Category: Sermons

Third Sunday in Advent: Sing For Joy (Zephaniah 3:14-20)

(This is a repeat of a sermon I first preached six years ago.)

Zephaniah 3:14-20

If, like me, you’re a bit of a misery guts in the run-up to Christmas, then the Third Sunday in Advent is your favourite. It’s the day we traditionally remember John the Baptist. And what finer example of pricking the balloon of froth and trivia is there than the man who called the people who rushed to him ‘You brood of vipers’ (Luke 3:7)? We’d be thrilled to have crowds rushing here, wouldn’t we? Imagine if we had a sudden major influx of newcomers on a Sunday morning and I stood in the pulpit, denouncing them in that way? I think you’d be going home and phoning the Superintendent – even though what John tells people to do, in sharing, honest and just behaviour, and plain integrity – isn’t theologically radical. (Although it is disturbing that he does have to be that basic.)

In clearing the way for the Messiah, we often think of the severe images in John’s preaching – the brood of vipers, the winnowing fork and fire of the Messiah, and so on. But what I want to look at this morning is not so much the process of preparation but rather what John was preparing for.

And that’s where Zephaniah’s prophecy comes in. He brings God’s vision of what things will be like after the end of exile. And while God’s people are no longer in a foreign land, you’ll perhaps recall how I’ve said that in Jesus’ day they saw themselves as still in exile, due to their occupation by the Roman forces.

Now we know that Jesus announced a very different end of exile from that which his nation anticipated. Not all of them would have seen the need for the repentance which John proclaimed. And even those who did would have assumed that if they lived in holiness then God would grant their wish of deliverance from the Romans.

But nevertheless the images in Zephaniah give us a great indication of what life is like in the kingdom of God that Jesus inaugurated. You may remember that Jesus was once asked why he and his disciples feasted, whereas the disciples of John fasted. He said that while the bridegroom was present, there would be feasting. So we’re not going to look this morning at the fasting and the preparation, we’re going to consider the feasting that follows the preparation.

I want to highlight two aspects.

Firstly, we find a singing people:

14 Sing, Daughter Zion;
    shout aloud, Israel!
Be glad and rejoice with all your heart,
    Daughter Jerusalem!
15 The Lord has taken away your punishment,
    he has turned back your enemy.
The Lord, the King of Israel, is with you;
    never again will you fear any harm.

Israel is forgiven and no longer under threat from her enemies. The natural reaction is to sing, to shout aloud, to be glad, and to rejoice. No longer are they oppressed due to their sins: God has taken that away. Joy is the natural result!

In my teens, one popular worship song had the words, ‘I get so excited, Lord, every time I realise I’m forgiven.’ We did sometimes deliberately sing wrong words to it: ‘I get so excited, Lord, every time I realise I’m a gibbon,’ but even our laughter at our silly alteration was part of our joy. We knew we were forgiven sinners through the Cross of Christ, and that led to excitement and great joy.

Sometimes, though, it’s hard to find where the joy has gone. As I’ve told you before, coming from a family which has a history of depression, I know what it is for the dark cloud suddenly to appear over my life, even though I’ve never been diagnosed with depression. Sometimes we don’t react in the best ways to circumstances, but at other times we are at the mercy of unbalanced chemicals in our bodies. These situations need talking therapies or tablet cures.

But on other occasions you really wonder where the joy has disappeared in the church generally. I recall a dismal Good Friday ecumenical service when I was young. We happened to be singing ‘I get so excited, Lord’, and our minister, who was leading the service, asked if there really was any evidence that people there were excited that they were forgiven. Were they so caught up with the sense that Good Friday reminded them of their sins that they had forgotten Good Friday also brought them relief from their sins?

As I’ve pondered this, I’ve developed a theory. The longer we go on as Christians and get further away from our heady younger days when we discover the joy of forgiveness for ourselves, and as we slowly with the help of the Holy Spirit correct wrong behaviour, the trouble is that we start to see ourselves not as forgiven sinners but as decent, respectable people.

And when you start to see yourself as fundamentally good, you see less reason to view yourself as a sinner needing the grace that first thrilled your heart. In fact, you become like those opponents of Jesus who criticised him for partying with the disreputable. Jesus told them with, I think, a note of sarcasm, that it was not the healthy who needed a doctor, but the sick. But we who now see ourselves as so healthy no longer connect with what brought us joy. Our spiritual amnesia makes us the miserable self-righteous religious types that nobody likes.

What is the cure? Well, if this condition is a progressive amnesia, what we need is the gift of remembering. We need the grace to look at our past (and at our present attitudes) in the searching light of Christ. We need then to remember what Christ did for us when we knew we were sinners, and then receive that gift of undeserved mercy again.

You may recall that the Preface to the 1933 Methodist Hymn Book began with the famous words, ‘Methodism was born in song,’ and so it was. But the birth of our spiritual tradition in song was not some cultural love of a particular kind of hymnody, it was a spiritual experience that had to be sung. It was the experience of forgiveness and the assurance of God’s love that led the early Methodists to sing for joy. Some Christians have argued that just about every major spiritual renewal down the centuries has been accompanied by a new outburst of music, because that’s the natural and creative outlet for the joy that God brings.

For us to be a joyful people, then, means reconnecting with the life of the Spirit – the Holy Spirit who showed us we were sinners but who also revealed to us the forgiving love of God in Christ; the Holy Spirit who graciously makes us more like Jesus as we open ourselves to him, but who also reminds us of our need of grace, to inoculate us from the risk of becoming Pharisees; the Holy Spirit, who indeed pours the joy of God into our hearts, along with divine love. If we welcome the Holy Spirit, one thing we do is welcome holy joy into the depths of our beings.

Secondly, we find a singing God:

16 On that day
    they will say to Jerusalem,
‘Do not fear, Zion;
    do not let your hands hang limp.
17 The Lord your God is with you,
    the Mighty Warrior who saves.
He will take great delight in you;
    in his love he will no longer rebuke you,
    but will rejoice over you with singing.’

So there you go, right there is ‘the Lord of the dance’: he ‘will rejoice over you with singing’. Sometimes in our Advent preparation as with our Lent preparation we think about the holiness of God in a severe way, and we are conscious of how far short we fall of God’s standards. Certainly, we can react that way to the preaching of John the Baptist, as I indicated at the beginning – although it’s worth noting that at the end of our Gospel reading, we heard Luke say that what John preached was ‘good news’.

And it may therefore be that our image of God is the stern headmaster with furrowed brow, holding us to unattainable standards and punishing us when we fail.

Now there is a place to speak of God’s holiness, and even of his judgment, but here we see another side to God: one who delights in his children and sings for joy over them. If anyone still believes that the Old Testament reveals God as a God of wrath and the New Testament shows him to be a God of love, this passage should thoroughly confuse such people!

Where do we most fully see such a joyful God? Surely it is in the ministry of Jesus. He teaches this about his Father when he tells the Parable of the Prodigal Son, where the father scandalously keeps looking out for his errant son and then throws a great party to celebrate the return. And Jesus lives it out as he turns water into wine at a wedding, as he invites himself to Zaccheus’ house, thus prompting the tax collector’s repentance, as he feasts with the last and the least. Jesus teaches and demonstrates a God who is full of joy when sinners come home to him, and whose joy is such that it leads sinners home.

Perhaps Johann Sebastian Bach got it right with his words, ‘Jesu, joy of man’s desiring.’ Jesus is our joy, for he is full of joy himself. He is utterly outrageous with joy. No wonder those who – perhaps like us, as I said earlier – had spent so much time concentrating on being good that they had forgotten their need of grace as sinners – were so wound up by him.

So out with the idea that God grudgingly or stingily or reluctantly forgives us our sins. The evidence of Scripture is that he longs to forgive, he loves to forgive, and he forgives generously and whole-heartedly. In Zephaniah he has longed for his children to return, and he has brought them home. Now they celebrate – and so does he. In the Gospels, Jesus shows us this same God in flesh and blood.

Perhaps you think that it’s all very well me preaching this, but I don’t know you, and I don’t know your darkest secrets. Believe me, in all my years of ministry I have heard plenty of dark secrets from church members, and yours probably would not surprise me. I have listened from time to time to someone talk about a terrible thing they did decades ago, which no-one at church knows about, and which has haunted them ever since. Then I have had the privilege of assuring them that no pit is too deep that God in Christ cannot haul them out. I have watched as relief, peace, and joy have broken out on their faces. And I believe that as such events have unfolded on earth, Jesus and the angels have been putting up the bunting and decorating the cake in heaven.

In the carol service, we will be reading of angels singing to shepherds. But we don’t need to wait to sense the divine song being sung over our lives. Right now God is lovingly offering restoration to the broken, forgiveness to the sinner, and strength to the weak. He loves to do this. Receive the grace he is offering you, even urging you to take, through Christ. Know and feel his forgiveness, as Jesus invites himself into your house, just as he did with Zaccheus.

And as you see the smile on his face, so let your facial muscles relax and let the joy spread across your countenance, too.

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Second Sunday in Advent: The Messiah’s Job Description (Isaiah 9:2-7)

Isaiah 9:2-7

I wonder whether you know what your name means.

In my case, my parents gave me the name ‘David’ because it means ‘beloved.’ And I was certainly beloved of them, right through to their deaths.

I am sure you know that in the Bible someone is often given a name with a particular meaning to signify their life’s calling. Thus, God sometimes commands parents to give babies certain names. Most prominent of all in this is the detail in the nativity stories, where Joseph is told by the angel to name the infant Mary is carrying ‘Jesus’, which means ‘God saves.’

We see something similar in the famous verse 6 of Isaiah 9:

For to us a child is born,
    to us a son is given,
    and the government will be on his shoulders.
And he will be called
    Wonderful Counsellor, Mighty God,
    Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.

Whoever Isaiah had in mind in his day, the early church saw this as only completely fulfilled in the coming of the Messiah, Jesus. Those four names or titles – Wonderful Counsellor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace – are like a job description for the Messiah.

And so we’re going to explore those four titles from the perspective of the New Testament.

Firstly, Wonderful Counsellor:

In the Old Testament, a counsellor tended to be an adviser to the king at the royal court. And that interpretation would do very nicely for some people: if the Messiah, Jesus, were just an adviser to us, we might be pleased. He could advise us, but we would be under no obligation to follow everything he said. All that pesky stuff about caring for the poor, sharing our possessions, and so on: we could reject awkward stuff like that and simply follow the bits we like.

And some people live pretty much like that, including regular churchgoers.

But in the New Testament we get a different sense of the word ‘counsellor.’ You may be familiar with the way the Holy Spirit is called ‘The Counsellor’ in John’s Gospel: well, in fact, when Jesus introduces that topic he speaks of the Holy Spirit as ‘another Counsellor.’ The sense is that the Spirit will come as Counsellor to replace the Counsellor who is leaving, namely Jesus.

And what does ‘counsellor’ mean here? ‘One called alongside.’ That’s why alternative translations to ‘Counsellor’ are Comforter, Helper, or Advocate.

The Holy Spirit comes alongside us to replace Jesus, who previously came alongside us. And this gets to the heart of the wonder of the Incarnation. In coming to earth, taking on human flesh, and living an ordinary (if not poverty-stricken) life, Jesus came alongside us.

Some people talk as if God is remote. There is that dreadful song that Cliff Richard covered some years ago called ‘From A Distance’, which includes the refrain, ‘God is watching us from a distance.’ But God has done so much more. In Jesus, he has come alongside us, in all the mess and the confusion of everyday living.

Don’t you want someone like that when you are in need? When I had a broken engagement a few years before I met Debbie, two friends of mine turned up on my doorstep and said they were taking me out to lunch. I hadn’t realised that both of them had been through broken engagements before meeting their husbands.

When we pray, let’s remember that Jesus is the ‘Wonderful Counsellor’, who in the Incarnation has come alongside human beings in the grimiest, bleakest parts of life. He is Good News.

Secondly, Mighty God:

A couple of weeks ago after the morning service, Haslemere Methodist Church hosted a nativity production by a group of Ukrainian refugees. Adults and children together in native costumes told the nativity story in what they said was a traditional Ukrainian way. Almost all of it was in their native tongue, so they provided a translation sheet. Their one concession to English was to sing ‘Silent Night’ in both languages. All of this was to raise money for a small charity set up by some British Christians in Portsmouth called Ukraine Mission, which takes relief supplies out there to suffering people.

They explained beforehand how elements of the Christmas story had become all the more relevant to them since Putin’s invasion, not least the flight into Egypt to escape murderous Herod, which spoke to them about the many Ukrainian mothers who had fled their homeland with their children.

And most notable to me in their presentation of the nativity was the attention they gave to Herod’s plot to kill the infant boys in Bethlehem. However, they did vary from the script of the Gospels by including an elite hit squad of angels who turned up to kill Herod and his henchmen. I can’t imagine what hopes they were expressing …

We’d like a ‘Mighty God’ like that. One who sent his hit squads of angels like some heavenly SAS unit to knock out the tyrants and evildoers of this world. Of course, it’s altogether too easy for us to assume that we are the goodies and this God would have no bones to pick with us.  Which makes this vision of God dangerous.

But our Mighty God is not like that, and it’s certainly not what we see of the Messiah in the Christmas story. Tom Wright says this:

When God wants to sort out the world, as the Beatitudes in the Sermon on the Mount make clear, he doesn’t send in the tanks. He sends in the meek, the broken, the justice hungry, the peacemakers, the pure-hearted and so on.[1]

He doesn’t send in the tanks. He sends in the meek. That sounds very Christmassy to me. That sounds like the way Jesus came. Mighty God? Oh yes. He turned history upside-down.

In the chorus of a song called ‘Cry of a Tiny Babe’, the Canadian Christian singer Bruce Cockburn put it like this:

Like a stone on the surface of a still river
Driving the ripples on forever
Redemption rips through the surface of time
In the cry of a tiny babe

Thirdly, Everlasting Father:

Well, this could be tricky: as Christians, we don’t want to confuse Jesus and the Father in our understanding of the Trinity.

But maybe what we need to remember here is this. There is plenty of biblical material to say that no-one has seen God. Even Moses, who wanted to see the face of God, was denied that.

But on the other hand, Isaiah says in chapter 6 of his prophecy that in the year King Uzziah died, he saw the Lord in the Jerusalem Temple. And we need to put this alongside Jesus’ assertion that if you have seen him, you have seen the Father.

Jesus himself is divine, and he is the revelation of God. If we want to know what God is like, we look at Jesus. And we get to see that in the Incarnation.

Michael Ramsey, Archbishop of Canterbury in a former generation, famously said,

God is Christlike, and in him is no un-Christlikeness at all

The other night, Debbie and I were watching Sky News when the ad break came. One of the ads was for Asda supermarkets. Now I expect companies like that to be promoting all their Christmas wares at this time – although as one of my Midhurst members said, much of it is insensitive at a time when food banks are being used more than ever.

But what really got me was the slogan at the end: Asda – the Home of Christmas.’ How shallow. How depressing. The home of Christmas is a manger.

And if Jesus came to reveal the Everlasting Father to us, then Christmas is so much more. It is a time when God is revealed to the world.

That’s why I’ll always have a short evangelistic talk in a carol service. God is revealed to the world at Christmas. It’s our unique message at this time.

Fourthly and finally, Prince of Peace:

This is a huge title for the Messiah. Paul talks about us receiving peace with God through Christ in Romans, and in Ephesians he talks about Jews and Gentiles finding peace with each other and bringing all things together in unity under Christ. Is it any surprise that the angels appear to the shepherds in Luke’s Gospel and proclaim peace on earth to those on whom God’s favour rests?

So this is big! It’s the Hebrew peace of shalom, where all is restored in the world. Not just the absence of war, but reconciled relationships, justice, healing of people and planet, basically everything right with the world. In other words, Jesus has come to reverse all the curses of Eden when everything went wrong.

Indeed, if we go back to Genesis 3 and the story of the Fall, we see brokenness everywhere. Adam and Eve hide from God – but now there will be peace with God through the Messiah. Adam and Eve are alienated from each other – because the man will rule over the woman – but in Christ human beings are reconciled with one another. Eve will suffer pain in childbirth – but Jesus brings healing. Adam is alienated from the earth, because his daily toil will be subjected to frustration – but the creation, which Paul says in Romans is ‘groaning’, will also find peace.

Let’s not just pick and choose our favourite bits from this and ignore the rest. Let’s not call people to conversion while missing the social dimensions. And equally, let’s not just make ourselves into religious politicians and downplay the call to personal commitment to Christ. Because if Jesus is the Prince of Peace we need to embrace the whole package. Jesus the Prince of Peace ushers in the new creation, and he calls us to be his disciples in this project.

Howard Thurman was an American Christian theologian at Boston University and civil rights leader who acted as a spiritual advisor to people like Martin Luther King. His most famous piece of writing is called ‘The Work of Christmas’. This is the best-known passage from it:

When the song of the angels is stilled,When the star in the sky is gone,When the kings and princes are home,When the shepherds are back with their flock,The work of Christmas begins:

To find the lost,
To heal the broken,
To feed the hungry,
To release the prisoner,
To rebuild the nations,
To bring peace among brothers,
To make music in the heart.

Conclusion

Jesus the Messiah comes alongside us in even the darkest parts of life. He mightily transforms the world in his meekness. He reveals the Father to us, and he brings peace to every aspect of creation.

This is Jesus’ job description. This is his calling. This is the mission on which he came at the Incarnation.

This is what we celebrate.

[1] N T Wright, The Challenge of Jesus; cited at https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/9023698-when-god-wants-to-sort-out-the-world-as-the

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First Sunday in Advent: Living in the Light of his Coming (1 Thessalonians 3:9-13)

1 Thessalonians 3:9-13

Earlier this week, the death was reported of Hal Lindsey, author of the multi-million-selling 1970 book The Late Great Planet Earth. This famous (or in my opinion, infamous) book promoted a crude understanding of prophecy in the Bible and confidently predicted we were in the last days before the Second Coming. The Common Market (not yet the EU at that point) was a sign of the Antichrist, and Chinese armies would be gathering for the Battle of Armageddon. It fascinated and scared people in equal measure.

For me, books like The Late Great Planet Earth bring unfair disrepute on the Bible and careful interpretation of its literature, and also on the doctrine of the Second Coming that we mark today on Advent Sunday. The collapse of the Soviet Union didn’t fit Lindsey’s prophecies, and nor did the failure of Jesus to return within forty years of the re-establishment of the State of Israel.

No wonder we get mocked. No wonder we get embarrassed about the doctrine of Christ’s re-appearing.

Among the early Christians, there was a sizable group in the Thessalonian church that decided ultimately to sell up and wait for the Second Coming, and Paul is not impressed. You hear of the idleness of this group in 2 Thessalonians, which includes Paul’s words that Margaret Thatcher so loved out of context: ‘The one who is unwilling to work shall not eat’ (2 Thessalonians 3:10).

In the verses we read today, Paul gives the Thessalonians (who he dearly loved, despite the wacky behaviour of some) pointers towards how Christians live in the light of Christ’s promised return. We’re going to consider three of them:

Firstly, we live under Providence:

11 Now may our God and Father himself and our Lord Jesus clear the way for us to come to you.

Paul knows that his life is lived under the sovereignty of God. Even now, in this chaotic, mixed-up, suffering, and sin-infested world, God is in charge. When Christ appears again, God will be in charge but the resistance will be ended.

So right now, God is directing Paul’s life. He is not micro-managing every fine detail, because he leaves room for the limited free will that human beings have, even if he has greater free will than us. This is what we call Providence.

And so Paul looks to the Father and Jesus to ‘clear the way’ to make a visit to Thessalonica possible. We don’t know what obstacles were preventing this, but Paul is expectant that with his greater free will, God will sort things out.

There is a fine balance here where Paul avoids extremes. On the one hand, he knows that as a servant of God he is not free to direct his own life simply as he pleases. God is in charge of his life. On the other, he is not looking for God to do and direct everything at the expense of human responsibility.

If we know that God is reigning now and that one day he will do so without opposition, then we are called today to live under that reign in anticipation of the Second Advent. We are neither to be the people who forget our Lord in between weekly Sunday services nor those who cannot get out of bed in the morning without knowing which clothes he is directing us to wear.

Many of you know how, despite an upbringing in the Methodist church, I went to an Anglican theological college to study when I was exploring God’s call on my life. When it became clear that the call was to ordained ministry, I was unsure whether to remain with my native Methodism or to go over to the Church of England, for which I was seeing a very good advertisement at college.

I consulted various people, but I got to the point that I no longer trusted the advice of any more Methodists or Anglicans, because I thought they all had a vested interest! So I went to see a friend who was the pastor of an Evangelical Free Church, outside both of the ‘competing’ traditions. As we chatted, Colin said something along these lines to me:

I am a pastor in this church, because I grew up in this tradition. I don’t know much about the Methodist or Anglican churches, but I would say this: if you have any belief in the Providence of God, however you understand it, then can you regard your upbringing in Methodism as an accident? And if your upbringing isn’t an accident, then you might have good reasons to leave the Methodist Church, but do you have overwhelming reasons? And if you have overwhelming reasons, are you saying that God has given up on Methodism?

Colin, then, is the person who helped me make that final decision to offer for the Methodist ministry.

Let’s see our lives as purposeful, not accidental, because we are under the Providence of God. In doing so, we anticipate the time when all the roadblocks will be clear and we will live with delight under his reign. We can point to that future by our living.

Secondly, we live in love:

12 May the Lord make your love increase and overflow for each other and for everyone else, just as ours does for you.

What is this injunction to love? Is it a kind of moralistic command: ‘You must love!’?

No. When Christ comes again, all that will remain will be life in the context and atmosphere of love. Love will characterise the new creation. The new heavens and the new earth will be filled with love. The citizens of the New Jerusalem will live by love. God will rule and reign in love.

Therefore, to love now is to align ourselves with the destiny of the universe. It may be far from obvious now, but when we love we are going with the grain.

You may have heard the old story which depicts both heaven and hell as places with plenty of food, but with only extremely long chopsticks to eat it. In hell, everyone starves, because they cannot manoeuvre the long chopsticks to feed themselves. It is too clumsy, and even if they do get some morsels between the chopsticks, it falls out before they can get it to their mouths. But in heaven, the place of love, they know the secret: they use the long chopsticks to feed one another.

Loving now is the sign of that future. It is why we cannot be solo Christians. Simon and Garfunkel may have sung, ‘I am a rock, I am an island,’ in contrast to John Donne’s ‘No man is an island’, but John Wesley said, ‘The Bible knows nothing of the solitary Christian’, and I go with Wesley.

Over the years I have been struck by the way our Catholic friends habitually refer to Jesus as ‘Our Lord,’ in contrast to the Protestant emphasis on ‘My Lord.’ Is it any coincidence that they also often refer to themselves as a Catholic community? There is a sense in their speech that they know the Christian life is meant to be lived out together, and that means in mutual love. This is what makes us the community into which the broken and suffering can be invited. By love we can be the fellowship which gives advance notice of the day when ‘there will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain’ (Revelation 21:4).

This doesn’t preclude us from acting individually in love for others, of course. Take this story from Friday’s weekly email by James Cary, whom I have quoted a few times before:

You’ve probably not heard of Maria Millis. She was a housekeeper in a loveless upper-class British family. She showed the love of Christ to a little boy starved of affection. That boy came to faith in his teens and grew up to dramatically improve the lives of children, miners and animals. God used a humble, faithful housekeeper to bring blessing to many through that boy, Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 7th Earl of Shaftesbury, celebrated philanthropist and social reformer. Lord Shaftesbury has a long Wikipedia page. Maria Millis doesn’t have one at all even though ‘she started it’.

If we want to point to the future, then, we also do so by love.

Thirdly and finally, we live in holiness:

13 May he strengthen your hearts so that you will be blameless and holy in the presence of our God and Father when our Lord Jesus comes with all his holy ones.

God’s great future age to come is one where there will no longer be any sin and evil. We don’t know how, and we puzzle over this, but this is what the New Testament affirms.

To be holy means to be set apart for God’s purposes, and putting that into action has moral lifestyle implications, as Paul indicates here by associating the word ‘blameless’ with ‘holy.’

And this call to be blameless and holy is one that Paul addresses not merely to individuals (although that is important) but to the Thessalonians as a church. He longs to see holiness not only as a characteristic of individual virtue, but of our corporate life.

And maybe this is more important than ever in our witness as the church. The scandal around the shocking behaviour of the late John Smyth is that rather than act in righteousness for the victims and survivors of this barbaric man, some key church leaders preferred to cover things up for fear of damaging the institution. I don’t think the world expects the church to be perfect, but it does have a reasonable expectation that we will root out evil when we encounter it.

Nevertheless, whether it’s individual holiness or what John Wesley called ‘social holiness’ we will readily admit it is not always an easy life to live. We therefore take heart from the fact that in this verse Paul begins by saying, ‘May [God] strengthen your hearts so that you will be blameless and holy.’ Yes, we need to commit to this, and we cannot avoid our personal responsibility for our actions, but at the same time we are fallible human beings and we seek the strength of God to live like Jesus.

And to strengthen our hearts is not to be taken in the way we talk of the heart today as the centre of our emotions; instead, in Jewish thought the heart was the very core of a person’s entire being. To pray, Lord strengthen our hearts, is to ask him to dig into the deepest parts of us and make us new by his Spirit. That may be painful surgery, but let us welcome it as we seek to anticipate God’s great future by living in holiness.

Conclusion

Live under Providence. Live in love. Live in holiness. How to summarise the spirit of this?

I go to a favourite story about Martin Luther. He said, ‘If I knew that the Lord were coming again tomorrow, I would plant a tree today.’

Friends, let’s go plant a tree.

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Jesus Wins! (Last Sunday Before Advent, Feast of Christ the King) Daniel 7:7-14 with Revelation 1:4-8

Daniel 7:7-14 (with Revelation 1:4-8)

World War One was called ‘The war to end all wars.’ The suffering and depravity of it shocked millions of people around the globe. Despair filled Europe. One Christian leader thought he could change the atmosphere.

That leader was Pope Pius XI. He believed people needed reminding of who was truly in charge, namely Jesus Christ. And so he proclaimed a new feast, the Feast of Christ the King. He said (and you’ll have to excuse the exclusive language of his day),

If men recognise the royal power of Christ privately and publicly, incredible benefits must spread through the civil community, such as a just liberty, discipline, tranquillity, agreement, and peace.

He directed that the feast be observed on the Last Sunday Before Advent, and that made excellent sense. It is the last day of the Christian Year. What begins in Advent with looking forward to the coming of Christ, continues with his birth, life, and ministry in Lent, marks his death and resurrection at Easter, then his Ascension, followed by the pouring out of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, reaches a climax with Christ reigning over all things.

There was just one problem. Not everyone heeded the teaching. Governments in places such as Berlin and Moscow ensured that the rest of the twentieth century was filled up with even more unimaginable and reprehensible evil as they rejected the rule of Christ.

To explore the reign of Christ now and in the future, and the tension with the presence of evil in the world, I’m going to take the final two verses of the Daniel reading as my foundation:

13 “In my vision at night I looked, and there before me was one like a son of man, coming with the clouds of heaven. He approached the Ancient of Days and was led into his presence. 14 He was given authority, glory and sovereign power; all nations and peoples of every language worshipped him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion that will not pass away, and his kingdom is one that will never be destroyed.

I’m going to interpret this, as the New Testament does, with the ‘son of man’ (NIV) or ‘human being’ (NRSV) being fulfilled by Jesus. There is much more nuance than that involved, but that will do us for our purposes today.

Firstly, let’s consider the reign of Christ now:

You may remember that Matthew, Mark, and Luke all record a conversation the disciples have with Jesus where they are in Jerusalem in ‘Holy Week’ and they point to the beauty of the Temple. Jesus replies by telling them that not a stone of it will be left standing, because Rome will come and destroy it. The disciples then ask him when this will happen, and Jesus launches into some prophetic words about the harrowing events that will come.

In that context, he quotes Daniel 7:13, about the Son of Man coming with the clouds of heaven, and many Christians have jumped on these words to think he is now talking about the Second Coming. If Jesus is the Son of Man and he is ‘coming’ then surely this must be his return? People who believe this then get into all sorts of knots about what Jesus says regarding people alive then who will witness this.

But they forget one important detail. When the Son of Man comes on the clouds of heaven, where does he come to? In Daniel, he doesn’t come to earth: he comes to the Ancient of Days, that is, Almighty God. It is about him returning to heaven. In other words, Jesus is talking about the Ascension. Jesus is reigning at the Father’s right hand from the Ascension onwards.

However, we live in a world where not everyone accepts this. We would rather have others in charge, or perhaps run our own lives. How does that work out? The writer James Cary puts it like this:

We say things like ‘The Prime Minister is running the country’. Could this ever possibly have been true? This is not a comment on Keir Starmer, or his predecessors or successors. I seek only to point out the insanity of the notion that any one single person can run an extremely complex and diverse society of 65 million people – all of whom seek to be their own king or queen. Premiership after premiership has ended in failure with ever increasing rapidity. Keir Starmer, impressively, has saved time by starting with failure. That’s rare but, at least, efficient.

So what’s required of us? As God’s people, we are a colony of his coming kingdom. One classic definition of the church is to say that we are a sign and foretaste of God’s kingdom. It is our calling to live under that reign and seek to bring people and all of creation under that reign, too. We see the vision of that in verse 14:

He was given authority, glory and sovereign power; all nations and peoples of every language worshipped him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion that will not pass away, and his kingdom is one that will never be destroyed.

We are junior partners in God’s project to usher in the day when ‘all nations and peoples of every language’ will worship Jesus Christ.

That means first of all bringing our own lives in order under his Lordship. The very fact that we have seen safeguarding scandals where church leaders were more concerned to protect the reputation of the church than the welfare of victims and survivors has had a devastating effect on the church’s witness. In the light of the John Smyth scandal, the radio broadcaster Nicky Campbell said on air that there was no way he would now ever consider the Christian faith. Campbell is on record as saying he was abused as a youngster.

But then a Christian woman came on his show and told her own story of abuse. And she told him how the church and her faith had helped her come through the experience. With great integrity, Campbell softened his position on Christianity as a result of her testimony.

We need then both to live our lives under the reign of Christ, which includes using power when we have it in a godly way, and taking the side of the last and the least in our world, as Jesus did. We also need to be inviting others to do the same.

And this links secondly with the reign of Christ to come:

I said that the Gospels use Daniel 7:13 about the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven to mean the Ascension. But Revelation 1 doesn’t. John chops off the bit about coming to the Ancient of Days and puts it with some words from Zechariah 12:

7 ‘Look, he is coming with the clouds,’
    and ‘every eye will see him,
even those who pierced him’;
    and all peoples on earth ‘will mourn because of him.’
So shall it be! Amen.

Now we do have the appearing of Christ again in view. This is the time when all nations and peoples of every language will worship him. It is the time Paul spoke of in Philippians 2 when every knee will bow and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.

We may long for that day when all will be good and true, when society will be just, when darkness in all its forms will be banished. This is our great hope. Just as God remade Jesus’ body in the Resurrection, so he will remake all things. It gives us that longing to say, ‘Come, Lord Jesus.’ And when we come to Holy Communion, our sharing in a small piece of bread and a sip of wine makes us ache for the heavenly banquet, the marriage feast of the Lamb.

Our critics would say this is classic ‘pie in the sky when you die.’ But it isn’t, if we understand it properly. Because this vision makes us restless with hope now. This hope drives us to action.

On Tuesday, one of the greatest preachers of our generation, the American Baptist minister and sociologist Tony Campolo, died at the age of 89. I heard him preach a few times when I was in my twenties and his emphasis on true discipleship involving not just belief but also committed action on behalf of the poor influenced many thousands of Christians.

On Wednesday, I watched a video of an old sermon of his from Spring Harvest.

In it, he tells contrasting stories of two students he knew from the university where he taught. One went on a mission trip to a developing country and came back saying, I am going to train as a doctor and then go and serve these people. He did train as a doctor, but instead of keeping his promise he became a cosmetic surgeon. He didn’t practise the kind of cosmetic surgery that helps people who have suffered life-changing accidents: he practised the sort that only the wealthy and vain pay for. Yes, he was a lay leader at his church, and yes, he tithed his income. But in Campolo’s eyes he blew it, because he was seduced by wealth and didn’t serve the poor.

The other student went from Campolo’s university in Philadelphia to Harvard Law School, and qualified to practise law. He was offered a lucrative job with a $500,000 annual salary, but he turned it down. He moved to Alabama to defend prisoners on death row. Many of them were on death row, because they couldn’t afford good lawyers, so he didn’t charge the fees he could have earned elsewhere. For him, it was an outworking of Jesus’ Beatitude, ‘Blessèd are the merciful.’

Which one followed Jesus? Which one anticipated the everlasting dominion of Christ? I think you know.

Apart from the obvious teaching of Jesus, what motivated Tony Campolo to make this emphasis his life’s defining characteristic? He used to tell a story of how people would ask him why he was so relentlessly cheerful in a world so full of pain and injustice. His reply?

‘I believe the Bible, and I’ve peeked at the final chapter. And Jesus wins.’

In other words, his commitment to the poor of the world was driven by his vision of Christ the King. He is reigning now, but currently not everyone acknowledges it. While waiting for the glorious day, Campolo called all who call themselves Christians not to be mere believers: after all, he said, the devil believes all the right doctrines about God. Jesus didn’t say go into all the world and make believers: he said go into all the world and make disciples. And that will involve us doing Jesus-like things, such as caring and advocating for the downtrodden.

You or I may not be a lawyer or a doctor. We may not hold some socially prestigious position. But all of us have opportunities to serve the disadvantaged in some way. We do it, because on the great day when Christ rules as King without any more resistance, there will be no more downtrodden, no more disadvantaged, no more poor, no more suffering of injustice. So we prepare for it now.

Remember: Jesus wins. Let’s get ready for that day.

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Paul’s Favourite Church 8: A Grateful Receiver (Philippians 4:10-23)

Philippians 4:10-23

Over the years, I have learned as a preacher that there are a few topics you can preach on that can easily make your hearers feel guilty. One is prayer: who can honestly say that they pray enough? Another is evangelism: many of us feel nervous about that and so it’s easy to ladle on the guilt.

And one other is giving: it’s easy to tug on the emotions on that subject. Just look at the highly emotive advertisements many charities produce, if you doubt me. Preachers can do something similar.

Well, today’s passage is about giving. But it’s in reverse. Paul speaks as the recipient, not the giver. And although elsewhere he quotes Jesus as saying, ‘It is more blessèd to give than to receive,’ here he tells his friends in Philippi about the grace of receiving.

It struck me that this would be a helpful approach to adopt. Some of us find it hard to receive. Others of us are rather too keen to receive!

So you’ve heard all those sermons down the years about being a cheerful giver; this is about being a gracious receiver.

I’ve identified three traits of a gracious receiver in these verses.

Firstly, thankfulness:

10 I rejoiced greatly in the Lord that at last you renewed your concern for me. Indeed, you were concerned, but you had no opportunity to show it.

Paul was so grateful that he ‘rejoiced greatly.’

I expect that when you were young you were taught to write thank-you notes to people who had given you birthday or Christmas presents. The age of the handwritten note may be fading away, but our kids still ask us for the mobile phone numbers of the people who have given them presents, so that they can send them text messages. In fact, every Christmas Day at present-opening time I sit there with sheets of paper, recording who gave what to whom, so these lists can be used for the thank-you messages.

How different this is from Trick Or Treat at Halloween, which is like a small-scale demanding of gifts with menaces. At least some things happen now to moderate that and to reduce the fear some elderly people have, by kids only going to houses with pumpkins outside. Whatever would happen to the economy of Rogate otherwise?

Thankfulness is an important discipline that reminds us all of life is a gift. We don’t need to wait for our annual harvest festival to affirm that ‘All good gifts around us are sent from heaven above.’

We may have saved for certain things. We may have earned them with hard work. But they are still gifts, because all that is good comes from the hand of God. We are dependent on the giving nature of our God for life itself and all its accoutrements.

God is a giver. The sun shines and the rain falls on the righteous and the unrighteous alike. In the Parable of the Sower, the farmer distributes the seed everywhere with an almost reckless extravagance.

Therefore thankfulness, especially when practised towards God, is a reminder of God’s grace. Whether he gives directly to us or through someone else, it is pure gift. It is not based on what we deserve, only on what we need and what he delights to give us.

We are thankful to a generous God. But this is something it took me many years to grasp. I came up in a family where the default financial atmosphere was one of struggle. That my parents couldn’t give my sister and me as much as our friends received from their Mums and Dads is something I carried over into my image of God. Yes, God the Father was a giver, but he only just about gave what we needed to scrape by.

I have learned differently since. I still affirm that God is Father, and not an indulgent grandfather. He doesn’t want spoilt brats for his children. But he is good, and he is generous, and these are all reasons for thankfulness.

In the ancient form of Christian prayer called the Examen, each evening we review the day that is about to pass, and we look back for where we can rejoice with thankfulness at what God has done. It’s an encouraging practice. I commend it to you.

Secondly, contentment:

Paul goes on to say,

11 I am not saying this because I am in need, for I have learned to be content whatever the circumstances. 12 I know what it is to be in need, and I know what it is to have plenty. I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation, whether well fed or hungry, whether living in plenty or in want. 13 I can do all this through him who gives me strength.

Remember, Paul is sending this letter from prison in Rome. In those days, prisoners did not have their basic needs met by the state. If one of your family was imprisoned, you needed to supply them with the basics of life, even including food and drink. This is why Paul depends on gifts like these ones from his friends the Philippians.

What a contrast this is from when he was Saul, the up-and-coming scholar who also ran his tentmaking business. He was probably quite comfortably off then. He has experienced such oscillations in his standard of living.

But in the middle of such tumultuous changes in his lifestyle over the years, he can affirm that ‘I have learned to be content whatever the circumstances.’

I don’t know whether you have been through similar ups and downs. I am sure some of you have. I certainly have. As I said a moment ago, my upbringing was financially challenging. But then when I was working as a single person, things were a lot easier. They were fine when we first got married.

Until we had children and Debbie ceased from paid work. Well do I remember the year when we would not have been able to afford new school uniform for one of our two unless I had received a funeral fee. For at that time, our friends at HMRC had managed to double-count my income and deny us the Child Tax Credits we were entitled to. On more than one occasion we only got the tax credits we were due thanks to the intervention of our MP.

Yet – did God change during that time? I would say ‘No.’ We still had whatever we needed, even if sometimes it was by the skin of our teeth.

God doesn’t change in his faithfulness. He doesn’t guarantee us wealth, but he does commit to looking after us in what he gives us. Perhaps Proverbs 30:8 puts it in a balanced way:

keep falsehood and lies far from me;
    give me neither poverty nor riches,
    but give me only my daily bread.

When we live in such an acquisitive society with its desire for more, more, more, what could be a more countercultural sign of living under God’s kingdom than doing so with contentment, because God is faithful?

Thirdly, reverence:

I’d like you to notice how Paul describes the Philippians’ generous gifts to him in verse 18:

I have received full payment and have more than enough. I am amply supplied, now that I have received from Epaphroditus the gifts you sent. They are a fragrant offering, an acceptable sacrifice, pleasing to God.

This is the language of temple worship: ‘a fragrant offering, an acceptable sacrifice, pleasing to God.’ Paul sees the package Epaphroditus has brought from Philippi as way more than a food parcel. He treats the giving of the Philippians as being an act of worship to God. Therefore, he handles it with reverence. Their gifts are holy.

Now I am sure that in one sense that is exactly how the Philippians regarded their giving. To supply Paul’s needs was something they did as an expression of their faith. Their love for God is a response to God’s love for them in the gift of Jesus Christ.

Therefore, a fitting response of worship is for them to give. And just as the giving of sacrifices in the Old Testament often constituted support for the temple workers such as the priests and Levites who had no land of their own where they could farm animals for their food, so here the Philippians give as an act of worship to support a worker in the new temple, namely their apostle. Paul recognises what they are doing. It’s worship. Their gifts should be handled with holiness.

Some of you have heard me say that when I first wanted to go to theological college, I was denied a student grant. (Remember them?) God provided for me financially in a remarkable way. I cannot tell you the whole story now, but I want to pull out one example of the generous giving. An elderly and very prayerful single lady in the church gave me a cheque for a large sum of money. With it she wrote a letter. In it she said, ‘It seems that God is calling you to trust him to supply your needs. We will trust him to meet our needs, too.’ Those words told me that her giving was a sacrifice. It was an act of worship.

All this is why I’m not so keen to refer to the monetary gifts we bring forward in the service as ‘The collection.’ Collections are OK, if not good, such as when we hold a collection for a good cause. But what we give to the Lord is not a collection because he’s in need: he owns the cattle on a thousand hills, as the Psalmist says.

No: it’s an offering. We dedicate it. We treat it with reverence. We pray for those who will handle it. It’s part of our worship.

Conclusion

You may have seen the news story in the week about the death of the famous actor Timothy West at the age of 90. He had been married to the actress Prunella Scales for 61 years. And you may well know that in their final years together West was caring for his wife through dementia. One of the news reports showed a clip of them a year or so ago when they had reached their diamond wedding. The reporter asked what it was like being married for that long. Prunella struggled for words, but then planted a kiss on her husband’s cheek, and said, ‘Thank you.’ It was a beautiful moment.

There is a beauty in being thankful, being content, and treating gifts with reverence. It offers beauty back to the giver and gives glory to the Great Giver himself.

Sure, it is more blessèd to give than to receive. But this is one way in which that giver is blessed.

So let us never tire of being thankful. We have an eternity of thankfulness ahead of us.

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Paul’s Favourite Church 7: And Finally (Philippians 4:1-9)

Philippians 4:1-9

For many years now, ITN’s News At Ten bulletin has had the tradition of the ‘And Finally’ item: a lighter item of news with which to close the broadcast after half an hour of unremitting doom.

The tradition continues to this day, and even has its own website. Going there, I discovered that recent stories included a girl from Sunderland whose message in a bottle reached Sweden; a man who has made a calendar from pictures of the M60 motorway; and another man who hopes to be the first disabled skier to reach the South Pole.

When we get to Philippians chapter 4, we’re getting into ‘And Finally’ territory in the letter. It’s the final chapter. We might have thought Paul was about to sign off at the beginning of chapter 3 which begins with the word ‘Finally’, but like the enthusiastic preacher that just means, ‘Here come another two chapters.’

But now, and in next week’s reading, Paul is wrapping up his thoughts. This is almost like the ‘Any Other Business’ section of a committee meeting. There are a last few items he wants to cover that he hasn’t been able to fit under any of the themes earlier in the letter.

The ‘AOB’ we shall cover this week are mainly matters of pastoral wisdom; next week we’ll look at some personal remarks Paul makes.

Firstly, stand firm:

Verse 1:

Therefore, my brothers and sisters, you whom I love and long for, my joy and crown, stand firm in the Lord in this way, dear friends!

Stand firm in what sense? Note that Paul begins with the word ‘Therefore.’ He’s referring back to what he’s just said, which I preached about last week. He urged his readers to stay focussed on Christ and the end of all things rather than leaving God out of the picture and only concentrating on earthly desires and making an idol of sensual yearnings.

This is a ‘stand firm’ in the sense of our lifestyle. To choose this way of life is not always easy. We will be subjected to pressure from our society. We are bombarded with messages, not only in advertising, that tell us we should buy things we don’t need. You could even argue that our economy depends on us doing so. If you want to see this in action, go back to 9/11 and remember that the first thing President George W Bush told the American people to do afterwards was ‘go shopping.’

Don’t misunderstand me. I am not saying that Christians cannot enjoy good things. Of course we can, when we can in all conscience do so with thankfulness to God. But we have a higher calling than just satisfying materialistic desires.

Pray too for younger Christians living among the pressure to turn all romantic relationships into sexual ones at an early stage, rather than waiting for marriage.

And the church has got sucked into this, oscillating from its prude-like past to validating this, that, and all sorts of sexual experiences, to the point where many single Christians have felt alienated. But their witness – often costly – to the truth that ultimate meaning is not found in a romantic relationship but in Christ is one we need to hear, but which has been devalued.

So firstly, let’s stand firm in seeking our meaning and our value in Christ and in eternity.

Secondly, be united:

 2 I plead with Euodia and I plead with Syntyche to be of the same mind in the Lord. 3 Yes, and I ask you, my true companion, help these women since they have contended at my side in the cause of the gospel, along with Clement and the rest of my co-workers, whose names are in the book of life.

What has happened here? Two women who had been co-workers with Paul in spreading the Gospel have now so fallen out with each other that he needs to ask someone else to mediate in order to restore the relationship. Of course, we don’t know anything about people falling out with each other in the church today, do we?

Except that every time I say something like that in a sermon I get reactions that include nervous laughter and awkward facial expressions.

Because, tragically, today we know only too well. I expect you can tell tales of arguments and verbal fisticuffs in church circles.

My problem comes when people try to laugh it off or minimise it. “Oh, that’s just Mrs Jones, she’s always like that.”

I’m sorry, that just won’t do. People get hurt. Christian witness gets damaged.

Now maybe as a minister I end up in the firing line more than other Christians, especially when I don’t do what some people want me to, but I can tell you stories of when church members have made up false stories about me, and – with no exaggeration – libelled both my wife and me.

We talk about the Internet being a Wild West where keyboard warriors think they can say anything they like, however hurtful, behind the protection of a screen, and – they hope – anonymity. But similar things have been happening in churches for years.

And it’s serious, because the Gospel is a message of reconciliation. It’s not just personal, private reconciliation with God through the forgiveness of our sins – although it is that. It’s also about being reconciled to one another, and the building of a new community that is a sign and foretaste of God’s kingdom.

So our commitment to good and healthy relationships in the church matters. Let’s never forget that Jesus died for our unity.

Thirdly, be positive:

4 Rejoice in the Lord always. I will say it again: rejoice! 5 Let your gentleness be evident to all. The Lord is near. 6 Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. 7 And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.

Now I’ll be honest with you and say this is the section of today’s sermon that I most have to preach to myself. For those of you who don’t know, I live with depression. It runs in my family. I am blessed in that mine does not require medication.

So I can read this list of positive qualities to which Paul calls us – rejoicing, gentleness, turning anxiety to prayer and finding the peace of God – and know that too often I can be miserable, grumpy, and despairing. Maybe a negative incident will have triggered me. But sometimes, the dark cloud just seems to blow in over my life.

And maybe some of you also struggle to rejoice and be positive, too. The Good News for us is that these qualities of rejoicing, gentleness, and peace are not simply things that can be flicked on like a switch – if only they could – but are an outworking of the Gospel. They come to us as Jesus invites us to get our eyes back on him and away from ourselves.

Yes, every one of these flow from Jesus and the Gospel. His love for us despite our sin is a source of wonder and hence of rejoicing. His grace, mercy, and forgiveness engender gentleness in us, because we want to be like him in response. His trustworthiness and his reign at the Father’s right hand give us confidence to pray and reason to be peaceful rather than anxious.

Some of us will express this by jumping for joy. Others of us, especially more introverted types like me, will do it in a quieter way. And yes, my kids have asked me, “Dad, is there anything that gets you excited?” Actually, there is a good number of things that do, it’s just that excitability is not my default state of mind.

Even if circumstances are discouraging, let’s get our minds on Jesus and the Gospel. Because, as the title of a recent Christian worship music project says, we may have downcast souls but we can still have expectant hearts.

Fourthly and finally, be focussed:

8 Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable – if anything is excellent or praiseworthy – think about such things. 9 Whatever you have learned or received or heard from me, or seen in me – put it into practice. And the God of peace will be with you.

Too often in the church we are what one author called ‘cultural Christians.’ It’s been happening since the earliest centuries of the church. We profess faith in Christ, but we imbibe so much of the surrounding culture that it dictates our thoughts and affections more than Christ does. Think of what we watch on TV, the books or magazines that we read, the music or other entertainment that we enjoy. All these things have their own moral values behind them, which may or may not be compatible with Christian faith.

I believe this is one strong reason why a lot of our moral and ethical decision-making as Christians is often indistinguishable from the world, when Jesus expects us to be distinct.

I’m not saying that we should only listen to Christian music and only read Christian books – although frankly a lot more reading of good Christian literature would make an improvement to the spiritual temperature in many churches. But we must be careful what captures our hearts and minds. That is why Paul says we need to take care to fill our minds with what is good, pure, and beautiful.

And if we need to fill our minds with that which is good and godly, the other side of the coin is that we are not to empty our minds. One of the dangers with some forms of meditation that can accompany yoga classes and other practices is that it is based on emptying the mind. But if we empty our minds, then we leave them vacant for all sorts of unhelpful and unsavoury things. It is far better to take a Christian approach to meditation based on the sort of things Paul advocates here, where we fill our minds with what is good and virtuous.

So it’s worth seeking out recommendations of Christ-honouring and beautiful art and culture. And if we find ourselves in a situation where someone wants us to empty our minds in order to meditate, then we either need to withdraw or we need to disregard their instruction and meditate on a verse or passage of Scripture. These are practices that will help us focus on the truth and beauty of our God.

Conclusion

So these four items of Any Other Business are not immediately related to each other – standing firm, being united, positive, and focussed – but together they do form good practices for formation in Christ and hence for Christian discipleship. I commend them to you, and next week I’ll finish my series on Philippians with another virtuous discipline – thankfulness.

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Paul’s Favourite Church 6: Gotta Serve Somebody (Philippians 3:15-21)

Philippians 3:15-21

What do you think the Apostle Paul’s musical taste was? If he were alive in our generation, I would put him down as a likely Bob Dylan fan. Because today’s passage fits very well with his song ‘Gotta Serve Somebody’:

It may be the devil or it may be the Lord, but you’re gonna have to serve somebody, he sings. And there appear to be those same two stark choices in life laid out in Philippians 3. On the one hand we have

18 For, as I have often told you before and now tell you again even with tears, many live as enemies of the cross of Christ. 19 Their destiny is destruction, their god is their stomach, and their glory is in their shame. Their mind is set on earthly things.

And on the other we have

20 But our citizenship is in heaven. And we eagerly await a Saviour from there, the Lord Jesus Christ, 21 who, by the power that enables him to bring everything under his control, will transform our lowly bodies so that they will be like his glorious body.

A nice, simple binary choice.

Or if you don’t like Bob Dylan, then maybe you’ll take someone I’ve quoted before, St Augustine of Hippo, who said that the key to our lives is not our thinking but our affections. Who or what are we devoted to? The great Augustinian scholar James K A Smith puts it like this: ‘You Are What You Love.’ He says there is spiritual power in what we devote ourselves to habitually.

So Paul asks us here: who are we going to serve? Who or what will have our love and devotion?

Let’s hear Option One again:

18 For, as I have often told you before and now tell you again even with tears, many live as enemies of the cross of Christ. 19 Their destiny is destruction, their god is their stomach, and their glory is in their shame. Their mind is set on earthly things.

At the end of every week, the BBC News website has a fun quiz on the week’s news with seven questions. This week’s finished with a question about the theft of luxury cheese from the famous Neal’s Yard Dairy in London, and the final screen, which told you how many answers you got right assigned you a famous quotation about cheese accordingly.

For those who got all seven right, the quotation was from the comedian Steven Wright: “The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.” Those like me who scored between four and six were assigned words by the French man of letters Eugène Briffault: “Cheese complements a good meal and supplements a bad one.” Those who scored between zero and three had a Spanish proverb: “I don’t want the cheese. I just want to get out of the trap.”

“I don’t want the cheese. I just want to get out of the trap.”

The problem for many of us is that metaphorically we do want the cheese while still getting out of the trap. To change the food proverb, we want to have our cake and eat it.

For having taken God out of the picture, all we are left with is devotion to our senses: ‘their god is their stomach, and their glory is in their shame.’ We place a priority on satisfying our bodily desires – not that food is unnecessary, but that we elevate things like that above the level of necessity and staple, because without God to satisfy our deepest needs we turn to lesser things to gratify ourselves. They become ends in themselves.

And perhaps it’s not surprising that in a world like Paul’s that was full of temple prostitution he says ‘their glory is in their shame.’ A good and beautiful gift of God is turned into something that is only about personal pleasure. Thus today, sex is no longer the sign of the covenant between a man and a woman for life, now it is something we purely do for our own pleasure, just so long as the other person consents. We have so detached it from the covenant of marriage that we now have ‘friends with benefits’, where two people, usually single, agree that if one of them needs their urges fulfilling, the other one will oblige, just so long as they don’t become romantically attached.

This is the world of Alistair Campbell, Tony Blair’s former adviser, who infamously said, ‘We don’t do God.’ Campbell may have only meant that in in the context of politics, but in a culture where we generally don’t do God then people seek satisfaction elsewhere in merely human things. ‘Their mind is set on earthly things.’ That’s all you can focus on then. Our sensual desires are a natural avenue in such circumstances.

And as Paul says, that’s disastrous: ‘Their destiny is destruction.’ When the ultimate reality is actually God and not our own senses, but we put him out of the picture and devote our affections purely to our own sensory desires, then there can only be one end result. If God is going to make all things new but we are just interested in our physical satisfaction now, then there can be no place for us in eternity. It’s that bleak, and that logical.

So now let’s restate Option Two:

20 But our citizenship is in heaven. And we eagerly await a Saviour from there, the Lord Jesus Christ, 21 who, by the power that enables him to bring everything under his control, will transform our lowly bodies so that they will be like his glorious body.

Here’s where we place our devotion. Here’s where we set our affections as Christians. We look to Christ and to eternity. We gratefully acknowledge that Jesus knows all about the frailties and weaknesses of our bodies and he will make them new in the resurrection of the dead. Instead of loving the creation, we love the One who is the Creator and the Re-Creator of all he has made. To worship the creation is to set our hearts on an idol; to worship the Creator gives us proper focus and perspective.

Our guiding principle for living becomes that of Jesus’ teaching and considering eternity: what will the creation be like when it is made new? I do not know how our bodies will be sustained in eternity, but I do know Jesus refers to feasting in the life to come. I will leave the details to him. In the meantime, I will seek to look after my body because he made it, but that body will not be my focus, Jesus will.

And in contrast to our society’s obsession with sex, I will remember Jesus’ eternal perspective that there will no longer be marrying and giving in marriage in the age to come. For since death will have been abolished, we shall no longer need to replace those who have died.

More generally, if Jesus has ‘the power that enables him to bring everything under his control’, then my goal will be to place my life under his control. What he says matters, because in his life he showed us what a life under his control looks like.

If you ‘gotta serve somebody’ and you choose the Lord, it looks something like this, says Paul.

But here’s the problem. We know all this. I daresay we aspire to all this. But what about the times when we succumb to ‘Option One’ living instead of this ‘Option Two’? How about the occasions when we allow our sensory desires to dictate our actions, rather than Christ, eternity, and the new creation? Are we no better than anyone else? Are we condemned? Do we lose our salvation?

In response I’m going to follow material from a recent article by Dr Jason Swan Clark, a former church leader and college principal who is now moving into the area of spiritual direction. This is how he talks about his conversion when he was a young man:

As I consider my faith, I am grateful that the youth leader who led me to Christ invited me to follow Jesus and exchange my life, plans, and past for one where “I would have something to live for, die for, meaning, adventure and purpose, every day of my life”. My sin has always worked against that salvation story and sought to create an anti-story. To repent means to realise how my sin has disordered me and moved me away from my story with God and to return to my adventure in Christ. 

He says that for us, sin is like what we do when we are asleep and don’t want to wake up. Confession is to wake up – to the truth. And here’s how he describes sin:

The greatest lie of the enemy is that I am free to create myself into any image I want to and, even worse, expect God to comply with my directions to him about my self-creations.

God wakes us up to our true identity and destiny. The Good News is this:

God is very aware of our past sins, but what if his principal interest in them was how they stop us from discovering and living into and out of who he made us to be? God loves us into being and wants us to be free from how Sin forms us away from Him. God meets us within this at our affective and psychological levels.

Note that: ‘God meets us at our affective … levels’ – our affections and loves, the very things I set out at the beginning. He knows our affections are truly for him, but that we have let our desires become disordered, and he describes confession and forgiveness by recounting some words from St Thérèse of Lisieux, the famous nineteenth century Carmelite nun who died from tuberculosis at the age of just twenty-four. She wrote these to a priest:

I picture a father who has two children, mischievous and disobedient, and when he comes to punish them, he sees one of them who trembles and gets away from him in terror, having, however, in the bottom of his heart the feeling that he deserves to be punished; and his brother, on the contrary, throws himself into his father’s arms, saying that he is sorry for having caused him any trouble, that he loves him, and to prove it he will be good from now on, and if this child asked his father to punish him with a kiss, I do not believe that the heart of the happy father could resist the filial confidence of his child, whose sincerity and love he knows.  He realizes, however, that more than once his son will fall into the same faults, but he is prepared to pardon him always, if his son always takes him by the heart.

Here is God’s discipline of those who fail but truly want to serve him: he punishes us … with a kiss.

So when we are faced with the fact that we ‘gotta serve somebody’, let us not choose the indulgence of our senses by not ‘doing God’; let us place our affections and desires on Jesus Christ, keeping our vision on his coming new creation, and knowing that when we fail him he will restore us with a kiss.

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Paul’s Favourite Church 5: The Wrong Passport (Philippians 3:1-14)

Philippians 3:1-14

When we go abroad, we have a problem at Passport Control. Many ports, airports, and train termini have automated electronic passport checking. No human being required. It makes things faster.

Or it should.

But not in our case. Because when our current passports were delivered by the postie, the dog collected them from the letterbox and added his own teeth-based signature to my wife’s passport. The teeth marks went through the electronic chip. Returning from her last foreign jaunt to see the ABBA Museum in Stockholm, the Swedish authorities were very sniffy about this, seeking additional ID, and telling her that she really needed a replacement passport.

The journey of our lives is meant to take us, in Paul’s word, ‘heavenwards’ (verse 14). What passport will get us in when we arrive?

What Paul talks about in our passage is how he knew he had had the wrong passport and how easy that is for religious people.

Look how he lists his religious qualifications to prove what an impeccable Jew he was:

If someone else thinks they have reasons to put confidence in the flesh, I have more: 5 circumcised on the eighth day, of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews; in regard to the law, a Pharisee; 6 as for zeal, persecuting the church; as for righteousness based on the law, faultless.

You couldn’t be better than that. And that little word ‘zeal’ points us to what kind of Pharisee he was. In his day, there were two competing schools of Pharisees: those who followed Rabbi Hillel, and those who followed Rabbi Shammai. The Hillelites were lenient, and the Shammaites were strict. The Hillelites had a ‘live and let live’ approach to the political authorities, just so long as they could study God’s Law in peace, but the Shammaites said peace would only come when Israel was free from Gentile oppressors. Guess which one Paul was? A Shammaite.[1]

But whereas for the modern Christian ‘zeal’ is something you do on your knees, or in evangelism, or in works of charity, for the first century Jew ‘zeal’ was something you did with a knife.[2]

You wanted a pure, undiluted Jew? Paul thought he was pretty much there. But on the Damascus Road he had discovered it wasn’t putting him in God’s favour: it was putting him in opposition to God, even persecuting him.

I had a pretty good passport, too, or so I thought. Methodism was almost embedded in my DNA. When my sister took over the family ancestry work from our father, she concluded that she and I had been ‘fifth generation, same congregation.’ Our family’s involvement with our home church, Edmonton Methodist, had gone back five generations to a woman who joined the ladies’ meeting.

It did me no good. In fact, it led me astray. I thought that Christianity equalled believing in God plus doing good things. Salvation by works, as we call it. I thought I was close to God. In reality, I was a long way away.

As a minister, I have had people start attending one of my churches on a Sunday, having moved into the area and previously belonged to another church. They have asked to be considered for membership ‘if [they] were good enough.’ Those words are a sure sign of someone who holds the wrong passport.

And I still get people who, on their first meeting with me, want to tell me all about their Methodist heritage and what good Methodists they are. My heart sinks. If they are relying on their Methodist credentials, then they have the wrong passport.

What I need to hear about is their love for Jesus. Because that is the right passport.

And Paul tells his readers that our passport for our heavenly journey is – Christ:

7 But whatever were gains to me I now consider loss for the sake of Christ. 8 What is more, I consider everything a loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them garbage, that I may gain Christ 9 and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ – the righteousness that comes from God on the basis of faith.

That old passport based on his religious credentials? He considers it ‘loss’, in fact he calls it ‘garbage’ in our refined and delicate English translations. The word is actually a little less cultivated than that. It’s what we flush down the loo. I’m sorry if you’re shocked, but that’s what it is.

All that relying on our Christian heritage as our way to heaven needs to be flushed away. When we rely on that, it’s toxic. It needs to go.

The right passport is Christ, not us. Our heavenly destiny depends on our union with him and on his virtues, not ours.

Think of it like marriage vows. At the giving of the rings in the current Methodist Worship Book service, the words the bride and groom say to each other include these:

All that I am I give to you,
and all that I have I share with you[3]

In older generations, the words will have been, ‘All my worldly goods I thee endow.’

Coming into relationship with Christ is like this. We give him all we have. He gives us all he has. We give him our sin (which he disposes of at the Cross). He gives us his righteousness. And having the righteousness of Christ by repentance of those sins we have given him and by faith in him is what qualifies us for the passport for our heavenly journey.

The problem with the wrong passport, the one that lists our religious bona fides, is that it is about pride. Look at me. Look at how good I am. Look at what I’ve achieved. Me, me, me.

But the right passport is him, him, him. Christ has died for us. Christ has been raised to new life for us. Christ reigns on high.

When our daughter recently wanted to change jobs, she updated her CV and sent it off to various employers. But it is no good presenting our religious CV as our heavenly passport. It does not pass muster. It cannot reach the heights of the heavenly standards, because those have been set by Christ.

If we want the heavenly passport, we need to be relying entirely on Jesus.

Why say this to a group of people, most of whom have embraced the Christian faith for decades? Because Paul knew there was a danger of lapsing back into old ways of thinking. It had happened to the Galatians. He seems here to be wanting to put in preventative measures so it doesn’t happen to the Philippians.

Let’s examine ourselves and make sure we haven’t lapsed back into using the wrong passport. Let’s make certain that we are relying entirely on Christ as our passport to glory.

Now that might be a good place to conclude. But Paul doesn’t stop there. He has something else to say here, and it’s about living with the right passport:

10 I want to know Christ – yes, to know the power of his resurrection and participation in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, 11 and so, somehow, attaining to the resurrection from the dead.

This union with Christ where we give him all we have and he gives us all he has leads to certain implications. Just as in a healthy marriage the couple get to know each other more deeply (even if men will never really understand women, and women will never really understand men) so we shall want to know Christ. And just as a couple will share one another’s sorrows and joys so we shall enter more deeply into both the suffering and the resurrection of Jesus.

But what does all that mean? Knowing Christ means we engage ever more deeply with his teaching. We read it in the Scripture. We ponder its meaning. We start putting it into practice.

Sharing in his sufferings and becoming like him in his death means that we too pay the cost of doing what is right and godly. And we also allow our hearts to be broken by the things that break his.

Attaining to the resurrection of the dead shows where we are heading, just as Jesus did, who was the first fruits of the resurrection of the dead, according to 1 Corinthians 15.

All in all, that union with Christ that provides our heavenly passport is like taking up all the marriage vows with him:

For better, for worse,
for richer, for poorer,
in sickness and in health,
to love and to cherish,
from this day forward[4]

We just delete the words ‘until we are parted by death’, because this is a union for eternity.

Therefore, union with Christ which provides our heavenly passport is not simply a ticket to heaven. It is a relationship that stretches into eternity. But it begins now.

Moreover, this is not just an individual thing. For we in the church in all our marital diversity – single, married, divorced, widowed – are together the Bride of Christ. And therefore this union with Christ that takes us to glory is something we work out together – not just united with Christ but united with one another. We cannot take the journey alone. As the church we are not just a bunch of snooker balls who bounce off each other every Sunday morning, we are a community that together works out the joys and sorrows of union with Christ.

And it’s OK to admit that we haven’t got our act together perfectly yet, that we are a project in the making, that – as Paul said in chapter 1 of Philippians, he who began a good work in us will complete it on the day of Christ Jesus. It’s OK to admit that – as long as we are committed to the relationship with Christ and each other and to its continual deepening. Paul himself knew he wasn’t the finished article, but he put his name to that development of the relationship. For as he said at the end of today’s passage:

12 Not that I have already obtained all this, or have already arrived at my goal, but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me. 13 Brothers and sisters, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: forgetting what is behind and straining towards what is ahead, 14 I press on towards the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenwards in Christ Jesus.

I hope and pray that’s what we’ve all signed up for. Rejecting the wrong passport of boasting about our religious credentials; taking up the true passport of Christ; and living out that union with Christ together.

That is what church is.

[1] Tom Wright, What St Paul Really Said, p26.

[2] Op. cit., p27.

[3] Methodist Worship Book, p375.

[4] Op. cit., p374.

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Paul’s Favourite Church 4: Shining Like Stars (Philippians 2:12-30)

Philippians 2:12-30

I’ve talked before about how my late father was an amateur astronomer, and how he shared his love of the subject with me as a child. I never picked up his level of interest, but he was understandably proud of one of my sister’s boys who went on to study astrophysics as part of his first degree.

But I still have fond memories of gazing up into a clear night sky with him, while he pointed out various constellations, and the names of the stars.

When my daughter as a teenager started asking me the same questions when we were walking home at night from her youth club, I installed an app on my phone that we could point to the sky and it would show us what all the stars and constellations were.

And recently my wife has been noticing these heavenly objects when we have been out on late night dog walks. So for her birthday I bought her a planisphere, a printed resource that helps you identify the planets and the stars.

I still get a thrill – and a poignant memory – when I see Orion or The Plough. I often think of Psalm 8 and get a sense of wonder and even of worship:

3 When I consider your heavens,
    the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars,
    which you have set in place,
4 what is mankind that you are mindful of them,
    human beings that you care for them?

In today’s passage Paul doesn’t call us to gaze in wonder at the stars but figuratively to emulate them:

Then you will shine among them like stars in the sky (verse 15b)

In the world, our calling is to shine like stars in a dark sky. We are to be those points of light in the darkness. Rather than just moan about all the darkness around us, we get on with shining with the light of Christ.

We do this, says Paul, under his call to

continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling, 13 for it is God who works in you to will and to act in order to fulfil his good purpose.

God has saved us for a purpose. He has made us new. Now we live out that newness of life – but not on our own, because God is at work in us to make it possible. And this will make us like shining stars in the darkness of the world.

So what qualities does Paul say will enable the Philippians to shine like stars in their dark world? I think we’ll find that things haven’t changed that much.

Firstly, kindness:

14 Do everything without grumbling or arguing, 15 so that you may become blameless and pure, ‘children of God without fault in a warped and crooked generation.’

Well, that should be a shoo-in, shouldn’t it? Don’t grumble or argue.

Unfortunately, it isn’t in some churches. It is more widespread than some of us would like to believe, especially when we tell ourselves that our churches are friendly and welcoming.

Now I freely admit that as a minister I am sensitive to this one, because we church leaders are often the target of the grumbling, when people don’t like what we do or what we don’t do. You may know the old joke where the question is: ‘What’s the favourite Sunday lunch in a Christian household?’ The answer? ‘Roast preacher.’

And I also know that some of this grumbling comes our way because in these days of declining and aging congregations, people pin massive hopes on a new minister being the one to turn around the losses. Which is why at one previous circuit welcome service I quoted the famous line from Monty Python’s Life Of Brian: ‘He’s not the Messiah, he’s just a very naughty boy.’ The job of Messiah was taken two thousand years ago.

I’m also sensitive to this, though, not for the barbs thrown at people like me, but because in my position I hear the stories of those who have left a church, having been wounded by cruel words and actions. Do you know the damage caused by a harsh word in church?

More positively, did you notice just how highly Paul rates the idea of avoiding grumbling and arguing? He says it contributes to us being ‘blameless and pure.’ So often when we think about what makes us blameless and pure we think about the avoidance of certain ‘big’ sins, not least those involving sexual impurity. And I’m certainly not denying that these things are important.

But here, Paul says that if we want to be ‘blameless and pure, ‘children of God without fault in a warped and crooked generation’’, then saying no to grumbling and arguing in the church is also part of this.

And doing this also makes us shine: we become ‘without fault in a warped and crooked generation’. A Christian community that chooses kindness over harshness will stand out in society. Indeed, we shine like stars in the dark sky.

When we are among our friends outside the church, can we truly say that the congregation we belong to is such a wonderful place of kindness and care, where people are not ripped apart by the words of others but rather are built up? Wouldn’t it be great if our churches were known in their communities as the places where people receive kindness?

Secondly, faithfulness:

Then you will shine among them like stars in the sky 16 as you hold firmly to the word of life.

Faithfulness – to the Gospel: ‘hold firmly to the word of life.’ This isn’t just an internal thing in the church, by the way: it’s also outward-facing, since it can also be translated, ‘hold out the word of life.’ In the church and in the world, we are called to hold faithfully to the Gospel, because that will make us shine like stars in the dark sky.

For too long now, we have heard church leaders say that we should adapt our message to the society we live in, because parts of it are unacceptable today. But the moment we just make Christianity like a religious version of the wider culture, then there is no longer any reason to join the church. Why join something that is just like how you are already, anyway? There is no point.

No: the only hope for the church to be like shining stars in the dark sky is if we keep to the Gospel, even and especially where it differs from the culture in which we live.

And if you don’t believe me, then listen to the respected historian Tom Holland. He has been on quite a journey in his thinking and in his life. In 2016, he wrote,

It took me a long time to realise my morals are not Greek or Roman, but thoroughly, and proudly, Christian.

He realised that we owe the good things in our society to our Christian foundations and began an excursion into the message of Christianity.

Recently, he has publicly urged churches to ‘keep Christianity weird’, and to ‘preach the weird stuff’. All those crucial values we cherish actually have their basis in the weird stuff of Christianity like the miraculous, not least the resurrection, ascension, and second coming of Jesus.

The church leaders and members who trumpet how the resurrection is just a way of saying someone stays in our memory, or that the ascension is a fairy-tale and the second coming is science fiction are not doing the church any good at all. They are doing the church a grave dis-service. They are removing all power from the Gospel and leaving it like a limp lettuce leaf.

If anyone comes into your church’s pulpit and starts preaching this stuff, do not just dismiss it and say, ‘It’s interesting to hear diverse opinions’, or ‘Let’s live with contradictory convictions.’ No! See them for what they are: wolves in sheep’s clothing.

Let’s stay faithful to the Gospel in all its weirdness: that’s where the power to transform lives is.

Thirdly, service:

Here I’m thinking of what Paul says at the end of the reading about Timothy and Epaphroditus. Paul says that Timothy will be concerned for the Philippians’ welfare, that he doesn’t spend his time on his own interests, and he has a track record of serving (verses 20-22). Epaphroditus, who didn’t enjoy good health, almost died for the Gospel and risked his life to help Paul (verses 26-30).

It’s not enough to be ‘nice’, which might be what you would think had Paul stopped after his admonition to avoid grumbling and arguing. A faith based on Jesus, who suffered and died on the Cross, cannot be reduced to ‘niceness.’ Timothy and Epaphroditus, with their modelling of selflessness and sacrifice, show such a faith in action.

People like Timothy and Epaphroditus are true Christian heroes. These are the kind of people we rightly celebrate. We write books about them. We use them as sermon illustrations! They are exceptional.

But why are they exceptional? Isn’t their example simply what should be the Christian norm? Aren’t their lives of service, sacrifice, and risk-taking the natural consequences of Jesus’ teaching and example?

And if they are, then why aren’t more of us like them?

Is it that it’s easier and more comfortable to opt for niceness rather than sacrificial servanthood? Have we bought into ‘Gentle Jesus, meek and mild’ but not the rest of him? Are we keen to scoop up the blessings of faith while not taking the responsibilities and the challenges?

Jesus certainly shone like a star in the dark sky, and so as we work out our own salvation, that is going to involve beginning to imitate him. That’s what Timothy and Epaphroditus did. They found ways to imitate Christ, and in doing so they shone brightly.

So I wonder in what ways Jesus is calling us to imitate him? Who are we being called to serve, as Timothy did? For whom are we being called to take risks, as Epaphroditus did?

And let’s remember that both of these men had their frailties. We read explicitly here that Epaphroditus had his health issues. We read in other New Testament Epistles that Timothy was timid. These were not people who were somehow genetically wired to be heroes. They had the same imperfections and weaknesses that we have.

Much as we might like to believe otherwise, the New Testament doesn’t have two categories of Christians: the ordinary ones, for whom a fairly modest standard of lifestyle is required, and the keen ones, who are held to higher standards, and in whose reflected glory we can bask. Jesus never made divisions like that.

The call to kindness, to faithfulness to the Gospel, and to sacrificial service is for all of us. Do we want to shine like stars in the dark sky? Or do we want our light to be snuffed out?

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Harvest Festival: A Harvest of Restoration, Joel 2:21-32

Joel 2:21-32

Many years ago, listeners to Radio 4’s Sunday morning service choked on their corn flakes when the minister leading a harvest festival announced: “And now, the children will bring up their gifts.”

I am glad I never witnessed that!

At harvest festival, there are certain themes that we regularly celebrate – not least the goodness of God in creation but also God’s concern for justice, because not everyone receives what they need from the harvest of the land. These are important themes to consider, even if harvest festival as we know it was merely the invention of a Victorian clergyman in the Cornish village of Morwenstow in 1843. In case you ever need to know it for a quiz, his name was Robert Hawker.

But our reading from Joel prompts another harvest theme, and that is restoration.

The context of Joel’s prophecy is that a locust swarm has invaded the Holy Land, devastating all the crops, and leaving the people facing starvation. Joel says that this is a warning from God to call the people back to him in repentance, although it’s hard to be sure what particular sins have been committed. Part of their returning to the Lord includes fasting – which they may already have been doing involuntarily due to the food shortages.

But now it appears God has heard their cry for mercy. Crops are growing again and he has driven out the locusts. In this context we hear the wonderful words of restoration in our reading. The people truly have reason to give thanks for having crops to harvest again.

Moreover, Joel tells the people that God’s restoration project is bigger and better than they ever asked or imagined. What does it include?

Firstly and most obviously, restoration of the land:

We hear that once again there will be pasture for the wild animals, autumn and spring rains, threshing-floors filled with grains, and vats overflowing with new wine and oil, and that these are reasons for rejoicing, not fear (verses 21-24).

We are used to supporting charities that help with disaster relief – whether it’s earthquakes, floods, droughts, or war. But in the popular mind we are often only thinking about helping those who are in trouble there and then. Yet many of these organisations will want to be in the affected areas for the long haul. Providing temporary accommodation, food, and medical help is only the beginning for them. They know there is a rebuilding job to be done. It’s not for nothing that ‘All We Can’ used to be called the ‘Methodist Relief and Development Fund’.

So, for example, if I visit the ‘Stories’ section of Tearfund’s website, then yes, I will find one account of emergency relief in South Sudan following floods. Homes, infrastructure, and farming land have all been destroyed, and relief workers are trying to bring in temporary shelters, food supplies, and clean water.

But I will also find the story of a small church in Bangladesh that is transforming its village. Many of the people come from lower castes. One consequence of this is they are often not well educated. Only menial jobs are available. But the outcomes from this church of just 33 members studying the Bible have been listed by their pastor:

‘We have seen financial development along with spiritual development.

‘We don’t only do church-based work, we also do various other things outside of the church. For example, we plant trees on behalf of the church. We also do awareness work about hygiene – not only in our congregation, but we also discuss these things in our community. We teach health awareness about toilet issues, such as having to wear sandals, what to do before going to the toilet, and having to use soap after coming back from the toilet.’

Their communication with the government has led to 24 new homes being built. With a water supply that contains toxic levels of arsenic and iron, they have built a water pump. They soon plan to campaign against child marriage.

All this is because they believe in a God who restores the land. God wants to make his creation new. If a small church of poor, uneducated people can make such a difference in their village, what can we do? By all means let us give our harvest gifts, but can we not be more ambitious than that?

Secondly, we have restoration of the people:

In verses 25-27 we hear that God will repay the people for the years the locusts have eaten. They will eat again and praise God. Twice he says, ‘never again will my people be shamed.’

There is a human toll to disasters: not just things like hunger, but also shame. Given that Israel had suffered the plague of locusts due to some unspecified sin, there will have been shame at the wrongdoing. The Gospel says that in Jesus God restores us from the shame of our sins. Those burdens we have carried are ones we can lay down at the foot of the Cross and find them burned up by the holy love of God. The blood of Jesus deals with them – for in the Old Testament blood symbolises life and Jesus replaces our shame with his life.

But shame is not limited to the guilty. Tragically, it is also felt by those who have been sinned against. If you have been following the news story about the monstrous abuse perpetrated by the late Mohamed al-Fayed, the former owner of Harrod’s this week, and if you have heard the stories of women coming forward to say they were raped by him, then time and time again you will have heard those women say that one of the reasons they said nothing for years was their sense of shame. Abusers control their victims by seeking to transfer shame onto them.

And here the Gospel is again by definition Good News for the shamed. Jesus is as much in the business of healing the broken as he is of forgiving sinners. We know that from the Gospels, don’t we?

Many years ago, I read a book called ‘The Locust Years’. It is the story of a woman called Jacqui Williams who went travelling in the United States but became caught up in the Reverend Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church – the cult popularly known as the Moonies. They took over her life, reducing her to an existence of little more than selling flowers, sweets, and trinkets on the street to support the cult’s income. When she had to return to the UK to renew her visa, she thankfully found faith in Jesus and her new-found Christian faith was her liberation. The book is called ‘The Locust Years’ after this very passage in Joel with God’s promise to restore the years the locusts have eaten – in her case, her time with the Moonies.

The Christian Church is about the business of seeing people restored in Christ. And if we’re not about that, we barely deserve the name ‘church.’ What used to be called ‘the harvest of souls’ is the restoration of people through the love of God in Christ. It’s why John Wesley said we had no business except the saving of souls.

Thirdly and finally, we have the restoration of all things:

Here we’re moving to the famous verses at the end of the reading (28-32) about God pouring out his Spirit on all flesh – sons and daughters, old, young, and servants alike. And I hope you’re thinking, ‘I hear that every year on Pentecost Sunday, because Peter quotes it in his sermon.’

It’s set in the middle of language about ‘the great and dreadful day of the LORD’ and contains references to the sun being turned to darkness and the moon to blood. The nature of this language is clearly not literal. After references to the sun going dark and the moon turning to blood, do not expect someone like Carol Kirkwood or Elizabeth Rizzini or Tomasz Schafernaker to pop up and add, ‘These will be followed by sunny intervals and scattered showers.’

So we’re in ‘end times’ language here, but that doesn’t mean a short countdown to the Second Coming. We have been in the end times since the Resurrection, and that’s one reason this language occurs at Pentecost. God’s kingdom has come and is coming, but it’s overlapping with the old order of things.

Therefore, God’s goal of ‘making all things new’ with a new creation that includes new heavens, a new earth, and a new Jerusalem that we read about in Revelation 21 doesn’t just all pop up at the end of history as we know it. That stuff begins now. Salvation and deliverance in every form have begun.

Hence, even now God wants to bring restoration in every way. And we the church are his agents of transformation. You name it, God wants to do it. The restoring of relationships with him. The restoring of relationships between people. The restoring of our broken relationship with creation. The restoring of the body. The restoring of a just and peaceful society. All these (and probably more!) are the many and varied harvests of restoration which God desires.

Naturally, not all of these things will come in all their fulness before Jesus appears to wrap things up. Don’t we all have the agonised experience of unanswered prayer? But let’s go for as much as we can get. Let’s not give up in despair, because some things have gone wrong. Let’s set out on this wonderful ministry of restoration that we have been given as the people of God. With the help of the Holy Spirit who is poured out on us, as these verses from Joel say, let’s confront the brokenness of this old order with the ministry of restoration that Jesus began and entrusted to us.

Who knows how much of a harvest we might see?

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