Sermon by Rev Sydney Maitland for Sunday 31 August 2025.
• First Reading: Jeremiah 2: 4-13 (God’s rebuke – you have forsaken Me)
• Second Reading: Hebrews 13: 1-8, 15-16 (Jesus is the same, yesterday, today and forever)
• Gospel: Luke 14:1, 7-14 (Jesus at a Pharisee’s house)
They call it the rat race but I wonder whether this is a race to the top or the bottom. And to the top, or bottom of what, exactly?
It is all very well to gain the highest position, the best job / home / holiday / family or whatever. To be acclaimed by all and sundry for the prowess on display.
But just whose effort went into it all? Whose insight, skill, imagination and drive? Just who got crushed in the process as others, more skilful and determined and ruthless got to clean up?
The drive to success is all very well but when it is the person least well placed in this striving for recognition who loses out then the game begins to go off. Morally suspect. Emotionally draining, spiritually bankrupt.
Now technology and progress in all its forms begins to develop a price – not always paid by those who benefit most from it.
But Jeremiah could see all this. The problem in Jerusalem was that the best sites for houses were near the water wells, while the coolest and most comfortable were at the top of the hills. The answer came with technology – in this case the ability to excavate water cisterns, enabled by new techniques in plastering.
Wonderful! But the cisterns leaked and the water was going to be stagnant. Not quite so good.
But Jeremiah saw it as a symptom of looking for a moral and spiritual independence from God. Perhaps human technique would triumph after all. Perhaps the law of Moses needed to be updated and brought into line with the latest social and cultural thinking. Maybe learn from the neighbours.
And so faced with this drift away from the faith of their fathers, Jeremiah grew more and more sceptical. Nothing wrong with the new plastering methods – provided that the people did not grow away from God. They could even talk to their trading neighbours – provided that they did not take everything else at face value. And definitely not copy their religious practices.
New ideas are fine – but see what effects they then have. Is the Lord still the God whom they will serve above and before all others? What about the ways they treat their neighbours – their own kin?
And so little by little the children of Jerusalem were being corrupted – all so quietly, with the highest degree of nuance and subtlety. Maybe ease the law of Moses here, redefine it there. Bring it up to date. And so little by little it drains away – like a leaking cistern.
Jesus also saw that competition for position and prestige.
He saw the jostling and jockeying for position. Somehow the strongest and fittest always seemed to be in the most prestigious positions at the social gatherings. Now just how could that be?
And so He introduced a new principle in which competing for position, power, prestige, or any of the other trappings of success was to have no place in the life of the church or the corporate lives of the disciples.
Leadership means serving, enabling, encouraging. It would be about building teams and looking to each other’s needs. It would be about learning from one another as they relived their times with Jesus, each person recalling a different event or lesson or parable.
This kind of leadership would support the efforts of others, especially if the venture did not go well. And it would give the credit to those who did the work when it was a success.
To put it another way, it is the city set on the hill, not the individual house or palace. It is the assemblage of lights in the candelabra. For these will shine in the darkness and the darkness will never overcome them.
For the light exists – but the darkness does not: not in itself.
