Category: Sermons

Good News For Short People, Luke 19:1-10 (Ordinary 31 Year C)

Luke 19:1-10

This week we have seen a short, wealthy man find his way into 10 Downing Street. How fitting that our Gospel reading today is one where a short, wealthy man wants to find his way into God’s kingdom.

Most of us have known the story of Zaccheus since childhood. We heard it at Sunday School. We sang songs based on it where Jesus invited himself for tea at Zaccheus’ house. All this despite there being no evidence whatsoever of tea-drinking anywhere in the Bible.

I want to ask a simple question of this story. It’s a question we could regularly deploy in our reflection on Bible passages. Here it is:

What is the Good News for Zaccheus?

I want to reflect on two areas where we see that Jesus is Good News for Zaccheus.

Firstly, I want to speak about Good News for the Rich.

Just to say those words will wind up some people. Good news for the rich? Really? It’s the poor who need good news.

And besides, Jesus said in Luke 4 he came to bring good news to the poor, not the rich. Not only that, Jesus told the rich in Luke’s version of the Beatitudes (Luke 6:20-26) that the rich have already received their comfort.

Furthermore, this was prophesied while Jesus was still in the womb. At that point she sang the song we know so well as The Magnificat. It includes the line, ‘He has sent the rich away empty’ (Luke 1:53).

So how can there be good news for the rich? The good news is for the poor and there is only bad news for the rich.

The answer is this. You have to define what you mean by good news. The Good News which is the Gospel is not a good news that tells someone everything about the way they live is fine. In fact, it’s rather different.

‘Good news’ for a citizen of the Roman Empire meant hearing a herald come to their town or village with a proclamation either that there was a new Emperor on the throne or that Rome’s armies had won a great victory.

The Good News of the Gospel Christianises that. It is the proclamation that there is a new king on the throne of the universe, and that his name is Jesus. And furthermore, he has won the greatest of all battles by conquering  sin, suffering, and death at the Cross.

That is Good News for everyone, including the rich. However, I will concede that it is challenging good News for the wealthy. If the rich are going to acknowledge that Jesus is on the throne of the universe then the good news for them will include some rethinking of financial habits.

And if you had gained your wealth by morally dubious means as Zaccheus had, then the Good News of Jesus’ reign was more challenging.

We know Zaccheus was corrupt, and there was little way out of being corrupt if you are a tax collector, due to the way the Romans managed the system. The tax collectors were given a target by Rome of how much tax they had to raise in their district. But the tax collectors had to gather their own income from the taxation, too, and so they charged residents over and above the amount Rome had set for them, otherwise they and their family would starve. So you can imagine that those tax collectors who wanted, shall we say, a somewhat comfortable life charged a higher taxation that those who were content with a more modest lifestyle.

But regardless of income, tax collectors would have been treated as ‘sinners’ because their very work meant they were collaborators with the occupying Roman armies. Indeed, that’s the scandal of what Jesus does for the crowd here:

‘He has gone to be the guest of a sinner.’ (Verse 7)

Somehow Jesus knew that just railing against Zaccheus for his sin wouldn’t melt his heart. The tax collector already knew he was a sinner, not only in the sight of the crowd, but of God. He knew what he was doing was wrong. It’s rather like going into a prison with the Christian message: you don’t need to tell the prisoners they are guilty, they are only too conscious of that fact. It is Jesus’ act of grace in seeking out hospitality from such an unpopular man that makes the difference.

Now Zaccheus can address his sin and show that his repentance is real by matching it with transformed actions. He offers half of his possessions and to repay what he has cheated fourfold – and fourfold was

the penalty for those who have stolen animals[1].

In addition, Zaccheus addresses Jesus as ‘Lord.’ He is a changed man.

This helps us with how we proclaim the good news to the wealthy today. How will they respond to the Good News that Jesus is on the throne and that he has conquered evil? Can we model to them the grace that leads to their conviction of sin by the Holy Spirit?

And it also challenges us, as it did Zaccheus. Do we own money or possessions that are not rightfully ours? What would Jesus, the king of the kingdom, say to us about those things?

Secondly, this story is about Good News for the Shamed.

Zaccheus has to climb a sycamore-fig tree in order to see Jesus (verse 4) and we assume the only reason he did that is the one Luke tells us about, namely that he was ‘short’ (verse 3).

All that is true, but here is something I discovered this week about sycamore-fig trees. The nature of their leaves is such that if a man climbed up into them, he would most likely be well-hidden. Jesus literally had ‘to seek and save the lost’ (verse 10).

Combine this with the way that Zaccheus runs ahead of the crowd on the route out of Jericho, anticipating Jesus’ route, where he is surely trying to put some distance between himself and the crowd who will hate him, then we can see an important truth. Zaccheus wanted to stay hidden.

And why was that? Surely it was an issue of shame – the shame he felt for his way of life.

But Jesus can see the man whose shame hides him and puts him at a distance from others. He sees through and brings the word of grace:

‘Zacchaeus, come down immediately. I must stay at your house today.’ (Verse 5)

Shame makes us run away from others. It makes us hide from them. Like Adam and Eve hiding in the Garden of Eden, shame even makes us want to hide from God. But for those who are shamed by their lives Jesus reaches out to restore them.

From my experience as a minister, there are stories I could tell you about the shameful things people have confessed to me. Often, they have been people who were among the most loved and respected church members in a congregation, but they held a dark secret.

Now of course I cannot share any specific stories with you, because they were shared with me in confidence. I’ll just say, think of the sins the church routinely says are very bad, and I’ve probably heard them confessed by Christians. But it has been my privilege to tell these people that there is indeed a God who forgives them, restores them, and welcomes them back to the heart of his family.

That is what Zaccheus found with Jesus, who calls him ‘a son of Abraham’ (verse 9) – a member of the family, the people of God, not an outcast.

So from this let me offer a couple of encouragements to you. One is to emphasise this word of  hope to any of you who are carrying the burden of shame. If there is something from your past that means you are secretly weighed down by shame, I want to encourage you to talk to someone like a minister, so that you can hear the reassurance of God’s forgiving love in Jesus Christ for you. The only reason I say a minister is not because we have special powers but because in all but the most exceptional circumstances we are required to keep confidential what you share with us.

Shame, however, is not just for those who carry guilt. Some of us carry shame for things that have been done to us. This is particularly true of abused people, of whom there are many in our churches and society. Let someone like a pastor reassure you in confidence that Jesus wipes away the false shame of being sinned against.

My other encouragement is to say that this is good news for the world. People may not talk about sin as much as they did, but they certainly talk about shame. That Jesus offers a way home to God for those who experience shame would be good news for many in our world.

Sadly, sometimes these people think the church is the last body to help them because they expect to hear little more than condemnation from us. But what if in our friendships with people outside the church we can speak and demonstrate a message where Jesus says to people today, ‘I must stay at your house today’?

So this wonderful story gives us both a challenge and an encouragement. The Good News that Jesus is on the throne of the universe is a challenge for us to respond and put our lives in harmony with his kingdom ways.

And the Good News that this King Jesus wipes away all the effects of shame through his victory over all sin and suffering at the Cross means liberation for us and for all who will hear and embrace it.

All that remains is for us to put these things into practice, both in our own lives and in our witness to others.

[1] https://www.psephizo.com/biblical-studies/jesus-calls-zacchaeus-in-luke-19/; also see Exodus 22:1 and 2 Samuel 12:6.

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The Tyson Fury Of Prayer? Luke 18:1-8 (Ordinary 29 Year C)

Luke 18:1-8

Back in the 1970s on Radio 1 the now-disgraced DJ Dave Lee Travis used to invite frustrated wives to send in stories of DIY jobs that their husbands had failed to do or failed to complete. Should their story be read on air, Travis sent them a circular object known as a ‘Round Tuit’, for when their husbands got ‘around to it’.

Perhaps stories like that encapsulate the unhelpful stereotype of nagging women. And if you read today’s Scripture superficially you may think it is about a nagging woman, the widow who wears down the unjust judge.

But that is to ignore the very first sentence of the reading:

Then Jesus told his disciples a parable to show them that they should always pray and not give up. (Verse 1)

The theme is not ‘nagging’ but ‘Don’t give up.’ Specifically, don’t give up praying.

And if we pay attention not simply to that first sentence generally, but to the first word, we realise we need to take into account the context. The first word is ‘Then.’ Luke is telling us this is related to what has just gone before.

Now we didn’t read that, but let me point you to the way near the end of the previous chapter that Jesus is in discussion with people who are longing for his Second Coming, but who will not live to see it:

Then he said to his disciples, ‘The time is coming when you will long to see one of the days of the Son of Man, but you will not see it.’ (Luke 17:22)

As the woman in the parable longed for justice, so there are many who long for the justice of God. But we shall only see it fully when Christ appears again in glory.

So why in the parable is the widow in need? The scholar Ian Paul lists three signs of her need:

First, she has to represent herself; courts are normally the province of men, and it appears that she has no male relative who will represent her. Second, she has to return continually, which means that she does not have the financial resources to offer a bribe and have her case settled quickly (not an unusual issue in many courts around the world today). Thirdly, she appears to have been denied justice, and the implication is that she has perhaps been deprived of her rights in inheritance. It might be that she has been deprived of her living from her late husband’s estate; later rabbinic law suggests that widows did not inherit directly, but makes provision for her living from the estate for that reason.

That’s quite a list. No professional representation. A corrupt legal system. And no financial support. How extraordinary that she is not cowed by her circumstances but is feisty enough to demand justice. She takes responsibility and takes the initiative in her relentless quest for justice.[1]

As such, she is an example for us. We may not face the same set of personal challenges as her, but there are so many terrible things in our world that we long to see changed, and so caring about justice can be disheartening. But just when we feel tempted to draw the curtains, curl up in a ball, eat comfort food, and ignore the wicked world outside our door, the widow in the parable says, ‘No!’

What we have here is a character in the story whose own circumstances and actions remind us to do what Jesus said on the tin at the beginning of the parable: ‘always pray and not give up.’

Look how she speaks up boldly in the face of corruption. She is so tenacious! The unjust judge gives up because he fears that she will come and attack him (verse 5)! Yes, he, the strong male judge, fears the poor, weak widow.

In fact, the Greek word for ‘attack’ here is one taken from the realm of boxing. It means ‘to beat’. Paraphrasing it, the judge fears the widow giving him a black eye.[2]

The world sees a poor, defenceless widow. The judge sees Tyson Fury!

Perhaps we too feel weak and feeble in the face of the wickedness and suffering in our world. Certainly, our opponents love to construe us this way. But a church that is bold to keep praying even in the face of unequal relationships and insurmountable odds is not a pushover.

One of my favourite images of this reality is C S Lewis’ description of it in The Screwtape Letters. You will remember that these are fictional letters written from a senior devil, Screwtape, to a junior one, his nephew Wormwood. In one of the letters, Screwtape writes this:

One of our great allies at present is the Church itself. Do not misunderstand me. I do not mean the Church as we see her spread out through all time and space and rooted in eternity, terrible as an army with banners. That, I confess, is a spectacle which makes our boldest tempters uneasy. But fortunately it is quite invisible to these humans. All your patient sees is the half-finished, sham Gothic erection on the new building estate. When he goes inside, he sees the local grocer with rather an oily expression on his face bustling up to offer him one shiny little book containing a liturgy which neither of them understands, and one shabby little book containing corrupt texts of a number of religious lyrics, mostly bad, and in very small print. When he gets to his pew and looks round him he sees just that selection of his neighbours whom he has hitherto avoided.[3]

In our ministry of intercession we may present as a poor widow but we are in fact terrible as an army with banners. We are the Tyson Fury of all things spiritual. That’s why we ‘should always pray and not give up.’

Nevertheless, bold as we may be with our prayers God is still playing the long game and we do not always see our prayers answered. I pray regularly that God will bring to naught various wicked regimes around the world that inflict persecution on their populations. But it hasn’t happened yet. I long for regimes to fall in China, North Korea, Iran, Cuba, Mexico, Vietnam, and other nations. I watch and I pray, longing for the day.

So how in the meantime do we cope with unanswered prayer? If God is so unlike the unjust judge and promises a quick administration of justice, why have these governments not fallen yet?

I have found a response by Pete Greig, the founder of the 24/7 Prayer movement stimulating in considering this. In the midst of seeing many wonderful answers to prayer in the movement in its early days, Greig was facing caring for his wife who developed epileptic seizures. His prayers for her health went unanswered. Much of his wrestling with that painful dilemma can be found in his remarkable book God On Mute, a book I highly commend.

But he gives a shorter account in a YouTube video where he describes three reasons why we don’t always see the answers to prayer that we desire.

One reason Greig calls ‘God’s World’, in other words the laws of nature. He talks about how because God has set up a creation that works consistently according to reliable laws then miracles must by definition be rare occurrences, as C S Lewis (that man again) said. You would no longer be able to rely on those laws in good ways if every time something painful were about to happen they were suspended. Suppose, says Lewis, every time a Christian dropped a hammer that God answered the prayer for the hammer not to hit their toe. We would be walking around in a world where we could no longer rely on gravity. We would be making our way every day through lots of hammers floating in the air!

One preacher I heard described scientific laws as being descriptions of God’s habits. Miracles happen when God occasionally changes his habits. But these occasions really are occasional. Otherwise, the many good things that follow from having predicable laws of nature would fall apart.

A second reason Pete Greig gives for prayer being unanswered is ‘God’s Will.’ There are many ways in which we do know God’s will, particularly in terms of the ethical ways in which we are to live. But there are other ways where we shall not always know God’s will, and where his ways are not our ways. His ways are higher than ours. No mere human being knows the entire will of God.

Perhaps you thought it was God’s will that you married a particular person but it proved to be unrequited love. How many of us look back on things like those in our lives and are glad that life did not pan out the way we wanted? God did something better for us, but we could not have seen it, and so our initial prayers went unanswered. It may have been painful at the time, and it may be something we can only appreciate with hindsight, but sometimes God overrules or ignores our prayer requests because he has a better outcome in mind than we can anticipate.

The third reason Greig describes for not seeing answered prayer is what he calls ‘God’s War.’ There is opposition to God’s ways. There is a spiritual conflict. I am not blaming everything on demons, but I am saying that human beings actively choose to do things that are opposed to the will of God, from small acts of selfishness to large-scale acts of violence. Jesus may be reigning at the right hand of the Father, but there are still forces arrayed against his kingdom, just as we have King Charles III on the throne but there are still criminals at work in our society.

What should we do in such circumstances? Why, we should pray all the more boldly for God to overcome his enemies. It may take a long time, but it is worth the investment in prayer.

Indeed, in the face of all that we encounter in creation that is not according to God’s purposes of love, let us be bold in prayer. The weak widow is but a disguise for the heavyweight boxer. Spiritually speaking, we can punch above the widow’s weight.

And if we do, then the Son of Man will find faith on the earth (verse 8).

[1] See Joel Green, The Gospel of Luke, p640.

[2] https://www.psephizo.com/biblical-studies/does-god-respond-to-nagging-in-luke-18/

[3] Cited at https://www.thespiritlife.net/about/81-warfare/warfare-publications/1877-chapter-2-the-screwtape-letters-cs-lewis

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One Out Of Ten Ain’t Bad, Luke 17:11-19 (Ordinary 28 Year C)

Luke 17:11-19

On the day when we first suspected Debbie might be pregnant with our first child we were on leave and in Hyde Park, attending a concert by an artist she had wanted to see for a long time, the now-deceased Meat Loaf.

I won’t detain you with my thoughts about that concert, which weren’t very flattering, but of course he performed a number of songs from his famous ‘Bat Out Of Hell’ album. Songs with lyrics such as

I want you, I need you
But there ain’t no way I’m ever gonna love you
Now don’t be sad
‘Cos two out of three ain’t bad.[1]

I guess Meat Loaf did better than Jesus here. Two out of three, 66.6%, versus one out of ten, 10 %. One out of then ain’t bad? Maybe that’s something to remember when we worry about lack of response to the Gospel.

But what I mainly want to explore today is what this story tells us about the ministry of Jesus and how we respond to it.

Firstly, the compassion of Jesus crosses boundaries.

There are two ways in which the compassion of Jesus crosses boundaries. As the lepers cry out, ‘Jesus, Master, have pity on us,’ his heart is roused to compassion.

The first boundary is one of distance. You will notice the lepers cried out – because they were not that near him. Why? Because it was socially prescribed that lepers stayed away from the rest of the population. So they have to shout. Think about all the COVID-19 measures of the last two years, especially before there were any vaccines: keeping two metres apart, the scandal of insufficient personal protective equipment for hospital staff, and so on. These were all required to keep us as safe a distance as possible from transmitting the virus to one another.

Now imagine you had to live with such restrictions for the whole of your life. Imagine too that you had to live outside the boundary of your town, where your only company was with your fellow sufferers. Think about the effect that would have on you – emotionally, socially, and in other ways. The compassion of Jesus crosses that.

The second boundary is about the distance created by geographical borders. We read here that Jesus was travelling ‘along the border between Samarian and Galilee’ (verse 11). Is it so surprising, then, to hear later in the story that one of the lepers is a Samaritan?

It is our task as the church to carry on the compassion of Jesus today. How tempting it is for us to keep it within the boundaries of the church family, with people we know, where we usually feel safe, and where we hope and expect people will support us.

Now that is a rose-tinted view of the church – some of the most virulent criticisms, character assassinations, and use of defamatory language have come inside church circles.

We need to be ready to cross boundaries with Christian compassion, just as Jesus did. To be like him we must take risks and demonstrate his compassion not just in the church but in the world also.

That’s why our Baptist friends are starting a course to help people face and overcome financial difficulties. That’s why our Anglican friends have run bereavement ministries, as well as their community fridge that helps prevent food going to landfill. That’s why one Saturday morning a month you can see ‘Healing On The Streets’ based in our high street, offering prayer for people. That’s why we run the clothes bank.

But just because things are happening doesn’t mean we can be complacent. We cannot sit and think, well so-and-so and so-and-so are operating something from our church, we don’t need to get involved. We do!

Do we already know someone or a group of people outside the church who need the compassion of Jesus? Or is his Holy Spirit drawing us to care for others?

Jesus went into the broken places to meet broken people with the love of God. Is that what we are doing?

Secondly, the ministry of Jesus is to the whole person.

How does Jesus heal? Here there is no laying on of hands, nor does he speak to the illness and rebuke it. All he says is, ‘Go, show yourselves to the priests’ (verse 14). The healing happens while they are on their way to the priests.

For one thing, the mere fact of physical healing by Jesus puts paid to the idea that we should confine ourselves to what is ‘spiritual’ and not concern ourselves with physical or material matters. It’s a criticism levelled at the church when we get involved in politics or when we have to spend time on practicalities.

But we cannot divorce the physical or the social from the spiritual. They are all inter-linked. Christians speak of human existence being a ‘psychosomatic unity’ – that is, soul and body are bound together in the one human person.

The mere act of healing shows Jesus’ concern for all that he created. It is a concern he calls us to share.

And why does he send the lepers to the priests? You may know that in that society the priests were the ones who could declare someone cured from leprosy. If they did so declare, then a sufferer’s social isolation as I described in the first point was over. No longer would they suffer socially and emotionally by being cut off from human contact. They could embrace their family again and experience the healing power of touch. They could take their place in society again. They could have the dignity of earning a living once more. They could share in worship with others as they had done before.

The healing of Jesus is physical and social as well as spiritual. Thus our expression of his ministry in the world today needs to be similar.

Of course, we have to be careful not simply to be another social agency. We need to find ways to show why we are showing God’s love in material and social ways. We need to express the reason for the hope that is in us, as the New Testament puts it.

I’m not suggesting we only give material and social help on condition of people hearing a gospel presentation – I have heard of churches that do that and it’s a form of manipulation. But I am saying that there should be something about the way we freely offer the love and mercy of God to all and sundry, regardless of whether they share our faith or not, that should end up prompting questions about why we might do such a thing.

One place where we have an opportunity for that is at our annual Christmas party for elderly and lonely people. We have always offered that event free of charge, and people have often wanted to give a donation towards the costs. How easy it would be for us to say to our guests on that afternoon, there is a reason we offer this for free, and it is to do with the God we believe in. We believe he freely offers his love to us: we don’t pay our way into heaven. We could leave people thinking about the Gospel on that Sunday afternoon.

Thirdly, faith in Jesus needs to be active.

To be scrupulously fair, you could say that all ten lepers put their faith into action, because they all obey Jesus’ command to go and show themselves to the priests. In that their healing comes.

But as we heard, only one returned praising God to Jesus. And that one was not a Jew but a Samaritan (verses 15-16) – someone with decidedly dodgy theological convictions in the view of typical Jews. He had God and where and how to worship God all wrong. Yet he is held up by Jesus as the exemplar of faith (verses 17-19).

So what is the difference between the Samaritan and the nine Jews? Surely it’s gratitude. That’s why the Samaritan returns. The other nine have got what they want out of Jesus and off they go.

How easy it is for us to treat faith in Jesus like the nine Jewish ex-lepers with their conventional, ‘correct’ beliefs about God. If we are not careful, we end up using faith to get what we want or need out of it without bowing at the feet of Jesus as the heretical Samaritan did.

An obvious area where this manifests is in those people who complain after a morning service that they never got much out of it. They came to get, not to give. Worship is a giving experience.

The same people and others will complain that they are not being fed spiritually. Yet what are they doing to feed themselves? Yes, the shepherd is meant to feed the sheep, but in the process the sheep themselves learn how to feed. But some people in our churches just want everything put on a plate for them. It’s selfish and un-Christlike.

Instead, a true active faith like that of the healed Samaritan is one that is characterised by gratitude. When we know what Jesus Christ has done for us the faithful response is gratitude. Gratitude seen in our commitment to regular worship. Gratitude in nurturing our own personal connection with him in prayer. Gratitude in recognising that as he laid down his life for us so the fitting response is to lay ours down for him. And that is why a ‘take, take, take’ attitude is so unworthy of the Christian.

But the grateful faith of someone who lays down their life for the One who died for them will not stay in splendid isolation in the church but cross boundaries with the love of God for others.

That same laid-down life in gratitude will show that love of God in physical, material, and social ways, all because of the spiritual connection with Christ.

Are we among the nine out of ten? Or are we the one out of ten?

[1] Words and music Jim Steinman, publisher Hal Leonard, copyright © Edward B Marks Music Company

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Discipleship 101, Luke 17:5-10 (Ordinary 27 Year C)

Luke 17:5-10

There is a controversial personality type test called the Myers Briggs Type Indicator. Broadly speaking, it locates a person in one of sixteen different personality types.

And I once came across a document that contained a one-line prayer for each of the sixteen types[1]. There is someone I know for whom the prayer would be

Lord, help me to relax about insignificant details beginning tomorrow at 11:41.23 am.

Someone else I know would probably own this prayer:

God help me to take things more seriously, especially parties and dancing.

And there is someone else I am close to for whom I think their prayer would be this one:

God, help me to keep my mind on one th-Look a bird-ing at a time.

I suppose you want to hear mine? I’m not sure I should tell you, but it’s this:

Lord, keep me open to others’ ideas, WRONG though they may be.

When I read today’s passage, though, I had a sense it was like that ‘God, help me to keep my mind on one th-Look a bird-ing at a time’ prayer.

Why? It flits from one thing to another. It starts with the subject of faith but before you know it, the passage is about servanthood. And even within the parable about the servants, you start off as the master and end up as the servant. Look, a bird!

Our problem is that the Lectionary has taken a chunk out of context. These verses belong in a part of Luke’s Gospel where discipleship is being discussed. Luke hasn’t necessarily ordered the material chronologically here, he has simply collected some of Jesus’ basic teaching on what it means to be a disciple.

So you could say that today’s reading is part of a Discipleship 101 course. This is an introduction to discipleship. It’s discipleship basics. And the two basic elements of discipleship taught here are faith and servanthood.

Firstly, then, faith:

5 The apostles said to the Lord, ‘Increase our faith!’

6 He replied, ‘If you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mulberry tree, “Be uprooted and planted in the sea,” and it will obey you.

Just taking these verses as they stand, the apostles ask for more faith and Jesus says, well you’ve just got to start exercising the small amount of faith you already have.

I think that’s important. Some of us just sit there waiting for God to increase out faith when Jesus tells us to get on with the faith we already have and if we put that into practice then things will happen.

In other words, you don’t build up muscle without exercise. So exercise the faith you have, even if it doesn’t seem like much, and over time it will grow.

As the missionary pioneer to China, Hudson Taylor, put it:

You do not need a great faith, but faith in a great God.[2]

For some of us, it is time to get out of the pews and start putting our faith in action. We have that ‘faith in a great God’, for we believe amazing things about our God. It is time to take what we hear on Sunday morning and put it into practice on Monday morning.

All the stuff about a mulberry tree being uprooted and planted in the sea is more of Jesus’ cartoon language to make a point. One writer puts it this way:

The best analogy I have heard is that faith is like a tow rope used by one car to pull another car up a hill. If the second car won’t move, then it is no good attaching a stronger rope; what matters is the vehicle the rope is attached to! In a similar way, it is not the strength of our faith that is the issue; the question is, who is our faith placed in?[3]

So you have to take the handbrake off in the second car! Even if you don’t need a tow rope to move a car, you still have to take the brake off and start moving if you are to steer the car.

For us, this means we need to get on with those basic actions of faith and not just sit around waiting for something magical to change us. Only when we start moving with the actions of faith will our faith move and grow.

In fact, although as I said Luke puts a lot of different pieces of Jesus’ teaching together in this part of his Gospel, there is a real possibility the apostles’ request for increased faith relates to what has come immediately before our passage today. For you could translate their words not so much as ‘Increase our faith’ as ‘Give us this kind of faith’. What kind of faith? It must be what immediately precedes it.

So what does come straight before the apostles’ words? The answer is some teaching of Jesus on what to do when people sin against us (verses 3-4). First, says Jesus, you rebuke them. Jesus wasn’t a doormat! There’s nothing wrong in saying to somebody, you wronged me. Then, if they repent, you forgive them. And even if they continue to sin but continue to repent you still go on forgiving them.

Well, the apostles realise, I think, that to rebuke someone for their sin but then forgive them when they are repentant requires more faith than they presently have. We know a couple of them quite fancied calling fire down from heaven on opponents, and we know Peter wielded a sword in Gethsemane. They know they need more faith in order to forgive. And Jesus says, you have a little bit of faith. Start with that. As you exercise it, that faith will grow.

Take the handbrake off. Begin to move.

Where is God calling us to release the brakes on our faith? Is it in forgiveness? Or is it in some other area?

Secondly, servanthood:

So – what do we make of Jesus’ little parable about the servant who works when his master is away and cannot rest when the master comes home?

Let’s put aside all our Downton Abbey images about the team of servants downstairs, because this single servant in Jesus’ story does everything. One moment he is doing the physical labour of a farmer – either ploughing or shepherding – and then when the master comes home, he is both the butler and the chef. That is one demanding job description!

So at first hearing it sounds like a recipe for relentless, hard work.

And not only that, what do we make of the conclusion where Jesus says that servants should simply say, “We are unworthy servants; we have only done our duty”? How does that go down with someone who has low self-esteem? Isn’t that contradictory to all the emphasis on the outrageous love and grace of God that we saw only two chapters earlier in the Parable of the Prodigal Son?

It’s important to recognise that Jesus is addressing a different concern here. Jesus is making sure that we don’t enter into Christian discipleship as if it’s a ticket to prosperity and status, let alone celebrity. No Christian belongs on a pedestal. Only Jesus does.

The point is this: we have a simple calling as disciples. It is to do what pleases our Master, Jesus. In Ephesians 5:10, Paul tells his readers to ‘find out what pleases the Lord’ – with the assumption that if they have found out what pleases him, they will then do it. That is our calling here, in today’s reading, according to Jesus. In a world where we are encouraged to please ourselves, our goal as Christians is to please Jesus.

We have four Gospels that tell us what pleases Jesus. There are plenty of things we can get along with, many of them the commonplace actions of everyday life with the important rider of how we go about them in contrast to other people. It isn’t that difficult to know a lot of the things that please him.

Perhaps our problem is best stated by Mark Twain. He said it was less the parts of the Bible that he didn’t understood that troubled him, and more the parts that he did understand. I suspect it’s like that for many of us with the teaching of Jesus. There are some very plain and challenging elements to his teaching that we wished said something else so that we didn’t have to comply. But they don’t.

Does any of us, then, face a dilemma where if we’re honest the choice is between claiming our own rights or privileges or status on the one hand and pleasing Jesus on the other? For me, I remember a friend of mine who told me he knew he couldn’t offer for the ministry until he was married. So I thought, I won’t answer that call until I’m married. But God wouldn’t let me put conditions on how I responded to what he wanted of me.

Do any of us say things like that to Jesus? I’ll only do x for you if you do y for me. We don’t get to set the terms. Because we follow One who gave up all those rights and privileges he had as the eternal Son of God to serve and to bring salvation. It is wrong for us to cling onto status in preference to serving Jesus.

In conclusion, then, this basic course in discipleship is one where Jesus issues two simple but important challenges to us.

Firstly, we need to stop waiting for God to dispense the spiritual equivalent of fertiliser on our faith if it is to grow. Instead, we need to exercise our faith muscles if we want our faith to grow. We need to get moving in faith if we are to get up to speed.

Secondly, we have a simple mission in life which is to find out what Jesus likes and then to please him. We cannot allow our pride to get in the way. The call to be servants is paramount, and it shapes everything we do.

How are we doing with our discipleship basics?

[1] https://faculty.georgetown.edu/jod/texts/mbprayers.html

[2] https://quotefancy.com/quote/1491446/James-Hudson-Taylor-You-do-not-need-a-great-faith-but-faith-in-a-great-God

[3] https://www.psephizo.com/biblical-studies/does-jesus-treat-us-as-good-for-nothing-slaves-in-luke-17/

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Harvest Thanks-Giving, Deuteronomy 26:1-11

Deuteronomy 26:1-11

Harvest is a time of giving -it’s a thanksgiving – and so without any further ado I’m going to explore two aspects of our harvest giving.

Firstly, our giving is a response to God’s giving.

There is so much God has given us. Under this heading I’m going to consider three ways he gives and our responses.

Number 1: The first-fruits of what Israel produced from the soil in the Promised Land were there by virtue of God’s creation. God has given to all humankind a physical, material creation filled with good things that we need and that we can enjoy.

So our giving back to God here recognises him as Creator. Perhaps that’s why people who don’t even have a clear faith can connect with harvest. They are aware they are surrounded by good things, and that they owe that to the One who created this universe.

We know too that God cares for such people. Jesus said that his Father sends the rain upon the righteous and the unrighteous. This is a blessing available to all. It is what John Calvin called ‘common grace.’

Initially, then we are giving at harvest in response to that general provision that God has made for all of us in this world. It does mean, though, that when we hear of peoples and places who do not have the basic necessities of life we are called to share out and redistribute the blessings of God.

It also means we take care of what God has given us. So it’s entirely reasonable to have a special concern at this time about climate change. We hear how East African nations have had four consecutive years of little or no harvest, thanks to a lack of rainfall that is almost certainly due to the climate change for which the heavily industrialised and developed nations bear a huge responsibility.

In that respect, our giving at this time needs also to encompass a giving up of dangerous things and a move to other approaches. We want there to be a land which contains what God has provided for us, and which can be harvested and dedicated to our God in gratitude for his fatherly supply of all we need.

Number 2: there is all that God has given to us not only as Creator but also as Rescuer. The ceremony described in Deuteronomy 26 is directly related to Israel’s liberation from enforced slavey in Egypt. We heard in the reading how in the prescribed form of words the worshipper recalls the suffering of God’s people in Egypt and their liberation at the hand of God.

How has God set you and me free? Not in a similar dramatic way to Israel in Egypt, I expect. But he has rescued us in other ways, and we can respond to that.

Sometimes on a smaller scale God rescues us from wicked people. In my first appointment I had trouble with some unsuitable children’s workers. One of them was a Freemason, and he was chummy with one of the church organists, who was also a Mason. Eventually, the opposition of the organist became so intolerable that I prayed, “Lord, please change him or move him. I’d rather you changed him, but if he won’t change, then please move him.”

Within a week his house was on the market. He moved a hundred miles away. I would have gladly put up bunting to celebrate.

It doesn’t always happen as simply and strikingly as that, but our God is a rescuer. We have reasons to be grateful and to bring our gifts in response.

And we also have our reasons here to pray and work for those today who we know need rescuing, for example our persecuted brothers and sisters. We can support them as a sign of gratitude for the freedoms God has given us.

I am currently reading an astonishing book. It is called ‘What Is A Girl Worth?’ It is written by Rachael Denhollander, an American woman who as a teenage gymnast was sexually abused by Larry Nassar, the team doctor to the USA Gymnastics squad. Later, Denhollander became a lawyer and those gifts and her faith in Christ led her into a position where she spearheaded the legal efforts to get Larry Nassar jailed.

Rachael Denhollander believes in a God who rescues, and she didn’t want vengeance for what happened to her but rather for other girls to be protected and rescued. Nassar is serving life in prison, and US Gymnastics has had to reform its practices.

I believe Rachel Denhollander did a deeply Christian thing in offering the pain of her own testimony alongside her legal skills, because she gave those things in response to her belief in a God who rescues.

We give in response to God as Creator and Rescuer. Number 3: we give in response to God as Saviour.

Christians have taken the motif of Israel being set free from Egypt and used it as an image of God setting us free, not from what others have done to us, but from our own sin. Through Jesus Christ and his death and resurrection, we are the recipients of the most generous gift of love ever: salvation.

It is therefore also in the harvest spirit of giving for us to dwell on all that God has done for us in Christ and then ponder our giving. What can I give of my money? My time? My possessions? My talents, skills, and interests? Our harvest giving is not limited to what we grow in the back garden or the allotment, or what we grab out of the pantry. Harvest for the Christian makes us look at all of God’s blessings and all of the good things we possess, to ask, what can I offer in response to all that he has done for me?

So that wraps up our first point. To summarise: our giving is a response to God’s giving to us as Creator, Rescuer, and Saviour.

Secondly, we give our best to the Lord.

I don’t know what the Sunday morning of harvest festival is typically like in your home, but when I was growing up there was often a panicked realisation not long before going out: “Oh no, it’s harvest festival! What are we going to take?” This would be followed by Mum scrambling through the kitchen cupboards to give my sister and me such things as tins of baked beans or anything else we could spare to bring to the front of the sanctuary during the first hymn.

I have to tell you that baked beans were a particular sacrifice for me. I was extremely fussy about vegetables as a child, but fortunately Mum had apparently had a craving for baked beans while she was pregnant with me, and she must have passed the influence down the umbilical cord to me.

But in all seriousness, I don’t suppose that sense of ‘What have we got to spare?’ is all that unfamiliar on harvest morning. However, it wasn’t what God commanded Israel in Deuteronomy 26. What the worshipper says to the priest marks a very different attitude:

9 He brought us to this place and gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey; 10 and now I bring the firstfruits of the soil that you, Lord, have given me.’ Place the basket before the Lord your God and bow down before him.

First-fruits. The first and the best is what Israel brings in gratitude for all God has done for her.

I think I can only remember two ways that ‘giving our best’ was codified into church life as a youngster. One was the idea of wearing your smartest clothes – your ‘Sunday best’ for church. The other was a certain assumption what constituted the ‘best’ music for use in worship.

It is of course much wider than that, and the cultural assumptions behind them. Giving our best takes me back to what I said earlier about the range of things we offer to God in response to his giving to us. I talked about money, time, possessions, talents, skills, and interests. In what way can we cultivate giving the best of these to our Lord?

It needs to be more than a ‘spare change and leftovers’ attitude. Our giving is not to be simply what’s left over afterwards: if he’s lucky, God will get something from us. Why does God sometimes only get the fag end of our lives? That cannot be right. It is not the spirit of the first-fruits.

Look at the way our military are rolling out and executing these precise and brilliantly planned exercises in our nation’s life at present to honour our late Sovereign Lady and our new King. That is a whole culture dedicated to offering the first and the best of all their resources in service of the monarchy.

Now consider that we are offering ourselves to the King of Kings and Lord of Lords. And we are doing that every day and every week, not just at one-off spectacular events. What is a fitting way for me to offer my best to my Lord after all he has given to me?

Cast your minds back just one week to our Covenant Service where we dwelt on how ‘Christ has many services to be done’, and how sometimes we can please him and please ourselves, but on other occasions we can only please him by denying ourselves.

So what am I delighted to offer him? Think for a moment. There must be something in your life that gives you great pleasure and nothing would thrill you more than to find a way to dedicate it to Jesus.

But also, where is he calling us to make a sacrifice to him? Is there something he calls you to do in which you don’t feel comfortable? I’ve told you before how being a minister doesn’t always sit easily with me. But I continue to serve Jesus this way, given how much he has given to me.

What about you? How can each of us give our first and our best in response to all that Christ has given to us?

Let’s remember: it isn’t simply ‘harvest festival’: it’s harvest thanksgiving.’

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Remaking The Church, Luke 15:1-10 (Ordinary 24 Year C 2022)

Luke 15:1-10

At the recent Lambeth Conference of Anglican bishops from around the world, Stephen Cottrell, the Archbishop of York, said,

McDonald’s makes hamburgers
Cadbury’s makes chocolate
Starbuck’s makes coffee
The Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela make music
Heineken makes beer
Toyota makes cars
Rolex makes watches
The church of Jesus Christ makes disciples. That is our core business.[1]

It seems important to go back to this at a Covenant Service where we renew our commitment to Jesus in the light of his commitment to us. He calls us to make disciples.

But how?

Later in the same address Cottrell describes a conversation he had once on Paddington train station while waiting for a connection to Cardiff. A woman asked him why he became a priest. I won’t quote his whole answer, but essentially he said that it was a combination of God calling him and his own desire to see change for the better in the world.

The woman then said to him

that when she met people of faith, she found they fitted into two categories. It either seems like their faith is like their hobby – either they go to church on Sunday but it doesn’t change their life on Monday, or “they embraced their faith so tightly, it frightens everyone else away.”  I have seen these extremes, and she said to me “is there another way?”

The woman identified two wrong responses to finding Christian faith. What is wrong with them?

The hobbyist who comes on a Sunday but doesn’t let it affect her way of life is someone who has not understood the Gospel. Or she may have understood the Gospel, but has chosen to look the other way.

As we have been seeing in Jesus’ teaching in recent weeks, that just isn’t a valid response to his coming. Yes, God loves us before we ever love him, but just because he meets us as we are doesn’t mean he wants us to stay as we are.

An essential element of Christian faith is embracing God’s agenda of transformation for us. That’s what makes sense of renewing promises at a covenant service. We recognise once more the enormity of what God has done for us in Christ and we respond.

Call it an argument from silence if you will, but in the two parables we read the thought of there being no action in response to the missing sheep or the missing coin is just not countenanced. Finding the love of Jesus puts us on his team. We are co-opted into his mission.

So a good thing to reflect on for all of us this morning is this question: what part am I playing in the mission of God as a response to God’s love for me?

Let me put it bluntly. How are we ever going to do more than just survive as a church unless more people step up to the plate? Right now we have a small group of people doing most of the work in this church. I can tell you, some of them get very tired! I lose count of how many hats some of them are wearing.

Friends, we need to lift burdens if we are to do more than just limp along as a church until we finally close.

But, you say, like so many people here I’ve got older. I don’t have the strength to do something vigorous.

That’s not a problem. Because you can begin with something simple that you can do. Even going on the tea and coffee rota would help. You can do that, can’t you? Don’t you make hot drinks for yourself at home? Then you can do it for your friends at church. And by doing so you can free up some of the people who are working to the bone in this church.

Similarly, you read for pleasure at home, or you may read for grandchildren. In that case, you can go on the rota of Bible readers for Sunday services. We have such a small rota of willing readers, but you could expand it. You do it at home, you can do it here.

And these are just simple jobs in the church. I’m not even asking you to be an evangelist at this point! But know this one thing. A Christian cannot be a hobbyist. We are on duty for the King.

The other group the woman who talked to Archbishop Cottrell identified were those who “embraced their faith so tightly, it frightens everyone else away.” Now these people do appear in our reading! They are there in verse 2:

 2 But the Pharisees and the teachers of the law muttered, ‘This man welcomes sinners, and eats with them.’

For shorthand, I’m going to call this second group of people of faith the Pharisees.

There’s a big question here that we don’t always see: why on earth would the Pharisees condemn Jesus’ missionary outreach activity? They were a missionary group themselves. In Matthew 23:15 Jesus notes this:

Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You travel over land and sea to win a single convert, and when you have succeeded, you make them twice as much a child of hell as you are.

As I’ve said before, the Pharisee movement had been founded a long time before as a way of renewing the Jewish faith and bringing it back to basics. They were also missionary.

But they didn’t like Jesus’ methods. They had so longed for the renewal of Jewish faith but hadn’t seen it come to fruition. I think they had become frustrated, and with that cynical.

Not only that, because they had lofty aims they then became superior and self-righteous as they blamed others for the failure of their hopes.

And in that superiority, they refused to mix with those who failed to live up to their standards. Why would Jesus do differently from them? And perhaps embarrassingly, how come he attracts people and they don’t?

This toxic combination led to their condemnation of Jesus.

I want us to be passionate Christians, not hobbyists. Christianity is not a leisure activity, it’s a way of life. But there is danger when our passion gets misdirected when disappointment sets in. Then we start hurling insults from our ivory towers and we begin plotting against those who do things differently from us.

No wonder some Christians and some churches take on toxic atmospheres. No wonder some of those Christians and some of those churches end up committing spiritual abuse.

So if my plea to the hobbyists is to embrace the mission of God, my plea to the Pharisees is to keep your hearts tender and full of grace before a merciful God. If you recognise Pharisee tendencies in yourself, please remember that you too are a sinner in need of God’s grace. You too are a beggar seeking bread.

And let that open you up to the loving heart of God that sends us on  his mission.

But finally we come to Jesus, and his attitude is represented by the actions of the owner of the sheep in the first parable and the woman in the second.

For someone to own a hundred sheep in Jesus’ day meant they were very wealthy. The typical family owned ten to fifteen. Perhaps Jesus made the number so large in his story as to make his point all the more strikingly to his listeners.

And when you hear of the woman’s ten coins it is a mistake to think of ordinary loose change. Either these were her savings or they were the dowry money given to her by her husband when they married, which some women wore around their neck.[2] The lost coin is valuable!

The parable of the lost sheep shows how Jesus will not simply be the chaplain to those who remain safely at home. He cares for the lost.

The parable of the coin takes this a little further and shows us just how valuable to him those lost from his love and the family of God are.

All this means that if we are to renew our commitment to working out the teaching of Jesus, then we need to rethink the priorities of the church.

If you ask many Christians what the main purpose of the church is, they will answer, ‘worship.’ I remember that coming out at the top of a survey in my home church, for example.

But is that right? Might we learn from the Westminster Catechism, the document so beloved of Presbyterian Christians? It said that ‘the chief end of man’ (please excuse the exclusive language of a bygone day) was ‘to glorify God and enjoy him for ever.’

I’ll leave aside ‘enjoying God’ for another time. But ‘glorifying God’ is more than Sunday worship. Certainly we glorify God in worship, but we also glorify him when we spread his name in the world and witness to it in our words and deeds. We glorify God when we share Jesus’ heart for those who are lost from him, as we see in these parables.

What if God’s vision for our church were a reordering of our life so that we glorified him every day and everywhere? What if we reordered our church around the glorification of God rather than the gathered worship of God?  

To do that, we need to put away our ‘hobby’ approach to religion and repent in humility of our ‘Pharisee’ tendencies.

Then we need to embrace the heart of love Jesus has for the world.

So what about it? Who fancies remaking the church?

[1] https://www.premierchristianity.com/bishops-should-always-have-the-name-of-jesus-on-their-lips-archbishop-of-yorks-message-to-church-leaders/13569.article

[2] On both the number of sheep and the nature of the coins, see https://www.psephizo.com/biblical-studies/the-short-parables-of-the-lost-in-luke-15/

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From Crowd Member To Disciple, Luke 14:25-35 (Ordinary 23 Year C)

Luke 14:25-35

Last week on the video and then in person at Knaphill (in front of my new Superintendent Minister) I said that a statement on the Methodist website claiming to sum up the good news was a half-truth at best. The words were,

God loves you unconditionally, no strings attached. That’s the good news.

I said that wasn’t the good news according to Jesus, who tended to say things such as ‘Repent and believe the good news’. Yes, it’s true that God takes the first step in loving us before we ever deserve it, but if it is to mean anything we need to respond. And that can be costly.

We see something similar in today’s reading. Here there is a crowd travelling with Jesus but he says that if you want to become a disciple, there is a price to pay.

And that’s a clue. The issue is, am I in the crowd or am I a disciple? To be in the crowd you just have to hear the attractive message that God loved us before we ever loved him and be intrigued. But if you want to be a disciple, then you have some big decisions to make in response to that love.

The story is told of a child who asked, “Mummy, do all fairy stories end with the words ‘And they all lived happily ever after’?”

Mum replied, “No, some end with the words, ‘When I became a Christian all my problems disappeared.’”

What do we need to weigh up if we are to be a disciple, rather than a crowd member? Three things:

Firstly, the Cross.

26 ‘If anyone comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters – yes, even their own life – such a person cannot be my disciple. 27 And whoever does not carry their cross and follow me cannot be my disciple.

Carrying the cross is paralleled with hating your own life. Because ‘carrying our cross’ doesn’t mean enduring whatever pain comes our way through life, it means being on the way to die. In Jesus’ time, someone carrying their cross was on their way to execution. Their life had effectively ended.

I think it was Winston Churchill who said there was a difference between something that was worth living for and something that was worth dying for. And a politician of a very different hue from Churchill, namely Tony Benn, took this further when he said that he preferred those who had a belief worth dying for to those who had a belief they thought was worth killing for.

And I wish I didn’t have to say this, but that is what Jesus says. Being his disciple involves being willing to die for our faith.

Of course, we frequently remark on how grateful we are that we don’t have to face that choice in our society, and we certainly should be grateful. For in one sense we are a minority, an abnormality. Historically and in the present day there are so many societies where faith in Jesus and in his teaching is seen as a threat that millions of our brothers and sisters live with this reality on a daily basis.

Each week I receive an email from Christian Solidarity Worldwide in which they urge Christians to pray and act for those suffering for their faith around the globe. In the last week we have been praying for Christians in Pakistan who are falsely accused of blasphemy against the Islamic prophet Muhammad, a crime that carries the death penalty. People with petty disputes against someone try to invoke this law.

And we have also been praying for those who have been forcibly ‘disappeared’ by government forces or terrorists around the world. These have included Malaysia, Peru, Nigeria, China, and other places. Some of these people have been missing for years.

Is our faith worth dying for?

Secondly, counting the Cost.

Here is a quotation from the tourist guide to St John’s College, Cambridge, referring to its magnificent chapel:

The 19th century chapel was designed by Sir George Gilbert Scott, apart from the tower which was an afterthought made possible by a former member of St John’s called Henry Hoare, who unfortunately died before he could pay for it all!

Similarly, Jesus talks about working out whether you can afford to pay for a tower before you build it, or a king calculating whether he can afford to wage war against another king. He concludes,

33 In the same way, those of you who do not give up everything you have cannot be my disciples.

There is going to be a cost if we decide to follow Jesus. Although John Wesley found that some of his converts became better off because they gave up spending money on worthless and unhealthy things, nevertheless the way of Jesus has a cost.

It will call us to be more generous with people in need.

It will sometimes have a negative effect on our popularity, because people will mock Jesus and anyone who follows him.

It may have a cost in the world of work or even a social organisation where following Jesus may involve taking an ethical stand. We might have promotion blocked. We might not be able to hold office.

It may have a cost when family members or friends think we are crazy and dissociate themselves from us.

So, Jesus says, if you’re going to move from the crowd to the disciples you’d better count the cost.

Right now, many of us are counting the cost quite literally as we face a level of inflation that we haven’t seen for decades and wonder what the coming winter has in store for us. We are trimming the fat from our budgets, and cutting our energy use as much as we can. These are sensible things to do.

And if we do that in the economic world, should we not also do it in the life of the Spirit? What will we need to give up in order to follow Jesus?

Thirdly and finally, the Commitment.

What Jesus says at the end about salt losing its saltiness (verses 34-35) is a matter of commitment, not chemistry. As one scholar puts it:

The final saying about saltiness makes less sense to us than to Jesus and his audience, since we cannot quite imagine salt becoming unsalty. But salt from the Dead Sea was in fact a mixture of all sorts of things, salt itself only being one ingredient. If the salt crystals themselves were dissolved away, then the remaining residue would be useless, fit for nothing.[1]

So what is Jesus saying to us when he warns us not to let the salt lose its saltiness? He’s saying, don’t let your faith in Jesus get dissolved in the wider culture. It’s a call to retain a commitment to our distinctiveness as Christians.

As faith in Jesus began to spread across the Roman Empire, there were certainly situations where the temptation before the disciples was to dissolve their commitment in order to have an easier or a quieter life. One example was that under Roman law, Judaism had some special privileges which were not extended to the followers of Jesus. If they wanted an easier life, they could roll back all their emphasis on Jesus and just say they were good Jews. That’s what the Letter to the Hebrews in the New Testament is all about, and it’s why the writer reminds them of the supremacy of Jesus.

Or another temptation was when good Roman citizens, whatever their religion, were enjoined to burn a pinch of incense to the emperor and say the words, ‘Caesar is Lord.’ Surely just saying that once every now and again would be harmless? But it was a denial of who Jesus was, so to do it would be to dissolve their Christian faith. They had to resist, whatever the cost.

Today we face our own temptations to dissolve our commitment to Jesus so that we fit in with society. It can come in various forms, urging us to change our attitudes to money and possessions, to career and ambitions, to sex and relationships.

And sometimes people in the church tell us that the best way to reach people today for Christ is to adapt our faith to today’s standards. But given what Jesus says here about the risk of salt losing its saltiness, we have to say that such a strategy is spiritual suicide. Jesus calls us to a distinctive commitment.

Conclusion

You know, I wrote this sermon with a heavy heart. Not another one where I’m talking all about the cost and the sacrifice of following Jesus? Surely there is some good news somewhere rather than having to proclaim something that can sound so austere?

But the reality is our own culture is moving further and further away from Christianity as its basis. We do need to be aware of dangers that may soon stalk us.

But beyond all that is that this call to costly commitment is only in the light of the costly commitment Jesus gave to us. It does us no harm to remember the Gospel message that Jesus gave up the glory of heaven for an obscure life and death on the Cross.

May the Holy Spirit grant us courage when the only response of gratitude we can show is one that involves us paying a high price.

[1] https://www.psephizo.com/biblical-studies/the-costly-grace-of-following-jesus-in-luke-14/

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Kingdom Culture, Luke 14:1-14 (Ordinary 22 Year C, 2022)

Luke 14:1-14

Meals out are a bit of a theme in our family at present. We had a large gathering of relatives in a pub recently to mark my wife’s big birthday. We are about to have another family meal before my sister and brother-in-law move away from this area.

Then a week or so ago, Debbie and I went for a Chinese before seeing a film at the cinema. Who was on the table behind us? Eamonn Holmes. It appeared we had happened upon one of his regular haunts.

We know that in the Gospels lots of important things happen around a meal table with Jesus. He even turns one of them into the central way that we remember his death for us.

And a meal table is a place where we see lots of protocols and cultural habits. In our case, they might range from not putting your elbows on the table to waiting for everyone to be served before beginning to eat.

There were certainly protocols and cultural values aplenty at the home of the Pharisee where Jesus dined in today’s reading. Yet what this story shows us is that the culture of God’s kingdom is often the reverse of the diners Jesus was with.

So today we’re going to examine what we see here about the culture of God’s kingdom and ask whether there are ways in which we need to reverse our values, too. Each of the three episodes in today’s story has something to tell us.

Firstly, in God’s kingdom, rules are interpreted by love.

I’m thinking of the first six verses of the reading here, where we learn that the meal is happening on a Sabbath, and people watch to see whether Jesus heals a sick man (just as he has done on a Sabbath in a synagogue). Sure enough, he does.

Jesus does not dispense with the rules. He honours them. But he will not apply them woodenly. He lives by the Law of God, knowing its intention for good. As he explains elsewhere, the Sabbath was made for the benefit of human beings, not vice-versa.

So here he makes it clear that of course you can and you should do good on the Sabbath. Any use of the Sabbath to prevent that would go against the spirit of God’s intentions about his Law.

If on the other hand all you do with the rules and laws is apply them literally and woodenly without any love, who benefits? The people who are in power.

And who doesn’t benefit when laws are interpreted woodenly and unlovingly? Those in need.

Jesus won’t have this. He has come to bring good news to the poor. God’s Laws must be interpreted in the spirit of love so that those in need receive good news. God never provided his Laws just to buttress the position of the wealthy and the powerful.

It’s something we need to bear in mind in the church. We have our own set of rules by which the church is governed. They contain a lot of wisdom. They should not be dismissed. But at the same time if all we do is enforce them rigidly and harshly, what good does that do? Who does that help? Only the rule-makers.

It isn’t being faithful to Jesus to ditch the rules – and especially not God’s Laws – but it is the way of Jesus to interpret them with love and compassion for those in need.

Secondly, in God’s kingdom, status is replaced by humility.

We come now to verses 7 to 11, where Jesus tells dinner guests not to take for themselves the seat of honour, in case their host demotes them, but rather to take the lowest seat, from which they may be called up higher.

In Jesus’ society, honour and status were everything. They determined your work, your income, your friendship circles, and who you could marry. This was given visual demonstration at meals. Therefore, in order to get on in society, people strove for higher status and greater honour. But

Jesus’ teaching here not only undercuts the importance of status; it also sees status and standing as something that is given, not something that is gained—a gift from another (specifically God), not something accrued by one’s own effort.[1]

People still lust after honour and status today. But why? It is selfish and self-centred. Not only that, it doesn’t necessarily last. A loss of income or the onset of a serious disease can take it away quickly. Why settle for something temporary and selfish when an alternative is on offer that is eternal?

But to have eternal honour and status in the kingdom of God requires a different approach. It requires being like Jesus, who had more status and honour than any other human being, but who laid it aside to be born into poverty and obscurity, and who laid down his life for the salvation of the world.

The best honour and status, then, is out of our hands. We humble ourselves and leave things in the hands of God. But we do so knowing he is full of mercy and grace. He does not habitually raise up the rich, the powerful, and the celebrities, he exalts the humble.

Some people will not like the idea that their status is out of their hands. They will not like such powerlessness. But our aim as Christians is not to exalt ourselves, it is to exalt Jesus Christ in our daily lives. If we have done that, then that will satisfy us.

Too many people in the church still get obsessed with rank and status. It’s time we put all that to bed. As Wesley’s hymn ‘Captain of Israel’s host, and guide’ puts it, ‘Our end, the glory of the Lord.’ Let that be our ambition  and let us be content to leave any elevation to him, putting aside our toxic pride and jealousy.

Thirdly, in God’s kingdom, giving is all about grace.

We come to the third and final section of the reading in verses 12 to 14, where Jesus tells meal hosts not to invite people to meals in order to get a return invitation, but rather to invite them who have no chance of being able to reciprocate. We are not to give in order to be repaid in this life, says Jesus.

This was revolutionary teaching. In the ancient world, you gave a gift to somebody because you considered them worthy of it. You didn’t give many gifts, but those you did tended to be lavish.

How was someone deemed worthy of a gift? It might be to do with their ethnic background, their social status, their sex, their moral qualities, their success in life, or their beauty. For ‘gift’ in the ancient world you might want to think something more akin to a ‘prize’ in our society.[2]

Now Jesus comes along and says that God’s approach to giving is utterly unlike this. It has nothing to do with the person deserving it, nor is it decided by the ability of the recipient to give back in return. Giving, according to Jesus, is an act of grace. God gives to people who neither deserve it nor can repay him. God invites people to his table on the same basis: the invitation goes out even though people do not deserve to be there, and even though there is no prospect of them reimbursing him.

That is why we are in the family of faith. None of us deserved to receive the invitation. None of us can pay God back for all he has done for us in Jesus Christ. But God in his grace said to each one of us, ‘Come to my feast.’

We cannot give back to God in equal measure of his gift to us. But we can show our gratitude, and we can pay it forward. For just as we have received the grace of God’s gift, so we can in grace give to others without expecting recompense, and we can invite those who could not possibly invite us.

After all, how else will the world know about the transforming grace of God in Christ unless we not only speak about it, we demonstrate it?

I have always loved a story that the American preacher and sociologist Tony Campolo used to tell. He would recount how when he was driving on a toll road, he would come up to the toll booth where he needed to pay and give the attendant twice as much money as he needed to.

‘That’s for me, and that’s for my friend in the car behind,’ he would say.

Of course, he didn’t know the person in the car behind at all, and he would drive off slowly watching in his rear view mirror with amusement as the toll booth attendant tried to explain to the next motorist that they didn’t need to pay.

So – our reading leaves us with three challenges this week. They are simple to state:

Firstly, how can I keep the Law of God lovingly this week?

Secondly, where do I need to let go of my desire for status and humbly leave my life in God’s hands?

And thirdly, how can I show the grace of God this week by giving to someone who cannot pay me back?

[1] Ian Paul, https://www.psephizo.com/biblical-studies/jesus-the-kingdom-and-the-politics-of-the-table-in-luke-14/

[2] Op. cit., quoting John Barclay, https://www.psephizo.com/reviews/the-subversive-power-of-grace/

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Jesus In Love Divides Us, Luke 12:49-56 (Ordinary 20 Year C 2022)

Luke 12:49-56

On the home page of the British Methodist Church you can currently find these words displayed prominently:

God loves you unconditionally, no strings attached. That’s the good news.

And I’d like to ask the author of those words whether they had read today’s Gospel passage. Because the best we can say for such words is, they are a half-truth.

With a certain sense of alarm at certain trends in our church and elsewhere, I have mischievously entitled today’s sermon ‘Jesus In Love Divides Us.’ And yes, that is a play on the report about sexuality that was called ‘God In Love Unites Us’ – a title that portrayed an utterly forlorn hope.

Fire on earth. Not peace but division, says Jesus here.

And perhaps the stark things Jesus says in our passage today are all the more shocking when you go back to the early chapters of Luke’s Gospel. When he is born in Bethlehem, the angels proclaim peace. When Jesus preaches at Nazareth, he says he has good news for the poor.

Yet here is Jesus not so much preaching good news as bad news! What do we make of it?

Firstly, Jesus is preparing his disciples for rejection.

Don’t misunderstand me, Jesus is good news. In his own Person he embodies God’s Kingdom. He brings the forgiveness of sins. He gives value to people who are treated as worthless by society. He brings ultimate purpose to life. He conquers death. Even Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak haven’t promised those things!

But – not everyone accepts that message, and not everyone likes it. We know the reaction of many leaders in society to Jesus when he was on earth. Was he popular with them? Largely, no. He was a threat to them. They plotted against him. They colluded to have him put on a Cross.

And Jesus warned his followers that similar things could and would happen to them. In this passage his ‘baptism’ may well be his baptism of suffering at the Cross. The division of families is because some will follow Jesus and others will not. Sometimes in church circles we make the family into an idol, but Jesus says following him is more important. It is not that we deliberately break up families as some religious cults do, but it is to say that deciding about Jesus is an unavoidably divisive thing, and pain may come our way.

Now when we ask why people are rejecting Jesus, we sometimes get into the question of what is wrong with the church. And to some extent we should think about that. There can be things about us that give people a bad impression of Jesus, and we need to address them. I have said much about this in the past.

But we must also see that people reject Jesus because his ways are a challenge to their self-centred living. I was reading a discussion about a magazine article where twelve church leaders had been asked how we respond to continued church decline. Basically, all of them in their different ways berated the church for what was wrong with it.

But one person said this:

I don’t think there is a problem with the church. The issue is with a self-righteous, materialistic society that has turned its back on God and is largely only interested in spirituality in a flesh-centred, personal-development sort of way. What we need to do is stay faithful to Christ through this difficult and challenging time.

I wouldn’t say there’s no problem with the church, but I would say let’s be realistic about how much rejection of Christianity there is in our culture. People sometimes disguise it with high-handed moral words, but in a lot of cases, the reason people say no to Jesus is because they don’t want to give up control of their lives to him. They are much happier in a me-centred world, but as we know, Jesus won’t allow that.

Although we see heart-warming stories of kindness and love in our society too, we are generally surrounded by people whose major life decisions are about themselves and their personal happiness, rather than the serving and self-giving love of Jesus and his kingdom. So we should not be surprised when our Jesus message and our faith is rejected.

So if you have done all you can to be faithful but are still not seeing things turn for the better, then understand that at times in history the church goes through phases like this. It’s a tough thing to say and it’s far from an excuse to be casual. Because what we need to do is ask ourselves, are we being faithful to Jesus and his teaching? If we are, then we are doing the right thing, and we leave the consequences to God.

Secondly, Jesus is preaching a bigger Gospel.

Let’s go back to that slogan on the Methodist website:

God loves you unconditionally, no strings attached. That’s the good news.

I said that at best it was a half-truth. What’s right with it and what’s wrong with it?

What’s right with it is that God’s love is offered to us without us deserving it, and before we ever made any attempt to love God ourselves. ‘While we were still sinners, Christ died for us,’ said Paul in Romans 5. God makes the first move in salvation. It all comes from him. Salvation is not of our making. It’s not something we deserve or earn.

But what’s wrong with the statement? Well, think about how Jesus himself proclaimed what the Gospel writers call the ‘good news’. His good news message was ‘Repent, for the kingdom of God is at hand.’ There is good news that doesn’t emanate from us or rely on us. The good news in first century terms is that God is on the throne, not Caesar. In our terms it is that God is on the throne, not Boris Johnson, Vladimir Putin, Joe Biden, or anyone else you care to name.

But because the only wise and compassionate God is on the throne of the universe, we need to make a response. Because God reigns over all, we need to respond by aligning our lives with his will. That’s why Jesus said to the first disciples, ‘Follow me.’ Are you going to go my way, asks Jesus? We have a choice to make.

In our tradition, John Wesley started a movement that stressed how the Gospel was available to all people, and he welcomed enquirers. But he distinguished between those who were exploring the faith and those who were committed to Christ.

So when we sing hymns like ‘Let Us Build A House’ where each verse ends with a rousing line, ‘All are welcome, all are welcome, all are welcome in this place,’ we must remember that is true for people exploring the faith. But when it comes to responding to the welcoming love of God, there is a commitment to be made that involves offering the whole of our lives. Anything less than that misrepresents the message of Jesus.

In all our talk of being inclusive, we must never lose sight of this challenge. It’s the old adage that I’ve often quoted before: God love us just as we are, but he loves us too much to leave us as we are.

Thirdly and finally, Jesus is warning about the implications of the Gospel.

What is all that talk about interpreting the signs of the times? Why does Jesus say to the crowds they are good at weather forecasts but not at understanding the times in which they live?

Well, it’s not the first time he’s accused the crowds of just wanting a sign. Now, he says, there is a sign before you but you don’t understand it. Yet you need to.

The sign they can’t see or interpret is that of the divisions that Jesus brings. He is the real deal. He is all that he claimed to be. He is all that the religious leaders feared he was, and for which they hated him. It’s no good thinking he’s just another teacher. Nor is it enough to think he is a prophet.

In other words, as Hughie Green used to say all those years ago, it’s make your mind up time. How we react to Jesus is critical. We cannot ignore him. We cannot patronise him by saying what a nice chap he was. We cannot say he was a great teacher – and then not follow his teaching. The sign that Jesus in love divides us points us to the fact that we must respond one way or the other to Jesus.

How do we respond positively to him? By turning from our selfish ways – and that’s a lifelong task – and following him. That following him will involve so much more than an hour on Sunday. It will mean learning from him as his apprentices and putting what we learn into practice. It will mean self-denial rather than the self-fulfilment that the world (and some of the church!) preaches.

It takes all that we are and all that we have. Allying ourselves with Jesus is not a hobby or a consumer decision. It is life and death, nothing less.

And among those who do not share our willingness to say yes to Jesus will be those who will reject us, as we noted in the first point. We should not be surprised. Our enthusiasm to be inclusive must always be tempered by this.

So – back to where we began.

God loves you unconditionally, no strings attached. That’s the good news.

Really? These words can never be a full statement of the good news. They might be the beginning, but we must never forget the challenge that Jesus brings and the cost it entails as we are divided into those who will follow him and those who will not.

And while we count the cost of discipleship, perhaps someone will have a word with the Methodist media team.

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Spiritual Fitness, Luke 12:32-40 (Ordinary 19 Year C)

Luke 12:32-40

Last Sunday afternoon, along with a massive chunk of the population, Debbie, Mark, and I sat in front of the TV to cheer on the England Lionesses in their Euro 22 final against our old friends from Germany. When the match went to extra time at 1-1, I thought the Germans were the more likely winners. I am glad I was wrong!

During the week we also enjoyed the exploits of the Scottish runner Eilish McColgan who followed in her mother Liz’s footsteps by becoming Commonwealth 10,000 metres champion – and breaking her mother’s record.

These tremendous athletes will all have given close attention to their fitness in order to scale the heights of their respective sports. Without doing so, they would not have ended up with medals being hung around their necks and trophies being lifted triumphantly before the fans.

You know where I’m going with this. Sometimes the New Testament uses the analogy of athletes in training to challenge us about our spiritual lives. Paul tells the Corinthians that running to win the crown of life requires discipline (1 Corinthians 9:24-27). Near the end of his life he says, ‘I have run the race’ (2 Timothy 4:7).

And while Jesus doesn’t explicitly use that language in today’s reading, there is something similar going on in what he teaches here. These verses may not seem terribly connected, but what holds them together is a theme of ‘spiritual fitness’. I am going to draw out two areas of spiritual fitness that I believe Jesus highlights here.

Firstly, the heart.

A young man I once knew got married in his late twenties. A year later, he was dead, his beautiful bride left as a widow. The inquest showed that he had an undiagnosed heart condition, and this killed him. Nobody had any idea that he had any heart troubles. Apparently, there are many cases like this every year.

We need to pay attention to the states of our hearts. Some of us pay little attention to our hearts and do not realise that they are diseased. Something could go wrong for us, too. Think of the stories you have heard over the years about Christians who seemed strong in their faith, but then – seemingly out of the blue – either they lost their faith or alternatively they were caught in a serious sin. When we don’t pay attention to our hearts, disasters like this can happen.

Jesus says,

33 Sell your possessions and give to the poor. Provide purses for yourselves that will not wear out, a treasure in heaven that will never fail, where no thief comes near and no moth destroys. 34 For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

We read this off the back of last week’s reading where we thought about biblical attitudes to money and possessions. One of the things I talked about last week was including the poor in our giving. Here Jesus specifically calls for that response from us.

This is not necessarily a call for all of us to sell all our possessions, for otherwise how would Jesus’ ministry have been funded by the wealthy women that Luke mentions in chapter 8?

But it is an issue of our heart. ‘For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.’

In other words, where do our most fundamental desires lie? When we have time to ourselves and are  not occupied with anything from work to looking after the grandchildren, what things does our heart alight upon? If we had limitless money and all our bills were taken care of, how would we spend that cash? If there were no obstacles, what would be our dream lifestyle?

Did anything come to mind as I asked those questions? Were we thinking of that dream cruise? Were we going to spend our money on yet more fancy toys? Were we going to fund the ultimate home improvement?

Or did Jesus and advancing his kingdom come into any of our minds?

What we set our hearts on is what we treasure, says Jesus.

Are the deepest desires of our hearts skewed off course? Do we need some spiritual heart surgery so that our number one passion is our love for Jesus and our service of his kingdom?

Perhaps when we were young Christians these were the things that commanded our energies. But over the years, our arteries have become clogged with the cares of this life and the attractions of Mammon.

How many of us need heart surgery? We may be doing a lot of good, right, and competent things in our lives, but like the church at Ephesus which received a letter in the book of Revelation, is it possible that we have lost our first love?

If our arteries have become clogged up, I offer these words from a song entitled ‘Passion For Jesus’ by an Irish singer named Brian Houston. May they become our prayer:

I’m calling out to You
There must be something more,
Some deeper place to find,
Some secret place to hide
Where I have not gone before.
Where my soul is satisfied,
And my sin is put to death,
And I can hear Your voice,
Your purpose is my choice,
As natural as a breath.
The love I knew before,
When You first touched my life,
I need You to restore,
I want You to revive.
Oh, place in my heart a passion for Jesus,
A hunger that seizes my passion for You.
My one desire, my greatest possession,
My only confession, my passion for You.[1]

Secondly, posture.

Right now, we are waiting as a family for our son’s A-Level results, but as many of you know, I never sat my A-Levels. About a month before the exams, I had a sudden onset of severe neck pain. The cause was never diagnosed at the time by the consultant rheumatologist, but years later when my wife was pregnant with our first child, our daughter, I was suffering from migraines and went to the GP about them.

“I’m pretty sure your migraines are caused by your neck problem,” said the GP, and he advised me to book an appointment with an osteopath attached to the practice. After a number of treatments with him, he offered a diagnosis of my neck problem.

Posture. And it had two causes. One was that as a typical blue—eyed boy I am highly sensitive to bright light. As a result, I had developed a slightly stooped, round-shouldered posture as I tried to shield my eyes. This has not had a good effect on my neck.

The second was due to my left-handedness. My secondary school made all the pupils use fountain pens, and these are difficult for left-handers, since we push the pen from left to right across the paper and have to avoid putting our writing hand in the ink that is still drying. I was not taught (as I learned too late in later years) that the answer is to turn your paper forty-five degrees, so I developed what is called the ‘hook’ writing style.

Moreover, at Sixth Form we had chairs with desks hinged to them. You could rest your writing arm on them. Well – you could if you were right-handed. They didn’t have any for left-handers. This exacerbated the bad posture of the hook writing style.

Putting all this together led to the bad posture that caused the pain which kept me from my A-Levels.

Jesus calls for us to adopt a certain (good!) posture as Christian disciples.

Be dressed ready for service and keep your lamps burning,

he says in verse 35.

Have the posture of a servant. This is how to be ready for when he will appear again in glory.

Jehovah’s Witnesses live in fear that if they are not actively doing God’s work at the very moment of the Second Coming they will not receive their eternal reward. But what Jesus says is more subtle than that. ‘Be dressed ready for action.’ It’s not about filling every second with frantic activity, but it is about having the right attitude, the right stance, the posture if you will.

Go back to the Commonwealth Games, and go to the athletics track or the swimming pool. See the sprinters on their blocks awaiting the starting gun or the swimmers on their pedestals awaiting the hooter that starts the race. These athletes are adopting the right posture for their race and are ready for action.

Jesus is calling us to be on our starting blocks, ready for the opportunity to serve.

After all, he says, when the Master returns, he will serve. To serve is to be like the Master. It is to be like Jesus washing the feet of his disciples, or ready to heal those in need who come across his path. Our posture is one of service because that is the posture of Jesus.

This raises a question about how we live our lives each day. Are we just going about our daily business, much like anybody else on Planet Earth, or do we begin each day on the starting blocks, ready to hear the starting gun that calls us to service?

Is it our daily prayer that we will take the opportunities to serve people in the name of Jesus when he brings such people across our path? Do we desire to have the same posture as Jesus?

If we do, then we don’t need to worry about the return of Jesus catching us by surprise and worrying us. We will be ready. As the late David Watson put it,

For those who are ready, he will not come as a thief in the night but as a friend in the day.[2]

So – what is our spiritual health like? There are many other areas to consider as well as what I have spoken about today. Is our heart healthy? Do we have a passion for God’s kingdom and a heart for the poor?

And is our posture healthy? Are we ready and willing to serve as Jesus did?

If there were a spiritual equivalent of a medical, what would it say about us?

[1] Brian Houston, ‘Passion For Jesus’ from the album Big Smile Copyright © 2000 Kingsway’s Thankyou Music

[2] Quoted by Ian Paul at https://www.psephizo.com/biblical-studies/how-do-we-live-in-trust-generosity-and-readiness-in-luke-12/

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