Category: Sermons

Sermon: The Temptations Of Jesus In The Big Story

Luke 4:1-13

During my first sabbatical, I went on a creative writing course. The timing was rather iffy – it was a couple of weeks before Debbie was due to give birth to our daughter, our first-born. I was allowed to sit in the seminars with my mobile phone on the desk, switched on. The one occasion it rang was on a morning when I knew Debbie was seeing the midwife, and I rushed out to answer the call. Other participants on the course said I was as white as a sheet – although surely budding writers could have come up with a more original image!

Fortunately, baby Rebekah was too busy inside the womb enjoying Debbie’s cravings for Cadbury’s Crème Eggs to consider a minor inconvenience like birth. And so I got through the whole week, learning from writers who specialised in a wide range of fields, from journalism and radio to – er – romantic fiction. (Not quite my favourite genre of literature.)

But it was the romantic novelist whose input stayed most with me, and I say this not only as a man (who would not like such books) but also as someone who rebelled against the teaching of English Literature at school. Far too girly and nothing like as useful as science, I thought then.

No: the romantic novelist taught us some important elements about how to tell a story well. You had to have an introduction which got you into the problem that the story was to solve. Most of the book was about the tension of trying to resolve the problem. Finally, it is resolved and at that point you finish the story quickly rather than stringing it out. She also introduced us to the ‘back story’ – that is, the lives of the characters before their appearance in the story.

I share all this, because when we come as we always do at the beginning of Lent to the account of Jesus’ temptations in the wilderness, we often speak of it as a story in its own right. However, it is not. The signs are there at the beginning and end of our reading. We begin with Jesus returning from the Jordan (verse 1), which tells us this is following on from what we have just read, and we end with the devil departing from Jesus ‘until an opportune time’ (verse 13).

In other words, this is an episode, not the whole story, and it has clear connections with what surrounds it. So this morning I want to explore the temptations within the big story of Jesus and the Gospel. We’ll take four key elements of the episode and set them in a bigger context.

Firstly, I want us to consider the role of the Holy Spirit in the episode and the bigger story. Our reading begins with Jesus ‘full of the Holy Spirit’ yet ‘led by the Spirit in the wilderness’. Is that what we expect the Spirit-filled life to look like – a wilderness time? The relationship so far between Jesus and the Spirit has been warm. He has been conceived by the Holy Spirit, and he has just been baptised in the Jordan, where the Spirit has descended upon him. Yet for all these positive experiences of the Holy Spirit, now Jesus finds that the same Spirit leads him in the wilderness, that is, in a bleak and parched place.

What’s more, Luke’s language is forceful. ‘Led by the Spirit’ is a rather weak translation, and it makes us think of the sometimes fuzzy or sentimental ways in which Christians say they ‘feel led’ to do something. But the word Luke uses means ‘to be thrown out’. It conjures up the hurling of a ball – say, like a cricketer fielding on the boundary and vigorously flinging the ball back to the wicket-keeper. Jesus is ‘flung’ by the Spirit in the wilderness.

How can this be so? How can the wilderness be in the purposes of God? Isn’t the Holy Spirit the ‘Comforter’? Don’t we just expect warm, glowing experiences of God when the Spirit is present in fullness?

Apparently not. Wilderness experiences can be just as much a part of the Christian pilgrimage as the dizzy, thin-air ecstasies of the mountain-top. To get the Israelites from Egypt to the Promised Land required a time in the wilderness. When Israel rebels some centuries later and is unfaithful to the Lord by worshipping idols, the prophet Hosea says that God will woo his people in the wilderness. It can be in the wilderness seasons of our lives that God strips things away from us so that our devotion to him is renewed. The comfortable things on which we rely, the good things which we have elevated too highly in our lives – these he puts aside for a season so that we may remember who our first love is.

Perhaps that is one of the purposes of a Lenten exercise – to consider again the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ as being worthy of devotion before and above all else. How dangerous it is when faith becomes corrupted into a hobby.

And that leads us to our second theme, namely that of self-denial, seen in the way Jesus fasted during the forty days (verse 2). Those of you with good memories will remember the days of an annual event in churches called ‘Self Denial Week’. For one week, we lived differently. Now I think those events can be helpful, but only if they are signs and symbols of a wider commitment to self-denial. Jesus didn’t simply fast for forty days and then think, “Great, now I can get back to self-indulgence.” Nothing of the sort. He rebuffs the first temptation to turn stones into bread (verse 4). He refuses to worship the devil (verse 8), because that will subvert all he has come to do. He will not go for the spectacular show-off event of diving off the Temple like a religious stuntman (verse 12).

Why? Because all three temptations go against his core mission, which is based around denying himself in order to love and serve others. This is what he came to do. Oh, we see plenty of evidence that Jesus enjoyed life. Religious killjoys can take no true inspiration from him. However, from the Incarnation to the Cross, his is a life and ministry of self-giving.

Does this have an application for us? Although people are having to be more careful financially in the last five years, it is apparent that our culture is based not on self-denial but on self-fulfilment. We are our own gods. Our politicians encourage our belief that the economy must always grow. As one Christian website put it the other day,

Every day, we are bombarded with the message that equates the “good life” with the “goods life.”

And whatever difficulties we are facing, the fact remains that we live in the wealthiest county in this country. At my first staff meeting in this circuit, one of my colleagues asked this question: ‘Is the Gospel against Surrey?’ Because it might be. And it might be that part of our witness involves self-denial.

Thirdly, I want us to dwell on that repeated title for Jesus, Son of God. Twice the devil begins a temptation with the words, ‘If you are the Son of God’ (verses 3 and 9). If? Jesus has just had a profound experience of the Holy Spirit at his baptism where he has heard a voice from heaven referring to him as God’s Son. The work of the Spirit in his conception is a sign that he is the Son of God, according to Gabriel at the Annunciation. If he is the Son of God? He is the Son of God! The wider, big story is there in those words!

Yet here is the attempt to undermine the core of the story. If. It’s like the snake in Eden asking, “Did God really say …?” Here is an attempt to slice the ground from under the feet of Jesus, just as the enemy does with us. Just enough of a voice to make us disbelieve what God has said and done. That’s all it takes.

Now for us it can’t come in terms of ‘If you are the Son of God’, because none of us can be Son of God in the unique way Jesus is. But the devil can do it in a way relevant to us. ‘If you are a child of God’; ‘If you are a Christian’, and so on. It can be in the form of, ‘Are you really a child of God? Are you sure that God loves you? Someone like you? If you were a real Christian, you wouldn’t have done that.’ Does that sound familiar? Subtly we have been switched from focussing on the love and grace of God to majoring on our failures.

So beware of that voice – not a still, small voice but a quiet, insidious voice. Jesus at his baptism had not simply been reminded of his unique divine status, he had been reminded that he was loved with an everlasting love before he had even set out to begin the ministry for which he had come. And God wants each one of us to know that we too are loved with no strings attached. He loves us first. He loves us because he loves us. This is the foundation of anything and everything that we can do in a spiritually healthy way as Christians: knowing that we are loved unconditionally by the Father.

Fourthly and finally, battle is joined over the Scriptures. Every time Jesus is tempted, he squashes the attack with his Hebrew Bible: ‘It is written’ (verse 4); ‘It is written’ (verse 8); ‘It is said’ (verse 12). The devil cottons onto this, and even tries quoting Scripture in the final temptation (verses 10 and 11).

Again, we need to see this as a thread in this episode that is seen in the bigger story. The early chapters of Luke’s Gospel have been stuffed full of quotations and allusions from the Hebrew Bible. The coming of Jesus the Messiah is the central event in the biggest story of them all, the story of God’s redeeming love. Not only that, I believe Jesus is very intentional about the particular verses he quotes in response to the temptations. I don’t think he sits there simply thinking, “What verse would be good to use here?” Every verse he cites comes from Deuteronomy, a book centred on Israel’s own wilderness experience. He sees the temptations in the framework of the bigger story, too. It’s the devil who can’t quote anything that parallels the big story that is going on here. His quotations come from elsewhere in the Scriptures, they are random quotations, fine in their place, but irrelevant to notion of God’s people and God’s Son in the wilderness.

Perhaps this illustrates the dilemma we can face as Christians. We know the Bible is our source book, our supreme insight into God’s ultimate authority in Jesus Christ. Yet we also know how it can be misused, and have probably done so ourselves, unwittingly at times. Sometimes we have been Pharisees, quoting Scripture rigidly, and hurting people with it.

I believe that if we set ourselves to follow not only a disciplined, regular reading of Scripture but also disciplined methods of doing so, we shall have more of a chance of using Scripture spiritually and responsibly. It will not be for everyone to use the academic disciplines that preachers and ministers deploy, but there are age-old, tried and tested methods known in Christ’s church. Yesterday at Addlestone we had a half-day of prayer, and during that time I taught two of them. One is called Ignatian Bible Reading, which involves a sanctified use of the senses and the imagination. The other is called Lectio Divina, where we read the text, meditate on it, pray through what it is saying to us and then seek to live out the text. The great spiritual writer Eugene Peterson has said of Lectio Divina that  it is

A way of reading that intends the fusion of the entire biblical story and my story.[1]

And if indeed the temptations of Jesus are an episode in the bigger story of redemption, then would it not be good in all that we do this Lent to seek to find where our story fits into the big story of God’s saving love in Christ?

[1] Eugene H Peterson, Eat This Book, p 90.

 

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Sermon: Eternity Versus Meaninglessness

Ecclesiastes 3:1-22

How many of you drifted back to your youth in the 1960s when you heard today’s Bible passage and started humming this under your breath?

Of course, in the spirit of the folk-rock revolution at that time, Pete Seeger changed the last line about ‘a time for war and a time for peace’ to ‘A time for peace, I swear it’s not too late.’

Or perhaps you have memories of funerals where those opening eight verses about a time for everything from ‘a time to be born’ to ‘a time to die’ (verses 1-2) have been read, and we may say that at death a person’s time has come.

But rather than default to the popular associations of this passage, we need to ask what problem the Preacher in Ecclesiastes is struggling with. I suggest to you that in this chapter he is grappling with the question of eternity. The faithful people of his day understood the idea of God’s eternal nature, but they didn’t have the perspective Christians have of eternal life. Not for them the understanding that Christ’s resurrection brings, and the hope it carries with them. There is very little in the Old Testament that connects with that.

The Preacher navigates three issues that we struggle with, and he knows they all require the setting of eternity. Let’s explore them together.

The first is the question of time. So yes, we’re into those first eight verses about there being a time for every activity under the heavens (verse 1). The point of the language here is that most of these areas of life are ones where we have some control over the decision-making, even though they don’t always sound like that in English. For example, we have no control over our ‘time to be born’ but the Hebrew is more about ‘a time for birthing’ and while expectant mothers can’t have complete control over when they give birth, the Preacher is alluding to all those decisions we freely make which lead up to the birth of a child. Similarly with ‘a time to die’: to a large extent we cannot control that, but we do make decisions over the years which contribute hugely to the outcome.

What Ecclesiastes is facing us with here, then, is the whole question of how we make decisions in the space and time allotted to us. Life is filled with decision-making. In our (still) wealthy western consumer society, we are faced with even more decisions. Go to the supermarket and view your options in the different categories of food. Just to type in the word ‘tomatoes’ on Tesco’s website returns 175 results for the Sandhurst store that makes online deliveries to Knaphill.  We have so many decisions to make, some important, others trivial, that we can become fatigued by the very need to do so. Go into my favourite world of computing and one reason a company like Apple has become so popular is because it has narrowed down the choices for people and made life easier.

Some of this for us is what is called a ‘first world problem’ – that is, we who live in a rich country are faced with many more possibilities than someone living in a famine-ravaged region of Africa. And that is undeniably true. However, all Christians have a responsibility to make good decisions in life, in the light of eternity.

I am not of course talking about seemingly trivial decisions. This is not a sermon about how to decide what shirt to put on in the morning, or whether to buy a Mars bar. I am not suggesting that we start seeking specific divine guidance over such matters. We have a range of decisions to make in life. In some cases, I believe we need to consult God specifically, and in others he has given us the freedom and responsibility to make good moral and ethical choices.

The point for all of us is that our decision-making in life has significance. If life ended in the grave and that was all there was, then despite what the atheists say, life would be emptied of all meaning. But because we believe there is more, and because we believe that our choices in this life impact the life of the world to come, Christians can rejoice that their decisions have meaning and importance. I do not say this so that we feel terrified about the consequences of every potential decision, but rather to encourage us. Whenever we thoughtfully and prayerfully engage in a life choice, doing so because we want to please Christ and work for his kingdom, then we are putting small yet eternal building blocks in place for the life of the new heavens and new earth that he will bring with him when he appears.

Be encouraged, then, that the holy decisions you make now will play out for eternity.

The second issue to think about this morning is our toil. Two weeks ago in the evening service, where we looked at the opening verses of Ecclesiastes in greater depth than we were able to in that morning’s all age worship service, we touched on the subject of work. To the Christian, work is something that was created as good by God, yet which was tainted with frustration and struggle through sin, yet which is redeemed through the resurrection of Jesus, in very similar terms to what I have just said about our decision-making. The work we do now ‘in the Lord’ is not in vain, but will be taken up into the kingdom of God.

Here, in chapter three of Ecclesiastes, we revisit that but go a little wider. The Preacher wonders what workers gain from their toil (verse 9), recognising the burden (verse 10) that although God has made everything beautiful in its time and set eternity in our hearts, we cannot fathom what he has done (verse 11). However much we labour and toil, and however much we know there is an eternal context, we still struggle to understand the meaning and purpose of what we do.

I have heard people talk about their sense of futility in their daily jobs. Some have thought that by giving up a regular job and working for the church or a Christian organisation, they would find greater fulfilment. It isn’t always the case. The other morning, I called in here at KMC after the school run and chatted with our friends who run the Pied Piper Pre-School. It was about fifteen minutes before any parents and carers were due to drop off their children, and Karen joked with me that I had arrived too early to play on any of the soft toys.

“Sometimes,” I said, “you don’t know how attractive an option that would be.”

Many – perhaps most, or even possibly all – of us go through periods of feeling like work is little more than a pay packet at best. How can we find some meaning and significance in that part of life? Graham Dow, who is now a retired Anglican bishop, gave this some thought when he was a tutor training ordinands for the ministry. He used to ask new students to write an essay about the jobs they worked in before their training. Many would refer to the opportunity for Christian witness at work, but few saw their previous careers as fulfilling a Christian calling. But Dow claimed there were three major purposes for all kinds of good work (not just ‘church work’) in the Scriptures[1]:

  1. Creative management of God’s world;
  2. Moral management for the good of all;
  3. A community of good relationships.

I cannot promise that when you arrive at the office tomorrow morning you will find that all eight hours (or however long) you spend there will suddenly  become fulfilling. Sin and futility will still have their say. But I can suggest that if you can look for the possibilities that in your daily work you can either creatively manage part of God’s world, or exercise moral management for the common good, or you can contribute to a community of good relationships then you will start to make connections between the eternity that God has set in your heart and the purposeful work of him who has made everything beautiful in its time.

The third issue we need to face in the light of eternity is testing. In the last few verses of the chapter, the Preacher gives us various bits of data that sum up the conundrum of living. He tells us there is nothing new in life (verse 15). He speaks about wickedness supplanting justice (verse 16), yet trusts that there will be a time for God’s justice (verse 17). God’s testing of human beings simply exposes us as no different from the animals, because like them we die (verses 18-21), so enjoy your work while you can (verse 22).

A famous Christian physicist and neuroscientist of a previous generation, Donald Mackay, used to bemoan a line of thinking that he called ‘nothing buttery’. No, it wasn’t anything to do with margarine or low fat spreads, for Mackay ‘nothing buttery’ was the idea that something or someone was ‘nothing but’: for example, in the terms of our passage, human beings are ‘nothing but’ animals; human beings are ‘nothing but’ mortal creatures. Mackay said it wasn’t the statement that people are animals or that people are mortal that was the problem. The problem was to say they were ‘nothing but’ that.

And that’s the difficulty here at the end of Ecclesiastes 3. If we say that humans are nothing but animals, then where is the special sense of dignity we feel? If we say that human beings are nothing but mortal and will die, then where do we stand in the context of eternity, because everything we do returns to dust and that’s that?

Mackay would say we are animals and we are mortals, but we are more than that. We are more than animals, because we are made in the image of God. While we share characteristics with the animal world, we have a special dignity due to the divine design. And yes, we are dust and to dust we shall return – but we shall not stay there. The God of eternity will one day raise us from the dead with new bodies animated by the Holy Spirit, and we shall live rejoicing in God’s new creation.

These are the truths to sustain us when life tests us, and test us is surely does. We do see injustice. People die, and one day we shall join them. Nothing lasts. Those who live without God may make brave statements about finding beauty and wonder within the confines of this life, but ultimately – on their own admission – it all disappears.

In contrast, the Christian can live with a sense of hope and purpose in the face of the bleak hand that life sometimes deals us. That doesn’t mean we know all the answers now. We have to hold on with what my former college Principal George Carey used to call a ‘reverent agnosticism’ – we don’t know, but we trust God. We too may walk in a dark tunnel, but we have reasons for our faith that we shall one day walk into the light.

However, I would hate for that promise to come across in some glib way. I have known times in my life when the darkness has seemed too intense, too all-encompassing. Only later have I known it was worth hanging on.

But because of my experiences, let me offer you the gentle word of hope that one day you will find the light again. Whatever life tells you, and however desolate the picture the Preacher of Ecclesiastes is at times, hear this promise and tuck it away in your mind: resurrection light is coming.

[1] Graham Dow, A Christian Understanding of Daily Work, Grove Books Pastoral Series #57, 1994.

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Sermon: Intercession

This Sunday, I get to preach in a sermon series on prayer.

1 Timothy 2:1-7

The Christian playwright Murray Watts tells a story of how in his early days in the profession he was waiting at a bus stop with his fellow playwright and actor Paul Burbridge. Fed up with waiting for a bus to come, they decided to pray for one. While they closed their eyes and prayed, a bus came … and went past. Watts says that has always been a reminder to him of Jesus’ words to ‘Watch and pray.’

So how do we pray when it comes to intercession – that is, praying for human need? Our passage gives us some answers, but some of what it says doesn’t always correspond with the way we typically pray, either on our own or in Sunday services. It may be that these verses provide a corrective to the ways we often pray.

There are three questions I think this text will help us with. They sound obvious questions with obvious answers, but I’d like us to pause and hear the answers that are actually given, rather than the ones we would give us a reflex response.

Firstly, how do we pray?

First of all, then, I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings should be made for everyone (verse 1)

What do you make of these different words Paul uses for prayer here? ‘Supplications, prayers, intercessions and thanksgivings’ give us a range of prayer.

Supplications are usually prayers for ourselves. Some of us are reluctant to ask God for things for ourselves. Perhaps we think it’s selfish or greedy. Maybe you’re like me and when you were a child your parents didn’t have much money, so you got used to the idea that with your earthly parents you asked for little or nothing, and then you transferred that over to your relationship with your heavenly Father. In my case, it took some special experiences of answered prayer in my early to mid-twenties before I could begin to feel confident that I could ask God for big things for myself in prayer. I’m still careful and wary of my motives, especially when I want to ask for something I think I will like. Habitually I make major purchases a subject of prayer, and if it something that appeals to me – such as a new computer – part of my praying is to ask God to show me whether this is something I really need or whether I am just lusting after the latest technology. I certainly prayed before buying the iPad you have seen me using lately.

Prayers [and] intercessions probably go together. These are our requests for others. When we intercede, we are the go-between person, connecting those in need with God. It is a priestly role, representing human beings to God. However much some of our other Christian friends may call some of their ordained people ‘priests’, the New Testament sense is that all Christians are priests. We have the privilege of representing people to God, and representing God to people.

If that’s the case, then intercession is a privilege. We are invited into the throne room of God with our prayers for others. Yet if you’re anything like me on this one, sometimes the regularity and even the monotony of intercession make it dull. The sense of privilege gets worn away over time. So let’s pause for a moment and remember what a remarkable privilege it is. As the old hymn writer put it:

Large petitions with thee bring
Thou art coming to a king.

And linked with that sense of privilege, let’s note that the last word used in the ‘how’ of prayer is thanksgivings. Is this something we overlook, too? Intercession is linked with gratitude, because God answers prayer. Oh, I know we sometimes struggle to see the answer, and we often have to wait for him to do something, but answer he does and when he does it is only right to bring our thanksgivings as well as our requests.

This is something that Knaphill has tried to build into its practice of prayer. The church has a prayer chain. If someone has an urgent need of prayer, it is circulated around the people on the prayer chain and they will pray. But we also ask the person requesting prayer to let us know what God does in response to those prayers, so that we can report what happened and give thanks to God for all he has done.

Probably the only area of weekly public intercessions that includes thanksgiving is when we thank God for the departed in Christ. That’s good, but there is so much more to thank him for, when we consider all he has done for us in response to our prayers.

Secondly, who do we pray for?

for everyone, for kings and all who are in high positions (verses 1b-2a)

How many of these people are Christians? Few indeed. We are to pray ‘for everyone’ – and Christians are a minority. We are to pray ‘for kings and all who are in high positions’ – well, in the days of this letter very few Christians held high office. But we seek the same amount of blessing for those who do not know Christ, or who are yet to know Christ, as for any Christians in need. It is the job of the Christian as part of mission to bless the world. We are not simply to rail against the aspects of life that we do not like, even if there is a place for a prophetic word against sin. We are also to bless those we believe to be outside the kingdom of God. It is like the days of Jeremiah. When some of the population of Judah was carried off to pagan Babylon by Nebuchadnezzar’s army, Jeremiah wrote them a letter, in which he told them to bless the place to which they had been taken (Jeremiah 29).

So can we ask ourselves, how can we bless the world where we live? Much of that will of course be by practical action, but it needs to be done on a foundation of prayer. Are there neighbours or colleagues we are praying for? Do our friends know that if they are in trouble, we would be willing to pray for them? Think: what might happen if your friend suddenly realised that Jesus had shown up in her life?

But as well as the general everyone, let us also think about the specific kings and all who are in high positions. Now we often pray for such people in our public intercessions. We pray for the needs of the world, we pray that rulers and governments will act with justice and for the sake of peace. All of that is good and I would not wish to stop it. However, Paul has other things in mind.

Note how this is linked with the reference in the next verse to ‘God our Saviour’. Not only is it true that God is our Saviour, Paul is reminding Timothy that these kings and rulers are not saviours[1]. Some of them expected to be acknowledged as saviours: think of the claims to divinity by Roman emperors, for example. This, then, is prayer that puts things in perspective – God’s perspective. Today we have other people and forces in society who want to claim that they can ‘save’: think of the inflated promises made for consumer goods, to take one example. Intercessory prayer that remembers God is our true Saviour dethrones these idols from their pedestals.

We need to dethrone these pretenders to the throne of God in our own lives, of course, and it is also a vital task for Christians to pray that idols will come crashing down in society. In that respect, is it too irresponsible to wonder whether the financial woes of the last five years have at least in part been a bringing down of false economic gods that have wrongly laid claim to our worship? Does prayer not begin to clear the ground, spiritually speaking, for what God wants to do in truth and love in a society?

And that leads to the third and final question: why do we intercede?

Again, it probably seems like there is an obvious answer. We want things to get better. We want people to be healed. We want to see justice and peace.

Well, yes indeed to all those things! They can all be signs of God’s kingdom, and therefore such prayers are consistent with the Lord’s Prayer, where we pray for God’s kingdom to come, for his will to be done on earth as in heaven. But Paul goes further:

so that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and dignity. This is right and is acceptable in the sight of God our Saviour, who desires everyone to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth. (Verses 2b-4)

The part about leading ‘a quiet and peaceable life’ is probably there because the early Christians were a small and insignificant group of people, often not from influential strands of society. They could not hope to make a big political difference in their culture – and remember, it wasn’t a democracy as we know it, anyway. The best they could hope for was the chance to live undisturbed by persecution. Millions are the Christians today for whom that is also true. They need our prayers.

Beyond that, the ‘why; of prayer goes to another kingdom of God theme: the spread of the Gospel. ‘God our Saviour … desires everyone to be saved,’ says Paul, and he goes on in the remaining verses to talk about the key rôle of Jesus as mediator between God and humankind. Paul wants Christians to pray for those in authority so that the climate will be right in a society for the unfettered spread of the Gospel.

Now there are certainly Christian traditions that pray regularly for the Gospel to reach more people at home and abroad. The trouble is, it’s not one of our strengths. You rarely see anything like that alluded to in official liturgical intercessions, and it doesn’t always come naturally to our lips when our preachers construct extempore intercessions, either. It has slipped off our radar – which is all the more strange when you consider how concerned we become about the decline in church attendance and membership. Wouldn’t you think that one thing we would want to pray for was for more people to start following Jesus Christ and becoming part of his community, the Church? This is something we need to recover.

Certainly we need to lead by example by including this in our weekly public intercessions, and – I would suggest – in our Thursday morning prayers here. But then we also need to follow through in our own private devotions. I don’t know what you include in your private prayers at home – I hope you do pray regularly! One thing we could include is a list of people we know who do not yet know and follow Jesus. Should we not be consistently praying for such people, that the Holy Spirit will be at work in their lives to show Jesus to them?

It is said that the famous evangelist D L Moody had a long list of people he prayed for. By the time of his death, all but two of them had found Christ. I wonder whether he went to his death sorrowful about those two.

If so, he needn’t have despaired. After he died, both of them became disciples of Jesus.

Friends, the question of people becoming committed Christians is a spiritual issue. It will not be solved simply by adopting a programme or a set of techniques. It needs to be handled spiritually, and that at very minimum means prayer.

In fact, what of value does happen in the kingdom of God without prayer? Let us commit ourselves to it.

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Sermon: Idols And Vanity (Ecclesiastes 1:1-11)

We start a new sermon series at Knaphill this Sunday on the book of Ecclesiastes. The morning service will be all age, but this is the sermon I plan to preach in the evening, going into more depth than we can in the morning.

Ecclesiastes 1:1-11

This weekend, Debbie has been indulging her love of musicals, going to see ‘Wicked’ with one of her best friends. Although she also loves moving and emotional shows such as ‘Les Miserables’, I think she mainly enjoys the bouncy, singalong nature of a musical. It goes with other parts of her musical taste, such as her love of Abba – something she has imparted to Rebekah, who even did a school project about them last year.

It will not surprise you to know that I am rather different. I like more ‘serious’ rock music, even some of the miserable stuff. I like grumpy, curmudgeonly artists such as Van Morrison. I like the wonderful singer and guitarist Richard Thompson, who sometimes deals in very bleak themes – some of them even too dark for me:

So perhaps you won’t be surprised when I was pleased that someone asked us to have a sermon series on Ecclesiastes!

But actually there were more serious reasons. Ecclesiastes may be unconventional in its tone, compared to many other books in Holy Scripture. It does so to preserve an important voice for us to hear. Sometimes we are so quick as believers to jump in with our perspective on life based on the existence of God and of eternal life. Ecclesiastes helps us to hear what life is like when God is not placed at the centre (even if someone believes in God) and if everything ends with death.

And that’s why you get the cries of ‘Meaningless! Meaningless!’ or ‘Vanity! Vanity!’ that you may be familiar with in the older translations. One scholar has argued that the Hebrew refers to a fleeting breath, and so he translates this expression as ‘Breath of breaths! Everything is temporary.’[1] Nothing is going to last. It’s all transient. Enjoy it while you can. But soon it will be gone and the world will continue without you, as if you never happened.

Some people try to live like that. The rock guitarist Wilko Johnson has recently been in the news, talking about the fact that he has terminal pancreatic cancer and how he has turned down chemotherapy but is going out on what will genuinely be a farewell tour. In an interview with the BBC he said that cancer has made him feel more alive, because he is appreciating the detail of things before he dies. But that’s it. Then it’s all gone.

You will say as a Christian that while it’s a brave outlook on life, it’s missing something fundamental. Ecclesiastes helps us appreciate how such people think and live.

In a world that doesn’t put God at the centre, people look to other things to find fulfilment and purpose. And such things can become so pervasive in society that Christians get sucked into the lies, too. In our passage today there are two such examples, where created things take centre stage instead of the Creator, and if we’re not careful, we Christians can absorb these values as much as everyone else. So I’m going to reflect on these two things in this sermon from a Christian perspective. There will be quite a few more as we progress through the book in the next few months.

The first is our work:

What do people gain from all their labours
at which they toil under the sun? (Verse 3)

What’s the point of loading all your sense of self-worth, achievement and meaning on what you accomplish in the world of work? As someone has once observed, “No-one ever wants inscribed on their tombstone, ‘I wish I’d spent more time at the office.’”

But some people do. Their career and promotion is all they care about. Families and friends are sacrificed on this altar. Perhaps they have been brought up since childhood to get a good job. As an uncle of my Mum’s told his children, “Make sure you work hard so that you are the one giving the orders, not taking them.” Their sense of identity and purpose is wrapped up in what they do at work.

And of course we collude with this in our society. Meet a person for the first time and after asking their name, the follow-up question is often, “What do you do?” We reinforce the idea that a person’s worth to society and to themselves is based on their employment status.

Yet we also know it can’t be all like that. I once had a manager at work who clearly lived to work, and made life unpleasant for those to instead worked to live. There is the catchphrase of some, “I owe, I owe, it’s off to work I go.” These people have more of a sense of the futility – the meaninglessness – of work. And that sense of frustration at work has quite early roots in the Bible. After Adam and Eve sin, God tells Adam that he will find his daily toil frustrating. Ultimately, all ambitions to make work the centre of our being are crippled by human sin and finish their days in dust and ashes.

However, when we make God the focus of our lives, our attitude to work changes. It doesn’t come out in Ecclesiastes 1, which simply knocks the idol of work off its pedestal and smashes it. But the wider Christian revelation gives a dignity to work, without letting it become a false god. When God sets the first humans to work, it makes employment a key part of human flourishing. It also means that good and worthwhile work is not limited to ‘religious’ jobs, as if what I do is superior to the work others do. Many jobs can fulfil the creation of mandate of exercising moral management for the Lord over elements of his creation.

And it’s more than our doctrine of creation that makes work worthwhile. As I’ve already said, sin turns work into toil, labour and frustration. Yet it can be redeemed, too, and we see that in the Resurrection. As some of you know, my favourite Bible verse over the last five or six years has been the final verse of 1 Corinthians 15, Paul’s great chapter on the Resurrection of Jesus. In that verse, verse 58, Paul urges his hearers to make every effort in all their work, because – he tells them – ‘your labour in the Lord is not in vain.’ All our work as Christians, whatever kind of work it is, will be taken up into the fullness of God’s kingdom, through the Resurrection, says Paul. It will not be futile, it will have value.

So – as Ecclesiastes says in dethroning the idol of work – death brings an end to everything. Indeed, ‘everything is temporary.’ But our faith does not end in death, it goes on to resurrection, and that is where we find meaning. Hence in the face of secular attitudes to work – either idolising it or seeing it as pointless – the Christian witness is one of hopefulness about work having a lasting value, when committed to Jesus Christ. Can we dedicate our work to him tomorrow morning?

The second idol is our senses:

All things are wearisome,
more than one can say.
The eye never has enough of seeing,
nor the ear its fill of hearing. (Verse 8)

How often we see today the attempt to gratify the senses as the way of finding pleasure and even fulfilment in life. It is no accident that more effort is put into making products visually appealing. Adverts are made to be persuasive, not with rational arguments about the superiority of something but by making a visual and emotional appeal. We live in front of screens – televisions, desktop and laptop computers, tablets, games consoles, smartphones and doubtless others yet to be invented.

The aural is another arena of appeal. What started when Gordon Selfridge became the first shop owner to turn shopping into an experience rather than a utilitarian necessity later became the advent of muzak in lifts and piped songs in shops and shopping centres. Certain chains even have their own dedicated programming that is like a radio station you can only hear in that shop.

If we continue with the senses, it wouldn’t be difficult to make a case for the elevation of taste in our culture. We have the rise of coffee shops that make most tea and coffee after church services look out of place, such that you can now go to the Christian Resources Exhibition each year and meet companies that will sell you the equipment to reach Starbuck’s or Costa levels of coffee in your church. (And let’s be honest, what would people outside the church expect these days?) We also have the powerful place of the celebrity chefs, where not only can a Nigella Lawson present her recipes in an overtly sensual way, Jamie Oliver can become a political influence, if only on a single issue of children’s school dinners.

And perhaps straddling all the sensory overload today is pornography, appealing to a multitude of human senses, making false claims about intimacy and satisfaction, then like a drug dealer leaving its customers addicted and desperate for stronger ‘highs’.

It’s not hard to see how the devotion to the satiation of the senses today is an idol, but one which comes crashing down in the face of decay and death. Beauty fades, senses weaken and all who have put their stock in living for those senses find life becoming futile.

Is there a Christian answer to this way of living? Surely there is. Some have responded by expecting Christians to live by denying their senses, and in limited ways that may be a calling for some. So some Christians may be called to be teetotal, as a witness to the fact that you do not need alcohol in order to be happy. Some Christians too may be called to celibacy, as a sign against our culture’s devotion to sex. Other disciples may take vows of poverty, in contrast to the way much of our world seeks sensory pleasure through material possessions.

But those acts of self-denial are not God’s calling for all people, especially because the very sensory experiences that people have made into idols are not fundamentally bad. They simply should not be the objects of our devotion. Only God has that right. If we put our hope in God first and foremost, then we can gratefully enjoy what our senses bring to our attention. As Paul told Timothy:

Command those who are rich in this present world not to be arrogant nor to put their hope in wealth, which is so uncertain, but to put their hope in God, who richly provides us with everything for our enjoyment. (1 Timothy 6:17)

Of course, even then putting God first is not then a ticket to get drunk on sensory overload. The same chapter reminds us that ‘godliness with contentment is great gain’ (verse 6) and calls on the wealthy ‘to be rich in good deeds’ (verse 18) and so ‘lay up treasure … for the coming age’ (verse 19). Yet when we do put God first and foremost, central in our lives, we may gratefully enjoy the gifts of his creation, returning further praise to him and sharing those riches with those around us, especially those who do not enjoy the many blessings we have.

And how pertinent to reach that point in our thinking tonight, in a week when a hundred aid charities have launched the biggest joint campaign since Make Poverty History, the Enough Food If initiative that is calling for sustained action so that everyone in the world can have enough food to eat. Christians putting God first and sensory enjoyment second can and should have a significant part to play in this movement. Is it not now more important than ever to ensure that we as Christians ensure that we treat our Lord as Sovereign over our lives, making everything else relative, for the sake of the world?

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Sermon: Maintaining The Unity Of The Spirit

It’s the Octave of Prayer for Christian Unity again, and I’m preaching at a united evening service today.

Ephesians 4:1-16

In my young Christian days, I used to go occasionally to charismatic renewal meetings held at a Catholic priory in North London – Christ the King, Cockfosters, where a wonderful priest called Dom Benedict Heron used to invite speakers from across the ecumenical traditions to inspire those who gathered.

One evening, however, someone gave a simple, short prophecy that has stayed with me ever since:

‘Weep, for my Body is broken.’

And I think that’s the default position we often adopt when it comes to Christian unity. The Body of Christ is broken. I wouldn’t deny it one bit. Schisms and arguments among and within churches are awful. It is an embarrassment to explain it to non-Christians. We have a hard job explaining it to ourselves, as well.

However, Ephesians 4 brings a different perspective. However much we may struggle with the disunity of the Church, Paul here assumes the unity of the Church. As I once heard an Anglican friend of mine, April Keech, put it: ‘Unity is a given’ in Ephesians 4.

Now I know, of course, that whoever Ephesians was written for, it wasn’t addressed to a group of different denominations like us. But even if part of the Christian unity struggle is about the unity we don’t yet have, another part we need to remember is the maintaining and growing of the fundamental unity we already do have. And it’s that which I want to address tonight: I’m not going to discuss how we deal with our differences over church government, the sacraments (or ordinances), and so on. We must have those discussions, but not this evening. I want to take the unity we all have, and look at what Paul says here are ways of building on it.

Firstly, unity is based in God. Listen for how God – whom we would later refer to as the Holy Trinity – crops up in Paul’s thinking as fundamental:

There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to one hope when you were called;  one Lord, one faith, one baptism;  one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all. (Verses 4-6)

One Spirit, one Lord and one Father are all central to unity. They are foundational. The unity of the Godhead is the basis for Christian unity. We, the people of God, are meant to reflect in our unity the unity of God.

Let me put it this way. Whenever I preach about the Trinity, I am fond of reminding congregations that the most basic statement about God made in the Scriptures is that  which is said in 1 John: ‘God is love.’ Love is the very nature of God. This is who and what God always is, always will be and always has been. Now how can it be true that God is love before creation? Surely we find an answer to that in the doctrine of the Trinity. The Father has always loved the Son and the Spirit; the Son has always loved the Father and the Spirit; and the Spirit has always loved the Father and the Son. So there is an internal unity of love within the Godhead.

But furthermore, love has to reach out beyond itself. Otherwise it is a kind of mutual narcissism. Hence God in love chose to create. Most commonly, for example, a married couple will express that love in the desire to have children. However, that doesn’t always happen and it doesn’t always happen at first. When I prepare couples for marriage, I ask them how their mutual love is going to reach out to others.

And so I see these aspects of God’s loving unity as needing to be reflected in the Church. There needs to be an internal unity of love that characterises our relationships. But that love within and among ourselves needs to reach out.

So let us ask first of all this evening whether our unity is reflected in our love for one another and our love for the world – ‘that they may be one, that the world may believe,’ as Jesus prayed.

Secondly, such united love is a challenge to our character. The unity of which Paul speaks in verses 4 to 6 is the reason why prior to that he calls the Church in verses 1 to 3 to ‘live a life worthy of the calling [we] have received]’, to be humble, gentle and patient.

I of all people should know this. I went to a Church of England secondary school, my first theological college was an Anglican one, and I married a Baptist. My best friend since the age of seven (and who was best man at our wedding) is a Catholic. Before coming here, I spent thirteen years working in ecumenical churches with Anglicans.

But … the Anglican chaplain at my secondary school described me as ‘a rabid Methodist’. (The Methodists might be surprised by that!) I was never more Methodist than when among Anglicans, but I am never less Methodist than when among Methodists. When I conducted my first infant baptism service in the ministry, it was on a Sunday when the Bible readings focussed on the baptism of Jesus. I made an idle joke in my sermon about ‘John the Baptist and Jesus the Methodist’, only to be introduced over lunch afterwards to some relatives of the twin baby girls, who were active members of … Millmead Baptist Church in Guildford.

It takes something to show humility and patience in building Christian unity. Sometimes we are so keen to trumpet the things we bring to the wider church that we forget the humility we need not to boast of our traditions but to receive with gratitude what our brothers and sisters offer us.

So I want to ask you if you can name what you appreciate about the other Christian traditions in our village. For me, I value the contemplative strands of Catholicism, the sense of history that my Anglican friends bring (we Methodists seem to think that church history only began in the eighteenth century) and the commitment to every member ministry that is at the heart of much of what the Baptist tradition values.

And that final example leads to the third and final point I want to share from Paul’s teaching in Ephesians 4 about unity. It is that unity requires diversity. I don’t simply mean the differences of opinion, referenced by the conversation at Christ Church Woking this afternoon between Steve Chalke and Peter Ould about Christianity and homosexual practice. Rather, I mean the diversity of gifts that we need in order to be more fully the Body of Christ.

So here, Paul talks about God’s gifts of ‘apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors and teachers’ (verse 11) to equip God’s people (verse 12). Now I’m not specifically going to look at those five callings, which themselves need to be more fully present in every congregation, in my opinion – and which all our institutional structures militate against, sadly.

But I do want to say that there is a wider issue for broader Christian unity, the unity we have been given and which we are to live out. It is this. When I was going to train for the ministry, a friend who in my younger days mentored me said to me, “Remember that no one church is the whole Body of Christ.” Many are the churches that fail because they think they should do everything. However, it is together that we receive the gifts of the Holy Spirit that all need in our work for the building of God’s kingdom.

That’s why a moment ago I listed some of the things I appreciate about the other Christian traditions represented in our village. To take just one of the examples I gave, let me say a little more about my appreciation for the more contemplative approach to the spiritual life that my Catholic friends bring. It is a much-needed corrective to the kind of spirituality often found in my tradition, that tends to value those who are busy and active. I am valued more for what I do and achieve than for a life of prayer. My tradition has an untold story of burnout. How fitting it is that our friends from St Hugh’s have invited the rest of us to participate in a Week of Accompanied Prayer in May – and how significant that the week in question ends with Pentecost. After all, if you know your Bible you will know that the Spirit fell on the disciples at Pentecost after a prolonged period of prayer.

I don’t want anyone to feel embarrassed about the good things their traditions enshrine, but I do want us to embrace the diversity of gifts among us. If we don’t, then the only Body of Christ we’ll have is an amputated one.

Indeed, that’s the danger if we don’t take Christian unity seriously. If we don’t see that our unity is based in the nature of God and that the God who is love calls us to love one another and his world, then we have lost something essential. If we don’t let the call to unity make us humble, we are going against the grain of Christ. And if we don’t embrace all the gifts God gives to his body, then we shall have a sick Body of Christ.

Of course maintaining unity is hard work – ask almost any married couple! But how can we who follow the Christ who went to the Cross bail out of the hard work? The prize is too great.

Let us make every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace. (Verse 3)

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Sermon: Epiphany Meets The Covenant Service

Matthew 2:1-12

The Feast of Epiphany, when Christ was revealed to the Gentiles in the visit of the Magi, is one that sometimes gets overlooked in Methodist churches, because it frequently clashes with the annual Covenant Service. Today, I thought I would try combining the two. The Covenant Service is the time when we renew our commitment to Christ, and the Magi are a great example of that. They arrive in Jerusalem saying they have come to pay homage to the child born to be king of the Jews (verse 2) and when they finally get to the house where the child is, they get down on their knees and do exactly that (verse 11). This morning I want to highlight some of the elements in this story that make them into true worshippers that we can emulate in our way in our day.

Firstly, they were listeners. They were more attuned than anyone else in the story to what God was saying and doing. They are the least likely candidates for that, yet that is true of them. They are pagans, they are Gentiles. They are astrologers, following a practice condemned in the Old Testament in the prophecies of Isaiah. They come to the land of God’s chosen people, yet they are the ones who are keen to know the purposes of God and act on them. You might think that Herod would know the Scriptures, but he hasn’t a clue and he has to call in the experts. You might think that those experts, the chief priests and scribes of the people (verse 4), would know their Scriptures. Well, they do, and they quote them. But they do nothing about them.

In this respect, it is sad to say that too many of us in the church are like either Herod or the experts. Either we don’t know our Scriptures at all, or we know them but we don’t put them into practice. It is a scandal that many professing Christians only engage with the Bible in a Sunday morning service. They listen to it being read but never pick it off the shelf in the week. And even among those who do read the Bible frequently, it is too common an attitude to read it and forget it.

In other words, we are shamed by people with less knowledge about the faith than we ourselves have.

In my youth and early adulthood, a relative we used to visit often as a family was a woman we called ‘Auntie Rene’. She wasn’t really an auntie, but she was a relative: she was my Mum’s cousin. But rather than get into complicated discussions about what kind of a cousin that made her to my sister and me, we called her ‘Auntie’.

She had poor health. In 1969 she was given six months to live, but – despite smoking – she stretched that six months out to eighteen years, and she finally passed away in the Spring of 1987. Sometimes we wondered about where she stood on matters of faith, but when she died, someone (I think it might have been my sister) discovered that by her bedside was a Bible. She had been reading Jeremiah.

As we talked about this, we came to the conclusion that in her life Auntie Rene had responded to as much light as she had come across, whether that was the full Gospel of Jesus Christ or not.

I suggest to you that the Magi are a group of people who respond to as much light from God as they find. It starts with following the star, it continues with going to Bethlehem when they hear about Micah’s prophecy and it ends with their obedience to the dream that leads to them avoiding Herod on their way home.

Now if that’s the case, what excuse do we have – we who have had decades of Christian experience? Maybe we feel we don’t know much about our faith – well if that’s the case, can we like the Magi start by responding to what light we already do have?

And if we do have some Bible knowledge, then will we start putting it into practice, unlike the chief priests and scribes? Christian teaching and learning is not simply about filling our heads with knowledge, it’s about assimilating what God wants us to do and then getting on with it.

Now that leads to the second element I want us to consider about the Magi: they were pilgrims. In other words, they went on a journey, a spiritual journey. Based on what light they had received from observing the star, they left their homeland. Based on what light they received when they heard Micah’s ancient prophecy, they travelled from Jerusalem to Bethlehem. Based on what light they received in their dream, they took a different route home. We would never have heard of them unless they had been willing to travel on a journey – that is, to be pilgrims.

Now surely the point about a pilgrim is that you travel somewhere with spiritual intentions, but in doing so you leave behind the familiarity of your home in order to arrive at somewhere unknown and in the process to encounter God. To go further in the spiritual life as a pilgrim requires getting off our familiar home territory to go to new places.

And that’s the challenge. How many of us are willing to move away from the places where we feel safe and comfortable in order to draw closer to Jesus Christ? Isn’t one of the problems with the church the fact that too many of us just want to keep everything familiar and cosy? Jesus calls us to an adventure. He calls us to what the Methodist Church called a few years ago ‘Holiness and Risk’.

There are so many areas where our unwillingness to be pilgrims onto new, uncharted ground means that the church withers. It can be in the area of evangelism, where any small efforts we make are all based on the assumption that people want to come to where we feel comfortable, in a church service, rather than us being willing to go to where they feel safe.

It affects our general profile in the community. Only the other day I was having to explain why the regular ecumenical lunch time meeting of the Knaphill ministers happens in a pub, rather than in the Christian coffee shop in the village. We feel it’s important to be off home territory and visible in the wider world. But some Christians think that anything other than doing things with overtly Christian tools is somehow wrong. Back in the 1980s, the Christian musician Steve Taylor satirised this in a song called ‘Guilty by Association’ with lines such as, ‘You’ll only drink milk from a Christian cow.’

More generally, our unwillingness to get away from the safe and the predictable afflicts any possibility whatsoever that the church might innovate in a creative way. Perhaps you’ve been told what the seven last words of a dying church are? ‘But we’ve always done it this way.’

Real disciples of Jesus are willing to go on pilgrimage. They will leave home territory behind to venture somewhere new as part of their longer journey to the New Jerusalem. It goes right back in our heritage to Abram, when he was called to leave his homeland. It is there in the incarnation of Jesus, who left the glory of heaven. We see it here in the account of the Magi. Why, then, do we not see it much in the life of today’s church? Might the New Year and our renewal of the Covenant be the time when we finally take this part of our Christian inheritance seriously?

Thirdly and finally, the Magi were givers. We had a bit of fun with this at Knaphill during the Christingle service on Christmas Eve. Following a throwaway comment, we based the whole service on the theme of ‘Elf and Safety’. We retold the Christmas story in dramatic form, but every now and again an elf would appear and object that something broke ‘elf and safety’ rules. For example, the donkey should not have been allowed to cover so many miles in such a short time, and it should have had a tag on its ear.

When it came to the arrival of the Magi, another elf sprang out when they produced the gold, frankincense and myrrh. He wanted to know whether they had an import licence for these goods.

I think some of us have trouble with the gifts of the Magi. They are so expensive and extravagant. Surely they are beyond us? Or maybe we don’t want to be challenged. So we resort to ancient explanations that the gold symbolises Jesus’ kingship, the frankincense his priestly role and the myrrh his death. We do so, despite Matthew never claiming that meaning in the text and despite none of the major commentaries seriously entertaining that interpretation.

But perhaps the key to understanding this example of devotion is not the contents but the container, not the gifts but the treasure box. The Magi ‘[opened] their treasure-chests’ (verse 11), and I think that is the call to us. What are our treasure chests? What are the things we treasure – which might be money, possessions, talents or a whole lot of other things? Our treasures may well not be gold, frankincense or myrrh, but there are aspects of our lives that are inordinately precious to us, and the Christian disciple lays them down before Jesus as an act of worship and commitment.

I believe that is something well worth thinking about as we make our solemn vows again this year in the traditional words of the Covenant Prayer. Our treasures may not be just money, talents or possessions. They may be people, ambitions or dreams we have had for our lives. All these we bring to the feet of Christ and say, “Here is all that is most precious to me. I offer it to you. Use it as you will.”

That was what made the Magi different. Herod was desperate to clutch tightly onto what he considered to be rightly his. The chief priests and scribes had great intellectual gifts, but those talents were not offered to the true King of the Jews. They were just intellectual dilettantes, not servants of God’s kingdom.

There may be ways in which our churches are mixtures of mini-Herods, priests and scribes and Magi. We have little Herods who secretly find Jesus a threat to their whole way of life. We have priests and scribes who are full of religious knowledge but empty when it comes to practical obedience. But we also have Magi, people who may not be the likely suspects but who actually are more committed to Jesus Christ than anyone else in the neighbourhood.

But in truth, each one of us may be a mixture of the three. Sometimes we are antagonistic towards what Jesus wants of us. Sometimes we are apathetic. And sometimes – thankfully – we are as passionate for Christ as the Magi were.

Let us identify these different aspects of ourselves this morning, so that we may put aside our Herod tendencies and our priestly and scribal complacency, in order that we may renew our to listen for God’s will and obey it the best way we know how; to strike out on the pilgrim way, even if that means going far from what we would call home; and to offer our treasures in devotion at the feet of Christ.

May that be the attitude of our hearts in a few minutes’ time, when we come to recite again the – truly – awesome words of the Covenant Prayer.

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A Brief Sermon For Christmas Eve Midnight Communion: The Christmas Covenant

Luke 2:8-20

Today in the town of David a Saviour has been born to you; he is the Messiah, the Lord. (Verse 11)

On Friday, Debbie and I took the children to the Wintershall Estate to see their annual nativity play. We began outside, witnessing Joseph accompanying Mary on a donkey, walking from a distance, picked out by a spotlight in the darkness of late afternoon December. Having then followed them to the inn, we found ourselves witnessing the shepherds. And while it rather stretched the imagination to behold a female shepherd singing ‘In the bleak midwinter’, one effective part of the play had those shepherds debating Israel’s history and hopes before they were shocked by the sudden appearance of the angel. It was a fitting context for what was to come in the angel’s message.

Why? When the angel says, “Today in the town of David a Saviour has been born to you; he is the Messiah, the Lord,” this is about the fulfilment of Israel’s hopes. It’s why we sing in the carol,

The hopes and fears of all the years
Are met in thee tonight.

The angel uses covenant language in announcing the birth of Jesus. Israel was well used to this. They had known it from the time they were on the borders of the Promised Land as described in the book of Deuteronomy. When Moses preaches back to them there their recent history, he does so in the format of an ancient covenant.

It was like this: a great king would make a covenant with a weaker group of people. The powerful king would bless the weaker party or nation by delivering them or protecting them in some way. In return, those he had saved would promise obedience to him in certain ways prescribed in the covenant. So, on the borders of the Promised Land, the covenant recalls that God, the great king, has provided a miraculous deliverance for the children of Israel from Egypt. Now, in return for his salvation, he asks them to follow his laws.

It’s similar here: the baby is called ‘the Messiah’. He is to be the great king who will deliver Israel, and hence he is also ‘Saviour’. Certainly, Israel was looking out for such a figure. The shepherds in the play at Wintershall recounted how their nation had been exiled in Babylon, but even after returning to their own land they had been invaded by Greece and now by Rome. They were like exiles in their own land.

Of course, with hindsight we know that the Messiah who was born, Jesus, would save his people in a different way from that which they expected. Deliverance from their sins was not to mean an army raised up against the Romans but a Saviour nailed to a Roman cross.

Furthermore, the Messiah’s coming to bring salvation is not just for the Jews, it is ‘good news that will bring great joy for all the people’ (verse 10, italics mine). What begins with the people of God will extend to the world.

The basic truth is clear: the long-awaited Messiah has finally come, and he is bringing salvation. We celebrate this at Christmas. Christmas will make complete sense with Easter: the One who came in poverty and weakness, ‘wrapped in cloths and lying in a manger’ (verse 12) will die in poverty and weakness, hanging on a Cross while soldiers gamble for his clothes. But in doing so, he will absorb all that the darkness will throw at him, and he will conquer evil. The first half of the covenant is clear: God’s king will save his people.

But what of the second half? The king saves a helpless people: what does he demand in return? Again, it is all clear in the angel’s announcement: ‘a Saviour has been born to you; he is the Messiah, the Lord’ (italics mine). Just as God saved his people from Egypt and then called them to obey his Law, so now Jesus the Messiah comes. He will save his people, and in response he calls them to recognise who he truly is – Lord.

In other words: salvation is freely given. God in Jesus brings it of his own initiative. It is not our doing. But while the gift is free, the appropriate response costs us everything. As Lord, he has the right to direct our ways. What is more, in the life of the Messiah he will show us that explicitly himself. He will not demand of us what he does not demand of himself.

However, it will be costly. In a world ruled by the Romans, to call someone Lord is to imply that the person who usually claimed the title of Lord is not. Caesar claimed to be Lord. To enter into covenant with God’s Messiah involves declaring that Jesus is Lord and the powers of the world are not. Jesus claims our ultimate allegiance, not the world.

Some Christians think that Christmas is just the prelude to the real message, that of Easter. But really they are of a piece. Both announce that the king has come. He is proclaimed at Christmas, and enthroned at Easter, on the Cross. Christmas proclaims Jesus as the Saviour, and Easter delivers on that proclamation. Christmas also says that the Saviour is the Lord, and Easter says he is declared as Lord in the Resurrection.

At Christmas, then, we see that Jesus is the fulfilment of God’s covenant with people. He is the King who comes to save his people. He is the Lord who calls all who receive that salvation to follow him as their Master.

This Christmas, may we come to worship the baby king who was given for our salvation and who commands our allegiance, not our tinsel.

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Carol Service Sermon: Shepherds Come, Shepherds Go

I’ve tried writing an address using an app on my new iPad called Haiku Deck. It’s a way of making simple PowerPoint presentations. You don’t get to do anything fancy with transitions, animations or anything like that. You just get to enter two lines of text and choose from some stunning Flickr images that have a Creative Commons copyright licence.

I’ve based this on the story of the shepherds in Luke 2:8-20. Obviously this isn’t a full script, but I hope there’s enough here for it to make sense. Let me know in the comments if it needs illuminating in any way.

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Sermon: The Good News Of John The Baptist

Tomorrow will be a milestone for me: the iPad arrived on Thursday, and so in the morning I shall preach my first paperless sermon in the thirty-five years since I first preached as a teenager. Here it is:

Luke 3:1-6

There’s no doubt about it: if you put together your dream team for ‘I’m A Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here’, John the Baptist would be on it. The man who lived in the desert and existed on a diet of locusts and honey would be a shoo-in for the bush tucker trials. In a cage, having insects dropped on him? Breakfast. Being forced to eat the private parts of strange Australian animals? Lunch. Any fading radio or television personalities seeking to re-ignite their careers by endearing themselves to the public through their endurance of humiliation would be blown away by J the B.

But sometimes we don’t get much past that aspect of John, those elements of his lifestyle that we condescendingly assume to be eccentric. Who has not secretly sniggered at the gospel descriptions of him?

There is far more to him, in terms of the way he prepares the way for the Messiah – which is why, part-way through Advent, we skip thirty years beyond Jesus’ birth to passages such as today’s. These six verses, which we might mistakenly dismiss as a mere preface to the real action, are packed with significance for the coming of the Christ.

What things?

Firstly, history.

In the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar – when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, Herod tetrarch of Galilee, his brother Philip tetrarch of Iturea and Traconitis, and Lysanias tetrarch of Abilene – during the high-priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas, the word of God came to John son of Zechariah in the wilderness. (Verses 1-2)

‘History is bunk’ was the foolish saying of Henry Ford, the car maker. It is a sentiment echoed by the so-called New Atheists today, who sneer at our scriptures on the basis that it is crazy to base our lives on writings from the Bronze Age.

But Luke – not for the first time – locates his story in space and time. ‘This is the year that it happened,’ he says, ‘and these are the people who were in power.’

Why does this matter? Because the coming of the Christ changed everything. There are such things as events that altered the course of history, and Luke makes the bold claim that the arrival of the Messiah is just that – indeed, the greatest such event in history. This is what we are marking. There are certain parts of our Scriptures where it is of little account whether they are historical, but this is one of many – and the pivotal one at that – where the fact of history is critical to the truth.

We celebrate at this time of year the decisive work of God in history. The singer Nick Cave once sang, ‘I don’t believe in an interventionist God’:

Well, this is not an interventionist God but the work of a God who is always at work in history, and who did his most significant historical work among the human race when he gave up his only begotten Son.

It is this God who is committed to changing history. It is this God who cares about the historical circumstances in which we find ourselves. The God who announced his Son through John the Baptist during the reign of Tiberius Caesar, under the delegated authority exercised by Pontius Pilate, Herod, Philip and Lysanias, and during the times of Annas and Caiaphas, is the God who is still at work in the reign of Elizabeth II, her Prime Minister David Cameron and of Mark Wakelin’s presidency of the Methodist Conference. Here and now, in December 2012, that God is present and at work for his kingdom through his Son and in the power of his Spirit.

What does that mean for us? God through Jesus is always committed to working for salvation. That includes now. Take a moment to reflect: where do we need to see God at work? Where does our world need to see God at work? The Advent message as John the Baptist heralds the coming King is that the King is still coming in salvation, because history is the arena where he works. That means us, just as much as the biblical story.

Our second theme is power. Tiberius Caesar, Pontius Pilate, Herod, Philip and Lysanias; Annas and Caiaphas. It’s quite a list, isn’t it? John the Baptist announces the coming Messiah in a context of these powerful people.

The snag is, John isn’t impressed by the powerful and the Gospel writers certainly weren’t, either. Pontius Pilate chose to save his own political bacon rather than do justice. Herod saved his adulterous marriage by executing John. Annas and Caiaphas conspired in the arrest of Jesus.

John, on the other hand, works on the margins, in the countryside (verse 3) and the wilderness (verse 4), far from the centres of power, just as Jesus was born in little old insignificant Bethlehem, not in the capital city of Jerusalem.

It raises a serious question for us about how we view power and influence. Ours is a culture that refers to the President of the USA as ‘the most powerful person on Earth’. We talk about politicians being ‘in power’. It is also exercised by the media and by multinational companies. We defer to the influence of celebrities.

And before we look too far down our noses at this culture, let us remember that the church falls into the same trap all too often as well. We like it when a famous person becomes a Christian, as if their testimony were more valuable than that of an ‘ordinary’ person. We think the Church is more effective when we lobby politicians. We are under a delusion that the most important people in the Church are the ministers, and especially those holding senior positions.

Does any of this make sense when John exercises his ministry off the beaten track? When the only time we know he came into contact with the powerful was when he criticised Herod’s adulterous marriage and paid with his life? It’s hardly the kind of life that would feature in Hello magazine, or get press releases in the daily papers.

Knowing this, I am fond of the expression coined by one Christian that what we are about in the mission of Jesus is ‘the conspiracy of the insignificant’. It is the sort of thing going on at Corinth when the Apostle Paul reminds them that not many of them came from influential parts of society.

So take heart if you are one of our world’s nobodies. You are precisely the sort of person God delights to use in the spread of his kingdom, as he reverses the values of our world. If he even sent his Son to be born in an obscure town and raised in another backwater, if he grew up as an artisan rather than a power broker, what do you think that says about his potential to use you in his kingdom purposes?

However, that still leaves a question especially for some Surrey residents. We include among our number people who are influential in ways that the world recognises. Should such Christians give up their roles?

By no means necessarily. There are a few such people featured among the disciples of Jesus in the Gospels, and occasionally in Acts and the Epistles. They clearly remained where they were when they were called by Christ. The distinctive Christian call to such people is surely to subvert the world’s love affair with power by not using it in self-aggrandising ways, but by seeking to use such positions for the welfare of others, as a voice for the voiceless not a cheerleader for the privileged, and in the fashion of a servant, contrary to expectations.

Thirdly and finally, having been firstly among the historians and secondly among the politicians and the powerful, then we are now among the civil engineers. Our third theme coalesces around images of roadworks:

‘A voice of one calling in the wilderness,
“Prepare the way for the Lord,
make straight paths for him.
Every valley shall be filled in,
every mountain and hill made low.
The crooked roads shall become straight,
the rough ways smooth.
And all people will see God’s salvation.”’ (Verses 4-6)

Straightened paths, filled-in valleys, mountains and hills flattened, crooked roads straightened, rough ways made smooth. As the arrival of winter here sees the increase of potholes in Surrey roads, so a Highways Agency project rather like this prophecy of Isaiah 40 that Luke quotes sounds very appealing to us.

But we generally interpret this as an image for the kind of message John the Baptist proclaimed, namely one of repentance. Although Isaiah 40 in its original context has a sense of smoothing out the way for God to lead his people on a highway back from Babylon to Judah, in the New Testament’s use in relation to John it becomes a metaphor for repentance. John is announcing that the King is coming, and so just as a town is cleaned up before a royal visit, so we need to straighten out the roads of our lives in order to be ready for Christ.

That much is certainly true. We need to get rid of our crooked ways if we are to be fit to receive the King. Advent needs to be a time of self-examination. Preparation for Christmas is not merely about completing the present-buying, writing the cards and finishing the annual letter. It is a time of spiritual preparation, which is why there are hints in earlier centuries of the Church that Advent was regarded as some kind of penitential season, almost like Lent. As the world is filled with lights outside, we need to shine lights inside to see how we are preparing our hearts and minds for the reign of God in Christ.

Yet let me suggest there is more to this than we sometimes suppose. There is here preparation that we need to do – ‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make straight paths for him’ but this is not just about commands to us. The rest of the prophecy is about promise – ‘Every valley shall be filled in, every mountain and hill laid low. The crooked roads shall become straight, the rough ways smooth. And all people will see God’s salvation.’

Not only are we commanded to change, God promises change. I believe this means a couple of things. One is the gospel reminder that the call to change our lives is never meant to be accomplished on our own. We are incapable alone of making ourselves into the people God wants us to be. But his command to turn our lives around is accompanied by the promise that he will be at work among us by his Spirit to fulfil those purposes.

However, I think there is even more here than that. If God promises that we shall change from crooked to straight, from rough to smooth, then I suggest that is not only about growing in holiness. I offer to you the thought that there is much that is rough and crooked in our lives that is not necessarily sin. We carry burdens, brokenness, damage and pain from so much of life and I believe God also promises the straightening out of these sorrows and defects, too. Is that not what Jesus also came to do, as well as call people to repentance, as his cousin John did? Just as I long for the day when I shall no longer have to slalom around the regular potholes in our road – well, I can hope! – so I long for the day when God will complete his work of restoration in every way.

If you thought, then, that everything about John the Baptist was severe, I invite you to think again. Yes, there is the challenge to repentance, but it comes in the context of the God who is always at work in history – including ours. It comes as good news from the God who is pleased to work among the nobodies and on the fringes. It comes as part of a rebuilding package for every part of our lives.

Let us celebrate the ministry of John the Baptist and every way in which he points us and the world to Christ.

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Sermon: The Advent Hope

1 Thessalonians 3:9-13 

A fortnight ago I preached on Mark 13:1-8 and said that despite certain appearances that chapter wasn’t about the Second Coming. Today, Advent Sunday, we start a new year in the Lectionary and we switch our main Gospel readings from Mark to Luke. The Luke reading set for today is the end of his equivalent chapter to Mark 13, and I would still contend that – despite appearances – it is more to do with the fall of Jerusalem to Rome than it is with the Second Coming.

Yet the Second Coming is a traditional theme for Advent Sunday. As we enter the season where we prepare to mark Jesus’ first coming, we also look forward to his appearing again – this time, in glory.

It was in remembering that emphasis for Advent Sunday that I decided instead to preach from today’s Lectionary epistle in 1 Thessalonians. There is no doubt that both of Paul’s letters to the Thessalonians have plenty of sane things to say to Christians about the return of Christ, and so I want to take verse 13 from our reading as a text this morning to explore this theme.

Let’s read it again:

And may he so strengthen your hearts in holiness that you may be blameless before our God and Father at the coming of our Lord Jesus with all his saints.

Firstly, let us think about Paul’s statement that Jesus is coming. We have to get beyond some of the silliness around the doctrine of the Second Coming in order to see that actually this is a wonderful and beautiful truth. We shouldn’t be distracted by the lurid interpretations of this. We should pay no attention to those who claim to have made elaborate deductions from Scripture about the relevance of present-day events to a heavenly timetable for Christ’s return. We should ignore those who use this doctrine as a way of scaring people. And I know that last one, having been subjected as a teenager to an American film called A Thief In The Night, which basically tried to frighten young people into following Jesus. It gave the members of some youth groups who watched it nightmares for years afterwards. Its effect was more like a religious horror film than an instrument for the Gospel.

But just because the fruitcake brigade exists doesn’t mean that sane interpretations don’t also exist. To believe in Christ’s return is to have real hope for our lives and for all creation. It is like the mirror image of Christmas. For just as his incarnation was announced by angels, so here Paul envisages his return, flanked by the entire army of angels. Paul refers to ‘the coming of our Lord Jesus with all his saints’, where ‘saints’ is literally ‘holy ones’ and in this case that probably means angels, not Christians. Jesus is coming back to wrap up what he began. Like Magnus Magnusson or John Humphrys on Mastermind, he is saying, “I’ve started, so I’ll finish.”

To put it another way, let us remember how Jesus came, proclaiming that the kingdom of God was at hand, and indeed had come. The evidence was seen in the healing of the sick, the release of the demonised and the preaching of the good news to the poor.

But it didn’t all come. Evil resisted Jesus, and still does. We do not live in a society where sickness, death and injustice have been conquered. We await that day. In other words, the kingdom of God has come, but not fully. In the words of some, it is both ‘now’ and ‘not yet’. When Jesus comes again, it is, as I said, to finish what he started. It was promised in the ministry of Jesus. It was guaranteed in his resurrection.

How does this affect us now, as we continue to live in a world where we are surrounded by suffering? One answer is that it fortifies us with hope. Other people are driven to despair, but we who live in the light of the resurrection and the hope of the Second Coming know that God will one day make all things new. He will banish all tears and pain.

I am fond at this time of year of telling a story about Tony Campolo, the American preacher, social activist and sociologist. He tells of how someone asked him how come he wasn’t despondent when faced with all the pain and wickedness of the world. He replied, “I’ve got the book and I’ve taken a peek at the final page, so I know the ending: Jesus wins!”

On Advent Sunday, we are the people who believe that Jesus wins, and we, too, are strengthened with that hope as we too live for him in a world that is often otherwise grim.

Secondly, we need to think about a fitting response to the news that Jesus is coming back to complete the coming of his kingdom. How might we be in harmony with God’s kingdom, fully come? Paul certainly anticipates something like that when he talks of us being ‘blameless’ when Jesus comes again with the angels.

What would it mean to be blameless before God? Well, this too is a matter of the ‘already’ and the ‘not yet’ of God’s kingdom. There is a sense in which we are already blameless, and a way in which we are not yet blameless. What do I mean?

We are already blameless in that we are forgiven by God in Jesus Christ. Our sins are forgiven, we are proclaimed ‘not guilty’ before God and the Great Judge has ‘justified’ us – he has declared us to be ‘in the right’ before him. As the Psalmist says, ‘As far as the east is from the west, so far has he removed our transgressions from us.’ Not only have we been pardoned from all our sins, the record is wiped clean. There is nothing left on our record before God. All has been dealt with at the Cross. ‘He remembers our sins no more.’ That much is our ‘already.’ This is what we already have.

But to hear the word ‘blameless’ is to feel the force of the ‘not yet’ as well. We are not yet fully blameless in the way we conduct our lives. Forgiven and justified we may be, but we do not live in perfect harmony with the will of God. Sometimes we are only too conscious of the ways in which we continue to fail God and disappoint Jesus. We have a long way to go to become blameless in our everyday lives.

Yet what would be more fitting and appropriate in the kingdom of God but to be utterly blameless? If Christ returns to make all things new, to make a new creation where not only is there no more sickness and pain, there is also no more sin and evil, then how would we fit in if we continue to be sinners? Does it not follow, then, that although God has already declared us blameless in his sight, he also wants to make us blameless in practice?

It therefore becomes our aspiration, as Paul says here, to seek greater holiness in our lives. Just because we have been forgiven we cannot sit back and say, “I’m OK, I have my ticket for heaven.” Rather, if we know we have been forgiven by such love and at such cost to Jesus, our response will surely want to be one of gratitude. What can I do to please such a Saviour? What can I do to demonstrate my thankfulness for receiving such a priceless gift? We shall never want to settle for some idea that we have already arrived in the Christian life. There is no room for complacency in the life of the disciple. Disciples are always learning, and not simply learning religious facts. Disciples are learning more how to live after the pattern of their Teacher, Jesus.

The story is told of a little girl who saw her grandma reading her Bible. “Grandma, why are you still reading the Bible at your age?” asked the girl. “Surely you’ve read it all by now. Why do you keep doing it?”

Because I’m studying for my finals,” replied grandma.

This leads us to the third and final theme this morning. How can we achieve such blamelessness? Surely it’s beyond us.

Paul knows that, and he doesn’t expect us to manage it ourselves. Remember how the verse began:

And may he so strengthen your hearts in holiness that you may be blameless … (emphasis mine)

The third theme is that God makes us ready for his kingdom.

Let me tell you a pretty open secret. You may disagree with me, but one Christmas carol I truly dislike is ‘Away in a manger.’ It’s that silly line, ‘But little Lord Jesus, no crying he makes’, that always gets to me. If Jesus were fully human, he would have cried! It ranks alongside ‘How silently, how silently, the wondrous gift is given’ from ‘O little town of Bethlehem’ – words clearly written by someone who had never attended the birth of a child.

But how does ‘Away in a manger’ end? ‘And fit us for heaven, to live with thee there.’ Now while I would still like to finesse that line a little too, because technically in the New Testament heaven is where we go between our death and our resurrection, but after our resurrection we live in God’s new creation, but nevertheless I like the thought that God fits us for eternity. ‘And may he so strengthen your hearts in holiness’ indeed.

If God strengthens us, then that usually indicates the work of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is the power of God. Jesus is coming again and will make all things new. We need to be ready for that, yet we are unable to be. But just as God has provided for our forgiveness, so he has also provided for our holiness. When we respond to the grace and mercy he lovingly offers us in Christ and we find redemption, he then grants us the gift of the Holy Spirit so that he can begin his work of fitting us for eternity. The power of God is available to us.

This doesn’t mean we become perfect overnight. Experience tells us that. But let us dwell on that image of being ‘fitted’ for eternity, and let that inform Paul’s teaching that God strengthens us in holiness. Think of someone who goes for a fitting for some clothes – perhaps a bride for her wedding dress. It takes a number of sessions over a period of months. A design is chosen. The bride is measured. She goes back a while later and the measurements have to be retaken, because she is making an effort to lose weight, ready for her wedding day. The dressmaker makes some adjustments, and notes what needs to be changed. And so it goes on, until the great day when the bride walks down the aisle, and stuns everyone with her beauty.

I think that what God does in strengthening us in holiness is a little like that. It is a process over a long time. It involves adjustments and changes. Eventually, one day, we – not as individuals but corporately as part of the Church, which is the Bride of Christ – will walk down the aisle for the marriage to Jesus the Bridegroom, and we shall stun people with our beauty – the beauty of holiness, as the hymn writer put it.

And let us remember also that the fact that God strengthens us in holiness does not absolve us from personal responsibility. We do not sit back and let God take the strain while we have an easy, quiet existence. Oh no. We need to co-operate with the Holy Spirit. The dressmaker would not be able to make the bride look beautiful unless that young woman co-operated with her work. We need to be open to the Holy Spirit, not closed.

This, then, describes some of the Advent hope. Jesus is coming again. He will finish what he started, by making all things new. It is only fitting that we seek holy lives in accordance with his kingdom purposes. However, we cannot do that on our own. Thankfully, God steps in with his Holy Spirit to strengthen us and fit us for eternity.

Our Advent calling, then, is to co-operate with the Spirit’s work in our lives. The same Spirit who brought Jesus into the world is available to us, so that we might live to please the One who came and who is coming.

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