Tag: Eugene Peterson

Journey To Jerusalem 2: How Worship Shapes Us, Psalm 122 (Lent 3)

Psalm 122

If you survey a group of Christians and ask them what the number one priority of the Christian life is, they will almost certainly answer, ‘worship.’ 

I personally would want to refine that answer a little: I would answer in terms of the description the crowd gave of the disciples at Pentecost, ‘We hear them declaring the mighty works of God,’ which to me seems to describe both worship and mission. 

But I get the basic point. Worship is a central activity of Christian faith. 

Worship was also central for ancient Israel. And with only three opportunities a year to travel to Jerusalem for the great feasts, they retained a sense of how special and awe-inspiring it was: 

1 I rejoiced with those who said to me,
  ‘Let us go to the house of the Lord.’

2 Our feet are standing
in your gates, Jerusalem.

What a contrast with our casual approach to worship that treats it as little more than a visit to the supermarket. “I don’t feel like going to church today, it’s raining, I’m tired, my friend isn’t going to be there, I don’t like the preacher, I bet it’s those horrible modern hymns,” and so on. 

So I believe the pilgrims of ancient Israel on their way to the Temple at Jerusalem have a lot to teach us about worship. Granted, our context is different. In New Testament terms, we are not to refer to church buildings as ‘the house of the Lord’ for two reasons. One is that the Gospels show us that Jesus is the new and true Temple, where heaven and earth meet in his divine and human natures. The other is that Paul tells us that we together are ‘the temple of the Holy Spirit,’ something the early church was able to express as they met in people’s homes. 

But for all those qualifications, my point remains: we have a lot to learn from ancient Israel about worship, and especially in this Psalm about how worship shapes us as disciples. 

Firstly, worship gives us a framework:

3 Jerusalem is built like a city
    that is closely compacted together.
4 That is where the tribes go up –
    the tribes of the Lord –

The tribes went up three times a year to participate in festivals that celebrated the creating, redeeming, and providing works of the Lord. They ‘declared the mighty acts of God,’ to use my earlier expression. And the building of Jerusalem ‘closely compacted together’ was an architectural metaphor for this structure and framework that the worship festivals gave to Israel.[i]

Christian worship is meant to do no less. We declare and celebrate our belief in God as Creator of all things. We rehearse his special creation of the human race in his own image. We recall his acts of salvation in forming a people for himself, and sending patriarchs to lead them and deliver them, judges and prophets to call them back to him. Most of all, we recall how the Father sent his only-begotten Son who took on human flesh, proclaimed the kingdom of God, and went to the Cross to conquer sin. We rejoice in God’s raising of Jesus from the dead to bring new life, Christ’s ascension to the Father’s right hand on high where he reigns until everything is put under his feet, and the sending of the Spirit to empower our lives of discipleship. We anticipate the full coming of God’s kingdom, when all things will be made new. 

This is what we acclaim about our God in worship. Have you ever wondered why we have a big thanksgiving prayer at Holy Communion? This is why. It goes over the mighty deeds of God and puts Christ and his Cross central. 

This gives us a framework for our life of devotion to Christ. You know, atheists have good arguments against the existence of God. Christians and others have good arguments to support the existence of God. But which gives a better framework for life? Is it atheism, with its belief that we are just an accidental collection of atoms and that the process of evolution is entirely random and without purpose? If that is true, then it is meaningless to talk about love. How can you love another accidental collection of atoms? How can you speak of having any purpose in life when everything is random? 

Or is it better and truer to speak of a God with good intentions for his creation, who continues to reach out to humans who have rejected him, who came and lived among us and paid the ultimate price, and whose kingdom project is to make all things new? For all the problems there might be in believing in God, this framework is surely a better one to live by. 

And it is worship that embeds us in that framework. 

Secondly, worship is a command:

4 That is where the tribes go up –
the tribes of the Lord –
to praise the name of the Lord
according to the statute given to Israel.

‘According to the statute given to Israel.’ Ancient Israel was commanded to worship. This was God’s decree for them. 

We may say that we are not under the Jewish Law, we are under grace, but that does not negate the command and duty to worship. The first commandment, according to Jesus, is to love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength. Jesus wasn’t shy in giving out commandments! He also talked about us worshipping God in spirit and in truth. 

Today, we resist the idea of being commanded by someone else. We think we run our own lives. We want to be in charge. We do not want to be subservient. We are wrong.

This is not about being humiliated, but it is about being humble. It is about recognising our true relationship with God, where he is the Creator and we are his creatures. 

You will have heard preachers say that the English word ‘worship’ is a contraction of ‘worth-ship.’ It is about ascribing true worth, in this case, to God. It is the right thing to do. 

But more than that, the Greek word most often translated as ‘worship’ in the New Testament means ‘to move towards and kiss.’ This is not in the romantic sense. It refers to the kiss of allegiance, such as when a new Prime Minister or a new Anglican bishop is appointed and they have to kiss the sovereign’s hand. 

If this is all true, then our habit of measuring worship by our feelings must go. It is not good worship just because it gives me a warm, fuzzy feeling inside, although it’s nice if that happens. Nor do we decide whether to worship depending on whether we feel like it. God is worthy of our worship, full stop! Maybe at times we shall particularly feel that it is a sacrifice to worship but so be it if we are doing what is right regardless of our feelings by offering our worship. 

Thirdly, worship is about hearing the Word of God:

5 There stand the thrones for judgment,
    the thrones of the house of David.

Judgment? We don’t like that word. But here’s a definition of this particular biblical word: 

The decisive word by which God straightens things out and puts things right.[ii]

In worship, we are not only coming to get our lives set in a proper framework and to give God the honour due to his Name, we are also coming to hear what God says to us. That is why the reading of the Scriptures and the preaching of them is so important. When I preach, it is not my task to share a soundbite or a religious opinion. It is not that I preach a sermon to make a point. 

I have a much deeper and more solemn task than that. It is to teach and proclaim the Word of God. Nothing less. And given the levels of biblical illiteracy among many experienced Christians, that takes time. I hold to the old adage that ‘Sermonettes by preacherettes make Christianettes.’ 

If we stay at home and engage with the Scriptures, that’s good and necessary. But we also need to engage with God’s Word in worship with others, as together we listen to what he is saying and discern together with guidance that word he has for us now. 

It may be fashionable to knock preachers, and maybe some of us deserve it on occasions, but do not despise the fact that God has ordained to speak to us through his Word. 

Fourthly and finally, worship is about seeking God’s action in the world:

6 Pray for the peace of Jerusalem:
    ‘May those who love you be secure.
7 May there be peace within your walls
    and security within your citadels.’
8 For the sake of my family and friends,
    I will say, ‘Peace be within you.’
9 For the sake of the house of the Lord our God,
    I will seek your prosperity.

Our encounter with God in worship leads to our desire that he act in the world. And so we ask him to do so. We ask for ‘peace’ and ‘security’. Peace and security are gifts we receive in worship: peace and security with God as he assures us of his faithful love. 

More than that, the Hebrew words for peace and security both play on the name ‘Jerusalem.’ Our worship and our life together as God’s people are to be characterised by these qualities. And we desire that the rest of the world also experience these gifts, not only peace and security in relationship with God but also peace and security in their own societies and nations. 

So, you say, this is the justification for prayers of intercession. Indeed so. If we have received such riches from God we shall want others to share in them, too. So we pray for God’s mission in the world – both for people to know God’s peace and security themselves (evangelism) and for societies to experience peace and security in their relationships and their ordering (social justice). 

But it doesn’t stop there. We don’t get away with just ‘thoughts and prayers’, as if we have done our duty by praying and continuing with our private happy lives. God calls us to partner with him in the answers to these prayers. 

So if worship begins with the journey to Jerusalem, it concludes with our departure into the world. As one church put over the exit doors from its premises, ‘Servants’ Entrance.’

[i] Eugene Peterson, A Long Obedience In The Same Direction, p47f.

[ii] Ibid., p50.

0

Journey To Jerusalem 1: Looking In The Wrong Place For God, Psalm 121 (Lent 2)

Psalm 121

Have you ever lost something and not found it for a while because you were looking in the wrong place for it? That sometimes happens in our household. One of us misplaces our mobile phone, cannot find it, and says to someone else in the family, ‘Can you ring my phone, please?’ It will then turn out that we have been looking downstairs for a phone that was upstairs in a bedroom. 

Or one of us goes to our pocket for our car key, only for it not to be there. It has fallen out of a pocket and slipped down between the seats of the sofa. It was no good looking in the pocket: that was the wrong place. 

I’ll leave those of you who know us personally to guess who it is who loses their phone, and who loses their car key. Either way, we get frustrated by looking in the wrong place – all without knowing. 

Psalm 121 is for people who are looking in the wrong place for God, matters of the spirit, and the meaning of life. And since this Psalm is describing the journey of pilgrims to Jerusalem for Israel’s great feasts, the implication is that even disciples can look in the wrong places for the important things in life. 

It’s all there in the opening two verses: 

1 I lift up my eyes to the mountains –
    where does my help come from?
2 My help comes from the Lord,
    the Maker of heaven and earth.

Many people read those famous words, ‘I lift my eyes to the mountains’ and think that the Psalmist is encouraging us to look at the wonder of creation. But while the majestic peaks the pilgrims would have seen on their journey would have been awe-inspiring, that is not what the Psalmist is affirming here. 

No: it’s looking to the mountains versus our help coming from the Lord. Why? Eugene Peterson says, 

During the time this psalm was written and sung, Palestine was overrun with popular pagan worship. Much of this religion was practised on hilltops. Shrines were set up, groves of trees were planted, sacred prostitutes both male and female were provided; persons were lured to shrines to engage in acts of worship that would enhance the fertility of the land, would make you feel good, would protect you from evil. There were nostrums, protections, spells and enchantments against all the perils of the road. Do you fear the sun’s heat? Go the sun priest and pay for protection against the sun god. Are you fearful of the malign influence of moonlight? Go to the moon priestess and buy an amulet. Are you haunted by the demons that can use a pebble under your foot to trip you? Go to the shrine and learn the magic formula to ward off the mischief. From whence shall my help come? From Baal? From Asherah? From the sun priest? From the moon priestess?[1]

Do you see now that for the pilgrims to lift up their eyes to the mountains was to go looking in the wrong place? The mountains were the strongholds of false gods, idols, demons, and occult practices. 

So firstly, the psalmist says, don’t look to false gods:

3 He will not let your foot slip –
    he who watches over you will not slumber;
4 indeed, he who watches over Israel
    will neither slumber nor sleep.

In the days of the psalmist, there was a popular belief that a demon could move a pebble and make you slip. Therefore, you needed to seek protection. There was a variety of idols to which you could turn. One of the most popular, Baal, is hinted at in these words of the psalm, when we read that the true God ‘will neither slumber nor sleep’ You may recall the story where the prophet Elijah took on the priests of Baal at Mount Carmel. When Baal failed to set the sacrifice his priests had offered alight by fire, Elijah mocked his opponents, telling them to shout louder, in case Baal was asleep. 

Ad the psalmist here says, Baal won’t answer you or protect you because it’s as if he’s asleep – in fact he doesn’t even exist. But ‘he who watches over Israel’ isn’t like that at all: he ‘will neither slumber nor sleep.’ 

 We may not have Baal today, but we have plenty of instances where we go after that which is not god in order to find satisfaction in life. I am not saying that advertising is wrong per se, but much of it is based on the idea of making people feel dissatisfied with their lives unless they have the one particular item being presented to them as the solution to all their problems. And we have so many adverts like that, because they work. We fall for them. The Christian virtue of contentment would destroy so much of our economics today. 

Money is similar. We need it, but it is a good servant and poor master. We delude ourselves that a higher income or a lottery win will make us happy. But J D Rockefeller, the first ever American billionaire, was asked how much money was enough, and he replied, ‘Just a little bit more than I already have.’ Yes, even someone as ridiculously wealthy as him. 

Money never satisfies. It always demands more. And it never delivers true peace. The best that can be said for it is as Spike Milligan said, that it may not make you happy, but it may make you comfortable in your misery. 

Alongside Baal in Canaanite religion was the goddess Asherah. She symbolised many things, but the theme the Bible seems most concerned about is that she was a fertility deity. There were trees and poles dedicated to her as totems of fertility, and we read of Gideon being told to cut down an Asherah pole. 

The contemporary equivalent is the devotion to sex as a god. We live in a society where primary school children are encountering pornography on the Internet. We make people feel inferior if they are not in a relationship. And in the general absence of belief in God, people look to their romantic partners to fulfil them – a burden a mere mortal cannot carry. 

Once again, we are dealing with idols. We have elevated a good part of God’s creation into a deity itself. Sex and relationships are crucial to humanity, and I would say they are among God’s best inventions! But they are only that: creations, not gods. And so to look to them for ultimate meaning and significance in life is to go looking in the wrong place again. We end up doing terrible things as a result. These things are a gift of God, to be received with thanksgiving, they are not of themselves divine, and they should not be worshipped. 

The trouble, as the great Catholic novelist G K Chesterton said, is that ‘When men stop believing in God, they don’t believe in nothing, they believe in anything.’

Secondly, the psalmist says, don’t fear the created order:

If we’re dealing with created things that are not gods, there is still the issue that creation itself can have fearsome power. Should we live our lives in terror of that? 

No, says the psalmist, that too would be looking in the wrong place for the meaning of life:

5 The Lord watches over you –
    the Lord is your shade at your right hand;
6 the sun will not harm you by day,
    nor the moon by night.

The power of the sun in the Middle East is significant. When I spent three weeks in Israel in July 1989, the temperature was regularly over 40C each day, and that was before the record-breaking summers of recent years. We were advised to drink six litres of water a day to remain hydrated. Hence, pilgrims walking to Jerusalem maybe not in the height of summer but probably in late Spring or early Autumn would still have protracted exposure to what we would consider quite hot conditions. They would have to be careful. 

And the reference to the moon? Surely the nights would be a relief? Not exactly:

A person travelling for a long distance on foot, under the pressures of fatigue and anxiety, can become emotionally ill, which was described by ancient writers as moonstroke (or by us as lunacy).[2]

But again, serious as these things are, and as we and the ancients also know through phenomena like storms and earthquakes, they are not the ultimate truth to be feared. Whatever the dangers are, we have a Lord who watches over us and who is our shade. Four times in this psalm we are told that the Lord watches over us. Whatever bad things come our way, God has not forgotten us. So Eugene Peterson again: 

The only serious mistake we can make when illness comes, when anxiety threatens, when conflict disturbs our relationships with others is to conclude that God has gotten bored in looking after us and has shifted his attention to a more exciting Christian, or that God has become disgusted with our meandering obedience and decided to let us fend for ourselves for awhile, or that God has gotten too busy fulfilling prophecy in the Middle East to take time now to sort out the complicated mess we have gotten ourselves into. That is the only serious spiritual mistake we can make. It is the mistake that Psalm 121 prevents the mistake of supposing that God’s interest in us waxes and wanes in response to our spiritual temperature.[3]

And we have read that our God is the ‘Maker of heaven and earth’. In other words, he created all these things to which we wrongly look for meaning and truth. They are created things, but he is their Creator. Instead of looking in the wrong place at these things, let us look in the right place to our Maker and Redeemer. We put these things in their place: under God’s sovereign rule, as we are. 

And we remember that God cares for us, even when the difficulties and the pain come. As the final two verses of the Psalm say, 

7 The Lord will keep you from all harm –
    he will watch over your life;
8 the Lord will watch over your coming and going
    both now and for evermore.

It is not that we shall have a trouble-free existence, even though the psalmist’s words may sound like that. The rest of Scripture affirms, as Jesus said, that ‘In the world you will have tribulation.’ But as Jesus goes on to say, ‘But be of good cheer: I have overcome the world.’ 

God will be taking care of us. His Son took the journey to Jerusalem and ended up on a cross. But God raised him from the dead. 

This is like the journey we are taking. On it we do not look in the wrong place to worship or fear the created order, but rather we put ourselves in the hands of the Lord, who is the Maker of heaven and earth. He will hold us, as we trust our lives to him through his Son Jesus Christ our Lord. 

[1] Eugene Peterson, A Long Obedience In The Same Direction, p36f

[2] Ibid., p35.

[3] Ibid., p39.

0

Good Habits Versus Wrong Desires, John 6:24-35 (Ordinary 18 Year B)

John 6:24-35
Many of us remember fondly the Wallace and Gromit movies. The second one, The Wrong Trousers, finds Wallace taking in a penguin lodger to alleviate his debts.  

Unfortunately, the lodger is the infamous criminal Feathers McGraw, and he spies the special techno-trousers Wallace has developed for taking Gromit on walks. Rewiring them for remote control and getting Wallace into them while he sleeps, he attempts to steal a diamond from the city museum.

The crowd in today’s reading don’t have a problem with the wrong trousers. They have a problem with asking the wrong questions. And their wrong questions betray their wrong desires.

As I said last week, the crowd has a choice between the grace Jesus offers them and their own mentality of grabbing. Ultimately, their wrong choices (which are also driven by wrong desires) will lead to them deserting Jesus.

Our desires are important – more so than we sometimes give them credit. Some Christians say we just need to get our thinking right and everything else will follow. It’s the religious version of the famous statement by the philosopher Descartes, ‘I think, therefore I am.’

But as the Christian thinker James K A Smith points out, that just makes us ‘brains on a stick.’ He urges us to remember the teaching of St Augustine of Hippo (354-430 AD), who reminded us that what actually drive us are our desires and our loves. These are what form us, especially the habits they encourage in us. Smith puts it this way: ‘You Are What You Love.’

So it’s important to examine our desires. And hence today we’re going to look at the wrong desires in the crowd that are betrayed by their wrong questions so that we can nurture the right desires in our lives as Christian disciples.

The first wrong desire is to prefer physical satisfaction at the expense of the spiritual.

25 When they found him on the other side of the lake, they asked him, ‘Rabbi, when did you get here?’
26 Jesus answered, ‘Very truly I tell you, you are looking for me, not because you saw the signs I performed but because you ate the loaves and had your fill. 

They are glad to have had their bellies filled – and Jesus was happy to meet their needs. But after that, it all went downhill. Or perhaps it’s better to say that their real attitudes were exposed.

Because there’s nothing wrong with Jesus and his people meeting physical and material needs. In fact, it’s important, and it’s often the first step in Christian witness. As General William Booth, the founder of the Salvation Army, once said: if you want to give a hungry man a tract, make sure it’s the wrapping on a sandwich.

The crowd is happy to receive the gift, but not the Giver. It’s me-centred, or perhaps we-centred, but not God-centred.

These attitudes still persist today. If God won’t give people what they want physically, then God must be rejected. It can be summed up in the T-shirt slogan, ‘He who has the most toys wins’ – to which the answer is, ‘He who has the most toys still dies.’ Paul’s teaching that ‘godliness with contentment is great gain’ (1 Timothy 6:6) is not popular teaching with our culture – and nor with our politicians and economists.

Nowhere is this more evident in our society than in the attitude to sex, where the typical time frame for a couple first to sleep together is now on just the third date. They would prefer to believe that God is a spoilsport and Christians are prudes to the truth that God actually has their well-being at heart when he prescribes a different and stricter approach.

We in the community of faith are not immune to these pressures to prioritise physical satisfaction and diminish or exclude our need to feed on Christ and his word. How easily we forget the way Jesus quoted Deuteronomy to the tempter in the wilderness, that we do not live on bread alone but on every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.

And that’s why we need to develop regular sustainable habits for our devotional lives. We have our regular habits for eating, and we know why we need them. So why do we shy away from doing the same for our spiritual sustenance? You cannot tell me that the average person cannot put aside at least ten or fifteen minutes a day for Bible reading and prayer.

And furthermore, we are spoilt for choice these days in the availability of resources to help us – from traditional daily Bible reading notes to apps for our smartphones.

Do we give an appropriate priority to our spiritual feeding as we do to the meeting of our physical needs? Or are we numbered among those the late AW Tozer had in mind when he said, ‘Most Christians live like practical atheists’?

The second wrong desire is to prefer human works at the expense of divine grace.

Continuing the conversation with the crowd, Jesus says,

27 Do not work for food that spoils, but for food that endures to eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you. For on him God the Father has placed his seal of approval.’
28 Then they asked him, ‘What must we do to do the works God requires?’
29 Jesus answered, ‘The work of God is this: to believe in the one he has sent.’
The crowd falls into the trap of Jesus mentioning working for food that endures to eternal life. They want to work in order to receive approval from God. Did Jesus know their hearts and minds? I rather suspect he did.
For Jesus’ response is to tell them to do something that isn’t really work:
29 Jesus answered, ‘The work of God is this: to believe in the one he has sent.’
There are no works you can do to win the approval of God, he says. What God requires is that you put your faith in me.

The crowd makes a common mistake. People use the following of God’s laws either as good works that they hope will win favour from God, or as boundary markers to show who’s in and who’s out – hopefully proving that they are ‘in’.

And it’s a mistake to say this is just a fault seen in Jewish opponents of Jesus. The idea that we are not fundamentally sinners and can be good enough on our own to be accepted by God has been called by some ‘The English heresy.’ It has a long and tawdry history in our culture.

It is seen in the relegation of the word ‘sin’ to the salacious stories that were always so beloved of Sunday tabloids, usually of a sexual nature. Even in our day as newspapers are replaced by the Internet, there are plenty of these tales around.

But Jesus says we just need to believe in him, and that isn’t a good work that merits us the love of God. Faith is to hold out empty hands to God and believe that he is going to fill them with his good things.
Sadly, the good works heresy still squirms its way into the church. I have had people ask me if they were good enough for church membership. To which the proper reply is no, but neither am I. We are here by the grace of God alone, and we receive that by holding out the empty hands of faith.

It’s why whatever we say about right and wrong in society and in other people, we must be careful not to become judgmental. We are only in the family of God by his grace, received by faith in Jesus and his death for our sins.

I once met a Christian who had a particular way of reminding himself of this. I met him when we were both patients on a hospital ward, and he gave me his business card. After his name were the initials ‘SSBG’, and I was puzzled. What degree or professional qualification was that, I asked him?

‘It stands for Sinner Saved By Grace,’ he replied.

‘The work of God is this: to believe in the one he has sent.’

The third and final wrong desire is to prefer signs at the expense of the Saviour.

30 So they asked him, ‘What sign then will you give that we may see it and believe you? What will you do? 31 Our ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness; as it is written: “He gave them bread from heaven to eat.”’

When I hear this, I’m inclined to think: what a cheek! You want a sign to prove that this is the One you should believe in? Well, what do you think you saw when he fed all five thousand of you?

It reminds me of what the Apostle Paul said in the first chapter of 1 Corinthians on this subject:

22 Jews demand signs and Greeks look for wisdom, 23 but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling-block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles

Some people have a lust for the spectacular and the dramatic. If there is a God, they expect a firework show with drones like the New Year extravaganza in London.

But Jesus points the crowd to the Father who gave bread from heaven in the wilderness, and ultimately to himself as ‘The Bread of Life’, because signs aren’t meant to be an alternative to faith in him and allegiance to him.

Now don’t get me wrong. Jesus did miracles. I believe he did. I also believe that miracles are not extinct. I do believe in a God who shows up in history and is not remote from us. And therefore, I believe in things like intercessory prayer.

But the signs are not an end in themselves. They are meant to point to Jesus. And that’s what we’re meant to focus on. That’s what matters.

Miracles are real, but rare, as CS Lewis said in his book on the subject. Why? Because the scientific laws by which our universe lives are a description of God’s habits – they must be, if it is true that Jesus ‘sustain[s] all things by his powerful word’, as Hebrews 1:3 says. The universe relies on God’s habits. Miracles are when God breaks his habits, but of necessity can only be rare, or the upholding of the universe will be disturbed.

Next time we want church or faith to be some kind of whizz-bang show, we need to ask ourselves whether we are putting our thirst for a religious performance ahead of our relationship with Jesus.
To be sure, I am not for one moment suggesting that church and faith should be boring. We believe in Jesus, and when we read about him we can be sure that he was many things, but one thing he certainly wasn’t was boring.

But the life of faith is not the explosive adrenaline rush of the hundred metres sprint, it is the marathon. We keep Jesus and the finish line before us in what Eugene Peterson called ‘A Long Obedience In The Same Direction.’

Conclusion

So what if we are to make the right choices, not the wrong ones? At the beginning, I linked this with the need to establish habits.

If we are not to prefer physical satisfaction over the spiritual, then I talked about the habit of regular Bible reading.

If we are not to prefer human works over grace, then we need the regular discipline of both confessing our sins and receiving the assurance of forgiveness. So yes, let us notice this as a rhythm in Sunday worship every week. But we might also consider a daily review of our lives. There is an old Christian practice called the Examen, where we review the day before going to bed. We rejoice in the good of the day and where we have seen God at work. We also repent of those times we have failed him and are assured we are forgiven.

If we are not to prefer signs over the Saviour, then these first two disciplines, along with our other commitments of worship, the sacraments, prayer, and fellowship will all be tools of the Holy Spirit to form us in the marathon race of God’s kingdom. Just so long as we keep doing them and they become regular habits.  
0

Mission in the Bible 4: Singing the Lord’s Song in a Strange Land (Jeremiah 29:1-14)

Confession time: I’m exhausted from a 3:45 am start (long story) and so rather than write something completely new, knowing I’ve preached on this passage before and realising I wouldn’t say anything substantially different, I’ve used a sermon from 2018. The full text of that sermon is below, but it is longer than what I deliver in the video and will be delivering in church, because it uses one or two stories I’ve already deployed in this series.

Jeremiah 29:1-14

If you’ve ever watched The Wizard Of Oz – and I’m guessing most of you have – you’ll know the early part of the story where the whirlwind hits Dorothy’s home in Kansas. When it subsides, Dorothy looks around in bewilderment at the strange and different surroundings she finds herself in. She turns to her dog Toto and says, “Toto, I’ve got a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore.”

Dorothy could be speaking for today’s church. We’ve been caught up in a social whirlwind, and when we’ve opened our eyes to survey the scene it looks nothing like that in which we grew up. The church used to be respected, but then we’ve gone through phases where first it was no longer a normal experience for people to attend church, and now there is a lot of outright hostility towards Christianity.

Similarly, you probably grew up in a culture where the ordained minister was a respected pillar of society. But again, no more. It is said that the average non-Christian man thinks that someone in a dog collar is either fleecing the flock for money or fiddling with kids as a paedophile.

Many of us would really like to cut to the end of the film where Dorothy finds herself back in home sweet home – there’s no place like it – but I have to say, that isn’t happening anytime soon. We must learn to be faithful disciples as a minority part of society. And actually that’s what most Christians down the centuries have had to do. To live as the majority in a society is less common.

Where do we go for help in being faithful to the Gospel in such circumstances? That’s where I find Jeremiah’s letter to the exiles in chapter 29 on his prophecy helpful. The armies of King Nebuchadnezzar have carted off the first lot of Jewish prisoners from Judah to Babylon. Those who found themselves as strangers in a strange land were disorientated and confused, like Dorothy. Had we read more of the letter, we would have heard Jeremiah warning them too not to believe the false prophets who were telling them it would all be over quickly and things would be back to the good old days. Instead, Jeremiah advises them how to live faithfully as aliens in a culture that is different from them and at times hostile.

I believe we can learn lessons for our discipleship today from Jeremiah’s model.

Firstly, it’s about where we live.

‘Build houses and settle down’ (verse 5a), says God to the exiles through Jeremiah.

I wonder whether you’ve noticed in recent years that the church is no longer regarded as the default moral voice in our nation. When Hallowe’en comes, it isn’t the church that is interviewed on BBC Breakfast about the content of the festival or the fears of elderly people about Trick Or Treat, it’s Age UK.

It’s no good pining for the good old days. This is where we are called to be missionaries, not back in some imaginary golden age of decades ago.

God called the exiles to do in some small way what his own Son would do later. What did Jesus say to the disciples in John 20? ‘As the Father has sent me, I am sending you’ (verse 21a). So how was Jesus sent? We have to go back from John 20 to John 1 and a verse that is too good to keep just for Christmas: ‘The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us’ (verse 14a).

Note that: Jesus dwelt among the people. Although he occasionally ministered in synagogues, for most of the time he didn’t say, ‘Come here and listen to me,’ he did his ministry amid people’s lives. He made his dwelling among people – literally, he ‘tabernacled’. Remember that in the Old Testament the tabernacle was the portable sign of God’s presence. So, then, Jesus was the presence of God in the middle of life.

Eugene Peterson puts it like this in The Message: ‘The Word became flesh and blood and moved into the neighbourhood.’

Friends, Christian mission today can no longer be sustained (apart from a minority) on ‘Come to us’. We have to go to the world and live actively in it. We don’t want to swallow the values of the world, many of which are contrary to our faith, but we still need to live in the middle of the world, not in a Christian ghetto.

I once took the funeral of an elderly church member, and in preparation visited her relatives, who were not Christians. As they told me about the lady’s life, they told me, ‘Her whole social life was based on the church.’ I could tell they thought I would be pleased by that, but in truth I was deeply saddened. We can’t scuttle across the moat, pull up the drawbridge and cosy up behind the turrets of a Christian castle if we are to be faithful missionaries in a world where we are the minority.

Are we known positively, then, in our neighbourhoods and our networks? And what are we known for? We’ll come on to that in other points.

Secondly, it’s about where we work.

‘Plant gardens and eat what they produce,’ says God (verse 5b).

In his book on Jeremiah, Eugene Peterson (him again!) says this means we should ‘Become a productive part of the economy of the place’ (The Quest, p151).

It’s time to bin the idea that the only work worth doing is church work. Church work – such as mine – is support work for those in the frontline of mission as Christ’s representatives in the world, pointing to the Gospel in word and deed, living lives that are so puzzling and magnetic that people end up asking them why they do what they do.

So when a circuit steward’s wife once told me that her husband wanted to spend more time on the important stuff, like church work, rather than his occupation, I was saddened. This man worked in commercial shipping, helping to ensure that vital goods got from one port in the world to another. He also volunteered as a governor at his daughter’s school. Imagine doing both of those things in a Christlike way, being a good steward of resources but not ruthless, caring for the wellbeing of the school community and its place in the wider area, and so on. Imagine doing these things for Christ, occupying ground in his Name.

You can find all sorts of resources for churches to encourage this approach, not least from an organisation called the London Institute for Contemporary Christianity. Their ‘whole life discipleship’ project includes all sorts of courses and resources to help Christians be fruitful on the frontline. It includes material to help preachers and worship leaders support this work.

One of the stories that set them on their way was that of a schoolteacher who also taught in Junior Church on a Sunday. “Why does my church pray for my Junior Church work,” she asked, “when I deal with maybe a dozen children there, but it doesn’t pray for my Monday to Friday work when I get the chance to influence many more children?”

Any church can start supporting people in this. One of LICC’s ideas is called ‘This Time Tomorrow’. You take five minutes out of Sunday services to interview someone from the congregation about where they will be and what they will be doing twenty-four hours later. You ask them what they most need prayer for, and include that in the service. It’s simple. And it is as applicable to retired people as to those still in paid work, because you can include what people do in the community and in their leisure activities.

Remember, church doesn’t stop when we leave this building on a Sunday lunchtime. As an Australian Christian called James Thwaites puts it, how far apart from each other do we have to be in order no longer to be church? Five yards? Five miles? No: we never stop being the church. It’s just that sometimes we are the church gathered, and sometimes we are the church dispersed. All our work in the world is Christian work.

Thirdly, it’s about where we flourish.

The next thing God says is, ‘Marry and have sons and daughters; find wives for your sons and give your daughters in marriage, so that they too may have sons and daughters. Increase in number there; do not decrease.’  (verse 6)

Whoa! Wait a minute! At other times, God’s people are told to be very careful about who their sons and daughters marry. Now, they’re meant to settle down in a pagan land. No wonder Psalm 137 asks, ‘How can we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?’

Our trouble today is that having been part of the majority culture where we haven’t had to fight for the place of our faith in public life, we now find ourselves singing the Lord’s song in a strange land, and the temptation is to be negative and self-pitying about it. But God says it’s possible for his people to flourish as minorities. Remember, that was certainly the story of the Early Church, too, both in Israel and in the wider Roman Empire. Why should it not be true for us, too?

In Mark chapter 6 we have the story of the disciples rowing their boat on the late at night, straining at the oars in the fourth watch of the night. Jesus comes to them, walking on the water. He thus comes to them from outside the boat.

Now given that the Early Church also read the boat symbolically, as standing for the Gospel community, maybe Jesus was coming to them from outside the church, so to speak. Maybe he had already been at work outside their community before he came to them in the dark of night.

Could it be that our task in order to flourish involves finding out where Jesus has gone ahead of us in the world by his Spirit, and we join in with him there? I’m not saying that people outside the church don’t need to become Christians, I am simply saying that Jesus prepares the way and we catch up.

Our children started school while we were in my last circuit. When you are a parent of primary school children you have a great opportunity to flourish as Christians in the community. Debbie and I made it our point to lurk with intent at the school gate. We made friends with other families. I told my churches not to expect me to be at my desk at 9 am for that reason. Some of them didn’t like that, because they thought the minister was there to be their private chaplain, but we persisted.

In doing that, and letting people know our door was always open and there was always water in the kettle for tea and coffee, we befriended three young mums who went through horrendous divorces. One husband went off with his wife’s best friend. Another drank away all the family income, even spending time in the pub when it was the birthday party for one of his three daughters. That mum and the little girls nearly joined the church.

When we announced our decision to leave, some of the church people cheered, but some of the community wanted to raise a petition to keep us – including our next door neighbour, who was totally clueless about church. On the last day of term that July, twenty of them threw a surprise picnic for us in the local park.

We may not have flourished in the church there, but we certainly flourished as Christians in the community.

Fourthly and finally, it’s about where we bless.

‘Also, seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile. Pray to the LORD for it, because if it prospers, you too will prosper.’ (verse 7)

Contrast that with the ways today’s church often reacts to the decline of Christianity in the West and the rise of ideologies we dislike. Either we claim that God is bringing revival soon (but remember God told Jeremiah the prophets who were saying that in his day were false prophets) or we rail against evil, and think we’re being prophetic in that way.

But look what happens here. Rather than condemn Babylon, God calls his people to bless it! I’m not calling us to ignore unrighteousness and injustice, but I am asking this: what difference would it make if Christians were known as a people of blessing?

The trouble is, there are plenty of indicators to suggest that we are not known as a people of blessing. If you ever ask an MP who they don’t want to send them letters, I’m afraid that often the answer is ‘Christians’. We are known at Parliament for our complaining and our judgmentalism.

In America, it’s commonly known in the catering industry that the people who moan the loudest and tip the least at restaurants are the Christians.

How exactly does that reputation stack against New Testament verses like these?

‘Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you’ (Mt 5:44)

‘Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse’ (Rom 12:14)

‘Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good’ (Rom 12:21)

What would it look like if we were the people who were always wondering what good we could do unconditionally for people? If we were the people who – rather than complaining – were instead always seeking to put in a good word for someone, or leaving a surprise ‘thank you’ gift for somebody? Do we encourage our elected representatives? Do we tip generously at the restaurant, realising that the waitress is a young student trying to make ends meet on her student loan?

What if in the wider society we were getting involved in those civic and political decisions that affect the wellbeing of our communities, as councillors or business people?

The Argentinean preacher Ed Silvoso has a wonderful way of putting this. He says, ‘In the celestial poker game, a hand of blessings always beats a hand of curses.’

So go – and bless your Babylon. See what happens when Christians start blessing. Wait for the questions about why you do this. And then speak of the One who calls you to bless.

0

Sermon: Psalm 131, A Question Of Balance

Psalm 131
As a small child, I had a tricycle. But when the time came to graduate to a bike, I never had one. The owner of the local cycle shop wouldn’t sell bikes with stabilisers. He said stabilisers were harmful to children’s attempts at cycling proficiency. So because I had a bad sense of balance, my parents never bought me a bike and to this day I still cannot ride one.

Only later did I learn that my parents couldn’t afford a bike for me and that my poor sense of balance helped them save face, but my wobbliness was a self-evident truth.

Just as we need balance to become a cyclist, so we need balance in the life of the Spirit before God. It’s easy to be an unbalanced Christian. We have to hold together various paradoxes to have a truthful relationship with God, but some of us wobble to one side or the other.

To give one example: God is both awesome in holiness and intimate as a friend, but it’s easy to tilt to one side at the expense of the other. Some so stress reverence before a holy God that they fail to hear the good news of God’s passionate, personal love for us. But some emphasise that intimacy with God to such an extent that they become matey with God and miss the importance of his terrifying holiness.

This week’s Psalm is also about balance. It calls us to hold together two different approaches to God in order that we might have a healthy posture before him. They involve on the one hand a downward move and on the other an upward move.

First, the downward move: we call this humility.

My heart is not proud, Lord, my eyes are not haughty; I do not concern myself with great matters or things too wonderful for me. (Verse 1)

Let’s make clear what we don’t mean by humility. We don’t mean the kind of debasing ourselves that sees ourselves as worth no more than a worm. We are not looking at the Uriah Heep notion of being ‘very ‘umble’. We are not referring to models that elevate the wealthy and powerful at the expense of the poor. There is good Christian reason for omitting the infamous verse from ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’:

The rich man in his castle, The poor man at his gate: God made them high and lowly And ordered their estate.

There is nothing bright and beautiful about these ways of conceiving humility.

Nevertheless, it is the opposite of pride to pursue ambitions beyond our abilities and callings. The RSV doesn’t say ‘My eyes are not haughty’, it renders the text, ‘My eyes are not raised too high’, and that’s the danger. The naked running after personal ambition in order to elevate ourselves is rampant in our society, and something Christians need to guard against. It isn’t just those in the office environment who climb higher by grovelling to those above them and treading on those below them. It also happens in the church. I know of two sad cases where ministers sought preferment beyond their capabilities, and their ministries were derailed by alcohol – in one case temporarily, in the other case permanently.

How can we judge our gifts with humility, then? Paul has a helpful approach in Romans 12. Significantly, it falls between his call for us to offer ourselves as living sacrifices and some descriptions he gives of the use of spiritual gifts. His link between the two is to call us to think of ourselves with sober judgement (Romans 12:3).

There are various practical ways in which we can come to a sober judgement of our gifts, so that we do not raise our eyes too high and then fall. One way would be this: there are various tools available that will create an inventory of our likely spiritual gifts. They usually come in the form of a questionnaire. You can find various examples on the Internet. Two of the best known are the Spiritual Gifts Inventory from Willow Creek Community Church in Illinois and the SHAPE test from Saddleback Church in California. None of these tests is perfect, but they will get you started. They can be useful material for a home group to use and discuss.

And that leads to the other helpful way to approach this: ask your friends and family what they think your strengths and weaknesses are. Again, it can be useful to do this in a small group. I have been in groups where we have written down not what we think our own gifts are, but what we think the gifts of the other group members are. If several people in the group start to spot similar abilities in you, then this is something to take seriously.

Ultimately, a sober judgement of our gifts that takes us away from selfish forms of ambition and pride is the way of peace. When we serve according to our abilities, we have the peace of knowing we are where God wants us.

Remember, it is about serving rather than ambition for ourselves. Our ambition must be for the glory of God, not ourselves. If we strain for things beyond us for the sake of our own advancement, we shall only know strife and cause strife. If we humbly accept the limits and extent of the gifts God has given us and use them for his praise, then that will bring with it the peace that comes from contentment.

So we move to the second element in our paradox, from the downward move to the upward move. If humility means a certain growing down, our second element, maturity, is about growing up.

How is this psalm about maturity? Because the writer speaks of being ‘like a weaned child’. Not a child, but a weaned child. This is not an image of being infantile, this is a picture of growth. A weaned child has come off the breast milk and is progressing with solids. Such a child is maturing physically.

Therefore the psalmist holds before us the need to be mature disciples. But what is it to be mature in Christ?

We hear a lot about the existence of mature and faithful Christians, when all we mean is that certain members have been in the church for many years, and turn up most Sundays. However, such people are not necessarily faithful or mature. They are simply regular. They may display signs of immaturity, throwing tantrums when they don’t get what they want, for example. Believe me, I’ve seen plenty such people in over twenty years of ministry.

No: a mature Christian is a growing Christian. Mature Christians are those who are never satisfied with the level of their spiritual lives. They want to know God’s will more deeply, and follow Christ more closely.

The writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews got frustrated with his readers about this very issue. He told them that they should have progressed in spiritual terms from milk to solid food – it’s a similar image of weaning a child. But they hadn’t, and thus were more likely to succumb to the pressures coming on them from outside the church to compromise their faith, especially about the superiority and uniqueness of Jesus Christ.

Thus it is not an option for the Christian to mature, it is a necessity. Growing in grace is not merely for the keen Christians, it is for all who might be disciples.

That’s why I was saddened to read in our Family Friendly church questionnaire last autumn about the number of members here who don’t engage regularly with the Bible outside of Sunday services. I’m not saying that daily personal Bible reading is a religious panacea, not least because I have known church members elsewhere who have been avid daily Bible readers who have been among the nastiest of Christians. But it is one key discipline among many we need to practise for the sake of growth. It is part of our feeding and our exercise.

But one sure sign of the immature Christian is the person who forever demands to be fed spiritually and makes little effort to feed themselves. Remember that although Jesus told Simon Peter to feed his sheep, it is also true that the Lord our shepherd in Psalm 23 simply takes the sheep to the green pastures: the assumption is that the sheep get on with feeding themselves.

If we listen to the Apostle Paul, we will learn that the function of church leaders is not to keep administering baby food, but to see to it that the church family grows up. So in Ephesians 4 he says that the purpose of apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors and teachers is to see the whole Body of Christ grow up. And in Colossians 1 he says that his aim as an apostle is ‘to present everyone mature in Christ’.

But, you may object, I aim at growth but I fail regularly. How, then, would I encourage us to live?

I would point to the words of the late Brennan Manning, who said in his classic book ‘The Ragamuffin Gospel’ that the Christian life is like a ‘victorious limp’ (chapter 10, passim). In particular, he says this:

The mature Christians I have met along the way are those who have failed and have learned to live gracefully with their failure. Faithfulness requires the courage to risk everything on Jesus, the willingness to keep growing, and the readiness to risk failure throughout our lives.[1]

The image of the weaned child as one of growing maturity speaks to us on many levels. The child will fail regularly, but the parent lifts them up, dusts them down, and encourages them to keep trying – whether it is attempting to walk, to climb, or to learn another life skill.

The weaned child is growing, and knows that a lot more growing is needed. Think how a child looks forward to when it will be taller than its parents. It will take time, but the child expects to grow.

It is a mystery to me why some Christians therefore seem to give up on the spiritual diet and exercise that are required for growing in grace. I am bemused by those Christians who tell me they should just be concentrating on ‘consolidating’. Believe me, there are only two choices in the life of the Spirit: growth and decline. Would the church not be healthier if we were all aspiring, like a child, to be taller?

But the progress from infancy to childhood is bumpy. Eugene Peterson says,

The early stages of Christian belief are not infrequently marked with miraculous signs and exhilarations of spirit. But as discipleship continues the sensible comforts gradually disappear. For God does not want us neurotically dependent upon him but willingly trustful in him. And so he weans us. The period of infancy will not be sentimentally extended beyond what is necessary. The time of weaning is very often noisy and marked with misunderstandings: “I no longer feel like I did when I was first a Christian. Does that mean I am no longer a Christian? Have I done something terribly wrong?”

The answer is, “Neither: God hasn’t abandoned you and you haven’t done anything wrong. You are being weaned. The apron strings have been cut. You are free to come to God or not come to him. You are, in a sense, on your own with an open invitation to listen and receive and enjoy our Lord.”[2]

Your duty in this is to attend to the diet and exercise that bring growth. My duty as your minister is to be a little like your personal trainer at the gym, advising you on the best ways to achieve fitness.

So we’re back to this question of balance. Some Christians can think altogether too much of themselves and need a dose of humility. Using our gifts requires sober judgement and a commitment to God’s glory, not ours.

But other Christians either don’t want to grow or belittle themselves as if they were no more than worms. To such we hold out the possibility of, and the need for growth in grace, by adjusting their spiritual diet and practising spiritual exercises.

Where does each one of us need to adjust our balance?

2

Sermon: Suffering And Faith

Psalm 130

The pastor of a Christian Science church was talking to a member of his congregation. ‘And how is your husband today?’

‘I’m afraid he’s very ill.’

‘No, no,’ corrected the pastor, you really shouldn’t say that – you should say that he’s under the impression that he’s very ill.’

The woman nodded meekly. ‘Yes, pastor, I’ll remember next time.’

A few weeks later, the pastor saw her again.

‘And how is your husband at the moment?’

‘Well, pastor,’ she replied, ‘he’s under the impression that he’s dead.’[1]

It isn’t long in life before a bright beginning is touched by suffering. A child is born, and discovers pain. Even Prince George will find that out. A wedding and honeymoon is followed by the reality of each partner’s frailties. Someone is converted to Christ, but then learns it isn’t a rose garden.

Meanwhile, we have people who want to play pretend about suffering. They want to act as if it doesn’t exist, or they demand it be magically removed from existence in an instant. Maybe they even try to get round it in a religious way by saying that the body doesn’t matter, it is only a shell for the real person. That isn’t a view you can take while still believing in the New Testament, with its strong emphasis on the resurrection of the body.

The first thing our Psalm of Ascent this week does is be frank about the reality of suffering.

Out of the depths I cry to you, Lord;
2     Lord, hear my voice.
Let your ears be attentive
to my cry for mercy. (Verses 1-2)

The Scriptures do not get into philosophical discussions about the existence of suffering and belief in a good and powerful God. They simply enter the story of suffering, and describe that narrative. Our Psalmist here is in deep suffering – he cries ‘out of the depths’. While there are great accounts of deliverance from suffering in the Bible – the Exodus, the healing miracles, and so on – we are not presented with faith as a ‘Get out of jail free’ card. Faith enters human suffering.

Henri Nouwen (1981?) at his apartment in New Haven
Henri Nouwen (1981?) at his apartment in New Haven (Photo credit: jimforest)

And so, before anything else, simplistic and obvious as it might sound to some of us, we need to embrace the reality of suffering and stop playing games. Henri Nouwen wrote,

Many people suffer because of the false suppositions on which they have based their lives. That supposition is that there should be no fear or loneliness, no confusion or doubt. But these sufferings can only be dealt with creatively when they are understood as wounds integral to our human condition. Therefore ministry is a very confronting service. it does not allow people to live with illusions of immortality and wholeness. It keeps reminding others that they are mortal and broken, but also that with the recognition of this condition, liberation starts.[2]

Are there areas where any of us is pretending? Are there times when – much as we believe that God heals – he is in truth going to take us the long route to wholeness? We like to believe that if God works a miracle it will be a great testimony, and it certainly can be. However, are there times when we say that, but what we really want is a short cut out of our personal difficulties rather than the testimony? Could it be that God will also bring glory to his name when he takes us on what seem to be detours rather than the direct route?

For me, that was true in one particular instance. In my first year at theological college, I suffered a collapsed lung. My lung had previously collapsed three times a few years earlier, and I had only avoided surgery then when the consultant was inconveniently on holiday. But on the weekend when it happened to me at college, the father of a student friend was visiting. My friend’s Dad was known for having a healing ministry. Surely he would pray for me and I would be healed. But he had left to go home a few minutes before I got back from A and E. This time, I had to have the operation. It meant a week and a half in hospital, a month’s convalescence at home, and three months before I was back to anything like full strength. But God used that experience so that when I visit people in hospital, I have a way of identifying with them and a reason to bring them a word of hope.

That leads to the second piece of frankness in the Psalm: we hear about the reality of God. The Lord is addressed throughout the Psalm. The Psalmist cries out to him (verses 1-2); he acknowledges and relies on the Lord’s mercy and forgiveness (verses 3-4); and the Lord is the reason to wait and hope (verses 5-8).

God is there. God is present. God is even in the depths. The Old Testament describes a God who hears his people’s suffering, even if he does not always act on it as quickly as his people would desire him to do. But the cry of suffering reaches him, and he liberates his enslaved people from Israel. He brings them back from exile in Babylon.

Not only that, the same Old Testament begins to describe God as being involved in his people’s suffering, even functioning as some kind of representative or substitute. I really don’t think you can avoid reading passages such as the Suffering Servant in Isaiah 52:13-53:12 that way.

What the Old Testament doesn’t have, but which we have, is the filling out of that belief in Jesus, who came as a servant, lived among the poor and suffered death on a Cross.

Ours, then, is the God of the depths – even the depths of Hades. In Christ God stands with us in suffering and he stands for us in suffering. And in doing so, he shows supremely the divine answer to the Psalmist’s cry for mercy and the forgiveness of sins. The merciful God is the One who enters the depths of human suffering, who drinks the cup to its dregs.

English: Eugene Peterson lecture at University...
English: Eugene Peterson lecture at University Presbyterian Church in Seattle, Washington sponsored by the Seattle Pacific University Image Journal. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

As Eugene Peterson puts it,

God makes a difference. God acts positively toward his people. God is not indifferent. He is not rejecting. He is not ambivalent or dilatory. He does not act arbitrarily in fits and starts. He is not stingy, providing only for bare survival.[3]

He goes on to say,

And this, of course, is why we are able to face, acknowledge, accept and live through suffering, for we know that it can never be ultimate, it can never constitute the bottom line. God is at the foundation and God is at the boundaries. God seeks the hurt, maimed, wandering and lost. God woos the rebellious and confused. … Because of the forgiveness we have a place to stand. We stand in confident awe before God, not in terrorized despair.[4]

Suffering is awful, but it is not the final word. God has seen to that in Christ. At the Cross and the Empty Tomb we find that God has the last word. God has not stayed remote and sent us a philosophical answer to our suffering. Instead, he has got his hands dirty. He has come alongside us, and also in his suffering he has accomplished what we cannot do for ourselves due to our sin. He has provided for forgiveness and so we can serve him with reverence (verse 4), or ‘stand in confident awe before [him]’, as Peterson put it.

Now this leads us on to the third and final piece of honest faith in the face of suffering that the Psalmist models for us, and that is the reality of waiting. Hear how he uses words about watching, waiting and hoping:

I wait for the Lord, my whole being waits,
and in his word I put my hope.
6 I wait for the Lord
more than watchmen wait for the morning,
more than watchmen wait for the morning.

7 Israel, put your hope in the Lord,
for with the Lord is unfailing love
and with him is full redemption.
8 He himself will redeem Israel
from all their sins. (Verses 5-8)

In the Old Testament, the words ‘waiting’ and ‘hoping’ are very close. There are passages where in one Bible translation the English word used may be ‘wait’ and in another English Bible it may be ‘hope’. You could say that the faithful disciple of Old Testament days waited in hope. Certainly when we face suffering we often need to wait, and our waiting will have meaning and significance if we can wait with hope. That is what we do as New Testament Christians for sure, living in some respects between the suffering of Good Friday and the hope of Easter Day.

But what do we do while we are waiting hopefully? The Psalmist suggests we apply for the job of nightwatchman:

I wait for the Lord
more than watchmen wait for the morning,
more than watchmen wait for the morning. (Verse 6)

In my home church was a gentle, devout Jamaican Christian called Clarence. He was employed as a security guard. Anyone less likely to tour a building site at night accompanied by fierce Rottweilers you would find it hard to imagine. But for most of the time, he told us, he was able to sit in the site office. Each night he would take his Bible and his Moody and Sankey hymn book, and study his faith. He may have been the most unlikely candidate for the job, and heaven knows how he got it, but he used his waiting time fruitfully and every morning, the dawn came.

So it is for us. We are on the night watch in our faith as we wait for God who is with us in our suffering to act on our behalf. What we think should not take him a trice is something he chooses for reasons only he can see to take longer about resolving. Meanwhile, in the darkness we wait.

But … we wait knowing that the dawn is coming. Hence we wait in hope. And during that waiting, it would be good if we put the time to good use, as Clarence did.

How can we use our waiting time? We too can certainly take advantage of opportunities to deepen our faith, too. We can express our trust, even if at times it is a bemused trust, in the God for whom we are waiting. We can share our hopeful waiting with others who are also struggling, so that we may encourage them. Such people can be found both inside and outside the church.

I’ll give the final word again to Eugene Peterson:

The depths have a bottom; the heights are boundless. Knowing that, we are helped to go ahead and learn the skills of waiting and hoping by which God is given room to work out our salvation and develop our faith while we fix our attention on his ways of grace and salvation.[5]

1

Sermon: A Servant Psalm

books
books (Photo credit: brody4)

Psalm 123

I have several friends who are authors. Some are journalists, others are playwrights, some are ghost writers for famous people who cannot write sufficiently well for their books, still others are novelists (everything from historical romance to science fiction) and some write non-fiction titles.

If I have learned one thing from my friends in the writing trade, it is a principle they all hold dear:

Show, don’t tell.

If they want to get a point across, they show it rather than telling it. They do not lecture you; they do not give you philosophical principles; instead, they describe, or they tell a story.

So it is with the Psalms. As songs, they are works of art, like books. While they contain great spiritual truth, they tend to show it rather than tell it.

That certainly happens in today’s Psalm. The Psalmist does not give us a host of reasons as to why we should consider ourselves servants of God; instead, the servant-master relationship is shown. It is described.

And perhaps that’s important when for us the notion of being somebody’s servant is not one we readily approve.

So first of all in Psalm 123, servants look up.

I lift up my eyes to you,
to you who sit enthroned in heaven.
2 As the eyes of slaves look to the hand of their master,
as the eyes of a female slave look to the hand of her mistress,
so our eyes look to the Lord our God,
till he shows us his mercy. (Verses 1-2)

Servants metaphorically ‘look up’, because God is enthroned in heaven, not in Jerusalem, the place to which they are heading on pilgrimage. However grand the Jerusalem Temple was, Jewish thought always understood that God was not restricted to a building, nor was he specially present in a holy building in ways that he wasn’t elsewhere in creation. It’s something we who end up venerating church buildings would do well to remember.

But there is a deeper reason in the ‘looking up’. Eugene Peterson puts his finger on the problem:

Too often we think of religion as a far-off, mysteriously run bureaucracy to which we apply for assistance when we feel the need. We go t a local branch office and direct the clerk (sometimes called a pastor) to fill out our order for God. Then we go home and wait for God to be delivered to us according to the specifications that we have set down.[1]

We are so used to being consumers that we treat religion like that. Just as we are used to buying goods and services, and then complaining when they do not meet our expectations, so we treat God. Unless he does what we want, when we want and to the standard we want, we will demand our money back. The title of the Billy Connolly film ‘The Man Who Sued God’ is not so far off the truth of our behaviour. And if pastors don’t meet our expectations, we’ll get rid of them. If churches don’t provide all we want, we’ll move.

But our posture is one of looking up, not looking down. We are the servants, not the masters. And as I said, we don’t like that. We would rather give the orders than be subject to them. My Mum’s uncle told his children that the reason they should work hard at school was so that they were the people who gave the orders, rather than followed them.

Furthermore, servanthood is associated in our minds with some awful things, especially if servants are actually slaves. We might celebrate the abolition of the slave trade, but it still exists and does wicked things to people. If that’s what being a servant entails, we don’t want it.

And this is where the second description of servants comes in: servants seek mercy.

so our eyes look to the Lord our God,
till he shows us his mercy.

3 Have mercy on us, Lord, have mercy on us,
for we have endured no end of contempt. (Verses 2b-3)

English: Eugene Peterson lecture at University...
English: Eugene Peterson lecture at University Presbyterian Church in Seattle, Washington sponsored by the Seattle Pacific University Image Journal. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

If you are a servant, then you certainly want a merciful master. And thankfully the testimony of the Scriptures is exactly that about God. Some may fear that being a servant puts us at risk from a despot of a God, but it is not the experience of God’s people down the centuries. Again, hear what Eugene Peterson has to say:

The basic conviction of a Christian is that God intends good for us and that he will get his way in us. He does not treat us according to our deserts, but according to his plan. He is not a police officer on patrol, watching over the universe, ready to club us if we get out of hand or put us in jail if we get obstreperous. He us a potter, working with the clay of our lives, forming and reforming until, finally he has shaped a redeemed life, a vessel fit for the kingdom.[2]

The God described in Christianity is the God Jesus alluded to in the character of the father in the Parable of the Prodigal Son. His younger son has asked for his share of the inheritance – effectively wishing his father to be dead. He squanders money, and is so desperate when it is all gone that he ends up with the pigs – a truly awful place for a good Jewish boy to be. Any respectable father in that culture would have had crossed arms, waiting for his son to return home and grovel, so no wonder the errant son plans his humble speech. But his father does what was considered inappropriate by looking out for his return, and undignified when he runs towards his son.

Tony Campolo: Author and speaker on political ...
Tony Campolo: Author and speaker on political and religious topics (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Tony Campolo tells a story in one of his books[3] where he has travelled from his home state of Pennsylvania to Hawaii and is on jet lag. As a result, he finds himself in a diner at 3 in the morning. The only other customers are a group of local prostitutes. He hears one, named Agnes, say that the next day will be her birthday, but she also says that she has never had a birthday party in her whole life.

So Campolo had a word with the diner owner. He discovered that Agnes and the other prostitutes came in every night, and asked if they could have a party for her the next night. The owner’s wife agreed to bake a cake, and it was all set up.

Agnes turned up at about 3:30 the next morning to the biggest surprise of her life. She even asked if she could take the cake home quickly so that others could see she actually had a cake before anyone else sliced it up.

At the end, Campolo found himself offering to lead a prayer. The owner of the diner said, “Hey! You never told me you were a preacher. What kind of church do you belong to?”

Campolo replied, “I belong to a church that throws birthday parties for whores at 3:30 in the morning.”

“No you don’t,” said the owner. “There’s no church like that. If there was I’d join it. I’d join a church like that!”

But this is the God of the Bible. He is full of mercy. He throws parties for those who have completely messed up. There is no fear in being his servant when this is the extent of his mercy.

And that takes us to a third and final description of servants in this psalm: servants are downtrodden.

Have mercy on us, Lord, have mercy on us,
for we have endured no end of contempt.
4 We have endured no end
of ridicule from the arrogant,
of contempt from the proud. (verses 3-4)

That doesn’t sound much like good news, does it? But put it like this: the servants who know their God is outrageously merciful can bring their downtrodden status to him. For a merciful God is one who is on the side of such people. And even if you don’t start off in that category, it’s possible to end up there, purely by being a disciple of Jesus Christ: at times that will earn you the ridicule and contempt of which the psalmist speaks.

Fiddler on Roof Tevya
Fiddler on Roof Tevya (Photo credit: jimmiehomeschoolmom)

We don’t know why the psalmist and his friends were on the receiving end of contempt. It may not so much have been simply because they were part of the people of God, but it might well have been because the people of God were not doing that well in the world. It reads as if they were suffering oppression at the time. Maybe they were being mocked, because that meant it didn’t look outwardly as if they were living under the favour of God. As Tevye in ‘Fiddler on the Roof’ says to God at one point, “I know, I know. We are your chosen people. But, once in a while, can’t you choose someone else?”

Those downtrodden by life may cry out to the God of mercy and he will hear them. The suffering People of God may cry out as servants to their master and he will hear them, too. If that is where we find ourselves in life, there is a God enthroned in heaven who will help, normally using human agency to do so.

What might we do about it? Well, remember that this is one of the Psalms of Ascent, sung by pilgrims on their way to the Jerusalem Temple for a great feast. They would surely have brought their troubles to God in prayer – just as they were already doing in the words of the psalm. They would have entered into worship, and thus experienced a little of God’s perspective on life. They would have made sacrifices, prefigured the great sacrifice God would make in due time for them through the offering of his Son. This God would in Jesus Christ endure contempt and ridicule himself so that the lowest strata of society could experience his merciful love.

What does this mean for us now? I think it has to turn us into the kind of ‘church that throws birthday parties for whores at 3:30 in the morning.’ There is a call for us to show God’s lavish love to those rejected and sidelined by society. If those who endure contempt today are to know about a merciful God, then we have to demonstrate it to them.

That gives us plenty of scope in the wider world. You probably don’t need me to give you too many examples from the news, and I invite you to get involved by supporting organisations that demonstrate God’s love to the broken.

But I also suggest we need to put this into practice close to home and not simply give money to bodies that will do this for us at a distance. We should put out our best biscuits, regardless of who is in the house. If the nice biscuits are only for those who know how to behave, what are we saying about the Gospel? People with troubled backgrounds need to be as welcome as anyone else here at KMC.

I wonder whether people would experience us as the kind of ‘church that throws birthday parties for whores at 3:30 in the morning’, as Tony Campolo describes. Or would they react like the owner of the diner, saying, “There’s no church like that,” all the while secretly wishing there was?

0

Sermon: Where Does My Help Come From?

Travel
Travel (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Psalm 121

When I was a child, one of the great parts of preparing for our family summer holiday was Dad’s planning of the journey. He would pore over maps, come up with a route and then ring the RAC to see what they thought. There was no chance in those days to go online and find out up to date information on road works or local hazards, so he made use of his RAC membership in this way. Armed finally with Dad’s plans and the RAC’s advice, we would set off.

On one occasion, we were heading to Willersley Castle in Derbyshire for our holiday and were driving up the M1. Dad had said something about us going via Nottingham. Mum had dozed off, but suddenly woke up and saw an exit sign for Nottingham. She screamed in panic, and Dad – who was in the middle lane – suddenly veered left across the other traffic to take the exit. Somehow nobody hit us.

And it wasn’t even the right exit for Nottingham. We needed the next one.

As we spend the summer meditating on the Psalms of Ascent, we are reflecting on ‘journey’ psalms. These are the psalms of the Jewish pilgrims as they travelled from wherever they lived to Jerusalem for the great feasts. We, too, as Christians are on a journey to Jerusalem for a great festival. However, our travels will take us to the New Jerusalem in the New Creation, for the great feast of God’s kingdom.

And like the child frustrated on a long journey, from time to time we cry out, “Are we there yet?” knowing full well we aren’t, but impatient for the glories of what awaits us.

So the Psalms of Ascent are there to be sung on our journey, too, and to sustain us in our travel to the light and beauty of God’s kingdom. None of us should speak in this life as if we have arrived: to become a Christian is not that at all. It is to have joined the pilgrims on their travels to Jerusalem.

There are dangers on the journey. It might be the panic that led to my Dad’s sudden left turn to Nottingham. Or it might be other things. One of my favourite places is Lee Abbey, a Christian retreat and conference centre in North Devon. The most direct route there involves 25% (1 in 4) hills, one of them combining the extreme gradient with a hairpin bend.

Go beyond these fair shores and you will of course find far greater challenges than those which challenge my modest driving skills. Some of my sister’s exploits when she spent three months working with a missionary hospital in Rwanda are in a different league. A combination of poor roads, over-filled vehicles and driving skills that make Italian drivers look a model of restraint might about cover some of her stories.

The Jewish pilgrims faced travelling dangers, too. Their feet could slip, and a sprained ankle when needing to walk miles with no cars and no NHS would hamper all the ambitions of pilgrimage and risk further damage to the ankle bones.

By day there would be the high temperatures if they were walking in the middle of the year. My own visit to Israel-Palestine was in July one year, and the temperatures Andy Murray and the Centre Court crowd experienced last Sunday were as nothing to what we endured, needing to drink six litres of water a day to stay hydrated.

Then there were the cold nights under clear skies. Not for those ancient pilgrims the pollution that keeps heat in, but a contrast to the day and little prospect of somewhere to sleep under cover. Wild animals would lurk; perhaps the travellers took turns to stay awake by a camp fire and guard everyone.

We face other dangers on our pilgrimage to the New Jerusalem. The attacks that would derail our journey to the Kingdom are different. There are both temptations and assaults to knock us off course.

The temptations might be summed up in the classic New Testament unholy triad of the world, the flesh and the devil. ‘World’ here does not mean creation in general, which is good, it means the prevailing culture that lives in disregard of God and his ways. So it involves all those temptations to go along with popular values, whether they are godly or not. It might mean the way we are tempted to allow ourselves to be absorbed into Surrey values of continuous acquisitiveness, the accrual of more, the necessity of taking several foreign holidays and driving a ‘Chelsea tractor’. Follow the world too keenly and we lose our passion for God and his Christ.

Similarly, the ‘flesh’ does not mean that our bodies are bad, but it does refer to a couple of things. One is our general sinful nature, our predisposition to selfishness, which can manifest in characteristics such as the whole culture of entitlement. I’m reminded of the old slogan that ‘sin is a little word with ‘I’ in the middle’.

And the flesh can also be about those ways in which good bodily desires take over and dominate. Appetites of all kinds are necessary in the ways they alert us to physical needs. But when we allow them to dominate, we end up as slaves to them, rather than servants of Christ.

The devil? Although I struggle with those Christians who see Satan behind every bad thing, I believe those who dismiss his existence are equally naïve. Jesus acknowledged the presence of an enemy of our lives, and we must beware the ways in which he tempts us by asking us to make a deal with sin.

But it is not only temptation to sin that threatens to take us off course. As well as sin, we have to cope with being sinned against – the violences done to us that we do not deserve. The enemy laughs at our pain, and further when those assaults raise questions in our minds about the goodness or even the existence of God.

Where, then, do we look for help in staying en route to the New Jerusalem? The Jewish pilgrims looked around. Perhaps when you hear those famous opening words of this psalm,

I lift up my eyes to the mountains –
where does my help come from? (Verse 1)

you think that the mountains were where they found help. Aren’t the mountains a sign of the grandeur and power of God?

Well, in some parts of Scripture they are, but not here. On a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, the mountains and their foothills were anything but. They were bandit country. Think of the Parable of the Good Samaritan.

And hear also what Eugene Peterson has to say about them in this psalm:

During the time this psalm was written and sung, Palestine was overrun with popular pagan worship. Much of this religion was practised on hilltops. Shrines were set up, groves of trees were planted, sacred prostitutes both male and female were provided; persons were lured to the shrines to engage in acts of worship that would enhance the fertility of the land, would make you feel good, would protect you from evil. There were nostrums, protections, spells and enchantments against all the perils of the road. Do you fear the sun’s heat? Go to the sun priest and pay for protection against the sun god. Are you fearful of the malign influence of moonlight? Go to the moon priestess and buy an amulet. Are you haunted by the demons that can use any pebble under your foot to trip you? Go to the shrine and learn the magic formula to ward off the mischief. From whence shall my help come? From Baal? From the sun priest? From the moon priestess?[1]

Is it possible that today we too go to the wrong spiritual sources for protection from the dangers of our journey to Jerusalem? I think so. The Christian who spends more time in the horoscope column than the Scriptures. Those more concerned to follow the latest guru who has been interviewed by Richard and Judy, or promoted by Oprah Winfrey. The believer who takes more guidance from friends at the health club or the school gate rather than the accumulated ancient wisdom of the Church. The church member who seeks security more in received financial wisdom than in Christ. All too often we look to our mountains instead of to the Lord.

Because that is where our help truly comes from:

My help comes from the Lord,
the Maker of heaven and earth. (Verse 2)

Not from the hills, but from the Lord. He has the power to keep us on the road. It is to him that we should turn.

How, then, does our Lord keep us on track or even put us back on the road?

Taking first the question of how our own sin (‘world, flesh and devil’-caused) takes us off-road, we remember before anything else how astonishing the forgiveness of God is. Our Father is not grudging in forgiving us; he is the Father who throws lavish parties with feasting for returning prodigals. What could be more wonderful for getting us back in the right direction, aligning our lives with the life of the world to come?

And accompanying that is the renewing power of the Holy Spirit. God’s commitment to us is that he will always set us back on the road through forgiveness, and he will give us the strength to stay on the road.

But what about the way we get knocked off by what is done to us? How often are we discouraged by the rude interruption of suffering, and the seismic jolts of untoward life events? Some of us question God’s existence, and so the journey becomes pointless. Some of us don’t do that, but we wonder about God’s goodness, and whether we want to move closer to him.

In response to that, I want to share with you something that struck me recently when I was reading an old John Ortberg book. He talks about the way God pays attention to us. He describes the number of times in the Gospels that something happens for good because Jesus ‘saw’ someone. He refers to the so-called Aaronic blessing with which we shall conclude Holy Communion this morning – the same words we use to bless babies who are baptised:

The LORD bless you and keep you,
The LORD make his face to shine on you and be gracious to you,
The LORD look on you with kindness and give you peace.

If God’s face is shining on us and he is looking on us with kindness, then surely he is paying attention to us.

“But,” we say, “God is silent in my suffering. I can’t hear him saying anything to me.”

Might that mean, then, that what God is actually doing as he pays attention to us is simply listening? The best listeners are those who are not thinking of how they will reply while the other person speaks. Could it be that God knows we still need to pour out more of our pain to him before he says a word? Perhaps, unlike the husband who hides behind his newspaper when his wife begins to speak, God is quietly giving us his attention, ready to speak when necessary. Maybe this is his ‘watching over you’ that the Psalmist describes (verse 5).

I venture to suggest, then, that while God does not stop harm coming our way, he ‘will keep [us] from all harm’ (verse 7) and ‘watch over [our] coming and going’ (verse 8) by keeping our spiritual lives with him. The God of Psalm 121 is the God of assurance. Wesley said we not only need to be saved and can be saved – even saved to the uttermost – we can also know we are saved.

And this God – the God of assurance – is the God of Psalm 121, the God who sets us back on our eternal journey.

0

Sermon: The Temptations Of Jesus In The Big Story

Luke 4:1-13

During my first sabbatical, I went on a creative writing course. The timing was rather iffy – it was a couple of weeks before Debbie was due to give birth to our daughter, our first-born. I was allowed to sit in the seminars with my mobile phone on the desk, switched on. The one occasion it rang was on a morning when I knew Debbie was seeing the midwife, and I rushed out to answer the call. Other participants on the course said I was as white as a sheet – although surely budding writers could have come up with a more original image!

Fortunately, baby Rebekah was too busy inside the womb enjoying Debbie’s cravings for Cadbury’s Crème Eggs to consider a minor inconvenience like birth. And so I got through the whole week, learning from writers who specialised in a wide range of fields, from journalism and radio to – er – romantic fiction. (Not quite my favourite genre of literature.)

But it was the romantic novelist whose input stayed most with me, and I say this not only as a man (who would not like such books) but also as someone who rebelled against the teaching of English Literature at school. Far too girly and nothing like as useful as science, I thought then.

No: the romantic novelist taught us some important elements about how to tell a story well. You had to have an introduction which got you into the problem that the story was to solve. Most of the book was about the tension of trying to resolve the problem. Finally, it is resolved and at that point you finish the story quickly rather than stringing it out. She also introduced us to the ‘back story’ – that is, the lives of the characters before their appearance in the story.

I share all this, because when we come as we always do at the beginning of Lent to the account of Jesus’ temptations in the wilderness, we often speak of it as a story in its own right. However, it is not. The signs are there at the beginning and end of our reading. We begin with Jesus returning from the Jordan (verse 1), which tells us this is following on from what we have just read, and we end with the devil departing from Jesus ‘until an opportune time’ (verse 13).

In other words, this is an episode, not the whole story, and it has clear connections with what surrounds it. So this morning I want to explore the temptations within the big story of Jesus and the Gospel. We’ll take four key elements of the episode and set them in a bigger context.

Firstly, I want us to consider the role of the Holy Spirit in the episode and the bigger story. Our reading begins with Jesus ‘full of the Holy Spirit’ yet ‘led by the Spirit in the wilderness’. Is that what we expect the Spirit-filled life to look like – a wilderness time? The relationship so far between Jesus and the Spirit has been warm. He has been conceived by the Holy Spirit, and he has just been baptised in the Jordan, where the Spirit has descended upon him. Yet for all these positive experiences of the Holy Spirit, now Jesus finds that the same Spirit leads him in the wilderness, that is, in a bleak and parched place.

What’s more, Luke’s language is forceful. ‘Led by the Spirit’ is a rather weak translation, and it makes us think of the sometimes fuzzy or sentimental ways in which Christians say they ‘feel led’ to do something. But the word Luke uses means ‘to be thrown out’. It conjures up the hurling of a ball – say, like a cricketer fielding on the boundary and vigorously flinging the ball back to the wicket-keeper. Jesus is ‘flung’ by the Spirit in the wilderness.

How can this be so? How can the wilderness be in the purposes of God? Isn’t the Holy Spirit the ‘Comforter’? Don’t we just expect warm, glowing experiences of God when the Spirit is present in fullness?

Apparently not. Wilderness experiences can be just as much a part of the Christian pilgrimage as the dizzy, thin-air ecstasies of the mountain-top. To get the Israelites from Egypt to the Promised Land required a time in the wilderness. When Israel rebels some centuries later and is unfaithful to the Lord by worshipping idols, the prophet Hosea says that God will woo his people in the wilderness. It can be in the wilderness seasons of our lives that God strips things away from us so that our devotion to him is renewed. The comfortable things on which we rely, the good things which we have elevated too highly in our lives – these he puts aside for a season so that we may remember who our first love is.

Perhaps that is one of the purposes of a Lenten exercise – to consider again the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ as being worthy of devotion before and above all else. How dangerous it is when faith becomes corrupted into a hobby.

And that leads us to our second theme, namely that of self-denial, seen in the way Jesus fasted during the forty days (verse 2). Those of you with good memories will remember the days of an annual event in churches called ‘Self Denial Week’. For one week, we lived differently. Now I think those events can be helpful, but only if they are signs and symbols of a wider commitment to self-denial. Jesus didn’t simply fast for forty days and then think, “Great, now I can get back to self-indulgence.” Nothing of the sort. He rebuffs the first temptation to turn stones into bread (verse 4). He refuses to worship the devil (verse 8), because that will subvert all he has come to do. He will not go for the spectacular show-off event of diving off the Temple like a religious stuntman (verse 12).

Why? Because all three temptations go against his core mission, which is based around denying himself in order to love and serve others. This is what he came to do. Oh, we see plenty of evidence that Jesus enjoyed life. Religious killjoys can take no true inspiration from him. However, from the Incarnation to the Cross, his is a life and ministry of self-giving.

Does this have an application for us? Although people are having to be more careful financially in the last five years, it is apparent that our culture is based not on self-denial but on self-fulfilment. We are our own gods. Our politicians encourage our belief that the economy must always grow. As one Christian website put it the other day,

Every day, we are bombarded with the message that equates the “good life” with the “goods life.”

And whatever difficulties we are facing, the fact remains that we live in the wealthiest county in this country. At my first staff meeting in this circuit, one of my colleagues asked this question: ‘Is the Gospel against Surrey?’ Because it might be. And it might be that part of our witness involves self-denial.

Thirdly, I want us to dwell on that repeated title for Jesus, Son of God. Twice the devil begins a temptation with the words, ‘If you are the Son of God’ (verses 3 and 9). If? Jesus has just had a profound experience of the Holy Spirit at his baptism where he has heard a voice from heaven referring to him as God’s Son. The work of the Spirit in his conception is a sign that he is the Son of God, according to Gabriel at the Annunciation. If he is the Son of God? He is the Son of God! The wider, big story is there in those words!

Yet here is the attempt to undermine the core of the story. If. It’s like the snake in Eden asking, “Did God really say …?” Here is an attempt to slice the ground from under the feet of Jesus, just as the enemy does with us. Just enough of a voice to make us disbelieve what God has said and done. That’s all it takes.

Now for us it can’t come in terms of ‘If you are the Son of God’, because none of us can be Son of God in the unique way Jesus is. But the devil can do it in a way relevant to us. ‘If you are a child of God’; ‘If you are a Christian’, and so on. It can be in the form of, ‘Are you really a child of God? Are you sure that God loves you? Someone like you? If you were a real Christian, you wouldn’t have done that.’ Does that sound familiar? Subtly we have been switched from focussing on the love and grace of God to majoring on our failures.

So beware of that voice – not a still, small voice but a quiet, insidious voice. Jesus at his baptism had not simply been reminded of his unique divine status, he had been reminded that he was loved with an everlasting love before he had even set out to begin the ministry for which he had come. And God wants each one of us to know that we too are loved with no strings attached. He loves us first. He loves us because he loves us. This is the foundation of anything and everything that we can do in a spiritually healthy way as Christians: knowing that we are loved unconditionally by the Father.

Fourthly and finally, battle is joined over the Scriptures. Every time Jesus is tempted, he squashes the attack with his Hebrew Bible: ‘It is written’ (verse 4); ‘It is written’ (verse 8); ‘It is said’ (verse 12). The devil cottons onto this, and even tries quoting Scripture in the final temptation (verses 10 and 11).

Again, we need to see this as a thread in this episode that is seen in the bigger story. The early chapters of Luke’s Gospel have been stuffed full of quotations and allusions from the Hebrew Bible. The coming of Jesus the Messiah is the central event in the biggest story of them all, the story of God’s redeeming love. Not only that, I believe Jesus is very intentional about the particular verses he quotes in response to the temptations. I don’t think he sits there simply thinking, “What verse would be good to use here?” Every verse he cites comes from Deuteronomy, a book centred on Israel’s own wilderness experience. He sees the temptations in the framework of the bigger story, too. It’s the devil who can’t quote anything that parallels the big story that is going on here. His quotations come from elsewhere in the Scriptures, they are random quotations, fine in their place, but irrelevant to notion of God’s people and God’s Son in the wilderness.

Perhaps this illustrates the dilemma we can face as Christians. We know the Bible is our source book, our supreme insight into God’s ultimate authority in Jesus Christ. Yet we also know how it can be misused, and have probably done so ourselves, unwittingly at times. Sometimes we have been Pharisees, quoting Scripture rigidly, and hurting people with it.

I believe that if we set ourselves to follow not only a disciplined, regular reading of Scripture but also disciplined methods of doing so, we shall have more of a chance of using Scripture spiritually and responsibly. It will not be for everyone to use the academic disciplines that preachers and ministers deploy, but there are age-old, tried and tested methods known in Christ’s church. Yesterday at Addlestone we had a half-day of prayer, and during that time I taught two of them. One is called Ignatian Bible Reading, which involves a sanctified use of the senses and the imagination. The other is called Lectio Divina, where we read the text, meditate on it, pray through what it is saying to us and then seek to live out the text. The great spiritual writer Eugene Peterson has said of Lectio Divina that  it is

A way of reading that intends the fusion of the entire biblical story and my story.[1]

And if indeed the temptations of Jesus are an episode in the bigger story of redemption, then would it not be good in all that we do this Lent to seek to find where our story fits into the big story of God’s saving love in Christ?

[1] Eugene H Peterson, Eat This Book, p 90.

 

1

The Inner Life Of A Christian Leader

The late Steve Jobs famously insisted that the same design standards be applied to those parts of an Apple product that no consumer would ever see as were applied to the outer parts, which gained admiration for their style.

Something similar is true of the Christian, and certainly of those of us called to the daunting task of leadership in the church. Gordon Macdonald makes a similar point in a recent book, using a similar analogy:

David McCullough’s book The Great Bridge tells a fascinating story about the building of the Brooklyn Bridge, which arches the East River and joins Manhattan to Brooklyn.

In June 1872, the chief engineer of the project wrote: “To such of the general public as might imagine that no work had been done on the New York tower, because they see no evidence of it above the water, I should simply remark that the amount of the masonry and concrete laid on that foundation during the past winter, under water, is equal in quantity to the entire masonry of the Brooklyn tower visible today above the waterline” (italics mine).

The Brooklyn Bridge remains a major transportation artery in New York City today because 135 years ago the chief engineer and his construction team did their most patient and daring work where no one could see it: on the foundations of the towers below the waterline. It is one more illustration of an ageless principle in leadership: the work done below the waterline (in a leader’s soul) that determines whether he or she will stand the test of time and challenge. This work is called worship, devotion, spiritual discipline. It’s done in quiet, where no one but God sees.

Macdonald’s book is appropriately called, ‘Building Below the Waterline: Shoring Up the Foundations of Leadership‘. The quote above is from the introduction (page 1). By the end of the first chapter he’s making the large claim that almost all Christian leaders agree that they need to carve out one to two hours a day for this work of nurturing the spiritual centre.

There seem to be some other books in recent years that take a similar tack. Ruth Haley Barton’s ‘Strengthening the Soul of Your Leadership: Seeking God in the Crucible of Ministry‘ is one. Pete Scazzero’s ‘Emotionally Healthy Spirituality‘ and ‘The Emotionally Healthy Church‘ are two more. In the last few decades, Eugene Peterson and Henri Nouwen have been voices callng in the wilderness, pleading with us to take this seriously, rather than concentrating on the latest techniques and plans to grow your church. Might it be that at last their cries are being heeded?

So – two questions:

1. What do you do to nurture the hidden parts of your spiritual life?

2. Are there any other authors and books you recommend on this subject?

2

Create a website or blog at WordPress.com

Up ↑