Tag: Charles Wesley

Two Ways of Speaking to Others About Jesus, John 1:29-42 (Epiphany 2, Year A)

John 1:29-42

Teetotalism illustration: Wikimedia Commons, CC Licence 4.0.

If you ask what Methodists are known for, it might be the hymns of Charles Wesley, an expectation that we are teetotal, and regulation green cups and saucers for the compulsory tea and coffee after services and meetings. The more daring Methodists bought blue cups and saucers.

Or there might be the social side of our faith, which leads to our commitment to social action and justice.

But one area where we are less strong today is in talking about our faith to others. It’s strange, isn’t it, that a movement which began with preaching in the open air should lose its ability to speak about Jesus.

And when we don’t share Jesus, the church dies. For how else will people know about their need to follow him and be part of his family? Our actions certainly witness to him, but we then need to explain them.

We need to address this, though, not through guilt trips but encouragement. I’m aware that since I am a ‘professional Christian’, people expect me to speak about Jesus, and that may make it easier for me. However, I think this reading from John’s Gospel gives us a couple of encouragements. Both John the Baptist and Andrew, in different ways, show us a way forward. Let’s look at how they can help us.

Firstly, John talks about who Jesus is:

St John the Baptist. Photographer: Randy Greve on Flickr, CC Licence 2.0.

Everything John says is about who Jesus is. He is the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world (verse 29). This is the One who solves all our needs for forgiveness and a new beginning. Even though Jesus comes after John (which implies the listeners think Jesus is one of John’s disciples) he outranks him because he was before him (that is, John speaks of Jesus’ pre-existence) (verse 30). I came to baptise, says John, but not to draw attention to me: I wanted you to see Jesus, who is the One Israel needs (verse 31). You were used in past times to the Spirit of God alighting on certain people temporarily, but now Jesus is the One on whom the Spirit rests permanently (verses 32-33). The divine mark of approval is on him, and he will bestow the same on his disciples. He is God’s Chosen One (verse 34) – not merely a teacher or even a prophet: there is no human equal to him.

John has gathered the crowds, and his popularity has grown among the ordinary people, to the point where the religious authorities had felt the need to set up a committee to investigate and report on him. But he is not interested in his own legacy. This is not about the setting up of John The Baptist Ministries, Inc. His sole aim is to point not to himself but to Jesus. And now that Jesus is on the scene, he can back out. He really doesn’t mind when two of his own disciples respond to his testimony by leaving him to follow Jesus (verses 35-37). In fact, that’s what he wants. Job done. It’s time to wind down the operation.

As I have been fond of saying over the years, the job of John the Baptist is to be the compère who introduces Jesus. Last weekend, Hollywood held the annual Golden Globes movie awards ceremony. A lot of the anticipatory talk in the media was about how good the jokes would be by the comedian hosting the ceremony, Nikki Glaser. But the job of the compère is not to point to themselves and enhance their reputation. It is to introduce the star of the show. That’s what John does.

Nikki Glaser at the Stress Factory in New Brunswick, NJ, Wikimedia Commons, CC Licence 2.0.

And that’s our task, too. Perhaps we are grateful that it’s not about us. John reminds us to put Jesus front and centre. Maybe that’s particularly important for those of us who witness in a public and formal way, such as preachers. The late American pastor Tim Keller, who developed a remarkable ministry in what was thought to be highly secular New York City among young adults, said in his book on preaching that every time you preach you should include the Gospel. You should hold us to that. Have we focussed on Jesus? Have you heard the good news this morning? Because that’s our priority.

Most of us are not preachers, though. For us, it means that when we get an opportunity to commend Jesus to someone, we say something about who he is and how he can help them. There are so many things we can say about Jesus to people, depending on the circumstances of those with whom we are conversing. It’s not necessarily about memorising the Gospel in four easy points, although some find that helpful. It’s more what the late W E Sangster, Superintendent minister at Westminster Central Hall through World War Two, said. He spoke of the Gospel as a many-faceted diamond. We need to find the facet of the diamond that reflects Jesus the Light of the World to the people or the situation where we find ourselves.

Therefore, when we are in a conversation with someone, and we sense it would be good to say something about our hope in Jesus to help them, it pays to pause and think, what aspect of Jesus would it be most helpful for them to consider? Do they need to know about Jesus, the forgiver of sins? Would it help them to know about Jesus the healer? Or do they need to encounter Jesus who is Lord of all? Or Jesus, through Whom God made all things good? Or is it some other element of who Jesus is that would be constructive?

We could make this part of our praying for these people, too. Something like this: ‘Lord, I sense my friend needs to know about Jesus. Please show me what would be most attractive or challenging or relevant to them. And please help me to share that in an appropriate way.’

Secondly, Andrew talks about what Jesus means to him:

Saint Andrew MET DP168806.jpg, Wikimedia Commons, CC Licence 1.0.

Andrew is possibly the most significant example of being a witness to Jesus outside of Paul and Peter in the New Testament. In fact, I once helped on an evangelistic mission where the preparatory training of local Christians was called Operation Andrew. Because Andrew is the character in the Gospels who speaks to friends and relatives and brings them to Jesus. He doesn’t preach, but he introduces people to Jesus by his personal and private conversations.

We see that for the first time in this reading:

41 The first thing Andrew did was to find his brother Simon and tell him, ‘We have found the Messiah’ (that is, the Christ).

In John 6:8-9, Andrew introduces the boy with the five loaves and two fish to Jesus, even though he doesn’t expect that small quantity to go far. But he still does it.

In John 12:20-22, some Greeks want to meet Jesus. It is Philip and Andrew who tell Jesus about them.

Andrew is that quiet, personal witness. We don’t see him preaching to the crowds, instead we see him in these private interactions that facilitate the possibility of people meeting Jesus.

And within that mode of operation, Andrew speaks about what Jesus means to him. ‘We have found the Messiah.’ Not just, ‘Jesus is the Messiah,’ but ‘We have found him.’ It’s the truth about who Jesus is, as per John the Baptist, but it’s personal. This is who Jesus is, and I’ve found it to be true in my life.

Is that not the essence of Christian witness for most of us? We have discovered that the claims of Jesus are true, but not merely in theory: we have found them to be true in our own lives. That gives us something we can share with others, not by preaching, but in the to-and-fro of respectful conversation.

Again, it is not about bigging up ourselves, it is about promoting Jesus. He is the focus. Many of us will not have dramatic stories to tell, but we shall have that knowledge that Jesus has been at work in our lives, and we can share that. Others of us may have known times when Jesus did indeed work in a remarkable way in our lives, but when we tell it, we don’t emphasise all the gory stuff about ourselves: rather, we put the emphasis on what Jesus did.

Therefore, whether or not we have had the sort of life that can get written up as a dramatic religious paperback, every Christian can reflect on their lives and think of the times when they have known for sure that Jesus was at work by his Spirit, and we can bring that into conversation when the time is right. It won’t be by making a formal, prepared speech, it will be in the way that friends and family tell each other stories about their lives. We do that, and then we let the Holy Spirit do the work of making this real to the people with whom we share. We pray, of course, for the Spirit to do that.

At this point, if this were a seminar rather than a sermon in a church service, I would want you to take a pen and paper, and spend some time thinking over the story of your own life, then writing down those occasions when you have known that Jesus did something particular for you.

A pen on paper, Wikimedia Commons, CC Licence 4.0.

But since we are not in a seminar environment, I want to suggest that you find half an hour for yourself at home to try that very exercise. Recall and write down the times when Jesus has done something special in your life. And when you have done that, I want you to work on memorising it. Not necessarily in a word-for-word way, because if you just regurgitate that to others, you will sound stilted and unnatural. In fact, they will feel like they are being preached at, and not in a good way.

One approach that some find helpful is to turn that story of Jesus’ work in you into a series of short bullet points that you can remember. What are the essential parts of the story?

What I have in mind here is, I think, in harmony with something the Apostle Peter said in his First Epistle. Writing to a group of Christians who were fearful of a negative response to their faith that would have been far worse than anything we might face, he said this:

But in your hearts revere Christ as Lord. Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. But do this with gentleness and respect (1 Peter 3:15).

This is a way in which we can have a reason for our hope: by recounting the ways in which Jesus has shown his faithful love to us over the years. I am sure that if I asked you, Christian-to-Christian, whether Jesus has been good to you over the years, you would probably say ‘Yes.’ What comes to your mind is helpful in witness, too. We can avoid flowery, churchy language, and share with people in a simple way what Jesus has done for us.

Conclusion

Let’s go from here and conduct an experiment. Let us meditate on the many things that are true about Jesus, so that we can offer an aspect of him in conversation with others.

And let’s reflect on our own experiences with Jesus, so that we are ready to share them when the Spirit prompts us that to do so would be helpful.

May it be that the Holy Spirit encourages us through this to speak about our faith as well as demonstrate it.

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Where is the Hope in the Slaughter of the Innocents? (Matthew 2:13-23, Christmas 1 Year A)

Matthew 2:13-23

Peter Paul Rubens, The Massacre of the Innocents; Wikimedia Commons, CC Licence 4.0

Sometimes, Christians tell stories of miraculous answers to prayer where they are saved from a disaster. Around the time of 9/11, I heard one about a Christian who should have been on one of the planes that crashed into the Twin Towers, but whose circumstances changed unexpectedly and they missed the flight.

Here is one I read recently, from a respected pastor:

I remember once almost booking a trip to Prague. I’d planned it perfectly—a romantic getaway for Vicky and me. My finger hovered over the “Book Now” button, but something in my spirit said no. It didn’t feel right. I hesitated and didn’t book it. Weeks later, there was a massive explosion in the very square where we would have been staying.

Admittedly, that pastor is making a different point, about how God sometimes says ‘no’ because he is preparing something better for us. But I still read the account and wondered about who might have been present at the site of the explosion.

And something like this is one of the concerns we bring to the disturbing account of Herod the Great’s order to kill babies and toddlers in Bethlehem, whereas Jesus, Mary, and Joseph miraculously escape.

How are we going to tackle this troubling story? It naturally falls into three acts: the escape, the slaughter, and the return. These will be our guide to the flow of the story and what Matthew is saying.

Firstly, the escape:

Just as he did when Mary fell pregnant by the Holy Spirit, Joseph hears an angel of the Lord in a dream, and they escape to Egypt. That would have been financially easy for well-off Jews of their day, but it was certainly not a preferred option[1]. And while it is debatable whether Jesus’ family was poor, they were certainly not wealthy, so this was not an easy decision.

And yes, that makes Jesus, Mary, and Joseph refugees, something we might remember in today’s fevered politics of immigration. The fact they returned later does not negate that, as some have tried to claim.

Right from the beginning, then, pain and suffering cast their shadow over the life of Jesus. It will also be so for his followers.

In doing so, Jesus is like Moses, who was also rescued from certain death as a baby at the hands of Pharaoh. It is one sign that Jesus will be the One greater than Moses, who was prophesied.

That gets further underlined when Matthew, as he does so often and especially in the birth stories, quotes Scripture as being fulfilled. In verse 15 he cites Hosea 11:1,

Out of Egypt I have called my son.

In other words, he makes a parallel to the Exodus, which again was led by Moses. And just as in Old Testament texts such as this one Israel was called God’s son, so now Jesus is supremely God’s Son – not only because of the virginal conception by the Holy Spirit, but also because Jesus will fulfil all that Israel was meant to be, but failed to be, due to sin.

Even – and perhaps especially because – suffering and injustice are at work, what we see here is that Jesus’ ministry of salvation is being foreshadowed, maybe even beginning, in his infancy. The One greater than Moses, the True Israel, will lead his people through and from suffering to salvation. In the midst of the darkness, the light of Christ is shining.

Is that not reason to praise God? Even in this darkest of stories, God is working his purpose out.

And if God has preserved us through trials, are we listening to know what our place in those purposes is?

Secondly, the massacre:

There is a lot to say here. There are those who think the story didn’t happen, and that Matthew made up this story to fit with the fulfilment of a Scripture. However, if that’s what he did, then that makes Matthew a pretty awful person, and I don’t think that’s sustainable on the tone of the rest of his Gospel.

The big objection is that there is no historical record of the ‘slaughter of the innocents.’ All sides agree that it is consistent with Herod’s vile character. We know he had family members whom he regarded as political rivals killed. We know he even arranged for a number of nobles to be executed on the day of his own death, so that there would be grieving in the land. He obviously knew that few would grieve his own death.

But the reality is, horrible as it sounds, that the killing of male babies and toddlers in Bethlehem was probably political small fry in comparison to all his other atrocities. The violent acts that get reported by ancient sources like Josephus tend to be ones of national importance. This would not have been so, especially given that working from our best estimates of Bethlehem’s population at the time, probably around twenty youngsters in an insignificant town were slain[2].

That is still twenty too many, and it is still unbearably wicked. And I am working from the assumption that Matthew has given us an entirely plausible account.

Building on that, this is not the only place in Scripture where we see a juxtaposition of deliverance for some but suffering for others. To give one other example, when persecution breaks out against the early church in the Acts of the Apostles, many are imprisoned, Simon Peter is freed from his cell by an angel, but others are executed.

Many years ago, I heard a story about a massacre of some missionaries, who lived together in a compound. Many were killed, but others escaped. The survivors returned to their homeland, where a memorial service was held. As you can imagine, people struggled there with the fact that some were murdered but others were not. A speaker at the memorial service said, “God delivered all the missionaries. He delivered some of them from suffering, but he delivered others through suffering.”

The slaughter of the innocents is the most graphic telling of why Jesus needed to come. This is the level of wickedness in our world. Human sin and depravity is such that we will even not spare the most vulnerable and the most innocent for the sake of our own comfort, status, or financial gain. It is just as true today. While some abortions do happen because of serious medical complications and other distressing reasons, there are others that happen because of couples who are unwilling to make the financial sacrifices necessary to raise a child. If the Assisted Dying Bill gets successfully through Parliament, there will be elderly people in this country put under emotional pressure to end their lives so that greedy relatives can get their hands on their inheritance sooner.

Make no mistake, the slaughter of the innocents is not just something terrifying that happened two thousand years ago. Parallels are still happening today. And they will continue until people bow the knee to Jesus.

For Jesus is God’s remedy for all the violence and hatred in the world. Jesus, who escaped suffering here, would one day go to the Cross where he would absorb the sin of the world for all of us.

God had planned this from the beginning. God had created this world out of love, but love is something that takes risks, including the risk of rejection. God knew from the outset that it could and would go wrong, and that a rescue plan was needed. That is why Revelation speaks of Jesus as ‘the Lamb who was slain from the creation of the world.’

Even here, there is hope. For when Matthew looks for an appropriate Old Testament text, he finds one in Jeremiah 31 that imagines the matriarch Rachel weeping in her grave as the exiles are marched off to Babylon. That sounds relentlessly bad, doesn’t it? But in that chapter, the disaster of the Exile leads to God’s rescue plan. For it climaxes in the promise of the New Covenant. And for Christians, that means Jesus.

Even in the darkness, God’s light in Christ is still shining. May we remember that.

Thirdly, the return:

Once again, Joseph has an angelic visitation during a dream. What a man Joseph was, for being open to God speaking to him. We laud Mary for her example of discipleship in agreeing to carry the Messiah in her womb, but Joseph deserves praise, too. He is an example of true faith to us as well.

When the family returns, Joseph also shows he is astute. Not Bethlehem, because although Herod is now dead, his son Archelaus is in charge of that area. He was every bit as bad, if not worse, than his father[3].

Joseph opts for Nazareth, where according to Luke he and Mary came from. It was politically insignificant, a small settlement of about five hundred people[4]. There is no way the sophisticated urban elites from Jerusalem would have ever had Nazareth on their shortlist for the upbringing of the Messiah.

But if the town was inconsequential to them, it certainly wasn’t to God. In his eyes, Nazareth was spiritually significant – something Matthew makes clear with a quotation that is a wordplay[5]. That quotation, ‘He will be called a Nazarene’, in verse 23, does not appear anywhere in the Old Testament. However, it was a common practice to make Hebrew puns by what was called ‘revocalising’ a word, which basically meant putting in a different selection of vowels. The best theory is that Matthew has revocalised the Hebrew word ‘nezer’ to make ‘Nazarene.’

If he has done that – and I think he has – then ‘nezer’ is the word for ‘branch’ in the prophecies that the Messiah will come from the ‘nezer’ or ‘branch’ of David’s line. The Messiah growing up in obscure Nazareth? Oh yes. What is insignificant in the world’s eyes is significant to God.

Now if that is true, what about those of us who do not live in our great metropolis or indeed in another major city today? Who cares about these places? God does. Let others write off the places we live in. God doesn’t. He cares about them and has plans for them.

For our part, let us be open to God’s leading in the places where he has called us to serve him. Let us be modern-day Josephs, attentive to the voice of God in our lives, especially in the Scriptures.

People who know their Methodist history should get this. We make a lot of the fact that John and Charles Wesley grew up in Epworth in Lincolnshire. For many years, we even had a publishing house named after Epworth. But who would have heard of Epworth were it not for the Wesleys? God had other ideas, just as he did for Nazareth.

What does God want to do here, and who does he want to raise up as his servants in this place, who might even go on to have a wider influence for Christ?

Let us be on the lookout.

[1] Craig S Keener, The Gospel of Matthew: A Socio-Rhetorical Commentary, p109.

[2] Keener, p111.

[3] Keener, p113.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Keener, pp113f for this and what follows.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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!”

 

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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)

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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.

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