George Kovoor On The Web

I don’t think I’m going to preach a brand new sermon this week. The Lectionary Gospel and Epistle are both fascinating: both Luke 7:36-8:3 amd Galatians 2:15-21 (especially if you take the latter in its context from verse 11 onwards) raise the question of table fellowship being used as a sign of who is included in or excluded from the people of God. In the case of the Luke reading, I don’t think I can yet improve on a sermon I preached three years ago on it, despite yesterday reading the chapter on the incident in Michael Frost‘s recently reissued expanded edition of Jesus The Fool. (Highly recommended, BTW.) When it came to Galatians, I again dug out Tom Wright‘s book from last year, Justification, which inspired my recent sermon about justification based on Romans 5:1-11. However, this time, much as Wright enlightened my understanding of the text, I didn’t come away feeling I had something to share with a congregation in a sermon.

So I thought I’d point you to something else on the web. Someone else, actually. Last year while I was on sabbatical, I blogged about my encounters with the extraordinary George Kovoor, current Principal of Trinity College, Bristol.  Well, George has just launched his own website, Kairos Global, and I commend it to you. At this stage it’s rather sparse, but you can start to gain a feel for the ministry of this remarkable man. The lead article that begins on the home page will certainly give you a flavour. There are also a couple of videos, showing five-minute extracts from longer presentations. One is also available on YouTube, so by the magic of WordPress I reproduce it below:

I can’t say I can work out what he’s doing broadcasting on TBN Europe in the company of the Creflo Dollars of this world, but Jesus didn’t worry who he mixed with (any more than the late Rob Frost worried about broadcasting on God TV) and at least it gets some sound teaching out there.

I think George’s site will be well worth watching, especially if it is updated frequently. If his admin can put on some of his talks, whether text, audio or video, in full, it will be invaluable for all of us who care about the evangelisation of the West – and, indeed, the entire world.

Oh, and for something lighter, you can always join the Facebook group George Kovoor Is Mad.

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Sermon: Compassionate Mission

Luke 7:11-17

We had all returned to college after the summer vacation, and were comparing experiences from our summer placements.

“I had a strange experience,” said Tom. “Someone in the parish died, but some members of the church were convinced God wanted to raise this man from the dead. They persuaded the staff in the hospital mortuary to let them pray over the dead body.”

Secretly glad that none of us had had to offer advice in that circumstance, we asked Tom what happened.

“Well, don’t you think you would have heard in the national media if he’d been raised from the dead?”

How we wish we might witness in our day the kind of miracles Jesus did, such as the one here. Like this story, perhaps we especially long for such supernatural turn of events when a young person dies. When an elderly person passes away, we often say it was their time and they ‘had a good innings’. But no parent wants to bury their own child, like the widow at Nain did. You will all know of people who died ‘before their time’, and sense something of the pain and injustice that surrounds such deaths.

Some Christians would say that we can receive more of the astounding power that Jesus exhibited in his ministry, and if we would only be more open to the Holy Spirit, we might see more miracles. Others (perhaps infected the disappointments of the years) would rather explain these things away.

I have no doubt we should be more open to the Holy Spirit’s power, and if we do, then we shall certainly see more amazing things than we presently do. Yet even then, we shall still have our disappointments and our questions. So I want to reflect on this story to ask some basic questions along these lines: how does the mission of Jesus in the world as seen here shape the mission he calls us to in the world?

Firstly, I want to draw attention to Jesus’ feelings. Luke tells us ‘he had compassion for her’ (verse 13). The miracle will be for her, not her son, because he gives the young man back to her afterwards (verse 15).

How critical it is that in mission our actions are driven by compassion for others. How easy it is to reach out to others for different reasons. When outreach becomes based on the thought that ‘We need to bring in more people if our church is to continue’, then we are no longer acting with compassion. In those cases, we are simply trying to preserve ourselves. Our feelings are far from those of Jesus.

He knew that the widow was in desperate need. Not only was she mourning the loss of her son – and we know instinctively it is not right for parents to have to bury their own children – he knows she will be in desperate economic straits. Her husband, who would have provided for her material needs, is dead. Now her son, who would have taken over his father’s rôle as the breadwinner, is also dead. There is no pension or other social security provision to act as a safety net for her. She is now potentially destitute.

So this isn’t an indiscriminate miracle. This is Jesus identifying a clear social and economic need, and then responding with the love of God and the power of the Spirit. He calls us to do the same. Who are the people we know in the community who have great needs or who are in pain? He sends us to those people, not to save the skin of our church, but because he has compassion for them. They are people who need the love of God.

Very well, then: how can I share Jesus’ compassion for lost and broken people? There is a simple prayer that any one of us can pray. ‘Lord, give me your heart for those who need your compassion.’

It’s a simple prayer, but it’s a dangerous one. For if we truly want God to share his compassion for people with us, then we may find he breaks our hearts. He will break our hearts with the things that break his heart. Yet if we are to be bearers of his love in the world, we shall need to embrace this simple but dangerous prayer.

An illustration from some of my novel-writing friends might help here. They tell me that when they want to put a point across in a story, the classic motto of the novelist is ‘Show, don’t tell.’ That is, they get the character to show their beliefs by their actions, rather than putting a long speech into their mouths. Clearly for the Christian it can’t be as simple as ‘Show, don’t tell’, because at some point we have to proclaim or explain the love of God in Christ to people. But if we have the compassion of Jesus, it may be something like this: ‘Show before you tell.’ As General Booth once said, “If you want to give a tract to a hungry man, make sure it’s the wrapping around a sandwich.”

Secondly, I’d like us to observe Jesus’ actions. His compassion leads to action. What is that action? ‘[H]e … touched the bier’ (verse 14). In those four words are some enormous implications.

This action ‘is a silent appeal for the funeral procession to be stopped’[1]. Now who is ever popular for interrupting or delaying a funeral? You may remember the kerfuffle here two years ago at Effie Downs’ funeral when an irate playgroup mother castigated me for allowing Pennack’s undertakers in the church car park when she wanted to pick up her little girl, and who then protested by gunning her engine as the funeral procession approached the church doors. If you recall that incident, you will have some idea of the disruption Jesus threatens to cause here at such a delicate time. I’m not suggesting for one moment that Jesus was aggressive and hostile as that woman was, but the mourners must have feared for what was coming next.

Not only that, you will probably have heard preachers tell you before that for the pious Jew, touching a dead body (even if all Jesus effectively did here amounted to touching the wooden plank on which the wrapped body was laid) made you ceremonially unclean. Jesus goes outside the boundaries of the Jewish Law in order to make his point.

Put these two insights together and you see that by touching the bier, Jesus risked offending social and religious customs in order to get on with what he needed to do. Jesus will take risks in order to act on the compassion he feels for the widow. He is not deterred by the thought that some people might not like him or approve of him. Staying within the boundaries of social niceties is no priority for him.

This is something that goes deep in the Methodist tradition. In remembering John Wesley, we rightly dwell much on his ‘conversion’ of 24th May 1738, when his ‘heart was strangely warmed’ and he was assured that he trusted in Christ alone for salvation. However, we ought also to dwell on 1st April 1739, when he gave into George Whitefield’s badgering to preach in the open air to the colliers at Kingswood, near Bristol. Wesley said that he ‘submitted to be more vile’, because he had previously considered it a sin to preach anywhere other than inside a church building. That was when the revival began.

For Jesus, the love of God meant disregarding the rules of respectable society. For Wesley, it was the same. What about the Church today? Take the way some churches talk about young people. They agree they want to reach them, but are not willing to take social risks. So they will not let them use parts of their premises for fear of vandalism. Or they refuse to give food and drink to some who do not know proper etiquette.

Jesus would ask us how many social boundaries we are willing to cross in order to bring his compassion to people. The American church planter Neil Cole has a provocative – to me, at least – way of putting it. He says we must be willing to ‘sit in the smoking section’. As someone who detests tobacco smoke in all its forms, those are challenging words to me. Jesus would tell us that if you want to share divine compassion in a hurting world, you’ve got to touch the bier.

Thirdly and finally, let us reflect on Jesus’ words. Yes, the words come last. He shows before he tells. “Young man, I say to you, rise!” (Verse 14) Rise up. A literal rising up may not happen as routinely as the people my friend Tom encountered hoped for, but the Gospel leads us into other situations where the message is ‘Rise up.’

One of my very first baptismal services involved the baptism of twin girls born to a church couple. When I visited them to plan the service, the husband told me that his brother and family would be present. He wanted me to know, because – to his bafflement – his brother was part of a strict church where the entire message was about doom, gloom and sin.

“I just don’t get that,” said Steve. “To me, God is about the word ‘welcome’.”

I believe the one Gospel needs couching in many forms, according to different people’s circumstances and needs. For the proud, a message of sin and repentance may need to take the headlines. They need bringing low before they can be raised up. (Although of course, we all must heed the call to repentance.)

For others, though, the message may well be what Steve called ‘welcome’. It will be a message that says “Young man, I say to you, rise!” For the poor and downtrodden, for those damaged by the demeaning or violent actions of others, for those whose self-esteem is lower than ground level, Jesus may well want to say, “Rise up!” The love of God brings new dignity to people, the dignity of being made and being remade in the image of God, the dignity of knowing you are loved by the God of the universe. As the Psalmist puts it:

But you, LORD, are a shield around me,
my glory, the one who lifts my head high. (Psalm 3:3)

God ‘lifts my head high’ – he is ‘the lifter of my head’,  as the Authorised Version puts it. Being loved by a God who gave up his only begotten Son to the Cross lifts our heads high. And because God does that for us, a key way in which we share his message is by raising people’s dignity. Why? Because they are ‘loved with an everlasting love’, just as we are.

Where to begin? Here’s a thought. When the New Testament talks about the gifts of the Holy Spirit, we read that they are for ‘edification’. That’s an interesting word, edification. It has to do with an edifice, a building. Spiritual gifts are therefore to ‘build people up’. It’s time to start practising building people up, because that is key to the work of the Holy Spirit. We may find it easiest to begin with our church family and then look for opportunities in the community.

We can be sure of one thing: we live in a culture that enjoys raising people up, only to tear them down. Which footballers will be subjected to that in the next few weeks during the World Cup? The Christian Church is called to be different. Our call to mission involves building up the lowly and downcast, saying to them, “Rise up! You are loved by God.” That becomes part of our witness as we seek to introduce people to personal faith in Jesus Christ.

Each week, the Essex Chronicle carries a ‘Remember When’ section. It looks back at news it covered in previous decades. Thursday’s edition contained a small piece from 1980 about a Catholic nun from Danbury called Mother Teresa (‘not the famous one’, as they said) who had put a shade at the top of her car’s windscreen with the words, ‘Smile, Jesus loves you.’ She commented how people would come up to her and tell her that it had made their day.

Of course, it will take more than a car sticker to do Christian mission. It will take godly compassion, a willingness to cross social barriers and a thorough commitment to build people up rather than run them down. That is what the example of Jesus shows us. May we have the heart to follow the example he sets, and may we seek the Holy Spirit’s power in order to do so.

[1] John Nolland, Luke 1-9:20, p323.

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Making A Good Move

Some months ago, another Methodist minister who is soon to move circuits said he was reading a book to help him prepare for that change. It was entitled ‘Making A Good Move‘ by Michael J Coyner, an American Methodist bishop. I set out to track it down.

First stop, Waterstone’s online.  A friend had given me a gift voucher for them at Christmas, and so I ordered from them. Unfortunately, this is not the first time I have found that Waterstone’s gaily advertises books, only to have a problem sourcing and supplying them. They seem to have a particular talent in this respect for American Christian titles. If you can’t sell it, don’t plug it, is what I say.

So off to trusty Amazon, who had no problem getting something published by Abingdon Press. These last few days I have had the pleasure of reading it. Not often would I say, “I wish I had read this years ago,” but this is one of the few books I would put into that category. I wish it had been published when I began in ministry (it wasn’t), and I certainly wish I had known about it before I moved to my current appointment.

The book is short (117 pages), which makes it pricey on the British market, at a list price of £11.99, but every single one of those pennies is well spent. Coyner has an easy writing style, which makes it quci reading. Almost too fast, in fact: it’s important to stop and reflect on his advice before diving into the next chapter. He covers everything from farewells in the place from which you are departing to your first year in the new appointment and your spiritual survival kit. In between, he looks at your first impressions, your early priorities, what style of leadership you might adopt and why, along with many other vital areas.

There are certain minor areas of difference between Coyner’s context and mine that can safely be reinterpreted. Few Methodist ministers in the UK will inherit a church with other paid staff. His examples of outreach are all grounded in the ‘attractional’ rather than the ‘missional’ model that I favour. (However, in fairness to him, that conversation had hardly started overtly ten years ago when the book was published.)

The one area I felt the book lacked was in the opening chapter, ‘Leaving Well and Letting Go’. Coyner only writes about situations where departing pastors have had a happy experience of the churches they are leaving. If he ever writes a second edition, then a section for those who are going because it had been an unhappy experience would be invaluable to many.

Having said that, I agree with Brian Bauknight who says in his blurb on the back cover, ‘Making A Good Move should be in the library of every pastor.’ If you are about to change appointments, you might well find this title a brilliant piece of last-minute reading.

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Sermon: Justification

Romans 5:1-11

The other day, a friend of mine said he was contemplating ‘pulling a sickie’. You may be surprised to know that my friend was another minister. (Not a local one!)

He wanted to go sick today. Why? Because today is Trinity Sunday, a notoriously difficult Sunday on which to preach. Preachers wonder how they are going to communicate a great and subtle doctrine, and congregations say they struggle with this belief – yet they don’t want difficult sermons. Nobody wins.

I have preached on the Trinity before, but I did it in a series of five sermons to make it manageable. I don’t think you can do it adequately in one sermon, and so I am going to take one of today’s Lectionary readings and expound its central theme.

I am taking Romans 5:1-11. You may have found the arguments in those verses demanding to cope with, but its appearance in the Lectionary today is timely for Methodists. Last Monday was the anniversary of what we call John Wesley’s conversion, and this passage was said to be Wesley’s favourite portion of Scripture.

The great theme of this passage is justification, a theme dear to Wesley and central to his life and preaching. So that is our subject for today: justification.

We ought then to ask, firstly, what is justification? Many people puzzle over this great biblical word. I once witnessed an oral examination of a Local Preacher (now a minister) who clearly didn’t even recognise the word. It often isn’t used in modern paraphrases, yet it is one of the great words of the New Testament, and denotes one of the great Christian doctrines.

When Paul uses it here, he does so in a much larger context. In expounding justification and the righteousness of God in Romans, he sets it in the great biblical story of God’s love in salvation. So more than once he returns to the story of Abraham, when God began his rescue work not just for individuals but for a broken creation when he chose Abraham and entered into a covenant with him. Everything God does from then on – including the coming of Jesus – builds on that foundation.

What does that mean? It means that God’s righteousness is his covenant faithfulness. He didn’t set out first of all to save people by them obeying the Law given at Sinai and then when that failed save people by faith in his Son. He has always been consistent, even if it meant bringing in a new covenant with Jesus after his people failed in the old one. He gave the Law at Sinai not that people might practise it in order to be saved, but that they might do it as a sign that he had saved them. In other words, keeping the Law of God was an act of gratitude.

What we are celebrating in justification by faith in Christ, then, is God bringing his historical purposes to a climax in his Son. This is where he was always headed. We are celebrating the work of a faithful God.

But there is another angle to consider about justification. We need to think of it as like a law court. You may have heard people describe being justified as ‘just if I’d never sinned’. There is some – er – justification – for this view. In both Hebrew and Roman courts, the person who received the favourable verdict of the judge was said to be ‘justified’. If you brought a complaint against someone and the court found in your favour, you were justified. If you were charged with a crime but acquitted, you were justified. To be justified was to be in the right with the judge.

The New Testament, though, takes this image from the law court and gives it a startling use. We read in this passage that ‘Christ died for the ungodly’ [my emphasis] (verse 6), and this is linked with being ‘justified by his blood’ (verse 9). How can the ungodly be justified? How can sinners be ‘in the right’ with the Great Judge? For the wonder of this doctrine is that in Christ God does indeed acquit the guilty.

It is not that a loving Jesus placates an angry Father. It is rather that a loving Father gives up his Son for us. As verse 8 says,

But God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us.

As a human father myself, that idea sends shivers through me. What if I had to give up my daughter or son for the blessing of others? It would tear my heart apart. But God in his love had his own heart torn apart in giving up his Son to the Cross so that we might be acquitted, forgiven. Father and Son were at one in love to achieve this status for us, without which we would stand before the heavenly court irredeemably guilty.

Secondly, what are the benefits of justification? God has always wanted to bless his creation. In justification, we see that played out through his covenant faithfulness and his sacrificial love. We no longer stand under a sentence of condemnation. What does that mean?

One consequence is that we have been ‘reconciled’ with God (verse 10). It isn’t simply an absence of condemnation. It isn’t merely the cessation of hostilities. Justification heals a broken relationship. Through it, we are reconciled to God.

In other words, we used to be estranged from God. God might long to bless everyone and everything in his creation, but the rebellion of our sin put us outside the possibility of blessing, in a place where we were opposed to his plans for good. But in justification, God – the wronged party! – puts things right. Through Jesus Christ and his death on the Cross, God says, “Welcome home.”

Have you ever been at odds with someone for a protracted time? What is it like when the relationship is healed and you are friends again? That is what justification does. Perhaps the Parable of the Prodigal Son puts it well. The shock of that parable to Jesus’ hearers is that the father doesn’t wait in a huff and demand humiliation from his errant son. Rather, the father is scanning the horizon, actively looking out for his wayward younger son. And when he sees him, he runs to him and arranges a feast.

So it is with justification. God is not cold and clinical in acquitting us of our sins. He is warm and fatherly, thrilled to have us back in the family. So the Christian doesn’t need to stand at a distance from God. Justification welcomes us back into the fold, and even near the centre, by the heart of God.

I know some churchgoers are nervous of that kind of religion that merely treats God as some kind of cosmic mate, but there is still no reason to hang back at a distance from him – not if you believe that God has justified you by faith through the death of Christ. God invites us to move closer to him. Do we think he endured such pain in love and faithfulness, only for us to remain remote from him?

There is another benefit to justification in this passage, and it is mentioned right at the beginning: peace. The reading opened like this:

Therefore, since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ (verse 1)

‘Peace’ and ‘reconciliation’ are similar words. As I am sure you have heard preachers say before, in the Bible ‘peace’ is more than the absence of war. If we think peace breaks out the moment a truce is declared or one side surrenders, then we have a very truncated view of peace. To be sure, peace begins when hostilities end. But that is not the limit of peace.

For although the Greek New Testament word for peace is weaker than the Hebrew Old Testament word for it, I am sure Paul would have been drawing on his Old Testament roots when he said that a benefit of justification was peace with God. Peace in the Old Testament is not a negative word, merely about the absence of something (namely, war). It is a positive word. It is about the presence of something good. It is about the presence of flourishing, harmony and justice. When God’s peace breaks out, individuals are in harmony with God and with one another. When God gives his peace, there is healing. When the peace of God comes to a group or a society, there is justice. Indeed, it doesn’t even stop with human beings: the Old Testament envisions the whole of creation enjoying harmony and goodwill when the peace of God reigns.

So if God gives us peace when we are justified through Jesus Christ, not only do we receive the peace of sins forgiven, we receive so much more. Our relationship with God becomes warm. We seek to live in love and harmony with one another. We seek the good of society. We look for the healing of creation. In doing so, justification gives us a glimpse of God’s future – not only because it anticipates God’s gracious acquittal of us on Judgment Day, but also because the gift of his peace that comes with it begins to shape us into his new society, the people of his kingdom.

And that starts to merge into the third question I want to ask of this passage: what are the consequences of justification? Well, the moment Paul describes peace as a benefit, and given that – as I have just claimed – that peace starts to shape us into God’s future – it’s not surprising that he says that ‘we boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God’ (verse 2). We have something to look forward to: a sure and certain hope that is the gift of God.

Now that hope does something in us. If our peace with God through justification enables us to anticipate God’s great future, and if that gives us hope for the future, it also does something for us in the present. Because the here and now is far from an image of God’s kingdom. Not only do we fail in our discipleship, we face disappointments and opposition. Justification might lead us out of guilt and estrangement from God, but it plunges us into a new situation of conflict with a sinful and broken creation.

But … God uses this for good. He forms character in the justified disciple. He uses the trials that we inevitably face as his justified people to shape our lives and to fortify that hope we have:

And not only that, but we also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us. (Verses 3-5)

Through justification, God may make his Church into a sign and foretaste of his kingdom, but the world doesn’t always like that. Nevertheless, we are the ones with the certain future. Because of hope, we have reason to hang on in there when the going gets tough. God shapes us and in forming our character through endurance, he uses the suffering inflicted on us to make us more ready for his coming kingdom. The justifying God even uses evil against itself to promote good. So if we are justified by faith in Jesus Christ, we have every reason to push on and discover that God is using the pressure to make us into diamonds.

So in conclusion, justification is a great and glorious theme in the Bible. It is the story of the God of sacrificial love and covenant faithfulness, who reconciles us to himself through his only Son, and grants us a peace that is a foretaste of his coming kingdom. This brings us into conflict with the world, but filled with hope we endure and God uses that to transform our characters.

This wonderful gift is received only one way. By faith. It is the gift of God to those who will trust in the Cross and Resurrection of Jesus, and who will turn from their selfish ways to partner God, by the power of his Spirit, in his kingdom project.

Today, then, let us rejoice again in the wonderful gift God gives us through faith in his Son, and let us recommit ourselves to his kingdom purposes.

Alternatively, if we have spent years in church thinking that something else would see us right for eternity, let us turn away from our folly, confessing our wrong and humbly receiving all that God has done for us in Christ.

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Getting Ready To Move

I realise that in recent weeks this blog has been little more than a place to post my sermons. Life has been busy. Some of that has been ministry – some big and painful things have happened, which I won’t discuss here for reasons of pastoral confidence.

We have also been busy with preparations for our forthcoming move of circuit. In August, we shall be on our way to Surrey, since (subject to the approval of the Methodist Conference) I shall take up a new post in the Woking and Walton-on-Thames circuit. We have made a couple of visits down there – one to check things out at the manse, another this last week to have a full tour of the school our children will be attending.

While we were at the school, we drew our children’s attention to a project they have that links them with a village in Uganda. The people grow chillis to sell in order to make a living. There is now a link with a local school there, too. We explained that people in other countries don’t always have the food or money that we have.

All I can say is, it’s funny and illuminating to see how young children take in these matters. The next day, Mark (our five-year-old) announced he no longer planned to follow a career as an author. Instead, he was going to set up huge supermarkets in Uganda, bigger than Tesco’s or Morrison’s, so that people could choose what they wanted to eat. We pointed out they still wouldn’t have much money and wouldn’t be able to buy all the lovely things in his supermarkets.

“That’s easy,” he said. “I’ll open shops where they can buy money.”

Sigh. If only …

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Sermon: The Purposes Of Pentecost

Acts 2:1-21

Perhaps you know the old story of the vicar who visited a primary school where they were learning the Creed. The children lined up for the vicar and one by one recited a section. However, an embarrassing silence enveloped proceedings part-way through.

Eventually, one child blurted out an explanation. “I’m sorry, the boy who believes in the Holy Spirit isn’t here today.”

Is there sometimes an embarrassing silence about the Holy Spirit in our churches? That can be true in some traditional churches. Well has it been said that Catholics believe in Father, Son and Holy Mother, whereas Protestants believe in Father, Son and Holy Bible.

The reasons for embarrassed silence aren’t hard to find. Often, they can be put down to one word. Fear. The Holy Spirit? Or worse, the old name ‘the Holy Ghost’. It sounds spooky, if not frightening. On top of that, you get stories like this one in Acts 2 with the account of people speaking in tongues. In some circles, I have only to mention that and people get upset with me!

As a result, we either ignore or domesticate the Holy Spirit. When we domesticate the Spirit, we reduce his work to a bland coating of the mundane. It’s like cooking without spices or herbs.

What a tragedy. For Pentecost is one of the key events in God’s story of salvation, along with creation, the Incarnation and Easter. And while today I don’t have time to explore the particular anxieties many have around the specific issue of speaking in tongues, what I want to do in this sermon is explore the purposes of Pentecost.

Here’s the first purpose: Pentecost makes us more like Jesus. Let me give you some background in order to explain that. If you know your Bibles, you will know that Luke’s Gospel and the Acts of the Apostles are both written by the same author (whom I take to be Luke himself) to the same recipient (a character otherwise unknown to us called Theophilus). Luke’s Gospel describes what Jesus began to do and teach; by implication, Acts is then Part Two of his story. In Acts, Jesus is still at work, but by the Holy Spirit through the Church.

In particular, there are parallels between some of the early episodes in Luke’s Gospel and those near the beginning of Acts. Both contain a promise that disciples will be ‘baptised with the Holy Spirit’. Then the Spirit comes down – upon Jesus at his baptism and upon the disciples at Pentecost. After that, there is a key sermon that explains what God is fulfilling – Jesus preaches at Nazareth, Peter preaches in Jerusalem after the Pentecostal outpouring. Then there is witness to people nearby.[1]

Put that together, and what is Luke telling us? He’s showing the early disciples going through the same process as Jesus. Pentecost begins their empowered public ministry just as the baptism did for Jesus. By drawing these parallels, Luke is telling Theophilus – and us – that the Holy Spirit has come in order to make us ‘little Jesuses’. The Spirit has come to make our lives and ministries much more like that of Jesus.

How often is it we lament that our lives are nothing like Jesus at all? Quite frequently, I’d guess. As Christians, we want to be more like him, but much of the time we know how vast the distance is between the way we live and how he did on earth.

What failing or weakness do we lament in our Christian lives? Is it that, unlike Jesus, we struggle to display selfless, sacrificial love? The Holy Spirit is here to move us closer to the example of our Saviour. Is it that we have no assurance that our prayers are heard and answered? The Holy Spirit comes to move us in the right direction. Do we lack courage to share the love of God with others through our words and deeds? Again, the Holy Spirit comes upon us to remake us more in the image of Christ.

Let me put it another way, in order to underline this point. Many Jewish people celebrated Pentecost, the Feast of Weeks, as a commemoration of when God gave his people the Law at Mount Sinai.[2] God gave the Law after he had delivered his people from Egypt. It set out the ways they were to please him in gratitude for that deliverance. We too seek to please God out of gratitude for our deliverance (not from Egypt but from our sins). The Pentecostal gift of the Spirit is what enables us to please God. God has shown us the ways we might please him, but he has also given us his Spirit so we may have the power to do what delights him.

The second purpose is this: Pentecost is a taste of God’s kingdom. Let me introduce this thought with an illustration. Every now and again, we go into Chelmsford town centre on a Saturday as a family for various reasons. There is one stall among all the market stalls where we are almost guaranteed to stop every time. That is the fruit and vegetable stall. Apart from the fact that we enjoy buying some of their delicious fruit, they have samples available on a table by the stall. Usually they have cut up oranges and pineapples in the hope that passers-by will try some and then say, “Wow! I must buy some!” Regardless of whether we are going to buy any, our seven-year-old daughter Rebekah stops off for a little feast. In her eyes, the fruit samples are there purely as a public service.

Pentecost is like the opportunity to sample a taste of some fruit, too. The Jewish Feast of Weeks was a harvest festival. Not a full harvest festival like that celebrated at the end of the summer when all the crops have been brought in, but a festival of first fruits. When the first crops came in during late Spring, the people got a taste of what was to come three months or so later.

Pentecost, then, becomes the taste of what the fullness of God’s kingdom will be like, when God sends his angels to bring in the great harvest of the ages. Just as the Resurrection of Jesus is also described as the first fruits (of the great resurrection of all) and anticipates the day when God will make all things new, so too the gift of the Holy Spirit brings a foretaste of the new creation, when God will renew the heavens and the earth. Every sign of the Spirit’s work now, whether large or small, quiet or loud, private or public, is a taste of God’s fruit stall.

So when the Holy Spirit inspires us to care for the stranger, we taste God’s future. When the Spirit calls someone from the darkness of sin to the light of Jesus Christ, our taste buds anticipate the flavours of the kingdom. When the same Spirit does a work of healing in a life (be that physical, emotional, social or any other kind of healing), we glimpse the glorious future where there will be no more pain. When the Spirit leads God’s people to confront evil powers with a prophetic word of truth and justice, we taste the new society to come. When the Holy Spirit does his supreme work of revealing Jesus to people, we get a flavour of that time when we shall no longer know in part, but see him face to face.

Yes, it is frustrating and painful that not everyone is healed, not everyone responds to the call to follow Christ, and that powerful forces dish out injustice. We long for the great harvest of love, healing, righteousness and justice. But right now we are in the era of the first fruits. God calls us to welcome his Holy Spirit and co-operate with him, so that there may in the meantime be many more foretastes of his kingdom when he will rule unchallenged.

The third purpose I want to highlight is that Pentecost is about mission. Even though I take it not that the disciples spoke to the crowd in ‘other tongues’ but rather that the crowd overheard, what is clear is that the Holy Spirit crosses national and cultural boundaries so that people hear the praises of God in their own languages.

Now on one level, there is something almost unnecessary about this miracle. Although the Jews who heard were from different lands, these are almost certainly

‘not in the main … pilgrims [who had] come to Jerusalem from the Diaspora for the feast, but rather Diaspora Jews who had come to live or retire in Jerusalem, and no doubt would have attended some of the synagogues founded in Jerusalem by Diaspora Jews’[3]

In other words, this is a group of people who could speak a common language together anyway, despite their different nationalities. They could understand Hebrew, the language of their faith. Why not just address them in Hebrew?

But the Holy Spirit takes the Gospel to them in the language of each of their cultures. They do not have to work within the language and culture of the established religion in order to hear the Good News.

For me, this is a vital approach in mission. One of the problems we have in church life is that we want to draw people into the community of faith, but we expect them to adapt to our ways of doing things and learn our jargon. We add unnecessary barriers to the acceptance of the Gospel.

This is not what the Holy Spirit does. Think about the ministry of Jesus himself in the Incarnation. He did not stand at a distance and expect people to come to him. Rather , he took on human flesh and dwelt in the midst of the people to whom he was sent. The Holy Spirit mirrors Jesus. He desires to take the Gospel to people where they are in a form they can understand.

That becomes the challenge for us. When we are filled with the Spirit, we shall not simply want to make more people who are Methodist or United Reformed like us. We shall want to establish new communities within the many cultures of our world, our nation, and even of our locality. That’s why ‘Fresh Expressions’ and all sorts of experiments in sharing the Gospel in culturally appropriate ways are at heart Spirit-led approaches to mission.

We should expect this. When Jesus told his followers they would be baptised with the Holy Spirit, he said the consequence would be that they would be his witnesses. The Holy Spirit is the Spirit of mission. The disciples were to be witnesses ‘in Jerusalem, in Judea and all Samaria, and to the ends of the earth’. Again, the work of the Spirit is not in creating a church that waits for people to come to her on her terms. The Spirit makes us missional people who move out of our comfort zones into the places where those who need the love of God are comfortable. By the power of the Holy Spirit, we share the love of God in Christ in other people’s comfort zones, not our own. This is what Spirit-led people do.

In conclusion, then, we have every reason to welcome the Holy Spirit rather than fear him. Who wants to be more like Jesus? Let us welcome the Holy Spirit. Who is hungry for a taste of God’s coming kingdom? Let us invite the Holy Spirit to come. And who wants to share the love of Christ in word and deed in a needy world? The Holy Spirit is already at work, within us and going ahead of us. Let us seek more of his power.

Yes, come Holy Spirit.

[1] See Ben Witherington III, The Acts of the Apostles: A Socio-Rhetorical Commentary, p128f.

[2] Although we’re not absolutely certain this was the case at this time – see Witherington, p131.

[3] Witherington, p135.

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Sermon: The Church Of The Ascension

Acts 1:1-11

You may know that my ‘claim to fame’ is that I studied Theology under George Carey, and that he was one of my referees when I candidated for the Methodist ministry. When George left the world of theological colleges to become Bishop of Bath and Wells, he was soon asked to be present at the reopening of a post office in Wells. The reopening was scheduled for Ascension Day. George discovered that the organisers wanted to mark the reopening happening on Ascension Day by him going up in a hot air balloon while people sang the hymn, ‘Nearer my God to thee’!

The story of Jesus’ ascension is a problem for us. Developing knowledge of astronomy over the centuries has meant that it is difficult to believe that geographically heaven is ‘up there’ and hell is ‘down below’. Despite the fact that Christians have long since abandoned such over-literal interpretations, you may recall how in the 1960s the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev said that [Yuri] “Gagarin flew into space, but didn’t see any God there”.

So we might think that the doctrine of the Ascension is worth rejecting. But in response to that we might say, how else do we know that Jesus Christ is reigning in the universe? If he didn’t return to his Father’s side, what did happen to him? If he returned to heaven in a different way without dying, how did he do so? Might we have in the story of Jesus’ Ascension what is sometimes called a ‘miracle of accommodation’? In other words, Jesus accommodates himself to the limited understanding of his followers by the miracle of rising into the clouds as the only way they would have understood that he was returning to his Father’s presence. In that sense, it’s similar to the creation stories – we’re not meant to take them literally, but they are written in the language of the creation stories of their day.

So if at the Ascension Jesus shows the disciples in their limited understanding that he is reigning at the Father’s right hand, what might he teach them – and us, too, with our limited understanding – through this event? I believe he has something to tell us about the church. I want to share ‘Three ‘W’s’ about the church that we see in the light of Jesus’ Ascension.

The first is that he calls his disciples to be a waiting church. Luke reports,

While staying with them, he ordered them not to leave Jerusalem, but to wait there for the promise of the Father. (Verse 4a)

He goes on to show that that ‘promise of the Father’ is the gift of the Holy Spirit. At first, you might think this is not relevant to us, because since Pentecost Christians don’t have to wait for the Holy Spirit. When we turn from our sins and put our faith in Christ, we receive the gift of the Spirit.

And the thought of not having to wait fits with our culture. Do you remember the advert for the old Access credit card, which said it ‘takes the waiting out of wanting’? A society built on credit (or should we say debt?) does not want to wait for anything or anyone. As the rock band Queen sang, ‘I want it all and I want it now.’

It’s something that society does to religious faith and practice, too. Our great annual season of waiting, Advent, is crushed by the unwillingness to wait for Christmas. We are infected by the disease of impatience. We expect instant solutions to deep problems. One application of something that ‘works’ elsewhere and we think the tribulations of the church will be solved.

But God calls us to be a waiting church. The best things take time. They take God’s time, and come in God’s timing. We know it is unwise to give children everything they want, and especially at the moment they request it. So it is between God and us, too. He has wise reasons as a loving parent for making us wait, even for good things.

In particular, I suggest that one reason he keeps us waiting is that he wants to develop character in us. If we received all we asked for instantly, we would love God for the gifts rather than loving him for who he is. Sadly, too many of us in churches are infatuated with the blessings rather than the One who blesses. We want what we can get out of God, rather than to follow him and love him in Jesus Christ.

So God makes us wait. Holy waiting purifies our motives and focuses our hearts. We grow in grace and become more tuned into the purposes of God, rather than the lusts of our hearts. Our willingness to wait is a mark of true discipleship. And that is what the church is meant to be: a group of disciples, those who are learning the ways of Christ. Waiting puts us in a position where we learn Christ. Is that what we want? If it is, let us accept the grace of waiting.

The second characteristic of the church at the Ascension is that she is a witnessing church. What happens after we’ve waited and the Holy Spirit has come? Jesus is quite clear:

But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth. (Verse 8 )

Make no mistake, the Ascension leads to Pentecost. In fact, Easter leads to Pentecost. With Pentecost comes the gift of the Holy Spirit. And with the gift of the Spirit comes the promise that we shall be witnesses.

In particular, the witness that happens starts from where we are and moves outwards. Just as the disciples were in Jerusalem when they received the Holy Spirit, so their witness began there but it didn’t end there. It went to Judea, Samaria and the ends of the earth. Their witness may have begun with the people with whom they were most familiar, but gradually the Spirit drove them further from their comfort zones to be witnesses to Jesus Christ.

The Holy Spirit does the same today. We make a grave mistake when we think witness is about us staying where we are and waiting for people to be attracted to us. That’s actually a cop-out from being witnesses to Christ, and thus cannot be a work of the Holy Spirit.

No. Instead of the idea that we attract people to us while we sit comfortably (or uncomfortably) in our pews, the Holy Spirit sends us out from the place that suits us to the world as the witnesses of Jesus. The word is not ‘come’ but ‘go’. A witnessing church asks, how are we going into the community and beyond, carrying the love of God in Christ?

Similarly, a witnessing church does not say, how can we attract enough people into this congregation so that it survives for another generation? It won’t say that, because that is a selfish question, more concerned with personal preservation than the Gospel. Jesus said that those who wanted to save their lives would lose it. Those who lose their lives for his sake and the Gospel’s will save their lives.

So a witnessing church, filled with the Holy Spirit, says, the love of God in Christ is such a beautiful gift. Where are the people who need that love? And in the waiting time of Ascension, a true church is consumed with that vision of witness that its members plan how to move out from the church base, spreading God’s redeeming love in Christ to people in spiritual need, material need and social and emotional need.

If this happens, then the church will meet as much as she needs for worship, fellowship and discipleship – but no more. It will not simply become the centre of our social lives, but the refuelling station as we venture into the world, filled with the Holy Spirit. Our social lives will more likely  be fulfilled in the world as we network with friends who do not yet know how much Jesus Christ loves them.

At Ascension-tide, then, the church anticipates this mission. We allow this mission to be the organising principle of church life. And we long for the equipping power of the Holy Spirit in order to put it into practice.

The third and final characteristic of the church at Ascension (at least in this sermon) is that she is a watching church.

While he was going and they were gazing up toward heaven, suddenly two men in white robes stood by them. They said, “Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up toward heaven? This Jesus, who has been taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven.” (Verses 10-11)

This last week I went to the races. Sandown Park, to be precise. I go once a year. Before you think I have a gambling problem, let me explain that it was to attend the annual Christian Resources Exhibition. I was helping to staff the Essex Christian Healing Trust stall, but also found an hour or two spare to look around for myself, buy presents for the family and new clerical shirts for myself. When I was trying to hunt down a gift for Debbie, I was accosted by one stallholder who wanted me to know that his organisation had collected together all the scriptures about the Second Coming and it was their sole aim of their charity to make known what they saw as the truth on this subject. I took their leaflet and hurried on.

Similarly, it was only the other day that one churchgoer told me how a relative lectured him for twenty minutes about the imminence of Christ’s Second Coming.

Hence many of us become nervous of the fervent, if not extreme Christians who go overboard on this theme. We tend to think they’ve consumed too much fruitcake. And that’s before we get to the sects and the cults with their bizarre readings of Holy Writ.

Nevertheless, we are to watch for the coming of Christ. Not in a standing-around-waiting posture, for which the men in white robes seem to censure the disciples here. Just doing that achieves nothing. The doctrine of Christ’s return was never meant to reduce us to inactivity and inertia. Quite the opposite, in fact. When we look for the coming of Christ, we are anticipating the fullness of God’s kingdom, the new creation in which God will bring into being the new heavens and the new earth.

What does that mean? If we are filled with hope because Christ is returning, then while that may give us inner peace, it also gives us holy restlessness. We want to see the kingdom of God, so we get on with building for it. We call people to follow Jesus. We bring relief to the poor, and seek to change all that puts them in poverty. We bring God’s healing to the sick. We look after the creation that God is going to renew.

Such a church is vibrant internally and externally. Internally, it is a forgiving, loving and safe place to be, where the only fear is awe at the presence of God’s holiness, not a worry that people have to tread on eggshells in the presence of bullies. Externally, it is known as a people who would be missed by the community if they folded, who champion the poor, and who have a winsome but challenging word for the world.

Let me ask, then, whether we are a church of the Ascension. Are we willing to wait, so that God may form us more in the image of Christ? Are we witnesses, replacing the idolatry of church as social club with church as fuelling station for sorties of love into the world? And are we watching for Christ’s return, aligning our life and witness by the shape of his coming kingdom?

Too often in the Methodist tradition we ignore the Ascension. O that we embraced it and let it shape us.

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