I Can Hear Music: Are We Climbing Jacob’s Ladder? Genesis 28:10-22 (Trinity 7 Ordinary 16 Year A)

Genesis 28:10-22

I cannot sing to save my life. I cannot play an instrument (although I once made an abortive attempt to learn the guitar). But I love music. It soundtracks my life. I hear somebody say something, and I make an association with a song lyric. In the immortal stylings of the Beach Boys, I Can Hear Music.

And that was my experience coming back to this famous passage, three years since it last leapt out at me in the Lectionary. As I read the text, I thought less of theological terms and more of song titles.

I will freely concede that the author (or authors) of Genesis had no clue about the people who went through my mind: the aforesaid Beach Boys, Del Shannon, Bonnie Raitt, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, and Kate Bush for starters. But I am going to use some of their song titles to peg the teaching of this story for us.

Firstly, Jacob is On The Run:

If Pink Floyd are too weird for you, I’ll let you have Del Shannon’s Runaway

or my preferred version of that song by Bonnie Raitt:

Why has Jacob ‘left Beersheba and set out for Harran’ (verse 10)? Because he has tricked his elderly, frail father Isaac so that he can steal his twin brother Esau’s birthright. Now, his mother Rebekah, who has conspired with him against her own husband and other son, urges him not only to leave for his own safety but also because he needs to find a wife if the birthright promise is to be fulfilled through him.

Lies and deception in a family. What a mess.

And nor will Jacob be the only person to run from others or from God in the Scriptures. Adam and Eve have already tried hiding in Eden. Later, Jonah will try to escape a call of God that he doesn’t like by jumping on a ship going in the opposite direction.

But God loves runaways. Adam and Eve are unsuccessful in hiding. God uses a storm and a big fish to catch up with Jonah and redirect his life. And in this story, Jacob too cannot run from God.

God didn’t stop pursuing runaways with his love when the pages of Scripture were closed. He chased after an English professor who had had enough of ideas about God after he witnessed horrors in World War One. But later, he would grudgingly become what he called ‘the most reluctant convert in Christendom’. Looking back, he would actually say he was ‘surprised by joy.’ His name? Clive Staples Lewis.

This story reveals God’s care for runaways. He has not changed his character. I wonder whether this gives us heart for those we love who have caused us such sorrow by refusing to share in our faith. Are you like me, and have loved ones for whom you pray pretty much every day? Then take heart. God loves your runaways. Keep praying, and one day he will act to make himself known to them. He may even be preparing things behind the scenes now.

Or are any of us in some sense runaways? We may have faith, but like Jacob we may be running in fear because we know we have done something terrible. Or we may be running away like Jonah, because we fear the cost or consequences of saying yes to something challenging that we know God has spoken to us about.

Either way, the safest course of action is to give up running. God has grace and mercy for even the worst things we have done. And nowhere is their greater peace than in the centre of God’s will for us.

Secondly, Jacob Sees a Stairway to Heaven:

There is a popular misconception here, perhaps encapsulated in the old slave spiritual ‘We Are Climbing Jacob’s Ladder’:

We think we have to climb the ladder from earth to heaven. Runaways often think this. To atone for their wrongdoing, they must make the effort to attain the moral heights that they have so singularly failed to ascend.

But in Jacob’s dream, the ladder (or ramp) is placed on the earth, ‘and the angels of God were ascending and descending on it’ (verse 12). We don’t make our own way to heaven. God’s messengers check out what’s happening on earth and report to the Lord.

And it is the Lord himself who has set this ramp upon the earth to reach heaven. He reaffirms the covenant that he had first made with Jacob’s grandfather Abraham. Now the promise comes down the line. It still stands. God promises the same innumerable descendants who will bless the earth, and he promises to take care of this runaway (verses 13-15).

There’s a word for this. Grace.

This is not the popular idea of being good enough for God. It is not about keeping the rules as a way of gaining entrance to heaven. It is not about our good deeds outweighing our bad deeds, as our Muslim friends hope.

This story is an early sign of what is to come in all its fulness in the Gospel announced by Jesus and the apostles. We are all failures, whether or not we are runaways. But God has made a way back to him. The ultimate stairway to heaven will be the Cross of Christ. Grace and mercy pour out to us from the loving heart of God.

And sure, you’ve heard that thousands of times before. But it bears repeating. Even we who hear about grace every Sunday slip back into old ways of thinking and behaving from time to time. ‘I haven’t repented enough.’ ‘I haven’t lived as Jesus wants me to and I don’t deserve his love.’

Remember grace. It’s not so much a stairway to heaven as a stairway from heaven.

Sometimes we want to insert moral conditions to the receipt of God’s love, because we realise just how scandalous it is. If this grace is how God operates, then the logical consequence is that it is open to all, even to the worst of people.

Around the time of 9/11, I used to write a regular column in a local newspaper. That week, you can imagine I suddenly had to change what I had prepared. Whilst expressing horror at what the terrorists had done and saying they deserved the judgment of God, I also told the true story of Henry Gerecke, an American Lutheran minister who was appointed as the Protestant chaplain to the Nazi war criminals at the Nuremberg trials.

Gerecke had lost a son to the Nazis. He really didn’t want to be a chaplain to these monsters. But God would let him have no peace until he agreed.

And then, he set about sharing the Gospel with these evil men. Some resisted, right up until they were hung. But others wept, confessed, repented, and threw themselves on the mercy of God.

The newspaper didn’t include that part of my article.

And some of us would like to pretend that it didn’t happen. But the story is documented[1].

All of us depend on a stairway from heaven.

Thirdly and finally, was Jacob Running Up That Hill?

Now that might not seem an obvious choice of song until you remember how the chorus begins:

And if I only could
I’d make a deal with God
And I’d get him to swap our places

A deal with God. That was Kate Bush’s original title for the song, until EMI’s marketing department said that certain countries wouldn’t play it with a title like that.

So – did Jacob make a deal with God? It rather sounds like it at the end of the reading. ‘If God will be with me … if God will protect me … if God will provide for me … then he will be my God and I will give him a tenth of all I have’ (verses 20-22). If you do things for me, then I’ll do stuff for you. I have read the passage like that for years. I might even have preached on it that way.

But not anymore. It’s a vow (verse 20). And the scholar John Goldingay (whose commentary on Genesis I bought with your very kind Christmas present of a book token) says that Jacob is just beginning near the end of where God ended in the promises he made to him in the dream[2]. There might be a bit of contract language still present, and of course Jacob still has a lot to learn, but essentially the runaway has found grace at the foot of the stairway from heaven and now he makes a response of gratitude.

Forgiveness is not a cheap get-out-of-jail-free card. As the theologian Amy Orr-Ewing says in her recent book on forgiveness,

If the basis for divine forgiveness is repentance, it should follow that a perpetrator of crime – seeking divine forgiveness – is willing to pay the civil or criminal penalty for their crime.[3]

There is no deal with God, but there is the response of honesty and gratitude. As August Gottlieb Spangenburg, one of the Moravian bishops who influenced John Wesley put it in a hymn,

What shall we offer our good Lord,
poor nothings, for his boundless grace?
Fain would we his great name record
and worthily set forth his praise.[4]

Jacob himself begins with the giving of a tithe. We can give, we can pay forward God’s grace to others, we can look for a place to serve in the church, we can consider how to bless others with God’s love in the world – it may be a cliché to say that the possibilities are endless, but it’s not far from the truth.

And don’t say, I can’t do anything very well, just do something out of gratitude to God. As the late Leonard Cohen said, ‘Forget your perfect offering.’

After all, Jacob will make some very imperfect offerings from hereon in. He, the deceiver, will suffer deceit at the hands of his uncle Laban. He will be in fear and trepidation when the time comes for reconciliation with his brother Esau. He will wrestle with God through the night and come out limping.

Let us simply acknowledge that we who have run away from God have found him build a stairway from heaven to us so that he can show us his grace. Now let’s simply get on with the gratitude.

And let God hear your music.

[1] Tim Townsend, Mission at Nuremberg: An American Army Chaplain and the Trial of the Nazis

[2] John Goldingay, Genesis (Baker Commentary on the Old Testament), p454.

[3] Amy Orr-Ewing, Forgiveness: Reclaiming its Power in a Culture of Outrage and Fear, p27 n7 on p179.

[4] Singing the Faith #671 verse 1.

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The Test of Faith, Genesis 22:1-14 (Trinity 4 Ordinary 13 Year A)

Genesis 22:1-14

Abraham and Isaac by Gainsborough Dupont at Picryl. Public Domain.

The first time I took my driving test, my instructor said to me, ‘You’ll be all right, just so long as you don’t get Mr McRea as your examiner.’

You can imagine who I got. My left foot kept shaking on the clutch, I don’t know how many times I stalled, and my failure was a foregone conclusion from the first minute of the test.

On my second test, I didn’t fail. But neither did I pass. A quarter of a mile from the end of the test route, there was a nail in the road, and I sustained a puncture. Because I didn’t complete the route, I was given a ‘no result.’

I passed the third time. And on the basis of how that test went, I think I would have passed the second time, but for that pesky nail.

‘After these things God tested Abraham’ (verse 1a)

But what a test this was. When I became a father later in life than most (but nothing like as late as Abraham), this story changed from a Sunday School episode to a distressing narrative. How could you ask a parent to do this? What trauma did it leave in Isaac?

And those who hate our faith love to point to Bible stories like this one to say, look at what a cruel God your Scriptures describe. Do you really want us to believe in a God like this?

So come with me as we wrestle with this disturbing but profound passage. Abraham’s test of faith can illuminate our faith.

I’m going to divide this into three sections: speech, action, and provision.

Firstly, speech:

File:Book of Genesis Chapter 22-1 (Bible Illustrations by Sweet Media).jpg – Wikimedia Commons CC 3.0

God speaks to Abraham and gives him this shattering assignment. Sacrifice Isaac, your son of the promise.

If somebody came to me today and said they believed God had called them to sacrifice one of their children, I would doubt whether they had heard God. Why would I say that now, and yet also maintain that Abraham did hear God?

The most important way in which we test whether a claim to hear God’s voice is true is by measuring it against what we know about the general will of God. Our basic plumbline for that is the Bible. Nothing beyond and outside the Bible has quite the same status, because it concludes where it does due to the supremacy of Christ.

In this case, we know from the story of Scripture that God is opposed to child sacrifice. Indeed, when the Israelites enter the Promised Land, one of the reasons he wants them to remove the existing people is that they practice child sacrifice, and it is an abomination to him.

So why not here? Because at this point, God has not yet revealed that. Abraham doesn’t have that particular yardstick to measure against. Now as we know with hindsight, God will ensure the child sacrifice doesn’t happen here, but at this juncture in history Abraham has no grounds to rule it out. He has heard God speak. Somehow, he gets himself together to respond.

There are many things we shall consider when we are wondering whether God has truly spoken to us, and especially if it is something surprising or unusual. There are some Christians who seem to think that the wackier it is, the more likely it is to be of God. And there are others who take the opposite view.

But we shall come back to the big ones. What is the advice and experience of wise Christians? Do the circumstances point us in a particular direction? What does careful reflection and thought tell us? Who does this promote: me or the kingdom of God?

And most of all, is this consistent with what we know about the character of God from Holy Scripture?

You have all heard a lot about scammers on the Internet. One way in which they try to trick people and exploit them is by seeking to make them panic and make rushed decisions. ‘You must phone this number now’ – but it takes you to more criminals. The standard advice is to take your time if you are not at all sure.

I think it is similar with discerning the speech of God. God will not pressurise you and panic you into a hasty decision that you will later regret. Because he is full of grace, he will not be worried if you seek to test whether you have heard him speak. It is only other forces that will aim to frighten you and unnerve you.

Secondly, action:

Day Of Service by Saint Joseph’s University on Flickr. CC 2.0

Abraham acts on what he has heard God say.

It’s easy to say that but think what is behind Abraham’s action. Think of the cost, and the possible confusion.

Isaac is the child or the promise. God had previously promised Abraham and Sarah in their old age that they, despite being decades past their fertile years, would have a son. And not only that, God was going to make their descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and the sand on the seashore. So why would God now call for that same child, by now probably a teenager[1], to be killed? Doesn’t it go against all that God has revealed as his plan, not only for Abraham’s family but also for his purposes for the world?

And how would it hit him personally? As I said in the introduction, I became a father at a later age than many – although nothing like as late as Abraham! I am sure that most family and friends had thought it was seriously possible that I would neither marry nor become a parent. One of my nephews has David as a middle name, and I’ve always wondered if that was a kind gesture in case I never had children of my own. Were I to be asked to give up one or both of my children, I would become a human wreck. So what might Abraham have felt? We are not told.

But we are told he still acts in obedience to God’s voice. And that is the sign of faith: when God speaks, we respond with the appropriate action.

An awful lot of Christians seem to get worried about not knowing God’s will for their lives. Yet the truth is, he has already given all of us a lot to be getting on with. It’s just that we find some of it, such as much of the teaching of Jesus, too challenging for our liking!

It was Mark Twain who said, it’s not the parts of the Bible that I don’t understand that trouble me: it’s the parts that I do understand that worry me.

I wonder whether some of us ought to take seriously the fact that God has indeed spoken to us, and that we need to respond. It doesn’t have to be something dramatic and life-changing. It may simply be a challenge about how we conduct our daily lives.

We have read the Scriptures. We have heard them read and expounded on Sundays, and maybe in Bible studies too. I don’t think God is half as silent as we claim he is. I suspect he has already spoken quite a lot to us and has given us plenty to be getting on with. We now need to respond in faith by our actions.

Thirdly and finally, provision:

J Hudson Taylor. Photomechanical print at Picryl. Public Domain

Here we get onto the question of the lamb. Isaac asks where the lamb for the burnt-offering is. Abraham replies that God will supply one – although at that point, he is thinking that Isaac is the lamb. Then, when the angel of the Lord calls a halt to the sacrifice, Abraham sees a lamb caught in a thicket by its thorns. God has indeed provided.

Christians of course give a further layer of meaning to this. God will supply his own Son as the Lamb of God to be the offering for the world. But even without that, this is an important truth to remember in the life of faith. When God speaks and calls us to action, he will provide what we need. Speech leads to action leads to provision. This is the natural sequence in the life of faith.

James Hudson Taylor was a pioneer Christian missionary to China in the nineteenth century. He faced many challenges and discouragements in such a huge task. He lost his first wife Maria to cholera. Several children died in infancy. He lived with chronic depression.

His work meant he endured persecution from local authorities, bandits, and warlords during both the Taiping Rebellion and the Boxer Rebellion. He faced language difficulties and a harsh climate. Established organisations criticised him for adopting traditional Chinese dress. Some workers deserted him, because progress was slow.

And with no guaranteed income, he and his colleagues had barely enough money to survive.

But in that context, he wrote these famous words:

Depend on it. God’s work done in God’s way will never lack God’s supply. He is too wise a God to frustrate His purposes for lack of funds, and He can just as easily supply them ahead of time as afterwards, and He much prefers doing so.

Again, there is the pattern: speech leads to action leads to provision. And that’s the challenge. If we have heard God speak, we are called into action, while believing God will provide. That’s often the point at which we are most tested. Will we believe that God will provide for us, so that we can act in response to his challenging word?

I have seen it go both ways. I saw a youth ministry that needed to hire larger premises, which were outside its budget. But they believed God was stretching them, and that God would provide. When they said yes to hiring the new place, a Christian businessman in the town stepped forward with the funding.

But I have also seen a church that wanted to find new ways forward. It engaged a Christian architect. He presented exciting plans that would have given them new opportunities. The church was excited, too. Until it heard the cost. And then all the energy drained away. They acted as if the provision all depended on them, and not their Lord.

So which way will we go? Have we heard God speak? Are we preparing for action? Will we believe in his provision?

Conclusion

There’s a coda to this story. We shouldn’t really finish at verse 14, as the Lectionary dictates. The natural break is at verse 19. In the verses we didn’t read, God re-emphasises his purposes for Abraham and his descendants, and his settled will to bless them so that all the nations of the world will also be blessed.

God promises his blessing when in faith we hear him speak, launch into action, and trust him to provide.

Who would like to see God’s greater blessing on this church? Because this is the way.  

[1] John Goldingay, Genesis (Baker Commentary on the Old Testament), p347.

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What Jesus Says About Facing Pressure, Matthew 10:24-39 (Ordinary 12 Trinity 3 Year A)

Matthew 10:24-39

A music magazine I read has a column every month where it asks three musicians various questions, including what was the first record they ever bought, and where?

Well, how about you? For me, if you exclude the set of Freddie and the Dreamers singles my aunt and uncle gave me when I was about five, it would be that I spent a token I was given as a Sunday School prize. It was a compilation album by someone I would no longer wish to admit to having liked – Rolf Harris.

When I got to my early teens and began serious record collecting, one of my first purchases was also a compilation album: Simon and Garfunkel’s Greatest Hits.

The thing about compilations is that they pull material from various stages of a musician’s career, and the only thing that gives them continuity is the performer in question.

What we have in our passage today is like that. It seems to be a compilation of different parts of Jesus’ teaching; all put together in one place by Matthew. The nearest equivalent passages in other Gospels like Luke do not appear all together, as they do here.

What holds them together? Well, the ‘artist’ is Jesus – obviously! If there is anything more, it is about discipleship under pressure. Jesus knew his followers would be put under pressure for their loyalty to him. Even if the pressures we face on our faith aren’t quite the same, there is still a lot here to help us stay faithful when the difficulties come.

The first pressure is fear.

Fear and Phobia free stock photo from Public Domain Pictures.

In verses 24 to 31, Jesus talks about those who are like Beelzebul, the devil, and who therefore implicitly make trouble for us. But he says, if you’re going to fear anyone, fear God – yet he cares for us more than the sparrows, and he numbers every hair on our heads.

If we trust in our heavenly Father, it puts our earthly fears in perspective. Whatever happens to us, we are safe in his hands. I know that’s easier said than done at times, but it is a truth and a hope to cling onto when times are dark.

Yesterday, we celebrated just one such person at Midhurst. Pauline had been the church treasurer until earlier this year, when she was given a terminal diagnosis with cancer. While she made what she could of time with her family in her final weeks and months, there was one thing she told me more than once. And I know she told others, too.

She said, I am not worried about where I am going. I trust in the Lord, and I am safe in his hands.

And as I listened to her saying that there was no anxiety in her voice. She truly believed that. Cancer could have imbued her with fear. But she knew Jesus. And that changed everything.

Now like I said, for some of us, this is still easier said than done. It may take us a while to work through the shock of bad news. Not all of us can flick a switch and have instant peace. Some of us will take a little journey before we get to that point of acceptance and peace. I think I am one such person. And so I am preaching as much to myself as to you on this. We may have things to grieve before we can feel the peace.

But that doesn’t change the fact that this is a destination Jesus offers to all his disciples. Whatever threatens to make us afraid, God is ready and willing to give us his gift of peace. For whatever happens to us, we belong to him. As the Apostle Paul told the Romans, nothing can separate us from the love of God that is ours in Christ Jesus our Lord.

We can also be afraid when something unjust is perpetrated against us. That is the sort of thing the children of Beelzebul can do. That is why Jesus reassured his disciples that ‘there is nothing concealed that will not be disclosed, or hidden that will not be made known’ (verse 27). In other words, God will expose these people.

I don’t know whether you’ve been on the end of unjust accusations, but I have. I can think of at least two occasions when church members who had taken a dislike to me then tried to make false Safeguarding allegations against me. It took me a while to realise that God was still with me, and that I had justice on my side. But it was true. God is bigger than our fears.

The second pressure is shame.

Woman wearing black long-sleeved shirt. Public Domain image at PickPik.

32 ‘Whoever acknowledges me before others, I will also acknowledge before my Father in heaven. 33 But whoever disowns me before others, I will disown before my Father in heaven.

In other words, don’t be ashamed of Jesus. There will be plenty of social pressure to disown him or play down our commitment to him and our love of him.

In our society, it’s often more about the risk of mockery. Like the time when I was on the bus going home from school with other friends, and one of them, Clifford, said sneeringly to me, ‘I hear you had a spiritual experience last weekend.’ (I had been away on a circuit youth weekend.) I played it down.

But in other societies today or in the time of those first Christian disciples, it was much more serious. I am currently reading the autobiography of John Lennox. If you haven’t heard of him, John Lennox is Emeritus Professor of Mathematics at Oxford University. He holds three doctorates and is also a committed Christian. He has become a doughty defender of the Christian faith in the public arena and is well-known for having debated leading atheists such as Richard Dawkins and the late Christopher Hitchens.

However, what is much less known about him is the amount of his spare time in between teaching at both Cardiff and Oxford universities he gave to travelling to Eastern Europe before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall. He and others provided education in Maths, science, and Christianity to people there.

In one story of those trips that he tells in the book, he talks about a Christian family in the former East Germany that he met. The children of the family were thrown out of school at the age of fourteen for continuing to profess faith in Jesus. No more education for them, as a punishment for their faith. No access to anything other than the most menial of jobs. But they were not ashamed of Jesus.

We know how so many of those first disciples held to their faith in Jesus when confronted with the pressure to deny him and be ashamed of their faith. So, what kept them, and those young East German Christians, loyal when they could have had an easier life if they had denied Jesus?

Surely, it was knowing just how much Jesus had done for them, how much he loved them, and how much it had already cost him to do so. Do we always keep that at the forefront of our minds? If I had done that, maybe I wouldn’t have clammed up on that bus trip. Maybe some of you wouldn’t have given in to social pressures, either, if you regularly remembered that Jesus loved us to the point of death.

The third and final pressure is a bit of a shock: it’s family.

Family silhouette on seashore during sunset. Public Domain image at PickPik.

In verses 34 to 39 Jesus says that he will divide family members against each other, and you aren’t worthy to be his disciple if you don’t love him more than you love your family.

Well! Isn’t the church supposed to be pro-family? Aren’t we the ones who care about marriages not only surviving but thriving? Aren’t we the ones who preach faithfulness and a strict sexual ethic? Aren’t we the ones who put on parenting courses so that children will be raised well? We’re pretty invested in the institution of the family.

But Jesus here is not addressing people who undermine the family, who promote the easy break-up of relationships, and the idea that you put your own happiness ahead of that of your spouse. No: he is saying something different from what we typically campaign about. He is telling us that even our families can become idols. Family life can trump commitment to God.

And it’s true. How many times today do family events mean that we don’t come to worship? How about what happens when a young person from a non-Christian family shows an interest in faith? It’s not unusual for their family to put pressure on them not to get too committed. Out come all the stories about religious cults.

Jesus has an important point here. Yes, elsewhere he teaches about the sanctity of marriage and all those things. But here he warns us never to put anything above our commitment to him, not even our families. It doesn’t mean that we neglect those we love, but it does mean that our family relationships must never compromise our radical commitment to Jesus.

I understand the pull of this temptation. I waited longer than most for the right woman to marry, and then to become a father. I moved my day off to Saturday to make it easier to have family time. Hence, I still have to ask myself: is Jesus still the most important person in my life?

I know a married couple who became Christians in adult life, a few years into their marriage. One day, one of them said rather nervously to the other, ‘I’m sorry, but there is someone else I love more than you.’

I wonder whether the other spouse thought they were about to hear the confession of an affair.

But then the first spouse continued. ‘His name is Jesus.’

How do we show our loved ones that Jesus is number one in our lives? Or do we only express any dedication to Jesus within the space that our family members allow us?

We need to remember the old saying: Jesus is a capitalist. He only believes in takeover bids.

And that’s right. That’s why we call him ‘Lord.’ We cannot call him Lord and then put someone else or something else higher in our lives than him.

Maybe family is not where we feel that temptation. But for some of us, it is. And if it’s not family, who or what else is it that we are enticed to elevate to a greater priority than Jesus? Do we need to do some re-ordering of our lives?

Conclusion

Is it any wonder that these verses conclude with Jesus reminding us that we need to take up our cross and follow him?

The Cross shows us the extent of his love for us, and hence why it puts our fears into context.

The Cross is where not only sin but also shame is dealt with.

The Cross is the price Jesus paid for us all. Does he not deserve to have our first, our highest, and our greatest loyalty?

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What Mission Requires According To Jesus, Matthew 9:35-10:8 (Trinity 2 Ordinary 11 Year A)

Matthew 9:35-10:8

Jesus Christ Heals The Sick – vector image at Wannapik. CC 3.0.

Mission. It’s everything the church is sent into the world to do. It’s our proclamation in words and deeds of God’s kingdom that has come in Jesus.

And increasingly, it’s on the lips of Christians and churches. Well – at least as an agenda item for our meetings.

Maybe church decline has made us wake up to this. In a society where Christianity is no longer natural or normal, we are belatedly realising that we cannot just sit here and wait for people to come to us, as past generations of Christians did.

But then we jump into panic mode. We lift a technique or a fashionable approach off the shelf. It comes with great claims and great reviews. Perhaps there is a book that tells us of the wonderful results this method has had elsewhere.

So we try it. But it doesn’t work for us. More gloom and despair.

Could it be that we need to listen to Jesus? I know that sounds obvious, and possibly patronising, but it’s shocking how little time we do spend seeking out his voice on the matter.

I’m going to suggest we listen to what Jesus has to say about what mission requires from our reading today.

Firstly, Jesus says mission requires compassion:

Image of sheep sourced at PxHere. Public Domain.

35 Jesus went through all the towns and villages, teaching in their synagogues, proclaiming the good news of the kingdom and healing every disease and illness. 36 When he saw the crowds, he had compassion on them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.

There it is: ‘he had compassion on them.’ Compassion for the crowds is his motivation. They have been let down by their leaders. This has left them far from God. He sees their need, and he has compassion. This is why he engages in mission. Compassion.

I have to say, it is not always why we dip our toes into the waters of mission. Our motives can be different.

Martyn Atkins, a former Principal of Cliff College and Secretary of the Methodist Conference, used to tell a story about how he visited a church that said they wanted to engage in mission. He asked them why.

The reply came back that they had lost numbers and had a lot of job vacancies to fill. Otherwise, the church wouldn’t survive into the future.

Atkins observed that this was a poor motivation for mission. It was a motivation that didn’t care about the people they wanted to reach. They only cared about themselves.

Compassion is the only healthy motivation for mission. What we need to consider is not so much the future of the church as the needs of people who do not yet know Jesus.

They may not realise that they are ‘harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd,’ but that does not change their need of Christ. They may be satisfied with reaching their own standard of what it is to be a good person, but they still need Jesus. They may think they will be satisfied by chasing money, but that only demonstrates their inner emptiness, even if they don’t know it yet.

I am sure you can think of people you know who do not yet acknowledge Jesus as Lord. Some of them will be as close as your own family. However full and happy their lives may be outwardly, they are lacking the most important thing of all. Can you allow compassion to rise up within you for them, and let that drive you to prayer, just as it did Jesus?

Others of them will have the kind of needs that Jesus met in the reading. Will you allow their presenting needs also to motivate you to compassionate prayer for them, and for their deepest needs, namely to know Christ?

I hope you have a list of people you pray for regularly – and I would suggest daily. Will you ask God to let you feel something of what his heart feels for them? And as a result, will you let the compassion of the Father grow in your heart, and motivate your prayers, your words, and your actions for the people on your list?

Secondly, Jesus says mission requires delegation:

Sheldon by Dave Faulkner. CC 2.0.

37 Then he said to his disciples, ‘The harvest is plentiful but the workers are few. 38 Ask the Lord of the harvest, therefore, to send out workers into his harvest field.’

1 Jesus called his twelve disciples to him and gave them authority to drive out impure spirits and to heal every disease and illness.

Jesus delegates. Even he can’t do it all. He appoints others to share in his mission. I sometimes wonder how well today’s church has learnt this lesson.

Outside of my local church responsibilities, I have spent some time in recent years helping probationer Methodist ministers (those in their first two years of ministry). I have provided reflective supervision for some as a safe space for some to ponder how things are going. I have also served on the District Probationers’ Committee. In doing this, I have observed the crazy list of ‘competencies’ that new ministers are expected to display, according to the official documents. They are supposed to prove themselves as good preachers, as leaders of traditional and modern worship, as community figures, as pastors, as people with a prophetic voice, as able administrators, as evangelists, as wise on property issues, and so on.

Quite honestly, the system wants people who are better than Jesus. No wonder some circuits write specifications for new ministers that mean the Archangel Gabriel would be turned down. I am reminded of the lay leader who said many years ago when talking about recruiting a minister, ‘You don’t buy a dog and then wag your own tail.’

And how nice to be compared to a dog, by the way.

Oh, and if you think that’s fanciful, there was a church in one of my previous circuits, where, when the circuit asked them to provide volunteers, responded, ‘We don’t do things: we pay other people to do them for us.’

Jesus shows us a different way. Delegation. Responsibilities are shared. They cannot be loaded on one person. Even Jesus cannot do it all. He appoints apostles. They will share in his mission.

We all have a part to play in the mission of God. We do not hire someone else to do the dirty work for us. While we shall each have different gifts and strengths, we are all sent into the world to be witnesses to the love of God in Christ.

Put it another way: if compassion has motivated us to pray for people, then this is the point at which we become the answers to our own prayers. We need to be willing to do what it takes.

How can we use our gifts and talents to demonstrate God’s love to others? If you are good at cooking or baking, have you thought of making some food for a sick person, or a grieving family, or someone who is struggling financially? If you have musical gifts, can you use them to soothe people with troubled souls? If you are good with words, can you bring hope or comfort to those who are despairing?

And given that people’s deepest need is that they are like sheep without a shepherd, will you rely on the Holy Spirit to give you the right words at the right time to point them to the Good Shepherd?

Thirdly and finally, Jesus says mission requires imitation:

Compare what Jesus did with what he called the apostles to do. First, Jesus:

35 Jesus went through all the towns and villages, teaching in their synagogues, proclaiming the good news of the kingdom and healing every disease and illness.

Now, hear again what he commanded the apostles:

7 As you go, proclaim this message: “The kingdom of heaven has come near.” 8 Heal those who are ill, raise the dead, cleanse those who have leprosy, drive out demons. Freely you have received; freely give.

It’s pretty similar, isn’t it? Jesus might just as well have said, ‘Go and do what I’ve been doing.’

Simples, as the advert would say.

But I hear you protest. And I do, too. Mission is as simple as healing the sick, casting out demons, and raising the dead? Well, I don’t call that simple.

Here’s the thing. We don’t all have all the gifts of Jesus, although there’s no harm in seeking more spiritual gifts from the Holy Spirit. But we do have some.

And even if we don’t have a specific gift, there is still something for us to do. For example, some people seem to have a specific powerful ministry of intercession, but we all have the general call to pray. Others have a specific gift of evangelism, but we all have the general call to be witnesses. Some have a specific healing ministry, but we all have the general call to pray for the sick. And you never know what God might do.

Let me repeat a story I have certainly told informally in some church circles and may have mentioned in the odd sermon. I once had a political refugee join one of my churches. He had fled for his life from another country where the regime was one of the cruellest Islamic governments in the world. He had to depart so quickly he left behind his wife and young son. And he didn’t know that his wife was pregnant with their second son.

He had shown an interest in Christianity and joined our church, slowly picking up English as he went. He came to Sunday worship and small groups.

One day, after a morning service, he asked me to pray for his second son back home. He was very sick. His wife had taken him to various doctors, but none could help him. Would I pray? Of course. I said a simple, short prayer, and thought no more of it.

Until, that is, he asked to be baptised. Two of us questioned him. He said that he had never come across anything in Islam like the teaching of Jesus, especially in the Sermon on the Mount. He also noticed how Christianity treated women so much better than Islam.

And one last thing. Did I remember when he asked me to pray for his younger son? Had he told me that after that, his son had been healed?

Well, wow. Because I have never thought I had a healing ministry. That is only one of two cases I know of where I have prayed for someone and they have been healed. But this incident played its part in leading this man to Christ.

Conclusion

So how about we let the compassion of Jesus for people in need drive our mission, rather than our fretting about the state of the church?

How about we all accept the responsibility to play a part in the mission of God, rather than just leaving it to the ‘paid staff’?

And how about we begin to imitate the ministry of Jesus, even if we think what we’re doing is feeble in comparison to what he did? Because you never know what his Spirit might do through your offering.

1

Expecting The Trinity And Getting Jesus, Matthew 28:16-20 (Trinity Sunday Year A)

Matthew 28:16-20

The Most Holy Trinity, St George’s Church, Guke near Pljevja – Montenegro on Wikimedia Commons. CC 4.0.

I can guess what many of you are thinking. It’s Trinity Sunday, and in this reading, we’ve heard about disciples being baptised in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. And in our act of worship, we’ve had another reading, which ended with reference to the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit. So you may have deduced from all of this that you’re getting another mind-bending annual sermon on the Trinity.

But no. I have preached about the basic meaning of the Trinity before. Years ago, I even preached a whole sermon series about the Trinity. I’m not sure what I would say this year that is different, if my aim were to explain the Trinity.

The scholar Ian Paul observed that this is the one Sunday of the year when preachers tend to depart from expounding the Bible readings for the day to preach on a theological idea, albeit one that is so important it distinguishes Christianity from all other faiths.

However, I am going to take up the challenge to expound the Gospel reading. Sure, it mentions the Trinity, but the focus of the passage is Jesus. We’re singing hymns about the Trinity today, but we’re concentrating on Jesus and his greatness.

Firstly, let’s focus on faith in Jesus:

I Could Be Meaner But Jesus Said No at GearEternal. CC 4.0.

16 Then the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain where Jesus had told them to go. 17 When they saw him, they worshipped him; but some doubted.

Matthew doesn’t give us any of the resurrection appearances. It may well be that he was running out of space on the scroll on which he was writing his Gospel, and so he had to compress things at the end.

But he tells us this story after both the women have found the empty tomb and believed, and the soldiers have chosen money and silence rather than faith. It’s a choice that comes before many of us when we meet with the risen Lord and the claims he makes on our lives.

There is even a split among the disciples here: some worshipped, but some doubted. Jesus doesn’t banish the doubters but reveals more of himself and lets them stay in the company of those who do believe, so that they may come to a point of surrender and faith.

The other day, I read the story of a Muslim man who had read the Gospels and been persuaded that what Jesus offered was far better than Islam. Realising the danger, his family quickly sorted out the prospects of an arranged marriage to a beautiful young woman, and a job in a prestigious company in a lucrative profession. All this he could have, if he just continued to recite that there was no god but Allah and that Muhammad was his prophet.

But he could not deny what Jesus offered. He declined the marriage and the job offer and went with Jesus. He took up his cross as he followed him and his family rejected him.

If Jesus is risen from the dead, then it makes all the difference in the world. This man knew that.

And this challenge is for us. What does it mean for us truly to put our faith in the risen Lord and worship him? What has it cost us? Are there things we have given up or even lost by virtue of trusting him? Have we recognised him as our risen Lord, or is our faith a hobby? Have we been glad to welcome him for all the comforting things such as the way this reading ends – ‘And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age’ – whilst being reluctant to bow the knee in worship? Do we recognise that such worship is more than singing a few hymns we like but is in fact an act of homage?

So – what does our faith in the risen Jesus look like? What does it involve? Have we paid a cost by choosing him against other attractions in the world?

Secondly, let’s focus on the identity of Jesus:

Jesus Christ, Son of God at Wannapik. CC 3.0.

Here, I’m putting together a few things in the reading. ‘All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me’ tells us something about his status. So does including him as ‘the Son’ in the baptismal formula of ‘Father, Son, and Holy Spirit’: Jews would have seen a reference to the Father and to God’s Spirit as identifying divinity, so putting Jesus in among that also tells us about Jesus’ identity. Finally, what sort of being could say he was with his disciples to the end of the age?

I suggest that if you add up all these things, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that Jesus is claiming divine status for himself. He is more than a rabbi. He is more than a prophet. He is the Son of God, a title which in Jewish thought does not make him junior to the Father but equal with him.

What does this mean for us? Well, for a start this immediately plugs back into what we were thinking about in the first point. Jesus’ divine status is the very reason that we have faith in him and worship him. We bow down, give homage, and profess loyalty to the Son of God. It makes sense that all authority is his, and therefore our calling is to follow what he says.

This is why Tom Wright said that the message of the Resurrection is not, ‘Jesus is raised from the dead and so we can go to heaven.’ Instead, it is, ‘Jesus is raised from the dead and we have a job of work to do.’

For the Resurrection and then the Ascension mean that first of all, God the Father has vindicated everything Jesus did and said in his mission before his crucifixion. He has underlined it. He has affirmed it. There is a big tick beside all of it. And secondly, given that the Son of God is now reigning at the Father’s right hand until every enemy is put under his feet, we join in the project of aligning with his will. As we do that, we express our membership of his coming kingdom now. The job of work we have to do because Jesus is raised and exalted is to co-operate with the Holy Spirit in the will of God. We build for his kingdom by being his junior partners in the great task of making all things new. We do this, because of who Jesus is. He is the Son of God, back from the dead to reign.

Do we truly believe this is who Jesus is? If we do, then let us stop to consider this question: what are we doing to participate in his kingdom project of making all things new? Where are we involved in the renewal of people and of this world? Can we answer that? If not, then let us pray until we have an answer. And when we have the answer, let’s start putting it into practice.

Thirdly and finally, let’s focus on the mission of Jesus:

Copyright Andreas F Borchert on Facebook. CC 3.0.

19 Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptising them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, 20 and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you.

There are a lot of verbs in that sentence. But one of them is the main verb, and it isn’t obvious in most English translations. You might think it’s the first verb, ‘go,’ but you’d be wrong. More literally, we would translate it as ‘going.’

No: the main verb is ‘make disciples.’ We make disciples by going, baptising, and teaching.

What is a disciple? As I said at the Lindford Bible Study on Thursday night, a helpful replacement word for disciple might be ‘apprentice.’ An apprentice is someone who learns, but who specifically learns on the job.

Therefore, we are not merely called to persuade people to believe in God and in Jesus. We are called to persuade people to become apprentices of Jesus.

To do that, we need to go. It will not happen if we stay within the comforting walls of the church family. We need to go where people are. Jesus didn’t merely teach and heal in the synagogue. He did that, but he also went out into the fields to where people lived and worked. It is why we need to find our place of service in the world as well as in the church. For that is where we shall look to be witnesses to Jesus in our words and our deeds.

We shall also need to baptise. We must rid ourselves of sentimental ideas that baptism is wetting the baby’s head, or little more than a rite of passage, or something that must be done if that child is to be able to have a church wedding when they grow up. Baptism is when we initiate someone into the ways of Jesus and plunge them into that life. Baptism is a revolutionary new beginning in an apprenticeship with Jesus.

And we shall need to teach – but not abstract theory. Remember, Jesus said we are to teach people to obey everything he has commanded. When you hear it like that, the idea of the apprentice makes sense. This is less about teaching people to memorise the maps on the inside covers of their Bible. It is more about learning the ways of Jesus on the job, in everyday life. You do not need to be an academic theologian to teach discipleship. You just need to be able to model for someone how to live the Christian life.

I wonder what would happen if we remodelled our church life according to this commandment of Jesus. I think we would have fewer church meetings, because we were busy in the world shining the light of Jesus there. Our main non-Sunday meetings would be those that supported us in that task.

I wonder also how many would or could be released into that ministry of showing newer disciples what it means in real-life practical terms what it means to follow Jesus. We need to identify and empower those who can teach by example. Although actually, that should be all of us to a greater or lesser extent.

Conclusion

So – you were expecting the Trinity and you got Jesus. Maybe to talk just about him is less intellectually challenging, but it is still very challenging for our life and our faith.

Has our faith in him cost us? Do we bow before him as Son of God and participate in his kingdom plans to renew all things? Do we put disciple-making as a major priority in our lives and in the church?

These are true tests of our faith in our risen and ascended Lord.

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Demystifying Pentecost, Acts 2:1-21

Acts 2:1-21

Religious brick wall painting at PickPik. Public Domain.

It has been said that neither Protestants nor Catholics really believe in Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Catholics believe in Father, Son, and Holy Mother, and Protestants in Father, Son, and Holy Bible.

In other words, all sorts of Christians become embarrassed about believing in the Holy Spirit.

And both the strangeness in the biblical account of Pentecost plus the apparently wild behaviour (at least to traditional Christians) in Pentecostal churches only exacerbates that disconnect from the Holy Spirit.

Therefore, what I want to do today is demystify Pentecost and the Holy Spirit. For however unfamiliar some of the account in Acts 2 is to many churchgoers in the older denominations, there is important truth for us to receive in this narrative.

And if some of it is strange – don’t be discouraged. Luke had trouble describing it. He refers to ‘a sound like the blowing of a violent wind’ (verse 2) and ‘what seemed to be tongues of fire’ (verse 3). This is awe-inspiring, and a moment of wonder.

Firstly, Pentecost is about restoration:

Restoration Techniques → Area → Sustainability at sustainable-directory.com. CC 4.0.

Pentecost celebrated the first fruits of the harvest.  The full harvest festival would come later, at the Feast of Tabernacles. But in late Spring, Israel would rejoice that the first fruits of the harvest were appearing.

This is an image that Paul uses about the Resurrection. He says that the Resurrection of Jesus is the first fruits, and he looks forward to the full harvest when all will be raised from the dead. And not only that, God will make all things new, including heaven and earth.

Pentecost puts us in that period between the first fruits and the final harvest – between God beginning to make all things new when he raised Jesus from the dead, and the great day when everything will be renewed and healed.

There is a biblical name for this period. It’s called the ‘last days.’ We are probably used to hearing ‘the last days’ from preachers who are predicting the imminent Second Coming of Jesus, but in the New Testament the last days is this entire period when the coming kingdom of God overlaps with the existing kingdom of death and sin, a time when God begins to make all things new. You will notice that Peter made reference to it in his Pentecost sermon. All that talk about ‘the sun being turned to darkness and the moon to blood’ was not a reference to today’s weather forecast from the Met Office.

Pentecost puts us in this season of restoration, even though much continues to happen that is anything but that. All those things we long for, and which we know God will ultimately bring in a full and perfect way – health, peace, justice, full provision of every need, the healing of relationships, you name it – are ministries of the Holy Spirit now.

So where is God calling you to make a difference for good in the world? Where is he calling you to rebuild and be an agent of restoration? The key to your response is to call on the Holy Spirit, who will work these things that we cannot do of ourselves.

Secondly, Pentecost is about holiness:

Your Pastor Is Not A Therapist by David Gate at rawpixel.com. Public Domain.

Pentecost was one of three Jewish festivals where pilgrims came to Jerusalem. As well as marking the first fruits of the harvest, it commemorated God’s giving of his Law to Israel at Mount Sinai during the Exodus.

Pentecost marks the New Testament response to that. For people tried and failed to keep God’s Law. Moreover, others used it as the mark of who was in or who was out of God’s People, and perhaps still others said that keeping the Law was your way of being in favour with God. Which was a problem if everyone failed.

Now, just as Ezekiel 36 prophesied the day when God would give his people a new heart and a new spirit, so the Spirit of God is poured out on all God’s people so they may have power to do the will of God. It is why Paul told the Galatians to ‘keep in step with the Spirit.’

We want to please God, don’t we? We want to do it, not to earn salvation but to show our gratitude that he has saved us from sin through Jesus Christ, his cross and resurrection. To live that life of pleasing God, he helps us by sending the Holy Spirit.

Pentecost is a day to rejoice that our struggles to obey God can be addressed. It is a day when we can go from ‘Can’t do’ to ‘Can do’ in the kingdom of God. If we want to be a ‘can do’ Christian, then we welcome the gift of the Holy Spirit.

Thirdly, Pentecost is about power:

Background Wallpaper Energy at needpix.com. Public Domain.

We see this in the way the Spirit comes ‘like the blowing of a violent wind.’ Wind or breath is the same as ‘Spirit’, in both Old and New Testaments. This is therefore the fulfilment of Jesus’ words where he told the disciples to stay in the city until they were clothed with power from on high.

A couple of years ago, I had a serious problem with my car, thanks to Peugeot failing to include monitoring of the cam belt in my service plan. Fortunately, a call to my dealer and their diagnosis caught the issue just in time before my engine was trashed. The dealer then fought Peugeot to get them to pay for the repair.

As a result, I started looking into the current car market, and it is so different from when we last bought one. Now, as you will know, it is as easy to buy an electric or hybrid vehicle as it is a conventional petrol-engined model.

But whatever car you go for, you need power, be that electric, petrol, or a mixture. Your wagon will not move without it.

Yet we forget this when we come to the Christian life. We think we can get on with things in our own strength or using the right techniques. What fools we are.

Pentecost is the reminder we badly need that we are utterly dependent upon the power of God to live for Jesus Christ. Today is the day we need to bring us back to that need for divine power, the Holy Spirit.

And what’s distinctive about the Spirit’s power is that it is related to the Cross – something certain Christians seeking to exercise power in the USA at present seem to have forgotten.

Fourthly, Pentecost is about presence:

Free bold abstract painting background at rawpixel.com. Public Domain.

‘What seemed to be tongues of fire’: time and again in the Bible, fire signifies the presence of God. Whether it was the burning bush, or the pillar of cloud by day and pillar of cloud by night that God used to lead Israel in the wilderness, or the God who answered by fire when Elijah confronted the prophets of Baal at Mount Carmel, fire is a symbol of the divine presence.

But that presence only came upon a few select individuals before Pentecost. Moses longed for the day when the Spirit of God would come upon all of God’s people, and they would prophesy. Pentecost is the occasion when Moses’ prayer is answered.

The presence of God comes upon all the disciples. Not just those who had been selected as apostles; there were a hundred and twenty gathered when the Spirit fell. Thus it is that Peter in his sermon goes on to quote the prophet Joel, who foresaw the day when the Spirit would come upon both sons and daughters, the young and the old, and female and male servants.

If you are a follower of Jesus, the Holy Spirit descends upon you and resides within you. No exceptions. The Spirit is not the deluxe gift for the especially enthusiastic, but the birthright of all Christians.

As a result, not only do we have the awe-inspiring comfort of knowing that God is always with us, but we also become carriers of his presence into the world. Part of our mission is for people to meet the presence of God through us. Therefore, we need to tend the gift of the Holy Spirit. To go back to my illustration of the car, we need either to fill up with petrol or charge it with electricity. So too do we need to ensure we are full of the Spirit.

The evangelist D L Moody was once speaking at a meeting about the text in Ephesians, ‘Be filled with the Spirit.’ He pointed out (correctly) that the Greek means, ‘Continue to be filled with the Spirit.’ Afterwards, a vicar objected to this teaching. ‘Why do I need to continue to be filled with the Spirit when I have already received him?’

Moody replied: ‘I need to continue to be filled with the Spirit, because I leak.’

Fifthly and finally, Pentecost is about reconciliation:

Refugee Resettlement Watercolor Painting | AI Art Generator | Easy-Peasy.AI. CC 4.0.

At Pentecost, we sometimes make a contrast with the story in Genesis about the Tower of Babel, where God acted against human pride by confusing people through making them speak different languages. Here, we have God crossing the language barrier through the gift of tongues. It isn’t that people are restored so that everyone speaks one language, but the Holy Spirit crosses over the barriers of human language and culture.

This is a sign of two forms of reconciliation: one is that God’s mission is to reconcile all people of all races and backgrounds to himself through Jesus Christ. The other is that the Holy Spirit enables reconciliation between people of different cultures and nationalities.

It’s not that there are different ways to God in different parts of the world, and that all religions lead to God. The way to reconciliation with him is through Jesus, for that is who the Spirit reveals. There is a strong mission and evangelism impulse in the outpouring of the Holy Spirit. The Spirit doesn’t simply come to give Christians a good time; the Spirit comes to send us into the world with the Good News of Jesus.

Then, in a world riven with fear and hatred between people of different races, the Holy Spirit comes to take down the barriers and build bridges of reconciliation. As someone who grew up in what became an increasingly multi-racial church, I have seen this.

And in a world where asylum seekers are demonised, the work of the Spirit is very much not about claiming white privilege. The early church, once it broke out of its initial Jewish context, quickly became a mixture of cultures. And they were known how? By their love. A love that transcended masters and slaves, male and female, Jew and Gentile. What would it say to our world if it saw the church modelling something similar today?

Conclusion

We began by saying that Pentecost is about God’s mission of restoration. It calls us to holiness, depending on the power of the Holy Spirit, carrying the presence of God into the world, and proclaiming reconciliation both with God and one another.

It’s time to stop being sheepish about the Holy Spirit. Instead, we urgently need to welcome the Spirit.

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Church Anniversary Sermon: The Jesus-Shaped Faith of the Church (Matthew 16:13-20)

Matthew 16:13-20

As a young person growing up, I became very frustrated by the Church. I used to describe it, in typical teenage black and white terms, as a God club where God had been voted off the committee.

It became a passion for me that the Church become more like she was meant to be. One time, as a young Local Preacher, I was in my bedroom one evening preparing a service for the following Sunday, when my sister came in.

‘What are you preaching about this Sunday?” she asked.

‘The Church,” I replied.

“You’re always preaching about the Church,” she said. She was probably right.

Even when I undertook my postgraduate research in Theology while I was training for the ministry, the focus of my thesis was ‘ecclesiology’ – that is, the doctrine that describes what we believe about the nature of the church.

So when you ask me to take a church anniversary, it feels to me like eating one of Penny’s cheese scones straight from the oven, closely followed by her lemon drizzle cake!

The way I want to speak about this subject today from this passage is to talk about ‘The Faith of the Church’.

Firstly, the Location of the Church’s faith:

Caesarea Philippi. Wikimedia Commons. CC 2.0.

Verse 13:

When Jesus came to the region of Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples, ‘Who do people say the Son of Man is?’

‘When Jesus came to Caesarea Philippi’ is not mere decorative detail. Caesarea Philippi[1] was twenty-five miles north from the Lake of Galilee by the source of the River Jordan and close to the ancient city of Dan, that had marked the northern end of the Promised Land.

But this boundary place no longer reflected the ancient faith of Israel. You can tell from the name ‘Caesarea Philippi’ that it had succumbed to Roman influence. It was famous by then for its grottos and caves dedicated to the worship of the Greek god Pan. He was the god of nature, flocks, shepherds, and wild mountain areas. Sacrifices of cows, rams, lambs, milk, and honey were offered to him in the hope he would bring them luck. He was approached noisily: quiet and silence were considered inappropriate.

Against this pagan context, Jesus invites his disciples to elucidate their faith. Not in the relative safety of the synagogue, but as part of God’s people throughout the world, surrounded by paganism and Roman military might. Here – in the midst of the world, where not everyone would agree – the faith was to be lived out.

It’s the same for us today. We live out our faith, not in the cosy warmth of church fellowship but in a world where it is one of many competing ideas. Today, Jesus calls us to live for him not only in a society full of other faiths but also in a context of different cultural persuasions. At one end we have a political protest that wants to reverse all the social change since the 1960s; at the other, we have so-called ‘progressive’ or ‘woke’ values. Not only that, we have a spectrum that runs from those who believe true satisfaction can be found in money and possessions to those who are beginning to realise that their parents’ rejection of God and religion has left a vacuum at the heart of life.

To live as a family that follows Jesus in such a society is neither easy nor simple. But this is the context in which our Lord calls us to be faithful community today. We cannot wistfully hope for a return to the way things were when we were younger. This is the generation in which Jesus calls his church to live as one for him.

Secondly, the Confession of the Church’s faith:

CS Lewis. Leman Ramishvili on Flickr. Public Domain.

Here, we go from ‘Who do people say the Son of Man is?’ in verse 13 to ‘Who do you say I am?’ in verse 15.

To be part of the faithful Church it’s not enough to say Jesus is a good guy, a prophet. Our Muslim friends revere Jesus, and that’s why it’s untrue to claim they want to ban Christmas, but this is as far as they go. They are vulnerable to CS Lewis’ famous criticism that it won’t do to say Jesus was a good man. It doesn’t fit with the remarkable claims he made about himself. Lewis said that the only realistic options in the light of those claims is to say that he is (or was) either Lord, liar, or lunatic. There is no evidence of him being a liar and he doesn’t behave like a lunatic. The best explanation that fits the evidence is that he is Lord.

And that’s where the Church’s confession of faith lands. The earliest Christian confession was the words, ‘Jesus is Lord.’

Naturally, the words of our confession need to be accompanied by deeds. To acknowledge him as Lord, as Son of the Living God, is something to be demonstrated. It calls us to be a community that lives according to his teaching.

Not only that, this complex, plural society that is the context for our faith expects us to live differently, and that is a fair expectation. Moreover, it may be one of the best ways we witness to Jesus. As the saying goes, ‘You may be the only Bible someone reads.’ People do not know the Christian faith anymore. It has been said that we have moved as a society from being one that framed itself inside the Christian story as its defining narrative to one that instead frames itself against the story of Hitler and the Nazis. You hear more reference to them negatively today than you do to Jesus positively. We have a calling here, to confess Jesus as Lord and to live in harmony with that confession.

Thirdly, the Foundation of the Church’s faith:

Sylvester Stallone. Wikimedia Commons. CC 2.0.

Have you ever wondered where Sylvester Stallone appears in the Bible? It’s here. Jesus pronounces a blessing on Simon for his answer that was given to him by heaven and then renames him Rocky. For that’s what Peter means. Those Hollywood movies would never have sounded so attractive had they been called ‘Peter I, II, III, and IV’, but in this text you get a sense of the wordplay if you read it as ‘You are Rocky, and on this rock I will build my church’ (verse 18).

Foundations were often made from rock. Remember Jesus’ teaching in the Sermon on the Mount about the wise man who built his house on a rock, whereas the foolish man built his on sand.

The Church, then, is built on the rock of Peter’s confession of faith in Jesus. How much of that is connected to the person of Peter as our Catholic friends believe is a debate I will not enter here, but the crucial point for us is that we are only the Church insofar as we build on the foundation of faith in Jesus, the Messiah, the Son of the Living God, our Lord. We cannot jettison any of what the apostles handed on to us whilst remaining the Church, even if it is true that we must always interpret the application of the ancient faith in our day.

So whatever we are doing in the Church, let us always bring it back to Jesus – and not our imaginings of him, but his life, teaching, and example as set out in the Gospels. That way, we attend to our foundations, and our house is not swept away in the storm.

Fourthly, the Resilience of the Church’s faith:

Salvation Army building. Wikimedia Commons. CC 2.0.

Jesus promises that the gates of Hades will not overcome the church in verse 18. Sometimes we imagine these words as depicting the church cowering under attack, but since when was anybody attacked by a set of gates?

No! Gates are defensive objects. They are there to keep people out. And these are the gates of Hades – not of Hell, as in older translations. Hades was the place of death. Here, Jesus promises that death cannot kill the church, and what is more, the church is on the offensive against death.

Therefore, all our worries about church decline and aging need to put into this context. Yes, it is true that certain individual churches (and denominations) will disappear, but overall, the Church of Jesus Christ is indestructible. He has made it so. In history, various denominations have declined and become moribund, but God has raised up a new expression of his church to continue his mission.

Methodism is one example. God raised up the Methodist movement when the eighteenth-century Church of England was not so much full of living waters as of spiritual ditchwater.

Then Methodism became rather too comfortable and middle-class cozy towards the end of the nineteenth century, so God raised up the Salvation Army to restore the importance of bringing good news to the poor.

When Methodism also declined in holiness and spiritual power at the beginning of the twentieth century, God acted again. He raised up the Pentecostal movement partly, at least, out of Wesleyan holiness churches.

Our version of Christianity may possibly wither and die, but still God will do something new with his people.

And whatever form it takes, God’s people will be on the offensive against death and all its friends – sickness, poverty, injustice. The gates of Hades don’t stand a chance against the Church of Jesus Christ.

Fifthly and finally, the Authority of the Church’s faith:

A metal keyring and three keys on a dark surface. Free Images Live. CC 3.0.

Here we’re thinking about all the ‘keys of the kingdom’ and ‘binding and loosing’ language Jesus applies to Peter (or should I say, Rocky?) in verse 19.

These words clearly involve Jesus giving Peter some power and authority. The keys to the kingdom make him some kind of ‘Prime Minister’ or ‘Chief Rabbi’[2] in God’s kingdom, giving ruling decisions and interpretations of God’s will. That comes down to us in the teaching of Peter and the other apostles that is authoritative for us in the New Testament canon.

The binding and loosing on earth as it is in heaven should probably be translated, ‘Whatever you bind on earth will have been bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will have been loosed in heaven.’ Therefore, this is about ratifying the decisions of heaven[3]. It means that church leaders must only allow into the church community those who have confessed Jesus Christ as Lord.

I know an incident in a past circuit where I think I failed in this regard. A couple started coming to the church and eventually asked to see me about church membership. They wanted to know if they were ‘good enough’ for membership of the church. I recommended them.

But those words ‘good enough’ should have been a red flag for me. Their religion was all about rules – that is, so-called legalism. They brought a harshness into the church that was hard to remove. We even had to shut down one home group because the husband of this couple turned all the discussions into occasions of taking every preacher in the circuit to pieces.

Pray that those entrusted with authority in Christ’s Church use it in ways that reflect the life and teaching of Jesus. To vary from it is disastrous.

Conclusion

We’ve looked at the location of the Church’s faith in a varied and mixed-up world. We’ve looked at our confession of Jesus as Lord, and how Jesus alone is the foundation of that faith. We have taken encouragement from the resilience of the Church’s faith, based on the unchanging purposes of God in Christ, and we have looked at the solemn responsibility of leaders to base their authority on Christ alone.

In other words, everything always comes back to Jesus in the Church. Let’s make sure we do.

[1] On what follows, see Craig S Keener, The Gospel of Matthew: A Socio-Rhetorical Commentary, p424.

[2] Keener, p429.

[3] Keener, p430.

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Loving Jesus, John 14:15-21 (Easter 6 Year A)

John 14:15-21

At our wedding rehearsal, Debbie and I tried out two different pieces of exit music for the end of the service. The winner was the Thunderbirds theme tune: it had just the right rhythm for walking out.

The one we rejected, for not quite having the right rhythm, was the theme tune to The Simpsons.

I guess if we’d gone with The Simpsons, we’d have had to have served doughnuts afterwards, given Homer Simpson’s love for them.

Homer Simpson vector by BillybobFM on DeviantArt CC 3.0

And I’d like you to think about doughnuts for a moment. An outer ring, an inner ring, and the centre. Because that’s roughly the structure of our reading today. There is one theme in an outer ring, at the beginning and end of the passage, a second them in the verses just inside that, and a central theme in the middle of all of them.

Not only that, let’s remember that this teaching comes from what we call Jesus’ ‘Farewell Discourses’: teaching he considered so important he had to share it before his death.

Specifically here, the theme is ‘Loving Jesus.’

The outer circle asks, what does loving Jesus involve?

Love Letter Free Stock Photo – StockSnap.io Public Domain.

The answer is simple to state: we keep Jesus’ commands. At the beginning in verse 15 Jesus says,

If you love me, keep my commands.

At the end in verse 21 he says,

Whoever has my commands and keeps them is the one who loves me. The one who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I too will love them and show myself to them.

This isn’t the only place where Jesus tells his disciples that if they love him, they will do what he says. He will repeat that emphasis later in the Farewell Discourses.

Not only that, but I have also preached on this teaching from other verses before. I don’t have anything particularly new or different to say about them. I’m going to say much what I’ve said before, but maybe in slightly different words.

Keeping commands may seem a strange way of showing love. We don’t expect our friends to command us. But Jesus our great friend is still also our Lord. He does have a right to tell us what he wants of us.

Therefore, we see this as a special, souped-up case of what we know in ordinary friendships. If we love someone, we want to please them. We please Jesus, our Lord and supreme Friend, by doing what he asks.

In his letter to the Ephesians, the Apostle Paul tells his readers to ‘Find out what pleases the Lord.’ While we may sometimes struggle with his will for certain specific circumstances, his general will is easy to find out. It’s laid out in the Gospels, where we find his teaching. In terms of our general behaviour as Christians, what Jesus wants of us is fairly straightforward to discern. He wants kindness, humility, forgiveness, sacrifice, and so on. He calls us to do these things and adopt these attitudes as a sign of our love for him.

What we can’t afford to do if we love Jesus is just sit around doing nothing while we wait to find out his will. Even if we are waiting and praying about something particular in our lives, we still have plenty to get on with doing that will please him.

We don’t always find it comfortable. Jesus’ commands are often rather more challenging than we would like. Mark Twain once said that it wasn’t so much the words of Jesus he didn’t understand that troubled him, so much as the words of Jesus he did understand that bothered him.

That’s not to deny that sometimes Jesus’ commands need understanding in their context and their cultural background, but I suspect many of us would like to explain away some of his words at times, when instead he calls us to simple obedience out of love.

The inner circle of the doughnut asks not, what does loving Jesus involve, but how can we do it?

Pentecost Free Stock Photo – Public Domain Pictures

The answer comes in verses 16 and 17:

16 And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another advocate to help you and be with you for ever – 17 the Spirit of truth. The world cannot accept him, because it neither sees him nor knows him. But you know him, for he lives with you and will be in you.

How can we love Jesus by obeying his commands when those commands can be so challenging? The answer is that Jesus promises to give us the Holy Spirit.

Now, we shall focus especially on the gift of the Holy Spirit in a fortnight’s time when we get to the Feast of Pentecost. But we cannot reduce the Spirit of God to one Sunday a year. Perhaps we do that, because the Holy Spirit is mysterious, strange, and disturbing to us. We remember the old name, the Holy Ghost, and get spooked.

But this section of John’s Gospel, the ‘Farewell Discourses’, is the part of the Bible where above all the Spirit is spoken of in personal terms. These passages, more than any others, are the ones that justify us speaking of the Holy Spirit as the Third Person of the Trinity. Just listen to the warm and tender way Jesus describes the Holy Spirit in the verses I just read:

Another advocate to help you and be with you for ever – the Spirit of truth.

An advocate is a legal official who speaks on our behalf. Advocates help us. The Spirit is with us for ever and is the Spirit of truth. That’s not a spook to be afraid of, but the holy and loving God to be welcomed.

Debbie and I decided recently that our wills needed to be completely rewritten. We first drew them up when the children were small and we were consumed with questions about guardians for them if we died before they reached eighteen. Now they are young adults, our wills need to be very different in content.

So, we arranged to see a friend we knew from our last appointment. Clare was church warden at the parish church, the Mum of one of Mark’s school friends, and a local solicitor. She dealt with probate when my Dad died. Now, she is rewriting our wills, according to the desires we have indicated. She will provide the words that we cannot. Were we to write new wills off our own backs, the words would be all wrong, and we would saddle our children with untold legal complications after we are gone. But Clare will know the right words for our situation and provide them for us.

In similar ways, Christians call on the Holy Spirit. We don’t have the right words to say, but the Spirit can provide them. We lack the strength to do the right things, but the Spirit brings us the power. We don’t always want to do what Jesus commands us to do, but we can say to the Holy Spirit, ‘I don’t feel willing, but I’m willing to be made willing.’

When we know what Jesus requires of us that would demonstrate our love for him, the Holy Spirit can guide us in the way of his truth and give us the spiritual muscle we don’t otherwise have to do it. The Spirit is always on hand for that, because as Jesus said, he is with us for ever.

Finally, the centre of the doughnut asks what the consequence of this loving obedience to Jesus is:

Understanding Grace: Unmerited Favor in the Beloved CC 4.0

Here is what Jesus says about this:

18 I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you. 19 Before long, the world will not see me any more, but you will see me. Because I live, you also will live. 20 On that day you will realise that I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you.

The consequence is a close relationship. A life that flows from the life of Jesus. A closeness with him just as he is close to the Father.

In a way, it makes sense, doesn’t it? Take any kind of human relationship – a marriage, siblings, a friendship, or almost anything you care to name. Then in that relationship one person takes the initiative to show great kindness and love. The other person responds in gratitude by finding things that please the first person. If that happens, and keeps happening, those two people will grow ever closer.

This is what happens in the relationship between Jesus and us as well. He has taken the initiative to show extraordinary kindness and love to us, and at immense cost – the cost of his life. Through that, he gives us salvation. We respond as I indicated in the first point with a love that we show by finding out what pleases him and obeying his commands. The Holy Spirit enables us to do this, even when it is difficult, as I said in the second point. As this keeps happening, so we draw nearer and nearer to Jesus, and he comes closer than ever to us.

Is this what we want? To know Jesus more deeply, more closely than we have ever known him? Is this not the best thing we could have in the world?

Does Jesus want this for us? Of course he does. He has made the first move. He took on human flesh. He lived and died for us. He has been raised from the dead and now reigns at the Father’s right hand, where he prays for us. And not only that: he delights in us, he rejoices in us, he loves us before we ever love him, and he calls us his friends. You can be sure he wants that close relationship.

What, then, if we were to delight in him, rejoice in his love, accept his invitation to call him our friend, listen to him, and make thankful sacrifices for him?

The next move is ours.

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Jesus’ Farewell Message, John 14:1-14 (Easter 5 Year A)

John 14:1-14

Last Supper by Steve Evans on Flickr. CC 2.0.

When you say farewell to people, do you not want to say the important things? When I left one circuit, knowing that too many people wanted growth but without paying the cost of change, I preached on Jesus’ words to the invalid man by the waters of Bethesda in John 5: ‘Do you want to get well?’

To a church that was forever behaving in a juvenile way, I preached on Paul’s words to the Colossians about presenting everyone mature in Christ. I entitled the sermon, ‘Grow Up!’

When I left the last circuit to come here, I was aware of all the disappointment that not everything had worked out as I or church members had hoped. I chose words from Jeremiah 8: ‘The harvest has passed, the summer has ended, and we are not saved.’

This is not a farewell sermon. But it is a sermon based on some verses from what we call the ‘Farewell Discourses’ in John’s Gospel. Starting near the end of chapter 13 and running to the end of chapter 16, Jesus uses the Last Supper to teach his disciples important truths for what they will soon experience.

We have just a few verses from the Farewell Discourses this morning. But they include some of the most beloved and most challenging of Jesus’ words in this section of Scripture. What does he teach his disciples here? And what does that teaching say to us today?

I’m going to focus on three elements in this passage, and I’m going to call them Place, Path, and Prayer.

Firstly, Place:

Jesus talks in verses 2 and 3 about going to prepare a place for his disciples – words we love to read at funerals with a sense of comfort and hope.

You may be used to older translations that referred not to the Father’s house having ‘many rooms’ but ‘many mansions’. These words have been taken up in hymns and gospel music:

However, don’t you think it’s a little strange to imagine many mansions inside one house? ‘Mansions’ is not the best translation. Our version said ‘rooms’, which would make sense inside one house. It’s actually the word for a lodging, perhaps a temporary lodging, and it’s the basis for another English word – not mansion, but monastery. Which is quite different!

If it’s a temporary lodging it might refer to our resting-place in the presence of God in between our death and future resurrection. If we don’t put too much emphasis on the ‘temporary’ part, then the important thing is that Jesus is preparing our place in the house of the Lord.

And that is a place of the closest fellowship and relationship. Look at all the emphasis in these verses about Jesus living in the Father and the Father living in him, and how we go to be with Jesus.

So what is Jesus promising here? When he departs, he will prepare a place for us in the closest possible fellowship with him, God, and one another. All those experiences of feeling distant from God? Gone. All those dark nights of the soul? Gone, and only light. All those times of fractured relationships with people in this life? No more. This is the richness of his promise here.

Or – put it this way. One day, not so long ago, Debbie and I were driving back to the manse and she said something like, ‘Not long now and we’ll be home.’

I replied, ‘I still find it hard to call this manse home. Not in the sense that I feel settled: I still don’t. But if I call the manse home, I do so for one reason: because you are there.’

Our eternal dwelling – our room in the Father’s house – is home. And it’s home like nowhere else. Because Jesus is there.

And to add something else briefly: when we were looking for a dog to buy, we first of all considered rescue dogs. Looking at the websites of various organisations including the RSPCA, we would see image after image of appealing canines. Often the accompanying text would say, ‘This dog is looking for their forever home.’

And that expression ‘forever home’ lodged itself in my mind. For we too have a forever home, one that Jesus will have prepared.

Secondly, Path:

I Am The Way by Patrick Oben at Deshen Ministries. CC 4.0. (Note: if you follow the link, you will find that Patrick Oben was ordained by Benny Hinn, someone I explicitly do not endorse. However, I still value this image.)

Here I’m going to tackle Jesus’ statement in verse 6 that is so controversial in our day:

I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.

This is what we call an exclusive claim. It’s not popular in a society where we want to be inclusive. Thus, people tell stories like the one of the different blind men feeling an elephant, reporting apparently contradictory things about its nature from the thick legs to the trunk to the ears to the tusks, and this is taken as an argument for all religions having something true to say about God.

There is just one problem with it, and it’s a fatal one: what if God has opened blind eyes and revealed himself to people? It’s our claim he has done this supremely in Jesus.

We still treat people of other faiths with dignity, for they, like all human beings, are made in God’s image. But whatever things we agree on, there are too many fundamental contradictions for them all to be true. To claim that would be like saying that the person who believes two plus two equals six has as valid an insight as the one who says two plus two equals four.

When Jesus says he is the way, that is a statement both about how we gain access to God and also about how we live in the light of that. The access that Jesus provides is because of where he is going: this is his Farewell Discourse, remember. He is going to the Cross, and by that will open up access to the Father.

But there is more to Jesus being ‘the way’ than that. As the scholar Ian Paul says,

in its Jewish context the idea of ‘way’ also includes wisdom for right living, the halakah.

Jesus as the way is also giving us the pattern of life to live in relationship with the Father once we have received that access to the Father through the Cross. The Cross brings us to the Father, and the Cross maps our path for the life of discipleship.

Now you still may say, that’s all very well for those who have heard the message of Jesus, but what about those who haven’t? Apart from that being an incentive to us to speak more about our faith to others, I would suggest the Bible gives us examples of people who did not hear the faith as either Christians or Jews would understand it, but who were accepted by God because they responded to whatever light they had received.

One would be Job. There is hardly anything distinctively Jewish about the setting of Job. There are no real signs of his connection with the descendants of Abraham. But he wrestles with God and responds as he knows how.

Another would be the mysterious figure called Melchizedek in the book of Genesis. We only know he is ‘priest of Salem’, but he appears out of nowhere to bless Abraham and receive gifts from him and then disappears.

So, the path is Jesus and his Cross, both in access to God and a pattern for life. Those who through no fault of their own do not hear are judged appropriately by our merciful and just God.

Thirdly and finally, Prayer:

Faith by Kai Stachowiak at Public Domain Pictures.

We have some more challenging words in the final three verses of the reading:

12 Very truly I tell you, whoever believes in me will do the works I have been doing, and they will do even greater things than these, because I am going to the Father. 13 And I will do whatever you ask in my name, so that the Father may be glorified in the Son. 14 You may ask me for anything in my name, and I will do it.

Let’s set some ground rules here. Asking anything in Jesus’ name doesn’t mean just anything. ‘In my name’ is not a magic formula to tack onto the end of a prayer. It means we are asking with the authority of Jesus and in line with his will.

Therefore, we can immediately rule out the idea that this is carte blanche to ask for this, that, and anything. This is not where we can ask God for riches. The so-called ‘prosperity gospel’ where it is taught that if God has not given you health and wealth in response to your prayers then you do not have enough faith is a pernicious lie.

Asking anything in Jesus’ name is about kingdom requests. Jesus is promising that when we ask him to supply what we need for the work of his kingdom, he will do it. This should be the primary focus of our petitions and intercessions in prayer. That may involve praying for money and material things, but we don’t ask for them as an end in themselves, only insofar as they further the kingdom of God.

And if we read back to where these three verses began, with another challenging word, about those who believe doing even greater things than Jesus, then that too will be about things that advance God’s kingdom.

Specifically, we should set these words in the wider context of John’s Gospel. There are two other places where Jesus refers to ‘greater things’ or ‘greater works’. One, in chapter 1 verses 50-51, is about the vindication of Jesus as God’s Chosen One. The other, in chapter 5 verses 20-21 and 24-29, connects ‘greater works’ with Jesus giving eternal life to people.

Therefore, while we shouldn’t rule out asking God for the miraculous – he can and will do great wonders from time time – it’s likely that the main meaning in the Gospel is about seeing more people bow the knee to Jesus and find life in his Name.

And for me, this raises a question about the content of our prayer life. How much are we praying for the greater works of Jesus in raising spiritually dead people into the gift of eternal life? It’s not that our other prayers are bad: it’s absolutely right that we should pray for justice, peace, healing, the relief of poverty and hunger, and the like. But are we missing out the greater works of bringing people into eternal life with Jesus now?

Maybe preachers like me need to be more explicit about this when leading prayers of intercession on a Sunday. But maybe also we all need to be praying daily for the Holy Spirit to lead people we know and love to discipleship in Jesus Christ. Let’s add the names of two people we know to our own prayer lists this week.

Conclusion

Remember, this is part of Jesus’ Farewell Discourse. He is concentrating on matters important to him. And if they are important to him, they should be to us, too.

Let us be encouraged by the good news of our eternal place in the close presence of God and the community of his people.

Let us be centred on the path of Jesus: that the Cross brings us into God’s presence, and the Cross shapes our own path in life.

And let us be challenged to pray for the greater works of the Holy Spirit in bringing people into the risen life of Christ.

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