Category: Uncategorized

Preachers’ Kids

It all started at the end of our holiday this year. “Dad, why do we just go away on holiday in this country when my school friends go to Turkey twice a year?”

A few weeks later it was, “Dad, why doesn’t the church pay you as much money as other people? A minister’s job is very important! You should be paid lots of money! Then we wouldn’t have to think about whether we can afford an iPad or not.”

At the weekend there were three questions. One went like this: “Dad, why do we have to go to church every Sunday when most of my friends don’t go very much at all?”

The next was, “Dad, why do our teachers ask us all the questions in RE lessons, just because they know you’re a minister?”

And at bath-time I got, “Dad, why don’t as many people go to church these days?” Oh yes: I had to explain theories of secularisation to an eight-year-old.

Our children, at the ages of eight and nine, are now beginning to feel how different it is to be the daughter and son of a manse family. Some of it is exacerbated by currently living in the wealthiest county in the country. But it was going to come at some point. So how do we respond?

I used the first two questions to discuss with them what Jesus teaches about money, and why it isn’t the most important thing in life. I hope I got them thinking about the priorities of love and relationships. However, the issue will keep returning, especially here in Surrey.

The question about church attendance was asked by one of the children and answered by the other: “We have to go every week, because Dad is the minister.” I said, “No, we go every week because that’s what Christians do.” I would have liked more time to explore that. On its own it wasn’t an adequate answer.

I sympathised with them over the way their teachers seem to single them out in RE, expecting them to know a lot. I suggested it was possible their teachers weren’t churchgoers, and were looking for help from them. But that just provoked another question: “If our teachers are meant to show us what is true and good, why don’t they go to church?” And that led into the bath-time discussion of secularisation.

Yet it’s not just a matter of asking the questions. It’s about what we model and how we handle the whole consequences of my distinctive (perhaps the old word ‘peculiar’ is appropriate here) calling.

So I thought I’d throw this out for discussion: what are the best ways to raise preachers’ kids? I especially don’t want church to put them off. They can’t help but realise at times that not everything about church is nicey-nicey. All that alongside peer pressure around here, based presently on financial lifestyle implications.

Over to you!

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Sermon: The Emmaus Road (Stations of the Resurrection)

After a week in which I’ve caught up with being human after the madness of the Easter routine, I’m back into preaching tomorrow – this time at another church in the circuit, not one of ‘mine’, where they are exploring the Resurrection appearances in a sermon series.
‘Look away now if you don’t want to know the result.’
You may have heard this sentence on the news when they are giving out the sports results, but when highlights are going to be shown later, perhaps on ‘Match of the Day’.
Similarly, I’ve known friends record entire football or rugby games, and plead with their friends not to tell them the result ahead of them watching the recording.
If you’re not a sports fan, you still have the same problem if you like television programmes, films or books. Advance reviews of some contain what are called ‘spoiler alerts’ – that is, if you read the review, you will find out a key element of the plot that you might not want to know ahead of watching or reading.
Christians have the same problem when reading the Gospels. To enter into the action as if we don’t know the ending or the result it close to impossible. In one sense, that gives us hope: we know that the outcome of history, will, in some form be, ‘Jesus wins’, as Tony Campolo puts it.
But in another way it makes it difficult for us to enter into the feelings of, say, Cleopas and his companion on the Emmaus road, and hence feel the impact of their mysterious encounter with Jesus. We read it, having read it many times over the years, knowing that the stranger is the risen Lord. We may not be so foolish as to think that if we were in their place we would have recognised him straightaway, but it is still hard to get inside their blindness.
And indeed, that is the first thing we need to consider when reflecting on this ‘Station of the Resurrection’ – the blindness of these two disciples. Luke tells us that when ‘Jesus himself came near and walked with them’ (verse 15) ‘their eyes were kept from recognising him’ (verse 16). What was it? I think we can rule out any sense of Jesus wanting to hide himself, even if you might get the feeling that Jesus is being rather playful with them. Ultimately, Jesus wants them to recognise him, and to live faithfully in the light of his resurrection.
I think we must look at the disciples and their spiritual and emotional state. They clearly do not believe the resurrection stories they have already heard from the women (verses 22-24). For one thing, women were not regarded as reliable witnesses in their day, to the point of not being allowed to give testimony in court. But more significant than that, resurrection is just not on their radar. They are not expecting it. They are good Jews who either believe that the resurrection will happen at the end of time (if they believe the Book of Daniel) or, like the Sadducees, they don’t believe in resurrection at all. It’s all outside their belief system, just as the idea of a suffering Messiah was. Remember that when Jesus prophesied his betrayal and death to his disciples, they either rejected it (like Simon Peter) or ‘they did not grasp what was said’ (18:34).
Isn’t their blindness, then, caused by their preconceived ideas? Isn’t their blindness caused by what is often called their ‘worldview’? in other words, people have a view of the way life is, and it determines how they see everything else – and indeed what they also fail to see. So for example the scientific atheist will have a worldview that says everything can be explained by reason, experiment and cause and effect. There is no such thing as purpose in our universe, and there are certainly no miracles. Their worldview rules out on principle something like the Resurrection. Cleopas and his companion in the story will have ruled out a resurrection in the middle of history, because it was contrary to their worldview.
Often our worldview is simply that of the prevailing culture in which we live, and that culture is so pervasive that we barely recognise it’s there. The overall perspective by which we understand the world, and the beliefs we hold about life and the universe are all around us. The late Lesslie Newbigin said we no more notice the worldview of our culture than a goldfish notices the water it is swimming in. It’s just there. Sometimes this worldview is helpful and illuminating, but sometimes – like here – it blinds us to ultimate truth.
What, then, is the challenge we might draw from reflecting on how the disciples’ worldview blinded them to the risen Jesus? Is it not something like this? The Christian needs to shape their view of the world not firstly by uncritically absorbing the views around us. If we do that, we may end up believing that the meaning of life is … shopping. Instead, we need a worldview shaped by Jesus. He needs to be the centre and horizon of how we view life. To change the metaphor, we need to look at life through the lens of Jesus. This means taking seriously every part of who he is and what he does. It means an immersion in his life, story and teaching. Like Cleopas, his companion and the other disciples, there will be aspects we just don’t grasp immediately. But to live as disciples of the risen Lord, we need to engage thoroughly and consistently with him.
The second thing we need to consider, then, is how Jesus made himself known to his two followers. The key element seems to be his use of Scripture:
Then he said to them, ‘Oh, how foolish you are, and how slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have declared! Was it not necessary that the Messiah should suffer these things and then enter into his glory?’ Then beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them the things about himself in all the scriptures. (Verses 25-27)
Just to mention Scripture is to open up a potentially difficult subject, especially as this is only one point within a wider sermon, and even one sermon would not do the subject justice. For instance, take the wide divergence of views about the nature and authority of Scripture, even among Christians. How does it relate to other sources of truth such as reason, tradition or experience? Christians who value the Bible equally highly still differ with each other over the interpretation of certain passages and doctrines. Whether your faith is conservative or liberal, you will know that there are difficult passages in the Scriptures. Atheists are quick to use the more violent passages in the Bible in their arguments against us. On the other hand, there are passages of unsurpassed beauty.
Without trying to settle all these arguments (and I’m not sure I could, anyway), let me simply point to the key issue Jesus raises about the Scriptures here: ‘he interpreted to them the things about himself in all the scriptures’ (verse 27).
Jesus, using what we call the Old Testament, says that the critical matter is the way the inspired testimony points to him. The point is not to treat the Bible as having fallen down out of heaven (which in any case is more like a Muslim approach to a holy book than a Christian one), nor is it just to see it as a jumbled and confused collection of human strivings after God. It is to see its overarching purpose as being testimony to Jesus the Messiah. It’s not just about individual proof texts that we think prophesy certain details about Jesus, it’s about the great story of Israel, God’s people, being fulfilled in Jesus. It’s about what we sing of at Christmas in the carol: ‘The hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight.’
So what does this mean for us now? We who know more of the story than Cleopas and his companion had while walking the dusty road to Emmaus also have more Scriptures, and much of what we have speaks explicitly of Jesus. We can engage with the sacred writings in order to engage with the risen Lord who appeared to his disciples two thousand years ago. Yes, we engage with him as not only risen but also ascended. He does not walk with us physically as he did in the story we are reflecting on today. But let us embrace one simple aim for our studying, meditating and praying of the Scriptures: how does this point me to Jesus? I believe it’s what he’d want us to do.
If the first two elements here in engaging with the risen Lord are firstly to interpret life through him and secondly to see the Scriptures as pointing to him, there is a third element in the Emmaus Road story that helps us to meet with him today. There may well be others, too, but I am going to make this third point my final one this morning. That third aspect is to meet the risen Lord in ordinary life.
How is Jesus recognised in the end? It’s when he as guest becomes host, when he takes the bread, blesses it, breaks it and gives it to them (verse 30).
For years I interpreted this as a hint of Holy Communion, because the four actions Jesus does here are the four he does at the Last Supper – he takes, blesses, breaks and gives. We even structure our sacramental services around those four actions. We have taken this up into our hymns, such as ‘Be known to us in breaking bread, but do not then depart.’
However, what happens when you discover that the four actions Jesus performs – the taking, blessing, breaking and giving of the bread – are simply the four that a devout Jew would have done at an ordinary meal? Is there not a case here for expecting to meet the risen Lord not merely in a ‘religious’ setting such as a sacrament, but in the most ordinary acts of everyday life? After all, as both risen and ascended he is present everywhere, reigning over all things. The problem is, we rush by and fail to take notice that he is present, wanting to reveal himself to us. In our world full of so-called labour-saving devices which really only create more time for us to do more things, we hurry past where God is travelling on foot at three miles an hour and miss his revelation. Back in 1917, the German theologian Rudolph Otto said, ‘Modern man cannot even shudder properly.’  In the nearly one hundred years since he said those words, I suggest the problem has got far worse.
It is time, I believe to recall the words of another early twentieth century European Christian, the French mystic Simone Weil, who said, ‘Prayer is simply coming to attention.’  I believe we need to ‘come to attention’ to Christ’s presence in the world. It is, if you like, to underline what I am sure you have heard other preachers say about the monk Brother Lawrence ‘practising the presence of God’. What it requires to come to attention to Christ’s risen presence among us, with us and beyond us, though, is this: coming to attention means stopping in order to listen. We have to curb the business, we have to pare down the cramming in of more things. We have to delete good things from our lives to concentrate on the best. We need to edit our lives at times to make space for giving attention to Christ’s presence in the world.
One of my hobbies is photography. The photographer whose work I most admire shot mainly black and white pictures in the 1930s and 1940s in the American national parks. His name was Ansel Adams, and here is one of his famous photos taken in Yosemite National Park. Adams used something my children only know of as an historical artefact – a film camera. It was large and bulky. He often had it on a specially made tripod on top of his car. He had to take time to line up his shots, to consider the light, the composition and the exposure. Even in this scene of a clearing winter storm, you can sense that he took his time to pay attention to the scenery and his equipment in order to produce this masterpiece. Does it not fill you with a sense of wonder? You can find many of his images online if you like this.
There is such a contrast with our all-too-quick digital photography today. We point and shoot speedily and indiscriminately, because we can delete the bad ones and we can alter the reasonable ones with software later. Much as I like digital gadgets, I acknowledge there is an incomparable value in those disciplines that require us to take time to pay attention.
I wonder where we might reorder our lives so that we can come to attention that the risen Lord is among us?
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Another Sermon On Matthew 22:1-14

I only preached on this passage back in October when I visited a church in another circuit and this was the Lectionary Gospel passage. Tomorrow I preach on it in a sermon series for Lent based on selected incidents from Holy Week.

Matthew 22:1-14
One of my cousins married the daughter of a captain in the Army Catering Corps. The father of the bride said he would therefore organise the food at the reception. And so, on a cold February day, we trekked after the wedding ceremony to the barracks in Aldershot. As we arrived, the usual champagne flute glasses were offered, along with plates of vol au vents. As we ate these appetisers, we waited for the call to the main course.

It never came. The vol au vents were the meal.

Some of us later decamped to my aunt and uncle’s house, and to compensate for our hunger we ordered in fish and chips. Just as we were tucking in, there was a ring at the doorbell. In came the bride and groom. “Fish and chips?” they said, “Great! Can we have some?”

It wasn’t exactly the image of the wedding banquet that we expected. The nearest I have experienced to that was at another friend’s wedding where there was at least a full roast meal. However, as I went along with my plate taking my food, I was told by a member of the catering company, “Only two potatoes, sir.”

I can’t quite imagine God (or the king in the parable) throwing a banquet for his son where there was a strict rationing of the food. Although I have to say I harbour strange thoughts at communion services where we thank God at the end that we have had ‘a foretaste of the heavenly banquet prepared for all people’ when that ‘foretaste’ consists of no more than a miniscule square of white bread and a tiny sip of sweet wine. It is the merest of mere foretastes!
In the parable, I am sure the king is sending out invitations to a lavish banquet, just as I am sure that the wedding reception at Buckingham Palace last year for ‘Wills and Kate’ was rather more than a selection of ready meals from Asda. The invitation is to something generous, swish, and – in the best sense of the word – tempting. It is to come to the table of the abundant God. Oxen and fattened cattle have been slaughtered – the best of the herd have been prepared (verse 4). Nothing less will do.

The question arises, then, what will people do with an invitation to such a feast?

But in normal circumstances that seems such an easy question to answer. The shock in this parable – and I never tire of saying that we need to look for the shocks in the parables of Jesus – is what happens in response to the invitation.

In the first instance, the king sends his servants ‘to those who had been invited to tell them to come’ (verse 3). It sounds like this is a group of people who have already received an invitation. But the nature of the invitation is different from our culture. In our society, when we receive an invitation to a wedding, we are told the date and time as well as the location. But these people have not yet been told the date and the time. They have been invited more generally. Now the servants go with the word that the date and time have been set, and they are to attend.
I therefore take these people to be the ones who expect an invitation. Given that this parable occurs in the midst of the tension being racked up between Jesus and the religious establishment, I take it that these are the people in the firing line here. They are the people who would expect an invitation to the great messianic banquet of God’s kingdom. They are the people who would expect not only to be invited, but to be sitting in the places of the greatest honour. They are the people who consider themselves uniquely favoured by God. And yet they are the ones whom Jesus says have effectively trashed the invitation.

What had they done wrong? If we are talking about the Pharisees, we are considering a group who honoured the Scriptures and cared passionately about the holiness of God’s people. Yet this had distorted into the erection of barriers to decide who was ‘in’ and who was ‘out’. Conveniently, they themselves were ‘in’.

If we are talking about the chief priests and the teachers of the law, we are considering a social class who had ingratiated themselves with the ruling Romans in order to protect their own status. To do that, they had made their religion in their own image, to justify their actions. It’s not dissimilar from what many Christians do today. It’s remarkable how many Christians of a certain political persuasion think that Jesus would vote in a rather similar way to them. The Guardian carried an article about this very phenomenon at the beginning of this week, which even showed a photo of Argentinean football supporters holding a large photo of Jesus, who by sheer coincidence was wearing an Argentinean football shirt. Not that we would ever claim that God was a perfect English gentlemen. Oh, no. Not us.

These, then, are people who use God and religion to their own ends. If we use faith as a way of justifying ourselves and fortifying our own positions, rather than seeing it as bowing the knee to Jesus Christ as Lord, then we can be sure that Jesus sees us as one of those who have scorned the invitation to the great banquet. Because the way to accept is to confess Jesus Christ as Lord, in both word and deed. People who seem the most ‘religious’ may in fact be those least likely to follow Jesus. For ourselves, we need to ensure that we don’t substitute religion for discipleship, and that in sharing the Gospel we don’t just assume that the ‘nicest’ people will be more disposed than others to the Good News.
The second wave of invitations goes out. Rather than send his servants to the usual suspects, now the king commands them to ‘go to the street corners’ (verse 9) and invite anyone, whether ‘good or bad’ (verse 10). The implication of this for Jesus’ critics is scandalous. He wants to invite into the kingdom the very people who had been kept out by their rules. Those with a blemish. Those who didn’t fit. Those whose reputations brought shame rather than honour.

Applying this to us, no longer are we necessarily talking about taking the Gospel to the obvious candidates, to the people we think would have the most chance of fitting in with the church culture.  One church I served appointed a married couple from another church as the cleaners. When this was done, somebody remarked that these people didn’t look like conventional churchgoers. The husband had long hair – even though he was in his fifties. They weren’t the most cultural of people. They were deeply working class. But the depth of faith this couple and their teenage daughter had shamed many established Christians. They had, as it were, come to the banquet from the street corners.

I have seen other people ostracised in churches who have had deeper faith than the clean, eloquent types who typically fill our pews. Not that there is anything wrong with being clean or eloquent, but too often we miss the fact that Jesus by his Spirit is going ahead of us to the street corners and wooing people we wouldn’t even think of with his grace and love. It’s our calling to join in with what the Holy Spirit is doing. As we do, we become the servants of the king, carrying the invitations to the great banquet.

Around the 1970s, when the so-called Church Growth Movement was at the height of its popularity, one of its most controversial beliefs was the idea that the best way to make churches grow numerically was to attract more people of similar social background. The idea was that people like to mix socially with others who are similar to them. Apply that to the church, and you have more chance of seeing growth. Many people criticised it, because the Gospel is not only about personal reconciliation with God in Christ, it is then also about reconciliation between human individuals and groups who would previously have shown animosity to each other. Not only that, it contradicted the teaching of this parable that involved taking the Gospel to people beyond the usual boundaries of those who normally embrace it.

Yet despite this, many churches persist who are monochrome. Same culture, same race, same economic background, similar interests, and so on. Yet the Gospel says that the banquet is not just for people like us. It is for all.

We’ve had two shocks so far. The expected guests at the wedding say ‘no’, and come under judgment, rather than blessing. Then, the invitation is extended to people you wouldn’t expect to be in attendance at the wedding banquet of the king’s son. It would be like the Queen throwing open the grounds of Buckingham Palace to the Occupy Movement.
But there is a third and final shock. A man turns up who is not wearing wedding clothes. Just as we dress up for weddings, so did people in the ancient Middle Eastern cultures. Furthermore, kings would provide wedding attire for their guests. This man has no excuse. In the words of a hymn we shall sing tonight at the ecumenical Lent service, ‘All are welcome in this place’. However, with the Gospel offer of grace comes in response the Gospel demand of discipleship. Does the man turn up for a free lunch? If so, he’s in for a shock. The Gospel is a free lunch – we are freely forgiven in Christ and have just to accept the gift by faith. But that free lunch is given us not only in love but also to build us up for the calling of discipleship.

The other day, somebody told me a story about not being allowed to go to Sunday School one week as a child because she was in her ‘play clothes’, not her ‘Sunday best’. This isn’t about the physical clothes we wear, it’s about being ‘clothed with Christ’. We are clothed in his righteousness that is our forgiveness and declares us to be in the right with God through his death in our place on the Cross. But we are also clothed in Christ in that we begin to take on his righteousness by the Holy Spirit. Our worship and gratitude in response to God’s free grace is shown as we actively co-operate with Christ’s work by his Spirit in our lives to make us new people, to make us more truly into the character that is fit to be at the king’s banquet. Of ourselves we are not fit to be there at all, and we only enter by grace. But we stay as we allow the Holy Spirit to transform us more into the image of the King’s Son.

You may be the sort of person who doesn’t notice that the clothes you have been wearing have become dirty, and it takes someone – perhaps a loved one – to point this out. Similarly, it is possible not to notice the bad habits or compromises that sneak into our lives. Someone may need to point them out lovingly to us. It may be our reading of the Scriptures or our participation in worship of fellowship groups that reveals the truth to us. However it happens, our calling is to be present at the wedding feast of the King’s Son when God’s kingdom comes in all its fullness. And for that reason, it’s time to dry clean our clothes, so to speak, to accept the invitation on Christ’s terms and to be part of taking his invitation to all who will receive it, whether they fit the commonly accepted stereotypes or not.

Friends, the wedding feast awaits. It’s time to get dressed.

1

Sermon: When Life Goes Pear-Shaped (Habakkuk): Habakkuk’s Prayer

Habakkuk 3:1-19
The first time I conducted a baptism service, the passage for the day was about John the Baptist. In my sermon, I made a crack about John the Baptist and Jesus the Methodist – only to discover that some of the happy couple’s family worshipped at Millmead Baptist Church in Guildford.

But today, I can proudly announce to you that I have discovered a Methodist in the Bible from before the birth of Christ. Habakkuk.

Why do I make this facetious comment? Because Habakkuk sang his theology. I have often said that if you spotted three Christians going to worship on a Sunday morning, each carrying a book with them, the Anglican is carrying a prayer book, the Baptist is holding a Bible, and the Methodist is holding a hymn book. It says something about our spirituality.

And as Habakkuk responds to God’s second answer in chapter 2 with a prayer, he sings it. That strange beginning in verse 1, complete with a Hebrew word to trip up the reader, highlights it:

A prayer of Habakkuk the prophet. On shigionoth.

Shigi-what? ‘Shigionoth’ is a rare term for a dirge, only used at times of complete reliance upon God’s faithfulness[1]. There are also references (not translated in the NIV) to another Hebrew musical term, selah, in verses 3, 9 and 13. Finally, the book ends with these words:

For the director of music. On my stringed instruments. (Verse 19b)

Habakkuk’s prayer, then, is not a private prayer that happens to have been preserved, but one that has been turned into a public act of worship. Just as we often look in our Bibles and see much of the words of the prophets written in poetry, so here Habakkuk has used a creative gift to share his prayer of response to God’s word. By sharing it that way, he makes his prayer memorable and the content usable by others. Could it be that when we have an insight into faith, we might consider using our creative gifts in order to share it with others?

But that’s a little off on a tangent, something that might spark one or two of you into action. For the bulk of this morning, we need to consider the message that Habakkuk preserved for us in his sung prayer, even if we no longer know the tune.

Firstly, Habakkuk sings about God the Deliverer in the past. Verses 3 to 7 use language that is reminiscent of the Exodus and the Conquest of the Promised Land. In other words, Habakkuk looks back to see and to celebrate what God has done in the past. He goes back to the greatest act of deliverance that the Yahweh, the God of Israel, has accomplished in history, and reminds himself – and others who will hear or sing this song – of that event. If times are bad now, this is the God he believes in and trusts. When God’s people were oppressed by an unjust nation before, this is what the Lord did. He delivered them from Egypt and brought them into their own land.

I believe Habakkuk takes strength and comfort from this. He knows that God has not changed. God is still able to do this. So he fortifies himself with a theological history lesson that underlines for him the character and the actions of his Lord.

It is something we Christians can do, too. We can remember God’s great acts of deliverance in Jesus Christ. We can celebrate his Incarnation, assuming human flesh in order to redeem it. We can celebrate his death for our sins and his resurrection for our justification. We can rejoice in how his Ascension tells us that he reigns.
Indeed, Jesus has provided a particular way of doing this regularly. “Do this in remembrance of me,” he said. Every time we share in Holy Communion we remember. And although the bread and the wine particularly point us to the giving up of his body to death, in that act of the Lord’s Supper we celebrate everything from creation onwards. Notice how the great prayers of thanksgiving move through the history of God’s saving acts, climaxing in Jesus Christ. Every time we eat bread and drink wine in obedient faith to Jesus Christ, he provides a way of remembering who he is and what he has done for us. It’s not just an act of memory, it’s not merely a feat of the intellect, Christ engages our sight as we see the bread broken, our hearing as we listen to the thanksgiving, and our senses of touch, taste and smell as we receive the elements. It is a full, sensory experience of remembering the God who has delivered us in Jesus Christ.

Furthermore, this Christian remembering of God’s deliverance in Christ is not one that leaves a two-thousand-year gap between those events and the present day. On the one hand, our sacramental remembering puts us back at the Cross, as if we were truly there. On the other hand, it brings the past into the present, making those past events effective today.

When we face our questions, doubts and troubles about the state of the world and about the state of the church or even our own lives, let us invite the Holy Spirit to sing the great song of remembrance in us, that encourages us to believe in our faithful, redeeming God at the worst of times as well as the best of times.

Secondly, Habakkuk sings about God the Warrior in the future. Now I have to say this is not so obvious in English translations, and here I rely on the scholars. As we move into 9 to 15, there is still a description, it seems to us, of God acting in deliverance in the past. However, not all the language here quite so easily fits the Exodus and the Conquest.
What it seems to be is this: Hebrews had a way of speaking as part of their language that is strange to us. Whereas in English we are used to a series of tenses in our verbs that are variations on the present, the past and the future, Hebrew was more complex when it came to a sense of time in their verbs. One example of this is what is called the ‘predictive past’. In other words, something is predicted to happen in the future, and the speaker is so certain of it that he or she speaks of it as already having happened in the past. When Jonah prays to God from the belly of the fish, he hasn’t been delivered, but he prays as if he has. Scholars think this part of Habakkuk 3 is also a ‘predictive past’. The prophet has been fortified by the act of remembering God’s acts of deliverance in the past. As a result, he now has faith that God will also act mightily in salvation in the future. He is so trusting of this that he sings as if it has already happened.

What does that mean for us? Something like this: if we have remembered God’s deeds of salvation in the past, we have reason to hope and trust for the future. Think of how we sing the old hymn, ‘This, this is the God we adore’ and recall those lines,

We’ll praise him for all that is past
And trust him for all that’s to come.

That, effectively, is what Habakkuk is singing. He has praise for the past, and that leads to trust for the future. Praise for the past and trust for the future are not separate. They are connected. Because we know what God has done for us in Jesus Christ, we can trust him in the future.

Think of it in terms of human relationships. What is our reaction if someone comes to us and makes false accusations against a loved one? We tend to say, “But that is not consistent with what I know about the one I love.” In other words, we fall back on what we know of their character and their deeds from the past. I know it isn’t a perfect illustration, because it’s possible that someone might hide things from us, but I hope you see the basic point. In our faith, we do something like that. A whisper comes in our ear that God cannot be so good, because all this evil is going on around us. We respond by saying, “But I know what God is like. He sent his Son. And because he did that in the past, I will trust him for what is to come.”

To summarise so far: Habakkuk’s song is first of all a great song of remembering, in which we engage with what God has done in the past. It then secondly is a great song of trust in the future, because of God’s past deeds. But that leads to the third and final part of the song: what about the present? After all, now is the time when things are bad. In Habakkuk’s case, it was the wrongdoing of God’s people and their looming punishment through the evil Babylon. For us, we may be exercised by other dark scenarios. It may be war, famine, injustice or economic turbulence in the world. It may be closer to home in the form of personal sickness or troubles. Either way, there isn’t much light at present in between what God has done in the past and what we trust him to do in the future. How shall we live now?

Habakkuk offers a glorious climax to his song:

I heard and my heart pounded, my lips quivered at the sound; decay crept into my bones, and my legs trembled. Yet I will wait patiently for the day of calamity to come on the nation invading us.

Though the fig-tree does not bud and there are no grapes on the vines, though the olive crop fails and the fields produce no food, though there are no sheep in the pen and no cattle in the stalls,

yet I will rejoice in the LORD, I will be joyful in God my Saviour.

The Sovereign LORD is my strength; he makes my feet like the feet of a deer, he enables me to go on the heights. (Verses 16-19a)

He is content to wait, and we’ve talked about that last week. But while the harvest fails and there are no animals on the farms for food, he rejoices in the Lord his Saviour and finds strength in him. This is an astonishing confession of faith in which the prophet basically says, “I’m not in my relationship with the living God just for what I can get out of it. I will not limit my faithfulness to the good times. God has made a covenant with his people, and I am committed in return to that covenant.” In that faith commitment Habakkuk finds joy and strength in the Lord, despite dire circumstances.

As I pondered this, I thought about which of my Christian friends leave the most impression on me. Yes, some of my dearest friends in the faith have a lot of money but have used it with a near-secret generosity to support missionaries in obscure former Soviet states, and they have also used their financial nous to advise those with far less than them. But even those people have faced devastating personal losses.

And I think of a couple I know, where both husband and wife were in professions ancillary to medicine. Yet both of them have been struck down by differing disabilities. In the fifteen years I have known them, neither has been in paid work. They depend to a large extent on the benefits system, and the forthcoming changes might well not be very kind to them. Yet they have raised three fine daughters and they both have such a vibrant faith, even though neither of them has yet received the healing from God that to my eyes would make an immense difference to them. They have suffered at the hands of a church leader, too, yet I would be proud to have them in any congregation I served. Their fig tree has not budded, so to speak, and they have no grapes on their vines, yet they rejoice in the Lord and find strength in him, because they know that God is faithful and they have committed themselves in faithfulness to him.
Are we in some form of darkness right now? Is it to do with world events or personal circumstances, be they ours or those of someone we love? Can we dare to sing with Habakkuk? Can we sing of God’s acts of salvation in the past in Christ? Can we sing of our belief that he will act again in salvation in the future? And while we wait, can we sing in defiance of the darkness, of our joy in the Lord and the strength we find in him?

[1] David W Baker, Nahum, Habakkuk and Zephaniah (Tyndale Old Testament Commentaries), p68.

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What Do We Do With Anger? Walter Brueggemann On The Psalms Of Vengeance

Someone once said that most of the Bible speaks to us, but the Psalms speak for us. Enter the famed Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann:

HT: the Pastors’ Weekly email from ChurchLeaders.com.

Brueggemann proposes there are three things we can do with our anger when something unjust has happened to us:

1. We can act it out – but surely Christians don’t want to do that;
2. We can deny it – but then it comes out somewhere else, perhaps in our family;
3. We can give it to God.

It is that third way which he says is present in the ‘imprecatory Psalms’.

I love Brueggemann’s illustration of the parent who has to deal with two children, where one has been hurt and accuses the other of having caused the injury. The wise parent doesn’t say, “Don’t be angry,” but, “Let me deal with it.”

Yet so often I see options 1 and 2. I see option 1 in the way some Christians support aggressive international policies by their governments. I see option 2 among those Christians who know they need to forgive, but mistakenly think that means denying their anger. Brueggemann is right, it does come out somewhere else. Either they take it out on an innocent party, or on someone who has only wronged them a little. Or they suppress it and it turns into something like depression. (Not that I am saying all depression is caused this way – it isn’t.)

Option 3 is the ‘healthy option’.

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Sermon: When Life Goes Pear-Shaped (Habakkuk): The Lord’s Reply

Habakkuk 2:2-20
Do you consider the recent snow a blessing? It was for me last weekend. At 8 o’clock last Sunday morning, one of my church stewards at Addlestone phoned to say they didn’t think most people would get to worship in the conditions, and I agreed they could cancel their service.

That’s why you saw me slipping into a pew near the back last week, and that’s why I felt blessed, to listen to Reza Naraghi preach his sermon that began this short series on Habakkuk. I chose Habakkuk, because he helps us struggle with where God is when bad things happen, and Reza spoke so movingly to us of what that meant for him when his younger brother was killed in an aerial crash of a passenger aircraft with a fighter jet.

Had you had to put up with my sermon, you would not have heard anything quite so personal, but what both Reza’s sermon and mine would have done would have been to bring you to this next point, where the Lord is about to speak a second time to the prophet. Habakkuk has outlined one complaint, namely that God is not doing anything about all that is wrong in the world, and the Lord has replied to say that he is doing something, but it is shocking to the prophet’s ears: he is bringing the Babylonian army as his instrument of judgment.

That provokes a second question from the prophet – not so much, Lord you aren’t doing anything, as Lord what you are doing is terrible! And the section ends with Habakkuk waiting attentively for a second reply, waiting like a soldier on sentry duty who expects instruction from the commanding officer.

And that’s where we are as we come to this week’s passage. Now, after that waiting period, the Lord speaks a second time to him. And he speaks with instruction. Essentially, there are three verbs of instruction for Habakkuk: ‘write’, ‘wait’ and ‘see’. They had particular application to the prophet, but they can also be significant for us as we too wrestle with the prevalence of injustice. So let’s listen in on God’s words to Habakkuk, and hear him also speaking to us.

Firstly, then, when God breaks the silence of waiting, he says, write:

Write down the revelation and make it plain on tablets so that a herald may run with it. (Verse 2)

What I’m going to say, Habakkuk, I want you to record it. This needs writing down, because it needs sharing – ‘so that a herald may run with it.’ The thing is, Habakkuk, this message is not just designed to change your outlook on life, it can change others. So it needs recording.

Now you might say, that’s all very well for Habakkuk, this prophecy was going to be recorded not only for his day but for future generations as a part of Holy Scripture. But Habakkuk didn’t know that at the time, and in any case there is an argument for recording all our lesser encounters with God. They may not constitute a word from God to all people for all time, but they are still worth noting. It’s valuable to do this, both for our personal benefit and for the encouragement of others.
So – I wonder how many of you have come across the spiritual exercise called ‘journalling’? It’s a little bit like keeping a spiritual diary, although you may not write an entry every day. It’s like writing down your relationship with God. You detail how you think things are going in your faith. You address God in writing. It becomes a record of your life of faith, with its ups and downs, and it is valuable not simply at the time for helping you to express your innermost thoughts and feelings, but at later dates when you look back on things and wonder.

For a period of time I kept a journal when I was wondering what God was calling me to, and it became useful to refer back to those notes when I had doubts about the direction in which I was going. Years later, when I was struggling in the ministry, Debbie was able to say to me, what about all those examples you had of how God had spoken to you about this? Not only did that inspire me to keep going, it also meant I had something by which I could encourage others to persevere in faith.

If you are wrestling with God about something, keep a written record of it. If you believe God is speaking to you about something, write it out or type it up. Keep it somewhere safe. If you don’t keep some kind of record, the day will dawn when you seriously doubt something that God had truly spoken to you about several years before.

What does it do for Habakkuk? He is living in that awful situation where life as it is surely cannot be as God intended, and that is the basis of his complaints to God. But the Lord gives him a word that contrasts life as it is now with life as God will make it to be. In a time of struggle and uncertainty, that’s worth recording – for his own benefit, and the edification of others.

Yet that tension between life now and life as it is meant to be leads to God’s second instruction to Habakkuk: wait:

For the revelation awaits an appointed time; it speaks of the end and will not prove false. Though it linger, wait for it; it will certainly come and will not delay. (Verse 3)

You’re going to have to wait, Habakkuk, for the time when God changes the injustice of now into the justice of the future. You can be sure God will do it, but in the meantime you have to wait (and hence why you should write down the revelation).

Wait. It’s not a word we want to hear when things are not as they should be. Yet this is God’s word to Habakkuk, and it’s often his word to us. Wait.

God’s gift of human freedom often means we have to wait. God allows individuals, groups and nations to exercise their free will, but then he acts. Look at the empires and kingdoms that have risen and fallen throughout history.

Waiting is also something God himself practised in Jesus Christ. There was the waiting for the Messiah. Paul says in Galatians that when the time was fully come, God sent his Son. But until that point, there was waiting. Long waiting, but worth it.

In his life, Jesus embodied waiting. He waited until he was about thirty before embarking on his public ministry. When Lazarus was dying, he waited, and didn’t even visit until after Lazarus had been placed in his tomb. What kind of pastoral visitor was Jesus? But he waited, and that waiting led to greater glory.

Psychologists tell us that what they call ‘deferred gratification’ is a sign of maturity. The adult who can wait for pleasure rather than the one who has to indulge it immediately is the mature one. God matures us as he calls us to wait for his work in our lives and the wider life of this world.

So we build disciplines of waiting into the Christian Year, twice a year. We call them Advent and Lent. The latter starts on Wednesday week. This could be a good time to remember the importance of waiting, as God shapes us in the ugliness and discomfort of the present into fit vessels for his great future, the new creation of his kingdom.

Which raises the third of God’s instructions to Habakkuk. Because it’s all very well writing something down, and it’s all very well waiting for that great something, but what is it? For that knowledge, the Lord calls the prophet to see:

See, he is puffed up; his desires are not upright— but the righteous will live by his faith (verse 4).

And in the rest of the chapter, God contrasts the situation now with what he will bring about – so much so that in verse 6 we hear the word ‘woe’ addressed to Babylon. Anyone else in those days would like at the power and wealth of Babylon and use a word like ‘blessed’, but God says, ‘woe’.

Now, there is a nation drunk on greed and invasion, making riches by theft and extortion. But God says, the debtors of Babylon will arise and call in the debt (verses 4-8).

Now, the peoples see a nation that has protected its interests by using unjust gain and has ruined others. But God says, you are foolish if you think you have silenced your enemies, because even the stones will cry out and you will lose your life, O Babylon (verses 9-11).

Now, we witness a superpower that conquers by bloodshed and crime, but that is not how it will always be, says the Lord. The labour of Babylon will come to nothing, and instead of Babylon’s glory filling the earth, the Lord’s glory will (verses 12-14).

Now, a nation holds power that demeans its neighbours through encouraging drunkenness and shame. But God says, that will change. In God’s future, Babylon will be shamed and exposed. The violence you dished out will be returned in the same measure to you (verses 15-17).

Now, Babylon thinks it can create its own gods, but a culture foolish enough to bow down before lifeless objects will discover that the Lord is on the throne of the universe, and they must acknowledge the one true God (verses 18-20).

Can you see where this leads for us? Now on our TV screens we see an oppressive régime in Syria crushing the opposition. But in God’s future, we see President Assad brought down and a reign of peace and justice.

Now, we see a western world torn apart by debt caused by greed – not only the greed of some bankers, but the greed of consumers who were happy to take advantage. We see innocent victims thrown out of work as the economic price, while CEOs still contemplate large bonuses. But it will not always be like that. In God’s great future, there will not be a needy person, and greed will dissolve.

Now, we see families torn apart by a lack of faithfulness that exhibits itself in many different ways. Children cry as they have to choose between parents. But in God’s economy there is reconciliation and forgiveness. It will not always be this way.

Now, we suffer chronic illnesses and loved ones are taken from us early. Medicine brings us many wonders, but still has its limits. But we look forward to the Day of the Lord when there will be no more mourning or crying or pain.

Of course, though, that is then and this is now. And while in the interim we may work for the kingdom of God, we shall still have a long time to wait for all the wrongs to be righted and the woes to be trumped by blessings. What do we do in the meantime, apart from living as faithfully as we know how to the teachings of Christ?

We go back to that word ‘wait’. As Habakkuk waited for the Lord’s second reply, and as he then was told that the revelation he was to write down awaited its fulfilment, so now he is in that very time of waiting.

How is he to wait? How are we to wait? What attitudes and actions would be appropriate to the season of waiting for God to act?

For the answer to that, we’ll have to wait. Until next week’s final instalment.

9

The National Health Service: My Daughter’s Keeper

It’s Monday, just gone, the day after New Year’s Day, and a Bank Holiday here in the UK. The Faulkner family is relaxing and preparing for the visit of friends from Sussex. All our other Christmas season get-togethers have failed to happen due to family illness, but this one will happen.

So Debbie is upstairs sorting out some household matters, Mark is in the conservatory playing, Rebekah is writing her thank-you letters for her Christmas presents in the dining room and I am in the study, catching up on news of friends via Facebook.

That’s when we hear the scream. A scream like nothing we have heard before. A scream so loud it reverberates around the house, such that I can’t tell where it’s coming from. I rush to the front door. I double back. There is Rebekah, on the laminate floor of the dining room, in terror and agony. She is screaming. Mark is with her, screaming too at what has happened. I scream, too.
Debbie rushes down the stairs like an Olympic steeplechase champion. She sees the scene, and she – the practical one – screams as well. Something awful has happened to Rebekah’s left elbow.

“She’s fractured it!” shouts Debbie. “Ring for an ambulance!”

“It might be a dislocation,” I observe, as I press 9, followed by 9, then another 9, and the green ‘call’ button.

While I’m on the phone to the emergency services, Debbie changes her mind. Her practical mind is kicking in. “It’ll be quicker to drive her to the hospital,” she says, so I say we don’t want the ambulance at all and we scramble as quickly and as delicately as we can into my small car. O that Debbie’s people carrier wasn’t off the road with an indicator fault.

I drive as fast and as safely as I can the seven miles to the nearest A and E unit. I don’t speed and I don’t take chances, but I am frustrated by the two cars ahead of me doing only 40 in a 60 limit for three of those miles.

At the hospital, I drop Debbie and Rebekah off outside A and E, while Mark stays with me as I find a car parking space. By the time we walk back to A and E, the girls are nowhere to be seen inside.

“Are you looking for Rebekah?” asks a woman sitting with her crutches, just inside the door. She points to double doors underneath a sign that reads, ‘Paediatric A and E’. “She’s in there.”

It turns out that the clerk had entered Rebekah’s details on the computer, instantly forwarded them to Paediatric A and E, where they would be waiting for her immediately.

A nurse administers diamorphine nasally. We are near the nurses’ station and we can hear them ringing Radiography to get Rebekah’s X-rays prioritised. We don’t wait long. In X-Ray, a senior radiographer dons a lead jacket and helps hold Becky in position for a difficult second picture.
I was behind the screen, and saw the first picture come up on the monitor. I am  no medic, but my untutored eyes saw two detached bones, neither apparently broken.

Back at A and E, the nurses are now phoning the orthopaedic surgeon to get him down quickly. He soon tells us that yes, it is a dislocation, not a fracture. Whatever we had seen of sportsmen having dislocations put in quickly and painfully, a child would have the bones relocated under general anaesthetic. We would have to wait until Becky’s breakfast was sufficiently out of her system for her to receive an anaesthetic safely, but that would be the course of action.

The nurses keep the phones hot. Now they are nagging the anaesthetist to come sooner than expected, so that a little girl not be kept waiting any longer than necessary. He confirms the surgeon’s proposed course of action. It was only a case of the waiting time to anaesthetise.

By 3 pm Becky is being wheeled into theatre for the relocation and a plaster cast. The accident had happened around 11:15 am.

Half an hour later, I help collect her from the recovery room. All has gone well, no fracture occurred when the bones were relocated, and she can consider starting the new term at school. She will wear the cast for a fortnight until it is reviewed at the Fracture Clinic.

We take Becky to a children’s ward where she is monitored regularly by a staff nurse for the after-effects of the anaesthetic. Although we are told around 5 pm that it will be another four to six hours before she can be discharged, at 7 pm the nurse pronounces herself satisfied that she is ready to go home.

And the nurse tells Rebekah, “You have made my day.” We think that was a reference to the teenage girl in another bed on the same bay, whose every adjective begins with ‘F’ and whose family is equally delightful.

Does anybody wonder why I love the National Health Service? It is an institutional way of putting into practice the mandate to be my brother’s keeper (or my daughter’s keeper, in this case). Quote the horror stories if you must, but the fundamental principle is sound and important. Think of those who work in it under great stress and who only hear feedback when something has gone wrong. I for one am glad we have it, and I cannot understand those Christians in certain other countries who seem to think the State should not provide these services.

FOOTNOTE: Please note the top picture above is not our Rebekah, nor is the second photo her x-ray. These have been used for illustrative purposes only.

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Peter Pan And Tintin: Icons For Today?

“Peter Pan is a lesbian.”

So said a seven-year-old to me, after he had seen the local pantomime. Sitting with my own seven-year-old who wouldn’t have a clue what a lesbian is, I didn’t know where to put my face.

“I’m right,” he added, “Peter Pan is played by a girl.”

All I thought was, just wait until you meet the  Ugly Sisters in Cinderella.

We saw Peter Pan a couple of days ago. It was a high quality production, with all the usual panto formulae. Oh yes it was …

But whereas in past generations Peter Pan was seen as inadequate because he didn’t want to grow up, is he now a hero? He conquers Captain Hook while remaining a child. Are we in a culture that doesn’t want to grow up? Having spent time before the performance in two or three shops selling computer games, where our children purchased games and accessories for their Nintendos, but where the majority of purchasers were adults, I do wonder whether we are filling our society with Peter Pans.
On the other hand, yesterday we took the children to see the incredible Spielberg animation of The Adventures Of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn. That painted a more positive image of youth. Tintin is young, but in a job as a reporter (whereas Peter Pan explicitly doesn’t want an office job). Yet he is the one who shows courage to help the older, alcoholic Captain Haddock – with the one exception of where he wants to give up and Haddock tells him, ‘When you face a brick wall, push through it.’

The New Testament expects people to grow into maturity. Paul’s goal for the Colossians is that he will be able to present everyone mature in Christ. In Ephesians 4, there is a notion of the church ‘growing up’. Is maturity an increasingly alien notion today, when we say that 40 is the new 30 and 70 is the new 50? Do we prefer not to delay gratification but to keep on gratifying ourselves? Is that the inevitable consequence of consumerism, or is this all just about increased life expectancy? Which model do we offer young people, young Christians – Peter Pan or Tintin?

Either way, what would Christian maturity look like today, and in what ways would it be counter-cultural?

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Another Brief Sermon For A Memorial Service

One of the most popular posts on this blog over the last year was A Brief Sermon For A Memorial Service. I preached it at our annual All Souls service at the end of October last year, and it has regularly been one of the posts found on Google searches. It seems to be something people need.

This weekend is the All Souls service for this year, and here I am posting tonight’s sermon. I hope people find this helpful, too.

Psalm 23

‘Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me.’ (Verse 4)

Tonight, we gather as people who have walked through the valley of the shadow of death. Indeed, we are still walking through the valley of the shadow of death. We have lost loved ones dear to us – some after a good, long life, some to cruel diseases and some far too young.

In walking through this darkest of valleys, we sometimes expect that at the time of bereavement we shall plunge into the darkness, but then we shall slowly climb out, bit by bit. The remarks of friends and acquaintances who naïvely expect us to have recovered after a length of time betray this unrealistic idea. I often remark that the experience of grief and bereavement is more like ‘three steps forward, two steps back’.

And it often starts before the death. Those of you who have been alongside a family member or a dear friend who received the news that the doctors could do no more know that your grief started early. Something similar is true for those of you who witnessed someone descend into Alzheimer’s Disease or other forms of dementia. You have a double bereavement: first, you lose the person, and later, you lose the body.

There is a number of emotions that we can go through in these seasons of our lives. One is denial. It can’t really be happening. I don’t want to believe this is happening. Or, it doesn’t feel real. Wake me up from this nightmare. This is just a TV show, right?
Or when we realise it is real, we turn to bargaining. Maybe we can strike a bargain with God. ‘Lord, if you’ll heal my loved one, then I’ll do things for you.’ It makes me remember the old Kate Bush song ‘Running Up That Hill’

in which she sings,

‘And if only I could
I’d make a deal with God
And I’d get him to swap our places’

And maybe when God doesn’t sign up to the bargain we offer him, we move into anger. Anger with God. Anger with doctors. Anger with our loved one, if they did something foolish. Reading recently how Steve Jobs refused potentially life-saving surgery for his pancreatic cancer at an early stage, I wonder how his wife and children have felt.

Finally, we get through to some form of acceptance. We know our loved one is going to die, or we accept that yes, they have died. We start to rebuild our lives, knowing they will never take the same shape again, because the one who has gone has left a hole no-one else can fill. It was uniquely their shape.

Given that these are typically the kinds of experiences we are having, how can I recognise Psalm 23’s affirmation that ‘Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me’?
I mean, how is God with us? We tend to assume he is remote, in heaven and far away from us. That leads us to think he doesn’t care. However, if he were with us, wouldn’t things be a bit different? The Psalmist didn’t know God physically with him, but he did have a sense of God’s presence in life, that he described as being like a Palestinian shepherd, with his rod and staff. The rod was a club that was used to fend off wild beasts and the staff was the shepherd’s crook, used to guide and control the sheep.[1]

For Christians, admittedly centuries after the Psalmist wrote, the answers to these questions come into sharp focus in Jesus. In Jesus, God did not stay remote from us. It is not simply true, as the song says, that ‘God is watching us from a distance.’ In Jesus, he came up close. He lived in poverty and powerlessness. He died young. And it was an unjust death.

And Jesus, the ‘Good Shepherd’, as he called himself, has a rod and a staff. A rod to beat away our enemies, and a staff to guide us.

It may seem absurd to claim that Jesus beats away our enemies when we are in the presence of what the Bible calls ‘the last enemy’, that is, death itself. The Christian hope is in Jesus not only having swallowed the bitter pill of death as we do and on our behalf, it is also that he was raised from the dead. And while that seems an absurd claim to many today, it is one we back up with strong historical evidence. From it, we hold the hope that Jesus’ resurrection is the sign that we shall all be raised from the dead one day, at the end of history as we know it. Because of that hope, even this worst of all enemies cannot have the final word. Death may win a battle and cause us immense suffering and pain, but it cannot in the end win the war. Through our tears, we have this hope, and in that sense the rod of Jesus beats away the enemy of death in the final analysis.

We also get to experience his staff, his shepherd’s crook, guiding us. Jesus, from his involvement in creation to his bringing in of a new creation in his resurrection, is the one who guides us in hope through the tragedies of death and suffering. He becomes our example of how to live in the face of the certainty of death and the hope of resurrection. How? Let me go back to that Kate Bush lyric:

‘And if only I could
I’d make a deal with God
And I’d get him to swap our places’

We may not be able to make a deal with God, but ‘to swap our places’ – that actually is more realistic, strange as it may seem. The Christian hope is about the Son of God who chose not to stay in the glory of heaven but take on human flesh in poverty and suffering. It is about the One who on the Cross ‘swapped places’ with us so that death might be defeated and we might be forgiven our sins. Handing our lives over to the One who brings us forgiveness, defeats death and shows us how truly to live is to find him whose staff guides and comforts us throughout life.

So wherever we are in our grieving, I commend a life of trusting Jesus to you. Trusting him doesn’t exempt us from the trials of life and death, but in his birth he is with us, in his death and resurrection he beats away our enemies and his life, death and resurrection we find his pattern and guide for living.

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Sermon: Overcoming Sin

1 John 2:12-17
The highest grossing film in British cinema history is ‘Mamma Mia!’. You may well know that it began life as a West End musical, in which the story is woven around songs by ABBA. It tells of a bride-to-be named Sophie, who is trying to find her real father. She discovers from reading her mother’s diary that her father could be any one of three different men, and so invites them all to the wedding.

In a conversation with her fiancé, a character called Sky, she says, “I want to know who I am.”

He replies, “That doesn’t come from finding your father; that comes from finding yourself.”[1]

Knowing who you are is vital to healthy living. And knowing who we are seems to be John’s point here in the battle against sin. When he tells us not to ‘love the world’ (verse 15) – that is, the parts of creation organised in rebellion against God – it would be easy to issue a list of what to do and what not to do. A set of rules. He could tell us what is wrong in terms of the greed and lust he describes ‘the desire of the flesh, the desire of the eyes, the pride of riches’ (verse 16), naming and shaming all the wrong behaviour. It would all be so easy.

And so wrong.

It would fail. A list of rules on its own doesn’t work. Telling us what is right and wrong isn’t enough to induce good behaviour. It doesn’t transform us. If anything, it makes wrongdoing more appealing.

John has a different tactic here. He encourages us to know our identity first. He wants us to know who we are in the sight of God. Because that will make a difference.

So to get to how we resist the allure of a world in opposition to God, we examine the words before that, the words addressed to ‘children’, ‘young people’ and ‘fathers’ – because in spiritual terms,

All Christians should have the innocence of childhood, the strength of youth, and the mature knowledge of age.[2]

To be innocent, strong and mature in the face of temptation to sin requires knowing our spiritual identity. We need to know who we are in God’s eyes.

Firstly, we are forgiven:

I am writing to you, little children,
because your sins are forgiven on account of his name. (Verse 12)

You will recall, no doubt, that my predecessor was a big fan of Doctor Who. I do not share his passion. However, Rebekah and Mark avidly watch repeats of the children’s spin-off The Sarah Jane Adventures and Debbie loves the adult spin-off, Torchwood. This last summer, there was a Torchwood story called Miracle Day, where suddenly humanity becomes immortal. A convicted child killer thus survives execution and lives to make this statement:

I have been forgiven, a substantial number of people have forgiven me. I can feel that in my heart, my guts. And forgiveness is like a tide or storm – it clears the air. I’m very lucky to have been forgiven and I feel very blessed. And I think of forgiveness as a cure.[3]

The character is right. Forgiveness clears the air. It is a cure. Amongst other things, it is not only a cure for past wrongs, it is a cure as we face present temptation.

How so? Like this: if we face temptation and simply invoke the ‘right and wrong’ approach, we shall get worked up about failure, because we shall feel both guilt and hopelessness on the occasions when we fail. There is no good news for someone who breaks the rules, if that is all there is.

But what if we know we are forgiven? People who are forgiven still have a deep sense of right and wrong. They too do not want to depart from God’s ways. However, their motive is different. They know they are loved, even when they transgress God’s laws. They still want to do what is right, but it is not out of fear. It is because they long to please the God who loves them enough to forgive them in Jesus Christ and him crucified.

Next time you face temptation, remember that God has already forgiven you in Jesus Christ. Remember what that tells you about the God of love, grace and mercy. When fear paralyses you, remember what kind of God we believe in: the God of the manger, the Cross and the empty tomb. He offers forgiveness before we receive it. Let that set you free in the face of temptation.

Secondly, we know Jesus:

I am writing to you, fathers,
because you know him who is from the beginning. (Verse 13)

‘Him who is from the beginning’ could be God the Father, but he gets a name check in the next verse, so we’ll assume this is Jesus[4]. In any case, knowledge of one is similar to knowledge of the other. However, for the purposes of this point we’ll stick with knowing Jesus, and see that as covering what John says about knowing the Father, too. But what is the significance to overcoming sin of knowing Jesus?
Let me approach it this way. I expect you remember the quiz show Mr and Mrs. Husbands and wives took it in turns to answer questions about each other while their spouse could not hear their replies. Then the spouse came back and we saw whether the answers were correct. You would see how well they knew each other. Sometimes it was surprisingly accurate, sometimes the surprise came in what they didn’t know about each other, however many years they’d been married.

Let me venture to suggest that our relationship with Jesus is a little bit like that. We come to know him through the forgiveness we have just talked about, and that relationship grows over the years. Our knowledge of him is far from perfect, but as we get to know him better we discover someone who is an amazing support in our struggle against sin.

It isn’t that Jesus is like an indulgent grandfather who trivialises the misdeeds of his grandchildren, who explains away their actions and makes easy excuses for their wrongdoing. Such an answer would not go down well on a spiritual ‘Mr and Mrs’.

Nor is it true to envisage Jesus as a severe monster, ready to rip to shreds any being that puts the slightest foot wrong. Again, that would be a wrong answer about our relationship with him.

The Bible presents an image of Jesus as full of both acceptance and holiness. His holiness means he cannot abide sin, but he also accepts us through the Cross, in which he has conquered sin. And furthermore, he is the Lord of the broken and the weak. If he has a particular group that he targets for criticism, it is religious leaders who harshly apply the rules and end up excluding people for no good reason.

When you know you are loved, warts and all, you can stand strong. If you doubt whether you are loved or accepted, you will wobble in the face of sin. If you are unsure of Jesus and his love, you will struggle. But if you know a relationship with Jesus in which you are accepted then yes, you will still stumble and fall from time to time, but you will be able to pick yourself up because Jesus does that for you and sets you on your way again. To know he loves you is to be in a different place when facing temptation.

Remember – Jesus is ‘him who is from the beginning’ – and since the beginning of all things, the Father and Jesus have had grand designs on your life. They have planned good things for you. Jesus is called ‘the Lamb who was slain from the foundation of the world’ (Revelation 13:8). Jesus is on our side in the war against sin. He is not standing back, waiting to condemn us at the earliest opportunity. He is for us, he has always been planning for our welfare, he is our cheerleader and he gives us all we need to fight against the lusts and desires of the world.

Thirdly and finally, we are winners. Compare the two statements John makes to those he calls ‘young people’:

I am writing to you, young people,
because you have conquered the evil one. (Verse 13)

I write to you, young people,
because you are strong
and the word of God abides in you,
and you have overcome the evil one. (Verse 14)

When our children are having one of their altogether too frequent wars with each other, they insult one another by calling out, ‘Loser!’ And sadly that’s what a lot of us think we are. We don’t see ourselves as winners, but as losers. We know our failures. The idea that we are in any sense winners makes little sense to us. We are conscious of our many failures, and some of us go further, tipping into low self-esteem, practising what someone once called ‘worm theology’ – as if we say, ‘I am only a worm.’ We might see ourselves the way Elvis Costello once described in a song:

I was a fine idea at the time
But now I’m a brilliant mistake.[5]

So talk of being winners in the spiritual life may sound like a foreign language to us. But John says we have conquered the evil one, we are strong, the word of God abides in us and we have overcome the evil one. In other words, whatever mess we have made of our lives, whatever mistakes and failures we can count, whatever disappointments we have caused, the Holy Spirit gives us the tools that can enable us to be winners – to ‘conquer’ or ‘overcome’ the evil one.

What are those tools? They come in our being ‘strong’ and in ‘the word of God [abiding] in [us]’. We have a new strength in that the Gospel is about more than the forgiveness of our sins. The kingdom message is not only that we are forgiven through the Cross of Christ. It is also that we are given power to live differently, because the Holy Spirit lives in us. Therefore, in the face of temptation, we have new resources to call on. When we struggle on our own, we frequently fail. But we are a new creation in Christ, the Spirit of God resides within us, and sometimes what we need to do is call out to the Holy Spirit for help.

We also have the ‘tool’ of ‘the word of God [which] abides in [us]’. The message of the Gospel, encapsulated in the Scriptures, is available to us, just as Jesus used it time and again in the wilderness when he was tempted. One of the things we can do to build up our defences ready to withstand seasons of temptation is to soak ourselves in the Scriptures. Not so much the quickly dashed off reading of the Bible for daily devotions, but taking the time to meditate on the Scriptures and give time for them to soak into us.

All in all, then, we don’t have to face the temptations of worldly lusts and desires with just our own willpower. We face temptation, knowing that it is not about struggling to achieve a certain performance level of holiness, because we are already forgiven. We face it too, in the knowledge that we are known and loved by Jesus and his Father. We cannot earn their love by attaining perfection; rather, we know already they are on our side, full of grace, mercy and love for the broken and the failures. And to our astonishment, we are no longer weak but strong, because the Holy Spirit gives us not only his own power but also unlocks the power of the Scriptures, as we take deliberate steps to store them up in our hearts and minds during our ‘seven years of plenty’ before the spiritual famine comes.

Let us be encouraged, then, that by the grace of God, the love of Jesus and the power of the Holy Spirit, we have the resources to resist worldly appetites. May we live more closely according to this Good News.

[1] Tools For Talks; subscription required.

[3] Tools For Talks; subscription required.

[4] Marshall, op. cit.. p 140.

[5] Elvis Costello, Brilliant Mistake.

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