Sermon: Forgiveness

Matthew 18:21-35

Introduction
Many years ago, I heard the true story of a young Christian woman who was raped. Many who suffer rape keep their identity secret, but this woman rushed to her church for support and told the story.

The support came in this form: ‘Have you forgiven him?’

Job’s comforters, indeed.

We believe in forgiveness, and this parable makes clear that it is paramount in discipleship. But do we always handle forgiveness well? Is it really a choice between denying the opportunity to express your pain -as happened to the woman who was raped – and being bitter?

Today, rather than expound the parable of the unforgiving servant in my normal style, I’d like us to explore what forgiveness is and why we need to forgive.

What Is Forgiveness?
What do we make of Peter’s question about how often we should forgive? Seven times? Seventy times seven? (Or should that just be seventy-seven times – so much easier!)

I think we generally accept that Jesus is not putting a ceiling on forgiveness when we reach four hundred and ninety. Forgiveness is something we keep having to do – and I’ll come back to that question later.

But I think Jesus is also showing us that forgiveness is the permanent refusal to exercise vengeance. The numbers ‘seven’ and ‘seventy’ are connected with vengeance in Genesis chapter four. In that chapter, Cain kills Abel. The Lord chooses not to kill Cain, but makes him a wanderer, and threatens seven-fold vengeance on anyone who kills him. Later, one of Cain’s grandsons, Lamech, kills a man who wounded him, and says, ‘If Cain is avenged sevenfold, truly Lamech seventy-sevenfold’ (Genesis 4:24).

So when Jesus says, ‘Not seven times but seventy times seven,’ he is withdrawing the vengeance option. That is what forgiveness is. True forgiveness never says, ‘I forgive you, it was nothing,’ it says, ‘Yes, you hurt me, but I choose to lay aside my desire for vengeance.’

This is probably one of the most important ways in which we can be witnesses to Christ today. Most people will not read a Bible, but they will read our lives. So when we refrain from the option to press the vengeance button, we are allowing them to read about Jesus.

Of course, there is much more to what forgiveness is. Just to examine the Greek word employed here by Matthew and other New Testament writers tells us something. The word,aphiémi, means to set free. It’s what you do when you cancel a debt: you set the debtor free from their obligation to repay you. Forgiveness is like that. You release the one who has hurt you from the obligation to pay for what they have done. You allow them to walk away. You choose not to exercise your right of punishment.

But forgiveness is much more than setting free the offender. In a wonderful way, forgiveness sets us free, too. If we harbour resentment, then we become bound up, as if ropes have been wrapped around us. When we forgive someone, then the ropes of bitterness fall away. Forgiveness sets everyone free.

Perhaps another image of forgiveness will help. The Psalmist says, ‘As far as the east is from the west, so far has he [God] removed our transgressions from us.’ To forgive is to remove. It is to take sin away. Think of the hurt from sin as a large object that you cannot put in the wheelie bin for your normal rubbish collection. Instead, you open up the rear doors of your car and fold down the rear seats. You open up the hatch and remove the parcel shelf. Then you put the large object in the back, take it to the council depot at Drovers Way and dispose of it. How do you feel? Considerable relief, I expect.

So it is with God’s forgiveness. Sin is landfill. That may not be a good illustration environmentally, but I’m sure you get the point. It’s buried. He doesn’t dig it up again. I think that’s why R T Kendall in his book Total Forgiveness says that if you keep talking about a wrong that has been done to you, then you probably haven’t forgiven. I’m not sure I entirely agree with him, but I take the general point. Forgiveness takes away sin. There is a sense in which it isn’t here any more.

One thing that is often said about forgiveness is that if we truly forgive, then we forget as well. ‘Forgive and forget’ are put together. Perhaps that’s a development of the idea that forgiveness is about the removal of sin. Others say, ‘I can forgive but I can’t forget’, and feel condemned by those who associate forgiveness with forgetting what happened. So does forgiveness necessarily involve forgetting the offence?

I am in the middle of reading a book by an Anglican priest containing his reflections on divorce, having been through a divorce himself. Early on in the book he gives one definition of forgiveness. He doesn’t describe it as forgetting at all. He calls it ‘remembering well’. Humanly, we are unlikely to forget bad things that have been done to us. The more we try to forget, the more they are entrenched in our memory – much like the proverbial flying elephant. But we can come to a point where we hold the memory in a holy way. When the memory comes back to us, we choose not to bitter. One way of doing this is by praying that God will bless the person who hurt us.

Some years ago, I heard a tape from Spring Harvest of a sermon by Caesar Molebatsi. If you haven’t heard of him, Molebatsi is a black South African pastor much involved in justice and reconciliation issues. During the terrible years of apartheid, he was hit by a white car driver and lost a leg. Although the driver was caught, he never apologised. Molebatsi has a permanent reminder of the violence in that he has only one leg. He regularly has to choose to forgive, because it is impossible to forget when the sin done to him meant he is without one of his limbs. His only choice is ‘remembering well’.

And that links with one other observation I’d like to make about forgiveness. One of our great mistakes when it comes to forgiveness is to think that it is instant, or a one-off. The moment we have said, ‘I forgive you,’ everything is fine. It isn’t. Someone like Caesar Molebatsi knows that. Bob Mayo, the author of the book on divorce I mentioned, also knows that. Whatever happened between him and his wife, he has the permanent reminder that she is no longer there, but living somewhere else.

No: forgiveness, says Bob Mayo, is a journey. It may take time and practice. We may long for reconciliation with the one who wronged us, but often forgiveness precedes reconciliation. It may be a long time before we can face seeing someone who hurt us deeply, even though we hold no bitterness against them.

Miroslav Volf is a Croatian theologian who has written much on forgiveness and reconciliation, especially in the light of his experiences through the wars in the Balkans after the collapse of communism. One of his books, ‘Free Of Charge‘, was the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Lent book in 2006. In it, he says that forgiveness means we blame but do not punish. We do not pretend about the offence. It is real. But we choose not to punish, or press for punishment.

That is rather like God’s treatment of us with regard to our own sin. The Holy Spirit convicts us of sin so that we might repent and follow Jesus. The Spirit of God never pretends that the sin was a fiction. Otherwise, we could never repent and walk in the ways of God’s kingdom. But having convicted us, there is no sentence and we are treated as if we had never sinned, even though we have. If this is how God treats us, then it is also the goal we seek in our journey of forgiveness.

Why Forgive?
Having explored in quite a few ways what forgiveness is, I’m sure it’s already evident to a large extent why we need to forgive.

First of all, because it is consistent with the character of God. The Lord may say, ‘Vengeance is mine,’ but that is surely because God is the only one to whom vengeance may safely be trusted. In our hands, vengeance becomes revenge, not justice. But ‘the Lord is slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love’, and the work of the Holy Spirit within us is to make us slower to anger and more ready to be rich in love.

It’s central to our calling to become more Christ-like. Whatever the word ‘Christian’ means today, it started out as meaning ‘little Christ’. Debbie and I say that Rebekah is her mini-me and Mark is my mini-me. Notwithstanding the fact that the ‘mini-me’ language comes from the Austin Powers films, where Mini-Me is the son of Doctor Evil, I nevertheless assume that Jesus is longing to see a vast crowd of his ‘mini-me’s on earth. A central way in which we can be more like him is in adopting the practice and discipline of forgiveness.

For of course Jesus often called his would-be disciples with the words, ‘Follow me’. He didn’t simply mean a geographical following of him, but following his lifestyle. It’s what Jewish rabbis did: they expected their disciples to follow them in the sense of imitating their life. So if discipleship is about following Jesus and Jesus modelled forgiveness, then it’s of the essence of Christian faith to forgive.

But this approach poses questions, and one is this: another strand of the call to faith is what Paul emphasises, namely that God saves us in Christ entirely by his own work, and not on the merits of our good deeds. How then can it be essential to forgive? Wouldn’t that be salvation by good works, rather than by faith?

I believe the answer is something along these lines. God does indeed save us entirely by his own work in Christ. We receive that by faith, and faith itself is not a good work, either: it is the holding out of empty hands in trust to receive all that God has done for us. However, the test of faith is whether we are grateful for God’s gifts – or as Paul put it to the Galatians, ‘faith working by love’. It’s therefore reasonable and logical to expect that those who by faith receive what God gives us in Christ demonstrate that by showing grateful love. And since Christ shows us the love of God supremely in forgiveness, it behoves us to show true faith by being forgiving people. That is what makes sense of the parable. That is why at the end the master is angry with the unforgiving servant. He has not demonstrated this.

One other question occurs to me, and it is the question of justice in society. If forgiveness means blaming but not punishing, how do we keep good order in society? Won’t criminals run rampant, free from concern about being imprisoned? Perhaps a story I have told before might help.

On the night of my thirtieth birthday, I was in Manchester training for the ministry and was invited to a friend’s house for a celebratory meal of – beans on toast. My friend and his wife offered to call a taxi to take me back to college, but – feeling I knew city life as a Londoner and being too stingy to pay for a ride – I declined. That was my mistake. On the way back, I was mugged by a teenager. He smashed my glasses and took cash. I had no hesitation after the attack in calling the police. As it turned out, they didn’t catch my assailant (even though he was clearly known in the area), but I resolved that if they had, I would have co-operated with a prosecution. However, I felt I could only do that as a Christian once I had committed to forgiving the thug. Society needed justice, and the criminal needed forgiveness. I felt that was a fair balance.

And that ties up some of the other reasons why we forgive, which I hinted at earlier: forgiveness is good and indeed authentic witness. If there is one thing we can do in society to show Christ, it is to forgive.

So may God who is rich in mercy fill us with the knowledge and experience of his mercy, that we too may be rich in mercy to others.

September 13, 2008 4

Honoured

My post, Osteopath, has just been made one of this week’s ‘Best of the Methoblogosphere’. Thank you, Allan. Go see all the other fine people to whom he links.

September 13, 2008 0

Trafficking

If you care about the trafficking of girls and women into prostitution – surely a modern-day slavery – here is a letter you can sign to the Newspaper Society, asking for the removal of certain small ads from all papers.

September 13, 2008 0

Osteopath

When I was eighteen, my life changed unexpectedly. Since the age of five, I had been identified as a university prospect. I had a place (subject to A-Level grades) to read Computer Science at Imperial College, London. One month before the A-Levels, though, a sudden searing pain in my neck put paid to them. Although a consultant rheumatologist prescribed some physiotherapy that regained the movement in my neck and the pain reduced, it never completely subsided. I took a clerical job in the Civil Service and decided to review my long-term future. Ultimately that led to theological colleges and the ministry, but that’s another story.

Fast-forward to six years ago. My wife was pregnant with our first child, but I was still suffering from neck pain and frequent headaches. I didn’t want to be regularly out of action when a baby was around. My GP recommended the osteopath attached to the practice, and I began seeing Jamie regularly. One of the first things he explained to me was that my neck problems began with my feet. I could begin to teach my body a healthier posture if I based my sitting positions on how I placed my feet. Then the spine would start to move into a better position.

When we moved here three years ago, Jamie recommended a practice, and I now see Tom every six weeks. This morning I saw him. He is always full of helpful advice. I explained today that on my daily power walk that I take for fitness and blood pressure reduction, I regularly end up with a stiff neck. I had noticed that I tighten up my shoulders involuntarily. He showed me how I could help that by tightening my abdominal muscles in order to take some strain off my spine.

Afterwards, I went to a local Christian bookshop. There I bumped into a vicar friend. In exchanging the usual pleasantries, he said of his parish, ‘I’ve been here three years and I’ve only just learned the questions I need to ask. I don’t know the answers, but I do at last know the questions.’

Later, it struck me that metaphorically there was a connection with osteopathy. What I have learned from osteopathy is the general life lesson that the presenting problem is not necessarily the source of the problem, nor is it necessarily the place where the solution must begin. Healing my neck involves my feet and abdominal muscles, amongst other places. Likewise, it has taken my friend three years to get to the roots of parish issues. Clearly, the questions weren’t what he first conceived them to be. A good proportion of ministry is about people wanting us to ‘take the pain away’, but the best ways of doing so may not be what people want.

Richard Foster famously said that superficiality is the curse of our age. We go for surface solutions, for style over substance. It is especially tempting in the ministry if your long-term future in an appointment is not secure. In order to make an impact, you may find yourself leaning in the direction of doing something spectacular that does not have roots, in the hope that you might be able to stay longer. However, if you knew you were staying longer, you might take the healthier course of action – of exploring what the real questions and issues were, rather than leaping on the obvious.

While I am not sure I like the Anglican system where the incumbent is granted the ‘freehold’ of the parish and can stay as long as they like, provided they are not naughty, I do wonder whether the Methodist system should have further longevity built into it. Our present system allows for an initial invitation of five years. This is reviewed just under four years in – that is the real length of time in which a minister has to have an impact in order to win the vote. It used to be worse: the initial appointment when I was younger was three years. We do seem to have learned from other traditions that longer ministries are generally better, but I wonder whether we should increase that initial five to, say, seven.

We need to resist the crash-bang-wallop nature of our culture, where everything has to be instant. (Blogging and twenty-four-hour news channels only exacerbate the instant coffee and microwave food society.) Might it be counter-cultural to be slow, so that we might trace the root causes of problems and begin to apply treatment?

UPDATE: When I wrote this post yesterday, there was another aspect of osteopathy I meant to include. As I understand it, osteopathy is a therapy that doesn’t so much heal the body itself as put the body into a place where it self-heals. That, it seems to me, makes for an interesting pastoral analogy. Pastors don’t heal people, they equip them to find healing. In Psalm 23, the Lord as shepherd leads the sheep to green pastures and still waters – but there they presumably feed and water themselves. A pastor’s ministry includes showing people how they may access spiritual food and water, rather than simply putting it on a plate for them all the time.

September 9, 2008 10

Friends

Yesterday, we travelled back to Kent for a barbecue. We had been one couple among eight on a National Childbirth Trust ante-natal course six years ago. Five of the eight couples remained friends. As it happens, two of the other couples are also Christians, one couple has started to show an interest in spiritual things recently, but the other couple – to our knowledge, at least – hasn’t. But they are our friends, regardless. We enjoy each other’s company. None of the other families has moved away, only us. But when we return, we seem to pick up where we left off.

Debbie and I are glad to have both Christian and non-Christian friends – both from before we ever met each other, and since. Some of the families we know through school here are good friends. As far as we know, only one of those families is Christian.

I think back to 2003, when I was on a sabbatical. We got away from Methodism and worshipped at the nearby Baptist Church, where we knew the pastor and his wife quite well. When he (or one or two others) preached, it was thoughtful and challenging. However, there were some regulars in the pulpit who were not so good.

One was a church deacon. He prowled across the dais like an evangelical superstar, waiting to pounce like a spiritual lion. In one sermon, he told us how Christian friends would always be there for us, but it would never be true of non-Christians. They would ask you how you were, but would not be interested in your response.

Idiot.

Both of us are grateful for friends who have stuck with us in the darkest of times, not all of them people who share our faith at all.

People are made in the image of God, and are capable of good and loving acts. Those acts are not salvific, but neither are ours. We hope we can be a model of Christian love – that our deliberate intention to cultivate friendships will be missional.

I’m glad we’re not trapped in the holy huddle. Thank God for our non-Christian friends.

September 7, 2008 0

Covenant Sermon

This Sunday, my church at Broomfield is experimenting with bringing its annual Covenant Service forward to the beginning of the ‘Methodist year’ rather than the calendar year. Hence what follows is a sermon for a Covenant Service, rather than on one of the regular weekly Lectionary readings.

Romans 12:1-2

Introduction
At my office, I worked with a Muslim guy. Javed (or ‘Suave Jave’ as we called him, for his attitude to the ladies) was more Muslim by upbringing than practice. But one day, he brought in to show us his mother’s copy of the Qur’an. It was edged and blocked in gold leaf. It came in a special tissue-like wrapper. One thing neither Javed nor his mother would have done with that book was write in it. Even touching it seemed risky, in case of damage.

But I don’t treat my copies of the Bible that way. In particular, I was taught as a young Christian to underline words in my Bible. Not only verses that struck me, but also some key words. ‘But’ was a good word to underline. It indicated an important change in Paul’s arguments.

And Romans 12 starts with another key word: ‘therefore’.

I appeal to you therefore, brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God—what is good and acceptable and perfect. (Romans 12:1-2)

‘I appeal to you therefore’: therefore indicates all that has preceded Romans 12. It indicates the first eleven chapters of Romans, summarised here as ‘the mercies of God’. We make and renew our covenant because of ‘the mercies of God’. All we offer today is in response to the mercies of God. Not just one-off mercy in initial forgiveness, but mercies. Over and over again, God is merciful to us. Our sins, our mistakes, our foolishness and weakness: for all these things God is merciful to us in Christ through the Cross. And because he is relentlessly merciful – his mercies are ‘new every morning, [so] great is [his] faithfulness’ (Lamentations 3:23) – we offer ourselves to him.

How does Paul ask his readers to respond to the mercies of God? In these two verses are two ways:

1. Sacrifice
Paul urges Christians to ‘to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship’ (verse 1).

‘Spiritual worship’ here implies that it is reasonable, rational and true. This is the right and proper thing to do in light of God’s enduring mercies to us. The mercies of God come to us through the sacrifice of Christ: is it not appropriate, urges Paul, for us to make sacrifices as a grateful response?

But what are these sacrifices? ‘Present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God’, he says. It’s not just something we do ‘spiritually’: we present our bodies. And if I might just re-order the words to reflect what many commentators think is the sense of the Greek, we make ‘sacrifices, living, holy and acceptable to God’. Those adjectives ‘living’, ‘holy’ and ‘acceptable to God’ illustrate the kinds of sacrifices we might make with our bodies.

‘Living’ – we freely offer our bodies to God, because of what he has done for us in Christ. It may cost us something. The author Robert J Morgan tells how one Sunday, the late Corrie ten Boom was preaching in Copenhagen on these very verses. She was eighty years old at the time. Two young nurses at the church invited her to lunch afterwards, but they lived in a tenth floor flat and there was no lift. Not what you want at eighty.

She struggled up the stairs as far as the fifth floor, but her heart was pounding and her legs buckled. Collapsing into a chair, she complained to the Lord. But she sensed God whispering to her that it was important she carried on.

When she finally made it to the tenth floor, she met the parents of one of the nurses. Neither was a Christian, but they were both interested in the Gospel. Corrie ten Boom led them to faith in Christ. All because she reluctantly followed her own sermon and made her life – her very body – a sacrifice in climbing ten flights. She was willing to go where God led her, despite the cost.

‘Holy’ – our dedication to God may also sometimes come at a price. The Covenant Service promises balances the way some parts of our discipleship are attractive and others are costly:

Christ has many services to be done: some are easy, others are difficult; some bring honour, others bring reproach; some are suitable to our natural inclinations and material interests, others are contrary to both; in some we may please Christ and please ourseleves, in others we cannot please Christ except by denying ourselves. Yet the power to do all these things is given to us in Christ, who strengthens us.’ (Methodist Worship Book, p288.)

Holy sacrifices are about being willing to pay the price of unpopularity and difficulty for the sake of dedication to the right thing. It is also a matter of doing so graciously, rather than with complaint, self-righteousness or attention-seeking.

‘Acceptable’ – this probes our motives. Other translations say, ‘well-pleasing to God’. It’s about a desire to please God. In marriage and other human relationships, we make it our first goal not to please ourselves but our spouse, or whoever it is we love. So too with God. When we know how merciful he has been to us and how regularly he has been merciful, the fitting response is to set our minds and hearts on doing the things that bring him joy.

There is a story told in the Old Testament that gives a small illustration of what I am talking about King David wanted to buy some land from a subject and use it for worship. The owner says he can have it free of charge, but David says, no: he insists on paying. Why? ‘I will not give to the Lord that which has cost me nothing,’ he says. Discipleship and giving need to cost us something to be genuine. It may be financial, material, emotional, psychological, even social. If we realise just how merciful God continually is to us, then out of joy we shall be willing to show love in return, even if it comes at a price.

2. Transformation
Verse 2:

Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God—what is good and acceptable and perfect.

‘Do not be conformed to this world’ – or, as J B Phillips famously translated this passage, ‘Don’t let the world around you squeeze you into its own mould’. Do not be conformed, be transformed, says Paul. Don’t be squeezed by the world, ‘let God re-mould your minds from within’ (Phillips).

Yet how easy it is to conform to the world, to let it squeeze us into its mould. Often we don’t notice. The late Lesslie Newbigin once observed that just as a goldfish is not consciously aware of the water in which it swims, so we are often unconscious of the culture we live in and its values.

In our society’s case, think about how we easily use popular words such as ‘tolerance’. It is presented as a quality that everybody must have. Woe betide the intolerant! But the word ‘tolerance’ carries with it overtones of a benign attitude to things that are wrong, enduring wrong things or having no deep convictions oneself. It’s a slippery slope towards tolerating sin. All these shades of meaning are therefore anathema to the Christian, but we refer to tolerance as much as anyone! The world is squeezing us into its mould, if we are not careful. I could give examples from other apparently innocent or positive words such as ‘inclusiveness’ and ‘community cohesion’.

So how do we resist social pressures to adopt ways of thinking that are inimical to the Gospel? Paul exhorts us to ‘be transformed by the renewing of [our] minds’, or to let God re-mould us from within, as Phillips puts it. Spiritual transformation involves a battle for the mind, because what we think affects our attitudes and our actions.

This doesn’t mean we all have to be intellectuals. Any Jesus-follower can develop Gospel thinking, Gospel attitudes and Gospel actions. That is Paul’s vision. Where do we begin?

We start with reading and reflecting on the Bible and its great story from the Garden to the New Jerusalem. It is Scripture above all that will help us to be Gospel thinkers. However, we don’t do so alone. Private Bible reading is good and worthy, but most of the books in the Bible itself were written or dictated to be heard less by individuals than by groups of disciples. It’s important, therefore, to get to grips with the Gospel together. If you’re not part of a small group that does that, you’re missing out! For starters, join the Living Faith course! It will help us get to grips with the big picture of our faith together.

But it’s not enough just to read the biblical message and discuss it. There are many people in churches who know their Bibles well, but who are harsh, unloving and judgmental. (Not that any of us is perfect – least of all, me.) So just reading the Bible and talking about it isn’t enough.

In other words, the biblical authors didn’t write their books just to be read or heard. They wrote them to generate action. The Bible isn’t just to be read, it’s to be done.

In my final year as a student minister, I spent half my time on placement in a circuit. At one of the two churches where I worked, I led a Bible study every week. However, the minister who supervised that group had been very frustrated with it. ‘When are they going to stop talking about the Bible and start doing something?’ he said to me once. ‘They’re more interested in the maps on the inside covers of their Bibles than in putting the teaching into practice.’

And that’s what I’m on about. Spiritual formation in Christ – the transformation of our minds to which Paul calls us – involves Bible reading, reflecting on it together where we support and challenge each other, and then getting on with what we’ve learned. It’s when the thinking leads to action that we truly learn. If I were a betting man, I would wager that Katie learned more about God’s love for the poor through her trip to Kenya with Hand In Hand than I would have done simply by reading about the poor.

One famous preacher said, ‘Never finish your sermon without telling your congregation what you want them to do about it.’ I suggest you might almost say, ‘Never finish your Bible reading without deciding what you are going to do about it.’

Conclusion
If God has been so persistently merciful to us, then what might we give him as a present? It would be appropriate if our offering involved sacrifice, when we recall all that he has done for us in Christ.

Transformation is also appropriate: Christ did not die on the Cross only for our forgiveness: he died that we might be saved from sin in every way. Not only the penalty of sin, but the practice of sin (which involves us co-operating with the Holy Spirit in being transformed) but also the presence of sin (as we anticipate God’s New Creation by being colonies of God’s Kingdom).

This Covenant Service, let us pledge ourselves again – in promise and in action – to the God of abundant mercy.

September 5, 2008 2

Names

Have you seen the World Names Profiler? It’s had a lot of publicity recently. It’s taken several days for me to get a result searching for ‘Faulkner’, due to massive demand on the site. Having finally done so, I now find there are more FPM (Frequency Per Million) in Australia than anywhere else. Cue ‘convict’ jokes from my wife …

Clicking on the UK results, the surname is most popular in Northern Ireland, followed by most parts of England. Then you get the rest of England (including East Anglia, where we currently live) and Wales. Bottom comes Scotland, which is where the surname originates.

It’s different if you profile the putative original spelling (insofar as you can assume anything of the like, given massive illiteracy affecting birth registrations in previous centuries). ‘Falconer’ is far and away most popular in Scotland in terms of UK density. (Worldwide, it’s found most commonly in New Zealand.)

All of which brings me to a story: when I was born, I was given the middle name ‘Duncan’ to mark the Scottish heritage of the family. Studies suggest that ‘Falconer’ originated in Aberdeenshire around the 1200s, and the Falconers were a sept of the Keith clan. There is a town in Aberdeenshire called Keith. Falconers were plebs who looked after the falcons on the laird’s estate, and of course ‘falconer’ is still used as the name of the associated profession.

When my father and aunt were growing up, they both clearly remember their grandfather telling them that he had been born in Scotland, but had come south of the border with his family as a boy. In those days, the name was still spelt ‘Falconer’. When he went to school in England, the teacher said to him, ‘Now you’re in England, you’ll spell your name the English way.’ And so, according to Dad’s grandfather, that is when our surname changed to ‘Faulkner’.

As a result, Dad has always supported Scotland at football and rugby. I was named David Duncan, as I said.

In recent years, however, a problem has arisen. After he retired, Dad began investigating the family tree. He discovered the part of ‘Scotland’ we come from. It’s called Lincolnshire. He got as far as the early eighteenth century, and our family was always living in Lincolnshire hamlets, where some of our ancestors were shepherds – a nice antecedent for what I do now.

I’ve never had the heart to tell Dad that I’d discovered ‘Duncan’ was originally Irish.

Still, at least they were OK with calling me ‘David’. They chose that, because they knew it meant ‘beloved’.

So what’s in a name? What’s in yours? I like to use these stories at Christmas when preaching about the naming of Jesus. You might think of other applications. Do tell.

September 4, 2008 5

Todd Bentley

I wrote several posts a few months ago about Todd Bentley. We arrived home from holiday to discover he was leaving the Lakeland ‘Revival’ and separating from his wife. Three days later his ministry admitted he was in an unhealthy relationship with another woman. Many bloggers have waded in. Dan Edelen has a lot of wisdom borne of pain in several posts. Bill Kinnon is more fiery, especially on the backtracking by C Peter Wagner. There are numerous others.

Whatever my criticisms of Bentley, I take no pleasure in these events. Here are some thoughts.

Losers According to Bill Kinnon, C Peter Wagner has described Todd Bentley as a loser. Crudely, that seems to mean Wagner didn’t back a winner, so he inflicts this description on Bentley. Whatever I think of Bentley’s ministry, especially the violence, if you write people off as losers you dismiss the Gospel. In the words of an old Steve Taylor song, ‘Jesus is for losers’. Watch the video for the song here:

No, if Wagner talks like this, what Gospel does he believe and preach? Where does the Cross fit in? Dan Edelen talks much about charismatics needing to recover the Cross: here is a prime reason why.

This isn’t a time for casting stones, it’s a time for prayer and grace as well as church discipline (which after all according to Jesus was meant to be restorative).

Accountability Bill Kinnon links to Phoenix Preacher, who said on August 26th,

Scott and I knew about Bentley’s immorality two months ago, but couldn’t find anyone willing to go on the record.

It’s in the nature of wrongly relating to someone other than yourself that there will be deceit, but this implies that appropriate accountability structures were abused. Yes, it’s good that Bentley stepped down, but that seems to have been for the sin of having been found out. Why were others culpable in the cover-up? Was it conspiracy or fear? We may never know.

But there is not only the accountability to his organisation Fresh Fire and the wider church, there is also the question of accountability in marriage. In what I am about to write I am aware that ‘there but for the grace of God go I’, but – it seems one of the problems seemed to be Bentley’s protracted absence in Lakeland. Like many ministry marriages, Debbie and I have it built into our relationship that if a question arises of my being absent overnight or longer, we discuss it before agreeing. We have done so with respect to my forthcoming sabbatical early next year.

It must have been very tempting (and yes, I probably do mean ‘tempting’) for Bentley to stay in Florida rather than Canada, given what was happening. It must have been exciting for him. The emotional pressure on Shonnah to agree must have been huge. But the fatal flaw in the logic is the idea that the revival depended on him. I suspect that when I take my sabbatical next year, my churches (which have never had a minister on study leave before) will discover just how unnecessary I am! It is a salutary lesson.

Prophecy Clearly, Wagner’s ‘prophecy’ in June that Bentley would increase in this, that and everything looks pretty sorry now. While I am not one of those who believes modern-day prophecies have to be 100% accurate (as per Old Testament standards) because they’re not adding to Scripture, it does strike me that the prophecy concerned is just altogether too typical of the prophetic drivel that sometimes infects charismatic Christianity. It is the sort once characterised by a friend of mine as ‘Thus says the Lord, I love you O my children’. It’s all about how wonderful the recipient is. While I’m neither for the sort of word that reduces everyone to worm status, I thought the only person we were meant to big up like this was Christ. This stuff needs serious questioning. It’s linked to my next observation.

Personality Whatever happened to all those prophecies around the 1990s that ‘the coming revival’ would be ‘a nameless, faceless’ one? Rather than that, we still promote our personalities, and then (like the secular press) exclaim with horror when they fall. The personality cult is one of the most insidiously worldly aspects of evangelical and charismatic Christianity. Bentley often said on the stage at Lakeland that it wasn’t about him but Jesus. Nevertheless, others promoted him and he allowed it. He could have stepped out of the way more for his associates or others. He rarely did. This may have been a tactical error rather than malicious, but any of us called to a public rôle in Christianity need to learn and accept the hard lesson that it’s not about us, it’s about Christ, and our actions need to match up. That’s not easy, and it requires some holy ruthlessness on our part. Often we’re not willing. The attention or acclaim is too attractive.

So may God have mercy on Todd and Shonnah Bentley and the anonymous female staff member. May God have mercy on C Peter Wagner. May God have mercy on us all. We who are without exception sinners need grace – the kindness of God that leads us to repentance.

September 3, 2008 11

Pioneering Ministries

Richard Hall points to a decision by Methodist Conference to set up a scheme for Pioneering Ministries in the Methodist Church. Richard has copied and pasted much of the press release. It’s been hard to find much on the conference website last night or this morning, except I did find the conference report of the Fresh Ways Working Group. This doesn’t contain the resolutions passed by conference, but doubtless forms a substantial background to the decision.

When I first saw Richard’s post yesterday evening, I posted a sceptical comment, fearing that if this was tied to our conventional doctrine of presbyteral ministry, we would end up recruiting people whose focus would be the care and nurture of existing Christians (not that that is a bad thing!), rather than those whose leadership gifts are missionary. I have to say that having read the press release again and the Fresh Ways Working Group, I am more positive. The report notes concerns in fresh expressions about sacramental presidency (not that the question is answered), plus, in paragraph 5.2.7., potential deficits in Methodism’s understanding of apostolicity. (Yes!) It also talks about leadership being shared between ‘laypeople’ (hate that word), and diaconal and presbyteral ministers. This gives scope for bringing a wide range of leadership charisms to the task. Encouragingly, it also notes:

It is thus a whole set of issues which lead Methodists to be wary of fresh expressions – they just don’t seem to fit established methods and rules. Although, as we have seen, it may well be our interpretation and understanding of what established Methodism is, rather than our theology and polity. (Paragraph 5.2.4)

That seems to strike the nail on the head. The report is strong on recovering the pragmatic missionary DNA of Methodism. Doing so could be a painful process, and in some areas take too long for the current urgent context. However, this seems clearly to be a priority: we need a return to a Wesleyan DNA that has been lost, albeit without the unhelpful Constantinian assumptions that Wesley held. That is, in an age when there was still a common national understanding of the Gospel, Wesley didn’t see the need for ordained ministry in the local situation to go beyond word, sacrament and pastoral care.

So I wonder whether we are up for the challenge?

If I have one reservation about the report, and I may be reading in too much here, I note it talks in paragraph 5.2.6 about leadership of fresh expressions being ‘entrepreneurial’. I just wonder whether that’s a helpful metaphor. It risks being consumerist. Hopefully, what they want to underline here is the importance of proactive, initiative-taking leadership.

(By the way, the Fresh Ways Working Group has a blog. Unfortunately, it hasn’t been updated since February.)

UPDATE: Further to Toby’s comment below, the report can be found on pages 13 to 18 of this document.

Technorati Tags: RichardHall, MethodistConference, FreshExpressions, missional, ministry

July 8, 2008 2

Tomorrow’s Sermon: The Gospel According To Jesus

Matthew 11:16-19, 25-30

Introduction
On Friday, Rebekah brought home her first ever school report. I won’t read it out, but let’s just say Debbie and I were two proud parents. We decided she deserved a reward, but unlike one other couple we know at the school who headed to Toys R Us at Harlow, we more modestly headed into town and Woolworth’s.

Now if ‘Woollies’ is famous for one thing, it’s the pick and mix counter. And today’s Gospel reading is something of a pick and mix reading. We hear Jesus’ frustration with those who perversely will accept neither him nor John the Baptist. We hear his joy that the simple, not the wise receive the kingdom of God. In between, it omits some verses about judgment. Then it ends with Jesus’ famous words of invitation:

‘Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.’ (Verses 28-30)

A sermon covering the whole passage wouldn’t be very coherent, in my opinion. So I thought I’d better pick but not mix. And I’m going with those closing verses I just read. They constitute, for me, The Gospel According To Jesus. If you want a flavour of the Good News as Jesus proclaimed it, you can hardly do better than meditate on these words.

1. Weary
As a father of young children, working morning, afternoon and evening most days, and then fitting in some domestic duties often late at night, it’s music to my ears when I read Jesus saying, ‘Come to me, all you that are weary’ (verse 28). I know a lot about weariness. When you go to bed late, you can’t catch up the next day, because the children wake you up.

Many other people know weariness. The single parent. The elderly person, whose infirmities keep her awake at night. The person with the second job, trying to make ends meet. Many people know weariness. If Jesus can offer rest to the weary, it has to be good news. What kind of weariness does he have in mind?

I believe Jesus speaks here about a weariness of spirit. Some people know all about that, too. They give, give, give only for church to suck the life out of them and give nothing back. They are running on empty. Church seems tailored to the needs of others, but not them.

I think Jesus has a specific form of spiritual weariness in mind, one that makes people feel they ‘are carrying heavy burdens’. It may be the kind of religious exhaustion I have just described. But it may be something else. Some forms of religion lay heavy burdens on people.

Jesus knew all about it in his day. The spiritual leaders took the Scriptures and twisted the laws of God. One moment they were the signs of gratitude for God’s salvation, the next moment they had become distorted into laws that either put you right with God or kept you in the right with God. Then, if that wasn’t enough, they added their own interpretations. These human traditions became yet more rules. Religion became a list of obligations. Faith was characterised by words such as ‘ought’ and ‘must’. When belief in God is only a list of ‘oughts’ and ‘musts’, a litany of obligations, then it is a lead weight, a heavy burden from which people need rest.

Heavy burden religion, wearying religion is something the Christian Church has slipped into too many times during her history. It is something we practise when we imply that people have to reach a certain standard of morality before they will be acceptable to God and to us. It is the religion I sadly grew up with in the Methodist Church. It said if you were good and believed in God, you were a Christian, but it led people to say they were trying to be Christians. Did they ever know whether they were Christians or not? Probably not, in heavy burden religion.

Jesus says this approach to faith tires people out. It doesn’t bring life, love and energy. It wearies folk. He came to abolish wearisome religion. He came to lift burdens. I wonder whether we feel that weight around our necks. If so, he has come to remove it. I wonder too whether it is a burden we have laid on others. Jesus comes to take it from them, and to challenge us to change.

2. Rest
What is Jesus’ promise to those carrying burdens? ‘I will give you rest’ (verse 28). I just said that he came to lift the dead weight of wearisome religion. We can see him doing that in the Gospels.

So it was that Jesus refused to lift stones to throw at the woman caught in adultery. He knew what the Jewish Law said about those who commit adultery. Yes, it did prescribe stoning. That was the letter of the law. But at this stage, all that would do was condemn the woman. Where might salvation be found? Instead of large stones, he drew in small grains of sand. And as the self-righteous accusers skulked away, he said, ‘Neither do I condemn you. Go and leave your life of sin.’

He invited himself to tea with Zaccheus, who promptly changed his life. None of the condemnation of the clean-living honest people had brought Zaccheus to repentance. But when Jesus welcomed himself into Zaccheus’ home, the man changed. He promised to put right his crooked ways, even exceeding the demands of the Jewish Law in making restitution to those he had cheated.

In both those stories, Jesus knows that strident denunciation of sin on its own won’t do the trick. Condemnation doesn’t bring transformation. What brings a change of lifestyle to the adulterous woman and the corrupt taxman? Grace. I believe they both felt their guilt. They probably both also felt hopeless. How could they change and be in the right with God and their communities?

But this is the good news of God’s grace in Jesus Christ. He comes to save, not condemn. God’s unconditional, accepting love is the ‘rest’ he offers from a religion that has been reduced to a set of rules that no one fully keeps. It isn’t that he condones sin, for in his death he would accept condemnation in our place. Jesus knows what sets people free, and it’s love, not denunciation.

Some of you may be thinking, this is just the basics of the Gospel, I know all this. If so, I’m glad you do. But we can distort faith every bit as much as the people of Jesus’ time did. It doesn’t surprise me when I find people in church, often regular attendees for decades, who are hiding a dark secret in their lives. They are thinking, if anyone here gets to know about this, then no one will love me and I shall be rejected. They live, if not in fear of God, then certainly with a considerable degree of nervousness towards him. So hear the Good News again. Jesus says to you, neither do I condemn you. I am coming to your house for tea. He says, let me lift the burden from you. Find rest in my grace. You are loved.

And if we need to hear this for ourselves, we need to remember it in our dealings with those we are seeking to reach for Christ. We extend grace, rather than expecting them to jump through prescribed hoops before being acceptable. It means surprising them with the unconditional love of God, just as we did in a small way last weekend by telling our visitors to the family fun day that there was no charge for any of the activities or food. Jesus loved people into the kingdom of God and a transformed life: that’s our route, too.

3. An Easy Yoke
As many of you know, I developed a neck problem when I was eighteen. Although the osteopathic treatment I receive for it is improving things, I still do not have a strong neck. I look with some envy on those other fathers who hoist their children up onto their shoulders and carry them. That is painful for me. It is also painful when Rebekah gets over-enthusiastic with her cuddles. ‘Mind my neck!’ I have to say – feeling wretched that I am complaining about a demonstration of her love for me.

One thing I can’t cope with, then, is heavy weights on my neck. Jesus doesn’t want that for us in spiritual terms, either. He promises that his yoke is easy: it is a light burden (verses 29-30). What does he mean?

The language of the ‘yoke’ is significant. It was a metaphor for the Jewish Law. Jews took on the yoke of the Law. But, as I said, the approach to it had become corrupted to the point that it was a heavy yoke. It was painful on the neck, so to speak. You can see the need for relief! Obeying all the Old Testament laws, plus the added traditions of the ages, all as either a means of either finding acceptance by God or remaining in the household of faith – what a burden!

What, then, is the yoke of Jesus, and how is it easier? If the yoke was the Jewish Law, then the yoke of Jesus must be his teaching. He is claiming that his teaching is the authoritative interpretation of God’s will. But how is that easy? Often Jesus seems to increase the demands, compared with those required by the religious authorities of his day. Just read the Sermon on the Mount: how easy is that to put into practice? So how can the yoke of Jesus be easy and light?

I believe the yoke of Jesus is light in this respect: obedience to Jesus is never something we do in order to earn God’s favour. Nor do we ever undertake it so that we remain accepted by God. Obedience to the law of Jesus is something we do out of gratitude. We obey Jesus, because we are accepted, not in order to be so or remain so. The light yoke of Jesus is when we rejoice that we are loved, and it is our heart’s desire to please him. It’s why the Apostle Paul wrote, ‘Find out what pleases the Lord.’ It’s why Martin Luther said, ‘Love God and sin boldly’ – because if you know God’s love, you won’t want to sin, you’ll want to please God.

A friend of mine once told me that the thing that had boosted her self-esteem more than anything else in life was when her then boyfriend had proposed to her. The thought that this man wanted to spend the rest of his life with her was the most astonishing revelation of love to her, especially when she was deeply conscious of her own flaws and frailties. Her response was to reciprocate the lifelong commitment.

That is what the easy yoke of Jesus is like. Looking at our weaknesses and sins, he would have every right to condemn us. But he doesn’t. He gives us the ‘rest’ of holy grace and love. In response, we want to love him back. Because – unlike certain brands of shampoo – he’s worth it.

Technorati Tags: ToysRUs, Woolworths, Gospel, Jesus, legalism, Zaccheus, MartinLuther

July 5, 2008 0

Category: Religion