A quick explanation above about why there’s no teaching video and blog this week. Hopefully, back to normal next week.
Mission in the Bible 4: Singing the Lord’s Song in a Strange Land (Jeremiah 29:1-14)
Confession time: I’m exhausted from a 3:45 am start (long story) and so rather than write something completely new, knowing I’ve preached on this passage before and realising I wouldn’t say anything substantially different, I’ve used a sermon from 2018. The full text of that sermon is below, but it is longer than what I deliver in the video and will be delivering in church, because it uses one or two stories I’ve already deployed in this series.
If you’ve ever watched The Wizard Of Oz – and I’m guessing most of you have – you’ll know the early part of the story where the whirlwind hits Dorothy’s home in Kansas. When it subsides, Dorothy looks around in bewilderment at the strange and different surroundings she finds herself in. She turns to her dog Toto and says, “Toto, I’ve got a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore.”
Dorothy could be speaking for today’s church. We’ve been caught up in a social whirlwind, and when we’ve opened our eyes to survey the scene it looks nothing like that in which we grew up. The church used to be respected, but then we’ve gone through phases where first it was no longer a normal experience for people to attend church, and now there is a lot of outright hostility towards Christianity.
Similarly, you probably grew up in a culture where the ordained minister was a respected pillar of society. But again, no more. It is said that the average non-Christian man thinks that someone in a dog collar is either fleecing the flock for money or fiddling with kids as a paedophile.
Many of us would really like to cut to the end of the film where Dorothy finds herself back in home sweet home – there’s no place like it – but I have to say, that isn’t happening anytime soon. We must learn to be faithful disciples as a minority part of society. And actually that’s what most Christians down the centuries have had to do. To live as the majority in a society is less common.
Where do we go for help in being faithful to the Gospel in such circumstances? That’s where I find Jeremiah’s letter to the exiles in chapter 29 on his prophecy helpful. The armies of King Nebuchadnezzar have carted off the first lot of Jewish prisoners from Judah to Babylon. Those who found themselves as strangers in a strange land were disorientated and confused, like Dorothy. Had we read more of the letter, we would have heard Jeremiah warning them too not to believe the false prophets who were telling them it would all be over quickly and things would be back to the good old days. Instead, Jeremiah advises them how to live faithfully as aliens in a culture that is different from them and at times hostile.
I believe we can learn lessons for our discipleship today from Jeremiah’s model.
Firstly, it’s about where we live.
‘Build houses and settle down’ (verse 5a), says God to the exiles through Jeremiah.
I wonder whether you’ve noticed in recent years that the church is no longer regarded as the default moral voice in our nation. When Hallowe’en comes, it isn’t the church that is interviewed on BBC Breakfast about the content of the festival or the fears of elderly people about Trick Or Treat, it’s Age UK.
It’s no good pining for the good old days. This is where we are called to be missionaries, not back in some imaginary golden age of decades ago.
God called the exiles to do in some small way what his own Son would do later. What did Jesus say to the disciples in John 20? ‘As the Father has sent me, I am sending you’ (verse 21a). So how was Jesus sent? We have to go back from John 20 to John 1 and a verse that is too good to keep just for Christmas: ‘The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us’ (verse 14a).
Note that: Jesus dwelt among the people. Although he occasionally ministered in synagogues, for most of the time he didn’t say, ‘Come here and listen to me,’ he did his ministry amid people’s lives. He made his dwelling among people – literally, he ‘tabernacled’. Remember that in the Old Testament the tabernacle was the portable sign of God’s presence. So, then, Jesus was the presence of God in the middle of life.
Eugene Peterson puts it like this in The Message: ‘The Word became flesh and blood and moved into the neighbourhood.’
Friends, Christian mission today can no longer be sustained (apart from a minority) on ‘Come to us’. We have to go to the world and live actively in it. We don’t want to swallow the values of the world, many of which are contrary to our faith, but we still need to live in the middle of the world, not in a Christian ghetto.
I once took the funeral of an elderly church member, and in preparation visited her relatives, who were not Christians. As they told me about the lady’s life, they told me, ‘Her whole social life was based on the church.’ I could tell they thought I would be pleased by that, but in truth I was deeply saddened. We can’t scuttle across the moat, pull up the drawbridge and cosy up behind the turrets of a Christian castle if we are to be faithful missionaries in a world where we are the minority.
Are we known positively, then, in our neighbourhoods and our networks? And what are we known for? We’ll come on to that in other points.
Secondly, it’s about where we work.
‘Plant gardens and eat what they produce,’ says God (verse 5b).
In his book on Jeremiah, Eugene Peterson (him again!) says this means we should ‘Become a productive part of the economy of the place’ (The Quest, p151).
It’s time to bin the idea that the only work worth doing is church work. Church work – such as mine – is support work for those in the frontline of mission as Christ’s representatives in the world, pointing to the Gospel in word and deed, living lives that are so puzzling and magnetic that people end up asking them why they do what they do.
So when a circuit steward’s wife once told me that her husband wanted to spend more time on the important stuff, like church work, rather than his occupation, I was saddened. This man worked in commercial shipping, helping to ensure that vital goods got from one port in the world to another. He also volunteered as a governor at his daughter’s school. Imagine doing both of those things in a Christlike way, being a good steward of resources but not ruthless, caring for the wellbeing of the school community and its place in the wider area, and so on. Imagine doing these things for Christ, occupying ground in his Name.
You can find all sorts of resources for churches to encourage this approach, not least from an organisation called the London Institute for Contemporary Christianity. Their ‘whole life discipleship’ project includes all sorts of courses and resources to help Christians be fruitful on the frontline. It includes material to help preachers and worship leaders support this work.
One of the stories that set them on their way was that of a schoolteacher who also taught in Junior Church on a Sunday. “Why does my church pray for my Junior Church work,” she asked, “when I deal with maybe a dozen children there, but it doesn’t pray for my Monday to Friday work when I get the chance to influence many more children?”
Any church can start supporting people in this. One of LICC’s ideas is called ‘This Time Tomorrow’. You take five minutes out of Sunday services to interview someone from the congregation about where they will be and what they will be doing twenty-four hours later. You ask them what they most need prayer for, and include that in the service. It’s simple. And it is as applicable to retired people as to those still in paid work, because you can include what people do in the community and in their leisure activities.
Remember, church doesn’t stop when we leave this building on a Sunday lunchtime. As an Australian Christian called James Thwaites puts it, how far apart from each other do we have to be in order no longer to be church? Five yards? Five miles? No: we never stop being the church. It’s just that sometimes we are the church gathered, and sometimes we are the church dispersed. All our work in the world is Christian work.
Thirdly, it’s about where we flourish.
The next thing God says is, ‘Marry and have sons and daughters; find wives for your sons and give your daughters in marriage, so that they too may have sons and daughters. Increase in number there; do not decrease.’ (verse 6)
Whoa! Wait a minute! At other times, God’s people are told to be very careful about who their sons and daughters marry. Now, they’re meant to settle down in a pagan land. No wonder Psalm 137 asks, ‘How can we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?’
Our trouble today is that having been part of the majority culture where we haven’t had to fight for the place of our faith in public life, we now find ourselves singing the Lord’s song in a strange land, and the temptation is to be negative and self-pitying about it. But God says it’s possible for his people to flourish as minorities. Remember, that was certainly the story of the Early Church, too, both in Israel and in the wider Roman Empire. Why should it not be true for us, too?
In Mark chapter 6 we have the story of the disciples rowing their boat on the late at night, straining at the oars in the fourth watch of the night. Jesus comes to them, walking on the water. He thus comes to them from outside the boat.
Now given that the Early Church also read the boat symbolically, as standing for the Gospel community, maybe Jesus was coming to them from outside the church, so to speak. Maybe he had already been at work outside their community before he came to them in the dark of night.
Could it be that our task in order to flourish involves finding out where Jesus has gone ahead of us in the world by his Spirit, and we join in with him there? I’m not saying that people outside the church don’t need to become Christians, I am simply saying that Jesus prepares the way and we catch up.
Our children started school while we were in my last circuit. When you are a parent of primary school children you have a great opportunity to flourish as Christians in the community. Debbie and I made it our point to lurk with intent at the school gate. We made friends with other families. I told my churches not to expect me to be at my desk at 9 am for that reason. Some of them didn’t like that, because they thought the minister was there to be their private chaplain, but we persisted.
In doing that, and letting people know our door was always open and there was always water in the kettle for tea and coffee, we befriended three young mums who went through horrendous divorces. One husband went off with his wife’s best friend. Another drank away all the family income, even spending time in the pub when it was the birthday party for one of his three daughters. That mum and the little girls nearly joined the church.
When we announced our decision to leave, some of the church people cheered, but some of the community wanted to raise a petition to keep us – including our next door neighbour, who was totally clueless about church. On the last day of term that July, twenty of them threw a surprise picnic for us in the local park.
We may not have flourished in the church there, but we certainly flourished as Christians in the community.
Fourthly and finally, it’s about where we bless.
‘Also, seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile. Pray to the LORD for it, because if it prospers, you too will prosper.’ (verse 7)
Contrast that with the ways today’s church often reacts to the decline of Christianity in the West and the rise of ideologies we dislike. Either we claim that God is bringing revival soon (but remember God told Jeremiah the prophets who were saying that in his day were false prophets) or we rail against evil, and think we’re being prophetic in that way.
But look what happens here. Rather than condemn Babylon, God calls his people to bless it! I’m not calling us to ignore unrighteousness and injustice, but I am asking this: what difference would it make if Christians were known as a people of blessing?
The trouble is, there are plenty of indicators to suggest that we are not known as a people of blessing. If you ever ask an MP who they don’t want to send them letters, I’m afraid that often the answer is ‘Christians’. We are known at Parliament for our complaining and our judgmentalism.
In America, it’s commonly known in the catering industry that the people who moan the loudest and tip the least at restaurants are the Christians.
How exactly does that reputation stack against New Testament verses like these?
‘Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you’ (Mt 5:44)
‘Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse’ (Rom 12:14)
‘Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good’ (Rom 12:21)
What would it look like if we were the people who were always wondering what good we could do unconditionally for people? If we were the people who – rather than complaining – were instead always seeking to put in a good word for someone, or leaving a surprise ‘thank you’ gift for somebody? Do we encourage our elected representatives? Do we tip generously at the restaurant, realising that the waitress is a young student trying to make ends meet on her student loan?
What if in the wider society we were getting involved in those civic and political decisions that affect the wellbeing of our communities, as councillors or business people?
The Argentinean preacher Ed Silvoso has a wonderful way of putting this. He says, ‘In the celestial poker game, a hand of blessings always beats a hand of curses.’
So go – and bless your Babylon. See what happens when Christians start blessing. Wait for the questions about why you do this. And then speak of the One who calls you to bless.
Mission in the Bible 3: Blessing the Enemy (2 Kings 5:1-14)
As I explain in the video, I’m not actually preaching this sermon in a church this weekend as it’s unsuitable for a baptism service I’m taking. However, I wanted to keep the series on mission going, using this passage. What follows is actually a sermon I first preached in 2007, as you may guess from some of the examples given.
Introduction
In early 2005, we realised that Debbie’s car, a Peugeot 306, was no longer going to be functional as family car. It was insufficiently like the Tardis to cope with the amount of clutter we needed to cart around with two small children. Through friends and family, we were quickly converted to the virtues of a ‘people-carrier’.
We short-listed three different cars: a Vauxhall Zafira, Renault Scenic and a Citroen Picasso. Despite three recommendations for the Zafira, we eliminated it as too expensive and with too small a boot.
That left the Scenic and the Picasso. For a while, we couldn’t tell the difference between them in appearance, but we settled on the Picasso and once we bought one we found that whenever we were out we were always spotting Picassos on the road. Had they suddenly increased in number once we became interested in them? No; we had simply become more tuned into them.
Sometimes I find reading the Bible is like that. It isn’t until I get interested in a particular issue that I realise how much of the Bible reflects that concern, or is relevant to it.
I had one of those experiences this last week. You will know by now that one of my concerns is how we are faithful Christian witnesses in a society where Christianity is no longer central, but on the margins. We live in a culture whose values have been changing rapidly in recent decades. The Gospel may not change, but many of our old ways of being church have become obsolete.
I have read the story of Naaman and his healing since Sunday School. Perhaps you have, too. However, this week when it came up in the Lectionary I found it was no longer a charming Sunday School story. It was a model for mission in today’s world. I see it, because the story is set in a time when Israel was under the cosh from Aram (verses 1-2). A pagan nation with alien values has mastery over the people of God. Within these strictures, fruitful mission happens – just as it can in our day when forces are pushing the church to the margins of society. This week we saw the church-state ties loosened as Gordon Brown relinquished some powers over the appointment of bishops other senior clergy. It opens up again the whole issue of the Church of England’s established status – and in my Methodist opinion, that’s a good thing.
So in this context, where the church is less central to our society, how does the story of Naaman encourage us in our mission? I find it by exploring the three Israelite characters connected with him: the slave girl, the king of Israel and Elisha.
1. The Slave Girl
How many of us were shocked by the news a couple of days ago that a three-year-old girl was kidnapped in Nigeria? Perhaps we need to think of something like that to understand the horror of what happened when this young girl was taken captive by the Arameans in 2 Kings 5. Granted, she is probably older than three, given the way she speaks, and neither is she being threatened by death. However, if you want a sense of the horror, think Nigeria.
Yet in this situation of trauma and oppression, the young girl is a star:
She said to her mistress, ‘If only my lord were with the prophet who is in Samaria! He would cure him of his leprosy.’ (verse 3)
Here is a wounded, marginalised person offering love. Here is one who as both child and female has no status, yet she offers love. Forgiving love and compassion for one who has done wrong to her, her family, her religion and nation. Truly, a little child leads here, as she blesses an enemy.
How does this translate for us? Isn’t one of the dangers of being a minority that has been sidelined more and more that all we want to do is carp and snipe at the society that has done this to us? We criticise this, we declaim about that and we lay into something else. If we’re good, we pretend we are offering a prophetic critique of the world, but if only we were. More likely, we are laying bare the chip on our shoulder and giving energy to the resentment we feel that people no longer see the church as an institution whose opinions should be sought and respected.
The young slave girl says, bless those who have done this to you. Look for ways to love and serve them. Search out opportunities to tell them the good news – not that God can’t wait to singe them in Hell, but that he is crazy with love for them and passionate that they find him.
When I ministered in Kent, there was a branch of Ottakar’s bookshops in Chatham High Street. They regularly displayed and promoted occult books. Alongside the display there was sometimes the opportunity to sign up for occult meetings. I shared this with a prayer meeting. The response was interesting. I thought they would be the kind of Christians who would want to instigate a prayer march against the shop, and perhaps a letter-writing campaign, too. They didn’t. Their immediate response was to pray that God would bless the shop and its employees, because that would be a better way of making a gospel difference.
For us, our ‘Naaman’ might be an unpleasant boss at work. What might happen if we showed Christian love and concern for that boss’s needs and difficulties? Or today’s Naaman could be an unjust political group or multinational corporation. How might we show the love of Christ to them? (And this is the end of International Boycott Nestlé Week!)
I am not saying we should never criticise or boycott, but we have to be sure our motive is God’s love, not vindictiveness. The slave girl reminds us to love and make a difference.
2. The King Of Israel
Naaman goes to his king, who prepares a letter for his opposite number, the king of Israel. Leave aside for a moment the naïveté that assumes the Israelite king can heal the soldier. We have to excuse that as innocent ignorance: it’s something Christians encounter often from people who make requests of them. I often find it comes in terms of expecting that the minister can do something, which another Christian can’t. There is no point in criticising this: we cannot expect complete understanding of our ways.
What is more disappointing is the king of Israel’s response. He doesn’t give a theological lecture – that would be bad enough. Instead, he goes on the defensive:
When the king of Israel read the letter, he tore his clothes and said, ‘Am I God, to give death or life, that this man sends word to me to cure a man of his leprosy? Just look and see how he is trying to pick a quarrel with me.’ (verse 7)
The king of Israel cannot see human need for what it is and respond appropriately. It is as if he knows the story of the Trojan Horse and sees Naaman’s illness as the way in which Israel will be further weakened.
Is that so far from some of our responses as a Christian minority today? I don’t think so. There are those who think we shouldn’t support environmental causes, because we become ‘guilty by association’ with some crazy green campaigners who happen to think that planet Earth is actually a goddess named Gaia, and we shouldn’t get our names tarnished by working with such fruitcakes. The fact that there is ample biblical material for being environmentally conscious should be enough: God calls us to be stewards of the earth, not rapists of it.
Alternatively, consider how long it took some Christians to become concerned with fighting HIV/AIDS, because of its association with sexual practices that lie outside traditional Christian morality. Thank God that mentality has changed through the example of organisations like ACET AND TEAR Fund, who hold orthodox Christian beliefs, but are at the forefront of medical prevention and political campaigning.
In a world packed with terrible needs, it would be spiritual suicide to follow the example of the king of Israel. It’s no good getting on our high horse about certain moral evils in our society, but doing nothing to heal the pain.
But let’s bring it close and personal. Who are the people we know, who have made a mess of their lives, perhaps through their own fault, but whom we have been resisting the idea of helping? Is now the time to see that we have made a mistake and need to reach out with Christian compassion? For Debbie and me recently it’s been about being available to two pregnant women: one is living with her partner and already has one child by him, the other had a second child on her own without ongoing involvement from the father of either child. Neither of these women lives lifestyles with which we agree as Christians. However, would it surprise you if I told you that one of these mothers is now asking questions about baptism?
3. Elisha
Surely the story is going to end up with Elisha performing an amazing miracle. It builds up that way. The slave girl calls him ‘the prophet who is in Samaria [who] would cure [Naaman] of his leprosy’ (verse 3). The writer of 2 Kings describes Elisha as ‘the man of God’ (verse 8) and Elisha himself urges the king of Israel to forward Naaman onto him so ‘that he may learn that there is a prophet in Israel’ (verse 8).
Therefore, it’s a surprise when Naaman arrives at Elisha’s house and the great man doesn’t come out to greet him, but sends a messenger, telling Naaman to wash seven times in the Jordan (verse 10). What’s going on?
Here’s my theory: Naaman has some kind of superstar complex. He’s miffed that the spiritual hero won’t come out to him (verse 11), and he’s insulted by the thought of washing in that feeble, insignificant river the Jordan. He’s got celebrity rivers back in Damascus – the Abana and the Pharpar (verse 12). So not meeting Elisha and suffering the indignity of the River Jordan force Naaman away from this hero-worship attitude.
And isn’t that just what we need today? We live in a culture that needs to be weaned off celebrity adulation, and where people – ooh, let me think, Chantelle Houghton and Paris Hilton – are merely famous for being famous. So addicted are we to this that an informed politician like Al Gore needs to utilise gas-guzzling pop stars to communicate his planet-saving message. By a conspiracy of insignificant non-celebrity Christians, operating without spin doctors or street teams, armed only with the love of Christ and the power of the Holy Spirit, we subvert a sick culture and bring healing in the name of Jesus.
And that means that the church needs to be healed of her own addiction to celebrity, too. We may not have the hype and publicity tools available to entertainers and politicians, but there is an unhealthy reliance upon famous Christians and Christian leaders. We believe, however, in a priesthood of all believers, and so it’s time to stop this dependency upon such people and realise this is a call to all Christians.
In fact, one Christian leader from the Southern Hemisphere, Alan Hirsch, tells a story in his recent book, ‘The Forgotten Ways’ about the early growth of a church he and his wife led in Melbourne. It did not happen under their leadership, but before they arrived. George the Greek was a drug dealer who once chose prison instead of a fine for his crimes. While there he read the Bible and God encountered him. Upon release, George and his brother John set about sharing their faith. Within six months, fifty people had become disciples of Jesus. There were gay men, lesbians, Goths, drug addicts and prostitutes among the converts. No Christian celebrity or authority figure did this: just George the Greek and his brother John, loving people into the kingdom.
Conclusion
Ultimately, this takes us full circle, back to the young slave girl, who blessed her needy, oppressive master. She, Elisha’s messenger and the river Jordan are the heroes of the story. Elisha knows well to get out of the way rather than garner praise for himself; sadly, the king of Israel sets no example at all.
For we who are squeezed daily further to the margins as Christians in our society, the message is clear: a generation of nobodies, operating from the fringes of our culture, is God’s apostolic team for the salvation of the world and the healing of the nations. This morning, as we take Holy Communion, we enlist for that call.
Mission in the Bible 2: Chosen to Bless the Nations (Genesis 12:1-9)
Last week, when I launched this series, I looked at Genesis chapter 3, where God comes looking for Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden after they have sinned. As such, God is the first missionary and mission is a God thing.
I used a quote from the great Anglican missiologist Dr Chris Wright, who wrote this:
It is not the church of God that has a mission in the world, but the God of mission who has a church in the world.
This week, we see God beginning to work out the plan of his mission in co-operation with human beings as he chooses Abram and his descendants.
Now before I get into the heart of this, I think it’s worth addressing one issue about this passage that some Christians are relating to the current violence between Israel and Hamas. It’s one that gets trotted out every time Israel engages in actions that are subjected to international criticism. It’s the first half of verse 3, where God says,
I will bless those who bless you,
and whoever curses you I will curse;
Some Christians take this as reason for saying we should never criticise Israel, and only ever support her. However, there is a difference between criticism and cursing. If criticising Israel constituted cursing, then the Old Testament prophets ought to be deleted from the Bible, because they do plenty of it! No: we can still make honest moral evaluations of Israel’s actions and be biblical. Cursing Israel should just be invoked on things like the constitutions of Hamas, the Houthis, and other radical Muslims who call for the destruction of Israel.
That said, let’s get back to considering what this passage teaches us about mission. We’ll have to say a little bit about the original Old Testament Israel context of each theme that I mention before we understand them in terms of the New Testament and the Church.
The first of three great themes here is what has been historically called election.
When I use the word ‘election’, I do not mean a poll where we choose our politicians. I mean that God elects, or chooses, his people. Here, God chooses Abram to be the forefather of the people he is choosing as his own.
Now some Christians have pushed this to the point of suggesting that God chooses some people for salvation and he chooses all the rest for damnation. Christians such as John Calvin taught this, and later John Wesley argued and disagreed with the followers of Calvin. Wesley said that while he agreed not all people would be saved, God offered salvation to all and it was up to us to respond, to receive God’s free gift.
Because of the Calvinist teaching about election which became expressed as what we call ‘double predestination’ – God predestines some to salvation and others to damnation, as I said – the word ‘election’ has had a bad reputation among people like us who stand in the tradition of Wesley.
But it need not, because it has a positive meaning. Election is not about privilege: it is about blessing. Hear what God said to Abram in the second half of verse 2:
I will make your name great,
and you will be a blessing.
Election means that God has blessed his people so that they will be a blessing to others.
Now we begin to see why this passage is a missionary text. We are blessed in order to bless others. Sometimes I have done that with a formal blessing at the end of a service: ‘May God bless you that you may bless others.’
We know the incredible blessings of God. We know about his love in creation, his love in sending people in his name over the centuries before finally sending his Son, who even died for us, rose again for us, and even now prays for us before the day he appears again in glory. We know the blessing of the Holy Spirit in our lives if we have given ourselves to Jesus Christ.
And all these blessings are not just so that we can enjoy some self-indulgent spiritual bless-up. God blesses us with the riches of his love so that we can bless others with that love.
It’s why the Bible contains such radical commands as ‘Love your enemies.’ It’s why God placed each of us in the world as well as in the church – so that we have people around us to bless.
In fact, on that subject why not ponder for a moment who you are likely to meet in the next twenty-four hours and consider how you might bless them? What if the church became known as a people who blessed others generously, outrageously, even? And what if at the same time as blessing people we prayed for the opportunity to open up so we can tell people about the source of the blessing, Jesus Christ?
The second theme overlaps with the first, but I’m separating them for convenience. It’s the great nation.
Consider how verse 2 begins:
I will make you into a great nation,
and I will bless you
The bigger the nation, the more people to bless, and the more who can bless others. Let there be no doubt that in Christian terms, God’s basic intention for the church is for it to grow in quantity as well as quality.
Now I say that in the face of decline that has been going on in our nation for about a century, there or thereabouts. Our numbers are reducing and our average age is increasing. It’s a hard thing to preach that God wants to grow the church when most of the time we see the opposite. Some of us had great hopes for the church when we were younger but have become progressively more discouraged as we have got older.
So let us be honest here about decline as well as growth. Some of the decline is our fault, and some of it is not. To some extent we cannot help it that we live in a society that is increasingly hostile to Christianity. Some of that is a sinful choice to reject God.
But in other ways it is down to us. We have not always been good witnesses. The obvious example of that is the huge number of sexual abuse scandals in churches. There are other factors, too: our unwillingness to share our faith; our ambivalent attitude to strangers; our rejection of core Christian beliefs by trying to make ourselves more like the world – in which case the world says, if you’re just like us then we don’t need to change or join you. And so on.
I cannot guarantee growth to you. If there were a foolproof method, then we would have reduced faith to a form of technology, rather than a mysterious relationship of love.
But we can be intentional about the things that make for growth. We can be disciplined about the ways of growing our spiritual lives – the ‘means of grace’, as Wesley called them. These involve prayer, Bible study, fellowship, worship, the sacraments, fasting, giving, serving the poor, openness to the Holy Spirit, and so on. And we can be intentional about building relationships with people outside the church, as I said in the first point about blessing people and looking for opportunities to share about the source of all blessing.
What we can do, then, is sow the seeds and pray that God will water what we sow.
The third and final theme I want to highlight for mission from this passage is the land.
Verses 6 and 7:
6 Abram travelled through the land as far as the site of the great tree of Moreh at Shechem. At that time the Canaanites were in the land. 7 The Lord appeared to Abram and said, ‘To your offspring I will give this land.’ So he built an altar there to the Lord, who had appeared to him.
We know how important the land was and is for Israel and the Jewish people. When they were exiled to Babylon, it struck at the very heart of their faith. ‘How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?’ lamented the Psalmist. The gift of the land was always conditional upon obedience to God’s Law.
And we still see the importance of the land for Judaism in dimensions of the current tragic violence in the Middle East.
But what sense does it make for us as the Church, the people who have been grafted onto the People of God through faith in Christ? We are not an ethnic group. We come from every tribe, and tongue, and nation (Revelation 7:9).
There’s a clue in the way Jesus takes one Old Testament verse and rephrases it. You will know how in the Sermon on the Mount he says,
Blessed are the meek,
for they will inherit the earth. (Matthew 5:5)
But do you know what Old Testament verse he is amending? It’s Psalm 37:11, which says,
But the meek will inherit the land
and enjoy peace and prosperity.
Inheriting the land made sense in the Old Testament with Israel. And that it’s the meek who do retains the important truth that the gift of the land is conditional, not automatic. You need to do what God requires.
But for Jesus it’s bigger. The meek will inherit the earth, which makes sense if it’s a multinational people of God. And it also makes sense if that’s at the end of all things, when God will bring in the new heavens and the new earth (Revelation 21:1).
Our inheritance is so much more than what falls within the boundaries of one nation. Our inheritance is the new creation itself.
Well, that’s all fine and dandy, but what does it have to do with mission? It means that our calling is to take as many people as we can on the journey to the new creation. That doesn’t mean simply that we say, get your sins forgiven and have a ticket to heaven when you die.
It certainly does include our sins being forgiven, but it is so much more. The vision of the new heavens and the new earth where God has made everything new is the hope that inspires us to say that this is what the kingdom of God looks like in all its richness and fulness, so let’s start working for the kingdom now.
And so what inspires us and what we urge people to do is not only come to Jesus for the forgiveness of sins, but also to come to him to find fulfilment and true purpose in life by building for his kingdom. Be made new by the Holy Spirit, and work for a world where sickness, sin, poverty, and other curses no longer exist. There really is nothing like it.
That’s why God chooses us. That’s why God wants us to grow. This is God’s mission. And he wants us to bless the nations with him.
Mission 1: God The First Missionary (Genesis 3:1-23)
On Friday, an advert popped up in my Facebook feed for a company called Mission UK. You may think that’s interesting for a Christian, and especially suspicious for a minister who’s about to preach on the subject of mission, but then I looked at the picture. Mission UK sell … sleep powder. One enthusiastic customer had slept for seven hours straight for the first time in a long time, even sleeping through the loud noise of foxes outside.
They also sell ‘performance-based tea’ – whatever that is.
I just hope you are not going to sleep through this. Because I have an important question.
‘Who was the first missionary in the Bible?’ If I ask people that, I get a variety of answers, all wrong. Some say the Apostle Paul. Others say Philip the Deacon in Acts 8 or the Apostle Peter. Still others say, ‘Well the answer must be Jesus!’ A few might go back to the Old Testament and mention Jonah, who is the poster boy for how not to be a missionary!
No. The answer – and you will have guessed if you have seen the title of this sermon – is God. We find God as the first missionary here in Genesis chapter 3:
8 Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the Lord God among the trees of the garden. 9 But the Lord God called to the man, ‘Where are you?’
God comes looking for Adam and Eve. ‘Where are you?’ This is the missionary God taking the initiative as he comes to look for sinners.
Mission begins with God. He wants to bring fallen people back to himself. He wants people and all creation back under the reign of his kingdom.
That’s why we talk in the church about ‘The mission of God.’ Some people who want to sound clever use the Latin, Missio Dei, but since I never learned Latin at school I’ll stick with ‘The mission of God.’
A great Anglican writer on this subject, Dr Chris Wright, once said:
It is not the church of God that has a mission in the world, but the God of mission who has a church in the world.
Mission is in the very heart of God. It is not raising money to send overseas. It is not simply getting bums on seats. It is certainly not about just waiting for people to come to us. Especially it is not getting people in to do the jobs, otherwise the church will close. Nor is it about hiring our premises to outside organisations.
Mission is God’s heart for the world. Mission is God’s desire to bring everyone and everything under the reign of his kingdom, and it is our calling to participate in that with the help of the Holy Spirit.
So let us understand right from the start of this series that mission is not an optional extra for keen Christians who have an extra dose of enthusiasm. Mission is the church’s calling because it is God’s heart.
I labour this point because it’s so important. Mission is a God thing. That’s why every Christian and every church must take it seriously and make it a priority.
Here are three things from the passage that show the priority of mission for God.
Firstly, God takes the initiative.
God doesn’t come into the Garden of Eden because Adam and Eve have called out to him, telling him they’ve made an absolute pickle of themselves. Far from it: they are hiding (verses 7, 10, 11)! He doesn’t wait for any human initiative. He knows something is wrong, and he comes.
Like everything in the life of faith, God makes the first move. Everything we do in faith is only a response to him.
John Wesley had an expression for this. He referred to ‘prevenient grace.’ If that word ‘prevenient’ sounds a bit complicated, let’s just break it down. ‘Pre-‘ is to come before. ‘Venient’ derives from the French ‘venir’, ‘to come.’ God comes before. Prevenient grace means that God’s grace comes before anything else.
That’s what happens in the picture language of Genesis 3. God takes the initiative when human beings mess up. No wonder I said that mission is in his heart.
Some Christians like to say that mission is about finding out what God is doing and then joining in. Now that can be abused, because some will label anything they particularly like as being something God is doing. But if we look carefully, prayerfully, and biblically at the world we may discern where God is already at work and then we can respond.
So if mission is a God thing, our first response can be to pray, ‘Lord, where are you already at work in restoring people and creation under your kingdom? How can I serve you in that?’
Secondly, God comes to us.
In Genesis 3 God does not summon Adam and Eve to him. He comes to them in the Garden. He goes to where they are.
This is where a lot of our talk about mission is all wrong. We say, how can we be more attractive for people to come to us? But although mission will involve people eventually joining the church, we cannot sit here waiting for people to come to us. It just won’t happen in most cases, unless they already have a church background.
I suspect that a lot of the ‘How can we be more attractive so that people come to us?’ language is more because we are nervous or afraid and don’t want to rise up to the challenge that mission presents us to get out of our comfort zones. But that is our calling if we are to respond to the God of mission as the church.
After all, having recently celebrated Christmas, we should be aware of this principle of God coming to us in the birth of Jesus. My favourite Christmas Bible text is John 1:14:
The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.
Do you see? God came to us. Emmanuel, God with us. These are not just words of comfort, these are words of God’s mission. He came to us.
And John tells us that it’s the pattern we are to copy. For the risen Jesus said to his disciples in John 20:23,
As the Father has sent me, so I am sending you.
God sent Jesus to us. Now Jesus sends us to others. We don’t sit on our backsides and wait for them.
I sometimes tell a story about a funeral I conducted about twenty years ago. An elderly church member died, and I went to visit her family, who were not churchgoers, to plan the funeral.
During that meeting when I asked them about the deceased’s life, they told me that church activities comprised her entire social life.
I think they thought I would be pleased to hear that, but I covered my true feelings. Because I was saddened. How can we spend all our time simply on church activities if we follow the God of mission who comes to us and who calls us also to go to people with his love?
How are some of us going to change our priorities? Because we need to.
Thirdly and finally, God provides the solution.
After God has questioned the man and the woman, he speaks first of all to the snake, secondly to the woman, and thirdly to the man about the consequences of sin being present in creation. The curse affects the relationship between animals and humans. It affects childbearing. It makes women subservient to men. It turns work into drudgery (verses 14-19). These things are not God’s best intentions for his creation.
But in the midst of this depressing description of what a world under the curse of sin is like comes one small but dazzling chink of light when God addresses the snake:
15 And I will put enmity
between you and the woman,
and between your offspring and hers;
he will crush your head,
and you will strike his heel.’
The offspring of the woman will crush the snake. But the snake will strike where this offspring touches the earth – with his heel.
Christians have traditionally seen this as a prophecy about the birth of Jesus from Mary (the offspring of the woman) and the Cross (where Jesus crushes the power of Satan, but evil strikes him and kills him).
God is so passionate about his mission to redeem the human race and heal creation that he sends his only begotten Son to conquer the forces of evil and reconcile people to himself and to one another.
We do not save ourselves. It does not depend on us. It is all down to God taking the initiative, coming to us, and breaking the power of cancelled sin, as Charles Wesley put it.
It is not up to us to devise clever wheezes or flashy programmes. Our rôle is to respond to the God who moves first by proclaiming Christ crucified, even though the world finds that offensive and foolish. It is nevertheless the only remedy for a broken world. And it is all God’s work, not ours.
So as we set out on a New Year with renewed commitment to Christ, let us specifically renew our commitment to co-operate by the Holy Spirit with the God of mission.
Covenant Service: Good News For Failures (Jeremiah 31:31-34)
It’s that time of year when sign-ups to health clubs and gyms breed like rabbits. Yet in a few months’ time, many of the direct debits will still be going out from bank accounts, but a lot of the new fitness enthusiasts of January will have given up. The thought of ‘New year, new me’ will lie in tatters. Another set of New Year’s Resolutions will have failed.
Maybe that’s why I haven’t bothered with such resolutions for many years. I feel sure I’ll fail.
So much of life is made up of failures – cheerful thought, I know! – be they failures of good intentions or that much larger feeling that our lives themselves are a total failure. Not one of us is without our failures.
But on this first Sunday of the New Year, when we renew our covenant with God, and we traditionally become sombre and serious, wondering whether we can keep the solemn and intimidating promises we make, I want to preach Good News.
In my draft order of service, I simply called this sermon ‘The New Covenant.’ But now I want to give it a different title: ‘Good News For Failures.’ I want you to have a sense of hope from our reading in Jeremiah.
Yes, I know many people have Jeremiah down as a depressing and depressive prophet of doom. But if you read him closely, he preaches short-term doom but long-term hope. And that’s why we can have a theme of ‘Good News For Failures.’
I have two pieces of Good News from Jeremiah for Failures:
Firstly, God’s New Covenant means Failures Are Not Forgotten:
31 ‘The days are coming,’ declares the Lord,
‘when I will make a new covenant
with the people of Israel
and with the people of Judah.
32 It will not be like the covenant
I made with their ancestors
when I took them by the hand
to lead them out of Egypt,
because they broke my covenant,
though I was a husband to them,’
declares the Lord.
Jeremiah has preached doom to Israel. He warned them that if they did not turn from their sins the king of Babylon would come and conquer them and take them into exile. They didn’t listen. They thought they could find political solutions to their troubles without changing their ways while continuing to sin.
It didn’t work. The Babylonian army turned up. At this point, a first tranche of Israel has been marched off into Babylon. They are away from the land, which was so central to their religion, because it had been promised to them by God. If they are away from their own land, then surely they are forgotten and rejected by God for ever.
Yet Jeremiah comes with this word and others that looks forward to the future. God has not finished with his people. They may have broken the old covenant, but he will make a new covenant.
And of course, that is what the coming of Jesus at Christmas is about. If you re-read the nativity stories you will see how many of the promises don’t simply look forward to Christianity and the Church (which is the way we often read them) but are promises to Israel. God has not forgotten and rejected his people. His own Son is bringing the promised new covenant.
Now we Gentile believers are grafted onto the vine which is the People of God, and so we too are inheritors of this same promise. When we fail, God has not forgotten us.
If we come to this Covenant Service this morning conscious of how much we have not lived up to our promise a year ago, we come to a God of grace who in Jesus Christ offers us yet another new beginning. Just as we confess our sins every Sunday morning together and receive assurance of forgiveness, so too year on year at this service we shall confess our sins before we renew the covenant and again receive God’s promise of a fresh start.
Every now and again, I come across people in church who believe that God cannot continue forgiving them. A few will even say they think they have committed ‘The unforgivable sin.’ However, Jesus said the unforgivable sin was blasphemy against the Holy Spirit, and if someone is sensitive to their sin then believe me that usually indicates they are also sensitive to the Holy Spirit.
No: to everyone who fails, I believe God invites us to look at Jesus on the Cross and see his arms stretched out wide – so wide they embrace the world, including us.
Those who are excluded from his embrace are those who exclude themselves not simply by sinning but by refusing to accept they have sinned, perhaps painting their sin as righteousness (often self-righteousness), and thinking they have no need to repent.
But to those of us who are acutely aware of our need to repent, God says, I have not forgotten you. I have not rejected you. Come back. You will find I am already waiting for you.
Secondly, God’s New Covenant Means Failures Have New Hope:
33 ‘This is the covenant that I will make with the people of Israel
after that time,’ declares the Lord.
‘I will put my law in their minds
and write it on their hearts.
I will be their God,
and they will be my people.
34 No longer will they teach their neighbour,
or say to one another, “Know the Lord,”
because they will all know me,
from the least of them to the greatest,’
declares the Lord.
‘For I will forgive their wickedness
and will remember their sins no more.’
Neatly for me, this gives me a chance to link back to my sermon for the Fourth Sunday of Advent, when I looked at the relationship between Jesus and Moses. To recap part of it:
In the Old Testament, people were not saved by the Law but by grace. Keeping the Law did not save people, rather it was a response to having been saved. We can see this by the fact that God only gave Moses the Law for Israel after he had delivered them from Egypt.
Nevertheless, it was external to the people. It showed God’s righteousness, but it did not convey the power to obey it. On the other hand, the Christmas promise is that Jesus is Emmanuel, God with us, and when Jesus returns to the Father that changes to the Holy Spirit, God within us.
Now link that with what Jeremiah records God as saying here. The external Law will be replaced in the New Covenant with everyone knowing the Lord. In other words, the New Covenant promises God’s indwelling of every disciple.
Not only that, we do not have to depend on priests to mediate between us and God – again, because everyone will know the Lord.
We don’t have to struggle to know God, we don’t have to struggle to know his law, and we are also enabled with divine power to do his will.
Yes, we shall still fail from time to time, and God in his mercy will forgive us and lift us up. But we shall also find God’s own strength when we truly want to obey his will.
The Old Covenant was good – it was very good – but the New Covenant is like that moment when you are driving in your car, gently accelerating, but then the turbo cuts in, and whoosh!
The New Covenant contains not only the Old Covenant promises of forgiveness, but the additional promises of God’s presence and power with us. This is God’s side of the bargain. This is his generous, grace-filled offer to every disciple of the Messiah.
So when we come to renew our promises today, I want us to realise that we are not coming to a severe God who is ready to stoke the flames of Hell the moment we let him down. He is the God of mercy and love who has provided everything we need through the Cross of Christ. Forgiveness comes there. The restoration of our relationship with God comes there. The gift of the Spirit follows.
If we remember that this is the nature of our God who calls us to reaffirm our covenant with him, then perhaps we shall be more ready to make those challenging promises.
After all, we’re not making a New Year’s Resolution, we’re responding to God’s grace.
Advent, The Prologue and Relationships: 4 Jesus and Moses (John 1:1-18)
Moses isn’t the first Old Testament character that comes to our mind at Christmas, I’ll give you that. Maybe we think of Isaiah prophesying the virgin birth or the One who is called Wonderful Counsellor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, and Prince of Peace. We might remember Micah and his prophecy that the Messiah would be born in Bethlehem, which Herod’s advisers quote when the Magi show up.
But Moses?
Well, John seems to think it’s worth contrasting Jesus with Moses at the end of our great passage. Hear verses 14 to 18 again:
14 The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.
15 (John testified concerning him. He cried out, saying, ‘This is the one I spoke about when I said, “He who comes after me has surpassed me because he was before me.”’) 16 Out of his fullness we have all received grace in place of grace already given. 17 For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. 18 No one has ever seen God, but the one and only Son, who is himself God and is in the closest relationship with the Father, has made him known.
Why didn’t I just read verse 17, which is the only verse here that explicitly mentions Moses? Because even when he’s not named, John is alluding to him. And by doing so, John tells us more about what the Good News of Jesus is.
I’m going back to three episodes in Moses’ life that John has in mind and we’ll see how the comparison and contrast with Jesus tells us about the wonder of the Incarnation.
Firstly, we go to the wilderness:
14 The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.
When we read, ‘The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us,’ the English ‘made his dwelling’ if translated more literally would be ‘tabernacled’ Jesus tabernacled among us. Why is that significant?
Do you remember the tabernacle that Moses was instructed to get Israel to construct? It was the dwelling-place of God’s presence that the Israelites carried with them in the wilderness. And indeed it remained so until the Temple was built, centuries later, in Jerusalem.
The tabernacle was the portable presence of God. When John says that Jesus tabernacled among us, he is telling us that in coming to earth Jesus is the very presence of God with us. He wasn’t just some prophet. He was the very presence of God in the midst of human life.
We do not believe in a God who has stayed remote from us. Contrary to the Julie Gold/Nanci Griffith song that Cliff Richard covered, God is not simply watching us from a distance. God has traversed the distance and in Jesus he is Emmanuel, God with us. He knows what it is to live the human life with all its joys and struggles. He is not an ivory tower God.
When we struggle with suffering or injustice, Jesus has lived it. This is what he came to do. As I often say at funerals, when I go through a bad experience in life, the people who come up with the clever answers that explain my predicament are no help. They are as smug as Job’s comforters. But those who have walked the road I am on, and who come alongside me – they make a difference. So it is with Jesus.
One simple example from my life: a few years before I met Debbie, I had a broken engagement. (Or a narrow escape, as my sister called it. I married the right woman in the end!) One day, when I was particularly down, two friends of mine, Sue and Kate, rang the doorbell and said, “We’re taking you out to lunch.” What I discovered over lunch was their own histories of broken relationships.
Jesus tabernacled among us. He understands. He is still present with us by the Holy Spirit. Hear the Good News of Christmas that the Son of God tabernacled among us. He is Emmanuel, God with us.
And it’s the model for the way we spread that Good News. For after the Resurrection, Jesus told his disciples,
As the Father has sent me, so I am sending you. (John 20:21)
So the way we begin sharing the Gospel is by openly living for Christ in the midst of those who do not yet believe. We do not go on helicopter raids to bring people in, we start by going among other people, living our Christian lives before them. This is what Jesus himself, the Word made flesh, did, when he tabernacled among us. So too us.
In one town where I ministered, some Christians left the local United Reformed Church and said they were going to start a new church on a deprived estate. They hired a hall there for meetings. But did any of them move to the estate and live out their faith among the people they were supposedly going to evangelise? No.
The Word was made flesh and tabernacled among us. It is Good News for us in all that life throws at us, and it is the model for us sharing that Good News even today.
Secondly, let’s look generally at the exodus and for this we go to verse sixteen of John chapter one:
16 Out of his fullness we have all received grace in place of grace already given.
Many people say that the Old Testament is about God’s Law and the New Testament is about God’s grace. Wrong! There is grace in the Old Testament. The New Testament tells us so, in verses like this. So when Jesus comes, his mission of grace builds on what has gone before and takes it to new levels.
In Moses’ case, grace is seen in the Exodus. God sees the suffering of his people in Egypt as they are enslaved, as Pharaoh worsens their already bad working conditions, as he attempts to have male Israelite babies killed.
The Israelites themselves are not perfect, but God in his mercy and grace will save them. Moses whom he calls to lead them is also far from perfect – in fact that’s an understatement, he’s a murderer. But in grace God calls him and mercifully redirects his passions.
Grace comes before anything we ever do for God. He acted in grace to deliver the Israelites from Egypt. And when Jesus comes, he does so to bring grace on a far greater scale, a cosmic scale, even. Yes, God is still interested in setting free people who are suffering due to the sins of others, but in Jesus he comes to do even more. He comes to set people free from their own sins. He comes to bring reconciliation not only with God but with one another. And he comes to heal broken creation. For when Jesus is raised from the dead, it will be the first fruits of God’s project to make all things new, even heaven and earth, as we learn in the Book of Revelation.
If from Moses and the wilderness we learn that Jesus is Emmanuel, God with us, then from Moses and the Exodus, we learn that Jesus is – er – Jesus, the One who will save his people from their sins.
This tells us why the Word was made flesh and tabernacled among us. He came to bring this comprehensive salvation. To save us from what others do to us. To save us from what we do. To save creation from its brokenness.
Never let us reduce salvation to a personal and private forgiveness of my own sins which earns me my ticket to heaven. Yes, we do need our own sins forgiving, we do need to repent of them and put our faith in Jesus, but that is just the beginning. God saves us to involve is in the whole project of grace that Jesus heralded. We have a job to do, and Jesus is enlisting us in the ways of grace.
I love to tell the story of a keen young Christian who found himself on a train sharing a compartment with a man of the cloth dressed in a purple shirt, in other words a bishop. The young Christian had heard about these religious establishment figures and was sure the bishop would not have any vital experience of Christ, and so he said to him, ‘Bishop, are you saved?’
The bishop looked up and calmly replied, ‘Young man, do you mean have I been saved? Or do you mean am I being saved? Or do you mean will I be saved?’
Before the bemused young man could respond the bishop continued: ‘Because I have been saved – Jesus in his grace has forgiven my sins. I am being saved – Jesus by his grace is slowly making me more like him. And I will be saved – because one day there will be no more sin in this creation. I have been saved from the penalty of sin, I am being saved from the practice of sin, and I will be saved from the presence of sin.’
The bishop understood what it meant for Jesus to have given us ‘grace in place of grace already given.’
Thirdly and finally, let’s go to Mount Sinai with Moses.
17 For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.
Ah, the law: that’s what we associate Moses with, isn’t it? Coming down from Mount Sinai with God’s prescription of two tablets, and then all those other laws, some of which perplex us today.
So it was law in the Old Testament and grace in the New Testament after all? Except you have to remember when it was that God gave the law to Israel. It was after he had delivered them from Egypt in the Exodus and they were on their way to the Promised Land. So it’s not true that keeping God’s law was the way to salvation, it was rather how they responded to salvation.
Even so, there was a problem. Israel failed to keep the law. Prophet after prophet called them to repentance, but either they rejected the message or it didn’t stick.
Hence, the coming of Jesus with grace and truth. For grace is not just about forgiveness. It is about that on-going salvation from sin that the bishop told the earnest young Christian about.
And he does not only bring the truth, he is the truth. Jesus the truth lives among us and eventually within us by his Spirit. The truth of God is no longer laws external to us on tablets of stone. Now that truth lives within us and enables us to be different. This is the promise of Christmas. Not only God with us, not only God saving us from our sins, but God within us.
An old lady once collared me after a service and told me that what this country needed to do was simply to get back to the Ten Commandments, and then all would be well. But she missed the grace that Jesus offers here. Because on our own we fail to keep the Ten Commandments, or indeed any of God’s law. We need the grace of forgiveness, and the grace of God’s presence in our lives to transform us. If faith was just a rule-keeping exercise, Jesus would never have needed to come.
But he did come. He came to be present with us, even when we wander in a wilderness, and he calls us to do the same in the midst of others. He came to bring the greatest exodus of all, in the many ways he liberates us and this world from sin. He came to bring the inner strength we need if we are to respond to God’s love for us by being with us and within us.
If anyone has reason for joy and celebration this Christmas, it’s the disciple of Jesus. Don’t be miserable in the face of inappropriate celebrations in the world at Christmastime. Instead, show that we have greater reasons to throw a party than anybody else.
I know there are lots of things that affect our mood and our ability to celebrate at Christmas. We may have had a good or a bad year. There may be an empty seat at the table this year, or there may be new life in our family.
But in terms of our faith, the coming of Jesus gives us true strength. Christmas really is ‘good tidings of great joy.’
Advent: The Prologue And Relationships: 3, Jesus And Ordinary People (John 1:9-13)
Well, it’s that time of year when you can’t escape the Christmas songs in the shops wherever you go. I have a certain sympathy for those shop workers who are subjected to the same songs all day long on an hourly basis. Maybe they think that by the time they’ve heard Slade’s Merry Xmas Everybody for the eighth time that day, it must be close to the end of their shift.
And I grew up, surrounded by those songs. I remember the Slade record coming out, just as I also remember Wizzard’s I Wish It Could Be Christmas Everyday being released, along with Elton John’s Step Into Christmas and many others. Goodness knows, I was an adult by the time Wham’s Last Christmas and Band Aid’s Do They Know It’s Christmas found their way into the world.
But if I were to confess a soft spot for one Christmas single, no, it’s not Mariah or Cliff, but it might be Driving Home For Christmas by Chris Rea. I wonder how many of you will be driving home for Christmas. Or perhaps you are at home and other family members are driving home to you?
Do you look forward to seeing family at Christmas? I do. That sense of the wider family gathering is important to me.
But what we often miss is that Christmas is about family in another sense. John tells us the purpose of Jesus coming is to invite us into the family of God.
Yet many of us missed our own Creator coming into the world (verses 9-10). Even a lot of those who should have known better ignored him or rejected him (verse 11).
12 Yet to all who did receive him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God – 13 children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband’s will, but born of God.
So what does it take to become a child of God? Let me recount a story that appears in my book ‘Odd One Out’:
Many years ago, I used to meet a friend in central London and we would go to see movies together. We would always find somewhere to eat first and catch up with each other over a meal before heading for the cinema.
On one of these occasions, my friend suddenly said during the meal, “I’ve got something to tell you.” Putting on my best pastoral expression, I listened carefully.
What my friend said was this: “I was adopted as a child.”
Seeing the look of concern on my face, my friend continued, “Don’t worry, it’s all right, I rather like the fact that I know I was adopted. It means I was wanted.”
And that’s how we come into God’s family. We are not naturally children of God, as John says. So God adopts us as his children. And like my friend, he adopts us because he wants us.
In fact, he so wants us in his family that he sent his Son Jesus to bring the invitation personally to Earth. And when Jesus came, he knew that we had barriers we had erected between ourselves and God.
So Jesus took down those barriers. The shame we feel, rightly or wrongly, over our lives: nailed to the Cross. Our wrongdoing, when we do the opposite of what God loves: nailed to the Cross. Our weakness in the face of the forces of evil: nailed to the Cross.
What is there left for us to do? John tells us it takes two responses: receive Jesus, and believe in Jesus.
To receive Jesus is to receive him and all the gifts he has given us, including what I’ve just described, where he has taken away all the barriers between us and God.
To believe in Jesus is not simply to believe in his existence, but to trust in him. In fact, it is to trust our lives into his hands. Not only does he know what is best for us, he also enrols us on his adventure of making all things new. He has a purpose for our lives when we believe in him.
So this is God’s invitation to us at Christmas: to understand that Jesus has come with God’s invitation to join his family, because he wants us and loves us. And to respond by receiving all that Jesus gives us, and by entrusting our lives to him.
These things bring us into the family of God, and we join our brothers and sisters in the family who support us in our new journey.
Advent, The Prologue and Relationships: 2, Jesus and John the Baptist (John 1:1-18)
Isn’t it strange that just as ‘I’m A Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here’ is on our screens yet again that John the Baptist comes into focus in the church year? The man whom Matthew tells us wore clothes made of camel’s hair and lived on a diet of locusts and honey[1] sounds perfect for the bush tucker trial.
And speaking personally, I’d rather engage with John the Baptist than Nigel Farage. Which is one major reason I’m not watching this year.
But we think of John at this time due to his connection with Jesus – not simply that they were related through their mothers[2] but that they were related in the purposes of God. We talk about John as the ‘Forerunner’ of Jesus. Their relationship is important for the Advent story.
But it’s not just interesting historical detail. John’s mission of preparing the way for Jesus is also a model for the ways in which God gives us our mission of pointing to Jesus.
I’m going to explore that in two phases today.
Firstly, John was sent.
We are used in the Methodist Church to the idea of ministers being sent. I was sent to this appointment by the authority of the Methodist Conference. The Salvation Army send their officers; the Roman Catholics send their priests. (Other denominations are different and speak less of the church sending and more of God calling.)
But being sent isn’t just a churchy thing. It happens in other areas of life, too. As I mentioned to some around Remembrance Sunday last month, I am the first man in my family for a couple of generations not to go into the Royal Air Force. My Dad only did National Service, but I often thought he might have fancied a longer time in it than that. My uncle served for many years, and so did my three male cousins.
The armed services’ concept of a ‘posting’ is very much a sending, and young families are often in an area only for a short time before the next posting happens, with adverse effects upon socialisation and education. One of my cousins was awarded the MBE for work he and his wife did on RAF bases with lonely families.
John the Baptist’s sending comes not from the church or the armed services, but from God:
6 There was a man sent from God whose name was John.
And yes, John has a very special calling that we mark at this time of year. And yes, we are used to the idea that certain Christians have particular callings in which they are sent by God.
Sadly, what we forget in all that is that every Christian is called and sent by God in some respect. Being sent by God doesn’t automatically mean being sent to dark jungles to be attacked by ferocious creatures and wild savages. Sometimes, God has already sent us to the place where we are, and this is the place where we are called to be fruitful and faithful for him.
Perhaps we still have that mediaeval Roman Catholic view of being sent that regarded the only vocations worth mentioning as those where someone was called to the church – priests, monks, and nuns. At least the Reformers broadened out that sense of vocation so that Martin Luther, ever provocative in his writing, could say that were the job of village hangman to fall vacant, the devout Christian should apply.
I am not here to recruit any hangmen today! But I am here to invite us all to consider our sense of being sent. Has God sent us to the particular job where we work? The neighbourhood where we live? The social groups in which we mix?
And if we think that’s possible, how does that change our attitude to those workplaces, neighbourhoods, and social groups? Are we on a mission from God in those places? Have we been placed there to live out our faith and bless those we meet with the love of God in our attitudes and actions? Has God sent us there as a sign of his abiding truth to those who may or may not want to know about it?
And for others of us, have we become restless where we are? Is it because we have not embraced the sense that God has sent us here, or is God preparing us to take up another posting and be sent somewhere else? Is this an issue that some of us should be praying about?
Secondly, John was specifically sent as a witness.
One of the things I do when I go to preach at a new church is I always ask for an assurance from the person on the sound desk that they will turn my microphone off during the hymns. Much as I love music, I am not blessed in that area with any personal ability. I was once next to my aunt in a congregation and she said to me afterwards, “I’m glad my bad singing voice has passed down another generation in the family.”
So when my friends in the church youth group formed a band, I was the only one not to be part of it. They became quite popular in local church circles and sold out some concerts.
I talk in the first chapter of my book about some of the socially awkward ways in which I related to them. Yet one Saturday evening in December, and I think it proved to be their biggest concert ever, they involved me by asking me to be the compère.
It stayed with me, because the next morning the Advent theme was John the Baptist, and the preacher spoke about how John was the compère for Jesus. Given my rôle the previous night, that description stuck with me. Just as the compère’s job is not to point to themselves but to the act everyone has paid to see, so the rôle of John the Baptist is not to big himself up but to be ‘a witness to the light’:
7 He came as a witness to testify concerning that light, so that through him all might believe. 8 He himself was not the light; he came only as a witness to the light.
This rôle of a witness is seen in some of the other New Testament models for those who speak of Christ. We have the herald, who brought ‘good news’, rather like a town crier. ‘Good news’ was a technical term in the Roman Empire for the announcements heralds made that either the Roman army had won a great battle or that there was a new emperor on the throne. The first Christians translated this to their heralding of a different good news, the good news that God had won a great battle against evil at the Cross and that there was now a new king of the universe, Jesus the Lord.
And we have the ambassador that the Apostle Paul talks about. The purpose of an ambassador is to represent the king and the kingdom that sent them to an alien land. Paul and the first Christians saw themselves as representing Christ and the kingdom of God in an alien land.
All of these images – the witness, the herald, and the ambassador – have one thing in common. These spokespeople are not drawing attention to themselves but to Jesus Christ and the good news of God’s kingdom.
This was John’s purpose in a particularly special way when Jesus came into the world and thirty years later began his public ministry. It is also our calling.
For the New Testament also calls us witnesses. We may not all be evangelists, but we are all witnesses. Every Christian has the ability to witness to Jesus Christ by speaking about what he has done for them and what he has done for the world.
Think of a witness in a court of law. The witness speaks of what he or she has seen or heard, or about what he knows to be true. These are the things we do as witnesses for Christ, too. We speak about our experience of Jesus. We speak about what we know about him. Sure, we are not all what the courts call expert witnesses – perhaps those are the evangelists – but if we think about it, can we not all think of what Jesus has done for us, what he means to us, and what we know for sure about him?
Conclusion
Last week we saw that the Father’s relationship with Jesus said something about our relationship with Jesus, too. This week, John’s relationship with Jesus also has something to say about our relationship with Jesus.
Last week we saw that just as the Father’s relationship with Jesus was characterised by unity, love, and light, so too was Jesus’ mission to the world. This week with John we find that we are sent by God as heralds and ambassadors of King Jesus and his kingdom of unity, love, and light.
May the Holy Spirit show us the place where we are sent. And may we depend on that same Spirit to empower us as witnesses to Jesus and all that he has done.
[1] Matthew 3:4
[2] Luke 1:36
Advent, The Prologue and Relationships: 1, Jesus and the Father (John 1:1-18)
Introduction to series
For Advent this year, I want to explore one of the great Bible passages – the one that above all talks about ‘The Mystery of the Incarnation’, as it is often called in carol services.
It’s the passage we more widely call ‘The Prologue’ – but people of a certain generation must not think about Frankie Howerd and Up Pompeii when I say that!
It’s The Prologue to the Gospel According to John, the first eighteen verses of the wonderful Fourth Gospel, in which the evangelist introduces many of the themes of his Gospel in the context of Jesus’ birth.
There are so many ways we could explore this passage, for there are so many riches there. A friend of mine wrote his PhD on it, and I could easily imagine preaching every Sunday for a year on these verses.
But I’m going to resist that temptation! This is just an Advent series. And one way of exploring the Prologue over the four Sundays of Advent is to take a particular strand in it about Jesus’ relationships. So we shall look first of all at Jesus’ relationship with the Father, and in other weeks at his relationships with Moses, John the Baptist, and human beings generally.
I am not the most avid television watcher, but I did set our satellite box to record Monday night’s quiz programmes on BBC2 – Only Connect, Mastermind, and the one that goes right back to my childhood, University Challenge. That was something we used to watch as a family on Sunday lunchtimes – that and Thunderbirds.
For some reason, I still remember one starter question from an early series: ‘Which two books of the Bible begin with the same three words in English?’
Now, leaving aside the awkward issue of differing translations, the answer they wanted was Genesis and John’s Gospel, both starting with the words, ‘In the beginning.’
And that’s where we’re going today – to the beginning, to that relationship between Jesus and the Father that existed before creation and led to creation. I follow those scholars who say that the inner relationships of the Trinity are demonstrated in their actions towards human beings and the world. In the case of the Incarnation, they tell us something about why Jesus came, and that’s what we’re going to explore today.
Firstly, unity:
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2 He was with God in the beginning.
Note those words ‘with God’, ‘was God’, and ‘with God in the beginning.’ The Word, that is, Jesus, and the Father are united in fellowship and very nature. Theirs is a perfect and pure unity of relationship. They are one in heart, mind, and spirit.
It is this inner experience of unity that Jesus comes to bring at the Incarnation. It is the knowledge that human relationships with God, each other, and creation are broken that leads him to come. This is not what was intended. Humankind was made in the image of God, the One God in Three Persons who is unity, but sin has distorted and destroyed that.
So when Jesus comes, his is a mission of reconciliation. He wants human beings at one with the Godhead again. He wants human beings reconciled to each other. He wants the alienation of human beings from the creation healed.
To bring this unity will involve a great cost. It will take him from Bethlehem to Calvary, from the manger to the Cross. It makes me think of a Graham Kendrick Christmas song, ‘Thorns in the straw’, where he imagines Mary seeing the thorns for Jesus’ crown of thorns in the straw of the manger.
Therefore as Christians we remember our need to draw ever closer to our God, as we receive the forgiveness of our sins. We remember our need to work for unity with one another, putting right our broken relationships, and finding reconciliation with each other. We remember that our reconciliation with one another is one of the deeds that witnesses to our preaching about reconciliation with God.
And we remember our calling to bind up the wounds of the creation – not out of the desperation many have over things like climate change, but in the Christian hope of the God who is making all things new.
Let us remember this Advent that the unity of Father and Son leads to Jesus’ mission to bring unity. And just as that was costly for him, let us be prepared to pay a cost to proclaim and demonstrate Christ’s nature and message of unity to the world.
Secondly, love:
3 Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made.
Jesus is the Father’s agent in creation. But what has that got to do with love?
Let me ask you a question that the famous twentieth century Swiss theologian Karl Barth asked: was it necessary for God to create?
Barth answered that question with a ‘Yes’, and so do I. Here’s why. It’s certainly true that love between people can be personal and exclusive, but it is never private. If two people love each other exclusively but it never touches others for good, how is it so very different from mutual self-indulgence?
Take marriage as an example. The most common way in which a married couple express this love is when they are able to have children. Their personal and exclusive love naturally reaches out in a creative act and they sacrificially love their children.
Of course, I know that many couples don’t want children immediately and others cannot have children at all. So one of the things I do when I prepare a couple for marriage is I challenge them to show the love they have wonderfully discovered between themselves in service of others. Can they do something in their community? Is there a cause they could support?
I think something like that has happened on a cosmic, spiritual scale in the Godhead. Such is the love between the members of the Trinity that it has to be expressed beyond them. The Father creates through the Son and in the power of the Spirit. A universe is created beyond the Godhead for the Godhead to love.
And it is out of this love at the heart of God that Jesus comes in the Incarnation. Seeing the brokenness and lack of unity that I talked about in the first point, it is his very nature of love that brings him to earth. Remember that most basic of all statements about God in the Bible: ‘God is love.’
What I’m talking about here is what Christina Rossetti wrote about in one of her Christmas carols:
Love came down at Christmas,
Love all lovely, Love divine;
Love was born at Christmas,
star and angels gave the sign.Worship we the Godhead,
Love incarnate, Love divine;
worship we our Jesus:
but wherewith for sacred sign?
There it is: Jesus comes in love because the very nature of the Godhead is love.
And Rossetti also tells us what the only fitting response is:
Love shall be our token,
love be yours and love be mine,
love to God and all the world,
love for plea and gift and sign.[1]
If the Incarnation is about the love at the heart of the Godhead coming to us in Jesus, then our response is ‘love to God and all the world’ – love God and love our neighbour, as Jesus was to say the two greatest commandments were. Even the new commandment he gave was about love: ‘Love one another as I have loved you.’
Howard Thurman, who was a great influence on Martin Luther King, wrote a short poem called ‘The Work of Christmas.’ It says this:
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 others,
To make music in the heart.
Thirdly and finally, light:
4 In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. 5 The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.
At the heart of God’s life is light: purity, wholeness, righteousness, hope. But we have a world of darkness: sin, brokenness, injustice, despair. So when Jesus brings very inner character of God to Earth in the incarnation, he comes as light, the light of the world who ‘stepped down into darkness’[2].
Wherever we experience darkness, Jesus comes to shed his light. It may be the darkness when we know ourselves to be a moral failure, but the light of Jesus’ seventy-times-seven forgiving love draws us back to him again.
It may be the wounds we carry through life that leave us with low self-worth or even a sense of self-loathing, but the hope found in Jesus gives us strength to carry on.
It may be that a particular issue of injustice in the world affects us and we get involved with campaigning but nothing seems to change for the better. I listened to a talk recently by a Christian journalist whose life work it is to expose corruption in the church, but she has suffered attacks and false accusations from parts of the Christian community for her work. She has been tempted to give up, but the light of Jesus keeps her persevering for justice in the darkness.
Or maybe it’s bereavement. Six years ago when my father died, I said that a light had gone out of my life. He had modelled for me so much of what it meant to live with integrity as a Christian man in the world. Yes, he was just two months shy of his ninetieth birthday. Yes, Alzheimer’s Disease had taken his true personality before death took his body, and you could say it was a merciful release. But you know what grief is like. The logical answers don’t remove the pain.
Dad died on 1st August. It was not until Advent that year and reading John 1 that I felt a sense of hope. It was verse 5: ‘The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it’ that made sense of things for me. Jesus gave just enough light in the darkness to take me forward in hope.
Let us begin this Advent with a sense of hope. The relationship between Jesus and his Father may seem like hi-falutin’ brain-bending stuff, but at its heart are characteristics that stretch out from the inner life of God to us through the Incarnation of Jesus. Let that unity, love, and light give us strength and hope.
[1] Christina Georgina Rossetti (1830-1894) in Singing The Faith #210.
[2] Tim Hughes, op. cit., #175.
Big Circumstance 