Seven Churches 3: Pergamum (Revelation 2:12-17)

Revelation 2:12-17

You may have spotted that I’m one of those ministers who only wears a clerical collar for formal occasions or when it’s absolutely necessary, such as when I visit someone who doesn’t know me and I need to be identified as a minister.

One of my Anglican friends noted this attitude of mine and said to me, “Dave, you’re not so much low church, you’re more like subterranean!”

Others, more particularly older and more traditional church members, have questioned me on this and claimed that the dog collar is like some magical Open Sesame that gains ministers entry into places others can’t go. The usual claim is that it allows us to get into hospital wards outside visiting hours.

I have to disappoint these people and tell them that I have no more right to go into a hospital ward out of hours than anybody else, unless I’m a member of the hospital chaplaincy team. And then what would gain me access is not the dog collar but a hospital lanyard.

If I’m feeling particularly mischievous in the conversation, what I then retort is that since Methodist doctrine says that ministers hold no priesthood that is different from the priesthood all believers have, then maybe all Christians should wear the collar!

Why am I telling you this? Because what Jesus writes to the church at Pergamum is all about being identifiably Christian. If we ask what Jesus praises them for, it’s being identifiably Christian. If we ask where he calls them out, it’s for when they hide their Christian identity.

Firstly, then, let’s listen to the praise Jesus heaps on the church at Pergamum:

13 I know where you live – where Satan has his throne. Yet you remain true to my name. You did not renounce your faith in me, not even in the days of Antipas, my faithful witness, who was put to death in your city – where Satan lives.

They wore their Christian uniform, so to speak, and were clearly identifiable as followers of Jesus. They knew it would put them in the firing line in a place ‘where Satan has his throne’. Whatever that phrase means precisely, we can be sure that Pergamum was a tough place to identify as a Christian, because hostility, opposition, and even violence would come their way. Yet they still did it. And it even cost one church member his life.

This wasn’t unusual at the time Revelation was written. We are fairly sure it was written around the time that Domitian was the Roman Emperor (that’s AD 81-96, fact fans). A cruel and ruthless ruler, he only tolerated religions other than the Roman emperor cult if they could be assimilated into that Roman culture. If they stood out, it seems persecution was the consequence.

Indeed, the Book of Revelation is not so much cryptic prophecies of future end-time events as a document to give hope to persecuted Christians. Throughout the centuries and around the world, the persecuted church has taken great comfort from it.

Today, we hear inspiring and shocking stories from around the world about what it means for many Christians to ‘wear their uniform’, to be publicly identifiable as disciples of Jesus.

Here’s one I found through an email from Christian Solidarity Worldwide:

[In August], hundreds of people stormed a Christian colony in Jaranwala city near Faisalabad in Pakistan. Up to 25 churches and chapels and hundreds of homes were ransacked and set on fire.

Why? Two local Christian residents, Rocky Masih and Raja Masih, had been accused of blasphemy. Mobs, stirred up by reports that the men had desecrated religious scriptures, attacked the colony, demanding to execute the two men themselves.

Rocky and Raja were subsequently arrested and charged with insulting Islam and defiling the name of the Prophet Mohammed. Other Christians in the area have fled in fear of their lives.

This is what happens in many places around the world when you publicly identify as a Christian. Lies, false charges, violence, and the risk of death.

But what does that all mean for us, in a country where it is much safer to be a Christian, even if it is less well received than it once was?

I think there are a couple of applications.

One is that we need to take seriously what happens to other members of the Christian family around the world. We need to use our freedoms to support them and campaign for them. I strongly recommend that we look into the work of organisations like Christian Solidarity Worldwide, whom I just quoted,  or Open Doors, who do similar work. Who else is going to speak up for suffering Christians if not the rest of the church? These organisations can provide us with material for prayer, for lobbying Parliament, and so on.

The other application I would draw is this. If our situation is easier, then why do we allow relatively trivial opposition to close our mouths from speaking up for Christ? I know we want to avoid the stereotype of Christians being judgmental, but the mockery or opposition we would face is nothing in comparison to what our sisters and brothers in Pakistan, Nigeria, India, Iran,  North Korea, China, and so many other countries face.

Surely we could find a bit more courage to nail our colours to the mast?

Secondly, why does Jesus call the church at Pergamum to repent?

You may know one of my favourite sermon stories. It concerns a question set in a training examination for police recruits:

‘You are on the beat and you see two dogs fighting. The dogs knock a baby out of its pram, causing a car to swerve off the road, smashing into a grocer’s shop. A pedestrian is severely injured, but during the confusion a woman’s bag is snatched, a crowd of onlookers chase after the thief and, in the huge build-up of traffic, the ambulance is blocked from the victim of the crash.

‘State, in order of priority, your course of action.’

One recruit wrote, ‘Take off uniform and mingle with crowd.’[1]

I think that’s rather like the issue Jesus had with Pergamum:

14 Nevertheless, I have a few things against you: there are some among you who hold to the teaching of Balaam, who taught Balak to entice the Israelites to sin so that they ate food sacrificed to idols and committed sexual immorality. 15 Likewise, you also have those who hold to the teaching of the Nicolaitans. 16 Repent therefore! Otherwise, I will soon come to you and will fight against them with the sword of my mouth.

Effectively, the Christians at Pergamum had taken off their uniform and mingled with the crowd. How? Note the reference to eating food sacrificed to idols and committing sexual immorality. It sounds very much like some of them were joining in with the practices of the local pagan religious cult.

The management guru Peter Drucker once famously said, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast,” and this rather sounds like the local culture had eaten the Christians for breakfast. After all, surely it doesn’t harm to mingle with the local crowd if the alternative is sticking out like a sore thumb as a Christian and getting in trouble as a result?

But the problem here is that in letting themselves be absorbed by the surrounding culture they ended up imbibing a lifestyle that denied the Gospel. So no wonder Jesus calls them to repentance.

Could it be that we face the same challenge? Sadly, there is plenty of evidence of both individual Christians and the church corporately taking off uniform and mingling with today’s crowd. We do it when we baptise the world’s ethics and try to convince ourselves they are consistent with the Gospel.

We take off our uniform when we succumb to the politics of ‘might is right.’

We mingle with the crowd when we adopt a celebrity cult in the church, just as the world does.

We do it when we worship the god of individual choice, or the idol of consumerism. And you don’t even have to buy anything to worship consumerism: you can just treat church as a consumer choice, that exists solely to meet your needs and tastes.

Yes, we are every bit in as much danger as the Pergamum church of letting the culture eat us up and losing our Christian distinctiveness.

And when we do this, we are saying we are ashamed of the Gospel, and of he One who went to the Cross for us. That’s serious.

We might do well to reflect on whether there are any ways in which we have bent the shape of our faith to fit what’s popular in our society, rather than calling our society to change shape in conformity to Christ.

Each one of us needs to examine ourselves from time to time to consider whether we have compromised our faith to fit the wider culture.

In conclusion, we have a choice and each choice will lead to a different response from Jesus.

If we choose to take off our uniform and mingle with the crowd, rendering ourselves indistinguishable from the wider world, then Jesus has a solemn response. He says,

16 Repent therefore! Otherwise, I will soon come to you and will fight against them with the sword of my mouth.

In other words, he will speak against us. Is that what he has done when scandals have been exposed in the church that is exposed in the world?

But there is good news from Jesus if we take the more difficult route of staying in our distinctive Christian uniform in the world:

17 Whoever has ears, let them hear what the Spirit says to the churches. To the one who is victorious, I will give some of the hidden manna. I will also give that person a white stone with a new name written on it, known only to the one who receives it.

The ‘hidden manna’ surely means he will sustain us in difficult, wilderness times in our lives. The ‘white stone’ is what a not guilty verdict was returned on in the local courts and indicates Christ’s acceptance of us. The secret name likely signifies his intimate knowledge and love for us.[2] These are ways in which Jesus strengthens us when times are tough.

So there we have it. We are faced with a tough choice, whether to identify publicly as Christians at a potential cost or to go underground and be indistinct from the rest of the world.

But the easy road is confronted by the opposition of Jesus, and the tough road takes us into the blessing of Jesus.

Which will we choose?

[1] Adapted from Murray Watts, Bats In The Belfry, p137 #232.

[2] See Ian Paul, Revelation (Tyndale New Testament Commentary), p90.

0

Seven Churches 2: Smyrna (Revelation 2:8-11)

Revelation 2:8-11

I was on sabbatical earlier this year, and when people asked what I was going to do with my time, some were surprised by one of the things I had chosen.

I had decided to revisit one of my favourite places, the Lee Abbey community in north Devon, to take a course on ‘Dealing with disappointment.’

“Why would you want to do that?” people asked me. “Don’t you want to do something more uplifting on a sabbatical?”

So I explained that I was coming to the end of thirteen years in a circuit appointment where not all my dreams had been fulfilled. I was in the latter stages of my ministry generally and as I look back I don’t see all the hopes I had for my calling at the outset fulfilled, either. I needed to process these things healthily.

Moreover, I said, disappointment is a regular pastoral theme when people talk with me. So few are living Plan A for their lives. More often it’s Plan B, Plan C, or Plan D. It’s important to have a grip of this theme.

Which brings us to that early church at Smyrna. Already facing afflictions, poverty, and slander (verse 9), Jesus tells them that suffering, imprisonment, persecution, and even death are just around the corner (verse 10). It’s not exactly the good life. So much for the old lie that said, ‘When I became a Christian, all my problems disappeared.’

Yet in these four short verses Jesus gives them a way to understand what they are going through that will fortify them for the difficult times and give them hope for the long term.

But what has all this got to do with us? We know about our Christian brothers and sisters in other parts of the world who suffer greatly for their faith. We often give thanks in our prayers that we have the freedom to worship.

I would not agree with those who say that Christians are now persecuted in this country, but I would say that it is becoming more difficult and there is increasing hostility in the public square to us. We should be prepared for days when Christianity will be costly even here.

And even if that doesn’t come our way, we shall all for sure face disappointments and injustices in life, so it’s best we prepare for facing them with faith rather than an attitude that expects everything to go right.

There are two things in what Jesus says to the church at Smyrna that help us. They are encapsulated in the way Jesus introduces himself, and they are implicit in his pastoral words to them.

How does he introduce himself?

These are the words of him who is the First and the Last, who died and came to life again. (Verse 8b)

Death and resurrection are the two themes that help us. How so?

Firstly, let’s consider death – and specifically here, I mean the death of Christ. He is the First and the Last, the agent of creation and also the One who will reign for ever and ever. And yet he died.

Whenever Christians think about injustice and suffering, the best place to start is at the Cross. Our faith is centred on the Cross. And what is the Cross if not the most unjust act in history? The eternal sinless Son of God is stitched up by both Jew and Gentile and condemned to an agonising death.

We might say that the death of Jesus was an unique event in history, and in the sense that if made possible the reconciliation of the world to God, that is true. But we might still draw a couple of lessons for ourselves.

One is that in a battle soldiers put themselves in harm’s way in order to conquer the enemy. That is what Jesus did with sin and the power of evil. We may not suffer for the sins of the world, but we do find ourselves in a spiritual battle. It is therefore not surprising if the enemy seeks to inflict damage and pain on us. It is the risk we take as soldiers of Christ.

Another is that our calling as disciples is to be imitators of Christ. I know we do that very imperfectly – well, I do, for sure – but it does mean that we are liable to be treated in a similar way to the way the world treated Jesus. Remember that he said,

If the world hates you, remember that it hated me first. (John 15:18)

So while we are not to go out and look for suffering, nor are we meant to be stupidly provocative (as I fear some Christians are), we should not be surprised when we are treated badly. In a time when more and more groups are trying to exclude Christians from the public square because they say we are hateful and dangerous, it’s par for the course. No wonder Jesus tells the Christians at Smyrna to expect suffering.

The trouble is, we have been led to think differently by living in a country where for many centuries Christianity was a major player in shaping the culture, where it has even been in partnership with the State – so-called Christendom.

But throughout history and throughout the world, this is not normal. It is more common to be reviled for following Jesus than praised. Remember: our faith is centred on the Cross.

Secondly, let’s consider resurrection – and again, we starting with the Resurrection of Jesus.

Not only does Jesus remind the church at Smyrna that he died, he also reminds them that he ‘came to life again.’

Now you might say that the Resurrection is an unique event in history, too. You would be right at present, but by the end of history as we know it you will be wrong. Jesus promises here,

The one who is victorious will not be hurt at all by the second death. (Verse 11b)

We look forward to the resurrection of the dead. The Resurrection of Christ is the first-fruits of the harvest of resurrection to come. If we follow Christ, then ‘The second death’, that is, eternal judgment, is nothing to fear, for by the grace of God we are put right with him by faith and he remembers our sins no more.

And we do see some mini-resurrections in this life. We see answers to prayer. Injustices are put right. People are healed. Those in need are provided for. Folk who have fallen out are reconciled. Wrongdoers make restitution to those they harmed. Forgiveness is given and received.

When we pray about a situation that is wrong, we do not always know whether our prayers are going to be answered in the affirmative in this life. But that should not stop us praying. If we don’t pray, then very little will happen. If we do pray, though, then there is more of a chance of seeing some divine resurrection.

So let us continue to pray and act for the sick, the bereaved, the suffering, and those facing injustice. We never know what God might do.

To speak personally, I can only think of two times when I can say for certain that God answered my prayer for someone to be healed. However, that neither stops nor discourages me from continuing to pray for the sick. Who knows when number three will come along?

Or maybe you are upset that certain close friends and relatives have never committed their lives to Christ. If so, then I remind you about D L Moody, the famous evangelist, who prayed daily for a hundred of his friends to come to know Christ. Amazingly, by the time of his death, ninety-six of them had done so.

But what about the other four? They were converted at Moody’s funeral.

Conclusion

How do we hold all this together? We do so in a framework that Christian thinkers call ‘The now and the not yet of God’s kingdom.’ Since the coming of Jesus, we are living in two overlapping eras. The first is the era of sin, and thus we continue to see injustice and suffering. This is our first category of death.

The second is the era of the kingdom of God, which Jesus inaugurated when he came. Thus we also continue to see people and things being made new in response to prayer. This is our second category of resurrection.

We haven’t simply passed from the era of death to the era of resurrection. The two are co-existing, overlapping until Christ appears again to judge the living and the dead. Thus we must expect that sometimes we shall face suffering, and on other times we shall experience restoration, and we won’t always know in advance which will be our lot.

But whichever happens, God is still in charge of our lives. Jesus is reigning at the Father’s right hand, even though not everybody acknowledges his rule.

Here is a story I like to tell that I think illustrates what I am trying to say. Some decades ago, there was a massacre of British Christian missionaries in a far-off land, although some survived the attack.

A memorial service was held back in the UK. At it, the preacher said, “I believe that all of the missionaries were delivered by God. Those who survived were delivered from suffering, and those who were murdered were delivered through suffering.”

For we worship

him who is the First and the Last, who died and came to life again.

0

Seven Churches 1: Ephesus (Revelation 2:1-7)

Revelation 2:1-7

There’s probably someone in your life whose opinion of you is important to you. This is somebody whom you long to please. It may be a spouse, a parent, a boss, or some other significant figure in your life. I tell a story in my book about how I longed for my parents to be pleased with my school reports, and how I misunderstood their unconditional acceptance of me.

For Christians, and for churches, the One whose opinion of us we cherish is Jesus. And when we come to the so-called ‘Letters to the seven churches’ in Revelation, we get to hear what Jesus thinks of the churches to whom Revelation is addressed.

They are not really seven letters. The whole of Revelation is an elaborate letter, and these are seven royal pronouncements about the churches.

But we are going to look at these seven royal pronouncements about the churches in the coming weeks. We are going to see what Jesus thought of those churches and use that as a way of considering what he might think of us.

The pronouncements are very similar in their style. They start by describing Jesus, using some of the material about him in Revelation chapter 1. They end with a call to hear what the Spirit is saying to the churches, and a blessing for the obedient. In between, we usually find both praise and criticism (although sometimes it’s only one and not the other).

If we’re going to concentrate on what Jesus thinks of each church, most of these sermons will focus in on the praise and the criticism. And that’s largely what we’ll do today with the congregation at Ephesus.

Firstly, what’s good about the congregation at Ephesus?

Jesus lists seven good things about them, which for simplicity I’m going to summarise as three: hard work, right living, and right belief.

Hard work can be seen in the way Jesus says,

2 I know your deeds, your hard work and your perseverance. …

3 You have persevered and have endured hardships for my name, and have not grown weary.

Hard-working people who keep going in the face of difficulty and even opposition are often the backbones of many churches. We know those people who will always take on something that needs doing, however busy they already are. Many of our churches stand or fall on the old maxim, ‘If you want a job done, ask a busy person.’ It’s been said that many churches are like a football match: twenty-two thousand people in the crowd desperately in need of exercise watching twenty-two people on the pitch desperately in need of a rest. What we do without our ‘twenty-two people desperately in need of a rest’? Churches would close without them.

And we know people who keep on loyally serving the church, even when other people are making snide remarks about them.

Right living appears when Jesus says,

I know that you cannot tolerate wicked people (verse 2b) …

6 But you have this in your favour: you hate the practices of the Nicolaitans, which I also hate.

Some churches are very lax in what they accept in terms of the lifestyle of their members. They won’t hear anything against their friends. Woe betide someone who comes in – be they a minister or another church member – and says that something is wrong: then look to see how the church reacts.

It happened to a friend of mine who began as a probationer minister at the same time as me. He discovered two Boys’ Brigade leaders conducting a sexually immoral relationship and when he said he wouldn’t sign the form to re-appoint them, a group of church members threatened to march on the manse and smash the windows in.

But at least the congregation at Ephesus knew how to oppose evil. Good for them.

Right belief features at the end of verse 2:

you have tested those who claim to be apostles but are not, and have found them false. (verse 2c)

It’s utterly important to follow right belief. Christianity is a religion based on truth. We need to know the truth about God. It’s simply no good just to say, “I like to believe in God this way,” if ‘this way’ is unrelated to what we learn about God in Holy Scripture. We cannot follow our fancies and what pleases us.

That’s why it dismayed me when I once heard a committed member of a congregation say, “I like having all the different preachers each week, so that I can hear all different opinions about God.” Friends, the job of the preacher is to preach biblical truth. Any deviation from that is unacceptable. It leads us astray spiritually.

So when the congregation at Ephesus opposes these false apostles who have ridden into town with their unique teaching, I say good for them. They are doing something vital. I wish it happened more in Methodist churches. We set our standards too low at times.

There is plenty of reason, then, to commend the church at Ephesus. Indeed, they are doing things that we could do more of. Hard work, even in the face of opposition; a commitment to right living; a desire to stay faithful to the truth of the Gospel. How I would love to see more of these things in our churches today, rather than places where ten per cent of the members do ninety per cent of the work, and where anything goes morally or doctrinally.

But did you also get a sense of a harshness of tone when you heard about what was good at Ephesus? That’s where we come to the second thing we need to look at: what’s bad about the congregation at Ephesus?

That can be summed up in verses 4 and 5:

4 Yet I hold this against you: you have forsaken the love you had at first. 5 Consider how far you have fallen! Repent and do the things you did at first. If you do not repent, I will come to you and remove your lampstand from its place.

‘You have forsaken the love you had at first.’ Other translations say, ‘You have lost your first love.’

Jesus doesn’t say what love they have forsaken. Is it love for God or love for neighbour? Well, since Jesus holds loving God and loving our neighbour together as the two greatest commandments, it’s probably both. If we truly love God, we also love our neighbour.

If the Ephesians have lost love of God and of neighbour, then no wonder all their good qualities still sounded rather harsh. Loving God and loving our neighbour, all in response to God’s love for us in Christ, is the foundation of Christian living. The Ephesians have got rid of the foundations and although they don’t realise it, their Christian faith is collapsing.

It is out of love for God that we work hard for the church. It is out of love for our neighbour that we long for right living. It is out of love for God that we want to believe the right things about him (and worship him appropriately as a result).

But sometimes we get so caught up in the busyness of working hard for the church, of defending holy living, and advocating the truth about God, that we forget to nurture the relationship of love. We forget our first love. When we see Christianity as all about being busy and forget that it is a relationship of love, we begin to chip away at the foundations of our faith, and we risk it collapsing one day.

It is urgent for every Christian to nourish a relationship of love with our God, and let the ways in which he is calling us to love our neighbours flow out of that. We cannot just come to church on Sunday and let that be the sum total of our engagement with God. Would a marriage survive if a couple only ever spoke to each other once a week? Why then do we think we can do that with our faith in God?

I decided when I came here that the regular pattern of prayer and Bible reading I had been following each day for many years had become rather stale. I have started combing around for other ways of maintaining my devotional life. But if I end up with nothing then my spiritual life will wither away. I need to give attention to this. So, I believe, does every Christian.

Jesus talks about removing the lampstand if we let go of our first love. According to Revelation chapter 1, the lampstand represents the church. What he is saying is that the church dies when we don’t prioritise our first love of loving God and loving our neighbour.

I believe that the Holy Spirit is warning many churches and Christians today that we get so obsessed with the mechanics of church life that we forget the very source of life, our relationship of love with God in Christ that then inspires us to love our neighbours.

And therefore when we do neglect our first love, the church dies. We ponder why traditional churches are declining and closing in our society, and while a fair amount of that is due to us living in a society that has rejected the Christian faith and embraced beliefs and lifestyles that are hostile to Christianity, it is also true that some of the decline is down to us. We have forsaken our first love.

So you will find that I regularly emphasise the need to read our Bibles prayerfully every day to grow our relationship with Christ. It is not an optional extra for keen Christians: it is essential for every Christian.

If you want to know more, then I can soon talk with you about different ways of reading and experiencing the Bible prayerfully. It may involve Bible reading notes, it may involve using some ancient practices of the church to meditate on Scripture. But whatever it is, let’s do it.

If we want to

eat from the tree of life, which is in the paradise of God (verse 7)

that is, participate in God’s new creation, then we need to make developing our relationship with our God our first priority. If we are serious about building our faith and building for the kingdom of God, this is where we start.

0

Harvest: May The Peoples Praise You (Psalm 67)

Psalm 67

One thing it’s not worth asking me when you arrive at church on a Sunday is, “Did you hear the morning service on Radio 4?” because I never listen to it.

But I do love the story of the harvest festival they broadcast many years ago, where the presenter rather unfortunately explained, “During the next hymn the children are going to bring up their gifts.”

I wouldn’t have liked to have cleared up that mess!

Actually, let me amend my words. Anyone can have a ‘harvest festival’, but Christians can have a ‘harvest thanksgiving.’ The world around us can celebrate harvest by having a festival, but as Christians we have Someone to thank for the harvest.

So I rather like referring to ‘harvest thanksgiving’ rather than ‘harvest festival.’ Although I don’t always remember.

Psalm 67 is full of thanksgiving. The people are exhorted to praise, gladness, and joy in response to God’s blessing in so many ways.

I see three areas in this Psalm for praise and thanksgiving, and all are relevant to a Christian celebration of harvest.

Firstly, thanksgiving for the harvest of salvation:

1 May God be gracious to us and bless us
    and make his face shine on us—
2 so that your ways may be known on earth,
    your salvation among all nations.

So often in the New Testament, and especially in the parables of Jesus, harvest is used as a metaphor for God taking the initiative to offer his grace and love to the human race. If you recall a few of the parables, you will recognise the agricultural context of them. Seeds, plants growing, gathering in the crops, the harvest itself. And so on. Jesus took images from the harvest to talk about what the Psalmist here calls God’s ways and his salvation.

Sometimes we only celebrate the physical, material harvest (which is a good thing in itself) but Jesus and the Psalmist would have us also give thanks for lives made new by the grace of God and people learning to walk in his ways.

I rarely hear this in Methodism. Have we forgotten this? Or is it that in aging and declining churches we have experienced the joy of people finding new life in Christ and following him so rarely that we have forgotten how to do this?

Perhaps we look on with envy at some of the numerically big and growing churches when God would have us celebrate and give thanks for what he is doing there.

But when the occasions come along in our orbit, let us not forget to give thanks for God’s life-giving and renewing work.

In my last circuit, one of the churches used to host an Iranian church on a Sunday afternoon. Sadly, it folded when the pastor retired and they couldn’t find a successor. The members dispersed to other Iranian congregations and around the UK.

One Sunday morning, a familiar face from that congregation turned up at the usual morning service, and had a friend with him, whom he introduced to us afterwards. He and the friend had been flat-sharing, but now a refugee agency had transferred him to our area, where he was living in a flat above a pizza takeaway.

This man knew very little English, but he came every week and also joined in some midweek activities. He had had to flee from Iran as a political asylum seeker, having opposed the government. He had to leave his wife and young son back there. He didn’t know when escaping that his wife was pregnant with their second son.

We supported his application for asylum and one day he asked to be baptised. I met him, along with a church member who had learned the Farsi language of Iran. We asked him why he was seeking baptism. He explained that he was so bowled over by Jesus, by his incomparable teaching such as the Sermon on the Mount, and by the way he treated women, which was so different from what he saw in Islam.

Oh, and one other thing. That second child whom he had only ever seen on Skype on his mobile phone had gone down with a mystery illness that the doctors couldn’t cure. He had asked us to pray for his little boy one Sunday after worship. Unbeknown to us, the boy had been completely healed after those prayers and before there was any further intervention from the doctors.

Jesus wasn’t a theory to our friend anymore. He was real, and he wanted to follow him. I baptised him on Easter Day.

When things like this happen, we give thanks for the harvest of salvation. May God trust us with may more.

Secondly, thanksgiving for the harvest of justice:

3 May the peoples praise you, God;
    may all the peoples praise you.
4 May the nations be glad and sing for joy,
    for you rule the peoples with equity
    and guide the nations of the earth.
5 May the peoples praise you, God;
    may all the peoples praise you.

Maybe this is more familiar to us at harvest. We know that millions of people in our world do not have what they need due to injustices, and so we campaign for justice. It’s clear from this psalm that God loves justice. He rules the people with equity and guides the nations of the earth.

This is why organisations like the Trussell Trust food banks do not only bring short-term relief to people in crisis, they also campaign for government policies that will help the poorest in our society.

This is why All We Can describes itself as both a relief and a development movement. They promote self-help for people in poverty, including conquering illiteracy. They support another project that campaigns for human rights in rural areas, where people have been left in poverty thanks to the work of major mining companies.

Or take an organisation that is dear to my heart, Tear Fund. Yes, they partner with local churches and organisations to bring relief to people who suffer when there are major disasters, like floods and earthquakes, but they do so much more. They are campaigning hard for the development of an international treaty on plastic pollution. Why? To quote one short paragraph from their website:

We’re facing mountains of plastic pollution. 2 billion people have no safe way to dispose of rubbish, and it’s people in poverty who are suffering the worst impacts of this rubbish problem. They are forced to live and work among piles of waste, which is making them sick, releasing toxic fumes, flooding communities and causing up to a million deaths each year.

When our God promises to rule with equity and guide the nations of the earth, and when we know he is doing that as part of his plan to make all things new, then it is a Christian responsibility for us not only to relieve poverty but to campaign against the causes.

And when we see some victories, let us again give thanks.

Thirdly and finally, thanksgiving for the harvest of the fields:

6 The land yields its harvest;
    God, our God, blesses us.
7 May God bless us still,
    so that all the ends of the earth will fear him.

And now the most familiar of all harvest themes, the one we think about when we sing the hymns, even if more people live in an urban setting these days and are more detached from the means by which food is produced. We raise the song of harvest home, we plough the fields and scatter, or imagine ourselves doing so. We decorate our churches with food and grain.

It’s a good thing to give thanks for God’s material provision for us. It reminds us that Christianity is not just concerned with the soul and the spiritual. Ours is a faith in a Creator God. Ours is a faith in a God who raised his Son bodily from death. He cares about his creation and wants to restore it from its brokenness. So the next time someone tells you that Christians shouldn’t poke their noses into material and political things, tell them they have no right to celebrate harvest festival.

Harvest celebrates the God who in his fatherly goodness takes care of his children and is outraged when some humans deny that provision to others. He is the God who does not want us to need to worry about having the basic essentials of life, who has entrusted the human race with the stewardship of this planet, and when it is mismanaged, he calls on us to change our ways.

Food banks aren’t the only way we show this. The local parish church where we lived in the last circuit ran a ‘community fridge’, which took donations of food the supermarkets weren’t going to be able to sell because it was soon to go out of date. Anyone, regardless of their economic status, could come and help themselves, so that the food could be used for what it was made for, rather than wasted. Which is an interesting thought in this county, where there appears to be no specific provision for food recycling.

One of my churches took food from the local Tesco Express that they couldn’t sell and repurposed it at coffee mornings, including leaving some out free of charge on a table for anyone in need. Several widows on limited incomes attended those coffee mornings and benefited.

In a wasteful world, these are reasons for gratitude towards our loving heavenly Father.

Conclusion

So the harvest is wide and broad, encompassing salvation, justice and material provision. Therefore our thanksgiving and our consequent actions shall surely also be wide in their scope.

No wonder Saint Ambrose said,

“No duty is more urgent than that of returning thanks.”

Maybe it’s the poet and parson George Herbert who summed up our harvest response:

“Thou hast given me so much … Give me one thing more, a grateful heart.”

0

New Beginnings 4: You Have Not Been This Way Before (Joshua 3:1-17)

Joshua 3:1-17

The late American church leader John Wimber used to say that Christians are like people who go down to the quayside, expecting to board a ship that will take them on a luxury cruise, only to find when they get there that their ship is gunmetal grey in colour. It’s a battleship.

He used to recall how, when he first found faith from a background as a rock musician (he was the keyboard player for the Righteous Brothers), he would go to church and hear all the Bible readings about Jesus and the apostles performing great miracles of healing. And he would say to the other church members, “Great! When do we do this?”

To which they would reply, “Oh no, we just talk about it.”

At some point for Christians, the rubber has to hit the road. We’re good at talking, planning, and preparing. But actually ‘doing the stuff’? Hmm, that’s a bit radical.

What I’ve said so far in my three previous sermons about New Beginnings was potentially challenging, but it could just be treated as preparation. Israel still had to take that final step of entering the Promised Land. We have to take that final step from theory to practice.

So yes – we must not live in the past but look to what God wants to do today. Yes – we must live by faith in what God says he wants to do, and not be constrained by fears based on our human limitations. And yes – we need courage and obedience to the Scriptures, all nourished by the promise of God’s presence.

We have to do something new. ‘You have never been this way before,’ say the Israelite officers to the people (verse 4). But that’s no excuse for staying put. This goes way beyond just singing an unfamiliar hymn! It means getting out of our comfortable space in church fellowship and taking God’s redeeming love in Christ into the world in both our deeds and our words.

Here are four things that Joshua 3 teaches us we need in order to live out our calling in the world.

Firstly, follow God’s lead.

“When you see the ark of the covenant of the Lord your God, and the Levitical priests carrying it, you are to move out from your positions and follow it. 4 Then you will know which way to go, since you have never been this way before. But keep a distance of about two thousand cubits between you and the ark; do not go near it.”

The ark of the covenant is the portable presence of God with Israel, especially in the centuries before the Temple is built at Jerusalem. For the ark to go ahead of Israel is to signify that God goes ahead of them. Their calling is to follow God’s lead. God will lead them forward into the land.

The Christian call is also to follow God’s lead. He leads and directs the mission to which he calls us. We don’t invent things and just do what we fancy. We seek God’s lead and we respond.

That is built right into all Christian theology in one way or another. In the Methodist tradition, we talk of God’s ‘prevenient grace’, which means that God acts graciously before we ever do anything.

There are some similarities in the way Christians widely talk about mission today. We say that Christian mission is the mission of God, not our mission. We are called to find out what God is doing, and join in.

But how do we do that? Well, there is no getting around the need to practise what Wesley called ‘The means of grace’ and which modern Christians ecumenically call ‘The spiritual disciplines.’ It means actively seeking to be in tune with God. That requires a serious commitment to prayer and to meditating on Scripture. It’s no good thinking that we can just tick those off as done on Sunday mornings in the service, these need to be daily personal habits.

There are many ways to practise these disciplines, and we shall vary according to our personalities and gifts how we do them. I don’t have time to list different options now, but speak with me if you want some ideas.

What is certain is that the church sinks without them.

Secondly, imitate God’s character.

5 Joshua told the people, “Consecrate yourselves, for tomorrow the Lord will do amazing things among you.”

To consecrate oneself is to dedicate oneself to God’s service. It is to be set aside for holy work. It is not just for the priests (or modern-day ministers, for that matter!) but for all of God’s people.

God’s mission is not something that merely requires a certain amount of religious competence. It needs character, too: God’s character. God’s mission is to make all things new, and that includes our character. If we are to be in harmony with God’s purposes, we need to grow in his likeness and utterly dedicated to his cause.

If you want an engineer or a plumber, character may not matter, only their competence. But not with the mission of God. It requires a people who are growing in Christlikeness.

So we are called to consecrate ourselves before God does amazing things among us.

Joshua does not tell us here how the people did this, but we may have a clue from a similar event. When they had arrived at Mount Sinai after leaving Egypt, Israel had been called to be consecrated at the foot of the mountain while Moses climbed up to meet with God. How did they do it then? By various forms of fasting. Not simply fasting from food, but married couples also abstained from marital relations.

Fasting takes various forms. We can fast from food, from marital relations, from TV, from gadgets, and so on. In each case we are giving up something good for a season to concentrate on something far better and much more important. That’s why when we fast we also pray.

And as we show God just how serious we are about his will by abstaining from something good in order to find extra time for prayer, so he will respond to a commitment like that by forming us more like his Son through the gift of the Holy Spirit in us.

It is no good being recklessly unholy when God turns up in power to do amazing things. If we are, either his power will burn us or in his mercy he will not act powerfully at all.

But if we long for God to act in power, we need to consecrate ourselves.

Thirdly, grow in faith.

8 Tell the priests who carry the ark of the covenant: ‘When you reach the edge of the Jordan’s waters, go and stand in the river.’”

Have you noticed the similarities and differences in this passage with the account of Israel crossing the Red Sea out of Egypt into the wilderness? Here at the end of their wilderness wanderings, they are again faced by a mass of water, and the waters divide.

Only this time, Joshua’s command differs from that of Moses. At the Red Sea in Exodus 14, Moses told the frightened people that all they needed to do was stand still and they would see the deliverance of their God. But here, the command is not to stand still at the water’s edge.

On this occasion, however, they don’t get to wait on dry land. Or at least, the priests are going to need some towels afterwards, because they have to go and stand in the river before God divides the water this time. They were called to do something more by faith before God enacted his promise.

Faith, like love, is something that needs to grow. If I still loved Debbie the same amount today as I did on our wedding day, our marriage would be long over. If I still had the same faith that I had on the day I was confirmed and received into Methodist membership at the age of sixteen then my faith would have collapsed years ago. It is for good reason that God calls us to grow in faith.

In my first circuit as a minister, I got involved in some youth ministry that worked across most of the churches in the town. We began by holding Sunday night youth services, but they became a bit cheesy, and in order to challenge ourselves in a more difficult situation, we then hired a vacant shop in the town. We couldn’t use as much gear, and so we did what we called ‘Worship Unplugged.’ If any of you remember the MTV Unplugged shows from the 1990s, you’ll have an idea of what we did.

But we had too many numbers to cram into the shop, and so we moved to the church hall at the URC. Again, that was fine for a time, until the numbers made that venue too uncomfortable. There was only one venue in the town that would hold us, but it required a step of faith. It was the local nightclub.

One of our team, a Christian businessman, approached the nightclub owner, and he said he was willing to take our booking for one Sunday night a month. He would provide bar staff who would only sell non-alcoholic drinks on those occasions.

There was just one thing: the fee he wanted went beyond our existing budget.

This was the time which we identified as our ‘put your feet in the water’ moment. God wanted us to go further than we had before. We agreed to the terms for the nightclub without having the money.

But when we did, another Christian businessman in the town stepped forward and underwrote the project.

If you want to go forward in faith (and why wouldn’t you?), then is it time for you to get your feet wet, metaphorically speaking?

Fourthly and finally, remember God’s deeds.

12 Now then, choose twelve men from the tribes of Israel, one from each tribe. 

What’s that about, then? The twelve men get mentioned but then Joshua goes back to talking about the priests.

We find the answer in chapter 4, which we didn’t read. These men take stones from the river and create a memorial to the miracle God does here.

Why? This is no monument or museum. This is no living in the past. This is about learning from the past. It is easy to forget what God has done. In later Old Testament times, tragically the prophets record that Israel had forgotten her God. Not that she forgot God existed, but she forgot what God had done for her. And when she did, she went off the rails spiritually.

We need to do something similar, because it stirs our faith to believe again in a God who does mighty things. The supreme memorial for Christians is of course Holy Communion, when we remember what God did for us in Christ at the Cross.

But we need to create smaller memorials too, by recording things God has done individually for each of us. Here’s how I have found that to be important.

Like many ministers, I have on more than one occasion become discouraged and considered resigning. If that shocks you, then you would be even more shocked to know the substantial percentage of ministers who have felt like that.

But when I have been down in the depths, on some occasions Debbie has said to me, how can you consider such a course of action when you look back at all the ways in which God guided you into this calling? My metaphorical memorial stones brought me back – even if reluctantly at times!

What are your memorial stones? If you don’t have a heap of them, then perhaps now is the time to start collecting them.

Because it’s time to set out on that new beginning to which God has called us, following his lead, living in his ways, stretching our faith, and being sustained by remembering his mighty deeds.

0

New Beginnings 3: Occupy The Land (Joshua 1:1-9)

Joshua 1:1-9

Moses my servant is dead. (Verse 2a)

It’s not quite what we experience in Methodism when one minister leaves and a new one arrives. Or, as is the case here, one minister in the circuit changes responsibilities and a new one arrives. But it is that time when we break with the past and set out on a new adventure. 

Now then, you and all these people, get ready to cross the River Jordan into the land I am about to give to them – to the Israelites. (Verse 2b)

I know our call is not literally to occupy geographical land, as was Israel’s. Nor is it military conquest. For Christians, crossing the Jordan and occupying the land is metaphorical. It is about breaking out of our holy huddles and bringing the Good News of God’s victory in Jesus Christ into the world. 

But even so, there are some parallels between the commands God gives Joshua and what he requires of us as we begin moving forward. These are commitments we can renew at our Covenant Service. Here are three. 

Firstly, be strong and courageous.

6 Be strong and courageous, because you will lead these people to inherit the land I swore to their ancestors to give them.

7 ‘Be strong and very courageous.

I think Joshua gets the memo! Be strong and courageous; be strong and very courageous. 

There is no doubt that we need strength and courage to announce the Good News of God’s victory in Jesus Christ to the world. We know that we risk being mocked, ignored, or maybe at best patronised. We know that we live in a society that understands life in a very different way from the historic Gospel. On occasions, the difference can be so much that we are assumed to be a threat to the well-being of our society, and we are treated as enemies. The number of people with a residual sympathy for Christianity is declining fast.

When our world is like that, it’s little wonder that we can feel nervous about speaking up for Christ. No wonder we get worried. Unlike Israel, we do not face military enemies who can take our lives, but we do face people who may be cruel with words and other actions. 

We too need to hear the injunction to be strong and courageous. We need strength that will overcome our paralysing fears so that we act in word and deed for the Gospel. 

We need strength and courage to overcome the excuses we make for keeping silent about Jesus. I’ve heard some Christians engage in worthy social action programmes but keep quiet about their faith, while claiming that their social action was their evangelism. No, it wasn’t. It was a demonstration of the Gospel, but the Good News still needs to be proclaimed and explained. That requires our words. 

We don’t all need to be confident evangelists with slick presentations, we just need to be people who are willing to speak of what Jesus has done for us and what he means to us. We are witnesses: we speak of what we have seen and heard. 

Neither do we all need to be people with clever answers to the questions and objections people raise against our faith. We can say with all honesty, I don’t know an answer to what you are saying, but I will come back to you. In the meantime, we can bring their questions to the Christian community for reflection, and where people who are more specialised in their knowledge can offer some thoughts. We can and should do our own thinking, too – O for more Christians to do serious reading about their faith in between Sundays. 

At heart, we simply need to be people who will speak of the difference Jesus has made in our lives. A friend of mine is an Anglican priest, and he is serving in parishes in the Church in Wales. Every week, he puts a video on Facebook of an ordinary church member speaking about the difference Jesus has made them. 

Can we do that? If Jesus went to the Cross for us, surely we can do that? The Cross gives us the strength and courage we need. 

Secondly, be scriptural.

Be careful to obey all the law my servant Moses gave you; do not turn from it to the right or to the left, that you may be successful wherever you go. 8 Keep this Book of the Law always on your lips; meditate on it day and night, so that you may be careful to do everything written in it. Then you will be prosperous and successful.

Joshua doesn’t have the whole Bible at hand – obviously! He just has the Law that God has given Moses. But he is to follow the revelation he has been given. 

We, on the other hand, do have the entire Bible. It is the collection of books which the Church recognised had the particular signs of the Holy Spirit’s work as the apostles, prophets, and others recorded in their own styles what God had revealed to them. 

And in handling the Bible, we hold no ordinary book, or library of books. We hold a collection that in classical Christian terms is sufficient rule for our faith and practice. Its origins with the Spirit’s guidance of divinely commissioned messengers makes it the written Word of God. Its job is to point us to the living Word of God, Jesus himself. 

As Christians, we therefore have no liberty to depart from and contradict the teaching of Holy Scripture in all that it affirms about our faith and practice. We cannot soften our message when the world doesn’t like it. We cannot adapt our meaning to make it more congenial, for if we do so we are more concerned to please people than please God. And in any case, if we think that making ourselves more like the world will bring more people into the church, we are seriously deluded. If they don’t have to change, there is no need for them to join us! 

In my ministry among you, it will be my task to expound the teaching of the Bible as our primary guidance in their faith. I know there are difficult parts. Some are difficult, because we don’t understand them. Other passages are difficult, because we do understand them and don’t like them. But I will grapple with the difficulties and seek to provide a lead through such exposition. 

And I therefore call every Christian to a regular and sustained encounter with the Bible, so that we may engage seriously with the written Word and let it reveal to us the will of the living Word, Jesus himself. 

Can we renew that commitment at this our Covenant Service?

Thirdly and finally, the promise of God’s presence.

9 Have I not commanded you? Be strong and courageous. Do not be afraid; do not be discouraged, for the Lord your God will be with you wherever you go.’

There it is a third time: ‘Be strong and courageous.’ Only this time it isn’t simply a command. It’s accompanied by a promise. In the Lord’s desire for us not to lapse into fear or discouragement, he makes Joshua and his people a promise: ‘the Lord your God will be with you wherever you go.’

There is something similar here to the promise of Jesus to be with us always, even to the end of the age in Matthew 28. In both cases, the promise of the divine presence with his people is given in a specific context. And that context is of God’s people being sent out into the world as witnesses to him. Israel and her army will witness to the presence of God as they occupy a land where tribes who practise detestable things such as child sacrifice are. Christians will go into the world with the Good News of God’s victory over death and sin in Jesus Christ. 

It’s not just a general promise for God to be with his people. It’s a promise that God will be with his people at the very time they may need strength and courage. 

It is as if God said, I didn’t make up all this going into places where people will be hostile just for a bit of fun as I watch you suffer. Oh no. I will be with you. 

Christians may not have the sort of visible signs of God’s presence that Israel had in the wilderness, such as the pillar of cloud by day and the pillar of fire by night. In any case, that didn’t always stop Israel from disobeying. 

But the sign of God’s presence with us is the gift of the Holy Spirit. The work of the Spirit is to bear witness to Jesus, and he will do that in many ways in our lives. He will help us see Jesus in our everyday. He will fill us with the peace of Christ, and not only individually, the peace of Christ will dwell in our midst. The Spirit will be there to help us speak when we are opposed. He will be our Advocate when we are under accusation. 

We may be a long time past Pentecost in the church calendar, but this is as good an occasion as any in the Christian Year to cry, ‘Come, Holy Spirit. Come with the presence of God. Come to make us strong and courageous as we witness to Jesus. Come and enliven the Scriptures as we read them so that we may know the will of God.’

Yes indeed: come, Holy Spirit.

0

New Beginnings 2: Moving On (Deuteronomy 1:1-46)

Deuteronomy 1:1-46

“Are we nearly there yet?”

I’m sure you recognise that as the frustrated cry of a young child on a car journey. I’m pretty certain those words came out of my mouth when I was small.

A frustrated child would have been driven mad by the antics of ancient Israel:

2 (It takes eleven days to go from Horeb to Kadesh Barnea by the Mount Seir road.)

3 In the fortieth year, on the first day of the eleventh month, Moses proclaimed to the Israelites all that the Lord had commanded him concerning them.

Forty years to travel a distance that should have taken them eleven days. And now Moses preaches this recent history back to the Israelites by recognising this trait in them: 

6 The Lord our God said to us at Horeb, ‘You have stayed long enough at this mountain. 7 Break camp and advance …

God is calling them into a new future, a future of blessing, in the Promised Land. But they are resistant.

And that makes this a good passage to look at in the second of my sermons on New Beginnings at the start of my ministry here. Last week, I talked about how we must leave the past behind, learning from it yes, but living there no, and seek the new thing God wants to do in our day and age. (You can watch the video or read the blog). This week, I want to talk about moving on, and the spiritual qualities we need.

Here are four important things we need to practise.

Firstly, every member ministry.

In verses 9 to 18 we read of how Moses was overloaded and how he shared the leadership and pastoral care of the people. He knew the whole enterprise would grind to a halt unless he stopped everything funnelling through him. 

I once heard about a vicar who would go to the bottom of his garden every morning at 10:30 to watch the Inter-City express train whizz past. Someone asked him why he did so.

He replied, “I want to see the only thing in this parish that moves without me pushing it.”

I think Moses felt like that, and so he drew on the gifts and talents of others. He wasn’t worried about keeping all the glory for himself. 

At Monday’s welcome service I said how such occasions made me uncomfortable. The very fact that ministers get public welcome services but others don’t tends to raise people’s expectations of people like me. 

But, I said, we are not your saviours, because the job of Saviour of the world is not vacant. It was taken long ago by Jesus. Ministers come alongside to help lead the work of the kingdom, we don’t come to save your church. 

So – I won’t be the first preacher to say this to you, but it bears regular repeating – have you considered what your talents and spiritual gifts are? And have you offered them in the service of God’s kingdom? We are all what the Bible calls ‘vessels of honour’ who have the privilege of serving Christ in response to his great salvation. 

How does that work out for you?

Secondly, obedience.

After the spies come back with some beautiful fruit from the Promised Land and their message that ‘It is a good land that the Lord our God is giving us’ (verse 25), how does Israel respond? Moses says,

26 But you were unwilling to go up; you rebelled against the command of the Lord your God.

Let us not think that once we have received salvation we can behave as we like. Obedience is not what earns us the love of God, but it is the way we show our gratitude for the salvation we have received. It’s no accident that Israel receives the Ten Commandments after being set free from Egypt, and not before. 

And there’s a very specific command here that Israel disobeys: to take the presence of God into the world where he is not yet known, and where people at the time worshipped other gods, false gods. Oh no, they said, we’ll stay among ourselves here where we’re comfortable. 

And God gets mad. 

I was once asked to conduct the funeral of an elderly church member, and so I arranged a meeting with her family to discuss the service and talk about her life. When her grown-up children, who were no longer churchgoers, were telling me about her, they said one very striking thing.

They told me that the old lady’s whole life had been based on the church and its activities, even her social life.

I think they were trying to impress me, but inside my heart sank. Just as Israel had a command from God to get into the Promised Land, so we have a command from Jesus to get into the whole world with his redeeming love. 

It’s so easy just to have a nice quiet life with our Christian friends, but all of us are called to show and tell the Gospel in our words and deeds. There are people around us who need some demonstration of God’s love, and we are the people to do it. 

I was so sad when I heard one of the lecturers where I trained for the ministry say, “I don’t have any non-Christian friends.” What a tragedy for the Gospel that was. 

There are many ways we could explore this question of obedience, but let’s just concentrate on this for now: how are our lives shining with the Gospel in the world?

Thirdly, gratitude.

It’s more than disobedience to take the presence of God into the world, says Moses. He goes on to say, 

27 You grumbled in your tents and said, ‘The Lord hates us; so he brought us out of Egypt to deliver us into the hands of the Amorites to destroy us.

Grumbling, rather than gratitude, characterises Israel here. 

Please don’t misunderstand me. There are times to complain. We should not always let lazy or malicious people mistreat us or others. There are issues of justice to take into account.

But there is a grumbling negativity that pervades some Christians and some churches. Nothing is ever good enough for some people. 

In one church I had people refuse to take on a role with teenagers. Two of those I approached declined, giving the same reason. 

“I’m not taking that on just to be ripped to shreds at Church Council by [Name].”

And when we did get someone else to do the job, guess what happened to them?

When we consider all that God has done for us in Jesus Christ from creation to redemption to the gift of the Spirit and the promise of a New Creation, surely our default attitude in the community of faith needs to be one of gratitude. It will show in our worship. It will come through in our relationships and our sense of community. It will be a shining witness to the world. 

When I was a child, I recall my maternal grandmother, who lived with us, singing the old chorus ‘Count your blessings’ around the house. The thought of counting our blessings and being surprised how much the Lord has done is a good principle. Put into practice, it changes the atmosphere in a place. It brings a kingdom atmosphere, I might say. 

In saying all this I don’t want to minimise the hardships and struggles that some of you are doubtless facing. But I do want to say that the sort of church which can survive and thrive in the future is a grateful one. There is more than enough of the grumbling spirit in the world. Let’s live – as one Christian leader once put it – ‘in the opposite spirit.’

Fourthly and finally, faith.

Here is the last issue that Moses and God have with Israel:

28 Where can we go? Our brothers have made our hearts melt in fear. They say, “The people are stronger and taller than we are; the cities are large, with walls up to the sky. We even saw the Anakites there.”’

29 Then I said to you, ‘Do not be terrified; do not be afraid of them. 30 The Lord your God, who is going before you, will fight for you, as he did for you in Egypt, before your very eyes, 31 and in the wilderness. There you saw how the Lord your God carried you, as a father carries his son, all the way you went until you reached this place.’

32 In spite of this, you did not trust in the Lord your God, 33 who went ahead of you on your journey, in fire by night and in a cloud by day, to search out places for you to camp and to show you the way you should go.

Fear replaces faith. Israel sees the task ahead purely in terms of what they can or cannot do on their own. They do not see that when God commands something that seems to be humanly impossible, that same God will provide the means to achieve what he has commanded. Israel does not trust its God. Paralysing fear takes over.

This is certainly something we see in churches, and it inhibits their mission. It may even be the beginning of the death of those churches. 

Perhaps you have come across churches where they have been offered a great refurbishment and rebuilding project that will reinvigorate their premises for mission. Their existing building is getting old and expensive to run. Although a lively and loving community worships there, the local community looks at the building and thinks it’s closed. What do they do?

They can choose between fear and faith. Fear says, ‘We can’t do this. It’s too much money and too much work for the people we have.’ Faith says, ‘What is God saying to us here? If he is calling us to do this, then we will.’

Fear says we can’t. Faith says God can – provided it’s what he has said. 

Hudson Taylor, the famous nineteenth century missionary to China, once said this:

God’s work done in God’s way will never lack God’s supply.

Conclusion

Perhaps, like Israel at the beginning of Deuteronomy, we are on the verge of something new. Will we embrace these qualities and go forward with God?

  • Every member ministry, where all our gifts contribute
  • Obedience, to take the love of God into the world
  • Gratitude for all God has done for us in Christ
  • Faith, to run with whatever God calls us to do, even if it stretches us.
2

New Beginnings 1: Isaiah 43:14-21

Isaiah 43:14-21

I was once talking with a Baptist minister friend about what our respective denominations do when one minister leaves and a new minister comes. I extolled the Methodist system where there is little or no gap between one minister going and the new one taking over. It saved congregations from enduring a vacancy or interregnum, I said. 

“But you’ve got that wrong,” he told me. “There is value in a church having a gap in between pastors. It gives them space to grieve the loss of a much-loved minister.”

And I think he had a point. I start with you today only a few days after David completed his time as your presbyter. Not only that, but he is also still in the circuit, and that’s a situation I know all about from the minister’s side. Five years into my last appointment, my responsibilities changed. I went from looking after Knaphill and Addlestone Methodist churches to having care of Knaphill and Byfleet. I missed Addlestone. And they were still close by in the circuit, which made it harder. 

So if today you are feeling the loss of David, and are wondering what things will be like with me, when I am largely an unknown quantity to you, I want to say I get it. 

You may not be wild that the first thing I want to highlight from Isaiah 43 is God telling his people to put the past behind them.

            Forget the former things;
    do not dwell on the past. (Verse 18)

This needs handling carefully. There are good ways to relate to the past, and bad ways.

But make no mistake, God is serious about us putting the past behind us. In the passage, the ‘former things’ he tells Israel to forget are when he parted the Red Sea for them and then closed it over the pursuing Egyptian army. It’s like he’s telling them to forget the Exodus – the central event in Israel’s history and the focus of the Passover. It would be like telling Christians to forget Good Friday, Easter, and Holy Communion – and did you notice how Jesus in the Luke reading referred to his forthcoming death and resurrection as his ‘departure’, or his ‘exodus’?

Of course, the Lord doesn’t mean it completely literally that Israel should forget the Exodus. Later in the chapter, he talks about Israel’s need to remember. This is shock language to get over a point, just as Jesus’ teaching, including his parables, often included shock language to make a point. 

We need to distinguish between living in the past (which is unhealthy) and learning from the past (which is life-giving). We live in the past when we make past events romantic and perhaps perfect when they probably weren’t. They become a mental prison for us. They crush our imagination and hope. 

For example, in one previous circuit there where I served there was one vociferous elderly lady who would not stop going on about the time when the Sunday School at the church had a hundred children in it. She expected us to get back to those days, and she loaded guilt on those who were serving in the Junior Church. She expected our two children, themselves only just on the cusp of starting school, to be among the pioneers!

Whatever you have enjoyed and appreciated in the past at this church, please do not allow those memories to blind you to what God wants to do today. 

Our reasons for living in the past are often not good ones. It may be that we don’t like the way things are going in our world today and that we fear the future. Well, there are bad trends in our society, but no Christian has reason to fear the future. We believe the future is in God’s hands. 

Indeed, one of my favourite quotes for sermons (and I’m nervous about playing this card right at the beginning of my ministry here!) is from the American preacher and sociologist Tony Campolo. When asked how he could be so positive and hopeful in a dark and depressing world he replied, “I’ve read the book and I’ve peeked at the final chapter: Jesus wins!”

So don’t live in the past out of fear. 

And don’t live in the past out of a sense of comfort. Yes, there are uncertainties ahead of us, but we are people of faith. We are called to put our trust in Jesus. Don’t go back in your mind to a comfortable time in the past in preference to trusting him. That isn’t our calling. 

The best thing to do with the past is to learn from it. We can learn about strengths and weaknesses in our lives, and in our families and institutions that influence us. 

Most important of all, learning from the past means we look back at what God has done in Jesus Christ, and we learn more about the character of the God that we love, trust, and serve. Isn’t that what we do in reading Scripture, for example?

So that’s my first point – let’s put the past behind us. Learn from it, yes, but live there, no. 

The second of the two things I want to emphasise to day is look for what God is doing now.

            See, I am doing a new thing!
    Now it springs up; do you not perceive it?
I am making a way in the wilderness
    and streams in the wasteland. (Verse 19)

In the case of Israel, they were in exile in Babylon at this time and had been so for a few decades. Older generations were dying off. New generations were being born there who had never seen the Promised Land. But now God promises to take them home: that’s what the way in the wilderness is. Our best guess is this prophecy came about ten years or so before they began to return. 

Maybe you are disillusioned about the state of the church today. I certainly get that way at times! There is a sense in which we are in exile, too. We are now a minority in our nation and our culture. Most people are not religious. We are strange to them. Sometimes they regard us as a threat. There may be Christian elements embedded into our unwritten constitution, as we saw in some ways at the coronation of King Charles earlier this year. But in practice, we are anything but a Christian nation (whatever that is, anyway). Spiritually, we live in exile. 

And when you live in exile for any length of time, either hope starts to fade, or we chase the latest fad, or we try to ape the culture we are living in. None of these is a good Christian response. 

We do need to live in the alien culture and to bless it, as Jeremiah told the first batch of Jewish exiles in Babylon, when we wrote them a letter. (You can read it in Jeremiah 29.) We can even get involved in its structures and power, as Daniel and his three friends did. What we can’t do is absorb the values. 

What will that look like for us? The COVID pandemic taught us the importance of the digital world as a way people live and communicate today. It doesn’t replace meeting together physically but is added to it. We are called to live in a hybrid of the two. 

We also look at how we can bless people outside the church today. We may or may not agree with their lifestyles, but we can still bless them. For instance, in my last circuit in one village the churches took boxes of chocolates to all the local shops and businesses at Christmas. We told them how much we appreciated them and that we were praying for them to prosper. We also gave them an email address if they wanted to send us any prayer requests. 

We get on with doing things like this while we wait for a word from the Lord about the new things he wants to do with us and among us. They won’t be any old crackpot thing that someone suggests, but they may surprise us, and they will certainly be consistent with what we know about his will and character from Holy Scripture. 

Indeed, we shall need to be people who are soaked in the Scriptures in order to test various claims when they come along, saying, ‘This is what God is calling us to do today.’ We shall need to echo the cry of John Wesley when he prayed, ‘O Lord, make me a man of one book.’

It may even be that, just like the Jewish exiles in Babylon, the older generations like many of us die out and God does his new thing predominantly with younger generations who will be the vanguard of his renewal. Older forms of church like ours might go and the newer churches replace us. But if that is what takes the Gospel into a new day and age, we should rejoice. God did that when he raised up Methodism. He may do that again. 

Of this I am sure: God’s new thing will involve us going outward with his redeeming love and not merely inward to a religious club.

So in conclusion, are we ready to leave the past behind, learning from it but not living in it? Are we willing to hear God speak of his new thing and test all claims to it by Holy Scripture? And in the meantime, will we hear the call to bless this alien culture we live in?

So now you know why the hymn before the sermon was ‘Lord, for the years.’ Let us echo the final two lines in our lives and in our life together: 

            Past put behind us, for the future take us,

                        Lord of our lives, to live for Christ alone. (Timothy Dudley-Smith)

3

Farewell 3: The End Is Not The End

Jeremiah 8:18-22 and 1 Corinthians 15:50-58

Last month, a poet friend of mine published a new anthology of his poetry. It is a series of poems for the end of life and beyond. He entitled it ‘The End Is Not The End’.

And if you want a title for the sermon today, that’s it: The End Is Not The End. That doesn’t mean I’m staying in this circuit after all, and that the farewells have all been part of a hoax.

No, I want to face head on the difficulties and discouragements we face in our churches here, and which of course so many churches in the western world do.

A few years ago, I was praying about my time here and I wondered in my praying what would summarise my time here. What popped into my head was a Bible verse I didn’t want to hear. We heard it in the Jeremiah reading:

‘The harvest is past,
    the summer has ended,
    and we are not saved.’

(Jeremiah 8:20)

I knew that many of the hopes and dreams I had had when coming here were not going to be fulfilled. Situations that looked like they had great potential proved to have more style than substance. People who gave an initial impression of being deeply spiritual turned out to be like the seeds that the sower in Jesus’ parable threw on rocky ground or among thorns.

And alongside all this we are fighting an uphill battle in a culture that is increasingly hostile to our faith.

So what does the Methodist Church nationally do? Well, apart from its periodic attempts to impersonate your embarrassing trendy uncle, it chooses not to learn from history but to delete a historic document, the so-called Liverpool Minutes, that show how the first Methodists to face decline dug deep into their spirituality and turned things around.

Meanwhile, it buries its head in the sand when all the evidence is there that the structures we have are creaking towards breaking point and it adds more bureaucracy – the classic behaviour of a decaying organisation. Let’s have even bigger Districts. Let’s amalgamate circuits to such a size that if you are like the one I am moving to, they cannot meaningfully consult the entire circuit about the appointment of a new minister. We defend these structures despite all the evidence from other churches that we need greater continuity between churches and their ordained leaders. And we spread our leaders even thinner.

And we pile even more responsibilities on the leaders without taking anything away from them. Renewing my Safeguarding training has gone from a two-hour session four years ago to eight hours now. There are good ideas added, such as getting all the ministers into a pastoral supervision programme, but no-one tells us what we should drop. Conference clearly thinks we can make bricks without straw.

‘The harvest is past,
    the summer has ended,
    and we are not saved.’

And it’s not just the ministers facing this. I look at what we ask our congregations to do, especially those in leadership positions. Some of them are being worn down to the bone with the amount of practical work and administration we need them to do. Not only that, some of them are holding these responsibilities at ages well beyond that where we always used to let people retire gracefully from positions in the church and let them have a well-deserved rest.

‘The harvest is past,
    the summer has ended,
    and we are not saved.’

Now to some of you this might sound like I am just settling some scores at the end of thirteen years here. Please believe me when I say that’s not what this is about. I believe we need some honesty and reality about the situation.

Of course, that’s what got Jeremiah into trouble in his day. Relentlessly he told God’s people the stark truth of their situation. With no change in direction, they were going to be conquered by Babylon and taken into exile there. He didn’t deal in the frothy shallow positivity of the popular culture.

Or maybe you think I’m just here as a spiritual doom and gloom merchant. We call such people Jeremiahs. But I am not here to be a religious Eeyore. Nor am I here to be Private Frazer from Dad’s Army, crying, ‘Doomed, doomed, we’re all doomed!’

I am here today to be a small-scale Jeremiah, but not in the way you might think. Let me explain.

Forty years ago, when I trained to be a Methodist Local Preacher, we had to sit four written exams. In my Old Testament paper, there was a question where we were asked to assess a statement that Jeremiah was a prophet of doom.

And like all good exam answers, the best response was to say, ‘Yes but’. You see, Jeremiah was about doom – in the short term – but in the long term he was about hope. Short term doom, yes – but long term hope.

He called on the exiled Israelites to find ways of living positively in Babylon and blessing their captors. And he looked beyond the exile to when they would return to the Promised Land.

So I want to proclaim to you today short term doom but long term hope. The End Is Not The End. Just as Jeremiah held out hope that it was still possible to live a fruitful life of faith in an alien and hostile culture, and just as he saw beyond that to restoration, so I want to say something similar to you today, but with a New Testament spin.

And so this is where I want to bring in our reading from 1 Corinthians 15. This is Paul’s great chapter on the Resurrection, and the verses we heard were the climax of that chapter.

This passage has the verse that has been dubbed the verse for the church crèche. It’s verse 51:

Listen, I tell you a mystery: we will not all sleep, but we will all be changed.

But to be more serious, here is God’s great promise that The End Is Not The End. For just as Jesus was raised from the dead, so shall we at the end of time. Death will be swallowed up in victory. Its sting will be neutralised. We gain the final victory through our Risen Lord.

It’s like the famous American preacher Tony Campolo used to put it. He would recount how people would come up to him and ask him how on earth he could be positive and hopeful in such a dreadful world as ours.

His reply? ‘I’ve read the last chapter of the book, and Jesus wins!’

Friends, The End Is Not The End. If it ends in death, then it’s not the end. Not in the light of Jesus our Risen Lord, it isn’t.

Well, you may say, that’s all very well, but isn’t that pie in the sky when we die? What can you say to us as we have to continue living in difficult times as Christians?

I want to give you two words of encouragement.

The first is this. Although we await the great resurrection at the end of time, we do experience in the meantime some little resurrections. Here’s what I mean by that.

Many of you know I was recently on sabbatical, and before I went, some of you asked what I was doing during my three months. One of the things I did was I spent five days at the Lee Abbey community in North Devon. I went there for a Christian conference on the theme of how to handle disappointment in the life of faith. I went knowing that I was wrestling with disappointment towards the end of my time here. I went knowing also that most if not all of us live with disappointments in our lives, and it’s therefore an important pastoral issue.

Now I guess one of the things we’re dealing with in this sermon is the theme of coping with disappointment. Our speaker at Lee Abbey that week focussed on what is commonly called ‘The now and the not yet’ of the kingdom of God. We see some signs of God’s kingdom now in our life of faith, perhaps when we see remarkable answers to prayer, but we also experience the fact that God’s kingdom has not yet come fully. Yes, Jesus reigns, but not everyone nor all creation bows the knee to him yet.

So it is part of the Christian life to live in this tension. And what I simply want to say to you about this today is that even as you find yourself immersed in disappointments, doom, and struggles, never lose sight of the fact that God in his mercy will grant you some little resurrections. He may be silent at times, but he is not absent. As I said to the Knaphill people last Sunday morning, sometimes he is like Jesus walking alongside the two disciples on their way to Emmaus, who do not realise who their companion is. You may not recognise his presence at times in the midst of the sorrows, but he is there, and he will grant you tokens of his grace.

The second word of encouragement I want to give you is this. The passage from 1 Corinthians 15 is very special to me personally, and I’d like to tell you why.

Many of you know that in my last appointment I had a rough time. I was a misfit in the appointment, and for me that meant five miserable years. We actually considered whether I might need to come out of ministry for a few years to recover and see whether I ever wanted to come back into ministry at all. Before we left, I went into counselling for some help.

In all those difficulties, this was the passage which was my lifesaver. At times I confess it only just kept my head above the water. But it did.

You see, you might expect that Paul’s great chapter on the Resurrection would end with inspirational words about the life to come, but he doesn’t. His last words are words that earth how we are going to live now in the light of that resurrection hope. Verse 58:

 Therefore, my dear brothers and sisters, stand firm. Let nothing move you. Always give yourselves fully to the work of the Lord, because you know that your labour in the Lord is not in vain.

Your labour in the Lord is not in vain – so keep going.

I have never really understood why God called us to that last appointment. I have the odd theory, but nothing completely makes sense. But, says Paul, your labour in the Lord is not in vain. Whatever I did for him and his kingdom there, Jesus will take and make into something beautiful because in the resurrection it will endure. It felt like five wasted years to me, but the resurrection means that in the economy of God it will not be wasted.

For those of you here who are particularly living at the coal face of our difficulties in the church today, I want you to hear those words: your labour in the Lord is not in vain.

For my lovely ministerial colleagues who work hard and don’t always feel they see the fruits they long for: your labour in the Lord is not in vain.

For my dear church members, not least some of you in my church leadership teams, who have put in sterling efforts that must at times feel like King Canute trying to banish the incoming tide, I say the same: your labour in the Lord is not in vain.

For those of you like me and some members of my family, who live with the dark clouds of depression, I say to you: your labour in the Lord is not in vain.

Just remember, dear friends, that if you think everything is ending in death and darkness, The End Is Not The End.

Jesus wins.

1

Farewell 2: Jesus Makes Sense (Luke 24:13-35)

Luke 24:13-35

So we come to my final sermon here. When I think back to our beginning here, I remember the sense of hope and positivity I felt about this church. I thought there was huge potential here. I really thought something could happen.

So to come to the end of my ministry here at a time when the church is seriously having to consider closure before too long is something I never would have anticipated thirteen years ago.

I have reflected on why we have got to this point, and I have my theories. Could we have anticipated before it happened that we would be financially vulnerable? Possibly. Have we been a divided congregation? Yes, at times. Have we on occasion chosen fear over faith? I think we might have done. And did COVID-19 accelerate our problems? Without question.

You may have your theories, too. But it’s all academic now. This is the situation we are in. So what to say?

I may have told you along the way the story of the late Ugandan evangelist, Bishop Festo Kivengere, whose ministry came to prominence during the evil and violent dictatorship of Idi Amin in that country. One day, he was told he could address a group of men before they were shot to death by firing squad in a football stadium before a huge crowd.

Kivengere said he didn’t know what on earth to say to men facing that fate. But then he heard the quiet voice of Jesus speaking to him:

“Tell them about me. I’ll make sense.”

So that’s what I’m attempting this morning. To tell you about Jesus, so that he will make sense to you at this time, and bring you hope in whatever you face when I have gone.

This story of the Emmaus Road is one that is special to Debbie and me, because the preacher at our wedding chose this lesson and preached on it. But I’m not aiming to reproduce that sermon. Instead, I want to take two simple truths about Jesus in the passage, because I believe they will hold you strong in faith, whatever you face.

Firstly, Jesus is present with us in our grief.

To some extent, the account of Cleopas and his companion walking along talking to the stranger about Jesus and not realising it’s Jesus is almost comical. It feels like a pantomime. Not so much, ‘He’s behind you!’ as ‘He’s beside you!’

But listen to them as they pour out their litany of dashed hopes about Jesus. All their dreams are gone. Jesus was going to change everything. They had pinned all their hopes on him. But now he had been executed. It had all gone.

Compare that to how many of us are feeling about this church now. W can remember so many happy times here. We have made great friends. There have been memorable special occasions. And most of all, the encounters we have had with the living God. The likely loss of these hits hard.

For me, I remember us visiting the church where we had got married and where the children were dedicated, a few weeks before it closed. I had been devastated when I heard it was going to shut.

But as Cleopas and his companion pour out their grief and sense of hopelessness, what is going on? Jesus is with them in their grief. I know they don’t realise it, and we read that ‘they were kept from recognising him’ (verse 16), which is a puzzle. Does their failure to believe in the resurrection stop them? Do dark forces prevent them? Or is the Holy Spirit closing their eyes until the moment of revelation to come in the house? We don’t know.

Many of us know the temptation to believe that Jesus has deserted us when we face troubles. But Jesus was with Cleopas and his friends, even though they didn’t realise at first, and he is with us, too. We may not recognise it. We may not understand why he has allowed a disaster to happen. But our lack of understanding is no reason to conclude that he has absented himself.

The fact is, disasters do happen to God’s people. Think of Israel being sent away from the Promised Land into exile in Babylon. They struggled at first with how they would sing the Lord’s song in a strange land (Psalm 137). But eventually, with the encouragement of people like Ezekiel and Jeremiah, they found a way to live faithfully in their new situation.

So too with us. Even if this church disappears, Jesus won’t. Ask him to show you where he is and what he is doing. Ask him for the privilege of knowing that he is listening to you in your grief.

After all, he endured the worst injustice of all, when he died on the Cross despite being sinless. Do you think he doesn’t understand the human condition at its most desolate? Of course he does.

And this is why we sang Matt Redman’s song ‘You Never Let Go’:

Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death
Your perfect love is casting out fear
And even when I’m caught in the middle of the storms of this life
I won’t turn back
I know You are near

And I will fear no evil
For my God is with me
And if my God is with me
Whom then shall I fear?
Whom then shall I fear?

[Chorus:]
Oh no, You never let go
Through the calm and through the storm
Oh no, You never let go
In every high and every low
Oh no, You never let go
Lord, You never let go of me

Secondly, Jesus is still in the resurrection business.

Think how Cleopas and his companion are trapped inside their own beliefs. They are good Jews who believe that resurrection will come – but only at the end of time. So it doesn’t matter that Jesus has prophesied three times that he will suffer, die, and rise, and it doesn’t matter that some women in their group that morning had reported that he had been raised (verses 22-24).

What changes them is an encounter with he risen Jesus. They are not forgotten or forsaken. Hope is not lost, it is renewed. Jesus is alive!

In exile, Israel was depicted as like a valley of dry, dead bones by Ezekiel. But the Spirit of God brought them new life and eventually they returned to Jerusalem and the Promised Land. The dead bones were alive. Jesus is in the resurrection business.

And I believe that whatever happens here in the coming months and years, Jesus has not got out of the resurrection business.

I don’t have any specific word from the Lord about what that will look like, but I do know this: the resurrection body is different, and when Jesus raises up his work from the dead again here it will look different. The resurrection body of Jesus was on the one hand identifiable as him, but on the other hand had new and different powers. Think of how Jesus appeared inside locked rooms.

I believe there is a hint in the Emmaus Road story that resurrection life is different. When the three travellers get to Emmaus and Jesus is invited into the home of Cleopas, he shuns his rôle as their guest and behaves as the host when he takes the bread, blesses God for it, breaks it, and shares it.

Some people think this is a precursor of Holy Communion, where we also see the fourfold action taking the bread, blessing God for it, breaking it, and sharing it. But I think that’s reading too much into the text, because devout Jews offered these four practices with the bread whenever they are.

But if Jesus is the host and Cleopas and his companion encounter him (verse 31), and they realise that their hearts have been burning inside them Verse 32, surely a reference to the Holy Spirit), then what we have here is church in the home. Jesus raises up a new form of worship, and of course by the time he writes his Gospel forty or fifty hears later, the early Christian church is worshipping not in the Temple or in synagogues, but where? In the home.

This is another case of the resurrection body being different. And because of that, what I want to say to you is this: if this church dies, God is capable of raising up a new work. Just don’t be limited by your prior expectations. Don’t assume that we’ll still have church buildings, and we’ll have them where we’ve always had them, or even as to whether we should take such precautions.

Be ready, then, for the Holy Spirit to do something new and different here. Perhaps what we were offering had had its time, and God wants to do something new here in order to reach people in the name of Jesus. Think of Mr Spock in Star Trek, but not so much saying, “It’s life, Jim, but not as know it,” but “It’s church, Jim, but not as we know it.” Let old and dying ways go. Give them a decent burial.

And be prepared to walk with Jesus into something new and unfamiliar, but much simpler than Methodist rules make them, except for the fact that he is the host.

Let it be in the spirit of the way the prophets prepared Israel to come back from exile in Babylon to the Promised Land. In Isaiah 43, they are told to forget the former things, including even the Exodus from Egypt, because God was doing something new.

So too, because Jesus is still in the resurrection business, be prepared to put aside the old ways as he does something new in raising up a new work to replace the old.

Let’s go back to that Matt Redman song we sang. Here are some other words from it:

And I can see a light that is coming for the heart that holds on
A glorious light beyond all compare
And there will be an end to these troubles
But until that day comes
We’ll live to know You here on the earth

We may weep at the grave of this church. But make no mistake. Jesus will raise up a new work. Let’s make sure we walk with him.

0

Create a website or blog at WordPress.com

Up ↑