Journey To Jerusalem 3: Building The Church, Psalm 127 (Lent 4)

Psalm 127

‘Unless the Lord builds the house’ are – ahem – interesting words for my family to hear at present, just when a wall of our manse is being rebuilt, following an incident where a delivery driver managed to reverse into it. It may not literally be the Lord rebuilding our manse, but at least Methodist Insurance have called in a good building firm.

‘Unless the Lord builds the house’. But which house? I suspect that, especially since this is a Psalm of Ascent for pilgrims on their way to the Temple at Jerusalem for one of Israel’s feasts, that the house in question is what they called ‘the house of the Lord’, that is, the Temple itself.

I said in last week’s sermon that we Christians don’t speak of church buildings as ‘the house of the Lord’ because Jesus is the true Temple and we together are the temple of the Holy Spirit. The church is fundamentally not the building but the people.

Hence, a Christian interpretation of this psalm would be to see it in terms of building the church, the people of God. In that case, ‘Unless the Lord builds the house’ sits very well with Jesus’ promise that he would build his church, and with worship songs where God says, ‘For I’m building a people of power and I’m making a people of praise’, and the people reply, ‘Build your church, Lord.’

Surely that is something all Christians are concerned about. Instead of decline, we want to see the church grow, both in quantity of people and in quality of living the Christlike life.

And it’s something we’re focussing on in the circuit right now as churches have Mission Action Plan meetings with John Illsley. We want to see the churches built up again. But how?

The Psalmist here gives us the two sides of the coin: God’s part and our part. Let’s explore them.

Firstly, God’s part:

¹ Unless the Lord builds the house,

the builders labour in vain.

Unless the Lord watches over the city,

the guards stand watch in vain.

² In vain you rise early

and stay up late,

toiling for food to eat –

for he grants sleep to those he loves.

Building the church is God’s work. It is a spiritual matter, therefore we need to see him at work.

This is consistent with what we know about God elsewhere. The whole of salvation is based on the fact that God acts first, and we only respond. When Adam and Eve sinned in the Garden of Eden, the first act in salvation was the Lord coming walking in the garden, looking for them. God delivers the Israelites from Egypt before he gives them the Ten Commandments: the commandments are a response to God acting first. In the New Testament, we read that ‘we love because God first loved us.’

This is so different from the way we often approach these things. We have so fallen into our society’s technological approach to solving problems that we think we need to devise some clever plan to make the church grow again. So we follow the latest trends, copy what the latest trendy speaker says, we fall for books that tell us there are a certain number of essential steps to take, and you know what? We fall flat on our faces.

What has happened? We have succumbed to the ancient sin of pride. We have believed that it all depends on us. And secretly, we rather like that. We want to be known for our daring exploits. But it’s wrong. This is God’s work, not ours. It is his Name that will be glorified, not ours. It is about God’s grace which requires our faithful trust. It is not about our good works. The Gospel itself tells us that salvation is about grace and faith, and that we are not saved by our good works. Well, neither does the church grow by our good works. It grows because God is at work and we merely respond.

Now if we accept that building the church is God’s work, there is an opposite error into which we can fall. We can say, well if it’s all down to God, then we don’t have to do anything. It takes the old saying, ‘Let go and let God’, which was meant to emphasise our need to trust, and extrapolates it to a point where we abdicate all moral responsibility. If the church grows, that’s down to God, and if it doesn’t grow, well that’s nothing to do with me, Guv.

It is God’s work to grow the church. We need a move of the Holy Spirit to make that happen. But you know what that means for us? If we desire that God build his church, then we need to pray.

There is a time and place for strategizing and planning the mission of the local church, but it is not the first thing. The first thing is that we need God to move, and on our side that means prayer. So all our planning and programming has to wait until we have heard from God. Unless and until we know what his vision is for our church in mission, we don’t start organising and managing things in the ways we love to do.

Because really all that organising and managing is just a subtle way of saying that we want to stay in control. We don’t have the faith and trust in God that is at the heart of Christianity. When we want to zoom into action first without taking time to be still and to listen to God, then all we are doing is proving the adage of the late American Christian leader AW Tozer, who once said that ‘Most Christians live like practical atheists.’

More positively, we remember the words of John Wesley, when he said that God does nothing except in response to prayer.

To build the church, we need God to move first.

Secondly, our part:

To examine this, I want to look at the second half of the Psalm, with those words we must handle sensitively about the gift of children. Let me initially read them again:

³Children are a heritage from the Lord,

offspring a reward from him.

⁴ Like arrows in the hands of a warrior

are children born in one’s youth.

⁵ Blessed is the man

whose quiver is full of them.

They will not be put to shame

when they contend with their opponents in court.

Let me add some context and qualifications. Yes, children are a blessing. I love my own daughter and son more than words can say. But children can also be a source of pain. And others may not have the blessing. They may have wished for children but not had them. They may have lost children. A few Christians are even specifically called not to become parents, because it will interfere with their particular divine calling.

There are some fundamentalist groups that say you should all have lots of children. One such movement is called ‘Quiver-full’, and is named after this psalm, where we heard ‘Blessed is the man whose quiver is full of them.’ To a certain extent, they have a point. Religions where families have large numbers of children tend to grow in the world. You could look at Northern Ireland, which when I was young had a significant Protestant majority in the population, but where soon the Catholics will outnumber the Protestants and a united Ireland will be a very real political prospect.

But at the same time you can’t make what the Psalm says into an absolute principle for everyone. After all, what would that say about Jesus, who had no children of his own. Was he not blessed?

We must look elsewhere for an interpretation of these words in the light of Jesus.

God has created a people for his praise. He wants to build that people, his church. Our privilege is to be the spiritual midwives who bring new children of God into his people. The new birth is all God’s work, but he calls us into partnership with him. Just as a couple comes together for a pregnancy to happen and a midwife comes alongside them to assist them with the birth, so the Holy Spirit reveals Jesus to people and God uses us to help bring them into the kingdom of God.

Now what does that involve on our part? How are we spiritual midwives? In a number of interlocking ways. One is that we set out to live such lives of devotion to the ways of Jesus in the world that our friends want to talk with us about what makes us the way we are. Another is that when we have the opportunity, we are willing and able to talk about Jesus and what he means to us with our non-Christian friends. Alongside that, we will be willing to give an appropriate invitation, whether that is to come to something exploratory like an Alpha Course, or even to attend church. It also means that we learn how to lead someone to faith in Christ.

Friends, what would it be like if we concentrated on training our church members in habits and practices like these, rather than just setting up meetings with speakers that amount to little more than religious entertainment?

There are many resources available to help churches learn these skills and virtues. Right now at my Haslemere church, our mission development worker is leading a weekly course on how to share our faith sensitively.

Honestly, it’s not difficult to find these courses. The question is, why don’t we? Do we do other things in church life in preference to these spiritual priorities? Do we try to fill our church life with other things to avoid dealing with these things? Is this why we come up with all the silly nonsense that having hirers of our church premises amounts to outreach?

For so long as we keep on doing the same old things, acting like a religious club rather than the Body of Christ, deluding ourselves that one day people will start rushing into our doors, we shall be guilty of Einstein’s definition of insanity: that we keep doing the same things while expecting a different result.

Sanity will come when we accept that we need God to act first, and on our part that means prayer. When God works in people’s lives, our response will be not to run an institution or a club but to be spiritual midwives to the new life the Holy Spirit brings.

Build your church, Lord. Unless you build it, we labour in vain.

March 30, 2025 0

New Series: Paul’s Favourite Church; 1. Christians Under Construction (Philippians 1:1-11)

Philippians 1:1-11

How do you choose a church? Some of us don’t: we grow up in it. My sister and I were fifth generation, same congregation.

Others of us move into an area and look for a new church. We may consider the denomination, the style of worship, or the theological outlook. We may look for one that has good children’s ministry. North American research has suggested that on that continent the number one consideration is the quality of the preaching.

But these options weren’t available in the early decades of Christianity. You came to faith and you joined the local group of believers in your city, who probably met in one of the larger Roman houses owned by a wealthy member of the congregation, and that was that.

Yet for an apostle like Paul, travelling from place to place planting new churches and overseeing them, there was an opportunity to see which churches were doing better. And while you might argue he shouldn’t have had favourites, the warmth of his letter to the Philippians contrasts strongly with the way he has to speak to some of the other churches, such as the Galatians and the Corinthians.

This doesn’t mean the Philippians were perfect: we shall encounter some issues they had as we explore the letter. But it does mean we can get an idea of what made them so attractive to Paul. And that may help us as we seek to be an appealing and attractive congregation today. Listen to his warm words in verses 7 and 8 to get a sense of his feelings for them:

⁷It is right for me to feel this way about all of you, since I have you in my heart and, whether I am in chains or defending and confirming the gospel, all of you share in God’s grace with me. ⁸God can testify how I long for all of you with the affection of Christ Jesus.

In the surrounding verses, we hear of his joy, his confidence, and his aspirations for the Philippians. When we hear the substance of his joy, confidence, and aspirations we get a sense of why he loved them so much. From that we can ponder whether we have these lovable traits, too.

So firstly, why is Paul joyful?

³I thank my God every time I remember you. ⁴In all my prayers for all of you, I always pray with joy ⁵because of your partnership in the gospel from the first day until now

He is joyful, because the Philippians are in partnership with him in the gospel. In what ways have they done this?

We know from later in the letter that they have sent gifts via a courier named Epaphroditus to help Paul in need. That might be financial support, or that might be material provisions, especially because he is dictating this letter from prison. In those days, friends and family of the prisoner had to supply their everyday needs, such as food.

We also know that two women in the congregation called Euodia and Syntyche and a man named Clement have been missionaries or evangelists alongside Paul.

Partnership in the gospel is not just a matter of words but of deeds for the Philippians. They have raised money – not just generally for charity, but specifically for the work of the gospel. And they have sent people to be part of God’s mission. They have skin in the game.

In what ways do we go into partnership in the gospel? Take the question of raising funds. Many churches are good at doing that for charities, and I’m not saying that’s a bad thing, but I am saying it’s not the same as funding the spread of the gospel. Many churches are also good at raising money for Christian organisations that provide disaster relief or other support to the poor, and that is good, because it is a way of demonstrating the gospel. It’s part of sharing the love of God in our deeds.

But in my experience of Methodist churches, raising money and practical support for the spread of the gospel in word is far rarer. In what ways can we get behind those whose call it is to urge people to come to faith in Christ? We seem to forget that unless we support evangelism, there will be no church. The church is always just one generation away from extinction.

There are many organisations we could support. Some specialise in bringing the gospel to students. I know someone who runs a network out of Southampton for women sharing the gospel with other women. Some groups specialise in rural areas, others in our cities, and so on.

And what about releasing some of our people for this work? Who are the folk in our congregations who talk naturally and easily about their faith in Jesus? Are these the individuals we should be encouraging and supporting to pursue a calling more specifically?

Imagine the joy this would bring to the wider church and to church leaders if we were explicit in our partnership in the gospel.

Secondly, why is Paul confident?

⁶being confident of this, that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.

I will be open with you: this is one of my favourite verses in the Bible. It’s why I entitled this sermon ‘Christians Under Construction.’ ‘He who began a good work in you will complete it.’ Replace the roadworks sign that says, ‘Danger, men at work’ with ‘Danger, God at work’!

Or to put it another way, this is a time of year when I, who do not watch much television, set the Sky box to record three consecutive Monday night shows on BBC2. Because Monday night becomes brainy quiz night. Only Connect, Mastermind, and University Challenge. I don’t care that I can only answer a few of the questions: I like being stretched.

And there in the middle is the famous catchphrase from Mastermind: ‘I’ve started, so I’ll finish.’ This, says Paul, is what God has promised the Philippian Christians. And this, says Paul, is the basis of his confidence. He has seen enough to be confident that God will see things through in their lives. He will complete the work of what John Wesley called ‘Christian Perfection.’

The Philippians are indeed Christians under construction. They are not the finished article. Paul is well aware of that. Again, later in the epistle we shall come across some of their failures and foibles. But Paul sees that bit by bit, God’s Holy Spirit is doing the work of transformation. Slowly, they are being remade in the image of Christ. Paul is confident God will see his project in them through to completion. This is an attractive feature of the Philippian church.

And yes, this work is all of God, but it takes a co-operation with the Holy Spirit for it to happen. This speaks well of the Philippian Christians. They are committed to seeing God’s transforming work happen in their lives.

We too will be an appealing community of God’s kingdom if the same is true of us. I am sure many of us can look back on our lives and tell stories about how God has done a makeover in our lives – something the late great Christian philosopher Dallas Willard called ‘The renovation of the heart.’ I’m sure if we take a moment to reflect we can each identify an example in our lives.

But here’s the thing: so often, such testimonies are accounts of what happened in the past. Do we also have a testimony in the present of God’s renewing work?

This means we cannot be complacent Christians. By all means let us rightly rejoice in what God has already done in our lives. But let us also be committed to hearing the still, small voice of the Spirit whispering to us about the next item on God’s agenda of change for us. And let us also encourage one another when we see signs of God being at work in our brothers and sisters.

Thirdly and finally, what are Paul’s aspirations?

⁹And this is my prayer: that your love may abound more and more in knowledge and depth of insight, ¹⁰so that you may be able to discern what is best and may be pure and blameless for the day of Christ, ¹¹filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ – to the glory and praise of God.

I suppose you could say that Paul’s aspirations are, ‘I like what I’ve already seen in you Philippians, now I pray that God does more.’ It’s the kind of prayer that follows through on his joy that they partner in the gospel and his confidence that God hasn’t stopped working in their lives.

But here Paul gets a little more specific about how he would love to see God continue to work among these people. It goes roughly like this: if you love God more that means you will know God more, which means you will know God’s will better, and then you will want to do that will. That seems to be the sequence he envisages: love God more – know God better – know God’s will – do God’s will.

My guess is that the Philippians share Paul’s aspirations for them, even if they can’t articulate them like he does. They want a deeper love and knowledge of God, so that they may know and do his will. That is what they are living for. That is what Paul longs to see fulfilled in them.

But in the modern church when we meet some people like this, it scares us. We think they are freaks or extremists. The late A W Tozer once said something to the effect that if someone with a normal New Testament commitment to Christ walked into one of our churches, we would treat them as if their spiritual temperature were a fever, when the reality is that we are spiritually cold.

Now of course there are some Christians who are genuinely extreme or unbalanced, who have an unhealthy intensity. Such people make me feel uncomfortable, because something doesn’t seem quite right with them. They may be sincere, but I am not sure about how healthily they are expressing their faith.

But I can’t dismiss every Christian who makes me feel uncomfortable in the same way. Sometimes, if I am honest, there are others who leave me with an uneasy feeling because their love for Christ is so wholehearted that it shows me up as being trivial and half-hearted. I don’t like that, and it’s easier to besmirch their faith than ask myself awkward questions about the depth of my commitment to Christ.

What if we made it our aspiration for ourselves and one another that together by the grace of God we would pursue a wholesome wholeheartedness for Christ, and rely on the Holy Spirit to lead us?

Conclusion

No wonder Paul loves the Philippian church. They partner with him in the gospel. They know God is at work in their lives. They are passionate to see more of that. What an encouragement they must have been to him as he spent time in a jail in Rome.

Imperfect as we are, still under construction as we are – just like the Philippians – what can we learn from them that we too might be attractive witnesses for Christ?

September 1, 2024 0

Good Habits Versus Wrong Desires, John 6:24-35 (Ordinary 18 Year B)

John 6:24-35
Many of us remember fondly the Wallace and Gromit movies. The second one, The Wrong Trousers, finds Wallace taking in a penguin lodger to alleviate his debts.

Unfortunately, the lodger is the infamous criminal Feathers McGraw, and he spies the special techno-trousers Wallace has developed for taking Gromit on walks. Rewiring them for remote control and getting Wallace into them while he sleeps, he attempts to steal a diamond from the city museum.

The crowd in today’s reading don’t have a problem with the wrong trousers. They have a problem with asking the wrong questions. And their wrong questions betray their wrong desires.

As I said last week, the crowd has a choice between the grace Jesus offers them and their own mentality of grabbing. Ultimately, their wrong choices (which are also driven by wrong desires) will lead to them deserting Jesus.

Our desires are important – more so than we sometimes give them credit. Some Christians say we just need to get our thinking right and everything else will follow. It’s the religious version of the famous statement by the philosopher Descartes, ‘I think, therefore I am.’

But as the Christian thinker James K A Smith points out, that just makes us ‘brains on a stick.’ He urges us to remember the teaching of St Augustine of Hippo (354-430 AD), who reminded us that what actually drive us are our desires and our loves. These are what form us, especially the habits they encourage in us. Smith puts it this way: ‘You Are What You Love.’

So it’s important to examine our desires. And hence today we’re going to look at the wrong desires in the crowd that are betrayed by their wrong questions so that we can nurture the right desires in our lives as Christian disciples.

The first wrong desire is to prefer physical satisfaction at the expense of the spiritual.

²⁵When they found him on the other side of the lake, they asked him, ‘Rabbi, when did you get here?’
²⁶Jesus answered, ‘Very truly I tell you, you are looking for me, not because you saw the signs I performed but because you ate the loaves and had your fill.

They are glad to have had their bellies filled – and Jesus was happy to meet their needs. But after that, it all went downhill. Or perhaps it’s better to say that their real attitudes were exposed.

Because there’s nothing wrong with Jesus and his people meeting physical and material needs. In fact, it’s important, and it’s often the first step in Christian witness. As General William Booth, the founder of the Salvation Army, once said: if you want to give a hungry man a tract, make sure it’s the wrapping on a sandwich.

The crowd is happy to receive the gift, but not the Giver. It’s me-centred, or perhaps we-centred, but not God-centred.

These attitudes still persist today. If God won’t give people what they want physically, then God must be rejected. It can be summed up in the T-shirt slogan, ‘He who has the most toys wins’ – to which the answer is, ‘He who has the most toys still dies.’ Paul’s teaching that ‘godliness with contentment is great gain’ (1 Timothy 6:6) is not popular teaching with our culture – and nor with our politicians and economists.

Nowhere is this more evident in our society than in the attitude to sex, where the typical time frame for a couple first to sleep together is now on just the third date. They would prefer to believe that God is a spoilsport and Christians are prudes to the truth that God actually has their well-being at heart when he prescribes a different and stricter approach.

We in the community of faith are not immune to these pressures to prioritise physical satisfaction and diminish or exclude our need to feed on Christ and his word. How easily we forget the way Jesus quoted Deuteronomy to the tempter in the wilderness, that we do not live on bread alone but on every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.

And that’s why we need to develop regular sustainable habits for our devotional lives. We have our regular habits for eating, and we know why we need them. So why do we shy away from doing the same for our spiritual sustenance? You cannot tell me that the average person cannot put aside at least ten or fifteen minutes a day for Bible reading and prayer.

And furthermore, we are spoilt for choice these days in the availability of resources to help us – from traditional daily Bible reading notes to apps for our smartphones.

Do we give an appropriate priority to our spiritual feeding as we do to the meeting of our physical needs? Or are we numbered among those the late AW Tozer had in mind when he said, ‘Most Christians live like practical atheists’?

The second wrong desire is to prefer human works at the expense of divine grace.

Continuing the conversation with the crowd, Jesus says,

²⁷Do not work for food that spoils, but for food that endures to eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you. For on him God the Father has placed his seal of approval.’
²⁸Then they asked him, ‘What must we do to do the works God requires?’
²⁹Jesus answered, ‘The work of God is this: to believe in the one he has sent.’
The crowd falls into the trap of Jesus mentioning working for food that endures to eternal life. They want to work in order to receive approval from God. Did Jesus know their hearts and minds? I rather suspect he did.
For Jesus’ response is to tell them to do something that isn’t really work:
²⁹Jesus answered, ‘The work of God is this: to believe in the one he has sent.’
There are no works you can do to win the approval of God, he says. What God requires is that you put your faith in me.

The crowd makes a common mistake. People use the following of God’s laws either as good works that they hope will win favour from God, or as boundary markers to show who’s in and who’s out – hopefully proving that they are ‘in’.

And it’s a mistake to say this is just a fault seen in Jewish opponents of Jesus. The idea that we are not fundamentally sinners and can be good enough on our own to be accepted by God has been called by some ‘The English heresy.’ It has a long and tawdry history in our culture.

It is seen in the relegation of the word ‘sin’ to the salacious stories that were always so beloved of Sunday tabloids, usually of a sexual nature. Even in our day as newspapers are replaced by the Internet, there are plenty of these tales around.

But Jesus says we just need to believe in him, and that isn’t a good work that merits us the love of God. Faith is to hold out empty hands to God and believe that he is going to fill them with his good things.
Sadly, the good works heresy still squirms its way into the church. I have had people ask me if they were good enough for church membership. To which the proper reply is no, but neither am I. We are here by the grace of God alone, and we receive that by holding out the empty hands of faith.

It’s why whatever we say about right and wrong in society and in other people, we must be careful not to become judgmental. We are only in the family of God by his grace, received by faith in Jesus and his death for our sins.

I once met a Christian who had a particular way of reminding himself of this. I met him when we were both patients on a hospital ward, and he gave me his business card. After his name were the initials ‘SSBG’, and I was puzzled. What degree or professional qualification was that, I asked him?

‘It stands for Sinner Saved By Grace,’ he replied.

‘The work of God is this: to believe in the one he has sent.’

The third and final wrong desire is to prefer signs at the expense of the Saviour.

³⁰So they asked him, ‘What sign then will you give that we may see it and believe you? What will you do? ³¹Our ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness; as it is written: “He gave them bread from heaven to eat.”’

When I hear this, I’m inclined to think: what a cheek! You want a sign to prove that this is the One you should believe in? Well, what do you think you saw when he fed all five thousand of you?

It reminds me of what the Apostle Paul said in the first chapter of 1 Corinthians on this subject:

²²Jews demand signs and Greeks look for wisdom, ²³but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling-block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles

Some people have a lust for the spectacular and the dramatic. If there is a God, they expect a firework show with drones like the New Year extravaganza in London.

But Jesus points the crowd to the Father who gave bread from heaven in the wilderness, and ultimately to himself as ‘The Bread of Life’, because signs aren’t meant to be an alternative to faith in him and allegiance to him.

Now don’t get me wrong. Jesus did miracles. I believe he did. I also believe that miracles are not extinct. I do believe in a God who shows up in history and is not remote from us. And therefore, I believe in things like intercessory prayer.

But the signs are not an end in themselves. They are meant to point to Jesus. And that’s what we’re meant to focus on. That’s what matters.

Miracles are real, but rare, as CS Lewis said in his book on the subject. Why? Because the scientific laws by which our universe lives are a description of God’s habits – they must be, if it is true that Jesus ‘sustain[s] all things by his powerful word’, as Hebrews 1:3 says. The universe relies on God’s habits. Miracles are when God breaks his habits, but of necessity can only be rare, or the upholding of the universe will be disturbed.

Next time we want church or faith to be some kind of whizz-bang show, we need to ask ourselves whether we are putting our thirst for a religious performance ahead of our relationship with Jesus.
To be sure, I am not for one moment suggesting that church and faith should be boring. We believe in Jesus, and when we read about him we can be sure that he was many things, but one thing he certainly wasn’t was boring.

But the life of faith is not the explosive adrenaline rush of the hundred metres sprint, it is the marathon. We keep Jesus and the finish line before us in what Eugene Peterson called ‘A Long Obedience In The Same Direction.’

Conclusion

So what if we are to make the right choices, not the wrong ones? At the beginning, I linked this with the need to establish habits.

If we are not to prefer physical satisfaction over the spiritual, then I talked about the habit of regular Bible reading.

If we are not to prefer human works over grace, then we need the regular discipline of both confessing our sins and receiving the assurance of forgiveness. So yes, let us notice this as a rhythm in Sunday worship every week. But we might also consider a daily review of our lives. There is an old Christian practice called the Examen, where we review the day before going to bed. We rejoice in the good of the day and where we have seen God at work. We also repent of those times we have failed him and are assured we are forgiven.

If we are not to prefer signs over the Saviour, then these first two disciplines, along with our other commitments of worship, the sacraments, prayer, and fellowship will all be tools of the Holy Spirit to form us in the marathon race of God’s kingdom. Just so long as we keep doing them and they become regular habits.

August 4, 2024 0

Fifth Sunday in Easter: I Am the Vine

I made one very tired mistake in the video below: I forgot to set my camera to eye autofocus, and so at points I go out of focus during the video. Of course, you may prefer me that way!

John 15:1-8

Last week we thought about one of the seven ‘I am’ sayings of Jesus in John’s Gospel, namely, ‘I am the Good Shepherd.’ This week we think about another one: ‘I am the Vine.’

We need to carry over two things from last week. The first is to remember that this very emphatic way of saying ‘I am’ indicates a claim by Jesus to divinity, reminiscent of God calling himself ‘I am who I am’ to Moses at the burning bush.

The second thing we need to carry over is to look to the Old Testament for some background to the title. So just as we looked at the title of ‘Shepherd’ last week, we must now look at ‘Vine’, and the obvious place to go is Isaiah 5:1-7, where the prophet describes Israel as like a vineyard. However, it’s a bad vineyard, and is symbolic of God’s people being persistently and seriously disobedient to God through their disregard for justice. God promises to withdraw the vineyard’s protective hedge and leave it to decay and destruction.

A new vineyard is needed. That’s what Jesus claims to be here in today’s passage. This is yet another New Testament passage where Jesus claims to be the True Israel, fulfilling everything that Israel should have done but didn’t.

And with Jesus’ disciples being the branches, Jesus says that the vineyard is now constituted differently, not on the basis of observing Torah, but on the basis of union with him.

Now we often say that all metaphors are limited, and one of the limitations here is that Jesus doesn’t describe how we become branches of the vine. There’s nothing obvious here about salvation by grace through faith, for example. We conclude that’s not the purpose of Jesus choosing this image.

Instead, Jesus seems to talk about what it takes to remain one of the branches. His Father is the gardener (verse 1). In the Apocrypha, the literature between the Old and New Testaments that our Catholic friends recognise as Scripture but we don’t,

The state of a tree’s fruit … was said to attest how well the farmer … had cared for it (Sir 27:6), reinforcing the importance of a gardener’s care for it.[i]

So, if you like, God’s reputation is at stake here! But he trusts that reputation to our behaviour – a very chancy thing, you may well think. It’s something that came home in a distressingly powerful way to me this last week when reports began to appear online that alleged the long-deceased headmaster of my old secondary school was a paedophile. You see, it was a Church of England school, and one of the alleged victims said that this behaviour pushed him towards atheism.

God’s reputation is at stake according to the conduct of his people.

So we need to give careful attention to our relationship with Christ.

A couple of things strike me about that in the reading.

The first is that we have a choice between being pruned and being cut off. Both sound painful. There is no choice that involves the avoidance of pain. It’s rather as I heard Adrian Plass put it some years ago:

Life is a choice between doing what you don’t want to do and doing what you really don’t want to do.

What’s the difference between being pruned and being cut off? Pruning took place in late Spring: the tendrils of the vine were clipped back to allow the fruit to grow. The idea was to get the vine to put all its energy into producing fruit.[ii]

Being cut off was much worse. This was when branches that would no longer produce fruit were removed to leave space for new ones that would.

I’m sure you can see some spiritual parallels here. God the Father is determined that the church of his Son Jesus be spiritually fruitful in what it does. If we share that concern (and if not, why not?) then we shall be wiling to submit to his pruning, removing those things from our lives individually and together that get in the way of fruit growing.

What might God prune from our lives if we are willing to let him work in us so that we are fruitful? I suspect it would include all those frivolous and shallow things on which we spend our time. How many of us are just not getting down to serious prayer and spiritual reading because we are filling our time with trashy magazines, Internet gossip, and maybe worse things? Or maybe he’s calling us to put aside something good in favour of what is better?

Are we aware of God wanting to prune us of the things that stop us going deeper with him?

And then what about the cutting off? How many of us have not only become unfruitful, we have also managed to get ourselves in the way of those promising branches that could become fruitful?

How might that happen? Do we dominate church life at the expense of those who want to move forward spiritually? Have we belittled the passion of those who want to press on with Christ?

Look at how few of us take our devotional life seriously, to the point that some surveys show many Christians only interact with the Bible on a Sunday morning, and when we talk about what we believe, it’s utterly infused with the values of the world rather than the Gospel.

In these cases, God has every right to look at his church and say, the situation is so serious that I shall have to get some people out of the way if the church is to have any hope.

Pray God that we shall not give him reason to consider us. Pray God instead that we accept his pruning.

The second strand of Jesus’ thought I wanted to pick up on is connected with this and is all the language about remaining – us remaining in Christ and Christ remaining in us.

The late Eugene Peterson’s translation of the Bible, The Message, paraphrases this language as a call to make our home in Jesus just as he does in us, or to be joined to him in an intimate and organic relationship.

I wonder what it means to be at home with Jesus? Surely it sounds like the sort of relationship where we are comfortable with him – as a Person, and in what he says and what he does. It’s not just a distant admiration for a great man: it’s such a desire for him that we want to draw close to him and even imitate him.

So yes, this begins with all the sorts of things I regularly bang on about: the importance of personal Bible reading and prayer, and all the other spiritual disciplines.

But that’s only where it begins. If it stops there it won’t be enough for us to remain in Christ. I have known avid Bible readers who have also been avid back stabbers.

It was the twentieth century American saint A W Tozer who captured the spirit of what I’m trying to say here in these words of his:

The driver on the highway is safe not when he reads the signs, but when he obeys them.[iii]

When we not only listen to Jesus but put into practice what he says, then what do we think the result will be? Answer: spiritual fruitfulness.

Alternatively, when we hear the words of Jesus (and most of us have heard them regularly for years) but do nothing about them, what is the logical conclusion? The answer, surely, is the predominantly fruitless church that we have today. God is determined to have a fruitful vine,, not one he has to leave to rack and ruin again. Will we draw close to him in listening and in obedience so that he makes us fruitful for him? Or will we be so casual in our faith that in the end he says, these people are getting in the way, I must remove them so that I can use newer and younger branches?

[i] Craig S Keener, The Gospel of John: A Commentary, Volume 2, p994.

[ii] https://www.psephizo.com/biblical-studies/jesus-the-true-vine-in-john-15/

[iii] https://www.pinterest.com/CandidChristian/aw-tozer-quotes/

May 2, 2021 0

Sermon: Begone, Unbelief

Mark 6:1-13

Many years ago, I was listening to the radio late at night, when a song came on that I’d never heard before and I’ve never heard since. Not only that, I can’t find any trace of it on the Internet, despite all sorts of searching. It was by an American soul singer (now deceased) called Lou Rawls, and it was called, ‘You can never go back home’. I’ve found one or two other songs of the same title, but not the one he recorded. [UPDATE: the song is called ‘You can’t go home’, it’s a duet with George Benson, and is on the At Last album. Thanks to my sister!]

‘You can never go back home’ could have been a song for Jesus in this reading. It was all looking so good. Having returned from the eastern side of Galilee where the people had begged him to depart after he ruined the pig farming industry (how we could have done with that at a multinational’s pig farm in Mexico not so long ago), he has arrived back on the west to be greeted by crowds, and he has healed the woman with the haemorrhage and Jairus’ daughter. The woman and Jairus were great examples of faith (as we saw last week).

So – a homecoming to Nazareth should top everything, shouldn’t it? This should be the climax, the triumphant homecoming.

Except – as we know with hindsight – it isn’t.

“On the sabbath he began to teach in the synagogue, and many who heard him were astounded. They said, ‘Where did this man get all this? What is this wisdom that has been given to him? What deeds of power are being done by his hands! Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary and brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon, and are not his sisters here with us?’ And they took offence at him.” (Verses 2-3)

‘The carpenter, the son of Mary’ is a derogatory expression. Jesus is just a common worker with his hands, like everyone else. He’s not special. He has no particular status[1]. In fact, he’s of low status: that’s indicated by ‘son of Mary’:

“It was contrary to Jewish usage to describe a man as the son of his mother, even when she was a widow, except in insulting terms. Rumo[u]rs to the effect that Jesus was illegitimate appear to have been circulated in his own lifetime and may lie behind this reference as well.”[2]

Familarity breeds contempt, we say. The congregation at the Nazareth synagogue thought they knew Jesus. They knew his family. Yet in a critical way they didn’t know him. Jesus labels himself as a prophet without honour at home (verse 4). He can only heal a few people (verse 5) and is ‘amazed at their unbelief’ (verse 6). Jesus was no less powerful, but his power has to be received. And instead of finding the open hands of faith to receive what he has to give, he encounters only clenched fists.

It would be different if Jesus visited us, wouldn’t it? We believe in him. We trust in him. We affirm our faith every Sunday and say words like those in the creeds. He wouldn’t find unbelief here, would he? A few doubts maybe, but surely not unbelief?

Or would he? Do we slip into unbelief at times? I think we do. I’m sure I do. For like the Nazareth congregation, it’s all too easy to think we know Jesus when in some important way we don’t. We tame him as ‘gentle Jesus, meek and mild’, when he vigorously confronted evil. Rarely do we express the contempt his fellow Nazarenes had for him (although I have come across occasional cynicism), but I do suspect that for us familiarity may breed complacency. We think we know him, yet he can’t do many miracles among us, either. Have we got so used to Jesus that we have forgotten his raw power? Is this why C S Lewis wrote that wonderful line in ‘The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe’ where he said, ‘Aslan is not a tame lion’? And is it why the American spiritual writer A W Tozer said, ‘Most Christians live like practical atheists’?

Of course, Jesus does visit us. He is present by his Spirit. Yet where is the daring faith in many churches? Our problem with faith may not be the cynicism of Nazareth but the unwillingness to take risks. Many years ago, I heard the Anglican vicar and evangelist Eric Delve say how typical it was of British people to say goodbye to someone with the words, ‘Take care’. What kind of words are they, he asked? Watch out, everything around you is dangerous, keep safe and hide away!

And does that reflect in our churches? Sadly, it often does. Like the one-talent man who buried what he was given in the ground, we opt for playing safe rather than the adventure of faith. In the words of one writer (was it Neil Cole?), we need to be in places where we are done for unless Jesus intervenes. Only then are we living by faith in Christ.

That’s why when I gave my sabbatical presentation last Sunday afternoon, I referred to that challenging document ‘The Life Cycle of a Congregation’ by George Bullard. Those of you who were present heard me describe an eight-step process from birth to death (not that death is inevitable) for churches. There were four cycles in the ascent, and four in the descent to death. I’ll just re-read two sentences from my notes:

“The movement happens as soon as the repeat of good practice is desired. Comfort zone instead of risk-taking.”

The moment we say, ‘We know what we’re doing’, we are in danger of leaving the life of faith. It means we don’t need to trust Jesus any more. We can get by on our own, thank you very much. I now see danger flags waving every time I hear Christians say they know what they’re doing. It’s why I know that one thing I need to do is leave behind my old cautious attitude of ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’, and instead make my maxim, ‘If it ain’t broke, break it’.

What does Jesus do when he doesn’t find faith? Faithlessness makes him unwelcome. He does the same as he did at Nazareth: he leaves. Remember how in the Book of Revelation he addressed seven churches. Often he warned them that if they did not live faithfully, he would ‘remove [his] lampstand’ from them – that is, he would remove his presence. Jesus is quite willing to leave churches that don’t have faith in him. It breaks his heart, but he is prepared to move on. Let us ensure we give him no reason to do that, by being people of daring faith.

So where does he go? The simple and startling answer is, he goes here, there and everywhere, all at the same time. How can that be? Because he authorises the Twelve to go out in pairs in his name (verse 7). They are an extension of his mission. In Jewish law, “the sent one is as the man who commissioned him.”[3]

And if the members of the Nazareth congregation fail to exercise daring faith in Jesus, one thing you can’t miss in the instructions to the Twelve is that Jesus expects them to have utter dependence upon God in their mission. They go in the clothes they are wearing, along with a staff and sandals. They get to take no food, no money and not even a second tunic to keep them warm at night (verses 8-9).

Is this a model we all should follow? I know one evangelistic organisation which takes the equivalent passage to this in Luke 10 as a principle for all the participants in its ‘Walk of a Thousand Men’ missions. To quote from their website:

“Team members come without cars, mobile phones or credit cards, only bringing £2 per day to engage in pub evangelism.

– They trust in God for provision of food and other necessities

– Teams of Walkers take this simplicity a stage further, carrying their own packs and sleeping on hall floors.”

In embracing simplicity, they encourage team members to exercise faith at the same time as they call people to faith. Having hosted a couple of their teams in the ‘Walk Kent’ mission ten years ago, I can tell you the faith is rewarded: most team members put on weight, thanks to generous hospitality!

It’s not that the precise instructions Jesus gave the Twelve for their mission should always be followed to the letter, but it is that the underlying principle of faith needs to be embraced. We can’t call people to faith unless we display faith ourselves. It’s what Jesus himself did. Making the community of faith something safe and predictable, both internally and in how we face the world, is far from the example of Jesus.

Full of faith, the Twelve are like Jesus. But also like Jesus, they may face rejection. In which case, they “shake off the dust that is on [their] feet” (verse 11), just as Jews did when they returned from alien lands. It was a sign that the place where they had been was pagan and polluted. And sometimes you just have to distance yourself from unbelief – it has a polluting effect on your own faith. Maybe those ancient Jews knew something. Jesus walked away from unbelief in his home synagogue. The Twelve were to do the same. If our faith is being sucked dry by people who won’t respond positively to Jesus, we might consider the same.

Yet at the same time, for all the warnings this passage contains about unbelief, it isn’t an unremittingly bleak reading. In the middle of Jesus’ call to the Twelve, he gives them a vision for the success of faith-filled mission. “Wherever you enter a house, stay there until you leave the place” (verse 10). You will be welcomed. Don’t believe the old lie that your locality is too tough and hardened to receive the Gospel, because there will be some places where you and your message are welcomed.

Why? Because God will have gone ahead of you, preparing the way. It isn’t up to us to prepare the soil: God does that. The Holy Spirit is at work preparing people for the Good News before Christians show up. If we go into the community with the love of God then yes, in some places people will mock or ridicule us. But don’t let the possibility of a negative reception paralyse you. There will be many instances where your message will enter and stay.

Jesus said he only did what he saw his Father doing (John 5:19). That’s why many Christians today say that mission is ‘finding out what God is doing and joining in’. God is always making the first move. It’s what John Wesley called ‘prevenient grace’ And if you know your French, the word ‘prevenient’ will make sense: ‘pre’ meaning ‘before’ and ‘venient’ from ‘venir’, meaning ‘to come’. Prevenient grace is God’s grace coming before any human action.

And that means we go in confident faith, praying that we will know where God has sent the Holy Spirit as the advance party. We don’t always need dramatic experiences to know that God has been at work ahead of us, we simply look for where we encounter a welcome for our message, and we ‘stay’ with such people, giving them our time. The rejections will come, and yes they will be painful, but like Jesus himself we walk away and concentrate on where we might see fruit.

So this has been a story about faith and unbelief. We have seen that unbelief can strike in the unlikeliest of places, maybe even close to our own hearts, if we are not so much ‘not careful’ but too careful, too cautious, too play-safe. ‘Safety first’ is as dangerous to the soul as cynicism. We must guard against both, for we risk losing Jesus.

Instead, Jesus calls us to the wild adventure of faith. Yes, we may be rejected too, but those sailing on the high seas of faith set their sails for the wind of the Spirit that will take them away from the pagan lands of unbelief and follow where God is preparing the way for the Gospel. Those who set out on the voyage of faith will, like the Twelve, see demons cast out and the sick healed (verse 13). Those who would rather stay in their home harbour and those who denounce the sailors of faith will see no such miracles.

So let’s pull up the anchor and take to the seas with Jesus.

[1] William L Lane, The Gospel According to Mark, p 202.

[2] Op cit, p 203.

[3] Op cit, p 206f.

July 4, 2009 5

Sabbatical, Day 29: From Mountain To Valley With A Bump

So we roused Mark at 9 pm yesterday. Despite the pain in his ear, he protested that he wanted to go back to sleep rather than see a doctor. Eventually, half way to the hospital (where the out of hours GP service is located), he began to be half-awake enough to view the trip as an adventure.

Arriving in the car park, we were still stung at that time to the tune of £3.50 for the privilege of leaving the car in a mostly empty facility. Thanks, Broomfield Hospital. You’re so kind.

Entering the waiting room at 9:20 with an appointment time of 9:40, I let Mark snuggle up to me as I noticed more than twenty minutes go by before anyone else was called into a consulting room. I calculated that with the number of people in front of us, we would probably only get to see a medic around 10:20 – 10:30. For me, the time was passing almost as slowly as it would for a child, and I invoked my interest in Maths to occupy my brain, just as I sometimes stimulate myself on a long car journey by periodically calculating my average speed to two or three decimal points. Did someone say ‘Sad’?

I gathered only one doctor was on duty, but while we were there one more began a shift, as did an advanced nurse practitioner. The pace thus sped up, and just after 10 Mark was called in. We trotted into see the nurse practitioner, along with his Favourite Bear. (He gives his cuddly toys descriptions rather than names.)

Sure enough, it was a routine ear infection and so out came another bottle of amoxicillin, or ‘banana medicine’ as Mark calls it. I wonder whether you can guess the flavour. 🙂

On the way home, he was chatty if still tired, but was very taken by the experience. He said that in future when he was ill he wanted to alternate between seeing ‘Chelmsford doctors’ (by which he meant our GP surgery) and ‘hospital doctors’.

Of course, he didn’t realise that he had seen ‘hospital doctors’ when he was a baby – not only when he was born, but when the root cause of his permanently screaming the manse down was discovered. No, not the shock of having me for a father: he had been born with an inguinal hernia. Diagnosis only happened at seven weeks, after several incidents when Debbie had taken refuge with large glasses of sherry on nights when I was out at church meetings. He had surgery at ten weeks.

This morning, Debbie took Rebekah to church while I stayed home with Mark. He has picked up considerably, but he has a week of banana medicine ahead of him and although he has been quite bouncy today, we’re keeping him off school tomorrow.

If I’ve done any thinking about the sabbatical today, it’s just been a temporary musing of the problem of re-entry that awaits me in two months’ time. I’ve had two mountain-top experiences already, and while the church usually aims to ease ministers back in post-sabbatical, it didn’t happen to me last time and I don’t suppose it will this time.

Last time, the circumstances were exceptional: the circuit treasurer had failed to apply for the release of some funds. Realising his mistake, he had put thousands of his own money into the circuit accounts, leaving us the recipients of an unauthorised loan. He was one of my church members, and a decent guy in many ways.

But what exercises me this time is the adjustment to ‘normal church life’. I think it was A W Tozer who once observed that the spiritual temperature in many churches is so low that when someone turns up with a normal, New Testament ‘temperature’, they treat that person as if they have a fever.

Now let me quickly qualify that. I’m again aware how easy it is at a point like this to slip into a judgmental attitude. I can only assure you I don’t mean that, just as I also don’t mean anyone reading this to assume I’m painting myself as the one with the normal spiritual temperature. I’m struggling for language to express the dilemma, and I expect and hope you know what I’m driving at. In a desire to be accepting, inclusive and indeed avoid judgmentalism we have tolerated a low temperature in our churches. There have been many times over the years when I have felt that slowly suck the life out of me. In such circumstances, regular outside support is vital. Sometimes it’s easy to come by, but not always. Even when it is available, it emphasises the disconnect painfully, and has to be channelled into a passion for change.

In other news: I’ve been wading through the five hundred emails that were in the inbox when I returned. Among the gems was yet another article from the wonderful Ruth Haley Barton. I realise this one on Ash Wednesday is now four days late, but you might still gain something from her reflections, or at very least note it for next year.

And on that positive note, it’s goodnight from me.

March 1, 2009 6

Tag: A W Tozer