Author: Dave Faulkner

I'm a British Methodist minister, married with two adult children. I blog from a moderate evangelical-missional-charismatic perspective. My interests include digital photography (currently using a Nikon Z8), contemporary music, and watching football (Tottenham Hotspur) and cricket. For my photography, please visit www.flickr.com/photos/davefaulkner

What To Do When A Move Of God Is Dying, 2 Kings 2:1-18 (Ordinary 13 Year C)

2 Kings 2:1-18

On my first full day at the first theological college I attended, one of the pastoral tutors said to us: ‘Coming to college is a bereavement experience.’

She was right. Of course, it was not on the scale of the death of a loved one. But there are other bereavements, including smaller ones. The tutor explained that we were going through the loss of families, friends, networks, homes, jobs, and other things that we had left behind to study and train. (Most of us were mature students.)

The account of Elijah’s departure to heaven is also a bereavement story. And it’s more than just losing a beloved leader of God’s people from this earth. There is a bigger bereavement going on here for Elisha, the company of the prophets, because the loss of Elijah to heaven is the end of one major phase of God’s work among his people.

In that respect, I believe this passage has a lot to tell today’s church. So much of it is dying, especially in the more traditional churches. We know the numbers are down and the age profile is increasing. A phase of God’s work is dying. But how do we respond?

We can take clues from this narrative about good and bad ways to respond when one move of God is passing, and we are waiting for the next. I am going to look at how Elisha reacts, and then how ‘the company of the prophets’ reacts.

Firstly, Elisha

I have no doubt that Elisha was consumed with grief. Every time Elijah told him to stay in one place while he went on, Elisha replied, ‘As surely as the Lord lives and as you live, I will not leave you.’ Elisha clings onto Elijah. Can he not face the thought that he is going to be separated from him? Or maybe he’s not willing to let his master go on his final journey alone.

Equally, every time the company of the prophets asks Elisha, ‘Do you know that the Lord is going to take your master from you today?’, he gives the same reply: ‘Yes, I know, so be quiet.’ I doubt this is like the old British stiff upper lip, because that would not fit the culture. But it does sound like someone who is saying, I just don’t want to talk about it. This is too awful.

In these ways, Elisha doesn’t sound that different from a lot of grieving people. Those who have studied the various stages of grief have shown that one of the early stages is that of denial, where we just cannot accept the awful reality.

I suspect some of us are like that in the church as it declines and ages. Some of us don’t want to talk about it. Somehow, we think that if we keep on doing the same old same old then maybe magically things will turn out for the better. We seem to have fallen for what some have called Einstein’s definition of insanity, which is to keep on doing the same things will expecting a different result.

But Elisha doesn’t stop there. He knows a new season is coming. For sure, his grief cries out after Elijah departs as he asks, ‘Where now is the Lord, the God of Elijah?’ But before that, we read this in verses 9 and 10:

9 When they had crossed, Elijah said to Elisha, ‘Tell me, what can I do for you before I am taken from you?’

‘Let me inherit a double portion of your spirit,’ Elisha replied.

10 ‘You have asked a difficult thing,’ Elijah said, ‘yet if you see me when I am taken from you, it will be yours – otherwise, it will not.’

The ‘double portion’ is what the eldest son received in their father’s will. It showed he was the favoured one. Here, Elijah knows the double portion of the spirit isn’t in his gift, it is only from the favour of God. Elisha will know he has received it if he sees Elijah when he is taken – for that is what a prophet does, he sees into the will of God.

At this point, Elisha gets it right. The succession of God’s work depends not on hankering for the days of Elijah but depending on the work of the Spirit. Only the Spirit of God animates the prophetic ministry.

And … only the Spirit of God animates the Church of Jesus Christ. Amid all our talking, posturing, and fantasising in the light of ongoing decline, the ‘one thing necessary’, a dependence upon the power of the Holy Spirit, seems to be the ‘one thing neglected.’ We need Pentecost fifty-two weeks of the year.

It’s no good telling stories of what the Holy Spirit did in past generations or when we were younger if we are not also relying on the Spirit now as well. It reminds me of my favourite story about the nineteenth century American evangelist D L Moody. During one visit to the UK, he spoke to a group of church leaders on the text Ephesians 5:18, ‘Be filled with the Spirit.’ He pointed out (correctly) that the Greek actually says, ‘Continue to be filled with the Spirit.’

An Anglican clergyman objected. ‘Mr Moody! Why do I have to be filled with the Spirit now? I was filled with the Spirit at conversion.’

And Moody simply replied: ‘Because I leak.’

Isn’t that our problem? We have leaked the Holy Spirit and we are dying. Is anything more urgent than petitioning God passionately to pour out his Spirit on his people again?

Let me ask you: are there any ways in which your church is in denial about the fact that the move of God which created our churches is dying? Are there ways you are trying to hide from this? We can have all the coffee mornings we like, but unless the Spirit is poured out, we are done for. Are we crying out for the Holy Spirit?

Secondly, the company of the prophets

If Elisha starts off on the wrong foot but then gets it right, the company of the prophets gets things the opposite way around. They start off well. Look at all the times they warn Elisha, ‘Do you know that the Lord is going to take your master from you today?’ Get real, Elisha, they say: you can’t play pretend, you need to face up to reality. This is good, honest living. They know you can’t live in denial. They know that fantasising and hiding are not helpful. They show a healthy instinct.

So where does it all go wrong for them? Well, that happens after Elijah has been taken to heaven and Elisha has taken up the prophetic mantle, both literally and spiritually, with Elijah’s cloak. After Elisha proves his spiritual authority by dividing the waters and walking across, we read this:

15 The company of the prophets from Jericho, who were watching, said, ‘The spirit of Elijah is resting on Elisha.’ And they went to meet him and bowed to the ground before him. 16 ‘Look,’ they said, ‘we your servants have fifty able men. Let them go and look for your master. Perhaps the Spirit of the Lord has picked him up and set him down on some mountain or in some valley.’

The very people who have warned Elisha that Elijah will be taken from him now propagate a delusional fantasy that maybe he hasn’t really gone, after all. Elisha may have the Spirit resting on him, but they still want the good old days, even though God is blatantly doing something new now.

And I fear this is where much of the mainstream, traditional church is spiritually today. God is doing something else, but we still want to propagate the old ways. Look at how Methodism clings onto its old structures. We must have our Circuits and Districts! So, we combine them into ever larger sizes. Here I am, in our circuit where three old ones were amalgamated twelve years ago, preaching at a church that is not one of mine, and travelling thirty-four miles to do so.

Or another Methodist example: every church must have a minister in pastoral charge. We can’t possibly let churches have a vacancy, like many other denominations do. Our congregations become infantilised, and our ministers get stretched over ever more small churches, because the rate of decline in church members is faster than the rate of decline in numbers of churches. We ministers are then far less able to be effective, because we are just travelling cheerleaders and find it hard to embed ourselves in a community.

Can’t anybody see what is blatantly in front of our eyes, that the system is breaking and dying? Have we so idolised the system that no-one will grasp the nettle? Yet we still go looking for Elijah when the Spirit is resting on Elisha.

But here’s the thing: although the company of the prophets go from being realistic and honest to living in a world of make-believe, ultimately there is hope. Why? Because if you continue reading in 2 Kings, the company of the prophets continues to work in partnership with Elisha. They come to the realisation that they must follow the leading of the Spirit in their day, even if that means doing something new.

And surely the same is true for us. We have lived for so long under the illusion that the structures the Holy Spirit led John Wesley to establish in the eighteenth century are still the structures we must use today, as if somehow God’s leading then were on the same level as Holy Scripture itself. But if we are both to survive and to thrive as the church, we shall need to stop our version of looking for the body of Elijah and instead ask what the Spirit is doing through the Elishas of our day. It may look very different. What we can guarantee is that if it is truly the work of the Holy Spirit then it will not be contrary to biblical teaching.

What might we do about it? Exactly what we have already seen Elisha do. We need as much of the Holy Spirit as the Lord will be pleased to pour out on us. When we are full of the Spirit we shall be led in Christlike ways. When we are full of the Spirit, we shall find that God will lead us to express the unchanging Gospel of Jesus Christ in new ways for our generation. Some sacred cows will need to go, but it will only be us who made them sacred in the first place, not God.

So, yes – we still need to do those administrative things that consume our time, like the accounts, Safeguarding, and GDPR, and we need to do them well as a good witness. But for all their importance on our agenda, the one thing that needs to trump them all in our priorities is seeking the fulness of the Holy Spirit.

Because – as Moody said – we leak.

0

Principles of Giving (2 Corinthians 9:6-15)

2 Corinthians 9:6-15

There is a certain cluster of topics that a minister can preach on and will know they are likely to provoke guilt feelings in the congregation. One is evangelism: which of us truly is a good witness to Christ? Another is prayer: can any of us say we pray enough, or are close to God?

And another is today’s subject: giving. How easy it is for a preacher to lay the guilt on thick when it comes to money. You may have had someone use emotional manipulation to obtain greater giving from you, either in the church or in the world. You may have been sucked in by the consumerism of our culture. If I had wanted to do that here, I would have preached this sermon before our annual Gift Day, not after – as is the case.

In our reading, Paul is not talking about regular giving. He is organising a collection among the early churches to support those in Jerusalem who are suffering from a famine. What he’s promoting here is closer to the one-off gifts we make when a natural disaster hits somewhere in the world, and the Disasters Emergency Committee springs into action with TV adverts.

One or two of you will say, so why don’t you go to the Old Testament teaching about tithes and offerings, then? Isn’t that about regular giving? If we did a series of sermons on the subject, I would cover it. But at this point I will just say that tithes and offerings are more complicated than some Christians think. Translating them to our situation is not that straightforward.

But in today’s passage, even though it is about one-off gifts, Paul goes back to basic Christian principles about giving to make his appeal here. Those same basic principles should be at the foundation of all our decisions about giving. So let’s explore them.

Firstly, Generosity

6 Remember this: whoever sows sparingly will also reap sparingly, and whoever sows generously will also reap generously.

Now this is a verse that has been abused by some Christian leaders. They have made false promises to congregations on the basis of this verse that if they give a lot of money, then God will bless them with a lot of money. They have appealed to the base instinct that wants to get rich and said, if you want to be wealthy then ‘sow a seed’ – usually into that preacher’s ministry. Sure enough, the preacher then gets enough money to fly everywhere in a private jet, while those who give find no improvement in their financial position and may even be driven into poverty. I think there is a special place in Hell for such preachers.

But there is still an important principle here, and that is the call for the Christian to have a generous character. There is only one way to develop a generous character, and that is to be generous.

We have good reason for doing this: we follow a generous God. I shall have more to say about that in a few minutes, but for now let’s note that Paul ends this passage on that note:

15 Thanks be to God for his indescribable gift!

God’s indescribable gift is Jesus! How generous was God in giving up his only begotten Son to take on human flesh and die and rise again for the salvation of the world? We seek to give generously, because we love and serve a God who is the supreme generous giver.

What kind of earthly parent would ask, how little can I get away with giving to my children? We know instead that loving parents give to their children at their own expense. This is what God has done for us. This is why we are called to be generous givers.

So a question we need to ask of ourselves when assessing our giving to the church is not, ‘How little can I get away with?’ but ‘How much from my income and in my circumstances would constitute generous giving?’

Remember: this is about the growth of Christian character. Do I desire to be like our generous God?

Secondly, Cheerfulness

7 Each of you should give what you have decided in your heart to give, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver.

‘God loves a cheerful giver.’ The late American Baptist preacher and sociologist Tony Campolo put this verse into practice. When driving on a toll road and coming up to the toll booth, he would wind his window down, give money to the clerk on duty, and say to them, ‘This is for me, and also for my friend in the car behind.’ Then, as he drove away, he would watch in his rear view mirror the ensuing conversation between the toll clerk and the next driver. You’ve guessed: Campolo didn’t know the driver behind him from Adam, but he took joy in his giving.

Your trivia fact for this week is that the Greek word translated in English as ‘cheerful’ is hilaros, from which we get our word ‘hilarious’. Does God love a hilarious giver? Why not? Tony Campolo had much hilarity in paying for the driver behind him. And is not God full of joy and hilarity?

So I’m very much trying to avoid making this sermon one of those gloomy ones that load more and more guilt on people. As I said at the beginning, the moment people hear the sermon is on this subject, the risk of ladling guilt on people is high.

And I hope you heard that in Paul’s language, much as he wants the Corinthians to give generously, there is no emotional manipulation here: the decision on how much to give should not be made ‘reluctantly or under compulsion’.

What if Christians are reluctant to give? When [my predecessor] John Illsley began his ministry in Sheffield, the local Anglican vicar was Robert Warren. He was in charge of a massive church with several satellite congregations across Sheffield: St Thomas, Crookes. They saw four-figure attendances on Sundays, and due to their growth had held several appeals to support more building. Warren said in a book that if people did not want to give, the answer was not to make them feel guilty. Rather, it was to give more grace. It is when we truly understand how gracious and merciful God has been to us in Christ that we shall want to give. Then it will be a freewill decision, and it will be joyful.

Thirdly, Trust

8 And God is able to bless you abundantly, so that in all things at all times, having all that you need, you will abound in every good work. 9 As it is written:

‘They have freely scattered their gifts to the poor;
    their righteousness endures for ever.’

10 Now he who supplies seed to the sower and bread for food will also supply and increase your store of seed and will enlarge the harvest of your righteousness.

Giving is an act of trust. I confess that for a long time I had trouble believing in a God who was a generous Father. My human father certainly showed me love, but my upbringing was one where for the most part my parents didn’t have it easy financially. I would always be the child in the class at school who received the cheapest Christmas presents. I overheard conversations between Mum and Dad about how they were going to manage their money.

But I learned an amazing lesson about the generous Father I could trust when I wanted to go to theological college and explore what God’s call on my life was. It was near the end of the days of student grants, not student loans, and the college that accepted me did not qualify for mandatory grants. My Local Education Authority took that as reason to deny me a grant.

The college told me I needed to guarantee my funding for the first year, and I appealed against the refusal to give me a grant. Forty-eight hours before the deadline the college gave me, I still hadn’t heard about my appeal. Phoning up, I was told, ‘I’m sorry, Mr Faulkner, there is a letter in the post saying we have rejected your appeal.’

It was at this late juncture that people suddenly started giving me money. My parents rediscovered a long-forgotten savings account. A student who was taking a year out between Sixth Form and college to work and save money for a car felt prompted to give that money to me. That student’s boyfriend also felt prompted to give me some funds. As did two elderly ladies at church, one of whom wrote the most moving letter in which she said, ‘It seems like God is calling you to trust him to meet your needs. He will meet ours, too.’

The next Sunday evening I was preaching at another church in our circuit. I preached on ‘Give us this day our daily bread’ and said that God had met my needs for college. In fact, I only had three-quarters, but I didn’t tell them that.

After the service, a middle-aged single man invited me back to his flat for coffee. As we sat in his living room, he explained that he had planned a three-week holiday to New Zealand to see his auntie. But his auntie had since died, and he no longer felt like going. He had already exchanged his sterling currency for New Zealand dollars, but since doing so their dollar had been devalued. Holding onto the money in the hope that the dollar’s value would improve, in fact it kept declining. Now this money was just annoying him. Would I like to take this annoyance off his hands?

Before I could say anything, he had thrown some plastic Thomas Cook envelopes into my lap. I can still remember the precise amount. 2310 NZ dollars. My Dad worked for NatWest and got me a staff rate of exchange: £742.31. Our friend had originally exchanged £1000 – and we’re talking a few decades ago now!

God blesses us, not so that we can financially keep up with the Joneses, but so that we can bless others.  Let us trust him.  

Conclusion, Thanksgiving

11 You will be enriched in every way so that you can be generous on every occasion, and through us your generosity will result in thanksgiving to God.

12 This service that you perform is not only supplying the needs of the Lord’s people but is also overflowing in many expressions of thanks to God. 13 Because of the service by which you have proved yourselves, others will praise God for the obedience that accompanies your confession of the gospel of Christ, and for your generosity in sharing with them and with everyone else. 14 And in their prayers for you their hearts will go out to you, because of the surpassing grace God has given you. 15 Thanks be to God for his indescribable gift!

Originally, I wanted to make a whole fourth point about thanksgiving, but time is not on my side and so I just want to emphasise that thanksgiving is the desired result of true Christian giving. The recipients of our generosity will thank God (verse 11). Their thanksgiving will overflow (verse 12). God will be praised, because people will see us living out our faith (verse 13) as we respond to his grace (verse 14). And as I noted earlier, this is all rooted in our thanksgiving for God’s giving to us (verse 15).

If thanksgiving is at the heart of our giving, then this is about worship. Our giving is not a subscription to a club or even fund-raising: that is why in a service, I refer to the offering, not the collection.

By the grace of God, may we learn to give as an act of worship.

1

Worship In The Midst Of The World (Isaiah 6)

Isaiah 6:1-13

I expect you’re aware of the custom whereby just before the Sunday service starts, the duty steward prays for the preacher in the vestry. Over the years, I have heard a variety of such prayers, the worst being one Good Friday where in his prayer the steward called the death of Jesus a mistake.

But another common one starts something like this: “Dear Lord, we gather here today to leave the world outside behind and concentrate on you.” Now I guess that could be interpreted more than one way. But is our worship really an escape from the world?

In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord (verse 1a).

Is that just a date in Isaiah’s diary? I don’t think so. If all he wanted to tell us was the day on which he had a powerful experience of worship and commissioning, he would surely just have named the month and the day of the month. ‘On the twenty-third day of Nisan,’ or something like that.

No. Locating his divine encounter as happening ‘In the year that King Uzziah died,’ Isaiah affirms that worship takes place in the middle of what is happening in the world. The events of history do not drive our worship, for sure, but worship is located in the midst of politics, economics, and every power that competes to shape our lives.

What does this worship look like?

Firstly, glory:

In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord, high and exalted, seated on a throne; and the train of his robe filled the temple. 2 Above him were seraphim, each with six wings: with two wings they covered their faces, with two they covered their feet, and with two they were flying. 3 And they were calling to one another:

‘Holy, holy, holy is the Lord Almighty;
    the whole earth is full of his glory.’

4 At the sound of their voices the doorposts and thresholds shook and the temple was filled with smoke.

I once arrived at a church as a visiting preacher and was greeted by a member of the congregation who said, “I hope you’re going to entertain us today.” This brought out my Mister Grump side, and I replied, “Well, I hope we’re going to worship.”

We must get rid of this idea that worship is entertainment. It is a prominent heresy across all sorts of Christian traditions and worship styles. Worship is to give glory to the triune God, who is holy, holy, holy. We are here to honour his name and to give thanks for all he has done. Worship is God-centred or it is not worship at all.

Archbishop William Temple gave a famous definition of worship:

Worship is the submission of all of our nature to God. It is the quickening of the conscience by his holiness; the nourishment of mind with his truth; the purifying of imagination by his beauty; the opening of the heart to his love; the surrender of will to his purpose–all this gathered up in adoration, the most selfless emotion of which our nature is capable.[i]

None of this is an escape from the world, for God is the greatest reality there is. Moreover, as the Creator of this world and its Redeemer, God is where our focus needs to be, without having an escapist mentality.

So while it’s not true to say that ‘the world sets the agenda’ – that was one of the heresies from liberals at the World Council of Churches – it is true that we come to focus our energies on God, who created the world we live in through Christ and by the Spirit, and who also redeems the world through Christ and in the power of the Spirit.

Secondly, confession:

5 ‘Woe to me!’ I cried. ‘I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, the Lord Almighty.’

6 Then one of the seraphim flew to me with a live coal in his hand, which he had taken with tongs from the altar. 7 With it he touched my mouth and said, ‘See, this has touched your lips; your guilt is taken away and your sin atoned for.’

If we truly encounter the living God in his glory in worship, then we shall realise quickly that we do not match up. That’s what Isaiah realises, and not only for himself. He admits not only his personal sin, but the sin of the nation. A true encounter with God will blow away once and for all the idea that we’re all good, decent people who merely make the occasional error in life. It will relieve us of the comfortable illusion that we are good enough for eternal life.

Furthermore, here our lives are calibrated not by the popular standards of the world but by God and his holiness alone.

Initially, this leaves Isaiah with a sense of hopelessness. He cannot get beyond ‘Woe is me! I am ruined!’ That’s desperate.

But God can get beyond it. A seraph brings a live coal from the altar, the place of sacrifice. It is God who provides for Isaiah and God’s people to know forgiveness and the removal of their sin.

If you remember the painful story in Genesis where God asks Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, you may recall how Isaac asks his father who will provide the lamb for the sacrifice. Abraham replies that God will provide the lamb. And he does – mercifully not in the way he was expecting.

Ultimately, we believe that is what God supremely did with Jesus at the Cross. The Lamb of God was provided. Now our sins are removed as we confess them. They have already been atoned for at Calvary.

The regularity of our failure is why we confess and receive assurance of forgiveness in every Sunday service. It is God’s free gift. We have not earned it. God has reached out in love to the world at the Cross. Will we look at the worldly horror of the Cross and allow it to cleanse and transform us?

Thirdly, God’s word:

8 Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, ‘Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?’

Following confession and forgiveness, the way is clear for us to hear God’s word. That’s why the reading of Scripture and the preaching come next in a typical Sunday service, by the way.

There’s no reading of Scripture in the Temple for Isaiah. It’s questionable what, if anything, they had in written form at this point – not much, for sure. But in any case, God speaks directly on this occasion.

If we are to be worshippers in the midst of the world, we need to hear God’s marching instructions to us. ‘Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?’

Therefore, the reading and proclaiming of the word is to have an honoured and central place in our worship. It is not that with a variety of preachers we get to hear a whole host of different opinions, because the job of the preacher is not to foist their sentiments or even prejudices on the congregation; it is rather to proclaim what the Word of God says.

Therefore, there is another steward’s vestry prayer that both encourages me for its meaning but also humbles me by reminding me of the expectation on my task. It is when the steward prays that the congregation may hear your word through me. That is profoundly sobering!

This is not to say that a congregation should be uncritical of what the preacher says, although I do note the old joke which asks what the favourite Sunday lunch in a Christian household is. The answer is, ‘Roast preacher.’

But it is to say that we should be like the Berean Jews, whom Paul encountered on his missionary travels. In Acts 17:11 we read of them,

Now the Berean Jews were of more noble character than those in Thessalonica, for they received the message with great eagerness and examined the Scriptures every day to see if what Paul said was true.

In some old pulpits, the preacher was confronted by a small plaque. On it were the words of the Greeks who came to meet Jesus before the crucifixion, where they told the disciples, ‘Sir, we would see Jesus.’ Our prayer and aspiration for worship needs to be that we see and hear Jesus, so that we know what he is expecting of us in the world.

Fourthly and finally, response:

And I said, ‘Here am I. Send me!’ (verse 8b)

Isaiah responds to God’s word. He is willing to go into the world on behalf of his God. We learn in the subsequent verses that he can’t necessarily expect people to respond positively to what he has to say, but nevertheless someone must go, and then if there is no redemption there will be no excuse. People will not be able to say they were not warned.

How does this play out in our worship? Within the service, it comes in the intercessions, which are meant to be a response to the word. (I’m not sure they always are, but that is the theory.) If you were used to services where the sermon was the climax of the service before the final hymn and blessing, but then noticed a change, where the intercessions followed the sermon, well, this is why.

And so it’s right that in our intercessions we pray not only for ourselves and the church, but for those in power, authority, or influence. If you read the Bible carefully, you will realise that the divine commands are not limited to God’s people. You will hear prophets speaking to kings and nations and all in authority.

This is a holy task. In the early church, those who had not yet been baptised and professed faith and who were undergoing catechism classes would leave the worship before the intercessions. Why? Because intercession is a priestly task, and they were not yet part of what we later called ‘the priesthood of all believers.’ But for those of us who believe, we are acting as God’s priests when we intercede in response to the word.

But the response doesn’t stop with the end of the prayers or with the blessing at the conclusion of the service. The genuineness of our response to the word is tested by what we do when we leave. At the end of the Latin Mass, Catholics were effectively told in the liturgy, ‘The Mass is over: now go out!’

Isaiah did that. It’s our calling, too. Like him, we may or may not see success in response to our bearing God’s word to the world in word and deed. But Isaiah kept faithfully doing it in response, because to do so in the world was intrinsic to true worship. May we do the same.

[i] William Temple, Readings In St John’s Gospel, on John 4:24.

0

The Meanings Of Pentecost, Acts 2:1-21

Acts 2:1-21

The vicar was paying a visit to his local Church of England primary school. To impress him, the children had memorised the Creed. They stood before the vicar, each one reciting a line in turn. ‘I believe in God, the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth’; ‘I believe in Jesus Christ, his Son, our Saviour’; and so on. 

But when it came to when one child should have said, ‘I believe in the Holy Spirit,’ there was nothing. Eventually, one child broke the embarrassed silence and said, ‘I’m sorry, sir, the boy who believes in the Holy Spirit isn’t here today.’

Are we sometimes embarrassed by believing in the Holy Spirit in the church, too? We do our business without reference to him. We complacently assume his presence. We find the name ‘Spirit’ rather spooky and unsettling, like the old name ‘Holy Ghost.’ And as for all those strange things attributed to his work in the New Testament like speaking in tongues and having direct words from God for people, well no thank you very much, that’s all too awkward and un-British. 

I want to take the familiar story of Pentecost from Acts chapter 2 and show you how the deep meaning of Pentecost shows us how vital it is to welcome the Holy Spirit and his work. I’m confining myself to the first thirteen verses: that is, I’m stopping before Peter gets to speak. There is just so much here I have to put a limit somewhere. 

Firstly, Pentecost is about obeying God’s Law:

As you will realise, Pentecost was an existing Jewish festival. It celebrated the time when God gave his Law (the ‘Torah’) to Israel at Mount Sinai. He had rescued them from slavery in Egypt. Then, on their way to freedom in the Promised Land, he gave them his Law to obey in response to him having delivered them. Keeping God’s Law always was a response to having first been saved by God. It never was the case that we kept God’s Law in order to be saved in the first place. 

But even so, there was a problem. Israel repeatedly failed to keep God’s Law. Ultimately, they were so thoroughly disobedient that in reality they preferred the ways of other gods, the false and imaginary gods of other nations and cultures. It didn’t end well. It ended with them being exiled from the Promised Land, as God had warned them when he first gave them his Law. 

I expect we know similar struggles. We know that God has commanded certain standards of behaviour from his people in response to the fact that he has delivered us not from Egypt but from sin. But we fail. Daily! It’s why we have the confession of sin and the assurance of forgiveness in our worship every week. 

The coming of the Spirit at Pentecost, the festival of God’s Law, shows us that God has not left us relying on our own feeble resources to obey his will. He pours out his Spirit upon us so that we can do the will of God. So often we are like cars drained of fuel (or electric charge today) and we cannot move. But with the Holy Spirit, we are filled with the power to do God’s will and obey his Law. 

So today, if there is an area of life where we know we want to obey God but are struggling to do so, let us seek again to be filled with the Holy Spirit. 

Secondly, Pentecost is about God’s harvest:

We are used to having one harvest festival a year in late summer or early autumn to mark the full ingathering of the crops from the fields. Ancient Israel, however, had two harvest festivals a year. One of them was just like ours. It was celebrated at the Feast of Tabernacles (which also remembered other aspects of their history). 

But their first harvest festival was at Pentecost. It was the festival of the first fruits of the harvest. The early crops were a sign that promised the full harvest would come later. 

This too is what the Holy Spirit does. God promises a full harvest of salvation at the end of time, when his people will be completely saved – not only from the penalty of sin in forgiveness, but also from the practice of sin, because we shall be made completely holy, and further from the very presence of sin, which will be eradicated. 

But there are victories on the way to that destination, and the Holy Spirit brings those first fruits in this life. Do we want to see people come to Jesus and find both the forgiveness of their sins and true purpose for life? If so, then we pray for the Holy Spirit to be poured out. We pray that the Spirit will energise our lives and witness. We also pray that the Spirit will be at work ahead of us in the lives of those we are longing to see discover Jesus. 

So never mind all the talk of learning techniques for evangelism. Pray instead for the Holy Spirit to be at work powerfully. Our job is simply to be witnesses. That is, we give an account of what has happened in our lives. No-one comes to the Father unless they are first drawn to him, so we ask the Spirit of God to do that. 

How many of you have a list of people dear to you whom you are longing to find faith? When you pray for them, pray that the Holy Spirit will reveal Jesus to them. 

Thirdly, Pentecost is about God’s new creation:

The coming of the Spirit is mysterious. Notice how Luke struggles to describe it:

2 Suddenly a sound like the blowing of a violent wind came from heaven and filled the whole house where they were sitting. 3 They saw what seemed to be tongues of fire that separated and came to rest on each of them. 

‘A sound like the blowing of a violent wind.’ ‘What seemed to be tongues of fire.’ It’s not literal, but it does convey the idea that the Spirit is hovering over the disciples. Does that remind you of anything? 

How about Genesis 1 verse 2?

2 Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.

As the Spirit hovered over the waters at creation, so at Pentecost the Spirit hovers over the disciples because this is the making of the new creation. 

God has come to make all things new. We’re on that journey to the new creation at the end of all things, when there will be new heavens and a new earth, with a new Jerusalem, God’s people. The renewal starts now. 

And so when we see things in the world that do not display the newness of God’s redeeming love, the Holy Spirit empowers God’s people to act for healing, renewal, and justice. 

Did the Holy Spirit empower Martin Luther King in the 1960s to stand up against institutional racist policies in the United States? I believe so. Did you know that when the Solidarity movement arose in Poland in the early 1980s against the terrors of Russian communism much of it came out of a renewal movement in the Roman Catholic Church in that nation? 

What, then, of the evils we see today? Be it Trump or Putin, God is raising up his people by his Spirit, though it will be costly. Where is the fastest growing church in the world today? It is exploding even under the persecution of the mullahs in Iran. 

Is God calling any of us to be equipped by the Spirit to pay the price of advocating for his new creation?

Fourthly and finally, Pentecost is about God’s community:

I want to bring a couple of things together here. One is that the episode begins with the disciples ‘all together in one place’ (verse 1), which followed on from their meeting for prayer in chapter 1. 

Then we get the crowd who gather, coming from different places and speaking different languages, yet they all ‘hear [the disciples] declaring the wonders of God in [their] own tongues’ (verse 11). It’s not the reversal of Babel, where proud humankind was scattered from one language into many, because there are still many languages. But it is about diverse humanity being united under ‘the wonders of God.’

In other words, the work of the Spirit brings unity in Christ across the biggest of divisions. Church is not about going to a place where I mingle with people who are just like me. Instead, it is about the Gospel of Jesus Christ uniting people who otherwise would not hold together. European, Asian, and African; highly educated and barely literate; poor and wealthy; even both Spurs and Arsenal fans! 

We live in a world riven by division. People feel its pain. We look for ways to cross the divide. The tragically murdered MP Jo Cox said before her untimely death, ‘There is more that unites us than divides us,’ but sadly she underestimated the fact that it is sin which causes the division and Jesus is the cure. 

And so the Holy Spirit takes the work of Jesus on the Cross to reconcile us to God and to reconcile us to one another. He applies that to our hearts and minds. In Ephesians Paul talks about God bringing Jew and Gentile together at the Cross. The Holy Spirit makes that real. 

It’s what we are marking when we share The Peace at Holy Communion. Some older Christians will remember communion services where the minister said that those who loved the Lord and who were in love and charity with their neighbour were invited to take the holy sacrament to their comfort. It’s the same idea, it’s just that The Peace is actually a much older tradition of the Church to express this. 

But while expressing this unity in a traditional, liturgical way is important for what it symbolises, it is also something that needs to be lived out. It involves us building our friendships. It means apologising and seeking forgiveness when we have hurt someone else in the church. It means refusing to hold onto bitterness. And it means the world seeing that our relationships are different. 

Conclusion

So who’s up for the challenge, then? These works of the Holy Spirit are all connected. The first about obeying God’s Law and the fourth about unity are two sides of the holiness coin, one personal, the other social. The second about the harvest and the third about the new creation are both about God’s mission on which all Christians are sent. 

All of this comes under that description of the crowd: ‘we hear them declaring the wonders of God in our own tongues’. Is that worship, or mission, or both? 

Let’s invite the Holy Spirit to empower us to declare the wonders of God in our words and in our lives, in the church and in the world. 

0

I’m A Lifelong Methodist – So What? Wesley Day (a day late!) Romans 5:1-11

Romans 5:1-11

Sometimes, when I arrive at a church for the first time, a person will approach me and introduce themselves. In the middle of their greeting, they will tell me, ‘I’m a lifelong Methodist.’ Their clear assumption is that I will be impressed.

More often than not, though, my heart sinks.

And I say that as someone who is also a life-long Methodist.

Because what they tend to mean is something like this. They love the hymns, the style of worship, the variety of preachers from week to week, and so on.

But I don’t want to know whether you like those things. I want to know – if you like Charles Wesley’s hymns, do you have the very experience of God in your life that Wesley wrote about and that his elder brother John preached about? If all you like are the hymns, you may have Methodist style but you don’t have Methodist substance.

And substance is what matters.

In my first circuit as a minister, some people tried to divide the church over the question of music in worship. Some members wanted us to introduce more contemporary worship songs and hymns alongside the traditional material. But some of the ‘lifelong Methodist’ contingent wouldn’t have it.

The tragedy was that those who wanted to add the contemporary to what we already had still loved the Wesley hymns. But they loved them not for the poetry or the melodies (many of which come from after the Wesleys’ time anyway!). No: they loved them, because they had the experience of the Holy Spirit that Charles Wesley described in those hymns. They had the substance. The critics just had the style.

And so since yesterday was the anniversary of John Wesley’s profound experience of faith and assurance in Christ through the Holy Spirit warming his heart at an address in the Barbican, I thought we should take today to examine whether we too have that knowledge of hearts being strangely warmed by the redeeming work of God.

The way I’m going to do this is by summarising Wesleyan beliefs under what have been called ‘The Four ‘Alls’ of Methodism’. Each of the four ‘All’ statements pertains to salvation.

And the first ‘All’ is that All need to be saved.

When John Wesley preached in the open air to the crowds, he used to say that first of all he preached ‘Law’ and then he preached ‘Grace.’ He spoke first about God’s law, to show God’s standards for life and to make it clear that we all fail to reach those standards. The word most commonly translated ‘sin’ in the New Testament means ‘to miss the mark.’ As Romans 3:23 famously puts it,

All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.

We have failed. We need grace.

If you grow up in the church, you can easily miss this. I did. I grew up hearing people being asked whether they were Christians and answering, ‘I’m trying to be a Christian.’ This communicated to me that Christianity could be summed up like a simple mathematical equation: Christianity equals believing in God plus doing good.

I was so wrong.

My mother even bought me a book that was a popular exposition of Romans, showing that faith, rather than good works, led to salvation. I tossed it aside as rubbish.

It was only when I went to series of church membership classes with members of the church youth group, that things clicked – and only then at the final session, when we looked at the service for the reception of new members. There were three promises and professions of faith the candidates had to make. Do you repent of your sins? Do you trust in Jesus Christ as your Lord and Saviour? Will you obey Christ and serve him in the world?

The penny dropped, at last.

Just as John Wesley had tried to live a methodical, holy life but was riddled with fear until his heart was strangely warmed, so God intervened through the words of that liturgy and I found myself responding.

It doesn’t matter how good and how respectable our lives and upbringings are. Each one of us is a sinner. We fail God’s standards. We need to be saved.

The second ‘All’ is that All can be saved.

The person who urged John Wesley to preach in the open air, first of all to colliers at Kingswood near Bath, was George Whitefield. While Whitefield was generally reckoned to be a better preacher than Wesley, they sharply differed on one issue. Whitefield, as a Calvinist, believed that Jesus only died for the ‘elect.’ That is, God had predestined some people to be saved and others to be damned.

Wesley disagreed. He did not believe that all people would be saved, but he did believe that all people could be saved. Therefore, the Gospel should be shared with as many as possible, so that people might have the opportunity of responding and receiving salvation from God by grace through faith thanks to the death and resurrection of Jesus.

While this debate still exists in parts of the Christian world, Wesley set the direction of travel very clearly for the Methodist movement. All can be saved, and that means sharing the Gospel is a priority. Sadly, I’m not sure you would guess that from the behaviours and priorities of many Methodist congregations today, but if you say you are a traditional Methodist, then this is in your spiritual DNA. It is not the only part of mission, but it is a key part.

Today, in other ways, there are people who think they can’t be saved. They’ve been too bad. They’ve been so damaged they can’t recognise goodness and grace when it is offered to them. Perhaps it’s expressed in words from the rock band Coldplay in a song of theirs called ‘Viva La Vida’:

For some reason I can’t explain
I know Saint Peter won’t call my name[1]

While the song is about a king who has lost his kingdom, it’s poignant to hear those words sung by Chris Martin, who grew up in a Christian family in Devon.

But it is our privilege to make it known to people that none of them need say, I can’t be saved. The love of God is on offer to all. It simply requires a response of opening out empty hands in faith to receive his gift.

The third ‘All’ is that All can know they are saved.

This is what we call the Christian doctrine of assurance. It is that we can be assured of having saving faith.

Various strands of Christianity had advanced ideas of how believers could know their eternal destiny for certain. At the more Catholic end,  it was simply by receiving the sacraments of the Church, but not all found that convincing. What if an unrepentant scoundrel took the sacraments? Tragically, this left many Catholics uncertain of God’s grace and love.

In the Reformation, Calvinists said you could know from the promises of God in Scripture. However, even those who were supposedly reprobates, not part of the elect, could also read Scripture. So some later Calvinists looked in the Bible for signs of God’s blessing upon people. Unfortunately, they landed on things such as those who received material wealth in the Old Testament. We see the legacy of this mistake even today in the so-called ‘Prosperity Gospel’, which really is no Gospel at all.

Wesley certainly had a place for believing in the promises of Scripture, and he also believed that the sacraments had power. But he added something else: the inner witness of the Holy Spirit. It’s there in Romans 5, which we read (one of Wesley’s favourite passages, by the way):

hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us. (Verse 5)

To those who, as in the title of the song recorded by both Dusty Springfield and David Cassidy, asked, ‘How can I be sure?’, Wesley answered that as well as receiving comfort from the presence of Christ at the sacraments and applying the promises of God in Scripture, you could know and feel the assuring work within you by the Holy Spirit.

It was what he had experienced at Aldersgate Street in the Barbican, when he said that his heart was strangely warmed and he felt he did trust in Christ, Christ alone for salvation.

It was what Charles wrote about in ‘O for a thousand tongues’ in the climactic verse:

In Christ, our Head, you then shall know,
shall feel your sins forgiven,
anticipate your heaven below,
and own that love is heaven.[2]

This is all part of the Good News. God doesn’t want you to be in any doubt of his saving love for you.

The fourth and final ‘All’ is that All can be saved to the uttermost.

This is John Wesley’s controversial doctrine of Christian Perfection. Wesley based it on texts such as the words of Jesus:

Be perfect, even as your Father in heaven is perfect. (Matthew 5:48)

Even Wesley realised there were problems with this view. He said it wasn’t so much as believing you could get to a point of not sinning at all as about not knowingly engaging in any conscious sin. He also was clear that he didn’t classify himself as perfect, and that he only in his lifetime ever knew one or two people whom he could call perfect, even by his own revised definition.

Furthermore, it is a debatable understanding of the words of Jesus. For the word translated ‘perfect’ might not mean ‘morally perfect.’ It might mean ‘mature.’

So how do we take this? I found some words of my college Principal about this helpful. He said that behind this controversial teaching of Wesley’s was what he called ‘an optimism of grace.’ And I think that’s a good lesson for us. We should always be optimistic about what God by his grace can accomplish in our lives and in the lives of others.

This means advancing in holiness, both in our private lives and in social dimensions. For this, we need the ongoing sanctifying work of the Holy Spirit – something to remember when Pentecost comes up in a couple of weeks.

And to achieve this, Wesley set up his famous small groups so that members could hold each other accountable for growing in grace and supporting one another. George Whitefield, whom I mentioned earlier, realised that this was Wesley’s genius: he organised converts into small groups for their spiritual growth. Whitefield didn’t, and in contrast, many of his converts didn’t stick: he sadly described them as ‘a rope of sand.’

To be a traditional Methodist, then, means having a holy dissatisfaction with our lives, but also a great hope in God’s grace to transform us, and a commitment to small-group relationships that will help us in that growth.

Conclusion

So – if you say you are a lifelong or traditional Methodist – are these things your knowledge and experience? And I ask the same question if you have been attracted to Methodism in mid-life.

Do you know your need to be saved?

Do you know you can be saved?

Do you have assurance that you have been saved?

And is God saving you more and more, even one day to the uttermost?

[1] Songwriters: Christopher A. J. Martin, Guy Rupert Berryman, Jonathan Mark Buckland, William Champion; lyrics © Universal Music Publishing Group

[2] Charles Wesley (1707-1788), italics mine.

2

Begin With The End In Mind, Revelation 21:1-8 (Easter 5 Year C)

Revelation 21:1-8

Have you ever heard the saying, ‘Begin with the end in mind’? A novelist may have a beginning point and also know the end of the story but then has to work out how to get the characters from that beginning point to the end. We do something similar when planning a journey. Our sat-nav knows where we are, and we enter the place where we want to end up. It would be ludicrous just to set out on our travels with a vague hope that we will arrive at somewhere good. We begin with the end in mind.

But do we apply the same principle to the life of faith? I believe we should. A good, clear, healthy vision of the end of all things will guide us as we wonder how to live now.

And the book of Revelation does something like that for its readers. While I don’t believe it was written only to be decoded in our day with details that correspond to our world political situation, it does give a vision of the end that enables its readers to live faithfully now. I accept the common theory that Revelation was written for persecuted Christians, perhaps in the late first century. As they struggled to know how to live as Christians when under pressure and facing suffering, Revelation gave them a vision of the end, which enabled them to calibrate their lives right where they were.

We may not live our lives of faith in Jesus under the same level of stress that they did, but we too need to live with the end in mind. If we don’t, our lives will drift aimlessly, like heading out on that journey with no idea where we’re going.

Our passage today tells us about the end in verses 1 to 5 and then shows how we live with the end in mind in verses 6 to 8. So first of all we’re going to think about the end, and only then secondly are we going to think about how we begin.

Firstly, then, the end:

What is the end that we are to have in mind? As I said, it is described in verses 1 to 5, and to understand it I want us to think about a sandwich[1]. A sandwich has bread on the outside, top and bottom. Then just inside that, we have the butter on each slice of bread. Finally, in the middle, we have the filling.

Verses 1 to 5 are like that. The bread on the outside are the statements about things being made new. So on the top we have the new heaven and the new earth in verse 1 and on the bottom, we have God saying that he is making everything new in verse 5.

This bread of newness is buttered with the ‘No longer’ statements. The top slice is buttered with the statement at the end of verse 1 that ‘there was no longer any sea’ and the bottom slice is buttered with verse 4, where we hear

He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death” or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.

What, then, is the tasty filling? It is that God and his people will dwell together in the holy city, the New Jerusalem, as found in verses 2 to 3.

The making of all things new, eventually leading to the renewal of the entire heavens and the earth, began with the bodily resurrection of Jesus, and that’s why it’s appropriate to read this passage in the Easter season. When God raised Jesus from the dead, while he was recognisable, his resurrection body clearly had new powers, as we see from the times when he suddenly appears and disappears before the disciples. In 1 Corinthians 15 Paul tells us the resurrection body will be animated by the Holy Spirit.

We, then, are anticipating living in a new creation where everything is recognisable but has new powers and does not decay.

The butter on the bread is the ‘no longer’ statements, which show that in this new creation, suffering will be ended. Imagine you are a persecuted Christian in the first century and you hear that in the world to come ‘there will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain’ – all the things you have gone through as either you have been tortured or your friends and loved ones have suffered and even been killed at the hands of the authorities.

And add to that the mysterious – to us – vision that ‘there was no longer any sea’ in verse 1. I suspect this alludes to the fact that the sea was a place of terror for ancient people, and that also earlier in Revelation one of the evil beasts had arisen from the sea. So if there is no longer any sea it’s not that H2O has been abolished: it is that in the new creation, not only is suffering gone, but the cause of suffering is no more. Evil will no longer have its way.

So at the end we have all creation renewed. It is identifiable but now no longer subject to decay but exhibiting new power at animated by the Holy Spirit. Furthermore, suffering and all that causes it has been given its marching orders.

But it gets better. Because the filling in the sandwich, the very centre and heart is the fact that we will dwell together with God. This is what everything is leading up to: creation – including us – is remade, suffering and its causes are banished, all so that the redeemed can live with God with no handicap. Such will be the new creation that, as Augustine of Hippo, the great thinker who inspired the new Pope, put it, everything will mediate the presence of God.

That is the great vision Revelation 21 gives us. That is the end. It is the end we keep in mind when we begin to live the Christian life now.

So secondly, let’s turn to the way we begin:

For now, by the vision we can see that both creation and new creation are accomplished. As God looked on his initial creation and said it was good or it was very good, so he has looked on his new creation and said, ‘It is done.’ (verse 6)

Now, we have a choice in the way we begin our journey with the end of the new creation, drained of evil but filled with the presence of God in mind.

God offers us the free gift of the water of life if we are thirsty (verse 6). Biblically, the water of life is the gift of the Holy Spirit. Our thirst will only truly be quenched by the Spirit of God. It is the Holy Spirit who leads us on in the direction of the end. I mentioned Augustine of Hippo earlier, and one of his prayers puts it neatly:

Breathe in me, O Holy Spirit, that my thoughts may be holy.
Act in me, O Holy Spirit, that my work may be holy.
Draw my heart, O Holy Spirit, to love what is holy.[2]

The way to get on the route from wherever we are beginning to God’s great end is to open ourselves to the Holy Spirit, and to all the Spirit wants to do in our lives. Paul says in Galatians we are to ‘walk by the Spirit’, the Spirit leads us on the journey from where we are now to the destination God has for us in the new creation and in his presence. The Spirit prepares us for such an existence, purifying our motives and transforming our lives, making us more into people who will be in harmony with God’s new creation where suffering and evil are gone.

To set ourselves on this route from our starting place to the end is what will make us ‘victorious’ in the word of verse 7. In other words, we will not bow down to the evil forces of this world that seek to get us to deny our faith in Jesus and our allegiance to him. The Spirit of God is offered to us so that we may persevere in following Jesus. Or to put it another way, when my least favourite Christmas carol ‘Away in a manger’ ends with the words ‘And fit us for heaven to live with thee there,’ the way God fits us for our destiny is by the work of the Holy Spirit.

The other choice is to reject all this and say, actually, Lord, I don’t want to live in your beautiful new creation where evil has had its marching orders and we live close to you in your presence. For those who choose the lifestyles described in verse 8 – ‘the cowardly, the unbelieving, the vile, the murderers, the sexually immoral, those who practise magic arts, the idolaters and all liars’ – are by their very lifestyle saying no to God’s new creation. These are examples of practices that will be extinguished there. Hence, there is nothing harsh and vindictive about the fate of the depraved being ‘the fiery lake of burning sulphur’ (verse 8). It is ‘the second death’ and this is the natural consequence of choosing against the beautiful end God has planned, designed, and promised.

That probably isn’t most or even all of us. But the tricky challenge we face is that sometimes we want the beautiful destination God has for us but we’d like to compromise – everything in moderation as it were, even sin. We can do a bit of cowardice, not always confessing our faith. We can be unbelieving if there are parts of the faith that don’t suit us. We can make concessions to the sexual standards of society. Magic arts? Well, I certainly think of those Christians who read their horoscopes. I see idolatry in the devotion of some Christians to Donald Trump or to the acquisition of wealth.

Some of us want it both ways, but Jesus doesn’t allow us that option.

Don’t get me wrong, I know we are all far from perfect, not least me. But there is a difference between on the one hand setting our sights on the presence of God in his new creation but slipping up from time to time, and on the other hand wanting to hoover up the blessings of God while not wanting to change our lives out of gratitude for all he has done for us.

So as we approach Ascension and then Pentecost, when God pours out his Spirit through the ascended Jesus, let us examine ourselves. Are we imperfect followers of Jesus who desire the ways of God as well as the blessings of God? Or do we simply want to have our cake and eat it?

Pentecost will be an ideal time to avail ourselves of the living water, the Holy Spirit, so that we can indeed live with the end in mind.

[1] This is my version of Ian Paul’s description of the chiastic structure of verses 1 to 5 in his TNTC on Revelation, p338f.

[2] Lectio 365 morning prayer, 16h May 2025, adapted and modernised from https://www.loyolapress.com/catholic-resources/prayer/traditional-catholic-prayers/saints-prayers/holy-spirit-prayer-of-saint-augustine

0

Jesus, the Good and Faithful Shepherd: Psalm 23 (Easter 4 Year C)

Psalm 23

Today, on a day when one of my churches celebrates its Church Anniversary, is a good day to consider the theme of God’s faithfulness. ‘Great is thy faithfulness,’ indeed. And when we come to the Lectionary today with Psalm 23 about the Lord being our shepherd and we also read from John 10 where Jesus is the good shepherd, we have an appropriate theme for considering God’s faithfulness. The Lord, our Good Shepherd, is the epitome of divine faithfulness.

And as we reflect on that now, we are going to recognise God’s faithfulness in the past, present, and future. Yes, Psalm 23 is written to express these truths to individuals, but they also work in terms of God’s faithful love to his people corporately, the church.

Firstly, we consider God’s faithfulness in our anxiety:

1 The Lord is my shepherd, I lack nothing.
2     He makes me lie down in green pastures,
he leads me beside quiet waters,
3     he refreshes my soul.
He guides me along the right paths
    for his name’s sake.

As I wondered over the last few days what held some seemingly different ways here in which God provides for our needs, I came to the conclusion that the common thread was that these were all situations that can promote anxiety in us, but that God in his faithfulness gives us what we need, our anxiety subsides, and we learn to trust more in him.

Anxiety is there when we lack something, be it necessary income or food. I know that when my grandfather was out of work for five years in the depression of the 1930s, my grandmother would go without a meal herself for the sake of the children and would be on her knees praying that God would provide what they needed as a family. We know there were times when even at the very time she was praying someone would anonymously leave a food parcel by the front door.

Today, we live in a world of anxiety. You will all have seen the discussions  in the media about the rise in mental health issues, especially since the Covid pandemic and particularly among younger people. Prescriptions of the relevant drugs are on the increase, and costing the NHS more, leading some politicians to make cruel statements about over-diagnosis of certain conditions.

It is something I recognise in myself. When something troubling happens, my body reacts in negative ways before my mind gets the chance to analyse whether the presenting issue really is so bad after all and whether there is a solution anyway.

We are not immune from a corporate anxiety in the church, as we worry about the future.

It is surely, though, part of the Good News we offer to the world as the church today that the Lord our Good Shepherd is faithful to us in our anxiety.

In recent weeks, the Bible Society released a report that claimed there was what they called a ‘quiet revival’ of faith among young adults. There are probably many reasons for this, including a rebellion against the atheism of their parents. But could it also be true that as they were notably afflicted by the anxiety of the Covid pandemic as I said, that a Gospel which emphasises a Good Shepherd who is faithful to the anxious, who enables them to cast all their cares on him, is appealing to them?

So on a day when we rejoice in God’s faithfulness to us, let us consider how that might be a relevant message to new generations.

Secondly, we consider God’s faithfulness in our darkness:

4 Even though I walk
    through the darkest valley,
I will fear no evil,
    for you are with me;
your rod and your staff,
    they comfort me.

Now I know we’re used to hearing not the words ‘the darkest valley’ but ‘the valley of the shadow of death’, but ‘the darkest valley’ is increasingly thought to be the best translation, and that surely includes ‘the valley of the shadow of death.’ In the very darkest times of life, the psalmist says, God is with me and he comforts me. For the psalmist, the experience of darkness does not mean that the light is absent. Jesus the Light of the World is still present with us even at the worst of times. No wonder we often read this psalm at funerals.

Perhaps this is one of the deepest examples of the fact that Jesus is Immanuel, ‘God with us’, as the Christmas stories tell us. He came to share human life, and did so to the very worst, when he suffered that cruel and unjust death on the cross. And because he was later raised from the dead, he can be with us in our darkness.

And that is the simple promise: he is with us. Often in our dark times that’s all we want and all we need. Clever explanations can wait. The people who come up to us and blithely tell us that everything happens for a reason are no help at all. What we need is presence. And we get that from Jesus, the Good Shepherd.

We may say, ‘But God is silent!’ Yet he may be the silent friend who is just sitting with us in our sorrows. Are they not sometimes the best comforters? But simply by being there, Jesus the Good Shepherd is our comfort. He does not have to shout from the rooftops, and if he did we would probably not be able to cope with it. For his presence now shows that he has conquered death, and in our bleakest time that may be all we need to know.

You may have heard preachers talk about the medieval mystic Mother Julian of Norwich. In her lifetime she witnessed the devastation of the Black Death, and at one time, around the age of 30, she was so ill she thought she was on her deathbed. But she recovered – or was healed – and afterwards wrote down her account of some visions she received from God when she was close to death. Out of that experience came perhaps her most famous words: ‘All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.’

That is the testimony of one who knew the presence of the faithful Good Shepherd in the darkest valley.

And that too is part of what we proclaim to the world. Jesus suffered and died in the very worst way, but he was raised from the dead, and will faithfully accompany all who trust in him in even the worst seasons of their lives.

Thirdly and finally, we consider God’s faithfulness in our mistreatment:

I’m avoiding the word ‘persecution’ here. It is that for millions of our brothers and sisters around the world, but for those of us in the west, the opposition that comes our way is really not strong enough or fundamental enough to warrant the word ‘persecution.’ So I have settled on ‘mistreatment’: that may not be a perfect word, but I hope you get my sense, when the psalmist says,

5 You prepare a table before me
    in the presence of my enemies.
You anoint my head with oil;
    my cup overflows.

We do face opposition and ridicule, and occasionally some forms of discrimination because of our faith. Many older Christians grew up in a society where there was more common acceptance of values that had some connection to the Christian faith, even if the faith was only honoured more in the breach. But that common acceptance and understanding has not been present in our society now for some decades. So it shouldn’t be surprising that when we are explicitly faithful to Jesus Christ today, that will sometimes attract enemies to us.

What we have here is that in the face of the ridicule and humiliation that comes with being treated unjustly for our faith, Jesus the Good Shepherd in his faithfulness to us honours us. That’s why there is a table for us in the presence of our enemies. That’s why the psalmist speaks of having his head anointed with oil: that was what happened to the honoured guest at a banquet.

So, when elements of the world turn against us – and they will, from time to time – God in his faithfulness still dignifies us with honour. He values our costly witness. He is proud of us when we stand up for him and it hurts. He knows when we have paid a price to stay faithful, and it doesn’t go unnoticed.

Naturally, we would like the situation remedied. Sometimes we shall get justice in this life, but not always. If what happens is we simply get the strength to stay true to Jesus under duress, we can be sure that there is another and greater banquet coming in God’s New Creation when he will prepare a feast for us and honour those who have continued to say yes to Jesus even in the most demanding circumstances.

In conclusion, what is our response? The final verse of the psalm gives us a pointer:

6 Surely your goodness and love will follow me
    all the days of my life,
and I will dwell in the house of the Lord
    for ever.

Here we have in summary this promise that the Good Shepherd will faithfully continue to be with us, as his goodness and love pursue us. The believer ‘will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever’ – that is, we shall do all we can in response to live in the presence of God. Yes, God pursues us, but also yes, we pursue God in gratitude for his faithful love. In worship, prayer, and Scripture, both together on Sundays and in small groups, and on our own during the week we seek to draw close to the presence of our faithful God.

But not only that: the ‘house of the Lord’ language should not deceive us into thinking this is purely in the context of the church building or merely of overtly religious practices. Since Jesus is accessible everywhere since the Resurrection and Ascension, we can live in his presence everywhere, too. And so our pursuit of the God who has already pursued us is an activity and a discipline that we follow not only in the church but also in the world. Yes, we ask, how would Jesus want me to love him in the church, but also, yes, how would Jesus want me to love him in the world?

0

Jesus, Pastor and Apostle of the Resurrection: Luke 24:36-49 (Easter 3)

Luke 24:36-49

Here is a supposed church chain letter from the United States:

The “Ideal” Pastor
The ideal preacher lasts precisely ten minutes.

He is a harsh critic of sin, yet he never causes damage to others.

He works as the church janitor in addition to working from 8 AM to midnight.

The ideal pastor is forty bucks a week, drives a nice car, has nice clothes, reads good literature, and gives thirty dollars a week to the church.

With forty years of experience, he is 29 years old.

Above all, he has great looks.

The ideal pastor spends much of his time with older people and has a strong desire to work with youth.

His sense of humor, which makes him smile all the time while keeping a straight face, helps him maintain his unwavering commitment to his church.

He visits fifteen homes every day and is constantly available in his office for emergencies.

The ideal pastor consistently makes time for every committee within the church council. He is always engaged evangelizing the unchurched and never skips a church organization meeting.

The ideal pastor can always be found in the church next door!

Just forward this notification to six other churches that are also sick of their pastor if yours falls short. Your pastor should then be wrapped up and sent to the church at the top of the list.

You will receive 1,643 pastors in one week if everyone works together.

There should be one that is flawless.

Trust this letter. In less than three months, one congregation broke the chain and welcomed back its former pastor.

And if you think that’s just a wild exaggeration for the sake of humour, then you haven’t seen some of the circuit profiles I’ve read over the years. Not least do I remember one I read when I was single where the circuit said their ideal minister was married with children. In other words, they wouldn’t even appoint Jesus.

I used to think this problem of expecting the Archangel Gabriel to be your next minister was a grassroots issue, until I got involved in supporting and mentoring probationer ministers. Then I got to see Methodism’s official documents about the required competencies to become a minister. I realised the problem went right to the top.

There is only one person who has exercised all the different New Testament leadership gifts, and that is, of course, Jesus himself. Ephesians talks about leadership offices of apostle, prophet, evangelist, pastor, and teacher. Jesus encompassed all of those. No-one else does. It’s why if Jesus is not your minister – and he isn’t – you need a team of people in leadership to cover the bases.

And I say all this, not to have a whinge about my own work, but to introduce the fact that in today’s passage Jesus exercises two of those leadership ministries.

Firstly, we have Jesus the Pastor:

Jesus appears to the disciples and speaks peace to them, offers them reassurance and reasons to grow in faith and deal with their doubts. And even when the disbelief persists, he is patient but persistent with them to bring them to a point of complete belief in his resurrection.

Does this sound like pastoral work to you? Because it does to me.

Where do you turn when fear threatens to overwhelm faith? I think that’s part of the story here. If, as I suspect, this is Luke’s version of the story John later describes in his Gospel where on the first Easter evening the disciples are behind locked doors out of fear that they will be arrested next, then no wonder his first words to them are ‘Peace be with you’ (verse 36). Well, that and the utter shock of his sudden materialisation in their midst, of course.

Sometimes it is the pastoral vocation to speak peace to troubled minds. I wish I could give you examples from my own experience, but I would be breaking pastoral confidences. What I will say is that when I was a young and enthusiastic Christian in my mid-twenties and wondering about my calling, a minister I admired said to me, ‘What most people need is simply the assurance they are loved by God and have a hope in heaven.’

And while that might be a bit simplistic, there is an important truth there. It is a pastoral calling to bring people into an assurance of their faith. And nothing does it like the truth of the resurrection. Those first disciples thought they might be facing imminent and cruel death, just as Jesus had. And the risen Lord doesn’t promise them an escape from suffering, but he embeds resurrection hope in them. When you have that, you can face even death with the peace of Christ.

Therefore, Jesus speaking the word of peace is accompanied by other words and demonstration that his resurrection is true. He isn’t a ghost. He has been raised bodily. He shows them his hands and feet to prove that it is him – just as he will offer Thomas a week later.

The other day, the Co-Op was in the news for pricing errors they made on their goods that would be delivered by the Deliveroo service. Jars of Loyd Grossman pasta sauce, Costa ground coffee, and Fox’s cookies were all free of charge. Robinson’s squash went down from £1.50 to 15p. At least one of those who dived in before the mistakes were corrected forty-five minutes later did at least donate his stash to his local food bank, but not all did.

Others steered clear, because we talk about things being too good to be true, and that seems to have been the disciples’ mindset. Luke says, ‘they still did not believe it because of joy and amazement’ (verse 41). So as well as having shown them his wounds and his flesh and bones (verse 39), Jesus eats fish in front of them (verses 42-43).

Too good to be true? No! It’s too good and it is true.

A few years ago, the Christian musician Matt Redman said that the familiar Christian expression ‘good news’ sometimes almost seemed to weak for what it represents. He wanted to use a stronger expression, and opted for ‘beautiful news.’

But whatever form of words we choose to use, we’re talking about something that goes against everything our culture and education tells us. That’s why it needs to go down deep. That’s why, I think, Jesus doesn’t mind offering more than one proof to the disciples so that it sinks in.

And that’s why the task of the pastor is to encourage us in all the ways that help the radical Christian message of the resurrection go deep into our lives and over-write the negative messages of our society. That’s why I will forever bang on about the importance of engaging with prayer and the Scriptures not only on a Sunday morning but in daily devotions and in small groups for fellowship and Bible study.

Jesus the pastor, then, brings the truth of the resurrection to troubled hearts and distorted minds in words and action.

Secondly, Jesus the Apostle:

Jesus takes the disciples on a Cook’s tour of the Scriptures (as they existed at that point). He shows them how they were all leading up to the Messiah suffering and then being raised from the dead (verses 44-46). All well and good. Just the sort of thing you might imagine happening in a home group. It also sounds quite similar to what Jesus did with Cleopas and his companion on the Emmaus Road, that we thought about last week, when we talked about interpreting Scripture in the light of God’s great story that points to the Resurrection and the New Creation.

Except that this time there’s a punchline:

and repentance for the forgiveness of sins will be preached in his name to all nations, beginning at Jerusalem. (Verse 47)

Now there’s a practical application! And if the disciples hadn’t been expecting a suffering Messiah who would also be raised from the dead before the end of history, then they wouldn’t have been anticipating this, either. For in what we call the Old Testament there is a lot of emphasis on the nations coming to Jerusalem to worship Israel’s God at the Temple, but now instead the divine message goes out from Jerusalem to the world.

And that’s going to require a new approach, one that was rarely seen in the Old Testament. You do have Jonah being sent to Nineveh, but as we know, he wasn’t keen on the idea. Now, it seems, Jesus says, this is the new norm. I’m not waiting for the nations to come to the Temple. I want to take the Temple to the nations.

An apostle is one who is sent with a message. That could describe the coming and the ministry of Jesus. But now, as the supreme apostle, he commissions his disciples with the apostolic call to be sent from Jerusalem to everywhere.

After all, when Jesus, as the risen Lord, returns to heaven in the Ascension, his presence will be available everywhere through his Spirit. Therefore, you don’t need to come to Jerusalem anymore. Jesus, the New Temple, can be accessed anywhere and everywhere. So it’s only appropriate to take that message everywhere and call on people to connect with Jesus where they are.

And by definition, a calling like that cannot be fulfilled by one person. It requires everyone who follows the risen Jesus to hear and respond.

But you might reply to that by saying, wait a minute, Dave, didn’t you say we don’t all have the same gifts, let alone all the gifts? Absolutely, I did. And we are not all apostles or evangelists. Quite right.

However, we are all witnesses (and that is not a leadership gift). Every Christian has encountered the risen Jesus in their lives and can bear witness to what that means for them. We bear witness in our words when we find the appropriate times to tell our friends about what Jesus has done in our lives and what he could do for them. We bear witness in our deeds when we live out the teaching of Jesus not only in the church but also in the world.

In all of this, though, we make that New Testament resurrection change of direction from the nations coming to Jerusalem where the Temple is, to taking Jerusalem to the nations, because Jesus the True Temple is accessible everywhere.

So out with all those lame strategies where we wait for people to come to us. Jesus never lived like that, and he never expected us to do that, either.

And when we leave our churches on a Sunday morning it isn’t merely to go home, it is to go into the world as commissioned by our risen Lord. The thought may make us tremble. We shall need the power of God in the Holy Spirit. But that is to jump ahead in the story.

0

Jesus Is Alive: The Sweet Centre Of Easter, Luke 24:13-35 (Easter 2, Low Sunday)

https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/luke-24-13-35-the-resurrection-is-at-the-centre/278456462

(Please see the PowerPoint at the link above: for some reason WordPress wouldn’t let me embed it in the usual way.)

Luke 24:13-35

The Greek letter chi looks like our ‘x’ but the ‘ch’ takes the sound as if it were Scottish – so ‘loch, not ‘lock, as in places like the silver sands of Loch Morar, where I proposed to my wife.

And the letter chi with its ‘x’ shape gives name to a literary structure. We speak of some narratives having a ‘chiastic structure.’ This means that instead of the themes simply being linear, with one theme following the next, they are more ‘x’ shaped. The first theme is repeated at the end, the second theme is repeated one from the end, and so on until you find out what’s at the centre of the story. Put another way, the story proceeds from the beginning to the middle, but then the themes come again in reverse.

The famous story of the walk to Emmaus that we have just read is ‘chiastic’ or ‘x-shaped’. Let me show you how.

A1 Journey from Jerusalem (vv 14-15)
            B1 Jesus appears, but unable to recognise him (v 16)
                        C1 Interaction (vv 17-18)
                                    D1 Summary of ‘the things’ (vv 19-21)
                                                E1 Empty tomb and vision (vv 22-23a)
                                                            F Jesus is alive (v 23b)
                                                E2 Empty tomb but no vision (v 24)
                                    D2 Interpretation of ‘the things’ (vv 25-27)
                        C2 Interaction (vv 28-30)
            B2 Able to recognise Jesus,  but he disappears (vv 31-32)
A2 Journey back to Jerusalem (vv 33-35)[1]

At the centre – like the sweet soft centre of a chocolate – is the fact that Jesus is alive.

And what does this central theme, that Jesus is alive, tell us about the surrounding layers in the story?

Firstly, it transforms the journey:

I am showing an image on the screen of two people on a journey and if you look closely you’ll see they are a man and a woman. There is an ancient tradition that the companion of Cleopas was his wife. And that was one reason why the Anglican rector friend of mine who preached at our wedding chose this passage for his sermon that day.

But whether they are husband and wife or simply two fellow disciples, it’s striking to contrast their two journeys: the one from Jerusalem, and the one back there. Either way, they are clearly two of the disciples who have dismissed the testimony of the women who went to the tomb early that morning and who came back with that fantastic story that it was empty, but they had met two angels who told them that Jesus was alive.

What does this indicate?

Dismissal of the women’s witness points to a fissure in the company of disciples, just as the departures of these two persons from Jerusalem marks the beginnings of the drift away from high hopes and the community of discipleship.[2]

In other words, they are not just walking away from Jerusalem, they are walking away from faith in Jesus and the band of disciples. The disappointment and the collapse of their hopes is leading to the disintegration of their faith. Note how they say about Jesus, ‘we had hoped’ (verse 21).

How many people find that disappointment with God leads to the crushing of their hopes and the dissolving of their faith? Sometimes, of course, their hopes were wrong and naïve, they had almost a ‘Father Christmas’ concept of God, where if one particular prayer was not answered then that was the end.

Sometimes they had not grasped that to be a Christian and walk the way of the Cross was going to mean that you embraced disappointment on the way, because not everything was ever going to go right in this life, even with belief in a loving God. They have been taught badly by the church. We have far too often sugar-coated the cost of discipleship.

And sometimes it’s more complicated than any of this. It can be a long, slow build-up of things.

Yet Cleopas and his companion at the end of the story return to Jerusalem with a very different vibe. Full of hope and excitement, and having invited the stranger into their house because it’s late and about to get dark, they have no compunction in going out in the dark to return to the disciples. At normal walking pace, we’re talking two and a half hours to get back, and this at night, and when they’ve not long that day already completed the same distance the other way. What has transformed them is that Jesus is alive.

It is still what transforms people. To know Jesus is alive means that this world doesn’t end in despair, because God is making all things new. It means that hate doesn’t win in the end, but love. It means that what we do isn’t worthless but has eternal value.

We can argue and debate with people who don’t share our faith and there’s a place for that, because our faith makes truth claims, but in the end for someone to follow Jesus they need to experience the living Jesus revealing himself to them. So with those we are praying for to find faith, let us pray that the living, risen Jesus will make himself known to them.

Secondly, the fact that Jesus is alive transforms the hospitality:

I want you to picture me as a young Local Preacher. A little taller. More hair, and none of it grey. Much skinnier. I have come to preach on this passage at Eastertide one year, and my eyes have landed on verse 30:

 When he was at the table with them, he took bread, gave thanks, broke it and began to give it to them.

Ah, I think, Jesus does the same four things with the bread here that he does at the Last Supper: he takes it, gives thanks, breaks it, and gives it to people. Surely in this episode Luke is preparing his readers to experience the risen Jesus at Holy Communion. And that’s what I preach. And that’s what many others have preached. Perhaps you’ve heard sermons on this passage where the preacher has said this.

But it ain’t necessarily so. Only later was I to learn that those four actions – taking, giving thanks, breaking, and giving – were what devout Jews did at every meal. If Luke’s language recalls any other part of his Gospel here, it’s more likely the feeding of the five thousand in chapter 9, which also acts as a revelation of Jesus[3].

The big thing here in Jesus performing those four actions is that he was invited into Cleopas’ home as a guest, but he doesn’t behave as a guest. He behaves as the host. The bread is his, for ultimately he created it. The home is his, for ultimately he as Creator is behind it. And the disciples are most certainly his, too.

And remember how central and almost sacred to Middle Eastern culture the act of hospitality is. Even today, you will be invited into homes if you mingle with the ordinary people rather than stay on your coach tour. They bring it with them to other countries, as I found out when in the last circuit the clothes bank one of my churches ran often served Syrian refugees. One man, profoundly deaf, always wanted to invite me to his flat, and told me I could turn up any time and he and his wife would feed me.

The story tells us that we invite the risen Jesus right into the centre of our lives, our homes, but that we cannot confine him to the guest room. He will take over. He has come to be in charge of our homes and our lives. It’s like the old gag that Jesus is a capitalist – he only believes in takeover bids.

Since Jesus is alive, we can welcome him into our lives. Let us do all we can to make sure he feels at home with us.

Thirdly and finally, the fact that Jesus is alive transforms the Scriptures:

One thing that comes up time and again in the Gospels and especially Luke at this time is about how you handle the Scriptures. Sometimes Christians, and especially Protestants, are prone to lifting proof-texts out from here and there to make a case for whatever it is we want to advocate. This has been called ‘Bible bingo’. I think of the story about the man who wondered what to do next in his life, so he opened up his Bible with his eyes closed and pointed his finger at a verse. It said, ‘Judas went out and hanged himself.’ Perturbed by this thought, he repeated the exercise, only to alight on the verse, ‘Go thou and do likewise.’

Cleopas and his companion evidently had their traditional Jewish way of doing so. It wasn’t quite like that, for the rabbis had developed particular ways of interpreting the holy texts. But it’s evident that by failing to take account of Jesus and his mission they had missed God’s revelation. As Joel Green puts it:

What has happened with Jesus can be understood only in light of the Scriptures, yet the Scriptures themselves can be understood only in light of what happened with Jesus. … And before the disciples will be able to recognise the risen Lord … they must grasp especially the nexus between suffering and messiahship.[4]

And so the fact that Jesus is alive now informs how we listen for what God is saying in Holy Scripture. As well as reading individual passages in their immediate context, we read everything in the light of God’s great story that comes to a climax in Jesus.

Therefore, when we read the Bible, we ask ourselves, where does this episode fit in God’s great story of salvation that leads to the Resurrection and the New Creation? What does it mean to read this, knowing that Jesus is alive?

To give a couple of quick examples from those difficult Old Testament laws: we no longer have to worry about the ritual laws prescribed for Temple worship, because Jesus has fulfilled everything to do with the Temple in his own body. He is the true Temple. Other laws may still hold, although we shall still need to interpret and apply them carefully.

And we don’t jump into making capital punishment such a widespread sentence as the Old Testament does, because it is given at a time when God had not yet revealed the Resurrection and life after death. We are free to come up with other punishments and leave open the possibility of repentance and faith before death, even for the worst of criminals.

Jesus, of course, reinterprets marriage in the light of eternal life, as I explained in my Holy Week meditations.

There is so much more to say here, but no time to do so. It is the Scriptures that give us the framework for understanding the suffering Messiah who was raised from the dead, but equally it is the risen Lord whose resurrection points to the climax of the chronicles of God, and we interpret the Bible in that light.

Conclusion

The truth that Jesus is alive is at the centre of the Emmaus Road story. It transforms the two disciples’ journeys, their hospitality, and their reading of the Scriptures.

But isn’t it also true that the presence of the risen Lord transforms everything? Is it not the case that every day we can ask what light the presence of the risen Jesus shines on whatever we are encountering?

[1] Adapted from Joel Green, The Gospel of Luke (NICNT), p842.

[2] Op. cit., p844.

[3] Op. cit., p843.

[4] Op. cit., p844.

0

I Can See Clearly Now: Easter Day 2025 (Luke 24:1-12)

Luke 24:1-12

When I conduct a wedding, I like to bring along some of my camera gear and took some photos. Not in the middle of the ceremony while I am marrying the couple, you understand, but before and after the service, and at the reception.

When I came to check the photos on the computer after one wedding, I was happy with some and unhappy with others. Nothing unusual in that, you might think.

But then I noticed that all the photos I thought were substandard had been taken with the same lens. They just weren’t sharp. And that was crazy, because it was one of my sharpest lenses.

Then I realised. That lens had needed cleaning, and I hadn’t done that before the ceremony. All the other lenses I used that day were clean.

So I cleaned the lens, and all the photos I have made with it since have been every bit as clear and sharp as I would expect.

Johnny Nash sang ‘I Can See Clearly Now’, and I believe the Resurrection, being the most stunning work of God since creation, is a time when we can see God more clearly now. Our lenses are cleaned, the rain is gone, and God comes into vision ever more vividly. That’s even true in Luke 24:1-12, where the disciples are still tentative and haven’t yet come to a full Easter faith.

So in what ways do we see God more clearly at the Resurrection? Here are three.

Firstly, we see God’s Work more clearly.

The women arrive at the tomb early in the morning and the miracle has already happened. This fits with an Old Testament theme ‘in which the action of God comes to light following the hours of darkness’[1]. When the Israelites are trapped at the Red Sea and the Egyptian army is pursuing them, we read that

During the last watch of the night the Lord looked down from the pillar of fire and cloud at the Egyptian army and threw it into confusion. (Exodus 14:24)

On an occasion when Israel was under siege from Assyria, we read this:

That night the angel of the Lord went out and put to death a hundred and eighty-five thousand in the Assyrian camp. When the people got up the next morning – there were all the dead bodies! (2 Kings 19:35)

God does his work of deliverance in the darkest and coldest times, and it comes to light at dawn. The same happens at the Resurrection.

I wonder whether that makes any connections for you? In these last few days of Holy Week, we’ve had the darkness of Judas Iscariot scuttling off from the Last Supper to earn his thirty pieces of silver. We’ve had the darkness of Gethsemane, in Jesus’ anguished prayer and then that betrayal by Judas. We’ve had the Cross itself, where for three hours the land is covered in darkness in the middle of the day. And we might think that only evil is at work. We might even think that evil has triumphed. But that isn’t true. God is at work. Redemption is coming.

I wonder whether we are prone to thinking that when all seems dark, God is not at work. When everything is going wrong, we are tempted to think that God is absent. When life is not going as it should, has God abdicated from the throne of the universe?

Not a bit of it! The Resurrection declares to us that God is at work to bring salvation and freedom even in the darkness, and even though we may only see the signs of his work when the light comes again. God is still continuing with his quiet revolution, rolling stones away and raising bodies under cover of darkness.

There will be some of us here today who are going through dark times. We shall be tempted to think that God is not on the case. But I tell you that he is. Invisible to our sight in the darkness, God is preparing to turn our worlds upside-down. He calls us to wait for the dawn, when we shall finally see what conspiracies of hope he has been plotting and executing.

So let the Resurrection give us increased insight into the work of God, even in the darkness.

Secondly, we see God’s Words more clearly.

The two men (whom I take to be angels) say to the women,

‘Why do you look for the living among the dead? 6 He is not here; he has risen! Remember how he told you, while he was still with you in Galilee: 7 “The Son of Man must be delivered over to the hands of sinners, be crucified and on the third day be raised again.”’ 8 Then they remembered his words.

So Jesus had promised his resurrection on at least three occasions to his disciples, but it just hadn’t sunk in. They couldn’t grasp it. Such a prophecy didn’t fit in with their existing understanding of faith and life, and so either they dismissed it or it just didn’t register. They believed that the resurrection of the dead would only happen at the end of time (as it will for everyone except Jesus) and so the words of Jesus just didn’t get through. As a result, they denied themselves the hope they would have had even when Jesus was crucified.

The Resurrection, then, is the greatest case of ‘Told you so!’ in history!

And what is it like when a human being says, ‘Told you so!’ to us? They usually tell us with some vigour that we should have listened to them in the first time. If we are humble, we may reflect on that, regret not listening to them, and wonder what it might have been like had we accepted their word. None of this seems to apply, however, if the person concerned is our spouse.

The ‘Told you so!’ of the Resurrection, though it is said with far greater grace than we mere mortals say it, makes the case for us going back on all the teaching and the promises of Jesus. How many of them just don’t seem to fit into our preconceived ideas or the popular values of our culture? Love your enemies? Well, OK, just so long as they don’t take the opposite view on Donald Trump from me. Forgive seventy times seven? But shouldn’t people get what they deserve? Yet if we are called to forgive seventy times seven, how much more does God forgive us? Give to the poor? They should get a job!

Yes, the words of Jesus certainly rub our culture up the wrong way. It’s tempting not to hear them, or to explain them away. But the Resurrection shows that it’s the words of Jesus that will come true. It’s his teaching that is eternal. It’s his promises that will stand for all time, not the promises of the advertisers or the politicians.

This Easter, then, let’s return to the words of Jesus with renewed confidence and renewed commitment. Truly, he has the words of eternal life.

Thirdly and finally, we see God’s Witnesses more clearly.

I’m referring here to the women, the first witnesses to the Resurrection. It’s a common point to make that if you were going to invent the story of the Resurrection, you wouldn’t have made your first and most important witnesses women. Generally speaking, women were not accepted as witnesses in Jewish courts of law two thousand years ago. You can sense the disparaging attitude that the male disciples had with Luke’s comment in verse 11:

11 But they did not believe the women, because their words seemed to them like nonsense.

Yet the gospel writers all tell us that women were the first to find the tomb empty. This becomes testimony to the veracity and honesty of the gospel accounts.

Now that’s all well and good, but I’d like to take that familiar point further forward. Here’s my point: if God can choose unlikely people to be the first witnesses to the Resurrection of his Son, does this not show that he can continue to pick people who are unlikely candidates to be his witnesses? I think he can.

There are many ways in which Christians like us think we are disqualified to be witnesses to the risen Jesus. We may say that we are not a trained religious professional, with all the appropriate academic knowledge. But Jesus didn’t seem too bothered when he called fishermen who had not been chosen by other rabbis to be his disciples.

We may say that we have disqualified ourselves by sin, but how many of Jesus’ original disciples stayed at the Cross? Simon Peter disowned Jesus three times publicly, and doubtless many of the others effectively did the same. Yet Jesus chooses these people to carry the message of his kingdom into the ancient world after his Resurrection and Ascension.

We may say that we lack the necessary confidence, but God chose Moses, who didn’t know how to speak in public, and Gideon, who wanted to hide. They were unlikely witnesses, too.

So who, then, do count as God’s witnesses? There’s a telling story early in the book of Acts, chapter 4. Peter and John have been hauled before the religious bigwigs for having preached the resurrection following the healing of the man at the Beautiful Gate of the temple. After Peter speaks defiantly to these leaders, Luke notes this:

13 When they saw the courage of Peter and John and realised that they were unschooled, ordinary men, they were astonished and they took note that these men had been with Jesus. (Acts 4:13)

‘Unschooled, ordinary men’ – or, if translated a little over-literally, ‘ungrammatical idiots’. But the difference was not their education, it was ‘that these men had been with Jesus’.

That’s the qualification. Not alphabet soup after your surname but being with Jesus. Not a charismatic personality but being with Jesus. Not a perfect life but one lived with Jesus.

Sure, some people will not take seriously out witness to the fact that Jesus is alive. If even the male disciples thought the women’s words were nonsense, then we can be sure that some people outside of our faith will certainly think that what we testify to is ridiculous.

But from time to time we will find a Peter. His curiosity was triggered by the witness of the women, and he ran to the tomb, where he found the strips of linen lying in an unexpected way (verse 12). It wouldn’t be long before his curiosity led to full Easter faith.

So in conclusion you may find this morning’s sermon a challenge. But what I really hope is that you find it to be a series of encouragements. Be encouraged that the Resurrection tells us God is still at work in the dark, and when the light comes we’ll see the marvellous things he’s been doing quietly.

Be encouraged that when Jesus speaks his word to us, he will keep his word. The fulfilment of his prophecies in the Resurrection show that he is trustworthy.

And be encouraged that when it comes to being his witnesses, you only need to be someone who lives in the presence of Jesus to have a credible testimony.

This Easter, let us be encouraged by our risen Lord in our faith and in our witness.

[1] John Nolland, Luke 18:35-24:53, p1193.

1

Create a website or blog at WordPress.com

Up ↑