where we are loved. Even as adults, we may feel this even on holidays. We visit wonderful places, have lovely experiences, but there’s something about returning home, stepping through the door, putting the kettle on for a brew, that fills us with comfort and peace.In my work as a chaplain, I see this longing in patients. They are deeply appreciative of the skill and care they receive in the hospital, yet many long for the familiar comfort of home. For many of us, our beautiful church here at St. Stephen’s also carries this sense of home. It is a place where we gather as a church family, where we are nurtured by Word and Sacrament, where we find connection and belonging.The Gospel’s parable of the Prodigal Son captures this longing for home at its deepest level. The son, lost and alone, comes to his senses and realises that home is where he belongs. But the most striking moment in the story is not his decision to return, it is the father, did you notice, running to meet him, even before he’d had chance to say sorry. This image of the father, filled with compassion, running to embrace his child, is one of the most tender in scripture. It reminds us that God’s love is not grudging or distant, but extravagant and eager. This story also speaks to the connection we long for with one another. Just as the father and son are reunited, so we are called to be a people of reconciliation. As St. Paul reminds us, God entrusts us with the message of reconciliation, calling us to build bridges of love and forgiveness. Mothering Sunday deepens these themes. Historically, it was a day to return to one’s mother church, the church of baptism or the cathedral at the heart of the diocese. It was a day of homecoming, both physical and spiritual. This tradition reminds us that the Church, like a mother, nurtures us in faith. Through the Sacraments, the liturgy, and the community of believers, the Church draws us into a deeper connection with Christ, who is our true home.This day also honours earthly mothers and those who show maternal care, reflecting the life-giving love of God. This nurturing love is seen in Christ’s Passion, the ultimate act of care and self-giving.But this theme of homecoming is not just about place; it is about connection. It is about being known and loved. In our daily lives, this might mean pausing to give thanks for those who have shaped our faith: the parents or grandparents who taught us to pray, the friends who encouraged us, the clergy who guided us. It also challenges us to be people of welcome, creating spaces where others can feel at home. As we reflect on home, it’s worth considering how the idea of homemaking has changed in our lifetime. Once seen as the primary domain of women, homemaking today is a shared responsibility, shaped by the diversity of modern family life. While the practical aspects of homemaking, cooking, cleaning, raising children, have shifted, the heart of homemaking remains the same: creating spaces of safety, love, and connection. In many ways, homemaking is a sacred calling, mirroring Christian values, preparing a place for us where we feel truly at home. As we reclaim the value of this role in its broader sense, whether in our families, our church, or our communities, we participate in the Christian mission of love and hospitality.For some, Mothering Sunday can be a difficult day. Loss, strained relationships, or unfulfilled longing for motherhood, may make this a time of pain. Yet even here, the Church offers the comfort of God’s unchanging love. Like the Prodigal Son welcomed to the banquet, today we are invited to the table, the Altar of the Lord, where we are made whole. The rose vestments of Laetare Sunday remind us of the joy and beauty at the heart of our faith, even amid the wilderness of Lent. This sense of homecoming is ultimately fulfilled in Christ, who reconciles all things to himself. Our earthly homes and even our church home point us toward the eternal home God prepares for us. In the words of the psalmist: “In your presence there is fullness of joy; at your right hand are pleasures forevermore” (Psalm 16:11). And as St. Augustine wrote, “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.”On this Mothering Sunday, let us give thanks for those who have nurtured us, for the Church that sustains us, and for the Father who runs to meet us with open arms. As we journey through this Laetare Sunday, may we rejoice in the God who welcomes us home and challenges us to make room for others. Let us find joy in the promise of home, both now and in the life to come. Amen
So many things are done to us to make us think one way or another way. Headlines in newspapers, particularly online, often bear little relation to the content of the article. Photos of world events can be very misleading, the internet, and specifically social media, is a battleground of differing opinions and outright lies which are so confusing that some people just believe them all or at least apply a sceptical mindset only to the ones which contradict the earlier opinion they were given. News agencies, politicians and preachers constantly contradict each other and there is a general lack of faith in the skills of experts, even to the point of some groups of people believing that every politician, doctor, nurse and so on is in some kind of cahoots, to which we offer the obvious analysis that trying to get ten people to agree to something is impossible, let alone five percent of the world. It’s a wonder that anyone listens to anyone at all. And nor do we, every day at Mass I hear the Word of the Lord addressed to me, and reply ‘Praise to you, Lord Jesus Christ’, but how often do I really attend to it? This may be partially distractedness but surely there is also an element of resistance. If I were to listen, my life would be turned upside down, or maybe I would not know what to believe after that. Where, like everything else, would it end? The disciples accompanying Jesus on the way to Jerusalem also do not want to hear his words. He has told them that he is on his way to suffer, die and rise again, but they simply don’t want to know. So the Lord dramatically challenges them to open their ears. He is transfigured in their sight and a voice from heaven cries out, ‘Listen to him.’ It’s a revelation that the blind man, and the paralytic and the demoniacs and the lepers do not need, for they know Him anyway, it’s a sign to the terminally confused, his disciples, and to us.God promises to us more than we could ever imagine, an infinity of joy and utter freedom. Abraham in the first reading is promised descendants as many as the stars of heaven. But God’s promises leave no one unchanged. Abraham is enveloped in darkness and his life is bound by covenant to God, the Creator of those very stars, and he loses tight control of his life. He loses his home, and his security, if indeed we find this world to be home, or security.Jesus is on his way to Jerusalem to make his ‘exodus’ into a freedom which infinitely transcends that given to Israel when she left the bondage of Egypt. He invites the disciples to accompany him freely on this journey out of the bondage of sin and death. But, like the rest of us, they are afraid. For I may long for that infinity of love which is God’s own life, but also fear its fire; I thirst for God’s unbounded freedom but freedom is frightening. Fyodor Dostoevsky tells the story of the Grand Inquisitor, who asserts that ‘nothing has ever been more insufferable for humanity and society than freedom. In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us; “Better that you enslave us, but feed us.”’- and that could be a motto for social media couldn’t it? Tell us lies, but give us something to hate. We have always been at war with Eurasia.The contemporary American author Annie Dillard claimed that listening to the gospel is the most risky thing one can do: ‘The Churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life jackets and signal flares.’ And she is entirely right, if Jesus is how He is shown to us in the Gospels and if His disciples are like they are shown to us as well, then we should be like them and that is profoundly dangerous, and our life jackets will not work and, perversely, we should hope that they would not, because it is not this world which can harm us.The final words of this gospel are almost chilling: ‘When the voice had spoken, Jesus was found alone. And they kept silent and in those days told no one any of the things they had seen.’ Jesus, who had been seen conversing with Moses and Elijah and whose Father cried out from heaven, is again found alone. We listen to the words as a community, in shared attention (or distraction). But we also hear them alone, as words addressed to each of us alone, invited on a journey into personal freedom that no one else can take for us. Listening to the Word, each of us is ‘alone with the alone.’ Like the disciples, we need silence to digest their import and space this Lent to be alone and see the path ahead.Yet they do not travel to Jerusalem alone. They walk with the Lord and each other. Our journey is also towards the shared freedom and joy of the Kingdom, for which we struggle now. Embracing freedom is costly and we must not submit to the tyranny of lies, judgementalism, and the devil. Our freedom is ultimately inseparable from that of the world. If we support the cause of freedom, even though it is but a tiny foretaste of what is promised, it will be costly for us too. Let us weigh the cost and set out, for it is the devil that we fight, and God is on our side.
I remember visiting the former East Germany when I was a lot younger, the cobbled motorways, the strange food, particularly dishes based on a perception of what Western food was made by people who had never eaten it, and the taste of disappointment and uncertainty about what the future would hold. In many ways, things have not changed so much, you can go to Stralsund near the Polish border and see a town beautifully restored but where there is little or no work to be had. The outside has changed, the inside is similar. John Le Carré’s novel, The Secret Pilgrim, tells of a young man, a member of the UK intelligence services, visiting the former East Germany to liaise with a spy. Against all proper procedure, acting from anxiety to do things right, he carries in his pocket some cards on which were written details of the spy network. The visit goes well, and it is only on his return that he notices that the cards are missing, that they must have fallen out of his pocket.Shortly afterwards, the spy network is rolled up, resulting in torture and loss of life. This leads to the young man having a mental crisis and confessing to his superior in the intelligence services what he had done. The superior writes: “Then the appalling banality of what the young man had told me got through to me: that you could lose a [spy] network as easily as you could lose a bunch of keys.” That allegory holds true for church communities too, we can just lose what has been built up by accident.Sin involves free choice and decision, and although world history is full of sins that are big and thought through and destructive, I wonder if there’s not an important part of the story of sin that is not unlike careless, unthinking banality, almost like losing a bunch of keys through lack of thought and care. We just forget the importance of keeping peace for a moment, and there is war. We forget the importance of our Christian pilgrimage, and there is the devil.Jesus is revealed to us as ‘being full of the Holy Spirit,’ presumably a reference to his baptism, when the Holy Spirit ‘descended upon him in bodily form, as a dove.’ So we come to his self-disclosure: Jesus was ‘fed by the Holy Spirit and ate no human food’ but, being human, he was hungry. When the devil asked him to turn a stone into bread he was not asking Jesus to perform some cheap circus trick. He was tempting Jesus to break his fast, to suggest that he could only be sustained by human food.The second tempting of Jesus becomes ‘cosmic.’ The Devil shows him all the kingdoms of the world and tells him that he may have their authority and glory if Jesus would only fall down and worship the devil. This is a blatant lie because they were not his to give. That is why Jesus, quoting Deuteronomy, dismisses his pretentions: ‘You shall worship the Lord your God and Him only will you serve.’In the final temptation Jesus is asked to throw himself from the pinnacle of the temple, in the belief that God will protect him from harm. The devil, who himself quotes scripture, is then told: ‘You shall not tempt the Lord your God.’So then, what is disclosed to us for reflection during Lent? What do we have which we are not to lose? What do we carry which is of great value? Given the Spirit at baptism, which we carry, we are to reflect that it is our spiritual lives in God that will sustain us: ‘We cannot live by bread alone.’ A challenge to the materialist culture of our day which is easy to be sucked into. That is why the rich are condemned in St Luke’s Gospel; not because they are rich, but because they see in wealth a security that can only come from God. The final temptation continues the theme. It is not simply about the abuse of power and riches: it is a thundering denunciation of the descent into idolatry that their worship implies. This is personified by the devil, who is a liar – true worship is the worship of God and, according to John, the devil ‘is a murderer from the beginning.’The point about idols is that ‘we know their names.’ We feel we can manipulate them and be in control of them. We feel that we can break the rules and it won’t matter, that we can drop the cards and if things unravel it won’t be our fault. So we must not turn God into an idol by putting him to the test and we must value the practices of a holy Lent. All this is surely why this passage is such a splendid opening for Lent, as it faces us with the truth about Jesus and how life is to be lived at the deepest level of our being – it is then about the self-disclosure of Jesus to us and our gift of the Spirit who will sustain us in all the ‘testing’ of our lives, and remind us not to lose the network of sacraments and devotions and salvation which has been entrusted to us and which, sometimes, we carry around a little too casually. There is a point to Lent, and it may be that we should remember the greatness of the faith which we hold.
I dislike standing here as most of you know. I don’t object at all to talking about the Bible, quite the opposite, but I object to standing up here doing so while all of you are, to put it bluntly, down there. I only do so because the microphone is better here and most visiting clergy like to be up here feeling safe and secure with notes in front of them, and there is a need for consistency of course. However, speaking from a lofty height does bring with it the charge of ‘Hypocrite!’ Anyone who stands up in public and offers spiritual or moral teaching faces the occupational pitfall of ‘hypocrisy’. Our lofty words and indeed physical position can never be matched by the reality of our lives. And not only the preacher but every Christian, indeed every person striving to be good, faces the same test of not being a hypocrite. It seems that we dare to observe the speck in others eyes while ignoring the one in our own, but thus is life, people hold each other accountable to standards which they do not themselves always live up to and cannot wait to stretch them out on the rack of public opinion, judgement and malice until every one of their bones are broken. Many like to dismiss an entire community, or race, or church as not meeting their personal expectations and do not rest easy until they have broken as much of that community as they can.So hypocrisy is a word used now to mean ‘does not do what I want’ or ‘does not say what I want to hear’ rather than genuinely having ingrained double standards, and we all fail to keep our moral standards to some degree (unless we’re setting our bar too low, which would be just as wrong, if not worse). Maybe we are all neo-hypocrites then, or maybe we have forgotten what it is to forgive and to love, because it’s hard if not impossible to love what you hate, so if you convince yourself that you hate something, or something is not what you want, you will contort yourself on the rack of your own judgement until you resemble a grotesque parody of a body. Or just look on twitter, or facebook, which may be easier.It's no surprise that we don’t need to be self aware to lay a charge of neo-hypocrisy, you can just say what you want and walk away, as though words have no meaning, which is the natural auto da fe of a world where there are different truths and prayers are thought to be weapons at worst or idiocy at best, and universally directed to a God who is not there to hear them. A wise teacher knows that which they are ignorant of, a faithful disciple knows the long path ahead, but many care to experience neither. Maybe there, in that sentence, is a truer definition of hypocrisy? In other words, as long as we are aware of the log in our own eye, and take steps to remove it, nothing prevents us calling the attention of others to the general problem of specks in eyes, or even to their particular speck in the eye, though we may not see clearly to help them actively remove it.In the present scandals in the Church, we need humility more than ever. Jesus says that ‘every tree can be told by its own fruit’, and that we draw good or bad from the store of goodness or badness in our heart. People might be justified in questioning the goodness of the Church when the outward actions of her members (especially in high places) are so visibly rotten. We urgently need humility to heal us all the way down, rooting us totally in Christ, until our inner core is pure, far purer than our outward appearance. That would eliminate all hypocrisy, however we define it.Jesus instructs us ‘to take the log out of our own eyes before we try to take the speck out of our neighbours’ eyes.’ If we didn’t have a log in our eye, then we would see that others are created in the image and likeness of God and therefore valuable and precious in the sight of God and therefore we would not judge them, but love them as part of our own self. Therefore we need to remember that we are sinners in need of God’s mercy, so that we may recognise and love other sinners- for by doing so, we build up the Body of Christ and build up our church, by loving each other and helping each other not to sin. That’s the love we are called to, and the model of a church.So pray for others rather than talk about them, judge them, or make our assessments about them. Our Lord Jesus calls us to love our enemies and pray for those that hurt us. If there is a sin issue that should be addressed then that should be done in a loving and caring way because it is our own body that we are healing. Finally, we should care for others when the situation permits. Meaning, be there for them, rather than pointing out their faults and sins because ultimately we are called to bring others to Christ and help them overcome their sinful struggles through the love, grace, and mercy of God. If the Lord leads you, guide them through the scriptures and through the sacraments of the church on how to live a life of wholeness and restoration and for all of us, in three days it will be Lent, so we can all make a new beginning together in Christ, to whom be the glory until the end of the age.
