Opening Verse
Collect Prayer
First Reading:
Second Reading:
Gospel Reading
Post Communion Sentence
Commentary:
Meditation:
Hymns
Prayers for Sunday and the week ahead:
Intercessions from our Sunday worship
Sermon

Prayer is a plant, the seed of which is sown in the heart of every Christian,

if it is well cultivated and nourished it will produce fruit, but if it is neglected, it will wither and die.

 

Heavenly Father, we give you thanks for the men and women of faith, who down the centuries have taught us how to be your children. We give you thanks for the inspiration of their lives and ask that we may grow to be worthy of joining the company of the saints in Heaven. Amen

My Father, how blind and deaf I am – to miss your voice as you speak within my own being! You call to me in my restlessness and discontent, You guide me by my own confusion….out of myself into you. Keep me faithful while I grope my way along – as one who searches blindly along a wall – until I understand that there is a door… always open. And the door is you. Amen (Julian of Norwich)

Almighty God, whose only Son has opened for us a new and living way into your presence: give us pure hearts and steadfast wills to worship you in spirit and truth: through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, who is alive and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God now and for ever Amen.

 

O blessed Jesus,
immortal and victorious,
by the sorrow you suffered when all the powers of your heart failed you,
have mercy on us and help us
in our days of darkness
and in our hours of weakness,
that we do not lose hold of you
either in this life, or in the life of the world to come; and this we ask for your own name's sake. Amen

St Bridget of Sweden, 1303-1373
 

God the Father, eternally mysterious, we worship you. God the Son, eternally responding, we bless you. God the Holy Spirit, eternally witnessing, we adore you. Holy and glorious Trinity, three persons and one God, we magnify you, now and for ever. Amen. Nestorian Liturgy, 5th century



 

Additional Material

Commentary

In 1972 Donny Osmond had a solo hit with the Paul Anka song ‘Puppy Love.’ He was 15 years old and the words expressed the torment of a teenager surrounded by older people who failed to appreciate the intensity of adolescent love. 

And they called it puppy love, 
Oh, I guess they'll never know 
How a young heart really feels, 
And why I love her so

At Caesarea Philippi, the Apostle Peter had a kind of ‘puppy love’ when he acknowledged Jesus as the Son of God, the Messiah. Jesus was proud of Peter and said that the confession he made would be like a solid rock foundation upon which to build the church. However things were soon to go wrong. 

Peter misunderstood Jesus because he imagined that since Jesus was the Son of God, he would have power and authority on earth. Instead Jesus went on to describe the route he would take to death on the cross. Peter was appalled and told Jesus that it must never happen. Peter had realised who Jesus was, but he could not come to terms with the fact that this meant life would actually get harder! 

In a few short paragraphs of the Gospel of Matthew, Peter went from being a rock to a stumbling block. Peter had a dream of what being the Messiah meant, he wanted Jesus to go to Jerusalem to sort out those in political, economic, and religious power. Jesus tells him that instead he will go and suffer and die. 

Peter has to move rapidly from an enthusiastic, but immature appreciation of who Jesus is, to a grown up and realistic understanding of the cost of real love. Perhaps Peter felt like Donny in the second verse of the song, 

‘And they called it puppy love, 
Just because we're in our teens, 
Tell them all it isn't fair, 
To take away my only dream.’

It was not fair, but the dream which Peter had lasted only a very short time, quite suddenly Jesus demanded that he grew up and understood the price of love. Most of us can grow gradually in our Christian understanding, over many years, but that was not a luxury afforded to Peter.

 Of course there are Christians who find maturity in their faith very difficult to come to terms with. Some churches encourage the belief that love of God will be rewarded with sparkling good health, happy and harmonious relationships and comfortable affluence. This is ‘puppy love Christianity,’ but as we learn about what being a true Christian means we understand that it is no more believable than the tooth fairy.

There is a difficult balance to be struck here. In the Book of Revelation the Church in Ephesus is criticised for having lost its first love. Christians must be aware of the possibility of their love of God going off the boil and becoming stale, like an old married couple with a dead marriage who take each other for granted. But the words of Jesus to Peter remind us that we must also have a love and appreciation of God which moves beyond adolescent ‘puppy love.’ The Apostle Paul put this very clearly in chapter 13 of his first letter to the Corinthians. He wrote "When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I gave up childish ways."

When we move beyond the initial rush of ‘puppy love’ we recognise that with real love there is a cost. It is tempting to worship a Jesus who is surrounded by uplifting worship songs, who makes us better when we are poorly and blesses us with good relationships and prosperity. But just like Peter in our story today, we have to put childish ways behind us and recognise that real love is not about good times and the Christian feel good factor.

In the song Donny calls out for his love to be taken seriously 

’Someone, help me, help me, help me please, 
Is the answer up above? 
How can I, how can I tell them, 
This is not a puppy love’ 

Jesus provides Peter and the disciples with a sure fire way for them to prove their true love. Jesus tells them, ‘If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me will find it.’

Peter was to find that ‘grown up love’ was costly and he trusted Christ through many difficulties which were to follow him in his life. This might sound rather depressing, it would be so much nicer to believe that Jesus was like a fairy godmother who would make everything better. But the Christian faith is for not a fairy tale for children and it is reassuring to know that when things are hard it is not because Jesus doesn’t love us anymore. The good news is that generations of Christians have found that when they walk through the storms of life, Jesus walks with them and they are never alone.  Charles Royden

Commentary

 

I always feel really sorry for Peter when Jesus bites his head off as he does in this passage. Naturally Peter can’t bear the warning that the beloved Lord Jesus might be abused and killed – no friend would relish the idea. I think that Jesus’ sharp words to his friend suggest that Jesus also felt the strain of the approaching crisis. Jesus knew what was very likely to come. He accepted suffering, he was willing to sacrifice himself, but it doesn’t mean that he was looking forward to pain and death. It is helpful for us to recognise that Jesus was not someone who was tired of this earthly life or who despised it. All we know of Jesus suggests that he had a healthy enjoyment of the things that make our lives valuable: love, warmth, the pleasures of companionship. In the final part of the passage, Jesus was reminding his followers that they were caught up in a spiritual struggle between good and evil. Anyone who wasn’t willing to accept the reality of that war, who did not accept that some of the Christians might die, was betraying the cause of good. Peter, by desiring a peaceful and quiet life, was playing into the hands of the opposition, the forces of evil and complacency. The passage starts off by being extremely grim, speaking of death and the battle against evil, but it finishes triumphantly, promising the brave, the faithful and the self-sacrificial a reward in the reality beyond this life. Christians must always remind themselves that sweet though this world seems, the one to come, where we will live in the presence of God, will be infinitely sweeter.

This last year I have taken up two new sports. The first is Body Combat, which is a series of moves related to boxing. You sometimes have a target, a punch bag, but usually you mime thumping someone, and you can choose the imaginary face on the receiving end of the punches. It is really good fun and you work off a lot of calories and quite a lot of aggression! But once you have learnt the moves, managed not to fall over and learned to move in time with the music, then that is it. You just keep doing it.
The second, Pilates invented in the 1930s by a bloke called Joseph Pilates, doesn’t at seem to be very difficult. You spend most of your time lying on a mat pulling in your stomach., But in fact it is a very subtle system, which draws on the concept of us all having core stability muscles. Just pulling in your stomach, stabilising as you do so, while you wave and arm or a leg, gives you a powerful workout and makes you stronger. Having done both sports for over a year, I now know that it is Pilates, the one, which is the most demanding of your mind, the one that is most difficult, which is most rewarding.

It seems to me that it is a pretty good comparison with the practise of the Christian faith. Those who reject it as being boring do so because they know only the most basic aspects of the faith, and so dismiss it. How can this possibly be? How can anyone think that Christianity is simplistic and boring? This is the faith that has kept the deepest of thinkers and theologians debating for the last two thousand years! This is the belief system that has inspired its believers to campaign for social justice, to abandon slavery; and to work for peace! This is the faith that has inspired its believers to make some of the greatest art, some of the most wonderful architecture, sublime poetry that the world has ever seen! How can it be boring?

I will tell you why outsiders have this false perception. There are two main reasons:one is that often Christians teach the faith in a bored and boring way. I have heard preachers make Jesus sound tedious. And I have heard the faith reduced to a dull set of little rules, like those pinned up on the walls of an uncomfortable B & B. Don’t do this, don’t do that. Secondly outsiders must feel inspired because they see that Christianity works! That it changes the lives of those who believe and live the way of the Lord Jesus. If it doesn’t make its followers happier, better, lovelier souls, and then how can it attract more people to the faith?
 

I get so infuriated when perfectly nice people tell me how limited Christianity is, as a world faith, compared to the inner spirituality of Buddhism? Have they nor troubled to read Christian mystic writers? Have they not read the scriptures?

I also feel very annoyed when serious intelligent people dismiss Christianity as being for hypocrites and Sunday souls. Yes, they exist, yes we have all met them, we know from reading the papers about cruel Christians, abusive or violent Christians, people who are a disappointment to themselves and a blight on the faith. But you can’t write off a whole faith on the basis of some poor examples. Here in the epistle to the Romans which we have read this morning you get a recipe for nothing less than a revolution in the way that humans relate to one another. It gives an exciting blueprint for a new emotional order: one in which hatred, enmity and violence is met with love and patience. It is a demand, written by Paul that Jesus’ followers launch a life-long personal campaign to uphold what is good. How can taking part in the cosmic battle be written off as dull? I believe that every beautiful, loving act, every gesture of self-sacrifice and generosity is nothing less than a brick in the wall of the Kingdom of God. Another blow for good in the perpetual battle against evil. This isn’t something that you can write off as being simple. We are going to fail, as we take part in the war against evil, of course we are, but we must keep on trying with all the effort that we can muster.
 

As with anything else worth doing, the more you know about it, the more your practise your faith, the more challenging and rewarding it gets. If you use a further analogy, if you once sat down at a piano and played a few bars then it would sound pretty bad, and you might feel frustrated and feel it wasn’t worth doing. If you put yourself to the trouble to practise, then it would sound better and you would want to know more, get to a higher level.
So it is with the spiritual life founded by Jesus: the more you examine and study and pray, the more you long to know. The challenge for us as a church is two fold: The first is mostly for those who preach and teach within the two churches, whether as lay or ordained, whether we teach children or adults: we must make sure that we do the Christian faith justice. We must make sure that the word of God is presented in an interesting and relevant way, unpacking its richness and profundity.
 

Secondly, and this is a challenge for all of us: it must be obvious from the way we speak and act, that our lives are enriched by this Gospel. Look at yourself hard and ask, am I proclaiming God in the way I behave? And if that isn’t the case then it may be a cue for you to reassess and work harder. We all need to do this all the time, we need to go deeper, pray harder. We build the Kingdom not with outward show, not with rituals or festivals, but from the inside out, with prayer and love. Those who want to know what value the Christian faith has should be able to see the outwards signs of that rich inner reality. Amen.   Rev Dr Joan Crossley

Meditation

Peter the rock became the Stumbling Block (Greek: skandalon).  Even worse, he becomes Satan. Satan is that which seeks to deflect us from the way of God and that is what Peter is doing trying to deflect Jesus from his God-given path to the cross. 

Just as Satan tried to persuade Jesus to take the easy way (turn these stones into bread -- make a spectacular display of yourself -- bow down before me and I will give you the world), so now Peter calls Jesus to abandon the narrow, rough road that leads to the cross for a wide, smooth road that leads elsewhere. 

It is the devil who loves human greatness; God despises it.

Hymns

1. Ye holy angels bright 783 
2. After confession Abba father
3. Because your love is better than life 53 
4. For I’m building a people of power 151 
5. Lord thy word abideth 476
6. Through all the changing scenes of life 702
7. I’ll go in the strength of the Lord
8. He’s got the whole world 225
9. Just as I am 396 (Tune Saffron Walden 697 Hymns and Psalms)
10. The Church’s one foundation, 640
11. O Lord my God when I with awesome wonder, 506
12. Soldiers of Christ arise, 604 (Tune St Ethelwald 719 Hymns and Psalms)

Prayers

Almighty God, whose only Son has opened for us a new and living way into your presence: give us pure hearts and steadfast wills to worship you in spirit and in truth; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, who is alive and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

Redeemer God, you heard the cry of your people and sent Moses your servant to lead them out of slavery. Free us from the tyranny of sin and death and, by the leading of your spirit, brings us to our promised land, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.