Tag: Dad’s Army

Farewell 3: The End Is Not The End

Jeremiah 8:18-22 and 1 Corinthians 15:50-58

Last month, a poet friend of mine published a new anthology of his poetry. It is a series of poems for the end of life and beyond. He entitled it ‘The End Is Not The End’.

And if you want a title for the sermon today, that’s it: The End Is Not The End. That doesn’t mean I’m staying in this circuit after all, and that the farewells have all been part of a hoax.

No, I want to face head on the difficulties and discouragements we face in our churches here, and which of course so many churches in the western world do.

A few years ago, I was praying about my time here and I wondered in my praying what would summarise my time here. What popped into my head was a Bible verse I didn’t want to hear. We heard it in the Jeremiah reading:

‘The harvest is past,
    the summer has ended,
    and we are not saved.’

(Jeremiah 8:20)

I knew that many of the hopes and dreams I had had when coming here were not going to be fulfilled. Situations that looked like they had great potential proved to have more style than substance. People who gave an initial impression of being deeply spiritual turned out to be like the seeds that the sower in Jesus’ parable threw on rocky ground or among thorns.

And alongside all this we are fighting an uphill battle in a culture that is increasingly hostile to our faith.

So what does the Methodist Church nationally do? Well, apart from its periodic attempts to impersonate your embarrassing trendy uncle, it chooses not to learn from history but to delete a historic document, the so-called Liverpool Minutes, that show how the first Methodists to face decline dug deep into their spirituality and turned things around.

Meanwhile, it buries its head in the sand when all the evidence is there that the structures we have are creaking towards breaking point and it adds more bureaucracy – the classic behaviour of a decaying organisation. Let’s have even bigger Districts. Let’s amalgamate circuits to such a size that if you are like the one I am moving to, they cannot meaningfully consult the entire circuit about the appointment of a new minister. We defend these structures despite all the evidence from other churches that we need greater continuity between churches and their ordained leaders. And we spread our leaders even thinner.

And we pile even more responsibilities on the leaders without taking anything away from them. Renewing my Safeguarding training has gone from a two-hour session four years ago to eight hours now. There are good ideas added, such as getting all the ministers into a pastoral supervision programme, but no-one tells us what we should drop. Conference clearly thinks we can make bricks without straw.

‘The harvest is past,
    the summer has ended,
    and we are not saved.’

And it’s not just the ministers facing this. I look at what we ask our congregations to do, especially those in leadership positions. Some of them are being worn down to the bone with the amount of practical work and administration we need them to do. Not only that, some of them are holding these responsibilities at ages well beyond that where we always used to let people retire gracefully from positions in the church and let them have a well-deserved rest.

‘The harvest is past,
    the summer has ended,
    and we are not saved.’

Now to some of you this might sound like I am just settling some scores at the end of thirteen years here. Please believe me when I say that’s not what this is about. I believe we need some honesty and reality about the situation.

Of course, that’s what got Jeremiah into trouble in his day. Relentlessly he told God’s people the stark truth of their situation. With no change in direction, they were going to be conquered by Babylon and taken into exile there. He didn’t deal in the frothy shallow positivity of the popular culture.

Or maybe you think I’m just here as a spiritual doom and gloom merchant. We call such people Jeremiahs. But I am not here to be a religious Eeyore. Nor am I here to be Private Frazer from Dad’s Army, crying, ‘Doomed, doomed, we’re all doomed!’

I am here today to be a small-scale Jeremiah, but not in the way you might think. Let me explain.

Forty years ago, when I trained to be a Methodist Local Preacher, we had to sit four written exams. In my Old Testament paper, there was a question where we were asked to assess a statement that Jeremiah was a prophet of doom.

And like all good exam answers, the best response was to say, ‘Yes but’. You see, Jeremiah was about doom – in the short term – but in the long term he was about hope. Short term doom, yes – but long term hope.

He called on the exiled Israelites to find ways of living positively in Babylon and blessing their captors. And he looked beyond the exile to when they would return to the Promised Land.

So I want to proclaim to you today short term doom but long term hope. The End Is Not The End. Just as Jeremiah held out hope that it was still possible to live a fruitful life of faith in an alien and hostile culture, and just as he saw beyond that to restoration, so I want to say something similar to you today, but with a New Testament spin.

And so this is where I want to bring in our reading from 1 Corinthians 15. This is Paul’s great chapter on the Resurrection, and the verses we heard were the climax of that chapter.

This passage has the verse that has been dubbed the verse for the church crèche. It’s verse 51:

Listen, I tell you a mystery: we will not all sleep, but we will all be changed.

But to be more serious, here is God’s great promise that The End Is Not The End. For just as Jesus was raised from the dead, so shall we at the end of time. Death will be swallowed up in victory. Its sting will be neutralised. We gain the final victory through our Risen Lord.

It’s like the famous American preacher Tony Campolo used to put it. He would recount how people would come up to him and ask him how on earth he could be positive and hopeful in such a dreadful world as ours.

His reply? ‘I’ve read the last chapter of the book, and Jesus wins!’

Friends, The End Is Not The End. If it ends in death, then it’s not the end. Not in the light of Jesus our Risen Lord, it isn’t.

Well, you may say, that’s all very well, but isn’t that pie in the sky when we die? What can you say to us as we have to continue living in difficult times as Christians?

I want to give you two words of encouragement.

The first is this. Although we await the great resurrection at the end of time, we do experience in the meantime some little resurrections. Here’s what I mean by that.

Many of you know I was recently on sabbatical, and before I went, some of you asked what I was doing during my three months. One of the things I did was I spent five days at the Lee Abbey community in North Devon. I went there for a Christian conference on the theme of how to handle disappointment in the life of faith. I went knowing that I was wrestling with disappointment towards the end of my time here. I went knowing also that most if not all of us live with disappointments in our lives, and it’s therefore an important pastoral issue.

Now I guess one of the things we’re dealing with in this sermon is the theme of coping with disappointment. Our speaker at Lee Abbey that week focussed on what is commonly called ‘The now and the not yet’ of the kingdom of God. We see some signs of God’s kingdom now in our life of faith, perhaps when we see remarkable answers to prayer, but we also experience the fact that God’s kingdom has not yet come fully. Yes, Jesus reigns, but not everyone nor all creation bows the knee to him yet.

So it is part of the Christian life to live in this tension. And what I simply want to say to you about this today is that even as you find yourself immersed in disappointments, doom, and struggles, never lose sight of the fact that God in his mercy will grant you some little resurrections. He may be silent at times, but he is not absent. As I said to the Knaphill people last Sunday morning, sometimes he is like Jesus walking alongside the two disciples on their way to Emmaus, who do not realise who their companion is. You may not recognise his presence at times in the midst of the sorrows, but he is there, and he will grant you tokens of his grace.

The second word of encouragement I want to give you is this. The passage from 1 Corinthians 15 is very special to me personally, and I’d like to tell you why.

Many of you know that in my last appointment I had a rough time. I was a misfit in the appointment, and for me that meant five miserable years. We actually considered whether I might need to come out of ministry for a few years to recover and see whether I ever wanted to come back into ministry at all. Before we left, I went into counselling for some help.

In all those difficulties, this was the passage which was my lifesaver. At times I confess it only just kept my head above the water. But it did.

You see, you might expect that Paul’s great chapter on the Resurrection would end with inspirational words about the life to come, but he doesn’t. His last words are words that earth how we are going to live now in the light of that resurrection hope. Verse 58:

 Therefore, my dear brothers and sisters, stand firm. Let nothing move you. Always give yourselves fully to the work of the Lord, because you know that your labour in the Lord is not in vain.

Your labour in the Lord is not in vain – so keep going.

I have never really understood why God called us to that last appointment. I have the odd theory, but nothing completely makes sense. But, says Paul, your labour in the Lord is not in vain. Whatever I did for him and his kingdom there, Jesus will take and make into something beautiful because in the resurrection it will endure. It felt like five wasted years to me, but the resurrection means that in the economy of God it will not be wasted.

For those of you here who are particularly living at the coal face of our difficulties in the church today, I want you to hear those words: your labour in the Lord is not in vain.

For my lovely ministerial colleagues who work hard and don’t always feel they see the fruits they long for: your labour in the Lord is not in vain.

For my dear church members, not least some of you in my church leadership teams, who have put in sterling efforts that must at times feel like King Canute trying to banish the incoming tide, I say the same: your labour in the Lord is not in vain.

For those of you like me and some members of my family, who live with the dark clouds of depression, I say to you: your labour in the Lord is not in vain.

Just remember, dear friends, that if you think everything is ending in death and darkness, The End Is Not The End.

Jesus wins.

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Sermon: Where Is Our Security?

Mark 10:17-31

I hate this passage! Sell all your possessions – is that what it takes to enter eternal life? I remember many years ago hearing Ronald Sider say, “What ninety-nine per cent of Western Christians need to hear ninety-nine per cent of the time is, ‘Sell all your possessions and give to the poor’.” And to read this only two weeks after we bought a new television! Surely that Sony has damned us to hell?

So what do I make of this story? What can I offer you before the flames start licking around my flesh?

I propose to think about it in the three phases of the story: firstly, considering Jesus and the man, secondly thinking about Jesus and the disciples, and thirdly Jesus’ reaction to what Peter says.

Firstly, Jesus and the man. Matthew calls him ‘young’ and Luke calls him a ‘ruler’; all we know from Mark is that he is rich. It would be easy for us to be cynical, especially since we know how the story ends. But he seems to have a genuine question, and Jesus treats him with dignity and respect. No – more than that – we read that Jesus ‘loved him’ (verse 21). That doesn’t suggest Jesus detected any hypocrisy. I think we must take the man’s enquiry as a sincere one.

Well, how many sincere enquirers would we turn away from the church today? Very few if any, I would suggest. Churches are often so desperate for new members that they will soften the entry requirements or rationalise what people say in order to get them in and swell the numbers.

Not Jesus. Far from lowering the bar, he raises the bar for the man. The man has kept this, that and every commandment, even one that isn’t in the Ten Commandments – ‘you shall not defraud’. Surely he has covered all the bases? What more could someone do? Isn’t he better than so many of the people who came to Jesus?

But even this man, with all his lofty moral conduct, still lacks one thing. It’s his attitude to his wealth. He needs to sell everything and give the proceeds to the poor before following Jesus (verse 21).

He has kept that extra commandment, ‘You shall not defraud’, with its implication about defrauding the poor, because they are usually the silent victims of wealth accumulation. But while he hasn’t gone out of his way to make life worse for the poor, neither has he shown any real concern.

And it’s ironic to contrast him with those Jesus talked about in the preceding four verses in Mark. He spoke about little, vulnerable children, who in worldly terms owned nothing yet in his eyes lacked nothing for the kingdom of God. Here is a man who has everything the world can give and yet has nothing that the kingdom of God requires.

Why? Because the critical issue for him is one of trust and security. His money and property are what help him to sleep at night. For all Jesus’ words of warning about wealth, he didn’t completely reject all the rich people of his day. He benefitted from the largesse of some rich women who supported his ministry (Luke 8), and his body would be laid in the tomb of a wealthy man.

Furthermore, it’s illuminating that the man asks, ‘What must I do to inherit eternal life?’ (verse 17). He doesn’t ask about the general conditions for everybody; his question is specific to his own situation. And Jesus picks on the way he trusts in his riches.

The question for people like us, then, is what our attitude to money and possessions is. Do they become the things we rely on? Is my security in the pension I will receive (even in economically uncertain times)? Is it the house we own? Are we free to give to the poor?

A minister I know told me earlier this year that he has thought for many years that the decline of the Methodist Church means it is futile for him to rely on that pension when he retires. So he plans to quit this country in a few years’ time and spend the rest of his ministry working as a Christian in Muslim lands, having the courage to find appropriate ways of sharing the love of Christ there. His security is not in money but in God.

And that is the question Jesus posed to the man: where was his security? It couldn’t be in his moral conduct, because everybody falls short somewhere. In his case, it was his finances and property. But the kingdom  requires that we put our trust in God. So where is our security?

Well, that’s a huge challenge. And when I hear something like that, I’m tempted to respond after the manner of Private Frazer in Dad’s Army: “Doomed, doomed, we’re all doomed!”

Which isn’t too far from the second conversation, the one between Jesus and the disciples. Jesus tells them it will be hard for the wealthy to enter the kingdom of God, harder even than for a camel to get through the eye of a needle (verses 23-25). And they respond, “Then who can be saved?” (verse 26). It’s their ‘Doomed, doomed, we’re all doomed’ moment.

We’d like something to break the tension. Something to let us off the hook. Some little indication that Jesus is being mischievous or ironic. So people talk about the ‘eye of the needle’ as describing a gate into Jerusalem. However, there is no record of that until the ninth century AD. Is there any hope in this passage, or are we all doomed? Is God lighting the blue touch paper and retiring while we burn?

Thankfully, Jesus replies with the essence of the Gospel:

“For mortals it is impossible, but not for God; for God all things are possible.” (Verse 27)

Discipleship is possible through God. Faith is possible with God. Obedience is possible with God. It is no use relying on our goodness, the Gospel only works because God makes the impossible possible. He makes it possible for selfish, self-centred other-forgetting people who are entirely bound up with themselves (get the message?) to be forgiven, put in the right with him through Christ – and transformed into entirely different people over a period of time, thanks to the Holy Spirit.

We need that sense of inadequacy and desperation that we can’t make it into the kingdom of God. But the story doesn’t stop there. God steps in with the Gospel. He does the impossible.

However, that Gospel does not stop with the forgiveness of sins, as some Christians would have us believe. That is central, but it is not the whole message. A Gospel which then requires us to follow Jesus, with all the challenges that involves, also does the impossible in turning us inside out.

Don’t get me wrong. To hear the Gospel proclaimed as the forgiveness of sins is wonderful. It is exactly what we need to hear. But when that is the limit of the message, it is in danger of becoming ‘cheap grace’. I can be forgiven and just wait for eternal life. In the meantime, I can live however I want.

But Jesus is not recruiting people by simply offering them a ticket to glory, he is calling them to enlist in the cause of God’s kingdom, which means following him. So as well as forgiveness there is transformation. God is making all things new, and he wants to include us in that.

So it may be hopeless for us, but there is always hope with God. He challenges us deeply about our security, but provides all we need in order to be different. We need not walk away, like the rich man did. We can instead walk with Jesus. Good news? I think so.

Which brings us to the third conversation, the one between Jesus and Peter. Because in the light of this, Peter issues a plea: “Look, we have left everything and followed you” (verse 28). In other words: we’ve done what you’ve asked us to do. We haven’t walked away, like the rich man. We’ve sized up the cost and paid it. we’ve made the sacrifices and are depending on God as we follow you, just as you’ve taught us. And it’s quite a sacrifice they’ve all made: home, family, business – all left behind. It’s rather like Peter is saying, “We’ve met the tough conditions you’ve laid down: what’s in it for us?”

And Jesus’ response is broadly to say, don’t just conceive of discipleship as being about what you’ve given up. Sure, there will be persecution, he says, but you will be amply rewarded in this life and in the life to come (verses 29-30). Your heavenly Father knows what you have given up, but there is more to discipleship than sacrifice. Certainly, it requires sacrifice, but God does not overlook that.

I wonder whether you ever feel like your efforts and sacrifices for Christ are not noticed? Do you sometimes wonder whether what you have done at great cost to yourself or your family was a waste of time and effort? Do you ever despair that you have sweated so much in following Jesus and yet you feel there is so little to show for it? Perhaps you feel like Joseph in the Old Testament, languishing in an Egyptian prison having accurately interpreted dreams, but forgotten by the man who was vindicated by what he said? In my experience, plenty of Christians feel like all they do has been forgotten by God.

If you are one of them, then Jesus says something to you that is similar to what he said to Peter. All that you put in for the kingdom will be rewarded, a hundredfold in this life and eternal life in the age to come.

Why can he say this? Ultimately, it’s because of the Resurrection. One of my favourite Bible verses – and also most challenging – comes at the end of 1 Corinthians 15, Paul’s great chapter on the Resurrection. His conclusion is nothing to do with sweetly waiting for the age to come, it’s this: ‘Nothing you do for the Lord is ever in vain.’

Now I frequently feel like what I am doing is in vain. I am seeing no fruit and precious little encouragement. I throw that text back at God sometimes when I’m exercising the spiritual gift of moaning!

Seriously – you might be shocked if you knew the number of ministers who at some point or another had seriously considered quitting the ministry. Put it alongside other Christians who find discouragement, apathy and hostility littered regularly across their way and it really isn’t surprising that many Christians do think their efforts are worthless.

But the text is true. The Resurrection is the promise that God will vindicate what is right, that truth and justice, beauty and love will prevail. It is what drives us on. It is what makes our efforts and sacrifices ‘worth it’.

And in the meantime, while God’s age to come clashes with the present evil age, there will still be some reward, even if it is mingled with suffering and opposition.

So in conclusion, I don’t know who you find yourself identifying with in this story. Sometimes I am with the rich man, struggling to find my security in God rather than in the material blessings of this world. I need to be reminded that in Christ God gives me true and lasting security, and everything else that seems so solid is a dead end. Sometimes when I think all is lost I am with the disciples, who need to know that God makes both the forgiveness of sins and the power to live a radical new life possible. And on other occasions, when I’m tempted to give up the effort needed to keep on keeping on, I’m with Peter, learning from Jesus that God has not forgotten me and will specifically remember what I have done for him and fulfil his purposes.

Who are you? What do you need to hear from God today?

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