Category: Books

Tomorrow’s Sermon: Foundations For Discipleship

Matthew
4:12-23

Introduction
The painter Edouard Manet is now recognised as one of the great masters of
Impressionist art, but his career didn’t get off to a very promising start. His
first ‘commission’ was as a sixteen-year-old sailor visiting Rio de Janeiro. The
ship’s cargo of cheeses had deteriorated during the long sea voyage, and Manet
was asked to touch up the rinds, which had been damaged on the journey. Unfortunately
the paint which he used had lead in it, and the cheeses caused a local outbreak
of lead poisoning.[1]

Beginnings. For Manet, a disaster. For some of us, an
embarrassment. But sometimes, beginnings show us in microcosm what is to come. Beginnings
can show us the foundations on which the subsequent building will take shape.

In Jesus’ case, we have a story of beginnings here. Matthew
records the beginning of his public work in today’s Gospel reading. In this
short episode, we see some key features that would mark Jesus’ life from now
on.

However, why look at these foundational features of Jesus’
life? Because it’s interesting? No. Because Jesus is our model for life and
discipleship. What might we find?

1. Movement
Some translations say that Jesus ‘withdrew’ to Galilee. You could understand
that, given that this follows John’s arrest (verse 12). But if it is a
withdrawal, it’s a strange one. He hardly goes undercover. This is not the
disappearing act of a stock market trader who has lost his bank between three
and four million pounds!

No. The movement of Jesus is not a withdrawal to hide away,
in case the same forces who despatched his cousin John come knocking for him. Jesus
makes a tactical move to a place where he can launch his public ministry
fruitfully. There is no cowering in the face of opposition here. Admittedly,
Capernaum might be a favourable location: it was within the more tolerant Galilee.
On the other hand, Galilee was historically a base for the Zealots who opposed
Roman occupying forces with terrorist-like guerrilla tactics. And – as the
quotation from Isaiah shows – it was known as ‘Galilee of the Gentiles’. Some of
the synagogues excavated in the area show this influence: when I visited in
1989, you could see the signs of the zodiac on the floor of one, indicating an
interest in astrology. That suggests a fusing of Jewish faith with something
the Scriptures forbid.

So there were pros and cons to Jesus basing himself in
Galilee, and Capernaum in particular. It could be tough, but there were the
prospects for a sympathetic hearing, too. We can be sure of this: Jesus wasn’t
one to batten down the hatches. He didn’t go on the defensive in the face of
difficulties.

I used to know a vicar who had previously been a travelling
evangelist. He said that whatever town he visited in order to conduct a
mission, the local Christians always told him the same story: ‘It’s so hard for
the Gospel here.’ They might even tell him it was the hardest town in the
country for Christian faith. My friend would have no truck with this. He was
not prepared to let their stories daunt him. I think he had a Christ-like
attitude in taking that stance.

It is easy to feel daunted about the prospects for the
Gospel today. Certainly, there are hard places and factors that discourage us. However,
Jesus does not allow us the excuse to pull up the drawbridge and retreat inside
our Christian castle. He calls us to be on the move, looking for opportunities
to be Gospel witnesses. The movement may be geographical – to a new place. The movement
may be one of change in an existing situation.

It is not that I am guaranteeing hordes of converts swarming
into the church. The Jesus who moved about his native country so much in three
years of public ministry saw as many people put off by him or reject him as he
did embrace his message. But wherever he went, he brought light to people
living in darkness. And he calls us to be on the move for the sake of the
Gospel. Moving forwards, that is, not retreating.

2. Message
Jesus has a simple message: ‘Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near’
(verse 17). You want foundations? You have them here. In these words is the
core of Jesus’ message. The kingdom of heaven has come near – what will your
response be? In Jesus, God’s reign comes close – how will you react? More
bluntly, God rules – what are you going to do about it?

God rules. Jesus will demonstrate that. He does so in this
passage, with the healings. He will do so in other ways, with his command over
nature, and by teaching with authority – unlike the religious leaders. God rules.
God does not simply have the title of king, God acts as king. Jesus shows this.
How will people react? Some will respond with joy. It will lead to them
following Jesus. Others will follow while the going is good, and then slip
away. Others will be offended. They will oppose him, and kill him.

One thing you don’t see is apathy. It was hard to encounter
Jesus and just shrug your shoulders as if nothing had happened. Because something
had happened. Someone had happened. You had to lean one way or another. You couldn’t
stay in the middle of the road.

When John Sentamu was enthroned
as Archbishop of York in November 2005, he pointed to this issue in his
enthronement sermon:

“The scandal of the church is that the Christ-event is no
longer life-changing, it has become life-enhancing,” he said. “We’ve lost the
power and joy that makes real disciples, and we’ve become consumers of religion
and not disciples of Jesus Christ.”

Perhaps that is our problem. Jesus never meant his message
to be life-enhancing, something that would make a good thing better. You can
see plenty of adverts for such products in a consumer society. However, Jesus
is not a product. Jesus is Lord, and he represents his Father, the King of the
universe. Jesus is not a deluxe addition to life. Jesus is life or death. We rely
on him, not on touching wood.

If we truly believe this, it will show in our lifestyles. There
will be something special about us, not just as individuals, but also as the
community of the church. People will say again, ‘See how those Christians love
one another.’ Society will be alternately seeking us for help, and in awe of
us, keeping their distance. If the world can see that Jesus orders our lives,
and the difference that makes, we shall earn the right to speak and challenge
people to walk in his ways, too. While Jesus is just a consumer choice, though,
we shall have no such cutting edge to our proclamation.

3. Mission
I have dim and distant memories of starting Sunday School as a small boy. In the
Beginners’ Department, we marched round in a circle to put our offertory in the
box, singing the same song every week: ‘Hear the pennies dropping.’ They were
such joyful days, singing away, that I bawled my eyes out when I moved to the
Infants’ Department on Promotion Sunday one year.

The singing left a mark on me in those early days. If I ever
see a book of the old CSSM Choruses, I have fond memories. When Rebekah first
came back from the Edward Bear Club at St Mary’s singing ‘Wide, wide as the
ocean’, I went misty-eyed.

And one song in particular formed its shape on my memory. ‘I
will make you fishers of men, if you follow me.’ Of course, it quotes our story
today. Jesus sees two fishermen, Simon Peter and his brother Andrew, casting a
net into the lake (verse 18), and he says, ‘Follow me, and I will make you fish
for people’ (verse 19). They leave their nets straight away to follow him
(verse 20), and he repeats the summons to James and John, the sons of Zebedee
(verses 21-22).

It was common for young men following a rabbi to imbibe both
his teaching and his lifestyle. However, normally, the young man would make his
own approach to the rabbi. It was highly unusual for the master to take the
initiative in calling someone to follow him.[2]

But that’s what happens here: Jesus says, ‘Follow me’. He is
intentional about gaining disciples. For mission is at the heart of his life. Not
only that, the disciples are to reproduce that emphasis on mission, if they are
to imitate him. Thus, it becomes, ‘Follow me, and I will make you fish for
people.’

Mission, then, for Jesus, is not an optional extra for
particularly enthusiastic disciples. It is for all. Not all of us are
evangelists (research suggests about one in ten might be). However, we are all
witnesses. We all have a part to play in God’s mission.

I read a
moving story[3]
along these lines yesterday. A man who rejoiced under the name Catfish
occasionally darkened the doors of a church building. He wasn’t regular, like
his wife. He was diagnosed with cancer. Someone regularly visited him in
hospital. Twice, the visitor asked Catfish if he’d made his peace with God. Every
time, he gave the same answer: ‘The Lord’s Spirit don’t strive with me anymore,
because I denied him and I missed my chance.’

The third time he visited, Catfish was waiting to die. The visitor
said, ‘You know what I’m going to ask, I want to know if you’ve made your peace
with God.’ Back came the usual answer. ‘The Spirit don’t strive with me
anymore. I’ve missed my chance.’ The friend squeezed Catfish’s hand, looked him
in the eye, and said, ‘My God is more merciful than that.’ Catfish broke down
in tears and found the peace of God before he died. All because one friend had
the courage to fish, and tell him what God was really like.

4. Ministry
The story naturally ends at verse 22, but for some reason the Lectionary gives
us verse 23, which is the first verse of the next episode in the Gospel:

Jesus went throughout Galilee, teaching in their synagogues
and proclaiming the good news of the kingdom and curing every disease and every
sickness among the people.

Here, Jesus puts it all together and applies what he has
already modelled. There is movement –
‘throughout Galilee’; the message – ‘proclaiming
the good news of the kingdom’; and there is mission,
as he heals the sick.

I can sum up the theme of Jesus’ ministry by recounting a
story. I mentioned earlier that I visited the Holy Land in 1989. When we
visited Galilee, we had the privilege on the Sunday morning of attending a Melkite
church[4]
in the village of Ibillin. The priest was a Palestinian man called Elias Chacour[5].
He is internationally famous for promoting reconciliation between the warring
communities in the Holy Land. Since his church was in communion with the Pope
and most of us weren’t Catholics, there was a delicate question about receiving
Holy Communion from him. We expected to hear that we couldn’t partake, and at
most could receive a blessing. We reckoned without Elias Chacour. He said, ‘Nobody
ordained me to check someone’s membership ticket. You are all welcome at the
sacrament.’

It was pure grace. No checking whether we met his standards;
Father Elias gave the bread and wine to all who would receive whatever God
would give them. And in that simple but rebellious act, I see an echo of Jesus.
As he travels around Galilee, preaching and healing, there is no hint that he
only offers the benefits of the kingdom to those who are good enough, to the
respectable, to those who tick the right boxes. He gives the love of God in
every way, to all and sundry, in an unconditional manner. He is not like the church
I once heard of that used to bus in elderly lonely people for socialising and a
meal, but which would not feed them until they had agreed to listen to the Gospel.
Jesus behaves here like the sower of his famous parable, who recklessly and
generously threw the seed here, there and everywhere, and waited for the
results. May the same sense of abandon characterise the way we spread around the
love of God.

[1]
Simon Coupland, Spicing
Up Your Speaking, p 203 # 193.

[4] The
Melkites are ordered like the Eastern Orthodox, but are in communion with Rome.

[5]
See his books Blood
Brothers and We
Belong To The Land, or his biography The
Other Side Of Welcome.

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Tomorrow’s Sermon: Foundations For Discipleship

Matthew
4:12-23

Introduction
The painter Edouard Manet is now recognised as one of the great masters of
Impressionist art, but his career didn’t get off to a very promising start. His
first ‘commission’ was as a sixteen-year-old sailor visiting Rio de Janeiro. The
ship’s cargo of cheeses had deteriorated during the long sea voyage, and Manet
was asked to touch up the rinds, which had been damaged on the journey. Unfortunately
the paint which he used had lead in it, and the cheeses caused a local outbreak
of lead poisoning.[1]

Beginnings. For Manet, a disaster. For some of us, an
embarrassment. But sometimes, beginnings show us in microcosm what is to come. Beginnings
can show us the foundations on which the subsequent building will take shape.

In Jesus’ case, we have a story of beginnings here. Matthew
records the beginning of his public work in today’s Gospel reading. In this
short episode, we see some key features that would mark Jesus’ life from now
on.

However, why look at these foundational features of Jesus’
life? Because it’s interesting? No. Because Jesus is our model for life and
discipleship. What might we find?

1. Movement
Some translations say that Jesus ‘withdrew’ to Galilee. You could understand
that, given that this follows John’s arrest (verse 12). But if it is a
withdrawal, it’s a strange one. He hardly goes undercover. This is not the
disappearing act of a stock market trader who has lost his bank between three
and four million pounds!

No. The movement of Jesus is not a withdrawal to hide away,
in case the same forces who despatched his cousin John come knocking for him. Jesus
makes a tactical move to a place where he can launch his public ministry
fruitfully. There is no cowering in the face of opposition here. Admittedly,
Capernaum might be a favourable location: it was within the more tolerant Galilee.
On the other hand, Galilee was historically a base for the Zealots who opposed
Roman occupying forces with terrorist-like guerrilla tactics. And – as the
quotation from Isaiah shows – it was known as ‘Galilee of the Gentiles’. Some of
the synagogues excavated in the area show this influence: when I visited in
1989, you could see the signs of the zodiac on the floor of one, indicating an
interest in astrology. That suggests a fusing of Jewish faith with something
the Scriptures forbid.

So there were pros and cons to Jesus basing himself in
Galilee, and Capernaum in particular. It could be tough, but there were the
prospects for a sympathetic hearing, too. We can be sure of this: Jesus wasn’t
one to batten down the hatches. He didn’t go on the defensive in the face of
difficulties.

I used to know a vicar who had previously been a travelling
evangelist. He said that whatever town he visited in order to conduct a
mission, the local Christians always told him the same story: ‘It’s so hard for
the Gospel here.’ They might even tell him it was the hardest town in the
country for Christian faith. My friend would have no truck with this. He was
not prepared to let their stories daunt him. I think he had a Christ-like
attitude in taking that stance.

It is easy to feel daunted about the prospects for the
Gospel today. Certainly, there are hard places and factors that discourage us. However,
Jesus does not allow us the excuse to pull up the drawbridge and retreat inside
our Christian castle. He calls us to be on the move, looking for opportunities
to be Gospel witnesses. The movement may be geographical – to a new place. The movement
may be one of change in an existing situation.

It is not that I am guaranteeing hordes of converts swarming
into the church. The Jesus who moved about his native country so much in three
years of public ministry saw as many people put off by him or reject him as he
did embrace his message. But wherever he went, he brought light to people
living in darkness. And he calls us to be on the move for the sake of the
Gospel. Moving forwards, that is, not retreating.

2. Message
Jesus has a simple message: ‘Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near’
(verse 17). You want foundations? You have them here. In these words is the
core of Jesus’ message. The kingdom of heaven has come near – what will your
response be? In Jesus, God’s reign comes close – how will you react? More
bluntly, God rules – what are you going to do about it?

God rules. Jesus will demonstrate that. He does so in this
passage, with the healings. He will do so in other ways, with his command over
nature, and by teaching with authority – unlike the religious leaders. God rules.
God does not simply have the title of king, God acts as king. Jesus shows this.
How will people react? Some will respond with joy. It will lead to them
following Jesus. Others will follow while the going is good, and then slip
away. Others will be offended. They will oppose him, and kill him.

One thing you don’t see is apathy. It was hard to encounter
Jesus and just shrug your shoulders as if nothing had happened. Because something
had happened. Someone had happened. You had to lean one way or another. You couldn’t
stay in the middle of the road.

When John Sentamu was enthroned
as Archbishop of York in November 2005, he pointed to this issue in his
enthronement sermon:

“The scandal of the church is that the Christ-event is no
longer life-changing, it has become life-enhancing,” he said. “We’ve lost the
power and joy that makes real disciples, and we’ve become consumers of religion
and not disciples of Jesus Christ.”

Perhaps that is our problem. Jesus never meant his message
to be life-enhancing, something that would make a good thing better. You can
see plenty of adverts for such products in a consumer society. However, Jesus
is not a product. Jesus is Lord, and he represents his Father, the King of the
universe. Jesus is not a deluxe addition to life. Jesus is life or death. We rely
on him, not on touching wood.

If we truly believe this, it will show in our lifestyles. There
will be something special about us, not just as individuals, but also as the
community of the church. People will say again, ‘See how those Christians love
one another.’ Society will be alternately seeking us for help, and in awe of
us, keeping their distance. If the world can see that Jesus orders our lives,
and the difference that makes, we shall earn the right to speak and challenge
people to walk in his ways, too. While Jesus is just a consumer choice, though,
we shall have no such cutting edge to our proclamation.

3. Mission
I have dim and distant memories of starting Sunday School as a small boy. In the
Beginners’ Department, we marched round in a circle to put our offertory in the
box, singing the same song every week: ‘Hear the pennies dropping.’ They were
such joyful days, singing away, that I bawled my eyes out when I moved to the
Infants’ Department on Promotion Sunday one year.

The singing left a mark on me in those early days. If I ever
see a book of the old CSSM Choruses, I have fond memories. When Rebekah first
came back from the Edward Bear Club at St Mary’s singing ‘Wide, wide as the
ocean’, I went misty-eyed.

And one song in particular formed its shape on my memory. ‘I
will make you fishers of men, if you follow me.’ Of course, it quotes our story
today. Jesus sees two fishermen, Simon Peter and his brother Andrew, casting a
net into the lake (verse 18), and he says, ‘Follow me, and I will make you fish
for people’ (verse 19). They leave their nets straight away to follow him
(verse 20), and he repeats the summons to James and John, the sons of Zebedee
(verses 21-22).

It was common for young men following a rabbi to imbibe both
his teaching and his lifestyle. However, normally, the young man would make his
own approach to the rabbi. It was highly unusual for the master to take the
initiative in calling someone to follow him.[2]

But that’s what happens here: Jesus says, ‘Follow me’. He is
intentional about gaining disciples. For mission is at the heart of his life. Not
only that, the disciples are to reproduce that emphasis on mission, if they are
to imitate him. Thus, it becomes, ‘Follow me, and I will make you fish for
people.’

Mission, then, for Jesus, is not an optional extra for
particularly enthusiastic disciples. It is for all. Not all of us are
evangelists (research suggests about one in ten might be). However, we are all
witnesses. We all have a part to play in God’s mission.

I read a
moving story[3]
along these lines yesterday. A man who rejoiced under the name Catfish
occasionally darkened the doors of a church building. He wasn’t regular, like
his wife. He was diagnosed with cancer. Someone regularly visited him in
hospital. Twice, the visitor asked Catfish if he’d made his peace with God. Every
time, he gave the same answer: ‘The Lord’s Spirit don’t strive with me anymore,
because I denied him and I missed my chance.’

The third time he visited, Catfish was waiting to die. The visitor
said, ‘You know what I’m going to ask, I want to know if you’ve made your peace
with God.’ Back came the usual answer. ‘The Spirit don’t strive with me
anymore. I’ve missed my chance.’ The friend squeezed Catfish’s hand, looked him
in the eye, and said, ‘My God is more merciful than that.’ Catfish broke down
in tears and found the peace of God before he died. All because one friend had
the courage to fish, and tell him what God was really like.

4. Ministry
The story naturally ends at verse 22, but for some reason the Lectionary gives
us verse 23, which is the first verse of the next episode in the Gospel:

Jesus went throughout Galilee, teaching in their synagogues
and proclaiming the good news of the kingdom and curing every disease and every
sickness among the people.

Here, Jesus puts it all together and applies what he has
already modelled. There is movement –
‘throughout Galilee’; the message – ‘proclaiming
the good news of the kingdom’; and there is mission,
as he heals the sick.

I can sum up the theme of Jesus’ ministry by recounting a
story. I mentioned earlier that I visited the Holy Land in 1989. When we
visited Galilee, we had the privilege on the Sunday morning of attending a Melkite
church[4]
in the village of Ibillin. The priest was a Palestinian man called Elias Chacour[5].
He is internationally famous for promoting reconciliation between the warring
communities in the Holy Land. Since his church was in communion with the Pope
and most of us weren’t Catholics, there was a delicate question about receiving
Holy Communion from him. We expected to hear that we couldn’t partake, and at
most could receive a blessing. We reckoned without Elias Chacour. He said, ‘Nobody
ordained me to check someone’s membership ticket. You are all welcome at the
sacrament.’

It was pure grace. No checking whether we met his standards;
Father Elias gave the bread and wine to all who would receive whatever God
would give them. And in that simple but rebellious act, I see an echo of Jesus.
As he travels around Galilee, preaching and healing, there is no hint that he
only offers the benefits of the kingdom to those who are good enough, to the
respectable, to those who tick the right boxes. He gives the love of God in
every way, to all and sundry, in an unconditional manner. He is not like the church
I once heard of that used to bus in elderly lonely people for socialising and a
meal, but which would not feed them until they had agreed to listen to the Gospel.
Jesus behaves here like the sower of his famous parable, who recklessly and
generously threw the seed here, there and everywhere, and waited for the
results. May the same sense of abandon characterise the way we spread around the
love of God.

[1]
Simon Coupland, Spicing
Up Your Speaking, p 203 # 193.

[4] The
Melkites are ordered like the Eastern Orthodox, but are in communion with Rome.

[5]
See his books Blood
Brothers and We
Belong To The Land, or his biography The
Other Side Of Welcome.

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0

Tomorrow’s Sermon: Joseph The Disciple

Matthew
1:18-25

Introduction
Here is a series of telegrams between a young man and his mother:

Mum
Wedding off STOP Mary pregnant STOP Not mine STOP Why me STOP
Joseph

Joseph
Cannot believe it STOP Seemed such a nice girl STOP Will you be stoning her
STOP
Mum

Mum
Have decided to dump her quietly STOP Stoning a bit messy STOP Still love her
STOP
Joseph

Joseph
Plenty more fish in the sea STOP What about Deborah from baker’s shop STOP You’ll
never be short of bagels STOP
Mum

Mum
Change of plans STOP Wedding back on STOP Angel told me God is father STOP See
you at the synagogue STOP
Joseph[1]

Poor Joseph. And he’s a neglected character in the Nativity
Story. But this morning I want to remedy that, to a small extent. I believe
Joseph is a positive example of discipleship. He is a man of faith, who goes
beyond human conventions to radical trust in God. How so? Here are three ways
in which he is a model disciple.

1. Joseph Goes Beyond Righteousness
Your fiancée is pregnant, and you’re not the father. What would you do? There are
plenty of answers that our culture might give, but in Joseph’s Jewish culture,
there is one answer: stone her. That is the righteous thing to do. It fulfils
the requirements of the Torah, the Jewish Law. Joseph, you have a reputation
for doing the right thing: organise the mob and the stones.

But Joseph, righteous as he is, does not want to expose Mary
to public disgrace (verse 19), let alone a stoning. He is more than righteous. He
has a strong streak of compassion in him. He decides to have the betrothal
dissolved. He doesn’t just follow the letter of the law; he is considerate. Surely,
we would respect a decent man like that today.

However, the story doesn’t stop there. In a dream, an angel
tells him not to be afraid to take Mary as his wife, because the Holy Spirit
has caused her to conceive (verse 20). Now that is one big step further. If being
considerate has moved him beyond cold righteousness, he is now being asked to
take a giant leap.

‘Don’t be afraid,’ says the angel. That’s the issue for
Joseph, isn’t it? Fear. He is afraid to take Mary as his wife. A quiet,
considerate dissolution of their relationship will at least preserve his
reputation. But to marry one who is already pregnant in a society that believes
sex is only for marriage – well! To marry Mary is for Joseph to share in her
shame. It is to stand with her in her social rejection.

Standing with the rejected – whether they deserve it or not –
is something Joseph’s legal son Jesus would do. Taking their shame upon
himself, although he was innocent would be central to Jesus’ life. He would be
baptised for repentance with sinners, even though he was guilty of nothing. He would
be executed on a cross, despite being innocent of the trumped-up charges. Jesus
would identify with the shamed and the sinners.

I am not saying that Mary had done wrong. She had not. For the
record, I believe in the Virgin Birth. But if you stand alongside the rejected,
you do so whether they are in the right or the wrong. So we care for an AIDS
patient, whether they were infected through a parent or spouse, or through
their own foolishness or sin. It’s called grace. We show love, forgiveness and
mercy to people. It’s not about whether they deserve it, because none of us deserves
it – especially ourselves.

And as we stand alongside the suffering, both the victims
and the culpable, our grace is what will speak most truly of God, rather than
our judgmentalism. I am not asking that we change our beliefs on the rights and
wrongs of certain ethical issues. I am saying, though, that a compassionate
solidarity with the hurting will speak faithfully about the purposes of God,
just as Joseph standing with Mary did.

2. Joseph Goes Beyond Tradition
When my sister and brother-in-law thought I would never marry, they gave their
second boy the middle name ‘David’ in my honour. When our daughter Rebekah was
born, we gave her the middle name ‘Anita’, after Debbie’s late mother. And when
Mark came along, we chose the middle name ‘Alan’, which is my father’s name.

Names are so important in the Bible, and perhaps nowhere
more than in the Nativity stories. Zechariah is to call his son ‘John’, and
here, the angel tells Joseph to name Mary’s child Jesus, ‘for he will save his
people from their sins’ (verse 21). The naming of Jesus to show his purpose and
destiny outranks any of the usual traditions. Remember that first century Jews
also had a tradition about using family names when a baby was born. We see it
in the surprise when Zechariah confirms his boy will be named ‘John’.

So Joseph’s obedience to God’s will as revealed by the angel
means that he will go beyond the normal human traditions. Traditions and
conventions have their place. They can describe tried and trusted ways of doing
things. They can be the means of handing down important truths. But when
tradition stops being a means to an end, we hit problems. When tradition
becomes an end in itself, we’re up the chute. When tradition has to be defended
or worshipped, we are in trouble.

The faithful disciple, then, will be keen to know when to
keep tradition and when to go beyond it. What is a tradition trying to
preserve? To take one issue here, does keeping wooden pews enhance worship? Do
the pews make us more like the community of Jesus or not? What exactly is the
church at gathered worship? We would need to pose questions like that if our
occasional discussions ever became a substantial debate.

We can be glad, though, that Joseph showed the obedience of the
disciple by dispensing with typical family tradition to name the baby ‘Jesus’. Giving
a child a name according to their divine purpose was the classic time when the
Jewish people over-ruled the tradition of family names. What matters most are
God’s purposes.

Therefore, that becomes the issue for us. What are God’s
purposes for us? His purposes for Jesus were those of salvation. He has
purposes for us in Hatfield Peverel and beyond. We have to ask whether our
traditions serve those purposes or get in the way.

One thing is for sure: Joseph becomes so committed to the
purposes of God that he is prepared to dispense with tradition if it gets in
the way. He is prepared to stick out as different from convention. Perhaps he
will be teased or mocked. If so, he takes the risk and the flak. It is worth
it, if going beyond tradition is what God requires in order for him to be
faithful.

And as with the first point, Joseph here gives a foretaste
of what Jesus will do. Jesus will participate in many Jewish traditions. But if
the traditions of the elders get in the way of grace and mercy, you can be sure
that Jesus will oppose them and thrown them out.

As for our situation, I’m not going to give any answers about
the pews or anything else. It’s something we have to grapple with together. Suffice
it to say, however, that like fire, tradition is a good servant but a bad
master. Is tradition our servant or our master? Joseph treats it as a servant,
and so does Jesus. Do we?

3. Joseph Goes Beyond His Rights
You will have heard preachers at Advent tell you before that a Jewish betrothal
is more than an engagement. The couple were called husband and wife (Joseph is
called ‘husband’ here in verse 19), and dissolving a betrothal required a
divorce. However, they only live together and sleep together once they are
married.

Against this background, let us assume that Joseph is a
typical red-blooded male. I think that’s reasonable. To read, then, at the end
of the story that not only did he obey by taking Mary as his wife, he also had
no marital relations with her until Jesus was born (verse 25), is quite a story
of self-denial! He does so to protect the integrity of the miracle. And it’s
because of Joseph’s self-denial here that we popularly speak of the Virgin
Birth rather than the Virginal Conception. Yes, Joseph is guarding the
integrity of God’s strange work by denying himself what every bridegroom would
have wanted on his wedding night and in the months to come.

It isn’t about the early Church having a downer on sex. That
wouldn’t be true of the New Testament. In 1 Corinthians 7, Paul tells his
readers there is only one reason why a married couple should deny each other,
and that is for a short season of prayer. No, as I said, Joseph abstains as an
act of self-denial to witness to the miraculous work of God in his wife’s body.

Suppose it became widely known that Joseph had done this. He
has probably already been despised for standing with the rejected Mary. He has
broken social convention. Now, surely, he will be mocked for this. What a fool
he will appear to be. His manhood will be in question.[2]

Were it to have happened today and in our culture, Joseph
would have been ridiculed even more. Not merely because ours is a sex-saturated
society, but because that is one symptom of a society addicted to pleasure. Self-denial
is not a prime virtue; self-fulfilment is. Do what you want, so long as you don’t
hurt anybody. You deserve it. Er,
why?

The lifestyle of the Christian disciple is not to satiate
every desire. Christ does allow us to enjoy following him. But it is the way of
love. And love gives up things for the beloved. Love sacrifices. It risks. It gives
up.

Our culture does know that in certain ways. We expect it of
parents with regard to children. We admire it when we see it in a Mother Teresa.
But we don’t make it the norm. We build
our economy around desire, lust and consumption.

Yet again, though, Joseph is only doing what his legal son
Jesus would do and teach. Jesus would grow up to teach that the lifestyle of
God’s kingdom was one of denying ourselves for the sake of the Gospel. And as
we approach the annual orgy of buying and selling, giving and receiving, we do
well to ponder the example of Joseph and consider where we would deny ourselves
our ‘rights’ so that the purposes of God’s merciful kingdom might be more truly
fulfilled.

Conclusion
You may know the story of how somebody once asked a famous orchestral conductor
what the hardest instrument to play in the orchestra was. The reply came back: ‘Second
fiddle.’ People want to play first fiddle, but who wants to play second? It
takes not only technique: it requires a humble attitude.

Joseph is a ‘second fiddle’ player in the nativity stories:
second fiddle to Mary, and ultimately second fiddle to Jesus. But what a second
fiddle! He gives us a taste of the melody Jesus will play. Joseph foreshadows
Jesus’ identification with the despised. Jesus’ overturning of tradition when
it gets in the way of God’s kingdom – Joseph previews that, too. And Joseph
models Jesus’ call to self-denial.

Joseph may be a bit-part player in the Nativity, but he
deserves to be known as more than the legal father of Jesus. He is more than
that. He is a model disciple of Jesus. May we follow in his ways this
Christmas.

[2] I
am grateful to Ruth
Haley Barton’s article Joseph And The
Walk Of Faith for some of these perspectives.

Technorati Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

0

Tomorrow’s Sermon: Joseph The Disciple

Matthew
1:18-25

Introduction
Here is a series of telegrams between a young man and his mother:

Mum
Wedding off STOP Mary pregnant STOP Not mine STOP Why me STOP
Joseph

Joseph
Cannot believe it STOP Seemed such a nice girl STOP Will you be stoning her
STOP
Mum

Mum
Have decided to dump her quietly STOP Stoning a bit messy STOP Still love her
STOP
Joseph

Joseph
Plenty more fish in the sea STOP What about Deborah from baker’s shop STOP You’ll
never be short of bagels STOP
Mum

Mum
Change of plans STOP Wedding back on STOP Angel told me God is father STOP See
you at the synagogue STOP
Joseph[1]

Poor Joseph. And he’s a neglected character in the Nativity
Story. But this morning I want to remedy that, to a small extent. I believe
Joseph is a positive example of discipleship. He is a man of faith, who goes
beyond human conventions to radical trust in God. How so? Here are three ways
in which he is a model disciple.

1. Joseph Goes Beyond Righteousness
Your fiancée is pregnant, and you’re not the father. What would you do? There are
plenty of answers that our culture might give, but in Joseph’s Jewish culture,
there is one answer: stone her. That is the righteous thing to do. It fulfils
the requirements of the Torah, the Jewish Law. Joseph, you have a reputation
for doing the right thing: organise the mob and the stones.

But Joseph, righteous as he is, does not want to expose Mary
to public disgrace (verse 19), let alone a stoning. He is more than righteous. He
has a strong streak of compassion in him. He decides to have the betrothal
dissolved. He doesn’t just follow the letter of the law; he is considerate. Surely,
we would respect a decent man like that today.

However, the story doesn’t stop there. In a dream, an angel
tells him not to be afraid to take Mary as his wife, because the Holy Spirit
has caused her to conceive (verse 20). Now that is one big step further. If being
considerate has moved him beyond cold righteousness, he is now being asked to
take a giant leap.

‘Don’t be afraid,’ says the angel. That’s the issue for
Joseph, isn’t it? Fear. He is afraid to take Mary as his wife. A quiet,
considerate dissolution of their relationship will at least preserve his
reputation. But to marry one who is already pregnant in a society that believes
sex is only for marriage – well! To marry Mary is for Joseph to share in her
shame. It is to stand with her in her social rejection.

Standing with the rejected – whether they deserve it or not –
is something Joseph’s legal son Jesus would do. Taking their shame upon
himself, although he was innocent would be central to Jesus’ life. He would be
baptised for repentance with sinners, even though he was guilty of nothing. He would
be executed on a cross, despite being innocent of the trumped-up charges. Jesus
would identify with the shamed and the sinners.

I am not saying that Mary had done wrong. She had not. For the
record, I believe in the Virgin Birth. But if you stand alongside the rejected,
you do so whether they are in the right or the wrong. So we care for an AIDS
patient, whether they were infected through a parent or spouse, or through
their own foolishness or sin. It’s called grace. We show love, forgiveness and
mercy to people. It’s not about whether they deserve it, because none of us deserves
it – especially ourselves.

And as we stand alongside the suffering, both the victims
and the culpable, our grace is what will speak most truly of God, rather than
our judgmentalism. I am not asking that we change our beliefs on the rights and
wrongs of certain ethical issues. I am saying, though, that a compassionate
solidarity with the hurting will speak faithfully about the purposes of God,
just as Joseph standing with Mary did.

2. Joseph Goes Beyond Tradition
When my sister and brother-in-law thought I would never marry, they gave their
second boy the middle name ‘David’ in my honour. When our daughter Rebekah was
born, we gave her the middle name ‘Anita’, after Debbie’s late mother. And when
Mark came along, we chose the middle name ‘Alan’, which is my father’s name.

Names are so important in the Bible, and perhaps nowhere
more than in the Nativity stories. Zechariah is to call his son ‘John’, and
here, the angel tells Joseph to name Mary’s child Jesus, ‘for he will save his
people from their sins’ (verse 21). The naming of Jesus to show his purpose and
destiny outranks any of the usual traditions. Remember that first century Jews
also had a tradition about using family names when a baby was born. We see it
in the surprise when Zechariah confirms his boy will be named ‘John’.

So Joseph’s obedience to God’s will as revealed by the angel
means that he will go beyond the normal human traditions. Traditions and
conventions have their place. They can describe tried and trusted ways of doing
things. They can be the means of handing down important truths. But when
tradition stops being a means to an end, we hit problems. When tradition
becomes an end in itself, we’re up the chute. When tradition has to be defended
or worshipped, we are in trouble.

The faithful disciple, then, will be keen to know when to
keep tradition and when to go beyond it. What is a tradition trying to
preserve? To take one issue here, does keeping wooden pews enhance worship? Do
the pews make us more like the community of Jesus or not? What exactly is the
church at gathered worship? We would need to pose questions like that if our
occasional discussions ever became a substantial debate.

We can be glad, though, that Joseph showed the obedience of the
disciple by dispensing with typical family tradition to name the baby ‘Jesus’. Giving
a child a name according to their divine purpose was the classic time when the
Jewish people over-ruled the tradition of family names. What matters most are
God’s purposes.

Therefore, that becomes the issue for us. What are God’s
purposes for us? His purposes for Jesus were those of salvation. He has
purposes for us in Hatfield Peverel and beyond. We have to ask whether our
traditions serve those purposes or get in the way.

One thing is for sure: Joseph becomes so committed to the
purposes of God that he is prepared to dispense with tradition if it gets in
the way. He is prepared to stick out as different from convention. Perhaps he
will be teased or mocked. If so, he takes the risk and the flak. It is worth
it, if going beyond tradition is what God requires in order for him to be
faithful.

And as with the first point, Joseph here gives a foretaste
of what Jesus will do. Jesus will participate in many Jewish traditions. But if
the traditions of the elders get in the way of grace and mercy, you can be sure
that Jesus will oppose them and thrown them out.

As for our situation, I’m not going to give any answers about
the pews or anything else. It’s something we have to grapple with together. Suffice
it to say, however, that like fire, tradition is a good servant but a bad
master. Is tradition our servant or our master? Joseph treats it as a servant,
and so does Jesus. Do we?

3. Joseph Goes Beyond His Rights
You will have heard preachers at Advent tell you before that a Jewish betrothal
is more than an engagement. The couple were called husband and wife (Joseph is
called ‘husband’ here in verse 19), and dissolving a betrothal required a
divorce. However, they only live together and sleep together once they are
married.

Against this background, let us assume that Joseph is a
typical red-blooded male. I think that’s reasonable. To read, then, at the end
of the story that not only did he obey by taking Mary as his wife, he also had
no marital relations with her until Jesus was born (verse 25), is quite a story
of self-denial! He does so to protect the integrity of the miracle. And it’s
because of Joseph’s self-denial here that we popularly speak of the Virgin
Birth rather than the Virginal Conception. Yes, Joseph is guarding the
integrity of God’s strange work by denying himself what every bridegroom would
have wanted on his wedding night and in the months to come.

It isn’t about the early Church having a downer on sex. That
wouldn’t be true of the New Testament. In 1 Corinthians 7, Paul tells his
readers there is only one reason why a married couple should deny each other,
and that is for a short season of prayer. No, as I said, Joseph abstains as an
act of self-denial to witness to the miraculous work of God in his wife’s body.

Suppose it became widely known that Joseph had done this. He
has probably already been despised for standing with the rejected Mary. He has
broken social convention. Now, surely, he will be mocked for this. What a fool
he will appear to be. His manhood will be in question.[2]

Were it to have happened today and in our culture, Joseph
would have been ridiculed even more. Not merely because ours is a sex-saturated
society, but because that is one symptom of a society addicted to pleasure. Self-denial
is not a prime virtue; self-fulfilment is. Do what you want, so long as you don’t
hurt anybody. You deserve it. Er,
why?

The lifestyle of the Christian disciple is not to satiate
every desire. Christ does allow us to enjoy following him. But it is the way of
love. And love gives up things for the beloved. Love sacrifices. It risks. It gives
up.

Our culture does know that in certain ways. We expect it of
parents with regard to children. We admire it when we see it in a Mother Teresa.
But we don’t make it the norm. We build
our economy around desire, lust and consumption.

Yet again, though, Joseph is only doing what his legal son
Jesus would do and teach. Jesus would grow up to teach that the lifestyle of
God’s kingdom was one of denying ourselves for the sake of the Gospel. And as
we approach the annual orgy of buying and selling, giving and receiving, we do
well to ponder the example of Joseph and consider where we would deny ourselves
our ‘rights’ so that the purposes of God’s merciful kingdom might be more truly
fulfilled.

Conclusion
You may know the story of how somebody once asked a famous orchestral conductor
what the hardest instrument to play in the orchestra was. The reply came back: ‘Second
fiddle.’ People want to play first fiddle, but who wants to play second? It
takes not only technique: it requires a humble attitude.

Joseph is a ‘second fiddle’ player in the nativity stories:
second fiddle to Mary, and ultimately second fiddle to Jesus. But what a second
fiddle! He gives us a taste of the melody Jesus will play. Joseph foreshadows
Jesus’ identification with the despised. Jesus’ overturning of tradition when
it gets in the way of God’s kingdom – Joseph previews that, too. And Joseph
models Jesus’ call to self-denial.

Joseph may be a bit-part player in the Nativity, but he
deserves to be known as more than the legal father of Jesus. He is more than
that. He is a model disciple of Jesus. May we follow in his ways this
Christmas.

[2] I
am grateful to Ruth
Haley Barton’s article Joseph And The
Walk Of Faith for some of these perspectives.

Technorati Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

0

Tomorrow’s Sermon: Joseph The Disciple

Matthew
1:18-25

Introduction
Here is a series of telegrams between a young man and his mother:

Mum
Wedding off STOP Mary pregnant STOP Not mine STOP Why me STOP
Joseph

Joseph
Cannot believe it STOP Seemed such a nice girl STOP Will you be stoning her
STOP
Mum

Mum
Have decided to dump her quietly STOP Stoning a bit messy STOP Still love her
STOP
Joseph

Joseph
Plenty more fish in the sea STOP What about Deborah from baker’s shop STOP You’ll
never be short of bagels STOP
Mum

Mum
Change of plans STOP Wedding back on STOP Angel told me God is father STOP See
you at the synagogue STOP
Joseph[1]

Poor Joseph. And he’s a neglected character in the Nativity
Story. But this morning I want to remedy that, to a small extent. I believe
Joseph is a positive example of discipleship. He is a man of faith, who goes
beyond human conventions to radical trust in God. How so? Here are three ways
in which he is a model disciple.

1. Joseph Goes Beyond Righteousness
Your fiancée is pregnant, and you’re not the father. What would you do? There are
plenty of answers that our culture might give, but in Joseph’s Jewish culture,
there is one answer: stone her. That is the righteous thing to do. It fulfils
the requirements of the Torah, the Jewish Law. Joseph, you have a reputation
for doing the right thing: organise the mob and the stones.

But Joseph, righteous as he is, does not want to expose Mary
to public disgrace (verse 19), let alone a stoning. He is more than righteous. He
has a strong streak of compassion in him. He decides to have the betrothal
dissolved. He doesn’t just follow the letter of the law; he is considerate. Surely,
we would respect a decent man like that today.

However, the story doesn’t stop there. In a dream, an angel
tells him not to be afraid to take Mary as his wife, because the Holy Spirit
has caused her to conceive (verse 20). Now that is one big step further. If being
considerate has moved him beyond cold righteousness, he is now being asked to
take a giant leap.

‘Don’t be afraid,’ says the angel. That’s the issue for
Joseph, isn’t it? Fear. He is afraid to take Mary as his wife. A quiet,
considerate dissolution of their relationship will at least preserve his
reputation. But to marry one who is already pregnant in a society that believes
sex is only for marriage – well! To marry Mary is for Joseph to share in her
shame. It is to stand with her in her social rejection.

Standing with the rejected – whether they deserve it or not –
is something Joseph’s legal son Jesus would do. Taking their shame upon
himself, although he was innocent would be central to Jesus’ life. He would be
baptised for repentance with sinners, even though he was guilty of nothing. He would
be executed on a cross, despite being innocent of the trumped-up charges. Jesus
would identify with the shamed and the sinners.

I am not saying that Mary had done wrong. She had not. For the
record, I believe in the Virgin Birth. But if you stand alongside the rejected,
you do so whether they are in the right or the wrong. So we care for an AIDS
patient, whether they were infected through a parent or spouse, or through
their own foolishness or sin. It’s called grace. We show love, forgiveness and
mercy to people. It’s not about whether they deserve it, because none of us deserves
it – especially ourselves.

And as we stand alongside the suffering, both the victims
and the culpable, our grace is what will speak most truly of God, rather than
our judgmentalism. I am not asking that we change our beliefs on the rights and
wrongs of certain ethical issues. I am saying, though, that a compassionate
solidarity with the hurting will speak faithfully about the purposes of God,
just as Joseph standing with Mary did.

2. Joseph Goes Beyond Tradition
When my sister and brother-in-law thought I would never marry, they gave their
second boy the middle name ‘David’ in my honour. When our daughter Rebekah was
born, we gave her the middle name ‘Anita’, after Debbie’s late mother. And when
Mark came along, we chose the middle name ‘Alan’, which is my father’s name.

Names are so important in the Bible, and perhaps nowhere
more than in the Nativity stories. Zechariah is to call his son ‘John’, and
here, the angel tells Joseph to name Mary’s child Jesus, ‘for he will save his
people from their sins’ (verse 21). The naming of Jesus to show his purpose and
destiny outranks any of the usual traditions. Remember that first century Jews
also had a tradition about using family names when a baby was born. We see it
in the surprise when Zechariah confirms his boy will be named ‘John’.

So Joseph’s obedience to God’s will as revealed by the angel
means that he will go beyond the normal human traditions. Traditions and
conventions have their place. They can describe tried and trusted ways of doing
things. They can be the means of handing down important truths. But when
tradition stops being a means to an end, we hit problems. When tradition
becomes an end in itself, we’re up the chute. When tradition has to be defended
or worshipped, we are in trouble.

The faithful disciple, then, will be keen to know when to
keep tradition and when to go beyond it. What is a tradition trying to
preserve? To take one issue here, does keeping wooden pews enhance worship? Do
the pews make us more like the community of Jesus or not? What exactly is the
church at gathered worship? We would need to pose questions like that if our
occasional discussions ever became a substantial debate.

We can be glad, though, that Joseph showed the obedience of the
disciple by dispensing with typical family tradition to name the baby ‘Jesus’. Giving
a child a name according to their divine purpose was the classic time when the
Jewish people over-ruled the tradition of family names. What matters most are
God’s purposes.

Therefore, that becomes the issue for us. What are God’s
purposes for us? His purposes for Jesus were those of salvation. He has
purposes for us in Hatfield Peverel and beyond. We have to ask whether our
traditions serve those purposes or get in the way.

One thing is for sure: Joseph becomes so committed to the
purposes of God that he is prepared to dispense with tradition if it gets in
the way. He is prepared to stick out as different from convention. Perhaps he
will be teased or mocked. If so, he takes the risk and the flak. It is worth
it, if going beyond tradition is what God requires in order for him to be
faithful.

And as with the first point, Joseph here gives a foretaste
of what Jesus will do. Jesus will participate in many Jewish traditions. But if
the traditions of the elders get in the way of grace and mercy, you can be sure
that Jesus will oppose them and thrown them out.

As for our situation, I’m not going to give any answers about
the pews or anything else. It’s something we have to grapple with together. Suffice
it to say, however, that like fire, tradition is a good servant but a bad
master. Is tradition our servant or our master? Joseph treats it as a servant,
and so does Jesus. Do we?

3. Joseph Goes Beyond His Rights
You will have heard preachers at Advent tell you before that a Jewish betrothal
is more than an engagement. The couple were called husband and wife (Joseph is
called ‘husband’ here in verse 19), and dissolving a betrothal required a
divorce. However, they only live together and sleep together once they are
married.

Against this background, let us assume that Joseph is a
typical red-blooded male. I think that’s reasonable. To read, then, at the end
of the story that not only did he obey by taking Mary as his wife, he also had
no marital relations with her until Jesus was born (verse 25), is quite a story
of self-denial! He does so to protect the integrity of the miracle. And it’s
because of Joseph’s self-denial here that we popularly speak of the Virgin
Birth rather than the Virginal Conception. Yes, Joseph is guarding the
integrity of God’s strange work by denying himself what every bridegroom would
have wanted on his wedding night and in the months to come.

It isn’t about the early Church having a downer on sex. That
wouldn’t be true of the New Testament. In 1 Corinthians 7, Paul tells his
readers there is only one reason why a married couple should deny each other,
and that is for a short season of prayer. No, as I said, Joseph abstains as an
act of self-denial to witness to the miraculous work of God in his wife’s body.

Suppose it became widely known that Joseph had done this. He
has probably already been despised for standing with the rejected Mary. He has
broken social convention. Now, surely, he will be mocked for this. What a fool
he will appear to be. His manhood will be in question.[2]

Were it to have happened today and in our culture, Joseph
would have been ridiculed even more. Not merely because ours is a sex-saturated
society, but because that is one symptom of a society addicted to pleasure. Self-denial
is not a prime virtue; self-fulfilment is. Do what you want, so long as you don’t
hurt anybody. You deserve it. Er,
why?

The lifestyle of the Christian disciple is not to satiate
every desire. Christ does allow us to enjoy following him. But it is the way of
love. And love gives up things for the beloved. Love sacrifices. It risks. It gives
up.

Our culture does know that in certain ways. We expect it of
parents with regard to children. We admire it when we see it in a Mother Teresa.
But we don’t make it the norm. We build
our economy around desire, lust and consumption.

Yet again, though, Joseph is only doing what his legal son
Jesus would do and teach. Jesus would grow up to teach that the lifestyle of
God’s kingdom was one of denying ourselves for the sake of the Gospel. And as
we approach the annual orgy of buying and selling, giving and receiving, we do
well to ponder the example of Joseph and consider where we would deny ourselves
our ‘rights’ so that the purposes of God’s merciful kingdom might be more truly
fulfilled.

Conclusion
You may know the story of how somebody once asked a famous orchestral conductor
what the hardest instrument to play in the orchestra was. The reply came back: ‘Second
fiddle.’ People want to play first fiddle, but who wants to play second? It
takes not only technique: it requires a humble attitude.

Joseph is a ‘second fiddle’ player in the nativity stories:
second fiddle to Mary, and ultimately second fiddle to Jesus. But what a second
fiddle! He gives us a taste of the melody Jesus will play. Joseph foreshadows
Jesus’ identification with the despised. Jesus’ overturning of tradition when
it gets in the way of God’s kingdom – Joseph previews that, too. And Joseph
models Jesus’ call to self-denial.

Joseph may be a bit-part player in the Nativity, but he
deserves to be known as more than the legal father of Jesus. He is more than
that. He is a model disciple of Jesus. May we follow in his ways this
Christmas.

[2] I
am grateful to Ruth
Haley Barton’s article Joseph And The
Walk Of Faith for some of these perspectives.

Technorati Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

0

Tomorrow’s Sermon, ‘Being Unprepared’ (Advent Sunday)

Someone said to me at the church Christmas Fayre this morning, ‘You haven’t been on the computer much this week.’ She hadn’t noticed any blog updates (apart from the couple of links I’ve posted), nor had I updated my Facebook profile since Sunday night. A combination of family illness, urgent pastoral visits and so on have kept me from writing anything thoughtful.

So no comments so far (and maybe it will be too late by the time I do) on Adrian Warnock‘s disabling of comments on his blog – in which case, is it still really a blog? And nothing yet on a fascinating blog discussion started over a fortnight ago by Drew Ditzel on the pros and cons of paid ministry in the light of emerging church insights. (I’ve got some Ben Witherington to bring into that topic some time.) I’d love to get back to the fray soon.

I have, however, edited and revised my April post on Digital Faith for publication as an article in Ministry Today. You may get a sneak preview on the ‘Preview’ page of the site. I’ve also reviewed two books for them: ‘A Moral Climate: The Ethics of Global Warming‘ by Michael Northcott, and ‘Earth And Word: Classic Sermons on Saving the Planet‘, edited by David Rhoads.

In the meantime, here is tomorrow’s sermon. Even that is a revised repeat of one I preached three years ago when this Gospel passage featured in the Lectionary.

Matthew 24:36-44

Introduction
Today may be Advent Sunday, but the official countdown to Christmas in our household began yesterday. Rather than buying the conventional Advent calendars, Debbie had bought two (one for each of our children) into which you could place the chocolate or gift of your choice. (We had also bought a fair trade calendar from Traidcraft.) Rebekah had spied one of these calendars hanging up the other day, but had somehow resisted the temptation to raid it. However, she has been on Christmas countdown since July – slightly earlier than the shops. Mark, on the other hand, didn’t even want to unwrap his chocolate coin. When he did, he informed us that it wanted to go to sleep, and he delicately placed it under a dirty handkerchief.

Preparing for Christmas is quite simple for small children – even if frustrating. It involves counting down. For the rest of us, the preparation time is more frantic (although I have a wife who aims to have bought all her presents each year by the end of November).>

But being prepared in the Christian sense is about more than buying and wrapping the presents, sending the cards and hoping that bird flu won’t prevent you getting a turkey. Furthermore, we are not preparing for the first coming of Christ, but his second. In our Gospel reading, Jesus warns us about the nature of people who are unprepared for his return.

1. Counterfeit Faith<
When we lived in Medway, our manse was near the major general hospital. Parking was a nightmare, and we had to buy residents’ parking permits, both for ourselves and our visitors. One day, a friend came to visit Debbie. When Jackie was about to leave, we realised that she had not asked for our visitor’s parking permit to place on the dashboard of her car in order to ward off evil spirits and traffic wardens. I accompanied Jackie to her car, but they had not been doing their rounds and she was safe. The traffic wardens hadn’t been, either. But we never knew when they were on duty. We had no access to their duty roster.

Jesus said, 

“No-one knows about that day or hour, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.” (verse 36)

Anyone who claims they know when Jesus will return is claiming knowledge that even Jesus himself doesn’t have. Of many examples from history, take just this one:

In 1992, a South Korean church leader named Lee Jang Rim persuaded 20,000 followers that the Rapture would occur on 28th October that year. To prepare for the Lord’s coming, people abandoned their jobs and their education, sold their homes, divorced their spouses and deserted the army. Some women even reportedly had abortions so that they wouldn’t be too heavy to be lifted up to heaven. In all, these gullible followers gave over $4 million to Lee and his church.

As the midnight deadline approached, the South Korean government sent 1,500 riot police to Lee’s ‘Mission for the Coming Days’, and placed the fire and ambulance services on alert. The deadline passed uneventfully, and next day forty-six-year-old Lee apologised to his followers for misleading them, and dissolved his church. The authorities were unimpressed, however, and sentenced the prophet to two years’ imprisonment for fraud and illegal possession of US currency. The prosecution successfully argued that if Lee truly believed what he preached, what was he doing holding bank bonds, which would only mature in May 1993?[1]

When you claim to know details of the Second Coming that even Jesus himself says he doesn’t know, what are you doing? You are claiming an intimacy with Almighty God that simply doesn’t exist.

Now as far as I know no-one in this church has predicted a date for Christ’s return. But the danger of false intimacy, of a counterfeit faith where we try to be spiritual show-offs claiming some kind of hotline to the will of God that others don’t have – well, that’s a far more common temptation than we’d like to admit.

It breaches the commandments, taking the Lord’s name in vain. There is more to blasphemy than using the name of God or Jesus as a swearword. When we make idle claims that “The Lord has spoken to me” when he hasn’t, surely that is taking his name in vain, too.

Not only does it breach the commandments, it denies the Gospel. Essentially this false faith is a form of boasting, a superiority complex. Hence it flies in the face of our need for grace. The Gospel shows our need for humility, because we depend on the mercy of God. You have to wonder sometimes whether a person who spends their time boasting of their spiritual knowledge has spent enough time kneeling at the Cross seeking forgiveness.

“Keep watch,” says Jesus (verse 42, “Be ready” (verse 44). One way of being ready is to keep watch over our lives in this sense: do we know as much today as when faith first became real for us that we rely entirely on the grace of God? Or have we become a spiritual fraud, full of outwardly impressive signs but inwardly shallow and proud, playing religious games as a way of impressing or having power over others?

2. Shallow Lives
It’s a typical conversation when you visit a family in preparation for a funeral. “Fred wasn’t a religious man, but he lived a Christian life.” They describe the life of a supposed saint who certainly loved his family but had no time for God. You grit your teeth or edit out of the eulogyl the references to the gambling, smoking and foul temper. But he was a Christian man, remember.

>It’s interesting to think of those conversations in the light of Jesus’ comparison with the days of Noah.

“As it was in the days of Noah, so it will be at the coming of the Son of Man. For in the days before the flood, people were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, up to the day Noah entered the ark; and they knew nothing about what would happen until the flood came and took them all away. That is how it will be at the coming of the Son of Man. Two men will be in the field; one will be taken and the other left. Two women will be grinding with a hand mill; one will be taken and the other left.”
(verses 37 to 41)

Here are people just getting on with the ordinary routine things of life (‘eating and drinking’, working in a field or ‘grinding with a hand mill’), going through the conventional staging posts of life’s journey (‘marrying and giving in marriage’), without any real sense that the journey is going anywhere. It is the tragedy of being consumed with the mundane without realising that we were made for more than this. It’s the body and maybe the soul but not the spirit. It’s all earthbound when we were made for friendship with God. There is more to life than food, work and family. It’s about empty lives that were meant to be full.

Jesus said,

“I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.”
(John 10:10)

I say this not to make us feel smug, superior and condescending to others. No. We need to think about ourselves, and our relationship with those who have not met Jesus.

For one thing, it means that we need to re-evaluate the whole way we conduct ourselves as church. It’s easier to value maintenance over mission, when we are called to mission first and then only do the maintenance to support the mission.

If we are to be more outward-looking we need to drop some baggage. We need to be a living testimony to the abundant life. Might it be that many people lead shallow lives without an awareness of Christ and his coming because so many Christians are also shallow?

3. Spiritually Asleep
In John’s Gospel Jesus gives a whole variety of attractive descriptions of himself. He is the Bread of Life; he is the Light of the World; he is the Good Shepherd; he is the Resurrection and the Life; he is the Way, the Truth and the Life, and so on. They are all appealing images. An advertising agency couldn’t beat them for slogans – thankfully.

But here in Matthew 24 we have a less appealing image of Jesus:

“If the owner of the house had known at what time of night the thief was coming, he would have kept watch and would not have let his house be broken into.”
(verse 43)

Jesus likens himself to a thief. Does that make you want to follow him?

Of course, the image isn’t meant to be pushed too far. It indicates that his coming will be sudden and unexpected. Thus Jesus goes on to say,

“So you also must be ready, because the Son of Man will come at an hour when you do not expect him.”
(verse 44)

Now you can’t be physically awake and ready twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. If you tried, you would not be ready for anything, least of all Jesus!

Jesus warns us we need to be spiritually awake and ready. What does that mean? One commentator says it means that 

‘disciples should be acting as disciples are supposed to act.’[2]

He goes on to quote a scholar by the name of Lövestam, who said it means the living of life

‘in communion with the Lord and in faithfulness to him’.[3]

Do you want to be ready for the coming of Jesus? You can’t install an alarm system to keep him out; you’ll still be taken by surprise when he comes; but you can be ready. The basic disciplines of the disciple are the key: communion with the Lord and faithfulness to him.

Steve Chalke calls this ‘Intimacy and Involvement’. In terms of intimacy or communion we practise those things that draw us into a close relationship with our God: prayer, Scripture reading, worship, fellowship, fasting, a holy lifestyle and so on. But alongside comes the faithfulness and involvement: we get our hands dirty in the world by being his witnesses in word and deed. As the Father sent Jesus into the world, so he sends us.

Don’t we often find, though, that many Christians prefer one or the other of these two? Some prefer the intimacy, that is, the praise, worship and prayer. Three years ago a Scotswoman called Catherine Brown founded a movement  called ‘A Million Hours Of Praise’[4]. She said at the time, 

‘God has given me a vision to mobilise the church and the nations of the earth to worship Jesus for one million hours, and we at million hours of praise believe that this worship will carry on past many millions of hours. You may ask why? Because Jesus is worth it!’

There are some Christians who would wrongly read her call as meaning that all we are meant to do is engage in some ongoing bless-up and everything will be fine. That would mean favouring communion over faithfulness, intimacy over involvement.

But some go to the opposite extreme. So consumed are they – and often rightly – with the needs of the world and those who are missing from the family of Jesus that the relationship with God is neglected. It’s like failing to tend a plant: they wither. They privilege faithfulness over communion and involvement over intimacy. They are like Martha without Mary.

Yet we need these two wings of the Christian life. A bird with one wing cannot fly, and neither can we. Spiritual wakefulness requires a combination of the two. The communion with the Lord fuels the faithfulness, else it is self-indulgence; the faithfulness requires the communion, else it is running on empty.

But have the two wings together and we shall not have counterfeit faith and nor will we live a shallow life. We shall be spiritually alive, and ready for our Lord.

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Tomorrow’s Sermon, ‘Being Unprepared’ (Advent Sunday)

Someone said to me at the church Christmas Fayre this morning, ‘You haven’t been on the computer much this week.’ She hadn’t noticed any blog updates (apart from the couple of links I’ve posted), nor had I updated my Facebook profile since Sunday night. A combination of family illness, urgent pastoral visits and so on have kept me from writing anything thoughtful.

So no comments so far (and maybe it will be too late by the time I do) on Adrian Warnock‘s disabling of comments on his blog – in which case, is it still really a blog? And nothing yet on a fascinating blog discussion started over a fortnight ago by Drew Ditzel on the pros and cons of paid ministry in the light of emerging church insights. (I’ve got some Ben Witherington to bring into that topic some time.) I’d love to get back to the fray soon.

I have, however, edited and revised my April post on Digital Faith for publication as an article in Ministry Today. You may get a sneak preview on the ‘Preview’ page of the site. I’ve also reviewed two books for them: ‘A Moral Climate: The Ethics of Global Warming‘ by Michael Northcott, and ‘Earth And Word: Classic Sermons on Saving the Planet‘, edited by David Rhoads.

In the meantime, here is tomorrow’s sermon. Even that is a revised repeat of one I preached three years ago when this Gospel passage featured in the Lectionary.

Matthew 24:36-44

Introduction
Today may be Advent Sunday, but the official countdown to Christmas in our household began yesterday. Rather than buying the conventional Advent calendars, Debbie had bought two (one for each of our children) into which you could place the chocolate or gift of your choice. (We had also bought a fair trade calendar from Traidcraft.) Rebekah had spied one of these calendars hanging up the other day, but had somehow resisted the temptation to raid it. However, she has been on Christmas countdown since July – slightly earlier than the shops. Mark, on the other hand, didn’t even want to unwrap his chocolate coin. When he did, he informed us that it wanted to go to sleep, and he delicately placed it under a dirty handkerchief.

Preparing for Christmas is quite simple for small children – even if frustrating. It involves counting down. For the rest of us, the preparation time is more frantic (although I have a wife who aims to have bought all her presents each year by the end of November).>

But being prepared in the Christian sense is about more than buying and wrapping the presents, sending the cards and hoping that bird flu won’t prevent you getting a turkey. Furthermore, we are not preparing for the first coming of Christ, but his second. In our Gospel reading, Jesus warns us about the nature of people who are unprepared for his return.

1. Counterfeit Faith<
When we lived in Medway, our manse was near the major general hospital. Parking was a nightmare, and we had to buy residents’ parking permits, both for ourselves and our visitors. One day, a friend came to visit Debbie. When Jackie was about to leave, we realised that she had not asked for our visitor’s parking permit to place on the dashboard of her car in order to ward off evil spirits and traffic wardens. I accompanied Jackie to her car, but they had not been doing their rounds and she was safe. The traffic wardens hadn’t been, either. But we never knew when they were on duty. We had no access to their duty roster.

Jesus said, 

“No-one knows about that day or hour, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.” (verse 36)

Anyone who claims they know when Jesus will return is claiming knowledge that even Jesus himself doesn’t have. Of many examples from history, take just this one:

In 1992, a South Korean church leader named Lee Jang Rim persuaded 20,000 followers that the Rapture would occur on 28th October that year. To prepare for the Lord’s coming, people abandoned their jobs and their education, sold their homes, divorced their spouses and deserted the army. Some women even reportedly had abortions so that they wouldn’t be too heavy to be lifted up to heaven. In all, these gullible followers gave over $4 million to Lee and his church.

As the midnight deadline approached, the South Korean government sent 1,500 riot police to Lee’s ‘Mission for the Coming Days’, and placed the fire and ambulance services on alert. The deadline passed uneventfully, and next day forty-six-year-old Lee apologised to his followers for misleading them, and dissolved his church. The authorities were unimpressed, however, and sentenced the prophet to two years’ imprisonment for fraud and illegal possession of US currency. The prosecution successfully argued that if Lee truly believed what he preached, what was he doing holding bank bonds, which would only mature in May 1993?[1]

When you claim to know details of the Second Coming that even Jesus himself says he doesn’t know, what are you doing? You are claiming an intimacy with Almighty God that simply doesn’t exist.

Now as far as I know no-one in this church has predicted a date for Christ’s return. But the danger of false intimacy, of a counterfeit faith where we try to be spiritual show-offs claiming some kind of hotline to the will of God that others don’t have – well, that’s a far more common temptation than we’d like to admit.

It breaches the commandments, taking the Lord’s name in vain. There is more to blasphemy than using the name of God or Jesus as a swearword. When we make idle claims that “The Lord has spoken to me” when he hasn’t, surely that is taking his name in vain, too.

Not only does it breach the commandments, it denies the Gospel. Essentially this false faith is a form of boasting, a superiority complex. Hence it flies in the face of our need for grace. The Gospel shows our need for humility, because we depend on the mercy of God. You have to wonder sometimes whether a person who spends their time boasting of their spiritual knowledge has spent enough time kneeling at the Cross seeking forgiveness.

“Keep watch,” says Jesus (verse 42, “Be ready” (verse 44). One way of being ready is to keep watch over our lives in this sense: do we know as much today as when faith first became real for us that we rely entirely on the grace of God? Or have we become a spiritual fraud, full of outwardly impressive signs but inwardly shallow and proud, playing religious games as a way of impressing or having power over others?

2. Shallow Lives
It’s a typical conversation when you visit a family in preparation for a funeral. “Fred wasn’t a religious man, but he lived a Christian life.” They describe the life of a supposed saint who certainly loved his family but had no time for God. You grit your teeth or edit out of the eulogyl the references to the gambling, smoking and foul temper. But he was a Christian man, remember.

>It’s interesting to think of those conversations in the light of Jesus’ comparison with the days of Noah.

“As it was in the days of Noah, so it will be at the coming of the Son of Man. For in the days before the flood, people were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, up to the day Noah entered the ark; and they knew nothing about what would happen until the flood came and took them all away. That is how it will be at the coming of the Son of Man. Two men will be in the field; one will be taken and the other left. Two women will be grinding with a hand mill; one will be taken and the other left.”
(verses 37 to 41)

Here are people just getting on with the ordinary routine things of life (‘eating and drinking’, working in a field or ‘grinding with a hand mill’), going through the conventional staging posts of life’s journey (‘marrying and giving in marriage’), without any real sense that the journey is going anywhere. It is the tragedy of being consumed with the mundane without realising that we were made for more than this. It’s the body and maybe the soul but not the spirit. It’s all earthbound when we were made for friendship with God. There is more to life than food, work and family. It’s about empty lives that were meant to be full.

Jesus said,

“I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.”
(John 10:10)

I say this not to make us feel smug, superior and condescending to others. No. We need to think about ourselves, and our relationship with those who have not met Jesus.

For one thing, it means that we need to re-evaluate the whole way we conduct ourselves as church. It’s easier to value maintenance over mission, when we are called to mission first and then only do the maintenance to support the mission.

If we are to be more outward-looking we need to drop some baggage. We need to be a living testimony to the abundant life. Might it be that many people lead shallow lives without an awareness of Christ and his coming because so many Christians are also shallow?

3. Spiritually Asleep
In John’s Gospel Jesus gives a whole variety of attractive descriptions of himself. He is the Bread of Life; he is the Light of the World; he is the Good Shepherd; he is the Resurrection and the Life; he is the Way, the Truth and the Life, and so on. They are all appealing images. An advertising agency couldn’t beat them for slogans – thankfully.

But here in Matthew 24 we have a less appealing image of Jesus:

“If the owner of the house had known at what time of night the thief was coming, he would have kept watch and would not have let his house be broken into.”
(verse 43)

Jesus likens himself to a thief. Does that make you want to follow him?

Of course, the image isn’t meant to be pushed too far. It indicates that his coming will be sudden and unexpected. Thus Jesus goes on to say,

“So you also must be ready, because the Son of Man will come at an hour when you do not expect him.”
(verse 44)

Now you can’t be physically awake and ready twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. If you tried, you would not be ready for anything, least of all Jesus!

Jesus warns us we need to be spiritually awake and ready. What does that mean? One commentator says it means that 

‘disciples should be acting as disciples are supposed to act.’[2]

He goes on to quote a scholar by the name of Lövestam, who said it means the living of life

‘in communion with the Lord and in faithfulness to him’.[3]

Do you want to be ready for the coming of Jesus? You can’t install an alarm system to keep him out; you’ll still be taken by surprise when he comes; but you can be ready. The basic disciplines of the disciple are the key: communion with the Lord and faithfulness to him.

Steve Chalke calls this ‘Intimacy and Involvement’. In terms of intimacy or communion we practise those things that draw us into a close relationship with our God: prayer, Scripture reading, worship, fellowship, fasting, a holy lifestyle and so on. But alongside comes the faithfulness and involvement: we get our hands dirty in the world by being his witnesses in word and deed. As the Father sent Jesus into the world, so he sends us.

Don’t we often find, though, that many Christians prefer one or the other of these two? Some prefer the intimacy, that is, the praise, worship and prayer. Three years ago a Scotswoman called Catherine Brown founded a movement  called ‘A Million Hours Of Praise’[4]. She said at the time, 

‘God has given me a vision to mobilise the church and the nations of the earth to worship Jesus for one million hours, and we at million hours of praise believe that this worship will carry on past many millions of hours. You may ask why? Because Jesus is worth it!’

There are some Christians who would wrongly read her call as meaning that all we are meant to do is engage in some ongoing bless-up and everything will be fine. That would mean favouring communion over faithfulness, intimacy over involvement.

But some go to the opposite extreme. So consumed are they – and often rightly – with the needs of the world and those who are missing from the family of Jesus that the relationship with God is neglected. It’s like failing to tend a plant: they wither. They privilege faithfulness over communion and involvement over intimacy. They are like Martha without Mary.

Yet we need these two wings of the Christian life. A bird with one wing cannot fly, and neither can we. Spiritual wakefulness requires a combination of the two. The communion with the Lord fuels the faithfulness, else it is self-indulgence; the faithfulness requires the communion, else it is running on empty.

But have the two wings together and we shall not have counterfeit faith and nor will we live a shallow life. We shall be spiritually alive, and ready for our Lord.

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0

Tomorrow’s Sermon, ‘Being Unprepared’ (Advent Sunday)

Someone said to me at the church Christmas Fayre this morning, ‘You haven’t been on the computer much this week.’ She hadn’t noticed any blog updates (apart from the couple of links I’ve posted), nor had I updated my Facebook profile since Sunday night. A combination of family illness, urgent pastoral visits and so on have kept me from writing anything thoughtful.

So no comments so far (and maybe it will be too late by the time I do) on Adrian Warnock‘s disabling of comments on his blog – in which case, is it still really a blog? And nothing yet on a fascinating blog discussion started over a fortnight ago by Drew Ditzel on the pros and cons of paid ministry in the light of emerging church insights. (I’ve got some Ben Witherington to bring into that topic some time.) I’d love to get back to the fray soon.

I have, however, edited and revised my April post on Digital Faith for publication as an article in Ministry Today. You may get a sneak preview on the ‘Preview’ page of the site. I’ve also reviewed two books for them: ‘A Moral Climate: The Ethics of Global Warming‘ by Michael Northcott, and ‘Earth And Word: Classic Sermons on Saving the Planet‘, edited by David Rhoads.

In the meantime, here is tomorrow’s sermon. Even that is a revised repeat of one I preached three years ago when this Gospel passage featured in the Lectionary.

Matthew 24:36-44

Introduction
Today may be Advent Sunday, but the official countdown to Christmas in our household began yesterday. Rather than buying the conventional Advent calendars, Debbie had bought two (one for each of our children) into which you could place the chocolate or gift of your choice. (We had also bought a fair trade calendar from Traidcraft.) Rebekah had spied one of these calendars hanging up the other day, but had somehow resisted the temptation to raid it. However, she has been on Christmas countdown since July – slightly earlier than the shops. Mark, on the other hand, didn’t even want to unwrap his chocolate coin. When he did, he informed us that it wanted to go to sleep, and he delicately placed it under a dirty handkerchief.

Preparing for Christmas is quite simple for small children – even if frustrating. It involves counting down. For the rest of us, the preparation time is more frantic (although I have a wife who aims to have bought all her presents each year by the end of November).>

But being prepared in the Christian sense is about more than buying and wrapping the presents, sending the cards and hoping that bird flu won’t prevent you getting a turkey. Furthermore, we are not preparing for the first coming of Christ, but his second. In our Gospel reading, Jesus warns us about the nature of people who are unprepared for his return.

1. Counterfeit Faith<
When we lived in Medway, our manse was near the major general hospital. Parking was a nightmare, and we had to buy residents’ parking permits, both for ourselves and our visitors. One day, a friend came to visit Debbie. When Jackie was about to leave, we realised that she had not asked for our visitor’s parking permit to place on the dashboard of her car in order to ward off evil spirits and traffic wardens. I accompanied Jackie to her car, but they had not been doing their rounds and she was safe. The traffic wardens hadn’t been, either. But we never knew when they were on duty. We had no access to their duty roster.

Jesus said, 

“No-one knows about that day or hour, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.” (verse 36)

Anyone who claims they know when Jesus will return is claiming knowledge that even Jesus himself doesn’t have. Of many examples from history, take just this one:

In 1992, a South Korean church leader named Lee Jang Rim persuaded 20,000 followers that the Rapture would occur on 28th October that year. To prepare for the Lord’s coming, people abandoned their jobs and their education, sold their homes, divorced their spouses and deserted the army. Some women even reportedly had abortions so that they wouldn’t be too heavy to be lifted up to heaven. In all, these gullible followers gave over $4 million to Lee and his church.

As the midnight deadline approached, the South Korean government sent 1,500 riot police to Lee’s ‘Mission for the Coming Days’, and placed the fire and ambulance services on alert. The deadline passed uneventfully, and next day forty-six-year-old Lee apologised to his followers for misleading them, and dissolved his church. The authorities were unimpressed, however, and sentenced the prophet to two years’ imprisonment for fraud and illegal possession of US currency. The prosecution successfully argued that if Lee truly believed what he preached, what was he doing holding bank bonds, which would only mature in May 1993?[1]

When you claim to know details of the Second Coming that even Jesus himself says he doesn’t know, what are you doing? You are claiming an intimacy with Almighty God that simply doesn’t exist.

Now as far as I know no-one in this church has predicted a date for Christ’s return. But the danger of false intimacy, of a counterfeit faith where we try to be spiritual show-offs claiming some kind of hotline to the will of God that others don’t have – well, that’s a far more common temptation than we’d like to admit.

It breaches the commandments, taking the Lord’s name in vain. There is more to blasphemy than using the name of God or Jesus as a swearword. When we make idle claims that “The Lord has spoken to me” when he hasn’t, surely that is taking his name in vain, too.

Not only does it breach the commandments, it denies the Gospel. Essentially this false faith is a form of boasting, a superiority complex. Hence it flies in the face of our need for grace. The Gospel shows our need for humility, because we depend on the mercy of God. You have to wonder sometimes whether a person who spends their time boasting of their spiritual knowledge has spent enough time kneeling at the Cross seeking forgiveness.

“Keep watch,” says Jesus (verse 42, “Be ready” (verse 44). One way of being ready is to keep watch over our lives in this sense: do we know as much today as when faith first became real for us that we rely entirely on the grace of God? Or have we become a spiritual fraud, full of outwardly impressive signs but inwardly shallow and proud, playing religious games as a way of impressing or having power over others?

2. Shallow Lives
It’s a typical conversation when you visit a family in preparation for a funeral. “Fred wasn’t a religious man, but he lived a Christian life.” They describe the life of a supposed saint who certainly loved his family but had no time for God. You grit your teeth or edit out of the eulogyl the references to the gambling, smoking and foul temper. But he was a Christian man, remember.

>It’s interesting to think of those conversations in the light of Jesus’ comparison with the days of Noah.

“As it was in the days of Noah, so it will be at the coming of the Son of Man. For in the days before the flood, people were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, up to the day Noah entered the ark; and they knew nothing about what would happen until the flood came and took them all away. That is how it will be at the coming of the Son of Man. Two men will be in the field; one will be taken and the other left. Two women will be grinding with a hand mill; one will be taken and the other left.”
(verses 37 to 41)

Here are people just getting on with the ordinary routine things of life (‘eating and drinking’, working in a field or ‘grinding with a hand mill’), going through the conventional staging posts of life’s journey (‘marrying and giving in marriage’), without any real sense that the journey is going anywhere. It is the tragedy of being consumed with the mundane without realising that we were made for more than this. It’s the body and maybe the soul but not the spirit. It’s all earthbound when we were made for friendship with God. There is more to life than food, work and family. It’s about empty lives that were meant to be full.

Jesus said,

“I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.”
(John 10:10)

I say this not to make us feel smug, superior and condescending to others. No. We need to think about ourselves, and our relationship with those who have not met Jesus.

For one thing, it means that we need to re-evaluate the whole way we conduct ourselves as church. It’s easier to value maintenance over mission, when we are called to mission first and then only do the maintenance to support the mission.

If we are to be more outward-looking we need to drop some baggage. We need to be a living testimony to the abundant life. Might it be that many people lead shallow lives without an awareness of Christ and his coming because so many Christians are also shallow?

3. Spiritually Asleep
In John’s Gospel Jesus gives a whole variety of attractive descriptions of himself. He is the Bread of Life; he is the Light of the World; he is the Good Shepherd; he is the Resurrection and the Life; he is the Way, the Truth and the Life, and so on. They are all appealing images. An advertising agency couldn’t beat them for slogans – thankfully.

But here in Matthew 24 we have a less appealing image of Jesus:

“If the owner of the house had known at what time of night the thief was coming, he would have kept watch and would not have let his house be broken into.”
(verse 43)

Jesus likens himself to a thief. Does that make you want to follow him?

Of course, the image isn’t meant to be pushed too far. It indicates that his coming will be sudden and unexpected. Thus Jesus goes on to say,

“So you also must be ready, because the Son of Man will come at an hour when you do not expect him.”
(verse 44)

Now you can’t be physically awake and ready twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. If you tried, you would not be ready for anything, least of all Jesus!

Jesus warns us we need to be spiritually awake and ready. What does that mean? One commentator says it means that 

‘disciples should be acting as disciples are supposed to act.’[2]

He goes on to quote a scholar by the name of Lövestam, who said it means the living of life

‘in communion with the Lord and in faithfulness to him’.[3]

Do you want to be ready for the coming of Jesus? You can’t install an alarm system to keep him out; you’ll still be taken by surprise when he comes; but you can be ready. The basic disciplines of the disciple are the key: communion with the Lord and faithfulness to him.

Steve Chalke calls this ‘Intimacy and Involvement’. In terms of intimacy or communion we practise those things that draw us into a close relationship with our God: prayer, Scripture reading, worship, fellowship, fasting, a holy lifestyle and so on. But alongside comes the faithfulness and involvement: we get our hands dirty in the world by being his witnesses in word and deed. As the Father sent Jesus into the world, so he sends us.

Don’t we often find, though, that many Christians prefer one or the other of these two? Some prefer the intimacy, that is, the praise, worship and prayer. Three years ago a Scotswoman called Catherine Brown founded a movement  called ‘A Million Hours Of Praise’[4]. She said at the time, 

‘God has given me a vision to mobilise the church and the nations of the earth to worship Jesus for one million hours, and we at million hours of praise believe that this worship will carry on past many millions of hours. You may ask why? Because Jesus is worth it!’

There are some Christians who would wrongly read her call as meaning that all we are meant to do is engage in some ongoing bless-up and everything will be fine. That would mean favouring communion over faithfulness, intimacy over involvement.

But some go to the opposite extreme. So consumed are they – and often rightly – with the needs of the world and those who are missing from the family of Jesus that the relationship with God is neglected. It’s like failing to tend a plant: they wither. They privilege faithfulness over communion and involvement over intimacy. They are like Martha without Mary.

Yet we need these two wings of the Christian life. A bird with one wing cannot fly, and neither can we. Spiritual wakefulness requires a combination of the two. The communion with the Lord fuels the faithfulness, else it is self-indulgence; the faithfulness requires the communion, else it is running on empty.

But have the two wings together and we shall not have counterfeit faith and nor will we live a shallow life. We shall be spiritually alive, and ready for our Lord.

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Tomorrow’s Sermon: A Map Of Mission

Luke 17:11-19

Introduction
The day we went on holiday this August was manic. I had to take a funeral at lunchtime.
When I returned, Debbie said to me, ‘Get changed as fast as you can, there’s
been a crash on the M25. You navigate, I’ll drive.’

It was natural for me to navigate. As a man, I am the better
map-reader. Of course, equally as a man, I can only do one thing at a time!

Well, perhaps some will forgive me, then, if I describe
today’s sermon as ‘A Map of Mission.’
There are geographical features in this story, and they give us images of God’s
mission, as practised by Jesus.

1. Between Samaria
and Galilee
The story starts with a geographical note:

On the way to Jerusalem Jesus was going through the region
between Samaria and Galilee (verse 11).

The action takes place ‘between Samaria and Galilee.’ That
accounts for the mixed group of lepers, both Jewish and Samaritan. Jesus would
never have reached such a group unless he had been ‘between Samaria and
Galilee.’ Galilee, where Jesus had based himself early on (Capernaum), chosen
the apostles and conducted much of his early ministry. Galilee in Judea, part
of the Jewish homeland. Samaria, on the other hand, home (in the eyes of Jews)
of spiritual deviants and heretics, home to the Samaritans, who were regarded
as ‘half-foreign, Israelites of doubtful descent’[1].

So where would be more comfortable? Galilee, surely.  Jesus would be with his own kind there. It would
be like structuring your whole life around church and your Christian friends. The
company of like-minded people who care about you is an attractive proposition. But
Jesus cannot stay there forever. Even on his way to Jerusalem, the capital of
his native Judea, he rides the boundaries between Samaria and Galilee.

I suggest you that is exactly what God calls us to do, in
following the example of Jesus.  He calls
us to surf between the comfort zone of those who share our faith, and the
people whom we might despise. That puts us in a place to meet people in need, and
demonstrate God’s love. Had Jesus remained in Galilee, he would not have met
these lepers; they would not have been healed; and the Samaritan leper would
not have found saving faith.

Why should we live ‘between Samaria and Galilee’? Just as
the lepers are desperate for help – they call out for mercy (verse 13), so
there are many crying out, but perhaps not knowing what Jesus can do for them. Even
the lepers here don’t completely know – their cry for mercy is a standard
request for alms.

So it isn’t just ‘why’, it’s ‘how’: how do we live between
Samaria and Galilee? I think it starts with dispensing with fear. Some
Christians have a naïve image of life, that everyone in the church is Good, and
everyone outside is Bad. They become fearful that we will be contaminated, and
unable to resist. So they counsel an avoidance of non-Christians. I witnessed
this a couple of times when I had a sabbatical, and we worshipped at a Baptist
church. One retired minister counselled the congregation not to watch a (then) forthcoming
television
programme, because it wouldn’t be encouraging to the Christian faith. Never
mind the fact that it would constitute a ‘water cooler moment’ at work the next
day, a real talking point, he told Christians to steer clear.

We need to address the fear. The First Letter of John has
the perspective we need:

You, dear children, are from God and have overcome them,
because the one who is in you is greater than the one who is in the world (1
John 4:4).

Step out. Stop being afraid of non-Christians. Of course,
there are Bad People out there. But unless we live between Samaria and Galilee,
we shall not meet the outcasts of today who need the love of God. For like the ‘lepers’
of Jesus’ day, we cannot wait for them to come to us: they will not come.

2. Go To The Priests
The second movement is what Jesus tells the leprous men to do:

When he saw them, he said to them, ‘Go and show yourselves to
the priests.’ And as they went, they were made clean (verse 14).

Note that Jesus sees
the lepers. He must see their condition. He knows their problem. He calls for a
real act of trust in sending them to the priests: off they go without seeing
any change in their skin. It’s rather like Elisha commanding Naaman to wash
seven times in the Jordan. Madness!

But on another level, it isn’t madness at all. As the lepers
obediently go (and what did they have to lose?), they are healed. Yet I am sure
you will know it is significant they are sent to the priests. A priest had the right to declare a leper clean, and
thus able to rejoin the community of faith. A priest alone could pronounce
someone an outcast no more.

So this healing is far from the nonsense perpetrated by some
Christians who say, ‘You’ve been healed – just throw away your pills.’ This is
a verifiable act of healing, and the priests will confirm it independently.
Believing in Jesus calls for faith, it doesn’t call for fiction. It means
trusting him enough to obey him, but it doesn’t mean a game of make-believe.

What does this mean for those of us called by Jesus to share
in the mission of God? I think it includes the need to be both hopeful and
honest. Hopeful in this sense – that just as Jesus blessed people whether they
were from Samaria or Galilee, so do we. When we encounter someone in need, we
offer help if we can. And whether we can or we can’t, we offer to pray for
them. Maybe we feel nervous about suggesting we pray for someone: how will they
react? Will they think we have a screw loose? More likely, unless their name is
something like Richard Dawkins, they will probably be pleased. Whether you pray
right then with them or not is a judgment call at the time, but keep the
promise to pray.

For too long we have confined the Christian healing ministry
to the walls of a church building. But if we follow Jesus in hopeful faith,
then we take it outside the walls. My impression is there are fewer stories of
Jesus blessing people in the synagogue than other locations. We may feel as if
doing so is like toppling off a precipice. Sometimes that is because we think
God is less inclined to answer prayer when the needy person has no faith. But rarely
if ever do Jesus’ miracles depend on the one in need. More often, the question
of faith is associated with those praying. Now if that is the case, then our
prayers will be no less effective than within the Christian circle. Remember,
it was a Samaritan, not a Jew, who came back to thank Jesus. It’s time to be
hopeful!

Hopeful … and honest. Honest, because Jesus said, ‘Show
yourselves to the priests.’ No flannel. If it doesn’t happen, don’t pretend,
don’t make excuses, but keep praying. When God does bless, it will be
unmistakable. Keep hanging in there, loving, supporting and praying.

3. This Foreigner
When the ten are healed, but only the Samaritan returns, Jesus says,

‘Were not ten made clean? But the other nine, where are they?
Was none of them found to return and give praise to God except this foreigner?’
(Verses 17-18)

‘This foreigner’ is an over-statement as a description by a
Jew of a Samaritan. As I said earlier, Samaritans were regarded as ‘half-foreign,
Israelites of doubtful descent.’ In using the expression ‘foreigner’ here,
Jesus is deploying ‘the term used in the temple inscription that forbade the
entry of foreigners into the Jerusalem temple’[2].

If Jesus speaks about the Samaritan like this, then he has a
radically different view of access to the Temple. ‘This foreigner’ gets to praise
God and thank Jesus as a sign of his faith. So Jesus is not imagining the
Temple as a stone fortress, with all sorts of defences to keep out various
undesirables or inferiors, such as Gentiles or women. For him, there is no ‘Court
of the Gentiles’, beyond which they may not go. Jesus’ Temple is not a
defensive castle. It is more like a marquee with open flaps. Boundaries are
clearly there, but there’s an open invitation to peek at what’s happening, and
even come inside.

What is the challenge for us here? It is to make our church
communities less like castles and more like marquees. It is about reducing the
obstacles to finding faith.

Now I have to be careful here. I do not mean that we throw
away those parts of our faith that some people find intellectually difficult.
Nor do I mean that we shape our faith according to popular social morality. But
I do mean that we take down some other barriers.

We dismantle the barrier named ‘Holier Than Thou.’ How many
times have we heard people say they are not good enough for church? Of course,
we respond by saying that it isn’t like that, but this has not just to be said,
but modelled as well. It means a vulnerability, openness and honesty before
people, if they are to see what we are truly like. And that means building deep
relationships with those ‘outside the Temple’.

We take down the barricades that mean children start leaving
the community of faith before the age of eleven. We stop treating their
activities as simply what they do before graduating to ‘real church.’ We won’t
simply impart information to them, but invite them to get stuck into practical
Christian action. Remember, Jesus taught his disciples by getting their hands
dirty in mission and service. That is just as possible in appropriate ways with
children as it is with adults. We’ll listen to their concerns and help them see
where the Gospel connects with them and challenges them.

In all this, we need to be relevant and down-to-earth. Yet we
cannot reduce our vision of God. Quite the reverse. C S Lewis had a beautiful way of putting it
in one of the Narnia novels, ‘Prince
Caspian’:

Lucy awakes from a deep sleep and is compelled to get up by
the sound of a voice calling her name. She follows the sound and shortly
encounters the great lion himself:

‘Aslan, you’re bigger,’ she said.

‘That’s because you’re older, little one,’ answered he.

‘Not because you are?’

‘I am not. But every year you grow, you will find me bigger.’[3]

It’s not all about answers, solutions, techniques and
packaging up everything. Curiously, the Temple remains more accessible if we
continue to embrace mystery. A God who is bigger, stranger and more mysterious
than we can ever conceive. One we can never pin down, although we can be
confident of certain things about him – especially his redeeming love in
Christ. We commend this God as we walk daily between Samaria and Galilee, as we
meet today’s lepers with the love of God and send them in hope and honesty to
the priests.

[2] Ibid.

[3] C S Lewis, Prince
Caspian, quoted in Ruth Hassall and Ian Macdonald, Effective
Ministry To Tweenagers, p 17.

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