Tag: church

Farewell 2: Jesus Makes Sense (Luke 24:13-35)

Luke 24:13-35

So we come to my final sermon here. When I think back to our beginning here, I remember the sense of hope and positivity I felt about this church. I thought there was huge potential here. I really thought something could happen.

So to come to the end of my ministry here at a time when the church is seriously having to consider closure before too long is something I never would have anticipated thirteen years ago.

I have reflected on why we have got to this point, and I have my theories. Could we have anticipated before it happened that we would be financially vulnerable? Possibly. Have we been a divided congregation? Yes, at times. Have we on occasion chosen fear over faith? I think we might have done. And did COVID-19 accelerate our problems? Without question.

You may have your theories, too. But it’s all academic now. This is the situation we are in. So what to say?

I may have told you along the way the story of the late Ugandan evangelist, Bishop Festo Kivengere, whose ministry came to prominence during the evil and violent dictatorship of Idi Amin in that country. One day, he was told he could address a group of men before they were shot to death by firing squad in a football stadium before a huge crowd.

Kivengere said he didn’t know what on earth to say to men facing that fate. But then he heard the quiet voice of Jesus speaking to him:

“Tell them about me. I’ll make sense.”

So that’s what I’m attempting this morning. To tell you about Jesus, so that he will make sense to you at this time, and bring you hope in whatever you face when I have gone.

This story of the Emmaus Road is one that is special to Debbie and me, because the preacher at our wedding chose this lesson and preached on it. But I’m not aiming to reproduce that sermon. Instead, I want to take two simple truths about Jesus in the passage, because I believe they will hold you strong in faith, whatever you face.

Firstly, Jesus is present with us in our grief.

To some extent, the account of Cleopas and his companion walking along talking to the stranger about Jesus and not realising it’s Jesus is almost comical. It feels like a pantomime. Not so much, ‘He’s behind you!’ as ‘He’s beside you!’

But listen to them as they pour out their litany of dashed hopes about Jesus. All their dreams are gone. Jesus was going to change everything. They had pinned all their hopes on him. But now he had been executed. It had all gone.

Compare that to how many of us are feeling about this church now. W can remember so many happy times here. We have made great friends. There have been memorable special occasions. And most of all, the encounters we have had with the living God. The likely loss of these hits hard.

For me, I remember us visiting the church where we had got married and where the children were dedicated, a few weeks before it closed. I had been devastated when I heard it was going to shut.

But as Cleopas and his companion pour out their grief and sense of hopelessness, what is going on? Jesus is with them in their grief. I know they don’t realise it, and we read that ‘they were kept from recognising him’ (verse 16), which is a puzzle. Does their failure to believe in the resurrection stop them? Do dark forces prevent them? Or is the Holy Spirit closing their eyes until the moment of revelation to come in the house? We don’t know.

Many of us know the temptation to believe that Jesus has deserted us when we face troubles. But Jesus was with Cleopas and his friends, even though they didn’t realise at first, and he is with us, too. We may not recognise it. We may not understand why he has allowed a disaster to happen. But our lack of understanding is no reason to conclude that he has absented himself.

The fact is, disasters do happen to God’s people. Think of Israel being sent away from the Promised Land into exile in Babylon. They struggled at first with how they would sing the Lord’s song in a strange land (Psalm 137). But eventually, with the encouragement of people like Ezekiel and Jeremiah, they found a way to live faithfully in their new situation.

So too with us. Even if this church disappears, Jesus won’t. Ask him to show you where he is and what he is doing. Ask him for the privilege of knowing that he is listening to you in your grief.

After all, he endured the worst injustice of all, when he died on the Cross despite being sinless. Do you think he doesn’t understand the human condition at its most desolate? Of course he does.

And this is why we sang Matt Redman’s song ‘You Never Let Go’:

Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death
Your perfect love is casting out fear
And even when I’m caught in the middle of the storms of this life
I won’t turn back
I know You are near

And I will fear no evil
For my God is with me
And if my God is with me
Whom then shall I fear?
Whom then shall I fear?

[Chorus:]
Oh no, You never let go
Through the calm and through the storm
Oh no, You never let go
In every high and every low
Oh no, You never let go
Lord, You never let go of me

Secondly, Jesus is still in the resurrection business.

Think how Cleopas and his companion are trapped inside their own beliefs. They are good Jews who believe that resurrection will come – but only at the end of time. So it doesn’t matter that Jesus has prophesied three times that he will suffer, die, and rise, and it doesn’t matter that some women in their group that morning had reported that he had been raised (verses 22-24).

What changes them is an encounter with he risen Jesus. They are not forgotten or forsaken. Hope is not lost, it is renewed. Jesus is alive!

In exile, Israel was depicted as like a valley of dry, dead bones by Ezekiel. But the Spirit of God brought them new life and eventually they returned to Jerusalem and the Promised Land. The dead bones were alive. Jesus is in the resurrection business.

And I believe that whatever happens here in the coming months and years, Jesus has not got out of the resurrection business.

I don’t have any specific word from the Lord about what that will look like, but I do know this: the resurrection body is different, and when Jesus raises up his work from the dead again here it will look different. The resurrection body of Jesus was on the one hand identifiable as him, but on the other hand had new and different powers. Think of how Jesus appeared inside locked rooms.

I believe there is a hint in the Emmaus Road story that resurrection life is different. When the three travellers get to Emmaus and Jesus is invited into the home of Cleopas, he shuns his rôle as their guest and behaves as the host when he takes the bread, blesses God for it, breaks it, and shares it.

Some people think this is a precursor of Holy Communion, where we also see the fourfold action taking the bread, blessing God for it, breaking it, and sharing it. But I think that’s reading too much into the text, because devout Jews offered these four practices with the bread whenever they are.

But if Jesus is the host and Cleopas and his companion encounter him (verse 31), and they realise that their hearts have been burning inside them Verse 32, surely a reference to the Holy Spirit), then what we have here is church in the home. Jesus raises up a new form of worship, and of course by the time he writes his Gospel forty or fifty hears later, the early Christian church is worshipping not in the Temple or in synagogues, but where? In the home.

This is another case of the resurrection body being different. And because of that, what I want to say to you is this: if this church dies, God is capable of raising up a new work. Just don’t be limited by your prior expectations. Don’t assume that we’ll still have church buildings, and we’ll have them where we’ve always had them, or even as to whether we should take such precautions.

Be ready, then, for the Holy Spirit to do something new and different here. Perhaps what we were offering had had its time, and God wants to do something new here in order to reach people in the name of Jesus. Think of Mr Spock in Star Trek, but not so much saying, “It’s life, Jim, but not as know it,” but “It’s church, Jim, but not as we know it.” Let old and dying ways go. Give them a decent burial.

And be prepared to walk with Jesus into something new and unfamiliar, but much simpler than Methodist rules make them, except for the fact that he is the host.

Let it be in the spirit of the way the prophets prepared Israel to come back from exile in Babylon to the Promised Land. In Isaiah 43, they are told to forget the former things, including even the Exodus from Egypt, because God was doing something new.

So too, because Jesus is still in the resurrection business, be prepared to put aside the old ways as he does something new in raising up a new work to replace the old.

Let’s go back to that Matt Redman song we sang. Here are some other words from it:

And I can see a light that is coming for the heart that holds on
A glorious light beyond all compare
And there will be an end to these troubles
But until that day comes
We’ll live to know You here on the earth

We may weep at the grave of this church. But make no mistake. Jesus will raise up a new work. Let’s make sure we walk with him.

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Forming The People Of God (Church Anniversary Sermon) Genesis 28:10-22

Genesis 28:10-22

The other day our cat got trapped in Mark’s bedroom and weed on his duvet. Going up to the loft to find a spare duvet for him, I had to fight past a couple of blankets and several pillows. Thankfully, none of those pillows was a stone like Jacob uses in our reading (verse 11). Unlike him, I don’t think I would fall asleep easily on a stone pillow. Just how tired was he?

Now you may wonder why Jacob’s dream is a suitable reading for a church anniversary, and the answer comes in his naming of the place as Bethel (verse 19), for that means ‘house of God.’

Yet this is no house of God in the sense of a permanent building structure where God’s people gather to worship. Rather, it’s a site where God is at work in the formation of a people for his praise through the patriarchs.

And what we learn here about God’s formation of Israel applies in New Testament terms to his formation of the church.

Firstly, the people of God are formed by God’s initiative.

I am the Lord, the God of your father Abraham and the God of Isaac. I will give you and your descendants the land on which you are lying. (Verse 13)

It’s God’s idea to form a people for himself. The people of Israel were not just another nation that emerged from ancient history, and the Christian church is not merely a human institution. God took the initiative. Why?

For the salvation of the world. God’s choice of Israel and his election of the church is not just a case of choosing people for their own salvation whereas he doesn’t choose others. No! He chooses and makes his people for a purpose: we are chosen so that we are a light to the nations. God chooses us so that we reflect his light in the world and that others might be attracted to the Light of the World, Jesus himself.

Now we are used to understanding that in an individual way. Each one of us is a witness to Christ. But we also need to understand it together as the fellowship of the Church. As the community of Christ we are called to be a light to the nations, beginning in our local area and spreading as far as we may be sent by God.

The Christian Church is not an accident. An individual congregation like this is not an accident, either. God made the first move to create this community and call it according to his purposes, of shining his light in the darkness.

So if we are here by God’s initiative, it’s an important question to ask how we are shining the light of Christ here and beyond our walls.

If we can identify how we are shining the light of Christ to the wider world, then we are at least in some respects fulfilling our purpose as a church. But if we realise we are not doing so, then we have some hard considerations. Either we must find ways, or we must close, because we’re only a pretend church.

Secondly, the people of God are formed by God’s promise.

Your descendants will be like the dust of the earth, and you will spread out to the west and to the east, to the north and to the south. All peoples on earth will be blessed through you and your offspring. (Verse 14)

There are things we need to do for the growth of God’s people to come. We cannot be passive. We must have intent if we are to grow. But before all that, the growth of the church is about God’s promise. He will make Israel ‘like the dust of the earth’, and Jesus famously promised that he would build his church. It all starts with God’s promise.

So are we seeing the growth of the church? Are people around the world hearing the Gospel through the Christian church? The answers to such questions are a very certain ‘yes’.

But what about us? So many of our churches are declining and aging drastically. Churches are closing all over the country. That doesn’t sound like God’s promise of a growing church, does it?

I think the fairest summary of the overall situation would be to say that in some places we are losing many of the battles against the spirit of darkness, but overall we are winning the war.

But even if that’s the case, we still have to grapple with our decline in contrast to God’s promise of growth. There are many reasons throughout history why churches decline and close. Sometimes, it’s because they are not sharing the Good News. Other times, it’s due to hostility in wider society against the Gospel. In some cases, it’s a bit of both. Or it could be something else, like being disunited so that we can’t demonstrate the love of God to the world.

If we are declining when God’s promise is for growth, we need an honest examination of why that is so. When we have identified why, we need to ask whether that reason can be reversed. If we are not sharing the Gospel, will we learn to do so? If we are disunited, will we be reconciled so that we can show God’s love to others? If we are in a hostile society, can we find ways of being a winsome witness to Christ despite that?

How we answer these questions help us decide what to do if – like many traditional churches in our culture – we are not seeing God’s promise of growth.

How will we respond in our churches?

Thirdly, the people of God are formed by God’s grace.

I could have begun with this point. But it’s also the theme behind the two other points about God’s initiative and God’s promise. The formation and development of God’s people is a matter of God’s grace.

After all, this is a story about Jacob. How come he’s travelling? He’s on the run after deceiving his twin brother Esau out of their father Isaac’s blessing. Esau wants blood. Jacob is hardly saintly.

Yet for all that, as the patriarch of the next generation, God is using him in his long term plans to form the people of God. Yes, this scheming, self-centred man! He’s not exactly the ideal material, is he?

However, when God intervenes in his life here via the dream at Bethel, Jacob responds with a vow that if God will provide for him and protect him, then the stone he lays will be the house of God and he will give a tenth of all he has back to God (verses 20-22).

In other words, grace transforms sinners.

One of my college lecturers said to me once, ‘Never forget that every church is a company of sinners.’ And when we look deeply at ourselves, isn’t that true? Like Jacob, we are unpromising material. We are not obviously saints in the making – at least not when left to our own devices.

But isn’t it also true that over the years we have seen God work changes in our lives as we have responded to all he has done for us in Jesus Christ? Has not the life, ministry, death, and resurrection of Jesus coaxed out a response from us to God’s grace?

No, we are not the finished article. We are not people who have got it all together. We are like broken pieces, glued together with gold, like the Japanese art of Kintsugi – and that’s what makes us beautiful.

For the world isn’t always attracted to the smooth operators who seem to have got it all together, whereas broken, fallible people like us who are utterly dependent on the grace of God are a more welcome proposition. We are more relatable.

So for all the challenges that this story is to us, ultimately it’s good news. As God’s initiative in forming the people of God calls us to be a light to the nations and as God’s promise of growth challenges us to face difficult questions if we’re not growing, in the final analysis it all comes down to grace.

And God’s grace is the most remarkable and wonderful thing, making beautiful creations out of broken people. While we believe that, and live out that truth, there is always hope.

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Forward To Normal: Finding A Prophetic Voice After COVID-19

It’s been a long time.

Years.

But restarting this blog is long overdue.

For the past several weeks during the coronavirus lockdown I’ve been posting weekly devotional videos on YouTube in place of regular sermons. At the very least – and especially considering how popular the sermons have been on here – I thought I ought to start posting them here as well as church websites, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

So here is this week’s.

There are just two disadvantages to this: you get both to hear me and to see me.

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Singles In The Church

Only The Lonely by Bandita on Flickr
Only The Lonely by Bandita on Flickr

A survey of single Christians in church does not surprise me at all. Single Christians often feel ‘isolated , alone and lonely’ in church. Single women feel they are seen as threats to married couples.

Why does this not surprise me? Because I was 41 before I married, and I experienced some of this. I was told that marriage was ‘the norm’, which made me feel abnormal. There were questions raised behind my back about my sexuality. To some extent, things changed when I began as a minister, because one of the positives about that was to find myself on the receiving end of many kind offers of hospitality. But I also heard married Christians say they did not think I would be able to help them – without a thought for all the single Christians who might feel that married ministers could not understand them.

I have reflected in the past that there is an assumption in the world that you are not fully human unless you are having regular sex. Since the church usually confines sex to marriage, that is adapted to a notion that you are not fully human unless you are married.

What are your experiences? Do you have some better examples, some stories of best practice?

After all, it’s ironic how often we don’t notice that our Lord and Saviour was single.

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A Benevolent View Of The Church

Often on this blog I’m aware of negative and hostile contemporary attitudes to the Church. Yesterday, I came across a much more benevolent view about the benefits of church-going for a family from a site I wouldn’t normally come across – Live-In Nanny. Of course I would want to go much further on this subject than the author of this post does, but it was at least pleasing to read a positive evaluation.

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A Church Anniversary Sermon

Matthew 16:13-20

Too many churches want nothing to do with Jesus.

Wait a minute! Isn’t that a bit judgemental? And what a thing to come and say as the visiting preacher at a Church Anniversary!

What I mean is this: many of the assumptions Christians make about the church bear only the most meagre resemblance to what Jesus teaches about the subject.

This morning, I want to contrast many of our popular suppositions about the church with what Jesus says here. There are great riches in our short reading, but I shall confine myself to verse 18 for a text:

And I tell you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not overcome it.

We’re going to start in the middle of the verse and work our way outwards. Firstly, church. We may protest when the world assumes that ‘church’ means ‘building’ and say, “No, it’s the people,” but what is the reality? How much of our time do we spend talking about property and finance? How often do we say we want to get more people through the doors? Have we not got locked into this idea that church is a building and an institution?

But what did the word ‘church’ originally mean? It did indeed mean ‘the people’ and they didn’t have their own buildings, gathering instead in the larger homes owned by the more wealthy believers.

More specifically than that, ‘church’ comes from a word used in the early Greek democracies to indicate the calling out of a people to assemble together. Split down very literally, it is ‘the called-out people’ and that came to mean ‘the assembly’ of people.

We are a ‘called-out people’. We assemble together for worship because God in Christ has called us out to be distinct from the world. The church is the people who have heard the call to follow Christ, and that means gathering together (the assembly) as a holy people (we are called out from the world and set apart for a special purpose).

This, then, is church. Our prime concerns are all located in that single word. Does our worship reflect the Christ who calls us out? Are living as a distinct, called-out people? How are we co-operating with the Holy Spirit who is calling other people out of worldliness to join us as Christ’s new community?

And if all the discussions about property and finance were related to those issues, we’d be in a healthier position.

Secondly, my church. There is a healthy way in which people can say ‘my church’. They can mean, this is the congregation where I can love and be loved, and work out my discipleship.

The trouble is, too many churchgoers say ‘my church’ and mean something else. They act as if they own the church, or as if church solely exists for their benefit, and that it should conform to their tastes and prejudices. Such people throw wobblies when an act of worship does not sit nicely with their tastes in music.

But it’s Jesus here who says ‘my church’. The church belongs to him. It is his. In Paul’s terms, it is the Body of Christ and Jesus is the head.

Not so many years ago, it was popular in some Christian circles to hear preachers declare this claim: “Jesus wants his church back.” You know what? I think we could do with hearing that again. It’s his church, not ours. How many of our worship wars would be different if we were more concerned about what Jesus likes than what we like? How many of our petty arguments would fade in the brilliant light of knowing that the church belongs to Jesus? Aht do we need to hand back?

Thirdly, I will build my church. An evangelist I used to know said that whichever town he went in the UK, the local Christians always told him the same thing: “This is the hardest place in the country for the Gospel.” Now some of that might reflect the general difficulty we have in the present climate for sympathy to Christianity, and I can understand that. But what is the alternative? If you were to believe some Christians, it is to batten down the hatches and simply ensure that my local congregation will see me out. Once I’m dead, it can close.

If that attitude shocks you, let me assure you that it is widespread among churches.

Yet whatever the difficulties, it has to be clear that Jesus has a big vision for his church. It is to be built. Let’s not have any arguments about quality versus quantity, Jesus wants both. He wants to build both the quality of our spiritual lives – holiness – and he wants to build the quantity of those who follow him – evangelism.

It is therefore only right to ask whether questions of holiness and evangelism are central to our conversations and our meeting agenda. I fear we avoid them and major on minors. Where are the class meetings where we hold one another accountable for our growth in grace? Where are those who are making sure we focus on how we shall reach out into the local community?

Fourthly, I will build my church. Some people who have got to know me well know one of my pet peeves. It’s the idea that churches and Christians run after the latest techniques and fads in order to turn around their fortunes. If someone else has made something work, then this is what we must do. If this is what we have learned at this conference, then it must be right for us. If this is the latest big-selling Christian paperback, then we must put it into practice here as soon as possible and as much as possible.

Now I don’t have any problem learning from the best of what is happening. I happen to be an avid reader. I told our daughter’s teacher at a parents’ evening last week that you can’t be a Faulkner if you aren’t a reader.

But what does this attitude do? It assumes a kind of technological, push-the-button approach to the spiritual life. Follow these five steps and everything will be all right. Practise this technique and your troubles will be over.

As if.

For God is not a machine who responds to us programming him. God is sovereign, and if that means anything it means that he has more free will than we do. It is Jesus who promises to build his church. We want to see it grow, too, but Jesus will be the one who makes that growth take place.

What does that mean for us? We may or may not use popular programmes such as the Alpha Course, but our attitude is to ask Jesus what he wants to do and what he is doing. We then seek to join in. Rather than us try to control or even manipulate things with our religious techniques, we instead place ourselves in a position of vulnerability rather than of control. Instead of taking charge ourselves, we ask Jesus to take that position. If he is to build his church, then that requires us to be dependent upon him, and therefore to seek to hear his voice and respond.

Fifthly, you are Peter and on this rock I will build my church. Here’s another challenging thought, something that goes against many of our natural instincts – something ‘counter-intuitive’ to use a popular fancy word these days. If we want the church to grow more, then wouldn’t it be obvious that to be able to include more people in the church we should lower the bar for entry? Shouldn’t we make church membership easier? Besides, we don’t like to ask embarrassing or intimidating questions, nor do we want to appear judgemental. That should start to increase our numbers.

But, no, Jesus sees it differently. When he says, “You are Peter and on this rock I will build my church,” he is surely responding to what Peter has just done. Peter has just confessed his faith in Jesus as the Messiah. Jesus grows his church by confession of faith in him. If you lower the bar, you stop being the church, because the church is the body of people who have faith in him. You might inflate your numbers in the short term, but in the long term you will no longer be the church. You might just about be a religious  club, but you will no longer be the church of Jesus Christ.

So what about the people on the fringe whom we are nurturing? Are we discriminating against them? Are we excluding them? There is still room for them. John Wesley had a number of small group meetings, not just the famous class meeting. Some of them were reserved for those who had made a clear commitment of faith and obedience to Jesus Christ. Others were open to both those who believed and those who were enquiring about the faith – or, in Wesley’s words, ‘desired to flee from the wrath to come’.

Church holds an aspiration before people, namely to become radical disciples of Jesus Christ. Set the bar high. Make it worth the leap.

Sixthly and finally, and the gates of Hades will not overcome it. Let’s call in the doom and gloom merchants again. The church is under attack. Christians in this country are now being persecuted. (Goodness knows how they would describe what happens to Christians in some other countries, then.) Everything and everyone is against us. It’s time to pull up the drawbridge and defend what we’ve got.

Well, let’s not deny that the climate is not so positive towards Christianity in our society anymore. That much is obvious. But is it really faithful to Jesus’ vision of the church to conceive of the battle as all being one way, the forces of darkness rampaging against the church? I don’t think that stands up to the words of our Lord here.

Did you notice I didn’t read the old translation, ‘the gates of Hell will not overcome it’? The association with Hell makes people think this is about evil forces assailing the church of Christ. But the translation I read is better: the gates of Hades. That is, the place of the dead. Death will not prevail against the church. Certainly, individual churches close and many decline, but Jesus is asserting the indestructible nature of his church. Can death ever conquer a community of faith founded in the Resurrection? Not a chance!

And specifically, there is no need to be negative here for this reason. ‘The gates of Hades’: when was the last time you were assaulted by a set of gates? It’s ridiculous! Gates are defensive tools. They are used to protect against invasion. But Jesus is saying that his church invades and conquers the forces of death. Where death attempts to reign, we proclaim resurrection. Where the forces of sin lead to death, we proclaim forgiveness. Where death is at work in the world, we proclaim the kingdom of God. The gates of death tremble as the gospel community, the church, preaches the good news of her Saviour and Lord!

In conclusion, then, yes, the church faces all sorts of challenges and difficulties today. But part of our problem is that we have allowed ourselves to believe distorted accounts of what the church is. When we return to the teaching of Jesus about the church, we have every reason to believe that God has given us a hope and a future. Let us put our house in order. Let us be humbly dependent upon Jesus Christ. And then let us face the world with confidence in him and his Gospel.

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A Contradiction In Terms: An Inward-Looking Church

Remembering the old quote attributed to Emil Brunner that ‘the church exists by mission as fire exists by burning’, it is sobering to read ‘10 Warning Signs Of An Inwardly Obsessed Church‘ by Thom Rainer. Some of Dr Rainer’s ten signs sound not only familiar but widespread to me.

What do you think of his list? Would you add any? Would you challenge any?

Whatever you think, the tenor of the article underlines even more for me the importance of churches being mission-focussed. (By which, I don’t simply mean, ‘raising funds for others to do mission’.) Stuff about the priority of worship often deteriorates into narcissistic arguments about personal taste and aesthetics. I agree that ‘mission exists because worship doesn’t’, but that is all the more reason to have mission-minded churches.
I’m reminded of the words of Ian Brown, former lead vocalist of the Stone Roses, who talked about his own spiritual quest in an interview in Q Magazine in November 2007:

My spiritual quest is for me to understand God. I’ve gotta educate myself, cos the church isn’t going to show me God. They put themselves next to God so that you’ve got to go through them to get to God. I don’t believe that.

It’s time we stopped getting in the way and being part of the solution for people like Brown.

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Organise Your Church On Purpose And Giftedness

So says Rick Warren. OK, you’d expect Warren to use the word ‘purpose’, but the thrust of the article is the benefits of structuring a church around people’s gifts, rather than in trying to fit them into a predetermined structure. Makes sense to me. But it means there are some powerful institutional forces we need to resist in our denominations.

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