Two stories. Number one: in a recent sermon I referred to the fact expectation that my wife was going to take over as chair of our children’s pre-school. For reasons that are not appropriate to mention on a public source such as this blog, she isn’t going to do so. She has withdrawn her acceptance of the nomination, and she has also resigned from the committee.

Number two: on Monday afternoon I visited a ninety-two-year-old saint in hospital. Her conversation was liberally seasoned with phrases such as, ‘God willing.’ I saw her on the day when she had been told that she was not going to be discharged today, as she had been led to believe, because they could not yet find the staff or budget (not sure which) to put in place the care package she will need at home. ‘God willing’ seemed appropriate language.

Yet expressions like ‘God willing’ are ones I have been hesitant to use. They have been too much like religious catchphrases. I have bracketed them alongside tacking ‘If it be your will’ onto the end of a prayer. However, I really should have spoken of my wife’s aspirations in ‘God willing’ terms rather than absolute ones. In the New Testament James reminds us of the importance of this approach.

Might it be more than just an aversion to the language of Zion that has seen ‘God willing’ language slip out of our vocabulary? Might it be a reliance on science, technique and technology in our culture that has changed us? They delude us into thinking we have more power than we truly do. It is the weaker and more vulnerable who resort more habitually to qualifying their aspirations along the lines James commend: ‘If the Lord wishes, we will live and do this or that’ (verse 15). We are seriously lacking in omnipotence, contrary to our regular delusions. The recent floods in the UK have brought this home in devastating fashion.

Having said that, many people yearn for certainty. ‘God willing’ is altogether too provisional for them. They prefer life to proceed with mechanical certainty. I think the words point us to considering that our security is not in our actions and decisions but in God. And even when I say that, it is not about a security in expecting God to behave in a particular way – we can be blown off course when prayers are not answered according to our expectations. The firm foundation of Christian hope and faith is in the character of God.

This coming Sunday I have to preach twice, and both will be on the Lectionary Gospel of Luke 11:1-13. With such a passage the theme of prayer is central, and thus I may well be touching further on the question of ‘God willing.’

Technorati Tags: prayer, faith, Godwilling

I’m doing something slightly different tomorrow: I’m splicing up the sermon with two DVD clips from Fresh Expressions: the first, from their DVD 1, is of ‘Messy Church’, and the second, from DVD 2, is from the chapter on rural mission about ‘The Gathering’ in the Whitby Methodist Circuit. We’re then showing as much of DVD 1 as we can get through while people have coffee after the service. Then folk are invited to a ploughman’s lunch, where we hope they will discuss what they see at their tables, and record their thoughts (anonymously, if so desired) on small wipeable whiteboards.

John 1:1-18

Introduction
Sunday 22^nd July: can I be the first this year to wish you a very
Happy Christmas?

You probably think I’ve finally lost it – if indeed I ever
had ‘it’. Did you wonder why we heard a ‘Christmas’ Bible reading – the first
eighteen verses of John chapter one? What has that to do with a morning when I
shall give over two quarters of the sermon to DVD clips from Fresh Expressions about new ways
of mission and church with children and families? Wouldn’t it have made more
sense if we had read Jesus’ words about letting the children come to him?

Well, it might have done – but some words in that famous
Prologue to John’s Gospel are central to the different way of doing mission and
church that I have been emphasising ever since coming here. You can find it
distilled in verse 14:

And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have
seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.

The Word became flesh and lived among us. Here are two other
ways of translating it. More literally, it is, ‘The Word became flesh and
pitched his tent among us.’ Or Eugene
Peterson paraphrases it, ‘The Word became flesh and blood and moved into
the neighbourhood.’ Simply put, I believe those words do two things: they
change our focus, and they change our order of priorities. We’ll briefly
consider the change of focus first, and then see the first DVD clip; then we’ll
think about the changing of our order of priorities, and then see the second
DVD clip.

1. Change Of Focus
The change of focus is from ‘come’ to ‘go.’ We have assumed that mission is
about getting people to come to us. But Jesus didn’t do that: ‘the Word became
flesh and lived among us.’ He moved into the neighbourhood. Relying on a ‘come
to us’ approach to mission brings fewer and fewer people into the orbit of
God’s love. In a passage where he explains that eighty per cent of people find
faith in Christ through friendship with Christians, Jeff Lucas summarises the futility of the
‘come to us’ approach to mission this way:

It’s like a fisherman spreading his expensive net on the side
of the riverbank, and then inviting the fish to jump out of the water and get
caught.
(Gideon:
Power From Weakness, p61)

Yet we persist in getting out our ever-more-fancy fishing
nets every week. Yet not only did Jesus himself model a mission based on
‘going’, he told his disciples to model their involvement in mission on his:
‘As the Father sent me, so I send you’ (John 20:21). Mission involves being
part of the community, researching its culture and needs, and then finding appropriate
ways of sharing the Good News in word and deed.

So, although Christian mission will occasionally involve the
use of a church building (as it does in the two clips we’re going to see) it
mostly happens away from our gathering place. Mission is not about bringing
people into the increasingly unfamiliar culture of the church and expecting
them to fit our shape: it’s about being in the world, finding the points where
the Gospel makes contact and the points where it challenges. You’ll see a lot
of examples in the clips we’re going to run over coffee between the end of the
service and our lunch together, but for now let’s see our first clip.

2. Changing The Order
Of Our Priorities
Put these three words in order of priority: Jesus, church and mission. It’s a
fair bet that most of us would put them in that order: Jesus first, then
church, and finally mission. But it’s not the way it happens in John’s Gospel,
or in the New Testament generally.

Everything begins with Jesus. Christianity is centred on a
personal and shared knowledge and experience of Jesus Christ and his saving
love. If we don’t start with Jesus, we’re in trouble. Those who might put
‘church’ first tend to be devoted to the institution and its rituals, not to
its Founder. Without making the connection with Jesus personal, there is no
Christian faith. It all starts with him, as it does here: ‘the Word became
flesh.’

But ‘church’ doesn’t come second. ‘The Word became flesh and
lived among us.’ ‘Mission’ comes next. The result of Jesus coming was mission.
He brought God’s love into the world. Anyway, you can’t have church if mission,
hasn’t happened, where people find the God’s love for themselves.

‘Church’ comes third. It is the fruit and consequence of
mission. When we place church ahead of mission we just end up with church as a
therapeutic community where the important thing is for me to have my needs met
(see Mike
McNichols  and Brother Maynard).
In such places, mission becomes the preserve of the enthusiastic few, and not
central to the life of the church. When we focus on church, we don’t usually
manage to build community; often, we destroy it. When we focus on mission, we
gather together as a group and end up functioning as the community we were
always meant to be. (See Michael
Frost, Exiles,
for further on this.)

So the community of the church arises both as the fruit of mission – people are gathered
together under the reign of God – and the passion
of mission – a shared commitment to mission draws people together into deep
Christian community.

So we need to reorder our priorities. Our priorities cannot
be about the building. Nor can they be about so filling up people’s diaries
with meetings that they can spend little meaningful time in the community. Our
church priorities are simple: gathering for worship, a small group where we
challenge one another to grow in discipleship, and only as much other business
as is absolutely necessary.

In fact, that small group might most profitably be people
who come together to work on mission – sharing God’s love in word and deed with
those yet to find that love. Within that you find the fellowship to sustain you
in Bible study, discipleship and mutual pastoral care.

You’re probably bored with me talking about it, but my best
experience of this was when I was involved in my first appointment with
ecumenical youth worship and outreach. As a team we met in three different
configurations, each with slightly different memberships. We were a group that
met to pray and strategise for this ministry. We were a fortnightly home group,
where we studied the Bible and supported one another. And we hung out as a
bunch of friends on Friday nights, with pizzas, videos and some non-Methodist
liquids. The mission energised everything else.

But enough from me: time for our second DVD clip.

Technorati Tags: FreshExpressions, MessyChurch, TheGathering, EugenePeterson, missional, JeffLucas, MikeMcNichols, BrotherMaynard, MichaelFrost

I’m doing something slightly different tomorrow: I’m splicing up the sermon with two DVD clips from Fresh Expressions: the first, from their DVD 1, is of ‘Messy Church’, and the second, from DVD 2, is from the chapter on rural mission about ‘The Gathering’ in the Whitby Methodist Circuit. We’re then showing as much of DVD 1 as we can get through while people have coffee after the service. Then folk are invited to a ploughman’s lunch, where we hope they will discuss what they see at their tables, and record their thoughts (anonymously, if so desired) on small wipeable whiteboards.

John 1:1-18

Introduction
Sunday 22^nd July: can I be the first this year to wish you a very
Happy Christmas?

You probably think I’ve finally lost it – if indeed I ever
had ‘it’. Did you wonder why we heard a ‘Christmas’ Bible reading – the first
eighteen verses of John chapter one? What has that to do with a morning when I
shall give over two quarters of the sermon to DVD clips from Fresh Expressions about new ways
of mission and church with children and families? Wouldn’t it have made more
sense if we had read Jesus’ words about letting the children come to him?

Well, it might have done – but some words in that famous
Prologue to John’s Gospel are central to the different way of doing mission and
church that I have been emphasising ever since coming here. You can find it
distilled in verse 14:

And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have
seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.

The Word became flesh and lived among us. Here are two other
ways of translating it. More literally, it is, ‘The Word became flesh and
pitched his tent among us.’ Or Eugene
Peterson paraphrases it, ‘The Word became flesh and blood and moved into
the neighbourhood.’ Simply put, I believe those words do two things: they
change our focus, and they change our order of priorities. We’ll briefly
consider the change of focus first, and then see the first DVD clip; then we’ll
think about the changing of our order of priorities, and then see the second
DVD clip.

1. Change Of Focus
The change of focus is from ‘come’ to ‘go.’ We have assumed that mission is
about getting people to come to us. But Jesus didn’t do that: ‘the Word became
flesh and lived among us.’ He moved into the neighbourhood. Relying on a ‘come
to us’ approach to mission brings fewer and fewer people into the orbit of
God’s love. In a passage where he explains that eighty per cent of people find
faith in Christ through friendship with Christians, Jeff Lucas summarises the futility of the
‘come to us’ approach to mission this way:

It’s like a fisherman spreading his expensive net on the side
of the riverbank, and then inviting the fish to jump out of the water and get
caught.
(Gideon:
Power From Weakness, p61)

Yet we persist in getting out our ever-more-fancy fishing
nets every week. Yet not only did Jesus himself model a mission based on
‘going’, he told his disciples to model their involvement in mission on his:
‘As the Father sent me, so I send you’ (John 20:21). Mission involves being
part of the community, researching its culture and needs, and then finding appropriate
ways of sharing the Good News in word and deed.

So, although Christian mission will occasionally involve the
use of a church building (as it does in the two clips we’re going to see) it
mostly happens away from our gathering place. Mission is not about bringing
people into the increasingly unfamiliar culture of the church and expecting
them to fit our shape: it’s about being in the world, finding the points where
the Gospel makes contact and the points where it challenges. You’ll see a lot
of examples in the clips we’re going to run over coffee between the end of the
service and our lunch together, but for now let’s see our first clip.

2. Changing The Order
Of Our Priorities
Put these three words in order of priority: Jesus, church and mission. It’s a
fair bet that most of us would put them in that order: Jesus first, then
church, and finally mission. But it’s not the way it happens in John’s Gospel,
or in the New Testament generally.

Everything begins with Jesus. Christianity is centred on a
personal and shared knowledge and experience of Jesus Christ and his saving
love. If we don’t start with Jesus, we’re in trouble. Those who might put
‘church’ first tend to be devoted to the institution and its rituals, not to
its Founder. Without making the connection with Jesus personal, there is no
Christian faith. It all starts with him, as it does here: ‘the Word became
flesh.’

But ‘church’ doesn’t come second. ‘The Word became flesh and
lived among us.’ ‘Mission’ comes next. The result of Jesus coming was mission.
He brought God’s love into the world. Anyway, you can’t have church if mission,
hasn’t happened, where people find the God’s love for themselves.

‘Church’ comes third. It is the fruit and consequence of
mission. When we place church ahead of mission we just end up with church as a
therapeutic community where the important thing is for me to have my needs met
(see Mike
McNichols  and Brother Maynard).
In such places, mission becomes the preserve of the enthusiastic few, and not
central to the life of the church. When we focus on church, we don’t usually
manage to build community; often, we destroy it. When we focus on mission, we
gather together as a group and end up functioning as the community we were
always meant to be. (See Michael
Frost, Exiles,
for further on this.)

So the community of the church arises both as the fruit of mission – people are gathered
together under the reign of God – and the passion
of mission – a shared commitment to mission draws people together into deep
Christian community.

So we need to reorder our priorities. Our priorities cannot
be about the building. Nor can they be about so filling up people’s diaries
with meetings that they can spend little meaningful time in the community. Our
church priorities are simple: gathering for worship, a small group where we
challenge one another to grow in discipleship, and only as much other business
as is absolutely necessary.

In fact, that small group might most profitably be people
who come together to work on mission – sharing God’s love in word and deed with
those yet to find that love. Within that you find the fellowship to sustain you
in Bible study, discipleship and mutual pastoral care.

You’re probably bored with me talking about it, but my best
experience of this was when I was involved in my first appointment with
ecumenical youth worship and outreach. As a team we met in three different
configurations, each with slightly different memberships. We were a group that
met to pray and strategise for this ministry. We were a fortnightly home group,
where we studied the Bible and supported one another. And we hung out as a
bunch of friends on Friday nights, with pizzas, videos and some non-Methodist
liquids. The mission energised everything else.

But enough from me: time for our second DVD clip.

Technorati Tags: FreshExpressions, MessyChurch, TheGathering, EugenePeterson, missional, JeffLucas, MikeMcNichols, BrotherMaynard, MichaelFrost

I’m doing something slightly different tomorrow: I’m splicing up the sermon with two DVD clips from Fresh Expressions: the first, from their DVD 1, is of ‘Messy Church’, and the second, from DVD 2, is from the chapter on rural mission about ‘The Gathering’ in the Whitby Methodist Circuit. We’re then showing as much of DVD 1 as we can get through while people have coffee after the service. Then folk are invited to a ploughman’s lunch, where we hope they will discuss what they see at their tables, and record their thoughts (anonymously, if so desired) on small wipeable whiteboards.

John 1:1-18

Introduction
Sunday 22^nd July: can I be the first this year to wish you a very
Happy Christmas?

You probably think I’ve finally lost it – if indeed I ever
had ‘it’. Did you wonder why we heard a ‘Christmas’ Bible reading – the first
eighteen verses of John chapter one? What has that to do with a morning when I
shall give over two quarters of the sermon to DVD clips from Fresh Expressions about new ways
of mission and church with children and families? Wouldn’t it have made more
sense if we had read Jesus’ words about letting the children come to him?

Well, it might have done – but some words in that famous
Prologue to John’s Gospel are central to the different way of doing mission and
church that I have been emphasising ever since coming here. You can find it
distilled in verse 14:

And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have
seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.

The Word became flesh and lived among us. Here are two other
ways of translating it. More literally, it is, ‘The Word became flesh and
pitched his tent among us.’ Or Eugene
Peterson paraphrases it, ‘The Word became flesh and blood and moved into
the neighbourhood.’ Simply put, I believe those words do two things: they
change our focus, and they change our order of priorities. We’ll briefly
consider the change of focus first, and then see the first DVD clip; then we’ll
think about the changing of our order of priorities, and then see the second
DVD clip.

1. Change Of Focus
The change of focus is from ‘come’ to ‘go.’ We have assumed that mission is
about getting people to come to us. But Jesus didn’t do that: ‘the Word became
flesh and lived among us.’ He moved into the neighbourhood. Relying on a ‘come
to us’ approach to mission brings fewer and fewer people into the orbit of
God’s love. In a passage where he explains that eighty per cent of people find
faith in Christ through friendship with Christians, Jeff Lucas summarises the futility of the
‘come to us’ approach to mission this way:

It’s like a fisherman spreading his expensive net on the side
of the riverbank, and then inviting the fish to jump out of the water and get
caught.
(Gideon:
Power From Weakness, p61)

Yet we persist in getting out our ever-more-fancy fishing
nets every week. Yet not only did Jesus himself model a mission based on
‘going’, he told his disciples to model their involvement in mission on his:
‘As the Father sent me, so I send you’ (John 20:21). Mission involves being
part of the community, researching its culture and needs, and then finding appropriate
ways of sharing the Good News in word and deed.

So, although Christian mission will occasionally involve the
use of a church building (as it does in the two clips we’re going to see) it
mostly happens away from our gathering place. Mission is not about bringing
people into the increasingly unfamiliar culture of the church and expecting
them to fit our shape: it’s about being in the world, finding the points where
the Gospel makes contact and the points where it challenges. You’ll see a lot
of examples in the clips we’re going to run over coffee between the end of the
service and our lunch together, but for now let’s see our first clip.

2. Changing The Order
Of Our Priorities
Put these three words in order of priority: Jesus, church and mission. It’s a
fair bet that most of us would put them in that order: Jesus first, then
church, and finally mission. But it’s not the way it happens in John’s Gospel,
or in the New Testament generally.

Everything begins with Jesus. Christianity is centred on a
personal and shared knowledge and experience of Jesus Christ and his saving
love. If we don’t start with Jesus, we’re in trouble. Those who might put
‘church’ first tend to be devoted to the institution and its rituals, not to
its Founder. Without making the connection with Jesus personal, there is no
Christian faith. It all starts with him, as it does here: ‘the Word became
flesh.’

But ‘church’ doesn’t come second. ‘The Word became flesh and
lived among us.’ ‘Mission’ comes next. The result of Jesus coming was mission.
He brought God’s love into the world. Anyway, you can’t have church if mission,
hasn’t happened, where people find the God’s love for themselves.

‘Church’ comes third. It is the fruit and consequence of
mission. When we place church ahead of mission we just end up with church as a
therapeutic community where the important thing is for me to have my needs met
(see Mike
McNichols  and Brother Maynard).
In such places, mission becomes the preserve of the enthusiastic few, and not
central to the life of the church. When we focus on church, we don’t usually
manage to build community; often, we destroy it. When we focus on mission, we
gather together as a group and end up functioning as the community we were
always meant to be. (See Michael
Frost, Exiles,
for further on this.)

So the community of the church arises both as the fruit of mission – people are gathered
together under the reign of God – and the passion
of mission – a shared commitment to mission draws people together into deep
Christian community.

So we need to reorder our priorities. Our priorities cannot
be about the building. Nor can they be about so filling up people’s diaries
with meetings that they can spend little meaningful time in the community. Our
church priorities are simple: gathering for worship, a small group where we
challenge one another to grow in discipleship, and only as much other business
as is absolutely necessary.

In fact, that small group might most profitably be people
who come together to work on mission – sharing God’s love in word and deed with
those yet to find that love. Within that you find the fellowship to sustain you
in Bible study, discipleship and mutual pastoral care.

You’re probably bored with me talking about it, but my best
experience of this was when I was involved in my first appointment with
ecumenical youth worship and outreach. As a team we met in three different
configurations, each with slightly different memberships. We were a group that
met to pray and strategise for this ministry. We were a fortnightly home group,
where we studied the Bible and supported one another. And we hung out as a
bunch of friends on Friday nights, with pizzas, videos and some non-Methodist
liquids. The mission energised everything else.

But enough from me: time for our second DVD clip.

Technorati Tags: FreshExpressions, MessyChurch, TheGathering, EugenePeterson, missional, JeffLucas, MikeMcNichols, BrotherMaynard, MichaelFrost

From Jeff Lucas, Gideon: Power From Weakness (again):

The heartbreaking thing is this: most Christians are so busy attending prayer meetings and being generally involved in the life of the church that they have no time to live out their faith in the marketplace. They are piously preoccupied, serving God in the winepress. if it weren’t so tragic, it would be amusing. It’s like a fisherman spreading his expensive net on the side of the riverbank, and then inviting the fish to jump out of the water and get caught.

(The ‘winepress’ reference is to the Gideon story – it’s where we first find him hiding, according to the book of Judges.)

I love this for the final sentence – and I may use that in tomorrow’s sermon.

Technorati Tags: JeffLucas, quotes, Gideon, mission, church

Yesterday I attended at New Wine Networks meeting. I used to belong, but had let my membership lapse when it changed from free to subscription. I also haven’t been able to have much to do with more charismatic Christianity since coming to Chelmsford. Meantime, I have been developing my already-existing interest in missional church. The two are quite different – can they hold together? Can they hold together in me? Each appeals to a different side of my personality and convictions.

In some respects, I’m a misfit in charismatic circles. I am an introvert, and much charismatic worship is not for people like me. I’m not one to shout or dance. Years ago a friend asked me whether the Lord had ‘released me in dance’. No, he hadn’t. He still hasn’t. In the eyes of some, that probably means I’m in spiritual bondage. But in terms of my general musical taste, I rarely listen to danceable music. It doesn’t fit and introverted and reflective person like me. I also want preaching to go beyond sloganeering and cheerleading. Even when I did visit the famous Toronto Airport church at the height of the so-called ‘Toronto Blessing’ in the mid-1990s, the sermon I lapped up was an hour’s exposition of the Trinity. Others who had been exuberant in their praise a few minutes earlier fell asleep. Not me. There is also a stupidity in charismatic circles that defies belief. The rule seems to be, the more off the wall, the more likely it is to be from God. No wonder (as my reader will have noticed) I have recently been enjoying the popular books of Jeff Lucas, a charismatic himself, who has no patience with this nonsense, and regularly deflates it with humour.

And yet, and yet … I can’t get away from the biblical base for core charismatic spiritual practice. For all the nutty stuff, the foundations are still there for me. so when I ended up at this meeting of similarly-inclined church leaders yesterday, it all came flooding back as if I’d never stopped moving in such circles. As we prayed for each other, I as much as anyone else shared things in prayer that were relevant to them in ways that couldn’t be explained as coincidence. The same happened as they prayed for me.

Of course, my introversion has consequences in other respects, as an ordained minister. It goes against the popular image of the minister. I recall the college tutor who told us that we should visit five different people every afternoon (if they weren’t in, they didn’t count towards the five), spending twenty minutes on each call. Not long ago, a retired minister told me of a minister who organised a sports/social event for children, with an open day for parents. This minister glad-handed all one hundred parents, apparently – and this was told as an implied criticism of my model of ministry. Those models may work for extraverts, who enjoy meeting many people, but it doesn’t work for introverts, who would rather spend in-depth time with a few people (which is what I do on a pastoral visit).

Temperamentally, I probably belong more in missional circles. I love the emphasis on reflective and contemplative spirituality. The writings of Eugene Peterson and Dallas Willard (neither of them strictly part of the ‘emergent’ clan, but deeply loved within it) connect with me. They are sane and spiritual. They remind me not to make my prayers a to-do list for God. I appreciate the profoundly biblical analyses of Michael Frost and Alan Hirsch. Incarnational mission, as opposed to ‘attractional’ (get them to come to us) makes huge sense to me, biblically and culturally. I welcome the desire to incarnate the Gospel in postmodern culture. I have long believed that even in Scripture there are many ways in which the Gospel is presented, and often it is presented in different ways for different cultures.

Having said that, I have my reservations about where the emerging church goes awry. Doing yoga is a no-no for me, even though I want to reach out positively to spiritual searchers. Some of my critiques would sound altogether too conservative to some emergent ears.

So I’m not a complete fit in either camp. I want to take the best of both, as I believe some people are doing: the 24/7 prayer movement, and some of the examples on the Expressions DVDs. It is an awkward calling to straddle the two, and I do so clumsily, lurching more onto one leg and then the other.

Here I am, then, continually feeling uncomfortable – but also suspecting I am far from unique.

Technorati Tags: ministry, leadership, personality, NewWine, charismatic, missional, emergingchurch, TorontoBlessing, EugenePeterson, DallasWillard, MichaelFrost, AlanHirsch, 24-7Prayer, FreshExpressions

There’s a great quote in Jeff Lucas‘ book Gideon: Power From Weakness that puts Christian leadership and ‘ministry’ in perspective in the light of the way it is pumped up at conferences, especially to young Christians:

The future is not in the hands of the articulate people who stand on platforms, and I say this as one who spends most of my life on one platform or another. But as a Christian leader, I am not on the ‘front line’ in God’s holy war. I am a member of God’s ordinance core, privileged to help, serve and resource the real heroes who today will be faithful to God as hospital workers and home-makers, mechanics and managers, school teachers and secretaries, or – an even greater challenge – as those unemployed, wrongly deployed or just holding down what can only be described as boring, mundane jobs. (p61)

I think he’s got it right. Not simply as a corrective in the context he mentions, but as a corrective to regular congregational life, which loads huge expectations on the minister. We foolishly believe that a new minister will change everything. It’s not only an abdication of responsibility, it’s a measure of desperation in the face of church decline and powerful social forces, in whose wake we feel hopeless. It’s also an act of social captivity, in a society of personality cults and celebrity adulation.

Our hope, however, is not in the latest ‘anointed’ leader but in Christ. To put our hope in anyone but him is an act of faithlessness for a Christian. At my welcome service here in Chelmsford, I quoted Brian’s mother from Monty Python’s Life Of Brian: ‘He’s not the Messiah, he’s just a very naughty boy.’ I may be called to be Christlike and to set an example, but I’m not the Messiah. There are no vacancies for that position.

Technorati Tags: JeffLucas, Gideon, ministry, leadership

Luke 10:25-37

Introduction
How on earth do you preach on the Parable of the Good Samaritan? It’s so
well known. We’ve reduced it just to a set of cheesy morals. That’s why I’ve
avoided hymns this morning like, ‘When I needed
a neighbour’.

Over the years, Christians have tried to freshen up their
approach to this parable, so that familiarity doesn’t breed contempt. In the 1970s,
the Riding Lights Theatre Company
published a book of sketches called ‘Time
To Act’, which included ‘The
Parable of the Good Punk Rocker’. In the Seventies, when respectable,
mainstream society hated punks, it made sense to rewrite the parable. After all,
as I once heard a preacher
say, it’s no more a nice Sunday School story than going into Israel today and telling
the story of the good Palestinian.

We need to avoid just reducing it to, ‘Be nice to everybody’,
and we have to do more than simply update it by putting in the latest bogeyman
as the hero – the Parable of the Good Al Qaeda Terrorist, for example.

But how to do it? My suggestion is this: rather than
bringing it up to date, let’s try going back two thousand years. I’m going to
try retelling the story with some of the background[1]
in the hope that we can recapture something of its original meaning. I think
we’ll see that this is more than about being nice to each other, even the
people who don’t like us.

Round One
There are three sports my Dad and I both love – cricket, rugby and football. But
there is one on which we disagree – one he participated in at school and in his
National Service. Boxing. I understand the thought of sports where you might
risk being hurt, but I can’t get my head around a sport where the intention is
to hurt. Dad doesn’t see it like that.

But at the beginning of our reading, the lawyer is up for an
intellectual boxing match with Jesus, or at least some sparring. The lawyer ‘stood
up’ – that’s a sign of respect for Jesus as a teacher, or of acknowledging him
as an equal. He even calls him, ‘Teacher.’ However, it’s all just a show,
because he stands up to ‘test’ Jesus. Social courtesy is coupled with a
deceptive and corrupt heart. When the lawyer asks, ‘What must I do to inherit
eternal life?’ (verse 25) you have to wonder about the sincerity of the
question.

So what does Jesus do? Well, he takes on the question. You might
wonder why, given that he is not prone to wasting his time on those who are not
serious. But he does so, in order to make a point against his opponents. He responds
to the sparring.

Jesus could take the question of inheriting one of two ways.
He could think about the inheritance of the land, which Israel knew was a gift
from God, and therefore you couldn’t do
anything to inherit it. Inheriting the land was seen as a metaphor for eternal
life. So if you took this approach there would be no question of doing anything
to get it. But he knows the lawyer is talking about inheriting eternal life in
the tradition of the rabbis, who saw it as a matter of keeping the Torah, the
Jewish Law. He doesn’t just say, ‘You’ve got it wrong, eternal life is all
about the undeserved grace of God, it’s a free gift’ (which it is), he meets
the guy on his own terms, on his own territory. It’s ‘wrong’ territory, the
idea that you can work your way to eternal life. But that is what the lawyer
thinks, so Jesus responds to that.

However – he responds, not with an answer, but a question. Jesus
probes those who come to him. He doesn’t always serve up an answer, well cooked
and neatly presented on a plate. He throws the question back at the man, and in
his own terms: ‘What is written in the law? What do you read there?’ (verse 26)
‘What do you read there?’ could be a way of asking the lawyer, ‘How do you
recite this in worship?’ And so he responds with what amounts to a Jewish
creed: ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your
soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbour as
yourself.’ (verse 27)

Perhaps it was popular to put the two commandments about
loving God and loving your neighbour together; Jesus had certainly done it. But
whether it was popular, or the lawyer was echoing Jesus, or it was a sincere
comment, Jesus seems to praise him: ‘You have given the right answer; do this,
and you will live.’ (verse 28) It’s the kind of affirmation that raises
questions: lawyer, you have the right beliefs, but do you put them into
practice? Faith without works is dead, Jesus’ brother James would later say.
Lawyer, you have told yourself what to do; now will you do it?

But Jesus has done more than that in saying, ‘Do this and
you shall live.’ He is saying, ‘Do this and you will really be living now. Don’t
just see eternal life as something in the future after death; don’t just buy
your ticket to heaven, as if you could. Loving God and loving neighbour is
truly coming alive.’ But not only that, Jesus implies it’s something not to do
once, but to keep on doing. If the lawyer wanted a simple answer that was easy
to fulfil, he didn’t get it. So we move to the second round of the bout.

Round Two
The lawyer wanted to see himself as fully righteous, so he asks, ‘And who is my
neighbour?’ (verse 29) He hopes Jesus will answer, ‘Your relative and your
friend.’ The rabbis thought your neighbour was your fellow Jew, maybe converts
to the faith, but certainly not Gentiles. There was a rabbinical saying ‘that
heretics, informers, and renegades ‘should be pushed (into the ditch) and not
pulled out’’[2].

It’s at this point that Jesus responds with his story. How else
can he respond? As someone has put it, ‘The question is unanswerable, and ought
not to be asked. For love does not begin by defining its objects: it discovers
them.’[3]
The lawyer gets a parable, not a list of neighbours.

The man is walking a descending seventeen-mile route from Jerusalem
to Jericho. The road has been notorious even in succeeding centuries. The crusaders
built a fort halfway along to protect pilgrims. In the nineteenth century, some
only walked it with an armed guard.

The robbers leave the man – presumably a Jew – beaten,
stripped and half-dead. ‘Beaten’ suggests he struggled; ‘half dead’ means he
was on the point of death. Stripped and unconscious, no-one who happens upon
him can now identify what national, social or religious background he comes
from.

First on the scene, is an aristocrat, a priest, who would
have been riding a beast. But his duty is to do good to a devout man, not a
sinner, a humble man, not a godless one (Sirach 12:1-7). He cannot be sure if
the naked, unconscious man at death’s door is good and devout. If he is
actually dead, contact with a dead body will defile the priest, so he will not
be able to collect, distribute and eat the tithes of food. He and his household
will suffer. What humiliation if he cannot feed his family! Even within four
cubits of a dead body he will be defiled, so he passes by on the other side
(verse 31). He is trying to be a good priest, keeping his status in the community
that supports him.

Next comes the Levite, a man of lower social class. Given that
the road was a straight Roman road and the nature of the man’s injuries, we can
assume he arrives quite soon after the priest, and has seen the priest steer
away. Fewer rules bound the Levite: the four-cubit exclusion zone would only
apply to him when he was on duty. If he’s travelling from Jerusalem, he’s off
duty. However, he also passes by on the other side (verse 32). Is it fear of
the robbers that makes him do so? Or is it that he dares not contradict the
example of the priest, a higher-ranking man than him? He gets closer than the priest
does – he comes ‘to the place’. He could have offered some first aid. But rules
and hierarchy mean he leaves the man to die.

Who will come next? A pious Jew hearing that first a priest
and then a Levite came will expect one from ‘the delegation of Israel’, nonprofessionals
who helped at the Temple. But to the lawyer’s shock, it’s that old enemy, a
Samaritan. And a Samaritan travelling in Judea is hardly likely to be coming
across a ‘neighbour’ in the usual limited sense. Yet he is ‘moved with pity’
(verse 33). That translates a Greek word that means he felt compassion in his
bowels. This is gut-level compassion.

He takes a risk. He too could be ritually unclean by contact
with a dead body – and so would his animal and his wares. Likewise, his animal
and his wares make him a prime target for the robbers. None of this stops him. He
sets to work. ‘He went to him and bandaged his wounds, having poured oil and
wine on them.’ (verse 34a) Why mention the binding of wounds before the
application of the oil and wine, which would have happened first to soften and
clean the wounds? Perhaps because the binding of wounds was characteristically
a picture of how God saves his people in the Old Testament (Jeremiah 30:17;
Hosea 6:1-10). And the oil and wine aren’t simply part of a first century St
John’s Ambulance kit, they are also elements used in the sacrificial worship at
the Temple. This is true worship, what Paul called ‘a living sacrifice’ (Romans
12:1).

He also risks rejection. If the man awoke and recognised him
as a Samaritan, then he is receiving oil and wine from a man from whom he is
forbidden to receive them. The man may have to pay tithes on them – and he can’t
even pay an hotel bill. He might dismiss the Samaritan with a curse. He would
be foolish, but he might.

More risks come. The Samaritan puts the man on his animal
(which the priest could have done), and leads him (as a servant would lead a
master who has mounted a beast) to an inn. Staying overnight to tend him is
fraught with danger. Presumably, the inn is at Jericho – there are no records
of inns in the middle of the desert. It looks like this is the man’s hometown. His
relatives could seek revenge on the attackers. But if they could not track down
the assailants, then anyone remotely related might be a victim. They might pick
on the hated Samaritan. He has risked his life again.

Finally, he pays the bill to the innkeeper. Innkeepers had a
terrible reputation, and inns were often associated with prostitution. The injured
man will be able to leave (and perhaps be glad to, if it is a place of ill
repute). However, the Samaritan has no chance of reimbursement if he has
overpaid. A Jewish innkeeper might do that for another Jew, but not for a
Samaritan.

With such an amazing figure as the Samaritan, no wonder the
church of the early centuries thought he stood for the incarnate Christ. Everything
about him is Christlike. But in the parable, Jesus is bringing the lawyer to an
awkward conclusion. You asked who your neighbour is: that’s the wrong question,
says Jesus. The right question, the question motivated by love of God, is, ‘To
whom can I become a neighbour?’

And at that point, the lawyer knows he is never going to inherit
eternal life on these terms. It isn’t just a one-off. Remember, Jesus was
telling him to keep on doing this in order to be fully alive now and in the
future. Who can meet this standard? Mother Teresa? A few others? What hope is
there for the lawyer? What hope is there for us?

It’s a knockout punch for the pretentious lawyer. Hope comes
in that ancient identification of the Samaritan with Jesus. As salvation came
in a costly expression of love to the wounded man, so it also comes that way to
us, through the Cross. We do not earn it. What is impossible for us is possible
for God.

But when we find God’s love through the sacrificial death of
Christ, he calls us to love him and look for neighbours to love, too. ‘Go and
do likewise,’ said Jesus (verse 37). So must we.

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