Tag: Elisha

Living As A People Of Blessing, 2 Kings 5:1-27 (Ordinary 14 Year C)

2 Kings 5:1-27

How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land? The words of the Psalmist have echoed throughout history. Most Christians live as the minority in their society. We have had to cope with a transition from being the majority culture to being the minority, seen in so many ways and not least the way recent decisions in Parliament trampled on the sanctity of life.

But the problem goes back to before the Psalmist. In today’s passage, we have a young Israelite girl taken captive by raiders from Aram (verse 2). It’s not the full exile of many centuries later, but it still poses the question of how to live out your faith as a good witness when your beliefs are not the dominant ones. Even those still living in the Promised Land know the threat of the King of Aram and his army, as the King of Israel makes clear by the fear he displays when he assumes his opposite number wants to pick a quarrel with him (verse 7).

The story of Naaman’s healing shows several Gospel values we would do well to emulate in our witness. Sometimes they are displayed by God’s people, sometimes by those receiving blessing, and sometimes they are the opposite of the behaviour that is condemned in the passage.

Firstly, love

Don’t you think the attitude of the young girl in forced slavery is remarkable? Separated from her parents, much like the dreaded ICE officers are doing to immigrants in the USA at present, surely she is living in fear.

And what does she do? She loves her enemy. She shows concern for Naaman’s condition and knows how he might be healed. No resentment gets in the way. Instead, she blesses a man who doubtless was significant in causing her plight.

In the later history of God’s people, when many had been taken into exile in Babylon, and the Psalmist had voiced their feelings with those words with which I began, ‘How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?’, the prophet Jeremiah had an answer for them. In his famous letter to the exiles in chapter 29 of his prophecy, he tells them to ‘seek the welfare of the city to which they have been taken’. It’s similar. And people notice it.

To whom can we show love, despite the fact that they may be opposed to our most cherished beliefs and values? It may be a family member who has rejected the way we brought them up. It may be a political representative who stands for a party or policies that we believe are harmful to us and to others.

Think of the ways in which our society is becoming more divided and ask where we can show love to all parties. The algorithms of social media promote the viewing of content that is negative and causes anger, thus contributing to division and even violence. We have seen the consequences at the ballot box and on the streets. Imagine what we could do if we brought love into those situations.

Secondly, grace

The King of Aram thinks that Naaman’s healing can be bought. He tries to buy favour with his opposite number in Israel by sending Naaman with ten talents of silver (that’s about 340 kilograms), six thousand shekels of gold (around 69 kilos), and ten sets of clothing (verse 5). It’s so over the top that the King of Israel thinks it’s a trick to provoke conflict.

It’s a common attitude. We think we can buy the favour and blessing of God. Some of us do it by trying to be good enough (whatever that is) in our lives. Some of us try, in the words of Kate Bush, to ‘make a deal with God.’

But it doesn’t work. God rejects these approaches. He gives freely to the undeserving. We cannot make ourselves deserving of his blessing, but he still gives. And here he heals way before Naaman professes any faith in him. It is undiluted grace.

It is our calling to be grace-bearers in the world, even to those opposed to us. It’s very easy for us to call down fire and brimstone on the enemies of God, and we are altogether rather too practised in the art of cursing others, but God in Christ calls us to a different approach. The Christ who prayed, ‘Father, forgive them, they don’t know what they are doing’ is our Lord. It may go against the grain for us, but how else are people going to be opened to the possibilities of redemption?

You may want to write to your MP. It may be something you feel passionately about, and you may think the MP is likely to disagree with you. Write with grace. Bless them. Tell them you are praying for them. So many Christians write letters and emails to their MPs in such a hostile spirit that we have a pretty terrible reputation in Parliament. Speak grace. Build a relationship, if you can. You never know what opportunities that might create in the long run.

Thirdly, humility

I see this in two ways in the reading, and it’s all to do with the central encounter between Elisha and Naaman. For Elisha’s part, he does not have to come out to Naaman and do something spectacular that will build his brand or his platform, as we would say today. He just sends his messenger with the instructions Naaman needs (verse 10). It’s not about show. Elisha only cares about the exalting of the name of the Lord, not the exalting of his own name. If that means staying in the shadows, then fine.

For Naaman’s part, he must put aside his pride to wash himself in the waters of the Jordan, not in the apparently superior rivers of Abana and Pharpar in Damascus (verse 12).

Humility in pointing to our God and not to ourselves, and humility in that we must put aside our pride to meet with the one true God. That is central. What else could be our response when the Gospel is about grace and mercy?

It is not that we want to do the exaggerated ‘very ‘umble’ Uriah Heep-type routine, nor is it that we want to dress up low self-esteem in some ‘I am a worm’ attitude, but it is to say that we want to deflect all the glory from ourselves to where it belongs.

You may recall Corrie ten Boom, the Dutch Christian of ‘The Hiding Place’ fame. She and her sister Betsy were imprisoned by the Nazis for hiding Jews as an expression of their faith. Betsy died in the concentration camp. After the war, Corrie exercised a remarkable ministry of compassion and reconciliation at no small cost to herself.

After she had given a talk or a sermon at an event, she would often have people come up to her and thank her for what she said. How did she handle the compliments? She said she thought of them as like a bouquet of flowers. She would smell the beautiful scent and then say, ‘These are really for you, Lord.’

Is that an attitude we can cultivate? A humility that gives glory to God?

Fourthly, thanksgiving

After he is healed, Naaman wants to offer Elisha a gift. But the prophet declines it. This is not about him. It was God who healed Naaman (verses 15-16).

But Naaman still wants to show his gratitude, and he wants to do so by transferring his allegiance to the Lord who had healed him. He does so, following the pagan belief of many cultures in Old Testament times, that the gods were limited to certain geographical areas, and so he asks to take some of the Promised Land home with him to the land where the idol Rimmon (whom he now probably realises is a false god) is worshipped (verses 17-18).

The measure of a true response to a genuine encounter with the Lord is simply this: thanksgiving. Remember when Jesus healed ten lepers, and just one returned to give thanks. That was the one who truly knew and appreciated what Jesus had done for him.

There are a couple of sides to this for us. For one, while we shall be unconditionally blessing people with grace and love in all humility, we shall be praying that some will respond with thanksgiving and encounter God in Christ. Our blessing is never conditional upon a person responding in a particular way, but it is a witness, and we put prayer behind that witness that people will respond in thanksgiving to God.

The other side for us is that we ourselves, as those who have already discovered the God of grace and love in Jesus Christ, are seen to be thankful people, too. At the graduation service for our son on Wednesday, the Dean spoke on Paul’s words in Colossians 3, ‘And be thankful.’ She quoted the famous words of Dag Hammarskjöld:

For all that has been, thank you. For all that is to come, yes!

How revolutionary would a thankful lifestyle be in an acquisitive society?

Fifthly, generosity

So the last part of the story is the dark episode that ends it, one that we often don’t read. Gehazi, the servant of Elisha, is scandalised that his master lets Naaman go without him leaving a gift. He says these chilling words to himself:

“My master was too easy on Naaman, this Aramean, by not accepting from him what he brought. As surely as the Lord lives, I will run after him and get something from him.” (verse 20)

‘My master was too easy on Naaman.’ Here is someone who does not understand grace. ‘I will run after him and get something from him.’ It’s all about getting, not giving. As such, his character is contrary to the God he supposedly serves. He is a precursor of the TV evangelists and other scammers, determined to make money out of those who have a need.

But God is a generous giver, not a taker. God gave out of love in creation. God gave his only begotten Son for the salvation of the world. God gave the Holy Spirit to the disciples of Jesus. Gave, gave, gave. God is generous.

I am not about to suggest that we are like Gehazi. He became diseased in body because he was diseased in spirit. But I do ask the question, what are we known for in society? Although we are called to speak out against wrongdoing, are we primarily known as those who are negative? Think again of those letters to MPs. Or are we known as those who positively give to society, who overflow with generosity to those in need and for the well-being of our towns, our cultures, and our nations?

By the grace of God, may it be that we are not a Gehazi, who grasp for ourselves, but a servant girl who knows how to love, an Elisha who humbly lives in and by the grace of God, and a Naaman, who by thanksgiving grows in grace.

Surely such a people will have an impact for Christ on their culture.

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What To Do When A Move Of God Is Dying, 2 Kings 2:1-18 (Ordinary 13 Year C)

2 Kings 2:1-18

On my first full day at the first theological college I attended, one of the pastoral tutors said to us: ‘Coming to college is a bereavement experience.’

She was right. Of course, it was not on the scale of the death of a loved one. But there are other bereavements, including smaller ones. The tutor explained that we were going through the loss of families, friends, networks, homes, jobs, and other things that we had left behind to study and train. (Most of us were mature students.)

The account of Elijah’s departure to heaven is also a bereavement story. And it’s more than just losing a beloved leader of God’s people from this earth. There is a bigger bereavement going on here for Elisha, the company of the prophets, because the loss of Elijah to heaven is the end of one major phase of God’s work among his people.

In that respect, I believe this passage has a lot to tell today’s church. So much of it is dying, especially in the more traditional churches. We know the numbers are down and the age profile is increasing. A phase of God’s work is dying. But how do we respond?

We can take clues from this narrative about good and bad ways to respond when one move of God is passing, and we are waiting for the next. I am going to look at how Elisha reacts, and then how ‘the company of the prophets’ reacts.

Firstly, Elisha

I have no doubt that Elisha was consumed with grief. Every time Elijah told him to stay in one place while he went on, Elisha replied, ‘As surely as the Lord lives and as you live, I will not leave you.’ Elisha clings onto Elijah. Can he not face the thought that he is going to be separated from him? Or maybe he’s not willing to let his master go on his final journey alone.

Equally, every time the company of the prophets asks Elisha, ‘Do you know that the Lord is going to take your master from you today?’, he gives the same reply: ‘Yes, I know, so be quiet.’ I doubt this is like the old British stiff upper lip, because that would not fit the culture. But it does sound like someone who is saying, I just don’t want to talk about it. This is too awful.

In these ways, Elisha doesn’t sound that different from a lot of grieving people. Those who have studied the various stages of grief have shown that one of the early stages is that of denial, where we just cannot accept the awful reality.

I suspect some of us are like that in the church as it declines and ages. Some of us don’t want to talk about it. Somehow, we think that if we keep on doing the same old same old then maybe magically things will turn out for the better. We seem to have fallen for what some have called Einstein’s definition of insanity, which is to keep on doing the same things will expecting a different result.

But Elisha doesn’t stop there. He knows a new season is coming. For sure, his grief cries out after Elijah departs as he asks, ‘Where now is the Lord, the God of Elijah?’ But before that, we read this in verses 9 and 10:

9 When they had crossed, Elijah said to Elisha, ‘Tell me, what can I do for you before I am taken from you?’

‘Let me inherit a double portion of your spirit,’ Elisha replied.

10 ‘You have asked a difficult thing,’ Elijah said, ‘yet if you see me when I am taken from you, it will be yours – otherwise, it will not.’

The ‘double portion’ is what the eldest son received in their father’s will. It showed he was the favoured one. Here, Elijah knows the double portion of the spirit isn’t in his gift, it is only from the favour of God. Elisha will know he has received it if he sees Elijah when he is taken – for that is what a prophet does, he sees into the will of God.

At this point, Elisha gets it right. The succession of God’s work depends not on hankering for the days of Elijah but depending on the work of the Spirit. Only the Spirit of God animates the prophetic ministry.

And … only the Spirit of God animates the Church of Jesus Christ. Amid all our talking, posturing, and fantasising in the light of ongoing decline, the ‘one thing necessary’, a dependence upon the power of the Holy Spirit, seems to be the ‘one thing neglected.’ We need Pentecost fifty-two weeks of the year.

It’s no good telling stories of what the Holy Spirit did in past generations or when we were younger if we are not also relying on the Spirit now as well. It reminds me of my favourite story about the nineteenth century American evangelist D L Moody. During one visit to the UK, he spoke to a group of church leaders on the text Ephesians 5:18, ‘Be filled with the Spirit.’ He pointed out (correctly) that the Greek actually says, ‘Continue to be filled with the Spirit.’

An Anglican clergyman objected. ‘Mr Moody! Why do I have to be filled with the Spirit now? I was filled with the Spirit at conversion.’

And Moody simply replied: ‘Because I leak.’

Isn’t that our problem? We have leaked the Holy Spirit and we are dying. Is anything more urgent than petitioning God passionately to pour out his Spirit on his people again?

Let me ask you: are there any ways in which your church is in denial about the fact that the move of God which created our churches is dying? Are there ways you are trying to hide from this? We can have all the coffee mornings we like, but unless the Spirit is poured out, we are done for. Are we crying out for the Holy Spirit?

Secondly, the company of the prophets

If Elisha starts off on the wrong foot but then gets it right, the company of the prophets gets things the opposite way around. They start off well. Look at all the times they warn Elisha, ‘Do you know that the Lord is going to take your master from you today?’ Get real, Elisha, they say: you can’t play pretend, you need to face up to reality. This is good, honest living. They know you can’t live in denial. They know that fantasising and hiding are not helpful. They show a healthy instinct.

So where does it all go wrong for them? Well, that happens after Elijah has been taken to heaven and Elisha has taken up the prophetic mantle, both literally and spiritually, with Elijah’s cloak. After Elisha proves his spiritual authority by dividing the waters and walking across, we read this:

15 The company of the prophets from Jericho, who were watching, said, ‘The spirit of Elijah is resting on Elisha.’ And they went to meet him and bowed to the ground before him. 16 ‘Look,’ they said, ‘we your servants have fifty able men. Let them go and look for your master. Perhaps the Spirit of the Lord has picked him up and set him down on some mountain or in some valley.’

The very people who have warned Elisha that Elijah will be taken from him now propagate a delusional fantasy that maybe he hasn’t really gone, after all. Elisha may have the Spirit resting on him, but they still want the good old days, even though God is blatantly doing something new now.

And I fear this is where much of the mainstream, traditional church is spiritually today. God is doing something else, but we still want to propagate the old ways. Look at how Methodism clings onto its old structures. We must have our Circuits and Districts! So, we combine them into ever larger sizes. Here I am, in our circuit where three old ones were amalgamated twelve years ago, preaching at a church that is not one of mine, and travelling thirty-four miles to do so.

Or another Methodist example: every church must have a minister in pastoral charge. We can’t possibly let churches have a vacancy, like many other denominations do. Our congregations become infantilised, and our ministers get stretched over ever more small churches, because the rate of decline in church members is faster than the rate of decline in numbers of churches. We ministers are then far less able to be effective, because we are just travelling cheerleaders and find it hard to embed ourselves in a community.

Can’t anybody see what is blatantly in front of our eyes, that the system is breaking and dying? Have we so idolised the system that no-one will grasp the nettle? Yet we still go looking for Elijah when the Spirit is resting on Elisha.

But here’s the thing: although the company of the prophets go from being realistic and honest to living in a world of make-believe, ultimately there is hope. Why? Because if you continue reading in 2 Kings, the company of the prophets continues to work in partnership with Elisha. They come to the realisation that they must follow the leading of the Spirit in their day, even if that means doing something new.

And surely the same is true for us. We have lived for so long under the illusion that the structures the Holy Spirit led John Wesley to establish in the eighteenth century are still the structures we must use today, as if somehow God’s leading then were on the same level as Holy Scripture itself. But if we are both to survive and to thrive as the church, we shall need to stop our version of looking for the body of Elijah and instead ask what the Spirit is doing through the Elishas of our day. It may look very different. What we can guarantee is that if it is truly the work of the Holy Spirit then it will not be contrary to biblical teaching.

What might we do about it? Exactly what we have already seen Elisha do. We need as much of the Holy Spirit as the Lord will be pleased to pour out on us. When we are full of the Spirit we shall be led in Christlike ways. When we are full of the Spirit, we shall find that God will lead us to express the unchanging Gospel of Jesus Christ in new ways for our generation. Some sacred cows will need to go, but it will only be us who made them sacred in the first place, not God.

So, yes – we still need to do those administrative things that consume our time, like the accounts, Safeguarding, and GDPR, and we need to do them well as a good witness. But for all their importance on our agenda, the one thing that needs to trump them all in our priorities is seeking the fulness of the Holy Spirit.

Because – as Moody said – we leak.

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Mission in the Bible 3: Blessing the Enemy (2 Kings 5:1-14)

As I explain in the video, I’m not actually preaching this sermon in a church this weekend as it’s unsuitable for a baptism service I’m taking. However, I wanted to keep the series on mission going, using this passage. What follows is actually a sermon I first preached in 2007, as you may guess from some of the examples given.

2 Kings 5:1-14

Introduction
In early 2005, we realised that Debbie’s car, a Peugeot 306, was no longer going to be functional as family car. It was insufficiently like the Tardis to cope with the amount of clutter we needed to cart around with two small children. Through friends and family, we were quickly converted to the virtues of a ‘people-carrier’.

We short-listed three different cars: a Vauxhall Zafira, Renault Scenic and a Citroen Picasso. Despite three recommendations for the Zafira, we eliminated it as too expensive and with too small a boot.

That left the Scenic and the Picasso. For a while, we couldn’t tell the difference between them in appearance, but we settled on the Picasso and once we bought one we found that whenever we were out we were always spotting Picassos on the road. Had they suddenly increased in number once we became interested in them? No; we had simply become more tuned into them.

Sometimes I find reading the Bible is like that. It isn’t until I get interested in a particular issue that I realise how much of the Bible reflects that concern, or is relevant to it.

I had one of those experiences this last week. You will know by now that one of my concerns is how we are faithful Christian witnesses in a society where Christianity is no longer central, but on the margins. We live in a culture whose values have been changing rapidly in recent decades. The Gospel may not change, but many of our old ways of being church have become obsolete.

I have read the story of Naaman and his healing since Sunday School. Perhaps you have, too. However, this week when it came up in the Lectionary I found it was no longer a charming Sunday School story. It was a model for mission in today’s world. I see it, because the story is set in a time when Israel was under the cosh from Aram (verses 1-2). A pagan nation with alien values has mastery over the people of God. Within these strictures, fruitful mission happens – just as it can in our day when forces are pushing the church to the margins of society. This week we saw the church-state ties loosened as Gordon Brown relinquished some powers over the appointment of bishops other senior clergy. It opens up again the whole issue of the Church of England’s established status – and in my Methodist opinion, that’s a good thing.

So in this context, where the church is less central to our society, how does the story of Naaman encourage us in our mission? I find it by exploring the three Israelite characters connected with him: the slave girl, the king of Israel and Elisha.

1. The Slave Girl
How many of us were shocked by the news a couple of days ago that a three-year-old girl was kidnapped in Nigeria? Perhaps we need to think of something like that to understand the horror of what happened when this young girl was taken captive by the Arameans in 2 Kings 5. Granted, she is probably older than three, given the way she speaks, and neither is she being threatened by death. However, if you want a sense of the horror, think Nigeria.

Yet in this situation of trauma and oppression, the young girl is a star:

She said to her mistress, ‘If only my lord were with the prophet who is in Samaria! He would cure him of his leprosy.’ (verse 3)

Here is a wounded, marginalised person offering love. Here is one who as both child and female has no status, yet she offers love. Forgiving love and compassion for one who has done wrong to her, her family, her religion and nation. Truly, a little child leads here, as she blesses an enemy.

How does this translate for us? Isn’t one of the dangers of being a minority that has been sidelined more and more that all we want to do is carp and snipe at the society that has done this to us? We criticise this, we declaim about that and we lay into something else. If we’re good, we pretend we are offering a prophetic critique of the world, but if only we were. More likely, we are laying bare the chip on our shoulder and giving energy to the resentment we feel that people no longer see the church as an institution whose opinions should be sought and respected.

The young slave girl says, bless those who have done this to you. Look for ways to love and serve them. Search out opportunities to tell them the good news – not that God can’t wait to singe them in Hell, but that he is crazy with love for them and passionate that they find him.

When I ministered in Kent, there was a branch of Ottakar’s bookshops in Chatham High Street. They regularly displayed and promoted occult books. Alongside the display there was sometimes the opportunity to sign up for occult meetings. I shared this with a prayer meeting. The response was interesting. I thought they would be the kind of Christians who would want to instigate a prayer march against the shop, and perhaps a letter-writing campaign, too. They didn’t. Their immediate response was to pray that God would bless the shop and its employees, because that would be a better way of making a gospel difference.

For us, our ‘Naaman’ might be an unpleasant boss at work. What might happen if we showed Christian love and concern for that boss’s needs and difficulties? Or today’s Naaman could be an unjust political group or multinational corporation. How might we show the love of Christ to them? (And this is the end of International Boycott Nestlé Week!)

I am not saying we should never criticise or boycott, but we have to be sure our motive is God’s love, not vindictiveness. The slave girl reminds us to love and make a difference.

2. The King Of Israel
Naaman goes to his king, who prepares a letter for his opposite number, the king of Israel. Leave aside for a moment the naïveté that assumes the Israelite king can heal the soldier. We have to excuse that as innocent ignorance: it’s something Christians encounter often from people who make requests of them. I often find it comes in terms of expecting that the minister can do something, which another Christian can’t. There is no point in criticising this: we cannot expect complete understanding of our ways.

What is more disappointing is the king of Israel’s response. He doesn’t give a theological lecture – that would be bad enough. Instead, he goes on the defensive:

When the king of Israel read the letter, he tore his clothes and said, ‘Am I God, to give death or life, that this man sends word to me to cure a man of his leprosy? Just look and see how he is trying to pick a quarrel with me.’ (verse 7)

The king of Israel cannot see human need for what it is and respond appropriately. It is as if he knows the story of the Trojan Horse and sees Naaman’s illness as the way in which Israel will be further weakened.

Is that so far from some of our responses as a Christian minority today? I don’t think so. There are those who think we shouldn’t support environmental causes, because we become ‘guilty by association’ with some crazy green campaigners who happen to think that planet Earth is actually a goddess named Gaia, and we shouldn’t get our names tarnished by working with such fruitcakes. The fact that there is ample biblical material for being environmentally conscious should be enough: God calls us to be stewards of the earth, not rapists of it.

Alternatively, consider how long it took some Christians to become concerned with fighting HIV/AIDS, because of its association with sexual practices that lie outside traditional Christian morality. Thank God that mentality has changed through the example of organisations like ACET AND TEAR Fund, who hold orthodox Christian beliefs, but are at the forefront of medical prevention and political campaigning.

In a world packed with terrible needs, it would be spiritual suicide to follow the example of the king of Israel. It’s no good getting on our high horse about certain moral evils in our society, but doing nothing to heal the pain.

But let’s bring it close and personal. Who are the people we know, who have made a mess of their lives, perhaps through their own fault, but whom we have been resisting the idea of helping? Is now the time to see that we have made a mistake and need to reach out with Christian compassion? For Debbie and me recently it’s been about being available to two pregnant women: one is living with her partner and already has one child by him, the other had a second child on her own without ongoing involvement from the father of either child. Neither of these women lives lifestyles with which we agree as Christians. However, would it surprise you if I told you that one of these mothers is now asking questions about baptism?

3. Elisha
Surely the story is going to end up with Elisha performing an amazing miracle. It builds up that way. The slave girl calls him ‘the prophet who is in Samaria [who] would cure [Naaman] of his leprosy’ (verse 3). The writer of 2 Kings describes Elisha as ‘the man of God’ (verse 8) and Elisha himself urges the king of Israel to forward Naaman onto him so ‘that he may learn that there is a prophet in Israel’ (verse 8).

Therefore, it’s a surprise when Naaman arrives at Elisha’s house and the great man doesn’t come out to greet him, but sends a messenger, telling Naaman to wash seven times in the Jordan (verse 10). What’s going on?

Here’s my theory: Naaman has some kind of superstar complex. He’s miffed that the spiritual hero won’t come out to him (verse 11), and he’s insulted by the thought of washing in that feeble, insignificant river the Jordan. He’s got celebrity rivers back in Damascus – the Abana and the Pharpar (verse 12). So not meeting Elisha and suffering the indignity of the River Jordan force Naaman away from this hero-worship attitude.

And isn’t that just what we need today? We live in a culture that needs to be weaned off celebrity adulation, and where people – ooh, let me think, Chantelle Houghton and Paris Hilton – are merely famous for being famous. So addicted are we to this that an informed politician like Al Gore needs to utilise gas-guzzling pop stars to communicate his planet-saving message. By a conspiracy of insignificant non-celebrity Christians, operating without spin doctors or street teams, armed only with the love of Christ and the power of the Holy Spirit, we subvert a sick culture and bring healing in the name of Jesus.

And that means that the church needs to be healed of her own addiction to celebrity, too. We may not have the hype and publicity tools available to entertainers and politicians, but there is an unhealthy reliance upon famous Christians and Christian leaders. We believe, however, in a priesthood of all believers, and so it’s time to stop this dependency upon such people and realise this is a call to all Christians.

In fact, one Christian leader from the Southern Hemisphere, Alan Hirsch, tells a story in his recent book, ‘The Forgotten Ways’ about the early growth of a church he and his wife led in Melbourne. It did not happen under their leadership, but before they arrived. George the Greek was a drug dealer who once chose prison instead of a fine for his crimes. While there he read the Bible and God encountered him. Upon release, George and his brother John set about sharing their faith. Within six months, fifty people had become disciples of Jesus. There were gay men, lesbians, Goths, drug addicts and prostitutes among the converts. No Christian celebrity or authority figure did this: just George the Greek and his brother John, loving people into the kingdom.

Conclusion
Ultimately, this takes us full circle, back to the young slave girl, who blessed her needy, oppressive master. She, Elisha’s messenger and the river Jordan are the heroes of the story. Elisha knows well to get out of the way rather than garner praise for himself; sadly, the king of Israel sets no example at all.

For we who are squeezed daily further to the margins as Christians in our society, the message is clear: a generation of nobodies, operating from the fringes of our culture, is God’s apostolic team for the salvation of the world and the healing of the nations. This morning, as we take Holy Communion, we enlist for that call.

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Sermon: Jesus Will Disappoint You (Palm Sunday)

Matthew 21:1-11

Disappointment
Disappointment by Dee Ashley on Flickr. Some rights reserved.

The great Christian writer Philip Yancey wrote a book a few years ago called ‘Disappointment With God’. He recognised that people ask at times, is God unfair? Is God silent? Is God hidden?

And when we face those experiences, the last thing we need is to hear Christian clichés and pious platitudes. In a web article called ‘God Has Let Me Down. There. I Said It’, a woman called Joy talks about having one daughter with heart defects, brain injury and cerebral palsy who died young, other children who are bullied, and one child who says to her, “I have tried praying, but I get no answer. People say they hear God, but I don’t.” In the face of all this, Joy has little patience for those who tell her, “People will let you down, but your Father God will never let you down,” or “God’s ways are not our ways,” and so on.

So my theme for Palm Sunday this year is, Jesus Will Disappoint You.

Now you may think that’s outrageous. We’ve just read the story of the so-called ‘Triumphal Entry’. He has been welcomed with palm branches, crowds have laid their cloaks on the ground like first-century Walter Raleighs, they have sung his praises and acclaimed him king … what could possibly go wrong?

I may not agree with Samuel Crossman, the author of the hymn ‘My Song Is Love Unknown’, who posits that the very crowd who praised Jesus on his entry to Jerusalem is the same mob that called for his crucifixion in place of Barabbas – I think that’s a different group of people – but the Palm Sunday supporters of Jesus will be disappointed by him. He comes in peace, not war. He takes on the religious establishment, but not the occupying Roman forces. He ends up on a cross.

I think we can safely say that isn’t what they were expecting when they sang Jesus’ praises.

When I went to Spring Harvest in its earliest years, there was always a seminar on the final full day before going home that tackled the issue of what to do when you got home. The organisers in those early days knew that while it was uplifting to worship for a week in a big tent with four thousand other Christians, led by a team of crack musicians and inspiring preachers and teachers, it would be very different back home. There would be rickety Mrs Smith on the harmonium, a boring preacher in the pulpit, and a few dozen scattered around a stone edifice from which the brown and green paint is peeling.

Or we have wider disappointments. Perhaps we have great hopes for the church. They might be simply for our own congregation, when we think we are entering a new phase where great strides will be made for the kingdom of God, or we may anticipate a new Spring for the church generally, such as in the 1990s, when on the back of certain dramatic events attributed to the Holy Spirit, many church leaders confidently predicted a spiritual revival in .

Our disappointments, then, may be personal or communal, but there is no doubt we shall have them, and there is no doubt that many of them will not be fixed by Jesus in the way we want.

Well, that’s all pretty bleak, isn’t it? You’ve come to church looking to taste something of the Good News of Jesus Christ, only to be told by some Eeyore in the pulpit that there is none.

Not exactly. But we Christians are too quick to jump to the happy ending, like people who give up reading a novel and skip to the last page. We don’t stay with the tension of the story as we wait for problems to be resolved. We came for good news, and if we can skip all the intervening messy stuff and just go to the good bits. We need the reminder the little girl received when she asked her mother, “Mummy, do all fairy tales end with the words, ‘And they all lived happily ever after’?”

“No,” replied Mum, “some say, ‘When I became a Christian all my troubles were over.’”

We live out our faith in Jesus in a broken, sin-cracked world. And yes, we do know the ‘happy ever after’ ending, and yes, that is the basis for our hope. But we do people a disservice when we minimise their present troubles by rushing to the end of the story.

Imagine Gethsemane, but envision it differently from the way you know the story. See Jesus praying in agony, needing the support of his friends. But instead of them falling asleep and letting him down, can you conceive of Jesus coming to them, asking them to watch and pray even though ‘the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak’, and Simon Peter leaping to his feet, saying, “I don’t know what you’re worried about, Master. I know you predicted that you would be betrayed, suffer and die, but you also prophesied that you would be raised from the dead! Everything’s going to be fine!”

Do you suppose that was the kind of support Jesus was looking for in the Garden? Somehow I don’t think so. Yet it’s the kind of encouragement we sometimes offer to people in the church. And when we do this, we let people down. We trivialise their present suffering. We dissolve their current questions. It doesn’t exactly affirm them, does it? Of course the future brings light into darkness, but the road to the empty tomb is riddled with stones and potholes. As the Anglican bishop Nick Baines wrote five years ago at this season,

On Easter Day it is traditional for the service to begin with the vicar proclaiming: ‘Alleluia, Christ is risen!’ The congregation responds: ‘He is risen indeed. Alleluia!’ I think this might be a bit wrong. If we are faithful to the Gospels, the congregation should really respond to the proclamation of resurrection: ‘What?! Don’t be so ridiculous!’ Why? Because the disciples of Jesus did not respond to his resurrection with unbridled joy, but rather with bewilderment and suspicion and doubt.

Even on Palm Sunday, Matthew whispers to us, disappointment can be detected in the atmosphere. As the crowd spread cloaks for him, reminiscent of what people did when Elisha anointed the warrior Jehu king over Israel, and as they acclaim him ‘Son of David’, a messianic title, they fail to notice his mode of transport. He is coming in peace to establish the kingdom of God. Therefore to engage in conflict the powers and authorities as he soon will is more or less to guarantee a grisly fate. Institutions don’t easily release their grip on power, and will often do all sorts of things – scrupulous and unscrupulous – to keep their talons clinging on. That is what they will do with Jesus, and he knows it when he selects a donkey and a colt.

This, though, tells us that although Jesus will disappoint the hopes of his most ardent supporters, he will let them down in order to do something deeper and more wonderful than they could ever have imagined. It cannot be revealed by jumping past the unpleasant parts. It can only come as Jesus journeys all the way into the darkness. And we need to take that same trip with those who today are suffering or disappointed.

But at the same time, the hope is there for those who will not look for a short-cut but who will embrace the disappointment of Jesus in order to find his purposes. It is indeed true that ‘his ways are not our ways’, but we do not learn that by repeating it as a platitude, we learn that by going into the depths with him.

And we need to be ready for the fact that the way he will deliver us in the end will be something we could not possibly have imagined, let alone requested. Just as none of Jesus’ followers expected the Cross as central to salvation, so they also did not expect the Resurrection. If they were good Jews (and provided they were not Sadducees, which none of his disciples seems to have been) then they believed that God would raise the dead at the end of time, following the prophecy of Daniel 12. But not one of them was looking for an empty tomb, despite Jesus’ own predictions of it. Those times when Jesus foretold of his suffering and resurrection simply didn’t register in their minds at the time, because it didn’t fit with their sincere but limited understandings of God’s ways.

The disappointment of Jesus, then, opens us to new ways of God’s working in the world. I don’t mean that in order to give licence to the kind of people who jump onto the latest cultural bandwagon and say it’s what God is doing in the world, but I do mean that our vision of God is limited, and our understanding of his ways – however faithfully we study the Scriptures – will always be finite. Sometimes we get so caught up in our own assumptions and our spiritual short-sightedness that we miss what God is doing.

Remember, for example, George Whitefield challenging John Wesley to preach in the open air to the miners at Kingswood in 1739. Wesley was convinced it was a sin to preach anywhere except in a church building! But God used Whitefield to lead Wesley into what would be central to his life’s work.

Or consider those who object to musical instruments other than the organ in church worship. Guitars and drums are apparently unholy. But such people forget that at one stage in church history that was exactly how people thought of organs in church! It used to be a requirement in Methodist churches that hymn-singing be unaccompanied, and until recent times even the singing at the annual Methodist Conference was without musical instrumentation, facilitated rather by a precentor.

Or think about those who have witnessed the decline and death of a church, or even suffered such hostility in an existing church, that they have gone outside the existing patterns, grieved for their loss, and then started something new with a small group of friend in their living room, or maybe in a pub. Oh, wait – that last example would be Knaphill Methodist Church in 1866, wouldn’t it?

Yes, the God who disappoints is also the God who re-creates, the God of new creation. I think of one of Paul’s prayers in Ephesians where he praises ‘him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine’ (Ephesians 3:20). Or I think back to last week’s Lectionary and my sermon at Addlestone on John 11, the raising of Lazarus, where Jesus causes immense disappointment by refraining from visiting Bethany where Lazarus and his sisters lived until after he had died. But then, having allowed Mary and Martha to begin a journey into grief, he does something extraordinarily beyond their expectations in raising their brother back to life.

I don’t know whether you see Palm Sunday as frothy or as joyful. But either way, I urge you not to let the emotional ecstasy of the crowd mislead you. Start this year’s Holy Week journey as a trajectory downwards into darkness and disappointment. Our God does answer prayer, but he doesn’t have a white beard and he doesn’t wear a red costume. At some point either his answers will disappoint you, or his lack of an answer will disappoint you. it’s even how he treated his Son.

But then, when all hopes have been dashed to pieces on the rocks, witness what God does instead. It may well not be what you originally desired. But it will be new, transforming, and far better than you dared imagine.

This is the faith we embrace as we enter Holy Week. Let us open our arms to greet it.

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