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As per the title.
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Enter the ingredients – such as what you actually have in the cupboard, rather than what you need to buy – and Recipe Puppy will supply a – guess what – recipe.
Sermon: Advent 2, An Undiluted Prophetic Hope
If I were ever to be on a TV show, I think Grumpy Old Men might suit me. Not that I would ever be famous enough to be invited, but I can be the sort of person who thinks that Ebenezer Scrooge was given an unfair press. It’s not simply that this is the time of year when Debbie gets out all the Singing Santa toys that she and the children love (and which can drive me mad), it’s this Second Sunday in Advent.
You see, the grump in me wonders why it got changed in the current Lectionary. You used to know where you were in the four Sundays of Advent. The first Sunday was about the Advent Hope – not just Christ’s original coming but the promise of his appearing again in glory. The second Sunday was about the promise of the Messiah in the Old Testament prophets. Sunday number three introduced you to the man with the extreme diet, John the Baptist. Then on the fourth Sunday it’s the Annunciation by Gabriel to Mary.
What went wrong? How come we now get a reading about John the Baptist this week as well as next week? Some of it has to do with the moving of Bible Sunday into October, although I’m not sure which came first. Perhaps a grumpy old man like me should appreciate two weeks’ worth of his fire and brimstone preaching, but actually I miss the emphasis on the prophets.
And no, it’s wrong to see the prophets as a job lot of grumpy old men. In the short term, they did warn people about the consequences of sin. But in the long term, they held out the hope of God’s future. In Isaiah’s case, that included the hope that God would send his Anointed One, that is, the Messiah.
So, then, what does this passage from Isaiah point us to in the hope of the Messiah’s coming? I want to take Isaiah’s original intentions and give them a distinctively Christ-centred flavour.
Firstly, let me take you to the manse Debbie and I had in the circuit before last. Known among local Methodists as ‘the Frost manse’, because David Frost famously lived there as a boy when his father was the local Methodist minister just after World War Two. The house had begun life, though, as the admiral’s house for the nearby Chatham Dockyard. Thus, although it was terraced, it was a large house. The downstairs study which Paradine Frost, David Frost’s father, had used when he was there, had by our time been converted into a huge kitchen. There was ample space not only to cook but also to seat several people around a dining table for meals.
There was a large window from the kitchen looking out onto the garden. Unfortunately, it didn’t let in much light, and we had to turn on the lights earlier and more frequently than might have been expected.
Why was this so? Because a large tree stood not far outside the window. Far enough away for the roots not to affect the house, but near enough to darken the kitchen. Eventually, we asked the circuit if they could send in a tree surgeon, which they did, and we gained more natural light when he had reduced it to a stump.
Isaiah begins by talking about a stump:
A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots. (Verse 1)
‘The stump of Jesse’ is a tragic statement. You will remember that Jesse was the father of David, and all Israel’s hopes had been in him. Yet this seems to suggest that David’s line has failed, even to the point where his father is named instead of him. The great tree has been cut down to a stump. ‘The stump of Jesse’ implies human failure and sin. Time after time, Israel and Judah had been let down by her kings.
Yet, says Isaiah, ‘from the stump of Jesse’ shall come ‘a shoot’ ‘and a branch shall grow out of his roots’. From a long line of human failure, God will grow his purposes. From generations of sinners, God will bring his Messiah. From iffy patriarchs whose morals crumbled under pressure, to Rahab the prostitute, to King David the adulterer and murderer, the ancestral line of the Messiah is filled with broken sinners. Within the purposes of God you get Moses who murdered a man and ran away, then protested when God called him that he couldn’t be a public speaker. You have Gideon, who was fearful and full of doubt. There is Jeremiah, who may well have suffered from depression, yet only Isaiah exceeds him among the prophets.
And so that is the first theme I want to take from Isaiah – the hope of the Messiah is one of God working through sinners. God’s purposes are accomplished through a people that one video clip I saw the other day called ‘The March of the Unqualified’.
This Advent, then, be encouraged by the prophetic hope that whatever your failures, whatever your weaknesses, whatever your disappointments, God is capable of working his purposes out through you. If you think that your sins have disqualified you from God and that you have shrivelled from a tree to a stump, then know that God is able to develop a shoot from your stump and a branch from your roots. The God of grace and mercy has come to shine his light into the world even through a cut-down stump.
Secondly, if there’s one thing I get very little of as a parent of young children, but which I would like to have more of, it’s rest. While – as I told Knaphill last week – I begrudgingly rely on an alarm clock in the morning, there are times when it’s not needed. We have two small human alarm clocks, and one in particular. Rest is something Debbie and I envy in others.
But the trouble with words is one of multiple meaning. Think of how you look up a dictionary definition for a word, only to face a range of options. And ‘rest’ is one such word. In the way I have just used it, the connection is with sleep. But ‘rest’ can also mean ‘stay’. I’d like to combine the two meanings of rest into one, of course: stay asleep!
But it’s this second meaning of ‘rest’, that of staying, which Isaiah uses here:
The spirit of the Lord shall rest on him, the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord. (Verse 2)
It’s not simply that the Messiah will have the Spirit of the Lord, it’s that the Spirit of the Lord will rest – that is, stay – on him. Generally in the Old Testament when the Spirit of God comes upon someone it is a ‘tumultuous and spasmodic’[1] experience. The Spirit usually comes dramatically, but only temporarily.
Therefore it’s a big thing for Isaiah to speak about the Spirit resting on the Messiah. Here is the one on whom the Spirit will come and remain. The Messiah will have God’s Spirit permanently. And when John the Baptist says that Jesus is the one on whom he saw the Holy Spirit come and remain, he is making a big claim – a claim that here indeed is the Messiah.
What does this resting of the Spirit upon Jesus mean for us? It ushers in the New Testament era of faith, where the people of the Messiah may receive the same gift. The coming of Jesus the Messiah is the coming of a new age, the age of the Holy Spirit, where Jesus, who received the Spirit permanently, gives the Spirit to his followers in the same way. There may still be dramatic experiences of the Holy Spirit, but the Spirit does not generally depart from a person any more. The Spirit may become distant when we grieve him by our sin, but the intention of Jesus in the messianic age is to give the Holy Spirit as a permanent endowment. In this way, Advent and Christmas look forward to Pentecost!
So be encouraged. Just as the Christ child is called ‘Immanuel’, God with us, so he comes with the promise of God being with us – ‘even to the close of the age’ – because he who receives the Spirit permanently gives the Spirit in the same way. Do not think that God has deserted you. As one Christian scholar puts it, even doubt ‘is a time of “disguised closeness” to God’. Or as the liturgy puts it, in a dialogue between minister and congregation: ‘The Lord is here.’ ‘His Spirit is with us.’
So far, then, we have good news twice over: firstly, that God works even through sinners and failures to bring his messianic purposes to fruition. Secondly, that the Messiah receives the Spirit permanently and gives the Spirit in a similar way to his disciples, so we may know that God is always present with us, even when we can neither see nor feel him. I want to draw out a third strand of this messianic hope before I close.
Just as we’ve thought about the word ‘rest’ as having more than one meaning, this third thought also depends on a double entendre. Not in the sense of a rude joke, but because biblical words are often so rich they convey multiple meanings.
There is one such word in our passage, and Isaiah uses it more than once: righteousness: ‘with righteousness he shall judge the poor’ (verse 4); ‘Righteousness shall be the belt around his waist’ (verse 5). Isaiah uses the word ‘righteousness’ of the Messiah here in terms of who he is, and what he does. Isaiah uses ‘righteousness’ for the Messiah’s dealings with people, and for the society he creates.
It’s a many-layered word, and at the heart of God’s righteousness in Christ is God’s covenant faithfulness. In covenant faithfulness through Jesus, God will make people righteous with him. Ultimately, we know he will do that through the Cross. But this righteousness is not just a ‘get out of jail free’ card for the Day of Judgment. God’s righteousness is also about the transformation he wants to bring to people, to societies, to the world and even to all creation. God’s righteousness is about personal and social salvation, personal and social transformation.
If this is what Jesus the Messiah came to do, it crosses the boundaries we sometimes erect in the church. On the one side we have those who say personal conversion to Christ is the be-all and end-all of faith. They say that society will not change until people are changed by God. On the other there are those who are almost cynical about personal conversion and say the big thing is social justice. Yet the righteousness of the Messiah doesn’t allow us to split personal conversion and social justice and play them off against each other, supporting our particular favourite. Jesus has come to call people to personal faith in him, and to share in his project of transforming the world.
And if that’s the case, woe betide us if we reduce Advent or Christmas to gooey sentimental thoughts about a baby. The baby who came did so through God’s purposes of using weak, sinful people. The baby who came would receive the Spirit in full measure and permanently, and came to give the Spirit permanently to those weak sinners that God delights in using. And the baby who came gave the Spirit to weak sinners to bring them to faith in him and to empower them to work for God’s kingdom.
The prophets don’t let us settle for a half-hearted, diluted hope. Let’s make sure we drink their hope neat.
Sermon, Advent: Time To Wake Up
One of my least favourite, but most necessary, possessions is the alarm clock. Without it, someone like me, who is constitutionally a night owl, would oversleep every morning. I cannot say I appreciate the insistent beeping that says, “Listen to me, I am so annoying. Just get up and switch me off.” While other people bounce out of bed, energised to meet the new day, I wish the god of sleep had not been dethroned for yet another day.
The apostle Paul wouldn’t have known about alarm clocks, but he describes Advent in a manner that is like seeing it as God’s alarm clock. It urgently tells us God’s time. It tells us that
our salvation is nearer now than when we first believed (verse 11)
and that
The night is nearly over; the day is almost here (verse 12).
Advent is the season that tells us God’s time. It tells us not simply that Christ is coming in terms of his birth at Christmas, it tells us that he will one day appear again, this time not in obscurity but in glory.
In these terms, we might get nervous about Advent as an alarm clock. The thought that ‘our salvation is nearer now than when we first believed’ makes us think of those Christians who are forever predicting that Jesus will come again very soon. Their predictions always fail, and we are left with the Christian faith being discredited by what is either well-meaning error or cynical emotional blackmail. We want none of that. We know that Jesus said no-one knew when he was coming again.
But the basic truth which Paul elucidates here must be true: our salvation is nearer now than when we first believed. The fullness of God’s kingdom is closer. There is less time until the general resurrection of the dead, and God brings in his new heavens and new earth.
God wants to tell us his time. He will not tell us when Jesus is returning, but the fact that he is has an effect upon the way that we live the Christian life. With an alarm clock, there is no room for complacency. It rings or beeps incessantly, until we do something about it. And that is what God is doing at Advent. He is saying to us, this is no time to be lax about being a Christian. Rather, this is a time to be active, deliberate and full of intent as a follower of Jesus. Like the t-shirt slogan says, ‘Jesus is coming: better look busy!’
Telling the Advent time, then, is about living with a sense of urgency. Not frantic, not haunted or hunted, but urgent.
That’s all very well, but what does that mean? Paul calls us to two actions that we need to do when the alarm clock goes off. The first is to wake up:
The hour has already come for you to wake up from your slumber (verse 11).
In a service where we have already baptised Leo, ‘wake up’ may be a theme that provokes certain thoughts and emotions from Kim and Mark! While I hope that at two years old, Leo has long since established a sleep pattern, there are doubtless still plenty of occasions when his parents don’t need an alarm clock, because they are woken by his calling.
What does it mean to wake up when we discover the urgency of God’s time? Partly, it is about the urgency of which I spoke a moment ago. When we know that the grains of sand are trickling down through God’s timer, then we know we need to wake up and get on with things. The alarm clock says, if you don’t get on with things now, you’ll be late for work. And you don’t want that. The crying baby says, I have an urgent need. Come to me!
What kind of person is ‘awake’, according to Paul? It is one who is prepared for the end of the night and the breaking of the dawn. For Paul, the ‘night’ is the present evil age, the age of sin, which Christ came to conquer and redeem in the Cross. The ‘day’ that is ‘close at hand’ (verse 12) is the kingdom of God, where God reigns in love, justice and grace. If we have heard God’s Advent alarm clock, we want to be living as if it is daylight, not as if it is night.
So if I am to be ‘awake’ in the sight of God, I will be a person who embraces the kingdom of God. I will be someone who lives according to the values and principles of God’s coming age, even when they conflict with the darkness of the contemporary ‘night’ in which we find ourselves living.
Therefore, to live awake as if in God’s daytime is to live by love for God and for neighbour. To be awake in Christ is to live in a spirit that forswears revenge in favour of forgiveness. To live in the day means to show God’s special concern for the poor and the obscure, instead of the popular fantasies that prefer the wealthy, the powerful and the celebrities. To be awake in the kingdom of God is to live a life based on the fact that the most precious thing in all the world is to know that I am ‘loved with an everlasting love’ by Almighty God in Jesus Christ. I do not then take my significance or status from my job or my social standing: to do so is a vanity, compared with God’s love for me in Christ. To live as awake in the light of Christ is to know that God’s words are a light to my path, not to let the loud but passing fads of our culture steer our lives.
Advent, then, is a call to wake up to God’s time: that Jesus who came will come again. It means we need to wake up and live in God’s daylight. I’ve just suggested a few examples of what that will mean for us.
But to do so requires a determined attitude. When we wake up, there are various things we need to do in order to face what life has for us. One such thing is to get dressed, and that is the other thing Paul calls us to do here: get dressed. In fact, he says it twice, in slightly different language each time:
So let us put aside the deeds of darkness and put on the armour of light. (Verse 12)
Rather, clothe yourselves with the Lord Jesus Christ (verse 14).
‘Put on’; ‘clothe yourselves’. Get dressed. Wear on the one hand ‘the armour of light’ or on the other hand ‘the Lord Jesus Christ’. What are we to take from these images? I believe it’s something to do with the fact that to live according to the daylight of God’s kingdom rather than the night-time of the present age is going to take an effort. We need to be intentional about it – that is, it won’t just happen to us. The old slogan ‘let go and let God’ may be valuable in teaching us to trust God, but if we think we don’t have a responsibility for our actions, we’re tragically mistaken. We need to co-operate with the work of the Holy Spirit in our lives. We shall live by his power, but we need to say ‘yes’ to walking in his ways.
We have all the resources of Jesus Christ, but we still need to ‘put him on’ – to be ‘clothed in Christ’. God shines his light, but we still need to ‘put on the armour of light’.
And perhaps ‘armour’ is a telling image for the clothing we wear. To wake up and live in God’s daytime is to accept not merely that we will live differently from the world. It is to accept that to do so will mean we need the protection of divine armour, because we shall find ourselves in a conflict, and sometimes under attack for doing so. The trouble with living by daylight is that light starts to shine into darkened places, and the darkness no more welcomes that than a dictatorship embraces dissidents. If we put on the armour of light, we are the dissidents of the world.
Think about it in relation to the examples I mentioned a minute or two ago: loving God and loving neighbour sounds attractive – after all Girl Guides promise to love God and do good – but while society will accept this up to a point, what our culture really wants to believe is that charity begins at home. In other words, we put ourselves first. Forgiving those who wrong us may get some admiring coverage for a while, but ultimately it’s a challenge to those who always need to find a scapegoat to blame for everything. Finding our status in the love of God rather than in our job or our social standing turns our society’s way of putting people in their place upside down. Favouring the poor and the marginalised may win you certain plaudits, but in the long run our economy can’t run that way, because it’s structured to thrive as much by our purchasing the things we don’t need as anything else.
It requires determination, then, to wake up and get dressed in the light of God’s time. Right now, Paul places us at the end of the night, as dawn is coming. Night is fleeing, the day is on its way. But his image breaks down, because he is imagining not a sequence where day follows night but a clash between night and day. If we live in God’s coming daylight, we shall be drawn into that conflict until the time of God’s final and ultimate triumph over the night. Sometimes, the forces of the night will inflict suffering on the armies of the day. That is to be expected for a community that was formed around the sinless Son of God who was crucified on false charges.
But … we are not merely the community of the Cross, but of the Empty Cross. We are the people of the Empty Tomb. We who are called to wake up and live in the light of God’s coming day are those who do so, knowing what the future holds. The final chapter of Revelation, the final book in the Bible, contains an image of God’s people in God’s new Jerusalem that is pertinent to our theme this morning. Revelation 22:5 says this:
There will be no more night. They will not need the light of a lamp or the light of the sun, for the Lord God will give them light. And they will reign for ever and ever.
Friends, as the Advent alarm clock rings and we wake up, determined to get dressed and live in the light of God’s coming day regardless of the temporary presence of the remaining night, we do so knowing the future God has for us. Whatever the darkness does to us now, the Advent hope is not merely that the light of Christ comes into the world. It is that it will prevail.
Whatever the evidence looks like at times, when we commit our lives to following Jesus, we sign up with the winning side.
That’s the Advent hope.
Jack Rutter
On Saturday, I had the privilege of conducting a memorial service for a church member who had recently died. His professional significance was such that an obituary will be appearing in The Guardian, probably next week. This text will soon be cross-posted on our church site, along with the audio of this tribute.
Jack was born within the sound of Bow Bells to Arthur and Amy Rutter. He had three younger sisters, Frances, Cecily (who died in 1989) and Noel. He grew up in Worcester Park and then Guildford, where he attended the Royal Grammar School.
From the Royal Grammar he went to Imperial College to study Botany. He graduated in 1938 and then began PhD research. With the advent of the war, he was called into a reserved occupation, where he studied how to increase crop yield to reduce British dependency on imported food. Alongside this, he joined the Home Guard, where he learned how to make Molotov Cocktails.
During the War, he travelled across the country – difficult journeys that often meant cycling. On one occasion he was at a wedding in Bristol where he met Betsy Stone, a nurse from Bridgwater, who was working at Bristol General Hospital. He was the first of Betsy’s boyfriends to win her mother’s approval! They married in 1944, and had three children: Margaret, Bill and John.
Jack completed his PhD and began lecturing at Imperial. Later, as we know, he would become Professor of Botany, until his retirement in 1979. His research centred on the hydrology of the Scots Pine, and his work would carry him from Forestry Commission land in this country to Rhodesia (as it was) and the island of Aldabra, 250 miles north of Madagascar. He also went on an academic exchange to Pakistan, and was able to take the family with him. While he was there, he had dysentery, only to be cured when a colleague made a goat stew and fed it to him. He and the family also explored up the Khyber Pass to the border with Afghanistan, where they met some ‘interesting’ tribesmen with guns.
He gave an illustrated talk about his work on Aldabra to a women’s meeting here at the church. His knowledge of Botany also meant giving advice to the Queen on her gardens. Then more humbly he ran a garden stall at the church bazaar, assisted by Helen Baker and Robb Peters. He also contributed a Christmas tree to the church for many years, once digging up one from Pauline and Jim Holden’s garden in Mayford. He helped Christine with the cultivation of a Mahonia plant that still flourishes as a bush in her garden. She is offering cuttings from it to anyone who would like one in Jack’s memory.
Back home, the family lived in Brookwood and then in Knaphill, where their house had a one-acre garden. Jack mowed the grass, cut the hedges, took care of the thirty fruit trees and grew fruit and vegetables. Betsy produced the jam. Jack also made wine from the grapes on the vine. He was also a beekeeper and produced several jars of honey a year. Through Marilyn Meller’s involvement in the Guides, he tested the one Guide who was brave enough to take on the beekeeper’s badge.
For all Jack’s professional foreign travel, family holidays were generally taken in England, and usually in locations that offered opportunities for good walking and visiting cultural locations as well as the seaside. So places such as Pembrokeshire, North Wales, Northumberland and the Yorkshire Dales featured.
Betsy was a nurse, and worked with Pauline Holden at the Health Visitors’ Clinic at Pirbright Village Hall. When she became terminally ill, she was under no illusions about what would happen and set about teaching Jack housekeeping and cookery.
Betsy died in 1978, the year before Jack retired, and in his retirement these skills became useful, not only for himself but for others. He cooked for others, and invited people to stay with him in his home. He cared for a teenage girl who had been thrown out of home by her father and stepmother. He fed two or three street people, who sometimes used to stay for two or three days. He took in someone who had had a breakdown, even though he hardly knew the person at the time. He also took over one particular concern of Betsy’s. She had always taken an interested in a lady in the village called Jean who had a son with special needs. The son went to live in a home and Betsy took her to visit him in Botley’s Park Hospital, Chertsey, every Sunday afternoon. When Betsy died, Jack took over these duties until both son and mother died about ten years ago.
Jack was extremely active in church life here. I have just noted his particular care for people, but there are some other incidents to mention. He was a class leader, as we sometimes call them in the Methodist Church, or pastoral visitor. One family he visited was Marilyn Meller’s. He visited her mother, Irene Elliot, in the farmhouse delivering the monthly magazine on a Thursday evening and would help her pack eggs into boxes ready for Marilyn’s egg round the next day. He would visit Marilyn and Tom at White Lodge after he had had his lunch, and talk about farming with them. he took an interest in their family, including their two daughters.
On other Thursdays he attended the Thursday evening fellowship group. Members of the group enjoyed sharing with him, and valued the contributions he made to the discussions. He could recite poetry and biblical passages.
Then there is the Spice Girls story. For those of you who don’t know, the Spice Girls recorded their earliest tracks in Knaphill. They used to have lunch breaks at the King’s House Coffee Shop, which is run by four of the churches in the village. A film was made of their early days, and a scene was recreated in the King’s House. Jack, who worked in there voluntarily, played the rôle of the waiter. He had to reel off a list of the available snacks – cheese sandwiches, ham rolls and so on. Finally, he had to deliver a line, the significance of which he did not understand:
“Tell me what you want, what you really, really want.”
He took an interest in the church youth club, often turning up on a Saturday evening to chat with everyone and make sure that the heating was working.
Indeed, the heating was but one aspect of the church property for which he cared, but the boiler room was the location where one day a fairy godmother left him a bottle of his favourite Guinness. He also made a new wooden gate for the car park and put in posts to hold up the fence around the church building.
However, not all Jack’s adventures with the church property went smoothly. Famously, he was one day climbing through the loft space to change some light bulbs when he accidentally put his foot through the ceiling. How he didn’t fall right down, nobody knows. Later, though, he made an almost invisible repair.
Then there was the time when he once covered the church cleaning for Helen Chamberlain while she was on holiday. During that period, he and Robb Peters decided to sand the church floor. They only did half, due to the sandstorm they created, which took twelve weeks to settle.
Finally on the subject of church work, as well as his pastoral and property duties, Jack was also for a period of time the church treasurer in an age before computerised accounts. He scrupulously kept a contingency fund for emergencies, decades before the Methodist Church required all local churches to formulate a reserves policy.
In the last few years before Betsy died, she and Jack holidayed in the Western Isles of Scotland. He continued to do this after they died, until he was about 90. He planned his routes, travelled light and walked long distances, befriending many B & B owners on his travels. He also continued to travel abroad, visiting relatives in Canada several times and attending a wedding in India.
In 1994, he could see that one day he would not be able to cope with the large garden in Knaphill, and moved to his bungalow in Goldsworth Park. He remained fit, active and independent until around the age of 90. That was when those close to him started to notice a change in his mental powers. He gave up driving a few months before reaching 92.
Jack leaves six grandchildren: They are: Margaret & Adrians’s children: Henry, Thomas and Emily;
Bill and Corrie’s son, Philip; and John and Esther’s children, Jennifer and Jack. He also leaves a great-grandson, Arthur, Henry and Cat’s son.
But he also leaves behind many more friends, and so many others whose lives he touched by his love and through his great gifts and talents. No longer for Jack the confusion of these last two or three years, but the peaceful sleep of rest, and the resurrection to come into a new, healed body in which he can continue to serve Jesus Christ.
And who knows what talents a resurrected Jack Rutter will have in God’s new creation?
links for 2010-11-22
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Drag and drop your photos onto http://www.min.us. You get a URL to share, and another URL to edit them. No login needed.
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Recommendation of software called FairShare that monitors RSS feeds for people using your content.
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How to clear up a jammed print job in Windows. NB doesn't apply to mechanical jams, nor if the job is held in your printer's memory.
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The mixed economy church – traditional/inherited churches ('Jerusalem') and Fresh Expressions ('Antioch').
Jesus Had HIV
There has been much coverage this week of the South African pastor who began a sermon by saying that ‘Jesus had HIV‘. I know I am not alone in being saddened by those who have opposed Pastor Skosana. Nearby Baptist pastor Mike Bele is offended, because ‘Christ is supreme and Christ is God’, but Skosana is not saying this is literally true, he is saying that Jesus always identified with the broken and the marginalised. Therefore the first thing to say is that this is emphasising a theology of incarnation.
But not only that, this is about an orthodox, dare I say conservative, doctrine of the atonement. By Pastor Bele’s account, 2 Corinthians 5:21 would only say of Christ, ‘him who had no sin’, but the entire verse says:
God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.
We may want to protect the sinlessness of Christ (‘him who had no sin’), but Paul decisively aligns that with Christ’s identification with sinners on the Cross. Verses like these are behind the most substitutionary understandings of the atonement you can find in Christian theology. If you believe that God laid the sins of the world upon Jesus on the Cross, and if you believe that HIV is often contracted through sinful acts (both positions held by many conservative Christians), then it makes sense to talk metaphorically of Jesus having HIV. What’s the big deal unless you want to keep Jesus in heaven, never assuming human flesh to come and die for the salvation of the world? If you hold a conservative theology, I believe you should applaud Pastor Skosana, not demonise him.
Let me link this with some British history. In 1923, Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon married the future King George VI. The BBC wanted to broadcast the service on radio. Who objected? Not the Royal Family, but the Church. The Dean and Chapter of Westminster Abbey protested, saying that ‘men may be listening in public houses with their hats on.’
Maybe we laugh at that story now, but it betrays a religious attitude that majors only on people who are ‘not good enough’ and denies them the welcome (and challenge) of grace. For me, those who reject Pastor Skosana’s approach are people who will only preach ‘you are not good enough’ and not offer grace. Or they are, if they logically follow through with their objections. I know they will deny that, but to me that seems to be the logic.
But I can’t end this short piece without also pointing out another obvious matter, namely that HIV is not always contracted through sinful actions. Many who contract it do so as innocent victims. Some catch it in the womb. Some wives catch it from infected husbands who think they will be cured by sexual intercourse with a virgin.
And therefore the ‘Jesus had HIV’ metaphor has further power: it is not only about Jesus’ identification with sinners, it is about his identification with the sinned-against. Salvation from sin is about freedom from the penalty, practice and presence of sin. Salvation from the presence of sin is not only about anticipating God’s coming new creation, it is about the healing ministry with victims today.
May Xola Skosana challenge us all into a lifestyle that identifies with both sinners and the sinned-against.
Preaching In Dialogue With The Congregation
My current reading is ‘The Preaching Of Jesus‘ by William Brosend. I wouldn’t have come across it but for my membership of the Ministry Today board, because a copy was sent to us for review, and I volunteered.
I like reading books about preaching, but this one wasn’t a natural as the foreword is by Marcus Borg, a scholar whom I find altogether too sceptical. However, it was also commended on the back by a scholar I admire, Ben Witherington III.
In this short post, I want to highlight one early and important point in the book. Brosend uses an elaborate first chapter to argue that there were four major characteristics to the preaching of Jesus. The first of these is dialogical preaching. This is not the same as those hackneyed ‘dialogue sermons’ from thirty or forty years ago, where two people presented an artificial conversation to cover the loss of confidence in proclaiming the Word. (And in any case, ‘proclamation’ is Brosend’s second characteristic.)
No: Brosend means that when Jesus preached, he was in dialogue with Scripture, tradition, the culture and his listeners. Here I just want to highlight one important point he makes about the preacher’s dialogue with Scripture. It is this: are we in dialogue with the passage in a way that is sensitive to the way our congregations will be in dialogue with it? Will they have been wrestling with the passage all week? Most unlikely. Will they have been consulting learned exegetes? Even less likely.
It isn’t that protracted meditation and responsible exegesis are bad things. But if we only bring our own questions and/or the scholars’ questions, we are not going to connect the Word to the listeners.
I think that’s a salutary reminder when preachers are often taught (especially, in my experience, in the Methodist ‘Faith and Worship’ course) to put academic exegesis first. I’m glad for the reminder.
Losing Faith, Rediscovering Faith
Some churches – particularly ‘traditional’ ones – are good at keeping the people they have, but not at recruiting new faces. Some other churches – especially evangelical ones – are so fixated on evangelism that they reach new people but don’t notice they’ve brought them into a building with a revolving door. Retention is one of their problems.
Various people have done work in recent years on the question of those who have left the church. Books such as Michael Fanstone‘s ‘The Sheep That Got Away‘ and Alan Jamieson’s ‘A Churchless Faith‘ come to mind. Now Andy Frost of Share Jesus International has done some research, and is touring it around the UK. It promises to be challenging but accessible material.
So I commend the ‘Rediscovering Faith‘ tour and the accompanying book ‘Losing Faith‘ to you. I hope to be at the Staines leg of the tour on 9th November. I think it could be a highly worthwhile evening for a mere £3 admission.
A Brief Sermon For A Memorial Service
Tonight, one of my churches holds an ‘All Souls Service’, where we invite all the families for whom we have conducted funerals over the past year. (My other church will do the same in a fortnight.) One church I previously served also had such a service, but the Anglican rector always took that, and so I was never involved. This evening, then, is my first stab at such a service. We shall scroll the names of the deceased on the screen, while family members light a candle in memory of their loved one, and our worship group will quietly sing some music while that happens.
Meanwhile, here is what I plan to preach.
Most of the funerals I take are for people whom I have never had the privilege of knowing. I know that can create a hurdle to leap between a grieving family and me, the minister.
Tonight, I am conscious of a further hurdle. The great majority of you had your loved one’s funeral conducted by my predecessor, Nick Oborski. He has now moved to Epsom, and I came here to replace him two months ago.
What I want to share with you in these few thoughts this evening is quite personal. The Bible reading we heard a few moments ago is one that is special to me. It became special to me eight years ago when a dear friend to my wife and me died of breast cancer. Carolyn was only 41. I chose this Bible passage for her funeral, and it has meant a lot to me ever since.
The theme I want to take from it is ‘Grieving with Hope’. Let me introduce it this way.
At the risk of over-simplifying things, I notice two main trends when I visit a bereaved family to arrange a funeral. One is the distraught family, overcome with grief. The other is the family that says something like this: ‘Dad wouldn’t want us to be sad. We want the funeral to be a celebration of his life.’ One family majors on sorrow, the other on joy. One is focussed on grief, the other on hope.
Paul says,
Brothers and sisters, we do not want you to be uninformed about those who sleep in death, so that you do not grieve like the rest, who have no hope. (Verse 13)
He doesn’t say, ‘do not grieve’: he says, ‘do not grieve like [those] who have no hope’. In other words, we can grieve with hope. Grief and hope. Sorrow and joy. Grief, but not hopeless. Sorrow, but not despairing.
Paul is real about the grief and sorrow that death brings. It isn’t for nothing that elsewhere he calls death ‘the last enemy’. Death is an enemy. We recognise that in our language. When someone dies after a protracted illness, we often say they ‘lost their battle’ with the disease. You battle an enemy.
And death is an enemy. It takes away from us people we love dearly. They can never be replaced. We can never be the same. Our lives take on a new shape over a period of time, but we all miss them.
In the face of an enemy’s action, our grief is not selfish. It is normal. We grieve, because we love. The one we love is no longer here for us to love. Our hearts ache with the pain, and we grieve. Anything less is unnatural.
You may know a popular reading at funerals is a piece called ‘Death is nothing at all’ by Henry Scott Holland. I have read it at funerals, but my problem is that death isn’t nothing, it’s a real and present enemy. Taken the way they are at funerals, you would think Holland was trivialising the grief experience. But they are lifted out of context from a sermon he preached when King Edward VII died. The sermon was called ‘King of Terrors’, and he knew well the terror that death brings.
So let us be real about grief. Let us own it. We don’t get anywhere without being honest about reality. And the reality of death leads us to grief.
However, says Paul, we grieve with hope. Let’s go back to that language of death being about ‘losing a battle’. Often we may also say – although not necessarily in connection with death – that someone has ‘lost the battle, but won the war’. Essentially, that’s what Christians say about death, and why we grieve with hope. We may ‘lose the battle’ in death, but in the long run we ‘win the war’.
How can we say that?
It’s because of the next thing Paul says:
We believe that Jesus died and rose again, and so we believe that God will bring with Jesus those who have fallen asleep in him. (Verse 14)
‘We believe that Jesus died and rose again.’ That’s the key. Jesus didn’t merely die. He rose from the dead. That may seem a fantastic and ridiculous claim in an age when atheist scientists claim to reduce religious belief to a delusion, but I believe there is decent historical evidence for the resurrection of Jesus. I don’t have time to go into it now, and besides you didn’t RSVP to a lecture tonight. However, since I believe Jesus is risen, I believe he shows the way to hope. I believe his resurrection is the winning of the war that trumps the losing of the battle in death.
It’s by trusting our lives into Jesus’ hands and committing to follow him that we share this hope. He wants to share it with everyone. But it’s a gift that needs to be received.
Let me tell you a story. When I was young, my Dad tried to explain the Christian hope in the face of death to me. Dad worked in banking, and he asked me to imagine that NatWest had ordered him to take a new post with them in Australia. How would we feel?
Well, I would be upset not to see him, I said. Much as I loved Mum and my sister, I would not want to be parted from him.
Yes, he said, of course you would feel like that. But while we remained behind in England, he would not only be working but preparing a new home and new life for us. Then, one day when that was ready, we would move to Australia and be reunited.
For the follower of Jesus, death is like that temporary parting. While it lasts, it is full of anguish. But one day it will end, and there will be a joyful reunion. This is the grieving with hope that is Jesus’ gift to all who put their faith in him.
Let me finish with a piece that echoes that idea. It’s called ‘What is Dying?’ by Charles Henry Brent:
What is dying?
I am standing on the seashore.
A ship sails and spreads her white sails to
the morning breeze and starts for the ocean.
She is an object of beauty
and I stand and watch her till at last
she fades on the horizon,
and someone at my side says, “She is gone.”
Gone where?
Gone from my sight, that is all;
she is just as large in the masts,
hull and spars as she was when I saw her,
and just as able to bear her load
of living freight to its destination.
The diminished size and total loss of sight
is in me, not in her.
And just at that moment when someone at my side says,
“She is gone”,
there are others who are watching her coming,
and other voices take up the glad shout,
“There she comes”,
and that is dying.
Big Circumstance 