Tag: Charles Wesley

I’m A Lifelong Methodist – So What? Wesley Day (a day late!) Romans 5:1-11

Romans 5:1-11

Sometimes, when I arrive at a church for the first time, a person will approach me and introduce themselves. In the middle of their greeting, they will tell me, ‘I’m a lifelong Methodist.’ Their clear assumption is that I will be impressed.

More often than not, though, my heart sinks.

And I say that as someone who is also a life-long Methodist.

Because what they tend to mean is something like this. They love the hymns, the style of worship, the variety of preachers from week to week, and so on.

But I don’t want to know whether you like those things. I want to know – if you like Charles Wesley’s hymns, do you have the very experience of God in your life that Wesley wrote about and that his elder brother John preached about? If all you like are the hymns, you may have Methodist style but you don’t have Methodist substance.

And substance is what matters.

In my first circuit as a minister, some people tried to divide the church over the question of music in worship. Some members wanted us to introduce more contemporary worship songs and hymns alongside the traditional material. But some of the ‘lifelong Methodist’ contingent wouldn’t have it.

The tragedy was that those who wanted to add the contemporary to what we already had still loved the Wesley hymns. But they loved them not for the poetry or the melodies (many of which come from after the Wesleys’ time anyway!). No: they loved them, because they had the experience of the Holy Spirit that Charles Wesley described in those hymns. They had the substance. The critics just had the style.

And so since yesterday was the anniversary of John Wesley’s profound experience of faith and assurance in Christ through the Holy Spirit warming his heart at an address in the Barbican, I thought we should take today to examine whether we too have that knowledge of hearts being strangely warmed by the redeeming work of God.

The way I’m going to do this is by summarising Wesleyan beliefs under what have been called ‘The Four ‘Alls’ of Methodism’. Each of the four ‘All’ statements pertains to salvation.

And the first ‘All’ is that All need to be saved.

When John Wesley preached in the open air to the crowds, he used to say that first of all he preached ‘Law’ and then he preached ‘Grace.’ He spoke first about God’s law, to show God’s standards for life and to make it clear that we all fail to reach those standards. The word most commonly translated ‘sin’ in the New Testament means ‘to miss the mark.’ As Romans 3:23 famously puts it,

All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.

We have failed. We need grace.

If you grow up in the church, you can easily miss this. I did. I grew up hearing people being asked whether they were Christians and answering, ‘I’m trying to be a Christian.’ This communicated to me that Christianity could be summed up like a simple mathematical equation: Christianity equals believing in God plus doing good.

I was so wrong.

My mother even bought me a book that was a popular exposition of Romans, showing that faith, rather than good works, led to salvation. I tossed it aside as rubbish.

It was only when I went to series of church membership classes with members of the church youth group, that things clicked – and only then at the final session, when we looked at the service for the reception of new members. There were three promises and professions of faith the candidates had to make. Do you repent of your sins? Do you trust in Jesus Christ as your Lord and Saviour? Will you obey Christ and serve him in the world?

The penny dropped, at last.

Just as John Wesley had tried to live a methodical, holy life but was riddled with fear until his heart was strangely warmed, so God intervened through the words of that liturgy and I found myself responding.

It doesn’t matter how good and how respectable our lives and upbringings are. Each one of us is a sinner. We fail God’s standards. We need to be saved.

The second ‘All’ is that All can be saved.

The person who urged John Wesley to preach in the open air, first of all to colliers at Kingswood near Bath, was George Whitefield. While Whitefield was generally reckoned to be a better preacher than Wesley, they sharply differed on one issue. Whitefield, as a Calvinist, believed that Jesus only died for the ‘elect.’ That is, God had predestined some people to be saved and others to be damned.

Wesley disagreed. He did not believe that all people would be saved, but he did believe that all people could be saved. Therefore, the Gospel should be shared with as many as possible, so that people might have the opportunity of responding and receiving salvation from God by grace through faith thanks to the death and resurrection of Jesus.

While this debate still exists in parts of the Christian world, Wesley set the direction of travel very clearly for the Methodist movement. All can be saved, and that means sharing the Gospel is a priority. Sadly, I’m not sure you would guess that from the behaviours and priorities of many Methodist congregations today, but if you say you are a traditional Methodist, then this is in your spiritual DNA. It is not the only part of mission, but it is a key part.

Today, in other ways, there are people who think they can’t be saved. They’ve been too bad. They’ve been so damaged they can’t recognise goodness and grace when it is offered to them. Perhaps it’s expressed in words from the rock band Coldplay in a song of theirs called ‘Viva La Vida’:

For some reason I can’t explain
I know Saint Peter won’t call my name[1]

While the song is about a king who has lost his kingdom, it’s poignant to hear those words sung by Chris Martin, who grew up in a Christian family in Devon.

But it is our privilege to make it known to people that none of them need say, I can’t be saved. The love of God is on offer to all. It simply requires a response of opening out empty hands in faith to receive his gift.

The third ‘All’ is that All can know they are saved.

This is what we call the Christian doctrine of assurance. It is that we can be assured of having saving faith.

Various strands of Christianity had advanced ideas of how believers could know their eternal destiny for certain. At the more Catholic end,  it was simply by receiving the sacraments of the Church, but not all found that convincing. What if an unrepentant scoundrel took the sacraments? Tragically, this left many Catholics uncertain of God’s grace and love.

In the Reformation, Calvinists said you could know from the promises of God in Scripture. However, even those who were supposedly reprobates, not part of the elect, could also read Scripture. So some later Calvinists looked in the Bible for signs of God’s blessing upon people. Unfortunately, they landed on things such as those who received material wealth in the Old Testament. We see the legacy of this mistake even today in the so-called ‘Prosperity Gospel’, which really is no Gospel at all.

Wesley certainly had a place for believing in the promises of Scripture, and he also believed that the sacraments had power. But he added something else: the inner witness of the Holy Spirit. It’s there in Romans 5, which we read (one of Wesley’s favourite passages, by the way):

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. (Verse 5)

To those who, as in the title of the song recorded by both Dusty Springfield and David Cassidy, asked, ‘How can I be sure?’, Wesley answered that as well as receiving comfort from the presence of Christ at the sacraments and applying the promises of God in Scripture, you could know and feel the assuring work within you by the Holy Spirit.

It was what he had experienced at Aldersgate Street in the Barbican, when he said that his heart was strangely warmed and he felt he did trust in Christ, Christ alone for salvation.

It was what Charles wrote about in ‘O for a thousand tongues’ in the climactic verse:

In Christ, our Head, you then shall know,
shall feel your sins forgiven,
anticipate your heaven below,
and own that love is heaven.[2]

This is all part of the Good News. God doesn’t want you to be in any doubt of his saving love for you.

The fourth and final ‘All’ is that All can be saved to the uttermost.

This is John Wesley’s controversial doctrine of Christian Perfection. Wesley based it on texts such as the words of Jesus:

Be perfect, even as your Father in heaven is perfect. (Matthew 5:48)

Even Wesley realised there were problems with this view. He said it wasn’t so much as believing you could get to a point of not sinning at all as about not knowingly engaging in any conscious sin. He also was clear that he didn’t classify himself as perfect, and that he only in his lifetime ever knew one or two people whom he could call perfect, even by his own revised definition.

Furthermore, it is a debatable understanding of the words of Jesus. For the word translated ‘perfect’ might not mean ‘morally perfect.’ It might mean ‘mature.’

So how do we take this? I found some words of my college Principal about this helpful. He said that behind this controversial teaching of Wesley’s was what he called ‘an optimism of grace.’ And I think that’s a good lesson for us. We should always be optimistic about what God by his grace can accomplish in our lives and in the lives of others.

This means advancing in holiness, both in our private lives and in social dimensions. For this, we need the ongoing sanctifying work of the Holy Spirit – something to remember when Pentecost comes up in a couple of weeks.

And to achieve this, Wesley set up his famous small groups so that members could hold each other accountable for growing in grace and supporting one another. George Whitefield, whom I mentioned earlier, realised that this was Wesley’s genius: he organised converts into small groups for their spiritual growth. Whitefield didn’t, and in contrast, many of his converts didn’t stick: he sadly described them as ‘a rope of sand.’

To be a traditional Methodist, then, means having a holy dissatisfaction with our lives, but also a great hope in God’s grace to transform us, and a commitment to small-group relationships that will help us in that growth.

Conclusion

So – if you say you are a lifelong or traditional Methodist – are these things your knowledge and experience? And I ask the same question if you have been attracted to Methodism in mid-life.

Do you know your need to be saved?

Do you know you can be saved?

Do you have assurance that you have been saved?

And is God saving you more and more, even one day to the uttermost?

[1] Songwriters: Christopher A. J. Martin, Guy Rupert Berryman, Jonathan Mark Buckland, William Champion; lyrics © Universal Music Publishing Group

[2] Charles Wesley (1707-1788), italics mine.

2

The J.O.Y. of Following Jesus, Luke 4:21-30 (Ordinary 4 Epiphany 4 Candlemas Year C 2025)

Luke 4:21-30

When I became due for my second sabbatical from ministry, I was serving in an appointment where no previous minister had had a sabbatical. The circuit tried to do lots of explaining to the senior church steward at my main church, but he only had one question:

‘What’s in it for us?’

There was no concern for my well-being, only for what they could get out of it.

Such was the attitude that when I then had to have surgery ten days after returning from the sabbatical, the response was, why didn’t you have the operation during the sabbatical?

Soon after that, my re-invitation came up for consideration, and you won’t be surprised to know that a faction organised against me. They didn’t try to throw me off a cliff as the Nazareth mob attempted with Jesus, and I would agree I made some mistakes in my ministry there, but you might understand why today’s passage resonates with me.

To treat the reading more positively, I would say it encapsulates that old Christian saying that the letters of the word ‘JOY’ stand for Jesus first, Others second, and Yourself last.

So – Jesus first:

There is a wonderful episode in the book of Joshua chapter 5, just before the Israelites are preparing to take Jericho:

13 Now when Joshua was near Jericho, he looked up and saw a man standing in front of him with a drawn sword in his hand. Joshua went up to him and asked, ‘Are you for us or for our enemies?’

14 ‘Neither,’ he replied, ‘but as commander of the army of the Lord I have now come.’ Then Joshua fell face down to the ground in reverence, and asked him, ‘What message does my Lord have for his servant?’

15 The commander of the Lord’s army replied, ‘Take off your sandals, for the place where you are standing is holy.’ And Joshua did so.

I think Jesus’ words to the Nazareth synagogue have a similar effect. They have heard all about his wonderful words and deeds. We read last week how the news had spread throughout the countryside about him, and how people in various synagogues had praised his teaching (Luke 4:14-15). Now the local lad made good has come home, but it doesn’t go to their plan, because if the words of Isaiah have been fulfilled in their hearing (verse 21) then who is he?

Oh.

He is making a proclamation that he is the long-awaited Messiah, even if he avoids the specific word. He is the prophet greater than Moses who has been expected according to Deuteronomy.

And if he is, then he is the One to whom they must bear allegiance. It’s not enough to take pride in what they regard as home-grown talent, like football supporters chanting when a young player has come through their academy and scored for the first team, ‘He’s one of our own.’ Like the mysterious character Joshua encountered, as commander of the Lord’s army he has come – and then some.

Our first call, then, is to pledge allegiance to Jesus. We do that in a big way each year at our Covenant Service, but there is a sense in which we do that every time we take communion.

For we call Holy Communion a ‘sacrament’, and that word comes from the Latin ‘sacramentum’, which was the oath of allegiance that a Roman soldier took to the Emperor. When we come to the Lord’s Table, we pledge our allegiance again to the King of Kings and Lord of Lords.

There is a slogan on the Methodist website that says, ‘God loves you unconditionally, no strings attached. That’s the good news.’ But that’s a very partial description of the good news. Because when John the Baptist and then Jesus came preaching what they called the good news, it came with the requirement of a response. And the first response is to pledge allegiance to Jesus as Lord. After all, the first Christian creed was simply the words, ‘Jesus is Lord.’

Next – Others second:

On Thursday, an American Christian friend of mine posted to Facebook with some disgust words of the new Vice President, JD Vance as reported by Fox News:

“I think there is a Christian concept that you love your family and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens, and then after that, prioritize the rest of the world.”

These are appalling words for someone like Vance to say, when he is a convert to Roman Catholicism. They so contradict the New Testament, where all believers are a family, where social distinctions are dissolved in the Gospel, and where Jesus redefines our neighbour as anyone at all who is in need and says that neighbour love of that kind is one of the greatest commandments.

And it may be that we can make an easy poke at the Trump administration for such blatant heresies. Certainly, JD Vance’s parish priest needs to call him to repentance.

But what is the difference between that and the way many other Christians turn religion into a consumer exercise? When our faith is about the style of worship I like, the music I prefer, and mixing with people just like me, we have gone far from the ways of Jesus.

What has Jesus just been reading about from Isaiah? Good news to the poor. Recovery of sight for the blind. Freedom for the captives. The Jubilee year. When we pledge allegiance to Jesus, these are the things that follow next.

If we are to follow Jesus and not the mob, we will be thinking, who can I bless today? Who can I serve this week? Where can we make a difference for good in our neighbourhood? What are the social issues that need a Gospel witness? Who have we excluded from hearing the Good News, especially among the poor, and what will we do to right that?

It may be a stark statement and possibly an over-statement, but you may know the famous words of William Temple, who was Archbishop of Canterbury during World War Two, about the Church. He said that the church was the only institution that existed for the benefit of those who were not its members. It is good that this congregation already takes that seriously. Let us always remember that such things are not peripheral to the church, but central to our calling.

Finally – Yourself last:

It’s important to hear that I said ‘Yourself last’ not ‘Yourself not at all.’ For this is the Jesus who taught, love your neighbour as you love yourself. And in doing so he assumed we would love ourselves. There is a distinction to be drawn between a proper loving of ourselves and indulging ourselves, always gratifying ourselves, or thinking the universe revolves around us.

No wonder we read in the Gospels of Jesus going away on his own to pray, and of him encouraging the disciples to come aside from all the activity to rest awhile. Is it what he did when he walked through the crowd here?

There is a proper self-care that is not the same as self-centredness. It is a looking after ourselves so that we are fit and able to live with Jesus at the heart of our lives and with the strength to show God’s love to all, especially those on the margins. Yes, Charles Wesley wrote in one of his hymns the line, ‘To spend and to be spent for those who have not yet my Saviour known.’ But where does the energy come from that we spend? And what do we do when we are spent? We need to tend to ourselves for the sake of the Gospel.

Yourself last, but this is self-care in order to be able to serve, and thus we distinguish it from self-pampering.

Much of this is a challenge to me, because I do not always look after myself as well as I might for the sake of all I am called to. Last year, I read a memoir by the great scholar who supervised my post-graduate research in Theology, Richard Bauckham. It was mainly a book about his struggles with poor eyesight, but in passing he made a comment about how he has always ensured he gets eight hours of sleep a night in order to be in a good state to pursue his calling as a scholar, even in retirement.

That is something I have not been good at, especially since a phase in my ministry ten years ago, when two of my three circuit colleagues curtailed their appointments, and the other retired. I ended up getting into the bad habit of doing late nights.

The Methodist Church has been on a learning curve with this. When I entered the ministry, the official guidance was that on our six working days a week, we ministers could take up to an hour off each day. That’s all. Somehow we were also meant to cultivate a hobby! Is it any surprise that in 2017 a nurse at our doctor’s surgery told me that working 8 am to 10 pm six days a week was bad practice for anyone?

Then, a few years ago, the Connexion woke up to the fact that there was a well-being crisis among ministers. Well, fancy that! Now they tell us to divide each of our working days into three sessions – morning, afternoon, and evening – and work two of the three. They also tell us to remember the provisions of the European Working Time Directive, under which workers normally do not start another day’s shift until at least eleven hours after their previous one has finished.

These are examples from my world. There will be approaches you can take in your circumstances. There will be other matters to consider, too. But the principles are the same.

So – Jesus first: in response to his love for us, we pledge our allegiance to him.

Others second: we have a Gospel to proclaim in word and deed.

Yourself last: self-care for the sake of that Gospel.

This is a Christian way of living. It rejects the ‘What’s in it for me?’ line. It doesn’t throw Jesus off a cliff. Instead, it exalts him and brings JOY to him and to us.

And that’s what we’re about.

0

Easter Day 2024: God Ships His Blessings On The Third Day (Mark 16:1-8)

Mark 16:1-8

Here’s a true story I heard on Thursday. Somebody was looking up on Google the famous blessing prayer from the Book of Numbers. I’m sure you’ll know the one:

The Lord bless you and keep you; the Lord make his face shine on you and be gracious to you; the Lord turn his face toward you and give you peace.

But the top result wasn’t from a Bible site like Bible Gateway, they only came in second to Amazon, who were selling a print of that text in a picture frame. As a result, the entry read:

 The Lord bless you and keep you; the Lord make his face shine on you and be gracious to you; the Lord turn his face toward you and give you peace. Usually ships within 2 to 3 days.

When the person shared this, somebody commented:

I do wish more of His promises came with delivery dates and tracking!

Welcome to Easter Sunday, where we celebrate the fact that God’s blessing has shipped within 2 to 3 days! For on the third day, the tomb was empty.

What blessings ship from God to us on Easter Day? There are many! I want to share four with you.

Firstly, a new body:

You may recall that during Holy Week, a woman at Bethany has anointed Jesus’ body with expensive perfume. Jesus says she has anointed his body for burial. You might say the woman did so prematurely, but perhaps prophetically.

Now, along comes this group of women to do what? Exactly the same.[1] The Greek implies they are bringing liquid spices. This is not the same as the solid spices that John tells us Nicodemus used. The women are coming to do what the woman at Bethany had prophetically foretold.

But if the woman at Bethany was early, the women at the tomb are too late! They knew Jesus was physically dead , otherwise they wouldn’t have come. But now, the body isn’t there, because he has risen.

They weren’t expecting that. Three times in Mark’s Gospel Jesus prophesies that he will suffer and die, but be raised from the dead, yet it hadn’t sunk in. It didn’t fit their prior beliefs. They were persuaded not by the divine words of Jesus but by God’s divine action.

Make no mistake, the Resurrection is bodily. This is not about an immortal soul, this is about God raising Jesus’ body from the dead and making it new – even with new powers, as we read in other Gospels such as John.

God is interested in redeeming the physical, the material, the bodily. Our faith is not simply an ethereal, spiritual matter. Resurrection tells us that the whole of creation is on God’s agenda for renewal.

And that’s why our mission is not only to call people to repentance and faith in Christ, it is also to things like healing, social justice, and the renewal of our planet. Everything that God created has been tainted, and everything that God created is up for redemption. The Resurrection assures us of that.

The second blessing to ship on Easter Day is a new family:

Who is ‘Mary the mother of James’ in verse 1?[2] In the previous chapter, among the women at the Cross, is ‘Mary the mother of Joses and James’ (15:40), which is then shortened to ‘Mary the mother of Joses’ (15:47). It’s likely that ‘Mary the mother of James’ at the empty tomb is ‘Mary the mother of Joses and James.’

But here’s the surprising thing. There is only one woman in Mark’s Gospel who is called ‘Mary the mother of Joses and James.’ She appears in chapter 6 verse 3 where she is the mother of Jesus’ brothers. In other words, this is Mary the mother of our Lord herself.

But just as Jesus had said that his true family were those who did his will, so here at the empty tomb Mary herself is discovering that the risen Jesus is indeed making a new family. His new family is the family of believers in him.

We sometimes talk about the church as a family, and that’s absolutely right. We are the family of God, the community of the King, the sign and foretaste of God’s coming kingdom. In our tradition, we may not go in for the hackneyed way that some Christians address one another as ‘brother’ or ‘sister’ and that’s fair enough, but that’s what we are. At both baptisms and funerals we refer to the subjects as ‘our sister’ or ‘our brother’, and that is because Jesus creates a new family in the Resurrection.

And his Resurrection will be ours one way. I guess that’s why he told the Sadducees during Holy Week that there would be no marrying and giving in marriage in the life of the age to come. There would be no more need for procreation, because no more would dead people need replacing in the population.

One of my colleagues recently told the circuit staff a story of how he was visiting a residential care home, and he met one resident who was dying for what would be the last time. Before my colleague left, the resident said to him, ‘I expect this will be the last time we see each other.’

He replied, ‘I’ve got news for you! I think you’ll find we’re going to be spending rather a long time together!’

So look around this morning in church. Here are members of your forever family. It’s worth us learning to get on with one another!

The third blessing to ship on Easter Day is a new commission:

Having seen the place where Jesus’ body had been laid, the ‘young man dressed in a white robe’ (verse 5) (which is just a long way of saying ‘angel’) tells the women to ‘Go’ (verse 7). They are to go with the message of the Resurrection.

Hang on – who is to go? The women. In our more egalitarian culture, that detail can pass us by. But this was a society in which women couldn’t even give evidence in a court of law. If you were going to choose witnesses to support your case, you wouldn’t select women. The fact that it’s women who are the first witnesses to the Resurrection is a sign that this is not a cobbled-together fiction.

And we might reflect on all those who still say only men can lead the church because Jesus chose twelve male apostles. He also only chose Jews. It’s apparent here that God doesn’t keep to our social conventions. Anyone and everyone who has encountered the Resurrection and wants to follow Jesus can be witnesses to Jesus.

How many of us feel disqualified from serving Jesus in any significant way? It may be through the disapproval of others. It may be through our own low self-esteem that we disqualify ourselves. We may feel unworthy or unfit. ‘I’ve let God down in the past.’ ‘I don’t have the necessary gifts.’ ‘I’m not strong enough.’

But could it be that in fact our risen Lord is giving us a poke on Easter Day and saying, the only thing that qualifies you is that you’ve encountered me and you want to follow me?

I want to invite you to consider whether there is some call you have been resisting, putting off, or filing away because you don’t think you fit the template. I certainly didn’t think I fitted the right mould to be a minister. I’ve had the odd congregation who have agreed! I still at times live with ‘imposter syndrome.’

But on Easter Day, we can put all that aside. Have we met with the risen Lord? Do we love him? If so, let’s take on a commission.

The fourth and final blessing is a new beginning:

But go, tell his disciples and Peter (verse 7)

says the angel to the women.

The disciples and Peter? Huh? Wasn’t Peter a disciple too, an apostle, even? Why mention him separately?

I’m sure we can guess. Peter is so mortified by his three denials of Jesus that he doesn’t even consider himself a true disciple anymore. He may even have returned to his old profession as a fisherman. It’s all over, especially with Jesus having been executed.

But in God’s economy, the end is not the end unless there is good news. And here we have that hint of what John’s Gospel will tell us in greater detail: that restoration is on the way for Peter. ‘No condemnation now I dread, Jesus and all in him is mine,’ as Charles Wesley wrote.

The new commission that I just spoke of is available to Peter as well. He has a new beginning.

This is after all the Gospel, isn’t it? That our sins and failures don’t have the final word, any more than the sins of those who conspired to have Jesus crucified had the last word. They didn’t. Jesus vacated his grave.

As the late Christian singer Larry Norman put it,

They nailed him to the cross,
They laid him in the ground,
But they should have known
You can’t keep a good man down.[3]

If anyone here thinks they have messed up so badly they can never be valuable to God, then the Resurrection says, think again. There is a new beginning for you.

If anyone here thinks they have committed the unforgivable sin, then the Resurrection says, think again. There is a new beginning for you, too.

The grace of God is bigger than our sins and failures. Even the worst of our betrayals of Christ do not have the final word in life: that place belongs to the love and mercy of God.

As a minister, I have heard respected church members privately tell me about the most awful sins they have committed. It has been my privilege to assure them of God’s forgiveness and the certainty that they, like Peter, have a new beginning with Christ. Easter Day is the reason I can do so. We all have a new beginning today.

I can’t conclude today without drawing attention to the theme of the women’s fear that is present in the reading.

‘Don’t be alarmed,’ says the angel, but despite his reassurances, the final verse says this:

Trembling and bewildered, the women went out and fled from the tomb. They said nothing to anyone, because they were afraid. (Verse 8)

I’m aware that I can give you all the arguments in the world for the joy, hope, and freedom of the Easter faith, but an encounter with almighty resurrection power can still leave us shaking.

And it seems such a strange way to end the Gospel – so much so that others have speculated that the original ending is lost, or have written alternative endings.

But maybe it all indicates that the necessary response is for us to write our own endings in each of our lives. For as Tom Wright has put it,

‘Jesus is risen, and we have a job of work to do.’

[1] This paragraph and the next are influenced by Ian Paul, The women at the empty tomb in Mark 16.

[2] Again, for what follows I am dependent on Ian Paul’s article.

[3] Larry Norman, ‘Why should the devil have all the good music?’, Only Visiting This Planet, MGM Records, 1972.

0

Mission 1: God The First Missionary (Genesis 3:1-23)

Genesis 3:1-23

On Friday, an advert popped up in my Facebook feed for a company called Mission UK. You may think that’s interesting for a Christian, and especially suspicious for a minister who’s about to preach on the subject of mission, but then I looked at the picture. Mission UK sell … sleep powder. One enthusiastic customer had slept for seven hours straight for the first time in a long time, even sleeping through the loud noise of foxes outside.

They also sell ‘performance-based tea’ – whatever that is.

I just hope you are not going to sleep through this. Because I have an important question.

 ‘Who was the first missionary in the Bible?’ If I ask people that, I get a variety of answers, all wrong. Some say the Apostle Paul. Others say Philip the Deacon in Acts 8 or the Apostle Peter. Still others say, ‘Well the answer must be Jesus!’ A few might go back to the Old Testament and mention Jonah, who is the poster boy for how not to be a missionary!

No. The answer – and you will have guessed if you have seen the title of this sermon – is God. We find God as the first missionary here in Genesis chapter 3:

8 Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the Lord God among the trees of the garden. 9 But the Lord God called to the man, ‘Where are you?’

God comes looking for Adam and Eve. ‘Where are you?’ This is the missionary God taking the initiative as he comes to look for sinners.

Mission begins with God. He wants to bring fallen people back to himself. He wants people and all creation back under the reign of his kingdom.

That’s why we talk in the church about ‘The mission of God.’ Some people who want to sound clever use the Latin, Missio Dei, but since I never learned Latin at school I’ll stick with ‘The mission of God.’

A great Anglican writer on this subject, Dr Chris Wright, once said:

It is not the church of God that has a mission in the world, but the God of mission who has a church in the world.

Mission is in the very heart of God. It is not raising money to send overseas. It is not simply getting bums on seats. It is certainly not about just waiting for people to come to us. Especially it is not getting people in to do the jobs, otherwise the church will close. Nor is it about hiring our premises to outside organisations.

Mission is God’s heart for the world. Mission is God’s desire to bring everyone and everything under the reign of his kingdom, and it is our calling to participate in that with the help of the Holy Spirit.

So let us understand right from the start of this series that mission is not an optional extra for keen Christians who have an extra dose of enthusiasm. Mission is the church’s calling because it is God’s heart.

I labour this point because it’s so important. Mission is a God thing. That’s why every Christian and every church must take it seriously and make it a priority.

Here are three things from the passage that show the priority of mission for God.

Firstly, God takes the initiative.

God doesn’t come into the Garden of Eden because Adam and Eve have called out to him, telling him they’ve made an absolute pickle of themselves. Far from it: they are hiding (verses 7, 10, 11)! He doesn’t wait for any human initiative. He knows something is wrong, and he comes.

Like everything in the life of faith, God makes the first move. Everything we do in faith is only a response to him.

John Wesley had an expression for this. He referred to ‘prevenient grace.’ If that word ‘prevenient’ sounds a bit complicated, let’s just break it down. ‘Pre-‘ is to come before. ‘Venient’ derives from the French ‘venir’, ‘to come.’ God comes before. Prevenient grace means that God’s grace comes before anything else.

That’s what happens in the picture language of Genesis 3. God takes the initiative when human beings mess up. No wonder I said that mission is in his heart.

Some Christians like to say that mission is about finding out what God is doing and then joining in. Now that can be abused, because some will label anything they particularly like as being something God is doing. But if we look carefully, prayerfully, and biblically at the world we may discern where God is already at work and then we can respond.

So if mission is a God thing, our first response can be to pray, ‘Lord, where are you already at work in restoring people and creation under your kingdom? How can I serve you in that?’

Secondly, God comes to us.

In Genesis 3 God does not summon Adam and Eve to him. He comes to them in the Garden. He goes to where they are.

This is where a lot of our talk about mission is all wrong. We say, how can we be more attractive for people to come to us? But although mission will involve people eventually joining the church, we cannot sit here waiting for people to come to us. It just won’t happen in most cases, unless they already have a church background.

I suspect that a lot of the ‘How can we be more attractive so that people come to us?’ language is more because we are nervous or afraid and don’t want to rise up to the challenge that mission presents us to get out of our comfort zones. But that is our calling if we are to respond to the God of mission as the church.

After all, having recently celebrated Christmas, we should be aware of this principle of God coming to us in the birth of Jesus. My favourite Christmas Bible text is John 1:14:

The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.

Do you see? God came to us. Emmanuel, God with us. These are not just words of comfort, these are words of God’s mission. He came to us.

And John tells us that it’s the pattern we are to copy. For the risen Jesus said to his disciples in John 20:23,

As the Father has sent me, so I am sending you.

God sent Jesus to us. Now Jesus sends us to others. We don’t sit on our backsides and wait for them.

I sometimes tell a story about a funeral I conducted about twenty years ago. An elderly church member died, and I went to visit her family, who were not churchgoers, to plan the funeral.

During that meeting when I asked them about the deceased’s life, they told me that church activities comprised her entire social life.

I think they thought I would be pleased to hear that, but I covered my true feelings. Because I was saddened. How can we spend all our time simply on church activities if we follow the God of mission who comes to us and who calls us also to go to people with his love?

How are some of us going to change our priorities? Because we need to.

Thirdly and finally, God provides the solution.

After God has questioned the man and the woman, he speaks first of all to the snake, secondly to the woman, and thirdly to the man about the consequences of sin being present in creation. The curse affects the relationship between animals and humans. It affects childbearing. It makes women subservient to men. It turns work into drudgery (verses 14-19). These things are not God’s best intentions for his creation.

But in the midst of this depressing description of what a world under the curse of sin is like comes one small but dazzling chink of light when God addresses the snake:

15 And I will put enmity
    between you and the woman,
    and between your offspring and hers;
he will crush your head,
    and you will strike his heel.’

The offspring of the woman will crush the snake. But the snake will strike where this offspring touches the earth – with his heel.

Christians have traditionally seen this as a prophecy about the birth of Jesus from Mary (the offspring of the woman) and the Cross (where Jesus crushes the power of Satan, but evil strikes him and kills him).

God is so passionate about his mission to redeem the human race and heal creation that he sends his only begotten Son to conquer the forces of evil and reconcile people to himself and to one another.

We do not save ourselves. It does not depend on us. It is all down to God taking the initiative, coming to us, and breaking the power of cancelled sin, as Charles Wesley put it.

It is not up to us to devise clever wheezes or flashy programmes. Our rôle is to respond to the God who moves first by proclaiming Christ crucified, even though the world finds that offensive and foolish. It is nevertheless the only remedy for a broken world. And it is all God’s work, not ours.

So as we set out on a New Year with renewed commitment to Christ, let us specifically renew our commitment to co-operate by the Holy Spirit with the God of mission.

0

Finding Jesus in the Storm (Mark 4:35-41, Ordinary 12)

Mark 4:35-41

This week in the south-east of England our weather has gone from the extreme heat of Wednesday with temperatures around 29C to rain and thunderstorms with the temperature not above 16C on Friday. We’re used to the idea that a period of considerable heat can be broken by thunderstorms. Often we’re grateful!

On the Sea of Galilee with its particular local geography they were used to sudden vicious squalls appearing, like the one in this story. However, they weren’t welcomed, because they could be a threat to life, especially to those who made their living on Galilee from fishing.

Our story from Mark depicts on such naturally occurring storm, just as all sorts of naturally occurring events can disrupt our lives and plunge us into fear, as it did Jesus’ disciples.

But alongside the naturally occurring threat are hints of something else. Jesus and his disciples are striking out on a new stage of his kingdom of God proclamation. ‘Let us go over to the other side’ (verse 35) is not an idle comment. It’s not like saying, ‘Let’s cross the road.’ Jesus wanted to go from the Jewish side of Galilee to the Gentile side. He wanted to go from the place where people sought to be true to the faith (although some of the most fiercely devout people opposed him) to a place where what was practised was dodgy and often heretical.

Not only that, he also leaves the crowd behind (verse 36). Fancy leaving behind all these people he has built up. But he does.

So imagine that for his disciples this is about leaving behind the familiar and the successful for a venture into an area that didn’t traditionally practise conventional and orthodox forms of faith. Jesus is extending the reach of the kingdom outside natural comfort zones. It’s something we in the church often don’t like to do. We’d prefer to stay with people who are just like us, with whom we feel safe. But the ministry of Jesus is rarely safe!

In that context we might see the storm differently, and not least because when Jesus wakes on the boat and responds to the disciples’ plea, we read that he ‘rebuked the wind and said to the waves, ‘Quiet! Be still!’’ (verse 39). This is the sort of language he uses in exorcisms! It’s as if Jesus sees demonic opposition behind the storm, which is not surprising if this boat ride is a journey to extend the kingdom.

Add to that the fact that Mark borrows some language here from Jonah chapter 1, where Jonah the reluctant missionary finds himself on a boat in a storm, and you have further evidence why it’s not far-fetched to see a mission dimension to this story.

And maybe that’s why we like to stay safe. We know that the call of Jesus may put us into tricky and risky situations. It will. But rather than saying ‘No thank you, I’ll stay at home,’ this story gives us reason to go on that risky adventure with Jesus.

I want you to have in your minds any challenging call you have from Jesus. It might be the general challenge most churches are facing at present to navigate a new future in a world scarred by COVID-19. It might be that Jesus is calling you or your church to a new form of outreach that is beyond your experience or involves people you don’t naturally like.

And I also want you to hold at present any of the ordinary storms of life that may be buffeting you. Serious illness, bereavement, job losses, problems in your family, and so on.

Into those storms come two truths about Jesus.

Firstly, Jesus is present in the storm.

Sometimes when we are in a storm it feels like Jesus isn’t there. Or we might acknowledge his presence in theory, but to all practical ends it feels like he isn’t or he might as well not be.

I suppose it was something like the latter for the disciples here. They knew he was there but ‘was in the stern, sleeping on a cushion’ (verse 37). And maybe we can identify with them waking him and saying, ‘Teacher, don’t you care if we drown?’ (Verse 38)

Perhaps we should ponder, then, from this story what it means when we know Jesus is present in our storm, but we aren’t hearing much from him. Could it be the equivalent to him being asleep here? But rather than that indicating his lack of care for us, is it actually a sign to say, ‘It’s all right, I’ve got this’?

Could it be that Jesus is quiet in our storms because he is saying to us through his silence that we don’t need to fear? Could it be that this is an occasion where Jesus shows his will for us not in his words but in his example? He is not afraid of the storm, and we don’t need to be either, seems to be the message of him sleeping in the stern.

On this subject, I used to quote the lyrics of a song by an artist who used to be known as Leslie Phillips (no, nothing to do with the British actor of ‘Ding dong!’ fame, this Leslie Phillips is female and American). She is now known as Sam Phillips, which confuses her with someone else.

Anyway, she wrote a song called ‘Answers Don’t Come Easy’ that is relevant to this idea that Jesus is present in the storm, even when he’s not speaking to us. The chorus says this:

Oh, and I can wait
It’s enough to know you can hear me now
Oh, I can wait
It’s enough to feel so near you now
And when answers don’t come easy
I can wait

I want to assure you that whatever storm you are facing, whether it’s the risky adventure of following Jesus out of our comfortable church existence into mission in the world or whether it’s a painful life crisis, he is with you. His silence speaks. And his silence tells you that even as the elements rage he’s still in charge.

I invite you to find that silence in the middle of the storm.

The second truth is that Jesus is in charge during the storm.

When Jesus gets up and stills the storm, some English Bible translations have it that he says ‘Peace!’ but he doesn’t. If it were, you would have the Greek word eirene here from which we get the girli’s name Irene.

The NIV which we read gives a better flavour when it says he ‘rebuked the wind and said to the waves, ‘Quiet! Be still!’’ (verse 39). The natural elements are given a telling-off by Jesus! It’s like even the elements here are in disobedience to him and he commands their obedience.

You might say his words are like scolding naughty children, but it’s stronger and that word ‘rebuked’ gives the game away. As I said earlier, this is exorcism language. Every part of creation, not just human beings, is commanded to come under obedience to Christ. One day, as Paul told the Philippians, every knee shall bow and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father (Philippians 2:10-11). Or as Charles Wesley put it in his hymn ‘Jesus, the name high over all’,

Angels and men before it fall
And devils fear and fly.

Now you may say that day isn’t here yet. We don’t always see the storm calming down. And you would be right. The kind of dramatic intervention by Jesus that happens in our story today isn’t an everyday occurrence, although maybe sometimes we’re too scared to ask.

No, we’re not yet at that time Paul prophesies about in Philippians where every knee will bow, and so in the meantime sometimes Jesus saves us from the storm and sometimes he saves us through the storm.

But rest assured of one thing. The storm will not have the final word. Jesus will. For we are people of resurrection faith.

So in conclusion, how might we respond when we are in a storm? Well, if we can appreciate that Jesus is present, even when silent, and if we can believe that he is in charge, even as we wait for the fulness of his kingdom, then I pray our faith and trust in him will grow and we shall not hear him say to us as he did to his first disciples, ‘Why are you so afraid? Do you still have no faith?’ (Verse 40)

Instead, while they then wondered and pondered, ‘Who is this? Even the wind and the waves obey him!’ (verse 41), may we, who know who he is, turn our wondering into worship and our pondering into trust.

0

A Methodist Message For Christmas

Mark WakelinThis is the Christmas message from the President of the Methodist Conference, the Revd Dr Mark Wakelin:

“Truly this was the Son of God!

“I was asked once by a well-known broadcaster, ‘do you believe that Jesus is the Son of God?’ I replied, as you do, by asking him, ‘it depends on what you mean by, ‘Son of God.’  His reply shook me because he then said, ‘It’s a perfectly simple question, ‘Is Jesus Christ the Son of God?’ My own thought was immediately, ‘I wonder which bit of ‘Son of God’ he is finding simple?’

“I presume he meant do I believe in a literal way? But that is hardly simple. Literal language is OK for baked beans and possibly sunsets, but it gets a bit thin when talking about most of the things that really matter such as love, sadness and wonder. It runs out of steam totally when talking of God. You can’t say anything literal about God!

“I was once in an argument about the new hymn book (I am afraid I get a bit grumpy about some of the alterations to ancient poems that we make and think that our desire to modernise the old is a little like the Christians who wanted to cover the modesty of the paintings in the Sistine Chapel). My colleague disliked the word ‘ineffable’ because he felt no one would understand it. There is a certain irony in that as you can imagine! Given that ‘ineffable’ basically means something we can’t understand, I would have thought it was a useful word to hang on to if we also want to talk about God. God is ‘ineffable’ – and that’s the point.

“That’s the point of Christmas. How does God communicate with us when words are not adequate? How can we even try to talk of God when literal language so lets us down? God’s answer is, of course, the ‘self sending’ – of a God who in Charles Wesley’s words is, ‘contracted to a span, incomprehensibly made man.’ What we can ever understand of God has to begin by taking account of God revealed in the person of Jesus Christ. Who is written about in Colossians 1:15: ‘He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation’ and verse 19: ‘For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell.’

“The ‘Word’ is God, says John. Now this isn’t simple language either, but it directs you a kind of struggle to understand that is different from, for example, trying to get your head around Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity! Because it is truth revealed and held in a person, understanding and engaging with that truth is as much about love and obedience as it is about intellectual capacity and linguistic dexterity. We are not so much asked to assent to a philosophical or religious claim, ‘yes I agree that Jesus is the Son of God,’ but inhabit a story, the Christmas story, to live within ancient tale of human struggle and courage, of wonder and delight, of mystery and of angels declaring good news. Children get this much more easily than adults who want the whys and the wherefores of an extraordinary story which is far more than an odd biological claim on the Universe.

“Do I believe that Jesus is the Son of God? Of course, wonder of wonders, ‘Let earth and heaven combine, angels and men agree, to praise in songs divine the incarnate deity.’ I inhabit this ancient story and find it to be true. Wrapped in our clay we may not immediately recognise the creator of all things. But it is our life task, to discover a vulnerable God who is on a mission to finish the ‘new creation’ and is looking for followers.

“Happy Christmas!”

 

5

Sermon: The Majesty of God in Creation

Psalm 8

Last Sunday evening, I got in after Richard Goldstraw’s farewell service and tea at Addlestone to find that we had a new temporary resident in the manse.

The Queen.

OK, it was a life-size cardboard cut-out of her, and apparently it is doing the rounds of every house in our road that will have her, ever since the Diamond Jubilee street party.

Jokingly, I put up a comment on my Facebook page, saying that this had happened, and asking any of my friends if they had any messages they would like me to relay to her. These included one friend who had recently been to a Buckingham Palace garden party asking me to give her a cheery wave and say ‘thanks’ for the tea. Another thought I could ask her to whip up a sermon for today. Somebody wanted to know if she had changed her mobile number. And another saw the opportunity for a lucrative business opening. I could advertise my services to parents who are regularly nagging their children over their manners by offering a practice Royal Garden Party. They could ‘meet the Queen’ and ‘have tea with the vicar’.

Of course, I wanted to have some fun with this, but our concept of a ruler’s majesty has declined over the years. The Psalmist, on the other hand, has a rich view of God’s majesty. Yet even then, the way in which that majesty is expressed on earth and in the heavens (verse 1) is surprising at times.

Firstly, God shows his glory in weakness.

Recently I had to take our daughter Rebekah on a Brownies’ trip to the dry ski slope at Aldershot, where the girls had an hour of ‘donutting’ – that is, coming down the dry ski slope in a glorified large rubber tyre, while wearing helmets for safety. As we arrived at the car park, Brown Owl suddenly got very excited and shouted to everyone, “Look! A Vulcan!”

I should explain that this was not a reference to Star Trek but to a Vulcan bomber that could be seen in the sky. The Farnborough Air Show was about to start.

And maybe an air show like that is what we expect in terms of rulers showing their power and might. They use displays of military hardware or force. Think back to all those parades of the Soviet Army through Red Square that we used to see on the news.

But God goes explicitly against this in the display of his majesty:

Out of the mouths of babes and infants
you have founded a bulwark because of your foes,
to silence the enemy and the avenger. (Verse 2)

What could contradict military might much more than ‘the mouths of babes and infants’? Those who claim might and majesty by force are those God treats as enemies. He shows his glory instead in a tiny, fragile life.

The Psalmist wasn’t to know this, but several hundred years later God would show this explicitly. His majesty would be seen not in the palaces of Rome or Jerusalem, but in a manger in Bethlehem. Supremely Christians see this in the incarnation of Jesus. There is God’s upside-down majesty. Wonder at his glory in, say, the words of Charles Wesley:

Our God contracted to a span,
Incomprehensibly made man.

For me, this is captured in the words of a contemporary Christian poet and singer, Bruce Cockburn, in two of his songs. One is called ‘Cry of a Tiny Babe’.

The chorus says:

Like a stone on the surface of a still river
Driving the ripples on forever
Redemption rips through the surface of time
In the cry of a tiny babe

Why does ‘redemption [rip] through the surface of time in the cry of a tiny babe’? Because this is how God shows the splendour of his glory – his majesty. He does so in a reversal of the world’s ways and the world’s values. In the scandal of humility, God reveals his glory.

What does that mean for us? Go to another Cockburn song, one called ‘Shipwrecked at the Stable Door’.

The stable door of the song is the stable in Bethlehem. In the lyrics of the final verse, Cockburn connects the frailty of the Incarnation with the revolutionary words of the Beatitudes:

Blessed are the poor in spirit –
Blessed are the meek
For theirs shall be the kingdom
That the power mongers seek
Blessed are the dead for love
And those who cry for peace
And those who love the gift of earth –
May their gene pool increase

Cockburn took inspiration here from a wonderful spiritual writer called Brennan Manning. The final chapter of one of his books, ‘The Lion and the Lamb’, is called ‘The Shipwrecked at the Stable’. Manning makes the case that it is the poor and the weak who find hope in the infant Christ:

The shipwrecked at the stable are the poor in spirit who feel lost in the cosmos, adrift on an open sea, clinging with a life-and-death desperation to the one solitary plank. Finally they are washed ashore and make their way to the stable, stripped of the old spirit of possessiveness in regard to anything. The shipwrecked find it not only tacky utterly absurd to be caught up either in tinsel trees or in religious experiences – “Doesn’t going to church on Christmas make you feel good?” They are not concerned with their own emotional security or any of the trinkets of creation. They have been saved, rescued, delivered from the waters of death, set free for a new shot at life. At the stable in a blinding moment of truth, they make the stunning discovery that Jesus is the plank of salvation they have been clinging to without knowing it!

All the time they are battered by wind and rain, buffeted by raging seas, they are being held even when they didn’t know who was holding them. Their exposure to spiritual, emotional and physical deprivation has weaned them from themselves and made them re-examine all they once thought was important. The shipwrecked come to the stable seeking not to possess but to be possessed, wanting not peace or a religious high, but Jesus Christ.

The God who comes to us in weakness and vulnerability can only be encountered in weakness and humility. Strutting pride and forceful power are not the entry tickets to the kingdom of God. The vulnerable God of Bethlehem meets those who are weak, who admit their need of him, and in doing so reveals his majesty.

Secondly, God shows his glory in insignificance.

I grew up as the son of an amateur astronomer. Even now, my father still belongs to the British Astronomical Association. One Saturday, Dad took me to London for a BAA lecture given by Patrick Moore. I didn’t understand it, but I noticed how he spent as much time afterwards answering the children’s questions as he did the adults’. Conversations at home were punctuated with Sirius, Orion, the Plough, the Pleiades, Aldebaran and the star I as a child called Beetlejuice. Television meant the Apollo missions, Tomorrow’s World and James Burke science shows. To learn that the nearest star outside our solar system was four light years away – that’s 23 trillion miles – was mind-blowing and awe-inspiring. Later, when I came to faith in my mid-teens, although I had not kept up the interest in astronomy, to gaze up at a clear night sky was to engender a spirit of worship:

When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars that you have established;
what are human beings that you are mindful of them,
mortals that you care for them? (Verses 3-4)

The Psalmist didn’t know what we know about the night sky, but what we know gives these words even greater force: our Sun is but one star among between two and four hundred billion stars in our Milky Way galaxy. There are one hundred and seventy billion known galaxies in the observable universe.

In a world like that, don’t you feel tiny and insignificant? No wonder some people say our own planet Earth is just ‘the third stone from the Sun’.

No wonder others say that humans are just ‘dust in the wind’.

The contemporary atheist movement makes a lot of this. It says that the scale of things are such that it is ludicrous to see human beings as in any way special. We are just an impersonal consequence of the Big Bang and evolution.

What is difficult for these arguments is the evidence for the fine-tuning of the universe. An apologist for the Christian faith called Andrew Wilson lays out some of these in his recent book ‘If God, Then What?’ According to Wilson, there are fifteen different mathematical constant numbers that all have to be right to one part in a million (or even more precisely) for life to exist. If the ratio between the strong nuclear constant and the electromagnetic constant were different by one part in ten million billion, we would have no stars. If the balance between the gravity constant and the electromagnetic constant altered by one part in 1040, the stars would not be able to sustain life. And there are many others. Wilson quotes scientists who say that it is like ‘the universe knew we were coming’ and laid out a ‘cosmic welcome mat’.

But more than this, the Psalmist sees human beings as having a specific status and dignity in creation:

Yet you have made them a little lower than God,
and crowned them with glory and honour. (Verse 5)

And not only that, this special status comes with a particular function on God’s behalf:

You have given them dominion over the works of your hands;
you have put all things under their feet,
all sheep and oxen,
and also the beasts of the field,
the birds of the air, and the fish of the sea,
whatever passes along the paths of the seas.
(Verses 6-8)

Instead of being meaningless, human beings have dignity and responsibility in creation. In the face of feeling insignificant amidst the vastness and power of creation, God grants to the human race the moral management of creation on earth. This is our calling as a race, and it has huge implications.

For one, this is a restatement of Genesis chapter one, where the function of human beings made in God’s image was to look after this planet. That is far from insignificant. It is humans who feel insignificant. That is not how God regards us.

‘Looking after this planet’ implies our daily work. One sadness I encounter in pastoral conversations is with Christians who think that because they are not ordained or do not work for the church, what they do is of little value to God. I think this is a legacy of our past. The Catholic understanding of vocation was indeed something like this. You had vocations into the priesthood, or into a religious order as a nun or a monk. The Protestant Reformation widened this, and so we began praying for people in the healing, caring and education professions.

But there are all sorts of opportunities for Christian vocation if our calling as people made in God’s image is to look after his world. Graham Dow, who was Bishop of Carlisle until three years ago, wrote a booklet on ‘A Christian Understanding of Daily Work’. He argued that there were three purposes of work for Christians:

  1. Creative management of God’s world.
  2. Moral management for the good of all.
  3. A community of good relationships.

While he didn’t go as far as Martin Luther, who once said that if the job of village hangman fell vacant, the conscientious Christian should apply, we can see from these three purposes of work that we have many opportunities to give glory to God in everyday life and work.

Although it would take a whole sermon to explore the three purposes of work, I want you to see that tomorrow morning, you have an opportunity to give glory to our majestic God in your work. Whether you are in paid employment, doing unpaid work, unemployed or retired, God has set us in a world where we may work to his praise and glory, whether what we do is overtly religious or not.

Yes, in weakness and in work, we can live our lives in ways that reflect the words with which the Psalmist both begins and ends here:

O Lord, our Sovereign,
how majestic is your name in all the earth! (Verses 1 and 9)

1

Last Sunday’s Sermon: Peter Heals The Lame Man

Life has been frantic since returning from leave at the weekend – and still is. Here, belatedly, is Sunday’s sermon.

Acts 3:1-26 
Whenever I read Acts 3, one story always comes to mind. One of the thirteenth century Popes was showing the great Catholic thinker Thomas Aquinas around the Vatican. Having shown him many of the beautiful works of art, the ornate architecture and the lavish fittings, the Pope turned to Thomas and said, “No longer can the church say like Peter, ‘Silver and gold have I none’.”

“No,” retorted Thomas, “and neither can she say any more, ‘In the name of Jesus of Nazareth, rise up and walk’.”

So we come to this famous story, this first major episode after Pentecost and the formation of the early community of Jesus-followers. And it’s a big story. It extends beyond chapter three, which we read, into chapter four, where Peter and John are hauled before the religious authorities. Just as the opposition to Jesus begins early in the Gospels, so does opposition to the apostles and the Jesus movement in Acts. It makes for three phases in the story: the healing, Peter’s speech and the opposition.

But I’ll have to leave that final phase of this story to next week. There is more than enough to meditate upon with the first two elements of the healing itself and then the speech.

Firstly, then, the healing. Right from the start, this is a story about what discipleship means. Compare it with Luke’s first volume, his Gospel. There, Jesus’ first converts (his disciples in 5:1-11) are followed by – guess what? Jesus healing a lame man (5:17-26). For Peter and John to heal a lame man here ‘in the name of Jesus’ is a sign they are walking in his footsteps. Right from the start, this is a story, then, that points to Jesus, as indeed Peter will tell the crowd (verse 12). It’s one of those stories that remind us of that important theme: nothing we do as Christians is about drawing attention to us, it’s about pointing to Jesus. Someone once said to preachers, “You can’t make yourself out to be a great preacher and tell people how wonderful Jesus is in the same breath.” That’s true for us all, whatever our gift is. Let’s call attention to Jesus through what we do.

And what does Jesus do here through Peter and John? This is not just a miracle of healing, and if it were only that this story might be daunting or discouraging to those of us who have not seen healing. There is something Jesus does in this miracle that we can all do, whether we have a healing ministry or not. This is a miracle of inclusion.

How? The man was lame. Lameness excluded you from Temple worship under Old Testament Law. It made you ritually unclean. Healing him meant he could take his full place with the People of God at worship. While we’re not sure exactly which gate is meant by the ‘gate called Beautiful’, what is clear is that now he doesn’t need to be carried just to the gate each day. Now he can go inside the gate.

Is this not what the Gospel does? God’s grace is the miracle of inclusion. To those who believe they are unworthy, Jesus says, “Come.” To those who feel that what they have done excludes them, Jesus says, “I will make it possible for you to come inside. Here is strength for you. Here is forgiveness. Here is love. Here is a fresh start.”

Here’s a video, though, about how some people feel:

All sorts of people feel they can’t ‘come to church’. It can be about lifestyle. It can be about what culture you come from. It can be to do with your generation. Only the other day I read an article about a church where someone was preaching on the need to accept all sorts of different people in the Christian family. As it was a sunny day, the Junior Church went outside for some fun and games. But as the preacher was preaching, a man got up, went outside and told the children to shut up and stop interrupting the service. I have seen comparable incidents in my own ministry. This is, in my experience, a welcoming community. However, let’s not be complacent.
A final point about the man’s lameness. Isaiah prophesied (35:6 LXX) that the lame walking would be a sign of the age to come (along with the deaf hearing, the blind seeing, the dumb speaking and so on). It’s a scripture that Charles Wesley had in mind when he wrote ‘O for a thousand tongues’ and included the verse,

Hear him, ye deaf; his praise, ye dumb
Your loosened tongues employ;
Ye blind, behold your Saviour come;
And leap, ye lame, for joy!

Biblically, then, the healing of the lame by Jesus in the Gospels and now by his followers in Acts is a sign that God’s new age has begun. Since the coming of Jesus and especially since his Resurrection we live in overlap between the old age of death and sin and the beginning of God’s new age. Healing is one sign of the new age. More widely, as the Church we are called to be the community of the new age. All that we do and share is meant to be a sign of God’s coming kingdom. We are to be the family where those who are not OK find healing grace. We are to be characterised by love that works itself out in forgiveness and justice.

Friends, this is more possible than we think. Let me introduce you to Joel. He is six years old and lives in Reigate. He became deeply affected by what he heard at church and at school about world poverty. After seeing a TEAR Fund video at church, he knew he had to do something. He took an empty Frubes box, labelled it the ‘Poor Box’ and started collecting donations. He then decided to do a sponsored run with his mum. His Dad Martin set up a donations page on Virgin Money Giving, and wrote about it on his blog. Joel aimed to raise £60. But the word spread. So far, he has raised over £5000.

Joel could easily have said, ‘Silver and gold have I none.’ The difference is, he went on to say, in his own way, ‘But what I do have I give you.’ It’s time to stop looking at what we don’t have and offering what we do have for the healing of people – and indeed for the healing of the nations.

Secondly, let’s think about Peter’s speech. I say ‘speech’, because that’s what it becomes, but it’s not initially your conventional speech. Mostly you know when you’re going to give a speech. They are scheduled, they are by arrangement. But not in this case. it’s a spontaneous reaction. Peter and John have invoked the authority of Jesus to heal the lame man, and then there is something of an accidental ambush. Word gets out, and the crowd finds the man, and yes, he has been healed.

Peter has to respond. He is in Solomon’s Colonnade, a place where Jesus himself had taught, and like his Master, this is his opportunity for some courageous teaching – again, like Jesus.

Not only that, he makes Jesus the subject of what he says. If he is relying on the Holy Spirit to give him the words to say in a crisis as Jesus promised, then it is no surprise, since the work of the Spirit is to point to Jesus, if he is the theme of what Peter says. As I said, the miracle, by being a great act of mercy and social inclusion for the man, points to Jesus. Peter makes no mistake.
And this may be an encouragement for us. When we are in the world, we can get bogged down in all sorts of minutiae in what we talk about when the topic turns to religion. But one subject will always get us a hearing. One subject will always be fascinating. That subject is Jesus. I recently read a book by a Christian called Carl Medearis. He tends to spend his time in places and with people whom you would not expect to be sympathetic to Jesus. He has spent years in the Middle East, working among Muslims. Back in his native America, he befriended the gay owner of a liberal coffee shop. But Carl, rather than going for conventional evangelistic methods that put people off, simply talks about Jesus. He gets a hearing. His book ‘Speaking of Jesus: The Art of (Not) Evangelism’ is an easy and inspiring read.

But of course to speak about Jesus to this audience has different implications from those we have. Peter is dealing with people who may have been involved in the events of only some weeks earlier. His speech is similar to the one he gives at Pentecost in that he starts with defending what has happened, and then moves onto the offensive. There is more than irony here that people who longed for the fulfilment of Israel’s hopes are faced with the One in whom God would indeed fulfil their aspirations, but they conspired to have him killed. Peter has to go from showing how God has vindicated Jesus and how Jesus is behind the wonderful miracle they have witnessed to confronting his hearers with their guilt, and calling them to repentance as the only way to the blessings of God they so greatly desire. And of course, that criticism will soon lead to conflict.

What about us? When our Christian lives lead to the need for an explanation – and if they don’t, then why not – what happens when we speak of Jesus? As I said a moment ago, there is something deeply attractive about Jesus, even in a society where the church is either boring, irrelevant or negative. But also, to talk about Jesus, his Cross and Resurrection will be such that people will need to make a response. As Peter says, once Jesus is in the frame God no longer overlooks ignorance, and that means people need to make a decision about him. That can go strongly one way or the other. It may be the kind of welcome because people find Jesus attractive, or it can be the kind of hostility that is seen in different ways – from the outright violent persecution that Christian suffer in some lands to the more subtle attempts to keep faith out of the public square that sometimes happen in the West.
So, for example, the question of facing people with the claims of Jesus has been n the national news in Canada recently. A nineteen-year-old Christian student called William Swinimer wore a t-shirt to school with the slogan ‘Life is wasted without Jesus’. Some students complained they found it offensive. The vice-principal asked him not to wear it. He refused on principle, and thus began a series of suspensions which led to five days at home. Eventually the school relented, but not before Swinimer had been told he could support his religion provided he did not offend others, and the vice-principal accused him of ‘hate talk’.

Now you can listen to that as an older and potentially wiser Christian and wonder whether this young man was naïve, but just as Peter was courageous so William Swinimer was willing to risk not graduating, rather like a promising British student risking missing A-Levels and hence university.

In conclusion, you might think then that blessing others in the world in the name of Jesus is a risky business. There is no dodging that fact: it is. But what is the alternative? If we don’t, then think of the many people who won’t be blessed. And let us think of our own faith, wasting like an unused muscle.

8

Sermon: Ascension – The Forgotten Festival

Acts 1:1-14
Like every English football fan, I turn into an amateur pundit when an England squad is announced for a major tournament. It was thus with interest and trepidation that I followed Wednesday’s announcement of Roy Hodgson’s squad for the Euro 2012 tournament. Were I a Frenchman, I would be quite pleased with the England squad. I wondered how certain players could be forgotten – notably Peter Crouch and Aaron Lennon. The fact that Lennon plays for Spurs, Crouch used to and that Spurs are my time, did not cloud my judgement at all.

And if we think about forgotten men, we come in the Ascension to the forgotten festival. For many Christians, it’s Christmas, Easter and hopefully Pentecost. Ascension gets overlooked. Whether it’s because it always happens on a Thursday, because biblically the event it marks happened ten days before Pentecost, I don’t know, but it is certainly our forgotten festival.

But perhaps there is one reason that leads to our embarrassed silence about the Ascension, and that’s all this talk about Jesus rising up out of sight in a cloud. It all sounds so primitive, so unsophisticated to our scientifically tuned ears. We make our assumptions that the ancients believed that earth was ‘down here’ and heaven was ‘up there’, whereas our knowledge of astronomy and related disciplines seems to make that unlikely.

Yet how else were ancient people going to understand that Jesus had returned to his Father’s presence? Some riding off into the sunset, like the hero of a Western movie, wouldn’t have worked. Could it be that the strange account in Acts of Jesus being taken up from the disciples and obscured by a cloud (verse 9) is the only way God could have communicated this to them? I like to think this is an example of what John Calvin called the ‘doctrine of accommodation’, that many things are just so beyond the human mind that God can only show them in any way to us by simplifying them to our terms. Some of the creation stories may do the same, taking Babylonian myths of the day but importing very different meanings into them.
So the first theme of the Ascension for me, then, is this one of divine mystery accommodated to puny human minds. Let us not think with all our additional knowledge today that we are in any less need of God accommodating himself to our own failures to understand him. As Charles Wesley put it about the Incarnation in one of his hymns,

Our God contracted to a span,
Incomprehensibly made man.

‘Incomprehensibly.’ The saving works of God are so beyond and above our thinking and our imagination that the Lord has to find ways of communicating them to us that can make some kind of sense to us.

Hence I would say that a major challenge of the Ascension for us as Christians is to embrace the mystery of God and to stop thinking that we can put him into little boxes of our own making. If God chooses to put small boundaries around his revelation so that we have some chance of comprehension, that is up to him. But it is not for us to say what the limits are. It is not up to us to say, ‘But of course God could not do such-and-such’ – unless it contradicted his character.

Therefore, at Ascension-tide, let us face the challenge that God wants us to think bigger about him than we ever have done before. We may find it hard, but it may be essential. Indeed, unless we do, how ever will we truly worship him? If we are the ones who set limits on who he can be and what he can do, then is he any longer truly God? If God contracts things to help us understand, then that is his business. But we have no business in contracting God for ourselves with the tool of unbelief.

The second theme the Ascension has for me is the joining of earth and heaven. That Wesley hymn I just quoted starts with the lines,

Let earth and heaven combine,
Angels and men agree

And the Ascension is about the uniting of earth and heaven. Jesus’ journey from earth to heaven is not a vacating of earth – after all, ten days later he will send his own Spirit. It is about the joining of earth and heaven.

Remember that this is central to Jesus himself. In Jewish thought, the Temple was the place where earth and heaven met. But Jesus presented himself as the true Temple when he said, ‘Destroy this Temple and in three days I will rebuild it,’ referring to his death and resurrection. Earth and heaven meet, and worship is the fitting response. The Ascension shows us, as does the Incarnation and other aspects of Jesus’ ministry, that he is the one where earth and heaven meet. He is the true Temple. He, therefore, is to be worshipped and adored. Ascension is a reason for worship.

And so we might be puzzled by the Ascension, but we need to get beyond the default modern reaction in order to worship the one who has brought earth and heaven together. Ascension tells us that Jesus is worthy of all our praise and honour, not only as we sing and pray but as we live for his glory each day.

That call to worship leads us neatly into a third theme, which is that Ascension shows Jesus as both Lord and king. Tom Wright tells how one of the ways in which the myth of Roman emperors becoming gods at the time of their death is that a slave was – shall we say – ‘encouraged’ to report that they saw the soul of the dying emperor flying to heaven at the moment of death.

When Luke tells us the story of the Ascension, witnessed not by conscripted slaves but willing disciples, and not just a soul but the whole raised body of Jesus, his initial audience is surely meant to understand that this is a claim that here is the true emperor of the world. Caesar may call himself Lord, but the true Lord is Jesus.

The Cross, of course, has already declared that Jesus is King. ‘When I am lifted up, I will draw all people to me,’ he had said. Pilate had put up the notice, ‘King of the Jews’, and the Gospel writers mean us to understand that this is ultimately not a criminal charge, nor a statement of irony, but the truth. Jesus is enthroned as king on the Cross. The Resurrection then sees that king’s kingdom coming in power. Now this is capped by the Ascension as a visual sign of his reign. Jesus is Lord and King of the universe.

But it all means that he reigns in a different manner. He had reminded his disciples that the rulers of the Gentiles lorded it over people, but they were not to be that way. They were to serve. His own enthronement, as I said, was to be on the Cross – in suffering. And as we bow before our ascended Lord and King, we commit ourselves to work for his kingdom in sacrificial ways. If we worship Jesus, the true Temple who brought earth and heaven together, and we should because he is both Lord and King, then that worship cashes out in costly service. Ascension, then, asks us the question: what has my devotion to Jesus Christ cost me? Because if it has cost us nothing then we may never have understood Jesus in the first place.

There is a fourth and final Ascension theme I want to share, and it’s reflected in Hebrews 10:11-18. What does Jesus do when he gets back to the right hand of the Father? He sits down. That could mean a number of things. It could be another statement about his authority – after all, a Jewish rabbi sat down, rather than stood up, to teach. Remember that is what Jesus himself did when he preached at Nazareth. He has not stopped speaking, and as we are reminded elsewhere in the Scriptures he has not stopped praying, either.
But I prefer to see the sitting down in the terms of a rest. When Methodist ministers apply to retire, we have a quaint practice of going before our Synod and ‘asking permission to sit down’. Before we retire, we are deemed to be in what is called ‘the active work’. When we retire, we ‘sit down’. It is about a sense of completion (although the church may still call on us to do certain things).

And the ascended Jesus sits down, because the main burden of his work is done:

Day after day every priest stands and performs his religious duties; again and again he offers the same sacrifices, which can never take away sins.  But when this priest had offered for all time one sacrifice for sins, he sat down at the right hand of God,  and since that time he waits for his enemies to be made his footstool.  For by one sacrifice he has made perfect for ever those who are being made holy. (Hebrews 10:11-14)

As Jesus said on the Cross, ‘It is finished’, so the Ascension confirms that fact. Everything has been done to ensure salvation. We are forgiven through his death. We have new life through his Resurrection. From the right hand of the Father he pours out the Spirit so that we can live sacrificially for his kingdom. As the ascended Jesus waits for the final destruction of death, he has given us all we need to lives as little Jesuses, to be the faithful people and new community he wants us to be.

Ascension, finally, then, says, let us rise to the task. Jesus is waiting.

0

Singing The Faith: A First Look

Singing The Faith is the first new official British Methodist hymn book for nearly thirty years, superseding the (in my opinion) deadly dull Hymns and Psalms. My copy arrived in the post on Friday, and I’ve been skimming through it for some first impressions.

Hymns and Psalms just had to go, and many churches were voting with their wallets. It had the misfortune to come out just before the explosion in contemporary worship music (twelve months too early even for Kendrick‘s ‘The Servant King’,

I seem to recall). But you got the feeling that even if it hadn’t, that stuff would probably not have been included. It was published around the high water tide of liberal antipathy to evangelical and charismatic Christianity in Methodism. Furthermore, the musical arrangements were, as one friend put it kindly, ‘for musicians by musicians, to interest musicians’. I can’t judge the truth of that as a non-musician, but it may explain why they were largely deadly dull to me.

It had its bright spots – and I think particularly of the additional verse it includes in ‘When I Survey The Wondrous Cross‘ (retained here) that I’ve never seen elsewhere, the scholarship applied to restoring original texts and the Scripture Index in the music edition.

Methodist Conference and the panel that put together Singing The Faith faced the implications of several cultural revolutions that have deeply affected how Christians, Methodists included, approach faith and sung worship. Revolutions in communications (especially the Internet), transport (you can more easily get to a church whose style you prefer) and ecumenism (people are exposed to other traditions more easily and frequently) mean that fewer Methodists will be easily satisfied with ‘what we already know’. Some would argue (myself included) that technological changes and the fact that churches had already bought all sorts of supplementary books, such as Songs Of Fellowship, Mission Praise and The Source, meant that a new hymn book probably wasn’t the answer, and another approach was needed. The moment of publication is the beginning of fossilisation today. However, Methodism is almost umbilically attached to hymn books, and so a new book it was.

Given that fact, the new book, then, would need to embrace a diversity of musical and theological styles. Centralised or hierarchical control of doctrine may technically be still present in our system, but for many people it is long gone. There is therefore a huge question here of how Methodism maintains her doctrine in this central aspect of our piety, our singing. It may be that the forthcoming additional resource Singing The Faith Plus will act as some kind of clearing house to reflect on which of the newer material that is published from now on is consonant with Methodist doctrine, but we’ll see.

When it gets to the handling of theological diversity, there certainly is a spread in Singing The Faith. It embraces both the neo-Calvinist emphasis on the wrath of God at the Cross in Stuart Townend‘s ‘In Christ Alone’

and at the other end we have Marty Haugen‘s ‘Let Us Build A House (All Are Welcome)’

which some have criticised for allegedly extended the universal offer of salvation into universalism. So the issue of acceptable diversity is alive and well within the book!

It is also worth noting the considerable reduction in Charles Wesley hymns – very significant for Methodists, this. Hymns And Psalms was originally to be edited by an ecumenical committee, but when Methodist Conference insisted on at least two hundred Wesley hymns, the United Reformed Church pulled out. And for the URC to withdraw takes quite something! In the new book, at a quick count Wesley is down to seventy-nine contributions. Much as I love Wesleyan theology, I think this is the right move. Indeed, if many in our churches who have been most vocal about singing Wesley hymns had been as fervently aligned to his doctrine as to the music, Methodism might be more vibrant! Here is a prime example of the argument that allegiance to hymns, however central they are to Methodist spirituality, has not always maintained and fed our faith in the ways to which we might aspire.

Two more traditional-style contemporary Methodist hymn writers, Andrew Pratt and Marjorie Dobson, both participated in the STF committee, and both are represented in the final collection. Both have nine entries. With those numbers, I don’t think anyone can accuse the compilers of favouritism. I imagine the STF panel did what the HAP committee did, and required authors who were members of the group to vacate when their potential contributions were being discussed.

On, then, to think about those writers who have come more out of the explosion in contemporary worship styles. Matt Redman (also) features nine times, and the observation that interests me here is how it isn’t always his ‘hits’ that have been chosen. It looks to me like the committee has taken a real interest in what he writes about struggle and suffering. So as well as the popular ‘Blessèd Be Your Name’ we get ‘When We Were In The Darkest Night’ (‘God Of Our Yesterdays’)

and ‘We Have Nothing To Give’. No sign of ‘The Father’s Song’: one hopes that isn’t about avoiding male language for God, in the way that Fred Pratt Green‘s ‘For The Fruits Of His Creation’ has been altered to ‘For The Fruits Of All Creation’.

Having said that, the compilers are less confident that middle of the road Methodist congregations are ready for much by the late Delirious? Martin Smith and Stuart Garrard get in a couple each, but that’s it. This might be about some of the slightly unusual ways the band expressed itself lyrically, or it is about the more performance-oriented style, or possibly some other reason.

There is also evidence of taking into account the effect of contemporary worship trends on older hymns. It has become popular, particularly under so-called ‘Celtic’ influences, to sing the afore-mentioned ‘When I Survey The Wondrous Cross’ to the tune ‘O Waly Waly’ as well as ‘Rockingham’. This is recognised in Singing The Faith.

But beyond the contemporary worship movement, one area where I am particularly pleased to see innovation is in children’s worship songs. Mark and Helen Johnson of Out Of The Ark Music have been producing worship songs for primary schools for many years. Indeed, that is how I was introduced to them – by a primary head teacher. It’s a delight to see songs such as ‘Everywhere Around Me’

included, along with songs about the Incarnation and the Crucifixion (which actually doesn’t feature that often in their lyrics). Sadly, the wonderful ‘Harvest Samba’

Vodpod videos no longer available.

isn’t in. Did it lose out because it has a middle eight, and that would confuse some older congregations? I wonder.

However, overall, as you will gather, for someone who stays on the fringes of the Methodist establishment, and who is usually quite uncomfortable about it, I greatly welcome Singing The Faith. I still think a new book wasn’t the right approach in a fast-moving creative and digital world, but given that the decision was made, I think what has been produced is far better than many of us might have hoped.

13

Create a website or blog at WordPress.com

Up ↑