We’re Off To Deconstruct The Wizard

Andrew. Lloyd. And Webber. Three words that strike fear into my music-loving heart.

Musicals are just not my thing. But a week ago, we took the children for a pre-Christmas treat to the London Palladium to see Lloyd-Webber‘s staging of The Wizard Of Oz, complete with the additional songs that he and Tim Rice have written to fill out the famous Hollywood film into a full musical.

And I have to say, that while it is not my taste, I had to admire the quality of the production – the staging, the singing, the special effects, the lot. For our children’s first ever visit to a West End production, it was pretty unbeatable.

But me being me, I was sitting through it pondering deeper meanings. I have thought for a while that The Wizard Of Oz was a prime text for post-Enlightenment modernists, with its unveiling of the Wizard as a mere mortal, whose apparent supernatural abilities are unmasked as mere human trickery. Is this the musical the New Atheists would like? I know, I should have been enjoying the show, but my mind was exploring tangents. And furthermore, I was wrong anyway. Reading the programme afterwards, I discovered that L Frank Baum, who wrote the story, had a completely different meaning in mind. My response was a classic of reader-response theory, you could say.
Baum’s meanings were all to do with the economic and political situation of the 1890s. The brick road was yellow to represent the gold standard. Dorothy’s slippers were silver (they only became red in the film to promote the virtues of Technicolor) to stand for those who also thought free silver should play a part in the economy. The Kansas farmers were poor agricultural victims of the economic times. The scarecrow is the farmers, the tin man the troubled industrial workers and the cowardly lion is unsuccessful Presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan, who refused to support the Spanish-American war. The Wicked Witch of the East stood for the evil financial institutions. The Wicked Witch of the West was the climactic conditions that ruined lives. The good witch came about, because Baum was a devotee of Theosophy and Spiritualism. The Wizard himself was almost any post-civil war US President, including perhaps William McKinley, who defeated Bryan. They were to be seen, in Dorothy’s terms, as ‘humbug’.

Which raises different questions today from the one I thought the story asked: why do we still expect our political leaders to be wizards? Why do we complain when their wizardry is unmasked? And can we ever expect more than humbug from them? What, in short, is a realistic expectation of our politicians, especially at a time of economic difficulty, such as our current circumstances?

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What Would Jesus Do?

The Archbishop of Canterbury has written a thoughtful piece in the Christmas double issue of Radio Times (some of which is reproduced here on his own site) where he takes on the way the Occupy movement has taken up the popular evangelical slogan, ‘What would Jesus do?’ (WWJD). Dr Williams points out that Jesus is often more about asking people questions than giving them answers, and when religion is like that, it is often at its most constructive. There is further background on the BBC website in a piece by Stephen Tomkins of Ship Of Fools.

What do you think? How easy, possible or desirable is it to answer the WWJD question?

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When ‘Church Unity’ Trumps The Gospel

Reported in many places, but particularly well in USA Today: Kentucky church barrs interracial couples as members.

Apparently

The recommendation “is not intended to judge the salvation of anyone, but is intended to promote greater unity among the church body and the community we serve,” according to the copy supplied by Harville to the Herald-Leader.

Yeah, right.

Not that we should be too smug. Churches are particularly good at elevating all sorts of things above the gospel as a false display of unity. This example is particularly vile, though.

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Sermon: The Prologue – Word, Life And Light

And here beginneth the first blog entry in a few weeks. Not only have I spent the last two Sundays either repeating an old sermon 0r taking part in all-age worship, other matters have drained my time and energies – not least a painful situation that led to us urgently transferring our children to a new school.

But now, we begin a new sermon series for Advent, based on the Prologue to John’s Gospel. I’ve wanted to do this for a few years at Advent, and this is my chance. We kick off tomorrow morning with the first five verses from John 1:1-18.

John 1:1-5
He is the man for whom the word ‘curmudgeon’ was probably invented. Bitter that he has not become the international superstar he deserves to be, jealous of others and angry at the machinations of the music industry in which he works. He fluctuates between belief in God and a raw atheism.

Yet when he sings of things spiritual, and he combines his Celtic roots with the blues traditions he loves, his music transports me to another place. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Mr Van Morrison.

And he’s here this morning. (If only.)

In one of my favourite songs of his, the chorus says,

Didn’t I come to bring you a sense of wonder?
Didn’t I come to lift your fiery vision bright?
Didn’t I come to bring you a sense of wonder in the flame?[1]

A sense of wonder is what this Advent sermon series is all about. For me, there is nothing like reading the Prologue to John’s Gospel for giving me a sense of wonder about Jesus, whose birth we are preparing to celebrate again.

Why not share for a moment with your neighbour what gives you a sense of wonder about the coming of Jesus?

What gives me a sense of wonder about the coming of Jesus is to think about who this Jesus is, who came in flesh. This morning, the first five verses of the Prologue give us three words to meditate on that give me that sense of wonder about the One who came.

And the first word is … Word:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. (Verses 1-2)

The Word. Because Jesus isn’t called Jesus until he is born, fully human, fully divine. Before the Incarnation, Jesus is the Word. Even before his birth, he is God speaking to us. He is God’s self-expression. We talk about the Bible as the Word of God, but because the Bible itself says that Jesus is the Word, we should refer to the Bible as the Word of God written, whereas Jesus is the living Word of God. Jesus is the guarantee that God speaks. God is not silent. In the Second Person of the Trinity, God speaks.

This Word of God is part of the divine fellowship: he is with God, and he is God, and he was with God from the beginning. Here, before all things, is the fellowship of love that is the Trinity. During our sermon series on 1 John, I argued that the statement ‘God is love’ only makes sense if God can express love within creation. The Father loves the Son and the Spirit; the Son loves the Father and the Spirit; and the Spirit loves the Father and the Son. We get a hint of that here: the Word was with God and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Here is that fellowship of love that has existed since before creation. Here, the Word is part of that love which must extend beyond its own boundaries. When we read that the Word was with God, we get hints of the love that led to creation and the love that led to redemption.
Jesus, the Word, expresses this inner love of the Trinity that will lead to creation and redemption. In these coming weeks, as we sing carols such as ‘Love came down at Christmas’, we shall be singing of this truth. It is a truth that has been since before the foundation of the universe. What we celebrate at Advent and Christmas is something that goes back before the Big Bang. Look into the night sky at the stars, whose light we see so many aeons since they emitted the waves that finally reach the Earth, and realise that way before that light ever left those celestial bodies, God was love and God was speaking. In the Incarnation we are about to celebrate, we look with awe at the constellations and galaxies that fill our skies and our telescopes, and however much we marvel at them, we remember that before they were flung on their journeys through space, there was a Word. That Word, part of the eternal Godhead, sharing in love and speech, would one day share that love and speech with the world in human flesh. And so we are filled with a sense of wonder.

The second word is life:

Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of men. (Verses 3-4)

So – the inner relationship of love in the Trinity that is hinted at when we say that the Word was with God from the beginning explodes beyond its boundaries into creation. Love cannot be contained within itself: love has to love outside itself. So God creates, and the Word is God’s agent of creation. Here, in the act of creation, is the first bursting out of God’s love. From Big Bang to infant worlds, from early microbes to human beings made in the image of God, here is the hand of God. The Bible never tells us how the world was made, for it is not a scientific text book, but it points us to the Maker.

In fact, God’s creative love involves giving life from within himself – ‘In him was life, and that life was the light of men’. Just as human parents give of their own lives to create life, so the Word does the same. This loving act of creation is an act of self-giving love. The life of God given to the pinnacle of creation, human beings, made in God’s image, is imparted. Remember the emphasis in Genesis upon God breathing life into human beings? Here is another way of saying that.

Moreover, as the Word gives life, ‘that life was the light of men’. Wherever there is light, it originates from the Word, the Second Person of the Trinity. Wherever you find truth, beauty and goodness in life, you find it because the Word of God gave life which is light to all.

Am I saying that all religions lead to God? By no means. But I am affirming what Paul said to the people of Lystra in Acts. Paul told them,

We are bringing you good news, telling you to turn from these worthless things to the living God, who made the heavens and the earth and the sea and everything in them. In the past, he let all nations go their own way. Yet he has not left himself without testimony: He has shown kindness by giving you rain from heaven and crops in their seasons; he provides you with plenty of food and fills your hearts with joy. (Acts 14:15b-17)

‘He has not left himself without testimony.’ ‘That life was the light of men.’ It’s what John Calvin called God’s common grace. In creation, God is good to all. And we affirm from the Prologue to John’s Gospel that it is through the Word, whom we came to know as Jesus, that God is good to all in creation.

How wonderful, then, to know that the One who was the agent of this loving creation, and whose gift of life provided for all goodness, would not only create but enter creation. As we enter Advent and prepare to mark the coming of the Christ child, we remember that the One who entered creation, born of a virgin, was God’s agent in making this creation, and his life already bestows beauty and truth throughout it. Look in the manger and see more than a baby boy. See the Life-giver. And then see if you are not filled with a sense of wonder.

We have heard the third and final word already, but it carries over from verse 4 to verse 5. The third word is light:

In him was life, and that life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it. (Verses 4-5)

I said earlier during the first point about the Word that the love in the Trinity had to go beyond the boundaries of the Godhead, and it did so in creation and redemption. In thinking about our second word, ‘life’, I showed that love in creation. Now in our third word, ‘light’, we see the love of the Trinity extending to redemption.

How? The light is not just the source of truth, beauty and goodness – ‘that life was the light of men’. It is more: there is not only light, there is darkness. Light is needed, because there is darkness. So the truth, beauty and goodness that come from the life-giving Word stand as a testimony in the face of sin. They are a testimony to the ways of God in opposition to the ways of a world that rejects that God.
But there is more. The light was to shine in the darkness in a more profound way. For the love of God sent into creation through the Word, which testified to love in contrast to hate and fear, could not stand still. The light would enter creation. It is what we celebrate as we approach Christmas by the route of Advent. So we marvel as, in the words of John Henry Newman, ‘A second Adam to the fight and to the rescue came.’ Darkness may abound, but light is coming. And on Christmas Day, we shall say: light has come! The baby of Bethlehem is born as a warrior of light, a sworn enemy of darkness.

And – again – there is more! This is no equal contest between light and darkness. Light and darkness, truth and falsehood, are not equal and opposite enemies. ‘The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not understood it.’ This is not an intellectual statement. To understand something is not merely to comprehend it, it is for that understanding to mean power over the other. The word ‘understood’ here can also be translated ‘overcome’ or ‘come to terms’. John is telling us that the darkness of the world cannot get to grips with the light of the Word. Once there is even a chink of light, the hold of darkness is broken. Though we still live in an age where light and darkness both exist, the light of the Second Person of the Trinity conquers, and will conquer.
How that light conquers, though, is another matter. Not for nothing did Graham Kendrick imagine Mary looking at Jesus lying in the manger and seeing thorns in the straw. Light would overcome darkness not by violence but by suffering, the suffering of the Cross.

Darkness will not have the final word. Light will. It is already guaranteed, in the coming of the Word who took the name Jesus. His birth, life, death and resurrection make light shine in the midst of a darkness that cannot come to terms with him.

Yes, the Word who experiences love within the Trinity is then the One who makes that love spill out in creation through his Life. And that love will stop at nothing, for it is the Light seen in sacrificial suffering to overcome the darkness.

Now tell me you’re not filled with a sense of wonder.

[1] Van Morrison, ‘A Sense of Wonder’, © Exile Music, 1984.

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Sermon: God’s Love And Ours

1 John 4:7-21

 

The other night I was talking with a friend of mine. He had seen somebody write something controversial on my Facebook page. My friend said, “As far as I’m concerned, if it’s not in the Bible, it’s wrong.”

To which I said, “Well, then, you’d better take your trousers off, because trousers are not in the Bible.”

It was one of my more subtle pieces of Theology, I’m sure you’ll agree. But my friend didn’t strip off.

Another word that isn’t the Bible is ‘Trinity’. Jehovah’s Witnesses will delight in telling you that. But the data that leads to the doctrine of the Trinity is all in the Bible, and that is why I believe in it.

To say that may make you nervous. Not a sermon on the Trinity! Has Trinity Sunday been secretly moved to November?

 

No. This is just to say that on a day when our theme is ‘God’s Love And Our Love’ (and hence why every hymn today features the love of God), we’re going to think firstly about God’s love. And in thinking about God’s love, we end up thinking about the Trinity. There’s nothing difficult coming here, just this thought: our passage makes one of the most basic statements in the whole Bible about God. John says, ‘God is love’ (verse 16). God’s very nature is love. How could that be true before creation? Only if it were possible for God to share and express love within God. There, within the Trinity, is love. The Father loves the Son and the Spirit. The Son loves the Father and the Spirit. The Spirit loves the Father and the Son. God is love.

If you accept that, then here is the next thought. Love between people (or beings) needs to go beyond them. The love that a couple or a family shares needs to be extended beyond their boundaries. If they only keep love between themselves, it is no longer love, it is mutual selfishness.

 

The example I usually give is this. When I prepare a couple for marriage and I take them through the things they need to consider about their relationship, I ask them how the love they share can be a gift to others. The most common expression of this is if they are able to have children. But (unless they are one of the increasing number of couples who have had children prior to marriage) they do not know whether they will be able to have children or not. So I ask them where they will extend their love. Is there something in the community they can do as a couple? Most couples understand that just staying cooped up together is unhealthy.

In a similar way, ask now about the statement ‘God is love’. Can God simply keep love within God? Or does God need to extend love? I would say, ‘yes’. The love that is within God as Trinity extends in the act of love we call creation. God’s inner nature of love is first expressed outwardly in creation. God’s love exploded in creation.

But it doesn’t stop there. John gives us a specific example of God’s love, namely the birth and death of Jesus:

God’s love was revealed among us in this way: God sent his only Son into the world so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins. (Verses 9-10)

We experience God’s love in the birth of Jesus, who came in humility, poverty and obscurity to bring us life. We experience God’s love in his giving up Jesus even to the Cross for us, so that our sins might be forgiven. We need never think God is indifferent to us, because he has come to us in Jesus and even died for us.

 

Think for a moment about the news items regarding St Paul’s Cathedral and the Occupy LSX protestors’ camp. You will have seen in the week that eventually the Dean of St Paul’s resigned, due to the sustained criticism of the cathedral’s apparent hostility to the demonstrators. After the Dean resigned, the Bishop of London and some of the remaining cathedral staff went to visit the protestors. To my astonishment, one news report said it was the first time they had met. We do not have to worry about that with God. Not only has he met us in the birth and death of Jesus, he continues to meet us in the gift of the Holy Spirit. As John puts it in verse 13,

By this we know that we abide in him and he in us, because he has given us of his Spirit.

So that is our first and fundamental point: God is love, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. That comes before everything else. It has to be the basis of our responses, due to the way John starts this section:

Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God (verse 7a).

Hence our second thought is that we love in response to God’s love. As John puts it in verse 19:

We love because he first loved us.

God loves first; we love in response. That is always the order. If we get that wrong, our whole spiritual life shrivels up. If we think that our duty of love comes first, then faith becomes a list of dos and don’ts, it is all about oughts and musts. When we fall into that trap, there are only two possible destinations for the end of our journey: one is pride and the other is condemnation. We shall end up in ugly pride, because we shall delude ourselves that it’s all about us, look at our achievements! We shall be quite happy to draw all the attention to ourselves and perhaps fail to notice that we are deflecting it away from God. Indeed, God will be reduced to no more than Santa’s Little Helper.

 

The other destination when we put our acts of love before God’s love for us is, as I said, condemnation. We shall become only too aware of our failings. We shall know we get nowhere near God’s standards, and quite probably we shall fall a long way short of our own personal expectations. We shall have a hard time believing God can forgive us, and a difficult task in forgiving ourselves.

Pride and condemnation are pretty unattractive options, don’t you think? But if you put things the right way round, both of them are dealt with. Pride is crucified, and condemnation is healed. When we remember that ‘we love, because God first loved us’, then we see that the spiritual life is not one of relentless rule-keeping, but a life of gratitude. Everything the Christian does is a grateful response to the God of love. I do not seek to lead a holy life, because that is what will earn me enough brownie points with God. I seek to lead a holy life, because I want to please the Lord who loves me. It is similar in some ways to the healthiest of human relationships. When you know that someone wants to spend their life with you, it brings out gratitude. We seek to please them, not because that will make us love them – they already do – rather, we want to please them because they already love us.

There is a small way in which we mark that in the pattern of our Sunday worship. I always place the offering fairly late in the service, and normally after the ministry of the Word, where we have read the Scriptures and heard them expounded in the sermon. The offering only comes in the light of that. We have heard God speak to us through the Bible and an interpretation of it. Now, having heard of his love, we respond by offering our gifts as a sign of offering our very selves in thankfulness that God loves us.

We then carry that pattern out into daily life. All of life is like the saying of grace before a meal. God has given us good things, especially in Jesus. We are truly thankful. This time tomorrow, our lives will be a benediction in response to God’s goodness and love.

Finally, I want to fill out what a life of responsive love looks like, according to John. Near the end of the reading, John gives a couple of examples of what ‘We love, because God first loved us’ means in everyday Christian living.

One is that we have a great sense of security:

Love has been perfected among us in this: that we may have boldness on the day of judgement, because as he is, so are we in this world. There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear; for fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not reached perfection in love. (Verses 17-18)

 

If God loves us in the way I’ve described – in creation, in the Cross and in the gift of the Spirit – if he loves us to that extent – and if we respond by welcoming that love into our lives and responding in gratitude, then what have we to fear, asks John? Certainly we have no need to fear a God who loves that extravagantly. It is not that God’s love is sentimental or slushy. Rather, because God’s love is so generous, outrageous even and sacrificial, one who goes to that extent in love is not about to withdraw it on the hoof. We shall certainly fail in our response of love, but God is faithful. So we can be bold in the face of judgement, and unafraid of punishment from God, because his love has been lavished on us and we have drunk it in.

As I said earlier, all the hymns today feature the love of God. One that didn’t make the final five but which easily could have done would have been ‘And can it be’. Imagine singing those lines Charles Wesley wrote, based not on 1 John 4 but on Romans 8:

No condemnation now I dread,
Jesus and all in him is mine.
Alive in him, my living Head,
And clothed in righteousness divine.
Bold I approach the eternal throne,
And claim the crown through Christ my own.

This is the inheritance of the one who knows God loves her or him. Whatever life throws at us, we live without paralysing fear of God, because we know we are accepted and loved beyond measure.

And that leads us to the other sign of living a life of responsive love. Because we are secure in God’s reckless love, we can live dangerously. In particular, we can give ourselves in love to our brothers and sisters.

Those who say, ‘I love God’, and hate their brothers or sisters, are liars; for those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen. The commandment we have from him is this: those who love God must love their brothers and sisters also. (Verses 20-21)

If God is for us, what is the worst that can happen to us? We can be rejected by human beings, but never by God. So we set out on the adventure of responsive love that not only responds directly to God in the language of worship, we also show responsive love by letting the love of God that has filled us overflow from us to others. If we have heard and received good news, how can we keep it to ourselves?

Or put it another way: when you first learn how to saw a piece of wood, you are taught to cut along the grain. Cutting across the grain is hard work. Therefore, since God made all of creation in love, it is cutting with the grain to love our brothers and sisters as God has loved us. There will be voices that tell us this is not the natural thing to do, but in God’s eyes they are tempting you to cut across the grain. It is not the way he made things to be.

 

There is a wonderful story in the Old Testament about a group of Israelite lepers who discover that the enemy army besieging their city has surprisingly fled. They go from tent to tent, plundering much-needed goods.

Eventually, one of the lepers says, what we are doing is not good. This is a day of good news! We should go to the city and tell everyone what we have found.

That is the position we are in when we love, because God first loved us. God has led us to discover the most wonderful treasure and the most vital gifts for true living. How can we not love our brothers and sisters by sharing our discovery, by letting God’s love spill over from our lives and flood the lives of others?

Truly, today is a day of good news.

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Another Brief Sermon For A Memorial Service

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

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

Psalm 23

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

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

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

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

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

in which she sings,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Sermon: Testing Truth And Error

I’m back tomorrow from a week off, and return with another sermon in our series on 1 John, which follows below. Then in the evening we have our annual All Souls service for bereaved people, and I’ll be posting my brief sermon for that service here on the blog tomorrow.

1 John 4:1-6
During the 1960s and 1970s, denominations such as the Methodist Church and the Church of England tried various experimental forms of worship. From that period comes the story of an Anglican bishop who visited a parish. He went to begin the service with the new form of words he had become used to. He said: “The Lord is here,” expecting the response, “His Spirit is with us.” But when he cried out, “The Lord is here,” nobody responded.

He said it a second time, slightly louder, in case people hadn’t quite heard him properly. “The Lord is here!” But again, there was no response.

A third time he said, “The Lord is here,” but again no-one said anything in reply. Finally, in desperation, he found himself saying, “The Lord is here, isn’t he?” To which the vicar replied, “Not in our service, he isn’t.”

How do we tell when the Holy Spirit is present? It’s an issue we have to deal with in the church. How do we assess people’s claims when they say that the Holy Spirit led them to say or do certain things?

Here is one occasion when perhaps I should have thought a little more discerningly about that question. We were sitting in the living room of an Anglican rector friend’s rectory. Several of us from an ecumenical group in our area were present, along with two other pastors from elsewhere in the county. One was a prominent vicar of a huge church ten miles away that attracted a huge congregation from all over London and the South East. The other was the pastor of a large independent church from down on the coast.

We were gathered along with the representative of an Argentinean evangelist to consider inviting him to lead a conference for the whole county. In the middle of the prayer time, the independent pastor started making huge claims about how he could feel the Holy Spirit very close to him, telling him what we should call the conference.

As it happens, the conference wasn’t bad – a few exaggerated spiritual claims from one or two people, but nothing sinister. Except the time when the aforesaid independent pastor made the appeal for the offering. He dished out twenty minutes of emotional manipulation about giving, some of it connected to the idea that the more you gave, the more likely it was that God would make you rich, and all to a background of stirring music. If I hadn’t been on the team organising the conference and if I hadn’t had a rôle to play that night organising the team that prayed with and counselled people afterwards, I would have walked out. In retrospect, I think I should have seen the warning signs when he started making his grand claims a few months earlier about how close he claimed the Holy Spirit was to him.

You may not find yourself in that situation, but we all hear claims from time to time that the Holy Spirit has led someone to say something contentious or do something controversial. We have to weigh these claims carefully. Just because something is out of the ordinary doesn’t necessarily mean it’s wrong – but nor does it automatically mean it’s right.

John faced a similar situation in the community to which he was writing. People were making bids for leadership in the community, and claimed the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, but clearly John himself was dubious about some of these people. He had to give counsel to the church about how to discern the godly from the fake. There are two tests he offers in this passage, and we’ll explore them for how they help us to separate the work of the Holy Spirit from that which is merely of the human spirit, or even of another kind of spirit.

The two tests are a test of belief and a test of behaviour. Let us consider, firstly, John’s test of belief.

This is how you can recognise the Spirit of God: Every spirit that acknowledges that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, but every spirit that does not acknowledge Jesus is not from God. This is the spirit of the antichrist, which you have heard is coming and even now is already in the world. (Verses 1-2)

John’s opponents are teaching that Jesus only appeared to be human – a denial of the doctrine of the Incarnation. A word from the Holy Spirit will glorify Jesus, the true Jesus. It will not undermine Jesus as fully divine and fully human. It will not deny the Cross and the Resurrection, the Ascension and his Return. In fact, a word from the Holy Spirit will bring praise to the name of Jesus Christ as Saviour and Lord.
So take, for example, the question of how you might respond to someone who tells you they have had a particular spiritual experience that seems strange or unsettling to you. Depending on your own Christian life and what you have become used to, that could be any one of a number of things. If, for example, you’re not used to the idea of people speaking in tongues and someone says to you they have received the gift of tongues, the question to ask is not, do I find this spooky and unsettling? Instead, the question to ask is, does this person praise Jesus more as a result of their experience?
Similarly, suppose someone tells you that they received prayer at a meeting and they claim that the Holy Spirit came powerfully upon them – so powerfully, indeed, that they couldn’t remain on their feet and they fell to the floor. The question to ask is not so much about the falling down as about the standing up afterwards. Did they acknowledge Jesus, the Jesus of the New Testament, as a result of their dramatic experience?

If the answer is yes, then you have a decent sign that the Holy Spirit was at work, because Jesus told his disciples (as recorded in John’s Gospel) that the work of the Spirit was to point to him. On the other hand, if someone’s conversation afterwards is all ‘me, me, me’ then you have reasonable grounds to doubt whether they had an authentic experience of the Holy Spirit.

Equally, if the spiritual experience is allied to a viewpoint that denies essential truths about Jesus, you can also be properly sceptical about its authenticity. So if someone claims something remarkable but it is in the name of, say, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, then you have every right to doubt not the reality but the validity of that experience. After all, Jehovah’s Witnesses dilute the full biblical revelation about Jesus into making him just a demi-god, rather than fully divine. The Holy Spirit bears no witness to claims like that.

It’s with things like that in mind that John talks about ‘the spirit of the antichrist’ – you have to delete from your memories the ideas you have had about some end times spiritual terrorist that you might have gained from horror films or tawdry Christian paperbacks. Instead, you have to see ‘the antichrist’ as all that opposes Jesus Christ in all his truth and majesty. Such opponents will not be drawing you into a legitimate experience of the Holy Spirit.

Secondly, let us consider John’s other test, the test of behaviour. Listen again to how this section ends:

We are from God, and whoever knows God listens to us; but whoever is not from God does not listen to us. This is how we recognise the Spirit of truth and the spirit of falsehood. (Verse 6)

The point John is making as a founding apostle of the Church is this: look for how people react to the teaching of the Church. John and his fellow apostles were witnesses to the Resurrection and many had spent time directly with Jesus, as John himself had. They were best qualified, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, to say what was authentic faith in Jesus. Therefore it was reasonable to expect that anyone claiming true spiritual experience would listen to them and respond positively to their teaching. (It still is.)

If we want to know whether someone is being led by the Holy Spirit, we have a right to ask whether they are walking in ‘the faith once delivered to the saints’, as received, interpreted and transmitted by the Church over the centuries. We shall always be open to new insights into the Scriptures, and it is also true that following ‘what the Bible says’ is by no means always a simple and clear matter. However, we can still discern whether there is a desire to be faithful to the apostolic testimony.

It is therefore often a sign of someone living under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit that she or he finds the Scriptures coming alive, and that this experience is accompanied by a desire to live out the teaching found there. If a person who is living like that speaks about experiences of the Holy Spirit, it is worth taking them seriously. That doesn’t mean being uncritical, but it does mean being warmly disposed towards them.

I can look back on the experience I had in my first circuit when we had an ecumenical project that put youth worship in the local night club. Some people thought that the loud and exuberant worship of the teenagers was spiritual froth. But I recall how some of those youngsters took part-time jobs in local care homes, where they washed and cleaned incontinent elderly people out of their love for Christ, and I say they passed John’s test of behaviour.

I look back too at what has happened to several of those teenagers and young adults in the intervening years. I see some who entered church leadership. I see a scientist who works on pioneer treatments for people with HIV/AIDS. And so I say yes, the test of behaviour was met by many of them.

On the other hand, we should seriously question those who make great claims to spiritual experience but who are not prepared to match it with a desire for holy living. The person who claims remarkable insights into the ways of God yet is also rather too acquainted with the emptying of alcohol bottles is not to be trusted, as is the person who shows dangerous signs of greed and acquisitiveness, or the Christian who treats the opposite sex with less than complete respect.

Likewise, too, we should be suspicious of those who take the apostles’ teaching and twist it to their own ends, in order to justify their own behaviour. Be wary, for example, of the Mormons, who claim all sorts of spiritual experiences, but who also teach the highly dubious notion of ‘celestial marriage’, despite Jesus’ clear teaching that ‘there will be neither marrying nor giving in marriage in heaven’. And in promoting ‘celestial marriage’ they end up privileging married people and demeaning the single, the divorced and the widowed. They don’t seem to notice Jesus’ own marital status. In fact, they fail both the behaviour and the belief tests.

But although I’ve used examples of sub-Christian groups such as the Mormons and the Jehovah’s Witnesses, let’s remember that John was specifically addressing a problem of people who infiltrated the church herself with their dilution of who Jesus was and is, and their rejection of apostolic teaching. They tried to claim a following, but the whole problem with them was that their whole approach to life and faith was captive to the world’s way of thinking and living, not Christ’s:

They are from the world and therefore speak from the viewpoint of the world, and the world listens to them. (Verse 5)

Being sucked into the vain values of a world opposed to Christ is a danger we all live with. It is something each of us needs to guard against. To give into the world’s ways and seek approval there is one of the surest recipes for cutting ourselves off from true, Christlike spirituality. So as well as exercising discernment over the claims of others by examining their belief in Christ and their behaviour in response to apostolic teaching, we do just as well to guard our own hearts and minds. Let us devote ourselves to the full, biblical Jesus and to the teaching of the apostles, that in doing so we may be more open to the work of the Holy Spirit.

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