Category: Sermons

Sermon: People At The Cross – Judas Iscariot

This weekend, we start a new sermon series for Lent and Easter, in which we meditate on the characters who inhabit the Passion and Easter stories. I get to begin with Judas Iscariot.

John 13:1-5, 18-32

Miss Duffell was my English teacher. Despite my goody-goody image at school, she was the only teacher I ever wanted to wind up. It wasn’t the way she tipped her cigarette ash into her coffee cup when having a discussion with pupils at break time, it was the fact that she taught English Literature. To my teenage male way of thinking, that was the most useless, irrelevant subject in the curriculum. Especially if you favoured the sciences, as I did.

It was only when I reached adulthood that I saw the worth of all those essays where we had to write character studies of people in the plays we were studying – Bluntschli in ‘Arms and the Man’, Falstaff in ‘Henry IV Part 1’, and so on. When I began to understand the power of the narrative in the Bible, then I started to appreciate the value in appreciating the characters. I learned that we might identify with a person or see ourselves in opposition to them, and through either reaction be caught up more in what the message the author of the story had for us. I might also end up going further than the original author intended, of course!

It’s with that experience in mind that I begin this new sermon series about the people we encounter in the gospel stories of Jesus’ suffering, death and resurrection. If reflecting on a character in a novel or play can have a powerful effect, how much more so when we dwell on those we find in the Holy Spirit-supervised words of Scripture? Especially when we also believe that the same Holy Spirit is here to help us hear, understand, believe and respond.

So this morning I have not given myself an easy task by starting with Judas Iscariot. As with several people in this series, there were several Bible passages I could have picked. But these verses from John 13 get us to the core of what I want to share about him.

The first reference to Judas in this account comes in verse 2:

The evening meal was in progress, and the devil had already prompted Judas, the son of Simon Iscariot, to betray Jesus.

Our first reflection, then, is on Judas and the devil. Nothing like starting with a difficult and contentious theme, then!

Whenever I reflect on anything to do with the devil, I go back to the famous words of C S Lewis in his Preface to The Screwtape Letters, where he wrote:

There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about the devils. One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe, and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them. They themselves are equally pleased by both errors, and hail a materialist or magician with the same delight.

Although I know it is difficult for some people to believe in ‘the devil’, I cannot disbelieve in ‘his’ existence, given Jesus’ belief in him. I cannot reduce Jesus merely to a child of his time, however much he constrained himself in the Incarnation. He is still Lord, and what he says, goes. So rejection of the reference to the devil prompting Judas Iscariot is out for me.

But on the other hand, I know too many Christians who make too much of the devil. One Anglican rector friend of mine used to put every mishap and setback down to ‘the devil’, as if by a reflex reaction.

So when we read John’s careful words that ‘the devil had already prompted Judas’ (my emphasis), let us take particular note of that word ‘prompted’. It is not that the devil made Judas do what he did, but that he had sown thoughts in his head. Judas could then choose what he did about those promptings. Although John clearly portrays demonic activity at work here, human responsibility is still in play. We cannot absolve ourselves of our actions by saying, “The devil made me do it.” Neither could Judas.

We may find ourselves under pressure to sin through persistent temptation. In one respect, we can do nothing about that. It is the lot of all people. Being tempted is not a sin: Jesus was, especially in the wilderness. But in another respect, we sometimes lay ourselves open to those promptings, those temptations. We put ourselves in situations where we know we could be vulnerable to our weaknesses. The devil will exploit that. We deliberately sail close to the wind. The devil will exploit that. Later in this sermon, we’ll see how Judas did precisely that. But for now, let’s simply note that while yes, the devil prompts us with temptation, we still have a responsibility for our actions and we need to do what we can to put ourselves at a distance from circumstances where we know we are weak.

The second reference to Judas comes in the second half of the reading, in the conversation Jesus has with his disciples which begins with him saying,

I am not referring to all of you; I know those I have chosen. But this is to fulfil this passage of Scripture: ‘He who shared my bread has turned against me.’ (Verse 18)

It continues with Jesus’ troubled admission that one of the Twelve will betray him, and when pressed about who that will be says,

It is the one to whom I will give this piece of bread when I have dipped it in the dish. (Verse 26)

So this second reflection is about the astonishing fact that Jesus shared table fellowship with his betrayer.

I have often heard people observe, then, that Jesus even gave the bread to Judas at the meal where he instituted the Lord’s Supper. They then take it that we should not be judgmental (fair enough, in one sense) and that there should be no boundaries at the Lord’s table. However, that last statement is patently incorrect from a biblical point of view. Paul was at pains in 1 Corinthians 11 to remind his readers that self-examination was important before taking the bread and wine. Lax discipline at Holy Communion is not good practice.

I would rather see Jesus’ sharing of table fellowship with Judas this way. My current reading is the memoirs of a man who has written more profound books in recent years on what it means to be a pastor than anyone else I have come across. His name is Eugene Peterson, and he is better known for the popular paraphrase of the Bible called The Message. In his latest book, The Pastor: A Memoir, he talks about how when he began the Presbyterian church in Maryland that he went on to lead for thirty years, his early vision was to gather together a group of visionary Christians who were all passionate for what it really meant to be disciples and to be church in a New Testament sense. Instead, he found himself with a rabble, rather as David did at Ziklag when he was on the run from King Saul.

And I observe that I have seen some friends fall away from faith over the years. Each time, they have been those whom I might consider the least likely. In at least two cases, it was weakness to sexual temptation that began their decline. It reminds me that Paul warned his readers in 1 Corinthians 10 that any of us who believe we are ‘standing’ in faith should beware lest we fall. It could be you. It could be me.

Therefore, when we too come to eat bread with Jesus this morning, let us pray that we will, in the words of Charles Wesley’s hymn ‘Soldiers of Christ, arise’ ‘leave no unguarded place’. Let us not simply be aware of our weaknesses so that we do not put ourselves in places where the devil might prompt us with temptation. Let us also positively ‘put on the full armour of God’, those godly qualities that are the very opposite of sin.

So what was Judas’ particular weakness? We get a hint later in the story, and this is my third reflection on him. After Jesus tells him, “What you are about to do, do quickly,” (verse 27), we read how the disciples misunderstood (verse 28) that statement:

Since Judas had charge of the money, some thought Jesus was telling him to buy what was needed for the festival, or to give something to the poor. (Verse 29)

Anyone who has read John’s Gospel cover to cover rather than in short segments will go back to chapter 12, when Mary anoints Jesus with a pint of expensive nard. There, Judas objected that the perfume would have been better used if it had been sold and the money given to the poor, but John reports that Judas didn’t care about the poor: he looked after the disciples’ common purse and wanted to dip his hands into the cash (John 12:4-6).

Judas’ weakness, then, was money. Here is where he failed to guard himself against the devil’s promptings to temptation. Here is where he thought he could stand in faith, but fell. No wonder his reward from the enemies of Jesus was thirty pieces of silver. That would have attracted him.

When the great contemporary spiritual writer Richard Foster wanted to publish a book about the major sins, is it any accident that he wrote about the ‘big three’? He called his book, Money, Sex and Power. These, he said, were the areas of human life with the greatest power to bless or to curse. Perhaps it is no surprise that monastic orders have taken vows of poverty, celibacy and obedience – in direct contrast to these three great temptations.

And perhaps for some of us the way to avoid our weakness will be by a strategy of avoidance. A friend of mine knows that he is incapable of drinking alcohol in moderation. If he has one drink, he will end up having a lot, and getting drunk. So his strategy is to be teetotal. In doing so, those who choose to avoid weaknesses can also be witnesses to a world that believes you can’t be happy unless you’re smashed out of your mind, sleeping around, buying all the latest consumer goods or climbing the greasy pole at work.

However, avoiding our besetting sins is not always possible. And we can also be good witnesses by facing temptation and avoiding it. That, though, requires not a spiritual gung-ho attitude but prayer, dependence upon the Holy Spirit and fellowship. And by ‘fellowship’ here, I mean deep Christian relationships where we regularly hold ourselves accountable to one another. It’s exactly what some of John Wesley’s small groups did. They talked each week about which sins they had been struggling with.

There are similar approaches today. We can form ‘accountability groups’. We can do it in other ways, too. One way that people facing the temptation of internet pornography cope with it is to install a program on their computer called Covenant Eyes which reports to a friend the details of every website the person looks at.

Fellowship is more than camaraderie at the Christmas Bazaar. It’s a vital tool in avoiding the trap that snared Judas.

But, of course, all of this is to some extent rather gloomy. Temptation, sin, avoidance. All necessary to consider for Christians, but is there any good news here? I believe there is, and it comes in the fourth and final reflection. Allow me to introduce it with an illustration.

When I was young and suffering bullying at school, my Dad tried to teach me some Judo. He had learned it in the RAF, and had kept his instruction manual. He argued that the virtue of Judo was that it was not itself violent, but you used your opponent’s strength against them in order to win.

In the light of  that, consider Jesus’ words at the end of our reading:

Now the Son of Man is glorified and God is glorified in him. (Verse 31)

Isn’t this what is going on here? Even the evil power at work as Judas gives in to his weakness and responds to the devil’s prompting is something God uses against his enemy for good, to win the victory over sin and death. Judas does not have the last word. Jesus does – in the forgiveness of sins through the Cross, and in the new life of the Resurrection.

Yes, here, in the murky, shabby story of Judas God the Father works his Gospel. He does not inflict violence, but he uses the violence and betrayal rendered against his only begotten Son to bring the salvation of the world. It is the truth of which Paul was to write,

And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose. (Romans 8:28)

In ‘all things’, even the treachery of Judas, God works for good. In ‘all things’, even the darkness of Calvary, God works for good.

And in all things today, God still works for good. The friends or acquaintances who betray us – God can turn it for good. The evil that affects us – God can even use that for good, as he uses the enemy’s force against him.

Allow me to conclude with a story. Members of the Church Council have already heard this, so I hope they will excuse hearing it again. Tomorrow, I return to a previous circuit to conduct a funeral. Sid was a proud Welshman – and his pride was not always his most attractive feature. He was married to Rita, an East German Lutheran Christian, whose response to Sid’s fierce Methodism was to vow never to become a Methodist, otherwise Sid would have won, in her words.

When I arrived in the circuit, he had just retired from a career in the Army and then some years in Civvy Street. That army background made him stiff and – yes – regimented. On one occasion when I had prepared an act of all age worship only to find the Junior Church not ready for it and going out after the second hymn, I received a stern lecture!

One thing Sid had never done, despite a lifetime in Methodism, was make a personal commitment to Jesus Christ as Lord and Saviour. I told him that one day he would have to get off the fence.

Well, one Saturday night he did. Sid and Rita attended a concert by a Christian band and choir. He heard one of the musicians give a testimony, and he suddenly thought, “If it can be true for him, it can be true for me.”

The next morning at church, he took Holy Communion for the first time. The look of joy on his face as he knelt at the rail and looked at me is an image that will remain with me for ever.

In the wake of that commitment, he started to soften. He lightened up. He began to forgive, and to become more humble.

In January, he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, and his health declined fast. Yet during his hospitalisation and treatment, he renewed his commitment to Christ, thanks to the witness of another Christian patient at the hospital.

Tragically, he had become alienated from one of his two daughters a few years ago, due to a terrible misunderstanding in a phone conversation. While he was in hospital, his other daughter said to him, “Dad, if you’re a Christian you’ve got to put things right with my sister.” The daughter in question lived in Germany, and Sid picked up a hospital phone and rang Germany. On his knees he sought reconciliation.

Sid’s suffering and death also led to another reconciliation – between his wife and the next door neighbours. When I visited, one of them was in the house, offering comfort.

The last sentence Sid uttered to his family was this. “You’re not going to like what I’m about to say, but I’m glad I’ve got cancer.”

I don’t know if I could ever say that, but I will say this. That is the testimony of a man who knows that the Judas in his life – in his case, a terminal disease – was something that God was using to overcome evil with good.

For the Judases of this world and the devils do not get the last word. God does.

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Sermon: Love Your Neighbour As Yourself

Leviticus 19:1-2, 9-18

I wonder whether you have heard the story of the churchgoer who wanted to abolish the Old Testament. His argument was that Jesus said, “Hang all the Law and the Prophets.”

Well, Jesus did say, “Hang all the Law and the Prophets”, but the problem with the argument was that the man quoted Jesus out of context. Jesus says these words when he is asked what the greatest commandment is, and his reply goes like this:

You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind and with all your strength. The second is, you shall love your neighbour as yourself. On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets. [Emphasis added]

You can’t abolish the Old Testament, then. Jesus said it contained the two greatest commandments.

And today’s Lectionary takes us to the second of these commandments: ‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself.’

So, for only the second time in over thirty years of preaching, I find myself preaching on a text from Leviticus! It might not be a book we would rush to preach from usually, but whatever its reputation for obscure Jewish dietary laws and the like, it also contains this commandment and a host of other commandments that enshrine God’s commitment to compassion and justice. And it all gets summed up at the end of our first reading with these words: ‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself’ (verse 18).

How, then, do we explore these famous words? I suggest that if the basis of loving our neighbour is the way we love ourselves, then I’m going to start with what it means in biblical terms to love ourselves and work back to loving our neighbour from there.

First of all, then, loving ourselves. It seems to me there are two equal and opposite errors into which we can fall in appreciating the assumption that we love ourselves. One is the assumption often made in our society today, and perhaps encapsulated by that dreadful series of adverts from the world’s largest cosmetics company, L’Oreal. Beginning with famous actresses closing the ads with the words, “Because I’m worth it”, they changed it in the middle of the last decade to “Because you’re worth it.” Then in 2009 they modified it again to “Because we’re worth it.”

You get the message? I am so good and so deserving that I should have the very best. It’s something that in a different way politicians have picked up on. They talk about welfare benefits as something that the right people deserve. It makes me out to be so good and perfect that the last thing you would dare to do is criticise me. The Christian notion of sin is entirely absent. There is nothing about responsibility, it is all about rights. As such, it’s unreliable as a gauge for understanding how God loves us, and we can only base love for ourselves on the way God loves us.

The opposite error takes this to the other extreme. It is what some people have called ‘worm theology’. It is the approach that says, “Lord, I am worth no more than a worm, because I am only a terrible sinner.” It is an attitude to life that leads to low self-esteem and even self-hatred, quite the opposite of ‘Because I’m worth it.’

At first glance this might seem to take seriously the Christian doctrine of sin, but it actually distorts the Christian view of God’s love for people. It makes it sound like the Cross of Christ is no more than the appeasing of an angry God, and not an expression of God’s sacrificial love in Christ.

So – loving ourselves can neither be based on “I’m wonderful”, nor on “I’m terrible.” What can it rest on, then? I believe it requires a big picture of the way God views us, and when we appreciate that, we shall be free to love ourselves healthily.

I believe it goes something like this. It begins not with sin, but with the fact that God made human beings in his image. Now whatever it means to be made in the image of God, and I’m not going to touch that this morning, what is clear is that it means that God accords human beings a special, indeed unique, dignity. It speaks of the amazing value that God puts on us.

Yes, we go on from there to speak about sin and the rupture it causes in our relationship with a holy God. But we also bring into play the fact that this holy God sets out on the journey of redemption, because his love is not incompatible with his holiness. He even gives up his only begotten Son for us. He draws us to himself by his Holy Spirit, and when we respond in faith to him through Jesus Christ, that Spirit comes to dwell within our lives.

All in all, it’s very Trinitarian: we are loved by the Father, redeemed by the Son and indwelt by the Spirit. This is the measure of God’s love for us.

Now when we know we are deeply loved, what does that do for us? A friend of mine who has suffered for much of her life with depression once told me that nothing boosted her sense of self-worth more than remembering that her husband had wanted to spend the rest of his life with her. In the midst of her illness, that knowledge gave her dignity.

So it is with the love of God. Because we are so wonderfully loved by God – extravagantly and sacrificially – we may love ourselves. It isn’t that self-love becomes self-indulgence, for then it would stand contrary to the love of God. But it is that we have an amazing sense of wonder and value. It is a firm foundation for life. We can begin to achieve a balance of taking proper care of ourselves, but also being ready to show that same sacrificial love of God to others.

All of which leads to the second part of our thinking, the part where the rubber hits the road – loving our neighbours. Now I don’t know about you, but when we are faced with something as stark and absolute in the Scriptures as ‘love your neighbour’, this is probably the time I want to start wriggling about the meaning. We know that some of the rabbis set complicated definitions about who was a neighbour and who wasn’t. In today’s Gospel passage Jesus is clearly aware of people who want to distort the plain meaning of Leviticus. He talks about those who twist the verse to say, ‘You shall love your neighbour and hate your enemy’ (Matthew 5:43), thus adding something to Holy Writ in order to undermine its meaning. We know, too, that this wasn’t the only time he faced this issue, since the lawyer who heard him proclaim the need to love one’s neighbour then wanted to justify himself by asking, ‘Who is my neighbour?’ and in response he tells that most shocking of parables about the Good Samaritan. Leviticus puts it bluntly, and Jesus won’t let anybody get out of the implications.

Why should it be that Leviticus and Jesus allow no limitations or exceptions on the definition of ‘neighbour’? Could it be ultimately that the same things which apply to us about God’s love for us also apply to every single human being? I think so.

In other words, it is not just me who is made in the image of God. You are, and everyone is, even our enemies, whoever they may be. All people are offered redemption in Jesus Christ. The Holy Spirit is wooing all people to find faith in Jesus and follow him. Everyone has the same extraordinary dignity in the sight of God.

And that means anybody in need is our neighbour when it comes to the command to love. We can’t pick and choose simply the people who appeal to us, or who are like us. It includes the people we are ambivalent about, and even those we actively dislike. Our neighbours include our enemies.

However, that is not to say that we should be glib about the question of offering neighbour love to enemies. I receive a weekly devotional email from an American pastor called Brian Jones. In this week’s email, he talked about this very issue. He described the problem of reconciling all the Psalms that display anger and ask God to wreak vengeance on enemies with Jesus’ command to love our enemies. He talked of an occasion when he preached a sermon about it, one of his best, he thought, in showing how in his opinion the words of Jesus trumped the angry words of the Psalms.

After the service, though, he was brought down to earth with heavy bruising. A man spoke to him and said, ‘What would you say to me, then? This week I have pressed charges against a man who molested my son.’

Brian Jones said he realised that sometimes we can only get through to that point of loving even our enemies when we have fully felt our anger first.

You may consider this ‘love of enemies’ talk a bit of a detour from the basic ‘love your neighbour’ theme, but in fact it’s like what some people call the ‘worst case scenario’. It’s the hardest variation on love of neighbour. If we can work on this, other aspects of loving our neighbours will fall into place.

What all this talk of loving our neighbour as ourselves comes down to in the end is about being Christlike. Loving our neighbour as ourselves is about seeing people as Christ sees them. It is about having Christ’s heart for them. It is about thinking and acting like Christ. The plastic bracelets with the initials ‘WWJD’ – ‘What Would Jesus Do?’ – may have seemed cheesy, but they make a point.

So if we want to know what love of neighbour looks like, then view Jesus healing Simon Peter’s mother-in-law. Or see him crossing boundaries to talk to a Samaritan woman or heal a Roman centurion’s servant.

If we want to know what neighbour love looks like, go more than anywhere else to the Cross. See him caring for his mother and the disciple he loved, while dying. See him forgiving the penitent thief. See him asking the Father to forgive those who put him on the Cross – and all the while dying for their sins, for your sins and for mine.

Yes, Jesus looks on people as made in God’s image. He sees the damage caused by sin and by being sinned against and sets out on his mission of redeeming love. When he returns to heaven from that mission, he bestows the gift of the Holy Spirit on those who put their faith in him and follow him.

He has the right, then, to tell us not to resist evildoers, to love our enemies and to pray for those who persecute us. He had the right to remind us not only to greet only our own brothers and sisters.

Walking this way may seem uncongenial and even impossible. But Jesus gives us the power to do so through the gift of the Holy Spirit. And he gives us motivation to love neighbours, even our enemies, when we consider how much he loves us and how much he has forgiven us.

Thus may we have the grace to live differently in our world.

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Sermon: Money And Possessions

Sorry it’s been a while since I posted. Three major things have been going on. Firstly, there has been a major pastoral situation. Although it eventually became public, it would not be good for me to allude in any way to its nature here. Furthermore, some of the decisions I had to take in relation to this matter led to me leading worship but not preaching, in order to be free to take particular essential courses of action. Hence there were no new sermons anyway for a couple of weeks.

Secondly, around the same time we had a major gas leak at the church, at one time with gas levels high enough for us to be at the risk of an explosion. That entailed several days of having to drop everything at short notice to sort things out with the engineers.

Thirdly, as you will gather below, I also suddenly lost the use of my car. I was driving at 70 mph on the M25 when the cam belt malfunctioned. Repair of the consequent damage would have cost more than the value of the old car. So I was then thrust into an urgent search for a new car.

However, I can now belatedly bring you the sermon I preached this morning. I hope you find it helpful.

Matthew 6:19-34

Peter used to sort the post and bring it to everyone’s desks in the office where I used to work. A bit of a lad, you wouldn’t have marked him down as the most likely to become interested in God and religion.

Not until his girlfriend became a Christian. She enthusiastically joined a local evangelical church, and Peter started going with her to the church young adults’ group. They went to the Greenbelt Festival together, and he began attending the Sunday evening youth fellowship with her.

It was one Monday morning at the office after he had been to the youth group the previous night that he started a conversation about how uneasy he had been about the youth group leader. This man had invited everyone to his home for the meeting. Peter said that the man couldn’t stop going on about all his lovely furniture and other household comforts.

“That’s not what you Christians are supposed to be like, is it?” he asked me.

Peter was right. Jesus says far more about topics such as money and possessions than he does about some of the issues that frequently obsess the church. Which is not to say I don’t believe matters such as sexual ethics are – they touch on who we are at the deepest level, and I hold fairly traditional views on them. But Jesus also knew that the way we handle material things would be critical if we aim to be the whole-hearted disciples he wants us to be.

So we come to this week’s section in the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus puts this question up front and centre, even when teaching a group of people in a culture full of peasants living at subsistence level. How much more relevant is it to us, in a society that depends upon us buying plenty of ‘stuff’? Indeed, much of our culture is defined by an addiction to consumer goods.

Let’s dive in, then, and see whether by following Jesus’ teaching here we can offer a distinctive witness to him in our world.

Firstly, let’s recognise that our attitude to money and possessions is a matter of the heart: ‘where your treasure is, there your heart will be also’ (verse 21). But what does this mean?

On Monday, people’s lives will be flooded with hearts – on cards, on balloons, chocolate-shaped ones, and so on. The heart will be the visual logo for Valentine’s Day. In our culture, we take the heart to be symbolic of the emotions and the affections.

But it would be dangerous to transfer our use of the word ‘heart’ to the world of the Bible. For Jewish people, if you wanted to talk about the emotions, the body part you symbolically used was … the bowels. When Jewish people referred to the heart, they meant something far deeper than we do: the heart represented the very core of a person’s being. So when Jesus says your treasure is where your heart is, he isn’t merely referring to the emotional pull of certain things, he’s talking about giving complete allegiance to them.

And to take that further, if Jesus is telling us that our treasure needs to be ‘treasures in heaven’, he is calling us to an undiluted commitment to him. Those who treasure money and possessions are those who devote their lives to them. Our devotion is to Jesus and his kingdom.

How do we work this out in the life of faith? One thing I recommend is that we ensure we do not simply make assumptions about our spending habits and our lifestyle decisions. We can do that by submitting every major decision about finances or possessions to God in prayer. And when I say ‘submitting’ I do so deliberately, because we must be willing for God to say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to the plans we propose.

So it came as an encouragement last week when my old car suddenly gave up the ghost that Debbie and I had separately come to the same conclusion about the budget we should set for a replacement. We kept within that budget – the car I chose was £25 under the budget, and fits well what I need for ministry.

This, then, is Jesus’ first command about money and possessions. Ensure you are wholeheartedly committed to his cause, and judge everything in the light of that.

Secondly, Jesus sees our attitude to riches as a test of our spiritual health. Why on earth does he suddenly start going on about healthy and unhealthy eyes (verses 22-23)? I mean, obviously a healthy eye means good sight and a diseased eye causes poor sight, but why on earth does that suddenly appear in the middle of teaching about wealth rather than health?

There is a simple explanation, and the footnotes in some Bibles point you towards it. When Jesus refers to healthy eyes, the word translated ‘healthy’ can also be translated ‘generous’. Does it begin to make sense now? A healthy attitude is a generous attitude. Generosity is a hallmark of a disciple.

And how important that is today. The other day I found myself in a conversation with a young man just in from work who glibly talked about the way he spent £30 to £40 a day on himself, and how he was partly funding that from an additional job that paid ‘cash in hand’. His approach may be crude, but it is more typical than we might like to think.

But Jesus says that the symptoms of true health are not acquisition, but generosity, not getting but giving. It is more blessèd to give than to receive. If you want to see like Jesus sees, then let him open your eyes to the needs you can meet by generous giving on your part. And yes, as well as your finances and your material possessions, consider too generosity in the giving of your time, skills and most of all your love.

Of course you will need discernment, because while the need constitutes the call, the need may not constitute your call. But those with generous eyes are open to what God directs them to see.

So far, then, we’ve seen that our attitude to wealth and property is about our allegiance to Christ and our willingness to be generous is a measure of our spiritual health. The third thing Jesus says is very similar. In fact, you could say Jesus repeats himself from a different angle. The way we treat material possessions says something about what we worship. We cannot serve two masters, he tells us. We either worship God or we worship Mammon (which is more than just money: it seems to be the spiritual force behind the love of money).

The point Jesus is making is this: God believes in monogamy. Not just in marriage, but in the life of the spirit, too. Only one can hold our adoration. Whatever commands our worship requires so much of us that we cannot possibly have anything left over for anything or anyone else in the same way. However much we attempt a spiritual version of bigamy by trying to retain an allegiance to money alongside devotion to God (rather like the youth group leader I mentioned in the introduction), in the end it just won’t work. We’ll have to choose.

Yet at the same time, we need money and material things for life. How do we decide what to do? What is an acceptable standard of living? Is it the same for everyone? Didn’t God make the material world good? How do we know when we’ve crossed the line from using something good as a servant into adoring it as an idol?

Here is where I return to the point I made in the first section about prayer. If prayer helps tease out issues of undiluted commitment, it will help here in distinguishing whether we are using something responsibly while retaining our devotion to God or trespassing in the land of idolatry.

As you know, I enjoy gadgets, and this can be a particular temptation for me. Some years ago, I was wondering whether to replace the computer I had. The one I had was getting old, and there was a good case for a new one. However, I was wary, because I knew I could deceive myself and come up with all sorts of reasons to buy a new PC, when really I might just have been lusting after the latest technological advances. So I prayed, and I left it with God.

What I didn’t know was the way one of my church members was praying for me at the time. One Saturday, she went down to the church building and prayed everywhere around it. while praying for me there, she distinctly heard the Holy Spirit speak to her and say, “Tell Dave he can have what he wants.” She relayed this message to me a day or two later. She had no idea I was thinking of buying a new computer: I had told nobody.

So I underline the point again: make it a habit to commit your financial and lifestyle decisions to God in prayer. Be willing to hear him say, ‘Yes’, ‘No’ or ‘Wait’. If your worship is for Christ, you will want to do this.

The fourth and final aspect that Jesus addresses here is a practical one. He realises that some of his listeners will be thinking, “It’s all very well calling me to undiluted commitment, to generosity and to ensuring that I only worship God, but that all sounds expensive. How will I ever have enough to live on?” Jesus knows he needs to address the question of worry.

Sure enough, he reassures us about God’s special love and care for us. As human beings made in the image of God (unlike the rest of creation), we are worth more than ‘the birds of the air’ or ‘the flowers of the field’.

After that, you would expect the punch line to be about chilling out and trusting God. Jesus wants us to have faith, doesn’t he?

But it isn’t what he says. Or at least the kind of faith and trust Jesus calls us to is not of the quiet, serene, ‘let go and let God’ variety. His application is different: ‘seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well’ (verse 33). Sure, don’t worry and obsess about your basic needs, because your heavenly Father will look after you. But neither should you just sit back: God is looking for those who are radically committed to his kingdom. The kingdom comes first, says Jesus. Concentrate on the great purposes of God. Yes, he will take care of us, but he isn’t our sugar daddy, he’s our Lord. We owe him our prime allegiance.

To return to the subject of my car: when my old car dramatically gave up the ghost last weekend – at 70 mph on the M25, near the Heathrow exit – it came at a bad time for us. We are still adjusting to the shock of the cost of living in Surrey. So many things are more expensive here, from DVD lending fees in the library to swimming lessons for the children. We are having to trim our spending, regardless of the recession. For the car to give up at this juncture was not the kind of timing we would have preferred.

Part of our praying, then, was not only about how much to spend. Even before that, it was about our desire to fulfil the will of the God who had led us here. Did I need a car to fulfil that will? Yes. What kind of car? A small one would be fine. Even within those parameters, we were still looking at spending more than we were keen to do. Yet God worked through various people who heard of our need and gave us gifts that considerably mitigated the negative effect upon our finances. He honoured our desire to be about his kingdom business.

I could tell you plenty of other stories. CAMEO heard on Wednesday an account of how God provided my funds to go to theological college. But I don’t have time to repeat that this morning, or to give other testimonies.

I do have time to say to you that it makes Jesus sense to put God at the centre of our lives. It makes Jesus sense to be generous givers, rather than mean takers. It makes Jesus sense to worship God rather than consumerism. And it makes Jesus sense to follow the kingdom passionately while we entrust the provision of our needs to our heavenly Father.

So why not live like this? We know it makes sense. Jesus sense.

5

Sermon: Unwrapping Discipleship

This Sunday, I get to preach at one of my colleagues’ churches. So I’m reverting to the Lectionary for one week only. There are a few things in this sermon that have appeared before, notably in the first point. Please excuse that if the odd bit is something you’ve read from me before.

Matthew 4:12-23

Both Debbie and I had our main Christmas presents after the big day. I had asked people for money or vouchers that I could put together so I could buy an Amazon Kindle e-reader. Debbie followed a similar route, and when she had finally weighed up the options and dismissed the idea of a new phone, she ordered a new camera. Like me, she ordered her present online from Amazon.

Being cheapskates – or as we like to think of it, good stewards – we ordered both products on Amazon’s free Super Saver Delivery. Effectively, that means second class post. Amazon gives you an estimated date by which your order should be with you.

I had ordered my e-reader first. I memorised the due date. I counted down, like a child. The due date came. And went. I phoned the local sorting office to see whether it was there and got a jobsworth who really couldn’t be bothered. Eventually, it turned up two days late, left outside the front door by the postie, even though we weren’t in. Debbie’s camera was a similar story. Apparently it was all down to a backlog they were still trying to clear since the snow of November and December.

We waited for the time of fulfilment and were disappointed. In that respect, we were like the people to whom Jesus came. Matthew tells us that his house move from Nazareth to Capernaum was fulfilment of the prophetic hope (verses 12-16). Just as Debbie and I (OK, particularly I) were wondering when our packages would come from Amazon, so God’s people were wondering when the Messiah would come and inaugurate God’s kingdom. Now, at last, the package arrives, and he’s called Jesus.

So – if the package has arrived, if Jesus the Messiah has come, bringing the kingdom of heaven – what do we do when we unwrap him?

The first action is repentance. The opening tone of Jesus’ message is,

Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near. (Verse 17)

What is repentance? We know it has to do with being sorry for our wrongdoings, but there is more to it than that. If it were only feeling sorry but without any change of heart or change of lifestyle, it would only be remorse. And remorse doesn’t change anything – apart from maybe persuading a judge to give a more lenient sentence in response to mitigation.

Repentance is bigger than that. In the Greek of the New Testament and even in English it means ‘a change of mind’. It means to ‘rethink’. Those of you who know French will recognise where the English word ‘repentance’ comes from. Remember penser, to think, so repenser is to rethink, to change your mind. The Greek metanoia is similar. When we repent, we change our minds about the way we live.

It’s like doing a u-turn in a car. We know we are going the wrong way, so we change our minds and our direction. Repentance, then, means a change of mind, so much so that we are sorry enough to change our actions.

So that unpacks one problem we have in understanding repentance. It is not simply being sorry, it is a change of mind that leads to a change in our actions. That is why it is also not the same as condemnation, which simply tells us how terrible we are but leaves us desperate and desolate about ourselves. Repentance brings positive change and hope.

Another problem we have with repentance is that we associate it with conversion and the beginnings of Christian faith, but not always with the ongoing life of Christian discipleship. Yet we do not make all the changes we need to make in our lives all at once, when we first encounter Jesus Christ. We don’t even make all the essential changes before we die.

My point is this: repentance is not a one-off change of direction, it is an ongoing process in our lives. One of my favourite stories to tell about this involves the Local Preacher who was always the most popular preacher among my youth group in the church where I grew up. John Evill was born in Wales in 1902, two years before the Welsh Revival. He preached like the revival was still going on. In one sermon, he asked the congregation: “Have you been converted?” Then he added, “I’ve been converted – many times.” His point wasn’t that he’d regularly slipped back and denied Christ, it was that time and time again Christ had to call him to change.

So it is with repentance. It is a change of mind that leads not simply to one change of action, but to repeated changes of action in our lives, until our dying day. Paul tells the Philippians that God who began a good work in them will complete it on the day of Christ Jesus (Philippians 1:6). Or, as the t-shirt slogan puts it:

Please be patient with me. God hasn’t finished with me yet.

When we unwrap the kingdom Jesus brings, then, the first thing it involves is a lifestyle of ongoing change, reorientating ourselves to the ways of God from our selfish ways.

The second thing we do when we unwrap the Jesus package is we follow. Having turned around, we now start positively and actively going in our new direction, the direction in which Jesus is travelling. To Simon Peter and Andrew, he says,

Follow me, and I will make you fish for people. (Verse 19)

Then he calls James and John and we read,

Immediately they left the boat and their father, and followed him. (Verse 22)

I find the nature of Jesus calling these fishermen to follow him utterly amazing. For one thing, I am staggered by their immediate decision to leave their family businesses and go with him. Some people have said that they may already have known Jesus in the area, but it’s still quite a decision to go off like that. Why would they do it?

Here’s one theory. As I’m sure you know, it was common practice for Jewish rabbis to call certain young men to follow them, learn their teaching and emulate their lifestyles. However, they tended to pick the cream of the crop, those who showed promise from a young age. If you got as far as getting into regular work – as Simon Peter, Andrew, James and John had – then you certainly weren’t among the elite. You were among the rejected. You were among those who were not considered up to the task of following a religious master.

But Jesus sees it differently. He calls these men. To him, they are not rejects, they are people who are every bit as capable of following him as anybody else. Why? Because – as the old catchphrase puts it – it’s not your ability that matters, it’s your availability. You don’t need great gifts and talents in order to follow Jesus, you just need to be willing to say ‘yes’ to him. And that’s what these four guys do.

So imagine you are one of them. Imagine you have been passed over by other rabbis as not good enough. Now this one comes along when you are at an age when you no longer think such an opportunity exists and he says to you, “Follow me.” What does that do for your self-esteem? I like to imagine the four young men striding off from their boats with their heads held high and their chests puffed out.

Translate that into our church context. One of the things that saddens me as a minister is the time many church members speak of how inferior they feel to ministers. “You can do {X, Y, Z] because you’re more learned than me,” some say. However, in Jesus’ eyes, it’s not the alphabet soup I have after my name because I spent six years studying Theology that matters. It’s whether I say ‘yes’ to Jesus. I hope I can bring benefits to people by sharing my learning. But what matters in the end is one simple matter that puts everybody on an equal following, regardless of gifts, talents, opportunities, wealth or privilege. It’s this: will we say ‘yes’ to Jesus? All we need to be concerned about today is whether we are saying ‘yes’ to him in the places where he is calling us to follow him.

The third way we unwrap Jesus is by imitation. Hear again the final verse in the reading:

Jesus went throughout Galilee, teaching in their synagogues and proclaiming the good news of the kingdom and curing every disease and every sickness among the people. (Verse 23)

The playwright Murray Watts tells a yarn that might explain how some of us feel about this verse:

An evangelist was so successful, he converted his own horse. He decided to develop his ministry with animals and took his horse to market, to exchange it for another. A farmer came riding along, on a very old horse, and the evangelist begged him to swap animals. The farmer looked at the fine fettle of the evangelist’s horse and agreed, delighted with his bargain. As he mounted his new steed, the evangelist explained to him about the horse’s religious zeal. The farmer looked at him incredulously.

‘It’s no good shouting “giddyup!” or “whoa, there, boy!”’ the evangelist went on. ‘To start, you have to shout, “Praise the Lord! Hallelujah!” and to stop you have to shout, “Amen!”’

The farmer now realised that he was dealing with a nutcase, but he decided to humour him. The horse was in excellent condition and he accepted. As the evangelist trotted away on the famer’s ageing horse, the farmer shouted ‘Giddyup thar!’ to his steed. There was no reaction. He whipped the horse, but there was still no reaction.

‘Go on tharr! Get going!’ he screamed, digging in his heels. The horse refused to budge. The farmer scratched his head.

‘Perhaps that old preacher wasn’t so crazy after all,’ he thought, ‘oh well, no harm in trying.’ He took a deep breath and shouted: ‘Praise the Lord, hallelujah!’ Immediately the horse galloped off. The astonished farmer clung on for dear life as it sped along the road.

‘Whatever its religious quirks,’ he mused, ‘this is some horse!’ On and on the pious creature went, crossing fields, jumping gates. At last, hearing the sound of the sea in the distance, the farmer knew they were approaching the cliffs of Dover.

‘Whoaa there, boy!’ he called. ‘Whoaa there!’ He yanked the reins. The horse sped on regardless. ‘Silly me,’ thought the farmer, ‘I’ve got to say that special word.’

‘Blessing!’ he shouted. ‘No, that’s wrong. Faith!!’ he called, urgently. ‘No, that’s not right either.’

The sound of the sea came nearer, and try as he might, the farmer could not remember the right religious word. Suddenly, within yards of the cliff edge, he remembered.

‘AMEN!!’ he screamed. The horse stopped, inches to spare. The farmer mopped his brow and, lifting his eyes to heaven in gratitude, murmured, ‘Praise the Lord! Hallelujah!’[1]

Maybe when we hear that Jesus went around preaching, teaching and healing, and when we realise that the call of the disciple is to imitate the teacher, we might feel like we are riding an out-of-control horse. Are we about to go over a cliff?

Disciples of a Jewish rabbi knew their call was to imitate the way their master lived. Some took that to considerable extremes, and if I mentioned specifics some of you might cry out that modern cliché, ‘Too much information!’[2]

So those first disciples of Jesus, watching him teach, preach and heal would have been making mental notes. This was their vocation, too.

But it contains scary aspects for us. Some of us are nervous about ‘proclaiming’ our faith. We would not feel able to ‘teach’ the faith. And as for healing people, well where do we begin?

I think there are two keys to embracing this. The first is to recognise that when we become disciples of Jesus, then we receive the Holy Spirit into our lives. And the Holy Spirit brings all sorts of gifts to us that we did not previously have. If we are open to the empowering of the Holy Spirit, then we shall find ourselves equipped for Jesus-like tasks that we would otherwise be unable to do.

The other key is this. Only together are we the Body of Christ. You will contribute some gifts towards copying the ministry of Jesus. Your friend will offer other gifts. I will bring different gifts of the Spirit.

So yes, imitating the ministry of Christ is daunting – but only if we view it purely humanly. If we put ourselves at the disposal of the Holy Spirit, all sorts of things become possible that previously were never even on the radar of our imagination.

Let’s pray.

[1] Murray Watts, Rolling In The Aisles, p 90f, story 153.

[2] See Michael Griffiths, The Example of Jesus.

2

Sermon: Salt And Light

Here is the sermon for this coming Sunday, the second in our series from the Sermon on the Mount. Those who have read my sermons here in recent years may recognise one or two things I’ve quoted before, but they get a repeat here for a new church!

Matthew 5:13-16

Salt and light. The salt of the earth and the light of the world. If the Sermon on the Mount is where we learn to be disciples before the watching world, as I argued in my introduction last week, then salt and light are prime examples of this. Not only do we live our faith while the world is watching – as if we were actors in a TV show being viewed by others – we live our faith with those people and towards the world. That is, when Jesus calls us the salt of the earth and the light of the world, he is telling us we live as disciples for the blessing of the world.

There you are, done. In one minute.

But I’m going to say more, because this is so important. And while we might think we affirm the importance of being salt and light, I want to say this morning that we pay lip service to it, and the way we run our churches often undermines this essential Christian task.

How am I going to do it? Firstly by thinking about salt and secondly about – you guessed it – light.

So we begin with salt.

You are the salt of the earth. But if the salt loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again? It is no longer good for anything, except to be thrown out and trampled underfoot. (Verse 13)

I am sure you have heard several preachers expound on why Jesus describes as salt, and what our saltiness is meant to achieve. Some will tell you that salt is a preservative, and so Christian involvement in the world is about preventing moral degradation in society. More positively, others will say that salt is for seasoning or purifying, so Christian disciples have a rôle in improving the moral and ethical life of our culture. Another positive image of salt is to see it as fertiliser, stimulating the growth of righteousness, justice and spirituality in the world. Others interpret salt as a metaphor for wisdom, and therefore Christians provide acute moral insight to help society. This might be an argument for Christian involvement in politics, even for having bishops in the House of Lords. Then there are those who point to the use of salt in Old Testament texts about sacrifice or about God’s covenant.[1]

There’s just one problem with all these views. Jesus doesn’t ascribe to any of them.

In other words, Jesus doesn’t take his simple analogy of us as the salt of the earth and extend it into some great allegory. He just says we are the salt of the earth, full stop. We have to seek his meaning not in ancient uses of salt nor in Old Testament verses, but in what he says about the image.

And the point Jesus wants to make about being the salt of the earth is a negative one. He is concerned about his disciples not being the salt of the earth, not influencing society for good – whatever that entails:

But if the salt loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again? It is no longer good for anything, except to be thrown out and trampled underfoot. (Verse 13b)

So let’s pause and consider the problems here. I read an article on Friday by Krish Kandiah, who holds a senior position with the Evangelical Alliance. He asked, what do churches have to do in order to reach the missing young adults in their twenties and thirties? One of the problems he cited as making the church unattractive to people in that age range was the disconnect between Sunday and Monday. In your twenties and thirties, he said, you are faced with a lot of life changes. You may go through university, leave home, start a job, begin paying a mortgage, get married, have children and so on. To face such major challenges requires a lot of energy, and this shows itself in other ways. Often such people are ones who want to see the world changed for the better.

Unfortunately [says Kandiah] what 20-30s often hear in church is not encouragement to take huge steps in their faith, but to take on huge responsibilities within the church.

He quotes American pastor Tim Keller, who says that

as a pastor he was taught how to make people busy working in the churches.

What a tragedy this is! We are more concerned with filling church jobs than with encouraging people into character-building witness opportunities where they are the salt of the earth. Jesus says that salt without the saltiness, disciples who don’t influence the world for good, is

no longer good for anything, except to be thrown out and trampled underfoot. (Verse 13b)

And the word translated ‘no longer good for anything’ is a word that means ‘to become or to make foolish’[2]. Not being the salt of the earth, not making it a priority for Christians to influence the world for good, is foolishness in the eyes of Jesus. We are quick to condemn when people in politics, the media or popular arts take stances that are ignorant of Christianity or hostile to it. Yet how often is it the case that Christians have vacated these areas, seeing involvement there as inferior to church work?

Indeed, we institutionalise such an approach. Kandiah reminds me in his article of a story I have heard several times before. It was told by Mark Greene, the Executive Director of the London Institute for Contemporary Christianity. He speaks of a teacher who was being prayed for in church, in support of his rôle in the congregation teaching Sunday School. The man broke down in tears. Why did he only receive prayer for the one hour a week he had contact with Christian children, but no prayer at all for the forty hours a week he devoted to contact with non-church children.

Wasn’t Jesus right? Are we not fools when we give no priority to influencing the world for good as the salt of the earth?

By way of transition to talking secondly about light, let me tell you about a circuit steward from one of my previous appointments. It was always hard to get hold of him by phone or email, because he was so busy. Not only was he a circuit steward, his day job was a responsible managerial one for an international shipping company and he was also a governor at his daughter’s school. One day, I was talking with his wife about the pressures he was under.

“Yes,” she said, “we’ve had some conversations about that. He’s decided he’s going to give up his post as a school governor in order to concentrate on the more important things – like his church work.”

She was surprised when I suggested that his church work might not be the most important thing he did. Because, I argued, it meant losing another person from the front line of Christian witness in the world.

And that, positively, is Jesus’ point when he goes on to describe Christians as the light of the world:

You are the light of the world. A town built on a hill cannot be hidden. Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl. Instead they put it on its stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven. (Verses 14-16)

What we say and do is seen by the world. It is our witness, whether good or bad. But we can take this positively. We can see this as a wonderful opportunity for witness in the world. It isn’t that shining our light before others so that they see our good deeds is about us boasting or acting as if we are superior. Jesus says we can do it for a different motive: ‘that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven.’ Isn’t that what we want? Don’t we want our witness to attract other people to Jesus and his Father?

So what might we do about it? Our witness is about both our words and our deeds. It isn’t that we speak about our faith and don’t match it with our actions. Nor is it that we engage in worthy deeds as a reason to avoid talking about Christ. I suggest that one thing implied here is that we so live lives of love and concern for the people in our world that it leads to questions and opportunities, so that then we can tell people the Gospel of the Saviour and Lord in whom we believe.

One of my favourite examples of this was told by the American pastor and sociologist Tony Campolo. Over the years, he has had a special concern for some of the impoverished nations in the Caribbean, such as Haïti and the Dominican Republic. He has campaigned against multinational companies that have exploited their workers in these lands, and he has taken groups of Christians from the United States on mission trips there.

In particular, he tells a story about a Christian doctor who went out to one of these nations – I think it was the Dominican Republic. That doctor set up a surgery in a poor village. By day he gave himself to providing medical care for people who otherwise would not be able to access it. By evening he would drive around the area, preaching the Gospel. People listened. With a touch of grudging admiration, a local Communist Party official said, “He has earned the right to speak.”

I believe Jesus calls us to earn the right to speak. He calls us to stop treating the church as our one-stop provider of religious services and our social life, and to get our hands dirty in the world. The moment we start treating the church as the provider of our religious services we start asking the wrong questions about whether the church is meeting our needs, and then walking out when the preaching, the music, the small groups or the children’s ministry doesn’t reach the standards we set in our minds. And when we think that our social lives should revolve around the church, we cut ourselves off from the world where we are meant to shine our light, by reflecting Christ.

No: Jesus calls us to see the church as the people of God gathering to edify one another and strengthen each other for witness in the world. We have neighbours whom we can love in the name of Christ. We have neighbourhoods, villages, towns and institutions that need the love of Christ. We are part of a world that needs to see the love of Christ demonstrated and explained.

And although some will mock, many will ‘glorify [our] Father in heaven.’ That might simply be we’ve done a good bit of PR for the faith. But it might well be part of their journey to faith in Christ themselves.

In short, cutting some ties from the institutional church and simplifying some of the ways we do church in order to release ourselves to spend more time blessing people in our communities with the love of God in word and deed is absolutely critical to our sharing in the mission of God.

Or, to put it another way, someone has put it like this. The test of a church is whether the local community would miss it if it shut.

So a good test of whether we are salt and light is whether Knaphill and the neighbouring villages would be upset if KMC closed.

What do you think?

[1] Donald Hagner, Matthew 1-13, p 99.

[2] Ibid.

2

Sermon: God Is Smiling (The Beatitudes)

Matthew 5:1-12

I wonder whether you recognise this person? Those of you who remember news stories from the 1960s may do so. This is Archbishop Makarios III, a key figure in the Cypriot campaign for independence from Britain. He was well-known in my native north London, which had heavy pockets of Greek Cypriot communities. We had consecutive Greek Cypriot next-door neighbours. One family set up a thriving dry-cleaning business near Tottenham Hotspur’s football ground. They promised that if you brought your suit in before the match, it would be ready by the time you came out.

Makarios. I wonder whether you know what his name means? Blessèd. I don’t think the British authorities considered him blessèd or a blessing.

But ‘makarios’ is the word Matthew uses in the Beatitudes for the blessedness Jesus pronounces on God’s behalf here. ‘Makarios’ are the poor in spirit, the pure in heart and so on. What do we understand Jesus to mean when Jesus says that these disciples whose characteristics are so far from what many say are the priorities of life are ‘blessèd’?

Infamously, the Good News Bible translates ‘makarios’, ‘blessèd’, as ‘happy’. So the poor in spirit, the pure in heart and the persecuted are all happy. Hmm. Maybe sometimes, but it’s not guaranteed. Take those who are persecuted for their faith. On occasion they will feel it is an honour to suffer for Christ, but at other times they will cry out for relief from that suffering. Does ‘happy’ cover it? I’m not convinced.

I think the point may not be that the disciples are happy, but that God is happy – he is happy with what they are doing. The Beatitudes describe attitudes, actions and priorities in our lives that bring joy to the heart of God. The Christian rock band Delirious had a song called ‘God is smiling’, and I think the ‘Blessèd’ of the Beatitudes may indicate that God is smiling when this is how we choose to live for him.

So the Beatitudes becomes a text for learning how we please God. There is a text in Ephesians where Paul urges his readers to ‘find out what pleases the Lord’. Well, the Beatitudes would be a good place to stop by and discover what pleases the Lord.

But before we plunge into them, there is one thing to remember about pleasing God in the Beatitudes, and it’s this. Jesus’ statement that God blesses certain things is followed by a reward. For example, ‘Blessèd are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.’ What are we to make of this reward? How are we to understand the idea that God rewards us when we do what pleases him?

As a father, I’m delighted when my children do something particular in order to please me. But it’s not as though I wasn’t pleased with them before they did it. I can just go into their bedrooms at night and look at them sleeping to feel my heart leap with joy at the sight of them. When they deliberately set out to please me, it’s from an existing relationship of mutual love. It doesn’t earn my love, it simply brings my existing love for them to the surface.

It’s similar when thinking of our relationship with God. If we set out to make God smile by following the Beatitudes, it won’t earn us his love. We have his love already. He has offered it to us in Christ, and we have responded in repentance, faith and a commitment to following Jesus. If we embrace the Beatitudes, let’s do so because God already looks upon us in love, and we simply want to draw that to the surface with a heavenly smile.

Overall, then, the movement is something like this: God calls us – we respond – God rewards us.

Right – enough with the preliminaries. Let’s ask two questions about each Beatitude, then: firstly, what makes God smile? Then, secondly, how does he reward?

God smiles on ‘the poor in spirit’ (verse 3). When we so lack things that – rather than simply desire what the rest of the world lusts after – we  throw ourselves upon him in dependence and faith, then God smiles. His heart aches when he sees people in poverty, but he rejoices when those who lack what is needed trust him to provide what they need. When we are in desperate straits but we trust him, God smiles.

And it is that complete dependence upon God that means the kingdom of heaven is our reward. Faith in God through Christ is what brings us into God’s kingdom. We are in that kingdom now, because when we trust ourselves to Christ we place ourselves under his reign. That kingdom has not yet come fully, because people, institutions and other forces still oppose God’s rule. But one day God will put every enemy under his feet. In the meantime, all those whose hopeless condition causes them to put their trust in God find themselves already in the kingdom. That is the reward as God smiles on their faith, even in terrible circumstances.

The second Beatitude we often quote at funerals, usually when the minister is walking in with the coffin. Those who mourn are blessèd, because they will be comforted (verse 4) – presumably by God. I wouldn’t want to deny that our God blesses those who grieve, but I would want to expand how we traditionally understand this particular Beatitude.

How? There is a clear link in the language with Isaiah 61, the passage Jesus read out in his home synagogue at Nazareth to describe his mission. In that chapter, God promises ‘to comfort all who mourn’ (Isaiah 61:2). Why are people mourning? Because the world is not the way God wants it to be. They are mourning not merely for themselves, but for a society where things are not as God would have them be. To those who grieve that the world is not as God wants it to be, Jesus promises comfort. ‘One day,’ he says, ‘it will not be like this. Your grief and anguish in prayer will be rewarded when the Father makes all things new in heaven and upon earth.’ So do not be afraid to keep weeping and praying for the world – God is pleased that you do, and your reward will be to see the coming of his kingdom.

Then we move to the London Underground, to the famous graffiti: ‘The meek will inherit the earth – so long as the rest of you don’t mind.’ The meek ‘are not persons who are submissive, mild and unassertive’[1], but those who have been humbled. Psalm 37 promised that such people would ‘inherit the land’, and the inheritance of the land was of course a powerful thought for Jewish people. (It still is, with arguments over territories and one state or two with the Palestinians.) But Jesus doesn’t limit this to the land of Israel: the whole land, the earth itself, is for those who have been humbled. God does not grant his new creation to the powerful, the wealthy or the violent, but to those of no account, those disregarded and trampled upon in the world. And many of the early disciples were just that. Beaten down, because they confessed Christ as Lord. To such people, and not to the emperors and armies, Jesus ‘promised the earth’. God would be pleased with their courageous, sacrificial witness, and he would reward their humble bravery at the end.

When we come to God’s delight in ‘those who hunger and thirst for righteousness’, we are into the area of multiple meanings. You will know the old saying, ‘The Greeks had a word for it,’ meaning that the Greek language had many words to encompass different shades of meaning – for example, the several different words for the various kinds of love. However, it’s also true that individual words also carried a range of meanings, just as we look up a word in a dictionary and see several varying definitions.

That is true of the word ‘righteousness’ here. When we hear ‘righteousness’ in English, we tend to think of personal, individual qualities of right living. But the Greek word Matthew uses is one that has not only an individual meaning, it also has a social meaning – that is, ‘justice’. Jesus says that God delights in those who care so much for justice that they are hungry and thirsty (literally). They may be hungry and thirsty for justice, because they themselves have been denied it. But they will not keep quiet, they will not be denied, even at the cost of diet, nutrition and hydration.

Yet they will not be empty always, ‘they will be filled’ – that will be God’s reward. God is pleased when people do not sit down, lie back and accept injustice. He is thrilled by people who make his justice their mission in life, even at great cost.

But the ‘righteousness’ element isn’t lost in the concentration on justice. It is those who are righteous in God’s sight – vindicated by him through Christ – who will enjoy the justice of God’s kingdom rule. The person who pleases God and calls forth his reward is the one who wants to be right with him in Christ and who also then is restless for justice, to the point of personal sacrifice.

The fifth Beatitude is where we learn of God’s pleasure in the merciful, who themselves will be shown mercy. In a world which all too routinely says that certain things are ‘unforgivable’, and which calls for ‘no mercy’ to be shown to undesirables, Jesus extols mercy. Mercy isn’t the province of do-gooders, of bleeding-heart liberals who excuse the inexcusable. Mercy knows that sin is always unjustified, but it forgivers.

The other day, a friend of mine from Essex put these slogans about mercy from the American pastor Rob Bell on his Facebook wall:

Revenge doesn’t work
Bitterness is Unfulfilled Revenge
To forgive is to set someone free and then find out it’s you.
To not forgive is to let someone rent free space in your head.
Why let the wrong they did determine your joy?

When we show mercy, we not only set the sinner free, we set ourselves free – free from the chains of bitterness. The God of mercy looks with delight on those who have learned mercy from him. To understand the forgiveness of God is so to receive it that when we consider how much we have been forgiven, we have to extend that to others. God blesses that.

What, next, of the way God smiles on ‘the pure in heart’ who ‘will see God’ as their reward? I once had a conversation with a Muslim imam about this. He said that the inner person, the heart and the motives, didn’t matter. All that mattered was outward action. I don’t know how representative his view would be of Islamic teaching, but I beg to differ. Jesus knew that our inner life affected our outward action, hence his stress on the pure in heart. It was something the psalmists had proclaimed, too. According to Psalm 24, only those with clean hands and pure hearts (outward and inward life) would see God.

Of course, who can be completely sure of their motives and their integrity? But it is critical that we pay attention to them. I once read the testimony of a minister who had become enslaved to pornography. He tried various strategies to get free of his addiction. Eventually, it was this verse that set him free. The knowledge that he wanted to see God one day led him to purify his heart. When his heart was pure, he lost his desire for porn. The reward drove him to seek God’s pleasure.

The peacemakers bring pleasure to the Father, and will be called sons of God. Now that’s polemical in Jesus’ day. Who called themselves the sons of God in those times? The Zealots, the political terrorists who wanted to bring God’s kingdom by violence. But the kingdom comes not by causing violence but by suffering to bring peace – supremely in the Cross of Christ. It is the way of the Cross that God blesses – not only so that we may be forgiven, it is also the shape of our discipleship. Later, Jesus would say that his followers needed to take up their cross.

We’re near the end now. The last two beatitudes have similar themes. Both express God’s pleasure at those who bear persecution, the first group ‘because of righteousness’ (verse 10), the second ‘because of [Jesus]’  (verse 11). Is God sadistic in wanting to see people suffer? No: he is heartened by those who are brave to stand for what is right and for his Son, even when it costs them. He will not let their persecutors have the final say. So the kingdom of heaven is theirs (verse 10), and their reward will be great in heaven (verse 12).

Why? These are people who will not fight on the world’s terms, but in kingdom ways, and so they are rewarded according to God’s kingdom. Their attitude could be encapsulated in some words of Martin Luther King that an American friend of mine posted on Facebook in response to yesterday’s assassination attempt on an Arizona politician:

Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.

How, then, might we conclude these reflections on the Beatitudes? They show God’s pleasure when the disciples of Christ follow him radically, even at the risk of sacrifice, because they go against the grain of the world. This brings such joy to his heart that it overflows in reward – not always in the here and now; sometimes it is a promise for the future.

But this joy of God – the smile on his face that says ‘Blessèd’ – comes from the fact that he already loves us unconditionally as his children. We take these brave actions of discipleship not in order to win his love but because we are loved.

So let God’s love for us draw out courageous discipleship from us in response. And may that lead to his blessing and reward – which leads us to further joyful service. May our life of love with Christ, therefore, be not a vicious circle but a virtuous circle.

[1] Donald Hagner, Matthew 1-13, p 92.

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A Brief Introduction To The Sermon On The Mount

We’re starting a sermon series on the Sermon on the Mount at Knaphill in the morning. During the service, I’m giving a five-minute introduction to the whole ‘sermon’, which I reproduce below. The next post on the blog will be the initial sermon from the series, which is on the Beatitudes.

Matthew 5:1-12

Before we get into today’s first sermon in the new series in a few minutes’ time, I want to offer a brief introduction to the Sermon on the Mount. It’s not a complete explanation of it, and the themes, but I hope what I can do in this little slot is a modest amount of scene-setting for the next few weeks, without stealing the thunder of any other preacher.

I want to do this by looking at those introductory two verses that come before the Beatitudes, which we’ll think about in the sermon proper later. Here are verses 1 and 2 again:

Now when Jesus saw the crowds, he went up on a mountainside and sat down. His disciples came to him, and he began to teach them.

Did you notice that contrast between the disciples and the crowds? Jesus sees the crowds, but tries to get his disciples away from them for some teaching. However, if you were to skip to the end of Matthew 5-7, you will find the crowds still there, roaring their approval of Jesus’ teaching.

So who is this teaching for – the disciples or the crowds? I think it is for the disciples, but Matthew reminds us that we shall always have to live out Jesus’ teaching before the crowds. The Sermon on the Mount is instruction for Christian disciples, but however much we may want to do things in quiet isolation, the world will always be watching us. As we ‘come apart from the crowds’ on a Sunday morning, then, we are doing so to ready ourselves for living out the teaching of Jesus in full view of the world.

Next, I invite you to notice the mountain. Jesus goes up a mountainside – hence ‘the Sermon on the Mount’. Whenever Jesus goes up a mountain in Matthew’s Gospel, something important happens. There is a revelation of Jesus. The climax of the temptations is when the devil takes Jesus up a high mountain (4:8). On another occasion, he heals people (15:29). The Transfiguration happens on a mountain (17:1ff). And after the Resurrection, Jesus gives the Great Commission on a mountain (28:16ff). So when we read here that Jesus went up a mountainside, we should be ready for something important, something close to the heart of Jesus. We are not about something incidental or trivial here. What Jesus is about to teach is serious and important.

Don’t forget too that Moses was known for receiving revelation on a mountain – Sinai. But here, Jesus gives revelation on a mountainside. This is one hint about the stature of Jesus, particularly that he is the ‘one greater than Moses’ who was prophesied in Deuteronomy to come. Another hint of this comes in the fact that the Sermon on the Mount is the first of five big blocks of Jesus’ teaching in Matthew’s Gospel. This is all building up Jesus’ authority. He’s more important than the person who shaped the Israelite nation. No wonder there will be passages in the Sermon on the Mount where Jesus says, ‘You have heard it said … but I say to you.’ He is outranking Moses and all the teachers of his day. He is claiming a higher authority than all of them.

And then he sits down to teach. This was the posture of an authoritative rabbi. In our culture, someone stands to deliver important teaching. Not in first century Judaism. Everything here is screaming that we had better take notice of this man and what he is going to teach.

So I invite you to embrace these coming weeks in this spirit. Anything Jesus teaches is important, but this seems to hold a special status, even among his teaching. He is telling us how to be disciples in the sight of a watching world.

That has to be important, doesn’t it?

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Covenant Service Sermon: Jumping Into The Arms Of The Father

John 15:1-17

In one of his books, Brennan Manning tells this story from a Catholic priest in the Bahamas:

A two-storey house caught fire. The family – father, mother, several children – were on their way out when the smallest boy became terrified and ran back upstairs. Seconds later he appeared at a smoke-filled window. His father, outside, shouted at him: “Jump, son, jump! I’ll catch you.” The boy cried, “But, Daddy, I can’t see you.” “I know,” his father called, “I know. But I can see you.”[1]

I wonder whether Covenant Sunday is a day when some of us Methodists are afraid of jumping. Afraid of jumping into our Father’s hands. We are afraid of the solemn covenant promises. Making those promises is like jumping out of a window, and fearing what will happen.

I have long been convinced that a way to approach the renewal of our covenant with God is to appreciate first the nature of the God into whose arms we jump. That, like the father in Brennan Manning’s story, he says to us, “I can see you”, and stretches out sure, strong arms to catch us and to keep us safe when we jump.

How are we going to do that? I want to take our Gospel reading. It is challenging and quite open about the fact that being a disciple of Jesus is not always an easy or comfortable experience. But at the same time, I believe we also find in the passage the Father who can see us, and whose arms are outstretched to catch us.

Firstly, Jesus talks about pruning. Whenever this passage comes up, I am fond of observing that I am no gardener. The only value of a garden centre is if it has a good café with decent coffee and cakes. Gardens hold little pleasure for me, hard as that may be for some of you to understand. But then you may not appreciate my love of cricket and computing! Debbie keeps the manse garden tidy, thankfully.

But for all my lack of interest in gardening, I do know that pruning is something that looks unpleasant. I have seen the implements, and they look like instruments of torture. If Jesus uses an image of pruning for the Father’s work in our lives, then that sounds painful to me. The removal of unfruitful branches and the cutting back of others – no, I don’t fancy being first in the queue for that. It’s like the little boy’s fears as his father calls him to jump from the window – he thinks he will break bones.

However, in a detail we easily miss in English, Jesus says any pruning the Father does is not for the first time. He says,

You have already been cleansed by the word that I have spoken to you. (Verse 3)

‘Cleansed’ sounds all right, doesn’t it? A nice, refreshing bath or shower? Except that in the Greek, ‘cleansed’ comes from the same source as ‘pruned’. Jesus effectively says that his word has already pruned us.

That’s what the Gospel does. It prunes us. We know that the call to follow Jesus involves not only faith but also repentance, where we change our minds about the way we lead our lives, where we perform a u-turn in order to go his way. That repentance is a pruning. Certain things go from our lives. The Gospel message of Jesus cuts them away.

So when Jesus tells his disciples here that the Father will continue the pruning process, he is telling us something about the ongoing nature of Christian discipleship. He does not call us to an act of repentance when we come to faith. Rather, he calls us to a life of repentance. Our salvation is more than forgiveness. To sign up to Jesus’ project is to enlist in a process of transformation. To be a disciple is like the road sign, ‘Danger: men at work’, except that in our case it reads, ‘Danger: God at work.’ Or, as the t-shirt puts it, ‘Please be patient with me: God hasn’t finished with me yet.’

To reinforce it further, the apostle Paul had a positive take on this process of transformation. He told the Philippians,

I am confident of this, that the one who began a good work among you will bring it to completion by the day of Jesus Christ. (Philippians 1:6)

Or, as the worship song puts it,

Jesus, You are changing me
By Your Spirit You’re making me like You
Jesus, You’re transforming me
That Your loveliness may be seen in all I do
You are the potter and I am the clay
Help me to be willing to let You have Your way
Jesus, You are changing me
As I let You reign supreme within my heart[2]

So, to mix metaphors, is the ‘pruning’ worth the ‘leap’ out of the building? Marilyn Baker, the author of those song words, says ‘yes’. She says that Jesus is changing her so ‘that your loveliness may be seen in all I do’.

And that is similar to what Jesus says here, when he says that the Father prunes us so that we ‘bear more fruit’ (verse 2). Is it not our longing to be more ‘fruitful’ in the life of faith? If so, we have to recognise that God will want to cut certain things away from our lives. Some will be obvious sins. Others will be good things that we have idolised. Others might be good, but not God’s best for us. The call to repentance is not a diatribe from a severe God who wants to paint a grey coating of misery on our lives. It is, as Paul tells the Romans, his ‘kindness’ that leads to repentance. It is because he has good plans for us in his kingdom purposes.

Is it worth submitting to God’s pruning? Is it worth saying ‘yes’ to that as we renew our solemn promises today? What do you think?

Secondly, Jesus calls us to abide in him as he does in us. ‘Abide in me as I abide in you,’ he says (verse 4). What is this about?

An abode is a dwelling place, a home, a residence. We sometimes say that homeless people are of ‘no fixed abode’. Jesus, however, abides in us. He has taken up residence in our lives. He has not come for a holiday, he has not come as part of a house-swap or to be a house-sitter. He has come to live in us.

So if we are called to abide in Jesus, we are called to live permanently with him. Not only permanently, but in close relationship. He draws near to us; we draw near to him. This mutual abiding is the spiritual version of living in each other’s pockets. That may sound wonderful to some people, and terrifying to others. What might it involve? I can’t cover everything, but here are a couple of areas.

Firstly, abiding in Christ means the disciplines of staying close to him. The most important thing in church life is not the property, it is not the finances or anything like that. The most critical aspect of Christian life is staying close to Jesus. Our property and finance can be in perfect order, but if we are not walking with Christ, we are wasting our time.

Therefore, if we are to heed the call to abide in Christ, we shall want to practise those disciplines which draw us close to his presence and his voice. So, yes, we renew our commitment to worship and fellowship, to personal prayer and Bible reading, to Holy Communion and fasting. All of these matter far more than the typical business preoccupations of many congregations.

But to say that we should renew our commitment to things like prayer and Bible study is to sound rather like I am asking us to make a New Year’s Resolution. And we know how easily we break those. If we just treat these things like that, we shall fail quickly and be discouraged.

I want to say, therefore, that the call to draw close to Jesus with spiritual disciplines is one we do out of response to his love for us. It is not something we do as an ‘ought’ or a ‘must’ or a ‘should’; it is something we do because Jesus has already drawn near to us, to abide in us. It is in gratitude for the love he extends to us.

Of course, we shall fail along the way. But instead of being discouraged that we have not reached the mark, we shall instead feel his abiding love in us that encourages us to get up again, dust ourselves down and keep on going. These things do not always come naturally. We can be like a toddler learning to walk. We fall down, but we get up again and have another go, because we are loved. On the way, I can offer you help with plans for Bible reading and approaches to prayer, but do not be afraid to try and fall down. Just get up and keep going again as you learn to draw closer to Christ.

The other thing I want to say about abiding in Christ is that being so close to him, we want to do what he says. That’s why Jesus links abiding in his love with keeping his commandments (verse 10). If you are close to someone, not only do you want to spend time with them (spiritual disciplines, in the case of our relationship with Jesus), you also want to please them. Abiding in Christ will mean a desire to obey him.

And that’s where the fear of jumping out of the building looms large again. What will he want me to do? What will I have to give up? What dark and strange place does he want to send me to?

But again, the promise is that if we jump, he will catch us. The promise, too, is that he will enable us to obey because he is with us. We are not dependent upon our own strength to do these things.

However, he kicks us off with a commandment that is simple to state, and highly important to take seriously:

This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. (Verses 12-13)

So let’s get going with that one – loving one another. We can take some simple steps straightaway. We can say that we shall no longer treat someone else in the church like they are our servant, but as a valued child of God We can commit ourselves to stop assuming that someone’s motives are wrong and seek to believe the best about them. If we jumped into such a love for one another that disowned the backbiting, backstabbing and character assassination that is too often seen in our society, what kind of witness would that be? Remember what was said of the early Christians:

See how these Christians love one another.

Let’s forget every other distraction and concern for a season. Let’s be known as a community of love. What importance do all our other debates, business items and ideas have in comparison to Jesus’ call to love one another?

Go back to that young boy at the smoke-filled window. Hear the call of the father again. “Jump, son, jump. I’ll catch you.” Is today the day to jump – and find ourselves held in the arms of God? What if we were to risk letting him prune us in repentance? What if we were to risk getting closer to Christ in devotion and obedience, specifically in loving one another?

What if …

What if we jumped?

[1] Brennan Manning, Lion And Lamb: The relentless tenderness of Jesus, p 64.

[2] Marilyn Baker, © 1981 Word’s Spirit of Praise Music.

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Sermon: Advent 2, An Undiluted Prophetic Hope

Isaiah 11:1-10

If I were ever to be on a TV show, I think Grumpy Old Men might suit me. Not that I would ever be famous enough to be invited, but I can be the sort of person who thinks that Ebenezer Scrooge was given an unfair press. It’s not simply that this is the time of year when Debbie gets out all the Singing Santa toys that she and the children love (and which can drive me mad), it’s this Second Sunday in Advent.

You see, the grump in me wonders why it got changed in the current Lectionary. You used to know where you were in the four Sundays of Advent. The first Sunday was about the Advent Hope – not just Christ’s original coming but the promise of his appearing again in glory. The second Sunday was about the promise of the Messiah in the Old Testament prophets. Sunday number three introduced you to the man with the extreme diet, John the Baptist. Then on the fourth Sunday it’s the Annunciation by Gabriel to Mary.

What went wrong? How come we now get a reading about John the Baptist this week as well as next week? Some of it has to do with the moving of Bible Sunday into October, although I’m not sure which came first. Perhaps a grumpy old man like me should appreciate two weeks’ worth of his fire and brimstone preaching, but actually I miss the emphasis on the prophets.

And no, it’s wrong to see the prophets as a job lot of grumpy old men. In the short term, they did warn people about the consequences of sin. But in the long term, they held out the hope of God’s future. In Isaiah’s case, that included the hope that God would send his Anointed One, that is, the Messiah.

So, then, what does this passage from Isaiah point us to in the hope of the Messiah’s coming? I want to take Isaiah’s original intentions and give them a distinctively Christ-centred flavour.

Firstly, let me take you to the manse Debbie and I had in the circuit before last. Known among local Methodists as ‘the Frost manse’, because David Frost famously lived there as a boy when his father was the local Methodist minister just after World War Two. The house had begun life, though, as the admiral’s house for the nearby Chatham Dockyard. Thus, although it was terraced, it was a large house. The downstairs study which Paradine Frost, David Frost’s father, had used when he was there, had by our time been converted into a huge kitchen. There was ample space not only to cook but also to seat several people around a dining table for meals.

There was a large window from the kitchen looking out onto the garden. Unfortunately, it didn’t let in much light, and we had to turn on the lights earlier and more frequently than might have been expected.

Why was this so? Because a large tree stood not far outside the window. Far enough away for the roots not to affect the house, but near enough to darken the kitchen. Eventually, we asked the circuit if they could send in a tree surgeon, which they did, and we gained more natural light when he had reduced it to a stump.

Isaiah begins by talking about a stump:

A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots. (Verse 1)

‘The stump of Jesse’ is a tragic statement. You will remember that Jesse was the father of David, and all Israel’s hopes had been in him. Yet this seems to suggest that David’s line has failed, even to the point where his father is named instead of him. The great tree has been cut down to a stump. ‘The stump of Jesse’ implies human failure and sin. Time after time, Israel and Judah had been let down by her kings.

Yet, says Isaiah, ‘from the stump of Jesse’ shall come ‘a shoot’ ‘and a branch shall grow out of his roots’. From a long line of human failure, God will grow his purposes. From generations of sinners, God will bring his Messiah. From iffy patriarchs whose morals crumbled under pressure, to Rahab the prostitute, to King David the adulterer and murderer, the ancestral line of the Messiah is filled with broken sinners. Within the purposes of God you get Moses who murdered a man and ran away, then protested when God called him that he couldn’t be a public speaker. You have Gideon, who was fearful and full of doubt. There is Jeremiah, who may well have suffered from depression, yet only Isaiah exceeds him among the prophets.

And so that is the first theme I want to take from Isaiah – the hope of the Messiah is one of God working through sinners. God’s purposes are accomplished through a people that one video clip I saw the other day called ‘The March of the Unqualified’.

This Advent, then, be encouraged by the prophetic hope that whatever your failures, whatever your weaknesses, whatever your disappointments, God is capable of working his purposes out through you. If you think that your sins have disqualified you from God and that you have shrivelled from a tree to a stump, then know that God is able to develop a shoot from your stump and a branch from your roots. The God of grace and mercy has come to shine his light into the world even through a cut-down stump.

Secondly, if there’s one thing I get very little of as a parent of young children, but which I would like to have more of, it’s rest. While – as I told Knaphill last week – I begrudgingly rely on an alarm clock in the morning, there are times when it’s not needed. We have two small human alarm clocks, and one in particular. Rest is something Debbie and I envy in others.

But the trouble with words is one of multiple meaning. Think of how you look up a dictionary definition for a word, only to face a range of options. And ‘rest’ is one such word. In the way I have just used it, the connection is with sleep. But ‘rest’ can also mean ‘stay’. I’d like to combine the two meanings of rest into one, of course: stay asleep!

But it’s this second meaning of ‘rest’, that of staying, which Isaiah uses here:

The spirit of the Lord shall rest on him, the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord. (Verse 2)

It’s not simply that the Messiah will have the Spirit of the Lord, it’s that the Spirit of the Lord will rest – that is, stay – on him. Generally in the Old Testament when the Spirit of God comes upon someone it is a ‘tumultuous and spasmodic’[1] experience. The Spirit usually comes dramatically, but only temporarily.

Therefore it’s a big thing for Isaiah to speak about the Spirit resting on the Messiah. Here is the one on whom the Spirit will come and remain. The Messiah will have God’s Spirit permanently. And when John the Baptist says that Jesus is the one on whom he saw the Holy Spirit come and remain, he is making a big claim – a claim that here indeed is the Messiah.

What does this resting of the Spirit upon Jesus mean for us? It ushers in the New Testament era of faith, where the people of the Messiah may receive the same gift. The coming of Jesus the Messiah is the coming of a new age, the age of the Holy Spirit, where Jesus, who received the Spirit permanently, gives the Spirit to his followers in the same way. There may still be dramatic experiences of the Holy Spirit, but the Spirit does not generally depart from a person any more. The Spirit may become distant when we grieve him by our sin, but the intention of Jesus in the messianic age is to give the Holy Spirit as a permanent endowment. In this way, Advent and Christmas look forward to Pentecost!

So be encouraged. Just as the Christ child is called ‘Immanuel’, God with us, so he comes with the promise of God being with us – ‘even to the close of the age’ – because he who receives the Spirit permanently gives the Spirit in the same way. Do not think that God has deserted you. As one Christian scholar puts it, even doubt ‘is a time of “disguised closeness” to God’. Or as the liturgy puts it, in a dialogue between minister and congregation: ‘The Lord is here.’ ‘His Spirit is with us.’

So far, then, we have good news twice over: firstly, that God works even through sinners and failures to bring his messianic purposes to fruition. Secondly, that the Messiah receives the Spirit permanently and gives the Spirit in a similar way to his disciples, so we may know that God is always present with us, even when we can neither see nor feel him. I want to draw out a third strand of this messianic hope before I close.

Just as we’ve thought about the word ‘rest’ as having more than one meaning, this third thought also depends on a double entendre. Not in the sense of a rude joke, but because biblical words are often so rich they convey multiple meanings.

There is one such word in our passage, and Isaiah uses it more than once: righteousness: ‘with righteousness he shall judge the poor’ (verse 4); ‘Righteousness shall be the belt around his waist’ (verse 5). Isaiah uses the word ‘righteousness’ of the Messiah here in terms of who he is, and what he does. Isaiah uses ‘righteousness’ for the Messiah’s dealings with people, and for the society he creates.

It’s a many-layered word, and at the heart of God’s righteousness in Christ is God’s covenant faithfulness. In covenant faithfulness through Jesus, God will make people righteous with him. Ultimately, we know he will do that through the Cross. But this righteousness is not just a ‘get out of jail free’ card for the Day of Judgment. God’s righteousness is also about the transformation he wants to bring to people, to societies, to the world and even to all creation. God’s righteousness is about personal and social salvation, personal and social transformation.

If this is what Jesus the Messiah came to do, it crosses the boundaries we sometimes erect in the church. On the one side we have those who say personal conversion to Christ is the be-all and end-all of faith. They say that society will not change until people are changed by God. On the other there are those who are almost cynical about personal conversion and say the big thing is social justice. Yet the righteousness of the Messiah doesn’t allow us to split personal conversion and social justice and play them off against each other, supporting our particular favourite. Jesus has come to call people to personal faith in him, and to share in his project of transforming the world.

And if that’s the case, woe betide us if we reduce Advent or Christmas to gooey sentimental thoughts about a baby. The baby who came did so through God’s purposes of using weak, sinful people. The baby who came would receive the Spirit in full measure and permanently, and came to give the Spirit permanently to those weak sinners that God delights in using. And the baby who came gave the Spirit to weak sinners to bring them to faith in him and to empower them to work for God’s kingdom.

The prophets don’t let us settle for a half-hearted, diluted hope. Let’s make sure we drink their hope neat.

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Sermon, Advent: Time To Wake Up

Romans 13:11-14

One of my least favourite, but most necessary, possessions is the alarm clock. Without it, someone like me, who is constitutionally a night owl, would oversleep every morning. I cannot say I appreciate the insistent beeping that says, “Listen to me, I am so annoying. Just get up and switch me off.” While other people bounce out of bed, energised to meet the new day, I wish the god of sleep had not been dethroned for yet another day.

The apostle Paul wouldn’t have known about alarm clocks, but he describes Advent in a manner that is like seeing it as God’s alarm clock. It urgently tells us God’s time. It tells us that

our salvation is nearer now than when we first believed (verse 11)

and that

The night is nearly over; the day is almost here (verse 12).

Advent is the season that tells us God’s time. It tells us not simply that Christ is coming in terms of his birth at Christmas, it tells us that he will one day appear again, this time not in obscurity but in glory.

In these terms, we might get nervous about Advent as an alarm clock. The thought that ‘our salvation is nearer now than when we first believed’ makes us think of those Christians who are forever predicting that Jesus will come again very soon. Their predictions always fail, and we are left with the Christian faith being discredited by what is either well-meaning error or cynical emotional blackmail. We want none of that. We know that Jesus said no-one knew when he was coming again.

But the basic truth which Paul elucidates here must be true: our salvation is nearer now than when we first believed. The fullness of God’s kingdom is closer. There is less time until the general resurrection of the dead, and God brings in his new heavens and new earth.

God wants to tell us his time. He will not tell us when Jesus is returning, but the fact that he is has an effect upon the way that we live the Christian life. With an alarm clock, there is no room for complacency. It rings or beeps incessantly, until we do something about it. And that is what God is doing at Advent. He is saying to us, this is no time to be lax about being a Christian. Rather, this is a time to be active, deliberate and full of intent as a follower of Jesus. Like the t-shirt slogan says, ‘Jesus is coming: better look busy!’

Telling the Advent time, then, is about living with a sense of urgency. Not frantic, not haunted or hunted, but urgent.

That’s all very well, but what does that mean? Paul calls us to two actions that we need to do when the alarm clock goes off. The first is to wake up:

The hour has already come for you to wake up from your slumber (verse 11).

In a service where we have already baptised Leo, ‘wake up’ may be a theme that provokes certain thoughts and emotions from Kim and Mark! While I hope that at two years old, Leo has long since established a sleep pattern, there are doubtless still plenty of occasions when his parents don’t need an alarm clock, because they are woken by his calling.

What does it mean to wake up when we discover the urgency of God’s time? Partly, it is about the urgency of which I spoke a moment ago. When we know that the grains of sand are trickling down through God’s timer, then we know we need to wake up and get on with things. The alarm clock says, if you don’t get on with things now, you’ll be late for work. And you don’t want that. The crying baby says, I have an urgent need. Come to me!

What kind of person is ‘awake’, according to Paul? It is one who is prepared for the end of the night and the breaking of the dawn. For Paul, the ‘night’ is the present evil age, the age of sin, which Christ came to conquer and redeem in the Cross. The ‘day’ that is ‘close at hand’ (verse 12) is the kingdom of God, where God reigns in love, justice and grace. If we have heard God’s Advent alarm clock, we want to be living as if it is daylight, not as if it is night.

So if I am to be ‘awake’ in the sight of God, I will be a person who embraces the kingdom of God. I will be someone who lives according to the values and principles of God’s coming age, even when they conflict with the darkness of the contemporary ‘night’ in which we find ourselves living.

Therefore, to live awake as if in God’s daytime is to live by love for God and for neighbour. To be awake in Christ is to live in a spirit that forswears revenge in favour of forgiveness. To live in the day means to show God’s special concern for the poor and the obscure, instead of the popular fantasies that prefer the wealthy, the powerful and the celebrities. To be awake in the kingdom of God is to live a life based on the fact that the most precious thing in all the world is to know that I am ‘loved with an everlasting love’ by Almighty God in Jesus Christ. I do not then take my significance or status from my job or my social standing: to do so is a vanity, compared with God’s love for me in Christ. To live as awake in the light of Christ is to know that God’s words are a light to my path, not to let the loud but passing fads of our culture steer our lives.

Advent, then, is a call to wake up to God’s time: that Jesus who came will come again. It means we need to wake up and live in God’s daylight. I’ve just suggested a few examples of what that will mean for us.

But to do so requires a determined attitude. When we wake up, there are various things we need to do in order to face what life has for us. One such thing is to get dressed, and that is the other thing Paul calls us to do here: get dressed. In fact, he says it twice, in slightly different language each time:

So let us put aside the deeds of darkness and put on the armour of light. (Verse 12)

Rather, clothe yourselves with the Lord Jesus Christ (verse 14).

‘Put on’; ‘clothe yourselves’. Get dressed. Wear on the one hand ‘the armour of light’ or on the other hand ‘the Lord Jesus Christ’. What are we to take from these images? I believe it’s something to do with the fact that to live according to the daylight of God’s kingdom rather than the night-time of the present age is going to take an effort. We need to be intentional about it – that is, it won’t just happen to us. The old slogan ‘let go and let God’ may be valuable in teaching us to trust God, but if we think we don’t have a responsibility for our actions, we’re tragically mistaken. We need to co-operate with the work of the Holy Spirit in our lives. We shall live by his power, but we need to say ‘yes’ to walking in his ways.

We have all the resources of Jesus Christ, but we still need to ‘put him on’ – to be ‘clothed in Christ’. God shines his light, but we still need to ‘put on the armour of light’.

And perhaps ‘armour’ is a telling image for the clothing we wear. To wake up and live in God’s daytime is to accept not merely that we will live differently from the world. It is to accept that to do so will mean we need the protection of divine armour, because we shall find ourselves in a conflict, and sometimes under attack for doing so. The trouble with living by daylight is that light starts to shine into darkened places, and the darkness no more welcomes that than a dictatorship embraces dissidents. If we put on the armour of light, we are the dissidents of the world.

Think about it in relation to the examples I mentioned a minute or two ago: loving God and loving neighbour sounds attractive – after all Girl Guides promise to love God and do good – but while society will accept this up to a point, what our culture really wants to believe is that charity begins at home. In other words, we put ourselves first. Forgiving those who wrong us may get some admiring coverage for a while, but ultimately it’s a challenge to those who always need to find a scapegoat to blame for everything. Finding our status in the love of God rather than in our job or our social standing turns our society’s way of putting people in their place upside down. Favouring the poor and the marginalised may win you certain plaudits, but in the long run our economy can’t run that way, because it’s structured to thrive as much by our purchasing the things we don’t need as anything else.

It requires determination, then, to wake up and get dressed in the light of God’s time. Right now, Paul places us at the end of the night, as dawn is coming. Night is fleeing, the day is on its way. But his image breaks down, because he is imagining not a sequence where day follows night but a clash between night and day. If we live in God’s coming daylight, we shall be drawn into that conflict until the time of God’s final and ultimate triumph over the night. Sometimes, the forces of the night will inflict suffering on the armies of the day. That is to be expected for a community that was formed around the sinless Son of God who was crucified on false charges.

But … we are not merely the community of the Cross, but of the Empty Cross. We are the people of the Empty Tomb. We who are called to wake up and live in the light of God’s coming day are those who do so, knowing what the future holds. The final chapter of Revelation, the final book in the Bible, contains an image of God’s people in God’s new Jerusalem that is pertinent to our theme this morning. Revelation 22:5 says this:

There will be no more night. They will not need the light of a lamp or the light of the sun, for the Lord God will give them light. And they will reign for ever and ever.

Friends, as the Advent alarm clock rings and we wake up, determined to get dressed and live in the light of God’s coming day regardless of the temporary presence of the remaining night, we do so knowing the future God has for us. Whatever the darkness does to us now, the Advent hope is not merely that the light of Christ comes into the world. It is that it will prevail.

Whatever the evidence looks like at times, when we commit our lives to following Jesus, we sign up with the winning side.

That’s the Advent hope.

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