Again, no script this week. I delivered this as extempore as possible with minimal notes to guide me.
A Covenant Service/Epiphany Mash-Up: The Magi As Disciples (Matthew 2:1-12)
No script again this week – once again I’ve experimented with giving the talk extempore.
Carol Service Talk: God’s Aspirations For Jesus, Isaiah 9:2-7 (Advent 4 Year C)
There’s no script to follow the video this week as unusually for me I prepared this talk entirely in my head and delivered it extempore. You could always watch the video a second time!
The Baptised Life (Luke 3:7-18) Advent 3, Year C
A favourite story I like to tell about the birth of our son concerns the first time we took him as a baby to one of the churches I was serving. One man looked at him, then looked at me, and said: “Don’t you ever bring a paternity suit against your wife over this lad, because the judge will take one look at him, then one look at you, and laugh the case out of court.”
Even now, seventeen years later, you can see the physical resemblance. You would do all the more if you’d known me at that age. We may have different colour hair, but his hair colour comes through from my father’s side of my family. He is a mathematician, as I was. He is blue-eyed, like me. He is left-handed, as I am – albeit that he is more like my father, who was a relatively ambidextrous left-hander, whereas I am much more left-handed. Like my father, he has an excellent sense of direction and is extremely good at navigating with maps.
But he won’t make his way in life based on whose son and grandson he is. That will depend more on how he uses his gifts, talents, and opportunities.
And John the Baptist is trying to get over something similar to his hearers in our passage today. He tells people who claim they are the offspring of Abraham that they are more like the offspring of snakes. You can have all the religious heritage you like, he says, but it counts for nothing if you’re not living a transformed life. Being raised in the Jewish faith won’t count for anything on its own. Being baptised won’t mean diddly-squat unless your life changes. (Verses 7-9)
It’s something that is painfully relevant to some of the pastoral conversations I have when I first meet people in Methodist churches. It’s not uncommon for people to tell me how they’ve been a Methodist for decades, maybe all their lives.
And I wonder, why is that the first thing they want to tell me about themselves? Because it won’t count for anything with Jesus – unless, of course, they are faithfully living according to the life-changing teaching and spiritual experience that John Wesley underwent and then taught to others.
So you were baptised a Methodist? Well, big deal. Actually, nobody is baptised a Methodist, they are baptised into the Christian faith.
But if you were brought to church as an infant and a minister poured water on your head in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, then it doesn’t matter one bit that the Methodist Church says that any administration of water in the name of the Trinity is a valid baptism, because John the Baptist says that baptism only matters if you go on to lead a baptised life.
So enough of all this claiming of a religious heritage as if it’s a ticket to heaven. It’s nothing of the sort. Presenting your baptism certificate will not work in the way that showing your passport does at Immigration Control in a new country. All that God accepts as the passport to glory is a life of repentance and faith, a baptised life more than a baptised body.
If you want to come to a minister and start telling us that you’ve been a Methodist for fifty years, then make sure you’re actually living as a Methodist in the sense John Wesley taught. Make sure that you come to God not dependent on your own good works, but by faith in Jesus who died for you. Be thankful for his forgiveness and show it by your love for God and for other people. After all, Wesley was fond of quoting from Galatians: ‘The only thing that counts is faith working through love.’ Seek a constant renewing and reordering of your life, joining a small group of other Christians where you each hold one another accountable. Be generous and have a concern for the poor. Share your faith with others.
If you think that’s a bit strong, look at what John the Baptist required of the people who came to him for baptism. They were to share with the poor, not cheat, be truthful, and avoid greed. That wouldn’t be a bad starting place today, either! (Verses 10-14)
And if that’s the sort of person you are, then I’m highly likely to believe that you’re a traditional Methodist! That would show the kind of spiritual DNA that Wesley wanted to see replicated in people.
But if all you can do is wave a baptism certificate or produce your latest membership ticket with a flourish, well, John Wesley would have had harsh words for you and so too would John the Baptist. Both of them would have warned you about the judgement that Jesus will bring.
And so John talks about how Jesus the Messiah will come to baptise with the Holy Spirit and fire – with fire being an image of judgement. He talks about how he will separate the wheat into the barn but burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire. It’s a challenging and powerful description of Jesus. (Verses 15-17)
Of course, some people won’t have it. They will say, that can’t be Jesus, he was all about telling us to love one another. Well he was about teaching us to love, but he also had strong words for those who would not love. He had particularly harsh words for those who used their religion for their own power or to put others down. Jesus was absolutely clear in his teaching that if you claim to be a disciple of his, then it needs to be seen in the way you live.
So all the people who call him ‘Lord, Lord’ but don’t do his bidding will have a shock. All the people who can’t be bothered to be prepared for his coming like the five foolish virgins in the parable will find that their future is not what they complacently assumed.
I have to ask myself, how am I preparing for the coming of Jesus? Not in the sense of, have I bought all the presents I should for Christmas, but in the sense of, am I adjusting my life to make it more fit for the arrival of the One who is King of Kings and Lord of Lords?
Do you ask yourself the same sort of question? Because we all need to do so.
This is why historically Advent has not been a time for feasting on mince pies but rather a season of penitence, like Lent. Preparing for the coming of the Messiah is a challenging matter.
But Jesus does come with the Holy Spirit. We are not left with only our own feeble power to alter our lives. When Jesus challenges us, he also provides the strength we need to make those changes. And we find that ability and energy in the gift of the Holy Spirit.
I want to conclude by saying that all week the ending of the reading has puzzled me.
18 And with many other words John exhorted the people and proclaimed the good news to them.
Good news? It doesn’t much sound like good news, does it, all this fire and brimstone preaching?
But it is good news. It is good news in the ancient sense, in the way the term ‘good news’ would have been used in the Roman Empire. When a Roman herald arrived in a place and said he was going to proclaim good news, it would be the announcement that there was a new Emperor, or that the armies of Rome had won a great battle against an enemy.
In that respect this is good news. It is the news that the kingdom of God is arriving in the person of the King himself, Jesus. It will later become the news that the king himself has won the greatest battle of all on the Cross against all the forces of evil. And it is the good news that in the reign of King Jesus he brings love, justice, reconciliation, harmony, healing, and much more.
Therefore when we are challenged to repent and to reorder our lives, the call is to bring our lives into step with the kingdom of God – that is, to be loving, to pursue justice, to work for reconciliation, to bring harmony, to exercise healing, and so on.
If we are to prepare for the coming of Christ, then this is the kind of life to which we are called.
Understanding Biblical Prophecy (Luke 3:1-6) Second Sunday In Advent, Year C
No script this week, I’m afraid: urgent pastoral priorities meant I had to dig out this old talk on understanding biblical prophecy, which I originally delivered from a PowerPoint with a set of bullet points rather than a rough script.
Anyway, here is that PowerPoint. You’ll see from the opening slide that I used different readings originally. However, the principles still hold.
Advent Sunday: The Most Miserable Time of the Year? (1 Thessalonians 3:9-13, Advent 1, Year C)
The other year on Advent Sunday I railed against the rise of luxury Advent calendars. Well,, no need for me to be original this year, because this week the Irish journalist Melanie McDonagh did exactly that in The Spectator magazine. This year, she writes,
There are tea or coffee Advent calendars with a different flavour for each day – see Whittard’s Tea or Pact Coffee or Fortnum’s – there are beauty advent calendars like the Space NK one for £199 with a different skincare product for each day or the one from Dior for £400; a gin advent calendar from the Craft Gin Club; there are cheese versions, pork scratching versions and there are, of course chocolate advent calendars, which are everywhere: Charbonnel et Walker does one for £75; Cadbury’s Dairy Milk for £2.19 (‘make every day in the run-up to Christmas magical’).
And in fairness, Ms McDonagh also rages against ordinary chocolate Advent calendars. Why?
Advent generally is about expectation (actually it’s partly about preparing for the Day of Judgment); it’s the reverse of a binge.
That’s right: Advent isn’t a time of preparation in the sense that we prepare by buying presents, getting the decorations out of the garage, and putting up the tree. It’s a time when we prepare not only for the humble coming of Christ in the manger, but also for his future coming in glory, when he will judge the living and the dead, as the Creed says.
No, this is not ‘The most wonderful time of the year’. If anything, it’s ‘The most miserable time of the year,’ and I don’t mean that purely for those who find this season hard due to the anniversaries of bereavements and other tragedies.
So let me be the first person this year to wish you a thoroughly dismal Advent.
Er, no, not really. In our reading from 1 Thessalonians Paul is anxious not only to visit his beloved friends in Thessalonica, but also to help them prepare for Christ’s coming as judge. And while he wants them to be serious about that preparation, we can hardly call his desires for them miserable.
There are two ways Paul urges the Thessalonians to prepare for Christ’s coming. As we explore them, I hope you’ll agree with me that they require seriousness but they don’t necessitate being miserable.
Firstly, says Paul, love one another.
12 May the Lord make your love increase and overflow for each other and for everyone else, just as ours does for you.
Love each other (presumably those are the church members) and love everyone else (all those Jesus would have called our neighbour).
Love. Easy to state, hard to do. But that’s the calling.
Love one another in the church, because when Jesus comes again the new creation is going to be a place of love. Nobody will be having a little dig at someone else in the kingdom of God. Nobody will be stabbing someone else in the back when Jesus comes again. Nobody will disregard or ignore their brother or sister when Jesus returns. The actions of the community will entirely be driven by love.
Love your neighbour. Because the world needs a witness to the redeeming and unconditional love of God in Christ. If someone is hurt, we do not look for an excuse by pondering whether they deserve help before deciding whether or not to do something. If their need is an interruption to our routine, then rather than worrying about our routine we consider their need as putting our routine into perspective. How can we expect the world to believe in a God who loves them if the community that professes to believe in that love doesn’t show it to them?
But as I said, all that is easy to state but hard to do. We may struggle to love some people in the church. Just as it is said that we can choose our friends but not our family members, so the same is true about the church family. There are some people here whom we honestly would not pick as fellow church members if we had the choice.
And we just don’t seem to fit together naturally all the time, do we? Many years ago a couple of writers described building the church as like ‘building with bananas.’ Imagine trying to build an edifice out of bananas. Their shape would make it very tricky! Growing the church feels like that at times!
And as for that ‘love your neighbour’ stuff – well, what if we don’t approve of their lifestyle and we don’t think God does, either? What if they hold political views we don’t like? If people inside the church can be hard to love, it can be doubly difficult to love some people who don’t share our faith.
So maybe this is miserable after all?
Let’s re-read verse 12:
12 May the Lord make your love increase and overflow for each other and for everyone else, just as ours does for you.
May the Lord make your love increase and overflow. That’s the key. It’s not that we can do this on our own. That would be drudgery and failure. Our challenge to love as a sign of the coming kingdom is one that the Lord enables us to do, and he does not expect us to achieve without him.
So here’s a prayer thought for those times when we struggle to love someone, either in the church or the community, and yet we know Jesus wants us to show them his love. I once heard a preacher tell a story where he said that God challenged him to do something difficult, and he said, ‘No, Lord, I’m not wiling.’
But then he heard the Lord’s reply to him. ‘Are you willing to be made willing?’
Are we willing to be made willing to love? Let us say ‘yes’ to Christ increasing our love.
Secondly, says Paul, be holy.
13 May he strengthen your hearts so that you will be blameless and holy in the presence of our God and Father when our Lord Jesus comes with all his holy ones.
Oh dear, holiness. Well, that must be dour and it must be hard work. Doesn’t it make you think of those Christians who think the closer you get to God, the more sour-faced you will be?
If that’s your image, then let me speak to you about the famous preacher and devotional writer of a hundred or so years ago, Oswald Chambers. Famed for his preaching that led people to repentance and new life, he was also known for his joy and laughter. Many of his converts may have wept for his sins, but they laughed for joy at their realisation of how great God’s love for them was.
D W Lambert, who as a child knew Chambers as a friend of his parents, wrote a book about him. Here is one story he recounts of him:
On one occasion when my mother was preparing the tea, to which a number of local ministers had been invited to meet Chambers, there came gales of laughter from the study. I, with the priggishness of a small boy, looked shocked, thinking that such holy men should not indulge in laughter. My mother, with quiet insight, remarked, “When God makes you holy He gives you a sense of humour.”[1]
Indeed, Chambers was often asked to babysit for some couples – something remarkable, given that he and his wife Biddy lost their only child Kathleen when she was just four years old. The children would tell their parents that Chambers didn’t preach to them, he was a playmate, and he taught them funny rhymes. I don’t have time for more stories today about him, but if you go on the Internet and search for ‘Oswald Chambers laughter children’ you will find several anecdotes that support this.
Sure, holiness can be tough, challenging and painful. But at its heart it is about becoming more like Jesus. And we remember that Jesus loved weddings and banquets, and he promised abundant life to his followers. If you come across one of those Christians who gives you the impression that the most devout Christians are the most miserable ones, it’s usually because they are miserable people and they don’t realise just how good Jesus is.
But I can’t deny the difficulties in being blameless and holy. Which one of us hasn’t had that sense of failure that we are so very far from being like Jesus? Isn’t the call to be holy a counsel of despair? We may understand that it makes sense, because surely when Jesus comes again all will good, true, pure, and right, and we need to be in harmony with that, but many of us are so conscious of our shortcomings and our besetting sins.
So note that there is good news in this verse. Let’s read it again:
13 May he strengthen your hearts so that you will be blameless and holy in the presence of our God and Father when our Lord Jesus comes with all his holy ones.
May he strengthen your hearts. Just as we found the command to love to be challenging but we discovered that God enables us, so the same is true of the call to holiness. May he strengthen our hearts.
So our prayer for holiness is similar to our prayer for greater love. Lord, I’m not always willing, but you can make me willing. I take responsibility for my own actions, but you can give me the strength I need in order to be holy, to be more like Jesus.
Yes, love and holiness are both marks of what life will be like when Christ returns. As Christians, we hear the call to conform to the life of the age to come while we live in the midst of this age which will pass away. This is all very demanding.
But in both cases, God is on hand and he waits for us to pray and ask him to give us the increase and the strength to fulfil his commands.
If we truly want to use Advent as a season of preparation, then let us prepare for Christ’s coming again by praying that God will give us more of himself so that we can be more truly loving and more deeply holy.
[1] D W Lambert, Oswald Chambers: An Unbridled Soul, p7f.
Last Sunday Before Advent, The Feast of Christ the King (Year B)
I feel sorry for Pontius Pilate. This was the man who should be in charge – well, on behalf of the Roman Emperor, of course. But he doesn’t know what to do with Jesus, this supposed King of the Jews. Pilate should be decisive, he should be acting powerfully, but he isn’t.
Why? He’s a lame duck ruler. We’ve sometimes seen lame duck Prime Ministers in the UK when the ruling party has lost its majority in the House of Commons and no other party will enter into an arrangement or a coalition with them. And we’ve seen lame duck American Presidents when their party has lost its majority in both Houses of their elected representatives.
Pilate is at the mercy of the Jewish leaders. They might be speaking as if they are soliciting a favour or pleading with him, but they have him round their little finger. For a few years previously, Pilate had sent Roman soldiers into the Temple in Jerusalem, where some of their acts had scandalised Jewish religious sensibilities. The Jewish leaders had sent a deputation to Rome to protest, knowing this kind of unnecessarily offensive behaviour was against Imperial policy. As a result, Pilate was on a final warning from Rome. One more mis-step and he would be exiled.
So we have this dreadful, ironic situation before us. Pilate, the man who has all the human power and authority, is weak. The Jewish leaders, who should have been kept in check by a better political operator, can play the system. And the One who looks weakest of all is the One hailed as King.
King of the Jews
33 Pilate then went back inside the palace, summoned Jesus and asked him, ‘Are you the king of the Jews?’
It’s a Jewish title being applied to Jesus. Never in the New Testament is Jesus called ‘Emperor’ in contrast to Caesar. No: when the Gospel gets thoroughly into the Graeco-Roman cultures the title the early church appropriates for him there is not ‘Emperor’ but ‘Lord’, corresponding with the divine claim that Roman Emperors made for themselves. That was used to claim not merely Jesus’ right to reign and rule, but his divine status. He is more than an Emperor.
But ‘King of the Jews’ – now that’s a problem. The Jewish nation had longed to have a king again since losing their monarchy at the Exile in the sixth century BC. And it was a threat to Rome, because of Jewish aspirations to have a leader who would topple the occupying Roman forces. Jesus could be a threat to Pilate, even if previous pretenders had usually been summarily arrested and executed.
Pilate would not be alone in finding the title ‘King of the Jews’ problematic. It was an issue for the Jewish leaders, too. It had become clear that Jesus didn’t conform to their ideals and not only that, he was fiercely critical of them. Whichever group of Jews they belonged to, Jesus had a largely unfavourable critique of them.
So if you were a teacher of the law but taught it rigorously without factoring in love for God and love for neighbour, Jesus had something to say to you. If you were a Pharisee with a passion for faithful, orthodox religion but had held that in such a way that you had become harsh and judgmental, Jesus would point that out. And if you were a Sadducee, believing as little as possible and all the while being in cahoots with the occupying forces who gave you a privileged position in society, then Jesus wasn’t going to be your biggest fan.
And none of this is merely interesting historical detail, because there are similarities and parallels in our lives today. If Jesus is King, then we need to look at our lives and attitudes.
For he threatens to topple our personal authority and autonomy. We think we have the right to run our own lives. In the title of a popular play many years ago, we ask, ‘Whose life is it anyway?’ Or we sing along with Billy Joel, ‘Keep it to yourself, it’s my life.’
But Jesus says no, it’s not your life, you were bought with a price. You belong to me. I am king. We have some re-ordering to do.
Or we apply our faith in Jesus harshly, looking down on others, casting aspersions on them, acting as if only they are the ones who have things to put right in their lives, because we hold to the true and pure faith. But many a passionate Christian has turned into a Pharisee over the centuries, and it’s still happening.
And others of us would rather hob-nob with the powerful of our society, feathering our nests and hoping that some of their glory brushes off on us. But Jesus the King will tell us that this is a highly disordered way to live, and will call us to account, not least when our attraction to power is bad news for the poor.
My kingdom is not of this world
36 Jesus said, ‘My kingdom is not of this world. If it were, my servants would fight to prevent my arrest by the Jewish leaders. But now my kingdom is from another place.’
Well, maybe here is where we’re let off the hook? If Jesus’ kingdom is not of this world, if it’s other-worldly and all about heaven, then perhaps we won’t be too challenged by it after all?
And for all their strictness, that’s the sort of line that cults like the Jehovah’s Witnesses take. Because Jesus’ kingdom is not of this world, we should not get involved in the things of this world, such as politics or economics. We can avoid getting messy with them.
And some Christians construe a version of faith that is a little bit like that, where Jesus is interested in their private, personal morality, but not about the rest of life. His kingdom is not of this world.
Except – there’s a problem. It would be better to translate these words ‘My kingdom is not from this world.’ You can see the intent from the rest of the verse, where Jesus says, ‘But now my kingdom is from another place.’
So it’s not about the limitations of the kingdom, it’s about where the kingdom originates from. The kingdom over which Jesus rules originates from heaven. It originates from the One who is the Creator of all things. And therefore, when Jesus says his kingdom is not from this world, he is distinguishing it from earthly kingdoms and empires, but not by limiting it. In fact, he’s expanding its reach.
If Jesus is King, then, he’s going to affect my personal morality, but he’s also going to affect my politics, my economics, my working life, and everything else. Many years ago, the late John Stott said that you can’t have Jesus as Saviour without having him as Lord, and if he isn’t Lord of all then he isn’t Lord at all.
As Christians we are recognising Jesus as King now, before the great day when every knee shall bow at his name and every tongue confess him as Lord[1]. We live in the knowledge that he is reigning now, before the day when all his enemies, death included, will be put under his feet, and there is no longer any rebellion or contesting of his rightful place.
We recognise Jesus as King now, because he is reigning already. That’s what the passage from Daniel 7:9-14 is about. When the one like a son of man (which in New Testament terms we understand to be Jesus) comes on the clouds of heaven it is not him returning to earth in glory in the Second Coming, for we read that at that time he comes to ‘The Ancient of Days’ – that is, Almighty God, and reigns there. This is a passage that foretells the implications of the Ascension.
At present, people ignore, disregard, oppose, or reject the reign of Jesus as King over all. But we know that day is coming, so as Christians we live as subjects of the King now. And in doing so, we witness to the world about what is coming.
The great twentieth century church leader Lesslie Newbigin once said that the local church is what he called ‘The hermeneutic of the Gospel.’ Now that may be high-falutin’ theological jargon to you, but the word ‘hermeneutic’ simply means ‘interpretation’. In other words, then, the way the local church lives interprets the Gospel to the people around it in society. If people want to know what the Christian message is, it’s not simply that we should be able to tell them what it means in our lives, they should be able to see what it’s like to live under the reign of Christ from the way we live.
I wonder how the local community looks at our church. Does it see a colony of Christ’s kingdom, living by what he says? Or does it see something else?
The Feast of Christ the King
And that is really what this Sunday is all about. I am reluctant to call it ‘The Last Sunday Before Advent’, with rather sounds to me like everything is petering out but don’t worry, everything will get going again next week.
I would rather call it by its positive title, ‘The Feast of Christ the King.’ This is where we have been heading for all of the church year since we began last Advent. We anticipated the coming of Christ and celebrated it. We marked his life and ministry, his death, resurrection, and ascension. Then we recalled the gift of the Spirit at Pentecost and the mission of God in which the Spirit-empowered church shares.
All this leads up to today. We are looking to the great day when Jesus reigns without any opposition, unlike now.
Therefore, it’s the climax of the Christian Year. This is where we’re heading. This is where history is heading.
Our calling is to live more faithfully like that future is here already, and to do so as a witness before the watching world.
[1] Philippians 2:10-11
Remembrance Sunday: The Healing of the Nations, Revelation 22:1-5 (Ordinary 33, Year B)
When I was a child, the Dam Busters movie came to the local cinema and my Dad – who had loved his National Service in the RAF – took me to see it. To me as a boy, Barnes Wallis, who invented and trialled the ‘bouncing bomb’ not far from here at Brooklands, Wing Commander Guy Gibson, and the crew members of Bomber Command were surely national heroes. This Remembrance Sunday, only one member of Bomber Command is still alive – Squadron Leader ‘Johnny’ Johnson, who is about to celebrate his one hundredth birthday.
Heroes. As a youngster, I didn’t really consider the complex moral questions about the bombing of the Ruhr Valley and whether Christians could view it as justified under the Just War Theory of St Augustine, who said that in a just war you could only target those who were actively involved in the enemy’s war effort.
But I suspect that whatever stance we take on war, a lot of us do childlike thinking about it. As a teenager I was to embrace pacifism, but some would say that is naïve idealism. It can be equally naïve to assume that bombing your enemies into oblivion makes everything right.
And Christians will never totally agree on issues of war. I’m not going to try to take on that hopeless task today.
But I do want us to use this Lectionary reading from Revelation 22 to show us what God’s glorious vision of the future in his new creation is like, because that gives us a good idea of his will, and it therefore points to some of the things we can hope for and live by now as we prepare for the full coming of his kingdom.
Firstly, in the New Creation there is life:
We hear about the ‘water of life’ coming from God and the Lamb (verse 1), just as in Ezekiel the water flowed from the Temple, the place of God’s presence. And we read about the ‘tree of life’ (verse 2), which you will remember from the Garden of Eden, so here Eden is restored but supersized.
So this is life that comes only from God (the water of life) and it is immortal life (Adam would have lived forever had he eaten from the tree of life in Eden). This is eternal life. This is the gift of God. This is the life we receive when we respond to the grace of God in Jesus Christ and find forgiveness of sins and new purpose in following Christ and turning away from sin.
It is this life, the gift of God, which stands in contrast to the death we witness in the world and which is at the forefront of our thinking on Remembrance Sunday. The ways of God are life, not death.
And it is not just physical death but spiritual death which the life of God opposes and replaces. To stay wilfully apart from God is to choose eternal death.
Therefore, one thing we might remember on Remembrance Sunday is the importance of the Gospel. Yes, we join with the rest of our society in commemorating the war dead and the sacrifices that millions made, but as Christians we go further. We say that there is an antidote to the ways of hatred, mistrust, and violence that lead to war, and that is in Jesus Christ and him only.
So one thing we learn from Revelation 22 is that in the church we need to keep the main thing the main thing. And the main thing is the proclamation of the Gospel. What a tragedy it is that other things get in the way. The other day a minister who is retiring next year told me how he sincerely hoped that in his final year of active ministry he would be able to concentrate on preaching and teaching rather than on GDPR, accounts, property, and all the other governance issues.
But not only that, this is a reminder to all of us in the church that we have our part to play in sharing the Good News of Jesus among those we know. It isn’t that we are all preachers – thank goodness we’re not – and it isn’t that we’re all called to go door-to-door or button-hole people in the street. But it remains the call to all of us to talk naturally in conversations about the difference Jesus has made in our lives.
If on Remembrance Sunday we want to see a better world, then it is incumbent upon those of us who believe a better world is coming to share that Good News with the world.
Secondly, in the New Creation there is healing:
We read that ‘the leaves of the tree [of life] are for the healing of the nations’ (verse 2) and that is then explained with the words, ‘No longer will there be any curse’ (verse 3).
The curse on the nations is healed in the New Creation. What does that mean? It means that the curse of Eden is reversed. In the pictorial language of early Genesis, it was the sin of Adam and Eve that led to a widespread curse on humanity. It was a wide-ranging curse. It not only adversely affected our relationship with God, our relationships with each other were cursed, so was our relationship with work, with children, and with the whole of creation. All of life was under a curse. What was previously blessèd became cursed.
But no more. Through the Cross and Resurrection God reverses the curse. We can know him. We can have good relationships. We can find purpose at work. We can bless and restore creation – something that is surely on our minds as the COP26 conference ends. All these are God’s gifts of healing in Christ. They are partial in this life, but they will be complete in the New Creation.
Now this is important in following on from my first point. Because there are those who will say that it isn’t enough to preach the Gospel, and that it doesn’t bring about the wider transformation in society. They will point to things like the dreadful genocide in Rwanda back in 1994 and point out that Rwanda was a heavily evangelised nation with a high proportion of confessing Christians. Indeed, in certain parts of the Christian world it was celebrated as a great example of evangelism and revival. People spoke about the ‘East African Revival.’ Yet many of these Christians participated in the terrible massacres.
The problem with Rwanda is that a narrow Gospel was proclaimed, one that only called converts to a personal, perhaps even private, piety. We need the call to conversion, but it needs to be a call to an entirely converted life. Because the message that the whole curse is lifted in the New Creation and that healing has come is a message that applies right across life – not just to personal and private issues like relationships, but also to public and social areas, such as work.
So what we cannot do as Christians is truncate the Gospel. Some truncate it by the sort of narrow private piety I’ve just described – ‘Come to Jesus, and let him put your personal life in order.’ Others truncate the Gospel but omitting the call to conversion and simply proclaiming that God loves social justice. But the healing of the nations from the curse of the Fall means we need to declare and to live out the healing from the curse in every sphere of life.
As we seek a better world than the one that we live in, let alone the ones that provoked world wars, our calling as Christians is to proclaim the Gospel in all its fulness and to live as an example of that all-encompassing Gospel which brings healing and restoration to every broken part of life.
This will therefore not only be in our spoken message, but in our lifestyles, and in what we offer the world. Too often churches are filled with toxic behaviour, and when that happens it’s a denial of the Gospel and it’s a denial of opportunity to the world to know the beauty of God’s healing love.
Instead, let’s be people who know that the life of the Gospel brings healing and let’s show that.
Thirdly, in the New Creation there is light:
There will be no more night, we read in verse 5. At this time of year when the clocks have gone back and the nights have drawn in, that sounds like Good News to me!
The other day on Twitter, someone parodied the old Simon and Garfunkel song ‘The Sound of Silence’ by writing these words:
Hello darkness, my old friend,
Why are you here? It’s 4 pm.
Not that I want things to be like New York, ‘The city that never sleeps’, having stayed in an hôtel there on Broadway where you could hear traffic noise and be assaulted by neon advertising 24/7.
But light instead of darkness. No more the darkness of sin, because my guilt has been wiped away. No more the darkness of continual sin, because the Holy Spirit has helped us to live differently. And no more the darkness caused by the sins others have inflicted on us, because God in Christ has healed us and helped us to forgive.
All those things that have brought darkness in this life will no longer cast shadows over us and suck life out of us. We shall know the beauty of God’s light.
How does he do this? There might be a clue in the preceding verse:
4 They will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads.
God’s name on our foreheads. Do you remember when as a child you had to write your name on everything you owned, and when you had name tags sewn into your clothes? God puts his name on us and says, ‘You belong to me.’ What could be more reassuring and restorative than that? We belong to him. His name is upon us. This can carry us through the darkest times: we are Christ’s.
We may not be facing a world war today, but where could we apply this? You’ve heard me talk about the fact that depression has had quite an effect on my family, and so you may not be surprised to know that I’m concerned by the increase in mental health issues since COVID-19 hit and I believe the church can offer something to the world alongside all the necessary medical resources.
And there is an encouraging growth in Christian resources for use in the church and the community to help with this. I’m looking at one called Kintsugi Hope. Whether it’s the right resource I don’t know yet, but the word ‘kintsugi’ is Japanese for a way of restoring broken pottery by painting it with seams of gold and thus making it more beautiful.
Whether that particular path is the right way forward for us or not, we have here a wonderful picture in these five verses from Revelation about how the fulness of the Gospel hope in the New Creation is the cure for the sickness that the world faces with when we think of the events that led to the establishment of Remembrance Sunday and its continuation. We also recognise that war is far from the only way in which there is brokenness, sickness, and darkness in our world.
We are people of hope. Jesus brings life, healing, and light. One day his new world will be flooded with these things. In the meantime, it’s our call to participate in his work by proclaiming the Gospel, by living and advocating healed lives, and by showing the world how Christ’s light overcomes the darkness.
Remembrance Sunday, then, reminds the church of our unfinished task.
Orbiting The Son, Mark 12:38-44 (Ordinary 32 Year B)
Sorry, the out of focus problem is back – I thought I had all the settings correct to record myself!
The new pastor of a large independent church invited all the other local ministers to attend a concert being given at his church by a well-known Christian musician. He invited us not only to the concert, but to come and eat with the musician beforehand.
At the time I was single, and the thought of not having to cook and wash up for myself for an evening was appealing, so I went along beforehand. We had a very agreeable time over food, and then when it was time for the concert itself I noticed some people from one of my churches arriving and taking up some seats on the back row, so I went to join them.
After the gig, the pastor expressed surprise that I had sat at the back. “I had a seat for you on the platform with me,” he said. I replied that was very kind of him, but really there were times when I felt I was up front in the public eye more than enough, and it was a pleasant change for me as a minister to sit at the back.
Later events were to show that that incident was merely the tip of the iceberg when it came to the pastor’s attitudes. A few years later, his ministry at that church fell to pieces over issues surrounding the unholy trinity of money, sex, and power.
It’s so dangerous to invest our status, identity, and security in the wrong things.
And that’s what our reading is about today. I know I’m often critical of the way the Lectionary selects verses, but not this time. I find it helpful the way we get to read these two separate incidents together, because they both have a similar theme. I’m used to hearing the story of the widow’s mite on its own, but to hear it alongside Jesus’ earlier condemnation of religious leaders is illuminating.
Both of these stories show people with power and authority seeking a sense of status from public acclaim.
In the first story, the teachers of the law (who were not necessarily wealthy, well-paid religious leaders) enjoyed drawing attention to themselves by dressing in a special way and looking important in the synagogue and at banquets. They would have been on the platform at the concert I attended.
Me, me, me. Look at me, they say. It’s a warped and dangerous approach to power and authority, so far from the servant model that Jesus taught.
And because their approach to power and authority deviates from the way of Jesus, it becomes a dangerous exercise. When it’s all about me getting the attention, then the power available also gets used for – guess who? – Me.
We get a flavour of this when Jesus says,
40 They devour widows’ houses and for a show make lengthy prayers. These men will be punished most severely.
Jesus knew what he was talking about. The Jewish historian
Josephus (Ant. 18.81-84) tells of a Jewish scoundrel exiled to Rome who affected the ways of a scribe (“he played the part of an interpreter of the Mosaic law and its wisdom”) and succeeded in persuading a high-standing woman named Fulvia to make substantial gifts to the temple in Jerusalem. The bequests, however, were embezzled, and Rome – from Emperor Tiberius on to plebs in the street – was outraged.[1]
Since the scribes were largely dependent on gifts from worshippers and benefactors for their livelihood this would be like a minister today finding a way to exploit congregational giving to feather his own nest.
We may not all have a position of power and influence, but we all need to take heed of the dangers of wanting the attention to be on ourselves. What we see here is that when that happens, corruption follows.
We need to remember the way of Jesus, which is to be a servant, not an attention-seeker.
Each Sunday when I’m at Byfleet there is a small way in which I try to remind you and myself about that important truth. You will have noticed that at the end of the service I don’t process out down the centre aisle. I sneak off round the side, saying a quick thank-you to Vaughan or Peter on the laptop and to Adrian on the organ. I don’t want you at the end of the service to be thinking about the person who led you in worship; I want you to be thinking about the object of our worship, Almighty God.
What can you do to remind yourself Jesus is the centre of attention in the Christian life, not you?
In the second story, the crowds are depositing their gifts for the Temple at the treasury. But some are making a flamboyant song and dance of it:
Many rich people threw in large amounts. (Verse 41b)
Why throw the money into the receptacle unless you want to be ostentatious about your giving? Once again, it’s a case of ‘Look at me!’ Those looking on are meant to think, ‘Wow, what wonderfully generous people!”
Again, the concern is to bolster up one’s personal image. These are people who feel good about themselves when other people praise them.
I can’t help thinking that these people would be the sort who today would turn up on a TV telethon like Children In Need or Comic Relief with an oversized cheque clearly bearing their name or their company’s name, because they’re less interested in helping the cause than in getting their name before the public and gaining publicity for themselves.
It’s the widow who shows true faith in this story, of course. Hear again Jesus’ estimation of her when she contributes ‘two of the smallest coins in circulation’[2]:
43 Calling his disciples to him, Jesus said, ‘Truly I tell you, this poor widow has put more into the treasury than all the others. 44 They all gave out of their wealth; but she, out of her poverty, put in everything – all she had to live on.’
What’s the difference between the widow and the wealthy? The widow puts her whole life in the hands of God. The wealthy keep control for themselves.
Thus, it’s the widow who shows what discipleship is like, according to Jesus. True faith is not a lifestyle option from the glossy magazines with the Sunday papers. It is not a deluxe extra specification on your car. True faith is to say to Jesus, here I am with all that I am and all that I have. I put it all in your nail-scarred hands to do with as you see fit.
The widow would ask us whether we have put our entire lives at the disposal of our Lord. It’s a life of sacrifice in response to the One who would lay down his own life very soon. Just as astronomers discovered that the Sun does not orbit the earth but rather the earth orbits the Sun, so the widow teaches us that we are not at the centre where the brightest and best orbit us. Rather, we orbit the Son – the Son of God.
And as these two episodes conclude, so also concludes Mark’s account of Jesus’ public ministry. Everything else will be behind closed doors or in secluded places. What are we like where no-one else sees us?
In such locations, we cannot be attention-seekers. In such places, we are challenged to remember that we make Jesus the centre of attention, not ourselves, and that as he laid down his life for us so we lay our lives before him to be used as he pleases.
Let us always remember that we orbit the Son, not vice-versa.
[1] James R Edwards, The Gospel According To Mark, p379.
[2] Ibid., p381.
No More Tears: A Brief Reflection For An ‘All Souls’/Memorial Service (Revelation 21:1-7)
After a week off, I return with two videos, which I’m posting at 15-minute intervals.
The second video will be my regular Lectionary teaching, but this one is for an ‘All Souls’/memorial service one of my churches is holding. I put All Souls in quote marks, because what we do probably doesn’t meet the aspirations of my Anglican and Catholic friends for such an occasion, but it is a pastoral service we normally offer each year for those who have been bereaved.
I once worked with an Anglican rector who believed there would be no sea in heaven. Not much fun for anyone who enjoyed playing with a bucket and spade and wearing swimming trunks or a swimming costume!
His argument was based on the first verse of our reading, which includes the words, ‘there was no longer any sea.’ I disagreed with him, pointing out that Revelation uses a lot of picture language, and that the sea was something that terrified the ancients. So to say there would no longer be any sea was a way of saying that all our fears would be removed in the life of the age to come.
Unfortunately, my argument didn’t work, it just came up against intransigence. ‘If the Bible says there isn’t any sea in heaven, then there isn’t any sea,’ he said.
But even if I disagreed with him about that – and you may wonder why I’m starting an All Souls service address with this line of thought – there is definitely one form of water that will be abolished in God’s new creation when it comes.
Verse 4:
He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.
No more tears. All wiped away. An end to crying.
No more tears. It’s a universal aspiration. Think of the song ‘No More Tears (Enough Is Enough)’ by Donna Summer and Barbra Streisand. It’s about the end of a relationship that started promisingly but descended into the man causing the woman misery.
No more tears. Even Ozzy Osbourne made an album with that title. It was the first recording he made sober.
We long for the day when there will be no more tears. Sometimes in this life our grief and pain is so huge and so draining that, in the words of Alison Moyet, we are ‘All cried out.’
My late aunt had a physiological problem with her tear ducts, and she couldn’t cry. But we long for the day when the tears don’t flow because we don’t need to cry anymore.
How we long for that on an occasion like today when we remember those we love dearly but who have been separated from us by death. Yes, we also learn to smile at happy memories. But we still weep.
No more tears.
Jesus says, that day is coming. When he makes all things new (verse 5), even the heavens and the earth (verse 1), he will make us new with resurrection bodies just like his. No longer will we be subject to decay and death. We shall have immortal bodies.
And we’re waiting for that day.
However, it already feels like a long wait. For all we know, it may be much longer yet. But it is coming.
And that’s why we light candles today for our loved ones. Small chinks of light in the darkness. For our hope is there, even in the darkest of times. At times it may seem to flicker and be at risk of being snuffed out, but it is real. It is real because of Jesus’ resurrection and his promises, which he always keeps.
As we come forward and put our lit taper on these tea lights, see it as a sign of hope. Light in the darkness. For all who entrust their lives to Jesus, light indestructible is coming.
Big Circumstance 