I am no gardener. I hate gardening. But my writer friend Fiona Veitch Smith loves gardening, and is writing about it from a spiritual perspective. Why not surf over to her site and read some of her ‘Gardener’s Gospel’ posts? Oh, and leave her a comment to encourage her.
Sermon For Trinity Sunday: The Holy Trinity In Ordinary Time
Introduction
‘It’s the end of the festival season,’ said a friend of mine the other day.
The end, I thought? But it’s only mid-May! The mud bath that
is the Glastonbury Festival hasn’t happened yet, let alone all the other summer
music festivals.
Then I realised. He wasn’t talking about that kind of festival.
My friend is an Anglican priest, and he was talking about the festivals of the
Christian year. We began with Advent and Christmas, we went to Epiphany (and
Candlemas for the enthusiasts). Then it was on to Lent, followed by Easter,
then Ascension and last week Pentecost. Today is Trinity Sunday, and it’s the
end of the festival season. From now on, everything until Advent is what we
call ‘Ordinary Time’. Trinity Sunday leads us into Ordinary Time. The festivals
are over, and it’s time to live out our faith in the ordinary seasons.
And it’s that faith in the Trinity that enables us to live
the life of disciples in ‘ordinary times’, when there are no festivities or
dramatic events, when everything is reduced from saturated colours to shades of
grey. I want to do some exploring this morning of what faith in the Trinity
means for us on those plain vanilla days. I’m going to use the familiar words
of ‘The Grace’, which form the very last verse of 2 Corinthians, as a
foundation for this.
So you won’t get an explanation of the Trinity this morning.
I once took a series of sermons to scratch the surface of that! There will be
the odd hint about it, but I can recommend a book[1]
that is not aimed at academics, if you want deeper exploration. What you will
get is some sense of the work of the Trinity, from which we deduce the
doctrine.
Off we go, then. I wonder if you can guess how many points
the sermon has today …
1. The grace of the
Lord Jesus Christ
A friend of mine called Colin had been a missionary in the Far East when he was
single. He had stayed with a Christian family. They had one daughter. Her name
was Grace.
Colin once asked if Grace had any middle names. ‘No,’
replied her parents, ‘because – as the Scripture says – grace is sufficient.’
The grace of God revealed to us in Jesus Christ is what is
sufficient for us. It is more than sufficient to bring salvation. Grace is a
gift of God. It is well summed up in the old acronym that G.R.A.C.E. stands for
‘God’s Riches At Christ’s Expense’. That is, through the suffering of Jesus, we
receive blessing upon blessing. It is more than the idea that we don’t get what
we do deserve as sinners (mercy): grace is the flip side of the coin, where we
receive many things we don’t deserve.
So grace is a gift. It is the gift of God in Christ. It is
the mercy of the Cross, the new life of the Resurrection and the power of
Pentecost. It is the generosity of the Holy Trinity, where the Father lavishes
his blessings upon us through the Son, by the Spirit.
But there is more:
‘In Paul’s usage, grace
is most characteristically action and gift … and in these words Paul prays for
a continuation and deepening of what has already been done and given in Corinth.’[2]
Grace is an action as well as a gift. That is where it comes
into play in ‘ordinary time’. In ordinary daily life, we need grace to be
action as well as gift. As disciples of Jesus, we already know the grace of the
Lord Jesus Christ as a gift – and yes, of course, we often need reminding of
that gift. But we also need grace as action. That is, we who have received the
gift of grace in Jesus need to express it in our actions.
Corinth was a messed-up place, where the powerful threw
their weight around, discriminated against the poor and against those who didn’t
have an impressive appearance or charisma (Paul included!). Relationships were
damaged and broken as a result. They were a group of people constituted by the
fact that they had received the gift of grace. Now they needed to act in grace,
if they were to be the community Christ wanted them to be. If relationships
were to be repaired, they needed grace in action.
It’s the same for us in our ‘ordinary time’. People hurt one
another. They don’t consider one another’s feelings. One person’s ambition
means others are trampled. Somebody blows a short fuse. It’s time to turn the
gift of grace into the action of grace. It’s the call to practise the
discipline of forgiveness. And yes, I do mean discipline of forgiveness,
because much of the time we won’t feel like doing it, but we need to.
So if we have received the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ as
a gift, let us turn it into an action.
2. The love of God
To those of us used to normal Trinitarian formulae, it seems strange that Paul puts
Jesus before God. ‘The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ’ is followed by ‘the love
of God’. But this is important. Behind the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ is
the love of God. Jesus brings grace because God is love. It is not that Jesus
has to persuade God to love us: rather, it is as Paul said earlier in 2
Corinthians, ‘God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself’.
And it’s more than the love of God. Why does God love us? He
loves us, because that is his nature. The most fundamental statement about God
in the whole Bible is this: ‘God is love.’ Now love is something that must be shown,
so how could God be love before he had creation to love? The answer, surely, is
that within the Trinity mutual love is expressed.
But then, love that is within a relationship has to go
beyond those in the relationship to others. In the love of man and woman in
marriage, the conventional way this happens is in children – perhaps biological
children, or adopted children, or maybe fostered children. When I prepare a
couple for marriage and I discover they do not plan to try for children
immediately, I challenge them to find a way of putting the love they have for
each other to work in serving the community, or in helping the needy. Love cannot
be turned in on itself forever.
So with God: the love within the Trinity burst out in the
loving act of creation. Then, in the light of sin and brokenness, the love of
God became salvation – ultimately, the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ.
If the love of the Trinitarian God is like this, what does
it mean for us in the ordinary time of routine life? It surely means that if God’s love is shared
among us, it cannot be contained within us. The church or Christians who experience
God’s love will share God’s love.
Does that mean doing something scary or dramatic, like
travelling to fearsome places to show the love of God? It will for some. In the
meantime, we need to start where we are. Where has God placed us? Those are where
we begin to share the love of God. For Debbie and me, the location of our manse
and the ages of our children place us at particular school and pre-school
gates. There we are available to people. Unconditionally, we help anyone in
need if we can. It may be the family split apart by alcoholism, or the little
girl whose mother’s behaviour towards her is deeply worrying. We hope and pray
people will realise we do this because of God’s love, and that the
opportunities will come to share just how much more God has done for them in
Christ.
Where has God placed you? That is the location to begin
showing the love of God beyond the boundaries of the church.
3. The fellowship of
the Holy Spirit
Paul’s final prayer here amounts to this:
‘Paul wishes for his readers a ‘continuing and deepening’ of
their participation in the Holy Spirit.’[3]
This is tricky. Participation in the Holy Spirit is a
slippery thing. Why? Because one thing we learn about the Holy Spirit in
Scripture is that the Spirit never points to himself[4],
but to Jesus. The Holy Spirit is the self-effacing Person of the Godhead.
If that is the case, then participating in the Holy Spirit
isn’t just about welcoming all the ways in which the Spirit works. It is also
about the manner in which we immerse ourselves in the Holy Spirit.
What does this mean? I think it means we welcome all the
gifts the Holy Spirit wants to give us. Anything from God is good. But how do
we use them? We cannot use spiritual gifts to enhance our own name or reputation.
If we truly are deeper and deeper in the Holy Spirit, our passion will be the
name of Jesus. There are times I have had this right in my life, and other
times when I have had it badly wrong.
One time I got it wrong was in 1997. I had been invited to
be a seminar speaker at Spring Harvest. It was the fulfilment of a prophetic
word given to me in 1980 that I would speak at conferences. The speakers that
week (including one Nicky Gumbel, by the way –yes, I have laid hands on him in
prayer, not that he would remember me!) could gather in a team lounge when not
on speaking duty. We would be expected to attend one of the evening celebration
meetings. One night, I was asked if for the rest of the week I would be
seconded from the one I attended to a children and family celebration that
friends of mine were running. I agreed.
A day or two later, I heard that in the team lounge while I was
at the family celebration, the Spring Harvest leadership had announced some
social evenings after the celebrations each night that the speakers could go
to. This would be a chance to mingle with the great and good of the evangelical
world. Hearing it second-hand later, I asked the people who hosted the team lounge.
‘No, it isn’t for you,’ they said. So I never went.
On the penultimate day, I discovered they were wrong. They had
mistaken me for someone else. I could have gone, but now the social evenings had
finished. My chance to get to know these people – and get known myself – was gone.
Then I realised that my motives were all wrong. When I had
heard about the social evenings, I had been too concerned to promote my name,
and not that of Jesus. I wonder whether that was why God allowed the
misunderstanding so that I didn’t go.
The next year, I had learned my lesson. I was running a Saturday
conference at a church for people involved in contemporary styles of worship. At
the evening worship celebration, an elderly man from one of my churches hadn’t
been able to attend. But two women from that church who did make it felt such a
fire in their hands during prayer that they were sure the Holy Spirit wanted
them to go and see this man after the meeting and lay hands on him. When they
did, he was healed. The next morning, he was in church, giving his testimony to
what happened the night before at a baptism service with many non-Christians
present.
I circulated the story on an email list on the Internet.
Back came a reply: ‘David, you mighty man of God!’ it said. (I mean, honestly,
you could tell he didn’t know me!) I was quick to reply and say it wasn’t I who
had laid hands on the man, but the two particular women, and in any case, it
was the work of God. That, I believe, is to participate more deeply in the Holy
Spirit – to welcome his gifts and make sure God gets the glory and no one else.
Maybe those two stories don’t easily qualify as mundane ‘ordinary
time’. But the principle remains. The gifts and ministries of the Holy Spirit are
for everyday, not just Sunday, for the street as much as the church. In all the ways we participate in the Holy Spirit’s
ministry, our part is to ensure the glory goes to the God of love whose grace
is made known in Jesus Christ. If we do, then we will imitate that God by
acting in grace to heal the wounds of the world, and showing God’s love to
those beyond our spiritual family. May the Holy Spirit enable us to do so, to
the glory of God.
[1] Darrell W Johnson, Experiencing
The Trinity – which I used for the aforementioned sermon series.
[2] C
K Barrett, The
Second Epistle To The Corinthians, p 344.
[3]
Ibid.
[4] Or
should that be herself? Can anyone remember the N T Wright comment from about
twenty years ago, where (in a Bible study at General Synod?) he said there was
a feminine personal pronoun in Romans 8 referencing the Spirit?
Welcome To Todd World
(And for those of you who don’t get the reference in the
title, you don’t have children who watch CBeebies.)
Last week I read with interest some of the posts on Richard Hall’s blog
regarding the possible ‘revival’ in Florida associated with the ministry of Todd Bentley. At the time, it was just
interesting reading. On Monday, it became more important for me to grapple with
this for myself. I received an email from my friend Peter Balls, the pastor of Chelmsford Community Church,
a church that has a wonderful heart for the community surrounding the school
where it meets for worship (see, for example, Our Cabin). Peter has invited a number of
local church leaders to meet next month and pray about whether we could do
something together for the kingdom of God in Chelmsford, in the light of the
Florida happenings. I am free on the date he suggests, and will attend.
So I watched one of the YouTube videos that Richard had
posted. What struck me first was the similarity to watching clips of the
dreaded Benny Hinn. The associate with the hand-held radio microphone tells the
big name the story of the person who has come onto the stage to testify. Big
Name then briefly interviews, and then prays, expecting the person to fall
under the power of the Spirit. I started comparing and contrasting this with
what I witnessed in 1995, when I visited the Toronto
Airport Christian Fellowship at the height of the ‘Toronto Blessing’. I
thought this would be instructive, because some supporters and opponents of
Bentley seem to have been making connections.
Here’s what I thought: yes, in Toronto, people could offer
testimonies with the hope of being selected to share it on the main stage
during one of the evening renewal meetings. Yes, they would be interviewed and
prayed for. They normally fell under the power of the Spirit. However – I never
had any worries while I was there that they were being pushed in order to fall.
Sometimes I was sitting quite close to the stage: I think I would have noticed
anything that would have made me suspicious. Furthermore, the person leading
the meeting changed from night to night, and so no personality cult developed.
Not only that, the vast majority of prayer ministry there happened at the back
of the auditorium. It was not a show. (You can legitimately debate the way they
asked people receiving prayer to stand on lines marked ten feet apart, with
‘catchers’ behind them. Their reply was that in a culture that resorted quickly
to litigation, they had to protect themselves, and they preferred to risk the
charge that they were suggesting people should fall. Every night I was there, I
accompanied one of their team who was praying for people, and at close hand, I
never saw anyone pushed.)
However, with Bentley, I’m less convinced. Naturally, I have
only the evidence of the YouTube videos. That is inferior to the close personal
observation I was able to engage in at Toronto. However, it looked to me as if
there was movement of the hand and arm as he laid his hand on people’s
foreheads. At least one man in the video didn’t go down to the floor
immediately, and Bentley laid his hand on him two or three times until he did.
Strictly, I’m not offering conclusive proof, but I am disturbed enough about
it.
If that’s what happened, what might it mean? I have no doubt
that falling under the power of the Spirit is a legitimate experience of God.
It has happened to me some times, and it is a feeling that the body cannot cope
with the presence of God. (By the way, I don’t call it being ‘slain in the
Spirit’. That’s an awful term, and as far as I’m concerned, the only people who
have ever been slain in the Spirit were Ananias and Sapphira in Acts chapter
5.) But if you asked all the responsible church leaders who were heavily
involved in the ‘Toronto Blessing’ at least in this country, they would have
said that the outward manifestation was not itself the proof of the Spirit’s
work. Certainly, that was the line I heard David Pytches hold. The
evidence of the Spirit’s work is the fruit. Outward signs at the time may be
commentary on the manifest presence of the Holy Spirit, or they may be
‘fleshly’ human responses.
If that were the case, why would anyone push someone to the
ground? One possibility might be insecurity. Certain immature charismatic
cultures want to see ‘falling under the power’ as the clear sign that God is at
work. Suppose Bentley or others felt they needed to ‘prove’ they were men or
women of God: they might then find it tempting to do something like that. I
don’t know the man, I’m just speculating. But I do know that many Christians,
leaders included, get their sense of security from the wrong source. There is a
great pressure to show results (and not least in elements of North American
Christianity). Does Bentley feel he has to prove he’s getting results? Were
that to be the case for anyone, the antidote is to know that our security is in
the Triune God, and in grace. God has made us in his image; in Christ, he has
redeemed us in love at immeasurable cost; the Holy Spirit indwells us. Results
don’t make us loved and accepted by God: grace does. Someone not acting out of
grace is capable of unintentionally hurting people.
However, it could be worse. It could be a show of power.
‘Look at me and my power.’ If someone takes that attitude, then s/he is trying
to stand in the place of God. Of course, in Bentley’s case he is quick to
attribute the healings to God. However, that falls by the wayside is the rest
of a person’s demeanour is of the ‘Look at me’ variety. While I don’t believe
the nonsense about just being channels for God (it’s rather like ‘worm
theology’ – ‘O Lord, I am just a worm’) and I believe that God uses
personalities, I believe that in every way we must be quick to give the glory
to God and deflect it from ourselves. It comes back to the old Corrie ten Boom quote
about compliments. She said that when she received a compliment, she saw it
like a bunch of flowers. She enjoyed the perfume, and then said, ‘Lord, these
are yours.’
Then we have the question of the healings. Richard referred
in one of his posts to the Gospel story of the ten lepers, where Jesus tells
them to go and show themselves to the priests. I have long felt this is an
important test of healing. Some months ago, a friend of mine was diagnosed with
cancer. At one point, after prayer, he believed he was healed. I understand he
came off his medication. A month or two ago, I attended his funeral. I believe
that God can and does heal in response to prayer (just as I also believe he
gives grace when healing doesn’t materialise). However, if God has done
something like that, it is verifiable. Rushing someone up to testify before
there has been time to test the claim is dangerous. There may be other
explanations for short-term improvements or remissions. In that respect, I
think the Toronto church made mistakes. Clearly, Bentley does, too. If God has
done something, it sticks. It doesn’t matter if we have to wait awhile before
that person gives public testimony. It is probably better for the Gospel that
they do.
Other issues to consider include finances and politics. With
regard to politics, I found the Toronto church was dangerously interested in
Christian Zionism. That isn’t just a question of politics, it’s also the desire
to feel part of God doing something amazing today, but that desire does lead to
a lack of discernment, and hence to a cultural captivity to a kind of politics
that doesn’t always favour the well-being of individuals, especially the poor.
If we care enough about someone’s physical plight to pray for their healing,
then it seems concomitant to me that we care for their social needs, too.
Unfortunately, many Christians don’t make that link. I’ve yet to hear any
connection with ministry with the poor and social justice from Bentley, and –
if he fits the rest of the stereotypes – I’m not expecting to hear anything.
Perhaps I do him an injustice: I hope so, but I suspect not.
Then, what about the issue of finances and the handling of
money? Billy Graham led the move towards financial accountability of
evangelical Christians in the States, especially after the TV evangelist
scandals of the 1980s. I couldn’t find Fresh
Fire on the Evangelical Council for
Financial Accountability website. That may be because FF is a Canadian
organisation, not American, but since Bentley seems to work a lot in the
States, I would have thought he’d have had an official US operation. Maybe
someone who knows the North American scene better than me can offer an
explanation, but it initially looks worrying.
To some people, all that I have written so far will elicit a
reaction of ‘So what?’ It’s all obvious stuff on one level. However, what if
Bentley is dubious? On the other hand, even if he’s perfectly genuine, we need
a lot of reflection on the question of why such people flourish. Yes, there is
what my blogging friend Kim Fabricius calls on one or Richard Hall’s posts
‘gullibilitus’, but why are people gullible? I’ve already mentioned two
paragraphs above that people want to believe they are part of something epic in
the purposes of God. Some believe so in the light of the ‘prophetic movement’
that often speaks in large, visionary terms about what is going on in the
world. Days of small things are despised.
In addition, there is the whole ‘Touch not the Lord’s
anointed’ problem. This mantra has been repeated for decades in certain
Pentecostal and charismatic circles. In its rightful original context in
Scripture, it captures the humility of the fugitive David in the days before he
was King of Israel, while his predecessor, Saul (ironically, a classic example
of someone who practised spiritual abuse) was hounding him. It is never in
Scripture a reason to accept everything a certain person says uncritically, and
surely it is highly unflattering to be compared to Saul! Nevertheless, ‘the
Lord’s anointed’ gets elevated. David was very aware of Saul’s frailties and
sins. In our day, ‘Touch not the Lord’s anointed’ is misused to build up people
who ought instead to be removed by church disciplinary procedures.
Worse than that, it is used to create a climate of fear.
‘Woe to you if you speak against the person the Lord has chosen.’ That is
unhealthy and dangerous, creating the conditions for abuse.
‘Touch not …’ is also used as the trump card against
cynicism. Yes, we need to guard against that in the church, although we should
always remember the saying that a cynic is a failed idealist. What needs
recovery is the gift of discerning spirits. Discernment is vital in the church,
and a valuable part of church leaders’ gifts. When someone doesn’t permit me to
weigh things carefully like the Berean people of Acts 17, I have every right to
be worried.
This post has started with Todd Bentley, but has spun off
onto wider issues that may or may not be relevant to him. On Bentley himself,
the jury is out, although I have seen enough to be concerned and need
convincing. He could be a holy man. He could be a charlatan. He could be a
mixture of sincere Christian and someone with dangerous weaknesses. And which
one of us doesn’t have a major weakness? However, unresolved weaknesses are the
fuel for spiritual abuse. As Marc
Dupont argued ten or so years ago in his book ‘Walking
Out Of Spiritual Abuse’ (and see also his more recent ‘Toxic
Churches’), it is not downright evil people who tend to cause spiritual
abuse: it is those with unresolved ‘baggage’. If Bentley’s behaviour stems from
serious insecurities, then watch out: danger is coming. We must not inhibit a
sincere and open process of discernment. No peer pressures should be allowed to
militate against that.
Before I wrap this up, let me put in a good word for a book
I am reading at present, ready to review for Ministry Today. Rob McAlpine knows a lot about spiritual
abuse in charismatic circles. His ‘Post-Charismatic?’
looks like it will be essential reading on topics like this.
Tomorrow’s Sermon: The Meanings Of Pentecost
Introduction
Yesterday morning, we held a coffee morning at Broomfield. We wanted to support
our missionary charity for the year, the Mission
Aviation Fellowship. You could make paper aeroplanes, take them to the
balcony and throw them in the direction of the communion table. Whoever got
their paper plane the nearest to the front would win a prize.
Mark, our three-year-old, got into the spirit of it,
especially after someone took him to a table and made him a paper plane. Then he
said, “Daddy, I want to play aeroplanes!”
I knew what that meant: with his hands, he would hold my
hands. Then he would run around me faster and faster, and would lift off. I whizzed
him around, and he flew with great joy and abandon. I put him down, and he
laughed. As I stood there dizzy, everybody laughed at me. Jim said, “Quick, get
a camera. I want a picture of the minister looking inebriated!”
“They are filled with new wine,” sneered the cynics at
Pentecost, witnessing the disciples who had been filled not with spirits but
the Holy Spirit.
It’s easy on Pentecost Sunday to be hung up on the
particular manifestations of the Holy Spirit described in Acts 2. Depending on
your personality or your style of faith, you may either loathe or love the
violent wind from heaven, the tongues of fire and the speaking in other
languages. In other sermons and articles, I have examined these things, but
today I want to concentrate on what Pentecost means.
1. After Easter
Pentecost was called so, because it was the fiftieth day after Passover in the
Jewish calendar. For Christians, it therefore comes after Easter. You may think
I have plumbed new depths in stating the obvious, but there is something
important here. Some Christians would like to stop with the joy of Easter
morning, but our journey must also take us through Ascension to Pentecost. As
Ben Witherington III says,
Throughout Acts, the presence of the Spirit is seen as the
distinguishing mark of Christianity – it is what makes a person a Christian.[1]
It isn’t just the question of speaking in tongues, it’s more
fundamental. The Holy Spirit enables us to confess Jesus as Lord[2].
Hence, Peter quotes Joel here:
Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.
(Verse 21)
The Holy Spirit shows us who Jesus truly is. The Spirit shows
how sinful we are and us how wonderful Jesus is. But the Spirit’s work doesn’t
stop there. The Holy Spirit shows us our need of God’s grace, and reveals to us
the saving work of Jesus in his Cross and Resurrection. Believing savingly in
the Easter events requires the Holy Spirit’s work in our lives. To see the
glory of Jesus and worship the Father through him means we need the Holy
Spirit. Neither worship nor evangelism are fundamentally human activities: we
need the Spirit to be at work in order for them to happen.
That’s to put it a challenging way. More positively, if you
have met Jesus, found the forgiveness of sins in his name through the Cross,
begun following him as a disciple and worshipping him as Lord, then the Holy
Spirit must have been at work in your life.
So, assuming we care about worship and evangelism as
Christians, we need to embrace a post-Easter faith, a Pentecost faith. It is a
faith that says, ‘Come, Holy Spirit. Be more at work in us, through us, ahead
of us and beyond us.’ Pentecost faith like that is grateful for all the past
signs of the Spirit’s work, but is hungry and thirsty for more.
2. Harvest
We have a lot of fun at Hatfield Peverel at harvest-time. As well as the Sunday
service and bringing offerings for good causes such as Harvest For The Hungry, we
have our Harvest Supper and Auction. The produce that cannot be given away is
auctioned off, and the proceeds given to our cause for the year. We have great
fun bidding against each other for tins of soup, home made jam and everything
else. Last year, Liz Ward and I enjoyed a ridiculous bidding war against each
other for a pineapple.
Now why am I talking about harvest in May? Well, our Jewish
friends so enjoyed their festivals and celebrations that they had two harvest festivals each year. One was
equivalent to our regular harvest festivals. It was the ingathering of the
crops at the end of the summer. But they also celebrated the arrival in late
Spring of the first fruits. They did this at Pentecost, or to give it its more
Jewish name, the Feast of Weeks, that happened seven weeks after Passover.[3]
Spiritually speaking, we look forward to the great
ingathering harvest at the end of the age, but we have plenty to celebrate in
the meantime. We have our spiritual first fruits. The gift of the Holy Spirit
is the first fruits of God’s harvest. The Spirit is the sign that shows us what
is coming. The Spirit is the first instalment of God’s kingdom in our lives. Here
is the foretaste of all that is to come.
Paul has a similar analogy in two of his letters, where he
describes the Holy Spirit as like a deposit[4].
Just as we pay a deposit on an item, intending to pay the remaining balance, so
the Holy Spirit is God’s initial deposit on us. He has begun his work of
salvation, and – as Paul says in Philippians – he will complete it[5].
If you think of the old Magnus Magnusson catchphrase from Mastermind, “I’ve
started, so I’ll finish”, the gift of the Spirit is God’s promise that he has
started his work in our lives, and he will finish.
So do you see the signs that the Holy Spirit is at work in
your life? Has the Spirit led you to saving faith in Christ? Does the Spirit increase
your vision of Jesus and your love for him, so that you want to worship God and
share God’s love? Is the Holy Spirit slowly making you more like Jesus, even if
you know there are still too many ways in which you are not like him? Does the
Spirit give you the courage and the words to be faithful to Christ under
pressure? If so, these are the first fruits of God’s harvest in you. One day it
will all come to complete fruition. These signs are the deposit God is putting
on your life. One day God will complete it.
3. Law
Like many homes, a weekday morning is frantic in ours, even though I work from
home. Getting one child ready for school and another for pre-school is a mad
rush. It is made even more so by the fact that Rebekah is a dreamer and that
ten minutes before we are due to leave, she and Mark know that their favourite
TV programme starts. Yes, it’s their Spanish language course. (Otherwise known
as Dora The Explorer.)
We are one of the closest families to the school; we are usually one of the
last to arrive. At points of great frustration, we tell Rebekah that if she is
late for school, a police officer will come and tell Mum and Dad off. We have
to try some way of scaring her into obedience! We pull out the same ‘policeman’
line in the car, if she doesn’t want to put on her seat belt or she dares us to
drive too fast.
We are used to ‘law’ as a list of rules, with some enforcers.
There was an ancient Jewish tradition that also associated Pentecost with the
giving of the Law at Sinai. And the Jewish writer Philo, who predates Luke,
wrote:
Then from the midst of the fire that streamed from heaven
there sounded forth to their utter amazement a voice, for the flame became the
articulate speech in the language familiar to the audience.[6]
It makes Sinai – where the Law was given – sound very much
like Acts 2. Pentecost is the Law of the Spirit, rather than the letter of the
Law. Pentecost fulfils Jeremiah’s vision of God’s new covenant, where God will
not write his law on tablets of stone, but inside the hearts of his people[7].
It is what Paul (again!) talked about when he wrote to the
Galatians in his famous words about the fruit of the Spirit. He tells his
readers that if they live by the Spirit, they will not spend their time
gratifying the full range of sinful desires, from immorality to the occult to
rage, envy and drunkenness. The Spirit, however, produces fruit: love, joy,
peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.
And his punch line? ‘There is no law against such things.’ Furthermore, ‘If we live
by the Spirit, let us also be guided by the Spirit.’[8]
In other words, if you want to please God and fulfil his
law, the Holy Spirit enables you to do so. It isn’t just about following a set
of rules, but becoming the kind of person God wants to be. The law of the Spirit
isn’t just about outward compliance, but inner transformation. When we try to
keep the rules in our own strength, we fail miserably, and fall back into
self-centredness. However, Pentecost brings the gift of the Spirit, God’s new
law. Not only does the Spirit lead us to the actions that please God, the Spirit
also enables to do that will of God and bring pleasure to God. If we want to
please God, we need to be open to the Holy Spirit.
Conclusion
I hope the things I’ve described about Pentecost are things for which we all
long in our lives as disciples of Jesus. I hope we long for a post-Easter
Pentecost faith, where the Holy Spirit is always enabling us to respond to
Jesus in repentance, worship and witness. I hope we also have a ‘first fruits’
faith, in which we can see signs of the Spirit’s work, but long for more,
before the final harvest. And I hope we have a love for God’s law that goes
beyond outward conformity to inward renewal, depending on the power of the
Spirit, not our own feebleness, to enjoy pleasing God.
But what to do about it? It’s easy to preach a sermon about
this and leave people feeling condemned. ‘You’re not doing enough of x, you
should do more of y.’ Here’s an alternative way of approaching it.
I came downstairs the other day, and could hear a noise. “Is
the tap running?” I asked Debbie. Sure enough, in the downstairs loo, the cold
tap hadn’t been turned off. Mark can wash his hands after going to the toilet,
but he struggles to turn off some of our taps. If he’s also managed to put the
plug in, the overflow saves us from disaster.
All the blessings of Pentecost are about the overflow of the
Spirit – the rivers of living water flowing from us to others. The disciples
don’t speak in tongues to the crowd:
the crowd overhears. It is an overflow. Pentecost is not the time to beat
ourselves up about our failures. It is the time to seek an overflow of the
Spirit, for then all the other things come as a natural consequence.
This Pentecost, let us ask God to soak us with the Holy Spirit
– not for the sake of spiritual self-gratification, such an ambition is a
contradiction in terms. But let us rather ask God to saturate us with the
Spirit so that we may more truly be worshippers, witnesses, holy people and all
the other things he longs for us to be.
Tomorrow’s Sermon: The Meanings Of Pentecost
Introduction
Yesterday morning, we held a coffee morning at Broomfield. We wanted to support
our missionary charity for the year, the Mission
Aviation Fellowship. You could make paper aeroplanes, take them to the
balcony and throw them in the direction of the communion table. Whoever got
their paper plane the nearest to the front would win a prize.
Mark, our three-year-old, got into the spirit of it,
especially after someone took him to a table and made him a paper plane. Then he
said, “Daddy, I want to play aeroplanes!”
I knew what that meant: with his hands, he would hold my
hands. Then he would run around me faster and faster, and would lift off. I whizzed
him around, and he flew with great joy and abandon. I put him down, and he
laughed. As I stood there dizzy, everybody laughed at me. Jim said, “Quick, get
a camera. I want a picture of the minister looking inebriated!”
“They are filled with new wine,” sneered the cynics at
Pentecost, witnessing the disciples who had been filled not with spirits but
the Holy Spirit.
It’s easy on Pentecost Sunday to be hung up on the
particular manifestations of the Holy Spirit described in Acts 2. Depending on
your personality or your style of faith, you may either loathe or love the
violent wind from heaven, the tongues of fire and the speaking in other
languages. In other sermons and articles, I have examined these things, but
today I want to concentrate on what Pentecost means.
1. After Easter
Pentecost was called so, because it was the fiftieth day after Passover in the
Jewish calendar. For Christians, it therefore comes after Easter. You may think
I have plumbed new depths in stating the obvious, but there is something
important here. Some Christians would like to stop with the joy of Easter
morning, but our journey must also take us through Ascension to Pentecost. As
Ben Witherington III says,
Throughout Acts, the presence of the Spirit is seen as the
distinguishing mark of Christianity – it is what makes a person a Christian.[1]
It isn’t just the question of speaking in tongues, it’s more
fundamental. The Holy Spirit enables us to confess Jesus as Lord[2].
Hence, Peter quotes Joel here:
Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.
(Verse 21)
The Holy Spirit shows us who Jesus truly is. The Spirit shows
how sinful we are and us how wonderful Jesus is. But the Spirit’s work doesn’t
stop there. The Holy Spirit shows us our need of God’s grace, and reveals to us
the saving work of Jesus in his Cross and Resurrection. Believing savingly in
the Easter events requires the Holy Spirit’s work in our lives. To see the
glory of Jesus and worship the Father through him means we need the Holy
Spirit. Neither worship nor evangelism are fundamentally human activities: we
need the Spirit to be at work in order for them to happen.
That’s to put it a challenging way. More positively, if you
have met Jesus, found the forgiveness of sins in his name through the Cross,
begun following him as a disciple and worshipping him as Lord, then the Holy
Spirit must have been at work in your life.
So, assuming we care about worship and evangelism as
Christians, we need to embrace a post-Easter faith, a Pentecost faith. It is a
faith that says, ‘Come, Holy Spirit. Be more at work in us, through us, ahead
of us and beyond us.’ Pentecost faith like that is grateful for all the past
signs of the Spirit’s work, but is hungry and thirsty for more.
2. Harvest
We have a lot of fun at Hatfield Peverel at harvest-time. As well as the Sunday
service and bringing offerings for good causes such as Harvest For The Hungry, we
have our Harvest Supper and Auction. The produce that cannot be given away is
auctioned off, and the proceeds given to our cause for the year. We have great
fun bidding against each other for tins of soup, home made jam and everything
else. Last year, Liz Ward and I enjoyed a ridiculous bidding war against each
other for a pineapple.
Now why am I talking about harvest in May? Well, our Jewish
friends so enjoyed their festivals and celebrations that they had two harvest festivals each year. One was
equivalent to our regular harvest festivals. It was the ingathering of the
crops at the end of the summer. But they also celebrated the arrival in late
Spring of the first fruits. They did this at Pentecost, or to give it its more
Jewish name, the Feast of Weeks, that happened seven weeks after Passover.[3]
Spiritually speaking, we look forward to the great
ingathering harvest at the end of the age, but we have plenty to celebrate in
the meantime. We have our spiritual first fruits. The gift of the Holy Spirit
is the first fruits of God’s harvest. The Spirit is the sign that shows us what
is coming. The Spirit is the first instalment of God’s kingdom in our lives. Here
is the foretaste of all that is to come.
Paul has a similar analogy in two of his letters, where he
describes the Holy Spirit as like a deposit[4].
Just as we pay a deposit on an item, intending to pay the remaining balance, so
the Holy Spirit is God’s initial deposit on us. He has begun his work of
salvation, and – as Paul says in Philippians – he will complete it[5].
If you think of the old Magnus Magnusson catchphrase from Mastermind, “I’ve
started, so I’ll finish”, the gift of the Spirit is God’s promise that he has
started his work in our lives, and he will finish.
So do you see the signs that the Holy Spirit is at work in
your life? Has the Spirit led you to saving faith in Christ? Does the Spirit increase
your vision of Jesus and your love for him, so that you want to worship God and
share God’s love? Is the Holy Spirit slowly making you more like Jesus, even if
you know there are still too many ways in which you are not like him? Does the
Spirit give you the courage and the words to be faithful to Christ under
pressure? If so, these are the first fruits of God’s harvest in you. One day it
will all come to complete fruition. These signs are the deposit God is putting
on your life. One day God will complete it.
3. Law
Like many homes, a weekday morning is frantic in ours, even though I work from
home. Getting one child ready for school and another for pre-school is a mad
rush. It is made even more so by the fact that Rebekah is a dreamer and that
ten minutes before we are due to leave, she and Mark know that their favourite
TV programme starts. Yes, it’s their Spanish language course. (Otherwise known
as Dora The Explorer.)
We are one of the closest families to the school; we are usually one of the
last to arrive. At points of great frustration, we tell Rebekah that if she is
late for school, a police officer will come and tell Mum and Dad off. We have
to try some way of scaring her into obedience! We pull out the same ‘policeman’
line in the car, if she doesn’t want to put on her seat belt or she dares us to
drive too fast.
We are used to ‘law’ as a list of rules, with some enforcers.
There was an ancient Jewish tradition that also associated Pentecost with the
giving of the Law at Sinai. And the Jewish writer Philo, who predates Luke,
wrote:
Then from the midst of the fire that streamed from heaven
there sounded forth to their utter amazement a voice, for the flame became the
articulate speech in the language familiar to the audience.[6]
It makes Sinai – where the Law was given – sound very much
like Acts 2. Pentecost is the Law of the Spirit, rather than the letter of the
Law. Pentecost fulfils Jeremiah’s vision of God’s new covenant, where God will
not write his law on tablets of stone, but inside the hearts of his people[7].
It is what Paul (again!) talked about when he wrote to the
Galatians in his famous words about the fruit of the Spirit. He tells his
readers that if they live by the Spirit, they will not spend their time
gratifying the full range of sinful desires, from immorality to the occult to
rage, envy and drunkenness. The Spirit, however, produces fruit: love, joy,
peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.
And his punch line? ‘There is no law against such things.’ Furthermore, ‘If we live
by the Spirit, let us also be guided by the Spirit.’[8]
In other words, if you want to please God and fulfil his
law, the Holy Spirit enables you to do so. It isn’t just about following a set
of rules, but becoming the kind of person God wants to be. The law of the Spirit
isn’t just about outward compliance, but inner transformation. When we try to
keep the rules in our own strength, we fail miserably, and fall back into
self-centredness. However, Pentecost brings the gift of the Spirit, God’s new
law. Not only does the Spirit lead us to the actions that please God, the Spirit
also enables to do that will of God and bring pleasure to God. If we want to
please God, we need to be open to the Holy Spirit.
Conclusion
I hope the things I’ve described about Pentecost are things for which we all
long in our lives as disciples of Jesus. I hope we long for a post-Easter
Pentecost faith, where the Holy Spirit is always enabling us to respond to
Jesus in repentance, worship and witness. I hope we also have a ‘first fruits’
faith, in which we can see signs of the Spirit’s work, but long for more,
before the final harvest. And I hope we have a love for God’s law that goes
beyond outward conformity to inward renewal, depending on the power of the
Spirit, not our own feebleness, to enjoy pleasing God.
But what to do about it? It’s easy to preach a sermon about
this and leave people feeling condemned. ‘You’re not doing enough of x, you
should do more of y.’ Here’s an alternative way of approaching it.
I came downstairs the other day, and could hear a noise. “Is
the tap running?” I asked Debbie. Sure enough, in the downstairs loo, the cold
tap hadn’t been turned off. Mark can wash his hands after going to the toilet,
but he struggles to turn off some of our taps. If he’s also managed to put the
plug in, the overflow saves us from disaster.
All the blessings of Pentecost are about the overflow of the
Spirit – the rivers of living water flowing from us to others. The disciples
don’t speak in tongues to the crowd:
the crowd overhears. It is an overflow. Pentecost is not the time to beat
ourselves up about our failures. It is the time to seek an overflow of the
Spirit, for then all the other things come as a natural consequence.
This Pentecost, let us ask God to soak us with the Holy Spirit
– not for the sake of spiritual self-gratification, such an ambition is a
contradiction in terms. But let us rather ask God to saturate us with the
Spirit so that we may more truly be worshippers, witnesses, holy people and all
the other things he longs for us to be.
Tomorrow’s Sermon: The Meanings Of Pentecost
Introduction
Yesterday morning, we held a coffee morning at Broomfield. We wanted to support
our missionary charity for the year, the Mission
Aviation Fellowship. You could make paper aeroplanes, take them to the
balcony and throw them in the direction of the communion table. Whoever got
their paper plane the nearest to the front would win a prize.
Mark, our three-year-old, got into the spirit of it,
especially after someone took him to a table and made him a paper plane. Then he
said, “Daddy, I want to play aeroplanes!”
I knew what that meant: with his hands, he would hold my
hands. Then he would run around me faster and faster, and would lift off. I whizzed
him around, and he flew with great joy and abandon. I put him down, and he
laughed. As I stood there dizzy, everybody laughed at me. Jim said, “Quick, get
a camera. I want a picture of the minister looking inebriated!”
“They are filled with new wine,” sneered the cynics at
Pentecost, witnessing the disciples who had been filled not with spirits but
the Holy Spirit.
It’s easy on Pentecost Sunday to be hung up on the
particular manifestations of the Holy Spirit described in Acts 2. Depending on
your personality or your style of faith, you may either loathe or love the
violent wind from heaven, the tongues of fire and the speaking in other
languages. In other sermons and articles, I have examined these things, but
today I want to concentrate on what Pentecost means.
1. After Easter
Pentecost was called so, because it was the fiftieth day after Passover in the
Jewish calendar. For Christians, it therefore comes after Easter. You may think
I have plumbed new depths in stating the obvious, but there is something
important here. Some Christians would like to stop with the joy of Easter
morning, but our journey must also take us through Ascension to Pentecost. As
Ben Witherington III says,
Throughout Acts, the presence of the Spirit is seen as the
distinguishing mark of Christianity – it is what makes a person a Christian.[1]
It isn’t just the question of speaking in tongues, it’s more
fundamental. The Holy Spirit enables us to confess Jesus as Lord[2].
Hence, Peter quotes Joel here:
Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.
(Verse 21)
The Holy Spirit shows us who Jesus truly is. The Spirit shows
how sinful we are and us how wonderful Jesus is. But the Spirit’s work doesn’t
stop there. The Holy Spirit shows us our need of God’s grace, and reveals to us
the saving work of Jesus in his Cross and Resurrection. Believing savingly in
the Easter events requires the Holy Spirit’s work in our lives. To see the
glory of Jesus and worship the Father through him means we need the Holy
Spirit. Neither worship nor evangelism are fundamentally human activities: we
need the Spirit to be at work in order for them to happen.
That’s to put it a challenging way. More positively, if you
have met Jesus, found the forgiveness of sins in his name through the Cross,
begun following him as a disciple and worshipping him as Lord, then the Holy
Spirit must have been at work in your life.
So, assuming we care about worship and evangelism as
Christians, we need to embrace a post-Easter faith, a Pentecost faith. It is a
faith that says, ‘Come, Holy Spirit. Be more at work in us, through us, ahead
of us and beyond us.’ Pentecost faith like that is grateful for all the past
signs of the Spirit’s work, but is hungry and thirsty for more.
2. Harvest
We have a lot of fun at Hatfield Peverel at harvest-time. As well as the Sunday
service and bringing offerings for good causes such as Harvest For The Hungry, we
have our Harvest Supper and Auction. The produce that cannot be given away is
auctioned off, and the proceeds given to our cause for the year. We have great
fun bidding against each other for tins of soup, home made jam and everything
else. Last year, Liz Ward and I enjoyed a ridiculous bidding war against each
other for a pineapple.
Now why am I talking about harvest in May? Well, our Jewish
friends so enjoyed their festivals and celebrations that they had two harvest festivals each year. One was
equivalent to our regular harvest festivals. It was the ingathering of the
crops at the end of the summer. But they also celebrated the arrival in late
Spring of the first fruits. They did this at Pentecost, or to give it its more
Jewish name, the Feast of Weeks, that happened seven weeks after Passover.[3]
Spiritually speaking, we look forward to the great
ingathering harvest at the end of the age, but we have plenty to celebrate in
the meantime. We have our spiritual first fruits. The gift of the Holy Spirit
is the first fruits of God’s harvest. The Spirit is the sign that shows us what
is coming. The Spirit is the first instalment of God’s kingdom in our lives. Here
is the foretaste of all that is to come.
Paul has a similar analogy in two of his letters, where he
describes the Holy Spirit as like a deposit[4].
Just as we pay a deposit on an item, intending to pay the remaining balance, so
the Holy Spirit is God’s initial deposit on us. He has begun his work of
salvation, and – as Paul says in Philippians – he will complete it[5].
If you think of the old Magnus Magnusson catchphrase from Mastermind, “I’ve
started, so I’ll finish”, the gift of the Spirit is God’s promise that he has
started his work in our lives, and he will finish.
So do you see the signs that the Holy Spirit is at work in
your life? Has the Spirit led you to saving faith in Christ? Does the Spirit increase
your vision of Jesus and your love for him, so that you want to worship God and
share God’s love? Is the Holy Spirit slowly making you more like Jesus, even if
you know there are still too many ways in which you are not like him? Does the
Spirit give you the courage and the words to be faithful to Christ under
pressure? If so, these are the first fruits of God’s harvest in you. One day it
will all come to complete fruition. These signs are the deposit God is putting
on your life. One day God will complete it.
3. Law
Like many homes, a weekday morning is frantic in ours, even though I work from
home. Getting one child ready for school and another for pre-school is a mad
rush. It is made even more so by the fact that Rebekah is a dreamer and that
ten minutes before we are due to leave, she and Mark know that their favourite
TV programme starts. Yes, it’s their Spanish language course. (Otherwise known
as Dora The Explorer.)
We are one of the closest families to the school; we are usually one of the
last to arrive. At points of great frustration, we tell Rebekah that if she is
late for school, a police officer will come and tell Mum and Dad off. We have
to try some way of scaring her into obedience! We pull out the same ‘policeman’
line in the car, if she doesn’t want to put on her seat belt or she dares us to
drive too fast.
We are used to ‘law’ as a list of rules, with some enforcers.
There was an ancient Jewish tradition that also associated Pentecost with the
giving of the Law at Sinai. And the Jewish writer Philo, who predates Luke,
wrote:
Then from the midst of the fire that streamed from heaven
there sounded forth to their utter amazement a voice, for the flame became the
articulate speech in the language familiar to the audience.[6]
It makes Sinai – where the Law was given – sound very much
like Acts 2. Pentecost is the Law of the Spirit, rather than the letter of the
Law. Pentecost fulfils Jeremiah’s vision of God’s new covenant, where God will
not write his law on tablets of stone, but inside the hearts of his people[7].
It is what Paul (again!) talked about when he wrote to the
Galatians in his famous words about the fruit of the Spirit. He tells his
readers that if they live by the Spirit, they will not spend their time
gratifying the full range of sinful desires, from immorality to the occult to
rage, envy and drunkenness. The Spirit, however, produces fruit: love, joy,
peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.
And his punch line? ‘There is no law against such things.’ Furthermore, ‘If we live
by the Spirit, let us also be guided by the Spirit.’[8]
In other words, if you want to please God and fulfil his
law, the Holy Spirit enables you to do so. It isn’t just about following a set
of rules, but becoming the kind of person God wants to be. The law of the Spirit
isn’t just about outward compliance, but inner transformation. When we try to
keep the rules in our own strength, we fail miserably, and fall back into
self-centredness. However, Pentecost brings the gift of the Spirit, God’s new
law. Not only does the Spirit lead us to the actions that please God, the Spirit
also enables to do that will of God and bring pleasure to God. If we want to
please God, we need to be open to the Holy Spirit.
Conclusion
I hope the things I’ve described about Pentecost are things for which we all
long in our lives as disciples of Jesus. I hope we long for a post-Easter
Pentecost faith, where the Holy Spirit is always enabling us to respond to
Jesus in repentance, worship and witness. I hope we also have a ‘first fruits’
faith, in which we can see signs of the Spirit’s work, but long for more,
before the final harvest. And I hope we have a love for God’s law that goes
beyond outward conformity to inward renewal, depending on the power of the
Spirit, not our own feebleness, to enjoy pleasing God.
But what to do about it? It’s easy to preach a sermon about
this and leave people feeling condemned. ‘You’re not doing enough of x, you
should do more of y.’ Here’s an alternative way of approaching it.
I came downstairs the other day, and could hear a noise. “Is
the tap running?” I asked Debbie. Sure enough, in the downstairs loo, the cold
tap hadn’t been turned off. Mark can wash his hands after going to the toilet,
but he struggles to turn off some of our taps. If he’s also managed to put the
plug in, the overflow saves us from disaster.
All the blessings of Pentecost are about the overflow of the
Spirit – the rivers of living water flowing from us to others. The disciples
don’t speak in tongues to the crowd:
the crowd overhears. It is an overflow. Pentecost is not the time to beat
ourselves up about our failures. It is the time to seek an overflow of the
Spirit, for then all the other things come as a natural consequence.
This Pentecost, let us ask God to soak us with the Holy Spirit
– not for the sake of spiritual self-gratification, such an ambition is a
contradiction in terms. But let us rather ask God to saturate us with the
Spirit so that we may more truly be worshippers, witnesses, holy people and all
the other things he longs for us to be.
Security, Faith And Hope
I didn’t preach today. I presided at Holy Communion, while Mike, a Local Preacher led the first part of the service and preached. I was glad it worked out that way this weekend. It meant that on Friday, I had been able to head down to see my parents. I stayed there until last night. Mum has been in more pain again, since her fall just before Christmas.
So now you know why I didn’t post a sermon this weekend on the blog. But it was good to sit under Mike’s ministry this morning. He preached from Isaiah 35 about ‘streams in the desert’. Feeling that ministry here often is a desert made it all the better to hear him.
Actually, it wasn’t just Mike and me leading this morning. Mike has a musician friend called Ian, who also took part. As well as leading one or two songs from the guitar, he also performed a couple for us to meditate upon.
Now I am perfectly used to this approach to worship. I am used enough to an Anglican approach where one person leads the service and another preaches. However, it was interesting to note how nervous some of the congregation were about whether three leaders would ‘work’. Just that simple change put some people outside their familiar context, and temporarily raised anxieties. (I believe the anxiety quickly passed, however.) The frames of reference established by the patterns familiar to us can be powerful things. There have been convulsions at one church I know. The new minister recognised quickly that in a large congregation, the traditional Methodist way of distributing the bread and wine at Holy Communion was unwieldy. He quickly adopted an Anglican ‘continuous flow’ method. I don’t know how he managed the change, but I gather there was pain at the AGM. Familiarity seems to equal normality for many of us. Fear of the unknown is a big factor in many churches.
Yet the Christian faith has something powerful to say to those who are afraid of the unknown. It is the doctrine of hope. I don’t say this glibly, after the fear I faced early last year when a routine urine test showed evidence of blood, and I had to be seen urgently at hospital. However, within routine church life it seems we bind ourselves up with some very mundane familiarities in which we find a degree of security. Discipleship is surely an adventure. In the understandable and important pastoral task of making church a ‘safe place’ for the hurting, we have both found the safety in the wrong things and also forgotten that faith is meant to be dangerous.
It is as if we have become the ‘health and safety’ church. By that I mean that health and safety regulations in our culture have operated in such a way as to remove as many risks as possible from all public activity. Before long, we shall need a risk assessment before getting out of bed in the morning. We have taken this attitude to church. We are the church of the buried single talent.
During Lent this year, I ran a weekly course based on the DVD version of John Ortberg‘s book, ‘If You Want To Walk On Water, You’ve Got To Get Out Of The Boat.’ I had read the book a few years ago, and enjoyed it. What struck me this time was how everything I had ever heard before about the story of Peter walking on the water to Jesus was about his sinking, because he failed to keep his eyes on Jesus. Peter was the failure. But Ortberg makes a great play on the idea that Peter was a success, compared with the other disciples who stayed in the boat. At least he got out of the boat and took a risk of faith, even if he wobbled. Some people, however, gained a big affinity for the other disciples. Traditionally, a boat has been a symbol for the church (think of the World Council of Churches’ logo). We may like to stay in the boat of the church rather than meet Jesus outside the church, on the rough waves.
I sense that one of the calls of Christian leadership today is to expose people to danger. Church needs to be a risky place once more. We need to embrace that before wider society makes it that for us, or before many of us die out. What can we do to make Christianity something that raises the pulse?
Doing that may involve exposing people not merely to risk and danger but to chaos. I am currently reading Alan Roxburgh‘s book ‘The Sky Is Falling‘ from 2005. He says that in a period of great discontinuous social change, people often want to do one of two things. One is to revert to how things were in an earlier time, when all seemed peaceful and ordered. The other is to rush through to the new shape of the future. But, he says, the transitional phase, or ‘liminality’, may last a long time. The only way to come through faithfully is to stay with the chaos until the new order emerges. I have done a lot to try to help congregations realise that we aren’t in Kansas any more, Toto. Through reading Roxburgh I am beginning to understand even more the importance of entering into biblical narratives of liminality, the biblical literature that describes or emanates from times in history when the familiar had been ripped from them, but the new had not yet come. The best example I know of that is the Jewish exile in Babylon. I have preached several times in recent years on Jeremiah’s letter to the exiles (Jeremiah 29). I am beginning to think I may need to engage with that most painful of Psalms, Psalm 137.
Where, then, is hope? Where do we find our security? The moment we pose such questions we should as Christians know the answer. It is in God. It is in God’s character as faithful, even when faithful doesn’t mean he does what we want him to do. Our faith and hope remains in God even though the fig tree may not blossom, as Habakkuk said. Yes, we can look to the long term future for what we believe God may do. But God is true, even before the Second Coming, and whether or not ‘revival’ comes, or whether it comes later rather than sooner. God is God; our church securities are not.
Theological Roots Of Mission
In which Len Hjalmarson develops Alan Hirsch‘s view of mission as Christology – Mission – Ecclesiology: NextReformation » missional rooting. He points out that God has always been on mission, and that God’s work of mission begins with forming Israel. Hence the root of mission is not Christology but the Trinity.
If Jesus Had A Blog
I can only aspire to this: Letters from Kamp Krusty: New Kamp Krusty Feature: “If Jesus Had a Blog”
Support
Ten days ago, my blogging friend Will Grady wrote this heartfelt post: Loneliness in Ministry « Ramblings from Red Rose. He poses important questions about church leadership.
There are structural attempts to support, but they tend to have inbuilt defects. A Methodist District will run a group for those in the first five years of ministry (the so-called ‘Under 5s Group’ – kind of like playgroup for ministers). Some Districts even run these groups for those in the first ten years. I remember being ordered to avail myself of the fellowship – something wrong there! A lot depends on whether you get on with the leader and the other members.
The same is true of the regular circuit staff meeting. That, though, has a further handicap: you can be consumed with business and forget the soul. It does have the advantage of being a good place to talk through difficult issues, but whether you bare your soul there is a judgment call, especially as the superintendent minister is your ‘boss’ and could be involved, if there were disciplinary issues. What exactly can you confess?
That in turn has a connection with the rôle in our system of the Chair of District. At one stage, District Chairs were seen as pastors to the pastors. I don’t doubt that many intend to be so, and on the odd occasion one has been so for me. However, one gave the game away in an annual letter when he said that each minister in the District was entitled to one hour of his time a year. Thanks, but no thanks, I thought. Furthermore, they would be even more closely involved in any disciplinary procedures, so a certain caution can inhibit you, especially if you’re thinking some non-Methodist thoughts.
Where have I found support? I’ve learned over sixteen years to look for it outside the structures, and often outside Methodism. That isn’t a criticism of Methodism, it’s just a fact about the tendencies of structures and institutionalism. Friendship is vital, and in my first circuit while I was single the local URC minister (herself also single) spotted my need for support, and invited me to join one of her church’s home groups. It was a generous move on her part. Out of that group and some other work came a bunch of us who used to meet socially on a Friday night for pizza, a video and some red liquid you wouldn’t use in a Methodist communion service. Those people became among the dearest friends I have ever had in my life.
In the last circuit, it was the monthly meeting of a group of similarly-minded church leaders from across the denominational spectrum. We worshipped and prayed together, shared our news and supported each other.
I have also found the need for inspiration from outside. In the first circuit, I travelled regularly to St Andrew’s Chorleywood while David Pytches was the vicar, for leaders’ days. These were held about six times a year. I was also a member of the (now defunct) Evangelical Forum for Theology, a small academic Methodist network. Our annual conference/retreat was a highlight.
Here, I meet monthly or so with a vicar friend as prayer partners. We have a similar outlook and have similar church situations. Other support has been more difficult to garner, and I often feel quite dry spiritually. There are some possibilities, but diary clashes have been the usual problem.
What means of support do others use and recommend? Let’s encourage one another.
Big Circumstance 