Category: Sermons

Sermon: It’s Not The End of the World, Luke 21:5-19 (Ordinary 33 Year C)

Luke 21:5-19

Do you want to predict a date for the end of the world and the Second Coming of Christ? If so, I understand there is a website that logs all the various dates predicted by different people. You can look on that website, pick your own date, and join that happy band of heretics.

Some read Bible passages like today’s reading and assume this is about Jesus prophesying his return. They look beyond the verses we have read to verse 27, where Jesus says,

At that time they will see the Son of Man coming in a cloud with power and great glory.

They then assume this is about the Second Coming.

Having done that, they then get tied up in knots, thinking that Jesus said he was coming soon, but got it wrong.

Not so.

Because this episode is not about the Second Coming. We heard right at the beginning that it’s about the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple, which would happen approximately forty years after Jesus’ death and resurrection. That’s what the disciples asked him about in verses 5 to 7.

And that’s why the heading of this passage in the NIV is misleading. It says, ‘The destruction of the temple and signs of the end times.’ There are no ‘signs of the end times’ here.

But what about all that ‘Son of Man coming in a cloud with power and great glory’? Nope. Jesus is quoting from Daniel 7. In that passage, the Son of Man does indeed come in a cloud with power and great glory – but not to earth. He comes into the presence of Almighty God, the Ancient of Days. It is about his arrival in heaven. In New Testament terms, that’s the Ascension.

It’s not the end of the world.

What our reading today does for us is tell us how to live as Christians during difficult times in history. For sure, the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple would have felt like the end of the world to pious Jews like the disciples, but Jesus says it isn’t. And he tells them how they should live for him in cataclysmic times. Much of what he foretells here is fulfilled in Luke’s second volume, the Acts of the Apostles.

I don’t know whether we are living in cataclysmic times, but we are living in times of great uncertainty and potential peril. Therefore, we too can learn from Jesus here about how to live as his disciples when our world is being upended malicious and unstable world leaders, by economic convulsions, climate change, and more.

How might we live when things are bad, even if it’s not the end of the world? For in such times there will be serious pressures to face. Jesus here refers to opposition to our faith (verse 12), division that even extends to our families (verse 16), and outright hatred (verse 17).

Here are three qualities that stand out from Jesus’ teaching that we would do well to embrace:

Firstly, discernment:

Watch out that you are not deceived. For many will come in my name, claiming, “I am he,” and, “The time is near.” Do not follow them. (Verse 8)

How do we ‘watch out’ to avoid deception? How do we discern between what is of the Spirit of God, what is of the spirit of the age, and what is from a malicious spirit?

Well, Jesus has just spent three years grounding the disciples in his teaching, and that’s where we need to begin. Nothing less than a deep commitment to the Scriptures, remembering that their central focus is Jesus, will do. It is the sheer biblical illiteracy in our congregations that has left us so vulnerable to being blown every which way in recent times.

One of my previous congregations did a survey of everything about the Sunday morning experience, from arriving at the church building to departing. That included the worship, and one of the shocking discoveries was the number of church members who never read the Bible for themselves between Sundays, and only ever hear it once a week in the service.

Is it any wonder with practices like this that people get deceived by the world? An appealing and emotional story will tempt people away from Christian truth. Congregations that just want things kept as simple and unchallenging as possible and then wonder why they lose their young people to the YouTube videos peddled by atheists. The dilution of Christian truth leads people into error.

Only this week the Methodist Church reported about a church in Stoke-on-Trent that celebrated the Hindu Diwali festival, on the basis that Diwali is a festival of light and Christian too believe in the light and hope of God. The similarities, however, are superficial; the differences are significant. It’s honourable wanting to stand against racism. It was diplomatic of them to make it a community event and not a religious service. But it’s misleading to suggest a serious parallel between Christian and Hindu beliefs, and that the Holy Spirit was present when the work of the Spirit is to point to Jesus, not to a multiplicity of Hindu deities.

This is why I now have two of my churches starting to study a Bible Society resource called The Bible Course. It will help them see the overarching story of Scripture and help them to interpret the Bible sensibly.

Let me ask you what you are doing to get your faith rooted in the Scriptures, and focussed on Jesus? It’s something worth doing both on our own and in groups together. It’s critical to our discernment at all times, but it is all the more important in turbulent seasons.

Secondly, testimony:

12 ‘But before all this, they will seize you and persecute you. They will hand you over to synagogues and put you in prison, and you will be brought before kings and governors, and all on account of my name. 13 And so you will bear testimony to me.

Here’s one of the elements of today’s passage that was, as I said earlier, fulfilled in the Acts of the Apostles. Things got sticky for the early Christians on several occasions. They were hauled up before the authorities on trumped-up charges, much as Jesus had been.

And this pattern has continued through history. The Christian message rubs people up the wrong way, especially those who have so much to lose. And when the world is convulsing and people are under pressure, they sometimes look for scapegoats. We can’t rule that out happening to us at some time, even if we have many more freedoms than so many of our Christian brothers and sisters around the world.

Jesus says, when the pressure is on, you will bear testimony to me. Our lives will show how much of Jesus we have. Our willingness to speak for him when there is no advantage in doing so and perhaps even significant disadvantages is a commentary on our faith.

Our testimony comes not only in words in a courtroom, but in our deeds. The world will see whether our words and deeds match up.

And the focus of our testimony will not be ourselves, rather it will be Jesus. A testimony is not the preserve of those with a dramatic conversion story. Our testimony is our account of what Jesus means to us, and what he has done for us. Every Christian, whether their life has been dramatic or mundane, has something to say on that subject.

Thirdly and finally, endurance:

17 Everyone will hate you because of me. 18 But not a hair of your head will perish. 19 Stand firm, and you will win life.

Going back over thirty years to when I was a probationer minister, a report on my progress one year that my Superintendent Minister wrote about me said, ‘David needs to learn that ministry is a marathon, not a sprint.’ I had seen the need for change in the churches, and I saw it as urgent, but I was trying to rush things that would take a long time if they were to be done at a deep level and with substance. Eventually, I came to describe my work as like seeking to change the direction of an ocean liner: a task that takes time to achieve.

Likewise, over the years, I learned that the life of Christian faith itself is a marathon and not a sprint. We are in it for the long haul. ‘Stand firm, and you will win life,’ as Jesus says here.

Now I think that’s good news to us when we are seeking to live out our faith when the world is in tumult. How we would love to change things quickly.

I think we are particularly prone to that temptation in our technological society. We expect to be able flick a switch, press a button, click or tap on a link and things will change. O that it were so simple. But it’s not.

I believe that often God’s word to us in difficult seasons can be simply put: ‘Keep on keeping on.’ Remain faithful to Jesus. Obey the Word of God. Continue to do the Christian basics: worship, prayer, fellowship, discipleship, being the salt of the earth and the light of the world, speaking for Jesus, resist being squeezed into the world’s mould, be open to the Holy Spirit. And seek God that he will bring the change that is needed in his time and in his way.

It’s not glamorous, it’s not flashy, it can be mundane rather than exciting. But it’s the right thing to do. And we leave the consequences to God.

Conclusion

One time when I was young, my father said to me that there were times when he wondered what on earth he and my mother had done by bringing my sister and me into this world. There are times when I, as a parent myself, have wondered the same. COVID. A warmongering Russian President and an American President who caves into him. Will my son end up being conscripted one day?

These are the times for me to remember the Christian basics. Be discerning through fidelity to the Word of God. Maintain witness, even under pressure. And just keep on keeping on in the everyday one-foot-in-front-of-the-other tasks of Christian endurance.

May we all stand together in this calling.

Remember: it may not be the end of the world now, but we are Resurrection People. In the end, Jesus wins.

0

A Sermon for Remembrance Sunday: God’s Manifesto (Revelation 22:1-5)

Revelation 22:1-5

Remembrance Day Free Stock Photo – courtesy Public Domain Photos. Creative Commons Licence 1.0 Universal.

I don’t know whether congregations dread certain Sundays of the year, but I can tell you for sure that preachers do. Remembrance Sunday is one of them. Being planned on this day is the preaching equivalent of what football fans call a ‘hospital pass’: the ball is played to you, but you know an opponent will clatter into you.

For this is a day when whatever you say, there is a high likelihood someone will disagree passionately with you afterwards. You can upset the pacifists and the patriots. Once, as a young minister after I had tried to expound the Beatitudes on this day, a highly opinionated church steward dismissed my efforts by saying, “There’s only one thing to say on Remembrance Sunday, and that is that war is pointless.”

And fundamentally, today is a civic and political day rather than a Christian festival. So you can always upset people politically. You might take the opposite view to someone. Or just saying anything political will annoy those who think the church should stay out of politics.

Well, the Gospel does have political implications, because Jesus is Lord of all creation, and that includes the political sphere. So, we will have something to say about moral and ethical issues. We will have something to say about political leaders who flagrantly contradict God’s Law.

But what we will not do is come up with particular political policies. Those are rightly the realm of the politicians, political advisers, and civil servants with their different rôles to come up with.

What we preachers will do is paint the broad brush-strokes of God’s love, God’s will, and God’s good plans for creation, so that we may live accordingly.

And that, for me, is where our reading from Revelation 22 comes in. Jesus said, ‘The kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe the Good News.’ Well, here is part of John’s vision about the fulness of God’s kingdom. These verses tell us where we are headed and the kind of society the kingdom of God will be. Therefore, they guide us in how we live today in anticipation of that time. They indicate how we are to live in the midst of a world that contains hatred and violence, pointing instead to God’s kingdom.

That’s why they form something of a manifesto for Christians on Remembrance Sunday.

Firstly, life:

1 Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, as clear as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb 2a down the middle of the great street of the city.

This part of the vision is inspired by Ezekiel 47, where the prophet sees water coming out from the temple of God and coursing through the land, bringing life in its waters and on its banks wherever it flows. True life and the renewal of the world come from God.

It is not just physical life, but life in every sense, given by God who is Spirit, for in the New Testament the water of life is a way of speaking about the Holy Spirit.

If we want a world and a community where life in all its fulness comes, then we remember that is the promise of Jesus. It is one of his gifts. It can be received from him. He said, ‘I have come that they might have life, and have it more abundantly.’ The trouble with the church, as one preacher said, is that we think Jesus said, ‘I have come that they might have meetings, and have them more abundantly.’

Life in all its beauty and fulness is on offer from God. If you give your life over to Jesus and receive the Holy Spirit, then what you should expect is not to become some spiritual robot, but rather to become more fully human than you’ve ever been. You can expect all your gifts, talents, and passions to flourish like never before, because you are connected to the Source of all life, and all that is good.

It’s significant that in the Roman Empire, if a waterway flowed through the middle of a city like the river of the water of life does here in the New Jerusalem, it wouldn’t be a river. It would be an open sewer.[1] Do not look to the empires of this world for life, be those empires political systems, economic powers, or military might. Of themselves, they will only lead you to the open sewer.

Instead, the Christian God Manifesto is life: life in all its beauty and richness, available through Christ and empowered by the Spirit.

Let’s offer that. And let’s live like it’s true.

Secondly, healing:

2b On each side of the river stood the tree of life, bearing twelve crops of fruit, yielding its fruit every month. And the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations.

Now I know that taken literally this is a bizarre image, seemingly describing one tree that stands on both banks of a river. But remember this is a vision. Treat it a little bit like dream language.

And let me point you again to the river of the water of life in Ezekiel 47. Everywhere it goes, as I said, life flourishes in its waters and on the banks. That happens here with the tree of life that we first met in the Bible in the Garden of Eden.

Biblically, the tree of life was taken to represent God’s wisdom, in verses about wisdom such as Proverbs 3:18, which says,

She is a tree of life to those who take hold of her;
    those who hold her fast will be blessed.

But God’s wisdom, although always available, has been scorned. Now, however, as the water of life does its work in the New Jerusalem, it flourishes. In the kingdom of God, the wisdom of God prevails over the foolishness of the world.

Is it not the foolishness of the world that has so often led us to wars and conflict? But in the kingdom, God’s wisdom puts a stop to that.

For whereas in Ezekiel, the tree of life healed God’s people, now says John, the tree of life is for the healing of the nations. The Gospel offer of God’s wisdom is a universal offer. Come and find healing and peace in Jesus Christ, the Prince of Peace.

Oh, to be sure I’m not being simplistic and saying, be converted and everything will be fine. It’s not just a case of being forgiven. For in response to the healing of God’s forgiving love in Christ we need his wisdom to live differently. It needs to be lived out.

And there is our challenge. For too often the world looks at the church and does not see a community that has been healed by the wisdom of God. Rather, it sees one full of foolishness and in-fighting. They see us easily duped by politicians, from American evangelicals falling for Donald Trump to British mainstream churches, where every social pronouncement skews in a left-wing direction. They see us fighting too, tearing one another apart at times.

So to offer this second strand of the God Manifesto, we have some changing to do.

Thirdly, restoration:

3 No longer will there be any curse. The throne of God and of the Lamb will be in the city, and his servants will serve him.

No more curse? John’s vision is sending us back to the Garden of Eden again, only this time not to the beauty of the Tree of Life, but to the consequences of Adam and Eve’s sin.

For God tells them that sin leads to a curse over every part of life. The link between humans and the rest of creation is damaged. The joy of childbirth is infected with pain. The beauty of the male-female relationship is damaged by male domination. The realm of work becomes one of frustration rather than fulfilment. Life ends in the dust of death. Is this the beauty of creation? No.

But in the New Jerusalem, ‘No longer will be there be any curse.’ All that is broken is put right. Relationships are restored. The abuse of power is replaced by the spirit of serving one another. What once seemed futile is now worthwhile.

This, then, is another element of the God Manifesto: a thorough-going restoration that applies across the whole of creation from the physical world itself to human relationships. This is God’s vision. This is what we proclaim.

And therefore it is also what we as the Church are called to live out as a sign of that coming kingdom. We are here to nurture reconciled relationships. We are here to treat the earth with kindness. We are here to alleviate pain and to bring meaning to our everyday work.

Most of all, we are here to say that this all flows from a restored relationship with God, where not only are our sins forgiven, we then with gratitude shall live to serve Jesus Christ, who redeemed us. To repeat the second half of verse 3:

The throne of God and of the Lamb will be in the city, and his servants will serve him.

As with every element of this God Manifesto that proclaims a different and contrary reality to that of war and destruction, this is something the church needs both to preach and to live. If we truly believe what we say we believe, then our calling is to live it and thereby show the world by our actions that it is true.

Conclusion

There is so much more I would love to say about these verses. But here is how I want to draw this vision to a conclusion.

It’s common today when talking about what is right or wrong to say, ‘Make sure you are on the right side of history.’ It’s a dodgy saying that assumes everything in the world is becoming increasingly better from a moral point of view, even though it’s self-evident that things are getting both better and worse.

But there is a God way of being on the right side of history, and it is to embrace this vision. It is to say, here in Revelation we have the blueprint of God’s eternal destiny for all those who will say ‘yes’ to him in Christ.

If we want to be part of God’s eternal Manifesto of life, healing, and restoration, then we need to do two things. We need to ‘publish abroad’ these truths in the church and in the world. And we need to live out their truth in our lives as a witness.

[1] Ian Paul, Revelation (TNTC), p359.

0

COVID

Well, this is quite a run on the blog of a few weeks without new content, and I’m sorry about that. This last week, I have been off sick with COVID, so I wasn’t up to taking a service.

Instead, I prepared hymns and prayers, sent the Bible reading, and provided this video from three years ago for the congregation:

I hope to be back in the saddle next week.

0

This Week And Next Week

This week, I again have to repeat a sermon – this time due to a couple of big pastoral issues at the end of the week. It being the week in the Lectionary when Luke 18:1-8, the Parable of the Persistent Widow and the Unjust Judge comes around, I’m bringing out this sermon from three years ago.

Then next week, I am on leave, so I hope to have something fresh for you then.

0

Mission On The Margins, Luke 17:11-19 (Ordinary 28 Year C)

Luke 17:11-19

On the day I first met Debbie face to face, I walked into her house to find her playing Meat Loaf’s ‘Bat Out Of Hell’ album. She was a fan of his music, and about a year after we married she took me to see him live in Hyde Park.

It was probably the worst concert I’ve ever attended, and we walked out on it.

Admittedly, Debbie too was feeling queasy, and the next morning we learned why: our first child was on the way.

If you know Meat Loaf’s songs, you’ll be familiar with one called ‘Two Out Of Three Ain’t Bad.’ It’s not a very flattering lyric that he sings about a girl:

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. (Jim Steinman, 1977)

The last time I preached on this passage three years ago, I took inspiration from that song title and called the sermon ‘One Out Of Ten Ain’t Bad.’

This time (and there is some crossover with last time) I have been particularly struck by the geographical background, and what that teaches us about Christian mission.

Firstly, Jesus goes to the margins:

Now on his way to Jerusalem, Jesus travelled along the border between Samaria and Galilee. (Verse 11)

Here’s the thing. Jerusalem is in the south. Galilee is in the north. There is more than one route Jesus could take. He doesn’t have to go near Samaria, but he does.

This is the border not only in a geographical sense but also in a spiritual sense. For the Jews regarded the Samaritans of their day as heretics. What they believed was unsound. But Jesus goes near them. And of course, that is emphasised by the fact that one of the ten lepers was a Samaritan.

And maybe this is a little unusual for Jesus. When he meets the Syrophoenician woman in Matthew 15, he tells her he was only sent to ‘the lost sheep of Israel.’ His mission is mainly to Israel. It will extend from there after his ascension.

The only comparable incident is in John 4, where he meets the Samaritan woman at the well. And the similarity there extends in that geographically Jesus didn’t need to go that way.

So, this is a deliberate decision by Jesus to go to the margins. Even if his primary call is to be with Israel, the People of God, he will from time to time loiter with missional intent among those whose beliefs are dubious.

Who are the people on the margins for us where we can demonstrate God’s love, as Jesus does here? For some of us, it’s easy to mingle among people on the margins. We have people in our families who don’t share our faith. We have neighbours. We have work colleagues.

But some of us spend so much time among the People of God that we need to take deliberate steps to mingle with others. It’s not healthy to make the church the be-all and end-all of our social lives. I know how easy that would be for me. I could spend all my time just going from one church meeting to another, if I wanted, as if Jesus had actually said (in the words of the late Gerald Coates), ‘I have come that they might have meetings, and have them more abundantly.’

For me, it has to be intentional to spend time with people outside the church. My main way of doing this is by being a member of the local camera club. It’s my hope that I can build friendships there, demonstrate God’s love by how I relate to people, and then when the time is right say something about my faith.

Can each of us ask ourselves, where is my margin between people of faith and those who don’t see life like me? What am I doing to cultivate these relationships? What can I do in those relationships and situations to show the love of God? Can I begin praying regularly for these people, that there might be an opportunity to introduce them to God’s love in Jesus?

Secondly – and related to this – Jesus works publicly:

12 As he was going into a village, ten men who had leprosy met him. They stood at a distance 13 and called out in a loud voice, ‘Jesus, Master, have pity on us!’

14 When he saw them, he said, ‘Go, show yourselves to the priests.’ And as they went, they were cleansed.

All the action happens in public. They are on the outskirts of a village. Jesus responds publicly. And perhaps most significantly of all, he tells them to go to the priests.

As you may well know, in that society, for a leper to be allowed back into mainstream society, a priest had to verify they were healed. This was an ancient form of infection control. You could not risk someone coming back into the village when they could still infect others.

In other words, what Jesus did in healing the ten could be verified. And there was no shame in seeking that verification. It contrasts hugely with some of the more extreme characters in Christian healing who pray for the sick and tell them to throw their pills away before the healing has been confirmed. Allegedly, this is supposed to be an act of faith, but in reality, there are people who have flushed away their medication, only to find they were not healed in the first place.

I’m not suggesting any of us would do something so reckless, foolish, and dangerous. But I am saying that Jesus’ example here is consistent with his own teaching in the Sermon on the Mount when he tells his disciples to let their light shine before others.

We don’t need to be afraid of accountability. Let the world see what we do and evaluate it. How else can it be a testimony to God’s love? It has to be seen.

Christian witness must be in the public arena. For too long, we have treated the church like a fortress, rushed back inside it, and pulled up the drawbridge to isolate ourselves from the world.

But that achieves nothing. In fact, it leads to the further decline of the church. We need to be known in society for what we do in love for people.

Some of this happens on a large scale, way beyond small local churches, when we set up Christian schools that serve the community, or when major charities do substantial work. But should we not also ask, what are we known for as a church in this locality? We certainly have a history of blessing this village, and it’s good to keep coming back to that question. Whatever good we may have done in the past, what are we doing today outside these walls to bear witness to a God who loves the people of this village dearly that his Son Jesus Christ died for them?

Over the years, I’ve seen this in everything from a Christian GP surgery where we were patients, and which took on the difficult patients that other surgeries refused to sign on, to the outreaches to the lonely that Haslemere Methodist Church engages in. What would it be here?

Thirdly and finally, Jesus engages in cross-cultural evangelism:

15 One of them, when he saw he was healed, came back, praising God in a loud voice. 16 He threw himself at Jesus’ feet and thanked him – and he was a Samaritan.

17 Jesus asked, ‘Were not all ten cleansed? Where are the other nine? 18 Has no one returned to give praise to God except this foreigner?’ 19 Then he said to him, ‘Rise and go; your faith has made you well.’

Some people look at this and say, oh look! A Samaritan has faith! This is a sign that God accepts people of all religions!

And this is frankly bunk. The faith Jesus commends is one that kneels at his feet and thanks him. The faith the Samaritan has exercised is in Jesus.

This is the end game for our mission, that people find faith in Jesus and confess him as Lord. We still offer love without any strings attached. We do not make our love conditional on people listening to the Gospel. But it is always our hope and our prayer that the witness of our loving acts will sooner or later lead people to put their faith in Jesus.

If anything, the story’s rebuke for existing believers is not about failing to accept that others can have faith, it is about the failure to thank God for his blessings. Yet when someone encounters Jesus for the first time like the Samaritan leper it is quite possible that his love will bowl them over and will lead to an affirmation of faith.

I have told some of you the story of how an Iranian political refugee started coming to one of my churches. He had had to escape from Iran so quickly he left behind his wife and young son – and also not knowing that his wife was pregnant with their second boy.

After a year or so with us, he asked to be baptised. I convened a meeting with him and the church member who had particularly come alongside him. Being aware that he was applying for leave to remain in the UK and that some refugees had spuriously gone through baptism to get that status, we questioned him closely about why he wanted to be baptised.

He told us about how he had never encountered teaching like that of Jesus, especially in the Sermon on the Mount. He told us that he saw Christianity treating women far better than Islam did. And then he told us a story.

‘Do you remember,’ he asked me, ‘when I asked you to pray for my baby boy back in Iran? Do you remember my wife had said he was ill, but the doctors could not make him better? And do you remember I asked you to pray for him?’

I did indeed remember. It had been a brief, matter-of-fact conversation at the coffee table after morning worship.

‘Did I tell you,’ he continued, ‘that after you prayed, my little boy got better?’

‘No, you didn’t tell me that,’ I replied with my jaw dropping. It had just been a short, simple, quiet prayer. Nothing dramatic.

‘So I know now that Jesus is real,’ he said, ‘and I want to follow him.’

We baptised him on Easter Day.

In conclusion, let me challenge you to cross some boundaries. Remember that in Jesus’ day Jews had nothing to do with Samaritans. What a good job Jesus ignored that custom.

Go and bless people across the boundaries.

And be prepared, when the opportunity comes, to tell them what your faith in Jesus means to you.

Because you don’t know just how much the Holy Spirit will use your witness.

0

A Harvest Festival Sermon: As Long As The Earth Endures (Genesis 8:15-22)

Genesis 8:15-22

A week ago, I got a new mobile phone. When I saw that I could get an up-to-date model on a cheaper contract than I had been paying, it was a no-brainer. Save money, get newer model with extra whizzy features: easy decision.

iPhone 17 family from heute.at CC 4.0

To save money, I had to change to a different phone network, and it took a few days to move my number from EE to Vodafone. However, when I then tried to make a phone call once that had all been done, I kept getting the message ‘Call failed.’

The nice AI robot I spoke to at Vodafone told me that what I needed to do was restart the phone. Then I should be sorted.

And a restart is what we have in our passage from Genesis. God reboots creation after the Flood. You can tell that from the way these verses restate things from the original creation stories. For example, the humans and the animals are to ‘multiply on the earth and be fruitful and increase in number on it’ (verse 16), just as it said in Genesis 1.

So what do we learn when we apply this notion of the restart (or reboot) to the words we read about harvest? Here they are again from verse 22:

 ‘As long as the earth endures,
seedtime and harvest,
cold and heat,
summer and winter,
day and night
will never cease.’

The rhythms of the world that we mark at a time like harvest remind us of God’s original good intentions for his creation. When seeds are planted and they ripen at the right time, this is a sign that what God built into his creation is working. The same goes, says the writer, for the rhythms of day and night, and of cold and heat – although as a true Brit I really don’t like it when the days get shorter, and I would happily settle for a climate that had no extremes of cold and heat.

Cosmic waves dancing at Stockcake CC 1.0

God’s intention was always to build a reliable rhythm into his creation. It fits with the notion of there being scientific laws that tell us how the universe behaves. A certainty and a reliability in how something behaves or operates is good and helpful. And because God has not simply created but continues to uphold the universe by the word of his power, as the Letter to the Hebrews says, one preacher was confident to say that scientific laws are a description of God’s habits.

Miracles, by the way, then become those occasional times when God in his sovereign will chooses to change his habits temporarily.

Therefore, one of the things we celebrate at a festival such as harvest is this rhythm and reliability that God has built into his creation. It is out of his goodness that he has built a predictability into our world. This is what he does as a good and benevolent Creator. Hence, the first thing we are doing at harvest is lifting our voices in praise to a trustworthy God who has made his creation reflect that nature of his character.

But when I say this, some of you have questions in your mind. Some of you are saying an inward ‘No’ or at the very least a ‘Yes, but.’ You are probably protesting, ‘But it isn’t always as good and as nice as that.’ We need to observe a second attribute of God when we consider harvest and creation.

Allow me to talk about my new phone again. Part of the process of setting it up involved restoring all my apps, text messages, photos, and so on to the new device so that when I wiped the old one I didn’t lose them. Thankfully, there is a simple way of doing this. Since I was moving from one iPhone to another, I logged into my Apple account on the new phone, and it began a process of downloading everything I needed to my shiny new model. I had always kept the old one backed up, so it went smoothly – although it did take time, and I still have to log into apps again when I first use them.

Why tell you this? Because the God we praise at Harvest is the God who restores. We are used to talking about God restoring broken people through the Cross of Christ, when he heals and forgives broken sinners, bringing us into that knowledge that he loved us before we ever considered him. We may also talk about a God who restores broken relationships, as he teaches us to forgive one another, just as God in Christ forgave us.

National Trust for Scotland Work Party restoring House 15, built in 1860 at Wikimedia Commons CC 2.0

But when we celebrate Harvest, we mark a God who also longs to restore his creation. He put things back together after the Flood, and I therefore believe he also wants to see the healing of creation in our day.

That’s why denominations and church leaders increasingly say that creation care is a Christian duty. We don’t do this out of fear that the world is about to burn, as many do, but out of trust in a God whose desire is to restore. It is an urgent task, but Christians can be hopeful about it.

Those decisions we make when shopping for small things or when considering large purchases like what kind of car we will buy are not just private financial matters. They are questions of discipleship. Do we truly believe in a God whose desire is to restore creation?

It is also our Christian duty to call out those who are banging the drum for policies that will blatantly damage God’s good creation. This week, we have witnessed what one environmental expert dubbed ‘The stupidest speech in UN history’. I am, of course, talking about President Trump’s address, where he falsely claimed that clean energy sources don’t work and are too expensive, and advocated a return to coal (or ‘clean, beautiful coal’ as he has mandated it be called in the White House) and North Sea oil.

Now you may so there is little chance of Mr Trump taking heed, and sadly I think that is right. But it is still our responsibility to declare God’s truth. That way, he – and his acolytes in this country and around the world – will be without excuse on the Day of Judgment.

For most of us, though, we won’t be operating in the political sphere. It will be about standing up for truth when friends pass on misinformation on social media or from extreme political parties.

Finally, there’s a third element I want to bring into this, and it requires us to interpret Genesis in the light of the New Testament.

I want to pick up on the words, ‘As long as the earth endures.’ The Old Testament doesn’t have much to say about the life of the world to come. There are a few glimpses, but for most of what the Bible says about that, we have to go to the New Testament.

The New Testament talks about the destruction of the earth in 2 Peter 3, which is what environmentalists worry about, and which climate-sceptic Christians take as a reason not to worry about the earth’s future.

End Of The World (El Fin Del Mumbo) at Wikimedia Commons CC 4.0

But what both miss is the greater promise of the New Testament that God is making all things new, that there will be a new creation, with new heavens and a new earth. God is the God of resurrection, and resurrection is bodily and material. Our eternal destiny is not to be disembodied spirits, but to be raised with a new body, just as Jesus was.

And therefore, our eternal home is also physical and material. Could it be that there will be harvests too in the life to come? I don’t see why not. John’s vision of the New Jerusalem in Revelation includes trees, and while Revelation is more symbolic than literal, it indicates to me a physical place.

What does that mean for us now? Given that, as Paul tells us, our ‘labour in the Lord is not in vain’ (1 Corinthians 15:58), can we assume that God takes what we do for his kingdom in this world and mysteriously builds it into his coming kingdom? Can it be that nothing we do for God’s creation is ever in vain?

If so, then this reinforces why as Christians we approach harvest and creation with a sense of hope. Yes, there are serious and dangerous issues to face in the world. Harvests do not always happen at their proper time. They do not always yield all that we need. And much of this is down to the way the human race has damaged the planet.

Let us not lose heart when we see the dreadful effects of climate change on our world, with its extreme temperatures, storms, and shortages. It’s not a case of just piously saying, everything is going to be all right and abdicating our responsibility, we still need to take these things seriously and act appropriately. But when we do so, and when we do so in faith that God in Jesus is making all things new, we know that we contribute will count, because God will make it so.

When we make that lifestyle change – it’s worth it. When we raise funds for people suffering in the developing world – it’s worth it. When we write to our MP about government policy – it’s worth it. When we refuse to be taken in by the conspiracy theories our friends are spreading – it’s worth it.

I invite you to ask yourself a question that I see posed in a Christian Facebook group every Friday: what have you been working on this week to help make the world a little more beautiful?

Isn’t that a fitting thing to do? After all, we have a trustworthy God who has made a good creation. He is worthy of our praise, both in gathered worship and in making what is good in the world ourselves.

Not only that, but our God is also a God who restores what is broken, and therefore we can sing his praise for his restoring work and show it by the beauty we create in the world.

And finally, he is a God whose restoring work extends into the life to come, and so it is worthwhile praising him now in anticipation of that new world, and in crafting things that are valuable and praiseworthy.

Let us rejoice in the harvest and build for God’s kingdom.

0

A Brief Sermon For An Infant Baptism (Acts 16:25-34)

Before we read from the Bible, I need to explain the background to what we’re going to hear. The Apostle Paul and his companion Silas have been preaching in a city called Philippi, but they kept getting interrupted by a very disturbed young woman. She was a fortune-teller, but she was also a slave, and so her owners made a lot of money out of her. They exploited her.

Image courtesy Picryl. Public Domain.

So Paul cast the spirit out of the young woman that enabled her to tell fortunes, and that angered her owners, who lost a lot of money, because they could no longer exploit her. In revenge, they got Paul and Silas locked up in the local prison, and that’s where we pick up the story.

Acts 16:25-34

Now I’ve read that story largely because we read near the end that the jailer found faith, but on the basis of his faith not only he was baptised, but so was his entire household – although it must also be admitted that Paul and Silas spoke the word to the whole household.

Image courtesy StockCake. Public Domain.

And today, we shall baptise [name] on the basis of [the child’s parent]’s faith. One day, [name] will have to decide for himself whether to follow Jesus.

So what does this faith look like? Well, it’s a lifetime commitment, but let me pick out two important elements from the story.

The first is belief:

Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved (verse 31)

What does it mean to ‘believe in the Lord Jesus’? It’s not simply that we believe he exists, although the historical evidence for that is extremely strong. No: we believe certain things about Jesus, and we then trust him with our lives.

We believe that Jesus is the Son of God, that he died for our sins, and that he rose again from the dead to give us new life.

Some people say that they think they are good people and that will get them into eternal life with God when they die. But none of us is good enough to meet God’s perfect standards. We all fall short. Those failures need to be forgiven.

And the thing about forgiveness is this: it hurts and it is costly. I think of a time when I was still living with my parents. A friend of mine had a broken engagement. He needed somewhere to stay while getting over it, and we invited him in. He stayed for two weeks. But he never helped with anything around the house. He seemed to expect my Mum to cook for him and do his washing. When he left, he didn’t offer any money towards all that my parents had shelled out while he was with us.

Image courtesy Picryl. Public Domain.

We had a family conference about this. I’ll never forget my Dad’s words. “We’ll put this down to God’s account.” To forgive my friend involved my parents absorbing that debt. It cost them.

Similarly, Jesus dying on the Cross shows us that it cost God to forgive our sins.

So I invite you this morning to realise that is the cost God has paid for you to be forgiven. Will you believe it? And will you then trust Jesus with your life?

The second thing that faith involves is action:

At that hour of the night the jailer took them and washed their wounds; then immediately he and all his household were baptized.

The jailer brought them into his house and set a meal before them; he was filled with joy because he had come to believe in God—he and his whole household. (Verses 33-34)

The jailer does engage in good deeds, but they are not what earn him salvation. Instead, his action is a matter of gratitude.

We are so grateful that God has loved us so much it has cost him the death of his Son, that we respond. And we do so by putting our faith into action.

Yes, that gratitude is certainly shown in worship, but it is also shown in the world. The jailer tends to the wounds of Paul and Silas, who had been beaten and flogged before they were thrown into prison (verses 22-24).

Food drive for homeless. Wikimedia Commons. CC 4.0

So if we are grateful for all that God has done for us in Jesus, who are the wounded people we can serve and show his love? Perhaps we can think of this a little bit like the idea today of ‘paying it forward.’ Where and how can I pay it forward, because God has shown so much love to me?

The jailer didn’t have to look too far and neither do we. You will have a neighbour who needs some practical help. You will find organisations where you live that that work and campaign on behalf of those in the most desperate need, either in this country or abroad.

Conclusion

This is the faith into which we baptise [name] this morning. One that urges him to believe that Jesus died for his sins, and to trust his life to him. One that shows gratitude for God’s love in our actions, especially in the service of those in most need.

But do you know what will make the most sense of this faith to [name]? It will be when those of us in the church and in his family live out that faith ourselves before his eyes.

0

Keeping The Wrong Company, Luke 15:1-10 (Ordinary 24 Year C)

Luke 15:1-10

Back in prehistoric times when I was training for the ministry, one of our tutors told us that we should be at our desks every morning at 9 am with our shoes on. I’m sure I wore out some carpet by wearing shoes rather than slippers in my first manse.

I used to follow that pattern at first. But in one appointment, I was rarely (if ever) at my desk at 9 am. For at this point, we had young children going first through pre-school and then on to primary school. These were at the top of our road, and Debbie and I made a point of building relationships with the other parents.

We didn’t always make it back by the sacred hour of 9 am, and sometimes there would be phone messages from church members who had an expectation of me being there for them at that time.

Christ and a Pharisee. Wikimedia Commons CC 1.0

I think of those church members when I read about the Pharisees and teachers of the law in today’s reading. They thought I was mixing with the wrong people, because to them I was their private chaplain, just as the religious leaders thought Jesus was mixing with the wrong sorts, and that this reflected badly on his character. Their attitude was rather like the saying that you know a person by the company they keep.

Yet it was Jesus’ vocation to be with ‘tax collectors and sinners’. He uses the two parables we heard (plus what follows – the Parable of the Prodigal Son) to lay out why this was so important.

And if it were important for Jesus, it is also important for us. If we are to renew our commitment to following him, then we need to understand why he did this, and then get on with doing it ourselves.

Now the parables have a lot in common. They both (all) speak about finding what is lost and rejoicing. Bringing, or bringing back those who are lost from the love of Jesus into that love and into his family is a high priority for Jesus.

It is not always a high priority for us. We like to run our Sunday services, have a few nice midweek activities, make sure there’s enough money in the kitty to keep the building in good order, and that’s quite enough.

But not for Jesus. Each of these parables has something important to tell us about why he spends so much time outside the synagogue with ordinary (and even disreputable) people for the sake of God’s kingdom. So let’s look at what we pick up from the Parable of the Lost Sheep and the Parable of the Lost Coin.

Firstly, the lost sheep

As you know, we were proud as anything a couple of months ago when our son graduated with a Maths degree from Cambridge. And when people asked us where he got his love of Maths from, I said that it had always been my subject at school. It was later that I developed my interest in Theology.

I have always loved numbers, even if I have not concentrated on Maths for decades now. And there is something about numbers in these parables. A hundred sheep, ten coins, and two sons. In relation to the lost sheep parable, I was reading the New Testament scholar Ian Paul this week, and he cited another scholar, Mikeal Parsons, from whom he learned this:

Counting on one’s fingers (flexio digitorum) was very commonplace in the Roman world, and was in fact seen as an indispensable skill for the educated (See Quintilian Inst 1.10.35). Up to 99, you would count on the left hand, but for three-digit numbers from 100, you would count on the right hand. In an age that preferred the right to the left, Luke’s Jesus is telling us that the whole flock is out of kilter as long as the one is missing—and the whole flock is ‘put right’ when the one returns. No wonder there is so much rejoicing!

The flock is not complete and whole while the lost sheep is missing. And we, the church, are also not whole and complete while there are lost people still to be brought into the orbit of God’s love in Christ, or former sheep to be coaxed back.

Lost Lamb by Roberto and Bianca on Flickr. CC 2.0

To put it another way, the Body of Christ is missing a limb while a lost person is still lost. We cannot stay as our own private association, just enjoying one another’s company or even saying dreadful things like, ‘As long as this church sees me out I’m happy.’ That is to take the opposite attitude to Jesus. The church was not founded by Jesus to be a religious club. It was founded to be his junior partner, working for the kingdom of God. It has an outward focus.

A few years ago, I saw a job advertised for a chaplain at an Army rehabilitation centre for soldiers who had lost limbs in military service. An admirable organisation, I am sure, helping soldiers to adapt and to get on with the fitting of prosthetic limbs.

I fear, however, that the church has spent too much time simply adjusting to living without certain limbs and to be content with the absence of many people. Certainly, much of the institutional leadership has set an agenda which is little more than the management of decline.

You may have come into the church because someone invited you to try it. I can think of someone I know who now attends church because she was invited by her elderly neighbour to try it when she was heartbroken over a relationship breakdown. The elderly neighbour said, I think Jesus might be able to help you in your sorrow.

All this requires us to have friends and relationships outside the church. And it means loving those people. It means being ready for the appropriate time to say something gentle and clear about our faith to them.

I am not asking anyone to go door-knocking. But I am asking that we look for those moments when we need to take a little bit of courage and speak about our faith to people outside the church. Jesus is missing them, and the church will be more complete when they find faith.

Secondly, the lost coin

Ever since the Covid pandemic accelerated the move in our society towards cashless ways of making payments in shops, our family has been divided in our attitudes. One of us occasionally pays by a contactless method but really regards cash as king. Another usually pays by contactless on their phone but keeps a small amount of cash. Another pays by contactless on their phone, and a fourth pays by contactless on their watch. I’ll leave you to guess who’s who!

You might think that in Jesus’ time cash was king when you hear the Parable of the Lost Coin, but actually coins were less common in their use. Kenneth Bailey, a New Testament scholar who spent most of his life in the Middle East, said this:

The peasant village is, to a large extent, self-supporting, making its own cloth and growing its own food. Cash is a rare commodity. Hence the lost coin is of far greater value in a peasant home than the day’s labour it represents monetarily.[i]

Ian Paul suggests that the woman’s ten coins in the parable are either family savings or possibly the dowry her husband gave her on marriage. Dowry coins were often worn by the wife either around the neck or on the forehead.

When you understand this, you realise that the loss of this coin is a catastrophe. She hasn’t mislaid a 5 pence piece. Something profoundly valuable has gone.

The Lost Coin by On Borrowed Time on Flickr. CC 2.0

What would it be like for me? It would be like me losing my wedding ring. It is not the most expensive item I own, but I do regard it as my most valuable possession, for what it represents. Earlier this week, when our elderly and grumpy cat bit my hand and I had to have a tetanus shot and strong antibiotics, I was told at the Urgent Treatment Centre that I had to remove my wedding ring in case my hand swelled up. I was careful to put the ring somewhere safe.

Those who are lost from the church and faith in Jesus are therefore to be seen as immensely valuable to Jesus. It doesn’t matter whether they are former Christians or never-been Christians, Jesus values them hugely. Sometimes we are very dismissive of judgmental of people outside the church, and of course some of them can be hostile to us, but the Jesus who tells us to love our enemies puts a high value on them. They are precious to him.

Like us, they are made in God’s image. Like us, they are loved so much by God that Jesus died for their sins. They are treasured by God.

Before he wrote worship songs, Graham Kendrick was a Christian folk singer. One of his most popular songs from that period of his life was called, ‘How Much Do You Think You Are Worth?’

The first verse says this:

 Is a rich man worth more than a poor man?
A stranger worth less than a friend?
Is a baby worth more than an old man?
Your beginning worth more than your end?

It goes on to consider various ways in which we might or might not value human life highly. Then it comes to a climax with these words:

If you heard that your life had been valued
That a price had been paid on the nail
Would you ask what was traded,
How much and who paid it
Who was He and what was His name?

If you heard that His name was called Jesus
Would you say that the price was too dear?
Held to the cross not by nails but by love
It was you broke His heart, not the spear!
Would you say you are worth what it cost Him?
You say ‘no’, but the price stays the same.
If it don’t make you cry, laugh it off, pass Him by,
But just remember the day when you throw it away
That He paid what He thought you were worth.

Every single person outside the church is valuable to God. The neighbour who annoys you. The child who keeps kicking his football at your fence. The greedy businessman. The politician whose policies you hate. The sex worker. The drug dealer. All these, as well as the ones we find it easy to like! The Cross tells us how much God values them.

And – while they are missing from God’s family, not only are they incomplete, so is the church.

It’s time to expand our networks, increase our love, and let faith prompt our courage.

[i] Kenneth Bailey, Poet & Peasant and Through Peasant Eyes: A Literary Cultural Approach to the Parables in Luke, 1983, p 157

0

Watching You, Watching Me: Jesus and the Pharisees at Dinner, Luke 14:1-14 (Ordinary 22 Year C)

Luke 14:1-14

Surveillance Society - Halsted and Division Edition (C) Seth Anderson on Flickr, CC Licence 2.0

We live in what some have called ‘the surveillance society.’ Everywhere you go, you are on camera. Never mind the old ‘Smile, you’re on Candid Camera’ TV catchphrase, in our society you can hardly move without being captured on CCTV.

Not only that, we have the increasing use of video doorbells. We fitted one at the manse soon after coming, because we discovered that on our estate parcels left by delivery companies were frequently stolen from doorsteps. We also had to deal with a stalker.

At the beginning of our reading, we hear this:

One Sabbath, when Jesus went to eat in the house of a prominent Pharisee, he was being carefully watched. (Verse 1)

Jesus was being carefully watched by the Pharisees and other religious leaders. He was under suspicion. They wanted to clock any incriminating move.

But the shock of the story is that in fact Jesus was also watching them. Listen again to verse 7:

When he noticed how the guests picked the places of honour at the table, he told them this parable.

When he noticed. It’s a two-way mirror. It’s a dose of their own medicine, to mix the metaphors.

What does Jesus notice? I’m going to divide up the story into three to answer that question. Spoiler alert: we’re going to see how Jesus’ values clash with those of his society, and also with ours.

Firstly, the sick man:

This week’s Lectionary doesn’t include verses 2 to 6. Perhaps it’s because last week’s Gospel reading also included Jesus healing someone on the Sabbath. There are certainly some similarities with last week’s episode where Jesus healed a crippled woman in the synagogue. Jesus provokes confrontation with the religious establishment and the way he asks them a question about what constitutes work on the Sabbath what constitutes good deeds is very similar. So perhaps the compilers of the Lectionary thought that if they included this story this week congregations would end up with two similar sermons on consecutive Sundays.

However, these are not the only two examples of Jesus healing on the Sabbath in Luke’s Gospel. There is another one in chapter 6, for example. And while there are clear similarities, this week’s story has at least one unique application, and it’s to do with how the ancient world interpreted the medical condition he had.

The NIV says he was ‘suffering from abnormal swelling of his body’ (verse 2). Other translations use the old word ‘dropsy.’ It’s an excess of fluid that indicates something else is wrong. A few years ago, I went to the doctor because my legs were swelling. The first thing the GP did was send me for a blood test to make sure I didn’t have an issue with my heart, because congestive heart failure can cause this. So can kidney disease.[i] In my case, it was nothing so disturbing, but rather a side-effect from a blood pressure tablet, and I just needed a different drug.

But the ancients saw those with dropsy as people who had insatiable thirst, and metaphorically as those who were greedy, loved money, and were rapacious[ii]. And which group of people was accused of these very sins in Luke’s Gospel? Oh yes: the Pharisees[iii], the very people who are condemning Jesus’ action of healing.

Hence, when Jesus heals the man of his abnormal swelling, he is not just continuing his war on those who interpret God’s commands in a cruel way, he is also putting them on notice about their greed. He has noticed this too about them.

Are we in danger of crossing a line from enjoying good things that God has provided to being greedy? We so often go along with our consumer society and get sucked into the idea that we need to fill our lives with more stuff. Could there be a surprising, maybe shocking message in the reading for us today that in the eyes of Jesus we are bloated, and that we need his healing? Is this something that any of us needs to pray about and act on?

Secondly, the wedding invitation:

In verses 7 to 11, Jesus imagines invitations to a wedding being sent out and people jostling for position at the banquet to be seen as having more honour and prestige. He has noticed it at the meal he is attending. Like I said, it’s not just the Pharisees doing the watching, Jesus is watching them.

This is an attitude that will be familiar to us. Were you ever in a work situation where someone was doing their best to ingratiate themselves with senior leadership to get promotion? Back in the days when I did a more conventional job, I saw that. There was an ambitious man who discovered that he shared a love of cricket with the office manager, and he used that to curry favour. It certainly got him one promotion.

We sometimes see attitudes like this in the church. Somebody wants to be a big fish in a small pond. But it goes against the teaching of Jesus.

And he tells his hearers to take the lowest place at the banquet. The host may invite them to move up to a more honoured seat, and that is better than the humiliation of having thought too highly or themselves and having had to be relegated. In a culture where issues of honour and shame were prominent, this was radical teaching from Jesus.

Even then, some people manipulate Jesus’ teaching here. Some of what masquerades as ‘servant leadership’ in the church is actually a way of exercising influence and gaining power through the back door.

But if we follow Jesus, we shall be content with the seat to which he appoints us. If he puts us in a prominent position, all well and good – although we shall have to guard ourselves against pride. If we remain in an obscure or insignificant place, that is fine, too. After all, Jesus himself in taking on human flesh took the nature of a servant[iv].

In my early years as a minister, I had a couple of incidents where people foresaw me rising to positions of prominence in the church world. Not least was the time when I ended up as a seminar speaker at Spring Harvest, and one or two people said that I would then be among the movers and shakers of the evangelical world. It never happened. I have remained an obscure minister, and over the years have learned to be content with that.

When it comes down to it, no Christian can be seeking to make a name for themselves. That is not consistent with the call to humility and servanthood that Jesus makes. The only fame we seek is the fame of Jesus. And we let Jesus appoint the places where he wants us to do that.

Thirdly, the dinner invitation:

In the final part of the reading, verses 12 to 14, Jesus asks his listeners to imagine themselves not as the recipients of an invitation but as the givers of one. Who will you invite to dinner, he asks? And in one sweeping move he undermines the entire social fabric within which his hearers are happily living. Is it just to have a go at them, and enjoy seeing them squirm? I’m sure they did, but Jesus’ real concern here is for the poor and the excluded.

It’s almost topical. This week, we’ve heard the news that the Liberal Democrat leader Sir Ed Davey has declined his invitation to the banquet the King will be hosting next month for Donald Trump’s state visit in protest at Trump’s apparent support for the Israeli government’s state-sanctioned violence in Gaza. Davy even said that as a Christian this was something he prayed about before confirming his decision.

But if Ed Davey’s decision is a negative one as a protest, what we have from Jesus here is a positive step on behalf of the poor. First of all, he blows away all the conventional wisdom of his day about patronage, mutual back-scratching, and reciprocal arrangements so that people can engage in social climbing. It’s not the way of the Christian, he says. I wonder whether it says anything to today’s practices. What would it say, for example, to the way people today go along to ‘networking’ events to promote themselves?

No, says Jesus, invite people who can’t offer you an invitation back. Don’t see this as a way of getting something in return. There’s nothing particularly Christian about that. The Christian approach is to be a giver, whether or not people give back to us.

I mean, doesn’t this model the Gospel and God’s giving to us? What God gives to us in his grace and mercy, forgiving our sins, wiping the slate clean, and giving us a fresh start is way beyond what we can offer back to him. ‘What shall we offer our good Lord, poor nothings for his boundless grace?’ as the hymn puts it.

I want to challenge us all to consider this question: who can I bless this week who cannot necessarily bless me back? Who, among the poor, excluded, and marginalised in our society can I give to or serve?

We refer today to the idea of ‘paying forward’: when someone has given to us and we cannot give back, we give to someone else instead. It would be within the spirit of what Jesus teaches here for us to ‘pay forward’ the grace, mercy, and love we have received from him to others as a sign of our gratitude to him.

So, why not look for an opportunity this week? And come back next Sunday to tell your friends what happened.

Conclusion

The Pharisees were watching Jesus. Unbeknown to them, Jesus was watching them. He called them to replace greed with kindness, pride with humble service, and social climbing with giving.

And surely Jesus is watching us, too. He is longing to see us display these qualities as a witness to him.

What will he see us do this week?

[i] Joel B Green, The Gospel Of Luke (NICNT), p546.

[ii] Op. cit., p547.

[iii] Luke 11:37-44 and 16:14.

[iv] Philippians 2:7.

0

The Answer Should Be Jesus But It Sounds Like A Squirrel, Luke 13:10-17 (Ordinary 21 Year C)

Grey Squirrel

Luke 13:10-17

You’ve probably heard the story about the preacher who begins a children’s address by asking, ‘What’s grey, furry, has a tail, and runs up trees?’

After an embarrassed silence, one of the children says, ‘I know the answer should be Jesus, but it sounds like a squirrel to me.’

Grey Squirrel
Courtesy Wikimedia Commons, CC Licence 3.0

The answer should be Jesus. Well, in today’s reading the answer definitely is Jesus. He is the central figure in the story. Everything revolves around his interactions with people and their responses to him.

Firstly, Jesus and the crippled woman:

There is widespread agreement that the physiological condition the woman was suffering from was ankylosing spondylitis, which is an arthritic condition affecting the vertebrae. It leads to curvature of the spine and an inability to flex the joints. The condition is well-known today – I’m sure you know or have seen people with it – and to this day is still incurable.

But what about all that ‘spirit’ and ‘Satan’ language attached to it? The NIV says the woman was ‘crippled by a spirit’ (verse 11), and other translations say, ‘a spirit of weakness.’ Then, when Jesus argues with the synagogue ruler, he says that Satan had kept her bound for the eighteen years she had had the condition (verse 16).

Ankylosing spondylitis
Courtesy Wikimedia Commons, CC Licence 3.0

So is Jesus performing an exorcism here? Was the woman possessed? No. Luke doesn’t use that language. There is no ‘casting out’ or ‘delivering’. Jesus puts his hands on her (verse 13), which doesn’t usually happen in an exorcism.

What is this language, then? It is a recognition that the whole of creation is disordered due to sin. Not that the woman’s ill-health is a result of her personal sin, but that everything in creation is broken and needs healing and restoring. God’s mission in Jesus is to put the whole world to rights. It is why the mission of God’s kingdom that Jesus announces includes so many things: the forgiveness of sins, the healing of sickness, good news for the poor, releasing people from evil spirits, and so on.

It is therefore understandable that when the woman is healed, Jesus says to her, ‘Woman, you are set free from your infirmity’ (verse 12). No wonder she straightens up and praises God (verse 13).

Here we find the mission that the church is called to continue. If you want to know what we are about, it is this. We are called to set people free from all the brokenness in creation. We bring people to faith in Jesus through the forgiveness of their sins. We bring healing and restoration in every sense: physically, emotionally, relationally, socially, and spiritually. And all in the Name of Jesus.

We are not a religious social club, set up for us to enjoy the Sunday meetings, and perhaps the midweek ones too if we’re keen. We are not on mission just to fill church jobs so that the institution can continue.

We are here to proclaim the kingdom of God, where Jesus is on the throne, and his will is to be done on earth as it is in heaven.

We are here to proclaim that kingdom so that more people, like the crippled woman, will praise God as they experience this good news.

Or maybe you are here today as one of those who in one way or another has been crippled in the brokenness of our world. Then may it be that here in this community you find the Jesus who can straighten you and make you whole.

Secondly, Jesus and the synagogue leader:

When I went to my first appointment as a probationer minister, it wasn’t long before some people sidled up to me quietly and asked me rather hesitatingly a question that began with the words, ‘Do you drink?’ I thought the sentence would be completed with ‘Do you drink alcohol?’ but in fact it was ‘Do you drink tea?’ It turned out that not only was my predecessor teetotal, he also did not drink tea or coffee. Well, I say he was teetotal: there was one occasion when he accidentally and unknowingly ate trifle that had sherry in it and then asked for seconds.

Being teetotal was for many years an ‘identity marker’ for a high number of Methodists. If you knew one thing about Methodists, it was generally that they didn’t drink.

The dispute between Jesus and the synagogue leader is a power battle. It centres on two things. One is about identity markers to show who are truly God’s people. For in Jesus’ day, Sabbath observance was one such marker of a true Jew. The synagogue leader clearly thinks this is under threat, and so he accuses Jesus of breaking the Sabbath by healing the woman.

Shabbat (Sabbath)
Courtesy Wikimedia Commons, CC Licence 2.5

But Jesus’ words and actions show that you have to go beyond wooden interpretations of the Scripture to find the true identity markers of God’s people. There is something wrong with coming up with an understanding of Scripture that prevents God’s people from doing good.

Jesus still believed in the Sabbath, but not in this crude, wooden way. If you asked him about an identity marker for God’s people, he would talk about loving God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength, and loving our neighbour as ourselves. The identity marker is that we love God and love people.

All of which means there is another battle going on here between Jesus and the synagogue leader. It’s about who is the authoritative interpreter of Holy Scripture. Jesus exposes the hypocrisy of someone who is happy to see animals set free from their tethering on the Sabbath, but who is not happy to see a woman set free from infirmity to take her full place among the People of God at worship again.

It’s worth asking what our identity markers are, and how we have interpreted the Bible to come to those conclusions. What are we known for, and why? Are we known as hypocrites, or as people who love?

The Christian church has a particular problem with this in our society, not least due to all the sex abuse scandals. Only this last week we’ve seen the conviction of Chris Brain, the former leader of the Nine O’Clock Service in Sheffield. Most men outside the church think that clergy are either child sex abusers or ripping off the flock financially.

It’s an urgent task for us as Christians to make sure we are known as those who love God and love people. How are we doing that? How are we going to do that? It’s why I often encourage church members to pray a simple prayer each day: ‘Lord, who can I bless today?’

But that prayer is also worth extending corporately to the church. What if we asked together at our committees and other meetings, ‘Who can we bless as a church?’

Let’s make sure we share the same identity markers of God’s People as those Jesus advocated: loving God and loving people.

Thirdly and finally, Jesus and the congregation:

When he said this, all his opponents were humiliated, but the people were delighted with all the wonderful things he was doing. (Verse 17)

The crowd is on their feet, cheering. ‘Go, Jesus!’ It’s like he’s scored a goal and the stadium has erupted.

What does it mean for us today to take delight in the wonderful things Jesus does? It is about more than being the Jesus Fan Club. We are the supporters of Jesus, I suppose, but we are more than that.

When we take delight in the wonderful things Jesus does, we erupt in praise and worship. The best hymns and songs of worship are those that describe the amazing things God has done in Christ. It’s like the disciples on the day of Pentecost, when the assembled crowd of many nations observes, ‘We hear them declaring the mighty deeds of God in our own tongues.’

Courtesy StockCake, CC Licence 1.0 (Public Domain)

Declaring the mighty deeds of God. That is the Christian calling in a nutshell. Declaring the mighty deeds of God is both praise and mission. In worship, we tell God of our delight in his marvellous works. In mission, we declare those works to the world.

Let us dwell on the wonderful things Jesus has done and is doing. Let us rejoice in what he did two thousand years ago, from healing a crippled woman to dying on the Cross for our sins. Let us also rejoice in what he is still doing today. Who here knows that Jesus has done something special for them? Have you shared it with any of your church family here?

I am sure there will be some of you here today who know that in the last seven days since we gathered together for worship, Jesus has done something for you. It might be big, it might be small. If you haven’t already told someone since arriving this morning, then I encourage you to mention it as you chat with your friends over tea and coffee after the service.

Don’t be shy about this! We are family. We accept one another. We love to hear each other’s good news. And what could be better than to talk about the work of God in our lives and celebrate together.

Why do this? Well, for one thing it has an effect upon the atmosphere here. Imagine what it would be like for a stranger or a newcomer to walk into a community that was full of joy because of what God has done.

For another, if we know God has done something for us then that can be an encouragement to others. There will be people among us who are struggling or discouraged, and for whom it could be a tonic to hear that God has not retired but is still active.

Further, talking together about our delight in what Jesus has done is good practice for those times when we take a bit of courage to tell our friends and family outside the church about our faith.

And most important of all, should not God receive the glory due to his Name for all his amazing works?

I love the story in the Old Testament where the Temple is dedicated, and the cloud of God’s glory comes in such overwhelming power that the priests cannot even remain standing to do their duties. What would it be like if our joy and thanksgiving for the work of God were so tangible that a visitor would spontaneously say, ‘Truly God is among you?’

1

Create a website or blog at WordPress.com

Up ↑