Journey To Jerusalem 3: Building The Church, Psalm 127 (Lent 4)

Psalm 127

‘Unless the Lord builds the house’ are – ahem – interesting words for my family to hear at present, just when a wall of our manse is being rebuilt, following an incident where a delivery driver managed to reverse into it. It may not literally be the Lord rebuilding our manse, but at least Methodist Insurance have called in a good building firm.

‘Unless the Lord builds the house’. But which house? I suspect that, especially since this is a Psalm of Ascent for pilgrims on their way to the Temple at Jerusalem for one of Israel’s feasts, that the house in question is what they called ‘the house of the Lord’, that is, the Temple itself.

I said in last week’s sermon that we Christians don’t speak of church buildings as ‘the house of the Lord’ because Jesus is the true Temple and we together are the temple of the Holy Spirit. The church is fundamentally not the building but the people.

Hence, a Christian interpretation of this psalm would be to see it in terms of building the church, the people of God. In that case, ‘Unless the Lord builds the house’ sits very well with Jesus’ promise that he would build his church, and with worship songs where God says, ‘For I’m building a people of power and I’m making a people of praise’, and the people reply, ‘Build your church, Lord.’

Surely that is something all Christians are concerned about. Instead of decline, we want to see the church grow, both in quantity of people and in quality of living the Christlike life.

And it’s something we’re focussing on in the circuit right now as churches have Mission Action Plan meetings with John Illsley. We want to see the churches built up again. But how?

The Psalmist here gives us the two sides of the coin: God’s part and our part. Let’s explore them.

Firstly, God’s part:

¹ Unless the Lord builds the house,

the builders labour in vain.

Unless the Lord watches over the city,

the guards stand watch in vain.

² In vain you rise early

and stay up late,

toiling for food to eat –

for he grants sleep to those he loves.

Building the church is God’s work. It is a spiritual matter, therefore we need to see him at work.

This is consistent with what we know about God elsewhere. The whole of salvation is based on the fact that God acts first, and we only respond. When Adam and Eve sinned in the Garden of Eden, the first act in salvation was the Lord coming walking in the garden, looking for them. God delivers the Israelites from Egypt before he gives them the Ten Commandments: the commandments are a response to God acting first. In the New Testament, we read that ‘we love because God first loved us.’

This is so different from the way we often approach these things. We have so fallen into our society’s technological approach to solving problems that we think we need to devise some clever plan to make the church grow again. So we follow the latest trends, copy what the latest trendy speaker says, we fall for books that tell us there are a certain number of essential steps to take, and you know what? We fall flat on our faces.

What has happened? We have succumbed to the ancient sin of pride. We have believed that it all depends on us. And secretly, we rather like that. We want to be known for our daring exploits. But it’s wrong. This is God’s work, not ours. It is his Name that will be glorified, not ours. It is about God’s grace which requires our faithful trust. It is not about our good works. The Gospel itself tells us that salvation is about grace and faith, and that we are not saved by our good works. Well, neither does the church grow by our good works. It grows because God is at work and we merely respond.

Now if we accept that building the church is God’s work, there is an opposite error into which we can fall. We can say, well if it’s all down to God, then we don’t have to do anything. It takes the old saying, ‘Let go and let God’, which was meant to emphasise our need to trust, and extrapolates it to a point where we abdicate all moral responsibility. If the church grows, that’s down to God, and if it doesn’t grow, well that’s nothing to do with me, Guv.

It is God’s work to grow the church. We need a move of the Holy Spirit to make that happen. But you know what that means for us? If we desire that God build his church, then we need to pray.

There is a time and place for strategizing and planning the mission of the local church, but it is not the first thing. The first thing is that we need God to move, and on our side that means prayer. So all our planning and programming has to wait until we have heard from God. Unless and until we know what his vision is for our church in mission, we don’t start organising and managing things in the ways we love to do.

Because really all that organising and managing is just a subtle way of saying that we want to stay in control. We don’t have the faith and trust in God that is at the heart of Christianity. When we want to zoom into action first without taking time to be still and to listen to God, then all we are doing is proving the adage of the late American Christian leader AW Tozer, who once said that ‘Most Christians live like practical atheists.’

More positively, we remember the words of John Wesley, when he said that God does nothing except in response to prayer.

To build the church, we need God to move first.

Secondly, our part:

To examine this, I want to look at the second half of the Psalm, with those words we must handle sensitively about the gift of children. Let me initially read them again:

³Children are a heritage from the Lord,

offspring a reward from him.

⁴ Like arrows in the hands of a warrior

are children born in one’s youth.

⁵ Blessed is the man

whose quiver is full of them.

They will not be put to shame

when they contend with their opponents in court.

Let me add some context and qualifications. Yes, children are a blessing. I love my own daughter and son more than words can say. But children can also be a source of pain. And others may not have the blessing. They may have wished for children but not had them. They may have lost children. A few Christians are even specifically called not to become parents, because it will interfere with their particular divine calling.

There are some fundamentalist groups that say you should all have lots of children. One such movement is called ‘Quiver-full’, and is named after this psalm, where we heard ‘Blessed is the man whose quiver is full of them.’ To a certain extent, they have a point. Religions where families have large numbers of children tend to grow in the world. You could look at Northern Ireland, which when I was young had a significant Protestant majority in the population, but where soon the Catholics will outnumber the Protestants and a united Ireland will be a very real political prospect.

But at the same time you can’t make what the Psalm says into an absolute principle for everyone. After all, what would that say about Jesus, who had no children of his own. Was he not blessed?

We must look elsewhere for an interpretation of these words in the light of Jesus.

God has created a people for his praise. He wants to build that people, his church. Our privilege is to be the spiritual midwives who bring new children of God into his people. The new birth is all God’s work, but he calls us into partnership with him. Just as a couple comes together for a pregnancy to happen and a midwife comes alongside them to assist them with the birth, so the Holy Spirit reveals Jesus to people and God uses us to help bring them into the kingdom of God.

Now what does that involve on our part? How are we spiritual midwives? In a number of interlocking ways. One is that we set out to live such lives of devotion to the ways of Jesus in the world that our friends want to talk with us about what makes us the way we are. Another is that when we have the opportunity, we are willing and able to talk about Jesus and what he means to us with our non-Christian friends. Alongside that, we will be willing to give an appropriate invitation, whether that is to come to something exploratory like an Alpha Course, or even to attend church. It also means that we learn how to lead someone to faith in Christ.

Friends, what would it be like if we concentrated on training our church members in habits and practices like these, rather than just setting up meetings with speakers that amount to little more than religious entertainment?

There are many resources available to help churches learn these skills and virtues. Right now at my Haslemere church, our mission development worker is leading a weekly course on how to share our faith sensitively.

Honestly, it’s not difficult to find these courses. The question is, why don’t we? Do we do other things in church life in preference to these spiritual priorities? Do we try to fill our church life with other things to avoid dealing with these things? Is this why we come up with all the silly nonsense that having hirers of our church premises amounts to outreach?

For so long as we keep on doing the same old things, acting like a religious club rather than the Body of Christ, deluding ourselves that one day people will start rushing into our doors, we shall be guilty of Einstein’s definition of insanity: that we keep doing the same things while expecting a different result.

Sanity will come when we accept that we need God to act first, and on our part that means prayer. When God works in people’s lives, our response will be not to run an institution or a club but to be spiritual midwives to the new life the Holy Spirit brings.

Build your church, Lord. Unless you build it, we labour in vain.

March 30, 2025 0

Journey To Jerusalem 2: How Worship Shapes Us, Psalm 122 (Lent 3)

Psalm 122

If you survey a group of Christians and ask them what the number one priority of the Christian life is, they will almost certainly answer, ‘worship.’

I personally would want to refine that answer a little: I would answer in terms of the description the crowd gave of the disciples at Pentecost, ‘We hear them declaring the mighty works of God,’ which to me seems to describe both worship and mission.

But I get the basic point. Worship is a central activity of Christian faith.

Worship was also central for ancient Israel. And with only three opportunities a year to travel to Jerusalem for the great feasts, they retained a sense of how special and awe-inspiring it was:

¹ I rejoiced with those who said to me,
‘Let us go to the house of the Lord.’

² Our feet are standing
in your gates, Jerusalem.

What a contrast with our casual approach to worship that treats it as little more than a visit to the supermarket. “I don’t feel like going to church today, it’s raining, I’m tired, my friend isn’t going to be there, I don’t like the preacher, I bet it’s those horrible modern hymns,” and so on.

So I believe the pilgrims of ancient Israel on their way to the Temple at Jerusalem have a lot to teach us about worship. Granted, our context is different. In New Testament terms, we are not to refer to church buildings as ‘the house of the Lord’ for two reasons. One is that the Gospels show us that Jesus is the new and true Temple, where heaven and earth meet in his divine and human natures. The other is that Paul tells us that we together are ‘the temple of the Holy Spirit,’ something the early church was able to express as they met in people’s homes.

But for all those qualifications, my point remains: we have a lot to learn from ancient Israel about worship, and especially in this Psalm about how worship shapes us as disciples.

Firstly, worship gives us a framework:

³Jerusalem is built like a city
that is closely compacted together.
⁴That is where the tribes go up –
the tribes of the Lord –

The tribes went up three times a year to participate in festivals that celebrated the creating, redeeming, and providing works of the Lord. They ‘declared the mighty acts of God,’ to use my earlier expression. And the building of Jerusalem ‘closely compacted together’ was an architectural metaphor for this structure and framework that the worship festivals gave to Israel.^[i]

Christian worship is meant to do no less. We declare and celebrate our belief in God as Creator of all things. We rehearse his special creation of the human race in his own image. We recall his acts of salvation in forming a people for himself, and sending patriarchs to lead them and deliver them, judges and prophets to call them back to him. Most of all, we recall how the Father sent his only-begotten Son who took on human flesh, proclaimed the kingdom of God, and went to the Cross to conquer sin. We rejoice in God’s raising of Jesus from the dead to bring new life, Christ’s ascension to the Father’s right hand on high where he reigns until everything is put under his feet, and the sending of the Spirit to empower our lives of discipleship. We anticipate the full coming of God’s kingdom, when all things will be made new.

This is what we acclaim about our God in worship. Have you ever wondered why we have a big thanksgiving prayer at Holy Communion? This is why. It goes over the mighty deeds of God and puts Christ and his Cross central.

This gives us a framework for our life of devotion to Christ. You know, atheists have good arguments against the existence of God. Christians and others have good arguments to support the existence of God. But which gives a better framework for life? Is it atheism, with its belief that we are just an accidental collection of atoms and that the process of evolution is entirely random and without purpose? If that is true, then it is meaningless to talk about love. How can you love another accidental collection of atoms? How can you speak of having any purpose in life when everything is random?

Or is it better and truer to speak of a God with good intentions for his creation, who continues to reach out to humans who have rejected him, who came and lived among us and paid the ultimate price, and whose kingdom project is to make all things new? For all the problems there might be in believing in God, this framework is surely a better one to live by.

And it is worship that embeds us in that framework.

Secondly, worship is a command:

⁴ That is where the tribes go up –
the tribes of the Lord –
to praise the name of the Lord
according to the statute given to Israel.

‘According to the statute given to Israel.’ Ancient Israel was commanded to worship. This was God’s decree for them.

We may say that we are not under the Jewish Law, we are under grace, but that does not negate the command and duty to worship. The first commandment, according to Jesus, is to love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength. Jesus wasn’t shy in giving out commandments! He also talked about us worshipping God in spirit and in truth.

Today, we resist the idea of being commanded by someone else. We think we run our own lives. We want to be in charge. We do not want to be subservient. We are wrong.

This is not about being humiliated, but it is about being humble. It is about recognising our true relationship with God, where he is the Creator and we are his creatures.

You will have heard preachers say that the English word ‘worship’ is a contraction of ‘worth-ship.’ It is about ascribing true worth, in this case, to God. It is the right thing to do.

But more than that, the Greek word most often translated as ‘worship’ in the New Testament means ‘to move towards and kiss.’ This is not in the romantic sense. It refers to the kiss of allegiance, such as when a new Prime Minister or a new Anglican bishop is appointed and they have to kiss the sovereign’s hand.

If this is all true, then our habit of measuring worship by our feelings must go. It is not good worship just because it gives me a warm, fuzzy feeling inside, although it’s nice if that happens. Nor do we decide whether to worship depending on whether we feel like it. God is worthy of our worship, full stop! Maybe at times we shall particularly feel that it is a sacrifice to worship but so be it if we are doing what is right regardless of our feelings by offering our worship.

Thirdly, worship is about hearing the Word of God:

⁵There stand the thrones for judgment,
the thrones of the house of David.

Judgment? We don’t like that word. But here’s a definition of this particular biblical word:

The decisive word by which God straightens things out and puts things right.^[ii]

In worship, we are not only coming to get our lives set in a proper framework and to give God the honour due to his Name, we are also coming to hear what God says to us. That is why the reading of the Scriptures and the preaching of them is so important. When I preach, it is not my task to share a soundbite or a religious opinion. It is not that I preach a sermon to make a point.

I have a much deeper and more solemn task than that. It is to teach and proclaim the Word of God. Nothing less. And given the levels of biblical illiteracy among many experienced Christians, that takes time. I hold to the old adage that ‘Sermonettes by preacherettes make Christianettes.’

If we stay at home and engage with the Scriptures, that’s good and necessary. But we also need to engage with God’s Word in worship with others, as together we listen to what he is saying and discern together with guidance that word he has for us now.

It may be fashionable to knock preachers, and maybe some of us deserve it on occasions, but do not despise the fact that God has ordained to speak to us through his Word.

Fourthly and finally, worship is about seeking God’s action in the world:

⁶Pray for the peace of Jerusalem:
    ‘May those who love you be secure.
⁷May there be peace within your walls
    and security within your citadels.’
⁸For the sake of my family and friends,
    I will say, ‘Peace be within you.’
⁹For the sake of the house of the Lord our God,
    I will seek your prosperity.

Our encounter with God in worship leads to our desire that he act in the world. And so we ask him to do so. We ask for ‘peace’ and ‘security’. Peace and security are gifts we receive in worship: peace and security with God as he assures us of his faithful love.

More than that, the Hebrew words for peace and security both play on the name ‘Jerusalem.’ Our worship and our life together as God’s people are to be characterised by these qualities. And we desire that the rest of the world also experience these gifts, not only peace and security in relationship with God but also peace and security in their own societies and nations.

So, you say, this is the justification for prayers of intercession. Indeed so. If we have received such riches from God we shall want others to share in them, too. So we pray for God’s mission in the world – both for people to know God’s peace and security themselves (evangelism) and for societies to experience peace and security in their relationships and their ordering (social justice).

But it doesn’t stop there. We don’t get away with just ‘thoughts and prayers’, as if we have done our duty by praying and continuing with our private happy lives. God calls us to partner with him in the answers to these prayers.

So if worship begins with the journey to Jerusalem, it concludes with our departure into the world. As one church put over the exit doors from its premises, ‘Servants’ Entrance.’

^[i] Eugene Peterson, A Long Obedience In The Same Direction, p47f.

^[ii] Ibid., p50.

March 23, 2025 0

Journey To Jerusalem 1: Looking In The Wrong Place For God, Psalm 121 (Lent 2)

Psalm 121

Have you ever lost something and not found it for a while because you were looking in the wrong place for it? That sometimes happens in our household. One of us misplaces our mobile phone, cannot find it, and says to someone else in the family, ‘Can you ring my phone, please?’ It will then turn out that we have been looking downstairs for a phone that was upstairs in a bedroom.

Or one of us goes to our pocket for our car key, only for it not to be there. It has fallen out of a pocket and slipped down between the seats of the sofa. It was no good looking in the pocket: that was the wrong place.

I’ll leave those of you who know us personally to guess who it is who loses their phone, and who loses their car key. Either way, we get frustrated by looking in the wrong place – all without knowing.

Psalm 121 is for people who are looking in the wrong place for God, matters of the spirit, and the meaning of life. And since this Psalm is describing the journey of pilgrims to Jerusalem for Israel’s great feasts, the implication is that even disciples can look in the wrong places for the important things in life.

It’s all there in the opening two verses:

¹I lift up my eyes to the mountains –
where does my help come from?
²My help comes from the Lord,
the Maker of heaven and earth.

Many people read those famous words, ‘I lift my eyes to the mountains’ and think that the Psalmist is encouraging us to look at the wonder of creation. But while the majestic peaks the pilgrims would have seen on their journey would have been awe-inspiring, that is not what the Psalmist is affirming here.

No: it’s looking to the mountains versus our help coming from the Lord. Why? Eugene Peterson says,

During the time this psalm was written and sung, Palestine was overrun with popular pagan worship. Much of this religion was practised on hilltops. Shrines were set up, groves of trees were planted, sacred prostitutes both male and female were provided; persons were lured to shrines to engage in acts of worship that would enhance the fertility of the land, would make you feel good, would protect you from evil. There were nostrums, protections, spells and enchantments against all the perils of the road. Do you fear the sun’s heat? Go the sun priest and pay for protection against the sun god. Are you fearful of the malign influence of moonlight? Go to the moon priestess and buy an amulet. Are you haunted by the demons that can use a pebble under your foot to trip you? Go to the shrine and learn the magic formula to ward off the mischief. From whence shall my help come? From Baal? From Asherah? From the sun priest? From the moon priestess?^[1]

Do you see now that for the pilgrims to lift up their eyes to the mountains was to go looking in the wrong place? The mountains were the strongholds of false gods, idols, demons, and occult practices.

So firstly, the psalmist says, don’t look to false gods:

³He will not let your foot slip –
he who watches over you will not slumber;
⁴indeed, he who watches over Israel
will neither slumber nor sleep.

In the days of the psalmist, there was a popular belief that a demon could move a pebble and make you slip. Therefore, you needed to seek protection. There was a variety of idols to which you could turn. One of the most popular, Baal, is hinted at in these words of the psalm, when we read that the true God ‘will neither slumber nor sleep’ You may recall the story where the prophet Elijah took on the priests of Baal at Mount Carmel. When Baal failed to set the sacrifice his priests had offered alight by fire, Elijah mocked his opponents, telling them to shout louder, in case Baal was asleep.

Ad the psalmist here says, Baal won’t answer you or protect you because it’s as if he’s asleep – in fact he doesn’t even exist. But ‘he who watches over Israel’ isn’t like that at all: he ‘will neither slumber nor sleep.’

We may not have Baal today, but we have plenty of instances where we go after that which is not god in order to find satisfaction in life. I am not saying that advertising is wrong per se, but much of it is based on the idea of making people feel dissatisfied with their lives unless they have the one particular item being presented to them as the solution to all their problems. And we have so many adverts like that, because they work. We fall for them. The Christian virtue of contentment would destroy so much of our economics today.

Money is similar. We need it, but it is a good servant and poor master. We delude ourselves that a higher income or a lottery win will make us happy. But J D Rockefeller, the first ever American billionaire, was asked how much money was enough, and he replied, ‘Just a little bit more than I already have.’ Yes, even someone as ridiculously wealthy as him.

Money never satisfies. It always demands more. And it never delivers true peace. The best that can be said for it is as Spike Milligan said, that it may not make you happy, but it may make you comfortable in your misery.

Alongside Baal in Canaanite religion was the goddess Asherah. She symbolised many things, but the theme the Bible seems most concerned about is that she was a fertility deity. There were trees and poles dedicated to her as totems of fertility, and we read of Gideon being told to cut down an Asherah pole.

The contemporary equivalent is the devotion to sex as a god. We live in a society where primary school children are encountering pornography on the Internet. We make people feel inferior if they are not in a relationship. And in the general absence of belief in God, people look to their romantic partners to fulfil them – a burden a mere mortal cannot carry.

Once again, we are dealing with idols. We have elevated a good part of God’s creation into a deity itself. Sex and relationships are crucial to humanity, and I would say they are among God’s best inventions! But they are only that: creations, not gods. And so to look to them for ultimate meaning and significance in life is to go looking in the wrong place again. We end up doing terrible things as a result. These things are a gift of God, to be received with thanksgiving, they are not of themselves divine, and they should not be worshipped.

The trouble, as the great Catholic novelist G K Chesterton said, is that ‘When men stop believing in God, they don’t believe in nothing, they believe in anything.’

Secondly, the psalmist says, don’t fear the created order:

If we’re dealing with created things that are not gods, there is still the issue that creation itself can have fearsome power. Should we live our lives in terror of that?

No, says the psalmist, that too would be looking in the wrong place for the meaning of life:

⁵The Lord watches over you –
the Lord is your shade at your right hand;
⁶the sun will not harm you by day,
nor the moon by night.

The power of the sun in the Middle East is significant. When I spent three weeks in Israel in July 1989, the temperature was regularly over 40C each day, and that was before the record-breaking summers of recent years. We were advised to drink six litres of water a day to remain hydrated. Hence, pilgrims walking to Jerusalem maybe not in the height of summer but probably in late Spring or early Autumn would still have protracted exposure to what we would consider quite hot conditions. They would have to be careful.

And the reference to the moon? Surely the nights would be a relief? Not exactly:

A person travelling for a long distance on foot, under the pressures of fatigue and anxiety, can become emotionally ill, which was described by ancient writers as moonstroke (or by us as lunacy).^[2]

But again, serious as these things are, and as we and the ancients also know through phenomena like storms and earthquakes, they are not the ultimate truth to be feared. Whatever the dangers are, we have a Lord who watches over us and who is our shade. Four times in this psalm we are told that the Lord watches over us. Whatever bad things come our way, God has not forgotten us. So Eugene Peterson again:

The only serious mistake we can make when illness comes, when anxiety threatens, when conflict disturbs our relationships with others is to conclude that God has gotten bored in looking after us and has shifted his attention to a more exciting Christian, or that God has become disgusted with our meandering obedience and decided to let us fend for ourselves for awhile, or that God has gotten too busy fulfilling prophecy in the Middle East to take time now to sort out the complicated mess we have gotten ourselves into. That is the only serious spiritual mistake we can make. It is the mistake that Psalm 121 prevents the mistake of supposing that God’s interest in us waxes and wanes in response to our spiritual temperature.^[3]

And we have read that our God is the ‘Maker of heaven and earth’. In other words, he created all these things to which we wrongly look for meaning and truth. They are created things, but he is their Creator. Instead of looking in the wrong place at these things, let us look in the right place to our Maker and Redeemer. We put these things in their place: under God’s sovereign rule, as we are.

And we remember that God cares for us, even when the difficulties and the pain come. As the final two verses of the Psalm say,

⁷The Lord will keep you from all harm –
he will watch over your life;
⁸the Lord will watch over your coming and going
both now and for evermore.

It is not that we shall have a trouble-free existence, even though the psalmist’s words may sound like that. The rest of Scripture affirms, as Jesus said, that ‘In the world you will have tribulation.’ But as Jesus goes on to say, ‘But be of good cheer: I have overcome the world.’

God will be taking care of us. His Son took the journey to Jerusalem and ended up on a cross. But God raised him from the dead.

This is like the journey we are taking. On it we do not look in the wrong place to worship or fear the created order, but rather we put ourselves in the hands of the Lord, who is the Maker of heaven and earth. He will hold us, as we trust our lives to him through his Son Jesus Christ our Lord.

^[1] Eugene Peterson, A Long Obedience In The Same Direction, p36f

^[2] Ibid., p35.

^[3] Ibid., p39.

March 16, 2025 0

The Transfiguration As Hope, Luke 9:28-36 (Sunday Before Lent, Year C)

This is a very lightly revised version of my old sermon Jesus Of The Transfiguration.

March 2, 2025 0

Love Your Enemies, Luke 6:27-38 (Ordinary 7 Year C)

Luke 6:27-38

The older I get and the longer I preach, the more I collect a list of subjects that are awkward to preach on. Prayer – because which of us can say we pray enough? Evangelism – because we know we struggle with that. Giving – because it’s often thought unseemly to talk about money.

I think I might add today’s theme to that list. Who wants to be told to love their enemies? Wouldn’t many of us rather turn up the dial on the furnaces in Hell for those who hate us and hurt us?

I may be doing some of you an injustice. Perhaps you have only serene and beatific thoughts about your enemies. But not all of us do.

I have certainly had to wrestle with this text this week. I contemplated getting out an old sermon on the passage and just modifying it. But the best one I found was tied to a particular item in the news at the time.

And so instead I bring to you the three questions that have been at the heart of my struggle to submit to the words of Jesus here this week:

Who is Jesus addressing?

Who are the enemies here?

How do we love our enemies?

Firstly, then, who is Jesus addressing?

I ask this question, because sometimes Christians want to apply Jesus’ teaching in the Sermon on the Mount (as it is in Matthew’s Gospel) or the Sermon on the Plain (as it is here in Luke) in a rather flat way to national life. They want to make the teaching of Jesus into national policy.

But that is not what Jesus is doing here. He has no vision for a Christian nation. There is no such thing, in contrast to aspirations from Christians on both the right and the left of politics. The Christian nationalists in the USA who have swung behind Donald Trump misunderstand the Gospel itself when they think they can make America more Christian by gaining political power and passing certain laws. That is legalism, not the Gospel.

And of course it’s rather awkward for some of their politics to find that the Jesus they invoke in their prayers taught some things that really don’t fit their political vision at all, not least here. They would probably dismiss this as ‘dangerous woke nonsense.’

But the Christians on the left of the political spectrum who might leap on Jesus’ teaching here and campaign for a nation state that is committed to pacifism are equally wrong. You cannot force the teaching of Jesus on those who do not bow the knee to him as Lord.

I do not say that to justify warmongering nations. Of course not! But we need to recognise that the group of people Jesus is addressing here is his disciples. When you read the Sermon the Mount or the Sermon on the Plain you realise Jesus is talking to his disciples. However, others are listening in.

Hence, in other words, Jesus addresses his followers, who together form a colony or outpost of his kingdom in the world. But others are listening in and watching us. The world will notice how we respond to the challenging teaching of Jesus, such as we find here.

So it’s important for us to get a handle on what it means to love our enemies, because the world knows that Jesus taught this, and it is watching to see how his disciples live it out. We will damage Christian witness if we ignore it, or if we explain it away.

Yes, even in these times when religion is less popular, the world is watching Christians. Just consider the damage to the Church of England caused by the safeguarding scandals lately. A recent survey showed that now only 25% of the population consider it trustworthy. For those of you who grew up thinking the church was a respected institution, please consider that.

Let’s take the challenging teaching of Jesus seriously, then. Including this ‘love your enemies’ stuff.

Secondly, who are the enemies here?

We begin to answer that by saying, it is anyone who hates us.

They may hate us for our faith. We know that millions of our brothers and sisters around the world pay a massive price for their faith, sometimes the ultimate price. In the last week, there have been reports that terrorists beheaded seventy Christians in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Not a week goes by without news of a similar atrocity or other forms of persecution against Christians appearing in my email inbox.

Our enemies may hate us, regardless of our faith. Some of the context here may well be Jesus imagining what the occupying Roman soldiers did to ordinary citizens. Yet we are not simply citizens of our nation, we are citizens of heaven, and our calling is not only to live by the laws of the land (insofar as our faith allows us) but to live by the law of God. In a properly constituted society we may wish to have recourse to the law against such people in order to protect others, but we are called to guard our hearts against hatred.

Or we may simply here be dealing with people who are not naturally in our orbit – our family, our neighbours, our colleagues, our friends, and so on. I say that, because of the way Jesus mentions giving to beggars (verse 30). We would not naturally label beggars as enemies in the conventional way. Yet Jesus calls us to show generous love to them, too.

And this example may have something to teach us about the recent public argument between JD Vance, the new American Vice-President, and Rory Stewart, the former British MP. Vance claimed,

There is a Christian concept that you love your family and then you love your neighbour, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens, and then after that, prioritize the rest of the world.

Vance seemed to imply that love of people further from us, especially around the world, came a distant last, and he based it on the Catholic concept of ‘ordo amoris’, which says there is an order or sequence of who you love. He probably misrepresented Catholic teaching, and Rory Stewart fired back at him, accusing him of a ‘bizarre take’ on the Bible, which was ‘less Christian and more pagan tribal’. Heaven only knows where Mr Vance would put loving your enemies. A distant last, at a guess. It may be natural and easiest to love those who are nearest to us first, but Jesus upends so many social conventions, and we need to listen to him.

Thirdly, how do we love our enemies?

Jesus sets out the range of what he calls us to do in verses 27 and 28, before he gives any specific examples:

²⁷ ‘But I say to you that listen, Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, ²⁸bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you.

How do we do this? I just want to give you a few examples.

In one town where I served, a bookshop in the High Street began overtly promoting occult books and practices associated with them. Many Christians faced with such a situation would have defaulted into aggressive protest mode. They would have organised petitions and boycotts and maybe contacted the local media. They might have requested a meeting with the manager and angrily demanded the withdrawal of the books. They might have gone on a prayer march and cast out demons.

But not the group of Christians who discovered this incident. They turned to prayer, but not of the angry kind. Instead, they prayed that the bookshop would be blessed. If the bookshop were blessed, they might not need to resort to promoting spiritual darkness.

These Christians had been influenced by a preacher who once said, ‘In the celestial poker game a hand of blessings always outranks a hand of curses.’

Or take the experience of one of my relatives many years ago. He was dating the girl who would later become his wife. However, his girlfriend’s mother disapproved of him. He wasn’t good enough for her daughter, in her opinion. His job did not rank as highly professionally, and he was less educated than the girlfriend.

My relative shared his frustrations about this with a friend at church. And his friend made a suggestion.

‘When you leave your girlfriend’s house each evening, say ‘God bless you’ to her mother. You won’t be able to feel mean towards someone you are blessing.’

My relative bristled at the idea. But he tried it – starting by saying it through gritted teeth. But eventually – it worked. Blessing changes relationships for the better.

One last story: one year while I was training for the ministry in Manchester, a married student and his wife invited me (still single then) to their flat to celebrate my birthday. My birthday meal? Beans on toast!

My friends offered to call a taxi for me to get home, but I declined and chose to walk back.

Big mistake. For on the journey back to the hall of residence a teenage thug mugged me, breaking my glasses and causing minor damage to my eyes.

Another student, himself a former solicitor, took me to the police station and stayed with me while I was interviewed and made a statement.

While I am sure this teenage thug was known in the locality, no-one was ever arrested.

However, people asked me what I would have done if the criminal had been. Would I, as a Christian who believed in and preached forgiveness, have pressed charges?

My answer was that provided I was sure no hatred remained in my heart towards the mugger, then yes, I would consent to the laying of charges. For me – and you may see this differently – this held together both the call to love and forgive my enemy and the need to uphold justice and protect other members of the public.

Conclusion

There may be one final question nagging in our minds: why should we love our enemies?

Because, says Jesus, this is what God is like. As he puts it:

Your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High; for he is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked. ³⁶Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.

We have been brought into the kingdom of God by divine mercy towards us who were his enemies due to sin. Yet God still loved us, his enemies, to the point of his Son dying on the Cross.

If we are to respond in gratitude and imitate our Saviour, then we too shall learn to show practical love to our enemies.

February 23, 2025 0

Thriving When The Heat Is On, or Spiritual Resilience, Jeremiah 17:5-10 (Ordinary 6 Year C)

This is a lightly revised version of a sermon I first preached eighteen years ago (!). You can find the text here.

February 16, 2025 0

Prepared For Mission, Luke 5:1-11 (Ordinary 5 Year C)

Luke 5:1-11

Before I was a minister and before I studied Theology, I worked in Social Security. It was, as I have sometimes said, one way of seeing life. I can recall a number of stories from those days which are, shall we say, a little too colourful for the delicate ears of some Christian congregations -notwithstanding other barriers such as the Official Secrets Act.

But suffice to say that in that work I encountered people with chaotic lives, in desperate circumstances, as well as the occasional chancer. I also represented colleagues to their bosses when their personal lives were affecting their work.

Just from that general outline I am sure you can guess that I had some formative experiences that were useful preparation for when I became a minister, even though I had no sense of such a call at the time.

Our story from Luke today is one where Jesus tells Simon that his experience as a business partner in a fishing co-operative will stand him in good stead for a life as a disciple and an apostle.

There is a sermon to be preached on this passage about just how much God values our everyday work, but I will save that for another time. For today, I want to look at the aspects here that prepared Simon for what was to come. Even though we are not fishermen (although I don’t know if anyone has angling as a hobby!) there are elements of Simon’s story that speak to us as well.

Firstly, obedience:

⁴When he had finished speaking, he said to Simon, ‘Put out into deep water, and let down the nets for a catch.’

⁵Simon answered, ‘Master, we’ve worked hard all night and haven’t caught anything. But because you say so, I will let down the nets.’

Simon, James, and John are experienced fishermen. They know what they are doing. That they are washing their nets after a night-time fishing trip tells us exactly what kind of nets they are using. They were called ‘trammel nets’. They were made of linen, were visible to fish in daylight hours and hence why they went fishing at night, and they would be cleaned the next morning[1]. All this is known from historians of the day and confirms that they were conducting their trade according to the best knowledge and practices known then.

But here comes this crazy carpenter – what does he know about fishing? – and he gives them instructions which make no sense to these experienced professionals. It’s daylight, and the fish will see the nets. No way will any fish be caught.

‘But because you say so, I will let down the nets,’ says Simon. Because this is more than a crazy carpenter. This is Jesus, the Expected One, the Hoped-For One, the Messiah himself. And so, even though their friends in other fishing co-operatives based on the lake will think they are mad, they set sail again. They head for the deep water. They let down their nets. And – oh my.

The call of the Christian disciple is to follow Jesus and do what he tells us, even when it seems scarcely credible. He sends us out into deep water, too – into situations that are deeper than we have ever encountered before, circumstances we would resist embracing because they seem too fraught with danger.

It’s something of a threat to our desire for a quiet, comfortable life, isn’t it? But why does it surprise us? Isn’t so much of what Jesus calls us to do the very opposite of conventional expectations? We are to forgive, not hate. We are to give, not take. It’s utterly consistent for Jesus to call us to do unexpected things in his service.

Perhaps what we need to do is to ask him to give us a dream for our lives that is so big and so deep that it can only be fulfilled by relying on him.

Sometimes we hear talk about having ‘smart goals’, where the letters of the word ‘smart’ stand for specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and targeted. But in the light of this, I want to ask, ‘Achievable by whom? By us? Or by Jesus?’ Because the latter are the goals that fix our Christian obedience.

Secondly, fellowship:

In verse 7, the people working alongside Simon in the boat are called his ‘partners.’ It’s a word that denotes business partners, which makes sense.

But by verse 9, they are no longer ‘partners’ but ‘companions’. The Greek word has changed, and while this word could denote the members of a fishing co-operative, it ‘is capable of much wider nuances’[2] and is related to the word ‘koinonia’, which is often translated with that glorious Christian word ‘fellowship.’ In the work of catching the abundant haul of fish, partners become a fellowship.

And fellowship is central to the life of Christian discipleship. We do not follow Jesus alone, but together in a body. We cannot do it alone. We need the power of the Holy Spirit, and the encouragement of our brothers and sisters.

But this word ‘fellowship’ is open to much misunderstanding, because we have seriously devalued its meaning. To listen to the way some churches conceive of fellowship, you would think it was little more than talking together. ‘Join us after the service for fellowship over tea and coffee.’ It is so much deeper than that.

Strictly, the word means, ‘what we have in common.’ Luke shows us what that meant for the early church in the first chapters of his second volume, the book we call The Acts of the Apostles. The first believers are sharing in fellowship by the end of chapter two. We find that it means they shared their very lives together, including their possessions. They had Jesus Christ in common, and they shared all they were and all they had in common, too.

When we think of the partners becoming a fellowship in Luke 5, it is reminiscent of Paul writing to the Christians in Philippi and giving thanks for their ‘fellowship in the Gospel.’ In other words, they had shared together in the hard work of the Gospel, just as Simon, James, and John, along with their partners, had shared together in the hard work of hauling those full nets into the boats.

The work of the Gospel can be tough, but Jesus has given us each other to do that work in common, supporting and helping one another. We do not need to be alone in the work. Indeed, we should not be alone. We were not designed that way. God always intended that we support our brothers and our sisters in all the ways we share the Gospel in the world. We may be on the frontline with them. We may be supporting them with prayer and financial giving. And together, we haul in the heavy nets.

I think it would be helpful if each one of us asked, with whom am I in fellowship in the Gospel? Who do I know who can support me as I bear witness to Jesus in the world with my words, my deeds, and my character?

One strategy would be for three of you to gather together as a ‘prayer triplet’, regularly praying each other’s spheres of influence. Such a group would meet regularly, review how everybody is getting on, hold one another to account, and be a source of encouragement. This is real fellowship: it’s so much more than chatting over tea and coffee!

Thirdly, grace:

Simon witnesses the amazing catch of fish and is overcome with the sense that this must be a demonstration of God’s holy power. There seems no other explanation for him being astonished to the point of him saying to Jesus, ‘Go away from me, Lord; I am a sinful man!’ (verse 8) In the presence of such holiness, he knows himself unworthy.

But of course, Jesus will not have that. For as well as holiness, he has grace. Don’t go away, Simon, come closer. I have a commission for you: ‘Don’t be afraid; from now on you will fish for people.’ (verse 10)

And that gracious invitation and call leads Simon, James, and John to leave behind their business (just as it is thriving!) and everything else to follow Jesus (verse 11).

Which of us has not echoed the words of Simon, ‘Go away from me, Lord; I am a sinner’? It may be that we witnessed the awesomeness of God’s power in some way. It may be that we are only too aware of our sins and failures: can he really forgive us again? And if he does, surely there is no way he can use me? Or it may just be a sense of our utter inadequacy in the face of Jesus’ blazing purity and beauty of character. We are unworthy. We are not heroes of the faith. What would God want with us?

And yet, and yet. ‘Don’t be afraid,’ says Jesus, ‘I still have work for you to do.’

There is a legend told of Jesus returning to heaven at the Ascension and being welcomed by the angels, who congratulate him on all he has achieved.

Then one angel says, ‘But Lord, what is the next stage of your great plan of salvation?’

Jesus replies, ‘I have left it in the hands of a small group of my followers.’

‘But Master,’ counters the angel, ‘what will you do if they mess things up? What will your plan be then?’

‘I have no other plan,’ says Jesus.

And that’s the plan. His plan is us – sinners that we are.

So if spiritually we are down in the gutter right now, it’s time to hear the good news that Jesus is still calling us. He still has work for us to do in building for his kingdom. He still has people for us to reach with his love. We may be the ideal people to speak and show his love to certain folk.

Let us allow Jesus to wipe us clean with his grace so that we can embrace again his call on our lives. And let’s set out in fresh obedience to him that we may see him do new wonders in our day. And let us do it not as lone rangers but in fellowship with others.

[1] Joel B Green, The Gospel of Luke (NICNT), p232.

[2] Op. cit., p234 n27.

February 9, 2025 0

The J.O.Y. of Following Jesus, Luke 4:21-30 (Ordinary 4 Epiphany 4 Candlemas Year C 2025)

Luke 4:21-30

When I became due for my second sabbatical from ministry, I was serving in an appointment where no previous minister had had a sabbatical. The circuit tried to do lots of explaining to the senior church steward at my main church, but he only had one question:

‘What’s in it for us?’

There was no concern for my well-being, only for what they could get out of it.

Such was the attitude that when I then had to have surgery ten days after returning from the sabbatical, the response was, why didn’t you have the operation during the sabbatical?

Soon after that, my re-invitation came up for consideration, and you won’t be surprised to know that a faction organised against me. They didn’t try to throw me off a cliff as the Nazareth mob attempted with Jesus, and I would agree I made some mistakes in my ministry there, but you might understand why today’s passage resonates with me.

To treat the reading more positively, I would say it encapsulates that old Christian saying that the letters of the word ‘JOY’ stand for Jesus first, Others second, and Yourself last.

So – Jesus first:

There is a wonderful episode in the book of Joshua chapter 5, just before the Israelites are preparing to take Jericho:

¹³Now when Joshua was near Jericho, he looked up and saw a man standing in front of him with a drawn sword in his hand. Joshua went up to him and asked, ‘Are you for us or for our enemies?’

¹⁴‘Neither,’ he replied, ‘but as commander of the army of the Lord I have now come.’ Then Joshua fell face down to the ground in reverence, and asked him, ‘What message does my Lord have for his servant?’

¹⁵The commander of the Lord’s army replied, ‘Take off your sandals, for the place where you are standing is holy.’ And Joshua did so.

I think Jesus’ words to the Nazareth synagogue have a similar effect. They have heard all about his wonderful words and deeds. We read last week how the news had spread throughout the countryside about him, and how people in various synagogues had praised his teaching (Luke 4:14-15). Now the local lad made good has come home, but it doesn’t go to their plan, because if the words of Isaiah have been fulfilled in their hearing (verse 21) then who is he?

Oh.

He is making a proclamation that he is the long-awaited Messiah, even if he avoids the specific word. He is the prophet greater than Moses who has been expected according to Deuteronomy.

And if he is, then he is the One to whom they must bear allegiance. It’s not enough to take pride in what they regard as home-grown talent, like football supporters chanting when a young player has come through their academy and scored for the first team, ‘He’s one of our own.’ Like the mysterious character Joshua encountered, as commander of the Lord’s army he has come – and then some.

Our first call, then, is to pledge allegiance to Jesus. We do that in a big way each year at our Covenant Service, but there is a sense in which we do that every time we take communion.

For we call Holy Communion a ‘sacrament’, and that word comes from the Latin ‘sacramentum’, which was the oath of allegiance that a Roman soldier took to the Emperor. When we come to the Lord’s Table, we pledge our allegiance again to the King of Kings and Lord of Lords.

There is a slogan on the Methodist website that says, ‘God loves you unconditionally, no strings attached. That’s the good news.’ But that’s a very partial description of the good news. Because when John the Baptist and then Jesus came preaching what they called the good news, it came with the requirement of a response. And the first response is to pledge allegiance to Jesus as Lord. After all, the first Christian creed was simply the words, ‘Jesus is Lord.’

Next – Others second:

On Thursday, an American Christian friend of mine posted to Facebook with some disgust words of the new Vice President, JD Vance as reported by Fox News:

“I think there is a Christian concept that you love your family and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens, and then after that, prioritize the rest of the world.”

These are appalling words for someone like Vance to say, when he is a convert to Roman Catholicism. They so contradict the New Testament, where all believers are a family, where social distinctions are dissolved in the Gospel, and where Jesus redefines our neighbour as anyone at all who is in need and says that neighbour love of that kind is one of the greatest commandments.

And it may be that we can make an easy poke at the Trump administration for such blatant heresies. Certainly, JD Vance’s parish priest needs to call him to repentance.

But what is the difference between that and the way many other Christians turn religion into a consumer exercise? When our faith is about the style of worship I like, the music I prefer, and mixing with people just like me, we have gone far from the ways of Jesus.

What has Jesus just been reading about from Isaiah? Good news to the poor. Recovery of sight for the blind. Freedom for the captives. The Jubilee year. When we pledge allegiance to Jesus, these are the things that follow next.

If we are to follow Jesus and not the mob, we will be thinking, who can I bless today? Who can I serve this week? Where can we make a difference for good in our neighbourhood? What are the social issues that need a Gospel witness? Who have we excluded from hearing the Good News, especially among the poor, and what will we do to right that?

It may be a stark statement and possibly an over-statement, but you may know the famous words of William Temple, who was Archbishop of Canterbury during World War Two, about the Church. He said that the church was the only institution that existed for the benefit of those who were not its members. It is good that this congregation already takes that seriously. Let us always remember that such things are not peripheral to the church, but central to our calling.

Finally – Yourself last:

It’s important to hear that I said ‘Yourself last’ not ‘Yourself not at all.’ For this is the Jesus who taught, love your neighbour as you love yourself. And in doing so he assumed we would love ourselves. There is a distinction to be drawn between a proper loving of ourselves and indulging ourselves, always gratifying ourselves, or thinking the universe revolves around us.

No wonder we read in the Gospels of Jesus going away on his own to pray, and of him encouraging the disciples to come aside from all the activity to rest awhile. Is it what he did when he walked through the crowd here?

There is a proper self-care that is not the same as self-centredness. It is a looking after ourselves so that we are fit and able to live with Jesus at the heart of our lives and with the strength to show God’s love to all, especially those on the margins. Yes, Charles Wesley wrote in one of his hymns the line, ‘To spend and to be spent for those who have not yet my Saviour known.’ But where does the energy come from that we spend? And what do we do when we are spent? We need to tend to ourselves for the sake of the Gospel.

Yourself last, but this is self-care in order to be able to serve, and thus we distinguish it from self-pampering.

Much of this is a challenge to me, because I do not always look after myself as well as I might for the sake of all I am called to. Last year, I read a memoir by the great scholar who supervised my post-graduate research in Theology, Richard Bauckham. It was mainly a book about his struggles with poor eyesight, but in passing he made a comment about how he has always ensured he gets eight hours of sleep a night in order to be in a good state to pursue his calling as a scholar, even in retirement.

That is something I have not been good at, especially since a phase in my ministry ten years ago, when two of my three circuit colleagues curtailed their appointments, and the other retired. I ended up getting into the bad habit of doing late nights.

The Methodist Church has been on a learning curve with this. When I entered the ministry, the official guidance was that on our six working days a week, we ministers could take up to an hour off each day. That’s all. Somehow we were also meant to cultivate a hobby! Is it any surprise that in 2017 a nurse at our doctor’s surgery told me that working 8 am to 10 pm six days a week was bad practice for anyone?

Then, a few years ago, the Connexion woke up to the fact that there was a well-being crisis among ministers. Well, fancy that! Now they tell us to divide each of our working days into three sessions – morning, afternoon, and evening – and work two of the three. They also tell us to remember the provisions of the European Working Time Directive, under which workers normally do not start another day’s shift until at least eleven hours after their previous one has finished.

These are examples from my world. There will be approaches you can take in your circumstances. There will be other matters to consider, too. But the principles are the same.

So – Jesus first: in response to his love for us, we pledge our allegiance to him.

Others second: we have a Gospel to proclaim in word and deed.

Yourself last: self-care for the sake of that Gospel.

This is a Christian way of living. It rejects the ‘What’s in it for me?’ line. It doesn’t throw Jesus off a cliff. Instead, it exalts him and brings JOY to him and to us.

And that’s what we’re about.

February 2, 2025 0

The Good News Covenant, Luke 4:14-21 (Ordinary 3 Epiphany 3)

No video this week: on Friday afternoon, while working on this sermon, a workman’s van crashed into our kitchen wall, causing structural damage to our manse.

No-one was hurt. But it does mean I’ve got behind. Anyway, here’s the text of this week’s sermon.

Luke 4:14-21

How did you hear about the assassination of John F Kennedy in November 1963? I am too young to remember how we heard the news in the UK, but I imagine people heard on the next available TV news bulletin.

But I do know how I heard about the death of Princess Diana in August 1997. I came downstairs that Sunday morning, and as was my habit I turned on the BBC breakfast news. There was the rolling coverage provided by 24-hour news services.

And I remember how I heard about the death of the Queen in 2023. Debbie and I were sitting in a branch of Pizza Express, waiting for a meal before going to a concert. A news alert flashed up on my phone.

How did people hear major news in the Roman Empire two thousand years ago? A messenger would come to their town or village and make a public announcement, probably in somewhere like the marketplace. I guess they were a little bit like town criers. They would tell the people that there was a new Emperor on the throne in Rome, or that Rome’s legions had won a great victory against an enemy.

And do you know what they called their proclamations? You do. ‘Good News.’

So when the New Testament speaks about Good News it takes over this model and gives it a refit according to the life and ministry of Jesus. It would be something like this:

‘Good News! There is a new king on the throne of the universe. His name is Jesus. He has conquered sin and death not with violence but by his own suffering love and death. And God has vindicated him by raising him from the dead.’

Jesus speaks of ‘Good News’ in Luke 4, and – to state the obvious – he is by definition doing so before his death and resurrection. But he is telling his hearers about the nature of the kingdom he is inaugurating, including what it is like to live under his reign and by implication what it requires of its citizens.

Therefore, what we are considering today is both the offer Jesus makes to us by his grace and the call he makes on us in response.

Firstly, good news to the poor:

I find that Christians go into battle with each other on this one. What is good news to the poor? Is it that we evangelise them? Or is it that we campaign politically for them?

I think the answer is ‘yes.’ In other words, I don’t see this as an either/or choice.

But we need to understand who people in Jesus’ world would have understood as ‘the poor.’ Certainly, it included the economically poor, but it also it also included those who had no status or honour in society. So we’re not only talking about the destitute, we’re talking about women, children, lepers, Gentiles, prostitutes, and so on.

And by making a list like that, you will I am sure be saying to yourself, that sounds pretty much like the main constituency Jesus served. He brought the Good News that there was a new king on the throne of the universe to these people, and they welcomed it. This king was for them. They could be citizens of his kingdom. God’s love was offered freely to them in word and deed by Jesus, and they too could enter the kingdom by repentance and faith, just like anyone else.

The early church clearly followed up on this. When Paul writes to the Corinthians, he observes that not many of them were of high rank. And after the apostolic age, we find former slaves becoming bishops in the church.

For John Wesley, it all kicked off on 1^st April 1739, when, at the urging of George Whitefield, he preached for the first time in the open air to the miners of Kingswood, between Bath and Bristol. The Good News was for them, he realised. And he would later become concerned about their social needs as well.

If we are to take the mission of God seriously today, we must put this front and centre, because Jesus did. Yet in this country, church historians say that the Christian church has not seriously taken the Gospel to the poor since the Industrial Revolution. John Wesley was probably the last person to do this on a significant scale.

I am not saying that we are doing nothing in this respect. I am sure some of the people who come to ‘Connect’ fall into the categories I am talking about. As we give a welcome and acceptance to them, we need to find the right ways and times to share the Good News with them.

And I am aware that this town is very much divided into two halves. But at the same time, it is a town with Marks and Spencer’s at one end and Waitrose at the other. This is the only church I have served where the hand gel provided to the minister before handling bread and wine at communion comes from M and S!

So allow me to flag this up, because in this area it would be easy for us to lose sight of this important strand of Jesus’ teaching. There are few things more dangerous for Christians than getting comfortable.

Secondly, freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind:

What did Jesus mean by quoting this from Isaiah? Clearly, ‘freedom for the prisoners’ didn’t mean he went around the jails of Palestine opening prison doors and letting the convicts out. It has more to do with him pronouncing freedom from the guilt of sin in the offer of forgiveness, freedom from the power of sin in his casting out of demons, and freedom from being sinned against by standing for justice and also enabling people to forgive wrongdoers.

Recovery of sight for the blind is a little more straightforward, given the healing miracles Jesus performed.

But a lot of that might sound a little distant to us. The church limits the number of people who exercise a deliverance ministry because it needs all sorts of safeguards and protections built in. Most of us don’t have a healing ministry, either. I only know for sure of two occasions in my life when I have prayed for someone to be healed and they were. Not that I want to discourage anyone from praying for healing, though: I’m just saying that only a few Christians have an ongoing ministry of healing.

So what can we take from this? Plenty, actually. We may not all be evangelists, but we are all witnesses who are called to share our faith in word and in deed with people beyond the Christian community. That’s why we’re beginning the Personal Evangelism course tomorrow morning. This is a chance for us to find ways of being able to speak about our faith gently to others. How else are people going to find faith and the Good News of God’s forgiveness in Christ? I encourage you to sign up!

It’s also about our example. When we are wronged, the world will look at how we respond. When terrible things happen, our culture is full of language about certain actions and crimes being ‘unforgivable.’ And while I obviously wish no harm on anyone, our neighbours will be watching us when we suffer wrongly. If they see forgiveness in us, or at the very least a working towards forgiveness, you can be sure it will make an impression.

Further, we can be involved socially in campaigns for those who have suffered wrongs. Yes, this includes our fellow Christians who are persecuted around the world, but we should not limit ourselves to our spiritual kith and kin. Anyone who is an unjust victim, even if it is someone we don’t agree with, is someone for whom Jesus wants freedom. In fact, standing up for those we disagree with can itself be a powerful witness.

As for the recovery of sight for the blind, apart from the question of physical healing there is the matter of those who are spiritually blind. Jesus spoke truth to the wilfully blind, such as many of the religious leaders of his day. He also spoke truth to reveal God’s love to those he was calling out of darkness.

Therefore, we can do two things. We can pray that blind hearts and minds be opened to the truth of God’s Good News. And we can also be the ones who share that truth, backed by prayer.

Thirdly and finally, to set the oppressed free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour:

All the talk of releasing and setting free is brought together in the talk of ‘the year of the Lord’s favour.’ And that language is the language of the Old Testament Jubilee. The Jubilee Year, which in the Law of Mosese was to occur once every fifty years. And in that year debts were forgiven, slaves were set free, and land was returned to its original owners. Whether Israel ever truly observed it is debatable, but here Jesus says it’s coming in with his kingdom and so it’s a sign not only of how to live now but also of the age to come. It is a manifesto for how the community of God’s kingdom will be and how his people are to live now.

The forgiveness of debts was financial. What a test of discipleship to hone in on how attached we are to our money. Will we always stand on our rights, demanding what is ours, or will we forgive a debt?

I saw that demonstrated by my father when I was still living at home in my early twenties. I had a friend who was an only child and an orphan. His father had been killed in a car crash when he was eight, and then when he was fifteen, just before our mock O-Levels, his mother died of cancer. Then in his early twenties he had a broken engagement. With few relatives, he came to live with us for a couple of weeks while he tried to get himself together again.

But in that time he just expected my mother to do his laundry and cook for him, and he never offered any money towards his keep. After he left to go back to his home, we had a family conference over dinner. What were we going to do about his debt to us?

And my father simply said, ‘We’re going to put it down to God’s account.’

And we know Jesus builds that into the Lord’s Prayer: Forgive us our debts, as we forgive those who are indebted to us. Yes, of course it’s a vivid metaphor for the forgiveness of sins and our forgiveness of those who sin against us, but we should never let that fact obscure the challenge of the literal words.

There is much more I could say about the Jubilee. I could talk about our attachment to the land, which may have implications for our national and international politics. I could mention the ongoing problem of slavery that still exists in our world, and which you might encounter in the staff at the local car wash or nail bar.

But I don’t have time to go into that. I’ll just say that the way we are willing to forgive and release people, money, land, and possessions will be a powerful witness in our world that frequently talks of things being ‘unforgivable’.

The Jubilee was part of God’s covenant with Israel. He had delivered them from Egypt, and this was part of their response of grateful obedience to him. In the renewal of our covenant with God, we are called to a similar response, as we also are in bringing good news to the poor along with freedom and sight to people.

In our commitment this morning, may these be formed as our continuing participation in God’s mission. For then we will be proclaimers of Good News today.

January 26, 2025 0

The Sign of Water Into Wine, John 2:1-11 (Second Sunday in Ordinary Time)

I’m still not completely shot of the sinusitis, so this is another repeated sermon. In this case, it’s from six years ago, and hasn’t previously appeared on the blog.

John 2:1-11

I have long wanted to write a book, and perhaps the easiest to write would be the ministry equivalent of the old James Herriot ‘All Creatures Great And Small’ vet tales. Over a long course of time in the ministry, you can gather all sorts of tales, and few areas are more fruitful than what are formally called ‘rites of passage’, or more informally ‘hatch, match, and despatch’ – baptisms, weddings, and funerals.

Having had Sarah Steele’s wedding here yesterday, my mind would easily go to several stories:

My first ever wedding, where my nerves affected my preparation, and just as I was catching up the bride arrived early
The fourteen bridesmaids who arrived on a bus
The Catholic wedding I was asked to register, which was so calamitous in so many ways that I became convinced Father Ted was a real person
The wedding where my address was interrupted by a drunk guest, who was promptly told by the bridegroom, ‘Shut up, I’m listening!’
The Star Wars actress whose wedding I conducted last March at Weybridge. OK, she only had a minor part in the last Star Wars film, but don’t ruin a good story for me!

And more, of course, that were memorable for a host of reasons.

Maybe the wedding at Cana was the most memorable one in history, though. This is more than a miracle story. All the miracles in John’s Gospel are more than miracles. As this account concludes:

¹¹What Jesus did here in Cana of Galilee was the first of the signs through which he revealed his glory; and his disciples believed in him.

It’s not just a miracle, it’s a sign. A sign of Jesus and his glory. But in what ways?

Firstly, it’s a sign of resurrection:

2 On the third day a wedding took place at Cana in Galilee. Jesus’ mother was there, ²and Jesus and his disciples had also been invited to the wedding. ³When the wine was gone, Jesus’ mother said to him, ‘They have no more wine.’

Those opening words ‘On the third day’ should be a hint. For even though in this part of his Gospel John is apparently narrating a week in the life of Jesus, the words ‘on the third day’ have additional suggested meaning for Christians, especially since that came at the end of the narration of another week, Holy Week. If you think I’m stretching a point, then note this passage from Isaiah:

On this mountain the Lord Almighty will prepare
    a feast of rich food for all peoples,
a banquet of aged wine –
    the best of meats and the finest of wines.
⁷On this mountain he will destroy
    the shroud that enfolds all peoples,
the sheet that covers all nations;
⁸    he will swallow up death for ever.
(Isaiah 25:6-8a)

In the words of Professor Richard Bauckham (and yes, I’m biased, because he was my research supervisor),

Here the provision of the finest wine is linked with the abolition of death.[1]

Here in the second chapter of John is a sign of what we shall see in the second to last chapter: the resurrection of Jesus. John is hinting at what is to come. Jesus will reveal his glory in his resurrection, and his disciples will believe in him because of it. Peter and John will believe. Doubting Thomas will believe. Before any of the men believe, Mary and the women will believe.

If you want to see the glory of Jesus, see the One who in vacating his tomb conquered death. This is glory: he has defeated the last enemy for himself, and this points to the time when he will abolish death for all.

Dr Paul Beasley-Murray, a retired Baptist minister friend of mine, wrote an article the other day in which he reflected on four books he had recently read about death and dying. He included some quotes from some of the books, which happen to illustrate how the glory of resurrection hope transforms the way Christians look at death. All the people I am about to quote are themselves Christians (including the vicar!).

From John Wyatt, Emeritus Professor of Neonatal Paediatrics at University College London:

If our hope is in the power of medical technology to overcome every obstacle, we are doomed to ultimate disappointment. What is worse, this kind of hope may stand in the way of godly acceptance of God’s will for the last phase of our life, impeding the possibility of strengthening or ‘completing’ our relationships in a healthy and faithful way.

From retired Anglican vicar Martin Down:

I know of no real remedy for fear of any sort other than faith… It is God alone who can both say to us ‘Fear not’ and give us good reason not to fear.

And finally from retired oncologist Elaine Sugden:

Rather than think about loss of hope, think instead of purpose and opportunity.

Because of the resurrection, we are people of hope. And that brings glory to Jesus.

Secondly, this story is a sign of intimacy between Jesus and his people:

³When the wine was gone, Jesus’ mother said to him, ‘They have no more wine.’

⁴‘Woman, why do you involve me?’ Jesus replied. ‘My hour has not yet come.’

⁵His mother said to the servants, ‘Do whatever he tells you.’

Now at first this exchange might just sound like an almost amusing account of a mother – and a Jewish mother at that – who knows how to get her son to do what she wants him to do. (Although did Mary know Jesus would turn water into wine? I don’t think so. I’m sure she was surprised, too.)

But it’s much more than that. Who was responsible for supplying the wine at a Jewish wedding two thousand years ago? The answer is, the bridegroom. So by giving Jesus the problem that the wine has run out, Mary gives Jesus the rôle of the bridegroom. That is probably why he replies, ‘My hour has not yet come.’ His own great wedding feast – the wedding feast of the Lamb and his bride, the Church – has not yet taken place. It is to happen at the end of all things as we currently know them.

What we have here, then, is another part of the great image that runs through Scripture in which God’s love for his people is depicted in marital terms. In the Old Testament God woos his people with love, but she is unfaithful, and divorce language is used. But Jesus, the Bridegroom Messiah, washes his bride clean with his blood at the Cross, and will marry her to be with her for ever in the new heavens and new earth.

It’s not surprising, then, that in the rest of his Gospel John records Jesus using the intimate language of mutual abiding to describe the relationship between him and the believer. Jesus abides in the believer, and the believer abides in him. Jesus goes so far as to say this is what his own relationship with the Father is like[2].

The glory of Jesus here, then, is in the closeness of the relationship that he wants to have with his disciples. It’s a great deal more than celestial chumminess. Rather, having come and lived among people in the Incarnation, as John describes in his first chapter, Jesus wants not only to live among us but to share life with us: the joy and the mess, the simple and the profound.

The glory of Jesus is this: however majestic the Second Person of the Trinity is, he wants to share life in relationship with his church and with each of his disciples. Is it not remarkable – no, astonishing – and wonderful that this is what he wants for you and for me and for us?

Do not be afraid, but by all means be amazed. Be thrilled and be grateful!

Thirdly, this story shows the glory of Jesus in his abundance:

⁶Nearby stood six stone water jars, the kind used by the Jews for ceremonial washing, each holding from eighty to a hundred and twenty litres.

⁷Jesus said to the servants, ‘Fill the jars with water’; so they filled them to the brim.

⁸Then he told them, ‘Now draw some out and take it to the master of the banquet.’

Stone jars were not subject to the Jewish purity laws. Unlike clay jars, they could not become impure and therefore have to be smashed. A priestly family, or at any rate a household concerned with ritual purity, would use them as working jars. They were also large, and expensive to make, because they had to be carved out of one large stone. But in the long run they were cheaper, because they could be reused, unlike clay jars. That meant that probably only the better-off families could afford them.

But the main thing here for our immediate purpose is that they were large. Connect this with these observations about wine (bearing in mind how much wine was made in the miracle) by a theologian called Andrew Wilson:

In the scriptural imagination, however, and particularly in the prophetic tradition, wine represents abundance, shalom, hope and new creation. It embodies blessing: “May God give you of the dew of heaven and of the fatness of the earth and plenty of grain and wine” (Genesis 27:28, ESV); and happiness: “wine to gladden the heart of man, oil to make his face shine, and bread to strengthen man’s heart” (Psalm 104:15). It speaks of love: “we will extol your love more than wine” (Song of Songs 1:4); and bounty: “then your barns will be filled with plenty, and your vats will be bursting with wine” (Proverbs 3:10).

Jesus makes so much wine in the six large stone jars. And he doesn’t make supermarket plonk, he makes fine wine:

‘Everyone brings out the choice wine first and then the cheaper wine after the guests have had too much to drink; but you have saved the best till now.’ (Verse 10)

Undoubtedly, we have a picture of the glory Jesus will reveal at the end of all time, in the new creation, when blessing and abundance will flow to his people and all will have plenty and be satisfied. This isn’t the so-called ‘prosperity gospel’, where if you truly have faith you will be healthy and wealthy now, but a promise of the End that Jesus will sometimes show glimpses of now when he blesses us in this life. And when he does bless us in this life, we respond with thanksgiving rather than hoarding, and with offering what he has blessed us with for the good of others.

We look forward, then, to the glory of Jesus when he puts all things right in creation, makes everything new, and blesses abundantly, not grudgingly.

But we also respond now, so when we witness those whose lives are not characterised by abundant living, we know as Christians we must pray, speak out, act, and give. It may be poverty. It may be famine. It may be injustice. It may be disease. Our call is to witness to the coming abundance of blessing, and to show that the present way of things is not the will of God.

All of which draws us to the conclusion where we note what the passage says about our response and how that may enable the glory of Jesus to be seen.

There are a couple of threads about response in the passage. One is about obedience to Jesus:

⁵His mother said to the servants, ‘Do whatever he tells you.’

⁶Nearby stood six stone water jars, the kind used by the Jews for ceremonial washing, each holding from eighty to a hundred and twenty litres.

⁷Jesus said to the servants, ‘Fill the jars with water’; so they filled them to the brim.

The co-operation of the servants in obedience to his command enables Jesus to show his glory.

The other is about faith, and it’s back to where we began:

¹¹What Jesus did here in Cana of Galilee was the first of the signs through which he revealed his glory; and his disciples believed in him.

Put these two threads together and you have ‘Trust and obey’. If I’d known exactly where my studies of the passage were going to lead me this week when I picked the hymns, then ‘Trust and obey’ would almost certainly have been the next hymn. But it isn’t, because I didn’t realise that at the time.

However, ‘trust and obey’ are the ways we respond to the glory of Jesus and co-operate with his ways so that others may see his glory. When we encounter the glory of Jesus, as the disciples did at Cana, then the right response is to believe in him.

And when we do believe in him, the appropriate way of showing that is to obey him, so that others too may see his glory in the promise of resurrection, a relationship of intimacy, and and the gift of abundance.

Indeed – let us trust and obey.

[1] Richard Bauckham, Gospel Of Glory, p182.

[2] Ibid., pp9-13.

January 19, 2025 0

Author: Dave Faulkner