Christ Jesus, you are our King, may we trust in your power to save and to heal – speak to us now words of hope and life. Amen.

In the Kingdom Season the readings are usually full of both warnings and hope, and today is no exception.

The message is clear – as God’s people, much is expected of us – yet much is promised: all will be well – even if it so obviously is not all well yet.

And we are not simply passive recipients, powerless in the face of the suffering of the present age,  holding on, waiting, hope against hope, for it to get better  – for God’s Kingdom to come.

No, Jesus always calls us into an active relationship with God – to be part of the new thing that God is always doing and joining in the work of the Kingdom.

The dire warnings of Zephaniah to people who seem to be trying to keep God at a safe distance in case he disturbs their rather comfortable lives are not easy to hear in our current context. Wrath, distress, anguish and terror leaps off the page in a way that grabs us by the heart because we are witnessing such terrible destruction in Gaza, such tiny innocent lives at risk and because we are seeing such terrible pain and fear within the Jewish community as a result of the attack a month ago.

What can be done to prevent further bloodshed and what part are we to play, rather than blaming either side and seeing it as someone else’s problem?

Archbishop Justin in his opening address at General Synod this week spoke of the need to understand the pain and fear on both sides and to recognise the special calling of the Church to offer a different message – of hope and peace.

We are called to be people of wisdom he said– not vilifying others, but rebuking those who stoke prejudice against our Jewish or Muslim neighbours and living out our belief that every person is made in the image of God.

And we know that peace won’t come because Israel drives out all Palestinians and kills all Hamas terrorists, or because Hamas commits further acts of terror on Israelis, but peace will only come when they sit down together to talk of peace.

To get to such a point will take a miracle – in which case then we must pray.

Archbishop Justin also said ‘when we pray, we are turning away from the delusion of self-sufficiency and saying that God is in charge.’ He quoted the theologian Karl Barth who said ‘To clasp the hands in prayer is the beginning of an uprising against the disorder of the world.’

And because the world is so disordered is no reason to despair – the good news of our Gospel is about how in Jesus, God brings about victory from suffering and death.

In the devastation, perhaps even because of it, new shoots of hope will be seen – like flowers blooming from a crack in the concrete.

The Gospel today helps us see all this from another direction – we see here what happens if we don’t trust God, presuming to know the limits of his goodness and refusing to take risks.

In the parable, three slaves are given different amounts of money to look after while their master goes away. Although their master doesn’t appear give them any instructions, it seems that they are supposed to invest the money and so have more to give him when he returns. Two of them do just that and the master is very pleased and rewards them. The third one, who was given the least, didn’t make any effort at all! We get the idea that he and his master didn’t think very much of each other to begin with, but the master is not pleased with the slave for not even trying. The slave had given up before he even began, and tried to blame everyone else.

Of course, it doesn’t seem fair that he was given less to begin with – we don’t know what led to this – but the other slaves are rewarded for their efforts with the varying amounts they are given, not the size of the outcome. The third slave has decided that he is being set up to fail and turns failure into a weapon.

He cannot see that God is always doing a new thing and that failure is so often the beginning of something wonderful when God is in the mix.

This parable makes us ask ourselves the question ‘What do we do with what we are given?’ Do we try and make the most of it, however great or small? Often, when we make a start to do something, we find that more happens than we could possibly have believed! God can help us achieve miracles, we just have to be prepared to try.

In every situation, however apparently hopeless, our prayer and our efforts need to be focussed on God’s power to bring about new possibilities. And we need to be prepared to take risks – not burying what we have for safekeeping, but allowing it the possibility of growth and life.

With today being Safeguarding Sunday, we might think there is a conflict here – surely Safeguarding is all about reducing risk. In one way of course it is. Through our Safeguarding policies and procedures we try to protect one another, especially those who are most vulnerable, and rightly so. But looked at another way – if we have a good approach to Safeguarding then we can afford to take good and necessary risks as we step out to proclaim the Gospel.

Its all about us doing our bit to the best of our ability, but then trusting God to do his – knowing that the best of God’s ability is so way beyond our understanding that we can do no other than trust God.

It was a risk opening up our church to become a Community Support Hub a year ago – but look how God has provided every step of the way – volunteers, funds, ever-growing relationships of support across the city – we are all learning and improving as we go, as we use what we have been given – our talents – our buildings, our people, our experience and skills, our compassion and care for one another, our refusal to blame each other when things don’t go as well as we hope.

Every new thing we have done has been a risk – Chill & Chat, our work with children and young people, a Beetle Drive! – and even carrying on with the old things too has been a risk – but in all this we are blessed and we are blessing others.

The Thessalonians to whom Paul is writing are prepared to take risks for God, that’s clear, but they are rightfully anxious about it too. They are definitely signing up to following this Jesus and his way of love, even though it will ask more of them than they might feel they can give.

But what safeguards them, ultimately what safeguards all of us, is that we are children of light, keeping awake to the risks and protecting one another as best we can, and encouraging one another as we step out in faith – putting on as Paul puts it, the breastplate of faith and love and the helmet of salvation.

Such a way of living can through God’s grace, bring even peace out of war and new possibilities out of dead ends – which is precisely what as Christians we believe and proclaim.

Service: Reverend Michelle Dalliston. 19th November 2023. (St John The Baptist Church Peterborough UK)

Readings:  Zephaniah 1.7, 12-end; 1 Thessalonians 5.1-11; Matthew 25.14-30