Holy Week Meditations 2024: Isaiah’s Servant Songs (3) Isaiah 50:4-9

Session 3
Isaiah 50:4-9a

Each day so far we’ve had to ask who the servant is in each passage. On Monday, the servant was Israel, the People of God. Yesterday, the servant was the prophet.

Today, it’s fairly easy to see that once again the servant is the prophet who is bringing this message. And so, following the pattern of the last two days, we will consider the relevance of this passage to the prophet, to Jesus, and to ourselves.

We’ve observed that Isaiah 40-55 belongs to the time when Israel was in Babylonian exile. It’s a section of the book that brings hope to a desolate people. It may date to ten or twenty years before they began returning home to Jerusalem and Judah, thanks to the policies of King Cyrus, whose Persian Empire would conquer Babylon.

But even though these chapters bring a message of hope right from the beginning – if you don’t know ‘Comfort, comfort my people’ at the beginning of chapter 40 you will at least know that Handel quotes it in The Messiah – it still takes a while for a positive message to have a healing effect on a discouraged and downcast group of people. They are ‘weary’, we learn in verse 4.

And their Babylonian captors haven’t yet given up all their old tricks, because we read in verse 6 about how the prophet has been beaten, had his beard pulled out, and subjected to mocking and spitting.

What does it take to be a faithful servant when we are surrounded by darkness and people struggle to hear and accept God’s good news? That’s what this ‘Servant Song’ is about.

Again, I am picking out three elements. Not three ‘C’s this time, like the commitment, call, and covenant of chapter 42 on Monday, or the call, crisis, and cure of chapter 49 yesterday, though. This time, it’s three ‘H’s.

Firstly, hearing:
Listen again to verses 4 and 5:

⁴The Sovereign Lord has given me a well-instructed tongue,
    to know the word that sustains the weary.
He wakens me morning by morning,
    wakens my ear to listen like one being instructed.
⁵The Sovereign Lord has opened my ears;
    I have not been rebellious,
    I have not turned away.

If the prophet is to have a ‘word that sustains the weary’, he must hear from God. He is in communion with God ‘morning by morning’ and it is a listening time: the Sovereign Lord ‘wakens [his] ear’ and ‘opens [his] ears’. God is saying, ‘Listen,’ and so I expect the prophet is silent in the presence of God to hear his word. If the word is to sustain the weary, then it needs to come from heaven.

We know Jesus took time out for prayer. He escaped from the crowds and those who would value him for being busy to spend time with his Father. Often that meant going to solitary places. Sometimes we read that he spent the night in prayer.

For us, I will not dare to suggest that we don’t pray, but I will venture the thought that for many of us prayer is a shopping list and a monologue. It is all us talking. I for one am by no means always good at leaving space and time in silence for God to speak to me during a time of prayer.

And we model the monologue approach to prayer in our Sunday services. If a preacher has a time of silence during prayers, I can assure you some people will feel uncomfortable, and may even tell the preacher afterwards.

If we approach God through Scripture and worship, though, we can tune into him. Yes, the distracting thoughts will still come our way when we are silent – so we take them captive by writing them down and leaving them for another time so we can return to silence.

And then should it be so very surprising if a heavenly Father wants to speak to his children? And should it surprise us also if when he speaks he not only has something for us but also something that will bless others in need?

Secondly, humility:
Babylon may soon be facing military defeat at the hands of Persia, but that doesn’t change its behaviour now for the better:

⁶I offered my back to those who beat me,
my cheeks to those who pulled out my beard;
I did not hide my face
from mocking and spitting.

If God’s prophet is mistreated like this, then that too will have a negative effect on captive Israel’s morale. It may even be designed to have that effect.

But the prophet does not fight back. He bears his unjust suffering. He doesn’t even hide from it.

It’s easy to see the parallels in the life of Jesus here, especially in Holy Week, how he didn’t fight his tormentors. Surely indeed he could have called down fire from heaven against them, but he declined to do so.

This is tough for us. If we are attacked with words, we often become defensive. We justify ourselves, and we fight back with our own words. If we are physically attacked, we will resist as much as we can. If we are strong enough, we may overpower and disarm our assailant. Who wants to be hurt?

Into this dilemma let me offer you the words that a friend of mine once said on this subject. John was an Anglican priest from Kenya. He was used to inter-racial and inter-tribal tensions, as well as religious conflict. John said,

‘If I am persecuted for being a black man or for being a member of the Kikuyu tribe, I will fight back. But if I am persecuted for being a Christian, I will not resist. The way of Christ involves suffering for him.’

I wonder what you think of that. Does he have the balance right? Whether he does or not, it is clear that in the face of difficulties for our faith and opposition to it, we are called to a gracious humility in the Name of Jesus.

Thirdly, hope:
God’s people may be short on hope, but the hope which sustains the prophet is not the short-term, quick-fix variety. They’ve had enough of that from false prophets. How I hope our political parties will resist that approach whenever the General Election is called.

The prophet goes in for a longer-term hope that is based on the character of the God in whom he trusts. Listen again to verses 7 to 9:

⁷Because the Sovereign Lord helps me,
    I will not be disgraced.
Therefore have I set my face like flint,
    and I know I will not be put to shame.
⁸He who vindicates me is near.
    Who then will bring charges against me?
    Let us face each other!
Who is my accuser?
    Let him confront me!
⁹It is the Sovereign Lord who helps me.
    Who will condemn me?
They will all wear out like a garment;
    the moths will eat them up.

When it comes down to it, the prophet believes in a God of justice who will vindicate the righteous and the innocent, and who will oversee the downfall of the ungodly and unjust. That isn’t a five-minute job, but it is the right long-term hope. And of course, he and his ministry was proved to be right, and also Babylon fell.

Jesus entrusted himself into his Father’s hands at the Cross. He committed his spirit into his Father’s care before he died. And on the third day, he was vindicated like no-one else ever has been.

When we face discouragement, or when those around us cannot drag themselves out of a pit, we too would do well to set aside the hopes in a quick fix and instead base our hopes on the solid truths we know about the character of God. His love. His justice. His grace.

These truths will stand for ever and will strengthen us to stand in hope.

March 27, 2024 0

Holy Week Meditations 2024: Isaiah’s Servant Songs (2) Isaiah 49:1-7

Session 2
Isaiah 49:1-7

Yesterday, I said that in each of the so-called ‘Servant Songs’ we had to determine who the particular servant was, because it isn’t always the same each time. So yesterday in chapter 42, the servant was Israel, but as well as thinking what the text meant for Israel, we looked at it as applying to Jesus, who perfectly fulfilled the prophecies, and then what it meant for us.

Today, the Servant is clearly the prophet himself. I am not going to say Isaiah, because chapters 40 onwards clearly come from a time two centuries after Isaiah himself lived – although in many ways they carry on Isaiah’s themes. Isaiah prophesied in the eighth century BC, when the people of Judah were still in their own land under a king. Chapters 40 to 55, however, come from the time of the Babylonian exile – perhaps ten to twenty years before God’s people start to go back home.

So our first lens today is the prophet. We shall keep Jesus and ourselves as the second and third lenses through which we view the text.

Yesterday, we looked at commitment, call, and covenant: the mutual commitment between God and his servant, the call God gives the servant, and the covenant whereby God doesn’t give up on a servant who has failed.

Today’s reading is about a crisis in the calling of the servant. Today, I also have three ‘C’s: call, crisis, and cure. We begin by going back to the servant’s original call (which is not quite the same as yesterday, because this is about the prophet, not the people), then the nature of the crisis that engulfed him, and finally the way God brings a cure for that crisis.

Firstly, the call:
Listen to the call of the prophet in verses 1 to 3:

¹Listen to me, you islands;
    hear this, you distant nations:
before I was born the Lord called me;
    from my mother’s womb he has spoken my name.
²He made my mouth like a sharpened sword,
    in the shadow of his hand he hid me;
he made me into a polished arrow
    and concealed me in his quiver.
³He said to me, ‘You are my servant,
    Israel, in whom I will display my splendour.’

The prophet’s call was no small, accidental thing, nor was it a coincidence. God had planned it from before his birth, just as he did with Jeremiah. God had prepared the prophet and his words to be effective – ‘like a sharpened sword’ and ‘a polished arrow.’ God had protected the prophet until the right time – ‘in the shadow of his hand he hid me’ and ‘concealed me in his quiver.’ Planned, prepared, protected: three ‘P’s this time! God had gone ahead and done all this before the prophet got to respond to the call with his ‘Yes.’

With his Servant and Son Jesus God also went ahead and prepared him and prepared the way for him to be born ‘when the time was right’, as Paul says in Galatians. There were plans, there were prophecies. People were prepared for their part. All this enabled Jesus to fulfil his call.

And God also goes ahead of us, preparing us and our circumstances for his call upon our lives. As a number of you know, when I thought God was calling me to something but I didn’t know what, I ended up studying Theology at an Anglican theological college. When the calling more clearly became one to pastoral ministry, I didn’t know whether to stay in my native Methodism or go over into the Church of England, for which I was seeing a very good advert.

In the end, I went to see a pastor friend who was neither Methodist nor Anglican. I needed someone neutral! When I explained my predicament, Colin said to me that he was a pastor in his tradition because it was the one in which he had been raised and found faith. And if I believed in the providence of God, then could I see my upbringing as an accident? For this reason and other logical arguments that he added, I offered for the ministry in the tradition in which I too had been raised. And here I am.

How do you look at the way God has prepared and ordered aspects of your life as being ways in which he has laid the foundations for your particular calling to be his servant?

Secondly, the crisis:
Despite all this, the prophet, who knows he has been called to be God’s servant, has a crisis of faith. Or perhaps we should call it a crisis of confidence or a crisis of fruitlessness. It comes in verse 4:

But I said, ‘I have laboured in vain;
I have spent my strength for nothing at all.
Yet what is due to me is in the Lord’s hand,
and my reward is with my God.’

It’s all been a waste of time. I’ve achieved nothing. What’s the point? That’s what he’s saying. Never assume that people who hold lofty callings from God just lurch from one triumph to another victory. And if they tell you they do, you have my permission to disbelieve them. A crisis in the calling to serve God is a common thing.

Later this week, we shall doubtless think about Jesus’ own crisis of confidence in his calling. It happened in Gethsemane. Father, if it is possible, please take this cup of suffering away from me. I know what it is going to involve, and I shudder. Yet not my will but yours be done.

I would guess that most or all of us at some point have had a crisis of confidence in God and in what we are meant to be doing for him. It is not just people like me who live with depression who get those feelings that it’s all pointless and we have wasted our lives.

And when we go through those dark seasons, I commend the Psalms. Some people don’t like the rather bleak and harrowing language that some of the Psalmists use. It’s not very nice, neat, and middle class, is it? But the Psalms give us explicit permission to be open and honest with God, red-raw even. As someone once said, ‘Most of the Bible speaks to us, but the Psalms speak for us.’

For when we have our crises, God is the safest place we can go. We can batter our fists on his chest, but we only ever do that while he is holding us in his arms. We are about to see in the third point that he does not have words of condemnation for his servant who is facing his crisis of confidence.

So let’s move on and hear that.

Thirdly, the cure:
The prophet has just said that things are not going well, and God’s response is compassionate, just not in the way we might expect. Is it to give him time off to rest, as he did when Elijah was stressed, running for his life from Jezebel? No: it’s very different. Hear again verses 5 and 6:

⁵And now the Lord says –
    he who formed me in the womb to be his servant
to bring Jacob back to him
    and gather Israel to himself,
for I am honoured in the eyes of the Lord
    and my God has been my strength –
⁶he says:
‘It is too small a thing for you to be my servant
    to restore the tribes of Jacob
    and bring back those of Israel I have kept.
I will also make you a light for the Gentiles,
    that my salvation may reach to the ends of the earth.’

God says, don’t put yourself down, because I rate you so highly – ‘honoured in the eyes of the Lord’, even. In fact, although you may not have confidence right now, I have every confidence in you. So much so that I am going to entrust you with even more. I so believe in what you can do with me that no longer is your calling simply to bring my people back to the Promised Land, I’m also commissioning you to reflect my light to all the nations. It’s not so much the adding of a burden as a vote of divine confidence.

Did that happen with Jesus? Well, possibly. Before the Cross his main mission was to God’s people, the Jews. Yes, he commended the faith of the Roman centurion and of the Syrophoenician woman, but he said his main focus was ‘The lost sheep of Israel.’ However, after the Resurrection, he commissions his disciples to take the Gospel of the Kingdom to Jerusalem, Judea, and all the ends of the earth.

Could it be that God might say and do something along those lines with us when we have our crises? Dare we believe that God believes in us more than we believe in ourselves? For he knows better than we do what we can accomplish when he equips us with his Spirit.

I’ll finish with some words of Graham Kendrick that I like. He once said, ‘When the odds get too big, I just remember that me plus God equals an invincible minority.’

March 26, 2024 1

Holy Week Meditations 2024: Isaiah’s Servant Songs (1) Isaiah 42:1-9

Some bonus blogs for you over the next few days, since one of my churches here likes to have some Holy Week meditations. The Lectionary Old Testament readings take the so-called ‘Servant Songs’ of Isaiah, and I’m reflecting on them.

I don’t have time for an accompanying video, but here at least is the text I have written.

Introduction to series[i]
Since 1892, when a German Lutheran scholar named Bernhard Duhm published a commentary on Isaiah, the four ‘Servant Songs’ in Isaiah chapters 42, 49, 50, and 52-53 have been regarded as separate works that belong together in their own right and not in the context where they have been placed in the book.

But this was blown apart in 1983 by a Swedish scholar, Tryggve Mettinger. While Mettinger agreed that there were difficulties interpreting the ‘songs’ in their contexts, that was still less problematic than taking them out of context.

He also said they are not strictly ‘songs.’ Granted, they are poetic – but much of this section of Isaiah is poetic.

Further, they are not the only passages to reference the ‘Servant of the Lord’ in Isaiah. It is a common theme.

Another question to ask is, ‘Who exactly is the Servant?’ Answers vary, and that includes varying from passage to passage. It’s a question we’ll be asking each day in these meditations.

Nevertheless, we can see the influences of the ‘Servant’ passages on Jesus. They inform his identity and his ministry, including his baptism and his healing ministry. Considering the relationship of these readings to Jesus will make them relevant to Holy Week.

And from there we need to make this all relevant to us. So with each reading we shall look at the servant, Jesus, and us.

Session 1
Isaiah 42:1-9

In this case, the servant is almost certainly Israel, following on from references in the previous chapter. So we’ll think here about Israel, Jesus, and us. I’m going to break the themes of these verses down into three ‘C’s: Commitment/Call/Covenant.

Firstly, commitment:
It’s clear from the outset that God is committed to his servant:

Here is my servant, whom I uphold,
my chosen one in whom I delight;
I will put my Spirit on him

Uphold, delight, my Spirit. All signs of God’s commitment to the servant.

But verse 1 ends with the suggestion that in response to that the servant is committed to God:

and he will bring justice to the nations.

God is committed to Israel in love and in empowering her for the reason he called her. In response, Israel is committed to God’s cause.

At least, that’s the ideal, and we know Israel didn’t live up to it. And thus when we see this in the light of Jesus, we remember that in the New Testament Jesus fulfils everything that Israel was meant to do. He is the True Israel.

So it’s not surprising that we see the same mutual commitment between God and Jesus. At his baptism, the voice from heaven says that God is delighted in Jesus, and the Spirit comes down on him there, just before he begins his public ministry.

In the light of the way we have rightly deduced the doctrine of the Trinity from the Bible, then no wonder the mutual commitment between God and Jesus, involving the work of the Spirit seems logical and even more intense than the relationship between God and Israel. Here is the basis on which Jesus set out on his mission that would eventually lead him to Jerusalem: he is dearly beloved of the Father, and he, even as the Son of God, is also a man empowered by the Holy Spirit.

When we consider ourselves, let us too wonder at the mutuality of the commitment between God and ourselves. We as his servants today are also upheld. God also delights in us – yes, really. Some of us find that hard to believe, but it’s true. He delights in us before we have even done anything for him. His commitment to us is shown in the gift of the Spirit.

Our commitment as servants is only in response to these prior commitments of love by God to us. We do not win God over by his goodness, but we respond to his commitment to us – ultimately seen at the end of this week at the Cross – by committing ourselves to him and the cause of his kingdom.

Secondly, call:
Well, the call is there in that description of our response of commitment:

and he will bring justice to the nations.

But what is that call to bring justice? John Goldingay points out that the Hebrew word mishpat that is translated ‘justice’ here has several shades of meaning: justice, judgment, and decisions[ii].

Therefore Israel was called to bring God’s just decisions to the world. This would not merely mean justice in the terms of condemning sin and sinners, this would also be in declaring what is right, and his grace and mercy, because grace is part of what he has decided and mercy is a part of justice, it is not the opposite of justice.

This was Israel’s calling from the beginning. When God called Abram and began to form a people for himself, it was to bless the nations, not simply enjoy blessing themselves. That Israel failed in this is seen in books like Jonah, which is a satire on Israel’s unwillingness to bless the nations.

Jesus, of course did bring God’s just decisions as he inaugurated the kingdom, taught God’s ways, and offered grace and mercy to sinners.

This becomes the church’s call as God’s servants. While bringing justice will involve declaring to the world what God says is right and wrong, it will not stop at that, or we shall be perceived as harsh and judgmental. It will be accompanied by declaring God’s decision to offer grace and mercy to all who will accept it and respond to him in Christ.

And perhaps we see this note of compassion in the proclamation of justice from the next words in the passage:

²He will not shout or cry out,
or raise his voice in the streets.
³A bruised reed he will not break,
and a smouldering wick he will not snuff out.

The tone is quiet and gentle, not loud and strident. Is that something we can aspire to?

Thirdly, covenant:
In verses 1 to 4 God speaks about the servant. In verses 5 to 9 he speaks to the servant. It’s like he’s saying, ‘You’ve heard what the calling is. Now do you know what it is going to involve?’

He tells Israel that even though he is ‘The Creator of the heavens’ (verse 5) he will take them by the hand (verse 6) – that commitment again – as they set out on their task to

to open eyes that are blind,
to free captives from prison
and to release from the dungeon those who sit in darkness. (Verse 7)

And in the midst of that, God also says,

I will keep you and will make you
to be a covenant for the people
and a light for the Gentiles (verse 6b).

Covenant. Light to the Gentiles. Israel had broken her covenant, and failed to be a light to the Gentiles, choosing instead to mimic them.

But God renews the call here. He does not toss his people aside. They have failed, but his grace and mercy is extended to them, too.

When we consider Jesus as the Servant, then of course we are not talking the language of failure to serve God at all, and the work opening blind eyes and freeing captives can be clearly seen in his public ministry. Of course, doing so wound up the authorities and helped bring him to Holy Week and the Cross. But these things were the work of the Servant, the True Israel.

But when it comes to us, we like Israel have failed. We are to be a blessing to the nations, but we are not always. We are to bring healing into society, but we are not consistent in doing so. Perhaps some of us think that God will have lost his patience with us after repeatedly disappointing him. If so, then look again at the renewal of the covenant and the mission here. Maybe as we dwell on Jesus the Servant we will hear God renewing his commitment and call to us, assuring us that he has not broken covenant with us. We often think of Holy Week as being about endings: could it also be about n

[i] John Goldingay, Isaiah (New International Biblical Commentary); Peabody, Massachusetts: Hendrickson, 2001, p237,

[ii] Goldingay, p239.

March 25, 2024 0

Palm Sunday 2024: Jesus The King (Mark 11:1-11)

Mark 11:1-11

Happy Cloak Sunday!

What, you say, not Palm Sunday?

Well, no. Of the four Gospel writers, only John tells us about the palm branches. We read from Mark, who gets the next closest by telling us that

others spread branches they had cut in the fields (verse 8b)

but he doesn’t specify that they are palms. He tells us more about the cloaks that the disciples put over the colt for Jesus to sit on (verse 7) and the cloaks that people spread on the road (verse 8a).

So I think we can be justified in renaming today Cloak Sunday.

In fact, to get more to the point of what this story is about, it’s helpful to note the heading that the NIV Bible gives it: ‘Jesus comes to Jerusalem as king.’ I don’t normally like the headings of Bible passages to be read out because they’re not part of the text, and they sometimes detract from the theme I am going to take from the reading, but on this occasion it’s spot-on. Jesus comes to Jerusalem as king.

Firstly, let’s look at the signs of kingship:

The colt, the colt, the colt, the colt. Four times in the first seven verses we read, ‘The colt.’ That’s without where a pronoun like ‘it’ substitutes for it. Those first seven verses are all about the colt.

And although Mark doesn’t directly quote it as Matthew does, you know what’s in his mind and you know what will be in the mind of those present – it’s Zechariah 9:9:

Rejoice greatly, Daughter Zion! Shout, Daughter Jerusalem! See, your king comes to you, righteous and victorious, lowly and riding on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey.

Even the cloaks on the colt’s back might indicate Jesus’ kingship, because the king’s steed could not be ridden by anyone else.[1]

But certainly the fact that Jesus rides into the city whereas all the pilgrims walk in sets him apart. And the ground was often covered for the arrival of a visiting dignitary. We can be in little doubt that Jesus is making an explicit claim to being Jerusalem’s king.

And that’s a change of tactic from Jesus. Up until now, Mark’s Gospel has recorded several incidents where Jesus has forbidden people to reveal who he is. He has wanted to keep his identity secret. (Scholars call it ‘The messianic secret.’)

But at this point, Jesus goes public. He is Israel’s true king, God’s anointed One. This is only going to do one thing, and that is to ratchet up the tension with both the Roman authorities who will not brook a challenge to their power, and the Jewish leadership who have rejected Jesus but will look bad if they reject their true king.

It had to come out at some point, but not earlier, when it would have ruined Jesus’ ministry in Galilee and other places. But all along Jesus has known his destiny and the climax of his mission. It isn’t what most people would consider a climax to their work, but yet again Jesus flips on its head the notions and the values of the world. His kingdom is different. It is different by one hundred and eighty degrees from the kingdoms of this world.

Many years ago, I read a book by an American Mennonite called Donald Kraybill that called the kingdom of God in Jesus’ teaching ‘The Upside-Down Kingdom.’ As the publisher’s blurb puts it:

What does it mean to follow the Christ who traded victory and power for hanging out with the poor and forgiving his enemies? How did a man in first-century Palestine threaten the established order, and what does that mean for us today? Jesus turned expectations upside down. The kingdom of God is still full of surprises. Are you ready?

So we need secondly to consider the type of kingship that Jesus was demonstrating on Cloak Sunday:

The crowds acclaim the coming kingdom of their father David (verse 10a), which is surely a sign of messianic expectation. You can imagine the hopes that this might be the one who will rid them of the hated Romans.

But if they did think that, then they missed the Zechariah hint with Jesus coming ‘lowly and riding on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey.’

Lowly. Not war-like. Among the disciples, I wonder what Simon the Zealot felt? Remember that the Zealots were committed to the overthrow, by violence if necessary, of Israel’s enemies. And did this contribute to Judas Iscariot’s disillusionment with Jesus? We don’t know, but I do wonder.

Jesus is clearly coming as king, but his enthronement will happen at of all places the Cross, where the charge against him will be ‘The King of the Jews’ (Mark 15:26). The Cross is enthronement and victory, not defeat.

It’s very easy for us to react with disillusionment, too. Some of the biggest conflicts and acts of sabotage in a local church are undertaken by people whose anxieties about the future have escalated. I was reading about this on Friday in an email from the organisation Bridge Builders, who train church leaders in how to transform conflict. Their Director of Training, Liz Griffiths, wrote this:

Triggers for that anxiety are plentiful – uncertainty about the future of many churches; declining numbers and aging congregations; rapid social change and concern as to how to respond to these with integrity and faithfulness; and the wider issues that impact far beyond the church – rising inequality, climate and environmental issues, and the aftermath of a global pandemic. It’s not surprising that anxiety is high, and reactive behaviour is so prevalent.

Now there may be all sorts of reasons in our family background and the history of our churches that lead to these anxieties, but in the long term what we need to do is bring them to Christ and submit them to his very different form of kingship. His way of overcoming evil is not by the crash-bang-wallop methods that some would advocate. It is by peace, lowliness, and ultimately, suffering.

I guess that Judas Iscariot bottled up all his frustrations and then his weakness for money became the flaw through which his dissatisfaction came to fatal expression with his betrayal of Jesus and his own subsequent suicide.

What about Simon the Zealot? He is still part of the eleven apostles come the Resurrection. Could it be that he submitted his own prior commitment to violent resistance to the ways of Jesus and followed the lowly, peaceable king? It looks to me like he did.

Will we bring our anxieties, our frustrations, our dissatisfaction with the state of the church and the world to Jesus, the king of peace and humility? Only his way brings healing.

And all that means that thirdly, we are talking about our responses to Jesus’ kingship.

How are we going to respond to the Jesus who rode humbly into Jerusalem as King? I have just posed it as a choice between Judas Iscariot’s pent-up frustrations and Simon the Zealot’s ability to put aside his prior commitments and go the way of Jesus. But there is another way of framing the binary choice we have, and it’s more directly in the passage. As with some earlier comments in this sermon, I owe what I am about to say to the Anglican New Testament scholar Ian Paul[2].

Mark refers to the two villages of Bethphage and Bethany at the Mount of Olives (verse 1), whereas Matthew only mentions Bethany. We know from John’s Gospel that Bethany was a safe place for Jesus, because that is where his friends Lazarus, Martha, and Mary lived. One Christian author, Frank Viola, even entitled a book of his about their relationship at Bethany ‘God’s Favourite Place On Earth.’

But Bethphage was different. The name of the village means ‘House of unripe figs’, and that seems rather significant given that one of the first things Jesus does in ‘Holy Week’ is to curse a fig tree that is not producing fruit. A fig tree sometimes symbolised Israel, and Jesus’ action was a prophetic sign of his assessment of the state of God’s people.

Symbolically, then, Bethany and Bethphage show us two contrasting responses to the kingship of Jesus. Either we draw close to him, learn from him, and follow him as Lazarus, Martha, and Mary did, or we make no serious response to him and end up unfruitful and even cursed.

This is a time, then, to take Jesus seriously.

And this week, I read a short devotional article entitled ‘Taking Jesus Seriously.’ The author, a retired American Baptist pastor named Mike Glenn, began by talking about how we don’t take Jesus seriously. We like to explain away some of his teaching. Some of us even think he was rather extreme in saying that he had to die on the Cross for our sins. Can’t we just say sorry and be done with it?

But this is a season which shows how much it does matter, just how serious the rupture between God and human beings caused by sin is.

Glenn ends the article by talking about the focussed seriousness for Jesus that we need, and which is the only proper response to him at this time:

It takes a focused effort to begin to our lives more seriously and when we begin to think about our lives and purpose, we begin to seek Jesus again. He’s the only one who knows how to make life matter. As Peter confessed, “Only You, Lord, have the words of life.”

Only by focusing on Christ are we able to take our attention away from the sin that tempts us and still seeks to destroy us. We don’t overcome temptation by fighting it. We overcome temptation by ignoring it, by no longer desiring it.

Believe it or not, it’s in watching Jesus die that we learn to live. It’s only when we begin take Jesus seriously that we can take ourselves seriously.

Easter tells us how seriously Jesus takes us. Now, the question we have to answer is how seriously we’ll take Jesus.

[1] Ian Paul, Jesus enters Jerusalem on ‘Palm Sunday’ in Mark 11

[2] Op. cit.

March 24, 2024 0

Mission in the Bible 8: The Great Commission (Matthew 28:16-20)

Matthew 28:16-20

So here it is, the reading most people would have expected as the big one in this series on mission. It’s the passage often called ‘The Great Commission.’

These are the verses responsible for many Christians being called to become missionaries or evangelists. And maybe because of that, a lot of us can feel it isn’t for us. We like to lift the end of verse 20,

And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age

and draw comfort from it, but the earlier stuff, we think, is for others.

But that won’t work. Jesus is addressing the same people throughout. In fact, this teaching is for all Christians. Why do I say that? Two reasons. Firstly, this is the incident that many scholars think the Apostle Paul was referring to in 1 Corinthians 15:6, when talking about the resurrection of Jesus:

After that, he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers and sisters at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep.

How many? ‘More than five hundred.’ So it wasn’t just the apostles.

My second reason comes more explicitly from the reading, and it’s found in verse 17:

When they saw him, they worshipped him; but some doubted.

In among the worshippers were the doubters. Whether their faith was strong or weak, Jesus included them in the call.

And as an aside, doubt isn’t the same as unbelief. Doubt means we are still in two minds but could still land on the side of faith. Unbelief is an outright rejection of faith.

Jesus’ call, then, is for all of his followers. Not just the leaders. And not just those with a strong faith. All of us.

Our question, then, is this: if Jesus is commissioning every Christian here, what is he asking of us?

Some would say there are four commands here: go, make disciples, baptise, and teach. However, it’s not as flat as that in the Greek, which is more like ‘Going, make disciples, baptising, teaching.’ In other words, the main command here is ‘make disciples’, and we make disciples by going, baptising, and teaching.

Hence, it’s a three-point sermon, all about how we are all called to make disciples. Make disciples by going; make disciples by baptising; make disciples by teaching.

Firstly, make disciples by going:

When Jesus tells us that making disciples will involve going, does this mean we all need to go abroad as missionaries? After all, the disciples are going to made from ‘all nations’, Jesus says.

Well, it does mean that for some Christians. Whatever the faults of the missionary movement, we should never throw out the idea that Christianity is a worldwide movement. And it also means we need to welcome missionaries here from nations where the faith is growing. They could reinvigorate us.

But most Christians aren’t called to go abroad, although we might easily be called to move somewhere else in general terms. If we accept that employers can move our jobs, why should we not think that God can call us to a new place to serve him?

Yet generally we will remain where we are. The word for most of us is what Paul tells the Corinthian Christians about their social status:

Brothers and sisters, each person, as responsible to God, should remain in the situation they were in when God called them. (1 Corinthians 7:24)

So how do we go? Most of us go in Christian mission by getting out of our comfortable places to show the love of God on territory where those who are not yet followers of Jesus feel at ease.

We need to ditch the idea that our mission happens on church premises. Maybe a few people will come to events and services that we host here, and perhaps the carol service is our best opportunity, but we must be realistic that fewer and fewer people feel comfortable – even safe – in a church building, and therefore it is our responsibility in the cause of the Gospel to go where they feel happy.

I suspect one of the reasons we have held onto church-based mission is that we are afraid of showing Jesus elsewhere. We end up making all sorts of excuses: a popular one I’ve heard in the Methodist church is that the groups which hire our premises are mission contacts. But they generally hire our halls as a commercial transaction: we have the facilities and a good price. By no means does it necessarily indicate spiritual openness.

Let’s see our going out into the world beyond our own private boundaries as a going with the presence of Christ to live out his way in those places where he calls us. For some, it will be a workplace. For others, it will be a social group like the U3A. Another place will be community groups that we are involved in. Many of us will go in mission in this way when we meet non-Christian relatives and friends.

In all these places Jesus calls us to live as his disciples, to radiate Christlikeness, such that our lives are an invitation or even a provocative question to others. We don’t need to harangue the people we meet, but we do need to be ready to speak about Jesus at an appropriate time.

Secondly, make disciples by baptising:

Here’s where we need to let go of all the sentimental and superstitious detritus that has clung to infant baptism. There is a place for infant baptism, because it arose in the early church when the first generation of Christians wondered about the spiritual status of their children, and they began to regard baptism rather like the way the Jewish faith sees circumcision for boys.

But all the social and superstitious accretions, like the need to be baptised as a baby if you are to have a church wedding in adulthood, or the thought that the unbaptised can’t go to heaven (which falls down the moment you think about the penitent thief on the cross) has obscured the relationship between baptism and discipleship. Baptism, says Jesus, is in the name of God, and the name of God is ‘Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.’

We are one of the Christian traditions that calls baptism a ‘sacrament’, and that’s worth thinking about. Now you hear certain definitions of sacrament as being ‘an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace’ and those are fine, but why the word ‘sacrament’? It comes from the Latin ‘sacramentum’, which was the oath of allegiance that Roman soldiers took to the Emperor. The sacraments are the Christian’s oaths of allegiance. Baptism is the initial oath of allegiance, Holy Communion is the ongoing one.

And that helps us see why baptism is linked to mission. It is the initiation ceremony where someone makes their oath of allegiance to God and his kingdom. It is a radical commitment to which we are calling people. None of this ‘Make a decision for Christ and then wait for heaven’: the early church called people to confess that Jesus was Lord, the very title the Emperor claimed for himself as a sign of divinity. In other words, it was a call to repudiate the powers that be, because confessing Jesus as Lord also meant that Caesar wasn’t Lord.

If we reduce baptism to ‘wetting the baby’s head’, we miss its fundamental message: that the Christian Gospel calls people to confess that Jesus is in charge of their lives and commands their ultimate loyalty, not the idols of our day, be they politics, technology, money, sexuality, or anything else.

This is where we have to be careful in all our talk today about inclusivity, much of which we pinch from the world rather than Jesus. Yes, Jesus wants us to invite all people, but when he welcomed people, such as the ‘tax collectors and sinners’, he did so with a view to calling them to leave behind their lives of sin and follow him.[1] Baptism should remind us of this.

Thirdly, make disciples by teaching:

Our three points are actually in a chronological sequence. Our discipling begins with going in order to reach people, it continues when they make a commitment with the oath of allegiance to Jesus at baptism, and finally the follow-up is our third point: teaching.

We need to get out of our heads the idea that teaching is filling our heads with facts and no more. It’s much more. Teaching involves getting people to learn things that they then apply in life. That is certainly true here in what Jesus says:

and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. (Verse 20a)

Someone who comes to faith in Christ needs to learn how to live the Christian life. In truth, we all need to learn that: to be a disciple of Jesus is to be a lifelong learner.

How does it happen? Only partly from the front on Sunday morning! I hope the sermons do some of the work of explaining what living the Christian life involves, but they are not the whole process. However much ministers should have a teaching gift, the sermon is only the start.

Small groups are a vital part of it. Bible study and fellowship groups are meant to be places where we reflect all the more on the teaching of Jesus, how we are going to put it into practice, and also to be accountable to one another about how we are living out what we have already learned. This is what Wesley did with some of his small groups in the Evangelical Revival in the eighteenth century. A church that is short on small groups, or where the small groups don’t get to grips with what it means to live as a disciple, are seriously lacking.

In one of my previous churches, we asked all the preachers to bring discussion questions based on their sermons so that the small groups could work on putting into practice. It did go a little awry in one group where an elderly man decided this was his opportunity to tear every preacher to pieces – it’s the old gag, ‘What’s the favourite Sunday dinner in a church household?’ Answer: ‘Roast preacher.’ But mostly the groups who stuck to the programme benefitted from it.

One-to-ones can help, too. Matching people together so that a more experienced Christian can nurture and mentor someone younger in the faith is valuable. I gained a lot in my early years as a Christian from the person I described as my ‘spiritual elder brother.’

I hope you can see from these examples that while the minister certainly plays a part in teaching the faith, it is an exercise for the whole church. We do not have to be theological specialists in order to help teach people how to live out the teaching of Jesus. At heart, we just need to love Jesus, want to go his way, and be willing to share our experience of that with others.

In conclusion, Jesus gives us a sequence here for our task as disciple-makers. We begin by going out of our comfort zones to live for Christ in front of the world. We call people not simply to receive the blessings of forgiveness, but to make the baptismal oath of allegiance to Jesus as Lord over all. And then we build relationships with people in the church family where we share our learning how to follow the teaching of Jesus.

It’s straightforward to describe, but we may feel nervous about putting it into practice. And I think that’s why Jesus’ final words here are

And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age. (Verse 20b)

These are not just general words of comfort, good as they are for that. These words are Jesus’ promise that he hasn’t sent us out on the challenging task of mission on our own. Where we go, he goes. And usually, he’s even gone there ahead of us. We can count on that as we seek to make more disciples.

[1] See Ian Paul, In what way does Jesus ‘welcome’ sinners?

March 17, 2024 0

Mission in the Bible 7: The Missionaries Went Out Two By Two (Luke 10:1-12)

Luke 10:1-24

If I asked you to name the most influential Bible passage on the subject of mission, I think most people would plump for the one we call ‘The Great Commission’ at the end of Matthew’s Gospel. (And indeed we’ll get to that later in this series.)

I don’t think many in our churches would think of today’s passage. But in the last few decades this is one that a number of mission organisations have used for inspiration. They have each taken different ideas out of it, each amounting to very partial readings of the story. But I’d like to look at a number of helpful and challenging themes in Jesus’ instructions here to the seventy-two that will give shape to our outreach. For even though it is not our regular habit to be going out on mission teams like this, there are useful principles here for us to remember.

Firstly, prayer and action:

²He told them, ‘The harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few. Ask the Lord of the harvest, therefore, to send out workers into his harvest field. ³Go! I am sending you out like lambs among wolves.

Mission is based in prayer. It is not a series of techniques. It is not a programme. It is not a method. It is not even fundamentally a set of skills. It is a spiritual matter and can only come to birth through prayer.

While I am not sure about the old adage that God does nothing except in response to prayer – that seems to deny God’s freedom and sovereignty – I do know that mission is a work of the Spirit and therefore must be set out on spiritually. One of the simplest ways we can put this into practice is by having our own list of people we know and love that we want to find faith in Christ. I am sure you can instantly think of friends and family.

But it cannot solely be prayer. There has been a major trend on the internet in recent years that when some terrible disaster happens, Christians post well-meaning messages offering ‘thoughts and prayers.’ But the atheists then jump in and ask what the point of prayer is if they’re not going to take any action.

Now of course the atheists will have no time for prayer under any circumstances. But the Christian should make a link between prayer and action. I know sometimes when there’s a major disaster it feels like there’s nothing practical we can do and that we can only pray, but most of the time prayer can be linked with action, and that’s what Jesus says here. Not only does he tell the seventy-two to pray – ‘Ask the Lord of the harvest’ – he follows it up by saying ‘Go!’

We cannot divorce prayer from action. I think it was the late David Watson who used to say that we need to pray as if there is no such thing as action, and act as if there is no such thing as prayer. Sometimes, including in mission, we need, as it were, to be the answers to our own prayers. So when we are praying for God’s love to have an impact on certain people, that may also require us to be the people who carry that love to the people in question. And that may include the way we speak and show God’s love to the loved ones we are praying for.

Secondly, simplicity:

⁴Do not take a purse or bag or sandals; and do not greet anyone on the road.

If I want to disabuse the church of one notion, it’s the idea that mission is a big-budget enterprise with big names, big campaigns, a huge budget, massive publicity, like the religious equivalent of the New Year’s fireworks in London with all the fancy stuff that is done with drones and the like.

Utter tosh. Show that to me in the New Testament. Oh, for sure there are some occasions where Jesus speaks to large crowds, but those incidents don’t justify the laser light show approach to mission – which actually disempowers many Christians from sharing in God’s mission.

No. Jesus says here that the enterprise of mission is simple. It’s ordinary Christians without any fancy accoutrements on the road with the love of God for people. None of us needs a big bank account in order to love people in Jesus’ name. We don’t need hi-tech equipment to tell people that Jesus loves them and wants them to turn their lives over to him. If we have that stuff then fine, but it’s far from essential.

Actually, I think some of us hide behind the big-money, big-event approach to mission. It’s too much for us, and so we think that gives us a free pass so as not to be involved.

But Jesus says, no. It just takes you and me without any fancy props, just the love of God in our hearts, to show the Gospel in our actions and speak the Gospel in our words. Let’s stop dodging the issue.

Thirdly, prevenient grace:

⁵‘When you enter a house, first say, “Peace to this house.” ⁶If someone who promotes peace is there, your peace will rest on them; if not, it will return to you. ⁷Stay there, eating and drinking whatever they give you, for the worker deserves his wages. Do not move around from house to house.

¹⁰But when you enter a town and are not welcomed, go into its streets and say, ¹¹“Even the dust of your town we wipe from our feet as a warning to you. Yet be sure of this: the kingdom of God has come near.” ¹²I tell you, it will be more bearable on that day for Sodom than for that town.

What’s all this stuff about peace? Well, the opposite is the material about not being welcomed. Do you get a welcome somewhere when you arrive with the love of God? If you do, it’s a sign that God has prepared the way for you. Remember at the beginning of this series we saw that God was the first missionary in the Garden of Eden, that mission is God’s idea, and that we simply join in. Mission is never our initiative, it is his.

And that’s prevenient grace, to use one of John Wesley’s terms. ‘Prevenient’ is to go before. So we are looking for the people and places where God has gone before, where he has prepared the ground. If someone shows signs of being receptive, then take that seriously. It may well mean that you will find evidence that the Holy Spirit is already at work there, preparing them to hear the good news of Jesus. Again, remember the beginning of the series where I quoted Chris Wright saying that it’s not the church of God that has a mission in the world, but that the God of mission has a church in the world.

And when prevenient grace isn’t there, says Jesus, move on. If all you get is hostility, leave. There are others who will willingly hear and receive. Give them your time, and leave those who reject you to God.

I know of one occasion when I experienced that. It was in a circuit appointment where my gifts had never been received and appreciated from the very first Sunday. Around the time that our re-invitation was being discussed, one week I was preaching on Mark’s equivalent passage to this one. As I got to the words about shaking the dust off your feet, I felt a small voice whisper inside me, you’ll be doing that very soon.

So share God’s love in word and deed in circumstances where it is welcomed. If people don’t want to know, move on. This is not just practical thinking. It is the teaching of Jesus himself.

Fourthly and finally, practice:

⁸‘When you enter a town and are welcomed, eat what is offered to you. ⁹Heal those there who are ill and tell them, “The kingdom of God has come near to you.”

Here’s what we are to get on with: demonstrating the kingdom of God in our actions, and explaining it with our words so that people hear the call to follow Jesus.

Now you may say it’s all very well for Jesus to tell these people who were evidently almost as close to him as the Twelve just to go around healing people. Well, I believe in the healing ministry but equally I can only enunciate for sure two occasions when I believe people have been healed in response to my prayers. So I want you to know that I feel the tension, too.

I would never want in principle to discourage Christians from praying for healing. Don’t ask, don’t get! But I think it will only ever be a minority of Christians who have a healing ministry. Where does that leave the rest of us?

We may not all be able to heal others in the name of Jesus, but we all can bless other people in Jesus’ name. Because the Holy Spirit lives in us, every Christian has the capacity to show Christ’s compassion and kindness to those who need it. When God interrupts our neat lives by bringing such people across our paths, let us be ready to show the love of Jesus to them, and to explain it when they ask why we have done so.

The other evening I was not at my best on this. Just as I had dished up our dinner, the phone rang and I picked it up to hear the voice of an elderly person who lived alone, who therefore talks at length given the opportunity, and who had just had a life-changing experience that was not for the better for him. I have to tell you, I was a little too keen to keep the phone call brief. When I was praying that night, I reflected that it wasn’t my finest hour.

Better, I understand that at the community lunch some people are saying, what is the cost, or why are you doing this free of charge? This is a perfect opportunity to explain about the God who showed his love for us in Christ before we ever responded to him, whether positively or negatively.

In conclusion, I don’t have time to look at the rest of the passage, where Jesus says more about leaving those who reject the message to God for him to deal with them, and where he urges his disciples to find their identity not in the success of their mission but in their love and redemption by God.

But there has been plenty even in these first twelve verses for us to chew on. Do we marry our prayers and our actions? Do we keep mission simple and not hide behind complexity? Are we attentive to God’s work of prevenient grace, so that we know where to concentrate our energies and where we are wasting our time? And will we practice both the demonstration of God’s love and explanation of it in words with those who God brings into our lives?

All of these are basic to the way we join in with God’s mission.

March 3, 2024 0

Mission in the Bible 6: The Apostolic Call (Mark 3:13-19)

Mark 3:13-19

Hearing a reading about the apostles might provoke a reaction in us that says, ‘What’s this got to do with us? We’re not in the same league as the apostles. We’re just a motley crew of ordinary Christians.’

Except we need to remember just how motley the apostolic crew was, too. How did James and John earn that nickname ‘Sons of thunder’ from Jesus? I envisage them turning up for apostolic meetings, gunning the engines of their Harley Davidsons.

We have the whole spectrum of political views from that day, ranging from Matthew the tax collector who helped fund the occupying Roman empire, to Simon the Zealot who wanted to send the Romans packing by the use of force.

We have a range of professions, from the physical labour exercised by the fishermen to the office accountant. That latter one would be Judas Iscariot, by the way: the Gospels tell us he was in charge of the finances.

Maybe the Twelve aren’t so far removed from us after all: the quiet and the loud, the right wing and the left wing, the manual labourers and the white collar workers. That’s not so very different from our diversity as a congregation, is it?

Sure, we may not be called by Jesus to be apostles, and we shall not exercise our calling in exactly the same way. But there are enough similarities for us to draw on here as we live out our calling to spread the apostolic faith. I’m taking verses 14 and 15 as the focus for our thoughts:

¹⁴He appointed twelve that they might be with him and that he might send them out to preach ¹⁵and to have authority to drive out demons.

There are three elements I’m going to pick out from these verses.

Firstly, ‘that they might be with him’ (verse 14).

In the Christian church, and especially in the Protestant traditions, we are very much into the idea that Christian life and witness involves us being highly active. We fill our churches with programmes, and we expect our ministers to be busy. We have a culture that faith is about doing rather than being.

I believe this is one of the reasons our churches are so often tired, dry, and dying. We can no more make Christian witness an endless cycle of action than we can drive our cars without filling up their tanks (or recharging their batteries). Our version of mission has been to run on empty. Is it any wonder it fails?

Before Jesus sent the apostles out, ‘He appointed twelve that they might be with him’ (my emphasis). We have nothing to share with the world if we are not in a vital relationship with Jesus Christ. How can we commend him if we spend no time with him? How can we expect people to see Jesus in us if we keep our distance from him?

For sure that involves our Sunday practices of worship and Holy Communion. But it also includes mutual sharing in small groups. It includes a personal prayer life each day. We can’t just rely on Sundays. Those of you who are married, would your marriage last if you and your spouse only spoke with each other once a week?

There are plenty of aids to help us in Bible reading and prayer. Traditional daily Bible reading notes still exist. You can get various ones from Scripture Union, or the excellent American daily devotional The Upper Room. Every Day With Jesus, which has been so popular for many years in the UK, is now available as an app for your smartphone or tablet.

Or the 24/7 Prayer movement has produced an app called Lectio 365. It gives you two brief prayer exercises a day. There is a morning one with a Bible reflection tuned to matters of prayer and mission. And there is an evening one where we can reflect with God on how the day has gone.

In the Western church, there is really no excuse when we have so many riches to help us with our devotional lives. It doesn’t reflect well on us that our brothers and sisters in far poorer parts of the world just get on with things and often have more vibrant prayer lives than us. Is that one reason why they tend to have more of an impact with their faith than we do?

If we want our church to have life, we need to begin by going back to spending time with Jesus. There is no substitute.

Secondly, ‘that he might send them out to preach’ (verse 14).

OK, so here’s where we might not all do things like the Twelve did. Jesus doesn’t call every disciple to be a preacher. But he does call every Christian to take his message into the world. We know people don’t like being ‘preached at’ today, but we do have good news to share.

In the ancient world, a herald would come to a town or a village, much like a town crier. There were two messages that he would call ‘Good news.’ One would be that Rome had a new emperor on the throne. The other would be that Rome’s armies had won a great battle.

The New Testament writers took inspiration from this. For them, there was not a new emperor on the throne of Rome but a new king on the throne of the universe, for Jesus had ascended to the Father’s right hand. He was not a coercive king like the Roman emperor, but still one who called people to follow the ways of his kingdom.

Similarly, the New Testament heralds proclaimed that Jesus too had won a great victory in battle – not by bludgeoning the enemy to death but by going to death himself at the Cross.

So our message of good news for today is that Jesus has done all that is necessary against the powers of evil in his death on the Cross, and that he now reigns in heaven, calling everyone to submit to his rule.

Our message is that Jesus has overcome all those things in life that frighten us the most, even death itself, and that he how calls for our allegiance.

If we live according to this message then it will provoke questions. If we are not frightened by what life can do to us, and if we are committed to the ways of Jesus, you bet people will notice and want to know more.

Here are the words of one such person[1]:

If you want, I’ll talk to you about God and salvation. I’ll turn up the volume of heartbreak to the maximum, so to speak. The fact is that I am a Christian, which usually rather sets me up for constant ridicule in the Anti-Corruption Foundation, because mostly our people are atheists, and I was once quite a militant atheist myself. But now I am a believer, and that helps me a lot in my activities, because everything becomes much, much easier. There are fewer dilemmas in my life, because there is a book in which, in general, it is more or less clearly written what action to take in every situation. It’s not always easy to follow this book, of course, but I am actually trying. And so, as I said, it’s easier for me, probably, than for many others, to engage in politics. “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be satisfied.” I’ve always thought that this particular commandment is more or less an instruction to activity. And so, while certainly not really enjoying the place where I am, I have no regrets about coming back, or about what I’m doing. It’s fine, because I did the right thing. On the contrary, I feel a real kind of satisfaction. Because at some difficult moment I did as required by the instructions, and did not betray the commandment.

I wonder if you know who said those words? They have been widely reported in the last week. Because they came in 2021 from Alexei Navalny, the Russian opposition leader who was recently murdered in prison.

So – firstly, be with Jesus. Secondly, preach the good news. Thirdly, ‘to have authority to drive out demons’ (verse 15).

Ooh. That’s a bit scary. And maybe we divide here between those who would run a mile from something like this and a few Christians on the other hand who would get unhealthily excited by it. We have also had the subject sensationalised and distorted by Hollywood and by the media generally.

Every now and again we hear of terrible misuses of this, where some church leader believes somebody to be possessed by demons, and physical force is used, leading to serious injury or even to death.

That’s why most churches restrict who can practise this. In Methodism, you now have to apply and be interviewed before you can be recognised as someone who practises in this area. You are not permitted just to go off and do exorcisms independently.

We may not have the particular authority to drive out demons. But all Christians have a mandate from Jesus to oppose evil. For evil is not just about what the devil does, according to the New Testament, it is also about the world and the flesh.

When the Bible talks about ‘The world’ in negative terms, it means the systems of this world in their opposition to God. So it’s when rulers, politics, or culture line up against God’s kingdom as inaugurated by Jesus. So it includes things such as when politicians don’t care about the poor. It’s about when our culture raises up created things as false idols – so think of the ways people are denigrated today for not being in sexual relationships and you will see one thing that our society treats as an idol. These things need to be opposed.

When the Bible talks about ‘The flesh’ as a bad thing it doesn’t simply mean the human body. It means our sinful human nature. It means that natural bias we seem to have towards doing what is wrong. And this too needs to be opposed.

And just talking about these things may make us realise that opposing evil is not just an external thing: it is also something we fight within ourselves. We have our idols. We have our own inner tendencies towards sin. And as I read this week, even when we take up an offering in an act of worship we engaging in an idol-busting exercise. For as someone said,

“It’s not a time when you’re trying to get money out of people’s pockets. It’s a time when you’re trying to get the idols out of their hearts.”

So in conclusion, the apostolic call to mission can be stated quite simply. It is fueled by spending time with Jesus. It is seen in living and proclaiming the Good News of Jesus’ reign. And it is characterised by opposing evil in all its forms, externally and internally.

It’s simple to state, but challenging to practise. So let us rely on the Holy Spirit to live out this call.

[1] Found on a friend’s Facebook feed. Source unknown.

February 25, 2024 0

Mission in the Bible 5: The River from the Temple (Ezekiel 47:1-12)

I’m back, although not fully recovered yet. So here is a slightly shorter than usual Bible talk. Please excuse the regular water-sipping in the video!

Ezekiel 47:1-12

If you ask most average Christians what the main purpose of the Church is, the most popular answer is, worship.

But in this life that is at best an incomplete answer. It may be true in the life of the world to come, but right now there is more than worship to do as the Church. There is mission as well as worship.

Look in our passage how the living waters, the river of God, ultimately coming to symbolise the Holy Spirit, may start flowing at the Temple in Ezekiel’s dream but they don’t remain there. They flow out to bless the surrounding world.

Let’s look at the flow.

Firstly, in the river beginning at the Temple, mission starts at the place of sacrifice.

Ezekiel’s dream or vision is of a rebuilt Temple after the return of Israel from exile in Babylon. It was the centre of worship and the place of sacrifice. Therefore, this vision says that sacrifice is not just about the benefits for the personal worshipper. It goes out and beyond.

As Christians, we see this most clearly in the Cross of Christ. His death ends all need for sacrifices for sin. It was the ‘one full, perfect, and sufficient oblation’ as the Anglican Book of Common Prayer puts it.

We receive the benefits of the Cross when we come to faith and when we confess our sins every week. It is comforting and healing to know that this is the sign of God’s enduring and faithful love for us, the love that anchors our lives.

But for Ezekiel, the river of life begins at the place of sacrifice. And for Christians, the Cross also means that God will pour out his Spirit, and when he does the benefits of Christ’s sacrifice will be seen as not merely for us but for the whole world. It is what happened at the first Christian Pentecost. The Spirit falls, Peter preaches the Gospel, people of many nations hear, and thousands profess faith.

The first thing to remember, then, is that our blessings are not for us alone. That’s why I can’t stomach attitudes to church that sound like consumerism: what’s in it for me? What do I get out of this, never mind anybody else? Perhaps one of the classic examples is the older person in a declining church who says, ‘All I care about is that this church is here to see me out.’ That is a selfishness that cannot sit in front of the Cross of Christ.

Secondly, also in the river beginning at the Temple, we see that mission is launched in worship.

The river of God, the water of life, the Holy Spirit, does not simply bring joy, refreshment, and power to worship. The river flows from the place of worship to the world.

Again, there’s a challenge to our consumer attitudes to church. Worship is not just a personal bless-up. Yes, there are times when God blesses us graciously out of his sheer love for us. And sure, we often come in great need of blessing ourselves. But worship is not fundamentally a ‘getting’ experience. It is a giving experience. And it takes us beyond Sunday, into Monday and on from there.

What happens on Sunday is part of what equips us for Monday. That’s why an organisation like the London Institute for Contemporary Christianity came up with something called ‘This Time Tomorrow’, where a church member is interviewed in the Sunday service, asked what they will be doing in twenty-four hours’ time, and how people might best pray for what they will be doing then.

Or come with me to an American church that has, over the exit from the building, put the words ‘Servants’ Entrance.’ We go out from worship on mission in the world, showing God’s redeeming love in our words and our deeds.

The Holy Spirit is always thrusting us out into the world with the love of God. In the Gospels, after Jesus has his amazing spiritual experience at his baptism, he next goes into the wilderness. Some English translations rather tamely translate the Greek to say that the Holy Spirit led Jesus into the wilderness, but it’s actually more forceful than that. In at least one of the Gospels, the writer literally says that the Holy Spirit threw Jesus out into the wilderness. The ‘throw’ part is related to where we get our word ‘ball’, and it makes me think of a cricketer in the field on the boundary, positively hurling the ball all the way back to the wicketkeeper with considerable force.

You and I have come to worship today for a purpose. Yes, we may need some blessing or comfort, but what we haven’t come for is, so to speak, just to be tickled by God. We have come to encounter the Holy Spirit, who will energise us for our daily witness in the world.

Thirdly, in the river flowing from the Temple, we see that mission is to transform creation.

The river gets deeper and deeper, even to the point where no-one can swim in it. And for someone like me who can’t swim at all in the first place, that’s scary!

But it’s scary in a good way. What we see here is the awesome power of God transforming creation. Take the reference to life teeming in the Dead Sea, where the extreme saltiness is usually a killer. I visited the Holy Land in 1989, and on the day we went to the Dead Sea, some of my friends got into the water and floated – I’m sure you’ve seen pictures of that there. But for me, the salt was so intense even in the air that my eyes stung and I couldn’t even look in the direction of the water to see my friends, let alone take photos on my camera. And I am a keen photographer.

That’s how salty it gets there. So for Ezekiel to see the salt water become fresh and be filled with fish and other creatures is an image of a miracle.

Then look at the trees on the riverbank, which bear fruit every month rather than every year, whose ‘fruit will serve for food and … leaves for healing’ (verse 12). Reading that from a New Testament perspective makes us think of the way this passage is an inspiration for the Book of Revelation, where trees line not a river but the Holy City, and whose ‘leaves are for the healing of the nations.’

Yes, there are marshes where nothing changes, just as there are many who are resistant to the Gospel of God’s grace in Christ that calls everyone to repentance and faith in Jesus. But overall what we perceive in Ezekiel’s vision is a foretaste of the day when God will make the new heavens and the new earth, where everything that is broken in creation is healed, where relationships with God and one another are reconciled, and where all pain, war, and suffering is abolished.

What does that mean for us? It means that our encounter with the Holy Spirit through the Cross of Christ and through worship throws us out into the world as bearers of God’s love in a multiplicity of ways. The Holy Spirit sends us to call people back to God through Jesus. The Holy Spirit sends us to be people who heal relationships. The Holy Spirit sends us to be people of peace, not violence. The Holy Spirit sends us to bring good news to the poor and the wounded. The Holy Spirit sends us to restore broken creation, not because we are afraid of what will happen to this planet, but because we are full of hope about God’s good intentions for his creation.

When we come to worship each Sunday, the presence of God equips us for these tasks. When we leave gathered worship each Sunday, we go as commissioned officers of God’s kingdom.

February 18, 2024 2

Off Sick!

A quick explanation above about why there’s no teaching video and blog this week. Hopefully, back to normal next week.

February 11, 2024 0

Mission in the Bible 4: Singing the Lord’s Song in a Strange Land (Jeremiah 29:1-14)

Confession time: I’m exhausted from a 3:45 am start (long story) and so rather than write something completely new, knowing I’ve preached on this passage before and realising I wouldn’t say anything substantially different, I’ve used a sermon from 2018. The full text of that sermon is below, but it is longer than what I deliver in the video and will be delivering in church, because it uses one or two stories I’ve already deployed in this series.

Jeremiah 29:1-14

If you’ve ever watched The Wizard Of Oz – and I’m guessing most of you have – you’ll know the early part of the story where the whirlwind hits Dorothy’s home in Kansas. When it subsides, Dorothy looks around in bewilderment at the strange and different surroundings she finds herself in. She turns to her dog Toto and says, “Toto, I’ve got a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore.”

Dorothy could be speaking for today’s church. We’ve been caught up in a social whirlwind, and when we’ve opened our eyes to survey the scene it looks nothing like that in which we grew up. The church used to be respected, but then we’ve gone through phases where first it was no longer a normal experience for people to attend church, and now there is a lot of outright hostility towards Christianity.

Similarly, you probably grew up in a culture where the ordained minister was a respected pillar of society. But again, no more. It is said that the average non-Christian man thinks that someone in a dog collar is either fleecing the flock for money or fiddling with kids as a paedophile.

Many of us would really like to cut to the end of the film where Dorothy finds herself back in home sweet home – there’s no place like it – but I have to say, that isn’t happening anytime soon. We must learn to be faithful disciples as a minority part of society. And actually that’s what most Christians down the centuries have had to do. To live as the majority in a society is less common.

Where do we go for help in being faithful to the Gospel in such circumstances? That’s where I find Jeremiah’s letter to the exiles in chapter 29 on his prophecy helpful. The armies of King Nebuchadnezzar have carted off the first lot of Jewish prisoners from Judah to Babylon. Those who found themselves as strangers in a strange land were disorientated and confused, like Dorothy. Had we read more of the letter, we would have heard Jeremiah warning them too not to believe the false prophets who were telling them it would all be over quickly and things would be back to the good old days. Instead, Jeremiah advises them how to live faithfully as aliens in a culture that is different from them and at times hostile.

I believe we can learn lessons for our discipleship today from Jeremiah’s model.

Firstly, it’s about where we live.

‘Build houses and settle down’ (verse 5a), says God to the exiles through Jeremiah.

I wonder whether you’ve noticed in recent years that the church is no longer regarded as the default moral voice in our nation. When Hallowe’en comes, it isn’t the church that is interviewed on BBC Breakfast about the content of the festival or the fears of elderly people about Trick Or Treat, it’s Age UK.

It’s no good pining for the good old days. This is where we are called to be missionaries, not back in some imaginary golden age of decades ago.

God called the exiles to do in some small way what his own Son would do later. What did Jesus say to the disciples in John 20? ‘As the Father has sent me, I am sending you’ (verse 21a). So how was Jesus sent? We have to go back from John 20 to John 1 and a verse that is too good to keep just for Christmas: ‘The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us’ (verse 14a).

Note that: Jesus dwelt among the people. Although he occasionally ministered in synagogues, for most of the time he didn’t say, ‘Come here and listen to me,’ he did his ministry amid people’s lives. He made his dwelling among people – literally, he ‘tabernacled’. Remember that in the Old Testament the tabernacle was the portable sign of God’s presence. So, then, Jesus was the presence of God in the middle of life.

Eugene Peterson puts it like this in The Message: ‘The Word became flesh and blood and moved into the neighbourhood.’

Friends, Christian mission today can no longer be sustained (apart from a minority) on ‘Come to us’. We have to go to the world and live actively in it. We don’t want to swallow the values of the world, many of which are contrary to our faith, but we still need to live in the middle of the world, not in a Christian ghetto.

I once took the funeral of an elderly church member, and in preparation visited her relatives, who were not Christians. As they told me about the lady’s life, they told me, ‘Her whole social life was based on the church.’ I could tell they thought I would be pleased by that, but in truth I was deeply saddened. We can’t scuttle across the moat, pull up the drawbridge and cosy up behind the turrets of a Christian castle if we are to be faithful missionaries in a world where we are the minority.

Are we known positively, then, in our neighbourhoods and our networks? And what are we known for? We’ll come on to that in other points.

Secondly, it’s about where we work.

‘Plant gardens and eat what they produce,’ says God (verse 5b).

In his book on Jeremiah, Eugene Peterson (him again!) says this means we should ‘Become a productive part of the economy of the place’ (The Quest, p151).

It’s time to bin the idea that the only work worth doing is church work. Church work – such as mine – is support work for those in the frontline of mission as Christ’s representatives in the world, pointing to the Gospel in word and deed, living lives that are so puzzling and magnetic that people end up asking them why they do what they do.

So when a circuit steward’s wife once told me that her husband wanted to spend more time on the important stuff, like church work, rather than his occupation, I was saddened. This man worked in commercial shipping, helping to ensure that vital goods got from one port in the world to another. He also volunteered as a governor at his daughter’s school. Imagine doing both of those things in a Christlike way, being a good steward of resources but not ruthless, caring for the wellbeing of the school community and its place in the wider area, and so on. Imagine doing these things for Christ, occupying ground in his Name.

You can find all sorts of resources for churches to encourage this approach, not least from an organisation called the London Institute for Contemporary Christianity. Their ‘whole life discipleship’ project includes all sorts of courses and resources to help Christians be fruitful on the frontline. It includes material to help preachers and worship leaders support this work.

One of the stories that set them on their way was that of a schoolteacher who also taught in Junior Church on a Sunday. “Why does my church pray for my Junior Church work,” she asked, “when I deal with maybe a dozen children there, but it doesn’t pray for my Monday to Friday work when I get the chance to influence many more children?”

Any church can start supporting people in this. One of LICC’s ideas is called ‘This Time Tomorrow’. You take five minutes out of Sunday services to interview someone from the congregation about where they will be and what they will be doing twenty-four hours later. You ask them what they most need prayer for, and include that in the service. It’s simple. And it is as applicable to retired people as to those still in paid work, because you can include what people do in the community and in their leisure activities.

Remember, church doesn’t stop when we leave this building on a Sunday lunchtime. As an Australian Christian called James Thwaites puts it, how far apart from each other do we have to be in order no longer to be church? Five yards? Five miles? No: we never stop being the church. It’s just that sometimes we are the church gathered, and sometimes we are the church dispersed. All our work in the world is Christian work.

Thirdly, it’s about where we flourish.

The next thing God says is, ‘Marry and have sons and daughters; find wives for your sons and give your daughters in marriage, so that they too may have sons and daughters. Increase in number there; do not decrease.’ (verse 6)

Whoa! Wait a minute! At other times, God’s people are told to be very careful about who their sons and daughters marry. Now, they’re meant to settle down in a pagan land. No wonder Psalm 137 asks, ‘How can we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?’

Our trouble today is that having been part of the majority culture where we haven’t had to fight for the place of our faith in public life, we now find ourselves singing the Lord’s song in a strange land, and the temptation is to be negative and self-pitying about it. But God says it’s possible for his people to flourish as minorities. Remember, that was certainly the story of the Early Church, too, both in Israel and in the wider Roman Empire. Why should it not be true for us, too?

In Mark chapter 6 we have the story of the disciples rowing their boat on the late at night, straining at the oars in the fourth watch of the night. Jesus comes to them, walking on the water. He thus comes to them from outside the boat.

Now given that the Early Church also read the boat symbolically, as standing for the Gospel community, maybe Jesus was coming to them from outside the church, so to speak. Maybe he had already been at work outside their community before he came to them in the dark of night.

Could it be that our task in order to flourish involves finding out where Jesus has gone ahead of us in the world by his Spirit, and we join in with him there? I’m not saying that people outside the church don’t need to become Christians, I am simply saying that Jesus prepares the way and we catch up.

Our children started school while we were in my last circuit. When you are a parent of primary school children you have a great opportunity to flourish as Christians in the community. Debbie and I made it our point to lurk with intent at the school gate. We made friends with other families. I told my churches not to expect me to be at my desk at 9 am for that reason. Some of them didn’t like that, because they thought the minister was there to be their private chaplain, but we persisted.

In doing that, and letting people know our door was always open and there was always water in the kettle for tea and coffee, we befriended three young mums who went through horrendous divorces. One husband went off with his wife’s best friend. Another drank away all the family income, even spending time in the pub when it was the birthday party for one of his three daughters. That mum and the little girls nearly joined the church.

When we announced our decision to leave, some of the church people cheered, but some of the community wanted to raise a petition to keep us – including our next door neighbour, who was totally clueless about church. On the last day of term that July, twenty of them threw a surprise picnic for us in the local park.

We may not have flourished in the church there, but we certainly flourished as Christians in the community.

Fourthly and finally, it’s about where we bless.

‘Also, seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile. Pray to the LORD for it, because if it prospers, you too will prosper.’ (verse 7)

Contrast that with the ways today’s church often reacts to the decline of Christianity in the West and the rise of ideologies we dislike. Either we claim that God is bringing revival soon (but remember God told Jeremiah the prophets who were saying that in his day were false prophets) or we rail against evil, and think we’re being prophetic in that way.

But look what happens here. Rather than condemn Babylon, God calls his people to bless it! I’m not calling us to ignore unrighteousness and injustice, but I am asking this: what difference would it make if Christians were known as a people of blessing?

The trouble is, there are plenty of indicators to suggest that we are not known as a people of blessing. If you ever ask an MP who they don’t want to send them letters, I’m afraid that often the answer is ‘Christians’. We are known at Parliament for our complaining and our judgmentalism.

In America, it’s commonly known in the catering industry that the people who moan the loudest and tip the least at restaurants are the Christians.

How exactly does that reputation stack against New Testament verses like these?

‘Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you’ (Mt 5:44)

‘Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse’ (Rom 12:14)

‘Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good’ (Rom 12:21)

What would it look like if we were the people who were always wondering what good we could do unconditionally for people? If we were the people who – rather than complaining – were instead always seeking to put in a good word for someone, or leaving a surprise ‘thank you’ gift for somebody? Do we encourage our elected representatives? Do we tip generously at the restaurant, realising that the waitress is a young student trying to make ends meet on her student loan?

What if in the wider society we were getting involved in those civic and political decisions that affect the wellbeing of our communities, as councillors or business people?

The Argentinean preacher Ed Silvoso has a wonderful way of putting this. He says, ‘In the celestial poker game, a hand of blessings always beats a hand of curses.’

So go – and bless your Babylon. See what happens when Christians start blessing. Wait for the questions about why you do this. And then speak of the One who calls you to bless.

February 4, 2024 0

Author: Dave Faulkner